M. P. Shiel - Purple Cloud

The Purple Cloud

By M. P. Shiel

http://www.blackmask.com

Introduction The Purple Cloud

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Introduction

In May of this year the writer received as noteworthy a packet of papers as it has been his lot to

examine—from a friend, Dr. Arthur Lister Browne, M A., F R C P.—consisting of four notebooks,

crowded with those giddy shapes of “shorthand,” whoseensembleresembles startled swarms hovering on

the wing—scribbled in pencil, and without vowels: so that their deciphering has been no holiday. The

letter also which accompanied them was pencilled in shorthand; and this, together with the note-book

marked “III,” I now publish.

The following is Browne's letter:

“Dear Old Chap,—I have just been lying thinking of you, wishing that you were here to give one a last

squeeze of the hand before I—'go':for going I am. Four days ago I felt a soreness in the throat, so,

passing by old Johnson's surgery at Selbridge, I asked him to have a look at me, and when he muttered

something about membranous laryngitis it made me smile, but by the time I reached home I was hoarse,

and not smiling: before night I had dyspnoea and laryngeal stridor.

So I wired to London for Morgan, and, between him and Johnson, they have been opening my trachea,

and singeing my in-side with chromic acid and the cautery; but I am too old a hand not to know what's

what: the bronchi involved—too far.Morgan is still, I believe, fondly longing to add me to his

successful-tracheotomy statistics, but prognosis was always my strong point, and the small consolation of

my death will be the beating of a specialist up his own street. So we shall see.

“I have been arranging some of my affairs this morning, and remembered these note-books—

intended letting you have them months ago, but you know my habit of putting things off, and, then, the

lady was living from whom I took down the statements: now she is dead, and, as a writing man, and a

man, you should be interested, if you can contrive to decipher. “I am under morphia at present, propped

up in a nice little state of languor, and, as I am able to write, will tell you something about her: her name

Mary Wilson; thirty when I met her, forty-five when she died; fifteen years of her. Do you know much

about the philosophy of the hypnotic trance? That was the relation between us—hypnotist and subject.

She had been under another man before my time, suffered fromticof the fifth nerve, had had most of her

teeth drawn before I saw her, and an attempt had been made to wrench out the nerve on the left side by

external scission. But it had made no difference: the clock of hell tick-tacked in that poor woman's jaw,

and it was a mercy that ever she dropped acrossme:my organization was found to possess easy control

over hers, and with a few suggestions I could expel her Legion.

“Well, you never saw anyone so singular as my friend, Miss Wilson: medicine-man as I am, I could

never behold her without a sort of shock: she so suggested what we call 'theotherworld,' some odor of

the worm, ghost more than woman! And yet I can hardly convey to you the why of this, except by dry

details as to the contours of her lofty forehead, meager lips, pointed chin, ashen cheeks. She was lank

and deplorably emaciated, her whole skeleton, except the femurs, being visible, her eyes of the bluish hue

of cigarette-smoke or quinine-solution made fluorescent by X-rays, and they had the strangest, feeble,

unearthly gaze, which at thirty-five her wisp of hair was white.

“She was well-to-do, lived alone in old Wooding Manor-house, five miles from Ash Thomas; and I,

'beginning' in these parts at the time, soon took up my residence at the manor, she insisting that I should

devote myself to her alone.

“Well, I found that, in the state of trance, Miss Wilson possessed remarkable powers: not peculiar to

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herself inkind,but so reliable, exact, far-reaching, in degree. Any tyro in psychical science will now sit and

discourse about the reporting powers of the mind in the trance-state—— a fact which Psychical

Research only after endless investigation admits to be scientific, but known to every old crone in the

Middle Ages; but I say that Miss Wilson's powers were'remarkable,'because I believe that,in general,

the powers manifest themselves more particularly with regard to space, as distinct from time, the spirit

roaming in the present, travelling over a plain; but Miss Wilson's gift was special in this, that she travelled

all ways, and easily in all but one, east, west, up, down, in the past, the present, and the future.

“This I discovered gradually. She would emit a stream of sounds—I can hardly call itspeech—

murmurous, guttural, mixed with puffy breath-sounds of the languid lips, this accompanied by an intense

contraction of the pupils, absence of the knee-jerk, rigor, a rapt and arrant expression; and I got into the

habit of sitting long at her bedside, fascinated by her, trying to catch the import of that visionary language

which came croaking from her throat, puffing and fluttering from her lips, until in the course of years my

ear learned to discern the words; 'the veil was rent' for me, too; and I could follow somewhat the trips of

her musing and wandering spirit.

