“So I should have thought, myself, if I had heard another fellow tell it,” he replied, with a slight shudder. “But you can’t dispute what you have seen for yourself; you can’t say a thing is impossible when you have experienced it. Ever since that time I have had a deeper appreciation of those lines in Hamlet regarding the mysteries of heaven and earth which are undreamt of in our philosophy.”
He paused — as if undecided whether to go on or not — and I saw his gaze travel to the window as he sank back against the cushion and shaded his eyes with a shaking hand.
“I know I am a fool, and that such an experience is never likely to be duplicated,” he said after a moment, “but I am always expecting that dead fellow to come back, and I never enter this horrible hole without looking for him.”
He was shaking all over now. I reached for my pocket-flask, and pulling off the metal cup, slopped out a good, stiff peg of brandy and handed it to him.
“Here, take a drink of this; it will pull you together,” I said. “And I should like to hear — if you care to talk about it.”
He drank the brandy at a gulp, and thanked me with a nod as he handed back the cup.
“I don’t often speak of it,” he replied. “I hate to be set down as a liar or a lunatic; but — well — I will tell you. It happened two years ago, and I was going then (as I am going now) to Luvinci, a small station just outside of this tunnel on the Italian side, where the train stops only on signal or by arrangement with the guard. At that time I was connected with a Franco-Italian firm of jewelers and dealers in precious stones, and as the samples I carried were extremely valuable, I made it a point when traveling by train always to engage an entire compartment and have the guard lock me in securely. I was, therefore, quite alone when the affair of which I am about to tell you occurred — a circumstance which I have always deeply regretted, since it leaves me absolutely without witnesses of any sort to corroborate my statement. I was, moreover, unusually careful on this particular occasion, and kept a loaded revolver lying upon the scat beside me. I did this for two very good reasons. The first was that I was carrying upon my person jewels amounting in value to nearly 300,000 francs (our firm was executing a commission for the Royal house of Italy); and the second because, some four months previously, a fellow commercial traveler, who had the misfortune to resemble me very closely indeed, had been murdered in a compartment of the Lyons express, and his murderer, who was most fortunately captured, confessed before going to the guillotine that he had mistaken the man for me.”
He paused as though overcome by some hideous recollection, and passed a shaking hand across his forehead.
“A narrow squeak for you,” I said, feeling that I ought to say something.
“Very,” he agreed. “And it did not tend to make me feel any the more comfortable to learn, as I did learn from the confession of the murderer — he was an Alsatian, by the way, and his name was Etienne Clochard — that I had long been shadowed by the members of the organized gang to which he had belonged, and that, in his own characteristic phraseology, ‘they would have me yet.’ On the morning prior to my starting upon the journey of which I am now telling you, this Etienne Clochard had been guillotined in Paris, and there was a full account of the execution in all the evening papers, La Presse in particular giving a very graphic description of it. Call it a morbid taste if you like, but that description fascinated while it appalled me. I think I read it a dozen times that night and a dozen more the next morning, and I was reading it again when the train whizzed suddenly into this tunnel, and all the world seemed to be blotted out in darkness and vapor. The lamp in the compartment was even less adequate than this one, and I laid the paper aside, unable to read more. The horrible droning of the wheels — listen! you can hear it now — combined with the gloom and, perhaps, the gruesomeness of the thing I had been reading, got on my nerves and made them raw; the moisture, catching the sulphurous vapor, covered the windows as though they were smeared with milk, and the foggy atmosphere of the compartment made breathing a labor. The rocking train raced on, and, after a time, the green silk ‘eyelids’ over the ceiling lamp, disturbed by the vibration, winked and slid down. I got up and stood with a foot on either seat, trying to adjust them. They would not remain up, however, and I had just determined to take out my pocketknife and cut them away altogether when I heard the door behind me — the locked door! — open and close with a bang. I don’t know whether I fell or jumped down from my perch; I only know that I got down somehow, and that, as I faced round, all my nerves pricking and twitching, and my heart hammering against my ribs as though it would beat its way out of me, I saw standing before me the shape of a man — a tall, slim man, with a great scoop cut out of his coat and shirt where the collar should have been, a slim, red line running round his throat, and above that line a gray-white, dead face with shut eyes and hanging lips.”
“Ach! Lieber Gott!”
I heard the words quaver out from the German’s corner, but I could not see his face, for the thick vapor which the opened window had let in floated between us, humid, yellow, reeking of sulphur. I looked round at the Cornishman, every fibre of my being tingling, and something creeping up my neck. He was sitting bolt upright and looking straight before him, his forehead puckered up, and the second joint of his left forefinger held between his teeth.
“Go on,” I said faintly. “You are sure it wasn’t nerves?”
“As sure as I am that you are sitting here beside me this minute,” he replied. “Nerves may often make a man fancy that he sees things, but they can’t make those things talk.”
“And he talked?”
“Yes. As I faced round and saw him, his dead lips said quite distinctly: ‘Good evening, comrade. We travel far and fast. It may be morning to you, but it is evening to me — forever!’ And then, with a wave of the hand, inviting me to resume my scat, he sat down in the corner near the window and turned his dead face towards me, his eyelids never once lifting, and his head, jarred by the movement of the train, rocking unsteadily upon his shoulders. Once he put up his hand to steady it, and as his fingers touched that red line about his throat, ‘The trademark of Monsieur de Paris,’ he said, with a ghastly movement of the lips which, in a living man, would have been a smile. ‘He guillotined me at dawn this morning.’ ”
The voice of the Cornishman dropped off suddenly into silence, and once again he took his knuckle between his teeth, his eyes looking straight before him as though he were lost in thought. As for me, I sat waiting for the next word as breathlessly as any schoolboy ever hung over one of Poe’s tales, my heart pumping like an engine, and the pores of my skin pricked up into little beads.
The train alone made sound now, for even the German’s voice was still. For a time we reeled on through the blackness of the tunnel in this state of nervous tension, and then the Cornishman spoke again.
“I do not know whether I fainted or not when the Thing in the corner said that,” he went on; “but some sort of suspension of the faculties must have occurred, for there is a period of blankness in my memory from that precise moment until the time when I found myself half-sitting, half-lying upon the seat immediately in front of my awful companion, and my hand groping blindly for the spot where I had placed my revolver. I know that even then I was conscious of the uselessness of such a weapon — of any weapon — against such a visitant as he; but I groped for it all the same, yet groped in vain. In some strange way, by some malign agency, the thing had been spirited away, and I sat there helpless, hopeless, appalled, with that dead creature gibbering at me in the green dusk of the veiled lamp. The train rocked on, his doddering head keeping time to the swaying motion of it, and that awful parody of a smile distorting his loose-lipped mouth. I fought with myself — I tried to reason with myself; I struck my hands together and dug my nails into the flesh in the effort to wake myself from what I felt must surely be nightmare. It could not be, this thing — it simply could not be, I told myself. It was out of all reason — out of all possibility, and yet — there it was before me, and I was not sleeping — not dreaming; neither was the creature in the corner a shade, for it actually cast a shadow on the cushioned back of the seat!”