Act 4 — SCENE-SHIFTING

Time, that sees everything, and hears everything, brings all things to light.—Sophocles.

The following letter, written by the proprietor of a curiosity shop in central London, was handed in at the toy-shop of one Emmanuel Falk in a by-way of the city of Nuremberg, and perused by the light of a yellow candle:—

“Dear Mr. Falk. I have pleasure in informing you that copies of the masks which belonged to the Biron family have come as pledges into my hands. They are genuine I have no doubt, because I find the name Joseph Falk engraved upon their backs. Permit me to state the incidents connected with this discovery.

“Yesterday a middle-aged Englishman, well-dressed, but apparently pressed for money, entered my shop and requested me to make him an advance, offering as security the pair of masks. Let me tell you he was well aware of their value. He asked for £5 and when I had handed him that amount he left hurriedly. I called my boy Jacob, pointed the man out, and bade him follow. Jacob went after the Englishman to his home. Very soon the man came out with a bag, which Jacob was permitted to carry for some coppers to the underground station. Jacob accompanied the man to Paddington, and standing close behind heard him ask for a ticket to a small town some distance from the metropolis. Not having sufficient money upon him to follow the man to his destination, Jacob returned. In the afternoon I called at the house, which the Englishman had entered after leaving my shop, told the woman who answered my ring that I was a tax-collector, and so managed to discover the name of the man who pawned the masks.

“You know where Mr. Biron can be found. Will you then write to him, letting him know of my discovery, and telling him that I will grant further information if he will communicate with me? The masks cannot leave my shop, as I may be ordered to give them up any day, but if he can visit me I will produce them for his inspection. I presume that the reward which he has offered for so long still holds good, if the information I am able to give may lead to the discovery of the originals? If you will forward this letter I will pay you five per cent upon the transaction, should the affair be brought to a satisfactory conclusion, and to this effect I enclose my commission note duly signed and stamped. If you are not content with my offer, remember, I can certainly discover Mr. Biron through advertisements in the Italian papers; but this would require time, and the masks may be redeemed to-morrow. I must not fail to produce them, because the English law is severe.

“I am, my dear sir, your most obedient, humble servant,

“Francesco Cerutti.”

The old toy-maker spluttered through his beard until the candle guttered.

“The thief! the rogue!” he shouted, “The son of a dog to offer me his five per cent. I will not help him. Not for twenty. Let him give me my fifty per cent, and I will do business. The vampire! How he would suck my blood. The toad! the fox! Would that I might put him in the Iron Virgin. Would that I might poison the Pegnitz and make him drink of the water.”

The candlelight fell with weird effect among stacks of toys, striking a thousand glassy eyes into a semblance of life. There were legions of dolls stuffed with mechanism; there were animals, birds, and realistic reptiles, quivering and mouthing at their long-bearded Frankenstein. Their eyes were so many points of light glinting all colours, tawny-red, yellow, black, green, winking and leering and grinning. These eyes appeared to the toy-maker to expand during the night and to contract by day. When the sun entered the shop the eyes were small and yellow, having each one a narrow line of black for pupil. Towards evening these pupils were enlarged, and by night became round and far-seeing. Here was a doll whose eyes by the candlelight were unduly large; they might have been disfigured by the use of drugs. Here was another with optic nerves shuddering; and there another with eyes distorted, as it were by some external influence, the refracting surfaces being marred by a shadow cast across the retina. Emmanuel Falk loved those glinting glassy eyes. He felt a creator when he looked at them. He settled himself between the candle and the eyes, and indited a letter to Signore Eugene Biron, at the Strada Nuova di Poggio Reale, Napoli.

A fortnight passed without bringing any reply. A month followed, during which time the Italian Jew and the citizen of Nuremberg exchanged letters, which were impatient on the one side, and indignant on the other. But one day a very thin man entered the crooked street, stopped at the gabled toy-shop, and confronted the proprietor with the intelligence that his name was Eugene Biron.

The toy-maker thought at first that the Lord of all the Dolls had taken life and come to haunt him. Mr. Biron did not appear to darken the doorway as he entered, so hopelessly devoid was he of flesh. He was so thin that the perfect outline of his skull could be traced distinctly. For all that his face was pleasant, because it happened to possess two singularly kind eyes. His head was as bald as an apple. He had neither eyebrows nor beard. He might have been thirty, or he might have been seventy.

“By Gott!” whispered the toy-maker. “What a model! I will make a doll like him by San. Nicholas’ Day. He will make the children scream.”

Then he welcomed the visitor, and brought him into the sanctity of the work-shop where the toy marvels were planned and composed. Bringing forward a chair, which with a sweep of the hand he cleared of dolls in embryo, he begged his guest to be seated, and floundering to a cupboard produced a bottle of thin wine and two beautiful Venetian glasses chased in blue.

“I have been travelling lately, and while in this neighbourhood happened to write to Italy for my letters,” the visitor explained in fluent German. “Having just received your communication, I take the earliest opportunity of visiting you, on the chance of your having some information to add to that which your letter gave.”

