Science Fiction
by
Gaslight
Books by Sam Moskowitz
The Immortal Storm: A History of Science Fiction Fandom
Men and Milestones in Science Fiction
Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction
Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction
Edited by Sam Moskowitz
Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911
Three Stories by Murray Leinster, Jack Williamson and John Wyndham
Great Spy Novels and Stories (with Roger Elwood)
Strange Signposts (with Roger Elwood)
A Martian Odyssey and Other Classics of Science Fiction by Stanley G. Weinbaum
Exploring Other Worlds
The Coming of the Robots
Great Railroad Stories of the World
Editor’s Choice in Science Fiction
Life Everlasting, and Other Tales of Science, Fantasy and Horror by David H. Keller, M.D.
Men and Milestones in Science Fiction
Masterpieces of Science Fiction
Modern Masterpieces of Science Fiction
Science Fiction by
Gaslight
A HISTORY AND ANTHOLOGY OF SCIENCE FICTION IN THE POPULAR MAGAZINES, 1891-1911
EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
Sam Moskowitz
Photography by Christine E. Haycock, M.D.
The World Publishing Company Cleveland and New York
Published by the World Publishing Company 2231 West 110th Street, Cleveland, Ohio 44102 Published simultaneously in Canada by Nelson, Foster & Scott Ltd.
First Printing 1968
Copyright © 1968 by Sam Moskowitz All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, except for brief passages included in a review appearing in a newspaper or magazine. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-24481
Designed by Christine Wilkinson
Printed in the United States of America
To the memory of my father
HARRY MOSKOWITZ
because he would have been proud
CONTENTS
Introduction: A History of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911
The Thames Valley Catastrophe by Grant Allen
(The Strand Magazine, December 1897)
The Doom of London by Robert Barr
{The Idler, November 1892)
A Corner in Lightning by George Griffith
(Pearson’s Magazine, March 1898)
The Tilting Island by Thomas J. Vivian and Grena J. Bennett
(Everybody’s Magazine, September 1909)
(The Argosy, June 1906)
An Express of the Future by Jules Verne
(The Strand Magazine, January 1895)
The Ray of Displacement by Harriet Prescott Spofford
(The Metropolitan Magazine, October 1903)
Congealing the Ice Trust by Capt. H. G. Bishop, USA
(The New Broadway Magazine, December 1907)
Lord Beden’s Motor by J. B. Harris-Burland
(The Strand Magazine, December 1901)
The Death-Trap by George Daulton
(Pearson’s Magazine, March 1908)
The Air Serpent by Will A. Page
(The Red Book Magazine, April 1911)
The Monster of Lake LaMetrie by Wardon Allan Curtis
(Pearson’s Magazine, September 1899)
The Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson
(The Red Book Magazine, November 1907)
The Land Ironclads by H. G. Wells
(The Strand Magazine, January 1904)
(The Red Book Magazine, April 1911)
(Pearson’s Magazine, February 1905)
The Purple Terror by Fred M. White
(The Strand Magazine, September 1899)
Professor Jonkin’s Cannibal Plant by Howard R. Garis
(The Argosy, August 1905)
An Experiment in Gyro Hats by Ellis Parker Butler
(Hampton’s Magazine, June 1910)
The Hybrid Hyperborean Ant by Roy L. McCardell
(Hampton’s Magazine, December 1910)
SCIENTIFIC CRIME AND DETECTION
Where the Air Quivered by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace
(The Strand Magazine, December 1898)
In re State vs. Forbes by Warren Earle
(The Black Cat, July 1906)
Old Doctor Rutherford by D. F. Hannigan
(The Ludgate Monthly, September 1891)
(The Black Cat, May 1907)
Citizen 504 by Charles H. Palmer
(The Argosy, December 1896)
The Mansion of Forgetfulness by Don Mark Lemon
(The Black Cat, April 1907)
In Explorers of the Infinite and Seekers of Tomorrow the author presented in the broadest strokes a history of science fiction from its earliest beginnings to the present, with the emphasis on certain era builders and pivotal figures who shaped the contour and general direction of the literature. This method was necessary so that the picture would be more than just an outline, so that it would transfer to the reader and to the student of the field a sample of the detailed richness of the subject.
Quite as obviously such a historical method cannot be definitive. The researcher and writer must make value judgments on what is imperative and what is not. He must establish a cut-off point as to how deep he dare delve before his work becomes unwieldy and confusing. Once he has presented a generally accepted, broad-gauge view of the field, it then becomes not only possible but also desirable to focus on those specific areas that provide a rich lode of important and fascinating historical lore.
Such a period for science fiction began in 1891 and ended in 1911. We have somewhat nostalgically (yet accurately) termed this time the “gaslight era,” but the fact that the days of gas illumination and these writings coincide is but a fortunate accident. 1891 was the year when The Strand Magazine, the first mass-circulation, quality middle-class general publication was issued at a price within the reach of all, the equivalent of ten cents. It was a British magazine, but between its American edition and the mass of imitators, it ushered in a golden age of magazines, which began with its January 1891 publication and ended about 1914, at the beginning of World War I. Never before had the middle class and even the working class had such an incredible selection of superb magazines of well-balanced general interest at a reasonable price, and probably they never will again.
The purpose of this volume is to offer a history and a selection of science fiction from the great general magazines of 1891 to 1911. The cut-off point is set at 1911 because early in 1912 the rise of the women’s magazines, coupled with the discovery of the great storyteller Edgar Rice Burroughs, shifted the mainstream of magazine science fiction from the general popular magazines to the specialized adventure pulps, which eventually led to the creation of magazines composed entirely of science fiction.
Having said all this is not to minimize what has been attempted. No one has written a deliberate history of the golden age of magazines, to provide the background and guide for this venture. Frank Luther Mott in his four tremendous volumes titled A History of American Magazines went broadly up to 1905 and died before he could complete the fifth volume that would have covered in great detail the further period and its publications. The Strand, Pearson’s Magazine, Everybody’s, Hampton’s, The Red Book, The Blue Book, The Metropolitan Magazine, and scores of others remained to be done, and we will be fortunate indeed if someone assumes the task and renders it as superbly as Mott covered the previous periodicals.
Even at that, Mott’s history would have been concerned primarily with American publications and the interrelationship and influence of one country upon another would not have been a major current. Theodore Peterson, in his intriguing book, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, titillates us with the socioeconomic factors concerned with the publications of the first sixty years of this century, and tells us just enough about the period under review to make us wish that he had written four volumes like Frank Luther Mott, instead of only one volume of highlights.
The main library in New York City has a great many of these magazines on file, but one cannot spend days on end attempting to read what is unquestionably one of the most extensive collections in the world when that institution is devoted to lighting so dim that the volumes cannot be perused except in the middle of a bright summer’s day by natural light. This fact necessitated contacting scores of dealers and buying as large and representative a selection of magazines from that era as could be found, so that scrutiny and search could proceed without the sure threat of blindness. Such a procedure, one may be assured, is not profitable, but it offers the great advantage of having the magazines always at hand to refer to time and again, instead of worrying about gaps in one’s notes. It also is a great deal of fun.
From these periodicals have been selected the stories in this volume. None has ever appeared in a previous science fiction anthology; the majority have never appeared in hard covers at all. Most of the titles will be unknown to even the hardened collectors of science fiction. In a number of cases, the names of the authors will not be familiar, but as can be seen by the credits, all of these stories came from leading magazines of the period; magazines that maintained respected literary standards.
This is the science fiction that was printed and read during the gaslight era. The intriguing thing about these stories is that, with few exceptions, the action occurs in the times in which the stories were written. Like H. G. Wells’ Martians in The War of the Worlds, who invade the earth in 1898, the events you will read about here include the destruction of the great cities of London and New York; the thrilling tale of a tube under the ocean; the implementation of weather control; systems for walking through walls; the discovery of fantastic monsters on land, sea, and in the air; the unfamiliar wars (did Japan actually invade the United States in 1911?); the man-eating plants; the super but benevolent ants; the incredibly ingenious devices for murders and detection of murderers; the miraculous methods of longevity and cure of disease; the systems of thought control. All have taken place in a familiar yet bewildering “world of if” that once we knew, but not like this!
It was the era of the illustrated magazine, and science fiction was not slighted. Included is a selection of science fiction art, many from the stories in this volume, others from associated sources of the same period. All are from the editor’s own collection. Though they date the stories, the illustrations amaze by their professional competence. They have been photographed especially for this volume by my wife, Christine E. Haycock, M.D., who has displayed extraordinary skill in giving definition to the impressions on aged and fading paper, and retaining enough clarity to make it possible to reproduce them.
Each of the twenty-six stories has an introduction, all the material of which is deliberately planned to be supplemental to the history, giving background on the author, his themes, and magazines not otherwise covered.
Accompanying all this is a history of science fiction in the magazines. This is not intended, except by inadvertence, to be a history of science fiction in hard covers during the period covered. For the first time, the science fiction stories in the magazines of the gaslight era are unified in a serious review. Through necessity, an outline of the great magazines of this era is also provided.
I owe my greatest debt to the rare-magazine dealers, without whom all of this would have been impossible. I must acknowledge special inspiration for the title to Joseph H. Wrzos, formerly managing editor of Amazing Stories and Fantastic. A timely bound file of Pearson’s Magazine and particular assistance on the biographical background of George Griffith were the contributions of the able and conscientious British researcher, Peter Coussee. Retyping my manuscripts on science fiction for the past six years has given Mrs. Rhea Finkelstein a knowledge of the field and a special sort of expertise that lifts her contribution to the finished work out of the realm of a purely technical one. Enthusiasm for the project was no small inducement from editor Wallace Exman. To the reader, I can only hope I have illuminated a previously darkened area of science fiction’s development, and for the authors of these stories (most of them deceased), possibly I have restored to some of them a modicum of deserved stature; hopefully I have revived interest in the works of several that would otherwise have been neglected.
Sam Moskowitz
Newark, New Jersey
January 1968
A HISTORY OF SCIENCE FICTION
IN THE POPULAR MAGAZINES, 1891-1911
Science fiction by gaslight?
A contradiction in terms?
Gaslight conjures up the legendary Baker Street study of Sherlock Holmes; the lavish, rococo generosity of Diamond Jim Brady and his busty companion Lillian Russell; genteel ladies wheeled in elegant horse-drawn carriages through shaded streets; magic lantern slides as the high point of an evening’s entertainment; the grating sound of the ice-cream mixer turning in the kitchen. Where does science fiction fit into so nostalgic a pattern of living?
The seeming dilemma is caused by a profound misunderstanding of the term “gaslight era.” Most people conceive of it as a time before the invention of the electric light in 1879. These same people would be incredulous if they were to see a Gay Nineties moving picture in which one of the characters turned on an electric light.
The electric light was not a single invention at all, but a system of literally hundreds of inventions, ranging from the development of dynamos, switches, cables at one end, and culminating in the electric bulb at the other. In between the invention of the electric light and its universal application lay long years of politics (one did not obtain an exclusive franchise to supply power and light in a community without approval of elected officials) and financing to build power stations, erect phone poles, string lines, and adapt homes and industry for the use of electricity.
All this necessary activity and the political maneuverings would take decades, and peak use of gas for illumination came after the invention of the electric light, sometime in the 1890s. Electricity did not surpass gas as the primary source of light until 1910.
When World War I broke out, public buildings and schools were frequently built with dual gas and electric systems. Such “insurance” can often be found in many homes built after World War I. Conversion when it came was frequently gradual. A family might put electricity in the kitchen and living room first and leave the bedrooms, bathroom, and cellar until later. Large mansions sometimes electrified a single wing. As late as the Roaring Twenties it was still a common sight to see a lamplighter on a bicycle at dusk, riding from lamp to lamp. Certain fashionable suburbs still use gaslights on the streets so that the community may retain a special atmosphere, but automatic pilots from a central switch control them now.
Before 1890, the oil lamp was a more common method of illumination than gas in the American home. In Europe the candle was the mainstay, even in mansions of the wealthy. The great era of gaslight was the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. The flickering gas jets gave that period a false aura of a more natural life and a more leisurely pace. Actually, gas was just a transitional phase between oil lamps and the electric light, and the supplanting of gas by electricity was merely the outward manifestation of an orgy of change and development; an incredible procession of invention and scientific discovery that was remaking the world beyond any hope of reversion.
The electric light cleared all shadows away from what had been happening. It was a world, even then, of the typewriter replacing the pen; the telephone bringing fast communication; the automobile putting the horse into pasture; floating hotels providing overseas travel; skyscrapers grasping toward the sky, with electric elevators to make them functional; phonograph records bringing the voices of great artists into the home; Eastman’s little black box outmoding the portrait painter; nickelodeons enchanting crowds with awkwardly jumpy motion pictures; and, almost forgotten but equally wonderful, it was the golden age of the marriage between educated masses and the popular magazine.
Progress had improved production methods and lowered the price of paper. Electrotype and linotype machines speeded up composition and drastically lowered costs. A little-known researcher, Frederic Ives, working at Cornell University with the camera, had come up with a satisfactory method of photoengraving which cut costs of illustrating magazines down to a fraction of that for wood cuts, steel engravings, or other procedures. Electric engines powered giant presses, increasing speed and improving quality of printing as well as making it possible to print more pages simultaneously. A nationwide distribution system, American News, evolved in the United States, which made practical the sale of magazines in railroad stations, ferry terminals, candy stores, street stands, and almost anywhere that groups of people congregated. Publishers were no longer dependent upon subscription solicitation by mail to obtain readers.
Previous to 1890, in both the United States and England, there were two predominant classes of readership: the educated and well-to-do on the one hand; and the great masses, including the workers and immigrants and the growing youngsters with meager education and limited income on the other. For the educated and well-to-do there were stately magazines: Harper’s, Atlantic, Scribner’s, Lippincott’s, and The Century; they were high-brow, with an excellent balance of both American and foreign material—fiction and nonfiction—copiously illustrated with photographs as well as line drawings and halftones. Generally they sold for 25 cents in a day when a male factory worker with a family considered himself fortunate to earn 7 dollars for a six-day week. The same condition prevailed in England where the periodicals were far inferior to those in America in quality, printing, and illustration and where such titles as Cassell’s, The Cornhill, Belgravia, and Longman’s were selling for a shilling, the equivalent of 25 cents.
The better magazines were generally sponsored by book publishing firms, which regarded them as a media of continuing promotion for their hardcover titles, both in the direct use of advertisements and in the more subtle employment of excerpts from books and critiques on authors which they published.
For the great segment of the population of the United States and England that could not afford the 25-cent magazine, there were nickel weeklies (in England as cheap as 1 pence, less than 2 cents) which ran an endless cycle of serials, sometimes three or four an issue. Paper novels for youngsters sold for 5 cents and paperbacks (not unlike those sold today) for adults which ran a complete novel were available at 5 cents to 10 cents. The term “dime novel” was a misnomer; most dime novels sold for a nickel.
In the low-price field by far the greatest quantity of available reading matter was aimed at the teenage boy and children under twelve years of age. There was no end of variety—westerns, detectives, sports stories, love stories, sea tales, fame-to-fortune wish fulfilment of the Horatio Alger mold, business success stories, and even science fiction.
With great inventors like Thomas Alva Edison, Alexander Graham Hell, George Eastman, and Simon Lake making newspaper headlines, it was scarcely surprising that science fiction would be included among the literary bill of fare, at least for teenagers. Appropriately, such stories eventually came to be called “invention novels” and in those tales was forecast a continuous and sometimes repetitious parade of aircraft, submarines, tanks, and robots.
For the rapidly growing educated lower class and middle class—a grammar school education was available to most and high school to many —there was little. The better magazines were too expensive, the others too cheap and juvenile. An indication of the small penetration of periodical reading matter made in the general population was the circulation of such leaders as The Century, which boasted little more than 100,000 monthly sales by 1890.
The break with the “establishment” that finally introduced a quality low-priced family magazine to the middle classes came in England and not in the United States. The publisher was George Newnes, who had made an outstanding success of gathering “human interest” stories from newspapers throughout England and featuring them in a weekly, launched with the issue of October 22, 1881, titled Tit-Bits (and still published today). The paper was composed of scores of short items ranging from its inspiration—a clipping concerning a runaway train—through oddments on trapped pets, bizarre crimes, monetary windfalls, unusual avocations, military episodes, thrilling rescues, and a potpourri of items that today form the backbone of the tabloids of both the United States and Great Britain.
Encouraged by the standing he had achieved with Tit-Bits (by 1890 it rated a building at 359 Burleigh Street, London, with an impressive sign on the roof proclaiming the name of the magazine), George Newnes engaged the former editor of The Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead, the leading literary critic of the era, and an entire staff to assist him in the production of a magazine to be titled Review of Reviews which would comb the best from the various publications of the day in the manner of today’s Reader’s Digest. A severance of relations with Stead before publication of the first issue caused him to think the policy of the new magazine through. Newnes discarded Review of Reviews (though Stead went on to publish it himself) and, employing the format of America’s Harper’s and Scribner’s as his guide, came up with the first issue of The Strand Magazine, dated January 1891.
Newnes’ policies were unusual. He strove to have an illustration on every page of the magazine and featured many picture stories of the type common in today’s periodicals, but infrequent at that time. At first he ran no serials and stressed the fact that every article and work of fiction was complete. He managed to enjoy the best of both worlds by inaugurating “series” stories and articles that were complete in themselves, yet frequently ran on in many related episodes longer than any novel or full-length book. Most important, the magazine, published on high-grade coated paper, sold for only 6 pence, or about 10 cents.
The title The Strand was derived from the name of London’s oldest street and its history was delineated in an article in the first issue, titled The Story of the Strand. The early issues ran illustrated articles, many with photographs, on such subjects as fire departments, animal hospitals, the police, minting of coins, and street-corner photography. Grant Allen, philosopher, naturalist, and outstanding fiction stylist, had a new railroad story, A Deadly Dilemma, in the first number, but because British authors did not write the short story as commonly as writers of other nations, a very large percentage of the fiction was in translation from the Continent, works by Alphonse Daudet, Michael Lermontoff, Paul Heyse, Leo Lespes, Alexander Pushkin, and Jules Clarelie. Americans Bret Harte and Frank R. Stockton were early represented in The Strand’s pages.
The magazine had asserted in its initial prospectus that “Special features which have not hitherto found place in Magazine Literature will be introduced from time to time.” These included such regular departments as “Portraits of Celebrities at Various Ages” and reproductions of handwritten notes by famed clergymen, authors, artists, performers, politicians, and others. There was a series of illustrated interviews which would eventually include authors noted for their science fiction and fantasy such as H. Rider Haggard (January 1892), A. Conan Doyle (August 1892), and Jules Verne (February 1895).
Acceptance of the magazine was instantaneous, and by the time its third issue was mailed imitators were already appearing. Some of them were financially viable, but their efforts to overtake The Strand were to be in vain. Tremendous impetus was to be given The Strand when, beginning with its July 1891 issue, it contracted to run a series of Sherlock Holmes stories by A. Conan Doyle, beginning with A Scandal in Bohemia. Only two other Sherlock Holmes stories had been previously published and they had made little impact: A Study in Scarlet (Beeton’s Christmas Annual, 1887) and The Sign of the Four (Lippincott’s, February 1890).
Six Sherlock Holmes stories appeared in The Strand consecutively between July and December 1891, and they made Conan Doyle famous. Before the sixth was published his name was a household word, America was crying for reprints, and he was on the threshold of literary immortality. Following A Scandal in Bohemia, The Strand published The Red Headed League, A Case of Identity, The Buscombe Valley Mystery, The Five Orange Pips and The Man with the Twisted Lip. Months before the last was printed it was obvious to The Strand’s editor, Greenough Smith, that the series must continue. Doyle was cool to all his pleas, planning to write a historical novel of the French Canadians titled The Refugees next. Finally, to silence Smith, Doyle dictated that he would only consider carrying on Sherlock Holmes for £50 per story (about $250) irrespective of length (he had received £35 a story for the previous six). His offer was accepted and when he had delivered that batch, he demanded £1,000 ($5,000) for another twelve stories and got it! Finally he closed the first set of Sherlock Holmes stories with The Adventure of the Final Problem (December 1893) where Holmes grapples with his arch-foe, Professor Moriarity, near Reichenbach Falls, and presumably falls to his death in the abyss, carrying the master criminal with him.
Once having published fiction of such general excellence and dramatic appeal as the Sherlock Holmes stories, The Strand was under no obligation to be traditional in its selection. This left the door open for science fiction and fantasy. Even the articles helped pave the way for such fiction, particularly Some Curious Inventions (January 1892), presenting various unusual devices either in use or registered at the patent offices of Great Britain and the United States.
Jules Verne was still the world master of science fiction, so to have him appear in the pages of The Strand would be to enhance them. Verne’s Dr. Trifulgus—A Fantastic Tale (July 1892) was new to the English. A money-hungry doctor in the town of Luktrop (which cannot be found on any map) refuses to come to the aid of a dying man until a very high fee has been paid in advance. Against a background of rumbling volcanoes, torrents of rain, and a lashing sea, Dr. Trifulgus trudges to attend and watch his own death.
A few years later The Strand would present the first English translation of a short story more in Verne’s usual tradition, An Express of the Future (January 1895), in which a method of pneumatic travel through undersea tubes from the United States to France is suggested.
The “monster” theme was introduced in Part Nine of a series of stories titled “Shafts from an Eastern Quiver,” The Keeper of the Great Burman, written by Charles J. Mansford, B.A. (March 1893), where a tree spider, large enough to carry off a man, is killed in that very attempt.
M. P. Shiel, who in the new century would make his reputation with The Purple Cloud, was represented in The Strand with two nonfantasies, Guy Harkaway’s Substitute (October 1893) and The Eagle’s Crag (September 1894). The Purple Cloud, with its gloomy adumbrations of all mankind destroyed except one explorer returning from the poles, would be serialized in The Royal Magazine (A companion to Pearson’s Magazine) from January to June 1900. Stylistically a prototype of Thomas Wolfe’s work, this story, with its eloquent soliloquizing, evoked mixed reactions in readers who followed a protagonist who burns cities in a neurotic frenzy and almost eats a young girl he meets who has survived the catastrophe.
If there was any question that Sherlock Holmes had sparked a new wave of detective heroes and that The Strand was the publication carrying on the tradition, it was settled by the appearance of the “Martin Hewitt, Investigator” series, of which the first, The Lenton Craft Robberies by Arthur Morrison, began in the March 1894 issue. This was obviously an effort to compensate for the demise of Sherlock Holmes only three months earlier, for even the famed Holmes illustrator, Sidney Paget, was recruited to illustrate the series.
Doyle, still continently refraining from relaxing his ban on new Sherlock Holmes stories, did appear with The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, a series on the Napoleonic Wars beginning in the April 1895 issue and later Rodney Stone, a prize-fight novel commencing in November 1895.
The first story in a new adventure group, “Gleams from the Dark Continent,” was by Charles J. Mansford, author of “Shafts from an Eastern Quiver.” It was a good lost-race story concerning the discovery of the remnants of an ancient Egyptian order in Africa. Its title, The Veiled Idol of Kor (July 1895), is indicative of its nature, the story concluding with the dethroning of the evil white queen who has held the natives in superstitious bondage.
The Strand had an American edition edited by James Walter Smith which sold for 10 cents. In a real sense George Newnes had reached across the Atlantic to offer to the American middle class the same fare that had proved so phenomenally satisfying to the British. Basically the American edition was similar to the British, with the exception that it was dated one month later, and that there was a substitution of articles of American interest for those too peculiarly British.
To offer a precise example, the March 1899 issue of The Strand was dated April in the United States. A six-page commentary on the British Parliament, “From the Speaker’s Chair” by Henry Lucy, was deleted from the American edition and in its place was a six-page short story by the popular Naval expert and sea-story writer Walter Wood, The Loading of the Convoy. A nine-page feature, Baron Brampton of Brampton by “E,” was eliminated in favor of A Single-Line Railway by William Shortis, an article on a British road, and Making a Life Madly, a short story by Harry Hems.
What of the new competition spawned by the appearance of The Strand?
One of the first imitators, most blatant and most eager, was The Ludgate Monthly, launched in April 1891, almost instantly after the appearance of the first issue of The Strand. Like The Strand, it had a near identical stock cover, showing the street on Ludgate Hill from which it derived its name. It sold for half the price, 3 pence instead of 6 pence, and it topped The Strand by actually getting at least one illustration on every page of the magazine and two or more on some. The only difference in editorial approach of The Ludgate Monthly was that it would carry words and music of a song as one of its features.
Destined to become better known was Pall Mall Magazine, which was a rather genteel adaptation of The Strand, more like an illustrated book than a magazine. Among its contributors were such noted names as Rudyard Kipling, Israel Zangwill, C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, Frank R. Stockton, George Meredith, George Chesney, and Mrs. Beatrice Kipling.
Of very special interest, and by far the best of the early group of imitators, was The Idler. Basically it employed the same format as The Strand, but with this difference. It was the “smart aleck” of the field, with just a touch of irreverence, a hint of iconoclasm, and a great deal of sophistication. This was scarcely to be wondered at, for its joint owners and editors, Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr, were men with a reputation for wit and candor as well as considerable literary competence. Jerome, humorist and playwright, had scored his biggest hit in 1889 with the play Three Men in a Boat. Scottish-born Barr received his training on a Detroit newspaper and had an early reputation for hair-raising escapades in connection with his work.
The Idler, which commenced publication with its February 1891 issue, was book-size, ran as liberal a quantity of illustrations as The Strand, and set its type single-column across the page.
The fiction was, if anything, more distinguished than The Strand’s, including in its early issues important works by Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Israel Zangwill, A. Conan Doyle, Eden Phillpotts, Barry Pain, Bret Harte, Jerome K. Jerome, and Robert Barr. Its literary tone was further enhanced with a department titled My First Book in which authors as renowned as Rudyard Kipling, Grant Allen, W. Clark Russell, Hall Caine, A. Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Israel Zangwill, and R. M. Ballantyne elaborated, with photographs, the conditions surrounding their first sanctification in hard covers. Every issue carried a full-page literary cartoon by Scott Rankin, People I Have Never Met, which included caricatures of Robert Louis Stevenson, Andrew Lang, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Israel Zangwill, and other figures of similar stature.
The same literary character was sustained in The Idler’s Club, a lengthy department in which most of the well-known contributors to The Idler expounded on a topic-of-the-month, whether it be an anecdote, the best place to loaf, smoking, or ghosts. All in all, it was a thoroughly delightful magazine, the mecca of all the smart set, though still basically aimed at and within the means of the middle-class audience.
Both Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr delighted in science fiction, fantasy, the ghost-story, and the off-trail yarn. Both wrote such stories themselves and for their own publication. Barr was prolific enough to be considered an important fantasy writer of his period, making his most notable impression with The Doom of London (November 1892), in which England’s largest metropolis is wiped out by the smog. Jerome K. Jerome contributed, in the context of Novel Notes (August 1893), a truly remarkable story of an electrical robot of masculine appearance, built to serve as a dancing partner, easily regulated by the girl, and capable of speaking a recorded patter. The robot has many virtues, the inventor assures the women assembled at a ball: “He never gets tired; he won’t kick you or tread on your dress; he will hold you as firmly as you like and go as quickly or as slowly as you please; he never gets giddy; and he is full of conversation.” The invention also has certain serious faults. The story was anthologized as The Dancing Partner in The Omnibus of Crime, edited by Dorothy L. Sayers in 1929.
The predilection of the editors for an unusual story was displayed throughout the life of the magazine. Mark Twain’s serial novel The American Claimant (February to December 1892) had all the atmosphere of science fiction, when an erratic scientist believes he has materialized from the ashes of the past the heir to a British title. It turns out to have been a misconception, but there are other tricks up the scientist’s sleeve, such as a swearing phonograph to cut down the number of mates needed on ships at sea and a sure-fire method of creating climates-to-order, to please inhabitants of various parts of the globe.
Vested with much of the same flip character of Twain’s tongue-in-cheek novel was Conan Doyle’s The Los Amigos Fiasco (December 1892), in which an attempt to execute a criminal in the electric chair results in the creation of a superman, impossible to electrocute, hang, or kill with bullets, and apparently infused with the energy to outlive the brick jail that confines him. Edward Lester Arnold, who gained a reputation for The Wonderful Adventures of Phra the Phoenician (Harper’s, 1890), the story of a man who is killed or dies and returns to life three times, centuries apart, in a series of absorbing sagas, played the same theme in a shorter scope in Rutherford the Twiceborne for The Idler (May 1892).
For a brief time it appeared that The Idler would enjoy an American edition, as Jerome K. Jerome and Robert Barr were friendly with S. S. McClure, the American who had organized the first syndicate distributing fiction to newspapers. McClure was frequently in Europe seeking stories for his syndicate and it was predominantly due to his efforts that Sherlock Holmes was popularized in the United States. He seriously planned to issue The Idler in the United States, and then discarded the notion, starting his own publication, McClure’s Magazine, whose first issue was dated June 1893.
McClure’s Magazine was patterned after The Strand, and even adapted certain of its features, such as portraits of celebrities at various ages (which it called “Human Documents”). This concept actually made the magazine, for on discovering that a Boston lawyer, Gardiner G. Hubbard, had an unparalleled assemblage of portraits and engravings of Napoleon Bonaparte at various stages of his life, McClure had Ida Tarbell, who was to become one of the editors of his magazine and one of the greatest of all “muckrakers,” write a six-part biography of Napoleon to accompany eighty-two portraits. Beginning in the November 1894 issue, the series pushed the circulation up from 35,000 to 100,000 and placed the magazine among the world’s leaders.
The superb quality of McClure’s fiction and articles has frequently been praised, but what has not been said is that in the early years, on an exchange arrangement, a substantial part of its fiction and many of its best articles were reprinted from The Idler. Much of the good science fiction and fantasy from The Idler ended up in McClure’s Magazine, including Conan Doyle, Bret Harte, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Barr, and the very popular interviews with leading authors.
A particularly notable science fiction prize by McClure’s was first publication of With The Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling, which ran in their November 1905 issue. This was a short story of the future, in which there was regular passenger service by dirigible, and Kipling even invented new slang terms to go with his world of tomorrow. The short story, illustrated in color, was published as a separate book by Doubleday & Page in 1909 and became a bestseller.
At one period, when it seemed that McClure’s was doomed because of an impending note for $5,000, it was saved by a check from Conan Doyle, investing in the magazine as a note of appreciation for what S. S. McClure had done to establish his reputation in the United States.
McClure’s was to drop its price from 15 cents to 10 cents and create in America the popular magazine for the middle classes, just as The Strand had done in England. McClure’s example would soon be followed by Cosmopolitan, Munsey’s, and then a parade of other publications, opening what has rightly been termed “The Golden Age of the Magazines” in America, running from 1893 through to just before World War I.
Science fiction had appeared in The Strand, simply because the off-trail beat to their stories, set by the precedent of the Sherlock Holmes yarns, did not preclude it. These stories were not numerous or frequent, they simply were not categorically barred. Science fiction appeared in The Idler because the editors wrote it and liked it. Because McClure’s reprinted from The Idler, it, too, published science fiction. But in 1895 occurred a literary event that was to alter the attitude toward science fiction in the popular magazines from one of sufferance to planned inclusion. That event was the appearance of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells.
The serialization of The Time Machine in The New Review in five instalments (January to May 1895) brought a running commentary from W. T. Stead in the Review of Reviews in which Wells was called “a man of genius.” Coming from Stead, possibly the most acclaimed journalist of his day, this comment was no wilted bouquet.
Acclaim elsewhere was immediate and widespread. Frank Harris, the notorious editor of the London Evening News, praised The Time Machine highly. Harris had published the young H. G. Wells’ early speculative piece, The Rediscovery of the Unique (Fortnightly Review, July 1891), which contained some of the basic theory he would later use in The Time Machine, and had also set another seminal article, The Universe Rigid, in type, but never printed it. Frank Harris himself, though best known for My Life and Loves, wrote a science fiction novel, Pantopia, published by Panurge Press, New York, in a limited edition of 1250 numbered copies in 1930. The novel of a “utopian” civilization on an unknown island was written many years before publication and contained the expected quota of sex, but it also had a certain amount of technical invention, and was privately published when Harris was seventy-four, only a year before his death.
The views of many critics on Wells reflected those of novelist Ford Madox Ford in 1898: “I do not have to assure you that it did not take us long to recognize that here was Genius. Authentic, real Genius. And delightful at that.”
Since 1893, short stories by H. G. Wells, predominantly science fiction, had appeared in The Pall Mall Gazette and The Pall Mall Budget, but very little attention was paid to them. Included were such stories as The Advent of the Flying Man, dealing with the invention of a parachute by a British soldier to get off a cliff on which he is trapped by natives; The Stolen Bacillus, a chemical that will turn living creatures blue; The Flowering of the Strange Orchid, concerning a plant that overpowers men with its odor and drains their blood; In the Avu Observatory, where an astronomer fights a grim battle with a huge batlike creature; Aepyornis Island, which sees the hatching of an egg of the biggest of all extinct birds; and The Diamond Maker, of a man who can make diamonds artificially. Many of these stories appeared in weekly succession with Wells hacking them out to keep food on the table.
Suddenly it was different. The more popular and better-paying magazines courted him. Now, not only Wells, but science fiction was “in.” First in line was The Idler. The Red Room, in that publication (March 1896), a well-done story of a castle bedroom where the candles and fireplace mysteriously snuff out, reads as though it might have provided inspiration for William Hope Hodgson’s The House Among the Laurels, a “Carnacki, The Ghost Finder” story, which would run in the March 1910 issue of The Idler. The Story of the Late Mr. Elvesham, the tale of a man who discovers the secret of transferring his personality into a younger body as he grows old, appeared in the May 1896 issue of The Idler. It was followed in October of the same year with The Apple, telling of a man who is given “The Fruit of Knowledge” from the scrub apple trees still growing from the seeds in the partially eaten apple that Adam and Eve sampled and discarded. The five stories that made up A Story of the Stone Age, a series about prehistoric man, ran in The Idler for May, June, July, August, and November 1897.
Far more important than The Idler in promoting H. G. Wells and science fiction to the public was a new publication, Pearson’s Magazine, whose first issue, dated January 1896, appeared on the newsstands January 1. Pearson’s Magazine was the most unblushing, forthright imitation of The Strand yet to appear. C. Arthur Pearson, publisher, was noted for his book publishing activities, a monthly titled Short Stories, Pearson’s Weekly, and other periodicals. Unlike The Idler, which waited well into its second year before acknowledging its debt to George Newnes (which it then did in “style” in a fourteen-page illustrated feature), Pearson’s Magazine in its second, February 1896, issue, ran a highly complimentary piece on George Newnes, with not only his picture, but the covers of his magazines, The Strand and Tit-Bits.
Had Pearson’s Magazine and The Strand changed titles any given month, it would have been extremely difficult, on the basis of internal evidence, for the reader to tell them apart. Pearson’s Magazine ran “series” in preference to serials. They had an illustration or two on virtually every page. In fiction they secured the efforts of Conan Doyle, Bret Harte, and Rudyard Kipling (running his novel Captains Courageous starting in the December 1897 number). They had a very popular series on espionage and intrigue titled “Secrets of the Courts of Europe— The Confidence of an Ex-Ambassador” by Allen Upward. They ran a feature called “The Bravest Deeds I Ever Saw” and interviewed celebrities in a department titled “Lions in Their Den.”
While the first story by Wells that Pearson’s ran, The Rajah’s Treasure (July 1896) was not fantasy at all, hinging on a joke, where the legendary “treasure” of a potentate turns out to be a cache of whiskey, the second story, In the Abyss (August 1896), involving the descent of a man in a bathysphere to discover a race of human-like reptilian creatures who have built cities beneath the seas, is one of Wells’ most highly regarded short stories.
Arthur Pearson did not buy science fiction because of the expediency that it happened to be written by Wells. The January 21, 1893, issue of his magazine Pearson’s Weekly had begun the anonymous serialization of a history-making novel titled Angel of the Revolution. This novel dealt with an attack on England by a vast Russian air armada and its repulse with the aid of an aerial fleet financed by a Jewish business tycoon with hypnotic powers. The novel was issued in hard covers under the author’s name, George Griffith, in October of that year and in one month the sixth edition had sold out and the book went on to become one of the top sellers ever published by Pearson, spawning a sequel and many follow-up science fiction novels. It accelerated the trend toward future war novels for which it may have represented a high-water mark for a single book.
Pearson brought George Griffith to his new magazine with War in the Water (February 1896), theorizing a battle between two fleets of ironclads, something which had not taken place up to that time. Many pieces by Griffith were reprinted from early issues of Pearson’s Weekly where they had appeared anonymously. In the same issue it ran Cutcliffe Hyne’s London’s Danger, in which all of London’s hydrants freeze during one cold winter, and a fire starts that rages unchecked, kills 500,000, and sends the remnants out plundering the countryside. England never recovers, her colonies are taken from her, and she is forced to sign humiliating treaties. An author’s wish-fulfilment was expressed in A Genius for a Year by Levin Carnese (June 1896), where a series of pills invests a man with literary brilliance for a limited period. The Man Child by W. Bert Foster (December 1896) was a lost-race story of white Indians and their strange civilization.
The publication of In the Abyss by Wells (July 1896) also underscored a special associational phenomenon that has existed concomitant with science fiction through the years: the artist specializing in such work. The first of these specialists was Fred T. Jane, whose illustrations accompanied The Angel of the Revolution. Jane went on to illustrate many science fiction books, including a number that he wrote himself. The second was Warwick Goble, who was to illustrate the lion’s share of science fiction for Pearson’s, as well as the frequent speculative and scientific features they ran. His illustrations for In the Abyss showed great imagination, delineated with just enough reticence of detail to sustain the mystery but not so much as to show a lack of imagination. He was equally adept at machines and monsters and, unlike many artists specializing in science fiction, had apparently mastered the basics of human anatomy.
When Pearson’s Magazine scored its mightiest coup, the first publication of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (April to December 1897), Goble outdid himself with as many as a dozen splendidly atmospheric illustrations each installment, fifteen of which were reprinted in the first American hardcover edition (Harper & Bros., New York, 1898). Wells’ The Invisible Man had run in Pearson’s Weekly during the months of June and July and had been placed into hard covers by Pearson’s the same year.
There is little question that Wells’ masterpiece of the invasion of the earth by the Martians did more to establish that author with the general public than any single work before or after that time. It gripped the imagination as few stories had ever done, fitting into the context of the future war craze typified by George Griffith’s best sellers. When the book appeared it was highly praised. The War of the Worlds made Wells a major figure in the United States where it was also a best seller. Cosmopolitan, one of the leading popular magazines in America, had a circulation of 400,000 in May 1897 when it began serialization of War of the Worlds. It also reproduced the illustrations of Warwick Goble.
The War of the Worlds was syndicated in American papers in late 1897 and early 1898 and the locale may very well have been changed for each individual city in which it ran. Robert H. Goddard, the great American rocket experimenter, said in his autobiography that “In January, 1898, there appeared daily for several months in the Boston Post the story, Fighters from Mars, or the War of the Worlds, in and near Boston. This, as well as the story which followed it, Edison’s Conquest of Mars, by Garrett P. Serviss, gripped my imagination tremendously.”
The indication was that Edison’s Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss was also syndicated. It had evidently been commissioned to follow immediately The War of the Worlds and was intended to be a sequel. Garrett P. Serviss was an astronomer and popular science writer who was familiar with Pearson’s Magazine, his article Climbing Mont Blanc in a Blizzard having appeared in the September 1896 issue.
This was Serviss’s first attempt at science fiction and his deadline must have been tight, since The War of the Worlds concluded in the December 1897 Cosmopolitan. Conceivably he wrote the installments as the serial ran, for the first chapter of Edison’s Conquest of Mars appeared in the New York Journal January 12, 1898, and ran each day except for Sundays in twenty-six installments through to February 10, 1898. The story told of the assemblage of the great minds of the world, under the aegis of Thomas Alva Edison, to build a space fleet, armed with disintegrator rays, to destroy the Martians before they could mount a second attack on earth.
The more than fifty illustrations, most of them by P. Gray, are historically important, showing massed space fleets, men outside their ships floating weightless in space suits, and close-ups of the moon, the asteroids, Mars, and the Martians.
Not as well known, but obviously similarly inspired was At War With Mars, or the Boys Who Won by Weldon J. Cobb, serialized in the boys’ weekly, Golden Hours, September 25, 1897, to November 27, 1897. This story was begun after only a few installments of War of the Worlds had appeared in Cosmopolitan and it had a similar plot, the landing of a spaceship from Mars and a battle with a bizarre group of strange creatures that emerge from it.
Several years later, obviously derived in this case from Serviss’s serial, To Mars With Tesla, or The Mystery of Hidden Worlds by Weldon J. Cobb was serialized in Golden Hours, March 30, 1901, to May 18, 1901. The hero was a youthful scientific genius, Frank Edison, “nephew of a noted scientific savant,” who works with the great scientist Nikola Tesla to communicate with Mars.
From his fellow authors H. G. Wells received a salute in the form of the satire, The War of the Weneses by C. L. Graves and E. V. Lucas, issued in hard covers by J. Arrowsmith, Bristol, England, in 1898. In this farce the earth is invaded by a bevy of beauties from Venus intent on taking the earthmen back with them. The dedication page reads: “To H. G. Wells this outrage on a fascinating and convincing romance.”
Wells was so big now that he simply could not be ignored. Furthermore, Pearson’s Magazine had become a dramatically effective publication, unquestionably just behind The Strand in circulation in two short years and growing quickly. Its December 1897 issue was startling for the period, with at least sixty of its editorial pages printed in a variety of colors, with portfolios of illustrations in three colors.
The Strand, which previously had always led, was now following. H. G. Wells turned up in its October 1898 issue with Mr. Ledbetter’s Vacation, a story of a schoolmaster intimidated by a house entering and forced to make a prolonged escapade with an embezzler. This was followed in November 1898 with The Stolen Body, dealing with a man who is successful in leaving his body and is able to project himself distances by the power of his will. (He returns to find his body in the possession of another and is involved in a struggle for its return.)
Previous to that, The Strand had secured from scientist and literary stylist Grant Allen an outstanding story, The Thames Valley Catastrophe (December 1897), in which London is wiped out by a lava flow from a fault in the earth. And in 1898, The Strand also came up with several good pieces of science fiction, including The Purple Terror (September 1898), a superior man-eating plant story by Fred M. White; and Where the Air Quivered by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, one of the earliest uses of a gas gun as a weapon (December 1898). Despite this, there was some indication that The Strand was having trouble getting science fiction of the standards it demanded. This was evidenced not so much by the paucity of science fiction run during 1899, but by the Erckmann-Chatrian short story The Spider of Guyana, translated from the French for its January 1899 issue. This tale of a giant spider, living in a cave near a warm springs health resort in France, and its deadly search for food, had been translated into English by Julia de Kay for the American fiction magazine Romance (October 1893) as The Crab Spider. It may have been old even then, and its revival by a magazine economically capable of bidding for the newest works of the world’s best writers seems to indicate stress.
Pearson’s was holding its own in science fiction. Their regular contributor George Griffith offered A Corner in Lightning (March 1898), showing the growing reliance of civilization upon electricity and the effects if it were cut off. This preoccupation with electrical power was reflected in Master of the Octopus by Edward Olin Weeks (October 1899), constructed around the invention of a magnificent ball of light, requiring no power source at all. An extraordinarily advanced concept in science fiction had appeared a month earlier, where the brain of a man is surgically transferred into the body of a giant prehistoric reptile in The Monster of Lake LaMetrie by Wardon Allan Curtis (September 1899).
The really “big” story for Pearson’s Magazine during 1899 was J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s The Lost Continent (July to December) telling of the last days before the sinking of the continent of Atlantis and the survival of a man and a woman in an ingeniously constructed “ark,” stocked with provisions and basic supplies to see them through for many years. To the science fiction collector, The Lost Continent was the high point of J. Cutcliffe Hyne’s career, and the book edition issued in 1900 by Harper’s has become a highly desirable item. Fortunately, it sold well enough to make copies far from rare and some of the illustrations of strange species of creatures and Atlantean pageantry by Ernest Prater, which accompanied the serialization of the story, were included in hard covers.
Despite this, and despite the fact that Cutcliffe Hyne wrote a number of other quite legitimate novels of science fiction, he was best known during his own time for his remarkable tales of Captain Kettle, a tough, ruthless, Vandyke-bearded and later peg-legged sprite of a man, who began his adventures in the February 1897 Pearson’s Magazine and remained a favorite of readers on both sides of the Atlantic in dozens of stories through to The Last of Captain Kettle (Pearson’s Magazine, February 1903). So bizarre and offbeat were Captain Kettle’s exploits (conducted nobly to make enough money to see his wife and children comfortable), that the collected volumes of his adventures were rather generously listed in The Checklist of Fantastic Literature (edited by Everett F. Bleiler 1948) as fantasy.
For the next few years both magazines would strive hard to excel in science fiction and would to a degree succeed, but their problem was compounded by the proliferation of magazines both in the United States and Europe, many of them of such substantial means that they were able to compete impressively for the better things available. Pearson’s now had an American edition, introducing it in 1898, so the influence of the fiction they printed was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. While The Strand roughly followed its British edition, the American Pearson’s was a stew of material from previous issues and new work especially written for the United States. While much of the fiction of the British edition eventually showed up in America, this was not the case with the nonfiction.
Another situation that affected the big-circulation general magazines was the beginning of a trend toward adult, all-fiction publications. Most all-fiction magazines up to then had been slanted toward lower-income groups, teenagers, and children.
There had been such publications previously, including the attractive, digest-size Romance, but they sold for 25 cents, too strong for the incomes of that day. England saw the introduction of a superior all-fiction magazine, Chapman’s, in 1895, running many tales of horror and the supernatural, including works of Arthur Machen, M. P. Shiel, E. F. Benson, Mary E. Wilkins, and Eden Phillpotts, but despite its quality it was no match for the unusual formula introduced in a peculiarly titled American magazine, The Black Cat. The first number of The Black Cat was October 1895 and its publisher was a former advertising man named Herman D. Umbstaetter, who had many novel ideas about publishing that were obviously all wrong, except that they worked.
First, since the 10-cent magazines such as McClure’s and Munsey’s were doing so well, he would introduce a 5-cent magazine. Second, the magazine would be 100 per cent fiction, all short stories, with no serials at any time and no stories longer than 5,000 words (later the limit was stretched). Third, most of the content would be made up of stories from amateurs. The magazine in its early issues would advertise:
$100.00—For a Ghost Story. $150.00—For a Story of Adventure. $200.00— For a Story of Mystery. $500.00—For a Detective Story. $1,000.00—For a Love Story. Stories which are tersely told . . . which are free from padding, foreign phrases, and attempted fine writing. No dialect stories, poetry, or foreign translations will be considered. Payment for accepted manuscripts will be made—not according to length, but according to the editor’s opinion of their worth. Manuscripts will be paid for on the day of acceptance.
Continuous prize contests kept entries pouring in, and most of The Black Cat’s contents was made up of beginning writers. In later years Umbstaetter, who handled all selective functions, claimed the discovery of Jack London, Rupert Hughes, Octavus Roy Cohen, and Ellis Parker Hutler, among others. The editor preferred the off-trail, unusual yarn, and a substantial percentage of the content was of this nature. The title led people to believe that The Black Cat was a magazine of the supernatural and horror. It was not, though if the only issue one happened to pick up was the February 1896 one, five of the six stories could have been classified as fantasy. The lead story, The Mysterious Card by Cleveland Moffett, telling of an American given a card inscribed in French by an unknown woman, who finds that attempts to get the message interpreted result in the complete ruin of his life, was one of the two or three most popular stories ever run in the magazine, and Moffett went on to become a successful science and science fiction writer.
Each issue carried a sketch of a black cat on the cover, but it was a good-natured cat, more like a well-groomed, sophisticated Walt Disney creation than something out of Edgar Allan Poe. Imitators sprang up called The Owl, The Gray Goose, The White Elephant, and Wayward Tales, which were never to be as well known or as long-lived.
The Black Cat was published in Boston, was half-letter size, printed on coated stock, unillustrated, with text single-column across the page like a book, and ran sixty-four pages, of which at least twenty were advertising. It rarely carried more than six stories an issue. Among these were some that may be classed as science fiction, though usually the scientific premise and explanation was weak.
Publisher Umbstaetter had a story (of rather good quality) in each of the first three issues under his own name and the first tale that could be pinpointed as science fiction was written by him in collaboration with T. F. Anderson for the April 1896 number, titled The Mystery of the Thirty Millions. It takes place seven years in the future when a Russian ship with a supermagnet almost succeeds in taking into tow an American liner with $30,000,000 in gold aboard. The same issue contained A Surgical Love Cure by James Buckham, dealing with the invention of special medical techniques for curing a universal human affliction.
Stories of the nature of A Surgical Love Cure, a little tongue-in-cheek with ephemeral scientific base, were common in The Black Cat. Two such tales, For Fame, Money or Love? by R. Ottolengui, involving the theory of translating music into poetry, and A Hundred Thousand Dollar Trance by Eugene Shade Bisbee, of hypnotically causing a man to age fifty years in minutes, appeared in the May 1896 issue.
A bit more tangible was The Man with the Box by George W. Tripp (July 1896), involving a machine that can turn water into any beverage desired and is capable of producing even more unusual effects.
A highly touted sequel to The Mysterious Card, titled The Mysterious Card Unveiled (August 1896), came close to turning the two stories into science fiction with the revelation that a method had been discovered for photographing good and evil from a man’s mind, and that prints of such photographs were visible to others but not to the one photographed.
Four of the five tales in the September 1896 issue were fantasy, with The Guardian of Mystery Island by Dr. Edmond Nolcini, employing a very effective sequence about a man-eating plant, particularly noteworthy. My Invisible Friend by Katherine Kip (February 1897) preceded H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man into print by four months; related to invisibility was Octavia Zollicoffer Bond’s A Rule That Worked Both Ways (December 1904), concerning the invention of a machine for materializing spirits from the ether and a reversal of polarization that causes the inventor gradually to disappear in full view of horrified visitors.
The scientific detective story was part of The Black Cat’s content. One of the most ingenious was In re State vs. Forbes by Warren Earle (July 1906), in which a girl in the process of being murdered starts to telegraph for aid and is killed before she can give the name of the murderer, but under the microscope her red and white corpuscles present it in Morse code!
Most of the authors who wrote science fiction for The Black Cat were little known then and are unknown today; but a few made modest imprints beyond its pages: Don Mark Lemon, whose The Mansion of Forgetfulness (April 1907) concerns the poignant pitfalls of a machine that can erase unpleasant memories, would later turn up in Munsey’s The All-Story Magazine and even see one novel published in Wonder Stories Quarterly as late as Winter 1931 (The Scarlet Planet). Their first publication of Harry Stephen Keeler’s tale of teaching by television, John Jone’s Dollar (August 1915), may have been the high point of The Black Cat’s science fiction program. The story was reprinted in the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories (April 1927), has been anthologized, and is today regarded as a classic. The Black Cat may even have discovered Frank Lillie Pollock (The Invisible City, September 1901).
Another publication was to take the same all-fiction road as The Black Cat, only with an adventure slant. It was The Argosy, published by Frank A. Munsey, which was changed from a boy’s magazine to the first adventure pulp magazine in 1896, selling for only 10 cents. This change was inspired by the success of Munsey’s Magazine, which had built a phenomenal circulation of 700,000 at that price as a general magazine along the lines of McClure’s.
The year of the change The Argosy ran Citizen 504 by C. H. Palmer, a remarkable projection of a regimented society of the future in which marriages are arranged by the government. An anti-utopian story, it was a harbinger of Dr. David H. Keller’s later Unto Us a Child is Born (Amazing Stories, July 1933), dealing with the tragic aspect of card-indexed societies.
Before the days of international copyright Frank Munsey had serialized Andre Laurie’s popular book, The Conquest of the Moon, in which the lunar orb is drawn into the Sahara Desert by powerful magnets (Golden Argosy in seventeen weekly installments beginning November 16, 1889). Now he revived the same novel as A Month in the Moon, to run in eight monthly chapters (February to August 1897).
His big story for 1898 was the serial publication of Frank Aubrey’s A Queen of Atlantis in seven installments beginning in February. Aubrey was a highly popular adventure and fantasy writer; his novel of a lost race on a plateau in British Guiana and the man-eating plant they worshiped, The Devil Tree of El Dorado, issued in 1897, was destined to become the classic of its type and an excellent seller. Aubrey would also gain a reputation writing science fiction novels under the pseudonym of Fenton Ash, the best known being A Trip to Mars (W. & R. Chambers, London, 1909).
W. Bert Foster, who in later years would become popular as a Western story writer, was frequently seen with lost-race stories, not only in The Argosy, but in Pearson’s and later in The All-Story Magazine.
The Argosy would have the distinction of being the only American magazine to run a novel by George Griffith (outside of the U.S. edition of Pearson’s Magazine), The Lake of Gold, beginning December 1902 and running for eight months. The discovery of vast deposits of gold spewed from a volcano enable England and the United States to conquer Europe and impose terms that will keep peace and make life more bearable for the masses.
A Round Trip to the Year 2,000 by William Wallace Cook, who received his training as a writer for the dime novels, was the first of a series by him (July to November 1903) which would be reprinted as paperback books in Street & Smith’s Adventure Library in the middle twenties, selling for 15 cents and containing over three hundred pages each. A Round Trip to the Year 2,000, as its title indicated, dealt with time travel into the future; Cast Away at the Pole (1904) told of a warm land and highly advanced civilization in the Arctic; Adrift in the Unknown (1904-1905) dealt with a space voyage to the planet Mercury; Marooned in 1492 (1905) found the characters traveling into the past through the use of a drug; and The Eighth Wonder (1906—1907) saw the rotation of the earth slowed due to the building of a great electromagnet.
Cook’s works, while easily readable, had a level of literary quality somewhere between the dime novel and the pulp story. They also had a note of flippancy, which in The Eighth Wonder took the form of converting the errors of judgment of scientist Copernicus Jones into near slapstick humor.
This was in tune with the mood of a great deal of science fiction of that period, which was dedicated to regarding the scientist as a misguided buffoon. Such an approach was so popular in The Argosy that numerous series were run, starting in 1903; the longest-lived was that of Edgar Franklin, whose nature may be surmised by the titles: The Hawkins Pumpless Pump, The Hawkins Gasowashine, The Hawkins Anti-Fire-Fly, and The Hawkins Crook Trap. Possibly the most carefully constructed tales of this type were those of Howard R. Garis, creator of Uncle Wiggily, who wrote a “precious” man-eating plant story to end all man-eating plant stories in Professor Jonkin’s Cannibal Plant (August 1905) and went on to write Professor Jonkin and His Busier Bees, Quick Transit by Beanstalk, Limited, and various others.
A score of authors were contributing slapstick invention stories, among them H. D. Smiley with his Bagley’s Coagulated Cyclone and Bagley’s Rain Machine’, G. Carling with The Heppswell Smoke Controller; and O. L. Clarke with The Telephonogram.
The vogue would spread to many magazines, slowing down only when the scientific death-dealing horrors of World War I made readers radically revise their views of the scientist as an absent-minded jackass. After World War I there were a great many works of science fiction where the scientist’s advances were viewed as transgressions of nature’s laws and the grim fate that overtook him as a result was therefore deserved and anything but funny.
Many unkind things have been said of Frank A. Munsey, who struggled for fifteen years before he finally put his publishing company on a firm basis. It has been said that he cared nothing for art and everything for money (though he left most of his fortune to an art museum at his death). His competitors accused him of debasing the publishing industry. He was noted for his sharp dealings, not only in the game of business give and take, but in his relations with authors.
What has not been said of him is that he never cheated his readers. To the contrary, he usually gave them double their money’s worth in quantity and more than that in entertainment. His philosophy of fiction could be summed up by his statement: “Good writing is as common as clam shells, while good stories are as rare as statesmanship.”
He wanted stories and he got them. For only 10 cents, readers in the early years of this century could get, in The Argosy, 192 pages of close-packed fiction, unrelieved by any illustrations. In all, each issue averaged 135,000 words. The magazine was probably the first pulp in history, and its policy was purely adult adventure. Sixty or more pages of advertisements appeared monthly, printed on coated stock, front and back. The covers, usually yellow, on thick paper, were generally indicative rather than illustrative of the magazine’s contents. At its peak, in 1907, The Argosy could boast a half-million satisfied readers.
As Munsey added magazines to his chain, many of those ran science fiction, too. The All-Story Magazine, inaugurated with its January 1905 issue, had two tales of science fiction in the first issue, When Time Slipped a Cog, a five-part serial, which found that a man apparently had lost a year of his life without remembering what had transpired; and a short story, The Great Sleep Tanks, by Margaret P. Montague, where the essence of sleep is concentrated and rented to people at night.
Garret P. Serviss’s short novel The Moon Metal, initially published by Harper’s in hard covers in 1900, was reprinted complete in the May 1905 number. This story, of a scientist who drains an unusual metal from the moon, which replaces gold as the monetary standard, has become a standard in the field and immediately established Serviss as a major writer of science fiction. A few years later, A Columbus of Space (January to June 1909), predicting the use of atomic-powered space ships for a trip to Venus, caused some to class Serviss as the equal of Jules Verne in his ability to put a tale of believable scientific speculation together.
The All-Story Magazine served up 192 pages of fiction for 10 cents, unillustrated on pulp paper, as did The Argosy, but its three-color covers hinted at class and sophistication and not action. It printed many more love stories than did The Argosy, and quite probably was attempting to appeal to women as well as men. Though The Argosy was heavily weighted for male interest, in practice The All-Story Magazine frequently published more imaginative and off-trail stories.
The launching by Street & Smith of a general fiction pulp in 1904, The Popular Magazine, to compete with The Argosy, found science fiction a regular portion of that magazine’s fare, including many humorous invention stories. Its most notable achievement was the serialization of H. Rider Haggard’s Ayesha: The Further History of She, beginning with its January 1905 number.
That high appeal was not maintained, for though The Popular Magazine ran as a rather thick pulp of 194 pages for 10 cents until January 1907, when the price rose to 15 cents and the pages to 224, and it published more fantasy and science fiction than most, the preponderance was undistinguished. It included tongue-in-cheek “humorous” stories of novel inventions, predominantly by the now-forgotten E. J. Appleton. It went in heavily for the scientific detective story that was frequently science fiction by courtesy, at first in a series titled “The Strange Cases of a Medical Free Lance” by W. B. Ferguson, running from January to May 1907, and in later years by the popularizers of such stories, Edwin Balmcr and Arthur B. Reeve.
A much more significant role was played by the appearance of The Monthly Story Magazine in May 1905, which later was to become nationally renowned as The Blue Book Magazine (May 1907). The Blue Book was a peculiar combination of portraits of theatrical celebrities and general pulp fiction. Slick paper pages would appear in the front of the publication on which would be published photos of the latest productions of the nation’s stage. The rest of the magazine was a thick standard pulp. Eventually it dropped the theater section, which was common in scores of magazines of all types before World War I.
The Blue Book presented to America one of the most promising writers ever to combine horror with science fiction: William Hope Hodgson. A well-built, handsome Englishman, Hodgson had spent eight years at sea, and most of his stories, long and short, reflect an intimate knowledge of the life and attitudes of seafaring men, superbly set to paper. Despite his obsession with seagoing backgrounds, the oceans of the world were not reflected in his works as wonderous and majestic. To the contrary, he depicted the sea as a loathsome fester from whose obscene depths any manner of foulness might arise, to threaten the soul as well as the body.
He could write both science fiction and supernatural stories with equal effectiveness, but like the later H. P. Lovecraft, he frequently supplied ingenious scientific credibility for horrors that the reader would have been willing to accept as beyond explanation. Among the stories he did for The Blue Book Magazine in 1906 and 1907 are several of his very finest, notably From the Tideless Sea (April 1906) which together with its sequel More News of the Homebird (August 1906) displayed his near-genius at being able to sustain a mounting pitch of terror for an apparently indefinite length. Like a singer who has immense power and range, he exercised this extraordinary rhetorical pitch frequently, yet so truly skilled was he that in The Voice in the Night (November 1907) he was able to employ understatement, indirection, and seeming pathos, to create one of the greatest examples of horror in science fiction ever published.
The Blue Book was also one of the first magazines to publish science fiction by George Allan England, the young socialist who for a scant few years upon the publication of his Darkness and Dawn trilogy in Munsey’s The Cavalier (1912 and 1913) was deservedly one of the most popular and influential writers in the science fiction canon, with his wonder-filled vision of the rebuilding of civilization after universal destruction. The Time-Reflector (September 1905), like Darkness and Dawn, had stamped clearly upon it the beneficial influence of H. G. Wells’ masterpiece, The Time Machine.
Otherwise, The Blue Book leaned heavily on the slapstick invention story, so prevalent during this period and also dabbled in detective stories dependent upon not-quite-established scientific methods of deduction.
In historical perspective, what was happening becomes crystal clear.
With the creation of the first pulp magazine, The Argosy, aimed primarily at adult readership, science fiction, because it lent itself to adventure, was incorporated into these predominantly male-oriented publications.
The British pace-setters, The Strand, The Idler, and Pearson’s Magazine, despite the general appeal of much of their nonfiction and even their frequent newly written fairy tales, also strongly favored masculine fiction although, at their most objective, they became “family” magazines. The rising, big-circulation American magazines, after the first few years of McClure’s, favored the feminine slant. This was true of McClure’s, Munsey’s, and Cosmopolitan, and became increasingly so as such later great new names were added to the list: Everybody’s, The Red Book, Hampton’s Magazine, The American Magazine, Ainslee’s, Smith’s Magazine, The Metropolitan Magazine, and many others. This did not mean the abolition of science fiction. Every one of those periodicals ran science fiction at one time or another, but it was not a part of their format since it did not lend itself as readily to light romance as did other genres.
While the leading British popular magazines, The Strand, Pearson’s, and The Idler, consistently continued to publish science fiction after the turn of the century, and while the first two enjoyed American editions, both were eventually reduced to the level of secondary publications as a result of the tide of lush and prosperous women-oriented periodicals.
Yet, in 1900 they were still in the vanguard of major science fiction. Pearson’s opened the year with a lavish interplanetary story featured simultaneously in both their British and American editions; it was destined to become a romantically imaginative landmark. A series of six stories by George Griffith was begun in the January 1900 issue under the heading of “Stories of Other Worlds.” Rollo Lenox Smeaton Aubrey, Earl of Redgrave, invents the “R Force,” which counteracts gravity, and uses it to power a space ship. He marries Lila Zaidie immediately prior to his initial voyage, so they will be the first couple in history to honeymoon in space. After A Visit to the Moon (January), they explore Mars in The World of the War God (February), proceed to Venus in A Glimpse of the Sunless Star (March), continue on to Jupiter in The World of the Crystal Cities (April), and finally to the ringed planet In Saturn’s Realms (May). Up until now, each installment had been printed monthly, but the final one, titled Homeward Bound, skipped June and did not appear until July, with an editorial note that George Griffith had been delayed getting his manuscript in from Australia because of a plague. This last installment included a stop on the asteroid Ceres.
The stories were collected with prefacing matter added to the early portion of the book and published as a novel under the intriguing and accurate title of A Honeymoon in Space (C. Arthur Pearson, London, 1901). It was also issued in paper covers.
There was no gainsaying that Griffith was an inventive and resourceful science fiction writer. The engaging array of intelligences and monsters he discovered in his journeys, the variety of special terrains, the free play he gave to his imagination, reflected up-to-date thinking and a rebellion against confinement of ideas that would not become common for almost thirty years. His science was weak in particulars, but conceptually strong in imparting the scope of science fiction. The illustrations by Stanley Wood were numerous and, some of them, highly unusual. The book contained a frontispiece by Harold Piffard, showing Lord Redgrave toasting his bride in space, which is a masterpiece, not merely because it is skillfully drawn, but because it captures completely the dress and spirit of the nineties set into the context of the conquest of other worlds.
Declining into near-oblivion today, the work of George Griffith was nevertheless a link in the development of science fiction. He was undeniably the most popular science fiction writer in England between 1893 and 1895. It seems very probable that he influenced the plotting of George S. du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) and The Martian (1896), and he was the envy and exasperation of H. G. Wells, who highly complimented his Outlaws of the Air (1895), and may have been influenced to later write War in the Air because of it, and who once fumed because critics were always comparing him to Griffith. Wells wanted to be known as more than an entertainer.
The gradual resolving of international copyright law was making it increasingly difficult for a British publication to throw its full muscle into an American edition. When The Strand broke the first installment of The First Men in the Moon by H. G. Wells in their November 1900 issue (to run through August 1901), they found it simultaneously serialized in the November 1900 Cosmopolitan. Pearson’s had no American edition at the time The War of the Worlds saw print in 1897, and Cosmopolitan had rerun it, illustrations and all.
This time, Cosmopolitan really brought home the severity of the competition by copiously illustrating The First Men in the Moon with pictorial wash drawings by E. Hering, which, while bizarre, were nevertheless more effective than Shepperson’s for The Strand. Both artists seemed to regard the entire story as one big joke and their drawings carried an air of tongue-in-cheek.
This was unfortunate, for The First Men in the Moon was one of Wells’ greatest stories, deadly serious in its relation of a trip to the moon in an anti-gravity globe; the discovery of a civilization built by a race of insect origin therein; and thoughtful in the final decision of the lunarites to prevent the astronauts from returning for fear of man’s warlike proclivities.
The competitive situation sometimes worked in reverse. Pearson’s found that it could get first serial rights to H. Rider Haggard’s novel Lysbeth (which it began serializing in its November 1900 issue) in America, but couldn’t run the novel in England.
The value of H. G. Wells as a drawing card led to his work being offered to the highest bidder. It is not known if A. P. Watt was his agent at that early period. Watt was agent for Arthur Conan Doyle, and was one of the first to understand income potentialities of a creative work if the rights were properly protected and proliferated.
Regardless, Pearson’s managed to show up with the next novel by Wells, The Sea Lady (July to December 1901), of a mermaid who falls in love with a man, permits herself to be captured, and finally entices him to return to the sea with her and his inevitable death. The story is a novel-length parable of the destruction of our well-being and even our lives by impractical dreams.
Again, everywhere one turned it was Wells, Wells, Wells. The amazing originality and fecundity of the man’s literary talent engaged the public. The New Accelerator (The Strand, December 1901) dealt with a drug that speeded up a person’s motions to the point where everyone else seemed to be standing still; The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost (The Strand, March 1902) told of a spirit that has forgotten how to make itself disappear.
When Pearson’s got the next big Wells science fiction novel, The Food of the Gods (December 1903 to January 1904), telling of the invention of a special food which causes men to grow into giants (and inadvertently some insects and rats as well), and face a final showdown with the “little men,” it was to find that their American edition, like that of The Strand, had been outbid by Cosmopolitan, which began serialization in ten monthly installments November 1903, a month before they could schedule it!
When Wells’ next big gun was ready, In the Days of the Comet, both The Strand and Pearson’s found themselves beaten out by a British newspaper, The Daily Chronicle (1905-1906), which was first with the story of a comet that passes so closely to the earth that an interaction of gases changes the nitrogen in the atmosphere to a new gas which completely alters human nature and creates a Utopia. Frustratingly, Cosmopolitan bought and ran the story in eight installments beginning with its January 1906 number.
So potent must Wells have been as a circulation builder that in desperation Pearson’s began reprinting, in 1904, Wells’ stories published in The Pall Mall Budget and The Pall Mall Gazette before the big success of The Time Machine. Such famous shorts as A Moth—Genus Nova, The Diamond Maker, Aepyornis Island, The Stolen Bacillus, and The Flowering of the Strange Orchid were among those so honored. Nowhere were the stories designated as repeats, though most of them had already been collected in hard covers under the title of The Stolen Bacillus (1895).
The Strand did manage to come up with some very powerful new Wells, most notably The Land Ironclads (December 1903), with its prophetic conquest of conventional armed forces by tanks (which they would reprint in November 1916, when tanks were introduced in World War I by the British); and The Country of the Blind (April 1904), probably the greatest single short story written by Wells, of a valley in which all men are sightless, into which intrudes an outsider, and his helplessness in attempting to use his vision to his own or the people’s advantage.
So badly hurt by the Panic that began in October 1906 was the American edition of Pearson’s Magazine that, in its March 1908 issue, it confessed its woes in an editorial, but took courage from the fact that, though advertising in some issues had plummeted 34 per cent, its circulation had suffered relatively little. Despite its financial plight, it was able to secure first American serial rights to H. G. Wells’ The War in the Air, beginning April 1908. In England Pearson’s had lost out to Pall Mall Magazine in bidding for the same title.
Significantly, almost as much promotion was given to the illustrations of Eric Pape for the novel (executed in both line and wash) as to the story. Eric Pape was the illustrator who aroused New England to save the old U.S. battleship Constitution when the navy was going to tow her to sea and use her as a target ship. Twenty of his illustrations were republished in the first edition of the book publication of The War in the Air, issued by Macmillan, and they displayed, from a variety of perspectives, the bombing of New York by German dirigibles and the carnage that resulted. Pall Mall also had some very effective illustrations by A. C. Michael, including one in four colors, which were used in the British book printing from George Bell and Sons, 1908. It was the era of book publishing when they didn’t try to pretend that illustrations were only for children and not for sophisticated adults.
There were other attempts to write in the Wells vein, many of them rather good, but one and all the authors were completely overwhelmed by the greatest science fiction writer of all time, pouring out novels and short stories in a veritable lava flow heated by genius. Only an event as startling as an untold adventure of Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, begun in the October 1901 issue of The Strand, even momentarily took the fiction public’s mind from Wells.
The skilled professional J. B. Harris-Burland could come up with a ghost story inspired by the age of invention, which was at the same time true science fiction, an extraordinary literary feat accomplished in his story Lord Beden’s Motor (The Strand, December 1901) and it would be forgotten.
A highly unusual six-story series along the lines of Robert Barr’s The Doom of London, written by Fred M. White, was published by Pearson’s Magazine, obviously intended to encourage reforms in London in particular and England in general. Each tale dealt with a different catastrophe that could strike London, as follows:
The Four White Days (January 1903) underscored the need for better snow removal and planning as London is frozen in by a prodigious storm with no running water or transport; The Four Day’s Night (February 1901) envisaged a smog so thick that the sun never penetrated and only bombing from a dirigible cleared a hole for rays of light; The Dust of Death (April 1903) saw a scourge break out as a result of using garbage for construction fill, and the city saved by electrically killing the bacteria; A Bubble Burst (May 1903) contemplated the stock market disaster that could overtake financial interests if a faked story, in this case of an earthquake that allegedly destroys Johannesburg, South Africa, were to start a panic; The Invisible Force (June 1903) predicted disasters from digging too many subways and underground tunnels; and finally The River of Death (June 1904) forecast what would happen if London ran out of water. As can be seen, disaster and catastrophe stories with civic significance were popular.
At times, it even appeared that the influence of The Black Cat was being transmitted to The Strand, for one story, The Microbe of Love by John George E. Leed (October 1902), of the isolation of a bacillus that causes people to get romantic stars in their eyes, was very similar to the substitution of science for magic so popular in the pussycat-dominated fashion of the short story.
After 1905, the influence of The Strand and Pearson’s on the American scene deteriorated in the sense that while The Strand was able to maintain a circulation of 200,000 and Pearson’s for a period asserted 300,000, American periodicals had entered the golden age of the magazines. Ten-cent magazines of incredible size and quality were everywhere, supported by the advertising of what already was acknowledged to be the richest nation in the world. Circulations of up to a million were claimed, and it would not be long before the magic million-copy figure was within reach of a number of publications.
What this meant in terms of science fiction was that it would be featured by the secondary magazines, now including The Strand and Pearson’s, and in the growing ranks of pulp magazines, The Argosy, The All-Story Magazine, The Blue Book, The Popular Magazine, and before too long, an army of others. To understand why nothing could prevail against the new group of general interest magazines, one had to see them. They were all the dimensions of the old pulp magazines (9 3/4 by 6 3/4 inches), a hundred pages of advertising was common, and the paper was coated stock.
Even before it was purchased by William Randolph Hearst, Cosmopolitan was something to behold, with two- and three-color illustrations throughout. A typical issue might feature short stories by Maxim Gorky, W. W. Jacobs, and Bruno Lessing; poetry by Edwin Markham; and a regular column by Ambrose Bierce. Hearst’s Magazine (eventually to be combined with Cosmopolitan) would have fiction by Hall Caine, Marie Corelli, Winston Churchill, and E. Phillips Oppenheim; Ainslee’s was capable of securing George Bernard Shaw; Collier’s would carry Sherlock Holmes; The Bohemian made it possible to be “in” for only 10 cents, and read some of Damon Runyon’s earliest work in the bargain; for 15 cents, one could buy The Metropolitan Magazine, which seemed, to judge by its covers, to be aimed at women, yet ran more nonfiction than fiction and with a heavy percentage of material that would distinctly interest men. Like a majority of the major magazines of that period, it featured substantial sections of photographs of female theatrical stars and a seemingly disproportionate amount of material on the stage. Perhaps this incongruity on the part of the magazines of the period may be explained by the fact that the theater was part of every major city and the stars shown could be seen at one time or another in most urban areas of the nation. The Metropolitan Magazine was one of the earliest publications to use posed photographs to illustrate articles and stories (in the manner which True Story later popularized). The excellence of this method was no better displayed than in the article The New Criminal by Broughton Brandenburg (April 1907), where the photos supplied by Lee Hamilton Keller can be characterized as nothing short of superb.
The Metropolitan Magazine was typical of the other major publications. It would, upon occasion, use science fiction, and it would run feature science articles like The Call of Another World by Charles Farquet (August 1907), an evaluation of life on Mars with magnificent alien concepts depicted by the artist Henri Lanos.
The Red Book, edited by Trumbell White, was a 10-cent fiction magazine on slick paper aimed at women. It was an excellent value, handsomely illustrated. One of its artists in 1906 and 1907 was Howard V. Brown, who would do the covers for Hugo Gernsback’s Science and Invention in the 1920s and for Astounding Stories in the 1930s. Its fictioneers were little known at first, but so prosperous did the magazine become that by 1915, under the editorship of Ray Long, a single issue would contain fiction by Gilbert Parker, Cyrus Townsend Brady, George Allan England, Albert Payson Terhune, Ellis Parker Butler, Octavus Roy Cohen, and Arthur Somers Roche, with illustrations by James Montgomery Flagg.
A good number of the periodicals of that decade, which were of truly superlative quality and enjoyed mass circulation and considerable influence, receive only a sentence or two in the histories of American magazines, because there were so many of them. Such a magazine was Hampton’s Magazine. It had started in the late nineties as Broadway Magazine, then the title was changed to The New Broadway Magazine. Theodore Dreiser was its editor in 1906 and early 1907 and he ran a few stories by his friend Charles Fort, later to become famous for Lo!, Wild Talents and other similar works. It made a drive for leadership in 1907 and 1908, then changed its name to Hampton’s Broadway Magazine after its owner Benjamin Hampton in 1908, and finally to Hampton’s Magazine in February 1909. Reports state that in 1906 this magazine had a circulation of 13,000, but by 1911 it had climbed to 444,000.
How was this done?
First we must credit a series of great editors. In addition to Dreiser, there were Harris Merton Lyon, drama critic and short-story writer, and Ray Long, who would become the world’s highest-paid editor for Cosmopolitan. None of these men were fired; all were lured away by other publications on the basis of their performances.
The introduction of muckraking articles of the type that had made McClure’s famous, also played a part, but with the exposes chiefly concerning food—prices, adulteration, poisoning—something involving everyone. The magazine also started, in its January 1910 issue, exclusive serialization of The Discovery of the North Pole by Robert E. Peary, USN, with scores of excellent photographs only a short time after the accomplishment of the feat. Edmond Rostand, whose play Cyrano de Bergerac has become a classic, had written a barnyard fantasy, Chantecler, in which all the actors are dressed as domestic animals, which was then running on Broadway. Hampton’s began serialization of it in its June 1910 issue, even though Peary’s account was still running. The translation was by Gertrude Hall, and dozens of magnificent drawings by Joseph Clement Coll were published in color.
Fiction in Hampton’s included top-grade work by Jack London, O. Henry, Rex Beach, Gouverneur Morris, Damon Runyon, Owen Johnson, P. G. Wodehouse, Rupert Hughes, and Ellis Parker Butler.
Hampton’s Magazine was of particular interest to science fiction readers because it drew from the pulps like The Argosy, The All-Story Magazine, The Blue Book, and The Popular Magazine, two types of stories—the scientific detective and the humorous invention tale —and introduced them to the family audience. Its humorous invention stories by H. G. Bishop, Ellis Parker Butler, and Roy McCardell were among the slickest and most sophisticated of their type up to that time. Butler’s An Experiment in Gyro Hats (June 1910) would later be reprinted by Amazing Stories.
Even more influential was the publication of The Man in the Room, The Achievements of Luther Trant, Psychological Detective, by Edwin Balmer and William B. MacHarg, the first story in a series which began in the May 1909 issue. “To make a bald statement,” the editor said, “this new detective theory is as important as Poe’s deductive theory of ratiocination.” Luther Trant trapped his criminals by the adaptation of existing experimental instruments like lie detectors, a chronoscope, galvanometer, automograph, plethysmograph, psychometer, pneumograph, spygmograph, and other devices for recording blood pressure, rate of respiration, length of time between answers to questions, pulse, respiratory changes, and other physical conditions that could indicate stress in an individual. What made these stories science fiction was that while some of the devices had been built, the theory of their use for crime detection had not been considered.
The stories were a great success, so much so that competitor Cosmopolitan commissioned Arthur B. Reeve to write an almost identical set for them built around the character and problems of Craig Kennedy. The first of Cosmopolitan’s stories, The Case of Helen Bond, appeared in its December 1910 issue and shockingly utilized the identical device and psychological procedures of The Man in the Room. It would not have taken much more approximation to have made the story a paraphrase. Reeve went on to pick up other of the gadgets of Balmer and MacHarg in later stories, but with a little more subtlety. For a period of ten years, Arthur B. Reeve, telling the adventures of Craig Kennedy, became the most successful detective story writer in the United States, parlaying them into a score of books, three moving picture serials, and, long after his own ability to write them had departed in the thirties, selling the use of the character and his by-line to other writers.
Edwin Balmer, who apparently made no outcry about the appropriation of his ideas by Reeve, would later become the editor of The Red Book during its most successful period, and co-author with Philip Wylie of When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide, two science fiction masterpieces. Balmer was listed as a consulting editor of Hampton’s Magazine, and he may have had some influence on the periodic use of science fiction by the publication.
The death of Hampton’s Magazine proved far more precipitous and mysterious than the swiftness of its growth. Mysterious because no one has ever bothered to explore the attendant circumstances despite a litter of startling clues of great sociological as well as economic interest. The December 1910 issue of Hampton’s Magazine contained 312 pages for 15 cents, of which about 130 were advertising. Ten months later, with its October 1911 issue, Hampton’s Magazine was released to another company after a consolidation attempt with The Columbian Magazine failed. The new company was pledged $2,600,000 by a group of investors but received only $92,000. The publication disbanded with its May 1912 issue after having gone letter-size in February 1912. Bankruptcy was filed September 12, 1913.
All clues to the magazine’s failure warrant investigation. One of the most significant was an article in the April 1911 issue which headlined newspaper-style: “Will the Magazines Remain Free—Will They Withstand the Attacks of Wall Street and Big Politics?” The essence of the piece was that financial interests were finally taking retaliatory action for the dozen years of muckraking they had been subjected to by the magazines. This retaliation assumed two forms: Advertising from the companies controlled by the big interests was cut off from publications that persisted in the expose type of feature; and political pressure was being brought to bear for special taxes and postal discrimination against magazines that were not “literary or educational.”
On page 789 of the June 1911 issue of Hampton’s Magazine appeared the heading “Advertisers Boycott Hampton’s.” The magazine went on to explain that the vigorous stands that the publication had taken on various subjects had led to this action.
Readers’ letters followed asking the magazine to name the companies involved in the boycott so that a counterboycott of their products could be started by Hampton’s readers. The magazine did not choose to spell out the names involved, for this would have destroyed all hope of luring them back into the pages of the magazine again.
A few examples of what may have caused Hampton’s distressing position were The Passing of Pills and Powders by Woods Hutchinson, A.M., M.D. (November 1910), condemning the thousands of patent medicines and drugs and Cassidy and the Food Poisoners by Cleveland Moffett (February 1911) telling of conditions of filth, adulteration, and chemically poisonous substances in the preparation of foods on the market. Included were jams, jellies, mincemeats, ketchups, canned soups, pie fillers, sauces, ice cream, soft drinks, milk and milk-based products, syrups, meat, chicken, eggs, candy, and glucose; specific company names were listed in profusion.
The magazine industry in general at this time found itself faced with a moral dilemma and a weakness in its publishing formula. In order to bring a top-quality magazine containing the finest fiction, articles, departments, illustrations, and format to a mass audience for a price of 10 or 15 cents, a subsidy was needed in the form of advertising. During the early days of muckraking, the targets had generally been giant trusts and political figures who appeared powerless to fight back. As advertising became a reason for being of American magazines, the trusts discovered that they had financial interests in the companies that dispensed this advertising and could punish those who punished them.
The publishers now learned they could not have it both ways. They could not excoriate those carrying the financial burden of their magazines and expect them to turn the other cheek. The purpose of spending advertising dollars was to sell more products. It was insanity to advertise such products in magazines that proclaimed them to be worthless or a menace to the public.
The advertisers did not assume control of magazines nor did they directly censor material. Rather, magazine publishers learned to become their own censors, evaluating what editorial material might injure their advertising prospects. Some of them “puffed” products to keep advertisers happy and encourage advertising.
Hampton’s Magazine, however, was somewhat different, in that it received a great deal of its financing, in small amounts, from the readers, to whom it sold shares in the magazine in blocks as small as $50. It promoted for such monies constantly and did not operate through brokerages, but went directly to its readership. In its prospectus it stated:
It is not surprising that newspapers and magazines which carry a heavy volume of Wall Street advertising are disposed to look with unfriendliness on “Hampton’s” plan to directly maintain a market for its own stock. . . . Its editorial policy has made enemies of many powerful men and “interests.” The magazine has been threatened. Repeated efforts have been made to frighten its stockholders. Only recently one “malefactor of great wealth” started a campaign to “cause trouble” among the stockholders.
The magazine may well have been growing so swiftly that it was losing money on its advertising. In other words, advertisers paying rates that may have been predicated on a circulation of 200,000 were receiving 450,000 circulation at the same price before the contract expired; so despite its volume of advertising, the magazine could have been in financial difficulty.
Hampton’s Magazine may have been an early major fatality of the new economics of mass-circulation publications, and as such deserves intensive study.
A few items of special interest to science fiction readers concerning Hampton’s Magazine during its last days are in order. It resumed what was intended to be a new series of the Luther Trant scientific detective stories with The Daughter of a Dream by William MacHarg and Edwin Balmer (June 1911), in which the interpretation of a Freudian dream is the means of solving a problem in which a woman believed to be white proves to be part Negro, with all the tragic connotations expected in the society of that period.
The artist Robert A. Graef—later to become famous for his work in magnificent color in Argosy-All-Story Weekly and Argosy for such popular scientific romancers as A. Merritt, Otis Adelbert Kline, Murray Leinster, Ralph Milne Farley, Austin Hall, and Ray Cummings —was an interior illustrator for Hampton’s Magazine during 1911. George Allan England, who would emerge as a giant of science fiction, was contributing fiction during 1912. It is evident that as the years progressed, many of the science fiction artists as well as writers would have to shift to the pulps for a living even though their artistic and literary talents were equal to the top markets of the day.
As the world marked time before World War I, the magazine picture was changing. Though certain periodicals were achieving circulations of a million, they were predominantly women’s or family publications. While the children might have enjoyed science fiction, magazines were mainly bought by women and they were less than enthusiastic. In later years Cosmopolitan would have a totally inexplicable lapse and print a wild interplanetary novel like Arthur Train’s The Moon Maker as a serial beginning in December 1916; or, Everybody’s would run Victor Rousseau’s highly readable and socially significant The Messiah of the Cylinder beginning July 1917 (a creditable anticipation of the method of 1984); but Everybody’s would shortly become a pulp, so that story might have been anticipatory.
If your name was H. G. Wells, that was still enough to get you the cover billing on the November 1922 issue of Hearst’s International for Men Like Gods, in which a group of present-day men accidentally enter a Utopian world.
The period of H. G. Wells’ dominance of science fiction and the era of gaslight ended almost simultaneously. After 1911, nothing would come from his pen that was not more preachment than fiction, including The World Set Free (1913), with its prognostication of atomic warfare, or Men Like Gods (1922).
The man who would replace Wells as the public’s champion of science fiction would rise out of his pulps and some of his books would become far better known to the masses than any individual work written by Wells. He was Edgar Rice Burroughs, who might have been able to sell to The Strand or Pearson’s fifteen years earlier, but was now as delighted to have his first novel, Under the Moons of Mars, appear with the by-line of Norman Bean in The All-Story Magazine (February to July 1912). This was the Mars that Percival Lowell, the astronomer, had intrigued the world with: a planet that achieved a civilization thousands of years before earth; a dying world that built canals to distribute its water from the polar caps; a land that was the repository of ancient knowledge and a symbol of romance.
