Chapter IX

The Witch of Prague

by F. Marion Crawford

The principal room of Keyork Arabian's dwelling was in every way
characteristic of the man. In the extraordinary confusion which at
first disturbed a visitor's judgment, some time was needed to
discover the architectural bounds of the place. The vaulted roof was
indeed apparent, as well as small portions of the wooden flooring.
Several windows, which might have been large had they filled the
arched embrasures in which they were set, admitted the daylight when
there was enough of it in Prague to serve the purpose of
illumination. So far as could be seen from the street, they were
commonplace windows without shutters and with double casements
against the cold, but from within it was apparent that the tall
arches in the thick walls had been filled in with a thinner masonry
in which the modern frames were set. So far as it was possible to
see, the room had but two doors; the one, masked by a heavy curtain
made of a Persian carpet, opened directly upon the staircase of the
house; the other, exactly opposite, gave access to the inner
apartments. On account of its convenient size, however, the sage had
selected for his principal abiding place this first chamber, which
was almost large enough to be called a hall, and here he had
deposited the extraordinary and heterogeneous collection of objects,
or, more property speaking, of remains, upon the study of which he
spent a great part of his time.

Two large tables, three chairs and a divan completed the list of
all that could be called furniture. The tables were massive, dark,
and old-fashioned; the feet at each end consisted of thick flat
boards sawn into a design of simple curves, and connected by strong
crosspieces keyed to them with large wooden bolts. The chairs were
ancient folding stools, with movable backs and well-worn cushions of
faded velvet. The divan differed in no respect from ordinary oriental
divans in appearance, and was covered with a stout dark Bokhara
carpet of no great value; but so far as its use was concerned, the
disorderly heaps of books and papers that lay upon it showed that
Keyork was more inclined to make a book-case of it than a couch.

The room received its distinctive character however neither from
its vaulted roof, nor from the deep embrasures of its windows, nor
from its scanty furniture, but from the peculiar nature of the many
curious objects, large and small, which hid the walls and filled
almost all the available space on the floor. It was clear that every
one of the specimens illustrated some point in the great question of
life and death which formed the chief study of Keyork Arabian's
latter years; for by far the greater number of the preparations were
dead bodies, of men, of women, of children, of animals, to all of
which the old man had endeavoured to impart the appearance of life,
and in treating some of which he had attained results of a startling
nature. The osteology of man and beast was indeed represented, for a
huge case, covering one whole wall, was filled to the top with a
collection of many hundred skulls of all races of mankind, and where
real specimens were missing, their place was supplied by admirable
casts of craniums; but this reredos, so to call it, of bony heads,
formed but a vast, grinning background for the bodies which stood and
sat and lay in half-raised coffins and sarcophagi before them, in
every condition produced by various known and lost methods of
embalming. There were, it is true, a number of skeletons, disposed
here and there in fantastic attitudes, gleaming white and ghostly in
their mechanical nakedness, the bones of human beings, the bones of
giant orang-outangs, of creatures large and small down to the flimsy
little framework of a common bull frog, strung on wires as fine as
hairs, which squatted comfortably upon an old book near the edge of a
table, as though it had just skipped to that point in pursuit of a
ghostly fly and was pausing to meditate a farther spring. But the eye
did not discover these things at the first glance. Solemn, silent,
strangely expressive, lay three slim Egyptians, raised at an angle as
though to give them a chance of surveying their fellow-dead, the
linen bandages unwrapped from their heads and arms and shoulders,
their jet-black hair combed and arranged and dressed by Keyork's
hand, their faces softened almost to the expression of life by one of
his secret processes, their stiffened joints so limbered by his art
that their arms had taken natural positions again, lying over the
edges of the sarcophagi in which they had rested motionless and
immovable through thirty centuries. For the man had pursued his idea
in every shape and with every experiment, testing, as it were, the
potential imperishability of the animal frame by the degree of
life-like plumpness and softness and flexibility which it could be
made to take after a mummification of three thousand years. And he
had reached the conclusion that, in the nature of things, the human
body might vie, in resisting the mere action of time, with the
granite of the pyramids. Those had been his earliest trials. The
results of many others filled the room. Here a group of South
Americans, found dried in the hollow of an ancient tree, had been
restored almost to the likeness of life, and were apparently engaged
in a lively dispute over the remains of a meal--as cold as themselves
and as human. There, towered the standing body of an African, leaning
upon a knotted club, fierce, grinning, lacking only sight in the
sunken eyes to be terrible. There again, surmounting a lay figure
wrapped in rich stuffs, smiled the calm and gentle face of a Malayan
lady--decapitated for her sins, so marvellously preserved that the
soft dark eyes still looked out from beneath the heavy, half-
drooping lids, and the full lips, still richly coloured, parted a
little to show the ivory teeth. Other sights there were, more ghastly
still, triumphs of preservation, if not of semi-resuscitation, over
decay, won on its own most special ground. Triumphs all, yet almost
failures in the eyes of the old student, they represented the mad
efforts of an almost supernatural skill and superhuman science to
revive, if but for one second, the very smallest function of the
living body. Strange and wild were the trials he had made; many and
great the sacrifices and blood offerings lavished on his dead in the
hope of seeing that one spasm which would show that death might yet
be conquered; many the engines, the machines, the artificial hearts,
the applications of electricity that he had invented; many the
powerful reactives he had distilled wherewith to excite the long dead
nerves, or those which but two days had ceased to feel. The hidden
essence was still undiscovered, the meaning of vitality eluded his
profoundest study, his keenest pursuit. The body died, and yet the
nerves could still be made to act as though alive for the space of a
few hours--in rare cases for a day. With his eyes he had seen a dead
man spring half across a room from the effects of a few drops of
musk--on the first day; with his eyes he had seen the dead twist
themselves, and move and grin under the electric current--provided it
had not been too late. But that "too late" had baffled him, and from
his first belief that life might be restored when once gone, he had
descended to what seemed the simpler proposition of the two, to the
problem of maintaining life indefinitely so long as its magic essence
lingered in the flesh and blood. And now he believed that he was very
near the truth; how terribly near he had yet to learn.

