II.
Eight months after Tyck and I parted at Brussels, I arrived in Rome. Sharing, as I did, the general ignorance in regard to the severity of the Italian winters, I was surprised to find the weather bitterly cold. It was the day before Christmas, and a breeze that would chill the bones swept the deserted streets. After three months’ idling in the East, paddling in the Golden Horn, dreamily watching from the hills of Smyrna the far-off islands of the Grecian Archipelago, and sleeping in the sun on the rocks at Piræus, Italy seemed as cold and barren as the shores of Scandinavia. It is a popular mistake to winter in Italy. The West of England, the South of France, and many sections of our own country are far preferable. It is not to be denied that Italy can be thoroughly enjoyed only in the warm months. Even in the hottest season, Americans find Naples, Rome, and Florence less uncomfortable than Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. Immediately on my arrival Tyck came to meet me at the hotel, and we spent a happy Christmas Eve, discussing the thousand topics that arise when two intimate friends meet after a separation like our own. Tyck was in better health and spirits than I had ever known him to be in before, and to all appearances Italian air agreed with him. In the course of the evening he gave me an invitation to make one of a breakfast-party that was to celebrate Christmas in his studio the next day, and the invitation was accompanied with the request to bring eatables and liquids enough to satisfy my own appetite on that occasion—a Bohemian fashion of giving dinner-parties to which we were no strangers. Accordingly, the next morning at eleven o’clock we were to meet again in Tyck’s quarters.
The studio was in the fifth story of a large block not far from the Porta del Popolo, and looked out upon a large portion of the city, the view embracing the Pincio and St. Peter’s, Monte Mario, and the Quirinal. The entrance on the street was dismal and prison-like. A long, dark corridor led back to a small court at the bottom of a great pit formed by the walls of the crowded houses, and the stones of the pavement were flooded with the drippings from the buckets of all the neighborhood, as they slid up and down the wire guys leading into the antique well in one corner, and rattled and splashed until they were drawn up by an unseen hand far above in the maze of windows and balconies—an ingenious and simple way of drawing water, quite common in Rome. From this sunless court-yard a broad, musty staircase twisted and turned capriciously up past narrow, gloomy passages to the upper floors of the house. At the fourth story began a narrow wooden staircase, always perfumed with the odors of the adjacent kitchens; and it grew narrower and steeper and more crooked until it met a little dark door at the very top, bearing the name of Tyck. The suite of rooms which Tyck occupied made up one of those mushroom-like wooden stories that are lightly stuck on the top of substantial stone or brick buildings. They add to the beauty of the silhouette, but detract from the dignity of the architectural effect, and look like the cabin of a wrecked ship flung upon the rocks. From the outside, quaint little windows, pretty hanging gardens, or an airy loggia make the place look cheerful and cosy. Within, one feels quite away from the world; far up beyond neighbors and enclosing walls, tossed on a sea of roofs, and with a broad sweep of the horizon on every side. Such a perch is as attractive as it is difficult to reach, and offers to the artist the advantages of light, quiet, and perfect freedom. Tyck’s rooms were three in number. A narrow corridor led past the door of the store-room to the studio—a large, square room with a great window on the north side and smaller ones with shutters on the east and west. From the studio a door opened into the chamber, in turn connected with the store-room. Thus there was a public and a private entrance to the studio.
The Christmas breakfast had more than ordinary significance: it was to be the occasion of the presentation of Tyck’s household to his artist friends. This, perhaps, needs explanation. At the time of our departure from Antwerp, Tyck was engaged to be married to a young lady, the daughter of a Flemish merchant, and there was every prospect of a wedding within a year. After he had been absent two or three months her letters ceased to come, and Tyck learned from a friend that the thrifty father of the girl had found a match more desirable from a mercenary point of view, and had obliged his daughter to break engagement number one in order to enter into a new relation. Tyck, after some months of despondency, at last made an alliance with a Jewish girl of the working class, and it was at the Christmas breakfast that Lisa was to be presented for the first time to the rest of the circle. When I entered the studio there were already a good many fellows present. The apartment was a picture in itself; and a long dining-table placed diagonally across the room, bearing piles of crockery and a great pièce montée of evergreen and oranges, and surrounded by a unique and motley assemblage of chairs, did not detract from the picturesqueness of the interior.
As studios go, this would not, perhaps, have been considered luxurious or of extraordinary interest, but it had a character of its own. Two sides of the room were hung with odd bits of old tapestry and stray squares of stamped leather, matched together to make an irregular patchwork harmonious in tone and beautifully rich in color. In the corner were bows and arrows, spears, and other weapons, brought from Java, a branch or two of palm, and great reeds from the Campagna with twisted and shrivelled leaves, yellow and covered with dust. Studies of heads and small sketches were tucked away between the bits of tapestry and leather, and thus every inch of these walls was covered. On another wall was a book-shelf with a confused pile of pamphlets and paper-covered books, and under this hung a number of silk and satin dresses, various bits of rich drapery, a coat or two, and a Turkish fez. The remaining wall, and the two narrow panels on either side of the great window, were completely covered with studies of torsos, drawings from the nude, academy heads, sketches of animals and landscapes, together with a shelf of trinkets, a skeleton, and a plaster death-mask of a friend hung with a withered laurel-wreath. Quaint old chairs, bits of gilded stage furniture, racks of portfolios, a small table or two covered with the odds and ends of draperies, papers, sketches, the accumulation of months, filled the corners and spread confusion into the middle of the room. Three or four easels huddled together under the light, holding stray panels and canvases and half-finished pictures, a lay-figure—that stiff and angular caricature of the human form—and a chair or two loaded with brushes, color-box, and palettes, witnessed that tools were laid aside to give room for the table that filled every inch of vacant space. In one corner was an air-tight stove, and this was piled up with dishes and surrounded by great tin boxes, whence an appetizing steam issued forth, giving a hint of the good things awaiting us. The bottles were beginning to form a noble array on the table, and as often as a new guest appeared, a servant with a porte-manger and a couple of bottles would contribute to the army of black necks and add to the breastwork of loaded dishes that flanked the stove. Tyck was in his element, welcoming heartily and with boyish enthusiasm every arrival, and leading the shout of joy at the sight of a fat bundle or a heavy weight of full bottles. By eleven o’clock every one was on hand, and there was an embarrassment of riches in the eating and drinking line. Before sitting down at the table—there were eighteen of us—we made a rule that each one should in turn act as waiter and serve with his own hand the dishes he had brought, the intention being to divide the accumulated stock of dishes into a great many different courses. French was chosen as the language of the day.
