Short-Stories
by
Various
Part 2 out of 5
_La Mere Sauvage_, Guy de Maupassant.
_The Confession_, Guy de Maupassant.
_On the Journey_, Guy de Maupassant.
_The Beggar_, Guy de Maupassant.
_A Ghost_, Guy de Maupassant.
_Little Soldier_, Guy de Maupassant.
_The Wreck_, Guy de Maupassant.
_The Necklace_, Guy de Maupassant.
_A Note of Scarlet_, Ruth Stuart.
_Expiation_, Octave Thanet.
_Fagan_, Rowland Thomas.
_La Grande Breteche_ ("Jessup and Canby"), Honore de Balzac.
THE MAN WHO WAS[1]
_By Rudyard Kipling (1865- )_
Let it be clearly understood that the Russian is a delightful person
till he tucks his shirt in. As an Oriental he is charming. It is only
when he insists upon being treated as the most easterly of Western
peoples, instead of the most westerly of Easterns, that he becomes a
racial anomaly[2] extremely difficult to handle. The host never knows
which side of his nature is going to turn up next.
Dirkovitch was a Russian--a Russian of the Russians, as he said--who
appeared to get his bread by serving the czar as an officer in a
Cossack regiment, and corresponding for a Russian newspaper with a
name that was never twice the same. He was a handsome young Oriental,
with a taste for wandering through unexplored portions of the earth,
and he arrived in India from nowhere in particular. At least no living
man could ascertain whether it was by way of Balkh, Budukhshan,
Chitral, Beloochistan, Nepaul, or anywhere else. The Indian
government, being in an unusually affable mood, gave orders that he
was to be civilly treated, and shown everything that was to be seen;
so he drifted, talking bad English and worse French, from one city to
another till he forgathered with her Majesty's White Hussars[3] in the
city of Peshawur,[4] which stands at the mouth of that narrow
sword-cut in the hills that men call the Khyber Pass. He was
undoubtedly an officer, and he was decorated, after the manner of the
Russians, with little enameled crosses, and he could talk, and (though
this has nothing to do with his merits) he had been given up as a
hopeless task or case by the Black Tyrones[5], who, individually and
collectively, with hot whisky and honey, mulled brandy and mixed
spirits of all kinds, had striven in all hospitality to make him
drunk. And when the Black Tyrones, who are exclusively Irish, fail to
disturb the peace of head of a foreigner, that foreigner is certain to
be a superior man. This was the argument of the Black Tyrones, but
they were ever an unruly and self-opinionated regiment, and they
allowed junior subalterns of four years' service to choose their
wines. The spirits were always purchased by the colonel and a
committee of majors. And a regiment that would so behave may be
respected but cannot be loved.
The White Hussars were as conscientious in choosing their wine as in
charging the enemy. There was a brandy that had been purchased by a
cultured colonel a few years after the battle of Waterloo. It has been
maturing ever since, and it was a marvelous brandy at the purchasing.
The memory of that liquor would cause men to weep as they lay dying in
the teak forests of upper Burmah[6] or the slime of the Irrawaddy[7].
And there was a port which was notable; and there was a champagne of
an obscure brand, which always came to mess without any labels,
because the White Hussars wished none to know where the source of
supply might be found. The officer on whose head the champagne
choosing lay was forbidden the use of tobacco for six weeks previous
to sampling.
This particularity of detail is necessary to emphasize the fact that
that champagne, that port, and above all, that brandy--the green and
yellow and white liqueurs did not count--was placed at the absolute
disposition of Dirkovitch, and he enjoyed himself hugely--even more
than among the Black Tyrones.
But he remained distressingly European through it all. The White
Hussars were--"My dear true friends," "Fellow-soldiers glorious," and
"Brothers inseparable." He would unburden himself by the hour on the
glorious future that awaited the combined arms of England and Russia
when their hearts and their territories should run side by side, and
the great mission of civilizing Asia should begin. That was
unsatisfactory, because Asia is not going to be civilized after the
methods of the West. There is too much Asia, and she is too old. You
cannot reform a lady of many lovers, and Asia has been insatiable in
her flirtations aforetime. She will never attend Sunday school, or
learn to vote save with swords for tickets.
Dirkovitch knew this as well as any one else, but it suited him to
talk special-correspondently and to make himself as genial as he
could. Now and then he volunteered a little, a very little,
information about his own Sotnia[8] of Cossacks, left apparently to
look after themselves somewhere at the back of beyond. He had done
rough work in Central Asia, and had seen rather more help-yourself
fighting than most men of his years. But he was careful never to
betray his superiority, and more than careful to praise on all
occasions the appearance, drill, uniform, and organization of her
Majesty's White Hussars. And, indeed, they were a regiment to be
admired. When Mrs. Durgan, widow of the late Sir John Durgan, arrived
in their station, and after a short time had been proposed to by every
single man at mess, she put the public sentiment very neatly when she
explained that they were all so nice that unless she could marry them
all, including the colonel and some majors who were already married,
she was not going to content herself with one of them. Wherefore she
wedded a little man in a rifle regiment--being by nature
contradictious--and the White Hussars were going to wear crape on
their arms, but compromised by attending the wedding in full force,
and lining the aisle with unutterable reproach. She had jilted them
all--from Basset-Holmer, the senior captain, to Little Mildred, the
last subaltern, and he could have given her four thousand a year and a
title. He was a viscount, and on his arrival the mess had said he had
better go into the Guards, because they were all sons of large grocers
and small clothiers in the Hussars, but Mildred begged very hard to be
allowed to stay, and behaved so prettily that he was forgiven, and
became a man, which is much more important than being any sort of
viscount.
The only persons who did not share the general regard for the White
Hussars were a few thousand gentlemen of Jewish extraction who lived
across the border, and answered to the name of Pathan. They had only
met the regiment officially, and for something less than twenty
minutes, but the interview, which was complicated with many
casualties, had filled them with prejudice. They even called the White
Hussars "children of the devil," and sons of persons whom it would be
perfectly impossible to meet in decent society. Yet they were not
above making their aversion fill their money belts. The regiment
possessed carbines, beautiful Martini-Henri carbines, that would cob a
bullet into an enemy's camp at one thousand yards, and were even
handier than the long rifle. Therefore they were coveted all along the
border, and since demand inevitably breeds supply, they were supplied
at the risk of life and limb for exactly their weight in coined
silver--seven and one half pounds of rupees[9], or sixteen pounds and
a few shillings each, reckoning the rupee at par. They were stolen at
night by snaky-haired thieves that crawled on their stomachs under the
nose of the sentries; they disappeared mysteriously from armracks; and
in the hot weather, when all the doors and windows were open, they
vanished like puffs of their own smoke. The border people desired them
first for their own family vendettas[10] and then for contingencies.
But in the long cold nights of the Northern Indian winter they were
stolen most extensively. The traffic of murder was liveliest among the
hills at that season, and prices ruled high. The regimental guards
were first doubled and then trebled. A trooper does not much care if
he loses a weapon--government must make it good--but he deeply resents
the loss of his sleep. The regiment grew very angry, and one
night-thief who managed to limp away bears the visible marks of their
anger upon him to this hour. That incident stopped the burglaries for
a time, and the guards were reduced accordingly, and the regiment
devoted itself to polo with unexpected results, for it beat by two
goals to one that very terrible polo corps the Lushkar Light Horse,
though the latter had four ponies apiece for a short hour's fight, as
well as a native officer who played like a lambent flame across the
ground.
Then they gave a dinner to celebrate the event. The Lushkar team came,
and Dirkovitch came, in the fullest full uniform of Cossack officer,
which is as full as a dressing-gown, and was introduced to the
Lushkars, and opened his eyes as he regarded them. They were lighter
men than the Hussars, and they carried themselves with the swing that
is the peculiar right of the Punjab[11] frontier force and all
irregular horse. Like everything else in the service, it has to be
learned; but unlike many things, it is never forgotten, and remains on
the body till death.
The great beam-roofed mess room of the White Hussars was a sight to be
remembered. All the mess plate was on the long table--the same table
that had served up the bodies of five dead officers in a forgotten
fight long and long ago--the dingy, battered standards faced the door
of entrance, clumps of winter roses lay between the silver
candlesticks, the portraits of eminent officers deceased looked down
on their successors from between the heads of sambhur[12],
nilghai[13], maikhor, and, pride of all the mess, two grinning
snow-leopards that had cost Basset-Holmer four months' leave that he
might have spent in England instead of on the road to Thibet, and the
daily risk of his life on ledge, snowslide, and glassy grass slope.
