Sagittarius

"If Mr. Hyde had sired a son," said Lord Terry, "do you realize that loathsome child could be alive at this moment?"

It was a humid summer evening, but he and his guest, Rolfe Hunt, were cool and crisp. They were sitting in the air-conditioned sanctuary of the Century Club (so named, say wags, because its members all appear to be close to that age) and, over their drinks, had been talking about vampires and related monsters, about ghost stories and other dark tales of happenings real and imagined, and had been recounting some of their favorites. Hunt had been drinking martinis, but Lord Terry -- The Earl Terrence Glencannon, rather--was a courtly old gentleman who considered the martini one of the major barbarities of the 20th Century. He would take only the finest, driest sherry before dinner, and he was now sipping his third glass. The conversation had touched upon the series of mutilation-killings that were currently shocking the city, and then upon such classic mutilators as Bluebeard and Jack the Ripper, and then upon murder and evil in general; upon certain works of fiction, such as The Turn of the Screw and its alleged ambiguities, Dracula, the short play A Night at an Inn, the German silent film Nosferatu, some stories of Blackwood, Coppard, Machen, Montague James, Le Fanu, Poe, and finally upon The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which had led the earl to make his remark about Hyde's hypothetical son.

"How do you arrive at that, sir?" Hunt asked, with perhaps too much deference, but after all, to old Lord Terry, Hunt must have seemed a damp fledgling for all his 35 years, and the younger man could not presume too much heartiness simply because the earl had known Hunt's father in the old days back in London. Lord Terry entertained few guests now, and it was a keen privilege to be sitting with him in his club, "The closest thing to an English club I could find in this beastly New York of yours," he once had grunted.

"Consider," he was saying. "We must first make a great leap of concession and, for sake of argument, look upon Bobbie Stevenson's story not as a story but as though it were firmly based in fact."

It certainly was a great leap, but Hunt nodded.

"So much for that. Now, the story makes no reference to specific years--it uses that 18-followed-by-a-dash business which writers were so fond of in those days, I've never understood why--but we do know it was published in 1886. So, still making concessions for sake of argument, mind you, we might say Edward Hyde was 'born' in that year--but born a full-grown man, a creature capable of reproducing himself. We know, from the story, that Hyde spent his time in pursuit of carnal pleasures so gross that the good Dr. Jekyll was pale with shame at the remembrance of them. Surely one result of those pleasures might have been a child, born to some poor Soho wretch, and thrust nameless upon the world? Such a child, born in 1886 or 1887, would be in his middle 70s today. So you see it's quite possible."

He drained his glass. "And think of this now: whereas all other human creatures are compounded of both good and evil, Edward Hyde stood alone in the roster of mankind. For he was the first--and, let us hope, the last--human being who was totally evil. Consider his son. He is the offspring of one parent who, like all of us, was part good and part evil (the mother) and of one parent who was all evil (the father, Hyde). The son, then (to work it out arithmetically, if that is possible in a question of human factors), is three quarters pure evil, with only a single thin flickering quarter of good in him. We might even weight the dice, as it were, and suggest that his mother, being most likely a drunken drab of extreme moral looseness, was hardly a person to bequeath upon her heir a strong full quarter of good--perhaps only an eighth, or a 16th. Not to put too fine a point on it, Hyde's son--if he is alive--is the second most evil person who has ever lived; and--since his father is dead--the most evil person on the face of the earth today!" Lord Terry stood up. "Shall we go in to dinner?" he said.

The dining room was inhabited by men in several stages of advanced decrepitude, and still-handsome Lord Terry seemed, in contrast, rather young. His bearing, his tall, straight body, clear eyes, ruddy face and unruly shock of thick white hair made him a vital figure among a room full of near-ghosts. The heavy concentration of senility acted as a depressant on Hunt's spirits, and Lord Terry seemed to sense this, for he said, as they sat down, "Waiting room. The whole place is one vast waiting room, full of played-out chaps waiting for the last train. They tell you age has its compensations. Don't believe it. It's ghastly."

Lord Terry recommended the red snapper soup with sherry, the Dover sole, the Green Goddess salad. "Named after a play, you know, The Green Goddess, George Arliss made quite a success in it, long before your time." He scribbled their choices on the card and handed it to the hovering waiter, also ordering another martini for Hunt and a fourth sherry for himself. "Yes," he said, his eye fixed on some long-ago stage, "used to go to the theater quite a lot in the old days. They put on jolly good shows then. Not all this rot..." He focused on Hunt. "But I mustn't be boorish--you're somehow involved in the theater yourself, I believe you said?"

Hunt told him he was writing a series of theatrical histories, that his histories of the English and Italian theaters had already been published, and that currently he was working on the French.

"Ah," the old man said. "Splendid. Will you mention Sellig?"

Hunt confessed that the name was new to him.

Lord Terry sighed. "Such is fame. A French actor. All the rage in Paris at one time. His name was spoken in the same breath with Mounet-Sully's, and some even considered him the new Lemaître. Bernhardt nagged Sardou into writing a play for him, they say, though I don't know if he ever did. Rostand left an unfinished play, Don Juan's Last Night, La Dernière Nuit de Don Juan, which some say was written expressly for Sellig, but Sellig never played it."

"Why not?"

Lord Terry shrugged. "Curious fellow. Very--what would you say--pristine, very dedicated to the highest theatrical art, classic stuff like Corneille and Racine, you know. The very highest. Wouldn't even do Hugo or Dumas. And yet he became a name not even a theatrical historian is familiar with."

"You must make me familiar with it," Hunt said, as the drinks arrived.

Lord Terry swallowed a white lozenge he took from a slim gold box. "Pills," he said. "In our youth we sow wild oats; in our dotage we reap pills." He replaced the box in his weskit pocket. "Yes, I'll tell you about Sellig, if you like. I knew him very well."

•••

We were both of an age (said Lord Terry), very young, 23 or 24, and Paris in those days was a grand place to be young in. The Eiffel Tower was a youngster then, too, our age exactly, for this was still the first decade of the century, you see. Gauguin had been dead only six years, Lautrec only eight, and although that Parisian Orpheus, Jacques Offenbach, had died almost 30 years before, his music and his gay spirit still ruled the city, and jolly parisiennes still danced the cancan with bare derrières to the rhythm of his Galop Infernal. The air was heady with a wonderful mixture of ancien régime elegance (the days of which were numbered and which would soon be dispelled forever by The War) combined with a forward-looking curiosity and excitement about the new century. Best of both worlds, you might say. The year, to be exact about it, was 1909.

It's easy to remember because in that very year both Coquelin brothers--the actors, you know--died. The elder, more famous brother, Constant-Benoît, who created the role of Cyrano, died first, and the younger, Alexandre Honoré, died scarcely a fortnight later. It was through a friend of the Coquelin family, as a matter of fact--a minor comédien named César Baudouin--that I first came to know Paris and, consequently, Sébastien Sellig.

He was appearing at the Théâtre Français, in Racine's Britannicus. He played the young Nero. And he played him with such style and fervor and godlike grace that one could feel the audience's sympathies being drawn toward Nero as to a magnet. I saw him afterward, in his dressing room, where he was removing his make-up. César introduced us.

