THE END.
Can the Dead Return to Life? Before You Answer, Read
The Conquering Will
By TED OLSON
Gordon Paige is dead now, and surely there can be no harm in giving to the world this mad story, contained in the manuscript he left behind. Many will think that the man WAS mad; many will believe that he was attempting to perpetrate an immense and grotesque hoax. I do not know. I do know that Gordon always impressed me as the sanest of men, and surely he never seemed a man to father so strange and horrible a practical joke. But it is not for me to tell you what I believe, or attempt to force upon you my own opinion. Rather I shall offer the story as he left it, and let you interpret it as a joke or a madman’s dream, or a remarkable document from that mysterious border realm of which we know so little.
What is Soul? Who can define it? What is that intangible quality that makes me what I am, that brands me as a creature distinct, individual, with an entity that is my own and none other’s?
Who can answer? I do not know. I can only tell you my story—the story of Malcolm Rae—and ask that you give it what credence you can.
It was two years ago that I bade Jane Cavanaugh good-by at the railway station in our little home town of Radford. She was weeping, and clumsily I tried to comfort her.
“I sha’n’t be gone long, dearest,” I said. “A year isn’t long. I’ll be back in June, when my work is done. Then—we’ll be married, and we’ll never be separated again.”
“I know,” she answered. “I’m foolish.” She smiled up at me bravely, an April smile, with the tears still glistening in her brown eyes. “But—I’ve been frightened, somehow. It seems so far, up in that cold wilderness, and I’ve had you such a short time. I won’t be foolish again.”
The northbound train began to move, and for the last time I caught her in my arms and pressed my lips to hers.
“In June, dear. I’ll be back. I promise. Don’t worry,” I said again, as I swung upon the step of the Pullman.
She was smiling—that brave, April smile—and I watched her until the train carried me beyond sight of her.
Northward we went, Dan Murdock and I. Somewhere in those barren mountains in the untrammeled Northwest of Canada, a grizzled old prospector had unearthed a store of that precious stuff, tungsten. Murdock and I had been sent by our government to investigate it, determine its value, its quantity, and report.
It was a long task that awaited us. August was already upon us. The road inland was long and hard. It would be winter when we reached the prospect, spring before we could hope to complete our data and return.
Four days took us to the end of the railroad—a station tumbled in the midst of scarce-broken prairie and timberland. There we met the prospector, a shriveled, wiry, hairy old man, marked indelibly with the brand that men bear who have lived much in solitude.
From there our trail led northwest. Up waterways we pressed, across silent, silver lakes, hemmed in to the very brim with an untouched growth of pine and spruce; across portages, where streams thundered down precipitous canyons while we laboriously transported canoe and duffel through the timber, following faint paths that told plainly how rarely they had known human foot prints.
August passed—a series of long days filled only with the toil of paddle and portage. September was on us, and the days grew shorter, and sharp at either end. We were in a veritable untrodden land now. The mountains were close upon us. The portages grew more frequent, the way more rough and toilsome. Norton, the leathery-skinned old prospector, informed us curtly one morning, “Four more days, and we’re there.”
That day we abandoned the canoe, cacheing it safely in shrubbery and underbush. For two days we pressed upward, packing across a ridge that tested our strength to the utmost.
The morning of the third day found us once more on water. We had reached a deep, swift river, a stream that flowed to the north. We had crossed the divide and were on a tributary of the Mackenzie. From a cunning cache Norton drew forth another canoe, and we sped at ease down the stream.
And then—came the tragedy. It was noon of the fourth day. From round the bend in the river we heard the unmistakable roar of rapids.
“Portage?” queried Dan of our guide.
Norton shook his head. “Shoot ’er,” he answered curtly.
A moment later we swung round the bend. Before us the banks drew suddenly closer together, and the river narrowed and shot down between granite walls. The channel was checkered with boulders, around them the tortured waters spat and hissed, flung themselves high in unavailing anger, yelled their rage in deafening uproar.
Dan and I glanced questioningly. One narrow channel we could see—perilously narrow, perilously swift. But it was too late to reconsider. Already the waters quickened beneath us, bore us on with an insidious smoothness that was belied by the speed with which the canyon walls shot by. Norton sat poised at the bow, alert, ready. Murdock and I gripped our paddles. In a moment we were in it.
With sickening speed we shot into the turmoil. The roar rang in our ears terrifyingly. Spray shot over and drenched us. We battled furiously, plunging our paddles deep as Norton signaled us. The light craft seemed to leap and bound, like a runner at the hurdles, gathering impetus at each new thrust.
Then—a rock seemed to leap up in our very path. Dan, kneeling amidships, gave a cry of terror, and plunged wildly with his paddle. The delicately-balanced boat swayed, lost for a moment its poise, slued sideways.
A splintering crash, and I found myself in the seething water.
How I lived I do not know. I was a strong swimmer, but in that blind turmoil, skill availed little. I was borne headlong. I was conscious of boulders bludgeoning me cruelly. But suddenly the waters grew quieter. I was swept into an eddy at the foot of the canyon. Somehow, I struck out weakly, and, blind, breathless, and beaten, drew myself on a gravelly bar.
How long I lay there I can only guess. Bit by bit my strength returned. I sat up. I was on the edge of a mountain meadow, through which the stream swept, still foaming and boisterous. The thunder of the canyon came to me noisily.
The sound of it called me suddenly to a realization of my position. I strove to rise. A sickening, terrible pain shot through me, and as I dropped back to the sand I knew that my left leg was shattered.
It was not long before I knew the worst. Murdock and Norton were dead. I could not doubt the truth. Dan, as I knew, could not swim; and even had he been an expert swimmer it would be but through blind good fortune that any man could live in that seething torrent.
By such blind luck I had been saved. For what? Crippled, alone, with neither food nor shelter, in a wilderness hundreds of miles from human aid, with winter hanging imminent, what chance did I have? Saved? Yes—for death by slow torture!
For a moment, as the realization sent a sick despair through me, I was tempted to plunge once more into the river, and let the waters finish their work. But I dismissed the cowardly impulse. I would not despair. I would not die!
I took a more careful review of my surroundings. For the first time I saw, on the bank not a hundred yards away, a cabin—a mere pen of mud-plastered logs, but still a cabin. On the hillside above it was a scar in the earth. It was Norton’s cabin, Norton’s mine. But Norton was dead.
The sight gave me new courage. There was yet hope. I dragged myself to a kneeling position, gritting my teeth until the pain cleared a bit, and then began to creep toward the cabin.
It was torture, every inch of the way. Twice I fainted with the sheer agony. But I kept on. It had been noon when we neared the canyon. The sun was setting when I drew my body across the cabin door and fell in a stupor on the floor. There I lay until morning.
The pale dawn found me tossing in a high fever. I must have been delirious for days. But after a time I woke, very weak, but rational. I began to take stock of my surroundings.
I had hoped to find the cabin well stocked with provisions. A hasty survey proved that my hopes were vain. The tiny room was almost barren. A hand made cupboard stood in one corner, but it was all but empty. A driblet of flour, a strip of moldy bacon, a few shreds of jerked venison. Again despair shook me nauseatingly, again I banished it with grim resolve.
With the scant supply of wood I built a fire, dragging myself somehow around the room to get what I needed. There was water in a pail by the fireplace. I brewed the jerked meat for an hour. The resultant mixture was a weak, tasteless broth. Yet it was food—the first I had tasted for days. I drank some of it, and felt stronger.
My shattered leg had begun to knit. I had set it as best I could before the fever took me. Now it pained greatly, but with the aid of an old broom that I found I made shift to move around. And again hope flared warm in my heart. I built the fire high, and crawled under the robes in Norton’s bunk.
In the night I woke uneasily. First I was conscious of the throbbing in my leg; then I realized that what had aroused me was the sound of the wind roaring and shrieking past the walls, yelling like a horde of demons without.
