The Wish House and Other Stories

  ‘But suppose he dies?’ I suggested to Manallace.

  ‘He won’t. I’ve been talking to Gleeag. He says he’s all right.’

  ‘Wouldn’t Gleeag’s talk be common form?’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t said that. But, surely, Gleeag wouldn’t have the face to play with me – or her.’

  ‘Why not? I expect it’s been done before.’

  But Manallace insisted that, in this case, it would be impossible.

  The operation was a success and, some weeks later, Castorley began to recast the arrangement and most of the material of his book. ‘Let me have my way,’ he said, when Manallace protested. ‘They are making too much of a baby of me. I really don’t need Gleeag looking in every day now.’ But Lady Castorley told us that he required careful watching. His heart had felt the strain, and fret or disappointment of any kind must be avoided. ‘Even,’ she turned to Manallace, ‘though you know ever so much better how his book should be arranged than he does himself.’

  ‘But really,’ Manallace began. ‘I’m very careful not to fuss—’

  She shook her finger at him playfully. ‘You don’t think you do; but, remember, he tells me everything that you tell him, just the same as he told me everything that he used to tell you. Oh, I don’t mean the things that men talk about. I mean about his Chaucer.’

  ‘I didn’t realize that,’ said Manallace, weakly.

  ‘I thought you didn’t. He never spares me anything; but I don’t mind,’ she replied with a laugh, and went off to Gleeag, who was paying his daily visit. Gleeag said he had no objection to Manallace working with Castorley on the book for a given time – say, twice a week – but supported Lady Castorley’s demand that he should not be over-taxed in what she called ‘the sacred hours’. The man grew more and more difficult to work with, and the little check he had heretofore set on his self-praise went altogether.

  ‘He says there has never been anything in the History of Letters to compare with it,’ Manallace groaned. ‘He wants now to inscribe – he never dedicates, you know – inscribe it to me, as his “most valued assistant”. The devil of it is that she backs him up in getting it out soon. Why? How much do you think she knows?’

  ‘Why should she know anything at all?’

  ‘You heard her say he had told her everything that he had told me about Chaucer? (I wish she hadn’t said that!) If she puts two and two together, she can’t help seeing that every one of his notions and theories has been played up to. But then – but then…Why is she trying to hurry publication? She talks about me fretting him. She’s at him, all the time, to be quick.’

  Castorley must have over-worked, for, after a couple of months, he complained of a stitch in his right side, which Gleeag said was a slight sequel, a little incident of the operation. It threw him back awhile, but he returned to his work undefeated.

  The book was due in the autumn. Summer was passing, and his publisher urgent, and – he said to me, when after a longish interval I called – Manallace had chosen this time, of all, to take holiday. He was not pleased with Manallace, once his indefatigable aide, but now dilatory, and full of time-wasting objections. Lady Castorley had noticed it, too.

  Meantime, with Lady Castorley’s help, he himself was doing the best he could to expedite the book: but Manallace had mislaid (did I think through jealousy?) some essential stuff which had been dictated to him. And Lady Castorley wrote Manallace, who had been delayed by a slight motor accident abroad, that the fret of waiting was prejudicial to her husband’s health. Manallace, on his return from the Continent, showed me that letter.

  ‘He has fretted a little, I believe,’ I said.

  Manallace shuddered. ‘If I stay abroad, I’m helping to kill him. If I help him to hurry up the book, I’m expected to kill him. She knows,’ he said.

  ‘You’re mad. You’ve got this thing on the brain.’

  ‘I have not! Look here! You remember that Gleeag gave me from four to six, twice a week, to work with him. She called them the “sacred hours”. You heard her? Well, they are! They are Gleeag’s and hers. But she’s so infernally plain, and I’m such a fool, it took me weeks to find it out.’

  ‘That’s their affair,’ I answered. ‘It doesn’t prove she knows anything about the Chaucer.’

