Prince Zaleski

by M. P. Shiel

charming Ottilie was marked by her parents asthe victim. The wedding, however, had been postponed owing to a slightillness of the veteran scientist, and just as he was on the point offinal recovery from it, death intervened to prevent altogether theexecution of his design. Never did death of man create a profoundersensation; _never was death of man followed by consequences moreterrible_. The _Residenz_ of the scientist was a stately mansion nearthe University in the _Unter den Linden_ boulevard, that is to say, inthe most fashionable _Quartier_ of Berlin. His bedroom from aconsiderable height looked out on a small back garden, and in this roomhe had been engaged in conversation with his colleague and medicalattendant, Dr. Johann Hofmeier, to a late hour of the night. During allthis time he seemed cheerful, and spoke quite lucidly on varioustopics. In particular, he exhibited to his colleague a curious strip ofwhat looked like ancient papyrus, on which were traced certaingrotesque and apparently meaningless figures. This, he said, he hadfound some days before on the bed of a poor woman in one of thehorribly low quarters that surround Berlin, on whom he had had occasionto make a _post-mortem_ examination. The woman had suffered frompartial paralysis. She had a small young family, none of whom, however,could give any account of the slip, except one little girl, whodeclared that she had taken it 'from her mother's mouth' after death.The slip was soiled, and had a fragrant smell, as though it had beensmeared with honey. The professor added that all through his illness hehad been employing himself by examining these figures. He wasconvinced, he said, that they contained some archaeologicalsignificance; but, in any case, he ceased not to ask himself how came aslip of papyrus to be found in such a situation,--on the bed of a deadBerlinerin of the poorest class? The story of its being taken from the_mouth_ of the woman was, of course, unbelievable. The whole incidentseemed to puzzle, while it amused him; seemed to appeal to theinstinct--so strong in him--to investigate, to probe. For days, hedeclared, he had been endeavouring, in vain, to make anything of thefigures. Dr. Hofmeier, too, examined the slip, but inclined to believethat the figures--rude and uncouth as they were--were only such asmight be drawn by any school-boy in an idle moment. They consistedmerely of a man and a woman seated on a bench, with what looked like anornamental border running round them. After a pleasant evening'sscientific gossip, Dr. Hofmeier, a little after midnight, took hisdeparture from the bed-side. An hour later the servants were rousedfrom sleep by one deep, raucous cry proceeding from the professor'sroom. They hastened to his door; it was locked on the inside; all wasstill within. No answer coming to their calls, the door was broken in.They found their master lying calm and dead on his bed. A window of theroom was open, but there was nothing to show that any one had enteredit. Dr. Hofmeier was sent for, and was soon on the scene. Afterexamining the body, he failed to find anything to account for thesudden demise of his old friend and chief. One observation, however,had the effect of causing him to tingle with horror. On his entrance hehad noticed, lying on the side of the bed, the piece of papyrus withwhich the professor had been toying in the earlier part of the day, andhad removed it. But, as he was on the point of leaving the room, hehappened to approach the corpse once more, and bending over it, noticedthat the lips and teeth were slightly parted. Drawing open the nowstiffened jaws, he found--to his amazement, to his stupefaction--that,neatly folded beneath the dead tongue, lay just such another piece ofpapyrus as that which he had removed from the bed. He drew it out--itwas clammy. He put it to his nose,--it exhaled the fragrance of honey.He opened it,--it was covered by figures. He compared them with thefigures on the other slip,--they were just so similar as twodraughtsmen hastily copying from a common model would make them. Thedoctor was unnerved: he hurried homeward, and immediately submitted thehoney on the papyrus to a rigorous chemical analysis: he suspectedpoison--a subtle poison--as the means of a suicide, grotesquely,insanely accomplished. He found the fluid to be perfectlyinnocuous,--pure honey, and nothing more.