On that evening when the Wanderer fell to the earth before the
shadow of Beatrice, Keyork Arabian sat alone in his charnel-house.
The brilliant light of two powerful lamps illuminated everything in
the place, for Keyork loved light, like all those who are intensely
attached to life for its own sake. The yellow rays flooded the life-
like faces of his dead companions, and streamed upwards to the
heterogeneous objects that filled the shelves almost to the spring of
the vault--objects which all reminded him of the conditions of lives
long ago extinct, endless heaps of barbarous weapons, of garments of
leather and of fish skin, Amurian, Siberian, Gothic, Mexican, and
Peruvian; African and Red Indian masks, models of boats and canoes,
sacred drums, Liberian idols, Runic calendars, fiddles made of human
skulls, strange and barbaric ornaments, all producing together an
amazing richness of colour--all things in which the man himself had
taken but a passing interest, the result of his central study--life
in all its shapes.

He sat alone. The African giant looked down at his dwarf-like
form as though in contempt of such half-grown humanity; the Malayan
lady's bodiless head turned its smiling face towards him; scores of
dead beings seemed to contemplate half in pity, half in scorn, their
would- be reviver. Keyork Arabian was used to their company and to
their silence. Far beyond the common human horror of dead humanity,
if one of them had all at once nodded to him and spoken to him he
would have started with delight and listened with rapture. But they
were all still dead, and they neither spoke or moved a finger. A
thought that had more hope in it than any which had passed through
his brain for many years now occupied and absorbed him. A heavy book
lay open on the table by his side, and from time to time he glanced
at a phrase which seemed to attract him. It was always the same
phrase, and two words alone sufficed to bring him back to
contemplation of it. Those two words were "Immortality" and "Soul."
He began to speak aloud to himself, being by nature fond of
speech.

