were arranged according to prices. At the high table, roped and guarded
by attendants, some of the great intellects of Europe played baccarat
for huge stakes--thousands and tens of thousands of francs. The shoe
of cards was passing. There was an English Marchioness looking like
the last rose of last summer as the French bank-notes dropped like
faded pink petals from her fingers. There was a gorgeously-dressed
pickpocket, who still spied sentimentally for international service
and patriotically relieved stray Englishmen of their francs. There was
an exiled King playing for his hotel bill. There was a Bond Street
jeweller fleecing the clients he overcharged at home. There was a green
Egyptian Prince trying furtively to pick up a little cash with one
hand and royal honours with the other. He was financed by an American
Lady who liked sharing in the pseudo-curtsies he extracted from the
gullible. There was a transatlantic widow in hooded black, whose face
of suppressed fury when she lost money made the humanitarian glad that
there were no husbands left to her reproach. And there was a beautiful
Italian Countess, whose favours inclined to the most substantial
winner at the tables. She at least must have had a human heart. But
it takes women with hearts and men with intellect to play baccarat.
One felt sorry that the love and council-chambers of the world were
even temporarily deprived of so much. The shoe of cards was passing,
and the notes were passing into the maw of the Casino, the little
insatiable slit, which takes a tithe on all gains and on all losses. I
was fascinated watching the croupiers, men like dead, dissected fish,
whisk the cards and bank-notes about with their long, thin shovels of
pearwood, which moved as quickly as the dorsal fins of sharks basking
on a sea of green baize. And the evening was passing into night, and
night into dawn.
Martha continued to explain her Gospel of Rhythm. Luck at the tables
was rhythm, she said, and when one was out of luck, it meant that one
was simply out of tune or accord with some subtlety of rhythm. My
escape from the doomed train had been due to some rhythm into which I
had strayed with the receptive note uppermost. Luck and rhythm were
the same things. Then she asked me what I had been thinking of when I
came to the Gare de Lyon. And I suddenly remembered the murder that
always crossed my mind there and there only. I told her the story of
the murder that my aunt had once seen, and had passed so vividly into
my mind. “Exactly,” said Martha. “That accounts for it all. You must
have seen the wife trying to warn her lover that her husband was on his
tracks, and the astral reflection of her agony to get him to change
trains was projected into your mind rhythmically.”
It sounded a good solution. I could imagine it all: the secret visit
and departure; the discovery by the husband of the hour of the lover’s
train; his pursuit with a revolver, while the agonised wife made an
equally desperate attempt to warn the other first; her failure to
warn her lover; the husband’s successful search and then the drama of
blood. I suppose I had put myself into the mood to see her unhappy and
disembodied soul, which is for ever doomed to scour that platform on
a vain quest. Her words had accorded miraculously with my fate. Luck
and rhythm, then, were the same. And that’s my Story, though I have
not kept the rules of short story telling. What I have written down is
true in the essentials. If you want to know how true it is exactly, ask
Martha MacArthur!
THE NECROPHILE
The most extraordinary story I ever heard in my life came from the
mouth of a priest. It came quite unsought, for I was making a silent
retreat in a Carthusian monastery. It was likewise unexpected, for
I had gone to rest, not to rack, my mind. The rule of Saint Bruno
enforces a cessation of sound. And the Great Silence from vespers to
midday had rolled over the wearied souls in the guest house twice:
silence unbroken save by the solemn and rugged chant of the monks; real
chant and real monks. The surreptitious aid of organ pipes was unknown
in the Carthusian service. The roaring and wheezing of compressed air
through leaden guts and wooden tripery, however harmonious and tuneful,
had never been thought necessary in the Carthusian scheme for bringing
Multiplicity back to Unity, Created to their Creator and contemplatives
into that glowing orb of essential Contemplation which is God.
