by Paul Merton
While he was speaking to me, I was trying to hide the pork chop, for it was oozing horrible blobs of grease between my fingers. I finally managed to put it into my pocket. Relieved, I realised this man would never take me seriously if he knew that I was walking about with a pork chop. And though I feared the neutral man like the plague, I still wished to make a good impression.
‘I’d like to learn some of your magic, perhaps study with you. Until now…’
‘There is nothing,’ he told me. ‘Try to understand what I’m telling you. There is nothing, absolutely nothing.’
It was at this point that I felt myself dissolving into an opaque and colourless mass. When I got my breath back, the man had disappeared. I wanted to go home, but I was lost in the garden, which was heavy with the scent of a certain shrub which people here call ‘it smells at night’.
I had been walking along the paths for some time when I arrived at a tower. Through the half-open door I noticed a spiral staircase. Somebody called me from inside the tower, and I went up the stairs, thinking that after all I didn’t have a great deal to lose anymore. I was much too stupid to run away like the hare with its triangular teeth.
I thought bitterly: At this moment I’m poorer than a beggar, though the bees have done all they could to warn me. Here I am, having lost a whole year’s honey and Venus in the sky.
At the top of the stairs I found myself in Mr MacFrolick’s private boudoir. He received me amiably, and I couldn’t explain to myself this change in attitude. With a gesture full of old-fashioned courtesy, Mr MacFrolick offered me a china dish (quite fine) on which rested his own moustache. I hesitated to accept the moustache, thinking that perhaps he wanted me to eat it. He’s an eccentric, I thought. I quickly made my excuses: ‘Thank you very much, dear sir,’ I said, ‘but I’m not hungry anymore after having eaten the delicious chop the bishop so kindly offered me.’
MacFrolick seemed slightly offended.
‘Madam,’ he said, ‘this moustache is not in any way edible. It is meant as a souvenir of this summer evening, and I thought you might perhaps keep it in a cabinet suitable for such keepsakes. I must add that this moustache has no magical power, but that its considerable size sets it apart from common objects.’
Understanding that I’d made a faux pas, I took the moustache and put it carefully in my pocket, where it immediately stuck to the disgusting pork chop. MacFrolick then pushed me onto the divan, and leaning heavily on my stomach, said in a confidential tone of voice, ‘Green woman, know that there are different kinds of magic: black magic, white magic, and, worst of all, grey magic. It is absolutely essential that you know that amongst us this evening is a dangerous grey magician. His name is D. This man, the vampire of velvet words, is responsible for the murder of many souls, both human and otherwise. After several attempts, D has succeeded in infiltrating this mansion to steal our vital essence.’
I found it difficult to suppress a little smile, since for a long time I had been living with a Transylvanian vampire, and my mother-in-law had taught me all the necessary culinary secrets to satisfy the most voracious of such creatures.
MacFrolick leaned more heavily on me and hissed, ‘It is absolutely crucial that I get rid of D. Unfortunately the Church forbids private assassination. I’m therefore obliged to ask you to come to my assistance. You’re a Protestant, aren’t you?’
‘Not at all,’ I replied. ‘I’m not a Christian, Mr MacFrolick. Besides, I’ve no wish to kill D, even if I had the chance of doing so before he pulverised me ten times over.’
MacFrolick’s face filled with rage.
‘Leave this house immediately.’ he screamed. ‘I don’t receive unbelievers in my house, madam. Go away!’
I left as quickly as I could on those stairs, while MacFrolick leaned against his door, insulting me in language that was pretty rich for so pious a man.
*
There is no proper ending to this story, which I recount here as an ordinary summer incident. There’s no ending because the episode is true, because all the people are still alive, and everyone is following his destiny. Everyone, that is, except the ecclesiastic, who drowned tragically in the mansion’s swimming pool: it’s said he was enticed there by sirens disguised as choirboys.
Mr MacFrolick never again invited me to his mansion, but I am told that he is in good health.
THE DEATH OF A GOVERNMENT CLERK
Anton Chekhov
Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) was a Russian writer whose works, such as the stories ‘The Steppe’ and ‘The Lady with the Dog’, and plays, such as The Seagull and Uncle Vanya, emphasized the depths of human nature, the hidden significance of everyday events and the fine line between comedy and tragedy. He died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-four.
One fine evening, a no less fine government clerk called Ivan Dmitritch Tchervyakov was sitting in the second row of the stalls, gazing through an opera glass at the Cloches de Corneville. He gazed and felt at the acme of bliss. But suddenly… In stories one so often meets with this “But suddenly.” The authors are right: life is so full of surprises! But suddenly his face puckered up, his eyes disappeared, his breathing was arrested… he took the opera glass from his eyes, bent over and… “Aptchee!!” he sneezed as you perceive. It is not reprehensible for anyone to sneeze anywhere. Peasants sneeze and so do police superintendents, and sometimes even privy councillors. All men sneeze. Tchervyakov was not in the least confused, he wiped his face with his handkerchief, and like a polite man, looked round to see whether he had disturbed any one by his sneezing. But then he was overcome with confusion. He saw that an old gentleman sitting in front of him in the first row of the stalls was carefully wiping his bald head and his neck with his glove and muttering something to himself. In the old gentleman, Tchervyakov recognised Brizzhalov, a civilian general serving in the Department of Transport.
