into his sanctum he broke into a perfect torrent of wild, enthusiastic
words, telling me with a kind of rapture, that he was just then
laboriously engaged in co-ordinating to one of the calculi certain new
properties he had discovered in the parabola, adding with infinite
gusto his 'firm' belief that the ancient Assyrians were acquainted with
all our modern notions respecting the parabola itself, the projection
of bodies in general, and of the heavenly bodies in particular; and
must, moreover, from certain inferences of his own in connection with
the Winged Circle, have been conversant with the fact that light is not
an ether, but only the vibration of an ether. He then galloped on to
suggest that I should at once take part with him in his investigations,
and commented on the timeliness of my visit. I, on my part, was anxious
for his opinion on other and far weightier matters than the concerns of
the Assyrians, and intimated as much to him. But for two days he was
firm in his tacit refusal to listen to my story; and, concluding that
he was disinclined to undergo the agony of unrest with which he was
always tormented by any mystery which momentarily baffled him, I was,
of course, forced to hold my peace. On the third day, however, of his
own accord he asked me to what epidemic I had referred. I then detailed
to him some of the strange events which were agitating the mind of the
outside world. From the very first he was interested: later on that
interest grew into a passion, a greedy soul-consuming quest after the
truth, the intensity of which was such at last as to move me even to
pity.
I may as well here restate the facts as I communicated them to Zaleski.
The concatenation of incidents, it will be remembered, started with the
extraordinary death of that eminent man of science, Professor
Schleschinger, consulting laryngologist to the Charité Hospital in
Berlin. The professor, a man of great age, was on the point of
contracting his third marriage with the beautiful and accomplished
daughter of the Herr Geheimrath Otto von Friedrich. The contemplated
union, which was entirely one of those _mariages de convenance_ so
common in good society, sprang out of the professor's ardent desire to
leave behind him a direct heir to his very considerable wealth. By his
first two marriages, indeed, he had had large families, and was at this
very time surrounded by quite an army of little grandchildren, from
whom (all his direct descendants being dead) he might have been content
to select his heir; but the old German prejudices in these matters are
strong, and he still hoped to be represented on his decease by a son of
his own. To this whim the charming Ottilie was marked by her parents as
the victim. The wedding, however, had been postponed owing to a slight
illness of the veteran scientist, and just as he was on the point of
final recovery from it, death intervened to prevent altogether the
execution of his design. Never did death of man create a profounder
sensation; _never was death of man followed by consequences more
terrible_. The _Residenz_ of the scientist was a stately mansion near
the University in the _Unter den Linden_ boulevard, that is to say, in
the most fashionable _Quartier_ of Berlin. His bedroom from a
considerable height looked out on a small back garden, and in this room
he had been engaged in conversation with his colleague and medical
attendant, Dr. Johann Hofmeier, to a late hour of the night. During all
this time he seemed cheerful, and spoke quite lucidly on various
topics. In particular, he exhibited to his colleague a curious strip of
what looked like ancient papyrus, on which were traced certain
grotesque and apparently meaningless figures. This, he said, he had
found some days before on the bed of a poor woman in one of the
horribly low quarters that surround Berlin, on whom he had had occasion
to make a _post-mortem_ examination. The woman had suffered from
partial paralysis. She had a small young family, none of whom, however,
could give any account of the slip, except one little girl, who
declared that she had taken it 'from her mother's mouth' after death.
The slip was soiled, and had a fragrant smell, as though it had been
smeared with honey. The professor added that all through his illness he
had been employing himself by examining these figures. He was
convinced, he said, that they contained some archaeological
significance; but, in any case, he ceased not to ask himself how came a
slip of papyrus to be found in such a situation,--on the bed of a dead
Berlinerin of the poorest class? The story of its being taken from the
_mouth_ of the woman was, of course, unbelievable. The whole incident
seemed to puzzle, while it amused him; seemed to appeal to the
instinct--so strong in him--to investigate, to probe. For days, he
declared, he had been endeavouring, in vain, to make anything of the
figures. Dr. Hofmeier, too, examined the slip, but inclined to believe
that the figures--rude and uncouth as they were--were only such as
might be drawn by any school-boy in an idle moment. They consisted
merely of a man and a woman seated on a bench, with what looked like an
ornamental border running round them. After a pleasant evening's
scientific gossip, Dr. Hofmeier, a little after midnight, took his
departure from the bed-side. An hour later the servants were roused
from sleep by one deep, raucous cry proceeding from the professor's
room. They hastened to his door; it was locked on the inside; all was
still within. No answer coming to their calls, the door was broken in.
