there—could be found to support Mr. Phillips' allega-
tions. The manuscript follows.
L
The nocturnal streets of any city along the Eastern Sea-
board afford the nightwalker many a glimpse of the strange
and terrible, the macabre and outré, for darkness draws
from the crevices and crannies, the attic rooms and cellar
hideways of the city those human beings who, for obscure
reasons lost in the past, choose to keep the day secure in
their gray niches—the misshapen, the lonely, the sick, the
very old, the haunted, and those lost souls who are forever
seeking their identities under cover of the night, which is
beneficent for them as the cold light of day can never be.
These are the hurt by life, the maimed, men and women
who have never recovered from the traumas of childhood
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THE M A N WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
or who have willingly sought after experiences not meant
for man to know, and every place where the human so-
ciety has been concentrated for any considerable length
of time abounds with them, though they are seen only in the
dark hours, emerging like nocturnal moths to move about in
their narrow environs for a few brief hours before they must
escape daylight once more.
Having been a solitary child, and much left to my own
devices because of the persistent ill-health which was my
lot, I developed early a propensity for roaming abroad by
night, at first only in the Angell Street neighborhood where
I lived during much of my childhood, and then, little by
little, in a widened circle in my native Providence. By day,
my health permitting, I haunted the Seekonk River from the
city into the open country, or, when my energy was at its
height, played with a few carefully chosen companions at a
“clubhouse” we had painstakingly constructed in wooded
areas not far out of the city. I was also much given to read-
ing, and spent long hours in my grandfathers extensive
library, reading without discrimination and thus assimilating
a vast amount of knowledge, from the Greek philosophies
to the history of the English monarchy, from the secrets
of ancient alchemists to the experiments of Niels Bohr,
from the lore of Egyptian papyri to the regional studies of
Thomas Hardy, since my grandfather was possessed of very
catholic tastes in books and, spuming specialization, bought
and kept only what in his mind was good, by which he
meant that which involved him.
But the nocturnal city invariably drew me from all else;
walking abroad was my preference above all other pursuits,
and I went out and about at night all through the later years
of my childhood and throughout my adolescent years, in
the course of which I tended—because sporadic illness kept
me from regular attendance at school—to grow ever
more self-sufficient and solitary. I could not now say what
it was I sought with such determination in the nigh ted city,
THE M A N WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
149
what it was in the ill-lit streets that drew me, why I sought
old Benefit Street and the shadowed environs of Poe Street,
almost unknown in the vastness of Providence, w hat it was
I hoped to see in the furtively glimpsed faces of other night-
wanderers slipping and slinking along the dark lanes and
byways of the city, unless perhaps it was to escape from the
harsher realities of daylight coupled with an insatiable
curiosity about the secrets of city life which only the night
could disclose.
When at last my graduation from high school was an ac-
complished fact, it might have been assumed that I would
turn to other pursuits; but it was not so, for my health was
too precarious to warrant matriculation at Brown Univer-
sity, where I would like to have gone to continue my studies,
and this deprivation served only to enhance my solitary
occupations—I doubled my reading hours and increased the
time I spent abroad by night, by the simple expedient of
sleeping during the daylight hours. And yet I contrived to
lead an otherwise normal existence; I did not abandon my
widowed mother or my aunts, with whom we lived, though
the companions of my youth had grown away from me, and
I managed to discover Rose Dexter, a dark-eyed descend-
ant of the first English families to come into old Providence,
one singularly favored in the proportions of her figure and
in the beauty of her features, whom I persuaded to share my
nocturnal pursuits.
W ith her I continued to explore nocturnal Providence,
and with new zest, eager to show Rose all I had already dis-
covered in my wanderings about the city. We met originally
at the old Athenaeum, and we continued to meet there of
evenings, and from its portals ventured forth into the night.
W hat began lightheartedly for her soon grew into dedicated
habit; she proved as eager as I to inquire into hidden by-
ways and long-disused lanes, and she was soon as much at
home in the night-held city as I. She was little inclined to
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THE M AN WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
irrelevant chatter, and thus proved admirably complemen-
tary to my person.
We had been exploring Providence in this fashion for
several months when, one night on Benefit Street, a gentle-
man wearing a knee-length cape over wrinkled and ill-kept
clothing accosted us. He had been standing on the walk not
far ahead of us when first we turned into the street, and I
had observed him when we went past him; he had struck me
as oddly disquieting, for I thought his moustached, dark-
eyed face with the unruly hair of his hatless head strangely
familiar; and, at our passing, he had set out in pursuit until,
at last, catching up to us, he touched me on the shoulder
and spoke.
