were all rejoiced at an improvement in Tyck. He grew better rapidly, and
in two weeks was able to sit up in bed and talk to us. Though we were
full of joy at his apparent speedy recovery, there was always a
bitterness in the thought that the fatal relapse might be expected at
every moment, and this shadow hung over us even in the most hopeful
hours. The sister gave up her charge, and as Tyck grew better day by
day, Lisa came to act as sole nurse and companion, although we made
daily visits to the sick-room. The month of January passed, and Carnival
approached. Tyck was able to have his clothes put on, and to move around
the room a little. The doctor made infrequent and irregular visits, and
but for the fear of a relapse would have ceased to come altogether.
The morning of the first day of Carnival week, I was awakened while it
was still dark by the ringing of my door-bell, and lay in bed for a
while undecided whether it was not a dream that had roused me. My studio
and apartment were of a very bogyish character, located at the top of a
house on the Tiber, completely shut away from the world, and full of
dream-compelling influences that lurked in the dingy and long-disused
bedroom with its worn and faded furniture, and filled the spacious
studio and the musty little _salon_ with an oppressive presence, which
did not vanish in the brightest days nor in the midst of the liveliest
assembly that ever gathered there. So it never astonished me to be
awakened by some unaccountable noise, or by the mental conviction that
there was some disturbance in the crowded atmosphere. When I was aroused
that dark, drizzly morning, I awaited the second pull of the bell before
I summoned courage enough to pass through the shadowy _salon_ and the
lofty studio, with its ghostly lay-figure and plaster casts, like pale
phantoms in the dim light of a wax taper, and open the great door that
led into the narrow corridor. A slender form wrapped in a shawl entered
the studio, and Lisa stood there, pale with fright, her great brown eyes
drowned in tears, shrinking from the invisible terrors that seemed to
pursue her. She whispered that Tyck was worse, and asked me to go for
the doctor. I led her back to Tyck’s room, and in an hour the doctor was
there.
The details of that last illness are painful in the extreme. The sister
was not in attendance, it having been decided by the superior that
artists’ studios were places whither the duties of the sisterhood did
not call its members, and so Lisa’s mother came and did her best to
fill, in a rough sort of way, the delicate office of nurse. On the last
day of Carnival, little suspecting that the end of my friend was near, I
was occupied in my own studio, until nearly dark, and just as the sport
was at its height I struggled through the crowd and reached Tyck’s
studio, white with _confetti_ and flour, and in a state of mind hardly
fitted for the sick-room. In the studio two doctors sat in consultation,
and their serious faces, with the frightened look in Lisa’s eyes, told
me the sad story at once. They had decided that Tyck must die, and made
a last examination just after I entered. They raised him in bed, thumped
his poor back, pulled out his swollen tongue, and felt of his tender
scalp, burned with fever and frozen with a sack of ice. The group at the
bedside, so picturesquely impressive, will always remain in my memory
like the souvenir of some gloomy old picture. Lisa’s mother was seated
on the back of the bed, raising Tyck like a sick child, his limp arms
dangling over her shoulders and his head drooping against her cheek. To
the right the slight and graceful form of Lisa, holding the earthen
lamp; one doctor bending over to listen at the bared back, the focus of
the dim light; the other doctor solemn and motionless, a dark silhouette
against the bed and the wall beyond. The examination only proved the
truth of the decision just reached, and it was then announced for the
first time that the real malady was lung-fever, with the not
infrequently accompanying first symptoms of typhoid. A few moments
later one or two young artists dropped in, learned the sad news, and
went away to warn the rest of the friends. At eight o’clock we were all
in the studio, and after a hushed and hasty discussion as to whether or
not a priest should be called in this last hour, the Catholic friends
were overruled, and it was decided to consult no spiritual adviser.
Tyck, meanwhile, was scarcely able to talk. One by one the fellows came
to his bedside, were recognized, and went away. I alone stayed in the
studio, waiting, waiting. The doctor was to come at half-past nine, and
the fellows had promised to return again at ten.
For a long hour we sat in silence, Lisa and I, and watched the approach
of death. The mother, completely exhausted, lay on the bare floor near
the stove, as motionless as a corpse; the dim light reflected from the
sick-room transformed the draperies into mysterious shapes, and made the
lay-figure look vaporous and spectral. Frequent fits of violent,
suffocating cough would call us to the bedside, and after a severe
struggle Tyck would for a moment throw off the clutch of the malady and
breathe again. He was in agony to speak with me, but was unable to. I
guessed part of his wishes, repeated them in Flemish, and he made a
signal of assent when I was right. In this way he communicated certain
directions about his affairs, and I promised to see Lisa provided for
and all his business properly settled. But there was something more he
was anxious to tell, and he continued to the last his vain struggle to
express it.
The stillness of the studio in the intervals between the spasms of
suffocation was painfully broken, as the long hour passed, by his heavy
breathing and by the stifled sobs of the poor girl, who, at last, cried
herself to sleep, exhausted by her watching. From outside, a dog’s
mournful howl, breaking into a short, spasmodic bark, came up at
intervals, and I could see that this sound disturbed the sufferer,
probably recalling to his waning faculties the history of the dog that
had so haunted us. From the street the chorus of the maskers came
floating to us, sounding hollow and far away, like the chant of a
distant choir in some great cathedral. Occasionally a carriage rumbled
over the rough pavement, the deep sound echoing through the deserted
court-yard and up the long, dreary stairways. It was within a few
moments of the doctor’s expected visit that a spasm more violent than
any previous one called me to the bedside. We had long since stopped the
medicine, and nothing remained to do but to ease the sufferer over the
chasm as gently as possible. He did not seem at all anxious to live, and
in the agonies of the suffocation there was no fear in those dark eyes
that rolled in their hollow sockets. I raised him in bed, and at last,
after the most prolonged fight, he caught his breath, opened his eyes,
turned towards me, and said plainly in English, “All right, old boy.”
Then he relapsed into a comatose state and never spoke again. The doctor
found him rapidly sinking, and another spasm came on while he was
feeling the pulse. The patient recovered from it only to pass into
another and more protracted one, at the end of which he sighed twice and
was dead. For a second or two after the last deep breath his face had
all the fever-flush and the look of life, but almost instantly he fell
over towards me, changed beyond recognition. The wave of death had
passed over us, carrying with it the last trace of life that lingered in
the face of my friend, and a ghastly pallor crept over his cheeks,
transforming him that I loved into an unrecognizable, inert thing. I
turned away and never saw that face again, although they told me it was
nobly beautiful in its Egyptian, changeless expression. That pause of an
instant, while death was asserting its power, impressed me
strangely--and this was no new experience for me. In that pause, when
time seemed to stand still, something urged me to raise my eyes in
confident expectation of seeing the spirit as it left the body. Even my
heated imagination, to which I was ready to charge much that was
inexplicable in my experience, did not produce an image, but instead,
where the wall should have been I seemed to look into space, into a
wide, wide distance. An awful vacancy, an infinity of emptiness, yawned
before me, and I looked down to meet the fixed expression of that
changed face. For that moment there was no lingering presence of my
friend that I could feel; in that short struggle he had separated
himself entirely from us and from the place he used to fill with his
charming presence. In the chamber of death there was no adumbration of
the life that once flourished there, of the soul that had just fled. And
so I thought only of burying the body and providing for poor Lisa.
The rest of the fellow-painters came a few moments after it was all
over, and received the news with surprise. Lisa still slept, and we did
not wake her. I remained in the studio all night, and in the morning the
formalities of the police notification were gone through with, and the
preparations made for the funeral. In the studio, unchanged in every
respect from the day when Tyck put his brushes in his palette and laid
it upon a chair, we held a meeting to decide upon the funeral
ceremonies. Lisa was completely broken down by grief and exhaustion,
and, with her mother and the dog, who joyfully occupied his old place by
the stove and disputed the entrance of every one, lived in the studio
and the store-room.
On Sunday morning we buried our friend in the Protestant cemetery.
Arriving at the little house in the enclosure, we found the coffin
there, with the undertaker, Lisa, her mother, and the dog. An hour later
an English minister came and conducted the ceremonies in a cold, hurried
manner; but perhaps the services were quite as satisfactory, after all,
because his language was unintelligible to the majority of those
present. We stood shivering in a circle around the coffin until the
services were over, and then bore the burden to the grave, dug deep near
the wall in a picturesque nook under a ruined tower--a fit monument to
our friend. Lisa and her mother stood a little apart, holding the dog,
while we put the body in the grave, and a cold sun shone down upon us,
quite as cheerless and as unsympathetic as the dull, lowering clouds of
that day in Flanders a year before. After the customary handful of earth
had been thrown, we turned away and separated, for the living had no
sympathy with each other after the cold formality of the funeral. As I
strolled across the field in the direction of Monte Testaccio, I looked
back once only. There, on the mound of fresh earth, stood the dog, and
Lisa was bending over to arrange a wreath of immortelles.
After the sale of Tyck’s effects, which brought a comfortable little sum
to Lisa, I left Rome, now unbearable, and sought the distractions of
busy Naples. Later, with warm weather, I settled in a solitary nest in
Venice, where the waves of the lagoon lapped my door-step. The
distressed cries of a dog called me to the water door, one rainy
morning, while I was writing a part of this very narrative, and I pulled
out of the water a half-drowned, shaggy black dog. With some anxiety I
assisted the poor animal to dry his fur, and found, instead of my old
enemy, a harmless shaggy terrier, who rests his dainty nose on the paper
as I write.
And so the fourth still waits.
THE BUSH
The six short stories in this volume have all been written at sea in
those brief intervals of enforced rest from an exacting profession which
a transatlantic voyage compels; and I have offered them to the public
with the full knowledge of the necessity of some explanation to palliate
my offence of meddling with literature, and in the belief that I must
hang out some sort of a bush to call attention to whatever merits they
may have. This bush will be a confession, made, like the confidential
communications in all prefaces, into the ear of the reader alone. The
reason why I have put my preface--if I may be permitted to misuse the
term--at the end of the book instead of at the beginning, is that the
confidences I impart may be, by reason of their position between the
covers, less likely to be read by the careless or mechanical reviewer or
by the superficial “skimmer” of fiction. I was afraid that if the reader
should by chance read the preface first, he would not care to peruse the
stories, because, having been admitted to the dark room, as it were, and
having had the formula of the developer told to him, he might, after he
had seen one set of images come up on the dull surface of the negative,
find his curiosity abated, his interest gone, and his desire satisfied.
These stories have been published in various magazines, at different
times, since the centennial year. When the earliest one of the series
appeared, I was not a little flattered by being often asked how much of
it was true. When the second one came out, this question grew a little
stale, and I began to resent the curiosity as to my method of
story-telling. The climax was finally reached when I received a letter
from a writer of most excellent short stories, in which communication he
desired information about the characters in the tale, and led me to
understand that he believed the main part of the tale to be true. In my
answer to his letter I wrote him this old story of the Western bar-room:
A crowd of men were leaning over a bar drinking together and listening
to the yarns of a frontiersman who, stimulated by the laughter and
applause, was drawing a very long bow. His triumph was not quite
complete, however, for he noticed a thin, silent man at the farther end
of the bar, whose face did not change its habitual expression at any of
the mirth-or wonder-compelling incidents. At last, having directed the
fire of his dramatic expression for some time towards the silent man
with no result, the Western Munchausen turned to him with an oath and
said: “Why in ---- don’t you laugh or cry, or do something, when I tell a
story?” “The fact is, stranger,” the sad man replied, in a mournful tone
of voice--“the fact is, I’m a liar myself!” I never heard from my
correspondent again.
We all think we have fertile imaginations, and no one can blame me for
not liking to be denied the credit of invention and imagination, even
if the stories be mostly true. It seemed to me quite as foolish to
expect a short story to be a simple chronicle of some experience with
changed names and localities as it would be to demand of an historical
artist that he paint only those events of history of which he has been
an actual spectator. However, while this suspicion of the existence of a
foundation of truth was not altogether flattering or encouraging, it did
set me to thinking what part of these stories was actually drawn from my
real experience, in what way the ideas arose, grew, and developed into
stories. The result of this examination--the confession of the
proportion of truth to fiction--is the bush, then, which I propose to
hang out.
The plot of the “Capillary Crime” turns on the force of capillary
attraction in wood. The remote origin of the idea was reading about the
employment of wooden wedges in ancient quarries, which were first driven
in dry and then, on being wetted, swelled and burst off the blocks of
stone. While living in Paris, in the Rue de l’Orient, a small street on
Montmartre, which was lighted at that time by lanterns hung on ropes
across from house to house, I had occasion to take out the breech-pin of
an old Turkish flint-lock gun in order to draw the charge. It was
impossible to start the plug at first, but after it had been soaked for
a short time in petroleum it was easily unscrewed. Capillary attraction
had carried the oil into the rusted threads of the screw. The knowledge
of this action, together with the memory of the immense power of wooden
wedges, naturally brought to my mind a possible case where the wetting
of wood in a gun-stock might so affect the mechanism of the lock that
the hammer would fall without the agency of the trigger. I constructed a
model on the plan of the finger of a manikin, and it worked perfectly.
An artist in the neighborhood committed suicide just about this time. My
studio on Montmartre had once been the scene of a similar tragedy. There
was every reason, then, why I selected that studio as the scene; there
was a plausible excuse for connecting capillary force with the
discharge of a gun; there was my recent experience with suicide to
warrant a realistic description of such an event. My story was
ready-made. I had only to sew together the patchwork pieces.
While I was engaged in revising “A Capillary Crime” for publication in
book form, a friend sent me a slip cut from a Western newspaper, which
testifies in such an unexpected manner to the possibility of the
combination of circumstances described in my story that I insert it
here:
“FACT AGAINST FICTION.
“A STRIKING INSTANCE OF THE UNRELIABILITY OF
CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.
“There is no figment of the imagination--if it is at all within the
limit of possibilities--more curious or strange than some things
that actually happen. The following is an instance in proof of
this:
“A few years ago Frank Millet, the well-known artist, war
correspondent, and story-writer, published a short story in a
leading magazine which had as its principal features the mysterious
killing of a Parisian artist in his own studio. A web of
circumstantial evidence led to the arrest of a model who had been
in the habit of posing for him. But through some chain of
circumstances which the writer of this has now forgotten, the
murder--if murder it can be called--was found to have been caused
by the discharge of a firearm through the force of capillary
attraction. The firearm was used by the artist as a studio
accessory, and was hung in such a manner that he was directly in
line with it. Its discharge occurred when he was alone in his
studio.
“The story was a vivid and ingenious flight of the imagination. Now
for its parallel in fact:
“A recent number of the Albany _Law Journal_ tells of the arrest of
a man upon the charge of killing his cousin. The dead man was found
lying upon a lounge, about three o’clock in the afternoon, with a
32-caliber ball in his brain. The cousin, who had an interest of
$100,000 in his death, was alone with him in the house at the time.
The discovery of the real cause of death was due to the lawyer of
the accused, who took the rifle from which the ball had been fired,
loaded and hung it upon the wall, and then marked the form of a man
upon a white sheet and placed it upon the lounge where the man had
been found. Then a heavy cut-glass pitcher of water was placed upon
a shelf above. The temperature was 90° in the shade. The pitcher of
water acted as a sun-glass, and the hot rays of the sun shining
through the water were refracted directly upon the cartridge
chamber of the rifle. Eight witnesses were in the room, and a few
minutes after three o’clock there was a puff and a report, and the
ball struck the outlined form back of the ear, and the theory of
circumstantial evidence was exploded.
“This is interesting, not only because the real occurrence is quite
as strange as the imagined one, but because the fact came after the
fiction and paralleled it so closely.”
I have accurately reported the brief conversation I had with the friend
who occupied the Roman studio with me, and can give no further proof of
the peculiar character of the place nor add to the description of the
uncomfortable sensations we endured there. My friend’s remarks so far
confirmed my own impressions that I have always felt that he must have
had the same experience as myself--if I may call the incident of the
simulacrum an experience. He has never to my knowledge talked with any
one about this, but now that I have broken the ice in this public manner
he may feel called upon to tell his own story, if he has any to relate.
There used to come and pose for me in my Paris studio a Hungarian model
who had been a circus athlete. The ranks of male models are largely
recruited from circus men, actors, lion-tamers--people of all trades and
professions, indeed--and it is not unusual to find among them
individuals of culture and ability whom some misfortune or bad habit has
reduced to poverty. This one was an unusually useful model. He had
tattooed on the broad surface of skin over his left biceps his name,
Nagy, not in ordinary letters, but in human figures in different
distorted positions, representing letters of the alphabet, evidently
copied from a child’s cheap picture-book. While I was painting from him,
the war between Russia and Turkey broke out, and the model came one day
and announced that he had joined the Hungarian Legion, and was off for
Turkey. As he left me I said:
“If you’re killed, there’ll be no trouble in identifying you, for,
unless your left arm is shot off, you have your passport always with
you.”
At that time I had no intention of going to Turkey myself, but in a few
days I found myself on the way there, and, while passing through
Hungary, Nagy naturally came to my mind, and it occurred to me that I
might possibly run across him. However, the fortunes of war did not
bring us together, and I never saw him or heard of him again. On my way
through London to America, after the war, I was witness to a slight
trapeze accident in a circus which, though by no means startling,
recalled to my mind Nagy and his tattooed name; and then, thinking over
the campaign and meditating on the possibilities of my having met him
there, the plan of the tale developed itself in a perfectly easy and
regular way. I had only to introduce a little incident of my Italian
travels, a bit of local coloring from Turkey, and the thing was done.
The evolution of “Tedesco’s Rubina” was simpler than that of either of
the preceding stories. Any one familiar with Capri will remember a
grotto similar to the one described, and probably many visitors to that
little terrestrial paradise have been made acquainted with the secret of
the smugglers’ path down into the grotto. A dozen years or more ago,
there was a very old model in Capri who had a remarkable history, and
who was accustomed to drone on for hours at a stretch about her early
experiences and the artists of a generation or two ago. Sketches of her
at different periods of her life hung in most of the public resorts of
the island. I made a careful study of this old and wrinkled face, still
bearing traces of youthful beauty. The contrast between this painting
and the plaster cast of the head of a Roman nymph which occupied a
prominent place in my studio was the cause of many a jest, and called
forth many a tradition of model life from the garrulous members of that
profession. The visible proofs that the old woman had once been the
great beauty of the island; the incident of the bust in the museum at
Rome; the discovery of human bones in the grotto--all were interwoven
together in a web of romance before I even thought of putting it on
paper. When I came to write it out, it was very much like telling a
threadbare story.
The Latin Quarter in Paris is the most fertile spot in the world for
the growth of romances, most of them of the mushroom species. If a
stenographer were to take down the stories he might hear any evening in
a _brasserie_ there, he would have a unique volume of strange
incidents--some of them incredible, perhaps, but all with much flavor of
realism about them to make them interesting from a human point of view.
Not a few strange suicides, incomprehensible alliances, marvellously
curious and pathetic bits of human history, have come under my own
notice there. Student life in the Latin Quarter is not all “beer and
skittles,” for its sordid side is horribly depressing and hopeless. Few
who have experienced it have ever entirely recovered from the taint of
this unnatural and degrading life.