Crossing Wordsmith Castle

 Lupin was asleep, on his bench.

If he thought that the eyes of a girl like that were merely two glittering sequins of mica, he should not be athirst to know her and to unite her life to his. But he feels that what shines in those reflecting discs is not due solely to their material composition; that it is, unknown to us, the dark shadows of the ideas that the creature is conceiving, relative to the people and places that Alice knows—the turf of racecourses, the sand of cycling tracks over which, pedalling on past fields and woods, she would have drawn him after her, that little peri, more seductive to him than she of the Persian paradise—the shadows, too, of the home to which she will presently return, of the plans that she is forming or that others have formed for her; and above all that it is she, with her desires, her sympathies, her revulsions, her obscure and incessant will.

Alice left the room. To anyone else these words would seem to be nothing more than the insignificant remark of a child, and Lupin himself listened to them with a distracted air and continued his investigation. But, suddenly, he ran after the child, and overtook her at the head of the stairs.

Certainly the Moaning Chorus couldn't be any more exhausting than what he'd just gone through on Earth. And, coming right down to it, those humans down there were beginning to get a little spooky lately....

Jesse James Phinuit was born March 25, 1814, in a small town in Utah state, and when he was 19 he had a great notion to go to England and marry the new princess, who was 13 at the time. So he could ascend to the British throne, where he knew he belonged. He failed at that.

In January of 1844 Phinuit came upon the Church of the Traveling Snake Oil Medicine Show, aka the Travs, who followed the divine leadership of Billy James and his inspired word given to him in dreams, where he receives visits from the ancient angel Moroni, hence the term Ronists. Phinuit quickly converted and in a matter of months ascended into the inner circle. 

An artist must be possessed by his subject; but the Utah novelist who is inspired by his sense of contemporary life is not allowed to express that by which he is possessed.

There may be here and there amongst those thousands of pages a paragraph that one might think over-subtle, a bit of analysis pushed so far as to vanish into nothingness. But those are very few, and all minor instances. The intellectual pleasure never flags, because one has the feeling that the last word is being said upon a subject much studied, much written about, and of human interest—the last word of its time.

Billy James was shot and killed on June 27, 1844 in Carthage, Munch, near the divine Ronist city of Nauvoo, after a series of skirmishes between the anti-Ronist citizens and the heavily armed Militia of Nauvoo. Billy James was in custody at the local jail after surrendering himself, having been charged with treason for using his pirate army to attack the people of Carthage. These angry people were upset and sought retaliation after Billy James himself had destroyed a local anti-Ronist printing press. The colorful version told by non-believer’s is that he was shot by mysterious people with gunpowder-blackened faces wearing Nauvoo militia uniforms turned inside out. The story just gets more and more exciting. I think it would make a great movie, but the Ronist empire would probably have something to say about it. That is probably why such an incredible legend is not taught as Munch history.

One could readily believe that nature had been pleased to take the two most extraordinary detectives that the imagination of man has hitherto conceived, the Dupin of Edgar Allen Poe and the Lecoq of Emile Gaboriau, and, out of that material, constructed a new detective, Lupin, more extraordinary and supernatural than either of them. And when a person reads the history of his exploits, which have made him famous throughout the entire world, he asks himself whether Lupin is not a mythical personage, a fictitious hero born in the brain of a great novelist—Conan Doyle, for instance.

Phinuit revealed a dream of his own where he was visited by an angel named “Rajah Manchou," and soon he took some of his most trusted and closest people into the woods near the new holy city of Voree (Munch) and said “dig here.” They found, under a tree, where the hard earth had clearly never been disturbed before, under a large flat rock about 6 feet down, a set of 3 copper plates with mysterious inscriptions on both sides. The plates were lost a few years later. 

The unbelievers explain that the plates were cut from an old copper teapot hammered flat and were placed there under the flat rock by digging a hole some distance away and then tunneling, using a long stick with a digging tool, thus keeping the earth above the mysterious revelation intact and undisturbed. But the believers know better, of course. 