Edgar Rice Burroughs was also a master of characterization, which aptitude was not shared by Wells. He gave the readers supermen, true heroes with which they could identify, set against a background more colorful and enthralling than anything since the fairy tales of their youth. Wells was one of the popularizers of the ordinary man in fiction. The same year, 1912, in the October issue of The All-Story, Tarzan of the Apes would appear complete and Burroughs would be on his way to becoming one of the best-selling authors of all time.
The great Munsey pulps of that era—The Argosy, The All-Story, The Cavalier—would follow the lead of Edgar Rice Burroughs. An entirely new type of story, the scientific romance, patterned after his Mars series, would evolve. For the next decade, Edgar Rice Burroughs would lead and names like A. Merritt, Charles B, Stilson, J. U. Giesy, Victor Rousseau, Ray Cummings, George Allan England, Francis Stevens, Austin Hall, and Homer Eon Flint would follow, to become the darlings of the pulp readers.
It might reasonably be asked why, in a world that was progressing scientifically at an unprecedented and accelerated rate, did readers select fairy tales for grownups instead of stories with a more tangibly logical basis? The answer was World War I, where the early Verne and Wells optimism about the utopianism of science was destroyed forever. Humorous stories about crackpot inventors also stopped being funny about the same time. They still appeared in semi-technical magazines like Hugo Gernsback’s Electrical Experimenter and Science and Invention, largely to lighten the publication’s serious air and partly because the publisher had a great sense of humor, but they would never again appear in issue after issue of The Argosy, The All-Story, and The Blue Book, as they had in the past.
One author might have challenged Edgar Rice Burrough’s supremacy and for a year or two it appeared he would. That author was Arthur Conan Doyle. It came as a surprise to those who forgot that some of the earliest stories he wrote were science fiction, to see The Lost World serialized in The Strand in 1912. That well-delineated prehistoric land, the superb characterization of Professor Challenger, and the altogether outstanding sense of humor displayed, created a formidable novel. A sequel, The Poison Belt, published in The Strand in 1913, though more philosophical, was also every bit a masterpiece. There were other short stories by Doyle like The Terror of Blue John Gap (The Strand, September 1910), the discovery of a holdover from prehistoric days in a cavern beneath England, or The Horror on the Heights (Everybody’s, November 1913). Doyle was an excellent storyteller and every bit Edgar Rice Burroughs’ match at characterization. Burroughs had created Tarzan, but Doyle gave birth to Sherlock Holmes.
The battle was never to be joined. The death of a relative in World War I turned Doyle’s mind sharply toward spiritualism and the great promise shown in The Lost World and The Poison Belt would not be fulfilled.
A great plant that has succeeded in rendering useless all equipment motivated by electricity, blows sky high, returning power to the big cities. Such a story could scarcely have been written much earlier, for electricity, as an important form of power, was just coming into its own when George Griffith’s A Corner in Lightning was published in Pearson’s Magazine for March 1898. The story described a novel form of a possible catastrophe similar to the blackouts of major cities in recent times. Illustration was by Paul Hardy.
The Strand Magazine
December, 1897
by Grant Allen
CHARLES Grant Blairfindie Allen was born February 24, 1848, near Kingston, Canada, to Joseph Antisell Allen, a minister of the Irish Church, and Charlotte Catherine Ann Grant, daughter of Baron de Longveil, holder of an ancient title recognized in France. As a boy, Charles lived with his family in New Haven, Connecticut, where he was instructed by a Yale tutor.
Abroad, he attended College Imperial at Dieppe and King Edward’s School, Birmingham, and received his B.A. degree in 1871. He married a semi-invalid and supported himself for three years by teaching at the British communities of Brighton, Cheltenham, and Reading.
He received a most unusual appointment in 1873, as professor of mental and moral philosophy at an experimental university for Negroes at Spanish Town, Jamaica. The venture was short-lived, and when only six students enrolled in 1876, Allen returned to England.
The West Indian sojourn was far from a total loss, for while there Allen began to reason out an evolutionary system of philosophy that was to form the basis of his first reputation. Science and philosophy were the two passions of his life, and with the severance pay he had received in Jamaica he financed publication of his first book, Physiological Esthetics (Henry S. King & Co., 1877). The book sold only three hundred copies, but some of these were purchased by readers of the caliber of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, both of whom endorsed Allen, as did most of the reviewers. This recognition paid off immediately, for Allen, who had suffered the rejection of more than one hundred popular articles on scientific subjects, began to get acceptances from publications as distinguished as Cornhill, Belgravia, and The Gentlemen’s Magazine, and he was given regular employment writing part of the contents of Sir William Hunter’s twelve-volume Imperial Gazetteer of India.
Grant Allen began writing fiction as an accident: “One day it happened that I wanted to write a scientific article on the impossibility of knowing that one had seen a ghost, even if one saw one. For convenience sake, and to make the moral clearer, I threw the article into narrative form, but without the slightest intention of writing a story. It was published in Belgravia under the title of ‘Our Scientific Observations on a Ghost!’ The editor came back and asked for another ‘story’ for Belgravia Annual.” Allen obliged with a tale about a mummy. More were demanded, and all the early fiction was published under the pen name of J. Arbuthnot Wilson (later he would also write fiction under the name of Cecil Power), so as not to injure his scientific reputation.
The turning point came when Belgravia changed editors and the new editor, the renowned John Payne, wrote one letter to “Grant Allen,” informing him that they would no longer be interested in scientific articles, and another to “J. Arbuthnot Wilson,” begging to see more of his fiction. Among the stories Allen wrote at that time was Pausodyne (1881), about a chemist who discovers a drug that puts him into suspended animation in 1750 to awaken in 1881, and his frantic attempts to make someone believe his story. An “anti-utopia” which appeared in Belgravia at that period was The Child of Phalanstery, a story of an idyllic civilization with the harsh code of forcing a mother to destroy a child that has been born imperfect.
The Thames Valley Catastrophe was published in The Strand Magazine in December 1897 and adequately displayed the fictional finesse of Allen’s later years, when his reputation as a prose stylist had superseded his contributions to scientific literature. Today he is best remembered for his science fiction novel The British Barbarians (1895), where a man from the twenty-fifth century appears in the England of 1895 and proceeds to draw an acid contrast.
IT CAN scarcely be necessary for me to mention, I suppose, at this time of day, that I was one of the earliest and fullest observers of the sad series of events which finally brought about the transference of the seat of Government of these islands from London to Manchester. Nor need I allude here to the conspicuous position which my narrative naturally occupies in the Blue-book on the Thames Valley Catastrophe (vol. ii., part vii.), ordered by Parliament in its preliminary Session under the new régime at Birmingham. But I think it also incumbent upon me, for the benefit of posterity, to supplement that necessarily dry and formal statement by a more circumstantial account of my personal adventures during the terrible period.
I am aware, of course, that my poor little story can possess little interest for our contemporaries, wearied out as they arc with details of the disaster, and surfeited with tedious scientific discussions as to its origin and nature. But in after-years, I venture to believe, when the crowning calamity of the nineteenth century has grown picturesque and, so to speak, ivy-clad, by reason of its remoteness (like the Great Plague or the Great Fire of London with ourselves), the world may possibly desire to hear how this unparalleled convulsion affected the feelings and fortunes of a single family in the middle rank of life, and in a part of London neither squalid nor fashionable.
It is such personal touches of human nature that give reality to history, which without them must become, as a great writer has finely said, nothing more than an old almanac. I shall not apologize, therefore, for being frankly egoistic and domestic in my reminiscences of that appalling day: for I know that those who desire to seek scientific information on the subject will look for it, not in vain, in the eight bulky volumes of the recent Blue-book. I shall concern myself here with the great event merely as it appeared to myself, a Government servant of the second grade, and in its relations to my own wife, my home, and my children.
On the morning of the 21st of August, in the memorable year of the calamity, I happened to be at Cookham, a pleasant and pretty village which then occupied the western bank of the Thames just below the spot where the Look-out Tower of the Earthquake and Eruption Department now dominates the whole wide plain of the Glassy Rock Desert. In place of the black lake of basalt which young people see nowadays winding its solid bays in and out among the grassy downs, most men still living can well remember a gracious and smiling valley, threaded in the midst by a beautiful river.
I had cycled down from London the evening before (thus forestalling my holiday), and had spent the night at a tolerable inn in the village. By a curious coincidence, the only other visitor at the little hotel that night was a fellow-cyclist, an American, George W. Ward by name, who had come over with his “wheel,” as he called it, for six weeks in England, in order to investigate the geology of our southern counties for himself, and to compare it with that of the far western cretaceous system. I venture to describe this as a curious coincidence, because, as it happened, the mere accident of my meeting him gave me my first inkling of the very existence of that singular phenomenon of which we were all so soon to receive a startling example. I had never so much as heard before of fissure-eruptions; and if I had not heard of them from Ward that evening, I might not have recognised at sight the actuality when it first appeared, and therefore I might have been involved in the general disaster. In which case, of course, this unpretentious narrative would never have been written.
As we sat in the little parlour of the White Hart, however, over our evening pipe, it chanced that the American, who was a pleasant, conversable fellow, began talking to me of his reasons for visiting England. I was at that time a clerk in the General Post Office (of which I am now secretary), and was then no student of science; but his enthusiastic talk about his own country and its vastness amused and interested me. He had been employed for some years on the Geological Survey in the Western States, and he was deeply impressed by the solemnity and the colossal scale of everything American. “Mountains!” he said, when I spoke of Scotland; “why, for mountains, your Alps aren’t in it,* (*A slang phrase of the time, equivalent to our modern “Your Alps swob the show,” or “fail to eventuate.”) and as for volcanoes, your Vesuviuses and Etnas just spit fire a bit at infrequent intervals; while ours do things on a scale worthy of a great country, I can tell you. Europe is a circumstance: America is a continent.”
“But surely,” I objected, “that was a pretty fair eruption that destroyed Pompeii!”
The American rose and surveyed me slowly. I can see him to this day, with his close-shaven face and his contemptuous smile at my European ignorance. “Well,” he said, after a long and impressive pause, “the lava-flood that destroyed a few acres about the Bay of Naples was what we call a trickle: it came from a crater; and the crater it came from was nothing more than a small round vent-hole; the lava flowed down from it in a moderate stream over a limited area. But what do you say to the earth opening in a huge crack, forty or fifty miles long—say, as far as from here right away to London, or farther—and lava pouring out from the orifice, not in a little rivulet, as at Etna, or Vesuvius, but in a sea or inundation, which spread at once over a tract as big as England? That’s something like volcanic action, isn’t it? And that’s the sort of thing we have out in Colorado.”
“You are joking,” I replied, “or bragging. You are trying to astonish me with the familiar spread eagle.”
He smiled a quiet smile. “Not a bit of it,” he answered. “What I tell you is at least as true as Gospel. The earth yawns in Montana. There are fissure-eruptions, as we call them, in the Western States, out of which the lava has welled like wine out of a broken skin—welled up in vast roaring floods, molten torrents of basalt, many miles across, and spread like water over whole plains and valleys.”
“Not within historical times!” I exclaimed.
“I’m not so sure about that,” he answered, musing. “I grant you, not within times which are historical right there—for Colorado is a very new country: but I incline to think some of the most recent fissure-eruptions took place not later than when the Tudors reigned in England. The lava oozed out, red-hot—gushed out—was squeezed out—and spread instantly everywhere; it’s so comparatively recent that the surface of the rock is still bare in many parts, unweathered sufficiently to support vegetation. I fancy the stream must have been ejected at a single burst, in a huge white-hot dome, and then flowed down on every side, filling up the valleys to a certain level, in and out among the hills, exactly as water might do. And some of these eruptions, I tell you, by measured survey, would have covered more ground than from Dover to Liverpool, and from York to Cornwall.”
“Let us be thankful,” I said, carelessly, “that such things don’t happen in our own times.”
He eyed me curiously. “Haven’t happened, you mean,” he answered. “We have no security that they mayn’t happen again to-morrow. These fissure-eruptions, though not historically described for us, are common events in geological history—commoner and on a larger scale in America than elsewhere. Still, they have occurred in all lands and at various epochs; there is no reason at all why one shouldn’t occur in England at present.”
I laughed, and shook my head. I had the Englishman’s firm conviction —so rudely shattered by the subsequent events, but then so universal—that nothing very unusual ever happened in England.
Next morning I rose early, bathed in Odney Weir (a picturesque pool close by), breakfasted with the American, and then wrote a hasty line to my wife, informing her that I should probably sleep that night at Oxford; for I was off on a few days’ holiday, and I liked Ethel to know where a letter or telegram would reach me each day, as we were both a little anxious about the baby’s teething. Even while I pen these words now, the grim humour of the situation comes back to me vividly. Thousands of fathers and mothers were anxious that morning about similar trifles, whose pettiness was brought home to them with an appalling shock in the all-embracing horror of that day’s calamity.
About ten o’clock I inflated my tyres and got under way. I meant to ride towards Oxford by a leisurely and circuitous route, along the windings of the river, past Marlow and Henley; so I began by crossing Cookham Bridge, a wooden or iron structure, I scarcely remember which. It spanned the Thames close by the village: the curious will find its exact position marked in the maps of the period.
In the middle of the bridge, I paused and surveyed that charming prospect, which I was the last of living men perhaps to see as it then existed. Close by stood a weir; beside it, the stream divided into three separate branches, exquisitely backed up by the gentle green slopes of Hedsor and Cliveden. I could never pass that typical English view without a glance of admiration; this morning, I pulled up my bicycle for a moment, and cast my eye clown stream with more than my usual enjoyment of the smooth blue water and the tall white poplars whose leaves showed their gleaming silver in the breeze beside it. I might have gazed at it too long—and one minute more would have sufficed for my destruction—had not a cry from the tow-path a little farther up attracted my attention.
It was a wild, despairing cry, like that of a man being overpowered and murdered.
I am confident this was my first intimation of danger. Two minutes before, it is true, I had heard a faint sound like distant rumbling of thunder; but nothing else. I am one of those who strenuously maintain that the catastrophe was not heralded by shocks of earthquake.* (* For an opposite opinion, see Dr. Haigh Withers’s evidence in Vol. iii, of the Blue-book.)
I turned my eye up stream. For half a second I was utterly bewildered. Strange to say, I did not perceive at first the great flood of fire that was advancing towards me. I saw only the man who had shouted—a miserable, cowering, terror-stricken wretch, one of the abject creatures who used to earn a dubious livelihood in those days (when the river was a boulevard of pleasure) by towing boats up stream. But now, he was rushing wildly forward, with panic in his face; I could see he looked as if close pursued by some wild beast behind him. “A mad dog!” I said to myself at the outset; “or else a bull in the meadow!”
I glanced back to see what his pursuer might be; and then, in one second, the whole horror and terror of the catastrophe burst upon me. Its whole horror and terror, I say, but not yet its magnitude. I was aware at first just of a moving red wall, like dull, red-hot molten metal. Trying to recall at so safe a distance in time and space the feelings of the moment and the way in which they surged and succeeded one another, I think I can recollect that my earliest idea was no more than this: “He must run, or the moving wall will overtake him!” Next instant, a hot wave seemed to strike my face. It was just like the blast of heat that strikes one in a glasshouse when you stand in front of the boiling and seething glass in the furnace. At about the same point in time, I was aware, I believe, that the dull red wall was really a wall of fire. But it was cooled by contact with the air and the water. Even as I looked, however, a second wave from behind seemed to rush on and break: it overlaid and outran the first one. This second wave was white, not red— at white heat, I realized. Then, with a burst of recognition, I knew what it all meant. What Ward had spoken of last night—a fissure-eruption!
I looked back. Ward was coming towards me on the bridge, mounted on his Columbia. Too speechless to utter one word, I pointed up stream with my hand. He nodded and shouted back, in a singularly calm voice: “Yes; just what I told you. A fissure-eruption!”
They were the last words I heard him speak. Not that he appreciated the danger less than I did, though his manner was cool; but he was wearing no clips to his trousers, and at that critical moment he caught his leg in his pedals. The accident disconcerted him; he dismounted hurriedly, and then, panic-stricken as I judged, abandoned his machine. He tried to run. The error was fatal. He tripped and fell. What became of him afterward I will mention later.
But for the moment I saw only the poor wretch on the tow-path. He was not a hundred yards off, just beyond the little bridge which led over the opening to a private boat-house. But as he rushed forwards and shrieked, the wall of fire overtook him. I do not think it quite caught him. It is hard at such moments to judge what really happens; but I believe I saw him shrivel like a moth in a flame a few seconds before the advancing wall of fire swept over the boat-house. I have seen an insect shrivel just so when flung into the midst of white-hot coals. He seemed to go off in gas, leaving a shower of powdery ash to represent his bones behind him. But of this I do not pretend to be positive; I will allow that my own agitation was far too profound to permit of my observing anything with accuracy.
How high was the wall at that time? This has been much debated. I should guess, thirty feet (though it rose afterwards to more than two hundred), and it advanced rather faster than a man could run down the centre of the valley. (Later on, its pace accelerated greatly with subsequent outbursts.) In frantic haste, I saw or felt that only one chance of safety lay before me: I must strike up hill by the field path to Hedsor.
I rode for very life, with grim death behind me. Once well across the bridge, and turning up the hill, I saw Ward on the parapet, with his arms flung up, trying wildly to save himself by leaping into the river. Next instant he shrivelled I think, as the beggar had shrivelled; and it is to this complete combustion before the lava-flood reached them that I attribute the circumstance (so much commented upon in the scientific excavations among the ruins) that no casts of dead bodies, like those at Pompeii, have anywhere been found in the Thames Valley Desert. My own belief is that every human body was reduced to a gaseous condition by the terrific heat several seconds before the molten basalt reached it.
Even at the distance which I had now attained from the central mass, indeed, the heat was intolerable. Yet, strange to say, I saw few or no people flying as yet from the inundation. The fact is, the eruption came upon us so suddenly, so utterly without warning or premonitory symptoms (for I deny the earthquake shocks), that whole towns must have been destroyed before the inhabitants were aware that anything out of the common was happening. It is a sort of alleviation to the general horror to remember that a large proportion of the victims must have died without even knowing it; one second, they were laughing, talking, bargaining; the next, they were asphyxiated or reduced to ashes as you have seen a small fly disappear in an incandescent gas flame.
This, however, is what I learned afterwards. At that moment, I was only aware of a frantic pace uphill, over a rough, stony road, and with my pedals working as I had never before worked them; while behind me, I saw purgatory let loose, striving hard to overtake me. I just knew that a sea of fire was filling the valley from end to end, and that its heat scorched my face as I urged on my bicycle in abject terror.
All this time, I will admit, my panic was purely personal. I was too much engaged in the engrossing sense of my own pressing danger to be vividly alive to the public catastrophe. I did not even think of Ethel and the children. But when I reached the hill by Hedsor Church—a neat, small building, whose shell still stands, though scorched and charred, by the edge of the desert—I was able to pause for half a minute to recover breath, and to look back upon the scene of the first disaster.
It was a terrible and yet I felt even then a beautiful sight—beautiful with the awful and unearthly beauty of a great forest fire, or a mighty conflagration in some crowded city. The whole river valley, up which I looked, was one sea of fire. Barriers of red-hot lava formed themselves for a moment now and again where the outer edge or vanguard of the inundation had cooled a little on the surface by exposure: and over these temporary dams, fresh cataracts of white-hot material poured themselves afresh into the valley beyond it. After a while, as the deeper portion of basalt was pushed out, all was white alike. So glorious it looked in the morning sunshine that one could hardly realize the appalling reality of that sea of molten gold; one might almost have imagined a splendid triumph of the scene-painter’s art, did one not know that it was actually a river of fire, overwhelming, consuming, and destroying every object before it in its devastating progress.
I tried vaguely to discover the source of the disaster. Looking straight up stream, past Bourne End and Marlow, I descried with bleared and dazzled eyes a whiter mass than any, glowing fiercely in the daylight like an electric light, and filling up the narrow gorge of the river towards Hurley and Henley. I recollected at once that this portion of the valley was not usually visible from Hedsor Hill, and almost without thinking of it I instinctively guessed the reason why it had become so now: it was the centre of disturbance—the earth’s crust just there had bulged upwards slightly, till it cracked and gaped to emit the basalt.
Looking harder, I could make out (though it was like looking at the sun) that the glowing white dome-shaped mass, as of an electric light, was the molten lava as it gurgled from the mouth of the vast fissure. I say vast, because so it seemed to me, though, as everybody now knows, the actual gap where the earth opened measures no more than eight miles across, from a point near what was once Shiplake Ferry to the site of the old lime-kilns at Marlow. Yet when one saw the eruption actually taking place, the colossal scale of it was what most appalled one. A sea of fire, eight to twelve miles broad, in the familiar Thames Valley, impressed and terrified one a thousand times more than a sea of fire ten times as vast in the nameless wilds of Western America.
I could see dimly, too, that the flood spread in every direction from its central point, both up and down the river. To right and left, indeed, it was soon checked and hemmed in by the hills about Wargrave and Medmenham; but downwards, it had filled the entire valley as far as Cookham and beyond; while upward, it spread in one vast glowing sheet towards Reading and the flats by the confluence of the Kennet. I did not then know, of course, that this gigantic natural dam or barrier was later on to fill up the whole low-lying level, and so block the course of the two rivers as to form those twin expanses of inland water, Lake Newbury and Lake Oxford. Tourists who now look down on still summer evenings where the ruins of Magdalen and of Merton may be dimly descried through the pale green depths, their broken masonry picturesquely overgrown with tangled water-weeds, can form but little idea of the terrible scene which that peaceful bank presented while the incandescent lava was pouring forth in a scorching white flood towards the doomed district. Merchants who crowd the busy quays of those mushroom cities which have sprung up with greater rapidity than Chicago or Johannesburg on the indented shore where the new lakes abut upon the Berkshire Chalk Downs have half forgotten the horror of the intermediate time when the waters of the two rivers rose slowly, slowly, day after day, to choke their valleys and overwhelm some of the most glorious architecture in Britain. But though I did not know and could not then foresee the remoter effects of the great fire-flood in that direction, I saw enough to make my heart stand still within me. It was with difficulty that I grasped my bicycle, my hands trembled so fiercely. I realized that I was a spectator of the greatest calamity which had befallen a civilised land within the ken of history.
I looked southwards along the valley in the direction of Maidenhead. As yet it did not occur to me that the catastrophe was anything more than a local flood, though even as such it would have been one of unexampled vastness. My imagination could hardly conceive that London itself was threatened. In those days one could not grasp the idea of the destruction of London. I only thought just at first, “It will go on towards Maidenhead!” Even as I thought it, I saw a fresh and fiercer gush of fire well out from the central gash, and flow still faster than ever down the centre of the valley, over the hardening layer already cooling on its edge by contact with the air and soil. This new outburst fell in a mad cataract over the end or van of the last, and instantly spread like water across the level expanse between the Cliveden hills and the opposite range at Pinkneys. I realized with a throb that it was advancing towards Windsor. Then a wild fear thrilled through me. If Windsor, why not Staines and Chertsey and Hounslow? If Hounslow, why not London?
In a second I remembered Ethel and the children. Hitherto, the immediate danger of my own position alone had struck me. The fire was so near; the heat of it rose up in my face and daunted me. But now I felt I must make a wild dash to warn—not London—no, frankly, I forgot those millions; but Ethel and my little ones. In that thought, for the first moment, the real vastness of the catastrophe came home to me. The Thames Valley was doomed! I must ride for dear life if I wished to save my wife and children!
I mounted again, but found my shaking feet could hardly work the pedals. My legs were one jelly. With a frantic effort, I struck off inland in the direction of Burnham. I did not think my way out definitely; I hardly knew the topography of the district well enough to form any clear conception of what route I must take in order to keep to the hills and avoid the flood of fire that was deluging the lowlands. But by pure instinct, I believe, I set my face Londonwards along the ridge of the chalk downs. In three minutes I had lost sight of the burning flood, and was deep among green lanes and under shadowy beeches. The very contrast frightened me. I wondered if I was going mad. It was all so quiet. One could not believe that scarce five miles off from that devastating sheet of fire, birds were singing in the sky and men toiling in the fields as if nothing had happened.
Near Lambourne Wood I met a brother cyclist, just about to descend the hill. A curve in the road hid the valley from him. I shouted aloud:—
“For Heaven’s sake, don’t go down! There is danger, danger!”
He smiled and looked back at me. “I can take any hill in England,” he answered.
“It’s not the hill,” I burst out. “There has been an eruption—a fissure-eruption at Marlow—great floods of fire—and all the valley is filled with burning lava!”
He stared at me derisively. Then his expression changed of a sudden. I suppose he saw I was white-faced and horror-stricken. He drew away as if alarmed. “Go back to Colney Hatch!” he cried, pedaling faster, and rode hastily down the hill, as if afraid of me. I have no doubt he must have ridden into the very midst of the flood, and been scorched by its advance, before he could check his machine on so sudden a slope.
Between Lambourne Wood and Burnham I did not see the fire-flood. I rode on at full speed among green fields and meadows. Here and there I passed a labouring man on the road. More than one looked up at me and commented on the oppressive heat, but none of them seemed to be aware of the fate that was overtaking their own homes close by, in the valley. I told one or two, but they laughed and gazed after me as if I were a madman. I grew sick of warning them. They took no heed of my words, but went on upon their way as if nothing out of the common were happening to England.
On the edge of the down, near Burnham, I caught sight of the valley again. Here, people were just awaking to what was taking place near them. Half the population was gathered on the slope, looking down with wonder on the flood of fire, which had now just turned the corner of the hills by Taplow. Silent terror was the prevailing type of expression. But when I told them I had seen the lava bursting forth from the earth in a white dome above Marlow, they laughed me to scorn; and when I assured them I was pushing forward in hot haste to London, they answered, “London! It won’t never get as far as London!” That was the only place on the hills, as is now well known, where the flood was observed long enough beforehand to telegraph and warn the inhabitants of the great city; but nobody thought of doing it; and I must say, even if they had done so, there is not the slightest probability that the warning would have attracted the least attention in our ancient Metropolis. Men on the Stock Exchange would have made jests about the slump, and proceeded to buy and sell as usual.
I measured with my eye the level plain between Burnham and Slough, calculating roughly with myself whether I should have time to descend upon the well-known road from Maidenhead to London by Colnbrook and Hounslow. (I advise those who are unacquainted with the topography of this district before the eruption to follow out my route on a good map of the period.) But I recognised in a moment that this course would be impossible. At the rate that the flood had taken to progress from Cookham Bridge to Taplow, I felt sure it would be upon me before I reached Upton, or Ditton Park at the outside. It is true the speed of the advance might slacken somewhat as the lava cooled; and strange to say, so rapidly do realities come to be accepted in one’s mind, that I caught myself thinking this thought in the most natural manner, as if I had all my life long been accustomed to the ways of fissure-eruptions. But on the other hand, the lava might well out faster and hotter than before, as I had already seen it do more than once; and I had no certainty even that it would not rise to the level of the hills on which I was standing. You who read this narrative nowadays take it for granted, of course, that the extent and height of the inundation was bound to be exactly what you know it to have been; we at the time could not guess how high it might rise and how large an area of the country it might overwhelm and devastate. Was it to stop at the Chilterns, or to go north to Birmingham, York, and Scotland?
Still, in my trembling anxiety to warn my wife and children, I debated with myself whether I should venture down into the valley, and hurry along the main road with a wild burst for London. I thought of Ethel, alone in our little home at Bayswater, and almost made up my mind to risk it. At that moment, I became aware that the road to London was already crowded with carriages, carts, and cycles, all dashing at a mad pace unanimously towards London. Suddenly a fresh wave turned the corner by Taplow and Maidenhead Bridge, and began to gain upon them visibly. It was an awful sight. I cannot pretend to describe it. The poor creatures on the road, men and animals alike, rushed wildly, despairingly on; the fire took them from behind, and, one by one, before the actual sea reached them, I saw them shrivel and melt away in the fierce white heat of the advancing inundation. I could not look at it any longer. I certainly could not descend and court instant death. I felt that my one chance was to strike across the downs, by Stoke Poges and Uxbridge, and then try the line of northern heights to London.
Oh, how fiercely I pedalled! At Farnham Royal (where again nobody seemed to be aware what had happened) a rural policeman tried to stop me, for frantic riding. I tripped him up, and rode on. Experience had taught me it was no use telling those who had not seen it of the disaster. A little beyond, at the entrance to a fine park, a gatekeeper attempted to shut a gate in my face, exclaiming that the road was private. I saw it was the only practicable way without descending to the valley, and I made up my mind this was no time for trifling. I am a man of peace, but I lifted my fist and planted it between his eyes. Then, before he could recover from his astonishment, I had mounted again and ridden on across the park, while he ran after me in vain, screaming to the men in the pleasure-grounds to stop me. But I would not be stopped; and I emerged on the road once more at Stoke Poges.
Near Galley Hill, after a long and furious ride, I reached the descent to Uxbridge. Was it possible to descend? I glanced across, once more by pure instinct, for I had never visited the spot before, towards where I felt the Thames must run. A great white cloud hung over it. I saw what that cloud must mean: it was the steam of the river, where the lava sucked it up and made it seethe and boil suddenly. I had not noticed this white fleece of steam at Cookham, though I did not guess why till afterwards. In the narrow valley where the Thames ran between hills, the lava flowed over it all at once, bottling the steam beneath; and it is this imprisoned steam that gave rise in time to the subsequent series of appalling earthquakes, to supply forecasts of which is now the chief duty of the Seismologer Royal; whereas, in the open plain, the basalt advanced more gradually and in a thinner stream, and therefore turned the whole mass of water into white cloud as soon as it reached each bend of the river.
At the time, however, I had no leisure to think out all this. I only knew by such indirect signs that the flood was still advancing, and, therefore, that it would be impossible for me to proceed towards London by the direct route via Uxbridge and Hanwell. If I meant to reach town (as we called it familiarly), I must descend to the valley at once, pass through Uxbridge streets as fast as I could, make a dash across the plain, by what I afterwards knew to be Hillingdon (I saw it then as a nameless village), and aim at a house-crowned hill, which I only learned later was Harrow, but which I felt sure would enable me to descend upon London by Hampstead or Highgate.
I am no strategist; but in a second, in that extremity, I picked out these points, feeling dimly sure they would lead me home to Ethel and the children.
The town of Uxbridge (whose place you can still find marked on many maps) lay in the valley of a small river, a confluent of the Thames. Up this valley it was certain that the lava-stream must flow; and, indeed, at the present day, the basin around is completely filled by one of the solidest and most forbidding masses of black basalt in the country. Still, I made up my mind to descend and cut across the low-lying ground towards Harrow. If I failed, I felt, after all, I was but one unit more in what I now began to realize as a prodigious national calamity.
I was just coasting down the hill, with Uxbridge lying snug and unconscious in the glen below me, when a slight and unimportant accident occurred which almost rendered impossible my further progress. It was past the middle of August; the hedges were being cut; and this particular lane, bordered by a high thorn fence, was strewn with the mangled branches of the may-bushes. At any other time, I should have remembered the danger and avoided them; that day, hurrying down hill for dear life and for Ethel, I forgot to notice them. The consequence was, I was pulled up suddenly by finding my front wheel deflated*; this untimely misfortune almost unmanned me. I dismounted and examined the tyre; it had received a bad puncture. I tried inflating again, in hopes the hole might be small enough to make that precaution sufficient. But it was quite useless. I found I must submit to stop and doctor up the puncture. Fortunately, I had the necessary apparatus in my wallet. (* The bicycles of that period were fitted with pneumatic tubes of india-rubber as tyres—a clumsy device, now long superseded.
I think it was the weirdest episode of all that weird ride—this sense of stopping impatiently, while the fiery flood still surged on toward London, in order to go through all the fiddling and troublesome little details of mending a pneumatic tyre. The moment and the operation seemed so sadly out of harmony. A countryman passed by on a cart, obviously suspecting nothing; that was another point which added horror to the occasion—that so near the catastrophe, so very few people were even aware what was taking place beside them. Indeed, as is well known, I was one of the very few who saw the eruption during its course, and yet managed to escape from it. Elsewhere, those who tried to run before it, either to escape themselves or to warn others of the danger, were overtaken by the lava before they could reach a place of safety. I attribute this mainly to the fact that most of them continued along the high roads in the valley, or fled instinctively for shelter towards their homes, instead of making at once for the heights and the uplands.
The countryman stopped and looked at me.
“The more haste the less speed!” he said, with proverbial wisdom.
I glanced up at him, and hesitated. Should I warn him of his doom, or was it useless? “Keep up on the hills,” I said, at last. “An unspeakable calamity is happening in the valley. Flames of fire are flowing down it, as from a great burning mountain. You will be cut off by the eruption.”
He stared at me blankly, and burst into a meaningless laugh. “Why, you’re one of them Salvation Army fellows,” he exclaimed, after a short pause. “You’re trying to preach to me. I’m going to Uxbridge.” And he continued down the hill towards certain destruction.
It was hours, I feel sure, before I had patched up that puncture, though I did it by the watch in four and a half minutes. As soon as I had blown out my tyre again I mounted once more, and rode at a break-neck pace to Uxbridge. I passed down the straggling main street of the suburban town, crying aloud as I went, “Run, run, to the downs! A flood of lava is rushing up the valley! To the hills, for your lives! All the Thames bank is blazing!” Nobody took the slightest heed; they stood still in the street for a minute with open mouths: then they returned to their customary occupations. A quarter of an hour later, there was no such place in the world as Uxbridge.
I followed the main road through the village which I have since identified as Hillingdon; then I diverged to the left, partly by roads and partly by field paths of whose exact course I am still uncertain, towards the hill at Harrow. When I reached the town, I did not strive to rouse the people, partly because my past experience had taught me the futility of the attempt, and partly because I rightly judged that they were safe from the inundation; for as it never quite covered the dome of St. Paul’s, part of which still protrudes from the sea of basalt, it did not reach the level of the northern heights of London. I rode on through Harrow without one word to anybody. I did not desire to be stopped or harassed as an escaped lunatic.
From Marrow I made my way tortuously along the rising ground, by the light of nature, through Wembley Park, to Willesden. At Willesden, for the first time, I found to a certainty that London was threatened. Great crowds of people in the profoundest excitement stood watching a dense cloud of smoke and steam that spread rapidly over the direction of Shepherd’s Bush and Hammersmith. They were speculating as to its meaning, but laughed increduously when I told them what it portended. A few minutes later, the smoke spread ominously towards Kensington and Paddington. That settled my fate. It was clearly impossible to descend into London; and indeed, the heat now began to be unendurable. It drove us all back, almost physically. I thought I must abandon all hope. I should never even know what had become of Ethel and the children.
My first impulse was to lie down and await the fire-flood. Yet the sense of the greatness of the catastrophe seemed somehow to blunt one’s own private grief. I was beside myself with fear for my darlings; but I realized that I was but one among hundreds of thousands of fathers in the same position. What was happening at that moment in the great city of five million souls we did not know, we shall never know; but we may conjecture that the end was mercifully too swift to entail much needless suffering. All at once, a gleam of hope struck me. It was my father’s birthday. Was it not just possible that Ethel might have taken the children up to Hampstead to wish their grandpapa many happy returns of the day? With a wild determination not to give up all for lost, I turned my front wheel in the direction of Hampstead Hill, still skirting the high ground as far as possible. My heart was on fire within me. A restless anxiety urged me to ride my hardest. As all along the route, I was still just a minute or two in front of the catastrophe. People were beginning to be aware that something was taking place; more than once as I passed they asked me eagerly where the fire was. It was impossible for me to believe by this time that they knew nothing of an event in whose midst I seemed to have been living for months; how could I realize that all the things which had happened since I started from Cookham Bridge so long ago were really compressed into the space of a single morning?—nay, more, of an hour and a half only?
As I approached Windmill Hill, a terrible sinking seized me. I seemed to totter on the brink of a precipice. Could Ethel be safe? Should I ever again see little Bertie and the baby? I pedalled on as if automatically; for all life had gone out of me. I felt my hip-joint moving dry in its socket. I held my breath; my heart stood still. It was a ghastly moment.
At my father’s door I drew up, and opened the garden gate. I hardly dared to go in. Though each second was precious, I paused and hesitated.
At last I turned the handle. I heard somebody within. My heart came up in my mouth. It was little Bertie’s voice: “Do it again, Granpa; do it again; it amooses Bertie!”
I rushed into the room. “Bertie, Bertie!” I cried. “Is Mammy here?”
He flung himself upon me. “Mammy, Mammy, Daddy has comed home.” I burst into tears. “And Baby?” I asked, trembling.
“Baby and Ethel are here, George,” my father answered, staring at me. “Why, my boy, what’s the matter?”
I flung myself into a chair and broke down. In that moment of relief, I felt that London was lost, but I had saved my wife and children.
I did not wait for explanations. A crawling four-wheeler was loitering by. I hailed it, and hurried them in. My father wished to discuss the matter, but I cut him short. I gave the driver three pounds—all the gold I had with me. “Drive on!” I shouted, “drive on! Towards Hatfield— anywhere!”
He drove as he was bid. We spent that night, while Hampstead flared like a beacon, at an isolated farm-house on the high ground in Hertfordshire. For, of course, though the flood did not reach so high, it set fire to everything inflammable in its neighbourhood.
Next day, all the world knew the magnitude of the disaster. It can only be summed up in five emphatic words: There was no more London.
I have one other observation alone to make. I noticed at the time how, in my personal relief, I forgot for the moment that London was perishing. I even forgot that my house and property had perished. Exactly the opposite, it seemed to me, happened with most of those survivors who lost wives and children in the eruption. They moved about as in a dream, without a tear, without a complaint, helping others to provide for the needs of the homeless and houseless. The universality of the catastrophe made each man feel as though it were selfishness to attach too great an importance at such a crisis to his own personal losses. Nay, more; the burst of feverish activity and nervous excitement, I might even say enjoyment, which followed the horror, was traceable, I think, to this selfsame cause. Even grave citizens felt they must do their best to dispel the universal gloom; and they plunged accordingly into a round of dissipations which other nations thought both unseemly and un-English. It was one way of expressing the common emotion. We had all lost heart—and we flocked to the theatres to pluck up our courage. That, I believe, must be our national answer to M. Zola’s strictures on our untimely levity. “This people,” says the great French author, “which took its pleasures sadly while it was rich and prosperous, begins to dance and sing above the ashes of its capital—it makes merry by the open graves of its wives and children. What an enigma! What a puzzle! What chance of an Œdipus!”
November, 1892
THE DOOM OF LONDON
by Robert Barr
ROBERT Barr lived the drama-packed adventures that are frequently credited to newspapermen in fiction. Though Glasgow-born and a grade school instructor in the Windsor, Ontario, public schools, he eventually obtained a post on the Detroit Free Press. There he became a legend, rumored to have dodged bullets and bounded across rivers of breaking ice in pursuit of news beats. He was eventually transferred to the paper’s London office. In England’s primary city he roomed with Rudyard Kipling and became a close friend of A. Conan Doyle.
He decided to start his own business and through Doyle was introduced to Jerome K. Jerome, famed playwright of Three Men in a Boat (1889). Pooling resources they launched The Idler, its first issue dated February 1892. It was a success from the start, featuring smart fiction of the highest quality by Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Rudyard Kipling, A. Conan Doyle, Israel Zangwill, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells, among others.
It was in The Idler (November 1892) that The Doom of London was first published. Quite obviously it was intended as a fictional warning to the city of London to do something about the paralyzing fog, actually caused by the fumes from the thousands of soft-coal fires, which read so romantically in Sherlock Holmes stories, but which accounted for numerous deaths annually. In doing so, Barr popularized a new fictional gambit of civic criticism disguised as science fiction, later to be taken up by other writers, among them Cutcliffe Hyne, Grant Allen and, most elaborately, Fred M. White with a series of six disasters for London in Pearson’s Magazine during 1903 and 1904. The Doom of London was reprinted in America in McClure’s Magazine (November 1894), again in The Idler (February 1905), and in Barr’s hardcover collection, The Face in the Mask (1895).
Barr frequently returned to tales that could be classed as science fiction or fantasy, among them The Fear of It (The Idler, May 1893), a Utopia of an island whose people have never heard of England or the United States; The Revolt of the— (The Idler, May 1894), telling of the rise of women to a place of dominance in business; and his very clever novel, From Whose Bourne (1896), where a murdered man recruits a great detective from the spirit world to help him clear his widow of suspicion in his death.
Almost forgotten today, Barr was an inventive and satirical writer, well regarded in his time and distinctly worth the trouble of reviving.
1.
The Self-Conceit of the Twentieth Century.
I TRUST I am thankful my life has been spared until I have seen that most brilliant epoch of the world’s history—the middle of the twentieth century. It would be useless for any man to disparage the vast achievements of the past fifty years; and if I venture to call attention to the fact, now apparently forgotten, that the people of the nineteenth century succeeded in accomplishing many notable things, it must not be imagined that I intend thereby to discount in any measure the marvellous inventions of the present age. Men have always been somewhat prone to look with a certain condescension upon those who lived fifty or a hundred years before them. This seems to me the especial weakness of the present age; a feeling of national self-conceit, which, when it exists, should at least be kept as much in the background as possible. It will astonish many to know that such also was a failing of the people of the nineteenth century. They imagined themselves living in an age of progress; and while I am not foolish enough to attempt to prove that they did anything really worth recording, yet it must be admitted by any unprejudiced man of research that their inventions were at least stepping-stones to those of today. Although the telephone and telegraph, and all other electrical appliances, are now to be found only in our national museums, or in the private collections of those few men who take any interest in the doings of the last century, nevertheless, the study of the now obsolete science of electricity led up to the recent discovery of vibratory ether which does the work of the world so satisfactorily. The people of the nineteenth century were not fools; and although I am well aware that this statement will be received with scorn where it attracts any attention whatever, yet who can say that the progress of the next half-century may not be as great as that of the one now ended, and that the people of the next century may not look upon us with the same contempt which we feel toward those who lived fifty years ago?
Being an old man, I am, perhaps, a laggard who dwells in the past rather than the present; still it seems to me that such an article as that which appeared recently in Blackwood from the talented pen of Professor Mowberry, of Oxford University, is utterly unjustifiable. Under the title of “Did the People of London deserve their Fate?” he endeavors to show that the simultaneous blotting out of millions of human beings was a beneficial event, the good results of which we still enjoy. According to him, Londoners were so dull-witted and stupid, so incapable of improvement, so sodden in the vice of mere money-gathering, that nothing but their total extinction would have sufficed, and that, instead of being an appalling catastrophe, the doom of London was an unmixed blessing. In spite of the unanimous approval with which this article has been received by the press, I still maintain that such writing is uncalled for, and that there is something to be said for the London of the nineteenth century.
2.
Why London, Warned, Was Unprepared.
The indignation I felt in first reading the article alluded to still remains with me, and it has caused me to write these words, giving some account of what I must still regard, in spite of the sneers of the present age, as the most terrible disaster that ever overtook a portion of the human race. I shall not endeavor to place before those who read, any record of the achievements pertaining to the time in question. But I would like to say a few words about the alleged stupidity of the people of London in making no preparations for a disaster regarding which they had continual and ever-recurring warning. They have been compared with the inhabitants of Pompeii making merry at the foot of a volcano. In the first place, fogs were so common in London, especially in winter, that no particular attention was paid to them. They were merely looked upon as inconvenient annoyances, interrupting traffic and prejudicial to health; but I doubt if any one thought it possible for a fog to become one vast smothering mattress pressed down upon a whole metropolis, extinguishing life as if the city suffered from hopeless hydrophobia. I have read that victims bitten by mad dogs were formerly put out of their sufferings in that way, although I doubt much if such things were ever actually done, notwithstanding the charges of savage barbarity now made against the people of the nineteenth century.
Probably the inhabitants of Pompeii were so accustomed to the eruptions of Vesuvius that they gave no thought to the possibility of their city being destroyed by a storm of ashes and an overflow of lava. Rain frequently descended upon London, and if a rainfall continued long enough it would certainly have flooded the metropolis, but no precautions were taken against a flood from the clouds. Why, then, should the people have been expected to prepare for a catastrophe from fog, such as there had never been any experience of in the world’s history? The people of London were far from being the sluggish dolts present-day writers would have us believe.
3.
The Coincidence That Came at Last.
As fog has now been abolished both on sea and land, and as few of the present generation have even seen one, it may not be out of place to give a few lines on the subject of fogs in general, and the London fogs in particular, which through local peculiarities differed from all others. A fog was simply watery vapor rising from the marshy surface of the land or from the sea, or condensed into a cloud from the saturated atmosphere. In my day, fogs were a great danger at sea, for people then travelled by means of steamships that sailed upon the surface of the ocean.
London at the end of the nineteenth century consumed vast quantities of a soft bituminous coal for the purpose of heating rooms and of preparing food. In the morning and during the day, clouds of black smoke were poured forth from thousands of chimneys. When a mass of white vapor arose in the night, these clouds of smoke fell upon the fog, pressing it down, filtering slowly through it, and adding to its density. The sun would have absorbed the fog but for the layer of smoke that lay thick above the vapor and prevented its rays reaching it. Once this condition of things prevailed, nothing could clear London but a breeze of wind from any direction. London frequently had a seven-days’ fog, and sometimes a seven-days’ calm, but these two conditions never coincided until the last year of the last century. The coincidence, as every one knows, meant death—death so wholesale that no war the earth has ever seen left such slaughter behind it. To understand the situation, one has only to imagine the fog as taking the place of the ashes at Pompeii, and the coal-smoke as being the lava that covered it. The result to the inhabitants in both cases was exactly the same.
4.
The American Who Wanted To Sell.
I was at the time confidential clerk to the house of Fulton, Brixton & Co., a firm in Cannon Street, dealing largely in chemicals and chemical apparatus. Fulton I never knew; he died long before my time. Sir John Brixton was my chief—knighted, I believe, for services to his party, or because he was an official in the city during some royal progress through it; I have forgotten which. My small room was next to his large one, and my chief duty was to see that no one had an interview with Sir John unless he was an important man or had important business. Sir John was a difficult man to see, and a difficult man to deal with when he was seen. He had little respect for most men’s feelings, and none at all for mine. If I allowed a man to enter his room who should have been dealt with by one of the minor members of the company, Sir John made no effort to conceal his opinion of me. One day, in the autumn of the last year of the century, an American was shown into my room. Nothing would do but he must have an interview with Sir John Brixton. I told him that it was impossible, as Sir John was extremely busy, but that if he explained his business to me I would lay it before Sir John at the first favorable opportunity. The American demurred at this, but finally accepted the inevitable. He was the inventor, he said, of a machine that would revolutionize life in London, and he wanted Fulton, Brixton & Co. to become agents for it. The machine, which he had in a small handbag with him, was of white metal, and it was so constructed that by turning an index it gave out greater or less volumes of oxygen gas. The gas, I understood, was stored in the interior in liquid form, under great pressure, and would last, if I remember rightly, for six months without recharging. There was also a rubber tube with a mouthpiece attached to it, and the American said that if a man took a few whiffs a day he would experience beneficial results. Now, I knew there was not the slightest use in showing the machine to Sir John, because we dealt in old-established British apparatus, and never in any of the new-fangled Yankee inventions. Besides, Sir John had a prejudice against Americans, and I felt sure this man would exasperate him, as he was a most cadaverous specimen of the race, with high nasal tones, and a most deplorable pronunciation, much given to phrases savoring of slang; and he exhibited also a certain nervous familiarity of demeanor toward people to whom he was all but a complete stranger. It was impossible for me to allow such a man to enter the presence of Sir John Brixton; and when he returned some days later I explained to him, I hope with courtesy, that the head of the house regretted very much his inability to consider his proposal regarding the machine. The ardor of the American seemed in no way dampened by this rebuff. He said I could not have explained the possibilities of the apparatus properly to Sir John; he characterized it as a great invention, and said it meant a fortune to whoever obtained the agency for it. He hinted that other noted London houses were anxious to secure it, but for some reason not stated he preferred to deal with us. He left some printed pamphlets referring to the invention, and said he would call again.
5.
The American Sees Sir John.
Many a time I have since thought of that persistent American, and wondered whether he left London before the disaster, or was one of the unidentified thousands who were buried in unmarked graves. Little did Sir John think, when he expelled him with some asperity from his presence, that he was turning away an offer of life, and that the heated words he used were, in reality, a sentence of death upon himself. For my own part, I regret that I lost my temper, and told the American his business methods did not commend themselves to me. Perhaps he did not feel the sting of this; indeed, I feel certain he did not, for, unknowingly, he saved my life. Be that as it may, he showed no resentment, but immediately asked me out to drink with him, an offer I was compelled to refuse. But I am getting ahead of my story. Indeed, being unaccustomed to writing, it is difficult for me to set down events in their proper sequence. The American called upon me several times after I told him our house could not deal with him. He got into the habit of dropping in upon me unannounced, which I did not at all like; but I gave no instructions regarding his intrusions, because I had no idea of the extremes to which he was evidently prepared to go. One day, as he sat near my desk reading a paper, I was temporarily called from the room. When I returned I thought he had gone, taking his machine with him; but a moment later I was shocked to hear his high nasal tones in Sir John’s room, alternating with the deep notes of my chief’s voice, which apparently exercised no such dread upon the American as upon those who were more accustomed to them. I at once entered the room, and was about to explain to Sir John that the American was there through no connivance of mine, when my chief asked me to be silent, and, turning to his visitor, requested him gruffly to proceed with his interesting narration. The inventor needed no second invitation, but went on with his glib talk, while Sir John’s frown grew deeper, and his face became redder under his fringe of white hair. When the American had finished, Sir John roughly bade him begone, and take his accursed machine with him. He said it was an insult for a person with one foot in the grave to bring a so-called health invention to a robust man who never had a day’s illness. I do not know why he listened so long to the American, when he had made up his mind from the first not to deal with him, unless it was to punish me for inadvertently allowing the stranger to enter. The interview distressed me exceedingly, as I stood there helpless, knowing Sir John was becoming more and more angry with every word the foreigner uttered; but, at last, I succeeded in drawing the inventor and his work into my own room and closing the door. I sincerely hoped I would never see the American again, and my wish was gratified. He insisted on setting his machine going and placing it on a shelf in my room. He asked me to slip it into Sir John’s room some foggy day and note the effect. The man said he would call again, but he never did.
6.
How the Smoke Held Down the Fog.
It was on a Friday that the fog came down upon us. The weather was very fine up to the middle of November that autumn. The fog did not seem to have anything unusual about it. I have seen many worse fogs than that appeared to be. As day followed day, however, the atmosphere became denser and darker, caused, I suppose, by the increasing volume of coal-smoke poured out upon it. The peculiarity about those seven days was the intense stillness of the air. We were, although we did not know it, under an air-proof canopy, and were slowly but surely exhausting the life-giving oxygen around us, and replacing it by poisonous carbonic acid gas. Scientific men have since shown that a simple mathematical calculation might have told us exactly when the last atom of oxygen would have been consumed; but it is easy to be wise after the event. The body of the greatest mathematician in England was found in the Strand. He came that morning from Cambridge. During a fog there was always a marked increase in the death rate, and on this occasion the increase was no greater than usual until the sixth day. The newspapers on the morning of the seventh were full of startling statistics, but at the time of going to press the full significance of the alarming figures was not realized. The editorials of the morning papers on the seventh day contained no warning of the calamity that was so speedily to follow their appearance. I lived then at Ealing, a Western suburb of London, and came every morning to Cannon Street by a certain train. I had up to the sixth day experienced no inconvenience from the fog, and this was largely due, I am convinced, to the unnoticed operations of the American machine. On the fifth and sixth days Sir John did not come to the city, but he was in his office on the seventh. The door between his room and mine was closed. Shortly after ten o’clock I heard a cry in his room, followed by a heavy fall. I opened the door and saw Sir John lying face downward on the floor. Hastening toward him, I felt for the first time the deadly effect of the deoxygenized atmosphere, and before I reached him I fell first on one knee and then headlong. I realized that my senses were leaving me, and instinctively crawled back to my own room, where the oppression was at once lifted, and I stood again upon my feet, gasping. I closed the door of Sir John’s room, thinking it filled with poisonous fumes, as indeed it was. I called loudly for help, but there was no answer. On opening the door to the main office I met again what I thought was the noxious vapor. Speedily as I closed the door, I was impressed by the intense silence of the usually busy office, and saw that some of the clerks were motionless on the floor, and others sat with their heads on their desks as if asleep. Even at this awful moment I did not realize that what I saw was common to all London, and not, as I imagined, a local disaster, caused by the breaking of some carboys in our cellar. (It was filled with chemicals of every kind, of whose properties I was ignorant, dealing as I did with the accountant, and not the scientific, side of our business.) I opened the only window in my room, and again shouted for help. The street was silent and dark in the ominously still fog, and what now froze me with horror was meeting the same deadly, stifling atmosphere that was in the rooms. In falling, I brought down the window and shut out the poisonous air. Again I revived, and slowly the true state of things began to dawn upon me. I was in an oasis of oxygen. I at once surmised that the machine on my shelf was responsible for the existence of this oasis in a vast desert of deadly gas. I took down the American’s machine, fearful in moving it that I might stop its working. Taking the mouthpiece between my lips I again entered Sir John’s room, this time without feeling any ill effects. My poor master was long beyond human help. There was evidently no one alive in the building except myself. Out in the street all was silent and dark. The gas was extinguished; but here and there in shops the incandescent lights were still weirdly burning, depending as they did on accumulators, and not on direct engine power. I turned automatically toward Cannon Street station, knowing my way to it even if blindfolded, stumbling over bodies prone on the pavement, and in crossing the street I ran against a motionless bus spectral in the fog, with dead horses lying in front, and their reins dangling from the nerveless hand of a dead driver. The ghostlike passengers, equally silent, sat bolt upright, or hung over the edge-boards in attitudes horribly grotesque.
7.
The Train with Its Trail of the Dead.
If a man’s reasoning faculties were alert at such a time (I confess mine were dormant), he would have known there could be no trains at Cannon Street station; for if there was not enough oxygen in the air to keep a man alive, or a gas-jet alight, there would certainly not be enough to enable an engine fire to burn, even if the engineer retained sufficient energy to attend to his task. At times instinct is better than reason, and it proved so in this case. The railway, in those days, from Ealing came under the City in a deep tunnel. It would appear that in this underground passage the carbonic acid gas would first find a resting-place, on account of its weight; but such was not the fact. I imagine that a current through the tunnel brought from the outlying districts a supply of comparatively pure air that, for some minutes after the general disaster, maintained human life. Be this as it may, the long platforms of Cannon Street underground station presented a fearful spectacle. A train stood at the down platform. The electric lights burned fitfully. This platform was crowded with men, who fought each other like demons, apparently for no reason, because the train was already packed as full as it could hold. Hundreds were dead under foot, and every now and then a blast of foul air came along the tunnel, whereupon hundreds more would relax their grips and succumb. Over their bodies the survivors fought, with continually thinning ranks. It seemed to me that most of those in the standing train were dead. Sometimes a desperate body of fighters climbed over those lying in heaps, and, throwing open a carriage door, hauled out passengers already in, and took their places, gasping. Those in the train offered no resistance, and lay motionless where they were flung, or rolled helplessly under the wheels of the train. I made my way along the wall as well as I could to the engine, wondering why the train did not go. The engineer lay on the floor of his cab, and the fires were out.
Custom is a curious thing. The struggling mob, fighting wildly for places in the carriages, were so accustomed to trains arriving and departing that it apparently occurred to none of them that the engineer was human and subject to the same atmospheric conditions as themselves. I placed the mouthpiece between his purple lips, and, holding my own breath like a submerged man, succeeded in reviving him. He said that if I gave him the machine he would take out the train as far as the steam already in the boiler would carry it. I refused to do this, but stepped on the engine with him, saying it would keep life in both of us until we got out into better air. In a surly manner he agreed to this and started the train, but he did not play fair. Each time he refused to give up the machine until I was in a fainting condition with holding in my breath, and finally he felled me to the floor of the cab. I imagine that the machine rolled off the train as I fell, and that he jumped after it. The remarkable thing is that neither of us needed the machine, for I remember that just after we started I noticed through the open iron door that the engine fire suddenly became aglow again, although at the time I was in too great a state of bewilderment and horror to understand what it meant. A western gale had sprung up—an hour too late. Even before we left Cannon Street those who still survived were comparatively safe, for one hundred and sixty-seven persons were rescued from that fearful heap of dead on the platforms, although many died within a day or two after, and others never recovered their reason. When I regained my senses after the blow dealt by the engineer, I found myself alone, and the train speeding across the Thames near Kew. I tried to stop the engine, but did not succeed. However, in experimenting, I managed to turn on the air brake, which in some degree checked the train, and lessened the impact when the crash came at Richmond terminus. I sprang off on the platform before the engine reached the terminal buffers, and saw passing me like a nightmare the ghastly train-load of the dead. Most of the doors were swinging open, and every compartment was jammed full, although, as I afterward learned, at each curve of the permanent way, or extra lurch of the train, bodies had fallen out all along the line. The smash at Richmond made no difference to the passengers. Besides myself, only two persons were taken alive from the train, and one of these, his clothes torn from his back in the struggle, was sent to an asylum, where he was never able to tell who he was; neither, as far as I know, did any one ever claim him.
March, 1898
A CORNER IN LIGHTNING
by George Griffith
UNQUESTIONABLY the second most popular science fiction writer in England in the nineties, after H. G. Wells, was George Griffith, whose full name was George Chetwynd Griffith-Jones. It is entirely conceivable that Griffith’s science fiction outsold that of Wells in England. Born in 1858, son of a clergyman, Griffith appeared to have the wanderlust, and he claimed to have traveled around the world six times. The variety of locales for his stories would tend to substantiate this claim.
At first a teacher and early a writer for a magazine of philosophy, The Secular Review, Griffith finally tried his hand at the short story (and poetry) for C. Arthur Pearson, magazine publisher. He scored his first big hit when Angel of the Revolution, a novel of the attempted aerial conquest of England by Russia, became a bestseller within thirty days of its book appearance in 1893. A sequel, Olga Romanoff; or, The Syren of the Skies (1894), did nearly as well, and carried the action into the future, as far as to involve communication with the planet Mars. While these were the high-water marks, he had numerous popular triumphs, most of them concerned with future war: The Outlaws of the Air (1895); The Romance of the Golden Star (1897); The Great Pirate Syndicate (1899); and the much-sought-after interplanetary, A Honeymoon in Space (1901).
He wrote a great deal of poetry which was very prominently featured in Pearson’s Magazine with pages of illustration, some in color, and did several books on the British penal system, displaying a considerable knowledge of the subject. Vigorous and romantic historical novels and profiles of great British heroes are also among his work.
He had a fine imagination, a reasonably good flair for characterization, and an excellent storyteller’s sense of pace, but the literary touch was lacking from his work. A Corner in Lightning may conceivably be the first story written in which cutting off all electrical current produces dire results. The great cities of the world had just reached the point where electricity for power and lighting had become an important factor; and a few years earlier this concept would have been unbelievable. Since then, it has been employed repeatedly with very dramatic impact.
THEY had been dining for once in a way tete-a-tete, and she—that is to say, Mrs. Sidney Calvert, a bride of eighteen months’ standing—was half-lying, half-sitting in the depths of a big, cosy, saddle-bag armchair on one side of a bright fire of mixed wood and coal that was burning in one of the most improved imitations of the medieval fireplace. Her feet—very pretty little feet they were, too, and very daintily shod—were crossed, and poised on the heel of the right one at the corner of the black marble curb.
Dinner was over. The coffee service and the liqueur case were on the table, and Mr. Sidney Calvert, a well set-up young fellow of about thirty, with a handsome, good-humoured face which a close observer would have found curiously marred by a chilly glitter in the eyes and a hardness that was something more than firmness about the mouth, was walking up and down on the opposite side of the table smoking a cigarette.
Mrs. Calvert had just emptied her coffee cup, and as she put it down on a little three-legged console table by her side, she looked round at her husband and said:
“Really, Sid, I must say that I can’t see why you should do it. Of course it’s a very splendid scheme and all that sort of thing, but, surely you, one of the richest men in London, are rich enough to do without it. I’m sure it’s wrong, too. What should we think if somebody managed to bottle up the atmosphere and made us pay for every breath we drew? Besides, there must surely be a good deal of risk in deliberately disturbing the economy of Nature in such a way. How are you going to get to the Pole, too, to put up your works?”
“Well,” he said, stopping for a moment in his walk and looking thoughtfully at the lighted end of his cigarette, “in the first place, as to the geography, I must remind you that the Magnetic Pole is not the North Pole. It is in Boothia Land, British North America, some 1500 miles south of the North Pole. Then, as to the risk, of course one can’t do big things like this without taking a certain amount of it; but still, I think it will be mostly other people that will have to take it in this case.
“Their risk, you see, will come in when they find that cables and telephones and telegraphs won’t work, and that no amount of steam-engine grinding can get up a respectable amount of electric light—when in short, all the electric plant of the world loses its value, and can’t be set going without buying supplies from the Magnetic Polar Storage Company, or, in other words, from your humble servant and the few friends that he will be graciously pleased to let in on the ground floor. But that is a risk that they can easily overcome by just paying for it. Besides, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t improve the quality of the commodity. ‘Our Extra Special Refined Lightning!’ ‘Our Triple Concentrated Essence of Electric Fluid’ and ‘Competent Thunder-Storms delivered at the Shortest Notice’ would look very nice in advertisements, wouldn’t they?”
“Don’t you think that’s rather a frivolous way of talking about a scheme which might end in ruining one of the most important industries in the world?” she said, laughing in spite of herself at the idea of delivering thunder-storms like pounds of butter or skeins of Berlin wool.
“Well, I’m afraid I can’t argue that point with you because, you see, you will keep looking at me while you talk, and that isn’t fair. Anyhow I’m equally sure that it would be quite impossible to run any business and make money out of it on the lines of the Sermon on the Mount. But, come, here’s a convenient digression for both of us. That’s the Professor, I expect.”
“Shall I go?” she said, taking her feet off the fender.
“Certainly not, unless you wish to,” he said; “or unless you think the scientific details are going to bore you.”
“Oh, no, they won’t do that,” she said. “The Professor has such a perfectly charming way of putting them; and, besides, I want to know all that I can about it.”
“Professor Kenyon, sir.”
“Ah, good evening, Professor! So sorry you could not come to dinner.” They both said this almost simultaneously as the man of science walked in.
“My wife and I were just discussing the ethics of this storage scheme when you came in,” he went on. “Have you anything fresh to tell us about the practical aspects of it? I’m afraid she doesn’t altogether approve of it, but as she is very anxious to hear all about it, I thought you wouldn’t mind her making one of the audience. “
“On the contrary, I shall be delighted,” replied the Professor; “the more so as it will give me a sympathiser.”
“I’m very glad to hear it,” said Mrs. Calvert approvingly. “I think it will be a very wicked scheme if it succeeds, and a very foolish and expensive one if it fails.”
“After which there is of course nothing more to be said,” laughed her husband, “except for the Professor to give his dispassionate opinion.”
“Oh, it shall be dispassionate, I can assure you,” he replied, noticing a little emphasis on the word. “The ethics of the matter are no business of mine, nor have I anything to do with its commercial bearings. You have asked me merely to look at technical possibilities and scientific probabilities, and of course I don’t propose to go beyond these.”
He took another sip at a cup of coffee that Mrs. Calvert had handed him, and went on:
“I’ve had a long talk with Markovitch this afternoon, and I must confess that I never met a more ingenious man or one who knew as much about magnetism and electricity as he does. His theory that they are the celestial and terrestrial manifestations of the same force, and that what is popularly called electric fluid is developed only at the stage where they become one, is itself quite a stroke of genius, or, at least, it will be if the theory stands the test of experience. His idea of locating the storage works over the Magnetic Pole of the earth is another, and I am bound to confess that, after a very careful examination of his plans and designs, I am distinctly of the opinion that, subject to one or two reservations, he will be able to do what he contemplates.”
“And the reservations, what are they?” asked Calvert a trifle eagerly.
“The first is one that is absolutely necessary to make with regard to all untried schemes, and especially to such a gigantic one as this. Nature, you know, has a way of playing most unexpected pranks with people who take liberties with her. Just at the last moment, when you are on the verge of success, something that you confidently expect to happen doesn’t happen, and there you are left in the lurch. It is utterly impossible to foresee anything of this kind, but you must clearly understand that if such a thing did happen it would ruin the enterprise just when you have spent the greatest part of the money on it—that is to say, at the end and not at the beginning.”
“All right,” said Calvert, “we’ll take that risk. Now, what’s the other reservation?”
“I was going to say something about the immense cost, but that I presume you are prepared for.”
Calvert nodded, and he went on:
“Well, that point being disposed of, it remains to be said that it may be very dangerous—I mean to those who live on the spot, and will be actually engaged in the work.”
“Then, I hope you won’t think of going near the place, Sid!” interrupted Mrs. Calvert, with a very pretty assumption of wifely authority.
“We’ll see about that later, little woman. It’s early days yet to get frightened about possibilities. Well, Professor, what was it you were going to say? Any more warnings?”
The Professor’s manner stiffened a little as he replied:
“Yes, it is a warning, Mr. Calvert. The fact is I feel bound to tell you that you propose to interfere very seriously with the distribution of one of the subtlest and least-known forces of Nature, and that the consequences of such an interference might be most disastrous, not only for those engaged in the work, but even the whole hemisphere, and possibly the whole planet.
“On the other hand, I think it is only fair to say that nothing more than a temporary disturbance may take place. You may, for instance, give us a series of very violent thunder-storms, with very heavy rains; or you may abolish thunder-storms and rain altogether until you get to work. Both prospects are within the bounds of possibility, and, at the same time, neither may come to anything.”
“Well, I think that quite good enough to gamble on, Professor,” said Calvert, who was thoroughly fascinated by the grandeur and magnitude, to say nothing of the dazzling financial aspects of the scheme. “I am very much obliged to you for putting it so clearly and nicely. Unless something very unexpected happens, we shall get to work on it at once. Just fancy what a glorious thing it will be to play Jove to the nations of the earth, and dole out lightning to them at so much a flash!”
“Well, I don’t want to be ill-natured,” said Mrs. Calvert, “but I must say that I hope the unexpected will happen. I think the whole thing is very wrong to begin with, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised if you blew us all up, or struck us all dead with lightning, or even brought on the Day of Judgment before its time. I think I shall go to Australia while you’re doing it.”
A little more than a year had passed since this after-dinner conversation in the dining-room of Mr. Sidney Calvert’s London house. During that time the preparations for the great experiment had been swiftly but secretly carried out. Ship after ship loaded with machinery, fuel, and provisions, and carrying labourers and artificers to the number of some hundreds, had sailed away into the Atlantic, and had come back in ballast and with bare working crews on board of them. Mr. Calvert himself had disappeared and reappeared two or three times, and on his return he had neither admitted nor denied any of the various rumours which gradually got into circulation in the City and in the Press.
Some said that it was an expedition to the Pole, and that the machinery consisted partly of improved ice-breakers and newly-invented steam sledges, which were to attack the ice-hummocks after the fashion of battering rams, and so gradually smooth a road to the Pole. To these little details others added flying machines and navigable balloons. Others again declared that the object was to plough out the North-West passage and keep a waterway clear from Hudson’s Bay to the Pacific all the year round, and yet others, somewhat less imaginative, pinned their faith to the founding of a great astronomical and meteorological observatory at the nearest possible point to the Pole, one of the objects of which was to be the determination of the true nature of the Aurora Borealis and the Zodiacal Light.
It was this last hypothesis that Mr. Calvert favoured as far as he could be said to favour any. There was a vagueness, and, at the same time, a distinction about a great scientific expedition which made it possible for him to give a sort of qualified countenance to the rumours without committing himself to anything, but so well had all his precautions been taken that not even a suspicion of the true object of the expedition to Boothia Land had got outside the little circle of those who were in his confidence.
So far everything had gone as Orloff Markovitch, the Russian Pole to whose extraordinary genius the inception and working out of the gigantic project were due, had expected and predicted. He himself was in supreme control of the unique and costly works which had grown up under his constant supervision on that lonely and desolate spot in the far North where the magnetic needle points straight down to the centre of the planet.
Professor Kenyon had paid a couple of visits with Calvert, once at the beginning of the work and once when it was nearing completion. So far not the slightest hitch or accident had occurred, and nothing abnormal had been noticed in connection with the earth’s electrical phenomena save unusually frequent appearances of the Aurora Borealis, and a singular decrease in the deviation of the mariner’s compass. Nevertheless, the Professor had firmly but politely refused to remain until the gigantic apparatus was set to work, and Calvert, too, had, with extreme reluctance, yielded to his wife’s intreaties, and had come back to England about a month before the initial experiment was to be begun.
The twentieth of March, which was the day fixed for the commencement of operations, came and went, to Mrs. Calvert’s intense relief, without anything out of the common happening. Though she knew that over a hundred thousand pounds of her husband’s money had been sunk, she found it impossible not to feel a thrill of satisfaction in the hope that Markovitch had made his experiment and failed.
She knew that the great Calvert Company, which was practically himself, could very well afford it, and she would not have regretted the loss of three times the sum in exchange for the knowledge that Nature was to be allowed to dispose of her electrical forces as seemed good to her. As for her husband, he went about his business as usual, only displaying slight signs of suppressed excitement and anticipation now and then, as the weeks went by and nothing happened.
She had not carried out her threat of going to Australia. She had, however, escaped from the rigours of the English spring to a villa near Nice, where she was awaiting the arrival of her second baby, an event which she had found very useful in persuading her husband to stop away from the Magnetic Pole. Calvert himself was so busy with what might be called the home details of the scheme that he had to spend the greater part of his time in London, and could only run over to Nice now and then.
It so happened that Miss Calvert put in an appearance a few days before she was expected, and therefore while her father was still in London. Her mother very naturally sent her maid with a telegram to inform him of the fact and ask him to come over at once. In about half-an-hour the maid came back with the form in her hand bringing a message from the telegraph office that, in consequence of some extraordinary accident, the wires had almost ceased to work properly and that no messages could be got through distinctly.
In the rapture of her new motherhood Kate Calvert had forgotten all about the great Storage Scheme, so she sent the maid back again with the request that the message should be sent off as soon as possible. Two hours later she sent again to ask if it had gone, and the reply came back that the wires had ceased working altogether and that no electrical communication by telegraph or telephone was for the present possible.
Then a terrible fear came to her. The experiment had been a success after all, and Markovitch’s mysterious engines had been all this time imperceptibly draining the earth of its electric fluid and storing it up in the vast accumulators which would only yield it back again at the bidding of the Trust which was controlled by her husband! Still she was a sensible little woman, and after the first shock she managed, for her baby’s sake, to put the fear out of her mind, at any rate until her husband came. He would be with her in a day or two, and, perhaps, after all, it was only some strange but perfectly natural occurrence which Nature herself would set right in a few hours.
When it got dusk that night, and the electric lights were turned on, it was noticed that they gave an unusually dim and wavering light. The engines were worked to their highest power, and the lines were carefully examined. Nothing could be found wrong with them, but the lights refused to behave as usual, and the most extraordinary feature of the phenomenon was that exactly the same thing was happening in all the electrically lighted cities and towns in the northern hemisphere.
By midnight, too, telegraphic and telephonic communication north of the Equator had practically ceased, and the electricians of Europe and America were at their wits’ ends to discover any reason for this unheard-of disaster, for such in sober truth it would be unless the apparently suspended force quickly resumed action on its own account. The next morning it was found that, so far as all the marvels of electrical science were concerned, the world had gone back a hundred years.
Then people began to awake to the magnitude of the catastrophe that had befallen the world. Civilised mankind had been suddenly deprived of the services of an obedient slave which it had come to look upon as indispensable.
But there was something even more serious than this to come. Observers in various parts of the hemisphere remembered that there hadn’t been a thunder-storm anywhere for some weeks. Even the regions most frequently visited by them had had none. A most remarkable drought had also set in almost universally. A strange sickness, beginning with physical lassitude and depression of spirits which confounded the best medical science of the world was manifesting itself far and wide, and rapidly assuming the proportions of a gigantic epidemic.
In the physical world, too, metals were found to be afflicted with the same incomprehensible disease. Machinery of all sorts got “sick,” to use a technical expression, and absolutely refused to act, and forges and foundries everywhere came to a standstill for the simple reason that metals seemed to have lost their best properties, and could no longer be utilised as they had been. Railway accidents and breakdowns on steamers, too, became matters of every-day occurrence, for metals and driving wheels, piston rods and propeller shafts, had acquired an incomprehensible brittleness which only began to be understood when it was discovered that the electrical properties which iron and steel had formerly possessed had almost entirely disappeared.
So far Calvert had not wavered in his determination to make, as he thought, a colossal amount of money by his usurpation of one of the functions of Nature. To him the calamities which, it must be confessed, he had deliberately brought upon the world were only so many arguments for the ultimate success of the stupendous scheme. They were proof positive to the world, or at least they very soon would be, that the Calvert Storage Trust really did control the electricity of the Northern Hemisphere. From the Southern nothing had yet been heard beyond the news that the cables had ceased working.
Hence, as soon as he had demonstrated his power to restore matters to their normal condition, it was obvious that the world would have to pay his price under penalty of having the supply cut off again.
It was now getting towards the end of May. On the 1st of June, according to arrangement, Markovitch would stop his engines and permit the vast accumulation of electric fluid in his storage batteries to flow back into its accustomed channels. Then the Trust would issue its prospectus, setting forth the terms upon which it was prepared to permit the nations to enjoy that gift of Nature whose pricelessness the Trust had proved by demonstrating its own ability to corner it.
On the evening of May 25th Calvert was sitting in his sumptuous office in Victoria Street, writing by the light of a dozen wax candles in silver candelabra. He had just finished a letter to his wife, telling her to keep up her spirits and fear nothing; that in a few days the experiment would be over and everything restored to its former condition, shortly after which she would be the wife of a man who would soon be able to buy up all the other millionaires in the world.
As he put the letter into the envelope there was a knock at the door, and Professor Kenyon was announced. Calvert greeted him stiffly and coldly, for he more than half guessed the errand he had come on. There had been two or three heated discussions between them of late, and Calvert knew before the Professor opened his lips that he had come to tell him that he was about to fulfil a threat that he had made a few days before. And this the Professor did tell him in a few dry, quiet words.
“It’s no use, Professor,” he replied, “you know yourself that I am powerless, as powerless as you are. I have no means of communicating with Markovitch, and the work cannot be stopped until the appointed time.”
“But you were warned, sir!” the Professor interrupted warmly. “You were warned, and when you saw the effects coming you might have stopped. I wish to goodness that I had had nothing to do with the infernal business, for infernal it really is. Who are you that you should usurp one of the functions of the Almighty, for it is nothing less than that? I have kept your criminal secret too long, and I will keep it no longer. You have made yourself the enemy of Society, and Society still has the power to deal with you—”
“My dear Professor, that’s all nonsense, and you know it!” said Calvert, interrupting him with a contemptuous gesture. “If Society were to lock me up, it should do without electricity till I were free. If it hung me it would get none, except on Markovitch’s terms, which would be higher than mine. So you can tell your story whenever you please. Meanwhile you’ll excuse me if I remind you that I am rather busy.”
Just as the Professor was about to take his leave the door opened and a boy brought in an envelope deeply edged with black. Calvert turned white to the lips and his hand trembled as he took it and opened it. It was in his wife’s handwriting, and was dated five days before, as most of the journey had to be made on horseback. He read it through with fixed, staring eyes, then he crushed it into his pocket and strode towards the telephone. He rang the bell furiously, and then he started back with an oath on his lips, remembering that he had made it useless. The sound of the bell brought a clerk into the room immediately.
“Get me a hansom at once!” he almost shouted, and the clerk vanished.
“What is the matter? Where are you going?” asked the Professor.
“Matter? Read that!” he said, thrusting the crumpled letter into his hand. “My little girl is dead—dead of that accursed sickness which, as you justly say, I have brought on the world, and my wife is down with it, too, and may be dead by this time. That letter’s five days old. My God, what have I done? What can I do? I’d give fifty thousand pounds to get a telegram to Markovitch. Curse him and his infernal scheme! If she dies I’ll go to Boothia Land and kill him! Hullo! What’s that? Lightning—by all that’s holy—and thunder!”
As he spoke such a flash of lightning as had never split the skies of London before flared in a huge ragged stream of flame across the zenith, and a roar of thunder such as London’s ears had never heard shook every house in the vast city to its foundation. Another and another followed in rapid succession, and all through the night and well into the next day there raged, as it was afterwards found, almost all over the whole Northern hemisphere, such a thunder-storm as had never been known in the world before and never would be again.
With it, too, came hurricanes and cyclones and deluges of rain; and when, after raging for nearly twenty-four hours, it at length ceased convulsing the atmosphere and growled itself away into silence, the first fact that came out of the chaos and desolation that it had left behind it was that the normal electrical conditions of the world had been restored— after which mankind set itself to repair the damage done by the cataclysm and went about its business in the usual way.
The epidemic vanished instantly and Mrs. Calvert did not die. Nearly six months later a white-haired wreck of a man crawled into her husband’s office and said feebly:
“Don’t you know me, Mr. Calvert? I’m Markovitch, or what there is left of him.”
“Good heavens, so you are!” said Calvert. “What has happened to you? Sit down and tell me all about it.”
“It is not a long story,” said Markovitch, sitting down and beginning to speak in a thin, trembling voice. “It is not long, but it is very bad. Everything went well at first. All succeeded as I said it would and then, I think it was just four days before we should have stopped, it happened.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. We must have gone too far, or by some means an accidental discharge must have taken place. The whole works suddenly burst into white flame. Everything made of metal melted like tallow. Every man in the works died instantly, burnt, you know, to a cinder. I was four or five miles away, with some others, seal shooting. We were all struck down insensible. When I came to myself I found I was the only one alive. Yes, Mr. Calvert, I am the only man that has returned from Boothia alive. The works are gone. There are only some heaps of melted metal lying about on the ice. After that I don’t know what happened. I must have gone mad. It was enough to make a man mad, you know. But some Indians and Eskimos, who used to trade with us, found me wandering about, so they told me, starving and out of my mind, and they took me to the coast. There I got better and then was picked up by a whaler and so I got home. That is all. It was very awful, wasn’t it?”
Then his face fell forward into his trembling hands, and Calvert saw the tears trickling between his fingers. Then he reeled backward, and suddenly his body slipped gently out of the chair and on to the floor. When Calvert tried to pick him up he was dead. And so the secret of the Great Experiment, so far as the world at large was concerned, never got beyond the walls of Mr. Sidney Calvert’s cosy dining-room after all.
September, 1909
THE TILTING ISLAND
by Thomas J. Vivian and Grena J. Bennett
THE authors Thomas J. Vivian and Grena J. Bennett are unknown today, yet in the first decade of this century they were regular contributors of fiction to the leading magazines of the period. They were authors with considerable technical skill, able to build their point by subtlety and indirection.
It can be seen that The Tilting Island follows the same basic formula as does The Thames Valley Catastrophe by Grant Allen. A physical flaw is found in the location of a great metropolis and the anticipated occurs. The story depends for its effectiveness not only upon the unusual central phenomenon, but also through the careful mirroring of people’s reaction to it.
Everybody’s Magazine was founded in 1896 by the New York branch of Wanamaker’s as a 10-cent magazine. In its early years it obtained a substantial portion of its material, particularly fiction, by a reprint arrangement with The Royal Magazine of London, a half-price imitation of The Strand with a necessarily lower standard of excellence, published by the owners of Pearson’s Magazine.
Everybody’s made steady progress and eventually was purchased by Erman J. Ridgway, John A. Thayer, and George W. Wilder. It was the golden age of magazines, and those that were managed well made fortunes. Everybody’s was well-managed. The issue from which The Tilting Island was taken had over 150 pages of advertising and 144 pages of editorial matter. The lead story was preceded by two full-page, four-color illustrations.
Everybody’s would carry Conan Doyle’s story of life forms existing at great altitudes, The Horror of the Heights (November 1913); it would serialize Victor Rousseau’s The Messiah of the Cylinder (June to August 1917); and after the war it would become an all-fiction magazine and finally a pulp featuring occasional science fiction. During this later period it ran a particularly interesting scientific detective series, along the lines of Craig Kennedy by S. Goodhue, of which there were four in number.
THE historians, when all the mass of contradictory reports had been winnowed out, established the fact that it was Joe Angel, the White Wing, otherwise Giuseppe Angelotti, otherwise No. 964 of the Street Cleaning Department of New York, who first saw it.
It was two hours past midnight of a still, murky summer night. Heat and humidity had settled like a blanket over the city, and a ragged moon swam, melting, in a sullen sky. Joe was wiping his brow with his sleeve as he trundled his refuse pail across 125th Street, just east of Eighth Avenue. The motion, and the dullness born of the heat, prevented him from seeing the crack in the pavement until the wheels of his cart bumped into it. The street was well lighted; he had no difficulty in seeing the crack after his attention had been called to it by the jolt. He stopped and looked at it, puzzled. He had swept that section of the street but a quarter of an hour before, and he had noticed no rift in the asphalt then. It was quite a crack, too—six inches wide, and so long that it ran from a point opposite Kinsman’s drug store as far east as Joe could see.
Inspector Rafferty strolled along just then. “Another av thim rotten asphalt jobs,” he said. He was turning away, when a snapping, crackling noise proceeded from the break. And immediately it became a cleft. Joe and Rafferty jumped for their lives; the barrow went clanging down into the gap of a two-foot trench. With an uneven rattling like the discharge of a Gatling gun with a rusty cog, the trench widened and deepened. The handles of the barrow sank slowly out of sight.
“‘Tis either the sewer or the water main that’s gone!” cried Rafferty. But he was crossing himself with a trembling hand which gave the lie to his materialistic explanation. Something in the hot stillness of the night, in the regularity with which the crack widened and deepened, gave the whole phenomenon a sinister portent. But he gathered himself together and rushed to notify Police Headquarters that 125th Street was falling in.
By the time Rafferty had hung up the telephone, he was aware that the crackling of the breaking asphalt had increased to a booming. There was a strange vibration underfoot, too—not the violent shaking of an earthquake, but a continued disturbance of the earth more haunting and terrible because more persistent. Rafferty hurried out of doors.
A group of men passed him on a stumbling run. Farther on, three street cars were piled up, end to tail. A fourth stopped with a jarring jolt as though it had struck something. And Rafferty saw that the crack had changed in aspect. Not only was it widening, but it had also affected the level of the pavement. The northern side was lower than the street level, or the southern higher—which, it was impossible then to determine. At the point where it neared the car tracks, the rails, lifted from their fastenings, had parted. A flash of electric light illuminated violently all the blockaded cars—and their lamps went out all together. The underground feed rails had snapped.
Among the sleepy, irritated passengers who tumbled out to find the cause for this stoppage of traffic was a stout, Teutonic gentleman—Heinrich Herman, Professor of Geology at Columbia. Though Americanized and a disciplinarian, he still felt at, times the old Heidelberg call within, which only much beer and protracted penuchle could assuage. The call had been answered and he was returning to his bachelor quarters on Riverside Drive for a few hours of preparatory sleep.
With an air of ponderous irritation, then, he joined the gaping, pushing crowd which edged that irregular trench along 125th Street. As he stood, there came one of those slight tremors which had been recurring at intervals ever since Joe the White Wing had first seen the crack. The professor heaved his great bulk against the crowd and pushed forward to the edge of the trench. As he looked, the gap shivered and widened again.
The mouth of the Herr Professor Herman dropped open like the mouth of the trench; then his whole frame stiffened. “Himmel!” he gasped under his breath, “can it be—that which I thought?”
And now a compact line of police was bearing down on the crowd, which, like all street gatherings in New York, seemed bent on thrusting itself obstinately into any danger that might threaten. Professor Herman found himself pushed back with the eddy, whirling away from the official night sticks. Suddenly a new vibration, no longer indefinite, shook the earth, and the whole north side of the street seemed to drop a foot. Only seemed to drop; in reality the south side had risen. The optical illusion (it was afterward explained) was like that of a passenger on a stationary car who thinks that he is moving backward because he sees a car on a parallel track moving forward.
The police line, on the edge of the crack, got the full force of the shock. Lieutenant Tiernan, in command, was thrown off his feet. He jumped up shouting: “It’s an earthquake—get them back if you have to kill them!”
Then, as the police rallied and charged, a hissing, streaming sound ran the length of the crack. Immediately from the broken mains a geyser of water and gravel spouted thirty feet in the air and struck the line of police midway. Two more geysers sprang up to right and left; then they died down into gigantic springs which made the street a shallow, but turbulent river.
When the terrified crowd had recovered a little from the shock of this new catastrophe, that happened which drove in the chill. They moved in darkness. The gas and electric lights had gone out. The flying, dancing drops from the river which had been 125th Street flickered only in the faint light of the ragged old moon. And in this darkness they heard the roar of the three dying geysers change to the rush of a cataract. The water main had given way all along its length. The river became a Niagara which coursed through the cross-streets, tumbling and tossing those who had been slowest to run. The police line, which had reformed and held again, was now quite broken and in the rush of the torrent many men were caught and dashed shrieking against the tottering houses and the iron pillars of the elevated.
