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The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales by Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch

A >> Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch >> The White Wolf and Other Fireside Tales




"For this bout, Sir Borre, I came with a fresh horse!" called my master
blithely; and so, striking spur, galloped off into the dark.

Little chance had Sir Borre to overtake them. The stallion was swift,
our boat waiting in the lee of the Ness, the wind southerly and fresh,
the _White Wolf_ ready for sea, with sail hoisted and but one small
anchor to get on board or cut away if need were. But there was no need.
Before the men of Egeskov reached the Ness and found there the black
stallion roaming, its riders were sailing out of the Strait with a merry
breeze. So began our voyage.

My master was minded to sail for Norway and take service under the king.
But first, coming to the island of Laeso, he must put ashore and seek a
priest, by whom he and the lady Mette were safely made man and wife.
Two days he spent at the island, and then, with fresh store of
provisions, we headed northward again.

It was past Skagen that our troubles began, with a furious wind from the
north-east against which there was no contending, so that we ran from it
and were driven for two days and a night into the wide sea. Even when
it lessened, the wind held in the east; and we, who could handle the
ship, but knew little of reckoning, crept northward again in the hope to
sight the coast of Norway. For two days we held on at this, lying close
by the wind, and in good spirits, although our progress was not much;
but on the third blew another gale--this time from the south-east--and
for a week gale followed gale, and we went in deadly peril, yet never
losing hope. The worst was the darkness, for the year was now drawing
towards Yule, and as we pressed farther north we lost almost all sight
of the sun.

At length, with the darkness and the bitter cold and our stores running
low, we resolved to let the wind take us with what swiftness it might to
whatsoever land it listed; and so ran westward, with darkness closing
upon us, and famine and a great despair.

But the lady Mette did not lose heart, and the worst of all (our failing
cupboard) we kept from her, so that she never lacked for plenty.
Truly her cheerfulness paid us back, and her love for my master, the
like of which I had not seen in this world; no, nor dreamed of.
Hand in hand this pair would sit, watching the ice which was our prison
and the great North Lights, she close against Ebbe's side for warmth,
and (I believe) as happy us a bird; he trembling for the end.
The worst was to see her at table, pressing food to his mouth and
wondering at his little hunger; while his whole body cried out for the
meat, only it could not be spared.

Though she must know soon, none of us had the heart to tell her; and not
out of pity alone, but because with her must die out the last spark by
which we warmed ourselves.

But there came a morning--I write it as of a time long ago, and yet it
was but yesterday, praise be unto God!--there came a morning when I
awoke and found that two of our men had died in the plight, of frost and
famine. They must be hidden before my mistress discovered aught; and so
before her hour of waking we weighted and dropped the bodies overside
into deep water; for the ice had not yet wholly closed about us. Now as
I stooped, I suppose that my legs gave way beneath me. At any rate, I
fell; and in falling struck my head against the bulwarks, and opened my
eyes in that unending dusk to find the lady Mette stooping over me.

Then somehow I was aware that she had called for wine to force down my
throat, and had been told that there was no wine; and also that with
this answer had come to her the knowledge, full and sudden, of our case.
Better had we done to trust her than to hide it all this while, for she
turned to Ebbe, who stood at her shoulder, and "Is not this the feast of
Yule?" she asked. My master bent his head, but without answering.

"Ah!" she cried to him. "Now I know what I have longed to know, that
your love is less than mine, for you can love yet be doubtful of
miracles; while to me, now that I have loved, no miracle can be aught
but small." She bowed herself over me. "Art dying, old friend?
Look up and learn that God, being Love, deserts not lovers."

Then she stooped and gathered, as I thought, a handful of snow from the
deck; but lo! when she pressed it to my lips, and I tasted, it was
heavenly manna.

And looking up past her face I saw the ribbons of the North Lights fade
in a great and wide sunlight, bathing the deck and my frozen limbs.
Nor did they feel it only, but on the wind came the noise of bergs
rending, springs breaking, birds singing, many and curious. And with
that, as I am a sinful man, I gazed up into green leaves; for either we
had sailed into Paradise or the timbers of the _White Wolf_ were
swelling with sap and pushing forth bough upon bough. Yea, and there
were roses at the mast's foot, and my fingers, as I stretched them,
dabbled in mosses. While I lay there, breathing softly, as one who
dreams and fears to awake, I heard her voice talking among the noises of
birds and brooks, and by the scent it seemed to be in a garden; but
whether it spake to me or to Ebbe I knew not, nor cared. "The Lord is
my Shepherd, and guides me," it said, "wherefore I lack nothing.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: He leadeth me by comfortable
streams: He reviveth my soul. Yea, though I walk through the valley of
the shadow of death, I will fear no harm: Thy rod and Thy staff they
comfort me." But, a little after, I knew that the voice spake to my
master, for it said: "Let us go forth into the field, O beloved: let us
lodge in the villages: let us get up betimes to the vineyard and see if
the vine have budded, if its blossom be open, the pomegranates in
flower. Even there will I give thee my love." Then looking again I saw
that the two had gone from me and left me alone.

