DOYLE, Arthur Conan - Lot No. 249

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LOT NO. 249
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Lot No. 249
By Arthur Conan Doyle
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LOT NO. 249
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Lot No. 249
By Arthur Conan Doyle
First publication: Harper’s Monthly Magazine, September 1892
Of the dealings of Edward Bellingham with William Monkhouse Lee, and of the cause of the
great terror of Abercrombie Smith, it may be that no absolute and final judgment will ever be
delivered. It is true that we have the full and clear narrative of Smith himself, and such
corroboration as he could look for from Thomas Styles the servant, from the Reverend Plumptree
Peterson, Fellow of Old's, and from such other people as chanced to gain some passing glance at
this or that incident in a singular chain of events. Yet, in the main, the story must rest upon Smith
alone, and the most will think that it is more likely that one brain, however outwardly sane, has
some subtle warp in its texture, some strange flaw in its workings, than that the path of Nature
has been overstepped in open day in so famed a centre of learning and light as the University of
Oxford. Yet when we think how narrow and how devious this path of Nature is, how dimly we
can trace it, for all our lamps of science, and how from the darkness which girds it round great
and terrible ossibilities loom ever shadowly upwards, it is a bold and confident man who will put
a limit to the strange by-paths into which the human spirit may wander.
In a certain wing of what we will call Old College in Oxford there is a corner turret of an
exceeding great age. The heavy arch which spans the open door has bent downwards in the
centre under the weight of its years, and the grey, lichen-blotched blocks of stone are bound and
knitted together with withes and strands of ivy, as though the old mother had set herself to brace
them up against wind and weather. From the door a stone stair curves upward spirally, passing
two landings, and terminating in a third one, its steps all shapeless and hollowed by the tread of
so many generations of the seekers after knowledge. Life has flowed like water down this
winding stair, and, waterlike, has left these smooth-worn grooves behind it. From the long-
gowned, pedantic scholars of Plantagenet days down to the young bloods of a later age, how full
and strong had been that tide of young, English life. And what was left now of all those hopes,
those strivings, those fiery energies, save here and there in some old-world churchyard a few
scratches upon a stone, and perchance a handful of dust in a mouldering coffin? Yet here were
the silent stair and the grey, old wall, with bend and saltire and many another heraldic device still
to be read upon its surface, like grotesque shadows thrown back from the days that had passed.
In the month of May, in the year 1884, three young men occupied the sets of rooms which
opened on to the separate landings of the old stair. Each set consisted simply of a sitting-room
and of a bedroom, while the two corresponding rooms upon the ground-floor were used, the one
as a coal-cellar, and the other as the living-room of the servant, or scout, Thomas Styles, whose
duty it was to wait upon the three men above him. To right and to left was a line of lecture-rooms
LOT NO. 249
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and of offices, so that the dwellers in the old turret enjoyed a certain seclusion, which made the
chambers popular among the more studious undergraduates. Such were the three who occupied
them now—Abercrombie Smith above, Edward Bellingham beneath him and William
Monkhouse Lee upon the lowest storey.
It was ten o'clock on a bright, spring night, and Abercrombie Smith lay back in his arm-chair, his
feet upon the fender, and his briar-root pipe between his lips. In a similar chair, and equally at his
ease, there lounged on the other side of the fireplace his old school friend Jephro Hastie. Both
men were in flannels, for they had spent their evening upon the river, but apart from their dress
no one could look at their hard-cut, alert faces without seeing that they were open-air men—men
whose minds and tastes turned naturally to all that was manly and robust. Hastie, indeed, was
stroke of his college boat, and Smith was an even better oar, but a coming examination had
already cast its shadow over him and held him to his work, save for the few hours a week which
health demanded. A litter of medical books upon the table, with scattered bones, models, and
anatomical plates, pointed to the extent as well as the nature of his studies, while a couple of
single-sticks and a set of boxing-gloves above the mantelpiece hinted at the means by which,
with Hastie's help, he might take his exercise in its most compressed and least-distant form. They
knew each other very well—so well that they could sit now in that soothing silence which is the
very highest development of companionship.