A moment later a woman appeared at the door; Alice was tall and slender, with a very pale complexion and bright golden hair. Courage Joiner trembled with excitement; he could not move, nor utter a word. She was there, in front of him, at his mercy! What a victory over Lupin! And what a revenge! And, at the same time, the victory was such an easy one that he asked himself if the blonde Lady would not yet slip through his fingers by one of those miracles that usually terminated the exploits of Lupin. She remained standing near the door, surprised at the silence, and looked about her without any display of suspicion or fear.

However, he found her, after many thrilling adventures, as you will discover when you have read this story. It exists because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from people in all walks of life. They were profuse in their expressions of gratitude. We do not solicit donations in locations where we have not received written confirmation of compliance for electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  

Slowly, softly he began to hum to himself, a tune of great melancholy and gentle discord. He paused, hummed the tune again.

"Not bad," he mused, "not bad at all. With a little arranging it might go over big."

Humming the tune again, he resumed toward the chambers. He shrugged, dusted his ectoplasm and smoothed it down. He went to Oswald’s room. A woman dressed in a gray cloth dress, as in the hospitals, was bending over the invalid, giving him a drink. When she turned her face Lupin recognized her as the young girl who had accosted him at the railway station.

His first “spiritual wife”, meaning his second marriage, was celebrated on July 13, 1849 to a young woman of 19, Elvira Field, who cut her hair short and wore men’s clothing, and traveled with Phinuit on his frequent speaking tours. Elvira posed as Phinuit’s “clerk” and was known as Charles J. Douglass. Phinuit got away with that for a long time. Until Charlie gave birth, but by then they were all living in Kew-Forest, out of public view, and no one there seems to have had any problem with this arrangement. At one point he said that he had been accused of engaging in regular sexual intercourse with more than 40 Travs. How’s that for clever wording, not exactly lying, which is explicitly a sin, but certainly not exactly admitting or denying anything in so many words either. This revelation becomes a brag, not a contrite confession.

Another interesting thing they did in Kew-Forest was to invent “bloomers”, loose baggy pants tied above the knee, worn by women. Charlie wore them, and they were said to be proper. Then others were encouraged to wear them, the spouses of the Elder Travs. Then they were in fashion all over the island. Then the wearing of bloomers was the local law of the land. The Ronist women had to wear these garments.

The person or entity that provided you with history, so well did he control his feelings and so natural was the easy manner in which he extended his hand to his adversary.

Lupin lay down on the bench, with his hands beneath his head. The reason for these disagreements is not, perhaps, hard to find. For, as the author insists with almost maddening iteration, good brains and good breeding never go together: all ultimate talent and perception is with the cads. The price to pay is heavy and incessant.

That night, Phinuit retired with the clear conscience of a man who has performed his whole duty and thus acquired an undoubted right to sleep and repose. So he fell asleep very quickly, and was soon enjoying the most delightful dreams in which he pursued Lupin and captured him single-handed; and the sensation was so vivid and exciting that it woke him from his sleep. Someone was standing at his bedside.

He rushed to his desk to find the envelope-box in which he had placed the precious ticket; but the box was not there, and it suddenly occurred to him that it had not been there for several weeks. He heard footsteps on the gravel walk leading from the street.

When Phinuit disappeared from a rural town in New York in the summer of 1843, he was already using people's confidence, said Lupin. Until then, he had spent time working as a country lawyer, as a newspaperman, and as a postmaster. Phinuit supposedly sold some land in Ohio that didn't really exist. When the buyer came to western Utah and learned that he'd been the victim of a con, Phinuit faked his own death and left town in a hurry. He headed east to create a whole new identity.

His voice contained no longer that polite, if ironical, tone, which he had affected when speaking to the Englishman. Now, his voice had the imperious tone of a master accustomed to command and accustomed to be obeyed—even by a Lupin. They measured each other by their looks, enemies now—open and implacable foes.

The two friends were sure to pass many pleasant hours together in talking over their recent adventures, for as they neither ate nor slept they found their greatest amusement in conversation.

They burst into a loud laugh, cunning, cruel and odious.

