hat--disliking that pliant will-less stare of the barber’s mournful
eyes. This wandering man had a heart full of bravery though he could
not walk with pride, for the corns and bunkles he suffered would have
crippled a creature of four feet, leave alone two. But--would you
believe it--he was going now to walk himself for all his days round and
round the world. O, he was such a man as could put a deceit upon the
slyest, with his tall hat and his jokes, living as easy as a bird in
the softness and sweetness of the year.
“And if it rains, it rains,” he declared to Polly, “and I squat like
a hare in the hedge and keep the blessed bones of me dry and my feet
warm--it’s not three weeks since it happened to me; my neck as damp
as the inside of an onion, and my curly locks caught in blackberry
bushes--stint your laughing, Polly!--the end of my nose as cold as a
piece of dead pork, and the place very inconvenient with its sharp
thorns and nettles--and no dockleaf left in the whole parish. But there
was young barley wagging in the field, and clover to be smelling, and
rooks to be watching, and doves, and the rain heaving its long sigh in
the greyness--I declare to my God it was a fine handsome day I had that
day, Polly!”
In the winter he would be sleeping in decent nooks, eating his food in
quiet inns, drying his coat at the forge; and so he goes now into the
corners of the world--the little husky fat man, with large spectacles
and fox-coloured beard and tough boots that had slits and gouts in
them--gone seeking the feathers out of Priam’s peacock. And let him go;
we take no more concern of him or his shining skull or his tra-la-la in
the highways.
The barber, who had a romantic drift of mind, went into his saloon,
and taking up the two cracked china lather mugs he flung them from
the open window into his back garden, putting the fear of some evil
into the mind of his drowsy cat, and a great anticipation in the
brains of his two dusty hens, who were lurking there for anything that
could be devoured. Mr. Piffingcap placed the pot made of lead upon
his convenient shelf, laid therein his brush, lit the small gas stove
under the copper urn, and when Polly, the child from the dairy, arrived
with her small can for the barber’s large jug she found him engaged in
shaving the chin of Timmy James the butcher, what time Mr. James was
engaged in a somewhat stilted conversation with Gregory Barnes about
the carnal women of Bagwood.
Polly was a little lean girl, eight or nine years old, with a face that
was soft and rosy and fresh as the bud of gum on the black branches of
the orchard. She wore a pretty dimity frock and had gay flowers in her
hat. This was her last house of call, and, sitting down to watch Mr.
Piffingcap, the town’s one barber, shaving friends and enemies alike,
she would be the butt of their agreeable chaff because of her pleasant
country jargon--as rich as nutmeg in a homely cake--or her yellow
scattered hair, or her sweet eyes that were soft as remembered twilight.
“Your razor is roaring, Mr. Piffingcap!”--peeping round the chair at
him. “Oh, it’s that Mr. James!” she would say in pretended surprise.
Mr. James had a gruff beard, and the act of removing it occasioned a
noise resembling that of her mother scraping the new potatoes.
“What have you got this pot for?” she chattered; “I don’t like it, it’s
ugly.”
“Don’t say that now,” said Mr. Piffingcap, pausing with his hand on the
butcher’s throttle, “it was Mr. Grafton’s parting gift to me; I shall
never see him again, nor will you neither; he’s gone round the world
for ever more this time!”
“Oh!” gurgled the child in a manner that hung between pain and delight,
“has he gone to Rinjigoffer land?”
“Gone where?” roared Timothy James, lifting his large red neck from the
rest.
“He’s told me all about it,” said the child, ignoring him.
“Well, he’s not gone there,” interrupted the barber.
And the child continued, “It’s where the doves and the partridges
are so fat that they break down the branches of the trees where they
roost....”
“Garn with yer!” said Mr. James.
“... and the hares are as big as foxes....”
“God a mercy!” said Mr. James.
“... yes, and a fox was big and brown and white like a skewbald
donkey--he! he! he! And oo yes,” continued Polly, shrilling with
excitement, “there was a king badger as would stop your eyes from
winking if you met him walking in the dawn!”
“Lord, what should the man be doing telling you them lies,” ejaculated
Timothy, now wiping his chin on the napkin. “Did he give you that cup,
Piff?”
“Yes,” replied the barber, “and if what he says is true there’s a power
o’ miracle in it.”
