When at last Lisa was quite worn out with nursing, and there was need of more skilful and experienced hands to administer the medicines and perform the thousand duties of a sick-room, the doctor advised us to make application at a convent for a sister to come and watch at night. We did so, and on the evening of the same day a cheerful, home-like little body, in the stiffest of winged bonnets, climbed the long stairs and took immediate possession of the sick-room, putting things into faultless order in a very few moments. Her first step was to banish the dog to a neighboring studio, and I awaited her entrance into the painting-room with some anxiety. The long table had been removed, but otherwise the studio remained just the same as it was on the day of the feast. A regiment of bottles was drawn upnear the window; various tell-tale dishes, broken glasses, and otherdébriscluttered the corner near where the stove stood, and I was sure that a lecture on the sin of the debauchery which had brought my friend to a sick-bed awaited me the moment the sister saw these proofs of our worldliness. She trotted out into the studio at last, in the course of her busy preparation for the night; and then, instead of bursting forth with a reproof, she covered her face with her hands, turned about, and walked out of the house. I, of course, followed her and begged for an explanation. She hesitated long, but finally with some difficulty said she could not stay in a room where such pictures decorated the walls, and before she would consent to return she must be assured of their removal or concealment. I hastened up, covered all the academy studies with bits of newspaper; and the sister returned and went on with her duties as if nothing had happened. So the expected lecture was never delivered. In the sight of the greater enormity of academy studies, she clearlythought it useless to lecture on the appetite.
Few days elapsed after the sister took charge of the sick-room before we were all rejoiced at an improvement in Tyck. He grew better rapidly, and in two weeks was able to sit up in bed and talk to us. Though we were full of joy at his apparent speedy recovery, there was always a bitterness in the thought that the fatal relapse might be expected at every moment, and this shadow hung over us even in the most hopeful hours. The sister gave up her charge, and as Tyck grew better day by day, Lisa came to act as sole nurse and companion, although we made daily visits to the sick-room. The month of January passed, and Carnival approached. Tyck was able to have his clothes put on, and to move around the room a little. The doctor made infrequent and irregular visits, and but for the fear of a relapse would have ceased to come altogether.
The morning of the first day of Carnival week, I was awakened while it was still darkby the ringing of my door-bell, and lay in bed for a while undecided whether it was not a dream that had roused me. My studio and apartment were of a very bogyish character, located at the top of a house on the Tiber, completely shut away from the world, and full of dream-compelling influences that lurked in the dingy and long-disused bedroom with its worn and faded furniture, and filled the spacious studio and the musty littlesalonwith an oppressive presence, which did not vanish in the brightest days nor in the midst of the liveliest assembly that ever gathered there. So it never astonished me to be awakened by some unaccountable noise, or by the mental conviction that there was some disturbance in the crowded atmosphere. When I was aroused that dark, drizzly morning, I awaited the second pull of the bell before I summoned courage enough to pass through the shadowysalonand the lofty studio, with its ghostly lay-figure and plaster casts, like pale phantoms in the dim light of a wax taper, and open the great door that led into thenarrow corridor. A slender form wrapped in a shawl entered the studio, and Lisa stood there, pale with fright, her great brown eyes drowned in tears, shrinking from the invisible terrors that seemed to pursue her. She whispered that Tyck was worse, and asked me to go for the doctor. I led her back to Tyck’s room, and in an hour the doctor was there.
