Complete Works of Frank Norris

by Frank Norris

  Then, with that sound, the spell was broken up. Panting as though from a death struggle Amelot sprang to himself once more, dashed the vielle to the ground, set his heel upon it, and trampled it into splinters, but even as he did so, the interior of the sounding board was exposed to view, and in its shattered fragments, sticky as they were with a revolting, thick, and darkly ruddy ichor, Amelot recognized the wood of the Black Pine of the Taillebois forest.

  And now he looked about him, struggling to regain composure, wondering if it was his voice that but now had been so passionately speaking, and if it had been so, endeavouring, yet fearing, to recollect what he had said, or, dreadful thought, what he had confessed. But now, dispelling all doubt, the old Comte d’Edme rose from his chair and, since the counts of his name had always possessed magisterial rights upon their estate, said: “Sieur Amelot, it is my duty to inform you that all you have said will be used against you at the trial, which, since the crime you speak of was committed upon foreign soil, must be conducted at Paris. Sergeant at arms, remove the prisoner.”

  The trial was over.

  The Echevins had pronounced the sentence. Through the throng the archers had forced a passage, and down the narrow Paris streets, down la Rue St. Honoré and la Rue St. Martin, over the island of La Cite Amelot had been conducted into the bowels of the Petit Chatelet, the guardian of the older city, battered by the then recent attacks of the Northmen. Ancient as the days of Lutetia and the Roman occupation.

  He was to be hanged upon the third day after that upon which the four walls of his cell had closed around him. These three days he had passed in bitter repentance over the folly of his confession, and in revolving with all his wonted care and discrimination the various possibilities of escape; but now was come the third day and as yet none such had afforded.

  The air of the outside world was fresh in his face as they led him up into the caille of the Chatelet, and the noises that the earth made in its living were pleasant to his ears that for three nights had listened to the waters of the moat licking the green slime on the outside walls of his deep cell.

  As he emerged into the caille or court, he beheld the mounted guard, which was to escort him to the Place Tratoir, drawn up in a hollow square. Some little delay had occurred, the provost’s horse had slipped a shoulder, and Amelot and his escort were obliged to wait until another could be brought from the archer’s barracks in the old Palais just across the river.

  He became very watchful.

  The gate of the fortress was up and the drawbridge down; outside he could catch a view of feudal Paris, gabioned and gabled, lying between its strips of blue Seine water and its strip of bluer sky. Straightest and longest of the streets of the mediaeval capital, la Rue St. Jacques lay open in a long vista directly in his line of vision; at the far end, la Porte St. Jacques; beyond it, the open fields and reach of green country; life, liberty, all for which men cared to live. He carefully approximated the distance that lay between him and the outer bank of the moat where the discarded horse of the provost was picketed. In his whilom vigour he could have covered it in a few bounds, the last of which would have set him astride of the horse, yet even now, with his feeble bones and cramped muscles, the end was worth the effort. He drew his swordless baldric tighter about his waist and looked about him. Close at his right hand a yeoman stood leaning upon his falchion, between him and the grate two others, one buckling on the plastron of the second; the usual guard at the portal paced back and forth the length of the narrow passage between the inner and outer gate, nursing his weapon. The warder of the prisons came to put the manacles upon him; Amelot held out his right wrist with his eyes intent upon the watch at the gate. He was slowly approaching that point in his walk where he would turn and with his back to the court recover the distance of his prescribed beat. The bracelet clicked as the warder locked it about Amelot’s wrist. The watch was within a yard of the turning point; as slowly as possible Amelot extended his foot to be locked upon the chain which bound his hand, and as the warder bent to fetter it, the gate watch paused in his beat and listlessly turned about.

