VIII PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES

Markheim.—Robert Louis Stevenson

On the Stairs.—Arthur Morrison

He [the author] can sometimes rouse our intense curiosity and eagerness by the mere depiction of a psychological state, as Walter Pater has done in the case of Sebastian Storck and other personages of his Imaginary Portraits. The fact that “nothing happens” in stories of this kind may be precisely what most interests us, because we are made to understand what it is that inhibits action.—Bliss Perry, A Study of Prose Fiction.

PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES

A subtle distinction is to be observed between the character-study and the psychological study, but it will not be supposed that writers of short-stories plainly label the distinction, or that the two types are frequently, if ever, found entirely separate. In the character-study more attention is paid to the true natures of the actors, and the demonstration of their natures is shown in the action of the story; in the psychological study more stress is laid upon the actual operation of thought, feeling and purpose—it is a laboratory study of what goes on in the human heart, to use a somewhat vague but necessary term, under stress of crisis.

The psychological study is the most difficult because the most penetrating of all short-story forms, and in consequence the most rare in its perfect presentation. To show the processes of reasoning, the interplay of motive, the power of feeling acting upon feeling, and the intricate combinations of these, calls for the most clear-sighted understanding of man, and the utmost skill in literary art, lest the story be lost in a fog of tiresome analysis and discussion. In “Markheim” and “On the Stairs,” two master story-tellers are easily at their best, for they never obtrude their own opinions, but swiftly and with a firm onward movement the stories disclose the true inward workings of the unique characters, while from mood, speech, and action we infallibly infer all the soul-processes by which their conclusions are reached.

MARKHEIM

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Introduction. Remarkable because it at once touches upon the external crisis of the story.

“Yes,” said the dealer, “our wind-falls are of various kinds. Some customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior knowledge. Some are dishonest,” and here he held up the candle, so that the light fell strongly on his visitor, “and in that case,” he continued, “I profit by my virtue.”

2. Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the shop.Note double reason. At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the flame, he blinked painfully and looked aside.

See how daringly the author plays with the reader without arousing suspicion. Compare Stevenson’s reasoning as to the reader’s suspicions with Dupin’s reasoning in “The Purloined Letter,” pp. 91, 92.

3. The dealer chuckled. “You come to me on Christmas-day,” he resumed, “when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that; you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of manner that I remark in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer can not look me in the eye, he has to pay for it.” The dealer once more chuckled; and then, changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of irony,Markheim has been there before. “You can give, as usual, a clean account of how you came into possession of the object?” he continued. “Still your uncle’s cabinet? A remarkable collector, sir!”

4. And the little, pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tip-toe, looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite pity, and a touch of horror.

Forecast.

5. “This time,” he said, “you are in error. I have not come to sell, but to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle’s cabinet is bare to the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas-present for a lady,” he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck Insincerity evident.into the speech he had prepared; “and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well know, a rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected.”

6. There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence.

Compare this setting, as it is gradually unfolded, with that of Gautier’s “The Mummy’s Foot.”

7. “Well, sir,” said the dealer, “be it so. You are an old customer after all; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good marriage, far be it from me to be an obstacle. Here is a nice thing for a lady now,” he went on, “this hand-glass—fifteenth century, warranted; comes from a good collection, too; but I reserve the name, in the interests of my customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole heir of a remarkable collector.”

Analyse its nature.

8. The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting voice, had stooped to take the object from its place; and, as he had done so, a shock had passed through Markheim, a start both of hand and foot, a sudden leap of many tumultuous passions to the face. It passed as swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a certain trembling of the hand that now received the glass.

Contributory incident.

9. “A glass,” he said, hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it more clearly. “A glass? For Christmas? Surely not?”

10. “And why not?” cried the dealer. “Why not a glass?”

Forecast.

11. Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expression. “You ask me why not?” he said. “Why, look here—look in it—look at yourself! Do you like to see it? No! nor I—nor any man.”

12. The little man had jumped back when Markheim had so suddenly confronted him with the mirror; but now, perceiving there was nothing worse on hand, he chuckled. “Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard favoured,” said he.

Note the working of Markheim’s morbid conscience, not yet understood by himself.

