Gods, Men and Ghosts

by Lord Dunsany

  “ ‘A nice village,’ I said, lifting up my head from the table. ‘Nice tree outside.’

  “ ‘No tree out there,’ said one of the men.

  “ ‘No tree?’ I said. ‘I’ll bet you five shillings there is.’

  “ ‘No,’ he said, and stuck to it. He didn’t even want to bet.

  “ ‘I thought I noticed something like a:’ I daren’t even say the word poplar, so I said ‘a tree’ instead. ‘Just outside the door,’ I added.

  “ ‘No, no tree,’ he repeated.

  “ ‘I’ll bet you ten shillings,’ I said.

  “He took that.

  “ ‘Well, go and have a look, governor,’ he said.

  “You don’t think I was going outside that door again. So I said, ‘No, you shall decide. I mayn’t trust your memory against mine, but if you go outside and look, and say whether it’s there or not, that’s quite good enough for me.’

  “He smiled and thought me a bit dotty. Oh Lord, what would he have thought me if I’d told him the bare truth.

  “Well, he came back with the news that thrilled all through me, the golden glorious news that I’d lost my ten shillings. And at that I paid my bet and had my third tumbler of whiskey, which I did not dare to risk while I didn’t know how things were. And that third whiskey won. It beat my misery, it beat my fatigue and my terror, and the awful suspicion which partly haunted my reason, that this unquestioned dominion that animal life believes itself to have established was possibly overthrown. It beat everything, and I dropped into a deep sleep there at the table.

  “I woke next day at noon immensely refreshed, where the good fellows had laid me upstairs on a bed. I looked out over ruddy tiles; there was a yard below, with poultry, among walls of red brick, and a goat was tied up there, and a woman went out to feed him; and from beyond came all the ancient sounds of the farm, against which time can do nothing. I revelled in all these sounds of animal mastery, and felt a safety there in the light of that bright morning that somehow told me my dreadful experience was over.

  “Of course you may say it was all a dream; but one doesn’t remember a dream all those years like that. No, that frightful poplar had something against man, and with cause enough I’ll admit.

  “What it would have done if I’d run doesn’t bear thinking of.”

  And Jorkens didn’t think of it; with a cheery wave of his hand he made the sign to the waiter, that drowns memory.

  How Ryan Got out of Russia

  “ONCE again,” said Jorkens suddenly, either in answer to some remark that I had not heard or to some fierce memory that awoke in his mind, “once again I must protest that anyone who finds anything unusual in any story that I may ever have happened to tell knows little of the stories that men do tell, daily, hourly, in fact all the time. All the twenty-four hours of every day there is someone telling some tale here in London, not to mention everywhere else, that is far less credible than anything I ever told. Then why do they single me out for what I can only call incredulity? Can you answer me that? No. And can you tell me any tale I have ever told you that has been definitely disproved in a properly scientific manner? No,” he added before giving anyone very much time, not that anyone seemed ready with any case in point. “And I’ll tell you what,” Jorkens went on; “I’m ready to prove what I say. I’m ready to take anyone now and show him someone within a mile from here who is telling stranger tales than I’ve ever told, at this very minute. And if he isn’t, he’ll begin as soon as we ask him. As many of you as you like. Now, who’ll come?”

  “Very well, very well,” Jorkens went on. “You’ll none of you come. Then please never say, or allow anyone else to say, that I tell any more unusual tales than other people. Because I’ve given you an opportunity of putting it to the proof; and you won’t take it. Very well. Waiter.”

  In another moment Jorkens would have settled down to a large whiskey; he would have soothed himself with it; he would then have slept a little: when he awoke he would have forgotten his anger, for he is never angry for long, and with his anger he would have forgotten the whole episode, including the man to whom he offered to take us. I don’t say that J or kens’ tales are unusual, or that they are usual; I leave the reader to judge that; but I do say that anyone whose tales were more unusual would certainly have something to tell that was distinctly out of the way. So before Jorkens had caught the waiter’s eye, before any whiskey had had time to be brought to him, I said: “That is unsporting of them, Jorkens. You have offered to prove that your stories are not unusual, as stories go. They should give you a chance to prove it. I’ll come.”

