C Is for Carroll

INVISIBLE CITIES XXXVII -- Trading Cities: ERSILIA

Ersilia and Romulus; from here

In Ersilia we have another web, though there's nothing necessarily spidery about it, as was the case in Octavia.  I don't know if Calvino meant it (I was more sure that he didn't mean a connection to Shelob, of course), but this chapter reminds me of something I read about in Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union.  In the book, the protagonist has a scuffle with the "Black Hats" -- a sect of a particularly strict observers of Judaism.  Now, I'm the first to admit that I know practically nothing about Judaism.  Really pretty much only what I've gotten from Chabon's books and a few read-throughs of the Old Testament.  It's been long enough since my last read of The YPU that I don't remember the details, but somewhere along the line, the protagonist has to speak to the guy who manages all the string.  Yeah.  Anyway, this guy is a master of all the boundaries put upon strict observers of Jewish law and marks them all on hundreds of maps and uses dozens of types and countless lengths of string to run throughout the town and demarcate the boundaries (how many steps one may take on the Sabbath, for example) for observers.  Anyway, the webs in Ersilia remind me of this, and I'm very interested in what you might make of it.

A few other things I find interesting, and about which I invite your thoughts:

• that the strings remain when the inhabitants leave;
• use of the word "refugee" and how it connects not only to the story of Ersilia itself, but also to the meta-story of the empire;
• that the bones don't remain, victims of the rolling wind, and in the same sentence of the mention, finally, of a spider (as if the spider ate the bodies whose bones are gone);
• lastly, Ersilia was the wife of Romulus -- you know, of Remus and Romulus, founders of Rome, another empire and also stretched particularly thin.

Has it Changed My Life? Quite Possibly.

So, Calvino's Invisible Cities is our next book.  Period.  I just finished reading it, which reading, as I've said before, was slow and savory, and I'm trying to decide: am I the same person, now that I've finished it, I was before?  Just the fact that the book's brought me to this question is saying a great deal.  Of course, to place it upon the pedestal aside the very few other truly life-changing books, I must compare it to them.  This also raises an interesting question: what is it that makes a book life-changing for its reader?  It's not a particularly difficult question, just interesting.  The answer, I think is simple: it must be a combination of [1] the book's quality (though generally to a lesser degree) and [2] the circumstances of time and place of the reader's life.  As it is, Invisible Cities is of a higher quality than some of the books way up there.  For example, as wonderful as Life of Pi is, it has its [few] limitations, one of which is word craft.  Don't get me wrong.  Martel is an excellent craftsman of the sentence, but Calvino is of the master-smithing status of Borges, Chabon, and McCarthy.  Other books include the obvious tomes of The Divine Comedy and East of Eden/Grapes of Wrath, as well as the Alice books, Ender's Game, Wonder Boys, and Blindness.  Each of these books arrived in my life at key moments, did their business, such as it was, and took up permanent residence upon my bookshelves--literal and metaphysical.  Does Invisible Cities, an essentially perfect book (yeah, really--and not perfect like Joyce, but perfect like, well, Joyce if he had a freaking heart or if Steinbeck could write briefly yet as powerfully), warrant place among the others?

Nearly all of the best books I've read, save All the Pretty Horses, which just bloody tortured me, broke me, heart and spirit, and highlighted in thirty-foot capital, fluorescent letters, "YOU CAN'T WRITE!" inspire me.  You see, I want to be a writer.  Rather, I want to be a successful writer.  I want to be a writer whose stuff people want to read!  The best books nearly always inspire me to write.  They tickle the muses who come and circle me and whisper in my ears and give my fingers and cerebral frontal lobe the itch and make me want to CREATE.  Yeah.  Well, Invisible Cities has done that--and in frickin' spades, man.  The last time I felt the bug this strongly (at least via a book) was when I finished Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North (or however you want to translate it) and subsequently began my own hyohakusha and used the genre and text as model for my creative writing students' end-of-year project.  (My hyohakusha ultimately failed (I'm an inadequate poet), though many of my students wrote and created brilliantly, beautifully.)

Basho was a three years ago.  Since reading it, I've returned to it again and again.  I've studied its poetry and form and in four or five translations.  I've traced his path on maps.  I've referred to and used him as model in poetry and a book of my own.  Has it changed my life?  I dare say it has.  Maybe it just takes time for a book to climb the long stair to the top once it's arrived at--been permitted access to--the base.  If this is the case (and you can't tell right away if it's happened), I expect Basho will soon arrive at the top right along with Steinbeck et al and Calvino will have likely just recently begun the ascent.  Time will tell, I suppose.

Regardless, this book amazed and amazes me.  I am eager to read it again.

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XIV -- chapter 13: OF DEVILS AND MASONS

While this is my favorite chapter of the book so far, so it contains one of my favorite comparison: that of tapeworms and gall stones to bad poetry, and all its pathetic symptoms and affectations.  Here, though, we have to examine Eco's use of, what he considers as its his own, bad poetry.  The creation and strategic use of intentionally bad poetry is like the now-commonly mentioned (Michael Chabon) generation of intentional coincidences.  A wise student once commented hopefully and pointedly on the poetry I confessed I was writing for a then-current novel.  "I hope you're not trying to write intentionally bad poetry to make it look like a teenager did it," she said.  I admitted that indeed I was not and so assured her with a sincere expression of my insecurity as a poet, (more or less:) "I'm hoping the best poetry I can do can qualify as believably excellent or even just believable teen-poetry."  So I wonder how Eco, certainly an excellent writer, but not necessarily a poet (and so he sagely acknowledges in the end of the chapter in reference to another's poem, "This is beautiful because it is not mine"), approached his poetry attempts, or, as I suspect is the case as with other issues/references in the book, these are autobiographically accurate, and indeed pieces he composed as a precocious teen--that and, well, the poems' apparent and beyond-coincidentally prophetic natures for Yambo's unique future.  For example, bad poetry or not, this is quite telling:

you cannot enter twice

the kingdom of remembrance

and hope to find unspoiled

the unexpected freshness

of the first theft.

1. The poem of "three days before Christmas" interests me, as in subject (a purity in stark contrast to what we know of the adult Yambo) and prediction (the loss of memory) it is particularly prophetic, appropriate (even mysteriously coincidentally so, as already mentioned above), and perhaps directly metaphoric.  It may even offer a potential explanation for why the memory was lost in the first place (accurate as prediction or not, I don't remember).  Thoughts?
2. As there are literal rooms of memory in the house that align with Yambo's segmented memories of his past, all of which are natural divisions--segmentations--of life, and with a particularly sturdy and tall wall set ("to put a final seal on memories I was renouncing") between adolescence and young adulthood, high school and college, so his literal loss of memory builds a wall (even a "satanically masonic" wall) between his present and past.  Sounds like a classic, though thoroughly exaggerated, mid-life crisis.
3. Lila Saba: "saba" is the food for bacteria that create balsamic vinegar.  Consider the various classic metaphors of vinegar, not to mention grapes, as well as the definition of balsam against the mellifluous connection between Lila Saba and Sibilla (additional, of course, to the fact that Lila is a nickname for Sibilla anyway).
4. An affecting little book: "La Vita Nuova."  Beatrice penetrated all sorts of walls that otherwise held everyone else back in Dante's life; so similar to this Lila who is the only one, besides Gianni, who transcends all of Yambo's barriers, consciously and subconsciously--the "relay race across the years."

