天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》 《The Bloody chamber And Other Stories》 Contents THE BLOODY CHAMBER AND OTHER STORIES The Bloody Chamber The Courtship 藏书网of Mr Lyon The Tige.９9lｉｂ.rs Bride Puss-in-Boots The Erl-King The Snow Child The Lady of the House of Love The Werewolf T九九藏书he pany of Wolves Wolf-Alice The Bloody Chamber-1 I remember how, that night, I lay awake in the wagon-lit in a tender, delicious ecstasy of excitement, my burning cheek pressed against the impeccable linen of the pillow and the pounding of my heart mimig that of the great pistons ceaselessly thrusting the train that bore me through the night, away from Paris, away from girlhood, away from the white, enclosed quietude of my mothers apartment, into the unguessable try of marriage. And I remember I tenderly imagined how, at this very moment, my mother would be moving slowly about the narrow bedroom I had left behind for ever, folding up and putting away all my little relics, the tumbled garments I would not need any more, the scores for which there had been no room in my trunks, the cert programmes Id abandoned; she would linger over this torn ribbon and that faded photograph with all the half-joyous, half-sorrowful emotions of a woman on her daughters wedding day. And, in the midst of my bridal triumph, I felt a pang of loss as if, whe the gold band on my finger, I had, in some way, ceased to be her child in being his wife. Are you sure, shed said when they delivered the gigantic box that held the wedding dress hed bought me, ed up in tissue paper and red ribbon like a Christmas gift of crystallised fruit. Are you sure you love him? There was a dress for her, too; black silk, with the dull, prismatic sheen of oil on water, fihan anything shed worn sihe adventurous girlhood in Indo-a, daughter of a rich tea planter. My eagle-featured indomitable mother; what other student at the servatoire could boast that her mother had outfaced a junkful of ese pirates; nursed a village through a visitation of the plague, shot a maing tiger with her own hand and all before she was as old as I? "Are you sure you love him?" "Im sure I want to marry him," I said. And would say no more. She sighed, as if it was with reluce that she might at last banish the spectre of poverty from its habitual place at our meagre table. For my mother herself had gladly, sdalously, defiantly beggared herself for love; and, one fine day, her gallant soldier never returned from the wars, leaving his wife and child a legacy of tears that never quite dried, a cigar box full of medals and the antique service revolver that my mrown magnifitly etri hardship, kept always in her reticule, in case -- how I teased her -- she was surprised by footpads on her way home from the grocers shop. Now and then a starburst of lights spattered the drawn blinds as if the railway pany had lit up all the stations through which we passed in celebration of the bride. My satin nightdress had just been shaken from its ings; it had slipped over my young girls pointed breasts and shoulders, supple as a garment of heavy water, and now teasingly caressed me, egregious, insinuating, nudgiween my thighs as I shifted restlessly in my narrow berth. His kiss, his kiss with tongue ah in it and a rasp of beard had hio me, though with the same exquisite tact as this nightdress hed given me, of the wedding night, which would be voluptuously deferred until we lay in his great aral bed in the sea-girt, pinnacled domain that lay, still, beyond the grasp of my imagination. . . that magic place, the fairy castle whose walls were made of foam, that legendary habitation in which he had been born. To which, one day, I might bear an heir. Our destination, my destiny. Above the syncopated roar of the train, I could hear his even, steady breathing. Only the unig door kept me from my husband and it stood open. If I rose up on my elbow, I could see the dark, leonine shape of his head and my nostrils caught a whiff of the opulent male st of leather and spices that always apanied him and sometimes during his courtship, had been the only hint he gave me that he had e into my mothers sitting-room, for, though he was a big man, he moved as softly as if all his shoes had soles of velvet, as if his footfall turhe carpet into snow. He had loved to surprise me in my abstracted solitude at the piano. He would tell them not to announce him, then soundlessly open the door and softly creep up behih his bouquet of hot-house flowers or his box of marrons glaces, lay his upon the keys and clasp his hands over my eyes as I was lost in a Debussy prelude. But the perfume of spiced leather always betrayed him; after my first shock, I was forced always to mimic surprise, so that he would not be disappointed. He was older than I. He was much older than I; there were streaks of pure silver in his dark mane. But his strange, heavy, almost waxen face was not lined by experience. Rather, experience seemed to have washed it perfectly smooth, like a stone on a beach whose fissures had been eroded by successive tides. And sometimes that face, in stillness when he listeo me playing, with the heavy eyelids folded over eyes that always disturbed me by their absolute absence of light, seemed to me like a mask, as if his real face, the face that truly reflected all the life he had led in the world before he met me, before, even, I was born, as though that face lay underh this mask. Or else, elsewhere. As though he had laid by the fa which he had lived for so long in order to offer my youth a fasigned by the years. And, elsewhere, I might see him plain. Elsewhere. But, where? In, perhaps, that castle to which the train now took us, that marvellous castle in which he had been born. Even when he asked me to marry him, and I said: "Yes", still he did not lose that heavy, fleshy posure of his. I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of a se vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of a flesh as thid tensely yielding to the touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a loinguished sigh. I thought: Oh! how he must want me! and it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its viole because of its very gravity. He had the ring ready in a leather box lined with crimso, a fire opal the size of a pigeons egg set in a plicated circle of dark antique gold. My old nurse, who still lived with my mother and me, squi the ring askance: opals are bad luck, she said. But this opal had been his own mothers ring, and his grandmothers, and her mothers before that, given to an aor by Catherine de Medici. . . every bride that came to the castle wore it, time out of mind. And did he give it to his other wives and have it back from them? asked the old woman rudely; yet she was a snob. She hid her incredulous joy at my marital coup -- her little Marquise -- behind a fa?ade of fault-finding. But, here, she touched me. I shrugged and turned my back pettishly on her. I did not want to be reminded how he had loved other women before me, but the knowledge often teased me ihreadbare self-fidence of the small hours. I was seventeen and knew nothing of the world; my Marquis had been married before, more than once, and I remained a little bemused that, after those others, he should now have chosen me. Indeed was he not still in m for his last wife? Tsk, tsk, went my old nurse. And even my mother had beeant to see her girl whisked off by a man so retly bereaved. A Romanian tess, a lady of high fashion. Dead just three short months before I met him, a boating act, at his home, in Brittany. They never found her body but I rummaged through the back copies of the society magazines my old nan in a trunk under her bed and tracked down her photograph. The sharp muzzle of a pretty, witty, naughty monkey; such potent and bizarre charm, of a dark, bright, wild yet worldly thing whose natural habitat must have been some luxurious interior decorators jungle filled with potted palms and tame, squawking parakeets. Before that? Her face is on property; everyone painted her but the Redon engraving I liked best, The Evening Star Walking on the Rim of Night. To see her skeletal, enigmatic grace, you would hink she had been a barmaid in a café in Montmartre until Puvis de Chavannes saw her and had her expose her flat breasts and elohighs to his brush. A was the absinthe doomed her, or so they said. The first of all his ladies? That sumptuous diva; I had heard her sing Isolde, precociously musical child that I was, taken to the opera for a birthday treat. My first opera; I had heard her sing Isolde. With what white-hot passion had she burned from the stage! So that you could tell she would die young. We sat high up, halfway to heaven in the gods, yet she half-blinded me. And my father, still alive (oh, so long ago), took hold of my sticky little hand, to e, in the last act, yet all I heard was the glory of her voice. Married three times within my own brief lifetime to three different graces, now, as if to demonstrate the eclecticism of his taste, he had invited me to join this gallery of beautiful women, I, the poor widows child with my mouse-coloured hair that still bore the kinks of the plaits from which it had so retly been freed, my bony hips, my nervous, pianists fingers. He was rich as Croesus. The night before our wedding -- a simple affair, at the Mairie, because his tess was so retly gone -- he took my mother and me, curious ce, to see Tristan. And, do you know, my heart swelled and ached s the Liebestod that I thought I must truly love him. Yes. I did. On his arm, all eyes were upohe whispering crowd in the foyer parted like the Red Sea to let us through. My skin crisped at his touch. How my circumstances had ged sihe first time I heard those voluptuous chords that carry such a charge of deathly passion in them! Now, we sat in a loge, in red velvet armchairs, and a braided bewigged flunkey brought us a silver bucket of iced champagne ierval. The froth spilled over the rim of my glass and drenched my hands, I thought: My cup ruh over. And I had on a Poiret dress. He had prevailed upon my relut mother to let him buy my trousseau; what would I have goo him in, otherwise? Twice-darned underwear, faded gingham, serge skirts, hand-me-downs. So, for the opera, I wore a sinuous shift of white muslin tied with a silk string uhe breasts. And everyoared at me. And at his wedding gift. His wedding gift, clasped round my throat. A choker of rubies, two inches wide, like araordinarily precious slit throat. After the Terror, in the early days of the Directory, the aristos whod escaped the guillotine had an ironic fad of tying a red ribbon round their necks at just the point where the blade would have sliced it through, a red ribbon like the memory of a wound. And his grandmother, taken with the notion, had her ribbon made up in rubies; such a gesture of luxurious defiahat night at the opera es bae even now. . . the white dress; the frail child within it; and the flashing crimson jewels rouhroat, bright as arterial blood. I saw him watg me in the gilded mirrors with the assessing eye of a oisseur iing horseflesh, or even of a housewife in the market, iing cuts on the slab. Id never seen, or else had never aowledged, that regard of his before, the sheer al avarice of it; and it was strangely magnified by the monocle lodged in his left eye. When I saw him look at me with lust, I dropped my eyes but, in glang away from him, I caught sight of myself in the mirror. And I saw myself, suddenly, as he saw me, my pale face, the way the muscles in my neck stuck out like thin wire. I saw how much that cruel necklace became me. And, for the first time in my i and fined life, I sensed in myself a potentiality for corruption that took my breath away. The day, we were married. The train slowed, shuddered to a halt. Lights; k of metal; a voice declaring the name of an unknown, o-be-visited station; silence of the night; the rhythm of his breathing, that I should sleep with, now, for the rest of my life. And I could not sleep. I stealthily sat up, raised the blind a little and huddled against the cold window that misted over with the warmth of my breathing, gazing out at the dark platform towards those regles of domestic lamp light that promised warmth, pany, a supper of sausages hissing in a pan oove for the station master, his children tucked up in bed asleep in the brick house with the painted shutters. . . all the paraphernalia of the everyday world from which I, with my stunning marriage, had exiled myself. Inte, into exile; I se, I k -- that, heh, I would always be lonely. Yet that art of the already familiar weight of the fire opal that glimmered like a gypsys magic ball, so that I could not take my eyes off it when I played the piano. This ring, the bloody bandage of rubies, the wardrobe of clothes from Poiret and Worth, his st of Russiaher -- all had spired to seduce me so utterly that I could not say I felt one siwinge ret for the world of tartines and maman that now receded from me as if drawn away on a string, like a childs toy, as the train began to throb again as if in delighted anticipation of the dista would take me. The first grey streamers of the dawn now flew in the sky and an eldritch half-light seeped into the railway carriage. I heard no ge in his breathing but my heighteed seold me he was awake and gazing at me. A huge man, an enormous man, and his eyes, dark and motionless as those eyes the a Egyptians painted upon their sarcophagi, fixed upon me. I felt a certain tension i of my stomach, to be so watched in such silence. A match struck. He was igniting a Romeo y Julieta fat as a babys arm. "Soon," he said in his resonant voice that was like the tolling of a bell and I felt, all at once, a sharp premonition of dread that lasted only as long as the match flared and I could see his white, broad face as if it were h, disembodied, above the sheets, illuminated from below like a grotesque ival head. Then the flame died, the cigar glowed and filled the partment with a remembered fragrahat made me think of my father, how he would hug me in a warm fug of Havana, when I was a little girl, before he kissed me a me and died. As soon as my husband handed me down from the high step of the train, I smelled the amniotic salinity o?９9ｌiｂ?f the o. It was November; the trees, stunted by the Atlantic gales, were bare and the lonely halt was deserted but for his leather-gaitered chauffeur waiting meekly beside the sleek black motor car. It was cold; I drew my furs about me, a of white and black, broad stripes of ermine and sable, with a collar from which my head rose like the calyx of a wildflower. (I swear to you, I had never been vain until I met him.) The bell ged; the straining trai its leash a us at that lonely wayside halt where only he and I had desded. Oh, the wonder of it; how all that might of iron and steam had paused only to suit his veniehe richest man in France. "Madame." The chauffeur eyed me; was he paring me, invidiously, to the tess, the artists model, the opera singer? I hid behind my furs as if they were a system of soft shields. My husband liked me to wear my opal over my kid glove, a showy, theatrical trick -- but the moment the ironic chauffeur glimpsed its simmering flash he smiled, as though it roof positive I was his masters wife. And we drove towards the widening dawn, that now streaked half the sky with a wintry bouquet of pink of roses, e of tiger-lilies, as if my husband had ordered me a sky from the florist. The day broke around me like a cool dream. Sea; sand; a sky that melts into the sea -- a landscape of misty pastels with a look about it of being tinuously on the point of melting. A landscape with all the deliquest harmonies of Debussy, of the etudes I played for him, the reverie Id been playing that afternoon in the salon of the princess where Id first met him, among the tea-cups and the little cakes, I, the orphan, hired out of charity to give them their digestive of music. And, ah! his castle. The faery solitude of the place; with its turrets of misty blue, its courtyard, its spiked gate, his castle that lay on the very bosom of the sea with seabirds mewing about its attics, the casements opening on to the green and purple, eva departures of the o, cut off by the tide from land for half a day. . . that castle, at home her on the land nor oer, a mysterious, amphibious place, travening the materiality of both earth and the waves, with the melancholy of a mermaiden who perches on her rod waits, endlessly, for a lover who had drowned far away, long ago. That lovely, sad, sea-siren of a place! The tide was low; at this hour, so early in the m, the causeway rose up out of the sea. As the car turned on to the wet cobbles between the slow margins of water, he reached out for my hand that had his sultry, witg ring on it, pressed my fingers, kissed my palm with extraordinary tenderness. His face was as still as ever Id seen it, still as a pond iced thickly over, yet his lips, that always looked sely red and naked between the black fringes of his beard, now curved a little. He smiled; he weled his bride home. No room, no corridor that did not rustle with the sound of the sea and all the ceilings, the walls on which his aors iern regalia of rank lined up with their dark eyes and white faces, were stippled with refracted light from the waves which were always in motion; that luminous murmurous castle of which I was the chatelaine, I, the little music student whose mother had sold all her jewellery, even her wedding ring, to pay the fees at the servatoire. First of all, there was the small ordeal of my initial interview with the housekeeper, who kept this extraordinary mae, this anchored, castellated o liner, in smooth running order no matter who stood on the bridge; how tenuous, I thought, might be my authority here! She had a bland, pale, impassive, dislikeable face beh the impeccably starched white linen headdress of the region. Her greeting, correct but lifeless, chilled me; daydreaming, I dared presume too muy status. . . briefly wondered how I might install my old nurse, so much loved, however cosily inpetent, in her place. Ill-sidered schemings! He told me this one had been his foster mother; was bound to his family imost feudal plicity, "as much a part of the house as I am, my dear." Now her thin lips offered me a proud little smile. She would be my ally as long as I was his. And with that, I must be tent. But, here it would be easy to be tent. Iurret suite he had given me for my very own, I could gaze out over the tumultuous Atlantid imagine myself the Queen of the Sea. There was a Bechstein for me in the musi and, on the wall, another wedding present -- an early Flemish primitive of Saint Cecilia at her celestial an. In the prim charm of this saint, with her plump, sallow cheeks and kled brown hair, I saw myself as I could have wished to be. I warmed to a loviivity I had not hitherto suspected in him. Then he led me up a delicate spiral staircase to my bedroom; before she discreetly vahe housekeeper set him chug with some, I dare say, lewd blessing for newlyweds in her native Breton. That I did not uand. That he, smiling, refused to interpret. And there lay the grand, hereditary matrimonial bed, itself the size, almost, of my little room at home, with the gargoyles carved on its surfaces of ebony, vermilion lacquer, gold leaf; and its white gauze curtains, billowing in the sea breeze. Our bed. And surrounded by so many mirrors! Mirrors on the walls, in stately frames of torted gold, that reflected more white lilies than Id ever seen in my life before. Hed filled the room with them, to greet the bride, the young bride. The young bride, who had bee that multitude of girls I saw in the mirrors, identical in their chiavy blue tailor-mades, for travelling, madame, or walking. A maid had dealt with the furs. Heh, a maid would deal with everything. "See," he said, gesturing towards those elegant girls. "I have acquired a whole harem for myself!" I found that I was trembling. My breath came quickly. I could not meet his eye and turned my head away, out of pride, out of shyness, and watched a dozen husbands approach me in a dozen mirrors and slowly, methodically, teasingly, unfastetons of my jacket and slip it from my shoulders. Enough! No; more! Off es the skirt; ahe blouse of apricot lihat ore than the dress I had for first union. The play of the waves outside in the cold sun glittered on his monocle; his movements seemed to me deliberately coarse, vulgar. The blood rushed to my face again, and stayed there. A, you see, I guessed it might be so -- that we should have a formal disrobing of the bride, a ritual from the brothel. Sheltered as my life had been, how could I have failed, even in the world of prim bohemia in which I lived, to have heard hints of his world? He stripped me, gourmand that he was, as if he were stripping the leaves off an artichoke -- but do not imagine much finesse about it; this artichoke was no particular treat for the diner nor was he yet in any greedy haste. He approached his familiar treat with a weary appetite. And when nothing but my scarlet, palpitating core remained, I saw, in the mirror, the living image of ag by Rops from the colle he had shown me when agemeted us to be aloogether. . . the child with her sticklike limbs, naked but for her button boots, her gloves, shielding her face with her hand as though her face were the last repository of her modesty; and the old, monocled lecher who examined her, limb by limb. He in his London tail; she, bare as a lamb ost praphic of all frontations. And so my purchaser uned his bargain. And, as at the opera, when I had first seen my flesh in his eyes, I was aghast to feel myself stirring. At once he closed my legs like a book and I saw again the rare movement of his lips that meant he smiled. Not yet. Later. Anticipation is the greater part of pleasure, my little love. And I began to shudder, like a racehorse before a race, yet also with a kind of fear, for I felt both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance I could not stifle for his white, heavy flesh that had too mu on with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom i glass jars, those uakers lilies with the heavy pollen that powders your fingers as if you had dipped them in turmeric. The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you. This se from a voluptuarys life was notly terminated. It turns out he has busio attend to; his estates, his panies -- even on your honeymoon? Even then, said the red lips that kissed me before he left me aloh my bewildered senses -- a wet, silken brush from his beard; a hint of the poiip of the tongue. Disgruntled, I ed a negligee of antique lace arouo sip the little breakfast of hot chocolate the maid brought me; after that, si was a sed nature to me, there was o go but the musi and soon I settled down at my piano. Yet only a series of subtle discords flowed from beh my fingers: Bout of tune. . . only a little out of tune; but Id been blessed with perfect pitd could not bear to play any more. Sea breezes are bad for pianos; we shall need a resident piano-tuner on the premises if Im to tih my studies! I flung down the lid in a little fury of disappoi; what should I do now, how shall I pass the long, sea-lit hours until my husband beds me? I shivered to think of that. His library seemed the source of his habitual odour of Russiaher. Row upon row of calf-bound volumes, brown and olive, with gilt lettering on their spihe octavo in brilliant scarlet morocco. A deep-buttoned leather sofa to ree on. A le, carved like a spread eagle that held open upon it aion of Huysmanss Là-bas, from some over-exquisite private press; it had been bound like a missal, in brass, with gems of class. The rugs on the floor, deep pulsing blues of heaven and red of the hearts dearest blood, came from Isfahan and Bokhara; the dark panelling gleamed; there was the lulling music of the sea and a fire of apple logs. The flames flickered along the spines ihe glass-fronted case that held books still crisp and new. Eliphas Levy; the name meant nothing to me. I squi a title or two: The Initiation, The Key of Mysteries, The Secret of Pandoras Box, and yawned. Nothing, here, to detain a seventeen-year-old girl waiting for her first embrace. I should have liked, best of all, a novel in yelloer; I wao curl up on the rug before the blazing fire, lose myself in a cheap novel, munch sticky liqueur chocolates. If I rang for them, a maid would brihe chocolates. heless, I opehe doors of the bookcase idly to browse. And I think I knew, I knew by some tingle of the fiips, even before I opehat slim volume with no title at all on the spine, what I should find inside. When he showed me the Rops, newly bought, dearly prized, had he not hihat he was a oisseur of such things? Yet I had not bargained for this, the girl with tears hanging on her cheeks like stuck pearls, her t a split fig below the great globes of her buttocks on which the kails of the cat were about to desd, while a man in a black mask fingered with his free hand his prick, that curved upwards like a scimitar he held. The picture had a caption "Reproof of curiosity." My mother, with all the precision of her etricity, had told me what it was that lovers did; I was i but not he Adventures of Eulalie at the Harem of the Grand Turk had been printed, acc to the flyleaf, in Amsterdam in 1748, a rare collectors piece. Had some aht it back himself from that northern city? Or had my husband bought it for himself, from one of those dusty little bookshops on the Left Bank where an old man peers at you through spectacles an inch thick, daring you to i his wares. . . I turhe pages iicipation of fear; the print was rusty. Here was aeel engraving: "Immolation of the wives of the Sultan". I knew enough for what I saw in that book to make me gasp. There u intensification of the odour of leather that suffused his library; his shadow fell across the massacre. "My little nun has found the prayerbooks, has she?" he demanded, with a ixture of mockery and relish; then, seeing my painful, furious bewilderment, he laughed at me aloud, snatched the book from my hands and put it down on the sofa. "Have the nasty pictures scared Baby? Baby mustnt play with grownups toys until shes learned how to hahem, must she?" Then he kissed me. And with, this time, ice. He kissed me and laid his hand imperatively upon my breast, beh the sheath of a lace. I stumbled on the winding stair that led to the bedroom, to the carved, gilded bed on which he had been ceived, I stammered foolishly: Weve not taken lun yet; and, besides, it is broad daylight. . . All the better to see you. He made me put on my choker, the family heirloom of one woman who had escaped the blade. With trembling fingers, I fastehe thing about my neck. It was cold as id chilled me. He twined my hair into a rope and lifted it off my shoulders so that he could the better kiss the downy furrows below my ears; that made me shudder. And he kissed those blazing rubies, too. He kissed them before he kissed my mouth. Rapt, he intoned: "Of her apparel she retains/Only her sonorous jewellery." A dozen husbands impaled a dozen brides while the mewing gulls swung on invisible trapezes in the empty air outside. I was brought to my senses by the i shrilling of the telephone. He lay beside me, felled like an oak, breathing stertorously, as if he had been fighting with me. In the course of that one-sided struggle, I had seen his deathly posure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall; I had heard him shriek and blaspheme at the asm; I had bled. And perhaps I had seen his face without its mask; and perhaps I had not. Yet I had been infinitely dishevelled by the loss of my virginity. I gathered myself together, reached into the cloisonne cupboard beside the bed that cealed the telephone and addressed the mouthpiece. His agent in New York. Urgent. I shook him awake and rolled over on my side, cradling my spent body in my arms. His voice buzzed like a hive of distant bees. My husband. My husband, who, with so much love, filled my bedroom with lilies until it looked like an embalming parlour. Those som lilies, that wave their heavy heads, distributing their lush, i inse remi of pampered flesh. When hed finished with the agent, he turo me and stroked the ruby necklace that bit into my neck, but with such tenderness now, that I ceased fling and he caressed my breasts. My dear one, my little love, my child, did it hurt her? Hes so sorry for it, such impetuousness, he could not help himself; you see, he loves her so. . . and this lovers recitative of his brought my tears in a flood. I g to him as though only the one who had inflicted the pain could e for suffering it. For a while, he murmured to me in a voice Id never heard before, a voice like the soft solations of the sea. But then he unwound the tendrils of my hair from the buttons of his smoking jacket, kissed my cheek briskly and told me the agent from New York had called with such urgent busihat he must leave as soon as the tide was low enough. Leave the castle? Leave France! And would be away for at least six weeks. "But it is our honeymoon!" A deal, aerprise of hazard and volving several millions, lay in the balance, he said. He drew away from me into that waxworks stillness of his; I was only a little girl, I did not uand. And, he said unspoken to my wounded vanity, I have had too manybbr> honeymoons to find them in the least pressing itments. I know quite well that this child Ive bought with a handful of coloured stones and the pelts of dead beasts wont run away. But, after hed called his Paris agent to book a passage for the States day -- just oiny call, my little one -- we should have time for diogether. And I had to be tent with that. A Mexi dish of pheasant with hazelnuts and chocolate; salad; white, voluptuous cheese; a sorbet of muscat grapes and Asti spumante. A celebration exploded festively. And then acrid black coffee in precious little cups so fi shadowed the birds with which they were painted. I had treau, he had a the library, with the purple velvet curtains drawn against the night, where he took me to per his knee in a leather armchair beside the flickering log fire. He had made me ge into the chaste little Poiret shift of white muslin; he seemed especially fond of it, my breasts showed through the flimsy stuff, he said, like little soft white doves that sleep, eae, with a pink eye open. But he would not let me take off my ruby choker, although it was growing very unfortable, nor fasten up my desding hair, the sign of a virginity so retly ruptured that still remained a wounded preseween us. He twined his fingers in my hair until I winced; I said, I remember, very little. The maid will have ged our sheets already," he said. "We do not hang the bloody sheets out of the window to prove to the whole of Brittany you are a virgin, not in these civilised times. But I should tell you it would have been the first time in all my married lives I could have shown my ied tenants such a flag." Then I realised, with a shock of surprise, how it must have been my innoce that captivated him -- the silent music, he said, of my unknowingness, like La Tenasse des audiences au clair de lune played upon a piano with keys of ether. You must remember how ill at ease I was in that luxurious place, how unease had been my stant panion during the whole length of my courtship by this grave satyr who now gently martyrised my hair. To know that my y gave him some pleasure made me take heart. Ce! I shall act the fine lady to the manner born one day, if only by virtue of default. Then, slowly yet teasingly, as if he were giving a child a great mysterious treat, he took out a bunch of keys from some interior hidey-hole in his jacket -- key after key, a key, he said, for every lo the house. Keys of all kinds -- huge, ahings of black iron; others slender, delicate, almost baroque; wafer-thin Yale keys for safes and boxes. And, during his abse was I who must take care of them all. I eyed the heavy bunch with circumspe. Until that moment, I had not given a sihought to the practical aspearriage with a great house, great wealth, a great man, whose key ring was as crowded as that of a prison warder. Here were the clumsy and archaic keys for the dungeons, for dungeons we had iy although they had been verted into cellars for his wihe dusty bottles inhabited in racks all those deep holes of pain in the ro which the castle was built. There are the keys to the kits, this is the key to the picture gallery, a treasure house filled by five turies of avid collectors -- ah! he foresaw I would spend hours there. He had amply indulged his taste for the Symbolists, he told me with a glint of greed. There was Moreaus great portrait of his first wife, the famous Sacrificial Victim with the imprint of the lacelike s on her pellucid skin. Did I know the story of the painting of that picture? How, wheook off her clothes for him for the first time, she fresh from her bar in Montmartre, she had robed herself involuntarily in a blush that reddened her breasts, her shoulders, her arms, her whole body? He had thought of that story, of that dear girl, when first he had undressed me. . . Ensor, the great Ensor, his monolithivas: The Foolish Virgins. two or three late Gauguins, his special favourite the one of the tranced brown girl in the deserted house which was called: Out of the Night We e, Into the Night We Go. And, besides the additions he had made himself, his marvellous iance of Watteaus, Poussins and a pair of very special Fragonards, issioned for a litious aor who, it was said, had posed for the masters brush himself with his own two daughters. . . He broke off his catalogue of treasures abruptly. Your thin white face, cherie; he said, as if he saw it for the first time. Your thin white face, with its promise of debauchery only a oisseur could detect. A log fell in the fire, instigating a shower of sparks; the opal on my finger spurted green flame. I felt so giddy as if I were on the edge of a precipice; I was afraid, not so much of him, of his monstrous presence, heavy as if he had been gifted at birth with more specific gravity than the rest of us, the presehat, even when I thought myself most in love with him, always subtly oppressed me. . . No. I was not afraid of him; but of myself. I seemed reborn in his unreflective eyes, reborn in unfamiliar shapes. I hardly reised myself from his description of me a, a -- might there not be a grain of beastly truth in them? And, in the red firelight, I blushed again, unnoticed, to think he might have chosen me because, in my innoce, he sensed a rare talent for corruption. Here is the key to the a et -- dont laugh, my darling; theres a kings ransom in Sevres in that closet, and a queens ransom in Limoges. And a key to the locked, barred room where five geions of plate are kept. Keys, keys, keys. He would trust me with the keys to his office, although I was only a baby; and the keys to his safes, where he kept the jewels I should wear, he promised me, wheuro Paris. Such jewels! Why, I would be able to ge my earrings and necklaces three times a day, just as the Empress Josephine used to ge her underwear. He doubted, he said, with that hollow, knog sound that served him for a chuckle, I would be quite so ied in his share certificates although they, of course, were worth