13. “I ask you,” said Markheim, “for a Christmas-present, and you give me this—this damned reminder of years, and sins and follies—this hand-conscience! Did you mean it? Had you a thought in your mind? Tell me. It will be better for you if you do. Come, tell me about yourself. I hazard a guess now, that you are in secret a very charitable man?”

First Moral Crisis.

14. The dealer looked closely at his companion. It was very odd, Markheim did not appear to be laughing; there was something in his face like an eager sparkle of hope, but nothing of mirth.

15. “What are you driving at?” the dealer asked.

16. “Not charitable?” returned the other, gloomily. “Not charitable; not pious; not scrupulous; unloving, unbeloved; a hand to get money, a safe to keep it. Is that all? Dear God, man, is that all?”

17. “I will tell you what it is,” began the dealer, with some sharpness, and then broke off again into a chuckle. “But I see this is a love match of yours, and you have been drinking the lady’s health.”

18. “Ah!” cried Markheim, with a strange curiosity. “Ah, have you been in love? Tell me about that.”

Note change of attitude.

19. “I,” cried the dealer. “I in love! I never had the time, nor have I the time to-day for all this nonsense. Will you take the glass?”

Analyse the forces back of Markheim’s parleying.

20. “Where is the hurry?” returned Markheim. “It is very pleasant to stand here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry away from any pleasure—no, not even from so mild a one as this. We should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a cliff’s edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it—a cliff a mile high—high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of humanity. Hence it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each other; why should we wear this mask? Let us be confidential. Who knows, we might become friends?”

21. “I have just one word to say to you,” said the dealer. “Either make your purchase, or walk out of my shop.”

Note how quickly Markheim follows the unconscious lead.

22. “True, true,” said Markheim. “Enough fooling. To business. Show me something else.”

First External Crisis.

23. The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace the glass upon the shelf, his thin blonde hair falling over his eyes as he did so. Markheim moved a little nearer, with one hand in the pocket of his great-coat; he drew himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time many Note all these. different emotions were depicted together on his face—terror, horror and resolve, fascination and a physical repulsion; and through a haggard lift of his upper lip, his teeth looked out.

He was prepared for the crime.

24. “This, perhaps, may suit,” observed the dealer; and then, as he began to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long, skewerlike dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen, striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a heap.

First Minor Climax.

25. Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings. Then the passage of a lad’s feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in upon these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness of his surroundings. He looked about him awfully. Beginning of the internal action. Note how all external things now begin to play upon the internal man. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the Throughout, note Stevenson’s rich imagery, and also his unusual vocabulary. tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer An unusual word. of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.

Picture.

26. From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim’s eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust.Evidence of premeditation. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices.Note the interplay of the outward picture and Markheim’s mind. Keep before you always the double movement of this study as both progress side by side, finally resulting in the predominance of the spiritual. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion—there it must lie till it was found. Found! ay, and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit. Ay, dead, or not, this was still the enemy. “Time was that when the brains were out,” he thought; and the first word struck into his mind. Time, now that the deed was accomplished—time, which had closed for the victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer.

27. The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and then another, with every variety of pace and voice—one deep as the bell from a cathedral turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz—the clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.

28. The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle, beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance reflections. In many rich mirrors, some of home designs, some from Venice or Amsterdam, he saw The old motive reasserts itself. his face repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. Plot Incident.And still as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him, with a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design.As fear subsides craft returns. He should have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all things otherwise; poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of A significant expression. the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like scurrying of rats in a deserted attic, filled the more remoteContrast physical and moral fear. Consider how the two are related. chambers of his brain with riot; the hand of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would jerk like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping defile, the dock, the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin.

Note the primary use of the word “rumor.”

29. Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind like a besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some rumor of the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their curiosity; and now, in all the neighboring houses, he divined them sitting motionless and with uplifted ear—solitary people, condemned to spend Contrast. Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now startlingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties, struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised finger: every degree and age and humor, but all, by their own hearths, prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him. Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. Study of fear. Impressionism.And then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and freeze the passerby; and he would step more boldly, and bustle aloud among the contents of the shop, and imitate, with elaborate bravado, the movements of a busy man at ease in his own house.

An important observation.

