The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton

by Wardon Allan Curtis

Mr. Middleton was at his wit’s end to supply a hypothesis to answer why the mulierose man, from being a criminal and object of the lady’s just wrath, should suddenly have become an inquisitor, sitting in judgment upon her conduct.

“I—I—was afraid to start right away. It was dark in there and I was afraid this young man might take liberties. Indeed, he did try to kiss me.”

With a roar, the mulierose man launched himself at Mr. Middleton, who dexterously stepping aside, had the satisfaction of seeing his assailant slip and fall on the wet sidewalk. The lady thereat raised a cry of great volume, which was taken up by the woman looking out of the window above, and Mr. Middleton thinking he could derive neither pleasure nor profit from remaining longer in that locality, fled incontinently.

Upon his arrival home and preparing for bed, he found that he was wearing a stiff hat made in Kansas City, bearing on the sweat-band a silver plate inscribed “George W. Dobson.” The mulierose man and he had exchanged hats at the restaurant. The mulierose man now had the love philter.

It was not until four days had elapsed that Mr. Middleton found an opportunity to visit the street where these inexplicable events took place. The house where he had comforted the eighth woman was still empty. At the house whence the mulierose man had issued, a very unprepossessing old woman, with a teapot in her right hand, was opening the front door to admit a large yellow cat whom she addressed as “Mahoney,” an appellation which, while not infrequently the family name of persons of Irish birth or descent, is of very seldom application to members of the domestic cat tribe, Felis cattus.

Wondering greatly at the chain of unusual events, he went about his business. You may depend upon it that he gave much thought to an attempted solution of all these mysteries. But whether or no it was after all only a series of events commonplace in themselves, but seeming mysterious because of their fortuitous concatenation, or he really had trodden upon the hem of a web of strange and darksome, perhaps appalling, mysteries, he has never been able to say. He was minded to speak of these things to the emir and get his opinion on them. Upon reflection, remembering how the philter had not been of any avail in the case of the young lady of Englewood, he thought, despite the explanation which might be offered for this failure, that the emir might be embarrassed at hearing of the failure of the charm, and accordingly he said nothing when once more he sat in the presence of the urbane and accomplished prince of the tribe of Al-Yam. Having handed him a bowl of delicately flavored sherbet, Achmed began to narrate The Unpleasant Adventure of the Faithless Woman.

The Unpleasant Adventure of the Faithless Woman.

Dr. August Moehrlein, Ph. D., was a professor of the languages and religions of India. A man of great gravity of countenance and of impressive port, he was popularly reputed to have a complete knowledge of the occult learning of the adepts of India, that nebulous and mysterious philosophy which irreducible to the laws of nature as recognized by Occidentals, is by them pronounced either magic and feared as such, or ridiculed and despised as pretentious mummery and deluding prestidigitation. There was a legend among the students of his department that he was wont to project himself into the fourth dimension and thus traveling downtown, effect a substantial saving of street-car fare. This is clearly impossible, for the yogis do not thus move about in their own persons. It is only the astral self that flies leagues through the air with the rapidity of thought, only the spiritual essence, the living man’s ghost flying abroad while the living man’s corpse lies inanimate at home. But even this, Dr. August Moehrlein could not do, for the yogis do not initiate men of Western nations into their mysteries. Dr. Moehrlein’s knowledge of the occult of India was wholly empirical. He knew that certain things were done and could recount them, but as to how they were done, he could tell nothing. It must not be thought that of all the marvelous and awe-compelling things the yogis of India are accustomed to do, none can be assigned to any other origin than cunning legerdemain and hypnotism, or to the exercise of supernatural powers. Many of them are due to a strange and wonderful knowledge of nature which the science of the Occident has not yet reached in all its boasted advance. Yet when once explained, the Westerner understands some of these phenomena and is able to repeat them. Into this region of the penumbra of science and exact knowledge the researches of Dr. Moehrlein had taken him a little way and it was this that had gained him his reputation among his pupils as a thaumaturgist.

Along with the learning which this country has imported from Germany have come some customs to which the savants of both that country and this ascribe a certain fostering influence, if not a creative impulse, highly advantageous to the national scholarship. It is the habit of the university men of Germany to foregather of nights in the genial pursuit of drinking beer, and many of the notable theories which German scholarship has propounded are to be directly attributed to this stimulating good fellowship known as kommers. Indeed, when one has imbibed twelve or fourteen steins of beer and sat in an atmosphere of tobacco smoke for some hours, his mind attains a clarity, a sense of proportion, a power of reflection, speculation, and intuition which enables him to evolve those notable theories for which German scholarship is so famous. It is under the intellectual stimulus of the kommers, when the foam lies thick in the steins and blue clouds of tobacco smoke roll overhead, that the great classical scholars of Germany perceive that the classical epics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, are but the typifying of the rolling of the clouds in the empyrean, the warfare of the foam-crested waves dashing upon the land, that the metamorphoses and amours of the gods and all the myths of the elder world, are but the mutations of the clouds and the fanciful figures they take on and the metamorphoses and hurryings of the ever-changing sea with its foam forms and the shadows that lie across its unquiet surface. Wonderful indeed is the scientific imagination that thus accounts for, classifies, and labels the imagination of the poets, which otherwise we might think a thing defying classification, an inspiration, a creative genius taking nothing from a dim suggestion of the cold clouds and sea, but weaving its tales from the suggestion of human lives and human passions. Wonderful indeed is the good sense of the rest of the world in accepting unquestioned these important discoveries of German scholars in the beer kellars, which well might be called the laboratories of the classical department of the German universities.

Dr. August Moehrlein was a staunch advocate of the advantage of the kommers as an adjunct to every thoroughly organized university. If he could not gather others for a kommers, he would hold a kommers all by himself, or perchance with the barkeeper. Needless to say that the name of Moehrlein was attached to many valuable and plausible theories which America received as the last word on the subject treated; needless to tell you that the various gods of India had been identified with the sun, moon, and more important stars, and that it was conclusively shown that the Sanskrit romancers had written their tales by merely looking at the clouds and the sea. Would that this accomplishment of the ancients had not gone from us and that the moderns might write as the ancients by merely looking at the clouds and the sea. Dr. Moehrlein was an upholder of the kommers. But his wife, though German-born, behaved like a very Philistine and objected to his constant and unwavering attendance upon these occasions of intellectual uplift. For as the doctor added to the knowledge of the world, he added to his weight. He had identified Brahma with the sun, but had drunk his face purple in the intellectual effort. In his search for the suggestions of the tale of Nala, he had acquired a paunch very like a bag. Mrs. Moehrlein was accustomed to shrink from the approach of the victim of the pursuit of knowledge. As for him, he would have liked to caress and fondle her. To him there was always present a remembrance of her early beauty and the golden mist of memory shone before his eyes and he did not see that she was a heavy, middle-aged woman with coarse features and coarse figure. Animal beauty she had once had. The beauty had utterly flown, but the animal all remained. She had a shifty and wandering eye, burned out and lusterless, that told of dreams that were of men, men who these many years had not included her husband, grotesque figure that he was, ugly as a satyr in one of the myths suggested by the clouds and the sea.