VI.

And travellers now within that valley Through the red-litten windows see Vast forms that move fantastically To a discordant melody; While, like a ghastly rapid river, Through the pale door, A hideous throng rush out forever, And laugh--but smile no more.

19. I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad led us into a train of thought, wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher’s which I mention, not so much on account of its novelty (for other men have thought thus) as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent or the earnest _abandon_ of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones,--in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around; above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence--the evidence of the sentience--was to be seen, he said (and I here started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made _him_ what I now saw him,--what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none.

20. Our books--the books which for years had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid--were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over such works as the Ververt and Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D’Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the _Directorium Inquisitorum_, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Ægipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic,--the manual of a forgotten church,--the _Vigilæ Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiæ Maguntinæ_.

21. I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable influence on the hypochondriac, when one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight (previously to its final interment), in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural, precaution.

22. At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and in later days as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been also similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound as it moved upon its hinges.

23. Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead, for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house.

24. And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue, but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified--that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.

25. It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch, while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavored to believe that much if not all of what I felt was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room,--of the dark and tattered draperies which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and at length there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, hearkened--I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me--to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavored to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment.

26. I had taken but a few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognized it as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped with a gentle touch at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan--but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes,--an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor. His air appalled me--but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief.

27. “And you have not seen it?” he said abruptly, after having stared about him for some moments in silence,--“you have not then seen it?--but, stay! you shall.” Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm.

28. The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity, for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this; yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars, nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.

29. “You must not--you shall not behold this!” said I shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him with a gentle violence from the window to a seat. “These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon--or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement; the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favorite romances. I will read, and you shall listen;--and so we will pass away this terrible night together.”

30. The antique volume which I had taken up was the “Mad Trist” of Sir Launcelot Canning; but I had called it a favorite of Usher’s more in sad jest than in earnest; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild, overstrained air of vivacity with which he hearkened, or apparently hearkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.

31. I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus:--

32. “And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now mighty withal on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright and with blows made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand; and now, pulling therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarumed and reverberated throughout the forest.”

33. At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment paused; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me)--it appeared to me that from some very remote portion of the mansion there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been in its exact similarity of character the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the story:--

34. “But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was so enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace with a floor of silver; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten:--

Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin; Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win.

And Ethelred uplifted his mace, struck upon the head of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard.”

35. Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement, for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound,--the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon’s unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.

36. Oppressed as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had during the last few minutes taken place in his demeanor. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast; yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea, for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus proceeded:--

37. “And now the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound.”

38. No sooner had these syllables passed my lips than--as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver--I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person; a sickly smile quivered about his lips; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.

39. “Not hear it?--yes, I hear it, and _have_ heard it. Long--long--long--many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it, yet I dared not--oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am!--I dared not--I _dared_ not speak! _We have put her living in the tomb!_ Said I not that my senses were acute? I _now_ tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them--many, many days ago--yet I dared not--_I dared not speak!_ And now--to-night--Ethelred--ha! ha!--the breaking of the hermit’s door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield!--say rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh, whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footsteps on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!”--here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul--“_Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!_”

40. As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell, the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust--but then without those doors there _did_ stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher! There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold--then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and, in her violent and now final death agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.

41. From that chamber and from that mansion I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened--there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind--the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight--my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder--there was a long, tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters--and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the “_House of Usher_.”

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS FOR STUDY

1. State as briefly as possible the impression made upon you by the story under consideration.

2. Cite passages which are most effective in making this impression.

3. Do you find any jarring elements which tend to mar the single impression?

4. Does the story approach any types besides that of the impressionistic?

5. Mention any weak points you discover.

6. Write about three hundred words on the merits of the story.

7. Try to find an impressionistic story in some present-day magazine.

8. Criticise Poe’s language, in general and in particular.

9. Would either of these stories be popular if written to-day by an unknown author?

10. Would cutting improve either of these stories? If so, say where.

11. Compare Hawthorne’s style with that of Poe.

12. Which story do you prefer, and why?

TEN REPRESENTATIVE IMPRESSIONISTIC STORIES

“The Luck of Roaring Camp,” Bret Harte, in _The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories_.

“The Father,” Björnstjerne Björnson, translated in _Stories by Foreign Authors, Scandinavian_.

“A Journey,” Edith Wharton, in _The Greater Inclination_.

“The Brushwood Boy,” Rudyard Kipling, in _The Day’s Work_.

“The Great Stone Face,” Nathaniel Hawthorne, in _The Snow-Image and Other Twice-Told Tales_.

“A Passion in the Desert,” Honoré de Balzac, translated in _Little French Masterpieces, Balzac_.

“The Pit and the Pendulum,” Edgar Allan Poe, in _Tales_.

“The Silent Woman,” Leopold Kompert, translated in _Modern Ghosts_.

“Jesus Christ in Flanders,” Honoré de Balzac, translated in _Little French Masterpieces, Balzac_.

“Silence,” Leonid Andreyev, translated in _Short-Story Masterpieces_.

VII CHARACTER STUDIES

_The Piece of String._--GUY DE MAUPASSANT _The Substitute._--FRANÇOIS COPPÉE

Most of us, in actual life, are accustomed to distinguish people who are worth our while from people who are not; and those of us who live advisedly are accustomed to shield ourselves from people who cannot, by the mere fact of what they are, repay us for the expenditure of time and energy we should have to make to know them. And whenever a friend of ours asks us deliberately to meet another friend of his, we take it for granted that our friend has reasons for believing that the acquaintanceship will be of benefit or of interest to both. Now the novelist stands in the position of a friend who asks us to meet certain people whom he knows; and he runs the risk of our losing faith in his judgment unless we find his people worth our while.... He ... owes us an assurance that they shall be even more worth while than the average actual person.--CLAYTON HAMILTON, _Materials and Methods of Fiction_.

CHARACTER STUDIES

A character-study, whether in the form of a sketch, a tale, or a short-story, attempts to reveal individual human nature by the unfolding of the story.

In the sketch it will be a photograph of character in a striking mood, under stress of emotion, or just before, or during, or after a crisis that is peculiarly suited to showing either the full character or one of its interesting phases. Some photographs consist of bold masses of light and shade, others are so handled as to bring out a multitude of details. The sketch allows in a literary way the same methods of treatment, but the typical sketch avoids unnecessary minutiæ.

The tale is also a photograph, but instead of being a single stationary picture, it is a moving-picture, delineating character by a chain of incidents which allow us to see what the characters are by what they do. True to the type of the tale, it does not deal with character crisis, but merely reveals character in a series of illuminating deeds.

In the character short-story the author’s method is more complicated, for the whole mechanism of the story--introduction, plot, dialogue, and conclusion--are designed to show us the characters under stress of emotion and the results of that emotional arousement. We learn the characters of the characters--for there is a distinction here--by seeing how they act upon each other, how they solve problems, how they meet the crises of life--what effect trouble or joy has upon them--and the final outcome of it all. It is like studying a human being while he is being subjected to a test, and observing the development of his character, or its failure to stand the test, in that critical moment.

By this it will be seen that a character-study is a story with a purpose--a purpose deeper than that of affording entertainment from the plot. The finest stories are those which so interest us in the action, or plot, of the story proper that the profound character disclosures and changes are borne in upon us while we are watching the progress of the story. It is this subtle balance of narrative and character-study which presents the story-teller’s art at its best.

THE PIECE OF STRING (LA FICELLE)

BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT

_Translation by The Editor_

[Sidenote: Introduction.]

[Sidenote: Establishes the general setting, and station in life of the characters.]

[Sidenote: Minute observation.]

On all the roads around Goderville the peasants and their wives were coming towards the town, for it was market-day. The men swung along at an easy gait, their whole bodies swaying forward with every movement of their long, twisted legs--legs misshapen by hard work: by holding down the plough, which throws up the left shoulder while it deforms the figure; by mowing grain, the effort of which spreads the knees too wide apart to permit them to stand quite steady; by all the tedious and laborious tasks of the fields. Their blue blouses, starched and glossy as though varnished, and decorated at collar and cuffs with neat designs in white stitching, puffed out about their bony forms just like balloons all ready to rise, from which protruded a head, two arms, and two legs.

[Sidenote: Characterization.]

[Sidenote: Local-color by character description.]

2. Some of the men were leading a cow or a calf at the end of a rope. Following close behind, the wives switched the animals over the back with branches still covered with leaves, in order to quicken their pace. The women carried on their arms great baskets from which the heads of chickens and ducks protruded, and they walked with a shorter, quicker step than the men--each withered figure erect and wrapped in a scanty little shawl pinned across her flat bosom, each head done up in a white cloth, bound close about the hair and surmounted by a cap.

3. Now a wagonette passed, drawn by a nag at a fitful trot, grotesquely shaking up the two men seated side by side, and the woman in the back of the vehicle, who clutched its sides to lessen the rough jolting.

[Sidenote: Local-color.]

4. In the Goderville market-place there was a great crowd--a medley of man and beast. The horns of the cattle, the high, long-napped hats of the prosperous peasants, and the head-dresses of the women, rose above the level of the throng. And the voices--sharp, shrill, squawking--rose in a wild, incessant clamor, which was dominated now and then by a great guffaw of laughter emitted from the robust chest of some sturdy bumpkin, or by the long-drawn-out lowing of a cow tethered to the wall of a house.

5. Everything there smelled of the stable--the milk, the manure, the hay, the sweat, gave forth that acrid, offensive odor of man and animal so peculiar to dwellers of the fields.

[Sidenote: CHIEF CHARACTER.]

[Sidenote: The Normans are said to be typically “ambitious, positive, bold, tricky, economical.”]

[Sidenote: FOUNDATION PLOT INCIDENT.]

[Sidenote: CHIEF COMPLICATION.]

[Sidenote: RESULTANT COMPLICATION.]

6. Master Hauchecorne, of Bréauté, had just arrived at Goderville, and was moving toward the square, when he observed a little piece of string on the ground. Economical, like a true Norman, Master Hauchecorne thought that everything which could be used was worth saving; so he stooped down painfully, for he suffered from rheumatism, picked up from the dirt the insignificant scrap of twine, and was just about to roll it up with care when he noticed Master Malandin, the harness-maker, standing on his doorstep looking at him. Once the two men had had a difference over the matter of a halter, and ever since they had remained angry with each other, cherishing their spite. Master Hauchecorne was seized with a sort of shame at having his enemy thus see him searching in the mud for a mere scrap of string. He therefore hastily hid away his find in his blouse, and then in his breeches-pocket. At the same time he pretended to be still searching in the dirt for something which he had not been able to find. Finally he moved on toward the market-place, his head thrust forward, his body bent double by his pains.

[Sidenote: Local-color.]

[Sidenote: See note on ¶6.]

7. In a moment he was lost in the slowly shifting, noisy throng, agitated by its own constant chafferings. The peasants felt of the cows, turned away, came back again, much puzzled--always fearful of being over-reached in the bargain, never reaching a decision, watching the eye of the vendor, seeking ever to unmask the ruse of the man and the defect in his animal.

8. The women, having set their huge baskets at their feet, took out their poultry, which they laid on the ground with legs tied together, terror-stricken eyes, and scarlet combs.

9. They listened to offers, maintaining their price with a keen air but impassive face, or else suddenly deciding to take the counter offer, crying out to the slowly retreating customer:

10. “It’s settled, Master Anthime, I’ll give them to you!”

11. At length, little by little, the square became empty, and when the Angelus sounded noon, those who lived too far away to go home repaired to the inns.

[Sidenote: Setting for main crisis.]

12. At Jourdain’s, the large hall was crowded with diners, while the great courtyard was full of vehicles of every sort--carts, gigs, wagonettes, tilburies, traps, nameless carriages, yellow with mud, shapeless, patched, shafts pointing to heaven like two arms, or with noses in the ground and backs in the air.

