The Project Gutenberg Etext of Can Such Things Be?
by Ambrose Bierce
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Title: Can Such Things Be?
Author: Ambrose Bierce
Release Date: August, 2003 [Etext #4366]
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The Project Gutenberg Etext of Can Such Things Be?
by Ambrose Bierce
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CAN SUCH THINGS BE?
Contents:
The death of Halpin Frayser
The secret of Macarger’s Gulch
One summer night
The moonlit road
A diagnosis of death
Moxon’s master
A tough tussle
One of twins
The haunted valley
A jug of sirup
Staley Fleming’s hallucination
A resumed identity
Hazen’s brigade
A baby tramp
The night-doings at “Deadman’s”
A story that is untrue
Beyond the wall
A psychological shipwreck
The middle toe of the right foot
John Mortonson’s funeral
The realm of the unreal
John Bartine’s watch
A story by a physician
The damned thing
Haïta the shepherd
An inhabitant of Carcosa
The Stranger
THE DEATH OF HALPIN FRAYSER
I
For by death is wrought greater change than hath been shown. Whereas
in general the spirit that removed cometh back upon occasion, and is
sometimes seen of those in flesh (appearing in the form of the body
it bore) yet it hath happened that the veritable body without the spirit
hath walked. And it is attested of those encountering who have
lived to speak thereon that a lich so raised up hath no natural affection,
nor remembrance thereof, but only hate. Also, it is known that
some spirits which in life were benign become by death evil altogether.
- Hali.
One dark night in midsummer a man waking from a dreamless sleep
in a forest lifted his head from the earth, and staring a few moments
into the blackness, said: “Catherine Larue.” He said
nothing more; no reason was known to him why he should have said so
much.
The man was Halpin Frayser. He lived in St. Helena, but where
he lives now is uncertain, for he is dead. One who practices sleeping
in the woods with nothing under him but the dry leaves and the damp
earth, and nothing over him but the branches from which the leaves have
fallen and the sky from which the earth has fallen, cannot hope for
great longevity, and Frayser had already attained the age of thirty-two.
There are persons in this world, millions of persons, and far and away
the best persons, who regard that as a very advanced age. They
are the children. To those who view the voyage of life from the
port of departure the bark that has accomplished any considerable distance
appears already in close approach to the farther shore. However,
it is not certain that Halpin Frayser came to his death by exposure.
He had been all day in the hills west of the Napa Valley, looking for
doves and such small game as was in season. Late in the afternoon
it had come on to be cloudy, and he had lost his bearings; and although
he had only to go always downhill - everywhere the way to safety when
one is lost - the absence of trails had so impeded him that he was overtaken
by night while still in the forest. Unable in the darkness to
penetrate the thickets of manzanita and other undergrowth, utterly bewildered
and overcome with fatigue, he had lain down near the root of a large
madroño and fallen into a dreamless sleep. It was hours
later, in the very middle of the night, that one of God’s mysterious
messengers, gliding ahead of the incalculable host of his companions
sweeping westward with the dawn line, pronounced the awakening word
in the ear of the sleeper, who sat upright and spoke, he knew not why,
a name, he knew not whose.
Halpin Frayser was not much of a philosopher, nor a scientist.
The circumstance that, waking from a deep sleep at night in the midst
of a forest, he had spoken aloud a name that he had not in memory and
hardly had in mind did not arouse an enlightened curiosity to investigate
the phenomenon. He thought it odd, and with a little perfunctory
shiver, as if in deference to a seasonal presumption that the night
was chill, he lay down again and went to sleep. But his sleep
was no longer dreamless.
He thought he was walking along a dusty road that showed white in the
gathering darkness of a summer night. Whence and whither it led,
and why he traveled it, he did not know, though all seemed simple and
natural, as is the way in dreams; for in the Land Beyond the Bed surprises
cease from troubling and the judgment is at rest. Soon he came
to a parting of the ways; leading from the highway was a road less traveled,
having the appearance, indeed, of having been long abandoned, because,
he thought, it led to something evil; yet he turned into it without
hesitation, impelled by some imperious necessity.
As he pressed forward he became conscious that his way was haunted by
invisible existences whom he could not definitely figure to his mind.
From among the trees on either side he caught broken and incoherent
whispers in a strange tongue which yet he partly understood. They
seemed to him fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracy against
his body and soul.
It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable forest through
which he journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point of diffusion,
for in its mysterious lumination nothing cast a shadow. A shallow
pool in the guttered depression of an old wheel rut, as from a recent
rain, met his eye with a crimson gleam. He stooped and plunged
his hand into it. It stained his fingers; it was blood!
Blood, he then observed, was about him everywhere. The weeds growing
rankly by the roadside showed it in blots and splashes on their big,
broad leaves. Patches of dry dust between the wheelways were pitted
and spattered as with a red rain. Defiling the trunks of the trees
were broad maculations of crimson, and blood dripped like dew from their
foliage.
All this he observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with
the fulfillment of a natural expectation. It seemed to him that
it was all in expiation of some crime which, though conscious of his
guilt, he could not rightly remember. To the menaces and mysteries
of his surroundings the consciousness was an added horror. Vainly
he sought by tracing life backward in memory, to reproduce the moment
of his sin; scenes and incidents came crowding tumultuously into his
mind, one picture effacing another, or commingling with it in confusion
and obscurity, but nowhere could he catch a glimpse of what he sought.
The failure augmented his terror; he felt as one who has murdered in
the dark, not knowing whom nor why. So frightful was the situation
- the mysterious light burned with so silent and awful a menace; the
noxious plants, the trees that by common consent are invested with a
melancholy or baleful character, so openly in his sight conspired against
his peace; from overhead and all about came so audible and startling
whispers and the sighs of creatures so obviously not of earth - that
he could endure it no longer, and with a great effort to break some
malign spell that bound his faculties to silence and inaction, he shouted
with the full strength of his lungs! His voice broken, it seemed,
into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, went babbling and stammering
away into the distant reaches of the forest, died into silence, and
all was as before. But he had made a beginning at resistance and
was encouraged. He said:
“I will not submit unheard. There may be powers that are
not malignant traveling this accursed road. I shall leave them
a record and an appeal. I shall relate my wrongs, the persecutions
that I endure - I, a helpless mortal, a penitent, an unoffending poet!”
Halpin Frayser was a poet only as he was a penitent: in his dream.
Taking from his clothing a small red-leather pocketbook, one-half of
which was leaved for memoranda, he discovered that he was without a
pencil. He broke a twig from a bush, dipped it into a pool of
blood and wrote rapidly. He had hardly touched the paper with
the point of his twig when a low, wild peal of laughter broke out at
a measureless distance away, and growing ever louder, seemed approaching
ever nearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of
the loon, solitary by the lakeside at midnight; a laugh which culminated
in an unearthly shout close at hand, then died away by slow gradations,
as if the accursed being that uttered it had withdrawn over the verge
of the world whence it had come. But the man felt that this was
not so - that it was near by and had not moved.
A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of his body and
his mind. He could not have said which, if any, of his senses
was affected; he felt it rather as a consciousness - a mysterious mental
assurance of some overpowering presence - some supernatural malevolence
different in kind from the invisible existences that swarmed about him,
and superior to them in power. He knew that it had uttered that
hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be approaching him; from what
direction he did not know - dared not conjecture. All his former
fears were forgotten or merged in the gigantic terror that now held
him in thrall. Apart from that, he had but one thought: to complete
his written appeal to the benign powers who, traversing the haunted
wood, might some time rescue him if he should be denied the blessing
of annihilation. He wrote with terrible rapidity, the twig in
his fingers rilling blood without renewal; but in the middle of a sentence
his hands denied their service to his will, his arms fell to his sides,
the book to the earth; and powerless to move or cry out, he found himself
staring into the sharply drawn face and blank, dead eyes of his own
mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave!
II
In his youth Halpin Frayser had lived with his parents in Nashville,
Tennessee. The Fraysers were well-to-do, having a good position
in such society as had survived the wreck wrought by civil war.
Their children had the social and educational opportunities of their
time and place, and had responded to good associations and instruction
with agreeable manners and cultivated minds. Halpin being the
youngest and not over robust was perhaps a trifle “spoiled.”
He had the double disadvantage of a mother’s assiduity and a father’s
neglect. Frayser père was what no Southern man of means
is not - a politician. His country, or rather his section and
State, made demands upon his time and attention so exacting that to
those of his family he was compelled to turn an ear partly deafened
by the thunder of the political captains and the shouting, his own included.
Young Halpin was of a dreamy, indolent and rather romantic turn, somewhat
more addicted to literature than law, the profession to which he was
bred. Among those of his relations who professed the modern faith
of heredity it was well understood that in him the character of the
late Myron Bayne, a maternal great-grandfather, had revisited the glimpses
of the moon - by which orb Bayne had in his lifetime been sufficiently
affected to be a poet of no small Colonial distinction. If not
specially observed, it was observable that while a Frayser who was not
the proud possessor of a sumptuous copy of the ancestral “poetical
works” (printed at the family expense, and long ago withdrawn
from an inhospitable market) was a rare Frayser indeed, there was an
illogical indisposition to honor the great deceased in the person of
his spiritual successor. Halpin was pretty generally deprecated
as an intellectual black sheep who was likely at any moment to disgrace
the flock by bleating in meter. The Tennessee Fraysers were a
practical folk - not practical in the popular sense of devotion to sordid
pursuits, but having a robust contempt for any qualities unfitting a
man for the wholesome vocation of politics.
In justice to young Halpin it should be said that while in him were
pretty faithfully reproduced most of the mental and moral characteristics
ascribed by history and family tradition to the famous Colonial bard,
his succession to the gift and faculty divine was purely inferential.
Not only had he never been known to court the muse, but in truth he
could not have written correctly a line of verse to save himself from
the Killer of the Wise. Still, there was no knowing when the dormant
faculty might wake and smite the lyre.
In the meantime the young man was rather a loose fish, anyhow.
Between him and his mother was the most perfect sympathy, for secretly
the lady was herself a devout disciple of the late and great Myron Bayne,
though with the tact so generally and justly admired in her sex (despite
the hardy calumniators who insist that it is essentially the same thing
as cunning) she had always taken care to conceal her weakness from all
eyes but those of him who shared it. Their common guilt in respect
of that was an added tie between them. If in Halpin’s youth
his mother had “spoiled” him, he had assuredly done his
part toward being spoiled. As he grew to such manhood as is attainable
by a Southerner who does not care which way elections go the attachment
between him and his beautiful mother - whom from early childhood he
had called Katy - became yearly stronger and more tender. In these
two romantic natures was manifest in a signal way that neglected phenomenon,
the dominance of the sexual element in all the relations of life, strengthening,
softening, and beautifying even those of consanguinity. The two
were nearly inseparable, and by strangers observing their manner were
not infrequently mistaken for lovers.