The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana XIII -- chapter 12: BOTH THE TIME and THE PLOT POINTS, THEY "SI GIRANO"

Ming the Merciless

1. If Chabon is right (or, at least, if his ideal carries over to Eco in this case), then the story of Saint Antoninus isn't merely told to characterize the little town.  Thoughts?
2. Superstition, of course, is borne as explanation by the ignorant of an event otherwise unexplained.  Any thoughts on how that applies here with Amalia, and maybe in context of events and information shared to this point?
3. Wretched simoniacs....
4. Of course the folio is Clarabell's treasure (or a foreshadowing thereof), and appropriately so, as he found it where he wasn't looking.  But how will this, if so it does, tie into his memory?  Regardless of the imminent connection, why is Shakespeare's first folio appropriate (and not only in personal terms to Yambo)?  Of course, it's not real.  Is it?
5. "That's my book.  Is it worth it?"
6. The little bottle atop the bookcase: any connection at all to the "Drink Me" bottle of Wonderland (though not by drinking, surely, or literally so, anyway)?
7. Gordon, Ming, and the castor oil.

A CALL FOR IGNORANCE -- and the Gap Between Observation and Reality

From chapter 3 of Summerland, by Michael Chabon:

Jennifer T. Rideout had spent more time at the ruins of the Summerland Hotel than any other child of her generation.  It was a thirty-seven-minute hike, through woods, fields and the parking lot of the county dump, from the Rideout place to the beach.  There was no road you could take to get you there; there had never been a road to the hotel.  That was something she had always liked about the place.  In the old days, her uncle Mo had told her, everything came to the hotel by steamship: food, linens, fine ladies and gentlemen, mail, musicians, fireworks on the Fourth of July.  Though nowadays it was a popular spot for teenagers in the summer, on gray winter afternoons Hotel Beach could be pretty forlorn.  As if in payment for the miracle of its summer sunshine, in the winter it was tormented by rain and fog, hailstorms, icy rain.  Green stuff grew all over everything, this weird cross between algae and fungus and slime that settled like snow over the piles of drift and anything else that was made out of wood.  On a damp, chilly winter afternoon she often found herself to be the only human being on the whole Tooth.

Another thing she liked, besides the solitude, were the stories.  A boy from up by Kiwanis Beach wandered into one of the abandoned beach cabins at dusk and came out stark raving mad, having seen something he could never afterward describe.  Ghosts of the hotel dead, ghostly orchestras playing, phantoms doing the Lindy Hop in the light of the full moon.  Sometimes people felt someone touching their cheek, pinching their arm, even giving them a kick in the seat of the pants.  Girls had their skirts lifted, or found their hair tied in intractable knots.  Jennifer T. didn’t necessarily believe these legends.  But they gave Hotel Beach an atmosphere that she enjoyed.  Jennifer T. Rideout believed in magic, maybe even more than Ethan did—otherwise she could not have been a part of this story.  But she also believed that she had been born a hundred years too late to get even the faintest taste of it.  Long ago there had been animals that talked, and strange little Indians who haunted the birch wood, while other Indians lived in villages on the bottom of the Sound.  Now that world had all but vanished.  Except on the ball field of Summerland, that is, and here at Hotel Beach.

My typical cycle of audiobooks has brought me back to Summerland.  I don't have very many audiobooks, and we haven't been back to the library anytime recently to get one I haven't already listened to a dozen times.  I don't mind.  This is a fantastic--and a fantastical--book, which, like so many of the best books, yields something new with each pass.

I listened to this passage (quoted above) about my favorite character from the book, Jennifer T., while driving home from work yesterday, and it got me thinking (fear not: I didn't hurt myself!) --not that my thoughts generally, much less these particularly, brought anything revolutionary.  Really this is all pretty old stuff, but borne upon something more poignant, less abstract.

We all know, of course, that superstition comes from ignorance.  The more educated you are, generally, the less superstitious you are.  Generally.  Along these same lines, and with far less connoted negativity, so the ability to live, to exist, and from within the very substance of one's imagination--to miss the fuzzy borders that divide personal fantasy from reality (and as only the recklessly preoccupied and gleefully distracted kid can do) --is reliant on ignorance.  Education and wisdom (conventional wisdom) de-fuzz that border.  This is not to say the educated can't imagine, but their (dare I say "our"?) imaginations must be lived out and delivered packaged neatly within the strictures of contrivance--the story, the picture, the movie, etcetera.

I watch my children, whose imaginations are just as real as reality, and I weakly relive, vicariously, the days when I was so ignorant (back before I'd burdened myself with the inconvenience of all this cumbersome knowledge, which, far from anything to boast of, so often translates merely to feeble pragmatism), and likely to trip, literally, into real fantasy, as they.

Maybe I'm irresponsible:  is the desperate speed with which we educate our children, and in effort to keep up with all the international and unimaginative Joneses, really so necessary?  More favorably and locally:  I wish I could be less responsible; and, even less likely and more selfishly, I wish I could be both.  I wish, often, that I could backtrack, wash away, as does Ethan in Summerland's finale (vague spoiler in the next phrase), where, by the mighty force of his childish faith and desperation, he returns the magic, eradicates Coyote's mischief, and the galls between the several worlds are remade.  But I can't.  No one can.  Once the magic is lost, it's gone, only to be had second-hand or through the machine--organic or calculated--of art and entertainment.  The less we know, the greater the gap between our observations and reality, and the more space there is for our imaginations to fill.  That gap shrinks as our life, within the real world, jades us.

Not that education is so bad.  Learning about this world and the reality of distant others--which learning is so often just as mysterious and mystifying as that childish magic in the gap--for me, an adult (more or less), carries, as far as I can tell, a very similar, and often as powerful, a bliss as those bygone fantasies and space-aliens and lands where I could speak the languages of all the prolix beasts, all so tangibly "real."

Dreams are insufficient proxies for the waking reality of childhood magic that lives and breathes around them, wheezes and coughs under their beds, in the vacant spaces away from knowledgeable adults, within the stuffed heads of teddy bears and rayon tigers--in the Lego box, the coloring book, or building blocks.  That empty air that crackles with life between the ecstatic faces of my 6- and 3-year-olds.

I love my books.  I love my "academic" discussions.  I love watching Jeopardy or playing Trivial Pursuit and knowing stuff.  I love being an English teacher and yet find that I can fairly fluently teach 7th and 8th grade science (not that this is so impressive, I know, but you get the idea).  And when it comes right down to it, the loss of magic--the narrowing of that gap--is inevitable.  'Tis the world we live in.  Responsibility erases the freedom of childhood.  Stuffed animals and Legos are no longer any more than stuffing and plastic.  That electric air loses its charge, as stress of bills, work, and family mount.  For this, then, to preserve what does yet remains of the gap, or even just fabricate a little more of it every once in while, I am eternally grateful for books, for movies, for stories, and  the ever-childish interest I have in creating/writing, and maybe, flimsily, even inhabiting my own.

Sunday Poetry XVI -- FICTION'S FICTION and POETRY

One of my favorite fictional fictions (yes) is Michael Chabon's "In the Black Mill," by August Van Zorn (pseudonym (and so now a fiction within a fiction's fiction) for one Albert Vetch, chronic sufferer of the Midnight Disease), which shows up as the final tale in Chabon's collection, Werewolves in Their Youth.  Van Zorn, a fictional horror writer, reputedly of the same mold as H.P. Lovecraft, is first mentioned by Chabon via his fictional novelist Grady Tripp in Wonder Boys.

Chabon quotes Tripp in his introduction to "In the Black Mill":

The first real writer I ever knew was a man who did all of his work under the name of August Van Zorn.  He lived at the McClelland Hotel, which my grandmother owned, in the uppermost room of its turret, and taught English literature at Coxley, a small college on the other side of the minor Pennsylvania river that split our town in two.  His real name was Albert Vetch, and his field, I believe, was Blake; I remember he kept a framed print of the Ancient of Days affixed to the faded flocked wallpaper of his room, above a stoop-shouldered wooden suit rack that once belonged to my father.


