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Ambrose Bierce >> The Parenticide Club
She, too, had been unable to deny herself the last profit which the
unfriendly action of the citizens and my absence had left her. For
one instant they looked into each other's blazing eyes and then sprang
together with indescribable fury. Round and round, the room they
struggled, the man cursing, the woman shrieking, both fighting like
demons--she to strike him with the dagger, he to strangle her with his
great bare hands. I know not how long I had the unhappiness to
observe this disagreeable instance of domestic infelicity, but at
last, after a more than usually vigorous struggle, the combatants
suddenly moved apart.
My father's breast and my mother's weapon showed evidences of contact.
For another instant they glared at each other in the most unamiable
way; then my poor, wounded father, feeling the hand of death upon him,
leaped forward, unmindful of resistance, grasped my dear mother in his
arms, dragged her to the side of the boiling cauldron, collected all
his failing energies, and sprang in with her! In a moment, both had
disappeared and were adding their oil to that of the committee of
citizens who had called the day before with an invitation to the
public meeting.
Convinced that these unhappy events closed to me every avenue to an
honorable career in that town, I removed to the famous city of
Otumwee, where these memoirs are written with a heart full of remorse
for a heedless act entailing so dismal a commercial disaster.
AN IMPERFECT CONFLAGRATION
Early one June morning in 1872 I murdered my father--an act which made
a deep impression on me at the time. This was before my marriage,
while I was living with my parents in Wisconsin. My father and I were
in the library of our home, dividing the proceeds of a burglary which
we had committed that night. These consisted of household goods
mostly, and the task of equitable division was difficult. We got on
very well with the napkins, towels and such things, and the silverware
was parted pretty nearly equally, but you can see for yourself that
when you try to divide a single music-box by two without a remainder
you will have trouble. It was that music-box which brought disaster
and disgrace upon our family. If we had left it my poor father might
now be alive.
It was a most exquisite and beautiful piece of workmanship--inlaid
with costly woods and carven very curiously. It would not only play a
great variety of tunes, but would whistle like a quail, bark like a
dog, crow every morning at daylight whether it was wound up or not,
and break the Ten Commandments. It was this last mentioned
accomplishment that won my father's heart and caused him to commit the
only dishonorable act of his life, though possibly he would have
committed more if he had been spared: he tried to conceal that
music-box from me, and declared upon his honor that he had not taken
it, though I know very well that, so far as he was concerned, the
burglary had been undertaken chiefly for the purpose of obtaining it.
My father had the music-box hidden under his cloak; we had worn cloaks
by way of disguise. He had solemnly assured me that he did not take
it. I knew that he did, and knew something of which he was evidently
ignorant; namely, that the box would crow at daylight and betray him
if I could prolong the division of profits till that time. All
occurred as I wished: as the gaslight began to pale in the library and
the shape of the windows was seen dimly behind the curtains, a long
cock-a-doodle-doo came from beneath the old gentleman's cloak,
followed by a few bars of an aria from _Tannhauser_, ending with a
loud click. A small hand-axe, which we had used to break into the
unlucky house, lay between us on the table; I picked it up. The old
man seeing that further concealment was useless took the box from
under his cloak and set it on the table. "Cut it in two if you prefer
that plan," said he; "I tried to save it from destruction."
He was a passionate lover of music and could himself play the
concertina with expression and feeling.
I said: "I do not question the purity of your motive: it would be
presumptuous of me to sit in judgment on my father. But business is
business, and with this axe I am going to effect a dissolution of our
partnership unless you will consent in all future burglaries to wear a
bell-punch."
"No," he said, after some reflection, "no, I could not do that; it
would look like a confession of dishonesty. People would say that you
distrusted me."
I could not help admiring his spirit and sensitiveness; for a moment I
was proud of him and disposed to overlook his fault, but a glance at
the richly jeweled music-box decided me, and, as I said, I removed the
old man from this vale of tears. Having done so, I was a trifle
uneasy. Not only was he my father--the author of my being--but the
body would be certainly discovered. It was now broad daylight and my
mother was likely to enter the library at any moment. Under the
circumstances, I thought it expedient to remove her also, which I did.
Then I paid off all the servants and discharged them.
That afternoon I went to the chief of police, told him what I had done
and asked his advice. It would be very painful to me if the facts
became publicly known. My conduct would be generally condemned; the
newspapers would bring it up against me if ever I should run for
office. The chief saw the force of these considerations; he was
himself an assassin of wide experience. After consulting with the
presiding judge of the Court of Variable Jurisdiction he advised me to
conceal the bodies in one of the bookcases, get a heavy insurance on
the house and burn it down. This I proceeded to do.
