THE REBUKE
Michael Shea
I
HACKLE the Smaller, by the spring of his fifty-first year, saw his death almost every day. It was a Death-by-Disease, and like most of this class, was a communicative sort that liked to get acquainted with its clients. The two of them would sit at dusk on Hackle's crumbling porch, talking quietly or pausing in their talk, their eyes musing on the hilly city of Hrabb, just across the Tumble River.
Hackle viewed that city of Hrabb with a stoic bitterness which flared into invective whenever he had a coughing fit. First, of course—whenever he coughed—he shot a questioning look at his death, which had always quietly shaken its head, so far at least. Then, when Hackle had finished the deep, sick labor, and spat out the clot of infection, he would shake his fist toward Hrabb and growl—his voice low to spare his lungs—"Smite and smash you, Hrabb, O Whore among cities! Oh that the blow might fall on you!"
His death understood the reference, which was to a fantasy of Hackle's. The prosperous main body of Hrabb, a clutch of marble-studded knolls, was overloomed by a crag—a tall, ragged eruption of naked rock from the riverside hills. In the cross-river slums where Hackle now resided, there was an old saying about this crag: "If the prayers of the poor could push stone, the Jut would have fallen on Nabob Hill a hundred years ago." Hackle's wish would go this proverb one better.
He had been, before the decay of his fortunes, a Statuarius, Master Grade, and one of his fortes and special loves had always been hands. Bodge of the Central Statuarium had been wont to say, when they sat with their colleagues in the refectory: "Now Hackle here, God bless him, friends—Hackle here cuts fingers as articulate, as eloquent as tongues. Hackle's hands speak, and they speak not prose, but balanced stanzas. Have we not seen him convey whole epics with the faintest crooking of a left thumb?"
So that now, on half-pension and dying from the toxic rock dust of the quarries, too poor to inhabit the city where once his profession had been dined and eulogized at the tables of the great—now in his ruin Hackle impotently longed to do a master-work, a stupendous clenched fist of stone poised to annihilate the city under it.
Sometimes Hackle would start running on about this project, which always distressed his death. Averting its small, starved face—usually so sympathetic—it would tactfully encourage him to resignation.
"Ah, well, my dear Hackle! But then, as you know, many of my colleagues have clients here, retired Statuarii. No suffering is unique, after all."
But, in fact, Hackle was no longer really angry at his city. It was half in jest that he pictured his fist as literally falling, for its mere sculpting would suffice him, a colossal proclamation of his contempt for all that was venal, facile, and corrupt in the values of his wealthier countrymen. But how could he really hate something as diffuse and masterless as that circus of follies, the Culture Market? The public purse has always fed or starved the arts according to its whim. In truth, he had better cause for anger at his own Guild. If sculpture in Hrabb, after its long supremacy, was now so displaced by other arts, so unattended, who but the Statuarium itself was to blame? In its infallible lust for immediate profit the Guild had energetically recapitulated whatever sold well, and tirelessly boycotted, blocked, and otherwise muffled every one of those stylistic radicals who might have infused new life into its art. Need anyone wonder that music, haute cuisine, and even literature currently engrossed the well-to-do—and their purses? Once the Guild had given steady birth to a marmoreal populace which took up residence in the gardens and grottos of the rich, the lamaseries and monkeries of the hills, the municipal prayer booths and public parks. Now the market was glutted.
Ships plied the Tumble laden with stony refugees, all bound for sale at discounts far away, where their history was unknown, and they were oddities. Oh, yes, the Statuarium could be said to have achieved what it had so blockheadedly worked for!
Yet, even for the Guild, Hackle felt little more than the remnants of anger. It did still cause him a twinge to recall the zeal with which the Guild's Directors had lobbied for city subsidies to open the pellucite quarry. How greedily they'd embraced this boon of bright, abundant, easy-working stone! But then they had at least all shared the unlucky outcome of its use, the tainted lungs and shortness of life. What else was to be expected, after all, of any human institution? All were heir to misfunction, self-damage, eventual entropy. Witness the Guild's concluding fiasco —the investment of its long-term assets in western blood-oysters, wherein said assets sank without a bubble. This left Hackle and his fellows hunched in the cross-river slums drawing stipends too small to buy more than one meal a day. What a perfect finishing touch, in a way! Guilds and their like are but men, after all, and men are fools.
And so, late one afternoon as they watched the sun wester behind hilly Hrabb, and his death was gently upbraiding him for some of his typical large talk, Hackle made a sudden gesture—as of surrender—and interrupted his companion.
"Please, my friend. After all, you know, it's really little more than a game of mine to carry on about the city, or the Statuarium. The fist—I'd like to carve it, yes. One last great orgy of expression, my concluding judgment on men and their world fairly thundered out, writ huge! But after all, everyone's world is a trap, a course of obstacles and pitfalls. The game has always been to outsmart your world—to excel, to accomplish good work in spite of it. Your colleagues must have told you how some of my retired coworkers rant and repine. 'Oh, but for this evil man or that stroke of bad luck, I'd be a wealthy and healthy success today!' And that's childish, after all, isn't it? To cry foul and swear you've been cheated? Far better to accept responsibility. It's a state of mind that leaves you readier for action."
His death sat hunched attentively, its elbows on its stark-knobbed knees. In their shadowy, bruise-colored sockets its eyes were vague and meditative glints. It seemed—while politely engrossed—to be hearing some faint, contradictory undertone in Hackle's words. Absently, it screwed a fingertip into its tattered ear and dislodged a wriggling maggot which, musingly, it flicked away.