The servants, in spotless white muslin and the crest of their
regiments on the brow of their turbans, waited behind their masters,
who were clad in the scarlet and gold of the White Hussars and the
cream and silver of the Lushkar Light Horse. Dirkovitch's dull green
uniform was the only dark spot at the board, but his big onyx eyes
made up for it. He was fraternizing effusively with the captain of the
Lushkar team, who was wondering how many of Dirkovitch's Cossacks his
own long, lathy down-countrymen could account for in a fair charge.
But one does not speak of these things openly.
The talk rose higher and higher, and the regimental band played
between the courses, as is the immemorial custom, till all tongues
ceased for a moment with the removal of the dinner slips and the First
Toast of Obligation, when the colonel, rising, said, "Mr. Vice, the
Queen," and Little Mildred from the bottom of the table answered, "The
Queen, God bless her!" and the big spurs clanked as the big men heaved
themselves up and drank the Queen, upon whose pay they were falsely
supposed to pay their mess bills. That sacrament of the mess never
grows old, and never ceases to bring a lump into the throat of the
listener wherever he be, by land or by sea. Dirkovitch rose with his
"brothers glorious," but he could not understand. No one but an
officer can understand what the toast means; and the bulk have more
sentiment than comprehension. It all comes to the same in the end, as
the enemy said when he was wriggling on a lance point. Immediately
after the little silence that follows on the ceremony there entered
the native officer who had played for the Lushkar team. He could not
of course eat with the alien, but he came in at dessert, all six feet
of him, with the blue-and-silver turban atop, and the big black
top-boots below. The mess rose joyously as he thrust forward the hilt
of his saber, in token of fealty, for the colonel of the White Hussars
to touch, and dropped into a vacant chair amid shouts of "_Rung ho_!
Hira Singh!" (which being translated means "Go in and win!"). "Did I
whack you over the knee, old man?" "Ressaidar Sahib, what the devil
made you play that kicking pig of a pony in the last ten minutes?"
"Shabash, Ressaidar Sahib!" Then the voice of the colonel, "The health
of Ressaidar Hira Singh!"
After the shouting had died away, Hira Singh rose to reply, for he was
the cadet of a royal house, the son of a king's son, and knew what was
due on these occasions. Thus he spoke in the vernacular:--
"Colonel Sahib and officers of this regiment, much honor have you done
me. This will I remember. We came down from afar to play you; but we
were beaten." ("No fault of yours, Ressaidar Sahib. Played on our own
ground, y' know. Your ponies were cramped from the railway. Don't
apologize.") "Therefore perhaps we will come again if it be so
ordained." ("Hear! Hear, hear, indeed! Bravo! Hsh!") "Then we will
play you afresh" ("Happy to meet you"), "till there are left no feet
upon our ponies. Thus far for sport." He dropped one hand on his sword
hilt and his eye wandered to Dirkovitch lolling back in his chair.
"But if by the will of God there arises any other game which is not
the polo game, then be assured, Colonel Sahib and officers, that we
shall play it out side by side, though _they_"--again his eye sought
Dirkovitch--"though _they_, I say, have fifty ponies to our one
horse." And with a deep-mouthed _Rung ho_! that rang like a musket
butt on flagstones, he sat down amid shoutings.
Dirkovitch, who had devoted himself steadily to the brandy--the
terrible brandy aforementioned--did not understand, nor did the
expurgated[14] translations offered to him at all convey the point.
Decidedly the native officer's was the speech of the evening, and the
clamor might have continued to the dawn had it not been broken by the
noise of a shot without that sent every man feeling at his defenseless
left side. It is notable that Dirkovitch "reached back," after the
American fashion--a gesture that set the captain of the Lushkar team
wondering how Cossack officers were armed at mess. Then there was a
scuffle, and a yell of pain.
"Carbine stealing again!" said the adjutant, calmly sinking back in
his chair. "This comes of reducing the guards. I hope the sentries
have killed him."
The feet of armed men pounded on the veranda flags, and it sounded as
though something was being dragged.
"Why don't they put him in the cells till the morning?" said the
colonel, testily. "See if they've damaged him, sergeant."
The mess-sergeant fled out into the darkness, and returned with two
troopers and a corporal, all very much perplexed.
"Caught a man stealin' carbines, sir," said the corporal.
"Leastways 'e was crawling toward the barricks, sir, past the
main-road sentries; an' the sentry 'e says, sir--"
The limp heap of rags upheld by the three men groaned. Never was seen
so destitute and demoralized an Afghan. He was turbanless, shoeless,
caked with dirt, and all but dead with rough handling. Hira Singh
started slightly at the sound of the man's pain. Dirkovitch took
another liqueur glass of brandy.
"_What_ does the sentry say?" said the colonel.
"Sez he speaks English, sir," said the corporal.
"So you brought him into mess instead of handing him over to the
sergeant! If he spoke all the tongues of the Pentecost you've no
business--"
Again the bundle groaned and muttered. Little Mildred had risen from
his place to inspect. He jumped back as though he had been shot.
"Perhaps it would be better, sir, to send the men away," said he to
the colonel, for he was a much-privileged subaltern. He put his arms
round the rag-bound horror as he spoke, and dropped him into a chair.
It may not have been explained that the littleness of Mildred lay in
his being six feet four, and big in proportion. The corporal, seeing
that an officer was disposed to look after the capture, and that the
colonel's eye was beginning to blaze, promptly removed himself and his
men. The mess was left alone with the carbine thief, who laid his head
on the table and wept bitterly, hopelessly, and inconsolably, as
little children weep.
Hira Singh leaped to his feet with a long-drawn vernacular oath
"Colonel Sahib," said he, "that man is no Afghan, for they weep '_Ai!
Ai_!' Nor is he of Hindustan, for they weep,'_Oh! Ho_!' He weeps after
the fashion of the white men, who say '_Ow! Ow_!'"
"Now where the dickens did you get that knowledge, Hira Singh?" said
the captain of the Lushkar team.
"Hear him!" said Hira Singh, simply, pointing at the crumpled figure
that wept as though it would never cease.
"He said, 'My God!'" said Little Mildred, "I heard him say it."
The colonel and the mess room looked at the man in silence. It is a
horrible thing to hear a man cry. A woman can sob from the top of her
palate, or her lips, or anywhere else, but a man cries from his
diaphragm, and it rends him to pieces. Also, the exhibition causes the
throat of the on-looker to close at the top.
"Poor devil!" said the colonel, coughing tremendously, "We ought to
send him to hospital. He's been manhandled."
Now the adjutant loved his rifles. They were to him as his
grandchildren--the men standing in the first place. He grunted
rebelliously: "I can understand an Afghan stealing, because he's made
that way. But I can't understand his crying. That makes it worse."
The brandy must have affected Dirkovitch, for he lay back in his chair
and stared at the ceiling. There was nothing special in the ceiling
beyond a shadow as of a huge black coffin. Owing to some peculiarity
in the construction of the mess room this shadow was always thrown
when the candles were lighted. It never disturbed the digestion of the
White Hussars. They were, in rather proud of it.
"Is he going to cry all night?" said the colonel, "or are we supposed
to sit up with Little Mildred's guest until he feels better?"
The man in the chair threw up his head and stared at the mess.
Outside, the wheels of the first of those bidden to the festivities
crunched the roadway.
"Oh, my God!" said the man in the chair, and every soul in the mess
rose to his feet. Then the Lushkar captain did a deed for which he
ought to have been given the Victoria Cross--distinguished gallantry
in a fight against overwhelming curiosity. He picked up his team with
his eyes as the hostess picks up the ladies at the opportune moment,
and pausing only by the colonel's chair to say, "This isn't _our_
affair, you know, sir," led the team into the veranda and the gardens.
Hira Singh was the last, and he looked at Dirkovitch as he moved. But
Dirkovitch had departed into a brandy paradise of his own. His lips
moved without sound, and he was studying the coffin on the ceiling.
"White--white all over," said Basset-Holmer, the adjutant. "What a
pernicious renegade[15] he must be! I wonder where he came from?"
The colonel shook the man gently by the arm, and "Who are you?" said
he.
