The principal room of Keyork Arabian’s dwelling was in every way
characteristic of the man. In the extraordinary confusion which at first
disturbed a visitor’s judgment, some time was needed to discover the
architectural bounds of the place. The vaulted roof was indeed apparent,
as well as small portions of the wooden flooring. Several windows, which
might have been large had they filled the arched embrasures in which
they were set, admitted the daylight when there was enough of it in
Prague to serve the purpose of illumination. So far as could be seen
from the street, they were commonplace windows without shutters and with
double casements against the cold, but from within it was apparent that
the tall arches in the thick walls had been filled in with a thinner
masonry in which the modern frames were set. So far as it was possible
to see, the room had but two doors; the one, masked by a heavy curtain
made of a Persian carpet, opened directly upon the staircase of the
house; the other, exactly opposite, gave access to the inner apartments.
On account of its convenient size, however, the sage had selected for
his principal abiding place this first chamber, which was almost large
enough to be called a hall, and here he had deposited the extraordinary
and heterogeneous collection of objects, or, more property speaking, of
remains, upon the study of which he spent a great part of his time.
Two large tables, three chairs and a divan completed the list of all
that could be called furniture. The tables were massive, dark, and
old-fashioned; the feet at each end consisted of thick flat boards sawn
into a design of simple curves, and connected by strong crosspieces
keyed to them with large wooden bolts. The chairs were ancient folding
stools, with movable backs and well-worn cushions of faded velvet.
The divan differed in no respect from ordinary oriental divans in
appearance, and was covered with a stout dark Bokhara carpet of no great
value; but so far as its use was concerned, the disorderly heaps of
books and papers that lay upon it showed that Keyork was more inclined
to make a book-case of it than a couch.
The room received its distinctive character however neither from its
vaulted roof, nor from the deep embrasures of its windows, nor from
its scanty furniture, but from the peculiar nature of the many curious
objects, large and small, which hid the walls and filled almost all
the available space on the floor. It was clear that every one of the
specimens illustrated some point in the great question of life and death
which formed the chief study of Keyork Arabian’s latter years; for by
far the greater number of the preparations were dead bodies, of men,
of women, of children, of animals, to all of which the old man had
endeavoured to impart the appearance of life, and in treating some of
which he had attained results of a startling nature. The osteology of
man and beast was indeed represented, for a huge case, covering one
whole wall, was filled to the top with a collection of many hundred
skulls of all races of mankind, and where real specimens were missing,
their place was supplied by admirable casts of craniums; but this
reredos, so to call it, of bony heads, formed but a vast, grinning
background for the bodies which stood and sat and lay in half-raised
coffins and sarcophagi before them, in every condition produced by
various known and lost methods of embalming. There were, it is true,
a number of skeletons, disposed here and there in fantastic attitudes,
gleaming white and ghostly in their mechanical nakedness, the bones of
human beings, the bones of giant orang-outangs, of creatures large and
small down to the flimsy little framework of a common bull frog, strung
on wires as fine as hairs, which squatted comfortably upon an old book
near the edge of a table, as though it had just skipped to that point in
pursuit of a ghostly fly and was pausing to meditate a farther spring.
But the eye did not discover these things at the first glance. Solemn,
silent, strangely expressive, lay three slim Egyptians, raised at an
angle as though to give them a chance of surveying their fellow-dead,
the linen bandages unwrapped from their heads and arms and shoulders,
their jet-black hair combed and arranged and dressed by Keyork’s hand,
their faces softened almost to the expression of life by one of his
secret processes, their stiffened joints so limbered by his art that
their arms had taken natural positions again, lying over the edges of
the sarcophagi in which they had rested motionless and immovable through
thirty centuries. For the man had pursued his idea in every shape
and with every experiment, testing, as it were, the potential
imperishability of the animal frame by the degree of life-like plumpness
and softness and flexibility which it could be made to take after a
mummification of three thousand years. And he had reached the conclusion
that, in the nature of things, the human body might vie, in resisting
the mere action of time, with the granite of the pyramids. Those had
been his earliest trials. The results of many others filled the room.
