The Dream of X and Other Fantastic Visions

by William Hope Hodgson; Douglas A. Anderson

  I lost the old man’s low-voiced explanation at this point; for I was suddenly aware that Father Johnson was almost at my side. I glanced an instant at him; but he was staring at the old man, with the oddest expression on his face. I noticed, subconsciously, that he was clenching and unclenching his hands rapidly. Then the old man’s quaver caught my ear again:—

  “It’s fine an’ good cloth, an’ them stain-marks couldn’t be ’elped. As she said, it wer’ ther Lord’s will, an’ she mustn’t complain. This ’ere one on the ’em wer’ done fifteen year back——” Again my attention was distracted. I caught the sharp flip of a finger and thumb, and a man looked round and sidled out of the crowd, up to Father Johnson, in obedience to his signal.

  “Sthop ut, Mike! Sthop ut this instant!” I heard the priest whisper, his brogue coming out strong, because he was stirred. “Offer ten bob for the lot, an’ sthop ut; ’tis breakin’ the hearts av us.”

  He handed the man some money, and Mike bid for the shawl-full. But, even then, it was horrible to see old Cardallon’s fight, before he could relinquish the garments to the buyer.

  The sale was over. The latter part of it had been attended by an ever increasing audience; from those who at first had been content to sit and talk and rest quietly on the benches; and who—coming from the outlying districts—were not intimate neighbours of old Tom. As they broke up to return to their seats, I saw one or two women crying openly.

  James Pelple and I stayed for the service of the Rosary, in all reverence, though of another persuasion. Afterwards, as we stood in doorway, waiting for Father Johnson, I looked across at him.

  “Well?” I queried, “a den of thieves?”

  But Pelple, “the Stickler,” shook his head.

  “A wonderful man,” he said, “a wonderful man. I should like to know him better.”

  I laughed outright.

  “So you’ve come under the banner too,” I said. “I wondered whether you would.” And just then, Father Johnson joined us it his cassock, and we began our return journey to his house.

  On the way, we passed the door of Cardallon’s cottage, the upper half of which was open. The priest looked in, with a cheery word, and we joined him. The old man was standing in the centre of his hard-beaten mud floor, staring round in a stunned, incredulous fashion at all his restored household goods. He stared half-vacantly at Father Johnson, the tears running slowly down his wrinkled face. In his right hand, he held the little bundle, knotted round with the faded shawl.

  The priest stretched a hand over the half-door, and blessed old Tom Cardallon in the loveliest, homeliest way, that stirred me, I admit frankly, to the very depths.

  Then he turned away, and we resumed our walk, leaving the old man to his tears, which I am convinced were signs, in part at least, of a gentle happiness.

  “He would not take the money from us,” said the priest, later. “But do ye think the heart av him would let him sind back the gear!”

  I looked across at Pelple, and smiled to his nod; for I knew that his last vague questioning was answered.

  JUDGE BARCLAY’S WIFE

  Mrs Judge Barclay she was called, and no one thought to call her anything less. And at the instant of this tale she sat in the crude, log-built cabin that did temporary duty for a court in the small township of Selville, which lay at the head of what was locally termed the “gold-creek.”

  Her husband, assisted by the sheriff and a number of his posse, accompanied by a number of miners, was trying a young miner named Jem Turrill, and the old Judge’s face showed a strong tendency to mercy as he looked down from his raised seat of packing-cases at the sullen face of the young man before him.

  On her part, Mrs Judge Barclay was trying to catch the Judge’s eye, to “stiffen his back-bone,” as she would have phrased it; for she had dealt with him often and bitterly concerning his undue tendency to mercy. A hard-faced, big-boned, childless woman of sixty she was, vigorous and a ruler of men, her husband in particular, except on this one point which pertained to mercy. Judge Barclay, however, had once been sheriff, and had practical knowledge that the capital sentence given in court was but the precursor of that dread scene where a rope, and too often a fine man, kicking his life away, formed a dreadful conjunction in his memory. Many and many a man had he seen pass outward this way; yet, with pleasure it may be told that such experiences had not brought callousness.

