Nightshade and Damnations (11 page)

We were conducted to this workshop, which was a workshop out of a dream. Upon the bench stood a silent clock upon which stood a bronze Father Time about two feet high, and a dozen other figures about four inches high. There was a king encrusted with jewels and wearing a golden crown; an enameled cardinal in a red robe; a knight in silver armor; a merchant carved out of lapis lazuli; a surgeon with a knife in one hand and a human heart made of a spinel ruby in the other; a nun of silver and ivory; an infanta of ivory and red gold; a painted harlot hung with oddments of jewelry; a peasant, all sinews, in old ivory and bronze; and an aged beggar made of bone and studded with sores which were little rubies. The idea was, at the striking of the hour, Time mowed these figures down, one by one, finishing with the king, who came under the scythe on the last stroke of midnight. It was a beautiful pie
c
e of workmanship, and we approached it with reverence.

Soon the King came in between two attendants. One of these was an old doctor and the other was a sturdy young man with a nondescript face; they supported him under the arms and led him to another red velvet chair. When Dicker and I began to bow the king said: “No, no, no need, no need. Get on with the work.” Then, trying to make an imperious gesture with his hand, he cried out in agony and groaned with terrible oaths and curses. Dicker and I went to work. This Fritz must have been a fool. I will not try your patience with technical details; but he had not seen one dazzlingly simple thing—one steel wire, less than half an inch long, bent at an angle of about sixty-five degrees, upon which the movement of the main figures, and therefore the movement of the whole mechanism, ultimately depended. Wear and tear and tiredness—for even steel gets tired—had reduced this angle by half a degree. I adjusted it in thirty seconds with a pair of pliers, wound and set the clock, and then—swish went the scythe, down went peasant, soldier, priest and king while the clock was still solemnly chiming (it had little golden bells like church bells). His Majesty uttered a cry of delight, a groan of anguish, half a dozen shocking words and a gracious compliment. We explained that it was nothing; that we would make a new angle-pin of the finest tempered steel, and Time would cut down men for another hundred years.

And after that, I can assure you, Dicker and I were established, under King Nicolas III. We could do no wrong. I really believe that even if Dicker and I had committed murder it would somehow have been hushed up and we could have got away with it. Poor Dicker—this went to his head. Once, for example, when the chamberlain at the palace, a terribly proud man with a very hasty temper, told Dicker to remember his place, Dicker threatened to go home. The chamberlain was dismissed with ignominy.

This man, whose name was Tancredy, then conceived a frightful hate for the king, and secretly gave his support to the Liberal-Democrat Party. I dare say you will have read something about the political situation in that country in King Nicolas’s time, especially towards the end of his reign when there was a great deal of discontent. King Nicolas, like his fathers before him, was an absolute monarch. In effect he was the Law.

After his father, King Vindex II, had been assassinated by a woman who threw a seven-pound bomb into his carriage, Nicolas, influenced by a wise old minister, had brought about certain reforms in the country. He had started a system of free education, free medical services, sanitation, the encouragement of the fine arts and of heavy industry, the development of an export trade—all this and much more was associated with Nicolas III. Nevertheless, the ordinary man of the people was subject to restrictions which horrified me. I am Swiss, you see.

There was no real freedom of speech or of the press. The average man had to glance over his shoulder before he felt it was safe to say what he wanted to say. There was frightful corruption in the highest places—especially when the king had grown too old and feeble and sick to care about anything but his seven hundred fantastic clocks. Consequently discontent was driven out of sight as an acorn is driven into the ground by your foot when you tread on it. This acorn, if I may put it that way, sent out all sorts of underground roots and pushed up unforeseen shoots. There were the Anarcho-Liberals, the terrorists of the Brutus party; the Democratic-Socialists, the Independent-Anarchists; the Republicans; the Labor-Royalists; and a dozen others. But the most subtle and formidable force working against the king was that of the Liberal-Democrat party, led by an ex-lawyer named Martin. This was a party to be reckoned with. Its methods were unquestionably constitutional and its policy was not to dethrone the king but to take away his power—which meant that the king would become a mere puppet; a king in name only. The Monarchists, who kept a great deal of personal power mainly because the king was a proper king, hated these Liberal-Democrats; and had indeed, my dear sir, very good reason to hate them. They were afraid of the Liberal-Democrats and of Martin, whose party was growing stronger and stronger. He was suspected of encouraging, and even of financing and inspiring, all kinds of anti-Nicolas propaganda—mysterious little newspapers, scurrilous and filthy books and pamphlets and cartoons printed abroad; riots, acts of terror, and sometimes strikes. But nothing could be proved. Martin was too clever.