Here a group of South Americans, found dried in the hollow of an
ancient tree, had been restored almost to the likeness of life, and were
apparently engaged in a lively dispute over the remains of a meal--as
cold as themselves and as human. There, towered the standing body of
an African, leaning upon a knotted club, fierce, grinning, lacking only
sight in the sunken eyes to be terrible. There again, surmounting a
lay figure wrapped in rich stuffs, smiled the calm and gentle face of a
Malayan lady--decapitated for her sins, so marvellously preserved
that the soft dark eyes still looked out from beneath the heavy,
half-drooping lids, and the full lips, still richly coloured, parted a
little to show the ivory teeth. Other sights there were, more ghastly
still, triumphs of preservation, if not of semi-resuscitation, over
decay, won on its own most special ground. Triumphs all, yet almost
failures in the eyes of the old student, they represented the mad
efforts of an almost supernatural skill and superhuman science to
revive, if but for one second, the very smallest function of the living
body. Strange and wild were the trials he had made; many and great
the sacrifices and blood offerings lavished on his dead in the hope
of seeing that one spasm which would show that death might yet be
conquered; many the engines, the machines, the artificial hearts, the
applications of electricity that he had invented; many the powerful
reactives he had distilled wherewith to excite the long dead nerves,
or those which but two days had ceased to feel. The hidden essence
was still undiscovered, the meaning of vitality eluded his profoundest
study, his keenest pursuit. The body died, and yet the nerves could
still be made to act as though alive for the space of a few hours--in
rare cases for a day. With his eyes he had seen a dead man spring half
across a room from the effects of a few drops of musk--on the first day;
with his eyes he had seen the dead twist themselves, and move and grin
under the electric current--provided it had not been too late. But that
“too late” had baffled him, and from his first belief that life might
be restored when once gone, he had descended to what seemed the simpler
proposition of the two, to the problem of maintaining life indefinitely
so long as its magic essence lingered in the flesh and blood. And now he
believed that he was very near the truth; how terribly near he had yet
to learn.
On that evening when the Wanderer fell to the earth before the shadow of
Beatrice, Keyork Arabian sat alone in his charnel-house. The brilliant
light of two powerful lamps illuminated everything in the place, for
Keyork loved light, like all those who are intensely attached to life
for its own sake. The yellow rays flooded the life-like faces of his
dead companions, and streamed upwards to the heterogeneous objects that
filled the shelves almost to the spring of the vault--objects which all
reminded him of the conditions of lives long ago extinct, endless heaps
of barbarous weapons, of garments of leather and of fish skin, Amurian,
Siberian, Gothic, Mexican, and Peruvian; African and Red Indian
masks, models of boats and canoes, sacred drums, Liberian idols, Runic
calendars, fiddles made of human skulls, strange and barbaric ornaments,
all producing together an amazing richness of colour--all things in
which the man himself had taken but a passing interest, the result of
his central study--life in all its shapes.
He sat alone. The African giant looked down at his dwarf-like form
as though in contempt of such half-grown humanity; the Malayan lady’s
bodiless head turned its smiling face towards him; scores of dead
beings seemed to contemplate half in pity, half in scorn, their would-be
reviver. Keyork Arabian was used to their company and to their silence.
Far beyond the common human horror of dead humanity, if one of them had
all at once nodded to him and spoken to him he would have started with
delight and listened with rapture. But they were all still dead, and
they neither spoke or moved a finger. A thought that had more hope in it
than any which had passed through his brain for many years now occupied
and absorbed him. A heavy book lay open on the table by his side, and
from time to time he glanced at a phrase which seemed to attract him.
It was always the same phrase, and two words alone sufficed to bring
him back to contemplation of it. Those two words were “Immortality”
and “Soul.” He began to speak aloud to himself, being by nature fond of
speech.
“Yes. The soul is immortal. I am quite willing to grant that. But it
does not in any way follow that it is the source of life, or the seat
of intelligence. The Buddhists distinguished it even from the
individuality. And yet life holds it, and when life ends it takes its
departure. How soon? I do not know. It is not a condition of life,
but life is one of its conditions. Does it leave the body when life is
artificially prolonged in a state of unconsciousness--by hypnotism,
for instance? Is it more closely bound up with animal life, or with
intelligence? If with either, has it a definite abiding place in the
heart, or in the brain? Since its presence depends directly on life, so
far as I know, it belongs to the body rather than to the brain. I once
made a rabbit live an hour without its head. With a man that experiment
would need careful manipulation--I would like to try it. Or is it all
a question of that phantom, Vitality? Then the presence of the soul
depends upon the potential excitability of the nerves, and, as far as
we know, it must leave the body not more than twenty-four hours after
death, and it certainly does not leave the body at the moment of dying.
