Devil Stories Part 16

"That makes two," says the chaplain quite panting; then without taking time to breathe, red and perspiring, he descends the altar steps and...

"Ting-a-ring!... Ting-a-ring!..."

Now the third ma.s.s is beginning. There are but a few more steps to be taken to reach the dining-hall; but, alas! the nearer the midnight repast approaches the more does the unfortunate Balaguere feel himself possessed by mad impatience and gluttony. The vision becomes more distinct; the golden carps, the roasted turkeys are there, there!...

He touches them, ... he ... oh heavens! The dishes are smoking, the wines perfume the air; and with furiously agitated clapper, the little bell is crying out to him:

"Quick, quick, quicker yet!"

But how could he go quicker? His lips scarcely move. He no longer p.r.o.nounces the words; ... unless he were to impose upon Heaven outright and trick it out of its ma.s.s.... And that is precisely what he does, the unfortunate man!... From temptation to temptation; he begins by skipping a verse, then two. Then the epistle is too long--he does not finish it, skims over the gospel, pa.s.ses before the _Credo_ without going into it, skips the _Pater_, salutes the _Preface_ from a distance, and by leaps and bounds thus hurls himself into eternal d.a.m.nation, constantly followed by the vile Garrigou (_vade retro, Satanas!_), who seconds him with wonderful skill, sustains his chasuble, turns over the leaves two at a time, elbows the reading-desks, upsets the vessels, and is continually sounding the little bell louder and louder, quicker and quicker.

You should have seen the scared faces of all who were present, as they were obliged to follow this ma.s.s by mere mimicry of the priest, without hearing a word; some rise when others kneel, and sit down when the others are standing up, and all the phases of this singular service are mixed up together in the mult.i.tude of different att.i.tudes presented by the worshippers on the benches....

"The _abbe_ goes too fast.... One can't follow him," murmured the old dowager, shaking her head-dress in confusion. Master Arnoton with great steel spectacles on his nose is searching in his prayer-book to find where the d.i.c.kens they are. But at heart all these good folks, who themselves are thinking about feasting, are not sorry that the ma.s.s is going on at this post haste; and when Dom Balaguere with radiant face turns towards those present and cries with all his might: "_Ite, missa est_," they all respond to him a "_Deo gratias_" in but one voice, and that as joyous and enthusiastic, as if they thought themselves already seated at the midnight repast and drinking the first toast.

III

Five minutes afterwards the crowd of n.o.bles were sitting down in the great hall, with the chaplain in the midst of them. The chateau, illuminated from top to bottom, was resounding with songs, with shouts, with laughter, with uproar; and the venerable Dom Balaguere was thrusting his fork into the wing of a fowl, and drowning all remorse for his sin in streams of regal wine and the luscious juices of the viands. He ate and drank so much, the dear, holy man, that he died during the night of a terrible attack, without even having had time to repent; and then in the morning when he got to heaven, I leave you to imagine how he was received.

He was told to withdraw on account of his wickedness. His fault was so grievous that it effaced a whole lifetime of virtue.... He had robbed them of a midnight ma.s.s.... He should have to pay for it with three hundred, and he should not enter into Paradise until he had celebrated in his own chapel these three hundred Christmas ma.s.ses in the presence of all those who had sinned with him and by his fault....

... And now this is the true legend of Dom Balaguere as it is related in the olive country. At the present time the chateau of Trinquelague no longer exists, but the chapel still stands on the top of Mount Ventoux, amid a cl.u.s.ter of green oaks. Its decayed door rattles in the wind, and its threshold is choked up with vegetation; there are birds'

nests at the corners of the altar, and in the recesses of the lofty windows, from which the stained gla.s.s has long ago disappeared. It seems, however, that every year at Christmas, a supernatural light wanders amid these ruins, and the peasants, in going to the ma.s.ses and to the midnight repasts, see this phantom of a chapel illuminated by invisible tapers that burn in the open air, even in snow and wind. You may laugh at it if you like, but a vine-dresser of the place, named Garrigue, doubtless a descendant of Garrigou, declared to me that one Christmas night, when he was a little tipsy, he lost his way on the hill of Trinquelague; and this is what he saw.... Till eleven o'clock, nothing. All was silent, motionless, inanimate. Suddenly, about midnight, a chime sounded from the top of the steeple, an old, old chime, which seemed as if it were ten leagues off. Very soon Garrigue saw lights flitting about, and uncertain shadows moving in the road that climbs the hill. They pa.s.sed on beneath the chapel porch, and murmured:

"Good evening, Master Arnoton!"