“But I have nothing,” wailed Emmanuel. “That Jew in London did write last week and say that the masks were still in bond. I have used already many postage-stamps upon the man. I did only meet him once, and then he talked me into an arrangement by which I did lose and he did gain—may Gott confound him! He calls himself my humble and obedient servant every time, and next time I write I will sign myself his lofty and unyielding master, by Gott I will. I will be even with that Jew. I would give one hundred of my best dolls to choke him in the Schöne Brunnen. I drink now to your long life, Mr. Biron, and to the increased prosperity of the toy business.”

“If you have nothing more to tell me I shall start for England to-night,” said the man of no nationality. “I have been searching all my life for these masks, and I may be now on the point of succeeding. Your great-grandfather made, I believe, several copies from the originals—”

“And he did die of it,” interrupted the toy-maker excitedly. “Gott in Heaven! They did kill him. Come up these stairs, and I will show you at the top of the house a great iron hook where he did hang himself and die.”

“I am afraid the masks may have killed others besides old Joseph Falk,” said the visitor solemnly. “That is why I want to discover them.”

The bearded toy-maker stared at his hairless guest with open mouth and eyes like two full moons behind his glasses. “And then what you do with them?” he demanded.

“Cremate them,” came the reply. “Or give them Christian burial.”

“Give to them Christian burial. Mine holy Gott!”

“Surely you know their history?”

“But I do not know,” shouted the toy-maker, snatching up a doll and screwing off its head, unmindful of the sawdust which snowed upon his slippers. “I know how Joseph Falk lost his brains and thought himself an actor, and would stand on these stairs reciting poetry. I know this old house was once the terror of all the strasse, and those who came here would sometimes stand and laugh as though the very devil of comedy was in them, and sometimes they would stamp and frown like Faustus at the opera. When Joseph Falk hanged himself Mr. Biron came and took the masks away. I know nothing more, except that these things happened more than a hundred years ago. Bah! they could not make my dolls in those days.”

“Falk begged for the masks to be returned to him after he had sold them,” said Biron slowly, “I believe he was compelled by his extraordinary nature to love them. He must have been a remarkable man. He called himself a toy-maker, but his toys were the products of a diseased and morbid imagination. He made a clock which, instead of ticking, groaned the seconds, and a candle with machinery attached which caused the flame to burn blue at midnight. Finally he made the masks.”

“And they did kill him,” muttered the great-grandson. “But he did sell them first to Mr. Biron.”

“To my great-grandfather, a man whose mind had suffered through intercourse with Joseph Falk. But is it possible that you, the present head of the family, do not know how the masks were made?”

“By Gott, I do know,” cried Emmanuel. “They were made of the skin of animals, treated with human blood. Bah! I will not talk about it. The thought gives me cold feelings here.” The toy-maker clapped his hand upon his spine.

“You are wrong,” said Biron. “They were made of skin certainly, but not the skin of animals. We will not go closely into details, because, as I have said, Joseph Falk’s mind was not a healthy one; but it was the skin of human beings that was used in the making of the masks.”

“That is one big lie,” roared the toy-maker; and as he uttered these words all the clocks in the establishment, above, around, and below, struck the hour together solemnly.

“I am sorry to say it is true,” said Biron quietly. “My great-grandfather’s notes leave no doubt on the matter. I will give you a few details concerning the composition of the masks. The idea was suggested to Joseph Falk one night at the opera. He was exceedingly fond of the stage, and his visits were as frequent as business would permit. One night he was attracted by a representation of the masks of Tragedy and Comedy modelled upon the proscenium; and straightway the idea entered his mind of creating two such masks, which should be influential types of the respective branches of the drama which they are supposed to represent. You know that he succeeded in carrying out this project; and you shall now hear how he did so.”

“Then he, my great-grandfather, was a devil,” cried the toy-maker. “I will forget him. He is not worthy to lie within a stone’s cast of the great Dürer. Bah! I will never again pray for him upon All Souls’ Day, and I will go no more to the cemetery of St. John to put immortelles upon his grave.”

“This is a story of the eighteenth century,” went on the visitor. “One of the institutions of this city was the College of Surgeons, which was placed hard by the prison, and distinguished from the buildings surrounding it by a gilded globe which satirists were fond of calling a globule—the only form of medicine which physicians of that day could, or would, dispense. Superstition ruled the art of healing to such an extraordinary extent that astrology was one of the important subjects for examination, and even barbers were required to pass in surgery before being licensed to shave chins. Anyone could be a surgeon in those days. It was in fact as easy as enlisting in the army, or, as a wit has said, as difficult to avoid as the press-gang; and knowing this you will not be surprised to hear that Joseph Falk became enrolled a member of the College, not because he wished to acquire the art of the physicians, but because his membership entitled him to a place in the dissecting-theatre, which was kept well supplied with material by the adjacent prison where executions were frequent.”

