The Charwoman's Shadow
by Lord Dunsany
XI: The Chill of Space
“So it does not grow,” said Ramon Alonzo bitterly.
He was all alone on the hill and the girls had fled. Alone with a mere strip of gloom; a thing refused by the charwoman. So this was the shadow he had received so confidently, believing he had obtained from magic something without payment. A mere patch of darkness that neither dwindled nor grew. In a flash his memory went back to the suspicion he had suddenly had on the stair, and recalled how the shade of the trees in the heat of the day had hidden the evil secret a little longer. He remembered how two evenings ago it had seemed not so late as it was; that was his lying shadow. But he no longer thought of it as a shadow at all; it was mere art, and the Black Art at that. It counterfeited what his own shadow had been in the middle of that fatal afternoon, and could no more grow than shadows in pictures grow.
What should he do? A chill came into the evening, depressing all his thoughts, and his fancy roamed to the long thin magical box, in which his young shadow lay. He pictured it locked in the gloom with other lost shadows, fallen a slave to magic. He thought of its blitheness at dawn, on dewy hills in Spring; and then he looked at the sinister thing beside him, an outcast amongst the lengthening shadows as he was now an outcast amongst men. At that moment he would sooner have been shadowless like the charwoman than to have that mockery there looking ludicrous in the landscape, and seeming to taunt him with the folly he had committed after warning enough. He turned his back on it and his eye fell then on the willowy lands a little to the left of the sun, and he saw the great trees far off with a new jealousy. Almost silvery their great shadows looked, slipping over the grass in the evening; and he saw the beauty of shadows as he had not seen before, and saw with envy. It had come to this already, that the man was jealous of trees.
From the grand substantial forms of the distant trees, and those dark comrades that vouched for them as being material things, he bitterly turned away, and looked once more to the spires of Aragona, with his gaze held high to avoid the mockery at his feet. But not by lifting his gaze could he escape the thought of his folly, for now he saw Lolun and Ariona hastening home over the fields, and knew he had lost his part in material things.
Some slight regret, some reluctance, Lolun showed as she went, which Ramon Alonzo was not able to see. He only felt all tangible things were against him.
“Must we leave him?” said Lolun after they had run for a while.
“He is not earthly,” cried Ariona.
“We might stay for only a little,” said Lolun.
“It were sin,” said the other, “though for only a moment.”
“Must we never sin?” sighed Lolun.
“Sin? Yes,” said Ariona, “where there is absolution. But this …” and she shuddered.
“This?” whispered Lolun, half terror, half curiosity.
“He has had traffic with what we may not name.”
And, as Ariona said this, the last of the sun’s huge rim disappeared from the hill, and a chill came into the air; and their doubts all turned to fears in the hour of bats. So they hurried on and did not stop to rest, and came all weary into Aragona; and there the news spread quicker than their tired feet could carry it that Ramon Alonzo had trafficked in the gaudy wares of damnation.
And he, with that pitiable ware he had got, that tawdry piece of gloom, stood all alone on the hill in the deepening gloaming, making helpless human plans that he hoped to set against magic. There was his sword, that he had never used yet on any serious business; he would confront the magician with its slender point and make him open the shadow-box; its purpose was to rescue the oppressed, then why not those hapless shadows that lay with his own in the box? And then there was the spell he had seen in the book, with which the Master opened the lock of his shadow-box. But he could not read the spell, which was in Chinese; and did not know with what art from his stores of magic the Master would meet the passes of his merely terrestrial sword. Vain plans that melted away as fast as he formed them.
Then the sun set; and in the sudden loss of gladness that all things felt, the faint melancholy that tinged wild grasses and tended gardens, Ramon Alonzo had comfort. For a little while he seemed to have lost nothing that all nature had not lost: he did not know that the word had gone out “The man is shadowless,” and that he would have to travel far, and faster than that rumour, to find any kindly human welcome again. And now it was the hour when all things sought their homes, and Ramon Alonzo turned towards the wood.
He came to the wood before the gloaming faded, but amongst those oaks it was as dark as night. Once more he pried for the house; once more its dark door was before him all of a sudden as he picked his way round a tree. It stood ajar as though tempting whatever was lost in the wood to enter that sombre house and be robbed at least of its shadow.
Again as Ramon Alonzo went in through that door he saw the magician’s presence increasing the gloom of the hall.
“You are late,” said the magician.
“I am late,” said Ramon Alonzo, and strode on to pass the magician, his left hand resting lightly on his sword-hilt. When the Master of the Art saw Ramon Alonzo’s humour he lost some of his ease, and stood there pondering answers to what his guest should say; for he saw that the great defect in his artificial shadow had by now been detected, and was ever anxious that nothing mortal should guess ought of his dealings with shadows. But Ramon Alonzo said nothing. He walked on silently into the deeps of the house, and presently the magician turned away and went sombrely back to the room that was sacred to magic, and unpadlocked his shadow-box; and soon in a riot of power exerted on helpless shades, he forgot all the irk he had felt at having one of his crooked dealings discovered.
But the young man called Anemone through the house; and she heard him and came from the nook in which she was resting, and met him in one of those dark passages, and led him back to the nook. It was a space beneath a wooden stair that ran whither she knew not; once in every generation she would hear the steps of the magician resounding above her head, going gravely up the stair upon which she was not permitted, and coming blithely down. One side of the space was open to the passage, but in the part that was sheltered by the stair she had a heap of straw to lie on, and all her pans and pails. Old brooms against the wall seemed to add to the darkness. She led him silently there before they spoke, seeing his attitude full of trouble if it was too dark for her to see his face; and there they sat on the floor on patches of straw, and she began to light a candle, a thing she had saved up out of old pieces of tallow.