While we were discussing the question of language, Lisa came in and was presented to us all in turn, impressing us very favorably. She was slight, but not thin, with dark hair, large brown eyes, and a transparent pink-and-white complexion—a fine type of a Jewess. She took the place of honor at Tyck’s right hand, and we sat down in a very jolly mood.
The menu of that breakfast would craze a French cook, and the arrangement of the courses was a work of great difficulty, involving much general discussion. The trattorie of Rome had been ransacked for curious and characteristic national dishes; every combination of goodies that ingenious minds could suggest was brought, and plain substantials by no means failed. In the hors d'œuvre, we had excellent fresh caviare, the contribution of a Russian; Bologna sausage and nibbles of radish; and, to finish, pâté de foie gras. Soup à la jardinière was announced, and was almost a failure at the start-off, because one very important aid to the enjoyment of soup, the spoons, had been forgotten by the contributor. A long discussion as to the practicability of leaving the soup to the end of the meal, meanwhile ordering spoons to be brought, terminated in the employment of extra glasses in place of spoons and soup-plates. Then all varieties of fish followed in a rapid succession of small courses. Tiny minnows fried in delicious olive-oil; crabs and crawfish cooked in various ways; Italian oysters, small, thin, and coppery in flavor; canned salmon from the Columbia River; baccalà and herrings from the North Sea; broad, gristly flaps from the body of the devil-fish, the warty feelers purple and suggestive of the stain of sepia and of Victor Hugo—all these, and an abundance of each, were passed around. An immense joint of roast beef, with potatoes, contributed by an Englishman; a leg of mutton, by a Scotchman; a roast pig, from a Hungarian; the potted meat of Australia, and the tasteless manzo of Italy, formed the solid course. Next we devoured a whole flock of juicy larks with crisp skins, pigeons in pairs, ducks from the delta of the Tiber, a turkey brought by an American, pheasants from a Milanese, squash stuffed with meat and spices, and a globe of polenta from a Venetian. At this point in the feast there were cries of quarter, but none was given. An English plum-pudding of the unhealthiest species, with flaming sauce; a pie or two strangely warped and burned in places, from the ignorance of the Italian cook or the bad oven; pots of jelly and marmalade, fruit mustard, stewed pears, and roasted chestnuts, ekmekataïf and havláh from a Greek, a profusion of fruits of all kinds, were offered, and at last coffee was served to put in a paragraph. The delicate wines of Frascati and Marino, the light and dark Falernian, a bottle of Tokay, one of Vöslau, thick red wine of Corfu, and flasks of the ordinary Roman mixture—a little more than water, a little less than wine—Capri rosso and bianco, Bordeaux and Burgundy, good English ale and porter, Vienna beer, American whiskey, and Dutch gin, Alkermes, Chartreuse, and Greek mastic, made, all told, a wine-list for a king, and presented a rank of arguments to convert a prohibitionist. This was no orgy that I am describing, simply a jolly breakfast for eighteen Bohemians of all nationalities—a complex, irregular affair, but for that reason all the more delightful.
When we were well along in the bill of fare, a little incident occurred which put me out of the mood for further enjoyment of the breakfast, and for the rest of the day my position was that of silent spectator, watching the amusements with an expression not calculated to encourage sport. To begin with, I was unusually sensitive to nervous shocks, from the fact that my first impression of Rome had been intensely disagreeable. I found myself in a strangely exciting atmosphere, and subject to unpleasant influences. The first night passed in Rome was crowded with visions, and I cannot recall a period of twenty-four hours during my residence in that city that has not its unpleasant souvenir of strange hallucinations, wonderful dreams, or some shock to my nerves. The meeting with Tyck was doubtless the occasion of my visions and restlessness on the night before the Bohemian breakfast. The events of the previous winter in Antwerp came freshly to my mind; I lived over again that dark season of horrors, and the atmosphere of Rome nourished the growth of similar strange fancies. There was, however, in my train of thoughts on Christmas Eve no foreboding that I can recall, no prophetic fear of a continuance of the strange relations with that black poodle which had already taken away the best half of our circle. It needed little, nevertheless, to put me in a state of mind very similar to that which tortured me for months in Antwerp.