Above my head was a window, made of caribou skin scraped parchment-thin, and against this I could hear the spit and rattle of snow. The fire had died to embers, and a bitter chill crept through the cabin. Winter had come.
At dawn it was still storming. For three days the blizzard kept up. I huddled in my robes, fed the fire from the diminishing pile of wood, ate sparingly of the scanty food. And again the fear began to play upon my heart with chill fingers; again I strove to banish it with grim resolve.
On the fourth day the snow ceased, but the wind remained unabated. It grew terribly cold. And on that day my woodpile dwindled to nothing, my last scrap of food vanished.
It grew colder. I kept the fire burning charily, feeding it, bit by bit, the scanty furniture that Norton had made with axe and hammer. I husbanded every bit, crouching over the merest spark of a flame, wrapping my thin body in robe and fur to conserve the precious warmth.
And still the storm raved around the cabin. Still the screaming wind drove the snowflakes against the windows, through badly-chinked crevices—a malicious, devilish wind, that seemed, to my disordered brain, to be an embodied spirit of evil bent on my destruction. And still the cold penetrated, mocking my efforts to stave it off.
Hunger and cold and pain combined to sap my strength. I grew delirious. For hours I forgot where I was, lived again the hours I had spent with Jane, saw her as I remembered her, a slim, exquisite thing, dark of hair, luminous of face, a spirit thing, too fine for man’s possession. And again I pressed her in my arms, and swore that I would return.
Waking from such visions, the will to live burned very strong in me. I would live; I would return. I swore it. Death could not conquer me; could not conquer love. Yet all the time I grew weaker; the flame of life flickered lower in my emaciated body.
The body was dying. I knew it. It scarce had strength now to cast more wood on the dying fire. Within it the pulse of existence flickered feebly. But never was the real me more alive. I burned fiercely with the desire to live. I swore I should not die.
Then one morning I awoke. The fire was out. Yet I was not cold. I attempted to rise; my body did not answer. I attempted to speak; no words came. Then I knew.
In the night the body had died. It lay there now, stiff, still. It had ceased to live.
But I was not dead. I could see my body lying there, a cast-off thing. But I was here.
The entity that was I had not perished with the flesh. The will to live was still mine. And I was alive! I was infinitely alive.
My perceptions were a hundred times clearer. I saw, I heard, I felt, as I never had before. And it seemed as if my whole being were concentrated in the one desire—to see Jane, to tell her I still lived.
And then there shot through my brain a terrible, sickening thought. To all the world’s knowledge I was dead. I was no longer flesh, but spirit. I could see Jane, no doubt, but I could never make myself known to her. I had lost her.
The most exquisite torture of soul racked me as the realization came. I was not dead. There was no death; my will had conquered it. But I was hopelessly and forever exiled from the world I had known. That warm familiar world that held love and so many other things, was forever taken away from me.
Hopelessly exiled! Again my will revolted at the thought. Why was I forever condemned to such exile? There lay the body. It had ceased to live, in truth. I had shed it as one does a garment. But why could I not don it again?
The body had stopped because of external, physical reasons. The soul had fled because living soul could not inhabit dead flesh. But if the physical conditions that had ended life were removed, could not the soul again restore it to life? If aid, food, warmth were to come, could I not live again in the body?
And so I waited. Soul kept vigil over body in that room—the two that had been linked so inextricably for thirty-one years, now divorced so irrevocably. You call it bizarre? That is because I tell it to you thus. How do you know but that it has happened times without number? You have watched by dead bodies, perhaps. How do you know that strange, invisible guest may not have shared the vigil with you?
And so I waited. Night came. The wind had died a little outside, and through the cold I heard the distant howl of wolves.
Again the howls came, and closer this time. It was a pack in full cry, spurred on by hunger, questing through the frozen solitudes for food. And now I could hear them in the clearing, and suddenly I realized what they sought.
Forgetting my impotence, I strove with desperate hands to bar the door more tightly. I seized my rifle—or tried to seize it. It was vain. Spirit has no fear from dangers of this world; equally it has no means of defense.
Round the cabin the wolves circled cautiously. I could hear them sniffing at the door.
Then one brute dashed himself against the panels. The stout frame quivered, but held. A long-drawn howl came; it thrilled me with terror. Then another clawed at the caribou-skin of the window.
A gleaming claw shot through, a pair of slavering jaws followed. In a minute they were in.
Can you dream of a thing so horrible as to watch your own body being torn apart by wild beasts?
They snarled, they fought. Their fangs clipped and tore. I grew sick with despair. The night was hideous with their snarls and yowling.
Unable to endure it, I fled. And horror tore at my heart. For now I knew I was indeed exile. The fleshly cloak that I had forsaken, that I had hoped to resume, was torn, destroyed.
I had only one wish now. To see Jane again, even though I could not speak to her, could not hold her in my arms. To see her at least, bitter as it would be, were still consolation.
There are no bounds of time or space to the unfettered soul. And so I found myself, without knowing how, in that long, homelike room where we had sat so often, with the fire flaming cheerily on the great hearth, the friendly books and pictures, everything that was so good a setting for the girl I loved. In the quiet peace of it I forgot that desolate solitude, that cabin with its howling, fighting inmates.
Jane was seated reading by the window, but as I watched she laid aside the book, and sat looking out of the window across the silent, moonlit fields. And I saw two tears glide from her eyelashes, and glisten on her cheeks. She spoke my name.
That evidence of her love was more than I could bear. I knelt beside her, strove to take her in my arms, whispered a thousand broken endearments. And she sat pensive, unresponsive, utterly unconscious of me. The tragedy smote me again. I was spirit; she spirit in flesh. I was exiled.
And, with the ecstasy of despair, there flamed once more in me that dogged, unreasoning will to live—to live again, I must say.
And, with it, I fled the room, guided somehow, blindly, by a new hope.
I found myself in another house—in a bedroom that was very quiet, with an unnatural silence. In the bed lay a man. I knew him. It was my old friend, Gordon Paige.
There were others, too. Gordon’s mother sat with her face in her hands, his sister, her eyes dry and bright, knelt beside her and pressed her in comforting arms. Then I saw the white-haired doctor turn mutely away. And I knew why I had come.
The body of Gordon Paige lay there, inert, lifeless. With all the power I knew I willed myself toward it.
The body of Gordon Paige stirred. He spoke. The light of sanity came back into his dead eyes. The doctor turned to him in amazement. A minute later he turned again.
“He lives! God knows how, but he lives. The crisis is past. He will recover.”
And he did recover. The body of Gordon Paige won back to life and health.
But the soul within his body was the soul of Malcolm Rae!
What is soul? What is self? I speak to you with the voice of Gordon Paige. I write, and the handwriting is that of Gordon Paige.
But I—the entity that dwells in the body of Paige—I am Malcolm Rae.
In the spring they brought the news of Malcolm Rae’s death to Jane Cavanaugh. She loved him—she was heart-broken. But she found comfort in the presence of her old friend Gordon Paige.
We were married last week, Jane and I. It was in June, just a year after the June in which Rae had promised to return. When I told Jane I loved her, she said:
“I do love you, Gordon. But sometimes it seems wrong—after poor Malcolm dying. But—you’re like him, Gordon. You’re so like Malcolm that I can’t blame myself for caring.”
I wish I could tell her—that I am Malcolm.
But the world is too incredulous. I do not dare.
The Strange Tale of a Yellow Man and His Beloved Reptile
Six Feet
of Willow-Green
By Carroll F. Michener
It was for no love of the Chinese that Allister risked his life in the shark-plagued waters off Samoa.
The motive was largely a rigid sense of fair play, which had led him into more than one hazard. Also, he hated the second mate, who was so ridiculously afraid of Ssu Yin’s serpent.