infinitely more. Outside our firelit privacy, I could hear the sound of the tide drawing back from the pebbles of the foreshore; it was nearly time for him to leave me. One single key remained unated for on the ring and he hesitated over it; for a moment, I thought he was going to unfasten it from its brothers, slip it bato his pocket and take it away with him. "What is that key?" I demanded, for his chaffing had made me bold. "The key to your heart? Give it me!" He dahe key tantalisingly above my head, out of reay straining fingers; those bare red lips of his cracked sidelong in a smile. "Ah, no," he said. "Not the key to my heart. Rather, the key to my enfer." He left it on the ring, fastehe ring together, shook it musically, like a carillon. Then threw the keys in a jingling heap in my lap. I could feel the etal chilling my thighs through my thin muslin frock. He bent over me to drop a beard-masked kiss on my forehead. "Every man must have o, even if only one, from his wife," he said. "Promise me this, my whey-faced piano-player; promise me youll use all the keys on the ring except that last little one I showed you. Play with anything you find, jewels, silver plate; make toy boats of my share certificates, if it pleases you, ahem sailing off to America after me. All is yours, everywhere is open to you -- except the lock that this single key fits. Yet all it is is the key to a little room at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room, at the end of a dark little corridor full of horrid cobwebs that would get into your hair and frighten you if you vehere. Oh, and youd find it such a dull little room! But you must promise me, if you love me, to leave it well alo is only a private study, a hideaway, a "den", as the English say, where I go sometimes, on those infreque iable occasions when the yoke of marriage seems to weigh too heavily on my shoulders. There I go, you uand, to savour the rare pleasure of imagining myself wifeless." There was a little thin starlight in the courtyard as, ed in my furs, I saw him to his car. His last words were, that he had telephohe mainland and taken a piano-tuner on to the staff; this man would arrive to take up his duties the day. He pressed me to his via breast, once, and then drove away. I had drowsed away that afternoon and now I could not sleep. I lay tossing and turning in his aral bed until another day-break discoloured the dozen mirrors that were iridest with the refles of the sea. The perfume of the lilies weighed on my senses; when I thought that, heh, I would always share these sheets with a man whose skin, as theirs did, taihat toad-like, clammy hint of moisture, I felt a vague desolation that within me, now my female wound had healed, there had awoken a certain queasy craving like the cravings nant women for the taste of coal or chalk or tainted food, for the renewal of his caresses. Had he not hio me, in his flesh as in his speed looks, of the thousand, thousand baroque interses of flesh upon flesh? I lay in our wide bed apanied by, a sleepless panion, my dark newborn curiosity. I lay in bed alone. And I longed for him. And he disgusted me. Were there jewels enough in all his safes to repense me for this predit? Did all that castle hold enough riches to repense me for the pany of the libertih whom I must share it? And recisely, was the nature of my desirous dread for this mysterious being who, to show his mastery over me, had abandoned me on my wedding night? Then I sat straight up in bed, uhe sardonic masks of the gargoyles carved above me, riven by a wild surmise. Might he have left me, not for Wall Street but for an importunate mistress tucked away God knows where who knew how to pleasure him far better than a girl whose fingers had been exercised, hitherto, only by the practice of scales and arpeggios? And, slowly, soothed, I sank ba to the heaping pillows; I aowledged that the jealous scare Id just given myself was not unmixed with a little tincture of relief. At last I drifted into slumber, as daylight filled the room and chased bad dreams away. But the last thing I remembered, before I slept, was the tall jar of lilies beside the bed, how the thick glass distorted their fat stems so they looked like arms, dismembered arms, drifting drowned into greenish water. Coffee and croissants to sole this bridal, solitary waking. Delicious. Hooo, in a se of b on a glass saucer. The maid squeezed the aromatic juice from an e into a chilled goblet while I watched her as I lay on the lazy midday bed of the rich. Yet nothing, this m, gave me more than a fleeting pleasure except to hear that the piano-tuner had been at work already. When the maid told me that, I sprang out of bed and pulled on my old serge skirt and flannel blouse, e of a student, in which I felt far more at ease with myself than in any of my fine new clothes. After my three hours of practice, I called the piano-tuner in, to thank him. He was blind, of course; but young, with a gentle mouth and grey eyes that fixed upohough they could not see me. He was a blacksmiths son from the village across the causeway; a chorister in the church whom the good priest had taught a trade so that he could make a living. All most satisfactory. Yes. He thought he would be happy here. And if, he added shyly, he might sometimes be allowed to hear me play. . . for, you see, he loved music. Yes. Of course, I said. Certainly. He seemed to know that I had smiled. The Bloody Chamber-2 After I dismissed him, even though Id woken so late, it was still barely time for my "five oclock". The housekeeper, who, thoughtfully forewarned by my husband, had restrained herself from interrupting my musiade me a solemn visitation with a lengthy menu for a late lun. When I told her I did not , she looked at me obliquely, along her nose. I uood at ohat one of my principal funs as chatelaine was to provide work for the staff. But, all the same, I asserted myself and said I would wait until diime, although I looked forward nervously to the solitary meal. Then I found I had to tell her what I would like to have prepared for me; my imagination, still that of a schoolgirl, ran riot. A fowl in cream -- or should I anticipate Christmas with a varurkey? No; I have decided. Avocado and shrimp, lots of it, followed by ree at all. But surprise me for dessert with every ice-cream in the ice box. She noted all down but sniffed; Id shocked her. Such tastes! Child that I was, I giggled when she left me. But, now. . . what shall I do, now? I could have spent a happy hour unpag the trunks that tained my trousseau but the maid had dohat already, the dresses, the tailor-mades hung in the wardrobe in my dressing room, the hats on wooden heads to keep their shape, the shoes on woode as if all these inanimate objects were imitating the appearance of life, to mock me. I did not like to linger in my overcrowded dressing room, nor in my lugubriously lily-sted bedroom. How shall I pass the time? I shall take a bath in my own bathroom! And found the taps were little dolphins made of gold, with chips of turquoise for eyes. And there was a tank of goldfish, who swam in and out of moving fronds of weeds, as bored, I thought, as I was. How I wished he had not left me. How I wished it were possible to chat with, say, a maid; or the piano-tuner . . . but I knew already my new rank forbade overtures of friendship to the staff. I had been hoping to defer the call as long as I could, so that I should have something to look forward to in the dead waste of time I foresaw before me, after my dinner was doh, but, at a quarter before seven, when darkness already surrouhe castle, I could tain myself no longer. I telephoned my mother. And astonished myself by bursting into tears when I heard her voice. No, nothing was the matter. Mother. I have gold bath taps. I said, gold bath taps! No; I suppose thats nothing to cry about, Mother. The line was bad, I could hardly make out her gratulations, her questions, her , but I was a little forted, when I put the receiver down. Yet there still remained one whole hour to dinner and the whole, unimaginable desert of the rest of the evening. The bunch of keys lay, where he had left them, on the rug before the library fire which had warmed their metal so that they no longer felt cold to the touch but warm, almost, as my own skin. How careless I was; a maid, tending the logs, eyed me reproachfully as if Id set a trap for her as I picked up the king bundle of keys, the keys to the interior doors of this lovely prison of which I was both the inmate and the mistress and had scarcely seen. When I remembered that, I felt the exhilaration of the explorer. Lights! More lights! At the touch of a switch, the dreaming library was brilliantly illuminated. I ran crazily about the castle, switg on every light I could find -- I ordered the servants to light up all their quarters, too, so the castle would shine like a seaborne birthday cake lit with a thousand dles, one for every year of its life, and everybody on shore would wo it. Whehing was lit as brightly as the café in the Gare du Nord, the significe of the possessions implied by the bunch of keys no longer intimidated me, for I was determined, now, to search through them all for evideny husbands true nature. His office first, evidently. A mahogany desk half a mile wide, with an impeccable blotter and a bank of telephones. I allowed myself the luxury of opening the safe that taihe jewellery and delved suffitly among the leather boxes to find out how my marriage had given me access to a jinns treasure -- parures, bracelets, rings. . . While I was thus surrounded by diamonds, a maid knocked on the door aered before I spoke; a subtle discourtesy. I would speak to my husband about it. She eyed my serge skirt superciliously; did madame plan to dress for dinner? She made a moue of disdain when I laughed to hear that, she was far more the lady than I. But imagine -- to dress up in one of my Poiret extravaganzas, with the jewelled turban and aigrette on my head, roped with pearl to the o sit down all alone in the baronial dining hall at the head of that massive board at which King Mark was reputed to have fed his knights. . . I grew calmer uhe cold eye of her disapproval. I adopted the crisp iions of an officers daughter. No. I would not dress for dinner. Furthermore, I was not hungry enough for diself. She must tell the housekeeper to cel the dormitory feast Id ordered. Could they leave me sandwiches and a flask of coffee in my musi? And would they all dismiss for the night? Mais oui, madame. I knew by her bereft intonation I had let them down again but I did not care; I was armed against them by the brilliance of his hoard. But I would not find his heart amongst the glittering stones; as soon as she had gone, I began a systematic search of the drawers of his desk. All was in order, so I found nothing. Not a random doodle on an old envelope, nor the faded photograph of a woman. Only the files of business correspondehe bills from the home farms, the invoices from tailors, the billet-doux from iional financiers. Nothing. And this absence of the evidence of his real life began to impress me strangely; there must, I thought, be a great deal to ceal if he takes such pains to hide it. His office was a singularly impersonal room, fag inwards, on to the courtyard, as though he wao turn his ba the siren sea in order to keep a clear head while he bankrupted a small businessman in Amsterdam or -- I noticed with a thrill of distaste -- engage in some business in Laos that must, from certain cryptic refereo his amateur botanists enthusiasm for rare poppies, be to do with opium. Was he not riough to do without crime? Or was the crime itself his profit? A I saw enough to appreciate his zeal for secrecy. Now I had ransacked his desk, I must spend a cool-headed quarter of an hour putting every last letter back where I had found it, and, as I covered the tray visit, by some ce, as I reached inside a little drawer that had stuck fast, I must have touched a hidden spring, for a secret drawer flew open within that drawer itself; and the secret drawer tained -- at last! -- a file marked: Personal. I was alone, but for my refle in the uncurtained window. I had the brief notion that his heart, pressed flat as a flower, crimson and thin as tisue paper, lay in this file. It was a very thin one. I could have wished, perhaps, I had not found that toug, ill-spelt note, on a paper napkin marked La Coupole, that began: "My darling, I ot wait for the moment when you may make me yours pletely." The diva had sent him a page of the score of Tristan, the Liebestod, with the single, cryptic word: "Until. . ." scrawled across it. But the stra of all these love letters ostcard with a view of a village graveyard, among mountains, where some black-coated ghoul enthusiastically dug at a grave; this little se, executed with the lurid exuberance of Grand Guignol, was captioned: "Typical Transylvanian Se -- Midnight, All Hallows." And, oher side, the message: "On the occasion of this marriage to the desdant of Dracula -- always remember, the supreme and unique pleasure of love is the certainty that one is doing evil. Toutes amities, C." A joke. A joke in the worst possible taste; for had he not been married to a Romanian tess? And then I remembered her pretty, witty face, and her name -- Carmilla. My most ret predecessor in this castle had been, it would seem, the most sophisticated. I put away the file, sobered. Nothing in my life of family love and music had prepared me for these grown-up games ahese were clues to his self that showed me, at least, how much he had been loved, even if they did not reveal any good reason for it. But I wao know still more; and as I closed the office door and locked it, the means to discover more fell in my way. Fell, indeed; and with the clatter of a dropped teen of cutlery, for, as I turhe slick Yale lock, I trived, somehow, to open up the key ring itself, so that all the keys tumbled loose on the floor, and the very first key I picked out of that pile was, as luck or ill fortune had it, the key to the room he had forbiddehe room he would keep for his own so that he could go there when he wished to feel himself once more a bachelor. I made my decision to explore it before I felt a faint resurgeny ill-defined fear of his waxen stillness. Perhaps I half-imagihen, that I might find his real self in his den, waiting there to see if indeed I had obeyed him; that he had sent a moving figure of himself to New York, the enigmatic, self-sustaining carapace of his public person, while the real man, whose face I had glimpsed iorm asm, occupied himself with pressing private business iudy at the foot of the west tower, behind the still-room. Yet, if that were so, it was imperative that I should find him, should know him; and I was too deluded by his apparent taste for me to think my disobedience might truly offend him. I took the forbidden key from the heap ahe others lying there. It was now very late and the castle was adrift, as far as it could go from the land, in the middle of the silent o where, at my orders, it floated, like a garland of light. And all silent, all still, but for the murmuring of the waves. I felt no fear, no intimation of dread. Now I walked as firmly as I had done in my mothers house. Not a narrow, dusty little passage at all; why had he lied to me? but an ill-lit one, certainly; the electricity, for some reason did end here, so I retreated to the still-room and found a bundle of waxed tapers in a cupboard, stored there with matches, to light the oak board at grand dinners. I put a maty little taper and advanced with it in my hand, like a pe along the corridor hung with heavy, I thiian, tapestries. The flame picked out here, the head of a man, there, the rich breast of a illing through a rent in her dress -- the Rape of the Sabines, perhaps? The naked swords and immolated horses suggested some grisly mythological subject. The corridor wound downwards; there was an almost imperceptible ramp to the thickly carpeted floor. The heavy hangings on the wall muffled my footsteps, even my breathing. For some reason, it grew very warm, the srang out in beads on my brow. I could no longer hear the sound of the sea. A long, a winding corridor, as if I were in the viscera of the castle; and this corridor led to a door of worm-eaten oak, low, round-topped, barred with black iron. And still I felt no fear, no raising of the hairs on the back of the neo prig of the thumbs. The key slid into the new lock as easily as a hot ko butter. No fear; but hesitation, a holding of the spiritual breath. If I found some traces of his heart in a file marked: Personal, perhaps, here, in his subterranean privacy, I might find a little of his soul. It was the sciousness of the possibility of such a discovery, of its possible strangeness, that kept me for a moment motionless, before in the foolhardiness of my already subtly tainted innoce I turhe key and the door creaked slowly back. "There is a striking resemblawee of love and the ministrations of a torturer," opined my husbands favourite poet; I had learned something of the nature of that similarity on my marriage bed. And now my taper showed me the outlines of a rack. There was also a great wheel, like the ones I had seen in woodcuts of the martyrdoms of the saints, in my old nurses little store of holy books. And -- just one glimpse of it before my little flame caved in and I was left in absolute darkness -- a metal figure, hi the side, which I ko be spiked at the inside and to have the he Iron Maiden. Absolute darkness. And, about me, the instruments of mutilation. Until that moment, this spoiled child did not know she had ied nerves and a will from the mother who had defied the yellow outlaws of Indo-a. My mothers spirit drove me on, into the dreadful place, in a cold ecstasy to know the very worst. I fumbled for the matches in my pocket; what a dim lugubrious light they gave! A, enough, oh, more than enough, to see a room designed for desecration and some dark night of unimaginable lovers whose embraces were annihilation. The walls of this stark torture chamber were the naked rock; they gleamed as if they were sweating with fright. At the four ers of the room were funerary urns, of great antiquity, Etrus, perhaps, and, on three-legged ebony stands, the bowls of inse he had left burning which filled the room with a sacerdotal reek. Wheel, rad Iron Maiden were, I saw, displayed as grandly as if they were items of statuary and I was almost soled, then, and almost persuaded myself that I might have stumbled only upon a little museum of his perversity, that he had installed these monstrous items here only for plation. Yet at the tre of the room lay a catafalque, a doomed, ominous bier of Renaissananship, surrounded by long, white dles and, at its foot, an armful of the same lilies with which he had filled my bedroom, stowed in a four-foot-high jar, glazed with a sombre ese red. I scarcely dared examihis catafalque and its oct more closely; yet I knew I must. Each time I struck a match to light those dles around her bed, it seemed a garment of that innoine for which he had lusted fell away from me. The opera singer lay, quite naked, under a thi of very rare and precious linen, such as the princes of Italy used to shroud those whom they had poisoned. I touched her, very gently, on the white breast; she was cool, he had embalmed her. Ohroat I could see the blue imprint of his stranglers fingers. The cool, sad flame of the dles flickered on her white, closed eyelids. The worst thing was, the dead lips smiled. Beyond the catafalque, in the middle of the shadows, a white nacreous glimmer; as my eyes aced themselves to the gathering darkness, I at last -- oh horrors! -- made out a skull; yes, a skull, so utterly denuded, now, of flesh, that it scarcely seemed possible the stark bone had once been richly upholstered with life. And this skull was strung up by a system of unseen cords, so that it appeared to hang, disembodied, iill, heavy air, and it had been ed with a wreath of white roses, and a veil of lace, the final image of his bride. Yet the skull was still so beautiful, had shaped with its sheer planes so imperiously the face that had oed above it, that I reised her the moment I saw her; face of the evening star walking on the rim of night. One false step, oh, my poor, dear girl, ied sisterhood of his wives; one false step and into the abyss of the dark you stumbled. And where was she, the latest dead, the Romanian tess who might have thought her blood would survive his depredations? I knew she must be here, in the place that had wouhrough the castle towards it on a spool of inexorability. But, at first, I could see no sign of her. Then, for some reason -- perhaps some ge of atmosphere wrought by my presence -- the metal shell of the Iron Maideed a ghostly twang; my feverish imagination might have guessed its oct was trying to clamber out, though, even in the midst of my rising hysteria, I knew she must be dead to find a home there. With trembling fingers, I prised open the front of the upright coffin, with its sculpted face caught in a rictus of pain. Then, overe, I dropped the key I still held in my hand. It dropped into the f pool of her blood. She ierced, not by o by a hundred spikes, this child of the land of the vampires who seemed so newly dead, so full of blood. . . oh God! how retly had he bee a widower? How long had he kept her in this obse cell? Had it been all the time he had courted me, in the clear light of Paris? I closed the lid of her coffin very gently and burst into a tumult of sobbing that tained both pity for his other victims and also a dreadful anguish to know I, too, was one of them. The dles flared, as if in a draught from a door to elsewhere. The light caught the fire opal on my hand so that it flashed, once, with a baleful light, as if to tell me the eye of God -- his eye -- on me. My first thought, when I saw the ring for which I had sold myself to this fate, was, how to escape it. I retained suffit presenind to snuff out the dles round the bier with my fingers, to gather up my taper, to look around, although shuddering, to ensure I had left behind me no tray visit. I retrieved the key from the pool of blood, ed it in my handkerchief to keep my hands , and fled the room, slamming the door behind me. It crashed to with a juddering reverberation, like the door of hell. I could not take refuge in my bedroom, for that retaihe memory of his preserapped ihomless silvering of his mirrors. My musi seemed the safest place, although I looked at the picture of Saint Cecilia with a faint dread; what had beeure of her martyrdom? My mind was in a tumult; schemes for flight jostled with one another. . . as soon as the tide receded from the causeway, I would make for the mainland -- on foot, running, stumbling; I did not trust the leather-clad chauffeur, nor the well-behaved housekeeper, and I dared not take any of the pale, ghostly maids into my fidence, either, sihey were his creatures, all. O the village, I would fling myself directly on the mercy of the gendarmerie. But -- could I trust them, either? His forefathers had ruled this coast fht turies, from this castle whose moat was the Atlantic. Might not the police, the advocates, even the judge, all be in his service, turning a on blio his vices since he was milord whose word must be obeyed? Who, on this distant coast, would believe the white-faced girl from Paris who came running to them with a shuddering tale of blood, of fear, of the ogre murmuring in the shadows? Or, rather, they would immediately know it to be true. But were all honour-bound to let me carry it no further. Assistance. My mother. I ran to the telephone; and the line, of course, was dead. Dead as his wives. A thick darkness unlit by any star, still glazed the windows. Every lamp in my room buro keep the dark outside, yet it seemed still to encroae, to be present beside me but as if masked by my lights, the night like a permeable substahat could seep into my skin. I looked at the precious little ade from hypocritically i flowers long ago, in Dresden; the hands had scarcely moved one single hour forward from when I first desded to the private slaughterhouse of his. Time was his servant, too; it would trap me, here, in a night that would last until he came bae, like a black sun on a hopeless m. Ahe time might still be my friend; at that hour, that very hour, he set sail for New York. To know that, in a few moments, my husband would have left France calmed my agitation a little. My reason told me I had nothing to fear; the tide that would take him away to the New World would let me out of the impriso of the castle. Surely I could easily evade the servants. Anybody buy a ticket at the railway statio I was still filled with unease. I opehe lid of the piano; perhaps I thought my own particular magic might help me, now, that I could create a pentacle out of music that would keep me from harm for, if my music had first ensnared him, then might it not also give me the power to free myself from him? Meically, I began to play but my fingers were stiff and shaking. At first, I could mahier than the exercises of y but simply the act of playing soothed me and, for solace, for the sake of the harmonious rationality of its sublime mathematics, I searched among his scores until I found The Well-Tempered Clavier. I set myself the therapeutic task of playing all Bachs equations, every one, and, I told myself, if I played them all through without a single mistake -- then the m would find me once more a virgin. Crash of a dropped stick. His silver-headed e! What else! Sly, ing, he had returned; he was waiting for me outside the door! I rose to my feet; fear gave me strength. I flung back my head defiantly. "e in!" My voice astonished me by its firmness, its clarity. The door slowly, nervously opened and I saw, not the massive irredeemable bulk of my husband but the slight, stooping figure of the piano-tuner, and he looked far more terrified of me than my mothers daughter would have been of the Devil himself. Iorture chamber, it seemed to me that I would never laugh again; now, helplessly, laugh I did, with relief, and, after a moments hesitation, the boys face softened and he smiled a little almost in shame. Though they were blind, his eyes were singularly sweet. "Five me," said Jean-Yves. "I know Ive given you grounds for dismissihat I should be croug outside your door at midnight. . . but I heard you walking about, up and down -- I sleep in a room at the foot of the west tower -- and some intuition told me you could not sleep and might, perhaps, pass the insomniac hours at your piano. And I could not resist that. Besides, I stumbled over these --" And he displayed the ring of keys Id dropped outside my husbands office door, the ring from whie key was missing. I took them from him, looked round for a place to stow them, fixed on the piano stool as if to hide them would protect me. Still he stood smiling at me. How hard it was to make everyday versation. "Its perfect," I said. "The piano. Perfectly in tune." But he was full of the loquacity of embarrassment, as though I would only five him for his impudence if he explaihe cause of it thhly. "When I heard you play this afternoon, I thought Id never heard such a touch. Such teique. A treat for me, to hear a virtuoso! So I crept up to your door now, humbly as a little dog might, madame, and put my ear to the keyhole and listened, and listenbbr>..ed -- until my stick fell to the floor through a momentary clumsiness of mine, and I was discovered." He had the most toug ingenuous smile. "Perfectly in tune," I repeated. To my surprise, now I had said it, I found I could not say anything else. I could only repeat: "In tune. . . perfect. . . in tune," over and ain. I saw a dawning surprise in his face. My head throbbed. To see him, in his lovely, blind humanity, seemed to hurt me very piergly, somewhere inside my breast; his figure blurred, the room swayed about me. After the dreadful revelation of that bloody chamber, it was his tender look that made me faint. When I recovered sciousness, I found I was lying in the piano-tuners arms and he was tug the satin cushion from the piano-stool under my head. "You are in some great distress," he said. "No bride should suffer so much, so early in her marriage." His speech had the rhythms of the tryside, the rhythms of the tides. "Any bride brought to this castle should e ready dressed in m, should bring a priest and a coffin with her," I said. "Whats this?" It was too late to keep silent; and if he, too, were one of my husbands creatures, then at least he had been kind to me. So I told him everything, the keys, the interdiy disobediehe room, the rack, the skull, the corpses, the blood. "I scarcely believe it," he said, w. "That man. . . so rich; so well-born." "Heres proof," I said and tumbled the fatal key out of my handkerchief on to the silken rug. "Oh God," he said. "I smell the blood." He took my hand; he pressed his arms about me. Although he was scarcely more than a boy, I felt a great strength flow into me from his touch. "We whisper all manner of straales up and down the coast," he said. "There was a Marquis, once, who used to hunt young girls on the mainland; he huhem with dogs, as though they were foxes. My grandfather had it from his grandfather, how the Marquis pulled a head out of his saddle bag and showed it to the blacksmith while the man was shoeing his horse. A fine spe of the genus, brue, eh, Guillaume? And it was the head of the blacksmiths wife." But, in these more democratic times, my husband must travel as far as Paris to do his hunting in the salons. Jean-Yves khe moment I shuddered. "Oh, madame! I thought all these were old wives tales, chattering of fools, spooks to scare bad children into good behaviour! Yet how could you know, a strahat the old name for this place is the Castle of Murder?" How could I know, indeed? Except that, in my heart, Id always known its lord would be the death of me. "Hark!" said my friend suddenly. "The sea has ged key; it must be near m. The tide is going down." He helped me up. I looked from the window, towards the mainland, along the causeway where the stones gleamed wetly ihin light of the end of the night and, with an almost unimaginable horror, a horror the iy of which I ot transmit to you, I saw, in the distaill far away yet drawing moment by moment inexorably he twin headlamps of his great black car, gouging tuhrough the shifting mist. My husband had indeed returhis time, it was no fancy. "The key!" said Jean-Yves. "It must go ba the ring, with the others. As though nothing had happened." But the key was still caked with wet blood and I ran to my bathroom and held it uhe hot tap. Crimson water swirled down the basin but, as if the key itself were hurt, the bloody token stuck. The turquoise eyes of the dolphin taps wi me derisively; they knew my husband had been too clever for me! I scrubbed the stain with my nail brush but still it would not budge. I thought how the car would be rolling silently towards the closed courtyard gate; the more I scrubbed the key, the more vivid grew the stain. The bell iehouse would jahe porters drowsy son would push back the patchwork quilt, yawning, pull the shirt over his head, thrust his feet into his sabots. . . slowly, slowly; open the door for your master as slowly as you . . . And still the bloodstain mocked the fresh water that spilled from the mouth of the leering dolphin. "You have no more time," said Jean-Yves. "He is here. I know it. I must stay with you." "You shall not!" I said. "Go back to your room, now. Please." He hesitated. I put the edge of steel in my voice, for I knew I must meet my lord alone. "Leave me!" As soon as he was gone, I dealt with the keys ao my bedroom. The causeway was empty; Jean-Yves was correct, my husband had already ehe castle. I pulled the curtains close, stripped off my clothes and pulled the bedcurtains around me as a pu aroma of Russiaher assured me my husband was once again beside me. "Dearest!" With the most treacherous, lascivious tenderness, he kissed my eyes, and, mimig the new bride newly awakened, I flung my arms around him, for on my seeming acquiesce depended my salvation. "Da Silva of Rio outwitted me," he said wryly. "My New Yent telegraphed Le Havre and saved me a wasted journey. So we may resume our interrupted pleasures, my love." I did not believe one word of it. I knew I had behaved exactly acc to his desires; had he not bought me so that I should do so? I had been tricked into my owrayal to that illimitable darkness whose source I had been pelled to seek in his absend, now that I had met that shadowed reality of his that came to life only in the presence of its own atrocities, I must pay the priy new knowledge. The secret of Pandoras box; but he had givehe box, himself, knowing I must learn the secret. I had played a game in which every move was governed by a destiny as oppressive and omnipotent as himself, sihat destiny was himself; and I had lost. Lost at the charade of innod vi which he had engaged me. Lost as the victim loses to the executioner. His hand brushed my breast, beh the sheet. I strained my nerves yet could not help but flinch at the intimate touch, for it made me think of the pierg embrace of the Iron Maiden and of his lost lovers in the vault. When he saw my reluce his eyes veiled over a his appetite did not diminish. His tongue ran over red lips already wet. Silent, mysterious, he moved away from me to draw off his jacket. He took the gold watch from his waistcoat and laid it on the dressing table, like a good beois; scooped out his rattling loose ge and now -- oh God! -- makes a great play of patting his pockets officiously, puzzled lips pursed, searg for something that he had mislaid. Then turns to me with a ghastly, a triumphant smile. "But of course! I gave the keys to you!" "Your keys? Why, of course. Here, theyre uhe pillow; wait a moment -- what -- Ah! No. . . now, where I have left them? I was whiling away the evening without you at the piano, I remember. Of course! The musi!" Brusquely he flung my negligee of antique la the bed. "Go ahem." "Now? This moment? t it wait until m, my darling?" I forced myself to be seductive, I saw myself, pale, pliant as a plant that begs to be trampled underfoot, a dozen vulnerable appealing girls reflected in as many mirrors, and I saw how he almost failed to resist me. If he had e to me in bed, I would have strangled him, then. But he half-snarled: "No. It wont wait. Now." The uhly light of dawn filled the room; had only one previous dawn broken upon me in that vile place? And there was nothing for it but to go ach the keys from the music stool and pray he would not examihem too closely, pray to God his eyes would fail him, that he might be struck blind. When I came bato the bedroom carrying the bunch of keys that ja every step like a usical instrument, he was sitting on the bed in his immaculate shirtsleeves, his head sunk in his hands. And it seemed to me he was in despair. Strange. In spite of my fear of him, that made me whiter than my , I felt there emanate from him, at that moment, a stench of absolute despair, rank and ghastly, as if the lilies that surrounded him had all at once begun to fester, or the Russiaher of his st were reverting to the elements of flayed hide and excrement