Short Fiction

By Saki.

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The Image of the Lost Soul

There were a number of carved stone figures placed at intervals along the parapets of the old Cathedral; some of them represented angels, others kings and bishops, and nearly all were in attitudes of pious exaltation and composure. But one figure, low down on the cold north side of the building, had neither crown, mitre, not nimbus, and its face was hard and bitter and downcast; it must be a demon, declared the fat blue pigeons that roosted and sunned themselves all day on the ledges of the parapet; but the old belfry jackdaw, who was an authority on ecclesiastical architecture, said it was a lost soul. And there the matter rested.

One autumn day there fluttered on to the Cathedral roof a slender, sweet-voiced bird that had wandered away from the bare fields and thinning hedgerows in search of a winter roosting-place. It tried to rest its tired feet under the shade of a great angel-wing or to nestle in the sculptured folds of a kingly robe, but the fat pigeons hustled it away from wherever it settled, and the noisy sparrow-folk drove it off the ledges. No respectable bird sang with so much feeling, they cheeped one to another, and the wanderer had to move on.

Only the effigy of the Lost Soul offered a place of refuge. The pigeons did not consider it safe to perch on a projection that leaned so much out of the perpendicular, and was, besides, too much in the shadow. The figure did not cross its hands in the pious attitude of the other graven dignitaries, but its arms were folded as in defiance and their angle made a snug resting-place for the little bird. Every evening it crept trustfully into its corner against the stone breast of the image, and the darkling eyes seemed to keep watch over its slumbers. The lonely bird grew to love its lonely protector, and during the day it would sit from time to time on some rainshoot or other abutment and trill forth its sweetest music in grateful thanks for its nightly shelter. And, it may have been the work of wind and weather, or some other influence, but the wild drawn face seemed gradually to lose some of its hardness and unhappiness. Every day, through the long monotonous hours, the song of his little guest would come up in snatches to the lonely watcher, and at evening, when the vesper-bell was ringing and the great grey bats slid out of their hiding-places in the belfry roof, the bright-eyed bird would return, twitter a few sleepy notes, and nestle into the arms that were waiting for him. Those were happy days for the Dark Image. Only the great bell of the Cathedral rang out daily its mocking message, “After joy … sorrow.”

The folk in the verger’s lodge noticed a little brown bird flitting about the Cathedral precincts, and admired its beautiful singing. “But it is a pity,” said they, “that all that warbling should be lost and wasted far out of hearing up on the parapet.” They were poor, but they understood the principles of political economy. So they caught the bird and put it in a little wicker cage outside the lodge door.

That night the little songster was missing from its accustomed haunt, and the Dark Image knew more than ever the bitterness of loneliness. Perhaps his little friend had been killed by a prowling cat or hurt by a stone. Perhaps … perhaps he had flown elsewhere. But when morning came there floated up to him, through the noise and bustle of the Cathedral world, a faint heart-aching message from the prisoner in the wicker cage far below. And every day, at high noon, when the fat pigeons were stupefied into silence after their midday meal and the sparrows were washing themselves in the street-puddles, the song of the little bird came up to the parapets—a song of hunger and longing and hopelessness, a cry that could never be answered. The pigeons remarked, between mealtimes, that the figure leaned forward more than ever out of the perpendicular.

One day no song came up from the little wicker cage. It was the coldest day of the winter, and the pigeons and sparrows on the Cathedral roof looked anxiously on all sides for the scraps of food which they were dependent on in hard weather.

“Have the lodge-folk thrown out anything on to the dust-heap?” inquired one pigeon of another which was peering over the edge of the north parapet.

“Only a little dead bird,” was the answer.

There was a crackling sound in the night on the Cathedral roof and a noise as of falling masonry. The belfry jackdaw said the frost was affecting the fabric, and as he had experienced many frosts it must have been so. In the morning it was seen that the Figure of the Lost Soul had toppled from its cornice and lay now in a broken mass on the dust-heap outside the verger’s lodge.

“It is just as well,” cooed the fat pigeons, after they had peered at the matter for some minutes; “now we shall have a nice angel put up there. Certainly they will put an angel there.”

“After joy … sorrow,” rang out the great bell.

Dogged

Artemus Gibbon was, by nature and inclination, blameless and respectable, and under happier circumstances the record of his life might have preserved the albino tint of its early promise; but he was of timid and yielding disposition, and had been carefully brought up, so that his case was clearly hopeless from the first. It only remained for the strong and unscrupulous character to come alongside, and the result was a foregone conclusion. And one afternoon it came. It is a well-tried axiom that, in human affairs, as in steeplechasing, the ugliest croppers occur at the “safest” and most carefully pruned places, and of all conceivable occasions for a young man to go irretrievably wrong, a church bazaar would seem to offer the least appropriate opportunity. Yet it was at such a function, opened by a bishop’s lady, and patronised by the most hopelessly correct people in the neighbourhood, that Artemus Gibbon went unsuspectingly to his undoing.