The details of that last illness are painful in the extreme. The sister was not in attendance, it having been decided by the superior that artists’ studios were places whither the duties of the sisterhood did not call its members, and so Lisa’s mother came and did her best to fill, in a rough sort of way, the delicate office of nurse. On the last day of Carnival, little suspecting that the end of my friend was near, I was occupied in my own studio, until nearly dark, and just as the sport was at its height I struggled through the crowd and reached Tyck’s studio, white withconfettiand flour, and in a state of mind hardly fitted for the sick-room. In the studio two doctors sat in consultation, and theirserious faces, with the frightened look in Lisa’s eyes, told me the sad story at once. They had decided that Tyck must die, and made a last examination just after I entered. They raised him in bed, thumped his poor back, pulled out his swollen tongue, and felt of his tender scalp, burned with fever and frozen with a sack of ice. The group at the bedside, so picturesquely impressive, will always remain in my memory like the souvenir of some gloomy old picture. Lisa’s mother was seated on the back of the bed, raising Tyck like a sick child, his limp arms dangling over her shoulders and his head drooping against her cheek. To the right the slight and graceful form of Lisa, holding the earthen lamp; one doctor bending over to listen at the bared back, the focus of the dim light; the other doctor solemn and motionless, a dark silhouette against the bed and the wall beyond. The examination only proved the truth of the decision just reached, and it was then announced for the first time that the real malady was lung-fever, with the not infrequently accompanying first symptoms of typhoid. A few moments later one or two young artists dropped in, learned the sad news, and went away to warn the rest of the friends. At eight o’clock we were all in the studio, and after a hushed and hasty discussion as to whether or not a priest should be called in this last hour, the Catholic friends were overruled, and it was decided to consult no spiritual adviser. Tyck, meanwhile, was scarcely able to talk. One by one the fellows came to his bedside, were recognized, and went away. I alone stayed in the studio, waiting, waiting. The doctor was to come at half-past nine, and the fellows had promised to return again at ten.
For a long hour we sat in silence, Lisa and I, and watched the approach of death. The mother, completely exhausted, lay on the bare floor near the stove, as motionless as a corpse; the dim light reflected from the sick-room transformed the draperies into mysterious shapes, and made the lay-figure look vaporous and spectral. Frequent fits of violent, suffocating cough would call usto the bedside, and after a severe struggle Tyck would for a moment throw off the clutch of the malady and breathe again. He was in agony to speak with me, but was unable to. I guessed part of his wishes, repeated them in Flemish, and he made a signal of assent when I was right. In this way he communicated certain directions about his affairs, and I promised to see Lisa provided for and all his business properly settled. But there was something more he was anxious to tell, and he continued to the last his vain struggle to express it.
The stillness of the studio in the intervals between the spasms of suffocation was painfully broken, as the long hour passed, by his heavy breathing and by the stifled sobs of the poor girl, who, at last, cried herself to sleep, exhausted by her watching. From outside, a dog’s mournful howl, breaking into a short, spasmodic bark, came up at intervals, and I could see that this sound disturbed the sufferer, probably recalling to his waning faculties the history of the dog that had so haunted us. From the street thechorus of the maskers came floating to us, sounding hollow and far away, like the chant of a distant choir in some great cathedral. Occasionally a carriage rumbled over the rough pavement, the deep sound echoing through the deserted court-yard and up the long, dreary stairways. It was within a few moments of the doctor’s expected visit that a spasm more violent than any previous one called me to the bedside. We had long since stopped the medicine, and nothing remained to do but to ease the sufferer over the chasm as gently as possible. He did not seem at all anxious to live, and in the agonies of the suffocation there was no fear in those dark eyes that rolled in their hollow sockets. I raised him in bed, and at last, after the most prolonged fight, he caught his breath, opened his eyes, turned towards me, and said plainly in English, “All right, old boy.” Then he relapsed into a comatose state and never spoke again. The doctor found him rapidly sinking, and another spasm came on while he was feeling the pulse. The patient recovered from it onlyto pass into another and more protracted one, at the end of which he sighed twice and was dead. For a second or two after the last deep breath his face had all the fever-flush and the look of life, but almost instantly he fell over towards me, changed beyond recognition. The wave of death had passed over us, carrying with it the last trace of life that lingered in the face of my friend, and a ghastly pallor crept over his cheeks, transforming him that I loved into an unrecognizable, inert thing. I turned away and never saw that face again, although they told me it was nobly beautiful in its Egyptian, changeless expression. That pause of an instant, while death was asserting its power, impressed me strangely—and this was no new experience for me. In that pause, when time seemed to stand still, something urged me to raise my eyes in confident expectation of seeing the spirit as it left the body. Even my heated imagination, to which I was ready to charge much that was inexplicable in my experience, did not produce an image, butinstead, where the wall should have been I seemed to look into space, into a wide, wide distance. An awful vacancy, an infinity of emptiness, yawned before me, and I looked down to meet the fixed expression of that changed face. For that moment there was no lingering presence of my friend that I could feel; in that short struggle he had separated himself entirely from us and from the place he used to fill with his charming presence. In the chamber of death there was no adumbration of the life that once flourished there, of the soul that had just fled. And so I thought only of burying the body and providing for poor Lisa.