"Have some whisky," said Abercrombie Smith at last between two cloudbursts. "Scotch in the
jug and Irish in the bottle."
"No, thanks. I'm in for the sculls. I don't liquor when I'm training. How about you?"
"I'm reading hard. I think it best to leave it alone."
Hastie nodded, and they relapsed into a contented silence.
"By the way, Smith," asked Hastie, presently, "have you made the acquaintance of either of the
fellows on your stair yet?"
"Just a nod when we pass. Nothing more."
"Hum! I should be inclined to let it stand at that. I know something of them both. Not much, but
as much as I want. I don't think I should take them to my bosom if I were you. Not that there's
much amiss with Monkhouse Lee."
"Meaning the thin one?"
"Precisely. He is a gentlemanly little fellow. I don't think there is any vice in him. But then you
can't know him without knowing Bellingham."
"Meaning the fat one?"
"Yes, the fat one. And he's a man whom I, for one, would rather not know."
LOT NO. 249
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Abercrombie Smith raised his eyebrows and glanced across at his companion.
"What's up, then?" he asked. "Drink? Cards? Cad? You used not to be censorious."
"Ah! you evidently don't know the man, or you wouldn't ask. There's something damnable about
him—something reptilian. My gorge always rises at him. I should put him down as a man with
secret vices —an evil liver. He's no fool, though. They say that he is one of the best men in his
line that they have ever had in the college."
"Medicine or classics?"
"Eastern languages. He's a demon at them. Chillingworth met him somewhere above the second
cataract last long, and he told me that he just prattled to the Arabs as if he had been born and
nursed and weaned among them. He talked Coptic to the Copts, and Hebrew to the Jews, and
Arabic to the Bedouins, and they were all ready to kiss the hem of his frock-coat. There are some
old hermit Johnnies up in those parts who sit on rocks and scowl and spit at the casual stranger.
Well, when they saw this chap Bellingham, before he had said five words they just lay down on
their bellies and wriggled. Chillingworth said that he never saw anything like it. Bellingham
seemed to take it as his right, too, and strutted about among them and talked down to them like a
Dutch uncle. Pretty good for an undergrad. of Old's, wasn't it?"
"Why do you say you can't know Lee without knowing Bellingham?"
"Because Bellingham is engaged to his sister Eveline. Such a bright little girl, Smith! I know the
whole family well. It's disgusting to see that brute with her. A toad and a dove, that's what they
always remind me of."
Abercrombie Smith grinned and knocked his ashes out against the side of the grate.
"You show every card in your hand, old chap," said he. "What a prejudiced, green-eyed, evil-
thinking old man it is! You have really nothing against the fellow except that."
"Well, I've known her ever since she was as long as that cherry-wood pipe, and I don't like to see
her taking risks. And it is a risk. He looks beastly. And he has a beastly temper, a venomous
temper. You remember his row with Long Norton?"
"No; you always forget that I am a freshman."
"Ah, it was last winter. Of course. Well, you know the towpath along by the river. There were
several fellows going along it, Bellingham in front, when they came on an old market-woman
coming the other way. It had been raining—you know what those fields are like when it has
rained—and the path ran between the river and a great puddle that was nearly as broad. Well,
what does this swine do but keep the path, and push the old girl into the mud, where she and her
marketings came to terrible grief. It was a blackguard thing to do, and Long Norton, who is as
gentle a fellow as ever stepped, told him what he thought of it. One word led to another, and it
ended in Norton laying his stick across the fellow's shoulders. There was the deuce of a fuss
LOT NO. 249
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about it, and it's a treat to see the way in which Bellingham looks at Norton when they meet now.
By Jove, Smith, it's nearly eleven o'clock!"
"No hurry. Light your pipe again."
"Not I. I'm supposed to be in training. Here I've been sitting gossiping when I ought to have been
safely tucked up. I'll borrow your skull, if you can share it. Williams has had mine for a month.