But if of the nerves, then what is the condition of the soul in the
hypnotic state? Unorna hypnotises our old friend there--and our young
one, too. For her, they have nerves. At her touch they wake, they sleep,
they move, they feel, they speak. But they have no nerves for me. I can
cut them with knives, burn them, turn the life-blood of the one into
the arteries of the other--they feel nothing. If the soul is of the
nerves--or of the vitality, then they have souls for Unorna, and none
for me. That is absurd. Where is that old man’s soul? He has slept for
years. Has not his soul been somewhere else in the meanwhile? If we
could keep him asleep for centuries, or for scores of centuries, like
that frog found alive in a rock, would his soul--able by the hypothesis
to pass through rocks or universes--stay by him? Could an ingenious
sinner escape damnation for a few thousand years by being hypnotised?
Verily the soul is a very unaccountable thing, and what is still more
unaccountable is that I believe in it. Suppose the case of the ingenious
sinner. Suppose that he could not escape by his clever trick. Then
his soul must inevitably taste the condition of the damned while he is
asleep. But when he is waked at last, and found to be alive, his soul
must come back to him, glowing from the eternal flames. Unpleasant
thought! Keyork Arabian, you had far better not go to sleep at present.
Since all that is fantastic nonsense, on the face of it, I am inclined
to believe that the presence of the soul is in some way a condition
requisite for life, rather than depending upon it. I wish I could buy a
soul. It is quite certain that life is not a mere mechanical or chemical
process. I have gone too far to believe that. Take man at the very
moment of death--have everything ready, do what you will--my artificial
heart is a very perfect instrument, mechanically speaking--and how long
does it take to start the artificial circulation through the carotid
artery? Not a hundredth part so long a time as drowned people often lie
before being brought back, without a pulsation, without a breath. Yet
I never succeeded, though I have made the artificial heart work on a
narcotised rabbit, and the rabbit died instantly when I stopped the
machine, which proves that it was the machine that kept it alive.
Perhaps if one applied it to a man just before death he might live on
indefinitely, grow fat and flourish so long as the glass heart worked.
Where would his soul be then? In the glass heart, which would have
become the seat of life? Everything, sensible or absurd, which I can
put into words makes the soul seem an impossibility--and yet there is
something which I cannot put into words, but which proves the soul’s
existence beyond all doubt. I wish I could buy somebody’s soul and
experiment with it.”
He ceased and sat staring at his specimens, going over in his memory the
fruitless experiments of a lifetime. A loud knocking roused him from his
reverie. He hastened to open the door and was confronted by Unorna.
She was paler than usual, and he saw from her expression that there was
something wrong.
“What is the matter?” he asked, almost roughly.
“He is in a carriage downstairs,” she answered quickly. “Something has
happened to him. I cannot wake him, you must take him in--”
“To die on my hands? Not I!” laughed Keyork in his deepest voice. “My
collection is complete enough.”
She seized him suddenly by both arms, and brought her face near to his.
“If you dare to speak of death----”
She grew intensely white, with a fear she had not before known in her
life. Keyork laughed again, and tried to shake himself free of her grip.
“You seem a little nervous,” he observed calmly. “What do you want of
me?”
“Your help, man, and quickly! Call your people! Have him carried
upstairs! Revive him! do something to bring him back!”
Keyork’s voice changed.
“Is he in real danger?” he asked. “What have you done to him?”
“Oh, I do not know what I have done!” cried Unorna desperately. “I do
not know what I fear----”
She let him go and leaned against the doorway, covering her face with
her hands. Keyork stared at her. He had never seen her show so much
emotion before. Then he made up his mind. He drew her into his room and
left her standing and staring at him while he thrust a few objects into
his pockets and threw his fur coat over him.
“Stay here till I come back,” he said, authoritatively, as he went out.
“But you will bring him here?” she cried, suddenly conscious of his
going.
The door had already closed. She tried to open it, in order to follow
him, but she could not. The lock was of an unusual kind, and either
intentionally or accidentally Keyork had shut her in. For a few moments
she tried to force the springs, shaking the heavy wood work a very
little in the great effort she made. Then, seeing that it was useless,
she walked slowly to the table and sat down in Keyork’s chair.
She had been in the place before, and she was as free from any
unpleasant fear of the dead company as Keyork himself. To her, as to
him, they were but specimens, each having a peculiar interest, as a
thing, but all destitute of that individuality, of that grim, latent
malice, of that weird, soulless, physical power to harm, with which
timid imaginations endow dead bodies.
She scarcely gave them a glance, and she certainly gave them no thought.