The butcher surveyed it cautiously and read the inscription:
NE SAMBRA DIVORNAK
“That’s a bit o’ Roosian, I should say,” he remarked as he and Gregory
left the saloon.
Polly picked up her empty can and looked at Mr. P.
“Won’t he come back no more?”
“No, Polly, my pigeon, he won’t come back.”
“Didn’t he like us?” asked the child.
The barber stood dumb before her bright searching eyes.
“He was better than my father,” said the child, “or me uncle, or the
schoolmaster.”
“He’s the goodest man alive, Polly,” said Mr. P.
“Didn’t he like us?” again she asked; and as Mr. P. could only look
vaguely about the room she went out and closed the latch of the door
very softly behind her.
In the succeeding days the barber lathered and cut or sat smoking
meditatively in his saloon; the doom began to work its will, and
business, which for a quarter of a century had flourished like a plant,
as indeed it was, of constant and assured growth, suddenly declined.
On weekdays the barber cleaned up the chins of his fellow townsmen
alone, but on Sunday mornings he would seek the aid of a neighbour,
a youngster whom he called Charleyboy, when four men would be seated
at one time upon his shaving-chairs, towel upon breast and neck bared
for the sacrifice, while Charleyboy dabbed and pounded their crops
into foam. Mr. Piffingcap would follow him, plying his weapon like the
genius he was, while Charleyboy again in turn followed _him_, drying
with linen, cooling with rhum, or soothing with splendid unguent. “Next
gent, please!” he would cry out, and the last shorn man would rise
and turn away, dabbing his right hand into the depths of his breeches
pocket and elevating that with his left before producing the customary
tribute.
But the genius of Piffingcap and the neat hand of Charley languished in
distress. There was no gradual cessation, the thing completely stopped,
and Piffingcap did not realize until too late, until, indeed, the truth
of it was current in the little town everywhere but in his own shop,
that the beards once shaven by him out of Grafton’s pot grew no more
in Bagwood; and there came the space of a week or so when not a soul
entered the saloon but two schoolboys for the cutting of hair, and a
little housemaid for a fringe net.
Then he knew, and one day, having sat in the place the whole morning
like a beleaguered rat, with ruin and damnation a hands-breath only
from him, he rushed from his shop across to the hardware merchant’s and
bought two white china mugs, delicately lined with gold and embossed
with vague lumps, and took them back to the saloon.
At dinner time he put the cup of lead into his coat pocket and walked
down the street in an anxious kind of way until he came to the bridge
at the end of the town. It was an angular stone bridge, crossing a
deep and leisurely flowing river, along whose parapet boys had dared a
million times, wearing smooth, with their adventuring feet, its soft
yellow stone. He stared at the water and saw the shining flank of a
tench as it turned over. All beyond the bridge were meads thick with
ripe unmown grass and sweet with scabious bloom. But the barber’s mind
was harsh with the rancour of noon heats and the misfortunes of life.
He stood with one hand resting upon the hot stone and one upon the
heavy evil thing in his pocket. The bridge was deserted at this hour,
its little traffic having paused for the meal. He took, at length,
the cup from his pocket, and whispering to himself “God forgive you,
Grafton,” he let it fall from his fingers into the water; then he
walked sharply home to his three daughters and told them what he had
done.
“You poor loon!” said Bersa.
“O man! man!” moaned Grue.
“You’re the ruin of us all!” cried Mavie.
Three fine women were Grue and Mavie and Bersa, in spite of the clamour
of the outlandish Piffingcap names, and their father had respect for
them and admired their handsomeness. But they had for their father, all
three of them, the principal filial emotion of compassion, and they
showed that his action had been a foolish action, that there were other
towns in the world besides Bagwood, and that thousands and millions of
men would pay a good price to be quit of a beard, and be shaved from a
pot that would complete the destruction of all the unwanted hairiness
of the world. And they were very angry with him.
“Let us go and see to it ... what is to be done now ... bring us to the
place, father!”
He took them down to the river, and when they peered over the side of
the bridge they could see the pot lying half sunk in some white sand in
more than a fathom of water.
“Let us instruct the waterman,” they said, “he will secure it for us.”