of which it was posed. The chthonic gravity of his preseed a tremendous pressure on the room, so that the blood pounded in my ears as if we had been precipitated to the bottom of the sea, beh the waves that pounded against the shore. I held my life in my hands amongst those keys and, in a moment, would place it between his well-manicured fingers. The evidence of that bloody chamber had showed me I could expeercy. Yet, when he raised his head and stared at me with his blind, shuttered eyes as though he did nnise me, I felt a terrified pity for him, for this man who lived in such strange, secret places that, if I loved him enough to follow him, I should have to die. The atrocious loneliness of that monster! The monocle had fallen from his face. His curling mane was disordered, as if he had run his hands through it in his distra. I saw how he had lost his impassivity and was now filled with suppressed excitement. The haretched out for those ters in his game of love ah shook a little; the face that turowards me tained a sombre delirium that seemed to me pounded of a ghastly, yes, shame but also of a terrible, guilty joy as he slowly ascertained how I had sihat tell-tale stain had resolved itself into a mark the shape and brilliance of the heart on a playing card. He disehe key from the ring and looked at it for a while, solitary, brooding. "It is the key that leads to the kingdom of the unimaginable," he said. His voice was low and had in it the timbre of certai cathedral ans that seem, when they are played, to be versing with God. I could not restrain a sob. "Oh, my love, my little love whht me a white gift of music," he said, almost as if grieving. "My little love, youll never know how much I hate daylight!" Then he sharply ordered: "Kneel!" I k before him and he pressed the key lightly to my forehead, held it there for a moment. I felt a faint tingling of the skin and, when I involuntarily gla myself in the mirror, I saw the heart-shaped stain had transferred itself to my forehead, to the space between the eyebrows, like the caste mark of a Brahmin woman. Or the mark of . And now the key gleamed as freshly as if it had just been cut. He clipped it ba the riing that same, heavy sigh as he had done when I said I would marry him. "My virgin of the arpeggios, prepare yourself for martyrdom." "What form shall it take?" I said. "Decapitation," he whispered, almost voluptuously. "Go and bathe yourself; put on that white dress you wore to hear Tristan and the necklace that prefigures your end. And I shall take myself off to the armoury, my dear, to sharpen my great-grandfathers ceremonial sword." "The servants?" "We shall have absolute privacy for our last rites; I have already dismissed them. If you look out of the window you see them going to the mainland." It was now the full, pale light of m; the weather was grey, iermihe sea had an oily, sinister look, a gloomy day on which to die. Along the causeway I could see trouping every maid and scullion, every potboy and pan-scourer, valet, laundress and vassal who worked in the great house, most on foot, a few on bicycles. The faceless housekeeper trudged along with a great basket in which, I guessed, shed stowed as much as she could ransack from the larder. The Marquis must have given the chauffeur leave to borrow the motor for the day, for it went last of all, at a stately pace, as though the procession were a ce and the car already bore my coffin to the mainland for burial. But I knew no good Bretoh would cover me, like a last, faithful lover; I had another fate. "I have given them all a days holiday, to celebrate our wedding," he said. And smiled. However hard I stared at the reg pany, I could see no sign of Jean-Yves, our latest servant hired but the preg m. "Go, now. Bathe yourself; dress yourself. The lustratory ritual and the ceremonial robing; after that, the sacrifice. Wait in the musi until I telephone for you. No, my dear!" And he smiled, as I started, recalling the line was dead. "One may call ihe castle just as much as one pleases; but outside -- never." I scrubbed my forehead with the nail brush as I had scrubbed the key but this red mark would not go away, either, no matter what I did, and I knew I would wear it until I died, though that would not be long. Then I went to my dressing room and put on the white muslin shift, e of a victim of an auto-da-fe, he had bought me to listen to the Liebestod in. Twelve young women bed out twelve listless sheaves of brown hair in the mirrors; soon, there would be he mass of lilies that surrounded me exhaled, now, the odour of their withering. They looked like the trumpets of the angels of death. On the dressing table, coiled like a snake about to strike, lay the ruby choker. Already almost lifeless, cold at heart, I desded the spiral staircase to the musi but there I found I had not been abandoned. "I be of some fort to you," the boy said. "Though not of much use." We pushed the piano stool in front of the open window so that, for as long as I could, I would be able to smell the a, reg smell of the sea that, in time, will se everything, scour the old bones white, wash away all the stains. The last little chambermaid had trotted along the causeway long ago and now the tide, fated as I, came tumbling in, the crisp wavelets splashing on the old stones. "You do not deserve this," he said. "Who say what I deserve or no?" I said. "Ive dohing; but that may be suffit reason for ning me." "You disobeyed him," he said. "That is suffit reason for him to punish you." "I only did what he knew I would." "Like Eve," he said. The teleph a shrill imperative. Let it ring. But my lover lifted me up a me on my feet; I must a. The receiver felt heavy as earth. "The courtyard. Immediately." My lover kissed me, he took my hand. He would e with me if I would lead him. Ce. When I thought of ce, I thought of my mother. Then I saw a muscle in my lovers face quiver. "Hoofbeats!" he said. I cast one last, desperate glance from the window and, like a miracle, I saw a horse and rider galloping at a vertiginous speed along the causeway, though the waves crashed, now, high as the horses fetlocks. A rider, her black skirts tucked up around her waist so she could ride hard and fast, a crazy, magnifit horsewoman in eeds. As the teleph again. "Am I to wait all m?" Every moment, my mother drew nearer. "She will be too late,"Jean-Yves said a he could not restrain a note of hope that, though it must be so, yet it might not be so. The third, intra call. "Shall I e up to heaven to fetch you down, Saint Cecilia? You wicked woman, do you wish me to pound my crimes by desecrating the marriage bed?" So I must go to the courtyard where my husband waited in his London-tailored trousers and the shirt from Turnbull and Asser, beside the mounting block, with, in his hand, the sword which his great-grandfather had preseo the little corporal, in token of surreo the Republic, before he shot himself. The heavy sword, uhed, grey as that November m, sharp as childbirth, mortal. When my husband saw my panion, he observed: "Let the blihe blind, eh? But does even a youth as besotted as you think she was truly blind to her own desires wheook my ring? Give it me back, whore." The fires in the opal had all died down. I gladly slipped it from my finger and, even in that dolorous place, my heart was lighter for the lack of it. My husband took it lovingly and lodged it oip of his finger; it would go no further. "It will serve me for a dozen more fiancees," he said. "To the block, woman. No -- leave the boy; I shall deal with him later, utilising a less exalted instrument than the oh which I do my wife the honour of her immolation, for do not fear that ih you will be divided." Slowly, slowly, one foot before the other, I crossed the cobbles. The longer I dawdled over my execution, the more time it gave the avenging ao desd. . . "Dont lirl! Do you think I shall lose appetite for the meal if you are so long about serving it? No; I shall grow hungrier, more ravenous with eaent, more cruel. . . Run to me, run! I have a place prepared for your exquisite corpse in my display of flesh!" He raised the sword and cut bright segments from the air with it, but still I lingered although my hopes, so retly raised, now began to flag. If she is not here by now, her horse must have stumbled on the causeway, have plunged into the sea. . . Ohing only made me glad; that my lover would not see me die. My husband laid my branded forehead oone and, as he had done once before, twisted my hair into a rope and drew it away from my neck. "Such a pretty neck," he said with what seemd to be a genuine, retrospective tenderness. "A neck like the stem of a young plant." I felt the silken bristle of his beard and the wet touch of his lips as he kissed my nape. And, once again, of my apparel I must retain only my gems; the sharp blade ripped my dress in two and it fell from me... A little green moss, growing in the crevices of the mounting block, would be the last thing I should see in all the world. The whizz of that heavy sword. And -- a great battering and pounding at the gate, the jangling of the bell, the frenzied neighing of a horse! The unholy silence of the place shattered in an instant. The blade did not desd, the necklace did not sever, my head did not roll. For, for an instant, the beast wavered in his stroke, a suffit split sed of astonished indecision to let me spring upright and dart to the assistany lover as he struggled sightlessly with the great bolts that kept her out. The Marquis stood transfixed, utterly dazed, at a loss. It must have been as if he had been watg his beloved Tristan for the twelfth, the thirteenth time and Tristan stirred, the from his bier in the last act, announced in a jaunty aria interposed from Verdi that bygones were bygones, g over spilt milk did nobody any good and, as for himself, he proposed to live happily ever after. The puppet master, open-mouthed, wide-eyed, impotent at the last, saw his dolls break free of their strings, abandouals he had ordained for them siime began and start to live for themselves; the king, aghast, withe revolt of his pawns. You never saw such a wild thing as my mother, her hat seized by the winds and blown out to sea so that her hair was her white mane, her black lisle legs exposed to the thigh, her skirts tucked round her waist, one hand on the reins of the rearing horse while the other clasped my fathers service revolver and, behihe breakers of the savage, indifferent sea, like the witnesses of a furious justice. And my husband stood stock-still, as if she had been Medusa, the sword still raised over his head as in those clockwork tableaux of Bluebeard that you see in glass cases at fairs. And then it was as though a curious child pushed his time into the slot a all in motion. The heavy, bearded figure roared out aloud, braying with fury, and wielding the honourable sword as if it were a matter of death lory, charged us, all three. On her eighteenth birthday, my mother had disposed of a maing tiger that had ravaged the villages in the hills north of Hanoi. Now, without a moments hesitation, she raised my fathers gun, took aim and put a single, irreproachable bullet through my husbands head. We lead a quiet life, the three of us. I ied, of course, enormous wealth but we have given most of it away to various charities. The castle is now a school for the blind, though I pray that the children who live there are not haunted by any sad ghosts looking for, g for, the husband who will never return to the bloody chamber, the tents of which are buried or burhe door sealed. I felt I had the right to retain suffit funds to start a little music school here, oskirts of Paris, and we do well enough. Sometimes we even afford to go to the Opera, though o sit in a box, of course We know we are the sourany whisperings and much gossip but the three of us know the truth of it and mere chatter ever harm us. I only bless the -- what shall I call it? -- the maternal telepathy that sent my mother running headlong from the telephoo the station after I had called her, that night. I never heard you cry before, she said, by way of explanation. Not when you were happy. And who ever cried because of gold bath taps? The night train, the one I had taken; she lay in her berth, sleepless as I had been. When she could not find a taxi at the lonely halt, she borrowed old Dobbin from a bemused farmer, for some internal urgency told her that she must reach me before the ining tide sealed me away from her for ever. My poor old nurse, left sdalised at home -- what? interrupt milord on his honeymoon? -- she died soon after. She had taken so much secret pleasure in the fact that her little girl had bee a marquise and now here I was, scarcely a penny the richer, widowed at seventeen in the most dubious circumstances and busily engaged iing up house with a piano-tuner. Poor thing, she passed away in a sorry state of disillusion! But I do believe my mother loves him as much as I do. No paint nor powder, no matter how thick or white, mask that red mark on my forehead; I am glad he ot see it -- not for fear of his revulsion, since I know he sees me clearly with his heart -- but, because it spares my shame. The Courtship of Mr Lyon-1 Outside her kit window, the hedgerow glistened as if the snow possessed a light of its own; when the sky darkeowards evening, ahly, reflected pallor remained behind upon the winters landscape, while still the soft flakes floated down. This lovely girl, whose skin possesses that same, inner light so you would have thought she, too, was made all of snow, pauses in her chores in the mean kit to look out at the try road. Nothing has passed that way all day; the road is white and unmarked as a spilled bolt of bridal satin. Father said he would be home before nightfall. The snht down all the telephone wires; he couldnt have called, even with the best of news. The roads are bad. I hope hell be safe. But the old car stuck fast in a rut, wouldnt budge an inch; the engine whirred, coughed and died and he was far from home. Ruined, ohen ruined again, as he had learnt from his lawyers that very m; at the clusion of the lengthy, slow attempt to restore his fortunes, he had turned out his pockets to find the cash for petrol to take him home. And not even enough money left over to buy his Beauty, his girl-child, his pet, the one white rose she said she wahe only gift she wanted, no matter how the case went, how rich he might once again be. She had asked for so little and he had not been able to give it to her. He cursed the useless car, the last straw that broke his spirit; then, nothing for it but to fasten his old sheepskin coat around him, abandon the heap of metal a off down the snow-filled lao look for help. Behind wrought-iron gates, a short, snowy drive performed a retit flourish before a miniature, perfect Palladian house that seemed to hide itself shyly behind snow-laden skirts of an antique cypress. It was almost night; that house, with its sweet, retiring, melancholy grace, would have seemed deserted but for a light that flickered in an upstairs window, so vague it might have been the refle of a star, if any stars could have peed the snow that whirled yet more thickly. Chilled through, he pressed the latch of the gate and saw, with a pang, how, ohered ghost of a tangle of thorns, there g, still, the faded rag of a white rose. The gate ged loudly shut behind him; too loudly. For an instant, that reverberating g seemed final, emphatiinous as if the gate, now closed, barred all within it from the world outside the walled, wintry garden. And, from a distahough from what distance he could not tell, he heard the most singular sound in the world: a great r, as of a beast of prey. In too mueed to allow himself to be intimidated, he squared up to the mahogany door. This door was equipped with a knocker in the shape of a lions head, with a ring through the nose; as he raised his hand towards it, it.. came to him this lions head was not, as he had thought at first, made of brass, but, instead, of gold. Before, however, he could announce his presehe door swung silently inward on well-oiled hinges and he saw a white hall where the dles of a great delier cast their benign light upon so many, many flowers i, free-standing jars of crystal that it seemed the whole of spring drew him into its warmth with a profound intake of perfumed breath. Yet there was no living person in the hall. The door behind him closed as silently as it had opened, yet, this time, he felt no fear although he knew by the pervasive atmosphere of a suspension of reality that he had entered a place of privilege where all the laws of the world he knew need not necessarily apply, for the very rich are often very etrid the house lainly that of an exceedingly wealthy man. As it was, when nobody came to help him with his coat, he took it off himself. At that, the crystals of the delier tinkled a little, as if emitting a pleased chuckle, and the door of a cloakroom opened of its own accord. There were, however, no clothes at all in this cloakroom, not eveatutory try-garden matosh to greet his own squirearchal sheepskin, but, when he emerged again into the hall, he found a greeting waiting for him at last -- there was, of all things, a liver and white King Charles spaniel crouched with head intelligently cocked, on the kelim runner. It gave him further, f proof of his unseen hosts wealth and etricity to see the dog wore, in place of a collar, a diamond necklace. The dog sprang to its feet in wele and busily shepherded him (how amusing!) to a snug little leather-paudy on the first floor, where a low table was drawn up to a r log fire. Oable, a silver tray; round the neck of the whisky deter, a silver tag with the legend: Drink me, while the cover of the silver dish was engraved with the exhortatio me, in a flowing hand. This dish tained sandwiches of thick-cut roast beef, still bloody. He drank the oh soda and ate the other with some excellent mustard thoughtfully provided in a stoneot, and, when the spaniel saw to it he had served himself, she trotted off about her own business. All that remaio make Beautys father entirely fortable was to find, in a curtained recess, not only a telepho the card of a garage that advertised a twenty-four-hour rescue service; a couple of calls later and he had firmed, thank God that there was no serious trouble, only the cars age and the cold weather. . . could he pick it up from the village in an hour? And dires to the village, but half a mile away, were supplied, in a one of deference, as soon as he described the house from where he was calling. And he was discerted but, in his impeious circumstances, relieved to hear the bill would go on his hospitable if absent hosts at; no question, assured the meic. It was the masters . Time for another ..whisky as he tried, unsuccessfully, to call Beauty and tell her he would be late; but the lines were still down, although, miraculously, the storm had cleared as the moon rose and now a glaween the velvet curtains revealed a landscape as of ivory with an inlay of silver. Then the spaniel appeared again, with his hat in her careful mouth, prettily waggiail, as if to tell him it was time to be gohat this magical hospitality was over. As the door swung to behind him, he saw the lions eyes were made of agate. Great wreaths of snow now precariously curded the rose trees and, when he brushed against a stem on his way to the gate, a chill armful softly thudded to the ground to reveal, as if miraculously preserved beh it, one last, single, perfect rose that might have been the last rose left living in all the white winter, and of so intense and delicate a fragra seemed t like a dulcimer on the frozen air. How could his host, so mysterious, so kind, dey her present? Not now distant but close to hand, close as the mahogany front door, rose a mighty, furious r; the garden seemed to hold its breath in apprehension. But still, because he loved his daughter, Beautys father stole the rose. At that, every window of the house blazed with furious light and a fugal baying, as if a pride of lions, introduced his host. There is always a dignity about great bulk, an assertiveness, a quality of being more there than most of us are. The being who now fronted Beautys father seemed to him, in his fusion, vaster than the house he owned, ponderous yet swift, and the moonlight glittered on his great, mazy head of hair, on the eyes green as agate, on the golden hairs of the great paws that grasped his shoulders so that their claws pierced the sheepskin as he shook him like an angry child shakes a doll. This leonine apparition shook Beautys father until his teeth rattled and then dropped him sprawling on his knees while the spaniel, darting from the open door, danced round them, yapping distractedly, like a lady at whose dinner party blows have been exged. "My good fellow --" stammered Beautys father; but the only response was a renewed roar. "Good fellow? I am no good fellow! I am the Beast, and you must call me Beast, while I call you, Thief!" "Five me for robbing yarde!" Head of a lion; mane and mighty paws of a lion; he reared on his hind legs like an angry lio wore a smoking jacket of dull red brocade and was the owner of that lovely house and the low hills that cupped it. "It was for my daughter," said Beautys father. "All she wanted, in the whole world, was one white, perfect rose." The Beast rudely snatched the photograph her father drew from his wallet and ied it, first brusquely, then with a strange kind of wonder, almost the dawning of surmise. The camera had captured a certain look she had, sometimes, of absolute sweetness and absolute gravity, as if her eyes might pierce appearances and see your soul. When he hahe picture back, the Beast took good care not to scratch the surface with his claws. "Take her her rose, then, but brio dinner," he growled; and what else was there to be done? Although her father had told her of the nature of the one who waited for her, she could not trol an instinctual shudder of fear when she saw him, for a lion is a lion and a man is a man and, though lions are more beautiful by far than we are, yet they belong to a different order of beauty and, besides, they have no respect for us: why should they? Yet wild things have a far more rational fear of us than is ours of them, and some kind of sadness in his agate eyes, that looked almost blind, as if sick of sight, moved her heart. He sat, impassive as a figurehead, at the top of the table; the dining room was Queen Aapestried, a gem. Apart from an aromatic soup kept hot over a spirit lamp, the food, though exquisite, was cold -- a cold bird, a cold soufflé, cheese. He asked her father to serve them from a buffet and, himself, ate nothing. He grudgingly admitted what she had already guessed, that he disliked the presence of servants because, she thought, a stant human presence would remind him too bitterly of his otherness, but the spaniel sat at his feet throughout the meal, jumping up from time to time to see that everything was in order. How strange he was. She found his bewildering difference from herself almost intolerable; its presence choked her. There seemed a heavy, soundless pressure upon her in his house, as if it lay under water, and when she saw the great paws lying on the arm of his chair, she thought: they are the death of any tender herbivore. And such a one she felt herself to be, Miss Lamb, spotless, sacrificial. Yet she stayed, and smiled, because her father wanted her to do so; and when the Beast told her how he would aid her fathers appeal against the judgement, she smiled with both her mouth and her eyes. But when, as they sipped their brandy, the Beast, in the diffuse, rumbling purr with which he versed, suggested, with a hint of shyness, of fear of refusal, that she should stay here, with him, in fort, while her father returo London to take up the legal cudgels again, she forced a smile. For she knew with a pang of dread, as soon as he spoke, that it would be so and her visit to the Beast must be, on some magically reciprocal scale, the price of her fathers good fortune. Do not think she had no will of her own; only, she ossessed by a sense of obligation to an unusual degree and, besides, she would gladly have goo the ends of the earth for her father, whom she loved dearly. Her bedroom tained a marvellous glass bed; she had a bathroom, with towels thick as fleed vials of suave us; and a little parlour of her own, the walls of which were covered with an antique paper of birds of paradise and amen, where there were precious books and pictures and the flrown by invisible gardeners in the Beasts hothouses. m, her father kissed her and drove away with a renewed hope about him that made her glad, but, all the same, she longed for the shabby home of their poverty. The unaced luxury about her she found poignant, because it gave no pleasure to its possessor and himself she did not see all day as if, curious reversal, she frightened him, although the spaniel came and sat with her, to keep her pany. Today, the spaniel wore a choker of turquoises. The Courtship of Mr Lyon-2 Who prepared her meals? Loneliness of the Beast; all the time she stayed there, she saw no evidence of another human prese the trays of food had arrived on a dumb waiter ihe mahogany cupboard in her parlour. Dinner was eggs Be and grilled veal; she ate it as she browsed in a book she had found in the rosewood revolving bookcase, a colle of courtly and elegant French fairy tales about white cats who were transformed princesses and fairies who were birds. Then she pulled a sprig of muscat grapes from a fat bunch for her dessert and found herself yawning; she discovered she was bored. At that, the spaook hold of her skirt with its velvet mouth and gave a firm but geug. She allowed the dog to trot before her to the study in which her father had beeertained and there, to her well-disguised dismay, she found her host, seated beside the fire with a tray of coffee at his elbow from which she must pour. The voice that seemed to issue from a cave full of echoes, his dark, soft rumbling growl; after her day of pastel-coloured idleness, how could she verse with the possessor of a voice that seemed an instrument created to inspire the terror that the chords of great ans bring? Fasated, almost awed, she watched the firelight play on the gold fringes of his mane; he was irradiated, as if with a kind of halo, and she thought of the first great beast of the Apocalypse, the winged lion with his paw upon the Gospel, Saint Mark. Small talk turo dust in her mouth; small talk had never, at the best of times, beeys forte, and she had little practice at it. But he, hesitantly, as if he himself were in awe of a young girl who looked as if she had been carved out of a single pearl, asked after her fathers law case; and her dead mother; and how they, who had been so rich, had e to be so poor. He forced himself to master his shyness, which was that of a wild creature, and so, she trived to master her own -- to such effect that soon she was chattering away to him as if she had known him all her life. Whetle cupid in the gilt clo the mantelpiece struck its miniature tambourine, she was astoo discover it did so twelve times. "So late! You will want to sleep," he said. At that, they both fell silent, as if these strange panions were suddenly overe with embarrassment to fi9９ｌｉｂ?nd themselves together, alone, in that room in the depths of winters night. As she was about to rise, he flung himself at her feet and buried his head in her lap. She stayed stock-still, transfixed; she felt his hot breath on her fingers, the stiff bristles of his muzzle grazing her skin, the rough lapping of his tongue and then, with a flood of passion, uood: all he is doing is kissing my hands. He drew back his head and gazed at her with his green, inscrutable eyes, in which she saw her face repeated twice, as small as if it were in bud. Then, without another word, he sprang from the room and she saw, with an indescribable shock, he went on all fours. day, all day, the hills on which the snow still settled echoed with the Beasts rumbling roar: has master gone a-hunting? Beauty asked the spaniel. But the spaniel growled, almost bad-temperedly, as if to say, that she would not have answered, even if she could have. Beauty would pass the day in her suite reading or, perhaps, doing a little embroidery; a box of coloured silks and a frame had been provided for her. Or, well ed up, she wandered in the walled garden, among the leafless roses, with the spa her heels, and did a little raking and rearranging. An idle, restful time; a holiday. The entment of that bright, sad pretty plavel９9liｂ?oped her and she found that, against all her expectations, she was happy there. She no longer felt the slightest apprehension at her nightly interviews with the Beast. All the natural laws of the world were held in suspension, here, where an army of invisibles tenderly waited on her, and she would talk with the lion, uhe patient chaperonage of the brown-eyed dog, oure of the moon and its borrowed light, about the stars and the substances of which they were made, about the variable transformations of the weather. Yet still his strangeness made her shiver; and when he helplessly fell before her to kiss her hand, as he did every night when they parted, she would retreat nervously into her skin, fling at his touch. The telephoned shrilled; for her. Her father. Suews! The Beast sunk his great head on to his paws. You will e bae? It will be lonely here, without you. She was moved almost to tears that he should care for her so. It was in her heart to drop a kiss upon his shaggy ma, though she stretched out her hand towards him, she could n herself to touch him of her own free will, he was so different from herself. But, yes, she said; I will e back. Soon, before the winter is over. Theaxi came and took her away. You are the mercy of the elements in London, where the huddled warmth of humanity melts the snow before it has time to settle; and her father was as good as rich again, since his hirsute friends lawyers had the business so well in hand that his credit brought them nothing but the best. A resple hotel; the opera, theatres; a whole new wardrobe for his darling, so she could step out on his arm to parties, to receptions, to restaurants, and life was as she had never known it, for her father had ruined himself before her birth killed her mother. Although the Beast was the source of this new-found prosperity and they talked of him often, now that they were so far away from the timeless spell of his house it seemed to possess the radiant and finite quality of dream and the Beast himse>lf, so monstrous, so benign, some kind of spirit of good fortune who had smiled on them ahem go. She sent him flowers, white roses iurn for the ones he had given her; and when she left the florist, she experienced a sudden sense of perfect freedom, as if she had just escaped from an unknown danger, had been grazed by the possibility of some ge but, finally, left intact. Yet, with this exhilaration, a desolatiiness. But her father was waiting for her at the hotel; they had planned a delicious expedition to buy her furs and she was as eager for the treat as any girl might be. Sihe flowers in the shop were the same all the year round, nothing in the window could tell her that winter had almost gone. Returning late from supper after the theatre, she took off her earrings in front of the mirror; Beauty. She smiled at herself with satisfa. She was learning, at the end of her adolesce, how to be a spoiled child and that pearly skin of hers lumping out, a little, with high living and pliments. A certain inwardness was beginning to transform the lines around her mouth, those signatures of the personality, and her sweetness and her gravity could sometimes turn a mite petulant when things went not quite as she wanted them to go. You could not have said that her freshness was fading but she smiled at herself in mirrors a little too often, these days, and the face that smiled back was not quite the one she had seen tained in the Beasts agate eyes. Her face was acquiring, instead of beauty, a lacquer of the invincible prettihat characterises certain pampered, exquisite, expes. The soft wind of spring breathed in from the nearby park through the open window; she did not know why it made her want to cry. There was a sudden urgent, scrabbling sound, as of claws, at her door. Her trance before the mirror broke; all at once, she remembered everything perfectly. Spring was here and she had broken her promise. Now the Beast himself had e in pursuit of her! First, she was frightened of his ahen, mysteriously joyful, she ran to open the door. But it was his liver and white spotted spaniel who hurled herself into the girls arms in a flurry of little barks and gruff murmurings, of whimpering and relief. Yet where was the well-brushed, jewelled dog who had sat beside her embroidery frame in the parlour with birds of paradise nodding on the walls? This ones fringed ears were matted with mud, her coat was dusty and snarled, she was thin as a dog that has walked a long way and, if she had not been a dog, she would have been in tears. After that first, rapturous greeting, she did not wait for Beauty to order her food and water; she seized the chiffon hem of her evening dress, whimpered and tugged. Threw back her head, howled, then tugged and whimpered again. There was a slow, late train that would take her to the station where she had left for London three months ago. Beauty scribbled a note for her father, threw a coat round her shoulders. Quickly, quickly, urged the spaniel soundlessly; ay khe Beast was dying. Ihick dark before dawn, the station master roused a sleepy driver for her. Fast as you . It seemed December still possessed his garden. The ground was hard as iron, the skirts of the dark cypress moved on the chill wind with a mournful rustle and there were no green shoots on the roses as if, this year, they would not bloom. And not one light in any of the windows, only, iopmost attic, the fai smear of radian a pahe thin ghost of a light on the verge of extin. The spaniel had slept a little, in her arms, for the poor thing was exhausted. But now her grieving agitation fed Beautys urgend, as the girl pushed open the front door, she saw, with a thrust of sce, how the golden door knocker was thickly muffled in black crepe. The door did not open silently, as before, but with a doleful groaning of the hinges and, this time, on to perfect darkness. Beauty clicked her gold cigarette lighter; the tapers in the delier had drowned in their own wax and the prisms were wreathed with dreadful arabesques of cobwebs. The flowers in the glass jars were dead, as if nobody had had the heart to replace them after she was gone. Dust, everywhere; and it was cold. There was an air of exhaustion, of despair in the house and, worse, a kind of physical disillusion, as if its glamour had been sustained by a cheap juring trid now the jurer, having failed to pull the crowds, had departed to try his luck elsewhere. Beauty found a dle to light her way and followed the faithful spaniel up the staircase, past the study, past her suite, through a house eg with desertion up a little back staircase dedicated to mid spiders, stumbling, ripping the hem of her dress in her haste. What a modest bedroom! An attic, with a sloping roof, they might have given the chambermaid if the Beast had employed staff. A night light on the mantelpieo curtains at the windows, no carpet on the floor and a narrow, iroead on which he lay, sadly diminished, his bulk scarcely disturbing the faded patchwork quilt, his mane a greyish rats and his eyes closed. Oick-backed chair where his clothes had been thrown, the roses she had sent him were thrust into the jug from the washstand but they were all dead. The spaniel jumped up on the bed and burrowed her way uhe sty covers, softly keening. "Oh, Beast," said Beauty. "I have e home." His eyelids flickered. How was it she had never noticed before that his agate eyes were equipped with lids, like those of a man? Was it because she had only looked at her own face, reflected there? "Im dying, Beauty," he said in a cracked whisper of his former purr. "Since you left me, I have been sick. I could not go hunting, I found I had not the stomach to kill the gentle beasts, I could . I am sid I must die; but I shall die happy because you have e to say goodbye to me." She flung herself upon him, so that the iroead groaned, and covered his poor paws with her kisses. "Dont die, Beast! If youll have me, Ill never leave you." When her lips touched the meat-hook claws, they drew bato their pads and she saw how he had always kept his fists ched, but now, painfully, tentatively, at last began to stretch his fingers. Her tears fell on his face like snow and, uheir soft transformation, the bones showed through the pelt, the flesh through the wide, tawny brow. And then it was no longer a lion in her arms but a man, a man with an u mane of hair and, how strange, a broken nose, such as the noses of retired boxers, that gave him a distant, heroic resemblao the handsomest of all the beasts. "Do you know," said Mr Lyon, "I think I might be able to manage a little breakfast today, Beauty, if you would eat something with me." Mr and Mrs Lyon walk in the garden; the old spaniel drowses on the grass, in a drift of falleals. The Tigers Bride-1 My father lost me to The Beast at cards. Theres a special madness strikes travellers from the North when they reach the lovely land where the lemon trees grow. We e from tries of cold weather; at home, we are at war with nature but here, ah! you think youve e to the blessed plot where the lion lies down with the lamb. Everything flowers; no harsh wind stirs the voluptuous air. The sun spills fruit for you. And the deathly, sensual lethargy of the sweet South is the starved brain; it gasps: "Luxury! more luxury!" But then the snow es, you ot escape it, it followed us from Russia as if it ran behind our carriage, and in this dark, bitter city has caught up with us at last, flog against the windowpao mock my fathers expectations of perpetual pleasure as the veins in his forehead stand out and throb, his hands shake as he deals the Devils picture books. The dles dropped hot, acrid gouts of wax on my bare shoulders. I watched with the furious icism peculiar to women whom circumstances force mutely to witness folly, while my father, fired in his desperation by more a more draughts of the firewater they call "grappa", rids himself of the last scraps of my iance. When we left Russia, we owned black earth, blue forest with bear and wild boar, serfs, fields, farmyards, my beloved horses, white nights of cool summer, the fireworks of the northern lights. What a burden all those possessions must have been to him, because he laughs as if with glee as he beggars himself; he is in such a passion to donate all to The Beast. Everyone who es to this city must play a.