The Wish House and Other Stories

by Rudyard Kipling

  Roger of Salerno hunched head and shoulders like an angry cat. ‘Always that!’ he said, and John snatched down the twist of the thin lips.

  ‘Never at rest, John.’ The abbot smiled at the artist. ‘You should break off every two hours for prayers, as we do. St Benedict was no fool. Two hours is all that a man can carry the edge of his eye or hand.’

  ‘For copyists – yes. Brother Martin is not sure after one hour. But when a man’s work takes him, he must go on till it lets him go.’

  ‘Yes, that is the Demon of Socrates,’ the friar from Oxford rumbled above his cup.

  ‘The doctrine leans toward presumption,’ said the abbot. ‘Remember, “Shall mortal man be more just than his Maker?”’

  There is no danger of justice;’ the friar spoke bitterly. ‘But at least Man might be suffered to go forward in his art or his thought. Yet if Mother Church sees or hears him move anyward, what says she? “No!” Always “No.”’

  ‘But if the little animals of Varro be invisible’ – this was Roger of Salerno to Thomas – ‘how are we any nearer to a cure?’

  ‘By experiment’ – the friar wheeled round on them suddenly. ‘By reason and experiment. The one is useless without the other. But Mother Church—‘

  ‘Ay!’ Roger de Salerno dashed at the fresh bait like a pike. ‘Listen, sirs. Her bishops – our princes – strew our roads in Italy with carcasses that they make for their pleasure or wrath. Beautiful corpses! Yet if I – if we doctors – so much as raise the skin of one of them to look at God’s fabric beneath, what says Mother Church? “Sacrilege! Stick to your pigs and dogs, or you burn!’”

  ‘And not Mother Church only!’ the friar chimed in. ‘Every way we are barred – barred by the words of some man, dead a thousand years, which are held final. Who is any son of Adam that his one say-so should close a door towards truth? I would not except even Peter Peregrinus, my own great teacher.’

  ‘Nor I Paul of Aegina,’ Roger of Salerno cried. ‘Listen, sirs! Here is a case to the very point. Apuleius affirmeth, if a man eat fasting of the juice of the cut-leaved buttercup – sceleratus we call it, which means “rascally”’ – this with a condescending nod towards John – ‘his soul will leave his body laughing. Now this is the lie more dangerous than truth, since truth of a sort is in it.’

  ‘He’s away!’ whispered the abbot despairingly.

  ‘For the juice of that herb, I know by experiment, burns, blisters, and wries the mouth. I know also the rictus, or pseudo-laughter, on the face of such as have perished by the strong poisons of herbs allied to this ranunculus. Certainly that spasm resembles laughter. It seems then, in my judgment, that Apuleius, having seen the body of one thus poisoned, went off at score and wrote that the man died laughing.’

  ‘Neither staying to observe, nor to confirm observation by experiment,’ added the friar, frowning.

  Stephen the Abbot cocked an eyebrow toward John.

  ‘How think you?’ said he.

  ‘I’m no doctor,’ John returned, ‘but I’d say Apuleius in all these years might have been betrayed by his copyists. They take short-cuts to save ’emselves trouble. Put case that Apuleius wrote the soul seems to leave the body laughing, after this poison. There’s not three copyists in five (my judgment) would not leave out the “seems to”. For who’d question Apuleius? If it seemed so to him, so it must be. Otherwise any child knows cut-leaved buttercup.’

  ‘Have you knowledge of herbs?’ Roger of Salerno asked curtly.

  ‘Only that, when I was a boy in convent, I’ve made tetters round my mouth and on my neck with buttercup-juice, to save going to prayer o’ cold nights.’

  ‘Ah!’ said Roger. ‘I profess no knowledge of tricks.’ He turned aside, stiffly.

  ‘No matter! Now for your own tricks, John,’ the tactful Abbot broke in. ‘You shall show the doctors your Magdalene and your Gadarene Swine and the devils.’

  ‘Devils? Devils? I have produced devils by means of drugs; and have abolished them by the same means. Whether devils be external to mankind or immanent, I have not yet pronounced.’ Roger of Salerno was still angry.

  ‘Ye dare not,’ snapped the friar from Oxford. ‘Mother Church makes Her own devils.’

