“Who and what is that gentleman?”
“That? Oh, a very remarkable man indeed! I met him last year amid the
caves of Petra, the Scriptural Edom. He is the best Oriental scholar I
know. We joined company, had an adventure with robbers, in which he
showed a coolness that saved our lives; afterward he invited me to spend
a day with him in a house he had bought at Damascus, buried among
almond-blossoms and roses—the most beautiful thing! He had lived there
for some time, quite as an Oriental, in grand style.
“I half suspect he is a renegade, immensely rich, very odd; by the by, a
great mesmerizer. I have seen him with my own eyes produce an effect on
inanimate things. If you take a letter from your pocket and throw it to
the other end of the room, he will order it to come to his feet, and you
will see the letter wriggle itself along the floor till it has obeyed
his command. ’Pon my honor ’tis true; I have seen him affect even the
weather, disperse or collect clouds by means of a glass tube or wand.
But he does not like talking of these matters to strangers. He has only
just arrived in England; says he has not been here for a great many
years; let me introduce him to you.”
“Certainly! He is English, then? What is his name?”
“Oh! a very homely one—Richards.”
“And what is his birth—his family?”
“How do I know? What does it signify? No doubt some _parvenue_; but
rich, so infernally rich!”
G—— drew me up to the stranger, and the introduction was effected. The
manners of Mr. Richards were not those of an adventurous traveler.
Travelers are in general gifted with high animal spirits; they are
talkative, eager, imperious. Mr. Richards was calm and subdued in tone,
with manners which were made distant by the loftiness of punctilious
courtesy, the manners of a former age.
I observed that the English he spoke was not exactly of our day. I
should even have said that the accent was slightly foreign. But then Mr.
Richards remarked that he had been little in the habit for years of
speaking in his native tongue.
The conversation fell upon the changes in the aspect of London since he
had last visited our metropolis. G—— then glanced off to the moral
changes—literary, social, political—the great men who were removed from
the stage within the last twenty years; the new great men who were
coming on.
In all this Mr. Richards evinced no interest. He had evidently read none
of our living authors, and seemed scarcely acquainted by name with our
younger statesmen. Once, and only once, he laughed; it was when G——
asked him whether he had any thoughts of getting into Parliament; and
the laugh was inward, sarcastic, sinister—a sneer raised into a laugh.
After a few minutes, G—— left us to talk to some other acquaintances who
had just lounged into the room, and I then said, quietly:
“I have seen a miniature of you, Mr. Richards, in the house you once
inhabited, and perhaps built—if not wholly, at least in part—in Oxford
Street. You passed by that house this morning.”
Not till I had finished did I raise my eyes to his, and then he fixed my
gaze so steadfastly that I could not withdraw it—those fascinating
serpent-eyes. But involuntarily, and as if the words that translated my
thought were dragged from me, I added, in a low whisper, “I have been a
student in the mysteries of life and nature; of those mysteries I have
known the occult professors. I have the right to speak to you thus.” And
I uttered a certain password.
“Well. I concede the right. What would you ask?”
“To what extent human will in certain temperaments can extend?”
“To what extent can thought extend? Think, and before you draw breath
you are in China!”
“True; but my thought has no power in China.”
“Give it expression, and it may have. You may write down a thought
which, sooner or later, may alter the whole condition of China. What is
a law but a thought? Therefore thought is infinite. Therefore thought
has power; not in proportion to its value—a bad thought may make a bad
law as potent as a good thought can make a good one.”
“Yes; what you say confirms my own theory. Through invisible currents
one human brain may transmit its ideas to other human brains, with the
same rapidity as a thought promulgated by visible means. And as thought
is imperishable, as it leaves its stamp behind it in the natural world,
even when the thinker has passed out of this world, so the thought of
the living may have power to rouse up and revive the thoughts of the
dead, such as those thoughts _were in life_, though the thought of the
living cannot reach the thoughts which the dead now may entertain. Is it
not so?”
“I decline to answer, if in my judgment thought has the limit you would
fix to it. But proceed; you have a special question you wish to put.”
“Intense malignity in an intense will, engendered in a peculiar
temperament, and aided by natural means within the reach of science, may
produce effects like those ascribed of old to evil magic. It might thus
haunt the walls of a human habitation with spectral revivals of all
guilty thoughts and guilty deeds once conceived and done within those
walls; all, in short, with which the evil will claims _rapport_ and
affinity—imperfect, incoherent, fragmentary snatches at the old dramas
acted therein years ago.