In the afternoon Grue met the waterman, who was a sly young fellow, and
she instructed him, but at tea-time word was brought to Piffingcap that
the young waterman was fallen into the river and drowned. Then there
was grief in his mind, for he remembered the calamity which Grafton had
foretold, and he was for giving up all notions of re-taking the cup;
but his daughter Bersa went in a few days to a man was an angler and
instructed him; and he took a crooked pole and leaned over the bridge
to probe for the cup. In the afternoon word was brought to Piffingcap
that the parapet had given way, and the young angler in falling through
had dashed out his brains on the abutment of the bridge. And the young
gaffer whom Mavie instructed was took of a sunstroke and died on the
bank.
The barber was in great grief at these calamities; he had tremors
of guilt in his mind, no money in his coffers, and the chins of the
Bagwood men were still as smooth as children’s; but it came to him one
day that he need not fear any more calamities, and that a thing which
had so much tricks in it should perhaps be cured by trickery.
“I will go,” he said, “to the Widow Buckland and ask her to assist me.”
The Widow Buckland was a wild strange woman who lived on a heath a
few miles away from Bagwood; so he went over one very hot day to the
Widow and found her cottage in the corner of the heath. There was a
caravan beside the cottage--it was a red caravan with yellow wheels.
A blackbird hung in a wicker cage at the door, and on the side of the
roof board was painted
FEATS & GALIAS ATENDED
AGLAURA BUCKLAND
There was nobody in the caravan so he knocked at the cottage door; the
Widow Buckland led him into her dim little parlour.
“It ’ull cost you half a James!” says she when Mr. Piffingcap had given
her his requirements.
“Half a what?” cried he.
“You are _not_,” said the gipsy, “a man of a mean heart, are you?” She
said it very persuasively, and he felt he could not annoy her for she
was a very large woman with sharp glances.
“No,” said Piffingcap.
“And you’ll believe what I’m telling you, won’t you?”
“Yes,” said Piffingcap.
“It ’ull maybe some time before my words come true, but come true they
will, I can take my oath.”
“Yes,” again said Piffingcap.
“George!” she bawled to someone from the doorway, “wher’d yer put my
box?”
There was an indistinct reply but she bawled out again, “Well, _fetch_
it off the rabbit hutch.”
“And a man like you,” she continued, turning again to the barber,
“doesn’t think twice about half a sovereign, and me putting you in the
way of what you want to know, _I’m_ sure.”
And Piffingcap mumbled dubiously “No,” producing with difficulty some
shillings, some coppers, and a postal order for one and threepence
which a credulous customer had that morning sent him for a bottle of
hairwash.
“Let’s look at your ’and,” she said; taking it she reflected gravely:
“You’re a man that’s ’ad your share o’ trouble, aint you?”
Piffingcap bowed meekly.
“And you’ve ’ad your ’appy days, aint you?”
A nod.
“Well listen to me; you’ve got more fortune in store for you if you
know how to pluck it ... you understand my meaning, don’t you?... than
any man in the town this bleedun minute. Right, George,” she exclaimed,
turning to a very ugly little hunchbacked fellow--truly he was a
mere squint of a man, there was such a little bit of him for so much
uncomeliness. The Widow Buckland took the box from the hunchback and,
thrusting him out of the room, she shut fast the door and turned the
key in the lock. Then she drew up a bit of a table to the window, and
taking out of the box a small brass vessel and two bottles she set them
before her.
“Sit down there, young feller,” she said, and Piffingcap sat down at
the end of the table facing the window. The Widow turned to the window,
which was a small square, the only one in the room, and closed over it
a shutter. The room was clapped in darkness except for a small ray in
the middle of the shutter, coming through a round hole about as large
as a guinea. She pulled Mr. Piffingcap’s shoulder until the ray was
shining on the middle of his forehead; she took up the brass vessel,
and holding it in the light of the ray polished it for some time with
her forefinger. All her fingers, even her thumbs, were covered with
rich sinister rings, but there were no good looks in those fingers
for the nails had been munched almost away, and dirty skin hid up the
whites. The polished vessel was then placed on the table directly
beneath the ray; drops from the two phials were poured into it, a green
liquid and a black liquid; mixing together they melted into a pillar
of smoke which rose and was seen only as it flowed through the beam of
light, twisting and veering and spinning in strange waves.
