The Devil in Manuscript And Other Tales of Forbidden Books

by Osie Turner

  "For whom then do you wait?" he said, and I answered, "I shall know her."

  Footsteps, a voice, and a song in the street below, and I knew the song but neither the steps nor the voice.

  "Fool!" he cried, "the song is the same, the voice and steps have but changed with years!"

  On the hearth a tongue of flame whispered above the whitening ashes: "Wait no more; they have passed, the steps and the voice in the street below."

  Then he smiled, saying, "For whom do you wait? Seek her throughout the world!"

  I answered, "My world is here, between these walls and the sheet of glass above; here among gilded flagons and dull jewelled arms, tarnished frames and canvasses, black chests and high-backed chairs, quaintly carved and stained in blue and gold."

  THE PHANTOM

  The Phantom of the Past would go no further.

  "If it is true," she sighed, "that you find in me a friend, let us turn back together. You will forget, here, under the summer sky."

  I held her close, pleading, caressing; I seized her, white with anger, but she resisted.

  "If it is true," she sighed, "that you find in me a friend, let us turn back together."

  The Phantom of the Past would go no further.

  THE SACRIFICE

  I went into a field of flowers, whose petals are whiter than snow and whose hearts are pure gold.

  Far afield a woman cried, "I have killed him I loved!" and from a jar she poured blood upon the flowers whose petals are whiter than snow and whose hearts are pure gold.

  Far afield I followed, and on the jar I read a thousand names, while from within the fresh blood bubbled to the brim.

  "I have killed him I loved!" she cried. "The world's athirst; now let it drink!" She passed, and far afield I watched her pouring blood upon the flowers whose petals are whiter than snow and whose hearts are pure gold.

  DESTINY

  I came to the bridge which few may pass.

  "Pass!" cried the keeper, but I laughed, saying, "There is time;" and he smiled and shut the gates.

  To the bridge which few may pass came young and old. All were refused. Idly I stood and counted them, until, wearied of their noise and lamentations, I came again to the bridge which few may pass.

  Those in the throng about the gates shrieked out, "He comes too late!" But I laughed, saying, "There is time."

  "Pass!" cried the keeper as I entered; then smiled and shut the gates.

  THE THRONG

  There, where the throng was thickest in the street, I stood with Pierrot. All eyes were turned on me.

  "What are they laughing at?" I asked, but he grinned, dusting the chalk from my black cloak. "I cannot see; it must be something droll, perhaps an honest thief!"

  All eyes were turned on me.

  "He has robbed you of your purse!" they laughed.

  "My purse!" I cried; "Pierrot—help! it is a thief!"

  They laughed: "He has robbed you of your purse!"

  Then Truth stepped out, holding a mirror. "If he is an honest thief," cried Truth, "Pierrot shall find him with this mirror!" but he only grinned, dusting the chalk from my black cloak.

  "You see," he said, "Truth is an honest thief, she brings you back your mirror."

  All eyes were turned on me.

  "Arrest Truth!" I cried, forgetting it was not a mirror but a purse I lost, standing with Pierrot, there, where the throng was thickest in the street.

  THE JESTER

  "Was she fair?" I asked, but he only chuckled, listening to the bells jingling on his cap.

  "Stabbed," he tittered. "Think of the long journey, the days of peril, the dreadful nights! Think how he wandered, for her sake, year after year, through hostile lands, yearning for kith and kin, yearning for her!"

  "Stabbed," he tittered, listening to the bells jingling on his cap.

  "Was she fair?" I asked, but he only snarled, muttering to the bells jingling on his cap.

  "She kissed him at the gate," he tittered, "but in the hall his brother's welcome touched his heart."

  "Was she fair?" I asked.

  "Stabbed," he chuckled. "Think of the long journey, the days of peril, the dreadful nights! Think how he wandered, for her sake, year after year through hostile lands, yearning for kith and kin, yearning for her!"

  "She kissed him at the gate, but in the hall his brother's welcome touched his heart."

  "Was she fair?" I asked; but he only snarled, listening to the bells jingling in his cap.

  THE GREEN ROOM

  The Clown turned his powdered face to the mirror.

  "If to be fair is to be beautiful," he said, "who can compare with me in my white mask?"

  "Who can compare with him in his white mask?" I asked of Death beside me.

  "Who can compare with me?" said Death, "for I am paler still."

  "You are very beautiful," sighed the Clown, turning his powdered face from the mirror.

  THE LOVE TEST

  "If it is true that you love," said Love, "then wait no longer. Give her these jewels which would dishonour her and so dishonour you in loving one dishonoured. If it is true that you love," said Love, "then wait no longer."

  I took the jewels and went to her, but she trod upon them, sobbing: "Teach me to wait—I love you!"

  "Then wait, if it is true," said Love.

