Part 3

A few days later there was gathered in a small room in the prefecture quite a knot of advocates and police officers. They were soon joined by Benner himself, accompanied by a short, stout gentleman with eye-glasses. Besides the ordinary furniture of the room, there was a wash-tub, a pail of water, a manikin, and the drawing-board with the mechanism on it. The entrance of the judge put a stop to the buzz of conversation, and when he took a seat on the low platform the rest of the company placed themselves on the benches in front. The judge, after a few preliminary remarks on the subject of the mystery of Montmartre, said that there had lately been developed such a new and surprising theory to account for the death of the artist that he had consented to give a hearing to the explanation of the theory. Benner then arose and made the following statement: “In the Café du Rat Mort, a few days ago, I noticed a peculiar movement in a broken match as it lay on the table before me. At first my curiosity was excited only to a moderate degree, but shortly this inexplicable motion interested me so that I experimented until I found the cause of it. At the same moment there flashed into my mind what I had learned long ago at school about capillary force, and the solution of the mystery of my friend’s death was at once plain to me. Hurrying to my studio, I cut off the hand of my manikin, and carried it to the Academy of Fine Arts to show it to Professor Brunin, of the Architectural Department, and ask his assistance. Finding him neither there nor at his house, I wrote him a note and left it for him. All that night I worked constructing a working model of a manikin’s finger, and the next morning I received a letter from Professor Brunin which gave me the data I was in search of--the facts in regard to the expansion of wood when moistened. I should read that letter here, but Professor Brunin is present, and will explain the phenomenon. My theory is very simple. My friend Charles Mandel was shot by his own manikin. There are witnesses enough to prove that the pistol had been loaded for a long time, and that Mandel had often tried in vain to draw the charge. It is also well known that the pistol was cocked when it was in the manikin’s belt, for on the half-completed picture it was so painted by Mandel on the last day of his life. Furthermore, the position of the right index finger of the manikin can also be plainly seen in the picture; for the artist, not having a model to hold the weapon, had roughly rubbed in the angular fingers of the lay figure, preparatory to finishing the hand from life. The pistol then, being loaded and cocked, needed but the pressure of the finger to discharge it. That pressure was given by the rain on the night of the death of my friend. The lieutenant will find, on reference to his note-book, that on the morning when he examined the studio there had been quite a serious leak in the ceiling, and that the water had fallen directly on the manikin. He will find also in his notes the exact position of the manikin in reference to the divan on which the corpse lay. Now, it is clear that when the wrist of the manikin was bent, and the index finger was placed on the trigger of the pistol, only a very slight motion of the whole was necessary to give the pressure required to fire a pistol. The weapon was braced against the inside of the thumb of the hand, and thus held firmly there as it stuck in the belt ready to be drawn and fired. When the water first fell from the ceiling, it soaked the covering of the wrist and hand, and swelled the wrist joint so that it became absolutely immovable. Next the moisture extended to the tip of the fingers, the hand being held somewhat downward. In the manikin we have here, the exact construction of the fingers and the movement of the joints of the hand and wrist can be plainly seen. In my working model I have imitated the mechanism of one finger, so arranging it that the least deflection of the finger from the straight line will be measured on a scale of millimetres. The joints are so constructed that any elongation of the pieces of wood will curve the line of joints away from the straight line which I have drawn on the board. I propose to experiment with this model so as to make it perfectly plain that my friend’s death was accidental. If the experiment were tried on the manikin, and with a flint-lock pistol, it would doubtless fail ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. In the accident which caused my friend’s death everything happened to be perfectly adjusted. If my model works, of course the manikin might have worked in exactly the same way.”

The lieutenant gave his explanation of the position in which the body was found, and added that he had calculated at the time that the shot must have been fired from the direction of the manikin, and from about the height of its waist. He found in his notes the statement that the roof had leaked, and the manikin was wet. Furthermore, the pistol was found just where the recoil would have thrown it backward out of the manikin’s hand. He ended by declaring that the theory just advanced was new to him then, and that he was convinced of its probability by the manner in which it harmonized with the conditions of the tragedy.

The professor proceeded next to give a full account of the expansion of wood by moisture, and went into the study of the whole phenomenon of capillary force. He was somewhat verbose in his statement, probably because he, like other regular lecturers, had been accustomed to spread a very little fact over a great deal of time. His closing argument in favor of the theory set forth by Benner was this: “In the ancient quarries wedges of wood were driven into holes in the rock, water was poured on the wedges, and the wood, expanding, split the solid mass. Capillary force is irresistible. It was this force which caused the deplorable accident which Mr. Benner has so ingeniously and logically explained.”