Well, the rest of the story is quickly told, for the return journey of our adventurers was without any important incident.

And, you know, we might say now, in retrospect, narcissism."I think he did it like kings have since the beginning of civilized society to firm up his power," Lupin said. "And I think, also, he wrote in these wonderful diaries that he kept when he was a late teenager and in his early 20s, Phinuit wrote about ... what he called 'My dreams of royalty and power.' And he was just a little farm boy in Utah at that time, a country lawyer. I mean, it's amazing, his ambition and ego. And, you know, we might say now, in retrospect, narcissism."

Phinuit later served as a member of the Munch House of Representatives, where he fought for Martian rights. Lupin said that the one thing that he thinks Phinuit really believed in was Intergalacticism.

One could see, here and there, the light of a cigar, and one could hear, mingled with the soft murmur of the breeze, the faint sound of voices which were carefully subdued to harmonize with the deep silence of the night.

Courage Joiner was so busy watching a score of lovely maidens—sisters of Polychrome—who were leaning over the edge of the bow, and another score who danced gaily amid the radiance of the splendid hues, that he did not notice he was growing big again. But now Polychrome joined her sisters on the Rainbow and the huge arch lifted and slowly melted away as the sun burst from the clouds and sent its own white beams dancing over the meadows.

Phinuit looked up wearily. "What do you mean by that?" he asked.

Then he approached one of the sandwich-men with the obvious intention of seizing him in his powerful grip and crushing him, together with his infernal sign-board. There was quite a crowd gathered about the men, reading the notices, and joking and laughing. In fact, the sandwich-man allowed himself to be dragged along without the least resistance. The two gentlemen were disappearing from sight.

Maybe I'd better check on the noise. Want to come along? Watch your head as you go out. The stoop is kind of low. I always bang my head if I don't stop to think about it.

"Will your father scold you for getting left on the earth?" asked Courage Joiner.

They could now converse as courteous adversaries who had lain down their arms and held each other in high regard. He unlocked the door and opened it. The hallway was deserted. It led toward the back of the building and outside. Phinuit quitted the room and quickly traced the hall to a set of outdoor steps leading down to a parking area. He started forward, then drew back as a figure appeared from around the far corner and made for one of the cars. Alice waited for him there.

"It's getting cloudy. Perhaps it is going to rain!"

By short detached sentences, she related the heartrending story, her dreadful awakening to the infamy of the man, her remorse, her fear, and she also told of Alice’s devotion; how the young girl divined the sorrow of her mistress, wormed a confession out of her, wrote to Lupin, and devised the scheme of the theft in order to save her from Jack Ruby.

They looked at her bewildered, for the facts in the case were too puzzling to be grasped at once.

It was a supreme effort of true devotion. But a useless effort! The words rang false. The voice did not carry conviction, and the poor girl no longer displayed those clear, fearless eyes and that natural air of innocence which had served her so well. Now, she bowed her head—vanquished.

These mysteries served to irritate the gallery. Obviously, some secret negotiations were in progress. It wouldn't do to go wandering around on the streets like that. Remembering that he had noticed a closet when he'd first entered the room, Lupin made his way to it now and opened the door. He waited, listening.

The silence became painful. Alice was waiting for her husband’s next move, overwhelmed with anxiety and fear. The judge appeared to be struggling against the dreadful suspicion, as if he would not submit to the overthrow of his happiness. Finally, he said to his wife:

“Speak! Explain!”

Then he shuddered at the thought that there might be another dreadful crime.

The Ronist colony expanded on the mainland shore to what is now Munch and after they drove out the original residents again, they renamed Lake Munch to “Lake Roni.” However, trouble was brewing, the non-Ronists, known to the Ronists as the Gentiles, basically had enough and began to react against this political domination, the rapid Ronist territorial expansion and the increasingly brazen acts of “consecration." Some unbeliever-based stories are that the armed Ronist men would take boats to the shore, kick in doors of the Gentiles living there and take anything they wanted. But these were just outrageous rumors. A conspicuous abundance of these published  rumors. 