In the library was a book-case which my father had recently purchased
of some cranky inventor and had not filled. It was in shape and size
something like the old-fashioned "ward-robes" which one sees in
bed-rooms without closets, but opened all the way down, like a woman's
night-dress. It had glass doors. I had recently laid out my parents
and they were now rigid enough to stand erect; so I stood them in this
book-case, from which I had removed the shelves. I locked them in and
tacked some curtains over the glass doors. The inspector from the
insurance office passed a half-dozen times before the case without
suspicion.
That night, after getting my policy, I set fire to the house and
started through the woods to town, two miles away, where I managed to
be found about the time the excitement was at its height. With cries
of apprehension for the fate of my parents, I joined the rush and
arrived at the fire some two hours after I had kindled it. The whole
town was there as I dashed up. The house was entirely consumed, but
in one end of the level bed of glowing embers, bolt upright and
uninjured, was that book-case! The curtains had burned away, exposing
the glass-doors, through which the fierce, red light illuminated the
interior. There stood my dear father "in his habit as he lived," and
at his side the partner of his joys and sorrows. Not a hair of them
was singed, their clothing was intact. On their heads and throats the
injuries which in the accomplishment of my designs I had been
compelled to inflict were conspicuous. As in the presence of a
miracle, the people were silent; awe and terror had stilled every
tongue. I was myself greatly affected.
Some three years later, when the events herein related had nearly
faded from my memory, I went to New York to assist in passing some
counterfeit United States bonds. Carelessly looking into a furniture
store one day, I saw the exact counterpart of that book-case. "I
bought it for a trifle from a reformed inventor," the dealer
explained. "He said it was fireproof, the pores of the wood being
filled with alum under hydraulic pressure and the glass made of
asbestos. I don't suppose it is really fireproof--you can have it at
the price of an ordinary book-case."
"No," I said, "if you cannot warrant it fireproof I won't take
it"--and I bade him good morning.
I would not have had it at any price: it revived memories that were
exceedingly disagreeable.
THE HYPNOTIST
By those of my friends who happen to know that I sometimes amuse
myself with hypnotism, mind reading and kindred phenomena, I am
frequently asked if I have a clear conception of the nature of
whatever principle underlies them. To this question I always reply
that I neither have nor desire to have. I am no investigator with an
ear at the key-hole of Nature's workshop, trying with vulgar curiosity
to steal the secrets of her trade. The interests of science are as
little to me as mine seem to have been to science.
Doubtless the phenomena in question are simple enough, and in no way
transcend our powers of comprehension if only we could find the clew;
but for my part I prefer not to find it, for I am of a singularly
romantic disposition, deriving more gratification from mystery than
from knowledge. It was commonly remarked of me when I was a child
that my big blue eyes appeared to have been made rather to look into
than look out of--such was their dreamful beauty, and in my frequent
periods of abstraction, their indifference to what was going on. In
those peculiarities they resembled, I venture to think, the soul which
lies behind them, always more intent upon some lovely conception which
it has created in its own image than concerned about the laws of
nature and the material frame of things. All this, irrelevant and
egotistic as it may seem, is related by way of accounting for the
meagreness of the light that I am able to throw upon a subject that
has engaged so much of my attention, and concerning which there is so
keen and general a curiosity. With my powers and opportunities,
another person might doubtless have an explanation for much of what I
present simply as narrative.
My first knowledge that I possessed unusual powers came to me in my
fourteenth year, when at school. Happening one day to have forgotten
to bring my noon-day luncheon, I gazed longingly at that of a small
girl who was preparing to eat hers. Looking up, her eyes met mine and
she seemed unable to withdraw them. After a moment of hesitancy she
came forward in an absent kind of way and without a word surrendered
her little basket with its tempting contents and walked away.
Inexpressibly pleased, I relieved my hunger and destroyed the basket.
After that I had not the trouble to bring a luncheon for myself: that
little girl was my daily purveyor; and not infrequently in satisfying
my simple need from her frugal store I combined pleasure and profit by
constraining her attendance at the feast and making misleading proffer
of the viands, which eventually I consumed to the last fragment. The
girl was always persuaded that she had eaten all herself; and later in
the day her tearful complaints of hunger surprised the teacher,
entertained the pupils, earned for her the sobriquet of Greedy-Gut and
filled me with a peace past understanding.
A disagreeable feature of this otherwise satisfactory condition of
things was the necessary secrecy: the transfer of the luncheon, for
example, had to be made at some distance from the madding crowd, in a
wood; and I blush to think of the many other unworthy subterfuges
entailed by the situation. As I was (and am) naturally of a frank and
open disposition, these became more and more irksome, and but for the
reluctance of my parents to renounce the obvious advantages of the new
regime I would gladly have reverted to the old. The plan that I
finally adopted to free myself from the consequences of my own powers
excited a wide and keen interest at the time, and that part of it
which consisted in the death of the girl was severely condemned, but
it is hardly pertinent to the scope of this narrative.
