Electronic Bookshelf/Electronic Bookshelf.iso/stories/exiles.txt

Text File | 1994-12-22 | 11KB | 197 lines

                       The Exiles Club

                       by Lord Dunsany


It was an evening party; and something someone had said to
me had started me talking about a subject that to me is full
of fascination, the subject of old religions, forsaken
gods.  The truth (for all religions have some of it), the
wisdom, the beauty, of the religions of countries to which I
travel have not the same appeal to me; for one only notices
in them their tyranny and intolerance and the abject
servitude that they claim from thought; but when a dynasty
has been dethroned in heaven and goes forgotten and outcast
even among men, one's eyes no longer dazzled by its power
find something very wistful in the faces of fallen gods
suppliant to be remembered, something almost tearfully
beautiful, like a long warm summer twilight fading gently
away after some day memorable in the story of earthly wars.
Between what Zeus, for instance, has been once and the
half-remembered tale he is to-day there lies a space so
great that there is no change of fortune known to man
whereby we may measure the height down which he has fallen.
And it is the same with many another god at whom once the
ages trembled and the twentieth century treats as an old
wives' tale.  The fortitude that such a fall demands is
surely more than human.
   Some such things as these I was saying, and being upon a
subject that much attracts me I possibly spoke too loudly,
certainly I was not aware that standing close behind me was
no less a person than the ex-King of Eritivaria, the thirty
islands of the East, or I would have moderated my voice and
moved away a little to give him more room.  I was not aware
of his presence until his satellite, one who had fallen with
him into exile but still revolved about him, told me that
his master desired to know me; and so to my surprise I was
presented though neither of them even knew my name.  And
that was how I came to be invited by the ex-King to dine at
his club.
   At the time I could only account for his wishing to know
me by supposing that he found in his own exiled condition
some likeness to the fallen fortunes of the gods of whom I
talked unwitting of his presence; but now I know that it was
not of himself he was thinking when he asked me to dine at
that club.
   The club would have been the most imposing building in
any street in London, but in that obscure mean quarter of
London in which they had built it it appeared unduly
enormous.  Lifting right up above those grotesque houses and
built in that Greek style that we call Georgian, there was
something Olympian about it.  To my host an unfashionable
street could have meant nothing, through all his youth
wherever he had gone had become fashionable the moment he
went there; words like the East End could have had no
meaning to him.
   Whoever built that house had enormous wealth and cared
nothing for fashion, perhaps despised it.  As I stood gazing
at the magnificent upper windows draped with great curtains,
indistinct in the evening, on which huge shadows flickered
my host attracted my attention from the doorway, and so I
went in and met for the second time the ex-King of
Eritivaria.
   In front of us a stairway of rare marble led upwards, he
took me through a side-door and downstairs and we came to a
banqueting-hall of great magnificence.  A long table ran up
the middle of it, laid for quite twenty people, and I
noticed the peculiarity that instead of chairs there were
thrones for everyone except me, who was the only guest and
for whom there was an ordinary chair.  My host explained to
me when we all sat down that everyone who belonged to that
club was by rights a king.
   In fact none was permitted, he told me, to belong to the
club unless his claim to a kingdom made out in writing had
been examined and allowed by those whose duty it was.  The
whim of a populace or the candidate's own misrule were never
considered by the investigators, nothing counted with them
but heredity and lawful descent from kings, all else was
ignored.  At that table there were those who had once
reigned themselves, others lawfully claimed descent from
kings that the world had forgotten, the kingdoms claimed by
some had even changed their names.  Hatzgurh, the mountain
kingdom, is almost regarded as mythical.
   I have seldom seen greater splendour than that long hall
provided below the level of the street.  No doubt by day it
was a little sombre, as all basements are, but at night with
its great crystal chandeliers, and the glitter of heirlooms
that had gone into exile, it surpassed the splendour of
palaces that have only one king.  They had come to London
suddenly most of those kings, or their fathers before them,
or forefathers; some had come away from their kingdoms by
night, in a light sleigh, flogging the horses, or had
galloped clear with morning over the border, some had
trudged roads for days from their capital in disguise, yet
many had had time just as they left to snatch up some small
thing without price in markets, for the sake of old times as
they said, but quite as much, I thought, with an eye to the