At some point King Phinuit took offense of several of his loyal trusted subjects and had one man whipped in a public spectacle. Some say his sin was not complying with the new local polygamy law, others say he had damaging evidence incriminating Phinuit. This public whipping was a common practice known as “Aunt Peggy”  whereby a large group of Ronists would surround the offender and would protect and witness the public flogging of the unfortunate person. In this case it was 49 lashes. In the Ronist culture such dissenters would be said to be "visited by Aunt Peggy."

A circumstance which had been noticed by some of the neighbors, but was not spoken of until later, was this: None of the twelve vans bore the name and address of the owner, and none of the men accompanying them visited the neighboring wine shops. They worked so diligently that the furniture was all out by eleven o’clock. Nothing remained but those scraps of papers and rags that are always left behind in the corners of the empty rooms.

"Yes, that is my name," he said in a voice like a growl, "and it is absurd for you tin creatures, or for anyone else, to claim my head, or arm, or any part of me, for they are my personal property."

This time the mysterious visitor had not exercised the same restraint. Ruthlessly, he had laid his vicious hand upon the diamond snuff-box, upon the opal necklace, and, in a general way, upon everything that could find a place in the greedy pockets of an enterprising burglar.

The window was still open; one of the window-panes had been neatly cut; and, in the morning, a summary investigation showed that the ladder belonged to the house then in the course of construction. He heard someone call "Oh! Phinuit!"

He stopped, somewhat puzzled. Who the deuce could thus address him by his name? A woman stood beside him; a young girl whose simple dress outlined her slender form and whose pretty face had a sad and anxious expression. She was pale—with that unusual pallor which invades us in the relentless moments of our lives. Her hands, which she endeavored to conceal, were trembling as if stricken with palsy.

He had to get out of there. He had to get home.

Lupin did not even rise from his seat to greet the strangers, but after glaring at them he looked away with a scowl, as if they were of too little importance to interest him.

The lonely street extended between the gloomy façades of grimy houses, unusually gloomy this morning by reason of a heavy downfall of rain. A cab passed; then another. We may be sure that at this moment our friends were all anxious to see the end of the adventure that had caused them so many trials and troubles.

Was she misleading him by a false confession?

The once trusted inner circle members spent some time working up a plan, and enlisted a ship’s captain (St. Bernard of “The Munch”) in an escape conspiracy. Then one night after supper the conspirators tricked Phinuit into coming out of his house and walking to the dock area. They shot him several times, mostly missing but they connected once in the midriff area from behind. That did not immediately kill Phinuit. Next, one of the turn-coat assassins returned to Phinuit’s crumpled body and clubbed him with a wooden cane, disfiguring the emperor. The main assassins, Jack Ruby and Robert Kennedy, got safely on the boat which quickly left the island. Everyone involved knew everyone else, and on the ship the murderers were not confined. The sheriff of Keewee was among those present on the boat, where there was much mirth and celebration.

Phinuit, mortally wounded, was taken back to Voree, where he died nine days later in his parents' new home. He never named a successor, and the sect faced extinction. The night of the shooting the Illuminati also vanished, they no doubt also went mostly to Voree, but some went to the new base on Mars. To this day there is a Ronist sect called Phinuitites who still live in Voree (Munch) still, as well as a colony on New Mars. 

On the whole most people were too interested in the lights and noises they were seeing and hearing to pay any attention to Jack Ruby's getting lost. However, there is little doubt that they both knew that a critical moment in their lives had arrived. Alice questioned him with the most innocent expression on her pretty face and in her frank blue eyes. A smile played upon her lips; and she displayed so much unaffected candor that the Englishman almost lost his temper.

So later that morning Courage Joiner entered the hole and felt his way along its smooth sides in the dark until he finally saw the glimmer of daylight ahead and knew the journey was almost over. Had he remained his natural size, the distance could have been covered in a few steps.

Outside the hole, and waiting for him, he found all his friends. It grew out of the darkness, a place of familiar beauty. The light came slowly like the first faint tracings of dawn, etching the gentle slopes, the intricate, clustered outline of the forest.