13. Right opposite the diners at table, the immense fireplace, all brightly aflame, cast a lively warmth on the backs of those ranged along the right. Three spits were turning, laden with chickens, pigeons, and legs of mutton; and a delectable odor of roasting meat, and of juices streaming over the browned skin, rose from the hearth, kindled good humor and made everyone’s mouth water.

[Sidenote: Note how the author gathers the people to witness the crisis.]

[Sidenote: _Maît’_--colloquial abbreviation for _Maître_, equal here to “Mine Host.”]

14. All the aristocracy of the plough were eating there, at _Maît’ Jourdain’s_, inn-keeper and horse-trader--a sly fellow who had made money.

15. The dishes went round, and, like the jugs of yellow cider, were emptied. Everyone told of his affairs: his sales and his purchases. They exchanged news of the crops--the weather was good for vegetables, but a trifle wet for wheat.

[Sidenote: Approach of crisis.]

[Sidenote: Typical of their class.]

16. Suddenly the roll of a drum sounded in the courtyard before the house. Instantly everyone was on his feet, save a few indifferent ones, and ran to the door or to the windows, with mouth still full and napkin in hand.

17. After the public crier had ended his tattoo, he shouted out in a jerky voice, making his pauses at the wrong time:

[Sidenote: Preparation for crisis.]

18. “Be it known to the people of Goderville, and in general to all--persons present at the market, that there was lost this morning, upon the Beuzeville road between--nine and ten o’clock, a black leather pocketbook, containing five hundred francs and some business papers. You are requested to return it--to the mayor’s office, without delay, or to Master Fortuné Houlbrèque of Manneville. There will be twenty francs reward.”

19. Then the man went away. Once again was heard afar the muffled roll of the drum and the faint voice of the crier.

20. Then they began to talk over the incident, estimating the chances Master Houlbrèque had of recovering or of not recovering his pocketbook. Meanwhile the meal went on.

21. They were finishing coffee when the corporal of gendarmes appeared in the doorway.

22. He asked:

[Sidenote: Closer approach of crisis.]

23. “Master Hauchecorne of Bréauté--is he here?”

24. Master Hauchecorne, who was seated at the other end of the table, replied:

25. “That’s me.”

26. And the corporal replied:

27. “Master Hauchecorne, will you have the goodness to go with me to the mayor’s office. _Monsieur le maire_ would like to speak with you.”

[Sidenote: Note how throughout the author emphasizes physical characteristics as indicating character.]

[Sidenote: Minute observation.]

28. The peasant--surprised, disturbed--drained his glass at a gulp, got up, and, more doubled up than in the morning, because the first steps after a rest were always particularly difficult, he started off, repeating:

29. “That’s me, that’s me,” and he followed the corporal.

30. The mayor was awaiting him, seated in an armchair. He was the notary of the place, a large man, grave, and pompous in speech.

[Sidenote: FULL CRISIS.]

31. “Master Hauchecorne,” said he, “you were seen to pick up this morning, on the Beuzeville road, the pocketbook lost by Master Houlbrèque, of Manneville.”

32. The countryman, speechless, stared at the mayor, already terrified by this suspicion which rested upon him without his understanding why.

33. “Me, me, I picked up that pocketbook?”

34. “Yes, exactly you.”

35. “Word of honor, I ain’t even so much as seen it.”

36. “You were seen.”

37. “They saw me, me? Who’s it 'as seen me?”

[Sidenote: Note how the complication is involved by personal prejudice.]

38. “Monsieur Malandin, the harness-maker.”

39. Then the old man remembered, and understood. Reddening with rage, he cried:

40. “Ah! he saw me, that cad! He saw me pick up this here string--look, _m’sieu le maire_.”

41. And, fumbling at the bottom of his pocket, he pulled out the little bit of cord.

42. But the mayor, incredulous, shook his head.

43. “You will not make me believe, Master Hauchecorne, that Monsieur Malandin, who is a man worthy of belief, has mistaken that bit of string for a pocketbook.”

44. The peasant, furious, raised his hand and spat to one side, thus to attest his honor, repeating:

45. “All the same it’s the truth of the good God, the holy truth, _m’sieu le maire_. There! Upon my soul and my salvation, I say it again.”

46. The mayor replied:

[Sidenote: Circumstantial evidence. The miser’s character helps condemn him unjustly.]

47. “After having picked the thing up, you even hunted a long time in the mud to see if some piece of money had not fallen out.”

48. The good man choked with indignation and fear.

49. “How can anyone tell--how can anyone tell--lies like that to misrepresent an honest man! How can anyone tell--”

50. However he might protest, no one believed him.

51. He was confronted with Monsieur Malandin, who repeated and sustained his affirmation. They railed at each other for a whole hour. At his own request, Master Hauchecorne was searched. They found nothing upon him.

[Sidenote: Suspense.]

52. At last, the mayor, greatly perplexed, sent him away, with the warning that he would advise the public prosecutor, and ask for orders.

53. The news had spread. When he came out of the mayor’s office the old man was surrounded and questioned with a curiosity either serious or bantering, but into which not the least indignation entered. And he began to recount the history of the piece of string. No one believed him. They laughed.

[Sidenote: Tone of story.]

54. He went on, halted by everyone, stopping his acquaintances, renewing endlessly his recital and his protestations, showing his pockets turned inside out to prove that he had nothing.

[Sidenote: Note Maupassant’s use of the short paragraph.]

55. They said to him:

56. “G’long, you old rascal!”

57. And he grew angry, working himself into exasperation, into a fever, desperate at not being believed, not knowing what to do, and always repeating his story.

58. Night came on. He must go home. He started out with three neighbors to whom he showed the place where he had picked up the piece of string; and all along the road he kept talking of his adventure.

59. That evening, he made a round of the village of Bréauté, in order to tell everyone of the matter. He encountered none but unbelievers.

60. He was ill of it all night.

61. The next day, about one o’clock in the afternoon, Marius Paumelle, a farm-hand of Master Breton’s, the market-gardener at Ymauville, returned the pocketbook and its contents to Master Houlbrèque, of Manneville.

[Sidenote: Apparent resolution of the complication.]

62. This man asserted, in substance, that he had found the article on the road; but, not being able to read, he had carried it home and given it to his employer.

63. The news spread to the suburbs. Master Hauchecorne was informed of it. He set himself at once to journeying about and commenced to narrate his story as completed by the denouement. He was triumphant.

64. “Wha’ made me feel bad,” he said, “wasn’t the thing itself, you understand, but it was the lies. There’s nothing hurts you like being blamed for a lie.”

[Sidenote: Tone of story.]

[Sidenote: FOUNDATION FOR CLIMAX.]

65. All day long he talked of his adventure, he recounted it on the roadways to the people who passed, at the tavern to the folks who drank, at the dismissal of church on the following Sunday. He even button-holed strangers to tell it to them.

[Sidenote: RESULTANT COMPLICATION.]

Now, he was tranquil, and yet something else bothered him without his being able to tell precisely what. People did not seem to be convinced. He felt as if they gossiped behind his back.

66. On Tuesday of the following week, he went to the Goderville market, solely impelled by the desire to relate his story. Malandin, standing in his doorway, began to laugh when he saw him pass. Why?

67. He accosted a farmer of Criquetot who would not let him finish, but giving him a dig in the pit of the stomach, cried out in his face, “G’long, you great rogue!” Then he turned on his heel.

[Sidenote: Peasant simplicity.]

68. Master Hauchecorne stood speechless, growing more and more disturbed. Why had he called him “great rogue”?

69. When seated at table at Jourdain’s tavern, he again began to explain the affair.

70. A Montivilliers horse-dealer called out to him:

71. “Go on, go on, you old trickster, I know you, and your piece of string!”

72. Hauchecorne stammered, “But--they--found it, the pocketbook!”

73. But the other retorted:

[Sidenote: DENOUEMENT AS TO THE RESULTANT COMPLICATION.]

[Sidenote: FINAL COMPLICATION.]

74. “Be quiet, daddy! There’s one who finds it, and one who takes it back. No one sees it, no one recognizes it, no one is the wiser for it.”

75. The peasant sat dumbfounded. He understood at last. They accused him of having returned the pocketbook by a confederate, an accomplice.

76. He tried to protest. Everyone at the table began to laugh.

77. He could not finish his dinner, and left amidst their mockeries.

[Sidenote: Key.]

78. He returned home, ashamed and indignant, strangled by his anger, by his confusion, and all the more thunderstruck because, with his Norman cunning, he was quite capable of having done the thing of which they had accused him, and even of boasting of it as a good trick. It appeared to him confusedly as impossible to prove his innocence, for his trickery was well known. And he felt struck to the heart with the injustice of the suspicion.

[Sidenote: Tone.]

[Sidenote: Key.]

79. Again he began to tell of his adventure, every day lengthening his recital, advancing each time new proofs, more energetic protestations, and more solemn oaths which he conjured up in his hours of solitude--his mind was occupied solely by the story of the piece of string. They believed him all the less as his defense became more complicated and his reasoning more fine-spun.

[Sidenote: Complication summarized.]

80. “Ha, they are liar’s reasons!” they said behind his back.

81. He realized it; he fretted over it; he exhausted himself in futile efforts.

82. He visibly wasted away.

83. The wags now made him recite “The Piece of String” for their amusement, as one persuades a soldier who has been through a campaign, to tell the story of his battles. His mind, attacked at its foundations, began to totter.

84. Towards the end of December he took to his bed.

85. During the first days of January he died, and, in the delirium of his mortal agony he protested his innocence, repeating:

[Sidenote: CLIMAX.]

86. “--a li’l’ piece of string ... a li’l’ piece of string ... see, here it is, _m’sieu le maire_.”

COPPÉE AND HIS WRITINGS

François Edouard Joachim Coppée was born in Paris, January 12, 1842. He was educated at the _Lycée St. Louis_, and early attracted attention by his poetic gifts. He held office as Librarian of the Senate, and also Guardian of the Archives at the _Comédie Française_. The honors of membership in the French Academy and that of being decorated with the Cross of the Legion of Honor were given him in 1883 and 1888 respectively. He died May 23, 1908.

François Coppée was a poet, dramatist, and short-story writer. The collection _Poèmes Modernes_, published at the age of twenty-seven, contains some remarkable work which well represents his talent. The plays _Madame de Maintenon_ and _Le Luthier de Crémone_ rank with his best dramatic work. Among his short-story gems are “The Sabots of Little Wolff,” “At Table,” “Two Clowns,” “The Captain’s Vices,” “My Friend Meurtrier,” “An Accident,” and “The Substitute.”

* * * * *

As a novelist, Coppée left no permanent mark upon his times, for in this field he was far surpassed by his contemporaries; but as a writer of little prose fictions, he stands well forward among that brilliant group which includes those immortals of the short-story--Maupassant, Daudet, and Mérimée. From the work of these masters, Coppée’s is well distinguished. The Norman Maupassant drew his lines with a sharper pencil, and, by the same token, an infinitely harder one; Daudet, child of Provence though he was, dipped his stylus more often in the acid of satire; and the Parisian Mérimée, though nearer than any other to Coppée in his manner of work, was less in sympathy with his own characters than the warmer-hearted author of “The Sabots of Little Wolff” and “The Substitute”--which follows in a translation by the author of this volume. Coppée was almost an idealist--certainly he was quick to respond to the call of the ideal in his themes. Amidst so much that is sordid and gross in French fiction, how refreshing it is to read a master who could be truthful without wallowing, moral without sermonizing, compassionate without sniveling, humorous without buffooning, and always disclose in his stories the spirit of a sympathetic lover of mankind. Like Dickens, he chose the lowly for his characters, and like Dickens, he found poetry in their simple lives.

In common with other modern French writers, with Daudet, Maupassant, and others, Coppée excels in the writing of tales. His prose is remarkable for the same qualities that appear in his poetical works: sympathy, tenderness, marked predilection for the weak, the humble, and especially a masterly treatment of subjects essentially Parisian and modern.--ROBERT SANDERSON, _François Coppée_, in WARNER’S _Library of the World’s Best Literature_.

