The Purple Cloud
By M. P. Shiel.
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Ἔσται καὶ Σάμος ἄμμος, ἐσεῖται Δῆλος ἄδηλος.
Sibylline Prophecy
The Purple Cloud
Introduction
About three months ago—that is to say, toward the end of May of this year of 1900—the writer whose name appears on the titlepage received as noteworthy a letter, and packet of papers, as it has been his lot to examine. They came from a very good friend of mine, whose name there is no reason that I should now conceal—Dr. Arthur Lister Browne, M.A. (Oxon.), F.R.C.P. It happened that for two years I had been spending most of my time in France, and as Browne had a Norfolk practice, I had not seen him during my visits to London. Moreover, though our friendship was of the most intimate kind, we were both atrocious correspondents: so that only two notes passed between us during those years.
Till, last May, there reached me the letter—and the packet—to which I refer. The packet consisted of four notebooks, quite crowded throughout with those giddy shapes of Pitman’s shorthand, whose ensemble so resembles startled swarms hovering in flighty poses on the wing. They were scribbled in pencil, with little distinction between thick and thin strokes, few vowels: so that their slow deciphering, I can assure the reader, has been no holiday. The letter also was pencilled in shorthand; and this letter, together with the second of the notebooks which I have deciphered (it was marked “III.”), I now publish.
[I must say, however, that in some five instances there will occur sentences rather crutched by my own guesswork; and in two instances the characters were so impossibly mystical, that I had to abandon the passage with a headache. But all this will be found immaterial to the general narrative.]
The following is Browne’s letter:
“Dear Old Shiel—I have just been lying thinking of you, and wishing that you were here to give one a last squeeze of the hand before I—‘go’: for, by all appearance, ‘going’ I am. Four days ago, I began to feel a soreness in the throat, and passing by old Johnson’s surgery at Selbridge, went in and asked him to have a look at me. He muttered something about membranous laryngitis which made me smile, but by the time I reached home I was hoarse, and not smiling: before night I had dyspnoea and laryngeal stridor. I at once telegraphed to London for Morgan, and, between him and Johnson, they have been opening my trachea, and burning my inside with chromic acid and the galvanic cautery. The difficulty as to breathing has subsided, and it is wonderful how little I suffer: but I am much too old a hand not to know what’s what: the bronchi are involved—too far involved—and as a matter of absolute fact, there isn’t any hope. Morgan is still, I believe, fondly dwelling upon the possibility of adding me to his successful-tracheotomy statistics, but prognosis was always my strong point, and I say No. The very small consolation of my death will be the beating of a specialist in his own line. So we shall see.
“I have been arranging some of my affairs this morning, and remembered these notebooks. I intended letting you have them months ago, but my habit of putting things off, and the fact that the lady was alive from whom I took down the words, prevented me. Now she is dead, and as a literary man, and a student of life, you should be interested, if you can manage to read them. You may even find them valuable.
“I am under a little morphia at present, propped up in a nice little state of languor, and as I am able to write without much effort, I will tell you in the old Pitman’s something about her. Her name was Miss Mary Wilson; she was about thirty when I met her, forty-five when she died, and I knew her intimately all those fifteen years. Do you know anything about the philosophy of the hypnotic trance? Well, that was the relation between us—hypnotist and subject. She had been under another man before my time, but no one was ever so successful with her as I. She suffered from tic douloureux of the fifth nerve. She 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 the external scission. But it made no difference: all the clocks in hell ticktacked in that poor woman’s jaw,