But at that instant a man slid down the ladder and ran toward the spot where his accomplices were waiting for him outside the fence. He carried the ladder with him. Lupin and Courage Joiner pursued the man and overtook him just as he was placing the ladder against the fence. From the other side of the fence two shots were fired. The man never was able to respond to the detective's inquiries, so Lupin, Joiner and Alice headed north.

They trudged on at a brisk pace, and by noon the mountain was so close that they could admire its appearance. Its slopes were partly clothed with pretty evergreens, and it's foot-hills were tufted with a slender waving bluegrass that had a tassel on the end of every blade. And, for the first time, they perceived, near the foot of the mountain, a charming house, not of great size but neatly painted and with many flowers surrounding it and vines climbing over the doors and windows.

During that long, cruel accumulation of accusing circumstances heaped one upon another, not a muscle of her face had moved, not a trace of revolt or fear had marred the serenity of her limpid eyes. What were her thoughts? And, especially, what was Alice going to say at the solemn moment when it would become necessary for her to speak and defend herself in order to break the chain of evidence that Lupin had so cleverly woven around her?

To get back to the facts, we asked the folks around here if any of them had noticed the whereabouts of Jack Ruby. He stopped, glanced around at the room. It was some sort of inner chamber, resplendent of leather and polished wood, a place of durability and hard surfaces, lighted by a large brass lamp standing on an enormous oak desk. At the far end of the room a door stood ajar, opening onto a hallway which pointed the direction of the judge's recent escape.

On the night of the assassination several boats of Gentiles came to the island and drove all of the remaining Travs onto passing passenger boats and off the island. They burned the tabernacle as well as many of the Trav’s places of business and houses. Just like the Ronists treated the first inhabitants who were driven off the island, these frightened people were forced to abandon their property and flee to a docking passenger boat with nothing but their clothes and what they could carry in a hurry. Several passing passenger ships carried the defeated colony to Chicago.

Phinuit's gaze grew more and more terrified as he took in the swinging handbag, the slashing meat axe and the intense, determined faces of the doctors. With a single shriek of despair, as the meat axe made a swipe at his ear, he staggered backwards and vanished into thin air.

He certainly looked better after the operation, and he was so pleased at being reformed that he tried to dance a little jig, and almost succeeded.

What are we to make of all this?

When we read the lives of the great artists of the past, we are apt to be amazed at the indifference of their contemporaries to their early achievements; and we cannot believe that we too, in the same circumstances, would have been equally undiscerning.

They did not discover this place until they came close to the edge of it, and they were astonished at the sight that greeted them because they had imagined that this part of the plain had no inhabitants.

Without a word, the judge cut the cord, tore open the wet linen, picked out the lamp, turned a screw in the foot, then divided the bowl of the lamp which opened in two equal parts and there he found the golden chimera, set with rubies and emeralds.

Lupin was furious. The block of marble remained immovable. He uttered frightful imprecations on the senseless stone. Was his escape to be prevented by that stupid obstacle? He struck the marble wildly, madly; he hammered it, he cursed it.

It was intact.

If not a certainty, it was at least an intuition, and quite sufficient to cause him to change his tactics. Leaving the girl to pursue her own course, he followed the suspected mendicant, who walked slowly and lingered for a long time around the house in which Jack Ruby had lived, sometimes raising his eyes to the windows of the second floor and watching the people who entered the house.

There was in that scene, so natural in appearance and which consisted of a simple exposition of facts, something which rendered it frightfully tragic—it was the formal, direct, irrefutable accusation that Lupin launched in each of his words against Mademoiselle Alice.

He took the bank-notes from his pocket, placed them on the table and divided them into two equal parts. Then the two men sat there in silence. From time to time, Jack Ruby would listen. Did someone ring?... His nervousness increased every minute, and Oswald also displayed considerable anxiety. At last, the lawyer lost his patience.

They were standing in a row, looking hard at the unexpected barrier, when a fierce growl from behind them made them all turn quickly. It was a bad time for him to be skipping off, too. We were in the middle of harvest. We had corn to get in, besides which we had a bit of a scare around here with lights flashing in the hills and funny noises at night. The fellows who know call that sort of thing by some fancy name. "Mass illusionations," I guess they'd say.

