Deodar

“ Would it be from a return of the poison? Or would the earth be uninhabitable from the mephitic products of universal decay? Or, finally, might our awful situation prey upon and unbalance our minds? A group of insane folk upon a dead world! My mind was brooding upon this last dreadful idea when some slight noise caused me to look down upon the road beneath me. The old cab-horse was coming up the hill!
I was conscious at the same instant of the twittering of birds, of someone coughing in the yard below, and of a background of movement in the landscape. ”

“ Should we not break up this séance?" I cried.
But the others were all earnest to see the end of it. They laughed at my scruples.
"All the powers are made for use," said Harvey Deacon. "If we can do this, we should do this. Every new departure of knowledge has been called unlawful in its inception. It is right and proper that we should inquire into the nature of death."
"It is right and proper," said the voice.
"There, what more could you ask?" cried Moir, who was much excited. "Let us have a test. Will you give us a test that you are really there?" ”

“ Doomdorf squatted on the rock. He must have brought a belt of gold pieces when he took to his horse, for he hired old Robert Steuart's slaves and built a stone house on the rock, and he brought the furnishings overland from a frigate in the Chesapeake; and then in the handfuls of earth, wherever a root would hold, he planted the mountain behind his house with peach trees. The gold gave out; but the devil is fertile in resources. Doomdorf built a log still and turned the first fruits of the garden into a hell-brew. ”

“ Fear was written on every face but one. Old man Dodson—Old Bill Dodson, as he was known in the valley—had yet to learn what fear meant. But before another sunrise he was to know.
Shouldering his flint-lock musket, he opened the door and passed out into the pitch-black night, which now and again was illuminated by flashes of lightning, for a storm had threatened since early twilight.
Grouped about the fireplace, the others huddled together and listened, scarce breathing, for another of those cries which made the roots of one’s hair to tingle, and the spine to prickle creepily. ”

“ Satisfied at last with their inspection of the peddler’s pack, the savages replaced its contents—much to the relief of the Yankee—and after assuring themselves that the captives were firmly held in their thongs, they gathered about the fire for rest.
From his hiding-place behind the tree, the Death-Dealer watched their every movement.
He saw that the moment for action had nearly come—the time for the deliverance of his friends was close at hand.
He knew that the savages had been without sleep the night before, and when once they were buried in slumber they would not easily awaken. ”

“ And among these were faces snow-white, or yellow as wax—upheld [Pg 616] by the pressure of the living crowd about them—that showed in the glassy stare and the dropped jaw where Death had taken toll. For the Red Reaper was busy gathering in his harvest. Many of these men would not live to be carried up the hilly road that was to serve as England’s Calvary. They died even as you looked, inwardly crying.... What wanton wreck and waste of splendid life, what reckless spill of strength, and hope, and courage! ”

“ Of rain beneath the blown cloud’s ravelled hem,
Or, huge on high, that lion-coloured steep
Which, like a lion, roared into the night
Answering the roaring from sea-caves far down.
Dire was the strife. That hour the Mountain old,
An anarch throned ’mid ruins flung himself
In madness forth on all his winds and floods,
An omnipresent wrath! For God reserved,
Too long the prey of demons he had been;
Possession foul and fell. Now nigh expelled
Those demons rent their victim freed. ”

“ October 17th.—All day today the rain poured down, rustling on the ivy and dripping from the eaves. I thought of the convict out upon the bleak, cold, shelterless moor. Poor devil! Whatever his crimes, he has suffered something to atone for them. And then I thought of that other one—the face in the cab, the figure against the moon. Was he also out in that deluged—the unseen watcher, the man of darkness? In the evening I put on my waterproof and I walked far upon the sodden moor, full of dark imaginings, the rain beating upon my face and the wind whistling about my ears. ”

“ No harm will come." The Frenchman's voice was treble with agitation.
"Good heavens, Moir, there's a large animal in the room. Here it is, close by my chair! Go away! Go away!"
It was Harvey Deacon's voice, and then came the sound of a blow upon some hard object. And then . . . And then . . . how can I tell you what happened then?
Some huge thing hurtled against us in the darkness, rearing, stamping, smashing, springing, snorting. The table was splintered. We were scattered in every direction. ”

“ Why should the beasts, birds, and creeping things be destroyed? What had the larks, the doves, and the bob-o-links done? What had the squirrels and the tortoises been guilty of, that they should be destroyed?
He proceeds to inform Noah how he will do this: "And behold I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die." And we are subsequently informed that "every thing that was in the dry land died." But why not every thing in the sea? ”

“ And in each of these steads was there a Doomring wherein Doom was given by the neighbours chosen, (whom now we call the Jury) in matters between man and man; and no such doom of neighbours was given, and no such voice of the Folk proclaimed in any house or under any roof, nor even as aforesaid on the tilled acres or the depastured meadows. This was the custom of our forefathers, in memory, belike, of the days when as yet there was neither house nor tillage, nor flocks and herds, but the Earth's face only and what freely grew thereon. ”

“ One might well think that the wind which went moaning down the valley as we rode along the [136] path to the Nile still carried the groans of the sufferers, and that the whispering rocks still echoed the cries of utter despair. Looking at the huts where these people lived and the mines where they laboured, one could not regard the record of their woe, which Diodorus makes known to us, as a tale of long ago. Two thousand years, one may repeat, is not really a period which we should regard as long ”

