The Hunter and Other Stories Part 6

"Equal results, far greater results," he pointed out, "have been achieved by wizards whose methods were the nadir of idiocy. Indubitable marvels have been worked at one time or another by means of almost anything you can name, so long as it was a thing offensive or ridiculous enough of itself. Guts of a sort or another have more than held their own in the long run, of course, but there are few things in our world that have not had their goetical properties soon or late."

He leaned forward to tap with derisive finger the tattered ma.n.u.script of The Black Pullet.

"This childish hocuspocus, whose fraudulent absurdities are known even to men who write books-haven't magicians used it successfully? Haven't such asinine formulas as the Grimoire of Honorius, the Verus Jesuitarum Libellus, and the Praxis Magica Fausti been effectively applied to the disarrangements of natural things' balance? Haven't simpler sorcerers perpetrated like wonders without any tools at all?"

"Yes, Master," Simon said, tight-lipped, his back to the wall of his faith, "but you have shown me things that could not be unless a true magic was behind them."

Strait put his face in his hands and fell to rolling his cheeks in his palms again. A wistfulness was behind the tired shrewdness of his pink face, perhaps because he could not now contradict his talmid.

"There is that thing in back of these things, Simon, in back of our toying, behind even the explorations of the elder cabalists. That thing, almost corporate, perhaps, in the knowledge and experience of the Magi's sanctuaries in the distant years, is a wisdom, a mystic science of knowledge behind and beyond and above known knowledge. It hasn't, it can't have anything to do with our trickeries, our juggling. All this"-he flicked a hand from his cheek to indicate the room and its appointments and everything that had happened or could happen in the room, and in the world because of the room-"is a twisted false shadow of that thing's possible shadow. And because that thing is almost certainly back there, this theurgic sleight-of-hand of ours would be all the more shabby for being valid.

"On a day, Simon, perhaps you will go through this playing to a perception of that thing in back. But it is not likely. What is likely is you'll try and fail and fall back into this legerdemain in which you daily gain facility. Maybe you'll try again, but it is not likely anything will come of it. In this nonsense you've learned you'll find the satisfaction a man has in doing what-however silly-he can do skillfully. There will be days when you'll find a pleasure in the thought of things you have done for your clients, though that will come only on optimistic days. You'll have the flavor of your power over our thin Procels and Hagentis, and of your romantic, even important, place in your world. Intelligent people will have small use for you, true enough, knowing your work is as futile when it succeeds as when it fails. But that won't worry you greatly: the intelligent won't be, really, citizens of your world.

"You'll have your skill, and your craftsman's pride in that skill, and the money it brings you, and presently you will be middle-aged and old. Some nights the thought of the True Magic you mock with your trickery will be a torment in your bed, but, in the end, your brain addled by fasting, by immersion in symbolism and formula, and by the rest of the business, you will become-as I hope-a simple-minded sorcerer with childish pride and faith in your utility."

"Yes, Master." A pleasantly indifferent smile colored the talmid's face. "Just the same, I'll be perfectly satisfied if I can ever do half the things you do."

Strait looked at his talmid with eyes wherein pity and amused contempt and a certain pleasure in the compliment were curiously blended. He grunted away the matter so unsatisfactorily discussed and turned to the immediate.

"I can't use Raum for this Buclip business, though he would have served nicely for the other," he said. "But, since I can raise one demon to handle both, there's no need of fasting another nine days. What we need, then, is one who is a reader of minds and a reconciler for the one, and a kindler of love for the other. There is Vaul, the camel, agreeable enough if it were not for his persistence in talking Egyptian, a devilishly confusing language for me. Dantalian would be best, I think, especially as the morning should be fair." He spoke to the boy who still rubbed Raum's ring. "Put up that ring, my son, and look to Dantalian's. You will find it near the top of the cabinet, a copper ring with a sprawling seal of crosses and small circles."

The morning's dawning, fair as the magician had foretold, was barely accomplished when, white and large in linen cap and robe, belted with the broad skin girdle that was marked with the Names, Strait came into the room where his a.s.sistants were in their proper garments. When he gave them good-morning they answered with nods only: they might not speak until the business was done. From the open west windows the velvet hangings had already been gathered back, and the four candles-the red, the white, the green, and the greenish black-stood on the table beside the silken roll in which the tools of the Art were bundled.

