The Case of the Mother-in-Law of Pearl

THE CASE OF THE MOTHER-IN-LAW-OF-PEARL

It was a bright afternoon after much rain and Doctor Eszterhazy decided to take the steam runabout on the fashionable three turns along the Motor Road in the great Private Park. He had put on his duster and was reaching for his cap when the day-porter came in.

“Yes, Lemkotch.”

“Sir Doctor, Housekeeper asks if you would be so graciously kind as to leave this here off at Weitmondl, in the Golden Hart, to be prepared,” and he set down a box upon the desk, bowed, and withdrew.

If the housekeeper’s master had been a boss butcher or an advocate of the Court of First Jurisdiction, he would probably have said, “What, damn it, does the woman think I am a messenger boy?” but as he was Engelebert Eszterhazy, Doctor of Medicine, Doctor of Jurispurdence, Doctor of Science, Doctor of Philosophy, and Doctor of Literature, he merely said, “Yes, of course.” He took up the box—it was a small one, inlaid, with part of the inlay missing and part about to be, evidently a sewing-box: and he put it in his pocket.

His manservant, Herrek, sat beside him, ringing the large bronze bell; Schwebel, the retired railroadman, sat behind, carefully stoking the fire. They were trying out a new fuel which Eszterhazy had been working on for some time now—the late Count Tunk and Tunk, for many years Consul for the Triune Monarchy at Boston in the American province of Nevengland, had been enamored of a tree called hickory and had planted thousands on his estates in Transbalkania and the Gothic Midlands: but the present Count found that he could make no commercial use of the wood, which was not known in East Central Europe—Eszterhazy, an old schoolmate of Count Beo Tunk and Tunk, desired to see if brickquets, made of the hickory sawdust, might not be an utile fuel.

“Nothing to lose,” Count Beo had said, with a shrug. "All that my stewards hear, they say, when they offer the wood for sale, is a variation on the phrase, ‘Ai—or, ‘Yoi’—"Us never hear of no khic- kory tree,’ and that, of course, is that. But if we call it say—” here he paused, at a loss as what to call it, say.

“Tunkfuel,” said Eszterhazy. “Tunkfuel, Patent-Amerikansko. ”

The Count had thought that Tunkfuel, American Invention, was an excellent idea; and so did his friend: but the former had nothing in mind but an economic use for a crop planted out of sentiment, and the latter hoped to devise something which might tend to retrench the reprehensible increase—slight but evident—in the use of hydrocarbon vehicles. He was aware that even many steam-propelled road vehicles used either kerosene or naphtha, or both, to say nothing of the ones powered entirely by petroleum-derivatives: but steadfastly preferred fuels less offensive to eye and nostril. They might be preferable to coal iself; other than that, he had nothing to say for them.

As though to prove his point for him, he observed, some streets ahead, the enormous vehicle of Glutlovicx the sweets-magnate. The magnate himself had no social ambitions, but as his wife could not be persuaded to be happy in a brand-new castle set in the semiexact center of forty thousand acres of sugar beets (the exact exact center was occupied by the refinery), Gutlovics, with a shrug, had agreed to move to Bella. There he had, among other things apparently needful for the happiness of Frow G., acquired a motor-vehicle. Neither one had any other standard of judging the value of new things save by cost and size: their motor was a hydrocarbon talley-ho, and, as they rode along, enabled them to look into the windows on the second floors of buildings. Glutlovicx always looked to see if his sweets, his sugars, or his preserves were on the tables; she only looked at her reflection in the mirrors or the windows.

And as always, driving along, Eszterhazy at the tiller, Herrek tirelessly tolled the bell. This not only alerted nervous pedestrians to get out of the way, it enabled drivers of nervous horses to make necessary adjustments of the reins—even, if deemed needful— to jump down and take the horse by the head. Sometimes bystanders had thought it funny to see a horse rear upon hind legs and whinny: but the horse had not thought it funny: sometimes horses had gone mad with fear and dashed up on the sidewalks and spilled drivers or passengers and trampled people; and sometimes they had galloped through the new-fasioned plates of window-glass, slashing themselves so that they had to be destroyed.

But such incidents were now becoming less frequent.

After the traditional three turns around the Motor Road, Eszterhazy drew off to the side. “How is the new fuel behaving, Stoker?” he asked. (It would perhaps have been fashionable to have addressed him in the French equivalent, but Schewebel, for one thing, would not have known what chauffeur meant; and, for another, was very proud of having been what he had been on the Royal and Imperial Ironroads S.-

P.-T.)

“Sir: a hot fire, a clean smoke, a clean ash,” he answered.

“Good, good. Very well, let us change places. The Court of the Golden Hart.”

The boiler required no fresh fuel for a while now, and, even if it had, Eszterhazy might have stoked it without soiling white gloves, so cleanly the new fuel was.

The interior of Weitmondl’s consisted chiefly of drawers, shelf after shelf of them, up to the ceiling; moving ladders ran on wheels along rails, and someone seemed always restocking the drawers or else taking stock out: and each drawer had in its front a little window, as it were, containing samples of the size and style of button contained within.

One of the clerks from aloft called something into the back, and the proprietor himself appeared. Seligman Weitmondl was himself a little blanched almond of a man, who managed to be serious and cheerful at the same time. He took the sewing box from Eszterhazy with small crows and clucks of pleasurable recognitoion. “Oh yes, oh yes! Done in my father’s day, my father’s day,” he affirmed. “That was the style, then, lozenge-work, lozenge-work,” he said, tapping the inlay with his finger. “Cheap stuff,” he said, a moment later.

