American Midnight

by Laird Hunt

  Wynne in the two voices of the play repeated:

  “VICTOR.—Where is the gentleman?

  CHISPE.—As the old song says:

  ‘His body is in Segovia,

  His soul is in Madrid.’”

  We could learn about the house we were in only that five families had moved in and out during the last year. Wynne resolved to shake off the gloom that wrapped us. In struggles to defy it, he on the strength of a thousand-dollar benefit, made one payment on the house and began repairs.

  On an off-night he was vainly trying to study a new part. Volz advised the relief to his nerves of reciting the dream scene from The Bells, reminding him he had compared it with his restlessness there. Wynne denied it.

  “Yes,” said Volz, “where the mesmerizer forces Matthias to confess.”

  But Wynne refused, as if vexed, till Volz offered to show in music his own mood, and I agreed to read some rhymes about mine. Volz was long tuning his violin.

  “I feel,” he said, “as if the passers-by would hear a secret. Music is such a subtle expression of emotion—like flower odor rolls far and affects the stranger. Hearken! In Heine’s Reisebilder, as the cross was thrown ringing on the banquet table of the gods, they grew dumb and pale, and even paler till they melted in mist. So shall you at the long-drawn wail of my violin grow breathless, and fade from each other’s sight.”

  The music closed round us, and we waited in its deep solitude. One brief, sad phrase fell from airy heights to lowest depths into a sea of sound, whose harmonious eddies as they widened breathed of passion and pain, now swooning, now reviving, with odd pauses and sighs that rose to cries of despair, but the tormenting first strain recurring fainter and fainter, as if drowning, drowning, drowned—yet floating back for repeated last plaint, as if not to be quelled, and closing, as it began, the whole.

  As I read the name of my verses, Volz murmured: “Les Nuits Blanches. No. 4. Stephen Heller.”

  SLEEPLESS NIGHTS.

  Against the garden’s mossy paling

  I lean, and wish the night away,

  Whose faint, unequal shadows trailing

  Seem but a dream of those of day.

  Sleep burdens blossom, bud, and leaf,

  My soul alone aspires, dilates,

  Yearns to forget its care and grief—

  No bath of sleep its pain abates.

  How dread these dreams of wide-eyed nights!

  What is, and is not, both I rue,

  My wild thoughts fly like wand’ring kites,

  No peace falls with this balmy dew.

  Through slumb’rous stillness, scarcely stirred

  By sudden trembles, as when shifts

  O’er placid pool some skimming bird,

  Its Lethean bowl a poppy lifts.

  If one deep draught my doubts could solve,

  The world might bubble down its brim,

  Like Cleopatra’s pearl dissolve,

  With all my dreams within its rim.

  What should I know but calm repose?

  How feel, recalling this lost sphere?

  Alas! the fabled poppy shows

  Upon its bleeding heart—a tear!

  Wynne unwillingly began to recite: “‘I fear nothing, but dreams are dreams—’”

  He stammered, could not go on, and fell to the floor. We got him to bed. He never spoke sanely after. His wild fancies appalled us watching him all night.

  “Avaunt Sathanas! That’s not my cue,” he muttered. “A full house tonight. How could Talma forget how the crowd looked, and fancy it a pack of skeletons? Tell Volz to keep the violins playing through this scene, it works me up as well as thrills the audience. Oh, what tiresome nights I have lately, always dreaming of scenes where rival women move, as in Court and Stage, where, all masked, the king makes love to Frances Stewart before the queen’s face! How do I try to cure it? ‘And being thus frighted, swear a prayer or two and sleep again.’ Madame, you’re late; you’ve too little rouge; you’ll look ghastly. We’re not called yet; let’s rehearse our scene. Now, then, I enter left, pass to the window. You cry ‘is this true?’ and faint. All crowd about. Quick curtain.”

  Volz and I looked at each other.

  “Can our magnetism make his senses so sharp that he knows what is in our minds?” he asked me.

  “Nonsense!” I said. “Memory, laudanum, and whisky.”

  “There,” Wynne went on, “the orchestra is stopping. They’ve rung up the curtain. Don’t hold me. The stage waits, yet how can I go outside my door to step on dead bodies? Street and sidewalk are knee-deep with them. They rise and curse me for disturbing them. I lift my cane to strike. It turns to a snake, whose slimy body writhes in my hand. Trying to hold it from biting me, my nails cut my palm till blood streams to drown the snake.”

  He awed us not alone from having no control of his thoughts, but because there came now and then a strange influx of emotion as if other souls passed in and out of his body.

  “Is this hell?” he groaned. “What blank darkness! Where am I? What is that infernal music haunting me through all space? If I could only escape it I need not go back to earth—to that room where I feel choked, where the very wallpaper frets me with its flaunting birds flying to and fro, mocking my fettered state. ‘Here, here in the very den of the wolf!’ Hallo, Benvolio, call boy’s hunting you. Romeo’s gone on.

  ‘See where he steals—

  Locked in some gloomy covert under key

  Of cautionary silence, with his arms

  Threaded, like these cross-boughs, in sorrow’s knot.’