The rest of the fellow-painters came a few moments after it was all over, and received the news with surprise. Lisa still slept, and we did not wake her. I remained in the studio all night, and in the morning the formalities of the police notification were gone through with, and the preparations made for the funeral. In the studio, unchanged in every respect from the day when Tyck puthis brushes in his palette and laid it upon a chair, we held a meeting to decide upon the funeral ceremonies. Lisa was completely broken down by grief and exhaustion, and, with her mother and the dog, who joyfully occupied his old place by the stove and disputed the entrance of every one, lived in the studio and the store-room.
On Sunday morning we buried our friend in the Protestant cemetery. Arriving at the little house in the enclosure, we found the coffin there, with the undertaker, Lisa, her mother, and the dog. An hour later an English minister came and conducted the ceremonies in a cold, hurried manner; but perhaps the services were quite as satisfactory, after all, because his language was unintelligible to the majority of those present. We stood shivering in a circle around the coffin until the services were over, and then bore the burden to the grave, dug deep near the wall in a picturesque nook under a ruined tower—a fit monument to our friend. Lisa and her mother stood a little apart, holding the dog, while we put the body in the grave,and a cold sun shone down upon us, quite as cheerless and as unsympathetic as the dull, lowering clouds of that day in Flanders a year before. After the customary handful of earth had been thrown, we turned away and separated, for the living had no sympathy with each other after the cold formality of the funeral. As I strolled across the field in the direction of Monte Testaccio, I looked back once only. There, on the mound of fresh earth, stood the dog, and Lisa was bending over to arrange a wreath of immortelles.
After the sale of Tyck’s effects, which brought a comfortable little sum to Lisa, I left Rome, now unbearable, and sought the distractions of busy Naples. Later, with warm weather, I settled in a solitary nest in Venice, where the waves of the lagoon lapped my door-step. The distressed cries of a dog called me to the water door, one rainy morning, while I was writing a part of this very narrative, and I pulled out of the water a half-drowned, shaggy black dog. With some anxiety I assisted the poor animal todry his fur, and found, instead of my old enemy, a harmless shaggy terrier, who rests his dainty nose on the paper as I write.
And so the fourth still waits.
THE six short stories in this volume have all been written at sea in those brief intervals of enforced rest from an exacting profession which a transatlantic voyage compels; and I have offered them to the public with the full knowledge of the necessity of some explanation to palliate my offence of meddling with literature, and in the belief that I must hang out some sort of a bush to call attention to whatever merits they may have. This bush will be a confession, made, like the confidential communications in all prefaces, into the ear of the reader alone. The reason why I have put my preface—if I may be permitted to misuse the term—at the end of the book instead of at the beginning, is that the confidences I impart may be, by reason of their position between the covers, less likely to be read by the careless or mechanical reviewer or by the superficial “skimmer” of fiction. I was afraid that if the reader should by chance read the preface first, he would not care to peruse the stories, because, having been admitted to the dark room, as it were, and having had the formula of the developer told to him, he might, after he had seen one set of images come up on the dull surface of the negative, find his curiosity abated, his interest gone, and his desire satisfied.
These stories have been published in various magazines, at different times, since the centennial year. When the earliest one of the series appeared, I was not a little flattered by being often asked how much of it was true. When the second one came out, this question grew a little stale, and I began to resent the curiosity as to my method of story-telling. The climax was finally reached when I received a letter from a writer of most excellent short stories, in which communication he desired information about the characters in the tale, and led me to understandthat he believed the main part of the tale to be true. In my answer to his letter I wrote him this old story of the Western bar-room: A crowd of men were leaning over a bar drinking together and listening to the yarns of a frontiersman who, stimulated by the laughter and applause, was drawing a very long bow. His triumph was not quite complete, however, for he noticed a thin, silent man at the farther end of the bar, whose face did not change its habitual expression at any of the mirth-or wonder-compelling incidents. At last, having directed the fire of his dramatic expression for some time towards the silent man with no result, the Western Munchausen turned to him with an oath and said: “Why in —— don’t you laugh or cry, or do something, when I tell a story?” “The fact is, stranger,” the sad man replied, in a mournful tone of voice—“the fact is, I’m a liar myself!” I never heard from my correspondent again.
