Kitabı oku: «The Black Reaper: Tales of Terror by Bernard Capes»
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by Equation 1989
Foreword © Ian Burns 2017
Introduction © Hugh Lamb 2017
Cover design by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2017
Cover images © Shutterstock.com
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008249076
Ebook Edition © October 2017 ISBN: 9780008249083
Version: 2017–09–07
Dedication
To my good friends,
Steve Jones and Randy Broecker,
and happy times at the Shakespeare.
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword
Introduction
The Black Reaper
The Vanishing House
The Thing in the Forest
The Accursed Cordonnier
The Shadow-Dance
William Tyrwhitt’s ‘Copy’
A Queer Cicerone
A Gallows-Bird
The Sword of Corporal Lacoste
The Glass Ball
Poor Lucy Rivers
The Apothecary’s Revenge
The Green Bottle
The Closed Door
The Dark Compartment
The Marble Hands
The Moon Stricken
The Queer Picture
Dark Dignum
The Mask
The Strength of the Rope
The White Hare
An Eddy on the Floor
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
These words are the culmination (so far, at least!) of a series of events which, together, tell a story that would have appealed hugely to Bernard Capes. It is a story of coincidences and timing, and the odd ounce or nanogram of good luck – all essential tools for an author. We could add, for the spookilyminded, a dash of the metaphysical to properly set the scene.
What made me go on to the Internet? Well, nothing other than ego: I wanted to see whether a book I’d written a few years ago could be purchased today. Without even a hint of surprise, it wasn’t listed anywhere; so I proceeded, with little confidence, to look up my grandfather ‘Bernard Capes’. And, lo! (I’m not sure why we use this expression, when we mean the exact opposite) there he was! Bernard E. Capes, At a Winter’s Fire, 1969 – seventy years after it was first published. Why on earth would someone reissue a comprehensively-forgotten (I thought) author, and then not in his own country?
The journey had begun!
I then wrote, for the Amazon Books site, a brief piece about my grandfather which – lo! again – drew a response from John in Connecticut, who’d come across a single phrase in Bloody Murder by Julian Symons: ‘… Bernard Capes’s neglected tour de force The Skeleton Key’.
Shortly after, I received an e-mail from Bruce in New York, who’d come across another Capes book that I didn’t know of, and – yet another lo! – he sent me a photocopy of the introduction to the original 1989 edition of The Black Reaper, another book I hadn’t heard of. It was a collection of short stories, and the editor was identified only as ‘Hugh Lamb, Sutton, Surrey, England’.
This wasn’t much to go on, but Lamb’s words (I almost said ‘tales’) told me so much that I didn’t know about my grandfather that I simply had to write to him. Indeed, until I read Hugh’s introduction, which filled in many gaps, all I knew about my grandfather was that my mother had adored him, that he had quite a sense of humour, that he died in a ’flu epidemic twenty years before I was born, and that his work was peppered with peerless similes.
Would my letter reach Hugh Lamb? Would he still be alive? And would he reply?
Yes, my letter was delivered. Bless Royal Mail!
Yes, he was still alive. Bless … well someone!
And yes, he did reply. Bless Hugh!
In his introduction, Hugh talks about my grandfather’s contrarian angel, and the bad luck he must have experienced, which led me somewhat to consider the parallels in our lives (his and mine). I’ve been fortunately deprived on the bad luck front and over-supplied on the good. However, bad luck is relative. To win second prize in a $30,000 competition at age forty-three, and first prize a year later, is luck of a kind that I would quite happily contribute half of my pension to receive! (From an Australian perspective, as well, being unable to breed rabbits would, to us, have been nearly as valuable as the Gold Rushes.)
The portrait of my grandfather that has been built up ought to give heart to other authors engaged in the eternal struggle to get published. Not many can say that they started at an age when many would have given up, and then actually had work published at an average rate of two books a year over a twenty-year period; and in fields ranging from poetry (two volumes) and history to detective stories, mysteries, romances, and – in numerous magazines – inventive tales of ghosts and other things which, deliciously, still go bump in the night.
Hugh speculates that Bernard probably had to bear his share of literary snobbery, but he might have had a bit of his own. His daughter (my mother) said that he made some disparaging remarks about authors of detective or crime stories – ‘Anyone could write that sort of stuff’ kind of thing – and was obviously called out by his publishers, William Collins. In something akin to petard and hoist, the result was The Skeleton Key, now recognised as the first original crime novel issued by that legendary publishing house.