I'll take the little bones of your ear, too, if you are sure you won't need them. Thanks very much.
Never mind a bag, I can carry them very well under my arm. Good night, my son, and take my
tip as to your neighbour."
When Hastie, bearing his anatomical plunder, had clattered off down the winding stair,
Abercrombie Smith hurled his pipe into the wastepaper basket, and drawing his chair nearer to
the lamp, plunged into a formidable, green-covered volume, adorned with great, coloured maps
of that strange, internal kingdom of which we are the hapless and helpless monarchs. Though a
freshman at Oxford, the student was not so in medicine, for he had worked for four years at
Glasgow and at Berlin, and this coming examination would place him finally as a member of his
profession. With his firm mouth, broad forehead, and clear-cut, somewhat hard-featured face, he
was a man who, if he had no brilliant talent, was yet so dogged, so patient, and so strong that he
might in the end overtop a more showy genius. A man who can hold his own among Scotchmen
and North Germans is not a man to be easily set back. Smith had left a name at Glasgow and at
Berlin, and he was bent now upon doing as much at Oxford, if hard work and devotion could
accomplish it.
He had sat reading for about an hour, and the hands of the noisy carriage clock upon the side-
table were rapidly closing together upon the twelve, when a sudden sound fell upon the student's
ear—a sharp, rather shrill sound, like the hissing intake of a man's breath who gasps under some
strong emotion. Smith laid down his book and slanted his ear to listen. There was no one on
either side or above him, so that the interruption came certainly from the neighbour beneath—the
same neighbour of whom Hastie had given so unsavoury an account. Smith knew him only as a
flabby, pale-faced man of silent and studious habits, a man whose lamp threw a golden bar from
the old turret even after he had extinguished his own. This community in lateness had formed a
certain silent bond between them. It was soothing to Smith when the hours stole on towards
dawning to feel that there was another so close who set as small a value upon his sleep as he did.
Even now, as his thoughts turned towards him, Smith's feelings were kindly.
Hastie was a good fellow, but he was rough, strong-fibred, with no imagination or sympathy. He
could not tolerate departures from what he looked upon as the model type of manliness. If a man
could not be measured by a public-school standard, then he was beyond the pale with Hastie.
Like so many who are themselves robust, he was apt to confuse the constitution with the
character, to ascribe to want of principle what was really a want of circulation. Smith, with his
stronger mind, knew his friend's habit, and made allowance for it now as his thoughts turned
towards the man beneath him.
There was no return of the singular sound, and Smith was about to turn to his work once more,
when suddenly there broke out in the silence of the night a hoarse cry, a positive scream—the
LOT NO. 249
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call of a man who is moved and shaken beyond all control. Smith sprang out of his chair and
dropped his book. He was a man of fairly firm fibre, but there was something in this sudden,
uncontrollable shriek of horror which chilled his blood and pringled in his skin. Coming in such
a place and at such an hour, it brought a thousand fantastic possibilities into his head. Should he
rush down, or was it better to wait? He had all the national hatred of making a scene, and he
knew so little of his neighbour that he would not lightly intrude upon his affairs. For a moment
he stood in doubt and even as he balanced the matter there was a quick rattle of footsteps upon
the stairs, and young Monkhouse Lee, half-dressed and as white as ashes, burst into his room.
"Come down!" he gasped. "Bellingham's ill."
Abercrombie Smith followed him closely downstairs into the sitting-room which was beneath his
own, and intent as he was upon the matter in hand, he, could not but take an amazed glance
around him as he crossed the threshold. It was such a chamber as he had never seen before—a
museum rather than a study. Walls and ceiling were thickly covered with a thousand strange
relics from Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an
uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-
headed statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange, beetle-like deities cut
out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche
and shelf, while across the ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was
slung in a double noose.
