The last cadence of the death-chant died away; the bearers, with heavy tread, carried the coffin through an iron door to its place in the vault; one by one the crowd passed out of the cathedral, and at last, in the choir, the dreamer stood alone. He turned himself also to depart, and, awakened to complete consciousness, beheld the pianist just resting from the keys. “What piece have you been playing?” asked Fred. The musician replied it was “Mendelssohn’s Funeral March!”
This piece, Fred solemnly assured me, he had never heard before. The phenomenon thus appears inexplicable by any hypothesis which would regard it as mere coincidence. Whether this vision was suggested by an unconscious recognition of Mendelssohn’s style in the piece performed, or, by the awakening of some unknown intuitional faculty, it was produced as an original creation, I know not, but certainly it is as remarkable an instance of sympathetic clairvoyance as I ever knew.
Dan, the partner of my hashish-walk mentioned as occurring in the town of P⸺, was, at the same time as myself, a member of the college. The Coryphaeus of witty circles, and the light of all our festivals, he was still imaginative in higher spheres, and as worthily held the rostrum and the bard’s chair as his place by the genial fireside or generous table. A poet, and an enthusiastic lover as well as performer of music, I supposed that the effect of hashish upon his susceptible temperament would be delightful in the extreme. But to such a result, the time at which he took the drug was one of the most unfavorable in the world—when his nervous system was in a state of even morbid excitability. We had started together on a walk when the thrill came on. And such a thrill—or, rather, such a succession of thrills—it is wonderful how a human organism could sustain. At first a cloud of impenetrable mystery enwrapped him; then upon the crown of his head a weight began to press. It increased in gravity without gaining bulk, and at last, breaking through the barrier of the skull, it slid down the spinal column like lightning, convulsing every nerve with one simultaneous shudder of agony.
This sensation was repeated again and again, until, with horror, he called on me to return, as assured as I had ever been in my first experiments that death was soon to be the result of the shock. I instantly obeyed his wish, and on reaching his room he lay down. Of a sudden all space expanded marvelously, and into the broad area where he reclined marched a multitude of bands from all directions, discoursing music upon all sorts of instruments, and each band playing a different march on a different key, yet all, by some scientific arrangement, preserving perfect harmony with each other, and most exquisitely keeping time. As the symphony increased in volume, so also did it heighten in pitch, until at last the needle-points of sound seemed to concentre in a demon music-box of incredible upper register, which whirled the apex of its scream through the dome of his head, inside of which it was playing.
Now, on the wall of the room, removed to a great distance by the hashish expansion, a monstrous head was spiked up, which commenced a succession of grimaces of the most startling yet ludicrous character. First its ferociously bearded under jaw extended forward indefinitely, and then, the jaw shooting back, the mouth opened from ear to ear. Now the nose spun out into absurd enormity, and now the eyes winked with the rapidity of lightning.
Yet suffering in Dan bore an excessive over-ratio to mirth. In his greatest pain he had framed a withering curse against someone who had entered the room, but when he tried to give it utterance his lips failed in their office as if paralyzed. I gave him water when his thirst had become extreme, and the same sensations of a cataract plunging down his throat which I have before described occurred so powerfully that he set the glass down, unwilling to risk the consequences of his draught.
Returning to consciousness, he did not, however, recover from the more moderate hashish effects for months. The nervous thrills which I have related reappeared to him at intervals, and his dreams constantly wore a hashish tint. Indeed, in all cases which I have known, this drug has retained a more enduring influence than any stimulant in the whole catalogue.
A number of experiments made upon other persons with more or less success, yet none of them characterized by any phenomenon differing from those already detailed, prove conclusively that upon persons of the highest nervous and sanguine temperaments hashish has the strongest effect; on those of the bilious occasionally almost as powerful a one; while lymphatic constitutions are scarcely influenced at all except in some physical manner, such as vertigo, nausea, coma, or muscular rigidity. Yet to this statement there are striking exceptions, arising out of the operation of some latent forces of vitality which we have not yet included in our physical or psychical science. Until the laws which govern these are fully apprehended, hashish must ever remain a mystery, and its operation in any specific case an uncertainty.
IX
The Shadow of Bacchus, the Shadow of Thanatos, and the Shadow of Shame
Once more at the table I