９9lib. hand with the grande seigneur; few e. They did not warn us at Milan, or, if they did, we did not uand them -- my limping Italian, the bewildering dialect of the region. Indeed, I myself spoke up in favour of this remote, provincial place, out of fashion two hundred years, because, oh irony, it boasted no o. I did not know that the price of a stay in its Decembral solitude was a game with Milord. The hour was late. The chill damp of this place creeps into the stones, into your bones, into the spongy pith of the lungs; it insiself with a shiver into our parlour, where Milord came to play in the privacy essential to him. Who could refuse the invitation his valet brought to our lodging? Not my profligate father, certainly; the mirror above the table gave me back his frenzy, my impassivity, the withering dles, the emptying bottles, the coloured tide of the cards as they rose and fell, the still mask that cealed all the features of The Beast but for the yellow eyes that strayed, now and then, from his unfurled hand towards myself. "La Bestia!" said our landlady, gingerly fingering an envelope with his huge crest of a tiger rampant on it, something of fear, something of wonder in her face. And I could not ask her why they called the master of the place, La Bestia -- was it to do with the heraldic signature -- because her tongue was so thied by the phlegmy, bronchitic speech of the region I scarcely mao make out a thing she said except, when she saw me: "Che bella!" Since I could toddle, always the pretty one, with my glossy, nut-brown curls, my rosy cheeks. And born on Christmas Day -- her "Christmas rose," my English nurse called me. The peasants said: "The living image of her mother," crossing themselves out of respect for the dead. My mother did not blossom long; bartered for her dowry to such a feckless sprig of the Russian nobility that she soon died of his gaming, his wh, his agonisiances. And The Beast gave me the rose from his own impeccable if outmoded buttonhole when he arrived, the valet brushing the snow off his black cloak. This white rose, unnatural, out of season, that now my nervous fingers ripped, petal by petal, apart as my father magnifitly cluded the career he had made of catastrophe. This is a melancholy, introspective region; a sunless, featureless landscape, the sullen river sweating fog, the shorn, hunkering willows. And a cruel city; the sombre piazza, a plaiquely suited to public executions, uhe beetling shadow of that malign barn of a church. They used to hang ned men in cages from the city walls; unkindness es naturally to them, their eyes are set so close together, they have thin lips. Poor food, pasta soaked in oil, boiled beef with sauce of bitter herbs. A funereal hush about the place, the inhabitants huddled up against the cold so you hardly see their faces. And they lie to you and cheat you, innkeepers, en, everybody. God, how they fleeced us. The treacherous South, where you think there is no winter but fet you take it with you. My senses were increasingly troubled by the fuddling perfume of Milord, far too potent a reek of purplish civet at such close quarters in so small a room. He must bathe himself i, soak his shirts and underlinen in it; what he smell of, that needs so much camouflage? I never saw a man so big look so two-dimensional, in spite of the quaint elegance of The Beast, in the old-fashioailcoat that might, from its looks, have been bought in those distant years before he imposed seclusion on himself; he does not feel he need keep up with the times. There is a crude clumsiness about his outlihat are on the ungainly, giant side; and he has an odd air of self-imposed restraint, as if fighting a battle with himself to remain upright when he would far rather drop down on all fours. He throws our human aspirations to the godlike sadly awry, poor fellow; only from a distance would you think The Beast not much different from any other man, although he wears a mask with a mans face painted most beautifully on it. Oh, yes, a beautiful face; but oh too mu?al symmetry of feature to be entirely human: one profile of his mask is the mirror image of the other, too perfect, uny. He wears a wig, too, false hair tied at the h a bow, a wig of the kind you see in old-fashioned portraits. A chaste silk stock stuck with a pearl hides his throat. And gloves of blond kid that are yet so huge and clumsy they do not seem to cover hands. He is a ival figure made of papier-mache and crepe hair; a he has the Devils knack at cards. His masked voice echoes as from a great distance as he stoops over his hand and he has such a growling impediment in his speech that only his valet, who uands him, interpret for him, as if his master were the clumsy doll ahe ventriloquist. The wick slumped in the eroded wax, the dles guttered. By the time my rose had lost all its petals, my father, too, was left with nothing. "Except the girl." Gambling is a siess. My father said he loved me yet he staked his daughter on a hand of cards. He fahem out; in the mirror, I saw wild hope light up his eyes. His collar was unfastened, his rumpled hair stood up on end, he had the anguish of a man in the last stages of debauchery. The draughts came out of the old walls and bit me, I was colder than Id ever been in Russia, when nights are coldest there. A queen, a king, an ace. I saw them in the mirror. Oh, I know he thought he could not lose me; besides, back with me would e all he had lost, the unravelled fortunes of our family at one blow restored. And would he not win, as well, The Beasts hereditary palazzo outside the city; his immense revenues; his lands around the river; his rents, his treasure chest, his Mantegnas, his Giulio Romanos, his Cellini saltcellars, his titles. . . the very city itself. You must not think my father valued me at less than a kings ransom; but at no more than a kings ransom. It was cold as hell in the parlour. And it seemed to me, child of the severe North, that it was not my flesh but, truly, my fathers soul that was in peril. My father, of course, believed in miracles; what gambler does not? In pursuit of just such a miracle as this, had we not travelled from the land of bears and shooting stars? So we teetered on the brink. The Beast bayed; laid down all three remaining aces. The indifferent servants now glided smoothly forward as on wheels to douse the dles one by oo look at them you would think that nothing of any moment had occurred. They yawned a little resentfully; it was almost m. We had kept them out of bed. The Beasts man brought his cloak. My father sat amongst these preparations for departure, staring on at the betrayal of his cards upoable. The Beasts man informed me crisply that he, the valet, would call for me and my bags tomorrow, at ten, and duct me forthwith to The Beasts palazzo. Capisco? So shocked was I that I scarcely did capisco; he repeated my orders patiently, he was a strahin, quick little man who walked with an irregular jolting rhythm upon splayed feet in curious, wedge-shaped shoes. Where my father had been red as fire, now he was white as the snow that caked the windowpane. His eyes swam; soon he would cry. " Like the base Indian, " he said; he loved rhet.99ｌib.oric. " One whose hand,/Like the base Indian, threearl away/Richer than all his tribe. . . I have lost my pearl, my pearl beyond price." At that, The Beast made a sudden, dreadful noise, halfway between a growl and a roar; the dles flared. The quick valet, the prim hypocrite, interpreted unblinkingly: "My master says: If you are so careless of your treasures, you should expect them to be taken from you." He gave us the bow and smile his master could not offer us and they departed. I watched the snow until, just before dawn, it stopped falling; a hard frost settled, m there was a light like iron. The Beasts carriage, of a if antique design, was black as a hearse and it was drawn by a dashing black gelding who blew smoke from his nostrils and stamped upon the packed snow with enough sprightly appearance of life to give me some hope that not all the world was locked in ice, as I was. I had always held a little tullivers opinion, that horses are better than we are, and, that day, I would have been glad to depart with him to the kingdom of horses, if Id been given the ce. The valet sat up on the box in a natty blad gold livery, clasping, of all things, a bunch of his masters damned white roses as if a gift of flowers would recile a woman to any humiliation. He sprang down with preternatural agility to place them ceremoniously in my relut hand. My tear-beslobbered father wants a rose to show that I five him. When I break off a stem, I prick my finger and so he gets his rose all smeared with blood. The valet crouched at my feet to tuck the rugs about me with a strange kind of unflattering obsequiousness yet he fot his station suffitly to scratch busily beh his white periwig with an over-supple index finger as he offered me what my old nurse would have called an "old-fashioned look", ironic, sly, a smidgen of disdain in it. And pity? No pity. His eyes were moist and brown, his face seamed with the i ing of an a baby. He had an irritating habit of chattering to himself under his breath all the time as he packed up his masters winnings. I drew the curtains to ceal the sight of my fathers farewell; my spite was sharp as broken glass. Lost to The Beast! And what, I wondered, might be the exaature of his "beastliness"? My English nurse oold me about a tiger-man she saw in London, when she was a little girl, to scare me into good behaviour, for I was a wild wee thing and she could not tame me into submission with a frown or the bribe of a spoonful of jam. If you dont stop plaguing the nursemaids, my beauty, the tiger-man will e and take you away. Theyd brought him from Sumatra, in the Indies, she said; his hinder parts were all hairy and only from the head downwards did he resemble a man. Ahe Beast goes always masked; it ot be his face that looks like mine. But the tiger-man, in spite of his hairiness, could take a glass of ale in his hand like a good Christian and drink it down. Had she not seen him do so, at the sign of The Gee, by the steps of Upper Moor Fields when she was just as high as me and lisped and toddled, too. Then she would sigh for London, across the North Sea of the lapse of years. But, if this young lady was not a good little girl and did her boiled beetroot, theiger-man would put on his big black travelling cloak lined with fur, just like your daddys, and hire the Erl-Kings galloper of wind and ride through the night straight to the nursery and -- Yes, my beauty! GOBBLE YOU UP! How Id squeal in delighted terror, half believing her, half knowing that she teased me. And there were things I khat I must not tell her. In our lost farmyard, where the giggling nursemaids initiated me into the mysteries of what the bull did to the cows, I heard about the waggoners daughter. Hush, hush, do on to your nursie we said so; the waggoners lass, hare-lipped, squint-eyed, ugly as sin, who would have taken her? Yet, to her shame, her belly swelled amid the cruel mockery of the ostlers and her son was born of a bear, they whispered. Born with a full pelt ah; that proved it. But, when he grew up, he was a good shepherd, although he never married, lived in a hut outside the village and could make the wind blow any way he wao besides being able to tell which eggs would bee cocks, which hens. The w peasants once brought my father a skull with horns four inches long oher side of it and would not go back to the field where their poor plough disturbed it until the priest went with them; for this skull had the jaw-bone of a man, had it not? Old wives tales, nursery fears! I knew well enough the reason for the trepidation I cosily titillated with superstitious marvels of my childhood on the day my childhood ended. For now my own skin was my sole capital in the world and today Id make my first iment. We had left the city far behind us and were now traversing a wide, flat dish of snow where the mutilated stumps of the willows flourished their ciliate heads athwart frozen ditches; mist dimihe horizon, brought down the sky until it seemed no more than a few inches above us. As far as eye could see, not ohing living. How starveling, how bereft the dead season of this spurious Eden in which all the fruit was blighted by cold! And my frail roses, already faded. I opehe carriage door and tossed the defunct bouquet into the rucked, frost-stiff mud of the road. Suddenly a sharp, freezing wind arose aed my face with a dry rice of powdered snow. The mist lifted suffitly to reveal before me an acreage of half-derelict facades of sheer red brick, the vast man-trap, the megalomaniac citadel of his palazzo. It was a world in itself but a dead one, a burned-out pla. I saw The Beast bought solitude, not luxury, with his money. The little black horse trotted smartly through the figured bronze doors that stood open to the weather like those of a barn and the valet handed me out of the carriage on to the scarred tiles of the great hall itself, into the odorous warmth of a stable, sweet with hay, acrid with horse dung. An equine chorus of neighings and soft drummings of hooves broke out beh the tall roof, where the beams were scabbed with last summers swallows s; a dozen gracile muzzles lifted from their mangers and turowards us, ears erect. The Beast had given his horses the use of the dining room. The walls were painted, aptly enough, with a fresco of horses, dogs and men in a wood where fruit and blossom grew on the bough together. The valet tweaked politely at my sleeve. Milord is waiting. Gaping doors and broken windows let the wind in everywhere. We mounted oaircase after another, our feet clopping on the marble. Through archways and open doors, I glimpsed suites of vaulted chambers opening o of another like systems of ese boxes into the infinite plexity of the innards of the place. He and I and the wihe only things stirring; and all the furniture was under dust sheets, the deliers bundled up in cloth, pictures taken from their hooks and propped with their faces to the walls as if their master could not bear to look at them. The palace was dismantled, as if its owner were about to move house or had never properly moved in; The Beast had chosen to live in an uninhabited place. The valet darted me a reassuring glance from his brown, eloquent eyes, yet a glah so much queer superciliousness in it that it did not e, a bounding ahead of me on his bandy legs, softly chattering to himself. I held my head high and followed him; but for all my pride, my heart was heavy. Milord has his eyrie high above the house, a small, stifling, darkened room; he keeps his shutters locked at noon. I was out of breath by the time we reached it auro him the sileh which he greeted me. I will not smile. He ile. In his rarely disturbed privacy, The Beast wears a garment of Ottoman design, a loose, dull purple gown with gold embroidery round the hat falls from his shoulders to ceal his feet. The feet of the chair he sits in are handsomely clawed. He hides his hands in his ample sleeves. The artificial masterpiece of his face appals me. A small fire in a small grate. A rushing wind rattles the shutters. The valet coughed. To him fell the delicate task of transmitting to me his masters wishes. "My master --" A stick fell in the grate. It made a mighty clatter in that dreadful silehe valet started, lost his pla his speech, began again. "My master has but one desire." The thick, rich, wild st with which Milord had soaked himself the previous evening hangs all about us, asds in cursive blue from the smoke hole of a precious ese pot. "He wishes only --" Now, in the fay impassivity, the valet twittered, his ironipone, for the desire of a master, however trivial, may yet sound unbearably i in the mouth of a servant and his role of go-between clearly caused him a good deal of embarrassment. He gulped; he swallowed, at last trived to unleash an unpunctuated flood. "My masters sole desire is to see the pretty young lady unclothed hout her dress and that only for the oime after which she will be returo her father undamaged with bankers orders for the sum which he lost to my master at cards and also a number of fine presents such as furs, jewels and horses --" I remaianding. During this interview, my eyes were level with those ihe mask that now evaded mine as if, to his credit, he was ashamed of his own request even as his mouthpiece made it for him. Agitato, molto agitato, the valet wrung his white-gloved hands. "Desnuda --" I could scarcely believe my ears. I let out a raucous guffaw; no young lady laughs like that! my old nurse used to remonstrate. But I did. And do. At the clamour of my heartless mirth, the valet danced backwards with peturbation, palpitating his fingers as if attempting to wrench them off, expostulating, wordlessly pleading. I felt that I owed it to him to make my reply in as exquisite a Tus as I could master. "You may put me in a windowless room, sir, and I promise you I will pull my skirt up to my waist, ready for you. But there must be a sheet over my face, to hide it; though the sheet must be laid over me so lightly that it will not e. So I shall be covered pletely from the waist upwards, and no lights. There you visit me once, sir, and only the once. After that I must be driven directly to the city and deposited in the public square, in front of the church. If you wish to give me mohen I should be pleased to receive it. But I must stress that you should give me only the same amount of mohat you would give to any other woman in such circumstances. However, if you choose not to give me a present, then that is yht." How pleased I was to see I struck The Beast to the heart! For, after a bakers doze-beats, one siear swelled, glittering, at the er of the masked eye. A tear! A tear, I hoped, of shame. The tear trembled for a moment on an edge of painted bohen tumbled down the painted cheek to fall, with an abrupt tinkle, oiled floor. The valet, tig and clug to himself, hastily ushered me out of the room. A mauve cloud of his masters perfume billowed out into the chill corridor with us and dissipated itself on the spinning winds. The Tigers Bride-2 A cell had been prepared for me, a veritable cell, windowless, airless, lightless, in the viscera of the palace. The valet lit a lamp for me; a narrow bed, a dark cupboard with fruit and flowers carved on it bulked out of the gloom. "I shall twist a of my bed linen and hang myself with it," I said. "Oh, no," said the valet, fixing upon me wide and suddenly melancholy eyes. "Oh, no, you will not. You are a woman of honour." And what was he doing in my bedroom, this jigging caricature of a man? Was he to be my warder until I submitted to The Beasts whim or he to mine? Am I in such reduced circumstahat I may not have a ladys maid? As if in reply to my unspoken demand, the valet clapped his hands. "To assuage your loneliness, madame. . ." A knog and clattering behind the door of the cupboard; the door swings open and out glides a soubrette from aa, with glossy, nut-brown curls, rosy cheeks, blue, rolling eyes; it takes me a moment tnise her, in her little cap, her white stogs, her frilled petticoats. She carries a looking glass in one hand and a powder puffiher and there is a musical box where her heart should be; she tinkles as she rolls towards me oiny wheels. "Nothing human lives here," said the valet. My maid halted, bowed; from a split seam at the side of her bodice protrudes the handle of a key. She is a marvellous mae, the most delicately balanced system of cords and pulleys in the world. "We have dispensed with servants," the valet said. "We surround ourselves instead, for utility and pleasure, with simulacra and find it no less vehan do most gentlemen." This clockwork twin of mine halted before me, her bowels ing out a settei, and offered me the bold ation of her smile. Click, click -- she raises her arm and busily dusts my cheeks with pink, powdered chalk that makes me cough, then thrusts towards me her little mirror. I saw within it not my own face but that of my father, as if I had put on his face when I arrived at The Beasts palace as the discharge of his debt. What, you self-deluding fool, are y still? And drunk, too. He tossed back his grappa and hurled the tumbler away. Seeing my astonished fright, the valet took the mirror away from me, breathed on it, polished it with the ham of his gloved fist, ha bae. Now all I saw was myself, haggard from a sleepless night, pale enough to need my maids supply e. I heard the key turn in the heavy door and the valets footsteps patter dowone passage. Meanwhile, my double tio powder the air, emitting her jangling tu, as it turned out, she was not inexhaustible; soon she more a more languorously, her metal heart slowed in imitation of fatigue, her musical box ran down until the notes separated themselves out of the tune and plopped like single raindrops and, as if sleep had overtaken her, at last she moved no longer. As she succumbed to sleep, I had no option but to do so too. I dropped on the narrow bed as if felled. Time passed but I do not know how much; then the valet woke me with rolls and honey. I gestured the tray away but he set it down firmly beside the lamp and took from it a little shagreen box, which he offered to me. I turned away my head. "Oh, my lady!" Such hurt cracked his high-pitched voice! He dextrously unfastehe gold clasp; on a bed of crimso lay a single diamond earring, perfect as a tear. I she box shut and tossed it into a er. This sudden, sharp movement must have disturbed the meism of the doll; she jerked her arm almost as if to reprimand me, letting out a rippling fart of gavotte. Then she was still again. "Very well," said the valet, put out. And indicated it was time for me to visit my host again. He did not let me wash or y hair. There was so little natural light ierior of the palace that I could not tell whether it was day ht. You would not think the Beast had budged an inch since I last saw him; he sat in his huge chair, with his hands in his sleeves, and the heavy air never moved. I might have slept an hour, a night, or a month, but his sculptured calm, the stifling air remained just as it had been. The inse rose from the pot, still traced the same signature on the air. The same fire burned. Take off my clothes for you, like a ballet girl? Is that all you want of me? "The sight of a young ladys skin that no man has seen before --" stammered the valet. I wished Id rolled in the hay with every lad on my fathers farm, to disqualify myself from this humiliating bargain. That he should want so little was the reason why I could not give it; I did not o speak for The Beast to uand me. A tear came from his other eye. And then he moved; he buried his cardboard ival head with its ribboned weight of false hair in, I would say, his arms; he withdrew his, I might say, hands from his sleeves and I saw his furred pads, his excoriating claws. The dropped tear caught upon his fur and shone. And in my room for hours I heard those paws pad bad forth outside my door. When the valet arrived again with his silver salver, I had a pair of diamond earrings of the fi water in the world; I threw the other into the er where the first one lay. The valet twittered with aggrieved regret but did not offer to lead me to The Beast again. Instead, he smiled ingratiatingly and fided: "My master, he say: ihe young lady to go riding." "Whats this?" He briskly mimicked the a of a gallop and, to my amazement, tunelessly croaked: "Tantivy! tantivy! a-hunting we will go!" "Ill run away, Ill ride to the city." "Oh, no," he said. "Are you not a woman of honour?" He clapped his hands and my maidservant clicked and jangled into the imitation of life. She rolled towards the cupboard where she had e from and reached i to fetch out over her syic arm my riding habit. Of all things. My verypeak carried it inside his cloak a out at his pleasure, for it stirred the horses manes but did not lift the lowland mists. A bereft landscape in the sad browns and sepias of winter lay all about us, the marshland drearily protrag itself towards the wide river. Those decapitated willows. Now and then, the swoop of a bird, its irrecilable cry. A profound sense of strangeness slowly began to possess me. I knew my two panions were not, in any way, as other men, the simiaainer and the master for whom he spoke, the oh clawed forepaas in a plot with the witches who let the winds out of their knotted handkerchiefs up towards the Finnish border. I khey lived acc to a different logic than I had doil my father abandoned me to the wild beasts by his human carelessness. This knowledge gave me a certain fearfulness still; but, I would say, not much. . . I was a young girl, a virgin, and therefore men denied me rationality just as they de to all those who were ly like themselves, in all their unreason. If I could see not one single soul in that wilderness of desolation all arouhen the six of us -- mounts and riders, both -- could boast amongst us not one soul, either, since all the best religions in the world state categorically that not beasts nor women were equipped with the flimsy, insubstantial things when the good Lord opehe gates of Eden a Eve and her familiars tumble out. Uand, then, that though I would not say I privately engaged iaphysical speculation as we rode through the reedy approaches to the river, I certainly meditated oure of my own state, how I had been bought and sold, passed from hand to hand. That clockwirl who powdered my cheeks for me; had I not been allotted only the same kind of imitative life amongst men that the doll-maker had given her? Yet, as to the true nature of the being of this clawed magus who rode his pale horse in a style that made me recall how Kublai Khans leopards went out hunting on horseback, of that I had no notion. We came to the bank of the river that was so wide we could not see across it, so still with wihat it scarcely seemed to flow. The horses lowered their heads to drink. The valet cleared his throat, about to speak; we were in a place of perfect privacy, beyond a brake of winter-bare rushes, a hedge of reeds. "If you will not let him see you without your clothes --" I involuntarily shook my head -- "-- you must, then, prepare yourself for the sight of my master, naked." The river broke on the pebbles with a diminishing sigh. My posure deserted me; all at once I was on the brink of panic. I did not think that I could bear the sight of him, whatever he was. The mare raised her dripping muzzle and looked at me keenly, as if urgihe river broke again at my feet. I was far from home. "You," said the valet, "must." When I saw how scared he was I might refuse, I he reed bowed down in a sudden snarl of wind that brought with it a gust of the heavy odour of his disguise. The valet held out his masters cloak to s him from me as he removed the mask. The horses stirred. The tiger will never lie down with the lamb; he aowledges no pact that is not reciprocal. The lamb must learn to run with the tigers. A great, feliawny shape whose pelt was barred with a savage geometry of bars the colour of burned wood. His domed, heavy head, so terrible he must hide it. How subtle the muscles, how profound the tread. The annihilating vehemence of his eyes, like twin suns. I felt my breast ripped apart as if I suffered a marvellous wound. The valet moved forward as if to cover up his master now the girl had aowledged him, but I said: "No." The tiger sat still as a heraldic beast, in the pact he had made with his own ferocity to do me no harm. He was far larger than I could have imagined. From the poor, shabby things Id seen once, in the Czars menagerie at Petersburg, the golden fruit of their eyes dimming, withering in the far North of captivity. Nothing about him reminded me of humanity. I therefore, shivering, now unfastened my jacket, to show him I would do him no harm. Yet I was clumsy and blushed a little, for no man had seen me naked and I roud girl. Pride it was, not shame, that thwarted my fingers so; and a certain trepidatiohis frail little article of human upholstery before him might not be, in itself, grand enough to satisfy his expectations of us, sihose, for all I knew, might have grown infinite during the eime he had been waiting. The wind clattered in the rushes, purled and eddied in the river. I showed his grave silence my white skin, my red nipples, and the horses turheir heads to watch me, also, as if they, too, were courteously curious as to the fleshly nature of women. Then the Beast lowered his massive head; Enough! said the valet with a gesture. The wind died down. All was still again. Then they went off together, the valet on his pony, the tiger running before him like a hound, and I walked along the river bank for a while. I felt I was at liberty for the first time in my life. Then the winter sun began to tarnish, a few flakes of snow drifted from the darkening sky and, when I returo the horses, I found The Beast mounted again on his grey mare, cloaked and masked and once more, to all appearances, a man, while the valet had a fich of waterfowl dangling from his hand and the corpse of a young roebuck slung behind his saddle. I climbed up on the black gelding in silend so we returo the palace as the snow fell more and more heavily, obsg the tracks that we had left behind us. The valet did not returo my cell but, instead, to a, if old-fashioned boudoir with sofas of faded pink brocade, a jinns treasury of Oriental carpets, tintinnabulation of cut-glass deliers. dles in antlered holders struck rainbows from the prismatic hearts of my diamond earrings, that lay on my new dressing table at which my attentive maid stood ready with her powder puff and mirror. Intending to fix the ors in my ears, I took the looking glass from her hand, but it was in the midst of one of its magic fits again and I did not see my own fa it but that of my father; at first I thought he smiled at me. Then I saw he was smiling with pure gratification. He sat, I saw, in the parlour of our lodgings, at the very table where he had lost me, but now he was busily engaged in ting out a tremendous pile of banknotes. My fathers circumstances had ged already; well-shavely barbered, smart new clothes. A frosted glass of sparkling wi veo his hand beside an ice bucket. The Beast had clearly paid cash on the nail for his glimpse of my bosom and paid up promptly, as if it had not been a sight I might have died of showing. Then I saw my fathers trunks were packed, ready for departure. Could he so easily leave me here? There was a note oable with the money, in a fine hand. I could read it quite clearly. "The young lady will arrive immediately." Some harlot with whom hed briskly iated a liaison orength of his spoils? Not at all. For, at that moment, the valet k my door to annouhat I might leave the palace at any time hereafter, and he bore over his arm a handsome sable cloak, my very own little gratuity, The Beasts m gift, in which he proposed to pack me up and send me off. When I looked at the mirrain, my father had disappeared and all I saw ale, hollow-eyed girl whom I scarcely reised. The valet asked politely when he should prepare the carriage, as if he did not doubt that I would leave with my booty at the first opportunity while my maid, whose face was no lohe spit of my own, tinued bonnily to beam. I will dress her in my own clothes, wind her up, send her back to perform the part of my fathers daughter. "Leave me alone," I said to the valet. He did not o lock the door, now. I fixed the earrings in my ears. They were very heavy. Then I took off my riding habit, left it where it lay on the floor. But, when I got down to my