  Jorkens looked for a moment a little regretfully in the direction of the screen at the far end of the room, behind which were the waiters, and then said: “Very well.” So away we went from the Billiards Club, and soon we were in a taxi, going towards Soho, with Tutton, another member, who at the last moment came too.

  I thought that even in the taxi Jorkens was regretting his whiskey, for he sat silent; but when we got to the dingy café to which he had directed the driver, a dark little place called The Universe, and we went in and he saw at once the man he was looking for, he brightened up a good deal. The man was seated alone at one of the tables eating some odd foreign dish. “Look at his forehead,” said Jorkens.

  “Yes,” I said. “He hasn’t got one.”

  “Well, a pair of bulging eyebrows,” said Jorkens. “But no forehead. As you say. Not a man to imagine anything.”

  “Not in the least,” I said.

  “No, no,” said Tutton.

  “Very well,” said Jorkens.

  He took hold of a couple of chairs then, and dragged them up to the man’s table, while I brought one for myself.

  “A couple of friends,” said Jorkens, “who would like to hear your tale.” And all at the same moment he made a sign with one finger to a waiter whose home I would have placed as the East of Europe, though I could get no nearer than that; and the sign meant evidently absinthe, for one came. The man had not spoken yet; then he tasted the absinthe; tasted it again, to be sure it was all right; then started at once. “I was in a Russian prison,” he said. “The walls were ten feet thick. And I was sentenced to death.”

  “Begin at the beginning,” said Jorkens.

  “Sentenced to die next morning, as a matter of fact,” the man went on; “so there wasn’t much time. And I was working on the mortar round one of the big stones with the edge of a button off my trousers.”

  “At the beginning,” said Jorkens.

  “Oh,” said the man; and he looked up from his absinthe, his clipped black moustache wet with it, his eyes groping with memory. Then he started again.

  “I never knew who I was spying for,” he said.

  “Tell them how you came to be spying,” said Jorkens.

  “I got into a chess-club in Paris,” said the man. And he took another drink from his glass of absinthe, and it all seemed to come back to him. “It was a dark low sty of a place. I only went there twice. It was only the second time I ever went there that I looked up from the game I was playing, at one of the other tables. I was having a good enough game and getting a bit the best of it, and I turned to look at one of the other tables while my man was making his move, a table level with mine on the other side of the gangway, and got the shock of my life. I saw all of a sudden that one of the two players didn’t know the move of the knight. He was moving it anyhow, and his opponent was taking no notice. Well, it wasn’t a chess-club.

  “I’d been introduced to the place by a man of whom I knew nothing. No help there. The man I was playing with was a chess-player all right, but one summer doesn’t make a swallow. I glanced at a few other boards, and saw pretty much the same thing going on as I had seen at the table beside me. Chess was a blind. What did go on there? I was a long way from the door, and I felt most damnably alone.”

  “You’ve never told me, you know,” said Jorkens, “what you were doing in Paris.”

  “Just looking round
to see what would turn up,” said the man.

  “Oh well, go on,” replied Jorkens.

  He took another sip at the absinthe, and went on.

  “I began looking round at the door then, and seeing how many men there were sitting between me and it. I couldn’t have done anything worse. I couldn’t have made myself more conspicuous if I’d made a dash for it. They followed the turn of my eyes, and all seemed to read my thoughts. And a man got up from another table presently, and loafed my way as though he were not coming up to me. But I knew he was. He passed my table, but turned round at once, and spoke to me. ‘Are you one of us?’ he said.

  “It was no use saying Yes. You can’t invent passwords. They’d have plenty of them all right. I knew the kind of people they were the moment I discovered what they were not.

