Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 15

by Plots (and) Counterplots (v1. 1)

  Although Cannabis sativa, the source of hashish and marijuana, is one of the oldest drugs known to man, it has been stated that “the only account of the use of this drug in the United States prior to the twentieth century” is an autobiographical work by Fitz Hugh Ludlow entitled The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean, published anonymously in New York in 1857.

  Now another nineteenth-century account of the drug has been unearthed—authored by “The Children’s Friend”! Had Louisa Alcott ever used hashish? It was freely available at six cents a stick. Had Louisa Alcott ever heard of the Hashish Club of writers and artists modeled in the 1850's upon the French Club des Hashishins? Had she pondered upon the “joy-giver” of the Hindu sages, Rabelais’s “Herb Pantagruelion” that induced “cerebral excitation”?

  Her description of the effects of hashish in “Perilous Play” certainly suggests either an incomparable imagination or a familiarity with the drug. According to Dr. Meredith, “Six [“comfits”] can do no harm. ... I take twenty before I can enjoy myself. . . . I’ve tried many experiments, both on the sick and the well, and nothing ever happened amiss, though the demonstrations were immensely interesting. ... A heavenly drowsiness comes over one, in which they move as if on air. Everything is calm and lovely to them: no pain, no care, no fear of anything, and while it lasts one feels like an angel half asleep.” The trance comes on “about three hours after you take your dose. . . . Your pulse will rise, heart beat quickly, eyes darken and dilate, and an uplifted sensation will pervade you generally. Then these symptoms change, and the bliss begins. I’ve seen people sit or lie in one position for hours, rapt in a delicious dream, and wake from it as tranquil as if they had not a nerve in their bodies.” As for an overdose, that is “not so pleasant, unless one likes phantoms, frenzies, and a touch of nightmare, which seems to last a thousand years.”

  And so the experiment is made. Rose St. Just is offered “a taste of Elysium,” which she secretly accepts. Her lover, Mark Done, is maddened by both love and hashish, and the two are caught not only in a gathering storm at sea but in the unnatural and wild excitement induced by Cannabis sativa. “Every nerve was overstrained, every pulse beating like a trip-hammer, and everything . . . was intensified and exaggerated with awful power. The thundershower seemed a wild hurricane, the quaint room a wilderness peopled with tormenting phantoms.” All night Mark “lay motionless, with staring eyes, feverish lips, and a mind on the rack, for the delicate machinery which had been tampered with revenged the wrong by torturing the foolish experimenter.” Nevertheless, thanks to the author’s ingenuity, the hashish folly ends happily and the Perilous Players can exclaim at curtainfall, “Heaven bless hashish, if its dreams end like this!”

  With “Perilous Play” most of Louisa May Alcott’s nightmarish dreams—or at least their literary applications—ended. The publication of Part II of Little Women in April, 1869, brought her the fame and fortune she coveted and set her on the path of sweetness and light from which she seldom strayed.

  Astute and sometimes piratical publishers, however, did not hesitate to reprint the Alcott forays into the realms of darkness and from time to time, without her knowledge, her thrillers reappeared. “Perilous Play,” for example, was lifted out of Frank Leslie’s Chimney Corner and run in November, 1876, in Frank Leslie’s Popular Monthly. “V. V.: or, Plots and Counterplots” reemerged around 1870 in an altogether new dress, as a Ten Cent Novelette by A. M. Barnard. Both The Mysterious Key, and What It Opened and The Skeleton in the Closet had been issued by Elliott, Thornes & Talbot of Boston in their series of Ten Cent Novelettes by Standard American Authors—the latter as the trailer of The Foundling by Perley Parker. Now, as the new decade of the 1870’s began, the firm—restyled Thornes & Talbot—reprinted V. V. under the authorship of A. M. Barnard as No. 80 in that series. The pseudonymous thriller, bound in blue wrappers, took its place in the literature of the dime novel and is today one of the rarest and most desirable of those ephemeral pamphlets thumbed to death in the nineteenth century, treasured in the twentieth.