  What is this dread that weighs like a nightmare? ‘I do not fear; like Macbeth, I only inhabit trembling.’ ‘For one of them—she is in hell already, and burns, poor soul! For the other’—Ah! must I die here, alone in the woods, felled by a coward, Indian-like, from behind a tree? None of the boys will know. ‘I just now come from a whole world of mad women that had almost—what, is she dead?’ Poor Felipa!”

  “Did you tell him her name?” I asked Volz.

  “No,” said he. “Can one man’s madness be another’s real life?”

  “Blood was spilt—the avenger’s wing hovered above my house,” raved Wynne. “What are these lights, hundreds of them—serpent’s eyes? Is it the audience—coiled, many-headed monster, following me round the world? Why do they hiss? I’ve played this part a hundred times. ‘Taught by Rage, and Hunger, and Despair?’ Do they, full-fed, well-clothed, light-hearted, know how to judge me? ‘A plague on both your houses!’ What is that flame? Fire that consumes my vitals—spon-ta-neous combustion! It is then possible. Water! water!”

  The doctor said there had been some great strain on Wynne’s mind. He sank fast, though we did all we could. Toward morning I turned to Volz with the words:

  “He is dead.”

  The city missionary was passing the open door. He grimly muttered:

  “Better dead than alive!”

  “My God! say not that!” cried Volz. “The nerve which hears is last to die. He may know—”

  He faltered. We stood aghast. The room grew suddenly familiar. I tore off a strip of the gray tint on the walls. Under it we found the old paper with its bright macaws.

  “Ah, ha!” Volz said; “will you now deny my theory of ‘far-working’?”

  Dazed, I could barely murmur: “Then people can be affected by it!”

  “Certainly,” said he, “as rubbed glasses gain electric power.”

  Within a week we sailed—he for Brazil, I for New York.

  Several years after, at Sacramento, Arne, an artist I had known abroad, found me on the overland train, and on reaching San Francisco
urged me to go where he lodged.

  “I am low-spirited here,” he said; “I don’t know why.”

  I stopped short on the crowded wharf. “Where do you live?” I asked.

  “Far up Market Street,” said he.

  “What sort of a house?” I insisted.

  “Oh—nothing modern—over a store,” he answered. Reassured, I went with him. He lived in a jumble of easels, portfolios, paint, canvas, bits of statuary, casts, carvings, foils, red curtains, Chinese goatskins, woodcuts, photographs, sketches, and unfinished pictures. On the wall hung a scene from The Wandering Jew, as we saw it at the Adelphi, in London, where in the Arctic regions he sees visions foreshadowing the future of his race. Under it was quoted:

  ——“All in my mind is confused, nor can I dissever

  The mould of the visible world from the shape of my thought in me—

  The Inward and Outward are fused, and through them murmur forever

  The sorrow whose sound is the wind and the roar of the limitless sea.”

  “Do you remember,” Arne asked, “when we saw that play? Both younger and more hopeful. How has the world used you? As for me, I have done nothing since I came here but that sketch, finished months ago. I have not lost ambition, but I feel fettered.”

  “Absinthe?—opium?—tobacco?” I hinted.

  “Neither,” he answered. “I try to work, but visions, widely different from what I will, crowd on me, as on the Jew in the play. Not the unconscious brain action all thinkers know, but a dictation from without. No rush of creative impulses, but a dragging sense of something else I ought to paint.”

  “Briefly,” I said, “you are a ‘Haunted Man.’”

  “Haunted by a willful design,” said he. “I feel as if something had happened somewhere which I must show.”

  “What is it like?” I asked.

  “I wish I could tell you,” he replied. “But only odd bits change places, like looking in a kaleidoscope; yet all cluster around one centre.”

  One day, looking over his portfolios, I found an old Temple Bar, which he said he kept for this passage—which he read to me—from T.A. Trollope’s ‘Artist’s Tragedy’:

  “The old walls and ceilings and floors must be saturated with the exhalations of human emotions! These lintels, doorways, and stairs have become, by long use and homeliness, dear to human hearts, and have become so intimately blended a portion of the mental furniture of human lives, that they have contributed their part to the formation of human characters. Such facts and considerations have gone to the fashioning of the mental habitudes of all of us. If all could have been recorded! If emotion had the property of photographing itself on the surfaces of the walls which had witnessed it! Even if only passion, when translated into acts, could have done so! Ah, what palimpsests! What deciphering of tangled records! What skillful separation of successive layers of ‘passionography’!”

  “I know a room,” said Arne, “thronged with acts that elbow me from my work and fill me with unrest.”

  I looked at him in mute surprise.

  “I suppose,” he went on, “such things do not interest you.”

  “No—yes,” I stammered. “I have marked in traveling how lonely houses change their expression as you come near, pass, and leave them. Some frown, others smile. The Bible buildings had life of their own and human diseases; the priests cursed or blessed them as men.”

  “Houses seem to remember,” said he. “Some rooms oppress us with a sense of lives that have been lived in them.”