“I have spattered him,” thought Tchervyakov, “he is not the head of my department, but still it is awkward. I must apologise.”
Tchervyakov gave a cough, bent his whole person forward, and whispered in the general’s ear.
“Pardon, your Excellency, I spattered you accidentally…”
“Never mind, never mind.”
“For goodness sake excuse me, I… I did not mean to.”
“Oh, please, sit down! Let me listen!”
Tchervyakov was embarrassed, he smiled stupidly and fell to gazing at the stage. He gazed at it but was no longer feeling bliss. He began to be troubled by uneasiness. In the interval, he went up to Brizzhalov, walked beside him, and overcoming his shyness, muttered:
“I spattered you, your Excellency, forgive me… you see… I didn’t do it to…”
“Oh, that’s enough… I’d forgotten it, and you keep on about it!” said the general, moving his lower lip impatiently.
“He has forgotten, but there is a fiendish light in his eye,” thought Tchervyakov, looking suspiciously at the general. “And he doesn’t want to talk. I ought to explain to him… that I really didn’t intend… that it is the law of nature or else he will think I meant to spit on him. He doesn’t think so now, but he will think so later!”
On getting home, Tchervyakov told his wife of his breach of good manners. It struck him that his wife took too frivolous a view of the incident; she was a little frightened, but when she learned that Brizzhalov was in a different department, she was reassured.
“Still, you had better go and apologise,” she said, “or he will think you don’t know how to behave in public.”
“That’s just it! I did apologise, but he took it somehow queerly… he didn’t say a word of sense. There wasn’t time to talk properly.”
Next day Tchervyakov put on a new uniform, had his hair cut and went to Brizzhalov’s to explain; going into the general’s reception room he saw there a number of petitioners and among them the general himself, who was beginning to interview them. After questioning several petitioners the general raised his eyes and looked at Tchervyakov.
“Yesterday at the Arcadia, if you recollect, your Excellency,” the latter began, “I sneezed and… accidentally spattered… Exc…”
“What nonsense… It’s beyond anything! What can I do for you,” said the general addressing the next petitioner.
“He won’t speak,” thought Tchervyakov, turning pale; “that means that he is angry… No, it can’t be left like this… I will explain to him.”
When the general had finished his conversation with the last of the petitioners and was turning towards his inner apartments, Tchervyakov took a step towards him and muttered:
“Your Excellency! If I venture to trouble your Excellency, it is simply from a feeling I may say of regret!… It was not intentional if you will graciously believe me.”
The general made a lachrymose face, and waved his hand.
“Why, you are simply making fun of me, sir,” he said as he closed the door behind him.
“Where’s the making fun in it?” thought Tchervyakov, “there is nothing of the sort! He is a general, but he can’t understand. If that is how it is I am not going to apologise to that fanfaron any more! The devil take him. I’ll write a letter to him, but I won’t go. By Jove, I won’t.”
So thought Tchervyakov as he walked home; he did not write a letter to the general, he pondered and pondered and could not make up that letter. He had to go next day to explain in person.
“I ventured to disturb your Excellency yesterday,” he muttered, when the general lifted enquiring eyes upon him, “not to make fun as you were pleased to say. I was apologising for having spattered you in sneezing… And I did not dream of making fun of you. Should I dare to make fun of you, if we should take to making fun, then there would be no respect for persons, there would be…”
“Be off!” yelled the general, turning suddenly purple, and shaking all over.
“What?” asked Tchervyakov, in a whisper turning numb with horror.
“Be off!” repeated the general, stamping.
Something seemed to give way in Tchervyakov’s stomach. Seeing nothing and hearing nothing he reeled to the door, went out into the street, and went staggering along… Reaching home mechanically, without taking off his uniform, he lay down on the sofa and died.
THE TREMENDOUS ADVENTURES OF MAJOR BROWN
G.K. Chesterton
G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) was an English critic, Catholic thinker and author of verse, essays, novels and short stories. He is best known for his novels – The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Man Who Was Tuesday – as well as the Father Brown series of detective novels. A rather rotund man (weighing around 130 kg), he once suggested, ‘Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a coloured pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling.’
Rabelais, or his wild illustrator Gustave Doré, must have had something to do with the designing of the things called flats in England and America. There is something entirely gargantuan in the idea of economising space by piling houses on top of each other, front doors and all. And in the chaos and complexity of those perpendicular streets anything may dwell or happen, and it is in one of them, I believe, that the inquirer may find the offices of the Club of Queer Trades. It may be thought at the first glance that the name would attract and startle the passer-by, but nothing attracts or startles in these dim immense hives. The passer-by is only looking for his own melancholy destination, the Montenegro Shipping Agency or the London office of the Rutland Sentinel, and passes through the twilight passages as one passes through the twilight corridors of a dream. If the Thugs set up a Strangers’ Assassination Company in one of the great buildings in Norfolk Street, and sent in a mild man in spectacles to answer inquiries, no inquiries would be made. And the Club of Queer Trades reigns in a great edifice hidden like a fossil in a mighty cliff of fossils.
