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Sir John Constantine by Prosper Paleologus Constantine

P >> Prosper Paleologus Constantine >> Sir John Constantine




"After an hour's climbing then (for the road twisted uphill along the
edge of the torrent) we came to the village, which was called Otta.
Now, the first thing to happen to us in Otta was that we found it
empty--not so much as a dog in the street--but all the inhabitants on
the hill above, in a crowd before a mighty great stone: and Badcock
would have it that they were gathered together in fear of us.
But the true reason turned out to be something quite different.
For this stone overhangs the village, which is built on a stiff
slope; and though it has hung there for hundreds of years without
moving, the villagers can never be easy that it will not tumble on
top of them; and once a year regularly, and at odd times when the
panic takes them, they march up and tie it with ropes. This very
thing they were doing as we arrived, and all because some old woman
had dreamed of an earthquake. We took notice that in the crowd and
in the gang binding the stone there was no man the right side of
fifty (barring a cripple or two); the reason being that all their
young men had enlisted in the militia.

"These people made us welcome (and I will say, gentlemen, once for
all and in spite of what has happened to Master Prosper here, that
there is no such folk as the Corsicans for kindness to strangers),
but they told us we were on the wrong road. By following the pass we
should find ourselves in forest-tracks which indeed would lead us
down to the great plain of the Niolo and across it to Corte, whence a
good road ran north to Cape Corso; but our shorter way was the
coast-road, which (they added) we must leave before reaching Calvi--
for fear of the Genoese--and take a southerly one which wound through
the mountains to Calenzana. They explained this many times to Sir
John, and Sir John explained it to us; and learning that we were
English, and therefore friends of liberty, they forced us to drink
wine with them--lashins of wine--until just as my head was beginning
to feel muzzy, some one called out that we were heroes and must drink
the wine of heroes, the pride of Otta, the Invincible St. Cyprien.

"By this time we were all as sociable together as mice in malt,
except that these Corsicans never laughed at all, but stared at us
awsome-like even when the creature Fett put one foot on a chair and
another on the table and made 'em a long tom-fool speech in English,
calling 'em friends Romans and countrymen and asking them to lend him
their ears, as though his own weren't long enough. Then they brought
in the Invincible St. Cyprien, and Sir John poured out a glass, and
sniffed and tasted it and threw up his head, gazing round on the
company and looking every man full in the eyes. I can't tell you
why, gentlemen, but his bearing seemed so noble to me at that moment
I felt I could follow him to the death (though of course there wasn't
the leastest need for it, just then). I reached out for the bottle,
filled myself a glass, drank it off, and stared around just as
defiant. It gave me a very pleasant feeling in the pit of the
stomach, and the taste of it didn't seem calculated to hurt a fly.
So I took two more glasses quickly, one after the other; and every
one looked at me with their faces very bright all of a sudden--and
the room itself grown brighter--and to my astonishment I heard them
calling upon me in English for a speech. Whereby, being no public
speaker, I excused myself and walked out into the village street,
which was bright as day with the moon well over the cliffs on the
other side of the gorge, and (to my surprise) crowded with people so
that I couldn't have believed the whole City of London held half the
number, let alone a god-forsaken hole like Otta. I stood for a while
on the doorstep counting 'em, and the next thing I remember was
crossing the street to a low wall overhanging the gorge and leaning
upon it and watching the cliffs working up and down like mine-stamps.
This struck me as curious, and after thinking it over I made up my
mind to climb across and discover the reason."

"I fear, Billy," said my uncle, "that you must have been
intoxicated."