  ‘She does! He told her everything that he had told me when I was pumping him, all those years. She put two and two together when the thing came out. She saw exactly how I had set my traps. I know it! She’s been trying to make me admit it.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Didn’t understand what she was driving at, of course. And then she asked Gleeag, before me, if he didn’t think the delay over the book was fretting Sir Alured. He didn’t think so. He said getting it out might deprive him of an interest. He had that much decency. She’s the devil!’

  ‘What do you suppose is her game, then?’

  ‘If Castorley knows he’s been had, it’ll kill him. She’s at me all the time, indirectly, to let it out. I’ve told you she wants to make it a sort of joke between us. Gleeag’s willing to wait. He knows Castorley’s a dead man. It slips out when they talk. They say “He was”, not “He is”. Both of ’em know it. But she wants him finished sooner.’

  ‘I don’t believe it. What are you going to do?’

  ‘What can I? I’m not going to have him killed, though.’

  Manlike, he invented compromises whereby Castorley might be lured up by-paths of interest, to delay publication. This was not a success. As autumn advanced Castorley fretted more, and suffered from returns of his distressing colics. At last, Gleeag told him that he thought they might be due to an overlooked gallstone working down. A second comparatively trivial operation would eliminate the bother once and for all. If Castorley cared for another opinion, Gleeag named a surgeon of eminence. ‘And then,’ said he, cheerily, ‘the two of us can talk you over.’ Castorley did not want to be talked over. He was oppressed by pains in his side, which, at first, had yielded to the liver-tonics Gleeag prescribed; but now they stayed – like a toothache – behind everything. He felt most at ease in his bedroom-study, with his proofs round him. If he had more pain than he could stand, he would consider the second operation. Meantime Manallace – ‘the meticulous Manallace’, he called him – agreed with him in thinking that the Mentzel page-facsimile, done by the Sunnapia Library, was not quite good enough for the great book, and the Sunnapia people were, very decently, having it re-processed. This would hold things back till early spring, which had its advantages, for he could run a fresh eye over all in the interval.

  One gathered these news in the course of stray visits as the days shortened. He insisted on Manallace keeping to the ‘sacred hours’, and Manallace insisted on my accompanying him when possible. On these occasions he and Castorley would confer apart for half an hour or so, while I listened to an unendurable clock in the drawing-room. Then I would join them and help wear out the rest of the time, while Castorley rambled. His speech, now, was often clouded and uncertain – the result of the ‘liver-tonics’; and his face came to look like old vellum.

  It was a few days after Christmas – the operation had been postponed till the following Friday – that we called together. She met us with word that Sir Alured had picked up an irritating little winter cough, due to a cold wave, but we were not, therefore, to abridge our visit. We found him in steam perfumed with Friar’s Balsam. He waved the old Sunnapia facsimile at us. We agreed that it ought to have been more worthy. He took a dose of his mixture, lay back and asked us to lock the door. There was, he whispered, something wrong somewhere. He could not lay his finger on it, but it was in the air. He felt he was being played with. He did not like it. There was something wrong all round him. Had we noticed it? Manallace and I severally and slowly denied that we had noticed anything of the sort.

  With no longer break than a light fit of coughing, he fell into the hideous helpless panic of the sick – those worse than captives who lie at the judgment and mercy of the hale fo
r every office and hope. He wanted to go away. Would we help him to pack his Gladstone? Or, if that would attract too much attention in certain quarters, help him to dress and go out? There was an urgent matter to be set right, and now that he had The Title and knew his own mind it would all end happily and he would be well again. Please would we let him go out, just to speak to – he named her; he named her by her ‘little’ name out of the old Neminaka days? Manallace quite agreed, and recommended a pull at the ‘liver-tonic’ to brace him after so long in the house. He took it, and Manallace suggested that it would be better if, after his walk, he came down to the cottage for a weekend and brought the revise with him. They could then re-touch the last chapter. He answered to that drug and to some praise of his work, and presently simpered drowsily. Yes, it was good – though he said it who should not. He praised himself awhile till, with a puzzled forehead and shut eyes, he told us that she had been saying lately that it was too good – the whole thing, if we understood, was too good. He wished us to get the exact shade of her meaning. She had suggested, or rather implied, this doubt. She had said – he would let us draw our own inferences – that the Chaucer find had ‘anticipated the wants of humanity’. Johnson, of course. No need to tell him that. But what the hell was her implication? Oh God! Life had always been one long innuendo! And she had said that a man could do anything with anyone if he saved him the trouble of thinking. What did she mean by that? He had never shirked thought. He had thought sustainedly all his life. It wasn’t too good, was it? Manallace didn’t think it was too good – did he? But this pick-pick-picking at a man’s brain and work was too bad, wasn’t it? What did she mean? Why did she always bring in Manallace, who was only a friend – no scholar, but a lover of the game – Eh? – Manallace could confirm this if he were here, instead of loafing on the Continent just when he was most needed.