30. But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold on his credulity. The neighbor hearkening with white face beside his window, the passerby arrested by a horrible surmise on the pavement—these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through the brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate.Note how his reasoning becomes hyper-acute But here, within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched the servant set forth sweethearting, in her poor best, “out for the day” written in every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course; and yet, in the bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear a stir of delicate footing—he was surely conscious, inexplicably conscious of some presence. Forecast.Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet again behold the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred.

31. At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door which still seemed to repel his eyes. The house was tall, the skylight small and dirty, the day Note force of “blind.”blind with fog; and the light that filtered down to the ground story was exceedingly faint, and showed dimly on the threshold of the shop. And yet, in that strip of doubtful brightness, did there not hang wavering a shadow?

Pseudo crisis.

32. Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to beat with a staff on the shop-door, accompanying his blows with shouts and railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon by name. Contributory incident. Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the dead man. But no! he lay quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows and shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentleman desisted from his knocking and departed.

33. Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to get forth from this accusing neighborhood, to plunge into a bath of London multitudes, and to reach, on Note “apparent.” the other side of day, that haven of safety and apparent innocence—his bed. One visitor had come: at any moment another might follow and be more obstinate. Key.To have done the deed, and yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a failure. The money, that was now Markheim’s concern; and as a means to that, the keys.

Note subsidence of acute fears and rise of his true mood.

34. He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the shadow was still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance of the mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew near the body of his victim. The human character had quite departed. Like a suit half-stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk doubled, on the floor; and yet the thing repelled him. Although so dingy and inconsiderable to the eye, he feared it might have more significance to the touch. He took the body by the shoulders, and turned it on its back. It was strangely light and supple, and the limbs, as if they had been broken, fell into the oddest postures. Carefully consider the question of Markheim’s sanity, judging only from the story as thus far told.The face was robbed of all expression; but it was as pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain fair day in a fisher’s village: a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd upon the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal voice of a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried over head in the crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great screen with pictures, dismally designed, garishly colored: Brownrigg with her apprentice; the Mannings with their murdered guest; Weare in the death-grip of Thurtell; and a score besides of famous crimes. The thing was as clear as an illusion; he was once again that little boy; he was looking once again, and with the same sense of physical revolt, at these vile pictures; he was still stunned by the thumping of the drums.Reaction. A bar of that day’s music returned upon his memory; and at that, for the first time, a qualm came over him, a breath of nausea, a sudden weakness of the joints, which he must instantly resist and conquer.

35. He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these considerations; looking the more hardily in the dead face, bending his mind to realize the nature and greatness of his crime. So little a while ago that face had moved with every change of sentiment, that pale mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire with governable energies; and now, and by his act, that piece of life had been arrested, as the horologist, with interjected finger,Key. What caused this benumbed conscience? arrests the beating of the clock. So he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more remorseful consciousness; the same heart which had shuddered before the painted effigies of crime, looked on its reality unmoved. At best, he felt a gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all those faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one who had never lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a tremor.

Plot Incident.

36. With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he found the keys and advanced toward the open door of the shop. Outside, it had begun to rain smartly; and the sound of the shower upon the roof had banished silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of the house were haunted by an incessant echoing, which filled the ear and mingled with the ticking of the clocks. Forecast of moral crisis.And, as Markheim approached the door, he seemed to hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps of another foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated loosely on the threshold. He threw a ton’s weight of resolve upon his muscles, and drew back the door.

37. The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and stairs; on the bright suit of armor posted, halbert in hand, upon the landing; and on the dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures that hung against the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was the beating Note harmony of setting with tone of approaching crisis. of the rain through all the house that, in Markheim’s ears, it began to be distinguished into many different sounds. Footsteps and sighs, the tread of regiments marching in the distance, the chink of money in theCompare Stevenson’s combination of fact and fantasy with Hawthorne’s in “The White Old Maid.” counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of the water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him to the verge of madness.Rise toward crisis. On every side he was haunted and begirt by presences. He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop, he heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a great effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and followed stealthily behind.Body and spirit. If he were but deaf, he thought, how tranquilly he would possess his soul. And then again, and hearkening with every fresh attention, he blessed himself for that unresisting sense which held the outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His head turned continually on his neck; his eyes, which seemed starting from their orbits, scouted on every side,A notable passage. and on every side were half-rewarded as with the tail of something nameless, vanishing. The four-and-twenty steps to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies.