Therefore the Chinese need have nourished no great feeling of obligation. Scales for weighing honor and indebtedness, however, are not the same in the East as in the West, where motives are perhaps more closely scanned; and it would have been difficult to persuade Ssu Yin that he did not owe more than life to Allister. He felt that he owed two lives; that of his own leather-yellowed body and that of the woman whose soul, so he believed, now sojourned on its vast pilgrimage along the Nirvana-road of incarnations, within his snake’s scaly longitude.
To the Chinese, an obligation clearly understood is a collectible asset. Death or the devil—or dishonor that is worse than either—claims him who escapes payment of a just debt. Therefore it need not be surprising that the magnitude of his fancied obligation to Allister discomfited Ssu Yin, and left him more than melancholy for the remainder of the voyage.
On the other hand, his devotion to the serpent, a poisonous six feet of willow-green relieved by the satin-white ribbon of its belly, was greater than before, and the venom of his regard for the second mate, who had dared toss the reptile’s basket overboard, was disquieting to observe.
The thing had happened in a flash that gave Allister no more than a moment for reflection before the action that had bound him with inseverable fetters to the destinies of Ssu Yin. The second mate, who was Irish, with a soul fed upon belief in banshees and leprechauns and the traditions of St. Patrick, had chafed bitterly at the captain’s indifference toward the Chinaman’s obnoxious galley-pet.
His irritation had grown steadily since the third day out from Panama, when the reptile’s presence on board had been discovered. The captain was one of those rare humans in whom a snake breeds no particular revulsion; he merely winked at Ssu Yin’s vagary, stipulating, as an afterthought, that the serpent should be tied by the neck and at all times safely confined to its bamboo cage.
The mate’s displeasure grew into agitation, and then into a saturnine fear. Ssu Yin’s notion that the serpent was animated by the spirit of his dead wife, a creature of frail morals whose fate it had been to be slain in an act of infidelity, reduced the mate to paroxysms of superstitious rage. A suggestion of insanity blazed from his eyes, and he vented his irritation upon the crew in a variety of diabolical mistreatment. Stealthily he plotted the serpent’s destruction.
He had long to wait, for Ssu Yin was rarely beyond sight of his somnolent pet. But one day, growing reckless from the excess of his somewhat alcoholic fear, the mate seized the bamboo cage, well beyond reach of its occupant’s fangs, lifted it brusquely through the window of the cook’s galley—from under the very eyes of Ssu Yin—and gave it a triumphant heave overboard.
With a yell that seemed to supply added impulse to his flying heels and to stiffen his queue into a rigid horizontal, Ssu Yin darted from the galley and flung himself after his ophidian treasure.
Allister turned automatically toward a life boat, but the mate thrust him back. A fanatical cruelty colored the leer in the man’s face as he watched Ssu Yin bobbing helplessly some yards from the bamboo cage, quite evidently unable to swim.
“Aren’t you going to launch that lifeboat?” Allister bawled at him.
The mate spat over the rail, with a sullen negation.
“The hell you won’t,” snarled Allister, poising swiftly to plunge after the Chinaman. “Let’s see if you’ll do it for a white man, then.”
The mate lowered the boat, not so much because Allister was white as because he was a brother of the captain.
There was a calm sea, and no difficulty in the rescue. The crew fished up the three of them, Allister supporting the exhausted Ssu Yin, who in turn held aloft, out of the wash of the sea, his most unhappy dry-land reptile.
The mate shut himself up in his cabin and drank Jamaica rum with such proficiency that it became necessary to lodge him in the brig. He wallowed there for the remainder of the voyage into Penang, where Ssu Yin, with the serpent clasped to his meager bosom, scuttled ashore and vanished from the mate’s bleary ken.
Allister, for whom the world was in its opening chapters, lost himself in bizarre and dizzy pages of Oriental life. At the end of three years he was “on the beach,” tossed up with other human jetsam from the slime of the Orient’s undertow.
He had brawled with sailors from many seas in the dives of Hongkong, tasted the wickedness of native inland cities, and squandered himself in a thousand negligible pursuits between Bangkok and Peking. He was the eternal parable of West meeting East, a conjunction perpetually fatal to the insecure soul. For it is only the strong who can sip safely at the pleasant vices of a mellower civilization.
On a day squally with the pestilent dust of an obscure Chinese outport, Allister sat gazing at a wooden door in a wall. He was oblivious to outward discomfort, although his clothes were remnants through which the wind drove chill misery. He felt only one need, and his mind had room for but one thought, and that was the gratification of an unholy lust. It was three days since opium had caressed his shrieking nerves.
Beggars, exhibiting their unspeakable sores, the ghastly souvenirs of real or simulated disease, jostled him in their crawling search for charity; it was the plaza of a temple where he had taken up his watch.
Curses, and the muttered insults that are flung to foreigners, came to him from the crowd, but he appeared not to hear; his senses were subject only to one diversion, and that was the wall before him, with its wooden door, and the peephole that for an hour of eternities had remained blind. If he could not gain the attention of Ssu Yin, he would be doomed to another night of drugless terror.
To knock on the door would be useless; he had tried that. Only a certain alarum would gain admittance, and no amount of cunning had been capable of revealing this to him. To shout was equally futile, for Ssu Yin had become almost wholly deaf, the result of his barber’s unskillful wax-scraping—an accident with an equally unfortunate sequel, the barber having been bitten to death shortly afterward by Ssu Yin’s serpent.
It was necessary, Allister well knew, to wait for the soya-brown eye that glistened intently through the peephole at a certain hour of the day—the eye of Ssu Yin, focused expectantly upon some indeterminate object within the temple grounds.
The impatient accents of a woman, half-concealed behind the discolored marble flank of a stone lion with the head of a dog, roused Allister. He had been long enough in the Orient to absorb an understanding of many dialects.
“The serpent-eared grandfather of a skillet is late,” complained the voice, and there was an answering murmur from another woman at her side.
Allister stole a glance at them, and saw that they, like himself, were interested in the wooden door. One was young, and probably, though not definitely, a courtesan; she may have been merely an adventurous and discontented second-wife. Her companion was an older woman, evidently a servant.
His eyes returned to the hole in the door, but his ears continued to listen for the words of the women. The servant was speaking:
“How long, Tai-tai, must my Crimson Lotus submit to the vile attentions of this opium hawker? Surely it should not be difficult——”
“It is more difficult than thou thinkest, mother of no sons.”
“Will he not take my Peach Blossom—my Lotus—into his stinking hovel? Will he look upon your beauty in no place other than the teahouse?”
“He fears the serpent.”
“The serpent?”
“Have I not told thee, daughter of an addled egg? He cherishes a creeping creature that he swears was once his wife in a former life. He fears the fangs of her jealousy.”
“A serpent may be crushed by the heel——”
“That shall be thy task, then. Nay, find the way, and it shall be my heel, and mine the silver sycee that lies under the bricks of his kang.”
“Find the way?”
“The secret of the knocks that gain admittance, O Half Moon of Wisdom—buy it from one of the slaves of the pipe that come here each day.”
Allister heard no more, for there was of a sudden a deeper shadow, a more animate void, within the aperture of the door. He shook himself together, and arose, for he was conscious of the eye of Ssu Yin.
After a moment the door opened, and the opium seller stood forth. He was imperceptibly startled when Allister touched his sleeve, for his attention had been directed to the vanishing glint of embroidery that beckoned him toward the tea pavilion of a Thousand and Three Beatitudes.
There was no greeting from either, and there was no need of word or gesture. Allister’s drug-lust uttered its own argument, and Ssu Yin bowed with the air both of acquiescence and of acknowledged obligation. He shouted backward into the passage behind the open door, and shuffling feet responded.
The door closed behind Allister’s starved figure, and Ssu Yin, conscious of the street-crowd admiration that followed the unwonted gayety of his attire, crossed a miasmatic lotus pool and entered the teahouse.