It was believed that only the personality of King Nicolas III kept the system in one piece. And poor King Nicolas was senile, paralytic, crippled with arthritis, and not far from death. After he died—and he was expected to die fairly soon—all the quiet, pale things underground would rush out and overwhelm the country.

As long as the old king lived, the Monarchists had something to stand on. You see, nobody was allowed to forget that old King Nicolas had been a much better man than his ancestors; that he was a humane, kind-hearted father of his people, and meant to make everyone happy as soon as he could afford to do so. Also, he was the king; as such, he inspired the people with an almost superstitious veneration.

But he had no issue. There had been only one son, a pitiful, sickly boy, who was dead of anemia.

It took me many months to learn all this, and, having learned it, I began to feel that, after all, Dicker and I were not as well provided for as we had thought.

By then I was working on the great clock of Nicolas. The old king came every day to watch while we worked. It is a strange thing: although I like a clock to be a clock and not a silly mechanical toy, I developed a kind of weakness for these ingenious little bits of machinery. It was very pleasant working in the palace: everything was to hand. His Majesty had a passion for exclusiveness: he insisted that the inner workings of the clock we were making should be seen by himself, Dicker, and (of course) me. Honoré de Kock worked with us later, because he, as the sculptor and caster of the figures, had to know what made them work. There was not a great deal for de Kock to do in the beginning. He was a bored, melancholy man, as I have said; and he could not keep his hands still; he was always playing with something.

One day, when it was necessary for him to stand by until we had worked out the details of the knee-joint of the central figure of the great clock of Nicolas, he began to knead and fidget with a large lump of putty on the bench. An hour passed. “What’s that?” asked his Majesty.

“Nothing your Majesty,” said de Kock.

“Show me,” said the king.

Then we saw that Honoré de Kock with his fidgety, photographic hands had squeezed, gouged, and patted out of that lump of putty an exact likeness of Dicker. The King was childishly delighted and said: “Do one of me.”

Poor de Kock bowed and said: “With pleasure, your Majesty, but not in putty. Putty will not hold its shape. If it would please you I could make your likeness in, say, wax—simply, Sire, as a little game to divert you.”

Although it was early in the day, de Kock had already drunk a whole bottle of apricot brandy, and scarcely knew, or cared, what he was saying.

“Yes,” he went on, “it might amuse your Majesty. One of the first commissions I ever had was a lady who had her likeness made in wax—full-length.”

“What for?” asked the king.

“Why, her husband was suspicious of her, you see, because she was very much younger than he. She used to leave her room stealthily in the dead of night to visit someone else. Her husband was in the habit of peeping in at odd hours to see if she was still there. I made her a perfect likeness, movable at the joints like a dressmaker’s dummy, so that she could put herself into all kinds of attitudes; and deceived her husband perfectly for three years.”

“And what happened then?”

“Your Majesty, one night the husband crept in to spy upon his wife as usual, and was so overcome by the beauty of my waxwork that he ventured to creep up and kiss it. And then he rushed out yelling that his wife was dead—just as she came creeping back along the passage.”

“And then? Did he kill her?”

“No, he broke up the wax model.”

That was the only occasion on which I ever saw the king laugh. It hurt him, and the laugh turned into a groan, and the groan into a curse. But de Kock’s story had put him into a very good humor. King Nicolas had been a very gay fellow in his time, fond of practical jokes—you know, making fools of people; pouring water over them, setting booby-traps so that when they opened the door a pailful of something nasty emptied itself over them . . . and so forth.