She sat before the table, supporting her head in her hands and trying
to think connectedly of what had just happened. She knew well enough how
the Wanderer had lain upon the frozen ground, his head supported on her
knee, while the watchman had gone to call a carriage. She remembered how
she had summoned all her strength and had helped to lift him in, as few
women could have done. She remembered every detail of the place, and
everything she had done, even to the fact that she had picked up his hat
and a stick he had carried and had taken them into the vehicle with her.
The short drive through the ill-lighted streets was clear to her. She
could still feel the pressure of his shoulder as he had leaned heavily
against her; she could see the pale face by the fitful light of the
lanterns as they passed, and of the lamps that flashed in front of the
carriage with each jolting of the wheels over the rough paving-stones.
She remembered exactly what she had done, her efforts to wake him, at
first regular and made with the certainty of success, then more and more
mad as she realised that something had put him beyond the sphere of her
powers for the moment, if not for ever; his deathly pallor, his chilled
hands, his unnatural stillness--she remembered it all, as one remembers
circumstances in real life a moment after they have taken place. But
there remained also the recollection of a single moment during which
her whole being had been at the mercy of an impression so vivid that
it seemed to stand alone divested of any outward sensations by which
to measure its duration. She, who could call up visions in the minds of
others, who possessed the faculty of closing her bodily eyes in order to
see distant places and persons in the state of trance, she, who expected
no surprises in her own act, had seen something very vividly, which
she could not believe had been a reality, and which she yet could not
account for as a revelation of second sight. That dark, mysterious
presence that had come bodily, yet without a body, between her and the
man she loved was neither a real woman, nor the creation of her own
brain, nor a dream seen in hypnotic state. She had not the least idea
how long it had stood there; it seemed an hour, and it seemed but a
second. But that incorporeal thing had a life and a power of its own.
Never before had she felt that unearthly chill run through her, nor
that strange sensation in her hair. It was a thing of evil omen, and the
presage was already about to be fulfilled. The spirit of the dark woman
had arisen at the sound of the words in which he denied her; she had
risen and had come to claim her own, to rob Unorna of what seemed most
worth coveting on earth--and she could take him, surely, to the place
whence she came. How could Unorna tell that he was not already gone,
that his spirit had not passed already, even when she was lifting his
weight from the ground?
At the despairing thought she started and looked up. She had almost
expected to see that shadow beside her again. But there was nothing.
The lifeless bodies stood motionless in their mimicry of life under the
bright light. The swarthy negro frowned, the face of the Malayan woman
wore still its calm and gentle expression. Far in the background the
rows of gleaming skulls grinned, as though at the memory of their four
hundred lives; the skeleton of the orang-outang stretched out its long
bony arms before it; the dead savages still squatted round the remains
of their meal. The stillness was oppressive.
Unorna rose to her feet in sudden anxiety. She did not know how long
she had been alone. She listened anxiously at the door for the sound
of footsteps on the stairs, but all was silent. Surely, Keyork had not
taken him elsewhere, to his lodgings, where he would not be cared for.
That was impossible. She must have heard the sound of the wheels as
the carriage drove away. She glanced at the windows and saw that the
casements were covered with small, thick curtains which would muzzle
the sound. She went to the nearest, thrust the curtain aside, opened the
inner and the second glass and looked out. Though the street below was
dim, she could see well enough that the carriage was no longer there.
It was the bitterest night of the year and the air cut her like a knife,
but she would not draw back. She strained her sight in both directions,
searching in the gloom for the moving lights of a carriage, but she saw
nothing. At last she shut the window and went back to the door. They
must be on the stairs, or still below, perhaps, waiting for help to
carry him up. The cold might kill him in his present state, a cold that
would kill most things exposed to it. Furiously she shook the door. It
was useless. She looked about for an instrument to help her strength.
She could see nothing--no--yes--there was the iron-wood club of the
black giant. She went and took it from his hand. The dead thing trembled
all over, and rocked as though it would fall, and wagged its great head
at her, but she was not afraid. She raised the heavy club and struck
upon the door, upon the lock, upon the panels with all her might. The
terrible blows sent echoes down the staircase, but the door did not
yield, nor the lock either. Was the door of iron and the lock of
granite? she asked herself. Then she heard a strange, sudden noise
behind her. She turned and looked. The dead negro had fallen bodily from
his pedestal to the floor, with a dull, heavy thud. She did not desist,
but struck the oaken planks again and again with all her strength. Then
her arms grew numb and she dropped the club. It was all in vain. Keyork
had locked her in and had taken the Wanderer away.
