Mark Twain's Medieval Romance

by Otto Penzler

  “You mean,” I exclaimed, “that you can photograph the two principles of good and evil that exist in us?”

  “Exactly that. The great truth of a dual soul existence, that was dimly apprehended by one of your Western novelists, has been demonstrated by me in the laboratory with my camera. It is my purpose, at the proper time, to entrust this precious knowledge to a chosen few who will perpetuate it and use it worthily.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful!” I cried, “and now tell me, if you will, about the house on the Rue Picpus. Did you ever visit the place?”

  “We did, and found that no buildings had stood there for fifty years, so we did not pursue the search.”1

  “And the writing on the card, have you any memory of it, for Burwell told me that the words have faded?”

  “I have something better than that; I have a photograph of both card and writing, which my sister was careful to take. I had a notion that the ink in my pocket pen would fade, for it was a poor affair. This photograph I will bring you tomorrow.”

  “Bring it to Burwell’s house,” I said.

  THE NEXT MORNING the stranger called as agreed upon.

  “Here is the photograph of the card,” he said.

  “And here is the original card,” I answered, breaking the seal of the envelope I had taken from Burwell’s iron box. “I have waited for your arrival to look at it. Yes, the writing has indeed vanished; the card seems quite blank.”

  “Not when you hold it this way,” said the stranger, and as he tipped the card I saw such a horrid revelation as I can never forget. In an instant I realized how the shock of seeing that card had been too great for the soul of wife or friend to bear. In these pictures was the secret of a cursed life. The resemblance to Burwell was unmistakable, the proof against him was overwhelming. In looking upon that piece of pasteboard the wife had seen a crime which the mother could never forgive, the partner had seen a crime which the friend could never forgive. Think of a loved face suddenly melting before your eyes into a grinning skull, then into a mass of putrefaction, then into the ugliest fiend of hell, leering at you, distorted with all the marks of vice and shame. That is what I saw, that is what they had seen!

  “Let us lay these two cards in the coffin,” said my companion impressively, “we have done what we could.”

  Eager to be rid of the hateful piece of pasteboard (for who could say that the curse was not still clinging about it?), I took the strange man’s arm, and together we advanced into the adjoining room where the body lay. I had seen Burwell as he breathed his last, and knew that there had been a peaceful look on his face as he died. But now, as we laid the two white cards on the still breast, the savant suddenly touched my arm, and pointing to the dead man’s face, now frightfully distorted, whispered:—“See, even in death It followed him. Let us close the coffin quickly.”

  1. Years later, some workmen in Paris, making excavations in the Rue Picpus, came upon a heavy door buried under a mass of debris, under an old cemetery. On lifting the door they found a vault-like chamber in which were a number of female skeletons, and graven on the walls were blasphemous words written in French, which experts declared dated from fully two hundred years before. They also declared this handwriting identical with that found on the door at the Water Street murder in New York. Thus we may deduce a theory of fiend reincarnation; for it would seem clear, almost to the point of demonstration, that this murder of the seventeenth century was the work of the same evil soul that killed the poor woman on Water Street towards the end of the nineteenth century.

  KARMESIN AND THE METER

  GERALD KERSH

  A prolific short story writer and novelist, Gerald Kersh (1911–1968) probably wrote across too great a spectrum to have acquired as wide a readership as his talent deserved. Perhaps his best-known works were Fowler’s End (1957), a novel of crime set in a part of London where bathtubs are considered effete and which houses a movie theater, “a place where thugs relax between felonies,” and Night and the City (1938), the tragic story of an idealistic pimp.

  In no arena did his charismatic wit excel as greatly as in his short-short stories about Karmesin, one of whose exploits is included in this volume even though the ending is clearly described. No, the riddle here is even greater than the failure of an author to supply a satisfying ending to a single story.

  Karmesin appeared in seventeen episodes in all. The roguish adventures of this master thief are narrated in the first person and include such feats as stealing the crown jewels from the Tower of London and the nefarious acquisition of a William Shakespeare manuscript. The character, a favorite of Rex Stout, Winston Churchill, Basil Rathbone, and Henry Miller, was played by Erich von Stroheim for a 1956 television movie titled Orient Express: Man of Many Skins.