"You speak now, my dear Hackle, like the excellent man I know you to be, though perhaps a readiness for action is not the most appropriate state of mind to cultivate in your present, ah, circumstances. Still your gameness does you credit, as does your manly acceptance of responsibility. But, you know, strangely enough, in spite of your assurances, I feel that there is some great anger in you, some vengeful fire. There is some deep matter wherein you do cast blame."
"Oh, yes, indeed. Nor is it anything I make a secret of. Have I not spoken to you of Haffkraff ?"
"Your Guild-sponsor."
"The same. Guide and governor of the first ten years of my education. Oh, brilliant, self-indulgent Haffkraff! How you betrayed me, week in, week out, through the long irrevocable seasons of my first development!"
"I think I have noted some grudge in you against this man. Yet your references to him are elliptical, oblique."
"Have I not said enough in saying that he educated me? Why, after all, did I not rise above the Guild? Why did I spend my life chained to it, and to Hrabb? Obviously due to a failure of talent— not lack of talent, but failure to master it, to give it the force and focus to accomplish something lasting. Were other worlds ever lacking, had my art been robust and confident enough to put at risk abroad? Why not go free-hammer in one of the south-coast cities, or hang out my shingle as magus lapidarius in some city of the Barbarian League, where a theorist of style might try—and get away with—anything?"
"My friend, I see you embrace the very fallacy you just now denounced. You're crying foul, and swearing you've been cheated."
Hackle gave his head a firm shake. "I'm sorry, my friend. That is logically true, no doubt. But this matter of education—it constitutes an exception, I believe. For, in every life's budding phase, where is responsibility for its growth if not with its teachers— with those who nurse its development? How, after all, can it nurse its own? The bitter thing is how able Haffkraff was to have done right by me. He had the talent, and my devotion! Any youngster would have burned to be like that lean, crankish man, who could make any solemn matter dance in the quick flame of his mockery, and with one laconic flicker of his scorn—a mere phrase—could reduce the most earnest pretension to ash! His chisel was as articulate—and as irresponsible—as his tongue. There was the key to his cowardice, you see—he lived off what he scorned, and shamelessly carved in stone, for gold, every cliche or fatuity he had ever mocked. Yet he would have bridled at a charge of hypocrisy—he believed his mockery absolved him of sin. For he was one of those satiric sorts whose prime concern was, by invalidating all around them, to remain free. Such men are their own audience, but will also use a pupil for audience, careless of his education. I learned his accuracy, his flexible invention—his comic skills. But I also swallowed whole his facile misanthropy and nihilism and—with these—his primary rationalization for doing pointless work."
"Can any teacher be omnicompetent?" his death asked delicately. "Surely the student's budding powers of judgment must be invoked at some point to assess his teacher's limits."
"But how? How could I have guessed the truths that this errant jack-of-all styles concealed from me? That great work is done only by those who risk seriousness—who stake off a ground of Truth and take a stand on it? Had I known these things in time, I might have imbibed the necessary ardor to forge my talent into something rare! I will tell you how I have come to understand —to visualize Haffkraff's crime against me. The teacher must regard a student as a work in progress. Each stroke, each pressure on his mind, must be deliberate, intended. The teacher's talent may be mediocre, but the mind he shapes will have learned at least of method, care, and purpose—learned the gravity of art.
But to heedless, hedonistic Haffkraff I was no work in progress. I was a practice-stone—such cheap chalkstone as stands in apprentices' halls to study technique on, or chop out a quick study of some theme. He practiced his notions on me—whatever they might be at a given time. There's his crime in essence, for which I never will forgive the damned old mountebank! And there, my friend, you have my history—what made me a jack-of-all-styles myself, a patchy talent, brilliant only in fits and starts—fit, in short, to spend my career, and my life, in the Guild."
After a brief silence, Hackle's death shivered. "Getting cold," it muttered. Leaning forward, and plugging one ragged nose hole with a black-nailed thumb, it blew a maggot from the other hole, and crushed it carefully under the ball of its stark-tendoned foot. "I do hate to hear clients recriminating like this," the death breathed sadly. "Rage is so useless for the business we have at hand."
Sighing, Hackle shrugged. The sigh had concession in it. The shrug was somehow mulish and unappeased.
II
Not many days after this conversation, Hackle and his death took an afternoon stroll by the river, along the slum shore's crumbling quays and rotting wharves. They talked, with many lackadaisical pauses, about mankind's love of life.
"An intractable paradox," the death said at length. "People will, on the weakest pretexts, waste vast amounts of time on aimless and valueless activities. They will do this to avoid fruitful and productive activities—even when these activities are not difficult. It is enough that they be 'work' to make them shunned. And yet no man or woman I have known would give away one week of his life, even if it purchased some rare thing."
Hackle was greatly surprised. "Can this be true?" The death gave a deprecatory wave of one gaunt hand. "Granting two conditions—that they are aware their deaths are somewhere close at hand, and that they are not in any extreme bodily agony. With these provisos I can swear to you that I have met no one who would willingly trade a week for anything I could offer."
"But this is quite astonishing!"
"Well, not that astonishing, surely. There is always the chance that one's fated time of death is less than a week away, and in that case one loses both life's remnant and the reward he sold it for."
"Certainly, but you misunderstood me. What I found astonishing was primarily the fact that you made such offers in the first place!"
The death showed some discomfort. It stayed Hackle, glanced left and right, and spoke in a lowered voice. "You must understand. These little bargains are in the nature of a personal interest of mine. They are not, ah, sanctioned, or even countenanced, by my superiors. Quite the reverse, in fact."
Hackle nodded sympathetically and kept his own voice low: "I understand. What do you offer in exchange for this week of life?"
...
widez2