Alcott, Louisa May - SSC 15 (4 page)

 
          
Although
Cannabis sativa, the source of hashish and marijuana, is one of the oldest
drugs known to man, it has been stated that “the only account of the use of
this drug in the United States prior to the twentieth century” is an
autobiographical work by Fitz Hugh Ludlow entitled The Hasheesh Eater: Being
Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean, published anonymously in New York in
1857.

 
          
Now
another nineteenth-century account of the drug has been unearthed—authored by
“The Children’s Friend”! Had Louisa Alcott ever used hashish? It was freely
available at six cents a stick. Had Louisa Alcott ever heard of the Hashish
Club of writers and artists modeled in the 1850's upon the French Club des
Hashishins? Had she pondered upon the “joy-giver” of the Hindu sages,
Rabelais’s “Herb Pantagruelion” that induced “cerebral excitation”?

 
          
Her
description of the effects of hashish in “Perilous Play” certainly suggests
either an incomparable imagination or a familiarity with the drug. According to
Dr. Meredith, “Six [“comfits”] can do no harm. ... I take twenty before I can
enjoy myself. . . . I’ve tried many experiments, both on the sick and the well,
and nothing ever happened amiss, though the demonstrations were immensely
interesting. ... A heavenly drowsiness comes over one, in which they move as if
on air. Everything is calm and lovely to them: no pain, no care, no fear of
anything, and while it lasts one feels like an angel half asleep.” The trance
comes on “about three hours after you take your dose. . . . Your pulse will
rise, heart beat quickly, eyes darken and dilate, and an uplifted sensation
will pervade you generally. Then these symptoms change, and the bliss begins.
I’ve seen people sit or lie in one position for hours, rapt in a delicious
dream, and wake from it as tranquil as if they had not a nerve in their
bodies.” As for an overdose, that is “not so pleasant, unless one likes
phantoms, frenzies, and a touch of nightmare, which seems to last a thousand
years.”

 
          
And
so the experiment is made.
Rose St
. Just is offered “a taste of Elysium,”
which she secretly accepts. Her lover, Mark
Done
, is
maddened by both love and hashish, and the two are caught not only in a
gathering storm at sea but in the unnatural and wild excitement induced by
Cannabis sativa. “Every nerve was overstrained, every pulse beating like a
trip-hammer, and everything . . . was intensified and exaggerated with awful
power. The thundershower seemed a wild hurricane, the quaint room a wilderness
peopled with tormenting phantoms.” All night Mark “lay motionless, with staring
eyes, feverish lips, and a mind on the rack, for the delicate machinery which
had been tampered with revenged the wrong by torturing the foolish
experimenter.” Nevertheless, thanks to the author’s ingenuity, the hashish
folly ends happily and the Perilous Players can exclaim at curtainfall, “Heaven
bless hashish, if its dreams end like this!”

 
          
With
“Perilous Play” most of Louisa May Alcott’s nightmarish dreams—or at least
their literary applications—ended. The publication of Part II of Little Women
in April, 1869, brought her the fame and fortune she coveted and set her on the
path of sweetness and light from which she seldom strayed.

 
          
Astute
and sometimes piratical publishers, however, did not hesitate to reprint the
Alcott forays into the realms of darkness and from time to time, without her
knowledge, her thrillers reappeared. “Perilous Play,” for example, was lifted
out of Frank Leslie’s Chimney Corner and run in November, 1876, in Frank
Leslie’s Popular Monthly. “V. V.: or, Plots and Counterplots” reemerged around
1870 in an altogether new dress, as a Ten Cent Novelette by A. M. Barnard. Both
The Mysterious Key, and What It Opened and The Skeleton in the Closet had been
issued by Elliott, Thornes & Talbot of Boston in their series of Ten Cent
Novelettes by Standard American Authors—the latter as the trailer of The
Foundling by Perley Parker. Now, as the new decade of the 1870’s began, the
firm—restyled Thornes & Talbot—reprinted V. V. under the authorship of A.
M. Barnard as No. 80 in that series. The pseudonymous thriller, bound in blue
wrappers, took its place in the literature of the dime novel and is today one
of the rarest and most desirable of those ephemeral pamphlets thumbed to death
in the nineteenth century, treasured in the twentieth.