But, blessed be God, they took not away the vision, and now I know
certainly that it is no cheat. For here sit I, dipping my pen into the
unfrozen ink, and, when a word will not come, looking up into the broad
branches and listening to the birds till I forget my story. It is long
since they left me; but I am full fed, and the ship floats pleasantly.
After so much misery I am as one rocked on the bosom of God; and the
pine resin has a pleasant smell.


[1] The courtship of Ebbe, the poor esquire of Nebbegaard, and the
maiden Mette is a traditional tale of West Jutland. A version of it was
Englished by Thorpe from Carit Etlar's "_Eventyr og Folkesagen fra
Jylland_": but this, while it tells of Ebbe's adventures at the
"Bride-show," and afterwards at the hunting-party, contains no account
of the lovers' escape and voyage, or of the miracle which brought them
comfort at the last. Indeed, Master Kurt contradicts the common tale in
many ways, but above all in his ending, wherein (although he narrates a
miracle) I find him worthy of belief.



SINDBAD ON BURRATOR.


I heard this story in a farmhouse upon Dartmoor, and I give it in the
words of the local doctor who told it. We were a reading-party of
three undergraduates and a Christ Church don. The don had slipped on a
boulder, two days before, while fishing the river Meavy, and sprained
his ankle; hence Dr. Miles's visit. The two had made friends over the
don's fly-book and the discovery that what the doctor did not know about
Dartmoor trout was not worth knowing; hence an invitation to extend his
visit over dinner. At dinner the talk diverged from sport to the
ancient tin-works, stone circles, camps and cromlechs on the tors about
us, and from there to touch speculatively on the darker side of the old
religions: hence at length the doctor's story, which he told over the
pipes and whisky, leaning his arms upon the table and gazing at it
rather than at us, as though drawing his memories out of depths below
its polished surface.


It must be thirty--yes, thirty--years ago (he said) since I met the man,
on a bright November morning, when the Dartmoor hounds were drawing
Burrator Wood. Burrator House in those days belonged to the Rajah
Brooke--Brooke of Sarawak--who had bought it from Harry Terrell; or
rather it had been bought for him by the Baroness Burdett Coutts and
other admirers in England. Harry Terrell--a great sportsman in his
day--had been loth enough to part with it, and when the bargain was
first proposed, had named at random a price which was about double what
he had given for the place. The Rajah closed with the sum at once,
asked him to make a list of everything in the house, and put a price on
whatever he cared to sell. Terrell made a full list, putting what
seemed to him fair prices on most of the furniture, and high ones--
prohibitive he thought--on the sticks he had a fancy to keep. The Rajah
glanced over the paper in his grand manner, and says he, "I'll take it
all." "Stop! stop!" cried Terrell, "I bain't going to let you have the
bed I was married in!" "As you please; we'll strike out the bed,
then," the Rajah answered. That is how he took possession.

Burrator House, as I daresay you know, faces across the Meavy upon
Burrator Wood; and the wood, thanks to Terrell, had always been a sure
draw for a fox. I had tramped over from Tavistock on this particular
morning,--for I was new to the country, a young man looking around me
for a practice, and did not yet possess a horse,--and I sat on the slope
above the house, at the foot of the tor, watching the scene on the
opposite bank. The fixture, always a favourite one, and the Rajah's
hospitality--which was noble, like everything about him--had brought out
a large and brightly-dressed field; and among them, in his black coat,
moved Terrell on a horse twice as good as it looked. He had ridden over
from his new home, and I daresay in the rush of old associations had
forgotten for the while that the familiar place was no longer his.

The Rajah, a statue of a man, sat on a tall grey at the covert's edge,
directly below me; and from time to time I watched him through my
field-glass. He had lately recovered from a stroke of paralysis, and
was (I am told) the wreck of his old self; but the old fire lived in the
ashes. He sat there, tall, lean, upright as a ramrod, with his eyes
turned from the covert and gazing straight in front, over his horse's
ears, on the rushing Meavy. He had forgotten the hounds; his care for
his guests was at an end; and I wondered what thoughts, what memories of
the East, possessed him. There is always a loneliness about a great
man, don't you think? But I have never felt one to be so terribly--yes,
terribly--alone as the Rajah was that morning among his guests and the
Devonshire tors.

