[11] 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.’
The “espada” had come forward, mumbled his boniment in Andaluz, swung his montera over his shoulder upon the ground, and after sticking his sword in every quarter of the bull had butchered him at last amid the applause of the assembled populace. Blood on the sand; sun on the white plaza; upon the women’s faces “cascarilla”; scarlet and yellow fans, and white mantillas with “fleco y alamares” in the antique style...; women selling water, calling out “aguá!” in so guttural a voice it seemed like Arabic; Cardobese hats, short jackets, and from the plaza a scent of blood and sweat acting like a rank aphrodisiac upon the crowd, and making the women squeeze each other’s sweating hands, and look ambiguously at one another, as they were men; and causing the youths, with swaying hips and with their hair cut low upon their foreheads, to smile with open lips and eyes that met your glance, as they had been half women. Blood, harlotry, sun, gay colours, flowers and waving palm-trees, women with roses stuck behind their ears, mules covered up in harness of red worsted, cigar girls, gipsies, tourists, soldiers, and the little villainous-looking urchins, who, though born old, do duty as children in the South.’