"Good evening, good evening, my friends!" ...

When all had entered, my vine-dresser, who was very courageous, silently approached, and when he looked through the broken door, a singular spectacle met his gaze. All those he had seen pa.s.s were seated round the choir, and in the ruined nave, just as if the old seats still existed. Fine ladies in brocade, with lace head-dresses; lords adorned from head to foot; peasants in flowered jackets such as our grandfathers had; all with an old, faded, dusty, tired look. From time to time the night birds, the usual inhabitants of the chapel, who were aroused by all these lights, would come and flit round the tapers, the flames of which rose straight and ill-defined, as if they were burning behind a veil; and what amused Garrigue very much was a certain personage with large steel spectacles, who was ever shaking his tall black wig, in which one of these birds was quite entangled, and kept itself upright by noiselessly flapping its wings....

At the farther end, a little old man of childish figure was on his knees in the middle of the choir, desperately shaking a clapperless and soundless bell, whilst a priest, clad in ancient gold, was coming and going before the altar, reciting prayers of which not a word was heard.... Most certainly this was Dom Balaguere in the act of saying his third low ma.s.s.

DEVIL-PUZZLERS[19]

BY FREDERICK BEECHER PERKINS

[19] By permission of G. P. Putnam's Sons, Publishers. New York and London.

It will not do at all to disbelieve in the existence of a personal devil. It is not so many years ago that one of our profoundest divines remarked with indignation upon such disbelief. "No such person?" cried the doctor with energy. "Don't tell me! I can hear his tail snap and crack about amongst the churches any day!"

And if the enemy is, in truth, still as vigorously active among the sons of G.o.d as he was in the days of Job (that is to say, in the time of Solomon, when, as the critics have found out, the Book of Job was written), then surely still more is he vigilant and sly in his tricks for foreclosing his mortgages upon the souls of the wicked.

And once more: still more than ever is his personal appearance probable in these latter days. The everlasting tooting of the wordy c.u.mming has proclaimed the end of all things for a quarter of a century; and he will surely see his prophecy fulfilled if he can only keep it up long enough. But, though we discredit the sapient Second-Adventist as to the precise occasion of the diabolic avatar, has there not been a strange coincidence between his noisy declarations, and other evidences of an approximation of the spiritual to the bodily sphere of life? Is not this same quarter of a century that of the Spiritists? Has it not witnessed the development of Od?

And of clairvoyance? And have not the doctrines of ghosts, and re-appearances of the dead, and of messages from them, risen into a prominence entirely new, and into a coherence and semblance at least of fact and fixed law such as was never known before? Yea, verily. Of all times in the world's history, to reject out of one's beliefs either good spirits or bad, angelology or diabology, chief good being, or chief bad being, this is the most improper.

Dr. Hic.o.k was trebly liable to the awful temptation, under which he had a.s.suredly fallen, over and above the fact that he was a prig, which makes one feel the more glad that he was so handsomely come up with in the end; such a prig that everybody who knew him, invariably called him (when he wasn't by) Hic.o.k-alorum. This charming surname had been conferred on him by a crazy old fellow with whom he once got into a dispute. Lunatics have the most awfully tricky ways of dodging out of pinches in reasoning; but Hic.o.k knew too much to know _that_; and so he acquired his fine t.i.tle to teach him one thing more.

Trebly liable, we said. The three reasons are,--

1. He was foreign-born.

2. He was a Scotchman.

3. He was a physician and surgeon.

The way in which these causes operated was as follows (I wish it were allowable to use Artemas Ward's curiously satisfactory vocable "thusly:" like Mrs. Wiggle's soothing syrup, it "supplies a real want"):--

Being foreign-born, Dr. Hic.o.k had not the unfailing moral stamina of a native American, and therefore was comparatively easily beset by sin.

Being, secondly, a Scotchman, he was not only thoroughly conceited, with a conceit as immovable as the Ba.s.s Rock, just as other folks sometimes are, but, in particular, he was perfectly sure of his utter mastery of metaphysics, logic and dialectics, or, as he used to call it, with a sn.o.bbish Teutonicalization, _dialektik_. Now, in the latter two, the Scotch can do something, but in metaphysics they are simply imbecile; which quality, in the inscrutable providence of G.o.d, has been joined with an equally complete conviction of the exact opposite.