"Every inch a king," said a voice at my elbow, and a little man settled
himself down on the turf beside me. I set down my glasses with a start.
He was a spare dry fellow of about fifty, dressed in what I took for the
working suit of a mechanic. Certainly he did not belong to the moor.
He wore no collar, but a dingy yellow handkerchief knotted about his
throat, and both throat and face were seamed with wrinkles--so thickly
seamed that at first glance you might take them for tattoo-marks; but I
had time for a second, for without troubling to meet my eyes he nodded
towards the Rajah.

"I've cut a day's work and travelled out from Plymouth to get a sight of
him; and I've a wife will pull my hair out when I get home and she finds
I haven't been to the docks to-day; and I've had no breakfast but thirty
grains of opium; but he's worth it."

"Thirty grains of opium!" I stared at him, incredulous. He did not
turn, but, still with his eyes on the valley below us, stretched out a
hand. It's fingers were gnarled, and hooked like a bird's claw, and on
the little finger a ruby flashed in the morning sunlight--not a large
ruby, but of the purest pigeon's-blood shade, and in any case a stone of
price.

"You see this? My wife thinks it a sham one, but it's not. And some
day, when I'm drunk or in low water, I shall part with it--but not yet.
You've an eye for it, I see,"--and yet he was not looking towards me,--
"but the Rajah, yonder, and I are the only two within a hundred miles
that can read what's in the heart of it."

He gazed for a second or two at the stone, lifted it to his ear as if
listening, and lowering his hand to the turf, bent over it and gazed
again. "Ay, _he_ could understand and see into you, my beauty!
_He_ could hear the little drums tum-a-rumbling, and the ox-bells and
bangles tinkling, and the shuffle of the elephants going by; _he_ could
read the lust in you, and the blood and the sun flickering and licking
round the _kris_ that spilt it--for it's the devil you have in you, my
dear. But we know you--he and I--he and I. Ah! there you go," he
muttered as the hounds broke into cry, and the riders swept round the
edge of the copse towards the sound of a view-halloo. "There you go,"
he nodded after the Rajah; "but ride as you will, the East is in you,
great man--its gold in your blood, its dust in your eyelids, its own
stink in your nostril; and, ride as you will, you can never escape it."

He clasped his knees and leaned back against the slope, following the
grey horse and its rider with idolatrous gaze; and I noted that one of
the clasped hands lacked the two middle fingers.

"You know him?" I asked. "You have seen him out there, at Sarawak?"

"I never saw him; but I heard of him." He smiled to himself. "It's not
easy to pass certain gates in the East without hearing tell of the Rajah
Brooke."

For a while he sat nursing his knee while I filled and lit a pipe.
Then he turned abruptly, and over the flame of the match I saw his eyes,
the pupils clouded around the iris and, as it were, withdrawn inward and
away from the world. "Ever heard of Cagayan Sulu?" he asked.

"Never," said I. "Who or what is it?"

"It's an island," said he. "It lies a matter of eighty miles off the
north-east corner of Borneo--facing Sandakan, as you might say."

"Who owns it?"

He seemed to be considering the question. "Well," he answered slowly,
"if you asked the Spanish Government I suppose they'd tell you the King
of Spain; but that's a lie. If you asked the natives--the Hadji Hamid,
for instance--you'd be told it belonged to them; and that's half a lie.
And if you asked the Father of Lies he might tell you the truth and call
me for witness. I lost two fingers there--the only English flesh ever
buried in those parts--so I've bought my knowledge."

"How did you come there?" I asked,--"if it's a fair question."

He chuckled without mirth. "As it happens, that's _not_ a fair
question. But I'll tell you this much, I came there with a brass band."

I began to think the man out of his mind.

"With the instruments, that is. I'd dropped the bandmaster on the way.
Look here," he went on sharply, "the beginning is funny enough, but I'm
telling you no lies. We'll suppose there was a ship, a British
man-of-war--name not necessary just now."

"I think I understand," I nodded.