38. On that first story, the doors stood ajar, three of them like three ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men’s observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among Note the exception. bed-clothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man’s experience, some willful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as the defeated tyrant overthrew the chess-board, should break the mold of their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said) when the winter changed Note how suspense in the reader is maintained by disclosing Markheim’s suspense. the time of its appearance. The like might befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him; if, for instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim; or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from all sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense, these things might be called the hands of God reached forth against Key. sin. But about God himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless exceptional, but so were his excuses, Is this normal? which God knew; it was there, and not among men, that he felt sure of justice.

Note action of auto-suggestion.

39. When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing cases and incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on the stage; many pictures, framed and unframed, standing with their faces to the wall; a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by great good fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and this concealed him from the neighbors. Here, then, Markheim drew in a packing case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It was a long business, for there were many; and it was irksome, besides; for, after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on the wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him. With the tail of his eye he saw the door—even glanced at it from time to time directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good estate of his defenses. Remarkable relief in suspense period. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and voices of many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was thronged with answerable ideas and images; church-going children and the pealing of the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on the brambly common, kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky; and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.

40. And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, went Powerful contrast. over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted the stair slowly and steadily, and Approach of moral crisis. presently a hand was laid upon the knob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened.

Markheim perceives only a physical danger. Note how long he remains dead to any moral judgment of himself.

41. Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not, whether the dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room, looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, Here is a real though unrecognized moral crisis. Fear eventually leads to his moral triumph. and then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the visitant returned.

Note the symbolism of the closed door.

42. “Did you call me?” he asked, pleasantly, and with that he entered the room and closed the door behind him.

Key.

43. Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a film upon his sight, but the outlines of the newcomer seemed to change and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light of the shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he bore a likeness to himself;This states the problem. and always, like a lump of living terror, there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the earth and not of God.

44. And yet the creature had a strange air of the common-place, as he stood looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: “You are looking for the money, I believe?” it was in the tones of everyday politeness.

45. Markheim made no answer.

46. “I should warn you,” resumed the other, “that the maid has left her sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences.”

47. “You know me?” cried the murderer.

48. The visitor smiled. “You have long been a favorite of mine,” he said; “and I have long observed and often sought to help you.”

49. “What are you?” cried Markheim: “the devil?”

This is an important passage.

50. “What I may be,” returned the other, “cannot affect the service I propose to render you.”

Forecast of Markheim’s struggle with his better self.

51. “It can,” cried Markheim; “it does! Be helped by you? No, never; not by you! You do not know me yet, thank God, you do not know me!”

52. “I know you,” replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or rather firmness. “I know you to the soul.”

Does Markheim really know himself?

53. “Know me!” cried Markheim. “Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control—if you could see their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is more overlaid; my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose myself.”

54. “To me?” inquired the visitant.

Note the author’s name for Markheim.

55. “To you before all,” returned the murderer. “I supposed you were intelligent. I thought—since you exist—you would prove a reader of the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts!Seek a cause for such reasoning. Think of it; my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants have dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother—the giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any willful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me for a thing that surely must be common as humanity—the unwilling sinner?”

Note the distinction between the final importance of cause and effect.

56. “All this is very feelingly expressed,” was the reply. “But it regards me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies;Contrast. the servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it is as if the gallows itself was striding toward you through the Christmas streets! Minor Moral Crisis.Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall I tell you where to find the money?”

A test of Markheim’s consistency.

57. “For what price?” asked Markheim.

58. “I offer you the service for a Christmas gift,” returned the other.

59. Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph. “No,” said he, “I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing to commit myself to evil.”

60. “I have no objection to a death-bed repentance,” observed the visitant.

61. “Because you disbelieve their efficacy!” Markheim cried.

62. “I do not say so,” returned the other; “but I look on these things from a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. Key.The man has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under color of religion, or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak compliance with desire.Is this irony? Now that he draws so near to his deliverance, he can add but one act of service—to repent, to die smiling, and thus to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from such a death bed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening to the man’s last words: and when I looked into that face, which had been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope.”