Then, a new horror appeared. The electric wires, the telephone and telegraph conduits being snapped, their broken ends came into contact with the twisted street car rails. In a twinkling there was a series of great zigzag flashes. The rivers that had been streets blossomed suddenly with a thousand lambent flames, which no water could quench. As the waters dashed the wires here and there, these flames died and lived again; darted like the fires of St. Anthony. The horses of a milk wagon came floundering into the current of the main river. They struck one of these writhing, flaming spots, and tumbled over so suddenly that the wagon piled up on top of them.
It was by this intermittent glare from the wires that Jimmie Dalton, Harlem Department man for the Chronicle, made his spectacular appearance on the scene, as a recognized actor in the tragedy. The Harlem office of the Chronicle was on the north side of 125th Street and just about opposite the point of breakage from which the first and central geyser spouted, and Dalton had been trying to get into communication with the city editor. The great stream washed out the office as though ten fire department nozzles rolled into one had been directed against it; and in the washout, Dalton, who was a small man, went along with the ruins of the wooden counter.
He was clinging to this, raft-fashion, and paddling his way toward Eighth Avenue when the geysers turned into a cascade and, from paddling with some degree of individual action, Dalton was carried helplessly away in the rapids. These, as luck would have it, struck the south front of Kinsman’s drug store and eddying there, bore him in a wild backwater down Eighth Avenue, and so on into the shelter of an Italian bootblack’s stand which was built against the east wall of the Colonial Hotel. Also he dashed against a stout and elderly gentleman who was splashing through the flood.
Dalton’s raft hit the stranger violently.
“Care, care! Have a care,” said the stranger, “or you will impale me.”
Dalton, reporter to the core, noticed that he spoke with a German accent.
A flicker of moonlight shone across the professor’s face. “Herman of Columbia!” said Dalton. “I reported your extension lectures last spring for the Chronicle.”
He got to his feet and shoved his raft into the central eddy of the stream. “I guess I can get along without this now. Safe and sound, are you? My God! I wonder what’s happened.”
Professor Herman stood dripping in the moonlight, something more solemn than terror in his face. “Perhaps I alone know—I of all that see this—what it is that may happen!” His expression changed. “Where can we get a telephone that is working? The newspapers—the whole city— should be notified!”
This practical consideration woke the reporter again in Jimmie Dalton.
“Two-thirty!” he said, “and only five minutes to catch the last edition —it will be an extra if I don’t! Wires all down on 125th Street—we’ll have to see if the Adams Express Company wire is working.”
They splashed down Eighth Avenue. The driven crowd had rallied on the edge of the torrent; Dalton perceived three men dragging a limp form out of the waters. On the edge of the gutter he stumbled against another.
“Two dead, anyway!” he cried. They were now in an outpost of light; for here, it seemed, gas and electricity were not yet affected. The affected district stood like an unlit vacant lot in the midst of an illuminated tenement area. It was Sergeant Farley of the 34th Precinct Reserves who saw the first slinking figures edging their way into the darkened doors. At once he called his men, battered out these undesirables, set up the fire lines back of which the crowd was held, and so, it was afterward said, averted the looting of the Harlem business district.
The barricade did more than save property, it saved life; for barely had 125th Street been cleared when a sickening, wavelike motion seemed to run from east to west across the whole district south of that thoroughfare, and in that undulation a business house and a fashionable restaurant building on Seventh Avenue quavered and collapsed, while high over the rattle and boom of the falling buildings sounded the sharp alarm whistle of the elevated. Dalton threw a swift glance upward. The luminous mass of a train shone from the structure above them; then suddenly it was blotted out.
“Run!” he cried. “The L is toppling!”
It did not fall then, however. It only shook and buckled to some tremendous strain, and swayed like a rope ladder against the side of a tumbling ship. And then—panic. The crowd, bursting through the police lines, broke into knots and scattered in twenty courses of flight. The babble of that fear sounded even from above; the passengers of the elevated, threading a course made dangerous by the twisted structure, were pressing their dreadful way along the tracks to the station stairs.
Save for the police, it seemed that only Dalton and the Professor kept their ground. They stood for a time holding each to the other’s shoulder and swaying as the crowd swayed about them. But German stability, together with that other mysterious thing which shone in his eyes, held the Professor firm. As for Dalton the reporter, his soldier-like sense of duty was simplicity itself—he must report to his office.
On Hancock Square, a watchman of the Adams Express Company was dragging shut the big door to keep out the panicky crowd. Dalton fought his way to the watchman, whom he knew, and begged for the use of the wire.
“What’s the matter—an explosion?” asked the watchman.
“Yes,” snapped Dalton, as the shortest way out of it. “Quick—I must get the Chronicle!”
The transmitter, as he put it to his ear, still gave the buzzing which showed that the wire was alive. Yet he was an age getting the office. The watchman and the Professor, standing close, each eager for news, heard both sides of the conversation.
“Hello—the city desk—quick—well, I don’t care if there is a big story down there, this is a better one. Is this Wilson?”
“No, Perkins—is that Dalton?—For God’s sake, get down to the Battery!”
“Wait! I’ve got a smasher up here. Earthquake or something in Harlem. Houses down, water mains running in the street, lights all off—Hello —must be a lot killed—I saw two—safe to play many dead for the extra—”
“That’s a big story,” came an agitated voice from the other end of the wire. “But there’s a bigger one here. Subway tunnel has caved in or something, and the whole bay is pouring into the hole. Five trains in there—must be dead—Hello—never mind up there—Mr. Wilson wants you at the Battery—no, come to the office—” A dead silence and the stoppage of all sensation in the wire; and at the same instant the lights which illuminated the great warehouse went out.
Out of the darkness came the Professor’s voice, sharp, thrilling. “Where are you going now—where do you go now?”
Dalton’s voice had a shiver in it. “To the office,” he said.
The Professor’s speech was an explosion again. “You go to your duty —I go, too—to mine!”
“But what has happened?” asked Dalton, as the watchman had asked him live minutes before.
They were outside the warehouse now. From half a dozen quarters came hazes of rosy light, as though dawn were breaking all about the horizon. A fire engine clattered down the street, splashing through the water, bumping upon this obstruction or that.
“Fire!” whispered Dalton. “Why, it’s San Francisco over again!”
“Yes,” said the voice beside him. “San Francisco and more. Come— if we are to see. Come, let us go! It is too late to warn, but not, I hope, too late to see the end. But we must hasten ourselves.”
All southbound lines of transportation seemed broken. The elevated structure down to 110th Street was so badly warped that a stalled train had been left deserted on the tracks just beyond the station, and below that the problem of effecting a shortened traffic by switching the cars had not yet been solved. The Eighth Avenue surface was disorganized as far along Central Park West as one could see; the Lenox Avenue subway was flooded and a man running wildly northward panted out the information that the Broadway tube was jammed, dark, and out of running.
“Let us walk,” said the Professor, “the further we walk downtown the sooner it may be shall we come to some means of transportation. Anyway it will be a Forwards.” But as fortune would have it they had not to walk far, for when they reached 110th Street, Dalton, who had been keeping his sharp eyes busy, pointed up Cathedral Parkway. Across its vista a flat-wheeled Amsterdam Avenue car could be seen clap-clapping downtownward.
“Ah,” said the Professor, “evidently the disturbance thus far is very much localized.”
Evidently the Professor’s ideas of “localization” were drawn on a generous scale, for as the two reached the Cathedral Close and looked down over the valley of Morningside Park they could see the quick lighting up of the houses, could hear the rush of frightened families into the open slopes of the park as they ran from their quivering homes; while from the blackened area about 125th Street came the dull roaring of an excited multitude, punctuated here and there with the rattle of some explosion, the thud of some falling building, or the sudden leaping of a flame where one of the great fires that devastated so much of Harlem had started. And near at hand out of the darkness there came a dreadful monotone from some crazed man “Prepare ye, for the Day of the Lord is come!” When they reached Amsterdam Avenue eight crowded cars filled with turbulent, wild-eyed passengers, flew past them before they could find squeezing room in the ninth.
“Step lively if you want to get downtown,” said the conductor, “we’re all gone plum crazy up here.”
“Do you think,” asked Dalton as the car bumped slowly southward, “that we are really in for anything like the San Francisco shake-up?”
“No,” said the Professor, “I think not. In the case of San Francisco there was a break and consequent subsidence in the earth’s crust—a slip, a displacement that extended downward, perhaps for miles, and the tremor of which was felt all over the world. Here, there has been but a displacement in a local geological formation.”
“You mean that the disturbance is limited to New York?” asked Dalton.
“I mean that I think it is confined to Manhattan Island,” said the Professor. “I have made a study of this island for the past fifteen years and in my opinion it is one of the most wonderful geological formations in the world. When some millions of years ago the bottom of the Laurentian Lake rose and spilled out all its waters, the torrent that came rushing south formed the Hudson, carved the Palisades and scoured out the Hackensack Valley. What is now Manhattan Island was then the seaward spur of the range that goes up through Westchester; but in that flood the insecure base of these hills was washed out and the stable summit of the isolated ridge which we call Manhattan settled down like a plate on soft butter. It might have stayed so for as many ages as it had already stood, but for two causes. Through the soft foundation run ridges of rock—and on such a ridge rests the lower part of the island. And at 125th Street is a fault—you know what that is—a weakness of rock. I knew always of that fault at 125th Street. I knew that if the strain came, and if the fault should break, the island would tip and tilt as though a man had laid his hand heavily upon one side of the plate.”
Dalton spoke as a man in a nightmare, ready to believe in any strange fantasy: “But what has broken it—where is the strain?”
“Ah, they could not have believed it—our ancestors! Like Babel we have built. Who thought that we little things could have made an island, a whole island tilt? But we have massed on its end those buildings— twenty stories of steel, thirty stories, forty stories—that is the hand of man on the edge of the plate. Do you see now?”
“But when will the tilting stop? It can go only so far!”
“Ach, that is the question! When the island has slid from its base, it may slide on until the tallest tower we have is below the sea. And if it starts one tidal wave! But let that come, and we shall tip and slide to extinction.” He paused here. “The richest tract of ground on the planet —gone, all gone—unless—”
“Unless what?”
“Unless I am right in my other surmise—and that is a dim hope. I have maintained always there is another fault across the lower island near Cortlandt Street. Salvation may lie in the weakness of that fault!”
At this moment there came one of the periodic shocks. It seemed heavier than the others, but more even. There was no vicious twisting and rasping in it, only a gentle, steady heave. The car stopped with a jerk that threw Dalton and the Professor in a heap on the floor. When they had scrambled to their feet they found that the conductor and motor-man had deserted the car and that on the downtown track ahead was a long blockade of other deserted cars. On the other track cars raced uptown, crowded with white-faced passengers. On the streets were throngs trudging north. The panic march had shifted from southward to northward. And presently Dalton began to resolve the hurrying crowds into their elements, to observe this or that incongruity of dress and behavior, to take mental notes for the story which might never be written: A man wearing an ulster over his pajamas and carrying a French horn; a woman dragging a bureau; a child crying alone; three men carrying from the doorway of a wreck something covered with a sheet. A figure sitting on a fire plug, his face buried in his hands, attracted him longer; for this one wore the official badge of the Fire Department. Dalton stopped to touch him on the shoulder and ask for news. The fireman lifted his face; he was weeping. “No water!” he gasped; and he buried his face again.
A little runabout had come up the street before them and slowed down to a stop. A popping noise came from its engines. The youthful, bareheaded driver, showing in all his motions the panic which had sent him fleeing away from the fall of a city toward the open fields, jumped down, seized the crank, and turned it violently. Leaping back into the seat, he pulled the clutch. The machine bounded forward a few feet and stopped again. At that moment, a great touring car came through the growing procession of vehicles making northward. The young driver of the runabout signaled with both arms; these were friends, apparently, for the touring car slowed down, took him aboard, and whirled off. Dalton shook himself.
“Gee! Here’s a chance,” he said. “What do we care for cars? I can run this machine—there’s nothing wrong but a stopped feed pipe, I guess.” Under the daze which overlaid his senses, Dalton felt his instincts running calm, matter-of-fact. Going to the stalled machine he cut off the tank, unscrewed a section of the feed pipe, blew into it, squinted through it against the bright side of the heavens. “That’s all!” he exclaimed. “A clogged feed pipe and a bad case of rattles!” He set the feed pipe back in place, tickled the carburetor, and cranked up the machine. It reverberated full power. “Now to steal a ride!”
Professor Herman had squeezed himself into the left-hand seat before he lifted his eyebrows and inquired: “South?”
Dalton nodded solemnly: “To see it through!” The Professor patted his shoulder. And they two, the only human beings, it seemed, who, knowing that terror and peril lay that way, turned toward the point where the prow of Manhattan was drooping as though it would bury itself in the Bay. They drove south, recklessly, along Amsterdam Avenue.
Indeed, as they traveled on past blocks of damaged buildings, past blocks which stood a-tilt and intact, it occurred to Dalton to marvel at the instinct which drove the crowds northward. He and the Professor alone knew the meaning of this calamity—and he himself was only half convinced. Save for those who burrowed in their homes, or fought the sporadic fires, the drift was north, away from the seaward point of the island—always north. The procession, bizarre, outlandish, moved without seeming consciousness of danger or calamity. That was the fearful and chilling thing about it—or would have been had Dalton been susceptible to fear or chill. There was none of the whirl or burr of the accustomed city crowd. Sound itself seemed as dazed as mind. Twice he was aware, by the sudden acceleration of motion in the machine under him, by the rattle of buildings falling at a distance, by the sudden stoppage of movement among the people, that the slipping had continued. After the second of these shocks, the Professor said:
“It is a gulf now—that crack at 125th Street. Will that lower fault hold—will it hold!” That was the only word spoken in their passage, except a sharp direction now and then as they turned east or west to avoid the blocks where the pile of fallen bricks and mortar barred the way.
At Fifty-ninth Street, indeed, they had to make a long detour westward to avoid a fire which stretched across Broadway east and west. At Tenth Avenue they found passage, turned toward Broadway again at Thirtieth Street, and struck another fire. So they zigzagged toward the open space of Union Square, and came out suddenly upon a huddled crowd whose clamors had been reaching them indistinctly for blocks. It lay like a flock of uneasy blackbirds over the whole greensward. Presently, as Dalton slowed down and stopped the machine for very wonder of the sight, the crowd resolved itself into its elements—group on group of men and women and children sitting on bundles, pathetically clinging to their belongings till the last; an ambulance, centering a circle of prostrate figures and guarded by a squad of policemen; a fringe of buzzing, pushing, gesticulating men.
As Dalton looked, some commotion agitated the crowd on the side farthest from them; it manifested itself in a buzzing, sprinkled with shouts. Then two shots; and immediately the police who held the line at the corner nearest them closed up at a word of command and trotted wearily toward the disturbance.
And then the earth heaved again.
Dalton gripped the clutch in instinctive fear that he would be pitched out of the machine A roar sounded in his ears; he saw the face of a tall building on the Broadway side tilt, tilt—and fall. All his senses went out in the crash as the mass met the pavement. He came to himself in a thick, white vapor. By instinct, he fumbled for the reverse to back away. The machine did not respond. All he felt for a moment was irritation that the machine should trick him. Memory returned with a flash—he had stopped the engine—he must get out and crank up. He set his feet on earth. They held firm.
And then the crowd struck. A great Hun, charging in the van, saw this vehicle of civilization. Russian and Pole and Italian tumbled after him toward it. Dalton wriggled away; he caught sight of the Professor scrambling from the other side. Without a word they fell in beside each other; without a word they trudged south. A policeman, his blue coat speckled white with mortar, stopped them. Dalton showed his reporter’s card.
“You’re a fool if you go on south,” said the policeman. “The bridges are gone!” His voice broke. “The bridges are gone!”
Dalton pushed on past him. But this human speech opened his mind to a languid curiosity. “Why are we keeping on?” he asked the Professor.
“Well, let them think so,” he continued, “I’m on the job.”
“That is true and good,” said the Professor. “Moreover, when you have feared all, there is nothing more to fear! We know, we two.” He threw a gesture back toward the huddled crowd in Union Square. “What if they die sooner or later? We keep on for duty—we see salvation or the destruction of all!”
And presently, out of their nightmare, their confusion of fires and barricades and falling walls avoided, their recurrent stupors when the earth heaved, they were before a great building on Broadway. Its shell remained intact; the work of an honest builder held it firm. Here the Professor stopped, and out came one of his Germanic bursts.
“The end or salvation is near!” he said. “How can we see better than from up there?”
Dalton looked up along its fourteen stories. The submerged half of his mind, which had directed hands and limbs and speech, told him how foolish it was, this proposal. The other half, which seemed to govern now, was indifferent. And up the stairs they trudged and panted and trudged on. At the top story, Professor Herman smashed his great bulk against a door. It gave. The windows looked south. Herman threw himself into an office chair and panted; but his eyes searched the horizon. The fires were mostly behind them. Still, a column of smoke which was becoming a cloud rose from the tenement quarter of the lower West Side. Before them lay the mighty skyscrapers, massed like Genii’s palaces —great beyond the imagination of man. The Professor dragged Dalton to a window.
“Look!” he shouted, pointing southward with a vibrating finger. “Look at that congregation of mighty skyscrapers that crowds the lower end of the island. That mountain range of masonry with its towering peaks of copper and its titanic ribs of steel; that mass of millions of tons that has been superimposed on the fragile extremity of the island; that gigantic, horrific mass has broken down one of the outpost foundations of Manhattan and the island is tilting to its destruction!”
“My God!” whimpered Dalton. “Do you mean that the whole blamed thing will plunge down into the bay at that end and up into the air in Harlem, and then crack to pieces and we’ll all go with it?”
“Yes,” cried the Professor. “It is the end! It is the end—unless that further point breaks off at the Cortlandt Street fault and plunges to its own destruction. So watch the cataclysm, fill your eyes with the awful wonder of the spectacle. We are seeing that of which we shall never speak again. My young and so-strangely-met-with friend, let us take hands and die like men.”
“Will it all be over soon?” whispered Dalton, as he clutched the Professor’s free hand. “Gee! but I would like to have said good-bye to mother and Lil.”
“One more such vibration,” shouted the Professor, as the roof crackled and leaped above them, and a high-pitched roar of dismay came from the streets below. “One more! Then perdition for us all! One more—unless the saving something happens—And God of Mercy, that something is happening! Look! Look!” he cried, his voice running up into a high falsetto shriek. “Look, my boy, look! The lower fault has broken!”
And Dalton, following the quavery line of the Professor’s pointing finger with his own staring eyes, saw that huge mass of skyscrapers with their cyclopean walls, their glistening summits and their deep canyons of shade, quiver and rock and slide and topple into the harbor! Up leaped a monster tidal wave that pared off the docks on both sides of the island, that swamped the huge transatlantic steamers and that swept in over the city to the base of the building on which Herman and Dalton stood and watched the horror below.
But as they watched, the waters rolled back, carrying their dreadful burden of dead and debris; one huge tremor ran through the earth from north to south as the island settled back to its level. And Manhattan was saved!
June, 1906
FINIS
by Frank Lillie Pollack
THE story Finis will probably stand as Frank Lillie Pollack’s major claim to fame. Its concerted effectiveness and maturity for the era in which it was published is something to marvel at. An end-of-the-world story, it tells of two people, a man and a woman, who wait alone through the night in a New York skyscraper, knowing they will die at dawn as the rays of a central cosmic sun, which have been on their way to earth for millions of years, dissolve the planet into gas. How they react to this foreknowledge is the entire story, and it is a magnificent one. Originally published in The Argosy, June 1906, it was reprinted in Famous Fantastic Mysteries, May June 1940, and in Fantastic Novels, July 1948. It was collected by British anthologist Kurt Singer for Horror Omnibus (W. H. Allen, 1965) under the title The Last Dawn, probably taken from its memorable last line.
So strong was the effect of this story on its readership at the time it was published, that Edward A. Start wrote for the March 1907 issue of The Red Book a story titled The Last Sunset, which depicts the mood of the world and a man and woman as they watch the sun set for the last time before the earth is plunged into eternal night and never-ending cold.
Pollack had written science fiction before. His Crimson Blight, a story of an old eccentric who invents a heat ray to strike down visitors in a resort town, appeared in The Argosy (May 1905), and he would write it again, in the form of The World Wrecker, a short novel of men who discover how to make gold artificially (The Cavalier, November 1908).
The World Wrecker was actually written for publication in The Scrap Book, edited by sometime science fiction writer Perley Poore Sheehan. The story was shifted to the newly created The Cavalier, which was first published in October 1908, when there was an abrupt change in the revolutionary policy of what may well have been the most unusual magazine in American publishing history, The Scrap Book. T his magazine, whose first issue was dated March 1906, was published by Frank A. Munsey, who had also issued The Argosy and The All-Story Magazine. It gave the reader 200 pages for 10 cents and its policy was to run almost anything, fiction and fact, new and reprints. In the first issue’s introduction Munsey told readers they would find “biography, review, philosophy, science, art, poetry, wit, humor, pathos, satire, the weird and the mystical.” The magazine was every bit as diverse and as good as he promised, but it didn’t sell.
With the July 1907 issue, The Scrap Book appeared as two simultaneously-issued magazines, published monthly, selling for two for 25 cents. One magazine was 100 per cent articles and features, copiously illustrated on coated stock. The other was 100 per cent fiction on book paper with no illustrations. The nonfiction magazine ran 180 pages and the fiction magazine 160. Two different covers were printed on the individual magazines and the same date and volume number. Either one of them was worth 25 cents. The newsdealer would not sell you one magazine; you had to pay the full price whether you took one or both. The idea was to permit two people to read the magazine at the same time. The one most interested in articles could take that section, and the one who preferred fiction could settle down with the other portion.
This policy continued until the September 1908 issue. In October of that year Munsey issued a new magazine of fiction titled The Cavalier which continued publishing the three unfinished serials from The Scrap Book. The Scrap Book then ran as a single monthly 10-cent magazine of fact and fiction with over a hundred illustrations every issue, each one in color.
To do justice to this strange publication would require an entire article, but during its life it frequently published tales of the supernatural and science fiction, both reprints and originals. The early fantasies were predominantly revivals, including works by Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, Ambrose Bierce, E. Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Daniel Defoe. As time went by it began to print new science fiction stories, among them The Sky Pirate by Garrett P. Serviss (1909), a novel of air piracy in the future which has never been reissued; The House of Transformation by George Allan England (1909), a novel of an ape invested with the intelligence of a man, and The Radium Terrors by A. Dorrington (1911), a tale of intrigue and the illicit uses of the then little-known radioactive substance, radium, one of the few novels from this publication later to be reprinted in book form (Doubleday, Page, 1912).
“I ‘M GETTING tired,” complained Davis, lounging in the window of the Physics Building, “and sleepy. It’s after eleven o’clock. This makes the fourth night I’ve sat up to see your new star, and it’ll be the last. Why, the thing was billed to appear three weeks ago.”
“Are you tired, Miss Wardour?” asked Eastwood, and the girl glanced up with a quick flush and a negative murmur.
Eastwood made the reflection anew that she certainly was painfully shy. She was almost as plain as she was shy, though her hair had an unusual beauty of its own, fine as silk and colored like palest flame.
Probably she had brains; Eastwood had seen her reading some extremely “deep” books, but she seemed to have no amusements, few interests. She worked daily at the Art Students’ League, and boarded where he did, and he had thus come to ask her with the Davises to watch for the new star from the laboratory windows on the Heights.
“Do you really think that it’s worth while to wait any longer, professor?” inquired Mrs. Davis, concealing a yawn.
Eastwood was somewhat annoyed by the continued failure of the star to show itself and he hated to be called “professor,” being only an assistant professor of physics.
“I don’t know,” he answered somewhat curtly. “This is the twelfth night that I have waited for it. Of course, it would have been a mathematical miracle if astronomers should have solved such a problem exactly, though they’ve been figuring on it for a quarter of a century.”
The new Physics Building of Columbia University was about twelve stories high. The physics laboratory occupied the ninth and tenth floors, with the astronomical rooms above it, an arrangement which would have been impossible before the invention of the oil vibration cushion, which practically isolated the instrument rooms from the earth.
Eastwood had arranged a small telescope at the window, and below them spread the illuminated map of Greater New York, sending up a faintly musical roar. All the streets were crowded, as they had been every night since the fifth of the month, when the great new star, or sun, was expected to come into view.
Some error had been made in the calculations, though, as Eastwood said, astronomers had been figuring on them for twenty-five years.
It was, in fact, nearly forty years since Professor Adolphe Bernier first announced his theory of a limited universe at the International Congress of Sciences in Paris, where it was counted as little more than a masterpiece of imagination.
Professor Bernier did not believe that the universe was infinite. Somewhere, he argued, the universe must have a center, which is the pivot for its revolution.
The moon revolves around the earth, the planetary system revolves about the sun, the solar system revolves about one of the fixed stars, and this whole system in its turn undoubtedly revolves around some more distant point. But this sort of progression must definitely stop somewhere.
Somewhere there must be a central sun, a vast incandescent body which does not move at all. And as a sun is always larger and hotter than its satellites, therefore the body at the center of the universe must be of an immensity and temperature beyond anything known or imagined.
It was objected that this hypothetical body should then be large enough to be visible from the earth, and Professor Bernier replied that some day it undoubtedly would be visible. Its light had simply not yet had time to reach the earth.
The passage of light from the nearest of the fixed stars is a matter of three years, and there must be many stars so distant that their rays have not yet reached us. The great central sun must be so inconceivably remote that perhaps hundreds, perhaps thousands of years would elapse before its light should burst upon the solar system.
All this was contemptuously classed as “newspaper science” till the extraordinary mathematical revival a little after the middle of the twentieth century afforded the means of verifying it.
Following the new theorems discovered by Professor Burnside, of Princeton, and elaborated by Dr. Taneka, of Tokyo, astronomers succeeded in calculating the arc of the sun’s movements through space, and its ratio to the orbit of its satellites. With this as a basis, it was possible to follow the widening circles, the consecutive systems of the heavenly bodies and their rotations.
The theory of Professor Bernier was justified. It was demonstrated that there really was a gigantic mass of incandescent matter, which, whether the central point of the universe or not, appeared to be without motion.
The weight and distance of this new sun were approximately calculated, and, the speed of light being known, it was an easy matter to reckon when its rays would reach the earth.
It was then estimated that the approaching rays would arrive at the earth in twenty-six years, and that was twenty-six years ago. Three weeks had passed since the date when the new heavenly body was expected to become visible, and it had not yet appeared.
Popular interest had risen to a high pitch, stimulated by innumerable newspaper and magazine articles, and the streets were nightly thronged with excited crowds armed with opera-glasses and star maps, while at every corner a telescope man had planted his tripod instrument at a nickel a look.
Similar scenes were taking place in every civilized city on the globe.
It was generally supposed that the new luminary would appear in size about midway between Venus and the moon. Better informed persons expected something like the sun, and a syndicate of capitalists quietly leased large areas on the coast of Greenland in anticipation of a great rise in temperature and a northward movement in population.
Even the business situation was appreciably affected by the public uncertainty and excitement. There was a decline in stocks, and a minor religious sect boldly prophesied the end of the world.
“I’ve had enough of this,” said Davis, looking at his watch again. “Are you ready to go, Grace? By the way, isn’t it getting warmer?”
It had been a sharp February day, but the temperature was certainly rising. Water was dripping from the roofs, and from the icicles that fringed the window ledges, as if a warm wave had suddenly arrived.
“What’s that light?” suddenly asked Alice Wardour, who was lingering by the open window.
“It must be moonrise,” said Eastwood, though the illumination of the horizon was almost like daybreak.
Davis abandoned his intention of leaving, and they watched the east grow pale and flushed till at last a brilliant white disc heaved itself above the horizon.
It resembled the full moon, but as if trebled in luster, and the streets grew almost as light as by day.
“Good heavens, that must be the new star, after all!” said Davis in an awed voice.
“No, it’s only the moon. This is the hour and minute for her rising,” answered Eastwood, who had grasped the cause of the phenomenon. “But the new sun must have appeared on the other side of the earth. Its light is what makes the moon so brilliant. It will rise here just as the sun does, no telling how soon. It must be brighter than was expected—and maybe hotter,” he added with a vague uneasiness.
“Isn’t it getting very warm in here?” said Mrs. Davis, loosening her jacket. “Couldn’t you turn off some of the steam heat?”
Eastwood turned it all off, for, in spite of the open window, the room was really growing uncomfortably close. But the warmth appeared to come from without; it was like a warm spring evening, and the icicles were breaking loose from the cornices.
For half an hour they leaned from the windows with but desultory conversation, and below them the streets were black with people and whitened with upturned faces. The brilliant moon rose higher, and the mildness of the night sensibly increased.
It was after midnight when Eastwood first noticed the reddish flush tinging the clouds low in the east, and he pointed it out to his companions.
“Thai must be it at last,” he exclaimed, with a thrill of vibrating excitement at what he was going to see, a cosmic event unprecedented in intensity.
The brightness waxed rapidly.
“By Jove, see it redden!” Davis ejaculated. “It’s getting lighter than day—and hot! Whew!”
The whole eastern sky glowed with a deepening pink that extended half round the horizon. Sparrows chirped from the roofs, and it looked as if the disc of the unknown star might at any moment be expected to lift above the Atlantic, but it delayed long.
The heavens continued to burn with myriad hues, gathering at last to a fiery furnace glow on the skyline.
Mrs. Davis suddenly screamed. An American flag blowing freely from its staff on the roof of the tall building had all at once burst into flame.
Low in the east lay a long streak of intense fire which broadened as they squinted with watering eyes. It was as if the edge of the world had been heated to whiteness.
The brilliant moon faded to a feathery white film in the glare. There was a confused outcry from the observatory overhead, and a crash of something being broken, and as the strange new sunlight fell through the window the onlookers leaped back as if a blast furnace had been opened before them.
The glass cracked and fell inward. Something like the sun, but magnified fifty times in size and hotness, was rising out of the sea. An iron instrument-table by the window began to smoke with an acrid smell of varnish.
“What the devil is this, Eastwood?” shouted Davis accusingly.
From the streets rose a sudden, enormous wail of fright and pain, the outcry of a million throats at once, and the roar of a stampede followed. The pavements were choked with struggling, panic-stricken people in the fierce glare, and above the din arose the clanging rush of fire engines and trucks.
Smoke began to rise from several points below Central Park, and two or three church chimes pealed crazily.
The observers from overhead came running down the stairs with a thunderous trampling, for the elevator man had deserted his post.
“Here, we’ve got to get out of this,” shouted Davis, seizing his wife by the arm and hustling her toward the door. “This place’ll be on fire directly.”
“Hold on. You can’t go down into that crush on the street,” Eastwood cried, trying to prevent him.
But Davis broke away and raced down the stairs, half carrying his terrified wife. Eastwood got his back against the door in time to prevent Alice from following them.
“There’s nothing in this building that will burn, Miss Wardour,” he said as calmly as he could. “We had better stay here for the present. It would be sure death to get involved in that stampede below. Just listen to it.”
The crowds on the street seemed to sway to and fro in contending waves, and the cries, curses, and screams came up in a savage chorus.
The heat was already almost blistering to the skin, though they carefully avoided the direct rays, and instruments of glass in the laboratory cracked loudly one by one.
A vast cloud of dark smoke began to rise from the harbor, where the shipping must have caught fire, and something exploded with a terrific report. A few minutes later half a dozen fires broke out in the lower part of the city, rolling up volumes of smoke that faded to a thin mist in the dazzling light.
The great new sun was now fully above the horizon, and the whole east seemed ablaze. The stampede in the streets had quieted all at once, for the survivors had taken refuge in the nearest houses, and the pavements were black with motionless forms of men and women.
“I’ll do whatever you say,” said Alice, who was deadly pale, but remarkably collected. Even at that moment Eastwood was struck by the splendor of her ethereally brilliant hair that burned like pale flame above her pallid face. “But we can’t stay here, can we?”
“No,” replied Eastwood, trying to collect his faculties in the face of this catastrophic revolution of nature. “We’d better go to the basement, I think.”
In the basement were deep vaults used for the storage of delicate instruments, and these would afford shelter for a time at least. It occurred to him as he spoke that perhaps temporary safety was the best that any living thing on earth could hope for.
But he led the way down the well staircase. They had gone down six or seven flights when a gloom seemed to grow upon the air, with a welcome relief.
It seemed almost cool, and the sky had clouded heavily, with the appearance of polished and heated silver.
A deep but distant roaring arose and grew from the southeast, and they stopped on the second landing to look from the window.
A vast black mass seemed to fill the space between sea and sky, and it was sweeping toward the city, probably from the harbor, Eastwood thought, at a speed that made it visibly grow as they watched it.
“A cyclone—and a waterspout!” muttered Eastwood, appalled.
He might have foreseen it from the sudden, excessive evaporation and the healing of the air. The gigantic black pillar drove toward them swaying and reeling, and a gale came with it, and a wall of impenetrable mist behind.
As Eastwood watched its progress he saw its cloudy bulk illumined momentarily by a dozen lightning-like flashes, and a moment later, above its roar, came the tremendous detonations of heavy cannon.
The forts and the warships were firing shells to break the waterspout, but the shots seemed to produce no effect. It was the city’s last and useless attempt at resistance. A moment later forts and ships alike must have been engulfed.
“Hurry! This building will collapse!” Eastwood shouted.
They rushed down another flight, and heard the crash with which the monster broke over the city. A deluge of water, like the emptying of a reservoir, thundered upon the street, and the water was steaming hot as it fell.
There was a rending crash of falling walls, and in another instant the Physics Building seemed to be twisted around by a powerful hand. The walls blew out, and the whole structure sank in a chaotic mass.
But the tough steel frame was practically unwreckable, and, in fact, the upper portion was simply bent down upon the lower stories, peeling off most of the shell of masonry and stucco.
Eastwood was stunned as he was hurled to the floor, but when he came to himself he was still upon the landing, which was tilted at an alarming angle. A tangled mass of steel rods and beams hung a yard over his head, and a huge steel girder had plunged down perpendicularly from above, smashing everything in its way.
Wreckage choked the well of the staircase, a mass of plaster, bricks, and shattered furniture surrounded him, and he could look out in almost every direction through the rent iron skeleton.
A yard away Alice was sitting up, mechanically wiping the mud and water from her face, and apparently uninjured. Tepid water was pouring through the interstices of the wreck in torrents, though it did not appear to be raining.
A steady, powerful gale had followed the whirlwind, and it brought a little coolness with it. Eastwood inquired perfunctorily of Alice if she were hurt, without being able to feel any degree of interest in the matter. His faculty of sympathy seemed paralyzed.
“I don’t know. I thought—I thought that we were all dead!” the girl murmured in a sort of daze. “What was it? Is it all over?”
“I think it’s only beginning,” Eastwood answered dully.
The gale had brought up more clouds and the skies were thickly overcast, but shining white-hot. Presently the rain came down in almost scalding floods and as it fell upon the hissing streets it steamed again into the air.
In three minutes all the world was choked with hot vapor, and from the roar and splash the streets seemed to be running rivers.
The downpour seemed too violent to endure, and after an hour it did cease, while the city reeked with mist. Through the whirling fog Eastwood caught glimpses of ruined buildings, vast heaps of debris, all the wreckage of the greatest city of the twentieth century.
Then the torrents fell again, like a cataract, as if the waters of the earth were shuttlecocking between sea and heaven. With a jarring tremor of the ground a landslide went down into the Hudson.
The atmosphere was like a vapor bath, choking and sickening. The physical agony of respiration aroused Alice from a sort of stupor, and she cried out pitifully that she would die.
The strong wind drove the hot spray and steam through the shattered building till it seemed impossible that human lungs could extract life from the semi-liquid that had replaced the air, but the two lived.
After hours of this parboiling the rain slackened, and, as the clouds parted, Eastwood caught a glimpse of a familiar form halfway up the heavens. It was the sun, the old sun, looking small and watery.
But the intense heat and brightness told that the enormous body still blazed behind the clouds. The rain seemed to have ceased definitely, and the hard, shining whiteness of the sky grew rapidly hotter.
The heat of the air increased to an oven-like degree; the mists were dissipated, the clouds licked up, and the earth seemed to dry itself almost immediately. The heat from the two suns beat down simultaneously till it became a monstrous terror, unendurable.
An odor of smoke began to permeate the air; there was a dazzling shimmer over the streets, and great clouds of mist arose from the bay, but these appeared to evaporate before they could darken the sky.
The piled wreck of the building sheltered the two refugees from the direct rays of the new sun, now almost overhead, but not from the penetrating heat of the air. But the body will endure almost anything, short of tearing asunder, for a time at least; it is the finer mechanism of the nerves that suffers most.
Alice lay face down among the bricks, gasping and moaning. The blood hammered in Eastwood’s brain, and the strangest mirages flickered before his eyes.
Alternately he lapsed into heavy stupors, and awoke to the agony of the day. In his lucid moments he reflected that this could not last long, and tried to remember what degree of heat would cause death.
Within an hour after the drenching rains he was feverishly thirsty, and the skin felt as if peeling from his whole body.
This fever and horror lasted until he forgot that he had ever known another state; but at last the west reddened, and the flaming sun went down. It left the familiar planet high in the heavens, and there was no darkness until the usual hour, though there was a slight lowering of the temperature.
But when night did come it brought life-giving coolness, and though the heat was still intense it seemed temperate by comparison. More than all, the kindly darkness seemed to set a limit to the cataclysmic disorders of the day.
“Ouf! This is heavenly!” said Eastwood, drawing long breaths and feeling mind and body revived in the gloom.
“It won’t last long,” replied Alice, and her voice sounded extraordinarily calm through the darkness. “The heat will come again when the new sun rises in a few hours.”
“We might find some better place in the meanwhile—a deep cellar; or we might get into the subway,” Eastwood suggested.
“It would be no use. Don’t you understand? I have been thinking it all out. After this, the new sun will always shine, and we could not endure it even another day. The wave of heat is passing round the world as it revolves, and in a few hours the whole earth will be a burnt-up ball. Very likely we are the only people left alive in New York, or perhaps in America.”
She seemed to have taken the intellectual initiative, and spoke with an assumption of authority that amazed him.
“But there must be others,” said Eastwood, after thinking for a moment. “Other people have found sheltered places, or miners, or men underground.”
“They would have been drowned by the rain. At any rate, there will be none left alive by tomorrow night.
“Think of it,” she went dreamily, “for a thousand years this wave of fire has been rushing toward us, while life has been going on so happily in the world, so unconscious that the world was doomed all the time. And now this is the end of life.”
“I don’t know,” Eastwood said slowly. “It may be the end of human life, but there must be some forms that will survive—some micro-organisms perhaps capable of resisting high temperatures, if nothing higher. The seed of life will be left at any rate, and that is everything. Evolution will begin over again, producing new types to suit the changed conditions. I only wish I could see what creatures will be here in a few thousand years.
“But I can’t realize it at all—this thing!” he cried passionately, after a pause. “Is it real? Or have we all gone mad? It seems too much like a bad dream.”
The rain crashed down again as he spoke, and the earth steamed, though not with the dense reek of the day. For hours the waters roared and splashed against the earth in hot billows till the streets were foaming yellow rivers, dammed by the wreck of fallen buildings.
There was a continual rumble as earth and rock slid into the East River, and at last the Brooklyn Bridge collapsed with a thunderous crash and splash that made all Manhattan vibrate. A gigantic billow like a tidal wave swept up the river from its fall.
The downpour slackened and ceased soon after the moon began to shed an obscured but brilliant light through the clouds.
Presently the east commenced to grow luminous, and this time there could be no doubt as to what was coming.
Alice crept closer to the man as the gray light rose upon the watery air.
“Kiss me!” she whispered suddenly, throwing her arms around his neck. He could feel her trembling. “Say you love me; hold me in your arms. There is only an hour.”
“Don’t be afraid. Try to face it bravely,” stammered Eastwood.
“I don’t fear it—not death. But I have never lived. I have always been timid and wretched and afraid—afraid to speak—and I’ve almost wished for suffering and misery or anything rather than to be stupid and dumb and dead, the way I’ve always been.
“I’ve never dared to tell anyone what I was, what I wanted. I’ve been afraid all my life, but I’m not afraid now. I have never lived; I have never been happy; and now we must die together!”
It seemed to Eastwood the cry of the perishing world. He held her in his arms and kissed her wet, tremulous face that was strained to his.
The twilight was gone before they knew it. The sky was blue already, with crimson flakes mounting to the zenith, and the heat was growing once more intense.
“This is the end, Alice,” said Eastwood, and his voice trembled.
She looked at him, her eyes shining with an unearthly softness and brilliancy, and turned her face to the east.
There, in crimson and orange, flamed the last dawn that human eyes would ever see.
Inventions
The pneumatic tubes that will propel a vehicle under the Atlantic from the United States to France at record speeds are shown illustrating Jules Verne’s little-known story An Express of the Future, The Strand Magazine, January 1895. It was but one of scores of stories anticipating advances in scientific technology. Illustrator unknown.
January, 1895
AN EXPRESS OF THE FUTURE
by Jules Verne
NO BIOGRAPHY or bibliography of Jules Verne makes any reference to this story, An Express of the Future, nor does it appear to have been collected in any of his books. It should be placed in the category of little-known works of science fiction by Verne. The concept, pushing a vehicle through a tube by compressed air under the Atlantic Ocean from the United States to Europe would date the story as having been written roughly about the period in which it appeared in The Strand, January 1895.
A friend and close collaborator of Verne’s, Andre Laurie, wrote an exciting novel titled New York to Brest in Seven Hours (Sampson, Low, 1890), which dealt with a pipeline under the Atlantic to carry oil from the United States to Europe, and showed how a man in a capsule could be shot through it in an emergency. It is quite obvious that Verne got his inspiration from Laurie.
Verne still had several good stories left in him and his name was famous around the world, but the very year that this story appeared, his successor, H. G. Wells, would thrill the critics with The Time Machine. One thing Wells had in common with Verne was a high optimism that science would prove the salvation of man. This common ground was not to last long. As Verne lost his loved ones, aged, and grew ill, his doubts about the efficacy of science in curing the world’s problems enlarged. At the time of his death, March 24, 1905, Verne well knew that science was only a tool of men, its use completely dependent upon the inclinations of men.
As he grew older, H. G. Wells, too, fell in line with Verne’s view. There was no more to be said about the inevitability of progress, he noted in sorrow; man must make his own salvation.
“TAKE care!” cried my conductor, “there’s a step!”
Safely descending the step thus indicated to me, I entered a vast room, illuminated by blinding electric reflectors, the sound of our feet alone breaking the solitude and silence of the place.
Where was I? What had I come there to do? Who was my mysterious guide? Questions unanswered. A long walk in the night, iron doors opened and reclosed with a clang, stairs descending, it seemed to me, deep into the earth—that is all I could remember. I had, however, no time for thinking.
“No doubt you are asking yourself who I am?” said my guide: “Colonel Pierce, at your service. Where are you? In America, at Boston—in a station.”
“A station?”
“Yes, the starting-point of the ‘Boston to Liverpool Pneumatic Tubes Company.’“
And, with an explanatory gesture, the Colonel pointed out to me two long iron cylinders, about a metre and a half in diameter, lying upon the ground a few paces off.
I looked at these two cylinders, ending on the right in a mass of masonry, and closed on the left with heavy metallic caps, from which a cluster of tubes were carried up to the roof; and suddenly I comprehended the purpose of all this.
Had I not, a short time before, read, in an American newspaper, an article describing this extraordinary project for linking Europe with the New World by means of two gigantic submarines tubes? An inventor had claimed to have accomplished the task; and that inventor, Colonel Pierce, I had before me.
In thought I realized the newspaper article,
Complaisantly the journalist entered into the details of the enterprise. He stated that more than 3,000 miles of iron tubes, weighing over 13,000,000 tons, were required, with the number of ships necessary, for the transport of this material—200 ships of 2,000 tons, each making thirty-three voyages. He described this Armada of science bearing the steel to two special vessels, on board of which the ends of the tubes were joined to each other, and incased in a triple netting of iron, the whole covered with a resinous preparation to preserve it from the action of the seawater.
Coming at once to the question of working, he filled the tubes—transformed into a sort of pea-shooter of interminable length—with a series of carriages, to be carried with their travellers by powerful currents of air, in the same way that despatches are conveyed pneumatically round Paris.
A parallel with the railways closed the article, and the author enumerated with enthusiasm the advantages of the new and audacious system. According to him, there would be, in passing through these tubes, a suppression of all nervous trepidation, thanks to the interior surface being of finely polished steel; equality of temperature secured by means of currents of air, by which the heat could be modified according to the seasons; incredibly low fares, owing to the cheapness of construction and working expenses—forgetting, or waving aside, all considerations of the question of gravitation and of wear and tear.
All that now came back to my mind.
So, then, this “Utopia” had become a reality, and these two cylinders of iron at my feet passed thence under the Atlantic and reached to the coast of England!
In spite of the evidence, I could not bring myself to believe in the thing having been done. That the tubes had been laid I could not doubt; but that men could travel by this route—never!
“Was it not impossible even to obtain a current of air of that length?” —I expressed that opinion aloud.
“Quite easy, on the contrary!” protested Colonel Pierce; “to obtain it, all that is required is a great number of steam fans similar to those used in blast furnaces. The air is driven by them with a force which is practically unlimited, propelling it at the speed of 1,800 kilometres an hour—almost that of a cannon-ball!—so that our carriages with their travellers, in the space of two hours and forty minutes, accomplish the journey between Boston and Liverpool.”
“Eighteen hundred kilometres an hour!” I exclaimed.
“Not one less. And what extraordinary consequences arise from such a rate of speed! The time at Liverpool being four hours and forty minutes in advance of ours, a traveller starting from Boston at nine o’clock in the morning, arrives in England at 3.53 in the afternoon. Isn’t that a journey quickly made? In another sense, on the contrary, our trains, in this latitude, gain over the sun more than 900 kilometres an hour, beating that planet hand over hand: quitting Liverpool at noon, for example, the traveller will reach the station where we now are at thirty-four minutes past nine in the morning—that is to say, earlier than he started! Ha! ha! I don’t think one can travel quicker than that!”
I did not know what to think. Was I talking with a madman?—or must I credit these fabulous theories, in spite of the objections which rose in my mind?
“Very well, so be it!” I said. “I will admit that travellers may take this mad-brained route, and that you can obtain this incredible speed. But, when you have got this speed, how do you check it? When you come to a stop, everything must be shattered to pieces!”
“Not at all,” replied the Colonel, shrugging his shoulders. “Between our tubes—one for the out; the other for the home journey—consequently worked by currents going in opposite directions—a communication exists at every joint. When a train is approaching, an electric spark advertises us of the fact; left to itself, the train would continue its course by reason of the speed it had acquired; but, simply by the turning of a handle, we are able to let in the opposing current of compressed air from the parallel tube, and, little by little, reduce to nothing the final shock or stopping. But what is the use of all these explanations? Would not a trial be a hundred times better?”
And, without waiting for an answer to his questions, the Colonel pulled sharply a bright brass knob projecting from the side of one of the tubes: a panel slid smoothly in its grooves, and in the opening left by its removal I perceived a row of seats, on each of which two persons might sit comfortably side by side.
“The carriage!” exclaimed the Colonel. “Come in.”
I followed him without offering any objection, and the panel immediately slid back into its place.
By the light of an electric lamp in the roof I carefully examined the carriage I was in.
Nothing could be more simple: a long cylinder, comfortably upholstered, along which some fifty arm-chairs, in pairs, were ranged in twenty-five parallel ranks. At either end a valve regulated the atmospheric pressure, that at the farther end allowing breathable air to enter the carriage, that in front allowing for the discharge of any excess beyond a normal pressure.
After spending a few moments on this examination, I became impatient.
“Well,” I said, “are we not going to start?”
“Going to start?” cried the Colonel. “We have started!”
Started—like that—without the least jerk, was it possible? I listened attentively, trying to detect a sound of some kind that might have guided me.
If we had really started—if the Colonel had not deceived me in talking of a speed of eighteen hundred kilometres an hour—we must already be far from any land, under the sea; above our heads the huge, foam-crested waves; even at that moment, perhaps—taking it for a monstrous sea-serpent of an unknown kind—whales were battering with their powerful tails our long, iron prison!
But I heard nothing but a dull rumble, produced, no doubt, by the passage of our carriage, and, plunged in boundless astonishment, unable to believe in the reality of all that had happened to me, I sat silently, allowing the time to pass.
At the end of about an hour a sense of freshness upon my forehead suddenly aroused me from the torpor into which I had sunk by degrees.
I raised my hand to my brow: it was moist.
Moist! Why was that? Had the tube burst under pressure of the waters —a pressure which could not but be formidable, since it increases at the rate of “an atmosphere” every ten metres of depth? Had the ocean broken in upon us?
Fear seized upon me. Terrified, I tried to call out—and—and I found myself in my garden, generously sprinkled by a driving rain, the big drops of which had awakened me. I had simply fallen asleep while reading the article devoted by an American journalist to the fantastic projects of Colonel Pierce—who also, I much fear, has only dreamed.
October, 1903
THE RAY OF DISPLACEMENT
by Harriet Prescott Spofford
WOMEN writers are relatively scarce in science fiction. It is predominantly a man’s literature, and because so little of it appears in the big-circulation women’s magazines, few of the numerous feminine authors attempt it. This contribution by Harriet Elizabeth Prescott Spofford is all the more unusual, inasmuch as she was sixty-eight years old when she wrote it.
Born in Calais, Maine, in 1835, Harriet Spofford had a successful novel, Sir Rohan’s Ghost, published in 1860 when she was only twenty-five. A writer of verse, essays, and short stories, she was one of the most prolific writers of the nineteenth century. Her great output was said to have been spurred by family responsibilities. In the later part of the century she was considered at least important enough to be praised by William Dean Howells and damned by Henry James.
She was criticized for the lavishness of her prose, but this short story displays little of that, moving without prelude right into its subject and pursuing it undeviatingly to its climax. This is one of the earliest and one of the finest stories done on the theme of humans passing through solid matter. Memorable stories in recent times in a similar vein have been The Mole Pirate by Murray Leinster (Astounding Stories, November 1934), where machinery as well as men are equipped to perform this feat; Exit by Wilson Tucker (Astonishing Stories, April 1943), in which an imprisoned man teaches himself the method; and the translation of The Man Who Walked Through Walls by the French author Marcel Ay me, which appeared in a magazine as distinguished as Harper’s in the early 1950s.
Where did a woman of Miss Spofford’s age dig up so outlandish a notion? Well, here the moralizing as well as the method very strongly indicates the influence of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was not averse to an occasional bit of science fiction and who was considered quite respectable reading for a genteel woman of Miss Spofford’s standing.
The Metropolitan Magazine in which the story appeared was one of the great periodicals of the time, and in 1903 it was still on the way up. It had started in 1895 as the equivalent of that era’s “girlie” magazines, publishing photos of as many nude statues and nude portraits as it could find, and then gradually going respectable, featuring contributions by Arthur Brisbane, Theodore Dreiser, John D. Rockefeller, and J. S. Fletcher, as well as a well-balanced selection of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and photographic album sections in each issue. While the cover and layout of later issues appeared to cater mostly to women, the contents were of general interest.
“We should have to reach the Infinite to arrive at the Impossible
IT WOULD interest none but students should I recite the circumstances of the discovery. Prosecuting my usual researches, I seemed rather to have stumbled on this tremendous thing than to have evolved it from formulae.
Of course, you already know that all molecules, all atoms, are separated from each other by spaces perhaps as great, when compared relatively, as those which separate the members of the stellar universe. And when by my Y-ray I could so far increase these spaces that I could pass one solid body through another, owing to the differing situation of their atoms, I felt no disembodied spirit had wider, freer range than I. Until my discovery was made public my power over the material universe was practically unlimited.
Le Sage’s theory concerning ultra-mundane corpuscles was rejected because corpuscles could not pass through solids. But here were corpuscles passing through solids. As I proceeded, I found that at the displacement of one one-billionth of a centimeter the object capable of passing through another was still visible, owing to the refraction of the air, and had the power of communicating its polarization; and that at two one-billionths the object became invisible, but that at either displacement the subject, if a person, could see into the present plane; and all movement and direction were voluntary. I further found my Y-ray could so polarize a substance that its touch in turn temporarily polarized anything with which it came in contact, a negative current moving atoms to the left, and a positive to the right of the present plane.
My first experience with this new principle would have made a less determined man drop the affair. Brant had been by way of dropping into my office and laboratory when in town. As I afterwards recalled, he showed a signal interest in certain toxicological experiments. “Man alive!” I had said to him once, “let those crystals alone! A single one of them will send you where you never see the sun!” I was uncertain if he brushed one off the slab. He did not return for some months. His wife, as I heard afterwards, had a long and baffling illness in the meantime, divorcing him on her recovery; and he had remained out of sight, at last leaving his native place for the great city. He had come in now, plausibly to ask my opinion of a stone—a diamond of unusual size and water.
I put the stone on a glass shelf in the next room while looking for the slide. You can imagine my sensation when that diamond, with something like a flash of shadow, so intense and swift it was, burst into a hundred rays of blackness and subsided—a pile of carbon! I had forgotten that the shelf happened to be negatively polarized, consequently everything it touched sharing its polarization, and that in pursuing my experiment I had polarized myself also, but with the opposite current; thus the atoms of my fingers passing through the spaces of the atoms of the stone already polarized, separated them negatively so far that they suffered disintegration and returned to the normal. “Good heavens! What has happened!” I cried before I thought. In a moment he was in the rear room and bending with me over the carbon. “Well,” he said straightening himself directly, “you gave me a pretty fright. I thought for a moment that was my diamond.”
“But it is!” I whispered.
“Pshaw!” he exclaimed roughly. “What do you take me for? Come, come, I’m not here for tricks. That’s enough damned legerdemain. Where’s my diamond?”
With less dismay and more presence of mind I should have edged along to my batteries, depolarized myself, placed in vacuum the tiny shelf of glass and applied my Y-ray; and with, I knew not what, of convulsion and flame the atoms might have slipped into place. But, instead, I stood gasping. He turned and surveyed me; the low order of his intelligence could receive but one impression.
“Look here,” he said, “you will give me back my stone! Now! Or I will have an officer here!”
My mind was flying like the current through my coils. How could I restore the carbon to its original, as I must, if at all, without touching it, and how could I gain time without betraying my secret? “You are very short,” I said. “What would you do with your officer?”
“Give you up! Give you up, appear against you, and let you have a sentence of twenty years behind bars.”
“Hard words, Mr. Brant. You could say I had your property. I could deny it. Would your word outweigh mine? But return to the office in five minutes—if it is a possible thing you shall--”
“And leave you to make off with my jewel! Not by a long shot! I’m a bad man to deal with, and I’ll have my stone or—”
“Go for your officer,” said I.
His eye, sharp as a dagger’s point, fell an instant. How could he trust me? I might escape with my booty. Throwing open the window to call, I might pinion him from behind, powerful as he was. But before he could gainsay, I had taken half a dozen steps backward, reaching my batteries.
“Give your alarm,” I said. I put out my hand, lifting my lever, turned the current into my coils, and blazed up my Y-ray for half a heart-beat, succeeding in that brief time in reversing and in receiving the current that so far changed matters that the thing I touched would remain normal, although I was left still so far subjected to the ray of the less displacement that I ought, when the thrill had subsided, to be able to step through the wall as easily as if no wall were there. “Do you see what I have here?” I most unwisely exclaimed. “In one second I could annihilate you—” I had no time for more, or even to make sure I was correct, before, keeping one eye on me, he had called the officer.
“Look here,” he said again, turning on me. “I know enough to see you have something new there, some of your damned inventions. Come, give me my diamond, and if it is worth while I’ll find the capital, go halves, and drop this matter.”
“Not to save your life!” I cried.
“You know me, officer,” he said, as the blue coat came running in. “I give this man into custody for theft.”
“It is a mistake, officer,” I said. “But you will do your duty.”
“Take him to the central station,” said Mr. Brant, “and have him searched. He has a jewel of mine on his person.”
“Yer annar’s sure it’s not on the primmises?” asked the officer.
“He has had no time—”
“Sure, if it’s quick he do be he’s as like to toss it in a corner—”
I stretched out my hand to a knob that silenced the humming among my wires, and at the same time sent up a thread of white fire whose instant rush and subsidence hinted of terrible power behind. The last divisible particle of radium—their eyeballs throbbed for a week.
“Search,” I said. “But be careful about shocks. I don’t want murder here, too.”
Apparently they also were of that mind. For, recovering their sight, they threw my coat over my shoulders and marched me between them to the station, where I was searched, and, as it was already late, locked into a cell for the night.
I could not waste strength on the matter. I was waiting for the dead middle of the night. Then I should put things to proof.
I confess it was a time of intense breathlessness while waiting for silence and slumber to seal the world. Then I called upon my soul, and I stepped boldly forward and walked through that stone wall as if it had been air.
Of course, at my present displacement I was perfectly visible, and I slipped behind this and that projection, and into that alley, till sure of safety. There I made haste to my quarters, took the shelf holding the carbon, and at once subjected it to the necessary treatment. I was unprepared for the result. One instant the room seemed full of a blinding white flame, an intolerable heat, which shut my eyes and singed my hair and blistered my face.
“It is the atmosphere of a fire-dissolving planet,” I thought. And then there was darkness and a strange odor.
I fumbled and stumbled about till I could let in the fresh air; and presently I saw the dim light of the street lamp. Then I turned on my own lights—and there was the quartz slab with a curious fusing of its edges, and in the center, flashing, palpitating, lay the diamond, all fire and whiteness. I wonder if it were not considerably larger; but it was hot as if just fallen from Syra Vega; it contracted slightly after subjection to dephlogistic gases.
It was near morning when, having found Brant’s address, I passed into his house and his room, and took my bearings. I found his waistcoat, left the diamond in one of its pockets, and returned. It would not do to remain away, visible or invisible. I must be vindicated, cleared of the charge, set right before the world by Brant’s appearing and confessing his mistake on finding the diamond in his pocket.
Judge Brant did nothing of the kind. Having visited me in my cell and in vain renewed his request to share in the invention which the habit of his mind convinced him must be of importance, he appeared against me. And the upshot of the business was that I went to prison for the term of years he had threatened.
I asked for another interview with him; but was refused, unless on the terms already declined. My lawyer, with the prison chaplain, went to him, but to no purpose. At last I went myself, as I had gone before, begging him not to ruin the work of my life. He regarded me as a bad dream, and I could not undeceive him without betraying my secret. I returned to my cell and again waited. For to escape was only to prevent possible vindication. If Mary had lived—but I was alone in the world.
The chaplain arranged with my landlord to take a sum of money I had, and to keep my rooms and apparatus intact till the expiration of my sentence. And then I put on the shameful and degrading prison garb and submitted to my fate.
It was a black fate. On the edge of the greatest triumph over matter that had ever been achieved, on the verge of announcing the actuality of the Fourth Dimension of Space, and of defining and declaring its laws, I was a convict laborer at a prison bench.
One day Judge Brant, visiting a client under sentence of death, in relation to his fee, made pretext to look me up, and stopped at my bench. “And how do you like it as far as you’ve gone?” he said.
“So that I go no farther,” I replied. “And unless you become accessory to my taking off, you will acknowledge you found the stone in your pocket-”
“Not yet, not yet,” he said, with an unctuous laugh. “It was a keen jest you played. Regard this as a jest in return. But when you are ready, I am ready.”
The thing was hopeless. That night I bade good-by to the life that had plunged me from the pinnacle of light to the depths of hell.
When again conscious I lay on a cot in the prison hospital. My attempt had been unsuccessful. St. Angel sat beside me. It was here, practically, he came into my life—alas! that I came into his.
In the long nights of darkness and failing faintness, when horror had me by the throat, he was beside me, and his warm, human touch was all that held me while I hung over the abyss. When I swooned off again his hand, his voice, his bending face recalled me. “Why not let me go, and then an end?” I sighed.
“To save you from a great sin,” he replied. And I clung to his hand with the animal instinct of living.
I was well, and in my cell, when he said. “You claim to be an honest man—”
“And yet?”
“You were about taking that which did not belong to you.”
“I hardly understand—”
“Can you restore life once taken?”
“Oh, life! That worthless thing!”
“Lent for a purpose.”
“For torture!”
“If by yourself you could breathe breath into any pinch of feathers and toss it off your hand a creature—but, as it is, life is a trust. And you, a man of parts, of power, hold it only to return with usury.”
“And stripped of the power of gathering usury! Robbed of the work about to revolutionize the world!”
“The world moves on wide waves. Another man will presently have reached your discovery.”
As if that were a thing to be glad of! I learned afterwards that St. Angel had given up the sweetness of life for the sake of his enemy. He had gone to prison, and himself worn the stripes, rather than the woman he loved should know her husband was the criminal. Perhaps he did not reconcile this with his love of inviolate truth. But St. Angel had never felt so much regard for his own soul as for the service of others. Self-forgetfulness was the dominant of all his nature.
“Tell me,” he said, sitting with me, “about your work.”
A whim of trustfulness seized me. I drew an outline, but paused at the look of pity on his face. He felt there was but one conclusion to draw—that I was a madman.
“Very well,” I said, “you shall see.” And I walked through the wall before his amazed eyes, and walked back again.
For a moment speechless, “You have hypnotic power,” then he said. “You made me think I saw it.”
“You did see it. I can go free any day I choose.”
“And you do not?”
“I must be vindicated.” And I told exactly what had taken place with Brant and his diamond. “Perhaps that vindication will never come,” I said at last. “The offended amour propre, and the hope of gain, hindered in the beginning. Now he will find it impossible.”
“That is too monstrous to believe!” said St. Angel. “But since you can, why not spend an hour or two at night with your work?”
“In these clothes! How long before I should be brought back? The first wayfarer—oh, you see!”
St. Angel thought a while. “You are my size,” he said then. “We will exchange clothes. I will remain here. In three hours return, that you may get your sleep. It is fortunate the prison should be in the same town.”
Night after night then I was in my old rooms, the shutters up, lost in my dreams and my researches, arriving at great ends.
Night after night I reappeared on the moment, and St. Angel went his way.
I had now found that molecular displacement can be had in various directions. Going further, I saw that gravity acts on bodies whose molecules are on the same plane, and one of the possible results of the application of the Y-ray was the suspension of the laws of gravity. This possibly accounted for an almost inappreciable buoyancy and the power of directing one’s course. My last studies showed that a substance thus treated has the degenerative power of attracting the molecules of any norm into its new orbit—a disastrous possibility. A chair might disappear into a table previously treated by a Y-ray. In fact, the outlook was to infinity. The change so slight—the result so astonishing! The subject might go into molecular interstices as far removed, to all essential purpose, as if billions of miles away in interstellar space. Nothing was changed, nothing disrupted; but the thing had stepped aside to let the world go by. The secrets of the world were mine. The criminal was at my mercy. The lover had no reserves from me. And as for my enemy, the Lord had delivered him into my hand. I could leave him only a puzzle for the dissectors. I could make him, although yet alive, a conscious ghost to stand or wander in his altered shape through years of nightmare alone and lost. What wonders of energy would follow this ray of displacement. What withdrawal of malignant growth and deteriorating tissue was to come. “To what heights of succor for humanity the surgeon can rise with it!” said St. Angel, as, full of my enthusiasm, I dilated on the marvel.
“He can work miracles!” I exclaimed. “He can heal the sick, walk on the deep, perhaps—who knows—raise the dead!”
I was at the height of my endeavor when St. Angel brought me my pardon. He had so stated my case to the Governor, so spoken of my interrupted career, and of my prison conduct, that the pardon had been given. I refused to accept it. “I accept,” I said, “nothing but vindication, if I stay here till the day of judgment!”
“But there is no provision for you now,” he urged. “Officially you no longer exist.”
“Here I am,” I said, “and here I stay.”
“At any rate,” he continued, “come out with me now and see the Governor, and see the world and the daylight outdoors, and be a man among men a while!”
With the stipulation that I should return, I put on, a man’s clothes again and went out the gates.
It was with a thrill of exultation that, exhibiting the affairs in my room to St. Angel, finally I felt the vibrating impulse that told me I had received the ray of the larger displacement. In a moment I should be viewless as the air.
“Where are you?” said St. Angel, turning this way and that. “What has become of you?”
“Seeing is believing,” I said. “Sometimes not seeing is the naked truth.”
“Oh, but this is uncanny!” he exclaimed. “A voice out of empty air.”
“Not so empty! But place your hand under the second coil. Have no fear. You hear me now,” I said. “I am in perhaps the Fourth Dimension. I am invisible to any one not there—to all the world, except, presently, yourself. For now you, you also, pass into the unseen. Tell me what you feel.”
“Nothing,” he said. “A vibration—a suspicion of one. No, a blow, a sense of coming collapse, so instant it has passed.”
“Now,” I said, “there is no one on earth with eyes to see you but myself!”
“That seems impossible.”
“Did you see me? But now you do. We are on the same plane. Look in that glass. There is the reflection of the room, of the window, the chair. Do you see me? Yourself?”
“Powers of the earth and air, but this is ghastly!” said St. Angel.
“It is the working of natural law. Now we will see the world, ourselves unseen.”
“An unfair advantage.”
“Perhaps. But there are things to accomplish to-day.” What things I never dreamed; or I had stayed on the threshold.
I wanted St. Angel to know the manner of man this Brant was. We went out, and arrested our steps only inside Brant’s office.
“This door is always blowing open!” said the clerk, and he returned to a woman standing in a suppliant attitude. “The Judge has gone to the races,” he said, “and he’s left word that Tuesday morning your goods’ll be put out of the house if you don’t pay up!” The woman went her way weeping.
Leaving, we mounted a car; we would go to the races ourselves. I doubt if St. Angel had ever seen anything of the sort. I observed him quietly slip a dime into the conductor’s pocket—he felt that even the invisible, like John Gilpin, carried a right. “This opens a way for the right hand undreamed of the left,” he said to me later.
It was not long before we found Judge Brant, evidently in an anxious frame, his expanse of countenance white with excitement. He had been plunging heavily, as I learned, and had big money staked, not upon the favorite but upon Hannan, the black mare. “That man would hardly put up so much on less than a certainty,” I thought. Winding our way unseen among the grooms and horses, I found what I suspected—a plan to pocket the favorite. “But I know a game worth two of that,” I said. I took a couple of small smooth pebbles, previously prepared, from the chamois bag into which I had put them with some others and an aluminum wafer treated for the larger displacement, and slipped one securely under the favorite’s saddle-girth. When he warmed to his work he should be, for perhaps half an hour, at the one-billionth point, before the virtue expired, and capable of passing through every obstacle as he was directed.
“Hark you, Danny,” then I whispered in the jockey’s ear.
“Who are you? What—I—I—don’t—” looking about with terror.
“It’s no ghost,” I whispered hurriedly. “Keep your nerve. I am flesh and blood—alive as you. But I have the property which for half an hour I give you—a new discovery. And knowing Bub and Whittler’s game, it’s up to you to knock ‘em out. Now, remember, when they try the pocket ride straight through them!”
Other things kept my attention; and when the crucial moment came I had some excited heart-beats. And so had Judge Brant. It was in the instant when Danny, having held the favorite well in hand for the first stretch, Hannan and Darter in the lead and the field following, was about calling on her speed, that suddenly Bub and Whittler drew their horses’ heads a trifle more closely together, in such wise that it was impossible to pass on either side, and a horse could no more shoot ahead than if a stone wall stood there. “Remember, Danny!” I shouted, making a trumpet of my hands. “Ride straight through!”
And Danny did. He pulled himself together, and set his teeth as if it were a compact with powers of evil, and rode straight through without turning a hair, or disturbing either horse or rider. Once more the Y-ray was triumphant.
But about Judge Brant the air was blue. It would take a very round sum of money to recoup the losses of those few moments. I disliked to have St. Angel hear him; but it was all in the day’s work.
The day had, not been to Judge Brant’s mind, as at last he bent his steps to the club. As he went it occurred to me to try upon him the larger ray of displacement, and I slipped down the back of his collar the wafer I had ready. He would not at once feel its action, but in the warmth either of walking or dining, its properties should be lively for nearly an hour. I had curiosity to see if the current worked not only through all substances, but through all sorts and conditions.
“I should prefer a better pursuit,” said St. Angel, as we reached the street. “Is there not something ignoble in it?”
“In another case. Here it is necessary to hound the criminal, to see the man entirely. A game not to be played too often, for there is work to be done before establishing the counteracting currents that may ensure reserves and privacies to people. To-night let us go to the club with Judge Brant, and then I will back to my cell.”
As you may suppose, Brant was a man neither of imagination nor humor. As you have seen, he was hard and cruel, priding himself on being a good hater, which in his contention meant indulgence of a preternaturally vindictive temper when prudence allowed. With more cunning than ability, he had achieved some success in his profession, and he secured admission to a good club, recently crowning his efforts, when most of the influential members were absent, by getting himself made one of its governors.
It would be impossible to find a greater contrast to this wretch than in St. Angel—a man of delicate imagination and pure fancy, tender to the child on the street, the fly on the wall; all his atmosphere that of kindness. Gently born, but too finely bred, his physical resistance was so slight that his immunity lay in not being attacked. His clean, fair skin, his brilliant eyes, spoke of health, but the fragility of frame did not speak of strength. Yet St. Angel’s life was the active principle of good; his neighborhood was purification.
I was revolving these things while we followed Judge Brant, when I saw him pause in an agitated manner, like one startled out of sleep. A quick shiver ran over his strong frame; he turned red and pale, then with a shrug went on. The displacement had occurred. He was now on the plane of invisibility, and we must have a care ourselves.
Wholly unconscious of any change, the man pursued his way. The street was as usual. There was the boy who always waited for him with the extra but to-night was oblivious; and failing to get his attention the Judge walked on. A shower that had been threatening began to fall, the sprinkle becoming a downpour, with umbrellas spread and people hurrying. The Judge hailed a car; but the motorman was as blind as the newsboy. The shower stopped as suddenly as it had begun, but he went on some paces before perceiving that he was perfectly dry, for as he shut and shook his umbrella not a drop fell, and as he took off his hat and looked at it, not an atom of moisture was to be found there. Evidently bewildered, and looking about shamefacedly, I fancied I could hear him saying, with his usual oaths, “I must be deucedly overwrought, or this is some blue devilment.”
As the Judge took his accustomed seat in the warm and brilliantly lighted room, and picking up the evening paper, looked over the columns, the familiar every-day affair quieting his nerves so that he could have persuaded himself he had been half asleep as he walked, he was startled by the voice, not four feet away, of one of the old officers who made the Kings County their resort. Something had ruffled the doughty hero. “By the Lord Harry, sir,” he was saying in unmodulated tones, “I should like to know what this club is coming to when you can spring on it the election of such a man as this Brant! Judge? What’s he Judge of? Beat his wife, too, didn’t he? The governors used to be gentlemen!”
“But you know, General,” said his vis-a-vis, “I think no more of him than you do; but when a man lives at the Club—”
“Lives here!” burst in the other angrily. “He hasn’t anywhere else to live! Is there a decent house in town open to him? Well, thank goodness, I’ve somewhere else to go before he comes in! The sight of him gives me a fit of the gout!” And the General stumped out stormily.
“Old boy seems upset!” said some one not far away. “But he’s right. It was sheer impudence in the fellow to put up his name.”
I could see Brant grow white and gray with anger, as surprised and outraged, wondering what it meant—if the General intended insult—if Scarsdale—but no, apparently they had not seen him. The contemptuous words rankled; the sweat stood on his forehead.
Had not the moment been serious, there were a thousand tricks to play. But the potency of the polarization was subsiding and in a short time the normal molecular plane would be re-established. It was there that I made my mistake. I should not have allowed him to depolarize so soon. I should have kept him bewildered and foodless till famished and weak. Instead, as ion by ion the effect of the ray decreased, his shape grew vague and misty, and then one and another man there rubbed his eyes, for Judge Brant was sitting in his chair and a waiter was hastening towards him.
It had all happened in a few minutes. Plainly the Judge understood nothing of the circumstances. He was dazed, but he must put the best face on it; and he ordered his dinner and a pony of brandy, eating like a hungry animal.
He rose, after a time, refreshed, invigorated, and all himself. Choosing a cigar, he went into another room, seeking a choice lounging place, where for a while he could enjoy his ease and wonder if anything worse than a bad dream had befallen. As for the General’s explosion, it did not signify; he was conscious of such opinion; he was overliving it; he would be expelling the old cock yet for conduct unbecoming a gentleman.
Meanwhile, St. Angel, tiring of the affair, and weary, had gone into this room, and in an arm-chair by the hearth was awaiting me—the intrusive quality of my observations not at all to his mind. He had eaten nothing all day, and was somewhat faint. He had closed his eyes, and perhaps fallen into a light doze when he must have been waked by the impact of Brant’s powerful frame, as the latter took what seemed to him the empty seat. I expected to see Brant at once flung across the rug by St. Angel’s natural effort in rising. Instead, Brant sank into the chair as into down pillows.
I rushed, as quickly as I could, to seize and throw him off, “Through him! Pass through him! Come out! Come to me!” I cried. And people to-day remember that voice out of the air, in the Kings County Club.
It seemed to me that I heard a sound, a sob, a whisper, as if one cried with a struggling sigh, “Impossible!” And with that a strange trembling convulsed Judge Brant’s great frame, he lifted his hands, he thrust out his feet, his head fell forward, he groaned gurglingly, shudder after shudder shook him as if every muscle quivered with agony or effort, the big veins started out as if every pulse were a red-hot iron. He was wrestling with something, he knew not what, something as antipathetic to him as white is to black; every nerve was concentrated in rebellion, every fiber struggled to break the spell.
The whole affair was that of a dozen heart-beats—the attempt of the opposing molecules each to draw the other into its own orbit. The stronger physical force, the greater aggregation of atoms was prevailing.
Thrust upward for an instant, Brant fell back into his chair exhausted, the purple color fading till his face shone fair as a girl’s, sweet and smiling as a child’s, white as the face of a risen spirit—Brant’s!
Astounded, I seized his shoulder and whirled him about. There was no one else in the chair. I looked in every direction. There was no St. Angel to be seen. There was but one conclusion to draw—the molecules of Brant’s stronger material frame had drawn into their own plane the molecules of St. Angel’s.
I rushed from the place, careless if seen or unseen, howling in rage and misery. I sought my laboratory, and in a fiend’s fury depolarized myself, and I demolished every instrument, every formula, every vestige of my work. I was singed and scorched and burned, but I welcomed any pain. And I went back to prison, admitted by the officials who hardly knew what else to do. I would stay there, I thought, all my days. God grant they should be few! It would be seen that a life of imprisonment and torture were too little punishment for the ruin I had wrought.
It was after a sleepless night, of which every moment seemed madness, that, the door of my cell opening, I saw St. Angel. St. Angel? God have mercy on me, no, it was Judge Brant I saw!
He came forward, with both hands extended, a grave, imploring look on his face. “I have come,” he said, a singular sweet overtone in his voice that I had never heard before, yet which echoed like music in my memory, “to make you all the reparation in my power. I will go with you at once before the Governor, and acknowledge that I have found the diamond. I can never hope to atone for what you have suffered. But as long as I live, all that I have, all that I am, is yours!”
There was a look of absolute sweetness on his face that for a dizzy moment made me half distraught. “We will go together,” he said. “I have to stop on the way and tell a woman whose mortgage comes due to-day that I have made a different disposition; and, do you know,” he added brightly, after an instant’s hesitation, “I think I shall help her pay it!” and he laughed gayly at the jest involved.
“Will you say that you have known my innocence all these years?” I said sternly.
“Is not that,” he replied, with a touching and persuasive quality of tone, “a trifle too much? Do you think this determination has been reached without a struggle? If you are set right before the world, is not something due to—Brant?”
“If I did not know who and what you are,” I said, “I should think the soul of St. Angel had possession of you!”
The man looked at me dreamily. “Strange!” he murmured. “I seem to have heard something like that before. However,” as if he shook off a perplexing train of thought, “all that is of no consequence. II is not who you are, but what you do. Come, my friend, don’t deny me, don’t let the good minute slip. Surely the undoing of the evil of a lifetime, the turning of that force to righteousness, is work outweighing all a prison chaplain’s—”
My God, what had the intrusion of my incapable hands upon forbidden mysteries done!
“Come,” he said. “We will go together. We will carry light into dark places—there are many waiting—”
“St. Angel!” I cried, with a loud voice, “are you here?”
And again the smile of infinite sweetness illuminated the face even as the sun shines up from the depths of a stagnant pool.
December, 1907
CONGEALING THE ICE TRUST
by Capt. H. G. Bishop, U.S.A.
READERS of the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, which began publication with its issue of April 1926, found a great many of the names on the title page familiar to them. There were the standby classics of H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Allan Poe; stars from Munsey’s pulps, including Edgar Rice Burroughs, George Allan England, Austin Hall, Murray Leinster, and Garrett P. Serviss; but here and there among the familiar names were a few unknowns.
Some of them were new authors who eventually appeared again, but most baffling were those who published once and in the process displayed such “savvy” of science fiction that it seemed impossible they did not possess past experience. Such an author was Capt. H. G. Bishop, USA, who in the entire history of science fiction magazines was represented by a single story, On the Martian Way, in the February 1927 issue of Amazing Stories. It was a tale of the future, when there was regular passenger service between Mars, Venus, and Earth, and it told of the carelessness that could cause space tragedy, the drama of those caught in a hopeless position, and the heroism and self-sacrifice that saved a spaceship from plunging into the sun.
For 1927, taking space travel for granted and writing a story that was not about the first voyage was extremely advanced. Through the years, Capt. Bishop’s single claim to fame appeared to be that one story, until finally research in the back files of The New Broadway Magazine revealed that he was “discovered” by them and wrote science fiction and fantasy for their pages.
In a certain sense, Congealing the Ice Trust holds kinship to the humorous stories of erratic inventors whose gimmicks always blow up in their faces at the crucial moment. However, that tie is the light touch of humor and the invention. This invention does not blow up in the face of its creator. It succeeds, to make it one of the most entertaining “world of if” stories ever. Involved is an invention for changing weather, but the reasons behind it center in an era when refrigeration was virtually unknown and when manufacturers of ice were of major importance. This is a story that could only have been completely effective when read in the gaslight era.
JOHN G. YATES, president of the Amsterdam Ice Company, was going over his daily mail. One by one he picked up each neatly slitted envelope, glanced at its contents and tossed it to his well-trained secretary with a few suggestions or a curt order.
His expression was complacent, even genial. For only a few weeks previously the labor of many years had netted its final reward. The last vestige of opposition had been swept away, and President Yates knew that not a pound of ice, whether bestowed by an all-wise Providence or congealed by the instrumentality of man, could be garnered within five hundred miles of Greater New York without his permission, nor disposed of without contributing its tithe to the stockholders he represented.
So he was in a particularly good humor this morning. His awakening, bath, shave and dressing had been very harmonious. His breakfast and the market reports in the morning paper had been unusually agreeable, and the trip down the Sound from Grand Neck to the Twenty-third Street anchorage surprisingly pleasant for an August day.
Furthermore, he had at last got rid of Peters, old Peters, who had superintended the Harlem plant for the past twenty years. Confounded old bucker! Impudent enough, crank enough to tell him, John G. Yates, president of the Amsterdam Ice Company, what he, Peters, thought of trusts in general and of the ice trust in particular. What business was it of Peters’ if he chose to make a hundred per cent profit or more, if he so desired? Ice was a luxury for those who could afford to pay. It was Peters’ business to make ice; John G. Yates was doing the selling. Also Peters had blown up over five hundred dollars’ worth of apparatus in some fool experiment; might blow up the plant itself some day.
So John G. waded on through the stack of mail, interspersing his instructions with many a joke and facetious remark, at which the secretary laughed immoderately, but not with the merriment that seemed to lie in the continued smile that clung to his features as the Ice King neared the last envelope in the stack.
Picking it up with a sigh of relief, the ice magnate extracted from it a sheet of paper covered with typewriting through which he proceeded to wade in his usual energetic manner, three lines at a time.
Ten seconds later his feet struck the floor with a thud that rattled the office furniture, and the Ice King rose suddenly to the full majesty of his six feet one, shouting in the bull-like voice he could call forth so readily: “A hold up! A hold up! Listen.” And he read:
New York, August 20th.
Mr. John G. Yates,
President, Amsterdam Ice Co.
Dear Sir:
After many years of study and interminable labor I have at last perfected a freezing and refrigerating apparatus which will revolutionize all existing methods in this line. The apparatus is so simple and inexpensive, both in original cost and operation as to be within reach of all, even the poorest, and of course when once placed upon the market will render practically useless and valueless all ice-houses and artificial ice-plants, as well as the means for ice distribution. My invention is based upon scientific principles and is practical reality. With my Patent Heat Wave Synchronizer, it is possible to take two bricks which have been lying in the sun all day and congeal a bucket of water in one minute. On a larger scale it is possible to refrigerate a portion of the earth’s surface, even on an August day. It is unnecessary to submit arguments to advise you of the effect this invention will have upon the ice trust, and for this reason I believe it no more than just to give you the first opportunity to acquire this valuable invention. Should you so elect, a complete working model of the apparatus, with descriptions and drawings, will be sent you on condition that you place $50,000 in cash under the large granite block laying north of the Woodbine road crossing, Long Island R. R., before August 23d. Failure so to do will result in the disintegration of the ice trust.
Yours for cheap refrigeration,
Hielo.
“What d’ye think of it?” thundered Yates, waving the sheet at the secretary and glaring at him as though that meek individual had composed it. “The audacity! To threaten me!” he bellowed. “Tryin’ to blackmail the trust. I’ll fix him! I’ll fix him! Send Treadwell here,” Yates bellowed.
Treadwell was the company’s chief detective, and had a reputation for cleverness in his profession.
As a result of the interview he hid a bag of “police money” at the appointed place and kept unobtrusive guard over the locality. But the day and night of August 23d passed uneventfully, and Treadwell returned to the office on the morning of the 24th only to be suddenly haled before the president, who was stamping up and down his office, purple with rage.
“Of course you didn’t get him,” Yates snarled. “You dunderhead! Read that! Some more of his confounded impudence, the blackmailing rascal!” he cried, shaking a paper at Treadwell.
Treadwell took it and read:
Dear Mr. Yates: I can’t trade my Heat Wave Synchronizer for Treadwell’s police money. Fifty thousand in coin of the Republic before the 26th or after that it will be a cold day for you. Hielo.
“You get that blackmailer, or the trust will get a new sleuth, you mullet!” the president hurled after Treadwell, as the latter escaped through the sanctum door.
John G. Yates was awakened on the morning of the 26th at his Grand Neck, Long Island, home by the thumping of radiators.
He jabbed the bell for his man and fiercely demanded to know what in the name of all that was hot and holy the idiots had steam up for.
“Well, sir,” replied the valet, “it turned cold suddenly in the night and is still so sharp this mornin’, we thought it best to warm up a little.”
“Cold!” exclaimed Yates. “Didn’t frost, did it?”
“A bit, sir,” answered the valet.
“What!” John G. leaped from his bed and strode to the window, threw it up and gazed down on a bed of particularly choice plants just out of his hot-houses.
“A little frost, eh?” he demanded. “I should say there had been a bit. Every blamed green thing is deader’n a door nail, and this the middle of August!”
Next to the trust, the famous Yates flowers, fruits and vegetables were nearest his heart, in fact his garden was almost his sole hobby, and he was dressed and out of doors before his man could get the bath ready.
A scene of desolation met his eye. Everything fragile and not under glass was frost-bitten beyond redemption. Even the hardy fruit-trees had suffered.
Although the sun was shining brightly the air was still cold and frosty when he went aboard the Octopus for his trip to town, but ten minutes alter the yacht had left her dock the chill gradually dissipated, and the thermometers, which had been hovering about forty, suddenly jumped to sixty-five.
In his mail that morning the ice magnate found a note:
This won’t be the last of the cold days for Mr. John G. Yates, if the $50,000 isn’t forthcoming. Temperature will drop rapidly from now on.
Treadwell was instantly despatched to Grand Neck, and returned late in the afternoon to report that the thermometers at the Yates house registered thirty-five degrees and that the temperature three miles away in every direction was above seventy.
“Some peculiarity of the weather,” remarked the magnate thoughtfully, “but pretty darned expensive for me. You keep after that ‘Hielo,’ though, Treadwell; and mind, don’t let any of this get into the papers.”
But there was a leak somewhere, and an enterprising Park Row reporter, who had got within half a mile of the Yates place by five o’clock the next morning stopped and rubbed his numb hands for just one second when he saw snowflakes in the air, then sprinted for the nearest telephone and sent in a story that roused dozing night editors and started an extra edition.
By nine o’clock every New York paper had a representative at Grand Neck, and when the trust president emerged from the house, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of an overcoat, a dozen shivering men closed around him, pads and pencils in hand.
It was not a pleasant forenoon for the Ice King. If the reporters had annoyed him excessively at Grand Neck in the early morning, they tortured him now.