He was a man of surpassing beauty: a face like the Apollo Belvedere, with classic features, a tumble of black curls, large brown eyes and sensuous lips. I did not compliment him on his good looks, of course, for the world had only recently become unsafe for even the most innocent admiration between men, Oscar Wilde having died in Paris just nine years before. I did compliment him on his performance, and on the rush of sympathy which I've already remarked.

"Thank you," he said, in English, which he spoke very well. "It was unfortunate."

"Unfortunate?"

"The audience's sympathies should have remained with Britannicus. By drawing them to myself--quite inadvertently, I assure you--I upset the balance, reversed Racine's intentions, and thoroughly destroyed the play."

"But," observed César lightly, "you achieved a personal triumph."

"Yes," said Sellig. "At irreparable cost. It will not happen again, dear César, you may be sure of that. Next time I play Nero, I shall do so without violating Racine."

César, being a professional, took exception. "You can't be blamed for your (continued on page 50) Sagittarius (continued from page 46) charm, Sébastien," he insisted.

Sellig wiped off the last streak of paint from his face and began to draw on his street clothes. "An actor who cannot control his charm," he said, "is like an actor who cannot control his voice or his limbs. He is worthless." Then he smiled, charmingly. "But we mustn't talk shop in front of your friend. So very rude. Come, I shall take you to an enchanting little place for supper."

It was a small, dark place called L'Oubliette. The three of us ate an enormous and very good omelet, with crusty bread and a bottle of white wine. Sellig talked of the differences between France's classic poetic dramatist, Racine, and England's, Shakespeare. "Racine is like"--he lifted the bottle and refilled our glasses--"well, he is like a very fine vintage white. Delicate, serene, cool, subtle. So subtle that the excellence is not immediately enjoyed by uninitiated palates. Time is required, familiarity, a return and another return and yet another."

As an Englishman, I was prepared to defend our bard, so I asked, a little belligerently: "And Shakespeare?"

"Ah, Shakespeare!" smiled Sellig. "Passionnel, tumultueux! He is like a mulled red, hot and bubbling from the fire, dark and rich with biting spices and sweet honey! The senses are smitten, one is overwhelmed, one becomes drunk, one reels, one spins ... it can be a most agreeable sensation."

He drank from his glass. "Think of tonight's play. It depicts the first atrocity in a life of atrocities. It ends as Nero murders his brother. Later, he was to murder his mother, two wives, a trusted tutor, close friends, and untold thousands of Christians who died horribly in his arenas. But we see none of this. If Shakespeare had written the play, it would have begun with the death of Britannicus. It would then have shown us each new outrage, the entire chronicle of Nero's decline and fall and ignoble end. Enfin, it would have been Macbeth."

I had heard of a little club where the girls danced in shockingly indecorous costumes, and I was eager to go. César allowed himself to be persuaded to take me there, and I invited Sellig to accompany us. He declined, pleading fatigue and a heavy day ahead of him. "Then perhaps," I said, "you will come with us tomorrow evening? It may not tempt a gentleman of your lofty theatrical tastes, but I'm determined to see a show at this Grand Guignol which César has told me of. Quite bloody and outrageous, I understand--rather like Shakespeare." Sellig laughed at my little joke. "Will you come? Or perhaps you have a performance..."

"I do have a performance," he said,"so I cannot join you until later. Suppose we plan to meet there, in the foyer, directly after the last curtain?"

"Will you be there in time?" I asked. "The Guignol shows are short, I hear."

"I will be there," said Sellig, and we parted.

•••

Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol, as you probably know, had been established just a dozen or so years before, in 1896, on the Rue Chaptal, in a tiny building that had once been a chapel. Father Didon, a Dominican, had preached there, and in the many incarnations the building was to go through in later years, it was to retain its churchly appearance. To this day, I understand, it is exactly as it was: quaint, small, huddled inconspicuously in a cobblestone nook at the end of a Montmartre alley; inside, it is black-raftered, with Gothic tracery writhing along the portals and fleurs de lis on the walls, with carved cherubs and a pair of seven-foot angels--dim with the patina of a century--smiling benignly down on the less than 300 seats and loges ... which, you know, look not like conventional seats and loges but like church pews and confessionals. After the good Father Didon was no longer active, his chapel became the shop of a dealer specializing in religious art; still later, it was transformed into a studio for the academic painter, Rochegrosse; and so on, until, in 1896, a man named Méténier--who had formerly been secretary to a commissaire de police--rechristened it Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol and made of it the famous carnival of horror. Méténier died the following year, aptly enough, and Max Maurey took it over. I met Maurey briefly--he was still operating the theater in 1909, the year of my little story.

The subject matter of the Guignol plays seldom varies. Their single acts are filled with girls being thrown into lighthouse lamps ... faces singed by vitriol or pressed forcibly down upon red-hot stoves ... a variety of surgical operations ... mad old crones who put out the eyes of young maidens with knitting needles ... chunks of flesh ripped from victims' necks by men with hooks for hands ... bodies dissolved in acid baths ... hands chopped off; also arms, legs, heads ... women raped and strangled ... all done in a hyper-realistic manner with ingenious trick props and the Guignol's own secretly formulated blood--a thick, suety, red gruel which is actually capable of congealing before your eyes and which is kept continually hot in a big caldron backstage.

At any rate, the evening following my first meeting with Sellig, César and I were seated in this unique little theater with two young ladies we had escorted there; they were uncommonly pretty but uncommonly common--in point of fact, they were barely on the safe side of respectability's border, being inhabitants of that peculiar demi-monde, that shadow world where several professions--actress, model, barmaid, bawd--mingle and merge and overlap and often coexist. But we were young, César and I, and this was, after all, Paris. Their names, they told us, were Clothilde and Mathilde--and I was never quite sure which was which. Soon after our arrival, the lights dimmed and the Guignol curtain was raised.

The play was called, if memory serves, La Septième Porte, and was nothing more than an opportunity for Bluebeard--played by an actor wearing an elaborately ugly make-up--to open six of his legendary seven doors for his new young wife (displaying, among other things, realistically moldering cadavers and a torture chamber in full operation). Remaining faithful to the legend, Bluebeard warns his wife never to open the seventh door. Left alone on stage, she of course cannot resist the tug of curiosity--she opens the door, letting loose a shackled swarm of shrieking, livid, rag-bedecked but not entirely unattractive harpies, whose white bodies, through their shredded clothing, are crisscrossed with crimson welts. They tell her they are Bluebeard's ex-wives, kept perpetually in a pitch-dark dungeon, in a state near to starvation, and periodically tortured by the vilest means imaginable. Why? the new wife asks. Bluebeard enters, a black whip in his hand. For the sin of curiosity, he replies--they, like you, could not resist the lure of the seventh door! The other wives chain the girl to them, and, cringing under the crack of Bluebeard's whip, they crawl back into the darkness of the dungeon. Bluebeard locks the seventh door and soliloquizes: Diogenes had an easy task, to find an honest man; but my travail is tenfold--for where is she, oh does she live, the wife who does not pry and snoop, who does not pilfer her husband's pockets, steam open his letters, and, when he is late returning home, demand to know what wench he has been tumbling?

The lights had been dimming slowly until now only Bluebeard was illumined, and at this point he turned to the audience and addressed the women therein. "Mesdames et Mesdemoiselles!" he declaimed. "Écoute! En garde! Voici la septième porte!"--Hear me! Beware! Behold the seventh door! By a stage trick, the door was transformed into a mirror. The curtain fell to riotous applause.