In the centre of this singular chamber was a square table, littered with papers, bottles, and the
dried leaves of some graceful, palm-like plant. These varied objects had all been heaped together
in order to make room for a mummy case, which had been conveyed from the wall, as was
evident from the gap there, and laid across the front of the table. The mummy itself, a horrid,
black, withered thing, like a charred head on a gnarled bush, was lying half out of the case, with
its claw-like hand and bony forearm resting upon the table. Propped up against the sarcophagus
was an old, yellow scroll of papyrus, and in front of it, in a wooden armchair, sat the owner of
the room, his head thrown back, his widely opened eyes directed in a horrified stare to the
crocodile above him, and his blue, thick lips puffing loudly with every expiration.
"My God! he's dying!" cried Monkhouse Lee, distractedly.
He was a slim, handsome young fellow, olive-skinned and dark-eyed, of a Spanish rather than of
an English type, with a Celtic intensity of manner which contrasted with the Saxon phlegm of
Abercrombie Smith.
"Only a faint, I think," said the medical student. "Just give me a hand with him. You take his
feet. Now on to the sofa. Can you kick all those little wooden devils off? What a litter it is! Now
he will be all right if we undo his collar and give him some water. What has he been up to at
all?"
"I don't know. I heard him cry out. I ran up. I know him pretty well, you know. It is very good of
you to come down."
LOT NO. 249
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"His heart is going like a pair of castanets," said Smith, laying his hand on the breast of the
unconscious man. "He seems to me to be frightened all to pieces. Chuck the water over him!
What a face he has got on him!"
It was indeed a strange and most repellent face, for colour and outline were equally unnatural. It
was white, not with the ordinary pallor of fear, but with an absolutely bloodless white, like the
under side of a sole. He was very fat, but gave the impression of having at some time been
considerably fatter, for his skin hung loosely in creases and folds, and was shot with a meshwork
of wrinkles. Short, stubbly brown hair bristled up from his scalp, with a pair of thick, wrinkled
ears protruding at the sides. His light-grey eyes were still open, the pupils dilated and the balls
projecting in a fixed and horrid stare. It seemed to Smith as he looked down upon him that he
had never seen Nature's danger signals flying so plainly upon a man's countenance, and his
thoughts turned more seriously to the warning which Hastie had given him an hour before.
"What the deuce can have frightened him so?" he asked.
"It's the mummy."
"The mummy? How, then?"
"I don't know. It's beastly and morbid. I wish he would drop it. It's the second fright he has given
me. It was the same last winter. I found him just like this, with that horrid thing in front of him."
"What does he want with the mummy, then?"
"Oh, he's a crank, you know. It's his hobby. He knows more about these things than any man in
England. But I wish he wouldn't. Ah, he's beginning to come to."
A faint tinge of colour had begun to steal back into Bellingham's ghastly cheeks, and his eyelids
shivered like a sail after a calm. He clasped and unclasped his hands, drew a long, thin breath
between his teeth, and suddenly jerking up his head, threw a glance of recognition around him.
As his eyes fell upon the mummy, he sprang off the sofa, seized the roll of papyrus, thrust it into
a drawer, turned the key, and then staggered back on to the sofa.
"What 's up?" he asked. "What do you chaps want?"
"You've been shrieking out and making no end of a fuss," said Monkhouse Lee. "If our
neighbour here from above hadn't come down, I'm sure I don't know what I should have done
with you."
"Ah, it's Abercrombie Smith," said Bellingham, glancing up at him. "How very good of you to
come in! What a fool I am! Oh, my God, what a fool I am!"
He sank his head on to his hands, and burst into peal after peal of hysterical laughter.
"Look here! Drop it!" cried Smith, shaking him roughly by the shoulder.
LOT NO. 249
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"Your nerves are all in a jangle. You must drop these little midnight games with mummies, or
you'll be going off your chump. You're all on wires now."
"I wonder," said Bellingham, "whether you would be as cool as I am if you had seen——"
"What then?"
"Oh, nothing. I meant that I wonder if you could sit up at night with a mummy without trying
your nerves. I have no doubt that you are quite right. I dare say that I have been taking it out of
myself too much lately. But I am all right now. Please don't go, though. Just wait for a few
minutes until I am quite myself."