They found their master lying calm and dead on his bed. A window of the
room was open, but there was nothing to show that any one had entered
it. Dr. Hofmeier was sent for, and was soon on the scene. After
examining the body, he failed to find anything to account for the
sudden demise of his old friend and chief. One observation, however,
had the effect of causing him to tingle with horror. On his entrance he
had noticed, lying on the side of the bed, the piece of papyrus with
which the professor had been toying in the earlier part of the day, and
had removed it. But, as he was on the point of leaving the room, he
happened to approach the corpse once more, and bending over it, noticed
that the lips and teeth were slightly parted. Drawing open the now
stiffened jaws, he found--to his amazement, to his stupefaction--that,
neatly folded beneath the dead tongue, lay just such another piece of
papyrus as that which he had removed from the bed. He drew it out--it
was clammy. He put it to his nose,--it exhaled the fragrance of honey.
He opened it,--it was covered by figures. He compared them with the
figures on the other slip,--they were just so similar as two
draughtsmen hastily copying from a common model would make them. The
doctor was unnerved: he hurried homeward, and immediately submitted the
honey on the papyrus to a rigorous chemical analysis: he suspected
poison--a subtle poison--as the means of a suicide, grotesquely,
insanely accomplished. He found the fluid to be perfectly
innocuous,--pure honey, and nothing more.
The next day Germany thrilled with the news that Professor
Schleschinger had destroyed himself. For suicide, however, some of the
papers substituted murder, though of neither was there an atom of
actual proof. On the day following, three persons died by their own
hands in Berlin, of whom two were young members of the medical
profession; on the day following that, the number rose to nineteen,
Hamburg, Dresden, and Aachen joining in the frenzied death-dance;
within three weeks from the night on which Professor Schleschinger met
his unaccountable end, eight thousand persons in Germany, France, and
Great Britain, died in that startlingly sudden and secret manner which
we call 'tragic', many of them obviously by their own hands, many, in
what seemed the servility of a fatal imitativeness, with figured,
honey-smeared slips of papyrus beneath their tongues. Even now--now,
after years--I thrill intensely to recall the dread remembrance; but to
live through it, to breathe daily the mawkish, miasmatic atmosphere,
all vapid with the suffocating death--ah, it was terror too deep,
nausea too foul, for mortal bearing. Novalis has somewhere hinted at
the possibility (or the desirability) of a simultaneous suicide and
voluntary return by the whole human family into the sweet bosom of our
ancient Father--I half expected it was coming, had come, _then_. It was
as if the old, good-easy, meek-eyed man of science, dying, had left his
effectual curse on all the world, and had thereby converted
civilisation into one omnivorous grave, one universal charnel-house. I
spent several days in reading out to Zaleski accounts of particular
deaths as they had occurred. He seemed never to tire of listening,
lying back for the most part on the silver-cushioned couch, and wearing
an inscrutable mask. Sometimes he rose and paced the carpet with
noiseless foot-fall, his steps increasing to the swaying, uneven
velocity of an animal in confinement as a passage here or there
attracted him, and then subsiding into their slow regularity again. At
any interruption in the reading, he would instantly turn to me with a
certain impatience, and implore me to proceed; and when our stock of
matter failed, he broke out into actual anger that I had not brought
more with me. Henceforth the negro, Ham, using my trap, daily took a
double journey--one before sunrise, and one at dusk--to the nearest
townlet, from which he would return loaded with newspapers. With
unimaginable eagerness did both Zaleski and I seize, morning after
morning, and evening after evening, on these budgets, to gloat for long
hours over the ever-lengthening tale of death. As for him, sleep
forsook him. He was a man of small reasonableness, scorning the
limitations of human capacity; his palate brooked no meat when his
brain was headlong in the chase; even the mild narcotics which were now
his food and drink seemed to lose something of their power to mollify,
to curb him. Often rising from slumber in what I took to be the dead of
night--though of day or night there could be small certainty in that
dim dwelling--I would peep into the domed chamber, and see him there
under the livid-green light of the censer, the leaden smoke issuing
from his lips, his eyes fixed unweariedly on a square piece of ebony
which rested on the coffin of the mummy near him. On this ebony he had
pasted side by side several woodcuts--snipped from the newspapers--of
the figures traced on the pieces of papyrus found in the mouths of the
dead. I could see, as time passed, that he was concentrating all his
powers on these figures; for the details of the deaths themselves were
all of a dreary sameness, offering few salient points for
investigation. In those cases where the suicide had left behind him
clear evidence of the means by which he had committed the act, there
was nothing to investigate; the others--rich and poor alike, peer and
peasant--trooped out by thousands on the far journey, without leaving
the faintest footprint to mark the road by which they had gone.