  ‘Not wholly! Our John has come back from Spain with brand-new ones.’ Abbot Stephen took the vellum handed to him, and laid it tenderly on the table. They gathered to look. The Magdalene was drawn in palest, almost transparent, grisaille, against a raging, swaying background of woman-faced devils, each broke to and by her special sin, and each, one could see, frenziedly straining against the Power that compelled her.

  ‘I’ve never seen the like of this grey shadow-work,’ said the abbot. ‘How came you by it?’

  ‘Non nobis! It came to me,’ said John, not knowing he was a generation or so ahead of his time in the use of that medium.

  ‘Why is she so pale?’ the friar demanded.

  ‘Evil has all come out of her – she’d take any colour now.’

  ‘Ay, like light through glass. I see.’

  Roger of Salerno was looking in silence – his nose nearer and nearer the page. ‘It is so,’ he pronounced finally. ‘Thus it is in epilepsy – mouth, eyes, and forehead – even to the droop of her wrist there. Every sign of it! She will need restoratives, that woman, and, afterwards, sleep natural. No poppy-juice, or she will vomit on her waking. And thereafter – but I am not in my schools.’ He drew himself up. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘you should be of Our calling. For, by the Snakes of Aesculapius, you seel’

  The two struck hands as equals.

  ‘And how think you of the Seven Devils?’ the abbot went on.

  These melted into convoluted flower- or flame-like bodies, ranging in colour from phosphorescent green to the black purple of outworn iniquity, whose hearts could be traced beating through their substance. But, for sign of hope and the sane workings of life, to be regained, the deep border was of conventionalized spring flowers and birds, all crowned by a kingfisher in haste, atilt through a clump of yellow iris.

  Roger of Salerno identified the herbs and spoke largely of their virtues.

  ‘And now, the Gadarene Swine,’ said Stephen. John laid the picture on the table.

  Here were devils dishoused, in dread of being abolished to the Void, huddling and hurtling together to force lodgment by every opening into the brute bodies offered. Some of the swine fought the invasion, foaming and jerking; some were surrendering to it, sleepily, as to a luxurious back-scratching; others, wholly possessed, whirled off in bucking droves for the lake beneath. In one corner the freed man stretched out his limbs all restored to his control, and Our Lord, seated, looked at him as questioning what he would make of his deliverance.

  ‘Devils indeed!’ was the friar’s comment. ‘But wholly a new sort.’

  Some devils were mere lumps, with lobes and protuberances – a hint of a fiend’s face peering through jelly-like walls. And there was a family of impatient, globular devillings who had burst open the belly of their smirking parent, and were revolving desperately towards their prey. Others patterned themselves into rods, chains and ladders, single or conjoined, round the throat and jaws of a shrieking sow, from whose ear emerged the lashing, glassy tail of a devil that had made good his refuge. And there were granulated and conglomerate devils, mixed up with the foam and slaver where the attack was fiercest. Thence the eye carried on to the insanely active backs of the downward-racing swine, the swineherd’s aghast face, and his dog’s terror.

  Said Roger of Salerno, ‘I pronounce that these were begotten of drugs. They stand outside the rational mind.’

  ‘Not these,’ said Thomas the Infirmarian, who as a servant of the monastery should have asked his abbot’s leave to speak. ‘Not these – look! – in the bordure.’

  The border to the picture was a diaper of irregular but balanced compartments or cellules, where sat, swam, or weltered, devils in blank, so to say – things as yet uninspired by Evil – indifferent, but lawlessly outside imagination
. Their shapes resembled, again, ladders, chains, scourges, diamonds, aborted buds, or gravid phosphorescent globes – some well-nigh star-like.

  Roger of Salerno compared them to the obsessions of a churchman’s mind.

  ‘Malignant?’ the friar from Oxford questioned.

  ‘“Count everything unknown for horrible,’” Roger quoted with scorn.

  ‘Not I. But they are marvellous – marvellous. I think—‘

  The friar drew back. Thomas edged in to see better, and half opened his mouth.

  ‘Speak,’ said Stephen, who had been watching him. ‘We are all in a sort doctors here.’

  ‘I would say then’ – Thomas rushed at it as one putting out his life’s belief at the stake – ‘that these lower shapes in the bordure may not be so much hellish and malignant as models and patterns upon which John has tricked out and embellished his proper devils among the swine above there!’

  ‘And that would signify?’ said Roger of Salerno sharply.

  ‘In my poor judgment, that he may have seen such shapes-without help of drugs.’

