a besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some rumor
of the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their
curiosity; and now, in all the neighboring houses, he divined them
sitting motionless and with uplifted ear--solitary people, condemned
to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now
startlingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties,
struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised
finger: every degree and age and humor, but all, by their own hearths,
prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him.
Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of
the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by
the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And
then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence
of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and
freeze the passerby; and he would step more boldly, and bustle aloud
among the contents of the shop, and imitate, with elaborate bravado,
the movements of a busy man at ease in his own house.
[Sidenote: An important observation.]
[Sidenote: Note how his reasoning becomes hyper-acute.]
[Sidenote: Forecast.]
30. But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while
one portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled
on the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong
hold on his credulity. The neighbor hearkening with white face beside
his window, the passerby arrested by a horrible surmise on the
pavement--these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through
the brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate. But
here, within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched
the servant set forth sweethearting, in her poor best, “out for the
day” written in every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course;
and yet, in the bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear
a stir of delicate footing--he was surely conscious, inexplicably
conscious of some presence. Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the
house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and
yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet
again behold the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and
hatred.
31. At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door
which still seemed to repel his eyes. [Sidenote: Note force of
“blind.”]
The house was tall, the skylight small and dirty, the day blind
with fog; and the light that filtered down to the ground story was
exceedingly faint, and showed dimly on the threshold of the shop. And
yet, in that strip of doubtful brightness, did there not hang wavering
a shadow?
[Sidenote: Pseudo crisis.]
[Sidenote: Contributory incident.]
32. Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began
to beat with a staff on the shop-door, accompanying his blows with
shouts and railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon
by name. Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the dead man. But no!
he lay quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows
and shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which
would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had
become an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentleman desisted from
his knocking and departed.
[Sidenote: Note “apparent.”]
[Sidenote: Key.]
33. Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to get
forth from this accusing neighborhood, to plunge into a bath of London
multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, that haven of
safety and apparent innocence--his bed. One visitor had come: at any
moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the
deed, and yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a failure.
The money, that was now Markheim’s concern; and as a means to that,
the keys.
[Sidenote: Note subsidence of acute fears and rise of his true mood.]
[Sidenote: Carefully consider the question of Markheim’s sanity,
judging only from the story as thus far told.]
[Sidenote: Reaction.]
34. He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the shadow
was still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance
of the mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew near the body
of his victim. The human character had quite departed. Like a suit
half-stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk doubled,
on the floor; and yet the thing repelled him. Although so dingy and
inconsiderable to the eye, he feared it might have more significance
to the touch. He took the body by the shoulders, and turned it on its
back. It was strangely light and supple, and the limbs, as if they had
been broken, fell into the oddest postures. The face was robbed of all
expression; but it was as pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with
blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing
circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain fair
day in a fisher’s village: a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd upon the
street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal voice of
a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried over head in the
crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out upon
the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great screen
with pictures, dismally designed, garishly colored: Brownrigg with
her apprentice; the Mannings with their murdered guest; Weare in the
death-grip of Thurtell; and a score besides of famous crimes. The thing
was as clear as an illusion; he was once again that little boy; he was
looking once again, and with the same sense of physical revolt, at
these vile pictures; he was still stunned by the thumping of the drums.
A bar of that day’s music returned upon his memory; and at that, for
the first time, a qualm came over him, a breath of nausea, a sudden
weakness of the joints, which he must instantly resist and conquer.
[Sidenote: Key. What caused this benumbed conscience?]
35. He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these
considerations; looking the more hardily in the dead face, bending
his mind to realize the nature and greatness of his crime. So little
a while ago that face had moved with every change of sentiment, that
pale mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire with governable
energies; and now, and by his act, that piece of life had been
arrested, as the horologist, with interjected finger, arrests the
beating of the clock. So he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more
remorseful consciousness; the same heart which had shuddered before
the painted effigies of crime, looked on its reality unmoved. At best,
he felt a gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all
those faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one
who had never lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a
tremor.
[Sidenote: PLOT INCIDENT.]
[Sidenote: Forecast of moral crisis.]