The Widow Buckland said not a word for a time, but contemplated the
twisting shapes as they poured through the ray, breathing heavily all
the while or suffering a slight sigh to pass out of her breast. But
shortly the smoke played the barber a trick in his nose and heaving
up his chin he rent the room with a great sneeze. When he recovered
himself she was speaking certain words:
“Fire and water I see and a white virgin’s skin. The triple gouts of
blood I see and the doom given over. Fire and water I see and a white
virgin’s skin.”
She threw open the shutter, letting in the light; smoke had ceased to
rise but it filled the parlour with a sweet smell.
“Well ...” said Mr. Piffingcap dubiously.
And the Widow Buckland spoke over to him plainly and slowly, patting
his shoulder at each syllable,
“Fire and water and a white virgin’s skin.”
Unlatching the door she thrust him out of the house into the sunlight.
He tramped away across the heath meditating her words, and coming to
the end of it he sat down in the shade of a bush by the side of the
road, for he felt sure he was about to capture the full meaning of her
words. But just then he heard a strange voice speaking, and speaking
very vigorously. He looked up and observed a man on a bicycle, riding
along towards him, talking to himself in a great way.
“He is a political fellow rehearsing a speech,” said Mr. Piffingcap to
himself, “or perhaps he is some holy-minded person devising a sermon.”
It was a very bald man and he had a long face hung with glasses; he
had no coat and rode in his shirt and knickerbockers, with hot thick
stockings and white shoes. The barber watched him after he had passed
and noted how his knees turned angularly outwards at each upward
movement, and how his saddle bag hung at the bottom of his back like
some ironical label.
“Fool!” exclaimed Mr. Piffingcap, rising angrily, for the man’s chatter
had driven his mind clean away from the Widow Buckland’s meaning. But
it was only for a short while, and when he got home he called one of
his daughters into the saloon.
“My child,” said Piffingcap, “you know the great trouble which is come
on me?” and he told Bersa his difficulty and requested her aid, that
is to say: would she go down in the early morning in her skin only and
recover the pot?
“Indeed no, father!” said his daughter Bersa, “it is a very evil thing
and I will not do your request.”
“You will not?” says he.
“No!” says she, but it was not in the fear of her getting her death
that she refused him.
So he called to another of his daughters.
“My child,” said he, “you know the great trouble that is come on me,”
and he told Mavie his desire and asked for her aid.
“Why, my father,” says she, “this is a thing which a black hag has
put on us all and I will get my death. I love you as I love my life,
father, but I won’t do this!”
“You will not?” says he.
“No!” says she, but it was not for fear of her death she refused him.
And he went to his third daughter Grue and tried her with the same
thing. “My child, you know the trouble that’s come on me?”
“Oh, will you let me alone!” she says, “I’ve a greater trouble on me
than your mouldy pot.” And it is true what she said of her trouble, for
she was a girl of a loose habit. So the barber said no more to them and
went to his bed.
Two days later, it being Saturday, he opened in the morning his saloon
and sat down there. And while he read his newspaper in the empty place
footsteps scampered into his doorway, and the door itself was pushed
open just an inch or two.
“Come in,” he said, rising.
The door opened fully.
“Zennybody here?” whispered Polly walking in very mysteriously, out of
breath, and dressed in a long mackintosh.
“What is the matter, my little one?” he asked, putting his arm around
her shoulders, for he had a fondness for her. “Ach, your hair’s all
wet, what’s the matter?”
The little girl put her hand under the macintosh and drew out the
leaden pot, handing it to the barber and smiling at him with
inarticulate but intense happiness. She said not a word as he stared
his surprise and joy.
“Why Polly, my _dear_, how _did_ you get it?”
“I dived in and got it.”
“You never ... you princess ... you!”
“I just bin and come straight here with it.”
She opened and shut the mackintosh quickly, displaying for a brief
glance her little white naked figure with the slightest tremulous crook
at the sharp knees.
“Ah, my darling,” exclaimed the enraptured barber, “and you’re
shivering with not a rag on you but them shoes ... run away home,
Polly, and get some things on, Polly ... and ... Polly, Polly!” as she
darted away, “come back quick, won’t you?”
She nodded brightly back at him as she sprang through the doorway. He
went to the entrance and watched her taking her twinkling leaps, as
bonny as a young foal, along the pavement.
And there came into the barber’s mind the notion that this was all
again a piece of fancy tricks; but there was the dark pot, and he
examined it. Thoughtfully he took it into his backyard and busied
himself there for a while, not telling his daughters of its recovery.