Allister was able to think more clearly when the stupor wore away, though mind and body were torn by a devastating revulsion. He lifted himself abruptly from the filthy bunk in which he lay, and the feeble, awkward movement upset a stand upon which was his chandoo pipe, still nauseous with burnt opium. The effort left him suddenly faint, and with alarm he shuddered back into the bunk, closing fiery-lidded eyes.
“Can’t be far from the end,” he murmured to himself. “If I could only get away—if I could only get back to the States!”
This was the usual burst of remorse; it was like all the rest, a feeble protest against ill-directed destiny. He knew that, of his own effort, he never would get back to the States, away from the insidious East. He had tried that; he had worked until the money was in his hands, only to dive more steeply for a time toward the poppy fields of oblivion.
The consul-general had shipped him out on a transport, but he had gone only as far as Manila. The call of the drug had been too insistent. If the vessel only had been going straight East, without a stop, to the California coast, he might have made it.
He would make it! He would get the money once more—earn it, perhaps, but somehow he would get it, and go Home.
After a second effort, he succeeded in struggling to his feet, then in staggering out of the room into a larger one where there was the light of a horn lantern, and the comforting aroma of tea.
Ssu Yin sat gurgling contemplatively at his water-pipe, his eyes fixed upon two brilliant points of light in the half-shadows over the kang. He did not stir at Allister’s approach, though he muttered an acknowledgment of the other’s presence. Slowly Allister’s bleared sight, following the direction of Ssu Yin’s comprehended the significance of those cold-blue darts of phosphorescence. They were set in a rigid, cylindrical, limblike standard, projecting motionless from a pyramid of symmetrical coils. Often as he had beheld the serpent of Ssu Yin, on the poppy excursions that brought him so frequently to the sea cook’s illicit den, he had never conquered a subtle fear, a rage for crushing, stamping out, obliterating. He had tried to explain this as an expression of man’s traditional enmity toward the creeping creatures of the earth. Curiously, to witness the same fear in another was his sole antidote. In the presence of one who was more afraid than himself he could laugh down his own feeling, as had happened in the case of the second mate.
He sat down beside the brazier and helped himself to a gulp of tea. Ssu Yin, removing his eyes from their fixed stare, with a gesture that suggested the snapping of an invisible thread binding them to the eyes of the serpent, regarded Allister with an attentive but unfathomable look. Though his countenance expressed nothing, he was, Allister observed, in an unwonted mood. It was as if there had been a misunderstanding between himself and his reptilian familiar.
“Was there sweetness in the Elder Brother’s honorable pipe of August Beginnings?” inquired Ssu Yin, bringing forth the foreign ear-trumpet that looked incongruous against its oriental setting.
A grimace of pain was Allister’s only answer.
“And was the sleep of this poor worm’s wise and illustrious benefactor filled with the jassmine-incense of celestial happiness?”
“May your flesh be jellied and your bones splintered,” was Allister’s discourteous shot into the trumpet. “May your ancestors——”
“Harmless is the bluster of the paper tiger,” interrupted Ssu Yin, with a playful malice. He went on in a more kindly vein: “A gem cannot be polished without friction, or a man perfected without adversity. The friction has been thine, Elder Brother, even as it is written; also the adversity; but a wise man also has said that the gods cannot help him who loses opportunities.”
“Oh, drop the classics, Ssu Yin, and tell me what you’re driving at!”
“The Elder Brother must set his feet unto new paths, or he will learn to walk soon in the Eternal Shades.”
“I’m through, Ssu Yin. No more chandoo for me. Tomorrow——”
“The man who overestimates himself is like a rat falling into a scale and weighing himself.”
Allister was stung by the contempt of his host’s words, but he feared to retort. His sense of need came more fully upon him. His head swam, leadenly, and his tongue was thick.
“The pipe, Ssu Yin—only once more. And tomorrow——”
“Spawn of frog begets but frog; the wise man does not give his cloak to the stealer of his coat; and to cure a habit by indulging it is to push a stone with an egg.”
“No, Ssu Yin, I mean it this time——”
“Dragging the lake for the moon in the water, adding fuel to put out a fire,” ran the relentless river of Ssu Yin’s scornful proverbs.
Nevertheless, Ssu Yin arose and led the way to the sleeping-room. He set forth within Allister’s reach a bamboo pipe with black tassels and a mouthpiece of jade, lighted the lamp, and from a receptacle within his capacious sleeve jealously produced three miniature cylinders of amber-hued opium.
Cynically, Ssu Yin observed the trembling hands of the white man as he held one of the precious morsels over the flame, watched it sizzle, dissolve, evaporate. He waited until the operation thrice had been performed, each puff sending Allister nearer to the paradise of drugs, and stood gazing at the young man’s emaciated features long after the squalid room had been translated, for Allister, into a pearly grotto through which he stepped forth on the winged feet of inexhaustible youth into a world of unimaginable color, transcendent beauty and unspeakable delight.
“A just debt—a just debt is mine,” muttered Ssu Yin, solemnly, “and it is thus that I have paid. For this have I merited no less than the reproach of the gods.”
When Allister returned again from the lotus fields of Elysium, his eyes were more fevered, his yellowed skin closer drawn over cadaverous cheeks, and his weakness even greater than before.
This was the tomorrow of which he had spoken to Ssu Yin.
But what had any Oriental tomorrow to do with him? Here there were promises only of more lethal hours that did not relieve so much as they accented the deepening miseries leading toward an indubitable end.
Tomorrow——
He sprang up suddenly, the effort startling his heart into wild uncertainties. The recurrence of a feeling of resentment, long nourished, supported him.
“Ssu Yin, the superstitious dog—rich—preaching to me in nasty proverbs and feeding me this spawn of hell when he might be sending me home!”
The thought took possession of him, made him stealthy and steel-nerved. He would take the money—Ssu Yin owed it to him, the heathen ingrate; this time he would have a share in that hoard of sycee beneath the bricks of the kang.
He crept into the other room, fearing to find Ssu Yin there, a delay to his plot. But Ssu Yin was not in the room; the house seemed empty even of servants. The seller of opium probably was at his daily tryst, Allister thought, in the teahouse of the Beatitudes.
For the moment Allister had forgotten the serpent, and it was only in the act of turning his darting steps toward the kang that he remembered. In that instant a ray of sunlight revealed the still creature, eternally somnolent, as immobile as the stones against which its gelid coils were ranged.
The old fear seized him, and with it the rage to kill; but his weakness returned, and he was incapable of that. He remained as motionless as the snake, thinking of its reputed iniquities. The opium den of Ssu Yin was not without a reputation for crime. It had had its murders, strange deaths that baffled the native doctors of both “inside” and “outside” anatomy.
The serpent, he knew, was master of man in a duel of eyes, and Allister felt relief at a sound of interruption. Someone had entered the house. The shock loosened his limbs, and he crept back to his foul bunk, waiting for the philosophical gibes of Ssu Yin, sick with revulsion at thought of his intended theft.
His ears told him in a moment, however, that the wary step and the listening caution of the one who had entered, were not Ssu Yin’s. Presently there were hurried movements, unwonted sounds, a breathless intenseness that took audible form, in the outer room. Stealthily, Allister moved nearer to see.
The figure of a woman was beneath the ray of sunlight now, cutting off its warning of the coiled spectre of dissolution. She stooped over the kang, lifting the bricks, laying them aside with a careless impatience. A cavity grew, and from it presently, with a sigh of gratification, she plucked a silver ingot—followed it with others, until a mound of them, too heavy for her own strength, lay at her feet.
Allister watched her in amazement. Was she unaware of the snake? Or was she, like Ssu Yin, its master, immune to ophidian fear?
She stood up, turned toward Allister, as if at some psychic warning of his presence, and he recognized her as the woman of the temple yard—the Crimson Lotus, Ssu Yin’s teahouse siren.
Doubtless her apprehensions heightened her error, but in the half-light it must have been easy to mistake Allister’s immobile figure for the darkly vengeful one of Ssu Yin.