My 1990s search for my name on the Internet – even before Google! – now brings up fourteen books, including Four Hander: Paths to Murder, which was directly inspired by HarperCollins re-issuing The Mystery of the Skeleton Key in 2015 and now The Black Reaper. Being the fourth generation in our family to have been published, it appears to me that there’s something in this gene thing. Or maybe it’s due to a clammy, twisting English Channel mist rolling its indefatigable, irresistible way through unsuspecting generations of veins across the Seven Seas and over more than a few black-cragged threatening mountain ranges …
And so, thanks to the Internet, some un-met friends in the States, two highly professional libraries (Sutton, England; Mercantile, New York), several happy coincidences, impeccable timing, Hugh Lamb, the oft-maligned postal service, several tons of good luck, and – above all – the spirits who inhabit those worlds so often visited by Bernard Capes, I commend to your reading this new edition of some of the work of my grandfather, (very) late of Winchester, England. I hope the old stories entertain you, and whip the odd tingle up your spine, more than a supernatural century since they were written. He would be amused.
Ian Burns
Melbourne
July 2017
INTRODUCTION
Literary fame seems almost like a lottery; ghost story writers in particular seem to pick losing tickets more than any other kind of author. It is an interesting exercise to ponder why certain authors and their works in this vein, just as well equipped to stand the test of time as their contemporaries, fall into speedy obscurity, while others stay in the public eye. The Victorian era is a fine example of this – for every tale of terror that has survived in print today, there are a hundred languishing in undeserved obscurity.
Bernard Capes is a case in point. During his writing career, he published forty-one books, contributed to all the leading Victorian magazines, and left behind some of the most imaginative tales of terror of his era – yet within ten years of his death, he had slipped down the familiar slope into total neglect. Until the early 1980s, Capes seldom appeared in reference works in this (or any other) field of literature, and even histories of Victorian writers published in his lifetime give him scant mention. He was overlooked by every anthologist in this genre from his death in 1918 right up until 1978: sixty years of lingering in the dark while many of his contemporaries were brought back to light.
I would place Capes among the most imaginative writers of his day. He turned out plot after plot worthy of the recognition accorded to such contemporaries as Stevenson, Haggard, and Conan Doyle, all of whom are still in print today. I hope this selection of his stories will help put Capes in his deserved position with the leading talents of Victorian fantasy.
Bernard Edward Joseph Capes was born in London on 30 August 1854, a nephew of John Moore Capes, a prominent figure in the Oxford Movement. He was educated at Beaumont College and brought up as a Catholic. His elder sister, Harriet Capes (1849–1936), was to become a noted translator and writer of children’s books, publishing a dozen or more up to 1932.
As we will see, a very awkward angel perched on Capes’s shoulder all his life, and made its presence felt at an early stage of his career. He was meant to go into the army; but somehow there was an almighty bureaucratic tangle, and his intended commission was not granted due to some mistake about the age he should have been when presenting himself for examination. There is no record as to why he did not pursue the matter further but the army career came to nothing.
Capes’s awkward angel then accompanied him on the long string of ventures that he made into the world at large. After the army fiasco, he started work in a tea-broker’s office. It must have been dreadfully dull – the tea business in the 1870s was not the most exciting field of human activity, and the young Capes must have endured it in silence until, after a few years, he packed it in and went to study art at the Slade School. What he did about an art career is not recorded; but we do know that in 1888 he went to work for the publishers Eglington and Co., and succeeded Clement Scott as editor of the journal The Theatre.
At this point in his career, he made his first attempts at novel writing, publishing two under the pseudonym ‘Bevis Cane’: The Haunted Tower (1888) and The Missing Man (1889), the latter being issued by Eglington. Presumably neither novel won him success, as ‘Bevis Cane’ never appeared again; and what was generally thought to have been his first novel – under his own name – did not appear for another eight years.
Capes must have thought he had found his niche at last; this foray into writing was to spark off his final (and successful) career. But the angel was not finished yet. Eglington and Co. went out of business in 1892, and Capes must have been really stuck for an occupation to follow his editorship of The Theatre, for he is next discovered making an unsuccessful attempt at, of all things, rabbit farming. There is a dreadful black humour in the thought of a man who cannot successfully breed rabbits.
At long last, however, Capes, aged forty-three, found his true vocation. In 1897 he entered a competition for new authors organised by the Chicago Record. Capes came second with his novel The Mill of Silence, published in Chicago that year by Rand, McNally.
Obviously heartened by this turn of events, Capes entered the competition in 1898 when the Chicago Record repeated it. This time he hit the jackpot. His entry, The Lake of Wine – a long, sometimes quite macabre tale of a fabulous ruby bearing the title of the book – won the competition. It was published by Heinemann the same year, and Capes was a writer from then on.