  The next day Germany thrilled with the news that ProfessorSchleschinger had destroyed himself. For suicide, however, some of thepapers substituted murder, though of neither was there an atom ofactual proof. On the day following, three persons died by their ownhands in Berlin, of whom two were young members of the medicalprofession; on the day following that, the number rose to nineteen,Hamburg, Dresden, and Aachen joining in the frenzied death-dance;within three weeks from the night on which Professor Schleschinger methis unaccountable end, eight thousand persons in Germany, France, andGreat Britain, died in that startlingly sudden and secret manner whichwe call 'tragic', many of them obviously by their own hands, many, inwhat seemed the servility of a fatal imitativeness, with figured,honey-smeared slips of papyrus beneath their tongues. Even now--now,after years--I thrill intensely to recall the dread remembrance; but tolive through it, to breathe daily the mawkish, miasmatic atmosphere,all vapid with the suffocating death--ah, it was terror too deep,nausea too foul, for mortal bearing. Novalis has somewhere hinted atthe possibility (or the desirability) of a simultaneous suicide andvoluntary return by the whole human family into the sweet bosom of ourancient Father--I half expected it was coming, had come, _then_. It wasas if the old, good-easy, meek-eyed man of science, dying, had left hiseffectual curse on all the world, and had thereby convertedcivilisation into one omnivorous grave, one universal charnel-house. Ispent several days in reading out to Zaleski accounts of particulardeaths as they had occurred. He seemed never to tire of listening,lying back for the most part on the silver-cushioned couch, and wearingan inscrutable mask. Sometimes he rose and paced the carpet withnoiseless foot-fall, his steps increasing to the swaying, unevenvelocity of an animal in confinement as a passage here or thereattracted him, and then subsiding into their slow regularity again. Atany interruption in the reading, he would instantly turn to me with acertain impatience, and implore me to proceed; and when our stock ofmatter failed, he broke out into actual anger that I had not broughtmore with me. Henceforth the negro, Ham, using my trap, daily took adouble journey--one before sunrise, and one at dusk--to the nearesttownlet, from which he would return loaded with newspapers. Withunimaginable eagerness did both Zaleski and I seize, morning aftermorning, and evening after evening, on these budgets, to gloat for longhours over the ever-lengthening tale of death. As for him, sleepforsook him. He was a man of small reasonableness, scorning thelimitations of human capacity; his palate brooked no meat when hisbrain was headlong in the chase; even the mild narcotics which were nowhis food and drink seemed to lose something of their power to mollify,to curb him. Often rising from slumber in what I took to be the dead ofnight--though of day or night there could be small certainty in thatdim dwelling--I would peep into the domed chamber, and see him thereunder the livid-green light of the censer, the leaden smoke issuingfrom his lips, his eyes fixed unweariedly on a square piece of ebonywhich rested on the coffin of the mummy near him. On this ebony he hadpasted side by side several woodcuts--snipped from the newspapers--ofthe figures traced on the pieces of papyrus found in the mouths of thedead. I could see, as time passed, that he was concentrating all hispowers on these figures; for the details of the deaths themselves wereall of a dreary sameness, offering few salient points forinvestigation. In those cases where the suicide had left behind himclear evidence of the means by which he had committed the act, therewas nothing to investigate; the others--rich and poor alike, peer andpeasant--trooped out by thousands on the far journey, without leavingthe faintest footprint to mark the road by which they had gone.

  This was perhaps the reason that, after a time, Zaleski discarded thenewspapers, leaving their perusal to me, and turned his attentionexclusively to the ebon tablet. Knowing as I full well did the daringand success of his past spiritual adventures,--the subtlety, theimagination, the imperial grip of his intellect,--I did not at alldoubt that his choice was wise, and would in the end be justified.These woodcuts--now so notorious--were all exactly similar in design,though minutely differing here and there in drawing. The following is afacsimile of one of them taken by me at random:

  T
he time passed. It now began to be a grief to me to see the turgidpallor that gradually overspread the always ashen countenance ofZaleski; I grew to consider the ravaging life that glared and blazed inhis sunken eye as too volcanic, demonic, to be canny: the mystery, Idecided at last--if mystery there were--was too deep, too dark, forhim. Hence perhaps it was, that I now absented myself more and morefrom him in the adjoining room in which I slept. There one day I satreading over the latest list of horrors, when I heard a loud cry fromthe vaulted chamber. I rushed to the door and beheld him standing,gazing with wild eyes at the ebon tablet held straight out in front ofhim.

  'By Heaven!' he cried, stamping savagely with his foot. 'By Heaven!Then I certainly _am_ a fool! _It is the staff of Phaebus in the handof Hermes!'_

  I hastened to him. 'Tell me,' I said, 'have you discovered anything?'