Let not man, therefore, put those traits asunder--not so much by reason of any divine ordinance, as because no man in his senses would try to convince a Scotchman--or anybody else, for that matter.

Thirdly, he was a physician and surgeon; and gentlemen of this profession are p.r.o.ne to become either thoroughgoing materialists, or else implicit and extreme Calvinistic Presbyterians, "of the large blue kind." And they are, moreover, positive, hard-headed, bold, and self-confident. So they have good need to be. Did not Majendie say to his students, "Gentlemen, disease is a subject which physicians know nothing about"?

So the doctor both believed in the existence of a personal devil, and believed in his own ability to get the upper hand of that individual in a tournament of the wits. Ah, he learned better by terrible experience! The doctor was a dry-looking little chap, with sandy hair, a freckled face, small grey eyes, and absurd white eyebrows and eyelashes, which made him look as if he had finished off his toilet with just a light flourish from the dredging-box. He was erect of carriage, and of a prompt, ridiculous alertness of step and motion, very much like that of Major Wellington De Boots. And his face commonly wore a kind of complacent serenity such as the Hindoos ascribe to Buddha. I know a little snappish dentist's-goods dealer up town, who might be mistaken for Hic.o.k-alorum any day.

Well, well--what had the doctor done? Why--it will sound absurd, probably, to some unbelieving people--but really Dr. Hic.o.k confessed the whole story to me himself: he had made a bargain with the Evil One! And indeed he was such an uncommonly disagreeable-looking fellow, that, unless on some such hypothesis, it is impossible to imagine how he could have prospered as he did. He gained patients, and cured them too; made money; invested successfully; bought a brown-stone front--a house, not a wiglet--then bought other real estate; began to put his name on charity subscription lists, and to be made vice-president of various things.

Chiefest of all,--it must have been by some superhuman aid that Dr.

Hic.o.k married his wife, the then and present Mrs. Hic.o.k. Dear me! I have described the doctor easily enough. But how infinitely more difficult it is to delineate Beauty than the Beast: did you ever think of it? All I can say is, that she is a very lovely woman now; and she must have been, when the doctor married her, one of the loveliest creatures that ever lived--a lively, graceful, bright-eyed brunette, with thick fine long black hair, pencilled delicate eyebrows, little pink ears, thin high nose, great astonished brown eyes, perfect teeth, a little rosebud of a mouth, and a figure so extremely beautiful that n.o.body believed she did not pad--hardly even the artists who--those of them at least who work faithfully in the life-school--are the very best judges extant of truth in costume and personal beauty. But, furthermore, she was good, with the innocent unconscious goodness of a sweet little child; and of all feminine charms--even beyond her supreme grace of motion--she possessed the sweetest, the most resistless--a lovely voice; whose tones, whether in speech or song, were perfect in sweetness, and with a strange penetrating sympathetic quality and at the same time with the most wonderful half-delaying completeness of articulation and modulation, as if she enjoyed the sound of her own music. No doubt she did; but it was unconsciously, like a bird. The voice was so sweet, the great loveliness and kindness of soul it expressed were so deep, that, like every exquisite beauty, it rayed forth a certain sadness within the pleasure it gave. It awakened infinite, indistinct emotions of beauty and perfection--infinite longings.

It's of no use to tell me that such a spirit--she really ought not to be noted so low down as amongst human beings--that such a spirit could have been made glad by becoming the yoke-fellow of Hic.o.k-alorum, by influences exclusively human. No!--I don't believe it--I won't believe it--it can't be believed. I can't convince you, of course, for you don't know her; but if you did, along with the rest of the evidence, and if your knowledge was like mine, that from the testimony of my own eyes and ears and judgment--you would know, just as I do, that the doctor's possession of his wife was the key-stone of the arch of completed proof on which I found my absolute a.s.sertion that he had made that bargain.

He certainly had! A most characteristic transaction too; for while, after the usual fashion, it was agreed by the "party of the first part,"--viz., Old Scratch--that Dr. Hic.o.k should succeed in whatever he undertook during twenty years, and by the party of the second part, that at the end of that time the D---- should fetch him in manner and form as is ordinarily provided, yet there was added a peculiar clause.