About one o’clock his wife telephoned him that the snow was six inches deep at Grand Neck and that she was leaving. He had scarcely hung up the receiver when Hicks, the heaviest and most intractable of the stockholders, called him up and announced in an ominous voice that ice trust stocks had fallen ten points in the past twenty minutes.
This was a turn in affairs that had not occurred to Yates, and he suddenly realized that if this fool story started some of the small fry to unload, the Street would make short work of the trust. Stock which he had spent years steering into the hands of persons whom he could control would be lost forever, and anyway the balance of power, which he held, was not large. He rushed to the ticker in the corner of his office and nervously hauled the tape through his trembling fingers.
Even as he read the last quotation of his precious stock—88—twenty points lower than it had ever been, the machine commenced to buzz again and rapidly spelled out “Amsterdam Ice offered at 85, 50 bid; offered at 80, at 78; 45 bid.” Then there was a pause while some racing news was run off and the machine began again: “Amsterdam Ice 60, 37 offered”—but John G. was now at the telephone bellowing orders to his brokers to get down there and buy right and left.
“Take everything in sight,” he fairly shrieked and then rushed frantically to the tape again.
“Amsterdam Ice 35, 20 offered.” The cold sweat stood out on his forehead. His trust was going to the devil if Jones and Baker, his brokers, didn’t get there and stop this thing. Then the ticker commenced again: “Amsterdam Ice, 30, 40, 50, 60.” “Thank God,” muttered Yates, dropping limply into a chair, “they got there all right.”
But thirty minutes later both Jones and Baker came rushing into the office. A few minutes before they were on the floor old Hicks had dumped all his holdings, and buyers suddenly turned up from everywhere. Brokers who had been forcing down the price only a few moments before and fairly giving the stock away, had suddenly commenced to buy and the price had gone up to almost its old figure, when the exchange closed.
Baker and Jones had picked up five hundred shares, but all Hicks’ holdings were gone, twenty thousand shares unaccounted for and the unknown holder was master of the trust.
The next morning dawned clear and bright, but the rain that had fallen elsewhere on Long Island during the night had deepened the snow at the Yates place to all of two feet, and gables, trees and fences were festooned with enormous icicles. However, the thermometer was rapidly going up and the hot August sun was making inroads on the white covering with a sort of yellow joy.
About eight o’clock Treadwell, clothes torn and face scarred and bleeding, came out of the grove in the rear of the house and hurried indoors, reappearing in a few minutes with Yates himself. A half-dozen of the men, guarding the premises, were assembled and the party waded through the snow and off into the grove behind the house.
“You see, Mr. Yates,” Treadwell was saying, “I argued that all this cold must come from somewhere and it must needs be colder there than here at the house. So last night I hung out thermometers in all directions around the place, and blamed if I didn’t find it colder out this way than any other; so I follers it up and ‘bout daylight I located some sort of a shack out here ‘bout half a mile away. There was a light in the window and a sound like forty automobiles goin’ full tilt. I goes up toward the place. Then I hears a step behind me and I turns jes’ in time to see a feller bat me a good one side th’ head. When I comes to, I finds meself tied fast to a tree and I been nigh three hours gettin’ loose.” Then as they rounded a clump of trees: “There we are, that’s the place,” he added, pointing to an old, disused stable.
John G. motioned to some of the men to surround the building, and they approached it gingerly; but the place was strangely silent. They forced the door and entered. The floor was covered with machinist’s tools and demolished machinery. In a conspicuous place a big envelope was tacked to the wall, bearing the address, “Mr. John G. Yates, soon to be ex-President of the Amsterdam Ice Company.”
Yates seized it, tore it open, and read:
My Dear Mr. Yates:—
Unintentionally you did me a very great service in forcing me out of my position as superintendent of the Harlem plant. My inventions and improvements had already made you rich, and you did not realize that other and revolutionary appliances were practically completed. I submitted to your bullying in silence until I was absolutely sure of success. Now the worm has turned. The whole affair was pulled off, every detail of it, according to a carefully prearranged plan. The blackmail letter was written in order that it might be given to a certain newspaper reporter at the proper time, with a tip to visit Grand Neck at once. Old Hicks was told just enough to scare him into selling all his holdings, when my brokers knocked the bottom out of your stock, and thanks to the kind offices of my well-coached representatives on the floor of the Stock Exchange, I now hold the balance of power in the trust, and I hereby announce to you that I shall take full control of affairs at once and conduct the business according to my own ideas.
I have organized a company to manufacture the Patent Heat Wave Synchronizer, and my little ice-maker will soon be an indispensable household utensil. We can make a good profit and sell it for less than the average householder has been paying you monthly for ice.
My invention can be made in any size required, from portable machines of pocket dimensions to big ones for hotels, breweries and so on. The logical owner of my invention is the ice trust, in fact, the Amsterdam Company could not remain in business otherwise.
I am sure you will not censure me for the method I have adopted to convince you and the public of the value of my invention. Our stockholders wanted to advertise, in a spectacular way, so as to attract instant and wide attention, and I felt that you would wish to have your name connected with a new idea. But even if I misjudged you in this, you must acknowledge that it has been a square fight between science and capital.
Sincerely yours,
A. L. Peters.
Six months later, at the Fifth Avenue Club, young Augustus Van Inghen was entertaining a few of his cronies at dinner. “Pardon my slang,” he said as a waiter placed on the table an affair of resplendent Tiffany silver resembling two chafing-dishes yoked together, “but this Patent Heat Wave Synchronizer is the smoothest article ever. Some people like their champagne hot, others like it frozen, but I like to serve mine always at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. I light these two alcohol lamps, so. I move this lever until the thermometer here on the little well reads 32. I place the magnum in this receptacle. I wait forty seconds. Behold, gentlemen! It is frappéd fit for a king.” And he held aloft the dark-brown bottle, its glassy exterior scintillating with frost.
“It certainly is a wonderful invention,” said a broker in the party. “My wife, who does settlement work, tells me that the push-cart men down on Stanton Street are hawking cheap makes at fifteen cents apiece, two for a quarter.”
“Yes,” chimed in a Harvard B.Sc., “and the principle is very simple. You gentlemen know that sound is only a vibration in the air, and that if any sound-wave is properly opposed by another wave of corresponding frequency and amplitude, even though each be very intense, absolute silence results. Well, similarly, heat is a vibration in the substance heated, and if the heat waves from any source are opposed by others from another source of equal frequency and amplitude, cold results. Not ordinary cold, but the cold of the absolute zero.”
December, 1901
LORD BEDEN’S MOTOR
by J. B. Harris-Burland
THIS story is one of the most remarkable in this book. It is a bona fide science fiction story and at one and the same time a ghost story. It could, with validity, be claimed by exponents of the supernatural to be one of the most unusual ghost stories ever written.
At the same time the ghost is a “modern” specter, a product of the industrial revolution. The background of the story is the very beginning of the motoring age, which lends a flavor distinctive and unique. It belongs to the gaslight era.
From the turn of the century through almost to 1930, John B. Harris-Burland appeared in a wide range of magazines, from the leading slicks to the lowly pulps. He wrote nonfiction as well as fiction and had a number of books published, three of them fantasy or science fiction written under the pen name of Hariss Burland. The Gold Worshippers (G. W. Dillingham, September 1906) is the best known, and deals with a very popular theme of the gaslight era, the artificial manufacture of gold. Among the many who wrote books on artificial manufacture of gold with some degree of success were A. Conan Doyle, Garrett P. Serviss, and George Allan England. He made a special impression with his short story The Blot of Ink (The Blue Book Magazine, May 1921), where a man coming out of surgery makes out the face of a murderer he has never seen in the outlines of an ink blot on the white walls. After the criminal is caught, it develops there has never been an ink blot on the wall. It was the type of story that the old Black Cat might have printed. The foregoing acknowledged, it is most likely that Harris-Burland will be longest remembered for Lord Beden’s Motor.
A HARD man was Ralph Strang, seventh Earl of Beden, seventy years of age on his last birthday, but still upright as a dart, with hair white as snow, but with the devilry of youth still sparkling in his keen dark eyes. He was, indeed, able to follow the hounds with the best of us, and there were few men, even among the youngest and most hot-headed of our riders, who cared to follow him over all the jumps he put his horse at.
When I first came to Upstanway as a doctor I thought it strange that so good a sportsman should be so unpopular. As a rule a man can do pretty well anything in a sporting county so long as he rides straight to hounds. But before I had been in the place a month I attended him after a fall in the hunting-field, and I saw that a man like that would be unpopular even if he gave all his goods to the poor and lived the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Not that he was harsh or even unpleasant, but he had the knack of making one feel foolish and uncomfortable, and there was something in the expression of his eyes that made one unable to look him squarely in the face. His manners, indeed, were perfect, and he retained all the old-world courtliness which seems to have been permanently abandoned by this generation, but I could not help feeling that underneath all his politeness and even hospitality lay a solid substratum of contempt.
It was doubtless this impression which had earned him his unpopularity, for I never heard a single one of his enemies lay anything definite to his charge beyond the fact that his elder brother had died in a lunatic asylum, and that Lord Beden was in some vague way held responsible for this unfortunate event.
But it was not until Lord Beden purchased a 12-h.p. “Napier” motorcar that the villagers really began to consider him possessed of a devil. And certainly his spirit of devilry seemed to have found a worthy plaything in that grey mass of snorting machinery, which went through the lanes like a whirlwind, enveloped in a cloud of dust, and scattering every living thing close back against the hedges as a steamer dashes the waves against the banks of a river. I had often heard people whisper that he bore a charmed life in the hunting-field, and that another and better man would have been killed years ago; and he certainly carried the same spirit of dash and foolhardiness, and also the same good fortune, into a still more dangerous pursuit.
It was the purchase of this car that brought me into closer contact with him. I had had some experience of motors, and he was sufficiently humble to take instructions from me, and also to let me accompany him on several occasions. At first I drove the car myself, and tried to inculcate a certain amount of caution by example, but after the third lesson he knew as much about it as I did, and, resigning the steering-gear into his hands, I took my place by his side with some misgivings.
I must confess that he handled it splendidly. The man had a wonderful nerve, and when an inch to one side or the other would probably have meant death his keen eye never made a mistake and his hand on the wheel was as steady as a rock. This inspired confidence, and although the strain on my nerves was considerable, I found after a time a certain pleasurable excitement in these rides. And it was excitement, I can tell you. No twelve miles an hour for Lord Beden, no precautionary brakes down hill, no wide curves for corners. He rode, as he did to hounds, straight and fast. Sometimes we had six inches to spare, but never more, and as often as not another half inch would have shot us both out of the car. We always seemed to come round a sharp corner on two wheels. It was certainly exhilarating. But there was something about it I did not quite like. I don’t think I was physically afraid, but I recalled certain stories about Lord Beden’s mad exploits in the hunting-field, and it almost seemed to me as though he might be purposely riding for a fall.
Then all at once my invitations to ride with him ceased. I thought at first that I had offended him, but I could think of no possible cause of offence; and, besides, his manner towards me had not changed in any way, and I dined with him more than once at Beden Hall, where he was as courteous and irritating as usual. However, he offered no explanation, and I certainly did not intend to ask for one. I watched him narrowly when we talked about the motor, but he made no mystery about his rides. I noticed however, that he looked older and more careworn, and that his dark eyes burned now with an almost unnatural brilliancy.
I met him two or three times on the road when I was going my rounds in the trap, and he appeared to be driving his machine more furiously and fearlessly than ever. I was almost glad that his invitations had ceased. Strangely enough, I always encountered him on the same road, one which led straight to Oxminster, a town about twenty miles away.
One evening, however, late in August, while I was finishing my dinner in solitude, I heard a familiar hum and rattle along the road in the distance. In less than a minute I saw the flash of bright lamps through my open window and heard the jar of a brake. Then there was a ring at the bell and Lord Beden was announced.
“Good evening, Scott,” he said, taking off his glasses. “Lovely night, isn’t it? Would you care to come for a ride?” He looked very pale, and was covered with dust from head to foot.
“A ride, Lord Beden?” I replied, thoughtfully. “Well, I hardly know what to say. Will you have some coffee and a cigar?”
He nodded assent and sat down. I poured him out some coffee, and noticed that his hand shook as he raised the cup to his lips. But driving a motor-car at a rapid rate might easily produce this effect. Then I handed him a cigar and lit one myself.
“Rather late for a ride, isn’t it?” I said, after a slight pause.
“Not a bit, not a bit,” he answered, hastily. “It is as bright as day and the roads clear of traffic. Come, it will do you good. We can finish our cigars in the car.”
“Yes,” I replied, thoughtfully, “or at any rate the draught will finish them for us.”
“Look here, Scott,” he continued, in a lower voice, leaning over the table and looking me straight in the eyes, “I particularly want you to come. In fact, you must come—to oblige me. I want you to see something which I have seen. I am a little doubtful of its actual existence.”
I looked at him sharply. His voice was cold and quiet, but his eyes were certainly a bit too bright. I should say that he was in a state of intense excitement, yet with all his nerves well under control. I laughed a little uneasily.
“Very well, Lord Beden,” I replied, rising from my chair. “I will come. But you will excuse me saying that you don’t look well to-night. I think you are rather overdoing this motor business. It shakes the system up a good deal, you know.”
“I am not well, Scott,” he said. “But you cannot cure me.”
I said no more, and left the room to put on my glasses and an overcoat.
We set off through the village at about ten miles an hour. It was a glorious night and the moon shone clear in the sky, but I noticed a bank of heavy black clouds in the west, and thought it not unlikely that we should have a thunderstorm. The atmosphere had been suffocating all day, and it was only the motion of the car that created the cool and pleasant breeze which blew against our faces.
When we came to the church we turned sharp to the right on to the Oxminster Road. It ran in a perfectly straight white line for three miles, then it began to wind and ascend the Oxbourne Hills, finally disappearing in the darkness of some woods which extend for nearly five miles over the summit in the direction of Oxminster.
“Where are we going to?” I asked, settling myself firmly in my seat.
“Oxminster,” he replied, rather curtly. “Please keep your eyes open and tell me if you see anything on the road.”
As he spoke he pulled the lever farther towards him and the great machine shot forward with a sudden plunge which would have unseated me if I had not been prepared for something of the sort. We quickly gathered up speed: hedges and trees went past us like a flash; the dust whirled up into the moonlight like a silver cloud, and before five minutes had elapsed we were at the foot of the hills and were tearing up the slope at almost the same terrific pace.
As we ascended the foliage began to thicken and close in upon us on either side; then the moon disappeared, and only our powerful lamps illuminated the darkness ahead of us. The car was a magnificent hill-climber, but the gradient soon became so steep that the pace slackened down to about eight miles an hour. Lord Beden had not spoken a word since he told me where we were going to, but he had kept his eyes steadily fixed on the broad circle of light in front of the car. I began to find the silence and darkness oppressive, and, to say the truth, was not quite comfortable in my own mind about my companion’s sanity. I took off my glasses and tried to pierce the darkness on either side. The moon filtered through the trees and made strange shadows in the depths of the woods, but there was nothing else to be seen, and ahead of us there was only a white streak of road disappearing into blackness. Then suddenly my companion let go of the steering-gear with one hand and clutched me by the arm. “Listen, Scott!” he cried; “do you hear it?”
I listened attentively, and at first heard nothing but the throb of the motor and a faint rustling among the trees as a slight breeze began to stir through the wood. Then I noticed that the beat of the piston was not quite the same as usual. It sounded jerky and irregular, faint and loud alternately, and I had an idea that it had considerably quickened in speed.
“I hear nothing, Lord Beden,” I replied, “except that the engine sounds a little erratic. It ought not to make so much fuss over this hill.”
“If you listen more carefully,” he said, “you will understand. That sound is the beat of two pistons, and one of them is some way off.”
I listened again. He was right. There was certainly another engine throbbing in the distance.
“I cannot see any lights,” I answered, looking first in front of us and then into the darkness behind. “But it’s another motor, I suppose. It does not appear to me to be anything out of the way.”
He did not reply, but replaced his hand on the steering-gear and peered anxiously ahead. I began to feel a bit worried about him. It was strange that he should get so excited about the presence of another motor-car in the neighbourhood. I was not reassured either when, in rearranging the rug about my legs, I touched something hard in his pocket. I passed my fingers lightly over it, and had no doubt whatever that it was a revolver. I began to be sorry I had come. A revolver is not a necessary tool for the proper running of a motor-car.
We were nearly at the top of the hill now, and still in the shadow of the trees. The road here runs for more than a mile along the summit before it begins to descend, and half-way along the level another road crosses it at right angles, leading one way down a steep slope to Little Stanway, and the other along the top of the Oxbourne Hills to Kelston and Rutherton, two small villages some miles away on the edge of the moors.
We had scarcely reached the level when a few heavy drops of rain began to fall, and, looking up, I saw that the moon was no longer visible through the branches overhead. A minute later there was a low roll of thunder in the distance, and for an instant the scenery ahead of us flashed bright and faded into darkness. I turned up the collar of my coat.
The car was now moving almost at full speed, but to my surprise, before we had gone a quarter of a mile, Lord Beden slowed it down and finally brought it to a full stop with the brake. Then he appeared to be listening attentively for something, but the rising wind and pouring rain had begun to make an incessant noise among the trees, and the thunder had become more loud and continuous. I strained my sense of hearing to the utmost, but I could hear nothing beyond the sounds of the elements.
“What is the matter?” I queried, impatiently. “Are we going to stop here?”
“Yes,” he replied, curtly. “That is to say, if you have no objection. There is a certain amount of shelter.”
I drew a cigar from my pocket and, after several attempts, managed to light it. To say the truth, I was in hopes that we should go no farther. The downward descent, three-quarters of a mile ahead of us, was about one in ten, and I did not feel much inclined to let my companion take me down a hill of that sort.
Then, for a few seconds, the rustling of the wind and pattering of the rain ceased among the trees, and once more I could distinctly hear the thud, thud, thud of an engine. It might have been a motor-car, but it certainly sounded to me more like the noise a traction engine would make. As we listened the sound came nearer and nearer and appeared to be on our left, still some distance down the hill. Then the storm broke out again with fresh fury, and we could hear nothing else. Lord Beden pulled the lever towards him and we ran slowly forward until we were within thirty yards of the cross-roads, when he again brought the machine to a standstill.
The noise had become much louder now, and was even audible above the roar of the wind and rain. It certainly came from somewhere on our left. I looked down through the trees, and thought I saw a faint red glow some way down the hill. Lord Beden saw it too, and pointed to it with a trembling hand.
“Looks like a fire in the wood,” I said, carelessly. I did not very much care what it was.
“Don’t be a fool,” he replied, sharply. “Can’t you see it’s moving?”
Yes, he was right. It was certainly moving, and in a few seconds it was hidden by a thicker mass of foliage. I did not, however, see anything very noticeable about it. It was evidently coming up the road to our left, and was probably a belated traction engine returning home from the reaping. I was more than ever convinced of my companion’s insanity and wished that I was safe at home. I had half a mind to get off the car and walk, but he had by now managed to infect me with some of his own fear and excitement, and I did not quite fancy being left with no swifter mode of progression than my feet.
The thumping sound came nearer and nearer, and, as we heard it more distinctly, was even more suggestive of a traction engine. Then I saw a red light through the trees like the glow of a furnace, and not more than fifty yards away from us. My companion laid his left hand on the lever and stared intently at the corner.
Then a rather peculiar thing happened. Whatever it was that had been lumbering slowly up the hill like a gigantic snail suddenly shot across the road in front of us like a streak of smoke and flame, and through the trees to our right I could see the red glow spinning up the road to Kelston at over thirty miles an hour. Almost simultaneously Lord Beden pulled down the lever and I instinctively clutched the seat with both hands. We shot forward, took the corner with about an inch to spare between us and the ditch, and dashed off along the road in hot pursuit. But the red glow had got at least a quarter of a mile’s start, and I could not see what it proceeded from. A flash of lightning, however, showed a dark mass flying before us in a cloud of smoke. It looked something like a large waggon with a chimney sticking out of it, and sparks streamed out of the back of it until they looked like the tail of a comet.
“What the deuce is it?” I said.
“You’ll see when we come up to it,” the Earl answered, between his teeth. “We shall go faster in a few minutes.”
We were, however, going quite fast enough for me, and though I have ridden on many motors since, and occasionally at a greater speed, I shall never forget that ride along the Kelston Road. The powerful machine beneath us trembled as though it were going to fall to pieces, the rain lashed our faces like the thongs of a whip, the thunder almost deafened us, the lightning first blinded us with its flashes and then left us in more confusing darkness, and, to crown all, a dense volume of smoke poured from the machine in front and hid the light of our own lamps. It would be hard to imagine worse conditions for a motor ride, and a man who could keep a steady hand on the steering-gear under circumstances like these was a man indeed. I should not have cared to try it, even in the daytime. But Lord Beden’s luck was with him still, and we moved as though guided by some unseen hand.
“You will find a small lever by your side, Scott,” he said, after a long pause. “Pull it towards you until it gives a click. It is an invention of my own.” I found the handle and, following out his instructions, saw the arc of light from our lamps shoot another fifty yards ahead, leaving the ground immediately in front of the car in darkness. We had gained considerably. The light just impinged on the streaming tail of sparks.
“At last!” my companion muttered. “He has always had half a mile’s start before, and the oil has given out before I could catch him. But he cannot escape us now.”
“What is it, Lord Beden?”
“I’m glad you see it,” he replied. “I thought before to-night that it was a fancy of my brain.”
“Of course I see it,” I said, sharply. “I am not blind. But what is it?”
He did not answer, but a flash of lightning showed me his face, and I did not repeat the question.
Mile after mile we spun along the lonely country road, but never gaining another inch. We dashed through Kelston like a streak of light. It was fortunate that all the inhabitants were in bed. Then we shot out on to a road leading across the open moor, which stretches from here to the sea, twenty miles away, and I remembered that eight miles from Kelston there was a deep descent into the valley of the Stour, and it was scarcely possible that we could escape destruction. I quickly made up my mind to overpower Lord Beden and gain control of the machine.
Then we suddenly began to sweep down a long and gentle gradient, and second after second our speed increased until the arc of light shone on the machine ahead of us, and I could see what manner of thing it was that we pursued.
It was, I suppose, a kind of motor-car, but unlike anything I had ever seen before, and bearing no more resemblance to a modern machine than a bone-shaker of twenty years ago does to the modern “free-wheel.” It appeared to be built of iron, and was painted a dead black. In the fore-part of the structure a 5-foot fly-wheel spun round at a terrific speed, and various bars and beams moved rapidly backwards and forwards. The chimney was quite 10 foot in height, and poured out a dense volume of smoke. On a small platform behind, railed in by a stout iron rail, stood a tall man with his back to us. His dark hair, which must have reached nearly to his shoulders, streamed behind him in the wind. In each hand he grasped a huge lever, and he was apparently gazing steadily into the darkness before him, though it seemed to me that he might just as well have shut his eyes, for the machine had no lamps, and the only light in the whole concern streamed out from the half-open furnace door.
Then, to my amazement, I saw the man take his hands off the levers and coolly proceed lo shovel coal into the roaring fire. I held my breath, expecting to see the flying mass of iron shoot off the side of the road and turn head over heels down the sloping grass. But nothing happened. The machine apparently required no guidance, and proceeded on its way as smoothly and swiftly as before.
I took hold of my companion’s arm and called his attention to this somewhat strange circumstance. He only laughed.
“Look at the smoke,” he cried. “That is rather strange too.” I looked up and saw it pouring over our heads in a long straight cloud, but I did not notice anything odd about it, and I said so.
“Can you smell it?” he continued. I sniffed, and noticed for the first time that there had been no smell of smoke at all, though in the earlier part of the journey we had been half blinded with it. I began to feel uncomfortable. There was certainly something unusual about the machine in front of us, and I came to the conclusion that we had had about enough of this kind of sport.
“I think we will go back, Lord Beden,” I remarked, pleasantly, moving one hand towards the lever.
“You will go back to perdition, Scott,” he answered, quietly. “If you meddle with me we shall be smashed to pieces. We are going forty miles an hour, and if you distract my attention for a single instant I won’t answer for the consequences.”
I felt the truth of what he said, and put my hand ostentatiously in my pocket. It was quite evident that I couldn’t interfere with him, and equally evident that if we went on as we were going now we should be dashed to pieces. My only hope was that we should speedily accomplish whatever mad purpose Lord Beden had in his mind, although by now I began to think that he had no other object than suicide. The valley of the Stour was only two miles off.
But we had been gaining inch by inch down the slope, and were now not more than thirty yards from the machine in front of us. Showers of sparks whirled into our faces, and I kept one arm before my eyes. I soon found, however, that, for some reason or other, the sparks did not burn my skin, and I was able to resume a more comfortable position and study the occupant of the car.
His figure somehow seemed strangely familiar to me, and I tried hard to recollect where I had seen those square shoulders and long, lean limbs before. I wished I could see the man’s face, for I was quite certain that I should recognise it. But he never looked back, and appeared to be absolutely unconscious of our presence so close behind him.
Nearer we crept, and still nearer, until our front wheels were not more than 10 feet from the platform. The glow of the furnace bathed my companion’s face in crimson light, and the figure of the man in front of us stood out like a black demon toiling at the eternal fires.
“Be careful, Lord Beden,” I cried. “We shall be into it.”
He turned to me with a smile of triumph, and I thought I saw the light of madness in his eyes.
“Do you know what I am going to do?” he said, in a low voice, putting his lips close to my ear. “I am going to break it to bits. We have a little speed in hand yet, and when we get to the slope of the Stour Valley I shall break the cursed thing to bits.”
“For Heaven’s sake,” I cried, “put the brake on, Lord Beden. Are you mad?” and I gripped him by the arm. He shook my hand off, and I clung to my seat with every muscle of my body strained to the utmost, for as I spoke there was a flash of lightning, and I saw the road dipping, dipping, dipping, and far below the gleam of water among dark trees, and on the height above a large building with many spires and towers. I idly called to mind that it was the Rockshire County Asylum.
Our speed quickened horribly, and the car began to sway from side to side. I saw my companion pull the lever an inch nearer to him and grip the steering-wheel with both hands. Then suddenly the road seemed to fall away beneath us; we sprang off the ground and dropped downwards and forwards like a stone flung from a precipice. We were going to smash clean through the machine in front of us.
For five seconds I held my breath, only awaiting the awful crash of splintering wood and iron and the shock that would fling us fifty feet from our seats. But we only touched the ground with a sickening thud an inch behind the other machine, and then a wonderful thing happened. We began to slowly pierce the rail and platform in front of us, until the man seemed to be almost touching our feet, and at last I saw his face —a wild, dark face with madness in his eyes, and the face of Lord Beden, as I had seen a portrait of him in Beden Hall taken thirty years ago.
My companion rose on his seat and grappled with his likeness, but he seemed to be only clutching the air, and neither car nor occupant appeared to have any tangible substance. Steadily and silently we bored our way clean through the machine, inch by inch, foot by foot; through the blazing furnace, through the framework of the boiler, through bolt and bar and stanchion, through whirring fly-wheel and pulsing shaft and piston, until there was nothing beyond us but the dip of the white road, and, looking back, I saw the whole dark mass running behind our back wheels.
Lord Beden was still standing and tearing at the air with his fingers. Our car was running without guidance, and I sprang to the steering-wheel and reversed the lever, but it was too late. We struck something at the side of the road and the whole machine made a leap from the ground. There was a rush of air, an awful shock and crash, and then—darkness!
A week afterwards in the hospital they told me Lord Beden was dead.
He had fallen on a large piece of scrap-iron by the roadside, and nearly every bone in his body had been broken. I myself had had a miraculous escape by falling into a thick clump of gorse, and had got off with a broken arm and dislocated collar-bone, but I was not able to get about for two months. I said nothing of what had happened, and the accident required but little explanation. Motor-car accidents are common enough, especially on slopes like that of the Stour Valley.
When I was able to get about, however, I visited the scene of the disaster. A friend of mine, one of the doctors at the County Lunatic Asylum, called for me and drove me over to the place. The smash had occurred nearly half-way down the hillside, close to a ruined shed. The ground was covered with gorse and bracken, but here and there huge pieces of rusty iron were scattered about. Some of them were sharp and brown and ugly, but many were overgrown with creeping convolvulus. They looked as if they had once been parts of some great machine.
“A curious coincidence,” said my companion, as we drove away from the place.
“What do you mean?”
“I have been told,” he continued, “that thirty years ago this old shed was used by the late Earl’s elder brother. He was a mechanical genius, and they say that his efforts to work out some particular invention in a practical form drove him off his head. He was allowed to have this place as a workshop, and, under the supervision of two keepers, worked on his invention till the day of his death. It was thought that perhaps he would recover his reason if he ever accomplished the task. But in some mysterious way his plans were stolen from him no fewer than three times, and after the third time the poor fellow lost heart and destroyed himself. I have heard it whispered by one of my colleagues up yonder that the late Earl was not altogether ignorant of these thefts, but this is probably only gossip. All the fragments of iron you saw lying about were parts of the machine. Heaven knows what it was.”
I did not venture any suggestion on this point, but I think I could have done so.
Horrors
The expression on its face leaves no doubt that this prehistoric leftover knows the jig is up as military regulars zero their artillery piece in on The Monster of Lake LaMetrie written by Wardon Allan Curtis for Pearson’s Magazine, September I899. Stanley L. Wood, the artist, would prove one the outstanding science fiction illustrators of his time.
March, 1908
THE DEATH-TRAP
by George Daulton
THE DEATH-TRAP by George Daulton is a classic study of horror in science fiction. The monster is a tangible entity and truly exists. His haunts, the sewers of Chicago, provide psychological preparation for something abominable and foul. What makes the story come alive from the hundreds of other monster tales is the immensely powerful Irish police officer, who cannot accept the fact that there are some things that he cannot defeat by physical strength. The hunt for the monster becomes a matter of heroic folly for him, in sharp contrast to his companions who force themselves, against the dictates of their fears, into the hunt.
This is also a modern horror story. Its monster arises from the dankness and filth of a city’s waste. It anticipates the methods of later writers who attempted to conjure ghosts from the smoke and industrial ash of today’s industrial complex (Smoke Ghost by Fritz Leiber, Unknown Worlds, October 1941); and a danger from half-human things in the subways of New York (Far Below by Robert Barbour Johnson, Weird Tales, June-July 1939).
George Daulton, who shows such great literary know-how here, has but one hardcover book to his credit, a non-fantasy titled The Helter Skelters (F. A. Stokes, 1909). He made no great impact upon the literary world. However, The Death-Trap, published initially in Pearson’s Magazine, March 1908, and reprinted in The Witch’s Tales, December 1936, deserves to be preserved by inclusion here.
A CAB had not been to my fancy that night. As I left the club I really had nothing to complain of, for I had not been unsuccessful; but I felt sick with something akin to remorse. The game had been of the right sort, among men who were close friends and all able to pay a good sum for a night’s amusement; there had been high stakes, but no ugly action in the bets, though the cards ran snappy and full of surprises; a lounging, friendly game, with no litter of discarded packs on the floor, for we all liked a seasoned deck when the cards began to run naturally into flushes and fulls. My remorse was perhaps a reaction from a surfeit of pleasure, and a longing to turn myself to something more satisfying than killing time. I decided to walk home, though it was two o’clock; I needed the thirty minutes’ sharp exercise to pump the fumes of smoke and wine out of me in the invigorating lake air.
But my depression was not relieved, when having passed the open front of the city’s heart, the stately wall of granite buildings stopped, and Michigan Avenue, without electricity, plunged on between grimy wholesale houses in a black sweep dimly defined by a few gaslights.
Hesitating there under the gigantic lamps of the library, the loneliness of the gloomy streets made me think better of a cab. I remembered the hold-ups so common in Chicago during the late fall, and a number of mysterious disappearances that had kept the whole city in dread of the unfrequented business districts at night. There were no cab lamps in sight up Randolph Street, and none nearer down Michigan than those I had passed at the Athletic Club. So I went on into the gloom, not wishing to appear daunted even to myself, though I knew it was not safe at that hour for a man alone and in evening dress to cross the river through that deserted street.
But the black dog was on my shoulder. My sense of folly became a dread and helpless loneliness, at once so great that I greeted the odors of sugar, coffee and tobacco that issued from the black solitudes of the great business houses as pleasant and safe company that stood for the comfortable human affairs of the broad, honest day. The empty chasm of the narrowed street echoed to my nervous footfalls; otherwise it was so silent that the sleepless growl of the surrounding streets made its loneliness all the more pronounced.
I am almost ashamed to tell—even now that I know that I must have experienced one of those strange premonitions of danger that sometimes forewarn us—how I rushed away from my fear more than from that which I feared.
When I had but a block more to go before reaching the Rush Street drawbridge, a small, thick-set man lurched out of Water Street from the direction of Randolph Station. I saw him pass under the corner lamp as plainly as I ever saw anything under similar conditions—I was alert for just such an encounter. The man had fallen into himself and was weaving his way over a good breadth of the pavement, and added to his drunken reel I thought I saw the sailor in the swaying of his shoulders.
We met on the corner, or rather, he stopped before the inlet of the sewer, while I was on the curb above him. I was so close to him I saw a look in his blood-shot eyes challenging the very idea that he was drunk.
I had no time to feel relieved. I saw the glance, I saw it; but with it on the instant came a black, lightning-like flicker out of the granite pavement on which we stood, as though the tongue of a monstrous serpent gave one devilish, wavering lick that encircled the man and dashed him down the mouth of the sewer—a clot of thin mud spattered my cheek —and the drunken sailor had vanished.
The shock of it made me leap and tremble, and horror struck me cold in the pit of the stomach, while waves of it rolled out over my body like the rings on smitten water—I must have been demented for the moment, else I should have fled my own immediate danger. There had been no sound of breaking bones upon the stony jaws of the sewer; but at that instant some sudden up-starting of night traffic had barked loudly round the corner of a by-street and may have drowned the thud. To the eye it had been as though the man had been blown away by an explosion —one instant there, bestial in his human bulk, the next scuttled, annihilated.
I do not know what I did just after the shock. It seems to me, in recalling my distraught fancies, that I heard the “whimper” of that passing soul and saw it curl upward in a thin mist, like the breath from a foul maw. When I came to I was crouching on the stones looking down the black gullet of the drain. There was nothing to be seen in its capacious mouth; but the brown, greasy sweat of traffic that glistened everywhere upon the paving was plainly wiped from the granite lips of the sewer, and with this as evidence of the reality of what I had seen I awoke to the hideous peril of that death-trap. I sprang up and backed away, then turned and fled up the street.
Coming out of that accursed and forsaken strip of the avenue was like escaping from a den of murderers to the shelter of a friendly home. The great bridge was rumbling on its cogs and sweeping majestically through arc-lit volumes of smoke and steam to let some sluggish freighter of the lakes trail by. I ran over the slippery pavement of the approach and leaped upon the last yard of the bridge as it swung out over the river.
I felt the unspeakable relief of escape, but I did not stop until I had crossed over the two roadways, though the bridge was still moving. How kindly powerful and humanly helpful the huge truss seemed as it widened the gulf between me and the South Side abutment, where I fancied the flickering phantom was licking over the water toward me! How good it was to hear the business-like breath of the tug, the sob of the steam imprisoned in the passing monster! The firm command and sensible response of bells and obedient feet upon the decks—all the worthiness of the grimy labor of honest men I joyfully greeted with noble comparisons, while the prosy tug and stupid barge seemed to sweep by me as stately as a classic chorus.
The bridge was beginning slowly to follow the retreating stern of the vessel when I became aware that I was not alone on the footway. Perhaps the smoke and steam had at first concealed the man, or in my excitement I had overlooked him; at any rate he was at my elbow before I knew it, giving my overwrought nerves such a shock that my first impulse was to fly at him like a savage dog. But the changing shadows of the bridge just then allowed the white light of an arc-lamp to fall upon his face, which was strangely sad and refined and certainly friendly.
“Sir,” said the man, with quaint politeness and solemnity, “I see you are ill. Will you accept a restorative? A Special Reserve that I can recommend.”
With a grace that at once gave me confidence he proffered a flask handsome enough for the traveling companion of a king.
“You have had a shock,” he observed, as I thanked him, “a shock that might prostrate any man. I saw you fly panic-stricken out of the mouth of Michigan Avenue, and caught the change of relief that came over you as you gained the draw and your white face was swept away from the glare of the shore lamp. Nevertheless I believe I knew you from that glance. ‘Now here is a man to depend on,’ thought I; ‘one to face and fight to the last, when the dread mystery that has sent him into a panic becomes a reality that may be reached.’ Such was my own case, and—since I am persuaded that we have been brought together for death or life—you will see that I shall not flinch when the test comes.”
I searched the man’s face. Had fate played that night with my life and reason only to finish me on the bridge with a madman? He seemed to read my thought, and denied it with a sad smile which added charm to the grace that had given me confidence.
“Why, you yourself will say to-morrow,” he pursued with renewed assurance, “ ‘Is it not passing strange that we two men of all Chicago should have met?’ But I believe there is no chance. What we call chance only seems so, and I mean no irreverence when I say that the Almighty, playing his great solemn game of solitaire through the ages, intended that we should rid the world of that dreadful thing that flickers out of the pavements at night and makes a death-trap of the sewer.”
“That black flicker of death out of the sewer!” I cried, starting up from the bridge rail. “What do you mean, sir—merciful heaven! What do you mean? Have you, too, seen it?”
“I have seen it, too,” he returned with intense feeling, and I thought the light of relief that he had made no mistake shone in his eyes. “Now, is it not strange that we should have met? I ran out of that street one night myself, more unmanned with terror, I doubt not, than you; I, too, had seen a human being, a life perhaps more worthy than my own, scooped down the gutter sewer like a truss of hay drawn through a mow door.”
The stranger paused and with apologetic courtesy drew my attention to a clot of thin mud staining my shirt front, which to me seemed as gruesome as a gout of blood.
“Chicago streets gleamed underfoot just as they do to-night,” he mused. “Down here in these granite gulches nature’s sweet dew is befouled by the young giant wallowing in the madness of his toil, and with some of this oily smear of the streets the black deed bespattered my face, too, and my clothing. Since that night I have been fascinated by the incredible horror of what I saw, and I have haunted the streets that I might find it; tempting the fiend, if possible, to an attack and a fight to the death. But now you have seen it—I beg of you, tell me what you saw!”
“I had an unnatural and overpowering sense of depression and foreboding as I came up the avenue,” I responded, as if that was an inseparable part of what I had seen. My companion acknowledged it with a nod of understanding, and verified each horrid detail of my story as I told it to him.
“God alone knows how many have gone that way,” said the stranger solemnly when I had finished. “Unseen and unfriended, how should they be reported? But the city rang with the one I saw. Water Street, you say? Mine was at Lake, but a block away. They are never far from the river, which at night gives an unfrequented district for the murderer’s work.”
“Why didn’t you report this to the police!” I exclaimed. “We must lose no more time in this way, but do it at once.”
“No; by no means,” objected my companion, “consider the incredible story we have to tell. Do you want to be listened to with insolent indulgence for a swell that has taken a bit too much? Very likely you would be received with cold doubt, or even suspicion; I have known men to be clapped into the sweat-box who brought their information to the authorities as innocently as you would. Your introduction at the sergeant’s desk would be like an arraignment, and perhaps for weeks you would be kept under a mild surveillance. Do you want to be the tool of Pinkerton, when you can be a free lance? Do you want the thousand and one questions and comments of friends, the common notoriety of the papers, the interviews and headlines and pictures, when you can quietly perform this sacred duty as a gentleman and at the same time, even in this most modern city, have an adventure prodigious as those of the sagas?”
“What is the hazard that you have in mind?” I demanded, and, strange to say, I felt my nerves refresh as the world-old thirst of men for the chancing life against great odds in a dangerous mystery tempted me. “This business is too wild and dangerous for a man of affairs to undertake upon a chance meeting and its premonitions.”
The strange man stopped me with his lifted hand.
“My dear sir,” he said with quiet decision, “though I did say I thought we had been brought together for a determined purpose, I haven’t asked you to go—nor to take any risks.”
“But I want to!” I flung out. The words came almost against my will.
“Ah, well, if you want to, that is another thing,” responded my companion with satisfaction, and with that his manner changed. He was still quaint and fanciful, but something of reserve power became apparent, his whole being knit itself together and somehow I felt myself included in the effect. The spirit of the hunt took possession of him.
“But what more foolhardy thing could a man do than to go into the sewer after this murderer?—for that is what we shall have to do,” I exclaimed with some irritation at my own determination to do it. “Perhaps that is the reason it lures me; at any rate I am going to follow you, taking your integrity for granted.”
“I took you from the first, as you have accepted me,” returned my comrade, and, if I may say it, even there, in the gloom of the bridge, I felt the gentlemanliness of the man flow over me, and yet I can mention nothing more of it than the endearing confidence of his smile. Then our hands gripped, and it was done—each knew without saying that the word passed for life or death.
“My family name,” he resumed, “is known round the world; but until this business is transacted I hope you will be satisfied to call me ‘Hood.’ Most men of my station, who wish to be men in spite of their wealth, plunge into money-getting, or enter politics; they explore Africa or the Amazon; they lose themselves in Tibet or the South Seas, or even take to mountain climbing.
“Now I seek to be the exponent of the dark and terrible in human passion, the apologist of the degenerate and gruesome. I pondered one day upon the moral condition of the slaughterer with a knife, as I stood on the Halsted Street bridge and heard the dying screams of the swine, and saw their limp carcasses continuously passing before the upper windows of a packing house. The following week I became a pig-sticker at the Stock Yards, and read my subject to a conclusion. To-night you find me an embalmer.”
I am glad to say, unnatural as it may seem, that it was not because the hag-ridden night could add no more of horror that I did not fly from him in fear and loathing; but truly the charm of the man’s gentleness seemed heightened by his strange confession, and, more convincing still, he gave me the feeling that he put his soul in my place and in the same fullness admitted mine to the motives of his own, as I have never known any other human being to do. I cleaved to him then, as I have ever since, in the most perfect friendship a man ever had.
“There are some who would say that such gruesome affairs have tempted me to my ruin, as drink or drugs do many men,” he mused sadly. “I cannot deny that I have made it too much the book and the lamp in my life; I love it and loathe it as the drunkard does the drink; but while I am in it I am not of it.”
He broke off with a sudden start and gripping my wrist, leaned over the rail, pointing down to the water. Down in the gloomy city-built gully through which the river flows I caught the disappearing dive of some black waving object, then there was a quiet eddy of the water, and further on a series of V-shaped ripples came to the surface and shot toward the South Side wharves; again a long, dark, indefinite thing lifted from the river and waved glistening wet one instant under an arc-lamp and then disappeared, as though it plunged under the stone-walled embankment of the street.
“Merciful heaven!” I cried, “the submerged outlet of a sewer must be there!”
“Yes,” said Hood. “It is nearly wide enough to drive through. Now,” he said solemnly, “we shall solve this hideous mystery of the sewers and shall do away with it as sure as there is a God in Heaven!”
His tone of suppressed exultation changed to one of solicitude as he saw that horror was again crawling over my back—for neither of us dared compare the hideous surmises that had taken shape in our minds.
“We would better go,” he said; “your nerves have had all they should stand. Ten or twelve hours in bed will make you over.”
“Did you notice the length and peculiar motion of that arm?” I whispered.
“I did,” he answered, laying his hand upon my shoulder; “perhaps before this time to-morrow morning we shall know.”
The clock on the old Inter-Ocean Building had just tolled midnight when I turned into a cross-town street and rang the night bell of the undertaking establishment that Hood had given me as his address.
A handsome, ruddy-cheeked youth admitted me with subdued professional concern that changed to a cheery welcome upon his learning my business was a matter of personal friendship with Mr. Hood. Behind a reception room, I was led through a heavily carpeted and dimly lighted hall; into another room at the foot of which was a huge bronze sarcophagus in a plate-glass case; from behind this Hood came forward to greet and conduct me on through a big, barren workroom, where beneath their sheets lay two rigid and indistinct forms, so awfully withdrawn from life yet so pathetically helpless against intrusion.
Into one of three or four stall-like compartments, partitioned but half-way to the ceiling off this work-room, Hood ushered me, explaining that they were the bedrooms of the employees who must be in constant attendance at the establishment.
“I shall not offer you my one chair,” said he, as we both glanced with a smile at the odd and meager furnishings of the room; “it is high time we were down to business. You may open your hunting case here on the cot—that’s good: a sweater, a duck coat, hip boots and two 44-caliber sixes—better for our purpose than rifles—a practical lot of stuff. Now I,” he went on, “am going to be rather unsportsman-like, if I am driven to it. The vampire has put himself beyond mercy; so, like Puckle, who invented a double-barreled gun, one side firing balls ‘for shootinge ye Christians,’ and the other square bullets for shootinge ye Turks,’ I have a special charge that I shall fire at the fiend—there is enough acid in this big syringe to bring an elephant to his knees.”
Hood was also armed with a long, keen knife, which, he said, since his packing-house experience, he trusted more than firearms. For our light he had provided two new electric clubs, like the morocco-covered section of a telescope, which on pressing a button emitted a powerful beam of light through the big lens set in the end.
“Are you ready now?” asked Hood, laying his hand upon my shoulder. “The affair that we are undertaking cannot be long in any case; but on the other hand, are you prepared to risk it should our return be—”
“Indefinitely extended?” I concluded. “Yes, I am ready. The thought that at this moment some one, happy and full of life, may be snatched down to that foul death makes my very soul yearn to hunt this mystery to the end. The papers gave no report of last night’s disappearance, and as you said, God alone knows how many have gone that way for us to avenge.”
Hood led the way through the rear ware-room to the alley, and we cautiously crept between iron-shuttered walls of business houses to the middle of the next block without encountering a watchman. Here he knelt on the paving, and after some groping lifted the lid of a manhole, thrusting his electric truncheon down into the black opening. A glare of white light showed a narrow shaft of masonry eight feet deep, connecting with a conduit scarcely large enough to crawl through. A warm, white, malodorous vapor arose from the glowing opening on the keen outer air. The place looked ratty and so confined that I dreaded sticking fast in it; but Hood motioned me to go in, and I filled my lungs with pure air and dropped down into total darkness.
At the bottom my light showed a drain so narrow that I found it better to back in feet first. I had at once the feeling of crushing suffocation, but I crawled away from the manhole to make room for Hood, and I heard his scuffling descent and the iron cover drop into its place. Lying almost upon my face I had little room for movement, but the fury with which I wormed my way through twenty yards of that drain was marvelous. I think Hood himself found the passage irksome, and when we dropped into a feeder of the trunk sewer we were glad enough to stand ankle-deep in a dark tunnel of sewage and breathe in the freedom of space, if not of purity.
We had gained the underground system that drained the city. A noisome sweat, the dank contamination of humanity, covered the walls; the arch of masonry was mottled with dark stains and straggling patches of a soot-like growth, through which a snow-white vermicular fungus wriggled, fed by the peculiar properties of the seepage above; over the sloping floor the foul flow from the many stories of life in the upper world sneaked away in the darkness with a loathsome gurgle, as though it would invite us that way to seek the murderer of the sewer.
Following the course of the brown streams for a block or two we entered what proved to be the main artery of the sewers, as spacious as a railway tunnel and as well-built as an ancient wine-cellar. We did not expect to find the outlaw in this thoroughfare, for even in the solitudes of the city’s vaults he would find some blind passage more to his purpose; but the trunk sewer was the natural base of our operations, the beginning and termination of each long excursion to the right or left with which we traced every feeder and cross tunnel in the hunt that followed—traced them of necessity in silence, and as much as possible in darkness, which encouraged the imagination to shrink all the more from fetid moistures and smells and the touch of vermin that we heard scurrying and gliding away from our footsteps.
Hood read the gush of every drain as an archeologist reads the layers of earth that cover a buried city: here was a hotel; there a wholesale chemist’s; this sickening spout of offal, he declared, came from the night cleansing of a dissecting-room; this was a livery stable, and that the emptying vats of a dye-house, and there the drain of a milk depot spouting a river of sour milk. Yet Hood never forgot the hunt; each flash of the light was first used to search for traces of the murderer, and at a single glance he saw things that might have escaped my prolonged quest. I fear I was of little use save as a companion in the black, lonely labyrinth, and while I kept myself alert my imagination heard a startled exclamation in every drip, retreating footfalls as our own echoed along the dark vaulting, and a disturbed snarl in the gurgle of the moving offal.
Without acknowledging it to each other, we had purposely avoided the fatal locality under Michigan Avenue, each feeling that it was best to become used to the strange conditions of the hunt before we risked the attempt on the murderer’s most probable lurking place. We must have been in the neighborhood of the Masonic Temple; I was about to flash my light into a branch sewer, my body bent against the angle of the wall, my finger ready upon the electric buttom, when there was a sudden snarl almost in my face and a hoarse voice whispered:
“Whist! Is it the murderin’ devil ye’re after at last?”
I leaped back, jostling Hood, and our electric clubs shot unsteady beams of white glare into the eyes of an enormous figure, that with a guttural curse cowered and buried his face in his arm.
“Take the light aff me! Take it aff, dom it!”
We poured the intense rays over the man and needed no other weapon to cover him, for he staggered against the wall and turned his back to the light.
“Shut it aff, men, shut it aff!” he wailed; “d’ye want to blind me? I’m Officer Kindelon, on duty, by—, on since Wednesday night, from Harrison Station.”
The lights showed a burly shape in brass buttons, the twisted wrack of a mighty man, who leaned forward and sideways in spite of painful effort to straighten up. His face, it seemed, had been florid, but black rings under his eyes made its unnatural pallor all the more noticeable. He was hatless, one arm was bare to the shoulder and bruised black and blue; the remnant of a white glove encircled his wrist in a dirty rag; his coat was ripped up the back, and what had been a smart uniform hung on him in tatters, befouled by the splash of the sewage.
Hood tucked his light under his arm and produced his flask; the big policeman brightened eagerly, but controlled himself like an abused simpleton.
“By the growth on me face it would be three days since I tasted food,” grumbled the poor fellow, and gulped the dram Hood poured for him; “three days since I saw the impudent devil himself reach up out of hell, as cool as you please, and drag a poor creature from aff his bones, without by yer leave—bad luck to the size of the sewer-trap that let me follow him, and the devil’s own mommickin’ up he give me!”
We had half guessed this, but we looked at each other in amazement. Here, then, was a man, who had not only seen, but had even dared the death-trap in its hiding-place, and by reason of superhuman strength had brought himself off to tell it.
“Officer Kindelon,” said I, with a kindly force that seemed necessary to stir his clouded understanding, “you were a powerful man and you must have met something of tremendous strength to have given you this terrible punishment. We are here to find this demon—where is he and what is he like?”
The man leaped up, and wrestling grotesquely with himself imitated the manner of his defense in the clutch of the death-trap.
“The Old One himself, none less, I tell ye,” he answered, drawing us both toward him and looking fearfully down the dark vaulting of the sewer. “He had no science; but he was hell for reach and for strength. D’ye think Kindelon was whipped?—what good is the science of the ring when ye fight the devil in the dark? Come, since ye have lights. I have listened to him wanderin’ about and never askin’ what’s the time of day. I’m dommed if I don’t shoy ye the fight of yer life.”
The man beckoned us down the passage, and limping, humped and askew, went ahead in the gloom, turning now and then to grimace us to be cautious. He led us into the trunk sewer and for a block or more down its wide vaulting; then turning to the right we knew, without his pantomime, we were nearing the lair of the murderer of the sewers.
At the next turn Kindelon stopped and motioned us to come on without lights. In total darkness we stood grouped and breathless listening to sounds so suggestive of the devil that they did not need the denunciation of Kindelon. They did not seem human, and yet they were, too; as though some human work was being lazily done, a long-drawn, gliding movement ending in a fleshy thud, then a deep breath of satisfaction followed by a sound as of something bone-like moving on the stone floor.
“Och, ye hellion!” muttered the big policeman, and spat in disgust.
I found that inaction and the presence of that awful mystery in the darkness was more than I could stand. I must have it out, even if it had to come to the repellent thing I had dreaded, a hand-to-hand contest with that foul fiend in the filth of the sewer floor. I whispered to Hood that I would try to cut off the retreat of the monster by slipping by him in the dark. He would have detained me, but Kindelon was working himself into a fury, and I glided away in the darkness while he was trying to control the policeman’s fever for revenge.
Foot by foot, nearer and nearer, I drew to the death-trap, feeling my way, no longer daintily, but low down and nearly upon all fours, along the wall, that seemed to draw out like elastic as I crept on. The vaulting became a whispering gallery of those hideous sounds, and they hummed in my ears with the blood that was rushing to my brain. As I came opposite them my lungs seemed to fail and then fill to bursting with the fetid breath of the place, and my heart rebelled with furious pounding at every thought I made to quiet it. I was in the midst of my peril when I stumbled over what I took to be a log; but it instantly arose and I leaped on, though not quickly enough, for a glancing blow across the shoulders sent me staggering down the sewer.
I shot my light and Hood’s followed on the instant. For a moment we all stood paralyzed by what we saw. Never since man began to kill has he brought to bay such a monster.
Gigantic it was, but its horror partook of no one of the familiar forms of this latter world’s creatures; it was not of earth, air or water, though it hideously combined the beast, the reptile and the bird; and yet I felt it was not misbegotten, but was perhaps the last survival of some species from the mesozoic era, a disinherited offspring of Mother Earth that had been overlooked in the ruthless management of her family affairs, bred down through the ages in some deep retreat in the receding lake. The thing reared itself at bay, dazzled by the bright shafts of light we poured over it; and still we gazed, fascinated by its hideous loathsomeness.
Then I noticed that the beam of Hood’s light was wavering, and out of the tail of my eye I saw Kindelon creeping toward the monster. Hood tried to restrain him, and at the same time manage his light, while he aimed his charge of acid. The stream of liquid fire shot toward the great creature and for an instant played upon its head. Then the stone vaulting of the sewer was full of the writhing of those agile, squid-like arms and their multiplying shadows. I fired in quick succession three shots and then saw the policeman straighten up to his full height and with a roar charge like a bull upon the writhing knot of tentacles. Hood clutched at him; he might as well have tried to stop a rhinoceros. Kindelon threw himself into the midst of the snaky turmoil, and unmindful of the burning fluid that dripped from it throttled the death-trap. Any other than a man of his gigantic strength would have been instantly wrung to death in that vortex; but the policeman fastened his great hands on the wartly leathern throat and clung to it while the huge beast tore at him cruelly.
Hood and I hovered about the fight, retreating as we were forced to, closing in as we saw opportunity. Twice Hood flashed his long keen knife and buried it in the monster with an accurate thrust. I shot a dozen times, but I doubt if more than three of the bullets were effective. Suddenly the fury of the fight slackened and Hood, seeing his chance, swung the knife. The death-trap reared and tearing Kindelon from his hold threshed the great body of the policeman like a rag between the walls of the sewer—then it began to waver, and sinking, sinking, sinking, it dropped lifeless, with the dead officer still in its grasp, upon the hideous debris of its lair.
April, 1911
THE AIR SERPENT
by Will A. Page
WILLIAM ADINO PAGE’s work is best remembered today as a forerunner of the “confidential” books about famous theatrical, movie, and political figures, before such material helped to establish the reputations of columnists like Walter Winchell, Jack Lait, Lee Mortimer, and, in a more remote sense, Drew Pearson. Page’s book, Behind the Curtain of the Broadway Beauty Trust, published by Edward A. Miller (1927), gave an inside view of the theatrical business. There were several letters by George Bernard Shaw tacked on to the book for effect, and the introduction was by none other than Jack Lait.
In his youth, Will Page had edited The Bauble (1895-1897), a little journal of destructive criticism. Later on he wrote fiction; The Air Serpent (The Red Book Magazine, April 1911) is of special interest on several counts. First, it is an early speculation on the possibility of unknown dangers and life forms existing in the upper atmosphere, which was a natural result of the advent of air flight and which remained a basic theme of science fiction even as recently as Robert A. Heinlein, who under the name of Anson MacDonald wrote for the March 1942 Astounding Science-Fiction, Goldfish Bowl, a well-handled novelette of a highly intelligent life form that exists in the stratosphere.
The flying saucer business has briefly revived that concept, but basically space travel has just about destroyed any vestigal possibility of sustaining the notion.
Secondly, it is possible that A. Conan Doyle secured his basic idea for The Horror of the Heights (published in Everybody’s, November 1913), about a year and a half later, from this source. Doyle never minded borrowing, though he often improved on his model. The similarity of the two stories is sinking.
GENTLEMEN: The report which I now have the honor to submit to your honorable body is so extraordinary, and deals with facts so difficult to prove—beyond my own mere word and the records of my barograph which indicate the approximate height reached by my machine—that it is with much trepidation that I now appear before you. In presenting to you the results of my recent exploration of the upper ether, and the mysterious disappearance of my late mechanic, John Aid, of which cognizance has already been taken by the police, I realize that I am taxing the limit of credulity; yet before passing final judgment upon the extraordinary narrative I am about to place before you, let me call your attention to the fact that my record hitherto in the annals of aviation has been a story of unquestioned achievements, of daring which has often been characterized as reckless, and of an earnest and constant effort to discover new truths in that wonderful air world which has been opened up to exploration through the recent development of the aeroplane.
I cannot refrain, also, from reminding your learned body that pioneers in all fields of endeavor suffer martyrdom from the unthinking and the unbelieving. Half a century ago, a ribald rhymster mocked at Darius Green and his flying machine; yet within the brief space of half-a-dozen years, the perfect aeroplane expresses of to-day have been evolved before our very eyes. Even last year, when a new world’s altitude record of 16,374 feet was established by the lamented Renegal, your sub-committee on altitude adopted a resolution that the limit of attainment in the upper ether had been reached; yet less than two months after, Santuza, the daring Spanish aviator, flying his 200-horse-power Mercadio tri-plane with the improved ailerons, reached the incredible height of 23,760 feet, when the ink in his barograph ran out and refused to register a greater height, although Santuza is of the belief that he climbed almost 1,000 feet higher.
To pause for a moment from the subject nearest our hearts, let me only speak for a moment of the derision and ridicule heaped upon Columbus when he planned his first voyage; of the insults and scorn directed at Galileo; or of the thousands of martyrs in the realm of science, invention and discovery who, at first denounced as fakers and preposterous humbugs, were proven after a lapse of time to have been honest, sincere and truthful in their claims.
Bearing these facts of history in mind, permit me to present herewith a brief, accurate and truthful account of all that happened during my recent ascent when, with the aid of John Aid, my invaluable and greatly mourned mechanic, I established an altitude record which I do not believe will ever be exceeded, if indeed it is reached by other aviators within our time. For not only are the difficulties such that our machines will have to be improved in some miraculous manner to go higher, but there are living, breathing obstacles to further exploration of the upper ether which will make all such experiments extremely hazardous, and probably fatal, to even the most venturesome aviator. For I have the important announcement to make, almost beyond your powers of belief, that I have discovered that the upper ether is inhabited. This astounding discovery was made simultaneously by me and my mechanic, John Aid, for whom the voyage of exploration brought death in an unprecedented and most deplorable manner. Had not the mysterious creature of the air claimed my poor mechanic as its first earthly victim, he would now be standing here beside me upon this platform, to corroborate my unsupported testimony with his own verbal report of the most extraordinary experience that ever befell mortal man.
As your honorable body well knows, I have secured patents from time to time for improvements in the Gesler engines with which my aeroplanes have been fitted the past two years. By enlarging the plane surface and fitting four blades to each propeller instead of two, I have been enabled to increase the speed record to 97.16 miles per hour, this having been officially accomplished at the July Palm Beach meeting. Having established a new speed record, which I confidently think will stand for some months, I determined to try for new altitude records, but in view of the numerous unfortunate accidents resulting from experiments in the upper ether, I determined to secure safety at all hazards. I therefore reconstructed my last imported Gamier tri-plane so that the improved ailerons invented by Santuza could be applied not only to the main planes, but to the forward controlling and lifting planes as well. This preserved the lateral balance to such a perfect degree that it was easily possible to make a turn in eight seconds in a 25-mile wind, without banking the machine more than 30 degrees. I found, also, that by fitting the new plane with three propellers, three Gesler engines, and three gasoline tanks of ample size, I could feel reasonably certain that my power would not be exhausted without warning, for a single turn of the lever would put any or all of the three engines in operation, singly or together, and if I wished to economize on power, I could climb with only one propeller, holding the others in reserve for possible accidents or in case I wished to combat any of the strong air currents sometimes encountered above the 12,000 foot level.
It was a clear August day, late in the afternoon, when John and a couple of hangers-on wheeled the big tri-plane out of the hangar at Belmont Park, the beautiful Long Island aviation ground where aerial history has been made in the past two years. Both John and I were determined that before another sun should rise, we would bring back as a trophy from the air a record for altitude that would never be broken. How little we knew at what a price we would succeed, or through what dangers we would pass before I returned to that dear old hangar where we had chummed together and experimented so much.
I was determined to go after the record at nightfall, because so far above the clouds the sun’s rays prove a trifle too glaring. It was undoubtedly the tremendous light from the sun which affected the sight of poor Renegal when his machine fell from a height of 14,800 feet when he tried to exceed his own altitude record at San Francisco. Therefore I determined to do my high flying at night, when the moon was at the quarter and gave just enough light for us to see clearly and distinctly after we had passed from the lower levels.
The gasoline tanks were carefully filled, the engines tested, a supply of light provisions placed in the basket between the two seats, and the oxygen tanks carefully strapped in place on both of us, with the connecting tubes and the helmets under the arms ready to be applied when we had passed the 15,000-foot level into the upper strata where the rarefied air made the oxygen tanks a necessity.
Egerton Brooks, the official secretary of the Montauk Aero Club, personally adjusted the official barograph of the American Aeronautical Society, and sealed it with his own seal.
“I hope you will get the record above 25,000 feet,” he cried, as the mechanics began to start the engines. “It is a new Angiers barograph, adjusted to register up to 50,000 feet, though of course no living thing could attain such an absurd height. You will notice that it is surrounded by cork, so that if you fall into the water, the record will not be injured or lost.”
Giving Brooks a hearty hand-shake and a few words of farewell, I gave the signal and Aid started the middle engine, No. 2.
“You may expect me about midnight,” I cried in farewell. “Keep the beacons burning until then, and if I don’t return you will know I have been blown out of my course.”
The great whirring of the propellers drowned further speech. I rang the forward bell, the mechanics let go, and like an eagle the tri-plane sprang aloft.
Forward, upward, over the field, over the grandstand, and ever onward and upward the giant tri-plane mounted. I had tilted the lifting forward planes to 28 degrees, and now started engine No. 1. The added power sent us upward at nearly twice the speed first employed, and in a few seconds the earth below was but a dull, dark, blurred mass, with now and then a faint twinkling from an electric light far below.
The early twilight faded into darkness when we had reached the 3,000 level and I directed Aid, who was looking after the engines behind me, to turn on the electric search-light. The warning came none too soon, for almost as I spoke there was a little fluttering, crashing sound as the machine plunged headlong into a flock of sea gulls which had not noticed our approach.
“Better look at the compass,” shouted Aid. “You are out at sea.”
Brushing two of the dead gulls from the plane at my side, and turning on the pocket electric light which was placed at my left over the map and compass, I soon realized that we had indeed been following a straight course across Long Island and were now probably over the Fire Island light. Shifting the vertical planes in the rear a trifle I set them at 18 degrees, which would mean that the tri-plane would describe great circles approximately ten miles in diameter, as it gradually ploughed upward through the atmosphere.
The earth was now entirely out of sight. In daylight, as all experienced aviators know, the earth becomes practically invisible at the 7,000-foot level, even on a clear day. On cloudy days one is lost to the earth after ascending a few hundred feet. Just as the waiting crowds below at an aviation meeting find it impossible to distinguish even a speck on the horizon ten minutes after a swift machine leaves the earth, so the aviator aloft on his speedy career finds himself absolutely alone in a new world.
The sensation is indescribable. One feels that one has opened up a new territory, discovered a new realm, in which he alone is king. Preserving the balance when thus out of sight of the earth is not as difficult as one might imagine, as the laws of gravitation operate through the unseen space, and one has only to watch the delicate mechanism of the anograph to ascertain whether one is losing the equilibrium of the machine.
Slowly the needle moved round and round on the barograph, steadily registering our ascent. Within the first hour, when darkness had completely shut us off from the rest of the universe, we had passed the 10,000-foot level, which for almost a year in the early days of aviation had been a prize goal for the amateur aviators before the business had been placed on the firm footing it now enjoys.
Then came the moon. It rose at 9:02 on the 75th meridian, but as we were nearly three miles above the horizon, we saw it much sooner. It seemed reflected in some faint, misty manner by the water which he knew must be far below us, but as we mounted higher and higher, even the faint reflection disappeared.
At 9:37 p.m. Aid leaned over my shoulder and grunted.
“Fifteen thousand feet,” he muttered. “We can do it faster if we use the other engine.”
“No,” I replied. “Hold engine No. 3 for emergencies.”
“Emergencies?” he repeated, with a laugh. “Good Lord, what emergencies can happen now? What? As if the tri-planes are not as safe as an express train or a submarine nowadays.”
I did not argue with him. Aid was noted for his fondness for a controversy. I merely signaled to him to get the oxygen helmets ready, for the increased difficulty of breathing showed me that the rarefied air was fast becoming too thin for us to breathe with comfort. I noticed, too, that our speed seemed to diminish slightly, as the planes found the supporting air becoming thinner and thinner. I fondly reflected, however, that the third engine would remedy this when it became necessary to get more speed to keep aloft on the last leg of our upward climb. However, we were soon inside the oxygen helmets, and once more I could take a long, full breath of life-giving ozone.
The helmets of course made further conversation impossible, but long experience in the higher altitudes had perfected a system of signals between my mechanic and myself which enabled us to carry on a conversation fairly well.
John leaned over my shoulder at 10:38 and pointed to the needle of the barograph. It registered 22,380 feet. He nudged me.
I understood that nudge perfectly. It meant that in less than ten minutes more of climbing, we would have passed the best record of Santuza, officially 23,760 feet, and would have the world’s altitude record within our grasp.
So absorbed were we in watching the barograph that we both neglected the engines, and it was only a miracle that something did not happen when engine No. 2 developed a hot bearing because of lack of oil. I sharply reprimanded John for not attending to such details, and bade him by signals to attend to his business, while I would watch the needle.
Up, around it moved. First it reached the 23,000 mark, then hundred by hundred, ten by ten, it moved on and on. I turned and gave a silent signal of joy when we passed Santuza’s mark. Then I set forward determined to establish a world altitude record that would never be broken. And I succeeded.
It must have been shortly after 11 o’clock when the barograph registered 30,000 feet. This gigantic achievement, nearly six miles away from the earth, higher than the loftiest mountain peak, higher than any balloon had ever floated, should have satisfied us. I deeply regret that we were not content to rest upon these laurels, but with a foolhardincss for which I can never forgive myself, I tried to see how much higher we could go without using the reserve supply of gasoline contained in the tank of engine No. 3—which fortunately, we had not yet started. In fact, I venture the assertion that had it not been for the precaution of providing a third engine neither of us would have been saved from the catastrophe that followed.
Onward, upward, past the 33,000 foot level the sturdy tri-plane, steady as a ship in a calm, continued to forge. When 35,000 was reached I turned and signaled John for his advice. The poor fellow, who didn’t realize how near he was to the end of all earthly things, answered to keep on going. So we went up past the 36,000 foot level.
And then we saw it.
Never to my dying day, gentlemen, will I forget the horror of that moment. Never will I be able to efface from memory the dread picture of that gigantic monster of the air, lazily floating along on the ether, scarcely moving the great, finnish wings with which a wonderful creator had endowed it. Although the cold was almost unendurable, and I had thought myself as nearly frozen as possible, I felt a sudden stiffness permeate my veins and I shook with terror. I felt John grasp my shoulder, his hand shaking as with the palsy, and though neither of us could speak because of the oxygen helmets, we both felt a grim horror which would no doubt have stricken us dumb under any circumstances.
For there, almost in front of us, a trifle to the right, coming in an opposite direction, and gazing at us with mild curiosity and perhaps astonishment, was a gigantic monster, utterly unlike anything I have ever seen before. The light from the electric searchlight cast a weird reflection upon the great creature, and this light, I believe, was one instrument which proved our salvation temporarily, for it struck the giant monster fairly in the eyes, and seemed to blind him.
The monster—or air serpent, for so I must call it—seemed to be about ninety or a hundred feet in length. Its physical structure seemed a cross between a bat and a snake. There were undulating movements as it slowly drifted, together with flapping of the twenty or thirty batlike wings which projected from its sides. The head was enormous, and it was not the head of a bird. Two great eyes, approximately a foot in diameter each, glared and blinked over a cavernous maw which opened and closed spasmodically as the creature breathed. This much we saw, and then as the swift tri-plane shot by almost under the creature’s startled eyes, I felt a sudden blast of hot air which made the tri-plane quiver and tremble for a moment. Then we had passed the creature and had sped forth into the darkness, for the moonlight was very faint.
I felt John grasp me for support. He was trembling. I turned, pointed toward engine No. 3, and at the same time deflected the forward controlling plane to an angle of 20 degrees, determined to make the quickest and yet safest descent on record. I had no desire to get a second look at the monster of the air.
The jarring of the third engine made a terrific noise, but we could not hear it. The stalwart tri-plane shook under the added pressure, and we sprang forward at a speed which I estimated at 80 miles an hour. The needle of the barograph began to settle quickly, as we dropped to the 35,000-foot level.
Suddenly I felt John’s convulsive grasp upon my shoulder. I turned, and he pointed off to the left.
“It’s there, sir,” he cried, as plainly by his signals as though he had spoken out loud.
I looked as he indicated. There, two hundred feet away, following us almost without an effort while we were making 80 miles an hour, was the air serpent.
I shifted the vertical plane sharply to the right and veered off to escape. Almost before I had settled down to a straight course ahead, I felt again that hot, nauseous breath, which I knew came from the giant monster hovering so near us.
John was trembling all over. We were descending fast, for the barograph now registered 33,750, and our course ahead was being made at 80 miles an hour, yet that gigantic, wonderful, monstrous thing seemed able to keep up with us without an effort.
I determined to try strategy. Remembering how the eyes had blinked at the electric searchlight, I suddenly turned a trifle to the left, shifted the searchlight, and struck the creature with it squarely in the eyes.
The air serpent backed off instantly, I turned sharply to the right, extinguished the searchlight as I did so and lowered the forward planes to 25 degrees, a dangerous angle for a descent, as all aviators know, but I was determined to escape from the monster if possible.
But it was futile. Before the barograph showed 30,000 feet, I felt the hot breath again, and this time it came from beneath.
With incredible ingenuity, probably realizing from the changing air pressure that its prey was trying to escape into the lower ether, the monster had placed himself under the aeroplane, and I firmly believe that if I had not suddenly shifted the forward lateral planes to the horizontal, we would have struck the creature from above.
I turned to John, mutely asking advice. He was quivering with fear. And I too began to tremble anew when I realized how completely this mysterious monster of the air had us in his power.
I switched on the searchlight again and aimed it below us. There he was, the giant, undulating, fin-like creature, his sixty wings flapping noiselessly, his hulking, soft, snaky body moving forward without an effort, and the great head and the cavernous maw turned upward as if it had not yet determined what manner of bird or beast this was which had invaded the upper realms where this creature alone seemed able to exist.
I turned the plane sharply to the right, and keeping the searchlight pointing downward, shifted the forward planes again for a descent. It was our only chance and we had to take it.
But the enemy was vigilant and ever-watchful. It followed us curiously to the 25,000-foot level. Then it evidently became oppressed by the thickness of the atmosphere, and decided we had gone far enough. With a quick, sudden lashing of the fins, it dived under us, the hot breath again making the planes tremble, and loomed up straight ahead. In another moment we would have struck it had I not tilted the vertical planes sharply to the left. I turned completely around in less than three seconds, the quickest turn on record, I believe, but while the strain on the ailerons was terrific, the tri-plane held on its course.
But we could not escape the enemy. The giant monster merely gave about two jumps, and with incredible speed, repeated the maneuver. Once more I jammed the wheel sharply to the right, and once more the ailerons creaked as the strain of the sudden turn almost tore them loose.
Then came the catastrophe. The next time the monster leaped before us I flashed the searchlight into its great wicked eyes. It blinked and ducked, and in an instant we had passed over it.
I firmly believe that John Aid expected me to execute another sharp turn. Perhaps he leaned too far over in an effort to help maintain the balance. Perhaps fear and the terror took possession of his heart, and he thought the end was near anyhow. Whether he fell or jumped from his seat I know not, but when I turned my head the instant after we had passed the creature, I realized that I was alone.
I swung about instantly, and felt an ominous snap about the ailerons under the terrific strain of the turn, but fortunately all held. Then I directed the searchlight downward, and what I saw by the brilliant flashing rays I shall never forget.
There, three hundred feet below me, I saw the giant monster of the air, his great maw pointing upward. A dark object hurtled through the air, falling like a stone. It passed the startled gaze of the air serpent and fell into space below. Quicker than I can speak the words the monster darted downward after the falling object. Sick with horror, scarcely able to work the controlling levers, I saw by the faint, flickering rays of the searchlight, down below, the monster suddenly pause in its mad dash. It had caught the falling object and swallowed it in its maw.
How I reached the lower levels I know not. My arms worked the planes automatically, the terrific descent was made in thirty minutes, and sometime about midnight I landed on the sandy beach of the south shore of Long Island near Montauk Point. Too weak to remove the oxygen helmet, which fortunately was charged for twelve hours, I lay there in a daze. About five o’clock some fishermen found me and aided in removing the helmet. The tri-plane, slightly injured by its sudden contact with the beach, was taken apart and shipped back to New York, and I personally brought the barograph, still sealed as I thought, to the rooms of the Montauk Aero Club. There a cruel disappointment awaited me, for it appears that the shock of landing broke the seal, and the record, while perfectly clear, could not be accepted as official without the official seal showing that it had not been tampered with.
I made a preliminary report on the extraordinary adventure to the newspaper reporters, and notified the police of the accident to my mechanic, but only to meet with such ridicule that I speedily decided to delay my report for careful reflection and consideration. The accepted version of the death of John Aid is that he dropped into the ocean, but gentlemen, I have made here my report, and in view of my hitherto unquestioned word, I believe I have the right to demand that it be accepted as authentic. Some day a venturesome air-man will penetrate to the upper levels, five miles from the earth, and discover new evidence to corroborate my unsupported word. And then, gentlemen, the world will realize that just as in the farthest depths of the sea, there are strange monsters we have never seen, so in the thin upper strata of air there are tenuous creatures living in a world of their own, which we have never seen.
September, 1899
THE MONSTER OF LAKE LAMETRIE
by Wardon Allan Curtis
MODERN readers first became aware of this story in the second and last issue (December 1936) of a magazine titled The Witch’s Tales. The title was derived from a radio program of the same name, first broadcast in May 1931, which presented listeners with a bedlamite catalogue of weekly terrors written by Alonzo Dean Cole, and introduced by an ancient witch, Nancy, accompanied by her black cat, Satan. The magazine was a larger-than-letter-sized pulp, whose first issue was dated November 1936, and it carried as part of the contents a fictionalization of a weird story from the radio program in each issue, adapted by Alonzo Dean Cole, who was also purported to be the “editor” of the short-lived venture.
Virtually all the other authors were unknown to the avid followers of the weird and fantastic, yet some of the stories possessed merit. Among them was The Monster of Lake LaMetrie by Wardon Allan Curtis, carrying a highly unusual twist on the theme of discovering a prehistoric monster still alive today. Actually it was a blend of two basic story lines, the second being the transplantation of a brain from one body to another. There was no indication that the story had initially been printed in Pearson’s Magazine of September 1899, and its origin was hard to determine since, in addition to its complex plot structure, a sardonic note of modern humor pervaded the whole.
As it developed, The Witch’s Tales in its two issues had reprinted at least two other fantasies from Pearson’s: The Death-Trap by George Daulton (March 1908), which is also reprinted in this volume; and, under the name of The Phantom of the Links, John Campbell Haywood’s ghost story of the golf course, The Grey People (March 1906). Evidently the editors of The Witch’s Tales owned a file of Pearson’s and were favorably impressed by the quality and number of fantasy yarns it published.
Little is known concerning Wardon Allan Curtis. He authored at least one science fiction novel, The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton (H. S. Stone, Chicago, 1903), and he did a monogram on David Bower Franken-burger for the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters, Madison, Wisconsin, in 1907. His The Seal of Solomon the Great (The Argosy, February 1901) was an effective variant in a serious vein of the fictional gambit of a genie in a bottle.
Being the narration of James McLennegan, M.D., Ph.D.
Lake LaMetrie, Wyoming
April 1st, 1899
Prof. William G. Brcyfogle,
University of Taychobera.
Dear Friend—Inclosed you will find some portions of the diary it has been my life-long custom to keep, arranged in such a manner as to narrate connectedly the history of some remarkable occurrences that have taken place here during the last three years. Years and years ago, I heard vague accounts of a strange lake high up in an almost inaccessible part of the mountains of Wyoming. Various incredible tales were related of it, such as that it was inhabited by creatures which elsewhere on the globe are found only as fossils of a long vanished time.
The lake and its surroundings are of volcanic origin, and not the least strange thing about the lake is that it is subject to periodic disturbances, which take the form of a mighty boiling in the centre, as if a tremendous artesian well were rushing up there from the bowels of the earth. The lake rises for a time, almost filling the basin of black rocks in which it rests, and then recedes, leaving on the shores mollusks and trunks of strange trees and bits of strange ferns which no longer grow—on the earth, at least —and are to be seen elsewhere only in coal measures and beds of stone. And he who casts hook and line into the dusky waters, may haul forth ganoid fishes completely covered with bony plates.
All of this is described in the account written by Father LaMetrie years ago, and he there advances the theory that the earth is hollow, and that its interior is inhabited by the forms of plant and animal life which disappeared from its surface ages ago, and that the lake connects with this interior region. Symmes’ theory of polar orifices is well known to you. It is amply corroborated. I know that it is true now. Through the great holes at the poles, the sun sends light and heat into the interior.
Three years ago this month, I found my way through the mountains here to Lake LaMetrie accompanied by a single companion, our friend, young Edward Framingham. He was led to go with me not so much by scientific fervor, as by a faint hope that his health might be improved by a sojourn in the mountains, for he suffered from an acute form of dyspepsia that at times drove him frantic.
Beneath an overhanging scarp of the wall of rock surrounding the lake, we found a rudely-built stone-house left by the old cliff dwellers. Though somewhat draughty, it would keep out the infrequent rains of the region, and serve well enough as a shelter for the short time which we intended to stay.
The extracts from my diary follow:
April 29th, 1896.
I have been occupied during the past few days in gathering specimens of the various plants which are cast upon the shore by the waves of this remarkable lake: Framingham does nothing but fish, and claims that he has discovered the place where the lake communicates with the interior of the earth, if, indeed, it does, and there seems to be little doubt of that. While fishing at a point near the centre of the lake, he let down three pickerel lines tied together, in all nearly three hundred feet, without finding bottom. Coming ashore, he collected every bit of line, string, strap, and rope in our possession, and made a line five hundred feet long, and still he was unable to find the bottom.
May 2nd, Evening.
The past three days have been profitably spent in securing specimens, and mounting and pickling them for preservation. Framingham has had a bad attack of dyspepsia this morning and is not very well. Change of climate had a brief effect for the better upon his malady, but seems to have exhausted its force much sooner than one would have expected, and he lies on his couch of dry water-weeds, moaning piteously. I shall take him back to civilization as soon as he is able to be moved.
It is very annoying to have to leave when I have scarcely begun to probe the mysteries of the place. I wish Framingham had not come with me. The lake is roaring wildly without, which is strange, as it has been perfectly calm hitherto, and still more strange because I can neither feel nor hear I he rushing of the wind, though perhaps that is because it is blowing from the south, and we are protected from it by the cliff. But in that case there ought to be no waves on this shore. The roaring seems to grow louder momentarily. Framingham—
May 3rd, Morning.
Such a night of terror we have been through. Last evening, as I sat writing in my diary, I heard a sudden hiss, and, looking down, saw wriggling across the earthen floor what I at first took to be a serpent of some kind, and then discovered was a stream of water which, coming in contact with the fire, had caused the startling hiss. In a moment, other streams had darted in, and before I had collected my senses enough to move, the water was two inches deep everywhere and steadily rising.
Now I knew the cause of the roaring, and, rousing Framingham, I half dragged him, half carried him to the door, and digging our feet into the chinks of the wall of the house, we climbed up to its top. There was nothing else to do, for above us and behind us was the unscalable cliff, and on each side the ground sloped away rapidly, and it would have been impossible to reach the high ground at the entrance to the basin.
After a time we lighted matches, for with all this commotion there was little air stirring, and we could see the water, now half-way up the side of the house, rushing to the west with the force and velocity of the current of a mighty river, and every little while it hurled tree-trunks against the house-walls with a terrific shock that threatened to batter them down. After an hour or so, the roaring began to decrease, and finally there was an absolute silence. The water, which reached to within a foot of where we sat, was at rest, neither rising nor falling.
Presently a faint whispering began and became a stertorous breathing, and then a rushing like that of the wind and a roaring rapidly increasing in volume, and the lake was in motion again, but this time the water and its swirling freight of tree-trunks flowed by the house toward the east, and was constantly falling, and out in the centre of the lake the beams of the moon were darkly reflected by the sides of a huge whirlpool, streaking the surface of polished blackness down, down, down the vortex into the beginning of whose terrible depths we looked from our high perch.
This morning the lake is back at its usual level. Our mules are drowned, our boat destroyed, our food damaged, my specimens and some of my instruments injured, and Framingham is very ill. We shall have to depart soon, although I dislike exceedingly to do so, as the disturbance of last night, which is clearly like the one described by Father LaMetrie, has undoubtedly brought up from the bowels of the earth some strange and interesting things. Indeed, out in the middle of the lake where the whirlpool subsided, I can see a large quantity of floating things; logs and branches, most of them probably, but who knows what else?
Through my glass I can see a tree-trunk, or rather stump, of enormous dimensions. From its width I judge that the whole tree must have been as large as some of the California big trees. The main part of it appears to be about ten feet wide and thirty feet long. Projecting from it and lying prone on the water is a limb, or root, some fifteen feet long, and perhaps two or three feet thick. Before we leave, which will be as soon as Framingham is able to go, I shall make a raft and visit the mass of driftwood, unless the wind providentially sends it ashore.
May 4th, Evening.
A day of most remarkable and wonderful occurrences. When I arose this morning and looked through my glass, I saw that the mass of driftwood still lay in the middle of the lake, motionless on the glassy surface, but the great black stump had disappeared. I was sure it was not hidden by the rest of the driftwood, for yesterday it lay some distance from the other logs, and there had been no disturbance of wind or water to change its position. I therefore concluded that it was some heavy wood that needed to become but slightly waterlogged to cause it to sink.
Framingham having fallen asleep at about ten, I sallied forth to look along the shores for specimens, carrying with me a botanical can, and a South American machete, which I have possessed since a visit to Brazil three years ago, where I learned the usefulness of this sabre-like thing. The shore was strewn with bits of strange plants and shells, and I was stooping to pick one up, when suddenly I felt my clothes plucked, and heard a snap behind me, and turning about I saw—but I won’t describe it until I tell what I did, for I did not fairly see the terrible creature until I had swung my machete round and sliced off the top of its head, and then tumbled down into the shallow water where I lay almost fainting.
Here was the black log I had seen in the middle of the lake, a monstrous elasmosaurus, and high above me on the heap of rocks lay the thing’s head with its long jaws crowded with sabre-like teeth, and its enormous eyes as big as saucers. I wondered that it did not move, for I expected a series of convulsions, but no sound of a commotion was heard from the creature’s body, which lay out of my sight on the other side of the rocks. I decided that my sudden cut had acted like a stunning blow and produced a sort of coma, and fearing lest the beast should recover the use of its muscles before death fully took place, and in its agony roll away into the deep water where I could not secure it, I hastily removed the brain entirely, performing the operation neatly, though with some trepidation, and restoring to the head the detached segment cut off by my machete, I proceeded to examine my prize.
In length of body, it is exactly twenty-eight feet. In the widest part it is eight feet through laterally, and is some six feet through from back to belly. Four great flippers, rudimentary arms and feet, and an immensely long, sinuous, swan-like neck, complete the creature’s body. Its head is very small for the size of the body and is very round and a pair of long jaws project in front much like a duck’s bill. Its skin is a leathery integument of a lustrous black, and its eyes are enormous hazel optics with a soft, melancholy stare in their liquid depths. It is an elasmosaurus, one of the largest of antediluvian animals. Whether of the same species as those whose bones have been discovered, I cannot say.
My examination finished, I hastened after Framingham, for I was certain that this waif from a long past age would arouse almost any invalid. I found him somewhat recovered from his attack of the morning, and he eagerly accompanied me to the elasmosaurus. In examining the animal afresh, I was astonished to find that its heart was still beating and that all the functions of the body except thought were being performed one hour after the thing had received its death blow, but I knew that the hearts of sharks have been known to beat hours after being removed from the body, and that decapitated frogs live, and have all the powers of motion, for weeks after their heads have been cut off.