  'It is possible.'

  'And has there really been foul play--murder--in any of these deaths?'

  'Of that, at least, I was certain from the first.'

  'Great God!' I exclaimed, 'could any son of man so convert himself intoa fiend, a beast of the wilderness....'

  'You judge precisely in the manner of the multitude,' he answeredsomewhat petulantly. 'Illegal murder is always a mistake, but notnecessarily a crime. Remember Corday. But in cases where the murder ofone is really fiendish, why is it qualitatively less fiendish than themurder of many? On the other hand, had Brutus slain a thousandCaesars--each act involving an additional exhibition of the sublimestself-suppression--he might well have taken rank as a saint in heaven.'

  Failing for the moment to see the drift or the connection of theargument, I contented myself with waiting events. For the rest of thatday and the next Zaleski seemed to have dismissed the matter of thetragedies from his mind, and entered calmly on his former studies. Heno longer consulted the news, or examined the figures on the tablet.The papers, however, still arrived daily, and of these he soonafterwards laid several before me, pointing, with a curious smile, to asmall paragraph in each. These all appeared in the advertisementcolumns, were worded alike, and read as follows:

  'A true son of Lycurgus, _having news_, desires to know the _time_ and_place_ of the next meeting of his Phyle. Address Zaleski, at R----Abbey, in the county of M----.'

  I gazed in mute alternation at the advertisement and at him. I may herestop to make mention of a very remarkable sensation which myassociation with him occasionally produced in me. I felt it withintense, with unpleasant, with irritating keenness at this moment. Itwas the sensation of being borne aloft--aloft--by a force external tomyself--such a sensation as might possibly tingle through an earthwormwhen lifted into illimitable airy heights by the strongly-daringpinions of an eagle. It was the feeling of being hurried out beyondone's depth--caught and whiffed away by the all-compelling sweep ofsome rabid vigour into a new, foreign element. Something akin I haveexperienced in an 'express' as it raged with me--winged, rocking,ecstatic, shrilling a dragon Aha!--round a too narrow curve. It was asensation very far from agreeable.

  'To that,' he said, pointing to the paragraph, 'we may, I think,shortly expect an answer. Let us only hope that when it comes it may beimmediately intelligible.'

  We waited throughout the whole of that day and night, hiding oureagerness under the pretence of absorption in our books. If by chance Ifell into an uneasy doze, I found him on waking ever watchful, andporing over the great tome before him. About the time, however, when,could we have seen it, the first grey of dawn must have been peepingover the land, his impatience again became painful to witness; he roseand paced the room, muttering occasionally to himself. This onlyceased, when, hours later, Ham entered the room with an envelope in hishand. Zaleski seized it--tore it open--ran his eye over thecontents--and dashed it to the ground with an oath.

  'Curse it!' he groaned. 'Ah, curse it! unintelligible--every syllableof it!'

  I picked up the missive and examined it. It was a slip of papyruscovered with the design now so hideously familiar, except only that thetwo central figures were wanting. At the bottom was written the date ofthe 15th of November--it was then the morning of the 12th--and the name'Morris.' The whole, therefore, presented the following appearance:

  My eyes were now heavy with sleep, every sense half-drunken with thevapourlike atmosphere of the room, so that, having abandoned somethingof hope, I tottered willingly to my bed, and fell into a profoundslumber, which lasted till what must have been the time of thegathering in of the shades of night. I then rose. Missing Zaleski, Isought through all the chambers for him. He was nowhere to be seen. Thenegro informed me with an affectionate and anxious tremor in the voicethat his master had left the rooms some hours before, but had saidnothing to him. I ordered the man to descend and look into the sacristyof the small chapel wherein I had deposited my _caleche_, and in thefield behind, where my horse should be. He returned with the news thatboth had disappeared. Zaleski, I then concluded, had undoubtedlydeparted on a journey.