Eszterhazy looked at it more closely. The nacre seemed indeed faint, the opalescence rather dim. “It does not appear to be the highest quality of mother-of- pearl,” he conceded. “Although I might have supposed it had merely faded—”

Weitmondl chuckled. “Faded here, faded there,” he said; “it wasn’t bright and it didn’t fade. It isn’t even mother-of-pearl, be blessed, my dear Sir: it’s what we in the trade call mother-in-law-of pearl. It doesn’t come from the South Sea or the North Sea or the Gulfs of Persia or the Gulfs of Anywhere-else. It comes from a mere river-mussle, somewhere in the Blox-Major. And if you had come to us last week, I’d have had to say, ‘No Sir, we can no longer repair the article in the same material for the reason that we haven’t got it in stock and haven’t had it in stock for long years, long years.’ ” And he nodded seriously. And, seemingly out of nowhere, perhaps from each nostril, he produced two shells. “This one, you see at once, dear Sir, is mother-of-pearl, the real and genuine article: look at it: Beautiful. Though not from Persia, to be sure, from Australia, which is a large island, my dear Sir, to the south of Persia— And this one, you see at once the difference, my dear Sir, day and night, day and night, is the river-mussel, such as we used to get in as a staple, ever so much cheaper, of course.”

And, sometimes stimulated by questions, and sometimes volunteering the data, Seligman Weit- mondl went on to explain, for one thing, the price of standard quality mother-of-pearl had come down—owing to the opening of new grounds in such places as Australia and the South Seas—and the purchasing power of the public had gone up, owing to manufacturing, railroads, abolition of the octroi, the defeat of the Serbians and the Grasutarkers, benevolent laws, and the immense benign influences of the Throne—consequently the demand for the cheaper article had dropped. “Nobody would buy it anymore, it took a long time for us to sell out what we had on hand, soldiers wouldn’t even buy it in snuffboxes for their sweethearts, you see. And then, then when, what with one thing and another, we could have sold some items in the cheaper material, why, we couldn’t get it anymore.”

Eszterhazy, his mild curiosity desiring to have the matter wrapped up, asked why they couldn’t get it anymore? And the button- maker, with a shrug and a smile, said They hadn’t brought it in. They? The dealers. That is, the dealers in such odds and ends— he implied that the odds were very odd, coming as they did from the ends of the Empire. Until the previous week. When one of the They had brought a lot of it in.

“So we should have this repaired and ready for the Dear Sir in very short order. Say two weeks?”

Eszterhazy said two weeks. Weitmondl smiled, bowed, withdrew. Eszterhazy was also withdrawing when a voice from above said, “You see, Sir, the lurlies stopped bringing the shells.”

Down from one of the movable ladders, where, presumably, he had heard the whole conversation, climbed one of the stock clerks—a man somewhat on in years, with a sallow little face framed in a curl of sallow little whiskers.

“The lurlies stopped—?”

The elder clerk now reached the floor, gave a short, stiff bow. “As in that song, Sir, about She combs her golden hair with a golden comb, sitting on the rocks by the river and he feels so sad.” “The lorelie, ah yes, go on.” Eszterhazy marveled how the man managed to get every element of the beginning of Heine’s beautiful poem into one sentence and in impeccably incorrect order. “But the poem, song, says nothing, surely, of shell—?”

"It says nothing. I says something. What the song calls, as the Sir says, a lorelie, we-folks back home calls a lurley, which is its correct name. And the old people always say, in the old days, how a lurley will bring ye gold or gems of such things, if you make right with her. But, by and by, don’t know what happen, the old people they say ‘the lurley stop bringing it,’ Sir, you see.”

“And now have started, again?” The old clerk’s only response was to call, as he moved the ladder further along the wall of drawers, “Number Twenty-two twenty, Coachman Gloves, two dozen short!”

More than once Eszterhazy had noticed that, once an idea or a notion had entered his mind, not long afterwards something hearing upon it would enter his Ken in some material way. Whether, by only thinking about it, he had released it—so to speak—into the Universal Aether, where it would grow and send forth intangible but none-the-less effective ‘tentacles,’ or whether, contrariwise, someone else had implanted it in the Aether by thinking about it, and so forth .... but he had never completed the concept. Nor could he tell why, now, he felt his eyes more than once straying to the telephone instrument in one corner of his room; or why he seemed to feel a sort of straining in his ears. Again and again he bent to his work, again and again he looked up from it: looked through the Swedish crystal-glass at the huge dry-cell batteries within the mahogany telephone- case. And it was with a sense of great relief that he did hear, at last, the clear, brisk tinking of the instrument’s bell.

“Eszterhazy is here,” he announced into the mouthpiece.

A voice asked him if he would graciously attend another moment “to faciliate a far-distant call.” In another moment, more-or-less, a second voice, somewhat weaker in volume, identified itself as the Avar-Ister exchange, and made the same request. After a somewhat longer wait, a somewhat even more distant voice proclaimed itself as “Second Princely Fortress of the Pious and Loyal Velotchshtchi”—in other words, Vlox-Minor—it had not quite finished when an other voice, entirely different in tone and quality, broke in to say, “Engli, this is Roldri Mud,” and all—or, at any rate, much—became clear.

Official maps of the Triune Monarchy bore none of those curious sad cross-hatchings, likelier to be found on maps of South America, and which mean—the key at the bottom informs us—Disputed Territory. Nevertheless. While some matters were certainly undisputed—the Romanou had never penetrated to the Gothic Highlands, for instance; the Slovatchko made no claims to Central Pannonia— nevertheless, there was not a single component nation-state of the Empire around whose borders things did not tend to become somewhere and in some measure subject to confusion, ethnicism, linguistic-nationalistic conflicts, and appeals to the tribunal of history: woe-betide whoever must bring his case to that much- crowded court!