Recounted baldly, La Septième Porte seems a trumpery entertainment, a mere excuse for scenes of horror--and so it was. But there was a strength, a (continued on page 76)Sagittarius(continued from page 50) power to the portrayal of Bluebeard; that ugly devil up there on the shabby little stage was like an icy flame, and when he'd turned to the house and delivered that closing line, there had been such force of personality, such demonic zeal, such hatred and scorn, such monumental threat, that I could feel my young companion shrink against me and shudder.

"Come, come, ma petite," I said, "it's only a play."

"Je lui déteste," she said.

"You detest him? Who, Bluebeard?" "Laval."

My French was sketchy at that time, and her English almost nonexistent, but as we made our slow way up the aisle, I managed to glean that the actor's name was Laval, and that she had at one time had some offstage congress with him, congress of an intimate nature, I gathered. I could not help asking why, since she disliked him so (I was naïf then, you see, and knew little of women; it was somewhat later in life I learned they find evil and even ugliness irresistible). In answer to my question, she only shrugged and delivered a platitude: "Les affaires sont les affaires"--Business is business.

Sellig was waiting for us in the foyer. His height, and his great beauty of face, made him stand out. Our two pretty companions took to him at once, for his attractive exterior was supplemented by waves of charm.

"Did you enjoy the programme?" he asked of me.

I did not know exactly what to reply. "Enjoy? ... Let us say I found it fascinating, M'sieu Sellig."

"It did not strike you as tawdry? cheap? vulgar?"

"All those, yes. But, at the same time, exciting--as sometimes only the tawdry, the cheap, the vulgar can be."

"You may be right. I have not watched a Guignol production for several years. Although, surely, the acting ..."

We were entering a carriage, all five of us. I said, "The acting was unbelievably bad--with one exception."

"Really? And the exception?"

"The actor who played Bluebeard in a piece called La Septième Porte. His name is --" I turned to my companion again.

"Laval," she said, and the sound became a viscous thing.

"Ah yes," said Sellig. "Laval. The name is not entirely unknown to me. Shall we go to Maxim's?"

At the end of the evening, César and I escorted our respective (but not precisely respectable) young ladies to their dwellings, where more pleasure was found. Sellig went home alone. I felt sorry for him, and there was a moment when it crossed my mind that perhaps he was one of those men who have no need of women--the theatrical profession is thickly inhabited by such men--but César privately assured me that Sellig had a mistress, a lovely and gracious widow named Lise, for Sellig's tastes were exceedingly refined and his image unblemished by descents into the dimly lit world of the sporting house. My own tastes, though acute, were not so elevated, and thus I enjoyed myself immensely that night.

Ignorance, they say, is bliss. I did not know that my ardent companion's warmth would turn unalterably cold in the space of a single night.

•••

The commissaire de police had never seen anything like it. He spoke poor English, but I was able to glean his meaning without too much difficulty. "It is, how you say..."

"Horrible?"

"Ah, oui, mais...étrange, incroyable." "Unique?"

"Si! Uniquenment monstrueux! Uniquement dégoÛtant!"

Uniquely disgusting. Yes, it was that. It was that, certainly.

"The manner, M'sieu ... the method ... the --"

"Mutilation."

"Oui, la mutilation ... C'est irrégulière, anormale ..."

We were in the morgue--not that newish Medico-Legal Institute of the University on the banks of the Seine, but the old morgue, that wretched, ugly place on the quai de l'Archevêché. She--Clothilde, my petite amie of the previous night--had been foully murdered; killed with knives; her prettiness destroyed; her very womanhood destroyed, extracted, bloodily but with surgical precision. I stood in the morgue with the commissaire, César, Sellig, and the other girl, Mathilde. Covering the corpse with its anonymous sheet, the commissaire said, "It resembles, does it not, the work of your English killer ... Jacques?"

"Jack," I said. "Jack the Ripper."

"Ah, oui. Le Ripper." He looked down upon the covered body. "Mais pourquoi?"

"Yes," I said, hoarsely. "Why indeed?"

"La cause ... la raison ... le motif," he said; and then delivered himself of a small, eloquent, Gallic shrug. "Inconnu."

Motive unknown. He had stated it succinctly. A girl of the streets, a fille de joie, struck down, mutilated, her femaleness canceled out. Who did it? Inconnu. And why? Inconnu.

"Merci, messieurs, mademoiselle ..." The commissaire thanked us and we left the cold repository of Paris' unclaimed dead. All four of us--it had been "all five of us" just the night before--were strained, silent. The girl Mathilde was weeping. We, the men, felt not grief exactly--how could we, for one we had known so briefly, so imperfectly?--but a kind of embarrassment. Perhaps that is the most common reaction produced by the presence of death: embarrassment. Death is a kind of nakedness, a kind of indecency, a kind of faux pas. Unless we have known the dead person well enough to experience true loss, or unless we have wronged the dead person enough to experience guilt, the only emotion we can experience is embarrassment. I must confess my own embarrassment was tinged with guilt. It was I, you see, who had used her, such a short time before. And now she would never be used again. Her warm lips were cold; her knowing fingers, still; her cajoling voice, silent; the very stronghold and temple of her treasure was destroyed.

In the street, I felt I had to make some utterance. "To think," I said, "that her last evening was spent at the Guignol!"

Sellig smiled sympathetically. "My friend," he said. "the Grand Guignol is not only a shabby little theater in a Montmartre alley. This"--his gesture took in the whole world--"this is the Grandest Guignol of all."

I nodded. He placed a hand on my shoulder. "Do not be too much alone," he advised me. "Come to the Théâtre tonight. We are playing Cinna."

"Thank you," I said. "But I have a strange urge to revisit the Guignol ..."

César seemed shocked or puzzled, but Sellig understood. "Yes," he said, "that is perhaps a good thought." We parted--Sellig to his rooms, César with the weeping girl, I to my hotel.

I have an odd infirmity--perhaps it is not so odd, and perhaps it is no infirmity at all--but great shock or disappointment or despair do not rob me of sleep as they rob the sleep of others. On the contrary, they rob me of energy, they drug me, they send me into the merciful solace of sleep like a powerful anodyne. And so, that afternoon, I slept. But it was a sleep invaded by dreams ... dreams of gross torture and mutilation, of blood, and of the dead Clothilde--alive again for the duration of a nap--repeating over and over a single statement.

I awoke covered with perspiration, and with that statement gone just beyond the reach of my mind. Try as I did, I could not recall it. I dashed cold water in my face to clear my head, and although I had no appetite, I rang for service and had some food brought me in my suite. Then, the theater hour approaching, I dressed and made my way (continued on page 78)Sagittarius(continued from page 76) toward Montmartre and the Rue Chaptal.

The offering that evening was unbearably boring, though it was no worse than the previous evening's offering. The reason for its tediousness was simple: Laval did not appear in the play. On my way out of the theater, I inquired of an usher about the actor's absence. "Ah, the great Laval," he said, with shuddering admiration. "It is his--do you say 'night away'?"

"Night off ..."

"Oui. His night off. He appears on alternate nights, M'sieu ..."

