The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)

by Baron Ludwigvon Reizenstein

  Since he was now certain there was no one in the entire house, he could go right in. His gait, his manners—in short, everything he now undertook—bore the stamp of the purest naturalness. Watch those who think they are not being observed—then you will either fall in love with them or become their mortal enemies. People are one thing in company, another when alone.

  Emil’s soft steps had barely reached the upper part of the carpeted stairway leading to the third floor when the despairing cry of a being he had long since forgotten compelled him to beat a brief retreat.

  This cry came from none other than our Papchen. He recognized Emil at once, but he was not quite ready to greet him in the accustomed way; rather, he could only make inarticulate noises that were too shrill and words he did not know precisely, which easily led to the conclusion that the two sisters had not been very careful with his training.

  “Señor caballero, ho, ho, ho!” at first…

  “Your Jenny loves you from her heart, with sorrow—” was the second verse, and …

  “Señor caballero, ho, ho, ho—no understand!” the third and last, for Papchen let his head sink and did not speak another word, no matter how much Emil petted him and tried to get him to speak.

  “Heaven only knows,” Emil thought, “what’s happened to my dear old Papchen—usually so easy and full of humor, and now he hangs his head and looks down in sorrow.”

  Papchen was a remarkable bird. He depended on the two sisters heart and soul. If people were happy in the lovely house, then Papchen was happy along with them, which he usually indicated by hopping quickly from ring to ring, sounding out the words he had learned one after another. If people showed themselves depressed, Papchen went along with that, too, and he would not eat until he saw happy faces around him again. Since that dreadful death, Papchen had become quite mute, and only Emil’s longed-for reappearance could shake him momentarily out of his apathy. Then he returned to the same mute sorrow he had taken on.

  The first place Emil now sought was his bedroom. He opened the door full of intense expectation. It was here, in this chamber, where he had taken Jenny in his arms so many times; where he had hung about her neck many a night weeping for her to forgive him and to have faith in his undivided love. It was here that he had often covered his wife with passionate kisses while—oh the unhappy error!—he thought of Lucy Wilson. What an unmeasured world of desires and hopes, of torment and pain, of disappointments and errors were held in this little world! Here an angel had kissed the hot tears from his cheek, where the kisses of her competitor had burned shortly before. Here she had created a heaven, and he—possessed by the devil of passion—had made of it a hell. He looked back on his past in his thoughts, and the name Hiram shuddered on his lips.

  Emil stepped to the bed and pressed his face to the pillows. In the next instant he bolted up. “A man has lain here!” he declared. “That is not my Jenny’s bed.”

  It was the bed in which the Hungarian slept with Frida. The very pillow in which Emil had lovingly pressed his face had supported the skull of the Hungarian, silent and dark, brooding over wild and deadly crimes, at the side of the unhappiest wife the sun had ever shone upon. His bestial head had rested there, with its sodomitic, hyenalike passions, slaughtering with felonious mockery the natural course of thought of a noble, innocent woman.

  Emil went to the neighboring room, in which Jenny’s bed now stood. He had almost become ill in the Hungarian’s bedroom. His chest was constricted by an unexplainable premonition.

  There could be no doubt about this bed. The pillows garnished with lace, on whose covers were embroidered the entwined letters of his and Jenny’s names, the two plumes of sky-blue silk, several blue-white fleurs de lis, speckled with lily-white, probably already arranged for the coming night, and several odds and ends on the heavenly night table—all this and much more, which even the gallant pen of the Marquis de Sade would not be able to describe, witnessed to it being Jenny’s place of rest.

  Emil threw half his body on the bed and covered it with a thousand hot kisses. Then he rose again and sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands on his forehead on the edge of the bed he had renounced for so long. It was clear he had been weeping bitterly, and he made an effort now to hide the rest of his tears behind his long eyelashes.

