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CZARKRESCO.

I am dead. § And yet by ways not known of men must my tale be told unto men that they may learn. By ways not of earth must each pain that I suffered be written, that ye may avoid what I did not avoid, and shrink from that from which I did not shrink. Scan ye my tale with attention, for there is within it more than ye know. (Correct this §)

My name on earth was Czarkresco, but it matters nobody what country I was, nor when I lived nor in which nation. I came of an ancient and very proud family, long impoverished and broken up ere I was born, the descendants of it scattered all over the earth and forced to earn their bread. My own father died a month after the day of my birth, and left us, my mother, my sister and myself, in circumstances the most wretched. My poor mother toiled for both of us, for my sister was but two years older than I; slowly she got the money to give to us education and of a kind as after should set us rightly in the position that had been ours.

My sister grew up a feisty, unquiet, beautiful child, myself an over quiet, obedient and pleasing boy, not less beautiful as a boy than my sister was as a girl. She charmed all strangers by her vivacity, I pleased them by[1] my quiet ways. At home my sister’s restlessness wearied my mother in her toil; and she always was wont to declare that no child she had ever known could be better than I in my docility and consideration. And yet I was during all this time of my quiet childhood conscious, lonely conscious of a feeling that told me that all in me was not good, that in me was not good, but evil beyond expression.

[1^v]

I was a child, but yet was sure beyond words that in me was found inside that at the bottom of me was no[2] good. I was puzzled in my own way at feeling this, and I dreaded, as far as a child can dread, in a vague inexplicable way the going of me into the world; for I realized with great pain that the evil in me was sated but could be easily stirred, an ill balanced[3] stone at the top of a […] hill |*stuck| the smallest impulse will sit rolling.

[…] with a world where was vice was the impulse, I so dreaded, and yet I must necessarily take steps that would bring me to it. The step was taken by my mother when she sent me, then twelve, to a boarding-school, a great and famous establishment. Oh, that I had never gone. And yet had I not gone, I had otherwise changed, vice and coarseness were in me waiting for the impulse, the stone had someway to be set rolling. But when I entered that school, how great a change was wrought in me; yet [I] myself was conscious of no change. All this I felt had been in me, it had only come forth, it had not risen new. From a good, quite obedient boy, I became a coarse, secondly blackguards, yet I was but a boy. It is needless, […] to say what was done at that school: is not done at all [schoo]ls; are not in our days the very cradles of infancy cuds and places of filth ere there not vices elsewhere more horrible than ought can tell.

[3^v]

As I grew in years, I grew in infamy; my mother, undeceived, threatened to discard me; I cared not. My unspeakable coarseness began (God help me!) to be extended to my mother and to my sister, the last a quiet, lovely, inocent girl.

_________

Czarcresco.

From vice I stepped on to vice, and from bad I grew to be worse. Let none think that I had, or that any man has, unconsciousness of evil, or lack of remorse. Vice came too rapid on vice for me to feel remorse as men picture it, but none the less, at the very bottom of me were shame, horror, self-contempt, pain, grief, everlasting woe. Cowardice was there too of a kind that I cannot explain. I say not these were in me to make my actions of a perverse kind; not so, they were |*mistaken|, unstriving as it seemed to me — not in any wise like into winds and seas that are at strife, rather (shall I say) as pearls, listless in profound ocean. 

[2^r]

Czarkresco (beginning)

Although, after careful inquiry and severe search the policial authorities of the town have freed us both from all blame, I think it due, nevertheless, both to ourselves and to the public, who are not unjustly curious in this affair, clearly to explain the extraordinary event that gave to the public a sensation.

My friend Professor Tremonlet was a man much learned in those parts of medicine and of science that have to do with brain, or, more clearly, with our inner nature. He was an ardent student of what he called psychic phenomena[4], and very fond of indulging in extraordinary quests and in strange and starting experiments. He did so, I am afraid, in a very nervous, unheated, enthusiastic manner. His most ardent quest generally resulted in fevers. In fact, though he knew that such experiments were torture to him, that they caused him anxiety and deep fear, that they brought him illness and unfitted him for life, yet, by that particular human quality known to all as Perverseness, he persisted in doing what was harmful, for no other reason than that he knew it could be harmful.

[4^r]

To tell the truth, Professor Tremonlet was naturally strange, for he united to his belief in spirits a most offensive and stupid naturalism. I am convinced, personally, that he believed in spirits and in super-carnal phenomena against his own will; that this belief was impressed upon him in spite of all his reactions, that after all, it was but a proof that he had in him some imagination, thus putting a |*look| little in advance of thinkers and philosophers of our time. It was the kicking of his immaterial self against the traces of his material being. But this is little to the purpose.

This professor lived, in a more than friendly manner, with a certain Mademoiselle Schultz, a girl of about nineteen, very beautiful, very affectionate and very nervous. Vacillating as was his disposition, and of a kind not of the best for the attainment of hypnotic control over anyone, he yet had over this young lady an influence almost immense. He mesmerized her with an ease that was very startling. Sometimes he would only come into the room where she was sitting, she unaware of his presence, and mentally wish her to sleep; when she would immediately lose consciousness. Nay, after some time so great was the Professor’s influence over Madem.^lle Schultz that there was no need of the two being in the same room; the Professor’s thought in his room could make her suddenly cease talking in the parlour and remain rigid in her chair.

M.^lle Schultz was made by Termonlet the medium of many of his psychic experiments. These are too various to be repeated, and though some of them were very interesting, some very disappointing and a great number of them very stupid, they have no bearing to all on the present question.

One of the Professor’s pet ideas was that some spirits departed, in the other world, could be got to impart information about obscure things upon earth. Thus, though Tremonlet never believed it possible to get information as to the problem of existence, he did really think it probable that he impart prevail on the souls of Caesar, or of Alexander, or of St. Augustine or of Pope Gregory the seventh to enlighten us regarding the characteristics of their wearers upon earth. He cherished before likeness of inducing the spirits of anciently departed to clear up historical accounts or do justice to many posterity had wronged.

[3^r]

Czarkresco.

At last Prof. Tremonlet adopted the patient method. Daily he put his mistress to sleep for one or two hours, and daily did he address through her an appeal to the population of the shades to the effect that if anyone, or better, if the shade of anyone, down these had anything to say, he or she or it should do him the kindness of taking the opportunity of saying it. The Professor believed that by their repeated orders and appeals he would at length succeed.

One day, about four o’clock, Tremonlet was giving M^lle Schultz the hundred and fifty-third suggestion of this kind, and I was present, I must confess to have the amusement of laughing at my friend for his successful persistence. It always cost me much to restrain my laughter at the Professor’s grieved look, as his mistress wrote sheet after sheet of her impressions or thoughts in her tender sloping and weak handwriting. For five or six weeks back there had been no amusement, since M^lle Schultz had written nothing; I was timing for these performances, and would not have come, had not the Professor expressed his conviction that success would be his in a few days.

On this day the usual scene was gone through, M^lle Schultz was placed in her chair and in readiness for spiritual inspiration, and I and my friend stood at the back of the seat of each with a different excitement and expectation. At length our medium picked up the pen dipped it in ink and proceeded to write. We both held back as long as our curiosity would let us, to make our discovery the better and so that there should be more for us to see. Then we went forward simultaneously {…}

[4^v]

CR CR. Anon

Charles Robert Anon

C. R. Anon

CR CR

Ch. Robert Anon

~ Poetry and Drama. ~

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[1] by ^/with\

[2] no ^{/little, if no,\}

[3] balanced ^/round\

[4] of what he called psychic phenomena ^{/[of the kind of phenomena called psychic]\}