Feeling somehow cheated, I decided to return the following night. I did so; in fact, I made it a point to visit the Guignol every night that week on which Laval was playing. I saw him in several little plays--shockers in which he starred as the monsters of history and legend--and in each, his art was lit by black fire and was the more admirable since he did not rely upon a succession of fantastic make-ups--in each, he wore the same grotesque make-up (save for the false facial hair) he had worn as Bluebeard; I assumed it was his trade mark. The plays--which were of his own authorship, I discovered--included L'Inquisiteur, in which he played Torquemada, the merciless heretic-burner (convincing flames on the stage) and Le Fils du Pape, in which he played the insane, incestuous Cesare Borgia. There were many more, among them, a contemporary story, Jacques l'Éventreur, in which he played the currently notorious Ripper, knifing pretty young harlots with extreme realism until the stage was scarlet with sham blood. In this, there was one of those typically Lavalesque flashes, an infernally inspired cri de coeur, when the Ripper, remorseful, sunken in shame, enraged at his destiny, surfeited with killings but unable to stop, tore a rhymed couplet from the bottom of his soul and flung it like a live thing into the house:

La vie est un corridor noir

D'impuissance et de désespoir!

That's not very much in English--"Life is a black corridor of impotence and despair"--but in the original, and when hurled with the ferocity of Laval, it was Kean's Hamlet, Irving's Macbeth, Salvini's Othello, all fused into a single theatrical moment.

And, in that moment, there was another fusion--a fusion, in my own mind, of two voices. One was that of the commissaire de police--"It resembles, does it not, the work of your English killer ... Jacques?" The other was the voice of the dead Clothilde, repeating a phrase she had first uttered in life, and then, after her death, in that fugitive dream--"Je lui déteste."

As the curtain fell, to tumultuous applause, I sent my card backstage, thus informing Laval that "un admirateur" wished to buy him a drink. Might we meet at L'Oubliette? The response was long in coming, insultingly long, but at last it did come and it was affirmative. I left at once for L'Oubliette.

Forty minutes later, after I had consumed half a bottle of red wine, Laval entered. The waitress brought him to my table and we shook hands.

I was shocked, for I looked into the ugliest and most evil face I had ever seen. I immediately realized that Laval never wore make-up on the stage. He had no need of it. Looking about, he said, "L'Oubliette," and sat down. "The filthy place is aptly named. Do you know what an oubliette is, M'sieu?"

"No," I said. "I wish my French were as excellent as your English."

"But surely you know our word, oublier?"

"My French-English lexicon," I replied, "says it means 'to forget, to omit, to leave.'"

He nodded. "That is correct. In the old days, a variety of secret dungeon was called an oubliette. It was subterranean. It had no door, no window. It could be entered only by way of a trap door at the top. The trap door was too high to reach, even by climbing, since the walls sloped in the wrong direction and were eternally slick with slime. There was no bed, no chair, no table, no light, and very little air. Prisoners were dropped down into such dungeons to be--literally--forgotten. They seldom left alive. Infrequently, when a prisoner was fortunate enough to be freed by a change in administration, he was found to have become blind--from the years in the dark. And almost always, of course, insane ..."

"You have an intimate knowledge of horrors, Monsieur Laval," I said.

He shrugged. "C'est mon métier."

"Will you drink red wine?"

"Since you are paying, I will drink whisky," he said; adding, "if they have it here."

They did, an excellent Scotch and quite expensive. I decided to join him. He downed the first portion as soon as it was poured--not waiting for even a perfunctory toast--and instantly demanded another. This, too, he flung down his throat in one movement, smacking his bestial lips. I could not help thinking how much more graphic than our "he drinks like a fish" or "like a drainpipe" is the equivalent French figure of speech: "he drinks like a hole."

"Now then, M'sieu ... Pendragon?"

"Glencannon."

"Yes. You wished to speak with me." I nodded.

"Speak," he said, gesturing to the barmaid for another drink.

"Why," I began, "I'm afraid I have nothing in particular to say, except that I admire your acting ..."

"Many people do."

What a graceless boor, I told myself, but I continued: "Rightfully so, Monsieur Laval. I am new to Paris, but I have seen much theater here these past few weeks, and to my mind yours is a towering talent, in the front rank of artistes, perhaps second only to --"

"Eh? Second?" He swallowed the fresh drink and looked up at me, his unwholesome eyes flaming. "Second to--whom, would you say?"

"I was going to say, Sellig."

Laval laughed. It was not a warming sound. His face grew uglier. "Sellig! Indeed. Sellig, the handsome. Sellig, the classicist. Sellig, the noble. Bah!"

I was growing uncomfortable. "Come, sir," I said, "surely you are not being fair ..."

"Fair. That is oh so important to you English, is it not? Well, let me tell you, M'sieu Whatever-your-name-is--the lofty strutting of that mountebank Sellig makes me sick! What he can do, fools can do. Who cannot pompously declaim the cold, measured alexandrines of Racine and Corneille and Molière? Stop any schoolboy on the street and ask him to recite a bit of Phèdre or Tartuffe and he will oblige you, in that same stately classroom drone Sellig employs. Do not speak to me of this Sellig. He is a fraud; worse--he is a bore."

"He is also," I said, "my friend."

"A sorry comment on your taste."

"And yet it is a taste that can also appreciate you."

"To some, champagne and seltzer water taste the same."

"You know, sir, you are really quite rude."

"True."

"You must have few friends."

"Wrong. I have none."

"But that is distressing! Surely --"

He interrupted. "There is a verse of the late Rostand's. Perhaps you know it. 'A force de vous voir vous faire des amis ...' et cetera?"

"My French is poor."

"You need not remind me. I will give you a rough translation. 'Seeing the sort of friends you others have in tow, I cry with joy: send me another foe!'"

"And yet," I said, persisting, "all men need friends ..."

Laval's eyes glittered like dark gems. "I am no ordinary man," he said. "I was born under the sign of Sagittarius. Perhaps you know nothing of astrology? Or, if you do, perhaps you think of Sagittarius as merely the innocuous sign of the Archer? Remember, then, just who that archer is--not a simple bear or (continued on page 110)Sagittarius(continued from page 78) bull or crab or pair of fish, not a man, not a natural creature at all, but a very unnatural creature half human, half bestial. Sagittarius: the Man-Beast. And I tell you this, M'sieu ..." He dispatched the whisky in one gulp and banged the empty glass on the table to attract the attention of the barmaid. "I tell you this," he repeated. "So potent was the star under which I was born, that I have done what no one in the world has done--nor ever can do!"

The sentence was like a hot iron, searing my brain. I was to meet it once again before I left Paris. But now, sitting across the table from the mad--for he indeed seemed mad--Laval, I merely said, softly, "And what is it you have done, Monsieur?"

He chuckled nastily. "That," he said, "is a professional secret."

I tried another approach. "Monsieur Laval ..."

"Yes?"

"I believe we have a mutual friend."

"Who may he be?"

"A lady."

"Oh? And her name?"

"She calls herself Clothilde. I do not know her last name."

"Then I gather she is not, after all, a lady."

I shrugged. "Do you know her?"

"I know many women," he said; and, his face clouding with bitterness, he added, "Do you find that surprising--with this face?"

"Not at all. But you have not answered my question."

"I may know your Mam'selle Clothilde; I cannot be certain. May I another drink?"

"To be sure." I signaled the waitress, and turned again to Laval. "She told me she knew you in her--professional capacity."

"It may be so. I do not clot my mind with memories of such women." The waitress poured out another portion of Scotch and Laval downed it. "Why do you ask?"

"For two reasons. First, because she told me she detested you."