There was no answer. The man stared round the mess room and smiled in
the colonel's face. Little Mildred, who was always more of a woman
than a man till "Boot and saddle" was sounded, repeated the question
in a voice that would have drawn confidences from a geyser. The man
only smiled. Dirkovitch, at the far end of the table, slid gently from
his chair to the floor, No son of Adam, in this present imperfect
world, can mix the Hussars' champagne with the Hussars' brandy by five
and eight glasses of each without remembering the pit whence he has
been digged and descending thither. The band began to play the tune
with which the White Hussars, from the date of their formation,
preface all their functions. They would sooner be disbanded than
abandon that tune. It is a part of their system. The man straightened
himself in his chair and drummed on the table with his fingers.
"I don't see why we should entertain lunatics," said the colonel;
"call a guard and send him off to the cells. We'll look into the
business in the morning. Give him a glass of wine first, though."
Little Mildred filled a sherry glass with the brandy and thrust it
over to the man. He drank, and the tune rose louder, and he
straightened himself yet more. Then he put out his long-taloned hands
to a piece of plate opposite and fingered it lovingly. There was a
mystery connected with that piece of plate in the shape of a spring,
which converted what was a seven-branched candlestick, three springs
each side and one on the middle, into a sort of wheel-spoke
candelabrum[16]. He found the spring, pressed it, and laughed weakly.
He rose from his chair and inspected a picture on the wall, then moved
on to another picture, the mess watching him without a word.
When he came to the mantelpiece he shook his head and seemed
distressed. A piece of plate representing a mounted hussar in full
uniform caught his eye. He pointed to it, and then to the mantelpiece,
with inquiry in his eyes.
"What is it--oh, what is it?" said Little Mildred. Then, as a mother
might speak to a child, "That is a horse--yes, a horse."
Very slowly came the answer, in a thick, passionless guttural: "Yes,
I--have seen. But--where is _the_ horse?"
You could have heard the hearts of the mess beating as the men drew
back to give the stranger full room in his wanderings. There was no
question of calling the guard.
Again he spoke, very slowly, "Where is _our_ horse?"
There is no saying what happened after that. There is but one horse in
the White Hussars, and his portrait hangs outside the door of the mess
room. He is the piebald drum-horse the king of the regimental band,
that served the regiment for seven-and-thirty years, and in the end
was shot for old age. Half the mess tore the thing down from its place
and thrust it into the man's hands. He placed it above the
mantelpiece; it clattered on the ledge, as his poor hands dropped it,
and he staggered toward the bottom of the table, falling into
Mildred's chair. The band began to play the "River of Years" waltz,
and the laughter from the gardens came into the tobacco-scented mess
room. But nobody, even the youngest, was thinking of waltzes. They all
spoke to one another something after this fashion: "The drum-horse
hasn't hung over the mantelpiece since '67." "How does he know?"
"Mildred, go and speak to him again." "Colonel, what are you going to
do?" "Oh, dry up, and give the poor devil a chance to pull himself
together!" "It isn't possible, anyhow. The man's a lunatic."
Little Mildred stood at the colonel's side talking into his ear. "Will
you be good enough to take your seats, please, gentlemen?" he said,
and the mess dropped into the chairs.
Only Dirkovitch's seat, next to Little Mildred's, was blank, and
Little Mildred himself had found Hira Singh's place. The wide-eyed
mess sergeant filled the glasses in dead silence. Once more the
colonel rose, but his hand shook, and the port spilled on the table as
he looked straight at the man in Little Mildred's chair and said,
hoarsely, "Mr. Vice, the Queen." There was a little pause, but the man
sprang to his feet and answered, without hesitation, "The Queen, God
bless her!" and as he emptied the thin glass he snapped the shank
between his fingers.
Long and long ago, when the Empress of India was a young woman, and
there were no unclean ideals in the land, it was the custom in a few
messes to drink the Queen's toast in broken glass, to the huge delight
of the mess contractors. The custom is now dead, because there is
nothing to break anything for, except now and again the word of a
government, and that has been broken already.
"That settles it," said the colonel, with a gasp. "He's not a
sergeant. What in the world is he?"
The entire mess echoed the word, and the volley of questions would
have scared any man. Small wonder that the ragged, filthy invader
could only smile and shake his head.
From under the table, calm and smiling urbanely[17], rose Dirkovitch,
who had been roused from healthful slumber by feet upon his body. By
the side of the man he rose, and the man shrieked and groveled at his
feet. It was a horrible sight, coming so swiftly upon the pride and
glory of the toast that had brought the strayed wits together.
Dirkovitch made no offer to raise him, but Little Mildred heaved him
up in an instant. It is not good that a gentleman who can answer to
the Queen's toast should lie at the feet of a subaltern of Cossacks.
The hasty action tore the wretch's upper clothing nearly to the waist,
and his body was seamed with dry black scars. There is only one weapon
in the world that cuts in parallel lines, and it is neither the cane
nor the cat. Dirkovitch saw the marks, and the pupils of his eyes
dilated--also, his face changed. He said something that sounded like
"Shto ve takete"; and the man, fawning, answered, "Chetyre."
"What's that?" said everybody together.
"His number. That is number four, you know." Dirkovitch spoke very
thickly.
"What has a Queen's officer to do with a qualified number?" said the
colonel, and there rose an unpleasant growl round the table.
"How can I tell?" said the affable Oriental, with a sweet smile. "He
is a--how you have it?--escape--runaway, from over there."
He nodded toward the darkness of the night.
"Speak to him, if he'll answer you, and speak to him gently," said
Little Mildred, settling the man in a chair. It seemed most improper
to all present that Dirkovitch. should sip brandy as he talked in
purring, spitting Russian to the creature who answered so feebly and
with such evident dread. But since Dirkovitch appeared to understand,
no man said a word. They breathed heavily, leaning forward, in the
long gaps of the conversation. The next time that they have no
engagements on hand the White Hussars intend to go to St. Petersburg
and learn Russian.
"He does not know how many years ago," said Dirkovitch, facing the
mess, "but he says it was very long ago, in a war, I think that there
was an accident. He says he was of this glorious and distinguished
regiment in the war."
"The rolls! The rolls! Holmer, get the rolls!" said Little Mildred,
and the adjutant dashed off bareheaded to the orderly room where the
rolls of the regiment were kept. He returned just in time to hear
Dirkovitch conclude, "Therefore I am most sorry to say there was an
accident, which would have been, reparable if he had apologized to our
colonel, whom he had insulted."
Another growl, which the colonel tried to beat down. The mess was in
no mood to weigh insults to Russian colonels just then.
"He does not remember, but I think that there was an accident, and so
he was not exchanged among the prisoners, but he was sent to another
place--how do you say?--the country. _So_, he says, he came here. He
does not know how he came. Eh? He _was_ at Chepany[18]"--the man
caught the word, nodded, and shivered--"at Zhigansk[19] and
Irkutsk[20]. I cannot understand how he escaped. He says, too, that he
was in the forests for many years, but how many years he has
forgotten--that with many things. It was an accident; done because he
did not apologise to our colonel. Ah!"
Instead of echoing Dirkovitch's sigh of regret, it is sad to record
that the White Hussars livelily exhibited unchristian delight and
other emotions, hardly restrained by their sense of hospitality.
Holmer flung the frayed and yellow regimental rolls on the table, and
the men flung themselves atop of these.
"Steady! Fifty-six--fifty-five--fifty-four," said Holmer. "Here we
are. 'Lieutenant Austin Limmason--_missing_.' That was before
Sebastopol[21]. What an infernal shame! Insulted one of their
colonels, and was quietly shipped off. Thirty years of his life wiped
out."
"But he never apologized. Said he'd see him----first," chorussed the
mess.
"Poor devil! I suppose he never had the chance afterward. How did he
come here?" said the colonel.
The dingy heap in the chair could give no answer.
"Do you know who you are?"
It laughed weakly.
"Do you know that you are Limmason--Lieutenant Limmason, of the White
Hussars?"
Swift as a shot came the answer, in a slightly surprised tone, "Yes,
I'm Limmason, of course." The light died out in his eyes, and he
collapsed afresh, watching every motion of Dirkovitch with terror. A
flight from Siberia may fix a few elementary facts in the mind, but it
does not lead to continuity of thought. The man could not explain how,
like a homing pigeon, he had found his way to his own old mess again.
Of what he had suffered or seen he knew nothing. He cringed before
Dirkovitch as instinctively as he had pressed the spring of the
candlestick, sought the picture of the drum-horse, and answered to the
Queen's toast. The rest was a blank that the dreaded Russian tongue
could only in part remove. His head bowed on his breast, and he
giggled and cowered alternately.