Markheim has judged the example.

63. “And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?” asked Markheim. “Do you think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and sin, and, at last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness? and is this crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of good?”

Is this true reasoning?

64. “Murder is to me no special category,” replied the other. “All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding on each other’s lives.Note the detached attitude. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself.Note paradox. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act, whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the rarest virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but because you are Markheim, that I offered to forward your escape.”

65. “I will lay my heart open to you,” answered Markheim. “This crime on which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. An unusual expression.Hitherto I have been driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty, driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these temptations; mine was not so:Note use of “of.” I had a thirst of pleasure. But to-day, and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches—both the power and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor in the world; Could that have been?I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past; something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of destination.”

66. “You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?” remarked the visitor; “and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some thousands?”

Self-deception uncovered.

67. “Ah,” said Markheim, “but this time I have a sure thing.”

68. “This time, again, you will lose,” replied the visitor, quietly.

69. “Ah, but I keep back the half!” cried Markheim.

70. “That also you will lose,” said the other.

Moral crisis begins to appear to Markheim.

71. The sweat started upon Markheim’s brow. “Well, then, what matter?” he exclaimed. “Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall one part of me, and that the worse, continue until the end to override the better? Evil and good run strong in me, haling me both ways. I do not love the one thing, Self-deception still struggling.I love all. I can conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyrdoms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the mind? Not so; good, also, is a spring of acts.”

72. But the visitant raised his finger. “For six-and-thirty years that you have been in this world,” said he, “through many changes of fortune and varieties of humor, I have watched you steadily fall. Here the story is plainly didactic.Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?—five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your way; nor can anything but death avail to stop you.”

73. “It is true,” Markheim said, huskily, “I have in some degree complied with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere exercise of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their surroundings.”

Key.

74. “I will propound to you one simple question,” said the other; “and as you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?”

Minor Moral Climax. Markheim at last sees himself.

75. “In any one?” repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration. “No,” he added, with despair, “in none! I have gone down in all.”

76. “Then,” said the visitor, “content yourself with what you are, for you will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are irrevocably written down.”

77. Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the visitor who first broke the silence. “That being so,” he said, “shall I show you the money?”

78. “And grace?” cried Markheim.

79. “Have you not tried it?” returned the other. “Two or three years ago, did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not your voice the loudest in the hymn?”

80. “It is true,” said Markheim; “and I see clearly what remains for me by way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul: my eyes are opened, and I behold myself at last for what I am.”

81. At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through the house; and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for which he had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanor.

Full Moral Crisis.

Physical Resultant Crisis.

82. “The maid!” he cried. “She has returned, as I forewarned you, and there is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you must say, is ill; you must let her in, with an assured but rather serious countenance—no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you success!Final test. Once the girl within, and the door closed, the same dexterity that has already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger in your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening—the whole night, if needful—to ransack the treasures of the house and to make good your safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up!” he cried: “up, friend; your life hangs trembling in the scales; up, and act!”

83. Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. “If I be condemned to evil acts,” he said, “there is still one door of freedom open—I can cease from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it, be! But I have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage.”

Who was the visitant?

84. The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely change; they brightened and softened with a tender triumph; and, even as they brightened, faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as chance-medley—a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but on the further side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the shop, where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamor.

85. He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.

Moral Climax. Denouement.

86. “You had better go for the police,” said he: “I have killed your master.”

MORRISON AND HIS WRITINGS

Arthur Morrison was born in Kent, England, in 1863. After some experience as a clerk in the civil service, as the secretary of a charity trust in the East End of London, and as a journalist on the editorial staff of an evening paper, he settled down definitely to his career as novelist and writer on oriental art. He is best known as a journalist, however, and his familiarity with the East End has largely contributed to his success in depicting the sordid life of London’s “mean streets,” as the “remorseless realism” of his pictures testify. Mr. Morrison’s literary work was in the nature of prose and verse panegyrizing bicycles and bicycling. His principal works, apart from several plays and magazine contributions, are Tales of Mean Streets; the several Martin Hewitt (detective) books; A Child of the Jago; To London Town; The Hole in the Wall; The Red Triangle; The Green Eye of Goona (published in America as The Green Diamond); and The Painters of Japan.

