Complete Works of Bram Stoker (13 page)
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Authors: Bram Stoker
‘Ay, fine talk that. But I’ve heard about it already. Grinnell told me all about it.’
‘Grinnell told you! Oh, Jerry, take care what that man tells you of me.’
‘What do you mean?’
The question was asked in a tone of bitter suspicion.
‘I mean that that wicked, wicked man hates me, and would do me harm if he could.’
‘What do you mean I say? Why does he hate you? Why should he hate you?’
Jerry was now so violent that Katey was afraid to tell him lest he should do something desperate. Jerry grew more and more violent, and finally struck her severely in the bosom with his clenched fist, and ran out swearing horribly.
When he came home that night Katey searched in his pocket and found the pawn ticket for his tools. The sum was only for a few shillings, and she resolved that if she possibly could she would redeem them, and then go herself and look for some work for him.
Accordingly, next day she went out and pledged the only thing left to her worth pledging - her wedding ring. It cost her many an effort, and many a bitter tear, but for too long bitterness had been her fortune to be deterred from action by it now. She got back the tool basket, and left it on the table where Jerry would see it when he returned.
So she waited and waited all though the long day.
Jerry was drinking at Grinnell’s, and was in such a state of despondency that his liquor seemed to have hardly any effect on him. Grinnell supplied him freely, for he had a design of vengeance against Katey on hands, and desired to work Jerry, whom he had fixed on as his tool, to the required pitch. Mons was present, too, and Sebright, and Popham, and Dirty Dick, who had been primed up to do Grinnell’s bidding.
By and by Jerry began to be excited, and grew quarrelsome. Dirty Dick, at a sign from Grinnell, put himself in his way, and an altercation arose. Jerry had a spite against the latter as being the means of his being put in gaol for the first time, and commenced hostilities at once.
‘Get out, you dog. You want to fight, I suppose. Best mind out or I’ll give you what I gave you before.’
‘You had better. Who laughed at the wrong side of his mouth after that? Who got his hair cut - eh? Look, boys, it hasn’t grown since.’
Jerry began to get savage.
‘Here, get out, I’ve murder in me.’
Grinnell, as he heard the latter remark, smiled softly to himself — a smile that boded no good to poor Katey. Dirty Dick ran behind Popham and peered over his shoulder in mock fear.
‘Don’t stir, man, don’t you see I’m goin’ to be murdered by the long-haired man?’
Jerry was getting furious, but they still continued to irritate him. Dirty Dick said again -
‘How is your wife, Irishman? Have you been beating her lately, or has she been run in for being drunk?’
This was too much for Jerry. By a sudden rush he caught the man by the throat, and before he could be torn away from him had inflicted some desperate blows, one of which laid his cheek open.
Then Dick lost his temper in turn and spoke out again, this time without heeding what he said, for he merely meant to wound.
‘Better go home and look after your wife.’
‘What does he mean?’ asked Jerry.
‘I mean what I mean. Ask Grinnell?’
The individual named seemed to grow paler. He saw that his tool was reckless and feared for himself — both personally from Jerry’s violence, should he find out his treachery, and in his character if such things should be known by the frequenters of his house. He came from behind the bar and laid his hand on Dick’s shoulder.
Dirty Dick shook him off. ‘Let me alone,’ he said.
Grinnell whispered to him -
‘Hush, man, do you know what you are saying? Best keep your temper or I’ll put my thumb on you.’
‘Damn your thumb. Don’t threaten me. I’m reckless now.’
Grinnell saw that another row was the only way to check his tongue, and struck him. The two men were at once seized and held, and then Dick gave his tongue full play. He spoke of Katey so foully that the men cried shame on him. He told Jerry how all the neighbours were talking of her and Grinnell. How Grinnell had paid him to get up a fight, so that he might be put in gaol and leave the field clear. He spoke with such an air of truth, and all he said being true, except his foul speeches about Katey, fitted so well into Jerry’s knowledge of things, that he took it all as true. There is no lie so damaging as that which is partly true. The shock of hearing all these things and believing them sobered Jerry, and he grew calm. Seeing him so the men let him go, and having done so did not attempt to lay hands on him, for there was a look in his face so deadly, that they were afraid. He said no word; he looked at no one but Grinnell, and at him only one glance, which said, ‘Wait’ so plainly, that Grinnell shuddered. Then he walked out of the room, and there was silence.
Jerry walked home on set purpose, and entered the garret where Katey, wearied out of her long waiting, lay asleep in bed. The first things he saw was the tool basket on the table, beside a bottle and glass. He pulled off his coat and flung it on the table, and hurled the basket on to the floor. Katey woke with the noise, and the children woke also, and sat up with their little eyes fixed with terror. Jerry went to the bedside and caught Katey’s hand. ‘Get up,’ he said. Katey was rising, when he pulled her impatiently out on the floor, bringing down the bed also.
Katey rose and stood before him. She saw that something dreadful was the matter, and thought that he had got into more fresh trouble. She said to him lovingly, ‘Oh, Jerry, if there is trouble, sure I am here to share it with you. Jerry - we will begin fresh to-morrow. Look, dear, I have got back your tools.’
‘How did you get them? Where did the money come from?’
‘Don’t ask me, Jerry.’
‘Where did the money come from - answer me at once, or’ — He spoke so savagely that she grew cold.
‘Jerry, I sold my wedding ring.’
Jerry laughed - the hard, cold laugh of a demon. ‘Time for you to sell it.’
She saw that there was some hidden meaning in his words, and asked him what he meant. ‘I mean that when you have a husband in every man, you need no ring.’