Entering his mother’s boudoir one day Halpin Frayser kissed her
upon the forehead, toyed for a moment with a lock of her dark hair which
had escaped from its confining pins, and said, with an obvious effort
at calmness:
“Would you greatly mind, Katy, if I were called away to California
for a few weeks?”
It was hardly needful for Katy to answer with her lips a question to
which her telltale cheeks had made instant reply. Evidently she
would greatly mind; and the tears, too, sprang into her large brown
eyes as corroborative testimony.
“Ah, my son,” she said, looking up into his face with infinite
tenderness, “I should have known that this was coming. Did
I not lie awake a half of the night weeping because, during the other
half, Grandfather Bayne had come to me in a dream, and standing by his
portrait - young, too, and handsome as that - pointed to yours on the
same wall? And when I looked it seemed that I could not see the
features; you had been painted with a face cloth, such as we put upon
the dead. Your father has laughed at me, but you and I, dear,
know that such things are not for nothing. And I saw below the
edge of the cloth the marks of hands on your throat - forgive me, but
we have not been used to keep such things from each other. Perhaps
you have another interpretation. Perhaps it does not mean that
you will go to California. Or maybe you will take me with you?”
It must be confessed that this ingenious interpretation of the dream
in the light of newly discovered evidence did not wholly commend itself
to the son’s more logical mind; he had, for the moment at least,
a conviction that it foreshadowed a more simple and immediate, if less
tragic, disaster than a visit to the Pacific Coast. It was Halpin
Frayser’s impression that he was to be garroted on his native
heath.
“Are there not medicinal springs in California?” Mrs. Frayser
resumed before he had time to give her the true reading of the dream
- “places where one recovers from rheumatism and neuralgia?
Look - my fingers feel so stiff; and I am almost sure they have been
giving me great pain while I slept.”
She held out her hands for his inspection. What diagnosis of her
case the young man may have thought it best to conceal with a smile
the historian is unable to state, but for himself he feels bound to
say that fingers looking less stiff, and showing fewer evidences of
even insensible pain, have seldom been submitted for medical inspection
by even the fairest patient desiring a prescription of unfamiliar scenes.
The outcome of it was that of these two odd persons having equally odd
notions of duty, the one went to California, as the interest of his
client required, and the other remained at home in compliance with a
wish that her husband was scarcely conscious of entertaining.
While in San Francisco Halpin Frayser was walking one dark night along
the water front of the city, when, with a suddenness that surprised
and disconcerted him, he became a sailor. He was in fact “shanghaied”
aboard a gallant, gallant ship, and sailed for a far countree.
Nor did his misfortunes end with the voyage; for the ship was cast ashore
on an island of the South Pacific, and it was six years afterward when
the survivors were taken off by a venturesome trading schooner and brought
back to San Francisco.
Though poor in purse, Frayser was no less proud in spirit than he had
been in the years that seemed ages and ages ago. He would accept
no assistance from strangers, and it was while living with a fellow
survivor near the town of St. Helena, awaiting news and remittances
from home, that he had gone gunning and dreaming.
III
The apparition confronting the dreamer in the haunted wood - the thing
so like, yet so unlike his mother - was horrible! It stirred no
love nor longing in his heart; it came unattended with pleasant memories
of a golden past - inspired no sentiment of any kind; all the finer
emotions were swallowed up in fear. He tried to turn and run from
before it, but his legs were as lead; he was unable to lift his feet
from the ground. His arms hung helpless at his sides; of his eyes
only he retained control, and these he dared not remove from the lusterless
orbs of the apparition, which he knew was not a soul without a body,
but that most dreadful of all existences infesting that haunted wood
- a body without a soul! In its blank stare was neither love,
nor pity, nor intelligence - nothing to which to address an appeal for
mercy. “An appeal will not lie,” he thought, with
an absurd reversion to professional slang, making the situation more
horrible, as the fire of a cigar might light up a tomb.
For a time, which seemed so long that the world grew gray with age and
sin, and the haunted forest, having fulfilled its purpose in this monstrous
culmination of its terrors, vanished out of his consciousness with all
its sights and sounds, the apparition stood within a pace, regarding
him with the mindless malevolence of a wild brute; then thrust its hands
forward and sprang upon him with appalling ferocity! The act released
his physical energies without unfettering his will; his mind was still
spellbound, but his powerful body and agile limbs, endowed with a blind,
insensate life of their own, resisted stoutly and well. For an
instant he seemed to see this unnatural contest between a dead intelligence
and a breathing mechanism only as a spectator - such fancies are in
dreams; then he regained his identity almost as if by a leap forward
into his body, and the straining automaton had a directing will as alert
and fierce as that of its hideous antagonist.
But what mortal can cope with a creature of his dream? The imagination
creating the enemy is already vanquished; the combat’s result
is the combat’s cause. Despite his struggles - despite his
strength and activity, which seemed wasted in a void, he felt the cold
fingers close upon his throat. Borne backward to the earth, he
saw above him the dead and drawn face within a hand’s breadth
of his own, and then all was black. A sound as of the beating
of distant drums - a murmur of swarming voices, a sharp, far cry signing
all to silence, and Halpin Frayser dreamed that he was dead.
IV
A warm, clear night had been followed by a morning of drenching fog.
At about the middle of the afternoon of the preceding day a little whiff
of light vapor - a mere thickening of the atmosphere, the ghost of a
cloud - had been observed clinging to the western side of Mount St.
Helena, away up along the barren altitudes near the summit. It
was so thin, so diaphanous, so like a fancy made visible, that one would
have said: “Look quickly! in a moment it will be gone.”
In a moment it was visibly larger and denser. While with one edge
it clung to the mountain, with the other it reached farther and farther
out into the air above the lower slopes. At the same time it extended
itself to north and south, joining small patches of mist that appeared
to come out of the mountainside on exactly the same level, with an intelligent
design to be absorbed. And so it grew and grew until the summit
was shut out of view from the valley, and over the valley itself was
an ever-extending canopy, opaque and gray. At Calistoga, which
lies near the head of the valley and the foot of the mountain, there
were a starless night and a sunless morning. The fog, sinking
into the valley, had reached southward, swallowing up ranch after ranch,
until it had blotted out the town of St. Helena, nine miles away.
The dust in the road was laid; trees were adrip with moisture; birds
sat silent in their coverts; the morning light was wan and ghastly,
with neither color nor fire.
Two men left the town of St. Helena at the first glimmer of dawn, and
walked along the road northward up the valley toward Calistoga.
They carried guns on their shoulders, yet no one having knowledge of
such matters could have mistaken them for hunters of bird or beast.
They were a deputy sheriff from Napa and a detective from San Francisco
- Holker and Jaralson, respectively. Their business was man-hunting.
“How far is it?” inquired Holker, as they strode along,
their feet stirring white the dust beneath the damp surface of the road.
“The White Church? Only a half mile farther,” the
other answered. “By the way,” he added, “it
is neither white nor a church; it is an abandoned schoolhouse, gray
with age and neglect. Religious services were once held in it
- when it was white, and there is a graveyard that would delight a poet.
Can you guess why I sent for you, and told you to come heeled?”
“Oh, I never have bothered you about things of that kind.
I’ve always found you communicative when the time came.
But if I may hazard a guess, you want me to help you arrest one of the
corpses in the graveyard.”
“You remember Branscom?” said Jaralson, treating his companion’s
wit with the inattention that it deserved.
“The chap who cut his wife’s throat? I ought; I wasted
a week’s work on him and had my expenses for my trouble.
There is a reward of five hundred dollars, but none of us ever got a
sight of him. You don’t mean to say - ”
“Yes, I do. He has been under the noses of you fellows all
the time. He comes by night to the old graveyard at the White
Church.”
“The devil! That’s where they buried his wife.”
“Well, you fellows might have had sense enough to suspect that
he would return to her grave some time.”
“The very last place that anyone would have expected him to return
to.”
“But you had exhausted all the other places. Learning your
failure at them, I ‘laid for him’ there.”
“And you found him?”
“Damn it! he found me. The rascal got the drop on
me - regularly held me up and made me travel. It’s God’s
mercy that he didn’t go through me. Oh, he’s a good
one, and I fancy the half of that reward is enough for me if you’re
needy.”
Holker laughed good humoredly, and explained that his creditors were
never more importunate.
“I wanted merely to show you the ground, and arrange a plan with
you,” the detective explained. “I thought it as well
for us to be heeled, even in daylight.”
“The man must be insane,” said the deputy sheriff.
“The reward is for his capture and conviction. If he’s
mad he won’t be convicted.”
Mr. Holker was so profoundly affected by that possible failure of justice
that he involuntarily stopped in the middle of the road, then resumed
his walk with abated zeal.
“Well, he looks it,” assented Jaralson. “I’m
bound to admit that a more unshaven, unshorn, unkempt, and uneverything
wretch I never saw outside the ancient and honorable order of tramps.
But I’ve gone in for him, and can’t make up my mind to let
go. There’s glory in it for us, anyhow. Not another
soul knows that he is this side of the Mountains of the Moon.”
“All right,” Holker said; “we will go and view the
ground,” and he added, in the words of a once favorite inscription
for tombstones: “‘where you must shortly lie’ - I
mean, if old Branscom ever gets tired of you and your impertinent intrusion.
By the way, I heard the other day that ‘Branscom’ was not
his real name.”
“What is?”
“I can’t recall it. I had lost all interest in the
wretch, and it did not fix itself in my memory - something like Pardee.
The woman whose throat he had the bad taste to cut was a widow when
he met her. She had come to California to look up some relatives
- there are persons who will do that sometimes. But you know all
that.”
“Naturally.”
“But not knowing the right name, by what happy inspiration did
you find the right grave? The man who told me what the name was
said it had been cut on the headboard.”
“I don’t know the right grave.” Jaralson was
apparently a trifle reluctant to admit his ignorance of so important
a point of his plan. “I have been watching about the place
generally. A part of our work this morning will be to identify
that grave. Here is the White Church.”
For a long distance the road had been bordered by fields on both sides,
but now on the left there was a forest of oaks, madroños, and
gigantic spruces whose lower parts only could be seen, dim and ghostly
in the fog. The undergrowth was, in places, thick, but nowhere
impenetrable. For some moments Holker saw nothing of the building,
but as they turned into the woods it revealed itself in faint gray outline
through the fog, looking huge and far away. A few steps more,
and it was within an arm’s length, distinct, dark with moisture,
and insignificant in size. It had the usual country-schoolhouse
form - belonged to the packing-box order of architecture; had an underpinning
of stones, a moss-grown roof, and blank window spaces, whence both glass
and sash had long departed. It was ruined, but not a ruin - a
typical Californian substitute for what are known to guide-bookers abroad
as “monuments of the past.” With scarcely a glance
at this uninteresting structure Jaralson moved on into the dripping
undergrowth beyond.
“I will show you where he held me up,” he said. “This
is the graveyard.”
