by Mike Ashley
“You are an Englishwoman, too,” he observed, with evident relish. “I knew it. Only the mists and rains of England can make color like yours. Did you notice how well we looked together as we walked along between the mirrors? Are we not as if made for each other, tall and regal both of us? What a picture we would make!”
It occurred to me then, with unpleasant appropriateness, that he was the painter of dead women.
“It is an English woman, too, that I lack for my collection,” he mused meditatively.
“Collection! Have you a collection of women? That is certainly unique. I have heard of collections of bugs, birds, but women, never. Perhaps you would like me to join it!”
“Indeed I should! I never saw a woman I admired so tremendously.”
I drew back in fear, silenced by the ardor of his words.
“Oh, you need not be afraid. I am not like other men. I do not love as they love. I love only with my brain. While you have been sitting here, I have caressed you a thousand times, and you have not even suspected it. I do not want the bestial common pleasures which my coachman can have, or my scullion can buy with a lira. Why should not I be as much superior to them in my loves as in my life? If I am not, then I am not their superior in any way. My pleasures are those of another plane of life, of a brain touched to a keener fire, of nerves that have reached the highest point of pleasurable vibration. Besides, when I love, I love only dead women. Life reaches its perfection only when death comes. Life is never real until then,” he added.
“Perhaps you would like to kill me for your amusement tonight,” I replied, still trying to keep up the jest. “I have always flattered myself, however, that I was better alive.”
No sooner were the words out than I regretted them. His face grew thin and strained like a bird-dog’s on the scent. His lips became expressive of a terrible desire, and his frail hands trembled with anticipation.
As I looked, his pupils disappeared, and his eyes became two pools of blue and blazing light. Unwittingly I had hit upon his object. I had surprised his purpose in a jest.
Who could have dreamed of this! At the worst, I thought, I might be detained for two or three days, forced to serve him for a model, and cause worry to my husband and gossiping comment.
But whose imagination could have reached this! Strangely enough, the decree of death that I read in his face dissipated my fear.
I became calm and collected. In an instant I was mistress of myself and ready to fight for life. The blood stopped pounding in my brain. I could think with normal clearness.
“The worst of it is,” I reflected, “this man is not mad. If he were, I might be able to play upon some delusion for freedom. He has passed the point where madness begins. He has gone just so much too far the other way.”
“Then you really think that you could love me if I were dead,” I laughed, leaning toward him gayly. “Is it not rather a strange requisite for winning a woman’s love? What would my reward be? Are you sure you could not endure me any other way?”
“Do not jest about sacred things! Death,” he answered slowly and reprovingly, “is the thing most to be desired by beautiful women. It saves them from something worse—old age. An ugly woman can afford to live; a beautiful woman can not. The real object of life is to ripen the body to its limit of physical perfection, and then, just as you would a perfect fruit, pluck and preserve it. Death sets the definite seal upon its perfection, that is, if death can be controlled to prevent decay. And that is what I can do,” he added proudly, getting up in his abstraction and pacing up and down the room. “And what difference does it make, what day it comes? All days march toward death.”
I admired unreservedly the elegant, intellectualized figure, now that I had thrown fear to the winds.
“Come,” he pleaded, “let me kill you! It is because I love you that I ask you. It is because I think that your physical self is worth being preserved. Your future will be assured. You will never be less happy than now, less lovely, less triumphant. You will always be an object of admiration.”
“What a magician you are to picture death attractively! But tell me more about it first.”
Joy leaped up and sang in my heart at the prospect of the struggle. I felt as the race horse feels when, knowing the strength and the suppleness of his limbs, he sees the long white track unfold before him.