  And then came a moment of excited shouting and a sudden outburst of confusion and rapid hurryings to and fro. Stepping upon the bending back of the warder, Amelot had sprung over him. With two sweeping sidelong blows of his chain, swung as in his old-time knightly days he had swung the “mace-at-arms,” he had struck from his path the two yeomen who had attempted to bar it, and with every sinew stretched to its last limit of tension started toward the gate. The soldier on guard, warned by the cries in his rear, turned and saw him rushing down upon him. Too old in the service to interpose his body between liberty and the man who leaped toward it with such a face, he sprang into the guardhouse and knocked away the catch from the windlass which lowered the grate; the path was clear. Avi! Amelot answered the shouts of his pursuers by another of triumph and defiance, which in chanting the terrible “Song of Roland” had so often fallen from his lips. There was nothing to stop him now, and he saw that, although the grate was beginning to stir, he would, if he could but maintain his present rate of speed, pass under it long before it fell, and at a flash he saw, too, what before had not occurred to him. The grate once fallen, and fallen behind him, would, with the loss of inestimable time, have to be again raised ere pursuit could be commenced.

  Swift as an arrow he sprang forward toward the opening; laboriously, ponderously the huge portcullis momentarily narrowed it, yet he laughed aloud as he ran in the certainty of his triumph.

  Hark!

  It was not often that occasion rendered necessary the closing of the grate; the slots in which it ran were rusted thick with disuse, and now, as it slid through the reluctant grooves, they uttered a shrill and grating remonstrance, as the heavy fabric of wood and iron dropped ever faster. The grating rose to a shrill scream. With that scream Amelot’s laugh died upon his lips, and with a bound his heart sprang to his throat, and, like a choking lump, stuck there motionless; one with his heart, his limbs moved with it in answering accord, a single leap and they stiffened rigid — locked in horror. For the scream of the Chatelet’s portcullis was the scream of the vielle of Chateau Edme, the scream of the falling Black Pine of the Taillebois forest; the eternal reverberation of the cry of the dying man, echo answering to echo, down all the lapse of fifteen years.

  But the callous hardihood of the man, awed into abeyance for one moment, reasserted itself in another; he paused for an instant, gathered his shaking legs under him, and once more sprang forward with all the energy of despair.

  Too late.

  The few seconds he had lost sufficed to turn the trembling balance on the scale of desperate chance; simultaneous with his own onward bound, the portcullis, propelled by its own massive weight, gathering impetus from its every downward movement, with a hoarse rattle of chains and clanking iron and with a rasping, grinding streak of smoking grooves, fell.

  Fell with a solid crash just as Amelot, with bowed shoulders, was bursting under its row of pointed teeth and, beneath it, as beneath some mighty guillotine, he was crushed to the pavement, bent double and venting low, quick screams.

  Writhing in a spasm of pain beneath the fatal engine he tore and bit at it with nails and teeth, great splinters came away in his clawlike fingers, and within he recognized the wood of the Black Pine of Taillebois and saw his own blood mingling with its thick and ruddy sap.

  But the end was not far now. The quivering body was heaped into a cart, and, at quick trot, hurried to the Place Tratoir.

  The day had been very hot.

  In the open squares of the city where the sunlight came flooding in like a palpable mass, hunting down and exterminating the timid, shrinking shadows, the heat was almost unbearable.

  Altogether unbearable was it in this the Place Tratoir, packed to its uttermost with sweating and not too clean humanity, and many a white-lipped woman, aye, and men not a few, had been by officious friends extricated from the throng in a fainting and all but suffocating co
ndition.

  It was a superstitious age. Those nearest the newly erected gibbet, in the centre of the square, often pointed to it and crossing themselves said: “What manner of man was this?” For the gibbet seemed very literally to be sweating blood. The heat had started the dormant sap from every pore, and in heavy resinous streams of dark red hue it felt its way downward throughout the whole structure; at a little distance it looked like revolting blood.

  The effect upon such a machine was horrible.

  When, with the clatter of many hoofs and the jangling of many lances against the steel housing of those that carried them, the prisoner had arrived, such of the mob as had been near enough to note the condition of the gibbet saw him look upon it and then, with a long shudder, turn his eyes away, but the attendant priest, though he understood not their meaning, heard him mutter the words: “Again the Black Pine,” and his head rolled forward upon the breast.

