_reading_ of them gave me very little trouble. But I was convinced that
behind their meaning thus read lay some deep esoteric significance; and
this, almost to the last, I was utterly unable to fathom. You perceive
that these border figures consist of waved lines of two different
lengths, drawings of snakes, triangles looking like the Greek delta,
and a heart-shaped object with a dot following it. These succeed one
another in a certain definite order on all the slips. What, I asked
myself, were these drawings meant to represent,--letters, numbers,
things, or abstractions? This I was the more readily able to determine
because I have often, in thinking over the shape of the Roman letter S,
wondered whether it did not owe its convolute form to an attempt on the
part of its inventor to make a picture of the _serpent;_ S being the
sibilant or hissing letter, and the serpent the hissing animal. This
view, I fancy (though I am not sure), has escaped the philologists, but
of course you know that all letters were originally _pictures of
things,_ and of what was S a picture, if not of the serpent? I
therefore assumed, by way of trial, that the snakes in the diagram
stood for a sibilant letter, that is, either C or S. And thence,
supposing this to be the case, I deduced: firstly, that all the other
figures stood for letters; and secondly, that they all appeared in the
form of pictures of the things of which those letters were originally
meant to be pictures. Thus the letter "m," one of the four "_liquid_"
consonants, is, as we now write it, only a shortened form of a waved
line; and as a waved line it was originally written, and was the
character by which _a stream of running water_ was represented in
writing; indeed it only owes its name to the fact that when the lips
are pressed together, and "m" uttered by a continuous effort, a certain
resemblance to the murmur of running water is produced. The longer
waved line in the diagram I therefore took to represent "m"; and it at
once followed that the shorter meant "n," for no two letters of the
commoner European alphabets differ only in length (as distinct from
shape) except "m" and "n", and "w" and "v"; indeed, just as the French
call "w" "double-ve," so very properly might "m" be called "double-en."
But, in this case, the longer not being "w," the shorter could not be
"v": it was therefore "n." And now there only remained the heart and
the triangle. I was unable to think of any letter that could ever have
been intended for the picture of a heart, but the triangle I knew to be
the letter #A.# This was originally written without the cross-bar from
prop to prop, and the two feet at the bottom of the props were not
separated as now, but joined; so that the letter formed a true
triangle. It was meant by the primitive man to be a picture of his
primitive house, this house being, of course, hut-shaped, and
consisting of a conical roof without walls. I had thus, with the
exception of the heart, disentangled the whole, which then (leaving a
space for the heart) read as follows:
{ ss
'mn { anan ... san.'
{ cc
But 'c' before 'a' being never a sibilant (except in some few so-called
'Romance' languages), but a guttural, it was for the moment discarded;
also as no word begins with the letters 'mn'--except 'mnemonics' and
its fellows--I concluded that a vowel must be omitted between these
letters, and thence that all vowels (except 'a') were omitted; again,
as the double 's' can never come after 'n' I saw that either a vowel
was omitted between the two 's's,' or that the first word ended after
the first 's.' Thus I got
'm ns sanan... san,'
or, supplying the now quite obvious vowels,
'mens sana in... sano.'
The heart I now knew represented the word 'corpore,' the Latin word for
'heart' being 'cor,' and the dot--showing that the word as it stood was
an abbreviation--conclusively proved every one of my deductions.
'So far all had gone flowingly. It was only when I came to consider the
central figures that for many days I spent my strength in vain. You
heard my exclamation of delight and astonishment when at last a ray of
light pierced the gloom. At no time, indeed, was I wholly in the dark
as to the _general_ significance of these figures, for I saw at once
their resemblance to the sepulchral reliefs of classical times. In case
you are not minutely acquainted with the _technique_ of these stones, I
may as well show you one, which I myself removed from an old grave in
Tarentum.'
He took from a niche a small piece of close-grained marble, about a
foot square, and laid it before me. On one side it was exquisitely
sculptured in relief.
'This,' he continued, 'is a typical example of the Greek grave-stone,
and having seen one specimen you may be said to have seen almost all,
for there is surprisingly little variety in the class. You will observe
that the scene represents a man reclining on a couch; in his hand he
holds a _patera,_ or dish, filled with grapes and pomegranates, and
beside him is a tripod bearing the viands from which he is banqueting.