This isn't a new idea--the creation of a fictional artist who inhabits the background or history of a story.  What I love about this story at the end of Werewolves, however, is that it's set out as further evidence that Van Zorn was real, and it's crazy fun!

As Chabon is perhaps the most outspoken "serious" writer championing genre fiction, which I've indicated here before, I think it's funny that I find my next favorite fictional artist, similar though not as fully realized as Van Zorn, in the pulpiest genre fiction I've ever read: Harry Stephen Keeler's The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, also which I've very recently discussed, and as comparison, no less, to James Joyce's abysmal "After the Race."

Keeler's fictional poet, and with her equally fictional (and gleefully dreadful) poetry, is one Miss Abigail Sprigg (Keeler shows himself equally skilled in the naming of characters as Thomas Pynchon, by the way).

As much as I want to tell you all about this awesome book and its awesome writer (as in, I'm-in-awe kind of awesome), I will refrain from the plug until I finish it, at which point I'll offer a complete review, and now simply quote this woman's "poetry."

Poor Pickings
A burglar entered by mistake
     A poetess's room one day.
And finding there was nothing else
     To steal, he stole away.

* "Poor Pickings" was extemporaneously reviewed before publication in the new quarterly publication Verse by Clay Calthorpe, protagonist of The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, self-professed poetry loather, and candy salesman:  "It's short, brief, and to the point.  With no flubdubbery.  Frank and honest.  Poetess money no has got.  Burglar no can steal nothing!  That--that appeals to me.  And because of it honesty--and simplicity--I--I call it one of the best poems I've ever read.  A fact!  Im a man in the street, am I not?  So if it scans all right--and rhymes correctly--for I'm not authority there, I say--mark her 100 per cent."

If His Love Dies--So Mine!
A Sonnet
He's gone: I would he had my wounded heart
That, by its aching beat, he might remember,
In these days of Passion's dead December,
The love of Passion's June.  I would the art
Of Cupid might rekindle with my fire
That heart of his, and light it through and through,
The flaming of my own heart to renew
Again, igniting all my first desire.

But his heart's whole, and mine is in my breast,
And every hour is filled with fear for me
Lest anguish, through each hour, become distress,
And then, by slow degrees, forgetfulness.
For every sun expires in the West,
And lo!  a new moon shines above the sea.

RELATIVE!
The sun was brighter, the air was cleaner,
     The skies were bluer
     When I was young;
The task of lighter, the grass was greener
     And love was truer,
     More sweetly sung!

The maids were fairer, the men were braver,
     The sages wiser
     in days of old;
Now joys are rarer, and cares are graver,
     And life a miser
     Who hoards his gold!

* I've been reading up on Keeler here and there in the few hours since I posted this entry.  It turns out that Keeler's first wife, Hazel Goodwin, wrote "If His Love Dies--So Mine" specifically for this particular novel.  In a biography posted HERE it's stated that Keeler was particular enamored of Hazel's writing, and somewhat regularly included her work within his own.  This, of course, explains why the in-text review by Clay Calthorpe of this second Miss Sprigg poem is so favorable and even possibly, and by degrees, converting Calthorpe to poetry.

MICHAEL CHABON and the OTHER JAMES

I highly recommend this, by the way, especially
if you have any interest in writing fiction.

I needed a new book to put in the bathroom and keep there at the ready for my daily visits and my periodic baths (rest assured: I bathe daily, but generally under the shower; sometimes, like this afternoon after helping a family pack up their house for a move, my muscles required a bath, submerged in the tub).  Bathroom fare is, with the exception of All the Pretty Horses, which I indeed read entirely in the bathroom (no disrespect meant or felt, especially as the bathroom is pretty much the only place where I can read in any kind of consistent peace), generally drawn from the light stuff--reads that are easily consumed three or four pages at a time.  I descended to my basement bookshelves and took down Michael Chabon's MrSweeney's-published essay collection, Maps and Legends, which generally treats the author's thoughts and ruminations on fiction, authoring, and inspiration.  Perfect.  I purchased the book back when it was first released, as I do with all of Chabon's works, and it's been some time since I've cracked it.  The second go-through does not disappoint.  Less disappointing still is the subject of the essay that I most easily remember and by which I mentally caption the whole collection, a short story--a ghost story, nonetheless--by M.R. James: "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad.," which Chabon, ever the mighty defender of genre fiction, the oft-snubbed, heralds as one of the greatest short stories ever.

This is an audacious claim!  Chabon makes no apologies to Joyce, Chekhov, the other James (all of whom he mentions within his essay), or anyone else otherwise associated with the greatest short fiction.  I love that.  And I love this story.  Here it is in its entirety (all 8000 words of it, which probably breaks some unwritten rule of blogging) for your enjoyment and evaluation:

"OH, WHISTLE, AND I'LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD" 

(1904)

by M.R. James

from The collected ghost stories of M.R. James (1931)

LONDON

Edward Arnold & Co.

"I SUPPOSE you will be getting away pretty soon, now. Full term is over, Professor," said a person not in the story to the Professor of Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast in the hospitable hall of St. James's College.

  The Professor was young, neat, and precise in speech.

  "Yes," he said; "my friends have been making me take up golf this term, and I mean to go to the East Coast--in point of fact to Burnstow--(I dare say you know it) for a week or ten days, to improve my game. I hope to get off to-morrow."

  "Oh, Parkins," said his neighbour on the other side, "if you are going to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of the Templars' preceptory, and let me know if you think it would be any good to have a dig there in the summer."

  It was, as you might suppose, a person of antiquarian pursuits who said this, but, since he merely appears in this prologue, there is no need to give his entitlements.

  "Certainly," said Parkins, the Professor: "if you will describe to me whereabouts the site is, I will do my best to give you an idea of the lie of the land when I get back; or I could write to you about it, if you would tell me where you are likely to be."

  "Don't trouble to do that, thanks. It's only that I'm thinking of taking my family in that direction in the Long, and it occurred to me that, as very few of the English preceptories have ever been properly planned, I might have an opportunity of doing something useful on off-days."

  The Professor rather sniffed at the idea that planning out a preceptory could be described as useful. His neighbour continued:

  "The site--I doubt if there is anything showing above ground--must be down quite close to the beach now. The sea has encroached tremendously, as you know, all along that bit of coast. I should think, from the map, that it must be about three-quarters of a mile from the Globe Inn, at the north end of the town. Where are you going to stay?"

  "Well, at the Globe Inn, as a matter of fact," said Parkins; "I have engaged a room there. I couldn't get in anywhere else; most of the lodging-houses are shut up in winter, it seems; and, as it is, they tell me that the only room of any size I can have is really a double-bedded one, and that they haven't a corner in which to store the other bed, and so on. But I must have a fairly large room, for I am taking some books down, and mean to do a bit of work; and though I don't quite fancy having an empty bed--not to speak of two--in what I may call for the time being my study, I suppose I can manage to rough it for the short time I shall be there."

  "Do you call having an extra bed in your room roughing it, Parkins?" said a bluff person opposite. "Look here, I shall come down and occupy it for a bit; it'll be company for you."

  The Professor quivered, but managed to laugh in a courteous manner.

  "By all means, Rogers; there's nothing I should like better. But I'm afraid you would find it rather dull; you don't play golf, do you?"

  "No, thank Heaven!" said rude Mr. Rogers. "Well, you see, when I'm not writing I shall most likely be out on the links, and that, as I say, would be rather dull for you, I'm afraid."

  "Oh, I don't know! There's certain to be somebody I know in the place; but, of course, if you don't want me, speak the word, Parkins; I shan't be offended. Truth, as you always tell us, is never offensive."