  Here is the riddle for “Karmesin and the Meter,” which was first published in the winter 1937/38 issue of Courier: Was Karmesin the world’s greatest thief, or its most outrageous liar?

  KARMESIN AND THE METER

  BY GERALD KERSH

  BOP! WENT MY GAS RING and extinguished itself. In permutations and combinations of six adjectives and three nouns, I blasted and I damned the bodies and souls of the Gas Companies. Karmesin was at this moment sitting at my table. He had, in front of him, a tin tobacco box, full of cigarette ends; with his usual deliberation, he quietly extracted the tobacco which he put into a saucer, and threw the torn papers back into the box. He could probably see in the dark. The failure of the gas did not disturb him. As I paused for breath I heard the faint crackling of the tiny pieces of paper and dried tobacco, and the ponderous deliberate voice of Karmesin, demanding in an elephantine mutter: —

  “What seems to be upsetting you?”

  “The gas,” I said, “I haven’t got another penny.”

  “Yes,” said Karmesin, “It is irritating how little gas one gets for one’s penny. Nevertheless, my young friend, you must learn to be philosophical. Light a candle.”

  “And how the devil,” I said, “can I cook an egg with a candle?”

  “Eat it raw,” said Karmesin; and crackle! crackle! went another cigarette. “Have you got any cigarette papers?”

  “No.”

  “Chort vizmi!” bellowed Karmesin.

  “Chew it,” I said malignantly, pointing to the tobacco.

  “All right,” said Karmesin. “Do not imagine that it is so easy to defeat a man like me. When you are my age, my young friend, you will learn a little philosophy. Calm, balance, and a faculty for objective reasoning, these things are necessary in this life—”

  … I have mentioned Karmesin; that powerful personality; that immense old man with his air of shattered magnificence. I wish you could have met him—Karmesin, with his looming chest and unfathomable abdomen, still excellently dressed in a suit of sound blue serge; with the strong, cropped skull and the massive purple face; the tattered white eyebrows and the heavy yellowish eyes as large as plums; the vast Nietzsche moustache, light brown with tobacco-smoke, which lay beneath his nose like a hibernating squirrel, concealing his mouth and stirring like a living thing as he breathed upon it—Karmesin the greatest criminal, or the greatest liar of his time …

  “Listen,” I said, “Say one cut a piece of cardboard to the size of a penny—”

  “No,” said Karmesin. “It would be a waste of time. I know a man who tried that once. Not merely did it fail to work, but it also jammed the mechanism of the gas meter; he had to confess to his landlord. To failure was added humiliation. He was a young man like you—”

  “Was that one of your great fiascos?”

  “My friend,” said Karmesin, “I do not indulge in fiascos. I have a creative mind, a grasp of facts, and an almost incredible foresight. When I swindle a gas company, it is not for pennies but for thousands of pounds.”

  “Thousands of pounds?” I asked.

  “Well, francs, anyway.”

  “Do you mean to say you have actually got money out of a gas company?”

  “It was s
imple,” said Karmesin. “But then, all truly great crimes are simple. One may always rely upon the ordinary man’s inability to see what is obvious. What is a genius? A man with a firm grasp of the obvious, plus a creative touch. Thus, in the winter of 19— when I found myself ill and temporarily short of money in Paris, I discovered a means whereby I could obtain free heating and light, and furthermore get heavily paid for doing so. In cash! 10,000 francs. That put me on my feet. It was with the capital that I obtained from the gas company that I was able to go to Brazil and perpetrate perhaps one of the most artistic diamond robberies of all time—”

  Karmesin is, as I have said, quite supreme; if not as a criminal, then as a story teller. It is quite easy to associate that immense, genial, aged, and philosophical man of mystery with almost any kind of lawlessness. He has a way with him. You tend to believe every word that finds its way through his cigarette-stained Nietzsche moustache. You cannot help liking the man. You feel that if you are to be swindled or otherwise taken in, you would rather have Karmesin do it than anybody else. He is this kind of man: if he stole your wallet, you would say, “I’m sorry there’s not more in it.” But, how could such a man stoop to crime? Or, on the other hand, to lying?