Mr. Morrison’s best fiction is not large in bulk, for his detective stories are surpassed both in merit and in popular appeal by more than one writer on similar themes; but in his Tales of Mean Streets, which contains the appended study, “On the Stairs,” he has attained a compressed power equalled only by the French realists and scarcely surpassed even by them. He has brought the art of suggestion to a high pass, his swiftness and firmness of delineation are equally effective, and though his subjects are sordid and often depressing they live before us as real folk.

The introduction to Tales of Mean Streets appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine in October, 1891, where it was called simply, “A Street.” This sketch attracted the attention of Mr. W. E. Henley, who gave the young writer the benefit of his own knowledge and criticism; and it is to Henley and to Walter Besant that Mr. Morrison makes special acknowledgment for help in the technicalities and mechanism of his tales. Most of these Tales of Mean Streets appeared in the National Observer (while Henley was the editor), and a few in the Pall Mall Budget.—Book Buyer (London), vol. 12.

If the modern novel about the slums, such as novels of Mr. Arthur Morrison, or the exceedingly able novels of Mr. Somerset Maugham, are intended to be sensational, I can only say that that is a noble and reasonable object, and that they attain it.... It may be ... it is necessary to have in our fiction the image of the horrible and hairy East-ender, merely to keep alive in us a fearful and childlike wonder at external peculiarities.... To summarize, our slum fiction is quite defensible as æsthetic fiction; it is not defensible as spiritual fact.—Gilbert K. Chesterton, Heretics.

Ever seeking the clean-cut, picturesque phrase and the vivid word, he produced a very striking picture of the East End. But, nevertheless, it was not quite satisfactory and convincing. Human nature does not alter so much with conditions as he seems to think. A little less or a little more morality does not affect its elements.... Mr. Morrison’s strongest gift in writing is a cynicism that is almost brutal. With it he elaborates the features of all his characters till the impression is produced that one savage, hideous, ugly coster and one gaudy-feathered, bedizened “Jonah” have acted as models for all his studies of Jagodom. Moreover, his success has been achieved in pictures of the brutal.—Academy (London), vol. 52.

The “mean streets” are streets in London.... [They] have found in Arthur Morrison an interpreter who lifts them out of their meanness upon the plane of a just claim to human sympathy. He lets us see the relief. Bill Napper, the drunken kerb-whacker, come into property and defending it against the rascally labor agitator, Scuddy Lond, mixing religious fervor and till-tapping with entire sincerity, Simmons and Ford, victims of their joint wife’s “jore” and mania for trouser-making, even the Anarchists of the Red Cow group, appeal to us with a sense almost of kinship because we feel that the figures are real. They are capital character-studies besides. Dickens never made a finer than the thief Scuddy Lond, or than Billy Chope.... The art of these stories seems flawless. Mr. Morrison’s gift amounts to genius.—Jacob Riis, Romances of “The Other Half,” The Book Buyer, vol. 12.

FURTHER REFERENCES FOR READING ON MORRISON

Methods of Arthur Morrison, Academy, vol. 50, 531; His Work, Academy, vol. 52, 493; Blackwood’s Magazine, vol. 163, 734; How to Write a Short Story, Bookman, vol. 5, 45; Morrison as a Realist, H. D. Traill, Fortnightly, vol. 67, 65; Reply, A. Morrison, New Review, vol. 16, 326; Child of the Jago: True to Facts, A. O. Jay, Fortnightly, vol. 67, 324.

FOR ANALYSIS

ON THE STAIRS

BY ARTHUR MORRISON

The house had been “genteel.” When trade was prospering in the East End, and the ship-fitter or block-maker thought it no shame to live in the parish where his workshop lay, such a master had lived here. Now, it was a tall, solid, well-bricked, ugly house, grimy and paintless in the joinery, cracked and patched in the windows: where the front door stood open all day long; and the womankind sat on the steps, talking of sickness and deaths and the cost of things; and treacherous holes lurked in the carpet of road-soil on the stairs and in the passage. For when eight families live in a house, nobody buys a door-mat, and the street was one of those streets that are always muddy. It smelt, too, of many things, none of them pleasant (one was fried fish); but for all that it was not a slum.