But to return to the breakfast. While we were at the table a hired singer and guitar-player, a young girl of sixteen or seventeen years, sang Italian popular songs and performed instrumental pieces. She had nearly exhausted her list when she began to sing the weird, mournful song of Naples, “Palomella,” at that time quite the rage, but since worn threadbare, and its naïve angles and depressions polished down to the meaningless monotony of a popular ditty. We heard a dog howl in the sleeping-room as the singer finished the ballad, and Lisa rose to open the door. My seat on Tyck’s left brought me quite near the door, and I turned on my chair to watch the entrance of the animal. A black poodle, as near as I could judge the exact counterpart of the Flemish dog, quietly walked into the room, evidently perfectly at home. My first calm reflection was that it was an hallucination, a mental reproduction of one of the grim pictures of the past winter; I could not believe my own vision, and it was some time before I came to realize the fact that my senses were not deceived. I was about to ask Tyck if he had noticed in the dog any curious resemblance to our self-appointed companion in Antwerp, when he turned, and, as I thought then, with a lingering touch of the old superstitious fear in his voice, said: “You’ve noticed the dog; he belongs to Lisa. When he first came here, a month ago, I was horrified to find in him the image of our Flemish friend. Lisa laughed me out of my fears, saying that the animal had been in the family for six months or more, and at last I began to look upon him as a harmless pup, and to wonder only at the strange coincidence.” But I could not turn the affair into a joke or forget for a moment past events, now recalled so vividly to my mind. This was the third time that a black poodle had taken a liking to one of us, and two out of the three attachments had already proved fatal to the human partner. It was not by any means clear that the same dog played these different renderings of one part, but to all appearance it was the identical poodle. If in two cases this friendship of the dog for his self-chosen master had proved fatal, it was but a natural inference that the third attachment would terminate in a similar manner. But Tyck was in better health than ever before, notwithstanding the companionship of the dog. Was not this a proof of the folly of my superstition? I asked myself. Reasons were not wanting to disprove the soundness of my logic. It was undoubtedly true that stranger and more wonderful coincidences had happened, and nothing had come of them, and it was undeniable that the imagination might distort facts to such a degree that coincidences would be suspected where none existed. If it were only a coincidence, fears were childish. And the dog manifested no particular friendship for Tyck; he belonged to Lisa, and seemed to take no special notice of any one else.
The déjeuner went on without further interruption, and the guitar girl drummed away until the table was cleared. We were not at a loss for entertainments after the feast was ended. Tyck’s costumes were drawn upon, and a Flemish musician sang a costume duet with a Walloon sculptor, one being laced up in a blue satin ball-dress, and the other staggering under the weight of a janissary’s uniform. Later on there was a dancing concours, in which the Indian war-dance, the English jig, the negro walk-around, the tarantella, the Flemish reuske, and the Hungarian csárdás each had its nimble-footed performers. The scene was worth putting upon canvas. The confusion of quaint and rare trinkets, the abundance of color-bits, and the picturesque groups of figures in all the costumes that could be improvised for the dance or the song—a museum of bric-à-brac and a carnival of characters—all this made a tableau vivant of great richness and interest.
About the middle of the afternoon the entertainment began to flag a little, and the moment there was a lull in the sport some one proposed a trip to Ponte Molle. The vote was immediately taken and carried, and we marched out to the Piazza del Popolo and engaged an omnibus for the rest of the day.
The straggling suburb outside the Porta del Popolo was lively with pleasure-seeking Romans. The wine-shops were full of sad-eyed peasants and weary, careworn laborers; all the mournful character of a Roman merry-making was unusually prominent on this cheerless holiday, and the cloaked natives chatted as solemnly as if they were mourners at a funeral. Roman festivities are, in general, not calculated to divert the participants to a dangerous extent. Wine-drinking is the chief amusement; and even under the enlivening influences of his potations the Roman rarely loses his habitual seriousness of manner, but bears himself to the end of the orgy as if he expected every moment to be called upon to answer for the sins of his ancestors. As we drove along the straight, broad road that raw afternoon, we met numberless carts and omnibuses filled with laborers returning from the wine-shops in the Campagna; the sidewalks were crowded with people on their way to and from the trattorie near the Tiber; and scarcely a song was heard, rarely a laugh sounded above the rattle of the wheels. The natives were making a business of amusement, and formed a staid and sober procession, on an occasion when in Germany or Belgium the frolics and noisy merriment of the people would have known no bounds short of the limit of physical endurance. We were probably regarded as escaped maniacs because we persisted in breaking the voiceless confusion by our hearty Flemish songs. We left the omnibus in the yard of a trattoria at some distance out in the Campagna, and strolled over the hills for an hour, watching the dark, cold mountains and the broad, sad-tinted waste spread out before us. The solemn beauty of the Campagna is always impressive; under a gray sky it assumes a sombre and mournful aspect. To the north of the city, the low, flat-topped hills combine in a peculiar way to form silhouettes of great nobleness of character and simplicity of line. They are the changeless forms that endure like the granite cliffs, monumental in their grandeur. When moving shadows of the clouds form purple patches across these hills, and the dull gray of the turf comes into occasional relief in a spot of strong sunlight, the scene is one of unique and matchless beauty—a heroic landscape, with wonderful vigor and dignity of line and extraordinary delicacy of tone. That afternoon the dog, which had accompanied Tyck on the excursion, furnished us our chief amusement. We tossed sticks down the steep gravel banks, to watch his lithe black form struggle through the brambles, seize the bit, and return it to us. He, poor animal, had probably been shut up within the walls of Rome longer than the rest of the party, and entered into the outdoor frolics with even more zest than his human companions. Below the trattoria there was a narrow brook bridged by a rail, and we tried to get the poodle to walk this narrow path, but with no success. Tyck at last made the attempt, to encourage the dog, but on his way back he slipped and wet his feet and ankles thoroughly. Most of us thought this accident of not the least importance, but one or two of the old residents advised a return to the wine-shop, hinting of a possible serious illness in consequence of the wetting. At the trattoria Tyck dried himself at the large open fire in the kitchen, and we thought no more of it. The old Porta del Popolo answered our chorus with a welcoming echo as we drove in, shortly after dark, and mingled with the shivering crowd hurrying to their homes. Our Christmas had at least been a merry one to the most of us, but I could not forget the incident of the dog; and as I walked through the streets to my cheerless room a strange dread gradually took entire possession of me in spite of my reason.
