Chapter 7 WHO WAS HE -WHAT WAS IT

"I made," said Beverly to me one day, "my projected tour, and had returned much wiser than I went, but no nearer the consummation of my chief hope. I had begun the practice of medicine in the city of Boston, and occupied an office reputed to have been haunted by the troubled ghosts of sundry persons who were there attracted by some strange influence. I laughed at, and ridiculed the pretensions of scores of so called seers, who claimed to behold these flitting gentry.

"There came to my office one day-it was a very stormy day in the latter part of the winter of the year in the spring of which I was so neatly swindled-there came, I repeat, on a stormy day, when the snow fell thick and fast; when the fierce wind blew, and the Frost-king was busily engaged in putting icy manacles upon all that he could reach-a lady to consult me upon a case of scrofula in her child. At that time my reputation in that specialty was great and constantly increasing; for I had but a few months before introduced and practised the method of treating that order of diseases, taught me in Constantinople by the famous negro sage of that metropolis. I prepared the materials required, and stood waiting for her to leave the office, as I was anxious to continue the perusal of some Hieratic manuscripts lent me that day by a lettered friend in Dedham. She made no movement indicative of leaving; but instead, challenged me to a discussion of some spiritual subject or other, which challenge I, from an innate horror of all strong-minded male-feminines, respectfully declined. She called herself my friend, and was, if sticking to one is a title to the name. She possessed all the qualities of the best adhesive plaster-it was impossible to get rid of her presence. She declared that she constantly saw, and held conversations with the dead, and she would then and there give a proof of her qualifications in that direction; whereupon she was instantly seized with an exceedingly violent trembling, accompanied with any amount of spasmodic jerks and twitchings. I had witnessed such things before, and consequently did not feel alarmed at Mrs. Graham's condition, but going into the rear office I procured a chair and sat down to wait for demonstrations; which, when they came, were but so many pretty word-paintings-commonplace counsel and advice addressed to me by what purported to be my mother-which latter, however, appeared to have forgotten her name, my own, and when and where she departed this life. I was perfectly certain that it was not my mother, and equally so that Mrs. Graham was not consciously acting the part of an impostor, and I accounted for the phenomenon on the Rosicrucian theory, then quite new to me, that she was obsessed, or possessed, by and with a distinct individuality entirely foreign to her own. To my mind the thing was certain that she, like scores of thousands of others are, was for the time being under the absolute control and dominion of a Will a myriad times stronger than that of any living human being that ever tenanted a body on this terraqueous globe of ours-beings perfectly intelligent, powerful, invisible, and totally conscienceless, wherein is a great difference from human beings.

"The lady came around in a few minutes, and I frankly stated my opinion to her. It was new and startling. 'Not human spirits-yet intelligent? An intelligent thing-and guileful? It is dreadful! Horrible! What, then, is that Thing? Angels? No! Devils? If so, whence come they? Why? For what end?'

"These were terrible questions; and we talked about the matter, the lady and I, as we sat in the back office, near the fire, for it was very cold; and she sat leaning on the desk near the window, and I sat near the door between the offices, my back nearly touching it. The outer door, which opened on the stair-landing, was closed, and a wire was so attached to it that it could not be opened, or even the latch be raised, without touching a spring that instantly rung a bell that was suspended directly over my head in the rear office. I used this rear office as a reading-room and laboratory, and I frequently became so absorbed in my reading or chemistry, that nothing less than the ringing of that bell would suffice to divert my attention.

"And there and thus we sat and talked for more than three long hours. The strong-minded woman's soul had at last really been aroused; while I once more brought to the surface my Rosicrucian lore. In thought and speech we traversed a score of conjectural worlds and labyrinths of Being; until, at last: 'Are there, really, any intelligent, but viewless beings, other than man, in all the broad universe-I mean other than man as he is here, and disembodied likewise?-that's the question,' said the lady by the desk.

"?'Of course there are! MYRIADS!' said a clear, manly voice in the room, right straight from the centre of the triangle formed by the desk, the door and the southern wall of the office! It was not the lady who thus replied to her own question! It was not I who spoke; nor, strange as it afterwards appeared, did the circumstance strike me as being at all out of the common. And, therefore, without an instant's hesitation, I rejoined to the observation of the speaker, whom I subsequently remember to have observed was a thin, strange-looking, scrawny, shrivelled little old man, with the queerest possible little sharp grey eyes. He looked half frozen, and acted so, for he advanced toward some shelves and proceeded very leisurely to warm his hands over my laboratory furnace, between the door and wall. The lady appeared no more surprised than myself at the inexplicable presence of this singular intruder.