"It is a common complaint. And the second reason?"

"Because she is dead."

"Ah?"

"Murdered. Mutilated. Obscenely disfigured."

"Quel dommage!"

"It is not a situation to be met with a platitude, Monsieur!"

Laval smiled. It made him look like a lizard. "Is it not? How must I meet it, then? With tears? With a clucking of the tongue? With a beating of my breast and a rending of my garments? Come, M'sieu ... she was a woman of the streets ... I scarcely knew her, if indeed I knew her at all ..."

"Why did she detest you?" I suddenly demanded.

"Oh, my dear sir! If I knew the answers to such questions, I would be clairvoyant. Because I have the face of a Notre Dame gargoyle, perhaps. Because she did not like the way I combed my hair. Because I left her too small a fee. Who knows? I assure you, her detestation does not perturb me in the slightest."

"To speak plainly, you relish it."

"Yes. Yes, I relish it."

"Do you also relish"--I toyed with my glass--"blood, freshly spilt?"

He looked at me blankly for a moment. Then he threw back his head and roared with amusement. "I see," he said at last. "I understand now. You suspect I murdered this trollop?"

"She is dead, sir. It ill becomes you to malign her."

"This lady, then. You really think I killed her?"

"I accuse you of nothing, Monsieur Laval. But ..."

"But?"

"But it strikes me as a distinct possibility."

He smiled again. "How interesting. How very, very interesting. Because she detested me?"

"That is one reason."

He pushed his glass to one side. "I will be frank with you, M'sieu. Yes, I knew Clothilde, briefly. Yes, it is true she loathed me. She found me disgusting. But can you not guess why?"

I shook my head. Laval leaned forward and spoke more softly. "You and I, M'sieu, we are men of the world... and surely you can understand that there are things ... certain little things ... that an imaginative man might require of such a woman? Things which--if she were overly fastidious -- she might find objectionable?" Still again, he smiled. "I assure you, her detestation of me had no other ground than that. She was a silly little bourgeoise. She had no flair for her profession. She was easily shocked." Conspiratorially, he added: "Shall I be more specific?"

"That will not be necessary." I caught the eye of the waitress and paid her. To Laval, I said, "I must not detain you further, Monsieur."

"Oh, am I being sent off?" he said, mockingly, rising. "Thank you for the whisky, M'sieu. It was excellent." And laughing hideously, he left.

•••

I felt shaken, almost faint, and experienced a sudden desire to talk to someone. Hoping Sellig was playing that night at the Théâtre Français, I took a carriage there and was told that he could probably be found at his rooms. My informant mentioned an address to my driver, and, before long, Sébastien seemed pleasantly surprised at the appearance of his unannounced guest.

Sellig's rooms were tastefully appointed. The drapes were tall, classic folds of deep blue. A few good pictures hung on the walls, the chairs were roomy and comfortable, and the mingled fragrances of tobacco and book-leather gave the air a decidedly masculine musk. Over a small spirit lamp, Sellig was preparing a simple ragoÛt. As he stood in his shirtsleeves, stirring the food, I talked:

"You said, the other evening, that the name Laval was not unknown to you."

"That gentleman seems to hold you fascinated," he observed.

"Is it an unhealthy fascination, would you say?" I asked, candidly.

Sellig laughed. "Well, he is not exactly an appealing personage."

"Then you do know him?"

"In a sense. I have never seen him perform, however."

"He is enormously talented. He domimites the stage. There are only two actors in Paris who can transfix an audience in that manner."

"The other is ...?"

"You."

"Ah. Thank you. And yet, you do not equate me with Laval?"

Quickly, I assured him: "No, not at all. In everything but that one quality, you and he are utterly different. Diametrically opposed."

"I am glad of that."

"Have you known him long?" I asked.

"Laval? Yes. For quite some time."

"He is not 'an appealing personage.' you said just now. Would you say he is ... morally reprehensible?"

Sellig turned to me. "I would be violating a strict confidence if I told you any more than this: if he is morally corrupt (and I am not saying that he is), he is not reprehensible. If he is evil, then he was evil even in his mother's womb."

A popular song came to my mind, and I said, lightly, "More to be pitied than censured?"

Sellig received this remark seriously. "Yes," he said. "Yes, that is the point precisely. 'The sins of the father ...'" But then he broke off and served the ragÛot.

As he ate, I--who had no appetite--spoke of my troubled mind and general depression.

"Perhaps it is not good for you to stay alone tonight," he said. "Would you like to sleep here? There is an extra bedroom."

"It would inconvenience you ..."

"Not at all. I should be glad of the company."

I agreed to stay, for I was not looking forward to my lonely hotel suite, and not long after that we retired to our rooms. I fell asleep almost at once, but woke in a sweat about three in the morning. I arose, wrapped myself in one of Sellig's robes, and walked into the library for a book that might send me off to sleep again.

Sellig's collection of books was extensive, although heavily overbalanced by plays, volumes of theatrical criticism, biographies of actors, and so forth, a high percentage of them in English. I chose none of these: instead, I took clown a weighty tome of French history. Its pedantic style and small type, as well as my imperfect command of the language, would form the needed sedative. I took the book to bed with me.

My grasp of written French being somewhat firmer than my grasp of the conversational variety, I managed to labor through most of the first chapter before I began to turn the leaves in search of a more interesting section. It was quite by accident that my eyes fell upon a passage that seemed to thrust itself up from the page and stamp itself upon my brain. Though but a single sentence, I felt stunned by it. In a fever of curiosity, I read the other matter on that page, then turned back and read from an earlier point. I read in that volume for about 10 minutes, or so I thought, but when I finished and looked up at the clock, I realized that I had read for over an hour. What I had read had numbed and shaken me.

I have never been a superstitious man. I have never believed in the existence of ghosts, or vampires, or other undead creatures out of lurid legend. They make excellent entertainment, but never before that shattering hour had I accepted them as anything more than entertainment. But as I sat in that bed, the book in my hands, the city outside silent, I had reason to feel as if a hand from some sub-zero hell had reached up and laid itself--oh, very gently--upon my heart. A shudder ran through my body. I looked down again at the book.

The pages I had read told of a monster--a real monster who had lived in France centuries before. The Marquis de Sade, in comparison, was a mischievous schoolboy. This was a man of high birth and high aspirations, a marshal of France, who at the peak of his power had been the richest noble in all of Europe and who had fought side by side with Joan of Arc, but who had later fallen into such depths of degeneracy that he had been tried and sentenced to the stake by a shocked legislature. In a search for immortality, a yearning to avoid death, he had carried out disgusting experiments on the living bodies of youths and maidens and little children. Seven or eight hundred had died in the laboratory of his castle, died howling in pain and insanity, the victims of a "science" that was more like the unholy rites of the Black Mass. "The accused," read one of the charges at his trial, "has taken innocent boys and girls, and inhumanly butchered, killed, dismembered, burned and otherwise tortured them, and the said accused has immolated the bodies of the said innocents to devils, invoked and sacrificed to evil spirits, and has foully committed sin with young boys and in other ways lusted against nature after young girls, while they were alive or sometimes dead or even sometimes during their death throes." Another charge spoke of "the hand, the eyes, and the heart of one of these said children, with its blood in a glass vase..."And yet this madman, this miscreant monster, had offered no resistance when arrested, had felt justified for his actions, had said proudly and defiantly under the legislated torture: "So potent was the star under which I was born that I have done what no one in the world has done nor ever can do."