“Is it not true what I say, that this Joseph Falk prostituted the noble art of toy-making?” cried the great-grandson appealingly to his creations.

“Had he turned his talents in the right direction it is certain he would have produced many useful models of mechanism,” Biron went on. “Unfortunately his mind was bent towards the horrible. It happened that fortune favoured him. I do not suppose you have heard of the criminal Cagliari, who perpetrated his villainies in this and many another country during the last half of the eighteenth century; but according to my great-grandfather’s notes he seems to have been the most inhuman murderer that has ever troubled the world. This man made a living by decoying youths and young women into secret places, and killing them for the sake of what money and jewellery they possessed. It is said that he despatched some twenty victims in this manner, burying the bodies in a lonely wood which he named the Cagliari Cemetery. Strangely enough he was a well-educated man, of good appearance and address, although entirely lacking in all moral sense. It was however argued at the autopsy that the development of his head showed that he was not a natural creature. Being at last convicted and executed, his body was brought in due course to the dissecting-hall of the College of Surgeons. Joseph Falk managed to secure the malefactor’s abnormal head.”

“Mine Gott, I do not yet understand these things,” muttered the toy-maker.

“From that head he extracted the materials for compounding his mask of Tragedy.”

The listener’s jaw dropped, and his tongue protruded, but no sound proceeded therefrom. He stared along the vista of glass-eyed dolls, and the orbs stared back and winked knowingly.

“That same year the body of Quillebeuf came into the hands of old Falk,” went on the visitor hurriedly. “This man was a little mountebank of unusual talent, who roamed from country to country, miming and jesting, and giving entertainments full of drollery by the way-side. He had never an opportunity of appearing before the better classes, indeed it is said that he rarely entered the large towns. He loved the country, and wandered there with tabor and drum, an itinerant maker of mirth, delighting the simple people by his artistic foolery. Had he been given a chance of appearing upon the stage, he must have made his mark as a comedian, but opportunity was not his, and he died a failure. One day he was arrested on suspicion of theft and sent to prison; there he was taken ill and died, wearing to the end a laugh on his comic face. It was subsequently discovered that he had been innocent of the theft, and to do what poor justice was then possible a memorial was subscribed for, and set up in the place where he was born, a memorial which could not have been of any permanent nature, for when I went to see it a few years ago it had disappeared. Quillebeuf’s body was sent from the prison to the dissecting-room; and thus Joseph Falk obtained material for his mask of Comedy. There,” Biron concluded, “you have the story, as I know it, of the two masks which your great-grandfather made and mine bought.”

“Find them, I do beseech you, Mr. Biron,” muttered the frightened little toy-maker. “Bury them deep, and get a holy priest to exorcise the evil spirits. Holy Gott! There are horrible things in this world. I shall tremble when I make my dolls. I shall feel that they may go from my hands with the power to work evil upon the minds of little children. I will leave my business, Mr. Biron, and come with you. I do not want my five per cent. I will give it to charity, and more besides, when you have destroyed those awful things.”

“I thank you for your offer of help,” said the visitor, as he rose carefully from the rickety chair. “But I shall not require it. I am upon the right track I believe. Unfortunately my great-grandfather’s notes finish abruptly. There is indeed a tragedy suggested about that termination, and it is curious that no authenticated record exists in my family concerning how, when, or where the old man came to his end. There is however a rumour, entirely unsupported by proof, to the effect that Mr. Biron went to live for a time in a manor-house situated in a lonely English valley, and there left the masks built up inside a cellar, and the harmless copies made by Joseph Falk disposed about the rooms. The latter point is of the greatest importance, for, if there be any truth in the rumour, this pledging of the copies may well lead to the discovery of the originals. England is not a large country, but there are many lonely valleys about the island, and thousands of manor-houses. My grandfather and father both searched in vain for the masks, and bequeathed the duty to me. I have done what little I could, but up to the present without success. Is it not strange that they should now break through the long silence of more than a hundred years?”

“You will find them, Mr. Biron,” said the toy-maker with religious confidence. “Cerutti the Jew knows more than he has told to me, and his mouth will open when you show him money. He would not rest until he had found out everything. By this time he has discovered that house, and can point out to you the cellar where the masks are hidden, and directly you go into his shop he will bring before you a receipt for five hundred pounds English money, the reward which your father offered, and you renewed, and will say to you, ‘I have the information you require. Give me my money.’ Yes, by Gott, he will, and he will not give me my five per cent unless I frighten him with the law.”

The toy-maker of Nuremberg unfairly judged the London dealer in curios, but he was prejudiced against the man who had once got the better of him in trade. His estimation of the Jew’s shrewdness was, how ever, not at fault. When, less than a week later, the shadowy figure of Biron flitted across the threshold of the curiosity shop and revealed its identity the shrewd Italian made no mention of the reward, but merely bowed obsequiously, and in a business-like manner produced from his pocket a slip of paper, which he handed to the visitor with a second obeisance deeper than the first. Across this piece of paper was written the three pregnant words, “Thorlund. The Strath.”