  Parkins was, indeed, scrupulously polite and strictly truthful. It is to be feared that Mr. Rogers sometimes practised upon his knowledge of these characteristics. In Parkins's breast there was a conflict now raging, which for a moment or two did not allow him to answer. That interval being over, he said:

  "Well, if you want the exact truth, Rogers, I was considering whether the room I speak of would really be large enough to accommodate us both comfortably; and also whether (mind, I shouldn't have said this if you hadn't pressed me) you would not constitute something in the nature of a hindrance to my work."

  Rogers laughed loudly.

  "Well done, Parkins!" he said. "It's all right. I promise not to interrupt your work; don't you disturb yourself about that. No, I won't come if you don't want me; but I thought I should do so nicely to keep the ghosts off." Here he might have been seen to wink and to nudge his next neighbour. Parkins might also have been seen to become pink. "I beg pardon, Parkins," Rogers continued; "I oughtn't to have said that. I forgot you didn't like levity on these topics."

  "Well," Parkins said, "as you have mentioned the matter, I freely own that I do not like careless talk about what you call ghosts. A man in my position," he went on, raising his voice a little, "cannot, I find, be too careful about appearing to sanction the current beliefs on such subjects. As you know, Rogers, or as you ought to know; for I think I have never concealed my views----"

  "No, you certainly have not, old man," put in Rogers sotto voce.

  "----I hold that any semblance, any appearance of concession to the view that such things might exist is equivalent to a renunciation of all that I hold most sacred. But I'm afraid I have not succeeded in securing your attention."

  "Your undivided attention, was what Dr. Blimber actually said,⁽¹⁾" I Rogers interrupted, with every appearance of an earnest desire for accuracy. "But I beg your pardon, Parkins: I'm stopping you."

1 Mr. Rogers was wrong, vide Dombey and Son, chapter xii.

  "No, not at all," said Parkins. "I don't remember Blimber; perhaps he was before my time. But I needn't go on. I'm sure you know what I mean."

  "Yes, yes," said Rogers, rather hastily--"just so. We'll go into it fully at Burnstow, or somewhere."

  In repeating the above dialogue I have tried to give the impression which it made on me, that Parkins was something of an old woman--rather henlike, perhaps, in his little ways; totally destitute, alas! of the sense of humour, but at the same time dauntless and sincere in his convictions, and a man deserving of the greatest respect. Whether or not the reader has gathered so much, that was the character which Parkins had.

  

  On the following day Parkins did, as he had hoped, succeed in getting away from his college, and in arriving at Burnstow. He was made welcome at the Globe Inn, was safely installed in the large double-bedded room of which we have heard, and was able before retiring to rest to arrange his materials for work in apple-pie order upon a commodious table which occupied the outer end of the room, and was surrounded on three sides by windows looking out seaward; that is to say, the central window looked straight out to sea, and those on the left and right commanded prospects along the shore to the north and south respectively. On the south you saw the village of Burnstow. On the north no houses were to be seen, but only the beach and the low cliff backing it. Immediately in front was a strip--not considerable--of rough grass, dotted with old anchors, capstans, and so forth; then a broad path; then the beach. whatever may have been the original distance between the Globe Inn and the sea, not more than sixty yards now separated them.

  The rest of the population of the inn was, of course, a golfing one, and included few elements a special description. The most conspicuous figure was, perhaps, that of an ancien militaire secretary of a London club, and possessed of a voice of incredible strength, and of views of a pronouncedly Protestant type. These were apt to find utterance after his attendance upon the ministrations of the Vicar, an estimable man with inclinations towards a picacresque ritual, which he gallantly kept down as far as he could out of deference to East Anglian tradition.

  Professor Parkins, one of whose principal characteristics was pluck, spent the greater part of the day following his arrival at Burnstow in what he had called improving his game, in company with this Colonel Wilson: and during the afternoon--whether the process of improvement were to blame or not, I am not sure--the Colonel's demeanour assumed a colouring so lurid that even Parkins jibbed at the thought of walking home with him from the links. He determined, after a short and furtive look at that bristling moustache and those incarnadined, features, that it would be wiser to allow the influences of tea and tobacco to do what they could with the Colonel before the dinner-hour should render a meeting inevitable.

  "I might walk home to-night along the beach," he reflected--"yes, and take a look--there will be light enough for that--at the ruins of which Disney was talking. I don't exactly know where they are, by the way; but I expect I can hardly help stumbling on them."

  This he accomplished, I may say, in the most literal sense, for in picking his way from the links to the shingle beach his foot caught, partly in a gorse-root and partly in a biggish stone, and over he went. When he got up and surveyed his surroundings, he found himself in a patch of somewhat broken ground covered with small depressions and mounds. These latter, when he came to examine them, proved to be simply masses of flints embedded in mortar and grown over with turf. He must, he quite rightly concluded, be on the site of the preceptory he had promised to look at. It seemed not unlikely to reward the spade of the explorer; enough of the foundations was probably left at no great depth to throw a good deal of light on the general plan. He remembered vaguely that the Templars, to whom this site had belonged, were in the habit of building round churches, and he thought a particular series of the humps or mounds near him did appear to be arranged in something of a circular form. Few people can resist the temptation to try a little amateur research in a department quite outside their own, if only for the satisfaction of showing how successful they would have been had they only taken it up seriously. Our Professor, however, if he felt something of this mean desire, was also truly anxious to oblige Mr. Disney. So he paced with care the circular area he had noticed, and wrote down its rough dimensions in his pocket-book. Then he proceeded to examine an oblong eminence which lay east of the centre of the circle, and seemed to his thinking likely to be the base of a platform or alter. At one end of it, the northern, a patch of the turf was gone--removed by some boy or other creature feræ naturæ. It might, he, thought, be as well to probe the soil here for evidences of masonry, and he took out his knife and began scraping away the earth. And now followed another little discovery: a portion of soil fell inward as he scraped, and disclosed a small cavity. He lighted one match after another to help him to see of what nature the hole was, but the wind was too strong for them all. By tapping and scratching the sides with his knife, however, he was able to make out that it must be an artificial hole in masonry. It was rectangular, and the sides, top, and bottom, if not actually plastered, were smooth and regular. Of course it was empty. No! As he withdrew the knife he heard a metallic clink, and when he introduced his hand it met with a cylindrical object lying on the floor of the hole. Naturally enough, he picked it up, and when he brought it into the light, now fast fading, he could see that it, too, was of man's making--a metal tube about four inches long, and evidently of some considerable age.

  By the time Parkins had made sure that there was nothing else in this odd receptacle, it was too late and too dark for him to think of undertaking any further search. What he had done had proved so unexpectedly interesting that he determined to sacrifice a little more of the daylight on the morrow to archeology. The object which he now had safe in his pocket was bound to be of some slight value at least, he felt sure.

  Bleak and solemn was the view on which he took a last look before starting homeward. A faint yellow light in the west showed the links, on which a few figures moving towards the club-house were still visible, the squat martello tower, the lights of Aldsey village, the pale ribbon of sands intersected at intervals by black wooden groynes, the dim and murmuring sea. The wind was bitter from the north, but was at his back when he set out for the Globe. He quickly rattled and clashed through the shingle and gained the sand, upon which, but for the groynes which had to be got over every few yards, the going was both good and quiet. One last look behind, to measure the distance he had made since leaving the ruined Templars' church, showed him a prospect of company on his walk, in the shape of a rather indistinct personage, who seemed to be making great efforts to catch up with him, but made little, if any, progress. I mean that there was an appearance of running about his movements, but that the distance between him and Parkins did not seem materially to lessen. So, at least, Parkins thought, and decided that he almost certainly did not know him, and that it would be absurd to wait until he came up. For all that, company, he began to think, would really be very welcome on that lonely shore, if only you could choose your companion. In his unenlightened days he had read of meetings in such places which even now would hardly bear thinking of. He went on thinking of them, however, until he reached home, and particularly of one which catches most people's fancy at some time of their childhood. "Now I saw in my dream that Christian had gone but a very little way when he saw a foul fiend coming over the field to meet him." "What should I do now," he thought, "if I looked back and caught sight of a black figure sharply defined against the yellow sky, and saw that it had horns and wings? I wonder whether I should stand or run for it. Luckily, the gentleman behind is not of that kind, and he seems to be about as far off now as when I saw him first. Well, at this rate he won't get his dinner as soon as I shall; and, dear me I it's within a quarter of an hour of the time now. I must run!"

