The Complete Simon Iff (57 page)

III

"I am bringing you into the next act," said Simon, "contrary to tact, to prudence, to good sense. There will be all kinds of a row when you appear, especially without our friendly parson, who, by the way, Dobson informs me, is quite reconciled to his sad fate. He has a nice little wad to console him, and, anyhow, he can hardly return to his flock, can he? Abduction is his Scylla, and laughter his Charybdis, if he goes back. So we eliminate him. But then why bring you up there? Why print a duodecimo edition of Hell, with plates, half morocco, when it isn't in the lease necessary? Because, o blue-eyed babe, I want all those naturally silent parties to go up in the air about it. I want excitement, and gossip, and the rest of it. We are still far from the solution of the problem of A. B. Smith. At least, we've got to prove our case to the hilt; otherwise, we're in a rather critical postion. We've done--apparently--a lot of moral, and possibly a little bit of legal, wrong. We must do a good deal more than put up the argument which the enemies of the Jesuits falsely attribute to them; that the end justifies the means. Well, here's Potter's Place; for I perceive the noble Dobson at the wheel, amidst a crowd who are not quite sure whether to lynch him. How perfectly jolly!"

Dobson himself was as indifferent to the gesticulating people as if he had been blind and deaf. His aplomb, aided by that of the magician and the maiden, was triumphant. Nothing happened. A pleasant time was had by all.

Twenty minutes later the Napier drew up at the door of the farm of William Smith. Simon Iff rapidly explained his business, in the most formal terms.

The coroner was with Smith, who had spent the hour or so previous in abusing Mollie, whom he perceived dimly as the cause of the catastrophe. At the sight of her he broke out into a string of curses. Iff stopped him with a commanding gesture. "Curse me, if you will," said he; "this lady acted at my request."

Smith was not a person of marked perspecuity; but he saw, even in his anger, that he had come suddenly upon an unintelligible motive; and his wrath fell instantly. "What's the big idea?" he said, almost with indifference.

"Mr. Smith," said Simon, "I am come to clear up the mystery of your father's disappearance." Something in his manner prevented the obvious retort of incredulity. This strange man, who had come so violently into his placid life, not only might, but must know something. Else, why should he have come? The pretext of publishing dropped out of sight without causing surprise or suspicion.

The magician was pleased; the reaction was better than he had expected.

"Come then," he continued, "let us get this famous manuscript. I will most particularly ask Dr. Upton here to take note of what I shall have to say during the reading."

The coroner nodded. "Pleased, I'm sure." They went into the dead woman's bedroom. The body still lay where life had left it. "She knew her anatomy," said the doctor; "a wound with a pair of common scissors, but as straight to the heart as the Mayos could have done. Never saw a neater job."

He took three keys from the dead throat. The cupboard, (in that distant simple place!) had a Yale lock. Within was a safe. Within the safe they found a second iron box, and again the key was of elaborate and expensive make. Everybody began to understand that such precautions must have been taken to guard something held of incalculable value.

But the second box, lined with cedar wood, contained only a heavy sheet of rose-coloured silk, which was wrapped about a small book of the kind that very fashionable stationers sell to rich women for memoranda. The binding was of deep blue polished morocco, the paper hand-made.

Simon Iff took the volume in his hands with a certain reverence.

"Before I open this," he said, "I will prove my right to be here. We know that this book contains poems, and that Miss Smith valued them most highly. We know no more; but I will say more, for the satisfaction of Mr. Smith." He turned to the brother. "Your sister was careless and clumsy with the pen?"

"Yes, sir, she never liked the trouble of writing."

"These poems will be found to be in the most careful and delicate caligraphy. She was a prosaic, matter-of-fact woman, very patient and humble, inclined to avoid notice?"

"Quite right, mister."

"These poems will be found high-flown, passionate, romantic, and above all proud. Now then to the proof."

He opened the book. The first page was his vindication. It was written with a crow quill, ornamented with flourishes which wandered, like strange vines, over the page, in such a fashion that the contour of the design was as it were a symbolic representation of the title itself. Simon read it out.