She cried out, took an involuntary step backward, tripped upon a sycee ingot, and a bared arm, thrust outward to break her fall, met the serpent’s fangs.
In the nine-toned sing-song of a Cantonese who is at peace with himself, Ssu Yin entered his hovel incanting a bar of that old song of Cathay, “The Millet’s in Flower.”
He paused at the door of his inner room, in the middle of a note, and allowed the details of the tableau to etch themselves upon his brain.
Across the kang lay his woman—his Crimson Lotus—inert, lifeless. Upon her still breast, its viridescence blending strangely with the soft tints of her silk tunic, was piled the deadly pyramid of the coiled serpent—flat, arrowy head drawn back awaiting the impulse to strike, glistening red tongue stirring with forked vibrations, and phosphorescent eyes blazing with a sinister fury.
Within reach of its fangs was crouched Allister, one hand touching, with a suggestion of pity, the face of the woman, the other, clasping a silver ingot, poised cataleptically in the midst of an intended blow. His was the arrested animation of carved marble, the impotent fascination of a bird obeying the hypnosis of the serpent’s eye.
Slow rage filled Ssu Yin—a calm cruelty. Here lay his broken Lotus Bud; a thief, an accomplice, a wanton, or a viperous traitor to his heart’s homage—what did it matter? And here was his “Elder Brother,” his benefactor, the white man—dog, despoiler—who would have robbed him of all.
Well, a simple solution—the fangs of his serpent, slavering for their prey....
But the poise of a hundred philosophical generations began to quiet his thick pulses—the restraints of a race that has schooled itself to play the game of life by meticulous rule. A debt was his—he must pay it.
Ssu Yin realized, suddenly, that an abrupt movement, the slightest translation of Allister’s rigid pose into activity, would bring to him the darting caress of oblivion.
Cautiously, Ssu Yin approached, uttering a curious sound that always, until now, had brought an answering acquiescence into the eyes of the serpent. He came closer, at last laying his parchment-skinned hand upon the vibrant coil, seeking a grip that would keep him safe from a scratch of fangs.
But something was amiss with Ssu Yin’s mastery over the snake. He recognized this in a thrill of terror at the moment when he knew it was forever too late. He would have explained, had there been time for such inquiry, that it was jealousy in the soul of the transmigrated woman who had been his wife—jealousy of the Crimson Lotus. This it was, he would have said, that animated the serpent’s yellow needles of death.
The poison gripped him, but a sense of unfinished justice gave him strength while he battered the cringing reptile into an amorphous, hideous mass.
With Allister, dazed, half understanding, he still had the business of words. A courteous smile crackled the parchment of his face as he took from his sleeve an envelope and held it out to Allister.
“Three lives for two,” he murmured, “and the debt is more than paid. May the August Elder Brother’s voyage into the friendly bosom of the West be as pleasant as the repose of Buddha.”
Allister’s wondering fingers disclosed within the envelope a steamer ticket to Seattle. He put out a protesting hand, began self-accusing phrases, but the seller of opium was beyond argument. Ssu Yin was on his knees murmuring before the shelf of the gods:
“Unabashed, Great Ancestors—into the Vale of Longevity Ssu Yin walks without shame.”
The Occultism of Ancient Egypt Permeates
The Hall of the Dead
A Strange Tale
By FRANCIS D. GRIERSON
“You have good nerves?” asked Professor Julius March, with a somewhat cynical smile.
Annette Grey shrugged her shoulders.
“People who work for their living,” she replied, “cannot afford nerves.”
The Professor nodded.
“There is something in that,” he answered, thoughtfully. “At the same time, I must make the position clear to you. As you are aware, I am an Egyptologist, and in my house here I have many queer things. Some people dislike the idea of working among mummies and——”
Annette interrupted him with a deprecating gesture.
“Believe me,” she said, “that sort of thing does not affect me in the least. As your secretary, I am prepared to work where and when you like.”
“My former secretary—” the professor began, and paused.
“Your former secretary disappeared,” said the girl. “Of course I know that; you will remember that I applied for the vacancy after reading about her in the paper. I do not propose to disappear; the terms you offer are too good.”
She smiled faintly, and the Egyptologist shrewdly eyed her.
“Well,” he said at last, “your qualifications and education appear to recommend you for the work I should want you to do. It is secretarial work in the broadest sense of the term—from typing my notes (when you have learned to decipher my abominably bad handwriting) to looking up references in the British Museum, or—should occasion arise—accompanying me on a flying visit to Egypt. I give you fair warning that I shall work you hard, but, apart from the salary and board, which I have already named, you will not find me ungenerous if you prove yourself valuable.”
“Then I may consider myself engaged?”
March bowed.
“Certainly,” he replied. “You will probably learn presently,” he added, in his cynical way, “that I am regarded as an eccentric person, and somewhat of a hard taskmaster—”
“I prefer to form my own opinion,” said Annette quietly.
Again he smiled. It was not a pleasant smile.
So Annette Grey took up her residence in the rambling old house on the outskirts of London in which Professor Julius March had gradually accumulated relics of ancient Egypt that were regarded with respect by the curators of some of the greatest museums in the world.
There were those who hinted that the Professor had not always been scrupulous in the methods he adopted to secure his rarer curios; but March laughed at such stories when anyone had the hardihood to repeat them to him, openly attributing them to the jealousy of less fortunate rivals. Wealthy and profoundly learned, he had become known as one of the greatest Egyptologists of his day.
Annette studied her new employer with the patience characteristic of her nature, and she found the study an interesting as well as a useful one. March, for the most part, was reserved and silent, but he was capable of bursts of extraordinary excitement. He devoted himself, with an almost religious fervor, to the pursuit which he had made his life study, and the few friends he possessed—for he was not a popular man—were almost all brother archeologists.
Tall and thin, with black eyes peering through large tortoise-shell-rimmed spectacles, his gray hair tumbled in a shaggy mass over his broad forehead, he had a habit of thrusting his square chin aggressively forward when he spoke. His long, graceful fingers moved in nervous sympathy with what he was saying, and he would spring from his chair and walk rapidly up and down with catlike steps that reminded Annette of a panther ceaselessly pacing to and fro behind the bars of its cage.
Possessed of great endurance, he would sit for hours at a stretch poring over an ancient papyrus, disdaining food and sleep. Then, plunging into a cold bath, he would emerge glowing, eat an enormous meal and set off for a long walk, indifferent as to whether it happened to be day or the middle of the night.
When March first asked her whether or not she had good nerves, Annette had supposed him to be referring to the disappearance of Beatrice Vane, his former assistant. Beatrice, a beautiful girl just budding into the maturity of womanhood, had vanished utterly, leaving her clothes and other possessions behind her, but no clue as to where she had gone. March, with his lawyer, Henry Sturges, had sought the assistance of the police, and every effort had been made to trace the missing girl, but without success.
Attorney Sturges, who had recommended Beatrice Vane to Professor March, had been the girl’s guardian. An orphan, she had been left a small annual income, the capital of which was under Sturges’ control as trustee. She had received a good education, and the lawyer had procured her employment with Julius March in order that she might occupy her time and at the same time supplement the scanty income which declining financial conditions had left her.
March spoke highly of her work, and was more affected by her disappearance than many, who saw only the cynicism of the man, would have believed. He feared, Annette supposed, that his new secretary would think it unlucky to step into the shoes of the girl who had vanished so mysteriously, and she hastened to disabuse his mind of any such idea.
But Annette soon found that there existed an additional reason for his question. The old house, she found, was divided into two parts. In one, the smaller of the two, lived March and his staff. A bachelor, he was looked after by an elderly housekeeper, one or two maids, a chauffeur and a confidential valet, who had been with him for years. These people attended to what he called the “domesticities” of the place.