Compassion is the chief quality of this little masterpiece,--compassion and understanding of a primitive type of character. The author shows us the good in a character not altogether bad; and he almost makes us feel that the final sacrifice was justifiable. He succeeds in doing this chiefly because he shows us the other characters only as they appeared to Jean François, thus focusing the interest of the reader on this single character.--BRANDER MATTHEWS, _The Short-story_.

More than Daudet, Coppée deserves the title of the French Dickens. A fellow member of the French Academy, José de Heredia, calls him “the poet of the humble, painting with sincere emotion his profound sympathy for the sorrows, the miseries, and the sacrifices of the meek.” As an artist in fiction, says Heredia, “Coppée possesses preëminently the gift of presenting concrete fact rather than abstraction,” and a “great grasp of character,” enabling him “to show us the human heart and intellect in full play and activity”--both of which endowments were the supreme characteristics of the author of _Nicholas Nickleby_ and _David Copperfield_.--MERION M. MILLER, Introduction to _The Guilty Man_.

Contrast the touching pathos of the “Substitute,” poignant in his magnificent self-sacrifice, by which the man who has conquered his shameful past goes back willingly to the horrible life he has fled from, that he may save from a like degradation and from an inevitable moral decay the one friend he has in the world, all unworthy as this friend is--contrast this with the story of the gigantic deeds “My Friend Meurtrier” boasts about unceasingly, not knowing that he has been discovered in his little round of daily domestic duties--making the coffee of his good old mother, and taking her poodle out for a walk.... No doubt M. Coppée’s _contes_ [stories] have not the sharpness of Maupassant’s nor the brilliancy of M. Daudet’s. But what of it? They have qualities of their own. They have sympathy, poetry, and a power of suggesting pictures not exceeded, I think, by those of either Maupassant or M. Daudet. M. Coppée’s street views in Paris, his interiors, his impressionist sketches of life under the shadow of Notre Dame, are convincingly successful.--BRANDER MATTHEWS, _Aspects of Fiction_.

FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON COPPÉE

Introduction to _Ten Tales by Coppée_, Brander Matthews (1890); _Books and Play-Books_, Brander Matthews (1895); _Literary Movement in France during the Nineteenth Century_, Georges Pellissier (1897); _Hours with Famous Parisians_, Stuart Henry (1897).

FOR ANALYSIS

THE SUBSTITUTE (LE REMPLAÇANT)

BY FRANÇOIS COPPÉE

_Translation by The Editor_[27]

He was scarcely ten years old when he was first arrested as a vagabond.

2. Thus he spoke to the judges:

3. I am called Jean François Leturc, and for six months now I’ve been with the man who sings between two lanterns on the Place de la Bastille, while he scrapes on a string of catgut. I repeat the chorus with him, and then I cry out, ‘Get the collection of new songs, ten centimes, two sous!’ He was always drunk and beat me; that’s why the police found me the other night, in the tumble-down buildings. Before that, I used to be with the man who sells brushes. My mother was a laundress; she called herself Adèle. At one time a gentleman had given her an establishment, on the ground-floor, at Montmartre. She was a good worker and loved me well. She made money because she had the clientele of the café waiters, and those people use lots of linen. Sundays, she would put me to bed early to go to the ball; but week days, she sent me to the Brothers’ school, where I learned to read. Well, at last the _sergent-de-ville_ whose beat was up our street, began always stopping before her window to talk to her--a fine fellow, with the Crimean medal. They got married, and all went wrong. He didn’t take to me, and set mamma against me. Every one boxed my ears; and it was then that, to get away from home, I spent whole days on the Place Clichy, where I got to know the mountebanks. My stepfather lost his place, mamma her customers; she went to the wash-house to support her man. It was there she got consumption--from the steam of the lye. She died at Lariboisière. She was a good woman. Since that time I’ve lived with the brush-seller and the catgut-scraper. Are you going to put me in prison?”

4. He talked this way openly, cynically, like a man. He was a ragged little rascal, as tall as a boot, with his forehead hidden under a strange mop of yellow hair.

5. Nobody claimed him, so they sent him to the Reform School.

6. Not very intelligent, lazy, above all maladroit with his hands, he was able to learn there only a poor trade--the reseating of chairs. Yet he was obedient, of a nature passive and taciturn, and he did not seem to have been too profoundly corrupted in that school of vice. But when, having come to his seventeenth year, he was set free again on the streets of Paris, he found there, for his misfortune, his prison comrades, all dreadful rascals, exercising their low callings. Some were trainers of dogs for catching rats in the sewers; some shined shoes on ball nights in the Passage de l’Opéra; some were amateur wrestlers, who let themselves be thrown by the Hercules of the side-shows; some fished from rafts out in the river, in the full sunlight. He tried all these things a little, and a few months after he had left the house of correction he was arrested anew for a petty theft: a pair of old shoes lifted from out an open shop-window. Result: a year of prison at Sainte-Pélagie, where he served as valet to the political prisoners.

[Sidenote: Revolutionary songs of 1793.]

[Sidenote: _Tu_--thou--used only in familiar address.]

7. He lived, astonished, among this group of prisoners, all very young and negligently clad, who talked in loud voices and carried their heads in such a solemn way. They used to meet in the cell of the eldest of them, a fellow of some thirty years, already locked up for a long time and apparently settled at Sainte-Pélagie: a large cell it was, papered with colored caricatures, and from whose windows one could see all Paris--its roofs, its clock-towers, and its domes, and far off, the distant line of the hills, blue and vague against the sky. There were upon the walls several shelves filled with books, and all the old apparatus of a _salle d’armes_--broken masks, rusty foils, leather jackets, and gloves that were losing their stuffing. It was there that the “politicians” dined together, adding to the inevitable “soup and beef” some fruit, cheese, and half-pints of wine that Jean François went out to buy in a can--tumultuous repasts, interrupted by violent disputes, where they sang in chorus at the dessert the _Carmagnole_ and _Ça ira_. They took on, however, an air of dignity on days when they made place for a newcomer, who was at first gravely treated as “_citizen_,” but who was the next day _tutoyed_, and called by his nickname. They used big words there--Corporation, Solidarity, and phrases all quite unintelligible to Jean François, such as this, for example, which he once heard uttered imperiously by a frightful little hunchback who scribbled on paper all night long:

8. “It is settled. The cabinet is to be thus composed: Raymond in the Department of Education, Martial in the Interior, and I in Foreign Affairs.”

[Sidenote: Police headquarters.]

9. Having served his time, he wandered again about Paris, under the surveillance of the police, in the fashion of beetles that cruel children keep flying at the end of a string. He had become one of those fugitive and timid beings whom the law, with a sort of coquetry, arrests and releases, turn and turn about, a little like those platonic fishermen who, so as not to empty the pond, throw back into the water the fish just out of the net. Without his suspecting that so much honor was done to his wretched personality, he had a special docket in the mysterious archives of _la rue de Jérusalem_, his name and surnames were written in a large back-hand on the gray paper of the cover, and the notes and reports, carefully classified, gave him these graded appellations: “the man named Leturc,” “the prisoner Leturc,” and at last “the convicted Leturc.”

[Sidenote: The California, a cheap eating-house in Paris.]

[Sidenote: In drawing lots for military service the higher numbers give exemption, and this he secured by drawing “a good number.”]

[Sidenote: A receiver of stolen goods.]

10. He stayed two years out of prison, dining _à la Californie_, sleeping in lodging-houses, and sometimes in lime-kilns, and taking part with his fellows in endless games of pitch-penny on the boulevards near the city gates. He wore a greasy cap on the back of his head, carpet slippers, and a short white blouse. When he had five sous, he had his hair curled. He danced at Constant’s at Montparnasse; bought for two sous the jack-of-hearts or the ace-of-spades, which were used as return checks, to resell them for four sous at the door of Bobino; opened carriage-doors as occasion offered; led about sorry nags at the horse-market. Of all the bad luck--in the conscription he drew a good number. Who knows whether the atmosphere of honor which is breathed in a regiment, whether military discipline, might not have saved him? Caught in a haul of the police-net with the younger vagabonds who used to rob the drunkards asleep in the streets, he denied very energetically having taken part in their expeditions. It was perhaps true. But his antecedents were accepted in lieu of proof, and he was sent up for three years to Poissy. There he had to make rough toys, had himself tattooed on the chest, and learned thieves’ slang and the penal code. A new liberation, a new plunge into the Parisian sewer, but very short this time, for at the end of hardly six weeks he was again compromised in a theft by night, aggravated by violent entry, a doubtful case in which he played an obscure rôle, half dupe and half fence. On the whole, his complicity seemed evident, and he was condemned to five years’ hard labor. His sorrow in this adventure was, chiefly, to be separated from an old dog which he had picked up on a heap of rubbish and cured of the mange. This beast loved him.

[Sidenote: Straw was stuffed into the sabots to cushion the feet.]

[Sidenote: The northwest storm-wind from the Mediterranean.]

11. Toulon, the ball on his ankle, the work in the harbor, the blows from the staves, the wooden shoes without straw, the soup of black beans dating from Trafalgar, no money for tobacco, and the horrible sleep on the filthy camp-bed of the galley slave, that is what he knew for five torrid summers and five winters blown upon by the _Mistral_. He came out from there stunned, and was sent under surveillance to Vernon, where he worked for some time on the river; then, an incorrigible vagabond, he broke exile and returned again to Paris.

12. He had his savings, fifty-six francs--that is to say, time enough to reflect. During his long absence, his old and horrible comrades had been dispersed. He was well hidden, and slept in a loft at an old woman’s, to whom he had represented himself as a sailor weary of the sea, having lost his papers in a recent shipwreck, and who wished to essay another trade. His tanned face, his calloused hands, and a few nautical terms he let fall one time or another, made this story sufficiently probable.

13. One day when he had risked a saunter along the streets, and when the chance of his walk had brought him to Montmartre, where he had been born, an unexpected memory arrested him before the door of the Brothers’ school in which he had learned to read. Since it was very warm, the door was open, and with a single glance the passing incorrigible could recognize the peaceful schoolroom. Nothing was changed: neither the bright light shining in through the large windows, nor the crucifix over the desk, nor the rows of seats furnished with leaden ink-stands, nor the table of weights and measures, nor the map on which pins stuck in still pointed out the operations of some ancient war. Heedlessly and without reflecting, Jean François read on the blackboard these words of the Gospel, which a well-trained hand had traced as an example of penmanship:

Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons which need no repentance.

14. It was doubtless the hour for recreation, for the Brother professor had left his chair, and, sitting on the edge of a table, he seemed to be telling a story to all the _gamins_ who surrounded him, attentive and raising their eyes. What an innocent and gay countenance was that of the beardless young man, in long black robe, with white necktie, with coarse, ugly shoes, and with badly cut brown hair pushed up at the back. All those pallid faces of children of the populace which were looking at him seemed less childlike than his, above all when, charmed with a candid, priestly pleasantry he had made, he broke out with a good and frank peal of laughter, which showed his teeth sound and regular--laughter so contagious that all the scholars broke out noisily in their turn. And it was simple and sweet, this group in the joyous sunlight that made their clear eyes and their blonde hair shine.

15. Jean François looked at the scene some time in silence, and, for the first time, in that savage nature all instinct and appetite, there awoke a mysterious and tender emotion. His heart, that rude, hardened heart, which neither the cudgel of the galley-master nor the weight of the watchman’s heavy whip falling on his shoulders was able to stir, beat almost to bursting. Before this spectacle, in which he saw again his childhood, his eyes closed sadly, and, restraining a violent gesture, a prey to the torture of regret, he walked away with great strides.