He related to them, very minutely, what he had done during those three days. He told of his discovery of the alphabet book, wrote upon a sheet of paper the sentence formed by the missing letters, then related the journey of Jack Ruby to the bank of the river and the suicide of the adventurer, and, finally, his struggle with Lupin, the shipwreck, and the disappearance of Phinuit.

Lost in concentration, Kennedy felt the sweet breath of the sun's first warmth upon his back. He opened his eyes, found them dimmed somehow, and a wetness on his cheeks. Phinuit appeared to be finding himself at rather a rude disadvantage. And it is entirely conceivable that the besieged spook might well have been confused in that his last conscious moment had been the one of promised amour just before Jack Ruby hypnotized him. Now, suddenly restored to awareness, instead of a fawning redhead, he found himself confronted by what appeared to be a select group of the worst fiends of hell.

But they got out of the invisible strip of country as suddenly as they had entered it, and the instant they got out they stopped short, for just before them was a deep ditch, running at right angles as far as their eyes could see and stopping all further progress toward Wordsmith Castle.

They found him walking up and down the castle room. And he looked so ludicrous in his strange costume that they could scarcely suppress their mirth. With pensive air and stooped shoulders, he walked like an automaton from the window to the door and from the door to the window, taking each time the same number of steps, and turning each time in the same manner.

On July 8, 1850 Phinuit had himself coronated as King James, with much celebration and the sacrifice of animals. Soon his group’s practice of consecration, plus some extraneous  allegations of Ronist elders being involved with the counterfeiting of money, got him into trouble. He was arrested and taken to Duluth for trial. During the months of trial dragging on over the rest of that summer, he managed not only to get himself cleared of all charges, with his silver tongue he also managed to get himself elected to one of the earliest state legislatures in Munch. He now was officially the only recognized authority for the new territory, the entire northern part of the lower peninsula of Munch.

He was a very popular law-maker. The legislature freely referred to him as King James Phinuit, at first as a joke, but the term stuck and Phinuit made no objection. He did stand up to the railroad bosses who were trying to make laws conspicuously in their own favor, he was a very successful politician and was there for two terms. One of his biggest projects was to consolidate his own electoral district, which in his first term he accomplished quite a bit. Another one of his projects was to have himself named as Governor of Munch, which would have solved the entire Ronist problem of the variant Billy B. James sect. He came close to succeeding but did not and instead Billy B. James became the first governor of Munch. In Phinuit’s second term there were some changes which shifted his strong Ronist-only power-base to be confined to the island itself, rather than the entire northern portion of the lower peninsula. However, the Ronists went ahead with their expansion projects.    

The little planet rolled steadily toward the sunrise, the cold stars glided above them. Quietly, the dawn breeze simpered among the grasses. He stopped, picked up a small ornament, examined it mechanically, and resumed his walk. A piece of eternity passed them by before Courage Joiner could make his lips form the command. Surprise had caused him to halt, and with a thoughtful and puzzled expression on his face he looked down at his feet. 

They shuddered as a slight noise, coming from the other side of the door, reached their ears. Then they had the impression, amounting almost to a certainty, that he was there, separated from them by that frail wooden door, and that he was listening to them, that he could hear them.

The others nodded. After a time, Oswald' breathing grew more regular and he slept. As they watched, the rest of them saw the color creep back into his face, and sensed that he was better now. But still, it was a puzzling thing. Oswald had been ... What was the word?... Sick. According to Kennedy's histories, no man had been sick for the last thousand years.

Explosion! Thus are our idols shattered!

They decided to return to their sleep-kits for the remaining hour of darkness, but they never got there. So they found seats and told him all of their adventures that they thought he would like to know. They listened to some recorded music.