"Yes. The soul is immortal. I am quite willing to grant that.
But it does not in any way follow that it is the source of life, or
the seat of intelligence. The Buddhists distinguished it even from
the individuality. And yet life holds it, and when life ends it takes
its departure. How soon? I do not know. It is not a condition of
life, but life is one of its conditions. Does it leave the body when
life is artificially prolonged in a state of unconsciousness--by
hypnotism, for instance? Is it more closely bound up with animal
life, or with intelligence? If with either, has it a definite abiding
place in the heart, or in the brain? Since its presence depends
directly on life, so far as I know, it belongs to the body rather
than to the brain. I once made a rabbit live an hour without its
head. With a man that experiment would need careful manipulation--I
would like to try it. Or is it all a question of that phantom,
Vitality? Then the presence of the soul depends upon the potential
excitability of the nerves, and, as far as we know, it must leave the
body not more than twenty-four hours after death, and it certainly
does not leave the body at the moment of dying. But if of the nerves,
then what is the condition of the soul in the hypnotic state? Unorna
hypnotises our old friend there --and our young one, too. For her,
they have nerves. At her touch they wake, they sleep, they move, they
feel, they speak. But they have no nerves for me. I can cut them with
knives, burn them, turn the life- blood of the one into the arteries
of the other--they feel nothing. If the soul is of the nerves--or of
the vitality, then they have souls for Unorna, and none for me. That
is absurd. Where is that old man's soul? He has slept for years. Has
not his soul been somewhere else in the meanwhile? If we could keep
him asleep for centuries, or for scores of centuries, like that frog
found alive in a rock, would his soul--able by the hypothesis to pass
through rocks or universes--stay by him? Could an ingenious sinner
escape damnation for a few thousand years by being hypnotised? Verily
the soul is a very unaccountable thing, and what is still more
unaccountable is that I believe in it. Suppose the case of the
ingenious sinner. Suppose that he could not escape by his clever
trick. Then his soul must inevitably taste the condition of the
damned while he is asleep. But when he is waked at last, and found to
be alive, his soul must come back to him, glowing from the eternal
flames. Unpleasant thought! Keyork Arabian, you had far better not go
to sleep at present. Since all that is fantastic nonsense, on the
face of it, I am inclined to believe that the presence of the soul is
in some way a condition requisite for life, rather than depending
upon it. I wish I could buy a soul. It is quite certain that life is
not a mere mechanical or chemical process. I have gone too far to
believe that. Take man at the very moment of death-- have everything
ready, do what you will--my artificial heart is a very perfect
instrument, mechanically speaking--and how long does it take to start
the artificial circulation through the carotid artery? Not a
hundredth part so long a time as drowned people often lie before
being brought back, without a pulsation, without a breath. Yet I
never succeeded, though I have made the artificial heart work on a
narcotised rabbit, and the rabbit died instantly when I stopped the
machine, which proves that it was the machine that kept it alive.
Perhaps if one applied it to a man just before death he might live on
indefinitely, grow fat and flourish so long as the glass heart
worked. Where would his soul be then? In the glass heart, which would
have become the seat of life? Everything, sensible or absurd, which I
can put into words makes the soul seem an impossibility--and yet
there is something which I cannot put into words, but which proves
the soul's existence beyond all doubt. I wish I could buy somebody's
soul and experiment with it."

He ceased and sat staring at his specimens, going over in his
memory the fruitless experiments of a lifetime. A loud knocking
roused him from his reverie. He hastened to open the door and was
confronted by Unorna. She was paler than usual, and he saw from her
expression that there was something wrong.

"What is the matter?" he asked, almost roughly.

"He is in a carriage downstairs," she answered quickly.
"Something has happened to him. I cannot wake him, you must take him
in--"

"To die on my hands? Not I!" laughed Keyork in his deepest
voice. "My collection is complete enough."

She seized him suddenly by both arms, and brought her face near
to his.

"If you dare to speak of death----"

She grew intensely white, with a fear she had not before known
in her life. Keyork laughed again, and tried to shake himself free of
her grip.

"You seem a little nervous," he observed calmly. "What do you
want of me?"

"Your help, man, and quickly! Call your people! Have him carried
upstairs! Revive him! do something to bring him back!"

Keyork's voice changed.

"Is he in real danger?" he asked. "What have you done to
him?"

"Oh, I do not know what I have done!" cried Unorna desperately.
"I do not know what I fear----"

She let him go and leaned against the doorway, covering her face
with her hands. Keyork stared at her. He had never seen her show so
much emotion before. Then he made up his mind. He drew her into his
room and left her standing and staring at him while he thrust a few
objects into his pockets and threw his fur coat over him.

"Stay here till I come back," he said, authoritatively, as he
went out.

"But you will bring him here?" she cried, suddenly conscious of
his going.

The door had already closed. She tried to open it, in order to
follow him, but she could not. The lock was of an unusual kind, and
either intentionally or accidentally Keyork had shut her in. For a
few moments she tried to force the springs, shaking the heavy wood
work a very little in the great effort she made. Then, seeing that it
was useless, she walked slowly to the table and sat down in Keyork's
chair.

She had been in the place before, and she was as free from any
unpleasant fear of the dead company as Keyork himself. To her, as to
him, they were but specimens, each having a peculiar interest, as a
thing, but all destitute of that individuality, of that grim, latent
malice, of that weird, soulless, physical power to harm, with which
timid imaginations endow dead bodies.