For a day or two, that least amusing of all occupations, studio-hunting, kept me busy from morning till night, and I saw none of the breakfast-party. It was beginning to surprise me that Tyck did not make his appearance, when I had a call from Lisa, bearing a message from him, saying he was slightly unwell and wanted me to come and see him. I lost no time in complying with his request. On my way to his room the same old dread, stifled for a while in the busy search for rooms, came back with all its force, and I already began to suffer the first agonies of grief at the loss of my friend. For, although the message was hopeful enough, it came at a time when it seemed the first sign of the fulfilment of my forebodings, and from that moment I looked upon Tyck as lost to us. Not pretending to myself that it was an excusable weakness on my part to become the victim of what would generally be declared a morbid state of the imagination; reasoning all the while that the weather, the peculiar, tomb-like atmosphere of Rome, our previous experience in Antwerp, and our long absence from the distractions and worldliness of a civilized society would have caused this state of mind in healthier organizations than my own; I still could not help thinking of my friend as already in the clutch of death, and soon to be numbered as the third lost from our little circle, while the fourth was still to wait.
Tyck was in bed when I entered his chamber. There was a fresh glow deep in his brown cheek, and his eyes seemed to me brighter than usual; still there was no visible sign of a dangerous illness, and my reason laughed at my fears. He complained of dizziness, headache, pains in the back, and coughed at intervals. His manner showed that his mind was troubled, and from Lisa I learned that he had not yet received the expected remittance for the sale of his last pictures sent to London. The winter was severe and fuel expensive; models were awaiting payment, and the rent-day was drawing near. I gave Lisa all the money I had with me, and charged her to keep me posted as to the wants of the household, if by any bad fortune Tyck should be obliged to keep his room for any length of time. She afterwards told me that later in the day several friends called, suspected the state of affairs, and each contributed according to his purse—always without the knowledge of the sufferer.
Every day after that, I passed a portion of the daylight in Tyck’s room. His cough gradually grew more violent, and in a day or two he became seriously ill with high fever. The doctor, a spare, wise-looking German, of considerable reputation as a successful practitioner in fever cases, was called that day and afterwards made more frequent visits than the length of our purses would warrant. On the third or fourth day he decided that the disease was typhoid fever, and commenced a severe and to us inexperienced nurses a harsh treatment, dosing continually with quinine and blistering the extremities. Before the end of a week Tyck fell into long spells of delirium, and recognized his friends only at intervals. His tongue was black, and protruded from his mouth, and between his fits of coughing he could at last only whisper a few words in Italian. We had been in the habit of conversing at discretion in English, French, Flemish, or German; talking always on art questions in French, telling stories in the picturesque Flemish patois, and reserving the German and English languages for more solemn conversation. Tyck would frequently attempt to use one of these languages when he wished to speak with me during his illness, aware of my slight acquaintance with Italian, and it was most painful to witness his struggles with an English or French sentence. The words seemed too rasping for his tender throat and blistered tongue; the easy enunciation of the Italian vowels gave him no pain, and in a sigh he could whisper a whole sentence.
When at last Lisa was quite worn out with nursing, and there was need of more skilful and experienced hands to administer the medicines and perform the thousand duties of a sick-room, the doctor advised us to make application at a convent for a sister to come and watch at night. We did so, and on the evening of the same day a cheerful, home-like little body, in the stiffest of winged bonnets, climbed the long stairs and took immediate possession of the sick-room, putting things into faultless order in a very few moments. Her first step was to banish the dog to a neighboring studio, and I awaited her entrance into the painting-room with some anxiety. The long table had been removed, but otherwise the studio remained just the same as it was on the day of the feast. A regiment of bottles was drawn up near the window; various tell-tale dishes, broken glasses, and other débris cluttered the corner near where the stove stood, and I was sure that a lecture on the sin of the debauchery which had brought my friend to a sick-bed awaited me the moment the sister saw these proofs of our worldliness. She trotted out into the studio at last, in the course of her busy preparation for the night; and then, instead of bursting forth with a reproof, she covered her face with her hands, turned about, and walked out of the house. I, of course, followed her and begged for an explanation. She hesitated long, but finally with some difficulty said she could not stay in a room where such pictures decorated the walls, and before she would consent to return she must be assured of their removal or concealment. I hastened up, covered all the academy studies with bits of newspaper; and the sister returned and went on with her duties as if nothing had happened. So the expected lecture was never delivered. In the sight of the greater enormity of academy studies, she clearly thought it useless to lecture on the appetite.