Here and there among the bushes were small inclosures containing graves,
sometimes no more than one. They were recognized as graves by
the discolored stones or rotting boards at head and foot, leaning at
all angles, some prostrate; by the ruined picket fences surrounding
them; or, infrequently, by the mound itself showing its gravel through
the fallen leaves. In many instances nothing marked the spot where
lay the vestiges of some poor mortal - who, leaving “a large circle
of sorrowing friends,” had been left by them in turn - except
a depression in the earth, more lasting than that in the spirits of
the mourners. The paths, if any paths had been, were long obliterated;
trees of a considerable size had been permitted to grow up from the
graves and thrust aside with root or branch the inclosing fences.
Over all was that air of abandonment and decay which seems nowhere so
fit and significant as in a village of the forgotten dead.
As the two men, Jaralson leading, pushed their way through the growth
of young trees, that enterprising man suddenly stopped and brought up
his shotgun to the height of his breast, uttered a low note of warning,
and stood motionless, his eyes fixed upon something ahead. As
well as he could, obstructed by brush, his companion, though seeing
nothing, imitated the posture and so stood, prepared for what might
ensue. A moment later Jaralson moved cautiously forward, the other
following.
Under the branches of an enormous spruce lay the dead body of a man.
Standing silent above it they noted such particulars as first strike
the attention - the face, the attitude, the clothing; whatever most
promptly and plainly answers the unspoken question of a sympathetic
curiosity.
The body lay upon its back, the legs wide apart. One arm was thrust
upward, the other outward; but the latter was bent acutely, and the
hand was near the throat. Both hands were tightly clenched.
The whole attitude was that of desperate but ineffectual resistance
to - what?
Near by lay a shotgun and a game bag through the meshes of which was
seen the plumage of shot birds. All about were evidences of a
furious struggle; small sprouts of poison-oak were bent and denuded
of leaf and bark; dead and rotting leaves had been pushed into heaps
and ridges on both sides of the legs by the action of other feet than
theirs; alongside the hips were unmistakable impressions of human knees.
The nature of the struggle was made clear by a glance at the dead man’s
throat and face. While breast and hands were white, those were
purple - almost black. The shoulders lay upon a low mound, and
the head was turned back at an angle otherwise impossible, the expanded
eyes staring blankly backward in a direction opposite to that of the
feet. From the froth filling the open mouth the tongue protruded,
black and swollen. The throat showed horrible contusions; not
mere finger-marks, but bruises and lacerations wrought by two strong
hands that must have buried themselves in the yielding flesh, maintaining
their terrible grasp until long after death. Breast, throat, face,
were wet; the clothing was saturated; drops of water, condensed from
the fog, studded the hair and mustache.
All this the two men observed without speaking - almost at a glance.
Then Holker said:
“Poor devil! he had a rough deal.”
Jaralson was making a vigilant circumspection of the forest, his shotgun
held in both hands and at full cock, his finger upon the trigger.
“The work of a maniac,” he said, without withdrawing his
eyes from the inclosing wood. “It was done by Branscom -
Pardee.”
Something half hidden by the disturbed leaves on the earth caught Holker’s
attention. It was a red-leather pocketbook. He picked it
up and opened it. It contained leaves of white paper for memoranda,
and upon the first leaf was the name “Halpin Frayser.”
Written in red on several succeeding leaves - scrawled as if in haste
and barely legible - were the following lines, which Holker read aloud,
while his companion continued scanning the dim gray confines of their
narrow world and hearing matter of apprehension in the drip of water
from every burdened branch:
“Enthralled by some mysterious spell, I stood
In the lit gloom of an enchanted wood.
The cypress there and myrtle twined their boughs,
Significant, in baleful brotherhood.
“The brooding willow whispered to the yew;
Beneath, the deadly nightshade and the rue,
With immortelles self-woven into strange
Funereal shapes, and horrid nettles grew.
“No song of bird nor any drone of bees,
Nor light leaf lifted by the wholesome breeze:
The air was stagnant all, and Silence was
A living thing that breathed among the trees.
“Conspiring spirits whispered in the gloom,
Half-heard, the stilly secrets of the tomb.
With blood the trees were all adrip; the leaves
Shone in the witch-light with a ruddy bloom.
“I cried aloud! - the spell, unbroken still,
Rested upon my spirit and my will.
Unsouled, unhearted, hopeless and forlorn,
I strove with monstrous presages of ill!
“At last the viewless - ”
Holker ceased reading; there was no more to read. The manuscript
broke off in the middle of a line.
“That sounds like Bayne,” said Jaralson, who was something
of a scholar in his way. He had abated his vigilance and stood
looking down at the body.
“Who’s Bayne?” Holker asked rather incuriously.
“Myron Bayne, a chap who flourished in the early years of the
nation - more than a century ago. Wrote mighty dismal stuff; I
have his collected works. That poem is not among them, but it
must have been omitted by mistake.”
“It is cold,” said Holker; “let us leave here; we
must have up the coroner from Napa.”
Jaralson said nothing, but made a movement in compliance. Passing
the end of the slight elevation of earth upon which the dead man’s
head and shoulders lay, his foot struck some hard substance under the
rotting forest leaves, and he took the trouble to kick it into view.
It was a fallen headboard, and painted on it were the hardly decipherable
words, “Catharine Larue.”
“Larue, Larue!” exclaimed Holker, with sudden animation.
“Why, that is the real name of Branscom - not Pardee. And
- bless my soul! how it all comes to me - the murdered woman’s
name had been Frayser!”
“There is some rascally mystery here,” said Detective Jaralson.
“I hate anything of that kind.”
There came to them out of the fog - seemingly from a great distance
- the sound of a laugh, a low, deliberate, soulless laugh, which had
no more of joy than that of a hyena night-prowling in the desert; a
laugh that rose by slow gradation, louder and louder, clearer, more
distinct and terrible, until it seemed barely outside the narrow circle
of their vision; a laugh so unnatural, so unhuman, so devilish, that
it filled those hardy man-hunters with a sense of dread unspeakable!
They did not move their weapons nor think of them; the menace of that
horrible sound was not of the kind to be met with arms. As it
had grown out of silence, so now it died away; from a culminating shout
which had seemed almost in their ears, it drew itself away into the
distance, until its failing notes, joyless and mechanical to the last,
sank to silence at a measureless remove.
THE SECRET OF MACARGER’S GULCH
North Westwardly from Indian Hill, about nine miles as the crow flies,
is Macarger’s Gulch. It is not much of a gulch - a mere
depression between two wooded ridges of inconsiderable height.
From its mouth up to its head - for gulches, like rivers, have an anatomy
of their own - the distance does not exceed two miles, and the width
at bottom is at only one place more than a dozen yards; for most of
the distance on either side of the little brook which drains it in winter,
and goes dry in the early spring, there is no level ground at all; the
steep slopes of the hills, covered with an almost impenetrable growth
of manzanita and chemisal, are parted by nothing but the width of the
water course. No one but an occasional enterprising hunter of
the vicinity ever goes into Macarger’s Gulch, and five miles away
it is unknown, even by name. Within that distance in any direction
are far more conspicuous topographical features without names, and one
might try in vain to ascertain by local inquiry the origin of the name
of this one.
About midway between the head and the mouth of Macarger’s Gulch,
the hill on the right as you ascend is cloven by another gulch, a short
dry one, and at the junction of the two is a level space of two or three
acres, and there a few years ago stood an old board house containing
one small room. How the component parts of the house, few and
simple as they were, had been assembled at that almost inaccessible
point is a problem in the solution of which there would be greater satisfaction
than advantage. Possibly the creek bed is a reformed road.
It is certain that the gulch was at one time pretty thoroughly prospected
by miners, who must have had some means of getting in with at least
pack animals carrying tools and supplies; their profits, apparently,
were not such as would have justified any considerable outlay to connect
Macarger’s Gulch with any center of civilization enjoying the
distinction of a sawmill. The house, however, was there, most
of it. It lacked a door and a window frame, and the chimney of
mud and stones had fallen into an unlovely heap, overgrown with rank
weeds. Such humble furniture as there may once have been and much
of the lower weatherboarding, had served as fuel in the camp fires of
hunters; as had also, probably, the curbing of an old well, which at
the time I write of existed in the form of a rather wide but not very
deep depression near by.
One afternoon in the summer of 1874, I passed up Macarger’s Gulch
from the narrow valley into which it opens, by following the dry bed
of the brook. I was quail-shooting and had made a bag of about
a dozen birds by the time I had reached the house described, of whose
existence I was until then unaware. After rather carelessly inspecting
the ruin I resumed my sport, and having fairly good success prolonged
it until near sunset, when it occurred to me that I was a long way from
any human habitation - too far to reach one by nightfall. But
in my game bag was food, and the old house would afford shelter, if
shelter were needed on a warm and dewless night in the foothills of
the Sierra Nevada, where one may sleep in comfort on the pine needles,
without covering. I am fond of solitude and love the night, so
my resolution to “camp out” was soon taken, and by the time
that it was dark I had made my bed of boughs and grasses in a corner
of the room and was roasting a quail at a fire that I had kindled on
the hearth. The smoke escaped out of the ruined chimney, the light
illuminated the room with a kindly glow, and as I ate my simple meal
of plain bird and drank the remains of a bottle of red wine which had
served me all the afternoon in place of the water, which the region
did not supply, I experienced a sense of comfort which better fare and
accommodations do not always give.
Nevertheless, there was something lacking. I had a sense of comfort,
but not of security. I detected myself staring more frequently
at the open doorway and blank window than I could find warrant for doing.
Outside these apertures all was black, and I was unable to repress a
certain feeling of apprehension as my fancy pictured the outer world
and filled it with unfriendly entities, natural and supernatural - chief
among which, in their respective classes, were the grizzly bear, which
I knew was occasionally still seen in that region, and the ghost, which
I had reason to think was not. Unfortunately, our feelings do
not always respect the law of probabilities, and to me that evening,
the possible and the impossible were equally disquieting.
Everyone who has had experience in the matter must have observed that
one confronts the actual and imaginary perils of the night with far
less apprehension in the open air than in a house with an open doorway.
I felt this now as I lay on my leafy couch in a corner of the room next
to the chimney and permitted my fire to die out. So strong became
my sense of the presence of something malign and menacing in the place,
that I found myself almost unable to withdraw my eyes from the opening,
as in the deepening darkness it became more and more indistinct.
And when the last little flame flickered and went out I grasped the
shotgun which I had laid at my side and actually turned the muzzle in
the direction of the now invisible entrance, my thumb on one of the
hammers, ready to cock the piece, my breath suspended, my muscles rigid
and tense. But later I laid down the weapon with a sense of shame
and mortification. What did I fear, and why? - I, to whom the
night had been
a more familiar face
Than that of man -
I, in whom that element of hereditary superstition from which none of
us is altogether free had given to solitude and darkness and silence
only a more alluring interest and charm! I was unable to comprehend
my folly, and losing in the conjecture the thing conjectured of, I fell
asleep. And then I dreamed.