16. The words written on the blackboard came back to him.

17. “If it were not too late, after all!” he murmured. “If I could once more, like the others, eat my toasted bread honestly, sleep out my sleep without nightmare? The police spy would be very clever to recognize me now. My beard, that I shaved off down there, has grown out now thick and strong. One can borrow somewhere in this big ant-heap, and work is not lacking. Whoever does not go to pieces soon in the hell of the galleys comes out agile and robust; and I have learned how to climb the rope-ladders with loads on my back. Building is going on all around here, and the masons need helpers. Three francs a day,--I have never earned so much. That they should forget me, that is all I ask.”

18. He followed his courageous resolution, he was faithful to it, and three months afterward he was another man. The master for whom he labored cited him as his best workman. After a long day passed on the scaffolding, in the full sun, in the dust, constantly bending and straightening his back to take the stones from the hands of the man below him and to pass them to the man above him, he went to get his soup, at the cheap eating house, tired out, his legs numb, his hands burning, and his eyelashes stuck together by the plaster, but content with himself, and carrying his well-earned money in the knot of his handkerchief. He went out without fear, for his white mask made him unrecognizable, and, then, he had observed that the suspicious glance of the policeman seldom falls on the real worker. He was silent and sober. He slept the sound sleep of honest fatigue. He was free.

* * * * *

19. At last--supreme recompense!--he had a friend.

20. It was a mason’s helper like himself, named Savinien, a little peasant from Limoges, red-cheeked, who had come to Paris with his stick over his shoulder and his bundle on the end of it, who fled from the liquor-dealers and went to mass on Sundays. Jean François loved him for his piety, for his candor, for his honesty, for all that he himself had lost, and so long ago. It was a passion profound, reserved, disclosing itself in the care and forethought of a father. Savinien, himself easily moved and self-loving, let things take their course, satisfied only in that he had found a comrade who shared his horror of the wine-shop. The two friends lived together in a furnished room, fairly clean, but their resources were very limited; they had to take into their room a third companion, an old man from Auvergne, sombre and rapacious, who found a way of economizing out of his meagre wages enough to buy some land in his own province.

21. Jean François and Savinien scarcely left each other. On days of rest they took long walks in the environs of Paris and dined in the open air in one of those little country inns where there are plenty of mushrooms in the sauces and innocent enigmas on the bottoms of the plates. There Jean François made his friend tell him all those things of which those born in the cities are ignorant. He learned the names of the trees, the flowers, the plants; the seasons for the different harvests; he listened avidly to the thousand details of a farmer’s labors: the autumn’s sowing, the winter’s work, the splendid _fêtes_ of harvest-home and vintage, and the flails beating the ground, and the noise of the mills by the borders of the streams, and the tired horses led to the trough, and the morning hunting in the mists, and, above all, the long evenings around the fire of vine-branches, shortened by tales of wonder. He discovered in himself a spring of imagination hitherto unsuspected, finding a singular delight in the mere recital of these things, so gentle, calm, and monotonous.

22. One anxiety troubled him, however, that Savinien should not come to know his past. Sometimes there escaped him a shady word of thieves’ slang, an ignoble gesture, vestiges of his horrible former existence; and then he felt the pain of a man whose old wounds reopen, more especially as he thought he saw then in Savinien the awakening of an unhealthy curiosity. When the young man, already tempted by the pleasures which Paris offers even to the poorest, questioned him about the mysteries of the great city, Jean François feigned ignorance and turned the conversation; but he had now conceived a vague inquietude for the future of his friend.

23. This was not without foundation, and Savinien could not long remain the naïve rustic he had been on his arrival in Paris. If the gross and noisy pleasures of the wine-shop always were repugnant to him, he was profoundly troubled by other desires full of danger for the inexperience of his twenty years. When the spring came, he began to seek solitude, and at first he wandered before the gayly lighted entrances to the dancing-halls, through which he saw the girls going in couples, without bonnets--and with their arms around each other’s waists, whispering low. Then, one evening, when the lilacs shed their perfume, and the appeal of the quadrilles was more entrancing, he crossed the threshold, and after that Jean François saw him change little by little in manners and in visage. Savinien became more frivolous, more extravagant; often he borrowed from his friend his miserable savings, which he forgot to repay. Jean François, feeling himself abandoned, was both indulgent and jealous; he suffered and kept silent. He did not think he had the right to reproach; but his penetrating friendship had cruel and insurmountable presentiments.

24. One evening when he was climbing the stairs of his lodging, absorbed in his preoccupations, he heard in the room he was about to enter a dialogue of irritated voices, and he recognized one as that of the old man from Auvergne, who lodged with him and Savinien. An old habit of suspicion made him pause on the landing, and he listened to learn the cause of the trouble.

25. “Yes,” said the man from Auvergne angrily, “I am sure that some one has broken open my trunk and stolen the three louis which I had hidden in a little box; and the man who has done this thing can only be one of the two companions who sleep here, unless it is Maria, the servant. This concerns you as much as me, since you are the master of the house, and I will drag you before the judge if you do not let me at once open up the valises of the two masons. My poor hoard! It was in its place only yesterday; and I will tell you what it was, so that, if we find it, no one can accuse me of lying. Oh, I know them, my three beautiful gold pieces, and I can see them as plainly as I see you. One was a little more worn than the others, of a slightly greenish gold, and that had the portrait of the great Emperor; another had that of a fat old fellow with a queue and epaulets; and the third had a Philippe with side-whiskers. I had marked it with my teeth. No one can trick me, not me. Do you know that I needed only two others like those to pay for my vineyard? Come on, let us look through the things of these comrades, or I will call the police. Make haste!”

26. “All right,” said the voice of the householder; “we’ll search with Maria. So much the worse if you find nothing, and if the masons get angry. It is you who have forced me to it.”

27. Jean François felt his heart fill with fear. He recalled the poverty and the petty borrowings of Savinien, the sombre manner he had borne the last few days. Yet he could not believe in any theft. He heard the panting of the man from Auvergne in the ardor of his search, and he clenched his fists against his breast as if to repress the beatings of his heart.

28. “There they are!” suddenly screamed the victorious miser. “There they are, my louis, my dear treasure! And in the Sunday waistcoat of the little hypocrite from Limoges. Look, landlord! they are just as I told you. There’s the Napoleon, and the man with the queue, and the Philippe I had dented with my teeth. Look at the mark. Ah, the little rascal with his saintly look! I should more likely have suspected the other. Ah, the villain! He will have to go to the galleys!”

29. At this moment Jean François heard the well-known step of Savinien, who was slowly mounting the stairs.

30. “He is going to his betrayal,” thought he. “Three flights. I have time!”

31. And, pushing open the door, he entered, pale as death, into the room where he saw the landlord and the stupefied servant in a corner, and the man from Auvergne on his knees amid the disordered clothes, lovingly kissing his gold pieces.

32. “Enough of this,” he said in a thick voice. “It is I who have taken the money and who have put it in my comrade’s trunk. But that is too disgusting. I am a thief and not a Judas. Go hunt for the police. I’ll not try to save myself. Only, I must say a word in private to Savinien, who is here.”

33. The little man from Limoges had, in fact, just arrived, and, seeing his crime discovered, and believing himself lost, he stood still, his eyes fixed, his arms drooping.

34. Jean François seized him violently about the neck as though to embrace him; he pressed his mouth to Savinien’s ear and said to him in a voice low and supplicating:

35. “Be quiet!”

36. Then, turning to the others:

37. “Leave me alone with him. I shall not go away, I tell you. Shut us up, if you wish, but leave us alone.”

38. And, with a gesture of command, he showed them the door. They went out.

39. Savinien, broken with anguish, had seated himself on a bed, and dropped his eyes without comprehending.

40. “Listen,” said Jean François, who approached to take his hands. “I understand you have stolen three gold pieces to buy some trifle for a girl. That would have cost six months of prison for you. But one does not get out of that except to go back again, and you would have become a pillar of the police tribunals and the courts of assizes. I know all about them. I have done seven years in the Reform School, one year at Sainte-Pélagie, three years at Poissy, and five years at Toulon. Now, have no fear. All is arranged. I have taken this affair on my shoulders.”

41. “Unhappy fellow!” cried Savinien; but hope was already coming back to his cowardly heart.

42. “When the elder brother is serving under the colors, the younger does not go,” Jean François went on. “I’m your substitute, that’s all. You love me a little, do you not? I am paid. Do not be a baby. Do not refuse. They would have caught me one of these days, for I have broken my exile. And then, you see, that life out there will be less hard for me than for you; I know it, and shall not complain if I do not render you this service in vain and if you swear to me that you will not do it again. Savinien, I have loved you well, and your friendship has made me very happy, for it is thanks to my knowing you that I have kept honest and straight, as I might have been, perhaps, if I had had, like you, a father to put a tool in my hands, a mother to teach me my prayers. My only regret was that I was useless to you and that I was deceiving you about my past. To-day I lay aside the mask in saving you. It is all right. Come, good-bye! Do not weep; and embrace me, for already I hear the big boots on the stairs. They are returning with the police; and we must not seem to know each other so well before these fellows.”

43. He pressed Savinien hurriedly to his breast, and then he pushed him away as the door opened wide.

44. It was the landlord and the man from Auvergne, who were bringing the police. Jean François started forward to the landing and held out his hands for the handcuffs and said, laughing:

45. “Forward, bad lot!”

46. To-day he is at Cayenne, condemned for life, as an incorrigible.

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS FOR STUDY

1. Write a paragraph showing how character is affected (a) unfavorably and (b) favorably by the two tests, as shown by these two stories.

2. In your opinion, was each character changed or merely revealed by the crisis which occurred in each instance?

3. Which of these stories seems the more real to you?

4. Have you ever heard of a similar instance in real life? If so, cite it.

5. Write a paragraph contrasting the trivial and the important crisis in each story, though both led to important results.

6. Set down all the traits of character exhibited by the two leading actors in each story.

7. Select a character-study from some book or magazine and write a brief discussion of it.

8. Do the same for another character-study by (a) Maupassant, and (b) Coppée.

TEN REPRESENTATIVE CHARACTER STUDIES

“The Captain’s Vices,” François Coppée, translated in _Ten Tales by Coppée_.

“The Incarnation of Krishna Mulvaney,” Rudyard Kipling, in _Soldiers Three_.

“A New England Nun,” Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, in volume of same title.

“The Old Gentleman of the Black Stock,” Thomas Nelson Page, _Harper’s Magazine_, Oct., 1894.

“The Sick-a-Bed Lady,” Eleanor Hallowell Abbott, in volume of same title.

“The Insurgent,” Ludovic Halévy, translated in _Short-Story Masterpieces_.

“Caybigan,” James Hopper, in volume of same title.

“The Liar,” Henry James, in _Short-Story Classics, American_.

“Editha,” W. D. Howells, in _Harper’s Novelettes_.

“Our Sermon Taster,” Ian Maclaren, in _Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush_.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] Copyright, 1911, by J. B. Lippincott Co., and used by permission.

VIII PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES

_Markheim._--ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON _On the Stairs._--ARTHUR MORRISON

He [the author] can sometimes rouse our intense curiosity and eagerness by the mere depiction of a psychological state, as Walter Pater has done in the case of Sebastian Storck and other personages of his _Imaginary Portraits_. The fact that “nothing happens” in stories of this kind may be precisely what most interests us, because we are made to understand what it is that inhibits

## action.--BLISS PERRY, _A Study of Prose Fiction_.

PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES

A subtle distinction is to be observed between the character-study and the psychological study, but it will not be supposed that writers of short-stories plainly label the distinction, or that the two types are frequently, if ever, found entirely separate. In the character-study more attention is paid to the true natures of the actors, and the demonstration of their natures is shown in the action of the story; in the psychological study more stress is laid upon the actual operation of thought, feeling and purpose--it is a laboratory study of what goes on in the human heart, to use a somewhat vague but necessary term, under stress of crisis.