“I heard her one day utter some words which were familiar to me: 'Such were the arts by which the

Romans extended their conquests, and attained the palm of victory'—from Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,'

which I could guess that she had never read.

“I said in a stem voice; 'Where are you?' “She replied, 'Us are eight hundred miles above. A man is

writing. Us are reading.

“I may tell you two things: first, that in trance she never spoke of herself as 'I,' but, for some reason, in

thisobjectiveway, as'us':'us are,' she would say, 'us went,' though, of course, she was 'educated';

secondly, when wandering in the past she always represented herself as being'above'(the earth?), and

higher the further back in time she went; in describing present events she felt herself'on,'while, as regards

the future, she invariably declared that'us'were so many miles'within.'“To her travels in this last direction,

however, there seemed to exist fixed limits: I say seemed, meaning that, in spite of my efforts, she never,

in fact, went far in this direction. Three, four thousand 'miles' were common figures on her lips in

describing her distance 'above'; but her distance 'within' never got beyond sixty. Usually, she would say

twenty, twenty-five, appearing in relation to the future to resemble a diver, who, the deeper he strives,

finds a more resistant pressure, until at no great depth resistance becomes prohibition, and he can no

deeper strive.

“I am afraid I can't go on, though I could tell you a lot about this lady. For fifteen years, off and on, I sat

listening by her dim bedside, until at last my expert ear could detect the sense of her faintest exhalation. I

heard the 'Decline and Fall' from beginning to end; and though some of her reports were the most

frivolous stuff, over others I have hung in a horror of interest. Certainly, I have heard some amazing

words proceed from those spirit-lips of Mary Wilson. Sometimes I could hitch her repeatedly to any

scene or subject that I chose by the mere use of my will; at other times the flighty waywardness of her

foot eluded me: she resisted—she disobeyed; otherwise I might have sent you, not four note-books, but

twenty. About the fifth year it struck me that I should do well to jot down her more connected utterances,

since I knew shorthand, and I did . . . . Note-book 'III' belongs to the eleventh year, its history being this:

I heard her one afternoon murmuring in the intonation used whenreading,asked her where she was, and

she replied: 'Us are forty-five miles within: us read, another writes. . . .' “But no more of Mary Wilson

now: rather let us think a little of A. L. Browne—with a breathing-tube in his trachea, and Eternity under

his pillow. . . .” (Dr. Browne's letter then continues on subjects of no interest here.)

(My transcription of the shorthand book “III” I now proceed to give, merely reminding the reader that

the words form the substance of a document to be written, or to be motived (according to Miss Wilson),

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in that Future, which, no less than the Past, substantially exists in the Present—though, like the Past, we

see it not. I need only add that the title, division into paragraphs, &c., have been arbitrarily contrived by

myself for convenience.)

[Here begins the note-book marked “III”.]

The Purple Cloud

Well, the memory seems to be getting rather impaired now. What, for instance, was the name of that

parson who preached, just before theBorealset out, about the wrongness of any more attempts to reach

the North Pole? Forgotten! Yet four years ago it was as familiar to me as my own name.

Things which took place before the voyage seem to be getting a little cloudy in the memory now: I have

sat here, in the loggia of this Cornish villa, to write down some sort of account of what has

happened—God knows why, since no eye can ever read it—and at the very beginning I cannot

remember the parson's name.

He was a strange sort of man surely, Scotchman from Ayrshire, big, gaunt, with tawny hair; used to go

about London streets in shough and rough-spun clothes, a plaid flung from one shoulder, and once I saw

him in Holborn with his rather wild stalk, frowning and muttering to himself. He had no sooner come to

London and opened chapel (I think in Fetter Lane), than the little room began to be crowded; and when,

some years afterwards, he moved to a big establishment in Kensington, all sorts of men, even from

America and Australia, flocked to hear the thunder-storms that he talked, though certainly it was not an

age prone to rage into enthusiasms over that species of pulpit prophet and prophecy. But this particular

man undoubtedly did rouse the strong dark feelings that sleep in the heart: his eyes were pretty singular

and powerful; his voice from a whisper ran gathering, like snowballs, and crashed, much like the pack-ice

in commotion yonder in the North; while his gestures were as uncouth and gawky as some wild man's of

the primitive ages.

Well, this man—whatwashis name?—Macintosh? Mackay? I think—yes,thatwas it!

Mackay,Mackay saw fit to take offence at the fresh attempt to reach the Pole in theBoreal;and for three

Sundays, when the preparations were nearing completion, fulminated against it at Kensington.