The larger part of the house was consecrated to his hobby, and had been, indeed, altered and partially reconstructed to suit his unusual requirements. Into this Egypt in miniature the servants were sternly forbidden to penetrate. There March would bury himself amid his mummies and papyri, and sometimes, in his morose moods, even his secretary was forbidden access.
Annette had a comfortably-furnished sitting-room of her own, and a little room furnished as an office, but a great part of her work, she found, was to be done in the room which March grimly called the “Hall of the Dead.”
It was, indeed, an apartment in which only a girl of strong nerves could have worked without glancing fearfully over her shoulder. Floored with black-and-white marble, alternated in a curious pattern, it was dimly lit by a lamp swung from the roof by bronze chains. To afford the stronger light necessary for the study of ancient inscriptions, a smaller lamp stood on each of two small tables, the incongruous effect of their electric wiring being mitigated by their antique shape. These lamps, however, illuminated only their immediate neighborhood, leaving the greater part of the huge room in semi-obscurity.
Round the room were placed at regular intervals mummies and mummy-cases, whose grave immobility seemed but a mask which they could tear off at will, descending to move about the hall with measured steps and to converse on topics that had been of living importance to a long-dead civilization.
In the center of the hall stood a great stone table, curiously grooved and hollowed, and between the mummies were placed objects of metal and earthenware, the uses of which Annette could only guess.
In this strange room March would pass hour after hour. Annette soon learned to understand and accommodate herself to his methods. The sharp sound of an electric bell in her room would bring her to the Hall of the Dead, notebook and pencil in hand. The heavy door, controlled by an automatic mechanism, would roll back as she approached, closing silently behind her as she entered and took her seat, without a word, at one of the smaller tables.
Acknowledging her presence only by a gesture, March would stride up and down the room with his quick tread, pausing now and again to examine a document or to apply a magnifying glass to the inscription on a mummy-case, muttering to himself as he resumed his rapid pacing. Suddenly, without warning, he would commence to dictate, in sharp, staccato sentences, admirably lucid and without a superfluous word.
He would cease as suddenly as he had begun, and for perhaps half an hour, or longer, he would remain buried in thought, resuming his dictation as unexpectedly as he had ceased, but without ever losing the sequence of his ideas.
Sometimes this would go on for hours. On such occasions he would recollect himself suddenly, glance at the ancient water-clock on its carved pedestal, and dismiss Annette with a word of apology for his forgetfulness.
Once an incident occurred which revealed yet another side of this man’s complex character.
Annette had received a lengthy piece of dictation, and had been at work in her office for nearly an hour, transcribing her notes. She was a competent writer of shorthand, but some of the technical expressions which March used were quite unfamiliar, and she did not care to interrupt him, preferring to wait until he had finished before asking him any questions. On this occasion it had seemed fairly plain sailing, but toward the end of her notes she came across a sign the significance of which completely baffled her.
Finding that the context was of no assistance, and not wishing to delay the work, which she knew the Professor required as quickly as possible, she resolved to consult him.
It was the first time she had visited the Hall of the Dead unbidden, and she was uncertain how to attract his attention from outside, for there was no knocker or bell on the great door. The mechanism which controlled it, however, either did not depend on the person inside, or could be so set as to work independently, for as she reached the threshold some concealed spring was put into operation and the door opened before her as usual. Still standing on the threshold, she was about to enter, when she stopped as though turned into stone.
Inside the hall she saw Julius March kneeling before one of the mummy-cases—the mummy-case of a woman. His head rested against the knees of the image, and his body was shaken by great sobs.
Amazed, moved by the strange sight, Annette turned and fled to her own room. Behind her the door of the Hall of the Dead swung noiselessly into its frame.
A week later, Annette entered the little-used drawing-room of Professor March’s house shortly before seven o’clock in the evening, and sat down near the bright fire ready to receive his guests. For March was giving one of his rare dinner-parties.
A few moments later the door opened, and the servant ushered in Attorney Sturges and a friend of his, a pleasant, rather simple-looking man named Sims.
“I fear we are a little early, Miss Grey,” said Sturges, when he had presented his friend.
“Not at all,” Annette replied easily. “Professor March asked me to make his excuses to you; he was detained at the British Museum and only arrived a few minutes ago. He is dressing, and will be down in a few minutes. Meanwhile, I must play hostess.”
“And most adequately,” murmured Sturges, with old-fashioned courtesy.
Then, as the door closed behind the servant, he spoke rapidly:
“We came a little early on purpose,” he explained. “You are prepared, Miss Vane?”
“Quite,” said the girl calmly.
“Good. Inspector Sims agrees with me that if we are ever to discover the mystery of your sister’s disappearance, it will be tonight. Sims has been practising his part, and does it admirably.”
The Scotland Yard man smiled.
“I think I can play it,” he said. “And I congratulate you, Miss Vane, on the way you have handled the matter. This idea is an excellent one, and I admit I should never have thought of it myself. I hope, too,” he went on, without the slightest alteration in his tone, as a step sounded outside and the door opened, “that Professor March will not deny me a peep at the wonderful treasures be keeps here.”
“Why, of course not,” cried March heartily, as he entered the room. “I caught your last words, Mr. Sims,” he went on, “—for I am sure you are Sturges’ psychic friend—and I shall be delighted to show you round my little museum. Well, Sturges, I must apologize to you both for keeping you waiting like this; but you have been in good hands.”
He bowed courteously to Annette.
“It is very good of you, Mr. Sims,” he went on, “to come and visit a recluse like this. Sturges has told me of your powers of necromancy, and I confess I am hoping to see something very wonderful.”
The words were polite and were uttered with perfect civility, but the old lawyer laughed gently.
“It’s no good, March,” he said; “you cannot quite get the true ring. You scientific fellows always scoff at the unseen, and decline to believe anything that cannot be set down in writing, like an algebraic equation.”
“Not at all,” replied the Professor, with sudden gravity. “On the contrary, my researches have convinced me that there are mysteries to which, if we only had the clue—but we’ll talk of that later,” he added, with a sudden change of tone. “My first duty, as your host, is to feed you; come and help me perform the sacred rite of hospitality.”
Laughing, he opened the door and bowed Annette to the head of the little procession to the dining-room, where they were presently seated round a candle-lit table of richly-polished mahogany.
It was a strange dinner-party, at which two, at least, of the diners found it difficult to appreciate the sallies of the host. Mr. Sims, however, expanded under the influence of the Professor’s geniality. March was in unusually high spirits, for he had just succeeded in translating a hieroglyphic inscription which had defeated the Museum authorities, and he devoted himself to the sport of drawing out his psychic guest with a delicate irony which, to do him justice, never passed the bounds of good taste.
The innocent Mr. Sims responded to this subtle flattery with a readiness which delighted the Professor, and even Annette and the lawyer could not refrain from smiling at the naïveté with which Sims played his part.
At last the dinner drew to a close, and March rose.
“I am not going to let you off, Mr. Sims,” he said. “I am eager to learn something of the methods of the modern spiritualists, for I admit I am more familiar with those of the past. But I think we ought to have a more suitable atmosphere for the seance,” he added, chuckling. “Miss Grey, I hope you will not leave us? I think my Egyptian room would form an admirable background for Mr. Sims’ experiments.”
Annette smiled, with something of an effort, and led the way to the Hall of the Dead.
Despite himself, Sims could not repress an exclamation of awe at the sight of the great, gloomy room, with its solemn figures and mysterious shadows.
The Professor rubbed his hands, well pleased at the effect he had produced.
“Now, Mr. Sims,” he said, “here is a carved chair on which a Pharaoh once sat. Enthrone yourself there. We will sit, metaphorically, at your feet, and listen to what you are pleased to tell us.”
Sims bowed, but did not return the Professor’s smile. Gravely he seated himself in the heavy wooden chair, rested his elbow on one of the quaintly-carved arms, and let his head sink onto his hand. The others grouped themselves near and waited, in a heavy silence.