Few days elapsed after the sister took charge of the sick-room before we were all rejoiced at an improvement in Tyck. He grew better rapidly, and in two weeks was able to sit up in bed and talk to us. Though we were full of joy at his apparent speedy recovery, there was always a bitterness in the thought that the fatal relapse might be expected at every moment, and this shadow hung over us even in the most hopeful hours. The sister gave up her charge, and as Tyck grew better day by day, Lisa came to act as sole nurse and companion, although we made daily visits to the sick-room. The month of January passed, and Carnival approached. Tyck was able to have his clothes put on, and to move around the room a little. The doctor made infrequent and irregular visits, and but for the fear of a relapse would have ceased to come altogether.
The morning of the first day of Carnival week, I was awakened while it was still dark by the ringing of my door-bell, and lay in bed for a while undecided whether it was not a dream that had roused me. My studio and apartment were of a very bogyish character, located at the top of a house on the Tiber, completely shut away from the world, and full of dream-compelling influences that lurked in the dingy and long-disused bedroom with its worn and faded furniture, and filled the spacious studio and the musty little salon with an oppressive presence, which did not vanish in the brightest days nor in the midst of the liveliest assembly that ever gathered there. So it never astonished me to be awakened by some unaccountable noise, or by the mental conviction that there was some disturbance in the crowded atmosphere. When I was aroused that dark, drizzly morning, I awaited the second pull of the bell before I summoned courage enough to pass through the shadowy salon and the lofty studio, with its ghostly lay-figure and plaster casts, like pale phantoms in the dim light of a wax taper, and open the great door that led into the narrow corridor. A slender form wrapped in a shawl entered the studio, and Lisa stood there, pale with fright, her great brown eyes drowned in tears, shrinking from the invisible terrors that seemed to pursue her. She whispered that Tyck was worse, and asked me to go for the doctor. I led her back to Tyck’s room, and in an hour the doctor was there.
The details of that last illness are painful in the extreme. The sister was not in attendance, it having been decided by the superior that artists’ studios were places whither the duties of the sisterhood did not call its members, and so Lisa’s mother came and did her best to fill, in a rough sort of way, the delicate office of nurse. On the last day of Carnival, little suspecting that the end of my friend was near, I was occupied in my own studio, until nearly dark, and just as the sport was at its height I struggled through the crowd and reached Tyck’s studio, white with confetti and flour, and in a state of mind hardly fitted for the sick-room. In the studio two doctors sat in consultation, and their serious faces, with the frightened look in Lisa’s eyes, told me the sad story at once. They had decided that Tyck must die, and made a last examination just after I entered. They raised him in bed, thumped his poor back, pulled out his swollen tongue, and felt of his tender scalp, burned with fever and frozen with a sack of ice. The group at the bedside, so picturesquely impressive, will always remain in my memory like the souvenir of some gloomy old picture. Lisa’s mother was seated on the back of the bed, raising Tyck like a sick child, his limp arms dangling over her shoulders and his head drooping against her cheek. To the right the slight and graceful form of Lisa, holding the earthen lamp; one doctor bending over to listen at the bared back, the focus of the dim light; the other doctor solemn and motionless, a dark silhouette against the bed and the wall beyond. The examination only proved the truth of the decision just reached, and it was then announced for the first time that the real malady was lung-fever, with the not infrequently accompanying first symptoms of typhoid. A few moments later one or two young artists dropped in, learned the sad news, and went away to warn the rest of the friends. At eight o’clock we were all in the studio, and after a hushed and hasty discussion as to whether or not a priest should be called in this last hour, the Catholic friends were overruled, and it was decided to consult no spiritual adviser. Tyck, meanwhile, was scarcely able to talk. One by one the fellows came to his bedside, were recognized, and went away. I alone stayed in the studio, waiting, waiting. The doctor was to come at half-past nine, and the fellows had promised to return again at ten.
For a long hour we sat in silence, Lisa and I, and watched the approach of death. The mother, completely exhausted, lay on the bare floor near the stove, as motionless as a corpse; the dim light reflected from the sick-room transformed the draperies into mysterious shapes, and made the lay-figure look vaporous and spectral. Frequent fits of violent, suffocating cough would call us to the bedside, and after a severe struggle Tyck would for a moment throw off the clutch of the malady and breathe again. He was in agony to speak with me, but was unable to. I guessed part of his wishes, repeated them in Flemish, and he made a signal of assent when I was right. In this way he communicated certain directions about his affairs, and I promised to see Lisa provided for and all his business properly settled. But there was something more he was anxious to tell, and he continued to the last his vain struggle to express it.
