It was Gargantua who combed Lalouette’s beautiful bright hair, evening after evening, while Tick and Tack sat exchanging looks. No words: only looks.
Sometimes the little men went hunting with Gargantua. Alone, neither Tick nor Tack could handle the heavy spear. But it must be remembered that they were a dancing-team, trained to move together in perfect accord. So, while Tick directed the fore-part of the shaft, Tack worked close behind him, and they put their combined, perfectly synchronised strength and agility into a dangerous leap-and-plunge. Once they killed a fat boar. This must have made them confident of their power to kill.
This is not all guesswork. I have ground for my assumption, in what Lalouette wrote in Tick’s loose-leaf notebook, holding the gold pencil in her teeth and guiding it with her lips, before she bit the paper into a ball and pushed it with her tongue into her grouch-bag.
It takes courage and determination to kill a wild boar with a spear. A boar is fearless, powerful, unbelievably ferocious, and armoured with hard hide and thick muscle. He is wickedly obstinate – a slashing fury, a ripping terror – two sickles on a battering-ram, animated by a will to kill, uninhibited by fear of death.
Having killed a boar, Tick and Tack, in their pride, resolved to kill Gargantua.
Lalouette says that she, unwittingly, gave them the idea, when she told them the story of Ulysses and Cyclops.
But the foolish giant called Gargantua the Horror, billed as the strongest and ugliest man on earth, must have been easy to kill. He worked all day. When Lalouette’s hair was combed and her singing ceased, he went away modestly to sleep in the bushes. One night, after he had retired, Tick and Tack followed him. Gargantua always carried the spear. Lalouette listened drowsily for the comforting rumble of Gargantua’s snoring a few yards away; she loved him, in a sisterly way.
… Ha-khaaa … kha-ha … khaaaa-huk … khaaaa …
As she listened, smiling, the snoring stopped with a gasp. Then Tick and Tack came back carrying the spear, and in the firelight Lalouette could see that the blade of the spear was no longer clean. The redness of it was not a reflected redness.
Thus she knew what the little men had done to Gargantua. She would have wept if she could; but there was no hand to wipe away her tears, and she was a proud woman. So she forced herself to pretend to be asleep.
Later she wrote: I knew that this was the end. I was sorry. In this place I have felt strangely calm and free, happier than I have ever been since my dear mother used to hold me in her arms and tell me all the stories I told here; stories of gods and heroes and pygmies and giants, and of men with wings….
But that night, looking through the lashes of her half-closed eyes, she saw Tick untying the blade of the spear. He worked for an hour before he got it loose, and then he had a sort of dirk, more than a foot long, which he concealed in a trouser-leg. Tack, she thinks, had been watching him also; for as soon as Tick closed his eyes and began to breathe evenly, he took out the knife which he had never allowed them to take away from him, and stabbed his partner through the heart.
He carried the body out of the range of her vision, and left it where he let it fall. Lalouette never knew where.
Next morning Tack said to her: ‘At last we are alone. You are my Queen.’
‘The fire?’ she said, calmly.
‘Ah yes. The fire. I will put wood on the fire, and then perhaps we may be alone after all this time.’
Tack went away and Lalouette waited. He did not return. The disposition of his bones, and the scars on them, indicated that he was killed by a boar. There was no more driftwood near-by. Tack went into the trees to pick up whatever he might find. As I visualise it, he stooped to gather sticks, and looked up into the furious and bloody eyes of a great angry boar gathering itself for a charge. This must be so: there is no other way of accounting for the scattering of his shattered bones. Hence, the last thing Tack saw must have been the bristly head of a pig, a pair of curled tusks, and two little red eyes….
The last words in what may be described as Lalouette’s Journal are as follows:
A wind is blowing. The fire is dying. God grant that my end may be soon.
This is the history of the Queen of Pig Island, and of the bones Captain Oxford found.
The Sympathetic Souse
THE Carpathians have always been the rocky-breasted wet nurse of sombre and terrible fantasy. Dracula came out of these parts in which, as the peasants whisper, crossing themselves: ‘The dead ride hard.’ Hungary, and Austria, have always been breeding grounds for vampires, werewolves, witches, warlocks, together with their bedevilments and bewitchings.
Psychoanalysis started in these parts. There are hundreds of professional psychologists (witch-doctors) from most other countries in the world who have studied under Freud, Jung, Adler, Groddeck, and the rest. Most of them go away with unblinking conviction: a species of owl stuffed with conjecture curdled into dogma. It is interesting, by the way, to observe that most of these fumblers in the dark are in a state of permanent nervous breakdown – an occupational disease you get when you try to take someone else’s soul to pieces and clean it and reassemble it. No man in the world ever emptied his heart and mind in an analyst’s office or anywhere else – only madmen try, who do not know what they are talking about; their candour is fantasy.
Anglo-Saxons ought to leave psychology to take care of itself. They break their hearts trying to make an exact science of what – considering the infinite permutations and combinations of the human mind – can never crystallise out of mere philosophy. In the end, it all boils down to repetitive case-histories, reports, and other rubbish – sex in statistical tedium, with the spicy bits veiled in the obscurity of a dead language.
So, in effect, said that shrewd little mental specialist whom I will call Dr Almuna, when I met him in a select scientific group at a cocktail party. He runs the Almuna Clinic – a polite, expensive kind of looney bin not far from Chicago – and specialises in dope fiends and alcoholics.
Almuna is good company. This cheerful man who has kept clean because he has learned how to wash his hands in any kind of water – this Almuna, a kindly cynic, believes everything and nothing. There is nothing didactic about Dr Almuna: he admits that the more he knows he knows, the less he knows he knows.
Once, in the course of a conversation he said to me, in reply to a certain question: ‘know the lobes of a brain, and have followed the convolutions of many brains, and the patterns of behaviour of many men and women. And still I cannot pretend to understand. I try, believe me! But every human brain is a separate labyrinth. He would be a lucky man who, in a lifetime, got to the heart of anybody’s brain. No, no; quite simply, I do not try to explain. I treat, and endeavour to understand. The other way lies theory. Hence, fanaticism; and so delusion …’
On the occasion to which I have referred, when earnest professional men made a group and discussed cases, Dr Almuna was there, cocking his head like a parrot; one eye shut; avidly attentive. Some practitioner whose name I forget was talking of a case of ‘sympathetic pains’. He had investigated and thoroughly authenticated the case of a girl who, at three o’clock in the morning of 7 January 1944 uttered a piercing shriek and cried: ‘I’m shot!’ She pointed to a spot under the collarbone. There, mysteriously, had appeared a small blue dot, exquisitely painful to the touch. It transpired that exactly at that moment her brother, who was serving overseas, had been struck by a bullet in that very place.