The Strange Adventures of Mr. Middleton Part 12

"You've robbed me, you've robbed me!" cried the lady.

"I haven't," said the mulierose man with the utmost composure. "I can explain it all satisfactorily. Come in. My Aunt Eliza is here and tea is ready. Where were you when I went back to the restaurant? They said you had gone. Where were you?"

To Mr. Middleton's surprise, the lady immediately quieted at the words of the mulierose man and instead of berating him, coughed nervously and hung her head sheepishly.

"Where were you?" repeated the man.

"At my house."

"All this time? With this young man?" There was a tinge of hardness and jealousy in the man's voice and he looked unpleasantly at Mr.

Middleton. "What did you stay in that empty house all this time for?

What-were-you-doing-there?"

Mr. Middleton was at his wit's end to supply a hypothesis to answer why the mulierose man, from being a criminal and object of the lady's just wrath, should suddenly have become an inquisitor, sitting in judgment upon her conduct.

"I--I--was afraid to start right away. It was dark in there and I was afraid this young man might take liberties. Indeed, he did try to kiss me."

With a roar, the mulierose man launched himself at Mr. Middleton, who dexterously stepping aside, had the satisfaction of seeing his a.s.sailant slip and fall on the wet sidewalk. The lady thereat raised a cry of great volume, which was taken up by the woman looking out of the window above, and Mr. Middleton thinking he could derive neither pleasure nor profit from remaining longer in that locality, fled incontinently.

Upon his arrival home and preparing for bed, he found that he was wearing a stiff hat made in Kansas City, bearing on the sweat-band a silver plate inscribed "George W. Dobson." The mulierose man and he had exchanged hats at the restaurant. The mulierose man now had the love philter.

It was not until four days had elapsed that Mr. Middleton found an opportunity to visit the street where these inexplicable events took place. The house where he had comforted the eighth woman was still empty. At the house whence the mulierose man had issued, a very unprepossessing old woman, with a teapot in her right hand, was opening the front door to admit a large yellow cat whom she addressed as "Mahoney," an appellation which, while not infrequently the family name of persons of Irish birth or descent, is of very seldom application to members of the domestic cat tribe, Felis cattus.

Wondering greatly at the chain of unusual events, he went about his business. You may depend upon it that he gave much thought to an attempted solution of all these mysteries. But whether or no it was after all only a series of events commonplace in themselves, but seeming mysterious because of their fortuitous concatenation, or he really had trodden upon the hem of a web of strange and darksome, perhaps appalling, mysteries, he has never been able to say. He was minded to speak of these things to the emir and get his opinion on them. Upon reflection, remembering how the philter had not been of any avail in the case of the young lady of Englewood, he thought, despite the explanation which might be offered for this failure, that the emir might be embarra.s.sed at hearing of the failure of the charm, and accordingly he said nothing when once more he sat in the presence of the urbane and accomplished prince of the tribe of Al-Yam. Having handed him a bowl of delicately flavored sherbet, Achmed began to narrate The Unpleasant Adventure of the Faithless Woman.

_The Unpleasant Adventure of the Faithless Woman._

Dr. August Moehrlein, Ph. D., was a professor of the languages and religions of India. A man of great gravity of countenance and of impressive port, he was popularly reputed to have a complete knowledge of the occult learning of the adepts of India, that nebulous and mysterious philosophy which irreducible to the laws of nature as recognized by Occidentals, is by them p.r.o.nounced either magic and feared as such, or ridiculed and despised as pretentious mummery and deluding prestidigitation. There was a legend among the students of his department that he was wont to project himself into the fourth dimension and thus traveling downtown, effect a substantial saving of street-car fare. This is clearly impossible, for the yogis do not thus move about in their own persons. It is only the astral self that flies leagues through the air with the rapidity of thought, only the spiritual essence, the living man's ghost flying abroad while the living man's corpse lies inanimate at home. But even this, Dr. August Moehrlein could not do, for the yogis do not initiate men of Western nations into their mysteries. Dr. Moehrlein's knowledge of the occult of India was wholly empirical. He knew that certain things were done and could recount them, but as to how they were done, he could tell nothing. It must not be thought that of all the marvelous and awe-compelling things the yogis of India are accustomed to do, none can be a.s.signed to any other origin than cunning legerdemain and hypnotism, or to the exercise of supernatural powers. Many of them are due to a strange and wonderful knowledge of nature which the science of the Occident has not yet reached in all its boasted advance. Yet when once explained, the Westerner understands some of these phenomena and is able to repeat them. Into this region of the penumbra of science and exact knowledge the researches of Dr. Moehrlein had taken him a little way and it was this that had gained him his reputation among his pupils as a thaumaturgist.