“Thoughts thus crossing each other haphazard, as in the nightmare of a
vision, growing up into fantom sights and sounds, and all serving to
create horror; not because those sights and sounds are really
visitations from a world without, but that they are ghastly, monstrous
renewals of what have been in this world itself, set into malignant play
by a malignant mortal. And it is through the material agency of that
human brain that these things would acquire even a human power; would
strike as with the shock of electricity, and might kill, if the thought
of the person assailed did not rise superior to the dignity of the
original assailer; might kill the most powerful animal, if unnerved by
fear, but not injure the feeblest man, if, while his flesh crept, his
mind stood out fearless.
“Thus when in old stories we read of a magician rent to pieces by the
fiends he had invoked, or still more, in Eastern legends, that one
magician succeeds by arts in destroying another, there may be so far
truth, that a material being has clothed, from his own evil
propensities, certain elements and fluids, usually quiescent or
harmless, with awful shapes and terrific force; just as the lightning,
that had lain hidden and innocent in the cloud, becomes by natural law
suddenly visible, takes a distinct shape to the eye, and can strike
destruction on the object to which it is attracted.”
“You are not without glimpses of a mighty secret,” said Mr. Richards,
composedly. “According to your view, could a mortal obtain the power you
speak of, he would necessarily be a malignant and evil being.”
“If the power were exercised, as I have said, most malignant and most
evil; though I believe in the ancient traditions that he could not
injure the good. His will could only injure those with whom it has
established an affinity, or over whom it forces unresisted sway. I will
now imagine an example that may be within the laws of nature, yet seem
wild as the fables of a bewildered monk.
“You will remember that Albertus Magnus, after describing minutely the
process by which the spirits may be invoked and commanded, adds
emphatically that the process will instruct and avail only to the few;
that _a man must be born a magician_!—that is, born with a peculiar
physical temperament, as a man is born a poet.
Rarely are men in whose constitutions lurks this occult power of the
highest order of intellect; usually in the intellect there is some
twist, perversity, or disease. But, on the other hand, they must
possess, to an astonishing degree, the faculty to concentrate thought on
a single object—the energic faculty that we call WILL. Therefore, though
their intellect be not sound, it is exceedingly forcible for the
attainment of what it desires. I will imagine such a person,
preeminently gifted with this constitution and its concomitant forces. I
will place him in the loftier grades of society.
“I will suppose his desires emphatically those of the sensualist; he
has, therefore, a strong love of life. He is an absolute egotist; his
will is concentered in himself; he has fierce passions; he knows no
enduring, no holy affections, but he can covet eagerly what for the
moment he desires; he can hate implacably what opposes itself to his
objects; he can commit fearful crimes, yet feel small remorse; he
resorts rather to curses upon others than to penitence for his misdeeds.
Circumstances, to which his constitution guides him, lead him to a rare
knowledge of the natural secrets which may serve his egotism. He is a
close observer where his passions encourage observation; he is a minute
calculator, not from love of truth, but where love of self sharpens his
faculties; therefore he can be a man of science.
“I suppose such a being, having by experience learned the power of his
arts over others, trying what may be the power of will over his own
frame, and studying all that in natural philosophy may increase that
power. He loves life, he dreads death; _he wills to live on_. He cannot
restore himself to youth; he cannot entirely stay the progress of death;
he cannot make himself immortal in the flesh and blood. But he may
arrest, for a time so long as to appear incredible if I said it, that
hardening of the parts which constitutes old age.
“A year may age him no more than an hour ages another. His intense will,
scientifically trained into system, operates, in short, over the wear
and tear of his own frame. He lives on. That he may not seem a portent
and a miracle, he _dies_, from time to time, seemingly, to certain
persons. Having schemed the transfer of a wealth that suffices to his
wants, he disappears from one corner of the world, and contrives that
his obsequies shall be celebrated.
“He reappears at another corner of the world, where he resides
undetected, and does not visit the scenes of his former career till all
who could remember his features are no more. He would be profoundly
miserable if he had affections; he has none but for himself. No good man
would accept his longevity; and to no man, good or bad, would he or
could he communicate its true secret.