Long ago the Goths and the Avars had fought along the Sable River—but the famous Kompromis of the Year ’60 had declared the area to form a part of Vlox-Minor, and so it still stood. To this district the Avars had in their customary fashion affixed one of their ponderous and polysyllabic names, meaning (in this case) ‘Estuary of the dark river where grow many reeds of the quality used for weirs and baskets’; the Goths, in their own fashion, had termed it ‘Mud.’ To be sure, the Vloxfolk doubtless had another name for it: but enough.

And all this area was the property of the Princes von Vlox, who, with their sixty-four proven quar- terings of nobility, their boresome plethora of available names and titles (Fitz-Guelf zu Borbon-Stuart, as exemplum), disdained not to describe themselves, in the person descendant of Charlemagne and the Lusignan kings of Cyprus, of Prince Roldrando, as Lord of Mud. The fens had in large part been reticulated and drained a century back, and constituted some of the richest farmland in the Monarchy. Probably sixty-four banks bulged with the quit-rents of the Lords of Mud, but one seldom saw them in Bella, even, let alone Paris or Monte Carlo: and legend pictured them as having returned altogether to the primitive, lolling about on rush-strewn floors, guzzling bread-beer, clad in wolf-skins.

“Ah, Roldri,” Eszterhazy said, aloud, “the lurlies have begun to bring up pearl-shell again after all this time—eh?”

And Prince Roldrando, his voice like an organ-note, said, “Ah . . . then you already know ”

Prince Roldrando was not wearing wolfskins, that had been a misunderstanding, he was wearing shaggy Scottish tweeds of such antique design that they must have been cut for a father or an uncle, and they had not been recently cleaned or pressed. “Damndest story you ever heard, Engli,” he said, as easily as he—a moment later—pointed out the Stationmas- ter’s office “—if you want to wash-up—” —the door of the public place of convenience, brightly painted with the internationally-recognized doublezero and W.C., he ignored as though it was not four feet away, and perhaps, inscribed in Hit- tite. “—or, we can stop by the roadside,” he offered an alternate suggestion.

“I won’t ask if you had a good journey,” he went on, "one never has a good journey by the cars, if the window is shut one swelters, if the window is open one gets cinders in one’s eyes.” Baggage had been picked up by two attendants, one of whom wore a footman’s coat and the other a footman’s hat: the trousers of both, as well as those of Prince Roldrando, gave evidence that a deer or boar had recently been killed, drawn, and flayed.

Very recently.

“Lunch in the hamper, whenever you like,” said the host, with a gesture. And, with another gesture, “Care to take the coachman’s seat?”

"Where is the coachman?” asked the guest.

“Coachman? There’s no coachman,” the Prince said, mildly surprised. “Do you think you’re in Bella?”

Sure enough. One of the attendants vaulted onto the near horse—it had been saddled!— gave a gutteral growl—both horses sprang forward—the servant playing the role of tiger uttered a bloodcurdling squaw] (no bronze bells hereabouts!)—the Town of the Princely Fortress (etc.) flashed by. Eszterhazy murmured to himself a few words from his favorite guide-and- phrase-book, “Help! My postilion has been struck by lightning!’ ” Prince Roldrando turned a face twisted with astonishment and concern, his golden-brown eyes wide. “Too-badV’ he exclaimed. “Oh, why didn’t he wear a charm?’ Then, in an instant, the eyes vanished, the face split into a half-a-hundred wrinkles, the mouth exploded into laughter. “Ha-ha! Oh, you had me there! Postillion struck by lightning, he says! Oh, Oh, sweet little Saint Peter in Chains!" And he rolled about in such a manner as to give Eszterhazy the most extreme concern for his safety: Prince Roldrando, however, did not fall off the coach, and neither did he forget the phrase: from time to time during his friend’s visit— and, indeed, often at the oddest times—he would repeat it, the words usually varying in their order, until, at last, it passed into the common speech of the district as a sort of byword, as it might be, “May the black pox pass us over and may our postillions ne’er be struck by lightnings. ...”

The farmhouses of the Vlox countryside were painted in an absolutely Mediterannean profusion of colors—pink, yellow, brown with white trimmings, green with white trimmings, blue, lavendar with brown trimmings: and many, many other shades, tints, permutations, combinations—as though to make up in splendor what they lacked in straightness of line. Presently the houses began to thin out, and the real and still untamed Mud spread out on both sides and all about.

The road itself was lined with trees, but through the trees one could see nothing but an endless expanse of marsh: water, reeds, hummocks, water, blue sky, white clouds, canals, here and there a man in a flat-bottomed boat . . . and, everywhere, everywhere, sometimes floating on the surface of a pool, sometimes diving and bobbing for food, sometimes wheeling and screaming, sometimes conducting a parliamentary inquiry in a clump of trees: the birds .... more birds than Eszterhazy had ever seen in one place before, certainly more birds than he could identity .. . although, like a familiar motif recurrently introduced into some half-wild sort of symphony, there were often swans. Sometimes they sailed majestically upon the waters. And sometimes they squatted like pigs in the mudbanks.

Prince Von Vlox, who had fallen silent, suddenly sat up. Eszterhazy followed his host’s gaze.

Through a fortuitous gap in the trees, Castle Vlox could be seen, perhaps less than a kilometer away: and it seemed to float upon the surface of the waters as though designed for a pageant out of some insubstantial substance. It had, seemingly, everything a castle traditionally should have: walls, a gate, a drawbridge, a moat, towers.

“H ow often one thinks,” Eszterhazy said, musingly, “that a castle must be upon a high hill, a peak. That they often were, had nothing to do with any desire for scenery or prospects, vistas. It is clear that the marshes afforded every bit as much protection to this place as any mountain top. It has a moat, to be sure, but the Mud itself is one vast moat. ..."