future.  And there these treasures glittered on that long
table in the banqueting-hall of the basement of that strange
club.  Merely to see them was much, but to hear their story
that their owners told was to go back in fancy to epic times
on the romantic border of fable and fact, where the heroes
of history fought with the gods of myth.  The famous silver
horses of Gilgianza were there climbing their sheer
mountain, which they did by miraculous means before the time
of the Goths.  It was not a large piece of silver but its
workmanship outrivaled the skill of the bees.
   A yellow Emperor had brought out of the East a piece of
that incomparable porcelain that had made his dynasty famous
though all their deeds are forgotten, it had the exact shade
of the right purple.
   And there was a little golden statuette of a dragon
stealing a diamond from a lady, the dragon had the diamond
in his claws, large and of the first water.  There had been
a kingdom whose whole constitution and history were founded
on the legend, from which alone its kings had claimed their
right to the sceptre, that a dragon stole a diamond from a
lady.  When its last king left that country, because his
favourite general used a peculiar formation under the fire
of artillery, he brought with him the little ancient image
that no longer proved him a king outside that singular club.
   There was the pair of amethyst cups of the turbaned King
of Foo, the one that he drank from himself, and the one that
he gave to his enemies, eye could not tell which was which.
   All these things the ex-King of Eritivaria showed me,
telling me a marvellous tale of each; of his own he had
brought nothing, except the mascot that used once to sit on
the top of the water tube of his favourite motor.
   I have not outlined a tenth of the splendour of that
table, I had meant to come again and examine each piece of
plate and make notes of its history; had I known that this
was the last time I should wish to enter that club I should
have looked at its treasures more attentively, but now as
the wine went round and the exiles began to talk I took my
eyes from the table and listened to strange tales of their
former state.
   He that has seen better times was usually a poor tale to
tell, some mean and trivial thing that has been his undoing,
but they that dined in that basement had mostly fallen like
oaks on nights of abnormal tempest, had fallen mightily and
shaken a nation.  Those who had not been kings themselves,
but claimed through an exiled ancestor, had stories to tell
of even grander disaster, history seeming to have mellowed
their dynasty's fate as moss grows over an oak a great while
fallen.  There were no jealousies there as so often there
are among kings, rivalry must have ceased with the loss of
their navies and armies, and they showed no bitterness
against those that had turned them out, one speaking of the
error of his Prime Minister by which he had lost his throne
as "poor old Friedrich's Heaven-sent gift of tactlessness."
   They gossiped pleasantly of many things, the
tittle-tattle we all had to know when we were learning
history, and many a wonderful story I might have heard, many
a side-light on mysterious wars had I not made use of one
unfortunate word.  That word was "upstairs."
   The ex-King of Eritivaria having pointed out to me those
unparalleled heirlooms to which I have alluded, and many
more besides, hospitably asked me if there was anything else
that I would care to see, he meant the pieces of plate that
they had in the cupboards, the curiously graven swords of
other princes, historic jewels, legendary seals, but I who
had had a glimpse of their marvelous staircase, whose
balustrade I believed to be solid gold and wondering why in
such a stately house they chose to dine in the basement,
mentioned the word "upstairs."  A profound hush came down on
the whole assembly, the hush that might greet levity in a
cathedral.
   "Upstairs!" he gasped, "We cannot go upstairs."
   I perceived that what I had said was an ill-chosen
thing.  I tried to excuse myself but knew not how.
   "Of course," I muttered, "members may not take guests
upstairs."
   "Members!" he said to me, "We are not the members!"
   There was such reproof in his voice that I said no more,
I looked at him questioningly, perhaps my lips moved, I may
have said, "What are you?"  A great surprise had come on me
at their attitude.
   "We are the waiters," he said.
   That I could not have known, here at least was honest
ignorance that I had no need to be ashamed of, the very
opulence of their table denied it.
   "Then who are the members?" I asked.
   Such a hush fell at that question, such a hush of genuine
awe, that all of a sudden a wild thought entered my head, a
thought strange and fantastic and terrible.  I gripped my
host by the wrist and hushed my voice.
   "Are they too exiles?" I asked.
   Twice as he looked in my face he gravely nodded his head.
   I left that club very swiftly indeed, never to see it
again, scarcely pausing to say farewell to those menial
kings, and as I left the door a great window opened far up
at the top of the house and a flash of lightning streamed
from it and killed a dog.