I was in a great city in a foreign land - a city whose people were of
my own race, with minor differences of speech and costume; yet precisely
what these were I could not say; my sense of them was indistinct.
The city was dominated by a great castle upon an overlooking height
whose name I knew, but could not speak. I walked through many
streets, some broad and straight with high, modern buildings, some narrow,
gloomy, and tortuous, between the gables of quaint old houses whose
overhanging stories, elaborately ornamented with carvings in wood and
stone, almost met above my head.
I sought someone whom I had never seen, yet knew that I should recognize
when found. My quest was not aimless and fortuitous; it had a
definite method. I turned from one street into another without
hesitation and threaded a maze of intricate passages, devoid of the
fear of losing my way.
Presently I stopped before a low door in a plain stone house which might
have been the dwelling of an artisan of the better sort, and without
announcing myself, entered. The room, rather sparely furnished,
and lighted by a single window with small diamond-shaped panes, had
but two occupants; a man and a woman. They took no notice of my
intrusion, a circumstance which, in the manner of dreams, appeared entirely
natural. They were not conversing; they sat apart, unoccupied
and sullen.
The woman was young and rather stout, with fine large eyes and a certain
grave beauty; my memory of her expression is exceedingly vivid, but
in dreams one does not observe the details of faces. About her
shoulders was a plaid shawl. The man was older, dark, with an
evil face made more forbidding by a long scar extending from near the
left temple diagonally downward into the black mustache; though in my
dreams it seemed rather to haunt the face as a thing apart - I can express
it no otherwise - than to belong to it. The moment that I found
the man and woman I knew them to be husband and wife.
What followed, I remember indistinctly; all was confused and inconsistent
- made so, I think, by gleams of consciousness. It was as if two
pictures, the scene of my dream, and my actual surroundings, had been
blended, one overlying the other, until the former, gradually fading,
disappeared, and I was broad awake in the deserted cabin, entirely and
tranquilly conscious of my situation.
My foolish fear was gone, and opening my eyes I saw that my fire, not
altogether burned out, had revived by the falling of a stick and was
again lighting the room. I had probably slept only a few minutes,
but my commonplace dream had somehow so strongly impressed me that I
was no longer drowsy; and after a little while I rose, pushed the embers
of my fire together, and lighting my pipe proceeded in a rather ludicrously
methodical way to meditate upon my vision.
It would have puzzled me then to say in what respect it was worth attention.
In the first moment of serious thought that I gave to the matter I recognized
the city of my dream as Edinburgh, where I had never been; so if the
dream was a memory it was a memory of pictures and description.
The recognition somehow deeply impressed me; it was as if something
in my mind insisted rebelliously against will and reason on the importance
of all this. And that faculty, whatever it was, asserted also
a control of my speech. “Surely,” I said aloud, quite
involuntarily, “the MacGregors must have come here from Edinburgh.”
At the moment, neither the substance of this remark nor the fact of
my making it, surprised me in the least; it seemed entirely natural
that I should know the name of my dreamfolk and something of their history.
But the absurdity of it all soon dawned upon me: I laughed aloud, knocked
the ashes from my pipe and again stretched myself upon my bed of boughs
and grass, where I lay staring absently into my failing fire, with no
further thought of either my dream or my surroundings. Suddenly
the single remaining flame crouched for a moment, then, springing upward,
lifted itself clear of its embers and expired in air. The darkness
was absolute.
At that instant - almost, it seemed, before the gleam of the blaze had
faded from my eyes - there was a dull, dead sound, as of some heavy
body falling upon the floor, which shook beneath me as I lay.
I sprang to a sitting posture and groped at my side for my gun; my notion
was that some wild beast had leaped in through the open window.
While the flimsy structure was still shaking from the impact I heard
the sound of blows, the scuffling of feet upon the floor, and then -
it seemed to come from almost within reach of my hand, the sharp shrieking
of a woman in mortal agony. So horrible a cry I had never heard
nor conceived; it utterly unnerved me; I was conscious for a moment
of nothing but my own terror! Fortunately my hand now found the
weapon of which it was in search, and the familiar touch somewhat restored
me. I leaped to my feet, straining my eyes to pierce the darkness.
The violent sounds had ceased, but more terrible than these, I heard,
at what seemed long intervals, the faint intermittent gasping of some
living, dying thing!
As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light of the coals in the fireplace,
I saw first the shapes of the door and window, looking blacker than
the black of the walls. Next, the distinction between wall and
floor became discernible, and at last I was sensible to the form and
full expanse of the floor from end to end and side to side. Nothing
was visible and the silence was unbroken.
With a hand that shook a little, the other still grasping my gun, I
restored my fire and made a critical examination of the place.
There was nowhere any sign that the cabin had been entered. My
own tracks were visible in the dust covering the floor, but there were
no others. I relit my pipe, provided fresh fuel by ripping a thin
board or two from the inside of the house - I did not care to go into
the darkness out of doors - and passed the rest of the night smoking
and thinking, and feeding my fire; not for added years of life would
I have permitted that little flame to expire again.
Some years afterward I met in Sacramento a man named Morgan, to whom
I had a note of introduction from a friend in San Francisco. Dining
with him one evening at his home I observed various “trophies”
upon the wall, indicating that he was fond of shooting. It turned
out that he was, and in relating some of his feats he mentioned having
been in the region of my adventure.
“Mr. Morgan,” I asked abruptly, “do you know a place
up there called Macarger’s Gulch?”
“I have good reason to,” he replied; “it was I who
gave to the newspapers, last year, the accounts of the finding of the
skeleton there.”
I had not heard of it; the accounts had been published, it appeared,
while I was absent in the East.
“By the way,” said Morgan, “the name of the gulch
is a corruption; it should have been called ‘MacGregor’s.’
My dear,” he added, speaking to his wife, “Mr. Elderson
has upset his wine.”
That was hardly accurate - I had simply dropped it, glass and all.
“There was an old shanty once in the gulch,” Morgan resumed
when the ruin wrought by my awkwardness had been repaired, “but
just previously to my visit it had been blown down, or rather blown
away, for its débris was scattered all about, the very floor
being parted, plank from plank. Between two of the sleepers still
in position I and my companion observed the remnant of a plaid shawl,
and examining it found that it was wrapped about the shoulders of the
body of a woman, of which but little remained besides the bones, partly
covered with fragments of clothing, and brown dry skin. But we
will spare Mrs. Morgan,” he added with a smile. The lady
had indeed exhibited signs of disgust rather than sympathy.
“It is necessary to say, however,” he went on, “that
the skull was fractured in several places, as by blows of some blunt
instrument; and that instrument itself - a pick-handle, still stained
with blood - lay under the boards near by.”
Mr. Morgan turned to his wife. “Pardon me, my dear,”
he said with affected solemnity, “for mentioning these disagreeable
particulars, the natural though regrettable incidents of a conjugal
quarrel - resulting, doubtless, from the luckless wife’s insubordination.”
“I ought to be able to overlook it,” the lady replied with
composure; “you have so many times asked me to in those very words.”
I thought he seemed rather glad to go on with his story.
“From these and other circumstances,” he said, “the
coroner’s jury found that the deceased, Janet MacGregor, came
to her death from blows inflicted by some person to the jury unknown;
but it was added that the evidence pointed strongly to her husband,
Thomas MacGregor, as the guilty person. But Thomas MacGregor has
never been found nor heard of. It was learned that the couple
came from Edinburgh, but not - my dear, do you not observe that Mr.
Elderson’s boneplate has water in it?”
I had deposited a chicken bone in my finger bowl.
“In a little cupboard I found a photograph of MacGregor, but it
did not lead to his capture.”
“Will you let me see it?” I said.
The picture showed a dark man with an evil face made more forbidding
by a long scar extending from near the temple diagonally downward into
the black mustache.
“By the way, Mr. Elderson,” said my affable host, “may
I know why you asked about ‘Macarger’s Gulch’?”
“I lost a mule near there once,” I replied, “and the
mischance has - has quite - upset me.”
“My dear,” said Mr. Morgan, with the mechanical intonation
of an interpreter translating, “the loss of Mr. Elderson’s
mule has peppered his coffee.”
ONE SUMMER NIGHT
The fact that Henry Armstrong was buried did not seem to him to prove
that he was dead: he had always been a hard man to convince. That
he really was buried, the testimony of his senses compelled him to admit.
His posture - flat upon his back, with his hands crossed upon his stomach
and tied with something that he easily broke without profitably altering
the situation - the strict confinement of his entire person, the black
darkness and profound silence, made a body of evidence impossible to
controvert and he accepted it without cavil.
But dead - no; he was only very, very ill. He had, withal, the
invalid’s apathy and did not greatly concern himself about the
uncommon fate that had been allotted to him. No philosopher was
he - just a plain, commonplace person gifted, for the time being, with
a pathological indifference: the organ that he feared consequences with
was torpid. So, with no particular apprehension for his immediate
future, he fell asleep and all was peace with Henry Armstrong.
But something was going on overhead. It was a dark summer night,
shot through with infrequent shimmers of lightning silently firing a
cloud lying low in the west and portending a storm. These brief,
stammering illuminations brought out with ghastly distinctness the monuments
and headstones of the cemetery and seemed to set them dancing.
It was not a night in which any credible witness was likely to be straying
about a cemetery, so the three men who were there, digging into the
grave of Henry Armstrong, felt reasonably secure.
Two of them were young students from a medical college a few miles away;
the third was a gigantic negro known as Jess. For many years Jess
had been employed about the cemetery as a man-of-all-work and it was
his favorite pleasantry that he knew “every soul in the place.”
From the nature of what he was now doing it was inferable that the place
was not so populous as its register may have shown it to be.
Outside the wall, at the part of the grounds farthest from the public
road, were a horse and a light wagon, waiting.
The work of excavation was not difficult: the earth with which the grave
had been loosely filled a few hours before offered little resistance
and was soon thrown out. Removal of the casket from its box was
less easy, but it was taken out, for it was a perquisite of Jess, who
carefully unscrewed the cover and laid it aside, exposing the body in
black trousers and white shirt. At that instant the air sprang
to flame, a cracking shock of thunder shook the stunned world and Henry
Armstrong tranquilly sat up. With inarticulate cries the men fled
in terror, each in a different direction. For nothing on earth
could two of them have been persuaded to return. But Jess was
of another breed.
In the gray of the morning the two students, pallid and haggard from
anxiety and with the terror of their adventure still beating tumultuously
in their blood, met at the medical college.
“You saw it?” cried one.
“God! yes - what are we to do?”
They went around to the rear of the building, where they saw a horse,
attached to a light wagon, hitched to a gatepost near the door of the
dissecting-room. Mechanically they entered the room. On
a bench in the obscurity sat the negro Jess. He rose, grinning,
all eyes and teeth.
“I’m waiting for my pay,” he said.
Stretched naked on a long table lay the body of Henry Armstrong, the
head defiled with blood and clay from a blow with a spade.
THE MOONLIT ROAD
I - STATEMENT OF JOEL HETMAN, JR.