The devil that lived in the brandy prompted Dirkovitch at this
extremely inopportune moment to make a speech. He rose, swaying
slightly, gripped the table edge, while his eyes glowed like opals,
and began:--"Fellow-soldiers glorious--true friends and hospitables.
It was an accident, and deplorable--most deplorable." Here he smiled
sweetly all round the mess. "But you will think of this little, little
thing. So little, is it not? The czar! Posh! I slap my fingers--I snap
my fingers at him. Do I believe in him? No! But the Slav who has done
nothing, _him_ I believe. Seventy--how much?--millions that have done
nothing--not one thing. Napoleon was an episode." He banged a hand on
the table. "Hear you, old peoples, we have done nothing in the
world--out here. All our work is to do: and it shall be done, old
peoples. Get away!" He waved his hand imperiously, and pointed to the
man. "You see him. He is not good to see. He was just one little--oh,
so little--accident, that no one remembered. Now he is _That_. So will
you be, brother-soldiers so brave--so will you be. But you will never
come back. You will all go where he has gone, or"--he pointed to the
great coffin shadow on the ceiling, and muttering, "Seventy
millions--get away, you old people," fell asleep.
"Sweet, and to the point," said Little Mildred. "What's the use of
getting wroth? Let's make the poor devil comfortable."
But that was a matter suddenly and swiftly taken from the loving hands
of the White Hussars. The lieutenant had returned only to go away
again three days later, when the wail of the "Dead March" and the
tramp of the squadrons told the wondering station, that saw no gap in
the table, an officer of the regiment had resigned his new-found
commission.
And Dirkovitch--bland, supple, and always genial--went away too by a
night train. Little Mildred and another saw him off, for he was the
guest of the mess, and even had he smitten the colonel with the open
hand the law of the mess allowed no relaxation of hospitality.
"Good-by, Dirkovitch, and a pleasant journey," said Little Mildred.
"_Au revoir[22]_ my true friends," said the Russian.
"Indeed! But we thought you were going home?"
"Yes; but I will come again. My friends, is that road shut?" He
pointed to where the north star burned over the Khyber Pass.
"By Jove! I forgot. Of course. Happy to meet you, old man, any time
you like. Got everything you want,--cheroots, ice, bedding? That's all
right. Well, _au revoir_, Dirkovitch."
"Um," said the other man, as the tail-lights of the train grew small.
"Of--all--the--unmitigated[23]--"
Little Mildred answered nothing, but watched the north star, and
hummed a selection from a recent burlesque that had much delighted the
White Hussars. It ran:--
"I'm sorry for Mister Bluebeard,
I'm sorry to cause him pain;
But a terrible spree there's sure to be
When he comes back again."
NOTES
[1] _The Man Who Was_ was written in 1889.
[2] 46:6 anomaly. Deviation from type.
[3] 47:1 Hussars. Light-horse troopers armed with sabre and carbine.
[4] 47:1 Peshawur. City in British India.
[5] 47:7 Tyrones. From a county in Ireland by this name.
[6] 47:26 Burmah. In southeastern Asia. Part of the British Empire.
[7] 47:27 Irrawaddy. Chief river of Burma.
[8] 48:27 Sotnia. Company of the Cossacks.
[9] 50:14 rupee. Indian coin worth about forty-eight cents.
[10] 50:21 vendettas. Private blood-feuds.
[11] 51:14 Punjab. Country of five rivers, tributaries of the Indus.
[12] 81:26 Sambhur. A rusine deer found in India.
[13] 51:26 nilghai. Antelope with hind legs shorter than its
fore-legs.
[14] 54:9 expurgated. Purified.
[15] 57:23 renegade. One who deserts his faith.
[16] 58:26 candelabrum. Stand supporting several lamps.
[17] 61:3 urbanely. Politely.
[18] 63:2 Chepany. Town in Siberia.
[19] 63:4 Zhigansk. Town in Siberia.
[20] 63:4 Irkutsk. Province and city in Siberia.
[21] 63:17 Sebastopol. Seaport in Russia.
[22] 65:26 Au revoir. Till we meet again.
[23] 66:6 unmitigated. As bad as can be.
BIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
_Essays on Modern Novelists_, William Lyon Phelps.
_A Kipling Primer_, Knowles.
_Rudyard Kipling_, Richard Le Galliene.
"Kipling to French Eyes," _Bookman_, 26: 584.
"Life of Kipling," _Encyclopaedia Britannica.
"Life of Kipling," _The Universal Encyclopedia_.
BIOGRAPHY
Rudyard Kipling, the most vigorous, versatile, and highly endowed of
the present-day writers of fiction, was born in Bombay, India,
December 30, 1865. His place of birth and extensive travelling make
him more Anglo-Saxon than British. His father was for many years
connected with the schools of art at Bombay and Lahore in India. His
mother, Alice MacDonald, was the daughter of a Methodist clergyman.
Kipling was brought to England when he was five years old to be
educated. While in college at Westward Ho he edited the _College
Chronicle_. For this paper he contributed regularly, poetry and
stories. After his school days and on his return to India, he served
on the editorial staff of the Lahore _Civil and Military Gazette_ from
1882 to 1887, and was assistant editor of the _Pioneer_ at Allahabad
from 1887 to 1889.
Kipling has travelled extensively. He is at home in India, China,
Japan, Africa, Australia, England, and America. The odd part about his
realistic observations, however, is that his notes, whether written
about California or India, are often repudiated by the people whom he
has visited. After visiting England and the United States in a vain
effort to find a publisher for his writings, he returned to India and
published in the _Pioneer_ his _American Notes_, which were
immediately reproduced in book form in New York in 1891.
He married Miss Balestier of New York in 1892. They settled at
Brattleboro, Vermont, immediately after their marriage and lived there
until 1896. Kipling revisited the United States in 1899. While on this
trip he suffered a severe attack of pneumonia which brought out a
demonstration of interest from the American people that clearly showed
their appreciation of him as a man and a writer.
CRITICISMS
Kipling is journalistic in all his writings. Oftentimes his material
is very thin, flippant, and sensational, but he always is interesting,
for he possesses the expert reporter's unerring judgment for choosing
the essentials of his situation, character, or description, that catch
and hold the reader's attention. In his earlier writings, like _Plain
Tales from the Hills_ or _The Jungle Books_, the radical racial
differences between his characters and readers, and the background of
primitive, mysterious India caught the reading world and instantly
established Kipling's fame.
His technique is brilliant, his wit keen, and his energy of the bold
and dashing military type. This audacious energy leads him very often
into sprawling situations, a worship of imperialism, and reckless
statements concerning moral and spiritual laws. Unlike Bret Harte, who
was in many respects one of Kipling's ideals, he leaves his bad and
coarse characters disreputable to the end. This is due in a large
measure to the lack of warmth and light in his writings. In
contradiction to this type of his works his _William the Conqueror_
and _An Habitation Enforced_ are filled with a gentle-human sympathy
that causes us to forget and forgive any vulgarity he may have used in
his more primitive and coarse characters. Even Kipling partisans must
sometimes wish that Kipling's vision were not so dimmed by the British
flag and that he might forget for a time the British soldier he loves
so ardently.
His writings since 1899 are much more mechanical than his earlier
works. He seems, at times, to resort to the orator's superficial
tricks in his attempts to attract readers. The _Athenaeum_, a friendly
organ, says of his later work: "In his new part--the missionary of
Empire--Mr. Kipling is living the strenuous life. He has frankly
abandoned story telling, and is using his complete and powerful armory
in the interests of patriotic zeal."
Whatever may be the final judgment of the world concerning Kipling's
claim to literary genius, the young student may rest assured that
there is no one in England who can compare with this strenuous and
versatile writer. He is original and powerful, interesting and
realistic. He is a lover of the men who earn their bread by the sweat
of their faces and a despiser of "flannelled fools." He lacks the
day-dreams of Stevenson and preaches from every housetop the gospel of
virile, acting morality. Many of his readers have criticised adversely
his spiritual teachings, because of the furious energy with which he
denounces an apathetic religion and eulogizes the person who works
with all his might, day after day, for the highest he knows and never
fears the day of death and judgment.
GENERAL REFERENCES
_The Book of the Short Story_, Alexander Jessup.
_The Short Story in English_, Henry Seidel Canby.
_Bibliography of Kipling's Works_, Eugene P, Saxton.