“Sir,” he said, “could you tell me how to reach the ceme-
tery where once Poe walked?”
I gave him directions, and then, spurred by a sudden
impulse, suggested that we accompany him to the goal he
sought; almost before I understood fully what had hap-
pened, we three were walking along together. I saw almost
at once with what a calculating air the fellow scrutinized
my companion, and yet any resentment I might have felt
was dispelled by the ready recognition that the stranger’s
interest was inoffensive, for it was rather more coolly critical
than passionately involved. I took the opportunity, also, to
examine him as carefully as I could in the occasional patches
of streetlight through which we passed, and was increasingly
disturbed at the gnawing certainty that I knew him or had
known him.
He was dressed almost uniformly in somber black, save
for his white shirt and the flowing Windsor tie he affected.
His clothing was unpressed, as if it had been worn for a
long time without having been attended to, but it was not
unclean, as far as I c
ould see. His brow was high, almost
dome-like; under it his dark eyes looked out hauntingly,
and his face narrowed to his small, blunt chin. Plis hair, too,
was longer than most men of my generation wore it, and
THE M AN WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
151
yet he seemed to be of that same generation, not more than
five years past my own age. His clothing, however, was
definitely not of my generation; indeed, it seemed, for all
that it had the appearance of being new, to have been cut
to a pattern of several generations before my own.
"Are you a stranger to Providence?״ I asked him
presently.
"I am visiting,״ he said shortly.
"You are interested in Poe?״
He nodded.
"How much do you know of him?״ I asked then.
"Little,״ he replied. "Perhaps you could tell me more?״
I needed no second invitation, but immediately gave him
a biographical sketch of the father of the detective story
and a master of the macabre tale, whose work I had long
admired, elaborating only on his romance with Mrs. Sarah
Helen Whitman, since it involved Providence and the visit
with Mrs. Whitman to the cemetery whither we were bound.
I saw that he listened with almost rapt attention, and seemed
to be setting down in memory everything I said, but I could
not decide from his expressionless face whether what I told
him gave him pleasure or displeasure, and I could not deter-
mine what the source of his interest was.
For her part, Rose was conscious of his interest in her, but
she was not embarrassed by it, perhaps sensing that his
interest was other than amorous. It was not until he asked
her name that I realized we had not had his. He gave it
now as "Mr. Allan,״ at which Rose smiled almost imper-
ceptibly; I caught it fleetingly as we passed under a street
lamp.
Having learned our names, our companion seemed in-
terested in nothing more, and it was in silence that we
reached the cemetery at last. I had thought Mr. Allan would
enter it, but such was not his intention; he had evidently
meant only to discover its location, so that he could return
to it by day, which was manifestly a sensible conclusion,
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THE M AN WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
for—though I knew it well and had walked there on occa-
sion by night—it offered little for a stranger to view in the
dark hours.
We bade him good night at the gate and went on.
“I’ve seen that fellow somewhere before,״ I said to Rose
once we had passed beyond his hearing. “But I can’t think
where it was. Perhaps in the library.״
“It must have been in the library,״ answered Rose with a
throaty chuckle that was typical of her. “In a portrait on
the wall.״
“Oh, come!” I cried.
“Surely you recognized the resemblance, Arthur!״ she
cried. “Even to his name. He looks like Edgar Allan Poe.״
And, of course, he did. As soon as Rose had mentioned
it, I recognized the strong resemblance, even to his clothing,
and at once set Mr. Allan down as a harmless idolater of
Poe’s, so obsessed with the man that he must fashion himself
in his likeness, even to his outdated clothing—another of
the curious specimens of humanity thronging the night
streets of the city.
“Well, that is one of the oddest fellows we’ve met in
all the while we’ve walked out,” I said.
Her hand tightened on my arm. “Arthur, didn’t you feel
something—something wrong about him?”
“Oh, I suppose there is something "wrong’ in that sense
about all of us who are haunters of the dark,” I said. “Perhaps,
in a way, we prefer to make our own reality.”
But even as I answered her, I was aware of her meaning,
and there was no need of the explanation she tried so ear-
nestly to make in the spate of words that followed—there
was something wrong in the sense that there was about Mr.