2. Three flights up, a gaunt woman with bare forearms stayed on her way to listen at a door which, opening, let out a warm, fetid waft from a close sick-room. A bent and tottering old woman stood on the threshold, holding the door behind her.

3. “An’ is 'e no better now, Mrs. Curtis?” the gaunt woman asked, with a nod at the opening.

4. The old woman shook her head, and pulled the door closer. Her jaw waggled loosely in her withered chaps: “Nor won’t be; till 'e’s gone.” Then after a certain pause, “'E’s goin’,” she said.

5. “Don’t doctor give no 'ope?”

6. “Lor’ bless ye, I don’t want to ast no doctors,” Mrs. Curtis replied, with something not unlike a chuckle. “I’ve seed too many on ’em. The boy’s a-goin’, fast; I can see that. An’ then”—she gave the handle another tug, and whispered—“he’s been called.” She nodded amain; “Three seprit knocks at the bed-head las’ night; an’ I know what that means!”

7. The gaunt woman raised her brows, and nodded. “Ah, well,” she said, “we all on us comes to it some day, sooner or later. An’ it’s often a 'appy release.”

8. The two looked into space beyond each other, the elder with a nod and a croak. Presently the other pursued, “'E’s been a very good son, ain’t 'e?”

9. “Ay, ay, well enough son to me,” responded the old woman, a little peevishly; “an’ I’ll 'ave ’im put away decent, though there’s on’y the Union for me after. I can do that, thank Gawd!” she added, meditatively, as chin on fist she stared into the thickening dark over the stairs.

10. “When I lost my pore 'usband,” said the gaunt woman with a certain brightening, “I give ’im a 'ansome funeral. 'E was a Oddfeller, an’ I got twelve pound. I 'ad a oak caufin an’ a open 'earse. There was a kerridge for the fam’ly an’ one for 'is mates—two 'orses each, an’ feathers, an’ mutes; an’ it went the furthest way round to the cimitry. 'Wotever 'appens, Mrs. Manders,’ says the undertaker, ‘you’ll feel as you’ve treated 'im proper; nobody can’t reproach you over that.’ An’ they couldn’t. 'E was a good 'usband to me, an’ I buried ’im respectable.”

11. The gaunt woman exulted. The old, old story of Manders’s funeral fell upon the other one’s ears with a freshened interest, and she mumbled her gums ruminantly. “Bob’ll 'ave a 'ansome buryin', too,” she said. “I can make it up, with the insurance money, an’ this, an’ that. On’y I dunno about mutes. It’s a expense.”

12. In the East End, when a woman has not enough money to buy a thing much desired, she does not say so in plain words; she says the thing is an “expense,” or a “great expense.” It means the same thing, but it sounds better. Mrs. Curtis had reckoned her resources, and found that mutes would be an “expense.” At a cheap funeral mutes cost half-a-sovereign and their liquor. Mrs. Manders said as much.

13. “Yus, yus, 'arf-a-sovereign,” the old woman assented. Within, the sick feebly beat the floor with a stick. “I’m a-comin’,” she cried shrilly; “yus, 'arf-a-sovereign, but it’s a lot, an’ I don’t see 'ow I’m to do it—not at present.” She reached for the door-handle again, but stopped and added, by after-thought, “Unless I don’t 'ave no plooms.”

14. “It 'ud be a pity not to 'ave plooms. I 'ad—”

15. There were footsteps on the stairs: then a stumble and a testy word. Mrs. Curtis peered over into the gathering dark. “Is it the doctor, sir?” she asked. It was the doctor’s assistant; and Mrs. Manders tramped up to the next landing as the door of the sick-room took him in.

16. For five minutes the stairs were darker than ever. Then the assistant, a very young man, came out again, followed by the old woman with a candle. Mrs. Manders listened in the upper dark. “He’s sinking fast,” said the assistant. “He must have a stimulant. Dr. Mansell ordered port wine. Where is it?” Mrs. Curtis mumbled dolorously. “I tell you he must have it,” he averred with unprofessional emphasis (his qualification was only a month old). “The man can’t take solid food, and his strength must be kept up somehow. Another day may make all the difference. Is it because you can’t afford it?” “It’s a expense—sich a expense, doctor,” the old woman pleaded. “An’ wot with 'arf-pints o’ milk an’—” She grew inarticulate, and mumbled dismally.