When he had seen that these things were ready, Strait drew on the white floor, still damp from the l.u.s.tral water, a wide circle, and, within it, another, less wide. Into the s.p.a.ce between the circles he copied, to the rhythm of an inarticulate mumbled chant, and writing always toward the west, the Names that were on his girdle, s.p.a.cing them with the astrological signs of sun, moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. In the inner circle's centre he drew a square whose angles terminated in crosses. Between that square and the circle he drew four five-pointed stars. In the centre of each he put the Tau, and, in the proper places, the proper letters. Outside the circle, close to its curve, he repeated the astrological signs, and, in the prescribed places, the four five-pointed stars with their centred Taus, but in each point of these stars he wrote a syllable of the Name Tetragrammaton. Last of all, he drew a triangle that lay partly outside the circle and partly over its western rim.

All this while Strait's chant had purred oppressively out of his throat to hang heavily about him, so that, by the time he had finished his mystic architecture and had gone to the table to unroll the silken bundle, the room's atmosphere was thick, repressive of movement: the talmid, carrying the brazier of virgin charcoal into the triangle, moved sluggishly, and the dumb boy's hands, setting the candles in the stars that were outside the circle, moved clumsily, stiffly, as if they needed the eyes' help to tell when they held the candles and when not. When the candles and the charcoal in the brazier had been lighted, Strait took the hazel rod inscribed Tetragrammaton and the sword whose legend was Elohim Gibor from the table and stepped into the circle's square. At their master's heels, one holding each of the lesser swords with their lesser legends-Panoraim Heamesin and Gamorin Debalin-Simon and the boy knelt.

Strait planted his feet firmly apart, looked to Dantalian's ring on his left hand that its bezel was out, shrugged his shoulders for greater ease under the heavy robe, hitched his girdle, freshened his grip on rod and sword, cleared his throat, and lifted his face to the west.

"I invoke and conjure you, O Spirit Dantalian, and, fortified with the power of the Supreme Majesty, I command you by Baralamensis, Baldachiensis, Paumachie, Apoloresedes and the most potent princes Genio, Liachide, ministers of the Tartarean Seat, chief princes of the Seat of Apologia in the ninth region; I exorcise and command you, O Spirit Dantalian, by Him Who Spake and it was done, by the most holy and glorious Names Adonai, El, Elohim, Elohe, Zebaoth, Elion, Escherce, Jah, Tetragrammaton, Sadai: do you forthwith appear and show yourself to me, here before this circle, in a fair and human shape, without any deformity or horror; do you come forthwith, from whatever part of the world, and make rational answers to my questions; come presently, come visibly, come affably, manifest that which I desire, being conjured by the Name. . . ."

And so, on and on, the mystic rigmarole rose and fell in carefully cadenced strain, on through its tedious length, now contradictory, now tautological, now repet.i.tious, but not ever in its emptiest phrase to be escaped. When it was done, except for the more rosy light of fuller risen sun, there was nothing in the room that had not been there before.

"Um-hmmm," Strait hummed briefly. "We shall see."

And he swung into the second conjuration, less restraint in his voice, loosing a gong-like resonance in his broader vowels. He called now on the Name Anehexeton which Aaron spoke and was made wise, the Name Joth that Jacob learned, the Name Escerchie Ariston which Moses named and the rivers and waters of Egypt were turned into blood, and others. And when he was done there was a vague flickering between brazier and window, a distortion of the air that was gone as soon as it was come.

Strait's face was bleak and Strait's eyes were hard and Strait's knuckles were white on rod and sword hilt.

"So?" he said softly, and softness went out of his voice. The third conjuration was a brazen song that beat the velvet walls, beat back on itself, beat the candle-flames to dim sparks, beat dark dampness out on the linen garments of the kneeling apprentices from armpit to hip. Besides the Names he had already invoked, Strait now called on Eye and Saray, and the Name Primematum, and others.

When he had done that, something was in the room without having come there in any manner: a soldier in russet, a narrow band of yellow metal around his brows, sat a sorrel horse between brazier and west window. If you chose to think he had materialized there, or had whisked himself there from another place, you were welcome, but it was certain you could not say when.

Strait's lids crept closer around his mad eyes, and there was no favor in the face with which he faced the soldier.

"O Spirit Berith, trans.m.u.ter of metals, revealer of the past and the present and the future, giver of dignities, liar: because I have not called you, do you at once depart, without injury to man or beast. Depart, I command you and be you. . . ."