"Contradictory Elements in Rudyard Kipling," _Current Literature_, 44:
274.
"Where Kipling Stands," _Bookman_, 29: 120-122.
"Are there two Kiplings?" _Cosmopolitan_, 31: 653-660.
"Literary Style of Kipling," _Lippincott_, 73: 99-103.
COLLATERAL READINGS
_The Man Who Would be King_, Rudyard Kipling.
_William the Conqueror_, Rudyard Kipling.
_Phantom Rickshaw_, Rudyard Kipling.
_The Finest Story in the World_, Rudyard Kipling.
_Under the Deodars_, Rudyard Kipling.
_An Habitation Enforced_, Rudyard Kipling.
_Plain Tales from the Hills_, Rudyard Kipling.
_The Light that Failed_, Rudyard Kipling.
_Wee Willie Winkie_, Rudyard Kipling.
_Baa Baa Black Sheep_, Rudyard Kipling.
_Captains Courageous_, Rudyard Kipling.
_The Jungle Books_, Rudyard Kipling.
_They_, Rudyard Kipling.
_The Brushwood Boy_, Rudyard Kipling.
_Christ in Flanders_, Honore de Balzac.
_The Old Gentleman of the Black Stock_, Thomas Nelson Page.
_A New England Nun_, Mary Wilkins Freeman.
_Outcasts of Poker Flat_, Bret Harte.
_The Siege of Berlin_, Alphonse Dadoed.
_The Prisoner of Assiout_, Grant Allen.
_A Terribly Strange Bed_, Wilkie Collins.
_The Prisoners_, Guy de Maupassant.
_Mr. Isaacs_, F. Marion Crawford.
_Where Love Is, There God Is Also_, Leo Tolstoi.
THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER [1]
_By Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)_
Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.
--De Beranger.[2]
During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of
the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had
been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of
country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew
on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it
was; but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of
insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the
feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because
poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the
sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the
scene before me--upon the mere house, and the simple landscape
features of the domain--upon the bleak walls--upon the vacant eye-like
windows--a few rank sedges--and upon a few white trunks of decayed
trees--with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no
earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the
reveller upon opium--the bitter lapse into every-day life--the hideous
dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening
of the heart--an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of
the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was
it--I paused to think--what was it that so unnerved me in the
contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble;
nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I
pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion
that while, beyond doubt, there _are_ combinations of very simple
natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the
analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It
was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the
particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be
sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for
sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to
the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn[3] that lay in
unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down--but with a shudder
even more thrilling than before--upon the remodelled and inverted
images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree stems, and the vacant
and eye-like windows.
Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a
sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of
my boon companions in boyhood; but many years had elapsed since our
last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant
part of the country--a letter from him--which, in its wildly
importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply.
The Ms. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute
bodily illness, of a mental disorder which oppressed him, and of an
earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only, personal
friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society,
some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this,
and much more, was said--it was the apparent _heart_ that went with
his request--which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I
accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular
summons.
Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really
knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and
habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been
noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament,
displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art,
and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent, yet
unobtrusive, charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the
intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily
recognizable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the
very remarkable fact that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored
as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch; in other
words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and
had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain.
It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought
the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the
accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the
possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries,
might have exercised upon the other--it was this deficiency, perhaps,
of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from
sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so
identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the
quaint and equivocal appellation of the _House of Usher_--an
appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who
used it, both the family and the family mansion.
I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment of
looking down within the tarn had been to deepen the first singular
impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid
increase of my superstition--for why should I not so term it?--served
mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is
the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it
might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my
eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my
mind a strange fancy--a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but
mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed
me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that
about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar
to themselves and their immediate vicinity--an atmosphere which had no
affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the
decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn--a pestilent and
mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.
Shaking off from my spirit what _must_ have been a dream, I scanned
more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature
seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages
had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in
a fine, tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from
any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen;
and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still
perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the
individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the
specious totality of old woodwork which has rotted for years in some
neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external
air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric
gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing
observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which,
extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down
the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen
waters of the tarn.
Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A
servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of
the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence,
through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the
_studio_ of his master. Much that I encountered on the way
contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which
I have already spoken. While the objects around me--while the carvings
of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon
blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies
which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as
which, I had been accustomed from my infancy--while I hesitated not to
acknowledge how familiar was all this--I still wondered to find how
unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On
one of the staircases I met the physician of the family. His
countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and
perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet
now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.
The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows
were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the
black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble
gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellised
panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent
objects around; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the
remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and
fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general
furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books
and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any
vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.
An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded
all.
Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying
at full length, and greeted me with, a vivacious warmth which had much
in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality--of the
constrained effort of the _ennuye_[4] man of the world. A glance,
however, at his countenance convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We
sat down; and for some moments, while he spoke not. I gazed upon him
with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before
so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher! It
was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of
the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet
the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A
cadaverousness of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous
beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a
surpassingly beautiful curve; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but
with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations; a finely
moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral
energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity; these
features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the
temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten.
And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these
features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much
of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of
the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things
startled, and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to
grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated
rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort,
connect its arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.
In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an
incoherence--an inconsistency; and I soon found this to arise from a
series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual
trepidancy, an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this
nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter than by
reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced
from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action
was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a
tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in
abeyance) to that species of energetic concision--that abrupt,
weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation--that leaden,
self-balanced, and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may
be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium,
during the periods of his most intense excitement.
It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest
desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He
entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of
his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and
one for which he despaired to find a remedy--a mere nervous affection,
he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It
displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as
he detailed them, interested and bewildered me; although, perhaps, the
terms and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He
suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses. The most insipid
food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain
texture; the odors of all flowers were oppressive; his eyes were
tortured by even a faint light; and there were but peculiar sounds,
and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with
horror.
To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden[5] slave. "I
shall perish," said he, "I _must_ perish, in this deplorable folly.
Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of
the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the
thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate
upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence
of danger, except in its absolute effect--in terror. In this
unnerved--in this pitiable condition--I feel that the period will
sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together,
in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR."
I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal
hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was
enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the
dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never
ventured forth--in regard to an influence whose supposititious force
was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be restated--an influence
which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family
mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his
spirit--an effect which the _physique_ of the gray walls and turrets,
and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length,
brought about upon the _morale_ of his existence.
He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the
peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more
natural and far more palpable origin--to the severe and long-continued
illness--indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution--of a
tenderly beloved sister, his sole companion for long years, his last
and only relative on earth. "Her decease," he said, with a bitterness
which I can never forget, "would leave him (him the hopeless and the
frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers." While he spoke,
the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a
remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my
presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not
unmingled with dread[6]; and yet I found it impossible to account for
such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed
her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my
glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the
brother; but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only
perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the
emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears.
The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her
physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person,
and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical
character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne
up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself
finally to bed; but on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at
the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with
inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer;
and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus
probably be the last I should obtain--that the lady, at least while
living, would be seen by me no more.
For several days ensuing her name was unmentioned by either Usher or
myself; and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavors to
alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together;
or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations[7] of his
speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy
admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the
more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a
mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured
forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one
unceasing radiation of gloom.
I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus
spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail
in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the
studies, or of the occupations in which he involved me, or led me the
way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphurous
luster over all. His long, improvised dirges will ring forever in my
ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular
perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of von
Weber[8]. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded,
and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered
the more thrillingly because I shuddered knowing not why,--from these
paintings (vivid as their images now are before, me) I would in vain
endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within
the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the
nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever
mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me, at
least, in the circumstances then surrounding me, there arose out of
the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw, upon
his canvas, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I
ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too
concrete reveries of Fuseli.[9]
One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so
rigidly of the spirit of abstraction may be shadowed forth, although
feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an
immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls,
smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory
points of the design served well to convey the idea that this
excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth.
No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch
or other artificial source of light was discernible; yet a flood of
intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and
inappropriate splendor.
I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve
which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the
exception of certain effects of stringed, instruments. It was,
perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the
guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character
of his performances. But the fervid _facility_ of his _impromptus_
could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the
notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not
unfrequently accompanied himself with rimed verbal improvisations),
the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to
which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular
moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of
these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more
forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or
mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the
first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the
tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were
entitled "The Haunted Palace,"[10] ran very nearly, if not accurately,
thus:--
I
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace--
Radiant palace--reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion--
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
II
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow;
(This--all this--was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odor went away.