At the command of the judge the sculptor proceeded with his experiment. He simply fastened the drawing-board with the mechanism to the bottom of the inside of the tub by means of screws. When it was in place it was covered by about an inch of water. The lieutenant then recorded on his note-book the time of day and the position of the index, and every one present made mental note of it. It was necessary, in order to give the wood sufficient time to swell, to leave it in the water for four or five hours. Consequently the judge adjourned the sitting until the afternoon at four o’clock. The room was locked and put in charge of the lieutenant and two men.

When the same company assembled at the appointed hour the door was opened by the lieutenant, and the judge, with genuine human curiosity, stepped up to the tub, looked into it, and gave an exclamation of surprise. The others approached and looked in. The lieutenant announced, almost triumphantly, that the index had moved seven millimetres--enough to have fired a cannon. The judge turned to the excited company and said, simply, “Messieurs, it was a capillary crime.”

A FADED SCAPULAR

We are seldom able to trace our individual superstitions to any definite cause, nor can we often account for the peculiar sensations developed in us by the inexplicable and mysterious incidents in our experience. Much of the timidity of childhood may be traced to early training in the nursery, and sometimes the moral effects of this weakness cannot be eradicated through a lifetime of severe self-control and mental suffering. The complicated disorders of the imagination which arise from superstitious fears can frequently be accounted for only by inherited characteristics, by peculiar sensitiveness to impressions, and by an overpowering and perhaps abnormally active imagination. I am sure I am confessing to no unusual characteristic when I say that I have felt from childhood a certain sentiment or sensation in regard to material things which I can trace to no early experience, to the influence of no literature, and to no possible source, in fact, but that of inherited disposition.

The sentiment I refer to is this: whatever has belonged to or has been used by any person seems to me to have received some special quality, which, though often invisible and still oftener indefinable, still exists in a more or less strong degree, according to the amount of the impressionable power, if I may call it so, which distinguished the possessor. I am aware that this sentiment may be stigmatized as of the school-girl order; that it is, indeed, of the same kind and class with that which leads an otherwise honest person to steal a rag from a famous battle flag, a leaf from an historical laurel wreath, or even to cut a signature or a title-page from a precious volume; but with me the feeling has never taken this turn, else I should not have confessed to the possession of it. Whatever may be said or believed, however, I must refer to it in more or less comprehensible terms, because it may explain the conditions, although it will not unveil the causes, of the incidents I am about to describe with all honesty and frankness.

Nearly twenty years ago I made my first visit to Rome, long before it became the centre of the commercial and political activity of Italy, and while it was yet unspoiled for the antiquarian, the student, the artist, and the traveller. Never shall I forget the first few hours I spent wandering aimlessly through the streets--so far as I then knew, a total stranger in the city, with no distinct plan of remaining there, and with only the slight and imperfect knowledge of the place that one gains from the ordinary travellers’ descriptions. The streets, the houses, the people, the strange sounds and stranger sights, the life so entirely different from what I had hitherto seen--all this interested me greatly. Far more powerful and far more vivid and lasting, however, was the impression of an inconceivable number of presences--I hesitate to call them spirits--not visible, of course, nor tangible, but still oppressing me mentally and morally, exactly the same as my physical self is often crushed and overpowered in a great assembly of people. I walked about, visited the cafés and concert-halls, and tried in various ways to shake off the uncomfortable feeling of ghostly company, but was unsuccessful, and went to my lodgings much depressed and nervous. I took my note-book, and wrote in it: “Rome has been too much lived in. Among the multitude of the dead there is no room for the living.” It seemed then a foolish memorandum to write, and now, as I look at the half-effaced pencil lines, I wonder why I was not ashamed to write it. Yet there it is before me, a witness to my sensations at the time, and the scrawl has even now the power to bring up to me an unpleasantly vivid memory of that first evening in Rome.

After a few days passed in visiting the galleries and the regular sights of the town, I began to look for a studio and an apartment, and finally found one in the upper story of a house on the Via di Ripetta. Before moving into the studio, I met an old friend and fellow-artist, and, as there was room enough for two, gladly took him in with me.

The studio, with apartment, in the Via di Ripetta was by no means unattractive. It was large, well lighted, comfortably and abundantly furnished. It was, as I have said, at the top of the house; the studio overlooked the Tiber, and the sitting-room and double-bedded sleeping-room fronted the street. The large studio window was placed rather high up, so that the entrance door--a wide, heavy affair, with large hinges and immense complicated lock and a “judas”--opened from the obscurity of the hall directly under the large window into the full light of the studio. The roof of the house slanted from back to front, so that the two rooms were lower studded than the studio, and an empty space or low attic opening into the studio above them was partly concealed by an ample and ragged curtain. The fireplace was in the middle of the left wall as you entered the studio; the door into the sitting-room was in the farther right-hand corner, and the bedroom was entered by a door on the right-hand wall of the sitting-room, so that the bedroom formed a wing of the studio and sitting-room, and from the former, looking through two doors, the bedroom window and part of the street wall could be seen. Both the beds were hidden from sight of any one in the studio, even when the doors were open.