Prince Roldrando gave a rich, deep chuckle. “Ferdy tried to besiege it once,” he said—he, probably the only living person who would even think of referring to that long-dead Holy Roman Emperor by a nickname— “a nice balls-up he made of it, trying to get his engines and his artillery through the Mud! So, after sitting and a-thinking about it a while, he sends word he’ll settle for a titular submission—say, the gaffer’s sceptre, and a silver bowl. Ha ha! Ah, the gaffer”—here he referred to none other than Sigismudo, Prince Von Vlox, 1520-1583—“the gaffer sends him a copper piss-pot and a gumph-stick, ho ho. . . .” In the 16th century and at this remove from the centers of soft living, a copper urinal was after all indeed a luxury of sorts: but a gumph-stick was a mere common appurtenance in every privy which hung out from a castle wall. What “Ferdy” had thought of it all need not trouble conjecture, but he had certainly never come back.

Eszterhazy gazed at the castle, slowly growing larger, appearing and vanishing as they came nearer and nearer. “It gives one a definite feeling of reassurance,” he said, “to know that tales like that are told of this old place. It is certainly neither Castle Dracula nor Castle Frankenstein—”

Roldrando nodded. “As for Vlad Drakulya, he was a Rumanian, need more be said? And the Franckensteins,” he said, indulgently, “one hears well of them, (hey are, after all, barons, is what llinj are. After all, anybody can be made a baron, but nobody can be made a prince; one is either born a prince or one is not, and the personal caprice of a monarch or a minister has nothing to do with it.” Eszterhazy was reminded ol the Great Duke of Wellington and his comment that what he liked about the Order of the Bath was that "there was no damned about ‘merit’ to it!” Such altitudes transcended snobbery. If one were, on one side, descended bom the Lusignan kings (one of whom quite casually married a mermaid), and, on the other side descended—somewhat farther back—from Charlemagne, the great-grandson of Big-footed Bertha, la reine pedauque—then one either automatically appropriated the Stationsmaster’s private pissoir or one merely “Stopped by the side of the road”—either one indifferently acceptable.

Prince Roldi took up a battered brass post-horn and blew a blast or two on it. Almost, one expected the draw-bridge to fall and men-at-arms to appear on the battlements. Actually, it was a signal to light the samovar. —The coach rattled over the bridge, and, making one half-turn around the court-yard, came to a stop. Several men half-rose, half-bowed, returned to their duties. Duties which, Eszterhazy noticed, consisted, respectively, of cleaning the latest model shotgun, and of sharpening the head of a boar- spear.

He really did not know if it was the latest model boar-spear.

They had the boar that night, with wild apple sauce; and with it a wine of the district, one which did not keep and so was never sent for sale: now, between sweet and sour, and slightly effervescent, it might have tempted angels.

Prince Roldi, gazing at the church-ransom of bees-wax candles all a glimmer, improved the vision by regarding it through his glass of wine. "Try it, Engli,” he urged. “Do the same. See if you can see the monkey in the glass.”

Eszterhazy complied. The flames winked, winked, wept, wept. Odd bits of things seemed to come into vision, then fall out of focus again. “The monkey?” he enquired, pleased, pleasantly tired, enjoying his dinner.

“ ‘Es. We had an old family doctor once. Said he could make monkeys. Long ago. The gaffer didn’t want him to make monkeys. Wanted him to make gold, I daresay. Atcful quarrel. Don’t know why the gaffer didn’t drop him in the sink. —Eh? The sink? Don’t you know what the—Ah, the, what do they call it, dunjeon. We call it the sink. He didn’t though. Chap rode away, swearing the sky sulfur-colored. Ever since then we always say, ‘Look through the wine into the flame and you’ll see the monkey old Theo made ’ ”

It was news indeed to Eszterhazy that Doctor Phillipus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, called Paracel- cus, had ever come this way. Sooner or later, he thought, must have a look in the library and the archives. Has ‘old Theo’ actually made him a homunculus here? One hardly knew. Still, the legend—however transmuted— the legend had persisted.

“You have more trouble brewing now, you say, Roldi, than many monkeys might cause. . . . ?” It seemed the right moment to broach the cask.

It was.

“Yes .... damn it. ...” The prince sat up, set down his glass, and shook his head. “If ’tisn’t settled, there’ll be no buckwheat. If there’s no buckwheat, then they’ll start eating the wheat and the potatoes. If they eat the wheat and the potatoes, then they’ll not be having enough to make vodka. And if they’ll not be having enough to make vodka, they’ll have to be buying vodka. —And the Vloxi, may the Almighty God of Heaven and Earth defend us from evil, when the Vloxi start buying vodka ”

Eszterhazy had made only the first, faintest of beginning at an understanding. It would not do to push, it never did do to push. Anywhere. So he said one sole word. “Lurley?”

“So they say—” His friend pushed his hands through his hair, sighed. “So they say. ...”

After a moment. "And you say. . . ?”

_ The prince shrugged. “Perhaps it’s not a lurley. Perhaps it’s— perhaps she is ... an undine. . .”

Candles weeping golden-brown tears. Guest saying nothing. Waiting, waiting. Sipping the rich red wine. Thinking of old thoughts. Of old beliefs . . . could one indeed call them ‘old’ when they were so evidently still being believed? After a long, long wait, and a long, long sigh, Prince Rol- drando said, “Maybe she is an undine. Maybe one that old Theo made. Let go loose, out of anger, you know, with our gaffer. And so, maybe . . . maybe she’s been waiting . . . waiting . . . ever since

Sweet scent of beeswax, mingled with sweet scent of wild apples.