  The dime novel, introduced by the New York firm of Beadle in 1860, caught on. A. M. Barnard’s publishers, Elliott, Thornes & Talbot, entered into competition, issuing their first Ten Cent Novelette in 1863— The Golden Eagle by Sylvanus Cobb, Jr., an author scorned by Louisa Alcott’s illustrious neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson. The Ten Cent

  Novelettes issued by Elliott, Thornes & Talbot were described as the handsomest and largest ten-cent books ever published. A new one appeared on the last Monday of every month, bound in pink, later in blue paper, and for one dollar subscribers could receive twelve complete choice novels a year. For a country from whose borders romantic adventure was fast disappearing, these stories offered the lure of the distant in time and space, the excitement of conquest and exploration, the color of the gun-toting West, not to mention the lurid delights of The Black Adder or The Dwarf Fiend.

  From their new address at 63 Congress Street, Boston, Thornes & Talbot reissued A. M. Barnard’s effusion V. V., and unbeknownst to Louisa May Alcott the violent and elaborate plots and counterplots she had abandoned were again made available to the public. Between the blue wrappers of a dime novel, the Spanish temptress Virginie Varens still danced, still wove her malignant web, still escaped her punishment. That paperback is remarkable indeed, for it tells a tale not only of a Spanish dancer but of a writer from New England whose variety was all but infinite.

  Unlike V. V., who embodied corruption, the heroine of “A Whisper in the Dark” was the victim, not the perpetrator, of evil. Partly for this reason Louisa Alcott, toward the end of her life, permitted her publishers to reprint that story under her own name as a trailer to A Modern Mephi- stopheles. On May 7, 1887, she wrote to Thomas Niles, of Roberts Brothers, who had made the suggestion: “‘A Whisper’ is rather a lurid tale, but might do if I add a few lines to the preface of ‘Modern Mephistopheles,’ saying that this is put in to fill the volume, or to give a sample of Jo March’s necessity stories, which many girls have asked for.”

  It was eminently fitting to reprint “A Whisper in the Dark” with A Modern Mephistopheles. When in 1877 her publishers had proposed that the author of Little Women provide an anonymous book for their “No Name Series,” Louisa Alcott had dipped her pen into A. M. Barnard’s lurid ink. and written a novel dreamed by A. M. Barnard’s ghost. In A Modern Mephistopheles she had reverted to the Gothic technique, incorporating in her novel the Mephistophelian sybarite Jasper Helwyze, who manipulates his victim, Felix Canaris; Gladys, beguiled out of “her tranquil girlhood”; and the familiar lush heroine, Olivia, “a woman in the midsummer of her life, brilliant, strong, and stately . . . passion slept in the Southern eyes . . . and will curved the closely folded lips of vivid red.”

  In her room at the Bellevue Hotel in Boston the erstwhile contributor to The Flag of Our Union rose from the past, dredging up themes once woven through “A Marble Woman,” “A Whisper in the Dark,” and “Perilous Play”: mind control and the lure of drugs. Again she analyzed the “psychological curiosity” that penetrates and violates “the mysterious mechanism of human nature.” And again she described an elaborate experiment with hashish.

  Jasper Helwyze’s “little bonbonniere of tortoiseshell and silver” contained “white comfits”—the “Indian drug,” which “made the face of Coleridge shine.” Hashish is given to Gladys who, like Rose St. Just, experiences “inward excitement ... a strange chill . . . through her blood. Everything seemed vast and awful; every sense grew painfully acute; and she walked as in a dream. . . . Her identity was doubled” until she floated into “the unconscious stage of the hasheesh dream.”

  Interspersed though it is with metaphysical borrowings from Goethe and Hawthorne, A Modern Mephistopheles is an A. M. Barnard thriller in which the now celebrated Louisa May Alcott indulged her “natural ambition ... for the lurid” and enjoyed a psychological and literary catharsis. When it was first published as an anonymous full-length no
vel in 1877, the author wrote in her journal: “‘M.M.’ appears and causes much guessing. It is praised and criticised, and I enjoy the fun, especially when friends say, ‘I know you didn’t write it, for you can’t hide your peculiar style.’”