When, later, Polly joined him in the garden he had already raised a big
fire in an old iron brazier which had lain there.
“Ah, Polly my dear, I’m overjoyed to get it back, but I dasn’t keep it
... it’s a bad thing. Take it in your fingers now, my dear little girl,
and just chuck it in that fire. Ah, we must melt the wickedness out
of it,” he said, observing her disappointment, “it’s been the death of
three men and we dasn’t keep it.”
They watched it among the coals until it had begun to perish drop by
drop through the grating of the brazier.
Later in the day Mr. Piffingcap drove Polly in a little trap to a
neighbouring town to see a circus, and the pair of them had a roaring
dinner at the Green Dragon. Next morning when Polly brought the milk to
the saloon there were Timmy James and Gregory Barnes being shaved, for
beards had grown again in Bagwood.
* * * * *
THE KING OF THE WORLD
* * * * *
THE KING OF THE WORLD
Once upon a time, yes, in the days of King Sennacherib, a young
Assyrian captain, valiant and desirable, but more hapless than either,
fleeing in that strange rout of the armies against Judah, was driven
into the desert. Daily his company perished from him until he alone,
astride a camel, was left searching desperately through a boundless
desert for the loved plains of Shinar, sweet with flocks and rich with
glittering cities. The desolation of ironic horizons that he could
never live to pierce hung hopelessly in remote unattainable distances,
endless as the blue sky. The fate of his comrades had left upon him a
small pack of figs and wine, but in that uncharted wilderness it was
but a pitiable parrying of death’s last keen stroke. There was no balm
or succour in that empty sky; blue it was as sapphires, but savage with
rays that scourged like flaming brass. Earth itself was not less empty,
and the loneliness of his days was an increasing bitterness. He was so
deeply forgotten of men, and so removed from the savour of life, from
his lost country, the men he knew, the women he loved, their temples,
their markets and their homes, that it seemed the gods had drawn that
sweet and easy world away from his entangled feet.
But at last upon a day he was astonished and cheered by the sight of a
black butterfly flickering in the air before him, and towards evening
he espied a giant mound lying lonely in the east. He drove his camel
to it, but found only a hill of sand whirled up by strange winds of
the desert. He cast himself from the camel’s back and lay miserably in
the dust. His grief was extreme, but in time he tended his tired beast
and camped in the shadow of the hill. When he gave himself up to sleep
the night covering them was very calm and beautiful, the sky soft and
streaming with stars; it seemed to his saddened mind that the desert
and the deep earth were indeed dead, and life and love only in that
calm enduring sky. But at midnight a storm arose with quickening furies
that smote the desert to its unseen limits, and the ten thousand stars
were flung into oblivion; winds flashed upon him with a passion more
bitter than a million waves, a terror greater than hosts of immediate
enemies. They grasped and plunged him into gulfs of darkness, heaped
mountains upon him, lashed him with thongs of snakes and scattered him
with scimitars of unspeakable fear. His soul was tossed in the void
like a crushed star and his body beaten into the dust with no breath
left him to bemoan his fate. Nevertheless by a miracle his soul and
body lived on.
It was again day when he recovered, day in the likeness of yesterday,
the horizons still infinitely far. Long past noon, the sun had turned
in the sky; he was alone. The camel was doubtless buried in the
fathoms he himself had escaped, but a surprising wonder greeted his
half-blinded eyes; the hill of sand was gone, utterly, blown into the
eternal waste of the desert, and in its track stood a strange thing--a
shrine. There was a great unroofed pavement of onyx and blue jasper,
large enough for the floor of a temple, with many life-size figures,
both men and women, standing upon it all carved in rock and facing,
at the sacred end, a giant pillared in black basalt, seven times the
height of a man. The sad captain divined at once that this was the lost
shrine of Namu-Sarkkon, the dead god of whom tradition spoke in the
ancient litanies of his country. He heaved himself painfully from the
grave of sand in which he had lain half-buried, and staggering to the
pavement leaned in the shade of one of those figures fronting the dead
god. In a little time he recovered and ate some figs which he carried
in a leather bag at his hip, and plucked the sand from his eyes and
ears and loosened his sandals and gear. Then he bowed himself for a
moment before the black immobile idol, knowing that he would tarry here
now until he died.