What century were they living in now, here, on the wild border inarches of the VIox, where the Avars and the Goths alike had left their bones to moulder and their spear-heads to rust and their ghosts, their still-vexed and angry ghosts, to wander, muttering and unshriven. . . . ?

“Because, you see, Engli, the old story of old King Baldwin’s bride? You know what the common-folk say about old King Baldwin’s bride?” Eszterhazy was lairly sure the story had not been originally told about old King Baldwin, but it was of the same blood; he summed the long and uncanny story up in a few words: Mow the noble lord had wedded a beautiful and a strange woman, bow her only condition was that she must never be seen to bathe. Mow for some several years the marriage had been happy enough, until ....one ill-fated

day ....the husband coming borne unexpectedly (ah, those eternal stories of husbands and their lalally-unexpected returns!), and bearing sounds of song and of the splashing of water, had dared to break his own word . . . had espied his wife in her bath ... espied, over the side of the tub, her glistening, glittering mermaids’s tail

Yes. . . . Yes. . . . Such is the common story. But it’s not the true story, you see. We know it. We of the family. She wasn’t a mere mermaid, you see. She was an undine. He spied her, she sprang out, and into the moat, and thence to the open flood. But they often used to be hearing her, wailing for her children. Es. An undine. She wedded him—for what? Gold? Hadn’t she, hadn’t they all of them gold enough, and silver and jewels as well, there at the bottom, where the rich ships sank? Ah, no, you know, what it is that undines want: a soul, a soul, is what undines want! She wedded him to gain a soul by reason of the Christian wedding, you know that, for the undine has no soul to start with. . . .

“And so maybe this is what she’s come for. Come back for. Is waiting for ” The prince’s voice droned on in the growing darkness, the last lights of the sunken day sinking into the horizon behind it, the candles sinking wetly into their sockets.

Eszterhazy felt his head snap up. Therefore, it must have dropped upon his bosom. A day’s travel by train and by coach. The full belly, stuffed with roast boar. The monotone narration. Narration stopped. Had Roldi noticed this breach of manners? What was the last thing he’d said? Ah. . . .

“Waiting for her soul, eh?” the guest said.

“No. No.” The host nodded emphatically. “Not her soul. She hasn’t got a soul. Don’t you see.

“She’s waiting for a soul, all right. But it’s my soul she. is waiting for….!”

Ephraim the trader was clad in velveteens, worn, clean velveteens. Tied at the knee in clumps of cords. His cross-gaiters. In Bella, such costume had not been seen off-stage in half-a-century. Here it was a suit of working- clothes. And the man and his trade was as archaic, in terms of imperial commerce, as his costume. But he was a man for all of that, and a civil man, too. It did not occur to him, as it often seemed to occur to others in this country scene—and in others, for that matter—-that the stranger from the big city was asking him about his own affairs for an ill purpose certain to involve the country fellow’s loss—or, what was just as bad: the stranger’s gain!

“Weel, sir [the traider said], I have four sisters. And tis our custom to dower them, not with much money, for our trade here doesn’t bring in much money, we don’t hunger or go in rags, but we don’t find ourselves with much in the way of cash. My old Dad, he give the girls furniture and featherbedding and of course they already has their own linens in their chests. And my old dad, he gives the bridegroom a gold watch and a chain, as is the custom with us. Well sir, as I say, I ve got four sisters, long may they live, and after the third, Estella was her name, After she was wedded off, twas like the house had suffered a fire. Oh, how she wept, ‘Father, Father, don’t forget me!’—and afterwards my old dad he says, in his wry way, ‘Forget her, how can I forger her, she’s tooken the last stick of furniture and the last feathertick off the pads!’ And yet there was the fourth sister, Mar- rianna, well, she gets betrothed, and there was a problem, how our old dad he did weep. ‘A shame to my name,’ he sayd. ‘I’ve got not a groushek nor a bedstool to dower her with, not to mention the gold watch and chain for the bridegroom,’—had I mentioned the gold watch and chain for the bridegroom, Sir?”

Eszterhazy listened patiently. A prosecutor or an examining magistrate might—at least in fiction— allow himself the luxury of asking crisp, incisive questions: short: to the point. But an enquirer such as himself, a stranger, among a strange-enough people, and involved in as strange a matter as this one—the best thing by far was simply to start with a general subject and then to listen. And listen and listen.

And listen. . .

“Well, Sir, we are not like how we hear the children in the cities are, we respect our old elders, our gaffers, as we say, and it pains us to see them weep. So I says, ‘Dad, never fear, I’ll help thee.’ And I gets in the wagon and off I goes, not half-knowing as to where, to tell the truth; and then it bethinks me. ‘No one has been down along the little river of late years, so off with thee, Em- phraim, and see what God may send thee.’ And among other things He sends me, Sir, is a whacking great pile of mussel shell, and so that’s the story, Sir.”

Someone, somehow, must have brought word to old Hakim the River Tartar, that a Highborn Guest was coming, for not only was rude hospitality already prepared on the table—a much scratched old pewter plate piled with nuts and mulberries, a jug of inilk, a pile of flatbread on a clean cloth—but the old man had put on his embroidered caftan: for usually the River Tartars, those lew who remained—usually they wore the cast-downs of the local Rag Market. The River Tartars had forgotten most of their own tongue without ever having gathered much mastery of the common speech. The old man muttered a long greeting which had once, perhaps, been current in the Courts of Karakorum. Then he pulled a boy from behind him, and shoved the lad forward. There was no robe for the lad, perhaps had been none such for a century. But the boy’s rags were at any rate clean.

