The Best American Mystery Stories of the Nineteenth Century

by Penzler, Otto

  “‘No.’

  “He struck the window-sill impatiently with the palm of his hand.

  “‘And why not?’

  “I hesitated an instant.

  “‘Because, upon the whole, I do not care to be the instrument of your self-destruction.’

  “‘Don’t be a fool!’ he retorted. ‘Speak honestly, and say that because of a little moral shrinkage on your part you prefer to leave a human being to a death of agony. I don’t like physical pain. I am like a woman about it, but it is better than hanging, or life-imprisonment, or any jury finding.’

  “I became exhortatory.

  “‘Why not face it like a man and take your chances? Who knows—’

  “‘I have had my chances,’ he returned. ‘I have squandered more chances than most men ever lay eyes on—and I don’t care. If I had the opportunity, I’d squander them again. It is the only thing chances are made for.’

  “‘What a scoundrel you are!’ I exclaimed.

  “‘Well, I don’t know,’ he answered; ‘there have been worse men. I never said a harsh word to a woman, and I never hit a man when he was down—’

  “I blushed. ‘Oh, I didn’t mean to hit you,’ I responded.

  “He took no notice.

  “‘I like my wife,’ he said. ‘She is a good woman, and I’d do a good deal to keep her and the children from knowing the truth. Perhaps I’d kill myself even if I didn’t want to. I don’t know, but I am tired—damned tired.’

  “‘And yet you deserted her.’

  “‘I did. I tried not to, but I couldn’t help it. If I was free to go back to her to-morrow, unless I was ill and wanted nursing, I’d see that she had grown shapeless, and that her hands were coarse.’ He stretched out his own, which were singularly white and delicate. ‘I believe I’d leave her in a week,’ he said.

  “Then with an eager movement he pointed to my bag.

  “‘That is the ending of the difficulty,’ he added, ‘otherwise I swear that before the train gets to London I will swallow this stuff, and die like a rat.’

  “‘I admit your right to die in any manner you choose, but I don’t see that it is my place to assist you. It is an ugly job.’

  “‘So am I,’ he retorted, grimly. ‘At any rate, if you leave the train with that package in your bag it will be cowardice—sheer cowardice. And for the sake of your cowardice you will damn me to this—’ He touched the vial.

  “‘It won’t be pleasant,’ I said, and we were silent.

  “I knew that the man had spoken the truth. I was accustomed to lies, and had learned to detect them. I knew, also, that the world would be well rid of him and his kind. Why I should preserve him for death upon the gallows I did not see. The majesty of the law would be in no way ruffled by his premature departure; and if I could trust that part of his story, the lives of innocent women and children would, in the other case, suffer considerably. And even if I and my unopened bag alighted at Leicester, I was sure that he would never reach London alive. He was a desperate man, this I read in his set face, his dazed eyes, his nervous hands. He was a poor devil, and I was sorry for him as it was. Why, then, should I contribute, by my refusal to comply with his request, an additional hour of agony to his existence? Could I, with my pretence of philosophic latitudinarianism, alight at my station, leaving him to swallow the acid and die like a rat in a cage before the journey was over? I remembered that I had once seen a guinea-pig die from the effects of carbolic acid, and the remembrance sickened me suddenly.

  “As I sat there listening to the noise of the slackening train, which was nearing Leicester, I thought of a hundred things. I thought of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann. I thought of the dying guinea-pig. I thought of the broad-faced Irish wife and the two children.

  “Then ‘Leicester’ flashed before me, and the train stopped. I rose, gathered my coat and rug, and lifted the volume of von Hartmann from the seat. The man remained motionless in the corner of the compartment, but his eyes followed me.

  “I stooped, opened my bag, and laid the chemist’s package upon the seat. Then I stepped out, closing the door after me.” As the speaker finished, he reached forward, selected an almond from the stand of nuts, fitted it carefully between the crackers, and cracked it slowly.

  The young lady upon the Captain’s right shook herself with a shudder.

