Nice country town became a great Centre of Industry, full of
wealth and desirable family mansions and street property, and was
called in hell 'Depot B' (Depot A you may guess at). But at last
toward the 15th of October 1900, the Learned Man began to shake in his
shoes and to dread the judgement; for, you see, he had not the
comfortable ignorance of his kind, and was compelled to believe in the
Devil willy-nilly, and, as I say, he shook in his shoes.
So he bethought him of a plan to cheat the Devil, and the day before
All-Hallowe'en he cut a very small round hole in the floor of his
study, just near the fireplace, right through down to the cellar. Then
he got a number of things that do great harm (newspapers, legal
documents, unpaid bills, and so forth) and made ready for action.
Next morning when the little imps came for orders as usual, after
prayers, he took them down into the cellar, and pointing out the hole
in the ceiling, he said to them:
'My friends, this little hole is a mystery. It communicates, I
believe, with the chapel; but I cannot find the exit. All I know is,
that some pious person or angel, or what not, desirous to do good,
slips into it every day whatever he thinks may be a cause of evil in
the neighbourhood, hoping thus to destroy it' (in proof of which
statement he showed them a scattered heap of newspapers on the floor
of the cellar beneath the hole). 'And the best thing you can do,' he
added, 'is to stay here and take them away as far as they come down
and put them back into circulation again. Tut! tut!' he added, picking
up a moneylender's threatening letter to a widow, 'it is astonishing
how these people interfere with the most sacred rights! Here is a
letter actually stolen from the post! Pray see that it is delivered.'
So he left the little imps at work, and fed them from above with all
manner of evil-doing things, which they as promptly drew into the
cellar, and at intervals flew away with, to put them into circulation
again.
That evening, at about half-past eleven, the Devil came to fetch the
Learned Man, and found him seated at his fine great desk, writing. The
Learned Man got up very affably to receive the Devil, and offered him
a chair by the fire, just near the little round hole.
'Pray don't move,' said the Devil; 'I came early on purpose not to
disturb you.'
'You are very good,' replied the Learned Man. 'The fact is, I have to
finish my report on Lady Grope's Settlement among our Poor in the Bull
Ring - it is making some progress. But their condition is
heart-breaking, my dear sir; heart-breaking!'
'I can well believe it,' said the Devil sadly and solemnly, leaning
back in his chair, and pressing his hands together like a roof. 'The
poor in our great towns, Sir Charles' (for the Learned Man had been
made a Baronet), 'the condition, I say, of the - Don't I feel a
draught?' he added abruptly. For the Devil can't bear draughts.
'Why,' said the Learned Man, as though ashamed, 'just near your chair
there _is_ a little hole that I have done my best to fill up, but
somehow it seemed impossible to fill it... I don't know...'
The Devil hates excuses, and is above all practical, so he just
whipped the soul of a lawyer out of his side-pocket, tied a knot in it
to stiffen it, and shoved it into the hole.
'There!' said the Devil contentedly; 'if you had taken a piece of rag,
or what not, you might yourself... Hulloa!...' He looked down and saw
the hole still gaping, and he felt a furious draught coming up again.
He wondered a little, and then muttered: 'It's a pity I have on my
best things. I never dare crease them, and I have nothing in my
pockets to speak of, otherwise I might have brought something bigger.'
He felt in his left-hand trouser pocket, and fished out a pedant,
crumpled him carefully into a ball, and stuffed him hard into the
hole, so that he suffered agonies. Then the Devil watched carefully.
The soul of the pedant was at first tugged as if from below, then
drawn slowly down, and finally shot off out of sight.
'This is a most extraordinary thing!' said the Devil.
'It is the draught. It is very strong between the joists,' ventured
the Learned Man.
'Fiddle-sticks ends!' shouted the Devil. 'It is a trick! But I've
never been caught yet, and I never will be.'
He clapped his hands, and a whole host of his followers poured in
through the windows with mortgages, Acts of Parliament, legal
decisions, declarations of war, charters to universities, patents for
medicines, naturalization orders, shares in gold mines,
specifications, prospectuses, water companies' reports, publishers'
agreements, letters patent, freedoms of cities, and, in a word, all
that the Devil controls in the way of hole-stopping rubbish; and the
Devil, kneeling on the floor, stuffed them into the hole like a
madman. But as fast as he stuffed, the little imps below (who had
summoned a number of their kind to their aid also) pulled it through
and carted it away. And the Devil, like one possessed, lashed the
floor with his tail, and his eyes glared like coals of fire, and the
sweat ran down his face, and he breathed hard, and pushed every
imaginable thing he had into the hole so swiftly that at last his
documents and parchments looked like streaks and flashes.