She scarcely gave them a glance, and she certainly gave them no
thought. She sat before the table, supporting her head in her hands
and trying to think connectedly of what had just happened. She knew
well enough how the Wanderer had lain upon the frozen ground, his
head supported on her knee, while the watchman had gone to call a
carriage. She remembered how she had summoned all her strength and
had helped to lift him in, as few women could have done. She
remembered every detail of the place, and everything she had done,
even to the fact that she had picked up his hat and a stick he had
carried and had taken them into the vehicle with her. The short drive
through the ill-lighted streets was clear to her. She could still
feel the pressure of his shoulder as he had leaned heavily against
her; she could see the pale face by the fitful light of the lanterns
as they passed, and of the lamps that flashed in front of the
carriage with each jolting of the wheels over the rough
paving-stones. She remembered exactly what she had done, her efforts
to wake him, at first regular and made with the certainty of success,
then more and more mad as she realised that something had put him
beyond the sphere of her powers for the moment, if not for ever; his
deathly pallor, his chilled hands, his unnatural stillness--she
remembered it all, as one remembers circumstances in real life a
moment after they have taken place. But there remained also the
recollection of a single moment during which her whole being had been
at the mercy of an impression so vivid that it seemed to stand alone
divested of any outward sensations by which to measure its duration.
She, who could call up visions in the minds of others, who possessed
the faculty of closing her bodily eyes in order to see distant places
and persons in the state of trance, she, who expected no surprises in
her own act, had seen something very vividly, which she could not
believe had been a reality, and which she yet could not account for
as a revelation of second sight. That dark, mysterious presence that
had come bodily, yet without a body, between her and the man she
loved was neither a real woman, nor the creation of her own brain,
nor a dream seen in hypnotic state. She had not the least idea how
long it had stood there; it seemed an hour, and it seemed but a
second. But that incorporeal thing had a life and a power of its own.
Never before had she felt that unearthly chill run through her, nor
that strange sensation in her hair. It was a thing of evil omen, and
the presage was already about to be fulfilled. The spirit of the dark
woman had arisen at the sound of the words in which he denied her;
she had risen and had come to claim her own, to rob Unorna of what
seemed most worth coveting on earth--and she could take him, surely,
to the place whence she came. How could Unorna tell that he was not
already gone, that his spirit had not passed already, even when she
was lifting his weight from the ground?

At the despairing thought she started and looked up. She had
almost expected to see that shadow beside her again. But there was
nothing. The lifeless bodies stood motionless in their mimicry of
life under the bright light. The swarthy negro frowned, the face of
the Malayan woman wore still its calm and gentle expression. Far in
the background the rows of gleaming skulls grinned, as though at the
memory of their four hundred lives; the skeleton of the orang-outang
stretched out its long bony arms before it; the dead savages still
squatted round the remains of their meal. The stillness was
oppressive.

Unorna rose to her feet in sudden anxiety. She did not know how
long she had been alone. She listened anxiously at the door for the
sound of footsteps on the stairs, but all was silent. Surely, Keyork
had not taken him elsewhere, to his lodgings, where he would not be
cared for. That was impossible. She must have heard the sound of the
wheels as the carriage drove away. She glanced at the windows and saw
that the casements were covered with small, thick curtains which
would muzzle the sound. She went to the nearest, thrust the curtain
aside, opened the inner and the second glass and looked out. Though
the street below was dim, she could see well enough that the carriage
was no longer there. It was the bitterest night of the year and the
air cut her like a knife, but she would not draw back. She strained
her sight in both directions, searching in the gloom for the moving
lights of a carriage, but she saw nothing. At last she shut the
window and went back to the door. They must be on the stairs, or
still below, perhaps, waiting for help to carry him up. The cold
might kill him in his present state, a cold that would kill most
things exposed to it. Furiously she shook the door. It was useless.
She looked about for an instrument to help her strength. She could
see nothing--no--yes--there was the iron-wood club of the black
giant. She went and took it from his hand. The dead thing trembled
all over, and rocked as though it would fall, and wagged its great
head at her, but she was not afraid. She raised the heavy club and
struck upon the door, upon the lock, upon the panels with all her
might. The terrible blows sent echoes down the staircase, but the
door did not yield, nor the lock either. Was the door of iron and the
lock of granite? she asked herself. Then she heard a strange, sudden
noise behind her. She turned and looked. The dead negro had fallen
bodily from his pedestal to the floor, with a dull, heavy thud. She
did not desist, but struck the oaken planks again and again with all
her strength. Then her arms grew numb and she dropped the club. It
was all in vain. Keyork had locked her in and had taken the Wanderer
away.