Supremely and serenely God contemplates, and the holy contemplatives on
earth enter His thoughts and His contemplation. And they contemplate
Him in return. If it were not so, how else could they endure that
appalling life of solitude, mewed in little prisons, toiling in lonely
workshops and solitary gardens, or, after rising to chant the sublime
office at midnight, returning to snatch a few hours of slumber, before
dawn recalls them to the choir and the Carthusian Mass. For, steeped
in the thirteenth century, they keep the ceremonies and liturgy of
their religion before it was demediævalised and emasculated by the
Renaissance. So delightfully do the Carthusians remain in their own
century that they still prostrate themselves flat at the Confiteor, and
wear stockings cut out of two pieces of linen and spliced together!
Knitting-needles would be heresy, and a sewing-machine modernism! It is
so throughout their rules and customs, which leave them with the proud
boast shared by no other Order. Never reformed because never deformed.
_Numquam reformata quia numquam deformata!_
We were a little wearied, for we had been listening to the great Office
of Matins chanted from midnight until two in the morning. Ensconced in
the hanging gallery, buried behind the huge printed prayer books of the
Carthusian rite, we had sat, letting the rival delights of slumber and
plain-chant dispute for our senses. At times it was like being carried
out to sea upon successive waves that choked one’s ear-drums. At
another time one felt sinking, sinking into the dull, matted vibrations
that eternally reach the ocean depths from above. Then the sound had
died down, and each holy father, wearing the ghostly white shroud in
which he will one day be buried, picked up his lantern and made his
way back through unending cloister to the cell in which he circumvents
death with pious irony. Death and the devil are put to considerable
mock in a Carthusian house. Death causes no alarm, no terror. All his
tricks, all his stage-effects have been put into daily practice by the
Religious. The utter loneliness that cuts off the soul from the whole
human family, the secretion behind narrow stone walls, the white
funeral clothes, the silence that forbids all the hum and humours and
humdrum of noisy, gossipy human life, reduce Death himself to parody.
And then? And then they see intellectually, that is to say they
contemplate while yet alive what the dead see to their exquisite joy or
lingering loss.
The guests were the usual habitants of monastery guest-houses. A poet,
who had failed of attaining perfect sonnet-form first on cocoa at
Oxford, and on cocaine subsequently in Paris. He was thinking, in some
despair, of joining the Holy Church. An architect successful enough in
his line, and with a rare knowledge of Gothic, but superficially and
glitteringly, for he was an atheist, and none can have real knowledge
of the Gothic grandeur without acknowledging the true religion and the
true God. God, shall we say? built the vault of Heaven, and strewed
the gargoyles of the constellations across its symmetry. Mediæval man
built the Gothic Cathedral in reply, and God saw that it was good.
God poised the planets in space to show what could be done without
actually breaking eggs, and man riposted with the flying buttress,
that marvellous hanging miracle of thrust and strain riveted into
immobility, and man showed God that he, too, could suspend stone in the
void. And again God perceived, almost to His delighted embarrassment,
that it was good.
None of us could understand how a Gothic architect could remain an
atheist. Once the Divine in man, that is to say his art, is realised,
it is only a step to the Divinity. There was also a Monsignor, an
Austrian and a mild-faced mystery. It was not until the end of the
retreat that we learnt a little of his identity. We were committed on
our honour to silence except during the hour of recreation, when we
moved round a high-walled garden, wondering desperately what things
were happening on the highway the other side--that is to say in the
world.
There were monks in the Monastery who had not seen a newspaper for
thirty years, and even happy ones to whom woman was an extinct animal.
A silent laybrother served our meals with shaven head and untrimmed
beard, looking like the shrouded figure of Time himself. After each
meal I expected him to leave a running hour glass on the table instead
of the cheese, and point toward it with bony fingers as though to
suggest that the course of our life was also finished. The strain of
silence was having its effect, and on the last day of the retreat we
became more and more communicative during the hour of recreation.