"Oh no, you don't," said he. "I'm not a deserter--at least not
exactly--or I shouldn't be telling this to you. Well, we'll suppose
this ship bound from Labuan to Hong-Kong with orders to keep along the
north side of Borneo, to start with, and do a bit of exploring by the
way. This would be in 'forty-nine, when the British Government had just
taken over Labuan. _Very_ good. Next we'll suppose the captain puts in
at Kudat, in Marudu Bay, to pay a polite call on the Rajah there or some
understrapper of the Sultan's, and takes his ship's band ashore by way
of compliment, and that the band gets too drunk to play 'Annie Laurie.'"
He chuckled again. "I never saw such a band as we were, down by the
water's edge; and O'Hara, the bandmaster, took on and played the fool to
such a tune, while we waited for the boat to take us aboard, that for
the very love I bore him I had to knock him down and sit on him in a
quiet corner.

"While I sat keeping guard on him I must have dropped asleep myself; for
the next I remember was waking up to find the beach deserted and the
boat gone. This put me in a sweat, of course; but after groping some
while about the foreshore (which was as dark as the inside of your hat),
I tripped over a rope and so found a native boat. O'Hara wouldn't wake,
so I just lifted him on board like a sack, tossed in his cornet and my
bombardon, tumbled in on top of them, and started to row for dear life
towards the ship's light in the offing.

"But the Rajah, or rather his servants, had filled us up with a kind of
sticky drink that only begins to work when you think it about time to
leave off. I must have pulled miles towards that ship, and every time I
cast an eye over my shoulder her light was shining just as far away as
ever. At last I remember feeling sure I was bewitched, and with that I
must have tumbled off the thwart in a sound sleep.

"When I awoke I had both arms round the bombardon; there wasn't a sight
of land, or of the ship, anywhere; and, if you please, the sun was near
sinking! This time I managed to wake up O'Hara. We had splitting
headaches, the pair of us; but we snatched up our instruments and
started to blow on them like mad. Not a soul heard, though we blew till
the sweat poured down us, and kept up the concert pretty well all
through the night. You may think it funny, and I suppose we did amount
to something like a joke--we two bandsmen booming away at the Popular
Airs of Old England and the Huntsmen's Chorus under those everlasting
stars. You wouldn't say so, if you had been the audience when O'Hara
broke down and began to confess his sins.

"Luckily the sea kept smooth, and next morning I took the oars in
earnest. We had no compass, and I was famished; but I stuck to it,
steering by the sun and pulling in the direction where I supposed land
to lie. O'Hara kept a look-out. We saw nothing, however, and down came
the night again.

"Though the hunger had been gnawing and griping me for hours, yet--
dog-tired as I was--I curled myself at the bottom of the boat and slept,
and dreamed I was on board ship again and in my hammock. A sort of
booming in my ears awoke me. Looking up I saw daylight around--clear
morning light and blue sky--and right overhead, as it were, a great
cliff standing against the blue. And there in the face of day O'Hara
sat on the thwart, tugging like mad, now cricking his neck almost to
stare up at the cliff, and now grinning down at me in silly triumph.

"With that I caught at the meaning of the sound in my ears.
'You infernal fool!' I shouted, staggering up and making to snatch the
paddle from him. 'Get her nose round to it and back her!' For it was
the noise of breaking water.

"But I was too late. Our boat, I must tell you, was a sort of Dutch
pram, about twelve feet long and narrowing at the bows, which stood well
out of water; handy enough for beaching, but not to be taken through
breakers, by reason of its sitting low in the stern. O'Hara, as I
yelled at him, pulled his starboard paddle and brought her (for these
prams spin round easily) almost broadside on to a tall comber. As we
slid up the side of it and hung there, I had a glimpse of a steep clean
fissure straight through the wall of rock ahead; and in that instant
O'Hara sprawled his arms and toppled overboard. The boat and I went by
him with a rush. I saw a hand and wrist lifted above the foam, but when
I looked back for them they were gone--gone as I shot over the bar and
through the cleft into smooth water. I shouted and pulled back to the
edge of the breakers; but he was gone, and I never saw him again.

"I suppose it was ten minutes before I took heart to look about me.
I was floating on a lake of the bluest water I ever set eyes on, and as
calm as a pond except by the entrance where the spent waves, after
tumbling over the bar, spread themselves in long ripples, widening and
widening until the edge of them melted and they were gone. The banks of
the lake rose sheer from its edge, or so steeply that I saw no way of
climbing them--walls you might call them, a good hundred feet high, and
widening gradually towards the top, but in a circle as regular as ever
you could draw with a pair of compasses. Any fool could see what had
happened--that here was the crater of a dead volcano, one side of which
had been broken into by the sea; but the beauty of it, sir, coming on
top of my weakness, fairly made me cry. For the walls at the top were
fringed with palms and jungle trees, and hung with creepers like
curtains that trailed over the face of the cliff and down among the
ferns by the shore. I leaned over the boat and stared into the water.
It was clear, clear--you've no notion how clear; but no bottom could I
see. It seemed to sink right through and into the sea on the other side
of the world!