The nature of this society, such as we afterwards discovered it to be, is soon and simply told. It is an eccentric and Bohemian Club, of which the absolute condition of membership lies in this, that the candidate must have invented the method by which he earns his living. It must be an entirely new trade. The exact definition of this requirement is given in the two principal rules. First, it must not be a mere application or variation of an existing trade. Thus, for instance, the Club would not admit an insurance agent simply because instead of insuring men’s furniture against being burnt in a fire, he insured, let us say, their trousers against being torn by a mad dog. The principle (as Sir Bradcock Burnaby-Bradcock, in the extraordinarily eloquent and soaring speech to the club on the occasion of the question being raised in the Stormby Smith affair, said wittily and keenly) is the same. Secondly, the trade must be a genuine commercial source of income, the support of its inventor. Thus the Club would not receive a man simply because he chose to pass his days collecting broken sardine tins, unless he could drive a roaring trade in them. Professor Chick made that quite clear. And when one remembers what Professor Chick’s own new trade was, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
The discovery of this strange society was a curiously refreshing thing; to realize that there were ten new trades in the world was like looking at the first ship or the first plough. It made a man feel what he should feel, that he was still in the childhood of the world. That I should have come at last upon so singular a body was, I may say without vanity, not altogether singular, for I have a mania for belonging to as many societies as possible: I may be said to collect clubs, and I have accumulated a vast and fantastic variety of specimens ever since, in my audacious youth, I collected the Athenaeum. At some future day, perhaps, I may tell tales of some of the other bodies to which I have belonged. I will recount the doings of the Dead Man’s Shoes Society (that superficially immoral, but darkly justifiable communion); I will explain the curious origin of the Cat and Christian, the name of which has been so shamefully misinterpreted; and the world shall know at last why the Institute of Typewriters coalesced with the Red Tulip League. Of the Ten Teacups, of course I dare not say a word. The first of my revelations, at any rate, shall be concerned with the Club of Queer Trades, which, as I have said, was one of this class, one which I was almost bound to come across sooner or later, because of my singular hobby. The wild youth of the metropolis call me facetiously ‘The King of Clubs’. They also call me ‘The Cherub’, in allusion to the roseate and youthful appearance I have presented in my declining years. I only hope the spirits in the better world have as good dinners as I have. But the finding of the Club of Queer Trades has one very curious thing about it. The most curious thing about it is that it was not discovered by me; it was discovered by my friend Basil Grant, a star-gazer, a mystic, and a man who scarcely stirred out of his attic.
Very few people knew anything of Basil; not because he was in the least unsociable, for if a man out of the street had walked into his rooms he would have kept him talking till morning. Few people knew him, because, like all poets, he could do without them; he welcomed a human face as he might welcome a sudden blend of colour in a sunset; but he no more felt the need of going out to parties than he felt the need of altering the sunset clouds. He lived in a queer and comfortable garret in the roofs of Lambeth. He was surrounded by a chaos of things that were in odd contrast to the slums around him; old fantastic books, swords, armour—the whole dust-hole of romanticism. But his face, amid all these quixotic relics, appeared curiously keen and modern—a powerful, legal face. And no one but I knew who he was.
Long ago as it is, everyone remembers the terrible and grotesque scene that occurred in—, when one of the most acute and forcible of the English judges suddenly went mad on the bench. I had my own view of that occurrence; but about the facts themselves there is no question at all. For some months, indeed for some years, people had detected something curious in the judge’s conduct. He seemed to have lost interest in the law, in which he had been beyond expression brilliant and terrible as a K.C., and to be occupied in giving personal and moral advice to the people concerned. He talked more li
ke a priest or a doctor, and a very outspoken one at that. The first thrill was probably given when he said to a man who had attempted a crime of passion: ‘I sentence you to three years’ imprisonment, under the firm, and solemn, and God-given conviction, that what you require is three months at the seaside.’ He accused criminals from the bench, not so much of their obvious legal crimes, but of things that had never been heard of in a court of justice, monstrous egoism, lack of humour, and morbidity deliberately encouraged. Things came to a head in that celebrated diamond case in which the Prime Minister himself, that brilliant patrician, had to come forward, gracefully and reluctantly, to give evidence against his valet. After the detailed life of the household had been thoroughly exhibited, the judge requested the Premier again to step forward, which he did with quiet dignity. The judge then said, in a sudden, grating voice: ‘Get a new soul. That thing’s not fit for a dog. Get a new soul.’ All this, of course, in the eyes of the sagacious, was premonitory of that melancholy and farcical day when his wits actually deserted him in open court. It was a libel case between two very eminent and powerful financiers, against both of whom charges of considerable defalcation were brought. The case was long and complex; the advocates were long and eloquent; but at last, after weeks of work and rhetoric, the time came for the great judge to give a summing-up; and one of his celebrated masterpieces of lucidity and pulverizing logic was eagerly looked for. He had spoken very little during the prolonged affair, and he looked sad and lowering at the end of it. He was silent for a few moments, and then burst into a stentorian song. His remarks (as reported) were as follows: