infinite tenderness, he kissed her tear-bedewed cheeks and gently he
laid her head upon his shoulder, and then with both arms clasped about
her, he imparted to her statuesque figure a sort of rocking motion,
crooning with each oscillation, "There, there, there, there," until
the paroxysm of her grief abated and passed from weeping into
gradually subsiding sobs, and he began to tell her that he would be
only too happy to give his legal services to convict the villains when
caught--as they surely would be. The lady by degrees becoming more
cheerful and giving him a description of the stolen property, he
discussed ways and means of recovering it, and to prevent her from
relapsing into her former depressed condition, occasionally imprinted
a consolatory salute upon her cheek, from which he had previously
wiped the wet tracks of the tears that had now some time ceased
gushing, for there had been a salty taste to the first osculations,
which while not actually disagreeable, had not been to his liking.
At length, the lady not only ceased even to sigh, but even to talk,
and yet remained leaning upon him, which was whether because she was
weary, exhausted by grief, or whether because her supporter was such a
good looking young man, is not evident. Doubtless it was true that at
first her misery and unhappiness made her need the sympathetic
caresses of any one within reach and that with the return of her
equilibrium she continued to make this an excuse for enjoying without
any reproach of impropriety a recreation which ordinarily the
conventions of society would compel her to eschew. As for the rising
light in the legal profession, he began to find the weight she leant
upon him oppressive, and his occupation, delightful at first, palling
and growing monotonous. The monotony he somewhat relieved by
frequently kissing her, now on one velvet cheek, now on the other, and
again her lips; slowly, one two, three, in waltz measure; and rapidly,
one, two three, four, in two-step measure, when all at once in the
midst of a sustained half note there came to him the reflection that
this was no time of night for him to be there in the dark in a
deserted house kissing a woman with whose social standing, whose very
name, he was unacquainted. He was about to ask a few leading
questions, when there was the sound of wheels in the street; a
carriage stopped before the door.
Quickly extricating himself from the lady's arms, Mr. Middleton
stepped to the door, only to see the carriage drive away, the sound of
voices singing a solemn chant in a strange and unknown tongue floating
back to him. Wondering what all this could mean, he turned to find the
lady standing at his side, silently regarding him in a wrapt manner.
"The hour is late," said she, in a hollow, mournful voice, "and I
ought to be seeking some shelter where I can lay my head, but where,
oh, where?"
The lady made a tragic gesture as she asked this question, and there
in that lonely street with this lorn woman at this late hour of the
night in the eerie light of the cloud-obscured moon, with the wind,
now howling and now sobbing and moaning, Mr. Middleton felt very
solemn indeed. But he pulled himself together and suggested a
low-priced and respectable hotel not far away, and toward this they
were faring when they passed a house which, unlike most of the others
of the vicinity, bore signs of habitation, and unlike any of the
others, had a light showing in a window. In fact, there was a light in
every window of the two upper stories and in the windows of the first
floor and even in the basement. Pausing to wonder at this unusual
illumination, Mr. Middleton felt his arm suddenly clutched, and a
voice which he would never have believed came from the lady, if there
had been any one else present, grated into his ear, "It's him."
Though startled by this enigmatical utterance, he followed when she
ascended two steps of the stoop for a better view in the uncurtained
window. There, with his face buried in his hands, seated on a roll of
carpeting with a tack hammer and saucer of tacks at his side, sat the
mulierose man!
"This house was empty at four this afternoon," said the lady.
"Heavens, that's my piano in the corner! That's my center table! I
believe that's my carpet! That's my watercolor painting I painted
myself! _He's_ robbed me!"
Her voice rose to a shriek, and at the sound a woman's head popped out
of the window above and the mulierose man came running to the door. He
was in his shirt sleeves but wore a hat.
"You've robbed me, you've robbed me!" cried the lady.
"I haven't," said the mulierose man with the utmost composure. "I can
explain it all satisfactorily. Come in. My Aunt Eliza is here and tea
is ready. Where were you when I went back to the restaurant? They said
you had gone. Where were you?"
To Mr. Middleton's surprise, the lady immediately quieted at the words
of the mulierose man and instead of berating him, coughed nervously
and hung her head sheepishly.
"Where were you?" repeated the man.
"At my house."