  ‘Now who – who,’ said John of Burgos, after a round and unregarded oath, ‘has made thee so wise of a sudden, my doubter?’

  ‘I wise? God forbid! Only, John, remember – one winter six years ago – the snowflakes melting on your sleeve at the cookhouse-door. You showed me them through a little crystal, that made small things larger.’

  ‘Yes. The Moors call such a glass the Eye of Allah,’ John confirmed.

  ‘You showed me them melting – six-sided. You called them, then, your patterns.’

  ‘True. Snowflakes melt six-sided. I have used them for diaper-work often.’

  ‘Melting snow-flakes as seen through a glass? By art optical?’ the friar asked.

  ‘Art optical? I have never heard!’ Roger of Salerno cried.

  ‘John,’ said the Abbot of St Mod’s commandingly, ‘was it – is it so?’

  ‘In some sort,’ John replied, ‘Thomas has the right of it. Those shapes in the bordure were my workshop-patterns for the devils above. In my craft, Salerno, we dare not drug. It kills hand and eye. My shapes are to be seen honestly, in nature.’

  The abbot drew a bowl of rose-water towards him. ‘When I was prisoner with – with the Saracens after Mansura,’ he began, turning up the fold of his long sleeve, ‘there were certain magicians-physicians – who could show-’ he dipped his third finger delicately in the water – ‘all the firmament of Hell, as it were, in – ’ he shook off one drop from his polished nail on to the polished table – ‘even such a supernaculum as this.’

  ‘But it must be foul water – not clean,’ said John.

  ‘Show us then – all – all,’ said Stephen. ‘I would make sure – once more.’ The abbot’s voice was official.

  John drew from his bosom a stamped leather box, some six or eight inches long, wherein, bedded on faded velvet, lay what looked like silver-bound compasses of old box-wood, with a screw at the head which opened or closed the legs to minute fractions. The legs terminated, not in points, but spoon-shapedly, one spatula pierced with a metal-lined hole less than a quarter of an inch across, the other with a half-inch hole. Into this latter John, after carefully wiping with a silk rag, slipped a metal cylinder that carried glass or crystal, it seemed, at each end.

  ‘Ah! Art optic!’ said the friar. ‘But what is that beneath it?’

  It was a small swivelling sheet of polished silver no bigger than a florin, which caught the light and concentrated it on the lesser hole. John adjusted it without the friar’s proffered help.

  ‘And now to find a drop of water,’ said he, picking up a small brush.

  ‘Come to my upper cloister. The sun is on the leads still,’ said the abbot, rising.

  They followed him there. Half-way along, a drip from a gutter had made a greenish puddle in a worn stone. Very carefully, John dropped a drop of it into the smaller hole of the compass-leg, and, steadying the apparatus on a coping, worked the screw in the compass-joint, screwed the cylinder, and swung the swivel of the mirror till he was satisfied.

  ‘Good!’ He peered through the thing. ‘My shapes are all here. Now look, Father! If they do not meet your eye at first, turn this nicked edge here, left-or right-handed.’

  ‘I have not forgotten,’ said the abbot, taking his place. ‘Yes! They are here – as they were in my time – my time past. There is no end to them, I was told…There is no end!’

  ‘The light will go. Oh, let me look! Suffer me to see, also!’ the friar pleaded, almost shouldering Stephen from the eyepiece. The abbot gave way. His eyes were on time past. But the friar, instead of looking, turned the apparatus in his capable hands.

  ‘Nay, nay,’ John interrupted, for the man was already fiddling at the screws. ‘Let the doctor see.’

  Roger of Salerno looked, minute after minute. John saw his blue-veined cheek-bones turn white. He stepped back at last, as though stricken.

  ‘It is a new world – a new world, and – Oh, God Unjust! – I am old!’

  ‘And now Thomas,’ Stephen ordered.

  John manipulated the tube for the infirmarían, whose hands shook, and he too looked long. ‘It is Life,’ he said presently in a breaking voice. ‘No Hell! Life created and rejoicing – the work of the Creator. They live, even as I have dreamed. Then it was no sin for me to dream. No sin – O God – no sin!’

  He flung himself on his knees and began hysterically the Benedicite omnia Opera.

  ‘And now I will see how it is actuated,’ said the friar from Oxford, thrusting forward again.

  ‘Bring it within. The place is all eyes and ears,’ said Stephen.