We all think we have fertile imaginations, and no one can blame me for not liking to be denied the credit of invention and imagination, even if the stories be mostly true. It seemed to me quite as foolish to expect a short story to be a simple chronicle of some experience with changed names and localities as it would be to demand of an historical artist that he paint only those events of history of which he has been an actual spectator. However, while this suspicion of the existence of a foundation of truth was not altogether flattering or encouraging, it did set me to thinking what part of these stories was actually drawn from my real experience, in what way the ideas arose, grew, and developed into stories. The result of this examination—the confession of the proportion of truth to fiction—is the bush, then, which I propose to hang out.
The plot of the “Capillary Crime” turns on the force of capillary attraction in wood. The remote origin of the idea was reading about the employment of wooden wedges in ancient quarries, which were first driven in dry and then, on being wetted, swelled and burst off the blocks of stone. While living in Paris, in the Rue de l’Orient, a small streeton Montmartre, which was lighted at that time by lanterns hung on ropes across from house to house, I had occasion to take out the breech-pin of an old Turkish flint-lock gun in order to draw the charge. It was impossible to start the plug at first, but after it had been soaked for a short time in petroleum it was easily unscrewed. Capillary attraction had carried the oil into the rusted threads of the screw. The knowledge of this action, together with the memory of the immense power of wooden wedges, naturally brought to my mind a possible case where the wetting of wood in a gun-stock might so affect the mechanism of the lock that the hammer would fall without the agency of the trigger. I constructed a model on the plan of the finger of a manikin, and it worked perfectly. An artist in the neighborhood committed suicide just about this time. My studio on Montmartre had once been the scene of a similar tragedy. There was every reason, then, why I selected that studio as the scene; there was a plausible excuse for connecting capillary force with the discharge of a gun; there was my recent experience with suicide to warrant a realistic description of such an event. My story was ready-made. I had only to sew together the patchwork pieces.
While I was engaged in revising “A Capillary Crime” for publication in book form, a friend sent me a slip cut from a Western newspaper, which testifies in such an unexpected manner to the possibility of the combination of circumstances described in my story that I insert it here:
“FACT AGAINST FICTION.“A STRIKING INSTANCE OF THE UNRELIABILITY OFCIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.“There is no figment of the imagination—if it is at all within the limit of possibilities—more curious or strange than some things that actually happen. The following is an instance in proof of this:“A few years ago Frank Millet, the well-known artist, war correspondent, and story-writer, published a short story in a leading magazine which had as its principal features the mysterious killing of a Parisian artist in his own studio. A web of circumstantial evidence led to the arrest of a model who had been in the habit of posing for him. Butthrough some chain of circumstances which the writer of this has now forgotten, the murder—if murder it can be called—was found to have been caused by the discharge of a firearm through the force of capillary attraction. The firearm was used by the artist as a studio accessory, and was hung in such a manner that he was directly in line with it. Its discharge occurred when he was alone in his studio.“The story was a vivid and ingenious flight of the imagination. Now for its parallel in fact:“A recent number of the AlbanyLaw Journaltells of the arrest of a man upon the charge of killing his cousin. The dead man was found lying upon a lounge, about three o’clock in the afternoon, with a 32-caliber ball in his brain. The cousin, who had an interest of $100,000 in his death, was alone with him in the house at the time. The discovery of the real cause of death was due to the lawyer of the accused, who took the rifle from which the ball had been fired, loaded and hung it upon the wall, and then marked the form of a man upon a white sheet and placed it upon the lounge where the man had been found. Then a heavy cut-glass pitcher of water was placed upon a shelf above. The temperature was 90° in the shade. The pitcher of water acted as a sun-glass, and the hot rays of the sun shining through the water were refracted directly upon the cartridge chamber of the rifle. Eightwitnesses were in the room, and a few minutes after three o’clock there was a puff and a report, and the ball struck the outlined form back of the ear, and the theory of circumstantial evidence was exploded.“This is interesting, not only because the real occurrence is quite as strange as the imagined one, but because the fact came after the fiction and paralleled it so closely.”
“FACT AGAINST FICTION.“A STRIKING INSTANCE OF THE UNRELIABILITY OFCIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE.
