I do not know why it should have happened so, but it did happen that
after my interview with Nansen I felt gloomy in my soul, and hence
naturally sought congenial company. My first inclination was to run down
to Greece and take luncheon with King George, but when I came to look
over my languages, the only bit of Greek I could speak fluently turned
out to be hoi polloi, and from private advices I gather that that is the
only bit of Greek that his honor the King has no use for. Therefore I
bought a ticket straight through to Gloomster Abbey, Isle of Man--the
residence of Hall Caine.
Appropriately enough, it was midnight when I arrived. It was a
moonlight night, but there were a dozen clouds on the horizon and
directly in the wake of the moon's rays, so that all was dark. From the
abbey itself no single ray of light gleamed, and all was still, save the
croaking of the tree-toads in the moat, and the crickets on the roof of
the parapet.
Any one else would have been chilled to the marrow; but I, having
visited Nansen, had to use a fan to overcome the extreme cordiality of
the scene. With the thermometer at 32 deg. I nearly swooned with the heat.
[Illustration: "'IS THIS GLOOMSTER ABBEY?' I ASKED"]
"Is this Gloomster Abbey?" I asked of my hackman.
"Yes," said he; "and, for Humanity's sake, pay your fare and let me go.
I am the father of seven orphans, and the husband of their widowed
mother. If I stay here ten minutes I'll die, and my wife will marry
again, Heaven help her!"
I paid him L6 10_s_. 6_d_. and let him go. He was nothing to me, but his
family had my sympathy.
Then I knocked on the portcullis with all my might, and was gratified to
find that, like a well-regulated portcullis, it fell, and with a loud
noise withal.
An intense silence intervened, and then out of the blackness of the blue
above me there came a voice with a reddish tinge to it.
"Who's there?" said the voice. "If you are a burglar, come in and rob.
If you are a friend, wait a minute. If you are an interviewer from an
American Sunday newspaper, accept my apologies for keeping you waiting,
turn the knob, and walk in. I'll be down as soon as I can get there."
It was Hall Caine himself who spoke.
I turned the knob and walked in. All was still, dark, and cold, but I
did not mind, for it fitted into my mood exactly.
[Illustrated: HE APPEARED!]
In the darkness of the corridor within I barked what if I were a man I
should call my shins. As it happened, being a woman, I merely bruised my
ankles, when he appeared--Hall Caine himself. There was no gas-light,
no electric light. Nothing but the blackness of the night, and _He
Appeared_! I suppose it was all due to the fact that he is a brilliant
man, who would shine anywhere. However it may have been, I suddenly
became conscious of a being that walked towards me as plainly
discernible as an ocean steamship at sea at night, with every electric
light burning in the saloon, and the red and green lanterns on the
starboard and port sides of its bow.
"Mr. Caine?" said I, addressing his starboard side.
"That's I," said he, grammatically and with dignity. A man less great
would have said "That's me," which is why in the darkness I knew it was
Mr. Caine and not his hired man I was speaking to--or with, as your
style may require.
"Mr. Caine," said I, not without nervousness, "I have come--"
"So I perceive," said he; and then an inspiration came to me.
"--to lay my gloom at your feet," I said, with apparent meekness. "It
is all I have, but such as it is you are welcome to it. Some people
would have brought you rich gifts in gold and silver; some would have
come with compliments and requests for your autograph; I bring you only
a morbid heart bursting with gloom. Will you take it?"
"I appreciate the courtesy, madame," replied the great man, wiping a
tear from the end of his nose, which twinkled like a silver star in the
blackness of the corridor, "but I cannot accept your offering. I have
more gloom on hand than I know what to do with. I am, however, deeply
touched, and beg to offer you the hospitality of the moat, unless you
have further business with me at my regular rates."
A dreadful, blood-curdling wail, like that of a soul in torment,
interrupted my answer. It seemed to come from the very centre of the
earth directly beneath my feet. I was frozen with horror, and my host,
with a muttered imprecation, turned and ran off.
"I haven't time to see you now," he cried, as he disappeared down the
steps of a yawning hole at the far end of the corridor. "I can't afford
to miss the experiment for anything so small and cheap as a morbid heart
bursting with gloom."