  “What a horrible story!” she exclaimed; “for it is a story, after all, and not a fact.”

  “A point, rather,” suggested the Englishman; “but is that all?”

  “All of the point,” returned the alienist. “The next day I saw in the Times that a man, supposed to be James Morganson, who was wanted for murder, was found dead in a first-class smoking-compartment of the Midland Railway, Coroner’s verdict, ‘Death resulting from an overdose of morphia, taken with suicidal intent.’”

  The journalist dropped a lump of sugar in his cup and watched it attentively.

  “I don’t think I could have done it,” he said. “I might have left him with his carbolic. But I couldn’t have deliberately given him his death-potion.”

  “But as long as he was going to die,” responded the girl in the yachting-cap, “it was better to let him die painlessly.”

  The Englishman smiled. “Can a woman ever consider the ethical side of a question when the sympathetic one is visible?” he asked.

  The alienist cracked another almond. “I was sincere,” he said. “Of that there is no doubt. I thought I did right. The question is—did I do right?”

  “It would have been wiser,” began the lawyer, argumentatively, “since you were stronger than he, to take the vial from him, and to leave him to the care of the law.”

  “But the wife and children,” replied the girl in the yachting-cap. “And hanging is so horrible!”

  “So is murder,” responded the lawyer, dryly.

  The young lady on the Captain’s right laid her napkin upon the table and rose. “I don’t know what was right,” she said, “but I do know that in your place I should have felt like a murderer.”

  The alienist smiled half cynically. “So I did,” he answered; “but there is such a thing, my dear young lady, as a conscientious murderer.”

  1899

  JACK LONDON

  A Thousand Deaths

  Born John Chaney, JACK LONDON (1876–1916) was the illegitimate son of an itinerant astrologer; eight months after his birth, his mother married John London. Growing up in poverty in California’s Bay Area, he went on the road as a hobo, riding freight trains and going to jail for a month of hard labor, which helped give him both understanding of and sympathy for the working-class poor as well as distaste for the drudgery of that sort of life. He became enamored of socialism after reading The Communist Manifesto, though he was so eager to be rich that he joined the gold rush to the Klondike region in Yukon, Canada, in 1896. He returned to Oakland without having mined an ounce of gold but with the background for the classic American novel The Call of the Wild (1903), which became one of the best-selling novels of the early twentieth century, with more than one and a half million copies sold in his lifetime.

  London began to sell stories to Overland Monthly, The Black Cat, and Atlantic Monthly in the 1890s. Books soon followed. He was hired as a journalist by Hearst to report the Russo-Japanese War for the unheard-of fee of $4,000, became an international best-selling author, earning over $1 million, and by 1913 was called the highest-paid, best-known, and most popular writer in the world. Among the books that remain read to this day are such adventure classics as The Sea Wolf (1904) and White Fang (1905) and the autobiographical Martin Eden (1909). He had become a heavy drinker while still a teenager, and alcoholism, illness, financial woes, and overwork probably induced him to commit suicide at the age of forty, though the official cause of death was listed as uremic poisoning.

  Though best known for his adventure fiction, London excelled at many literary genres, including crime fiction. The present story is a strange and compelling mixture of scie
nce, adventure, and crime fiction and is one of very few stories involving multiple murders—of the same victim!

  “A Thousand Deaths” was first published in the May 1899 issue of The Black Cat.

  ***

  I HAD BEEN IN the water about an hour, and cold, exhausted, with a terrible cramp in my right calf, it seemed as though my hour had come. Fruitlessly struggling against the strong ebb tide, I had beheld the maddening procession of the water-front lights slip by, but now I gave up attempting to breast the stream and contended myself with the bitter thoughts of a wasted career, now drawing to a close.

