Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911

by Sam Moskowitz (ed. )

  He evidently thought I was becoming wearied by his discourse, for he went on:

  “You do not see what all this has to do with the murder of Lapham.” He spoke as though murder on the public street with a cheap revolver purchased for the purpose was a scientific phenomenon. I replied that I was much interested in his discovery, and had no doubt that it bore significantly upon the tragedy.

  “It does,” he muttered, “it does,” and suddenly lapsed into silence. He sat so, staring fixedly into space, the smoke trailing up slowly from the stump of his cigarette. I watched, and I saw the gleam gradually grow in his eyes, exactly as it grew in the eyes of the murderer Harley when the heart of the man he had stabbed, with the hole made by his knife, was produced in court. Dr. Forbes suddenly flicked the ash from his cigarette and turning upon me swiftly, said:

  “I knew the man for a villain from the first. I knew it instinctively. I knew it from observation. But, like a fool, I could not be content with mere knowledge. I had to tell someone what I thought, and most foolish of all, I told Rhoda. She did not, would not, so consider him. I was afraid she would fall in love with him. He came and I said nothing. He continued to come and I protested. She laughed—defended him. He came more and more frequently, and finding it was useless to object, I shut myself in my laboratory and trusted that her natural good sense would find him out. They became intimate, how intimate I never fully realized until one evening, while he was calling, the telegraphic instrument in the laboratory clicked off the message, ‘Come to the library.’

  “I dropped my work and rushed in. They greeted me with a burst of laughter, and to my queries Rhoda explained that she had been showing all our private means of communication, and she had sent the message to prove their efficiency! I was intensely angry, not so much because of the poor jest at my expense, as because of the revelation of our secrets to a stranger. I fear I talked too sharply. I certainly left the room in a rage.

  “As a matter of fact, I probably took the incident too much to heart, but, at the time, it seemed to me an infallible indication that she loved the man, and I had no desire that she should marry him. This fear, however, was groundless, for but a short time afterwards, she came to me one night and told me that he had proposed to her and that she had refused him. I asked how he took it, and she reluctantly admitted that he had been very angry. I expected that this would put an end to his visits, but it did not. The man was infatuated, and continued to call regularly.

  “In the meantime, in fact, all the time, there was another young man who seemingly could not be kept away. You may know him. He is a young attorney and a very decent chap—Hal Drenning.”

  I acknowledged a slight acquaintance.

  “I will confess that I was rather prepossessed in his favor and hoped that if anyone were successful it might be he. His principal fault seemed to be a quick and terrible temper. I knew him to be preferable to Lapham, and said so, and when I said it I was surprised to notice that Rhoda blushed. Perhaps I was too much inclined to dictate to her, but seeing her so, I said:

  “‘Rhoda, I wouldn’t flirt with him if I were you.’ She laughed and said, ‘Why not?’

  “‘I think he loves you,’ I replied, ‘and he quite meets with my approval.’

  “She curtsied mockingly, and mockingly said:

  “ ‘But how can I marry him when Bert says I shall marry him and him alone?’

  “ ‘When did he say that?’ I asked.

  “ ‘Oh, the other evening, after he had accused me of seeing too much of Mr. Drenning.’

  “I spoke my mind rather plainly concerning his impertinence, and, still angry, was leaving the room, when she danced before me and smilingly declared me foolish.

  “ ‘I shall marry neither of them,’ she said, ‘I shall remain here and be your loyal and devoted sister.’

  “ ‘You will refuse Hal?’ I said.

  “ ‘Certainly, I shall refuse them all,’ she cried.

  “ ‘Hal would not take a refusal calmly,’ I said, and as I spoke the thought of his ungovernable temper occurred to me. Indeed he would not take a refusal lightly, and if she did intend to refuse him then her conduct had been inexcusable, for she had flirted with him outrageously.

  “This conversation took place a little over a week ago. Last Tuesday evening Rhoda came down at eight, dressed to receive visitors. I was in the laboratory at work when she came in to me and twirled about to show me a new dress. I said something about it in response to her inquiries as to its length and fit and style, etc., and I then asked her who was coming, and she, in a sort of a pouting way, said she did not know whether she would tell me or not. I was somewhat piqued, for I could see no reason for her attitude, when, with one of her quick changes, she broke into a laugh and said—I remember her words distinctly:

  “ ‘Oh, Oh, you are a funny brother. Well, if you must know, it is—’ she hesitated for a moment—’your friend, Mr. Drenning. You see, he is liable to propose any evening, and I want to be prepared to meet the emergency.’

  “Still laughing, she tripped lightly out of the room, and of course it never occurred to me that she might be joking. Somewhat later, I heard the bell ring and footsteps in the hall. I continued at my work, which was that of testing some new tubes and recording their relative strengths. Later in the evening I heard the front door slam, and some one pass out. It was an ordinary occurrence, and made no marked impression on my mind. You will understand. I have often noticed, as I presume you have, that the unusual is seldom accompanied by what might be termed anticipatory phenomena.