  Parkins had, in fact, very little time for dressing. When he met the Colonel at dinner, Peace--or as much of her as that gentleman could manage reigned once more in the military bosom; nor was she put to flight in the hours of bridge that followed dinner, for Parkins' was a more than respectable player. When, therefore, he retired towards twelve o'clock, he felt that he had spent his evening in quite a satisfactory way, and that, even for so long as a fortnight or three weeks, life at the Globe would be supportable under similar conditions--"especially," thought he, "if I go on improving my game."

  As he went along the passages he met the boots of the Globe, who stopped and said:

  "Beg your pardon, sir, but as I was a-brushing your coat just now there was somethink fell out of the pocket. I put it on your chest of drawers, sir in your room, sir--a piece of a pipe or somethink of that, sir. Thank you, sir. You'll find it on your chest of drawers, sir--yes, sir. Good night, sir."

  The speech served to remind Parkins of his little discovery of that afternoon. It was with some considerable curiosity that he turned it over by the light of his candles. It was of bronze, he now saw, and was shaped very much after the manner of the modern dog-whistle; in fact it was--yes, certainly it was--actually no more nor less than a whistle. He put it to his lips, but it was quite full of a fine, caked-up sand or earth, which would not yield to knocking, but must be loosened with a knife. Tidy as ever in his habits, Parkins cleared out the earth on to a piece of paper, and took the latter to the window to empty it out. The night was dear and bright, as he saw when he had opened the casement, and he stopped for an instant to look at the sea and note a belated wanderer stationed on the shore in front of the inn. Then he shut the window, a little surprised at the late hours people kept at Burnstow, and took his whistle to the light again. Why, surely there were marks on it, not merely marks, but letters! A very little rubbing rendered the deeply-cut inscription quite legible, but the Professor had to confess, after some earnest thought, that the meaning of it was as obscure to him as the writing on the wall to Belshazzar. There were legends both on the front and on the back of the whistle. The one read thus:

FLA

FUR   FLE

BIS

  

The other:

  QUIS EST ISTE QUI UENIT  

  "I ought to be able to make it out," he thought; "but I suppose I am a little rusty in my Latin. When I come to think of it, I don't believe I even know the word for a whistle. The long one does seem simple enough. It ought to mean, 'Who is this who is coming?' Well, the best way to find out is evidently to whistle for him."

  He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet pleased at the note he had elicited. It had a quality of infinite distance in it, and, soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles round. It was a sound, too, that seemed to have the power (which many scents possess) of forming pictures in the brain. He saw quite clearly for a moment a vision of a wide, dark expanse at night, with a fresh wind blowing, and in the midst a lonely figure--how employed, he could not tell. Perhaps he would have seen more had not the picture been broken by the sudden surge of a gust of wind against his casement, so sudden that it made him look up, just in time to see the white glint of a sea-bird's wing somewhere outside the dark panes. The sound of the whistle had so fascinated him that he could not help trying it once more, this time more boldly. The note was little, if at all, louder than before, and repetition broke the illusion--no picture followed, as he had half hoped it might. "But what is this? Goodness! what force the wind can get up in a few minutes! What a tremendous gust! There! I knew that window-fastening was no use! Ah! I thought so--both candles out. It's enough to tear the room to pieces."

  The first thing was to get the window shut. While you might count twenty Parkins was struggling with the small casement, and felt almost as if he were pushing back a sturdy burglar, so strong was the pressure. It slackened all at once and the window banged to and latched itself. Now to relight the candles and see what damage, if any, had been done. No, nothing seemed amiss; no glass even was broken in the casement. But the noise had evidently roused at least one member of the household: the Colonel was to be heard stumping in his stockinged feet on the floor above, and growling.

  Quickly as it had risen, the wind did not fall at once. On it went, moaning and rushing past the house, at times rising to a cry so desolate that, as Parkins disinterestedly said, it might have made fanciful people feel quite uncomfortable; even the unimaginative, he thought after a quarter of an hour, might be happier without it.

  Whether it was the wind, or the excitement of golf, or of the researches in the preceptory that kept Parkins awake, he was not sure. Awake he remained, in any case, long enough to fancy (as I am afraid I often do myself under such conditions) that he was the victim of all manner of fatal disorders: he would lie counting the beats of his heart, convinced that it was going to stop work every moment, and would entertain grave suspicions of his lungs, brain, liver, etc.--suspicions which he was sure would be dispelled by the return of daylight, but which until then refused to be put aside. He found a little vicarious comfort in the idea that someone else was in the same boat. A near neighbour (in the darkness it was not easy to tell his direction) was tossing and rustling in his bed, too.

  The next stage was that Parkins shut his eyes and determined to give sleep every chance. Here again over-excitement asserted itself in another form--that of making pictures. Experto crede, pictures do come to the closed eyes of one trying to sleep, and are often so little to his taste that he must open his eyes and disperse them.

  Parkins's experience on this occasion was a very distressing one. He found that the picture which presented itself to him was continuous. When he opened his eyes, of course, it went; but when he shut them once more it framed itself afresh, and acted itself out again, neither quicker nor slower than before. What he saw was this:

  A long stretch of shore--shingle edged by sand, and intersected at short intervals with black groynes running down to the water--a scene, in fact, so like that of his afternoon's walk that, in the absence of any landmark, it could not be distinguished therefrom. The light was obscure, conveying an impression of gathering storm, late winter evening, and slight cold rain. On this bleak stage at first no actor was visible. When, in the distance, a bobbing black object appeared; a moment more, and it was a man running, jumping, clambering over the groynes, and every few seconds looking eagerly back. The nearer he came the more obvious it was that he was not only anxious, but even terribly frightened, though his face was not to be distinguished. He was, moreover, almost at the end of his strength. On he came; each successive obstacle seemed to cause him more difficulty than the last. "Will he get over this next one?" thought Parkins; "it seems a little higher than the others." Yes; half climbing, half throwing himself, he did get over, and fell all in a heap on the other side (the side nearest to the spectator). There, as if really unable to get up again, he remained crouching under the groyne, looking up in attitude of painful anxiety.

  So far no cause whatever for the fear of the runner had been shown; but now there began to be seen, far up the shore, a little flicker of something light-coloured moving to and fro with great swiftness and irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters. It would stop, raise arms, bow itself toward the sand, then run stooping across the beach to the water-edge and back again; and then, rising upright, once more continue its course forward at a speed that was startling and terrifying. The moment came when the pursuer was hovering about from left to right only a few yards beyond the groyne where the runner lay in hiding. After two or three ineffectual castings hither and thither it came to a stop, stood upright, with arms raised high, and then darted straight forward towards the groyne.

  It was at this point that Parkins always failed in his resolution to keep his eyes shut. With many misgivings as to incipient failure of eyesight, overworked brain, excessive smoking, and so on, he finally resigned himself to light his candle, get out a book, and pass the night waking, rather than be tormented by this persistent panorama, which he saw clearly enough could only be a morbid reflection of his walk and his thoughts on that very day.