  It had been my luck to come of good, English stock, but of parents whose account with the bankers far exceeded their knowledge of child-nature and the rearing of children. While born with a silver spoon in my mouth, the blessed atmosphere of the home circle was to me unknown. My father, a very learned man and a celebrated antiquarian, gave no thought to his family, being constantly lost in the abstractions of his study; while my mother, noted far more for her good looks than her good sense, sated herself with the adulation of the society in which she was perpetually plunged. I went through the regular school and college routine of a boy of the English bourgeoisie, and as the years brought me increasing strength and passions, my parents suddenly became aware that I was possessed of an immortal soul, and endeavored to draw the curb. But it was too late; I perpetrated the wildest and most audacious folly, and was disowned by my people, ostracized by the society I had so long outraged, and with the thousand pounds my father gave me, with the declaration that he would neither see me again nor give me more, I took a first-class passage to Australia.

  Since then my life had been one long peregrination—from the Orient to the Occident, from the Arctic to the Antarctic—to find myself at last, an able seaman at thirty, in the full vigor of my manhood, drowning in San Francisco bay because of a disastrously successful attempt to desert my ship.

  My right leg was drawn up by the cramp, and I was suffering the keenest agony. A slight breeze stirred up a choppy sea, which washed into my mouth and down my throat, nor could I prevent it. Though I still contrived to keep afloat, it was merely mechanical, for I was rapidly becoming unconscious. I have a dim recollection of drifting past the sea-wall, and of catching a glimpse of an upriver steamer’s starboard light; then everything became a blank.

  I heard the low hum of insect life, and felt the balmy air of a spring morning fanning my cheek. Gradually it assumed a rhythmic flow, to whose soft pulsations my body seemed to respond. I floated on the gentle bosom of a summer’s sea, rising and falling with dreamy pleasure on each crooning wave. But the pulsations grew stronger; the humming, louder; the waves, larger, fiercer—I was dashed about on a stormy sea. A great agony fastened upon me. Brilliant, intermittent sparks of light flashed athwart my inner consciousness; in my ears there was the sound of many waters; then a sudden snapping of an intangible something, and I awoke.

  The scene, of which I was protagonist, was a curious one. A glance sufficed to inform me that I lay on the cabin floor of some gentleman’s yacht, in a most uncomfortable posture. On either side, grasping my arms and working them up and down like pump handles, were two peculiarly clad, dark-skinned creatures. Though conversant with most aboriginal types, I could not conjecture their nationality. Some attachment had been fastened about my head, which connected my respiratory organs with the machine I shall next describe. My nostrils, however, had been closed, forcing me to breathe through my mouth. Foreshortened by the obliquity of my line of vision, I beheld two tubes, similar to small hosing but of different composition, which emerged from my mouth and went off at an acute angle from each other. The first came to an abrupt termination and lay on the floor beside me; the second traversed the floor in numerous coils, connecting with the apparatus I have promised to describe.

  In the days before my life had become tangential, I had dabbled not a little in science, and, conversant with the appurtenances and general paraphernalia of the laboratory, I appreciated the machine I now beheld. It was composed chiefly of glass, the construction being of that crude sort which is employed for experimentative purposes. A vessel of water was surrounded by an air chamber, to which was fixed a vertical tube, surmounted by a globe. In the center of this was a vacuum gauge. The water in the tube moved upwards and downwards, creating alternate inhalations and exhalations, which were in turn communicated to me through the hose. With this, and the aid of the men who pumped my arms so vigorously, had the process of breathing been artificially carried on, my chest rising and falling and my lungs expanding and contracting, till nature could be persuaded to again take up her wonted labor.

  As I opened my eyes the appliance about my head, nostrils and mouth was removed. Draining a stiff three fingers of brandy, I staggered to my feet to thank my preserver, and confronted—my father. But long years of fellowship with danger had taught me self-control, and I waited to see if he would recognize me. Not so; he saw in me no more than a runaway sailor and treated me accordingly.

  Leaving me to the care of the blackies, he fell to revising the notes he had made on my resuscitation. As I ate of the handsome fare served up to me, confusion began on deck, and from the chanteys of the sailors and the rattling of blocks and tackles I surmised that we were getting under way. What a lark! Off on a cruise with my recluse father into the wide Pacific! Little did I realize, as I laughed to myself, which side the joke was to be on. Aye, had I known, I would have plunged overboard and welcomed the dirty fo’c’sle from which I had just escaped.