‘Where me get the shell? Me get she from the lurleygirly.” Broken, the boy’s speech, but straightforward enough. “Me see a great pile oft by Lurley Bend, and me leave a bowl of milk one lime and me take some shell, wrap up in me sark,” he gestured and he grinned; stripping off his shirt had evidently posed no problem, likely he went most ways and most days in his breech-clout, no more. “And a nex’ day me go, take some more shell, leave some more milk, and a next day me go,” and so on and so on. “ ‘Es, me pay milk, take shell. ‘Nen come pedlar-khan and give me crockery and we trade crockery for we don’t be needin’ it, us eats outen table-holes. ‘Es, us trades it for salt and matches and lamp-oil, an’—”

Eszterhazy barely followed. To Joachim-the-Groom (thus to dis­tinguish him from Joachim-the- Smith, Joachim-the-Shrewd, Joachim-Cuckold, and a few score more) he said, “Ask how he knows it was a lurley?”

The old Tartar-man answered, in some surprise at the question. “Why, it be find to Lurley Bend, who else, me khan, would leave it shell there?”

But the boy had a word of his own. "Me do see she, all a-bare!”

The gaffer clouted his shaven pate, “For shame! Giaour!”

Perhaps the clout, perhaps the guffaw which Groom-Joachim had not felt able to constrain—well, for whatever reason, the boy had no more to say. They sipped the sour milk, pecked at the mulberries, put some bread and some nuts into their pockets, and left something beneath the cloth—at least Eszterhazy did—something which was no salt or matches or lamp-oil. And, with bows here and there, they departed.

Riding away, on the heavy horses whose feet were so accustomed to the mud, Eszterhazy asked, “Have these mussels any other use, Joachim?”

The groom scratched his beard. “Aye, Sir Doctor. Can be eaten.” “Ah. And how do you eat them?”

A shocked look was his first answer. “/? Ah, Sir Doctor, I don’t eat them!”

“Oh. So. Who does, then?” Again, a sidelong look. Another scratch at the beard. “The lurley, then.” said Joachim-the-Groom.

The map of the area, as it hung in the office of the Bailiff (half tack- room, half gun-room, another half of it somehow made shift to serve for business: if there are not three halves in one whole in most places, be sure that the Mud is not one of them) of the Estate, might not have passed inspection at the Royal and Imperial Institute of Cartography. But it sufficed to locate the cove of the little river—

“Does it have a name, Bailiff?” “Does, Sir Doctor.”

A silence.

A sigh.

“And what, then, is its name, Bailiff?

“It’s name? It’s name is Little River, Sir Doctor.”

—The cove called Lurley Bend had, so far as could be recalled, always been called that. There seemed no local legends of any golden-haired sirens sitting on rocks and luring men to their certain deaths there. There seemed, in fact, no local legends about it at all—save the one local legend, so strange and totally unfamiliar to Eszterhazy, that the appearance of the lurley meant certain death to the buckwheat crop.

“It’s certain death to the buckwhat crop,” Prince Roldrando burst out, “if you will all neglect to tend it!”

The Bailiff said nothing, but one of the older men, wagging his head, said, respectfully, but nonetheless doggedly, "Ah, me Lord Prince, tis easy for you to say, but tis a known fact that whenever there is a lurleygirly in the river, us buckwheat crop do blight and die: and then us have no kasha for the winter, lulladay!”

His lord prince pointed out, again, that the only certain fact was that the buckwheat had to be tended: but this brought nothing but a certain clarification, to wit, that if anyone were to dare to tend the buckwheat while the lurleygirly was in the river, he or she or they would be so doing incur certain death.

It was certain, to be sure, that buckwhat was the staple food-stuff for the winter thereabouts. Some wheat was saved to make bread, some potatoes were saved for the borsht, much wheat and potatoes went to pay rent or be sold for cash (or, likelier, to pay against credit): the main use for wheat and potato, however, as far the fact of good crops of either one gladdening the hearts of the farmer-folk, was that much of both went into the making of the local vodka. To have used wheat alone would have seemed a wanton extravagance; to have used potatoes only would have seemed a degree of coarseness to which they were unwilling to descend. They sought a balance, and—usually—they found it.

And if, instead of bowl after bowl of familiar buckwheat grits winterday after winterday, if, instead of this, they had needs fill their bellies with bread, with potato—why, a two-fold sadness would surely come upon them: One—no kasha; Two—no homemade vodka. None of this meant, of course, that they would do without vodka! The very thought was alien, would have brought unbelieving grunts. But sometimes the buckwheat failed for natural reasons. The results were familiar to all. One sold what one could—sometimes the wife’s gold trinkets—and the wife never oared for that—or the silver- liames of the ikons—and one wont to town to buy town-made vodka. And, once in town, once at the tavern, did one—could one—have a quiet and thoughtful sip, as one always did at home? Never a bit of it. There was always the urging to pass the pint around .... to stand someone else a round . . . before one knew il, the pint was gone .... so quickly! .…

And then, one by one: the wagon. The harness. Even the horse.

And then the first fight. And then the second fight. And—

“Ah, Sirs, she lurley ha’been seen up and down the river, yes. Tis bad, oh, bad.” It was clear that more than one, as Eszterhazy and his princely friend made their rounds, had anticipated whatever might come by dipping into the vodka already. Not only the buckwheat was suffering, the district itself had begun to suffer. The fishermen no longer set their nets, the fowlers feared to go abroad in the ferns.

“Now, Sir,” said the fellow whom the Bailiff had sent as guide, “it’s just as you follow that bit of path, there, and you come, you are bound to come, as easy as easy, to within sight . . . within sight of. ...”

“Of Lurley Bend?”