  For some time she hid it successfully, reviewers asking, “Who wrote this story? Whose hand painted these marvellous pictures of the angel and the demon striving for the mastery in every human soul?” A decade after its appearance in the “No Name Series,” when the author was paying the penalty of years of overwork and suffering with the cancer that would soon prove fatal, she agreed to the reprinting of A Modern Mephistopheles and A Whisper in the Dark. The combined volume that embodied the techniques and preoccupations of her salad days was published posthumously in 1889.

  Now “A Whisper in the Dark” has been reprinted once again for the twentieth-century audience that still clamors for more stories by Louisa May Alcott. With “V. V.: or, Plots and Counterplots,” “A Marble Woman: or, The Mysterious Model,” “The Skeleton in the Closet” and “Perilous Play,” it forms a collection that rounds out the stories introduced in Behind a Mask. Always there may be a lingering suspicion that Louisa Alcott had other masks, that in the brittle pages of sensational nineteenth-century weeklies lurk more of her anonymous and pseudonymous shockers awaiting excited discovery. The lingering suspicion is really but a persistent hope, for the appetite grows with what it feeds on. The flamboyant thrillers of Plots and Counterplots—narratives delving into violence, mind control, drug experimentation—present in still another, wilder guise the many-sided author of Little Women.

  The corpus of Louisa Alcott’s excursions into the gruesome horrors of the mind has now been completed. The Concord Scheherazade emerges full-face from behind her mask.

  V. V. Or PLOTS AND COUNTERPLOTS

  Chapter I

  WON AND LOST

  IN the greenroom of a Parisian theater a young man was pacing to and fro, evidently waiting with impatience for some expected arrival. The room was empty, for the last performance of a Grand Spectacle was going on, and the entire strength of the company in demand. Frequent bursts of barbaric music had filled the air; but now a brief lull had fallen, broken only by the soft melody of flutes and horns. Standing motionless, the young man listened with a sudden smile, an involuntary motion of the head, as if in fancy he saw and followed some object of delight. A storm of applause broke in on the last notes of the air. Again and again was it repeated, and when at length it died away, trumpet, clarion, and drum resumed their martial din, and the enchanting episode seemed over.

  Suddenly, framed in the dark doorway, upon which the young man's eyes were fixed, appeared an apparition well worth waiting for. A sylph she seemed, costumed in fleecy white and gold; the star that glittered on her forehead was less brilliant than her eyes; the flowers that filled her graceful arms were outrivaled by the blooming face that smiled above them; the ornaments she wore were forgotten in admiration of the long blond tresses that crowned her spirited little head; and when the young man welcomed her she crossed the room as if borne by the shining wings upon her shoulders.

  “My Virginie, how long they kept you,” began the lover, as this beautiful girl leaned against him, flushed and panting, but radiant with the triumphs of the hour.

  “Yes, for they recalled me many times; and see—not one bouquet without a hillet-doux or gift attached!”

  “I have much to say, Virginie, and you give me no time but this. Where is Victor?”

  “Safe for many minutes; he is in the ‘Pas des Enters/ and then we are together in the ‘Pas des Deesses/ Behold! Another offer from the viscount. Shall I accept?”

  While speaking she had been rifling the flowers of their attractive burdens, and now held up a delicately scented note with an air half serious, half gay. Her lover crushed the paper in his hand and answered hotly, “You will refuse, or I shall make the viscount a different sort of offer. His devotion is an insult, for you are mine!”

  “Not yet, monsieur. Victor has the first claim. And see, he has set his mark upon me.”

  Pushing up a bracelet, she showed two dark letters stamped or tattooed on the white flesh.

  “And you permitted him to disfigure you? When, Virginie, and why?”

  “Ah, that was years ago when I cared nothing for beauty, and clung to Victor as my only friend, letting him do what he would, quite content to please him, for he was very kind, and I, poor child, was nothing but a burden. A year ago we were betrothed, and next year he hopes to marry—for we do well now, and I shall then be eighteen.”

  “You will not marry him. Then why deceive him, Virginie?”