  END

  The Man Who Found Out (A Nightmare)

  by

  Algernon Blackwood

  I

  PROFESSOR MARK EBOR, the scientist, led a double life, and the only persons who knew it were his assistant, Dr. Laidlaw, and his publishers. But a double life need not always be a bad one, and, as Dr. Laidlaw and the gratified publishers well knew, the parallel lives of this particular man were equally good, and indefinitely produced would certainly have ended in a heaven somewhere that can suitably contain such strangely opposite characteristics as his remarkable personality combined.

  For Mark Ebor, F.R.S., etc., etc., was that unique combination hardly ever met with in actual life, a man of science and a mystic.

  As the first, his name stood in the gallery of the great, and as the second—but there came the mystery! For under the pseudonym of “Pilgrim” (the author of that brilliant series of books that appealed to so many), his identity was as well concealed as that of the anonymous writer of the weather reports in a daily newspaper. Thousands read the sanguine, optimistic, stimulating little books that issued annually from the pen of “Pilgrim,” and thousands bore their daily burdens better for having read; while the Press generally agreed that the author, besides being an incorrigible enthusiast and optimist, was also—a woman; but no one ever succeeded in penetrating the veil of anonymity and discovering that “Pilgrim” and the biologist were one and the same person.

  Mark Ebor, as Dr. Laidlaw knew him in his laboratory, was one man; but Mark Ebor, as he sometimes saw him after work was over, with rapt eyes and ecstatic face, discussing the possibilities of “union with God” and the future of the human race, was quite another.

  “I have always held, as you know,” he was saying one evening as he sat in the little study beyond the laboratory with his assistant and intimate, “that Vision should play a large part in the life of the awakened man—not to be regarded as infallible, of course, but to be observed and made use of as a guide-post to possibilities——”

  “I am aware of your peculiar views, sir,” the young doctor put in deferentially, yet with a certain impatience.

  “For Visions come from a region of the consciousness where observation and experiment are out of the question,” pursued the other with enthusiasm, not noticing the interruption, “and, while they should be checked by reason afterwards, they should not be laughed at or ignored. All inspiration, I hold, is of the nature of interior Vision, and all our best knowledge has come—such is my confirmed belief—as a sudden revelation to the brain prepared to receive it——”

  “Prepared by hard work first, by concentration, by the closest possible study of ordina
ry phenomena,” Dr. Laidlaw allowed himself to observe.

  “Perhaps,” sighed the other; “but by a process, none the less, of spiritual illumination. The best match in the world will not light a candle unless the wick be first suitably prepared.”

  It was Laidlaw’s turn to sigh. He knew so well the impossibility of arguing with his chief when he was in the regions of the mystic, but at the same time the respect he felt for his tremendous attainments was so sincere that he always listened with attention and deference, wondering how far the great man would go and to what end this curious combination of logic and “illumination” would eventually lead him.

  “Only last night,” continued the elder man, a sort of light coming into his rugged features, “the vision came to me again—the one that has haunted me at intervals ever since my youth, and that will not be denied.”

  Dr. Laidlaw fidgeted in his chair.

  “About the Tablets of the Gods, you mean—and that they lie somewhere hidden in the sands,” he said patiently. A sudden gleam of interest came into his face as he turned to catch the professor’s reply.

  “And that I am to be the one to find them, to decipher them, and to give the great knowledge to the world——”

  “Who will not believe,” laughed Laidlaw shortly, yet interested in spite of his thinly-veiled contempt.

  “Because even the keenest minds, in the right sense of the word, are hopelessly—unscientific,” replied the other gently, his face positively aglow with the memory of his vision. “Yet what is more likely,” he continued after a moment’s pause, peering into space with rapt eyes that saw things too wonderful for exact language to describe, “than that there should have been given to man in the first ages of the world some record of the purpose and problem that had been set him to solve? In a word,” he cried, fixing his shining eyes upon the face of his perplexed assistant, “that God’s messengers in the far-off ages should have given to His creatures some full statement of the secret of the world, of the secret of the soul, of the meaning of life and death—the explanation of our being here, and to what great end we are destined in the ultimate fullness of things?”

  Dr. Laidlaw sat speechless. These outbursts of mystical enthusiasm he had witnessed before. With any other man he would not have listened to a single sentence, but to Professor Ebor, man of knowledge and profound investigator, he listened with respect, because he regarded this condition as temporary and pathological, and in some sense a reaction from the intense strain of the prolonged mental concentration of many days.

  He smiled, with something between sympathy and resignation as he met the other’s rapt gaze.

  “But you have said, sir, at other times, that you consider the ultimate secrets to be screened from all possible——”

  “The ultimate secrets, yes,” came the unperturbed reply; “but that there lies buried somewhere an indestructible record of the secret meaning of life, originally known to men in the days of their pristine innocence, I am convinced. And, by this strange vision so often vouchsafed to me, I am equally sure that one day it shall be given to me to announce to a weary world this glorious and terrific message.”