“In ancient days my ancestors,” he began, “were Roman Governors in Spain. At the court of one of them, Vitellius Ponteleone, lived a famous Jewish physician (in old Spanish days the Jews were the first of scientists), by name Ibn Ezra. He made a poison (poison is not the right word, I regret greatly its vulgar suggestiveness) from a mineral which has now vanished from the face of the earth. This poison causes a delicious, pleasureful death, and at the same time arrests physical decay. Now, if you will just let me inject one drop of it into that white arm of yours, you will be immortal superior to time and change, indestructibly young. You do not seem to realize the greatness of the offer. For this honor I have selected you from all the women in Naples.”
“It is an honor, of course; but, like a proposal of marriage, it seems to me important and to require consideration.”
“Oh, no, it is not important. We have to prepare for life, but for death we are always ready. Besides, I am offering you a chance to choose your own death. How many can do that!”
“Do not think that I am ungrateful, good Count, but—” “One little drop of the liquid will run through your veins like flame, cutting off thought and all centers of painful sensation. Only a dim sweet memory of pleasant things will remain. Gradually, then, cells and arteries and flesh will harden. In time your body will attain the hardness of a diamond and the whiteness of fine marble. But it is months, years, before the brain dies. I am not really sure that it ever dies. In it, like the iridescent reflections upon a soap bubble, live the shadows of past pleasures. There is no other immortality that can equal this which I offer. Every day that you live now lessens your beauty. In a way every day is a vulgar death. It coarsens and over-colors your skin, dulls the gold of your hair, makes this bodily line, or this, a bit too full. That is why I brought you here to-night, at the height of your beauty, just as love and life have crowned you.”
“It must be a remarkable liquid. Let me see it. Is it with you?” “No, indeed! It is kept in a vault which it takes an hour to open. It is guarded as are the crown jewels of Italy,” he responded proudly.
“There is no immediate danger,” I thought. “There is time. Now the road lies long before me.”
“I suppose there is an antidote for this liquid. I will not call it poison, since you dislike the word so greatly.”
“None that is known now. You see it destroys instantly what only patient nature can rebuild.”
“I am greatly interested in it. Show me the other women upon whom you have tried it. I am eager to see its effect.”
“I knew you would be. Come this way.”
We ascended a staircase, where again I felt the sting of light. Upon a landing, half way up, he paused and pointed to our reflected figures.
“Are we not as if made for each other you and I? When I sleep the white liquid sleep, I shall arrange that it be beside you.”
My death evidently was firmly determined upon.
At the top he unlocked a door, and we entered a room where some fifty women were dancing a minuet. Above them great crystal chandeliers swung, giving to their jewels and their shimmering silks and satins reflected life. Each one was in an attitude of arrested motion. It was as if they had been frozen in the maddest moment of a dance. But what a horrible sight this dance of dead women, this mimic merriment of death!
“You know my picture of this scene, do you not?” said he, turning on more light. “They were perfect models, I can assure you. I can paint them for hours in any light.
“When I die I shall bequeath to Naples this art gallery. Will it not be a gift to be proud of ? Nothing can surpass it in uniqueness. Then the bodies of these
women will have attained the hardness and the whiteness of fine marble. They can in no way be distinguished from it except by their hair.
“Of course now, if the outside world knew of this, I should be punished as a murderer.”
How firmly it is settled in his mind that the outside world is mine no more!
“But then I shall be revered as a scientist who preserved for posterity the most perfect human specimens of the age in which I lived. I shall be looked upon as a God. It is as great to preserve life as it is to make it.”
The next room we entered was a luxurious boudoir. Before an exquisite French dressing-table sat a woman whose bronze hair swept the floor. On either side peacocks stood with outspread tails. Their backs served as a rest for a variety of jeweled hair pins, one of which she was in the act of picking up.
“That is the Contessa Fabriani. She is not dead yet. She hears every word we say, but she is unable to speak. I am painting her now. You can see the unfinished picture against the wall.”
In an adjoining room a dark-skinned woman of the Orient, whose black and unbound hair showed purplish tints, was reclining upon the back of a Bengal tiger. Other Eastern women lay upon couches and divans.