“There is no figment of the imagination—if it is at all within the limit of possibilities—more curious or strange than some things that actually happen. The following is an instance in proof of this:
“A few years ago Frank Millet, the well-known artist, war correspondent, and story-writer, published a short story in a leading magazine which had as its principal features the mysterious killing of a Parisian artist in his own studio. A web of circumstantial evidence led to the arrest of a model who had been in the habit of posing for him. Butthrough some chain of circumstances which the writer of this has now forgotten, the murder—if murder it can be called—was found to have been caused by the discharge of a firearm through the force of capillary attraction. The firearm was used by the artist as a studio accessory, and was hung in such a manner that he was directly in line with it. Its discharge occurred when he was alone in his studio.
“The story was a vivid and ingenious flight of the imagination. Now for its parallel in fact:
“A recent number of the AlbanyLaw Journaltells of the arrest of a man upon the charge of killing his cousin. The dead man was found lying upon a lounge, about three o’clock in the afternoon, with a 32-caliber ball in his brain. The cousin, who had an interest of $100,000 in his death, was alone with him in the house at the time. The discovery of the real cause of death was due to the lawyer of the accused, who took the rifle from which the ball had been fired, loaded and hung it upon the wall, and then marked the form of a man upon a white sheet and placed it upon the lounge where the man had been found. Then a heavy cut-glass pitcher of water was placed upon a shelf above. The temperature was 90° in the shade. The pitcher of water acted as a sun-glass, and the hot rays of the sun shining through the water were refracted directly upon the cartridge chamber of the rifle. Eightwitnesses were in the room, and a few minutes after three o’clock there was a puff and a report, and the ball struck the outlined form back of the ear, and the theory of circumstantial evidence was exploded.
“This is interesting, not only because the real occurrence is quite as strange as the imagined one, but because the fact came after the fiction and paralleled it so closely.”
I have accurately reported the brief conversation I had with the friend who occupied the Roman studio with me, and can give no further proof of the peculiar character of the place nor add to the description of the uncomfortable sensations we endured there. My friend’s remarks so far confirmed my own impressions that I have always felt that he must have had the same experience as myself—if I may call the incident of the simulacrum an experience. He has never to my knowledge talked with any one about this, but now that I have broken the ice in this public manner he may feel called upon to tell his own story, if he has any to relate.
There used to come and pose for me in my Paris studio a Hungarian model whohad been a circus athlete. The ranks of male models are largely recruited from circus men, actors, lion-tamers—people of all trades and professions, indeed—and it is not unusual to find among them individuals of culture and ability whom some misfortune or bad habit has reduced to poverty. This one was an unusually useful model. He had tattooed on the broad surface of skin over his left biceps his name, Nagy, not in ordinary letters, but in human figures in different distorted positions, representing letters of the alphabet, evidently copied from a child’s cheap picture-book. While I was painting from him, the war between Russia and Turkey broke out, and the model came one day and announced that he had joined the Hungarian Legion, and was off for Turkey. As he left me I said:
“If you’re killed, there’ll be no trouble in identifying you, for, unless your left arm is shot off, you have your passport always with you.”
At that time I had no intention of going to Turkey myself, but in a few days I foundmyself on the way there, and, while passing through Hungary, Nagy naturally came to my mind, and it occurred to me that I might possibly run across him. However, the fortunes of war did not bring us together, and I never saw him or heard of him again. On my way through London to America, after the war, I was witness to a slight trapeze accident in a circus which, though by no means startling, recalled to my mind Nagy and his tattooed name; and then, thinking over the campaign and meditating on the possibilities of my having met him there, the plan of the tale developed itself in a perfectly easy and regular way. I had only to introduce a little incident of my Italian travels, a bit of local coloring from Turkey, and the thing was done.
The evolution of “Tedesco’s Rubina” was simpler than that of either of the preceding stories. Any one familiar with Capri will remember a grotto similar to the one described, and probably many visitors to that little terrestrial paradise have been made acquainted with the secret of the smugglers’ path downinto the grotto. A dozen years or more ago, there was a very old model in Capri who had a remarkable history, and who was accustomed to drone on for hours at a stretch about her early experiences and the artists of a generation or two ago. Sketches of her at different periods of her life hung in most of the public resorts of the island. I made a careful study of this old and wrinkled face, still bearing traces of youthful beauty. The contrast between this painting and the plaster cast of the head of a Roman nymph which occupied a prominent place in my studio was the cause of many a jest, and called forth many a tradition of model life from the garrulous members of that profession. The visible proofs that the old woman had once been the great beauty of the island; the incident of the bust in the museum at Rome; the discovery of human bones in the grotto—all were interwoven together in a web of romance before I even thought of putting it on paper. When I came to write it out, it was very much like telling a threadbare story.