His name was Gilles de Laval, Baron de Rais, and he became known for all time and to all the world, of course, as Bluebeard.

I was out of bed in an instant, and found myself pounding like a madman on the door of Sellig's bedroom. When there was no response, I opened the door and went in. He was not in his bed. Behind me, I heard another door open. I turned.

Sellig was coming out of yet another room, hardly more than a closet: behind him, just before he closed the door and locked it, I caught a glimpse of bottles and glass trays -- I remember surmising, in that instant, that perhaps he was a devotee of the new art of photography, but I had no wish to dwell further on this, for I was bursting with what I wanted to say. "Sébastien!" I cried. "I must tell you something...

"What are you doing up at this hour, my friend?"

"... Something incredible ... terrifying ..." terrible (It did not occur to me to echo his question.)

"But you are distraught. Here, sit clown ... let me fetch you some cognac ..."

The words tumbled out of me pell-mell, and I could see they made very little sense to Sellig. He wore the expression of one confronted by a lunatic. His eyes remained fixed on my face, as if he were alert for the first sign of total disintegration and violence. At length, out of breath, I stopped talking and drank the cognac he had placed in my hand.

Sellig spoke. "Let me see if I understand you," he began. "You met Laval this evening...and he said something about his star, and the accomplishment of something no other man has ever accomplished...and just now, in this book, you find the same statement attributed to Bluebeard...and, from this, you are trying to tell me that Laval ...

I nodded. "I know it sounds mad ..."

"It does."

"... But consider, Sébastien: the names, first of all, are identical -- Blue-beard's name was Gilles de Laval. In the shadow of the stake, he boasted of doing what no man had ever clone, of succeeding at his ambition ... and are you aware of the nature of his ambition? To live forever! It was to that end that he butchered hundreds of innocents, trying to wrest the very riddle of life from their bodies!"

"But you say he was burned at the stake ..."

"No! Sentenced to be burned! In return for not revoking the crimes he confessed under torture, he was granted the mercy of strangulation before burning..."

"Even so --"

"Listen to me! His relatives were allowed to remove his strangled body from the pyre before the flames reached it! That is a historical fact! They took it away--so they said!--to inter it in a Carmelite church in the vicinity. But don't you see what they really did?"

"No ...

"Don't you see, Sébastien, that this monster had found the key to eternal life, and had instructed his helots to revive his strangled body by use of those same loathsome arts he had practiced? Don't you see that he went on living? That he lives still? That he tortures and murders still? That even when his hands are not drenched in human blood, they are drenched in the mock blood of the Guignol? That the actor Laval and the Laval of old are one and the same?"

Sellig looked at me strangely. It infuriated me. "I am not mad!" I said. I rose and screamed at him: "Don't you understand?"

And then--what with the lack of food, and the wine I had drunk with Laval, and the cognac, and the tremulous state of my nerves--the room began to tilt, then shrink, then spin, then burst into a star-shower, and I dimly saw Sellig reach out for me as I fell forward into blackness ...

•••

The bedroom was full of noonday sunlight when I awoke. It lacerated my eyes. I turned away from it and saw someone sitting next to the bed. My eyes focused, not without difficulty, and I realized it was a woman--a woman of exceptional beauty. Before I could speak, she said, "My name is Madame Pelletier. I am Sébastien's friend. He has asked me to care for you. You were ill last night."

"You must be ... Lise ..."

She nodded. "Can you sit up now?"

"I think so."

"Then you must take a little bouillon."

At the mention of food, I was instantly very hungry. Madame Pelletier helped me sit up, propped pillows at my back, and began to feed me broth with a spoon. At first, I resisted this, but upon discovering that my trembling hand would not support the weight of the spoon, I surrendered to her ministrations.

Soon, I asked, "And where is Sébastien now?"

"At the Théâtre. A rehearsal of Oedipe." With a faintly deprecatory inflection, she added, "Voltaire's."

I smiled at this, and said, "Your theatrical tastes are as pristine as Sébastien's."

She smiled in return. "It was not always so, perhaps. But when one knows a man like Sébastien, a man dedicated, noble, with impeccable taste, and living a life beyond reproach... one climbs up to his level, or tries to."

"You esteem him highly."

"I love him, M'sieu."

I had not forgotten my revelation of the night before. True, it seemed less credible in daylight, but it continued to stick in my mind like a burr. I asked myself what I should do with my fantastic theory. Blurt it out to this charming lady and have her think me demented? Take it to the commissaire and have him think me the same? Try to place it again before Sébastien, in more orderly fashion, and solicit his aid? I decided on the last course, and informed my lovely nurse that I felt well enough to leave. She protested; I assured her my strength was restored; and, at last, she left the bedroom and allowed me to dress. I did so quickly, and left the Sellig rooms immediately thereafter.

By this time, they knew me at the Thèâtre Français, and I was allowed to stand in the wings while the Voltaire tragedy was being rehearsed. When the scene was finished, I sought out Sellig, drew him aside, and spoke to him, phrasing my suspicions with more calm than I had before.

"My dear friend," he said, "I flatter myself that my imagination is broad and ranging, that my mind is open, that I can give credence to many wonders at which other men might scoff. But this --"

"I know, I know," I said hastily, "and I do not profess to believe it entirely myself--but it is a clue, if nothing more, to Laval's character; a solution, perhaps, to a living puzzle ..."

Sellig was a patient man. "Very well. I will have a bit of time after this rehearsal and before tonight's performance. Come back later and we will ..." His voice trailed off. "And we will talk, at least. I do not know what else we can do."

I agreed to leave. I went directly to the Guignol, even though I knew that, being midafternoon, it would not be open. Arriving there, I found an elderly functionary, asked if M. Laval was inside, perhaps rehearsing, and was told there was no one in the theater. Then, after pressing a bank note into the old man's hand, I persuaded him to give me Laval's address. He did, and I immediately hailed a passing carriage.

As it carried me away from Montmartre, I tried to govern my thoughts. Why was I seeking out Laval? What would I say to him once I had found him? Would I point a finger at him and dramatically accuse him of being Gilles de Laval, Baron de Rais, a man of the 15th Century? He would laugh at me, and have me committed as a madman. I still had not decided on a plan of attack when the carriage stopped, and the driver opened the door and said, "We are here, M'sieu."

I stepped out, paid him, and looked at the place to which I had been taken. Dumbfounded, I turned to the driver and said, "But this is not --"

"It is the address M'sieu gave me." He was correct. It was. I thanked him and the carriage drove off. My mind churning, I entered the building.

It was the same one which contained Sellig's rooms. Summoning the concierge, I asked the number of Laval's apartment. He told me no such person lived there. I described Laval. He nodded and said, "Ah. The ugly one. Yes, he lives here, but his name is not Laval. It is De Retz."

Rayx, Rays, Retz, Rais--according to the history book, they were different spellings of the same name. "And the number of his suite?" I asked, impatiently.

"Oh, he shares a suite," he said. "He shares a suite with M'sieu Sellig ..."

I masked my astonishment and ran up the stairs, growing more angry with each step. To think that Sébastien had concealed this from me! Why? For what reason? And yet Laval had not shared the apartment the night before ... What did it mean?

Etiquette discarded, I did not knock but threw open the door and burst in. "Laval!" I shouted. "Laval, I know you are here! You cannot hide from me!"