  And he continued at great length and in glowing language to describe the species of vivid dream that had come to him at intervals since earliest childhood, showing in detail how he discovered these very Tablets of the Gods, and proclaimed their splendid contents—whose precise nature was always, however, withheld from him in the vision—to a patient and suffering humanity.

  “The Scrutator, sir, well described ‘Pilgrim’ as the Apostle of Hope,” said the young doctor gently, when he had finished; “and now, if that reviewer could hear you speak and realize from what strange depths comes your simple faith——”

  The professor held up his hand, and the smile of a little child broke over his face like sunshine in the morning.

  “Half the good my books do would be instantly destroyed,” he said sadly; “they would say that I wrote with my tongue in my cheek. But wait,” he added significantly; “wait till I find these Tablets of the Gods! Wait till I hold the solutions of the old world-problems in my hands! Wait till the light of this new revelation breaks upon confused humanity, and it wakes to find its bravest hopes justified! Ah, then, my dear Laidlaw——”

  He broke off suddenly; but the doctor, cleverly guessing the thought in his mind, caught him up immediately.

  “Perhaps this very summer,” he said, trying hard to make the suggestion keep pace with honesty; “in your explorations in Assyria—your digging in the remote civilization of what was once Chaldea, you may find—what you dream of——”

  The professor held up his hand, and the smile of a fine old face.

  “Perhaps,” he murmured softly, “perhaps!”

  And the young doctor, thanking the gods of science that his leader’s aberrations were of so harmless a character, went home strong in the certitude of his knowledge of externals, proud that he was able to refer his visions to self-suggestion, and wondering complaisantly whether in his old age he might not after all suffer himself from visitations of the very kind that afflicted his respected chief.

  And as he got into bed and thought again of his master’s rugged face, and finely shaped head, and the deep lines traced by years of work and self-discipline, he turned over on his pillow and fell asleep with a sigh that was half of wonder, half of regret.

  II

  It was in February, nine months later, when Dr. Laidlaw made his way to Charing Cross to meet his chief after his long absence of travel and exploration. The vision about the so-called Tablets of the Gods had meanwhile passed almost entirely from his memory.

  There were few people in the train, for the stream of traffic was now running the other way, and he had no difficulty in finding the man he had come to meet. The shock of white hair beneath the low-crowned felt hat was alone enough to distinguish him by easily.

  “Here I am at last!” exclaimed the professor, somewhat wearily, clasping his friend’s hand as he listened to the young doctor’s warm greetings and questions. “Here I am—a little older, and much dirtier than when you last saw me!” He glanced down laughingly at his travel-stained garments.

  “And much wiser,” said Laidlaw, with a smile, as he bustled about the platform for porters and gave his chief the latest scientific news.

  At last they came down to practical considerations.

  “And your luggage—where is that? You must have tons of it, I suppose?” said Laidlaw.

  “Hardly anything,” Professor Ebor answered. “Nothing, in fact, but what you see.”

  “Nothing but this hand-bag?” laughed the other, thinking he was joking.

  “And a small portmanteau in the van,” was the quiet reply. “I have no other luggage.”

  “You have no other luggage?” repeated Laidlaw, turning sharply to see if he were in earnest.

  “Why should I need more?” the professor added simply.

  Something in the man’s face, or voice, or manner—the doctor hardly knew which—suddenly struck him as strange. There was a change in him, a change so profound—so little on the surface, that is—that at first he had not become aware of it. For a moment it was as though an utterly alien personality stood before him in that noisy, bustling throng. Here, in all the homely, friendly turmoil of a Charing Cross crowd, a curious feeling of cold passed over his heart, touching his life with icy finger, so that he actually trembled and felt afraid.

  He looked up quickly at his friend, his mind working with startled and unwelcome thoughts.

  “Only this?” he repeated, indicating the bag. “But where’s all the stuff you went away with? And—have you brought nothing home—no treasures?”

  “This is all I have,” the other said briefly. The pale smile that went with the words caused the doctor a second indescribable sensation of uneasiness. Something was very wrong, something was very queer; he wondered now that he had not noticed it sooner.

  “The rest follows, of course, by
slow freight,” he added tactfully, and as naturally as possible. “But come, sir, you must be tired and in want of food after your long journey. I’ll get a taxi at once, and we can see about the other luggage afterwards.”

  It seemed to him he hardly knew quite what he was saying; the change in his friend had come upon him so suddenly and now grew upon him more and more distressingly. Yet he could not make out exactly in what it consisted. A terrible suspicion began to take shape in his mind, troubling him dreadfully.

  “I am neither very tired, nor in need of food, thank you,” the professor said quietly. “And this is all I have. There is no luggage to follow. I have brought home nothing—nothing but what you see.”

  His words conveyed finality. They got into a taxi, tipped the porter, who had been staring in amazement at the venerable figure of the scientist, and were conveyed slowly and noisily to the house in the north of London where the laboratory was, the scene of their labours of years.

  And the whole way Professor Ebor uttered no word, nor did Dr. Laidlaw find the courage to ask a single question.