  “I never know when to believe you,” I said.

  “My dear sir,” said Karmesin, “I comfort myself with the memory of this incident, whenever the gas fails.

  “This is how it was. I found myself in Paris. In all businesses one has one’s ups and downs. This was a barren period. It had been necessary for me, on account of certain unforeseen circumstances, to leave Geneva in a great hurry, and to travel in a third–class carriage across France. French third–class carriages even in these times are bad enough, but before the War they were worse. It is scarcely extraordinary, therefore, that I contracted a severe attack of influenza which stretched me on my back in my little room, off the Boulevard Ornano.

  “I may say that I carried French papers in the name of Charles Lavoisier. I spoke French like a Parisian. That is nothing. I speak eleven languages like a native, even Finnish.

  “You must imagine me therefore lying upon my bed of suffering in this abominable little room in the atrocious cold of one of the severest winters on record. My rent was paid for a quarter in advance, and I had a certain amount of credit with the local tradesmen, but all my portable property was gone. I had no money, and the room was very cold. This is the quality of Parisian blankets; they are of some diaphanous substance lightly sprinkled with fluff; when you cover yourself with them all the fluff flies into your nostrils leaving nothing but a sort of woven basis, so thin that no bug dares to set foot on them for fear of falling through and breaking his legs. Even in the midst of my fever my brain began to work. Picture to yourself one unquenchable spark of genius fighting single-handed against the fogs and the vapours of influenza—that was the brain of Karmesin! Outside, the snow came down, melted and turned to ice. There were nights of appalling frost—”

  “Well,” I said, “well, what about the gas company?”

  “I’m just coming to that. Even in the midst of my fever I had an inspiration. I thought it out overnight and in the morning my gas lights were burning, my gas radiator was glowing and I had stopped shivering; and yet I had achieved this without putting a single coin in the meter and without tampering with its mechanism.”

  “How did you manage that?”

  “Wait! A fortnight passed. The man from the gas company came to empty the meter.

  “He read the little dials, saw that so many cubic feet had been consumed, opened the meter and found it empty. He was a French official with an absurd beard.

  “He said:—‘M’sieur, your meter is empty.’

  “I said:—‘M’sieur the collector, that is nothing to me.’

  “He said:—‘But where is the money?’

  “I replied:—‘Monsieur, I am a sick man. I cannot sit here and answer your riddles. Have the goodness to go.’

  “He said:—‘Monsieur, this will have to be reported.’

  “I said:—‘Go to the devil.’ He replaced the padlock and sealed it. All the same, I had gas for the next fortnight. Then the collector came again with another official. First of all they examined the seal on the padlock and found it intact; it was one of those complicated lead seals that cannot easily be tampered with. Then they looked at the glaring lights and the red hot stove. Then the inspector gave me one of those looks with which lesser men than myself are so easily terrified, opened the box and found nothing.

  “You could have heard the argument as far away as the Place D’Anvers.

  “Result? They decided that my meter was faulty, took it away, and replaced it with a new one. A devil of a meter, as large and as red as an omnibus, with a mechanism that made a noise like a lady in a car changing gear.

  “A week later they came again, again found all the gas lights burning and a room like an oven. It took them about three-quarters of an hour to open the meter, they had locked it up so tight. And what did they find? Empty space!” roared Karmesin, with a shout of laughter, that made the water jug dance in its basin and the window panes vibrate.

  “But, Karmesin,” I asked, “How did you manage it?”

  “Wait,” said Karmesin. “That is exactly what the gas people asked me. I simply smiled a mysterious smile and said nothing. And then one day, as I expected, I was politely invited to interview one of the directors of the company, and he said something to this effect: —‘Monsieur Lavoisier, I don’t know what you’re up to but it certainly can’t be legal. What tricks have you been playing with our meter?’