"But the worst, sir, was the moon; which was not like any ordinary
moon, but kept swelling and bursting in showers of the most beautiful
fireworks, so that I said to myself, 'O for the wings of a dove,' I
said, 'so that I fetch some one to put a stop to this!' And I'd
hardly said the words before it was broad day, and me lying in the
street with a small crowd about me, very solemn and curious, and my
head in the lap of a middle-aged woman that smelt of garlic, but
without any pretensions to looks. And she was lifting up her head
and singing a song, and the sound of it as melancholy as a gib-cat in
a garden of cucumbers. Whereby the whole crowd stood by and stared,
without offering to help. Whereby I said to myself, 'This is a
pretty business, and no mistake.' Whereby I saw Sir John come forth
from the house where the drinking had been, and his face was white
but his step steady; and says he, 'What have you been doing to this
woman?' 'Nothing at all,' said I; 'or, leastways, nothing to warrant
this behaviour on her part.' 'Well,' said he, 'you may be surprised
to hear it, but she maintains that you are betrothed to her.'
'A man,' said I, 'may woo where he will, but must wed where his wife
is. If this woman be my fate, I'll say no more except that 'tis
hard; but as for courting her, I never did so.' 'You are in a worse
case than you guess,' said he; 'for, to begin with, the lady is a
widow; and, secondly, she is marrying you, not for your looks, but
for revenge.' 'Why, what have I done?' said I. 'Nothing at all,'
said he; 'but from what I can hear of it, five years ago a man of
Evisa, up the valley, stole a goat belonging to this woman's husband;
whereupon the husband took a gun and went to Evisa and shot the
thief's cousin, mistaking him for the thief; whereupon the thief came
down to Otta and shot the honest man one day while he was gathering
olives in his orchard. He himself left neither chick nor child; but
his kinsmen of the family of Paolantonuccio (I can pronounce the
name, gentlemen, if you will kindly look the other way) took up the
quarrel, and with so much liveliness that to-day but three of them
survive, and these are serving just now with the militia. For the
while, therefore, the Widow Paolantonuccio has no one to carry on the
custom of the country; nor will have, until a husband offers.'
'For pity's sake, Sir John,' said I, `get me out of this! Tell them
that if any man has been courting this woman 'tis not I, William
Priske, but another in my image.' 'Why, to be sure!' cried Sir John.
'It must have been the Invincible St. Cyprien!'

"So stepping back and seating himself again upon the doorstep, he
began to argue with the villagers, the woman standing sullen all the
while and holding me by the arm. I could not understand a word, of
course, but later on he told me the heads of his discourse.

"'I began,' he said, 'by expounding to 'em all the doctrine of
cross-revenge, or _vendetta trasversa_, as they call it; and this I
did for two reasons--the first because in an argument there's naught
so persuasive as telling a man something he knows already--the second
because it proved to them, and to me, that I wasn't drunk. For the
doctrine has more twists in it than a conger.

"'Next I taught them that the doctrine was damnable; and that it
robbed Corsica of men who should be fighting the Genoese, on which
errand we were bound.

"'And lastly I proved to them out of the mouths of several wise men
(some of Greece, and others of my own inventing) that a man with
three glasses of their wine in his belly was a man possessed, and
therefore that either nothing had happened, or, if anything had
happened, the fellow to blame must be that devil of a warrior the
Invincible St. Cyprien.

"'Yet (as so often happens) the argument that really persuaded them,
as I believe, was one I never used at all; which was, that the woman
had money and a parcel of land, and albeit no man could pick up
courage to marry her, they did not relish a stranger stepping in and
cutting them out.'

"Be that as it may, gentlemen, in twenty minutes the crowd had come
round to Sir John's way of thinking; and they not only sold us mules
at thirty livres apiece--which Sir John knew to be the fair current
price--but helped us to truss up Mr. Fett and Mr. Badcock, each on
his beast, and walked with us back to the cross-roads, singing hymns
about Corsican liberty. Only we left the woman sadly cast down.

"From the cross-roads, where they left us and turned back, our road
led through a great forest of pines. Among these pines hung
thousands of what seemed to be balls of white cotton, but were the
nests of a curious caterpillar; which I only mention because Mr.
Fett, coming to, picked up one of these caterpillars and slipped it
down the nape of Mr. Badcock's neck, whereby the poor man was made
uncomfortable all that day and the next; for the hairs of the insect
turned out to be full of poison. In the end we were forced to strip
him and use the gridiron upon him for a currycomb; so it came in
handy, after all.