Allan a profound note of error. It lay, now that I faced and
accepted it, in a number of trivial things, but particularly
in the lack of expressiveness in his features; his speech,
limited though it had been, was without modulation, almost
mechanical; he had not smiled, nor had he been given to
THE M AN WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
153
any variation in facial expression whatsoever; he had spoken
with a precision that suggested an icy detachment and aloof-
ness foreign to most men. Even the manifest interest he
showed in Rose was far more clinical than anything else. At
the same time that my curiosity was quickened, a note of
apprehension began to make itself manifest, as a result of
which I turned our conversation into other channels and
presently walked Rose to her home.
II
I suppose it was inevitable that I should meet Mr. Allan
again, and but two nights later, this time not far from my
own door. Perhaps it was absurd to think so, but I could not
escape the impression that he was waiting for me, that he
was as anxious to encounter me again as I was to meet him.
I greeted him jovially, as a fellow haunter of the night,
and took quick notice of the fact that, though his voice
simulated my own joviality, there was not a flicker of emo-
tion on his face; it remained completely placid—“wooden,״
in the words of the romantic writers. Not the hint of a smile
touched his lips, not a glint shone in his dark eyes. And now
that I had had it called to my attention, I saw that the
resemblance to Poe was remarkable, so much so, that had
Mr. Allan put forth any reasonable claim to being a descend-
ant of Poe’s, I could have been persuaded to belief.
It was, I thought, a curious coincidence, but hardly more,
and Mr. Allan on this occasion made no mention of Poe
or anything relating to him in Providence. He seemed, it
was soon evident, more intent on listening to me; he was as
singularly uncommunicative as he had been at our first meet-
ing, and in an odd way his manner was precisely the same—
as if we had not actually met before. But perhaps it was that
he simply sought some common ground, for once I men-
tioned that I contributed a weekly column on astronomy to
the Providence Journal. At this he began to take part in our
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THE M AN W H0 CALLED h i m s e l f p o e
conversation; what had been for several blocks virtually a
monologue on my part became a dialogue.
It was immediately apparent to me that Mr. Allan was not
a novice in astronomical matters. Anxious as he seemed to be
for my views, he entertained some distinctly different views
of his own, some of them highly debatable. He lost no time
in setting forth his opinion that not only was interplanetary
travel possible, but that countless stars—not alone some of
the planets in our own solar system—were inhabited.
“By human beings?” I asked incre
dulously.
“Need it be?” he replied. “Life is unique—not man. Even
here on this planet life takes many forms.”
I asked him then whether he had read the works of
Charles Fort.
He had not. He knew nothing of him, and, at his request, I
outlined some of Fort’s theories, together with the facts
Fort had adduced in support of those theories. I saw that
from time to time, as we walked along, my companion’s
head moved in a curt nod, though his unemotional face
betrayed no expression; it was as if he agreed. And on one
occasion, he broke into words.
“Yes, it is so. W hat he says is so.”
I had at the moment been speaking of the sighting of un-
identified flying objects near Japan during the latter half of
the nineteenth century.
“How can you say so?” I cried.
He launched at once into a lengthy statement, the gist of
which was that every advanced scientist in the domain of
astronomy was convinced that earth was not unique in hav-
ing life, and that it followed therefore that, just as it could
be concluded that some heavenly bodies had lower life forms
than our own, so others might well support higher forms,
and, accepting that premise, it was perfectly logical that
such higher forms had mastered interplanetary travel and
might, after decades of observation, be thoroughly famil
THE M AN WHO CALLED HIMSELF POE
155
iar with earth and its inhabitants as well as with its sister
planets.
"To what purpose?״ I asked. "To make war on us? To in-
vade us?״
"A more highly developed form of life would hardly need
to use such primitive methods,״ he pointed out. "They watch
us precisely as we watch the moon and listen for radio sig-
nals from the planets—we here are still in the earliest stages
of interplanetary communication and, beyond that, space
travel, whereas other races on remote stars have long since
achieved both.״
"How can you speak with such authority?״ I asked then.
"Because I am convinced of it. Surely you must have come
face to face with similar conclusions.״
I admitted that I had.
"And you remain open-minded?״
I admitted this as well.
"Open-minded enough to examine certain proof if it were
offered to you?״
The Man Who Called Himself Poe Page 20
