The Charwoman's Shadow
by Lord Dunsany
XXIII: The Plan of Ramon Alonzo
When the charwoman found that the despair of Ramon Alonzo was so vigorous that she could bring him no comfort then, she went back to the dismal haunt of her brooms and pans, while he went lurking down the passages to watch for the egress of the magician, bent only on clutching the shadow-box, without any thought or plan how to rescue the shadows within it. He found his sword was still gripped in his hand and, looking at it, even in that dim light, he saw that its glitter was gone and all the steel gone grey from its meeting with magic. A long while he waited. And, shadowless there amongst so many shadows, he envied once more the common inanimate things that had their simple shadows and excited no man’s wonder. The magician lingered in his gloomy room, till Ramon Alonzo wondered what dreadful plan he was working out against him for having drawn sword in the room that was sacred to magic. But already he had forgotten Ramon Alonzo and was brooding on problems beyond the young man’s guesses. That he had fought to protect his shadows was no more to him than it is to a master chess-player that he has locked the door of his room, when he goes to study alone the mysteries of the Ruy Lopez. Fight and antagonist were soon forgot, and he was following intricate orbits of unknown moons, a lonely imagination.
From such studies he rose late, and Ramon Alonzo saw his dark shape loom through the doorway when the light of evening was far gone from the corridors. To his joy he saw that the door had been left wide open, and before the magician’s steps had died wholly away the young man rushed into the room that was sacred to magic and had his hands on the shadow-box. First he put his sword’s point to the crack between box and lid, then he smote the box with the edge of it. But not thus easily are souls won from damnation. The open door would have hinted to any mind that was calmer that there was something about that box that was not to be opened by the first earthly implement. The gap between lid and box was narrower than the gap between one granite slab and the next in the temple beside the Sphinx, narrower than the line between night and day; the delicate point of the rapier looked gross beside it. And as for the material of the box it was not of wood, which the young man had thought to shatter, but some element that cared for the edge of steel no more than steel itself cares for the edge or point of a thin feather. He picked at the padlock then; and something about the padlock’s glittering hardness brought him to calmer ways, and taught him that, though his soul was in peril of loss, yet unreasoning haste would help him no better in this than it would in any trifle of daily things.
He put the shadow-box slowly back in its place and sheathed his sword, from which lustre and temper and ring seemed all to have gone, and walked thoughtfully thence and came to the stairs of stone, and ascended them and saw his spidery bed. There he lay down for such a night as men have who see doom close. Though the doom be only earthly they plan and plan, and mix up their plans with hopes, and then again they mix them with despairs, till all over the web of reason that makes their plans come curious patterns of the despairs and hopes; and least of all the weaver knows which is which. And the stars go slowly gliding by, and the gradual affairs of Earth; and the plans race on and on. And if the doom be earthly, often towards dawn fatigue overtakes their plans and they sleep when the birds sing. But Ramon Alonzo did not dare to rest from his whirl of plans, and did not sleep till he saw clear reason shine faint through his hopes and despairs, and then it was broad morning.
That ray of reason that shone at last on his plans came from that remark of the charwoman that she made in her feeble efforts to bring him comfort: “it might be Tong or Tang.” Some time between dawn and midnight these words had come back to him in all their absurdity. Of the myriad sounds that might form a syllable in an utterly unknown tongue how would it be possible thus lightly to guess the right one? “Tong or Tang”: the suggestion was ludicrous. And it could not be Tong or Tang in any case, for the second syllable of the spell was far too unlike the first for the difference to be in no more than the change of a vowel. What might it be? He had much of the night before him, with all its wide spaces for fears and lost hopes to roam in: he had ample leisure in which to wonder what was the second syllable. But not until light began to creep through the wood did he order his wonder and guesses into a plan.
His plan was this: the number of possible syllables was limited; he knew the first syllable, he would suppose the last to be ab, and he would say the spell over and over again to the shadow-box varying only the second syllable. When every possible sound had been tried for that he would change the last syllable to bab, and try again. Then to bac, then bad, then baf; and, every time that he changed the last syllable, going through all the sounds that could possibly form the second. He would work through all the hours of day and night in which the magician was away from his room. And one day years hence he would hit on the three syllables and see the shadow-box open before he died. He calculated it might take forty years.