“See, even in death, what enticing languor! See the arrested dreams in their dark eyes, deep as an Oriental night! These women I have loved very greatly. Sometimes I have a fancy that death cannot touch them. In them there is an electric energy, the stored-up indestructible ardor of the sun, which, I like to fancy, death cannot dissipate.”
“Now here,” said the Count, opening another door, “I will show you an effect I have tried for years to reproduce. This has been the desire of my life.”
He flung back a row of folding windows, making the room on one side open to the sea.
“It is the effect of the blended radiance flung from the water here and the moon, upon dull silver, upon crystal, and the flesh of blond women.”
He turned out the lights. The moon sent an eerie, shivering luster across the crystal and silver decorations, and touched three women in robes of white, who were standing in attitudes of dreaming indolence.
“This thin, ethereal, surface light, this puissance de lumiere, is what I have tried in vain to prison. I have always been greedy of the difficult and the unattainable. If I could do this, I should be the prince of painters! It is a fact, a real thing, and yet it possesses the magic of dreams, the enchantment of the fleeting and the illusory.
“I wish to be the wizard of light. I wish to be the only one to prison its bright, defiant insubstantiality. Can you not see how wonderful it is? It is the dust of light. Reflected upon silver and clear crystal it is what shadow is to sound. Sometimes it seems to me like a thin, clear acid; then like some blue, sweet-smelling volatile liquid, eager again to join the air. Have you noticed how it penetrates blond flesh? It reveals, yet transfigures it. I wish you could watch its effect often. Sometimes the wind churns the sea-light into transparent foam. Then I love its curd-like, piled-up whiteness. Sometimes when there is no moon, and only a wan, tremulous luster from the water, the light of a far star is focused on their satins, on their diamonds, struggles eeriely among their laces, or flickers mournfully from a pearl. The room then is filled with a regretful, metallic radiance. The stars caress them. They have become impersonal, you see, and the eternal things love them.
“When the autumn moons are high, the light that fills the room is resonant and yellow. It tingles like a crystal. It gives their cold white satins the yellow richness of the peach’s heart, and to the women the enticing languor of life. On such nights the moonlight is musical and makes the crystal vibrate Now, to-night, the light is more like the vanishing ripple of the sea. Is it not wonderful? Look! It is the twin of silence, the ghost of light!”
In his excitement and exhilaration, his eyes shone like the moon-swept sea. I knew that in them, too, slept terrors inconceivable.
“This is the room I have in mind for you. You will queen it by a head over the other women. The color of your dress is right. Your gems, too, are white. Here, sometime, I promise to join you, and together we will be immortal.
“Excuse me just a moment. Wait here. Let me get the liquid and show it to you. You will be fascinated by it, just as other women have been. I never saw one who could resist it.”
As he left, I heard the key turn in the lock. When we entered the other rooms, I remembered that he bolted the doors on the inside. This door, then, was the only one by which he could gain entrance. Swiftly I slipped the bolt. Now I was safe for a time, unless there was a secret entrance.
It was not far from the window to the water. I laughed with delight. I had dived that distance many a time for pleasure. I was one of the best swimmers in England, and I had always longed for a plunge in this sapphire sea. Now was my chance and life as the goal to gain. I took off my satin gown as gayly as I had put it on. Like the Count of Ponteleone, I, too, admired the play of light on its piled-up whiteness. How merrily the sea-wind came! How it counseled courage!
I took the plunge. Down, down, down I went, cleaving the clear water. The distance up seemed interminable. It was like being born again when at last I saw the white foam feather my arms and felt my lungs expand with air. I swam in the direction of Naples. I could not reach the city, but I could easily reach some fisher’s hut and there gain shelter.
Oh, the delight of that warm, bright water under the moon! I felt that the strength of my arms and my legs was inexhaustible. I exulted in the water as a bird exults in its natural element, the air.