"'The Book of the Heart's Blood of the Lily of God.' Do you understand?" he asked.

"I was never one for this highbrow stuff."

"Well," said Iff, "it means that she regarded herself as a being divinely pure, perhaps even uniquely pure, and that she had pressed out her sorrow, like rich wine, into this book. Let us go on."

The second page bore the author's name, and a date: May, 1891. Beneath this, in brackets, 'My first poem'. Then the title 'The Angel of the Sun.' Simon proceeded to read it.

 'I am he the soul that dwelleth

 In the Sun mine habitation.

 I must cloke myself with glory,

 Clouds of burning flame and glory,

 Lest the people of the planets

 See my face and die of terror,

 Hear my voice and die of terror,

 O be silent! O be silent!

 Such a little slip might slay them,

 Just a glimpse or just a whisper.

 For I am the soul that dwelleth

 In the Sun mine habitation.'

"Now what is the meaning of this poem? Why does a girl of twelve or thirteen occupy herself with such ideas? She uses the first person, yet who is speaking? The most glorious being possible to imagine, so glorious that the photosphere of the Sun himself is a thick mask upon his face. Yet this being is afraid! He fears that mortals might see or hear him, and die of terror.

"Now what does this really mean? Here is a child of unusual plainness, rather despised, feeling herself already an inferior person..."

"Why yes, she was never of any account."

"So, being sensitive, she created a psychic compensation. She deliberately retired from reality, and identified herself with what is really little less than God. Probably she would have made it God but that the idea of Him was bound up too closely with the minds of the people whom she hated, and so had become repellent. It was God, too, who had made her weak, plain, feminine; so she had to invent a 'Saviour' of her own. She had to be very careful, too, not to let out this secret life of hers; so she invents a reason for her own shyness and reticence and fear of others. If those who tortured her guessed for one second Who She Really Was, they would fall dead with terror. Thus her social weakness is pictured as the virtue--she was taught to consider it as such--of compassion. Let us turn over."

The next poem was entitled 'Knut Olaf' with a date two years later. It was in ballad form, quatrains, and began by describing the power of this great Norseman, how he slew the Dragon of the Sea, and made war on giants and kings. At last he comes to America; the Red Man resists him in vain. But he meets his Waterloo in the end. "Now, listen to this particularly," said Simon, who had been reading out only a few lines here and there to give the general idea.

 "'Spare me', the father cried, 'and I

 Will give thee for thy bride

 My daughter, the White Butterfly,

 That is my country's pride.'

 'Nay, I will take her 'gainst thy will,

 For she is beautiful.'

 Knut Olaf swung his axe with skill,

 And split the father's skull.

 But then came forth White Butterfly

 Dressed in her silk attire;

 Knut Olaf laughed 'Come here, and I

 Will tell thee my desire.'

 She came, but oh! to end my tale!

 Never a word she said.

 She simply lifted her white veil.

 The Viking fell down dead."

"Exactly the same idea as in the first poem; but we have a touch of the sex-symbol, as she is now of age to use it. Here is the incarnation of all might and violence, the world-conqueror, slain in an instant by the mere lifting of White Butterfly's veil. Kindly note the complete absence of any sense of humour in this passage! Note too, please, that there is a distinct feeling of satisfaction in allowing Olaf to split her father's skull. Let us go on."

The third poem in the book was entitled 'A Dream.' It began, shamelessly enough:

 "Here, where the forest primeval once sheltered the tent  of the redman."

and continued, less obviously,

 "We may be thankful to see nice farms and churches and railroads,

 Yet, in the night there may come, to those who are  fitted to see them,

 People pure in the heart, like the moon, some dreams.

 And I dreamt one,

 And I cannot imagine at all why it seemed so exceedingly vivid.

 It was in the fall of the year, and the trees

 were losing their verdure.

 I went through the woods, and the leaves on the

 ground were all of them corpses.

