Avram Davidson - The Avram Davidson Treasury - a tribute collection

“Mphh. I notice your use of the past pluperfect. ‘ Had intended.’ Eh?”

With a horrible start Stirrup noticed, just beyond the headlights’ brightness, the silent approach of a company of men. Temper obviously in no way improved by the hole in his forehead, O’Donnell scowled hideously.

Speaking very rapidly, Stirrup said in a loud voice, “I am not to blame. The reading public little realize the small extent to which writers are their own masters. My own attitude in regard to baronets and, ah, butlers, was of no importance at all. It was my publisher! He laughs at butlers. Despises baronets. I give you my word. Indeed, I would freely admit how richly I deserve the punishment an ignoble government has failed to mete out to me for the slanders I have written — but I really could not help it. I was bound hand and foot by contracts. How many times have I stood there with tears in my eyes. ‘Another bad butler,’ demanded Boatwright. ‘Another silly baronet,’ Boatwright insisted. What could I do?”

There was a long silence. Then Peebles stepped forward. “It was very wrong of you, sir,” he said. “But your weakness is not altogether beyond exculpation.”

“Not altogether, no,” conceded Sir Sholto, twisting a lock of his long, gray hair. “The second Sir Sholto, outraged by the filthy treatment accorded the proffered manuscript of his experiences in the Peninsular Wars, was in the habit of toasting Napoleon for having once shot a publisher.”

“And quite properly, Sir Sholto,” said Peebles. “ And quite rightly.”

“Never would’ve been allowed if the Duke of Cumberland hadn’t been cozened out of the crown by Salic Law,” said Sir Peregrine, moodily.

Peebles stiffened. “While it is true that a mere valet has not the status of a butler, and equally true that His Royal Highness (later King Ernest of Hanover) was absolved of guilt for having caused the death of his personal gentleman—”

“Who was a foreigner anyway,” Stirrup put in; “taking bread from the mouths of honest British men, and doubtless richly deserved his fate…”

Butlers and baronets, once the matter was put in this light, nodded judiciously.

“Therefore,” said Peebles, “I propose a joint convocation of both Houses, as it were, to deal with the case of the Infamous Publisher Boatwright.”

“Bugger the bastard with a rusty sword, you mean? And then splatter his tripes with a silver bullet or two?”

Peebles said that that was the precise tenor of his meaning, and he much admired Sir Sholto’s vigorous way of phrasing it.

“Mr. Boatwright is at his country place not far from here at this very moment,” Rodney Stirrup quickly pointed out. “The Mill Race, Little Chitterlings, near Guilford.” He held his breath.

Then, “Fiat justicia!” exclaimed Peebles.

And, “St. George, no quarter, and perish publishers!” cried the baronets. There was a diffident cough, and a large, pear-shaped man with prominent and red-rimmed eyes stepped forward. He looked at Stirrup and Stirrup felt his hair follicles retreat.

“If I may take the liberty, gentlemen,” he said, with an air both diffident and determined.

“Hullo, hullo, what’s this?” Peebles queried. “A newcomer to our ranks. Pray, silence, gentlemen: a maiden speech.”

“It is not without misgivings that I feel obliged to pause en route to the Butlers’ Valhalla and raise a rather unpleasant matter,” said the newcomer. “I am Bloor, late butler to Jeremy Boatwright. Not being conversant with the latter’s business affairs, I can neither confirm nor deny Mr. Stirrup’s charges. However, I feel it my duty to point out that while Mr. Stirrup was for many years an annual week end guest at The Mill Race (Little Chitterlings, near Guilford), he invariably failed to tip the butler on taking his departure! ”

There was a chorus of sharp, hissing, indrawn breaths. Lips were curled, eyebrows raised.

“Not the thing, not the thing at all,” said Sir Peregrine. “Shoot butlers, yes, certainly. But — fail to tip them on leaving? Not done, simply not done.”

“A loathsome offense,” said Arbuthnot.

“Despicable,” Peebles declared.

Stirrup, trembling, cried, “It was the fault of my publisher in not allowing me a proper share of royalties.” But this was ill received.

“Won’t do, won’t do at all.” Sir Sholto shook his head. “Can’t scrape out of it that way a second time. If one’s income obliges one to dine on fish and chips in a garret, then dine on fish and chips in a garret — dressing for dinner first, I need hardly add. But unless one is prepared to tip the butler, one simply does not accept week end invitations. By gad,” he said furiously, “a chap who would do that would shoot foxes!”

“Afoot,” said Sir Peregrine.

Bloor said it was not that he wished to be vindictive. It was purely out of duty to his profession that he now made public the offense which had rankled — nay, festered — so long in his bosom.

“I see nothing else for it,” said Peebles, heavily, “but that Mr. Rodney Stirrup must occupy the lesser guest room at Butlers’ Valhalla until his unspeakable dereliction be atoned for.”

(“Man’s a rank outsider,” huffed Sir Sholto. “And to think I was about to ask him to shoot with us when the were grouse season starts!”)

The lesser guest room! In a sudden flash of dim, but all-sufficient, light, Stirrup saw what his fate must be. Henceforth his life was one long week end. His room would be the one farthest from the bath, his mattress irrevocably lumpy. The shaving water would always be cold, the breakfast invariably already eaten no matter how early he arose. His portion at meals would be the gristle; his wine (choked with lees), the worst of the off-vintage years. The cigar box was forever to be empty, and the whisky locked away …

His spirits broke. He quailed.

For a brief moment he sought comfort in the fate awaiting Boatwright. Then despair closed in again, and the most dreadful thought occurred to him. Sir Sholto Shadwell’s silver bullets: ghosts, werewolves (and were grouse), vampires, ghouls — yes. But would they work, he wondered, despairingly, could they really work, on a creature infinitely more evil and ungodly? Was there anything of any nature in any world at all which could kill a publisher?

There are stories which tell us they are something significant, and there are stories whose greatness slides into the back of the mind, where they explode in a sudden nectar of meaning. “Dagon,” which is a genuinely great tale, is one of the latter. The quietude it generates in the reader is what a waterbug might feel floating in the meniscus above a hungry pike. Like the waterbug, readers of “Dagon” (1959) will find the ultimate meaning of their tale beneath the surface of events.

It is not, perhaps, an easy surface to penetrate. The story is told in the first person, by an American military officer who has arrived in Peking with fellow officers on 12 October 1945 as part — it would seem — of a liaison team. In a seeming aside, he mentions the lotos, which when crushed into wine engenders forgetfulness, and the plural form of which— lotoi —reminds him of Pierre Loti, who had also arrived in Peking, forty-five years earlier, on 12 October. The narrator tells of his slow immersion in the underlife of the great, halfdestroyed, smouldering city; of his admiring thoughts on the “mystery of fish …, growing old without aging and enjoying eternal growth without the softness of obesity”; of his meeting with a Chinese police officer whom he corrupts, buys a concubine from, and has killed; of his earning money by selling faked drugs to Chinese buyers hungry for virility; of his meeting a Chinese magician who does magic tricks with a goldfish caught in a bowl, and who seems to be his concubine’s father-in-law; and of his final retreat into what might seem to be a lotos-eater’s torpor.