17. “But he must have it, Mrs. Curtis, if it’s your last shilling: it’s the only way. If you mean you absolutely haven’t the money—” and he paused a little awkwardly. He was not a wealthy young man—wealthy young men do not devil for East End doctors—but he was conscious of a certain haul of sixpences at nap the night before; and, being inexperienced, he did not foresee the career of persecution whereon he was entering at his own expense and of his own motion. He produced five shillings: “If you absolutely haven’t the money, why—take this and get a bottle—good: not at a public-house. But mind, at once. He should have had it before.”

18. It would have interested him, as a matter of coincidence, to know that his principal had been guilty of the selfsame indiscretion—even the amount was identical—on that landing the day before. But, as Mrs. Curtis said nothing of this, he floundered down the stair and out into the wetter mud, pondering whether or not the beloved son of a Congregational minister might take full credit for a deed of charity on the proceeds of sixpenny nap. But Mrs. Curtis puffed her wrinkles, and shook her head sagaciously as she carried in her candle. From the room came a clink as of money falling into a teapot. And Mrs. Manders went about her business.

19. The door was shut, and the stair a pit of blackness. Twice a lodger passed down, and up and down, and still it did not open. Men and women walked on the lower flights, and out at the door, and in again. From the street a shout or a snatch of laughter floated up the pit. On the pavement footsteps rang crisper and fewer, and from the bottom passage there were sounds of stagger and sprawl. A demented old clock buzzed divers hours at random, and was rebuked every twenty minutes by the regular tread of a policeman on his beat. Finally, somebody shut the street-door with a great bang, and the street was muffled. A key turned inside the door on the landing, but that was all. A feeble light shone for hours along the crack below, and then went out. The crazy old clock went buzzing on, but nothing left that room all night. Nothing that opened the door....

20. When next the key turned, it was to Mrs. Manders’s knock, in the full morning; and soon the two women came out on the landing together, Mrs. Curtis with a shapeless clump of bonnet. “Ah, 'e’s a lovely corpse,” said Mrs. Manders. “Like wax. So was my 'usband.”

21. “I must be stirrin’,” croaked the old woman, “an’ go about the insurance an’ the measurin’ an’ that. There’s lots to do.”

22. “Ah, there is. 'Oo are you goin’ to 'ave,—Wilkins? I 'ad Wilkins. Better than Kedge, I think: Kedge’s mutes dresses rusty, an’ their trousis is frayed. If you was thinkin’ of 'avin’ mutes—”

23. “Yus, yus,”—with a palsied nodding,—“I’m a-goin’ to 'ave mutes: I can do it respectable, thank Gawd!”

24. “And the plooms?”

25. “Ay, yus, and the plooms too. They ain’t sich a great expense, after all.”

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS FOR STUDY

1. What are the points of similarity between the Character-Study and the Psychological Study?

2. Define (a) Psychology, (b) Realism.

3. Does Markheim’s change of heart seem to you to be genuine? Give your reasons.

4. Analyze his motives fully.

5. Is the supernatural element convincing?

6. Could conscience produce the same effect as the Visitant?

7. What impression did Stevenson seek to convey by “Markheim”?

8. Fully analyze the thoughts, feelings, and motives of the mother.

9. Can you detect Morrison’s motive in writing “On the Stairs”?

10. Fully analyze one other psychological study, from any source.

TEN REPRESENTATIVE PSYCHOLOGICAL STUDIES

“A Coward,” Guy de Maupassant, translated in The Odd Number.

“Another Gambler,” Paul Bourget, translated in Stories by Foreign Authors.

“La Bretonne,” André Theuriet, translated in Short-Story Masterpieces.

“The Song of Death,” Hermann Sudermann, translated in The Indian Lily.

“The Recovery,” Edith Wharton, in Crucial Instances.

“Billy-Boy,” John Luther Long, in volume of same title.

“The Executioner,” Honoré de Balzac, translated in Masterpieces of Fiction.

“The Revolt of ‘Mother,’” Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Harper’s Magazine, vol. 81, 553.

“The Lady or the Tiger,” Frank R. Stockton, in volume of same title.

“The Man Without a Country,” Edward Everett Hale, in Short Story Classics, American.