I removed the top of the head to look into it and here another surprise awaited me, for the edges of the wound were granulating and preparing to heal. The colour of the interior of the skull was perfectly healthy and natural, there was no undue flow of blood, and there was every evidence that the animal intended to get well and live without a brain. Looking at the interior of the skull, I was struck by its resemblance to a human skull; in fact, it is, as nearly as I can judge, the size and shape of the brain-pan of an ordinary man who wears a seven-and-an-eighth hat. Examining the brain itself, I found it to be the size of an ordinary human brain, and singularly like it in general contour, though it is very inferior in fibre and has few convolutions.
May 5th, Morning.
Framingham is exceedingly ill and talks of dying, declaring that if a natural death does not put an end to his sufferings, he will commit suicide. I do not know what to do. All my attempts to encourage him are of no avail, and the few medicines I have no longer fit his case at all.
May 5th, Evening.
I have just buried Framingham’s body in the sand of the lake shore. I performed no ceremonies over the grave, for perhaps the real Framingham is not dead, though such a speculation seems utterly wild. To-morrow I shall erect a cairn upon the mound, unless indeed there are signs that my experiment is successful, though it is foolish to hope that it will be.
At ten this morning, Framingham’s qualms left him, and he set forth with me to see the elasmosaurus. The creature lay in the place where we left it yesterday, its position unaltered, still breathing, all the bodily functions performing themselves. The wound in its head had healed a great deal during the night, and I daresay will be completely healed within a week or so, such is the rapidity with which these repitilian organisms repair damages to themselves. Collecting three or four bushels of mussels, I shelled them and poured them down the elasmosaurus’s throat. With a convulsive gasp, they passed down and the great mouth slowly closed.
“How long do you expect to keep the reptile alive?” asked Framingham.
“Until I have gotten word to a number of scientific friends, and they have come here to examine it. I shall take you to the nearest settlement and write letters from there. Returning, I shall feed the elasmosaurus regularly until my friends come, and we decide what final disposition to make of it. We shall probably stuff it.”
“But you will have trouble in killing it, unless you hack it to pieces, and that won’t do. Oh, if I only had the vitality of that animal. There is a monster whose vitality is so splendid that the removal of its brain does not disturb it. I should feel very happy if someone would remove my body. If I only had some of that beast’s useless strength.”
“In your case, the possession of a too active brain has injured the body,” said I. “Too much brain exercise and too little bodily exercise are the causes of your trouble. It would be a pleasant thing if you had the robust health of the elasmosaurus, but what a wonderful thing it would be if that mighty engine had your intelligence.”
I turned away to examine the reptile’s wounds, for I had brought my surgical instruments with me, and intended to dress them. I was interrupted by a burst of groans from Framingham and turning, beheld him rolling on the sand in an agony. I hastened to him, but before I could reach him, he seized my case of instruments, and taking the largest and sharpest knife, cut his throat from ear to ear.
“Framingham, Framingham,” I shouted and, to my astonishment, he looked at me intelligently. I recalled the case of the French doctor who, for some minutes after being guillotined, answered his friends by winking.
“If you hear me, wink,” I cried. The right eye closed and opened with a snap. Ah, here the body was dead and the brain lived. I glanced at the elasmosaurus. Its mouth, half closed over its gleaming teeth, seemed to smile an invitation. The intelligence of the man and the strength of the beasts. The living body and the living brain. The curious resemblance of the reptile’s brain-pan to that of a man flashed across my mind.
“Are you still alive, Framingham?”
The right eye winked. I seized my machete, for there was no time for delicate instruments. I might destroy all by haste and roughness, I was sure to destroy all by delay. I opened the skull and disclosed the brain. I had not injured it, and breaking the wound of the elasmosaurus’s head, placed the brain within, I dressed the wound and, hurrying to the house, brought all my store of stimulants and administered them.
For years the medical fraternity has been predicting that brain-grafting will some time be successfully accomplished. Why has it never been successfully accomplished? Because it has not been tried. Obviously, a brain from a dead body cannot be used and what living man would submit to the horrible process of having his head opened, and portions of his brain taken for the use of others?
The brains of men are frequently examined when injured and parts of the brain removed, but parts of the brains of other men have never been substituted for the parts removed. No injured man has even been found who would give any portion of his brain for the use of another. Until criminals under sentence of death are handed over to science for experimentation, we shall not know what can be done in the way of brain-grafting. But the public opinion would never allow it.
Conditions are favorable for a fair and thorough trial of my experiment. The weather is cool and even, and the wound in the head of the elasmosaurus has every chance for healing. The animal possesses a vitality superior to any of our later-day animals, and if any organism can successfully become the host of a foreign brain, nourishing and cherishing it, the elasmosaurus with its abundant vital forces can do it. It may be that a new era in the history of the world will begin here.
May 6th, Noon.
I think I will allow my experiment a little more time.
May 7th, Noon.
It cannot be imagination. I am sure that as I looked into the elasmosaurus’s eyes this morning there was expression in them. Dim, it is true, a sort of mistiness that floats over them like the reflection of passing clouds.
May 8th, Noon.
I am more sure than yesterday that there is expression in the eyes, a look of troubled fear, such as is seen in the eyes of those who dream nightmares with unclosed lids.
May 11th, Evening.
I have been ill, and have not seen the elasmosaurus for three days, but I shall be better able to judge the progress of the experiment by remaining away a period of some duration.
May 12th, Noon.
I am overcome with awe as I realise the success that has so far crowned my experiment. As I approached the elasmosaurus this morning, I noticed a faint disturbance in the water near its flippers. I cautiously investigated, expecting to discover some fishes nibbling at the helpless monster, and saw that the commotion was not due to fishes, but to the flippers themselves, which were feebly moving.
“Framingham, Framingham,” I bawled at the top of my voice. The vast bulk stirred a little, a very little, but enough to notice. Is the brain, or Framingham, it would perhaps be better to say, asleep, or has he failed to establish connection with the body? Undoubtedly he has not yet established connection with the body, and this of itself would be equivalent to sleep, to unconsciousness. As a man born with none of the senses would be unconscious of himself, so Framingham, just beginning to establish connections with his new body, is only dimly conscious of himself and sleeps. I fed him, or it—which is the proper designation will be decided in a few days—with the usual allowance.
May 17th, Evening.
I have been ill for the past three days, and have not been out of doors until this morning. The elasmosaurus was still motionless when I arrived at the cove this morning. Dead, I thought; but I soon detected signs of breathing, and I began to prepare some mussels for it, and was intent upon my task, when I heard a slight, gasping sound, and looked up. A feeling of terror seized me. It was as if in response to some doubting incantations there had appeared the half-desired, yet wholly-feared and unexpected apparition of a fiend. I shrieked, I screamed, and the amphitheatre of rocks echoed and re-echoed my cries, and all the time the head of the elasmosaurus raised aloft to the full height of its neck, swayed about unsteadily, and its mouth silently struggled and twisted, as if in an attempt to form words, while its eyes looked at me now with wild fear and now with piteous intreaty.
“Framingham,” I said.
The monster’s mouth closed instantly, and it looked at me attentively, pathetically so, as a dog might look.
“Do you understand me?”
The mouth began struggling again, and little gasps and moans issued forth. “If you understand me, lay your head on the rock.”
Down came the head. He understood me. My experiment was a success. I sat for a moment in silence, meditating upon the wonderful affair, striving to realise that I was awake and sane, and then began in a calm manner to relate to my friend what had taken place since his attempted suicide.
“You are at present something in the condition of a partial paralytic, I should judge,” said I, as I concluded my account. “Your mind has not yet learned to command your new body. I see you can move your head and neck, though with difficulty. Move your body if you can. Ah, you cannot, as I thought. But it will all come in time. Whether you will ever be able to talk or not, I cannot say, but I think so, however. And now if you cannot, we will arrange some means of communication. Anyhow, you are rid of your human body and possessed of the powerful vital apparatus you so much envied its former owner. When you gain control of yourself, I wish you to find the communication between this lake and the under-world, and conduct some explorations. Just think of the additions to geological knowledge you can make. I will write an account of your discovery, and the names of Framingham and McLennegan will be among those of the greatest geologists.”
I waved my hands in my enthusiasm, and the great eyes of my friend glowed with a kindred fire.
June 2nd, Night.
The process by which Framingham has passed from his first powerlessness to his present ability to speak, and command the use of his corporeal frame, has been so gradual that there has been nothing to note down from day to day. He seems to have all the command over his vast bulk that its former owner had, and in addition speaks and sings. He is singing now. The north wind has risen with the fall of night, and out there in the darkness I hear the mighty organ pipetones of his tremendouus, magnificent voice, chanting the solemn notes of the Gregorian, the full-throated Latin words mingling with the roaring of the wind in a wild and weird harmony.
To-day he attempted to find the connection between the lake and the interior of the earth, but the great well that sinks down in the centre of the lake is choked with rocks and he has discovered nothing. He is tormented by the fear that I will leave him, and that he will perish of loneliness. But I shall not leave him. I feel too much pity for the loneliness he would endure, and besides, I wish to be on the spot should another of those mysterious convulsions open the connection between the lake and the lower world.
He is beset with the idea that should other men discover him, he may be captured and exhibited in a circus or museum, and declares that he will fight for his liberty even to the extent of taking the lives of those attempting to capture him. As a wild animal, he is the property of whomsoever captures him, though perhaps I can set up title to him on the ground of having tamed him.
July 6th.
One of Framingham’s fears has been realised. I was at the pass leading into the basin, watching the clouds grow heavy and pendulous with their load of rain, when I saw a butterfly net appear over a knoll in the pass, followed by its bearer, a small man, unmistakably a scientist, but I did not note him well, for as he looked down into the valley, suddenly there burst forth with all the power and volume of a steam calliope, the tremendous voice of Framingham, singing a Greek song of Anacreon to the tune of “Where did you get that hat?” and the singer appeared in a little cove, the black column of his great neck raised aloft, his jagged jaws wide open.
That poor little scientist. He stood transfixed, his butterfly net dropped from his hand, and as Framingham ceased his singing, curvetted and leaped from the water and came down with a splash that set the whole cove swashing, and laughed a guffaw that echoed among the cliffs like the laughing of a dozen demons, he turned and sped through the pass at all speed.
I skip all entries for nearly a year. They are unimportant.
June 30th, 1897.
A change is certainly coming over my friend. I began to see it some time ago, but refused to believe it and set it down to imagination. A catastrophe threatens, the absorption of the human intellect by the brute body. There are precedents for believing it possible. The human body has more influence over the mind than the mind has over the body. The invalid, delicate Framingham with refined mind, is no more. In his stead is a roistering monster, whose boisterous and commonplace conversation betrays a constantly growing coarseness of mind.
No longer is he interested in my scientific investigations, but pronounces them all bosh. No longer is his conversation such as an educated man can enjoy, but slangy and diffuse iterations concerning the trivial happenings of our uneventful life. Where will it end? In the absorption of the human mind by the brute body? In the final triumph of matter over mind and the degradation of the most mundane force and the extinction of the celestial spark? Then, indeed, will Edward Framingham be dead, and over the grave of his human body can I fittingly erect a headstone, and then will my vigil in this valley be over.
Fort D. A. Russell, Wyoming,
April 15 th, 1899.
Prof. William G. Breyfogle.
Dear Sir—The inclosed intact manuscript and the fragments which accompany it, came into my possession in the manner I am about to relate and I inclose them to you, for whom they were intended by their late author. Two weeks ago, I was dispatched into the mountains after some Indians who had left their reservation, having under my command a company of infantry and two squads of cavalrymen with mountain howitzers. On the seventh day of our pursuit, which led us into a wild and unknown part of the mountains, we were startled at hearing from somewhere in front of us a succession of bellowings of a very unusual nature, mingled with the cries of a human being apparently in the last extremity, and rushing over a rise before us, we looked down upon a lake and saw a colossal, indescribable thing engaged in rending the body of a man.
Observing us, it stretched its jaws and laughed, and in saying this, I wish to be taken literally. Part of my command cried out that it was the devil, and turned and ran. But I rallied them, and thoroughly enraged at what we had witnessed, we marched down to the shore, and I ordered the howitzers to be trained upon the murderous creature. While we were doing this, the thing kept up a constant blabbing that bore a distinct resemblance to human speech, sounding very much like the jabbering of an imbecile, or a drunken man trying to talk. I gave the command to fire and to fire again, and the beast tore out into the lake in its death-agony, and sank.
With the remains of Dr. McLennegan, I found the foregoing manuscript intact, and the torn fragments of the diary from which it was compiled, together with other papers on scientific subjects, all of which I forward. I think some attempts should be made to secure the body of the elasmosaurus. It would be a priceless addition to any museum.
Arthur W. Fairchild
Captain U.S.A.
November, 1907
by William Hope Hodgson
IT MAY be said that a spark of interest in the works of a nearly forgotten British writer of science fiction and horror. William Hope Hodgson, was revived when The Voice in the Night was anthologized in They Walk Again, “an anthology of ghost stories,” edited by Colin de la Mare, son of Walter de la Mare (E. P. Dutton, 1931). The appearance of that story in company with such greats of the supernatural as Algernon Blackwood, Lord Dunsany, Ambrose Bierce, Edith Wharton, E. F. Benson, Oliver Onions, M. R. James, Walter de la Mare, J. Sheridan Ie Fanu, and W. W. Jacobs centered special attention upon it and led at least one reader to investigate the background of the author.
The Voice in the Night was certainly not a ghost story. Actually, it was science fiction. While its ultimate effect evoked horror, it was accomplished through a most sympathetic handling of the characters and their situation. The late Herman C. Koenig, an executive of an electrical testing laboratory in New York City and a collector and reader of science fiction, was intrigued by this story and began a campaign through the amateur press that eventually resulted in the republication of William Hope Hodgson’s four unique novels of science fiction and the supernatural under the title of The House on the Borderland and other Novels (Arkham House, 1946). The same publisher subsequently issued Carnacki, the Ghost Finder (1947), a collection of short stories concerning a detective who solves cases involving psychic phenomenon; and Deep Waters (1967), the cream of his shorter works of the fantastic.
During his lifetime, William Hope Hodgson was a pulpster. He contributed some of his finest short stories, including The Voice in the Night to America’s The Blue Book Magazine (November 1907); his fiction appeared in Adventure, Short Stories, All Around, People’s Favorite Magazine, and after his death, in Sea Stories and Argosy-all-story magazine. In England, he could be found in the equivalent of the American pulps, among them The Harmsworth Red Magazine and Grand Magazine.
There is no record that his novels were first serialized in magazines, but two of them, The Boats of the “Glen Carrig’“ (Chapman & Hall, 1907) and The House on the Borderland (Chapman & Hall, 1908), are such obvious cliff-hangers that it would not be surprising if they had been. He might quite understandably have been dismissed as a popular adventure story writer, with the emphasis in his work on tales of the sea, but this was not the case; his books received remarkable reviews from distinguished publications.
In speaking of his short fantastic stories of the sea, which include The Voice in the Night, the reviewer for The Bookman (England) said in November 1914: “They grip you, as Poe’s grim stories do, by their subtle artistry and sheer imaginative power. . . . We have read few stories equal. . .
Within the limited range of mounting and sustaining a peak of unrequited horror, William Hope Hodgson achieved heights of genius. In reading his short stories as a group, one might easily conclude that Hodgson’s imagination was circumscribed to dealing with variations on a theme, particularly involving horror at sea, and that his originality was confined to experimenting with new techniques and formulae that project such horrors. However, this impression is swept away by examining his novels, The House on the Borderland and The Nightland, where his imaginative reaches seem not only boundless but extraordinarily original, plumbing the furthermost reaches of space and time.
Of the dozens of authors who wrote science fiction by gaslight, Hodgson is one of the very few a portion of whose work will endure.
IT WAS a dark, starless night. We were becalmed in the Northern Pacific. Our exact position I do not know; for the sun had been hidden during the course of a weary, breathless week, by a thin haze which had seemed to float above us, about the height of our mastheads, at whiles descending and shrouding the surrounding sea.
With there being no wind, we had steadied the tiller, and I was the only man on deck. The crew, consisting of two men and a boy, were sleeping forrard in their den; while Will—my friend, and the master of our little craft—was aft in his bunk on the port side of the little cabin.
Suddenly, from out of the surrounding darkness, there came a hail:
“Schooner, ahoy!”
The cry was so unexpected that I gave no immediate answer, because of my surprise.
It came again—a voice curiously throaty and inhuman, calling from somewhere upon the dark sea away on our port broadside:
“Schooner, ahoy!”
“Hullo!” I sung out, having gathered my wits somewhat. “What are you? What do you want?”
“You need not be afraid,” answered the queer voice, having probably noticed some trace of confusion in my tone. “I am only an old—man.”
The pause sounded oddly; but it was only afterwards that it came back to me with any significance.
“Why don’t you come alongside, then?” I queried somewhat snappishly; for I liked not his hinting at my having been a trifle shaken.
“I—I—can’t. It wouldn’t be safe. I—” The voice broke off, and there was silence.
“What do you mean?” I asked, growing more and more astonished. “Why not safe? Where are you?”
I listened for a moment; but there came no answer. And then, a sudden indefinite suspicion, of I knew not what, coming to me, I stepped swiftly to the binnacle, and took out the lighted lamp. At the same time, I knocked on the deck with my heel to waken Will. Then I was back at the side, throwing the yellow funnel of light out into the silent immensity beyond our rail. As I did so, I heard a slight, muffled cry, and then the sound of a splash as though someone had dipped oars abruptly. Yet I cannot say that I saw anything with certainty; save, it seemed to me, that with the first flash of the light, there had been something upon the waters, where now there was nothing.
“Hullo, there!” I called. “What foolery is this!”
But there came only the indistinct sounds of a boat being pulled away into the night.
Then I heard Will’s voice, from the direction of the after scuttle:
“What’s up, George?”
“Come here, Will!” I said.
“What is it?” he asked, coming across the deck.
I told him the queer thing which had happened. He put several questions; then, after a moment’s silence, he raised his hands to his lips, and hailed:
“Boat, ahoy!”
From a long distance away there came back to us a faint reply, and my companion repeated his call. Presently, after a short period of silence, there grew on our hearing the muffled sound of oars; at which Will hailed again.
This time there was a reply:
“Put away the light.”
“I’m damned if I will,” I muttered; but Will told me to do as the voice bade, and I shoved it down under the bulwarks.
“Come nearer,” he said, and the oar-strokes continued. Then, when apparently some half-dozen fathoms distant, they again ceased.
“Come alongside,” exclaimed Will. “There’s nothing to be frightened of aboard here!”
“Promise that you will not show the light?”
“What’s to do with you,” I burst out, “that you’re so infernally afraid of the light?”
“Because—” began the voice, and stopped short.
“Because what?” I asked quickly.
Will put his hand on my shoulder.
“Shut up a minute, old man,” he said, in a low voice. “Let me tackle him.”
He leant more over the rail.
“See here, Mister,” he said, “this is a pretty queer business, you coming upon us like this, right out in the middle of the blessed Pacific. How are we to know what sort of a hanky-panky trick you’re up to? You say there’s only one of you. How are we to know, unless we get a squint at you—eh? What’s your objection to the light, anyway?”
As he finished, I heard the noise of the oars again, and then the voice came; but now from a greater distance, and sounding extremely hopeless and pathetic.
“I am sorry—sorry! I would not have troubled you, only I am hungry, and—so is she.”
The voice died away, and the sound of the oars, dipping irregularly, was borne to us.
“Stop!” sung out Will. “I don’t want to drive you away. Come back! We’ll keep the light hidden, if you don’t like it.”
He turned to me:
“It’s a damned queer rig, this; but I think there’s nothing to be afraid of?”
There was a question in his tone, and I replied.
“No, I think the poor devil’s been wrecked around here, and gone crazy.”
The sound of the oars drew nearer.
“Shove that lamp back in the binnacle,” said Will; then he leaned over the rail and listened. I replaced the lamp, and came back to his side. The dipping of the oars ceased some dozen yards distant.
“Won’t you come alongside now?” asked Will in an even voice. “I have had the lamp put back in the binnacle.”
“I—1 cannot,” replied the voice. “I dare not come nearer. I dare not even pay you for the—the provisions.”
“That’s all right,” said Will, and hesitated. “You’re welcome to as much grub as you can take—” Again he hesitated.
“You are very good,” exclaimed the voice. “May God, Who understands everything, reward you—” It broke off huskily.
“The—the lady?” said Will abruptly. “Is she—”
“I have left her behind upon the island,” came the voice.
“What island?” I cut in.
“I know not its name,” returned the voice. “I would to God—!” it began, and checked itself as suddenly.
“Could we not send a boat for her?” asked Will at this point.
“No!” said the voice, with extraordinary emphasis. “My God! No!” There was a moment’s pause; then it added, in a tone which seemed a merited reproach:
“It was because of our want I ventured—because her agony tortured me.”
“I am a forgetful brute,” exclaimed Will. “Just wait a minute, whoever you are, and I will bring you up something at once.”
In a couple of minutes he was back again, and his arms were full of various edibles. He paused at the rail.
“Can’t you come alongside for them?” he asked.
“No—I dare not” replied the voice, and it seemed to me that in its tones I detected a note of stifled craving—as though the owner hushed a mortal desire. It came to me then in a flash, that the poor old creature out there in the darkness, was suffering for actual need of that which Will held in his arms; and yet, because of some unintelligible dread, refraining from dashing to the side of our little schooner, and receiving it. And with the lightning-like conviction, there came the knowledge that the Invisible was not mad; but sanely facing some intolerable horror.
“Damn it, Will!” I said, full of many feelings, over which predominated a vast sympathy. “Get a box. We must float off the stuff to him in it.”
This we did—propelling it away from the vessel, out into the darkness, by means of a boathook. In a minute, a slight cry from the Invisible came to us, and we knew that he had secured the box.
A little later, he called out a farewell to us, and so heartful a blessing, that I am sure we were the better for it. Then, without more ado, we heard the ply of oars across the darkness.
“Pretty soon off,” remarked Will, with perhaps just a little sense of injury.
“Wait,” I replied. “I think somehow he’ll come back. He must have been badly needing that food.”
“And the lady,” said Will. For a moment he was silent; then he continued: “It’s the queerest thing ever I’ve tumbled across, since I’ve been fishing.”
“Yes,” I said, and fell to pondering.
And so the time slipped away—an hour, another, and still Will stayed with me; for the queer adventure had knocked all desire for sleep out of him.
The third hour was three parts through, when we heard again the sound of oars across the silent ocean.
“Listen!” said Will, a low note of excitement in his voice.
“He’s coming, just as I thought,” I muttered.
The dipping of the oars grew nearer, and I noted that the strokes were firmer and longer. The food had been needed.
They came to a stop a little distance off the broadside, and the queer voice came again to us through the darkness:
“Schooner, ahoy!”
“That you?” asked Will.
“Yes,” replied the voice. “I left you suddenly; but—but there was great need.”
“The lady?” questioned Will.
“The—lady is grateful now on earth. She will be more grateful soon in—in heaven.”
Will began to make some reply, in a puzzled voice; but became confused, and broke off short. I said nothing. I was wondering at the curious pauses, and, apart from my wonder, I was full of a great sympathy.
The voice continued:
“We—she and I, have talked, as we shared the result of God’s tenderness and yours—”
Will interposed; but without coherence.
“I beg of you not to—to belittle your deed of Christian charity this night,” said the voice. “Be sure that it has not escaped His notice.”
It stopped, and there was a full minute’s silence. Then it came again:
“We have spoken together upon that which—which has befallen us. We had thought to go out, without telling any, of the terror which has come into our—lives. She is with me in believing that to-night’s happenings are under a special ruling, and that it is God’s wish that we should tell to you all that we have suffered since—since—”
“Yes?” said Will softly.
“Since the sinking of the Albatross “
“Ah!” I exclaimed involuntarily. “She left Newcastle for ‘Frisco some six months ago, and hasn’t been heard of since.”
“Yes,” answered the voice. “But some few degrees to the North of the line she was caught in a terrible storm, and dismasted. When the day came, it was found that she was leaking badly, and, presently, it falling to a calm, the sailors took to the boats, leaving—leaving a young lady—my fiancee—and myself upon the wreck.
“We were below, gathering together a few of our belongings, when they left. They were entirely callous, through fear, and when we came up upon the deck, we saw them only as small shapes afar off upon the horizon. Yet we did not despair, but set to work and constructed a small raft. Upon this we put such few matters as it would hold, including a quantity of water and some ship’s biscuit. Then, the vessel being very deep in the water, we got ourselves on to the raft, and pushed off.
“It was later, when I observed that we seemed to be in the way of some tide or current, which bore us from the ship at an angle; so that in the course of three hours, by my watch, her hull became invisible to our sight, her broken masts remaining in view for a somewhat longer period. Then, towards evening, it grew misty, and so through the night. The next day we were still encompassed by the mist, the weather remaining quiet.
“For four days we drifted through this strange haze, until, on the evening of the fourth day, there grew upon our ears the murmur of breakers at a distance. Gradually it became plainer, and, somewhat after midnight, it appeared to sound upon either hand at no very great space. The raft was raised upon a swell several times, and then we were in smooth water, and the noise of the breakers was behind.
“When the morning came, we found that we were in a sort of great lagoon; but of this we noticed little at the time; for close before us, through the enshrouding mist, loomed the hull of a large sailing-vessel. With one accord, we fell upon our knees and thanked God; for we thought that here was an end to our perils. We had much to learn.
“The raft drew near to the ship, and we shouted on them to take us aboard; but none answered. Presently the raft touched against the side of the vessel, and, seeing a rope hanging downwards, I seized it and began to climb. Yet I had much ado to make my way up, because of a kind of grey, lichenous fungus which had seized upon the rope, and which blotched the side of the ship lividly.
“I reached the rail and clambered over it, on to the deck. Here I saw that the decks were covered, in great patches, with grey masses, some of them rising into nodules several feet in height; but at the time I thought less of this matter than of the possibility of there being people aboard the ship. I shouted; but none answered. Then I went to the door below the poop deck. I opened it, and peered in. There was a great smell of staleness, so that I knew in a moment that nothing living was within, and with the knowledge, I shut the door quickly; for I felt suddenly lonely.
“I went back to the side where I had scrambled up. My—my sweetheart was still sitting quietly upon the raft. Seeing me look down she called up to know whether there were any aboard of the ship. I replied that the vessel had the appearance of having been long deserted; but that if she would wait a little I would see whether there was anything in the shape of a ladder by which she could ascend to the deck. Then we would make a search through the vessel together. A little later, on the opposite side of the decks, I found a rope side-ladder. This I carried across, and a minute afterwards she was beside me.
“Together we explored the cabins and apartments in the after part of the ship; but nowhere was there any sign of life. Here and there, within the cabins themselves, we came across odd patches of that queer fungus; but this, as my sweetheart said, could be cleansed away.
“In the end, having assured ourselves that the after portion of the vessel was empty, we picked our ways to the bows, between the ugly grey nodules of that strange growth; and here we made a further search, which told us that there was indeed none aboard but ourselves.
“This being now beyond any doubt, we returned to the stern of the ship and proceeded to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. Together we cleared out and cleaned two of the cabins; and after that I made examination whether there was anything eatable in the ship. This I soon found was so, and thanked God in my heart for His goodness. In addition to this I discovered the whereabouts of the fresh-water pump, and having fixed it I found the water drinkable, though somewhat unpleasant to the taste.
“For several days we stayed aboard the ship, without attempting to get to the shore. We were busily engaged in making the place habitable. Yet even thus early we became aware that our lot was even less to be desired than might have been imagined; for though, as a first step, we scraped away the odd patches of growth that studded the floors and walls of the cabins and saloon, yet they returned almost to their original size within the space of twenty-four hours, which not only discouraged us, but gave us a feeling of vague unease.
“Still we would not admit ourselves beaten, so set to work afresh, and not only scraped away the fungus, but soaked the places where it had been, with carbolic, a can-full of which I had found in the pantry. Yet, by the end of the week the growth had returned in full strength, and, in addition, it had spread to other places, as though our touching it had allowed germs from it to travel elsewhere.
“On the seventh morning, my sweetheart woke to find a small patch of it growing on her pillow, close to her face. At that, she came to me, so soon as she could get her garments upon her. I was in the galley at the time lighting the fire for breakfast.
“ ‘Come here, John,’ she said, and led me aft. When I saw the thing upon her pillow I shuddered, and then and there we agreed to go right out of the ship and see whether we could not fare to make ourselves more comfortable ashore.
“Hurriedly we gathered together our few belongings, and even among these I found that the fungus had been at work; for one of her shawls had a little lump of it growing near one edge. I threw the whole thing over the side, without saying anything to her.
“The raft was still alongside, but it was too clumsy to guide, and I lowered down a small boat that hung across the stern, and in this we made our way to the shore. Yet, as we drew near to it, I became gradually aware that here the vile fungus, which had driven us from the ship, was growing riot. In places it rose into horrible, fantastic mounds, which seemed almost to quiver, as with a quiet life, when the wind blew across them. Here and there it took on the forms of vast fingers, and in others it just spread out flat and smooth and treacherous. Odd places, it appeared as grotesque stunted trees, seeming extraordinarily kinked and gnarled— the whole quaking vilely at times.
“At first, it seemed to us that there was no single portion of the surrounding shore which was not hidden beneath the masses of the hideous lichen; yet, in this, I found we were mistaken; for somewhat later, coasting along the shore at a little distance, we descried a smooth white patch of what appeared to be fine sand, and there we landed. It was not sand. What it was I do not know. All that I have observed is that upon it the fungus will not grow; while everywhere else, save where the sand-like earth wanders oddly, path-wise, amid the grey desolation of the lichen, there is nothing but that loathsome greyness.
“It is difficult to make you understand how cheered we were to find one place that was absolutely free from the growth, and here we deposited our belongings. Then we went back to the ship for such things as it seemed to us we should need. Among other matters, I managed to bring ashore with me one of the ship’s sails, with which I constructed two small tents, which, though exceedingly rough-shaped, served the purposes for which they were intended. In these we lived and stored our various necessities, and thus for a matter of some four weeks all went smoothly and without particular unhappiness. Indeed, I may say with much of happiness—for—for we were together.
“It was on the thumb of her right hand that the growth first showed. It was only a small circular spot, much like a little grey mole. My God! how the fear leapt to my heart when she showed me the place. We cleansed it, between us, washing it with carbolic and water. In the morning of the following day she showed her hand to me again. The grey warty thing had returned. For a little while, we looked at one another in silence. Then, still wordless, we started again to remove it. In the midst of the operation she spoke suddenly.
“ ‘What’s that on the side of your face, dear?’ Her voice was sharp with anxiety. I put my hand up to feel.
“‘There! Under the hair by your ear. A little to the front a bit.’ My finger rested upon the place, and then I knew.
“ ‘Let us get your thumb done first,’ I said. And she submitted, only because she was afraid to touch me until it was cleansed. I finished washing and disinfecting her thumb, and then she turned to my face. After it was finished we sat together and talked awhile of many things; for there had come into our lives sudden, very terrible thoughts. We were, all at once, afraid of something worse than death. We spoke of loading the boat with provisions and water and making our way out on to the sea; yet we were helpless, for many causes, and— and the growth had attacked us already. We decided to stay. God would do with us what was His will. We would wait.
“A month, two months, three months passed and the places grew somewhat, and there had come others. Yet we fought so strenuously with the fear that its headway was but slow, comparatively speaking.
“Occasionally we ventured off to the ship for such stores as we needed. There we found that the fungus grew persistently. One of the nodules on the maindeck became soon as high as my head.
“We had now given up all thought or hope of leaving the island. We had realized that it would be unallowable to go among healthy humans, with the things from which we were suffering.
“With this determination and knowledge in our minds we knew that we should have to husband our food and water; for we did not know, at that time, but that we should possibly live for many years.
“This reminds me that I have told you that I am an old man. Judged by the years this is not so. But—but—”
He broke off; then continued somewhat abruptly:
“As I was saying, we knew that we should have to use care in the matter of food. But we had no idea then how little food there was left, of which to take care. It was a week later that I made the discovery that all the other bread tanks—which I had supposed full—were empty, and that (beyond odd tins of vegetables and meat, and some other matters) we had nothing on which to depend, but the bread in the tank which I had already opened.
“After learning this I bestirred myself to do what I could, and set to work at fishing in the lagoon; but with no success. At this I was somewhat inclined to feel desperate until the thought came to me to try outside the lagoon, in the open sea.
“Here, at times, I caught odd fish; but so infrequently that they proved of but little help in keeping us from the hunger which threatened. It seemed to me that our deaths were likely to come by hunger, and not by the growth of the thing which had seized upon our bodies.
“We were in this state of mind when the fourth month wore out. Then I made a very horrible discovery. One morning, a little before midday, I came off from the ship with a portion of the biscuits which were left. In the mouth of her tent I saw my sweetheart sitting, eating something.
“ ‘What is it, my dear?’ I called out as I leapt ashore. Yet, on hearing my voice, she seemed confused, and, turning, slyly threw something towards the edge of the little clearing. It fell short, and a vague suspicion having arisen within me, I walked across and picked it up. It was a piece of the grey fungus.
“As I went to her with it in my hand, she turned deadly pale; then a rose red.
“I felt strangely dazed and frightened.
“ ‘My dear! My dear!’ I said, and could say no more. Yet at my words she broke down and cried bitterly. Gradually, as she calmed, I got from her the news that she had tried it the preceding day, and— and liked it. I got her to promise on her knees not to touch it again, however great our hunger. After she had promised she told me that the desire for it had come suddenly, and that, until the moment of desire, she had experienced nothing towards it but the most extreme repulsion.
“Later in the day, feeling strangely restless, and much shaken with the thing which I had discovered, I made my way along one of the twisted paths—formed by the white, sand-like substance—which led among the fungoid growth. I had, once before, ventured along there; but not to any great distance. This time, being involved in perplexing thought, I went much further than hitherto.
“Suddenly I was called to myself by a queer hoarse sound on my left. Turning quickly I saw that there was movement among an extraordinarily shaped mass of fungus, close to my elbow. It was swaying uneasily, as though it possessed life of its own. Abruptly, as I stared, the thought came to me that the thing had a grotesque resemblance to the figure of a distorted human creature. Even as the fancy flashed into my brain, there was a slight, sickening noise of tearing, and I saw that one of the branch-like arms was detaching itself from the surrounding grey masses, and coming towards me. The head of the thing—a shapeless grey ball, inclined in my direction. I stood stupidly, and the vile arm brushed across my face. I gave out a frightened cry, and ran back a few paces. There was a sweetish taste upon my lips where the thing had touched me. I licked them, and was immediately filled with an inhuman desire. I turned and seized a mass of the fungus. Then more, and—more. I was insatiable. In the midst of devouring, the remembrance of the morning’s discovery swept into my mazed brain. It was sent by God. I dashed the fragment I held to the ground. Then, utterly wretched and feeling a dreadful guiltiness, I made my way back to the little encampment.
“I think she knew, by some marvellous intuition which love must have given, so soon as she set eyes on me. Her quiet sympathy made it easier for me, and I told her of my sudden weakness; yet omitted to mention the extraordinary thing which had gone before. I desired to spare her all unnecessary terror.
“But, for myself, I had added an intolerable knowledge, to breed an incessant terror in my brain; for I doubted not but that I had seen the end of one of those men who had come to the island in the ship in the lagoon; and in that monstrous ending I had seen our own.
“Thereafter we kept from the abominable food, though the desire for it had entered into our blood. Yet our drear punishment was upon us; for, day by day, with monstrous rapidity, the fungoid growth took hold of our poor bodies. Nothing we could do would check it materially, and so—and so—we who had been human, became— Well, it matters less each day. Only—only we had been man and maid!
“And day by day the fight is more dreadful, to withstand the hunger-lust for the terrible lichen.
“A week ago we ate the last of the biscuit, and since that time I have caught three fish. I was out here fishing tonight when your schooner drifted upon me out of the mist. I hailed you. You know the rest, and may God, out of His great heart, bless you for your goodness to a—a couple of poor outcast souls.”
There was the dip of an oar—another. Then the voice came again, and for the last time, sounding through the slight surrounding mist, ghostly and mournful.
“God bless you! Good-bye!”
“Good-bye,” we shouted together, hoarsely, our hearts full of many emotions.
I glanced about me. I became aware that the dawn was upon us.
The sun flung a stray beam across the hidden sea; pierced the mist dully, and lit up the receding boat with a gloomy fire. Indistinctly I saw something nodding between the oars. I thought of a sponge—a great, grey nodding sponge— The oars continued to ply. They were grey—as was the boat—and my eyes searched a moment vainly for the conjunction of hand and oar. My gaze flashed back to the—head. It nodded forward as the oars went backward for the stroke. Then the oars were dipped, the boat shot out of the patch of light, and the—the thing went nodding into the mist.
Future warfare was possibly the single most frequent theme in science fiction between the years 1870 and 1914, and one of the most precise predictions concerning it was H. G. Wells’ anticipation of tanks for warfare. Wells described them accurately from their caterpillar treads to their metal turret. Shown is the interpretation of Claude A. Shepperson, R. L., of a tank from The Land Ironclads by H. G. Wells, The Strand Magazine, January, 1904.
January, 1904
THE LAND IRONCLADS
by H. G. Wells
THE LAND IRONCLADS, published in The Strand for January 1904, represents that aspect of Wells’ writing in which he acts as a technical prophet of science as well as a storyteller and “educator.” This story deals with the use of tanks for warfare. In the years that followed Wells also suggested aircraft for bombing cities (The War in the Air, 1908) and atomic energy for the destruction of civilization (The World Set Free, 1914).
Most of his early successes, The Time Machine (1895); The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896); The Invisible Man (1897); The War of the Worlds (1898); and even The First Men in the Moon (1901), were not fundamentally stories of future invention. The major exception was When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), where some of the inventions of the future had to be described in order to supply background for the story.
Wells was far from the first to predict the use of tanks for warfare. Leonardo da Vinci drew sketches of such weapons, and the famed dime-novel writer, Luis P. Senarens, devised several dozen different models of tanks and armored cars as the basis for his stories (1878 to 1902) involving Frank Reade and Jack Wright. However, Wells better understood the tactical use of tanks in war than any of his predecessors and seems to have been the first to anticipate the need for caterpillar treads. In describing the tanks he wrote: “. . . it had lifted its skirt and displayed along the length of it— feet. They were thick, stumpy feet, between knobs and buttons in shape— flat, broad things, reminding one of the feet of elephants or the legs of caterpillars; and then, as the skirt rose higher, the war correspondent, scrutinising the thing through his glasses again, saw that these feet hung, as it were, on the rims of wheels.”
It has only recently been underscored that during the period from 1871 to the outbreak of Work! War I, Hngland was inordinately obsessed with future war stories. The Battle of Dorking by George T. Chesney (1871), in which Germany successfully invades England, was the popularizer, and after that tales continued to come off the presses by the hundreds, ranking easily among the best-selling literature in England during this time. Many well-known writers made their reputations with novels of future war, including George Griffith, Louis Tracy, M. P. Shiel, William Le Queux, Max Pemberton, as well as scores of names that would have no association for modern readers. German authors wrote some too, which were translated into English, and the vogue spread, with slightly less virulence, to the United States.
It was almost the manifestation of a war psychosis on the part of nations. The navies of the world could scarcely wait to try out their ironclads. There were many medium-size powers and the writers paired them off like prize-fighters. It was as though the world regarded war as an international sport, and could barely contain itself waiting to see if Germany or England had the best “team.”
It should be noted that although Wells might have sermonized harder on the evils of what he was writing about in The Land Ironclads, War in the Air, and The World Set Free than did other authors, he was still riding on the crest of popularity of stories of future carnage.
I
THE young lieutenant lay beside the war correspondent and admired the idyllic calm of the enemy’s lines through his field-glass.
“So far as I can see,” he said at last, “one man.”
“What’s he doing?” asked the war correspondent.
“Field-glass at us,” said the young lieutenant.
“And this is war?”
“No,” said the young lieutenant; “it’s Bloch.”
“The game’s a draw.”
“No! They’ve got to win or else they lose. A draw’s a win for our side.” They had discussed the political situation fifty times or so, and the war correspondent was weary of it. He stretched out his limbs. “Aaai s’pose it is!” he yawned.
Flut!
“What was that?”
“Shot at us.”
The war correspondent shifted to a slightly lower position. “No one shot at him,” he complained.
“I wonder if they think we shall get so bored we shall go home?” The war correspondent made no reply. “There’s the harvest, of course. . . .”
They had been there a month. Since the first brisk movements after the declaration of war things had gone slower and slower, until it seemed as though the whole machine of events must have run down. To begin with, they had had almost a scampering time; the invader had come across the frontier on the very dawn of the war in half-a-dozen parallel columns behind a cloud of cyclists and cavalry, with a general air of coming straight on the capital, and the defender horsemen had held him up, and peppered him and forced him to open out to outflank, and had then bolted to the next position in the most approved style, for a couple of days, until in the afternoon, bump! they had the invader against their prepared lines of defence. He did not suffer so much as had been hoped and expected: he was coming on, it seemed, with his eyes open, his scouts winded the guns, and down he sat at once without the shadow of an attack and began grubbing trenches for himself, as though he meant to sit down there to the very end of time. He was slow, but much more wary than the world had been led to expect, and he kept convoys tucked in and shielded his slow-marching infantry sufficiently well to prevent any heavy adverse scoring.
“But he ought to attack,” the young lieutenant had insisted.
“He’ll attack us at dawn, somewhere along the lines. You’ll get the bayonets coming into the trenches just about when you can see,” the war correspondent had held until a week ago.
The young lieutenant winked when he said that.
When one early morning the men the defenders sent to lie out five hundred yards before the trenches, with a view to the unexpected emptying of magazines into any night attack, gave way to causeless panic and blazed away at nothing for ten minutes, the war correspondent understood the meaning of that wink.
“What would you do if you were the enemy?” said the war correspondent, suddenly.
“If I had men like I’ve got now?”
“Yes.”
“Take those trenches.”
“How?”
“Oh—dodges! Crawl out half-way at night before moonrise and get into touch with the chaps we send out. Blaze at ‘em if they tried to shift, and so bag some of ‘em in the daylight. Learn that patch of ground by heart, lie all day in squatty holes, and come on nearer next night. There’s a bit over there, lumpy ground, where they could get across to rushing distance—easy. In a night or so. It would be a mere game for our fellows; it’s what they’re made for. . . . Guns? Shrapnel and stuff wouldn’t stop good men who meant business.”
“Why don’t they do that?”
“Their men aren’t brutes enough; that’s the trouble. They’re a crowd of devitalised townsmen, and that’s the truth of the matter. They’re clerks, they’re factory hands, they’re students, they’re civilised men. They can write, they can talk, they can make and do all sorts of things, but they’re poor amateurs at war. They’ve got no physical staying power, and that’s the whole thing. They’ve never slept in the open one night in their lives; they’ve never drunk anything but the purest water-company water; they’ve never gone short of three meals a day since they left their feeding-bottles. Half their cavalry never cocked leg over horse till it enlisted six months ago. They ride their horses as though they were bicycles—you watch ‘em! They’re fools at the game, and they know it. Our boys of fourteen can give their grown men points. . . . Very well—”
The war correspondent mused on his face with his nose between his knuckles.
“If a decent civilisation,” he said, “cannot produce better men for war than—”
He stopped with belated politeness. “I mean—”
“Than our open-air life,” said the young lieutenant.
“Exactly,” said the war correspondent. “Then civilisation has to stop.”
“It looks like it,” the young lieutenant admitted.
“Civilisation has science, you know,” said the war correspondent. “It invented and it made the rifles and guns and things you use.”
“Which our nice healthy hunters and stockmen and so on, rowdy-dowdy cowpunchers and nigger-whackers, can use ten times better than – What’s that?”
“What?” said the war correspondent, and then seeing his companion busy with his field-glass, he produced his own: “Where?” said the war correspondent, sweeping the enemy’s lines.
“It’s nothing,” said the young lieutenant, still looking.
“What’s nothing?”
The young lieutenant put down his glass and pointed. “I thought I saw something there, behind the stems of those trees. Something black. What it was I don’t know.”
The war correspondent tried to get even by intense scrutiny.
“It wasn’t anything,” said the young lieutenant, rolling over to regard the darkling evening sky, and generalized: “There never will be anything any more for ever. Unless—”
The war correspondent looked inquiry.
“They may get their stomachs wrong, or something—living without proper drains.”
A sound of bugles came from the tents behind. The war correspondent slid backwards down the sand and stood up. “Boom!” came from somewhere far away to the left. “Halloa!” he said, hesitated, and crawled back to peer again. “Firing at this time is jolly bad manners.”
The young lieutenant was uncommunicative for a space.
Then he pointed to the distant clump of trees again. “One of our big guns. They were firing at that,” he said.
“The thing that wasn’t anything?”
“Something over there, anyhow.”
Both men were silent, peering through their glasses for a space. “Just when it’s twilight,” the lieutenant complained. He stood up.
“I might stay here a bit,” said the war correspondent.
The lieutenant shook his head. “There’s nothing to see,” he apologised, and then went down to where his little squad of sun-brown, loose-limbed men had been yarning in the trench. The war correspondent stood up also, glanced for a moment at the businesslike bustle below him, gave perhaps twenty seconds to those enigmatical trees again, then turned his face towards the camp.
He found himself wondering whether his editor would consider the story of how somebody thought he saw something black behind a clump of trees, and how a gun was fired at this illusion by somebody else, too trivial for public consumption.
“It’s the only gleam of a shadow of interest,” said the war correspondent, “for ten whole days.
“No,” he said presently; “I’ll write that other article, ‘Is War Played Out?’“
He surveyed the darkling lines in perspective, the tangle of trenches one behind another, one commanding another, which the defender had made ready. The shadows and mists swallowed up their receding contours, and here and there a lantern gleamed, and here and there knots of men were busy about small fires. “No troops on earth could do it,” he said. . . .
He was depressed. He believed that there were other things in life better worth having than proficiency in war; he believed that in the heart of civilisation, for all its stresses, its crushing concentrations of forces, its injustice and suffering, there lay something that might be the hope of the world; and the idea that any people, by living in the open air, hunting perpetually, losing touch with books and art and all the things that intensify life, might hope to resist and break that great development to the end of time, jarred on his civilised soul.
Apt to his thought came a file of the defender soldiers, and passed him in the gleam of a swinging lamp that marked the way.
He glanced at their red-lit faces, and one shone out for a moment, a common type of face in the defender’s ranks: ill-shaped nose, sensuous lips, bright clear eyes full of alert cunning, slouch hat cocked on one side and adorned with the peacock’s plume of the rustic Don Juan turned soldier, a hard brown skin, a sinewy frame, an open, tireless stride, and a master’s grip on the rifle.
The war correspondent returned their salutations and went on his way.
“Louts,” he whispered. “Cunning, elementary louts. And they are going to beat the townsmen at the game of war!”
From the red glow among the nearer tents came first one and then half-a-dozen hearty voices, bawling in a drawling unison the words of a particularly slab and sentimental patriotic song.
“Oh, go it!” muttered the war correspondent, bitterly.
II
It was opposite the trenches called after Hackbone’s Hut that the battle began. There the ground stretched broad and level between the lines, with scarcely shelter for a lizard, and it seemed to the startled, just-awakened men who came crowding into the trenches that this was one more proof of that inexperience of the enemy of which they had heard so much. The war correspondent would not believe his ears at first, and swore that he and the war artist, who, still imperfectly roused, was trying to put on his boots by the light of a match held in his hand, were the victims of a common illusion. Then, after putting his head in a bucket of cold water, his intelligence came back as he towelled. He listened. “Gollys!” he said; “that’s some thing more than scare firing this time. It’s like ten thousand carts on a bridge of tin.”
There came a sort of enrichment to that steady uproar. “Machine-guns!”
Then, “Guns!”
The artist, with one boot on, thought to look at his watch, and went to it hopping.
“Half an hour from dawn,” he said. “You were right about their attacking, after all. . . .”
The war correspondent came out of the tent, verifying the presence of chocolate in his pocket as he did so. He had to halt for a moment or so until his eyes were toned down to the night a little. “Pitch!” he said. He stood for a space to season his eyes before he felt justified in striking out for a black gap among the adjacent tents. The artist coming out behind him fell over a tent-rope. It was half-past two o’clock in the morning of the darkest night in time, and against a sky full of dull black silk the enemy was talking search-lights, a wild jabber of searchlights. “He’s trying to blind our riflemen,” said the war correspondent with a flash, and waited for the artist and then set off with a sort of discreet haste again. “Whoa!” he said, presently. “Ditches!”
They stopped.
“It’s the confounded search-lights,” said the war correspondent.
They saw lanterns going to and fro, near by, and men falling in to march down to the trenches. They were for following them, and then the artist began to get his night eyes. “If we scramble this,” he said, “and it’s only a drain, there’s a clear run up to the ridge.” And that way they took. Lights came and went in the tents behind, as the men turned out, and ever and again they came to broken ground and staggered and stumbled. But in a little while they drew near the crest. Something that sounded like the impact of a tremendous railway accident happened in the air above them, and the shrapnel bullets seethed about them like a sudden handful of hail. “Right-oh!” said the war correspondent, and soon they judged they had come to the crest and stood in the midst of a world of great darkness and frantic glares, whose principal fact was sound.
Right and left of them and all about them was the uproar, an army-full of magazine fire, at first chaotic and monstrous, and then, eked out by little flashes and gleams and suggestions, taking the beginnings of a shape. It looked to the war correspondent as though the enemy must have attacked in line and with his whole force—in which case he was either being or was already annihilated.
“Dawn and the dead,” he said, with his instinct for headlines. He said this to himself, but afterwards by means of shouting he conveyed an idea to the artist. “They must have meant it for a surprise,” he said.
It was remarkable how the firing kept on. After a time he began to perceive a sort of rhythm in this inferno of noise. It would decline— decline perceptibly, droop towards something that was comparatively a pause—a pause of inquiry. “Aren’t you all dead yet?” this pause seemed to say. The flickering fringe of rifle-flashes would become attenuated and broken, and the whack-bang of the enemy’s big guns two miles away there would come up out of the deeps. Then suddenly, east or west of them, something would startle the rifles to a frantic outbreak again.
The war correspondent taxed his brain for some theory of conflict that would account for this, and was suddenly aware that the artist and he were vividly illuminated. He could see the ridge on which they stood, and before them in black outline a file of riflemen hurrying down towards the nearer trenches. It became visible that a light rain was falling, and farther away towards the enemy was a clear space with men—”our men?”—running across it in disorder. He saw one of those men throw up his hands and drop. And something else black and shining loomed up on the edge of the beam-coruscating flashes; and behind it and far away a calm, white eye regarded the world. “Whit, whit, whit,” sang something in the air, and then the artist was running for cover, with the war correspondent behind him. Bang came shrapnel, bursting close at hand as it seemed, and our two men were lying flat in a dip in the ground, and the light and everything had gone again, leaving a vast note of interrogation upon the light.
The war correspondent came within bawling range. “What the deuce was it? Shooting our men down!”
“Black,” said the artist, “and like a fort. Not two hundred yards from the first trench.”
He sought for comparisons in his mind. “Something between a big blockhouse and a giant’s dish-cover,” he said.
“And they were running!” said the war correspondent.
“You’d run if a thing like that, with a search-light to help it, turned up like a prowling nightmare in the middle of the night.”
They crawled to what they judged the edge of the dip and lay regarding the unfathomable dark. For a space they could distinguish nothing, and then a sudden convergence of the search-lights of both sides brought the strange thing out again.
In that flickering pallor it had the effect of a large and clumsy black insect, an insect the size of an iron-clad cruiser, crawling obliquely to the first line of trenches and firing shots out of port-holes in its side. And on its carcass the bullets must have been battering with more than the passionate violence of hail on a roof of tin.
Then in the twinkling of an eye the curtain of the dark had fallen again and the monster had vanished, but the crescendo of musketry marked its approach to the trenches.
They were beginning to talk about the thing to each other, when a flying bullet kicked dirt into the artist’s face, and they decided abruptly to crawl down into the cover of the trenches. They had got down with an unobtrusive persistence into the second line, before the dawn had grown clear enough for anything to be seen. They found themselves in a crowd of expectant riflemen, all noisily arguing about what would happen next. The enemy’s contrivance had done execution upon the outlying men, it seemed, but they did not believe it would do any more. “Come the day and we’ll capture the lot of them,” said a burly soldier.
“Them?” said the war correspondent.
“They say there’s a regular string of ‘em, crawling along the front of our lines. . . . Who cares?”
The darkness filtered away so imperceptibly that at no moment could one declare decisively that one could see. The search-lights ceased to sweep hither and thither. The enemy’s monsters were dubious patches of darkness upon the dark, and then no longer dubious, and so they crept out into distinctness. The war correspondent, munching chocolate absent-mindedly, beheld at last a spacious picture of battle under the cheerless sky, whose central focus was an array of fourteen or fifteen huge clumsy shapes lying in perspective on the very edge of the first line of trenches, at intervals of perhaps three hundred yards, and evidently firing down upon the crowded riflemen. They were so close in that the defender’s guns had ceased, and only the first line of trenches was in action.
The second line commanded the first, and as the light grew, the war correspondent could make out the riflemen who were fighting these monsters, crouched in knots and crowds behind the transverse banks that crossed the trenches against the eventuality of an enfilade. The trenches close to the big machines were empty save for the crumpled suggestions of dead and wounded men; the defenders had been driven right and left as soon as the prow of a land ironclad had looked up over the front of the trench. The war correspondent produced his field-glass, and was immediately a centre of inquiry from the soldiers about him.
They wanted to look, they asked questions, and after he had announced that the men across the traverses seemed unable to advance or retreat, and were crouching under cover rather than fighting, he found it advisable to loan his glasses to a burly and incredulous corporal. He heard a strident voice, and found a lean and sallow soldier at his back talking to the artist.
“There’s chaps down there caught,” the man was saying. “If they retreat they got to expose themselves, and the fire’s too straight. . . .”
“They aren’t firing much, but every shot’s a hit.”
“Who?”
“The chaps in that thing. The men who’re coming up—”
“Coming up where?”
“We’re evacuating them trenches where we can. Our chaps are coming back up the zigzags. . . . No end of ‘em hit. . . . But when we get clear our turn’ll come. Rather! Those things won’t be able to cross a trench or get into it; and before they can get back our guns’ll smash ‘em up. Smash ‘em right up. See?” A brightness came into his eyes. “Then we’ll have a go at the beggars inside,” he said. . . .
The war correspondent thought for a moment, trying to realise the idea. Then he set himself to recover his field-glasses from the burly corporal. . . .
The daylight was getting clearer now. The clouds were lifting, and a gleam of lemon-yellow amidst the level masses to the east portended sunrise. He looked again at the land ironclad. As he saw it in the bleak, grey dawn, lying obliquely upon the slope and on the very lip of the foremost trench, the suggestion of a stranded vessel was very strong indeed. It might have been from eighty to a hundred feet long—it was about two hundred and fifty yards away—its vertical side was ten feet high or so, smooth for that height, and then with a complex patterning under the eaves of its flattish turtle cover. This patterning was a close interlacing of port-holes, rifle barrels, and telescope tubes—sham and real—indistinguishable one from the other. The thing had come into such a position as to enfilade the trench, which was empty now, so far as he could see, except for two or three crouching knots of men and the tumbled dead. Behind it, across the plain, it had scored the grass with a train of linked impressions, like the dotted tracings sea things leave in sand. Left and right of that track dead men and wounded men were scattered—men it had picked off as they fled back from their advanced positions in the search-light glare from the invader’s lines. And now it lay with its head projecting a little over the trench it had won, as if it were a single sentient thing planning the next phase of its attack. . . .
He lowered his glasses and took a more comprehensive view of the situation. These creatures of the night had evidently won the first line of trenches and the fight had come to a pause. In the increasing light he could make out by a stray shot or a chance exposure that the defender’s marksmen were lying thick in the second and third line of trenches up towards the low crest of the position, and in such of the zigzags as gave them a chance of a converging fire. The men about him were talking of guns. “We’re in the line of the big guns at the crest, but they’ll soon shift one to pepper them,” the lean man said, reassuringly.
“Whup,” said the corporal.
“Bang! bang! bang! Whir-r-r-r-r!” it was a sort of nervous jump, and all the rifles were going off by themselves. The war correspondent found himself and the artist, two idle men crouching behind a line of preoccupied backs, of industrious men discharging magazines. The monster had moved. It continued to move regardless of the hail that splashed its skin with bright new specks of lead. It was singing a mechanical little ditty to itself, “Tuf-tuf, tuf-tuf, tuf-tuf,” and squirting out little jets of steam behind. It had humped itself up, as a limpet does before it crawls; it had lifted its skirt and displayed along the length of it—feet! They were thick, stumpy feet, between knobs and buttons in shape—flat, broad things, reminding one of the feet of elephants or the legs of caterpillars; and then, as the skirt rose higher, the war correspondent, scrutinising the thing through his glasses again, saw that these feet hung, as it were, on the rims of wheels. His thoughts whirled back to Victoria Street, Westminster, and he saw himself in the piping times of peace, seeking matter for an interview.
“Mr.—Mr. Diplock,” he said; “and he called them Pedrails. . . . Fancy meeting them here!”
The marksman beside him raised his head and shoulders in a speculative mood to fire more certainly—it seemed so natural to assume the attention of the monster must be distracted by this trench before if— and was suddenly knocked backwards by a bullet through his neck. His feet flew up, and he vanished out of the margin of the watcher’s field of vision. The war correspondent grovelled tighter, but after a glance behind him at a painful little confusion, he resumed his field-glass, for the thing was putting down its feet one after the other, and hoisting itself farther and farther over the trench. Only a bullet in the head could have stopped him looking just then.
The lean man with the strident voice ceased firing to turn and reiterate his point. “They can’t possibly cross,” he bawled. “They—”
“Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!”—drowned everything.
The lean man continued speaking for a word or so, then gave it up, shook his head to enforce the impossibility of anything crossing a trench like the one below, and resumed business once more.
And all the while that great bulk was crossing. When the war correspondent turned his glass on it again it had bridged the trench, and its queer feet were rasping away at the farther bank, in the attempt to get a hold there. It got its hold. It continued to crawl until the greater bulk of it was over the trench—until it was all over. Then it paused for a moment, adjusted its skirt a little nearer the ground, gave an unnerving “toot, toot,” and came on abruptly at a pace of, perhaps, six miles an hour straight up the gentle slope towards our observer.
The war correspondent raised himself on his elbow and looked a natural inquiry at the artist.
For a moment the men about him stuck to their position and fired furiously. Then the lean man in a mood of precipitancy slid backwards, and the war correspondent said “Come along” to the artist, and led the movement along the trench.
As they dropped down, the vision of a hillside of trench being rushed by a dozen vast cockroaches disappeared for a space, and instead was one of a narrow passage, crowded with men, for the most part receding, though one or two turned or halted. He never turned back to see the nose of the monster creep over the brow of the trench; he never even troubled to keep in touch with the artist. He heard the “whit” of bullets about him soon enough, and saw a man before him stumble and drop, and then he was one of a furious crowd fighting to get into a transverse zigzag ditch that enabled the defenders to get under cover up and down the hill. It was like a theatre panic. He gathered from signs and fragmentary words that on ahead another of these monsters had also won to the second trench.
He lost his interest in the general course of the battle for a space altogether; he became simply a modest egotist, in a mood of hasty circumspection, seeking the farthest rear, amidst a dispersed multitude of disconcerted riflemen similarly employed. He scrambled down through trenches, he look his courage in both hands and sprinted across the open, he had moments of panic when it seemed madness not to be quadrupedal, and moments of shame when he stood up and faced about to see how the fight was going. And he was one of many thousand very similar men that morning. On the ridge he halted in a knot of scrub, and was for a few minutes almost minded to stop and see things out.
The day was now fully come. The grey sky had changed to blue, and of all the cloudy masses of the dawn there remained only a few patches of dissolving fleeciness. The world below was bright and singularly clear. The ridge was not, perhaps, more than a hundred feet or so above the general plain, but in this flat region it sufficed to give the effect of extensive view. Away on the north side of the ridge, little and far, were the camps, the ordered wagons, all the gear of a big army; with officers galloping about and men doing aimless things. Here and there men were falling in, however, and the cavalry was forming up on the plain beyond the tents. The bulk of men who had been in the trenches were still on the move to the rear, scattered like sheep without a shepherd over the farther slopes. Here and there were little rallies and attempts to wait and do—something vague; but the general drift was away from any concentration. There on the southern side was the elaborate lacework of trenches and defences, across which these iron turtles, fourteen of them spread out over a line of perhaps three miles, were now advancing as fast as a man could trot, and methodically shooting down and breaking up any persistent knots of resistance. Here and there stood little clumps of men, outflanked and unable to get away, showing the white flag, and the invader’s cyclist infantry was advancing now across the open, in open order, but unmolested, to complete the work of the machines. Surveyed at large, the defenders already looked a beaten army. A mechanism that was effectually ironclad against bullets, that could at a pinch cross a thirty-foot trench, and that seemed able to shoot out rifle-bullets with unerring precision, was clearly an inevitable victor against anything but rivers, precipices, and guns.
He looked at his watch. “Half-past four! Lord! What things can happen in two hours. Here’s the whole blessed army being walked over, and at half-past two—
“And even now our blessed louts haven’t done a thing with their guns!”
He scanned the ridge right and left of him with his glasses. He turned again to the nearest land ironclad, advancing now obliquely to him and not three hundred yards away, and then scanned the ground over which he must retreat if he was not to be captured.
“They’ll do nothing,” he said, and glanced again at the enemy.
And then from far away to the left came the thud of a gun followed very rapidly by a rolling gun-fire.
He hesitated and decided to stay.
III
The defender had relied chiefly upon his rifles in the event of an assault. His guns he kept concealed at various points upon and behind the ridge ready to bring them into action against any artillery preparations for an attack on the part of his antagonist. The situation had rushed upon him with the dawn, and by the time the gunners had their guns ready for motion, the land ironclads were already in among the foremost trenches. There is a natural reluctance to fire into one’s own broken men, and many of the guns, being intended simply to fight an advance of the enemy’s artillery, were not in positions to hit anything in the second line of trenches. After that the advance of the land ironclads was swift. The defender-general found himself suddenly called upon to invent a new sort of warfare, in which guns were to fight alone amidst broken and retreating infantry. He had scarcely thirty minutes in which to think it out. He did not respond to the call, and what happened that morning was that the advance of the land ironclads forced the fight, and each gun and battery made what play its circumstances dictated. For the most part it was poor play.
Some of the guns got in two or three shots, some one or two, and the percentage of misses was unusually high. The howitzers, of course, did nothing. The land ironclads in each case followed much the same tactics. As soon as a gun came into play the monster turned itself almost end-on, so as to minimise the chances of a square hit, and made not for the gun, but for the nearest point on its flank from which the gunners could be shot down. Few of the hits scored were very effectual; only one of the things was disabled, and that was the one that fought the three batteries attached to the brigade on the left wing. Three that were hit when close upon the guns were clean shot through without being put out of action. Our war correspondent did not see that one momentary arrest of the tide of victory on the left; he saw only the very ineffectual fight of half-battery 96B close a hand upon his right. This he watched some time beyond the margin of safety.
Just after he heard the three batteries opening up upon his left he became aware of the thud of horses’ hoofs from the sheltered side of the slope, and presently saw first one and then two other guns galloping into position along the north side of the ridge, well out of sight of the great bulk that was now creeping obliquely towards the crest and cutting up the lingering infantry beside it and below, as it came.
The half-battery swung round into line—each gun describing its curve —halted, unlimbered, and prepared for action. . . .
“Bang!”
The land ironclad had become visible over the brow of the hill, and just visible as a long black back to the gunners. It halted, as though it hesitated.
The two remaining guns fired, and then their big antagonist had swung round and was in full view, end-on, against the sky, coming at a rush.
The gunners became frantic in their haste to fire again. They were so near the war correspondent could see the expression of their excited faces through his field-glass. As he looked he saw a man drop, and realised for the first time that the ironclad was shooting.
For a moment the big black monster crawled with an accelerated pace towards the furiously active gunners. Then, as if moved by a generous impulse, it turned its full broadside to their attack, and scarcely forty yards away from them. The war correspondent turned his field-glass back to the gunners and perceived it was now shooting down the men about the guns with the most deadly rapidity.
Just for a moment it seemed splendid, and then it seemed horrible. The gunners were dropping in heaps about their guns. To lay a hand on a gun was death. “Bang!” went the gun on the left, a hopeless miss, and that was the only second shot the half-battery fired. In another moment half-a-dozen surviving artillerymen were holding up their hands amidst a scattered muddle of dead and wounded men, and the fight was done.
The war correspondent hesitated between stopping in his scrub and waiting for an opportunity to surrender decently, or taking to an adjacent gully he had discovered. If he surrendered it was certain he would get no copy off; while, if he escaped, there were all sorts of chances. He decided to follow the gully, and take the first offer in the confusion beyond the camp of picking up a horse.
IV
Subsequent authorities have found fault with the first land ironclads in many particulars, but assuredly they served their purpose on the day of their appearance. They were essentially long, narrow, and very strong steel frameworks carrying the engines, and borne upon eight pairs of big pedrail wheels, each about ten feet in diameter, each a driving wheel and set upon long axles free to swivel round a common axis. This arrangement gave them the maximum of adaptability to the contours of the ground. They crawled level along the ground with one foot high upon a hillock and another deep in a depression, and they could hold themselves erect and steady sideways upon even a steep hillside. The engineers directed the engines under the command of the captain, who had look-out points at small ports all round the upper edge of the adjustable skirt of twelve-inch iron-plating which protected the whole affair, and who could also raise or depress a conning-tower set about the port-holes through the centre of the iron top cover. The riflemen each occupied a small cabin of peculiar construction, and these cabins were slung along the sides of and before and behind the great main framework, in a manner suggestive of the slinging of the seats of an Irish jaunting-car. Their rifles, however, were very different pieces of apparatus from the simple mechanisms in the hands of their adversaries.
These were in the first place automatic, ejected their cartridges and loaded again from a magazine each time they fired, until the ammunition store was at an end, and they had the most remarkable sights imaginable, sights which threw a bright little camera-obscura picture into the light-tight box in which the riflemen sat below. This camera-obscura picture was marked with two crossed lines, and whatever was covered by the intersection of these two lines, that the rifle hit. The sighting was ingeniously contrived. The rifleman stood at the table with a thing like an elaboration of a draughtsman’s dividers in his hand, and he opened and closed these dividers, so that they were always at the apparent height —if it was an ordinary-sized man—of the man he wanted to kill. A little twisted strand of wire like an electric-light wire ran from this implement up to the gun, and as the dividers opened and shut the sights went up or down. Changes in the clearness of the atmosphere, due to changes of moisture, were met by an ingenious use of that meteorologically sensitive substance, catgut, and when the land ironclad moved forward the sights got a compensatory deflection in the direction of its motion. The rifleman stood up in his pitch-dark chamber and watched the little picture before him. One hand held the dividers for judging distance, and the other grasped a big knob like a door-handle. As he pushed this knob about the rifle above swung to correspond, and the picture passed to and fro like an agitated panorama. When he saw a man he wanted to shoot he brought him up to the cross-lines, and then pressed a finger upon a little push like an electric bell-push, conveniently placed in the centre of the knob. Then the man was shot. If by any chance the rifleman missed his target he moved the knob a trifle, or readjusted his dividers, pressed the push, and got him the second time.
This rifle and its sights protruded from a port-hole exactly like a great number of other port-holes that ran in a triple row under the eaves of the cover of the land ironclad. Each port-hole displayed a rifle and sight in dummy, so that the real ones could only be hit by a chance shot, and if one was, then the young man below said “Pshaw!” turned on an electric light, lowered the injured instrument into his camera, replaced the injured part; or put up a new rifle if the injury was considerable.
You must conceive these cabins as hung clear above the swing of the axles, and inside the big wheels upon which the great elephant-like feet were hung, and behind these cabins along the centre of the monster ran a central gallery into which they opened, and along which worked the big compact engines. It was like a long passage into which this throbbing machinery had been packed, and the captain stood about the middle, close to the ladder that led to his conning-tower, and directed the silent, alert engineers—for the most part by signs. The throb and noise of the engines mingled with the reports of the rifles and the intermittent clangout of the bullet hail upon the armour. Ever and again he would touch the wheel that raised his conning-tower, step up his ladder until his engineers could see nothing of him above the waist, and then come down again with orders. Two small electric lights were all the illumination of this space— they were placed to make him most clearly visible to his subordinates; the air was thick with the smell of oil and petrol, and had the war correspondent been suddenly transferred from the spacious dawn outside to the bowels of this apparatus he would have thought himself fallen into another world.
The captain, of course, saw both sides of the battle. When he raised his head into his conning-tower there were the dewy sunrise, the amazed and disordered trenches, the flying and falling soldiers, the depressed-looking groups of prisoners, the beaten guns; when he bent down again to signal “half speed,” “quarter speed,” “half circle round toward the right,” or what not, he was in the oil-smelling twilight of the ill-lit engine-room. Close beside him on either side was the mouthpiece of a speaking-tube, and ever and again he would direct one side or other of his strange craft to “concentrate fire forward on gunners,” or to “clear out trench about a hundred yards on our right front.”
He was a young man, healthy enough but by no means sun-tanned, and of a type of feature and expression that prevails in His Majesty’s Navy: alert, intelligent, quiet. He and his engineers and riflemen all went about their work, calm and reasonable men. They had none of that flapping strenuousness of the half-wit in a hurry, that excessive strain upon the blood-vessels, that hysteria of effort which is so frequently regarded as the proper state of mind for heroic deeds.
For the enemy these young engineers were defeating they felt a certain qualified pity and a quite unqualified contempt. They regarded these big, healthy men they were shooting down precisely as these same big, healthy men might regard some inferior kind of nigger. They despised them for making war; despised their bawling patriotisms and their emotionality profoundly; despised them, above all, for the petty cunning and the almost brutish want of imagination their method of fighting displayed. “If they must make war,” these young men thought, “why in thunder don’t they do it like sensible men?” They resented the assumption that their own side was too stupid to do anything more than play their enemy’s game, that they were going to play this costly folly according to the rules of unimaginative men. They resented being forced to the trouble of making man-killing machinery; resented the alternative of having to massacre these people or endure their truculent yappings, resented the whole unfathomable imbecility of war.
Meanwhile, with something of the mechanical precision of a good clerk posting a ledger, the riflemen moved their knobs and pressed their buttons. . . .
The captain of Land Ironclad Number Three had halted on the crest close to his captured half-battery. His lined-up prisoners stood hard by and waited for the cyclists behind to come for them. He surveyed the victorious morning through his conning-tower.
He read the general’s signals. “Five and Four are to keep among the guns to the left and prevent any attempt to recover them. Seven and Eleven and Twelve, stick to the guns you have got; Seven, get into position to command the guns taken by Three. Then we’re to do something else, are we? Six and One, quicken up to about ten miles an hour and walk around behind that camp to the levels near the river—we shall bag the whole crowd of them,” interjected the young man. “Ah, here we are! Two and Three, Eight and Nine, Thirteen and Fourteen, space out to a thousand yards, wait for the word, and then go slowly to cover the advance of the cyclist infantry against any charge of mounted troops. That’s all right. But where’s Ten? Halloa! Ten to repair and get movable as soon as possible. They’ve broken up Ten!”
The discipline of the new war machines was business-like rather than pedantic, and the head of the captain came down out of the conning-tower to tell his men: “I say, you chaps there. They’ve broken up Ten. Not badly, I think; but anyhow, he’s stuck.”
But that still left thirteen of the monsters in action to finish up the broken army.
The war correspondent stealing down his gully looked back and saw them all lying along the crest and talking, fluttering congratulatory flags to one another. Their iron sides were shining golden in the light of the rising sun.
V
The private adventures of the war correspondent terminated in surrender about one o’clock in the afternoon, and by that time he had stolen a horse, pitched off it, and narrowly escaped being rolled upon; found the brute had broken its leg, and shot it with his revolver. He had spent some hours in the company of a squad of dispirited riflemen, had quarrelled with them about topography at last, and gone off by himself in a direction that should have brought him to the banks of the river and didn’t. Moreover, he had eaten all his chocolate and found nothing in the whole world to drink. Also, it had become extremely hot. From behind a broken, but attractive, stone wall he had seen far away in the distance the defender-horsemen trying to charge cyclists in open order, with land ironclads outflanking them on either side. He had discovered that cyclists could retreat over open turf before horsemen with a sufficient margin of speed to allow of frequent dismounts and much terribly effective sharp-shooting and he had a sufficient persuasion that those horsemen, having charged their hearts out, had halted just beyond his range of vision and surrendered. He had been urged to sudden activity by a forward movement of one of those machines that had threatened to enfilade his wall. He had discovered a fearful blister on his heel.
He was now in a scrubby gravelly place, sitting down and meditating on his pocket-handkerchief, which had in some extraordinary way become in the last twenty-four hours extremely ambiguous in hue. “It’s the whitest thing I’ve got,” he said.
He had known all along that the enemy was east, west, and south of him, but when he heard land ironclads Number One and Six talking in their measured, deadly way not half a mile to the north he decided to make his own little unconditional peace without any further risks. He was for hoisting his white flag to a bush and taking up a position of modest obscurity near it until some one came along. He became aware of voices, clatter, and the distinctive noises of a body of horse, quite near, and he put his handkerchief in his pocket again and went to see what was going forward.
The sound of firing ceased, and then as he drew near he heard the deep sounds of many simple, coarse, but hearty and noble-hearted soldiers of the old school swearing with vigour.
He emerged from his scrub upon a big level plain, and far away a fringe of trees marked the banks of the river.
In the centre of the picture was a still-intact road bridge, and a big railway bridge a little to the right. Two land ironclads rested, with a general air of being long, harmless sheds, in a pose of anticipatory peacefulness right and left of the picture, completely commanding two miles and more of the river levels. Emerged and halted a few yards from the scrub was the remainder of the defender’s cavalry, dusty, a little disordered and obviously annoyed, but still a very fine show of men. In the middle distance three or four men and horses were receiving medical attendance, and nearer a knot of officers regarded the distant novelties in mechanism with profound distaste. Every one was very distinctly aware of the twelve other ironclads, and of the multitude of townsmen soldiers, on bicycles or afoot, encumbered now by prisoners and captured war-gear, but otherwise thoroughly effective, who were sweeping like a great net in their rear.
“Checkmate,” said the war correspondent, walking out in the open. “But I surrender in the best of company. Twenty-four hours ago I thought war was impossible—and these beggars have captured the whole blessed army! Well! Well!” He thought of his talk with the young lieutenant. “If there’s no end to the surprises of science, the civilised people have it, of course. As long as their science keeps going they will necessarily be ahead of open-country men. Still. . . .” He wondered for a space what might have happened to the young lieutenant.
The war correspondent was one of those inconsistent people who always want the beaten side to win. When he saw all these burly, suntanned horsemen, disarmed and dismounted and lined up; when he saw their horses unskillfully led away by the singularly not equestrian cyclists to whom they had surrendered; when he saw these truncated Paladins watching this scandalous sight, he forgot altogether that he had called these men “cunning louts” and wished them beaten not four-and-twenty hours ago. A month ago he had seen that regiment in its pride going forth to war, and had been told of its terrible prowess, how it could charge in open order with each man firing from his saddle, and sweep before it anything else that ever came out to battle in any sort of order, foot or horse. And it had had to fight a few score of young men in atrociously unfair machines!
“Manhood versus Machinery” occurred to him as a suitable headline. Journalism curdles all one’s mind to phrases.
He strolled as near the lined-up prisoners as the sentinels seemed disposed to permit, and surveyed them and compared their sturdy proportions with those of their lightly built captors.
“Smart degenerates,” he muttered. “Anaemic cockneydom.”
The surrendered officers came quite close to him presently, and he could hear the colonel’s high-pitched tenor. The poor gentleman had spent three years of arduous toil upon the best material in the world perfecting that shooting from the saddle charge, and he was inquiring with phrases of blasphemy, natural in the circumstances, what one could be expected to do against this suitably consigned ironmongery.
“Guns,” said someone.
“Big guns they can walk round. You can’t shift big guns to keep pace with them, and little guns in the open they rush. I saw ‘em rushed. You might do a surprise now and then—assassinate the brutes, perhaps—”
“You might make things like ‘em.”
“What? More ironmongery? Us? . .
“I’ll call my article,” meditated the war correspondent, “ ‘Mankind versus Ironmongery,’ and quote the old boy at the beginning.”
And he was much too good a journalist to spoil his contrast by remarking that the half-dozen comparatively slender young men in blue pyjamas who were standing about their victorious land ironclad, drinking coffee and eating biscuits, had also in their eyes and carriage something not altogether degraded below the level of a man.
April, 1911
THE DAM
by Hugh S. Johnson
THE United States was scarcely immune to the “future war” story, particularly after the Japanese naval victory over Russia at the turn of the century. The efficiency of the Japanese navy left no doubt in the mind of anyone that Japan could provide formidable opposition at sea and was capable of landing an invading army.
Hugh Samuel Johnson, author of The Dam, graduated from West Point in 1903. He was to become an internationally known figure since he would formulate the methodology and policies for selective service in World War I and supervise its execution through 1917 and 1918, rising to the rank of Brigadier General. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president of the United States in the midst of the worst depression in this nation’s history, Hugh Johnson was appointed to head the NRA (National Recovery Administration) during 1933 and 1934, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that its functions were unconstitutional. He was then made head of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) for New York City in 1935.
Although Johnson owed his political life to Franklin Roosevelt, he campaigned against Roosevelt’s third term in 1940.
Johnson practiced law, but in his younger days he had been a regular contributor of fiction and nonfiction to the popular magazines. He resumed writing as a columnist for the Scripps-Howard papers in 1934 and was also much in demand as a lecturer and radio commentator.
Understanding Johnson’s background, it is easy to believe that The Dam was written as a “warning” story, to encourage military preparedness on the part of the United States. On the Contents page of the April 1911 issue of the red book magazine in which it appeared, editor Karl Edwin Harriman blurbed the story as “An incident of the American-Japanese War.” When the story begins, the war has been in progress for some time and the United States has had reverses. When the story ends, the war is continuing and the end is not yet in sight.
There would be many other stories of American wars with Japan, at least enough to warrant the writing of a substantial monogram, and thorough research would probably disclose a quantity adequate for an entire book. With the advantage of historical perspective, it can be said that such stories have underscored the accuracy of a great deal of science fiction prophecy.
THERE had been no warning of the war. The Pacific cables had ceased to work and the Atlantic fleet voyaged southward. Then, the lifting fog-curtain across Monterey Bay disclosed the Japanese transports riding at anchor in the offing. The puny flower of the American army was destroyed at a blow, and the great, half-trained colossus that now lay sprawled along the edge of the last green strip of California, with the desert behind it, and a new Japanese Empire in front, was the remaining hope of the Union on the Coast.
For the country had settled earnestly to the bitter business of war. It had strengthened the remnant of that early-destroyed army of laymen, in every way that six months’ time can strengthen an army. There were sent to it thousands of eager but untrained volunteers, hundreds of guns, and mountains of supplies. Eagerness and guns and supplies do not make armies and of this fact the invaders at least were confidently aware.
Japan had been very busy, organizing to remain, taking toll for the cost of war, and converting the mountain passes into miniature Port Arthurs. Up to this time they had paid scant heed to the huddled and defeated remnant that still held the gate of the last feasible avenue of attack from the states beyond the mountains. The time had come to seal that gap and render themselves as securely in possession as hills and desert could make them.
Perhaps they had waited a month too long. The American general, Eblee, was a theoretical soldier, but he was, first of all, an organizer— and he had done good work. It was true, that at his back, were only the desert and the shimmering rails of the Southern Pacific leading across it to safety. But his right flank rested firmly in the mountains, his left in a strong position on the Mexican frontier, and his center was manned by his best troops.
“They will strike our left and try to crumple it back on the center, and then push us from our railroad and into the mountains,” the General predicted. “If they succeed, we’re lost—but they won’t succeed.”
The American extreme right consisted of two regiments of cavalry, posted at the great dam of the Santa Symprosa Irrigation Project.
“Where that wild Indian, Bolles,” the General said, “won’t have any chance to go cavorting around with his ‘splendid survivals,’ getting in the way of good infantry, and spoiling what little strategy there is in this war.”
Eblee did not believe in cavalry. He had even decried the rear-guard work of Bolles’ regiments, which same work had saved the remnant of the First Army in its long flight down the length of California. The General was a soldier of the new Germanic school, with which nothing could have been more at outs than that same hard-riding, irreverent, chance-taking Bolles who, with his admiring and sympathetic troopers, was enduring his banishment from the supposed seat of war with the worst of grace. To Bolles, Eblee sent a bespectacled and well-crammed Lieutenant, fresh from a service school.
“To instill a little modern science into your command,” the tactless order said. Considering that Bolles had been chasing White Mountain Apaches across the Arizona alkali, when the Lieutenant was still kicking on a counterpane, he, Bolles, was not vastly pleased.
“Look here, Napoleon,” was his greeting, “I have no doubt at all of your ability and acquirements, but I wish you’d demonstrate them for me by figuring out the stresses and strains of the Santa Symprosa dam, the amount of water it backs up, and the country it controls.”
“That will keep him busy for ten days,” Bolles explained to the British Observer, who had insisted upon remaining at Cavalry Headquarters in spite of many invitations from the General, “and by that time I expect doing along this line.”
“But why the dam? I should think you could get all that information— if you have the faintest need for it.”
“Heavens, man, I don’t care a blue fig about the dam—it’ll keep him from messing with my troops, won’t it?”
“Oh,” said the Guards’ Major, “I see.”
In the fullness of their own good time the Japanese turned their attention to the growing army in the South, and out in front of Eblee’s long line their perfectly ordered divisions began to take positions on a parallel range of hills.
For five days the forces lay facing each other across the valley of the Santa Symprosa, with no other evidence of either’s presence than the helios winking from the crests by day and the rare bar of a search-light’s beam against the sky by night.
Then began a week of scientific sparring. An aeroplane chugged and whirred across the American lines at a thousand feet, one morning at dawn. It drew a sputtering fire from the Japanese hills, and then, swooping toward it from the invaders’ signal station, came the first of the blue Odzu monoplanes to be seen in the war. The American had the wings of his pursuer and he began a sweeping reconnaissance of the whole line. Over the center, he ran fairly counter of a vertical battery firing “marking” shells, that left a parabolic wake of stringy, heavy smoke, and finally brought the American to the earth, wheeling and tumbling out of the sky like a wounded sand-hill crane.
Patrols were wrangling in the valley and finally a force of Japanese cavalry struck Eblee’s right flank, driving in Bolles’ outposts, where the narrow gorge of the Santa Symprosa canon debouches on the valley. It was their first real experience with American dragoons. Upon them descended Bolles like an angry deity. He caught them in the open, slashed them with short-range fire and drove them pell-mell to their hills and the cover of their artillery. But they came back, to follow an erratic course down Eblee’s front. They were checking the reports of their aeroplanes and patrols. After they disappeared, there was an ominous quiet for two days and then—along the whole left wing of the American army, from the center to the very Mexican line, the Japs opened the ball with their guns.
They sprayed the trenches with indirect shrapnel fire and hunted the hills for the range. Then they found the American artillery positions and proceeded methodically to pound them. The gunners’ work in that battle was a bit of well-turned beauty. One by one, Eblee’s field-pieces withdrew from the Yankee chorus, and they did it so plausibly that even the General was not certain that his artillery had not been duly silenced. The ruse worked well, for on the heels of the last salvos, came the premature infantry advance and, over the distant sky-line, the long black columns began to pour. They disintegrated in the V of the valley and came out of the cover of the trees along the stream, in a slender cordon of skirmishers that looked, through the field glasses, like a string of infinitesimal beads on an invisible wire. They were about half-way up the defenders’ slope when every gun in the American left wing opened on them. A horizontal sheet of sharpnel and machine-gun fire struck them like a blight. They crumpled but came on, and down to the cover of the trees rushed their reserves.
The American infantry had just opened fire when a staff-officer brought Eblee Bolles’ message, reporting activity in the front of that detached and forgotten position in the hills. The General was quite ready to stand firm in the strength of his prophecy.
“Mere demonstration on our right,” he said, not taking his glasses from his eyes. “Tell Major Bolles that we are in full possession of the details of this attack—and you might add, Caldwell, that he needn’t be alarmed.”
Squatting at the far end of the field-buzzer Bolles received this message and swore.
“I needn’t be alarmed—needn’t I? As if I couldn’t get out of the way of any skip-two-and-carry-a-dozen saddle-colored-serfs-of-the-Orient that have ever shouldered a rifle—I needn’t be alarmed. Well when the end of this theoretical, Deutcherized line crumples like a jack-knife, we’ll see who needs to be alarmed.”
“You really needn’t, you know, Major,” ventured the well-crammed Lieutenant. “They have nothing to gain by attacking us in force here and all the German authorities are unanimous—” He got no further.
