Complete Works of Bram Stoker (344 page)

But it is not merely the architect work of the garden that is so beautiful, nor is the assembling there of the manifold wealth of floral beauty  —  there is the beauty that Nature creates by the hand of her servant, Time.  You see, Aunt Janet, how the beautiful garden inspires a danger-hardened old tramp like me to high-grade sentiments of poetic fancy!  Not only have limestone and sandstone, and even marble, grown green in time, but even the shrubs planted and then neglected have developed new kinds of beauty of their own.  In some far-distant time some master-gardener of the Vissarions has tried to realise an idea  —  that of tiny plants that would grow just a little higher than the flowers, so that the effect of an uneven floral surface would be achieved without any hiding of anything in the garden seen from anywhere.  This is only my reading of what has been from the effect of what is!  In the long period of neglect the shrubs have outlived the flowers.  Nature has been doing her own work all the time in enforcing the survival of the fittest.  The shrubs have grown and grown, and have overtopped flower and weed, according to their inherent varieties of stature; to the effect that now you see irregularly scattered through the garden quite a number  —  for it is a big place  —  of vegetable products which from a landscape standpoint have something of the general effect of statues without the cramping feeling of detail.  Whoever it was that laid out that part of the garden or made the choice of items, must have taken pains to get strange specimens, for all those taller shrubs are in special colours, mostly yellow or white  —  white cypress, white holly, yellow yew, grey-golden box, silver juniper, variegated maple, spiraea, and numbers of dwarf shrubs whose names I don’t know.  I only know that when the moon shines  —  and this, my dear Aunt Janet, is the very land of moonlight itself!  —  they all look ghastly pale.  The effect is weird to the last degree, and I am sure that you will enjoy it.  For myself, as you know, uncanny things hold no fear.  I suppose it is that I have been up against so many different kinds of fears, or, rather, of things which for most people have terrors of their own, that I have come to have a contempt  —  not an active contempt, you know, but a tolerative contempt  —  for the whole family of them.  And you, too, will enjoy yourself here famously, I know.  You’ll have to collect all the stories of such matters in our new world and make a new book of facts for the Psychical Research Society.  It will be nice to see your own name on a title-page, won’t it, Aunt Janet?

From Rupert Sent Leger
,
Vissarion
,
to Janet MacKelpie
,
Croom
.

January
30, 1907.

My dear Aunt Janet,

I stopped writing last night  —  do you know why?  Because I wanted to write more!  This sounds a paradox, but it is true.  The fact is that, as I go on telling you of this delightful place, I keep finding out new beauties myself.  Broadly speaking, it
is all
beautiful.  In the long view or the little view  —  as the telescope or the microscope directs  —  it is all the same.  Your eye can turn on nothing that does not entrance you.  I was yesterday roaming about the upper part of time Castle, and came across some delightful nooks, which at once I became fond of, and already like them as if I had known them all my life.  I felt at first a sense of greediness when I had appropriated to myself several rooms in different places  —  I who have never in my life had more than one room which I could call my own  —  and that only for a time!  But when I slept on it the feeling changed, and its aspect is now not half bad.  It is now under another classification  —  under a much more important label  — 
proprietorship
.  If I were writing philosophy, I should here put in a cynical remark:

“Selfishness is an appanage of poverty.  It might appear in the stud-book as by ‘Morals’ out of ‘Wants.’”

I have now three bedrooms arranged as my own particular dens.  One of the other two was also a choice of Uncle Roger’s.  It is at the top of one of the towers to the extreme east, and from it I can catch the first ray of light over the mountains.  I slept in it last night, and when I woke, as in my travelling I was accustomed to do, at dawn, I saw from my bed through an open window  —  a small window, for it is in a fortress tower  —  the whole great expanse to the east.  Not far off, and springing from the summit of a great ruin, where long ago a seed had fallen, rose a great silver-birch, and the half-transparent, drooping branches and hanging clusters of leaf broke the outline of the grey hills beyond, for the hills were, for a wonder, grey instead of blue.  There was a mackerel sky, with the clouds dropping on the mountain-tops till you could hardly say which was which.  It was a mackerel sky of a very bold and extraordinary kind  —  not a dish of mackerel, but a world of mackerel!  The mountains are certainly most lovely.  In this clear air they usually seem close at hand.  It was only this morning, with the faint glimpse of the dawn whilst the night clouds were still unpierced by the sunlight, that I seemed to realise their greatness.  I have seen the same enlightening effect of aerial perspective a few times before  —  in Colorado, in Upper India, in Thibet, and in the uplands amongst the Andes.