  I was deeply touched by the demeanour of Ham as the hours went by. Hewandered stealthily about the rooms like a lost being. It was likematter sighing after, weeping over, spirit. Prince Zaleski had neverbefore withdrawn himself from the _surveillance_ of this sturdywatchman, and his disappearance now was like a convulsion in theirlittle cosmos. Ham implored me repeatedly, if I could, to throw somelight on the meaning of this catastrophe. But I too was in the dark.The Titanic frame of the Ethiopian trembled with emotion as in broken,childish words he told me that he felt instinctively the approach ofsome great danger to the person of his master. So a day passed away,and then another. On the next he roused me from sleep to hand me aletter which, on opening, I found to be from Zaleski. It was hastilyscribbled in pencil, dated 'London, Nov. 14th,' and ran thus:

  'For my body--should I not return by Friday night--you will, no doubt,be good enough to make search. _Descend_ the river, keeping constantlyto the left; consult the papyrus; and stop at the _Descensus Aesopi._Seek diligently, and you will find. For the rest, you know my fancy forcremation: take me, if you will, to the crematorium of _Pere-Lachaise._My whole fortune I decree to Ham, the Lybian.'

  Ham was all for knowing the contents of this letter, but I refused tocommunicate a word of it. I was dazed, I was more than ever perplexed,I was appalled by the frenzy of Zaleski. Friday night! It was thenThursday morning. And I was expected to wait through the drearyinterval uncertain, agonised, inactive! I was offended with my friend;his conduct bore the interpretation of mental distraction. The leadenhours passed all oppressively while I sought to appease the keenness ofmy unrest with the anodyne of drugged sleep. On the next morning,however, another letter--a rather massive one--reached me. The coveringwas directed in the writing of Zaleski, but on it he had scribbled thewords: 'This need not be opened unless I fail to reappear beforeSaturday.' I therefore laid the packet aside unread.

  I waited all through Friday, resolved that at six o'clock, if nothinghappened, I should make some sort of effort. But from six I remained,with eyes strained towards the doorway, until ten. I was so utterly ata loss, my ingenuity was so entirely baffled by the situation, that Icould devise no course of action which did not immediately appearabsurd. But at midnight I sprang up--no longer would I endure thecarking suspense. I seized a taper, and passed through the door-way. Ihad not proceeded far, however, when my light was extinguished. Then Iremembered with a shudder that I should have to pass through the wholevast length of the building in order to gain an exit. It was an all buthopeless task in the profound darkness to thread my way through thelabyrinth of halls and corridors, of tumble-down stairs, of bat-hauntedvaults, of purposeless angles and involutions; but I proceeded withsomething of a blind obstinacy, groping my way with arms held outbefore me. In this manner I had wandered on for perhaps a quarter of anhour, when my fingers came into distinct momentary contact with whatfelt like cold and humid human flesh. I shrank back, unnerved as Ialready was, with a murmur of affright.

  'Zaleski?' I whispered with bated breath.

 
; Intently as I strained my ears, I could detect no reply. The hairs ofmy head, catching terror from my fancies, erected themselves.

  Again I advanced, and again I became aware of the sensation of contact.With a quick movement I passed my hand upward and downward.

  It was indeed he. He was half-reclining, half-standing against a wallof the chamber: that he was not dead, I at once knew by his uneasybreathing. Indeed, when, having chafed his hands for some time, I triedto rouse him, he quickly recovered himself, and muttered: 'I fainted; Iwant sleep--only sleep.' I bore him back to the lighted room, assistedby Ham in the latter part of the journey. Ham's ecstasies wereinfinite; he had hardly hoped to see his master's face again. Hisgarments being wet and soiled, the negro divested him of them, anddressed him in a tightly-fitting scarlet robe of Babylonish pattern,reaching to the feet, but leaving the lower neck and forearm bare, andgirt round the stomach by a broad gold-orphreyed _ceinture_. With allthe tenderness of a woman, the man stretched his master thus arrayed onthe couch. Here he kept an Argus guard while Zaleski, in one deepunbroken slumber of a night and a day, reposed before him. When at lastthe sleeper woke, in his eye,--full of divine instinct,--flitted thewonted falchion-flash of the whetted, two-edged intellect; the secret,austere, self-conscious smile of triumph curved his lip; not a trace ofpain or fatigue remained. After a substantial meal on nuts, autumnfruits, and wine of Samos, he resumed his place on the couch; and I satby his side to hear the story of his wandering. He said:

  'We have, Shiel, had before us a very remarkable series of murders, anda very remarkable series of suicides. Were they in any way connected?To this extent, I