Here the soldier Berith, fingers toying with red mane, leaned over his charger's neck and sought to stem the dismissal. His scarred face was bland, and his harsh voice counterfeited bluff friendliness.

"But since I am here, Strait, you may as well make use of me."

". . . ready to come whensoever, and only when, duly exorcised and conjured," the magician's voice went heedless on. "I command you to withdraw peaceably. . . ."

The soldier urged the sorrel nearer, and leaned farther over its neck.

"But, Strait, what is the-?"

With "and quietly, and may the peace of G.o.d continue forever between me and you," Strait had finished, and the russet soldier was no more in the room than his russet mount.

The magician rubbed the back of one hand over his forehead that was wet and s.h.i.+ny, and with camphor and brandy he revivified the brazier's weakening flame, while the apprentices s.h.i.+fted their knees on the floor behind him and breathed with unguarded noisiness through open mouths.

The charcoal burning afresh, Strait put away his vials, braced himself on his short legs, lifted his face once more to the west, and became an iron horn through which thunder trumpeted the invocation of King Corson of the West. That invocation completed to no effect save the s.h.i.+vering of the two behind him, Strait hunched his shoulders, smiled a basilisk's smile, and the Chain Curse came cruelly out of his mouth. The dumb boy tried to stop his ears with his fingers, but Simon struck his arm down.

When the last hard black word of the Chain Curse had been uttered, and no thing had come into the room, Strait took a small black box from under his robe, and held his other hand behind him. Into that hand the talmid put the virgin parchment inked with Dantalian's seal. Into the box, among the a.s.safetida and brimstone that was there, went the parchment, the lid closed, iron wire went thrice around the box, Strait's sword found purchase in a loop of the wire, and the box dangled down in the charcoal's flame.

The jagged, crackling phrases of the Fire Curse dulled the walls' embroidery into colorlessness, made a cringing small heap of the boy, painted the talmid's chin with blood beneath the sob-checking cut of his teeth. Strait's face was a cold, dry, white blur as the box slid off his sword and nestled among the hot coals.

Between fire and window stood a man-shape. The face atop his neck was not ugly even in its sullen endurance of agony. Some of his other faces grimaced hideously in their pain. The faces that were his right hand's finger-tips were smeared into shapelessness by the book they held.

Strait plucked the box from the fire, dropping in its stead a pinch of incense that clouded the room with pungent sweetness. He spoke politely to the man by the window, but he held aside the fold of his robe that bared the Seal of Solomon until that man had come into the part of the drawn triangle which lay outside the circle.

"I am here, Strait," that one said meekly enough, however confusing it was to have each word in turn come from another of his faces. "Command me."

The magician wasted no time in recrimination, in railing against the obstinacy the spirit had shown. Into the hand Strait held behind him Simon put two written slips of paper. From the first of these Strait looked up at the demon.

"There is a man Eton who had some s.h.i.+ps with another man Dirk. A while ago they divided their s.h.i.+ps and each took his portion to himself. Now I must know does Dirk prosper more than Eton, who seems to prosper little?"

Dantalian raised the book in his right hand while his finger-tip faces turned the leaves with their tiny white teeth. Dantalian nodded with all his faces.

"Dirk prospers more," three of his mouths affirmed.

"So? Now you will put it in Dirk's mind that he should return to Eton, that they should pool their boats again, share and share alike."

The woman's face on Dantalian's left shoulder smiled slowly and heavily through her weight of seductiveness, and took the answering from the other heads: "Will it serve to put the idea first into the head of Dirk's wife?"

Strait shrugged his linened shoulders.

"I have heard the gossip. So the matter is arranged, you may suit yourself how. Now there is another thing; there is a jeweler Buclip who wants the love of a woman"-Strait bent his head to the second slip in his hand and clicked his teeth together-"named Bella Chara. You will-"

"Wait!" Dantalian called deafening, discordantly, with all his mouths at once. "Don't do this foolish thing!"

Though there was nothing yielding in his cold eyes, Strait withheld his words and looked at the demon.

"Why should you do this foolish thing?" the vocal change-ringing went on. "You have-"

Now Strait checked the demon's words with upraised rod in the hand on which the demon's seal glowed, looking meanwhile for an uneasy instant over his shoulders at his kneeling a.s.sistants.

"We will take all that for granted," he said. "You and I know what we know. Let us only say what needs to be said from that point, if anything."