The psychological study is the most difficult because the most penetrating of all short-story forms, and in consequence the most rare in its perfect presentation. To show the processes of reasoning, the interplay of motive, the power of feeling acting upon feeling, and the intricate combinations of these, calls for the most clear-sighted understanding of man, and the utmost skill in literary art, lest the story be lost in a fog of tiresome analysis and discussion. In “Markheim” and “On the Stairs,” two master story-tellers are easily at their best, for they never obtrude their own opinions, but swiftly and with a firm onward movement the stories disclose the true inward workings of the unique characters, while from mood, speech, and action we infallibly infer all the soul-processes by which their conclusions are reached.

MARKHEIM BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

[Sidenote: INTRODUCTION. Remarkable because it at once touches upon the external crisis of the story.]

“Yes,” said the dealer, “our wind-falls are of various kinds. Some customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior knowledge. Some are dishonest,” and here he held up the candle, so that the light fell strongly on his visitor, “and in that case,” he continued, “I profit by my virtue.”

[Sidenote: Note double reason.]

2. Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the shop. At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the flame, he blinked painfully and looked aside.

[Sidenote: See how daringly the author plays with the reader without arousing suspicion. Compare Stevenson’s reasoning as to the reader’s suspicions with Dupin’s reasoning in “The Purloined Letter,” pp. 91, 92.]

[Sidenote: Markheim has been there before.]

3. The dealer chuckled. “You come to me on Christmas-day,” he resumed, “when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that; you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of manner that I remark in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer can not look me in the eye, he has to pay for it.” The dealer once more chuckled; and then, changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of irony, “You can give, as usual, a clean account of how you came into possession of the object?” he continued. “Still your uncle’s cabinet? A remarkable collector, sir!”

4. And the little, pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tip-toe, looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite pity, and a touch of horror.

[Sidenote: Forecast.]

[Sidenote: Insincerity evident.]

5. “This time,” he said, “you are in error. I have not come to sell, but to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle’s cabinet is bare to the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas-present for a lady,” he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he had prepared; “and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well know, a rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected.”

6. There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence.

[Sidenote: Compare this setting, as it is gradually unfolded, with that of Gautier’s “The Mummy’s Foot.”]

7. “Well, sir,” said the dealer, “be it so. You are an old customer after all; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good marriage, far be it from me to be an obstacle. Here is a nice thing for a lady now,” he went on, “this hand-glass--fifteenth century, warranted; comes from a good collection, too; but I reserve the name, in the interests of my customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole heir of a remarkable collector.”

[Sidenote: Analyse its nature.]

8. The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting voice, had stooped to take the object from its place; and, as he had done so, a shock had passed through Markheim, a start both of hand and foot, a sudden leap of many tumultuous passions to the face. It passed as swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a certain trembling of the hand that now received the glass.

[Sidenote: Contributory incident.]

9. “A glass,” he said, hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it more clearly. “A glass? For Christmas? Surely not?”

10. “And why not?” cried the dealer. “Why not a glass?”

[Sidenote: Forecast.]

11. Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expression. “You ask me why not?” he said. “Why, look here--look in it--look at yourself! Do you like to see it? No! nor I--nor any man.”

12. The little man had jumped back when Markheim had so suddenly confronted him with the mirror; but now, perceiving there was nothing worse on hand, he chuckled. “Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard favoured,” said he.

[Sidenote: Note the working of Markheim’s morbid conscience, not yet understood by himself.]

13. “I ask you,” said Markheim, “for a Christmas-present, and you give me this--this damned reminder of years, and sins and follies--this hand-conscience! Did you mean it? Had you a thought in your mind? Tell me. It will be better for you if you do. Come, tell me about yourself. I hazard a guess now, that you are in secret a very charitable man?”

[Sidenote: FIRST MORAL CRISIS.]

14. The dealer looked closely at his companion. It was very odd, Markheim did not appear to be laughing; there was something in his face like an eager sparkle of hope, but nothing of mirth.

15. “What are you driving at?” the dealer asked.

16. “Not charitable?” returned the other, gloomily. “Not charitable; not pious; not scrupulous; unloving, unbeloved; a hand to get money, a safe to keep it. Is that all? Dear God, man, is that all?”

17. “I will tell you what it is,” began the dealer, with some sharpness, and then broke off again into a chuckle. “But I see this is a love match of yours, and you have been drinking the lady’s health.”

18. “Ah!” cried Markheim, with a strange curiosity. “Ah, have you been in love? Tell me about that.”

[Sidenote: Note change of attitude.]

19. “I,” cried the dealer. “I in love! I never had the time, nor have I the time to-day for all this nonsense. Will you take the glass?”

[Sidenote: Analyse the forces back of Markheim’s parleying.]

20. “Where is the hurry?” returned Markheim. “It is very pleasant to stand here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry away from any pleasure--no, not even from so mild a one as this. We should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a cliff’s edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it--a cliff a mile high--high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of humanity. Hence it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each other; why should we wear this mask? Let us be confidential. Who knows, we might become friends?”

21. “I have just one word to say to you,” said the dealer. “Either make your purchase, or walk out of my shop.”

[Sidenote: Note how quickly Markheim follows the unconscious lead.]

22. “True, true,” said Markheim. “Enough fooling. To business. Show me something else.”

[Sidenote: FIRST EXTERNAL CRISIS.]

23. The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace the glass upon the shelf, his thin blonde hair falling over his eyes as he did so. [Sidenote: Note all these.]

Markheim moved a little nearer, with one hand in the pocket of his great-coat; he drew himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time many different emotions were depicted together on his face--terror, horror and resolve, fascination and a physical repulsion; and through a haggard lift of his upper lip, his teeth looked out.

[Sidenote: He was prepared for the crime.]

24. “This, perhaps, may suit,” observed the dealer; and then, as he began to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long, skewerlike dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen, striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a heap.

[Sidenote: FIRST MINOR CLIMAX.]

[Sidenote: Beginning of the internal action. Note how all external things now begin to play upon the internal man.]

[Sidenote: Throughout, note Stevenson’s rich imagery, and also his unusual vocabulary.]

[Sidenote: An unusual word.]

25. Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings. Then the passage of a lad’s feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in upon these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness of his surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.

[Sidenote: Picture.]

[Sidenote: Evidence of premeditation.]

[Sidenote: Note the interplay of the outward picture and Markheim’s mind. Keep before you always the double movement of this study as both progress side by side, finally resulting in the predominance of the spiritual.]

26. From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim’s eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion--there it must lie till it was found. Found! ay, and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit. Ay, dead, or not, this was still the enemy. “Time was that when the brains were out,” he thought; and the first word struck into his mind. Time, now that the deed was accomplished--time, which had closed for the victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer.

27. The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and then another, with every variety of pace and voice--one deep as the bell from a cathedral turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz--the clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.

[Sidenote: The old motive reasserts itself.]

[Sidenote: PLOT INCIDENT.]

[Sidenote: As fear subsides craft returns.]

[Sidenote: A significant expression.]

[Sidenote: Contrast physical and moral fear. Consider how the two are related.]

28. The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle, beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance reflections. In many rich mirrors, some of home designs, some from Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. And still as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him, with a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design. He should have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all things otherwise; poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like scurrying of rats in a deserted attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the hand of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would jerk like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping defile, the dock, the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin.

[Sidenote: Note the primary use of the word “rumor.”]

[Sidenote: Contrast.]

[Sidenote: Study of fear.]

[Sidenote: Impressionism.]

29. Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind like a besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some rumor of the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their curiosity; and now, in all the neighboring houses, he divined them sitting motionless and with uplifted ear--solitary people, condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now startlingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties, struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised finger: every degree and age and humor, but all, by their own hearths, prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him. Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and freeze the passerby; and he would step more boldly, and bustle aloud among the contents of the shop, and imitate, with elaborate bravado, the movements of a busy man at ease in his own house.

[Sidenote: An important observation.]

[Sidenote: Note how his reasoning becomes hyper-acute.]

[Sidenote: Forecast.]

30. But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold on his credulity. The neighbor hearkening with white face beside his window, the passerby arrested by a horrible surmise on the pavement--these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through the brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate. But here, within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched the servant set forth sweethearting, in her poor best, “out for the day” written in every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course; and yet, in the bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear a stir of delicate footing--he was surely conscious, inexplicably conscious of some presence. Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet again behold the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred.

31. At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door which still seemed to repel his eyes. [Sidenote: Note force of “blind.”]

The house was tall, the skylight small and dirty, the day blind with fog; and the light that filtered down to the ground story was exceedingly faint, and showed dimly on the threshold of the shop. And yet, in that strip of doubtful brightness, did there not hang wavering a shadow?

[Sidenote: Pseudo crisis.]

[Sidenote: Contributory incident.]

32. Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to beat with a staff on the shop-door, accompanying his blows with shouts and railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon by name. Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the dead man. But no! he lay quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows and shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentleman desisted from his knocking and departed.

[Sidenote: Note “apparent.”]

[Sidenote: Key.]

33. Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to get forth from this accusing neighborhood, to plunge into a bath of London multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, that haven of safety and apparent innocence--his bed. One visitor had come: at any moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the deed, and yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a failure. The money, that was now Markheim’s concern; and as a means to that, the keys.

[Sidenote: Note subsidence of acute fears and rise of his true mood.]

[Sidenote: Carefully consider the question of Markheim’s sanity, judging only from the story as thus far told.]

[Sidenote: Reaction.]

34. He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the shadow was still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance of the mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew near the body of his victim. The human character had quite departed. Like a suit half-stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk doubled, on the floor; and yet the thing repelled him. Although so dingy and inconsiderable to the eye, he feared it might have more significance to the touch. He took the body by the shoulders, and turned it on its back. It was strangely light and supple, and the limbs, as if they had been broken, fell into the oddest postures. The face was robbed of all expression; but it was as pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain fair day in a fisher’s village: a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd upon the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal voice of a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried over head in the crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great screen with pictures, dismally designed, garishly colored: Brownrigg with her apprentice; the Mannings with their murdered guest; Weare in the death-grip of Thurtell; and a score besides of famous crimes. The thing was as clear as an illusion; he was once again that little boy; he was looking once again, and with the same sense of physical revolt, at these vile pictures; he was still stunned by the thumping of the drums. A bar of that day’s music returned upon his memory; and at that, for the first time, a qualm came over him, a breath of nausea, a sudden weakness of the joints, which he must instantly resist and conquer.

[Sidenote: Key. What caused this benumbed conscience?]

35. He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these considerations; looking the more hardily in the dead face, bending his mind to realize the nature and greatness of his crime. So little a while ago that face had moved with every change of sentiment, that pale mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire with governable energies; and now, and by his act, that piece of life had been arrested, as the horologist, with interjected finger, arrests the beating of the clock. So he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more remorseful consciousness; the same heart which had shuddered before the painted effigies of crime, looked on its reality unmoved. At best, he felt a gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all those faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one who had never lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a tremor.

[Sidenote: PLOT INCIDENT.]

[Sidenote: Forecast of moral crisis.]

36. With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he found the keys and advanced toward the open door of the shop. Outside, it had begun to rain smartly; and the sound of the shower upon the roof had banished silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of the house were haunted by an incessant echoing, which filled the ear and mingled with the ticking of the clocks. And, as Markheim approached the door, he seemed to hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps of another foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated loosely on the threshold. He threw a ton’s weight of resolve upon his muscles, and drew back the door.

[Sidenote: Note harmony of setting with tone of approaching crisis.]

[Sidenote: Compare Stevenson’s combination of fact and fantasy with Hawthorne’s in “The White Old Maid.”]

[Sidenote: Rise toward crisis.]

[Sidenote: Body and spirit.]

[Sidenote: A notable passage.]

37. The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and stairs; on the bright suit of armor posted, halbert in hand, upon the landing; and on the dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures that hung against the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was the beating of the rain through all the house that, in Markheim’s ears, it began to be distinguished into many different sounds. Footsteps and sighs, the tread of regiments marching in the distance, the chink of money in the counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of the water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him to the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted and begirt by presences. He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop, he heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a great effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and followed stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, how tranquilly he would possess his soul. And then again, and hearkening with every fresh attention, he blessed himself for that unresisting sense which held the outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His head turned continually on his neck; his eyes, which seemed starting from their orbits, scouted on every side, and on every side were half-rewarded as with the tail of something nameless, vanishing. The four-and-twenty steps to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies.