The excitement as to the Pole had at this time reached a pitch which can only be described asfevered,if

this expresses the strange ecstasy and unrest which prevailed: for the scientific interest which men had felt

in this unknown region was now, suddenly, a thousand times intensified by a new interest—a tremendous

moneyinterest.

And the new zeal had ceased to be healthy in its tone as the old zeal had been: for now the mean demon

Mammon was having a hand in this matter.

Within the ten years preceding theBorealexpedition no less than twenty-seven expeditions had set out,

and failed. . .

The secret of which new rage lay in the last will of Mr. Charles P. Stickney of Chicago, that shah of

faddists, supposed to be the richest individual who ever lived, who, ten years before theBoreal

undertaking, dying, had bequeathed 175 million dollars to the man, of whatever nationality, who first

reached the Pole.

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Such the actual wording of the will—“man who first reached“:and from this loose method of

designating the person meant had immediately broken forth a prolonged heat of controversy in Europe

and America as to whether or no the testator meantthe Chiefof the first expedition which reached, until it

was finally decided on legal authority that the actual wording held good, that it was the individual,

whatever his station in the expedition, whose foot first reached the 90th degree of latitude, who would

have title to the “swag.”

At all events, the furore had risen, I say, to the pitch of fever; and, as to theBorealin particular, the

progress of her preparations was minutely conned in the newspapers, everyone was an authority on her

fitting, and she was in every mouth a bet, a hope, a joke, or a jeer: for now, at last, it was felt that

success was near. So this Mackay had an interested audience, if a somewhat startled, and a somewhat

cynical, one.

A lion-hearted man this must have been, after all, to dare proclaim a point-of-view so at variance with

the mood of his time! One against four hundred millions, they bent one way, he the opposite, saying that

they were wrong, all wrong! People used to call him “John the Baptist Redivivus”: and without doubt he

did suggest something of that sort. I suppose that at the time when he had the audacity to denounce the

Borealthere was not a sovereign on any throne who, but for loss of standing, would not have been glad

of a galley-post on board.

On the third Sunday night of his denunciation I was there in that Kensington chapel, and I heard him.

And the wild talk he talked!—seemed like a man delirious with inspiration.

We all sat hushed, while the man's prophesying voice ranged up and down through all the modulations of

thunder, from the hurrying mutter to the reverberant burst and hubbub: and those who came to scoff

remained to wonder.

What he said was this: That there was some sort of Fate, or Doom, connected with the Pole in reference

to the human race; that man's continued failure, in spite of continual effort, to attain proved this; and that

this failure constituted a lesson—and a warning—which the race disregarded at its peril.

The North Pole, he said, was not so far away, and the difficulties in the way of reaching it were not, on

the face of them, so great: human ingenuity had achieved a thousand things a thousand times more

difficult; yet in spite of over half-a-dozen well-planned efforts in the nineteenth century, and of thirty-one

in the twentieth, men had never really reached, though some had pretended to: always we had been

balked, balked, by some seeming chance—some restraining Hand: and herein lay the lesson—herein the

warning.Wonderfully like “the Tree of Knowledge”

in “Eden,” he said, was that Pole: the rest of the earth open and offered to man—butThatpersistently

veiled and “forbidden”; as when a father lays a hand upon his son, with “Not here, my child; where you

will—not here.”

But persons, he said, were free to stop their ears, and turn a callous consciousness to the whispers and

hints of Heaven; and he believed, he said, that the time was now near when we would find it absolutely in

our power to stand on that 90th of latitude, and plant an impious foot on the head of this planet—as it

had been given into the power of “Adam” to stretch an impious hand to the “Tree of Knowledge”; but,

said he—his voice vaulting now to a prolonged proclamation of awful augury—as the abuse of that

power had been followed in the one case by downfall prompt and cosmic, so, in the other, he warned the

whole human crew to look out thenceforth for nothing from God but a grumbling heaven, and thundery

weather.

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The man's frantic sincerity, authoritative voice, savage gestures, could not but have their effect upon

all—as for me, I declare, I sat as though a messenger from Heaven addressed me; but I believe that I

had not yet reached home when the whole impression of the discourse had passed from me like water

from a duck's back. No, the Prophet in the twentieth century was not a success: John Baptist himself,

camel-skin and all, would have met with only tolerant shrugs. I dismissed Mackay from my mind with the

thought: “Behind his age, I suppose.”

But haven't I thought differently of Mackay since, my God . . .?

* * *

Three weeks—about that—before that Sunday-night discourse, I was visited by Clark, the chief of the

expedition— visit of friendship, I having then been established a year at 24, Harley Street, and, though

under twenty-seven, had, I suppose, asélitea practice as any doctor in Europe.