The stillness of the studio in the intervals between the spasms of suffocation was painfully broken, as the long hour passed, by his heavy breathing and by the stifled sobs of the poor girl, who, at last, cried herself to sleep, exhausted by her watching. From outside, a dog’s mournful howl, breaking into a short, spasmodic bark, came up at intervals, and I could see that this sound disturbed the sufferer, probably recalling to his waning faculties the history of the dog that had so haunted us. From the street the chorus of the maskers came floating to us, sounding hollow and far away, like the chant of a distant choir in some great cathedral. Occasionally a carriage rumbled over the rough pavement, the deep sound echoing through the deserted court-yard and up the long, dreary stairways. It was within a few moments of the doctor’s expected visit that a spasm more violent than any previous one called me to the bedside. We had long since stopped the medicine, and nothing remained to do but to ease the sufferer over the chasm as gently as possible. He did not seem at all anxious to live, and in the agonies of the suffocation there was no fear in those dark eyes that rolled in their hollow sockets. I raised him in bed, and at last, after the most prolonged fight, he caught his breath, opened his eyes, turned towards me, and said plainly in English, “All right, old boy.” Then he relapsed into a comatose state and never spoke again. The doctor found him rapidly sinking, and another spasm came on while he was feeling the pulse. The patient recovered from it only to pass into another and more protracted one, at the end of which he sighed twice and was dead. For a second or two after the last deep breath his face had all the fever-flush and the look of life, but almost instantly he fell over towards me, changed beyond recognition. The wave of death had passed over us, carrying with it the last trace of life that lingered in the face of my friend, and a ghastly pallor crept over his cheeks, transforming him that I loved into an unrecognizable, inert thing. I turned away and never saw that face again, although they told me it was nobly beautiful in its Egyptian, changeless expression. That pause of an instant, while death was asserting its power, impressed me strangely—and this was no new experience for me. In that pause, when time seemed to stand still, something urged me to raise my eyes in confident expectation of seeing the spirit as it left the body. Even my heated imagination, to which I was ready to charge much that was inexplicable in my experience, did not produce an image, but instead, where the wall should have been I seemed to look into space, into a wide, wide distance. An awful vacancy, an infinity of emptiness, yawned before me, and I looked down to meet the fixed expression of that changed face. For that moment there was no lingering presence of my friend that I could feel; in that short struggle he had separated himself entirely from us and from the place he used to fill with his charming presence. In the chamber of death there was no adumbration of the life that once flourished there, of the soul that had just fled. And so I thought only of burying the body and providing for poor Lisa.
The rest of the fellow-painters came a few moments after it was all over, and received the news with surprise. Lisa still slept, and we did not wake her. I remained in the studio all night, and in the morning the formalities of the police notification were gone through with, and the preparations made for the funeral. In the studio, unchanged in every respect from the day when Tyck put his brushes in his palette and laid it upon a chair, we held a meeting to decide upon the funeral ceremonies. Lisa was completely broken down by grief and exhaustion, and, with her mother and the dog, who joyfully occupied his old place by the stove and disputed the entrance of every one, lived in the studio and the store-room.
On Sunday morning we buried our friend in the Protestant cemetery. Arriving at the little house in the enclosure, we found the coffin there, with the undertaker, Lisa, her mother, and the dog. An hour later an English minister came and conducted the ceremonies in a cold, hurried manner; but perhaps the services were quite as satisfactory, after all, because his language was unintelligible to the majority of those present. We stood shivering in a circle around the coffin until the services were over, and then bore the burden to the grave, dug deep near the wall in a picturesque nook under a ruined tower—a fit monument to our friend. Lisa and her mother stood a little apart, holding the dog, while we put the body in the grave, and a cold sun shone down upon us, quite as cheerless and as unsympathetic as the dull, lowering clouds of that day in Flanders a year before. After the customary handful of earth had been thrown, we turned away and separated, for the living had no sympathy with each other after the cold formality of the funeral. As I strolled across the field in the direction of Monte Testaccio, I looked back once only. There, on the mound of fresh earth, stood the dog, and Lisa was bending over to arrange a wreath of immortelles.
After the sale of Tyck’s effects, which brought a comfortable little sum to Lisa, I left Rome, now unbearable, and sought the distractions of busy Naples. Later, with warm weather, I settled in a solitary nest in Venice, where the waves of the lagoon lapped my door-step. The distressed cries of a dog called me to the water door, one rainy morning, while I was writing a part of this very narrative, and I pulled out of the water a half-drowned, shaggy black dog. With some anxiety I assisted the poor animal to dry his fur, and found, instead of my old enemy, a harmless shaggy terrier, who rests his dainty nose on the paper as I write.
And so the fourth still waits.
THE BUSH
THE six short stories in this volume have all been written at sea in those brief intervals of enforced rest from an exacting profession which a transatlantic voyage compels; and I have offered them to the public with the full knowledge of the necessity of some explanation to palliate my offence of meddling with literature, and in the belief that I must hang out some sort of a bush to call attention to whatever merits they may have. This bush will be a confession, made, like the confidential communications in all prefaces, into the ear of the reader alone. The reason why I have put my preface—if I may be permitted to misuse the term—at the end of the book instead of at the beginning, is that the confidences I impart may be, by reason of their position between the covers, less likely to be read by the careless or mechanical reviewer or by the superficial “skimmer” of fiction. I was afraid that if the reader should by chance read the preface first, he would not care to peruse the stories, because, having been admitted to the dark room, as it were, and having had the formula of the developer told to him, he might, after he had seen one set of images come up on the dull surface of the negative, find his curiosity abated, his interest gone, and his desire satisfied.
These stories have been published in various magazines, at different times, since the centennial year. When the earliest one of the series appeared, I was not a little flattered by being often asked how much of it was true. When the second one came out, this question grew a little stale, and I began to resent the curiosity as to my method of story-telling. The climax was finally reached when I received a letter from a writer of most excellent short stories, in which communication he desired information about the characters in the tale, and led me to understand that he believed the main part of the tale to be true. In my answer to his letter I wrote him this old story of the Western bar-room: A crowd of men were leaning over a bar drinking together and listening to the yarns of a frontiersman who, stimulated by the laughter and applause, was drawing a very long bow. His triumph was not quite complete, however, for he noticed a thin, silent man at the farther end of the bar, whose face did not change its habitual expression at any of the mirth-or wonder-compelling incidents. At last, having directed the fire of his dramatic expression for some time towards the silent man with no result, the Western Munchausen turned to him with an oath and said: “Why in —— don’t you laugh or cry, or do something, when I tell a story?” “The fact is, stranger,” the sad man replied, in a mournful tone of voice—“the fact is, I’m a liar myself!” I never heard from my correspondent again.