  I was not allowed on deck till we had sunk the Farallones and the last pilot boat. I appreciated this forethought on the part of my father and made it a point to thank him heartily, in my bluff seaman’s manner. I could not suspect that he had his own ends in view, in thus keeping my presence secret to all save the crew. He told me briefly of my rescue by his sailors, assuring me that the obligation was on his side, as my appearance had been most opportune. He had constructed the apparatus for the vindication of a theory concerning certain biological phenomena, and had been waiting for an opportunity to use it.

  “You have proved it beyond all doubt,” he said; then added with a sigh, “But only in the small matter of drowning.” But, to take a reef in my yarn—he offered me an advance of two pounds on my previous wages to sail with him, and this I considered handsome, for he really did not need me. Contrary to my expectations, I did not join the sailor’s mess, for’ard, being assigned to a comfortable stateroom and eating at the captain’s table. He had perceived that I was no common sailor, and I resolved to take this chance for reinstating myself in his good graces. I wove a fictitious past to account for my education and present position, and did my best to come in touch with him. I was not long in disclosing a predilection for scientific pursuits, nor he in appreciating my aptitude. I became his assistant, with a corresponding increase in wages, and before long, as he grew confidential and expounded his theories, I was as enthusiastic as himself.

  The days flew quickly by, for I was deeply interested in my new studies, passing my waking hours in his well-stocked library, or listening to his plans and aiding him in his laboratory work. But we were forced to forego many enticing experiments, a rolling ship not being exactly the proper place for delicate or intricate work. He promised me, however, many delightful hours in the magnificent laboratory for which we were bound. He had taken possession of an uncharted South Sea island, as he said, and turned it into a scientific paradise.

  We had not been on the island long before I discovered the horrible mare’s nest I had fallen into. But before I describe the strange things which came to pass, I must briefly outline the causes which culminated in as startling an experience as ever fell to the lot of man.

  Late in life, my father had abandoned the musty charms of antiquity and succumbed to the more fascinating ones embraced under the general head of biology. Having been thoroughly grounded during his youth in the fundamentals, he rapidly explored all the higher branches as fa
r as the scientific world had gone, and found himself on the no man’s land of the unknowable. It was his intention to pre-empt some of this unclaimed territory, and it was at this stage of his investigations that we had been thrown together. Having a good brain, though I say it myself, I had mastered his speculations and methods of reasoning, becoming almost as mad as himself. But I should not say this. The marvelous results we afterwards obtained can only go to prove his sanity. I can but say that he was the most abnormal specimen of cold-blooded cruelty I have ever seen.

  After having penetrated the dual mysteries of physiology and psychology, his thought had led him to the verge of a great field, for which, the better to explore, he began studies in higher organic chemistry, pathology, toxicology and other sciences and sub-sciences rendered kindred as accessories to his speculative hypotheses. Starting from the proposition that the direct cause of the temporary and permanent arrest of vitality was due to the coagulation of certain elements and compounds in the protoplasm, he had isolated and subjected these various substances to innumerable experiments. Since the temporary arrest of vitality in an organism brought coma, and a permanent arrest death, he held that by artificial means this coagulation of the protoplasm could be retarded, prevented, and even overcome in the extreme states of solidification. Or, to do away with the technical nomenclature, he argued that death, when not violent and in which none of the organs had suffered injury, was merely suspended vitality; and that, in such instances, life could be induced to resume its functions by the use of proper methods. This, then, was his idea: To discover the method—and by practical experimentation prove the possibility—of renewing vitality in a structure from which life had seemingly fled. Of course, he recognized the futility of such endeavor after decomposition had set in; he must have organisms which but the moment, the hour, or the day before, had been quick with life. With me, in a crude way, he had proved this theory. I was really drowned, really dead, when picked from the water of San Francisco bay—but the vital spark had been renewed by means of his aerotherapeutical apparatus, as he called it.