I am the most unfortunate of men. Rich, respected, fairly well
educated and of sound health - with many other advantages usually valued
by those having them and coveted by those who have them not - I sometimes
think that I should be less unhappy if they had been denied me, for
then the contrast between my outer and my inner life would not be continually
demanding a painful attention. In the stress of privation and
the need of effort I might sometimes forget the somber secret ever baffling
the conjecture that it compels.
I am the only child of Joel and Julia Hetman. The one was a well-to-do
country gentleman, the other a beautiful and accomplished woman to whom
he was passionately attached with what I now know to have been a jealous
and exacting devotion. The family home was a few miles from Nashville,
Tennessee, a large, irregularly built dwelling of no particular order
of architecture, a little way off the road, in a park of trees and shrubbery.
At the time of which I write I was nineteen years old, a student at
Yale. One day I received a telegram from my father of such urgency
that in compliance with its unexplained demand I left at once for home.
At the railway station in Nashville a distant relative awaited me to
apprise me of the reason for my recall: my mother had been barbarously
murdered - why and by whom none could conjecture, but the circumstances
were these: My father had gone to Nashville, intending to return the
next afternoon. Something prevented his accomplishing the business
in hand, so he returned on the same night, arriving just before the
dawn. In his testimony before the coroner he explained that having
no latchkey and not caring to disturb the sleeping servants, he had,
with no clearly defined intention, gone round to the rear of the house.
As he turned an angle of the building, he heard a sound as of a door
gently closed, and saw in the darkness, indistinctly, the figure of
a man, which instantly disappeared among the trees of the lawn.
A hasty pursuit and brief search of the grounds in the belief that the
trespasser was some one secretly visiting a servant proving fruitless,
he entered at the unlocked door and mounted the stairs to my mother’s
chamber. Its door was open, and stepping into black darkness he
fell headlong over some heavy object on the floor. I may spare
myself the details; it was my poor mother, dead of strangulation by
human hands!
Nothing had been taken from the house, the servants had heard no sound,
and excepting those terrible finger-marks upon the dead woman’s
throat - dear God! that I might forget them! - no trace of the assassin
was ever found.
I gave up my studies and remained with my father, who, naturally, was
greatly changed. Always of a sedate, taciturn disposition, he
now fell into so deep a dejection that nothing could hold his attention,
yet anything - a footfall, the sudden closing of a door - aroused in
him a fitful interest; one might have called it an apprehension.
At any small surprise of the senses he would start visibly and sometimes
turn pale, then relapse into a melancholy apathy deeper than before.
I suppose he was what is called a “nervous wreck.”
As to me, I was younger then than now - there is much in that.
Youth is Gilead, in which is balm for every wound. Ah, that I
might again dwell in that enchanted land! Unacquainted with grief,
I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate
the strength of the stroke.
One night, a few months after the dreadful event, my father and I walked
home from the city. The full moon was about three hours above
the eastern horizon; the entire countryside had the solemn stillness
of a summer night; our footfalls and the ceaseless song of the katydids
were the only sound aloof. Black shadows of bordering trees lay
athwart the road, which, in the short reaches between, gleamed a ghostly
white. As we approached the gate to our dwelling, whose front
was in shadow, and in which no light shone, my father suddenly stopped
and clutched my arm, saying, hardly above his breath:
“God! God! what is that?”
“I hear nothing,” I replied.
“But see - see!” he said, pointing along the road, directly
ahead.
I said: “Nothing is there. Come, father, let us go in -
you are ill.”
He had released my arm and was standing rigid and motionless in the
center of the illuminated roadway, staring like one bereft of sense.
His face in the moonlight showed a pallor and fixity inexpressibly distressing.
I pulled gently at his sleeve, but he had forgotten my existence.
Presently he began to retire backward, step by step, never for an instant
removing his eyes from what he saw, or thought he saw. I turned
half round to follow, but stood irresolute. I do not recall any
feeling of fear, unless a sudden chill was its physical manifestation.
It seemed as if an icy wind had touched my face and enfolded my body
from head to foot; I could feel the stir of it in my hair.
At that moment my attention was drawn to a light that suddenly streamed
from an upper window of the house: one of the servants, awakened by
what mysterious premonition of evil who can say, and in obedience to
an impulse that she was never able to name, had lit a lamp. When
I turned to look for my father he was gone, and in all the years that
have passed no whisper of his fate has come across the borderland of
conjecture from the realm of the unknown.
II - STATEMENT OF CASPAR GRATTAN
To-day I am said to live; to-morrow, here in this room, will lie a senseless
shape of clay that all too long was I. If anyone lift the cloth
from the face of that unpleasant thing it will be in gratification of
a mere morbid curiosity. Some, doubtless, will go further and
inquire, “Who was he?” In this writing I supply the
only answer that I am able to make - Caspar Grattan. Surely, that
should be enough. The name has served my small need for more than
twenty years of a life of unknown length. True, I gave it to myself,
but lacking another I had the right. In this world one must have
a name; it prevents confusion, even when it does not establish identity.
Some, though, are known by numbers, which also seem inadequate distinctions.
One day, for illustration, I was passing along a street of a city, far
from here, when I met two men in uniform, one of whom, half pausing
and looking curiously into my face, said to his companion, “That
man looks like 767.” Something in the number seemed familiar
and horrible. Moved by an uncontrollable impulse, I sprang into
a side street and ran until I fell exhausted in a country lane.
I have never forgotten that number, and always it comes to memory attended
by gibbering obscenity, peals of joyless laughter, the clang of iron
doors. So I say a name, even if self-bestowed, is better than
a number. In the register of the potter’s field I shall
soon have both. What wealth!
Of him who shall find this paper I must beg a little consideration.
It is not the history of my life; the knowledge to write that is denied
me. This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories,
some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread,
others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with
interspaces blank and black - witch-fires glowing still and red in a
great desolation.
Standing upon the shore of eternity, I turn for a last look landward
over the course by which I came. There are twenty years of footprints
fairly distinct, the impressions of bleeding feet. They lead through
poverty and pain, devious and unsure, as of one staggering beneath a
burden -
Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.
Ah, the poet’s prophecy of Me - how admirable, how dreadfully
admirable!
Backward beyond the beginning of this via dolorosa - this epic
of suffering with episodes of sin - I see nothing clearly; it comes
out of a cloud. I know that it spans only twenty years, yet I
am an old man.
One does not remember one’s birth - one has to be told.
But with me it was different; life came to me full-handed and dowered
me with all my faculties and powers. Of a previous existence I
know no more than others, for all have stammering intimations that may
be memories and may be dreams. I know only that my first consciousness
was of maturity in body and mind - a consciousness accepted without
surprise or conjecture. I merely found myself walking in a forest,
half-clad, footsore, unutterably weary and hungry. Seeing a farmhouse,
I approached and asked for food, which was given me by one who inquired
my name. I did not know, yet knew that all had names. Greatly
embarrassed, I retreated, and night coming on, lay down in the forest
and slept.
The next day I entered a large town which I shall not name. Nor
shall I recount further incidents of the life that is now to end - a
life of wandering, always and everywhere haunted by an overmastering
sense of crime in punishment of wrong and of terror in punishment of
crime. Let me see if I can reduce it to narrative.
I seem once to have lived near a great city, a prosperous planter, married
to a woman whom I loved and distrusted. We had, it sometimes seems,
one child, a youth of brilliant parts and promise. He is at all
times a vague figure, never clearly drawn, frequently altogether out
of the picture.
One luckless evening it occurred to me to test my wife’s fidelity
in a vulgar, commonplace way familiar to everyone who has acquaintance
with the literature of fact and fiction. I went to the city, telling
my wife that I should be absent until the following afternoon.
But I returned before daybreak and went to the rear of the house, purposing
to enter by a door with which I had secretly so tampered that it would
seem to lock, yet not actually fasten. As I approached it, I heard
it gently open and close, and saw a man steal away into the darkness.
With murder in my heart, I sprang after him, but he had vanished without
even the bad luck of identification. Sometimes now I cannot even
persuade myself that it was a human being.
Crazed with jealousy and rage, blind and bestial with all the elemental
passions of insulted manhood, I entered the house and sprang up the
stairs to the door of my wife’s chamber. It was closed,
but having tampered with its lock also, I easily entered and despite
the black darkness soon stood by the side of her bed. My groping
hands told me that although disarranged it was unoccupied.
“She is below,” I thought, “and terrified by my entrance
has evaded me in the darkness of the hall.”
With the purpose of seeking her I turned to leave the room, but took
a wrong direction - the right one! My foot struck her, cowering
in a corner of the room. Instantly my hands were at her throat,
stifling a shriek, my knees were upon her struggling body; and there
in the darkness, without a word of accusation or reproach, I strangled
her till she died!
There ends the dream. I have related it in the past tense, but
the present would be the fitter form, for again and again the somber
tragedy reenacts itself in my consciousness - over and over I lay the
plan, I suffer the confirmation, I redress the wrong. Then all
is blank; and afterward the rains beat against the grimy window-panes,
or the snows fall upon my scant attire, the wheels rattle in the squalid
streets where my life lies in poverty and mean employment. If
there is ever sunshine I do not recall it; if there are birds they do
not sing.
There is another dream, another vision of the night. I stand among
the shadows in a moonlit road. I am aware of another presence,
but whose I cannot rightly determine. In the shadow of a great
dwelling I catch the gleam of white garments; then the figure of a woman
confronts me in the road - my murdered wife! There is death in
the face; there are marks upon the throat. The eyes are fixed
on mine with an infinite gravity which is not reproach, nor hate, nor
menace, nor anything less terrible than recognition. Before this
awful apparition I retreat in terror - a terror that is upon me as I
write. I can no longer rightly shape the words. See! they
-
Now I am calm, but truly there is no more to tell: the incident ends
where it began - in darkness and in doubt.
Yes, I am again in control of myself: “the captain of my soul.”
But that is not respite; it is another stage and phase of expiation.
My penance, constant in degree, is mutable in kind: one of its variants
is tranquillity. After all, it is only a life-sentence.
“To Hell for life” - that is a foolish penalty: the culprit
chooses the duration of his punishment. To-day my term expires.
To each and all, the peace that was not mine.
III - STATEMENT OF THE LATE JULIA HETMAN, THROUGH THE MEDIUM BAYROLLES
I had retired early and fallen almost immediately into a peaceful sleep,
from which I awoke with that indefinable sense of peril which is, I
think, a common experience in that other, earlier life. Of its
unmeaning character, too, I was entirely persuaded, yet that did not
banish it. My husband, Joel Hetman, was away from home; the servants
slept in another part of the house. But these were familiar conditions;
they had never before distressed me. Nevertheless, the strange
terror grew so insupportable that conquering my reluctance to move I
sat up and lit the lamp at my bedside. Contrary to my expectation
this gave me no relief; the light seemed rather an added danger, for
I reflected that it would shine out under the door, disclosing my presence
to whatever evil thing might lurk outside. You that are still
in the flesh, subject to horrors of the imagination, think what a monstrous
fear that must be which seeks in darkness security from malevolent existences
of the night. That is to spring to close quarters with an unseen
enemy - the strategy of despair!
