Basterga

“ Somehow the fact augmented his courage. "Where the devil is, is no need of locks," he muttered, and he felt above the door, then, stooping, groped under it. In the latter place he found the key, thrust out of sight between door and floor, where doubtless it was Basterga's custom to hide it. He drew it out, and with a grim face set it in the lock.
"Quick!" muttered a voice in his ear, and turning he saw that the Syndic was trembling with eagerness. "Quick, quick! Or he may return!"
Claude smiled. If he did not fear the devil he certainly did not fear Basterga. ”

“ Not that he purposed buying his life at the price which Basterga had put on it. Never! But when a ship is on the lee-shore it is pleasant to know that if one anchor fails to hold there is a second, albeit a borrowed one. The knowledge steadies the nerves and enables the mind to deal more firmly with the crisis. Or—to put the image in a shape nearer to the fact—though the power to escape by a shameful surrender may sap the courage of the garrison, it may also enable it to array its defences without panic. ”

“ If you will please to tell me——"
"Yes, yes!"
"What Messer Basterga—how he comes to have this?" She must parley with him until she could collect her thoughts; until she could make up her mind whether he was sane or mad and what it behoved her to do.
"Comes to have it!" he cried vehemently. "God knows! And what matter? 'Tis the remedium, I tell you, whoever has it! It is life, strength, youth!" he repeated, his eyes glittering, his face working, and the impulse to tell her not the truth only, but more even than the truth, if he might thereby dazzle her, carrying him away. ”

“ Which is a pure handicraft and cheirergon, unworthy a scholar, who stoops of right to naught but the goose-quill!"
"And yet, master, by these same things——"
"Men grow rich," Basterga continued with a sneer, "and get power? Ay, and the bastard sits in the chair of the legitimate; and pure learning goes bare while the seekers after the Stone and the Elixir (who, in these days are descending to invent even lesser things and smaller advantages that in the learned tongues have not so much as names) grow in princes' favour and draw on their treasuries! ”

“ Witchcraft! The word rang in his brain. Witchcraft would account for this, ay, for all; for her long submission to vile behests and viler men; for that which he had heard in [Pg 119] this house at midnight; for that which the Syndic had whispered of Basterga; for that which he noted in her now! Would account for it; ay, but by fixing her with a guilt, not of this world, terrible, abnormal: by fixing her with a love of things vile, unspeakable, monstrous, a love that must deprive her life of all joy, all sweetness, all truth, all purity! ”

“ Claude leant back against the wall. The girl alone—she alone moved. Without speaking, without looking, as a bird flies to its young, she sprang to the stairs and fled up them.
The maniacal laugh, the crazy words—a moment only, they heard them: and then the door above, which the poor woman, so long bedridden, had contrived in her frenzy of fear to open, closed on the sounds and stifled them. But enough had been heard: enough to convince Blondel, enough to justify Basterga, enough to change the fortunes of more than one in the room. The scholar's eyes met the Syndic's. ”

“ And youth, thrice happy, imbibes wisdom at the feet of age! Messer Blondel," he continued, looking to him, and dropping in a degree the irony of his tone, "I have not seen you for so long, I feared that something was amiss, and I come to inquire. It is not so, I hope?"
The Syndic, unable to mask his confusion, forced a sickly phrase of denial. He had dreaded nothing so much as to be surprised by Basterga in the young man's company: for his conscience warned him that to find him with Mercier and to read his plan, would be one and the same thing to the scholar's astuteness. ”

“ And at the thought—at the thought of the destruction of that wherein lay his only chance of life, his only hope of seeing the sun and feeling again the balmy breath of spring, the Syndic trembled and shook and sweated with rage and fear. No, he would not have the courage. He would not dare. For a week and more after the thought occurred to him, he dared not approach the scholar's lodging, or be seen in the neighbourhood, so great was his fear of arousing Basterga's suspicions and setting him on his guard. ”