I told some very dull and uninspiring tale. I suffer from normality,
and my life is inclined to convention. The architect, while redoubling
his artistic appreciation of the Carthusian life, repeated his
atheistic ultimates toward life. He gave the rather absurd reason for
his attitude that he had been always disappointed by women. Who hasn’t,
including the Saints? I could not help retailing him a newspaper poster
I had once read in America which ran: “MAN TWICE DIVORCED REFUSES TO
BELIEVE IN GOD!” We all laughed, and the Monsignor began disclosing
his past. As we had expected, he had incurred some kind of disgrace
in his own country. He was not a fallen priest, but a Prelate on the
shelf. It was not owing to any scandal, he explained, and we believed
him, but owing to his intellectual backsliding that he had missed
his ecclesiastical career. Modernism had fired him with its bright
Will-o’-the-wisp, and he had not remained unsinged. However, he had
been permitted to retain priestly rank and dress, and to travel on his
own means. He was visiting the English cathedrals (an American rather
than a Christian form of pilgrimage) and had been so shocked by their
ghastly and sepulchral interiors that he had fled to the Carthusians
as he said to seek a little oil for his creaking soul. The actual
services he had seen had filled him with depression. As he expressed it
himself they reminded him of the facetiousness of undertakers! Better
he thought that the cathedrals had been destroyed than made ridiculous.
His was the true Catholic spirit.
He never forgot the holy office which was his, and made a serious
attempt to supplement the silent efforts of the Carthusians in
converting the architect. On our last evening of recreation we agreed
to make a concerted assault on our companion. We found that his atheism
was not based on any pose of disbelief, but on a total inability to
understand how a human body could rise formally and substantially from
the dead. “I don’t see why spirits shouldn’t survive like sheets of
luminous paint, but as for atoms rearranging their constituency in a
human body it is impossible,” he argued. “Annihilation seems far more
logical and probable, and proper after death.”
“Nevertheless,” said the Monsignor, “we believe in the resurrection
of the body from the dead.” And he proceeded to the theories of
scholastics. “You must understand that the body like the soul is
created not generated by the Creator. Creation is a more perfect and
sublimer act than generation. Soul and body are both called out of
the misty void, out of space, out of nothing, and therefore both
are capable of passing into complete abeyance again. The Creator can
uncreate and then recreate. The resurrection of the body is a form of
recreation. But He Himself will not annihilate an atom of His own work.”
The architect returned to the charge: “The atoms of a dead human
body pass into other bodies. Whose body shall they be on the Day of
Resurrection?” The reply was that Unity could bring about Multiplicity,
and just as the multiplication of the loaves was a scriptural miracle,
and the multiplication of the Host a constant occurrence in missionary
history, it was possible that atoms could be multiplied to serve their
different turns so to speak.
“Can God unmake? Can He annihilate the dust He has created?” asked
the architect. “No!” said the Monsignor, for they had settled down
to a duel, “but God is the cause of energy as the sun is of colour,
and as the sun can equally cause colour to rise or fade, so God can
cause energy and existence to come or collapse out of the atoms. That
is death! But the sun can one day recolour those identical atoms in
other leaves. The atoms can be the same, so that you really get a
resurrection of the body of the leaf. The human body can be similarly
restored.” Somehow it did not convince.
“What age will our bodies be when they rise again?” asked the
architect. “We shall be outside of Time and therefore quite ageless.
God is not a source or a sequence, but the primal power. He is the
Motor causing all motion. Our bodies are emanations from Him, and He
can cause or uncause them voluntarily.”
The conversation was only prevented from becoming quarrelsome by the
difficulty both combatants felt in wielding metaphysical terms. They
disagreed as to what atoms were, as to whether the divine power showed
itself in a materialistic manipulation of things or in a kind of cosmic
mania. The architect was at one time willing to admit the personality
of God, but only on the corollary that God was mad. It explained so
much, the crinks in the universe, the genius of man, the brilliance
of the stars, the comets tearing out of place. The madness of God was
of course a divine madness. “Yes,” said the Monsignor very solemnly.