"Then why should you give her away?" some of Dantalian's voices were asking while the courtesan's head on his shoulder leered knowingly. "Is it any fairer to herself than to you to bind her by these means in a place she has not gone of her accord? She is yours-keep her."

"What of the jeweler's gifts?"

The courtesan sn.i.g.g.e.red, but a fair face elsewhere on Dantalian spoke softly:"Weren't you away for weeks at a time with your abstinences and your fastings? Was she, knowing nothing, to sit in her house and twiddle her fingers and wait for you to find time to visit her? And what of the jewelry? Does not Buclip's coming to you show that he needs more than jewelry?"

Strait frowned and said, "I made a bargain. I set my theurgy to do a thing. You will-"

"Wait!" Dantalian cried again, and tried scoffery. "You made a bargain, yes. But what of your bargain with her? That, of course, is nothing where your silly vanity is concerned! That is not enough to balance the fear that this dolt Buclip might tell his neighbor Strait's sorcery failed him. Are you a child, Strait, to toss away that which you value for the sake of a traffic in which you have no belief? Does being pointed out as Strait the magician mean that much to you?"

Scowling, Strait replied, "You will give-" and he stopped to look at the book whose pages spun swiftly to the click of Dantalian's snapping finger-mouths. The white whir of the leaves became less a whir, less a book, and into the demon's hand came a woman's face.

This face was the first thing to come eerily into the room. For a demon to materialize, however abruptly, however trickily, can be nowise genuinely weird, for such is the nature of spirits. But the matter is different when a face of ripe pink flesh comes out of a book, a warm oval of compact meatiness and creased lips and merry eyes that so awfully do not belong apart from a soft pulsing body.

"This is what you will pay for the privilege of showing off," Dantalian accused the magician. "This is what, in your empty vanity, you will throw to a baldly grey jeweler."

Strait swallowed and wet his lips and looked away from the delectable face held up in a hand whose finger-ends were tiny faces that kissed and ran red tongues over the round throat they held. Strait looked at the floor and wrinkled his forehead under his linen cap and seemed in every way ashamed.

And Strait said, "You will give the jeweler Buclip the love of this woman so she will never see any other man with love."

Dantalian was a pandemonium of voices that barked and growled and screamed, a horrible gallery of rage-masks that snarled and spat.

Strait said, "O Spirit Dantalian, because you have diligently answered my demands, I do hereby license you to depart, without injury to man or beast. Depart, I say, and be you willing and ready to come, whensoever duly exorcised and conjured. I conjure you to withdraw peaceably and quietly, and may the peace of G.o.d continue forever between me and you."

Strait flourished sword and rod and copper ring, and there was not anything in the room but the magician and his paraphernalia, and white Simon swaying up from his knees, and the boy fainting across the floor, his face all smudged by the charcoal with which the mystic circle had been drawn.

Simon the talmid touched his master's sleeve.

"Oh, Master, if I had only known when the jeweler gave me her name!"

Strait said that was nonsense. He said it did not matter; Dantalian had made much of little. He said he was a middle-aged man who should not be trifling with love.

"But, Master, isn't the jeweler at least ten years older than you? And she herself-she's twenty-five if she's a day!"

Strait smiled sidewise then into the talmid's pale face, and asked if Simon had considered her ancient hag's face not at all desirable.

Simon blushed contritely and tried to wipe out the slight.

"No, Master!" he protested. "She was-if she had been mine, I would never have-" and there he floundered, for that way lay another slight.

But Strait did not seem to mind. He confessed he had not played the man's part. He said Simon would understand, when his day came, that to the extent one becomes a magician one ceases to be a man. And he added that this same thing might hold true of sailors and jewelers and bankers, and the boy seemed to be stirring, and Simon might let the cleaning of the room wait while he went out to market for a fat goose and whatever else they would need for the evening meal, now the fasting was over.

FAITH.

Sprawled in a loose evening group on the river bank, the fifty-odd occupants of the clapboard barrack that was the American bunk-house listened to Morphy d.a.m.n the canning-factory, its superintendent, its equipment, and its pay. They were migratory workingmen, these listeners, simple men, and they listened with that especial gravity which the simple man-North American Indian, Zulu, or hobo-affects.

But when Morphy had finished one of them chuckled.