There was no answer. I stalked furiously through the rooms. They were empty. "Madame?" I called. "Madame Pelletier?" And then, standing in Sellig's bedroom, I saw that the place had been ransacked. Drawers of chiffoniers had been pulled out and relieved of their contents. It appeared very much as if the occupant had taken sudden flight.

Then I remembered the little room or closet I had seen Sellig leaving in the small hours. Going to it, I turned the knob and found it locked. Desperation and anger flooded my arms with strength and, yelling unseemly oaths, I broke into the room.

It was chaos.

The glass phials and demijohns had been smashed into shards, as if someone had flailed methodically among them with a cane. What purpose they had served was now a mystery. Perhaps a chemist could have analyzed certain residues among the debris, but I could not. Yet, somehow, these ruins did not seem, as I had first assumed, equipment for the development of photographic plates.

Again, supernatural awe turned me cold. Was this the dread laboratory of Bluebeard? Had these bottles and jars contained human blood and vital organs? In this Paris apartment, with Sellig as his conscripted assistant, had Laval distilled, out of death itself, the inmost secrets of life?

Quaking, I backed out of the little room, and in so doing, displaced a corner of one of the blue draperies. Odd things flicker through one's mind in the direst of circumstances--for some reason, I remembered having once heard that blue is sometimes a mortuary color used in covering the coffins of young persons ... and also the it is a symbol of eternity and human immortality ... blue coffins ... blue drapes ... Blue-beard ...

I looked down at the displaced drape and saw something that was to delay my return to London, to involve me with the police for many days until they would finally judge me innocent and release me. On the floor at my feet, only half hidden by the blue drapes, was the naked, butchered, dead body of Madame Pelletier.

I think I screamed. I know I must have dashed from those rooms like a possessed thing. I cannot remember my flight, nor the hailing of any carriage, but I do know I returned to the Thèâtre Français, a babbling, incoherent maniac who demanded that the rehearsal be stopped, who insisted upon seeing Sébastien Sellig.

The manager finally succeeded in breaking through the wall of my hysteria. He said only one thing, but that one thing served as the cohesive substance that made everything fall into place in an instant.

"He is not here, M'sieu," he said. "It is very odd ... he has never missed a rehearsal or a performance before today ... he was here earlier, but now ... an understudy has taken his place... I hope nothing has happened to him ... but M'sieu Sellig, believe me, is not to be found ...

I stumbled out into the street, my brain a kaleidoscope. I thought of that little laboratory... and of those two utterly opposite men, the sublime Sellig and the depraved Laval, living in the same suite ... I thought of Sagittarius, the Man-Beast ... I thought of the phrase "The sins of the fathers," and of a banal tune, More to Be Pitied Than Censured ... I realized now why Laval was absent from the Guignol on certain nights, the very nights Sellig appeared at the Thèâtre Français ... I heard my own voice, on that first night, inviting Sellig to accompany us to the Guignol: "Will you come? Or perhaps you have a performance?" And Sellig's answer: "I do have a performance" (yes, but where?) ... I heard my own voice in other scraps: I have not watched a Guignol performance for several years; I have never seen Laval perform ...

Of course not! How could he, when he and Laval ...

I accosted a gendarme, seized his lapels, and roared into his astounded face: "Don't you see? How is it possible I overlooked it? It is so absurdly simple! It is the crudest ... the most childish ... the most transparent of cryptograms!"

"What is, M'sieu!" he demanded.

I laughed -- or wept. "Sellig!" I cried. "One has only to spell it backward!"

•••

The dining room of the Century Club was now almost deserted. Lord Terry was sipping a brandy with his coffee. He had refused dessert, but Hunt had not, and he was dispatching the last forkful of a particularly rich baba aurhum. His host produced from his pocket a massive, ornate case--of the same design as his pillbox--and offered Hunt a cigar. It was deep brown, slender, fragrant, marvelously fresh. "The wizard has his wand," said Lord Terry, "the bishop his miter, the king his scepter, the soldier his sword, the policeman his nightstick, the orchestra conductor his baton. I have these. I suppose your generation would speak of phallic symbolism."

"We might," Hunt smiled, "but we would also accept a cigar." He did, and a waiter appeared from nowhere to light then for the two men.

Through the first festoons of smoke, Hunt said, "You tell a grand story, sir."

"Story," the earl repeated. "By that, you imply I have told a--whopper?"

"An extremely entertaining whopper."

He shrugged. "Very well. Let it stand as that and nothing more." He drew reflectively on his cigar.

"Come, Lord Terry," Hunt said. "Laval and Sellig were one man? The son of Edward Hyde? Starring at the Guignol in his evil personality and then, after a drink of his father's famous potion in that little laboratory, transforming himself into the blameless classicist of the Théâtre Français?"

"Exactly, my boy. And a murderer, besides, at least the Laval part of him; a murderer who felt I was drawing too close to the truth, and so fled Paris, never to be heard from again."

"Fled where?"

"Who knows? To New York, perhaps, where he still lives the double life of a respectable man in constant fear of involuntarily becoming a monster in public (Jekyll came to that pass in the story), and who must periodically imbibe his father's formula simply to remain a man ... and who sometimes fails. Think of it! Even now, somewhere, in this very city, this very club, the inhuman man-beast, blood still steaming on his hands, may be drinking off the draught that will transform him into a gentleman of spotless reputation! A gentleman who, when dominant, loathes the dormant evil half of Isis personality--just as that evil half, when it is dominant, loathes the respectable gentleman! I am not insisting he is still alive, you understand, but that is precisely the way it was in Paris, back in the 1900s."

Hunt smiled. "You don't expect me to believe you, sir, surely?"

"If I have given you a pleasant hour," Lord Terry replied, "I am content. I do not ask you to accept my story as truth. But I do inquire of you: why not accept it! Why couldn't it be truth?"

Hunt was determined not to be led into pitfalls, so he did not trot out lengthy rebuttals and protestations about the fantastic and antinatural "facts" of the tale--he was sure the earl had arguments woven of the best casuistry to meet and vanquish anything he might have said. So he simply conceded: "It could be true, I suppose."

But a second later, not able to resist, he added, "The--story--does have one very large flaw."

"Flaw? Rubbish. What flaw?"

"It seems to me you've tried to have the best of both worlds, sir, tried to tell two stories in one, and they don't really meld. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I am prepared to accept as fact the notion that Gilles de Rais was not burned at the stake, that he not only escaped death but managed to live for centuries, thanks to his unholy experiments. All well and good. Let's say that he was indeed the Guiguol actor known as Laval. Still well, still good. But you've made him something else--something he could not possibly be. The son of Dr. Henry Jekyll, or, rather, of Jekyll's alter ego, Edward Hyde. In my trade, we would say your story 'needs work.' We would ask you to make up your mind--was Laval the son of Edward Hyde, or was he a person centuries older than his own father?"

Lord Terry nodded. "Oh, I see," he said. "Yes. I should have made myself clearer. No, I do not doubt for a moment that Laval and Sellig were one and the same person and that person the natural son of Edward Hyde. I think the facts support that. The Bluebeard business is, as you say, quite impossible. It was a figment of my disturbed mind, nothing more. Sellig could not have been Gilles."