 
          
The
dime novel, introduced by the
New York
firm of Beadle in 1860, caught on. A. M.
Barnard’s publishers, Elliott, Thornes & Talbot, entered into competition,
issuing their first Ten Cent Novelette in 1863— The Golden Eagle by Sylvanus
Cobb, Jr., an author scorned by Louisa Alcott’s illustrious neighbor Ralph
Waldo Emerson. The Ten Cent

 
          
Novelettes
issued by Elliott, Thornes & Talbot were described as the handsomest and
largest ten-cent books ever published. A new one appeared on the last Monday of
every month, bound in pink, later in blue paper, and for one dollar subscribers
could receive twelve complete choice novels a year. For a country from whose
borders romantic adventure was fast disappearing, these stories offered the
lure of the distant in time and space, the excitement of conquest and
exploration, the color of the gun-toting West, not to mention the lurid
delights of The Black Adder or The Dwarf Fiend.

 
          
From
their new address at
63 Congress Street
,
Boston
, Thornes & Talbot reissued A. M.
Barnard’s effusion V. V., and unbeknownst to Louisa May Alcott the violent and
elaborate plots and counterplots she had abandoned were again made available to
the public. Between the blue wrappers of a dime novel, the Spanish temptress
Virginie Varens still danced, still wove her malignant web,
still
escaped her punishment. That paperback is remarkable indeed, for it tells a
tale not only of a Spanish dancer but of a writer from
New England
whose variety was all but infinite.

 
          
Unlike
V. V., who embodied corruption, the heroine of “A Whisper in the Dark” was the
victim, not the perpetrator, of evil. Partly for this reason Louisa Alcott,
toward the end of her life, permitted her publishers to reprint that story
under her own name as a trailer to A Modern Mephi- stopheles. On May 7, 1887,
she wrote to Thomas Niles, of Roberts Brothers, who had made the suggestion:
“‘A Whisper’ is rather a lurid tale, but might do if I add a few lines to the
preface of ‘Modern Mephistopheles,’ saying that this is put in to fill the
volume, or to give a sample of Jo March’s necessity stories, which many girls
have asked for.”

 
          
It
was eminently fitting to reprint “A Whisper in the Dark” with A Modern
Mephistopheles. When in 1877 her publishers had proposed that the author of
Little Women provide an anonymous book for their “No Name Series,” Louisa
Alcott had dipped her pen into A. M. Barnard’s lurid ink.
and
written a novel dreamed by A. M. Barnard’s ghost. In A Modern Mephistopheles
she had reverted to the Gothic technique, incorporating in her novel the
Mephistophelian sybarite Jasper Helwyze, who manipulates his victim, Felix
Canaris; Gladys, beguiled out of “her tranquil girlhood”; and the familiar lush
heroine, Olivia, “a woman in the midsummer of her life, brilliant, strong, and
stately . . . passion slept in the Southern eyes . . . and will curved the
closely folded lips of vivid red.”

 
          
In
her room at the Bellevue Hotel in
Boston
the erstwhile contributor to The Flag of
Our Union rose from the past, dredging up themes once woven through “A Marble
Woman,” “A Whisper in the Dark,” and “Perilous Play”: mind control and the lure
of drugs. Again she analyzed the “psychological curiosity” that penetrates and
violates “the mysterious mechanism of human nature.” And again she described an
elaborate experiment with hashish.

 
          
Jasper Helwyze’s “little bonbonniere of tortoiseshell and silver”
contained “white comfits”—the “Indian drug,” which “made the face of Coleridge
shine.”
Hashish is given to Gladys who, like
Rose St
. Just, experiences “inward excitement ... a
strange chill . . . through her blood. Everything seemed vast and awful; every
sense grew painfully acute; and she walked as in a dream. . . . Her identity
was doubled” until she floated into “the unconscious stage of the hasheesh
dream.”