“Slow up, Von Moltke. I don’t know what the German authorities say about the Santa Symprosa dam, but American common-sense says that it controls this theatre of operations like an electric push-button—”
Bolles stopped suddenly as thought distracted by something in his own words. The lieutenant thought that “something” was their rather rough jocularity. He smiled faintly, patronizingly.
“Oh, that’s all right, Major. I don’t mind a little chaffing.”
Bolles heard this remark no more than he noticed the good-natured sarcasm of Major Barwell-Carruthers, of the Guards:
“You don’t seem to have much influence with your general, Bolles.”
Forty miles away, the General was beaming with elation. For the infantry fire of the defenders had completed the work of the guns. From where Eblee stood he could see below him a few squat figures, staggering like drunken men in a yellow fog. But the fog was the heavy, saffron smoke of exploding shells and the dust and earth kicked up from the hillside by the withering fire of his own rifles and guns. It lay along the valley as far as he could see. In its cover the broken Japanese line had hesitated a moment—only a moment; after that, it went scuttling down the hill in chaotic rout. Already news of an American victory was being blocked out before cheering crowds on a thousand bulletin boards throughout the states. It was the first reversal of humiliation and utter gloom in the six months’ war, and it produced an hysterical enthusiasm that peace-time words cannot suggest. Stores and offices were not closed. They were deserted with open doors, and the streets were filled with mobs of joy-crazed people.
Eblee was certain of what to expect now. The enemy’s attack had developed exactly as he had deduced it. They were trying to force him from the railroad and destroy him in the hills. He knew that the assault would be repeated and he began drawing fresh troops from his center and even from the far-off right flank.
“Bolles—at the Santa Symprosa dam—two regiments of cavalry—” the chief of staff read, from his list of available reserves.
“Oh, cavalry has no bid to this party,” Eblee ordered, “leave ‘em there. If we get that badly stalled we can send for ‘em.”
All that night troops from the center and right were stumbling in through the darkness to be assigned to positions by sleepy staff-officers who had been in the saddle for hours on end. With the dawn came the opening guns of the renewed attack. In retrospect, there was something unusual about that attack that, in the elation of its repulse, Eblee cannot be blamed for overlooking, any more than he blamed himself, when Bolles’ second message came growling over the field-buzzer:
“Force of Japanese of all arms marching up the gorge of the Santa Symprosa cañon. Conservative estimate—forty thousand men. Reports indicate that it is the Second Japanese Field Army—Field Marshal Tsushima. You might add for me to the General, Caldwell, in a purely unofficial way, that I, personally, am not in the least alarmed, though I am sure that the Right of the Line is completely enveloped and the last position for American troops is rendered untenable. We may be able to put up a bluff and hold ‘em for an hour—they’re ten miles away— say four hours in all. I’m waiting orders.”
It is difficult to make clear enough the significance of Tsushima’s flanking movement in the Battle of Santa Symprosa. The frontal attack on Eblee’s left wing had been a colossal feint, to allow the approach, on an unprotected portion of the American position, of an overwhelming force, which (once it had reached the dam), by its mere presence decided the battle more completely than any amount of firing and death could ever decide it. Eblee was not only checkmated, he was rendered helpless, boxed, tied and tagged for transportation. He knew it before his aide had half-finished the stammered message. To his credit be it said that his first thought was of the waiting, cheer-hoarse Americans, whom he had deceived by his early confident messages of victory. Eblee was not a strong man; he was only a superficially brilliant one and he had been completely cozened. He sat limply down upon a rock and his flushed, tired face dropped to his knees and folded arms. The chief of staff assumed control.
Out at the dam, Bolles’ two regiments were standing “to horse” in columns of masses, eagerly watching the little group of waiting officers about the box of the field-buzzer on the ground. Bolles was fully as bitter in his rage and disappointment as Eblee could possibly have been, but he was a different stamp of man. He could even reply to the chaffing of the British attache.
Major Barwell-Carruthers had had much to suffer in his weeks with Bolles. A camp-intimacy that allowed it had sprung up between them, and the distinctively American Bolles had lost no opportunity and overlooked no racial peculiarity, in that time. The South-Sea generic term of “lime-juicer” had been shortened to mere “lime,” and not one time-honored quip had been forgotten.
Major Carruthers’ day had come, and he was making gentle use of it.
“You’ve got to give it to the little beggars, Bolles. Right up to your back-door—and your outposts all asleep—I say, old fay-low, it’s rough. You’d better show ‘em your heels—their infantry will catch you.”
“Don’t you worry about their infantry, Lime; they haven’t got the Santa Symprosa dam—yet, you know.”
“There’s no use holdin’ ‘em, I’d say—even if you could. The general couldn’t possibly get enough troops here to do any good, in ten hours’ time. The refreshin’ audacity of ‘em though! Marchin’ up a canon that way. They wouldn’t have done that if they hadn’t known you Yankees were asleep. Too risky and gives you too good a chance to pot ‘em. As it was, it screened the movement from the aeroplanes and the like. Oh, you’ve got to give it to ‘em.”
Some thought of his own was filling Bolles with heightening and helpless anger.
“If I could only reach the artillery ammunition column,” he fumed, half-aloud, “I’d fix ‘em yet.”
“Artillery column? You’d better get to the rear and try to escape the general capture. You’ll look fit after you’ve lived on the fish and rice diet of a prison camp for a year. Why are you waitin’?”
“I’m waiting to see how much time the General wants.”
“He’ll get the time Japanese infantry needs to march nine miles— it’s precious little.”
Bolles started to reply when the man at the receiver interrupted.
“Message comin’ over, sir,” he said. Bolles took the receiver.
“Yes,” he called, “Bolles—Santa Symprosa dam.”
“The General’s orders are that you withdraw toward the center. Other advices confirm the report that our right flank is completely turned. Destroy all supplies. The General also says that you should have obtained information of this movement long before you did. He holds you responsible. We’re completely done for.”
Bolles’ face became crimson with anger. He mumbled something into the mouth-piece.
“What’s that?” came clearly over the wire. “Didn’t you get the message?”
“Didn’t get a word of it,” growled Bolles. “Something the matter with the line.” And he reached out where the black thread of the buzzer lay along the ground, grasped it in a strong hand, and before ten witnesses deliberately jerked it asunder.
‘Wow, Lime,” he bantered as he got to his feet, “I’ll bet you a month’s pay against your Whippy saddle that I hold the Japs in the cañon until— until—until the General gets away.”
There was one idea dominant in the mind of Eblee’s chief-of-staff. That was, to get as many men as his limited time would let him aboard the trains that lay waiting in black and puffing ranks on the newly built switches of the main base, and away toward the safety of the states. He kept a brave show of force on the front where three successive Japanese attacks had been repulsed on the preceding days, but back at the base, where the night was lighted to a ghastly day by the flames of the fires that were forever saving great hillocks of supplies from Japanese capture, and the shrieking of locomotive whistles drowned all sound, and the confusion of hurrying men made passage perilous, regiment after regiment was being loaded on anything that ran on wheels. He had hoped for ten hours, and when that time had dragged by, and a second relay of freight cars came rumbling out of the desert, he stopped long enough to say to the General:
“It’s not as bad as we thought, sir. Five brigades of the First Field Army have been entrained. New cars are here and there aren’t any more reports from Bolles.”
“It’s bad enough,” groaned Eblee. “Think of Washington—think of the States! After we’d reported a victory, too. Oh, I don’t want to go back— I don’t want to go back—”
Looming like a specter in the red glare, a staff-officer galloped straight for temporary headquarters and began calling the general’s name.
“Here—” said Eblee wearily, “here—I suppose it’s all over now.”
The boy threw himself from his horse and stood panting and trying to speak. A group of disconsolate correspondents looked up from the brims of their pulled-down hats, and finally rose and drew closer. No one interfered with them.
“Message—from Major Bolles—sir,” gasped the aide. “He presents Mar—shal Tsushima’s un—conditional surrender—Fifty thousand men— sir—colors and guns—for God’r sake—get troops there—general, it’s a—bluff—and it may bust—any moment—”
The Japanese advance, marching up the floor of Santa Symprosa cañon, heard firing on the plateau above them and on both flanks. Their service of information had been perfect, and the firing disturbed no one. They knew that they could reach the Santa Symprosa dam before any considerable force could cut them off. They had placed flank guards in advance of their columns on both sides of the canon’s walls—guards with strength enough to brush Bolles’ little force aside without so much as stopping. Field Marshal Tsushima glanced smilingly up at the cliffs that rose a sheer five hundred feet on either side of his massed columns, but he did no more.
Ten minutes later an aide signaled down from above. An officer stopped to take the message, but the staff did not draw rein. Then the man galloped up and turned in his report.
The General began reading it, marching, but before he was half through it he raised his hand for “halt.” There was more signaling and at last, that signaling became frantic. The firing had ceased and the whole Japanese army was receiving word to stand fast. There was a ripple of excitement that became a questioning murmur. For Field Marshal Tsushima, after more wig-wagging and many exclamations, dismounted and made a scrambling, painful way up a zigzag trail to the top of the canon, to a consultation with an American major, who had given good and sufficient reasons for not coming down.
Marshal Tsushima was met by officers of the right flank guard and conducted to a large flat rock on which were spread maps, tracings and blue prints of the Santa Symprosa dam. A white flag of truce was leaning against a tree, and an officer in American khaki was languidly explaining something to an interpreter, who was excitedly retailing it to a pushing, craning circle of Japanese officers.
“You can see for yourself, sir,” Bolles drawled, when the gist of his previous talk had been retailed to the general, “the dam is three hundred feet high and half-a-mile long. Here are the figures on the water it backs up,” and he proffered a closely-covered sheet, sprinkled with Greek symbols and footed by an underscored result, in which the word “gals” tailed off a row of figures that covered the bottom of it from edge to edge. “Here is a contoured map of the canon, showing the ‘fall’ we get. You see—the gorge narrows again, below here, about opposite where your supply-trains are now. Labor could have been saved by building the dam there, but it wouldn’t have given the tremendous ‘head’ of water we need here, for power. Now, sir, we have the whole Symprosa dam fairly honey-combed with Rack-a-Rock. Here is an elevation of the front face—we weren’t taking any chances, you perceive. There are about three tons of explosive—more or less.” The last sheet was a wide blue print on which had been traced with red ink the current lines of an electric detonator that ramified to power charges indicated on the wall of the dam. “As I started to say, sir, you can see from this that fourteen minutes after I give the signal to the look-out, standing over there on the peak of Conduit Point, all the ground that your army now occupies will be covered with a torrential flood of fifty feet of water. A few of your men might escape—but it’s extremely doubtful.” Bolles hesitated a little and stammered becomingly.
“You will understand, sir,” he went on, “that when the time came for me to act, I found myself unable to take the responsibility for such an unprecedented destruction of human life, without giving you some opportunity of avoiding it.”
There was bickering and there was bluster, and many requests for armistices, and time to consult superiors—deprecations of unheard of methods of warfare, and diplomacy, and references to the precepts of the Geneva Convention. Bolles had not played twenty years of poker for nothing. He made one great concession when he allowed a detail of Japanese officers to be conducted to the dam. One sight of it was enough.
At a black box of a friction detonator a young officer was waiting with his hand on the plunger, intently watching a sergeant who stood on the opposite wall, a red flag held horizontally and well away from his body. From the base of this box a cable of black cords lay fifty yards across the ground to the cañon wall and there ramified into many strands that ran to different points across the curving face of the dam. A sentinel kept the investigators at a respectful distance. A troop of dismounted men heightened the effect from the shelter of every rock and tree, prepared for and safe from any terrific explosion that might occur.
The stupendous audacity of “Bolles’ Bluff” may be bruited down the ages, but history holds no moment of more acute suspense than the one Bolles suffered while the Japanese staff was jargoning its report to its general. What they were saying was:
“Sir, there is an officer standing over the dam who holds in the crook of his finger the life of every man in the gorge.”
What Bolles’ rather vulgar imagination feared they were saying was: “Sir, the cables are cavalry lariats, blackened with harness dressing, the charges are mud-daubs on the wall, the detonator—if all the rest were real—is, on its face, inadequate, and this man has the American Doctor Cook kicked into a corner and begging for mercy as the teller of historic and colossal lies.”
But it was not until the last Japanese prisoner had toiled up the incline that leads out of the Symprosa cañon, and the last wagon of the captured supply train had gone creaking into park, that even Eblee was informed of the details of the surrender of Tsushima. And that was when Major Barwell Carruthers, Military Observer for the British Army, handed to the General a splotchily stained and (at close range) palpably counterfeit electric detonator.
“Allow me to present you, sir,” he begged, “as a suggested pedestal for Major Bolles’ statue in your Hall of Fame, one empty, but forever glorified, hard-tack box.”
And beyond the desert, a nation, not yet fully enlightened, was aflame with joy.
February, 1905
SUBMARINED
by Walter Wood
WALTER Wood was a “natural” for the role of writer of war stories of the future. He was an authentic naval expert with a number of books on the subject, including Famous British War Ships and Their Commanders (Hurst & Blackett, 1891), The Battleship (K. Paul, French, Tribner & Co., 1912), and his most famous work, The Enemy in our Midst, The German Invasion (J. Long, 1917). Wood was a prolific magazine writer of both fiction and nonfiction, a heavy percentage of it involved with the sea.
In Submarined, Walter Wood was not only early warning the public of the deadly danger of the submersible in warfare, but he was also suggesting means of counteracting it. In this brief incident, neither country is identified, but the story accurately predicts the mood of the period before World War I.
Any credit to Wood for anticipating the submarine menace was to be usurped by A. Conan Doyle when, in the July 1914 issue of The Strand Magazine, he published a story titled Danger!, which finds Great Britain picking a quarrel with an unspecified small country that possesses eight submarines, and being defeated by the mass destruction of its merchant shipping. Doyle, in his story, also urged the construction of a channel tunnel to France, so England would have an alternative sea route. So close was Doyle’s publication to the beginning of the actual U-boat threat to England that previous anticipations were forgotten.
THE Samson, first-class battleship, lonely, and for the time disabled as a fighter, blundered through a thick fog and a heavy sea. She was down by the head, in spite of all the pumps could do, and the leaks were gaining slowly. The ship drove through the stormy darkness into a cheerless dawn; but the fog passed with the night, and the daybreak showed that she had been steering straight for a sullen, rocky coast. “That lift in the fog saved us,” remarked the Captain to the Commander, who was standing by his side. “Ten minutes more and few of us would have had breath enough left to pray.”
Already the Samson was going full speed astern with her engines. “In a roundabout way it’s luck,” said the Captain, “for since the water is coming in faster than we can pump it out, I’m going to run in here until we’re patched up. We’re in the enemy’s territory, it’s true, but better that than foundering.”
An hour later the Samson was snug in a natural harbor, and on her divers were at work. Some officers and men were ashore, sweeping the bleak land with glasses, to see whether their coming was known, and a boat—the only serviceable one that was left to the Samson—had been sent out to watch for the enemy.
“Look here, and see how safely we could ride if it weren’t for the submarines,” said the Captain to the Commander. “I know every yard of the region, and it’s all like this.” He drew with a pencil on a slip of paper a rough but clear plan of the anchorage and entrance. “Here’s the ship, snug and safe in deep water. Here’s the entrance, deep and narrow, a mere neck, with shoal water on each side. To get in at all a ship must exactly hit the middle, otherwise she’s done for. We don’t need to stay here more than twenty-four hours, we can patch her up well enough in that time to steam home; and our friends are so busy elsewhere that they’ll scarcely have time to give a thought to an out-of-the-way spot like this. Ah! they’re signaling from the shore that they can see nothing. That’s good—excellent!”
“Yes, but—” the Commander finished his sentence with a look seaward and a sweep of the arm.
“Um,” murmured the Captain with a troubled look.
The boat came alongside, and the officer in command reported that one of the enemy’s torpedo boats had dashed into view, stopped for an instant, and had gone back the way she came.
“So they’ve spotted us,” said the Captain. He called his officers into his cabin, and held a hurried council of war. Every man was invited to speak freely, and each did so, except Harden, the torpedo lieutenant. For the most part the officers favored the idea of the Commander, which was that the Samson should put to sea at once, and trust to Providence and her engines to escape from her predicament.
“Unfortunately,” replied the Captain, “it can’t be done. We can’t get out of the channel—it’s ebb tide. Depend upon it, though, we’ll get out on the next flood. What we must consider is what to do until then. You haven’t spoken,” he said with a smile, turning to Harden. “Come, you’ve had some original ideas at maneuvers. What do you say, Mr. Harden?”
Harden stepped forward quietly. “Well, sir,” he said, “of course, as most submarines are now provided with a ‘natiscope’ attachment to the periscope, they can see to maneuver at night. I feel sure we shall be attacked at night. But I have an idea. Perhaps it isn’t much; I’ll just explain it my own way.” When he finished the officers clustered earnestly about him. Harden was an authority on submarines and how to circumvent and destroy them.
For a full minute there was silence. The Captain, with folded arms, looked steadily at the young man. “Your scheme is just possible, I believe,” he said very gravely. “But there is one point on which there can be little or no doubt. You might destroy any submarine that tried to reach us—but you would lose your own life.”
“The ship would be saved, sir.”
Again there was silence. “Well, I shall let you try,” the Captain said. “We have only one mine left. I wish you luck. If you want help, I will ask for volunteers.”
There was a chorus of eager voices. Not an officer present seemed to value his life to the extent of a penny candle.
“No, sir,” said Harden. “I can do it better alone.”
“Will you have a diver with you?” asked the Captain. “There’s the gunner—he’s good at the work.”
“If I may do it entirely by myself—at the finish, I’d rather, sir,” replied the torpedo lieutenant; and it was settled so.
“As for these submarines,” resumed the Captain to the Commander as they returned to the deck, “my fervent prayer is like Nelson’s of something else— ‘curse them all.’ It isn’t what I call honest fighting. There seems no way of guarding against them.”
The clumsy torpedo-nets were laced together and were lowered around the Samson from the ends of her great steel booms, but because of the net-cutters of the enemy’s torpedoes the Captain had not unbounded faith in this method of protection.
“Before you actually begin operations,” said the Captain to Harden, “look at this chart of the harbor—I made it myself. Everything is in your favor so far as the water and the bottom go, for the one is as clear as crystal and the other level as a tennis-lawn. And the depth is not too great, I take it, for comfortable work in longish spells?”
“It ought to be child’s play, sir,” said Harden.
They bent over the chart together.
“Now,” said the Captain, after the scrutiny, “make a trial trip, and come up and tell me exactly what you think. If you then believe that the plan won’t work, tell me. We may have to try other means, for there is plenty of daylight, and no submarine will dare to strike before dark.”
Harden had trained as a diver, and had trained thoroughly. He was the only man in the Samson who could bear the enormous pressure of the water at one-hundred-and-sixty-feet depth. He knew his apparatus, his captain and his assistants, and had blind faith in them all, which is half the battle with a diver. But in view of the task before him, he was glad that the extreme depth at which he must now work did not exceed thirty feet at low water, which was only just enough to float the ship. At high water ten feet more had to be reckoned, so that at the worst the depth was only forty feet.
Harden’s dress was of the latest pattern, and was fitted with a telephone which established communication between the diver and the Samson.
He went over the side and down the ladder.
Messages passed between the torpedo lieutenant and the Captain, and in half an hour Harden had come to the surface to talk with the Captain. After that he went down again over the side.
At the outset Harden worked on the seabed in the company of two blue-jacket divers, handling carefully a watertight, iron cylinder which had been lowered from the battleship. This was an observation mine, and contained seventy-two pounds of gun-cotton. Since it was their only one, it was too precious to risk as a defense to the harbor entrance, for a submarine might escape it.
At last the torpedo lieutenant clambered up out of the water and was helped to the deck.
“Well?” said the chief kindly. “But before you talk, get your wind back. You must be pretty well compressed.”
“I am a bit winded,” answered Harden.
“Yes,” said the Captain anxiously, “that’s bothering me. How long can you hold out?”
“Till I burst, sir,” replied the torpedo lieutenant respectfully, but with a smile.
“I believe you,” said the Captain admiringly. “But can it be done?”
“It can, sir,” answered Harden.
“Good! How have you placed it? Remember, all our eggs are in one basket.”
The lieutenant explained what he had done.
“Good,” repeated the Captain. “Now, let us thoroughly understand your plan: you wait and watch, and, when the time comes, press your own button. If that fails, you warn us, and we let go instantly. If that isn’t a success—well—now go and sleep. I’ll have you called at sunset.”
Harden withdrew to his cabin, but excitement banished sleep. The hours passed slowly; but at last the sun set, and the torpedo lieutenant again went over the side in his diving suit. This time he was alone.
“Don’t forget,” said the Captain, “to send a message often—then we shall know you’re all right.”
It was a period of great tension as soon as darkness came on. There was no moon, but the air was clear, and the stars shone brightly, suggesting the dim outline of the rocky shore. Not a light was showing on the Samson. She lay, a huge, dark mass of steel, on the water. At all her shotted machine and quick-firing guns the crews were standing; the engineers stood to their levers, and at each search-light were men ready to throw the intense beams through the darkness.
On the sea-bed the torpedo lieutenant was not less ready. His engine of destruction was placed to cover the narrow channel. The Samson’s search-lights were to be turned on as soon as he signaled that he was ready for them, when their powerful rays would flood the surface, outlining the enemy.
Harden looked about him and above him. But there was no sign of a submarine. Darkness had only just set in.
He made his signal, and was no longer in darkness. The sea was suffused with light—a dull, green glow, caused by the play of the battleship’s search-lights on the surface of the water.
The air was clear as well as the water, the search-lights worked un-blinkingly, and Harden was sure that he would be able to detect any submarine that might approach. He could perceive the dim, shadowy hulk of the huge battleship—a long, broad, dark outline on the greenish glow.
The torpedo lieutenant could now see tolerably clearly ahead and about him. He never let his eyes be drawn away from the narrow neck of the anchorage. They were aching with the strain upon them when he saw a shadowy cigar-shaped form coming very slowly toward him.
At last!
Almost instinctively he began gently to press the button of his mine, but he overcame the thrill of the excitement, and stayed his hand. He held his breath, too, for he saw that the growing outline was in very truth a submarine coming in a straight line for the Samson, and would be within sure striking distance of her in a few seconds. It was passing slowly overhead like some foul monster of the deep.
Even as he looked Harden saw a long, narrow body leave the bow of the submarine. He gave a groan. “Too late!” he thought, as the torpedo passed overhead—doubly terrifying as seen in that appalling gloom. For a second or two it seemed as if his heart stood still. He waited a second or two longer; then, hearing no crash, he assumed that the torpedo had missed its mark and failed to act.
Intense fear was followed by a paroxysm of fury. Harden jammed the button home.
A dull roar as if the bottom of the universe had been blown out, a mountain-high geyser, a cloud of inky smoke as if a volcano had burst through the sea, and the air was filled with bent, twisted, gnarled fragments of the submarine destroyer. Far and wide splashed the wreckage, or crashed aboard the battleship. Then the seething, hissing waters subsided. Only a huge, inky spot where the mine had gouged through sand to mud, spread lazily within the silvery glare of the search-lights.
“The life-line! The hose! The life-line!” cried a score of voices, and as many willing hands laid hold and hauled in the slack. Fathom after fathom lay coiled on the deck, then—hose and line dangled in air, torn in two.
All that night small boats grappled. In vain were divers sent below. Torpedo-lieutenant Harden had given his life for his ship.
Intimation that there is something unnatural about the trees in the Cuban jungle registers on this party, as they view the skeleton of a man, bones picked clean, held aloft by a network of green cords, in The Purple Terror by Fred M. White, The Strand Magazine, September 1898. Illustration is by Paul Hardy.
September, 1899
THE PURPLE TERROR
by Fred M. White
A WELL-EMPLOYED gambit of science fiction during the gaslight era was the possibility of man-eating plants. The patron saint of all man-eating plant stories was Frank Aubrey with his The Devil Tree of El Dorado (Hutchinson & Company, London, 1897), which went into numerous editions over a period of more than ten years. The Devil Tree of El Dorado was inspired by the elevated plateau in South America called Roraima. At the time of the book’s appearance, no one had ever ascended the two thousand-foot precipice leading to it, and in his introduction to the book Frank Aubrey made an impassioned plea for Great Britain to annex it as part of British Guiana before Venezuela, whose border it straddled, claimed it.
Aubrey felt that plant and animal life might have remained unaltered for hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of years, on the Roraima plateau, and that scientific discoveries of incalculable worth conceivably could be found there.
Time has been unkind to Frank Aubrey. Venezuela did annex the Roraima and no incredible scientific discoveries have been made on its surface, but Aubrey’s speculations, including the ancient man-eating plant worshiped and feared by the imaginary natives of that South American skyland, have been burned into the traditions of science fiction.
Fred Merrick White, author of The Purple Terror, wrote science fiction frequently for Pearson’s Magazine, The Strand Magazine, and in later years, dozens of adventure pulps. His story is a man-eating-plant tale in the finest tradition, well handled, with good characterization and a few new ideas on the biology of such a plant. It is very probable that White was inspired by The Devil Tree of El Dorado, which had become a bestseller only a year previously, and was therefore early in exploiting an idea that has become an integral part of science fiction. So much so, in fact, that there also seems little doubt that the story that follows this one, Professor Jonkin’s Cannibal Plant by Howard R. Garis, was intended to be a satire on the theme.
Fred M. White was best known for his detective stories, both of short and novel length, and a number of them achieved hard covers, the most successful being The Sundial (B. W. Dodge, 1908). White also managed to get one fantasy novel into cloth, The White Battalions (Pearson, 1900).
LIEUTENANT Will Scarlett’s instructions were devoid of problems, physical or otherwise. To convey a letter from Captain Driver of the Yankee Doodle, in Porto Rico Bay, to Admiral Lake on the other side of the isthmus, was an apparently simple matter.
“All you have to do,” the captain remarked, “is to take three or four men with you in case of accidents, cross the isthmus on foot, and simply give this letter into the hands of Admiral Lake. By so doing we shall save at least four days, and the aborigines are presumedly friendly.”
The aborigines aforesaid were Cuban insurgents. Little or no strife had taken place along the neck lying between Porto Rico and the north bay where Lake’s flagship lay, though the belt was known to be given over to the disaffected Cubans.
“It is a matter of fifty miles through practically unexplored country,” Scarlett replied; “and there’s a good deal of the family quarrel in this business, sir. If the Spaniards hate us, the Cubans are not exactly enamoured of our flag.”
Captain Driver roundly denounced the whole pack of them.
“Treacherous thieves to a man,” he said. “I don’t suppose your progress will have any brass bands and floral arches to it. And they tell me the forest is pretty thick. But you’ll get there all the same. There is the letter, and you can start as soon as you like.”
“I may pick my own men, sir?”
“My dear fellow, take whom you please. Take the mastiff, if you like.”
“I’d like the mastiff,” Scarlett replied; “as he is practically my own, I thought you would not object.”
Will Scarlett began to glow as the prospect of adventure stimulated his imagination. He was rather a good specimen of West Point naval dandyism. He had brains at the back of his smartness, and his geological and botanical knowledge were going to prove of considerable service to a grateful country when said grateful country should have passed beyond the rudimentary stages of colonization. And there was some disposition to envy Scarlett on the part of others floating for the past month on the liquid prison of the sapphire sea.
A warrant ofliccr, Tarrer by name, plus two A.B.’s of thews and sinews, to say nothing of the dog, completed the exploring party. By the time that the sun kissed the tip of the feathery hills they had covered some six miles of their journey. From the first Scarlett had been struck by the absolute absence of the desolation and horror of civil strife. Evidently the fiery cross had not been carried here; huts and houses were intact; the villagers stood under sloping eaves, and regarded the Americans with a certain sullen curiosity.
“We’d better stop for the night here,” said Scarlett.
They had come at length to a village that boasted some pretensions. An adobe chapel at one end of the straggling street was faced by a wine-house at the other. A padre, with hands folded over a bulbous, greasy gabardine, bowed gravely to Scarlett’s salutation. The latter had what Tarrer called “considerable Spanish.”
“We seek quarters for the night,” said Scarlett. “Of course, we are prepared to pay for them.”
The sleepy padre nodded towards the wine-house.
“You will find fair accommodations there,” he said. “We are friends of the Americanos.”
Scarlett doubted the fact, and passed on with florid thanks. So far, little signs of friendliness had been encountered on the march. Coldness, suspicion, a suggestion of fear, but no friendliness to be embarrassing.
The keeper of the wine-shop had his doubts. He feared his poor accommodation for guests so distinguished. A score or more of picturesque, cut-throat-looking rascals with cigarettes in their mouths lounged sullenly in the bar. The display of a brace of gold dollars enlarged mine host’s opinion of his household capacity.
“I will do my best, señors,” he said. “Come this way.”
So it came to pass that an hour after twilight Tarrer and Scarlett were seated in the open amongst the oleanders and the trailing gleam of the fire-flies, discussing cigars of average merit and a native wine that was not without virtues. The long bar of the wine-house was brilliantly illuminated; from within came shouts of laughter mingled with the ting, tang of the guitar and the rollicking clack of the castanets.
“They seem to be happy in there,” Tarrer remarked. “It isn’t all daggers and ball in this distressful country.”
A certain curiosity came over Scarlett.
“It is the duty of a good officer,” he said, “to lose no opportunity of acquiring useful information. Let us join the giddy throng, Tarrer.”
Tarrer expressed himself with enthusiasm in favour of any amusement that might be going. A month’s idleness on shipboard increases the appetite for that kind of thing wonderfully. The long bar was comfortable, and filled with Cubans who took absolutely no notice of the intruders. Their eyes were turned towards a rude stage at the far end of the bar, whereon a girl was gyrating in a dance with a celerity and grace that caused the wreath of flowers around her shoulders to resemble a trembling zone of purple flame.
“A wonderfully pretty girl and a wonderfully pretty dance,” Scarlett murmured, when the motions ceased and the girl leapt gracefully to the ground. “Largesse, I expect. I thought so. Well, I’m good for a quarter.”
The girl came forward, extending a shell prettily. She curtsied before Scarlett and fixed her dark, liquid eyes on his. As he smiled and dropped his quarter-dollar into the shell a coquettish gleam came into the velvety eyes. An ominous growl came from the lips of a bearded ruffian close by.
“Othello’s jealous,” said Tarrer. “Look at his face.”
“I am better employed,” Scarlett laughed. “That was a graceful dance, pretty one. I hope you are going to give us another one presently—”
Scarlett paused suddenly. His eyes had fallen on the purple band of flowers the girl had twined round her shoulder. Scarlett was an enthusiastic botanist; he knew most of the gems in Flora’s crown, but he had never looked upon such a vivid wealth of blossom before.
The flowers were orchids, and orchids of a kind unknown to collectors anywhere. On this point Scarlett felt certain. And yet this part of the world was by no means a difficult one to explore in comparison with New Guinea and Sumatra, where the rarer varieties had their homes.
The blooms were immensely large, far larger than any flower of the kind known to Europe or America, of a deep pure purple, with a blood-red centre. As Scarlett gazed upon them he noticed a certain cruel expression on the flower. Most orchids have a kind of face of their own; the purple blooms had a positive expression of ferocity and cunning. They exhumed, too, a queer, sickly fragrance. Scarlett had smelt something like it before, after the Battle of Manila. The perfume was the perfume of a corpse.
“And yet they are magnificent flowers,” said Scarlett. “Won’t you tell me where you got them from, pretty one?”
The girl was evidently flattered by the attention bestowed upon her by the smart young American. The bearded Othello alluded to edged up to her side.
“The señor had best leave the girl alone,” he said, insolently.
Scarlett’s fist clenched as he measured the Cuban with his eyes. The Admiral’s letter crackled in his breast-pocket, and discretion got the best of valour.
“You are paying yourself a poor compliment, my good fellow,” he said, “though I certainly admire your good taste. Those flowers interested me.”
The man appeared to be mollified. His features corrugated in a smile.
“The senor would like some of those blooms?” he asked. “It was I who procured them for little Zara here. I can show you where they grow.”
Every eye in the room was turned in Scarlett’s direction. It seemed to him that a kind of diabolical malice glistened on every dark face there, save that of the girl, whose features paled under her healthy tan.
“If the señor is wise,” she began, “he will not—
“Listen to the tales of a silly girl,” Othello put in menacingly. He grasped the girl by the arm, and she winced in positive pain. “Pshaw, there is no harm where the flowers grow, if one is only careful. I will take you there, and I will be your guide to Port Anna, where you are going, for a gold dollar.”
All Scarlett’s scientific enthusiasm was aroused. It is not given to every man to present a new orchid to the horticultural world. And this one would dwarf the finest plant hitherto discovered.
“Done with you,” he said; “we start at daybreak. I shall look to you to be ready. Your name is Tito? Well, good-night, Tito.”
As Scarlett and Tarrer withdrew the girl suddenly darted forward. A wild word or two fluttered from her lips. Then there was a sound as of a blow, followed by a little stifled cry of pain.
“No, no,” Tarrer urged, as Scarlett half turned. “Better not. They are ten to one, and they are no friends of ours. It never pays to interfere in these family quarrels. I daresay, if you interfered, the girl would be just as ready to knife you as her jealous lover.”
“But a blow like that, Tarrer!”
“It’s a pity, but I don’t see how we can help it. Your business is the quick dispatch of the Admiral’s letter, not the squiring of dames.”
Scarlett owned with a sigh that Tarrer was right.
II
It was quite a different Tito who presented himself at daybreak the following morning. His insolent manner had disappeared. He was cheerful, alert, and he had a manner full of the most winning politeness.
“You quite understand what we want,” Scarlett said. “My desire is to reach Port Anna as soon as possible. You know the way?”
“Every inch of it, señor. I have made the journey scores of times. And I shall have the felicity of getting you there early on the third day from now.”
“Is it so far as that?”
“The distance is not great, senor. It is the passage through the woods. There are parts where no white man has been before.”
“And you will not forget the purple orchids?”
A queer gleam trembled like summer lightning in Tito’s eyes. The next instant it had gone. A time was to come when Scarlett was to recall that look, but for the moment it was allowed to pass.
“The señor shall see the purple orchid,” he said; “thousands of them. They have a bad name amongst our people, but that is all nonsense. They grow in the high trees, and their blossoms cling to long, green tendrils. These tendrils are poisonous to the flesh, and great care should be taken in handling them. And the flowers are quite harmless, though we call them the devil’s poppies.”
To all of this Scarlett listened eagerly. He was all-impatient to see and handle the mysterious flower for himself. The whole excursion was going to prove a wonderful piece of luck. At the same time he had to curb his impatience. There would be no chance of seeing the purple orchid to-day.
For hours they fought their way along through the dense tangle. A heat seemed to lie over all the land like a curse—a blistering, sweltering, moist heat with no puff of wind to temper its breathlessness. By the time that the sun was sliding down, most of the party had had enough of it.
They passed out of the underwood at length, and, striking upwards, approached a clump of huge forest trees on the brow of a ridge. All kinds of parasites hung from the branches; there were ropes and bands of green, and high up a fringe of purple glory that caused Scarlett’s pulses to leap a little faster.
“Surely that is the purple orchid?” he cried.
Tito shrugged his shoulders contemptuously.
“A mere straggler or two,” he said, “and out of reach in any case. The señor will have all he wants and more to-morrow.”
“But it seems to me,” said Scarlett, “that I could—”
Then he paused. The sun like a great glowing shield was shining full behind the tree with its crown of purple, and showing up every green rope and thread clinging to the branches with the clearness of liquid crystal. Scarlett saw a network of green cords like a huge spider’s web, and in the centre of it was not a fly, but a human skeleton!
The arms and legs were stretched apart as if the victim had been crucified. The wrists and ankles were bound in the cruel web. Fragments of tattered clothing fluttered in the faint breath of the evening breeze.
“Horrible,” Scarlett cried, “absolutely horrible!”
“You may well say that,” Tarrer exclaimed, with a shudder. “Like the fly in the amber or the apple in the dumpling, the mystery is how he got there.”
“Perhaps Tito can explain the mystery,” Scarlett suggested.
Tito appeared to be uneasy and disturbed. He looked furtively from one to the other of his employers as a culprit might who feels he has been found out. But his courage returned as he noted the absence of suspicion in the faces turned upon him.
“I can explain,” he exclaimed, with teeth that chattered from some unknown terror or guilt. “It is not the first time that I have seen the skeleton. Some plant-hunter doubtless who came here alone. He climbed into the tree without a knife, and those green ropes got twisted round his limbs, as a swimmer gets entangled in the weeds. The more he struggled, the more the cords bound him. He would call in vain for anyone to assist him here. And so he must have died.”
The explanation was a plausible one, but by no means detracted from the horror of the discovery. For some time the party pushed their way on in the twilight, till the darkness descended suddenly like a curtain.
“We will camp here,” Tito said; “it is high, dry ground, and we have this belt of trees above us. There is no better place than this for miles around. In the valley the miasma is dangerous.”
As Tito spoke he struck a match, and soon a torch flamed up. The little party were on a small plateau, fringed by trees. The ground was dry and hard, and, as Scarlett and his party saw to their astonishment, littered with bones. There were skulls of animals and skulls of human beings, the skeletons of birds, the frames of beasts both great and small. It was a weird, shuddering sight.
“We can’t possibly stay here,” Scarlett exclaimed.
Tito shrugged his shoulders.
“There is nowhere else,” he replied. “Down in the valley there are many dangers. Further in the woods are the snakes and jaguars. Bones are nothing. Peuf, they can be easily cleared away.”
They had to be cleared away, and there was an end of the matter. For the most part the skeletons were white and dry as air and sun could make them. Over the dry, calcined mass the huge fringe of trees nodded mournfully. With the rest, Scarlett was busy scattering the mocking frames aside. A perfect human skeleton lay at his feet. On one finger something glittered—a signet ring. As Scarlett took it in his hand he started.
“I know this ring!” he exclaimed; “it belonged to Pierre Anton, perhaps the most skilled and intrepid plant-hunter the Jardin des Plantes ever employed. The poor fellow was by way of being a friend of mine. He met the fate that he always anticipated.”
“There must have been a rare holocaust here,” said Tarrer.
“It beats me,” Scarlett responded. By this time a large circle had been shifted clear of human and other remains. By the light of the fire loathsome insects could be seen scudding and straddling away. “It beats me entirely. Tito, can you offer any explanation? If the bones were all human I could get some grip of the problem. But when one comes to birds and animals as well! Do you see that the skeletons lie in a perfect circle, starting from the centre of the clump of trees above us? What does it mean?”
Tito professed utter ignorance of the subject. Some years before a small tribe of natives invaded the peninsula for religious rites. They came from a long way off in canoes, and wild stories were told concerning them. They burnt sacrifices, no doubt.
Scarlett turned his back contemptuously on this transparent tale. His curiosity was aroused. There must be some explanation, for Pierre Anton had been seen of men within the last ten years.
“There’s something uncanny about this,” he said, to Tarrer. “I mean to get to the bottom of it, or know why.”
“As for me,” said Tarrer, with a cavernous yawn, “I have but one ambition, and that is my supper, followed by my bed.”
III
Scarlett lay in the light of the fire looking about him. He felt restless and uneasy, though he would have found it difficult to explain the reason. For one thing, the air trembled to strange noises. There seemed to be something moving, writhing in the forest trees above his head. More than once it seemed to his distorted fancy that he could see a squirming knot of green snakes in motion.
Outside the circle, in a grotto of bones, Tito lay sleeping. A few moments before his dark, sleek head had been furtively raised, and his eyes seemed to gleam in the flickering firelight with malignant cunning. As he met Scarlett’s glance he gave a deprecatory gesture and subsided.
“What the deuce does it all mean?” Scarlett muttered. “I feel certain yonder rascal is up to some mischief. Jealous still because I paid his girl a little attention. But he can’t do us any real harm. Quiet, there!”
The big mastiff growled and then whined uneasily. Even the dog seemed to be conscious of some unseen danger. He lay down again, cowed by the stern command, but he still whimpered in his dreams.
“I fancy I’ll keep awake for a spell,” Scarlett told himself.
For a time he did so. Presently he began to slide away into the land of poppies. He was walking amongst a garden of bones which bore masses of purple blossoms. Then Pierre Anton came on the scene, pale and resolute as Scarlett had always known him; then the big mastiff seemed in some way to be mixed up with the phantasm of the dream, barking as if in pain, and Scarlett came to his senses.
He was breathing short, a beady perspiration stood on his forehead, his heart hammered in quick thuds—all the horrors of nightmare were still upon him. In a vague way as yet he heard the mastiff howl, a real howl of real terror, and Scarlett knew that he was awake.
Then a strange thing happened. In the none too certain light of the fire, Scarlett saw the mastiff snatched up by some invisible hand, carried far on high towards the trees, and finally flung to the earth with a crash. The big dog lay still as a log.
A sense of fear born of the knowledge of impotence came over Scarlett; what in the name of evil did it all mean? The smart scientist had no faith in the occult, and yet what did it all mean?
Nobody stirred. Scarlett’s companions were soaked and soddened with fatigue; the rolling thunder of artillery would have scarce disturbed them. With teeth set and limbs that trembled, Scarlett crawled over to the dog.
The great, black-muzzled creature was quite dead. The full chest was stained and soaked in blood; the throat had been cut apparently with some jagged, saw-like instrument away to the bone. And, strangest thing of all, scattered all about the body was a score or more of the great purple orchid flowers broken off close to the head. A hot, pricking sensation travelled slowly up Scarlett’s spine and seemed to pass out at the tip of his skull. He felt his hair rising.
He was frightened. As a matter of honest fact, he had never been so horribly scared in his life before. The whole thing was so mysterious, so cruel, so bloodthirsty.
Still, there must be some rational explanation. In some way the matter had to do with the purple orchid. The flower had an evil reputation. Was it not known to these Cubans as the devil’s poppy?
Scarlett recollected vividly now Zara’s white, scared face when Tito had volunteered to show the way to the resplendent bloom; he remembered the cry of the girl and the blow that followed. He could see it all now. The girl had meant to warn him against some nameless horror to which Tito was leading the small party. This was the jealous Cuban’s revenge.
A wild desire to pay this debt to the uttermost fraction filled Scarlett, and shook him with a trembling passion. He crept along in the drenching dew to where Tito lay, and touched his forehead with the chill blue rim of a revolver barrel. Tito stirred slightly.
“You dog!” Scarlett cried. “I am going to shoot you.”
Tito did not move again. His breathing was soft and regular. Beyond a doubt the man was sleeping peacefully. After all he might be innocent; and yet, on the other hand, he might be so sure of his quarry that he could afford to slumber without anxiety as to his vengeance.
In favour of the latter theory was the fact that the Cuban lay beyond the limit of what had previously been the circle of dry bones. It was just possible that there was no danger outside that pale. In that case it would be easy to arouse the rest, and so save them from the horrible death which had befallen the mastiff. No doubt these were a form of upas tree, but that would not account for the ghastly spectacle in mid-air.
“I’ll let this chap sleep for the present,” Scarlett muttered.
He crawled back, not without misgivings, into the ring of death. He meant to wake the others and then wait for further developments. By now his senses were more alert and vigorous than they had ever been before. A preternatural clearness of brain and vision possessed him. As he advanced he saw suddenly falling a green bunch of cord that straightened into a long, emerald line. It was triangular in shape, fine at the apex, and furnished with hooked spines. The rope appeared to dangle from the tree overhead; the broad, sucker-like termination was evidently soaking up moisture.
A natural phenomenon evidently, Scarlett thought. This was some plant new to him, a parasite living amongst the tree-tops and drawing life and vigour by means of these green, rope-like antennae designed by Nature to soak and absorb the heavy dews of night.
For a moment the logic of this theory was soothing to Scarlett’s distracted nerves, but only for a moment, for then he saw at regular intervals along the green rope the big purple blossoms of the devil’s poppy.
He stood gasping there, utterly taken aback for the moment. There must be some infernal juggling behind all this business. He saw the rope slacken and quiver, he saw it swing forward like a pendulum, and the next minute it had passed across the shoulders of a sleeping seaman.
Then the green root became as the arm of an octopus. The line shook from end to end like the web of an angry spider when invaded by a wasp. It seemed to grip the sailor and tighten, and then, before Scarlett’s afrighted eyes, the sleeping man was raised gently from the ground.
Scarlett jumped forward with a desire to scream hysterically. Now that a comrade was in danger he was no longer afraid. He whipped a jack-knife from his pocket and slashed at the cruel cord. He half expected to meet with the stoutness of a steel strand, but to his surprise the feeler snapped like a carrot, bumping the sailor heavily on the ground.
He sat up, rubbing his eyes vigorously.
“That you, sir?” he asked. “What is the matter?”
“For the love of God, get up at once and help me to arouse the others,” Scarlett said, hoarsely. “We have come across the devil’s workshop. All the horrors of the inferno are invented here.”
The bluejacket struggled to his feet. As he did so, the clothing from his waist downwards slipped about his feet, clean cut through by the teeth of the green parasite. All around the body of the sailor blood oozed from a zone of teeth-marks.
Two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage is a virtue vouchsafed to few. The tar, who would have faced an ironclad cheerfully, fairly shivered with fright and dismay.
“What does it mean, sir?” he cried. “I’ve been—”
“Wake the others,” Scarlett screamed; “wake the others.”
Two or three more green tangles of rope came tumbling to the ground, straightening and quivering instantly. The purple blossoms stood out like a frill upon them. Like a madman, Scarlett shouted, kicking his companions without mercy.
They were all awake at last, grumbling and moaning for their lost slumbers. All this time Tito had never stirred.
“I don’t understand it at all,” said Tarrer.
“Come from under those trees,” said Scarlett, “and I will endeavour to explain. Not that you will believe me for a moment. No man can be expected to believe the awful nightmare I am going to tell you.”
Scarlett proceeded to explain. As he expected, his story was followed with marked incredulity, save by the wounded sailor, who had strong evidence to stimulate his otherwise defective imagination.
“I can’t believe it,” Tarrer said, at length. They were whispering together beyond earshot of Tito, whom they had no desire to arouse for obvious reasons. “This is some diabolical juggling of yonder rascally Cuban. It seems impossible that those slender green cords could—”
Scarlett pointed to the centre of the circle.
“Call the dog,” he said grimly, “and see if he will come.”
“I admit the point as far as the poor old mastiff is concerned. But at the same time I don’t—however, I’ll see for myself.”
By this time a dozen or more of the slender cords were hanging pendent from the trees. They moved from spot to spot as if jerked up by some unseen hand and deposited a foot or two farther. With the great purple bloom fringing the stem, the effect was not unlovely save to Scarlett, who could see only the dark side of it. As Tarrer spoke he advanced in the direction of the trees.
“What are you going to do?” Scarlett asked.
“Exactly what I told you. I am going to investigate this business for myself.”
Without wasting further words Scarlett sprang forward. It was no time for the niceties of an effete civilization. Force was the only logical argument to be used in a case like this, and Scarlett was the more powerful man of the two.
Tarrer saw and appreciated the situation.
“No, no,” he cried; “none of that. Anyway, you’re too late.”
He darted forward and threaded his way between the slender emerald columns. As they moved slowly and with a certain stately deliberation there was no great danger to an alert and vigorous individual. As Scarlett entered the avenue he could hear the soak and suck as the dew was absorbed.
“For Heaven’s sake, come out of it,” he cried.
The warning came too late. A whip-like trail of green touched Tarrer from behind, and in a lightning flash he was in the toils. The tendency to draw up anything and everything gave the cords a terrible power. Tarrer evidently felt it, for his breath came in great gasps.
“Cut me free,” he said, hoarsely; “cut me free. I am being carried off my feet.”
He seemed to be doomed for a moment, for all the cords there were apparently converging in his direction. This, as a matter of fact, was a solution of the whole sickening, horrible sensation. Pulled here and there, thrust in one direction and another, Tarrer contrived to keep his feet.
Heedless of possible danger to himself Scarlett darted forward, calling to his companions to come to the rescue. In less time than it takes to tell, four knives were at work ripping and slashing in all directions.
“Not all of you,” Scarlett whispered. So tense was the situation that no voice was raised above a murmur. “You two keep your eyes open for fresh cords, and cut them as they fall, instantly. Now then.”
The horrible green spines were round Tarrer’s body like snakes. His face was white, his breath came painfully, for the pressure was terrible. It seemed to Scarlett to be one horrible dissolving view of green, slimy cords and great weltering, purple blossoms. The whole of the circle was strewn with them. They were wet and slimy underfoot.
Tarrer had fallen forward half unconscious. He was supported now by but two cords above his head. The cruel pressure had been relieved. With one savage sweep of his knife Scarlett cut the last of the lines, and Tarrer fell like a log unconscious to the ground. A feeling of nausea, a yellow dizziness, came over Scarlett as he staggered beyond the dread circle. He saw Tarrer carried to a place of safety, and then the world seemed to wither and leave him in the dark.
“I feel a bit groggy and weak,” said Tarrer an hour or so later: “but beyond that this idiot of a Richard is himself again. So far as I am concerned, I should like to get even with our friend Tito for this.”
“Something with boiling oil in it,” Scarlett suggested, grimly. “The callous scoundrel has slept soundly through the whole of this business. I suppose he felt absolutely certain that he had finished with us.”
“Upon my word, we ought to shoot the beggar “ Tarrer exclaimed.
“I have a little plan of my own,” said Scarlett, “which I am going to put in force later on. Meanwhile we had better get on with breakfast. When Tito wakes a pleasant little surprise will await him.”
Tito roused from his slumbers in due course and looked around him. His glance was curious, disappointed, then full of a white and yellow fear. A thousand conflicting emotions streamed across his dark face. Scarlett read them at a glance as he called the Cuban over to him.
“I am not going into any unnecessary details with you,” he said. “It has come to my knowledge that you are playing traitor to us. Therefore we prefer to complete our journey alone. We can easily find the way now.”
“The senor may do as he pleases,” he replied. “Give me my dollar and let me go.”
Scarlett replied grimly that he had no intention of doing anything of the kind. He did not propose to place the lives of himself and his comrades in the power of a rascally Cuban who had played false.
“We are going to leave you here till we return,” he said. “You will have plenty of food, you will be perfectly safe under the shelter of these trees, and there is no chance of anybody disturbing you. We are going to tie you up to one of these trees for the next four-and-twenty hours.”
All the insolence died out of Tito’s face. His knees bowed, a cold dew came out over the ghastly green of his features. From the shaking of his limbs he might have fared disastrously with ague.
“The trees,” he stammered, “the trees, señor! There is danger from snakes, and—and from many things. There are other places—”
“If this place was safe last night it is safe to-day,” Scarlett said, grimly. “I have quite made up my mind.”
Tito fought no longer. He fell forward on his knees, he howled for mercy, till Scarlett fairly kicked him up again.
“Make a clean breast of it,” he said, “or take the consequences. You know perfectly well that we have found you out, scoundrel.”
Tito’s story came in gasps. He wanted to get rid of the Americans. He was jealous. Besides, under the Americanos would Cuba be any better off? By no means and assuredly not. Therefore it was the duty of every good Cuban to destroy the Americanos where possible.
“A nice lot to fight for,” Scarlett muttered. “Get to the point.”
Hastened to the point by a liberal application of stout shoe-leather, Tito made plenary confession. The señor himself had suggested death by medium of the devil’s poppies. More than one predatory plant-hunter had been lured to his destruction in the same way. The skeleton hung on the tree was a Dutchman who had walked into the clutch of the purple terror innocently. And Pierre Anton had done the same. The suckers of the devil’s poppy only came down at night to gather moisture; in the day they were coiled up like a spring. And anything that they touched they killed. Tito had watched more than one bird or small beast crushed and mauled by these cruel spines with their fringe of purple blossoms.
“How do you get the blooms?” Scarlett asked.
“That is easy,” Tito replied. “In the daytime I moisten the ground under the trees. Then the suckers unfold, drawn by the water. Once the suckers unfold one cuts several of them off with long knives. There is danger, of course, but not if one is careful.”
“I’ll not trouble the devil’s poppy any further at present,” said Scarlett, “but I shall trouble you to accompany me to my destination as a prisoner.”
Tito’s eyes dilated.
“They will not shoot me?” he asked, hoarsely.
“I don’t know,” Scarlett replied. “They may hang you instead. At any rate, I shall be bitterly disappointed if they don’t end you one way or the other. Whichever operation it is, I can look forward to it with perfect equanimity.”
August, 1905
PROFESSOR JONKIN’S CANNIBAL PLANT
by Howard R. Garis
PROFESSOR Jonkin’s Cannibal Plant is beyond doubt the most delightful spoof on the man-eating-plant theme in science fiction. If it were submitted today as a new work, it would instantly be purchased as a satiric gem.
Oddly enough, its author, Howard Roger Garis, is best known for his “Bedtime Stories” about Uncle Wiggily, the rheumatic old rabbit with the full-dress suit, along with a retinue of ducks, an old-lady muskrat, an alligator, a villainous fox, and a full cast of “humanized” woodland creatures.
Before his death on November 6, 1962, in Amherst, Massachusetts, at the age of eighty-nine, Garis had written an estimated 15,000 short stories about his rabbit character. At the height of their popularity they were syndicated daily in papers here and abroad, and the best of them were collected into seventy-five books. In addition, scores of games (many invented by Garis), toys, and other products have used the name “Uncle Wiggily” or one of the characters from the series.
Virtually buried under this mass of bedtime tales were Garis’s stories published in The Argosy. The following series eventually included such intriguing titles as Professor Jonkin and His Busier Bees, Quick Transit by Beanstalk, Ltd., and His Winged Elephant. These stories followed the vogue of the era for poking fun at strange new inventions and their inventors.
Though the dime novels of “invention” science fiction may have inspired the horseplay which Garis helped develop into a trend, it also served as the prototype for a far more significant and influential series. Just at about the time the dime novels were succumbing to the pulp magazines, Edward Stratemeyer, one of the greatest of boys’ novel writers, started a syndicate in which he produced low-priced, hardcover books aimed at youngsters and teenagers. The most successful of all his series (which included The Rover Hoys, The Motor Hoys, The Hobhsey Twins, and Bomba the Jungle Boy) was that featuring the young inventor, Tom Swift.
In each story Tom Swift would acquire or invent a new vehicle or device and the stories featured such advanced ideas as the manufacture of diamonds from carbon, a photo telephone, chemicals for extinguishing fires from the air, a gigantic magnet for raising sunken submarines, or a device for seeing through walls.
Howard R. Garis wrote the first thirty-five of the Tom Swift stories, under the house name of Victor Appleton, making him one of the most influential science fiction writers that ever lived, since that first series eventually sold 20,000,000 copies.
Garis’s son Roger, also a writer, in his biography, My Father Was Uncle Wiggily (McGraw-Hill, 1966), claimed that his father had written titles in The Great Marvel Series, also originated by The Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate and predating Tom Swift. One that he seems certain of is Through Space to Mars (1910), in which a radioactive material called Cardite is discovered on the Red Planet and brought back to Earth. Garis had earlier written Isle of Black Fire, a book concerning a search for radium in the South Seas, so there was a familiarity with radioactivity.
Just before Garis died in 1962, he had partially finished the first book of a new juvenile series based on space exploration. The record seems to show that Howard R. Garis was a lifelong writer of science fiction, who remained anonymous, despite the exercise of a vast influence on the minds of millions.
AFTER Professor Jeptha Jonkin had, by skilful grafting and care, succeeded in raising a single tree that produced, at different seasons, apples, oranges, pineapples, figs, cocoanuts, and peaches, it might have been supposed he would rest from his scientific labors. But Professor Jonkin was not that kind of a man.
He was continually striving to grow something new in the plant world. So it was no surprise to Bradley Adams, when calling on his friend the professor one afternoon, to find that scientist busy in his large conservatory.
“What are you up to now?” asked Adams. “Trying to make a rosebush produce violets, or a honeysuckle vine bring forth pumpkins?”
“Neither,” replied Professor Jonkin a little stiffly, for he resented Adams’ playful tone. “Not that either of those things would be difficult. But look at that.”
He pointed to a small plant with bright, glossy green leaves mottled with red spots. The thing was growing in a large earthen pot.
It bore three flowers, about the size of morning glories, and not unlike that blossom in shape, save, near the top, there was a sort of lid, similar to the flap observed on a jack-in-the-pulpit plant.
“Look down one of those flowers,” went on the professor, and Adams, wondering what was to come, did so.
He saw within a small tube, lined with fine, hair-like filaments, which seemed to be in motion. And the shaft or tube went down to the bottom of the morning-glory-shaped part of the flower. At the lower extremity was a little clear liquid.
“Kind of a queer blossom. What is it?” asked Adams.
“That,” said the professor with a note of pride in his voice, “is a specimen of the Sarracenia Nepenthis.”
“What’s that? French for sunflower, or Latin for sweet pea?” asked Adams irreverently.
“It is Latin for pitcher plant,” responded the professor, drawing himself up to his full height of five feet three. “One of the most interesting of the South American flora.”
“The name fits it pretty well,” observed Adams. “I see there’s water at the bottom. I suppose this isn’t the pitcher that went to the well too often.”
“The Sarracenia Nepenthis is a most wonderful plant,” went on the professor in his lecture voice, not heeding Adams’ joking remarks. “It belongs to what Darwin calls the carnivorous family of flowers, and other varieties of the same species are the Dionaea Muscipula, or Venus Fly-trap, the Darlingtonia, the Pinguicula and Aldrovandra, as well as—”
“Hold on, professor,” pleaded Adams. “I’ll take the rest on faith. Tell me about this pitcher plant, sounds interesting.”
“It is interesting,” said Professor Jonkin. “It eats insects.”
“Eats insects?”
“Certainly. Watch.”
The professor opened a small wire cage lying on a shelf and took from it several flies. These he liberated close to the queer plant.
The insects buzzed about a few seconds, dazed with their sudden liberty.
Then they began slowly to circle in the vicinity of the strange flowers. Nearer and nearer the blossoms they came, attracted by some subtle perfume, as well as by a sweet syrup that was on the edge of the petals, put there by nature for the very purpose of drawing hapless insects into the trap.
The flies settled down, some on the petals of all three blooms. Then a curious thing happened.
The little hair-like filaments in the tube within the petals suddenly reached out and wound themselves about the insects feeding on the sweet stuff, which seemed to intoxicate them. In an instant the flies were pulled to the top of the flower shaft by a contraction of the hairs, and then they went tumbling down the tube into the miniature pond below, where they were drowned after a brief struggle. Their crawling back was prevented by spines growing with points down, as the wires in some rat-traps are fastened.
Meanwhile the cover of the plant closed down.
“Why, it’s a regular fly-trap, isn’t it?” remarked Adams, much surprised.
“It is,” replied the professor. “The plant lives off the insects it captures. It absorbs them, digests them, and, when it is hungry again, catches more.”
“Where’d you get such an uncanny thing?” asked Adams, moving away from the plant as if he feared it might take a sample bite out of him.
“A friend sent it to me from Brazil.”
“But you’re not going to keep it, I hope.”
“I certainly am,” rejoined Professor Jonkin.
“Maybe you’re going to train it to come to the table and eat like a human being,” suggested Adams, with a laugh that nettled the professor.
“I wouldn’t have to train it much to induce it to be polite,” snapped back the owner of the pitcher plant.
And then, seeing that his jokes were not relished, Adams assumed an interest he did not feel, and listened to a long dissertation on botany in general and carnivorous plants in particular.
He would much rather have been eating some of the queer hybrid fruits the professor raised. He pleaded an engagement when he saw an opening in the talk, and went away.
It was some months after that before he saw the professor again. The botanist was busy in his conservatory in the meantime, and the gardener he hired to do rough work noticed that his master spent much time in that part of the glass house where the pitcher plant was growing.
For Professor Jonkin had become so much interested in his latest acquisition that he seemed to think of nothing else. His plan for increasing strawberries to the size of peaches was abandoned for a time, as was his pet scheme of raising apples without any core.
The gardener wondered what there was about the South American blossoms to require such close attention.
One day he thought he would find out, and he started to enter that part of the conservatory where the pitcher plant was growing. Professor Jonkin halted him before he had stepped inside and sternly bade him never to appear there again.
As the gardener, crestfallen, moved away after a glimpse into the forbidden region he muttered:
“My, that plant has certainly grown! And I wonder what the professor was doing so close to it. Looked as if he was feeding the thing.”
As the days went by the conduct of Professor Jonkin became more and more curious. He scarcely left the southern end of the conservatory, save at night, when he entered his house to sleep.
He was a bachelor, and had no family cares to trouble him, so he could spend all his time among his plants. But hitherto he had divided his attention among his many experiments in the floral kingdom.
Now he was always with his mysterious pitcher plant. He even had his meals sent into the green-house.
“Be you keepin’ boarders?” asked the butcher boy of the gardener one day, passing on his return to the store, his empty basket on his arm.
“No. Why?”
“The professor is orderin’ so much meat lately. I thought you had company.”
“No, there’s only us two. Mr. Adams used to come to dinner once in a while, but not lately.”
“Then you an’ the professor must have big appetites.”
‘What makes you think so?”
“The number of beefsteaks you eat.”
“Number of beefsteaks? Why, my lad, the professor and I are both vegetarians.”
“What’s them?”
“We neither of us eat a bit of meat. We don’t believe it’s healthy.”
“Then what becomes of the three big porterhouse steaks I deliver to the professor in the green-house every day?”
“Porterhouse steaks?” questioned the gardener, amazed.
“Do you feed ‘em to the dog?”
“We don’t keep a dog.”
But the butcher boy questioned no further, for he saw a chum and hastened off to join him.
“Three porterhouse steaks a day!” mused the gardener, shaking his head. “I do hope the professor has not ceased to be a vegetarian. Yet it looks mighty suspicious. And he’s doing it on the sly, too, for there’s been no meat cooked in the house, of that I’m sure.”
And the gardener, sorely puzzled over the mystery, went off, shaking his head more solemnly than before.
He resolved to have a look in the place the professor guarded so carefully. He tried the door when he was sure his master was in another part of the conservatory, but it was locked, and no key the gardener had would unfasten it.
A month after the gardener had heard of the porterhouse steaks, Adams happened to drop in to see the professor again.
“He’s in with the Sarracenia Nepenthis,” said the gardener in answer to the visitor’s inquiry. “But I doubt if he will let you enter.”
“Why won’t he?”
“Because he’s become mighty close-mouthed of late over that pitcher plant.”
“Oh, I guess he’ll see me,” remarked Adams confidently, and he knocked on the door that shut off the locked section of the green-house from the main portion.
“Who’s there?” called the professor.
“Adams.”
“Oh,” in a more conciliatory tone. “I was just wishing you’d come along. I have something to show you.”
Professor Jonkin opened the door, and the sight that met Adams’ gaze startled him.
The only plant in that part of the conservatory was a single specimen of the Sarracenia Nepenthis. Yet it had attained such enormous proportions that at first Adams thought he must be dreaming.
“What do. you think of that for an achievement in science?” asked the professor proudly.
“Do you mean to say that is the small, fly-catching plant your friend sent you from Brazil?”
“The same.”
“But—but—”
“But how it’s grown, that’s what you want to say, isn’t it?”
“It is. How did you do it?”
“By dieting the blossoms.”
“You mean—?”
“I mean feeding them. Listen. I reasoned that if a small blossom of the plant would thrive on a few insects, by giving it larger meals I might get a bigger plant. So I made my plans.
“First I cut off all but one blossom, so that the strength of the plant would nourish that alone. Then I made out a bill of fare. I began feeding it on chopped beef. The plant took to it like a puppy. It seemed to beg for more. From chopped meat I went to small pieces, cut up. I could fairly see the blossom increase in size. From that I went to choice mutton chops, and, after a week of them, with the plant becoming more gigantic all the while, I increased its meals to a porterhouse steak a day. And now—”
The professor paused to contemplate his botanical work.
“Well, now?” questioned Adams.
“Now,” went on the professor proudly, “my pitcher plant takes three big beefsteaks every day—one for breakfast, one for dinner, and one for supper. And see the result.”
Adams gazed at the immense plant. From a growth about as big as an Easter lily it had increased until the top was near the roof of the greenhouse, twenty-five feet above.
About fifteen feet up, or ten feet from the top, there branched out a great flower, about eight feet long and three feet across the bell-shaped mouth, which except for the cap or cover, was not unlike the opening of an immense morning glory.
The flower was heavy, and the stalk on which it grew was not strong enough to support it upright. So a rude scaffolding had been constructed of wood and boards, and on a frame the flower was held upright.
In order to see it to better advantage, and also that he might feed it, the professor had a ladder by which he could ascend to a small platform in front of the bell-shaped mouth of the blossom.
“It is time to give my pet its meal,” he announced, as if he were speaking of some favorite horse. “Want to come up and watch it eat?”
“No, thank you,” responded Adams. “It’s too uncanny.”
The professor took a large steak, one of the three which the butcher boy had left that day. Holding it in his hand, he climbed up the ladder and was soon on the platform in front of the plant.
Adams watched him curiously. The professor leaned over to toss the steak into the yawning mouth of the flower.
Suddenly Adams saw him totter, throw his arms wildly in the air, and then, as if drawn by some overpowering force, he fell forward, lost his balance, and toppled into the maw of the pitcher plant!
There was a jar to the stalk and blossom as the professor fell within. He went head first into the tube, or eating apparatus of the strange plant, his legs sticking out for an instant, kicking wildly. Then he disappeared entirely.
Adams didn’t know whether to laugh or be alarmed.
He mounted the ladder, and stood in amazement before the result of the professor’s work as he looked down into the depth of the gigantic flower, increased a hundred times in size.
He was aware of a strange, sickish-sweet odor that seemed to steal over his senses. It was lulling him to sleep, and he fought against it. Then he looked down and saw that the huge hairs or filaments with which the tube was lined were in violent motion.
He could just discern the professor’s feet about three feet below the rim of the flower. They were kicking, but with a force growing less every second. The filaments seemed to be winding about the professor’s legs, holding him in a deadly embrace.
Then the top cover, or flap of the plant, closed down suddenly. The professor was a prisoner inside.
The plant had turned cannibal and eaten the man who had grown it!
For an instant, fear deprived Adams of reason. He did not know what to do. Then the awful plight of his friend brought back his senses.
“Professor!” he shouted. “Arc you alive? Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” came back in faint and muffled tones. “This beast has me, all right.”
Then followed a series of violent struggles that shook the plant.
“I’ll get you out. Where’s an ax? I’ll chop the cursed plant to pieces!” cried Adams.
“Don’t! Don’t” came in almost pleading tones from the imprisoned professor.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t hurt my pet!”
“Your pet!” snorted Adams angrily. “Nice kind of a pet you have! One that tries to eat you alive! But I’ve got to do something if I want to save you. Where’s the ax?”
“No! No!” begged the professor, his voice becoming more and more muffled. “Use chloroform.”
“Use what?”
“Chloroform! You’ll find some in the closet.”
Then Adams saw what the professor’s idea was. The plant could be made insensible, and the imprisoned man released with no harm to the blossom.
He raced down the ladder, ran to a closet where he had seen the professor’s stock of drugs and chemicals stowed away on the occasion of former visits, and grabbed a big bottle of chloroform. He caught up a towel and ran back up the ladder.
Not a sign of the professor could be seen. The plant had swallowed him up, but by the motion and swaying of the flower Adams knew his friend was yet alive.
He was in some doubt as to the success of this method, and would rather have taken an ax and chopped a hole in the side of the blossom, thus releasing the captive. But he decided to obey the professor.
Saturating the towel well with the chloroform, and holding his nose away from it, he pressed the wet cloth over the top of the blossom where the lid touched the edge of the bloom.
There was a slight opening at one point, and Adams poured some of the chloroform down this. He feared lest the fumes of the anesthetic might overpower the professor also, but he knew they would soon pass away if this happened.
For several minutes he waited anxiously. Would the plan succeed? Would the plant be overcome before it had killed the professor inside?
Adams was in a fever of terror. Again and again he saturated the towel with the powerful drug. Then he had the satisfaction of seeing the lid of the pitcher plant relax.
It slowly lifted and fell over to one side, making a good-sized opening. The strong filaments, not unlike the anus of a devil fish, Adams thought, were no longer in uneasy motion. They had released their grip on the professor’s legs and body.
The spines which had pointed downward, holding the plant’s prey, now became limber.
Adams leaned over. He reached down, grasped the professor by the feet, and, being a strong man, while his friend was small and light, he pulled him from the tube of the flower, a little dazed from the fumes of the chloroform the plant had breathed in, but otherwise not much the worse for his adventure.
He had not reached the water at the bottom of the tube, which fact saved him from drowning.
“Well, you certainly had a narrow squeak,” observed Adams as he helped the professor down the ladder.
“I did,” admitted the botanist. “If you had not been on hand I don’t know what would have happened. I suppose I would have been eaten alive.”
“Unless you could have cut yourself out of the side of the flower with your knife,” observed Adams.
“What! And killed the plant I raised with such pains?” ejaculated the professor. “Spoil the largest Sarracenia Nepenthis in the world? I guess not. I would rather have let it eat me.”
“I think you ought to call it the cannibal plant instead of the pitcher plant,” suggested Adams.
“Oh, no,” responded the professor dreamily, examining the flower from a distance to see if any harm had come to it. “But to punish it, I will not give it any supper or breakfast. That’s what it gets for being naughty,” he added as if the plant were a child.
“And I suggest that when you feed it hereafter,” said Adams, “you pass the beefsteaks in on a pitch-fork. You won’t run so much danger then.”
“That’s a good idea. I’ll do it,” answered the professor heartily.
And he has followed that plan ever since.
Prior to World War I the public regarded inventors and their inventions as exceedingly funny, and an entire school of science fiction based on this viewpoint came into existence. Albert Levering, an artist who illustrated a number of such stories, portrays the breeder of a super all-purpose ant carrying one suitable for lobster {ant) tails as described in The Hybrid Hyperborean Ant by Roy L. McCardell from Hampton’s Magazine December 1910.
June, 1910
AN EXPERIMENT IN GYRO-HATS
by Ellis Parker Butler
ELLIS Parker Butler always maintained that his fame was confined to a single story, Pigs is Pigs, published in The American Magazine in 1905, and said to have been written at the suggestion of the editor, Ellery Sedgwick. The story was a hilarious commentary on the obtuseness of an express agent who insisted on applying a livestock rate instead of a pet rate to a shipment of guinea pigs. The consignee refuses to pay and as the argument waxes and wanes the guinea pigs continue to do what comes naturally, until the express office is completely disorganized by them.
While Pigs is Pigs certainly caught the public’s fancy and has remained in print in one place or another ever since its publication, Butler’s hundreds of other stories were also extremely well received. It was a common thing to see a single short story by Butler issued as a 50-cent hardcover book and enjoy a wide sale. Additionally, collections of his stories not only became popular sellers, but also enjoyed library respectability.
An Experiment in Gyro-Hats is a perfect example of the scores of humorous invention stories which were so popular in the pulp adventure magazines after the turn of the century. It was published in Hampton’s Magazine for June 1910, and it richly deserves to be preserved for posterity. The story displays the real feel for humor possessed by the author, lifting it far above the average.
It was reprinted as a thirty-one-page hardcover book by The Q and C Co., New York, with five well-executed line drawings by Albert Levering, taken from Hampton’s Magazine. The book, though undated and uncopyrighted, would seem to have appeared before World War I. It is not listed in bibliographies of Butler’s published works.
Ellis Parker Butler quite probably was a radio enthusiast, for he wrote sixteen humorous stories for Hugo Gernshack’s Radio News during 1923 and 1924, displaying an intimate knowledge of the art as it was practiced in those innocent days. When Hugo Gernsback began publication of Amazing Stories, he reprinted two stories by Butler. The first, An Experiment in Gyro-Hats, which appeared in the third issue, June 1926, with a full-page illustration by science fiction artist Frank R. Paul, very similar to one by Albert Levering for Hampton’s Magazine, showed the inebriated inventor walking perpendicularly on a metal picket fence. The other was Solander’s Radio Tomb from the December 1923 Radio News. Published in Amazing Stories, June 1927, Solander’s Radio Tomb perfectly fitted its period, telling of an eccentric millionaire who had a radio station set up to broadcast sermons, hymns, and inspirational sayings from his tomb after his death. The entire plan functions well until the government reassigns the radio wavelengths and a permanent diet of red-hot jazz replaces the more solemn program.
Ellis Parker Butler died September 13, 1937 at the age of sixty-eight, perhaps not a great author, but a well-loved author whose name is remembered with affection.
THE idea of a gyro-hat did not come to me all at once, as some ideas come to inventors; and in fact I may say that but for a most unpleasant circumstance I might never have thought of gyro-hats at all, although I had for many years been considering the possibility of utilizing the waste space in the top of silk hats in some way or other. As a practical hat dealer and lover of my kind, it had always seemed to me a great economical waste to have a large vacant space inside the upper portion of top hats, or high hats, or “stove-pipe” hats, as they are variously called. When a shoe is on, it is full of foot, and when a glove is on, it is full of hand; but a top hat is not, and never can be, full of head, until such a day as heads assume a cylindrical shape, perfectly flat on top. And no sensible man ever expects that day to come.
I had, therefore, spent much of my leisure in devising methods by which the vacant space above the head in high hats might be turned to advantage, and my patents ranged all the way from a small filing cabinet that just occupied the waste space, to an extensible hat rack on the accordion plan that could be pushed compactly into the top of the top hat when the hat was worn, but could be extended into a hat and coat rack when the hat was not in use. This device should have been very popular, but I may say that the public received the idea coldly.
My attention had been for some time drawn away from this philanthropic work by certain symptoms of uneasiness I noticed in my daughter Anne, and my wife and I decided after careful consideration that Anne must be in love, and that her love must be unhappy. Otherwise we could not account for the strange excitability of our usually imperturbable daughter. As a practical hat dealer my time has been almost exclusively devoted to hats and, as a good wife, my companion’s attention has been almost exclusively devoted to her husband, while Anne was usually so calm and self-contained that she did not take my attention from my hat business at all. But when such a daughter suddenly develops signs of weeping and sighs and general nervousness, any father, no matter how devoted to the hat trade, must pay attention.
One of the primary necessities of a dealer in good hats is calm. An ordinary hat dealer may not need calm. He may buy his hats as another dealer buys flour, in the bulk, and then trust to advertisements to sell them; but I am not that kind of hat dealer. Hat dealing is an art with me, and great art requires calm and peace in order that it may reach its highest development. When I buy hats I do not think of dozens and dollars. No, indeed; I think of noses and ears. To be able to buy of a manufacturer a hat that will make the pug nose and big ears of a man I have never seen seem normal and beautiful when that man enters my store and buys a hat, requires calm. And no hatter can have calm in his soul while his daughter is love sick and unhappy. I demand happiness about and around me, and I must have it. So I told my wife, and I told her so most emphatically, and I informed her that Anne must become happy at once.
Perhaps you can imagine the shock I received when my wife, after making the necessary inquiries of Anne, informed me that Anne was indeed in love, and in love with Walsingham Gribbs. It was not because Walsingham Gribbs had never bought a hat of me that I was shocked. Bad hats are a common failing of mankind, and a man will try a hundred hatters before he at last comes to me.
The trouble was deeper than this. The thing that staggered me was that Walsingham was a staggerer. (This is a joke, but I hold that a hatter has as good a right to make a joke as the next man.)
That my daughter had fallen in love with Walsingham Gribbs without having met him was altogether to her credit. She first saw him when she was crossing the ocean (for she travels where she pleases, my hat business affording her such pleasures) and that he reeled and staggered about the boat did not impress her, for it was a stormy trip and everyone aboard reeled and staggered, even the captain of the boat. But when she returned to New York and saw Walsingham Gribbs on the firm pavement of Fifth Avenue, she had a harsh, cruel disillusionment. Walsingham Gribbs reeled and staggered on terra firma.
I am glad to say that my daughter saw at once the impossibility of the daughter of a high-class hatter mating with a permanent staggerer
As she realized this, she became sad and nervous, thus creating an atmosphere in my home that was quite opposed to the best high-class hatting, irritating my faculties and threatening to reduce me to the state of a mere commercial hatter.
Further investigation only made the matter seem worse, for quiet inquiries brought out the information that Walsingham Gribbs had been staggering since the year his father died. He had been constantly in a reeling, staggering state since his twentieth birthday. For such a man reform is, indeed, impossible. And what made the case more sad was that all proof seemed to point to the fact that Walsingham Gribbs was not a “bounder” nor a “rounder,” two classes of men who occasionally acquire a stagger and a reel in company with hearty boon companions.
In short, no one had ever seen Walsingham Gribbs take a drink in public, and I was forced to conclude that he was of that horrid type that drinks alone—”Alone but with unabated zeal” as that great poet, Sir Walter Scott, has remarked in one of his charming poems.
If all these investigations of mine were conducted without the knowledge of Walsingham Gribbs, you must admit I did only what was right in keeping them secret from him; for since he had never met my daughter he might have considered the efforts of a perfect stranger to peer into his life as being uncalled for. My wife did what she could to comfort Anne, but Anne sadly replied that she could never marry a man that staggered and reeled day in and day out. Thus day by day she became more sad, and I became so upset that I actually sold a narrow-brimmed derby hat to a man with wide, outstanding ears.
Of course this could not go on. No high-grade hat business could support it, and I was standing in my shop door looking gloomily out when I chanced to see Walsingham Gribbs stagger by. I had seen him many times, but now, for the first time I noticed what I should have noticed before—that he invariably wore a high hat, or “topper,” as our customers like to call them.
I observed that the shape was awful, and that the hat badly needed the iron, and then my mind recurred to the old problem of the vacant space in the top of top hats; but I found I could not concentrate. Whenever I tried to think of top hats I thought of Walsingham Gribbs in one of them, staggering and reeling up the street, and gradually the thought came that it would be an excellent idea should I be able so to use the space in the top of Walsingham’s hat that he would no longer stagger and reel, and then the thought of the gyroscope hat came to me.
I admit that at first I put the idea aside as futile, but it came back again and again, and at length it seemed to force me into enthusiasm. I dropped everything and went to work on the gyro-hat.
The gyroscope is, as everyone knows, a top, and I might have called the hat I invented a top hat, except that any tall cylindrical silk or beaver hat is called a top hat, so I was forced to adopt the name of gyro-hat.
A gyroscope is not an ordinary top. It is like a heavy fly wheel, revolving on an axis; and if it is spun, the speed of the revolutions maintains the axis in the perpendicular. A huge gyroscope is used to steady the channel steamers, which would otherwise stagger and reel. A gyroscope has just been adopted to the monorail cars, and so long as the gyroscope gyrates the monorail car cannot stagger or reel. If a proper gyroscope was placed on the end of a knitting needle and gyrated at full speed, that knitting needle could be stood on end and it would not fall over.
Therefore, if a gyroscope was placed in the top of a top hat, and the top hat firmly fastened to the head of a man, and the gyroscope set going, that man would remain perpendicular in spite of anything. He could not stagger. He could not reel. He could walk a line as straight as a crack.
When I had completed this gyro-hat I showed it to my wife, and briefly explained what it was and what I meant to do with it. The small but wonderfully powerful motor and the gyroscope itself were all concealed inside the hat, and I explained to my wife that Walsingham Gribbs need but fasten the hat firmly on his head and he would never stagger again. At first my wife seemed doubtful, but as I went on she became enthusiastic.
The only thing she disliked was the method of fastening the hat to the head, for, as it was quite necessary that the hat be very firmly fixed to the head, I had sewed ear tabs to the hat, and these I tied firmly under my chin. My wife said she feared it would require some time to persuade the public to take to silk hats with ear tabs, and that the sight of a man in a silk hat with ear tabs would be a sign that he was a staggerer. She wanted another method of holding the hat on the head.
“Vacuum suction,” I said, for I am quick to catch an idea. A man has to be, in the hat business. “But,” I added, “where would you get the vacuum? A man cannot be expected to carry a can of vacuum, or whatever he would need to carry vacuum in, around with him; especially the kind of man that would need the gyro-hat.”
“My dear,” said my wife, after a minute of thought, during which we both studied the gyro-hat, “I have it! Let the hat make its own vacuum. If the hat is lined with air-tight aluminum, and has a rubber sweat-band, and an expulsion valve, the gyroscope motor could pump the air out itself. It could create its own vacuum.”
“Of course it could!” I exclaimed. “I could rig it up so that putting the hat on the head would start the gyroscope, and the gyroscope would pump a vacuum. All any staggerer would need to do would be to put on his hat, and the hat would do the rest. It would stay on his head and it would keep him evenly on his keel.” (Of course I would not use a nautical term like “keel” in my hat shop, but at home I allow myself some liberties of that sort.)
I set to work at once to perfect the gyro-hat on the plan suggested by my wife and in a few days I was able to say it was a success. By this I mean it was a success in so far as the eye could judge by looking at the hat, and all that was needed was a practical trial.
As the hat had been invented for Walsingham Gribbs more than for any other man, I proposed to my wife that Walsingham—we had spoken of him so often that we now mentioned him as Walsingham—should be the man to try it out. But my wife is better posted in social matters than I, and she said it would not do at all to attempt such a thing.
In the first place, none of us knew Walsingham; and in all the other places, it would be insulting to suggest such a thing to him, and might ruin Anne’s chances. I then assured my wife that I did not mean to allow any ordinary intoxicated man to experiment with the only gyro-hat I possessed, and possibly wreck and ruin it. We had too much at stake for that. So, after considerable discussion, my wife and I decided upon what was, after all, the only rational course—I should try out the gyro-hat myself.
I admit here that I am not much of a drinker. Although not so by principle, I am by action a teetotaller. I consider that the highest good of a hat shop demands it. As a matter of fact I had never up to this time tasted intoxicating liquor, but it was evident to my wife and me that the time had arrived when the hat business demanded this sacrifice on my part. Evidently, if a gyro-hat is meant to keep a staggerer and reeler steady on his keel, the only test of the gyro-hat must be on the head of a man who, without the hat, could not help staggering and reeling —a thoroughly intoxicated man.
We did not, of course, admit Anne into our little conspiracy, and we chose a restaurant where we were sure intoxicants would be sold. We proceeded to the restaurant about the dinner hour; and after studying the waiters carefully, I selected one that seemed likely to know something about intoxicants, and we seated ourselves at his table. I placed the gyro-hat carefully across my knees, first setting the starter, and beckoned the waiter to us.
“My good fellow,” I said, when he had approached with his pencil and order card in hand, “I desire to become intoxicated this evening, and I presume you know something about intoxicating liquors.”
“Yes, sir,” said the waiter.
“Tell him, Henry,” said my wife, “that we also wish something to eat, but that as our principal object in coming here is to secure intoxicants, we wish him to be particular about them.”
“You have heard what the lady said,” I told the waiter, “and you will be guided accordingly.”
“Yes, sir,” said the waiter, politely. “Does the lady desire to become intoxicated also?”
“Heavens, no!” exclaimed my wife.
“Certainly not,” said the waiter.
“Now,” I said to the waiter, “you doubtless have different kinds of intoxicating liquors here—some strong and some not so strong—and I do not desire to drink a great quantity to obtain the result I desire. What would you recommend to give the required reeling and staggering condition as quickly as possible?”
“Well, sir,” he said, “if you will let me advise, I would advise a certain brandy we have. Of that brandy, sir, a little goes a long way. I have seen it work, sir, and I can assure you that a small quantity of that will make you stagger and reel to your heart’s content.”
“Very well,” I said, “you may bring me some. I suppose a quart would be enough.”
“I beg your pardon, sir,” he said, “but have you ever tried the brandy of which I speak?”
“I have not,” I said.
“Then, sir,” said the waiter apologetically, “unless you are a very heavy drinker I would not advise a quart of that brandy. A quart of that brandy, sir, would, if I may so speak, lay you out flat. You would not reel and stagger, sir. You would be paralyzed stiff, sir, dead to the world.”
I thanked the waiter warmly.
“You observe,” I said, “that I am not used to this sort of thing, and I appreciate the interest you are taking. I am inclined to leave the matter entirely in your hands. I may not know when I have had exactly the right quantity, but you, with your larger experience, will know, sir.”
“Yes, sir. And I think the lady will know, sir,” said the waiter.
I found the brandy most unpleasant to the taste, but certain symptoms assured me that the waiter had not belied its effectiveness. Long before the waiter was satisfied that I would stagger and reel, my long lost vocal prowess returned and I caroled gaily some songs that had been favorites of my youth. Many of these were affectionate songs, and when I sang them I had a great longing to hold my wife’s hand, and did so; but as she would not let me kiss her, I felt the need of kissing the waiter. Here again I was repulsed, but it did not make me angry. I merely slid down into my chair and waved my hand at him coquettishly.
“If you please, sir,” said the waiter, when I had finished another burst of song, “I think you are pretty ripe, now. If you would just get up and walk a few steps I can tell more definitely.”
My wife smiled at me reassuringly and nodded to me that what the waiter proposed had her full sanction; but even so, I was filled with a fear that we were about to be parted forever, and for a few minutes I clung to her neck, weeping bitter tears. I then tore myself away, and I did indeed stagger and reel. I believe I knocked over two small tables and ended by seating myself in the lap of a young man who was dining alone. He accepted my apology before I had spoken more than fifteen minutes of it, and then he aided the waiter in steering me back to my table.