  The scraping of match on box and the glare of light must have startled some creatures of the night--rats or what not--which he heard scurry across the floor from the side of his bed with much rustling. Dear, dear! the match is out! Fool that it is! But the second one burnt better, and a candle and book were duly procured, over which Parkins pored till sleep of a wholesome kind came upon him, and that in no long space. For about the first time in his orderly and prudent life he forgot to blow out the candle, and when he was called next morning at eight there was still a flicker in the socket and a sad mess of guttered grease on the top of the little table.

  After breakfast he was in his room, putting the finishing touches to his golfing costume--fortune had again allotted the Colonel to him for a partner--when one of the maids came in.

  "Oh, if you p~lease," she said, "would you like any extra blankets on your bed, sir?"

  "Ah! thank you," said Parkins. "Yes, I think I should like one. It seems likely to turn rather colder."

  In a very short time the maid was back with the blanket.

  "Which bed should I put it on, sir?" she asked.

  "What? Why, that one--the one I slept in last night," he said, pointing to it.

  "Oh yes! I beg your pardon, sir, but you seemed to have tried both of 'em; leastways, we, had to make 'em both up this morning."

  "Really? How very absurd!" said Parkins. "I certainly never touched the other, except to lay some things on it. Did it actually seem to, have been slept in?"

  "Oh yes, sir!" said the maid. "Why, all the things was crumpled and throwed about all ways, if you'll excuse me, sir quite as if anyone 'adn't passed but a very poor night, sir."

  "Dear me," said Parkins. "Well, I may have disordered it more than I thought when I unpacked my things. I'm very sorry to have given you the trouble, I'm sure. I expect a friend of mine soon, by the way--a gentleman from Cambridge--to come and occupy it for a night or two. That will be all right, I suppose, won't it?"

  "Oh yes, to be sure, sir. Thank you, sir. It's no trouble, I'm sure," said the maid, and departed to giggle with her colleagues.

  Parkins set forth, with a stern determination to improve his game.

  I am glad to be able to report that he succeeded so far in this enterprise that the Colonel, who had been rather repining at the prospect of a second day's play in his company, became quite chatty as the morning advanced; and his voice boomed out over the flats, as certain also of our own minor poets have said, "like some great bourdon in a minster tower."

  "Extraordinary wind, that, we had last night," he said. "In my old home we should have said someone had been whistling for it."

  "Should you, indeed!" said Parkins. "Is there a superstition of that kind still current in your part of the country?"

  "I don't know about superstition," said the Colonel. "They believe in it all over Denmark and Norway, as well as on the Yorkshire coast; and my experience is, mind you, that there's generally something at the bottom of what these country-folk hold to, and have held to for generations. But it's your drive" (or whatever it might have been: the golfing reader will have to imagine appropriate digressions at the proper intervals). When conversation was resumed, Parkins said? with a slight hesitancy: "Apropos of what you were saying just now, Colonel, I think I ought to tell you that my own views on such subjects are very strong. I am, in fact, a convinced disbeliever in what is called the 'supernatural.'

  "What!" said the Colonel, "do you mean to tell me you don't believe in second-sight, or ghosts, or anything of that kind?"

  "In nothing whatever of that kind," returned Parkins firmly.

  "Well," said the Colonel, "but it appears to me at that rate, sir, that you must be little better than a Sadducee."

  Parkins was on the point of answering that, in his opinion, the Sadducees were the most sensible sons he had ever read of in the Old Testament; but, feeling some doubt as to whether much mention of them was to be found in that work, he preferred laugh the accusation off.

  "Perhaps I am," he said; "but---- Here, give me my cleek, boy!--Excuse me one moment, Colonel." A short interval. "Now, as to whistling for the wind, let me give you my theory about it. The laws which govern winds are really not at all perfectly known--to fisher-folk and such, of course, not known at all. A man or woman of eccentric habits, perhaps, or a stranger, is seen repeatedly on the beach at some unusual hour, and is heard whistling. Soon afterwards a violent wind rises; a man who could read the sky perfectly or who possessed a barometer could have foretold that it would. The simple people of a fishing-village have no barometers, and only a few rough rules for prophesying weather. What more natural than that the eccentric personage I postulated should be regarded as having raised the wind, or that he or she should clutch eagerly at the reputation of being able to do so? Now, take last night's wind: as it happens, I myself was whistling. I blew a whistle twice, and the wind seemed to come absolutely in answer to my call. If anyone had seen me- ---"

  The audience had been a little restive under this harangue, and Parkins had, I fear, fallen somewhat into the tone of a lecturer; but at the last sentence the Colonel stopped.

  "Whistling, were you?" he said. "And what sort of whistle did you use? Play this stroke first." Interval.

  "About that whistle you were asking, Colonel. It's rather a curious one. I have it in my---- No; I see I've left it in my room. As a matter of fact, I found it yesterday."

  And then Parkins narrated the manner of his discovery of the whistle, upon hearing which the Colonel grunted, and opined that, in Parkins's place, he should himself be careful about using a thing that had belonged to a set of Papists, of whom, speaking generally, it might be affirmed that you never knew what they might not have been up to. From this topic he diverged to the enormities of the Vicar, who had given notice on the previous Sunday that Friday would be the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle, and that there would be service at eleven o'clock in the church. This and other similar proceedings constituted in the Colonel's view a strong presumption that the Vicar was a concealed Papist, if not a Jesuit; and Parkins, who could not very readily follow the Colonel in this region, did not disagree with him. In fact, they got on so well together in the morning that there was no talk on either side of their separating after lunch.

  Both continued to play well during the afternoon, or, at least, well enough to make them forget everything else until the light began to fail them. Not until then did Parkins remember that he had meant to do some more investigating at the preceptory; but it was of no great importance, he reflected. One day was as good as another; he might as well go home with the Colonel.

  As they turned the corner of the house, the Colonel was almost knocked down by a boy who rushed into him at the very top of his speed, and then, instead of running away, remained hanging on to him and panting. The first words of the warrior were naturally those of reproof and objurgation, but he quickly discerned that the boy was almost speechlees with fright. Inquiries were useless at first. When the boy got his breath he began to howl, and still clung to the Colonel's legs. He was at last detached, but continued to howl.

  "What in the world is the matter with you? What have you been up to? What have you seen?" said the two men.

  "Ow, I seen it wive at me out of the winder," wailed the boy, "and I don't like it."

  "What window?" said the irritated Colonel. "Come, pull yourself together, my boy."

  "The front winder it was, at the 'otel," said the boy.

  At this point Parkins was in favour of sending the boy home, but the Colonel refused; he wanted to get to the bottom of it, he said; it was most dangerous to give a boy such a fright as this one had had, and if it turned out that people had been playing jokes, they should suffer for it in some way. And by a series of questions he made out this story: The boy had been playing about on the grass in front of the Globe with some others; then they had gone home to their teas, and he was just going, when he happened to look up at the front winder and see it a-wiving at him. It seemed to be a figure of some sort, in white as far as he knew--couldn't see its face; but it wived at him, and it warn't a right thing--not to say not a right person. Was there a light in the room? No, he didn't think to look if there was a light. Which was the window? Was it the top one or the second one? The seckind one it was--the big winder what got two little uns at the sides.

  "Very well, my boy," said the Colonel, after a few more questions. "You run away home now. I expect it was some person trying to give you a start. Another time, like a brave English boy, you just throw a stone--well, no, not that exactly, but you go and speak to the waiter, or to Mr. Simpson, the landlord, and--yes--and say that I advised you to do so."

  The boy's face expressed some of the doubt he felt as to the likelihood of Mr. Simpson's lending a favourable ear to his complaint, but the Colonel did not appear to perceive this, and went on:

  "And here's a sixpence--no, I see it's a shilling--and you be off home, and don't think any more about it."