36. With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he found
the keys and advanced toward the open door of the shop. Outside, it
had begun to rain smartly; and the sound of the shower upon the roof
had banished silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of the
house were haunted by an incessant echoing, which filled the ear and
mingled with the ticking of the clocks. And, as Markheim approached the
door, he seemed to hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps
of another foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated
loosely on the threshold. He threw a ton’s weight of resolve upon his
muscles, and drew back the door.
[Sidenote: Note harmony of setting with tone of approaching crisis.]
[Sidenote: Compare Stevenson’s combination of fact and fantasy with
Hawthorne’s in “The White Old Maid.”]
[Sidenote: Rise toward crisis.]
[Sidenote: Body and spirit.]
[Sidenote: A notable passage.]
37. The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and
stairs; on the bright suit of armor posted, halbert in hand, upon the
landing; and on the dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures that hung
against the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was the beating of
the rain through all the house that, in Markheim’s ears, it began to
be distinguished into many different sounds. Footsteps and sighs, the
tread of regiments marching in the distance, the chink of money in the
counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to
mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of
the water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him
to the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted and begirt by
presences. He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop,
he heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a great
effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and followed
stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, how tranquilly he
would possess his soul. And then again, and hearkening with every fresh
attention, he blessed himself for that unresisting sense which held the
outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His head turned
continually on his neck; his eyes, which seemed starting from their
orbits, scouted on every side, and on every side were half-rewarded as
with the tail of something nameless, vanishing. The four-and-twenty
steps to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies.
[Sidenote: Note the exception.]
[Sidenote: Note how suspense in the reader is maintained by disclosing
Markheim’s suspense.]
[Sidenote: Key.]
[Sidenote: Is this normal?]
38. On that first story, the doors stood ajar, three of them like three
ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could
never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men’s
observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among
bed-clothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he
wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear
they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at
least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous
and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence
of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious
terror, some scission in the continuity of man’s experience, some
willful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on
the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as
the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the mold of
their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said) when
the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might befall
Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his
doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield
under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; ay, and
there were soberer accidents that might destroy him; if, for instance,
the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim;
or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him
from all sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense, these things
might be called the hands of God reached forth against sin. But about
God himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless exceptional, but so
were his excuses, which God knew; it was there, and not among men,
that he felt sure of justice.
[Sidenote: Note action of auto-suggestion.]
[Sidenote: Remarkable relief in suspense period.]
39. When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door
behind him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was
quite dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing cases
and incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he
beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on the stage; many
pictures, framed and unframed, standing with their faces to the wall;
a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old
bed, with tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by
great good fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and
this concealed him from the neighbors. Here, then, Markheim drew in a
packing case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It
was a long business, for there were many; and it was irksome, besides;
for, after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on
the wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him. With the
tail of his eye he saw the door--even glanced at it from time to time
directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good estate
of his defenses. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the
street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the
notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and voices of
many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable
was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it
smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was thronged with
answerable ideas and images; church-going children and the pealing of
the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on
the brambly common, kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky;
and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the
somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson
(which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs,
and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.
[Sidenote: Powerful contrast.]
[Sidenote: Approach of moral crisis.]
40. And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his
feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, went
over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted
the stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the
knob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened.
[Sidenote: Markheim perceives only a physical danger. Note how long he
remains dead to any moral judgment of himself.]
[Sidenote: Here is a real though unrecognized moral crisis. Fear
eventually leads to his moral triumph.]
41. Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not, whether
the dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or
some chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows.
But when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room,
looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and
then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke
loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the
visitant returned.
[Sidenote: Note the symbolism of the closed door.]
42. “Did you call me?” he asked, pleasantly, and with that he entered
the room and closed the door behind him.
[Sidenote: KEY.]
[Sidenote: This states the problem.]
43. Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there
was a film upon his sight, but the outlines of the newcomer seemed to
change and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light
of the shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he
thought he bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of
living terror, there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing
was not of the earth and not of God.
44. And yet the creature had a strange air of the common-place, as he
stood looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: “You are
looking for the money, I believe?” it was in the tones of everyday
politeness.
45. Markheim made no answer.
46. “I should warn you,” resumed the other, “that the maid has left her
sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be
found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences.”
47. “You know me?” cried the murderer.
48. The visitor smiled. “You have long been a favorite of mine,” he
said; “and I have long observed and often sought to help you.”