[Sidenote: Note the exception.]

[Sidenote: Note how suspense in the reader is maintained by disclosing Markheim’s suspense.]

[Sidenote: Key.]

[Sidenote: Is this normal?]

38. On that first story, the doors stood ajar, three of them like three ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men’s observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among bed-clothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man’s experience, some willful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the mold of their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said) when the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him; if, for instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim; or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from all sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense, these things might be called the hands of God reached forth against sin. But about God himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless exceptional, but so were his excuses, which God knew; it was there, and not among men, that he felt sure of justice.

[Sidenote: Note action of auto-suggestion.]

[Sidenote: Remarkable relief in suspense period.]

39. When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing cases and incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on the stage; many pictures, framed and unframed, standing with their faces to the wall; a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by great good fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and this concealed him from the neighbors. Here, then, Markheim drew in a packing case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It was a long business, for there were many; and it was irksome, besides; for, after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on the wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him. With the tail of his eye he saw the door--even glanced at it from time to time directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good estate of his defenses. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and voices of many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was thronged with answerable ideas and images; church-going children and the pealing of the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on the brambly common, kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky; and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.

[Sidenote: Powerful contrast.]

[Sidenote: Approach of moral crisis.]

40. And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, went over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted the stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the knob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened.

[Sidenote: Markheim perceives only a physical danger. Note how long he remains dead to any moral judgment of himself.]

[Sidenote: Here is a real though unrecognized moral crisis. Fear eventually leads to his moral triumph.]

41. Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not, whether the dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room, looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the visitant returned.

[Sidenote: Note the symbolism of the closed door.]

42. “Did you call me?” he asked, pleasantly, and with that he entered the room and closed the door behind him.

[Sidenote: KEY.]

[Sidenote: This states the problem.]

43. Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a film upon his sight, but the outlines of the newcomer seemed to change and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light of the shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror, there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the earth and not of God.

44. And yet the creature had a strange air of the common-place, as he stood looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: “You are looking for the money, I believe?” it was in the tones of everyday politeness.

45. Markheim made no answer.

46. “I should warn you,” resumed the other, “that the maid has left her sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences.”

47. “You know me?” cried the murderer.

48. The visitor smiled. “You have long been a favorite of mine,” he said; “and I have long observed and often sought to help you.”

49. “What are you?” cried Markheim: “the devil?”

[Sidenote: This is an important passage.]

50. “What I may be,” returned the other, “cannot affect the service I propose to render you.”

[Sidenote: Forecast of Markheim’s struggle with his better self.]

51. “It can,” cried Markheim; “it does! Be helped by you? No, never; not by you! You do not know me yet, thank God, you do not know me!”

52. “I know you,” replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or rather firmness. “I know you to the soul.”

[Sidenote: Does Markheim really know himself?]

53. “Know me!” cried Markheim. “Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control--if you could see their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is more overlaid; my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose myself.”

54. “To me?” inquired the visitant.

[Sidenote: Note the author’s name for Markheim.]

[Sidenote: Seek a cause for such reasoning.]

55. “To you before all,” returned the murderer. “I supposed you were intelligent. I thought--since you exist--you would prove a reader of the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of it; my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants have dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother--the giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any willful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me for a thing that surely must be common as humanity--the unwilling sinner?”

[Sidenote: Note the distinction between the final importance of cause and effect.]

[Sidenote: Contrast.]

[Sidenote: MINOR MORAL CRISIS.]

56. “All this is very feelingly expressed,” was the reply. “But it regards me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; the servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it is as if the gallows itself was striding toward you through the Christmas streets! Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall I tell you where to find the money?”

[Sidenote: A test of Markheim’s consistency.]

57. “For what price?” asked Markheim.

58. “I offer you the service for a Christmas gift,” returned the other.

59. Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph. “No,” said he, “I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing to commit myself to evil.”

60. “I have no objection to a death-bed repentance,” observed the visitant.

61. “Because you disbelieve their efficacy!” Markheim cried.

[Sidenote: Key.]

[Sidenote: Is this irony?]

62. “I do not say so,” returned the other; “but I look on these things from a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under color of religion, or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance, he can add but one act of service--to repent, to die smiling, and thus to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from such a death bed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening to the man’s last words: and when I looked into that face, which had been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope.”

[Sidenote: Markheim has judged the example.]

63. “And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?” asked Markheim. “Do you think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and sin, and, at last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness? and is this crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of good?”

[Sidenote: Is this true reasoning?]

[Sidenote: Note the detached attitude.]

[Sidenote: Note paradox.]

64. “Murder is to me no special category,” replied the other. “All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding on each other’s lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their

## acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my

eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in

## action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act,

whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the rarest virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but because you are Markheim, that I offered to forward your escape.”

[Sidenote: An unusual expression.]

[Sidenote: Note use of “of.”]

[Sidenote: Could that have been?]

65. “I will lay my heart open to you,” answered Markheim. “This crime on which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty, driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day, and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches--both the power and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past; something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of destination.”

66. “You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?” remarked the visitor; “and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some thousands?”

[Sidenote: Self-deception uncovered.]

67. “Ah,” said Markheim, “but this time I have a sure thing.”

68. “This time, again, you will lose,” replied the visitor, quietly.

69. “Ah, but I keep back the half!” cried Markheim.

70. “That also you will lose,” said the other.

[Sidenote: Moral crisis begins to appear to Markheim.]

[Sidenote: Self-deception still struggling.]

71. The sweat started upon Markheim’s brow. “Well, then, what matter?” he exclaimed. “Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall one part of me, and that the worse, continue until the end to override the better? Evil and good run strong in me, haling me both ways. I do not love the one thing, I love all. I can conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyrdoms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the mind? Not so; good, also, is a spring of acts.”

[Sidenote: Here the story is plainly didactic.]

72. But the visitant raised his finger. “For six-and-thirty years that you have been in this world,” said he, “through many changes of fortune and varieties of humor, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?--five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your way; nor can anything but death avail to stop you.”

73. “It is true,” Markheim said, huskily, “I have in some degree complied with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere exercise of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their surroundings.”

[Sidenote: Key.]

74. “I will propound to you one simple question,” said the other; “and as you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?”

[Sidenote: MINOR MORAL CLIMAX.]

[Sidenote: Markheim at last sees himself.]

75. “In any one?” repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration. “No,” he added, with despair, “in none! I have gone down in all.”

76. “Then,” said the visitor, “content yourself with what you are, for you will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are irrevocably written down.”

77. Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the visitor who first broke the silence. “That being so,” he said, “shall I show you the money?”

78. “And grace?” cried Markheim.

79. “Have you not tried it?” returned the other. “Two or three years ago, did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not your voice the loudest in the hymn?”

80. “It is true,” said Markheim; “and I see clearly what remains for me by way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul: my eyes are opened, and I behold myself at last for what I am.”

81. At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through the house; and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for which he had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanor.

[Sidenote: FULL MORAL CRISIS.]

[Sidenote: PHYSICAL RESULTANT CRISIS.]

[Sidenote: Final test.]

82. “The maid!” he cried. “She has returned, as I forewarned you, and there is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you must say, is ill; you must let her in, with an assured but rather serious countenance--no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you success! Once the girl within, and the door closed, the same dexterity that has already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger in your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening--the whole night, if needful--to ransack the treasures of the house and to make good your safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up!” he cried: “up, friend; your life hangs trembling in the scales; up, and act!”

83. Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. “If I be condemned to evil acts,” he said, “there is still one door of freedom open--I can cease from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it, be! But I have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage.”

[Sidenote: Who was the visitant?]

84. The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely change; they brightened and softened with a tender triumph; and, even as they brightened, faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as chance-medley--a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but on the further side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the shop, where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamor.

85. He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.

[Sidenote: MORAL CLIMAX. DENOUEMENT.]

86. “You had better go for the police,” said he: “I have killed your master.”

MORRISON AND HIS WRITINGS

Arthur Morrison was born in Kent, England, in 1863. After some experience as a clerk in the civil service, as the secretary of a charity trust in the East End of London, and as a journalist on the editorial staff of an evening paper, he settled down definitely to his career as novelist and writer on oriental art. He is best known as a journalist, however, and his familiarity with the East End has largely contributed to his success in depicting the sordid life of London’s “mean streets,” as the “remorseless realism” of his pictures testify. Mr. Morrison’s literary work was in the nature of prose and verse panegyrizing bicycles and bicycling. His principal works, apart from several plays and magazine contributions, are _Tales of Mean Streets_; the several _Martin Hewitt_ (detective) books; _A Child of the Jago_; _To London Town_; _The Hole in the Wall_; _The Red Triangle_; _The Green Eye of Goona_ (published in America as _The Green Diamond_); and _The Painters of Japan_.

Mr. Morrison’s best fiction is not large in bulk, for his detective stories are surpassed both in merit and in popular appeal by more than one writer on similar themes; but in his _Tales of Mean Streets_, which contains the appended study, “On the Stairs,” he has attained a compressed power equalled only by the French realists and scarcely surpassed even by them. He has brought the art of suggestion to a high pass, his swiftness and firmness of delineation are equally effective, and though his subjects are sordid and often depressing they live before us as real folk.

The introduction to _Tales of Mean Streets_ appeared in _Macmillan’s Magazine_ in October, 1891, where it was called simply, “A Street.” This sketch attracted the attention of Mr. W. E. Henley, who gave the young writer the benefit of his own knowledge and criticism; and it is to Henley and to Walter Besant that Mr. Morrison makes special acknowledgment for help in the technicalities and mechanism of his tales. Most of these _Tales of Mean Streets_ appeared in the _National Observer_ (while Henley was the editor), and a few in the _Pall Mall Budget_.--_Book Buyer_ (London), vol. 12.

If the modern novel about the slums, such as novels of Mr. Arthur Morrison, or the exceedingly able novels of Mr. Somerset Maugham, are intended to be sensational, I can only say that that is a noble and reasonable object, and that they attain it.... It may be ... it is necessary to have in our fiction the image of the horrible and hairy East-ender, merely to keep alive in us a fearful and childlike wonder at external peculiarities.... To summarize, our slum fiction is quite defensible as æsthetic fiction; it is not defensible as spiritual fact.--GILBERT K. CHESTERTON, _Heretics_.

Ever seeking the clean-cut, picturesque phrase and the vivid word, he produced a very striking picture of the East End. But, nevertheless, it was not quite satisfactory and convincing. Human nature does not alter so much with conditions as he seems to think. A little less or a little more morality does not affect its elements.... Mr. Morrison’s strongest gift in writing is a cynicism that is almost brutal. With it he elaborates the features of all his characters till the impression is produced that one savage, hideous, ugly coster and one gaudy-feathered, bedizened “Jonah” have acted as models for all his studies of Jagodom. Moreover, his success has been achieved in pictures of the brutal.--_Academy_ (London), vol. 52.

The “mean streets” are streets in London.... [They] have found in Arthur Morrison an interpreter who lifts them out of their meanness upon the plane of a just claim to human sympathy. He lets us see the relief. Bill Napper, the drunken kerb-whacker, come into property and defending it against the rascally labor agitator, Scuddy Lond, mixing religious fervor and till-tapping with entire sincerity, Simmons and Ford, victims of their joint wife’s “jore” and mania for trouser-making, even the Anarchists of the Red Cow group, appeal to us with a sense almost of kinship because we feel that the figures are real. They are capital character-studies besides. Dickens never made a finer than the thief Scuddy Lond, or than Billy Chope.... The art of these stories seems flawless. Mr. Morrison’s gift amounts to genius.--JACOB RIIS, _Romances of “The Other Half,” The Book Buyer_, vol. 12.

FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON MORRISON

_Methods of Arthur Morrison_, _Academy_, vol. 50, 531; _His Work, Academy_, vol. 52, 493; _Blackwood’s Magazine_, vol. 163, 734; _How to Write a Short Story, Bookman_, vol. 5, 45; _Morrison as a Realist_, H. D. Traill, _Fortnightly_, vol. 67, 65; _Reply_, A. Morrison, _New Review_, vol. 16, 326; _Child of the Jago: True to Facts_, A. O. Jay, _Fortnightly_, vol. 67, 324.

FOR ANALYSIS

ON THE STAIRS BY ARTHUR MORRISON

The house had been “genteel.” When trade was prospering in the East End, and the ship-fitter or block-maker thought it no shame to live in the parish where his workshop lay, such a master had lived here. Now, it was a tall, solid, well-bricked, ugly house, grimy and paintless in the joinery, cracked and patched in the windows: where the front door stood open all day long; and the womankind sat on the steps, talking of sickness and deaths and the cost of things; and treacherous holes lurked in the carpet of road-soil on the stairs and in the passage. For when eight families live in a house, nobody buys a door-mat, and the street was one of those streets that are always muddy. It smelt, too, of many things, none of them pleasant (one was fried fish); but for all that it was not a slum.

2. Three flights up, a gaunt woman with bare forearms stayed on her way to listen at a door which, opening, let out a warm, fetid waft from a close sick-room. A bent and tottering old woman stood on the threshold, holding the door behind her.

3. “An’ is 'e no better now, Mrs. Curtis?” the gaunt woman asked, with a nod at the opening.

4. The old woman shook her head, and pulled the door closer. Her jaw waggled loosely in her withered chaps: “Nor won’t be; till 'e’s gone.” Then after a certain pause, “'E’s goin’,” she said.

5. “Don’t doctor give no 'ope?”

6. “Lor’ bless ye, I don’t want to ast no doctors,” Mrs. Curtis replied, with something not unlike a chuckle. “I’ve seed too many on ’em. The boy’s a-goin’, fast; I can see that. An’ then”--she gave the handle another tug, and whispered--“he’s been called.” She nodded amain; “Three seprit knocks at the bed-head las’ night; an’ I know what _that_ means!”

7. The gaunt woman raised her brows, and nodded. “Ah, well,” she said, “we all on us comes to it some day, sooner or later. An’ it’s often a 'appy release.”

8. The two looked into space beyond each other, the elder with a nod and a croak. Presently the other pursued, “'E’s been a very good son, ain’t 'e?”

9. “Ay, ay, well enough son to me,” responded the old woman, a little peevishly; “an’ I’ll 'ave ’im put away decent, though there’s on’y the Union for me after. I can do that, thank Gawd!” she added, meditatively, as chin on fist she stared into the thickening dark over the stairs.

10. “When I lost my pore 'usband,” said the gaunt woman with a certain brightening, “I give ’im a 'ansome funeral. 'E was a Oddfeller, an’ I got twelve pound. I 'ad a oak caufin an’ a open 'earse. There was a kerridge for the fam’ly an’ one for 'is mates--two 'orses each, an’ feathers, an’ mutes; an’ it went the furthest way round to the cimitry. 'Wotever 'appens, Mrs. Manders,’ says the undertaker, ‘you’ll feel as you’ve treated 'im proper; nobody can’t reproach you over that.’ An’ they couldn’t. 'E was a good 'usband to me, an’ I buried ’im respectable.”

11. The gaunt woman exulted. The old, old story of Manders’s funeral fell upon the other one’s ears with a freshened interest, and she mumbled her gums ruminantly. “Bob’ll 'ave a 'ansome buryin', too,” she said. “I can make it up, with the insurance money, an’ this, an’ that. On’y I dunno about mutes. It’s a expense.”

12. In the East End, when a woman has not enough money to buy a thing much desired, she does not say so in plain words; she says the thing is an “expense,” or a “great expense.” It means the same thing, but it sounds better. Mrs. Curtis had reckoned her resources, and found that mutes would be an “expense.” At a cheap funeral mutes cost half-a-sovereign and their liquor. Mrs. Manders said as much.

13. “Yus, yus, 'arf-a-sovereign,” the old woman assented. Within, the sick feebly beat the floor with a stick. “I’m a-comin’,” she cried shrilly; “yus, 'arf-a-sovereign, but it’s a lot, an’ I don’t see 'ow I’m to do it--not at present.” She reached for the door-handle again, but stopped and added, by after-thought, “Unless I don’t 'ave no plooms.”

14. “It 'ud be a pity not to 'ave plooms. I 'ad--”

15. There were footsteps on the stairs: then a stumble and a testy word. Mrs. Curtis peered over into the gathering dark. “Is it the doctor, sir?” she asked. It was the doctor’s assistant; and Mrs. Manders tramped up to the next landing as the door of the sick-room took him in.

16. For five minutes the stairs were darker than ever. Then the assistant, a very young man, came out again, followed by the old woman with a candle. Mrs. Manders listened in the upper dark. “He’s sinking fast,” said the assistant. “He _must_ have a stimulant. Dr. Mansell ordered port wine. Where is it?” Mrs. Curtis mumbled dolorously. “I tell you he _must_ have it,” he averred with unprofessional emphasis (his qualification was only a month old). “The man can’t take solid food, and his strength must be kept up somehow. Another day may make all the difference. Is it because you can’t afford it?” “It’s a expense--sich a expense, doctor,” the old woman pleaded. “An’ wot with 'arf-pints o’ milk an’--” She grew inarticulate, and mumbled dismally.

17. “But he must have it, Mrs. Curtis, if it’s your last shilling: it’s the only way. If you mean you absolutely haven’t the money--” and he paused a little awkwardly. He was not a wealthy young man--wealthy young men do not devil for East End doctors--but he was conscious of a certain haul of sixpences at nap the night before; and, being inexperienced, he did not foresee the career of persecution whereon he was entering at his own expense and of his own motion. He produced five shillings: “If you absolutely haven’t the money, why--take this and get a bottle--good: not at a public-house. But mind, _at once_. He should have had it before.”

18. It would have interested him, as a matter of coincidence, to know that his principal had been guilty of the selfsame indiscretion--even the amount was identical--on that landing the day before. But, as Mrs. Curtis said nothing of this, he floundered down the stair and out into the wetter mud, pondering whether or not the beloved son of a Congregational minister might take full credit for a deed of charity on the proceeds of sixpenny nap. But Mrs. Curtis puffed her wrinkles, and shook her head sagaciously as she carried in her candle. From the room came a clink as of money falling into a teapot. And Mrs. Manders went about her business.

19. The door was shut, and the stair a pit of blackness. Twice a lodger passed down, and up and down, and still it did not open. Men and women walked on the lower flights, and out at the door, and in again. From the street a shout or a snatch of laughter floated up the pit. On the pavement footsteps rang crisper and fewer, and from the bottom passage there were sounds of stagger and sprawl. A demented old clock buzzed divers hours at random, and was rebuked every twenty minutes by the regular tread of a policeman on his beat. Finally, somebody shut the street-door with a great bang, and the street was muffled. A key turned inside the door on the landing, but that was all. A feeble light shone for hours along the crack below, and then went out. The crazy old clock went buzzing on, but nothing left that room all night. Nothing that opened the door....

20. When next the key turned, it was to Mrs. Manders’s knock, in the full morning; and soon the two women came out on the landing together, Mrs. Curtis with a shapeless clump of bonnet. “Ah, 'e’s a lovely corpse,” said Mrs. Manders. “Like wax. So was my 'usband.”

21. “I must be stirrin’,” croaked the old woman, “an’ go about the insurance an’ the measurin’ an’ that. There’s lots to do.”

22. “Ah, there is. 'Oo are you goin’ to 'ave,--Wilkins? I 'ad Wilkins. Better than Kedge, _I_ think: Kedge’s mutes dresses rusty, an’ their trousis is frayed. If you was thinkin’ of 'avin’ mutes--”

23. “Yus, yus,”--with a palsied nodding,--“I’m a-goin’ to 'ave mutes: I can do it respectable, thank Gawd!”

24. “And the plooms?”

25. “Ay, yus, and the plooms too. They ain’t sich a great expense, after all.”

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS FOR STUDY

1. What are the points of similarity between the Character-Study and the Psychological Study?

2. Define (a) Psychology, (b) Realism.

3. Does Markheim’s change of heart seem to you to be genuine? Give your reasons.

4. Analyze his motives fully.

5. Is the supernatural element convincing?

6. Could conscience produce the same effect as the Visitant?

7. What impression did Stevenson seek to convey by “Markheim”?

8. Fully analyze the thoughts, feelings, and motives of the mother.

9. Can you detect Morrison’s motive in writing “On the Stairs”?

10. Fully analyze one other psychological study, from any source.

TEN REPRESENTATIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES

“A Coward,” Guy de Maupassant, translated in _The Odd Number_.

“Another Gambler,” Paul Bourget, translated in _Stories by Foreign Authors_.

“La Bretonne,” André Theuriet, translated in _Short-Story Masterpieces_.

“The Song of Death,” Hermann Sudermann, translated in _The Indian Lily_.

“The Recovery,” Edith Wharton, in _Crucial Instances_.

“Billy-Boy,” John Luther Long, in volume of same title.

“The Executioner,” Honoré de Balzac, translated in _Masterpieces of Fiction_.

“The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, _Harper’s Magazine_, vol. 81, 553.

“The Lady or the Tiger,” Frank R. Stockton, in volume of same title.

“The Man Without a Country,” Edward Everett Hale, in _Short Story Classics, American_.

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

An extended list of books and magazine articles on the short-story will be found on pages 375-378, 426-431 of the present author’s _Writing the Short-Story_, New York, Hinds, Hayden and Eldredge (1909), xiv+441 pp. Most of the bibliographical references here appended also appear in the revised edition of _Writing the Short-Story_ (1918). Magazine articles have not been included, as they may be found listed in the cumulative periodical indexes. For several years, _The Writer’s Monthly_, Springfield, Mass., a periodical for literary workers, has printed monthly a list of magazine articles of interest to writers.

_Notes on the Influence of E. T. A. Hoffman on Edgar Allan Poe_, G. Gruener, Modern Language Association of America (1904).

_How to Write_, Charles Sears Baldwin. Macmillan (1906). Chapters on “How to Tell a Story,” and “How to Describe.” Based upon Bible narratives.

_The Art of the Short-Story_, George W. Gerwig. Werner (1909). A brief general study. Out of print.

_The Short Story in English_, Henry Seidel Canby. Holt (1909). An exhaustive examination into the origin and development of the form.

_A History of Story Telling_, Arthur Ransome. Stokes (1909).

_Studies in Several Literatures_, Harry Thurston Peck. Dodd, Mead (1909). Chapters on “Poe,” and “The Detective Story.”

_The Art of Writing_ (also issued under the title, _The Art of Short Story Writing_), George Randolph Chester. The Publishers Syndicate (1910). A collection of brief notes on all phases of the title-subject.

_The Fiction Factory_, John Milton Edwards (pseudonym). Editor Co. (1911). “The author tells how he conceived, planned, wrote and sold $100,000 worth of manuscripts.”

_The Craftsmanship of Writing_, Frederic Taber Cooper. Dodd, Mead (1912). These papers appeared serially in _The Bookman_, New York.

_The Plot of the Short Story_, Henry Albert Phillips. Stanhope-Dodge (1912). The technique and mechanics of plot.

_The American Short Story_, C. Alphonso Smith. Ginn (1912). An American reprint of one of the author’s lectures delivered as Roosevelt Professor at the University of Berlin.

_The Art and Business of Story Writing_, W. B. Pitkin. Macmillan (1912).

_The American Short Story_, Elias Lieberman. Editor Co. (1912).