  The youth hurried off with agitated thanks, and the Colonel and Parkins went round to the front of the Globe and reconnoitred. There was only one window answering to the description they had been hearing.

  "Well, that's curious," said Parkins; "it's evidently my window the lad was talking about. Will you come up for a moment, Colonel Wilson? We ought to be able to see if anyone has been taking liberties in my room."

  They were soon in the passage, and Parkins made as if to open the door. Then he stopped and felt in his pockets.

  "This is more serious than I thought," was his next remark. "I remember now that before I started this morning I locked the door. It is locked now, and, what is more, here is the key." And he held it up. "Now," he went on, "if the servants are in the habit of going into one's room during the day when one is away, I can only say that--well, that I don't approve of it at all." Conscious of a somewhat weak climax, he busied himself in opening the door (which was indeed locked) and in lighting candles. "No," he said, "nothing seems disturbed."

  "Except your bed," put in the Colonel.

  "Excuse me, that isn't my bed," said Parkins. "I don't use that one. But it does look as if someone had been playing tricks with it."

  It certainly did: the clothes were bundled up and twisted together in a most tortuous confusion. Parkins pondered.

  "That must be it," he said at last: "I disordered the clothes last night in unpacking, and they haven't made it since. Perhaps they came in to make it, and that boy saw them through the window; and then they were called away and locked the door after them. Yes, I think that must be it."

  "Well, ring and ask," said the Colonel, and this appealed to Parkins as practical.

  The maid appeared, and, to make a long story short, deposed that she had made the bed in the morning when the gentleman was in the room, and hadn't been there since. No, she hadn't no other key. Mr. Simpson he kep' the keys; he'd be able to tell the gentleman if anyone had been up.

  This was a puzzle. Investigation showed that nothing of value had been taken, and Parkins remembered the disposition of the small objects on tables and so forth well enough to be pretty sure that no pranks had been played with them. Mr. and Mrs. Simpson furthermore agreed that neither of them had given the duplicate key of the room to any person whatever during the day. Nor could Parkins, fair- minded man as he was, detect anything in the demeanour of master, mistress, or maid that indicated guilt. He was much more inclined to think that the boy had been imposing on the Colonel.

  The latter was unwontedly silent and pensive at dinner and throughout the evening. When he bade good night to Parkins, he murmured in a gruff undertone:

  "You know where I am if you want me during the night."

  "Why, yes, thank you, Colonel Wilson, I think I do; but there isn't much prospect of my disturbing you, I hope. By the way," he added, "did I show you that old whistle I spoke of? I think not. Well, here it is."

  The Colonel turned it over gingerly in the light of the candle.

  "Can you make anything of the inscription?" asked Parkins, as he took it back.

  "No, not in this light. What do you mean to do with it?"

  "Oh, well, when I get back to Cambridge I shall submit it to some of the archæologists there, and see what they think of it; and very likely, if they consider it worth having, I may present it to one of the museums."

  "'M!" said the Colonel. "Well, you may be right. All I know is that, if it were mine, I should chuck it straight into the sea. It's no use talking, I'm well aware, but I expect that with you it's a case of live and learn. I hope so, I'm sure, and I wish you a good night."

  He turned away, leaving Parkins in act to speak at the bottom of the stair, and soon each was in his own bedroom.

  By some unfortunate accident, there were neither blinds nor curtains to the windows of the Professor's room. The previous night he had thought little of this, but to-night there seemed every prospect of a bright moon rising to shine directly on his bed, and probably wake him later on. When he noticed this he was a good deal annoyed, but, with an ingenuity which I can only envy, he succeeded in rigging up, with the help of a railway-rug, some safety-pins, and a stick and umbrella, a screen which, if it only held together, would completely keep the moonlight off his bed. And shortly afterwards he was comfortably in that bed. When he had read a somewhat solid work long enough to produce a decided wish for sleep, he cast a drowsy glance round the room, blew out the candle, and fell back upon the pillow.

  He must have slept soundly for an hour or more, when a sudden clatter shook him up in a most unwelcome manner. In a moment he realized what had happened: his carefully-constructed screen had given way, and a very bright frosty moon was shining directly on his face. This was highly annoying. Could he possibly get up and reconstruct the screen? or could he manage to sleep if he did not?

  For some minutes he lay and pondered over the possibilities; then he turned over sharply, and with all.his eyes open lay breathlessly listening. There had been a movement, he was sure, in the empty bed on the opposite side of the room. To-morrow he would have it moved, for there must be rats or something playing about in it. It was quiet now. No! the commotion began again. There was a rustling and shaking: surely more than any rat could cause.

  I can figure to myself something of the Professor's bewilderment and horror, for I have in a dream thirty years back seen the same thing happen; but the reader will hardly, perhaps, imagine how dreadful it was to him to see a figure suddenly sit up in what he had known was an empty bed. He was out of his own bed in one bound, and made a dash towards the window, where lay his only weapon, the stick with which he had propped his screen. This was, as it turned out, the worst thing he could have done, because the personage in the empty bed, with a sudden motion, slipped from the bed and took up a position, with outspread arms, between the two beds, and in front of the door. Parkins watched it in a horrid perplexity. Somehow, the idea of getting past it and escaping through the door was intolerable to him; he could not have borne--he didn't know why to touch it; and as for its touching him, he would sooner dash himself through the window than have that happen. It stood for the moment in a band of dark shadow, and he had not seen what its face was like. Now it began to move, in a stooping posture, and all at once the spectator realized, with some horror and some relief, that it must be blind, for it seemed to feel about it with its muffled arms in a groping and random fashion. Turning half away from him, it became suddenly conscious of the bed he had just left, and darted towards it, and bent over and felt the pillows in a way which made Parkins shudder as he had never in his life thought it possible. In a very few moments it seemed to know that the bed was empty, and then, moving forward into the area of light and facing the window, it showed for the first time what manner of thing it was.

  Parkins, who very much dislikes being questioned about it, did once describe something of it in my hearing, and I gathered that what he chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face of crumpled linen.What expression he read upon it he could not or would not tell, but that the fear of it went nigh to maddening him is certain.

  But he was not at leisure to watch it for long. With formidable quickness it moved into the middle of the room, and, as it groped and waved, one corner of its draperies swept across Parkins's face. He could not--though he knew how perilous a sound was--he could not keep back a cry of disgust, and this gave the searcher an instant clue. It leapt towards him upon the instant, and the next moment he was half-way through the window backwards, uttering cry upon cry at the utmost pitch of his voice, and the linen face was thrust close into his own. At this, almost the last possible second, deliverance came, as you will have guessed: the Colonel burst the door open, and was just in time to see the dreadful group at the window. When he reached the figures only one was left. Parkins sank forward into the room in a faint, and before him on the floor lay a tumbled heap of bed-clothes.

  Colonel Wilson asked no questions, but busied himself in keeping everyone else out of the room and in getting Parkins back to his bed; and himself, wrapped in a rug, occupied the other bed for the rest of the night. Early on the next day Rogers arrived, more welcome than he would have been a day before, and the three of them held a very long consultation in the Professor's room. At the end of it the Colonel left the hotel door carrying a small object between his finger and thumb, which he cast as far into the sea as a very brawny arm could send it. Later on the smoke of a burning ascended from the back premises of the Globe.

  Exactly what explanation was patched up for the staff and visitors at the hotel I must confess I do not recollect. The Professor was somehow cleared of the ready suspicion of delirium tremens, and the hotel of the reputation of a troubled house.

  There is not much question as to what would have happened to Parkins if the Colonel had not intervened when he did. He would either have fallen out of the window or else lost his wits. But it is not so evident what more the creature that came in answer to the whistle could have done than frighten. There seemed to be absolutely nothing material about it save the bed-clothes of which it had made itself a body. The Colonel, who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. The whole thing, he said, served to confirm his opinion of the Church of Rome.