“ Yes, I feel, I know, that death is approaching. Who will bury me when it has come? Who will visit my tomb? Who will sorrow for me? And now it is in a strange place, in the house of a stranger, that I may have to die! Yes, in a corner which I do not know!... My God, how sad a thing is life!... Why do you send me comfits to eat? Whence do you get the money to buy them? Ah, for God’s sake keep the money, keep the money. Thedora has sold a carpet which I have made. She got fifty roubles for it, which is very good—I had expected less. ”

“ Rain is descending in pailfuls, and it is such a soaking kind of rain that—that you might catch cold from it, my darling, and the chill might go to your heart. Why should your fear of this man lead you to take such risks when all the time I am here to do your bidding? So Thedora declares great happiness to be awaiting you, does she? She is a gossiping old woman, and evidently desires to ruin you. ”

“ To this he replied that a person who did not possess a groat must surely be rather badly off; to which Thedora retorted that I could always either live by the labour of my hands or marry—that it was not so much a question of my losing posts as of my losing my happiness, the ruin of which had led almost to my death. ”

“ Yes, he also declared that he greatly liked me for my purity and good sense; that I must beware of dissolute young men; and that he knew Anna Thedorovna, who had charged him to inform me that she would shortly be visiting me in person. Upon that, I understood all. What I did next I scarcely know, for I had never before found myself in such a position; but I believe that I broke all restraints, and made the old man feel thoroughly ashamed of himself--Thedora helping me in the task, and well-nigh turning him neck and crop out of the tenement. ”

“ One corpse at a time was enough for any man on a night like this and in a country as cheerless as the plains of Gomorrah. A phrase or two out of his familiar bills of lading recurred to the fruit merchant's mind—“the act of God.” There was something so horrific in the contorted set of the branches outthrust in ungainly menace above his head that he was reminded of no less a depravity than the devil himself. ”

“ I am sending you thirty kopecks in silver, and regret that I cannot send you more. Buy yourself what you most need until tomorrow. I myself have almost nothing left, and what I am going to do I know not. Is it not dreadful, Makar Alexievitch? Yet do not be downcast—it is no good being that. Thedora declares that it would not be a bad thing if we were to remain in this tenement, since if we left it suspicions would arise, and our enemies might take it into their heads to look for us. ”

“ But when you are dying, all will abandon you, all will turn away from you, for then there will be nothing to get from you. What’s more, they will reproach you for cumbering the place, for being so long over dying. However you beg you won’t get a drink of water without abuse: ‘Whenever are you going off, you nasty hussy, you won’t let us sleep with your moaning, you make the gentlemen sick.’ That’s true, I have heard such things said myself. They will thrust you dying into the filthiest corner in the cellar—in the damp and darkness ”

“ Still he did not doubt but what he could easily leave the savages behind him.
And this he did. Before twenty minutes had passed he had left them so far in the rear, that he could hear nothing of them, though he paused and listened several times for the sound of their footsteps.
“You ain’t got the Death-Dealer into yer clutches yet,” he muttered to himself. “He’s going to live to stop a good deal more of yer deviltry. You’ve done pretty well to-night, but you ain’t out of the woods yet. You’ve got a good deal of trouble still, afore you settle down to housekeeping, Mister Red-skin. ”

“ Some malign intruder has rumpled those grave clothes down to the waist in quest of the jewels on neck and breast, and has trampled or overturned in his guilty haste the furniture beside the coffin. But since he withdrew with his accomplices and sealed the door, all has been silence and fine rain of dust from the roof, until, after four thousand years, you come. You may talk of science and think of loot, while the chattering diggers are working like fiends to lift the last of the filling from the shaft ”

“ And there are men and women who appear and vanish like shooting stars or falling meteors. Their path is traced in ruin and devastation, as the path of the tornado, as the path of the locust is. And having accomplished their appointed work, they pass on like the destroying wind, like the winged devourer: leaving prone trees and ruined homes, wrecked ships, stripped fields—Death where there was Life. ”

“ It is impossible to express the astonishment of these poor creatures at the noise and fire of my gun: some of them were even ready to die for fear, and fell down as dead with the very terror; but when they saw the creature dead, and sunk in the water, and that I made signs to them to come to the shore, they took heart and came, and began to search for the creature. ”

“ Although the demon already created has sworn to abandon the haunts of man and to live in a desert country with his mate, what hold will there be over this second being with an individuality and will of its own? What might be the future consequences to humanity of the existence of such monsters? He forms a resolution to abandon his dreaded work, and at that moment it is confirmed by the sight of his monster grinning at him through the window of the hut in the moonlight. ”

“ With incineration, the ghost took the place of the restless body.
The change from burying the body to burning it was due to a revolt of the living against the tyranny and exactions of the dead. The dead having been treated very handsomely, made themselves, as Devonshire people would put it, ‘proper nuisances.’ They meddled in private affairs, would have the best cut off the joint, and the last bit of fashionable finery ”

“ And thus there had materialized, and in other cases developed, grotesque and horrible Creatures, which now beset the humans of this world. And where there was no power to take on material form, there had been allowed to certain dreadful Forces to have power to affect the life of the human spirit. And this growing very dreadful, and the world full of lawlessness and degeneracy, there had banded together the sound millions, and built the Last Redoubt ”

“ He just took breath, after the exhaustion and excitement, alike of both body and mind, which his aerial adventure had entailed; and then hastened straight to the home of the Nightingale and Thrush, to tell of the glorious ascent (what the old and learned creatures of the earth would have called [Pg 58] the apotheosis) of the Dewdrop on the rose-leaf; its severance into a million fragments; and how these, in the shape of a great army, had marched right within
The Sun's Golden Gates! ”