And write he did. Out flooded short stories, articles, newspaper editorials, reviews, and novels. He published a further two in 1898 (including the book bearing one of the most unappetising titles of all time: The Adventures of the Comte de la Muette During the Reign of Terror). All through the early 1900s, with a four-book bulge in 1910, and right up through the First World War, Capes knocked out a couple of books every year.
Each novel took three months to write, working six hours a day, and Capes would take a month’s holiday after finishing the book. He also played the piano and made games for his children. Another great interest was painting and illustrating.
When I met Ian Burns and Helen Capes in October 2002, they honoured me by showing me (and letting me hold!) a precious family heirloom – the only copy of Bernard’s The Book Of The Beasts. Subtitled ‘Being certain animals which through their own perversity or ill temper have become extinct’, the book had been hand-made by Capes, written and illustrated with his own watercolours, for his children. It was fascinating. No wonder Renalt said of his father in 1982: ‘Bernard was the nicest, kindest man I have ever known, and never had anything nasty to say about anybody at all.’
He wrote mainly novels, but every so often he issued a book of his stories collected from their various magazine appearances. The list of magazines he contributed to is impressive, and includes Blackwood’s, Cassell’s, Cornhill, The Idler, Illustrated London News, Lippincott’s, Macmillan’s, Pall Mall and Pearson’s: a roll of honour of the finest magazines of the era.
In 1889, Bernard Capes married Rosalie Amos (1865–1949) and they moved from Streatham to Winchester, where he spent the rest of his life. Rosalie appears to have been something of a domestic tyrant, handling the finances and running the household (vigorously, so it seems). Bernard must have been quite happy to concentrate on his writing. They had three children: Gareth (1893–1921), Nerine (1897–1967), and Renalt (1905–1983). Gareth had an army career (perhaps to make up for the one his father never had), while Renalt Capes (1905–1983) became, like his father, a writer late in life. He published three books in the late 1940s, including studies on Lord Nelson and Alexandre Dumas. He also wrote short stories, one of which was filmed as Dual Alibi (1946) with Herbert Lom. Nerine married Graham Burns and had an eventful time in the Second World War; Graham was later to be the last European killed in the Malayan emergency in 1952. Their son, Ian Burns, lives in Australia and carries on the Capes’s writing tradition, as the author of the children’s book Scratcher (1987) and many more since.
Bernard was very popular in Winchester and Renalt recalled one incident which indicates why. He remembered the First Army, the ‘contemptible little army’ according to the Kaiser, on its way from Winchester to Southampton, there to go to France, at the beginning of the first world war. The soldiers marched past Bernard’s house (for three days) and he set up tables outside, with coffee, sandwiches and cigarettes for the troops.
Even during his period of literary success, Bernard Capes’s angel was never far away. With a new novel on the stocks (The Skeleton Key, published posthumously), Capes was struck down by the influenza epidemic which swept Europe at the end of the First World War. A short illness was followed by heart failure, and he died in Winchester on 1 November 1918. He was sixty-four, and had had only twenty years at writing. Capes’s luck, as always, ran out at the wrong time.
Rosalie organised a plaque for him in Winchester Cathedral, among the likes of Izaak Walton and Jane Austen. It can still be seen, next to the entrance to the crypt.
He had earned enough of a reputation to merit an obituary in The Times on 4 November 1918. It called him a ‘busy writer, and always a readable one … as he grew older, his style mellowed, for gifted as he was he took some time to find himself’; then added, in typically sniffy fashion, ‘Nor were his The Fabulists, a collection of eerie tales, unworthy of him.’ This fastidious approach to tales of terror is very familiar, even now; Capes probably had to bear his share of literary snobbery in his lifetime. Ghost stories are always treated as a poor relation by literary thinkers, although heaven knows why – they are one of the longest surviving branches of literature.
Capes received a less snooty obituary from The New Witness, which called him ‘one of our most brilliant contributors’. It said of him that ‘He had a very real genius for the supernatural, his ghost stories are among the best in the language. He had an eerie gift for touching on the very quick of horror and never spoilt a supernatural situation by the suggestion of materialism.’
Capes had also earned the enthusiasm of G.K. Chesterton, who wrote an introduction for Capes’s posthumous The Skeleton Key (a fine detective novel). Chesterton said of Capes; ‘It may seem a paradox to say that he was insufficiently appreciated because he did popular things well. But it is true to say that he always gave a touch of distinction to a detective story or a tale of adventure; and so gave it where it was not valued, because it was not expected.’ Chesterton obviously knew about the sniffy tones of the day as well. He praised Capes’s ‘technical liberality of writing a penny-dreadful so as to make it worth a pound. In his short stories … he did indeed permit himself to be poetic in a more direct and serious fashion.’ And it is those stories which concern us now.