  “It must have been an hour later that I finished my task, and then, for the first time, it occurred to me that Rhoda had not been in to say good-night, nor had I heard her go upstairs. I lit a cigarette and, opening the door into the hall, saw that the light in the parlor was still burning. Thinking that she was reading, and that it was time for her to retire, I walked down the hall and stepped into the room.”

  The doctor paused and passed his hand across his eyes.

  “I presume,” he continued, “that I shall continue to stand and gaze from that doorway until I am aimlessly twirling at the end of a rope. She was seated in the Morris chair by the table and she was facing me. Her body had collapsed upon itself, her head hung to the left, and her tongue was lolling from a mouth idiotically agape, and the spittle was drooling from the lips to the lace frill of the gown. Her eyes were open and glazed and full of a wild terror. Her arms lay along the arms of the chair, and about them there was a queer suggestion of a sudden relapse after vainly striving to reach something. I do not know, I cannot explain to you, how or why a recumbent figure could or would suggest a collapse preceded by a straining for some definite object, but such was the effect produced upon me in the instant I stood staring, dazed.

  “Recovering, I rushed to her and straightened her up. She was loose flesh in my hands. I felt for her pulse and felt—nothing. I tried again and there was no movement. I held the crystal face of my watch to her mouth. There was no breath visible. She was dead. I dropped her hand and ran back to the laboratory for a stimulant. I always kept a supply in a small cabinet in the corner, and in that I was groping for the flask I wished when I was startled by the quick click of one of the telegraphic instruments. I stopped in amazement. There was a message coming in from the room I had just left, and the touch was her touch. I would have known it in a thousand.

  “Jerkily, in the abbreviations we used for greater convenience, were ticked off these words, ‘Come, being killed by’—I waited for no more, but rushed to the room. It was empty save for her, and she was exactly as I had left her, except that her hand had slipped off the chair arm and was hanging down outside.

  “Just a moment,” I said. “Was there a sender on that chair?” He stared at me fixedly, the lids slowly rolling back from the whites of his eyes. “Your mind travels with mine, Sir,” he said in a husky, rasping whisper. “There was a sender on that chair arm, on the under side. Do you think it possible that s
he could have revived sufficiently to send? Between us—between us —when I dropped her hand before leaving for the whiskey I left it on the arm by the sender. I know that the hand was not hanging down when I went away.”

  “Go on,” I prompted.

  He paid no heed to me, but commenced to talk as though to himself. “But she was dead,” he said. “She was dead. She had been dead for at least an hour. There was absolutely no change in her when I had returned. She was dead both before and after. I knew it, though I denied it to myself.”

  He seemed to come out of his musings, and turning to me again, went on with his narrative:

  “I picked her up and carried her, a lifeless, slippery, jelly-like mass, into the laboratory, and laid her on the operating table. There, in frantic haste, I tried every means of revival I knew, and all without success. Sir, from the time I first caught sight of her until I finally gave up the struggle I vow to you there was no movement, sign, symbol or symptom of life. She was dead.

  “Like anyone else suddenly deprived of a great possession I did not at first grasp its full meaning. Indeed, I doubt if I ever will. Not until I gave up my efforts at resuscitation did I commence to wonder. The coroners have returned their verdict. You know what they say. They do not know what caused her death. They think I killed her while experimenting, I fancy.”

  He glanced at me from the corner of his eye and went on calmly, as a totally disinterested witness might on the stand:

  “There was no mark on the body. There was not a scratch or pin prick on the skin. There were no bruises, no discolorations, no abrasions, no traces or signs of physical violence. I was about to name it heart disease, when I remembered the message which had come in over the wire, ‘Come, being killed by—For the first time I realized that the message was incomplete. For some unaccountable reason that fact had theretofore escaped me. Then, Sir, I became calm and went about my work systematically.

  “I had no doubt about the identity of the murderer, if there was one. I reasoned that Drenning had proposed, been refused, and, perhaps in a fit of passion, had struck and killed her. ‘But—but’, I said, ‘there has been no striking. It must have been done in some other way. But if it was done, then there will certainly be some trace.’ The body was already on the operating table, so I attached the proper tube and searched for metallic substances. I expected to discover the presence in the body of some hard, foreign substance matter capable of producing death. I did not know what form it would take, so I searched carefully, realizing that it might take any one of a dozen odd and unexpected appearances such, for instance, as a needle driven into and broken off in some vital part. You are perhaps aware that long, slender glass needles, if thrust in quickly, will kill very effectually, and with such an instrument, if it is broken carefully, there is scarcely any wound visible.

  “I worked over her for hours and hours. I found nothing, but I would not give up. Again and again I examined, and always with the same result. Sir, it was only after four long hours that I sat down, realizing that further search was in vain.