"On the second day, having crossed a river and come to a village
which, if I remember, was called Manso, we bore away southward among
the most horrible mountains. Among these we wandered four days,
relying always on Sir John's map: but I reckon the man who made it
must have drawn the track out of his own head and trusted that no
person would ever be fool enough to go there. Hows'ever, the weather
keeping mild, we won through the passes with no more damage than the
loss of Mr. Fett's mule (which tumbled over a precipice on the third
day), and a sore on Mr. Fett's heel, brought about by his having to
walk the rest of the way into Calenzana.

"Now at Calenzana, a neat town, we found ourselves nearly in sight of
Calvi and plumb in sight of the Genoese outposts that were planted a
bare gunshot from the house where we lodged, on the road leading
northward to Calvi gate. To the south, as we heard--though we never
saw them--lay a regiment of Paoli's militia; and, between the two
forces Calenzana stood as a sort of no-man's-land, albeit the Genoese
claimed what they called a 'supervision' over it. In fact they never
entered it, mistrusting its defences, and also the temper of its
inhabitants, who were likely enough to rise at their backs if the
patriots gave an assault.

"They contented themselves, then, with advancing their outposts to a
bend on the Calvi road not fifty yards from our lodging, which
happened to be the last house in the suburbs; and from his window,
during the two days we waited for Mr. Fett's sore to heal, Sir John
would watch the guard being relieved, and sometimes pick up his gun
and take long aim at the sentry, but lay it down with a sort of sigh:
for though the sight of a Genoese was poison to him, he reckoned
outpost-shooting as next door to shooting a fox.

"Our hosts, I should tell you, were an old soldier and his wife.
The man, by his own account, followed the trade of a bird-stuffer;
which was just an excuse for laziness, for no soul ever entered his
shop but to hear him talk of his campaigning under Gaffori and under
the great Pascal Paoli's father, Hyacinth Paoli. This he would do at
great length, and, for the rest, lived on his wife, who was a
well-educated woman and kept a school for small children when they
chose to come, which again was seldom.

"This Antonio, as we called him, owned a young ram, which was his pet
and the pride of Calenzana: for, to begin with, it was a wild ram;
and in addition to this it was tame; and, to cap all, it wasn't a bit
like a ram. And yet it was a wild ram--a wild Corsican ram.

"Being an active sort of man in his way, though well over fifty, and
given to wandering on the mountains above Calenzana, he had come one
day upon a wild sheep with a lamb running at her heels. He let fly a
shot (for your Corsican, Master Prosper, always carries a gun) and
ran forward. The mother made off, but the lamb sat and squatted like
a hare; and so Antonio took him up and carried him home.

"By the time we came to Calenzana the brute had grown to full size,
with horns almost two feet long. As we should reckon, they were
twisted the wrong way for a ram's, and for fleece he had a coat like
a Gossmoor pony's, brown and hairy. But a ram he was; and, the first
night, when Mr. Badcock obliged us with a tune on the flute, he came
forward and stared at him for a time and then butted him in the
stomach.

"We had to carry the poor man to bed. We slept, all four of us, in a
loft, which could only be reached by a ladder; and a ram, as you
know, can't climb a ladder. It's out of nature. Yet the brute tried
its best, having taken such a fancy to Badcock, and wouldn't be
denied till his master beat him out of doors with a fire-shovel and
penned him up for the night.

"The next morning, being loosed, he came in to breakfast with the
family, and butted a crock of milk all over the kitchen hearth, but
otherwise bore himself like a repentant sinner; the only difference
being that from breakfast onward he turned away from his master and
took to following Mr. Fett, who didn't like the attention at all.
Badcock kept to his bed; and Mr. Fett too, who could only manage to
limp a little, climbed up to the loft soon after midday and lay down
for a rest.

"Sir John and I, left alone downstairs, took what we called a siesta,
each in his chair, and Sir John's chair by the shaded window.
For my part, I was glad enough for forty winks, and could have
enlisted among the Seven Sleepers after those cruel four days in the
mountains. So, with Sir John's permission, I dozed off; and sat up,
by-and-by--awake all of a sudden at the sound of my master's
stirring--to see him at the window with his gun half-lifted to his
shoulder, and away up the road a squad of Genoese soldiers marching
down to relieve guard.