Whatever may have been my past opinion of Walsingham Gribbs—for it was he—I loved him most dearly at that moment, and in my incoherent manner I tried to tell him so. I think he understood. At any rate, he spoke to my wife like a true gentleman.
“Madame,” he said, “I can sincerely sympathize with your husband, and if you will allow me, I will gladly help you assist him to a cab. I beg you not to be frightened by his condition. I myself am subject to the same trouble, and although he may seem drunk—”
“Seem drunk!” exclaimed my wife. “Seem drunk! I beg you to know that my husband is as drunk as a man can become without being senseless. Either that, or we have been defrauded by this waiter!”
Walsingham Gribbs looked at my wife, and then smiled.
“Very well,” he said, “if what you wanted was to have him drunk, I’ll admit that he is about the drunkest man I have ever seen. I only spoke as I did in order that I might spare your feelings, for most wives object to seeing their husbands stagger and reel. I myself stagger and reel continually, and I have never tasted intoxicating liquor in my life, but I can share the feelings of one who staggers and reels, or who has a relative that staggers and reels.”
At this my wife said:
“Are you not Walsingham Gribbs? If you are I am delighted to have met you, even in this unconventional manner, for what brought us here will interest you.”
She then told him of the gyro-hat I had invented, and explained just why I had come to this place and had swallowed the strong brandy. I took no part in this conversation, but Walsingham gladly agreed to accompany us, and he put my gyro-hat on my head.
The result was indeed marvelous. Instantly the vacuum pump began to work and the gyroscope to revolve. My head, which had been lying on one side, straightened up. The rubber sweat band gripped my head tightly with a slight pulling sensation. Without assistance I arose from my chair and stood erect. My brain was still confused, but I walked as straight as a string direct to the door of the restaurant, and stood holding it open while my wife and Walsingham passed out.
The gyroscope was revolving at the rate of three thousand revolutions a minute, and the slight humming was hardly noticeable. I did not stagger and I did not reel. When I reached Gramercy Park I was full of glee. I had been walking on the edge of the curb, but I now desired to climb atop of the iron fence that surrounds the park, and walk on the points of the pickets.
My wife and Walsingham tried to dissuade me, but I climbed to the top of the fence. I not only walked on the points of the pickets easily, but I was able to place the end of one toe on the point of one picket, and thus balanced wave the other leg in the air. My wife and Walsingham Gribbs coaxed me to come down to the level of the walk, but as I saw no reason to do so, I flatly refused, and at last Walsingham reached up and took me by the hand and pulled me.
Ordinarily a man that had imbibed a quantity of brandy would have fallen to the street if pulled by one hand while standing on the top of a row of pickets, but I did not. When Walsingham pulled my hand I inclined gently toward him until I was at right angles to the picket fence, with my feet still on top of the pickets; and when he released my hand I slowly swung upright again, without any effort whatever on my part. I got down off that fence when I was ready, and not before.
There could be no doubt whatever that I was far more intoxicated than Walsingham Gribbs, and all the way home I gave vent to tremendous bursts of laughter over the idea that while Walsingham thought he was seeing me safely home I walked as straight and true as a general, and he staggered and reeled except when he clung closely to my arm.
Many persons stopped and looked at us, and I cannot wonder at it. For Walsingham is a young man of most dignified countenance, and it must have seemed strange to see a young man of such sober mien reeling drunkenly, while a dignified and steadily walking hatter laughed and shouted drunkenly. It was as if the two of us had been able to afford but one spree, and had divided it in that way, he taking the stagger and I taking the boisterousness.
My wife was much touched by the kind attentions of Walsingham, and when we reached home she invited him in, and while I found a little harmless amusement in walking up the stair banisters and sliding down them standing on my feet, which I was enabled to do because of the steadying effect of the gyro-hat, she took Walsingham into the parlor and introduced him to Anne formally.
My poor daughter was quite overcome with embarrassment and pleasure, but when Walsingham was sitting he showed no evidence of his stagger and reel whatever, and they managed to become quite well acquainted while my wife was assisting me to bed.
Unfortunately I had neglected to arrange any method for letting the vacuum out of the gyro-hat, and although my wife tugged and pulled at the hat, the suction held it fast to my head and it refused to come off unless my scalp came with it. My wife decided that I must sleep in the hat, since I was in no condition of mind to do anything about it myself.
I was dying for sleep, and my wife tumbled me into bed and pulled the sheet over me, and that same instant I fell into a heavy slumber, but the moment my wife released her grasp on me I began arising to my feet, irresistibly drawn to the perpendicular by the action of the gyro-hat. I continued to arise until I was standing upright. I can only liken the manner in which I arose to the way a man might raise a stiff arm slowly until it pointed straight upward.
My wife immediately pushed me down onto the pillow again, but it was unavailing. Again the gyro-hat drew me to a standing position, and my wife was forced to let me continue my night’s rest in that position.
The next morning I did not feel very well, but I never saw my wife in better spirits. She told me she was sure Walsingham had taken a great fancy to Anne, for he had asked permission to call again that evening, and my wife said that in her opinion it would be well to take up the matter of the marriage with Walsingham at once, before it went any further. If he meant business he would be glad to wear the hat and be rid of his stagger and reel; and if he meant nothing it would be a good thing to know it, and the sooner we were rid of him the better. I agreed with her fully, but I spent the day perfecting the vacuum outlet on the hat.
I must admit that Walsingham seemed somewhat surprised when I made the suggestion to him that evening. For a few minutes he did not seem to know what to say. Perhaps it was a little overcoming to have the parents of Anne suggest the idea of marriage in this offhand manner and at the same time proposed the wearing of a gyro-hat; but Walsingham was a gentleman, and when he glanced up, after his first surprise, and saw Anne gazing at him appealingly, with her hands clasped, I could see that love had won. But instead of acquiescing immediately, Walsingham Gribbs took one of Anne’s hands in his, and after patting it, spoke directly to me.
“Sir,” he said, “I cannot but appreciate the delicate manner in which you have handled this matter, but if I am only too glad to find that there is a hat that will correct my unfortunate staggering and reeling, and if I am glad to accept your offer of that hat, I feel it due to myself to assure you that liquor has nothing whatever to do with my staggering and reeling. I am the victim of an unfortunate experience of my youthful days.
“My father was a man of many ideas, and always trying to make the world better. He had a neighbor that had a mule. It was a mouse-colored mule and very stubborn, and it used to wring my father’s heart to see the neighbor belabor that mule with a heavy whip, trying to make the mule proceed in a direction in which it did not wish to go. The mule was quite willing to go toward the barn, where the feed was kept; but it often refused to go in the opposite direction, although it would go well enough if it once started.
“My father, therefore, conceived the idea of what he called the Gribbs Mule Reverser. This was a circular platform large enough to hold a mule and his loaded wagon, and beneath the platform was a motor capable of revolving the platform. All that was necessary was to place the mule and the wagon on the platform and start the mule in the direction of home, and then suddenly turn the platform in the direction the mule was desired to go, and the mule would proceed, unwittingly in that direction.”
“A very excellent idea,” I said.
“Except that it would not work in the least,” said Walsingham. “In the first place, it was necessary to dig a pit five feet square beneath the revolving platform to contain the motor, and this was not always convenient. In the second place, the platform and motor would hardly ever happen to be where the mule balked, and it would have been a great deal easier to load the mule on a wagon than to load the platform and motor on three wagons. And in the third place, if the mule would not start homeward, neither would it start onto the platform of the Mule Reverser.
“So, after my father had tried the platform in our back yard, with a mule on it, and the revolutions had thrown the mule up against the side of the barn, breaking both the mule and the barn, he decided that other things were better to invent and abandoned the platform. I and the lads of the neighborhood found this a good place to play, and one day I was standing exactly in the center of the platform when one of the boys happened to start the motor. I had sense enough to remain exactly in the center of the platform, or I would have been thrown off, and possibly killed, for the platform was revolving at the rate of eight thousand revolutions a minute. The motor had power to revolve the platform slowly when loaded with a mule and loaded wagon, so it was capable of immense speed with only a small boy on it.
“When my companions saw what they had done,” continued Walsingham, “they all ran away, and for four hours I remained in the center of that platform, being revolved at an enormous speed, and when my father came home and stopped the platform I staggered and reeled and fell in a heap at his feet. That is how I acquired my unfortunate stagger and unpleasant reel, and I have only told you this that you may have no unjust suspicions.”
“But why,” asked my wife, who had been greatly interested by Walsingham’s story, “do you not revolve in the opposite direction, and ‘unwind’ yourself, as we used to say?”
“Madame,” said Walsingham, “I have. Every night, for one hour before I go to bed I revolve, but it requires an immense number of revolutions to overcome such a spin as I had in my youth.” He waited a moment and then said: “But I am now ready to try the gyro-hat.”
I looked out of the window, and hesitated. A thin rain was falling, and was freezing as it fell, and I hated to have a good, silk, gyro-hat go out into such weather; but as a leading hatter I felt that it would never do for me to seem small and pickayunish in regard to hats. I remembered that a really good silk hat should not be ruined by a few drops of water; and I saw that if anything could convince Anne and Walsingham that the gyro-hat held their happiness, it would be a trial on such slippery walks as the evening had provided.
So I brought down the hat and pressed it on Walsingham’s head. Instantly the vacuum creator began to work and the hat clung fast to his head. He arose to his feet and walked across the parlor in a perfectly steady manner, and out into the hall. I held open the front door and he stepped out.
Walsingham crossed the porch with as steady a tread as ever any man crossed the porch of a high-class hatter, but when he reached the top step his foot struck the ice and he slipped. He did not stagger nor reel. If he fell, he fell steadily. I can best liken his fall to the action of a limber reed when the wind strikes it. He inclined slowly, with his feet still on the top step, and continued to incline until his head touched the walk below with considerable violence, and then his feet slipped down the edges of the steps until they rested on the walk.
I never saw a more graceful fall, and I was about to congratulate Walsingham, when he began to incline toward the perpendicular again, in the same slow manner. But this was not the reason I held my words. The reason was that the gyro-hat and Walsingham were behaving in a most unaccountable manner. Walsingham was revolving.
I discovered later that the fall had jammed the gyroscope on the pivot so that the gyroscope could not revolve without revolving the whole hat, and as the hat was firmly suctioned to Walsingham, the hat could not revolve without revolving Walsingham. For an instant Walsingham revolved away from us down the walk, and Anne gave a great cry; but almost at that moment Walsingham regained the upright and began to revolve rapidly. The icy walk offered no purchase for his feet, and this was indeed lucky; for if it had, his head would have continued to revolve none the less, and the effect would have been fatal.
I estimated that Walsingham was revolving at a rate of perhaps fifteen hundred revolutions a minute, and it was some minutes before my wife was able so far to recover from the shock of seeing her prospective son-in-law whirl thus as to ask me to stop him. My first impulse was to do so, but my long training as a hatter had made me a careful, thoughtful man, and I gently pushed my wife back.
“My dear,” I said, “let us pause and consider this case. Here we have Walsingham revolving rapidly. He is revolving in one of the only two directions in which he can revolve—the direction in which he revolved on the Mule Reverser, or the opposite direction. If it is the opposite direction all is well, for he will be unwound in a few hours, if his neck is not wrung in the meantime. If it is in the same direction it is no use to stop him now, for by this time he will be in such a condition of reeling and staggering that we would not have him as a son-in-law on any terms. I propose, therefore, to let him spin here for a few hours, when he will have had a full recovery or be permanently too dizzy for any use.”
My wife, and Anne too, saw the wisdom of this course, and as it was very miserable weather outside we all withdrew to my parlor, from the window of which we could watch Walsingham revolve. Occasionally, when he seemed about to revolve off the walk, I went out and pushed him on again.
I figure that by six o’clock in the morning he would be sufficiently revolved—provided he was revolving in the right direction—and at midnight I sent my wife and Ann to bed. I fear Anne slept but little that night, for she must have had a lover’s natural anxiety as to how all was to turn out.
At six in the morning I called Anne and my wife, and we went into the yard to stop Walsingham, and it was not until I had carefully walked down the porch steps that it came to me that I had no way of stopping him whatever. To add to my dismay I knew that when the sun arose the thin ice would melt, and as Walsingham’s feet could no longer slip easily, he would in all probability be wrenched in two, a most unsatisfactory condition for a son-in-law.
But while I was standing in dismay love found a way, as love always will, and Anne rushed to the cellar and brought out the stepladder and the ice pick. Placing the stepladder close to Walsingham she climbed it, and holding the point of the ice pick at the exact center of the top of the hat she pushed down. In a moment a sizzling noise told us that she had bored a hole in the hat, letting the vacuum escape, and the hat flew from Walsingham’s head.
Slower and slower he revolved, until he stood quite still, and then, without a reel or a stagger he walked up to me and grasped my hand, while tears told me the thanks he could not utter. He had revolved in the right direction! He was cured!
December, 1910
THE HYBRID HYPERBOREAN ANT
by Roy L. McCardell
ROY Larcom McCardell was one of the truly smart and sophisticated writers of the turn of the century. He cultivated a light, clever turn of the phrase and always gave the impression of knowing what went on behind the scenes.
This was in part due to an intimate knowledge of the Broadway theater, reflected in books which brought him attention: Conversations of a Chorus Girl (Street & Smith, 1903) and The Show Girl and Her Friends (Street & Smith, 1904). As early as 1899 he attracted notice with The Wage Slaves of New York (Dillingham), and as recently as 1930 Farrar & Rinehart would publish his book My Aunt Angie.
His writing and his outlook reflected the times, giving him immediate status but no permanence. The Hybrid Hyperborean Ant was an exception for though actually an off-shot of the humorous invention story, it is based on biology rather than mechanics and written with style and gusto.
There is in this story, despite its high humor and farcical nature, an element of understanding about the grass-roots exploitation of new developments. Roy McCardell’s super-ants could find a constructive place in the world if they had actually been bred. They would have fitted superbly into the economy and filled many basic needs. Unlike the biological creations of many science fiction stories, which tend to develop into monsters and whose extermination is the entire point of the story, the elimination of hyperborean ants has a note of tragedy, because they were so potentially useful.
The Hybrid Hyperborean Ant does not stand alone in biological “invention.” It is quite evident that Howard R. Garis’ Professor Jonkin and His Busier Bees (The Argosy, March 1906), with his idea of crossing a lightning bug with a bee so that it will have the light to work at night and make twice as much honey, fits perfectly into the same category.
All of which underscores that, after the turn of the century, the humorous-inventor story had subdivisions of mechanics and biology with “artistic” standards of their own.
NOW that my friend and neighbor, D. Frank Dodge, has gone to the Bermudas for rest and recreation, I feel it is only fair, both to him and myself, to tell the whole truth of the strange results of his remarkable experiments with the family formicidœ, of which so much has been hinted at but of which so few of the real facts are known.
“They will not believe you, old man,” said Frank to me, as I bade him good bye, whilst his man-servant tucked his rug around him, placed a cushion under his head, and made comfortable the worn, wan fellow, plucky still though he had lost the great fight of his life.
“They will not believe you,” he repeated. “Let the heathen rave, I mean rage. It will all die out and be forgotten and they will stop bothering you, now that I have gone away.”
But they haven’t stopped bothering me. Hardly a day passes but that I receive fool letters from pseudo-savants, nature fakirs and would-be humorists, or am held up by vacuous commuting acquaintances and made the butt of the dreary wit of the smoking car about “Your friend’s ant farm.”
And, to make matters short, that is what Frank Dodge had—an ant, a n t, farm. But for an accident, but for the merest chance, he would be hailed to-day as the saviour of the Southern planter, as a benefactor to mankind and a Burbank of beneficial insect life; instead of being a nervous wreck slowly coming back to health and strength in the far Bermudas, a man anguished at the thought of his lifework swept away— stung still by the recollection of the jeers of the vapid, cackling mob that might even now be hailing him as the greatest man of his time. And here was I, his friend, left behind to share in the crackling jocosities that greet his name when, had not one thing happened, an incident turned to a tragedy, he might be feted and famous and I be shining in his reflected glory.
So I will tell it. I will tell it truthfully, simply, plainly—for even the obloquy of fools becomes in time unbearable. Dear old Frank shall be set aright, and the world shall judge whether it were best to laugh or cry at the misfortune that overtook him at the moment that fame and fortune were within his grasp.
It all began when I received the appended letter from my old friend.
That is, it began for me. With Frank it was the end in sight, after years of ceaseless effort, expense and experiment. Here is the letter.
D. FRANK DODGE
IMPORTER AND BREEDER OF ANTS
The Largest Importer of Ants in America. Scavenger and Hybrid Hyperborean Ants Always on Hand. Special Rates to the Trade.
Ant Hills, Westchester Co., N. Y.
August 23, 1909.
Dear Mac: Come out to Ant Hills to-morrow. Efforts crowned with success. No doubt about proving every claim I have ever made for my hybrid hyperborean ants. The work of my scavenger ants you know. Agricultural Department of Washington pays $10,000 for two million hybrid hyperborean ants for Texas. Prof. Twombley Jenks, F.N.H.S. (Fellow Natural History Society) will be here to take charge of them and proceed with them south. If what I claim, and you know they are and more, Government will award a million dollars and a gold medal. I’m as nervous as a cat. Come stand by me now in the hour of success as you have always done in the weary days of trial and defeat. Trap will meet you at station. As always.
D. FRANK DODGE.
The 9:27 train saw me aboard, and in due time I was alighting at Pelham and driving over with Frank’s man in the trap to Ant Hills, Frank’s farm and experimental station.
The whole six acres of Ant Hills, as many will remember, was surrounded with a high wire fence of fine fly screen, reinforced with half-inch steel cable. Tangle-foot flypaper tacked along the supporting scantling rail at the top marked “No Thoroughfare” for Frank’s busy insect friends.
A wait for a moment to close one great fly screen door behind me, before the inner one was opened, a space Frank facetiously termed “the ante-room.” And then I was on my friend’s domains, famous Ant Hills, the home of his ants “and other relations,” as the poor fellow used to say, and the breeding place of his edible lobster ant, his most useful scavenger ant, and the even more remarkable hybrid hyperborean ant, This last was the intelligent and docile insect that Frank’s patience and genius had originated to maintain cotton in its Kingship, and our beloved Southland as the King’s greatest realm in the world!
Ant Hills was familiar to me, but for the benefit of those who have heard of the place only as a gigantic hoax or joke that reacted upon its alleged perpetrator, I will briefly describe it.
Frank’s neat bungalow, “Antlers,” with its trim privet hedges and garden of old-fashioned flowers, all surrounded by a step-overable moat filled with viscid tar—to keep out visiting ants—was in the foreground, occupying with its private grounds about an acre. The rest of the screened farm was given over to the Antery.
The visitor would have rubbed his eyes to see the bizarre surroundings behind the bungalow. The first things that engaged the attention were huge sets of painted canvas backgrounds representing tropical and jungle scenes. A tangle of theatrical grass mats and imitation palms and tropic plants, all of a rank and poisonous green color, occupied the foreground. There was method in this seeming madness, as Frank had long ago explained to me. The equatorial and sub-tropical ants, especially the larger ants from the Antilles, and the African termites, or true Termes lucifugus, for many years had died as soon as imported. My friend’s experiments were thus at times at a standstill, although he had imported tropic timber, insects and fruits for the expatriated ants to feed upon. Yet the ants had lain in lethargic heaps and refused to eat or exercise.
After trying everything to aid in simulating in another clime their sunny homes, from phonographs imitating tropic sounds to placing them in heated sands, my friend at last decided that the equatorial and African ants were homesick for their own far tropic scenes.
As is well known, and has been constantly stated in the slurred and garbled accounts printed of his experiments, Dodge is a theatrical scene painter. It was through his success at his profession that he was enabled to make the vast amount of money he expended on his experiments with ants—experiments that covered twenty years.
The idea of the ants being homesick almost seemed ridiculous, but my friend Dodge was not to be deterred in ascertaining if it were so or not. He secured vast stretches of canvas and had laboriously painted two tropic scenes, when the failure of “The King of the Cannibal Islands” and several other comic operas of its kind gave him opportunity to secure tropical scenery sufficient for his needs at slight cost. And Frank’s seemingly ridiculous idea was the correct solution. The tropical ants had been pining for jungle scenes.
In homelike surroundings, with the painted tangle of the rookh before their eyes and the practical tangle of grass mats and artificial palms around them, the next importation of equatorial ants set briskly and even blithely to work, and reared ant hills twenty feet in height. It was as though they said, “Here are we home,” for they burrowed so extensively that Frank was put to the expense of sinking a concrete wall ten feet deep all around the now rightly named Ant Hills.
The visitor might also have marked the vast glass hothouses, the winter quarters of Dodge’s insect friends, to which on the first indication of cool nights in September they would follow him at the sound of the clicked call he used, a crackling metallic instrument such as elevator starters signal with in big office buildings. Ants, as we all know, are the most intelligent of insects. They soon learned the sound of the call and the varied significance of the different signals Frank sounded upon it, from “First call to breakfast” to “Taps.” The call to winter quarters was simply the prolongation of the call, “Follow me.”
Much confusion was occasioned later when a plague of crickets came down upon the farm, and millions of the first hybrid hyperboreans, as well as many of the useful if not as valuable scavenger ants, died from exhaustion trying to obey the sounds. The trained and domesticated ants, such as Frank had at Ant Hills, were all faithful and obedient mites. So they rushed continuously as the crickets made their constant and confusing calls—sounds made by their master, so the ants thought. This was the first disaster of the last days of Ant Hills, and led up to the final and irreparable tragedy of which I will tell anon.
Once in their winter quarters, the smaller-sized and more portable tropic scenery being brought in to make the place homelike, the ants passed the winter industriously caring for their cows or aphides; an almost human husbandry to which all formicidœ are partial, as any natural history will tell you.
I will not go into the various details of my friend Dodge’s experiments, or of how he endeavored to raise honey ants for the local markets. But despite several orders for them for freak dinners, and having them put on the menu at the Waldorf Astoria and the Cafe des Beaux Arts for one season, Frank found them less appealing to New York appetites than escargots, or snails, have been. For the snails, at least, have expatriated Frenchmen and art students to call for them at Martin’s or Mouquin’s. And yet American visitors, especially New Yorkers, traveling in Mexico, will eat the succulent honey ant sold by the measure in the Mexican markets and even notoriety-desiring Pittsburgers and other nouveaux riches have them sent from our sister republic to be served at sensational banquets.
But that is not all. To show the superiority of those he had raised, Frank had Mexican honey ants sent him, sealed, turned them over to a well-known analytical laboratory, and proved conclusively that the ones shipped from below the Rio Grande were grossly adulterated with glucose, and were also preserved from fermentation by one-tenth of one per cent of benzoate of soda.
To those who do not know of the honey ant, I may state that any work on entomology will explain that it is a fermicid of the genus Myrmecocystus melliger, one form of worker which receives and stores in its abdomen the honey gathered by other workers until it is round and distended with honey and almost as large as a small grape.
As regards the weird stories that my friend Dodge had bred, by large type-selection and certain stimulating foods, a species of ant as big as a house dog, that is pure hyperbole—unless we consider that it could be likened in size to a very small sort of house dog.
The fact is that Frank, before he saw the practical use of the hybrid hyperborean ant in destroying the boll weevil pest—there, the secret is out!—had a wild idea that the edible Giantigascutus, or lobster ant as he called the largest variety he originated and bred, might be of great value in taking the place of the fast-disappearing lobster as a viand for epicures.
To this end, he bred them from varieties that assumed an almost lobsterlike appearance, but through some strange freak of nature the ants that grew to the size of lobsters, and almost lobster-like in appearance, lost their pinchers. It was the demand for claws when the lobster ant was served that precluded them from ever becoming a successful substitute for the popular and costly crustacean. The red color of the cooked lobster was easily simulated in the case of the lobster ant by an application of aniline dye.
It was the clawless lobster ant that caused Mr. Thomas Sharkey, the sailor-saloonkeeper-gladiator, to make his famous mot when the waiter explained that the lobsters got to fighting and this one had lost its claws. Mr. Sharkey regarded the cooked lobster ant before him dubiously, and said, gruffly: “Well, take this one away and bring me the winner.”
After that, Mr. Thomas Shanley and other Broadway restaurateurs refused to further endeavor to substitute the lobster ant for the real Homarus cimericanus, or true soubrette food.
It was about this time, when my friend Dodge could be seen going from restaurant to hotel carrying a special-sized lobster ant in a shawl strap, that the rumor concerning his sanity first began to be bruited abroad—rumors as cruel as they were unjust. For Frank Dodge, humble savant and scientist, would have been a benefactor to mankind to rank with Benner, Harvey, Fulton, Burbank, any or all who have done mankind beneficial service beyond mundane comprehension or earthly reward. Here also is a fitting place to dignify with denial the slander that Frank Dodge was in the habit of grinding up red ants and selling them as “antchovy paste.”
It was his scavenger ants that first turned my friend Dodge’s thoughts to making what had been simply a hobby something of great practical benefit. His scavenger ants, as all the good housewives of Pelham and New Rochelle will testify, were unequalled as sanitary aids in the home. Manager Boldt of the Waldorf-Astoria; George Rector of the Cafe Madrid; Proprietor Regan of the Knickerbocker Hotel; all will tell you that so far as his scavenger ants were concerned, Frank Dodge was a man who should have been encouraged instead of jeered at and disheartened.
Hearing of a plague of moths, roaches or mice, or of stopped drain pipes from the kitchen sink, Frank Dodge, as a friendly service and also to keep his scavenger ants in training, would appear on the scene with a tin dress suitcase filled with the little workers for health and sanitation. All he would ask was an indemnity bond that no hot or even cold water be turned on while his insect sanitary corps were in the drains. At his clicking command, uGo to it,” they would march in myriads and legions down cracks and crevices or through the sink strainer holes, and busy themselves until their work was fully done.
The appearance of the leaders, or foremen scavenger ants, as if to ask, “Anything else, sir?” was the signal the work was done. The sharp clicks on Frank’s metallic call that meant “To quarters,” would bring them all back into the tin suitcase, tired but satisfied with the consciousness of good work well done.
But all this only leads up to the crux and climax of Dodge’s efforts in formicid culture—his evolving of the famous hybrid hyperborean ant, a new variety of the crossed Megalomyrmex septentrionalis with Termes lucifugus. The resultant variety was the most docile and intelligent ant of all, a beneficial insect that would have destroyed the boll weevil and saved incalculable millions to the planter and the cotton factor, had not fate intervened.
Like all discoveries destined to benefit mankind, the great purpose for which the hybrid hyperborean ant was evolved was ascertained by chance. The hybrid hyperboreans were Frank’s favorites, even above the lobster ant—bred for its edibility—and the scavenger ant, that blessing to the housewife. Frank had evolved the hybrid hyperborean, as he called it, by mating and crossing his best strains. The hybrid hyperborean was a sleek and graceful fellow, almost an inch in length.
One day in passing through his flower garden, Frank had noticed upon a small peach tree a tent or cluster of the caterpillar of the brown-tailed moth. He had plucked it off, intending to burn it, when the thought struck him that perhaps here was insect food at hand for his ants. He bore the branch with the caterpillar cobweb or tent with him into the Antery.
The lobster ants refused it emphatically. A long diet on dead fish and chopped clams had perhaps vitiated their appetite for that kind of food. Even the scavenger ants hesitated as if asking whether the caterpillars were a gift or an assignment.æ
But not so the hybrid hyperboreans. They devoured them ravenously. And from that time on, Frank used the hybrid hyperborean ants as destroyers of caterpillars, moth clusters, and San Jose scale on his own place and in the neighborhood.
Reading about this time of the ruinous ravages of the boll weevil in Texas, Frank sent to a friend of his in the devastated cotton belt for a large quantity of the ruined cotton plants covered with the cocoons and pupæ of the pest. As he opened the box containing the infected cotton plants, the very presence of their destined prey seemed to excite all the hybrid hyperboreans in the Antery. They rushed from all quarters, the champing of their mandibles being plainly discernible.
As Frank advanced toward them holding the cotton plants, the hybrid hyperborean ants jumped up in the air to a height of fully two feet, seized upon the boll weevils, and devoured them instantly. By this time, the very box that held the rest of the plants was pierced in ten thousand places so that it crumbled to powder. Without harming a fiber of such of the cotton as the boll weevil had spared, or touching a leaf or twig of the plants, the hybrid hyperborean ants destroyed in the twinkling of an eye every boll weevil of the thousands with which the plants were thickly covered.
The idea struck Frank like a flash that not only was the killer of the scourge of the cotton field found at last, but that in time the hybrid hyperborean ants would develop their embryonic jumping faculties so that, with the boll weevil wiped out, they could destroy, upon the jump as it were, the Western grasshopper plagues.
That night the originator of the edible lobster ant, the sanitary scavenger ant, and best of all, the hybrid hyperborean ant—the found-at-last destroyer of the boll weevil pest—wrote to the Department of Agriculture in Washington the news that was to cause hope to spring renewed in Southern hearts.
A courteous but somewhat skeptical reply was received from the head of the Entomological Bureau, Professor Twombley Jenks. But Mr. Dodge was neither to be denied nor discouraged. He sent half a hundred hybrid hyperborean ants to Washington, and the moment Professor Twombley Jenks brought these into contact with the boll weevils he had at the Entomological Bureau for experimental purposes, my friend’s contentions were proved.
Now the hybrid hyperboreans, having had a second feeding of boll weevil, refused to eat anything else, and they starved to death while awaiting the arrival of more of their positively preferred diet from Texas —although, as my friend Dodge said, it is possible they missed the tropical scenery of Ant Hills and perished of nostalgia.
Scientists and government investigators, however, are slow to reach assumed conclusions. Professor Twombley Jenks was interested but not wholly convinced. An interminable correspondence now ensued, and poor Frank wavered so much between high hopes and most depressing despair that here began the nervous tendency that was to find its climax in collapse when the great final misfortune overwhelmed and struck him down.
At last the second supply of weevil-infected cotton plants arrived in Washington, and passed through all the mazes of circumlocution, delaying detail and governmental red tape. Frank was at last advised, through letter 3096-B, form 181827, to send a dozen more gross of hybrid hyperborean ants. He did so.
The Secretary of Agriculture, the Washington newspaper correspondents, and Whitelaw Reid’s ex-social secretary were all present when they arrived. The hybrid hyperborean ants attacked the boll weevils so fiercely and so murderously that Whitelaw Reid’s ex-social secretary fainted at the sight, and the experiment ended in some confusion. The Washington papers, of course, played up the society aspect of the affair, giving two columns to the account of the swooning of the ex-social secretary who was the White House cotillion leader during that administration. They also printed his pictures, one taken before he fainted, and one afterwards, but both showing him in correct evening attire.
The Washington correspondents of the New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco papers all followed the example of Samuel Blythe of the New York World, who set the fashion that session of Congress of treating all events transpiring at the capital in a humorous light. Thus it was that in one paragraph they described the hybrid hyperborean ants as lighting on to the boll weevils like magazine editors on to second-night seats at the theaters. But the great news that a White House cotillion leader had swooned at the same time, because some coarse person had eaten all the macaroons, was given the first page, right column position in even the metropolitan papers. And the greatest epoch in entomology, the fact that the hybrid hyperborean ant had been discovered to be the speedy destroyer of the boll weevil, was thus passed almost unnoticed.
After Professor Twombley Jenks had recovered from his agitation over the prostration of the White House’s favorite cotillion leader, and that gentleman was able to sit up and partake of his usual afternoon tea with watercress sandwiches, my friend Dodge was again communicated with and assured, in the usual cold and formal official verbiage, that there was no doubt as to the efficacy of the hybrid hyperborean ant in eliminating the boll weevil as a factor in the cotton’s crop’s destruction.
Mr. Dodge was further informed, after three months’ correspondence, that following certain experiments to be conducted by Professor Twombley Jenks in person at Ant Hill, the government would award him $10,000, and Congress would be urged to vote him a million dollars and a gold medal: provided said further experiments were equally successful upon a large scale and a practical test bore them out.
Mr. Dodge was likewise advised that to secure even the preliminary $10,000, and to place Professor Twombley Jenks in a position to make the practical tests in the cotton fields of Texas, a supply of a billion hybrid hyperborean ants would be necessary, possibly more, as Professor Jenks had not yet figured out by integral calculus just how many thousands of the pest destroyers would be needed to the acre. The hybrid hyperborean ants must also be guaranteed to stand the Texas scenery, and have no homesick qualms or yearns for the painted jungle backdrops of the late musical melange “All Girls and Glitter,” or “Old King Kafoozelum,” or “The King of the Cannibal Islands,” and other canvas vistas of comic opera jungle-land saved from the storehouse to make Ant Hill homey for the transplanted equatorial formicidæ.
Frank Dodge, however, was jubilant. He gave an ant-bake to the Niagara Hose of Pelham, the Neptune and Relief Hose of New Rochelle, and the Millionaire’s Fire Company of Larchmont, selecting a Saturday for the ant-bake when the millionaires of the Larchmont Fire Company would have a half-holiday from Macy’s, Wanamaker’s and the Siegel-Cooper stores, and could get home on the 1:33 train.
This ant-bake cleared the Antery of all the lobster ants. Frank then distributed the scavenger ants generously among the actors’ boarding houses around Seventh Avenue, from Thirty-eighth to Fiftieth Streets, and farmed out the rest to Costar, the Insecticide King on Sixth Avenue, so that he could turn his attention solely to increasing the flocks of hybrid hyperboreans. He kept these quiet and unmolested, supplied them with all the boll weevils he could get shipped to him, and let nature take its course.
Race suicide has no part or portion in the social life of the hybrid hyperborean ant, and with a nervous glee that bordered almost on hysteria, my poor friend Dodge saw his Antery soon contain two billion of the docile and intelligent hybrid hyperboreans, always his favorite of the thoroughbred formicidæ. And thus the eventful day drew near that was to bring Professor Twombley Jenks, of the Entomological Bureau, Department of Agriculture, to Ant Hills, Westchester County, New York.
Had not “Robinson’s Regal Railroad Shows” raised its tents in nearby Mount Vernon that fateful day, my poor friend would now be a millionaire, the acclaimed benefactor of the farmer and the planter, the wearer of a medal from Congress, and the most popular man in America, instead of hiding in the Bermudas as he is to-day, as discredited, though most unjustly so, as Dr. Cook.
“Robinson’s Regal Railroad Shows” raised at daybreak its dingy round-tops on the vacant lots adjoining the koumyss factory in Mount Vernon. A high wind tore to tatters the gaudy banners that told the wonders of the greatest zoological congress ever gathered beneath canvas, together with the pictured representations of the rarest pathological specimens, or human curios—”The Blue-Faced Boy,” “The Four-Legged Girl,” “The Lion-Faced Lady,” and “Bosco the Snake Eater, Who Eats ‘Em Alive! He Bites Their Heads Off! He Grovels in a Den of Loathsome Reptiles! An Exhibit for the Educated and a Show for the Sensitive and the Refined.” So read the precious banners that had been destroyed.
An agonized appeal over the telephone to Frank Dodge, scene painter, came from old man Robinson himself. He couldn’t come? Frank Dodge couldn’t come? Would he desert a friend, an old friend, in his hour of need?
Frank looked at his watch, hesitated, and was lost. He would come over to repaint the banners, after telephoning for his assistants at his New York scenic studio to come out. He himself would lay out the work, but he must be back at Ant Hills by noon, as Professor Twombley Jenks would arrive on the 2:22 to experiment with the hybrid hyperborean ants and the boll weevil pest.
Mr. Dodge hired an auto and started for Mount Vernon, not heeding that his tamest hybrid hyperborean ants were clinging to him in myriads. I was with him at the time, and unfortunately called his attention to the fact. Shouting for the head ant-keeper to leave the gate open, as the hybrid hyperborean ants had developed the homing instinct since being fed boll weevils and would not now voluntarily leave or stay away from their feeding grounds, Frank began to brush off the ants, which promptly started to crawl back over the road toward the Antery. He was not rid of the last ones until we had reached the circus grounds and the damaged menagerie tent and banners.
In a few hours Frank had order out of chaos. Nothing occurred to mar or delay the work of restoring the gaudy banners that depicted the fauna in the animal tent or the human freaks in the side show, save a little excitement over the escape of some animals from a cage that had been overturned and broken by the wind. When it was stated that the animals that escaped were some South African specimens not dangerous unless annoyed, several keepers were sent after them, and Frank kept on quietly directing his men who had arrived from New York within an hour of being ‘phoned for. Had Frank known what animals those were that escaped he would not have whistled so gayly, and better had I presented a real revolver to his head than the “pocket pistol” I handed him to take a liquid shot from—for I was told but gave no heed.
We returned a little late from the banner restorations, for Frank was not the one to leave an old friend in distress until he saw that distress alleviated.
“That old boy, Twombley Jenks, will be hollering for me, I’ll bet,” said Frank laughingly, as we neared Ant Hills.
He spoke truer than he knew. As we reached Ant Hills the shrill cries of a querulous-voiced old man rang upon our ears together with hoarse curses that Frank knew at once emanated from his head ant-keeper, the only assistant that day on the place.
Springing from the vehicle, Frank dashed through the still open high screen gates.
What a scene of destruction met his eye. The tropic back-drops were torn to tatters; the glass-panel winter quarters were shattered and sundered; the grass mats and artificial palms were rent and scattered; and up in the two tallest and strongest palms left standing were the battered and ragged figures of Professor Twombley Jenks and Lars Swenson, late head ant-keeper of the hybrid hyperboreans. Below them, champing at the bases of the two great artificial palms that swayed and tottered dangerously before their onslaughts, were two swollen but enraged gigantic ant-eating aardvarks, the great ant-bears of Africa. They were the animals that had escaped, the harmless animals unless annoyed!
It was all plain now. The escaping aardvarks, or ant-bears, had followed the trail of the homing ants all the way along the road, and in through the open doors of the very citadel of my poor friend’s golden hopes.
Into Ant Hills came the great ant-bears, driving their capacious snouts among the two billion docile and intelligent hybrid hyperboreans that were to exterminate the boll weevil scourge from the cotton fields and make the fair South smile again!
But where were the hybrid hyperborean ants? One glance at the still enraged Orycteropus capensis answered that horrific question. The giant aardvarks, or great ant-bears, were harmless unless annoyed. The efforts made by Professor Twombley Jenks and Lars Swenson, head ant-keeper, to save the hybrid hyperboreans had evidently annoyed them.
My poor friend Dodge went raving mad. In the ebullitions of his super-Berserker rage he fell upon the two aardvarks, or great ant-bears of Africa, and seizing one in each hand held them in the air until they starved to death.
And nobody will believe that, either.
When my poor friend was conscious again, and the brain fever that had wasted him for weeks had passed, I whispered to him hopefully: “Cheer up, old man, we’ll start all over.”
But he raised a thin wan hand and shrilly screamed: “Never again!”
Anyway, the report Professor Twombley Jenks made of the final experiments (Agr. Dept. Bulletin 398764) ended forever any hope of further government recognition of experiments to destroy the boll weevil with the docile and intelligent hybrid hyperborean ant. Besides, not a single one of these succulent (to them) insects survived the ravenous onslaughts of the giant aardvarks, the Orycteropus capensis, or great ant-bears of Africa.
and Detection
A little box proves to be a weapon of death that leaves no clue in a murder mystery involving baffling scientific methods conjured up by authors L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace for Where the Air Quivered, The Strand Magazine, December 1895. The illustrator signed himself Tiffard.
December, 1898
WHERE THE AIR QUIVERED
by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace
WHERE the Air Quivered is an early example of the employment of scientific invention for the purposes of crime, usually a device that never existed or did not exist at the time the story was published. Later, this would evolve into the scientific detective stories of Edwin Balmer and William B. McHarg concerning Luther Trant, and Arthur B. Reeve’s tales involving Craig Kennedy, both employing devices that had not yet been built or used for the purposes of crime detection. It can be seen that the fascination of such stories did not rest in the crime itself, but in the mental exercise of deciding whether such a machine could really be built, and if so, whether it could accomplish its purpose.
Fundamentally, L. T. Meade, whose real name was Mrs. Elizabeth Thomasina Meade Smith, was a specialist in wholesome tales for teenage girls. She literally had scores of such books published, both in the United States and England, most on a literary level only slightly above The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale. Until her death in 1914, the quantity of the stories testified to a popularity that must have ranked her as one of the most widely-read authors of juveniles prior to World War I.
Somehow The Strand Magazine got her to writing mystery stories and tales of medical problems involving detective work which were not only adult but highly unusual and imaginative. Among her early books was Stories from the Diary of a Doctor (G. Newnes, 1894). A second volume with the same title continued the series and was also published in 1894, both books in collaboration with Clifford Halifax. All of the stories in those two books had previously run in The Strand. She also had published three books of mystery with Robert Eustace, all previously appearing in The Strand. Therefore, the story that follows was well in accord with her secondary writing interests.
Her collaborator on this story, Robert Eustace, was the pen name of Eustace Rawlins, whose contribution to the story that follows is difficult to determine, since Mrs. Meade frequently wrote murder mysteries on her own. He may, in this specific story, have helped supply the Near Eastern background, since he was credited with a novel, The Hidden Treasures of Egypt, “a romance compiled and adapted from the records of Pthomes.”
Where the Air Quivered is one of the better examples of an entire school of fiction writing that attempted to crossbreed the elements of the murder mystery with science fiction.
WHEN my daughter Vivien became engaged to Archie Forbes I naturally took a great interest in the circumstance. Vivien was my only child, and her mother had died at her birth. She was a handsome, bright, sensible girl, worthy to be the wife of any good fellow, and with as much pluck and common sense as I have ever seen in anyone.
Archie was a landed proprietor on a small scale, and had not a debt in the world; his past was a clean record, and his future was as bright as health, intelligence, and a fair amount of money could make it. He was devotedly attached to Vivien, and I gave my hearty consent to the engagement.
I am a doctor by profession, and thoroughly enjoy the life. In the ordinary course of things the physician comes into close contact with the stranger and rarer forms of human nature, and being myself a lover of all that is out of the common, this outlook weighed with me in my choice. After many years of hard work I secured an enormous practice, and when I settled down as a specialist in Harley Street I was already a wealthy man.
On a certain warm evening in June I sat smoking at the open window of my dining-room when Vivien entered.
She held a telegram in her hand.
“This has just come,” she cried, in some excitement; “it is from Archie. He has returned, and will be here this evening.”
She sat down as she spoke on the edge of the table, and put her slim hand affectionately on my shoulder.
“You won’t be sorry to see him, Vi, will you?” was my answer.
“Sorry!” she cried. “I cannot tell you how thankful I am! You never supposed I was nervous, did you, father; but the fact is, I hated Archie going away with Jack Fletcher. Oh, I know that Jack is a right good fellow, but he is terribly wild and daring. Lately I have had most uncomfortable dreams about both of them. Yes, it is a relief to get this telegram. Archie promises to call about ten o’clock; how nice it will be to see him again!”
Her bright eyes sparkled as she spoke, and into them stole that radiant look which girls wear when they speak of the man they love best on earth.
“Ah! Vivien,” I answered, “there are two sides to every question. Archie will be taking you away, and what shall I do?”
“You will have another home to go to,” she replied; but her face suddenly became grave.
“I wonder what their adventures have been,” she said, a moment later.
“They will tell you themselves before another hour is out,” I answered. I glanced, as I spoke, at a small clock on the mantel-piece. Vivien gave a quick sigh and stood up. She was in full evening dress, of some soft, white texture, and wore a bunch of yellow roses at her belt.
“Aunt Mary wishes me to go with her to Lady Farrell’s reception,” she said; “but I will be back, if possible, within the hour.”
“Well, go, my dear, and enjoy yourself,” I answered, standing up and kissing her. “If Archie should arrive before you are back, I will get him to wait.”
She slowly left the room. I lay back in my chair and thought over my girl’s prospects. The moments flew quickly. Shortly after ten o’clock I heard the hall-door bell ring, and the next instant Archie burst into the room.
“Here you are, old fellow, and you are welcome,” I said, grasping him by the hand.
He came to me hurriedly; his dress was in considerable disorder, and his face wore a wild and terribly disturbed expression. To my hearty grip of the hand he scarcely responded.
“Is anything wrong?” I said, giving him a quick glance.
“I am in awful trouble,” was the reply. “Is Vivien in?”
“No, she is out with her aunt, but she got your telegram, and will be back almost immediately.”
“I cannot see her; not just yet. Do you mind if I lock the door?”
“What is wrong, my dear fellow?”
“Oh, I am in terrible trouble,” he repeated. He strode across the room as he spoke, turned the key in the lock, and then sank into the nearest chair.
“I want your advice and help badly, Dr. Kennedy,” he continued.
“But, my dear boy, what is the matter? What has happened?”
He raised his sunburnt face and looked at me gravely.
“Poor Jack is dead,” he said then, in a broken sort of voice.
“Jack Fletcher!” I cried, springing to my feet.
“Yes, he died an hour ago, quite suddenly, at the Savoy Hotel, in his room. We got into London all right at six o’clock, and drove off to the Savoy at once. I never saw Jack in better spirits. We went to our rooms and had a wash and sat down to dinner at half-past seven. At half-past eight he went to his room for something. He did not come back, and after a time I followed him. I found his door locked and called to him, but he made no reply. In great alarm I went for help, and we had the door burst open. Jack was lying on the floor. Everything was done, of course. A doctor happened to be in the house, who applied all the usual restoratives, but it was too late; he was quite dead. My God, it is awful! I don’t seem able to think. You must think for me, and come to the Savoy at once to see to things. What can have caused his death? You will come round, won’t you?”
“Yes, I’ll come,” I replied. “I’ll just scribble a note to Vivien first. It is fearfully sad. Death must have been caused by heart failure, of course.”
I scribbled a few words on a card, laid it on the table to be given to my daughter, and then went into the hall. A few moments later Archie and I were on our way in a hansom to the Savoy.
“Of course, there will be an inquest,” he said, “and you will be present, won’t you, Dr. Kennedy? The death must have been due to natural causes.”
“Why, of course,” I answered, looking round at him in some surprise. “What do you mean?”
“Oh nothing, nothing,” he said, “only it seems so strange. He was in the best of health and spirits.”
“All the same, there may have been lesion of the heart,” I answered; “but we shall soon know. You say you found the door of his room locked?”
“Yes, fast, and the key was within; the window was open, though.”
“What had that to do with it?”
“Nothing.” Archie hung his head. Painful as the occasion was, his gloom and depression seemed greater than the circumstances warranted.
We soon reached the hotel. I saw poor Fletcher’s body. Until a postmortem was made it was impossible to tell the cause of death, so I superintended all the details of the removal, sent off a wire and letter to the poor fellow’s mother in Lancashire, and then rejoined Archie in his private sitting-room. I found him pacing up and down the room, a wild gleam in his eye, a restlessness about his manner which I had never observed before. Once more I thought that Jack Fletcher’s death could scarcely account for the disordered state of his whole appearance.
“You must pull yourself together, my boy,” I said. “Men have died suddenly before now. Of course it is fearfully sad, but you have got Vivien to think of.”
“I don’t want to see her to-night,” he said, eagerly.
“Why so?” I asked.
“She must be acquainted with the fact of Jack’s death; it will upset her, and I—the fact is, I am completely done up; I don’t know myself, doctor.”
“Nor do I know you, Archie, in your present state. You must pull yourself together; and I tell you what, the very best thing you can do is to come away with me, and let us put you up for the night. Vivien will naturally expect to see you, whatever has happened, and the sooner you unburden your mind to her the better.”
“My nerves are shaken to bits,” he replied. “I have the strangest feeling about this whole matter. There is a cloud over me. The fact is, I don’t believe Vivien and I will ever be married.”
“Oh, nonsense, my dear fellow; come and have a talk with my sensible, matter-of-fact girl, and you will feel a new man. I am not going to leave you here, so come at once.”
I got him to do so, but evidently with extreme unwillingness.
When we got home Vivien was waiting for us. She came into the hall. One glance into her face caused Archie to change colour. He went up to her, kissed her, took her hand, and then dropped it again.
“Something very sad has happened, Vivien,” I remarked, “and Archie wants to tell you. Take him into your private room, my love, and have a good talk.”
“Come, Archie, this way,” said the girl. She led him down one of the corridors, opened the door of her own sitting-room, and closed it behind them.
“This is a queer affair,” I could not help murmuring to myself. “Strange and disastrous as Jack Fletcher’s death is, I am more disturbed about Archie. What can be the matter with him?”
The next day, with the consent of the coroner, I assisted at the autopsy. I need not go into details, but merely state at once that, after two hours’ careful and most minute investigation, the cause of Jack Fletcher’s death still remained an absolute mystery. Every organ was sound, there was no wound anywhere, and not a trace of poison was discovered. Dr. Benjamin Curtis, the skilled pathologist and analyst, was present, and the last sentence of his exhaustive report I append herewith:—
“There is absolutely nothing to account for the cause of death; and the only remaining alternative is that it was probably due to some very severe nervous shock of central origin, the nature of which is wholly obscure.”
I flung the report down in annoyance, and went to meet Archie, who was waiting for me outside the coroner’s court. I told him what Dr. Curtis had said. To my astonishment his face turned ashy white, and he almost reeled as he walked.
“Then it is as I thought,” he said.
“What do you think?” I said. “Forbes, you are keeping something from us; you have something on your mind. What is wrong?”
“Nothing, nothing,” he said, hurriedly. “I hoped the coroner would find a cause for death. Dr. Curtis’s report has upset me.”
I asked a few more questions, and felt now absolutely convinced that Forbes was concealing something. Whatever it was, he was determined to keep it to himself. I went home considerably troubled.
A week after poor Jack’s funeral, Vivien came into my consulting-room. Archie had only been to the house once, and on that occasion he could not be got to say a word with regard to their approaching marriage.
“Now, father,” said my girl, closing the door, and coming up and planting herself in front of me, “there is something wrong, and you have got to find out what it is.”
I looked full into her eyes; they were brighter than usual, and had a suspicion of tears about them.
“Archie is terribly changed,” she said; “you must have noticed it.”
“I have,” I answered, in a low tone.
“I know he was very much attached to Jack,” continued Vivien, “but this is no ordinary grief. There is something terrible weighing on his mind. If I did not know that he was a thoroughly brave fellow, I should say that he was oppressed by a fearful sense of overmastering fear. It cannot be that. What, then, can it be?”
I made no answer. She continued to stand upright before me, and to keep her eyes fixed on my face.
“What can it be?” she repeated. “I puzzle myself over the whole thing day and night. I don’t believe he is tired of me.”
“Assuredly that is not the case,” was my quick response.
“But all the same, he is completely changed,” she continued. “Before he went on this cruise, he was devoted to me—each moment in my presence was paradise to him—now it may be likened to purgatory. He is restless until he gets away from me. When he is with me he is unhappy and distrait. In short, there is something terribly wrong, and you must help me to find out what it is.”
“Ask him yourself, my dear. I have seen just what you have seen, but cannot get him to say a word.”
“I am glad you agree with me,” she said, the gloom of her brow lightening for a moment. “I will write to him at once and ask him to come here.”
She had scarcely said the words before the door was opened and Forbes himself came in.
“Ah, that’s right, Archie,” I cried, in a tone of relief. “Come over here, dear fellow, and sit down. The fact is, Vivien is thoroughly unhappy. She sees that there is something wrong with you, and is discontented with the present state of matters. You have something on your mind, and you ought to tell us what it is.”
Forbes raised two lack-lustre eyes and fixed them on the girl’s face. The tears which were close to her grey eyes now brimmed over.
“Archie,” she said, going to him and laying her hand on his shoulder, “I want to ask you a plain question. Would you like our engagement to be broken off?”
“I was coming here to propose it, Vivien,” was his strange reply.
She turned very white, and fell back as if someone had dealt her a blow.
“Good God!” she said. “It is then as I feared; there is something terribly wrong.”
“It is not that I do not love you as much as ever,” continued the poor fellow; “but I have no right to bind you to me. I scarcely dare to tell you what has happened. I am unworthy of you, Vivien, and besides, I am doomed. It is only a matter of time.”
He flung himself into the nearest chair, and covered his face with two hands which trembled from nervous terror.
I nodded to Vivien.
“You had better leave him with me for a few moments,” I said.
“No, I will not,” she answered, desperately. “I have a right to know the truth, and I am determined to get at it. What is wrong, Archie? You are not tired of me? You still love me, don’t you?”
“With all my heart and soul,” he groaned.
“And yet you want our engagement to be broken off! Why?”
“Because I am a guilty and doomed man,” was his reply.
I started and felt my heart beat. Was it possible? But, no—I flung the unworthy suspicion from me.
“I ought not to be in this house,” continued Archie. “I ought not to have let you kiss me the night we came home. I am unworthy of you, and yet . . . My God! this misery is driving me mad.”
He pushed back the hair from his forehead; there were beads of perspiration on his brow.
“If we were engaged fifty times over, our wedding would have never come off,” he continued, speaking in the most reckless, excited tone. “I can no more prevent the fate which is hanging over me, than I can get rid of that thing which has stained me. I can only say this: As Jack died so I shall die. I am doomed, and the less you have to say to me the better.”
“Now, that is all nonsense,” she said, in her quick way, which could, at times of intense emotion, be wonderfully matter-of-fact, and, therefore, soothing. “Whatever you have done you must tell me and you must tell Father, and you must allow us to judge as to whether it is a barrier between you and me or not. As to my love, you must have a very poor opinion of it if you think I would forsake you in an hour of trouble. Women who care for a man do not leave him when he is down. I am a woman, and, I hope, a brave one. I mean to comfort you, and to stay by you to the last, whatever has happened; yes, whatever has happened.”
He looked at her with incredulous eyes, into which just a flicker of hope returned.
“You cannot mean it?” he cried.
“Yes, I do mean it; but I want your whole confidence, and so does Father. You are concealing something. You must tell us at once.”
“Yes, speak, Archie,” I said, gravely. “Vivien, my girl, come here and stand by me. Archie, this is no ordinary case. Vivien and I will deal with you with all fairness, only we must know the absolute truth.”
“I meant to tell you some days ago,” said Archie, fixing his eyes on my face, “but somehow I could not get the pluck. The whole thing is so horrible, and the burden on my conscience so great, that I am overcome by a ghastly fear. I cannot fight against it.”
“Well, speak,” I said, with impatience.
“It is the queerest thing on earth,” he said, slowly. “It has half stunned me. Though I consider myself pretty tough, the whole thing has knocked the pluck clean out of me.”
He paused to wet his dry lips, and continued:—
“You know we were in the Mediterranean cruising about for six weeks?”
I nodded.
“We were just about to come home, when Fletcher, who was always up to a lark, suggested that we should go through the Canal, down to Jeddah, and then on to Mecca, to see the pilgrims. They would be all there, as it was the twelfth month of the Mohammedan year. I did not mind, so we went. We left the yacht at Jeddah, and went on to Mecca. The place was one mass of pilgrims. They were on their way to the Kaaba, the oblong stone building within the great Mosque. You have heard of it, of course, and also of the famous lava-like Black Stone, to which all Moslems turn in their prayers. It was in the north-east corner of the building. The place was in a sort of uproar, for it is a part of the faith of every good Moslem to kiss that stone once in the course of his life. Well, Dr. Kennedy, you would scarcely believe it, but Fletcher, when he got into the midst of this throng, seemed to turn quite mad. He lost his head, and insisted that we should go and see the whole show. He intended to kiss the Black Stone, if he could. Of course, I knew we should run into the most fearful danger, and did my best to dissuade him, but nothing would do; go he would. He said to me:—
“ ‘You may stay away, old boy; you arc engaged to be married, and perhaps ought to consider your life a little bit, but with me it is different. When I want a lark, I must have it at all risks. I am going; you can please yourself.’
“Of course, I didn’t relish running the risk of being torn to pieces, but I wasn’t the fellow to see him start off alone, so at last I agreed to go with him. We put on the Ihram, the woollen thing worn by the Arabs round the waist and shoulders, got some sandals, and went bareheaded with the crowd of pilgrims to the Mosque. We joined the procession and managed to get right inside, and Jack got inside the Kaaba and went up to the north-east corner of the building and kissed the Black Stone. He told me afterwards that it is quite worn away with the kisses of millions of human beings. I missed him in the crowd, and just as I was looking around to see where he could have got to, I noticed one of the Mueddins, or priests, watching me closely, and when his eyes met mine, I can tell you I shuddered. From the moment they singled me out he seemed never to take his gaze away, and I shall not, to my dying day, forget the expression of cruel, fierce suspicion that was stamped on his face, which was rendered hideous by being deeply pitted with small-pox.
“Well, Jack turned up, and we got out all right; and Jack, poor fellow! was in the best spirits. He said it was the biggest lark he had ever enjoyed, and he did nothing but laugh at my fears. I told him about the priest, and said I was certain we had been discovered, but he made nothing of it.
“When we got out we were in an awful crowd, and our donkeys could scarcely move. We had just cleared the thickest of the mob, and I was hoping we were safe, when I noticed the priest, who had already observed me in the Mosque, detach himself from the crowd and move swiftly towards us. It was now nearly dark. I saw that he wanted to speak and, not knowing why I did it, reined in my donkey. He came up to my side. In his left hand he held a parchment scroll, and as I took it I saw his right hand steal down to his belt. There was the flash of steel. In an instant I should have been stabbed. I do not know what came over me; there was a ringing in my ears, and my head seemed to swim. I leant quickly over the donkey and plunged my long hunting-knife with all my force into the man’s heart. He fell without a groan. I touched Jack on the arm. We galloped madly and for our lives. The mob followed us, but we outpaced them, and at last their howls and shouts grew fainter and fainter behind us. We reached Jeddah in safety, got on board, and steamed away with all possible speed.
“ ‘Why in the name of Heaven did you kill him, Archie?’ said Jack to me then.
“ ‘He would have killed us if we had not killed him,’ was my reply, but while I spoke there was a dead-weight at my heart, and wherever I turned I seemed to see the dying eyes of the man, and to hear the thud of his body as he fell to the ground.
“Have you got the parchment he put into your hand?’ continued Jack.
“I had. He took it from me and opened it. It had some writing on it in Arabic, which we could both read and speak. Jack copied it out in English and here it is.”
As he spoke Archie produced from his pocket-book a piece of parchment and an old envelope, and read as follows:—
“The vengeance of Mahomet rests upon the two infidels and unbelievers who have profaned the Prophet. Their days are numbered, and before the sun rise on the Festival of Eed-Al-Kurban in the month of Dsul Heggeh they will be no more “
“There,” said Archie standing up, “that is what was written; and now, Dr. Kennedy, that I have had courage to tell you my story, I want to ask you a question. Do you think it is within the bounds of probability, or even possibility, that poor Fletcher’s sudden death could have had any connection with this affair?”
“Absolutely out of the question,” was my first remark, but then I paused to think the situation over.
“You certainly did a mad thing,” I said then; “not only did you profane the religious rights of these fanatics, but you, in especial, killed one of their priests. Under such circumstances there is little doubt that they would do much to compass their revenge, but that they would follow you both to England seems on the face of it ridiculous. No, no, Archie; it is an unpleasant business, and I am sorry you did not tell me before, but that Jack’s death has anything to do with that paper is the wildest fiction.”
“I do not believe you,” he answered. “I am firmly convinced that the Mueddin whom I killed will be revenged. Jack is already dead and the words of the prophecy will come true, with regard to me. I shall not live after sunrise on the festival of Eed-Al-Kurban, whenever that is.”
While he was speaking Vivien had remained absolutely quiet. She went up to him now, and put her hand on his shoulder.
“Why do you touch me?” he said, starting away from her. “I have that man’s blood on my hands.”
“You did it in self-defence,” she answered.
“But we must not think of that at all now. Father”—she turned to me—”I agree with Archie: I believe that his life is in grave danger. We must save him; that is our present business. Nothing else can be thought of until his life is safe.”
“I have one thing more to say,” continued Archie. “Last night I saw one of the Mueddins in London. I knew him; I could not mistake him; he resembled the priest I had killed. He was standing under a lamppost, opposite St. George’s Hospital. He fixed his eyes on my face. I believe he is the man who compassed poor Jack’s death, and mine is only a matter of time.”
“Come, come, this is nonsense,” I answered. “Fletcher was not murdered.”
“What did he die of?” asked Archie, gloomily. “You say yourself that he was thoroughly healthy; he was in the prime of youth. Do healthy men in the prime of youth die suddenly without any discoverable cause? I ask you a straight question.”
“The death was a strange one,” I could not help replying.
“Very strange,” echoed Vivien, “strange enough,” she added, “to account for Archie’s fears. The Moslems have threatened the deaths of both Archie and Jack. Jack is dead. Archie is the most guilty man of the two, for he killed their priest. They will certainly not leave a stone unturned to kill him.”
“Yes, my days are numbered,” said Forbes; “there is no getting over the fact. Vivien, our engagement must come to an end, and in any case I feel now that I have no right to marry you.”
Vivien’s brows contracted in a nervous frown.
“We will not talk of our marriage at present,” she said, with some impatience; “but why should we not consult Dr. Khan?”
“Dr. Khan!” I cried. “Do you mean the Persian?”
“Yes; why should not we all three go to him at once? He knows much more about these Arabs and their queer ways and their sorceries than anyone else in London.”
“Upon my word, it is a capital idea,” I said. “Khan does know strange things, and is up to all the lore of the East. He is in some ways one of the cleverest fellows I know. He does not practice, but he has gone in for chemical research and forensic medicine as a hobby. There is no one in London whose opinion would be of more value in a difficult case like the present, and, being a Mohammedan by religion, he can help us with the side issues of this most extraordinary affair. Archie, you have got to pull yourself together, my boy, if for no other reason, for Vivien’s sake. Come, we will go down to Professor Khan’s chambers in Gray’s Inn at once, and tell him the whole story.”
“And Dr. Khan is a special friend of mine,” said Vivien, brightly. “Oh, now that we are doing something to help you, Archie, I can live.”
I crossed the room to order the carriage. As I did so I heard Archie say to her, in a low tone:—
“And you love me still?”
“I love you still,” was her reply.
He drew himself up; the colour returned to his ashen cheeks and the light to his eyes.
In half an hour we were all driving to Hussein Khan’s chambers, in Gray’s Inn. When we reached them I rang the outer bell. It seemed ages before anyone came. At last the door was opened by an old housekeeper, in his shirt sleeves. He recognised me, and nodded when I spoke to him.
“Is Dr. Khan in?” I asked.
“Yes, sir; you know your way,” was the answer.
We hurried up the uncarpeted stairs to the second floor, and pressed the electric bell. There was the sound of the latch being drawn back inside; I pushed the panel, and we all three entered; the door closed automatically behind us, and stretched on the sofa at the far end of a long room, in a loose dressing-gown and slippers, lay the Persian. He was smoking a long opium pipe. The moment his eyes rested upon Vivien he put down the pipe and stood up. He looked us all over with heavy, lustreless eyes, and nodded slowly. He was evidently only half awake.
“I am sorry to disturb you, Professor,” I said, apologetically. “You know my daughter, of course?”
Vivien came forward and offered her hand. Khan bent over it, and then raised it respectfully to his lips.
“I have not forgotten Miss Vivien,” he said.
“I have come here to-day because I am in great trouble, and because I want your advice,” she said at once. “It has to do with this gentleman. May I introduce him? Mr. Forbes—Dr. Khan.”
Dr. Khan slowly turned his heavy eyes in Archie’s direction. He looked him all over from head to foot, and then, rather to my astonishment, I observed a lightning look of intelligence and remarkable interest fill his eyes.
“Has the trouble anything to do with Mr. Forbes?” he said, glancing at Vivien.
“It has.”
“Then I believe I may help you. Sit down, sir, pray; and tell me at once what is the matter.”
Archie told his strange tale. While he spoke I closely watched the effect on my friend; but, once the narrative had begun, the expression on the Persian’s face never altered. After that first glance of interest, it had settled down into a stolid, Oriental indifference.
“What do you think of it all?” I said, as Archie ceased to speak.
“Let me examine the parchment, please,” he replied, with deliberate composure.
Archie gave it to him. He took it and read it over and over again, muttering the words to himself.
“You could find no cause for your friend’s death?”
“None.”
“You are quite certain, Mr. Forbes, that the man you saw yesterday outside St. George’s Hospital was one of the Mueddins whom you had already noticed in the Mosque?”
“Ouite.”
“Well, my dear friend, I am sorry to say it looks a very queer business.”
“And do you really believe that Jack’s death was the work of the Mueddin?” I cried, aghast at his words.
“No; I only say that it is quite possible. I recall a similar case; the same thing may happen again. The Arabians, upon whose early researches the whole science of Europe was founded, possess, of course, secrets unknown to our Western scientists of the present day. I have seen some strange things done by them. The act of sacrilege you both committed was one of the gravest offences possible, but it is just within the realm of possibility that such a crime might have been looked over; but as you, my friend, killed one of the priests as well, the Mohammedans whom you so deeply insulted would not leave a stone unturned to compass your end. The marvel is that you escaped immediate death. But now let us quite clearly sum up the position as it stands.”
As he spoke the Persian stood up. He remained quiet for a moment thinking deeply, then he crossed the room and took down a volume in Arabic from a shelf. With pencil and paper he began working some calculations, referring now and then to an almanac, and once to a map of Asia.
We all three watched him in intense silence. After a moment or two he looked up.
“Assuming for the sake of argument that the Mueddin whom you saw last night has undertaken this work of revenge,” he continued, “the position is this. Owing to the Arabs’ year being a lunar one, the festival of Eed-Al-Kurban does not occur at the same date each year. I see, however, that it will commence according to our calendar to-morrow, the 8th of June, at daybreak, or Subh. At daybreak or Subh the first call to prayer is given by the Mueddin from the Mosque. Now, Mecca is exactly 40 degrees longitude east of Greenwich, and, therefore, day will break with them two hours and forty minutes earlier than with us— that is, at seven minutes past one o’clock to-morrow morning. Of course, the Mueddin, whom you believe to have followed you, would know all this. And as, according to the words on the parchment, you are both to be dead before sunrise on the festival of Eed-Al-Kurban, so also, failing the fulfillment of this vow, you are perfectly safe when that hour has passed.”
“Then you believe that Archie is in grave danger until after one o’clock to-morrow morning?” exclaimed Vivien.
“That is my belief,” answered Dr. Khan, bowing to her.
“But all this is most unsatisfactory,” I cried, getting up. “Surely, Dr. Khan, even granted that it is as you say, we can easily protect Forbes. He has but to stay quietly at home until the hour of danger is past. These Arabs are not magicians: they cannot hurt a man in his own house, for instance?”
“How was it your friend died?” said the Persian, looking full into Archie’s face.
“That I cannot say,” was the reply.
Dr. Khan shrugged his shoulders.
“You declare that the Arabs are not magicians,” he said, turning to me, “but that is just the point. They are! I can tell you things which I have seen with my own eyes which happened in Arabia that you would find hard to believe.”
“Very likely,” I answered, “but they require the Oriental stage and surroundings for the exhibition of the so-called phenomena. They cannot use magic within the four-mile radius of Charing Cross, under the vigilant eye of the Metropolitan police.”
Dr. Khan did not immediately answer. He remained motionless in deep thought.
“What do you intend to do to-night?” he said then, turning to Archie.
“I have made no plans,” was the low, indifferent reply. “I am so certain of my impending end,” he continued, “that nothing seems to make any difference.”
“You must come home with us, Archie,” cried Vivien. “Dr. Khan declares that after one o’clock you are safe. Until one o’clock you must be with us; and suppose, Dr. Khan,” she added, “you come too? Suppose we spend this momentous evening together? What do you say, Father?”
Before I could answer the Persian said, slowly:—
“I was going to ask you to invite me. Yes, I will come, with pleasure.”
“One more question,” said Vivien; “you do firmly believe that Archie will be safe after one o’clock to-morrow morning?”
“Yes; the words on the parchment point distinctly to his death on or before the commencement of the festival. The Mohammedans keep their vows to the letter, or not at all.”
As he spoke Dr. Khan got up slowly, went into his bedroom, and reappeared ready dressed for the evening. It was already nearly seven o’clock. We got into my carriage and returned to Harley Street. I sent a servant for Archie’s evening dress to the hotel, and at eight o’clock we found ourselves seated round the dinner-table. It was a strange and silent meal, and I do not think we any of us had much appetite.
I am naturally not a superstitious man, but matters were sufficiently queer and out-of-the-way to excite a certain foreboding which I could neither account for nor dismiss. The Persian looked utterly calm and indifferent, as betokened his race. But I noticed that from time to time he fixed his deep-set, brilliant eyes on Forbes’s haggard face, as if he would read him through.
The night happened to be the hottest of that year. There was not a breath of air, and the heat inside the house was stilling.
When dinner was over, Vivien suggested that we should go into my smoking-room. The house was a corner one, and the windows of the smoking-room were on the ground floor, and looked into a side street.
She seated herself by Archie’s side. He took little or no notice of her. Khan continued to give him anxious glances from time to time. Vivien was restless, often rising from her seat.
“Sit down, Miss Vivien,” said Dr. Kahn, suddenly. “I know exactly what you feel, but the time will soon pass. Let me tell you something interesting.”
She shook her head. It was almost beyond her power to listen. The gloomy face of her lover, the slightly bent figure which had been so athletic and upright, the change in the whole man, absorbed her entire attention.
“Save him—give him back to me if you can,” was the unspoken wish in her eyes, as they fixed themselves for a moment on Dr. Khan’s face.
He gave her a strange smile, and then turning addressed me. He was the most brilliant talker I ever met, and on this occasion he roused all the power of his great intellect to make his conversation interesting. He related some of his own experiences in the East, and made many marvellous revelations with regard to modern science.
Eleven and twelve chimed from a neighbouring church clock. Soon after midnight the Persian, who had been silent for several moments, said, suddenly, “During this last hour of suspense, I should like to put out the electric light.”
As he spoke he crossed the room, and was about to switch off the current when our attention was suddenly attracted to Vivien. She had sunk back in her seat with a deep sigh. The intense heat of the room had been too much for her.
“Air! Air!” I cried.
Archie laid his hand on the heavy sash of one of the windows and raised it. There seemed to be a hush everywhere—I had never known so still a night. But just at that instant I saw—or fancied I saw—the tassel of the blind move, as though the air had quivered.
The next instant Khan uttered a sharp cry.
“He is there—he has done it—I thought so!”
The words died on his lips, for Archie Forbes reeled, clutched wildly at the lintel of the window, and then with a heavy thud lay like a log on the floor.
I had always looked upon the Persian as a man of exceptional promptitude and great strength of character, but never for a moment had I realized his lightning grasp of an emergency.
“Artificial respiration—don’t lose a moment. Take his chest, man; we shall save him!” he cried. As he spoke he leapt through the open window, vaulted the railings, and was in the street.
The shock acted upon Vivien like a charm. With her assistance I tore open Forbes’s collar and shirt, and began applying artificial respiration with all my might. In less than a minute the Persian came back. He carried a small box in his hand.
“The solution of the mystery,” he said. “I will explain presently. Now to save him. I believe we shall do it.”
He fell on his knees and helped me with the artificial respiration with all his might. For five long minutes there was not the slightest result. Then there came a feeble gasp. It was followed by another. We redoubled our efforts and waited for a moment. Forbes began to breathe again; we drew back and dashed the sweat from our streaming faces.
“He will do now,” whispered Khan; “leave him quiet.”
“What is it? For God’s sake, what is it?” I said, as soon as I could get my voice to speak.
“I will tell you. This has been the most dastardly and awful thing. I have been trying to get at the solution the whole evening, and just grasped it as Mr. Forbes stood up to open that window. I was too late. He got what they meant for him, but he will do. Yes, his pulse is stronger.”
I laid my hand on the victim’s wrist: the beats came more regularly each moment, though he was still only half-conscious.
“But what can it be?” I cried; “what have you discovered?”
Khan’s eyes were blazing with excitement.
“What has happened?” I continued. “A bullet through the brain could not have been more instantaneous; but, silent and unseen, before our very eyes the blow fell and left no trace. This is magic with a vengeance.”
“I will explain it,” said Khan. “I have been hammering out the solution all the evening, and, fool that I was, never suspected the real thing until just too late, Look here—here is something that your modern scientific criminal has never dreamt of.”
“But what the deuce is it?” I said, examining a small box in much bewilderment which Khan now placed in my hands. Three of the sides and the top and bottom were made of wood, but across one end was stretched some material which looked like indiarubber. At the opposite end to this was a small circular opening, which could be closed by a hinged flap.
“Explain what this means, for God’s sake,” I cried. As I spoke I bent my nose towards the box, and instantly was seized by a catching sensation at the back of the throat.
“Ah, you had better not come too close to it,” cried Khan. “This box contained the most deadly gas known to modern chemists: the vapour of concentrated anhydrous hydrogen cyanide.”
I started back. Well did I know the action of this most infernally potent and deadly gas. Still, the mystery of how the gas reached Forbes was unexplained.
“How was it done?” I cried, staring at Khan in absolute bewilderment.
“Simply in this way,” he answered. As he spoke he lit a cigarette, and at the same time laid his hand on the box. “The poison was projected as a vortex ring in the marvellous and mysterious rotational motion which vortex rings assume. This motion can be imparted to gas, but even scientists of the present day cannot explain it, although the study has given rise to Thompson’s fascinating theory on the constitution of matter. All we know is this,” continued Khan, “that, projected by the operator, a ring of that gas would move through the air as a solid body, and would burst as true as a shot from a rifle, and slay as quickly, only it would be perfectly silent and invisible. When made with smoke these rings are visible, of course, and we can watch their motion—so.” He shot a ring of cigarette smoke from his mouth, and I watched it as it sailed across the room and burst at last into curling wreaths.
“With this apparatus,” he continued, pointing to the box, “an enormous velocity could be given to a vortex ring. Even in broad daylight its approach could not be seen, and, breaking on the mouth and nostrils of a man, it would instantly kill him unless artificial respiration were immediately resorted to. Yes,” he added, “the modern detective has a lot to learn.”
“But the man who did it?” I cried.
“Gone! We shall never see or hear of him again. He must have seen me when I leapt from the window, and dropped the box in his hasty flight. Of course he followed us here, and crept up to the open window. This was the Mueddin’s chance—he projected the vortex ring straight into Archie’s face. Thank Heaven, the instant remedies employed have saved him. One second’s delay, and he must have died.”
Forbes had now staggered to a sitting posture, and Vivien had fallen on her knees by his side.
“Leave us alone, father,” she said to me; “yes, leave us alone for a little.”
And the Persian and I slowly left the room.
My girl is now married to Archie Forbes. She loves him, as only such women can love. He has recovered his manhood and his pluck, but there is a shadow on his face which I think will stay there while he lives.
July, 1906
IN RE STATE VS. FORBES
by Warren Earle
THIS is a scientific detective story of a most unusual nature, with a surprise ending of high originality. It is at the same time a typical “Black Cat” story, the type of yarn that made The Black Cat a by-word of the unusual for almost twenty-five years. The author, who comes down to us from July 1906 as only a name, has avoided the charge of scientific impossibility by a technical device so skilled that it causes one to suspect that this story was not a one-shot accident.
At the time this tale appeared, Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen’s discovery of the effects of the X-ray, made November 5, 1895, was not yet eleven years old. X-rays figure prominently in many science fiction stories at the turn of the century as one phenomenon whose full effects were not completely known and from which new ramifications might yet be expected. The X-ray machine is used in this story as an integral part of the plot.
The story method, of having a condemned man confess to his lawyers the true facts behind a murder, is very old, but its effectiveness is acute. This is a tale that skirts the borderline of believability yet will be admired for its ingenuity.
OF ALL the questions put to the lawyer, the one he is most often called upon to answer, if so be his work carries him that way, is how can you conscientiously defend a murderer when you know him to be guilty? And though there are many good answers to that question, viewed from the legal standpoint, they seldom, if ever, appeal to the lay mind. To the man in the street the man under indictment is probably guilty. If a jury subsequently so find him the original opinion is confirmed. If not, a deal of credit is given to the shrewdness of the lawyer as to one who has succeeded in setting at naught all the machinery of the law. In either instance, the public is absolutely sure of its facts, and the original query remains.
It has been my fortune to defend several men accused of high crimes and misdemeanors, and, invariably, my friends and acquaintances have asked me the question. Occasionally, I have been publicly criticized, or pityingly excused on the plea that it was my business, with the emphasis on the business. All this is fresher in my mind by reason of the fact that it has all been repeated in the last few weeks. Many of my cases have caused comment, but none have subjected me to a more universal uplifting of eyebrows and elevation of chins than my late defense of Dr. Forbes. In all justice to my critics I will say that the facts appearing on the trial rather justified them in their attitude, if such an attitude can ever be justified. Long before the trial was finished the public had condemned the defendant, and the verdict of the jury was in accordance with the public view. And, now that they have both had their say, I am inclined to have mine. Not that I intend to change public opinion, or attempt to do so, but because the facts present one of the most curious cases which has ever fallen under my notice.
For the benefit of those who have never heard of the case of the State vs. Forbes, I will briefly outline the evidence, as testified to by the witnesses: Dr. Forbes was a man thirty-six years of age, unmarried, and living very quietly in an old quarter of the city. His parents were both dead, and, in fact, it was not shown that he had any living relatives, except a younger sister who lived with and kept house for him. He was a well-educated man, of studious habits and possessed of sufficient means to allow of close application to scientific medical investigations, to which he seems to have devoted a large portion of his time. He had a laboratory at the back of his house, where he carried on his work and conducted his experiments. He was taciturn and diffident, a trifle priggish, and in consequence enjoyed the reputation among his neighbors of being queer, odd, haughty and “stuck up.”
The sister, Rhoda Forbes, was a very beautiful girl of about twenty-four years, and the same neighbors who condemned the brother declared her bright, clever and vivacious. It appeared that they had been left as orphans when she was a young child, and that her education and maintenance had devolved upon the elder brother. Between them, and notwithstanding their constitutional differences in temperament, there existed a pleasant and wholesome relationship, a condition and mutual attitude, in short, which proved extremely baffling to the State’s Attorney in his endeavors to prove motive. It is needless to say that the young lady had a number of suitors, but with a single exception, none of them attracted much attention upon the trial.
The exception was one Bert Lapham, the son of a merchant in the city, of good repute and large fortune. The young man was a college graduate, and, unlike his father, had a reputation around town which was far from savory. Very naturally that side of his character was not on exhibition while he was courting Rhoda Forbes, and from the evidence it was inferable that he was not an unwelcome visitor at the house. It did not appear that the Doctor encouraged his visits, but the same might have been said concerning any of the other young men. And aside from a certain jealousy which he seems to have manifested against all who sought favor of his sister, he showed no excessive ill-will toward Lapham. Such, then, was the apparent condition of affairs when, on the morning of February 2d, 1905, Dr. Forbes met Lapham on the street, and deliberately and carefully shot him down. Lapham died almost instantly and without making any statement.
The Doctor was arrested and taken to the jail. He made no resistance, but, as is often the case with murderers, acted like a man who had planned up to a certain point and deed, and was without purpose thereafter. As soon as he was disposed of, the police went to his house, and there, on the operating table in the laboratory they found the dead body of the sister. The coroner was summoned, and an inquest was held. Two other doctors were called in, an autopsy was decided upon. That, too, was held, and the doctors reported that there were no visible signs of foul play. The verdict, being unexpected, aroused a deal of astonishment. The doctors were asked how she came to die, and in such a place, and they answered in a most astounding burst of medical candor that they did not know, and added that it was probably heart trouble.
Being without evidence then as to the sister, the grand jury merely indicted the Doctor for the murder of Lapham. The above are the facts elicited upon the trial; that which follows I learned from the lips of the Doctor himself. Soon after his indictment he sent for me, and in response to his request I went to the jail.
I was obliged to wait but a few moments before he was brought in. I had read a few of the less lurid accounts of the affair, and had a fair idea of the facts and the man, but nevertheless, I was somewhat surprised at his appearance. He had been described as a man of medium height, dark complexion, black hair shot with gray, brown eyes, brown mustache and Vandyke beard. All this was very true, but they had omitted to mention the low and very wide forehead, and the fact that he looked at one with the steady, unblinking stare of the short-sighted naturalist. He looked the well-to-do doctor of studious habits, and as I stepped forward to greet him I thought: “He might murder for the sake of science, but not in passion.”
He received me calmly, and we seated ourselves.
“You sent for me,” I said.
“Yes,” his tones were well modulated. “Yes. I presume you are aware of the indictment against me—and the case?”
“I have read some of the accounts. You are indicted for the murder of Lapham.”
“Yes. It occurred about as the newspapers have it. As a matter of fact, I presume there is no adequate defense.”
“Suppose you tell me the facts,” I suggested.
He shrugged his shoulders. “You have them already,” he replied.
“All of them?” I queried.
“No—” he hesitated. “No—but all that would do you any good.”
“It would be better if I knew them all,” I said.
“There is nothing which would relieve.”
“But there may be something which would entertain.”
He nodded and smiled and twirled the point of his beard reflectively.
“Briefly,” he said, “I met Lapham on the street. I said ‘Sir, I am about to kill you.’ I raised the revolver and fired. I left the house with the purpose of doing so. That is what I believe you call premeditation, and the thing for which you hang people. I bought the revolver at a store on the way downtown, and I had the man show me how to load and fire it. This I did in order that I might not miss my aim when I met him. I thought out all the details before I left the house.”
“Exactly,” I said, “And now for the matters which occurred before the premeditation.”
“They would not aid you, I fear.”
“And I am certain they would entertain me,” I repeated.
He looked at me between half-closed lids steadily, keenly, quizzically.
“I like your attitude,” he said, and after another short pause, and a few more twirls of his beard he added, “but I warn you that in all I say you will find no particle of what you call competent evidence.”
“Motives seldom constitute legal excuses,” I volunteered, “ and we need not consider them in that light, if you desire it so.”
He handed me his cigarette case, and while holding the match for him I for the first time noticed a certain gleam in the eyes which was distinctly animal. He inhaled a long breath and dropped his lids in the manner of a cat in contentment by a fire, or a tiger in a quiet mood.
“If you are to understand me at all,” he said, “you must know that our family is peculiar in one respect. We arc what you might call a telegraphic race. You know that by instinct, development or training, some families in all their ramifications have certain trails, I do not mean merely physical traits, but more particularly, tendencies to certain lines of work. I can point you to families which have had ministers in the line for centuries. There are others which have run to lawyers or merchants, or clowns or what not. In ours this tendency is all to telegraphy. My father and all his brothers and their father before them, and that in the days of the infancy of the science, were all connected with the telegraphic business.
“I do not suppose there is a man or woman of our family today who is not thoroughly familiar with the instruments and code of the craft. I, myself, in common with my sister, learned the code as soon as I could read. We had senders all over the old house at home, and among my earliest recollections is the sharp clicking of the machines. You are aware that the things we inherit and the lessons we learn in our early childhood gradually become instinct—no less. So it was with myself and my sister. We never forgot our early training and, in fact, fostered it. In a hundred ways we used it about the house where we lived together, and we even played with it elsewhere. At the theatre or in church we would tap messages to each other with our finger nails on wood, thus”:
He drummed on the arms of his chair in a nonchalant manner, and with such a perfect show of indifference that had my attention not been called, I should not have caught the peculiar telegraphic rhythm.
“Our house was fitted up with all sorts of devices. The senders were concealed in out-of-the-way places, and generally within reach of the hand, so that often when I was in the laboratory and Rhoda in the parlor she would be telling me the things the caller of the moment was doing and saying. Of course the position and character of these instruments we kept secret from all our acquaintances, and a certain attachment which rendered the sending soundless and which was and is a secret of my family, greatly aided us to this end.
“Personally, I was expected by my parents to follow in their footsteps, but as I grew older, I found that I had a natural inclination toward medicine and surgery, and particularly the latter. This tendency increased with age, and before I had finished my academic course in college I had made up my mind to practice. That plan the mechanical turn in my blood frustrated. As I went on I found myself absorbed by the scientific phase of the subject. I was still in college when the X-ray was first discovered. It took a strong hold upon my imagination. I watched and followed the improvements, and without further parley decided to put my life into that line of work. Being sufficiently well fortified financially so that I was not obliged to practice for a living, I gave it up, except in so far as I found it running with my scientific work. As you can see, I am not an old man, and indeed, it has been but a few years since my graduation.
“Those years I have spent in the attainment of one object, the perfection of the X-ray. As you are doubtless aware, despite all the advertisement given the matter in the newspapers, the most that the masters have been able to do has been to use the ray for the discovery and location of solid substances embedded in or surrounded by substances of less consistency. That is, for instance, the perception of bones in the flesh of the arm or leg, or the presence of metals in the body.
“It was my purpose in taking up the study to perfect the apparatus to the point where it would be possible to discern the blood vessels, or possibly, the nerves. To this task I gave all my time, and, Sir, I can state to you that I have been successful!”
He leaned forward and searched my face. His eyes shone with the fervor of the enthusiast. He drew a long breath and sank back in his chair, and it was several moments before he continued his narrative.