III
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well-tuned law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene!)[11]
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
IV
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
V
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate!);
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
VI
And travelers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh--but smile no more.
I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into
a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's
which I mention not so much on account of its novelty (for other
men[12] have thought thus) as on account of the pertinacity with which
he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the
sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the
idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under
certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words
to express the full extent or the earnest _abandon_ of his persuasion.
The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with
the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the
sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of
collocation of these stones--in the order of their arrangement, as
well as in that of the many _fungi_ which overspread them, and of the
decayed trees which stood around--above all, in the long-undisturbed
endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still
waters of the tarn. Its evidence--the evidence of the sentience--was
to be seen, he said (and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual
yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the
waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that
silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had
molded the destinies of his family, and which made _him_ what I now
saw him--what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make
none.
Our books--the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of
the mental existence of the invalid--were, as might be supposed, in
strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over
such works as the _Ververt et Chartreuse_[13] of Gresset; the
_Belphegor_[14] of Machiavelli; the _Heaven and Hell_[15] of
Swedenborg; the _Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm_[16] by
Holberg; the _Chiromancy_[17] of Robert Flud, of Jean D'lndagine, and
of De la Chambre[18]; the _Journey into the Blue Distance_ of
Tieck[19]; and the _City of the Sun_[20] of Campanella. One favorite
volume was a small octavo edition of the _Directorium
Inquisitorium_[21] by the Dominican Eymeric de Cironne; and there were
passages in _Pomponius Mela_,[22] about the old African Satyrs and
Oegipans,[23] over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief
delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and
curious book in quarto Gothic--the manual of a forgotten church--the
_Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae_.[24]
I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its
probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having
informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his
intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight (previously to its
final interment) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls
of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this
singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to
dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution, so he told me, by
consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased,
of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical
men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial ground of
the family, I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister
countenance of the person whom I met upon the staircase, on the day of
my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as
at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural precaution.
At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements
for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two
alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which
had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its
oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation)
was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light;
lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the
building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used,
apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a
donjon-keep, and in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or
some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor,
and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it,
were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had
been also similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually
sharp grating sound as it moved upon its hinges.
Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region
of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the
coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude
between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and
Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words
from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and
that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed
between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead--for
we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed
the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies
of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush
upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile
upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed
down the lid, and having secured the door of iron, made our way, with
toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of
the house.
And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable
change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His
ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected
or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal,
and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if
possible, a more ghastly line--but the luminousness of his eye had
utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard
no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually
characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought
his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive
secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At
times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable
vagaries of madness; for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long
hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to
some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition
terrified--that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet
certain degrees, the wild influence of his own fantastic yet
impressive superstitions.
It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the
seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within
the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep
came not near my couch, while the hours waned and waned away, I
struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I
endeavored to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to
the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room--of the
dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath
of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and
rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were
fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and,
at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly
causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I
uplifted myself upon the pillows, and peering earnestly within the
intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened--I know not why, except
that an instinctive spirit prompted me--to certain low and indefinite
sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals,
I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror,
unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I
felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavored to
arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by
pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment.
I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an
adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognized it
as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle
touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was,
as usual, cadaverously wan--but, moreover, there was a species of mad
hilarity in his eyes--and evidently restrained hysteria in his whole
demeanor. His air appalled me--but anything was preferable to the
solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence
as a relief.
"And you have not seen it?" he said abruptly, after having stared
about him for some moments in silence--"you have not then seen
it?--but stay! you shall." Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded
his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open
to the storm.
The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our
feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and
one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had
apparently collected its force in our vicinity; for there were
frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the
exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon
the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the lifelike
velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each
other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their
exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this--yet we had no
glimpse of the moon or stars--nor was there any flashing forth of the
lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated
vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were
glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly
visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the
mansion.
"You must not--you shall not behold this!" said I, shudderingly, to
Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a
seat. "These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical
phenomena not uncommon--or it may be that they have their ghastly
origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement--the
air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your
favorite romances. I will read and you shall listen; and so we will
pass away this terrible night together."
The antique volume which I had taken up was the _Mad Trist_ of Sir
Launcelot Canning[25]; but I had called it a favorite of Usher's more
in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its
uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for
the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the
only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the
excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief
(for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even
in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have
judged, indeed, by the wild, overstrained air of vivacity with which
he hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the words of the tale, I
might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.
I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred,
the hero of the "Trist," having sought in vain for peaceable admission
into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by
force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run
thus:--
"And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now
mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had
drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in
sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn; but, feeling the rain
upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted
his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings
of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now pulling therewith
sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the
noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarummed[26] and
reverberated throughout the forest."
At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment
paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my
excited fancy had deceived me)--it appeared to me that, from some very
remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears
what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo
(but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and
ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It
was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my
attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and
the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the
sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or
disturbed, me. I continued the story:--
"But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was
sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit;
but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious
demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace
of gold, with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield
of shining brass with this legend enwritten:--
Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath been;
Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win.
"And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the
dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a
shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had
fain[27] to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise
of it, the like whereof was never before heard."
Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild
amazement--for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this
instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it
proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant,
but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating
sound--the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up
for the dragon's unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.
Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and
most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations,
in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained
sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the
sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that
he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange
alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his
demeanor. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought
round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the
chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features,
although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring
inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast--yet I knew that he
was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught
a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at
variance with this idea--for he rocked from side to side with a gentle
yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all
this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus
proceeded:--
"And now the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the
dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking
up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out
of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver
pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall; which in
sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon
the silver floor, with a mighty, great and terrible ringing sound."
No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than--as if a shield of
brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of
silver--I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic and clangorous,
yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to
my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I
rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before
him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony
rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a
strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about
his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering
murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I
at length drank in the hideous import of his words.
"Not hear it?--yes, I hear it, and _have_ heard it.
Long--long--long--many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard
it--yet I dared not--oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!--I dared
not--I _dared_ not speak! _We have put her living in the tomb!_ Said I
not that my senses were acute? I _now_ tell you that I heard her first
feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them--many, many days
ago--yet I dared not--_I dared not speak!_ And
now--to-night--Ethelred--ha! ha!---the breaking of the hermit's door,
and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!--say,
rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges
of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the
vault! Oh, whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not
hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footstep on
the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her
heart? Madman!"--here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked
out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his
soul--"_Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!_"
As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found
the potency of a spell--the huge antique panels to which the speaker
pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony
jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust--but then without those
doors there _did_ stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady
Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the
evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated
frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon
the threshold--then, with a low, moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon
the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final
death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the
terrors he had anticipated.
From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was
still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old
causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I
turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the
vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that
of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly
through that once barely discernible fissure, of which I have before
spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag
direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly
widened--there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind--the entire orb
of the satellite burst at once upon my sight--my brain reeled as I saw
the mighty walls rushing asunder--there was a long tumultuous shouting
sound like the voice of a thousand waters--and the deep and dank tarn
at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the
"_House of Usher_."
NOTES
[1] _The Fall of the House of Usher_ was written in 1839 and published
at the end of the same year in his Tales of the Grotesque and of the
Arabesque.
[2] 70: Motto de Beranger. Popular French lyric poet (1780-1857). "His
heart is a suspended lute; as soon as it is touched it resounds."
[3] 71:23 tarn. A small mountain lake.
[4] 76:7 ennuye. Mentally wearied or bored.
[5] 78:11 bounden. An archaic word.
[6] 79:19 Dread. Reading of the first edition, "Her figure, her air,
her features,--all, in their very minutest development, were
those--were identically (I can use no other sufficient term), were
identically those of the Roderick Usher who sat beside me. A feeling
of stupor," etc.
[7] 80:16 Improvisations. Extemporaneous composition of poetry or
music.
[8] 81:4 von Weber. The celebrated German composer (1786-1826).
[9] 81:20 Fuseli. An artist and professor of painting at the Royal
Academy in London (1741-1825).
[10] 82:24 "The Haunted Palace." First published in the _Baltimore
Museum_ for April, 1839.
[11] 83:18 Porphyrogene. Of royal birth.