  “So I said, ‘No, but I wish to be.’

  “It was the only thing to do. But it let me in for a lot of oaths, of which I can tell you nothing; with penalties attached, you know. And I became a member, of the lowest degree, of an association of which I still know practically nothing at all. All I really knew of its aims was that they seemed to be to give orders to members of the degree to which I belonged. And you had to obey those orders. Otherwise, several unpleasant things, behind the screen at the end of that dingy room, the far end from the door of course, and the Seine afterwards.

  “Well, I got away from that room, and I went back to Mimi. I haven’t told you about Mimi. And I said to her: ‘Mimi, that chess-club isn’t a chess-club; it’s something else, and I’ve got to leave Paris.’

  “And she said at once: ‘Don’t you go. People like that would be sure to watch you. Don’t let them see you trying to get away. It’s not safe.’

  “And, do you know, she was right. But all I said to her was: ‘People like that, Mimi? But I’ve not told you what they are like.’

  “And all she would say was: ‘I know that type,’ and went on urging me not to try to go.

  “She was right, sure enough. They were watching me. I saw Mimi gazing out of the window next morning, and saying nothing; just gazing, till I went up and gazed too. And there was a man outside looking too unconcerned, looking a shade too thoughtfully up at the sky; and I knew Mimi was right.

  “So I merely stayed with Mimi. And one day the order came. I was to go round to the chess-club that evening to receive instructions from the Grand Master. Well, I went. I had a pretty shrewd idea as to what those instructions would be. But I went.

  “Well, there he was all dressed up, at the dark end of the room; dingy and curtained off, and a couple of candles.

  “ ‘You will go to Russia,’ he said; and before he had time to get in another word I slipped in with what I had to say. ‘Not to assassinate anybody,’ I said. I slipped in with it then because, once he had given me my orders, there was an end of it. If I disobeyed after that, it was the Seine, with certain accessories: if I let him see now that I wouldn’t do it for certain, there seemed the ghost of a chance. Why put themselves to the trouble of carrying a sack all the way to the Seine at night, I thought, if they knew they had nothing to gain by it? It was a slender chance. He seemed surprised, and was silent a moment. ‘And if he has already signed the death-warrants of two hundred thousand innocent men and women?’ he said.

  “ ‘That’s his affair,’ I said. ‘I attend to mine.’

  “ ‘You wouldn’t kill even such a man?’ he said.

  “ ‘No,’ I answered.

  “He was silent again; so were the others; the sort of silence that seemed like earthquake, or any awful natural disaster; and the sort of robes they were wearing rustled against the silence. It was only two seconds, probably, before he spoke again.

  “ ‘I have not commanded you to assassinate anyone,’ he said.

  “So it worked, my slender chance.

  “ ‘You are to destroy something deadlier than a man,’ he said. ‘But perhaps your scruples won’t let you hurt a machine?’

  “The words sound simple, but he said them nastily enough.

  “ ‘I obey,’ I said.

  “ ‘You will go to Russia,’ he repeated. ‘There is a machine in Novarsinsk that makes certain munitions. There are only three of them in Russia. They are the three deadliest machines in the world. You will wreck one of them.’

  “He ceased speaking. Others gave me my passport, money, railway tickets, and a varnished walking-stick, half of which was a steel bar. I was to break off the bar later on and secrete it in my clothing, and drop it one day into the machine. And they gave me a testimonial that seemed to make me out one of the world’s best experts in the handling of that particular machine, signed by some fellow that seemed to cut a good deal of ice in Russia; forged of course. I knew something of engineering, but not that much.

  “ ‘What will I do with the machine?’ I asked.