  But Mrs Judge Barclay knew nothing of what I might term the practical side of Justice. She failed in Realisation. She attended constantly at the courts where her husband presided, and would listen with critical severity to her husband’s “handling” of the case, and see no further than the given sentence. Too often, she would listen, with a sort of impatient half-contempt in her heart old Judge Barclay’s constant tempering of Justice with good human mercy; and always after any special evidence of this trait in him, she would consider it her duty to “stiffen his backbone,” as she termed it—a process which occasionally included the unloading upon the Judge of some rather brusque comments, bordering almost on the contemptuous.

  As a result of his wife’s constant attitude, old Judge Barclay had more than once found himself dealing out sentences that were sterner than his heart considered the needs of the case to require. This wife of his strung him up, as it were, to a sort of concert-pitch of austerity. But such stringing up was only temporary, in every case; and after the Court had ended the old Judge would have a bad time with his own kindly nature, the while, perhaps, that he would be walking back to his log hotel with his wife, nodding absently to her comments of somewhat grim approbation. Perhaps, once in a way, he would wake up to the whole meaning of the situation, with, maybe, something of a vague half-bitterness towards his wife, and a desire to show her somewhat of the things that lay actually “behind the sentence”—the human agony and shame and degradation of the poor human in the Machinery of Correction.

  Once, indeed, he had made the attempt; had silenced her with a sudden sternness that had astounded her, and brought a certain novel respect for him into her general feeling of Proprietorship. But he had failed entirely, as he worked slowly and earnestly, striving to pull up for her inspection the deep roots (the principles) out of which grew the plant of his conduct in life. He had no particular gift of speech and had striven with logic, where only the wand of emotion might have helped him to reach down to the sunk wells of pity that lay so deep in the frozen womanhood of his grim and childless wife.

  His effort merely earned the retort that “evildoers must take their physic, or else quit their bad ways,” and further, that if he had not the “stomach for his duty,” he would be better employed doing other work, “maybe nursin’ babbies!” (What an inverted expression of the pain of her denied motherhood lay in this tilt at the Judge; though it is more than probable that the woman never realised it.)

  And now she sat in the log-shanty court, and stared with cold eyes of complete condemnation from Jem Turrill, the prisoner, to her husband, the Judge, and so back again to the prisoner, her brain taking the evidence, piece by piece, and her stern reasoning breeding in her an impatient contempt for the look of compassion which old Judge Barclay occasionally turned upon the sullen and youthful Jem.

  Jem Turrill was certainly a rather sullen looking young lout; but, for all that, he was possessed of a more wholesome heart and better abilities than a casual look at his face suggested; the poor effect he produced owing itself probably to his constant sullen expression, which put onlookers immediately out of sympathy with him. He was given to occasional heavy drinking-bouts, and he gambled inveterately, but also he worked hard, and he had a very real affection for his old mother, whose love for him had for so long been pitiful in its hungry anxiety to aid and coax him to steady ways, without angering him.

  Her affection had brought her West, among the mining towns, that she might be near to him. She had come one evening, a few months prior to the event I am relating, and the son had welcomed her with a curious mixture of honest
joy and equally honest shamefacedness, lest the other miners of his acquaintanceship should view the matter from the standpoint of the “maternal apron-strings.” Yet the over-youthful Jem need not have troubled; his comrades neither thought nor cared one way or the other about the new arrival, except, it might be, to envy him the possession of a competent house-keeper and cook in his little, rough shanty. And, as I have said, though a wayward, sullen youth, his affection for his mother was genuine and curiously intense, after its own peculiar fashion.

  But of all this Mrs Judge Barclay was unaware. It is to be doubted whether she even realised that the youthful thief and murderer (for these were the counts on which he was standing his trial) so much as possessed a mother—whether, indeed, such a dreadful creature could possibly have been born of woman! If she herself had borne children, she might have understood many things, and she would not have been sitting there. As it was, she sat there, calm and logical and utterly impatient of the “sentimentality!” of her husband’s expression as he viewed the sodden-looking young reprobate before the Court.