  He was generally believed by those about him to have died, or at least to have lost consciousness, with this last word. But it was not so. To the last he retained every power of the mind, every sense of the body. He knew and felt when he was lifted out of the cart; he knew and felt when two archers supported him upon the platform; he knew and felt when the cord was adjusted about his neck; he knew and felt, with the recurrence of the old dread of the stormy night in the Taillebois forest, when the gibbet beetled over his head and when its shadow fell coldly across his brow, aye, and to the last he knew and felt, and even when the jar and wrench of the drop came, he knew and felt, and heard the timbers as they creaked and groaned beneath his weight give forth that dreadful cry which had tracked his own life to its close, ever since he had taken that of his fellow man in the shadowy forests of far-distant England, and that now, as its haunting accents filled the air about him, seem to thrill with ring of triumph and of final exultation.

  It was the last sound he ever heard.

  San Francisco Wave, July 16, 1892.

  A SALVATION BOOM IN MATABELELAND

  I THINK the story should be set down in this place because it is curious and worth its ink, and because it shows what strange manner of men are the Matabele — the music-mad, magnificent, brave, unspeakably cruel Matabele.

  Ingodusi, who first told it, was an induna in Lobengula’s pet regiment or impi, which afterward came to be the great Imbezzu impi. Since the tale is from such high authority, I think it must be true. Ingodusi is a ring man and a head induna and can have more than one wife, and can speak his thoughts aloud in the king’s indaba.

  It happened when Ingodusi was nineteen years old and was undergoing Mahunda with about a hundred other young Matabele, away up in the heart of Matabeleland, somewhere between Inyungo and the Umfuli River.

  By some fearful mischance, at the very height of the Mahunda indaba, Otto Marks trekked full upon it. But the matter must be told from Otto’s point of view.

  Otto was a sergeant in the Salvation Army. He came from Toledo, Ohio, to Mafeking in Bechuanaland, which is as far north as the railroad goes. Otto used to play the little organ every evening at the gatherings in the Salvation barracks at Mafeking, until his superior officer decided to boom salvation in that mysterious wilderness of South Africa known indiscriminately as “up country,” or Charterland, or Rhodesia, or Matabeleland.

  Otto Marks started up in April before the rains were done, with a transport rider named West and a little nigger voorlooper, a ten-year-old Zulu boy.

  Eighteen bullocks were spanned into their wagon; but their load was made up chiefly of two Estey parlour organs from Boston that were to help outfit the barracks in some up-country settlement.

  That was a strange sight — the eighteen lean Basuta bullocks, very slow-paced, led by the little Zulu voorlooper, and the big, strange Transvaal wagon loaded only with these two boxed-up organs, the name of the Boston firm stencilled on the outside of the boards.

  For two months Otto trekked steadily northward, singing hymns upon occasion, and on Sundays spanning out all day long. At times he tried to revive the spirit of righteousness in his transport rider, West, who blasphemed the bullocks hourly in more ways than you would believe possible, and at times he would try to convert the little voorlooper. The little Zulu was stunned and bewildered by Otto Marks’ clamour, but Otto’s swinging revival songs with their tambourine accompaniment sent him into a frenzy of delight, and he would invariably set to dancing, shaking his fists with vague and furious gestures.

  After two months they were stopped by the Umnyati River, which was in flood, and were obliged to make a long cross-country detour, with the line of telegraph poles as their guide.

  The huge wagon lurched down into the bed of the sluit, ploughed across through the scattered boulders, and took the rising slope of the opposite bank with the heave and crash of a stranding galley. West lashed at the wheel bullocks with the sjambok of rhinoceros hide, and then swore in Cechuana at the little voorlooper because he was not prodding on the lead bullocks, but was standing motionless at the head of the span, his hands dangling at his sides, staring stupidly across the bush. He was dumb with terror. The wagon slipped backward into the bed of the sluit, and the bullocks fell into confusion as the voorlooper came running back along the span, waving his arms wildly.