  “It would be impossible for me to explain to you the feeling of anger which possessed me during the next half hour. It was a rage growing out of a sense of impotence, inspired by a realization that, despite all my knowledge, I was baffled. I went over every expedient I knew. I thought of every device of which I had ever heard. I endeavored to invent new and untried experiments, and while so groping it occurred to me that an examination of the blood and the nerves might by a remote chance reveal something.

  “In desperation, I fitted on a tube for the circulatory system and swung the fluoroscope over the body. I thought I would begin with the hands, for there, in some of the very small blood vessels where the corpuscles pass in single file, if there was anything wrong it would be visible. I turned on the power and put my eye to the microscope. Gradually, as I looked, and my eye became accustomed to the light, the flesh faded away from the bones, leaving them crude and ghastly like a withered and steamed stump of a limb. In the continued light from the tube, and even as I watched, this, too, faded into fog and disappeared. Then gradually and slowly the circulatory system came into view, a network of veins like the web of a spider.

  “I was looking at the tip of the first finger of the right hand. And now, as the blood became more distinct, I changed the object glass of my microscope for a stronger one, and with that brought into the field one section of one minute vessel. It needed but a glance to assure me that the machine was in perfect order. There were the outer walls of the vein, and within, like coins in a groove, were the disk-like corpuscles, not as I had often seen them, moving slowly along their way, but stopped, set in their places, still, as machinery is still when the engine is dead.

  “I examined closely, and was about to abandon my investigations, finding nothing, when I happened to notice that all the corpuscles were arranged in one certain way. It was such an unusual thing that it attracted my attention. Instead of the red and white corpuscles being mixed together as they usually are, without any order or sequence, all those within the field of the microscope were as accurately ordered as though they had been arranged and put in place. They lay in series, three red disks clogged into a line, a short space, one white disk, two more reds and a long space, after which the same thing was repeated. It was a collection of groups of corpuscles, each group distinct from each other and each composed as I have stated.”

  I fancy that I started, for he quickly sketched the following:

  “It was thus that they were arranged,” he said.

  I did not look enlightened, for I saw nothing strange.

  “Do you know what those are?” he asked, leaning forward excitedly. “They are the Morse code letters L and A, and together form the abbreviation for the name Lapham, which we always used in designating him whenever we had occasion to put his name on the wire. Sir, there were no foreign or poisonous manifestations in her blood, but in all her veins, in all her body, I found the corpuscles arranged that way. What significance has it? I am not a psychologist. I cannot explain, but you will readily recognize the condition confronting us.

  “We are reduced to an alternative. When I entered the room she was either dead or in a comatose condition. If she was dead, the sending of the partial message can only be explained on spiritualistic grounds, or on the theory that the subliminal self, which in our family is probably telegraphic, was temporarily roused to action by the touch of the finger upon the button. In that case, it would not be imagining vainly to suppose that the whole material fabric was concentrated in the expression to which it was giving utterance, and such concentration would very naturally involve the fundamental elements of life, the blood among the first.

  “On the other hand, if she was not dead, the same reasoning holds good. Given the concentration which certainly must have been present, add but the hand slipping from the chair arm and sender the instant the name of the murderer was to be transmitted, and when the whole system was charged with the symbol, and the identical situation here produced might not be impossible.”

  He stopped abruptly, absently raised his dead cigarette to his lips; drew on it once or twice, and looking at me languidly, said:

  “I see that you follow me. You now have the entire narrative preliminary to the premeditation. I can only add that when I announced to Lapham my intention of shooting, primal fear shone in his eyes and his thickening tongue stuttered a feeble ‘God, how did you find it out?’ That is the entire story, and as I said, you will recognize the absolute inutility of it all as evidence.”

  “There is one thing more,” I said, “What caused her death?”

  The keeper was moving nearer, and to avoid being overheard he leaned over and whispered in my ear. I was astonished.

  “How did he know of that?” I asked. “It is most unusual.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but it can be done that way.”

  And that is why I defended Dr. Forbes. After his conviction, I intended to let him go before
the court and tell his story, and thereby save his neck, and get himself incarcerated in the insane asylum but, unfortunately, the night after he was pronounced guilty he was found dead in his cell. The doctors said, in another burst of medical candor, that they did not know the cause of death, but were inclined to suspect the heart.

  Medical Miracles

  It is quite understandable that one of the primary interests that readers of the turn of the century had in medical progress was in the prolongation of life. The brewing of the long-searched-for “elixir” is depicted with proper atmospheric background by Louis Gunnis for Old Doctor Rutherford by D. F. hannigan, The Ludgate Monthly, September 1891.

  The Ludgate Monthly

  September, 1891

  OLD DOCTOR RUTHERFORD

  by D. F. Hannigan

  OLD DOCTOR RUTHERFORD is the oldest story in this book. It was first published in The Ludgate Monthly, September 1891, and clearly displays its transitional qualities. It deals with the elixir of immortality, a holdover from the alchemists of medieval times, and can be directly related to the concept of The Wandering Jew. The presentation is in the classic tradition but nevertheless sustains interest and is not without entertainment value.