‘For shame, Jerry, for shame. What have I done to deserve all this?’
Jerry grew furious. The big veins stood out on his forehead and his eyes rolled.
‘Done!’ he said. ‘Done! What about Grinnell?’
Then without another word, or if the very idea was too much for him, he stooped and picked up a hammer which had rolled out of the tool-basket.
Katey saw the act and screamed, for she read murder in his eyes. He clutched her by the arm and raised the hammer; she struggled wildly, but he shook her off, and then, with a glare like that of a wild beast, struck her on the temple.
She fell as if struck by lightning.
When he saw her lying on the floor, with the blood streaming round her and forming a pool, the hammer dropped from his hand, and he stood as one struck blind.
So he stood a moment, then knelt beside her and tried to coax her back to life.
‘Katey, Katey, what have I done? Oh, God, what have I done? I have murdered her. Oh? the drink! the drink! Why didn’t I stay at home and this wouldn’t have happened?’
He stopped suddenly, and, rushing over to the tool-basket, took up a chisel, and with one fierce motion drew it across his throat, and fell down beside the body of his wife.
THE SNAKE’S PASS
Stoker’s second novel was originally published in 1890 by Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, Limited of London. A year before the release of
The Snake’s Pass
, Stoker published chapter three “The Gombeen Man” as a short story in
The People
.
The first edition
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I
Between two great mountains of gray and green, as the rock cropped out between the tufts of emerald verdure, the valley, almost as narrow as a gorge, ran due west towards the sea. There was just room for the road-way, half cut in the rock, beside the narrow strip of dark lake of seemingly unfathomable depth that lay far below, between perpendicular walls of frowning rock. As the valley opened, the land dipped steeply, and the lake became a foam- fringed torrent, widening out into pools and miniature lakes as it reached the lower ground. In the wide terrace-like steps of the shelving mountain there were occasional glimpses of civilization emerging from the almost primal desolation which immediately surrounded us — clumps of trees, cottages, and the irregular outlines of stone-walled fields, with black stacks of turf for winter firing piled here and there. Far beyond was the sea — the great Atlantic — with a wildly irregular coast-line studded with a myriad of clustering rocky islands. A sea of deep dark blue, with the distant horizon tinged with a line of faint white light, and here and there, where its margin was visible through the breaks in the rocky coast, fringed with a line of foam as the waves broke on the rocks or swept in great rollers over the level expanse of sands.
The sky was a revelation to me, and seemed almost to obliterate memories of beautiful skies, although I had just come from the south, and had felt the intoxication of the Italian night, where, in the deep blue sky, the nightingale’s note seems to hang as though its sound and the colour were but different expressions of one common feeling. The whole west was a gorgeous mass of violet and sulphur and gold — great masses of storm-cloud piling up and up till the very heavens seemed weighted with a burden too great to bear. Clouds of violet, whose centres were almost black, and whose outer edges were tinged with living gold; great streaks and piled up clouds of palest yellow deepening into saffron and flame-color which seemed to catch the coming sunset and to throw its radiance back to the eastern sky. The view was the most beautiful that I had ever seen; and accustomed as I had been only to the quiet pastoral beauty of a grass country, with occasional visits to my great aunt’s well-wooded estate in the south of England, it was no wonder that it arrested my attention and absorbed my imagination. Even my brief half-a-year’s travel in Europe, now just concluded, had shown me nothing of the same kind.
Earth, sea, and air all evidenced the triumph of Nature, and told of her wild majesty and beauty. The air was still — ominously still. So still was all, that through the silence, that seemed to hedge us in with a sense of oppression, came the booming of the distant sea, as the great Atlantic swell broke in surf on the rocks or stormed the hollow caverns of the shore.
Even Andy, the driver, was for the nonce awed into comparative silence. Hitherto, for nearly forty miles of a drive, he had been giving me his experiences — propounding his views — airing his opinions; in fact, he had been making me acquainted with his store of knowledge touching the whole district and its people — including their names, histories, romances, hopes and fears — all that goes to make up the life and interest of a country-side.
No barber — taking this tradesman to illustrate the popular idea of loquacity in excelsis — is more consistently talkative than an Irish car-driver to whom has been granted the gift of speech. There is absolutely no limit to his capability, for every change of surrounding affords a new theme and brings on the tapis a host of matters requiring to be set forth.
I was rather glad of Andy’s “brilliant flash of silence” just at present, for not only did I wish to drink in and absorb the grand and novel beauty of the scene that opened out before me, but I wanted to understand as fully as I could some deep thought which it awoke within me. It may have been merely the grandeur and beauty of the scene — or perhaps it was the thunder which filled the air that July evening — but I felt exalted in a strange way, and impressed at the same time with a new sense of the reality of things. It almost seemed as if through that opening valley, with the mighty Atlantic beyond and the piling up of the storm-clouds overhead, I passed into a new and more real life. Somehow I had of late seemed to myself to be waking up. My foreign tour had been gradually dissipating my old sleepy ideas, or perhaps overcoming the negative forces that had hitherto dominated my life; and now this glorious burst of wild natural beauty — the majesty of nature at its fullest — seemed to have completed my awakening, and I felt as though I looked for the first time with open eyes on the beauty and reality of the world.
Hitherto my life had been but an inert one, and I was younger in many ways and more deficient in knowledge of the world in all ways than other young men of my own age. I had stepped but lately from boyhood, with all boyhood’s surroundings, into manhood, and as yet I was hardly at ease in my new position.