In the first place it must be admitted that his natural timidity was played upon by the embarrassing absence of anything at the bazaar which a bachelor of prosaic tastes might reasonably be expected to purchase with any approach to hearty conviction that his money was profitably laid out. Baby linen, which seemed to be the staple article on most of the stalls, was not to be thought of for a moment and the innate modesty of his taste in dress caused him to recoil from the “Jubilee Memento Scarves,” hand-worked with the royal arms in a delirium of crimson and gold. Hence, when he had purchased a harmless and unnecessary pincushion and two views of Durham Cathedral, he felt that he might, without odium, effect a dexterous retreat. Here it was that the Foreseen and Inevitable stepped in and changed the placid current of his life. He was pounced upon by a severe-looking dame, with an air of one being in authority, who gave him to understand that it was required of him that he should buy a dog.

“Only two guineas; my niece has charge of him over there. Clara!” Gibbon found himself a moment later confronted by a vivacious damsel—and the dog. The possibility of admitting a canine companion within the narrow compass of his establishment had not been altogether foreign to his speculations on life; a quiet, meek-eyed spaniel for instance, which would occupy an unobtrusive position by his domestic hearth, or participate in his constitutional walks, or, in later days, perhaps, a dignified deerhound with a tendency to statuesque repose—such were the shapes that his occasional ruminations on the subject had taken. But the dog now before him was by no means built according to these patterns. A rakish-looking fox terrier, stamped with the hallmark of naked and unashamed depravity, and wearing the yawningly alert air of one who has found the world is vain and likes it all the better for it, such was the specimen of dog-flesh at which Mr. Artemus Gibbon found himself gazing in blank dismay.

Before he had quite realised the full force of the cataclysm in which he was involved, he had parted with the demanded forty-two shillings, and learned from the vivacious damsel the appalling fact that his new purchase was named Beelzebub. Something instinctively told him that he had parted too with his peace of mind, and as he was towed out of the bazaar premises in the wake of a yelping and plunging terrier, with an accompaniment of noise and publicity uncongenial to his natural modesty, he was dimly aware that he had started on a downgrade path that led to no good and peaceful end. To the ordinary intellect his position might not have appeared irretrievable; the dog which he had been rushed into buying, and whose personality inspired him with the strongest repugnance, was not necessarily a fixture. An immediate purchaser might be discovered, or the undesired acquisition might be given away, lost, or otherwise disposed of.

But here again the working of inexorable laws sterilized the chances of Gibbon’s emancipation. In a conflict between their respective will powers, the man inevitably succumbed to the fox terrier, and, when the dinner-hour exposed the bachelor’s sitting room to the observation of a tray-bearing handmaiden, its occupant was discovered in a condition of deprecatory embarrassment; whilst the dog, snugly ensconced in the only armchair, was the embodiment of self-composure and critical appraisement. As a general rule, Gibbon was not demonstratively communicative with maidservants, and his intercourse in this direction was usually limited to a perfunctory (vocal) salutation, or a mild request for a forgotten napkin, or suchlike trifle. But the advent of Beelzebub had already dislocated the wonted disposition of affairs, and the girl became aware that an appeal of some nature was being addressed to her.

“Er, Mary, this little dog, er, I think you—might say nothing about it to Mrs. Mulberry, er, just yet, that is, I will break it to her—I mean—will tell her myself—tomorrow morning.” While Gibbon was delivering himself of this charge he was shoving a warm, moist shilling Mary-wards along the table with a succession of short pats, as if he thought the coin should have some impetus of its own, and start forward in the desired direction. The hush money staved off the crisis which must assuredly arise when the landlady became aware of the canine presence in her apartments, and Gibbon, having successfully smuggled the contraband article into his bedroom, congratulated himself on having so far made the best of the situation. But, as the dog slipped out next morning on the incoming of the hot water, and chivvied the landlady’s cat into the landlady’s bedroom, and followed it on to her bed and under the blankets, where a muffled but vigorous battle royal ensued, it became doubtful whether the shilling had been, after all, a judicious outlay.

Gibbon found that his selection of new rooms was considerably narrowed by the prejudice aroused in the breasts of prospective landladies on the sight of his canine satellite, who accompanied him as a matter of course on all his quests; and finally, having strayed into a suite of chambers furnished in a style of bohemian extravagance that was wholly out of keeping with his accustomed ways of life, the terrier clinched matters for him by settling down therein and refusing to leave. Gibbon hunted him ineffectually round the place, upset and disarranged the furniture, all to no purpose; and at length, on the suggestion of the proprietor—“you’d better take the rooms, sir, seems as if it was meant like”—he took alarm at the idea of resisting the possible workings of a Higher Power, and yielded. It was the weak character pitted against the strong once more, and the result was as it ever must be.

To the deteriorating effects of baneful companionship were now added the subtle workings of the laws of environment. Gibbon was too bashfully diffident to remove even the most glaringly uncongenial adornments of his new quarters, and it was a sign of his drifting progress that the views of Durham Cathedral did not find hanging room on the well-covered walls. Instead of these solidly respectable works of art, his eyes were daily confronted with presentiments of ladies who had apparently conquered the love of dress that is attributed to their sex, interspersed with portraits of racehorses noted for their fastness, or of society beauties with a similar reputation. But the chief agent in the moral slump which was becoming more and more pronounced in the person of Artemus Gibbon was undoubtedly Beelzebub. The very name was a stumbling block to the leading of a respectable life, and a young man who called an already sufficiently unprepossessing animal by such an unseemly appellation was doomed to be dropped by self-respecting acquaintances.