_The Art of Story Writing_, J. Berg Esenwein and Mary Davoren Chambers. Home Correspondence School (1913). A study of the shorter fictional forms--the anecdote, fable, parable, tale, sketch, and short-story--with outlines for study and instruction.

_The Technique of the Mystery Story_, Carolyn Wells. Home Correspondence School (1913).

_Art in Short Story Narration_, Henry Albert Phillips. Stanhope-Dodge (1913).

_The Art of Writing_, Preface to “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” Joseph Conrad. Doubleday (1914).

_Short Stories in the Making_, Robert Wilson Neal. Oxford University Press (1914).

_The Author’s Craft_, Arnold Bennett. Doran (1914)

_The Art of the Short Story_, Carol Grabo. Scribner (1914).

_The Modern Short-Story_, Lilian Notestein and Waldo H. Dunn. Barnes (1914).

_On the Art of Writing_, A. Quiller-Couch. Putnam (1916).

_The Contemporary Short Story_, Harry T. Baker. Heath (1916).

_The Short-Story_, Barry Pain. Doran (1916). Reprint of an earlier English edition.

_The Thirty Six Dramatic Situations_, Georges Polti. Editor Co. (1916).

_A Handbook of Story Writing_, Blanche Colton Williams. Dodd, Mead (1917).

_Children’s Stories and How to Tell Them_, J. Berg Esenwein and Marietta Stockard. Home Correspondence School (1917).

_Helps for Student-Writers_, Willard E. Hawkins. The Student-Writer Press (1917).

_The Technique of Fiction Writing_, Robert Saunders Dowst. Editor Co. (1917).

Besides the edited collections of miscellaneous short-stories included in the first edition of _Writing the Short-Story_, which need not be reproduced here, are the following. In most instances the collections are prefaced by introductory notes by the editors named.

_The Best American Tales_, W. P. Trent and John Bell Henneman. Crowell (1907).

_International Library of Fiction_ (3 vols.), William Patten. Collier (1910).

_The Great English Short-Story Writers_ (2 vols.), William J. and Coningsby W. Dawson. Harper (1910).

_The Lock and Key Library_ (10 vols.), Julian Hawthorne. This is an expansion of the six-volume edition of _Mystery and Detective Stories_ (6 vols.). Review of Reviews Co. (1912).

_Short-Story Masterpieces, French_ (2 vols.), J. Berg Esenwein. Home Correspondence School (1912).

_Short-Story Masterpieces, Russian_ (2 vols.), J. Berg Esenwein. Home Correspondence School (1913).

_A Collection of Short Stories_, L. A. Pittenger. Macmillan (1913).

_A Study of the Short Story_, Henry S. Canby. Holt (1913).

_A Book of Short Stories_, Stuart P. Sherman. Holt (1914).

_Types of the Short-Story_, Benjamin A. Heydrick. Scott, Foresman (1914).

_The Short-Story_, E. A. Cross. McClurg (1914).

_Modern Short Stories_, Margaret Ashmun. Macmillan (1914).

_Short Stories_, Leonard Moulton. Houghton, Mifflin (1915).

_Short Stories for High Schools_, Rosa M. R. Mikels. Scribner (1915).

_Elements of the Short Story_, E. E. Hale, Jr., and F. T. Dawson. Holt (1915).

_Short Stories from “Life,”_ T. L. Masson. Doubleday (1916).

_Short Stories and Selections, for Use in Secondary Schools_, Emilie K. Baker. Macmillan (1916).

_Representative Short Stories_, Nina Hart and Edna M. Perry. Macmillan (1917).

_The Best Short Stories of 1915, and The Yearbook of the American Short Story_, E. J. O’Brien. Small, Maynard (1916).

Similar collections by the same editor have been issued for 1916 and 1917, and others for later years are to follow.

_Atlantic Narratives_, Charles Swain Thomas. Atlantic Monthly Press (1918).

_Index to Short Stories._ Ina TenEyck Firkins. Wilson.

INDEX

In this index, names of authors are printed in small capitals and titles of books in italics; titles of short-stories are enclosed in quotations, and general persons and subjects are in Roman type. It has not seemed necessary to index titles and authors which are merely included in biographical and bibliographical notes.

A

## Action, 2, 3.

ADDISON, JOSEPH, xix.

Adventure (see Action), xvi, 3.

Anecdote, xvi, xvii, xx.

_Arabian Nights_, xviii.

B

BALDWIN, CHARLES S., xxiv.

BALZAC, HONORÉ DE, xx, 134, 253.

BARRIE, JAMES M., 133, 215-249.

BARRETT, CHARLES RAYMOND, xxiii.

BEERS, H. A., 300.

BERANGER, 320.

Bibliography of Short-Story, xxi, 433.

BIERCE, AMBROSE, 72.

BOCCACCIO, xviii; _Decameron_, xvii; _Rinaldo_, xvii.

BURKE, EDMUND, 132.

BURTON, RICHARD, 32.

BUTLER, ELLIS PARKER, 133.

C

CANBY, H. S., xxiv, 32, 33, 75, 76, 149, 258, 301, 302.

Characters, 4, 354, 355, 356.

Character Studies, 353-389.

CHAUCER, GEOFFREY, xviii, _Canterbury Tales_, xvii, _Pardoner’s Tale_, xvii.

CHESTERTON, GILBERT K., 424.

CODY, SHERWIN, xxiii.

Comedy, 192.

_Conte dévot_, xvi, xvii.

Contributory incident, 21, 199.

COPPÉE, FRANÇOIS, 134, 368-388.

“Courting of T’Nowhead’s Bell, The,” 219-249.

CRAWFORD, F. MARION, 72.

CRAWFORD, V. M., 137, 138.

Crisis, xxvi, 355.

CROSS, J. W., 252.

CURTIS, GEORGE WILLIAM, 70.

D

DAUDET, ALPHONSE, 133-147.

DEFOE, DANIEL, xix.

Denouement, xxvi.

Detective Story, xix.

Developing incident (see contributory incident).

DYE, CHARITY, xxiii.

E

EDGEWORTH, MARIA, _Moral Tales_, xix.

Egyptian tales, xv, xvi.

ELIOT, GEORGE, 252.

Emotion, Stories of, 131-190.

Episode, xvii, xix.

Essay-Stories, xix.

_Esther, Book of_, xvi.

Exercises, xxxi, 67, 129, 189, 249, 290, 351, 388, 431.

F

_Fabliau_, xviii.

FAGUET, ÉMILE, 6.

“Fall of the House of Usher, The,” 320-351.

Fiction, Art of, xiii.

FLAUBERT, GUSTAVE, 32, 33.

G

Ghosts, 70.

_Golden Ass, The_, Apuleius, xvi.

_Graham’s Magazine_, xxii, 295.

GRENIER, EDOUARD, 7.

GRISWOLD, HATTIE T., 218.

_Guardian_, xix.

H

HAMILTON, CLAYTON, 354.

HAMMERTON, J. A., 218.

_Handbook of Literary Criticism_, 31.

HARTE, BRET, 133, 253, 254.

HAWTHORNE, JULIAN, 70, 258.

HAWTHORNE, NATHANIEL, xix, xxii, xxiii, 33, 71, 75, 297-319.

HENRY, O., 193-215.

HIGGINSON, THOMAS WENTWORTH, xxiii.

HOFFMAN, E. A., xix, 75.

Homeric stories, xv.

Humorous Stories, 191-250.

HUTTON, R. H., 301.

I

_Idler_, xix.

Impressionistic Stories, 293-352.

INDEPENDENT, xxiii.

IRVING, WASHINGTON, xix, 71; _Rip Van Winkle_, xviii.

J

JACOBS, W. W., 108-129.

JAMES, HENRY, 137, 149, 279.

JESSUP, ALEXANDER, xxiv.

JOHNSON, SAMUEL, xix.

K

KING, GRACE, 6, 7.

KIPLING, RUDYARD, 31, 133, 147-189, 258.

L

LANG, ANDREW, 32, 75.

“Last Class, The,” 134, 136, 139-147.

LE GALLIENNE, RICHARD, 150, 258, 300.

LEMMON, LEONARD, 258.

LEWIN, WALTER, 257, 258.

LEWIS, E. H., xxiii.

_Lippincott’s Magazine_, xxiii.

Local color, 8, 254 (see setting).

“Lodging for the Night, A,” 32, 34-67.

LONGFELLOW, H. W., 299.

M

MABIE, HAMILTON WRIGHT, 279.

MCINTYRE, MARION, 137.

MACLAREN, IAN, 216.

“Mateo Falcone,” 8-29, 134, 254.

MATTHEWS, BRANDER, xxiii, 75, 280, 370, 371.

“Markheim,” 32, 33, 393-422.

MAUPASSANT, GUY DE, vii, xxix, 133, 196, 254, 277-290, 356-368.

MÉRIMÉE, PROSPER, xix, xx, 4, 8-29.

Milesian Tales, xvi.

MILLER, MERION M., 370.

“Moonlight,” 253, 278, 281-290.

“Monkey’s Paw, The,” 110-129, 134.

MORRISON, ARTHUR, 422-431.

Mystery and Fantasy Stories, 69-130.

N

NATHAN, G. J., 196.

NODIER, CHARLES, xix.

Novel, xiii.

Novelette, xx, xxvii.

_Novella_, xvii, xviii.

O

O’BRIEN, FITZ-JAMES, 72.

“On the Stairs,” 393, 425-431.

“Outcasts of Poker Flat, The,” 253, 258-277.

P

PATER, WALTER, 392.

PECK, HARRY THURSTON, 197.

PELLISSIER, GEORGES, 7.

PERRY, BLISS, 2, 392.

PHELPS, WILLIAM LYON, 31.

“Piece of String, The,” 356-368.

Plot, xxv.

Plot incident, 11.

POE, EDGAR ALLAN, xix, xx, xxi, xxii, xxv, 30, 72-107, 134, 294, 295, 296, 320-351.

Psychological Studies, 391-432.

“Purloined Letter, The,” 72, 75-107.

PUSHKIN, xix.

Q

Questions, see Exercises.

R

_Rambler_, xix.

“Ransom of Red Chief, The,” 198-215.

Representative Stories, Lists of, 68, 130, 190, 250, 290, 351, 389, 432.

RIIS, JACOB, 424.

Romanticism, 31.

ROZ, FIRMIN, 280.

_Ruth, Book of_, 133.

S

Sadness in Stories, viii.

SAINTSBURY, GEORGE, 7.

SANDERSON, ROBERT, 370.

_Saturday Review_, xxiii.

Scenario, xvi, xxvii.

SCOTT, SIR WALTER, xix.

Setting, Stories of, 251-290.

SHERAN, WILLIAM H., 31.

_Short History of French Literature_, 7.

Short-Story, origin of, xx; defined, xxv, xxvi; Study of, xiii, xiv.

Sketch, xxviii, 355.

SMITH, C. ALFONSO, xxiii.

SMITH, LEWIS W., xxiii.

_Spectator_, xix.

SPIELHAGEN, FRIEDRICH, xxiii.

STEELE, RICHARD, xix.

STEVENSON, ROBERT LOUIS, 29-67, 393-422.

Story-tellers, xv, xvi.

“Substitute, The,” 371-388.

SYMONS, ARTHUR, 138, 279.

T

Tale, xv, xvii, xx, xxvii, 355.

_Taller_, xix.

TIECK, J. L., xix, 75.

To Teachers, vii.

TRENT, W. P., 137.

TWAIN, MARK, 193.

V

VOLTAIRE, xix, 72.

W

WARD, ARTEMUS, 193.

_Warner Library_, 6, 7, 218, 280, 370.

WEISS, JOHN, 192.

“White Old Maid, The,” 302-319.

WHITE, WILLIAM ALLEN, 193.

“Without Benefit of Clergy,” 134, 148-189.

_Writing the Short-Story_, vii, ix, xi, xxvi, 133, 253, 255.

Z

_Zadig_, xix, 72.