  “But they were busy closing down their meeting. ‘You won’t be there long,’ said one of them, ‘before you drop the bar in. Then you get back here as quickly as possible.’ And he rather hustled me out. He was the man that saw me off next day, by the train across Europe. I tried to tell Mimi something about it without giving anything away. There’s a lot I haven’t told you: I told Mimi still less. And yet she seemed to guess a good deal of it. And the odd thing was she said I’d come back all right. Lord knows how she knew. And I remembered what she said, through the oddest experiences, and when a thousand to one against her being right looked like a safe bet to lay.

  “Well I went all through Europe, past the German rye-fields, silvery green; and a great many other things; but I wasn’t thinking so much of scenery, as of my chances of ever seeing it again, coming the other way. You see, I fancied I should come out of Russia by train, if I ever came out at all. You can waste your time guessing how I did come out, if you like. Certainly I never guessed it.

  “Well, I arrived and showed my testimonial. It looked a good one to me when first I saw it, but nothing to what it looked to them: I was evidently just the one man in the world they were waiting for; they seemed a bit short of engineers. They brought me along to their machine; and, except that it was a machine and needed oiling, I knew very very little about it. It was a huge affair, as big as the engines of a small ship; and there it was roaring away underneath me, and they looking at it as though—well, there simply weren’t any standards of comparison; they hadn’t any religion, and no king, and didn’t care overmuch about human life, so it’s no use saying it was like one of their children to them, or a god or anything else; but I saw, from the way they looked at it, roughly what they would do to anybody that hurt it. Well, I went round oiling it, but as that was about all I was able to do for it, for a wage of £2000 a year, I thought the sooner I wrecked it and cleared out the better. And so I did. Not the clearing out; they saw to that; but the wrecking of it. I pushed the steel bar, a foot and a half of it, in through a grating with my forefinger at the end of it, with which I gave it a good send off; and it went down like an arrow in amongst the great cogs of the wheels, till a heaving piston hid it out of my sight, and it didn’t heave any more, and the roar of the engine that had been like a huge purr changed its note suddenly. I didn’t like that change of note coming as quick as it did. I don’t know what else I expected. I see now that I might as well have tried to kill a tiger in the Zoo with a spike, and expect that none of the keepers would notice, as expect to smash a machine like that quietly. Of course I was alone when I did it, but the thing began roaring like a wounded gorilla that has been trapped in a china shop; and the Bolshies rushed in on me. Of course I said I knew nothing about it; and they didn’t try to mob me. They said there would have to be a trial, and they took me to prison; but they were rather polite than otherwise. I got the idea that they would never be able to prove anything, and that my chances were quite good. What I was worrying mostly about was that they might keep me a long time in prison before they had any trial, several months perhaps; but they were in more of a hurry to deal with me than I knew. As for my
chances, the first shadow came over them when one of the Russians came to the prison to question me. ‘You can prove nothing whatever,’ I had remarked to him.

  “ ‘Prove things!’ he answered. ‘We don’t waste time proving things when we know perfectly well what has happened.’

  “ ‘You have to in a court of law,’ I said.

  “ ‘Have to? Why?’ he asked.

  “ ‘Because you might punish an innocent man otherwise,’ I told him.

  “He laughed rather a nasty laugh at that. ‘And if we stopped the course of the law for that,’ he said, ‘we’d stop ploughing the steppes with our motor-tractors for fear of killing a worm.’

  “I was on the point of telling him things were different in England, and stopped myself in time and did a good deal of thinking.

  “And then the trial came on, very soon, as I said. I’d worked out a good enough defence. Who had ever seen me with a steel bar? How could I have concealed it? Why should I wreck a machine that was to pay me £2000 a year? And a lot more points besides. But somehow when I looked at them in their law-court I got the idea that they were up to all that. And at the very last moment I felt I must do something better.

  “The charge was read out and the judge looked straight at me. ‘Did you do it?’ he said.

  “ ‘Yes,’ I replied, on the spur of the moment.

  “ ‘Why?’ he asked.

  “ ‘I was compelled to, by capitalists,’ I answered.

  “They were interested at once. ‘Of what country?’ he asked me.