  There is really nothing more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the Professor's views on certain points are less clear cut than they used to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than one sleepless night.

East of Eden L -- chpt50: ALICE IN EVIL-LAND, LOST THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

Reading Questions
Chapter 50.1

by John Tenniel

1. Maybe Cathy could read when she was five, but she clearly missed the boat on what those words meant.  How is she like--short answer--and how is she really almost completely different than Alice in Wonderland?  (Obviously, this one's for those who've read AND UNDERSTOOD the Alice books.)
2. How does this misinterpretation shed light on her evil--and, I'm going to pursue it still, her humanity (I believe less and less that she is indeed so inhuman and without justification as we and others have claimed)?  After all, what else in the universe does to itself what she does at the end of this section?
3. Take a look at the very last sentence of the section;" and she had never been."  Not, "as if."  Unfortunately, it's just not true.  I think we're meant to hope so.  What legacy does she leave behind?  And regardless of how Aron responds to the news of the will (if he ever gets it), has Cathy won?  What will determine her victory?

chapter 50.2

1. I hate to ask it, but is all this death a cop-out--a great steamroller ending?  Is this whole book thing turning all Grady-Tripp on ol' Steinbeck?  (Sorry -- for anyone following along who hasn't read Wonder Boys, Grady Tripp is a fictional creative writing professor who's working on a mammoth book with absolutely no aim to it, and which just goes and goes and goes--and goes nowhere.)

"All the Pretty Horses," McCarthy, and my [lack of] Confidence as a Writer

There are writers whom I admire, whom I emulate, and who inspire me to be better; then there are those writers--not many--who just make me depressed, simply because they are such unapproachable masters.  Among these authors, each of whom fit somewhere among this list, are Michael Chabon, who is likely the closest thing to which I aspire; Tolkein, whom I admire immensely and who awes me; Steinbeck, who seems to provide me with inspiration for all kinds of things, not just writing (or at least his characters and his words do); and then there's Cormac McCarthy. 

Of the author a critic from the New York Times Book Review writes, responding to All the Pretty Horses, that McCarthy "puts most other American writers to shame."  As I endeavor (in word count, pathetically) to accomplish my first NaNoWriMo goal, and having read the scathing review of the enterprise by Laura Miller of Salon.com (much of which I highly agree with), I wonder, for realzies, if I should even bother.  I've got a book STILL in the final reviewing stages at a publishing house (IT'S TAKING SO LONG; and how great can it be if they're STILL deliberating!), I've got two books underway, and I still love to write and will always do so anyway, but is it really worth bothering with or stressing over getting published?  Is it really a valuable use of my time and little-available emotions?

I don't know, but I am nothing if not an optimistic person.

I've read a lot of books.  I would even venture to claim that I have read thousands of books, many of which I've read more than once (yes, I am a re-reader, and I highly recommend that you become one as well, if you're not already).  That said, I have not read a lot of McCarthy.  Shame on me.  I know.  He has passively climbed, via the transmission of just over one hundred pages, to the tippy top of my list.  Bar none.  Well, unless Chabon comes out with a new one.

I read The Road.  I loved it.  I read it twice.  I taught it once.  Haven't read it?  READ IT!  It's fast, it's easy, it's tragic, it's flipping amazing (lexically speaking it's easy; emoitionally speaking, it will bowl you over like a glacier), it won the National Book Award, for crying out loud, and yet it is not as good as All the Pretty Horses, which I'm not even halfway through yet.

How does McCarthy write?  Unconventionally.  At first glace, even lazily.  I don't get it!  He writes like he doesn't give a crap about the English language, and yet he pracitcally DEFINES what the English language is in the U.S. of A. in the first place!  The man doesn't punctuate.  Period.  Except for the period, I mean.  He practically doesn't use adjectives or adverbs at all (and I use way too many, especially "especially" and "particularly" and "certainly" (yes, I'm self-aware, and even of my overuse of punctuation, which use I generally defend, but which, in McCarthy's shadow, embarrasses me)).  He is so supremely confident and so lazer-focused in his writing that he does just what he wants, exactly how he wants, and it works so well it's heart-breaking and crushing and spectacular, and all these only after you remember that you're reading a book in the first place.  He's like a black hole.  You don't see a black hole.  You know it's there because you see what it does to everything around it.  Cormac McCarthy writes a sentence, a paragraph, a chapter, a book, and he only tells you THIS MUCH (imagine my thumb and forefinger just barely not touching), yet you know three, four, five times more than anything he tells you about his characters, his setting, his plot, his intentions for guiding your thoughts and your heart.  He is the minimalist, imagist writer of prose that Hulme and Pound and Williams are of poetry.  I don't think I can give a higher compliment.

Within two pages, the man has made me laugh my guts out, while being simultaneously awed (not about the writing, though I was, but about the situation and characters) and then finding the briefest piece of equine-metaphor and philosophy the likes of which might be found in the finest Steinbeck passage, yet told so much more briefly and at least as profoundly.  (Maybe we'll eventually read this book here (if I have any guts left), and I'll pose the questions to you that it brought to me.)

Here's the crux of the issue once again: when I read these authors who just blow my brains right out the back of my head (think symbolically of Vincent D'Onofrio in Full Metal Jacket), I want to be just like them.  Imagine the hopelessly ambitious--and hopeless--eighth grade boy claiming he's going to be a professional basketball player when he grows up.  That's me with these guys.  Except I'm 33.  I read McCarthy and I want to go back and rewrite all ten thousand words of my NaNoWriMo attempt, because I think it will work better if I do it like McCarthy.  If I'm reading Steinbeck (which I'm doing right now, too, so imagine the bizarre combination and conflict of ambitions here!), I want to go back and insert philosophy and enrichen my characters with more words.  If I'm reading Chabon, I wonder why I can't arrange my words just right to make them spring off the page like Disney "Real-D," which HIS WORDS ACTUALLY--and, I swear, they PHYSICALLY--DO (I don't know how he does it; it undefinable; he, like, uses them just SO, that a single word is suddenly more than it ever was or could be out of your own fingers).  Each of these guys' styles are so THEM (not to mention someone like Saramago or Barthelme or any of my other five million literary idols), and I want to be just SO ME, just like they are so them.

Am I?  Does it matter?  Will anyone care if I am?  Well, not if I don't get published.  Not if I don't keep it up!

And yeah, yeah, I know, there's room for all kinds of writers and there are all kinds of audiences and there are countless chances, especially since I'm just going to keep doing it anyway, because I love it, right?

I'm not looking for consolation.  I'm not looking for compliments (unless you're a publisher and want to read my books!).  I want to be great.  I mean, GREAT.  I want to be a McCarthy, a Chabon, a Tolkein, or a Steinbeck.  I want someone to read something I write and be inspired.  Okay, so maybe I don't want to be McCarthy then, because he makes me want to shrivel up and die and stop telling students that I know what I'm doing or talking about when I say "this is how you should write."

So, I write.  I practice.  And I have four thousand words to slog through to catch up with my NaNoWriMo schedule, in a book that, so far, is exactly all the crap that NaNoWriMo professes it should be.  (And thank goodness, right?  Less pressure that way, right?)

I suppose I can take some consolation in the fact that each of the guys listed didn't just explode onto the scene out of nowhere when they were twenty-one years old or whatever and somehow gain the staying power that holds them yet in the literary eye after all these years (well, okay, Chabon did).  Maybe there's hope yet for this somewhat and ever aging "young" man tapping away at a fairly worthless blog entry that practically no one will read.

So on to NaNoWriMo.

Tally-ho!