Sensitive to impressions, the Professor’s gay mood faded gradually into a tense expectancy that made his long fingers work nervously. He startled as Sims’ voice broke the silence sharply.
“I am aware, Professor March,” said Sims in a hard, level tone that startled his hearers, “that you are a skeptic.”
The Professor murmured something, but Sims went on, without heeding him.
“I feel tonight that I am going to prove to you that I can see things that are hidden....”
He paused, and again the silence was broken only by the sound of heavy breathing. As suddenly as before, Sims spoke again:
“Listen!” he said. “I see a great room, half lit by a lamp in the roof. There is a brighter light near a table in the center of the room. It is a stone table, such as was used in ancient Egypt by the embalmers.”
The Professor drew in his breath with a sharp gasp, but the voice went steadily on:
“Beside the table I see a man. He is bending over something—something white. It is the body of a woman—”
“Stop, damn you!” screamed the Professor; and Sims, springing from his chair, took something from the pocket of his dinner-jacket.
The Professor laughed discordantly—the laugh of a madman.
“Put up your pistol,” he cried. “You will not need it. I don’t know who you are, and, damn you, I don’t care! Do you hear that? I don’t care! Listen, all of you; listen, I say! Today I have completed my task; I have learned the secret which I have sought so patiently. I am going to join my Princess, my Hora.”
He ceased, and threw his arms out in a great gesture to the mummy-case in front of which he had been standing. Huge drops of sweat stood out on his forehead, and he tore open his linen collar with a madman’s strength. But it was in a controlled, almost tender voice that he went on:
“Listen to me, and I will tell you a wonderful thing. Countless years ago I—I who speak to you here tonight—was a priest in Egypt. I was vowed to the service of Isis. But one day there came to the temple, where I ministered, a woman. A woman? Nay, a goddess! A being of such beauty that my heart leaped within me at the sight of her loveliness.
“She was the Princess Hora. We loved. Ten thousand words could say no more. But an evil fate tore her from me; the Pharaoh had seen her, and coveted her. Sooner than lie in his foul embrace she plunged a dagger into her white bosom....”
He paused, and for a few moments covered his face with his hands, his shoulders quivering. Then he tore his hands away and stretched them once more toward the painted image that looked so calmly down at him.
“Hora, my Hora!” he cried passionately. “I have sought thee for centuries, through age after age. And now, at last thou hast come to me—and gone again. But only for a little while, a few brief moments, for I follow thee tonight.”
Again he paused, and again he resumed, mastering his emotion:
“She came to me here, here in this house, where I have labored so long, striving to regain my knowledge of that past which is sometimes so clear, and sometimes, O Isis, so terribly dark! She came to me, my beautiful Hora; came clad in the garb of today, bearing the name of Beatrice.”
A low sob broke from Annette, but he went on, unheeding:
“I told you, Hora, I tried to tell you—but your eyes were filmed by the gods. You could not understand.... You spurned me. Then it was that I understood that for us there could be only one way. One touch of this little knife, steeped in a poison so deadly that your soul had flown ere your body had fallen into my arms.
“Tenderly I bathed you and poured into your veins the secret essences that keep the flesh firm and fair as in life, and bore you to the tomb where you sit, waiting for me. But in another world, Hora, you wait for me, a thousand times more beautiful, and knowing that I, your lover, have sought you and found you at last. Hora, I come!”
With a wild cry, he raised the little dagger which he had drawn from his pocket. Sims sprang forward, but before he could reach him Professor Julius March had buried it in his heart. Hardly had the blade touched his flesh than he swayed, stumbled and crashed down at the feet of the mummy-case.
For a moment the others gazed at the prostrate form. Then Inspector Sims sprang forward and fumbled with trembling fingers at the fastenings of the mummy-case. Suddenly the front fell forward, and Annette uttered a terrible cry.
In the case, thus revealed, sat the girl who had been Beatrice Vane. She was nude, the chaste beauty of her lovely form standing out against the dark interior of the case. So wonderfully had the madman done his work that no scar marred the grace of the firm bosom, the long, rounded limbs, the head set proudly on the ivory neck. She sat as might have sat the Princess Hora, had she so wished, beside the Pharaoh himself on his Egyptian throne.
Sims drew back and bowed his head reverently as Annette, stumbling forward, laid her head on her dead sister’s knees in a grief too terrible for tears.
The
Parlor Cemetery
A Grisly Satire
By C. E. Howard
“Good morning! I’m getting the information for the new city directory. May I step in and rest a moment while I’m asking you a few questions?”
“Well, ye—es, I reckon yuh kin come in and set,” conceded the old lady who had answered my knock, “but I won’t give yuh no order, Mister. I haint much of a booker.”
“Oh, I don’t sell the books,” I hastened to assure her, as I laid my sample volume on the floor by my chair and placed my hat on it. “I just go around from house to house gathering the names for it. The company publishes and sells the book. I don’t have anything to do with that part of it.”
“Oh, you jes’ do th’ authorin’? It must take yuh consid’ble time to write as big a book as that! Do yuh do it all ’lone?”
“No; we have fifty-four men working on it now, and it will take about two months to get it all. Now may I ask—?”
“How much does it cost?”
“This year they will sell for fifteen dollars—”
“Apiece!” she shrilled. “My land o’ livin’! Whoever buys th’ things?”
“All the big stores keep them, especially the drug stores, for the benefit of the public, you know. Now your name is—?”
“Well, what’s it all ’bout, anyhow?” she insisted. “An’ what’s it fur? Is it a tillyphone dickshanary?”
“Something like that. It contains the names and addresses of everybody living in this city, and all the big establishments keep one so that if anybody wishes to find out where anyone else lives they just go in some store and look in this directory and there it is. Now, will you give me your name for the new book, please?”
“My name? W’y, my name is—Now, is this a-goin’ to cost me anything? Yuh know I said I wouldn’t take none afore I let yuh in.”
“It will not cost you a cent,” I told her earnestly, “and it may do you some good. See”—running through the leaves of the book in which I entered the statistics—“how many people I have interviewed this morning, and all of them gave me the information I asked for. Now you will see all there is to it; right down here on this top line I write your name—what did you say it was?”
“I never said yit; but it was Cook.”
“Ah!” We were off at last! “Cook”—I paused at the “k” and asked, “Do you spell it the short way or with an ‘e’?”
“Which?”
“How do you spell it? ‘C-double-o-k,’ or ‘C-double-o-k-e’?”
“No; not with no ‘e’ on to it! That would be cooky! It was jes’ plain Cook—C-o-o-k.”
I was willing to let it go at that and wrote it down. “And your first name now?”
“My fust name? I don’t tell my fust name to no strangers—’specially men!”
“I beg your pardon, but I am not asking that from impertinence, Mrs. Cook,” I explained carefully. “We do not mean to pry into people’s personal affairs—such things are of no concern to us—but you see there are probably a hundred or more Cooks in this city and if we didn’t have their first names there would be no telling them apart. All the ladies so far have told me their first names,” I declared, holding my book toward her with the evidence.
After peering at it intently for some time she relaxed in her chair, reassured. “Well, ’tain’t no name to be ’shamed of, if ’tis old-fashioned. It’s Ann.”
“Ann—‘A-n-n’.” I spelled aloud, to give her the chance to correct me if necessary. Thinking of the famous query connected with that name and thankful I didn’t have to ask that, too, I continued:
“You have a husband?”
“No, not now. I’ve had ’em, though.”
“Ah, a widow, then—that is, I presume your husband is not alive, Mrs. Cook?” I essayed gently, avoiding, as always, the direct interrogation as to grass-widowship.
“No; they’re all on ’em dead now; but, Mister, my name ain’t Cook—it’s Hay!”
“What!” I exclaimed. “Why, I understood you to say it was Cook?”
“Well, yuh understood right. It was Cook—that what’s yuh asked me, what it was—but it’s Hay now. ’Bout two years after Cook went up in smoke I married a feller named Hay, see?”