  An ordinary man would not have been able to do this. Certainly strange thoughts swirled in his head, seeking to form rationally to make a decision, but in vain. Should he remain here until Jenny returned? Should she find him in her bed? Or rather, should he go to Lady Evans-Stuart’s and seek his Jenny in the midst of company? What did the etiquette and conventional norms of social life matter to him when it came to the stormy boiling over of his heart? But he still had to take account of one matter, since such a violation would create too great a scandal. For though he assumed that Lady Evans and the entire company with her at this moment would be perfectly familiar with the garb of Olympian majesty and divinity, he still thought it advisable to put on clothing, as was expected in our modern world. He must disguise himself as solid in order to appear as something he was not.

  But another question that would be harder to answer imposed itself on Emil: Where was he to get clothing at this moment? The idea of going into a clothing store and buying a coat, trousers, a vest, etc.—he would not do that for all the world; he would rather step utterly naked into Lady Evans-Stuart’s salon. Emil had a far too noble, chivalrous sensibilities to be able to go to a clothing store and buy clothes. That was something done by actors, newspaper editors, theater critics, café merchants, rag-pickers, bone-black manufacturers, architects, building inspectors, deputy surveyors, gas-works clerks, and similar demigods.

  There was nothing else for Emil to do than to make use of the services of his old personal tailor—which every noble must have. But this fellow lived too far away, and even if he had risked the trip to Frenchmen Street, it would still be a week before he could get his things. Then a grace, costumed as a saleslady of fashion, whispered to him a fortunate thought. No sooner had he decided than he acted to carry out his decision. In the lowest drawer of a German commode, Jenny had preserved his page costume, the same one he’d worn four years before when she fell in love with him at the court chapel. Was it still kept in the same place? Why not? A German woman’s love of order is world-famous and is never violated by disaster, domestic confusion, violent passions, or the like. If a place for any object is chosen today, it will still be there in fifty years. Emil did not harbor any doubts about this hypothesis, so he went at once to the commode in question and opened the bottom drawer. There lay the full outfit, wrapped in snow-white linen. As Emil removed the pins that held the linen to the page costume, he revealed the blue uniform, embroidered with silver. Each of the silver buttons, decorated with lions, was separately wrapped in paper, as were the epaulettes, which had been removed carefully so as not to crease the delicate silk. On both sides of the uniform lay the white silken stockings, reaching to the knee, the white kid gloves—one would have sworn they belonged to a maiden of twelve—and the narrow little slippers of sky-blue silk, decorated with silver filigree and fringe. The brief white breeches lay on the bottom, probably so they would not press on the more delicate items of clothing. There were also several white silk handkerchiefs with the coat of arms of the Counts of R* embroidered in gold. Since Emil only had to strip off his short blouse, dressing was very fast. When he stepped before the full-length mirror, tears came to his eyes. If he had not thought of Jenny at that instant, he would have rushed to the mirror and planted a warm kiss on his own lips. One could see that he wanted to do this, but it was better that he abstained, so much he flamed for Jenny. Kissing his image in the mirror would have seemed not unlike a new adultery, and he wanted never to do that again—that was his unshakable decision.

  But Emil jumped when he saw a figure rise above his shoulder. He hardly believed his own eyes. When he turned his eyes from the mirror, he stepped back in shock.

  The figure wa
s quite oddly dressed. The gaunt silhouette was shrouded in a long, narrow mantle of a dark color, which was closed to the chin by a standing collar and practically touched the ground. The small collars, which turned somewhat inward toward the neck, revealed a lining of dark red; the sleeves extended beyond the middle of the hands, virtually covering them. The mantle was buttoned down along its entire length. His pointed head, dominated by a disproportionately broad and high forehead, was yellow and pale, and his cheeks were hollowed so that one could have laid a flat hand in them. His nose, which arched dramatically outward in the middle, almost touched the fine, almost invisible lips at the end.

  Above his eyes, which were completely hidden by green glasses with side-lenses, one could see a pair of bushy, gray eyebrows of uncanny length. Above his forehead ran a blue-red stripe from ear to ear, only slightly covered by gray hair combed forward. This skull must once have been under the scalping knife of an Indian, for that is the standard scalping line, rising from the temples. This man had somehow escaped execution through some fortunate accident.

