The Witch of Prague

F >> F. Marion Crawford >> The Witch of Prague


"You can do this. If I resign my will into your keeping you can cause
me to dream. You can call up vividly before me the remembered and
unremembered sights of my life. You can make me see clearly the sights
impressed upon your own memory. You might do that, and yet you could
be showing me nothing which I do not see now before me--of those things
which I care to see."

"But suppose that you were wrong, and that I had no dream to show you,
but a reality?"

She spoke the words very earnestly, gazing into his eyes at last without
fear. Something in her tone struck him and fixed his attention.

"There is no sleep needed to see realities," he said.

"I did not say that there was. I only asked you to come with me to the
place where she is."

The Wanderer started slightly and forgot all the instinct of opposition
to her which he had felt so strongly before.

"Do you mean that you know--that you can take me to her----" he could
not find words. A strange, overmastering astonishment took possession
of him, and with it came wild hope and the wilder longing to reach its
realisation instantly.

"What else could I have meant? What else did I say?" Her eyes were
beginning to glitter in the gathering dusk.

The Wanderer no longer avoided their look, but he passed his hand over
his brow, as though dazed.

"I only asked you to come with me," she repeated softly. "There is
nothing supernatural about that. When I saw that you did not believe me
I did not try to lead you then, though she is waiting for you. She bade
me bring you to her."

"You have seen her? You have talked with her? She sent you? Oh, for
God's sake, come quickly!--come, come!"

He put out his hand as though to take hers and lead her away. She
grasped it eagerly. He had not seen that she had drawn off her glove. He
was lost. Her eyes held him and her fingers touched his bare wrist. His
lids drooped and his will was hers. In the intolerable anxiety of the
moment he had forgotten to resist, he had not even thought of resisting.

There were great blocks of stone in the desolate place, landed there
before the river had frozen for a great building, whose gloomy,
unfinished mass stood waiting for the warmth of spring to be completed.
She led him by the hand, passive and obedient as a child, to a sheltered
spot and made him sit down upon one of the stones. It was growing dark.

"Look at me," she said, standing before him, and touching his brow. He
obeyed.

"You are the image in my eyes," she said, after a moment's pause.

"Yes. I am the image in your eyes," he answered in a dull voice.

"You will never resist me again, I command it. Hereafter it will be
enough for me to touch your hand, or to look at you, and if I say,
'Sleep,' you will instantly become the image again. Do you understand
that?"

"I understand it."

"Promise!"

"I promise," he replied, without perceptible effort.

"You have been dreaming for years. From this moment you must forget all
your dreams."

His face expressed no understanding of what she said. She hesitated
a moment and then began to walk slowly up and down before him. His
half-glazed look followed her as she moved. She came back and laid her
hand upon his head.

"My will is yours. You have no will of your own. You cannot think
without me," She spoke in a tone of concentrated determination, and a
slight shiver passed over him.

"It is of no use to resist, for you have promised never to resist me
again," she continued. "All that I command must take place in your mind
instantly, without opposition. Do you understand?"

"Yes," he answered, moving uneasily.

For some seconds she again held her open palm upon his head. She seemed
to be evoking all her strength for a great effort.

"Listen to me, and let everything I say take possession of your mind for
ever. My will is yours, you are the image in my eyes, my word is your
law. You know what I please that you should know. You forget what I
command you to forget. You have been mad these many years, and I am
curing you. You must forget your madness. You have now forgotten it. I
have erased the memory of it with my hand. There is nothing to remember
any more."

The dull eyes, deep-set beneath the shadows of the overhanging brow,
seemed to seek her face in the dark, and for the third time there was
a nervous twitching of the shoulders and limbs. Unorna knew the symptom
well, but had never seen it return so often, like a protest of the body
against the enslaving of the intelligence. She was nervous in spite
of her success. The immediate results of hypnotic suggestion are
not exactly the same in all cases, even in the first moments; its
consequences may be widely different with different individuals. Unorna,
indeed, possessed an extraordinary power, but on the other hand she had
to deal with an extraordinary organisation. She knew this instinctively,
and endeavoured to lead the sleeping mind by degrees to the condition in
which she wished it to remain.

The repeated tremor in the body was the outward sign of a mental
resistance which it would not be easy to overcome. The wisest course was
to go over the ground already gained. This she was determined to do by
means of a sort of catechism.

"Who am I?" she asked.

"Unorna," answered the powerless man promptly, but with a strange air of
relief.

"Are you asleep?"

"No."

"Awake?"

"No."

"In what state are you?"

"I am an image."

"And where is your body?"

"Seated upon that stone."

"Can you see your face?"

"I see it distinctly. The eyes in the body are glassy."

"The body is gone now. You do not see it any more. Is that true?"

"It is true. I do not see it. I see the stone on which it was sitting."

"You are still in my eyes. Now"--she touched his head again--"now, you
are no longer an image. You are my mind."

"Yes. I am your mind."

"You, my Mind, know that I met to-day a man called the Wanderer, whose
body you saw when you were in my eyes. Do you know that or not?"

"I know it. I am your mind."

"You know, Mind, that the man was mad. He had suffered for many years
from a delusion. In pursuit of the fixed idea he had wandered far
through the world. Do you know whither his travels had led him?"

"I do not know. That is not in your mind. You did not know it when I
became your mind."

"Good. Tell me, Mind, what was this man's delusion?"

"He fancied that he loved a woman whom he could not find."

"The man must be cured. You must know that he was mad and is now sane.
You, my Mind, must see that it was really a delusion. You see it now."

