boucher book oct28.pdf - Index of

450 Anthony Boucher
ness, I heard a grating croak of which I could make out only the words “… aspiring
blood …” Then I was calmly looking at diamonds again and stepping back to read
the plaque stating that tradition says that here the devout Henry VI was slain at his
orisons in fourteen blankty-blank. With my ears still feeling the rasp of the words
which Shakespeare attributed to his murderer, I prayed for his gentle soul.
And these episodes were without Pernod (brandy at the Opera, tea at the Tower),
but there is no denying the Pernod (the Pernods) when I visited, late at night, the
sports deck of R.M.S. Queen Anne in mid-Atlantic.
The deck was deserted. I like the open decks at night, in any weather save the
most drenching; but the average passenger (wisely? I now wonder) huddles by the
bar or the dance orchestra or the coffee-and-sandwiches or the bingo.
The deck and I were the nucleus of a cocoon of fog, opaque and almost colorless—white,
one might say, in contrast to the soiled fog/smog of a city, but more
of an intensely dense absence of color. Absence of form, absence of movement—a
nothing that tightly enswathed.
We could be in the midst of a story by William Hope Hodgson, I thought, recalling
with a pleasant shudder some of the tales by that master of horror of the sea.
I settled myself in a deck chair. Even with my eyes closed I could sense the fog
pressing in, ever narrowing the limits of my little universe.
My first awareness of the other was through my nose. A lifetime of respiratory
illnesses has left me with a deficient sense of smell normally roused only by, say, a
fine cognac; but this was a smell that even I could notice. Prosaically, it suggested to
me a badly refrigerated fish-market—which would have been horror enough for H.
P. Lovecraft, who found (almost comically, I once thought) something profoundly
horrible in the very notion of fish.
“We could be in the midst of a story by William Hope Hodgson,” said a voice
that I almost recognized.
I could not see him clearly, though he was sitting in the next deck chair. I started
to say, “You took the words—”
“—From the same source as you,” he concluded. “They used Hodgson. He
was one of the first of us. Still the best, perhaps, on the sea, though I had my own
touch in the air.”
“Ev!” I exclaimed, and turned to him with that warmth one feels toward a colleague
who is a genuine professional.
You will remember Everard Wykeham. (And to whom am I speaking? Hypocrite
écrivain …) Wrote a little for Weird Tales back in the Lovecraft days, then went to
England and developed quite a reputation in the Strand and British Argosy. Much
good general fiction, including Buchanesque adventure, but what one particularly
recalls (and so vividly!) are his horror stories, perfect capsules of grisly suggestion,
mostly dealing with the unsuspected and chilling implications, psychological and
metaphysical, of man’s flight in the air. It was true: in the domain of the horror story,
the air was Wykeham’s as the sea was Hodgson’s; and rarely had I flown without a
twinge of grue as I recalled one or another of the Wykeham stories collected as The
Arrow That Flies.
Wykeham and I had never been intimate; but we had met occasionally at conventions
or at publishers’ parties and had (I think) liked and respected each other. Now