  And young Jem Turrill was in very sore trouble, indeed; though far less a guilty-souled man than the woman or the Court believed him. Indeed, by the woman and the Court, he was already foredoomed to condemnation; but Judge Barclay saw a little deeper, and was striving, somewhat inefficiently, to elicit such replies from the prisoner as should present his case in a less dreadful light. But young Jem only stood like a clumsy oaf, protesting with sullen earnestness his innocence to the old Judge who desired to believe him; and to the Court that entirely disbelieved him. Once, in the midst of his protesting of innocence he stopped, and looked suddenly at Mrs Judge Barclay—the one woman in the court—as if he had an abrupt thought that she perhaps might understand that he was innocent of the worst. The action was born of a sudden, rather hopeless instinct, that became instantly wholly hopeless, as his look met her grim, unfaltering gaze, as merciless as that of any man present. And with a hopeless little half-drunken shrugging of his shoulders he had turned from her, and once more faced the old Judge, whose leaning towards mercy he perceived dimly.

  The details were brief enough. He had been up at the shanty of one Duncan Larsden, playing cards, during the past night (it was early morning still). Pistol shots a little before dawn had brought up the sheriff and a couple of his men, who found Larsden dead, with a bullet-wound in his head. Young Jem Turrill was gone, and with him, as was shortly proved, at least two hundred ounces of Larsden’s gold. The sheriff took up the hot trail, and ran the young man down within two hours, and already he was in the Court, being tried for his life. Indeed, so speedily had events moved that his old mother at that very moment awaited him in the shanty with a newly cooked damper, and a freshly opened tin of salmon, all unaware of the dreadfulness that was falling.

  As I have said, Jem sullenly but vehemently protested his innocence. When caught by the sheriff he was found to have on him a one hundred ounce bag of gold-dust, in addition to the nuggets of the dead man. The gold dust he was easily able to prove as his own property; at least, it had been his on the previous evening. His version was that Larsden had lost his two hundred ounces of nuggets to him, and had then staked his claim against the three hundred ounces of gold that Jem held. Larsden had won, but even as he declared himself winner, two aces had dropped out of his sleeve, and Jem had rounded upon him as a cheat—a swizzler. At the accusation, Larsden had drawn on him, but his “gun” had missed fire, and Jem had got home a good useful shot before the other man had time to pull the trigger a second time, and Duncan Larsden had slipped out noisily into the twilight of life. Jem had then got a sick fright that the affair might look bad for him, and, like a silly young fool, had proceeded to make it immediately ten thousand times worse by bolting with the gold. Possibly, if he had been more sober, he would have seen the folly of his action in time, but regrets were useless; he had bolted, and been found with the “stolen” gold upon him.

  It is true that, in young Jem’s favour, it was found that a miss-fire cartridge occupied one of the chambers of Larsden’s revolver, but this was not exactly evidence; and against this one favourable item was the fact that the young man had gone off with the two hundred ounces of gold that had not been his the previous evening. This was the thing that condemned him; there was no thought of mercy on the part of the jurors; there had been far too much thieving in the township of late; it was a matter that vitally affected each and every one of them, for some had gold in their shanties or tents, and others hoped some time to be in a like pleasing condition. The result of such interests, dealing with such evidence, was a foregone conclusion—young Jem Turrill was sentenced to be hanged the next morning at dawn; the gallows a tree just outside of the north end of the township. It had been used previously for the same purpose, having a convenient bough.

  As Jem was led out of the shanty where the Court had been held, he turned suddenly and stared fiercely at Mrs Judge Barclay; she was, as I have said, the only woman there.

  “Hey!” shouted the sullen Jem, with an extraordinary flash of analytical inspiration. “You’m a hard-hearted old brute you be! Sittin’ there an’ thinkin’ proper to have me murdered, you old hag!”

  He was hustled away, for old Mrs Barclay was well enough liked, and thoroughly respected; and the only effect of the young man’s outburst was to fix more firmly on her mind, and on the minds of all the others, that he was but a brutish creature, and better hanged soon than late. Even old Judge Barclay was conscious of a momentary flash of anger against him for his address to his wife.

  And so the young man went out to the little log-built lock-up, where he was to fret away the hours that remained.

  Meanwhile, someone told his old mother.

  At daybreak next day, however, when the sheriff visited the lock-up with a number of his posse to lead young Turrill to his own grim version of under-the-greenwood-tree, he found the men he had left on guard comfortably ensconced within the lock-up, in a state of beatific drunkenness, but Jem, the condemned (but soul-guiltless) murderer, was distinctly not there.