"Well, all this was mighty pretty, but it didn't tell me where to find a
meal; so I baled out the boat and paddled along the eastern edge of the
lake searching the cliffs for a path, and after an hour or so I hit on
what looked to me like a foot-track, zig-zagging up through the creepers
and across the face of the rock. I determined to try it, made the boat
fast to a clump of fern, slung O'Hara's cornet on to my side-belt and
began to climb.

"I saw no marks of footsteps; but the track was a path all right, though
a teazer. A dozen times I had to crawl on hands and knees under the
creepers--creepers with stems as thick as my two wrists--and once, about
two-thirds of the way up, I was forced to push sideways through a
crevice dripping with water, and so steep under foot that I slid twice
and caked myself with mud. I very nearly gave out here; but it was do
or die, and after ten minutes more of scratching, pushing, and
scrambling, I reached the top and sat down to mop my face and recover.

"I daresay it was another ten minutes before I fetched breath enough and
looked about me; and as I turned my head, there, close behind me, lay
another crater with another lake smiling below, all blue and peaceful as
the one I had left! I gazed from one to the other. This new crater had
no opening on the sea; its sides were steeper, though not quite so tall;
and either my eyes played me a trick or its water stood at a higher
level. I stood there, comparing the two, when suddenly against the
skyline, and not two hundred yards away, I caught sight of a man.

"He was walking towards me around the edge of the crater, and halting
every now and then to stare down at my boat. He might be a friend, or
he might be a foe; but anyway it was not for me, in my condition, to
choose which, so I waited for him to come up. And first I saw that he
carried a spear, and wore a pair of wide dirty-white trousers and a
short coat embroidered with gold; and next that he was a true Malay,
pretty well on in years, with a greyish beard falling over his chest.
He had no shirt, but a scarlet sash wrapped about his waist and holding
a _kris_ and two long pistols handsomely inlaid with gold. In spite of
his weapons he seemed a benevolent old boy.

"He pointed towards my boat and tried me with a few questions, first in
his own language, then in Spanish, of which I knew very little beyond
the sound. But I spread out my hands towards the sea, by way of
explaining our voyage, and then pointed to my mouth. If he understood
he seemed in no hurry. He tapped O'Hara's cornet gingerly with two
fingers. I unstrung it and made shift to play 'Home, Sweet Home.'
This delighted him; he nodded, rubbed his hands, and stepped a few paces
from me, then turned and began fingering his spear in a way I did not
like at all. 'It's a matter of taste, sir,' said I, or words to that
effect, dropping the cornet like a hot potato; but he pointed towards
it, and then over a ridge inland, and I gathered I must pick it up and
follow him--which I did, and pretty quick.

"From the top of this ridge we faced across a small plain bounded on the
north with a tier of hills, most of which seemed by their shape to be
volcanoes, and out of action--for the sky lay quite blue and clear above
them. The way down into this plain led through jungle; but the plain
itself had been cleared of all but small clumps dotted here and there,
which gave it, you might say, the look of an English park; and about
half-way across, in a clear stretch of lalang grass, stood a village of
white huts huddling round a larger and much taller house.

"The old man led me straight towards this, and, coming closer, I saw
that the large house had a rough glacis about it and a round wall
pierced with loopholes. A number of goats were feeding here and a few
small cattle; also the ground about the village had been cleared and
planted with fruit-trees,--mangoes, bananas, limes, and oranges,--but as
yet I saw no inhabitants. The old Malay, who had kept ahead of me all
the way, walking at a fair pace, here halted and once more signed to me
to blow on the cornet. I obeyed, of course, this time with 'The British
Grenadiers.' I declare to you it was like starting a swarm of bees.
You wouldn't believe the troops that came pouring out of those few
huts--the women in loose trousers pretty much like the men's, but with
arms bare and loose _sarongs_ flung over their right shoulders, the
children with no more clothes than a pocket-handkerchief apiece.
I can't tell you what first informed me of my guide's rank among them--
whether the salaams they offered him, or the richness of his dress--
he was the only one with gold lace and the only one who carried
pistols--or the air with which he paraded me through the crowd, waving
the people back to right and left, and clearing a way to a narrow door
in the wall around the great house. A man armed with a long
fowling-piece saluted him at the entry; and once inside he pointed from
the house to his own breast, as much as to say, 'I am the Chief, and
this is mine.' I saluted him humbly.

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