She went back to her seat and fell into an attitude of despair. The
reaction from the great physical efforts she had made overcame her. It
seemed to her that Keyork’s only reason for taking him away must be that
he was dead. Her head throbbed and her eyes began to burn. The great
passion had its will of her and stabbed her through and through with
such pain as she had never dreamed of. The horror of it all was too deep
for tears, and tears were by nature very far from her eyes at all times.
She pressed her hands to her breast and rocked herself gently backwards
and forwards. There was no reason left in her. To her there was no
reason left in anything if he were gone. And if Keyork Arabian could not
cure him, who could? She knew now what that old prophecy had meant,
when they had told her that love would come but once, and that the
chief danger of her life lay in a mistake on that decisive day. Love had
indeed come upon her like a whirlwind, he had flashed upon her like
the lightning, she had tried to grasp him and keep him, and he was gone
again--for ever. Gone through her own fault, through her senseless folly
in trying to do by art what love would have done for himself. Blind,
insensate, mad! She cursed herself with unholy curses, and her beautiful
face was strained and distorted. With unconscious fingers she tore at
her heavy hair until it fell about her like a curtain. In the raging
thirst of a great grief for tears that would not flow she beat her
bosom, she beat her face, she struck with her white forehead the heavy
table before her, she grasped her own throat, as though she would tear
the life out of herself. Then again her head fell forward and her body
swayed regularly to and fro, and low words broke fiercely from her
trembling lips now and then, bitter words of a wild, strong language in
which it is easier to curse than to bless. As the sudden love that had
in a few hours taken such complete possession of her was boundless, so
its consequences were illimitable. In a nature strange to fear, the fear
for another wrought a fearful revolution. Her anger against herself was
as terrible as her fear for him she loved was paralysing. The instinct
to act, the terror lest it should be too late, the impossibility of
acting at all so long as she was imprisoned in the room, all three came
over her at once.
The mechanical effort of rocking her body from side to side brought no
rest; the blow she struck upon her breast in her frenzy she felt no more
than the oaken door had felt those she had dealt it with the club. She
could not find even the soothing antidote of bodily pain for her intense
moral suffering. Again the time passed without her knowing or guessing
of its passage.
Driven to desperation she sprang at last from her seat and cried aloud.
“I would give my soul to know that he is safe!”
The words had not died away when a low groan passed, as it were, round
the room. The sound was distinctly that of a human voice, but it seemed
to come from all sides at once. Unorna stood still and listened.
“Who is in this room?” she asked in loud clear tones.
Not a breath stirred. She glanced from one specimen to another, as
though suspecting that among the dead some living being had taken a
disguise. But she knew them all. There was nothing new to her there. She
was not afraid. Her passion returned.
“My soul!--yes!” she cried again, leaning heavily on the table, “I would
give it if I could know, and it would be little enough!”
Again that awful sound filled the room, and rose now almost to a wail
and died away.
Unorna’s brow flushed angrily. In the direct line of her vision stood
the head of the Malayan woman, its soft, embalmed eyes fixed on hers.
“If there are people hidden here,” cried Unorna fiercely, “let them show
themselves! let them face me! I say it again--I would give my immortal
soul!”
This time Unorna saw as well as heard. The groan came, and the wail
followed it and rose to a shriek that deafened her. And she saw how
the face of the Malayan woman changed; she saw it move in the bright
lamp-light, she saw the mouth open. Horrified, she looked away. Her eyes
fell upon the squatting savages--their heads were all turned towards
her, she was sure that she could see their shrunken chests heave as they
took breath to utter that terrible cry again and again; even the fallen
body of the African stirred on the floor, not five paces from her. Would
their shrieking never stop? All of them--every one--even to the white
skulls high up in the case; not one skeleton, not one dead body that did
not mouth at her and scream and moan and scream again.
Unorna covered her ears with her hands to shut out the hideous,
unearthly noise. She closed her eyes lest she should see those dead
things move. Then came another noise. Were they descending from their
pedestals and cases and marching upon her, a heavy-footed company of
corpses?
Fearless to the last, she dropped her hands and opened her eyes.
“In spite of you all,” she cried defiantly, “I will give my soul to have
him safe!”
Something was close to her. She turned and saw Keyork Arabian at her
elbow. There was an odd smile on his usually unexpressive face.
“Then give me that soul of yours, if you please,” he said. “He is quite
safe and peacefully asleep. You must have grown a little nervous while I
was away.”