Capes’s imagination soared. He imagined the moon being the repository of lost souls (‘The Moon Stricken’); the soul of a dead glassblower trapped in a bottle and released to terrorise a foolish investigator (‘The Green Bottle’); a smuggler brought down by the man whose death he caused twenty years earlier (‘Dark Dignum’); a werewolf priest in a grisly variation of ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (‘The Thing in the Forest’); a prison cell haunted by a dead man who makes the dust swirl constantly (‘An Eddy on the Floor’); a suicide returning to teach his ne’er-do-well nephew a grisly lesson (‘The Closed Door’); and a wicked ancestor who steps down from his portrait to give visitors a guided tour (‘A Queer Cicerone’). He ranged from Napoleonic terrors to haunted typewriters; from marble hands which come to life to plague-stricken villagers haunted by a scythe-wielding ghost; from werewolves to the Wandering Jew. Bernard Capes rang the changes on tales of terror like very few writers of his day. It makes his neglect all the more surprising.
Of the tales in this book, nearly all appeared first in magazine form and were then collected into various books of short stories as Capes published them. Those from The Fabulists need some explanation. The shorter stories first appeared in The New Witness, and were tales told by four young men who decide to journey from village to village telling stories to earn their keep. They merely narrate the tales, without necessarily appearing in them; but the stories all bear the marks of a camp-fire yarn. As for the others, they stand up superbly on their own. Capes could hit the mark better than most.
We must never forget the sardonic angel on Capes’s shoulder. When I reprinted a couple of these stories in Tales from a Gas-Lit Graveyard in 1979, I sent a copy of the volume to Robert Aickman, one of our foremost ghost story writers (his grandfather, Richard Marsh, was in the book as well). Aickman wrote back, commenting on the stories, and said this of Capes: ‘His stories reveal the author’s desperate frustration, an all too familiar property of the trade. He also uses words in a curious way at many places; as if he were writing under the influence of drink, as perhaps he was, when one considers his basic attitude.’
Intrigued by Aickman’s insight (I had not told him of Capes’s long record of failure), I asked him to elaborate for the benefit of this book when it finally appeared. His reply deserves reprinting:
Consider the opening paragraph and second paragraph in ‘The Green Bottle’. When Capes describes himself as ‘happening to be grinding his literary barrel organ – always adaptable to the popular need’, this is not character drawing but an expression of rueful awareness that the words are largely true. Similarly, the contempt expressed for Sewell is partly self contempt and partly contempt for the awful people one has to mix with in the awful trade of popular authorship. Thus again with the first paragraph of ‘An Eddy on the Floor’; these words do not even pretend to be in character. They are Capes speaking. No man who sees himself as even reasonably content or fulfilled writes like this. The entire atmosphere is saturated with disappointment, disillusionment, and despair. None of this means that Capes’s stories are without good qualities. Still less does it mean that Capes was necessarily justified in his apparent estimate of his powers and deserts. Least of all does it mean that you have to accept a word I say on the subject.
Anyone who knew Robert Aickman would accept his word on this like a shot. Aickman did his fair share of research into ghost stories and knew his authors well.
If you examine Capes’s tales, you won’t find any conventional heroes or conventional happy endings. His protagonists wander into situations or are obliged to take action almost by default, while suffering humanity gets short shrift as well. He also seems to reserve harsh fates for gentlemen of the press – consider ‘The Green Bottle’, ‘An Eddy on the Floor’, or ‘William Tyrwhitt’s “Copy”’. Capes hardly needed to populate the moon with lost souls – he sends them wandering blindly through the pages of his stories down here on earth.
Perhaps it is his basic pessimism that gives Capes’s stories their undoubted power. Few authors from the time conjured up such dark canvasses as he paints in ‘A Gallows-bird’ or ‘The Sword of Corporal Lacoste’. However, this dark vision never seemed to extend to his novels, which are often lighter, less grim, historical follies. The Pot of Basil (1913), for instance, is an airy, whimsical piece about eighteenth century court life in Italy – a long way from the grinding horror of ‘A Gallows-bird’. And the lovers in The Story of Fifine (1914) are in a world far removed from the blossoming courtship we see outlined in ‘The Accursed Cordonnier’.