We all think we have fertile imaginations, and no one can blame me for not liking to be denied the credit of invention and imagination, even if the stories be mostly true. It seemed to me quite as foolish to expect a short story to be a simple chronicle of some experience with changed names and localities as it would be to demand of an historical artist that he paint only those events of history of which he has been an actual spectator. However, while this suspicion of the existence of a foundation of truth was not altogether flattering or encouraging, it did set me to thinking what part of these stories was actually drawn from my real experience, in what way the ideas arose, grew, and developed into stories. The result of this examination—the confession of the proportion of truth to fiction—is the bush, then, which I propose to hang out.
The plot of the “Capillary Crime” turns on the force of capillary attraction in wood. The remote origin of the idea was reading about the employment of wooden wedges in ancient quarries, which were first driven in dry and then, on being wetted, swelled and burst off the blocks of stone. While living in Paris, in the Rue de l’Orient, a small street on Montmartre, which was lighted at that time by lanterns hung on ropes across from house to house, I had occasion to take out the breech-pin of an old Turkish flint-lock gun in order to draw the charge. It was impossible to start the plug at first, but after it had been soaked for a short time in petroleum it was easily unscrewed. Capillary attraction had carried the oil into the rusted threads of the screw. The knowledge of this action, together with the memory of the immense power of wooden wedges, naturally brought to my mind a possible case where the wetting of wood in a gun-stock might so affect the mechanism of the lock that the hammer would fall without the agency of the trigger. I constructed a model on the plan of the finger of a manikin, and it worked perfectly. An artist in the neighborhood committed suicide just about this time. My studio on Montmartre had once been the scene of a similar tragedy. There was every reason, then, why I selected that studio as the scene; there was a plausible excuse for connecting capillary force with the discharge of a gun; there was my recent experience with suicide to warrant a realistic description of such an event. My story was ready-made. I had only to sew together the patchwork pieces.
While I was engaged in revising “A Capillary Crime” for publication in book form, a friend sent me a slip cut from a Western newspaper, which testifies in such an unexpected manner to the possibility of the combination of circumstances described in my story that I insert it here:
“FACT AGAINST FICTION.
“A STRIKING INSTANCE OF THE UNRELIABILITY OF
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.
“There is no figment of the imagination—if it is at all within the limit of possibilities—more curious or strange than some things that actually happen. The following is an instance in proof of this:
“A few years ago Frank Millet, the well-known artist, war correspondent, and story-writer, published a short story in a leading magazine which had as its principal features the mysterious killing of a Parisian artist in his own studio. A web of circumstantial evidence led to the arrest of a model who had been in the habit of posing for him. But through some chain of circumstances which the writer of this has now forgotten, the murder—if murder it can be called—was found to have been caused by the discharge of a firearm through the force of capillary attraction. The firearm was used by the artist as a studio accessory, and was hung in such a manner that he was directly in line with it. Its discharge occurred when he was alone in his studio.
“The story was a vivid and ingenious flight of the imagination. Now for its parallel in fact:
“A recent number of the Albany Law Journal tells of the arrest of a man upon the charge of killing his cousin. The dead man was found lying upon a lounge, about three o’clock in the afternoon, with a 32-caliber ball in his brain. The cousin, who had an interest of $100,000 in his death, was alone with him in the house at the time. The discovery of the real cause of death was due to the lawyer of the accused, who took the rifle from which the ball had been fired, loaded and hung it upon the wall, and then marked the form of a man upon a white sheet and placed it upon the lounge where the man had been found. Then a heavy cut-glass pitcher of water was placed upon a shelf above. The temperature was 90° in the shade. The pitcher of water acted as a sun-glass, and the hot rays of the sun shining through the water were refracted directly upon the cartridge chamber of the rifle. Eight witnesses were in the room, and a few minutes after three o’clock there was a puff and a report, and the ball struck the outlined form back of the ear, and the theory of circumstantial evidence was exploded.
“This is interesting, not only because the real occurrence is quite as strange as the imagined one, but because the fact came after the fiction and paralleled it so closely.”
I have accurately reported the brief conversation I had with the friend who occupied the Roman studio with me, and can give no further proof of the peculiar character of the place nor add to the description of the uncomfortable sensations we endured there. My friend’s remarks so far confirmed my own impressions that I have always felt that he must have had the same experience as myself—if I may call the incident of the simulacrum an experience. He has never to my knowledge talked with any one about this, but now that I have broken the ice in this public manner he may feel called upon to tell his own story, if he has any to relate.
There used to come and pose for me in my Paris studio a Hungarian model who had been a circus athlete. The ranks of male models are largely recruited from circus men, actors, lion-tamers—people of all trades and professions, indeed—and it is not unusual to find among them individuals of culture and ability whom some misfortune or bad habit has reduced to poverty. This one was an unusually useful model. He had tattooed on the broad surface of skin over his left biceps his name, Nagy, not in ordinary letters, but in human figures in different distorted positions, representing letters of the alphabet, evidently copied from a child’s cheap picture-book. While I was painting from him, the war between Russia and Turkey broke out, and the model came one day and announced that he had joined the Hungarian Legion, and was off for Turkey. As he left me I said:
“If you’re killed, there’ll be no trouble in identifying you, for, unless your left arm is shot off, you have your passport always with you.”