There is certainly something in looking at things from above which tends to raise one’s own self-esteem.  From the height, inequalities simply disappear.  This I have often felt on a big scale when ballooning, or, better still, from an aeroplane.  Even here from the tower the outlook is somehow quite different from below.  One realises the place and all around it, not in detail, but as a whole.  I shall certainly sleep up here occasionally, when you have come and we have settled down to our life as it is to be.  I shall live in my own room downstairs, where I can have the intimacy of the garden.  But I shall appreciate it all the more from now and again losing the sense of intimacy for a while, and surveying it without the sense of one’s own self-importance.

I hope you have started on that matter of the servants.  For myself, I don’t care a button whether or not there are any servants at all; but I know well that you won’t come till you have made your arrangements regarding them!  Another thing, Aunt Janet.  You must not be killed with work here, and it is all so vast . . . Why can’t you get some sort of secretary who will write your letters and do all that sort of thing for you?  I know you won’t have a man secretary; but there are lots of women now who can write shorthand and typewrite.  You could doubtless get one in the clan  —  someone with a desire to better herself.  I know you would make her happy here.  If she is not too young, all the better; she will have learned to hold her tongue and mind her own business, and not be too inquisitive.  That would be a nuisance when we are finding our way about in a new country and trying to reconcile all sorts of opposites in a whole new country with new people, whom at first we shan’t understand, and who certainly won’t understand us; where every man carries a gun with as little thought of it as he has of buttons!  Good-bye for a while.

Your loving
Rupert.

From Rupert Sent Leger
,
Vissarion
,
to Janet MacKelpie
,
Croom
.

February
3, 1907.

I am back in my own room again.  Already it seems to me that to get here again is like coming home.  I have been going about for the last few days amongst the mountaineers and trying to make their acquaintance.  It is a tough job; and I can see that there will be nothing but to stick to it.  They are in reality the most primitive people I ever met  —  the most fixed to their own ideas, which belong to centuries back.  I can understand now what people were like in England  —  not in Queen Elizabeth’s time, for that was civilized time, but in the time of Coeur-de-Lion, or even earlier  —  and all the time with the most absolute mastery of weapons of precision.  Every man carries a rifle  —  and knows how to use it, too.  I do believe they would rather go without their clothes than their guns if they had to choose between them.  They also carry a handjar, which used to be their national weapon.  It is a sort of heavy, straight cutlass, and they are so expert with it as well as so strong that it is as facile in the hands of a Blue Mountaineer as is a foil in the hands of a Persian
maître d’armes
.  They are so proud and reserved that they make one feel quite small, and an “outsider” as well.  I can see quite well that they rather resent my being here at all.  It is not personal, for when alone with me they are genial, almost brotherly; but the moment a few of them get together they are like a sort of jury, with me as the criminal before them.  It is an odd situation, and quite new to me.  I am pretty well accustomed to all sorts of people, from cannibals to Mahatmas, but I’m blessed if I ever struck such a type as this  —  so proud, so haughty, so reserved, so distant, so absolutely fearless, so honourable, so hospitable.  Uncle Roger’s head was level when he chose them out as a people to live amongst.  Do you know, Aunt Janet, I can’t help feeling that they are very much like your own Highlanders  —  only more so.  I’m sure of one thing: that in the end we shall get on capitally together.  But it will be a slow job, and will need a lot of patience.  I have a feeling in my bones that when they know me better they will be very loyal and very true; and I am not a hair’s-breadth afraid of them or anything they shall or might do.  That is, of course, if I live long enough for them to have time to know me.  Anything may happen with such an indomitable, proud people to whom pride is more than victuals.  After all, it only needs one man out of a crowd to have a wrong idea or to make a mistake as to one’s motive  —  and there you are.  But it will be all right that way, I am sure.  I am come here to stay, as Uncle Roger wished.  And stay I shall even if it has to be in a little bed of my own beyond the garden  —  seven feet odd long, and not too narrow  —  or else a stone-box of equal proportions in the vaults of St. Sava’s Church across the Creek  —  the old burial-place of the Vissarions and other noble people for a good many centuries back . . .