Capes soon passed into the neglect so common in this field. After The Skeleton Key was published in 1919, nothing more appeared in Britain until a couple of re-issues in 1928 and 1929 – and then that was it. His neglect over the years is strange indeed, especially when other authors from the same era are reprinted mercilessly.
I hope that this new edition of The Black Reaper will bring Bernard Capes back into the eye of the ghost story enthusiast, and a wider public. He deserves reprinting and a second chance. We must hope that his usual bad luck died with him.
Hugh Lamb
Sutton, Surrey
February 2017
THE BLACK REAPER
Taken from the Q— Register of Local Events,
as Compiled from Authentic Narratives
Now I am to tell you of a thing that befell in the year 1665 of the Great Plague, when the hearts of certain amongst men, grown callous in wickedness upon that rebound from an inhuman austerity, were opened to the vision of a terror that moved and spoke not in the silent places of the fields. Forasmuch as, however, in the recovery from delirium a patient may marvel over the incredulity of neighbours who refuse to give credence to the presentments that have been ipso facto to him, so, the nation being sound again, and its constitution hale, I expect little but a laugh for my piety in relating of the following incident; which, nevertheless, is as essential true as that he who shall look through the knot-hole in the plank of a coffin shall acquire the evil eye.
For, indeed, in those days of a wild fear and confusion, when every condition that maketh for reason was set wandering by a devious path, and all men sitting as in a theatre of death looked to see the curtain rise upon God knows what horrors, it was vouchsafed to many to witness sights and sounds beyond the compass of Nature, and that as if the devil and his minions had profited by the anarchy to slip unobserved into the world. And I know that this is so, for all the insolence of a recovered scepticism; and, as to the unseen, we are like one that traverseth the dark with a lanthorn, himself the skipper of a little moving blot of light, but a positive mark for any secret foe without the circumference of its radiance.
Be that as it may, and whether it was our particular ill-fortune, or, as some asserted, our particular wickedness, that made of our village an inviting back-door of entrance to the Prince of Darkness, I know not; but so it is that disease and contagion are ever inclined to penetrate by way of flaws or humours where the veil of the flesh is already perforated, as a kite circleth round its quarry, looking for the weak place to strike: and, without doubt, in that land of corruption we were a very foul blot indeed.
How this came about it were idle to speculate; yet no man shall have the hardihood to affirm that it was otherwise. Nor do I seek to extenuate myself, who was in truth no better than my neighbours in most that made us a community of drunkards and forswearers both lewd and abominable. For in that village a depravity that was like madness had come to possess the heads of the people, and no man durst take his stand on honesty or even common decency, for fear he should be set upon by his comrades and drummed out of his government on a pint pot. Yet for myself I will say was one only redeeming quality, and that was the pure love I bore to my solitary orphaned child, the little Margery.
Now, our vicar – a patient and God-fearing man, for all his predial tithes were impropriated by his lord, that was an absentee and a sheriff in London – did little to stem that current of lewdness that had set in strong with the Restoration. And this was from no lack of virtue in himself, but rather from a natural invertebracy, as one may say, and an order of mind that, yet being no order, is made the sport of any sophister with a wit for paragram. Thus it always is that mere example is of little avail without precept – of which, however, it is an important condition – and that the successful directors of men be not those who go to the van and lead, unconscious of the gibes and mockery in their rear, but such rather as drive the mob before them with a smiting hand and no infirmity of purpose. So, if a certain affection for our pastor dwelt in our hearts, no tittle of respect was there to leaven it and justify his high office before Him that consigned the trust; and ever deeper and deeper we sank in the slough of corruption, until was brought about this pass – that naught but some scourging despotism of the Church should acquit us of the fate of Sodom. That such, at the eleventh hour, was vouchsafed us of God’s mercy, it is my purpose to show; and, doubtless, this offering of a loop-hole was to account by reason of the devil’s having debarked his reserves, as it were, in our port; and so quartering upon us a soldiery that we were, at no invitation of our own, to maintain, stood us a certain extenuation.
It was late in the order of things before in our village so much as a rumour of the plague reached us. Newspapers were not in those days, and reports, being by word of mouth, travelled slowly, and were often spent bullets by the time they fell amongst us. Yet, by May, some gossip there was of the distemper having gotten a hold in certain quarters of London and increasing, and this alarmed our people, though it made no abatement of their profligacy. But presently the reports coming thicker, with confirmation of the terror and panic that was enlarging on all sides, we must take measures for our safety; though into June and July, when the pestilence was raging, none infected had come our way, and that from our remote and isolated position. Yet it needs but fear for the crown to that wickedness that is self-indulgence; and forasmuch as this fear fattens like a toadstool on the decomposition it springs from, it grew with us to the proportions that we were set to kill or destroy any that should approach us from the stricken districts.