Extinguishing the lamp I pulled the bed-clothing about my head and lay
trembling and silent, unable to shriek, forgetful to pray. In
this pitiable state I must have lain for what you call hours - with
us there are no hours, there is no time.
At last it came - a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs!
They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see
its way; to my disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as
the approach of some blind and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal.
I even thought that I must have left the hall lamp burning and the groping
of this creature proved it a monster of the night. This was foolish
and inconsistent with my previous dread of the light, but what would
you have? Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal
witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are
unrelated. We know this well, we who have passed into the Realm
of Terror, who skulk in eternal dusk among the scenes of our former
lives, invisible even to ourselves and one another, yet hiding forlorn
in lonely places; yearning for speech with our loved ones, yet dumb,
and as fearful of them as they of us. Sometimes the disability
is removed, the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate
we break the spell - we are seen by those whom we would warn, console,
or punish. What form we seem to them to bear we know not; we know
only that we terrify even those whom we most wish to comfort, and from
whom we most crave tenderness and sympathy.
Forgive, I pray you, this inconsequent digression by what was once a
woman. You who consult us in this imperfect way - you do not understand.
You ask foolish questions about things unknown and things forbidden.
Much that we know and could impart in our speech is meaningless in yours.
We must communicate with you through a stammering intelligence in that
small fraction of our language that you yourselves can speak.
You think that we are of another world. No, we have knowledge
of no world but yours, though for us it holds no sunlight, no warmth,
no music, no laughter, no song of birds, nor any companionship.
O God! what a thing it is to be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an
altered world, a prey to apprehension and despair!
No, I did not die of fright: the Thing turned and went away. I
heard it go down the stairs, hurriedly, I thought, as if itself in sudden
fear. Then I rose to call for help. Hardly had my shaking
hand found the doorknob when - merciful heaven! - I heard it returning.
Its footfalls as it remounted the stairs were rapid, heavy and loud;
they shook the house. I fled to an angle of the wall and crouched
upon the floor. I tried to pray. I tried to call the name
of my dear husband. Then I heard the door thrown open. There
was an interval of unconsciousness, and when I revived I felt a strangling
clutch upon my throat - felt my arms feebly beating against something
that bore me backward - felt my tongue thrusting itself from between
my teeth! And then I passed into this life.
No, I have no knowledge of what it was. The sum of what we knew
at death is the measure of what we know afterward of all that went before.
Of this existence we know many things, but no new light falls upon any
page of that; in memory is written all of it that we can read.
Here are no heights of truth overlooking the confused landscape of that
dubitable domain. We still dwell in the Valley of the Shadow,
lurk in its desolate places, peering from brambles and thickets at its
mad, malign inhabitants. How should we have new knowledge of that
fading past?
What I am about to relate happened on a night. We know when it
is night, for then you retire to your houses and we can venture from
our places of concealment to move unafraid about our old homes, to look
in at the windows, even to enter and gaze upon your faces as you sleep.
I had lingered long near the dwelling where I had been so cruelly changed
to what I am, as we do while any that we love or hate remain.
Vainly I had sought some method of manifestation, some way to make my
continued existence and my great love and poignant pity understood by
my husband and son. Always if they slept they would wake, or if
in my desperation I dared approach them when they were awake, would
turn toward me the terrible eyes of the living, frightening me by the
glances that I sought from the purpose that I held.
On this night I had searched for them without success, fearing to find
them; they were nowhere in the house, nor about the moonlit lawn.
For, although the sun is lost to us forever, the moon, full-orbed or
slender, remains to us. Sometimes it shines by night, sometimes
by day, but always it rises and sets, as in that other life.
I left the lawn and moved in the white light and silence along the road,
aimless and sorrowing. Suddenly I heard the voice of my poor husband
in exclamations of astonishment, with that of my son in reassurance
and dissuasion; and there by the shadow of a group of trees they stood
- near, so near! Their faces were toward me, the eyes of the elder
man fixed upon mine. He saw me - at last, at last, he saw me!
In the consciousness of that, my terror fled as a cruel dream.
The death-spell was broken: Love had conquered Law! Mad with exultation
I shouted - I must have shouted, “He sees, he sees: he
will understand!” Then, controlling myself, I moved forward,
smiling and consciously beautiful, to offer myself to his arms, to comfort
him with endearments, and, with my son’s hand in mine, to speak
words that should restore the broken bonds between the living and the
dead.
Alas! alas! his face went white with fear, his eyes were as those of
a hunted animal. He backed away from me, as I advanced, and at
last turned and fled into the wood - whither, it is not given to me
to know.
To my poor boy, left doubly desolate, I have never been able to impart
a sense of my presence. Soon he, too, must pass to this Life Invisible
and be lost to me forever.
A DIAGNOSIS OF DEATH
“I am not so superstitious as some of your physicians - men of
science, as you are pleased to be called,” said Hawver, replying
to an accusation that had not been made. “Some of you -
only a few, I confess - believe in the immortality of the soul, and
in apparitions which you have not the honesty to call ghosts.
I go no further than a conviction that the living are sometimes seen
where they are not, but have been - where they have lived so long, perhaps
so intensely, as to have left their impress on everything about them.
I know, indeed, that one’s environment may be so affected by one’s
personality as to yield, long afterward, an image of one’s self
to the eyes of another. Doubtless the impressing personality has
to be the right kind of personality as the perceiving eyes have to be
the right kind of eyes - mine, for example.”
“Yes, the right kind of eyes, conveying sensations to the wrong
kind of brain,” said Dr. Frayley, smiling.
“Thank you; one likes to have an expectation gratified; that is
about the reply that I supposed you would have the civility to make.”
“Pardon me. But you say that you know. That is a good
deal to say, don’t you think? Perhaps you will not mind
the trouble of saying how you learned.”
“You will call it an hallucination,” Hawver said, “but
that does not matter.” And he told the story.
“Last summer I went, as you know, to pass the hot weather term
in the town of Meridian. The relative at whose house I had intended
to stay was ill, so I sought other quarters. After some difficulty
I succeeded in renting a vacant dwelling that had been occupied by an
eccentric doctor of the name of Mannering, who had gone away years before,
no one knew where, not even his agent. He had built the house
himself and had lived in it with an old servant for about ten years.
His practice, never very extensive, had after a few years been given
up entirely. Not only so, but he had withdrawn himself almost
altogether from social life and become a recluse. I was told by
the village doctor, about the only person with whom he held any relations,
that during his retirement he had devoted himself to a single line of
study, the result of which he had expounded in a book that did not commend
itself to the approval of his professional brethren, who, indeed, considered
him not entirely sane. I have not seen the book and cannot now
recall the title of it, but I am told that it expounded a rather startling
theory. He held that it was possible in the case of many a person
in good health to forecast his death with precision, several months
in advance of the event. The limit, I think, was eighteen months.
There were local tales of his having exerted his powers of prognosis,
or perhaps you would say diagnosis; and it was said that in every instance
the person whose friends he had warned had died suddenly at the appointed
time, and from no assignable cause. All this, however, has nothing
to do with what I have to tell; I thought it might amuse a physician.
“The house was furnished, just as he had lived in it. It
was a rather gloomy dwelling for one who was neither a recluse nor a
student, and I think it gave something of its character to me - perhaps
some of its former occupant’s character; for always I felt in
it a certain melancholy that was not in my natural disposition, nor,
I think, due to loneliness. I had no servants that slept in the
house, but I have always been, as you know, rather fond of my own society,
being much addicted to reading, though little to study. Whatever
was the cause, the effect was dejection and a sense of impending evil;
this was especially so in Dr. Mannering’s study, although that
room was the lightest and most airy in the house. The doctor’s
life-size portrait in oil hung in that room, and seemed completely to
dominate it. There was nothing unusual in the picture; the man
was evidently rather good looking, about fifty years old, with iron-gray
hair, a smooth-shaven face and dark, serious eyes. Something in
the picture always drew and held my attention. The man’s
appearance became familiar to me, and rather ‘haunted’ me.
“One evening I was passing through this room to my bedroom, with
a lamp - there is no gas in Meridian. I stopped as usual before
the portrait, which seemed in the lamplight to have a new expression,
not easily named, but distinctly uncanny. It interested but did
not disturb me. I moved the lamp from one side to the other and
observed the effects of the altered light. While so engaged I
felt an impulse to turn round. As I did so I saw a man moving
across the room directly toward me! As soon as he came near enough
for the lamplight to illuminate the face I saw that it was Dr. Mannering
himself; it was as if the portrait were walking!
“‘I beg your pardon,’ I said, somewhat coldly, ‘but
if you knocked I did not hear.’
“He passed me, within an arm’s length, lifted his right
forefinger, as in warning, and without a word went on out of the room,
though I observed his exit no more than I had observed his entrance.
“Of course, I need not tell you that this was what you will call
an hallucination and I call an apparition. That room had only
two doors, of which one was locked; the other led into a bedroom, from
which there was no exit. My feeling on realizing this is not an
important part of the incident.
“Doubtless this seems to you a very commonplace ‘ghost story’
- one constructed on the regular lines laid down by the old masters
of the art. If that were so I should not have related it, even
if it were true. The man was not dead; I met him to-day in Union
street. He passed me in a crowd.”
Hawver had finished his story and both men were silent. Dr. Frayley
absently drummed on the table with his fingers.
“Did he say anything to-day?” he asked - “anything
from which you inferred that he was not dead?”
Hawver stared and did not reply.
“Perhaps,” continued Frayley, “he made a sign, a gesture
- lifted a finger, as in warning. It’s a trick he had -
a habit when saying something serious - announcing the result of a diagnosis,
for example.”
“Yes, he did - just as his apparition had done. But, good
God! did you ever know him?”
Hawver was apparently growing nervous.
“I knew him. I have read his book, as will every physician
some day. It is one of the most striking and important of the
century’s contributions to medical science. Yes, I knew
him; I attended him in an illness three years ago. He died.”
Hawver sprang from his chair, manifestly disturbed. He strode
forward and back across the room; then approached his friend, and in
a voice not altogether steady, said: “Doctor, have you anything
to say to me - as a physician?”
“No, Hawver; you are the healthiest man I ever knew. As
a friend I advise you to go to your room. You play the violin
like an angel. Play it; play something light and lively.
Get this cursed bad business off your mind.”
The next day Hawver was found dead in his room, the violin at his neck,
the bow upon the strings, his music open before him at Chopin’s
funeral march.
MOXON’S MASTER
“Are you serious? - do you really believe that a machine thinks?”
I got no immediate reply; Moxon was apparently intent upon the coals
in the grate, touching them deftly here and there with the fire-poker
till they signified a sense of his attention by a brighter glow.