  They walked quietly back along the leads, three English counties laid out in evening sunshine around them; church upon church, monastery upon monastery, cell after cell, and the bulk of a vast cathedral moored on the edge of the banked shoals of sunset.

  When they were at the after-table once more they sat down, all except the friar, who went to the window and huddled bat-like over the thing. ‘I see! I see!’ he was repeating to himself.

  ‘He’ll not hurt it,’ said John. But the abbot, staring in front of him, like Roger of Salerno, did not hear. The infirmarian’s head was on the table between his shaking arms.

  John reached for a cup of wine.

  ‘It was shown to me,’ the abbot was speaking to himself, ‘in Cairo, that man stands ever between two Infinities – of greatness and littleness. Therefore, there is no end – either to life – or—‘

  ‘And I stand on the edge of the grave,’ snarled Roger of Salerno. ‘Who pities me?’

  ‘Hush!’ said Thomas the Infirmarian. ‘The little creatures shall be sanctified – sanctified to the service of His sick.’

  ‘What need?’ John of Burgos wiped his lips. ‘It shows no more than the shapes of things. It gives good pictures. I had it at Granada. It was brought from the East, they told me.’

  Roger of Salerno laughed with an old man’s malice. ‘What of Mother Church? Most Holy Mother Church? If it comes to Her ears that we have spied into Her Hell without Her leave, where do we stand?’

  ‘At the stake,’ said the Abbot of St Mod’s, and, raising his voice a trifle, ‘You hear that? Roger Bacon, heard you that?’

  The friar turned from the window, clutching the compasses tighter.

  ‘No, no!’ he appealed. ‘Not with Falcodi – not with our English-hearted Foulkes made Pope. He’s wise – he’s learned. He reads what I have put forth. Foulkes would never suffer it.’

  ‘“Holy Pope is one thing, Holy Church another,’” Roger quoted.

  ‘But I – I can bear witness it is no art magic,’ the friar went on. ‘Nothing is it, except art optical – wisdom after trial and experiment, mark you. I can prove it, and – my name weighs with men who dare think.’

  ‘Find them!’ croaked Roger of Salerno. ‘Five or six in all the world. That makes less than fifty pounds by weight of ashes at the stake. I have watched such men – redu
ced.’

  ‘I will not give this up!’ The friar’s voice cracked in passion and despair. ‘It would be to sin against the Light.’

  ‘No, no! Let us – let us sanctify the little animals of Varro,’ said Thomas.

  Stephen leaned forward, fished his ring out of the cup, and slipped it on his finger. ‘My sons,’ said he, ‘we have seen what we have seen.’

  ‘That it is no magic but simple art,’ the friar persisted.

  ‘Avails nothing. In the eyes of Mother Church we have seen more than is permitted to man.’

  ‘But it was Life – created and rejoicing,’ said Thomas.

  ‘To look into Hell as we shall be judged – as we shall be proved – to have looked, is for priests only.’

  ‘Or green-sick virgins on the road to sainthood who, for cause any midwife could give you—‘

  The abbot’s half-lifted hand checked Roger of Salerno’s outpouring.

  ‘Nor may even priests see more in Hell than Church knows to be there. John, there is respect due to Church as well as to devils.’

  ‘My trade’s the outside of things,’ said John quietly. ‘I have my patterns.’

  ‘But you may need to look again for more,’ the friar said. ‘In my craft, a thing done is done with. We go on to new shapes after that.’

  ‘And if we trespass beyond bounds, even in thought, we lie open to the judgment of the Church,’ the abbot continued.

  ‘But thou knowest – knowest!’ Roger of Salerno had returned to the attack. ‘Here’s all the world in darkness concerning the causes of things – from the fever across the lane to thy Lady’s – thine own Lady’s – eating malady. Think!’

  ‘I have thought upon it, Salerno! I have thought indeed.’

  Thomas the Infirmarian lifted his head again; and this time he did not stammer at all. ‘As in the water, so in the blood must they rage and war with each other! I have dreamed these ten years – I thought it was a sin – but my dreams and Varro’s are true! Think on it again! Here’s the Light under our very hand!’

  ‘Quench it! You’d no more stand to roasting than – any other. I’ll give you the case as Church – as I myself – would frame it. Our John here returns from the Moors, and shows us a hell of devils contending in the compass of one drop of water. Magic past clearance! You can hear the faggots crackle.’