 Then I came to the town where my father was

 selling a diamond,

 But nobody wanted to buy it; but then came a

 squab, and he took it

 Away in his beak to the woods, and buried it

 under the corpses

 And sat on it all through the winter, and then,

 when I wanted to know most

 Of all what would happen, I woke, and I found

 that the pillow was moistened

 With tears. Ah, what did it mean? It was really

 exceedingly vivid."

"I want only to call attention to the fact that in the first scene she is the one live being in a world of corpses; in the next, her father is trying to sell a diamond, a clean and precious jewel, unvalued except by a squab (or dove; connected in her mind, of course, with the Holy Ghost). She herself has really disappeared in this scene; in truth, she has become the diamond. And though she is sure that some glorious fortune is in store for her, the feeling of doubt enters, and prevents a triumphant conclusion to the dream, which therefore makes her cry.

"Hullo, here's prose. August 1895.

 "'Diarfa saw eh LLA fo em debbor sah rehtaf ym niatrec si ti

 llik ot hguone gnorts eb dluohs yeht tsel syob owt evah ot

 eht meeder ot nesohc ma I live lla si nam suht mih

 deyortsed eb lliw nam snaem siht yb ytinigriv yb dlrow'*

"She may have thought that a sentence with the words written backwards was undecipherable. Poe is unknown in America as yet. Now what is the next lyric? 'The Waterfall.'

 "'I loathe thy ceaseless clamour in my ears,

 O waterfall! I would thy noisome flood

 That speaks to me of evil and of fears

 Were turned, as Moses turned the Nile, to blood.

 Nay, I would rather have thee turned to glassy steel,

 So to beat back the Sun in proud disdain;

 For in thy motion and thy noise I feel

 Only the threat of everlasting pain.'

"In a dream or a phantasy water usually means maternity. That idea is to her the climax of horror. Birth is the device by which nature perpetuates suffering--for to her the world now appears wholly evil. Of course, she did not know what she was writing. She thought of it only as a 'poem'. But to us who have the key the reference to Moses is highly significant. The blood is the safeguard. Yet there is still danger from which the subconscious mind shrinks. Nothing can really alleviate its anxiety but the cessation of the water altogether, its transformation into a glassy steel, which shall repel the assault even of the sun, the greatest of creative forces. It is a symbolic confirmation of the cipher, at least of part of it. Here's another lyric, same month: 'The Sun'.

 "'O father of all woe, I will not deign

 To plead with thee for universal pain.

 I will remind thee only that thy face,

 Red robber, is no match for icy space.

 The time is coming when thy race so rash

 Is run, and thou a crust of cinder ash.'

"Same story; the father had robbed her; she hates his energy, his superiority, his power; and she delights to think that he will die. And what is it that will overcome him? Empty space, cold, formless, infinite. She is no longer merely the angel of the sun, who wishes only to avoid striking men dead. She is space itself. She will strike the sun himself dead, and she rejoices in it.

"This change is brought about by her experience of the world. As a child she was still hopeful of acquiring superiority in the world of reality. Now she knows that it is hopeless. Her vanity-phantasy is not strong enough to compensate; she hates her torturers, and begins to concentrate that hatred upon her father, who robbed her, by one of those mysterious sex-magic tricks, of her right to be a boy."

"But this is rubbish," broke in Smith. "Mamie was very fond of her father. And she didn't want to be a boy; she was always boasting of her womanhood."

"I said so. Men were all evil to her. Yet she did want to be a boy before she invented these phantasies. Think now. Go back to your earliest memories."

"That's so, by Gosh. I remember it all now. And then one day she shut up like a clam, and got furious when I teased her."

"And she only developed the hate of her father when she was old enough to have all this subconscious stuff thoroughly suppressed. She would have been horrified if you had told her what those poems meant. And yet the cipher is plain enough. It was dictated by the neurotic's need of confession, and put in cipher by his parallel need of secrecy. Cheer up! I know it sounds mysterious and contradictory, and not a little unlike humbug; but I've a hunch that we'll come out to a Fact with a capital F before we're through this book. Come along; let's skip a little--suppose we find something about nineteen five or six. What's this? The title-poem! 'The Lily of God.'

 "'There is a lake--'tis everlasting space,

 And on its windless calm a lily flowers