That he would hold on to the end, crouching upon the gloomy floor murmuring three syllables to the padlock, he did not doubt. Sooner or later a man might have stopped, saying, “Is it worth it?” if the box had held the whole wealth of the Indies; but Ramon Alonzo would work for his soul’s salvation. And all the while he remembered the knightly quest to which he had pledged his chivalry. Morning shone wide on the wood and he fell asleep.
When Ramon Alonzo woke his plan was as clear in his mind as though he had pondered it further during his sleep. It was then late in the morning. He went to the charwoman, following the sound of her pail, and putting aside the old woman’s efforts to comfort him obtained from her carefully the hours at which the magician left his room, the result of all her experience. Often before he had discussed plans and hopes with her, but not now, for he based upon this plan all the hope that he had in time or eternity, and would discuss it with none. Thence he went straight to the room that was sacred to magic, and offered his sword, hilt foremost, to the magician. The magician bade him keep it; for, whatever terrors vexed him from beyond the path of the comet, he had no fear of any earthly sword. Neither man desired to continue their quarrel, the youth because he saw that his folly already had brought his soul to the very brink of Hell, and he regretted his haste; the magician because his need of a pupil, upon whom to unburden himself of some of the wisdom he had carried alone down the ages, was a greater need than Ramon Alonzo knew. So that the tensity between them passed; and the magician turned his mind to the obligation, that is laid upon all magicians, of handing on to a pupil the lore that has come to them from the Dread Masters; for so the magicians of old are known by all that follow the Art: thus is there magic even to this day. Ramon Alonzo meanwhile was only planning and waiting to rob the box within which the magician enslaved his shadows. He knew not when the day would come on which he would rob the box: it might be years hence; he might be grey when he did it: but all his fervour and patience were centred on this. His scheme may seem little better than the Black Art; but he had been taught from childhood that such crafty ways were justified in cases that touched the safety of the soul, nor did he hold that the Master had earned his fee. His whole attention lost in the plans he was making, arranging in countless formulae a legion of possible syllables, he scarcely heard the suave voice of the Master speaking across the gloom to him.
“What learning would you have of me?”
Back came his thoughts from a far imagined year, in which with a sudden spell that was right at last he should free his shadow from that eternal doom that ownerless shadows share with the souls of those who were once their masters; back came his thoughts as alert as though they had wandered never an hour away from that very morning.
“I would learn the making of some more durable thing,” said Ramon Alonzo, “than gold.”
And the Master smiled thereat, as Ramon Alonzo had hoped.
“We shall therefore study,” the Master said, “the making of Persian spells, which, more than any other inscription of magic, charm spirits whose courses are not within this sphere; and thus they shall be remembered after Earth.”
He rose and placed upon the lectern a tome in a leather binding as rough and black as a saddle on an old battlefield, written by one of the Magi in his old age before the fall of Sidon.
“If speech would be had by the folk of Earth with those that dwell not here, and spell be sought that shall compel their answer, it is in this book,” said the Master.
Then began the teaching of heathen script, with its dots and curious flourishes, the pronouncing of alien vowels, and strange intonations; and all that labour that thoughts must undergo to bring up wisdom out of a former age, which is no lighter than the toil of the miners who dig up bygone forests from out of the past of the Earth. And all the time that Ramon Alonzo learned, his attention was fixed upon the approach of that hour when the magician would leave his room that was sacred to magic and sail away a dark shape down the corridor, and he should have leisure at last to attend to his soul’s salvation. And that hour came so slowly that in one of those lingering moments the fear came to Ramon Alonzo that time was done and eternity was begun and his doom was to learn heathen spells in the gloom forever and ever, while the blessed sat in the sunlight singing in Spanish. And this fear passed, giving way to one more terrible, that told him far worse awaited him than this, unless he could rescue his shadow from the doom it must share with his soul.
The hour came at last when, with an earnest reminder of the way of a heathen vowel, the magician arose and went bat-like out of the room. For many moments Ramon Alonzo sat motionless, listening to fading echoes from the feet of that master of shadows; then he was down by the shadow-box eagerly uttering a spell. Not a flicker made the padlock. Rapidly he uttered another, and then another, and with a kind of singsong intoned spell after spell in the gloom and dust of the floor, bending above the shadow-box. The first syllable was always Ting, which he knew to be right; the last was always Ab, which was only an assumption that he meant to vary slowly through weary years; the second syllable he changed every time. The thought of the years that he should spend in that room murmuring spells to the box did not appal him, for he knew that the relation of all time to eternity is as a drop to the sea: he only feared that those years might be too few. Close to him lay the box that held the magician’s weapon, the old flash of lightning. It had neither padlock nor keyhole and, when he tried to raise the lid, it seemed to be shut forever: by what magic it opened he knew not. He rightly reflected that the magician, having gone from the room without it, had other and probably more terrible weapons. He turned again to his monotonous work.