shift?, my arms dropped to my sides. I was unaced to nakedness. I was so uo my own skin that to take off all my clothes involved a kind of flaying. I thought The Beast had wanted a little thing pared with what I repared to give him; but it is not natural for humankind to go naked, not since first we hid our loins with fig leaves. He had demahe abominable. I felt as much atrocious pain as if I was stripping off my own underpelt and the smiling girl stood poised in the oblivion of her balked simulation of life, watg me peel down to the cold, white meat of trad, if she did not see me, then so much more like the market place, where the eyes that watch you take no at of your existence. And it seemed my entire life, since I had left the North, had passed uhe indifferent gaze of eyes like hers. Then I was fling stark, except for his irreproachable tears. I huddled in the furs I must return to him, to keep me from the lacerating winds that raced along the corridors. I khe way to his den without the valet to guide me. No respoo my tentative rap on his door. Then the wind blew the valet whirling along the passage. He must have decided that, if one should go hen all should go naked; without his livery, he revealed himself, as I had suspected, a delicate creature, covered with silken moth-grey fur, brown fingers supple as leather, chocolate muzzle, the ge creature in the world. He gibbered a little to see my fine furs and jewels as if I were dressed up for the opera and, with a great deal of tender ceremony, removed the sables from my shoulders. The sables thereupon resolved themselves into a pack of black squeaking rats that rattled immediately dowairs on their hard little feet and were lost to sight. The valet bowed me ihe Beasts room. The purple dressing gown, the mask, the wig, were laid out on his chair; a glove lanted on each arm. The empty house of his appearance was ready for him but he had aba. There was a reek of fur and piss; the inse pot lay broken in pieces on the floor. Half-buricks were scattered from the extinguished fire. A dle stuck by its own grease to the mantelpiece lit two narrow flames in the pupils of the tigers eyes. He ag backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, the tip of his heavy tail twitg as he paced out the length and breadth of his impriso between the gnawed and bloody bones. He will gobble you up. Nursery fears made flesh and sinew; earliest and most archaic of fears, fear of devourment. The beast and his ivorous bed of bone and I, white, shaking, raroag him as if , in myself, the key to a peaceable kingdom in which his appetite need not be my extin. He went still as stone. He was far more frightened of me than I was of him. I squatted o straw and stretched out my hand. I was now within the field of force of his golden eyes. He growled at the back of his throat, lowered his head, sank on to his forepaws, snarled, showed me his red gullet, his yellow teeth. I never moved. He snuffled the air, as if to smell my fear; he could not. Slowly, slowly he began t his heavy, gleami across the floor towards me. A tremendous throbbing, as of the ehat makes the earth turn, filled the little room; he had begun to purr. The sweet thunder of this purr shook the old walls, made the shutters batter the windows until they burst apart a in the white light of the snowy moon. Tiles came crashing down from the roof; I heard them fall into the courtyard far below. The reverberations of his purring rocked the foundations of the house, the walls began to dance. I thought: "It will all fall, everything will disie." He dragged himself closer and closer to me, until I felt the harsh velvet of his head against my hand, then a tongue, abrasive as sandpaper. "He will lick the skin off me!" And each stroke of his tongue ripped off skin after successive skin, all the skins of a life in the world, a behind a patina of shiny hairs. My earrings turned back to water and trickled down my shoulders; I shrugged the drops off my beautiful fur. Puss-in-Boots-1 Figaro here; Figaro, there, I tell you! Figaro upstairs, Figaro downstairs and -- oh, my goodness me, this little Figaro slip into my ladys chamber smart as you like at any time whatsoever that he takes the fancy for, dont you know, hes a cat of the world, opolitan, sophisticated; he tell when a furry friend is the Missus best pany. For what lady in all the world could say "no" to the passio toujours discret advances of a fine marmalade cat? (Unless it be her eyes intily overflow at the slightest whiff of furr, which happened once, as you shall hear.) A tom, sirs, a giom and proud of it. Proud of his fine, white shirtfront that dazzles harmoniously against his e and tangeriessellations (oh! what a fiery suit of lights have I); proud of his bird-entrang eye and more than military whiskers; proud, to a fault, some say, of his fine, musical voice. All the windows in the square fly open when I break into impromptu song at the spectacle of the moon above Bergamo. If the poor players in the square, the sullen rout ed trash that haunts the provinces, are rewarded with a hail of pennies when they set up their makeshift stage and start their raucous choruses; then how much more liberally do the citizens deluge me with pails of the freshest water, vegetables hardly spoiled and, occasionally, slippers, shoes and boots. Do you see these fine, high, shiniher boots of mine? A young cavalry officer made me the tribute of, first ohen, after I celebrate his generosity with a fresh obbligato, the moon no fuller than my heart -- whoops! I nimbly spring aside -- down es the other. Their high heels will click like castas when Puss takes his promenade upoiles, for my song recalls flamenco, all cats have a Spanish tihough Puss himself elegantly lubricates his virile, muscular, native Bergamasque with French, sihat is the only language in which you purr. "Merrrrrrrrrrci!" Instanter I draw my new boots ohe natty white stogs that terminate my hinder legs. That young man, with curiosity by moonlight the use to which I put his footwear, calls out: "Hey, Puss! Puss, there!" "At your service, sir!" "Up to my baly, young Puss!" He leans out, in his nightshirt, encement as I swing suctly up the fa?ade, forepaws on a curly cherubs pate, hindpaws on a stucco wreath, bring them up to meet your forepaws while, first paw forward, hup! on to the stone nymphs tit; left paw down a bit, the satyrs bum should do the triothing to it, once you know how, rocoo problem. Acrobatics? Born to them; Puss perform a baersault whilst holding aloft a glass of vino in his right paw and never spill a drop. But, to my shame, the famous death-defying triple somersault en plein air, that is, in middle air, that is, unsupported and without a safety , I, Puss, have never yet attempted though often I have dashingly brought off the double tour, to the applause of all. "You strike me as a cat of parts," says this young man when Im arrived at his windowsill. I made him a handsome geion, rump out, tail up, head down, to facilitate his friendly chuder my ; and, as involuntary free gift, my natural, my habitual smile. For all cats have this particularity, ead every one, from the mea alley so the proudest, whitest she that ever graced a pontiffs pillow -- we have our smiles, as it were, painted on. Those small, cool, quiet Mona Lisa smiles that smile we must, no matter whether its been fun or its been not. So all cats have a politis air; we smile and smile and so they think were villains. But, I his young man is something of a smiler hisself. "A sandwich," he offers. "And, perhaps, a snifter of brandy..." His lodgings are poor, though hes handsome enough and even en déshabillé, nightcap and all, theres a , smart, dandified air about him. Here is one who knows whats what, thinks I; a man who keeps up appearances in the bedchamber ever embarrass you out of it. And excellent beef sandwiches; I relish a lean slice of roast beef and early learned a taste for spirits, since I started life as a wine-shop cat, hunting cellar rats for my keep, before the world sharpened my wits enough to let me live by them. And the upshot of this midnight interview? Im engaged, on the spot, as Sirs valet: valet de chambre and, from time to time, his body servant, for, when funds are running low, as they must do for every gallant officer when the pigs fall off, he pawns the quilt, doeshen faithful Puss curls up on his chest to keep him warm at night. And if he dont like me to knead his nipples, which, out of the purist affe and the desire -- ouch! he says -- to test the retractability of my claws, I do in moments of absenind, then what other valet could slip into a young girls sacred privad deliver her a billet-doux at the very moment when shes reading her prayerbook with her sainted mother? A task I once or twice perform for him, to his infinite gratitude. And, as you will hear, brought him at last to the best of fortunes for us all. So Puss got his post at the same time as his boots and I dare say the Master and I have mu on for hes proud as the devil, touchy as tin-tacks, lecherous as liquorid, though I say it as loves him, as quick-witted a rascal as ever put on linen. When times were hard, Id pilfer the market for breakfast -- a herring, an e, a loaf; we never went hungry. Puss served him well in the gaming salons, too, for a cat may move from lap to lap with impunity and cast his eye over any hand of cards. A cat jump on the dice -- he t resist to see it roll! poor thing, mistook it for a bird; and, after Ive been, limp-spined, stiff-legged, playing the silly buggers, scooped up to be chastised, who remember how the dice fell in the first place? And we had, besides, less. . . gentlemanly means of maintenance when they closed the tables to us, as, churlishly, they sometimes did. Id perform my little Spanish dance while he went around with his hat: ole! But he only put my loyalty and affe to the test of this humiliatiohe cupboard was as bare as his backside; after, in fact, hed sunk so low as to pawn his drawers. So all went right as ninepend you never saw such boon panions as Puss and his master; until the man must needs go fall in love. "Head over heels, Puss." I went about my ablutions, tonguing my arsehole with the impeccable hygienitegrity of cats, ou the air like a ham bone; I choose to remain silent. Love? What has my rakish master, for whom Ive jumped through the window of every brothel iy, besides haunting the virginal back garden of the vent and god knows what oatish errands, to do with tender passion? "And she. A princess in a tower. Remote and shining as Aldebaran. ed to a dolt and dragon-guarded." I withdrew my head from my privates and fixed him with my most satiric smile; I dared him warble on in that strain. "All cats are ics," he opines, quailih my yellow glare. It is the hazard of it draws him, see. There is a lady sits in a window for one hour and one hour only, at the teime of dusk. You scarcely see her features, the curtains almost hide her; shrouded like a holy image, she looks out on the piazza as the shops shut up, the stalls go down, the night es on. And this is all the world she ever sees. Never a girl in all Bergamo so secluded except, on Sundays, they let her go to Mass, bundled up in black, with a veil on. And then she is in the pany of an aged hag, her keeper, who grumps along grim as a prison dinner. How did he see that secret face? Who else but Puss revealed it? Back we e from the tables so late, so very late at night we found, to our emergent surprise that all at o was early in the m. His pockets were heavy with silver and both uts sweetly a-gurgle with champagne; Lady Luck had sat with us, what fine spirits were we in! Winter and cold weather. The pious trot to church already with little lanterns through the chill fog as we go ungodly rolling home. See, a black barque, like a state funeral; and Puss takes it into his bubbly-addled brain to board her. Tag obliquely to her side, I rub my marmalade pate against her shin; how could any duenna, be she never so stern, take offe such attentions to her chargeling from a little cat? (As it turns out, this otishooo! does.) A white hand fragrant as Arabia desds from the black cloak and reciprocally rubs behind his ears at just the ecstatic spot. Puss lets rip a r purr, rears briefly on his high-heeled boots; jig with joy and pirouette with glee -- she laughs to see and draws her veil aside. Puss glimpses high above, as it were, an alabaster lamp lit behind by dawns first flush: her face. And she smiling. For a moment, just that moment, you would have thought it was May m. "e along! e! Dont dawdle over the nasty beast!" snaps the old hag, with the oooth in her mouth, and warts; she sneezes. The veil es down; so cold it is, and dark, again. It was not I alone who saw her; with that smile he swears she stole his heart. Love. Ive sat inscrutably by and washed my fad sparkling dicky with my clever paw while he made the beast with two backs with every harlot iy, besides a number of good wives, dutiful daughters, rosy try girls e to sell celery and endive on the er, and the chambermaid who strips the bed, whats more. The Mayors wife, even, shed her diamond earrings for him and the wife of the notary unshuffled her petticoats and if I could, I would blush to remember how her daughter shook out her flaxen plaits and jumped in bed between them and she not sixteen years old. But he word, "love", has fallen from his lips, nor in nor out of any of these transports, until my master saw the wife of Signor Panteleone as she went walking out to Mass, and she lifted up her veil though not for him. And now he is half sick with it and will go to the tables no more for lack of heart and never even pats the bustling rump of the chambermaid in his new-found maudlin celibacy, so we get our slops left festering for days and the sheets filthy and the wench goes banging about bad-temperedly with her broom enough to fetch the plaster off the walls. Ill swear he lives for Sunday m, though never before was he a religious man. Saturday nights, he bathes himself punctiliously, even, Im glad to see, washes behind his ears, perfumes himself, presses his uniform so youd think he had a right to wear it. So mu love he very rarely pao the pleasures, even of Onan, as he lies tossing on his couch, for he ot sleep for fear he miss the summoning bell. Then out into the , harking after that black, vague shape, hapless fisherman for his sealed oyster with such a pearl in it. He creeps behind her across the square; how one so amorous bear to be so inspicuous? A, he must; though, sometimes, the old hag sneezes and says she swears there is a cat about. He will insinuate himself into the pew behind milady and sometimes trive to touch the hem of her garment, when they all kneel, and never a thought to his orisons; she is the divinity hes e to worship. Then sits silent, in a dream, till bed-time; leasure is his pany for me? He wo, either. I brought him a fine pigeon from the inn kit, fresh off the spit, parfumé avec tarragon, but he wouldnt touch it so I ched it up, bones and all, perf, as ever after meals, my meditative toilette, I pohus: one, he is in a fair way to ruining us both by ing his business; two, love is desire sustained by unfulfilment. If I lead him to her bedchamber and there he takes his fill of her lily-white, hell be right as rain in two shakes a day tricks as usual. Then Master and his Puss will soon be solvent once again. Which, at the moment, very muot, sir. This Signer Panteleone employs, his only servant but the hag, a kit cat, a sleek, spry tabby whom I accost. Grasping the slack of her neck firmly between my teeth, I gave her the ary tribute of a few firm thrusts of my striped loins and, whe her breath back, she assured me in the frie fashion the old man was a fool and a miser who kept herself on short ons for the sake of the mousing and the young lady a soft-hearted creature who smuggled breast of chi and sometimes, when the hag-dragon-governess midday, snatched this pretty kitty out of the hearth and into her bedroom to play with reels of silk and run after trailed handkerchiefs, when she and she had as much fun together as two derellas at an all-girls ball. Poor, lonely lady, married so young to an old dodderer with his bald pate and his goggle eyes and his limp, his avarice, his gore belly, his rheumaticks, and his flag hangs all the time at half-mast indeed; and jealous as he is impotent, tabby declares -- hed put a stop to all the rutting in the world, if he had his way, just to certify his young wife do from another what she t get from him. "Then shall we hatch a plot to antler him, my precious?" Nothing loath, she tells me the best time for this aplishment should be the one day in all the week he forsakes his wife and his ting-house to ride off into the try to extort mraspis from starveli farmers. And shes left all alohen, behind so many bolts and bars you wouldnt believe; all alone -- but for the hag! Aha! This hag turns out to be the biggest snag; an iron-plated, copper-bottomed, sworn man-hater of some sixty bitter winters who -- as ill luck would have it -- shatters, clatters, erupts into paroxysms of the s the very glimpse of a cats whisker. No ce of Puss w his winsome way into that ones affes, nor for my tabby her! But, oh my dear, I say; see how my iy rises to the challenge. . . So we resume the sweetest part of our versation in the dusty venience of the coalhole and she promises me, least she do, to see the fair, hitherto-inaccessible os a letter safe if I slip it to her and slip it to her forthwith I do, though somewhat disoded by my boots. He spent three hours over his letter, did my master, as long as it takes me to lick the coaldust off my dicky. He tears up half a quire of paper, splays five pen-nibs with the force of his adoration: "Look not for any peace, my heart; having bee a slave to this beautys tyranny, dazzled am I by this suns rays and my torments ot be assuaged." Thats not the high road to the rumpling of the bedcovers; shes got one ninween them already! "Speak from the heart," I finally exhort. "And all good women have the missionary streak, sir; vince her her orifice will be your salvation and shes yours." "When I want your advice, Puss, Ill ask for it," he says; all at once hoity-toity. But at last he mao pen ten pages; a rake, a profligate, a card-sharper, a cashiered officer well on the way to rad ruin when first he saw, as if it were a glimpse of grace, her face. . . his angel, his good angel, who will lead him from perdition. Oh, what a masterpiece he penned! "Such tears she wept at his addresses!" says my tabby friend. "Oh, Tabs, she sobs -- for she calls me Tabs -- I never meant to wreak such havoc with a pure heart when I smiled to see a booted cat! And put his paper o her heart and swore, it was a good soul that sent her his vows and she was too mu love with virtue to withstand him. If, she adds, for shes a sensible girl, hes her old as the hills nly as sin, that is." An admirable little he ladys sent him iurn, per Figaro here and there; she adopts a respo unpromising tone. For, says she, how she usefully discuss his passion further without a glimpse of his person? He kisses her letter owice, a thousand times; she must and will see me! I shall serenade her this very evening! So, when dusk falls, off we trot to the piazza, he with an old guitar he pawned his sword to buy and most, if I may say so, outlandishly rigged out in some kind of vagabond mountebanks outfit he bartered his gold-braided waistcoat with poor Pierrot braying in the square for, moonstruck zany, lovelorn loon he was himself and even plastered his face with flour to make it white, poor fool, and so ram home his heartsick state. There she is, the evening star with the clouds around her; but such a creaking of carts in the square, such a clatter and crash as they dismahe stalls, su ululation of ballad-singers and oration of nostrum-peddlers aubation of errand boys that though he wails out his heart to her: "Oh, my beloved!" why she, all in a dream, sits with her gaze in the middle distance where theres a crest moon stu the sky behind the cathedral pretty as a paiage, and so is she. Does she hear him? Not a graote. Does she see him? Never a glance. "Up you go, Puss; tell her to look my way!" If rococos a piece of cake, that chaste, tasteful, early Palladian stumped many a better cat than I in its time. Agilitys not in it, when it es to Palladian, daring alone will carry the day and, though the first storeys graced with a hefty caryatid whose bulbous loincloth and tremendous pects facilitate the first ast, the Dorin on her head proves a horse of a different colour, I tell you. Had I not seen my precious Tabby crouched iter above me keening encement, I, even I, might never have braved that flying, upward leap that brought me, as if Harlequin himself on wires, in one bound to her windowsill. "Dear god!" the lady says, and jumps. I see she, too, ah, seal thing! clutches a well-thumbed letter. "Puss-in-boots!" I bow her with a courtly flourish. What luck to hear no sniff or sneeze; wheres hag? A sudden flux sped her to the privy -- not a moment to lose. "Cast your eye below," I hiss. "Him you know of lurks below, in white with the big hat, ready to sing you an evening ditty." The bedroom door creaks open, then, and: whee! through the air Puss goes, discretion is the better part. And, for both their sweet sakes I did it, the sight of both their bright eyes inspired me to the never-before-attempted, by me or any other cat, in boots or out of them -- the death-defying triple somersault! And a three-storey drop to ground, whats more; a grand dest. Only the merest trifle winded. Im proud to say, I ly land on all my fours and Tabs goes wild, huzzah! But has my master witnessed my triumph? Has he, my arse. Hes tuning up that old mandolin and breaks, as down I e, again into his song. I would never have said, in the normal course of things, his voice would charm the birds out of the trees, like mine; ahe bustle died for him, the homeward-turning costers paused iracks to hearken, the preening street girls fot their hard-edged smiles as they turo him and some of the old ones wept, they did. Tabs, up on the roof there, prick up your ears! For by its power I know my heart is in his voice. Puss-in-Boots-2 And now the lady lowers her eyes to him and smiles, as once she smiled at me. Then, bang! a stern hand pulls the shutters to. And it was as if all the violets in all the baskets of all the flower-sellers drooped and faded at once; and spring stopped dead in its tracks and might, this time, not e at all; and the bustle and the business of the square, that had so magically quieted for his song, now rose up again with the harsh clamour of the loss of love. Arudge drearily off to dirty sheets and a mean supper of bread and cheese, all I steal him, but at least the poor soul mas a hearty appetite now she knows hes in the world and not the ugliest of mortals; for the first time sihat fateful m, sleeps sound. But sleep es hard to Puss tonight. He takes a midnight stroll across the square, soon fortably discusses a choice morsel of salt cod his tabby friend found among the ashes on the hearth before our verse turns to other matters. "Rats!" she says. "And take your boots off, you uncouth bugger; those three-inch heels wreak havoc with the soft flesh of my underbelly!" When wed recovered ourselves a little, I ask her what she means by those "rats" of hers and she proposes her scheme to me. How my master must pose as a rat-catcher and I, his ambulant marmalade rat-trap. Hoill then go kill the rats that ravage miladys bedchamber, the day the old fool goes to fetch his rent, and she have her will of the lad at leisure for, if there is ohing the hag fears more than a cat, it is a rat and shell cower in a cupboard till the last rat is off the premises before she es out. Oh, this tabby one, sharp as a tack is she; I gratulate her iy with a few affeate cuffs round the head and home again, for breakfast, ubiquitous Puss, here, there and everywhere, whos yaro? Master applauds the rat ploy; but, as to the rats themselves; how are they to arrive in the house in the first place? he queries. "Nothing easier, sir; my aplice, a witty soubrette who lives among the ders, dedicated as she is to the young ladys happiness, will personally strew a large number of dead and dying rats she has herself collected about the bedroom of the said ingenues duenna, and, most particularly, that of the said ingenue herself. This to be doomorrow m, as soon as Sir Pantaloon rides out to fetch his rents. By good fortune, down in the square, plying for hire, a rat-catcher! Since ot abide either a rat or a cat, it falls to milady to escort the rat-catcher, her than yourself, sir, and his intrepid hunter, myself, to the site of the iion.９9ｌib?t> "Once youre in her bedroom, sir, if you dont know what to do, then I t help you." "Keep your foul thoughts to yourself, Puss." Some things, I see, are sacrosanct from humour. Sure enough, prompt at five in the bleak m, I observe with my owhe lovely ladys lubberly husband hump off on his horse like a sack of potatoes to rake in his dues. Were ready with n: SIGNOR FURIOSO, THE LIVIH OF RATS; and in the leathers hes borrowed from the porter, I hardly reise him myself, not with the false moustache. He coaxes the chambermaid with a few kisses -- poor, deceived girl! love knows no shame -- and so we install ourselves under a certain shuttered window with the great pile of traps shes lent us, the sign of our profession, Puss perched atop them bearing the humble yet determined look of a sworn enemy of vermin. Weve not waited more than fifteen minutes -- and just as well, as many rat-plagued Bergamots approach us already and are not easily dissuaded from employing us -- when the front door flies open on a lusty scream. The hag, aghast, flings her arms round fling Furioso; how fortuitous to find him! But, at the whiff of me, shes sneezing so valiantly, her eyes awash, the vertical gutters of her nostrils aswill with snot, she barely depict the ses inside, rattus domesticus dead in her bed and all; and worse! in the Missus room. So Signor Furioso and his questing Puss are ushered into the very sanctuary of the goddess, our presennounced by a fanfare from her keeper on the nose harp. Attishhoooo!!! Sweet and pleasant in a m gown of loose linen, enue jumps at the tattoo of my boot heels but recovers instantly and the wheezing, hawking hag is in no state to sniffle more than: "Aint I seen that cat before?" "Not a ce," says my master. "Why, hes e but yesterday with me from Milano." So she has to make do with that. My Tabs has lihe very stairs with rats; shes made a mue of the hags room but something more lively of the ladys. For some of her prey shes very cleverly not killed but crippled; a big black beastie weaves its way towards us over the turkey carpet, Puss, pounce! Between screaming and sneezing, the hags in a fiate, I tell you, though milady exhibits a most praiseworthy and collected presenind, being, I guess, a young woman of no small grasp so, perhaps, she has a sniff of the plot already. My master goes down on hands and knees uhe bed. "My god!" he cries. "Theres the biggest hole, here in the wainsg, I ever saw in all my professional career! And theres an army of black rats gathering behind it, ready to storm through! To arms!" But, for all her terror, the hags loath to leave the Master and me aloo deal with the rats; she casts her eye on a silver-backed hairbrush, a coral rosary, twitters, hovers, screeches, mutters until milady assures her, amidst ses of rising pandemonium: "I shall stay here myself ahat Signor Furioso doesnt make off with my tris. You go and recover yourself with an infusion of friars balsam and dont e batil I call." The hag departs; quick as a flash, la belle turns the key in the door on her and softly laughs; the naughty one. Dusting the slut-fluff from his knees, Signor Furioso now stands slowly upright; swiftly, he removes his false moustache, for no element of the farcical must mar this first, delirious enter of these lovers, must it. (Poor soul, how his hands tremble!) Aced as I am to the splendid, feline nakedness of my kind, that offers no cealment of that soul made ma in the flesh of lovers, I am always a little moved by the poignaice with which humanity shyly hesitates to divest itself of its clutter of cealing rags in the presence of desire. So, first, these two smile, a little, as if to say "How strao meet you here!" uain of a loving wele, still. And do I deceive myself, or do I see a tear a-twinkle in the er of his eye? But who is it steps towards the other first? Why, she; women, I think, are, of the two sexes, the more keenly tuo the sweet music of their bodies. (A penny for my foul thoughts, indeed! Does she, that wise, grave personage in the negligee, think youve staged this grand charade merely in order to kiss her hand?) But, then -- oh, what a pretty blush! steps baow its his turn to take two steps forward in the saraband of Eros. I could wish, though, theyd dance a little faster; the hag will soon recover from her spasms and shall she find them in flagrante? His hand, then, trembling, upon her bosom; hers, initially more hesitant, sequentially more purposeful, upon his breeches. Then their strarance breaks; that seal havering done, I never saw two fall to it with such appetite. As if the whirlwind got into their fingers, they strip each other bare in a twinkling and she falls ba the bed, shows him the target, he displays the dart, scores an instant bullseye. Bravo! Never that old bed have shook with such a storm before. And their sweet choked mutterings, poor things: "I never. . ." "My darling. . ." "More. . ." Ac. etough to melt the thor heart. He rises up on his elbows ond gasps at me: "Mimic the murder of the rats, Puss! Mask the music of Venus with that clamour of Diana!" A-hunting we shall go! Loyal to the last, I play catch as catch with Tabs dead rats, giving the dying the coup de grad baying with resonant vigour to drowravagant screeches that break forth from that (who would have suspected?) more passionate young woman as she es off in fiyle. (Full marks, Master.) At that, the old hag es battering at the door. Whats going on? Why for the racket? And the door rattles on its hinges. "Peace!" cries Signer Furioso. "Havent I just now blocked the great hole?" But miladys in no hurry to don her smock again, she takes her lovely time about it; so full of pleasure gratified her languorous limbs youd think her very navel smiled. She pecks my master prettily thank-you on the cheek, wets the gum on his false moustache with the tip of her strawberry tongue and sticks it ba his upper lip for him, thes her wardress into the se of the faux age with the most modest and irreproachable air in the world. "See! Puss has slaughtered all the rats." I rush, purring proud, to greet the hag; instantly, her eyes oerflow. "Why the bedclothes so disordered?" she squeaks, not quite blinded yet, by phlegm and chose for her post from all the other applications on at of her suspiind, even (oh, dutiful) when in grande peur des rats. "Puss had a mighty battle with the biggest beast you ever saw upon this very bed; t you see the bloodstains on the sheets? And now, what do we owe you, Signer Furioso, for this singular service?" "A hundred ducats," says I, quick as a flash, for I know my master, left to himself, would like an honourable fool, take nothing. "Thats the entire household expenses for a month!" wails avarices well-chosen aplice. "And worth every penny! For those rats would have eaten us out of house and home." I see the glimmerings of sturdy bae in this little lady. "Go, pay them from your private savings that I know of, that youve skimmed off the housekeeping." Muttering and moaning but nothing for it except to do as she is bid; and the furious Sir and I take off a laundry basket full of dead rats as souvenir -- we drop it, plop! in the sewer. And sit down to one dinner holy paid for, for a wonder. But the young fool is off his feed again. Pushes his plate aside, laughs, weeps, buries his head in his hands and, time and time and time again, goes to the window to stare at the shutters behind which his sweetheart scrubs the blood away and my dear Tabs rests from her supreme exertions. He sits, for a while, and scribbles; rips the page in four, hurls it aside. I spear a falling fragment with a claw. Dear God, hes took to writing poetry. "I must and will have her for ever," he exclaims. I see my plan has e to nothing. Satisfa has not satisfied him; that soul they both saw in one anothers bodies has susatiable hunger no single meal could ever appease it. I fall to the toilette of my hinder parts, my favourite stance when plating the ways of the world. "How I live without her?" You did so for twenty-seven years, sir, and never missed her for a moment. "Im burning with the fever of love!" Then were spared the expense of fires. "I shall steal her away from her husband to live with me." "What do you propse to live on, sir?" "Kisses," he said distractedly. "Embraces." "Well, you wont grow fat on that, sir; though she will. And then, more mouths to feed." "Im sid tired of your foul-mouthed barbs, Puss," he snaps. A my heart is moved, for now he speaks the plain, clear, foolish rhetoric of love and who is there ing enough to help him to happiness but I? Scheme, loyal Puss, scheme! My wash pleted, I step out across the square to visit that charming she whos wormed her way directly into my own hitherto-untrammelled heart with her sharp wits and her pretty ways. She exhibits warm emotion to see me; and, oh! what news she has to tell me! News of a rapt and personal nature, that turns my mind to thoughts of the future, and, yes, domestic plans of most familial nature. Shes saved me a pigs trotter, a whole entire pigs trotter the Missus smuggled to her with a wink. A feast! Mastig, I muse. "Recapitulate," I suggest, "the daily motions of Sir Pantaloon whe home." They set the cathedral clock by him, sid and sular his habits. Up at the crack, he meagrely breakfasts off yesterdays crusts and a cup of cold water, to spare the expense of heating it up. Down to his ting-house, ting out his money, until a bowl of well-watered gruel at midday. The afternoon he devotes to usury, bankrupting, here, a small tradesman, there, a weeping widow, for fun and profit. Dinners luxurious, at four; soup, with a bit of rancid beef or a tough bird in it -- hes an arra with the butcher, takes unsold stock off his hands iurn for a shut mouth about a pie that had a finger in it. From four-thirty until five-thirty, he unlocks the shutters as his wife look out, oh, dont I know! while hag sits beside her to make sure she doesnt smile. (Oh, that blessed flux, those precious loose mihat set the game in motion!) And while she breathes the air of evening, why, he checks up on his chest of gems, his bales of silk, all those treasures he loves too much to share with daylight and if he wastes a dle when he so indulges himself, why, any man is entitled to otle extravagance. Another draught of Adams ale healthfully cludes the day; up he tucks besides Missus and, since she is his prize possession, sents to finger her a little. He palpitates her hide and slaps her flanks: "What a good bargain!" Alack, do no more, not wishing to profligate his natural essence. And