And then suddenly there appeared in our midst he that was appointed to be our scourge and our cautery.
Whence he came, or how, no man of us could say. Only one day we were a community of roysterers and scoffers, impious and abominable, and the next he was amongst us smiting and thundering.
Some would have it that he was an old collegiate of our vicar’s, but at last one of those wandering Dissenters that found never as now the times opportune to their teachings – a theory to which our minister’s treatment of the stranger gave colour. For from the moment of his appearance he took the reins of government, as it were, appropriating the pulpit and launching his bolts therefrom, with the full consent and encouragement of the other. There were those, again, who were resolved that his commission was from a high place, whither news of our infamy had reached, and that we had best give him a respectful hearing, lest we should run a chance of having our hearing stopped altogether. A few were convinced he was no man at all, but rather a fiend sent to thresh us with the scourge of our own contriving, that we might be tender, like steak, for the cooking; and yet other few regarded him with terror, as an actual figure or embodiment of the distemper.
But, generally, after the first surprise, the feeling of resentment at his intrusion woke and gained ground, and we were much put about that he should have thus assumed the pastorship without invitation, quartering with our vicar, who kept himself aloof and was little seen, and seeking to drive us by terror, and amazement, and a great menace of retribution. For, in truth, this was not the method to which we were wont, and it both angered and disturbed us.
This feeling would have enlarged the sooner, perhaps, were it not for a certain restraining influence possessed of the newcomer, which neighboured him with darkness and mystery. For he was above the common tall, and ever appeared in public with a slouched hat, that concealed all the upper part of his face and showed little otherwise but the dense black beard that dropped upon his breast like a shadow.
Now with August came a fresh burst of panic, how the desolation increased and the land was overrun with swarms of infected persons seeking an asylum from the city; and our anger rose high against the stranger, who yet dwelt with us and encouraged the distemper of our minds by furious denunciations of our guilt.
Thus far, for all the corruption of our hearts, we had maintained the practice of church-going, thinking, maybe, poor fools! to hoodwink the Almighty with a show of reverence; but now, as by a common consent, we neglected the observances and loitered of a Sabbath in the fields, and thither at the last the strange man pursued us and ended the matter.
For so it fell that at the time of the harvest’s ripening a goodish body of us males was gathered one Sunday for coolness about the neighbourhood of the dripping well, whose waters were a tradition, for they had long gone dry. This well was situate in a sort of cave or deep scoop at the foot of a cliff of limestone, to which the cultivated ground that led up to it fell somewhat. High above, the cliff broke away into a wide stretch of pasture land, but the face of the rock itself was all patched with bramble and little starved birch trees clutching for foothold; and in like manner the excavation beneath was half-stifled and gloomed over with undergrowth, so that it looked a place very dismal and uninviting, save in the ardour of the dog-days.
Within, where had been the basin, was a great shattered hole going down to unknown depths; and this no man had thought to explore, for a mystery held about the spot that was doubtless the foster-child of ignorance.
But to the front of the well and of the cliff stretched a noble field of corn, and this field was of an uncommon shape, being, roughly, a vast circle and a little one joined by a neck and in suggestion not unlike an hour-glass; and into the crop thereof, which was of goodly weight and condition, were the first sickles to be put on the morrow.
Now as we stood or lay around, idly discussing of the news, and congratulating ourselves that we were for once quit of our incubus, to us along the meadow path, his shadow jumping on the corn, came the very subject of our gossip.
He strode up, looking neither to right nor left, and with the first word that fell, low and damnatory, from his lips, we knew that the moment had come when, whether for good or evil, he intended to cast us from him and acquit himself of further responsibility in our direction.
‘Behold!’ he cried, pausing over against us, ‘I go from among ye! Behold, ye that have not obeyed nor inclined your ear, but have walked everyone in the imagination of his evil heart! Saith the Lord, “I will bring evil upon them, which they shall not be able to escape; and though they shall cry unto Me, I will not hearken unto them.”’
His voice rang out, and a dark silence fell among us. It was pregnant, but with little of humility. We had had enough of this interloper and his abuse. Then, like Jeremiah, he went to prophesy:
‘I read ye, men of Anathoth, and the murder in your hearts. Ye that have worshipped the shameful thing and burned incense to Baal – shall I cringe that ye devise against me, or not rather pray to the Lord of Hosts, “Let me see Thy vengeance on them”? And he answereth, “I will bring evil upon the men of Anathoth, even the year of their visitation.”’