  As was said before, Otto Marks had trekked full upon an impi of Matabele, doing Mahunda, and when that happens to a white man he were best do himself to death as swiftly as he may. For a swift death, even if it be the kind that lies in the crook of one’s forefinger, is better than the kind that comes slowly and in the midst of thick smoke and screams and horrid twistings of the body. But Otto did not know this, and West, who should have known it, chose to think that they might even then escape. Otto climbed down from the wagon and he and West ran up the bank of the sluit and looked out far across the bush and saw the Matabele coming down on them slowly, in two long lines. But West observed that they advanced with a regular cadenced movement and that many of them staggered in the ranks, sometimes reeling almost to the ground.

  “Drunk!” he exclaimed. “Drunk with Cape Smoke; blind drunk and dancing. I’ve seen these niggers before — we may get off, but, oh, it’s a chance. Pray your God for a miracle now, Otto Marks, for there’s little short of it going to get us clear of here. Drunk and dancing,” he repeated; “yes, it’s our only chance. Quick, now, off with the case of that melodeon.”

  Otto obeyed, at first stupidly and benumbed with fear, then, as West’s crazy expedient flashed upon him, with an excess of frenzy tearing wildly at the stubborn boards, prying them up with his hunting knife, wrenching them away with a strength that was born of the moment.

  Meanwhile, West had started the bullocks again, and the wagon was pulled up from the bed of the sluit and rolled out through the bush, heading directly toward the line of dancing natives.

  “They’re close in,” shouted West in a few moments. Otto raised his head from his work and saw that it was so. Then the last boards fell away and the little American organ stood out under the African sun, shining bravely with veneer and scrollwork and celluloid.

  “Play,” cried West again. “For God’s sake, play, play anything. They’ll dance so long as you can keep it up.” And Otto Marks flung himself at the instrument and dashed his hands upon the keys just as the rush came, and the green bush was shut from view by the scores of crowding brown bodies, glistening with sweat and all a-jingle with beads and wirework.

  Otto was hiccoughing with terror, but he stuck to his work, playing away at the only kind of music he knew, the Moody and Sankey Gospel hymns that he had learned in Toledo, Ohio, and that he found effective in the Salvation Barracks at Cape Town and at Mafeking.

  Then that strange procession began. The eighteen bullocks, headed by the little voorlooper, gray with fear; West, his face set rigidly to the front, walking by the wheel bullocks; the creaking wagon following, and upon it Otto Marks toiling at the melodeon, playing Gospel hymns for the life he loved, while close pressed about them all, hemming them
in on every side, the hundreds of naked Matabele, shaking their bull’s-hide shields and tossing their assegais and kirris high in the air.

  Music mad, as only the Zulu race can be, their minds all exalted and distorted by the self-imposed tortures of the Mahunda rites, dizzied and confused by the drunkenness of the Cape Smoke, Otto’s music caught them and held them, and they danced and danced as though they would never tire, dazed and bewildered, working themselves into a fury, leaping and shouting aloud without knowing why.

  Otto Marks struck into a fresh hymn with a veritable frenzy. The excitement and the strangeness of the thing was beginning to tell upon him as well. No barrack gathering had ever aroused such enthusiasm as this. By now he had come to

  “Pull for the shore, sailor,

  Pull for the shore,

  Heed not the raging waves

  Though loudly they roar.”

  And after this without a moment’s pause he dashed into

  “I am so glad that Jesus loves me.”

  When that was done he dug his fingers into the celluloid keys again, kneading them with all the strength of his two arms, swaying from side to side, and while his feet threshed out the rhythm upon the pedals, played

  “Hallelujah, ’tis done

  I believe on the Son.”

  Suddenly the Matabele began to sing, catching up the tunes with the quickness and facility of savages, singing to the airs of these Gospel hymns the words of the war song of “Moselekatse,” the chant of the Black Bull: