The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

by The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  On the ninth day, towards evening, Plattner heard the invisible footsteps approaching, far away down the gorge. He was then wandering over the broad crest of the same hill upon which he had fallen in his entry into this strange Other-World of his. He turned to hurry down into the gorge, feeling his way hastily, and was arrested by the sight of the thing that was happening in a room in a back street near the school. Both of the people in the room he knew by sight. The windows were open, the blinds up, and the setting sun shone clearly into it, so that it came out quite brightly at first, a vivid oblong of room, lying like a magic-lantern picture upon the black landscape and the livid green dawn. In addition to the sunlight, a candle had just been lit in the room.

  On the bed lay a lank man, his ghastly white face terrible upon the tumbled pillow. His clenched hands were raised above his head. A little table beside the bed carried a few medicine bottles, some toast and water, and an empty glass. Every now and then the lank man’s lips fell apart, to indicate a word he could not articulate. But the woman did not notice that he wanted anything, because she was busy turning out papers from an old-fashioned bureau in the opposite corner of the room. At first the picture was very vivid indeed, but as the green dawn behind it grew brighter and brighter, so it became fainter and more and more transparent.

  As the echoing footsteps paced nearer and nearer, those footsteps that sound so loud in that Other-World and come so silently in this, Plattner perceived about him a great multitude of dim faces gathering together out of the darkness and watching the two people in the room. Never before had he seen so many of the Watchers of the Living. A multitude had eyes only for the sufferer in the room, another multitude, in infinite anguish, watched the woman as she hunted with greedy eyes for something she could not find. They crowded about Plattner, they came across his sight and buffeted his face, the noise of their unavailing regrets was all about him. He saw clearly only now and then. At other times the picture quivered dimly, through the veil of green reflections upon their movements. In the room it must have been very still, and Plattner says the candle flame streamed up into a perfectly vertical line of smoke, but in his ears each footfall and its echoes beat like a clap of thunder. And the faces! Two, more particularly near the woman’s: one a woman’s also, white and clear-featured, a face which might have once been cold and hard, but which was now softened by the touch of a wisdom strange to earth. The other might have been the woman’s father. Both were evidently absorbed in the contemplation of some act of hateful meanness, so it seemed, which they could no longer guard against and prevent. Behind were others, teachers, it may be, who had taught ill, friends whose influence had failed. And over the man, too—a multitude, but none that seemed to be parents or teachers! Faces that might once have been coarse, now purged to strength by sorrow! And in the forefront one face, a girlish one, neither angry nor remorseful, but merely patient and weary, and, as it seemed to Plattner, waiting for relief. His powers of description fail him at the memory of this multitude of ghastly countenances. They gathered on the stroke of the bell. He saw them all in the space of a second. It would seem that he was so worked on by his excitement that, quite involuntarily, his restless fingers took the bottle of green powder out of his pocket and held it before him. But he does not remember that.

  Abruptly the footsteps ceased. He waited for the next, and there was silence, and then suddenly, cutting through the unexpected stillness like a keen, thin blade, came the first stroke of the bell. At that the multitudinous faces swayed to and fro, and a louder crying began all about him. The woman did not hear; she was burning something now in the candle flame. At the second stroke everything grew dim, and a breath of wind, icy cold, blew through the host of watchers. They swirled about him like an eddy of dead leaves in the spring, and at the third stroke something was extended through them to the bed. You have heard of a beam of light. This was like a beam of darkness, and looking again at it, Plattner saw that it was a shadowy arm and hand.

  The green sun was now topping the black desolations of the horizon, and the vision of the room was very faint. Plattner could see that the white of the bed struggled, and was convulsed; and that the woman looked round over her shoulder at it, startled.

  The cloud of watchers lifted high like a puff of green dust before the wind, and swept swiftly downward towards the temple in the gorge. Then suddenly Plattner understood the meaning of the shadowy black arm that stretched across his shoulder and clutched its prey. He did not dare turn his head to see the Shadow behind the arm. With a violent effort, and covering his eyes, he set himself to run, made, perhaps, twenty strides, then slipped on a boulder, and fell. He fell forward on his hands; and the bottle smashed and exploded as he touched the ground.

  In another moment he found himself, stunned and bleeding, sitting face to face with Lidgett in the old walled garden behind the school.

  * * *

  —

  There the story of Plattner’s experiences ends. I have resisted, I believe successfully, the natural disposition of a writer of fiction to dress up incidents of this sort. I have told the thing as far as possible in the order in which Plattner told it to me. I have carefully avoided any attempt at style, effect, or construction. It would have been easy, for instance, to have worked the scene of the death-bed into a kind of plot in which Plattner might have been involved. But, quite apart from the objectionableness of falsifying a most extraordinary true story, any such trite devices would spoil, to my mind, the peculiar effect of this dark world, with its livid green illumination and its drifting Watchers of the Living, which, unseen and unapproachable to us, is yet lying all about us.