"Then --"

"You or I might take a saint as our idol, might we not, or a great statesman--Churchill, Roosevelt--or possibly a literary or musical or scientific genius. At any rate, some lofty benefactor of immaculate prestige. But the son of Hyde? Would he not be drawn to and fascinated by history's great figures of evil? Might he not liken himself to Bluebeard? Might he not assume his name? Might he not envelop himself in symbolic blue draperies? Might he not delight in portraying his idol upon the Guignol stage? Might it not please his fiendish irony to saddle even his 'good' self with a disguised form of Gilles' name, and to exert such influence over that good self that even as the noble Sellig he could wallow in the personality of, say, a Nero? Of course he was not actually Bluebeard. It was adulation and aping, my dear sir, identification and a touch of madness. In short, it was hero worship, pure and simple.

"There is something else," Lord Terry said presently. "Something I have been saving for the last. I did not wish to inundate you with too much all at once. You say I've tried to tell two stories. But it may be--it just possibly may be--that I have not two but three stories here."

"Three?"

"Yes, in a way. It's just supposition, of course, a theory, and I have no evidence at all, other than circumstantial evidence, a certain remarkable juxtaposition of time and events that is a bit too pat to be coincidence ..."

He treated himself to an abnormally long draw on his cigar, letting Hunt and the syntax hang in the air; then he started a new sentence: "Laval's father, Edward Hyde, may have left his mark on history in a manner much more real than the pages of a supposedly fictional work by Stevenson. Certain criminal deeds that are matters of police record may have been his doing. I think they were. Killings that took place between 1885 and 1891 in London, Paris, Moscow, Texas, New York, Nicaragua and perhaps a few other places, by an unknown, unapprehended monster about whom speculation varies greatly but generally agrees on one point: the high probability that he was a medical man. Hyde, of course, was a medical man; or, rather, Jekyll was; the same thing, really.

"What I'm suggesting, you see, is that our friend Laval was--is?--not only the son of Hyde but the son of a fiend who has been supposed an Englishman, a Frenchman, an Algerian, a Polish Jew, a Russian, and an American; and whose sobriquets and supposed names include George Chapman, Severin Klosowski, Neill Cream, Ameer Ben Ali, Frenchy, El Destripador, L'Eventreur, The White-chapel Butcher, and, most popularly--"

Hunt snatched the words from his mouth: "Jack the Ripper."

"Exactly," he said. "The Ripper's killings, without exception, resembled the later Paris murders, and also the earlier massacres of Bluebeard's, in that they were obsessively sexual and resulted in 'wounds of a nature too shocking to be described,' as the London Times put it. The Bluebeard comparison is not exclusive with me--a Chicago doctor named Kiernan arrived at it independently and put it forth at the time of the Whitechapel murders. Anti the current series of perverted butcheries here in New York are, of course, of that same stripe. Incidentally, may I call your attention to the sound of Jekyll's name? Trivial, of course, but it would have been characteristic of that scoundrel Hyde to tell one of his victims his name was Jekyll, which she might have taken as 'jackal' and later gasped out in her last throes to a passerby, who mistook it for 'Jack.' And the dates fit, you know. We've placed Hyde's 'birth' at 1886 for no better reason than because the Stevenson story was published in that year ... but if the story is based in truth, then it is a telling of events that took place before the publication date, perhaps very shortly before. Yes, there is a distinct possibility that Jack the Ripper was Mr. Hyde."

Hunt toyed with the dregs of his coffee. "Excuse me, Lord Terry," he said, "but another flaw has opened up."

"Truth cannot be flawed, my boy."

"Truth cannot, no." This time, it was Hunt who stalled. He signaled the waiter for hot coffee, elaborately added sugar anti cream, stirred lougly and thoughtfully. Then he said, "Jack the Ripper's crimes were committed, you say, between the years 1885 and 1891?"

"According to the best authorities, yes."

"But sir," Hunt said, smiling deferentially all the while, "in Stevenson's story, published in 1886, Hyde died. He therefore could not have committed those crimes that took place after 1886."

Lord Terry spread his arms expansively. "Oh, my dear boy," he said, "when I suggest that the story was based in truth, I do not mean to imply that it was a newspaper report, a dreary list of dates and statistics. For one thing, many small items, such as names and addresses, were surely changed for obvious reasons (Soho for Whitechapel, perhaps). For another thing, Stevenson was a consummate craftsman, not a police blotter. The unfinished, so-called realistic story is stylish today, but in Stevenson's time a teller of tales had to bring a story to a satisfying and definite conclusion, like a symphony. No, no, I'm afraid I can't allow you even a technical point."

"If names were fabricated, what about that Jekyll-jackal business?"

"Quite right--I retract the Jekyll-jackal business. Trivial anyway."

Hunt persisted. "Was Hyde's nationality a fabrication of Stevenson's, too, then?"

"No, I'm inclined to believe he was actually English ..."

"Ah! But Laval and Sellig --"

"Were French? Oh, I rather think not. Both spoke English like natives, you know. And Laval drank Scotch whisky like water--which I've never seen a Frenchman do. Also, he mistook my name for Peudragon--a grand old English name out of Arthurian legend, not the sort of name that would spring readily to French lips, I should think. No, I'm sure they--he--were compatriots of mine."

"What was he--they--doing in France?"

"For the matter of that, what was I? But if you really need reasons over and above the mundane, you might consider the remote possibility that he was using an assumed nationality as a disguise, a shield from the police. That's not too fanciful for you, I hope? Although this may be: might not a man obsessed with worship of Gilles de Rais, a man who tried to emulate his evil idol in all things, also put on Isis idol's nationality and language, like a magic cloak? But I shan't defend the story any further." He looked at his gold pocket watch, the size of a small potato and nearly as thick. "Too late, for one thing. Time for longwinded old codgers to be in their beds."

As Hunt and his host walked to the cloakroom to redeem Hunt's hat, the younger man said, "I'm sorry, Lord Terry, but the hardest of all to believe is the business about Laval perhaps being alive today, with his flamboyant alchemy, his bubbling, old-fashioned retorts and demijohns. In the 20th Century, it strikes a very false note."

The earl chuckled good-naturedly. "My story still--needs work?"

Hunt's hat was on and the stood at the door, ready to leave his host and allow him to go upstairs to bed. "Yes," he said, "just a little."

"I will take that under advisement," Lord Terry said. Then, his eyes glinting with mischief, he added, "As for those old-fashioned demijohns and other outmoded paraphernalia, however--modern science has made many bulky pieces of apparatus remarkably compact. The transistor radio and whatnot, you know. To keep my amateur standing as a raconteur, I must continue to insist that my story is true--except for one necessary alteration. Good night, my boy. It was pleasant to see you."

"Good night, sir. And thanks again for your kindness."

Outside, the humidity had been dispelled, and the air, though warm, was dry and clear. The sky was cloudless, and dense with the stars of summer. From among them, Hunt picked out the 11 stars that form the constellation Sagittarius. The newspapers were announcing the appearance of another mutilated corpse, discovered in an alley only a few hours before. Reading the headlines, Hunt recalled a certain utterance--"This ... is the Grandest Guignol of all." And another--"La vie est no corridor noir/D'impuissance et de désespoir." He bought a paper and hailed a taxi.

It was in the taxi, three blocks away from the club, that he suddenly "saw" the trivial, habitual action that had accompanied Lord Terry's closing remark about modern compactness. The old man had reached into his pocket for that little gold case and had casually taken a pill.