“Oh yes,” I smiled cheerfully, and, reversing my pencil I endeavored to rub off the former husband’s name.
Of course the flimsy paper tore. I yanked out the sheet and began again.
“‘H-a-y,’ Hay,” I put down, writing lightly with an eye to more erasures or corrections. “Just the plain, short Hay, I presume?”
“Yes, jes’ th’ plain Hay—not timothy ner alfalfy ner none o’ them fancy hoss brekfus foods. My lan’!” she broke out in astonishment, “I sh’uld think the’ comp’ny’d git men to do this work that c’uld spell!”
“That is one of the things we are told to be most careful about, Mrs.—ah—Hay. We must always ask everybody’s name and just how they spell it, even if we think we know. Often people having the same sounding name spell it differently, and if it goes in the directory wrong they generally blame us. And now, may I ask,” I said sympathetically, recalling the peculiar way in which she had spoken of the late Mr. Cook’s decease, “if your former husband lost his life in a fire?”
“Who, Cook? Oh, yuh mean what’d I mean when I spoke o’ ’im goin’ up in smoke? No, he was plumb dead—I was sattyfied o’ that, afore he was burned. That’s th’ way I’ve had ’em all done; kin’ of a habit I got into, I reckon, but seems to me ’twas a pretty good habit. That’s Cook, second from th’ right-hand end,” she said calmly, pointing to an object on the humble mantel as though she were indicating a specimen in a museum.
“How! What?” I gasped, as every separate hair on my head arose and tried to spring from its root-cell.
“W’y, I had all my husban’s’ bodies consoomed by fire—what d’yuh call it, cremated?—w’en they up an lef’ me, an’ that’s the’ ashes of all on ’em in them dishes there! Seems t’ me that’s th’ bes’ way t’ do with dead folks—have your own cem’terry right in your house where it’s handy. It’s ’specially nice when one moves ’round a good deal like I’ve done. I never c’uld a-forded t’ gone visitin’ here an’ there t’ that many graves scattered ’bout in dif’rent states. Besides, it saves tumstones an’ th’ ’spense o’ takin’ care o’ the lots.”
Gradually, I grasped the woman’s meaning as she continued to rock back and forth and utter her placid Mrs. Jarley explanation. The men who had been so unfeelingly abrupt as to “up an’ leave” this poor creature had evidently, each in his turn, been cremated, and now their ashes, side by side, served to adorn the mantel and comfort the heart of the faithful widow. “Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay....” I gazed at the row of assorted receptacles with awe and back at the woman with feelings still more curious.
“Some folks thinks them’s odd kin’ o’ coffins,” she continued, “but I d’know what c’uld be more ’propriate. Yuh see, I’ve tried t’ have each one sort o’ repasent either th’ man hisself or his trade. Now, for instance, this here one,” she explained, rising and placing her hand on a small stone jar at the left end of the line—there were five of these unique memorials altogether—“this was my fust husban’, John Marmyduke. Th’ label on th’ crock, yuh’ll notice, is ‘Marmylade’, an’ that’s purt’ near his name, an’ then it almose d’scribes his dispazishun, too. Th’ grocer tol’ me that marmylade was a kin’ o’ English jam, an’ John was sort o’ sweet-tempered, fer a man, so I thought one o’ them stun things ’ud do fine to keep him in.
“This is William Thompson here,” she continued, tapping a small tea caddy with her thimble. “He was a teacher, an’ I always called ’im Mr. T. so w’en he departed I thinks to myself, thinks I, ‘One o’ them little chests that Chinymens packs tea in is jes’ th’ ticket fer yuh’—tea standin’ for both his name an’ his callin’, do you see?”
I expressed my admiration for this delightful idea, and she proceeded with her cataloguing:
“This third cuhlection, in th’ fruit jar, is Mason. That was his name an’ his trade, an’ he belonged to that lodge an’ that’s the make o’ th’ jar, so, considerin’ all them facks, I d’know what c’uld be a fitter tum fer ’im. Mason fell off a roof one day an’ broke his back, an’ though he lived six months, somehow, he was never much ’count arter that. He was a big man—weighed 225 afore breakfus—an’ he made such a pile o’ ashes, spite o’ their keepin’ him in the oven double time, that it took a gallon jar to hol’ his leavin’s. I had some quart jars on hand already an’ ’spected to put ’im in one of ’em, but I never begrudged buyin’ a bigger one fer he was always, or purt near always gen’rous with me, an’ then I knew I was savin’ an undertaker’s bill, anyhow.
“Now, I wa’n’t altogether sattyfied with th’ coffin I fin-ly chose fer Cook,” she said, looking at me doubtfully, as she motioned toward the small japanned tin bread-box that was the next mortuary souvenir on the shelf. “I worried over th’ matter th’ hull time he was sick, but I never got a mite o’ help from ’im. Ev’ry time I tried to git that man to suggest what he thought he’d rest cumft-ble in he’d go on frightful. Doctor said his temper prob’bly shortened his life.
“Well, at last I dee-cided on the bread box as comin’ as near to repasentin’ him as anything I c’uld think on—his name bein’ Cook an’ him havin’ occupated as a baker as long’s he was ’live. What’s your ’pinion ’bout it, Mister?”
I declared that if Mr. Cook did not now rest in peace and content he was certainly a hard man to please.
“Th’ las’ one there, as I tole yuh,” she went on, with something like animation, “is Mr. Hay, an’ I do feel consid’able proud over his casket—it sure was a happy thought o’ mine. See?” She took down the object and held it in the sunlight where I could get a plainer view. “He died jes’ las’ year.”
Mr. Hay’s ashes reposed in one of the large square glass perfume bottles such as most druggists carry, and the ornate label thereon had become the painfully true epitaph, “New Mown Hay”!
When I could trust my voice, I inquired, “was he ill long?”
“No; he wa’n’t ill a-tall. He left me kinda on’spectedly. However, he always was a great man fer doin’ things on th’ impulse o’ th’ moment. We was livin’ out on a farm then, an’ one day Mr. Hay was cutting grass in th’ orchard an’ I ’spose he must ’a’ struck a nest o’ bees. Anyhow, somethin’ started th’ team an’ they run ’way an’ throwed him off in front o’ th’ knives, an’ th’ horses stepped on him a few times an’ th’ machine finished it up. He cert’inly was most completely dead when we reached him. Hired man tole me he had to gether him up with a rake an’ wheelbarrer. Only forty-six years ol’, too, he was—mowed down in his prime!
“Well, this is a funny world, ain’t it? Some women kin take one man an’ keep him ’live an’ whole fer fifty or sixty years, but I sure had bad luck with my batch o’ husban’s. It’s a comfort to me, though, that I kin have ’em with me in death, at least. I take down their monnyments ev’ry mornin’ an’ dust ’em off, an’ w’enever I go on th’ keers vis’tin’ anywheres I pack one in my valeese an’ carry it along. When I git it out an’ put it up in my room, w’erever I be, I feel right to hum.”
I succeeded in getting answers to the rest of my questions in another half hour, and I went on my way, dazed. And though, when my day’s work was over, I had no rarebit for supper, yet a vision came to me sometime between the dark and the daylight. I thought I saw myself fall ill and die, and my body was prepared for cremation.
I struggled to escape, to call out, but in vain. They slid me into a kiln and the inexorable heat dissolved flesh, blood and bone. Then some brutal, careless wretch came and swept me up on a dustpan, and put me in a sack and delivered me over to an eager old woman, whose face seemed strangely familiar.
This ghoulish woman bore me away to her home and went to work trying to pack me down in a catsup bottle. It was too small. It seemed to press on my throat. I was choking. I struggled. I shrieked.
And I awoke—to find, thank Heaven, that a large crayon portrait above my bed had fallen down and was now around my neck, and the man in the next room was hammering on the wall with his shoe and shouting and swearing at me.