"With that there came a yell from the loft overhead. I sprang up,
rubbing my eyes, and, between rubbing 'em, saw Sir John lower his gun
and stand back a pace. The next instant--_thud, thud!_--over the
eaves upon the roadway dropped Fett and Badcock and picked themselves
up as if to burst in through the window. No good! A second later
that ram was on top of them.

"How he had contrived to climb up the ladder and butt the pair over
the roof, there's no telling. But there he was; and gathering up his
legs from the fall as quick as lightning he headed them off from the
house and up the road. There was no violence. So far as one could
tell from the clouds of dust, he never hurt 'em once, but through the
dust we could see the Genoese staring as he nursed the pair up the
road straight into their arms. The queer part of it," wound up
Billy, reflectively, "was that, after the first moment, Sir John had
never the chance of a shot. You may doubt me, gentlemen, but Sir
John is a shot in a thousand, and, what with the dust and the
confusion, there was never a chance without risk to human life.
The Genoese giving back, in less than half a minute the road was
clear."

"But what happened?" asked my uncle.

"Well, sir, this here Corsica being an island, it follows that they
must have stopped somewhere. But where there's no telling."

"You never saw them again."

"Never," said Billy, solemnly; and, having asked and received
permission to light his pipe, resumed the tale.

"There being now no reason to loiter in Calenzana, we left the town
next morning and rode along the hill tracks to Muro, when again we
struck the high road running northward to the coast. Sir John had
sold Mr. Badcock's mule to our hosts in Calenzana, and here in Muro
he parted with our pair also, reck'nin' it safer to travel the next
stage on foot; since by all accounts we were about to skirt the
Genoese outposts to the east of Calvi. The Corsicans, to be sure,
held and patrolled the high road (by reason that every week-day a
train of waggons travelled along it with material for the new town
a-building on the seashore, at Isola Rossa), yet not so as to
guarantee it safe for a couple of chance riders. Also Sir John had
no mind to be stopped a dozen times and questioned by the Corsican
patrols. We kept, therefore, along the hills to the east of the
road; and on our way, having halted and slept a night in an olive
orchard about five miles from the coast, we woke up a little after
daylight to the sound of heavy guns firing.

"The meaning of this was made plain to us as we fetched our way round
to the eastward and came out upon the face of a steep hill that broke
away in steep cliffs to the very foreshore. There, below us, lay a
neat deep-water roadstead covered to westward by a small island with
a tower on it and a battery. The shore ran out towards the island,
and the two had been joined by a mole, or the makings of one, about
thirty yards long; and well back in the bight of the shore, where it
curved towards us, was a half-built town, all of new stone, with
scaffoldings standing everywhere, yet not a soul at work on 'em.
Out in the roadstead five small gunboats were tacking and blazing
away, two at the mole and three at the town itself; and the town and
the island blazing and banging back at the gunboats. We could not
see the town battery, but the island one mounted three guns, and Sir
John's spy-glass showed the people there running from one to another
like emmets.

"Sir John studied the boats and the town through his glass for five
minutes, and after them the inshore water and the beach on our side
of the town, that was of white sand with black rocks here and there,
and ran down pretty steep as it neared the foot of our hill.
'If those fellows had any sense--' he began to say, and with that, as
if struck by a sudden thought, he looked close around him, and
towards the edge of the cliff where it broke away below us. The next
moment he was down on his stomach and crawling to the brink for a
look below. I did the same, of course; and overtook him just as he
drew back his head, and gave a sort of whistle, looking me in the
face--as well he might; for right underneath us lay a sixth gunboat,
and the crew of her ashore already with a six-pounder and hoisting it
by a tackle to a slab of rock about fifty feet above the water's
edge. A neater spot they couldn't have chosen, for it stood at an
angle the town battery couldn't answer to (which was plain, from its
sending no shot in this direction), and yet it raked the whole town
front as easy as ninepins.