“ The abruptness of the departure did not surprise him. "Believe me, I feel for you, Messer Blondel."
The Syndic acknowledged the phrase by a gesture not without pathos, and, passing out, stumbled blindly down the narrow stairs. Basterga attended him with respect to the outer door, and there they parted in silence. The magistrate, his shoulders bowed, walked slowly to the left, where, turning into the town through the inner gate, the Porte Tertasse, he disappeared. The big man waited a while, sunning himself on the steps, his face towards the ramparts. ”

“ Thus a virgin in deed, although a mother, Bertha was in her one-and-twentieth year a castle flower, the glory of her good man, and the honour of the province. The said Bastarnay took great pleasure in beholding this child come, go, and frisk about like a willow-switch, as lively as an eel, as innocent as her little one, and still most sensible and of sound understanding; so much so that he never undertook any project without consulting her about it, seeing that if the minds of these angels have not been disturbed in their purity, they give a sound answer to everything one asks of them. ”

“ The grey cubes piled against the mountain brightened into tall houses still locked in sleep. Presently, with a fore-glow of citron, the clear rim of the sun cut the sea-line; and the sea became jade green. The air was diamond pure; the mountains took on colour; and Bastia awakened to another careless day.
High caserne-like houses, massive-walled and stucco-fronted; shabby shops half a century behind the times; mustiness and age; cigarettes, vendetta knives, and goat-flesh,—these were some of Hugh’s first impressions of Bastia. ”

“ He faded as the Southern Cross rose higher in the sky, till even Balatta knew that he would be dead ere the nuptial date determined by his taboo. Ngurn made pilgrimage personally and gathered the smoke materials for the curing of Bassett's head, and to him made proud announcement and exhibition of the artistic perfectness of his intention when Bassett should be dead. As for himself, Bassett was not shocked. Too long and too deeply had life ebbed down in him to bite him with fear of its impending extinction. ”

“ Ngurn was in himself a forerunner of ethics and contract, of consideration, and gentleness in man. No, Bassett decided; it would be a ghastly pity and an act of dishonour to cheat the old fellow at the last. His head was Ngurn’s, and Ngurn’s head to cure it would be.
And Bassett, raising his hand in signal, bending forward his head as agreed so as to expose cleanly the articulation to his taut spinal cord, forgot Balatta, who was merely a woman, a woman merely and only and undesired. He knew, without seeing, when the razor-edged hatchet rose in the air behind him. ”

“ Yet therein was usually to be found his favourite crony and gossip, Ngurn, always willing for a yarn or a discussion, the while he sat in the ashes of death and in a slow smoke shrewdly revolved curing human heads suspended from the rafters. For, through the months' interval of consciousness of his long sickness, Bassett had mastered the psychological simplicities and lingual difficulties of the language of the tribe of Ngurn and Balatta and Vngngn--the latter the addle-headed young chief who was ruled by Ngurn, and who, whispered intrigue had it, was the son of Ngurn. ”

“ From the striker king-post, were suspended ropes of climbers to which men could apply their strength and direction. Like a battering ram, this king-post could be driven end-onward against the mighty red-iridescent sphere.
Here was where Ngurn officiated and functioned religiously for himself and the twelve tribes under him. Bassett laughed aloud, almost with madness, at the thought of this wonderful messenger, winged with intelligence across space, to fall into a bushman stronghold and be worshipped by ape-like, man-eating and head-hunting savages. ”

“ Ngurn had he failed to bribe with the inevitable curing of his head when he was dead. Vngngn, imbecile and chief that he was, was too imbecilic, too much under the sway of Ngurn, to be considered. Remained Balatta, who, from the time she found him and poked his blue eyes open to recrudescence of her grotesque female hideousness, had continued his adorer. Woman she was, and he had long known that the only way to win from her treason of her tribe was through the woman’s heart of her.
Bassett was a fastidious man. ”

“ With these words Jehan took Bertha in his arms, and strained her hungering to his heart, for in the soft light of the lamp, and clothed with the spotless linen, she was in this tempting bed, like the pretty petals of a lily at the bottom of the virgin calyx.
"When he held me as I hold thee he said to me, with a voice far sweeter than mine, 'Ah, Bertha, thou art my eternal love, my priceless treasure, my joy by day and my joy by night; thou art fairer than the day is day; there is naught so pretty as thou art. ”