“I have found out about his shadow,” he said.
“Ah yes,” she said, “a mere piece of gloom.” She knew he must have discovered it when she saw how late he was out.
“It will not grow,” he said.
“Never an inch,” she answered.
“You warned me,” said Ramon Alonzo.
She only sighed. She had known that the magician was after his shadow, but knew not all his tricks. Had she dreamed that he would have dared to offer one of his wretched pieces of darkness even in part exchange for a good human shadow she would have warned Ramon Alonzo of the specious imitation. And now she regretted she had not. And as she sighed a sudden tremor shook her, and shook the wretched candle she had just lighted, and convulsed her again and again, till the straw upon which she sat rustled audibly with her tremblings. And Ramon Alonzo suddenly trembled too, as he had trembled once before in that strange house, and previously he had put his tremors down to the draughts and the damp, but now they were more violent.
“It is our shadows,” said the charwoman, leaning towards Ramon Alonzo and speaking with chattering teeth.
“Our shadows?” said he.
“They are out on dreadful journeys,” she replied.
“Whither?” said he.
“Who knows?” she said. “And we are feeling their terror.”
“Has he that power?” he gasped.
“Aye,” she said. “He is sitting there now over his shadow-box, taking them out and driving them off by the dreadful spells he uses, to carry messages for him to spirits far from here. And their misery and terror touches us, for so it is with shadows.”
Ramon Alonzo was shivering now with a fear that was strange to him. The charwoman watched him a moment.
“Yes, yes,” she said, “he has our shadows out.”
“Are they far from the house?” he asked between chattering teeth.
“Beyond Earth,” she answered.
This he could scarcely believe. But now a gust of more dreadful shivering shook her, and he too felt the touch of a sudden chill.
“They are beyond the paths of the planets now,” she said. “I know that cold. It is the chill of Space. Yes, that’s Space sure enough. It’s little warmth enough that they get from the planets; just a little from some of the larger ones, and that’s something. But this is Space: I know it. They’re right out there now.”
She huddled her hands almost into the flame of the candle, but that did no good, for the shudders that come from lost shadows go deeper than skin or bones. They chill not merely the blood but the very spirit.
And the chill and the awe of Space gripped also Ramon Alonzo.
“Why does he send them there?” he whispered to her, for his voice had sunk to this.
“Ah, we don’t know that,” she said. “He’s too deep and sly. But he has friends out there, and he’s likely sending them, poor shadows, to one of them, to bow before one of them and give it a message, and dance to it and then come back to the shadow-box.”
“He’ll bring it back?” asked Ramon Alonzo quickly.
“Oh yes,” she said, “he always brings them back. He won’t part with his shadows.”
“What spirits are they?” he asked.
“Evil spirits,” she answered.
And then they sat silent awhile, trembling and wan, while their nerves were numbed by an unearthly cold. And if the charwoman’s aged frame was more easily shaken by tremblings, yet the young heart of Ramon Alonzo seemed to feel more vividly his shadow’s distress.
“Often the spirits pass close to Earth on a journey, and he sends his shadows a little way out to greet them. But they are right beyond that now, poor shadows,” she said.
“Why does he send them so far?” he asked.
“Lust of power,” she said. “Cruel savagery. I know his piques and his ways. He doesn’t like your finding out the trick that he played you. I’ve known him make the shadows dance for hours because I haven’t worked hard enough for him. And I’ve been all tired after that, worn out and years older.”
Somehow her courage in speaking at all when racked by those terrible tremors, and in speaking against the grim man to whose tyranny they were subject, brought a warmth to Ramon Alonzo.
And soon she said: “They are turning homeward now.”
Then they sat silent both waiting. And now the terror had gone, and gradually some slight thawing, too faint to be called a glow, touched the unearthly cold that had gripped them so sorely. Whether it was some warmth that the shadows got from Jupiter, or from the sun itself, neither Ramon Alonzo nor the wise old charwoman knew; and at last the charwoman leaned back against the wall with a certain content again on her worn old face: “They are back in the box,” she said.
And suddenly he stood up, his left hand dropping upon his sword-hilt, a fine figure there in his cloak, even in that dim light.
“I will take your shadow,” he said, “and he shall torment it no more. My own must stay in the box because of the bargain I made with him and the need that I have for gold, but I will bring back yours to you and he shall torment it no more.”
He had said the same before, and she had smiled it away; but he was so vehement now that, if resolution could have accomplished it, she saw the thing had been done. And yet she shook her head.
“I have my sword,” he said.
But she looked at it pityingly.
“He has more terrible things,” she answered sadly.
And at that he realized that in that dark house more store must be set by immaterial things than by those that men can handle. And he thought of the spell.
“Then I will open the box while he is away,” he said. “And you shall have back your shadow and mine will stay in the box.”
And again she warned him that the shadow-box opened to no key.
“I have seen the spell in his book,” he said, “unto which the padlock opens!”
“Can you utter it?” said she.
“No, it is in Chinese.”
Now there was at that time no Chinaman in all the lands of Spain. And the ships of Spain had no traffic with Chinese lands. Yet Ramon Alonzo pondered this most faint hope, and leaving the pails and brooms went thoughtfully thence.