The man threw him a reproachful look. Speak not the word, lest it come to pass . . . “Within sight of it,” he said, after a nervous swallow, visible and audible. And asked, stiffly, “Will Your Honor be wanting to come back before noon-tide?—or after? What I means is—” What he meant, clearly, was that he had no intention of accompanying Eszterhazy. But was, however, willing to return for him—here. Thus far would he go, and no farther. Eszterhazy shrugged. “Tether the horse, then," he said. “I daresay I can find my way back.” And, as the man hesitated, painfully, he added, “And if I can’t, no doubt the horse knows the way.”

How eagerly the man was about to grasp at this easy way out of it! But then, then something which may have been duty, or may have been a fear of something other than the lurley—the prince, perhaps—or may have been honest concern, came over the man’s face. It was, God knows (Eszterhazy thought), an honest enough face. The man shook his head. “I shall meet Your Honor here,” he said. ‘‘At when the shadows are like so,” he drew in the soft dirt with his stick. About three hours after noon hour, Eszterhazy calculated. ‘‘Surely Your Honor will be here then?” It was less a question than a plea. And then he stayed and watched as his master’s guest walked off down the path.

The day was warm, and growing warmer, but here all was cool. Ahead, the trees thinned out. The path was already thinning out, itself. And then the path came to a hollow, and that was the end of the path. It was less a pool than an eddy, less an eddy than a backwater. Flocculent bits of decayed leaves and such floated, dotting the surface and subsurface of the dark water. Ahead, some good way ahead, there was the shine of the unobstructed sun upon the water. The river, then.

Lurley’s Bend, then.

He sat down and took out his binoculars. And he waited.

The quality of the light, the quantity of the light, was never the same two seconds in a row. The trees and the bushes wavered in the slow, soft wind; and the light, filtering between and amongst them, wavered with them. Sometimes the air was bright, then it went into flux and turned green. Now one corner was yellow from the sun, and now another. In a way, it was like being under water. And he fell into a sort of revery, in which he was, in deed and fact, underneath the waters. He rose and fell with the waves. And then, from somewhere in the dim and aqueous distances, came the daughter of the wave, the child of the unda, of the undulating wave, there came the undine herself. And she—

He had the glasses to his eyes before he realized what he was doing.

The movement was too abrupt. Perhaps the glasses flashed. Far way as the woman was, still, she had noticed. Something, at least, she must have noticed. As swiftly as she had come out of the waters, even more swiftly did she return to them.

But the glimpse, brief as it had been, had been enough.

There were two or three with their heads together, at the curve of the road. That is, one man, one woman, and one child, straining on her toes. They drew apart as the horse ambled up. One of them was his guide. His face went almost weak and loose with the relief on seeing Eszterhazy. “Ah, thank God, Your Honor, well, the horse, and now, although tis nowhere near time," he babbled.

“Well enough, Augsto,” said Eszterhazy. “Look here.” They looked. “The fact is,” he began. "A touch of the sun, you see. Only a touch. No more, but my skin, well, I am a city fellow. I am aliaid I don’t tan, I may burn. I was wondering. A salve? An ointment? Is a shop around, where such things are sold? An apothecary?” They shook their heads, Noo. . . . Nothing like that. . . . Not round here. . . And it was the woman’s face which first lighted with a sudden thought. As he had known it would.

“Ah, Sir! Ah— The midwife!”

“To be sure, Mamma, the midwife!” the girl echoed. And even Augsto had understood, and, happy that all was well and that the new matter was merely something which could be settled by the administrations of one well- known and familiar, added his own exclamations of, “The midwife, to be sure, Your Honor, the midwife! She does make all salves and such, as well as her tending to the women in their time! And il your Honor will be so kind as to allow. I’ll—”

But His Honor declined to be so kind as to allow it. He insisted on being given directions. And, indeed, it was not very far. The woman was tending to her sunflowers, already beginning to droop their heads, so heavy with seed; she was barefoot and had her outer skirt tucked up, showing a perfectly respectable profusion of petticoats. She looked up, bobbed him a courtsey, and waited for him to dismount and enter the yard. A woman with a seamed face, and pale blue eyes. She waited for him to speak.

“I am His Highness’s guest,” he said. She gave a nod of knowing much—and, indeed, he wondered how much she might really know. He repeated his story, she looked at him, somewhat doubtfully. Then, “If you will step inside, Sir,” she said.

The house was as neat as anyone had any right to expect, and smelled of herbs and of flowers and of something cooking on the stove. . .a chicken in paprika sauce, probably. “Well, Sir,” she said, still looking at him with the same doubtful expression, “The best thing for sunburn, you know, is simply oil and vinegar, mixed.”

“I don’t wish to smell like a salad,” he said, entirely honestly.

She gave a sudden snort of laughter. Obviously she was in no great awe of him. This might be all to the good. On the other hand—

“Perhaps you have a salve,” he suggested.

She nodded, slowly. “I have a number. I suppose the best thing might be the zinc oxide, although—”

Despite himself, he was star- tied, he had expected, perhaps, something along the lines of, say, swallow’s fat, mixed with the juice of cornflowers plucked in the light (or the dark) of the moon.

“Zinc oxide! What do you know about zinc oxide?”

Th e look she gave him was heavy with reproof. "I have the diploma of the Provincial School for Midwifery and Nursing, Sir. The late Prince Von Vlox sent me there, he paid my expenses, so that his people should have good care. I know a good deal about zinc oxide, Sir: and a great deal more, besides. ...”

At once he said, "Then you know who or what was born in these parts about fifteen or sixteen years ago, and is now frightening the present Prince Von Vlox’s people into imbecility—don’t you think it is time for you to come out in the open with it?”

