In The Wrong Paradise, And Other Stories - free ebook by Andrew Lang

In the Wrong Paradise and Other Stories by Andrew Lang

Contents: The End of Phæacia In the Wrong Paradise A Cheap Nigger The Romance of the First Radical A Duchess’s Secret The House of Strange Stories In Castle Perilous The Great Gladstone Myth My Friend the Beach-Comber...

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DEDICATION.

DEAR RIDER HAGGARD, I have asked you to let me put your name here, that I might have the opportunity of saying how much pleasure I owe to your romances. They make one a boy again while one is reading them; and the student of “The Witch’s Head” and of “King Solomon’s Mines” is as young, in heart, as when he hunted long ago with Chingachgook and Uncas. You, who know the noble barbarian in his African retreats, appear to retain more than most men of his fresh natural imagination. We are all sava

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PREFACE.

The writer of these apologues hopes that the Rev. Mr. Gowles will not be regarded as his idea of a typical missionary. The countrymen of Codrington and Callaway, of Patteson and Livingstone, know better what missionaries may be, and often are. But the wrong sort as well as the right sort exists everywhere, and Mr. Gowles is not a very gross caricature of the ignorant teacher of heathendom. I am convinced that he would have seen nothing but a set of darkened savages in the ancient Greeks. The

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I. INTRODUCTORY. {1}

The Rev. Thomas Gowles, well known in Colonial circles where the Truth is valued, as “the Boanerges of the Pacific,” departed this life at Hackney Wick, on the 6th of March, 1885. The Laodiceans in our midst have ventured to affirm that the world at large has been a more restful place since Mr. Gowles was taken from his corner of the vineyard. The Boanerges of the Pacific was, indeed, one of those rarely-gifted souls, souls like a Luther or a Knox, who can tolerate no contradiction, and will p

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II. NARRATIVE OF MR. GOWLES. {6}

“I must now, though in sore straits for writing materials, and having entirely lost count of time, post up my diary, or rather commence my narrative. So far as I can learn from the jargon of the strange and lost people among whom Providence has cast me, this is, in their speech, the last of the month, Thargeelyun , as near as I can imitate the sound in English. Being in doubt as to the true time, I am resolved to regard to-morrow, and every seventh day in succession, as the Sabbath. The very

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III. THE PROPHECY.

The priest and the man with the gold circlet, whom I took to be a chief, now met, and, fixing their eyes on me, held a conversation of which, naturally, I understood nothing. I maintained an unmoved demeanour, and, by way of showing my indifference, and also of impressing the natives with the superiority of our civilization, I took out and wound up my watch, which, I was glad to find, had not been utterly ruined by the salt water. Meanwhile the priest was fumbling in his casket, whence he prod

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IV. AT THE CHIEF’S HOUSE.

The chief leading the way, I followed through the open entrance of the courtyard. The yard was very spacious, and under the dark shade of the trees I could see a light here and there in the windows of small huts along the walls, where, as I found later, the slaves and the young men of the family slept. In the middle of the space there was another altar, I am sorry to say; indeed, there were altars everywhere. I never heard of a people so religious, in their own darkened way, as these islander

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V. A STRANGER ARRIVES.

When I wakened next morning, wonderfully refreshed by sleep and the purity of the air, I had some difficulty in remembering where I was and how I came there in such a peculiar costume. But the voices of the servants in the house, and the general stir of people going to and fro, convinced me that I had better be up and ready to put my sickle into this harvest of heathen darkness. Little did I think how soon the heathen darkness would be trying to put the sickle into me! I made my way with litt

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VI. A BACKSLIDER. A WARNING.

We had not remained long by ourselves in the square, when the most extraordinary procession which I had ever beheld began to climb into the open space from the town beneath. I do not know if I have made it sufficiently clear that the square, on the crest of the isolated hill above the sea, was occupied only by public buildings, such as the temple, the house of the chief, and a large edifice used as a kind of town hall, so to speak. The natives in general lived in much smaller houses, many of t

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VII. FLIGHT.

“Flog us first, and roast us afterwards.” I repeated mechanically the words of William Bludger. “Why, you must be mad; they are more likely to fall down and worship us,— me at any rate.” “No, Capt’n,” replied William; “that’s your mistake. They say we’re both Catharmata ; that’s what they call us; and you’re no better than me.” “And what are Catharmata ?” I inquired, remembering that this word, or something like it, had been constantly used by the natives in my hearing. “Well, Capt’n, it mean

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VIII. SAVED!

Why should I linger over the sufferings of the miserable week that followed our capture? Hauled back to my former home, I was again made the object of the mocking reverence of my captors. Ah, how often, in my reckless youth, have my serious aunts warned me that I “would be a goat at the last”! Too true, too true; now I was to be a scapegoat, to be driven forth, as these ignorant and strangely perverted people believed, with the sins of the community on my head, those sins which would, accordi

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IN THE WRONG PARADISE AN OCCIDENTAL APOLOGUE.

In the drawing-room, or, as it is more correctly called, the “dormitory,” of my club, I had been reading a volume named “Sur l’Humanité Posthume,” by M. D’Assier, a French follower of Comte. The mixture of positivism and ghost-stories highly diverted me. Moved by the sagacity and pertinence of M. D’Assier’s arguments for a limited and fortuitous immortality, I fell into such an uncontrollable fit of laughter as caused, I could see, first annoyance and then anxiety in those members of my club w

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I.

“Have you seen the Clayville Dime ?” Moore chucked me a very shabby little sheet of printed matter. It fluttered feebly in the warm air, and finally dropped on my recumbent frame. I was lolling in a hammock in the shade of the verandah. I did not feel much inclined for study, but I picked up the Clayville Dime and lazily glanced at that periodical, while Moore relapsed into the pages of Ixtlilxochitl. He was a literary character for a planter, had been educated at Oxford (where I made his acq

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II.