[12] 84:16 for other men. Watson, Dr. Percival, and especially the
Bishop of Llandaff. See "Chemical Essays," Vol. V.
[13] 85:16 Ververt et Chartreuse. Two poems by Jean Baptiste Cresset
(1709-1777).
[Footenote 14] 85:17 Belphegor. Satire on Marriage by Machiavelli
(1469-1527).
[15] 85:17 Heaven and Hell. Extracts from "Arcana Coelestia" by
Swedenborg (1688-1772).
[16] 85:18 Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm. A celebrated poem by
Ludwig Holberg (1684-1754).
[17] 85:19 Chiromancy. Palmistry applied to the future. Poe refers
rather to physiognomy. The book was written by the English mystic,
Robert Fludd (1574-1637).
[18] 85:19 Jean d'Indagine and De la Chambre. Two continental writers
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively.
[19] 85:21 Tieck. A great German romanticist (1773-1853).
[20] 85:21 City of the Sun. A sketch of an ideal state by Campanella
(1568-1639).
[21] 85:23 Directorium Inquisitorium. A detailed account of the
methods of the Inquisition by Cironne, inquisitor-general for Castile,
in 1356.
[22] 85:24 Pomponius Mela. Spanish geographer in the first century
A.D. Author of "De Chorographia," the earliest extant account of the
geography of the ancient world.
[23] 85:25 Oegipans. An epithet applied to Pan.
[24] 85:30 Vigiliae Mortuorum. No such book is known.
[25] 90:30 Mad Trist. No such book is known.
[26] 91:29 alarummed. Alarmed.
[27] 92:25 had fain. In the sense of was glad.
BIOGRAPHY
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, January 19, 1809. His parents, who
were actors, died before their son was three years old. Mr. Allan, a
wealthy Richmond merchant, adopted the child and gave him a splendid
home. How scantily Poe appreciated and improved the advantages of this
kindness he himself confesses in a letter to Lowell in 1844. "I have
been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of
temporal things to give any continuous effort to anything--to be
consistent in anything. My life has been _whim_--impulse--passion--a
longing for solitude--a scorn of all things present in an earnest
desire for the future." He was a dreamer who had a fair chance to be
happy, but he flung the opportunity away. He was a spoiled child who
remained ignorant of life even unto his death.
He entered the University of Virginia in 1826, where his conduct was
so bad that he was, after a year, removed from the college. This
action broke the strong friendship Mr. Allan had long held for his
adopted son. Poe, urged by a hot temper or possibly by a remorse for
his actions, ran away and enlisted in the regular army. In 1829 Mr.
Allan became partially reconciled with Poe, and again came to his
assistance. In 1830 Poe entered West Point, but was there only a short
time when he was dismissed for wilful neglect of duty.
Following this dismissal Poe went to Baltimore, where he did hack work
for newspapers. This was the beginning of a process of writing that
has brought him high rank and an imperishable honor. His narrative is
clear, compressed, and powerful, and throughout his writings choice
symbols abound. He was fond of themes of death, insanity, and terror.
The wonder of it all is that this struggling, poverty-stricken
craftsman, irregular in his habits of living, using only negative life
and shadowy abstractions, should, from out his disordered fancies,
weave stories and poems of such undying beauty and force.
Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. Her health
was always delicate and her death confirmed Poe's tendency toward
dissipation. His life was filled with dire poverty and a hard struggle
for a livelihood. His home relations were happy. The last years of his
life were spent at Fordham, a suburb of New York. He died in a
Baltimore hospital, October 7, 1849.
BIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
_Introduction to American Literature_, Brander Matthews.
_Studies in American Literature_, Charles Noble.
_Introduction to American Literature_, F.V.N. Painter.
_Life of Poe_, Richard Henry Stoddard.
_Edgar Allan Poe_, G.E. Woodberry.
_Makers of English Fiction_, W.J. Dawson.
"Art of Poe, _Independent_, 66: 157-8. January 21, 1909.
"Dual Personality," _Current Literature_, 43: 287-8.
CRITICISMS
Some critics have maintained that Poe is our only original genius in
American Literature. Lowell wrote in his _Fable for Critics_:--
"There comes Poe with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge, Three-fifths of
him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge."
Whatever judgments the various critics may give of Poe and his
writings, they must all agree that he is original. He is a clever
writer in a limited field. His writings have a glow and burnish that
have their origin in his fondness for sensations, color, and vividness
of details. He loves mystery and terror,--not the fancies and fears of
a child, but overwrought nerves. His material is unreal, and remote
from ordinary life. His characters are abnormal, and the world they
live in is exceptional. He is inventive, original in arranging his
material, and shallow but keen in his thinking.
He believed that art and life have little in common, and in his
writings seemed to be unmoved by friendship, loyalty, patriotism,
courage, self-sacrifice or any of the great positive attributes of
life that make living worth while. His writings lack the human touch,
tenderness, and the buoyancy of sympathy. He is an artist who does his
work with a clear-cut, hard finish. His choice of words, vivid
pictures, and clearly evolved plots make his writings excellent
studies for any one who wishes to develop literary appreciation and to
learn to write.
GENERAL REFERENCES
_Studies and Appreciations_, L.E. Gates.
_American Prose Masters_, William Crary Brownwell.
_The Short Story in English_, Henry Seidel Canby.
_Edgar Poe_, R.H. Button.
_Inquiries and Opinions_, Brander Matthews.
"Life of Edgar Allan Poe," _Nation_, 89: 100-110.
"Weird Genius," _Cosmopolitan_, 46:243-252.
COLLATERAL READINGS
_Ligeia_, Edgar Allan Poe.
_The Cask of Amontillado_, Edgar Allan Poe.
_The Assignation_, Edgar Allan Poe.
_Ms. Pound in Bottle_, Edgar Allan Poe.
_The Black Cat_, Edgar Allan Poe.
_Berenice_, Edgar Allan Poe.
_The Tell-Tale Heart_, Edgar Allan Poe.
_The White Old Maid_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.
_Moonlight_ ("Odd Number"), Guy de Maupassant.
_A Journey_, Edith Wharton.
_The Brushwood Boy_, Rudyard Kipling.
_At the Pit's Mouth_, Rudyard Kipling.
The Gold Bug[1]
_By Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)_
What ho! what ho! this fellow is dancing mad!
He hath been bitten by the Tarantula.
--_All in the Wrong_.[2]
Many years ago I contracted an intimacy with a Mr. William Legrand. He
was of an ancient Huguenot[3] family, and had once been wealthy; but a
series of misfortunes had reduced him to want. To avoid the
mortification consequent upon his disasters, he left New Orleans, the
city of his forefathers, and took up his residence at Sullivan's
Island, near Charleston, South Carolina.
This island is a very singular one. It consists of little else than
the sea sand, and is about three miles long. Its breadth at no point
exceeds a quarter of a mile. It is separated from the mainland by a
scarcely perceptible creek, oozing its way through a wilderness of
reeds and slime, a favorite resort of the marsh-hen. The vegetation,
as might be supposed, is scant, or at least dwarfish. No trees of any
magnitude are to be seen. Near the western extremity, where Fort
Moultrie[4] stands, and where are some miserable frame buildings,
tenanted, during summer, by the fugitives from Charleston dust and
fever, may be found, indeed, the bristly palmetto; but the whole
island, with the exception of this western point, and a line of hard,
white beach on the seacoast, is covered with a dense undergrowth of
the sweet myrtle, so much prized by the horticulturists of England.
The shrub here often attains the height of fifteen or twenty feet, and
forms an almost impenetrable coppice, burthening the air with its
fragrance.
In the utmost recesses of this coppice, not far from the eastern or
more remote end of the island, Legrand had built himself a small hut,
which he occupied when I first, by mere accident, made his
acquaintance. This soon ripened into friendship, for there was much in
the recluse to excite interest and esteem. I found him well educated,
with unusual powers of mind, but infected with misanthropy, and
subject to perverse moods of alternate enthusiasm and melancholy. He
had with him many books, but rarely employed them. His chief
amusements were gunning and fishing, or sauntering along the beach and
through the myrtles, in quest of shells or entomological
specimens--his collection of the latter might have been envied by a
Swammerdam.[5] In these excursions he was usually accompanied by an
old negro, called Jupiter, who had been manumitted[6] before the
reverses of the family, but who could be induced, neither by threats
nor by promises, to abandon what he considered his right of attendance
upon the footsteps of his young "Massa Will." It is not improbable
that the relatives of Legrand, conceiving him to be somewhat unsettled
in intellect, had contrived to instil this obstinacy into Jupiter,
with a view to the supervision and guardianship of the wanderer.