The Latin Quarter in Paris is the mostfertile spot in the world for the growth of romances, most of them of the mushroom species. If a stenographer were to take down the stories he might hear any evening in abrasseriethere, he would have a unique volume of strange incidents—some of them incredible, perhaps, but all with much flavor of realism about them to make them interesting from a human point of view. Not a few strange suicides, incomprehensible alliances, marvellously curious and pathetic bits of human history, have come under my own notice there. Student life in the Latin Quarter is not all “beer and skittles,” for its sordid side is horribly depressing and hopeless. Few who have experienced it have ever entirely recovered from the taint of this unnatural and degrading life.
Away up in the top of one of the largest and most populous hotels of the quarter, an American artist has kept “bachelor hall” for a score of years or more. He is an animal-painter, and spends the winter in elaborating his summer’s studies, and in preparing immense canvases for sacrifice before that Juggernaut, the annual Salon. He received once a commission to paint a portrait—a “post-mortem,” as such a commission is usually called—of a deceased black-and-tan terrier. The only data he had to work from were a small American tintype and the tanned skin of the defunct pet. Having been inoculated with the spirit of modern French realism, the artist could not be content with constructing a portrait of the dog out of the materials provided, and went to a dog-fancier and hired an animal as near as could be like the one in the tintype. At the appointed hour the dog was brought to the studio in a covered basket. When the canvas was ready and the palette set, the artist opened the lid of the basket and the animal sprang out and began to run about the room. The artist thought the dog would soon make himself at home, so at first he did not attempt to secure him. But he shortly found that he grew wilder and more excited every moment, and that catching him was no easy matter. After knocking over all the furniture in the room except the heavy easel, he succeededin cornering him and seized him by the collar. A savage bite through the thumb made him loose his hold, and the rôles of pursuer and pursued immediately changed. The beast flew into a terrible state of rage, snapping and snarling like a mad thing. As there was no safer refuge than the large easel, the artist climbed upon that to escape his infuriated enemy. By the aid of a long mahl-stock he fished up the bell-cord which hung within reach, and pulled it until the concierge came. The owner of the dog was speedily brought, and the siege of the studio was raised. The same artist brought in from the country one autumn a torpid snake, which he kept in a box all through the winter. One morning in spring he was horrified to find the reptile coiled up on the rug beside his bed. He killed it by dropping a heavy color-box on it, without stopping to find out whether it was venomous or not. It is easy to see how my story grew out of these two incidents.
Now that the chief actors in the drama which I have sketched in “The Fourth Waits” are long since dead, I may confess without fearof hurting anybody’s feelings that all the incidents in this tale are absolutely true. There are plenty of witnesses to the accuracy of this statement, and I have no doubt they would, if called upon, gladly testify to almost every detail of the descriptions. No one who was present at the funeral ceremonies in Antwerp and Rome can ever forget the impression made upon him at the time; neither is any member of the little artistic circle likely to forget to the end of his days the strange sensation of superstitious awe with which the incidents of the story of the stray dog were listened to every time the subject was broached among us. The memory of this experience weighed heavily upon my mind for two or three years, and I only threw off the load after I had written the story.
It is only to complete this series of confessions that I explain how this preface came to be written. I was riding home with a friend late one raw afternoon at the close of a long day’s hunting in one of the Midland counties of England, and we stopped to refresh ourselves and horses at a wayside inncalled The Holly Bush. When we mounted again at the door, I reached up with my hunting crop and struck the holly bush that hung over the door as a sign. It rattled like metal, and as we rode away I said to my companion:
“That wasn’t a real holly bush!”
“That wasn’t real whiskey!” he replied.
The memory of the mongoose story which these remarks called up cheered us more than the pause at the inn.
“The mongoose story is almost the only tale that need not be explained even to a Scotchman,” my friend added.
This is how I came to think of explaining the construction of my stories, and how I came to call my confessions “The Bush.”
THE END.