  “Welcome to New Orleans, wanderer from the mesa!” the figure said, placing his emaciated right hand on Emil’s shoulder. Only then did Emil recognize whom he had before him. For the clothing the figure wore was so different from what he had worn before that it was impossible to recognize him at once. The dark glasses hid his extraordinary, spectral eyes.

  Emil stood calmly in the presence of Hiram. Reverence and pious awe no longer spoke from his eyes. He also no longer bowed as if in the presence of a higher being. His handsome head was held high and free on his pale, full neck, on which the pure gold of his splendid hair sat in disordered, wavy locks.

  “Your welcome comes at an inopportune time, man of misfortune—what brought you into my house and disturbed my solitude?” Emil said.

  Hiram the Freemason replied: “You are courageous and contrary now, poor Emil, since you know that I have no more power over you. Poor, weak child, you press your hot cheek on your love’s pillow and think that you can conjure everything back as it was and bring it into everyday existence—”

  “Quit your fruitless talk and entwine other hearts with the mystical threads of your magic! Happy is the lover who has never fallen into your hands and been subjected to your devilish illusions. Were there two more happy mortals on the whole globe than Jenny and I? Where did two hearts love each other more purely and with more enthusiasm? Then you appeared and—”

  “Stop, senseless raver! Where did I encounter you when you saw me for the first time? Was it at the side of your Jenny? Hadn’t you already alienated her heart from yours? Who ordered you to climb out of her bed and into that of Lucy Wilson?”

  “Who other than you? You were playing this felonious game with my heart even before I met you—oh, now it is all clear to me, now I understand why an irresistible force always drove me from my true wife into the bosom of Lucy Wilson. Your devilish arts confused my senses and poisoned my heart. How often, when I wandered through the streets in the middle of the night, did I complain to heaven for giving me such an unfaithful heart, which rejected true love and fled into the arms of a whore. But always in vain—all of my begging was in vain! I even left my peaceful home to be with Lucy all the time—on that night I fell into your laid net, and now—tell me that I am a senseless raver—”

  “What a commonplace man you have become again since you left the mesa! You howl and thump like a schoolchild who has promised not to do something out of fear of the schoolmaster’s rod. You make every earthly effort to deceive your lord that you are guiltless and that I was the one who enticed you into your infidelity and your flippant promiscuity. You appear to have forgotten that you admired and made love to Lucy long before I drew you into the charmed circle of the Mantis religiosa. I don’t blame you for that, dear, penitent Emil, since my ideas, as you know, are not those of convenience or of an inherited false morality. When it is a matter of humanity as a whole, then one individual can go down to ruin, and a husband can separate from his wife or a child from his parents. Let the husband be unfaithful and the wife a whore, and you will see the good fruits that grow out of this disorder, to the benefit of all mankind. Let all the bonds of family be broken, and you will see how man and woman gird the sword about their loins when the cry is heard: ‘Freedom and Equality for every race!’ Thousands are in our midst who would take up the holy struggle at any moment, if they were not bound by the ties of an ordinary family life. A desperado will begin this revolution, and only a desperado will bring it to a conclusion. Then beauty will raise itself to eternal glory, no more compelled to rub and waste its wild, untamed sensuality within the chains of slavery. Bald Eagle will then no longer hunt and goad to death black prey—he will flee dazzled before the shining sun of Nigritia—”

  Emil had seated himself on Jenny’s bed and in this position had been listening quietly to what Hiram said. But now he rose and interrupted him in a very curt tone: “I never understood you before, and now I understand you even less. What does your nigger business have to do with my situation? Believe and hope whatever you like, but I must ask you to leave my house and never again disturb the peace that prevails in these rooms. You will have no opportunity to drive me mad a second time—your nonsense will not find any sympathy from me. May heaven be thanked that I have finally been freed from the magic, and that I am at last back in the shrine of my spirited, faithful wife. Whether or not Lucy bears the messiah who is to liberate the niggers, I don’t care—she can also figure out who will pay for the birth. Who is this Lucy Wilson now, now that magic binding us together has been broken? We had barely returned from the mesa, had hardly set foot on the cursed soil of New Orleans, than she was once again back on the track of a rich man, selling her charms with the greatest boldness, since she assumed that she would starve to death with me. And tell me, could she have become such a loose woman all of a sudden? Wasn’t she rotten from childhood, and hasn’t all of New Orleans known of that slut Lucy Wilson of the Mulattoes’ Settlement? What devil struck me with such blindness? How could I love this money-loving whore, this slippery snake! And how could I leave my faithful, lovable wife?”