Without conventions any sort of group life is impossible, and no division of society is without its canons. The laws of the jungles are not the laws of the drawing-room, but they are as certainly existent, and as important to their subjects. If you are a migratory workingman you may pick your teeth wherever and with whatever tool you like, but you may not either by word or act publicly express satisfaction with your present employment; nor may you disagree with any who denounce the conditions of that employment. Like most conventions, this is not altogether without foundation in reason.

So now the fifty-odd men on the bank looked at him who had chuckled, turned upon him the stare that is the social lawbreaker's lot everywhere: their faces held antagonism suspended in expectancy of worse to come, physically a matter of raised brows over blank eyes, and teeth a little apart behind closed lips.

"What's eatin' you?" Morphy-a big-bodied dark man who said "the proletariat" as one would say "the seraphim"-demanded. "You think this is a good dump?"

The chuckler wriggled, scratching his back voluptuously against a p.r.o.ng of the uptorn stump that was his bolster, and withheld his answer until it seemed he had none. He was a newcomer to the Bush River cannery, one of the men hurried up from Baltimore that day: the tomatoes, after an unaccountable delay in ripening, had threatened to overwhelm the normal packing force.

"I've saw worse," the newcomer said at last, with the true barbarian's lack of discomfiture in the face of social disapproval. "And I expect to see worse."

"Meanin' what?"

"Oh, I ain't saying!" The words were light-flung, airy. "But I know a few things. Stick around and you'll see."

No one could make anything of that. Simple men are not ready questioners. Someone spoke of something else.

The man who had chuckled went to work in the process-room, where half a dozen Americans and as many Polacks cooked the fresh-canned tomatoes in big iron kettles. He was a small man, compactly plump, with round maroon eyes above round cheeks whose original ruddiness had been tinted by sunburn to a definite orange. His nose was small and merrily pointed, and a snuff-user's pouch in his lower lip, exaggerating the lift of his mouth at the corners, gave him a perpetual grin. He held himself erect, his chest arched out, and bobbed when he walked, rising on the ball of the propelling foot midway each step. A man of forty-five or so, who answered to the name Feach and hummed through his nose while he guided the steel-slatted baskets from truck, to kettle, to truck.

After he had gone, the men remembered that from the first there had been a queerness about Feach, but not even Morphy tried to define that queerness. "A nut," Morphy said, but that was indefinite.

What Feach had was a secret. Evidence of it was not in his words only: they were neither many nor especially noteworthy, and his silence held as much ambiguity as his speech. There was in his whole air-the c.o.c.k of his round, boy's head, in the sparkle of his red-brown eyes, in the nasal timbre of his voice, in his trick of puffing out his cheeks when he smiled-a sardonic knowingness that seemed to mock whatever business was at hand. He had for his work and for the men's interests the absent-minded, bantering sort of false-seriousness that a busy parent has for its child's affairs. His every word, gesture, attention, seemed thinly to mask preoccupation with some altogether different thing that would presently appear: a man waiting for a practical joke to blossom.

He and Morphy worked side by side. Between them the first night had put a hostility which neither of them tried to remove. Three days later they increased it.

It was early evening. The men, as usual, were idling between their quarters and the river, waiting for bed-time. Feach had gone indoors to get a can of snuff from his bedding. When he came out Morphy was speaking.

"Of course not," he was saying. "You don't think a G.o.d big enough to make all this would be crazy enough to do it, do you? What for? What would it get Him?"

A freckled ex-sailor, known to his fellows as Sandwich, was frowning with vast ponderance over the cigarette he was making, and when he spoke the deliberation in his voice was vast.

"Well, you can't always say for certain. Sometimes a thing looks one way, and when you come to find out, is another. It don't look like there's a G.o.d. I'll say that. But-"

Feach, tamping snuff into the considerable s.p.a.ce between his lower teeth and lip, grinned around his fingers, and managed to get derision into the snapping of the round tin lid down on the snuff-can.

"So you're one of them guys?" he challenged Morphy.

"Uh-huh." The big man's voice was that of one who, confident of his position's impregnability, uses temperateness to provoke an a.s.sault. "If somebody'd show me there was a G.o.d, it'd be different. But I never been showed."

"I've saw wise guys like you before!" The jovial ambiguity was suddenly gone from Feach; he was earnest, and indignant. "You want what you call proof before you'll believe anything. Well, you wait-you'll get your proof this time, and plenty of it."

"That's what I'd like to have. You ain't got none of this proof on you, have you?"

Feach sputtered.