The apartment was furnished in a way which denoted a certain amount of liberality, but everything was faded and worn, though not actually shabby or dirty. The carpets were threadbare, the damask-covered sofa and chairs showed marks of the springs, and the gimp was fringed and torn off in places. The beds were not mates; the basin and ewer were of different patterns; the few pictures on the wall were, like everything else in the place, curiously gray and dusty-looking, as if they had been shut up in the darkened rooms for a generation. Beyond the fireplace in the studio, the corner of the room was partitioned off by a dingy screen, six feet high or more, fixed to the floor for the space of two yards, with one wing which shut like a door, enclosing a small space fitted up like a miniature scullery, with a curious and elaborate collection of pots and pans and kitchen utensils, all hung in orderly rows, but every article with marks of service on it, and more recent and obtrusive traces of long disuse.

In one of the first days of my search for a studio I had found and inspected this very place, but it had given me such a disagreeable feeling--it had seemed so worn out, so full of relics of other people--that I could not make up my mind to take it. After a thorough search and diligent inquiry, however, I came to the conclusion that there was absolutely no other place in Rome at that busy season where I could set up my easel, and, after having the place recommended to me by all the artists I called upon as a well-known and useful studio, and a great find at the busy season of the year, I took a lease of the place for four months.

My friend and I moved in at the same time, and I will not deny that I planned to be supported by his presence at the moment of taking possession. When we arrived and had our traps all deposited in the middle of the studio, there came over the spirits of us both a strange gloom, which the bustle and confusion of settling did not in the least dispel. It was nearly dark that winter afternoon before we had finished unpacking, and the street lights were burning before we reached the little restaurant in the Via Quattro Fontane, where we proposed to take our meals. There was a cheerful company of artists and architects assembled there that evening, and we sat over our wine long after dinner. When the jolly party at last dispersed, it was well past midnight.

How gloomy the outer portal of the high building looked as we crossed the dimly lighted street and pushed open the back door! A musty, damp smell, like the atmosphere of the catacombs, met us as we entered. Our footsteps echoed loud and hollow in the empty corridor, and the large wax match I struck as we came in gave but a flickering light, which dimly shadowed the outline of the stone stairway, and threw the rest of the corridor into a deep and mysterious gloom. We tramped up the five long flights of stone stairs without a word, the echo of our footsteps sounding louder and louder, and the murky space behind us deepening into the damp darkness of a cavern. At last, after what seemed an interminable climb, we came to the studio entrance. I put the large key in the lock, turned it, and pushed open the door. A strong draught, like the lifeless breath from the mouth of a tunnel, extinguished the match and left us in darkness. I hesitated an instant, instinctively dreading to enter, and then went in, followed by my friend, who closed the door behind us. The heavy hinges creaked, the door shut into the jambs with a solid thud, the lock sprang into place with a sharp click, and a noise like the clanging of a prison gate resounded and re-echoed through the corridor and through the spacious studio. I felt as if we were shut in from the whole world.

Lighting all the candles at hand and stirring up the fire, we endeavored to make the studio look cheerful, and, neither of us being inclined to go to bed, we sat for a long time talking and smoking. But even the bright fire and the soothing tobacco smoke did not wholly dispel the gloom of the place, and when we finally carried the candles into the bedroom, I felt a vague sense of dismal anticipation and apprehension. We left both doors open, so that the light from our room streamed across the corner of the sitting-room, and threw a great square of strong reflection on the studio carpet. While undressing, I found that I had left my matchbox on the studio table, and thought I would return for it. I remember now what a mental struggle I went through before I made up my mind to go without a candle. I glanced at my friend’s face, partly to see if he noticed any indication of nervousness in my expression, and partly because I was conscious of a kind of psychological sympathy between us. But fear of his ridicule made me effectually conceal my feelings, and I went out of the room without speaking. As I walked across the non-resonant, carpeted stone floor I had the most curious set of sensations I have ever experienced. At nearly every step I took I came into a different stratum or perpendicular layer of air. First it was cool to my face, then warm, then chill again, and again warm. Thinking to calm my nervous excitement, I stood still and looked around me. The great window above my head dimly transmitted the sky reflection, but threw little light into the studio. The folds of the curtain over the open space above the sitting-room appeared to wave slightly in the uncertain light, and the easels and lay figure stood gaunt and ghostly along the further wall. I waited there and reasoned with myself, arguing that there was no possible cause for fear, that a strong man ought to control his nerves, that it was silly at my time of life to begin to be afraid of the dark; but I could not get rid of the sensation. As I went back to the bedroom I experienced the same succession of physical shocks; but whether they followed each other in the same order or not I was unable to determine.

