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Updated: June 25, 2025
Isak hauled up the roof-beams on a rope, Inger guiding them with one hand; it seemed a help just to have her about. Bit by bit the work went on; there was no great height to the roof, but the timber was huge and heavy for a little house. The weather kept fine, more or less. Inger got the potatoes in by herself, and Isak had the roofing done before the rain came on in earnest.
Bashti sighed wearily, and wearily wrapped the heads in their grass-mat coverings all but Van Horn's; and hoisted them up in the air to hang from the roof-beams to hang as he debated, long after he was dead and out if it, even as some of them had so hung from long before his father's and his grandfather's time.
It was the largest house in the village, ambitiously ornamented with fancy-plaited mats and king-posts carved into obscene and monstrous forms half-human and half-animal. Into it they went, in the obscure light stumbling across the sleeping-logs of the village bachelors and knocking their heads against strings of weird votive-offerings, dried and shrivelled, that hung from the roof-beams.
The incongruity, we mean, observable between the queer little ticket-porter and the elfin phantoms of the belfry; between Trotty Veck, in his "breezy, goose-skinned, blue-nosed, red-eyed, stony-toed, tooth-chattering" stand-point by the old church-door, and the Goblin Sight beheld by him when he had clambered up, up, up among the roof-beams of the great church-tower.
As the figure was called, the 'Russian Princess' gave the unique rhythm to limb and body. A chorus of I-told-you-so's shook the squared roof-beams, when lo! it was noticed that 'Aurora Borealis' and another masque, the 'Spirit of the Pole, were performing the same trick equally well.
The windows were high up in the wall, with their heads among the black roof-beams, which with their grotesquely carven brackets were half lost in the dusk. Through the windows Nick could see nothing but a world of chimney-pots. "Is London town all smoke-pipes?" he asked confusedly. "Nay," replied the little maid; "there are people." Pushing a chair up to the table, she bade him sit down.
Among the verandah roof-beams, three grey squirrels argued, with subdued chitterings, over a kipper's head stolen from a breakfast plate; and at intervals a piteous wailing came from the servants' quarters, where, as all knew, Nizam Din, kitmutgar, was beating his pretty wife, Miriam Bibi, for the third time that week, because she had grown careless in the matter of covering her face, since the coming of Zyarulla, whose arrogant magnificence had created a flutter in more than one respectable household.
"Father," said she, patting his cheek, "some one hath told him naughty things of thee. Come, daddy, say they are not so!" The master-player's face turned red as flame. He coughed and looked up among the roof-beams. "Why, of course they're not," said he, uneasily. "There, boy!" cried she; "I told thee so.
At the last fraction of a second, the plane reeled again and crashed into the fisherman's shack before which, from a distance of five miles, a man had been photographed, laughing. Timbers splintered. Glass broke musically. Then there were thuds as men leaped swiftly from the plane and dived under the still-falling roof-beams.
"Just help me to hoist these up," says Isak, and that was all. October came, and Inger had to give up. This was a hard blow, for the roof-beams must be got up at any cost, and the place covered in before the autumn rains; there was not a day to be lost. What could be wrong with Inger? Not going to be ill?
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