I followed closely after, although he had not granted permission. I
didn't feel that I could afford to miss the experiment either, and ere
he had time to slam to the door of the dungeon which we ultimately
reached, I was inside his workshop.
If it was chill without, it was deadly within, save that the darkness
was not so intense, red lights burning dimly in each of the four corners
of the dungeon. The walls were covered with a green trickling ooze from
the moat, and under foot the ground was dank and almost mushy.
[Illustration: IN THE WORKSHOP]
In the very centre of the place was a huge rack, a relic of some by-gone
age of torture, and stretched at full length upon it was a man of, I
should say, about forty years of age. Two flunkies in livery--red plush
trousers and powdered wigs--now and then turned the screw, and with
each turn horrid shrieks would come from the victim, mingled with
alternate prayers and curses.
"What on earth is the meaning of this?" I cried, in horror.
"It means, madame," replied the famous author, calmly, "that I never
fake. All my situations, all my passages descriptive of human emotions
and sufferings, are drawn from life, and not from the imagination."
"You work from living models?" I gasped. "Why would not a lay figure do
as well for torture?"
"Because lay-figures do not shriek and pray and curse. I am surprised
that you should be so dull. James, turn the thumb-screw three times;
and, Grimmins, take your cricket-bat and give the patient a bastinado on
his right foot."
"It is a pitiless shame!" I cried.
"It is in the interest of art, madame," said the novelist, shrugging his
shoulders. "Just as our surgeons have to vivisect for the advancement
of science, so must I conduct experiments here in the interest of
letters. My new novel has a stirring episode in it based upon the
capture and torture of a newspaper correspondent in Thibet. I might, I
suppose, have imagined the whole thing, but this so far surpasses the
imagination that I am convinced it is the better way of getting my
color."
"There isn't any doubt about that," said I; "but consider this man here,
whose limbs you are stretching beyond all endurance--"
"He should regard it as a splendid sacrifice," vouchsafed the novelist,
lighting a cigarette and winking pleasantly at his victim.
"Is his a voluntary sacrifice?" I demanded.
"Rather good joke that, eh, Rogers?" laughed Mr. Caine, addressing the
sufferer. "This simple-minded little American girl asks if you are there
because you like it. Ha! ha! What a droll idea! Thinks you do this for
pleasure, Rogers. Has an idea you tied yourself on there and racked
yourself at first, so she has. Thinks you shriek so as to smother your
laughter, which would be very inappropriate to the occasion."
The sufferer groaned deeply, and the novelist, turning to me, observed:
"No, madame. My poor unhappy friend Rogers is here against his will, I
regret to say. It would be far pleasanter for me when I hear him
bastinadoed to know that he derived a certain amount of personal
satisfaction from it in spite of the pain, but it must be otherwise.
Furthermore, in the story the newspaper man who is tortured is not
supposed to like it, so that accuracy requires that I should have a man,
like Rogers, who dislikes it intensely."
"And do you mean to say, sir, that you deliberately went out into the
street and seized hold of this poor fellow, carried him in here, and
subjected him to all this? Why, it's a crime!"
"Not at all," replied Mr. Caine, nonchalantly. "I am no common
kidnapper. I do not belong to a literary press-gang. I have simply
exercised my rights as the owner of this castle. This man came here on
his own responsibility, just as you have come. I never asked him any
more than I asked you, and he has had to take the consequences, just as
you will have to abide by whatever may result from your temerity. Rogers
is a newspaper man, and he tried to get a free interview out of me by
deceit, knowing that I no longer do a gratis business. It so happened
that I was at that moment in need of just such a person for my
experiment. I gave him the interview, and now he is paying for it."
The novelist paused, and after eying me somewhat closely for a moment,
turned to his notes, lying on his desk alongside the rack, while a
tremor of fear passed over me.
"Curious coincidence," he remarked, looking up from an abstract of his
story. "In my very next chapter I take up the sufferings in captivity
of a young and beautiful American girl who is languishing and starving
in a loathsome cell, full of reptiles and poisonous beasts, like Gila
monsters and centipedes. She is to be just your height and coloring and
age."