“Yes,” he said to de Kock, “you shall make me in wax, life-size. But you mustn’t tell anyone about it, do you hear? You go on and model me—every hair, every line, everything. Then we’ll have fun. Yes, we’ll play tricks. I shall be in two places at the same time. I’ll frighten them out of their wits, the rogues. . . .”

Later, the king sent de Kock a beautiful gold cigar-case, studded with diamonds, but de Kock was gloomy and furious. “Why did I tell him?” he cried. “Why in God’s name? After all these years—have I come down to making wax dolls for old men in their second childhood?”

But I said: “Wax doll or bronze doll, what is the difference? If it pleases the old gentleman, let him have it. You know how generous he is when he is pleased. You’ll have to hang about in the workshop for several months, perhaps. You will be bored. Instead of playing with a bit of putty, play with a bit of wax, and do yourself some good at the same time.”

De Kock was mollified; and set up a great lump of clay on a stand and went to work on the king’s head. His technique was, if I remember rightly, as follows: first he modeled the head with microscopic accuracy in sculptor’s clay. When this was dry, he made with infinite care a plaster mold, into which a special sort of wax was poured. So, the mold being taken away, section by section, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, out came the head, looking so horrible that it gave me a nightmare. It did not look a bit like the king at that stage, because de Kock had made him without the hair and the beard.

The putting in of the king’s hair was the most tedious part of the business, because in a real life-like waxwork image every hair must be put in separately. I should not have cared for the job of putting in King Nicolas’s beard a hair at a time; but when de Kock was at work he was a fanatic in his thoroughness. That is why he was what he was, poor fellow. Also, in spite of his first angry reluctance, he became engrossed in the king’s head. He went to a shop where such things were sold, and bought an enormous quantity of beautiful silky white hair. (The starving peasant women of the Balkans, some of whom have beautiful heads of hair, sell their crowning glory for a few copper coins in order to buy something to eat.) The old king watched, blinking, fascinated. Then, looking at him, an idea occurred to me. I said to de Kock: “Since the old gentleman has taken such an interest in this doll, as you call it, why not let us combine our two arts? If you can fix your model constructionally, I can undertake to do the rest.”

“What do you mean?” asked de Kock.

“Why,” I said, “it would be no trouble at all for me to devise a clockwork mechanism to make him blink his eyes, sway his poor old head, tremble all over, and move those stiff, shaky hands of his. To me, that would be as easy as making a cuckoo-clock.”

De Kock was delighted with the idea. We arranged it between us secretly, so as to give his Majesty a pleasant little surprise. If he wanted his harmless fun, he could have it. No one knew what we were doing. Dicker was very ill with a disease of the heart—of which, by the way, he died shortly after. So de Kock and I spent all our spare time playing with his dummy and, as a matter of fact, we really began to take quite a fancy to it—as a job, I mean. It had taken hold of us.

The machinery that made the eyes and the head move and the hands tremble was nothing: a mere toy-maker’s job. I always liked difficult, intricate pieces of work. So it occurred to me that it might be really amusing to fix the jointed figure so that it could stand up and even take a few stiff rheumaticky paces backwards and forwards. That also was easy—hawkers in the street sell tin toys which can do that very thing; and even turn somersaults. No, it was not complicated enough for me.

Having made the dummy tremble and blink and sit and stand and walk, I now wanted to make it talk.

Well, you know that the phonograph had been invented then, although it was a very crude affair and did not sound real. But then again, neither did the king’s voice sound real—in fact it sounded rather like a scratchy old phonograph record. Also, the king’s voice was the easiest thing in the world for any man to imitate. You can imitate it yourself if you like. Let a lot of saliva run to the back of your throat and groan—there is the king’s voice. I say once again, it was easy. The entire mechanism fitted into the back of the figure between the shoulder blades and the hips, and was operated by several levers. If you pressed one, the figure stood up. If you pressed another, it walked twelve paces forward and turned on its heel. So if you wanted the figure to pace up and down all you had to do was repeat the pressure on that lever.