Table of Contents
How the Enemy Came to Thlunrana
Preface to The Last Book of Wonder
Charon
Charon leaned forward and rowed. All things were one with his weariness.
It was not with him a matter of years or of centuries, but of wide floods of time, and an old heaviness and a pain in the arms that had become for him part of the scheme that the gods had made and was of a piece with Eternity.
If the gods had even sent him a contrary wind it would have divided all time in his memory into two equal slabs.
So grey were all things always where he was that if any radiance lingered a moment among the dead, on the face of such a queen perhaps as Cleopatra, his eyes could not have perceived it.
It was strange that the dead nowadays were coming in such numbers. They were coming in thousands where they used to come in fifties. It was neither Charon’s duty nor his wont to ponder in his grey soul why these things might be. Charon leaned forward and rowed.
Then no one came for a while. It was not unusual for the gods to send no one down from Earth for such a space. But the gods knew best.
Then one man came alone. And the little shade sat shivering on a lonely bench and the great boat pushed off. Only one passenger; the gods knew best.
And great and weary Charon rowed on and on beside the little, silent, shivering ghost.
And the sound of the river was like a mighty sigh that Grief in the beginning had sighed among her sisters, and that could not die like the echoes of human sorrow failing on earthly hills, but was as old as time and the pain in Charon’s arms.
Then the boat from the slow, grey river loomed up to the coast of Dis and the little, silent shade still shivering stepped ashore, and Charon turned the boat to go wearily back to the world. Then the little shadow spoke, that had been a man.
“I am the last,” he said.
No one had ever made Charon smile before, no one before had ever made him weep.
The Three Infernal Jokes
This is the story that the desolate man told to me on the lonely Highland road one autumn evening with winter coming on and the stags roaring.
The saddening twilight, the mountain already black, the dreadful melancholy of the stags’ voices, his friendless mournful face, all seemed to be of some most sorrowful play staged in that valley by an outcast god, a lonely play of which the hills were part and he only the actor.
For long we watched each other drawing out of the solitudes of those forsaken spaces. Then when we met he spoke.
“I will tell you a thing that will make you die of laughter. I will keep it to myself no longer. But first I must tell you how I came by it.”
I do not give the story in his words with all his woeful interjections and the misery of his frantic self-reproaches for I would not convey unnecessarily to my readers that atmosphere of sadness that was about all he said and that seemed to go with him wherever he moved.
It seemed that he had been a member of a club, a West-end club he called it, a respectable but quite inferior affair, probably in the City: agents belonged to it, fire insurance mostly, but life insurance and motor-agents too, it was in fact a touts’ club.
It seems that a few of them one evening, forgetting for a moment their encyclopaedias and non-stop tyres, were talking loudly over a cardtable when the game had ended about their personal virtues, and a very little man with waxed moustaches who disliked the taste of wine was boasting heartily of his temperance. It was then that he who told this mournful story, drawn on by the boasts of others, leaned forward a little over the green blaze into the light of the two guttering candles and revealed, no doubt a little shyly, his own extraordinary virtue. One woman to him was as ugly as another.
And the silenced boasters arose and went home to bed leaving him all alone, as he supposed, with his unequalled virtue. And yet he was not alone, for when the rest had gone there arose a member out of a deep armchair at the dark end of the room and walked across to him, a man whose occupation he did not know and only now suspects.
“You have,” said the stranger, “a surpassing virtue.”
“I have no possible use for it,” my poor friend replied.
“Then doubtless