"?'I am not so sure of that,' I replied, in answer to the words uttered by the strange old man-'I am not so sure that there are such beings in existence.'

"?'Then you're a greater fool than I took you for! Good evening!' And he moved slightly toward the door, against which my chair firmly stood.

"?'Don't go yet, for I want you to explain,' said the lady. 'Don't you think he ought to?' turning to me with a very peculiar earnestness expressed in her countenance, especially in her eyes-very peculiar eyes at all times, but lit up in the most extraordinary manner at that moment. 'I think he ought to prove his statement, and not leave us in this state of uncertainty. It is positively cruel!' And, as she spoke, her eye met mine, and fastened it as if the encountering glances were riveted together.

"There must be some magic in the soul that is only flashed forth on very rare occasions, else why did her glance so fix my gaze for ten seconds that I could not stir? At the end of that space of time the fascination ended, and, raising my eyes, I answered-

"?'Certainly! he ought to explain; and, of course,' said I, turning toward the man-'of course, you will explain yourself, and--'

"There was no man there! Not even a sign that he had been. He had disappeared, gone, utterly vanished-not through the window, for that was a clear fall of seventy feet to the ground, besides which it had been securely nailed down for over four months-not through the door, for my chair and back were against it!

"Mrs. Graham fainted, and fell prone upon the floor!

* * *

"I lived in Charlestown, and reached home rather early that evening. Not that I was frightened. Oh, no! but because home seemed cheerier than the office; for the weather was bitterly cold, and the storm-spirits were holding high, tempestuous revels in the common and the bay; and, ever and anon, as the shivering pedestrian jogged along, and turned the sharp corners of what is literally and emphatically, and in more senses than one, the most angular city in the world, the blast would meet him square in the face, side-ways, and all around him in the same blessed moment of time, no matter which way he headed; for a Boston snow-storm blows every way at once-here it is due north, around the corner it is south-east, behind you it is north-west; over the way it blows straight up, and in the middle of the street it blows straight down.

"It was hard work travelling the four miles to my home that night, for every step had to be wearily footed. True, there were street cars, but no man in Boston ever remembers one going the right way when most it was wanted; but everybody can find scores coming, when everybody is bent upon going.

"Well, after a perilous walk, I at last reached home, and gladly sat down to my comfortable supper of toast and tea in my snug little parlor-the same little parlor where I wrote my book and received the loan of money to publish it, which money I was afterwards deprived of by the financial acumen of as great a scoundrel as ever went loose upon the world.

"Oh, how it stormed outside! and oh, how warm and cosy was the little snug harbor into which I had just moored myself!

"It was the second cup of tea-orange pekoe it was, for I had bought it of a Chinaman in Boston, who knew all about tea-and the second slice of toast that I was discussing, along with my daily paper, when suddenly there came a loud, imperative double knock at the door, similar to that of an English postman when in a hurry to deliver his letters. The door was immediately opened by a servant, who thought some one had been taken suddenly ill, and that I had been sent for professionally. But what was my astonishment when in stalked, with as much ease and nonchalance as if he belonged there, no less a personage than the mysterious little old man of the afternoon. I was thunderstruck. It was the same person who had treated me so rudely, and who had first come and then gone again so unaccountably, and who had induced an illness in Mrs. Graham that resulted in causing her to forever abandon her mediumatic practices-the same that has sent so many scores of people to premature graves, and will send thousands more. The strange man advanced toward the fire, and exclaimed-

"?'What a fright I caused you and your guest this afternoon! Ha! ha! It was capital-was it not?'

"And again he laughed, but this time in a manner and with a voice which, had it not been for the immense physical disparity apparent, I could have sworn was that of the Italian Count in Paris. But this supposition was hardly possible. The man before me was so decidedly human, that, by a rapid and comprehensive induction, I concluded that Mrs. Graham and myself had been victimized for sport by one who was perfect master of the mesmeric art. This hypothesis was quite plausible, only I could not account for the non-ringing of the office bell; and the idea seemed at that time quite preposterous that any one could successfully magnetize the clapper of a bell into silence. I learned more afterwards. Neither did it seem quite reasonable that this man had, before entering the office at all, exerted his power upon our sense of hearing, rendering us deaf.