Towards evening the magician came back again; and Ramon Alonzo ceased his lonely mutterings, and soon was learning again old Persian lore, for the plan was growing in the Master’s mind to make of him a magician. Had he studied with such a master, patiently following that lore whose splendours have made many forget salvation, he could have had a name that would have resounded through Wizardry, and hereafter have had great honour among the damned. Of this honour the magician had spoken once, when Ramon Alonzo had wonderingly enquired of the present state of that illustrious professor who had held the Chair of Magic at Saragossa. “He walks through Hell,” said the magician, “flaming, an object of awe and reverent veneration, while all abase themselves as he goes by, their faces low in the cinders. He is, as many have told me, an apparition of glory, and amongst the first of all the splendours of Hell.”
From such a fame Ramon Alonzo now wilfully turned away. Such choices have often to be made.
Whenever the Master blamed his inattention he apologized gracefully and pretended diligence, but his heart was far from Persia, and never a spell he learned that would have hailed passing spirits and given him news unbiased by the narrower views of Earth. And thus he lost what he lost, and gained what he gained.
And at last night came and the magician left him; and, rising as though he too would go, he tarried in the room and joyfully looked to have the long night alone with his work. He had no light but the gleam of a sickle moon, for he did not dare to burn the magician’s taper, lest its shortening should show how late he had been at work; and the young moon soon sank: he had forgotten food and even water, and sleep seemed unnecessary and impossible to him. He needed no light except to watch the padlock; and for this purpose he laid a finger upon it all night long, to feel if it moved for any spell that he said. Owls going afield for their nocturnal hunt saw Ramon Alonzo bent over the box, and saw him again as they returned in the chill: bands of moths to whose glowing eyes the night is luminous saw his shape in the corner, and with other hours of the night came other moths of wholly different tribes; they saw the same shape there: mice that at first were terrified at the sound of the human voice grew used to its long monotony, and ran all round the motionless crouching figure: stars that he knew not saw him kneeling there.
And then, as a greyness paled the night and made all hopes seem groundless and his long labour absurd, there came a sudden quiver into the padlock just as he uttered a spell; he felt it vibrating his fingertips. He had said thousands of spells that night, and for none had the padlock moved; and now it had quivered, but it did not open. Hopes had shot through his mind in that moment of quivering, singing to him of salvation, only to fall like dead birds. He said the same spell again: again the padlock quivered. Yet it remained shut. Ramon Alonzo sat back on his heels and wondered. Then he said it again, and over and over; and always the same thing happened. By dim grey light that came in he now saw the padlock, and no movement in it could be perceived by the eye, but always he felt the quiver along his fingertip whenever he said that spell. Somehow it increased his despair, for he believed that the spell he was using was the correct one and, for some reason he could not guess, would do no more when uttered by him than to make that faint vibration. Again and again he repeated it, and always the same thing happened. The spell was Ting Yung Ab.
He would not leave it to continue his formula, because no other spell he had used had moved the padlock at all; so he went on hopelessly repeating it while the dawn grew wider and chillier, and more and more objects appeared out of the dark with their shadows; and their shapes seemed to bring him back to his shadowless situation, and all these material things seemed to be triumphing over him one by one, like an army of victors marching by one of its prisoners. Amongst these fancies of despair he noticed at last that the quivering of the padlock occurred at one part of the spell he uttered, and not quite at the end of it. It occurred at the word Yung. He said the spell slowly then to make sure of this, for hitherto he had spoken rapidly. And sure enough, just as he said the word Yung, the padlock always quivered, and was quiet again as he said the word Ab.
A hope came to Ramon Alonzo, glorious and sudden as sunrise, but he would not acknowledge it in that chill hour, burdened by his despairs; yet he planned a change in his formula and went to bed and slept. And when he awoke in the broad and brilliant day the hope was still with him, and it had grown since dawn.