“I have in my laboratory a table, an operating table, which is the result of my inventions. On that table I place a body. Beneath is the ray, and connected with the ray, above and directly over, is the ordinary fluoro-scope with a microscopic attachment. I shall not undertake to describe the entire matter to you. Unless you are of a scientific turn of mind you would not understand, and—” He paused and I shook my head. “Ah, you are not—then I will refrain. It is sufficient to say that the fluoroscope and the connected ray may be moved about at will, and any part of the body may be subjected to investigation. The light is developed in a bulb as in the ordinary machine, but the quality of it and thereby its usefulness for descrying nerves, muscles or blood vessels, is the secret which I have learned. You may perhaps get a better comprehension if I state that I use a separate tube for each species of investigation. That is, I attach the ordinary X-ray for the detection of metal. With another tube all the intervening substances fade into fog and the nerves stand revealed. So, by yet another adjustment, I can study the blood, the microscope aiding very materially, as you can readily understand.”
He evidently thought I was becoming wearied by his discourse, for he went on:
“You do not see what all this has to do with the murder of Lapham.” He spoke as though murder on the public street with a cheap revolver purchased for the purpose was a scientific phenomenon. I replied that I was much interested in his discovery, and had no doubt that it bore significantly upon the tragedy.
“It does,” he muttered, “it does,” and suddenly lapsed into silence. He sat so, staring fixedly into space, the smoke trailing up slowly from the stump of his cigarette. I watched, and I saw the gleam gradually grow in his eyes, exactly as it grew in the eyes of the murderer Harley when the heart of the man he had stabbed, with the hole made by his knife, was produced in court. Dr. Forbes suddenly flicked the ash from his cigarette and turning upon me swiftly, said:
“I knew the man for a villain from the first. I knew it instinctively. I knew it from observation. But, like a fool, I could not be content with mere knowledge. I had to tell someone what I thought, and most foolish of all, I told Rhoda. She did not, would not, so consider him. I was afraid she would fall in love with him. He came and I said nothing. He continued to come and I protested. She laughed—defended him. He came more and more frequently, and finding it was useless to object, I shut myself in my laboratory and trusted that her natural good sense would find him out. They became intimate, how intimate I never fully realized until one evening, while he was calling, the telegraphic instrument in the laboratory clicked off the message, ‘Come to the library.’
“I dropped my work and rushed in. They greeted me with a burst of laughter, and to my queries Rhoda explained that she had been showing all our private means of communication, and she had sent the message to prove their efficiency! I was intensely angry, not so much because of the poor jest at my expense, as because of the revelation of our secrets to a stranger. I fear I talked too sharply. I certainly left the room in a rage.
“As a matter of fact, I probably took the incident too much to heart, but, at the time, it seemed to me an infallible indication that she loved the man, and I had no desire that she should marry him. This fear, however, was groundless, for but a short time afterwards, she came to me one night and told me that he had proposed to her and that she had refused him. I asked how he took it, and she reluctantly admitted that he had been very angry. I expected that this would put an end to his visits, but it did not. The man was infatuated, and continued to call regularly.
“In the meantime, in fact, all the time, there was another young man who seemingly could not be kept away. You may know him. He is a young attorney and a very decent chap—Hal Drenning.”
I acknowledged a slight acquaintance.
“I will confess that I was rather prepossessed in his favor and hoped that if anyone were successful it might be he. His principal fault seemed to be a quick and terrible temper. I knew him to be preferable to Lapham, and said so, and when I said it I was surprised to notice that Rhoda blushed. Perhaps I was too much inclined to dictate to her, but seeing her so, I said:
“‘Rhoda, I wouldn’t flirt with him if I were you.’ She laughed and said, ‘Why not?’
“‘I think he loves you,’ I replied, ‘and he quite meets with my approval.’
“She curtsied mockingly, and mockingly said:
“ ‘But how can I marry him when Bert says I shall marry him and him alone?’
“ ‘When did he say that?’ I asked.
“ ‘Oh, the other evening, after he had accused me of seeing too much of Mr. Drenning.’
“I spoke my mind rather plainly concerning his impertinence, and, still angry, was leaving the room, when she danced before me and smilingly declared me foolish.
“ ‘I shall marry neither of them,’ she said, ‘I shall remain here and be your loyal and devoted sister.’
“ ‘You will refuse Hal?’ I said.
“ ‘Certainly, I shall refuse them all,’ she cried.
“ ‘Hal would not take a refusal calmly,’ I said, and as I spoke the thought of his ungovernable temper occurred to me. Indeed he would not take a refusal lightly, and if she did intend to refuse him then her conduct had been inexcusable, for she had flirted with him outrageously.
“This conversation took place a little over a week ago. Last Tuesday evening Rhoda came down at eight, dressed to receive visitors. I was in the laboratory at work when she came in to me and twirled about to show me a new dress. I said something about it in response to her inquiries as to its length and fit and style, etc., and I then asked her who was coming, and she, in a sort of a pouting way, said she did not know whether she would tell me or not. I was somewhat piqued, for I could see no reason for her attitude, when, with one of her quick changes, she broke into a laugh and said—I remember her words distinctly:
“ ‘Oh, Oh, you are a funny brother. Well, if you must know, it is—’ she hesitated for a moment—’your friend, Mr. Drenning. You see, he is liable to propose any evening, and I want to be prepared to meet the emergency.’
“Still laughing, she tripped lightly out of the room, and of course it never occurred to me that she might be joking. Somewhat later, I heard the bell ring and footsteps in the hall. I continued at my work, which was that of testing some new tubes and recording their relative strengths. Later in the evening I heard the front door slam, and some one pass out. It was an ordinary occurrence, and made no marked impression on my mind. You will understand. I have often noticed, as I presume you have, that the unusual is seldom accompanied by what might be termed anticipatory phenomena.
“It must have been an hour later that I finished my task, and then, for the first time, it occurred to me that Rhoda had not been in to say good-night, nor had I heard her go upstairs. I lit a cigarette and, opening the door into the hall, saw that the light in the parlor was still burning. Thinking that she was reading, and that it was time for her to retire, I walked down the hall and stepped into the room.”
The doctor paused and passed his hand across his eyes.
“I presume,” he continued, “that I shall continue to stand and gaze from that doorway until I am aimlessly twirling at the end of a rope. She was seated in the Morris chair by the table and she was facing me. Her body had collapsed upon itself, her head hung to the left, and her tongue was lolling from a mouth idiotically agape, and the spittle was drooling from the lips to the lace frill of the gown. Her eyes were open and glazed and full of a wild terror. Her arms lay along the arms of the chair, and about them there was a queer suggestion of a sudden relapse after vainly striving to reach something. I do not know, I cannot explain to you, how or why a recumbent figure could or would suggest a collapse preceded by a straining for some definite object, but such was the effect produced upon me in the instant I stood staring, dazed.
“Recovering, I rushed to her and straightened her up. She was loose flesh in my hands. I felt for her pulse and felt—nothing. I tried again and there was no movement. I held the crystal face of my watch to her mouth. There was no breath visible. She was dead. I dropped her hand and ran back to the laboratory for a stimulant. I always kept a supply in a small cabinet in the corner, and in that I was groping for the flask I wished when I was startled by the quick click of one of the telegraphic instruments. I stopped in amazement. There was a message coming in from the room I had just left, and the touch was her touch. I would have known it in a thousand.
“Jerkily, in the abbreviations we used for greater convenience, were ticked off these words, ‘Come, being killed by’—I waited for no more, but rushed to the room. It was empty save for her, and she was exactly as I had left her, except that her hand had slipped off the chair arm and was hanging down outside.
“Just a moment,” I said. “Was there a sender on that chair?” He stared at me fixedly, the lids slowly rolling back from the whites of his eyes. “Your mind travels with mine, Sir,” he said in a husky, rasping whisper. “There was a sender on that chair arm, on the under side. Do you think it possible that she could have revived sufficiently to send? Between us—between us —when I dropped her hand before leaving for the whiskey I left it on the arm by the sender. I know that the hand was not hanging down when I went away.”
“Go on,” I prompted.
He paid no heed to me, but commenced to talk as though to himself. “But she was dead,” he said. “She was dead. She had been dead for at least an hour. There was absolutely no change in her when I had returned. She was dead both before and after. I knew it, though I denied it to myself.”
He seemed to come out of his musings, and turning to me again, went on with his narrative:
“I picked her up and carried her, a lifeless, slippery, jelly-like mass, into the laboratory, and laid her on the operating table. There, in frantic haste, I tried every means of revival I knew, and all without success. Sir, from the time I first caught sight of her until I finally gave up the struggle I vow to you there was no movement, sign, symbol or symptom of life. She was dead.
“Like anyone else suddenly deprived of a great possession I did not at first grasp its full meaning. Indeed, I doubt if I ever will. Not until I gave up my efforts at resuscitation did I commence to wonder. The coroners have returned their verdict. You know what they say. They do not know what caused her death. They think I killed her while experimenting, I fancy.”
He glanced at me from the corner of his eye and went on calmly, as a totally disinterested witness might on the stand:
“There was no mark on the body. There was not a scratch or pin prick on the skin. There were no bruises, no discolorations, no abrasions, no traces or signs of physical violence. I was about to name it heart disease, when I remembered the message which had come in over the wire, ‘Come, being killed by—For the first time I realized that the message was incomplete. For some unaccountable reason that fact had theretofore escaped me. Then, Sir, I became calm and went about my work systematically.
“I had no doubt about the identity of the murderer, if there was one. I reasoned that Drenning had proposed, been refused, and, perhaps in a fit of passion, had struck and killed her. ‘But—but’, I said, ‘there has been no striking. It must have been done in some other way. But if it was done, then there will certainly be some trace.’ The body was already on the operating table, so I attached the proper tube and searched for metallic substances. I expected to discover the presence in the body of some hard, foreign substance matter capable of producing death. I did not know what form it would take, so I searched carefully, realizing that it might take any one of a dozen odd and unexpected appearances such, for instance, as a needle driven into and broken off in some vital part. You are perhaps aware that long, slender glass needles, if thrust in quickly, will kill very effectually, and with such an instrument, if it is broken carefully, there is scarcely any wound visible.
“I worked over her for hours and hours. I found nothing, but I would not give up. Again and again I examined, and always with the same result. Sir, it was only after four long hours that I sat down, realizing that further search was in vain.
“It would be impossible for me to explain to you the feeling of anger which possessed me during the next half hour. It was a rage growing out of a sense of impotence, inspired by a realization that, despite all my knowledge, I was baffled. I went over every expedient I knew. I thought of every device of which I had ever heard. I endeavored to invent new and untried experiments, and while so groping it occurred to me that an examination of the blood and the nerves might by a remote chance reveal something.
“In desperation, I fitted on a tube for the circulatory system and swung the fluoroscope over the body. I thought I would begin with the hands, for there, in some of the very small blood vessels where the corpuscles pass in single file, if there was anything wrong it would be visible. I turned on the power and put my eye to the microscope. Gradually, as I looked, and my eye became accustomed to the light, the flesh faded away from the bones, leaving them crude and ghastly like a withered and steamed stump of a limb. In the continued light from the tube, and even as I watched, this, too, faded into fog and disappeared. Then gradually and slowly the circulatory system came into view, a network of veins like the web of a spider.
“I was looking at the tip of the first finger of the right hand. And now, as the blood became more distinct, I changed the object glass of my microscope for a stronger one, and with that brought into the field one section of one minute vessel. It needed but a glance to assure me that the machine was in perfect order. There were the outer walls of the vein, and within, like coins in a groove, were the disk-like corpuscles, not as I had often seen them, moving slowly along their way, but stopped, set in their places, still, as machinery is still when the engine is dead.
“I examined closely, and was about to abandon my investigations, finding nothing, when I happened to notice that all the corpuscles were arranged in one certain way. It was such an unusual thing that it attracted my attention. Instead of the red and white corpuscles being mixed together as they usually are, without any order or sequence, all those within the field of the microscope were as accurately ordered as though they had been arranged and put in place. They lay in series, three red disks clogged into a line, a short space, one white disk, two more reds and a long space, after which the same thing was repeated. It was a collection of groups of corpuscles, each group distinct from each other and each composed as I have stated.”
I fancy that I started, for he quickly sketched the following:
“It was thus that they were arranged,” he said.
I did not look enlightened, for I saw nothing strange.
“Do you know what those are?” he asked, leaning forward excitedly. “They are the Morse code letters L and A, and together form the abbreviation for the name Lapham, which we always used in designating him whenever we had occasion to put his name on the wire. Sir, there were no foreign or poisonous manifestations in her blood, but in all her veins, in all her body, I found the corpuscles arranged that way. What significance has it? I am not a psychologist. I cannot explain, but you will readily recognize the condition confronting us.
“We are reduced to an alternative. When I entered the room she was either dead or in a comatose condition. If she was dead, the sending of the partial message can only be explained on spiritualistic grounds, or on the theory that the subliminal self, which in our family is probably telegraphic, was temporarily roused to action by the touch of the finger upon the button. In that case, it would not be imagining vainly to suppose that the whole material fabric was concentrated in the expression to which it was giving utterance, and such concentration would very naturally involve the fundamental elements of life, the blood among the first.
“On the other hand, if she was not dead, the same reasoning holds good. Given the concentration which certainly must have been present, add but the hand slipping from the chair arm and sender the instant the name of the murderer was to be transmitted, and when the whole system was charged with the symbol, and the identical situation here produced might not be impossible.”
He stopped abruptly, absently raised his dead cigarette to his lips; drew on it once or twice, and looking at me languidly, said:
“I see that you follow me. You now have the entire narrative preliminary to the premeditation. I can only add that when I announced to Lapham my intention of shooting, primal fear shone in his eyes and his thickening tongue stuttered a feeble ‘God, how did you find it out?’ That is the entire story, and as I said, you will recognize the absolute inutility of it all as evidence.”
“There is one thing more,” I said, “What caused her death?”
The keeper was moving nearer, and to avoid being overheard he leaned over and whispered in my ear. I was astonished.
“How did he know of that?” I asked. “It is most unusual.”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but it can be done that way.”
And that is why I defended Dr. Forbes. After his conviction, I intended to let him go before the court and tell his story, and thereby save his neck, and get himself incarcerated in the insane asylum but, unfortunately, the night after he was pronounced guilty he was found dead in his cell. The doctors said, in another burst of medical candor, that they did not know the cause of death, but were inclined to suspect the heart.
It is quite understandable that one of the primary interests that readers of the turn of the century had in medical progress was in the prolongation of life. The brewing of the long-searched-for “elixir” is depicted with proper atmospheric background by Louis Gunnis for Old Doctor Rutherford by D. F. hannigan, The Ludgate Monthly, September 1891.
September, 1891
OLD DOCTOR RUTHERFORD
by D. F. Hannigan
OLD DOCTOR RUTHERFORD is the oldest story in this book. It was first published in The Ludgate Monthly, September 1891, and clearly displays its transitional qualities. It deals with the elixir of immortality, a holdover from the alchemists of medieval times, and can be directly related to the concept of The Wandering Jew. The presentation is in the classic tradition but nevertheless sustains interest and is not without entertainment value.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, precocious author of Frankenstein, very competently recounted the problems of a man who had drunk an alchemist’s elixir in The Mortal Immortal (Keepsake, 1834) and the problems he met with his aging wife; only three years later Nathaniel Hawthorne had published under the title of The Fountain of Youth in The Salem Gazette (1837) his well-known Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment, a story of four people momentarily made young again.
The theme would range hauntingly through the work of generations of writers, to be featured even by the mass circulation publication Cosmopolitan, which in its January 1903 issue ran Dr. Cox’s Discovery by Herbert D. Ward, wherein a vaccine that restores youth is discovered and administered to a middle-aged woman on behest of her daughter, with the unusual result of both of them competing for the attentions of the inventor.
Amazing Stories in its September 1929 issue was still running the same basic type of immortality story in The Young Old Man by Earl L. Bell, placing an ageless man who has formulated and drunk an elixir formula of Roger Bacon in a secluded small village in the Ozarks. This pattern revived the immortality theme for modern authors like Robert A. Heinlein, whose long-lived Gramps Schneider dwelled among the Amish (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1942), and Clifford D. Simak, whose 163-year-old hillbilly, Joe, is still an adolescent (Census, Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1944), both placing the unusual individual in an out-of-the-way part of society, where his presence might not have been noted by the mainstream.
The science fiction plot based on longevity will never disappear, because it is one of the most ardent expressions of man’s wish fulfillment. A great number of the stories of prolonged life or of youth restoration eventually focus on the negative aspects of such a condition. This is sour grapes. Knowing its unattainability, the author tells the reader: “You wouldn’t like it if you had it.”
This ambivalent attitude of science fiction writers toward immortality is unintentionally satirized in the short poem The Immortal by Robert Sanders Shaw (Amateur Correspondent, November-December 1937), which crudely but effectively sums up the traditional plot line:
I have seen mountains and valleys so low,
And I’ve drunk from fountains ‘neath a ship’s bow—
Marble carved fountains, where grey giants grow,
‘Mid the pained throes of Atlantean woe.
I have flown spaceways, myself, all alone
In a star-studded ship, shaped like a cone.
I’ve cursed at those silent stars—brilliant, cold;
They know that I shall never become old.
I’ve solved a secret which men yearn to know;
I am immortal, a demigod—Lo!
Tired, though, of living, I long to return;
Withal my cursed gift, one thing I’ll not learn
Though it’s a secret which all men can know—
When through the dark ports of Death they shall go.
IN ONE of those quaint-looking, cage-work houses, of which only a few decaying specimens now remain in Dublin, lived Doctor Humphry Rutherford. He was so old, that no person born within the past three generations could form even a general estimate of his age. He lived apart from society, and wore a costume that brought the minds of those who saw him back to the days when Jonathan Swift was still an infant in arms.
He was, indeed, a queer old man; and no wonder that some of his poorer and more superstitious neighbours regarded him as a restless ghost who had come back to re-visit the scenes of his former life. That old fashioned peruke, those curious-looking shoe-buckles, those ruffles recalling the reign of Charles the Second, had nothing in common with the latter half of the nineteenth century; and so, if most people avoided him as something weird, uncanny, and phantom-like, they were, after all, only acting upon one of the most universal and deeply-rooted instincts of human nature.
This strange old personage had only one servant, who, curiously enough, was of foreign extraction. His features were of a tawny hue, and there was something of the Zingari about his entire appearance. He was far from being as old as the Doctor; and yet his thick hair was quite white, and his dark skin was creased with wrinkles. The name by which his master called him, was Hafiz, apparently indicating that he was a Persian by birth. He was, indeed, the only connecting link between Doctor Rutherford and the outer world; and it must be admitted that very little, if anything at all, could be ascertained through him concerning his master’s private life, for a more uncommunicative type of servant never existed.
The Doctor had long since ceased to practise his profession openly, though he spent much of his time in compounding strange mixtures out of ingredients, some of which had been for many years in his possession, while others were procured by Hafiz, his dusky retainer, at some chemist’s shop in their immediate neighbourhood. A laboratory had been specially fitted up for this purpose in one wing of the house; and the old physician, as he bent over the vessel in which he heated the mysterious decoction, might not inaptly have been compared to an alchemist, eagerly brooding over his marvellous task of transmuting the baser metals into gold.
But, in truth, the Doctor’s experiment was even more daring and far-reaching than any of the feats performed, or supposed to have been performed, by the believers in alchemy; and, incredible as it may seem, his efforts had hitherto been attended with apparent success. The old man had, many years before, conceived the idea of prolonging life indefinitely by judiciously extracting the vital properties of plants and combining them with the essence of the most potent minerals. The notion was not quite original; and modern science, if, indeed, it had ever seriously entertained it, had discarded it as a wild and baseless dream. To Doctor Rutherford’s mind, however, the possibility of repelling the approach of death had presented itself as something quite within the scope of the physician’s art; and the great age to which he had already attained, seemed to show that his speculations were not entirely chimerical.
One evening, in the month of October, the doctor was engaged in his favourite occupation in the laboratory, while Hafiz respectfully watched his movements in the background. In the midst of the silence, which neither the old man nor his attendant seemed disposed to break, could be distinctly heard the simmering of the peculiarly-shaped antique-looking vessel suspended above the glowing fire.
All at once, the Doctor, lifting up the cover of the vessel, and peering down into its interior, uttered a hoarse cry of alarm.
“Gracious God!” he exclaimed, “what is this? The Elixir has lost its natural colour. It is as red as blood!”
“Nay, master,” said Hafiz, pronouncing the words with a distinctly foreign accent, “you must be wrong, I swear. By the prophet, you must be wrong!”
“How dare you contradict me, sirrah?” burst out the Doctor, with an expression partly of anger and partly of fear on his withered countenance. “I tell you, knave, I see my fate in this mixture to-night.”
Hafiz grinned, but speedily stifled any tendency towards mirth, as he scanned his master’s face.
“Perhaps there is something forgotten,” he said at length.
“No, no,” said the Doctor; “I have put in all the ingredients. What can it be? I cannot have made a mistake; and yet—and yet—”
He paused, and stared into the fire with glistening eyes.
“Were it not better, master,” Hafiz ventured to suggest, “not to touch a drop of the Elixir to-night?”
“Nay, you white-livered rascal,” rejoined the Doctor, with a contemptuous sneer; “I am not afraid of consequences, I have suffered too much during my long life to shrink from what most men call disaster. If I have gained a lengthened lease of life what has it availed me? My years, for nearly two full centuries, have been but a dreary waste.” As he uttered the last words, a deep sigh came forth, as it were, from the caverns of his aged heart.
The Asiatic, now assuming a more serious look, advanced a few steps, and rather diffidently asked:
“Might I, too, look at it, master, to see it is all right?”
“Yes, Hafiz, you may look; and then, perhaps, your shallow brain may realize that I am not labouring under any delusion.”
The keen vision of Hafiz quickly detected that his master had unconsciously distorted the fact, when he said that the mysterious contents of the vessel were “as red as blood.” They had, certainly, an entirely different colour from that which they had always exhibited before, on similar occasions; and the impression conveyed by a close inspection was that the compound was gradually assuming a crimson hue, which, when it began to cool, might be easily mistaken for blood.
“Now, Hafiz, are you satisfied?” said Doctor Rutherford, as the Asiatic drew back with an almost imperceptible shudder. “—Was I right, or not, in thinking that a strange transformation has taken place in the Elixir?”
Hafiz was now genuinely alarmed.
“Master,” he said eagerly, laying his swarthy hand on the Doctor’s arm, “drink none of it to-night. Some demon has turned it into blood!”
“Folly! Folly!” said Doctor Rutherford, with a frown. “I have carefully compounded it; and, if any change is to come to-night, it must be part of Nature’s inscrutable designs, and cannot be averted by human agency. As for me, I am ready to meet my destiny. By the use of the precious Elixir, I have lived more than two hundred years, and I will not cast it away now, whatever may befall me.”
“But—but—oh! dear master,” said Hafiz, with trembling lips, “what if you should die?”
“If I should die?” repeated the Doctor, with a ghastly smile. “Ha! ha! ha! and what then, Hafiz? What is death? Release from the bondage of the flesh—the emancipation of the enslaved soul. Is life so dear a thing to me that I should choose to dwell imprisoned in the body for ever? Have I not told you more than once that in the scroll of Fate there is affixed to my name these cabalistic words: ‘Through death he shall regain his lost happiness, and even from the grave love shall bloom again?’ Ah! Hafiz, what a thought—to be reunited to one without whom the world is a desert and existence a curse! For this have I lived—for this I would gladly die. Yes, yes, the Elixir has been my friend, my sustainer all these years, and to-night, perhaps, it may bring me that happiness I have vainly yearned for. The goblet, man—the goblet. Hasten, hasten; I can tarry in suspense no longer!”
The Asiatic dared not disobey this peremptory command. He rushed over to a corner of the laboratory, and, snatching up a silver goblet, beautifully chased, silently handed it to his master. Then, at a gesture from the Doctor, he removed the vessel from its position above the fire, and poured into it a goodly portion of the mysterious fluid.
As the old physician raised the goblet to his lips, its contents bubbled up in crimson globules.
The Doctor’s dark grey eyes flashed from beneath his shaggy eye-brows with almost the fire of youth.
“The time has come!” he murmured. “Even if I should lose the great gift of extended life, the fruit of long research and occult knowledge, what does it matter if she comes back to me?”
Hafiz looked on amazed and almost terror-stricken at his master, who drained the goblet to the dregs.
Scarcely had the old physician finished the draught, when he suddenly laid his hand upon his heart.
“Oh! wonderful! wonderful! wonderful!” he exclaimed, with a look of exultation; “my youth is returning—the shadows of old age are fading away from me, like night before the dawn!”
The attendant silently took the goblet extended towards him by his master.
“Pour out a fresh draught,” said the Doctor, eagerly. “Let not the precious Elixir be wasted! Drink of it, too, yourself, Hafiz! Drink, drink, poor, wavering fool!”
The Asiatic shook his head with an air of mild protest.
“What, Hafiz,” said Doctor Rutherford, with an odd smile, “do you not wish, too, to renew your youth, to be happy, to be loved?”
“No, no, master,’ said the Asiatic, with a scared look in his dusky face. “I need it not. I am satisfied to remain as I am. The Elixir to-night has such a blood-red colour that it frightens me. I cannot bring myself to drink it, master. I feel that it would kill me!”
“Then live, wretch, and wither!” exclaimed his master, fiercely.
“I envy you not, even though you were to exist in earthly misery for ten thousand years. Better one hour of true happiness than countless centuries of loneliness and gloom!”
The old man’s face had by this time become quite radiant with glowing rapture. It seemed as if he were anticipating some great event, which was to be the crowning glory of his life.
“Light me to the Blue Room, Hafiz,” he said, waving his hand with unwonted gaiety toward his dark-faced attendant, “and bring with you the golden candlesticks which were presented to me by Lord Berkeley, in the year 1670. For to-night at least my spirit shall rejoice, and the shadows of the past shall vanish.”
The Asiatic automatically obeyed, leading the way up a broad staircase to a large, wainscoted chamber, whose ceiling and panelling were painted in light blue, so as to present a very curious and somewhat fantastic aspect. Immediately above the massive chimney-piece hung the portrait of a lady in the dress of a bygone day. She looked quite young, and there was an indefinable expression at once wistful, wayward, and winsome in her dreamy, wide-open eyes, and in her chaste, flower-shaped lips, that seemed to tremble on the verge of speech.
The Doctor gazed up for a moment at this portrait, and then, with a low murmur of satisfaction, dropped down upon a kind of couch, whereon he lay for some moments, apparently wrapt in a delicious reverie.
“Perhaps, master,” interposed the Asiatic, stealthily approaching him, “you might wish to see some eminent man in the profession? The effects of the Elixir might be dangerous.”
He emphasized the last word in the most significant manner, as if he were anxious to arouse in the Doctor’s breast a sense of fear which would naturally impel him to seek the necessary antidote at once.
“Hence, hence, prating fool!” said the old physician, “I am happy, and I know I shall be happier still. Go!—leave me to myself. I feel that I could laugh and be glad at this moment, even though the world weir splintered into fragments in the morning!”
Hafiz stole out of the room; but a parting glance at the Doctor convinced him that this unnatural exuberance was only the forerunner of some sudden fatality. Attached as he was to his master, and desirous of saving him, if possible, from the consequences of what he regarded as a rash and desperate act, he resolved in this emergency to take a decisive step. He flung a kind of cloak across his shoulders, drew a hat over his dark brows, and rushed off precipitately in the direction of Fitzwilliam Square.
He had frequently, in the course of his wanderings through the city, heard Doctor Hugh Melville spoken of as not only a distinguished physician but a perfect master of the science of chemistry. In many cases where persons had been suspected of secret poisoning, Doctor Melville’s examination of the dead bodies had settled the question of “yea” or “nay,” though some of his brother physicians had failed to determine the exact cause of death. Though not yet quite fifty years of age, he had reached the front rank in his profession,, and had gained quite a European reputation. His book on Vitality was considered a masterpiece of scientific investigation and profound physiological research. He was, moreover, a man of the most courteous and obliging disposition. He often attended the poorest class of patients in their own dingy homes without any hope of remuneration, manifesting sincere sympathy with them in their distress, and giving them a great deal of his valuable time.
It may, therefore, be seen that Hafiz was wise in seeking the assistance and counsel of this excellent man.
Without delay, Doctor Melville ordered out his own carriage, late as the hour was, and drove rapidly towards the residence of the eccentric, old recluse, whose very existence he had never heard of before. Such thorough goodness of heart, such spontaneous kindness, we do not frequently find amongst the medical men of our time. Less than half-an-hour had elapsed since Hafiz had left the Blue Room, when the old man, who was lying in a state of semi-consciousness on the couch, whereon he had flung himself, was roused by the sound of an opening door.
He started up, and exclaimed, in a half-stupefied fashion:
“Hafiz, are you there? Is that you, Hafiz?”
“No, sir,” replied the newcomer; “it is a stranger, who has heard of your sudden indisposition, and has come to prescribe for you, and let us hope, to restore you to your usual health.”
The old man stared somewhat haughtily at Doctor Melville.
“My good friend,” he said, in a slightly disdainful tone, “you are, I presume, a physician. So am I; but we differ in this—that you belong to the present age—an age of superficial science, and vain half-knowledge, while I have studied in the old-world school, which professed to solve all the mysteries of man’s complex nature. You who, perhaps, regard Paracelsus as a mediaeval quack, must know very little about the Elixir of Life.”
The younger physician shook his head and smiled.
“I am afraid, my dear sir,” he said, “your Paracelsus was a foolish dreamer. Modern physiology has explained away such folly.”
“There you err egregiously,” returned Doctor Rutherford, who had now raised himself to a sitting posture on the couch. “Come, now, tell me how long do you think I have lived by the use of a rare decoction?”
“I should say you are a very old man, sir.”
“Just two hundred and forty-five years. That is all.”
Doctor Melville raised his eyebrows incredulously.
“I fear there must be a slight mistake somehow,” he said, with great suavity.
“Not a bit of it,” said the other; “and if you want to know something more of my private history, just cast your eyes at that portrait over the chimney-piece there. That was my wife, and we were married in this city in the year 1670. I was then quite a young man, and had only just entered the medical profession. I may mention that, on the occasion, the Viceroy, Lord Berkeley, for whom I had acted as an amanuensis for some months, made me a present of that pair of golden candlesticks on the table there before your eyes.”
The face of Doctor Melville at that moment was a study. He seemed like a man endeavouring to dispel some illusion caused by the influence of mesmerism, or by the agency of a powerful opiate.
“There is certainly something very extraordinary in all this,” he said, with an air of brooding truth. “How curious is it that the face of the lady, whose portrait hangs there above the fire-place, is marvellously like my daughter’s face! But for the difference of dress I would almost have sworn it was my daughter’s portrait.”
“Ha! ha! ha!” laughed the old man. “What a singular coincidence, truly! And pray, doctor—doctor—what’s your name?—for I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance—might I trouble you to let me know your daughter’s name, and also her age?”
“Her name is Una, and she is just nineteen years of age.”
With an exclamation of astonishment Doctor Rutherford raised himself to his feet.
“In God’s name, sir,” he said, now speaking with terrible earnestness, “if you wish to save me from everlasting misery, gratify an old man’s wish —call it a whim if you like—let me see your daughter! bring her here; it can do her no harm. I want to see her. You tell me she resembles that portrait, and that her name is Una? Strange—strange! Can this be some phantasy of nature—for sometimes nature plays us curious tricks—or can it be possible that somewhere on this earth my Una still lives, not old, withered as I am, but blooming in changeless youth and loveliness? Listen, and in a few words I will tell you how it happened. I was young and ambitious. My profession at first seemed to be all in all to me; but there is something stronger than ambition, and that is love—the master passion of our being. And so it was, that just two hundred and twenty-one years ago I fell in love, with the sweetest, purest, fairest creature that ever visited this sad world in the shape of woman. Her maiden name was Una Talbot. Her family was a Roman Catholic one, and they objected to me as a suitor, first, because I happened to be a member of the Reformed Church, and, secondly, because I was associated with Lord Berkeley, to whom the Talbots were bitterly opposed on political grounds. I was an ardent lover, however, and in a moment of weakness—or, should I not rather say, yielding to her supreme trust in me—Una consented to wed me secretly, without obtaining her parent’s sanction.”
“Una Talbot,” murmured Doctor Melville, as if uttering his thoughts aloud, “there is something peculiar in the recurrence of that name.” Then staring confusedly at the old man he went on: “you say that your wife’s name was Una Talbot, and that she lived in Dublin over two hundred years ago. Why, that was the very name of an ancestress of mine on my mother’s side, and it was after her my daughter was called.”
“I knew it must be so!” said the old man, with glittering eyes. “The same! the very same! But let me finish. There was something mysterious about Una’s early life. She was just blossoming into womanhood—nineteen at most—and her parents had been always fearful about her health, for she seemed more like an embodied spirit, than a thing of flesh and blood. She was fair-haired, blue-eyed, and was like the Madonna before the angel told her she was to be the Mother of God. I shrank in my secret soul from the idea of marriage with so ethereal a being: but love is stronger than reason—stronger than the strongest presentiments. Well, we were married. Ah! how vividly I can recall that day! It seems as if it were only yesterday. Oh! what unutterable rapture it was to hear her pronounce the marriage formula: I take thee for my wedded husband,’ to lead her to my home, to whisper in her ears those words of burning love, which were the last I ever addressed to her! Some curious fancy led her to suggest that we should pass the first few days after our marriage in this house. It was not my residence at the time, but it had been the property of a young nobleman, who, having squandered his patrimony, sold it to me at a very low figure a few weeks before my marriage. I gladly acted on Una’s suggestion, for here was a capital means of baffling the inquiries of her incensed relatives. They would seek me at my former address, and would find no tidings of me there, as I kept my new residence a complete secret from all my acquaintances. Therefore, they could find no trace of either myself or Una. But alas! a worse misfortune than any I had sought to escape from fell upon me, even on my wedding-day! She had not been many hours my bride, when she disappeared like a phantom, and left me lonely and wretched to wear out life, without love, without hope!”
“I do not quite understand you,” Doctor Melville here broke in.
“It was simple enough,” said the old man, mournfully shaking his head, “and yet so extraordinary was it that no logic could explain it, no science account for it. On the evening of our wedding-day we were seated side by side. I was telling her, for perhaps the thousandth time, how much she was to me—more than ambition, friends, fame, life itself. In the ecstasy of that sweet moment, I did not pause to notice that she scarcely responded to my impassioned words. I clasped her in my arms. I touched her dear lips with mine; but lo! in that very instant she seemed to melt away like a vision. She dissolved, as it were, into thin air; and since then I have seen her only in dreams. I have tried to clasp her in my arms as she flitted through the lonely spaces of the night; but I awoke with the bitter consciousness that it was an illusion.”
“And so, perhaps, was your marriage,” said Doctor Melville, half cynically, as the old man stopped, gasping for breath, and looking more wan and ghostly than ever.
In his own mind, the younger physician asked himself: “Is this a case of senile dementia? or what is it, in Heaven’s name?”
“My marriage an illusion?” exclaimed Doctor Rutherford. “My friend, you are too practical, to use the wretched phrase of the nineteenth century. The world, indeed, is perishing from the effect of this sordid materialism. No, no. It was no illusion. We were united at God’s altar. Our creeds were different, but we both were true believers in the Redeemer of man, and it mattered not that the clergyman was one of my church and not of hers. But do not mock at me, my good sir; I am old and foolish, perhaps, but bear with my weaknesses, and grant the request I asked of you, to let me see your daughter. Ah! sir, you are leavened, I fear, with the scepticism of a cold-blooded age. You do not believe in the transmigration of souls. What, indeed, is there that people do believe in now-a-days but money? As for me, mere possessions appear to me so much dross. To show you how little I cling to the things of this world, give me one sheet of note paper, and reach me a pen, which you will find on yonder table.”
Doctor Melville followed the old man’s directions, but had some difficulty in getting at a writing desk, which he placed on the couch by Doctor Rutherford’s side.
“Call in Hafiz, or wait, I will call myself. Hafiz! Hafiz!” and his voice rose to a feeble effort at shouting.
The Asiatic speedily made his appearance.
“I need you as a witness,” said his master grimly. “As I have otherwise made provision for you, I am not going to leave you any legacy. Preserve the secret of the Elixir when I am gone, and use it to prolong your own existence.”
Hafiz bowed.
Then fixing a keen glance on Doctor Melville, he said:
“Long as we have been talking together you have not told me your surname; let me know it, pray.”
Doctor Melville gave the information required.
Then, for some minutes, all that could be heard in the room was the scratching of a pen.
At length, with a sigh, the old physician laid down the pen, and read aloud the following words:
“In the name of God, Amen. I, Humphrey Rutherford, of the city of Dublin, Doctor of Medicine, being of sound mind, memory, and understanding, make this as my last will and testament. I leave all I die possessed of to Una, daughter of Doctor Melville, of the city of Dublin, and I appoint her my residuary legatee and sole executrix of this my will.”
“And now there is nothing to be done save to attest the will,” said Doctor Rutherford.
“But, my dear sir—” began Doctor Melville.
“Do not gainsay,” said the old man, with a supplicating look: and forthwith he signed his name at the foot of the document, whose contents he had just read out.
The signatures of Doctor Melville and Hafiz were speedily attached.
“So much for settling my affairs,” said the old physician with forced calmness. “And now let me see her face—the face of Una—before I die.”
“Well, Doctor Rutherford, I should be a brute to refuse, under the circumstances,” said the younger physician. “Have patience for half-an-hour, and I promise you that you shall see my daughter. Meanwhile, your servant here must remain with you in case you want anything.”
“Yes, yes,” said the old man, nodding self-complacently. “Hafiz will stay here until your return. Go! Gratify the wish, the last hope of an unhappy being; and may God Almighty bless you for it!”
Without saying anything in reply, Doctor Melville hurried away.
The old man awaited his return with breathless impatience. Every moment he was becoming more restless, more vehement, more frenzied.
“Yes, yes, yes,” he muttered, with his eyes fixed on vacancy; “she will come back! I know she will come back to me; and I shall realize what true happiness means before I die!”
Hafiz vainly tried to calm his overstrung excitement. He kept saying repeatedly, “She is coming back! she is coming back,” and listening eagerly for the sound of approaching footsteps.
At length, there was a knock at the hall door; and the old physician, unable to control his emotions, rose, and endeavoured to follow Hafiz out of the Blue Room. He was, however, too feeble to make his way farther than the door of the apartment. There he paused, with a wild stare in his eyes, and his hands stretched forth tremblingly.
“Oh! hasten, hasten,” he exclaimed, in a broken voice; “hasten, or I die!”
Presently Hafiz, holding in his right hand one of the golden candlesticks, showed a young girl of a strange and almost unearthly type of beauty up the old-fashioned staircase. There was a dreamy smile on her face; but her lips trembled slightly as she gazed upon the withered countenance of the poor old physician. Still, she did not pause, but advanced towards him quietly until they stood quite close to each other.
“O Una! O my wife!—my long-lost Una, found at last!” almost shrieked the old man. And he spasmodically strove to fling his arms around her neck.
She shrank away from him with a cry of alarm, and would have fallen, had not Hafiz rushed to her assistance.
As for Doctor Rutherford, his withered features now grew frightfully pallid. A low, heart-piercing moan escaped him, and then from his blanched lips trickled a stream of blood. He made a faint effort to speak, but could only articulate one word:
“Wife!”
The next moment, his jaws relaxed, and he fell back—dead.
May, 1907
ITSELF
by Edgar Mayhew Bacon
EDGAR Mayhew Bacon (1855-1935) was a teacher and a writer of nonfiction as well as fiction. His forte was guidebook-like expositions of various regions (which he also illustrated), typified by The New Jamaica, details of Modern Jamaica (1890), The Hudson River (1902), and Nar.ra-gansett Bay (Putnam, 1904). He was an important regional historian with Chronicles of Tarry town and Sleepy Hollow (Putnam, 1897), Henry Hudson (Putnam, 1907), In Memoriam Washington Irving (1909), as well as an anthologist. His last book, The Capture of Major Andre, was published in 1930.
Itself clearly benefits from his interest in people and their immediate environment. It is a remarkable story for 1907, anticipating the manner of John Steinbeck in a very modern approach to telling a story.
When this story was written, it had been only five years since Marie and Pierre Curie had actually been able to isolate radium in a measurable amount. The speed with which this new advance in science, like that of the X-ray, was incorporated into science fiction as a base for more advanced speculations is here demonstrated. It illustrates that science fiction, while unquestionably a great prophet of science, is frequently also a reflection of scientific progress.
THE MISSOURI was in flood. To use a common financial phrase, there was a slump in real estate, and several thousand acres of well-connected, arable land had abandoned their ancient riparian rights and degenerated into mere yellow mud, which swept by Glascow and Booneville at the rate of fifty miles an hour. Between Arrow Rock and Lisbon the stream, that had spread out below the islands, tried to swing at racing speed into its narrowing channel, swirling against the curving bank with mad impetuosity,—tearing, grinding, and overflowing it.
When the wall of soapy froth that marked the edge of the flood began to fill the windows and doorway of Mike Cassedy’s house, the family thought it time to go. Their exodus was accompanied with loud bewailings, led by Jane Cassedy, the teamster’s wife, while Ellen, Janey and Mamie Cassedy chimed in according to their ability. Gramma McCrea, a victim of rheumatism, hobbled out in tearful silence, devoutly crossing herself when the little band of homeless refugees reached the safer ground of the bluff. They were not alone in their flight. When they halted, the forlorn family found themselves in the midst of equally unfortunate neighbors, a circumstance which went far to mitigate the severity of their affliction.
Mrs. Toone was there, with her six children, each one redder-eyed than the others, and Mrs. O’Grady lamented in concert with Mrs. Donelly and the Widow Daly. The Kearnses, being a thrifty race, had already begun to build a shack to cover them, and the O’Brians, in view of their royal blood, actually aspired to nothing less than a two-roomed cabin, built from wreckage carried up from the shore.
About three o’clock in the afternoon, after rocking for some time upon its foundations, the Cassedy house floated off. It careened till it struck the only unshaken building in the neighborhood, the little stone church of St. Ann. The last the tearful family saw of their late home, it was being whirled away in fragments on the face of the waters.
Mike Cassedy had no idea of joining in the idle lamentations of the women, nor the aimless speculations of most of the men. Having saved his team and wagon, he pursued a work of salvage till twilight settled over land and flood, the result of his toil being a pile of lumber, motley in its variety, but quite sufficient to form a shelter that vied with the camp of the Kearnses, or the gypsy palace of the O’Brians.
When night covered the turgid waters of the Missouri, and the last keener on the bluff forgot her wailing in troubled sleep, a strange thing occurred on the sunken neck of land where the Cassedy house had stood. Mistress McCrea, being blessed with the faculty of dreaming true when important things were coming to pass, saw in her slumbers a brave, new house riding the flood. It stranded on the point, the lower angle of the front grinding first upon the submerged bar, and then, as it righted, gradually dragged more and more to the east, till at last it settled solidly within twenty paces of the spot where the old house had stood.
With the first peep of day Ellen, Tessie and Mamie were awake and out of doors. To the edge of the bluff they went, to discover what they could of novelty. In five minutes they were back, breathless with excitement, and pouring an astonishing tale into the credulous ears of the grandmother.
“A new house, bigger an’ better’n ourn,” explained Tessie.
“An’ it’s got paint on it!” supplemented the other sisters, shrilly exultant that this important item of news, the delivery of which would almost outweigh the glory of the first announcement, should have been omitted by the nimble-tongued Tessie.
Gramma showed no astonishment but, rising, took her cane without a word, and being already dressed, hobbled slowly to the point of observation, while her newly awakened daughter-in-law, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes, made frantic haste to put on such clothes as decency demanded before facing the gaze of early rising neighbors. Mike Cassedy, being stiff and sore from yesterday’s exertions, was longer in getting his faculties in hand, poor man; but at last he, too, joined the little procession, and after all Gramma McCrea arrived last at the bluff.
“Did iver annywan see th’ loike?” Mrs. Cassedy’s voice was reduced almost to a whisper in the face of what she made no doubt was a miraculous dispensation of Providence.
“Yis, yis, ‘tis jest as I saw it,” Gramma repeated. “ ‘Tis jest as I saw it last night in me drame.”
“What’s that yere saying’?” asked Mrs. Cassedy.
“Gramma dramed it,” whispered the children to each other, while Mike, who was seldom known to speak unless he had something of importance to say, and seldom then till the occasion was passed, turned his serious big face inquiringly toward the wise woman.
“Aye”; repeated Gramma. “ ‘Deed I dramed it while ye were all slapin’, not long from midnight. I saw it come down on the strame and shtrand thayer, where it is now, an’ that I’ll take oat’ to.”
It was not long before the refugee settlement on the bluff had learned that Mike Cassedy’s family were favored of Heaven to the extent of having a better house in the place of the one they had lost, and to add to the excitement caused by this astonishing news, word was solemnly passed that Mistress McCrea had dramed it.
“She’s a wonderful woman, that.”
“Aye. She has the second sight.”
“Seein’ she dramed it, wouldn’t the house belong to her, now?”
“Whisht. What differ does it make? Wouldn’t she have a home anyhow? Mike Cassedy has been good to th’ ould woman, an’ whether she was in her own house or his, I warrant she’ll never know any odds.”
It was a nice point to raise, this question of ownership in a house that had come unincumbered by title-deed, lease, mortgage, or other document wherewith properties are wont to be trammeled, all the world over. Former proprietor there seemed to have been none. Advised by the good priest, Father Joseph, Cassedy sought diligently to discover whence the house had come; but although his inquiries extended for thirty miles up the river, and descriptions of the dwelling were inserted in several papers between Booneville and Lexington, no trace of an owner could be found.
So it came to pass that by the time the flood had entirely subsided and the mud which occupied the site of the Cassedy’s garden had dried so that one could reach the new house by walking, the exiled family returned to an enlarged and improved domain, and respectful acquaintances were careful to speak of it as Mistress McCrea’s house.
Blessed be little. Even in the haste of their exodus the Cassedys had been able to take with them the most sacred of their household gods, and as for furniture, they could afford to lose the few simple old pieces they had possessed, in view of the fact that the new dwelling contained twice as much, and that of a much better quality.
The building was not quite in the position desired, but with the aid of his team, and the willing assistance of his neighbors, Cassedy succeeded in jacking it about till he got it in the right place. When the family, amid the congratulations of their friends and to their own great satisfaction, took formal possession, and the careful Cassedy with his team drew back the heterogeneous lot of lumber that had sheltered them on the hill, and built with it a fence that was the envy of the neighborhood, people even began to whisper that the Cassedys were getting up in the world, and Father Joseph suggested that a thank-offering would be most suitably bestowed upon the parish of Saint Ann.
But how approach, or by what reference preface, the crowning discovery that filled to overflowing the cup of the delighted Cassedys? The statement that the furniture of the new house doubled in extent and value that of the old one, is short of the whole truth. In one of the four bedrooms (no other house upon Fiddler’s Neck had more than two) there was a heavy black walnut bedstead, with springs and mattress reasonably dry, in spite of the soaking that the lower floor of the house had sustained. The headboard of the bed was high and ornately decorated with moldings, while the sides were of unusual thickness. It was altogether a massive piece of furniture, such as a rich man might own, but entirely above the ordinary aspirations of people like the Cassedys. In the very center of the high headboard was a medallion or shield in high relief, and upon it, swinging from a small hook, hung a picture the like of which had never before been seen on Fiddler’s Neck. A young woman, with auburn hair, blue eyes piously raised to Heaven, and delicate hands clasped in uninterrupted devotion, occupied a frame of Florentine gold, shaped to form a cross. It is no wonder that the awestruck family regarded this miniature and its setting with superstitious joy. To their simple minds it was at once the symbol and the flower of their new fortunes.
For days the returning neighbors were admitted to view the precious thing. With but one dissenting voice, they pronounced it the likeness of a saint, and when Father Joseph had added his approval to the general verdict, the matter was deemed to be settled beyond dispute. It was even whispered that Saint Ann herself had come to take the Cassedys under her special protection, and a halo of sanctity began to gather about the teamster’s house. It cost him something, to be sure, as dignities and reputation are apt to cost. There could be no doubt that one so favored should do more for the church than could be expected from his less fortunate neighbors. Father Joseph was certainly just in advancing this view, and in fairness to Mike Cassedy it should be said that he entirely fell in with it, and labored early and late to support his new dignities. Business increased with him; in place of two horses, within the year he had six, and two strong, sober lads were employed as helpers; so that in time he became the most prosperous man in the community.
In the grand new bedroom, in the magnificent bed, under the blessed picture, they put Gramma McCrea. An amiable dispute between the mother and daughter had been settled by the unusual utterance of a word from Mike.
“Y’r mother’ll take that room, who else?” Who else, indeed. The whole family agreeing that it was her right, not only because she had “dramed it,” but by reason of her advanced years, her rheumatic pains, and her greatly loved personality, the old woman was affectionately installed in the best chamber.
“‘Deed, my dear,” she said to her daughter, “ye are all too good to th’ useless ould ‘ooman. I’d be better plazed if yerself and Mike, good, honest man, wud slape in it.”
“Whisht, an’ don’t be callin’ yerself names,” answered Mrs. Cassedy, bustling about in pretense of tidying the already immaculate premises. “What’d me an’ Mike fale like, slapin’ in the grand bed, an’ you on straw. I’d take shame to do it. We’re young yet, and our bones rest aisy wherever we are.”
The first night that Gramma McCrea slept in the big bed she painfully climbed to her knees at the head of the mattress, and reaching up, touched the picture with thin, trembling fingers. Then she said her prayers and signed the cross, feeling safe and rich as she had never before felt in all her long, toil-filled life. Was not “Itself” watching over her?
The exposure at the time of the flood had greatly increased Gramma’s rheumatism. When she first was established in the great bed, under the blessed protection of “Itself,” she was nearly doubled with pain, and even her pious thanksgiving and petitions to Heaven were punctuated with groans and sighs. Now a miracle, or what bore strong external resemblance to one, gave the Cassedy family and their neighbors fresh occasion to marvel. The first twenty-four hours in the bed were marked by a decided improvement in Mistress McCrea’s condition. At the end of the second day she arose, declaring that her pains had left her, and offered to help her daughter with the housework. After the third night—but this is a secret between Gramma and her youngest grandchild—she astonished Mamie by challenging her to a contest at rope-skipping, and the agility displayed by the rejuvenated old woman could only be equalled by the astonishment of the child, or by her own subsequent contrition. The details of Gramma’s recovery, the rope-skipping episode alone omitted, soon became public property. It may be that doubters would have arisen to question the truth of the story, had not Gramma been seen frequently without her cane, a living witness to the supernatural virtue of “Itself.”
Janey Mack, lame from her birth, was living in the next house but one from the Cassedy home when these things occurred, and after many consultations her mother made bold to ask Gramma McCrea might Janey sleep one night in the great bed.
“Not wan night, but a wake if ‘twill do her anny good,” was the hearty reply. “I’ll not be sayin’ that ‘Itself’ will cure her, but ‘twill be no harm to thry. I’m that young meself now that I cud slape on the flure and not be the worse.”
Janey’s uncle, the acknowledged skeptic of Fiddler’s Point, made great sport of the “shuperstition of thim wimmin”; but when, at the end of a week, Janey walked out of the Cassedy’s house without her crutches, he fairly turned tail and went up to Kansas City to look for a job that he heard was waiting for him there.
Father Joseph had been away during the time occupied by these miraculous cures. On his return to Fiddler’s Point he found the settlement in an uproar.
“What’s this they tell me about miracles being worked in your house?” he asked Mike. There was a suggestion of sternness in the good priest’s voice, for to him this was altogether a serious matter, to be reported to his superiors in the church in any event, to be investigated solemnly, and if the work of error, to be sternly suppressed.
“They tell me that the picture has been curing Mistress McCrea and Janey Mack,” he specified.
Mike twisted the whip he had in his hands, and made several efforts before the machinery of his jaws could frame a reply.
“They do be sayin’ so,” he finally admitted.
“What do you say?” pressed the clergyman.
“They’re both walkin’“; came the slow answer.
There being nothing further to be elicited from Mike, Father Joseph went to see the late sufferers, and found both active, as reported. Still puzzled and anxious, not willing to let error slip into his fold unchallenged, nor yet content to be himself an obstacle to what might be really the goodness of Heaven, the careful priest startled the Cassedys with a request. He had been troubled for years with an annoying malady of the nerves, which caused the left side of his face to twitch. Would the family permit him to sleep in the wonderful bed?
He had not meant to make this experiment public, but forgetting to enjoin the Cassedys to silence, the news soon spread like wildfire that Father Jo, no less, was himself going to sleep in Gramma McCrea’s bed.
Many were the speculations upon the outcome of the priest’s experiment, many would have been the comments if that little community could have witnessed the strange goings on in the grand bedroom, after the Cassedys had bade their reverend guest good night, and gone to their own untroubled repose. In the first place, Father Joseph produced several sacred emblems and instruments of his high office, and betook himself to devotions of so exceptionally lengthy a character that the clock was on the stroke of twelve when he had concluded. Even then he showed no evidence of an intention to undress, but arrayed himself rather in the robes of his calling, and with candle and book proceeded, according to long disused formulas, to determine whether the picture upon the bedhead could by any possible chance derive its extraordinary power from the spirit of darkness and evil.
A weird, yet impressive spectacle, the priest afforded, in that midnight solitude, performing sacred rites by the light of a solitary candle, with the purpose of guarding his parish against the presence of a possible necromantic influence.
Father Joseph was not a particularly superstitious man, but he was a highly imaginative, and exceedingly conscientious one, and his performance in the Cassedys’ house that night was the antithesis of things frivolous or vain. At length, thoroughly satisfied that whatever the picture might be, it certainly was not the result of satanic inspiration, the conscientious priest laid off his clothes and pillowed his head beneath “Itself,” where, weary with his long vigil, he soon dropped into a delicious sleep. He did not waken till Mrs. Cassedy, alarmed at his long silence, knocked timidly at the bedroom door. Cheerfully he answered her and sprang from the bed, conscious of a new vigor. Before he had finished dressing, he became aware of a great change in himself. The nervous affection that had afflicted him for twenty years had entirely left him. He descended to the family living room in a state of amazement. The Cassedys gathered about him with ejaculations of wonder and expressions of joy, and before long half the parish had congregated at the teamster’s door, to learn the new miracle that “Itself” had wrought.
For days following this event nothing else was talked of on Fiddler’s Point. The ordinary affairs of life seemed of meager importance compared with the astonishing certainty that a series of supernatural works were being performed in that very neighborhood where so lately men had stood aghast and women had bemoaned the loss of property and the destruction of the fruits of lifelong labor.
Such congregations as Father Joseph welcomed at the little church of St. Ann, such reformations on the part of hardened backsliders, such conversions of recalcitrant heretics, such piety among the women of his flock, and such liberal donations to the various funds of the church, had never before been known in that poor parish.
As the rumors of the marvelous cures spread, and in spreading no doubt were magnified, other cripples, from other parishes, began to visit the poverty-stricken and long despised Point, and beg for admission to the potent presence of “Itself.” From up and down the river they came, thicker and faster, till the Cassedys were at their wits’ end to receive them, and at the same time conduct the domestic affairs of their home. Their privacy was a thing of the past, to be looked back upon with regret and longing. No more could Mike, returning from his day’s work, stretch his coatless arms, and extend his shoeless stockings in the comfort of his own house. The children were arrayed from morning to night in their best dresses and their best manners, which, after the novelty had worn off, became highly irksome. Gramma McCrea, poor woman, had no more comfort in her grand room and wonderful bed, seeing that by day the premises were invaded by curious or anxious pilgrims, and by night generally occupied by one or more of the lame, the halt, or the blind.
At first, when those in direful plight petitioned for a chance to occupy the great bed, the hearts of Mrs. Cassedy and Gramma McCrea melted, and the strangers were made freely welcome, without charge, to the benefit they might derive from the curative influence of “Itself”; but after a time, acting under the advice of Father Joseph, they made a slight charge for the privilege. The honest Priest, full of pious joy at the development of such a marvel in his parish, notified his Bishop, and the latter came straightway to add the seal of his approval to a matter which promised to redound to the fame of his diocese.
When the great man entered the honored dwelling of the Cassedys, the little girls were awed into a becoming silence, and the women adorned themselves as for a great festival, and attended him with tremulous devotion, while even Mike was constrained to remain at home, to surrender the freedom of his muscular frame to the thraldom of Sunday broadcloth, and submit his bronzed neck to the irksome bondage of a starched collar. The Bishop questioned and was satisfied. Moreover, he was pleased to pronounce the episcopal benediction, and when he departed, left behind him an odor of sanctity, and the endorsement of his authority. After that the very door-yard of the Cassedys was not sufficient to contain the throng that gathered there daily, and the now prominent family longed secretly but fervently for a return to their former obscurity and the delightful peace of a quiet way of life.
When the Jefferson City Palladium got hold of the news, which it finally did, a young and enterprising reporter was detailed to take care of the item. He visited Fiddler’s Point, with a determination to make a good story out of what he believed would prove a very small sensation. The reality so far exceeded his anticipations that upon his return to the office he wrote an enthusiastic account of his discoveries, embellished with numerous clever touches of an original character, and further adorned with a display head by which the wayfaring man, though a deafmute, could not fail to be stunned. In letters that would have lent distinction to a billboard, men were invited to learn that a new Lourdes had been discovered, an American shrine that made fair to rival the greatest religious healing establishments of the old world. The curing of Father Burke was the text for half a column, in an article which occupied fully a page and a half of the Palladium.
One of the immediate effects of that publication was the fact that it attracted the attention of Doctor Hamilton Wilton, the great nerve specialist, newly returned from his sabbatical year in Europe.
“I’ll just take a run down and look into this,” he said, thoughtfully. “The phases of communal hysteria are sure to be exhibited beautifully during such an epidemic.”
A series of surprises attended Doctor Wilton’s visit to Fiddler’s Point. In the first place, he recognized in the Cassedys’ dwelling a house of his own, built three years before, on the Kansas River, below Topeka. He had made there a sort of hermitage, where he sometimes retired to pursue in solitude those scientific experiments which were his recreation. During the great flood, while he was absent in Europe, this building had been swept away, and he had imagined that, with its contents, it had been wrecked and carried piecemeal to the Mississippi.
Led by Mrs. Cassedy the Doctor ascended to Gramma McCrea’s room, where the old woman sat in tedious state and explained in sentences so often repeated that they sounded like a lesson learned by rote, the marvelous story of the miracles wrought by “Itself.” The corners of the room were already beginning to be filled with a collection of cranes and crutches, inevitable attachments of a curative shrine. Wilton looked long and curiously at the picture over the bed, then with a compassionate interest at the woman, to whom already so evidently this exhibition had become a wearisome task. He placed his hand thoughtfully on the frame of the bedstead and ran his fingers along the molding. Once he seemed upon the point of saying something in reply to Gramma McCrea’s rehearsal, but at the end only thanked her courteously, and leaving a bank bill in her hand, bowed himself out.
The second surprise was when the Doctor stood at the rectory door, face to face with the Priest. For a while neither could find voice. As Ham and Jo, they had filled the hours of active boyhood with pranks and adventures, never undertaken singly, and had gained a brilliant, if unenviable, local reputation for mischief before they were fairly in their teens. Now the Physician and the Pastor stood face to face, dumb because old recollections stubbornly combated the formality of mature propriety.
“Jo!—Jo!—you old—” Wilton choked.
“Ham! You sinner—” The priest drew him in and closed the door before flinging his arms around him and executing a fandango for which he was, at a later hour, becomingly penitent.
After awhile, when they were seated over a chop and a bottle of Chablis in a quiet room in the tower, Wilton told Father Jo the story of the house.
“Among the experiments that interested me just before my departure for Europe,” he said, “those upon which I entered with the keenest zest were connected with the wonderful properties of the newly discovered mineral, radium. By singular good fortune I secured a very small quantity of this inestimably precious substance and tried to discover a means by which water or some other medium might be made radio-active, with a view to testing the curative powers which scientists, even then, were beginning to claim for radium. The mineral itself, you understand, is not only too enormously expensive, but far too powerful an agent for direct use. Such an employment of it, I believe, would result in ulcers, hideous deformity, insanity, and death. Reduced to an infinitesimal proportion in water, I conceived that the malefic properties of the substance might be made beneficent. Unwilling to trust my secret hopes to popular discussion, and being anxious to apply the result of my labors in the most effectual way, I purchased an old, massive bedstead, in the sides of which, having grooved them for the purpose, I inserted phials of fluid specially prepared, practically surrounding the occupant of the bed with what I hoped would prove a novel and effectual curative influence.”
Doctor Wilton paused and as he sipped his wine looked earnestly at the Priest, whose face was a study of conflicting emotions. For a moment neither spoke. Then the Physician continued:
“A little picture, that I picked up in a curio shop in Florence, I hung at the bed’s head, for no other reason than that it seemed to me a good place for it. I had no particular motive in putting it there, except a delight in decoration.”
Again he paused. Finally Father Jo asked, “Have you been to the Cassedys’?”
“I recognized the house before I entered,” was the reply. “The bed and the picture are both mine.”
“Are you telling me the truth, Ham Wilton, or is this one of your pranks?” asked Father Jo. “The story of the picture being a miracle-working relic was hard to believe, God forgive me, but this is harder. Do you know, beyond a doubt, that your science is doing this; is working these cures, I mean?”
“No, but—”
“Hold on a bit. Do you know that the picture—Itself—is not doing it?”
“No, but—”
“Easy, easy! You know neither the one thing nor the other. Perhaps ‘Itself’ is doing more than you think. Anyway, you may be sure that God Almighty uses strange means to accomplish His purposes. What do you mean to do? Tell these people that their faith is naught, and make them a laughing stock to their neighbors?”
“Not so fast, Jo,” answered the Doctor. “Do you mean to say that you will build faith upon a doubt, to use no stronger term? Isn’t your religion big enough and broad enough to stand alone, without being bolstered by a—a—”
“A lie, you mean,” broke in Father Jo hotly. Then, after a moment, his face changed. A noble expression chased away the troubled lines that had gathered there, and he rose and took his friend by the hand.
“The truth needs no lie to bolster it,” he said. “You have given me a hard task, Hamilton Wilton; and sorely it goes against the grain to tell those good people that they have been fooling themselves. It’ll be harder still,” he added ruefully, “to tell the Bishop, but it must be done. It must be done.”
The Doctor held the hand extended to him in a hearty grip.
“Fix it to suit yourself, Jo. As for me, I’m out of it. If I were to tell those people, they wouldn’t believe me, and after all—Who knows?”
A girl volunteers to be the subject in a demonstration of a machine that decodes an individual’s thoughts and emotions, changing them into images. The ensuing scene is depicted by G. W. Peters as presented in The Platinum Web by William Hurd Hillyer, Pearson’s Magazine, January 1906. The trauma that results from the images formed the basis for this bit of science fiction presenting a psychological theme in an earlier and simpler form than today’s intricate Freudian complications.
December, 1896
CITIZEN 504
by Charles H. Palmer
CITIZEN 504 by Charles H. Palmer has the distinction of being the first science fiction story printed by The Argosy after it changed its policy to become an adult adventure fiction magazine (the first all-fiction pulp) with its January 1896 issue. Had N. T. Babcock, the author of The Man With the Brown Beard (February 1896) bothered to offer even a weak explanation in his rather well-done tale of a respectable man who wakes up in jail in the body of a criminal, he would have had a prior right to the claim.
The reason for interest in the first science fiction story run by The Argosy was that before that magazine would finally change from a pulp into a slick in the forties, it published more science fiction than any nonspecialized magazine in history. The Munsey group, notably All-Story Weekly, The Cavalier, as well as The Argosy, were collectively the leading repository of science fiction from 1912 to 1926.
The influence of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) was considerable even as late as 1896, and it seems that Charles Palmer may have gotten the germ of the idea for Citizen 504 from that source. Citizen 504 is notable as an early dystopia or anti-utopia story, depicting the impact of certain scientific or ‘‘ideal” societies in small focus on a few individuals. It anticipates the impersonality of the computer age.
IT WAS where, in years gone by, the great city of New York had stood, with its gigantic buildings of marble and steel towering into the skies; its streets choked with tiers of walks and electric railroads elevated one above another, with its clanging steam carts and carriages rattling over its iron pavements; its foundations pierced to frightful depths by elevator shafts, and honeycombed with railway tunnels and pneumatic tubes diving under and over each other, crossing and recrossing.
“How good it is to be here, Eric; to have the fields around you, and the woods and water where you can see them every day. It seems like being very close to nature, doesn’t it? It’s living, to me!” Alora sat up very straight on the rock and took a prolonged whiff of the breeze that blew fresh from the sea, her eyes going out over the green stretches and the river to the hills beyond. “Oh, I don’t think we can be too thankful for living now. We don’t half appreciate that we are Americans of the twenty-third century.”
Eric stretched himself at full length on the grass at her feet and looked about him without displaying any enthusiasm over his lot. “Sometimes I think we are not so much better off,” he said slowly.
“Not better off! I wish you could have read what I’ve been reading about New York. It just made my heart ache to think of those poor wretches and what they’ve missed. And I suppose they thought they were living, too! Only think of the millions who were hived up in the huge city, living by electric light, with hardly a glimpse of the sun from one year’s end to the other. I don’t wonder the death rate increased to ten per cent of the population, and the daily average of suicides was two hundred. And think of that ceaseless roar! I fancied I could hear it while I read—night and day that horrible roar that filled a hundred great asylums for the insane with half a million patients. Then when it was all so bad that it couldn’t get much worse came Chauvel with his theories. ‘Spread out!’ he said. How they laughed at him—and now New York is a name, and we are here with our Township No. 1. It was such a splendid idea to have No. 1 right on the site of the greatest of all the old cities, and make it a monument to Chauvel, ‘the man with a cobweb in his brain.’ I wonder if those men expected forever to go on adding more stories to their Towers of Babel, and concocting new methods for shooting people up and down them or through the streets! It was all a big treadmill. Their inventions made life unbearable. And then they had to contrive ways to overcome the obstacles their inventions had created; and the new improvements made other inventions necessary, and the more they invented the more unhappy they were. Perhaps they looked forward to our times and saw us even more enslaved than themselves to inventions still more marvelous. They thought human progress was a straight line. We are inclined to think it may be a circle. Certainly we seem much nearer to their ancestors than they were. Our advance is toward simplicity. What is it you object to, Eric?”
“A good many things. I don’t half like our marriage system, for example. It is all very perfect when you think of it in the abstract, but when you come to apply it personally it is quite probable that you might discover some flaws in it. It don’t see why there isn’t a chance for an immense amount of unhappiness. I can tell you I felt relieved when the Bureau finished its sitting last year. My last birthday made me eligible, and came while the Marriage Bureau was in session. I used to dread coming home at night for fear I should find my notice on the table; and I can tell you I had a whole drove of nightmares about it. You want to laugh, but it’s not such a laughing matter when you come right down to it. Wait until your turn comes.”
“I don’t doubt it would seem a little strange at first, but what better system could we have? What is your plan?”
“I haven’t any—only perhaps the old way was the best after all—”
“You wouldn’t bring back the old belief in romances!”
“And why not?”
“Oh, Eric, you make my faith in you tremble! Why, how absurd the old way was. The romance of love was sung by the poets and discussed by the essay writers until all the world got into the habit of thinking it was a reality, that it was something that must come to every one. No wonder, then, that as each arrived at a certain age he imagined himself suffering with the disease. It was fancy, not common sense, that chose the life companions, and the ones selected were usually the most ill-suited possible. Instead of admiring what was really admirable in each other, and making the best of what was not at all so, each must form an ideal image of the other, embodying all the virtues of the original, along with a hundred others that never existed, and not a single fault. It was marriage that shattered the image. Then those who had been mated according to reason let their fancies go, and friendship came in place of the romantic love, and they were good comrades. Other high-minded persons, when the hallucination was gone and they realized that nature had never meant them for each other, still tried to make the best of it, but there was no happiness left. They were together and yet most pitiably alone, unsatisfied, and neither life could give out the best that was in it. Another class found relief through the abomination of divorce. Isn’t it reasonable that a body of the most intelligent men and women of the community, who have been married themselves, should know who are best adapted to each other better than we younger ones who have never been married? We couldn’t be expected to have a very valuable opinion on a subject we know practically nothing about. Eric, your ideas are a century behind the times. That Dr. Johnson, who lived five hundred years ago, really foreshadowed our system when he said he believed marriages in general would be as happy, and often more so, if they were all made by the Lord Chancellor on due consideration of the characters and circumstances, without the chief actors having any choice in the matter. And when Mr. Hoswell asked if he didn’t suppose there were fifty women in the world with whom a man might be as happy as with any one woman in particular, the old fellow thundered out, ‘Ay, sir, fifty thousand!’“
“Yet,” replied Eric, “the Great Cham picked out a wife whom I’m sure our Bureau would never have thought suited to him, and apparently he was as happy as possible. I venture to say the Bureau would have made a flat failure had they tried to provide Samuel with a helpmate! I think I do know something about marriage. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t get a good idea of what it means by seeing it around me—in my father’s household for example. As for the Councilors of the Bureau, most of them have had the experience of only one marriage, and perhaps that has given them a warped idea of the institution. To have a competent Bureau nothing under twenty experiences should qualify a Councilor to hold office! Joking aside, Alora, I know I could choose well for myself. I don’t want to marry whomsoever the Bureau selects for me. I want to marry you. I’m not ashamed to say I do read those old poets and believe in their love.”
“That only proves what I’ve been saying. We’ve been much together, so you apply to me what you’ve been reading. If we were to marry you’d soon find that the real me and the image you dream about are two very different things. Shall we go? There’s the Refectory bell. You mustn’t be angry, Eric; I can understand that you feel a little anxious, thinking any day may bring your notice. I might feel the same if father hadn’t seen the Chief Councilor, and arranged that my notice shouldn’t be served while mother and he are away. Roger Elbert couldn’t promise in so many words, but he’s an old friend of father’s, and father said it would be all right.”
“Still your name might come up while Roger Elbert is ill. Some one else is Acting Chief of the Bureau now.”
“You don’t think it would, Eric? I’m sure Roger Elbert would speak about my father’s wishes.”
They walked on down the street under the arch of elms to the great town dining hall. Eric left Alora at her seat with a rather sullen good by, and took his place at the other extreme of the building, where only now and then he could catch a glimpse of the back of her head.
Alora would have been slow to admit how much Eric’s suggestion troubled her as she went about her work the rest of the day. The thought of a notice served, with her mother and father away off in Africa, was not reassuring. She wished she could talk it over with Eric for a few minutes.
She was sorry, too, that she had asserted her opinions so strongly. She had been fresh from reading Lyle’s inspiring account of the development of Chauvel’s township theory. She had read with keenest interest the story that told how the brave man, with a handful of followers, had gained a hearing for his ideas in spite of the bitterest opposition, and had lived to see the sons of men who had laughed at him cast their votes for the destruction of New York and the foundation of a township on its site.
Tears had come to her eyes as she read of the death of Chauvel before the work he was so eager to see was accomplished. And then as she read of the present, of the thrifty townships spread throughout the land side by side, with a healthy race of happy, prosperous people evenly distributed through them, living in touch with nature and breathing God’s fresh air, with not one city to contaminate them, she had felt a new enthusiasm at the thought that she was a part of this splendid scheme. She wanted to spin perfectly her little thread in Chauvel’s great cobweb.
Is there always a corresponding depression after a season of moral exhilaration? Alora began to think so. With twilight falling, it even occurred that she could cablephone her father in Africa, but her pride prevented anything so childish.
There it lay in all its bulky importance, its white ribbons and seals flaunting themselves in her face with what seemed a ghastly mockery. In all her experience Alora had never been so unnerved and utterly helpless as at the instant when her eyes rested on this folded packet of parchment.
The little clock told off the hours cheerily by quarters and halves, the noon bell from the Refectory rang its invitation, but Alora did not move. With head buried in her arms, she sat there alone with her notice.
In at the window came the sound of voices of people passing down the street. Did they know of this paper hidden beneath her arms? And if they did not it would be only a few days before they would be reading her name from the bulletin board: “Alora Swift and—” The other name she did not know herself. At length the desire to know it overcame her dread, and she went to her room, locking herself in, to read the ominous document.
It did look forbidding, unrolled to its full length, with its authoritative way of calling attention in heavy type to important phrases, as if to warn the receiver that there was no gainsaying its provisions. It was dated June 30th, and recited in a becomingly formal manner that the name of the recipient, Citizen 986, had been presented by the Committee on Eligibility for Marriage to the Board of Qualifications, which had assigned it to the proper group of names, and submitted them to the Council on Marriages. After careful consideration, the Council had selected and hereby named Citizen 504 as in all respects best suited to be the life companion of said Citizen 986. The marriage of the above named citizens would take place at the Council Hall on July 10th. Any objections to the decision of the Council must be filed at its office within three days. Such objections would be passed upon by the Board of Appeal, whose decision would be final. On a separate sheet was a brief description of Citizen 504, Lemuel Phelps.
Lemuel Phelps! So this was the man above all others who in the estimation of the Council was thoroughly suited to her! She made no attempt to conceal her anger, but dropping upon the bed, she sobbed it forth passionately among the pillows.
Late in the afternoon the ringing of the telephone bell aroused her. That was the thing to do! She would call up her father in Africa. While she waited to be answered, Alora could see in the little metallic mirror beneath the telephone box the clerk of the Hotel Zulu leaning over the onyx counter, bantering with a stylishly dressed Chinese tourist. When he did respond it was to say that her mother and father had left that morning for Mount Ora. Their next address would be at the Summit House, Lake Nyassa, which they hoped to reach by July 10th, the day appointed for her marriage. Poor Alora!
“Is she ill?” inquired Eric.
“No,” said Alora’s aunt; “and yet she doesn’t look really well, either.”
“I came back from the north only this afternoon, and mother said she hadn’t seen Alora for a week.”
“She has received her notice, you know. I don’t know why she should feel so, I’m sure—”
“Won’t she see me—just for a minute?”
“No; she said she couldn’t see you tonight.”
Eric’s eyebrows almost joined each other in their gloomy scowling as he walked slowly away. Down below in the darkness he could see the lights of vessels at anchor in the river, throwing long, trembling reflections that glittered in red and green. Near the shore lay a steamer that loomed up to an enormous size. It was the Tyra, which sailed the next day for Spain. While his eyes wandered restlessly over the water some one hurried by him. It was Alora. He recognized her at once, and in an instant had overtaken her. It startled him when she looked up, her face was so very white and her eyes shone so.
“What is it, Alora?”
She tried to laugh, but the laugh was a failure.
“Isn’t this the trouble—isn’t it that you’re finding out that you do believe in the old ideas in spite of yourself? Alora, I’ve been thinking while I stood here that there’s one way to help it all. Take me as a substitute, and we’ll sail away on her tomorrow night to Spain, and leave this accursed marriage system behind us.”
“Oh, if we could!” she said, almost in a whisper, pressing her hands together tightly. “But I don’t know whether I think your way, Eric. I like you better than any one else, but—”
“Never mind,” said Eric, looking down at her tenderly; “perhaps I can teach you to think my way.”
It was a feverish night for Alora. In the morning, as soon as she had seen her aunt safely off to make a visit in the next township, she set about her preparations. There was no one in the house, and yet she found herself stealing softly from room to room on tip toe, collecting her things like a thief.
At times a feeling of shame nearly put an end to the work; then a thought of what would happen on the next day if she stayed came to goad her on. Everything was ready at last, even to the cloak that was to hide this backsliding daughter of Township No. 1.
It was nine to a minute when Eric came. “Let me have your things, Alora; we haven’t a moment’s time to spare.”
There were the inevitable few last indispensables to get together. Alora had gone up stairs for the fourth time to rummage for something, when unexpectedly she came upon a little book in white and gold. It was the “Life of Chauvel.”
Eric was pacing the hall below, his small remnant of patience evaporating rapidly. “Come, Alora, we can’t wait any longer. We’ve only twenty minutes now.” And after a minute, “You must come at once, Alora!”
When she came down it was with her hat and cloak off. Eric looked at her in astonishment.
“I can’t go.” She held the book in her hand. “I found this and I can’t go.”
“Alora!” There was despair and entreaty in his voice.
“I’ve promised to him,” she said, pointing to the face on the cover. “Think of what he endured. I’ve been proud to believe in him, and now when my turn comes to suffer a little I turn coward. I can’t be untrue to that dead man. And, Eric—”
The bell in the town hall clock rang the half hour with its usual solemnity. Eric sank into a chair. “We’re too late!”
She realized fully what his words meant to her, but in the determination to be faithful to her belief at any cost she was not troubled about herself. The misfortune seemed to have fallen not on her but on Eric. She stood before him without a word or a motion.
Presently there was the sound of voices in the hall, and the maid brought in a letter. Alora broke the seal and read through the paper, at first listlessly, and then, as she began to understand it, she gave an excited little gasp and thrust the paper into Eric’s hand.
“Oh, Eric, it’s not too late. Read it!”
Eric was on his feet just in time to receive Alora and her shower of tears. He managed to keep one arm around her, while with the other he held the paper behind her back, where the lamplight fell on it, and read its surprising contents:
“Dear Madam, it is with profound regret that the Bureau begs to inform you that owing to a clerical error the number of the citizen assigned you was given as 504, instead of 405 (Eric Holt), which latter number is hereby substituted. In view of the unfortunate mistake, your marriage, if you so desire, will be postponed for ten days. Permit us to render our most sincere apologies.”
It was signed by the Secretary of the Bureau.
Alora has given her husband much assistance, since her marriage, in preparing his monograph on “Is Our Marriage System a Failure?” Now that it has been conclusively proved that our system of marriage as it exists at present is not Chauvel’s at all, and was not included in his original scheme, Alora’s last bit of compunction in opposing it has been removed.
Eric says that so long as he lives his first duty shall be to do all in his power to abolish a system which makes it possible for the life happiness or unhappiness of two persons to depend upon the possibility of a clerical error.
April, 1907
THE MANSION OF FORGETFULNESS
by Don Mark Lemon
DON Mark Lemon would appear to have been a minor acolyte of the San Francisco group of literati who experienced their golden age at the turn of the century. San Francisco was then a magazine publishing center that encouraged development of western authors. Surprisingly, a good number had an inclination toward science fiction and fantasy, including names as distinguished as Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, George Sterling, and W. C. Morrow. At the end there were even patrons of Clark Ashton Smith.
Lemon’s book, Plays and Poems, was published in that city by L. Roesch Co. in 1899. Another book of verse, Ione and other Poems, would be issued by a New York firm, the Broadway Publishing Company, in 1905. He also collaborated with a relative, Eli Lemon Sheldon, on a volume of basic information titled Everybody’s Writing Desk. Eli Lemon Sheldon had enjoyed considerable success with a very similar book, Everybody’s Pocket Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing (Harper’s, 1892), which went into a number of editions. Lemon apparently never got any of his fiction between hard covers.
The Mansion of Forgetfulness is a vignette which deals with the ability of man to invent devices that can artificially help mental problems. The shaping and reshaping of personality has been in recent times the basis of much science fiction including not only neurotic and psychopathic problems, but also depression brought on by unbearable grief, the inability to eliminate the pangs of conscience, the hurt of unrequited love, and other conditions that affect the behavior of man.
There is no question that procedures to influence such psychological problems will eventually be perfected, bringing about thought control for the good as well as harm of the individual. Man’s trouble is that he frequently deliberately cripples himself psychologically because he does not want to forget the loss of a loved one or a wrong he has done another, because he feels a sense or guilt or of disloyalty at doing so. Don Mark Lemon has stripped away the senselessness of this attitude in a piece rich in irony.
Don Mark Lemon also has to his credit the distinction of having contributed two short stories to The Thrill Book, a semi-monthly magazine published by Street & Smith in 1919, which was intended to be an all-fantasy publication, but somehow fell short of its aim. Today, the magazine is so rare and obscure that to have had a story published in it is of interest primarily to scholars, and precious few of them could validate the claim. For the record, the two stories were The Whispering from the Grave (July 15, 1919) where a phonograph is planted in the grave of a murdered man to trap his killer through superstitious fear; and The Spider and the Fly August 1, 1919) in which a woman bitten by a “whistling” spider gradually adopts a spider’s attitudes, with dire results for her husband. Both stories are extremely well written.
FOUR months after the salt waves had laid at his feet the cold form of his Love, came the news that Herbert Munson was the possessor of a startling secret. He had, it was stated, discovered a Purple Ray that would wither and destroy certain human cells of memory without injury or danger to neighboring cells. This rumor was followed by the still more amazing report that Munson had erected the Mansion of Forgetfulness, to which all who would free their minds of a hopeless passion might repair, and in one brief hour, forget.
And, sure enough, here they came—those who loved not wisely but too well, those who loved deeply but hopelessly, and those who loved the Dead and could endure their grief no longer—and the Purple Ray “plucked from the memory its rooted sorrow” and they went forth from the Mansion of Forgetfulness unscarred and fancy-free.
Yet he who showed others how to forget would not himself forget. It was agony to know that she was dead, and he would never see her face again, yet he shrank from forgetfulness as the soul shrinks from oblivion. Try as he would, he could not drag himself from the haunted halls of memory, though he remembered that the world without was wonderfully fair, and other women, perhaps as lovely as she, were waiting there to love and be loved. No! Let others forget, he would not! Not that he lived in hope, for had he not kissed the salt foam from her dead face? But that memory was all that remained of a Love who was no more.
He watched them come and go—watched the many, ah, too many, pilgrims arrive with sorrowful, love-haunted faces, but depart with unconcerned, care-free looks, and at times he feared that his philanthropy was a sacrilege. There seemed something unholy in this sudden transmutation of grief into gladness—this swift thrusting aside of the tragic presence of sorrow—yet they had chosen of their own free will to forget a hopeless passion, and they could now return whence they came and love again, more wisely if less deeply.
Some came, thinking to blot out other memories than that of a hopeless love—memories of sin and crime—but the Purple Ray would not be thwarted to such base purposes, and they left, abashed and disappointed.
It was in winter, when the snow was changed to crystal as it fell upon the walls and cornices of the beautiful marble edifice, or piled itself in drifts of sifted diamonds against the stained glass windows, when a lady came alone across the vales and entered the broad gateway of the Mansion of Forgetfulness.
Something in her manner—perhaps her agitated hesitation at the portals—moved the master to accost her.
“Kind friend,” he said, “were it not better to remember what you now seek to forget?” As he spoke he drew closer about his face the cowl he wore to conceal his identity from the merely curious.
A sigh was the only immediate answer, as the pilgrim leaned wearily against a marble pillar. Then came the low spoken words:
“Perhaps I may only half-forget. I would remember, yet not remember so acutely.”
“No, you will wholly forget. The Purple Ray is oblivion itself.”
“Ah, well, better I kill these painful memories than break my heart!”
“Then, if it must be so, enter and forget.”
“Show me the way and let me go quickly,” was the plea of the veiled lady. “I have come far, and the worst is only a few steps farther on.”
“Come, then!” and the master led the way to the room of the Purple Ray.
An hour passed, when the door was opened and the veiled visitor came forth and descended the broad stairway. She moved quickly and lightly, and at the foot of the stairs she laughed musically as she again met the master.
“Have you forgotten?” he asked.
“Forgotten! I know that I have forgotten something, else why am I here, yet I do not know what I have forgotten.”
“So they all say!”
A flush of rosy light shone from a slender window overhead, haloing the pilgrim like a saint.
“How beautiful everything is!” she exclaimed. “Why do I wear this veil? I will no longer!”
So saying, she loosened it, disclosing a face young and exquisitely fair. The man shrank back as if pierced by a bolt.
“My God, it is her spirit!” he gasped.
“No, no!” protested the visitor. “I am not a spirit, and I fear I am too, too human.”
“You are Morella!” whispered the man, staring before him like one peering through intense darkness.
“I am. Who are you that you ask?”
“Morella! I thought you dead! I kissed you for dead and then the waves swept me away and I saw you no more.”
“Some fishermen once found me on a sandy beach, where they said I fainted. Who are you?”
The man drew back his cowl. “Look!” There was no light of recognition in the other’s eyes. “My God! the Ray has blotted out all memory!”
“Pray tell me what you mean, and let me go,” came the passionless words.
A groan was the only reply, and the man hid his face in his hands.
“You seem to know what I have forgotten. Has it aught to do with you?”
“O Morella, it were better that I thought you dead than to know that you have forgotten! Do you not recall our betrothal? See, you have the ring upon your hand! Does it not awaken one recollection of other days?”
The girl gazed blankly at the ring on her hand, and shook her head.
“Has the Ray blotted out every fair memory! Have you returned to life only to forget! Try to think, dearest: Do you not remember that day in Naples when we pledged eternal love for one another?”
“I remember no betrothal.” A deep look of pity came into the speaker’s eyes when she saw the pain her words had caused. “If remembrance is so sad, why do you not also forget?”
“My love!” he groaned, “you are making the world darker to me than to dying eyes! You ask me to forget! You!”
“You forget that I have forgotten.”
The man groaned in utter anguish.
As she turned to go he stayed her by a gentle touch. “Wait here while I, too, go and kill that memory!”
He dragged himself up the broad stairway, looking back once when he had reached the landing, then turned and staggered toward the room of the Purple Ray.