For several weeks I had been observing in him a growing habit of delay
in answering even the most trivial of commonplace questions. His
air, however, was that of preoccupation rather than deliberation: one
might have said that he had “something on his mind.”
Presently he said:
“What is a ‘machine’? The word has been variously
defined. Here is one definition from a popular dictionary: ‘Any
instrument or organization by which power is applied and made effective,
or a desired effect produced.’ Well, then, is not a man
a machine? And you will admit that he thinks - or thinks he thinks.”
“If you do not wish to answer my question,” I said, rather
testily, “why not say so? - all that you say is mere evasion.
You know well enough that when I say ‘machine’ I do not
mean a man, but something that man has made and controls.”
“When it does not control him,” he said, rising abruptly
and looking out of a window, whence nothing was visible in the blackness
of a stormy night. A moment later he turned about and with a smile
said: “I beg your pardon; I had no thought of evasion. I
considered the dictionary man’s unconscious testimony suggestive
and worth something in the discussion. I can give your question
a direct answer easily enough: I do believe that a machine thinks about
the work that it is doing.”
That was direct enough, certainly. It was not altogether pleasing,
for it tended to confirm a sad suspicion that Moxon’s devotion
to study and work in his machine-shop had not been good for him.
I knew, for one thing, that he suffered from insomnia, and that is no
light affliction. Had it affected his mind? His reply to
my question seemed to me then evidence that it had; perhaps I should
think differently about it now. I was younger then, and among
the blessings that are not denied to youth is ignorance. Incited
by that great stimulant to controversy, I said:
“And what, pray, does it think with - in the absence of a brain?”
The reply, coming with less than his customary delay, took his favorite
form of counter-interrogation:
“With what does a plant think - in the absence of a brain?”
“Ah, plants also belong to the philosopher class! I should
be pleased to know some of their conclusions; you may omit the premises.”
“Perhaps,” he replied, apparently unaffected by my foolish
irony, “you may be able to infer their convictions from their
acts. I will spare you the familiar examples of the sensitive
mimosa, the several insectivorous flowers and those whose stamens bend
down and shake their pollen upon the entering bee in order that he may
fertilize their distant mates. But observe this. In an open
spot in my garden I planted a climbing vine. When it was barely
above the surface I set a stake into the soil a yard away. The
vine at once made for it, but as it was about to reach it after several
days I removed it a few feet. The vine at once altered its course,
making an acute angle, and again made for the stake. This manoeuvre
was repeated several times, but finally, as if discouraged, the vine
abandoned the pursuit and ignoring further attempts to divert it traveled
to a small tree, further away, which it climbed.
“Roots of the eucalyptus will prolong themselves incredibly in
search of moisture. A well-known horticulturist relates that one
entered an old drain pipe and followed it until it came to a break,
where a section of the pipe had been removed to make way for a stone
wall that had been built across its course. The root left the
drain and followed the wall until it found an opening where a stone
had fallen out. It crept through and following the other side
of the wall back to the drain, entered the unexplored part and resumed
its journey.”
“And all this?”
“Can you miss the significance of it? It shows the consciousness
of plants. It proves that they think.”
“Even if it did - what then? We were speaking, not of plants,
but of machines. They may be composed partly of wood - wood that
has no longer vitality - or wholly of metal. Is thought an attribute
also of the mineral kingdom?”
“How else do you explain the phenomena, for example, of crystallization?”
“I do not explain them.”
“Because you cannot without affirming what you wish to deny, namely,
intelligent cooperation among the constituent elements of the crystals.
When soldiers form lines, or hollow squares, you call it reason.
When wild geese in flight take the form of a letter V you say instinct.
When the homogeneous atoms of a mineral, moving freely in solution,
arrange themselves into shapes mathematically perfect, or particles
of frozen moisture into the symmetrical and beautiful forms of snowflakes,
you have nothing to say. You have not even invented a name to
conceal your heroic unreason.”
Moxon was speaking with unusual animation and earnestness. As
he paused I heard in an adjoining room known to me as his “machine-shop,”
which no one but himself was permitted to enter, a singular thumping
sound, as of some one pounding upon a table with an open hand.
Moxon heard it at the same moment and, visibly agitated, rose and hurriedly
passed into the room whence it came. I thought it odd that any
one else should be in there, and my interest in my friend - with doubtless
a touch of unwarrantable curiosity - led me to listen intently, though,
I am happy to say, not at the keyhole. There were confused sounds,
as of a struggle or scuffle; the floor shook. I distinctly heard
hard breathing and a hoarse whisper which said “Damn you!”
Then all was silent, and presently Moxon reappeared and said, with a
rather sorry smile:
“Pardon me for leaving you so abruptly. I have a machine
in there that lost its temper and cut up rough.”
Fixing my eyes steadily upon his left cheek, which was traversed by
four parallel excoriations showing blood, I said:
“How would it do to trim its nails?”
I could have spared myself the jest; he gave it no attention, but seated
himself in the chair that he had left and resumed the interrupted monologue
as if nothing had occurred:
“Doubtless you do not hold with those (I need not name them to
a man of your reading) who have taught that all matter is sentient,
that every atom is a living, feeling, conscious being. I do.
There is no such thing as dead, inert matter: it is all alive; all instinct
with force, actual and potential; all sensitive to the same forces in
its environment and susceptible to the contagion of higher and subtler
ones residing in such superior organisms as it may be brought into relation
with, as those of man when he is fashioning it into an instrument of
his will. It absorbs something of his intelligence and purpose
- more of them in proportion to the complexity of the resulting machine
and that of its work.
“Do you happen to recall Herbert Spencer’s definition of
‘Life’? I read it thirty years ago. He may have
altered it afterward, for anything I know, but in all that time I have
been unable to think of a single word that could profitably be changed
or added or removed. It seems to me not only the best definition,
but the only possible one.
“‘Life,’ he says, ‘is a definite combination
of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive, in correspondence
with external coexistences and sequences.’”
“That defines the phenomenon,” I said, “but gives
no hint of its cause.”
“That,” he replied, “is all that any definition can
do. As Mill points out, we know nothing of cause except as an
antecedent - nothing of effect except as a consequent. Of certain
phenomena, one never occurs without another, which is dissimilar: the
first in point of time we call cause, the second, effect. One
who had many times seen a rabbit pursued by a dog, and had never seen
rabbits and dogs otherwise, would think the rabbit the cause of the
dog.
“But I fear,” he added, laughing naturally enough, “that
my rabbit is leading me a long way from the track of my legitimate quarry:
I’m indulging in the pleasure of the chase for its own sake.
What I want you to observe is that in Herbert Spencer’s definition
of ‘life’ the activity of a machine is included - there
is nothing in the definition that is not applicable to it. According
to this sharpest of observers and deepest of thinkers, if a man during
his period of activity is alive, so is a machine when in operation.
As an inventor and constructor of machines I know that to be true.”
Moxon was silent for a long time, gazing absently into the fire.
It was growing late and I thought it time to be going, but somehow I
did not like the notion of leaving him in that isolated house, all alone
except for the presence of some person of whose nature my conjectures
could go no further than that it was unfriendly, perhaps malign.
Leaning toward him and looking earnestly into his eyes while making
a motion with my hand through the door of his workshop, I said:
“Moxon, whom have you in there?”
Somewhat to my surprise he laughed lightly and answered without hesitation:
“Nobody; the incident that you have in mind was caused by my folly
in leaving a machine in action with nothing to act upon, while I undertook
the interminable task of enlightening your understanding. Do you
happen to know that Consciousness is the creature of Rhythm?”
“O bother them both!” I replied, rising and laying hold
of my overcoat. “I’m going to wish you good night;
and I’ll add the hope that the machine which you inadvertently
left in action will have her gloves on the next time you think it needful
to stop her.”
Without waiting to observe the effect of my shot I left the house.
Rain was falling, and the darkness was intense. In the sky beyond
the crest of a hill toward which I groped my way along precarious plank
sidewalks and across miry, unpaved streets I could see the faint glow
of the city’s lights, but behind me nothing was visible but a
single window of Moxon’s house. It glowed with what seemed
to me a mysterious and fateful meaning. I knew it was an uncurtained
aperture in my friend’s “machine-shop,” and I had
little doubt that he had resumed the studies interrupted by his duties
as my instructor in mechanical consciousness and the fatherhood of Rhythm.
Odd, and in some degree humorous, as his convictions seemed to me at
that time, I could not wholly divest myself of the feeling that they
had some tragic relation to his life and character - perhaps to his
destiny - although I no longer entertained the notion that they were
the vagaries of a disordered mind. Whatever might be thought of
his views, his exposition of them was too logical for that. Over
and over, his last words came back to me: “Consciousness is the
creature of Rhythm.” Bald and terse as the statement was,
I now found it infinitely alluring. At each recurrence it broadened
in meaning and deepened in suggestion. Why, here, (I thought)
is something upon which to found a philosophy. If consciousness
is the product of rhythm all things are conscious, for all have
motion, and all motion is rhythmic. I wondered if Moxon knew the
significance and breadth of his thought - the scope of this momentous
generalization; or had he arrived at his philosophic faith by the tortuous
and uncertain road of observation?
That faith was then new to me, and all Moxon’s expounding had
failed to make me a convert; but now it seemed as if a great light shone
about me, like that which fell upon Saul of Tarsus; and out there in
the storm and darkness and solitude I experienced what Lewes calls “The
endless variety and excitement of philosophic thought.”
I exulted in a new sense of knowledge, a new pride of reason.
My feet seemed hardly to touch the earth; it was as if I were uplifted
and borne through the air by invisible wings.
Yielding to an impulse to seek further light from him whom I now recognized
as my master and guide, I had unconsciously turned about, and almost
before I was aware of having done so found myself again at Moxon’s
door. I was drenched with rain, but felt no discomfort.
Unable in my excitement to find the doorbell I instinctively tried the
knob. It turned and, entering, I mounted the stairs to the room
that I had so recently left. All was dark and silent; Moxon, as
I had supposed, was in the adjoining room - the “machine-shop.”
Groping along the wall until I found the communicating door I knocked
loudly several times, but got no response, which I attributed to the
uproar outside, for the wind was blowing a gale and dashing the rain
against the thin walls in sheets. The drumming upon the shingle
roof spanning the unceiled room was loud and incessant.
I had never been invited into the machine-shop - had, indeed, been denied
admittance, as had all others, with one exception, a skilled metal worker,
of whom no one knew anything except that his name was Haley and his
habit silence. But in my spiritual exaltation, discretion and
civility were alike forgotten and I opened the door. What I saw
took all philosophical speculation out of me in short order.
Moxon sat facing me at the farther side of a small table upon which
a single candle made all the light that was in the room. Opposite
him, his back toward me, sat another person. On the table between
the two was a chessboard; the men were playing. I knew little
of chess, but as only a few pieces were on the board it was obvious
that the game was near its close. Moxon was intensely interested
- not so much, it seemed to me, in the game as in his antagonist, upon
whom he had fixed so intent a look that, standing though I did directly
in the line of his vision, I was altogether unobserved. His face
was ghastly white, and his eyes glittered like diamonds. Of his
antagonist I had only a back view, but that was sufficient; I should
not have cared to see his face.