 
          
Interspersed
though it is with metaphysical borrowings from Goethe and Hawthorne, A Modern
Mephistopheles is an A. M. Barnard thriller in which the now celebrated Louisa
May Alcott indulged her “natural ambition ... for the lurid” and enjoyed a
psychological and literary catharsis. When it was first published as an
anonymous full-length novel in 1877, the author wrote in her journal: “‘M.M.’
appears and causes much guessing. It is praised and criticised, and I enjoy the
fun, especially when friends say, ‘I know you didn’t write it, for you can’t
hide your peculiar style.’”

 
          
For
some time she hid it successfully, reviewers asking, “Who wrote this story?
Whose hand painted these marvellous pictures of the angel and the demon
striving for the mastery in every human soul?” A decade after its appearance in
the “No Name Series,” when the author was paying the penalty of years of
overwork and suffering with the cancer that would soon prove fatal, she agreed
to the reprinting of A Modern Mephistopheles and A Whisper in the Dark. The
combined volume that embodied the techniques and preoccupations of her salad
days was published posthumously in 1889.

 
          
Now
“A Whisper in the Dark” has been reprinted once again for the twentieth-century
audience that still clamors for more stories by Louisa May Alcott. With “V. V.:
or, Plots and Counterplots,” “A Marble Woman: or, The Mysterious Model,” “The
Skeleton in the Closet” and “Perilous Play,” it forms a collection that rounds
out the stories introduced in Behind a Mask. Always there may be a lingering
suspicion that Louisa Alcott had other
masks, that
in
the brittle pages of sensational nineteenth-century weeklies lurk more of her
anonymous and pseudonymous shockers awaiting excited discovery. The lingering
suspicion is really but a persistent hope, for the appetite grows with what it
feeds on. The flamboyant thrillers of Plots and Counterplots—narratives delving
into violence, mind control, drug experimentation—present in still another,
wilder guise the many-sided author of Little Women.

 
          
The
corpus of Louisa Alcott’s excursions into the gruesome horrors of the mind has
now been completed. The Concord Scheherazade emerges full-face from behind her
mask.

           
WON AND LOST

 
          
IN
the greenroom of a Parisian theater a young man was pacing to and fro,
evidently waiting with impatience for some expected arrival. The room was
empty, for the last performance of a Grand Spectacle was going on, and the
entire strength of the company in demand. Frequent bursts of barbaric music had
filled the air; but now a brief lull had fallen, broken only by the soft melody
of flutes and horns. Standing motionless, the young man listened with a sudden
smile, an involuntary motion of the
head,
as if in
fancy he saw and followed some object of delight. A storm of applause broke in
on the last notes of the air. Again and again was it repeated, and when at
length it died away, trumpet, clarion, and drum resumed their martial din, and
the enchanting episode seemed over.

 
          
Suddenly,
framed in the dark doorway, upon which the young man's eyes were fixed,
appeared an apparition well worth waiting for. A sylph she seemed, costumed in
fleecy white and gold; the star that glittered on her forehead was less
brilliant than her eyes; the flowers that filled her graceful arms were
outrivaled by the blooming face that smiled above them; the ornaments she wore
were forgotten in admiration of the long blond tresses that crowned her
spirited little head; and when the young man welcomed her she crossed the room
as if borne by the shining wings upon her shoulders.

 
          
“My
Virginie, how long they kept you,” began the lover, as this beautiful girl
leaned against him, flushed and panting, but radiant with the triumphs of the
hour.
 
          
“Yes,
for they recalled me many times; and see—not one bouquet without a hillet-doux
or gift attached!”

 
          
“I
have much to say, Virginie, and you give me no time but this. Where is Victor?”

 
          
“Safe
for many minutes; he is in the ‘Pas des Enters/ and then we are together in the
‘Pas des Deesses/ Behold!
Another offer from the viscount.
Shall I accept?”

 
          
While
speaking she had been rifling the flowers of their attractive burdens, and now
held up a delicately scented note with an air half serious, half gay. Her lover
crushed the paper in his hand and answered hotly, “You will refuse, or I shall
make the viscount a different sort of offer. His devotion is an insult, for you
are mine!”