"All this time? With this young man?" There was a tinge of hardness
and jealousy in the man's voice and he looked unpleasantly at Mr.
Middleton. "What did you stay in that empty house all this time for?
What-were-you-doing-there?"
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.
It was a pleasant day of the last of May, in the mating season of
birds, when the world was warm and throbbing with young life. The
eminent Asiatic scholar looked across the lunch table, regarding his
wife with wistful sadness as she refreshed herself with boiled
cabbage.
"Do you know the day? It is thirty years since Hilsenhoff went into
the box; thirty years since we have been man and--woman."
"Ah, yes, this is the anniversary. Thirty years, thirty years. Poor
young Hilsenhoff."
She said these words with a tinge of sadness that was almost regret
and this did not escape the doctor.
"One might fancy you were sorry. Yet it was your own doing. I was
young and handsome then. A Hercules, young, full of life, late
champion swordsman of the university, a rising light in the realm of
learning, as well as a figure in society. You were the beautiful wife
of tutor Hilsenhoff, the buxom girl with the form of a Venus and the
passion of that goddess as well, tied to a thin, pallid bookworm ten
years your senior, neglecting his pouting wife with blood full of fire
for the pages of the literature of Hindoostan, prating of the loves of
Ganesha and Vishnu, when a goddess awaited his own neglectful arms. So
when on the day when he stepped into the box, leaving us the sole
repository of the secret of his whereabouts--that the mutton-headed
police might not interfere with the success of his experiment by
preventing what they might think practically suicide--you said to let
him stay."
"I was twenty and he thirty," mused the woman. "Poor young
Hilsenhoff."
"Young! I was twenty-three--and a man."
"Dead or alive, he is young Hilsenhoff to me. He was thirty when last
I saw him."
"Dead or alive? What are you thinking of?"
An idea had been taking shape in the woman's mind without her
realizing it. It had grown from her own words, rather than had the
words sprung from the idea.
"Why, if a man be brought into a condition where all bodily functions
are suspended and he is as he were dead, and remain in this condition
for months and be brought out of it no more harmed than if he had
slept overnight, why may it not be years, instead of months? Has any
man ever proved that, in this condition, one may not live on
indefinitely?" she said.
"No man has ever proved that one cannot, but what is more important,
no man has ever proved that one can. No man has ever proved beyond
shadow of doubt that one may not fashion wings and fly, but no man has
ever demonstrated that one can. In India, only one man has ever tried
to continue in a state of suspended animation for over six months, and
that was the rajah who, condemned to death by the English, ostensibly
died before the soldiers could come to carry out the sentence and was
brought out of his tomb and restored to life three days after a new
British viceroy had proclaimed a general amnesty to all past
offenders. The period was eight months. If the viceroys had not been
changed for a number of years, we might have learned more concerning
the length of the period in which a man may continue in the semblance
of death without it becoming reality. No, these twenty-five years has
Hilsenhoff been bones."
"Then let us take them out and bury them."
"No, no. Then would I feel like a murderer indeed. I left him in there
for you. Now let his bones rest there for sake of me."
But the woman had become possessed of an idea which in turn possessed
her, a dream, for which like all mankind, she would fight harder than
for any substantiality, for no reality can be so glorious as a dream.
"But there was the man at Sutlej, the man who had himself buried in a
wheat field for the edification of Alexander the Great, there to
remain until a wheat crop had passed through its stages from sowing
until harvest."
"The man at Sutlej!" exclaimed the doctor impatiently. "That a man was
thus buried, the pages of Quintus Curtius's history show, and the
Macedonian armies suddenly retreating from India, he was forgotten and
not one, but two thousand wheat harvests have been garnered over his
burial place."
"But the article in the _Revue Des Deux Mondes_, telling how he had
been found," objected the woman faintly.
The doctor looked at her in amazement.
"What will not people do to believe that which they wish to believe.