This was perhaps the reason that, after a time, Zaleski discarded the
newspapers, leaving their perusal to me, and turned his attention
exclusively to the ebon tablet. Knowing as I full well did the daring
and success of his past spiritual adventures,--the subtlety, the
imagination, the imperial grip of his intellect,--I did not at all
doubt that his choice was wise, and would in the end be justified.
These woodcuts--now so notorious--were all exactly similar in design,
though minutely differing here and there in drawing. The following is a
facsimile of one of them taken by me at random:
[Illustration]
The time passed. It now began to be a grief to me to see the turgid
pallor that gradually overspread the always ashen countenance of
Zaleski; I grew to consider the ravaging life that glared and blazed in
his sunken eye as too volcanic, demonic, to be canny: the mystery, I
decided at last--if mystery there were--was too deep, too dark, for
him. Hence perhaps it was, that I now absented myself more and more
from him in the adjoining room in which I slept. There one day I sat
reading over the latest list of horrors, when I heard a loud cry from
the vaulted chamber. I rushed to the door and beheld him standing,
gazing with wild eyes at the ebon tablet held straight out in front of
him.
'By Heaven!' he cried, stamping savagely with his foot. 'By Heaven!
Then I certainly _am_ a fool! _It is the staff of Phaebus in the hand
of Hermes!'_
I hastened to him. 'Tell me,' I said, 'have you discovered anything?'
'It is possible.'
'And has there really been foul play--murder--in any of these deaths?'
'Of that, at least, I was certain from the first.'
'Great God!' I exclaimed, 'could any son of man so convert himself into
a fiend, a beast of the wilderness....'
'You judge precisely in the manner of the multitude,' he answered
somewhat petulantly. 'Illegal murder is always a mistake, but not
necessarily a crime. Remember Corday. But in cases where the murder of
one is really fiendish, why is it qualitatively less fiendish than the
murder of many? On the other hand, had Brutus slain a thousand
Caesars--each act involving an additional exhibition of the sublimest
self-suppression--he might well have taken rank as a saint in heaven.'
Failing for the moment to see the drift or the connection of the
argument, I contented myself with waiting events. For the rest of that
day and the next Zaleski seemed to have dismissed the matter of the
tragedies from his mind, and entered calmly on his former studies. He
no longer consulted the news, or examined the figures on the tablet.
The papers, however, still arrived daily, and of these he soon
afterwards laid several before me, pointing, with a curious smile, to a
small paragraph in each. These all appeared in the advertisement
columns, were worded alike, and read as follows:
'A true son of Lycurgus, _having news_, desires to know the _time_ and
_place_ of the next meeting of his Phyle. Address Zaleski, at R----
Abbey, in the county of M----.'
I gazed in mute alternation at the advertisement and at him. I may here
stop to make mention of a very remarkable sensation which my
association with him occasionally produced in me. I felt it with
intense, with unpleasant, with irritating keenness at this moment. It
was the sensation of being borne aloft--aloft--by a force external to
myself--such a sensation as might possibly tingle through an earthworm
when lifted into illimitable airy heights by the strongly-daring
pinions of an eagle. It was the feeling of being hurried out beyond
one's depth--caught and whiffed away by the all-compelling sweep of
some rabid vigour into a new, foreign element. Something akin I have
experienced in an 'express' as it raged with me--winged, rocking,
ecstatic, shrilling a dragon Aha!--round a too narrow curve. It was a
sensation very far from agreeable.