49. “What are you?” cried Markheim: “the devil?”
[Sidenote: This is an important passage.]
50. “What I may be,” returned the other, “cannot affect the service I
propose to render you.”
[Sidenote: Forecast of Markheim’s struggle with his better self.]
51. “It can,” cried Markheim; “it does! Be helped by you? No, never;
not by you! You do not know me yet, thank God, you do not know me!”
52. “I know you,” replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or
rather firmness. “I know you to the soul.”
[Sidenote: Does Markheim really know himself?]
53. “Know me!” cried Markheim. “Who can do so? My life is but a
travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All
men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and
stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos
have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control--if
you could see their faces, they would be altogether different, they
would shine out for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is
more overlaid; my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I
could disclose myself.”
54. “To me?” inquired the visitant.
[Sidenote: Note the author’s name for Markheim.]
[Sidenote: Seek a cause for such reasoning.]
55. “To you before all,” returned the murderer. “I supposed you were
intelligent. I thought--since you exist--you would prove a reader of
the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of
it; my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants
have dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother--the
giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you
not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can
you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by
any willful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read
me for a thing that surely must be common as humanity--the unwilling
sinner?”
[Sidenote: Note the distinction between the final importance of cause
and effect.]
[Sidenote: Contrast.]
[Sidenote: MINOR MORAL CRISIS.]
56. “All this is very feelingly expressed,” was the reply. “But it
regards me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province,
and I care not in the least by what compulsion you may have been
dragged away, so as you are but carried in the right direction. But
time flies; the servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and
at the pictures on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer;
and remember, it is as if the gallows itself was striding toward you
through the Christmas streets! Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall
I tell you where to find the money?”
[Sidenote: A test of Markheim’s consistency.]
57. “For what price?” asked Markheim.
58. “I offer you the service for a Christmas gift,” returned the other.
59. Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter
triumph. “No,” said he, “I will take nothing at your hands; if I were
dying of thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips,
I should find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do
nothing to commit myself to evil.”
60. “I have no objection to a death-bed repentance,” observed the
visitant.
61. “Because you disbelieve their efficacy!” Markheim cried.
[Sidenote: Key.]
[Sidenote: Is this irony?]
62. “I do not say so,” returned the other; “but I look on these things
from a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls.
The man has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under color of
religion, or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course
of weak compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his
deliverance, he can add but one act of service--to repent, to die
smiling, and thus to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous
of my surviving followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept
my help. Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please
yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; and when the
night begins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for
your greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your
quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God.
I came but now from such a death bed, and the room was full of sincere
mourners, listening to the man’s last words: and when I looked into
that face, which had been set as a flint against mercy, I found it
smiling with hope.”
[Sidenote: Markheim has judged the example.]
63. “And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?” asked Markheim. “Do
you think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and
sin, and, at last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought.
Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find
me with red hands that you presume such baseness? and is this crime of
murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of good?”
[Sidenote: Is this true reasoning?]
[Sidenote: Note the detached attitude.]
[Sidenote: Note paradox.]
64. “Murder is to me no special category,” replied the other. “All sins
are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving
mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and
feeding on each other’s lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their
acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my
eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on
a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such
a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues
also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes
for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in
action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act,
whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling
cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the
rarest virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but
because you are Markheim, that I offered to forward your escape.”
[Sidenote: An unusual expression.]
[Sidenote: Note use of “of.”]
[Sidenote: Could that have been?]
65. “I will lay my heart open to you,” answered Markheim. “This crime
on which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many
lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been
driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty,
driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these
temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day,
and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches--both the power
and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor
in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents
of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past;
something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of
the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble
books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my
life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of
destination.”
66. “You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?”
remarked the visitor; “and there, if I mistake not, you have already
lost some thousands?”
[Sidenote: Self-deception uncovered.]
67. “Ah,” said Markheim, “but this time I have a sure thing.”
68. “This time, again, you will lose,” replied the visitor, quietly.
69. “Ah, but I keep back the half!” cried Markheim.
70. “That also you will lose,” said the other.
[Sidenote: Moral crisis begins to appear to Markheim.]
[Sidenote: Self-deception still struggling.]