Now, though I was no participator in that direful thing that followed, I stood by, nor interfered, and so must share the blame. For there were men risen all about, and their faces lowering, and it seemed that it would go hard with the stranger were he not more particular.
But he moved forward, with a stately and commanding gesture, and stood with his back to the well-scoop and threatened us and spoke.
‘Lo!’ he shrieked, ‘your hour is upon you! Ye shall be mowed down like ripe corn, and the shadow of your name shall be swept from the earth! The glass of your iniquity is turned, and when its sand is run through, not a man of ye shall be!’
He raised his arm aloft, and in a moment he was overborne. Even then, as all say, none got sight of his face; but he fought with lowered head, and his black beard flapped like a wounded crow. But suddenly a boy-child ran forward of the bystanders, crying and screaming—
‘Hurt him not! They are hurting him – oh, me! oh, me!’
And from the sweat and struggle came his voice, gasping, ‘I spare the little children!’
Then only I know of the surge and the crash towards the well-mouth, of an instant cessation of motion, and immediately of men toiling hither and thither with boulders and huge blocks, which they piled over the rent, and so sealed it with a cromlech of stone.
That, in the heat of rage and of terror, we had gone further than we had at first designed, our gloom and our silence on the morrow attested. True we were quit of our incubus, but on such terms as not even the severity of the times could excuse. For the man had but chastised us to our improvement; and to destroy the scourge is not to condone the offence. For myself, as I bore up the little Margery to my shoulder on my way to the reaping, I felt the burden of guilt so great as that I found myself muttering of an apology to the Lord that I durst put myself into touch with innocence. ‘But the walk would fatigue her otherwise,’ I murmured; and, when we were come to the field, I took and carried her into the upper or little meadow, out of reach of the scythes, and placed her to sleep amongst the corn, and so left her with a groan.
But when I was come anew to my comrades, who stood at the lower extremity of the field – and this was the bottom of the hour-glass, so to speak – I was aware of a stir amongst them, and, advancing closer, that they were all intent upon the neighbourhood of the field I had left, staring like distraught creatures, and holding well together, as if in a panic. Therefore, following the direction of their eyes, and of one that pointed with rigid finger, I turned me about, and looked whence I had come; and my heart went with a somersault, and in a moment I was all sick and dazed.
For I saw, at the upper curve of the meadow, where the well lay in gloom, that a man had sprung out of the earth, as it seemed, and was started reaping; and the face of this man was all in shadow, from which his beard ran out and down like a stream of gall.
He reaped swiftly and steadily, swinging like a pendulum; but, though the sheaves fell to him right and left, no swish of the scythe came to us, nor any sound but the beating of our own hearts.
Now, from the first moment of my looking, no doubt was in my lost soul but that this was him we had destroyed come back to verify his prophecy in ministering to the vengeance of the Lord of Hosts; and at the thought a deep groan rent my bosom, and was echoed by those about me. But scarcely was it issued when a second terror smote me as that I near reeled. Margery – my babe! put to sleep there in the path of the Black Reaper!
At that, though they called to me, I sprang forward like a madman, and running along the meadow, through the neck of the glass, reached the little thing, and stooped and snatched her into my arms. She was sound and unfrighted, as I felt with a burst of thankfulness; but, looking about me, as I turned again to fly, I had near dropped in my tracks for the sickness and horror I experienced in the nearer neighbourhood of the apparition. For, though it never raised its head, or changed the steady swing of its shoulders, I knew that it was aware of and was reaping at me. Now, I tell you, it was ten yards away, yet the point of the scythe came gliding upon me silently, like a snake, through the stalks, and at that I screamed out and ran for my life.
I escaped, sweating with terror; but when I was sped back to the men, there was all the village collected, and our vicar to the front, praying from a throat that rattled like a dead leaf in a draught. I know not what he said, for the low cries of the women filled the air; but his face was white as a smock, and his fingers writhed in one another like a knot of worms.
‘The plague is upon us!’ they wailed. ‘We shall be mowed down like ripe corn!’
And even as they shrieked the Black Reaper paused, and, putting away his scythe, stooped and gathered up a sheaf in his arms and stood it on end. And, with the very act, a man – one that had been forward in yesterday’s business – fell down amongst us yelling and foaming; and he rent his breast in his frenzy, revealing the purple blot thereon, and he passed blaspheming. And the reaper stooped and stooped again, and with every sheaf he gathered together one of us fell stricken and rolled in his agony, while the rest stood by palsied.