'To that,' he said, pointing to the paragraph, 'we may, I think,
shortly expect an answer. Let us only hope that when it comes it may be
immediately intelligible.'
We waited throughout the whole of that day and night, hiding our
eagerness under the pretence of absorption in our books. If by chance I
fell into an uneasy doze, I found him on waking ever watchful, and
poring over the great tome before him. About the time, however, when,
could we have seen it, the first grey of dawn must have been peeping
over the land, his impatience again became painful to witness; he rose
and paced the room, muttering occasionally to himself. This only
ceased, when, hours later, Ham entered the room with an envelope in his
hand. Zaleski seized it--tore it open--ran his eye over the
contents--and dashed it to the ground with an oath.
'Curse it!' he groaned. 'Ah, curse it! unintelligible--every syllable
of it!'
I picked up the missive and examined it. It was a slip of papyrus
covered with the design now so hideously familiar, except only that the
two central figures were wanting. At the bottom was written the date of
the 15th of November--it was then the morning of the 12th--and the name
'Morris.' The whole, therefore, presented the following appearance:
[Illustration]
My eyes were now heavy with sleep, every sense half-drunken with the
vapourlike atmosphere of the room, so that, having abandoned something
of hope, I tottered willingly to my bed, and fell into a profound
slumber, which lasted till what must have been the time of the
gathering in of the shades of night. I then rose. Missing Zaleski, I
sought through all the chambers for him. He was nowhere to be seen. The
negro informed me with an affectionate and anxious tremor in the voice
that his master had left the rooms some hours before, but had said
nothing to him. I ordered the man to descend and look into the sacristy
of the small chapel wherein I had deposited my _calèche_, and in the
field behind, where my horse should be. He returned with the news that
both had disappeared. Zaleski, I then concluded, had undoubtedly
departed on a journey.
I was deeply touched by the demeanour of Ham as the hours went by. He
wandered stealthily about the rooms like a lost being. It was like
matter sighing after, weeping over, spirit. Prince Zaleski had never
before withdrawn himself from the _surveillance_ of this sturdy
watchman, and his disappearance now was like a convulsion in their
little cosmos. Ham implored me repeatedly, if I could, to throw some
light on the meaning of this catastrophe. But I too was in the dark.
The Titanic frame of the Ethiopian trembled with emotion as in broken,
childish words he told me that he felt instinctively the approach of
some great danger to the person of his master. So a day passed away,
and then another. On the next he roused me from sleep to hand me a
letter which, on opening, I found to be from Zaleski. It was hastily
scribbled in pencil, dated 'London, Nov. 14th,' and ran thus:
'For my body--should I not return by Friday night--you will, no doubt,
be good enough to make search. _Descend_ the river, keeping constantly
to the left; consult the papyrus; and stop at the _Descensus Aesopi._
Seek diligently, and you will find. For the rest, you know my fancy for
cremation: take me, if you will, to the crematorium of _Père-Lachaise._
My whole fortune I decree to Ham, the Lybian.'
Ham was all for knowing the contents of this letter, but I refused to
communicate a word of it. I was dazed, I was more than ever perplexed,
I was appalled by the frenzy of Zaleski. Friday night! It was then
Thursday morning. And I was expected to wait through the dreary
interval uncertain, agonised, inactive! I was offended with my friend;
his conduct bore the interpretation of mental distraction. The leaden
hours passed all oppressively while I sought to appease the keenness of
my unrest with the anodyne of drugged sleep. On the next morning,
however, another letter--a rather massive one--reached me. The covering
was directed in the writing of Zaleski, but on it he had scribbled the
words: 'This need not be opened unless I fail to reappear before
Saturday.' I therefore laid the packet aside unread.
I waited all through Friday, resolved that at six o'clock, if nothing
happened, I should make some sort of effort. But from six I remained,
with eyes strained towards the doorway, until ten. I was so utterly at
a loss, my ingenuity was so entirely baffled by the situation, that I
could devise no course of action which did not immediately appear
absurd. But at midnight I sprang up--no longer would I endure the
carking suspense. I seized a taper, and passed through the door-way. I
had not proceeded far, however, when my light was extinguished. Then I
remembered with a shudder that I should have to pass through the whole
vast length of the building in order to gain an exit. It was an all but
hopeless task in the profound darkness to thread my way through the
labyrinth of halls and corridors, of tumble-down stairs, of bat-haunted
vaults, of purposeless angles and involutions; but I proceeded with
something of a blind obstinacy, groping my way with arms held out
before me. In this manner I had wandered on for perhaps a quarter of an
hour, when my fingers came into distinct momentary contact with what
felt like cold and humid human flesh. I shrank back, unnerved as I
already was, with a murmur of affright.