"The room is very close," remarked Lee, throwing open the window and letting in the cool night
air.
"It's balsamic resin," said Bellingham. He lifted up one of the dried palmate leaves from the table
and frizzled it over the chimney of the lamp. It broke away into heavy smoke wreaths, and a
pungent, biting odour filled the chamber. "It's the sacred plant—the plant of the priests," he
remarked. "Do you know anything of Eastern languages, Smith?"
"Nothing at all. Not a word."
The answer seemed to lift a weight from the Egyptologist's mind.
"By the way," he continued, "how long was it from the time that you ran down, until I came to
my senses?"
"Not long. Some four or five minutes."
"I thought it could not be very long," said he, drawing a long breath. "But what a strange thing
unconsciousness is! There is no measurement to it. I could not tell from my own sensations if it
were seconds or weeks. Now that gentleman on the table was packed up in the days of the
eleventh dynasty, some forty centuries ago, and yet if he could find his tongue, he would tell us
that this lapse of time has been but a closing of the eyes and a reopening of them. He is a
singularly fine mummy, Smith."
Smith stepped over to the table and looked down with a professional eye at the black and twisted
form in front of him. The features, though horribly discoloured, were perfect, and two little nut-
like eyes still lurked in the depths of the black, hollow sockets. The blotched skin was drawn
tightly from bone to bone, and a tangled wrap of black, coarse hair fell over the ears. Two thin
teeth, like those of a rat, overlay the shrivelled lower lip. In its crouching position, with bent
joints and craned head, there was a suggestion of energy about the horrid thing which made
Smith's gorge rise. The gaunt ribs, with their parchment-like covering, were exposed, and the
sunken, leaden-hued abdomen, with the long slit where the embalmer had left his mark; but the
lower limbs were wrapped round with coarse, yellow bandages. A number of little clove-like
LOT NO. 249
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pieces of myrrh and of cassia were sprinkled over the body, and lay scattered on the inside of the
case.
"I don't know his name," said Bellingham, passing his hand over the shrivelled head. "You see
the outer sarcophagus with the inscriptions is missing. Lot 249 is all the title he has now. You see
it printed on his case. That was his number in the auction at which I picked him up."
"He has been a very pretty sort of fellow in his day," remarked Abercrombie Smith.
"He has been a giant. His mummy is six feet seven in length, and that would be a giant over
there, for they were never a very robust race. Feel these great, knotted bones, too. He would be a
nasty fellow to tackle."
"Perhaps these very hands helped to build the stones into the pyramids," suggested Monkhouse
Lee, looking down with disgust in his eyes at the crooked, unclean talons.
"No fear. This fellow has been pickled in natron, and looked after in the most approved style.
They did not serve hodsmen in that fashion. Salt or bitumen was enough for them. It has been
calculated that this sort of thing cost about seven hundred and thirty pounds in our money. Our
friend was a noble at the least. What do you make of that small inscription near his feet, Smith?"
"I told you that I know no Eastern tongue."
"Ah, so you did. It is the name of the embalmer, I take it. A very conscientious worker he must
have been. I wonder how many modern works will survive four thousand years?"
He kept on speaking lightly and rapidly, but it was evident to Abercrombie Smith that he was
still palpitating with fear. His hands shook, his lower lip trembled and look where he would, his
eye always came sliding round to his gruesome companion. Through all his fear, however, there
was a suspicion of triumph in his tone and manner. His eyes shone, and his footstep, as he paced
the room, was brisk and jaunty. He gave the impression of a man who has gone through an
ordeal, the marks of which he still bears upon him, but which has helped him to his end.
"You're not going yet?" he cried, as Smith rose from the sofa.
At the prospect of solitude, his fears seemed to crowd back upon him, and he stretched out a
hand to detain him.
"Yes, I must go. I have my work to do. You are all right now. I think that with your nervous
system you should take up some less morbid study."
"Oh, I am not nervous as a rule; and I have unwrapped mummies before."
"You fainted last time," observed Monkhouse Lee.
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