The winters in the latitude of Sullivan's Island are seldom very
severe, and in the fall of the year it is a rare event indeed when a
fire is considered necessary. About the middle of October, 18--, there
occurred, however, a day of remarkable chilliness. Just before sunset
I scrambled my way through the evergreens to the hut of my friend,
whom I had not visited for several weeks--my residence being at that
time in Charleston, a distance of nine miles from the island, while
the facilities of passage and re-passage were very far behind those of
the present day. Upon reaching the hut I rapped, as was my custom, and
getting no reply, sought for the key where I knew it was secreted,
unlocked the door, and went in. A fine fire was blazing upon the
hearth. It was a novelty, and by no means an ungrateful one. I threw
off an over-coat, took an armchair by the crackling logs, and awaited
patiently the arrival of my hosts.
Soon after dark they arrived, and gave me a most cordial welcome.
Jupiter, grinning from ear to ear, bustled about to prepare some
marsh-hens for supper. Legrand was in one of his fits--how else shall
I term them?--of enthusiasm. He had found an unknown bivalve, forming
a new genus, and, more than this, he had hunted down and secured, with
Jupiter's assistance, a _scarabaeus_[7] which he believed to be
totally new, but in respect to which he wished to have my opinion on
the morrow.
"And why not to-night?" I asked, rubbing my hands over the blaze, and
wishing the whole tribe of _scarabaei_ at the devil.
"Ah, if I had only known you were here!" said Legrand, "but it's so
long since I saw you; and how could I foresee that you would pay me a
visit this very night of all others? As I was coming home I met
Lieutenant G----, from the fort, and, very foolishly, I lent him the
bug; so it will be impossible for you to see it until the morning.
Stay here to-night, and I will send Jup down for it at sunrise. It is
the loveliest thing in creation!"
"What!--sunrise?"
"Nonsense! no!--the bug. It is of a brilliant gold color--about the
size of a large hickory-nut--with two jet-black spots near one
extremity of the back, and another, somewhat longer, at the other. The
_antennae[8]_ are--"
"Dey ain't _no_ tin in him, Massa Will, I keep a tellin' on you," here
interrupted Jupiter; "de bug is a goolebug, solid, ebery bit of him,
inside and all, 'sep him wing--neber feel half so hebby a bug in my
life."
"Well, suppose it is, Jup," replied Legrand, somewhat more earnestly,
it seemed to me, than the case demanded; "is that any reason for your
letting the birds burn? The color"--here he turned to me--"is really
almost enough to warrant Jupiter's idea. You never saw a more
brilliant metallic lustre than the scales emit--but of this you cannot
judge till to-morrow. In the meantime I can give you some idea of the
shape." Saying this, he seated himself at a small table, on which were
a pen and ink, but no paper. He looked for some in a drawer, but found
none.
"Never mind," said he at length, "this will answer;" and he drew from
his waistcoat pocket a scrap of what I took to be very dirty foolscap,
and made upon it a rough drawing with the pen. While he did this I
retained my seat by the fire, for I was still chilly. When the design
was complete, he handed it to me without rising. As I received, it, a
loud growl was heard, succeeded by a scratching at the door. Jupiter
opened it, and a large Newfoundland, belonging to Legrand, rushed in,
leaped upon my shoulders, and loaded me with caresses; for I had shown
him much attention during previous visits. When his gambols were over,
I looked at the paper, and, to speak the truth, found myself not a
little puzzled at what my friend had depicted.
"Well!" I said, after contemplating it for some minutes, "this _is_ a
strange _scarabaeus_, I must confess: new to me: never saw anything
like it before--unless it was a skull, or a death's-head--which, it
more nearly resembles than, anything else that has come under _my_
observation."
"A death's-head!" echoed Legrand. "Oh--yes--well, it has something of
that appearance upon paper, no doubt. The two upper black spots look
like eyes, eh? and the longer one at the bottom like a mouth--and then
the shape of the whole is oval."
"Perhaps so," said I; "but, Legrand, I fear you are no artist. I must
wait until I see the beetle itself, if I am to form any idea of its
personal appearance."
"Well, I don't know," said he, a little nettled, "I draw
tolerably--_should_ do it at least--have had good masters, and flatter
myself that I am not quite a blockhead."
"But, my dear fellow, you are joking then," said I; "this is a very
passable _skull_--indeed, I may say that it is a very _excellent_
skull, according to the vulgar notions about such specimens of
physiology--and your _scarabaeus_ must be the queerest _scarabaeus_ in
the world if it resembles it. Why, we may get up a very thrilling bit
of superstition upon this hint. I presume, you will call the bug
_scarabaeus caput hominis_,[9] or something of that kind--there are
many similar titles in the natural histories. But where are the
_antennae_ you spoke of?"
"The _antennae_!" said Legrand, who seemed to be getting unaccountably
warm upon the subject; "I am sure you must see the _antennae_. I made
them as distinct as they are in the original insect, and I presume
that is sufficient."
"Well, well," I said, "perhaps you have--still I don't see them;" and
I handed him the paper without additional remark, not wishing to
ruffle his temper; but I was much surprised at the turn affairs had
taken; his ill-humor puzzled me--and, as for the drawing of the
beetle, there were positively _no antennae_ visible, and the whole
_did_ bear a very close resemblance to the ordinary cuts of a
death's-head.
He received the paper very peevishly, and was about to crumple it,
apparently to throw it in the fire, when a casual glance at the design
seemed suddenly to rivet his attention. In an instant his face grew
violently red--in another as excessively pale. For some minutes he
continued to scrutinize the drawing minutely where he sat. At length
he arose, took a candle from the table, and proceeded to seat himself
upon a sea-chest in the farthest corner of the room. Here again he
made an anxious examination of the paper, turning it in all
directions. He said nothing, however, and his conduct greatly
astonished me; yet I thought it prudent not to exacerbate the growing
moodiness of his temper by any comment. Presently he took from, his
coat pocket a wallet, placed the paper carefully in it, and deposited
both in a writing-desk, which he locked. He now grew more composed in
his demeanor; but his original air of enthusiasm had quite
disappeared. Yet he seemed not so much sulky as abstracted. As the
evening wore away he became more and more absorbed in reverie, from
which no sallies of mine could arouse him. It had been my intention to
pass the night at the hut, as I had frequently done before, but,
seeing my host in this mood, I deemed it proper to take leave. He did
not press me to remain, but, as I departed, he shook my hand with even
more than his usual cordiality.
It was about a month after this (and during the interval I had seen
nothing of Legrand) when I received a visit, at Charleston, from his
man Jupiter. I had never seen the good old negro look so dispirited,
and I feared that some serious disaster had befallen my friend.
"Well, Jup," said I, "what is the matter now?--how is your master?"
"Why, to speak de troof, massa, him not so berry well as mought be."
"Not well! I am truly sorry to hear it. What does he complain of?"
"Dar! dat's it!--him nebber 'plain of notin'--but him berry sick for
all dat."
"_Very_ sick, Jupiter!--why didn't you say so at once? Is he confined
to bed?"
"No, dat he ain't!--he ain't 'find nowhar--dat's just whar de shoe
pinch--my mind is got to be berry hebby 'bout poor Massa Will."
"Jupiter, I should like to understand what it is you are talking
about. You say your master is sick. Hasn't he told you what ails him?"
"Why, massa, 'tain't worf while for to git mad 'bout de matter--Massa
Will say noffin' at all ain't de matter wid him--but den what make him
go about looking dis here way, wid he head down and he soldiers up,
and as white as a gose? And den he keep a syphon all de time--"
"Keeps a what, Jupiter?"
"Keeps a syphon wid de figgurs on de slate--de queerest figgurs I
ebber did see. Ise gittin' to be skeered I tell you. Hab for to keep
mighty tight eye pon him noovers.[10] Todder day he gib me slip fore
de sun up, and was gone de whole ob de blessed day. I had a big stick
ready cut for to gib him d----d good beating when he did come--but Ise
sich a fool dat I hadn't de heart after all--he look so berry poorly."
"Eh?--what? Ah, yes!--upon the whole, I think you had better not be
too severe with the poor fellow--don't flog him, Jupiter, he can't
very well stand it--but can you form an idea of what has occasioned
this illness, or rather this change of conduct? Has anything
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