"To his remark I replied, rather sententiously, with 'Very!' and said no more, for I did not fancy his joke, if such it was, nor his brusquerie, nor his decided lack of good manners, nor his rude speech; in fact, I did not fancy the man at all, nor anything about him. Not that he was hated or despised, but because there was a something about him that made my very flesh creep again, and caused me to instinctively shrink from his contact.

"It is well known that one of the cardinal points of the Rosicrucian belief is that bodily life can be prolonged through whole ages in two different ways; first, by means of the Elixir of Life; secondly, by means of mere will alone. In the first case beauty and youth accompany age; but in the second, age is apparent all along the centuries. This latter secret and the processes were revealed by a degenerate Rosicrucian in 1605; and all students of medicine are aware that great capital was made of it in later times by a French physician named Asgill. This writer undertook to publicly demonstrate and teach the art of life-prolonging, laying it down positively, that man is literally immortal, or rather that any given man alive could, if he choose, utterly laugh at and defy death; that he need not, if so disposed, ever die, if he used sufficient prudence, and forcibly and constantly exerted his will in that direction. Asgill used to complain of the cowardly practice of dying, considering it a mere trick, and unnecessary habit. The records tell us that several men have used both these means to perpetuate existence, and I have not the slightest doubt that it has been attempted and proved measurably successful; and now, on this stormy night, as I gazed on the withered wreck before me, it struck me that he was one of those wretches who had attained indefinite length of years by the second method, and, as a necessary consequence, had lost all fire, all feeling, all love, and all conscience. I shuddered as the possibility flashed upon me. He saw the motion, and a smile of ineffable scorn curled his lip as he did so. I abandoned my notion.

"People who observe things as they plod their way through the world, and who have at all made the human soul a study, have often been made aware that there is a certain nameless something that comes over a man, that with resistless eloquence persuades his inner soul that some danger approaches, some peril besets, some disaster impends over him. There are times, when calm reigns all around him, and peace blossoms in his heart, that he suddenly is apprised that Calamity is flapping her way toward him through the terrible nebulous gloom of the Future. Many a man and woman has felt this; and some such feeling, some such horror-form, now seemed hovering, cowering, crawling near me, and preparing to seize upon and fang my very soul, in the presence of the queer little man at my side. It was a mixed feeling of guilt and dread, and yet no guilt was mine. I had not cheated, robbed, lied, to my best friend. I had not fared sumptuously every day on the proceeds of villainy; my wife and daughters did not dress in purple and fine linen, bought with the money wronged from a poor man, or any man at all. I had not a fine piano, and parlors full of guests enjoying funds thus gotten; nor had I driven fast and fine horses of my own, fed and fattened on the money of a man whose child was at that very moment struggling, gasping, choking in the clutches of grim death for want of bread and medicine. True, there were those who did all this-and the corpse of a pretty little girl attests it-but I did not; why then should I be afraid? There is no answer to that, and yet I was in dread.

"After saying 'Very!' I spoke no more, but striving to repress the horror creeping over me, I tried to look as indignant as possible, which he was not slow to observe; for he approached, slapped me familiarly on the back, poured out and drank a cup of tea and ate a rusk, which settled the question as to his being no ghost; then he dropped carelessly into my easy-chair, rubbed his little perked-up nose with his thin, little, bluish-pale fingers, and throwing himself forward, so as to look right up into my face, he laughed heartily, and then bawled out, rather than sung, at the top of his voice:

"?'The storm howls drearily,

Let you and I live cheerily;

And we'll study things that never were known.

I've come from the West,

To see the man that I like best.

Don't think I'm all depravity-

I'm in search of the centre of gravity-

And you'll find out the Philosophers' Stone.'

And then he again burst out into one of the wildest, most outré, and ridiculous laughs that ever fell on mortal hearing.

"The wretched doggerel that I had just heard was beneath my notice; and little did I know of the singer, and still less did I imagine that those lines were to me the most important I had ever heard.