  “Yes, but I may if no one else will offer me a name as he does. I do not love him, but he is useful; he guards me like a dragon, works for me, cherishes me, and keeps me right when from mere youth and gaiety of heart I might go astray. What then? I care nothing for lovers; they are false and vain, they annoy me, waste my time, keep Victor savage, and but for the eclat it gives me, I would banish all but—” She finished the sentence with a caress more eloquent than any words and, before he could speak, added half tenderly, half reproachfully, while the flowers strayed down upon the ground, “Not one of all these came from you. I thought you would remember me on this last night.”

  Passionately kissing the red lips so near his own, the lover answered, “I did remember you, but kept my gift to offer when we were alone.” “That is so like you! A thousand thanks. Now give it to me.”

  With a pretty gesture of entreaty she held out her little hand, and the young man put his own into it, saying earnestly, “I offer this in all sincerity, and ask you to be my wife.”

  A brilliant smile flashed over her face, and something like triumph shone, in her eyes as she clasped the hand in both her own, exclaiming with mingled delight and incredulity, “You ask that of me, the danseuse, friendless, poor and humble? Do you mean it, Allan? Shall I go with you to Scotland, be my lady’ by-and-by? Ciell It is incredible.”

  “Yes, I mean it. Passion has conquered pride, and for love’s sake I can forgive, forget anything but degradation. That you shall never know; and I thank Victor that his jealous vigilance has kept you innocent through all the temptation of a life like yours. The viscount offers you an establishment and infamy; I offer you an honorable name and a home with my whole heart. Which shall it be, Virginie?”

  She looked at him keenly—saw a young and comely face, now flushed and kindled with the ardor of a first love. She had seen many such waiting for her smile; but beyond this she saw truth in the honest eyes, read a pride on the forehead that no dishonor could stain, and knew that she might trust one whose promises were never broken. With a little cry of joy and gratitude she laid her face down on the generous hand that gave so much, and thanked heaven that the desire of her life was won. Gathering her close, Allan whispered, with a soft cheek against his own, “My darling, we must be married at once, or Victor will discover and betray us. All is arranged, and this very night we may quit Paris for a happy honeymoon in Italy. Say yes, and leave the rest to me.”

  “It is impossible! I cannot leave my possessions behind me; I must prepare a little. Wait till tomorrow, and give me time to think.”

  She spoke resolutely; the young man saw that his project would fail unless he yielded the point, and controlling his impatience, he modified his plan and won her by the ease of that concession.

  “I will not hurry you, but, Virginie, we must be married tonight, because all is prepared, and delay may ruin us. Once mine, Victor has no control over you, and my friends will have no power to part us. Grant me this boon, and you shall leave Paris when you will.”

  She smiled and agreed to it, but did not confess that the chief reason of her reluctance to depart so suddenly was a desire to secure the salary which on the morrow would be paid her for a most successful but laborious season. Mercenary, vain, and hollow-hearted as she was, there was something so genuine in the perfect confidence, the ardent affection of her lo
ver, that it won her respect and seemed to gift the rank which she aspired to attain with a redoubled charm.

  “Now tell me your plan, and tell me rapidly, lest Victor should divine that we are plotting and disturb us,” she said, with the look of exultation still gleaming in her eyes.

  “It is this. Your engagement ends tonight, and you have made no new one. You have spoken of going into the country to rest, and when you vanish people will believe that you have gone suddenly to rusticate. Victor is too proud to complain, and we will leave a penitent confession behind us to appease him.”

  “He will be terrible, Allan.”

  “You have a right to choose, I to protect you. Have no fear; we shall be far beyond his reach when he discovers his mistake. I asked you of him honorably once, and he refused with anger.”

  “He never told me that. We are requited, so let him rave. What next?”

  “When your last dance is over, change your dress quickly, and instead of waiting here for your cousin, as usual, slip out by the private door. I shall be there with a carriage, and while Victor is detained searching for you, we will be married, and I shall take you home to gather up those precious possessions of yours. You will do this, Virginie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your courage will not fail when I am gone, and some fear of Victor keep you?”

  “Bah! I fear nothing now.”