  ‘I’ve come back,’ Manallace interrupted, unsteadily. ‘I can confirm every word you’ve said. You’ve nothing to worry about. It’s your find – your credit – your glory and – all the rest of it.’

  ‘Swear you’ll tell her so then,’ said Castorley. ‘She doesn’t believe a word I say. She told me she never has since before we were married. Promise!’

  Manallace promised, and Castorley added that he had named him his literary executor, the proceeds of the book to go to his wife. ‘All profits without deduction,’ he gasped. ‘Big sales if it’s properly handled. You don’t need money…Graydon’ll trust you to any extent. It ’ud be a long…’

  He coughed, and, as he caught breath, his pain broke through all the drugs, and the outcry filled the room. Manallace rose to fetch Gleeag, when a full, high, affected voice, unheard for a generation, accompanied, as it seemed, the clamour of a beast in agony, saying: ‘I wish to God someone would stop that old swine howling there! I can’t…I was going to tell you fellows that it would be a dam’ long time before Graydon advanced me two quid.’

  We escaped together, and found Gleeag waiting, with Lady Castorley, on the landing. He telephoned me, next morning, that Castorley had died of bronchitis, which his weak state made it impossible for him to throw off. ‘Perhaps it’s just as well,’ he added, in reply to the condolences I asked him to convey to the widow. ‘We might have come across something we couldn’t have coped with.’

  Distance from that house made me bold.

  ‘You knew all along, I suppose? What was it, really?’

  ‘Malignant kidney-trouble – generalized at the end. No use worrying him about it. We let him through as easily as possible. Yes! A happy release…What?…Oh! Cremation. Friday, at eleven.’

  There, then, Manallace and I met. He told me that she had asked him whether the book need now be published; and he had told her this was more than ever necessary, in her interests as well as Castorley’s.

  ‘She is going to be known as his widow – for a while, at any rate. Did I perjure myself much with him?’

  Not explicitly,’ I answered.

  ‘Well, I have now – with her – explicitly,’ said he, and took out his black gloves…

  As, on the appointed words, the coffin crawled sideways through the noiselessly-closing door-flaps, I saw Lady Castorley’s eyes turn towards Gleeag.

  GERTRUDE’S PRAYER

  (Modernized from the ‘Chaucer’ of Manallace.)

  That which is marred at birth Time shall not mend,

  Nor water out of bitter well make clean;

  All evil thing returneth at the end,

  Or elseway walketh in our blood unseen.

  Whereby the more is sorrow in certaine–

  Dayspring mishandled cometh not againe.

  To-bruized be that slender, sterting spray

  Out of the oake’s rind that should betide

  A branch of girt and goodliness, straightway

  Her spring is turned on herself, and wried

  And knotted like some gall or veiney wen. –

  Dayspring mishandled cometh not agen.

  Noontide repayeth never morning-bliss-

  Sith noon to morn is incomparable;

  And, so it be our dawning goth amiss,

  None other after-hour serveth well.

  Ah! Jesu-Moder, pitie my oe paine–

  Dayspring mishandled cometh not againe!

  * The Village that voted the Earth was Flat.’ ? Diversity of Creatures.

  * Officially it was on account of his good work in the Departmental of Co-ordinated Supervisais, but all true lovers of literature knew the real reason, and told the papers so.