"Gradually, and by imperceptible degrees, my prejudices began to wane; I conversed with him upon a variety of subjects, and the conference was maintained during four long hours, perhaps more; for if my memory serves me, it was nearly eleven o'clock when he arose from his seat, shook me cordially by the hand, said he was going, promised to call again 'when he wanted to serve me,' and then, opening the doors, passed out into the midst of one of the most fierce and vindictive tempests that ever desolated the shores of Boston Bay. A singular thing was this: in the depth of winter, this man, who refused steadily to speak concerning himself, was clad in the very thinnest summer raiment, not having enough even for a northern June, much less for such fearful weather as prevailed on the night of that 4th of February-a night when the glass in Boston told of cold twenty degrees below zero, and in New Hampshire nineteen lower still-a night so bitter that many and many a man went to eternity, borne thither on the frosty pinions of the Ice-king.

"?'After all it is a man, and mesmerism furnishes a key to all this seeming mystery,' thought I; and with this consoling supposition I went to bed, and there reproduced all that he had said or done. Now, although little was said in regard to himself, yet, from that little, I gathered that he was an Armenian by birth, that his name was Miakus, which is the ancient Chaldaic for Priest of Fire. He told me this as he bent down to kiss a sweet little prattling Cora, and said that he was very fond of children, and felt particularly so toward the little fairy, who, seated in her chair, was busily engaged in laying down the law to a culprit kitten, who, it appeared, had been guilty of leze majeste to her Christmas doll. After the child had been sent to bed, Miakus produced from his bosom a little square, flat case, apparently of rose or olive wood, and about seven inches across by two and a half deep.[5] It was locked, and the key, a silver one, hung by a golden clasp to an ordinary steel watch-chain round his neck. The little man laid this case upon the bureau, where it lay undisturbed, although it became clear to me that his business there was in some way associated with that box and myself. It was equally clear that his air was more than half assumed, and that, in spite of his nonchalance and brusque surface, great trouble reigned beneath; for, occasionally, as he spoke, there was a melancholy cadence and plaintive modulation in his tones, that, to practised ears, spoke, if not of a breaking heart, at least of one most deeply injured and bereaved. This circumstance affected me much, for, through life, I have been one who grieved with those in grief, and joyed with those in joy. Then, after a little, he told me that one of his objects was to initiate me into certain mysteries of white magic, to teach me how to construct the magic mirror in which the majority of persons could glance through space, see and talk with the dead, and in all things, save a few, have an unerring guide through life. Said he-'I have such a curious looking-glass in yonder box, and perhaps-and perhaps not-you may test its qualities before I leave you. The fact is, I feel down-hearted, have been so all day, and all the more because I hurt your amour propré by calling you a fool, which, of course, I do not apologize for. It struck me that I would take advantage of the weather to chat with you, without infringing upon your business, and that, possibly, you might learn something and I find relief in teaching you, and thus withdraw us both for a time from the great Failure'-by which he meant the world. 'I am weary of myself, the world, philosophers and philosophy. There's nothing good but magic! You have been a fool while striving to be wise; and are ambitious to know what you have hitherto merely imagined.'