 
          
“Not yet, monsieur.
Victor has the first claim. And see, he
has set his mark upon me.”

 
          
Pushing
up a bracelet, she showed two dark letters stamped or tattooed on the white
flesh.

 
          
“And
you permitted him to disfigure you?
When, Virginie, and why?”

 
          
“Ah,
that was years ago when I cared nothing for beauty, and clung to Victor as my
only friend, letting him do what he would, quite content to please him, for he
was very kind, and I, poor child, was nothing but a burden. A year ago we were
betrothed, and next year he hopes to marry—for we do well now, and I shall then
be eighteen.”

 
          
“You
will not marry him. Then why deceive him, Virginie?”

 
          
“Yes,
but I may if no one else will offer me a name as he does. I do not love him,
but he is useful; he guards me like a dragon, works for me, cherishes me, and
keeps me right when from mere youth and gaiety of heart I might go astray. What
then? I care nothing for lovers; they are false and vain, they annoy me, waste
my time, keep Victor savage, and but for the eclat it gives me, I would banish
all but—” She finished the sentence with a caress more eloquent than any words
and, before he could speak, added half tenderly, half reproachfully, while the
flowers strayed down upon the ground, “Not one of all these came from you. I
thought you would remember me on this last night.”

 
          
Passionately
kissing the red lips so near his own, the lover answered, “I did remember you,
but kept my gift to offer when we were alone.” “That is so like you! A thousand
thanks. Now give it to me.”

 
          
With
a pretty gesture of entreaty she held out her little hand, and the young man
put
his own into it,
saying earnestly, “I offer this
in all sincerity, and ask you to be my wife.”

 
          
A
brilliant smile flashed over her face, and something like triumph shone, in her
eyes as she clasped the hand in both her own, exclaiming with mingled delight
and incredulity, “You ask that of me, the danseuse, friendless, poor and
humble? Do you mean it, Allan? Shall I go with you to
Scotland
, be my lady’ by-and-by? Ciell It is
incredible.”

 
          
“Yes,
I mean it. Passion has conquered pride, and for love’s sake I can forgive,
forget anything but degradation. That you shall never know; and I thank Victor
that his jealous vigilance has kept you innocent through all the temptation of
a life like yours. The viscount offers you an establishment and infamy; I offer
you an honorable name and a home with my whole heart. Which shall it be,
Virginie?”

 
          
She
looked at him keenly—saw a young and comely face, now flushed and kindled with
the ardor of a first love. She had seen many such waiting for her smile; but
beyond this she saw truth in the honest eyes, read a pride on the forehead that
no dishonor could stain, and knew that she might trust one whose promises were
never broken. With a little cry of joy and gratitude she laid her face down on
the generous hand that gave so much, and thanked heaven that the desire of her
life was won. Gathering her close, Allan whispered, with a soft cheek against
his own, “My darling, we must be married at once, or Victor will discover and
betray us. All is arranged, and this very night we may quit
Paris
for a happy honeymoon in
Italy
. Say yes, and leave the rest to me.”

 
          
“It
is impossible! I cannot leave my possessions behind me; I must prepare a
little. Wait till tomorrow, and give me time to think.”

 
          
She
spoke resolutely; the young man saw that his project would fail unless he
yielded the point, and controlling his impatience, he modified his plan and won
her by the ease of that concession.

 
          
“I
will not hurry you, but, Virginie, we must be married tonight, because all is
prepared, and delay may ruin us. Once mine, Victor has no control over you, and
my friends will have no power to part us. Grant me this boon, and you shall
leave
Paris
when you will.”

 
          
She
smiled and agreed to it, but did not confess that the chief reason of her
reluctance to depart so suddenly was a desire to secure the salary which on the
morrow would be paid her for a most successful but laborious season. Mercenary,
vain, and hollow-hearted as she was, there was something so genuine in the
perfect confidence, the ardent affection of her lover, that it won her respect
and seemed to gift the rank which she aspired to attain with a redoubled charm.

 
          
“Now
tell me your plan, and tell me rapidly, lest Victor should divine that we are
plotting and disturb us,” she said, with the look of exultation still gleaming
in her eyes.