  It remains to add, that a death did actually occur in Vincent Terrace, just beyond the school garden, and, so far as can be proved, at the moment of Plattner’s return. Deceased was a rate-collector and insurance agent. His widow, who was much younger than himself, married last month a Mr. Whymper, a veterinary surgeon of Allbeeding. As the portion of this story given here has in various forms circulated orally in Sussexville, she has consented to my use of her name, on condition that I make it distinctly known that she emphatically contradicts every detail of Plattner’s account of her husband’s last moments. She burnt no will, she says, although Plattner never accused her of doing so: her husband made but one will, and that just after their marriage. Certainly, from a man who had never seen it, Plattner’s account of the furniture of the room was curiously accurate.

  One other thing, even at the risk of an irksome repetition, I must insist upon, lest I seem to favour the credulous superstitious view. Plattner’s absence from the world for nine days is, I think, proved. But that does not prove his story. It is quite conceivable that even outside space hallucinations may be possible. That, at least, the reader must bear distinctly in mind.

  Willa (Sibert) Cather (1873–1947) was a well-known American novelist recognized for her portrayals of the frontier and of settlers; the Great Plains was the inspiration for much of her fiction. Cather won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922 for her novel One of Ours. She clearly expresses her love of nature in her novels and short stories through the use of masterful description. Some of her more popular works include Sapphira and the Slave Girl (1940), which was her last novel, her short story collection The Troll Garden (1905), and A Lost Lady (1923), a tale about the loss of spirit in a small town. Cather first published “Princess Baladina—Her Adventure” in 1896 under the pseudonym Charles Douglass.

  The Princess Baladina—Her Adventure

  Willa Cather

  THE PRINCESS BALADINA sat sullenly gazing out of her nursery window. There was no use in crying any more for there was no one there to see and pity her tears, and who ever cries unless there is some one to pity them? She had kicked at the golden door until it became evident that she was much more discomforted than the door, and then she gave it up and sat sullenly down and did nothing but watch the big bumble-bees buzzing about the honey-suckles outside t
he window. The Princess Baladina had been shut up in her nursery for being naughty. Indeed, she had been unusually naughty that day. In the first place she had scratched and bitten the nurse who had combed her golden hair in the morning. Later, while she was playing about the palace grounds, she had lost in the moat one of the three beautiful golden balls which her father had bought for her of an old Jewish magician from Bagdad who was staying at the court, and who bought up the queen’s old dresses and loaned the courtiers money on their diamonds. Then she had been so rude to her fairy godmother who came to luncheon with them that her mother had reprimanded her twice. Finally, when she poured custard in her fairy godmother’s ear-trumpet, she was sent up to her nursery. Now she sat locked up there and thinking how cruelly her family had used her. She wondered what she could do to make them repent of their harsh behavior and wish they had been kinder to their little Princess Baladina. Perhaps if she should die they would realize how brutal they had been. O yes, if she were to die, then they would grieve and mourn and put flowers on her grave every day, and cry for their little Baladina who would never gather flowers any more. Baladina wept a little herself at the pathetic picture she had conjured up. But she decided not to die, that was such a very decisive thing to do; beside, then she could not see the remorse of her family, and what good is it to have your family repent if you cannot have the satisfaction of seeing them reduced to sackcloth and ashes? So the Princess cast about for another plan. She might cut off her beautiful golden hair, but then she had no scissors; besides, if a young Prince should happen to come that way it would be awkward not to have any golden hair. Princesses are taught to think of these things early. She began thinking over all the stories she had read about Princesses and their adventures, until suddenly she thought of the story of the Princess Alice, who had been enchanted by a wizard. Yes, that was it, that would be the best revenge of all, she would be enchanted by a wizard, and her family would be in despair; her father would offer his kingdom to the knight who should free her, and some young Prince would come and break the spell and bear her triumphantly off to his own realm, on his saddle bow. Then her unfeeling parents would never see her any more, and her sisters and brothers would have no dear sweet little Princess to wait on.

  But the next question was where to find a wizard. The Princess went over all the gentlemen of her acquaintance, but could not think of one who belonged to that somewhat complicated profession. Never mind, she would find one, she had heard of Princesses wandering away from their palaces on strange missions before. She waited through all the hot afternoon, and when the nurse brought her tea she took two of the buns and a piece of raisin cake and did them up carefully in a handkerchief, and said her prayers and let them put her to bed. She lay awake for a time, half hoping that her mother would come up to see her and relieve her from the obvious necessity of running away. But there was a court ball that night and no one came, so listening to the tempting strains of music and feeling more aggrieved and forgotten than ever, the little Princess fell asleep.

  As soon as she had breakfasted in the morning, she took the buns tied up in the handkerchief and went down into the yard.