“Bethlehem was madness, Nazareth was paranoia, and Calvary delirium.”
From the metaphysical the discussion became biological. The architect
admitted that fresh bouts of the life-spirit could reanimate dead
matter, but not the same set of atoms. Once dead, nothing could revive
a dead anatomy. Could the Monsignor record a single instance except the
legendary tale of Lazarus, who was probably in a state of coma, and
whose personal experiences by some extraordinary oversight on the part
of the Evangelists had been withheld from the human race?
The Monsignor became angry and took his challenge. “I believe it is
quite possible,” he said, “for the life-spirit to be restored to a
dead body long after physical death has occurred. I will tell you a
story for which I have the evidence. I shall make a series of positive
statements and leave it as such. The circumstances are morbid in
the extreme, but you will excuse my narration of them. I have never
breathed this story before, but I consider that I am justified if I can
at least refute your statement that the dead rise up never. I say they
do. I can give an instance which was not coma. Life can go, and life
can be reinfused.
“When I was a young priest in Vienna, before my rise to favour at
Court, I was, in addition to my parish duties, detailed for work at
the Morgue. I waited there three nights every week to receive the
unknown dead, and to give them the benefit of a religious reception.
Some of the dead were recognised, and a few were claimed. Relatives
were grateful for such Catholic rites as I could give to those, who had
generally died without Absolution or Sacrament. I loved saying Mass for
the Unknown dead lying in the Morgue, not knowing their names or their
lives. The Church is the Mother not only of the living, but also of the
dead, and her arms are strong to stretch down even into the pit. How
surprised some of these stray souls must have been to find the Church,
which they had forgotten on earth, following them with charitable hands
into the other world. I was stationed for two years at the Morgue.
“One day the police brought an unclaimed body and left it upon a
marble slab. It was that of a woman still in her beauty, and not more
than thirty years of age. I could see that she had been a woman of
pleasure, though, as is often the case, the extreme sadness of her face
counteracted the dis-sanctification of her body. Poor child! The Morgue
was seldom without one of her unclassed class. I could say Mass for
her which I could not for the suicides. The suicides the Church leaves
to God. He alone can say the Office of the Dead for those who have
destroyed the life which He gave to them, and which He alone has the
right to take.
“It happened that evening that the Commissioner of Police brought
an anonymous party apparently of relations to view the tragic human
relics in the Morgue. One of them appeared to be of rank, for the
Commissioner saluted him at every opportunity. They remained some time
in front of the woman’s body admiring the great beauty of her features
and inquiring her name. Though the records were examined, nothing
definite could be learned except that she was a courtesan, who had
had the misfortune to die during an evening party in the house of a
gentleman, who preferred to remain unnamed. His doctor had brought the
body and filled the necessary certificates, and the great gentleman,
at whose expenses she had perished, had sent a hundred kronen to
provide her funeral. It was understood that she had no family. In his
anxiety to learn her history the distinguished stranger asked for me
to be presented to him, and I found myself shaking the hand of a Duke,
connected with one of the German Royal Houses. When I was unable to
add to his information, he turned from me with wandering eyes and an
expression which to me seemed bordering on dementia. Curiously enough
he congratulated me on my good fortune in being chaplain at the Morgue,
but this I took for an excess of politeness on his part. It was not
considered a very high ecclesiastical position. He was closeted for
some time with the Commissioner and drove away.
“Later that night I was summoned to attend a dying man, who died
before I could do more than hear his confession. He was friendless,
and his body was taken to the Morgue. I followed. It was a late hour,
and I decided to finish reading my Breviary in the Secretary’s room.