  “That,” I said, “is like Draper’s theory of shadows on walls always staying. He shows how after a breath passes over a coin or key, its spectral outline remains for months after the substance is removed. But can the mist of circumstance sweeping over us make our vacant places hold any trace of us?”

  “Why not? Who can deny it? Why do you look at me so?” he asked.

  I could not tell him the sad tale. I hesitated; then said: “I was thinking of Volz, a friend I had, who not only believed in what Bulwer calls ‘a power akin to mesmerism and superior to it, once called Magic, and that it might reach over the dead, so far as their experience on earth,’ but also in animal magnetism from any distance.”

  Arne grew queerly excited. “If Time and Space exist but in our thoughts, why should it not be true?” said he. “Macdonald’s lover cries, ‘That which has been is, and the Past can never cease. She is mine, and I shall find her—what matters it when, or where, or how?’” He sighed. “In Acapulco, a year ago, I saw a woman who has been before me ever since—the centre of the circling, changing, crude fancies that trouble me.”

  “Did you know her?” I asked.

  “No, nor anything about her, not even her name. It is like a spell. I must paint her before anything else, but I cannot yet decide how. I feel sure she has played a tragic part in some life-drama.”

  “Swinburne’s queen of panthers,” I hinted.

  “Yes. But I was not in love. Love I must forgo. I am not a man with an income.”

  “I know you are not a nincompoop!” I said, always trying to change such themes by a jest. I could not tell him I knew a place which had the influence he talked of. I could not revisit that house.

  Soon after he told me he had begun his picture, but would not show it. He complained that one figure kept its back toward him. He worked on it till he fell ill. Even then he hid it. “Only a layer of passionography,” he said.

  I grew restless. I thought his mood affected mine. It was a torment as well as a puzzle to me that his whole talk should be of the influence of houses, rooms, even personal property that had known other owners. Once I asked him if he had anything like the brown coat Sheridan swore drew ill-luck to him.

  “Sometimes I think,” he answered, “it is this special brown paint artists prize which affects me. It is made from the best asphaltum, and that can be got only from Egyptian mummy cloths. Very likely dust of the mummies is ground in it. I ought to feel their ill-will.”

  One day I went to Saucelito. In the still woods I forgot my unrest till coming to the stream where, as I suddenly remembered, Anson was found dead, a dread took me which I tried to lose by putting into rhyme. Turning my pockets at night, I crumpled the page I had written on, and threw it on the floor.

  In uneasy sleep I dreamed I was again in Paris, not where I liked to recall being, but at “Bullier’s,” and in wartime. The bald, spectacled leader of the orchestra, leaning back, shamming sleep, while a dancing, stamping, screaming crowd wave tri-colored flags, and call for the ‘Chant du départ.’ Three thousand voices in a rushing roar that makes the twenty thousand lights waver, in spasmodic but steady chorus:

  “Les departs—parts—parts!

  Les departs—parts—parts!

  Les departs—parts—parts!”

  Roused, I supposed by passing rioters, I did not try to sleep again, but rose to write a letter for the early mail. As I struck a light I saw, smoothed out on the table, the wrinkled page I had cast aside. The ink was yet wet on two lines added to each verse. A chill crept over me as I read:

  FOREST MURMURS.

  Across the woodland bridge I pass,

  And sway its three long, narrow planks,

  To mark how gliding waters glass

  Bright blossoms doubled ranks on ranks;

  And how through tangle of the ferns

  Floats incense from veiled flower urns,

  What would the babbling brook reveal?

  What may these trembling depths conceal?

  Dread secret of the dense woods, held

  With restless shudders horror-spelled!

  How shift the shadows of the wood,

  As if it tossed in troubled sleep!

 
Strange whispers, vaguely understood,

  Above, below, around me creep;

  While in the sombre-shadowed stream

  Great scarlet splashes far down gleam,

  The odd-reflected, stately shapes

  Of cardinals in crimson capes;

  Not those—but spectral pools of blood

  That stain these sands through strongest flood!

  Like blare of trumpets through black nights—

  Or sunset clouds before a storm—

  Are these red phantom water-sprites

  That mock me with fantastic form;

  With flitting of the last year’s bird Fled ripples

  that its low flight stirred—

  How should these rushing waters learn

  Aught but the bend of this year’s fern?

  The lonesome wood, with bated breath,

  Hints of a hidden blow—and death!

  I could not stay alone. I ran to Arne’s room. As I knocked, the falling of some light thing within made me think he was stirring. I went in. He sat in the moonlight, back to me before his easel. The picture on it might be the one he kept secret. I would not look. I went to his side and touched him. He had been dead for hours! I turned the unseen canvas to the wall.

  Next day I packed and planned to go east. I paid the landlady not to send Arne’s body to the morgue, and watched it that night, when a sudden memory swept over me like a tidal wave. There was a likeness in the room to one where I had before watched the dead. Yes—there were the windows, there the doors—just here stood the bed, in the same spot I sat. What wildness was in the air of San Francisco!