As we rode slowly homeward, behind the trap which conveyed the dear-bought slave, Moore was extremely moody and disinclined for conversation. “Is your purchase not rather an expensive one?” I ventured to ask, to which Moore replied shortly— “No; think he is perhaps the cheapest nigger that was ever bought.” To put any more questions would have been impertinent, and I possessed my curiosity in silence till we reached the plantation. Here Moore’s conduct became decidedly eccentric. He had the bla

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III.

The conclusion of my story shall be very short. What was the connection between Gumbo and the spoils of the Sachem’s Mound, and how did the treasures of the Aztec Temple of the Sun come to be concealed in the burial place of the Red Man? All this Moore explained to me the day after we secured the treasures. “My father,” said Moore, “was, as you know, a great antiquarian, and a great collector of Mexican and native relics. He had given almost as much time as Brasseur de Bourbourg to Mexican hi

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A PREHISTORIC APOLOGUE.

“Titius. Le premier qui supprime un abus, comme on dit, est toujours victime du service qu’il rend. Un Homme du Peuple. C’est de sa faute! Pourquoi se mêlé t’il de ce qui ne le regarde pas.”—Le Prêtre de Nemi. The Devil, according to Dr. Johnson and other authorities, was the first Whig. History tells us less about the first Radical—the first man who rebelled against the despotism of unintelligible customs, who asserted the rights of the individual against the claims of the tribal conscience

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THE YOUTH OF WHY-WHY.

Why-Why, as our hero was commonly called in the tribe, was born, long before Romulus built his wall, in a cave which may still be observed in the neighbourhood of Mentone. On the warm shores of the Mediterranean, protected from winds by a wall of rock, the group of which Why-Why was the offspring had attained conditions of comparative comfort. The remains of their dinners, many feet deep, still constitute the flooring of the cave, and the tourist, as he pokes the soil with the point of his umb

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THE MANHOOD OF WHY-WHY.

As time went on our hero developed into one of the most admired braves of his community. No one was more successful in battle, and it became almost a proverb that when Why-Why went on the war-path there was certain to be meat enough and to spare, even for the women. Why-Why, though a Radical, was so far from perfect that he invariably complied with the usages of his time when they seemed rational and useful. If a little tattooing on the arm would have saved men from a horrible disease, he wou

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THE LOVES OF VERVA AND WHY-WHY.

No man, however intrepid, can offend with impunity the most sacred laws of society. Why-Why proved no exception to this rule. His decline and fall date, we may almost say, from the hour when he bought a fair-haired, blue-eyed female child from a member of a tribe that had wandered out of the far north. The tribe were about to cook poor little Verva because her mother was dead, and she seemed a bouche inutile . For the price of a pair of shell fish-hooks, a bone dagger, and a bundle of grass-

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LA MORT WHY-WHY.

Two years had passed like a dream in the pleasant valley which, in far later ages, the Romans called Vallis Aurea, and which we call Vallauris. Here, at a distance of some thirty miles from the cave and the tribe, dwelt in fancied concealment Why-Why and Verva. The clear stream was warbling at their feet, in the bright blue weather of spring; the scent of the may blossoms was poured abroad, and, lying in the hollow of Why-Why’s shield, a pretty little baby with Why-Why’s dark eyes and Verva’s

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A DUCHESS’S SECRET.

When I was poor, and honest, and a novelist, I little thought that I should ever be rich, and something not very unlike a Duke; and, as to honesty, but an indifferent character. I have had greatness thrust on me. I am, like Simpcox in the dramatis personæ of “Henry IV.,” “an impostor;” and yet I scarcely know how I could have escaped this deplorable (though lucrative) position. “Love is a great master,” says the “Mort d’Arthur,” and I perhaps may claim sympathy and pity as a victim of love.

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THE HOUSE OF STRANGE STORIES.

The House of Strange Stories, as I prefer to call it (though it is not known by that name in the county), seems the very place for a ghost. Yet, though so many peoples have dwelt upon its site and in its chambers, though the ancient Elizabethan oak, and all the queer tables and chairs that a dozen generations have bequeathed, might well be tenanted by ancestral spirits, and disturbed by rappings, it is a curious fact that there is not a ghost in the House of Strange Stories. On my earliest vis

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IN CASTLE PERILOUS.

“What we suffer from most,” said the spectre, when I had partly recovered from my fright, “is a kind of aphasia .” The spectre was sitting on the armchair beside my bed in the haunted room of Castle Perilous. “I don’t know,” said I, as distinctly as the chattering of my teeth would permit, “that I quite follow you. Would you mind—excuse me—handing me that flask which lies on the table near you. . . . Thanks.” The spectre, without stirring, so arranged the a priori sensuous schemata of time and

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THE GREAT GLADSTONE MYTH. {283}

In the post-Christian myths of the Teutonic race settled in England, no figure appears more frequently and more mysteriously than that of Gladstone or Mista Gladstone. To unravel the true germinal conception of Gladstone, and to assign to all the later accretions of myth their provenance and epoch, are the problems attempted in this chapter. It is almost needless (when we consider the perversity of men and the lasting nature of prejudice) to remark that some still see in Gladstone a shadowy hi

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MY FRIEND THE BEACH-COMBER.

“Been in some near things in the islands?” said my friend the beach-comber; “I fancy I have .” The beach-comber then produced a piece of luggage like a small Gladstone bag, which he habitually carried, and thence he extracted a cigar about the size of the butt of a light trout-rod. He took a vesuvian out of a curious brown hollowed nut-shell, mounted in gold (the beach-comber, like Mycenæ in Homer, was polychrysos , rich in gold in all his equipments), and occupied himself with the task of sett

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