'Zaleski?' I whispered with bated breath.
Intently as I strained my ears, I could detect no reply. The hairs of
my head, catching terror from my fancies, erected themselves.
Again I advanced, and again I became aware of the sensation of contact.
With a quick movement I passed my hand upward and downward.
It was indeed he. He was half-reclining, half-standing against a wall
of the chamber: that he was not dead, I at once knew by his uneasy
breathing. Indeed, when, having chafed his hands for some time, I tried
to rouse him, he quickly recovered himself, and muttered: 'I fainted; I
want sleep--only sleep.' I bore him back to the lighted room, assisted
by Ham in the latter part of the journey. Ham's ecstasies were
infinite; he had hardly hoped to see his master's face again. His
garments being wet and soiled, the negro divested him of them, and
dressed him in a tightly-fitting scarlet robe of Babylonish pattern,
reaching to the feet, but leaving the lower neck and forearm bare, and
girt round the stomach by a broad gold-orphreyed _ceinture_. With all
the tenderness of a woman, the man stretched his master thus arrayed on
the couch. Here he kept an Argus guard while Zaleski, in one deep
unbroken slumber of a night and a day, reposed before him. When at last
the sleeper woke, in his eye,--full of divine instinct,--flitted the
wonted falchion-flash of the whetted, two-edged intellect; the secret,
austere, self-conscious smile of triumph curved his lip; not a trace of
pain or fatigue remained. After a substantial meal on nuts, autumn
fruits, and wine of Samos, he resumed his place on the couch; and I sat
by his side to hear the story of his wandering. He said:
'We have, Shiel, had before us a very remarkable series of murders, and
a very remarkable series of suicides. Were they in any way connected?
To this extent, I think--that the mysterious, the unparalleled nature
of the murders gave rise to a morbid condition in the public mind,
which in turn resulted in the epidemic of suicide. But though such an
epidemic has its origin in the instinct of imitation so common in men,
you must not suppose that the mental process is a _conscious_ one. A
person feels an impulse to go and do, and is not aware that at bottom
it is only an impulse to go and do _likewise_. He would indeed
repudiate such an assumption. Thus one man destroys himself, and
another imitates him--but whereas the former uses a pistol, the latter
uses a rope. It is rather absurd, therefore, to imagine that in any of
those cases in which the slip of papyrus has been found in the mouth
after death, the cause of death has been the slavish imitativeness of
the suicidal mania,--for this, as I say, is never _slavish._ The
papyrus then--quite apart from the unmistakable evidences of suicide
invariably left by each self-destroyer--affords us definite and certain
means by which we can distinguish the two classes of deaths; and we are
thus able to divide the total number into two nearly equal halves.
'But you start--you are troubled--you never heard or read of murder
such as this, the simultaneous murder of thousands over wide areas of
the face of the globe; here you feel is something outside your
experience, deeper than your profoundest imaginings. To the question
"by whom committed?" and "with what motive?" your mind can conceive no
possible answer. And yet the answer must be, "by man, and for human
motives,"--for the Angel of Death with flashing eye and flaming sword
is himself long dead; and again we can say at once, by no _one_ man,
but by many, a cohort, an army of men; and again, by no _common_ men,
but by men hellish (or heavenly) in cunning, in resource, in strength
and unity of purpose; men laughing to scorn the flimsy prophylactics of
society, separated by an infinity of self-confidence and spiritual
integrity from the ordinary easily-crushed criminal of our days.
'This much at least I was able to discover from the first; and
immediately I set myself to the detection of motive by a careful study
of each case. This, too, in due time, became clear to me,--but to
motive it may perhaps be more convenient to refer later on. What next
engaged my attention was the figures on the papyrus, and devoutly did I
hope that by their solution I might be able to arrive at some more
exact knowledge of the mystery.