"Yes. I see it."

Unorna watched the waking sleeper narrowly. It was now night, but the
sky had cleared and the starlight falling upon the snow in the lonely,
open place, made it possible to see very well. Unorna seemed as
unconscious of the bitter cold as her subject, whose body was in a
state past all outward impressions. So far she had gone through all the
familiar process of question and answer with success, but this was not
all. She knew that if, when he awoke, the name he loved still remained
in his memory, the result would not be accomplished. She must
produce entire forgetfulness, and to do this, she must wipe out every
association, one by one. She gathered her strength during a short pause.
She was greatly encouraged by the fact that the acknowledgment of the
delusion had been followed by no convulsive reaction in the body. She
was on the very verge of a complete triumph, and the concentration of
her will during a few moments longer might win the battle.

She could not have chosen a spot better suited for her purpose. Within
five minutes' walk of streets in which throngs of people were moving
about, the scene which surrounded her was desolate and almost wild. The
unfinished building loomed like a ruin behind her; the rough hewn blocks
lay like boulders in a stony desert; the broad gray ice lay like a floor
of lustreless iron before her under the uncertain starlight. Only afar
off, high up in the mighty Hradschin, lamps gleamed here and there from
the windows, the distant evidences of human life. All was still. Even
the steely ring of the skates had ceased.

"And so," she continued, presently, "this man's whole life has been a
delusion, ever since he began to fancy in the fever of an illness that
he loved a certain woman. Is this clear to you, my Mind?"

"It is quite clear," answered the muffled voice.

"He was so utterly mad that he even gave that woman a name--a name, when
she had never existed except in his imagination."

"Except in his imagination," repeated the sleeper, without resistance.

"He called her Beatrice. The name was suggested to him because he had
fallen ill in a city of the South where a woman called Beatrice
once lived and was loved by a great poet. That was the train of
self-suggestion in his delirium. Mind, do you understand?"

"He suggested to himself the name in his illness."

"In the same way that he suggested to himself the existence of the woman
whom he afterwards believed he loved?"

"In exactly the same way."

"It was all a curious and very interesting case of auto-hypnotic
suggestion. It made him very mad. He is now cured of it. Do you see that
he is cured?"

The sleeper gave no answer. The stiffened limbs did not move, indeed,
nor did the glazed eyes reflect the starlight. But he gave no answer.
The lips did not even attempt to form words. Had Unorna been less
carried away by the excitement in her own thoughts, or less absorbed in
the fierce concentration of her will upon its passive subject, she would
have noticed the silence and would have gone back again over the old
ground. As it was, she did not pause.

"You understand therefore, my Mind, that this Beatrice was entirely the
creature of the man's imagination. Beatrice does not exist, because she
never existed. Beatrice never had any real being. Do you understand?"

This time she waited for an answer, but none came.

"There never was any Beatrice," she repeated firmly, laying her hand
upon the unconscious head and bending down to gaze into the sightless
eyes.

The answer did not come, but a shiver like that of an ague shook the
long, graceful limbs.

"You are my Mind," she said fiercely. "Obey me! There never was any
Beatrice, there is no Beatrice now, and there never can be."

The noble brow contracted in a look of agonising pain, and the
whole frame shook like an aspen leaf in the wind. The mouth moved
spasmodically.

"Obey me! Say it!" cried Unorna with passionate energy.

The lips twisted themselves, and the face was as gray as the gray snow.

"There is--no--Beatrice." The words came out slowly, and yet not
distinctly, as though wrung from the heart by torture.

Unorna smiled at last, but the smile had not faded from her lips when
the air was rent by a terrible cry.

"By the Eternal God of Heaven!" cried the ringing voice. "It is a
lie!--a lie!--a lie!"

She who had never feared anything earthly or unearthly shrank back. She
felt her heavy hair rising bodily upon her head.

The Wanderer had sprung to his feet. The magnitude and horror of the
falsehood spoken had stabbed the slumbering soul to sudden and terrible
wakefulness. The outline of his tall figure was distinct against the
gray background of ice and snow. He was standing at his full height, his
arms stretched up to heaven, his face luminously pale, his deep eyes
on fire and fixed upon her face, forcing back her dominating will upon
itself. But he was not alone!

"Beatrice!" he cried in long-drawn agony.

Between him and Unorna something passed by, something dark and soft and
noiseless, that took shape slowly--a woman in black, a veil thrown back
from her forehead, her white face turned towards the Wanderer, her white
hands hanging by her side. She stood still, and the face turned, and the
eyes met Unorna's, and Unorna knew that it was Beatrice.

There she stood, between them, motionless as a statue, impalpable as
air, but real as life itself. The vision, if it was a vision, lasted
fully a minute. Never, to the day of her death, was Unorna to forget
that face, with its deathlike purity of outline, with its unspeakable
nobility of feature.

It vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. A low broken sound of pain
escaped from the Wanderer's lips, and with his arms extended he fell
forwards. The strong woman caught him and he sank to the ground gently,
in her arms, his head supported upon her shoulder, as she kneeled under
the heavy weight.

There was a sound of quick footsteps on the frozen snow. A Bohemian
watchman, alarmed by the loud cry, was running to the spot.

"What has happened?" he asked, bending down to examine the couple.

"My friend has fainted," said Unorna calmly. "He is subject to it. You
must help me to get him home."

"Is it far?" asked the man.

"To the House of the Black Mother of God."



CHAPTER IX

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."