This was, that, when the time came for the doctor to depart, he should be left entirely whole and unharmed, in mind, body, and estate, provided he could put to the Devil three consecutive questions, of which either one should be such that that cunning spirit could not solve it on the spot.

So for twenty years Dr. Hic.o.k lived and prospered, and waxed very great. He did not gain one single pound avoirdupois however, which may perchance seem strange, but is the most natural thing in the world.

Who ever saw a little, dry, wiry, sandy, freckled man, with white eyebrows, that did grow fat? And besides, the doctor spent all his leisure time in hunting up his saving trinity of questions; and hard study, above all for such a purpose, is as sure an anti-fattener as Banting.

He knew the Scotch metaphysicians by heart already, _ex-officio_ as it were; but he very early gave up the idea of trying to fool the Devil with such mud-pie as that. Yet be it understood, that he found cause to except Sir William Hamilton from the muddle-headed crew. He chewed a good while, and pretty hopefully, upon the Quantification of the Predicate; but he had to give that up too, when he found out how small and how dry a meat rattled within the big, noisy nut-sh.e.l.l. He read Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Peter Dens, and a cartload more of old casuists, Romanist and Protestant.

He exhausted the learning of the Development Theory. He studied and experimented up to the existing limits of knowledge on the question of the Origin of Life, and then poked out alone, as much farther as he could, into the ineffable black darkness that is close at the end of our noses on that, as well as most other questions. He hammered his way through the whole controversy on the Freedom of the Will. He mastered the whole works of Mrs. Henry C. Carey on one side, and of two hundred and fifty English capitalists and American college professors on the other, on the question of Protection or Free Trade.

He made, with vast pains, an extensive collection of the questions proposed at debating societies and college-students' societies with long Greek names. The last effort was a failure. Dr. Hic.o.k had got the idea, that, from the spontaneous activity of so many free young geniuses, many wondrous and suggestive thoughts would be born. Having, however, tabulated his collection, he found, that, among all these innumerable gymnasia of intellect, there were only seventeen questions debated! The doctor read me a curious little memorandum of his conclusions on this unexpected fact, which will perhaps be printed some day.

He investigated many other things too; for a sharp-witted little Presbyterian Scotch doctor, working to cheat the Devil out of his soul, can accomplish an amazing deal in twenty years. He even went so far as to take into consideration mere humbugs; for, if he could cheat the enemy with a humbug, why not? The only pain in that case, would be the mortification of having stooped to an inadequate adversary--a foeman unworthy of his steel. So he weighed such queries as the old scholastic _brocard, An chimoera bombinans in vacuo devorat secundas intentiones?_ and that beautiful moot point wherewith Sir Thomas More silenced the challenging schoolmen of Bruges, _An averia carrucae capta in vet.i.to nomio sint irreplegibilia?_

He glanced a little at the subject of conundrums; and among the chips from his workshop is a really clever theory of conundrums. He has a cla.s.sification and discussion of them, all his own, and quite ingenious and satisfactory, which divides them into answerable and unanswerable, and, under each of these, into resemblant and differential.

For instance: let the four cla.s.ses be distinguished with the initials of those four terms, A. R., A. D., U. R., and U. D.; you will find that the Infinite Possible Conundrum (so to speak) can always be reduced under one of those four heads. Using symbols, as they do in discussing syllogism--indeed, by the way, a conundrum is only a jocular variation in the syllogism, an intentional fallacy for fun (read Whately's _Logic_, Book III., and see if it isn't so)--using symbols, I say, you have these four "figures:"--

I. (A. R.) Why is A like B? (answerable): as, Why is a gentleman who gives a young lady a young dog, like a person who rides rapidly up hill? A. Because he gives a gallop up (gal-a-pup).

_Sub-variety_; depending upon a violation of something like the "principle of excluded middle," a very fallacy of a fallacy; such as the ancient "n.i.g.g.e.r-minstrel!" case, Why is an elephant like a brick?

A. Because neither of them can climb a tree.

II. (A. D.) Why is A _unlike_ B? (answerable) usually put thus: What is the difference between A and B? (Figure I., if worded in the same style, would become: What is the similarity between A and B?): as, What is the difference between the old United-States Bank and the Fulton Ferry-boat signals in thick weather? A. One is a fog whistle, and the other is a Whig fossil.

III. (U. R.) Why is A like B? (unanswerable): as Charles Lamb's well-known question, Is that your own hare, or a wig?