But, when at length all that was cut was accounted for, and a dozen of us were gone each to his judgment, and he had taken up his scythe to reap anew, a wild fury woke in the breasts of some of the more abandoned and reckless amongst us.
‘It is not to be tolerated!’ they cried. ‘Let us at once fire the corn and burn this sorcerer!’
And with that, some five or six of them, emboldened by despair, ran up into the little field, and, separating, had out each his flint and fired the crop in his own place, and retreated to the narrow part for safety.
Now the reaper rested on his scythe, as if unexpectedly acquitted of a part of his labour; but the corn flamed up in these five or six directions, and was consumed in each to the compass of a single sheaf: whereat the fire died away. And with its dying the faces of those that had ventured went black as coal; and they flung up their arms, screaming, and fell prone where they stood, and were hidden from our view.
Then, indeed, despair seized upon all of us that survived, and we made no doubt but that we were to be exterminated and wiped from the earth for our sins, as were the men of Anathoth. And for an hour the Black Reaper mowed and trussed, till he had cut all from the little upper field and was approached to the neck of juncture with the lower and larger. And before us that remained, and who were drawn back amongst the trees, weeping and praying, a fifth of our comrades lay foul, and dead, and sweltering, and all blotched over with the dreadful mark of the pestilence.
Now, as I say, the reaper was nearing the neck of juncture; and so we knew that if he should once pass into the great field towards us and continue his mowing, not one of us should be left to give earnest of our repentance.
Then, as it seemed, our vicar came to a resolution, moving forward with a face all wrapt and entranced; and he strode up the meadow path and approached the apparition, and stretched out his arms to it entreating. And we saw the other pause, awaiting him; and, as he came near, put forth his hand, and so, gently, on the good old head. But as we looked, catching at our breaths with a little pathos of hope, the priestly face was thrown back radiant, and the figure of him that would give his life for us sank amongst the yet standing corn and disappeared from our sight.
So at last we yielded ourselves fully to our despair; for if our pastor should find no mercy, what possibility of it could be for us!
It was in this moment of an uttermost grief and horror, when each stood apart from his neighbour, fearing the contamination of his presence, that there was vouchsafed to me, of God’s pity, a wild and sudden inspiration. Still to my neck fastened the little Margery – not frighted, it seemed, but mazed – and other babes there were in plenty, that clung to their mothers’ skirts and peeped out, wondering at the strange show.
I ran to the front and shrieked: ‘The children! the children! He will not touch the little children! Bring them and set them in his path!’ And so crying I sped to the neck of the meadow, and loosened the soft arms from my throat, and put the little one down within the corn.
Now at once the women saw what I would be at, and full a score of them snatched up their babes and followed me. And here we were reckless for ourselves; but we knelt the innocents in one close line across the neck of land, so that the Black Reaper should not find space between any of them to swing his scythe. And having done this, we fell back with our hearts bubbling in our breasts, and we stood panting and watched.
He had paused over that one full sheaf of his reaping; but now, with the sound of the women’s running, he seized his weapon again and set to upon the narrow belt of corn that yet separated him from the children. But presently, coming out upon the tender array, his scythe stopped and trailed in his hand, and for a full minute he stood like a figure of stone. Then thrice he walked slowly backwards and forwards along the line, seeking for an interval whereby he might pass; and the children laughed at him like silver bells, showing no fear, and perchance meeting that of love in his eyes that was hidden from us.
Then of a sudden he came to before the midmost of the line, and, while we drew our breath like dying souls, stooped and snapped his blade across his knee, and, holding the two parts in his hand, turned and strode back into the shadow of the dripping well. There arrived, he paused once more, and, twisting him about, waved his hand once to us and vanished into the blackness. But there were those who affirmed that in that instant of his turning, his face was revealed, and that it was a face radiant and beautiful as an angel’s.
Such is the history of the wild judgment that befell us, and by grace of the little children was foregone; and such was the stranger whose name no man ever heard tell, but whom many have since sought to identify with that spirit of the pestilence that entered into men’s hearts and confounded them, so that they saw visions and were afterwards confused in their memories.
But this I may say, that when at last our courage would fetch us to that little field of death, we found it to be all blackened and blasted, so as nothing would take root there then or ever since; and it was as if, after all the golden sand of the hour-glass was run away and the lives of the most impious with it, the destroyer saw fit to stay his hand for sake of the babes that he had pronounced innocent, and for such as were spared to witness to His judgment. And this I do here, with a heart as contrite as if it were the morrow of the visitation, the which with me it ever has remained.
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