so drifts off to sinless slumber amid the prospects of tomorrows gold. "How rich is he?" "Croesus." "Enough to keep two loving couples?" "Sumptuous." Early in the undled m, groping to the privy bleared with sleep, were the old man to place his foot upon the subfuse yet volatile fur of a shadow-camouflaged young tabby cat -- "You read my thoughts, my love." I say to my master: "Now, you get yourself a down, impedimenta all plete or Im doh you." "Whats this, Puss?" "Do as I say and never mind the reason! The less you know of why, the better." So he expends a few of the hags ducats on a black gown with a white collar and his skull cap and his black bag and, under my direakes himself ann that announces, with all due pomposity, how he is Il Famed Dottore: Aches cured, pains prevented, bones set, graduate of Bologna, physi extraordinary. He demands to know, is she to play the invalid to give him further access to her bedroom? "Ill clasp her in my arms and jump out of the window; we too shall both perform the triple somersault of love." "You just mind your own business, sir, a me mind it for you after my own fashion." Another raw and misty m! Here in the hills, will the weather ever ge? So bleak it is, and dreary; but there he stands, grave as a sermon in his black gown and half the market people e with coughs and boils and broken heads and I dispehe plasters and the vials of coloured water Id forethoughtfully stowed in his bag, he too agitato to sell for himself. (And, who knows, might we not have stumbled on a profitable profession for future pursuit, if my present plans miscarry?) Until dawn shoots his little yet how flaming arrow past the cathedral on which the clock strikes six. At the last stroke, that famous door flies open once again and -- eeeeeeeeeeeeech! the hag lets rip. "Oh, Doctor, oh, Doctor, e quick as you ; ood mans taken a sorry tumble!" And weeping fit to float a smack, she is, so doeshe doctors apprentice is most colourfully and pletely furred and whiskered. The old boobys flat out at the foot of the stair, his head at an acute ahat might turn id a big bunch of keys, still, grinned in his right hand as if they were the keys to heaven marked: Wanted on voyage. And Missus, in her , bends over him with a pretty air of . "A fall --" she begins when she sees the doctor but stops short when she sees your servant, Puss, looking as suitably down-in-the-mouth as his ic smile will let him, humping his masters sto-trade and hawing like a sawbones. "You, again," she says, and t forbear to giggle. But the dragons too blubbered to hear. My master puts his ear to the old mans chest and shakes his head dolefully; then takes the mirror from his pocket and puts it to the old mans mouth. Not a breath clouds it. Oh, sad! Oh, sorrowful! "Dead, is he?" sobs the hag. "Broke his neck, has he?" And she slyly makes a little grab for the keys, in spite of her well-orchestrated distress; but Missus slaps her hand and she gives over. "Lets get him to a softer bed," says Master. He ups the corpse, carries it aloft to the room we know full well, bumps Pantaloon down, twitches an eyelid, taps a kneecap, feels a pulse. "Dead as a doornail," he pronounces. "Its not a doctor you want, its an uaker." Missus has a handkerchief very dutifully and correctly to her eyes. "You just run along a one," she says to hag. "And then Ill read the will. Because dont think hes fotten you, thou faithful servant. Oh, my goodness, no." So off goes hag; you never saw a woman of her accumulated Christmases spring so fast. As soon as they are left alone, no trifling, this time; theyre at it, hammer and tongs, down on the carpet sihe bed is occupé. Up and down, up and down his arse; in and out, in and out her legs. Then she heaves him up and throws him on the back, her turn at the grind, now, and youd think shell op. Toujours discret, Puss occupies himself in unfastening the shutters and throwing the windows open to the beautiful beginning of m in whose lively yet fragrant air his sensitive nostrils catch the first and vernal hint of spring. In a few moments, my dear friend joins me. I notice already -- or is it only my fond imagination? -- a charming new portliness in her gait, hitherto so elastic, s-heeled. And there we sit upon the windowsill like the two genii and protectors of the house; ah, Puss, your rambling days are over. I shall bee a hearthrug cat, a fat and cosy cushion cat, sing to the moon no more, settle at last amid the sedentary joys of a domesticity we two, she and I, have so richly earned. Their cries of rapture rouse me from this pleasant revery. The hag chooses, naturellement, this tender if eous moment to return with the uaker in his chiffoopper, plus a brautes black as beetles, glum as bailiffs, bearing the elm box betweeo take the corpse away in. But they cheer up something wonderful at the ued spectacle before them and he and she clude their amorous interlude amidst roars of approbation and torrents of applause. But what a racket the hag makes! Police, murder, thieves! Until the Master chucks her purseful of gold back again, fratuity. (Meanwhile, I hat sensible young woman, mother-naked as she is has yet the presenind to catch hold of her husbands key ring and sharply tug it from his sere, cold grip. Once shes got the keys secure, shes in charge of all.) "Now, no more of your nonsense!" she snaps to hag. "If I hereby give you the sack, youll get a handsome gift to go along with you for now" -- flourishing the keys -- "I am a rich widow and here" -- indig to all my bare yet blissful master -- "is the young man wholl be my sed husband." When the governess found Signer Panteleone had indeed remembered her in his will, left her a keepsake of the cup he drank his m water from, she made not a squeak more, pocketed a fat sum with thanks and, sneezing, took herself off with no more cries of "murder" her. The old buffoon briskly.9９ｌｉｂ. bundled in his coffin and buried; Master es into a great fortune and Missus rounding out already and they as happy as pigs in plunk. But my Tabs beat her to it, sis dont take much time about engendering; three fine, new-minted ginger kittens, all plete with snowy socks and shirtfronts, tumble in the cream and tangle Missuss knitting and put a smile on every faot just their mothers and proud fathers for Tabs and I smile all day long and, these days, we put our hearts in it. So may all your wives, if you hem, be rid pretty; and all your husbands, if you want them, be young and virile; and all your cats as wily, perspicacious and resourceful as: PUSS-IN-BOOTS. The Erl-King-1 The lucidity, the clarity of the light that afternoon was suffit to itself; perfect transp.９９ｌｉb.arency must be imperable, these vertical bars of a brass-coloured distillation of light ing down from sulphur-yellow iices in a sky hunkered with grey clouds that bulge with more rain. It struck the wood with nie-stained fingers, the leaves glittered. A cold day of late October, whehered blackberries dangled like their own dour spooks on the discoloured brambles. There were crisp husks of beechmast and cast a cups underfoot in the russet slime of dead bra where the rains of the equinox had so soaked the earth that the cold oozed up through the soles of the shoes, lanating cold of the approag of wihat grips hold of your belly and squeezed it tight. Now the stark elders have an anorexic look; there is not mu the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of the year. Only, there is a haunting sense of the immi cessation of being; the year, in turning, turns in on itself. Introspective weather, a si hush. The woods enclose. You step between the fir trees and then you are no longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way through the wood any more, this wood has reverted to its inal privacy. Once you are i, you must stay there until it lets you out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety; grass grew over the track years ago and now the rabbits and the foxes make their own runs in the subtle labyrinth and nobody es. The trees stir with a noise like taffeta skirts of women who have lost themselves in woods and hunt round hopelessly for the way out. Tumbling crows play tig in the branches of the elms they clotted with their s, now and then raucously g. A little stream with soft margins of marsh runs through the wood but it has grown sullen with the time of the year; the silent, blackish wat?9９lｉｂ?er this, now, to ice. All will fall still, all lapse. A young girl would go into the wood as trustingly as Red Riding Hood trannys house but this light admits no ambiguities and, here, she will be trapped in her own illusion because everything in the wood is exactly as it seems. The woods enclose and then enclose again, like a system of ese boxes opening oo ahe intimate perspectives of the wood ged endlessly around the interloper, the imaginary traveller walking towards an ied distahat perpetually receded before me. It is easy to lose yourself in these woods. The two notes of the song of a bird rose oill air, as if my girlish and delicious loneliness had been made into a sound. There was a little tangled mist ihickets, mimig the tufts of old mans beard that flossed the lower branches of the trees and bushes; heavy bunches of red berries as ripe and delicious as goblin or ented fruit hung on the hawthorns but the old grass withers, retreats. One by ohe ferns have curled up their hundred eyes and curled bato the earth. The trees threaded a cats cradle of half-stripped branches over me so that I felt I was in a house of s and though the cold wind that always heralds your presence, had I but known it then, blew gentle around me, I thought that nobody was in the wood but me. Erl-King will do you grievous harm. Piergly, now, there came again the call of the bird, as desolate as if it came from the throat of the last bird left alive. That call, with all the melancholy of the failing year in it, went directly to my heart. I walked through the wood until its perspectives verged upon a darkening clearing; as soon as I saw them, I k ohat all its octs had been waiting for me from the moment I first stepped into the wood, with the endless patience of wild things, who have all the time in the world. It was a garden where all the flowers were birds as; ash-soft doves, diminutive wrens, freckled thrushes, robins iawny bibs, huge, helmeted crows that shone like pateher, a blackbird with a yellow bill, voles, shrews, fieldfares, little brown bunnies with their ears laid together along their backs like spoons, croug at his feet. A lean, tall, reddish hare, up on its great hind legs, witch. The rusty fox, its muzzle sharpeo a point, laid its head upon his knee. Orunk of a scarlet rowan a squirrel g, to watch him; a cock pheasant delicately stretched his shimmering neck from a brake of thorn to peer at him. There was a goat of uny whiteness, gleaming like a goat of snow, who turned her mild eyes towards me and bleated softly, so that he knew I had arrived. He smiles. He lays down his pipe, his elder bird-call. He lays upon me his irrevocable hand. His eyes are quite green, as if from too much looking at the wood. There are some eyes eat you. The Erl-King lives by himself all alone in the heart of the wood in a house which has only the one room. His house is made of sticks and stones and has groelt of yellow li. Grass and weeds grow in the mossy roof. He chops fallen branches for his fire and draws his water from the stream in a tin pail. What does he eat? Why, the bounty of the woodland! Stewed les; savoury messes of chickweed sprinkled with nutmeg; he cooks the foliage of shepherds purse as if it were cabbage. He knows which of the frilled, blotched, rotted fungi are fit to eat; he uands their eldritch ways, how they spring up ht in lightless places and thrive ohings. Even the homely wood blewits, that you cook like tripe, with milk and onions, and the egg-yolk yellow terelle with its fan-vaulting and faint st of apricots, all spring up ht like bubbles of earth, sustained by nature, existing in a void. And I could believe that it has been the same with him; he came alive from the desire of the woods. He goes out in the m to gather his unnatural treasures, he hahem as delicately as he does pigeons eggs, he lays them in one of the baskets he weaves from osiers. He makes salads of dandelion that he calls rude names, "bum-pipes" or "piss-the-beds," and flavours them with a few leaves of wild strawberry but he will not touch the brambles, he says the Devil spits o Michaelmas. His nanny goat, the colour of whey, gives him her abundant milk and he make soft cheese that has a unique, rank, amniotic taste. Sometimes he traps a rabbit in a snare of string and makes a soup or stew, seasoned with wild garlic. He knows all about the wood and the creatures in it. He told me about the grass snakes, how the old ones open their mouths wide when they smell danger and the thin little ones disappear down the old ohroats until the fright is over and out they e again, to run around as usual. He told me how the wise toad who squats among the kingcups by the stream in summer has a very precious jewel in his head. He said the owl was a bakers daughter; then he smiled at me. He showed me how to thread mats from reeds and weave osier twigs into baskets and into the little cages in which he keeps his singing birds. His kit shakes and shivers with birdsong from cage upon cage of singing birds, larks and lis, which he piles up one on anainst the wall, a wall of trapped birds. How cruel it is, to keep wild birds in cages! But he laughs at me when I say that; laughs, and shows his white, poieeth with the spittle gleaming on them. He is an excellent housewife. His rustie is spid spas his well-scoured sau and skillet ly on the hearth side by side, like a pair of polished shoes. Over the hearth hang bunches mushrooms, the thin, curling kind they call jews-ears, which have grown on the elder trees since Judas hanged himself ohis is the kind of lore he tells me, tempting my half-belief. He hangs up herbs in buo dry, too -- thyme, marjoram, sage, verva..in, southern wood, yarrow. The room is musical and aromatid there is always a wood fire crag in the grate, a sweet, acrid smoke, a bright, glang flame. But I you ot get a tu of the old fiddle hanging on the wall beside the birds because all its strings are broken. Now, when I go for walks, sometimes in the ms when the frost has put its shiny thumbprint on the undergrowth or sometimes, though less frequently, yet more entigly, in the evening when the cold darkness settles down, I always go to the Erl-King and he lays me down on his bed of rustling straw where I lie at the mercy of his huge hands. He is the tender butcher who showed me how the price of flesh is love; skin the rabbit, he says! Off e all my clothes. The Erl-King-2 When he bs his hair that is the colour of dead leaves, dead leaves fall out of it; they rustle and drift to the ground as though he were a tree and he stand as still as a tree, when he wants the doves to flutter softly, ing as they e, down upon his shouders, those silly, fat, trusting woodies with the pretty wedding rings round their necks. He makes his whistles out of an elder twig and that is what he uses to call the birds out of the air -- all the birds e; and the sweetest singers he will keep in cages. The wind stirs the dark wood; it blows through the bushes. A little of the cold air that blows raveyards always goes with him, it crisps the hairs on the bay neck but I am not afraid of him; only afraid of vertigo, of the vertigo with which he seizes me. Afraid of falling down. Falling as a bird would fall through the air if the Erl-King tied up the winds in his handkerchief and khe ends together so they could not get out. Then the moving currents of the air would no longer sustain them and all the birds would fall at the imperative of gravity, as I fall down for him, and I know it is only because he is kind to me that I do not fall still further. The earth with its fragile fleece of last summers dying leaves and grasses supports me only out of plicity with him, because his flesh is of the same substance as those leaves that are slowly turning ih. He could thrust me into the seed-bed of years geion and I would have to wait until he whistled me up from my darkness before I could e back again. Yet, when he shakes out those two clear notes from his bird call, I e, like any other trusting thing that perches on the crook of his wrist. I found the Erl-King sitting on an ivy-covered stump winding all the birds in the wood to him on a diatonic spool of sound, one rising note, one falling note; such a sweet pierg call that down there came a soft, chirruping jostle of birds. The clearing was cluttered with dead leaves, some the colour of honey, some the colour of ders, some the colour of earth. He seemed so much the spirit of the place I saw without surprise how the fox laid its muzzle fearlessly upon his khe brown light of the end of the day drained into the moist, heavy earth; all silent, all still and the ell of night ing. The first drops of rain fell. In the wood, no shelter but his cottage. That was the way I walked into the bird-haunted solitude of the Erl-King, who keeps his feathered things in little cages he has woven out of osier twigs and there they sit and sing for him. Goats milk to drink, from a chipped tin mug; we shall eat the oatcakes he has baked on the hearthstone. Rattle of the rain on the roof. The latch ks on the door; we are shut up ih one another, in the brown room crisp with the st of burning logs that shiver with tiny flame, and I lie down on the Erl-Kings creaking palliasse of straw. His skin is the tint aure of sour cream, he has stiff, russet nipples ripe as berries. Like a tree that bears blossom and fruit on the same bough together, how pleasing, how lovely. And now -- ach! I feel your sharp teeth in the subaqueous depths of your kisses. The equinotical gales seize the bare elms and make them whizz and whirl like dervishes; you sink your teeth into my throat and make me scream. The white moon above the clearing coldly illumihe still tableaux of our embrats. How sweet I roamed, or, rather, used to roam; once I was the perfect child of the meadows of summer, but then the year turhe light clarified and I saw the gaunt Erl-King, tall as a tree with birds in its branches, and he drew me towards him on his magic lasso of inhuman music. If I strung that old fiddle with your hair, we could waltz together to the music as the exhausted daylight founders among the trees; we should have better music than the shrill prothalamions of the larks stacked in their pretty cages as the roof creaks with the freight of birds youve lured to it while we engage in your profane mysteries uhe leaves. He strips me to my last nakedness, that underskin of mauve, pearlised satin, like a skinned rabbit; then dresses me again in an embrace so lucid and enpassing it might be made of water. And shakes over me dead leaves as if into the stream I have bee. Sometimes the birds, at random, all singing, strike a chord. His skin covers me entirely; we are like two halves of a seed, enclosed in the same integument. I should like to grow enormously small, so that you could swallow me, like those queens in fairy tales who ceive when they swallow a grain of or a sesame seed. Then I could lodge inside your body and you could bear me. The dle flutters and goes out. His touch both soles aates me; I feel my heart pulse, then wither, naked as a stone on the r mattress while the lovely, moony night slides through the window to dapple the flanks of this i who makes cages to keep the sweet birds i me, drihirsty, kered, goblin-ridden, I go bad ba to have his fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in his dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning. Now the crows drop winter from their wings, ihe harshest season with their cry. It is growing colder. Scarcely a leaf left orees and the birds e to him ier numbers because, in this hard weather, it is lean pigs. The blackbirds and thrushes must hunt the snails from hedge bottoms and crack the shells on stones. But the Erl-King gives them and when he whistles to them a moment later you ot see him for the birds that have covered him like a soft fall of feathered snow. He spreads out a gobli of fruit for me, such appalling succe; I lie above him ahe light from the fire sucked into the black vortex of his eye, the omission of light at the tre, there, that exerts on me such a tremendous pressure, it draws me inwards. Eyes green as apples. Green as dead sea fruit. A wind rises; it makes a singular, wild, low, rushing sound. What big eyes you have. Eyes of an inparable luminosity, the numinous phosphoresce of the eyes of lythropes. T９9lｉb?he gelid green of your eyes fixes my reflective face. It is a preservative, like a green liquid amber; it catches me. I am afraid I will be trapped in it for ever like the poor little ants and flies that stuck their feet in resin before the sea covered the Baltic. He winds me into the circle of his eye on a reel of birdsong. There is a black hole in the middle of both your eyes; it is their still tre, looking there makes me giddy, as if I might fall into it. Yreen eye is a redug chamber. If I look into it long enough, I will bee as small as my own refle, I will diminish to a point and vanish. I will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be ed by you. I shall bee so small you keep me in one of your es and mock my loss of liberty. I have seen the cage you are weaving for me; it is a very pretty one and I shall sit, hereafter, in my cage among the other singing birds but I -- I shall be dumb, from spite. When I realised what the Erl-Ki to do with me, I was shaken with a terrible fear and I did not know what to do for I loved him with all my heart a I had no wish to join the whistling gregation he kept in his cages although he looked after them very affeately, gave them fresh water every day ahem well. His embraces were his es a, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven. But in his innoce he never knew he might be the death of me, although I knew from the first moment I saw him how Erl-King would do me grievous harm. Although the bow hangs beside the old fiddle on the wall, all the strings are broken so you ot play it. I dont know what kind of tunes you might play on it, if it were strung again; lullabies for foolish virgins, perhaps, and now I know the birds dont sing, they only cry because they t find their way out of the wood, have lost their flesh when they are dipped in the corrosive pools of his regard and now must live in cages. Sometimes he lays his head on my lap as me b his lovely hair for him; his bings are leaves of every tree in the wood and dryly susurrate around my feet. His hair falls down over my knees. Silence like a dream in front of the spitting fire while he lies at my feet and I b the dead leaves out of his languorous９９ｌib? hair. The robin has built his ihatch again, this year; he perches on an unburnt log, s his beak, ruffles his plumage. There is a plaintive sweetness in his song and a certain melancholy, because the year is over -- the robin, the friend of man, in spite of the wound in his breast from which Erl-King tore out his heart. Lay your head on my knee so that I t see the greenish inward-turning suns of your eyes any more. My hands shake. I shall take two huge handfuls of his rustling hair as he lies half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so he will not wake up, and softly, with hands as gentle as rain, I will str藏书网angle him with them. Then she will open all the cages ahe birds free; they will ge bato young girls, every one, each with the crimson imprint of his love-bite ohroats. She will carve off his great mah the knife he uses to skin the rabbits; she will string the old fiddle with five sirings of ash-brown hair. Then it will play discordant music without a hand toug it. The bow will dance over the rings of its own accord and will cry out: "Mother, mother, you have murdered me!" The Snow Child Midwinter -- invincible, immaculate. The t and his wife go riding, he on a grey mare and she on a blae, she ed in the glitteris of black foxes; and she wore high, black, shining boots with scarlet heels, and spurs. Fresh snow fell on snow already fallen; when it ceased, the whole world was white. "I wish I had a girl as white as snow," says the t. They ride on. They e to a hole ９９ｌib?in the snow; this hole is filled with blood. He says: "I wish I had a girl as red as blood." So they ride on again; here is a raven, perched on a bare bough. "I wish I had a girl as black as that birds feathers." As soon as he pleted her description, there she stood, beside the road, white skin, red mouth, black hair and stark naked; she was the child of his desire and the tess hated her. The t lifted her up and sat her in front of him on his saddle but the tess had only ohought: how shall I be rid of her? The tess dropped her glove in the snow and told the?9９lｉｂ? girl to get down to look for it; she meant to gallop off and leave her there but the t said: "Ill buy you new gloves." At that, the furs sprang off the tesss shoulders and twined round the naked girl. Then the tess threw her diamond brooch through the ice of a frozen pond: "Dive in ach it for me," she said; she thought the girl would drown. But the t said: "Is she a fish to s>im in such cold weather?" Then her boots leapt off the tesss feet and on to the girls legs. Now the tess was bare as a bone and the girl furred and booted; the t felt sorry for his wife. They came to a bush of roses, all in flower. "Pick me one," said the tess to the girl. "I t deny you that," said the t. So the girl picks a rose; pricks her finger ohorn; bleeds; screams; falls. Weeping, the t got off his horse, unfastened his breeches and thrust his virile member into the dead girl. The tess reined iamping mare.. and watched him narrowly; he was soon finished. Then the girl began to melt. Soon there was nothi of her but a feather a bird might have dropped; a blood stain, like the trace of a foxs kill on the snow; and the bbr>..rose she had pulled off the bush. Now the tess had all her clothes on again. With her long hand, she stroked her furs. The t picked up the rose, bowed and ha to his wife; wheouched it, she dropped it. "It bites!" she said. The Lady of the House of Love-1 At last the revenants became so troublesome the peasants abahe village and it fell solely into the possession of subtle and vindictive inhabitants who maheir presences by shadows that fall almost inperceptibly awry, too many shadows, even at midday, their shadows that have no sour anything visible; by the sound, sometimes, of sobbing in a derelict bedroom where a cracked mirror suspended from a wall does not reflect a presence; by a sense of uhat will afflict the traveller unwise enough to pause to drink from the fountain in the square that still gushes spring water from a faucet stu a stone lions mouth. A cat prowls in a weedy garden; he grins and spits, arches his back, bounces away from an intangible on four fear-stiffened legs. Now all shun the village below the chateau in which the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her aral crimes. Wearing an antique bridal gown, the beautiful queen of the vampires sits all alone in her dark, high house uhe eyes of the portraits of her demented and atrocious aors, eae of whom, through her, projects a baleful posthumous existence; she ts out the Tarot cards, ceaselessly struing a stellation of possibilities as if the ran99lｉb.dom fall of the cards on the red plush tablecloth before her could precipitate her from her chill, shuttered room into the try of perpetual summer and obliterate the perennial sadness of a girl who is both death and the maiden. Her voice is filled with distant sonorities, like reverberations in a cave: now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. And she is herself a cave full of echoes, she is a system of repetitions, she is a closed circuit. " a bird sing only the song it knows or it learn a new song?" She draws her long, sharp fingernail across the bars of the cage in which her pet lark sings, striking a plawang like that of the plucked heartstrings of a woman of metal. Her hair falls down like tears. The castle is mostly giveo ghostly octs but she herself has her own suite of drawing room and bedroom. Closely barred shutters and heavy velvet curtains keep out every leak of natural light. There is a round table on a single leg covered with a red plush cloth on which she lays out her iable Tarot; this room is never more than faintly illuminated by a heavily shaded lamp on the mantelpied the dark red figured aper is obscurely, distressingly patterned by the rain that drives in through the ed roof and leaves behind it random areas of staining, ominous marks like those left on the sheets by dead lovers. Depredations of rot and fungus everywhere. The unlit delier is so heavy with dust the individual prisms no longer show any shapes, industrious spiders have woven opies in the ers of this ornate and rotting place, have trapped the porcelain vases on the mantelpie soft grey s. But the mistress of all this disiion notiothing. She sits in a chair covered in med burgundy velvet at the low, round table and distributes the cards; sometimes the lark sings, but more often remains a sullen mound of drab feathers. Sometimes the tess will wake it for a brief za by strumming the bars of its cage; she likes to hear it announce how it ot escape. She rises when the sus and goes immediately to her table where she plays her game of patieil she grows hungry, until she bees ravenous. She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those toug imperfes that recile us to the imperfes of the human dition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness. The white hands of the tenebrous belle deal the hand of destiny. Her fingernails are lohan those of the mandarins of a a and each is pared to a fine point. These ah as fine and white as spikes of spun sugar are the visible signs of the destiny she wistfully attempts to evade via the ara; her claws ah have been sharpened ouries of corpses, she is the last bud of the poisohat sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who piicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania. The walls of her bedroom are hung with black satin, embroidered with tears of pearl. At the rooms four ers are funerary urns and bowls which emit slumbrous, pu fumes of inse. In the tre is an elaborate catafalque, in ebony, surrounded by long dles in enormous silver dlesticks. In a white laegligee stained a little with blood, the tess climbs up on her catafalque at dawn each m and lies down in an open coffin. A oned priest of the Orthodox faith staked out her wicked father at a Carpathian crossroad before her milk teeth grew. Just as they staked him out, the fatal t cried: "u is dead; long live u!" Now she possesses all the haunted forests and mysterious habitations of his vast domain; she is the hereditary andant of the army of shadows who camp in the village below her chateau, who pee the woods in the form of owls, bats and foxes, who make the milk curdle and butter refuse to e, who ride the horses all night in a wild hunt so they are sacks of skin and bone in the m, who milk the cows dry and, especially, torment pubest girls with fainting fits, disorders of the blood, diseases of the imagination. But the tess herself is indifferent to her own weird authority, as if she were dreaming it. In her dream, she would like to be human; but she does not know if that is possible. The Tarot always shows the same figuration: always she turns up La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution. On moonless nights, her keeper lets her out into the garden. This garden, an exceedingly sombre place, bears a strong resemblao a burial ground and all the roses her dead mother planted have grown up into a huge, spiked wall that incarcerates her in the castle of her iance. When the back door opens, the tess will sniff the air and howl. She drops, now, on all fours. Croug, quivering, she catches 1 the st of her prey. Delicious ch of the fragile bones of rabbits and small, furry things she pursues with fleet, four-footed speed; she will creep home, whimpering, with blood smeared on her cheeks. She pours water from the ewer in her bedroom into the bowl, she washes her face with the wing, fastidious gestures of a cat. The voraargin of huntresss nights in the gloomy garden, croud pounce, surrounds her habitual tormented somnambulism, her life or imitation of life. The eyes of this noal creature enlarge and glow. All claws ah, she strikes, she ges, but nothing sole her for the ghastliness of her dition, nothing. She resorts to the magifort of the Tarot pad shuffles the cards, lays them out, reads them, gathers them up with a sigh, shuffles them again, stantly strug hypotheses about a future which is irreversible. An old mute looks after her, to make sure she never sees the sun, that all day she stays in her coffin, to keep mirrors and all reflective surfaces away from her -- in short, to perform all the funs of the servants of vampires. Everything about this beautiful and ghastly lady is as it should be, queen of night, queen of terror -- except her horrible reluce for the role. heless, if an unwise adventurer pauses in the square of the deserted village to refresh himself at the fountain, a e in a black dress and white aproly emerges from a house. She will invite you with smiles aures; you will follow her. The tess wants fresh meat. When she was a little girl, she was like a fox and tented herself entirely with baby rabbits that squeaked piteously as she bit into their necks with a ed voluptuousness, with voles and fieldmice that palpitated for a bare momeween her embroidresss fingers. But now she is a woman, she must have men. If you stop too long beside the giggling fountain, you will be led by the hand to the tesss larder. All day, she lies in her coffin in her negligee of bloodstained lace. When the sun drops behind the mountain, she yawns and stirs and puts on the only dress she has, her mothers wedding dress, to sit and read her cards until she grows hungry. She loathes the food she eats; she would have liked to take the rabbits home with her, feed them ouce, pet them and make them a in her red-and-black oiserie escritoire, but hunger always overes her. She sinks her teeth into the neck where an artery throbs with fear; she will drop the deflated skin from which she has extracted all the nourishment with a small cry of both pain and disgust. And it is the same with the shepherd boys and gypsy lads who, ignorant or foolhardy, e to wash the dust from their feet ier of the fountain; the tesss governess brings them into the drawing room where the cards oable always show the Grim Reaper. The tess herself will serve them coffee in tiny cracked, precious cups, and little sugar cakes. The hobbledehoys sit with a spilling cup in one hand and a biscuit iher, gaping at the tess in her satin finery as she pours from a silver pot and chatters distractedly to put them at their fatal ease. A certain desolate stillness of her eyes indicates she is insolable. She would like to caress their lean brown cheeks and stroke their ragged hair. Wheakes them by the hand and leads them to her bedroom, they scarcely believe their luck. Afterwards, her governess will tidy the remains into a pile and it in its own discarded clothes. This mortal parcel she then discreetly buries in the garden. The blood on the tesss cheeks will be mixed with tears; her keeper probes her fingernails for her with a silver toothpick, to get rid of the fragments of skin and bohat have lodged there. Fee fie fo fum I smell the blood of an Englishman. O, ripe summer in the pubest years of the preseury, a young officer in the British army, blond, blue-eyed, heavy-muscled, visiting friends in Vienna, decided to spend the remainder of his furlough expl the little-known uplands of Romania. When he quixotically decided to travel the rutted cart-tracks by bicycle, he saw all the humour of it: "on two wheels in the land of the vampires". So, laughing, he sets out on his adventure. He has the special quality of virginity, most a ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance. He is more than he knows -- and has about him, besides, the special glamour of that geion for whom history has already prepared a special, exemplary fate irenches of Frahis being, rooted in ge and time, is about to collide with the timeless Gothic eternity of the vampires, for whom all is as it has always been and will be, whose cards always fall in the same pattern. Although so young, he is also rational. He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip round the Carpathians. To ride a bicycle is in itself some prote against superstitious fear, sihe bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motiory at the servian! Give me two spheres and a straight line and I will show you how far I take them. Voltaire himself might have ied the bicycle, si tributes muans welfare and nothing at all to his bane. Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes as only the most decorous speeds. How a bicycle ever be an implement of harm? A single kiss woke up the Sleepiy in the Wood. The waxen fingers of the tess, fingers of a holy image, turn up the card called Les Amoureux. Never, never before. . . never before has the tess cast herself a fate involving love. She shakes, she trembles, her great eyes close beh her finely veined, nervously fluttering eyelids; the lovely ancer has, this time, the first time, dealt herself a hand of love ah. Be he alive or be he dead Ill grind his boo make my bread. At the mauvish beginnings of evening, the English msieu toils up the hill to the village he glimpsed from a great way off; he must dismount and push his bicycle before him, the path too steep to ride, He hopes to find a friendly inn to rest the night; hes hot, hungry,?hirsty, weary, dusty. . . At first, such disappoi, to discover the roofs of all the cottages caved in and tall weeds thrusting through the piles of fallen tiles, shutters hanging dissolately from their hinges, airely uninhabited place. And the raation whispers, as if foul secrets, here, where, if one were suffitly imaginative, one could almost imagiwisted faces appearing momentarily beh the crumbling eaves. . . but the adventure of it all, and the solation of the poignant brightness of the hollyhocks still bravely blooming in the shaggy gardens, and the beauty of the flaming su, all these siderations soon overcame his disappoi, even assuaged the faint unease hed felt. And the fountaihe village womeo wash their clothes still gushed out bright, clear water; he gratefully washed his feet and hands, applied his mouth to the faucet, thehe icy stream run over his face. When he raised his dripping, gratified head from the lions mouth, he saw, silently arrived beside him in the square, an old woman who smiled eagerly, almost ciliatorily at him. She wore a bla..ck dress and a white apron, with a housekeepers key ring at her waist; her grey hair was ly coiled in a oh the white linen headdress worn by elderly women of that region. She bobbed a curtsy at the young man and beed him to follow her. When he hesitated, she poiowards the great bulk of the mansion above them, whose fagade loured over the village, rubbed her stomach, poio her mouth, rubbed her stomach again, clearly miming an invitation to supper. Then she beed him again, this time turnierminedly upon her heel as though she would brook no opposition. A great, intoxicated surge of the heavy st of red roses blew into his face as soon as they left the village, indug a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness strong enough, almost, to fell him. Too many roses. Too many roses bloomed on enormous thickets that lihe path, thickets bristling with thorns, and the flowers themselves were almost too luxuriant, their huge gregations of plush petals somehow obse in their excess, their whorled, tightly budded cores eous in their implications. The mansion emerged grudgingly out of this jungle. In the subtle and haunting light of the setting sun, that golden light rich with nostalgia for the day that was just past, the sombre visage of the place, part manor house, part fortified farmhouse, immense, rambling, a dilapidated eagles atop the crag down which its attendant village meandered, reminded him of childhood tales on winter evenings, when he and his brothers and sisters scared themselves half out of their wits with ghost stories set in just such places and then had to have dles to light them up newly terrifying stairs to bed. He could almost have regretted accepting the es unspoken invitation; but now, standing before the door of time -- eroded oak while she selected a huge iron key from the king ringful at her waist, he k was too late to turn bad brusquely reminded himself he was no child, now, to be frightened of his own fancies. The old lady unlocked the door, which swung baelodramatically creaking hinges, and fussily took charge of his bicycle, in spite of his protests. He felt a certain involuntary sinking of the heart to see his beautiful two-wheeled symbol of rationality vanish into the dark entrails of the mansion, to, no doubt, some damp outhouse where they would not oil or check its tyres. But, in for a penny, in for a pound -- in his youth and strength and bloy, in the invisible, even unaowledged pentacle of his virginity, the young man stepped over the threshold of us castle and did not shiver in the blast of cold air, as from the mouth of a grave, that emanated from the lightless, cavernous interior. The e took him to a little chamber where there was a black oak table spread with a white cloth and this cloth was carefully laid with heavy silverware, a little tarnished, as if someoh foul breath had breathed on it, but laid with one plaly. Curiouser and curiouser; io the castle for dinner, now he must dine alone. All the same, he sat down as she had bid him. Although it was not yet dark outside, the curtains were closely drawn and only the sparing light trig from a single oil lamp showed him how dismal his surroundings were. The e bustled about to get him a bottle of wine and a glass from an a et of wormy oak; while he bemusedly drank his wine, she disappeared but soourned bearing a steaming platter of the local spiced meat stew with dumplings, and a shank of black bread. He was hungry after his long days ride, he ate heartily and polished his plate with the crust, but this coarse food was hardly the eai hed expected from the gentry and he uzzled by the assessing glint in the dumb womans eyes as she watched him eating. But she darted off to get him a sed helping as soon as hed fihe first one and seemed so friendly and helpful, besides, that he knew he could t on a bed for the night in the castle, as well as his supper, so he sharply reprimanded himself for his own childish lack of enthusiasm for the eerie silehe clammy chill of the place. When hed put away the sed plateful, the old woman came aured he should leave the table and follow her once again. She made a pantomine of drinking; he deduced he was now io take after-dinner coffee in another room with some more elevated member of the household who had not wished to dih him but, all the same, wao make his acquaintance. An honour, no doubt; in defereo his hosts opinion of himself, he straightened his tie, brushed the crumbs from his tweed jacket. He was surprised to find how ruinous the interior of the house was -- cobwebs, worm-eaten beams, crumbling plaster; but the mute e resolutely wound him on the reel of her lantern down endless corridors, up winding staircases, through the galleries where the painted eyes of family portraits briefly flickered as they passed, eyes that belonged, he noticed to faces, one and all, of a quite memorable beastliness. At last she paused and, behind the door where theyd halted, he heard a faint, metallic twang as of, perhaps, a chord stru a harpsichord. And then, wonderfully, the liquid cascade of the song of a lark, bringing to him, in the heart -- had he but known it -- of Juliets tomb, all the freshness of m. The e rapped with her knuckles on the panels; the most seductively caressing voice he had ever heard in his life softl藏书网y called out, in heavily ated French, the adopted language of the Romanian aristocracy: "Entrez." The Lady of the House of Love-2 First of all, he saw only a shape, a shape imbued with a faint luminosity si caught and reflected in its yellowed surfaces what little light there was in the ill-lit room; this shape resolved itself into that of, of all things, a hooped-skirted dress of white satin draped here and there with lace, a dress fifty or sixty years out of fashion but once, obviously, intended for a wedding. And then he saw the girl who wore the dress, a girl with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail that her dress seemed to him to hang suspended, as if ued in the dank air, a fabulous lending, a self-articulated garment in which she lived like a ghost in a mae. All the light in the room came from a low-burning lamp with a thick greenish shade on a distant mantelpiece; the e who apanied him shielded her lantern with her hand, as if to protect her mistress from too suddenly seeing, or their guest from too suddenly seeing her. So that it was little by little, as his eyes grew aced to the half-d９９ｌｉb.ark, that he saw how beautiful and how very young the bedizened scarecrow was, ahought of a child dressing up in her mothers clothes, perhaps a child putting on the clothes of a dead mother in order t her, however briefly, to life again. The tess stood behind a low table, beside a pretty, silly, gilt-and-wire birdcage, hands outstretched in a distracted attitude that was almost one of flight, she looked startled by their entry as if she had not requested it. With her stark white face, her lovely deaths head surrounded by long dark hair that fell down as straight as if it were soaki, she looked like a shipwrecked bride. Her huge dark eyes almost broke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; yet he was disturbed, almost repelled, by her extraordinarily fleshy mouth, a mouth with wide, full, promi lips of a vibrant purplish-crimson, a morbid mouth. Even -- but he put the thought away from him immediately -- a whores mouth. She shivered all the time, a starveling chill, a malarial agitation of the bones. He thought she must be only sixteen or seventeen years old, no more, with the hectihealthy beauty of a ptive. She was the chatelaine of all this decay. With many tender precautions, the e now raised the light she held to show his hostess her guests face. At that, the tess let out a faint mewing cry and made a blind, appalled gesture with her hands, as if pushing him away, so that she knocked against the table and a butterfly dazzle of painted cards fell to the floor. Her mouth formed a round "o" of woe, she swayed a little and then sank into her chair, where she lay as if now scarcely capable of moving. A bewilderiion. Tsking under her breath, the e busily poked about oable until she found an enormous pair of dark green glasses, such as blind beggars wear, and perched them on the tesss nose. He went forward to pick up her cards for her from a carpet that, he saw to his surprise, art rotted aartly encroached upon by all kinds of virulent-looking fungi. He retrieved the cards and shuffled them carelessly together, for they meant nothing to him, though they seemed strange playthings for a young girl. What a grisly picture of a capering skeleton! He covered it up with a happier one -- of two young lovers, smiling at one another, and put her toys bato a hand so slender you could almost see the frail of bones beh the translut skin, a hand with fingernails as long, as finely pointed, as banjo picks. At his touch, she seemed to revive a little and almost smiled, raising herself upright. "Coffee," she said. "You must have coffee." And scooped up her cards into a pile so that the e could set before her a silver spirit kettle, a silver coffee pot, cream jug, sugar basin, cups ready on a silver tray, a straouch of elegance, even if discoloured, in this devastated interior whose mistress ethereally shone as if with her own blighted, submarine radiance. The e found him a chair and tittering noiselessly, >..departed, leaving the room a little darker. While the young lady atteo the coffee-making, he had time to plate with some distaste a further series of family portraits which decorated the stained and peeling walls of the room; these livid faces all seemed torted with a febrile madness and the blubber lips, the huge, demented eyes that all had in on bore a disquieting resemblao those of the hapless victim of inbreeding now patiently filtering her fragrant brew, even if some rare grace has so firansformed those features when it came to her case. The lark, its chorus done, had long ago fallen silent; no sound but the k of silver on a. Soon, she held out to him a tiny cup of rose-painted a. "Wele," she said in her voice with the rushing sonorities of the o in it, a voice that seemed to e elsewhere than from her white, still throat. "Wele to my chateau. I rarely receive visitors and thats a misfortune sihing animates me half as much as the presence of a stranger. . . This place is so lonely, now the village is deserted, and my one panion, alas, she ot speak. Often I am so silent that I think I, too, will soon fet how to do so and nobody here will ever talk any more." She offered him a sugar biscuit from a Limoges plate; her fingernails struck carillons from the antique a. Her voice, issuing from those red lips like the obese roses in her garden, lips that do not move -- her voice is curiously disembodied; she is like a doll, he thought, a ventriloquists doll, or, more, like a great ingenious piece of clockwork. For she seemed iely powered by some slow energy of which she was not in trol; as if she had been wound up years ago, when she was born, and now the meism was inexorably running down and would leave her lifeless. This idea that she might be an automaton, made of white velvet and black fur, that could not move of its own accord, never quite deserted him; indeed, it deeply moved his heart. The ival air of her white dress emphasised her uy, like a sad bine who lost her way in the wood a long time ago and never reached the fair. "And the light. I must apologise for the lack of light. . . a hereditary affli of the eyes. . ." Her blind spectacles gave him his handsome face baself twice over; if he presented himself to her naked face, he would dazzle her like the sun she is forbidden to look at because it would shrivel her up at once, pht bird, poor butcher bird. Vouse serez ma proie. You have such a fihroat, msieu, like a n of marble. When you came through the door retaining about you all the golden light of the summers day of which I know nothing, nothing, the card called "Les Amoureux" had just emerged from the tumbling chaos of imagery before me; it seemed to me you had stepped off the card into my darkness and, for a moment, I thought, perhaps, you might irradiate it. I do not mean to hurt you. I shall wait for you in my brides dress in the dark. The bridegroom is e, he will go into the chamber which has been prepared for him. I am o solitude and dark; I do not mean to hurt you. I will be very gentle. (And could love free me from the shadows? a bird sing only the song it knows, or it learn a new song?) See, how Im ready for you. Ive always been ready for you; Ive been waiting for you in my wedding dress, why have you delayed for so long. . . it will all be over very quickly. You will feel no pain, my darling. She herself is a haunted house. She does not possess herself; her aors sometimes e and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening. She has the mysterious solitude of ambiguous states; she hovers in a no-mans laween life ah, sleeping and waking, behind the hedge of spiked flowers, us sanguinary rosebud. The beastly forebears on the walls o a perpetual repetition of their passions. (One kiss, however, and only one, woke up the Sleepiy in the Wood.) Nervously, to ceal her inner voices, she keeps up a front of insequential chatter in French while her aors leer and grima the walls; however hard she tries to think of any other, she only knows of one kind of mation. He was struck, once again, by the birdlike, predatory claws which tipped her marvellous hands; the sense of strahat had been growing in him since he buried his head uhe streaming water in the village, since he ehe dark portals of the fatal castle, now fully overcame him. Had he been a cat, he would have bounced backwards from her hands on four fear-stiffened legs, but he is not a cat: he is a hero. A fual disbelief in what he sees before him sustains him, even in the boudoir of tess u herself; he would have said, perhaps, that there are some things which, even if they are true, we should not believe possible. He might have said: it is folly to believe ones eyes. Not so much that he does not believe in her; he see her, she is real. If she takes off her dark glasses, from her eyes will stream all the images that populate this vampire-haunted land, but, since he himself is immuo shadow, due to his virginity -- he does not yet know what there is to be afraid of -- and due to his heroism, which makes him like the sun, he sees before him, first and foremost, an inbred, highly strung girl child, fatherless, motherless, kept in the dark too long and pale as a plant that never sees the light, half-blinded by some hereditary dition of her eyes. And though he feels unease, he ot feel terror; so he is like the boy in the fairy tale, who does not know how to shudder, and not spooks, ghouls, beasties, the Devil himself and all his retinue could do the trick. This laagination gives his heroism to the hero. He will learn to shudder irenches. But this girl ake him shudder. Now it is dark. Bats swoop and squeak outside the tightly shuttered windows. The coffee is all drunk, the sugar biscuits eaten. Her chatter es trig and diminishing to a stop; she twists her fiogether, picks at the lace of her dress, shifts nervously in her chair. Owls shriek; the impedimenta of her dition squeak and gibber all around us. Now you are at the place of annihilation, now you are at the place of annihilation. She turns her head away from the blue beams of his eyes; she knows no other mation than the only one she offer him. She has en for three days. It is diime. It is bed-time. Suivez-moi. Je vous attendais. Vouse serez ma proie. The raven caws on the accursed roof. "Diime, diime," g the portraits on the walls. A ghastly hunger gnaws her entrails; she has waited for him all her life without knowing it. The handsome bicyclist, scarcely believing his luck, will follow her into her bedroom; the dles around her sacrificial altar burn with a low, clear flame, light catches on the silver tears stitched to the wall. She will assure him, in the very voice of temptation: "My clothes have but to fall and you will see before you a succession of mysteries." She has no mouth with which to kiss, no hands with which to caress, only the fangs and talons of a beast of prey. To touch the mineral sheen of the flesh revealed in the cool dle gleam is to invite her fatal embrace; hear her low, sweet voice, she will the lullaby of the House of u. Embraces, kisses; yolden head, of a lion, although I have never seen a lion, only imagined one, of the sun, even if Ive only seen the picture of the sun oarot card, yolden head of the lover whom I dreamed would one day free me, this head will fall back, its eyes roll upwards in a spasm you will mistake for that of love and not of death. The bridegroom bleeds on my ied marriage bed. Stark and dead, poor bicyclist; he has paid the price of a night with the tess and some think it too high a fee while some do not. Tomorrow, her keeper will bury his bones under her roses. The food her roses feed on gives them their rich colour, their swooning odour, that breathes lasciviously of forbidden pleasures. Suivez-moi "Suivez-moi!" The handsome bicyclist, fearful for his hostesss health, her sanity, gingerly follows her hysterical imperiousness into the other room; he would like to take her in his arms and protect her from the aors who leer down from the walls. What a macabre bedroom! His el, an old goat with jaded appetites, had given him the visiting card of a brothel in Paris where, the satyr assured him, ten louis would buy just such a lugubrious bedroom, with a naked girl upon a coffin; offstage, the brothel pianist played the Dies Irae on a harmonium and, amidst all the perfumes of the embalming parlour, the er took his necrophiliac pleasure of a pretend corpse. He had good-naturedly refused the old mans offer of su initiation; how he now take criminal advantage of the disirl with fever-hot, bone-dry, taloned hands and eyes that deny all the erotiise of her body with their terror, their sadness, their dreadful, balked tenderness? So delicate and damned, poor thing. Quite damned. Yet I do believe she scarcely knows what she is doing. She is shaking as if her limbs are not effitly joiogether, as if she might shake into pieces. She raises her hands to unfasten the neck of her dress and her eyes well with tears, they trickle dowh the rim of her dark glasses. She t take off her mothers wedding dress unless she takes off her dark glasses; she fumbled the ritual, it is no longer inexorable. The meism within her fails her, now, when she needs it most. Wheakes off the dark glasses, they slip from her fingers and smash to pieces oiled floor. There is no room in her drama for improvisation; and this ued, mundane noise of breaking glass breaks the wicked spell in the room, entirely. She gapes blindly down at the splinters and iively smears the tears across her face with her fist. What is she to do now? When she ko try to gather the fragments of glass together, a sharp sliver pierces deeply into the pad of her thumb; she cries out, sharp, real. She kneels among the broken glass and watches the bright bead of blood form a drop. She has never seen her own blood before, not her own blood. It exercises upon her an awed fasation. Into this vile and murderous room, the handsome bicyclist brings the i remedies of the nursery; in himself, by his presence, he is an exorcism. He gently takes her hand away from her and dabs the blood with his own handkerchief, but still it spurts out. And so he puts his mouth to the wound. He will kiss it better for her, as her mother, had she lived, would have done. All the silver tears fall from the wall with a flimsy tinkle. Her painted aors turn away their eyes and grind their fangs. How she bear the pain of being human? The end of exile is the end of being. He was awakened by larksong. The shutters, the curtains, even the long-sealed windows of the horrid bedroom were all opened up and light and air streamed in; now you could see how tawdry it all was, how thin and cheap the satin, the catafalque not ebony at all but black-painted paper stretched on struts of wood, as iheatre. The wind had blown droves of petals from the roses outside in to the room and their crimson residue swirled fragrantly about the floor. T..he dles had burnt out and she must have set her pet lark free because it perched on the edge of the silly coffin to sing him its ecstatic m song. His bones were stiff and ag, hed slept on the floor with his bundled-up jacket for a pillow, after hed put her to bed. But now there was no trace of her to be seen, except, lightly tossed across the crumbled black satin bedcover, a laegligee lightly soiled with blood, as it might be from a womans menses, and a rose that must have e from the fierce bushes nodding through the window. The air was heavy with inse and roses and made him cough. The tess must have got up early to enjoy the sunshine, slipped outside to gather him a rose. He got to his feet, coaxed the lark on to his wrist and took it to the window. At first, it exhibited the reluce for the .sky of a long-caged thing, but, wheossed it up on to the currents of the air, it spread its wings and and away into the clear blue bowl of the heavens; he watched its trajectory with a lift of joy in his heart. Then he padded into the boudoir, his mind busy with plans. We shall take her to Zurich, to a ic; she will be treated for nervous hysteria. Then to an eye specialist, for her photophobia, and to a dentist, to put her teeth into better shape. Any petent manicurist will deal with her claws. We shall turn her into the lovely girl she is; I shall cure her of all these nightmares. The heavy curtains are pulled back, to let in brilliant fusillades of early m light; in the desolation of the boudoir, she sits at her round table in her white dress, with the cards laid out before her. She has dropped off to sleep over the cards of destiny that are so fingered, so soiled, so worn by stant shuffling that you o longer make the image out on any single one of them. She is not sleeping. Ih, she looked far older, less beautiful and so, for the first time, fully human. I will vanish in the m light; I was only an iion of darkness. And I leave you as a souvenir the dark, fanged rose I plucked from between my thighs, like a flower laid on a grave. On a grave. My keeper will attend to everything. u always attends his own obsequies; she will not go to the graveyard unattended. And now the aterialised, weeping, and roughly gestured him to be gone. After a sear some foul-smelling outhouses, he discovered his bicycle and, abandoning his holiday, rode directly to Bucharest where, at the poste restante, he found a telegram summoning him to rejoin his regiment at once. Much later, when he ged bato uniform in his quarters, he discovered he still had the tesss rose, he must have tucked it into the breast pocket of his cyg jacket after he had found her body. Curiously enough, although he had brought it so far away from Romania, the flower did not seem to be quite dead and, on impulse, because the girl had been so lovely and her death so ued and pathetic, he decided to try and resurrect her rose. He filled his tooth glass with water from the carafe on his locker and popped the rose into it, so that its withered head floated on the surface. Wheurned from the mess that evening, the heavy fragrance of t us rose drifted dowone corridor of the barracks to greet him, and his spartan quarters brimmed with the reeling odour of a glowing, velvet, monstrous flower whose petals had regained all their former bloom aicity, their corrupt, brilliant, baleful splendour. day, his regiment embarked for France. The Werewolf It is a northern try; they have cold weather, they have cold hearts. Cold; tempest; wild beasts in the forest. It is a hard life. Their houses are built of logs, dark and smoky within. There will be a crude i of the virgin behind a guttering dle, the leg of a pig hung up to cure, a string mushrooms. A bed, a stool, a table. Harsh, brief, poor lives. To these upland woodsmen, the Devil is as real as you or I. More so; they have not seen us nor even know that we exist, but the Devil they glimpse often in the graveyards, those bleak and toug townships of the dead where the graves are marked with portraits of the deceased in the na?f style and there are no flowers to put in front of t..hem, no flrow there, so they put out small, votive s, little loaves, sometimes a cake that the bears e lumbering from the margins of the forest to snatch away. At midnight especially on urgisnacht, the Devil holds pii the graveyards and ihe witches; then they dig up fresh corpses, ahem. Anyone will tell you that. Wreaths of garli the doors keep out the vampires. A blue-eyed child bor first on the night of St Johns Eve will have sed sight. When they discover a witch -- some old woman whose cheeses ripen when her neighbours do not, another old woman whose black cat, oh, sinister! follows her about all the time, they strip the e, search her for marks, for the supernumary nipple her familiar sucks. They soon find it. Theoo death. Winter and cold weather. Go and visit grandmother, who has been sick. Take her the oatcakes Ive baked for her on the hearthstone and a little pot of butter. The good child does as her mother bids -- five miles trudge through the forest; do not leave the path because of the bears, the wild boar, the starving wolves. Here, take your fathers hunting knife; you know how to use it. The child had a scabby coat of sheepskin to keep out the cold, she khe forest too well to fear it but she must always be on her guard. When she heard that freezing howl of a wolf, she dropped her gifts, seized her knife and turned on the beast. It was a huge one, with red eyes and running, grizzled chops; any but a mountaineers child would have died ht at the sight of it. It went for her throat, as wolves do, but she made a great swipe at it with her fathers knife and slashed off its right forepaw. The wolf let out a gulp, almost a sob, when she saw what had happeo it; wolves are less brave than they seem. It went lolloping off dissolately betweerees as well as it could on three legs, leaving a trail of blood behind it. The child wiped the blade of her knife on her apron, ed up the wolfs paw in the cloth in which her mother had packed the oatcakes a on towards her grandmothers house. Soon it came on to snow so thickly that the path and any footsteps, track or spoor that might have been upon it were obscured. She found her grandmother was so sick she had taken to her bed and fallen into a fretful sleep, moaning and shaking so that the child guessed she had a fever. She felt the forehead, it burned. She shook out the cloth from her basket, to use it to make the old woman a cold press, and t.?he wolfs paw fell to the floor. But it was no longer a wolfs paw. It was a hand, chopped off at the wrist, a hand toughened with work and freckled with age. There was a wedding ring ohird finger and a wart on the index finger. By the wart, she k for her grandmothers hand. She pulled back the sheet but the old woman woke up, at that, and began tle, squawking, and shrieking like a thing possessed. But the child was strong, and armed with her fathers hunting knife; she mao hold her grandmother down long enough to see the cause of her fever. There was a bloody stump where her right hand should have beeering already. The child crossed herself and cried out so loud the neighbours heard her and came rushing in. They khe wart on the hand at once for a witipple; they drove the old woman, in her shift as she was, out into the snow with sticks, beating her old carcass as far as the edge of the forest, aed her with stones until she fell down dead. Now the child lived in her grandmothers house; she prospered. The Company of Wolves-1 O and only one howls in the woods by night. The wolf is ivore inate and hes as ing as he is ferocious; once hes had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do. At night, the eyes of wolves shine like dle flames, yellowish, reddish, but that is because the pupils of their eyes fatten on darkness and catch the light from your lao flash it back to you -- red for danger; if a wolfs eyes reflely moonlight, then they gleam a cold and unnatural green, a mineral, a pierg colour. If the benighted traveller spies those luminous, terrible sequins stitched suddenly on the black thickets, then he knows he must run, if fear has not struck him stock-still. But those eyes are all you will be able to glimpse of the forest assassins as they cluster invisibly round your smell of meat as you gh the wood unwisely late. They will be like shadows, they will be like wraiths, grey members of a gregation of nightmare; hark! his long, wavering howl. . . an aria of fear made audible. The wolfsong is the sound of the rending you will suffer, in itself a murdering. It is winter and cold weather. In this region of mountain and forest, there is now nothing for the wolves to eat. Goats and sheep are locked up in the byre, the deer departed for the remaining pasturage on the southern slopes -- wolves grow lean and famished. There is so little flesh ohat you could t the starveling ribs through their pelts, if they gave you time before they pouhose slavering jaws; the lolling tohe rime of saliva on the grizzled chops -- of all the teeming perils of the night and the forest, ghosts, hobgoblins, ogres that grill babies upon gridirons, witches that fatten their captives in cages for ibal tables, the wolf is worst for he ot listen to reason. You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are. Step between the portals of the great pines where the shaggy braangle about you, trapping the unwary traveller is as if the vegetation itself were in a plot with the wolves who live there, as though the wicked trees go fishing on behalf of their friends -- step betweeeposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you. They are grey as famihey are as unkind as plague. The grave-eyed children of the sparse villages always carry knives with them when they go to tend the little flocks of goats that provide the homesteads with acrid milk and rank, maggoty cheese. Their knives are half as big as they are, the blades are sharpened daily. But the wolves have ways of arriving at your owhside. We try and try but sometimes we ot keep them out. There is no winters night the cottager does not fear to see a lean, grey, famished snout questing uhe door, and there was a woman oten in her own kit as she was strai9９ｌｉb?ning the mai. Fear and flee the wolf; for, worst of all, the wolf may be more than he seems. There was a hunter onear here, that trapped a wolf in a pit. This wolf had massacred the sheep and goats; eaten up a mad old man who used to live by himself in a hut half the mountain and sing to Jesus all day; pounced on a girl looking after the sheep, but she made such a otion that men came with rifles and scared him away and tried to track him to the forest but he was ing and easily gave them the slip. So this hunter dug a pit and put a du it, for bait, all alive -- oh; and he covered the pit with straw smeared with wolf dung. Quack, quack! went the dud a wolf came slinking out of the forest, a big one, a heavy one, he weighed as much as a grown man and the straw gave way beh him -- into the pit he tumbled. The hunter jumped down after him, slit his throat, cut off all his paws for a trophy. And then no wolf at all lay in front of the hunter but the bloody trunk of a man, headless, footless, dying, dead. A witch from up the valley ourned aire wedding party into wolves because the groom had settled on anirl. She use to order them to visit