You, you, you!--do you ask me concerning that lie in the _Revue Des
Deux Mondes_? Oh, woman, woman! When did your memory of the details of
that hoax fail you? Not longer ago than ten minutes. A lying Frenchman
said he was on his way to France with a resuscitated contemporary of
Alexander the Great and that a full account of the matter would be
published in two or three months. Hilsenhoff left the duration of his
stay in the box at my discretion, enjoining me, however, that he
should not be taken out before the Frenchman had published the full
account of the Sutlej case, for we would then have many interesting
comparisons in his behavior and response to the restorative methods
used, and the reaction and response of this man buried two thousand
years to the same methods for restoring suspended animation. The
Frenchman never arrived with his man. It was all a lie. Yet by
following Hilsenhoff's solemn injunctions to the letter, we had an
excuse to leave him as dead, and you insisted that we should do so,
and I, weak and infatuated with your ripe beauty, I agreed. You said
that we would leave him in his self-chosen sleep and that he should be
our lodger. And so he has been and we have never called him to
breakfast in all these thirty years. We have even brought him to
America with us and he sleeps. Ah, no, we did not slay him. We but
obeyed his commands."
"Poor young Hilsenhoff. And I am his wife and he is but thirty years
old and I am fifty. Heigho!"
"Woman, you will drive me crazy," said the great annotator of the
Upanishads, and he left for a kommers with the nearest barkeeper.
"As if you did not drive me crazy, you obese, misshapen wine skin! you
bloated, blue-faced sot!" said the woman. "I deserted young Hilsenhoff
for you, Hilsenhoff with his delicate cheeks and his soft yellow hair,
and he is mine and I am his and I will let him out of the box and we
will live together in love, the dear young thing. What if he does
study sometimes? I shall not mind. He need not always sit with me in
love's dalliance."
All at once it came home to her that if Moehrlein maintained the
resuscitation of Hilsenhoff was impossible and charged her with
believing it possible because she wished to believe it so, it might
also be true that he did not believe it possible because he did not
wish to so believe. The burned out eyes that told of dreams of men,
men who these many years had not included her husband, smoldered with
a sudden fire. With a song in her heart, she was up and bustling
about. She filled a brazier with coals and got a frying-pan and
wheat-cake batter, and a razor and a crocheting hook--ah, she knew how
the process of restoring suspended animation was practised. She
lumbered up into the third story with her burdens, into the room where
slept the lodger. Not for fifteen years had anyone looked into that
sleeping chamber. The blinds and curtains, all were drawn, the dust
lay thick under foot. She let in the light of day at every window.
There sat the box in the middle of the floor, hooped with bands of
iron and with the great seal of the University of Bonn stamped upon
the lock. She broke the seal and turned the lock and then sank down in
a sudden faintness of heart. Indeed, how loath she was to put an end
to the dream that had just now filled her whole being with rapture,
and what else would it be but to put an end to it when she delved into
that box? She would go away and let herself dream on a few days more
before putting the matter to its final test, perhaps never doing so.
Thus she reasoned, and yet her hand, as she sat before the box with
averted face, rose as if impelled by the volition of another
intelligence, over the edge of the box, down to the mass of wool and
wadding, through it to the wrappings and swathings in the middle,
through the wrapping, and felt--the thrill of unimaginable joy ran
through her. It was not bones, it was not bones!
Into the room of the lodger came Dr. August Moehrlein. The coals of
the brazier were out, the batter had been turned into cakes, the razor
was covered with hair, four waxen plugs lay by the crocheting hook.
The process was over. The sleeper was awake and there he stood, his
delicate face yet pinched with sleep and his eyes heavy, but alive and
young, young Hilsenhoff with his soft yellow hair and mild blue eyes.
On the floor before him in an attitude of adoration, knelt the woman
who in the view of the law, was his wife, her eyes burned out no
longer, but aflash with youthful passion. But in her eyes alone was
there youth. Nothing of youthful archness and coquetry was there in
her gaze, only greed, the sickening fondness of an aging woman for a
young man. In a daze, he stared at her and heard her clumsy
compliments, her vulgar protestations of love, things which the ripe
beauty of her youth might have condoned, but now were nauseating. He
saw her heavy jowls and sensual lips, the thick nose and all the
revenges of time upon a once beautiful body that had clothed an ugly
soul. He looked at his own rusty clothing, stiff and hard and creased
in a thousand wrinkles, and into the mildewed nest where the mould
from the moisture of his own body grew thick and green and horrible.
He gazed at Dr. Moehrlein, the one-time Adonis of Bonn, and he
shuddered, and which of what he looked at, or whether all, made him do
so, he could not tell.