  Explanations from the guard were confused, and the sheriff twisted the key on him, in turn, whilst he organised search parties for Jem Turrill. The search parties were not a success, and it seemed that Jem had got safely away, but the sheriff was an obstinate man, and having arranged a hanging, was determined that a hanging there should be. He stuck, therefore, to the search, but adopted a new method; he watched the comings and goings of Jem’s old mother.

  Meanwhile, old Judge Barclay, having a day of rest before him, chose to go fishing, accompanied, as ever, by Mrs Barclay. He was in a restful and contented frame of mind. He was thoroughly, though secretly, glad that young Jem had escaped. He felt in his heart that, whatever the evidence, the man was less guilty than proof had shown.

  It was in the late afternoon, just as old Judge Barclay was having an exciting moment with an exceptionally fine fish, that both he and his wife heard a woman screaming somewhere among the trees on their side of the river. The Judge handed his rod to his wife, and ran off in the direction of the sound. Mrs Judge Barclay consigned the rod to the river-bank, and followed him. The screams continued, and the old Judge began to run, breathlessly, and his wife also, with a sudden, new-born feeling of something that was worse than discomfort stirring peculiar emotions within her. They dashed on among the trees, guided by the screams, and burst through into a small clearing, in the midst of which stood a solitary oak; and so had view of a painful and dreadful sight—Justice, the Fetish of all perfect man, about to accept a victim.

  There was a group of men under a great bough of the oak, and one of the men was trying to throw a rope up over the branch; and even as the old Judge and his wife ran across the clearing, he succeeded; whereupon several of the men ran and caught hold of the dangling end, and proceeded to haul the slack over the branch. Mrs Judge Barclay saw then, all in a moment, as it were, that the other end of the rope was fast about the neck of a man who had his bac
k turned to her, and she experienced a peculiar little sick feeling, as Nature began to have birth in her. She was still hastening towards the group as she discovered these details, and in almost the same instant she discovered that the screaming came from a woman who was held by a couple of the men.

  Her glance went again to the others. Several of them had stepped back a little from the noosed man, and had their Smith and Wessons in their hands. She recognised the sheriff, and knew that the man with the rope about his neck was Jem Turrill. She did not know that they were going to shoot poor Jem full up with lead as soon as he should have swung sufficiently to get the “taste of the hangin’ into his heart.” Nor, if she had realised the fact, would she have understood that mercy was really at the back of the men’s intention—mercy with the cestus, instead of the gentle fingers of woman, but mercy nevertheless. And so came Mrs Judge Barclay to the group of men intent about their work.

  The condemned lad (for he was scarcely more) stood pale and grimly silent, swallowing constantly and dreadfully at the dryness that seemed to fill his throat, and looking with wild eyes at the woman held by the two men, for it was his old mother.

  “Help! Help!” she would scream, and fall into a sudden, trembling silence, quivering so that her quivering shook the two brawny men who held her, so callously determined. And again her scream would ring out madly, “Help! Help!” crying to any god that might be listening.

  Mrs Judge Barclay stood a moment, looking at it all with wider eyes than she had ever opened before—seeing it, and at last beginning, with a horrible sickness in all her being, to understand something of what old Judge Barclay, her husband, had never been given words or skill to “make seen” to her.

  The mother’s crying broke out again, fierce and terrible in its white-hot intensity:—“Help! Help!” And she began to struggle like a maniac, with the two big men who held her. The dreadfulness of it all! … It was she, his own mother, who had innocently led the posse to where her son was hid. They had watched her, as I have told, and had followed her, secretly, as she slipped away quietly through the woods, taking a towelful of damper and tinned goods to Jem’s hiding-place. She it was who had managed the escape for him by conveying drink to the man on guard, and she it was who had found the hiding-place for him, and she it was who had brought him food; and now she had brought him to his death. She began to scream incoherent words and to give out scarcely human sounds, and her struggles became so fierce that her clothing was ripped literally into ribbons of cloth and cotton in the hands of the two unemotional, almost casually determined men who had held her off from going to her son.