her, at night, from spite, and they would sit and howl around her cottage for her, serenading her with their misery. Not so very long ago, a young woman in our village married a man who vanished away on her wedding night. The bed was made with new sheets and the bride lay down in it; the groom said, he was going out to relieve himself, insisted on it, for the sake of decy, and she drew the coverlet up to her and lay there. And she waited and she waited and then she waited again -- surely hes been gone a long time? Until she jumps up in bed and shrieks to hear a ho9９ｌｉｂ?wling, ing on the wind from the forest. That long-drawn, wavering howl has, for all its fearful resonance, some i sadness in it, as if the beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own dition. There is a vast melancholy in the ticles of the wolves, melancholy infinite as the forest, endless as these long nights of winter ahat ghastly sadness, that m for their own, irremediable appetites, ever move the heart for not one phrase in it hints at the possibility of redemption; grace could not e to the wolf from its own despair, only through some external mediator, so that, sometimes, the beast will look as if he half weles the khat dispatches him. The young womans brothers searched the outhouses and the haystacks but never found any remains so the sensible girl dried her eyes and found herself another husband not too shy to piss into a pot who spent the nights indoors. She gave him a pair of bonny babies and all went right as a trivet until, one freezing night, the night of the solstice, the hinge of the year when things do not fit together as well as they should, the lo night, her first good man came home again. A great thump on the door announced him as she was stirring the soup for the father of her children and she knew him the moment she lifted the lat although it was years since shed worn black for him and now he was in rags and his hair hung down his bad never saw a b, alive with lice. "Here I am again, missus," he said. "Get me my bowl of cabbage and be quick about it." Then her sed husband came in with wood for the fire and when the first one saw shed slept with another man and, worse, clapped his red eyes on her little children whod crept into the kit to see what all the din was about, he shouted: "I wish I were a wolf again, to teach this whore a lesson!" So a wolf he instantly became and tore off the eldest boys left foot before he was chopped by the hatchet they used for chopping logs. But when the wolf lay bleeding and gasping its last, the pelt peeled off again and he was just as he had been, years ago, when he ran away from his marriage bed, so that she wept and her sed husba her. They say theres an oihe Devil gives you that turns you into a wolf the minute you rub it on. Or, that he was bor first and had a wolf for his father and his torso is a mans but his legs aals are a wolfs. And he has a wolfs heart. Seven years is a werewolfs natural span but if you burn his human clothes you n him to wolfishness for the rest of his life, so old wives hereabouts think it some prote to throw a hat or an apron at the werewolf, as if clothes made the ma by the eyes, those phosphorest eyes, you know him in all his shapes; the eyes alone unged by metamorphosis. Before he bee a wolf, the lythrope strips stark naked. If you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you. It is midwinter and the robin, the friend of man, sits on the handle of the gardeners spade and sings. It is the worst time in all the year for wolves but this strong-minded child insists she will go off through the wood. She is quite sure the wild beasts ot harm her although, well-warned, she lays a carving knife in the basket her mother has packed with cheeses. There is a bottle of harsh liquor distilled from brambles; a batch of flat oatcakes baked on the heathstone; a pot or two of jam. The girl will take these delicious gifts to a reclusive grandmother so old the burden of her years is crushio death. Granny lives two hours trudge through the winter woods; the child s herself up ihick shawl, draws it over her head. She steps into her stout wooden shoes; she is dressed and ready and it is Christmas Eve. The malign door of the solstice still swings upon its hinges but she has been too much loved ever to feel scared. Children do not stay young for long in this savage try. There are no toys for them to play with so they work hard and grow wise but this one, so pretty and the you of her family, a little late-er, had been indulged by her mother and the grandmother whod knitted her the red shawl that, today, has the ominous if brilliant look of blood on snow. Her breasts have just begun to swell; her hair is like lint, so fair it hardly makes a shadow on her pale forehead; her cheeks are an emblematic scarlet and white and she has just started her womans bleeding, the closide her that will strike, henceforward, once a month. She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity. She is an unbroken egg; she is a sealed vessel; she has inside her a magic space the entrao which is shut tight with a plug of membrane; she is a closed system; she does not know how to shiver. She has her knife and she is afraid of nothing. Her father might forbid her, if he were home, but he is away in the forest, gathering wood, and her mother ot deny her. The forest closed upon her like a pair of jaws. There is always something to look at in the forest, even in the middle of winter -- the huddled mounds of birds, succumbed to the lethargy of the season, heaped on the creaking boughs and too forlorn to sing; the bright frills of the winter fungi on the blotched trunks of the trees; the eiform slots of rabbits and deer, the herringboracks of the birds, a hare as lean as a rasher of ba streaking across the path where the thin sunlight dapples the russet brakes of last years bra. When she heard the freezing howl of a distant wolf, her practised hand sprang to the handle of her knife, but she saw no sign of a wolf at all, nor of a naked maher, but then she heard a clattering among the brushwood and there sprang on to the path a fully clothed one, a very handsome young one, in the green coat and wideawake hat of a hunter, laden with carcasses of game birds. She had her hand on her k the first rustle of twigs but he laughed with a flash of white teeth when he saw her and made her a ic yet flattering little bow; shed never seen such a fine fellow before, not among the rustic s of her native village. So on they went, through the thiing light of the afternoon. The Company of Wolves-2 Soon they were laughing and joking like old friends. When he offered to carry her basket, she gave it to him although her knife was in it because he told her his rifle would protect them. As the day darkened, it began to snow again; she felt the first flakes settle on her eyelashes but now there was only half a mile to go and there would be a fire, and hot tea, and a wele, a warm one surely, for the dashing huntsman as well as for herself. This young man had a remarkable obje his pocket. It was a pass. She looked at the little round glassfa the palm of his hand and watched the wavering needle with a vague wonder. He assured her this pass had taken him safely through the wood on his hunting trip because the needle always told him with perfect accuracy where the north was. She did not believe it; she knew she should never leave the path on the way through the wood or else she would be lost instantly. He laughed at her again; gleaming trails of spittle g to his teeth. He said, if he plunged off the path into the forest that surrouhem, he would guarao arrive at her grandmothers house a good quarter of an hour before she did, plotting his way through the undergrowth with his pass, while she trudged the long way, along the winding path. I dont believe you. Besides, arent you afraid of the wolves? He only tapped the gleaming butt of his rifle and grinned. Is it a bet? he asked her. Shall we make a game of it? What will you give me if I get to yrandmothers house before you? What would you like? she asked disingenuously. A kiss. onplaces of a rustic sedu; she lowered her eyes and blushed. He went through the undergrowth and took her basket with him but she fot to be afraid of the beasts, although now the moon was rising, for she wao dawdle on her way to make sure the handsome gentleman would win his wager. Grandmothers house stood by itself a little way out o..he village. The freshly falling snow blew in eddies about the kit garden and the young man stepped delicately up the snowy path to the door as if he were relut to get his feet wet, swinging his bundle of game and the girls basket and humming a little tuo himself. There is a faint trace of blood on his ; he has been snag on his catch. He rapped upon the panels with his knuckles. Aged and frail, granny is three-quarters succumbed to the mortality the ache in her bones promises her and almost ready to give iirely. A boy came out from the village to build up her hearth for the night an ho and the kit crackles with busy firelight. She has her Bible for pany, she is a pious old woman. She is propped up on several pillows in the bed set into the easant-fashion, ed up ichwork quilt she made before she was married, more years ago than she cares to remember. Two a spaniels with liver-coloured blotches on their coats and blaoses sit oher side of the fireplace. There is a bright rug of woven rags on the pahe grandfather clock ticks away her eroding time. We keep the wolves outside by living well. He rapped upon the panels with his hairy knuckles. It is yranddaughter, he mimicked in a high soprano. Lift up the latd walk in, my darling. You tell them by their eyes, eyes of a beast of prey, noal, devastating eyes as red as a wound; you hurl your Bible at him and your apron after, granny, you thought that was a sure prophylactic against these infernal vermin. . . now call on Christ and his mother and all the angels in heaven to protect you but it wont do you any good. His feral muzzle is sharp as a knife; he drops his golden burden of gnawed pheasant oable and puts down your dear girls basket, too. Oh, my God, what have you doh her? Off with his disguise, that coat of forest-coloured cloth, the hat with the feather tucked into the ribbon; his matted hair streams down his white shirt and she see the lice moving in it. The sticks in the hearth shift and hiss; night and the forest hbbr>?as e into the kit with darkangled in its hair. He strips off his shirt. His skin is the colour aure of vellum. A crisp stripe of hair runs down his belly, his nipples are ripe and dark as poison fruit but hes so thin you could t the ribs under his skin if only he gave you the time. He strips off his trousers and she see how hairy his legs are. His genitals, huge. Ah! huge. The last thing the old lady saw in all this world was a young man, eyes like ders, naked as a stone, approag her bed. The wolf is ivore inate. When he had finished with her, he licked his chops and quickly dressed himself aga９９lｉb.in, until he was just as he had been when he came through her door. He burhe inedible hair in the fireplad ed the bones up in a napkin that he hid away uhe bed in the woode in which he found a pair of sheets. These he carefully put on the bed instead of the tell-tale stained ones he stowed away in the laundry basket. He plumped up the pillows and shook out the patchwork quilt, he picked up the Bible from the floor, closed it and laid it oable. All was as it had been before except that grandmother was gohe sticks twitched in the grate, the clock ticked and the young man sat patiently, deceitfully beside the bed in grannys nightcap. Rat-a-tap-tap. Whos there, he quavers in grannys antique falsetto. Only yranddaughter. So she came in, bringing with her a flurry of snow that melted in tears oiles, and perhaps she was a little disappoio see only her grandmother sitting beside the fire. But then he flung off the bla and sprang to the door, pressing his back against it so that she could not get out again. The girl looked round the room and saw there was not even the iion of a head on the smooth cheek of the pillow and how, for the first time shed seen it so, the Bible lay closed oable. The tick of the clock cracked like a whip. She wanted her knife from her basket but she did not dare to reach for it because his eyes were fixed upon her -- huge eyes that now seemed to shih a unique, interiht, eyes the size of saucers, saucers full of Greek fire, diabolic phosphoresce. What big eyes you have. All the better to see you with. No trace at all of the old woman except for a tuft of white hair that had caught in the bark of an unburned log. When the girl saw that, she knew she was in danger of death. Where is my grandmother? Theres nobody here but we two, my darling. Now a great howling rose up all around them, near, very near as close as the kit garden, the howling of a multitude of wolves; she khe worst wolves are hairy on the inside and she shivered, in spite of the scarlet shawl she pulled more closely round herself as if it could protect her although it was as red as the blood she must spill. Who has e to sing us carols, she said. Those are the voiy brothers, darling; I love the pany of wolves. Look out of the window and youll see them. Snow half-caked the lattid she ope to look into the garden. It was a white night of moon and snow; the blizzard whirled round the gaunt, grey beasts who squatted on their haunches among the rows of winter cabbage, pointing their sharp snouts to the moon and howling as if their hearts would break. Ten wolves; twenty wolves -- so many wolves she could not t them, howling in cert as if demented or deraheir eyes reflected the light from the kit and shone like a hundred dles. It is very cold, poor things, she said; no wohey howl so. She closed the window on the wolves threnody and took off her scarlet shawl, the colour of poppies, the colour of sacrifices, the colour of her menses, and, since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid. What shall I do with my shawl? Throw it on the fire, dear one. You wont again. She bundled up her shawl and threw it on the blaze, whistantly ed it. Then she drew her blouse over her head; her small breasts gleamed as if the snow had ihe room. What shall I do with my blouse? Into the fire with it, too, my pet. The thin musli flaring up the ey like a magic bird and now off came her skirt, her woollen stogs, her shoes, and on to the fire they went, too, and were gone food. The firelight shohrough the edges of her skin; now she was clothed only in her untouched integument of flesh. This dazzling, naked she bed out her hair with her fingers; her hair looked white as the snow outside. The directly to the man with red eyes in whose u mahe lice moved; she stood up on tiptoe and unbuttohe collar of his shirt. What big arms you have. All the better to hug you with. Every wolf in the world now howled a prothalamion outside the window as she freely gave him the kiss she owed him. What big teeth you have! She saw how his jaw began to slaver and the room was full of the clamour of the forests Liebestod but the wise child never flinched, even as he answered: All the better to eat you with. The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobodys meat. She laughed at him full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing. The flames danced like dead souls on ursignacht and the old bones uhe bed set up a terrible clattering but she did not pay them any heed. ivore inate, only immaculate flesh appeases him. She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lito her mouth ahem, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony. The blizzard will die down. The blizzard died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow as if a blind woman had thrown a sheet over them, the upper branches of the forest pines limed, creaking, swollen with the fall. Snowlight, moonlight, a fusion of paw-prints. All silent, all silent. Midnight; and the clock strikes. It is Christmas day, the werewolves birthday, the door of the solstice stands wide opehem all sink through. See! sweet and sound she sleeps in grannys bed, between the paws of the tender wolf. Wolf-Alice-1 Could this ragged girl with brindled lugs have spoken like wbbr>e do she would have called herself a wolf, but she ot speak, although she howls because she is lonely -- yet "howl" is not the right word for it, since she is young enough to make the he pups do, bubbling, delicious, like that of a panful of fat on the fire. Sometimes the sharp ears of her foster kindred hear her across the irreparable gulf of absehey answer her from faraine forest and the bald mountain rim. Their terpoint crosses and criss-crosses the night sky; they are trying to talk to her but they ot do so because she does not uand their language even if she knows how to use it for she is not a wolf herself, although suckled by wolves. Her panting tongue hangs out; her red lips are thid fresh. Her legs are long, lean and muscular. Her elbows, hands and knees are thickly callused because she always runs on all fours. She never walks; she trots allops. Her pace is not our pace. Two-legs looks, fs sniffs. Her long nose is always a-quivering, sifting every st it meet.s. With this useful tool, she lengthily iigates everything she glimpses. She et so much more of the world than we through the fine, hairy sensitive filters of her nostrils that her poor eyesight does not trouble her. Her nose is sharper by night than our eyes are by day so it is the night she prefers, when the cool reflected light of the moon does not make her eyes smart and draws out the various fragrances from the woodland where she wanders when she . But the wolves keep well away from the peasants shotguns, now, and she will no longer find them there. Wide should..ers, long arms and she sleeps suctly curled into a ball as if she were cradling her spine iail. Nothing about her is human except that she is not a wolf; it is as if the fur she thought she wore had melted into her skin and bee part of it, although it does . Like the wild beasts, she lives without a future. She inhabits only the present tense, a fugue of the tinuous, a world of sensual immediacy as without hope as it is without despair. When they found her in the wolfs den beside the bullet-riddled corpse of her foster mother, she was no more than a little brown scrap so snarled in her own brown hair they did not at first think she was a child but a cub; she s her would-be saviours with her spiky es until they tied her up by force. She spent the first days amongst us crouched stock-still, staring at the whitewashed wall of her cell in the vent to which they took her. The nuns poured water over her, poked her with sticks to rouse her. Then she might snatch bread from their hands and race with it into a er to mumble it with her back towards them; it was a great day among the novices when she learo sit up on her hind legs and beg for a crust. They found, if she were treated with a little kindness, she was not intractable. She learnise her own dish; then, to drink from a cup. They found that she could quite easily be taught a few, simple tricks but she did not feel the cold and it 藏书网took a long time to wheedle a shift over her head to cover up her bold nakedness. Yet she always seemed wild, impatient of restraint, capricious in temper; wheher Superior tried to teach her to give thanks for her recovery from the wolves, she arched her back, pawed the floor, retreated to a far er of the chapel, crouched, trembled, urinated, defecated -- reverted entirely, it would seem, to her natural state. Therefore, without a qualm, this nine days wonder and tinuing embarrassment of a child was delivered over to the bereft and unsanctified household of the Duke. Deposited at the castle, she huffed and snuffled and smelled only a reek of meat, not the least whiff of sulphur, >nor of familiarity. She settled down on her hunkers with that dogs sigh that is only the expulsion of breath and does not meaher relief nation. The Duke is sere as old paper; his dry skin rustles against the bedsheets as he throws them back to thrust out his thin legs scabbed with old scars where thorns score his pelt. He lives in a gloomy mansion, all alo for this child who has as little in on with the rest of us as he does. His bedroom is paierracotta, rusted with a wash of pain, like the interior of an Iberian butchers shop, but for himself, nothing hurt him since he ceased to cast an image in the mirror. He sleeps in an antlered bed of dull black wrought iron until the moon, the governess of transformations and overseer of somnambulists, pokes an imperative fihrough the narrow window and strikes his face: then his eyes start open. At night, those huge, insolable, rapacious eyes of his are eaten up by swollen, gleaming pupil. His eyes see only appetite. These eyes open to devour the world in which he sees, nowhere, a refle of himself; he passed through the mirror and now, henceforward, lives as if upoher side of things. Spilt, glistering milk of moonlight on the frost-crisped grass; on such a night, in moony, metamorphic weather, they say you might easily find him, if you had been foolish enough to ve late, scuttling along by the churchyard wall with half a juicy torso slung across his back. The white light scours the fields and scours them again until everything gleams and he will leave paw-prints in the hoar-frost when he runs howling round the graves at night in his lupine fiestas. By the red early hour of midwinter su, all the doors are barred for miles. The cows low fretfully in the byre when he goes by, the whimpering dogs sink their noses in their paws. He carries on his frail shoulders a weird burden of fear; he is cast in the role of the corpse-eater, the body-snatcher who ihe last privacies of the dead. He is white as leprosy, with scrabbling fingernails, and nothiers him. If you stuff a corpse with garlic, why, he only slavers at the treat: cadavre proven?al. He will use the holy cross as a scratg post and crouch above the font to thirstily lap up holy water. She sleeps in the soft, warm ashes of the hearth; beds are traps, she will not stay in one. She perform a few, small tasks to which the nuns trained her, she sweeps up the hairs, vertebrae and phalahat litter his room into a dustpan, she makes up his bed at su, when he leaves it and the grey beasts outside howl, as if they know his transformation is their parody. Unkind to their prey, to their own they are tender; had the Duke been a wolf, they would have angrily expelled him from the pack, he would have had to lollop along miles behind them, creeping in submission on his belly up to the kill only after they had eaten and were sleeping, to gnaw the well-chewed bones and chew the hide. Yet, suckled as she was by wolves on the high uplands where her mother bore a her, only his kit maid, who is not wolf or woman, knows er than to do his chores for him. She grew up with wild beasts. If you could transport her, in her filth, rags and feral disorder, to the Eden of our first beginnings where Eve and grunting Adam squat on a daisy bank, pig the lice from one anothers pelts, then she might prove to be the wise child who leads them all and her silend her howling a language as authentic as any language of nature. In a world of talkis and flowers, she would be the bud of flesh in the kind lions mouth: but how the bitten apple flesh out its scar again? Mutism is her lot; though, now and then, she will emit an involuntary rustle of sound, as if the unused chords ihroat were a wind-harp that moved with the random impulses of the air, her whisper, more obscure than the voices of the dumb. Familiar desecrations in the village graveyard. The coffin had been ripped open with the abandon with which a child uns a gift on Christmas m and, of its tents, not a trace could be found but for a rag of the bridal veil in which the corpse had been ed that was caught, fluttering, in the brambles at the churchyard gate so they knew which way he had taken it, towards his gloomy castle. In the lapse of time, the trance of being of that exiled place, this girl grew amongst things she could her name nor perceive. How did she think, how did she feel, this perennial stranger with her furred thoughts and her primal sentiehat existed in a flux of shifting impressions; there are no words to describe the way she iated the abyss between her dreams, those wakings strange as her sleepings. The wolves had tended her because they knew she was an imperfect wolf; we secluded her in animal privacy out of fear of her imperfe because it showed us what we might have been, and so time passed, although she scarcely k. Then she began to bleed. Wolf-Alice-2 Her first blood bewildered her. She did not know what it meant and the first stirrings of surmise that ever she felt were directed towards its possible cause. The moon had been shining into the kit when she woke to feel the trickle betweehighs and it seemed to her that a wolf who, perhaps, was fond of her, as wolves were, and who lived, perhaps, in the moon? must have nibbled her t while she was sleeping, had subjected her to a series of affeate nips too geo wake her yet sharp enough to break the skin. The shape of this theory was blurred yet, out of it, there took root a kind of wild reasoning, as it might have from a seed dropped in her brain off the foot of a flying bird. The flow tinued for a few days, which seemed to her an eime. She had, as yet, no direotion of past, or of future, or of duration, only of a dimensionless, immediate moment. At night, she prowled the empty house looking fs to sop the blood up; she had learned a little elementary hygiene in the vent, enough to know how to bury her excrement and se herself of her natural juices, although the nuns had not the means to inform her how it should be, it was not fastidiousness but shame that made her do so. She found towels, sheets and pillowcases in closets that had not been opened sihe Duke came shrieking into the world with all his teeth, to bite his mothers nipple off and weep. She found once-worn ball dresses in cobwebbed wardro>9９ｌｉｂ.bes, and, heaped in the er of his bloody chamber, shrouds, nightdresses and burial clothes that had ed items on the Dukes menus. She tore strips of the most absorbent fabrics to clumsily diaper herself. In the course of these prowlings, she bumped against that mirror over whose surface the Duke passed like a wind on ice. First, she tried to nuzzle her refle; then, nosing it industriously, she soon realised it gave out no smell. She bruised her muzzle on the cold glass and broke her claws trying to tussle with this stranger. She saw, with irritation, then amusement, how it mimicked every gesture of hers when she raised her forepaw to scratch herself ed her bum along the dusty carpet to rid herself of a slight disfort in her hindquarters. She rubbed her head against her reflected face, to show that she felt friendly towards it, a a cold, solid, immovable surface between herself and she -- some kind, possibly, of invisible cage? In spite of this barrier, she was lonely enough to ask this creature to try to play with her, barieeth and grinning: at once she received a reciprocal invitation. She rejoiced; she began to whirl round on herself, yappiantly, but, whereated from the mirror, she halted in the midst of her ecstasy, puzzled, to see how her new friend grew less in size. The moonlight spilled into the Dukes motionless bedroom from behind a cloud and she saw how pale this wolf, not-wolf who played with her was. The moon and mirrors have this mu on: you ot see behind them. Moonlit and white, Wolf-Alice looked at herself in the mirror and wondered whether there she saw the beast who came to bite her in the night. Then her sensitive ears pricked at the sound of a step in the hall; trotting at once back to her kit, she entered the Duke with the leg of a man over his shoulder. Her toenails clicked against the stairs as she padded incuriously past, she, the serene, inviolable one in her absolute and verminous innoce. Soon the flow ceased. She fot it. The moon vanished; but, little by little, reappeared. When it again visited her kit at full strength, Wolf-Alice was surprised into bleeding again and so it went on, with a punctuality that transformed her vague grip on time. She learo expect these bleedings, to prepare her rags against them, and afterwards, ly bury the dirtied things. Sequence asserted itself with and then she uood the circumambulatory principle of the clock perfectly, even if all clocks were banished from the den where she and the Duke inhabited their separate solitudes, so that you might say she discovered the very a of time by means of this returning cycle. When she curled up among the ders, the colour, texture and warmth of them brought her foster mothers belly out of the past and pri on her flesh; her first semory, painful as the first time the nuns bed her hair. She howled a little, in a firmer, deepening trajectory, to obtain the inscrutable solation of the wolves response, for now the world around her was assuming form. She perceived an essential differeween herself and her surroundings that you might say she could not put her finger on -- only, the trees and grass of the meadows outside no longer seemed the emanation of her questing nose a ears, a suffit to itself, but a kind of backdrop for her, that waited for her arrivals to give it meaning. She saw herself upon it and her eyes, with their sombre clarity, took on a veiled, introspective look. She would spend hours examining the new skin that had been born, it seemed to her, of her bleeding, she would lick her soft upholstery with her long tongue and groom her hair with her fingernails. She examined her new breasts with curiosity; the white growths reminded her of nothing so much as the night-sprung puffballs she found, sometimes, on evening rambles in the woods, a natural if discerting apparition, but then, to her astonishment, she found a little diadem of fresh hairs tuftiweehighs. She showed it to her mirror littermate, who reassured her by showing her she shared it. The damned Duke haunts the graveyard; he believes himself to be both less and more than a man, as if his obse difference were a sign of grace. During the day, he sleeps. His mirror faithfully reflects his bed but he meagre shape within the disordered covers. Sometimes, on those white nights when she was left alone in the house, she dragged out his grandmothers ball dress and rolled on suave velvet and, abrasive lace because to do so delighted her adolest skin. Her intimate in the mirror wound the old clothes around herself, wrinkling its nose in delight at the a yet still potent sts of musk and civet that woke up in the sleeves and bodices. This habitual, at last b, fidelity to her very movement finally woke her up to the regretful possibility that her panion was, in fao more than a particularly ingenious variety of the shadow she cast on sunlit grass. Had not she and the rest of the litter tussled and romped with their shadows long ago? She poked her agile nose around the back of the mirror; she found only dust, a spider stu his web, a heap s. A little moisture leaked from the ers of her eyes, yet her relation with the mirror was now far more intimate since she knew she saw herself within it. She pawed and tumbled the dress the Duke had tucked away behind the mirror for a while. The dust was soon shaken out of it; she experimentally ied her front legs in the sleeves. Although the dress was torn and crumpled, it was so white and of such a sinuous texture that she thought, before she put it on, she must thhly wash off her coat of ashes ier from the pump in the yard, which she knew how to manipulate with her ing forepaw. In the mirror, she saw how this white dress made her shine. Although she could not run so fast on two legs iicoats, she trotted out in her new dress to iigate the odorous October hedgerows, like a debutante from the castle, delighted with herself but still, now and then, singing to the wolves with a kind of wistful triumph, because now she knew how to wear clothes and had put on the visible sign of her difference from them. Her footprints on damp earth are beautiful and menag as those Man Friday left. The young husband of the dead bride spent a long time planning his revenge. He filled the church with an arsenal of b.９9ｌｉｂ.ells, books and dles; a battery of silver bullets; they brought a ten gallon tub of holy water in a wagon from the city, where it had been blessed by the Archbishop himself, to drown the Duke, if the bullets bounced off him. They gathered in the church to t a litany and wait for the one who would visit the first deaths of winter. She goes out at night more often now; the landscape assembles itself about her, she informs it with her presence. She is its significe. It seemed to her the gregation in the church was iually attempting to imitate the wolves chorus. She lent them the assistance of her own, educated voice for a while, rog platively on her haunches by the graveyard gate; then her nostrils twitched to catch the rank stench of the dead that told her her cohabitor was at hand; raising her head, who did her new, keen eyes spy but the lord of cobweb castle i on perf his ibal rituals? And if her nostri..ls flare suspiciously at the choking reek of inse and his do not, that is because she is far more sehan he. She will, therefore, run, run! when she hears the crack of bullets, because they killed her foster mother; so, with the self-same lilting lope, drenched with holy water, will he run, too, until the young widower fires the silver bullet that bites his shoulder and drags off half his fictive pelt, so that he must rise up like any on forked biped and limp distressfully on as best he may. When they saw the white bride leap out of the tombstones and scamper off towards the castle with the werewolf stumbling after, the peasants thought the Dukes dearest victim had e back to take matters into her own hands. They ran screaming from the presence of a ghostly vengean him. Poor, wouhing. . . locked half and half between such straates, an aborted transformation, an inplete mystery now he lies writhing on his black bed in the room like a Myaean tomb, howls like a wolf with his foot in a trap or a woman in labour, and bleeds. First, she was fearful when she heard the sound of pain, in case it hurt her, as it had done before. She prowled round the bed, growling, snuffing at his wound that does not smell like her wound. Then, she itiful as her gaunt grey mother; she leapt upon his bed to lick, without hesitation, without disgust, with a quick, tender gravity, the blood and dirt from his cheek and forehead. The lucidity of the moonlight lit the mirror propped against the red wall; the rational glass, the master of the visible, impartially recorded the ing girl. As she tinued her ministrations, this glass, with infinite slowness, yielded to the reflexive strength of its own material stru. Little by little, there appeared within it, like the image on photographic paper that emerges, first, a formless web of tracery, the prey caught in its own fishihen a firmer yet still shadowed outliil at last as vivid as real life itself, as if brought into being by her soft, moist, geongue, finally, the face of the Duke.天涯在线书库《www.tianyabook.com》