Note 11 — III

Eric Stenbock was at Balliol, Oxford. He collaborated in a volume of translations of Balzac’s ‘Short Stories.’ He contributed to Lord Alfred Douglas’s The Spirit Lamp. As a specimen of his style the following extract from his short story, The Other Side, may be offered. It is supposed to be an old Breton woman’s description of the Black Mass:

‘Then when they get to the top of the hill, there is an altar with six candles quite black and a sort of something in between, that nobody sees quite clearly, and the old black ram with the man’s face and long horns begins to say Mass in a sort of gibberish nobody understands, and two black strange things like monkeys glide about with the book and the cruets—and there’s music too, such music. There are things the top half like black cats, and the bottom part like men only their legs are all covered with close black hair, and they play on the bag-pipes, and when they come to the elevation then—. Amid the old crones there was lying on the hearth-rug, before the fire, a boy whose large lovely eyes dilated and whose limbs quivered in the very ecstacy of terror.’