At his feet sits a woman--for the Greek lady never reclined at table.
In addition to these two figures a horse's head, a dog, or a serpent
may sometimes be seen; and these forms comprise the almost invariable
pattern of all grave reliefs. Now, that this was the real model from
which the figures on the papyrus were taken I could not doubt, when I
considered the seemingly absurd fidelity with which in each murder the
papyrus, smeared with honey, was placed under the tongue of the victim.
I said to myself: it can only be that the assassins have bound
themselves to the observance of a strict and narrow ritual from which
no departure is under any circumstances permitted--perhaps for the sake
of signalling the course of events to others at a distance. But what
ritual? That question I was able to answer when I knew the answer to
these others,--why _under the tongue,_ and why _smeared with honey?_
For no reason, except that the Greeks (not the Romans till very late in
their history) always placed an _obolos,_ or penny, beneath the tongue
of the dead to pay his passage across the Stygian river of ghosts; for
no reason, except that to these same Greeks honey was a sacred fluid,
intimately associated in their minds with the mournful subject of
Death; a fluid with which the bodies of the deceased were anointed, and
sometimes--especially in Sparta and the Pelasgic South--embalmed; with
which libations were poured to Hermes Psuchopompos, conductor of the
dead to the regions of shade; with which offerings were made to all the
chthonic deities, and the souls of the departed in general. You
remember, for instance, the melancholy words of Helen addressed to
Hermione in _Orestes:_
[Greek: _Kai labe choas tasd'en cheroin komas t'emas
elthousa d'amphi ton Klutaimnaestras taphon
melikrat'aphes galaktos oinopon t'achnaen._]
And so everywhere. The ritual then of the murderers was a _Greek_
ritual, their cult a Greek cult--preferably, perhaps, a South Greek
one, a Spartan one, for it was here that the highly conservative
peoples of that region clung longest and fondliest to this
semi-barbarous worship. This then being so, I was made all the more
certain of my conjecture that the central figures on the papyrus were
drawn from a Greek model.
'Here, however, I came to a standstill. I was infinitely puzzled by the
rod in the man's hand. In none of the Greek grave-reliefs does any such
thing as a rod make an appearance, except in one well-known example
where the god Hermes--generally represented as carrying the _caduceus_,
or staff, given him by Phoebus--appears leading a dead maiden to the
land of night. But in every other example of which I am aware the
sculpture represents a man _living_, not dead, banqueting _on earth_,
not in Hades, by the side of his living companion. What then could be
the significance of the staff in the hand of this living man? It was
only after days of the hardest struggle, the cruellest suspense, that
the thought flashed on me that the idea of Hermes leading away the dead
female might, in this case, have been carried one step farther; that
the male figure might be no living man, no man at all, but _Hermes
himself_ actually banqueting in Hades with the soul of his disembodied
_protégée_! The thought filled me with a rapture I cannot describe, and
you witnessed my excitement. But, at all events, I saw that this was a
truly tremendous departure from Greek art and thought, to which in
general the copyists seemed to cling so religiously. There must
therefore be a reason, a strong reason, for vandalism such as this. And
that, at any rate, it was no longer difficult to discover; for now I
knew that the male figure was no mortal, but a god, a spirit, a DAEMON
(in the Greek sense of the word); and the female figure I saw by the
marked shortness of her drapery to be no Athenian, but a Spartan; no
matron either, but a maiden, a lass, a LASSIE; and now I had forced on
me lassie daemon, _Lacedaemon._
'This then was the badge, the so carefully-buried badge, of this
society of men. The only thing which still puzzled and confounded me at
this stage was the startling circumstance that a _Greek_ society should
make use of a _Latin_ motto. It was clear that either all my
conclusions were totally wrong, or else the motto _mens sana in corpore
sano_ contained wrapped up in itself some acroamatic meaning which I
found myself unable to penetrate, and which the authors had found no
Greek motto capable of conveying. But at any rate, having found this
much, my knowledge led me of itself one step further; for I perceived
that, widely extended as were their operations, the society was
necessarily in the main an _English,_ or at least an English-speaking
one--for of this the word "lassie" was plainly indicative: it was easy
now to conjecture London, the monster-city in which all things lose
themselves, as their head-quarters; and at this point in my
investigations I despatched to the papers the advertisement you have
seen.'