He was apparently not more than five feet in height, with proportions
suggesting those of a gorilla - a tremendous breadth of shoulders, thick,
short neck and broad, squat head, which had a tangled growth of black
hair and was topped with a crimson fez. A tunic of the same color,
belted tightly to the waist, reached the seat - apparently a box - upon
which he sat; his legs and feet were not seen. His left forearm
appeared to rest in his lap; he moved his pieces with his right hand,
which seemed disproportionately long.
I had shrunk back and now stood a little to one side of the doorway
and in shadow. If Moxon had looked farther than the face of his
opponent he could have observed nothing now, except that the door was
open. Something forbade me either to enter or to retire, a feeling
- I know not how it came - that I was in the presence of an imminent
tragedy and might serve my friend by remaining. With a
scarcely conscious rebellion against the indelicacy of the act I remained.
The play was rapid. Moxon hardly glanced at the board before making
his moves, and to my unskilled eye seemed to move the piece most convenient
to his hand, his motions in doing so being quick, nervous and lacking
in precision. The response of his antagonist, while equally prompt
in the inception, was made with a slow, uniform, mechanical and, I thought,
somewhat theatrical movement of the arm, that was a sore trial to my
patience. There was something unearthly about it all, and I caught
myself shuddering. But I was wet and cold.
Two or three times after moving a piece the stranger slightly inclined
his head, and each time I observed that Moxon shifted his king.
All at once the thought came to me that the man was dumb. And
then that he was a machine - an automaton chess-player! Then I
remembered that Moxon had once spoken to me of having invented such
a piece of mechanism, though I did not understand that it had actually
been constructed. Was all his talk about the consciousness and
intelligence of machines merely a prelude to eventual exhibition of
this device - only a trick to intensify the effect of its mechanical
action upon me in my ignorance of its secret?
A fine end, this, of all my intellectual transports - my “endless
variety and excitement of philosophic thought!” I was about
to retire in disgust when something occurred to hold my curiosity.
I observed a shrug of the thing’s great shoulders, as if it were
irritated: and so natural was this - so entirely human - that in my
new view of the matter it startled me. Nor was that all, for a
moment later it struck the table sharply with its clenched hand.
At that gesture Moxon seemed even more startled than I: he pushed his
chair a little backward, as in alarm.
Presently Moxon, whose play it was, raised his hand high above the board,
pounced upon one of his pieces like a sparrow-hawk and with the exclamation
“checkmate!” rose quickly to his feet and stepped behind
his chair. The automaton sat motionless.
The wind had now gone down, but I heard, at lessening intervals and
progressively louder, the rumble and roll of thunder. In the pauses
between I now became conscious of a low humming or buzzing which,
like the thunder, grew momentarily louder and more distinct. It
seemed to come from the body of the automaton, and was unmistakably
a whirring of wheels. It gave me the impression of a disordered
mechanism which had escaped the repressive and regulating action of
some controlling part - an effect such as might be expected if a pawl
should be jostled from the teeth of a ratchet-wheel. But before
I had time for much conjecture as to its nature my attention was taken
by the strange motions of the automaton itself. A slight but continuous
convulsion appeared to have possession of it. In body and head
it shook like a man with palsy or an ague chill, and the motion augmented
every moment until the entire figure was in violent agitation.
Suddenly it sprang to its feet and with a movement almost too quick
for the eye to follow shot forward across table and chair, with both
arms thrust forth to their full length - the posture and lunge of a
diver. Moxon tried to throw himself backward out of reach, but
he was too late: I saw the horrible thing’s hands close upon his
throat, his own clutch its wrists. Then the table was overturned,
the candle thrown to the floor and extinguished, and all was black dark.
But the noise of the struggle was dreadfully distinct, and most terrible
of all were the raucous, squawking sounds made by the strangled man’s
efforts to breathe. Guided by the infernal hubbub, I sprang to
the rescue of my friend, but had hardly taken a stride in the darkness
when the whole room blazed with a blinding white light that burned into
my brain and heart and memory a vivid picture of the combatants on the
floor, Moxon underneath, his throat still in the clutch of those iron
hands, his head forced backward, his eyes protruding, his mouth wide
open and his tongue thrust out; and - horrible contrast! - upon the
painted face of his assassin an expression of tranquil and profound
thought, as in the solution of a problem in chess! This I observed,
then all was blackness and silence.
Three days later I recovered consciousness in a hospital. As the
memory of that tragic night slowly evolved in my ailing brain recognized
in my attendant Moxon’s confidential workman, Haley. Responding
to a look he approached, smiling.
“Tell me about it,” I managed to say, faintly - “all
about it.”
“Certainly,” he said; “you were carried unconscious
from a burning house - Moxon’s. Nobody knows how you came
to be there. You may have to do a little explaining. The
origin of the fire is a bit mysterious, too. My own notion is
that the house was struck by lightning.”
“And Moxon?”
“Buried yesterday - what was left of him.”
Apparently this reticent person could unfold himself on occasion.
When imparting shocking intelligence to the sick he was affable enough.
After some moments of the keenest mental suffering I ventured to ask
another question:
“Who rescued me?”
“Well, if that interests you - I did.”
“Thank you, Mr. Haley, and may God bless you for it. Did
you rescue, also, that charming product of your skill, the automaton
chess-player that murdered its inventor?”
The man was silent a long time, looking away from me. Presently
he turned and gravely said:
“Do you know that?”
“I do,” I replied; “I saw it done.”
That was many years ago. If asked to-day I should answer less
confidently.
A TOUGH TUSSLE
One night in the autumn of 1861 a man sat alone in the heart of a forest
in western Virginia. The region was one of the wildest on the
continent - the Cheat Mountain country. There was no lack of people
close at hand, however; within a mile of where the man sat was the now
silent camp of a whole Federal brigade. Somewhere about - it might
be still nearer - was a force of the enemy, the numbers unknown.
It was this uncertainty as to its numbers and position that accounted
for the man’s presence in that lonely spot; he was a young officer
of a Federal infantry regiment and his business there was to guard his
sleeping comrades in the camp against a surprise. He was in command
of a detachment of men constituting a picket-guard. These men
he had stationed just at nightfall in an irregular line, determined
by the nature of the ground, several hundred yards in front of where
he now sat. The line ran through the forest, among the rocks and
laurel thickets, the men fifteen or twenty paces apart, all in concealment
and under injunction of strict silence and unremitting vigilance.
In four hours, if nothing occurred, they would be relieved by a fresh
detachment from the reserve now resting in care of its captain some
distance away to the left and rear. Before stationing his men
the young officer of whom we are writing had pointed out to his two
sergeants the spot at which he would be found if it should be necessary
to consult him, or if his presence at the front line should be required.
It was a quiet enough spot - the fork of an old wood-road, on the two
branches of which, prolonging themselves deviously forward in the dim
moonlight, the sergeants were themselves stationed, a few paces in rear
of the line. If driven sharply back by a sudden onset of the enemy
- and pickets are not expected to make a stand after firing - the men
would come into the converging roads and naturally following them to
their point of intersection could be rallied and “formed.”
In his small way the author of these dispositions was something of a
strategist; if Napoleon had planned as intelligently at Waterloo he
would have won that memorable battle and been overthrown later.
Second-Lieutenant Brainerd Byring was a brave and efficient officer,
young and comparatively inexperienced as he was in the business of killing
his fellow-men. He had enlisted in the very first days of the
war as a private, with no military knowledge whatever, had been made
first-sergeant of his company on account of his education and engaging
manner, and had been lucky enough to lose his captain by a Confederate
bullet; in the resulting promotions he had gained a commission.
He had been in several engagements, such as they were - at Philippi,
Rich Mountain, Carrick’s Ford and Greenbrier - and had borne himself
with such gallantry as not to attract the attention of his superior
officers. The exhilaration of battle was agreeable to him, but
the sight of the dead, with their clay faces, blank eyes and stiff bodies,
which when not unnaturally shrunken were unnaturally swollen, had always
intolerably affected him. He felt toward them a kind of reasonless
antipathy that was something more than the physical and spiritual repugnance
common to us all. Doubtless this feeling was due to his unusually
acute sensibilities - his keen sense of the beautiful, which these hideous
things outraged. Whatever may have been the cause, he could not
look upon a dead body without a loathing which had in it an element
of resentment. What others have respected as the dignity of death
had to him no existence - was altogether unthinkable. Death was
a thing to be hated. It was not picturesque, it had no tender
and solemn side - a dismal thing, hideous in all its manifestations
and suggestions. Lieutenant Byring was a braver man than anybody
knew, for nobody knew his horror of that which he was ever ready to
incur.
Having posted his men, instructed his sergeants and retired to his station,
he seated himself on a log, and with senses all alert began his vigil.
For greater ease he loosened his sword-belt and taking his heavy revolver
from his holster laid it on the log beside him. He felt very comfortable,
though he hardly gave the fact a thought, so intently did he listen
for any sound from the front which might have a menacing significance
- a shout, a shot, or the footfall of one of his sergeants coming to
apprise him of something worth knowing. From the vast, invisible
ocean of moonlight overhead fell, here and there, a slender, broken
stream that seemed to plash against the intercepting branches and trickle
to earth, forming small white pools among the clumps of laurel.
But these leaks were few and served only to accentuate the blackness
of his environment, which his imagination found it easy to people with
all manner of unfamiliar shapes, menacing, uncanny, or merely grotesque.
He to whom the portentous conspiracy of night and solitude and silence
in the heart of a great forest is not an unknown experience needs not
to be told what another world it all is - how even the most commonplace
and familiar objects take on another character. The trees group
themselves differently; they draw closer together, as if in fear.
The very silence has another quality than the silence of the day.
And it is full of half-heard whispers - whispers that startle - ghosts
of sounds long dead. There are living sounds, too, such as are
never heard under other conditions: notes of strange night-birds, the
cries of small animals in sudden encounters with stealthy foes or in
their dreams, a rustling in the dead leaves - it may be the leap of
a wood-rat, it may be the footfall of a panther. What caused the
breaking of that twig? - what the low, alarmed twittering in that bushful
of birds? There are sounds without a name, forms without substance,
translations in space of objects which have not been seen to move, movements
wherein nothing is observed to change its place. Ah, children
of the sunlight and the gaslight, how little you know of the world in
which you live!
Surrounded at a little distance by armed and watchful friends, Byring
felt utterly alone. Yielding himself to the solemn and mysterious
spirit of the time and place, he had forgotten the nature of his connection
with the visible and audible aspects and phases of the night.
The forest was boundless; men and the habitations of men did not exist.
The universe was one primeval mystery of darkness, without form and
void, himself the sole, dumb questioner of its eternal secret.
Absorbed in thoughts born of this mood, he suffered the ti