Élite—but small: I was able to maintain my state, and move among the great; but now and again I would

feel a pinch: just about then, in fact, I was only saved from embarrassment by the success of my book,

Applications of Science to the Arts.

In the course of conversation that afternoon Clark said to me in his haphazard way: “Do you know what

I dreamed about you last night, Adam Jeffson?—that you were with us on the expedition.' I think he must

have seen my start: on the same night I had dreamed the same thing; but not a word said I about it now.

There was a stammer in my tongue when I answered: “Who? I? on the expedition?—wouldn't go, if I

were asked.”

“Oh, you would”—from Clark.

“I wouldn't. You forget that I am about to be married.”

“Well, we need not discuss it, as Peters is not going to die. Still, if anything did happen to him, it is you I

should come straight to, Adam Jeffson.”

“Clark, you jest,” I said: “I know little of astronomy or meteorological phenomena. Besides, I am about

to be married. . . .”

“But what about your botany, my friend?There'swhat we should be wanting of you; and as for nautical

astronomy, poh, a man of your scientific habit would pick all that up in no time.”

“You discuss the matter gravely, Clark,” I said, smiling: “such a thought would never enter—

There is, first of all, myfiancée——”

“Ah, the all-important Countess, eh?—Well, but she, as far as I know the lady, would be the first to

force you to go. The chance of stamping one's foot on the Pole does not occur to a man every day, my

son.”

“Talk of something else!” I said: “there is Peters. . . .”

“Well, of course, there is Peters. But, believe me, the dream I had—”

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“Oh, your dreams!” I laughed.

Yes, I remember: pretended to laugh! but my secret heart knew, eventhen,that one of those crises was

occurring in my life which, from my childhood, have made it the most extraordinary that any creature of

the earth ever lived; and I knew that this was so, firstly because of the two dreams, and secondly

because, when, Clark gone, I was drawing on my gloves to go to see myfiancée,I heard distinctly the old

two voices; and one said: “Go not to see her now!” and the other: “Yes, go, go!”

The two voices of my life! One, reading this, would think that I mean merely two contradictory

impulses—or else that I rave: for what modern man could comprehend how real-seeming were those

voices, how loud, and how anon I could hear them contend within me with a nearness “nearer than

breathing,” “closer than hands and feet.”

About the age of seven it happened first to me: I playing one summer evening in a pine-wood of my

father's; half a mile away a quarry-cliff; and it seemed as if someone said inside of me “Take a walk

toward the cliff,” and as if someone else said “Don't go that way at all!”—

whispers then, which gradually, as I grew up, swelled to cries of wrathful contention. I did go toward the

cliff: and fell. Some weeks later, on recovering speech, I told my astonished mother that someone “had

pushed me” over the edge, and that someone else “had caught me” at the bottom!

One night, somewhat before my thirteenth birthday, lying on a sofa, the notion visited me that my life

must be of mighty importance to some thing or things that I could not see; that two Powers, which hated

each other, must be continually after me, one wishing to kill me, the other to keep me living, one wishing

me to do so and so, the other to do the opposite; that I was not a boy like other boys, but a being

separate, special, marked for—something. Already then I had notions, touches of mood, fugitive

instincts, as occult and primitive, I verily believe, as those of the first man that stepped: so that such

expressions as “Lord spake to So-and-so, saying” have never suggested any question in my mind as to

how the voice washeard:I did not find it difficult to comprehend that originally men had more ears than

two, as beasts and “mediums”

have. Nor should have been surprised to know that I, in these latter days, more or less resemble those

primeval ones.

But not a creature, except maybe my mother, has ever dreamed me what I here state that I was:

I seemed the ordinary boy of my day, bow in my “Varsity eight,” cramming for exams., dawdling in

clubs. When I had to select a profession, who could have suspected the battle that transacted itself in my

breast, while my brain was careless—that conflict wherein the brawling voices brawled, the one: “Be a

doctor,” the other: “Be a lawyer, an artist—beanythingbut a doctor!”

A doctor I became; went to what had grown into the greatest of medical schools—Cambridge; and

there it was that I came across a man named Scotland, who had an odd view of the world—

was always talking about certain “Black” and White” Powers, till it became absurd, and the men used to

call him “Black-and-white-mystery-man,” because one day when someone said something about “the

black mystery of the unierse,” Scotland corrected him with “the black-andwhite mystery.”

Well I remember Scotland now—had rooms in the New Court at Trinity, and a set of us were generally

there—the genes with a passion for cats, and Sappho, and the Anthology, very short in stature, with a

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M. P. Shiel - Purple Cloud

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