After I had covered what I thought to be a safe distance, I turned on my back and floated. Then I caught sight of the window from which I had leaped. It was brilliantly lighted. Count Ponteleone was leaning from it, his white hair shining like a malevolent flame. Despite the distance, I could feel the power of his wild blue eyes, which sparkled like the sea. Again I dived, lest they should reassert their power over me and draw me back.
I came up under the shadow of the shore, and made my way along until I reached a boat where Neapolitan fisherwomen were spreading their nets to dry.
They took me in, and for the doubled price of a good month’s fishing brought me that night to Naples.
“Ah, Luigi,” I sobbed, as he folded me in his arms, “little did I think, when you spoke of the dance this morning, that I should spend the night with the dead dancing women of Ponteleone.”
“Nor I that you would solve Naples mystery of crime.”
THE AUTOMATON EAR
Florence McLandburgh (1850–1934)
The following is the earliest story in this book, dating from 1873. Its age perhaps betrays the comparatively impractical nature of the invention described, but who lets technicalities get in the way of an imaginative idea. The author wonders whether all sounds made throughout history can be captured and heard again, but she exercises caution over the idea by questioning the state of mind of the inventor.
Florence McLandburgh, who lived for much of her life in Chicago, though she was born and died in Ohio, was better known as a poet, often under the pseudonym McLandburgh Wilson. Her poetry was collected in The Little Flag on Main Street (1917), which showed her support for the war effort. Her few short stories were collected as The Automaton Ear and Other Stories (1876), which includes several supernatural stories and shows her interest in music and the rhythm of words.
THE DAY WAS hardly different from many another day, though I will likely recall it even when the mist of years has shrouded the past in an undefined hueless cloud. The sunshine came in at my open window. Out of doors it flooded all the land in its warm summer light—the spires of the town and the bare college campus; farther, the tall bearded barley and rustling oats; farther still, the wild grass and the forest, where the river ran and the blue haze dipped from the sky.
The temptation was greater than I could stand, and taking my book I shut up the “study,” as the students called my small apartment, leaving it for one bounded by no walls or ceiling.
&n
bsp; The woods rang with the hum and chirp of insects and birds. I threw myself down beneath a tall, broad-spreading tree. Against its moss-covered trunk I could hear the loud tap of the woodpecker secreted high up among its leaves, and off at the end of a tender young twig a robin trilled, swinging himself to and fro through the checkered sunlight. I never grew weary listening to the changeful voice of the forest and the river, and was hardly conscious of reading until I came upon this paragraph:
As a particle of the atmosphere is never lost, so sound is never lost. A strain of music or a simple tone will vibrate in the air forever and ever, decreasing according to a fixed ratio. The diffusion of the agitation extends in all directions, like the waves in a pool, but the ear is unable to detect it beyond a certain point. It is well known that some individuals can distinguish sounds which to others under precisely similar circumstances are wholly lost. Thus the fault is not in the sound itself, but in our organ of hearing, and a tone once in existence is always in existence.
This was nothing new to me. I had read it before, though I had never thought of it, particularly; but while I listened to the robin, it seemed singular to know that all the sounds ever uttered, ever born, were floating in the air now—all music, every tone, every bird-song—and we, alas! could not hear them.
Suddenly a strange idea shot through my brain—Why not? Ay, why not hear? Men had constructed instruments which could magnify to the eye and—was it possible?—Why not?
I looked up and down the river, but saw neither it, nor the sky, nor the moss that I touched. Did the woodpecker still tap secreted among the leaves, and the robin sing, and the hum of insects run along the bank as before? I cannot recollect, I cannot recollect anything, only Mother Flinse, the deaf and dumb old crone that occasionally came to beg, and sell nuts to the students, was standing in the gateway. I nodded to her as she passed, and walked up her long, slim shadow that lay on the path. It was a strange idea that had come so suddenly into my head and startled me. I hardly dared to think of it, but I could think of nothing else. It could not be possible, and yet—why not?