  “I merely smiled. ‘Come, Monsieur,’ said this gas man, ‘we wish to be lenient. We do not wish to prosecute. Tell us exactly how you cause these meters to function without putting any money in, and we will let the matter rest—we might even forget about the small item of gas you have consumed without paying for it!’

  “I said: ‘If I tell you, Monsieur, you will not only refrain from prosecuting but you will also pay me 20,000 francs. If you do not do this then I shall discreetly make public a perfectly simple method whereby the consumers of your gas can get it free of charge. It really is just as well for you to know these things. It would be worth more than 20,000 to you.’

  ‘This is preposterous!’ he shouted.

  “‘You would have to modify all your meters,’ I insinuated.

  “We compromised at 10,000, and he went with me back to my room.”

  “Well?” I asked.

  “The whole thing was so simple. I pointed to the bottom of the meter and showed him a tiny hole, no larger than a pinhole. That was number one, then I showed him my cake of soap; apparatus No. 2. ‘Well?’ asked the gas director. I took him to the window and opened it. Lying in the window sill were two or three cakes of soap; in each cake an indentation of the size of a silver franc.

  “It was so childishly simple. Into my little soap moulds I had poured water; the night frost turned the water to ice; the one-franc piece of ice was just hard enough to operate the mechanism of the meter; the gas thus obtained heated the room, the heat turned the ice back to water which dripped out at my little pin hole. Result? Invisibility!”

  “That’s extraordinarily clever,” I said. “And did you get your 10,000 francs?”

  “Yes,” said Karmesin. “But what the devil was 10,000 francs? £500? £500! Chicken feed!—”

  Karmesin rolled some of his twice-used cigarette tobacco into a kind of mahorka-cigarette, in a bit of newspaper, and fumigated his gigantic moustache with a puff of frightfully acrid smoke.

  ONE HUNDRED IN THE DARK

  OWEN JOHNSON

  In the early part of the twentieth century, few writers had greater success in depicting the college student than Owen Johnson (1878–1952). His stories and novels, known collectively as the “Lawrenceville Stories,” catalogued the personal and educational experiences of Dink Stover. Johnson founded and edited the Lawrenceville Literary Magazine and made his school famous by publ
ishing The Eternal Boy (1909), which was set there.

  While at Yale, he was chairman of the Yale Literary Review and, a decade after his graduation, shocked the school by publishing the best-selling Dover at Yale (1911), which is still in print, though inevitably dated. He had previously published such best-sellers as The Prodigious Hickey (1908), The Varmint (1910), and The Tennessee Shad (1911), which remained popular for decades and was on the curriculum of many schools.

  He had few contributions to the mystery genre, though his story collection Murder in Any Degree (1913) received excellent reviews upon publication; the New York Times called it “immensely diverting and entertaining.”

  Apart from the title story, the only other mystery contribution to the book was “One Hundred in the Dark,” which shows what a great member of the crime fiction community Johnson could have been had he kept his hand in it.

  ONE HUNDRED IN THE DARK

  BY OWEN JOHNSON

  THEY WERE DISCUSSING languidly, as such groups do, seeking from each topic a peg on which to hang a few epigrams that might be retold in the lip currency of the club—Steingall, the painter, florid of gesture, and effete, foreign in type, with black-rimmed glasses and trailing ribbon of black silk that cut across his cropped beard and cavalry mustaches; De Gollyer, a critic, who preferred to be known as a man about town, short, feverish, incisive, who slew platitudes with one adjective and tagged a reputation with three; Rankin, the architect, always in a defensive, explanatory attitude, who held his elbows on the table, his hands before his long sliding nose, and gestured with his fingers; Quinny, the illustrator, long and gaunt, with a predatory eloquence that charged irresistibly down on any subject, cut it off, surrounded it, and raked it with enfilading wit and satire; and Peters, whose methods of existence were a mystery, a young man of fifty, who had done nothing and who knew every one by his first name, the club postman, who carried the tittle-tattle, the bon mots and the news of the day, who drew up a petition a week and pursued the house committee with a daily grievance.