Along with the learning which this country has imported from Germany have come some customs to which the savants of both that country and this ascribe a certain fostering influence, if not a creative impulse, highly advantageous to the national scholars.h.i.+p. It is the habit of the university men of Germany to foregather of nights in the genial pursuit of drinking beer, and many of the notable theories which German scholars.h.i.+p has propounded are to be directly attributed to this stimulating good fellows.h.i.+p known as kommers. Indeed, when one has imbibed twelve or fourteen steins of beer and sat in an atmosphere of tobacco smoke for some hours, his mind attains a clarity, a sense of proportion, a power of reflection, speculation, and intuition which enables him to evolve those notable theories for which German scholars.h.i.+p is so famous. It is under the intellectual stimulus of the kommers, when the foam lies thick in the steins and blue clouds of tobacco smoke roll overhead, that the great cla.s.sical scholars of Germany perceive that the cla.s.sical epics, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, are but the typifying of the rolling of the clouds in the empyrean, the warfare of the foam-crested waves das.h.i.+ng upon the land, that the metamorphoses and amours of the G.o.ds and all the myths of the elder world, are but the mutations of the clouds and the fanciful figures they take on and the metamorphoses and hurryings of the ever-changing sea with its foam forms and the shadows that lie across its unquiet surface. Wonderful indeed is the scientific imagination that thus accounts for, cla.s.sifies, and labels the imagination of the poets, which otherwise we might think a thing defying cla.s.sification, an inspiration, a creative genius taking nothing from a dim suggestion of the cold clouds and sea, but weaving its tales from the suggestion of human lives and human pa.s.sions. Wonderful indeed is the good sense of the rest of the world in accepting unquestioned these important discoveries of German scholars in the beer kellars, which well might be called the laboratories of the cla.s.sical department of the German universities.

Dr. August Moehrlein was a staunch advocate of the advantage of the kommers as an adjunct to every thoroughly organized university. If he could not gather others for a kommers, he would hold a kommers all by himself, or perchance with the barkeeper. Needless to say that the name of Moehrlein was attached to many valuable and plausible theories which America received as the last word on the subject treated; needless to tell you that the various G.o.ds of India had been identified with the sun, moon, and more important stars, and that it was conclusively shown that the Sanskrit romancers had written their tales by merely looking at the clouds and the sea. Would that this accomplishment of the ancients had not gone from us and that the moderns might write as the ancients by merely looking at the clouds and the sea. Dr. Moehrlein was an upholder of the kommers. But his wife, though German-born, behaved like a very Philistine and objected to his constant and unwavering attendance upon these occasions of intellectual uplift. For as the doctor added to the knowledge of the world, he added to his weight. He had identified Brahma with the sun, but had drunk his face purple in the intellectual effort. In his search for the suggestions of the tale of Nala, he had acquired a paunch very like a bag. Mrs. Moehrlein was accustomed to shrink from the approach of the victim of the pursuit of knowledge. As for him, he would have liked to caress and fondle her. To him there was always present a remembrance of her early beauty and the golden mist of memory shone before his eyes and he did not see that she was a heavy, middle-aged woman with coa.r.s.e features and coa.r.s.e figure. Animal beauty she had once had. The beauty had utterly flown, but the animal all remained. She had a s.h.i.+fty and wandering eye, burned out and l.u.s.terless, that told of dreams that were of men, men who these many years had not included her husband, grotesque figure that he was, ugly as a satyr in one of the myths suggested by the clouds and the sea.

It was a pleasant day of the last of May, in the mating season of birds, when the world was warm and throbbing with young life. The eminent Asiatic scholar looked across the lunch table, regarding his wife with wistful sadness as she refreshed herself with boiled cabbage.

"Do you know the day? It is thirty years since Hilsenhoff went into the box; thirty years since we have been man and--woman."

"Ah, yes, this is the anniversary. Thirty years, thirty years. Poor young Hilsenhoff."

She said these words with a tinge of sadness that was almost regret and this did not escape the doctor.