It was some time before I could get to sleep, and I opened my eyes once or twice before I lost consciousness. From the bedroom window there was a dim, very dim, light on the lace curtains, but the window itself was visible as a square mass, and did not appear to illuminate the room in the least. Suddenly, after a dreamless sleep of some duration, I awoke as completely as if I had been startled by a loud noise. The lace curtains were now quite brilliantly lighted from somewhere, I could not tell where, but the window itself seemed to be as little luminous as when I went to sleep. Without moving my head, I turned my eyes in the direction of the studio, and could see the open door as a dark patch in the gray wall, but nothing more. Then, as I was looking again at the curious illumination of the curtains, a moving mass came into the angle of my vision out of the corner of the room near the head of the bed, and passed slowly into full view between me and the curtain. It was unmistakably the figure of a man, not unlike that of the better type of Italian, and was dressed in the commonly worn soft hat and ample cloak. His profile came out clearly against the light background of the lace curtain, and showed him to be a man of considerable refinement of feature. He did not make an actually solid black silhouette against the light, neither was the figure translucent, but was rather like an object seen through a vapor or through a sheet of thin ground glass.

I tried to raise my head, but my nerve force seemed suddenly to fail me, and while I was wondering at my powerlessness, and reasoning at the same time that it must be a nightmare, the figure had moved slowly across in front of the window, and out through the open door into the studio.

I listened breathlessly, but not a sound did I hear from the next room. I pinched myself, opened and shut my eyes, and noticed that the breathing of my room-mate was irregular, and unlike that of a sleeping man. I am unable to understand why I did not sit up or turn over or speak to my friend to find out if he were awake. I was fully conscious that I ought to do this, but something, I know not what, forced me to lie perfectly motionless watching the window. I heard my room-mate breathing, opened and shut my eyes, and was certain, indeed, that I was really awake. As I reasoned on the phenomenon, and came naturally to the unwilling conclusion that my hallucination was probably premonitory of malaria, my nerves grew quiet, I began to think less intensely, and then I fell asleep.

The next morning I awoke with a feeling of disagreeable anticipation. I was loath to rise, even though the warm Italian sunlight was pouring into the room and gilding the dingy interior with brilliant reflections. In spite of this cheering glow of sunshine, the rooms still had the same dead and uninhabited appearance, and the presence of my friend, a vigorous and practical man, seemed to bring no recognizable vitality or human element to counteract the oppressiveness of the place. Every detail of my waking dream or hallucination of the night before was perfectly fresh in my mind, and the sense of apprehension was still strong upon me.

The distracting operations of settling the studio, and the frequent excursions to neighboring shops to buy articles necessary to our meagre housekeeping, did much towards taking my mind off the incident of the night; but every time I entered the sitting-room or the bedroom it all came up to me with a vividness that made my nerves quiver. We explored all the corners and cupboards of the place. We even crawled up over the sitting-room behind the dingy curtain, where a large quantity of disused frames and old stretchers were packed away. We familiarized ourselves, in fact, with every nook and cranny of each room; moved the furniture about in a different order; hung up draperies and sketches; and in many ways changed the character of the interior. The faded, weary-looking widow from whom I had hired the place, and who took care of the rooms, carried away to her own apartment many of the most obnoxious trifles which encumbered the small tables, the étagère, and the wall spaces. She sighed a great deal as we were making the rapid changes to suit our own taste, but made no objection, and we naturally thought it was the regular custom of every new occupant to turn the place upside down.

Late in the afternoon I was alone in the studio for an hour or more, and sat by the fire trying to read. The daylight was not gone, and the rumble of the busy street came plainly to my ears. I say “trying to read,” for I found reading quite impossible. The moment I began to fix my attention on the page, I had a very powerful feeling that some one was looking over my shoulder. Do what I would, I could not conquer the unreasonable sensation. Finally, after starting up and looking about me a dozen times, I threw down the book and went out. When I returned, after an hour in the open air, I found my friend walking up and down in the studio with open doors, and two guttering candles alight.

“It’s a curious thing,” he said, “I can’t read this book. I have been trying to put my mind on it a whole half-hour, and I can’t do it. I always thought I could get interested in ‘Gaboriau’ in a moment under any circumstances.”

“I went out to walk because I couldn’t manage to read,” I replied, and the conversation ended.