“Such a man might exist; such a man as I have described I see now before
me—Duke of ——, in the court of ——, dividing time between lust and brawl,
alchemists and wizards; again, in the last century, charlatan and
criminal, with name less noble, domiciled in the house at which you
gazed to-day, and flying from the law you had outraged, none knew
whither; traveler once more revisiting London with the same earthly
passion which filled your heart when races now no more walked through
yonder streets; outlaw from the school of all the nobler and diviner
mysteries. Execrable image of life in death and death in life, I warn
you back from the cities and homes of healthful men! back to the ruins
of departed empires! back to the deserts of nature unredeemed!”
There answered me a whisper so musical, so potently musical, that it
seemed to enter into my whole being and subdue me despite myself. Thus
it said:
“I have sought one like you for the last hundred years. Now I have found
you, we part not till I know what I desire. The vision that sees through
the past and cleaves through the veil of the future is in you at this
hour—never before, never to come again. The vision of no puling,
fantastic girl, of no sick-bed somnambule, but of a strong man with a
vigorous brain. Soar, and look forth!”
As he spoke, I felt as if I rose out of myself upon eagle wings. All the
weight seemed gone from air, roofless the room, roofless the dome of
space. I was not in the body—where, I knew not; but aloft over time,
over earth.
Again I heard the melodious whisper:
“You say right. I have mastered great secrets by the power of will.
True, by will and by science I can retard the process of years, but
death comes not by age alone. Can I frustrate the accidents which bring
death upon the young?”
“No; every accident is a providence. Before a providence snaps every
human will.”
“Shall I die at last, ages and ages hence, by the slow though inevitable
growth of time, or by the cause that I call accident?”
“By a cause you call accident.”
“Is not the end still remote?” asked the whisper, with a slight tremor.
“Regarded as my life regards time, it is still remote.”
“And shall I, before then, mix with the world of men as I did ere I
learned these secrets; resume eager interest in their strife and their
trouble; battle with ambition, and use the power of the sage to win the
power that belongs to kings?”
“You will yet play a part on the earth that will fill earth with
commotion and amaze. For wondrous designs have you, a wonder yourself,
been permitted to live on through the centuries. All the secrets you
have stored will then have their uses; all that now makes you a stranger
amid the generations will contribute then to make you their lord. As the
trees and the straws are drawn into a whirlpool, as they spin round, are
sucked to the deep, and again tossed aloft by the eddies, so shall races
and thrones be drawn into your vortex. Awful destroyer! but in
destroying, made, against your own will, a constructor.”
“And that date, too, is far off?”
“Far off; when it comes, think your end in this world is at hand!”
“How and what is the end? Look east, west, south, and north.”
“In the north, where you never yet trod, toward the point whence your
instincts have warned you, there a specter will seize you. ’Tis Death! I
see a ship; it is haunted; ’tis chased! it sails on. Baffled navies sail
after that ship. It enters the region of ice. It passes a sky red with
meteors. Two moons stand on high, over ice-reefs. I see the ship locked
between white defiles; they are ice-rocks. I see the dead strew the
decks, stark and livid, green mold on their limbs. All are dead but one
man—it is you! But years, though so slowly they come, have then scathed
you. There is the coming of age on your brow, and the will is relaxed in
the cells of the brain. Still that will, though enfeebled, exceeds all
that man knew before you; through the will you live on, gnawed with
famine. And nature no longer obeys you in that death-spreading region;
the sky is a sky of iron, and the air has iron clamps, and the ice-rocks
wedge in the ship. Hark how it cracks and groans! Ice will imbed it as
amber imbeds a straw. And a man has gone forth, living yet, from the
ship and its dead; and he has clambered up the spikes of an iceberg, and
the two moons gaze down on his form. That man is yourself, and terror is
on you—terror; and terror has swallowed up your will.
“And I see, swarming up the steep ice-rock, gray, grizzly things. The
bears of the North have scented their quarry; they come nearer and
nearer, shambling, and rolling their bulk. In that day every moment
shall seem to you longer than the centuries through which you have
passed. Heed this: after life, moments continued make the bliss or the
hell of eternity.”
“Hush!” said the whisper. “But the day, you assure me, is far off, very
far! I go back to the almond and rose of Damascus! Sleep!”
The room swam before my eyes. I became insensible. When I recovered, I
found G—— holding my hand and smiling. He said, “You, who have always
declared yourself proof against mesmerism, have succumbed at last to my
friend Richards.”
“Where is Mr. Richards?”
“Gone, when you passed into a trance, saying quietly to me, ‘Your friend
will not wake for an hour.’”