"One might fancy you were sorry. Yet it was your own doing. I was young and handsome then. A Hercules, young, full of life, late champion swordsman of the university, a rising light in the realm of learning, as well as a figure in society. You were the beautiful wife of tutor Hilsenhoff, the buxom girl with the form of a Venus and the pa.s.sion of that G.o.ddess as well, tied to a thin, pallid bookworm ten years your senior, neglecting his pouting wife with blood full of fire for the pages of the literature of Hindoostan, prating of the loves of Ganesha and Vishnu, when a G.o.ddess awaited his own neglectful arms. So when on the day when he stepped into the box, leaving us the sole repository of the secret of his whereabouts--that the mutton-headed police might not interfere with the success of his experiment by preventing what they might think practically suicide--you said to let him stay."

"I was twenty and he thirty," mused the woman. "Poor young Hilsenhoff."

"Young! I was twenty-three--and a man."

"Dead or alive, he is young Hilsenhoff to me. He was thirty when last I saw him."

"Dead or alive? What are you thinking of?"

An idea had been taking shape in the woman's mind without her realizing it. It had grown from her own words, rather than had the words sprung from the idea.

"Why, if a man be brought into a condition where all bodily functions are suspended and he is as he were dead, and remain in this condition for months and be brought out of it no more harmed than if he had slept overnight, why may it not be years, instead of months? Has any man ever proved that, in this condition, one may not live on indefinitely?" she said.

"No man has ever proved that one cannot, but what is more important, no man has ever proved that one can. No man has ever proved beyond shadow of doubt that one may not fas.h.i.+on wings and fly, but no man has ever demonstrated that one can. In India, only one man has ever tried to continue in a state of suspended animation for over six months, and that was the rajah who, condemned to death by the English, ostensibly died before the soldiers could come to carry out the sentence and was brought out of his tomb and restored to life three days after a new British viceroy had proclaimed a general amnesty to all past offenders. The period was eight months. If the viceroys had not been changed for a number of years, we might have learned more concerning the length of the period in which a man may continue in the semblance of death without it becoming reality. No, these twenty-five years has Hilsenhoff been bones."

"Then let us take them out and bury them."

"No, no. Then would I feel like a murderer indeed. I left him in there for you. Now let his bones rest there for sake of me."

But the woman had become possessed of an idea which in turn possessed her, a dream, for which like all mankind, she would fight harder than for any substantiality, for no reality can be so glorious as a dream.

"But there was the man at Sutlej, the man who had himself buried in a wheat field for the edification of Alexander the Great, there to remain until a wheat crop had pa.s.sed through its stages from sowing until harvest."

"The man at Sutlej!" exclaimed the doctor impatiently. "That a man was thus buried, the pages of Quintus Curtius's history show, and the Macedonian armies suddenly retreating from India, he was forgotten and not one, but two thousand wheat harvests have been garnered over his burial place."

"But the article in the _Revue Des Deux Mondes_, telling how he had been found," objected the woman faintly.

The doctor looked at her in amazement.

"What will not people do to believe that which they wish to believe.

You, you, you!--do you ask me concerning that lie in the _Revue Des Deux Mondes_? Oh, woman, woman! When did your memory of the details of that hoax fail you? Not longer ago than ten minutes. A lying Frenchman said he was on his way to France with a resuscitated contemporary of Alexander the Great and that a full account of the matter would be published in two or three months. Hilsenhoff left the duration of his stay in the box at my discretion, enjoining me, however, that he should not be taken out before the Frenchman had published the full account of the Sutlej case, for we would then have many interesting comparisons in his behavior and response to the restorative methods used, and the reaction and response of this man buried two thousand years to the same methods for restoring suspended animation. The Frenchman never arrived with his man. It was all a lie. Yet by following Hilsenhoff's solemn injunctions to the letter, we had an excuse to leave him as dead, and you insisted that we should do so, and I, weak and infatuated with your ripe beauty, I agreed. You said that we would leave him in his self-chosen sleep and that he should be our lodger. And so he has been and we have never called him to breakfast in all these thirty years. We have even brought him to America with us and he sleeps. Ah, no, we did not slay him. We but obeyed his commands."

"Poor young Hilsenhoff. And I am his wife and he is but thirty years old and I am fifty. Heigho!"

"Woman, you will drive me crazy," said the great annotator of the Upanishads, and he left for a kommers with the nearest barkeeper.