I have been reading over this letter, dear Aunt Janet, and I am afraid the record is rather an alarming one.  But don’t you go building up superstitious horrors or fears on it.  Honestly, I am only joking about death  —  a thing to which I have been rather prone for a good many years back.  Not in very good taste, I suppose, but certainly very useful when the old man with the black wings goes flying about you day and night in strange places, sometimes visible and at others invisible.  But you can always hear wings, especially in the dark, when you cannot see them. 
You
know that, Aunt Janet, who come of a race of warriors, and who have special sight behind or through the black curtain.

Honestly, I am in no whit afraid of the Blue Mountaineers, nor have I a doubt of them.  I love them already for their splendid qualities, and I am prepared to love them for themselves.  I feel, too, that they will love me (and incidentally they are sure to love you).  I have a sort of undercurrent of thought that there is something in their minds concerning me  —  something not painful, but disturbing; something that has a base in the past; something that has hope in it and possible pride, and not a little respect.  As yet they can have had no opportunity of forming such impression from seeing me or from any thing I have done.  Of course, it may be that, although they are fine, tall, stalwart men, I am still a head and shoulders over the tallest of them that I have yet seen.  I catch their eyes looking up at me as though they were measuring me, even when they are keeping away from me, or, rather, keeping me from them at arm’s length.  I suppose I shall understand what it all means some day.  In the meantime there is nothing to do but to go on my own way  —  which is Uncle Roger’s  —  and wait and be patient and just.  I have learned the value of that, any way, in my life amongst strange peoples.  Good-night.

Your loving
Rupert.

From Rupert Sent Leger
,
Vissarion
,
to Janet MacKelpie
,
Croom
.

February
24, 1907.

My dear Aunt Janet,

I am more than rejoiced to hear that you are coming here so soon.  This isolation is, I think, getting on my nerves.  I thought for a while last night that I was getting on, but the reaction came all too soon.  I was in my room in the east turret, the room on the
corbeille
, and saw here and there men passing silently and swiftly between the trees as though in secret.  By-and-by I located their meeting-place, which was in a hollow in the midst of the wood just outside the “natural” garden, as the map or plan of the castle calls it.  I stalked that place for all I was worth, and suddenly walked straight into the midst of them.  There were perhaps two or three hundred gathered, about the very finest lot of men I ever saw in my life.  It was in its way quite an experience, and one not likely to be repeated, for, as I told you, in this country every man carries a rifle, and knows how to use it.  I do not think I have seen a single man (or married man either) without his rifle since I came here.  I wonder if they take them with them to bed!  Well, the instant after I stood amongst them every rifle in the place was aimed straight at me.  Don’t be alarmed, Aunt Janet; they did not fire at me.  If they had I should not be writing to you now.  I should be in that little bit of real estate or the stone box, and about as full of lead as I could hold.  Ordinarily, I take it, they would have fired on the instant; that is the etiquette here.  But this time they  —  all separately but all together  —  made a new rule.  No one said a word or, so far as I could see, made a movement.  Here came in my own experience.  I had been more than once in a tight place of something of the same kind, so I simply behaved in the most natural way I could.  I felt conscious  —  it was all in a flash, remember  —  that if I showed fear or cause for fear, or even acknowledged danger by so much as even holding up my hands, I should have drawn all the fire.  They all remained stock-still, as though they had been turned into stone, for several seconds.  Then a queer kind of look flashed round them like wind over corn  —  something like the surprise one shows unconsciously on waking in a strange place.  A second after they each dropped the rifle to the hollow of his arm and stood ready for anything.  It was all as regular and quick and simultaneous as a salute at St. James’s Palace.