“ The earth has been broken, and fissured, and worn away. The Elbe sweeps majestically at the foot of the Bastei; a plain is spread beneath, closed in by an amphitheatre of huge columnar hills, which do not, as is usually the case, begin with gradual upland, but rise at once in shape fantastic,—isolated one from the other. Some of the highest and most abrupt have been used as fortresses. The sides of the precipices of the Bastei are clothed in a forest of firs and other wood. [1] The whole scene was bathed in dazzling sunshine. ”

“ A feeling of theatrical unreality was Bassett's chief emotion during the trying time that followed. The cloaked and shrouded figure of the woman ahead, the passage through two dark and empty rooms by pass key to an unguarded corridor in the rear, the descent of the fire-escape, where they stood flattened against the wall while a man, possibly one of the posse, rode in, tied his horse and stamped in high heeled boots into the building, and always just ahead the sure movement and silent tread of the woman, kept his nerves taut and increased his feeling of the unreal. ”

“ Thus, in the heart of two lovers, the roses of pleasure multiply within them in a manner which causes them to be astonished that so much joy can be contained, without anything bursting. Bertha and Jehan would have wished in this night to have finished their days, and thought, from the excessive languor which flowed in their veins, that love had resolved to bear them away on his wings with the kiss of death; but they held out in spite of these numerous multiplications.
On the morrow, as the return of Monsieur Imbert de Bastarnay was close at hand, the lady Sylvia was compelled to depart. ”

“ Bastin was indeed a most charitable man and in his way wide-minded.
The person whom I could not tolerate, however, was his wife, who, to my fancy, more resembled a vessel, a very unattractive vessel, full of vinegar than a woman. Her name was Sarah and she was small, plain, flat, sandy-haired and odious, quite obsessed, moreover, with her jealousies of the Rev. Basil, at whom it pleased her to suppose that every woman in the countryside under fifty was throwing herself. ”

“ Maritzburg natives are mostly Basutos, the only tribe in South Africa that white troops have never conquered. Most of Basutoland is situated in the Drakensburg Mountains, some parts of which contain rich land. They have a king, and are 93 said to be wealthy. Europeans cannot travel in Basutoland without permission from the ruler or some high native officer. A large amount of firearms and munitions of war is said to have been smuggled into their country. The Basuto is feared by all in South Africa, and that will explain why Basutoland is for Basutos only. ”

“ In the stern of the boat stood a mighty Norwegian with a red beard and a voice like a bull. One of his arms rested protectingly round a woman's shoulders, and he shook a knotted fist in von Sperrgebiet's face as his ship blew up and sank.
The woman seen thus in the pale moonlight was young and pretty, and the red-bearded man bellowed that she was his wife. The announcement was not an unfamiliar one to Oberleutnant von Sperrgebiet: they usually were young and pretty when he heard that hot rage in a man's voice. ”

“ From Kamlot’s description I visualized the basto as an enormous boar with horns, or a buffalo with the jaws and teeth of a carnivore, and judged that its twelve hundred pounds of weight would render it a most formidable beast. I asked him with what weapons they hunted the animal.
“Some prefer arrows, others spears,” he explained, “and it is always handy to have a low branched tree near by,” he added with a grin.
“They are bellicose?” I asked.
“Very. When a basto appears upon the scene, man is as often the hunted as the hunter, but we are not hunting bastos now. ”

“ Fortunately, taboo rule was strong in the tribe. Thus, Ngurn could never touch bone, or flesh, or hide of crocodile. This had been ordained at his birth. Vngngn was denied ever the touch of woman. Such pollution, did it chance to occur, could be purged only by the death of the offending female. It had happened once, since Bassett's arrival, when a girl of nine, running in play, stumbled and fell against the sacred chief. And the girl-child was seen no more. In whispers, Balatta told Bassett that she had been three days and nights in dying before the Red One. ”