She threw back her head. If he had expected her—and, half, he had—to break into tears, to sigh or sob or cross herself, well, he was mistaken, to that extent. The pale blue eyes were quite steady. “So, it is her, then,” she said, calmly. “I half-thought it might be. I have been thinking. Thinking. Even just now, as you came up, I was thinking. But no clear answer came to me. —But, Sir, have some mercy on her: it is no matter of ’what,’ it is a matter of a human child, begotten in secret, to be sure, and bom in even more secrecy ... a child sadly afflicted . . . but a child, a human child all the same. . .’’

"Forgive me that lapse,” he said. “Of course you are entirely right. Go on, then. Go on.”

Less may be hidden from the midwife than from most, but it can happen, and not seldom does it happen, that even from the widwife a thing may be hidden until the last moment. “I did not want you to see me,” the woman had said, tight-lipped, sweat already beginning to break out upon her face. And then the first cry broke. And then the waters broke. And then all such thoughts as secrecy .fell into the shadows where all but the essentials fall. And the woman herself began to writhe, as though she herself were a broken thing.

“But for all of that, it was a normal labor,” the midwife said. "The labor was normal. ...”

And Eszterhazy said, “The child, though. ...”

“The flesh of the lower limbs was fused. In appearance, there was but one lower limb. Ah, God, how she did indeed break down at that. I told her, ‘Helena, this may very probably be cured through surgery,’ but she knew nothing of such things. And she was in agony for her child and said it was a punishment for sin, for her sin in getting the child—”

He said, “Ah. ...”

The woman shrugged. “I do not sit in judgment. I do not make reports. I did not even tell the priest, he is a monk, if he had been a married priest, well In fact, I told no one. Until now.” He tried to imagine what it must have been like, trying to keep such a secret for such a length of time— Not the midwife: ihe mother. “Surely the child’s mother must have guessed, lltough,” he said. “How could she have escaped hearing? How far into the woods do they live, that tlie mother hasn’t heard these stories, these few past months?” Said the midwife: “That is it, you see. She died, the mother, I mean, Helena, 1 mean. She died only a few past months ago.”

It took a few seconds for the meaning of it all to be clear to Fszterhazy. Then he said, softly, "Oh, my God. ...”

To have lived a life, even a life of only fifteen or sixteen years, a life of concealment, even if not complete concealment, to have spent those years pretending to be a cripple in a chair. . . .a chair from which one never moved during daylight hours. . .clad in a dress so long that no one would see ... or guess ... or even suspect. ... A life largely confined to oneself and one’s mother: and then, of a sudden stroke: half the world gone out. After a life of being warned, and warned, and warned, “No one must know. . . No one must ever know-”

"Well, the rest can wait,” he said. “We must find that child. And find her soon. —What is her name?”

The midwife said, “The same as mine. Maria Attanasia. I baptized her. Yes. Find her.” She thought a moment, then nodded. “A boat, to begin with.”

It was not as hard as one might have thought, nor did it take very long, either. He had one more question, and asked it as they went towards the boat-mooring. “As to the child’s father. ...” He paused. Maria the midwife stopped, swung about. Again the pale blue eyes gazed at him.

“You do not know, then,” she said. “I never knew if Helena ever told him. Evidently she did not. —This, too, must wait.”

She would not let him in the boat. The child, she said, must not be frightened further. She had food with her, and drink, and she had clothing, too. But most of all, he thought, as he saw her get calmly into the flat-bottomed boat and take the oars in her own deft hands, most of all she had her own calm heart and her own unfearing soul.

“At FIRST, she said,” Maria the midwife told him later, “she had intended to drown herself. She took off her dress, there, where she had crawled up on the bank, and she threw herself in. But by the sure mercy of God, she did not sink, she must have floated, I think, for at least as long as it took her to discover that she could swim. I have known that to happen with children, sometimes the older boys will throw a young one in, and the scream and kick and before they quite know it: there they are, swimming.” This newfound way of motion, perhaps even more than the shock of the water, brought her to another way of thinking. And the young woman did not think again of dying. What had hindered her upon the land was no hindrance in the water. She was formed after the manner of a seal, and in that manner she found her way with ever-increasing confidence upon the river. She ate the mussels and left the shells, had it been only coincidence that the secluded cove was named Lurley’s Bend? She had not known it. And there were berries, windfallen fruit, and then, for a while, at least, the milk which the River Tartar lad had so innocently and so honestly left “for pay for shell.”

But someone had to be told, of course. And Eszterhazy told the natural person to tell.

"Helena?” said Prince Roldrando Von Vlox. “Helena— Oh, God. I do remember now. I wondered what had happened. For a while. And then I forgot. Helena. ...”

He took the rest of it very well indeed. “After all,” he said, “it is in the blood. She is descended from King Baldwin and his undine wife on the one line, and on the other we are out of the body of Charlemagne himself, the great- grandson of the Webfooted Queen. Yes, yes,” he said—almost to himself, almost, one might have thought, almost proudly, “the blood will tell. ...” After a while he agreed that the younger Maria should go back to Bella and be examined by the Medical Faculty. “If she wishes to try what they can do, she is free to do so. And if not, not. She will lack for nothing which I can provide, of course.”

The story which soon spread all around the fens and farmlands was that the Lord Prince’s friend had caught the lurley-girl and had taken her up to Bella to show her to the Emperor, whom God preserve for many years. . . For a moment, as the news spread, each one who heard it reflected what a fine thing it was to be the tenant of a prince whose friend could capture a lurley and take her up to the capital city and show her to the Emperor.

And then, without exception, after a moment of such reflection, the same thought would occur to each and every of them. “Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph!” they cried. “The buckwheat!”

Fortunately, the days were long, the weather stayed clear, they toiled like serfs. . . . but they saved the crop.