At that time I had no intention of going to Turkey myself, but in a few days I found myself on the way there, and, while passing through Hungary, Nagy naturally came to my mind, and it occurred to me that I might possibly run across him. However, the fortunes of war did not bring us together, and I never saw him or heard of him again. On my way through London to America, after the war, I was witness to a slight trapeze accident in a circus which, though by no means startling, recalled to my mind Nagy and his tattooed name; and then, thinking over the campaign and meditating on the possibilities of my having met him there, the plan of the tale developed itself in a perfectly easy and regular way. I had only to introduce a little incident of my Italian travels, a bit of local coloring from Turkey, and the thing was done.
The evolution of “Tedesco’s Rubina” was simpler than that of either of the preceding stories. Any one familiar with Capri will remember a grotto similar to the one described, and probably many visitors to that little terrestrial paradise have been made acquainted with the secret of the smugglers’ path down into the grotto. A dozen years or more ago, there was a very old model in Capri who had a remarkable history, and who was accustomed to drone on for hours at a stretch about her early experiences and the artists of a generation or two ago. Sketches of her at different periods of her life hung in most of the public resorts of the island. I made a careful study of this old and wrinkled face, still bearing traces of youthful beauty. The contrast between this painting and the plaster cast of the head of a Roman nymph which occupied a prominent place in my studio was the cause of many a jest, and called forth many a tradition of model life from the garrulous members of that profession. The visible proofs that the old woman had once been the great beauty of the island; the incident of the bust in the museum at Rome; the discovery of human bones in the grotto—all were interwoven together in a web of romance before I even thought of putting it on paper. When I came to write it out, it was very much like telling a threadbare story.
The Latin Quarter in Paris is the most fertile spot in the world for the growth of romances, most of them of the mushroom species. If a stenographer were to take down the stories he might hear any evening in a brasserie there, he would have a unique volume of strange incidents—some of them incredible, perhaps, but all with much flavor of realism about them to make them interesting from a human point of view. Not a few strange suicides, incomprehensible alliances, marvellously curious and pathetic bits of human history, have come under my own notice there. Student life in the Latin Quarter is not all “beer and skittles,” for its sordid side is horribly depressing and hopeless. Few who have experienced it have ever entirely recovered from the taint of this unnatural and degrading life.
Away up in the top of one of the largest and most populous hotels of the quarter, an American artist has kept “bachelor hall” for a score of years or more. He is an animal-painter, and spends the winter in elaborating his summer’s studies, and in preparing immense canvases for sacrifice before that Juggernaut, the annual Salon. He received once a commission to paint a portrait—a “post-mortem,” as such a commission is usually called—of a deceased black-and-tan terrier. The only data he had to work from were a small American tintype and the tanned skin of the defunct pet. Having been inoculated with the spirit of modern French realism, the artist could not be content with constructing a portrait of the dog out of the materials provided, and went to a dog-fancier and hired an animal as near as could be like the one in the tintype. At the appointed hour the dog was brought to the studio in a covered basket. When the canvas was ready and the palette set, the artist opened the lid of the basket and the animal sprang out and began to run about the room. The artist thought the dog would soon make himself at home, so at first he did not attempt to secure him. But he shortly found that he grew wilder and more excited every moment, and that catching him was no easy matter. After knocking over all the furniture in the room except the heavy easel, he succeeded in cornering him and seized him by the collar. A savage bite through the thumb made him loose his hold, and the rôles of pursuer and pursued immediately changed. The beast flew into a terrible state of rage, snapping and snarling like a mad thing. As there was no safer refuge than the large easel, the artist climbed upon that to escape his infuriated enemy. By the aid of a long mahl-stock he fished up the bell-cord which hung within reach, and pulled it until the concierge came. The owner of the dog was speedily brought, and the siege of the studio was raised. The same artist brought in from the country one autumn a torpid snake, which he kept in a box all through the winter. One morning in spring he was horrified to find the reptile coiled up on the rug beside his bed. He killed it by dropping a heavy color-box on it, without stopping to find out whether it was venomous or not. It is easy to see how my story grew out of these two incidents.
Now that the chief actors in the drama which I have sketched in “The Fourth Waits” are long since dead, I may confess without fear of hurting anybody’s feelings that all the incidents in this tale are absolutely true. There are plenty of witnesses to the accuracy of this statement, and I have no doubt they would, if called upon, gladly testify to almost every detail of the descriptions. No one who was present at the funeral ceremonies in Antwerp and Rome can ever forget the impression made upon him at the time; neither is any member of the little artistic circle likely to forget to the end of his days the strange sensation of superstitious awe with which the incidents of the story of the stray dog were listened to every time the subject was broached among us. The memory of this experience weighed heavily upon my mind for two or three years, and I only threw off the load after I had written the story.
It is only to complete this series of confessions that I explain how this preface came to be written. I was riding home with a friend late one raw afternoon at the close of a long day’s hunting in one of the Midland counties of England, and we stopped to refresh ourselves and horses at a wayside inn called The Holly Bush. When we mounted again at the door, I reached up with my hunting crop and struck the holly bush that hung over the door as a sign. It rattled like metal, and as we rode away I said to my companion:
“That wasn’t a real holly bush!”
“That wasn’t real whiskey!” he replied.
The memory of the mongoose story which these remarks called up cheered us more than the pause at the inn.
“The mongoose story is almost the only tale that need not be explained even to a Scotchman,” my friend added.
This is how I came to think of explaining the construction of my stories, and how I came to call my confessions “The Bush.”
THE END.