For some years afterward I had little opportunity to practice
hypnotism; such small essays as I made at it were commonly barren of
other recognition than solitary confinement on a bread-and-water diet;
sometimes, indeed, they elicited nothing better than the
cat-o'-nine-tails. It was when I was about to leave the scene of
these small disappointments that my one really important feat was
performed.
I had been called into the warden's office and given a suit of
civilian's clothing, a trifling sum of money and a great deal of
advice, which I am bound to confess was of a much better quality than
the clothing. As I was passing out of the gate into the light of
freedom I suddenly turned and looking the warden gravely in the eye,
soon had him in control.
"You are an ostrich," I said.
At the post-mortem examination the stomach was found to contain a
great quantity of indigestible articles mostly of wood or metal.
Stuck fast in the esophagus and constituting, according to the
Coroner's jury, the immediate cause of death, one door-knob.
I was by nature a good and affectionate son, but as I took my way into
the great world from which I had been so long secluded I could not
help remembering that all my misfortunes had flowed like a stream from
the niggard economy of my parents in the matter of school luncheons;
and I knew of no reason to think they had reformed.
On the road between Succotash Hill and South Asphyxia is a little open
field which once contained a shanty known as Pete Gilstrap's Place,
where that gentleman used to murder travelers for a living. The death
of Mr. Gilstrap and the diversion of nearly all the travel to another
road occurred so nearly at the same time that no one has ever been
able to say which was cause and which effect. Anyhow, the field was
now a desolation and the Place had long been burned. It was while
going afoot to South Asphyxia, the home of my childhood, that I found
both my parents on their way to the Hill. They had hitched their team
and were eating luncheon under an oak tree in the center of the field.
The sight of the luncheon called up painful memories of my school
days and roused the sleeping lion in my breast. Approaching the
guilty couple, who at once recognized me, I ventured to suggest that I
share their hospitality.
"Of this cheer, my son," said the author of my being, with
characteristic pomposity, which age had not withered, "there is
sufficient for but two. I am not, I hope, insensible to the
hunger-light in your eyes, but--"
My father has never completed that sentence; what he mistook for
hunger-light was simply the earnest gaze of the hypnotist. In a few
seconds he was at my service. A few more sufficed for the lady, and
the dictates of a just resentment could be carried into effect. "My
former father," I said, "I presume that it is known to you that you
and this lady are no longer what you were?"
"I have observed a certain subtle change," was the rather dubious
reply of the old gentleman; "it is perhaps attributable to age."
"It is more than that," I explained; "it goes to character--to
species. You and the lady here are, in truth, two broncos--wild
stallions both, and unfriendly."
"Why, John," exclaimed my dear mother, "you don't mean to say that I
am--"
"Madam," I replied, solemnly, fixing my eyes again upon hers, "you
are."
Scarcely had the words fallen from my lips when she dropped upon her
hands and knees, and backing up to the old man squealed like a demon
and delivered a vicious kick upon his shin! An instant later he was
himself down on all-fours, headed away from her and flinging his feet
at her simultaneously and successively. With equal earnestness but
inferior agility, because of her hampering body-gear, she plied her
own. Their flying legs crossed and mingled in the most bewildering
way; their feet sometimes meeting squarely in midair, their bodies
thrust forward, falling flat upon the ground and for a moment
helpless. On recovering themselves they would resume the combat,
uttering their frenzy in the nameless sounds of the furious brutes
which they believed themselves to be--the whole region rang with their
clamor! Round and round they wheeled, the blows of their feet falling
"like lightnings from the mountain cloud." They plunged and reared
backward upon their knees, struck savagely at each other with awkward
descending blows of both fists at once, and dropped again upon their
hands as if unable to maintain the upright position of the body.
Grass and pebbles were torn from the soil by hands and feet; clothing,
hair, faces inexpressibly defiled with dust and blood. Wild,
inarticulate screams of rage attested the delivery of the blows;
groans, grunts and gasps their receipt. Nothing more truly military
was ever seen at Gettysburg or Waterloo: the valor of my dear parents
in the hour of danger can never cease to be to me a source of pride
and gratification. At the end of it all two battered, tattered,
bloody and fragmentary vestiges of mortality attested the solemn fact
that the author of the strife was an orphan.
Arrested for provoking a breach of the peace, I was, and have ever
since been, tried in the Court of Technicalities and Continuances
whence, after fifteen years of proceedings, my attorney is moving
heaven and earth to get the case taken to the Court of Remandment for
New Trials.
Such are a few of my principal experiments in the mysterious force or
agency known as hypnotic suggestion. Whether or not it could be
employed by a bad man for an unworthy purpose I am unable to say.