"He rose, took the case, laid it on the table between us, and, while playing with the key, continued-'If you really desire to pierce through the gloom that palls the human senses, you must abandon all human loves and passions, most especially all that relates to woman; for woman's love destroys-in the very moment of man's victory over her, she triumphs-he yields his life, and offers up existence itself on her altars, and then she laughs! Is it not so? Does not every man's experience corroborate this? Strong as iron alone, no sooner does he reach the goal of love than he is lost in a sea of weakness, lethargy, deadness! Bah! avoid woman. You want high knowledge, and must pay high prices. God gives nothing-he sells all; and he who would have must purchase, and the price is suffering. So with love. Its life is bought with the coin of death. Woman is like the ivy vine mantling round some hoary tower, and the more you are ruined the closer she clings, and the closer she clings the more you are ruined! Listen. No one acts without a motive. I have one with regard to yourself, and it is a selfish one. It so happens that the possessor of the magic mirror can in it behold all other horoscopes but his own, beyond a certain point; and, if he would know it, he must consult other seers. Now, there are certain beings in existence whose future cannot be read except by certain persons specially constituted. You are one of the latter, I am one of the former; and such as we only meet at the beginning and the end of epochs and eras. The present is one of these. I will present you with the mirror when you have done me this favor; I will teach you the art of their construction; and I will give you a verbatim copy of the answers you shall make to the questions I shall ask you while gazing in its awful depths. To this I pledge a word that never yet was broken, and an oath that never will be. For this purpose I have followed you for years, patiently waiting for the hour that dawns at last. To successfully do the thing I ask, two things are essential. 1st, That, in a perfectly pure state of body, health, mind, intent, and morals, you gaze into the glass. 2d, That, while doing so, you make no resistance against certain sleepful influences that may assail you, which influences will not be mesmeric, nor assisted by myself in any way, but is the sacred slumber of Sialam Boaghiee, which can only be enjoyed once in a hundred years, and then only by persons who are singularly constituted as you are-whose veins are filled with the mingled blood of all the nations that sprung from the loins of the Edenic protoplast, the Biblical Adam, and who, temperamentally, and in all other respects, save sex, are perfectly neutral. Certain great advantages will accrue to you from this concession that are unattainable without. From this slumber you will awaken doubly; first, to the old life without; and, second, to another and a fuller though stranger life within, and to the power of comprehending innumerable mysteries that lie enshrouded in dim regions far beyond the ken of ordinary man. Dreamer! you shall comprehend your dreams. Rosicrucian! you shall comprehend the Light, the Tower, and the Flame, and where Artefius and Zimati failed you shall find success! It is difficult, if not impossible, to either over-rate the advantages to be derived by the possession of the power I allude to, or to define and characterize it in words, mainly for the reason that, although the idea stands out well marked and distinct before the mind, yet the language which you speak has no terms of symbols adequate to its naming or expression; for, at best, words are coarse raiment for thought, and no more show the beauty of what they cover, than the preposterous costumes of Christendom display the superlative glories of the human form. The soul that sleeps this slumber passes through a gate which even the privileged dead cannot enter, save once in a century, and then only by reason of neutrality, for positive people are to be counted by the billion on either side the grave, negative people outnumber them ten million to one, while neutrals are, like cold heat, very rare indeed. I trust we shall yet assist each other.'

"Now, I had, two hours before, on seeing him eat and drink, hastily abandoned my ghostly hypothesis regarding the little queer old man. But now, as he talked so strangely, and so grandly indicated the Door of the Dome of all possible human knowledge and attainment, the mystery that wrapped him changed its character, but enveloped him in a ten-fold gloom and shadow, that continually grew more thick and dense, so much so, indeed, that, but for his eating, and the fact that several persons in the house beside myself had seen and exchanged speech with and touched him, I certainly should have doubted the evidence of my senses, and set the whole thing down, from the scene in the office till his departure, to the account of a disturbed imagination. There was a something unearthly about his voice and manner; and once, when he turned his chair, the upper part of his right thigh came in direct contact with the red-hot stove, and I watched it there until the chair was ruined by the fire, and the smoke of its varnish and seat fairly filled the room, and yet he was not burned, but coolly rose and opened the door for the smoke to escape, and then resumed his seat as if nothing whatever had happened; and, two or three times in the course of the evening, I not only felt a chilly atmosphere proceed from him, but distinctly saw his skeleton beneath his thin, parchment-like skin, as if but the thinnest integument had been loosely thrown over it to hide its naked deformity by some mouldy tenant of the grave, doomed to expiate its offences by again walking the earth with embodied human beings. Could it be that I had struck the truth, and that this mysterious Miakus was in reality such a vampire as we read of in German story?"

FOOTNOTE:

[5] Both the incidents of the magic mirror are actual, literal facts, as is also its curious construction and effects as herein related. I have witnessed many astonishing experiments with mirrors constructed as was that treated of in the text. I have seen several exactly similar-one in Zagazik, Lower Egypt, in the hands of a Hindoo magician, two in Cairo, one in Thebes, two in Constantinople, and one in London. In the East, owing to the scarcity of the peculiar material wherewith the space between the glasses is filled, they cost enormous prices, and then can only be had by a Christian through favor. In this country, or England, they might cheaply be made. I have one in my possession that I would not part with for three thousand dollars, so wonderful, so astonishing are the effects witnessed in and through it.-Editor.