'But,' I exclaimed, 'even now I utterly fail to see by what mysterious
processes of thought you arrived at the wording of the advertisement;
even now it conveys no meaning to my mind.'
'That,' he replied,' will grow clear when we come to a right
understanding of the baleful _motive_ which inspired these men. I have
already said that I was not long in discovering it. There was only one
possible method of doing so--and that was, by all means, by any means,
to find out some condition or other common to every one of the victims
before death. It is true that I was unable to do this in some few
cases, but where I failed, I was convinced that my failure was due to
the insufficiency of the evidence at my disposal, rather than to the
actual absence of the condition. Now, let us take almost any two cases
you will, and seek for this common condition: let us take, for example,
the first two that attracted the attention of the world--the poor woman
of the slums of Berlin, and the celebrated man of science. Separated by
as wide an interval as they are, we shall yet find, if we look closely,
in each case the same pathetic tokens of the still uneliminated
_striae_ of our poor humanity. The woman is not an old woman, for she
has a "small young" family, which, had she lived, might have been
increased: notwithstanding which, she has suffered from hemiplegia,
"partial paralysis." The professor, too, has had not one, but two,
large families, and an "army of grand-children": but note well the
startling, the hideous fact, that _every one of his children is dead!_
The crude grave has gaped before the cock to suck in _every one_ of
those shrunk forms, so indigent of vital impulse, so pauper of civism,
lust, so draughty, so vague, so lean--but not before they have had time
to dower with the ah and wo of their infirmity a whole wretched "army
of grand-children." And yet this man of wisdom is on the point, in his
old age, of marrying once again, of producing for the good of his race
still more of this poor human stuff. You see the lurid significance,
the point of resemblance,--you see it? And, O heaven, is it not too
sad? For me, I tell you, the whole business has a tragic pitifulness
too deep for words. But this brings me to the discussion of a large
matter. It would, for instance, be interesting to me to hear what you,
a modern European, saturated with all the notions of your little day,
what _you_ consider the supreme, the all-important question for the
nations of Europe at this moment. Am I far wrong in assuming that you
would rattle off half a dozen of the moot points agitating rival
factions in your own land, select one of them, and call that "the
question of the hour"? I wish I could see as you see; I wish to God I
did not see deeper. In order to lead you to my point, what, let me ask
you, what _precisely_ was it that ruined the old nations--that brought,
say Rome, to her knees at last? Centralisation, you say, top-heavy
imperialism, dilettante pessimism, the love of luxury. At bottom,
believe me, it was not one of these high-sounding things--it was simply
War; the sum total of the battles of centuries. But let me explain
myself: this is a novel view to you, and you are perhaps unable to
conceive how or why war was so fatal to the old world, because you see
how little harmful it is to the new. If you collected in a promiscuous
way a few millions of modern Englishmen and slew them all
simultaneously, what, think you, would be the effect from the point of
view of the State? The effect, I conceive, would be indefinitely small,
wonderfully transitory; there would, of course, be a momentary lacuna
in the boiling surge: yet the womb of humanity is full of sap, and
uberant; Ocean-tide, wooed of that Ilithyia whose breasts are many,
would flow on, and the void would soon be filled. But the effect would
only be thus insignificant, if, as I said, your millions were taken
promiscuously (as in the modern army), not if they were _picked_
men----in _that_ case the loss (or gain) would be excessive, and
permanent for all time. Now, the war-hosts of the ancient
commonwealths--not dependent on the mechanical contrivances of the
modern army--were necessarily composed of the very best men: the
strong-boned, the heart-stout, the sound in wind and limb. Under these
conditions the State shuddered through all her frame, thrilled adown
every filament, at the death of a single one of her sons in the field.
As only the feeble, the aged, bided at home, their number after each
battle became larger _in proportion to the whole_ than before. Thus the
nation, more and more, with ever-increasing rapidity, declined in
bodily, and of course spiritual, quality, until the _end_ was reached,
and Nature swallowed up the weaklings whole; and thus war, which to the
modern state is at worst the blockhead and indecent _affaires
d'honneur_ of persons in office--and which, surely, before you and I
die will cease altogether--was to the ancient a genuine and
remorselessly fatal scourge.