While seated there, I was astonished to hear footsteps in the inner
hall, where the unclaimed dead were thrown on marble slabs. A shadow
was cast against the frosted-glass partition, and it was followed by
another. I stood involuntarily in the doorway. To my amazement it was
the Commissioner, who was again taking the Duke round the grim contents
of the room. I could not help overhearing them, and what I did not
overhear my horrified senses supplied. There are things that one has
read in books about sick souls or demented bodies, that I had never
dreamed of meeting. How can I explain?
“To forestall my story, the Duke I could realise was deeply afflicted
mentally, I do not say morally, for he was not responsible. It was
not hereditary but accidental. I learnt all this some time after. I
must explain that he had had a terrible experience at marriage. After
a passionate and romantic courtship his young wife had died of heart
failure in his arms a few hours after the ceremony. The marriage night
had become a watch night of the dead, during which he had passed a
ghastly vigil instead of enjoying an efflorescence of happiness. In
answer to his entreaties he had been left alone with the body of his
wife that night. His groans and prayers were heard until a late hour....
“The effect on the unhappy Duke was serious. His character, hitherto,
had been irreproachable, and his experiences in love matters exceeding
slight, considering the opportunities possible to his rank and fortune.
It was a stroke of incredibly bitter irony, which I should hesitate to
lay at the door of a benevolent Providence, that his marriage night
should have been of such horror. His bride was buried, but the effect
on the white tablets of his mind was lasting. To a large extent he
became a recluse, avoiding society, and more especially all the gay
world of women and wives and half-women and half-wives, who present
such an alarming phase of modern civilisation. Unfortunately his
loneliness was obsessed by one very gruesome but innocent form of
sentiment. He only fell in love with the dead, in whom he ocularly
memorised the last vision of his wife. There was no carnal wickedness
on his part, for he showed signs of a diabolical possession, that is of
not being his own possessor, and of indulging in uncanny and fantastic
wishes, which in his saner moments he would never have tolerated. His
friends proposed that he should be solemnly exorcised by the Church,
but his Confessor was nervous, and the modern Cardinal Archbishop
would never give his consent to anything so mediæval. In the Middle
Ages of course the most solemn and terrifying of rites would have
been performed, and I have no doubt that the poor Duke was actually
possessed by an unhappy demon--explain his malady how you will. He was
unable to resist this terrible instinct, this love of watching women
who were newly dead. I suppose it could be explained. The supreme
anguish and the supreme joy of his life had come to him on the same
day, and he had mingled them in the one night until agony and ecstasy,
delight and grief, life and death must have become indistinguishable.
But the result had been distressing in the extreme, and from time to
time the mad Duke emerged from gloomy solitude to satisfy his widowed
eyes. The police had orders, certainly not to facilitate his sepulchral
amours, but not to prevent him, for the doctors when consulted agreed
that if he were thwarted he would become dangerous. As it was, he was
studiously observant of the natural rights and feelings of the living,
and though when his secret agents heard of the death of a beautiful
woman they instantly visited the next of kin, he never pressed his
suit except with the most pathetic delicacy. In the cases when through
poverty or even through a curious form of snobbery (for with some folk
snobbery is stronger than reverence or death) he was permitted to see
the corpse, he always insisted on defraying the eventual expenses of
the funeral and, when the relatives allowed, of appearing at the grave
side of the object of his momentary affection. There is no human law
which forbids a man to love a corpse, provided the dead body is not
desecrated, and receives proper burial within the number of ordained
days. And the Duke was careful almost to the verge of scruple on this
point. However morbid this habit might be considered, it was overlooked
under two heads. There was the fact that the Duke’s aberration caused
no unhappiness to anyone except himself, and secondly that he suffered
the most agonising remorse and shame between each outbreak of his
singular passion for still life. The leading pathologists declared that
it was a very exceptional case.
“In any case the Duke was not interrupted in his Platonic love affairs
with Hades, though, poor man, I remember his pathetic grief, which
could be charitably construed into a madman’s ideas of being faithful
to a dead woman.