"To make things a bit fairer, this landing-party offered us as simple
pretty a target as any man could wish for; nothing to do but fire
down on 'em at forty yards, bob back and reload, with ne'er a chance
of their climbing up to do us a mischief or even to count how many we
were. I touched Sir John's elbow and tapped my gun-stock, and for
the moment he seemed to think well of it. 'Cut the tackle first,'
said he, lifting his gun. ''Twill be as good as hamstringing 'em':
and for him the shot would have been child's play. But after a
second or two he lowered his piece and drew back. 'Damme,' said he,
'I'm losing my wits. Let 'em do their work first, and we'll get
cannon and all. If only'--and here he looked nervous-like over his
shoulder up the hill--'if only those fellows from the town don't
hurry up and spoil sport!'

"I couldn't see his face, but I could feel that he was chuckling as
the fellows below us swung up the gun and fixed it in position and
handed up the round shot. But when they followed up with two kegs of
powder and dumped 'em on to the platform, my dear master's hand went
up and he rubbed the back of his head in pure delight. After that--
as I thought, for nothing but frolic--he even let 'em load and train
the gun for us, and only lifted his musket when the gunner--a
dark-faced fellow with a red cap on his head--was act'lly walking up
with the match alight in his linstock.

"'I don't want to hurt that man afore 'tis necessary,' says Sir John;
and with that he takes aim and lets fly, and shears the linstock
clean in two, right in the fellow's hand. I saw the end of it--match
and all--fly halfway across the platform, and popped back my head as
the dozen Genoese there turned their faces up at us. The pity was,
we hadn't time for a look at 'em!

"Sir John had warned me to hold my fire. But neither he nor I were
prepared for what happened next. For first one of them let out a
yell, and right on top of it half a dozen were screaming '_Imboscata!
Imboscata!_"--and with that we heard a rush of feet and, looking
over, saw the last two or three scrambling for dear life off the edge
of the platform and down the rocks to their boat.

"'Quick, Billy--quick! Damme, but we'll risk it!' cried Sir John,
snatching up his spare gun. 'If we make a mess of it,' says he,
'plug a bullet into one of the powder kegs! Understand?' says he.

"'Sakes alive, master!' says I. 'You bain't a-going to clamber down
that gizzy-dizzy place sure 'nuff!'

"'Why, o' course I be,' says he, and already he had his legs over and
was lowering himself. 'Turn on your back, stick out your heels, and
hold your gun wide of you, _so_,' says he; 'and you'll come to no
harm.'

"Well, as it happened, I didn't. Not for a hundred pound would I go
down that cliff again in cold blood, and my stomach turns wambly in
bed o' nights when I dream of it. But down it I went on the flat of
my back with my heels out, as Sir John recommended, and with my eyes
shut, about which he'd said nothing. I felt my jacket go rip from
tail to collar--you can see the rent in it for yourselves--and my
shirt likewise; and what happened to the seat of my breeches 'twould
be a scandal to mention. But in two shakes or less we were at the
bottom of the cliff together, safe and sound, and not a moment too
soon, neither: for as I picked myself up I saw Sir John lurch across
and catch up the burning fuse that lay close alongside one of the
powder kegs. Whereby, although the danger was no sooner seen than
over, I pretty near turned sick on the spot.

"But Sir John gave me no time. 'Hooray!' he sings out. 'Help me to
slew this blessed gun round, and we'll sink boat and all for 'em
unless she slips her moorings quick!'

"Well, sir, that was the masterpiece. We heaved and strained, and
inside of two minutes we had it trained upon the gunboat. The men
that had quitted the platform were down by the shore before this; and
a dozen had pushed their boat off and sat in her, some pulling,
others backing, and all jabbering and disputing whether to return and
take off the five or six that stood in a huddle by the water's edge
and were crying out not to be left behind. And mean time on the
gunboat some were shouting to 'em not to be a pack of cowards--for
the crew on board could see us on the platform (which the others
couldn't) and that we were only two--and others were running to cut
her cable, seeing the gun trained on 'em and not staying to think
that the wind was light and the current setting straight onshore.
And in the midst of this Sir John finds a fresh fuse, and lights it
from the old one, and bang! says we.