  “One can see that your higher genius, which was with you in the Atchafalaya Bank and at the source of the Red River, has utterly abandoned you. You strolled though the sanctified plain of the mesa like the son of a god, accompanied with your bacchantic beloved. The beauty of her splendid body, the magic of her passionate eyes, was everything then. You went to sleep every night at her breasts, and when the young morning dawned and Diana Robert brought you your breakfast drink, you seemed so happy and pleased that even the Olympian gods would have envied you. Times have passed, and no sooner are you back in reality than your enervating moral scruples return. Out of the son of a god has come a German Philistine, and I don’t wonder that Lucy Wilson has so quickly grown tired of you and sought relief from her tiresome lover in her old promiscuity. You Germans cannot love freely and recklessly, and even if you’ve caught Venus in your nets for a time, you would rather let her run away, since she cannot stand your weeping and howling, your bites of conscience and mousy philosophizing. Now you will resume legitimate lovemaking with your wife because this will not disturb the peace of your heart. Don’t spin fantasies about your nice marriage nest, you have no idea what awaits you, my Emil, and it would be better to leave now than to dream and rave. What drives you to these pillows with such abandon? Rise up and you will see evidence of the fidelity of your wife. Poor Emil, unhappy spouse in his tear-soaked penitential shirt!”

  Cagliostro Hiram was right, after a fashion, but the reader has already understood that Emil was still no ordinary person. The magician knew this quite well, but why he spoke this way anyway—who can decipher it? If Emil had been an ordinary German, he would not have sought his salvation in the page’s uniform. Just the fact that he was not about to go to a clothing store in order to cover his mythological nudity demonstrates the presence of an extraordinary spirit.

 
The Philistine would call the magician immoral, and a man of spirit would say he was a blithering old man. Perhaps the sequel will demonstrate that neither the Philistine nor the man of spirit would have hit the nail on the head.

  “What drives you to these pillows with such abandon? Rise up and you will see evidence of the fidelity of your wife!”

  Without asking, without looking at Hiram, without understanding the import of these words in the slightest, Emil lifted the pillow mechanically—he did this because they had been speaking about it and without the slightest intention of proving anything by this hasty act. But now? Suddenly the scales fell from his eyes, the coral freshness of his lips transformed into the paleness of a corpse, his eyes were glued to the place now uncovered, and he ran both hands through the smooth gold of his Balder-like locks and once more arranged them à la Utgard-Loki. He now turned his eyes from the spot and turned them toward Hiram’s long, gaunt form—fear, revenge, distrust raged in his interior, finally breaking out in the words.

  “So I still am under your spell, mysterious man! And, poor me, I believed myself to be free of it? Oh, go somewhere else with your arts and do not rob me of my faith in the fidelity of my noble wife with such relish!”

  “Poor Emil, you believe in the fidelity of your wife so much that now, when you see it attacked, it all seems so strange that you would rather suspect magic than to try to explain this fact in natural ways. Ever since you and Lucy Wilson took Mantis religiosa as an antidote for the yellow fever, you have had nothing to fear from my magic. Even when I spread death and ruin all about, you will remain untouched by it. Everything that happens to you will be the normal result of the confusions and absurdities of everyday life, with nothing at all to do with my personality. I do not have any further reason to test you, since a part of my mission was completed with the prophecy I gave to you and Lucy on the mesa. The Caucasian has impregnated the Ethiopian at the source of the Red River, and the messiah shall rise, whether Lucy leads a fine, decent life or not—but unfortunately the beauty, in which I believed—”