She went back to her seat and fell into an attitude of despair.
The reaction from the great physical efforts she had made overcame
her. It seemed to her that Keyork's only reason for taking him away
must be that he was dead. Her head throbbed and her eyes began to
burn. The great passion had its will of her and stabbed her through
and through with such pain as she had never dreamed of. The horror of
it all was too deep for tears, and tears were by nature very far from
her eyes at all times. She pressed her hands to her breast and rocked
herself gently backwards and forwards. There was no reason left in
her. To her there was no reason left in anything if he were gone. And
if Keyork Arabian could not cure him, who could? She knew now what
that old prophecy had meant, when they had told her that love would
come but once, and that the chief danger of her life lay in a mistake
on that decisive day. Love had indeed come upon her like a whirlwind,
he had flashed upon her like the lightning, she had tried to grasp
him and keep him, and he was gone again--for ever. Gone through her
own fault, through her senseless folly in trying to do by art what
love would have done for himself. Blind, insensate, mad! She cursed
herself with unholy curses, and her beautiful face was strained and
distorted. With unconscious fingers she tore at her heavy hair until
it fell about her like a curtain. In the raging thirst of a great
grief for tears that would not flow she beat her bosom, she beat her
face, she struck with her white forehead the heavy table before her,
she grasped her own throat, as though she would tear the life out of
herself. Then again her head fell forward and her body swayed
regularly to and fro, and low words broke fiercely from her trembling
lips now and then, bitter words of a wild, strong language in which
it is easier to curse than to bless. As the sudden love that had in a
few hours taken such complete possession of her was boundless, so its
consequences were illimitable. In a nature strange to fear, the fear
for another wrought a fearful revolution. Her anger against herself
was as terrible as her fear for him she loved was paralysing. The
instinct to act, the terror lest it should be too late, the
impossibility of acting at all so long as she was imprisoned in the
room, all three came over her at once.

The mechanical effort of rocking her body from side to side
brought no rest; the blow she struck upon her breast in her frenzy
she felt no more than the oaken door had felt those she had dealt it
with the club. She could not find even the soothing antidote of
bodily pain for her intense moral suffering. Again the time passed
without her knowing or guessing of its passage.

Driven to desperation she sprang at last from her seat and cried
aloud.

"I would give my soul to know that he is safe!"

The words had not died away when a low groan passed, as it were,
round the room. The sound was distinctly that of a human voice, but
it seemed to come from all sides at once. Unorna stood still and
listened.

"Who is in this room?" she asked in loud clear tones.

Not a breath stirred. She glanced from one specimen to another,
as though suspecting that among the dead some living being had taken
a disguise. But she knew them all. There was nothing new to her
there. She was not afraid. Her passion returned.

"My soul!--yes!" she cried again, leaning heavily on the table,
"I would give it if I could know, and it would be little enough!"

Again that awful sound filled the room, and rose now almost to a
wail and died away.

Unorna's brow flushed angrily. In the direct line of her vision
stood the head of the Malayan woman, its soft, embalmed eyes fixed on
hers.

"If there are people hidden here," cried Unorna fiercely, "let
them show themselves! let them face me! I say it again--I would give
my immortal soul!"

This time Unorna saw as well as heard. The groan came, and the
wail followed it and rose to a shriek that deafened her. And she saw
how the face of the Malayan woman changed; she saw it move in the
bright lamp-light, she saw the mouth open. Horrified, she looked
away. Her eyes fell upon the squatting savages--their heads were all
turned towards her, she was sure that she could see their shrunken
chests heave as they took breath to utter that terrible cry again and
again; even the fallen body of the African stirred on the floor, not
five paces from her. Would their shrieking never stop? All of
them--every one--even to the white skulls high up in the case; not
one skeleton, not one dead body that did not mouth at her and scream
and moan and scream again.

Unorna covered her ears with her hands to shut out the hideous,
unearthly noise. She closed her eyes lest she should see those dead
things move. Then came another noise. Were they descending from their
pedestals and cases and marching upon her, a heavy-footed company of
corpses?

Fearless to the last, she dropped her hands and opened her
eyes.

"In spite of you all," she cried defiantly, "I will give my soul
to have him safe!"

Something was close to her. She turned and saw Keyork Arabian at
her elbow. There was an odd smile on his usually unexpressive
face.

"Then give me that soul of yours, if you please," he said. "He
is quite safe and peacefully asleep. You must have grown a little
nervous while I was away."