"It took her plump in the stern-works, knocking her wheel and
taffrail to flinders and ripping out a fair six feet of her larboard
bulwarks. This much I saw while the smoke cleared; but Sir John was
already calling for the reload. The Genoese by good luck had left a
rammer; and the pair of us had charged her and were pushing home shot
number two as merry as crickets, when we heard a horn blown on the
hill above us, and at the same instant spied a body of Corsicans on
the beach below, marching towards us from the town.

"Well, Sir John decided that we might just as well have a second shot
at the boat while our hand was in; and so we did, but trained it too
high in our excitement and did no damage beyond knocking a hole in
her mainsail. And our ears hadn't lost the noise of it before a man
put his head over the cliff above and spoke to us very politely in
Corsican.

"He seemed to be asking the way down; for Sir John pointed to the way
we had come. Whereby he laughed and shook his head. And a dozen
others that had gathered beside him looked down too and laughed and
waved their hands to us. By-and-by they went off, still waving, to
look for a better way down: but they took a good twenty minutes to
reach us, and before this the gunboat had drifted close upon the
rocks and no hope for it but to surrender to the party marching along
the beach and now close at hand.

"Well, sirs, the upshot was that this party, which had marched out
for a forlorn hope, took the gunboat and her crew as easily as a man
gathers mushrooms. And the rest of the boats, dispirited belike,
sheered off after another hour's banging and left the roadstead in
peace. But, while this was happening, the party on the cliffs had
worked their way down to our rock by a sheep-track on the western
side, and the first man to salute us was the man who had first spoken
to us from the top of the cliff: and this, let me tell you, was no
less a person than the General himself."

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Stephen King fan publishes Shining's Jack Torrance's novel
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A Stephen King fan has published an 80-page version of the book which novelist Jack Torrance obsessively writes during King's The Shining, where his descent into madness is revealed when his wife discovers that his work consists of just one phrase, endlessly repeated.

Torrance, played by Jack Nicholson in terrifying form in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film, is a frustrated writer who goes with his wife and son to spend the winter in the isolated Overlook Hotel in an attempt to get the novel he has always wanted to write started. But the hotel's grisly past and unquiet ghosts have their way with him, and his wife Wendy eventually finds that the manuscript he has been working on actually only contains the phrase "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", typed over and over again.

Now New York artist Phil Buehler, who describes himself as "a big fan of Stanley Kubrick and Stephen King", has self-published a book credited to Torrance, repeating the phrase throughout but formatting each page differently, using the words to create different shapes from zigzags to spirals.

"The idea has probably been marinating for years, because I loved the movie and the Stephen King book," said Buehler. "I'd just finished my own obsessive art project [and] it was an idea I had over the Christmas holidays."

He said he decided to stick to type and formatting that could have been created on a typewriter, with the first ten pages duplicating shots of Torrance's work from the film. "I thought 'if he continues to get crazier, what would those pages look like?'" he said. "I hit writer's block about 60 pages in, and I had to get to 80 - that went on for about a week." His fiancée, who had neither read the book nor seen the film, became a little concerned about his actions. "I finally showed her the movie, and she realised I wasn't really losing it," said Buehler.

He's included a spoof review from the blog OverThinkingIt.com on the book's back jacket, which compares it to "the best of Beckett" in its "lack of forward momentum", and considers the struggles of the author, "heroically pitting himself against the Sisyphusean sentence". "It's that metatextual struggle of Man vs. Typewriter that gives this book its spellbinding power," the review says. "Some will dismiss it as simplistic; that's like dismissing a Pollack canvas as mere splatters of paint."

So far, Buehler says that around 1,000 people have viewed the book, for sale on Blurb.com for $8.95 in paperback, or $22.95 in hardback, and he's sold "a few" copies, with sales now starting to pick up steam. "A few people have asked me to sign it - they're looking it as a piece of art rather than a funny thing to give to a Kubrick fan," he said. "If you're not a Kubrick or King fan, you might not even get it."

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