"As if you did not drive me crazy, you obese, misshapen wine skin! you bloated, blue-faced sot!" said the woman. "I deserted young Hilsenhoff for you, Hilsenhoff with his delicate cheeks and his soft yellow hair, and he is mine and I am his and I will let him out of the box and we will live together in love, the dear young thing. What if he does study sometimes? I shall not mind. He need not always sit with me in love's dalliance."

All at once it came home to her that if Moehrlein maintained the resuscitation of Hilsenhoff was impossible and charged her with believing it possible because she wished to believe it so, it might also be true that he did not believe it possible because he did not wish to so believe. The burned out eyes that told of dreams of men, men who these many years had not included her husband, smoldered with a sudden fire. With a song in her heart, she was up and bustling about. She filled a brazier with coals and got a frying-pan and wheat-cake batter, and a razor and a crocheting hook--ah, she knew how the process of restoring suspended animation was practised. She lumbered up into the third story with her burdens, into the room where slept the lodger. Not for fifteen years had anyone looked into that sleeping chamber. The blinds and curtains, all were drawn, the dust lay thick under foot. She let in the light of day at every window.

There sat the box in the middle of the floor, hooped with bands of iron and with the great seal of the University of Bonn stamped upon the lock. She broke the seal and turned the lock and then sank down in a sudden faintness of heart. Indeed, how loath she was to put an end to the dream that had just now filled her whole being with rapture, and what else would it be but to put an end to it when she delved into that box? She would go away and let herself dream on a few days more before putting the matter to its final test, perhaps never doing so.

Thus she reasoned, and yet her hand, as she sat before the box with averted face, rose as if impelled by the volition of another intelligence, over the edge of the box, down to the ma.s.s of wool and wadding, through it to the wrappings and swathings in the middle, through the wrapping, and felt--the thrill of unimaginable joy ran through her. It was not bones, it was not bones!

Into the room of the lodger came Dr. August Moehrlein. The coals of the brazier were out, the batter had been turned into cakes, the razor was covered with hair, four waxen plugs lay by the crocheting hook.

The process was over. The sleeper was awake and there he stood, his delicate face yet pinched with sleep and his eyes heavy, but alive and young, young Hilsenhoff with his soft yellow hair and mild blue eyes.

On the floor before him in an att.i.tude of adoration, knelt the woman who in the view of the law, was his wife, her eyes burned out no longer, but aflash with youthful pa.s.sion. But in her eyes alone was there youth. Nothing of youthful archness and coquetry was there in her gaze, only greed, the sickening fondness of an aging woman for a young man. In a daze, he stared at her and heard her clumsy compliments, her vulgar protestations of love, things which the ripe beauty of her youth might have condoned, but now were nauseating. He saw her heavy jowls and sensual lips, the thick nose and all the revenges of time upon a once beautiful body that had clothed an ugly soul. He looked at his own rusty clothing, stiff and hard and creased in a thousand wrinkles, and into the mildewed nest where the mould from the moisture of his own body grew thick and green and horrible.

He gazed at Dr. Moehrlein, the one-time Adonis of Bonn, and he shuddered, and which of what he looked at, or whether all, made him do so, he could not tell.

Old men like young women, but so do old women hanker after young men.

The life companion of Moehrlein embraced Hilsenhoff's knees. With smirkings and grimacings and leers that started his shudders afresh, she told him all. She confessed her crime and abased herself, but now they would begin life again, and she croaked forth a string of allurements from a throat that had known too many rich puddings. Oh, who shall describe her transports! Never before had every fiber of her being been so penetrated with joy! A young husband, oh, a young husband! By as much as Moehrlein had once surpa.s.sed him, did Hilsenhoff now surpa.s.s Moehrlein a hundred fold. And young, young, young! She was like to fall on her face in her ecstasy. The discarded and despised Moehrlein stood by and paid, if never before, the price of his villainy. There is a contempt of man for man and a contempt of woman for woman, but the contempt of woman for man----

One sleeps and is unconscious, but nonetheless by some subtle sense is aware of the pa.s.sage of time, and the thirty years that he had slept, pressed upon young Hilsenhoff and his soul yearned to take up life again. He looked at the companions of his youth, that youth which was still his and had gone from them, and he looked at the place where he had lain for a third of a century, thick with damp green mould.

Outside the song of birds was calling him, the rustle of green leaves and the glorious sunlight, the world renewing its life with the warm throbs of the year's youth, and putting from him forever his living grave and the woman and her paramour, he rushed into the joyous springtide.