  * Illa

  alma Mater

  ecca

  secum

  affcrens

  me

  acceptum

  Nicolaus

  Atrib.

  The Manner of Men

  ‘If after the manner of men I have fought with beasts.’

  1 Cor. XV. 32.

  HER cinnabar-tinted topsail, nicking the hot blue horizon, showed she was a Spanish wheat-boat hours before she reached Marseilles mole. There, her mainsail brailed itself, a spritsail broke out forward, and a handy driver aft; and she threaded her way through the shipping to her berth at the quay as quietly as a veiled woman slips through a bazaar.

  The blare of her horns told her name to the port. An elderly hook-nosed inspector came aboard to see if her cargo had suffered in the run from the South, and the senior ship-cat purred round her captain’s legs as the after-hatch was opened.

  ‘If the rest is like this – ‘ the inspector sniffed – ‘you had better run out again to the mole and dump it.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ the captain replied. ‘All Spanish wheat heats a little. They reap it very dry.’

  ‘Pity you don’t keep it so, then. What would you call that – crop or pasture?’

  The inspector pointed downwards. The grain was in bulk, and deck-leakage, combined with warm weather, had sprouted it here and there in sickly green films.

  ‘So much the better,’ said the captain brazenly. ‘That makes it waterproof. Pare off the top two inches, and the rest is as sweet as a nut.’

  ‘I told that lie, too, when I was your age. And how does she happen to be loaded?’

  The young Spaniard flushed, but kept his temper.

  ‘She happens to be ballasted, under my eye, on lead-pigs and bagged copper-ores.’

  ‘I don’t know that they much care for verdigris in their dole-bread at Rome. But – you were saying?’

  ‘I was trying to tell you that the bins happen to be grain-tight, two-inch chestnut, floored and sided with hides.’

  ‘Meaning dressed African leathers on your private account?’

  ‘What has that got to do with you? We discharge at Port of Rome, not here.’

  ‘So your papers show. And what might you have stowed in the wings of her?’

  Oh, apes! Circumcised apes – just like you!’

  ‘Young monkey! Well, if you are not above taking an old ape’s advice, next time you happen to top off with wool and screw in
more bales than are good for her, get your ship undergirt before you sail. I know it doesn’t look smart coming into Port of Rome, but it’ll save your decks from lifting worse than they are.’

  There was no denying that the planking and waterways round the after-hatch had lifted a little. The captain lost his temper.

  ‘I know your breed!’ he stormed. ‘You promenade the quays all summer at Caesar’s expense, jamming your Jew-bow into everybody’s business; and when the norther blows, you squat over your brazier and let us skippers hang in the wind for a week!’

  ‘You have it! Just that sort of a man am I now,’ the other answered. ‘That’ll do, the quarter-hatch!’

  As he lifted his hand the falling sleeve showed the broad gold armlet with the triple vertical gouges which is only worn by master mariners who have used all three seas – Middle, Western, and Eastern.

  ‘Gods!’ the captain saluted. ‘I thought you were—‘

  ‘A Jew, of course. Haven’t you used Eastern ports long enough to know a Red Sidonian when you see one?’

  ‘Mine the fault – yours be the pardon, my father!’ said the Spaniard impetuously. ‘Her topsides are a trifle strained. There was a three days’ blow coming up. I meant to have had her undergirt off the Islands, but hawsers slow a ship so – and one hates to spoil a good run.’

  ‘To whom do you say it?’ The inspector looked the young man over between horny sun and salt creased eyelids like a brooding pelican. ‘But if you care to get up your girt-hawsers tomorrow, I can find men to put ’em overside. It’s no work for open sea. Now! Main-hatch, there!…I thought so. She’ll need another girt abaft the foremast.’ He motioned to one of his staff, who hurried up the quay to where the port guard-boat basked at her mooring-ring. She was a stoutly-built, single-banker, eleven a side, with a short punching ram; her duty being to stop riots in harbour and piracy along the coast.

  ‘Who commands her?’ the captain asked.

  ‘An old shipmate of mine, Sulinus – a River man. We’ll get his opinion.’