  She waited awhile until there was no one looking and then slipped out through one of the rear gates. Once fairly outside, she drew a long breath and looked about her; yes, there was the green meadow and the blue sky, just as they always were in the Princess’ books. She started off across the meadow, keeping a little under the shadow of the wild crab hedge to better screen herself from the palace windows. She saw some little peasant children down by the pool watching some white things that must be sheep. O yes, they were sheep and the boys were shepherds’ sons, thought Baladina. She approached them and greeted them politely.

  “Kind shepherds, why keep ye your sheep so near the town?”

  “These are not sheep, but geese, Silly,” replied the biggest boy surlily.

  “That is not the way to speak to a Princess,” said Baladina angrily.

  “Princess, so that’s what you call yourself, Miss Stuck Up?” cried the big boy, and with that he set the geese on her.

  The Princess fled in the wildest alarm, with the squawking geese after her, while the little peasant children rolled over and over on the grass, screaming with merriment. The chase did not continue long, for the Princess’ long silk gown tripped her and she fell, covering her eyes with her hands and screaming with fright, expecting to feel the sharp beaks of the geese in her face at any moment. But just then a chubby curly-headed boy rode up on a donkey. He chased the geese away with his staff, and sliding down from his beast picked up the little Princess and brushed the dust from her hair.

  “Who are you, little girl?” he asked.

  “I am the Princess Baladina, and those naughty boys set their geese on me because I corrected them for being rude. They don’t believe I’m a Princess; you believe it, don’t you?”

  “If you say so, of course I do,” returned the boy, looking wonderingly at her with his big blue eyes and then doubtfully at his bare feet and rough clothes. “But what are you doing out here?”

  “I want to find a wizard, do you know of one?”

  “O yes, there’s Lean Jack, he lives back of the mill. If you’ll get on my donkey I’ll walk and lead him and we’ll get there in no time.”

  The Princess accepted this homage as her due and was soon on the donkey, while the boy trotted along beside her.

  “What do you want of a wizard anyway, a spell to cure something?” he asked curiously.

  “No,” said Baladina. “I wish to become enchanted because my family have been unkind to me. And then I want some Prince to come and free me. You are not a Prince in disguise, I suppose?” she added hopefully.

  The boy shook his head regretfully. “No, I am only the miller’s son.”

  When they came to Lean Jack’s house, they found the old man out in his garden hoeing melon vines. They approached slowly and stood still for some time, Baladina expecting him to at once perceive her and cast his spell. But the old man worked on until the braying of the donkey attracted his attention.

  “Well, youngsters, what is it?” he asked, leaning on his spade and wiping his brow.

  “I believe you are a wizard, sir?” inquired Baladina politely.

  He nodded. “So they say, what can I do for you?”

  “I have come,” said Baladina, “to allow you to cast a spell upon me, as my family are very unkind to me and if I am enchanted some Prince will come and free me from your power and carry me off to his own country.”

  The wizard smiled grimly and returned to his hoeing. “Sorry I can’t accommodate you, but I can’t leave my melons. There is a fat wizard who lives in a little red house over the hill yonder, he may be able to give you what you want.”

  “Dear me,” sighed Baladina as they turned away, “how very rude everyone is. Most wizards would be glad enough to get a chance to enchant a Princess.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t be enchanted at all. It must be very uncomfortable, and I shouldn’t like to see you changed into an owl or a fox or anything,” said the miller’s boy as he trotted beside her.

  “It must be,” said Baladina firmly, “all Princesses should be enchanted at least once.”

  When they reached the red house behind the hill they had considerable trouble in finding the wizard, and the miller’s boy pounded on the door until his knuckles were quite blue. At last a big, jolly looking man with a red cap on his head came to the window. The Princess rode her donkey up quite close to the window and told him what she wanted. The fat wizard leaned up against the window sill and laughed until the tears came to his eyes, and the Princess again felt that her dignity was hurt.

  “So you want to be enchanted, do you, so a Prince can come and release you? Who sent you here? It was that lean rascal of a Jack, I’ll warrant, he’s always putting up jokes on me. This is a little the best yet. Has it occurred to you that w
hen your Prince comes he will certainly kill me? That’s the way they always do, you know, they slay the cruel enchanter and then bear off the maiden.”

  The Princess looked puzzled. “Well,” she said thoughtfully, “in this case, if you leave me the power of speech, I will request him not to. It’s unusual, but I should hate to have him kill you.”

  “Thank you, my dear, now I call that considerate. But there is another point. Suppose your Prince should not hear of you, and should never come?”

  “But they always do come,” objected Baladina.

  “Not always, I’ve known them to tarry a good many years. No, I positively cannot enchant you until you find your Prince.”

  Baladina turned her donkey and went slowly down to the road leaving the fat wizard still laughing in the window.

  “How disobliging these wizards seem to be, but this one seems to mean well. I believe they are afraid to undertake it with a Princess. Do you know where we can find a Prince?”