 
          
“It
is this. Your engagement ends tonight, and you have made no new one. You have
spoken of going into the country to rest, and when you
vanish
people will believe that you have gone suddenly to rusticate. Victor is too
proud to complain, and we will leave a penitent confession behind us to appease
him.”

 
          
“He
will be terrible, Allan.”

 
          
“You
have a right to choose, I to protect you. Have no fear; we shall be far beyond
his reach when he discovers his mistake. I asked you of him honorably once, and
he refused with anger.”

 
          
“He
never told me that. We are requited, so let him rave. What next?”

 
          
“When
your last dance is over, change your dress quickly, and instead of waiting here
for your cousin, as usual, slip out by the private door. I shall be there with
a carriage, and while Victor is detained searching for you, we will be married,
and I shall take you home to gather up those precious possessions of yours. You
will do this, Virginie?”

 
          
“Yes.”

 
          
“Your
courage will not fail when I am gone, and some
fear of Victor
keep
you?”

 
          
“Bah!
I fear nothing now.”

 
          
“Then
I am sure of you, and I swear you never shall regret your confidence; for as
soon as my peace is made at home, you shall be received there as my honored
wife.”

 
          
“Are
you very sure that you will be forgiven?” she asked anxiously, as if weighing
possibilities even then.

 
          
“I
am sure of pardon after the first anger is over, for they love me too much to
disinherit or banish me, and they need only see you to be won at once.”

 
          
“This
marriage, Allan—it will be a true one? You will not deceive me; for if I leave
Victor I shall have no friend in the wide world but you.”

 
          
The
most disloyal lover could not have withstood the pleading look, the gesture of
appeal which accompanied her words, and this one, who harbored no treachery,
assured her with solemn protestations and the most binding vows.

 
          
A
few moments were spent in maturing their plan, and Virginie was just leaving
him with the word “Tomorrow” on her lips when an animated flame of fire seemed
to dart into the room. It was a youth whose scarlet-and-silver costume glowed
and glittered in the light, as with one marvelous bound he crossed the room and
stood before them. Supple, sinewy, and slight was the threatening figure which
they saw; dark and defiant the face, with fierce black eyes, frowning brows,
and the gleam of set teeth between lips parted by a muttered malediction.
Lovely as the other apparition had been, this was far more striking, for it
seemed full of the strong grace and beauty of the fallen angel whom it
represented. The pose was magnificent; a flaming crown shone in the dark hair,
and filmy pinions of scarlet flecked with silver drooped from shoulder to heel.
So fiery and fierce he looked, it was little wonder that one lover drew back
and the other uttered an exclamation of surprise. Instantly recovering herself,
however, Virginie broke into a blithe laugh, and airily twirled away beyond the
reach of Victor s outstretched hand.

 
          
“It
is late; you are not dressed—you will be disgraced by a failure. Go!” he said,
with an air of command.

 
          
“Au
revoir, monsieur; I leave
Paris
with you.” And as she uttered the words with a glance that pointed
their double meaning, Virginie vanished.

 
          
Turning
to the long mirror behind him, the young gentleman replaced his hat, resettled
in his buttonhole the flower just given him, tranquilly drew on his gloves,
saying, as he strolled toward the door, “I shall return to my box to witness
this famous ‘Pas des Deesses.’ Virginie, Lucille, and Clotilde, upon my word,
Paris
, you will find it difficult to decide upon
which of the three goddesses to bestow the golden apple.” Not a word spoke
Victor, till the sounds of steps died away. Then he departed to his dressing
room, moodily muttering as he went, “Tomorrow, she said. They intend to meet
somewhere. Good! I will prevent that. There has been enough of this—it must
end, and Virginie shall keep her promise. I will stand guard tonight and watch
them well tomorrow.” Three hours later, breathless and pale with fatigue and
rage, Victor sprang up the steps leading to his cousin’s chamber in the old
house by the
Seine
. A lamp burned in a niche beside her door;
a glass of wine and a plate of fruit stood there also, waiting as usual for
him. As his eye fell upon these objects a long sigh of relief escaped him.