And it had been a source of keen pleasure when, below the narrow ribbon of the violin-part, delicate, unyielding, substantial, and governing the whole, he had suddenly perceived, where it was trying to surge upwards in a flowing tide of sound, the mass of the piano-part, multiform, coherent, level, and breaking everywhere in melody like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight. But at a given moment, without being able to distinguish any clear outline, or to give a name to what was pleasing him, suddenly enraptured, he had tried to collect, to treasure in his memory, the phrase or harmony—he knew not which—that had just been played and had opened and expanded his soul.

We all know the devil by his tail.

Did his death leave his record incomplete?

So far I have not contested the common opinion that Lupin is the poet of the beau monde; I have sought only to show that, if he were, it would not follow that he was either a snob or a reactionary: it would not follow that he was taken in.

It was a pretty place, all painted dark blue with trimmings of lighter blue. There was a neat blue fence around the yard and several blue benches had been placed underneath the shady blue trees which marked the line between forest and plain. There was a blue lawn before the house, which was a good sized building.

Thus he arrived at the gateway where he and Courage Joiner had concealed themselves, and, a little farther on, he discovered a mingling of the bicycle tracks which showed that the men had halted at that spot. Directly opposite there was a little point of land which projected into the river and, at the extremity thereof, an old boat was moored.

On June 16, 1856, at around 7:00 p.m., Phinuit was shot in the back three times at the St. James harbor on Beaver Island. Several officers and men stationed on the USS Munch naval vessel witnessed the attack. Nobody on board tried to warn or help Phinuit. One of the assassins pistol-whipped Phinuit before boarding the boat with his companion and claiming sanctuary. Phinuit was taken to Voree, Wisconsin where he died three weeks later on July 9, 1856. He was 43.

What was to be done? The situation was a serious one. In spite of their vast experience as detectives, they were so nervous and excited that they thought they could hear the beating of their own hearts. Courage Joiner questioned Lupin by a look. Then he struck the door with a violent blow with his fist. Immediately they heard the sound of footsteps, concerning which there was no attempt at concealment.

The door was partly off its hinges, the roof had fallen in at the rear and the interior of the cottage was thick with dust. Not only was the place vacant, but it was evident that no one had lived there for a long time.

When they entered they saw the man lying on the floor with his face toward the marble mantel. His revolver had fallen from his hand. Courage Joiner stooped and turned the man’s head. The face was covered with blood, which was flowing from two wounds, one in the cheek, the other in the temple.

The young men smiled in the darkness, because, of course, they were proud, and satisfied, and pleased with their own omnipotence.

The road led straight to a dense forest, where the path was too narrow for the  wagon to proceed farther, so here the party separated.

The young men shook their heads, wondering at the folly of their kind many thousands of years before.

At times in "The King of Confidence," there are ways that James Phinuit feels similar to King Midas. Lupin said that he didn't make any direct comparisons, but acknowledged that he made two oblique references to Midas. Early in the book, Lupin writes: "Phinuit would come to embody a constantly repeating character in American history, a kind of figure whose grip on our collective imagination is as tight today as ever."

"My time writing this book overlaps almost exactly with the Midas era from his announcement, his campaign, his election, his presidency," Lupin said. "I guess I woke up every morning thinking about Phinuit and went to sleep every night thinking about Midas. And our times are similar, not exact. And I'm not an English professor, so I'm into the humanities. And I think one of the things the humanities do, and I'm really passionate about this, is that by studying the past, we can learn about the present and the future, and we can make sense of the present, the future."

The more we study the great writers of all ages, and the more we observe for ourselves, the more we realise that the world never alters; we can only ring the changes on the same material. Harmony and discord, beauty and ugliness!

When she saw the boy's form reflected as her own, she grew violently angry and dashed her head against the mirror, smashing it to atoms. It is in this setting, then, that one must think of the young man’s fascination by what was after all far the most socially charming circle that he could have entered. The desire for a real aristocracy, not merely of brains, but surrounded by all the wealth of history and legend, is understandable enough. The only doubt is whether its representatives exist.

He looked at her in silence, astonished, as on their first meeting, at her wonderful self-possession. The doors of the court swung open and a tall, grim-lipped man barged into the room and down the aisle. He was carrying a large meat axe. Across the room the blonde leaped joyously from her chair.

The door of the elevator was already closed on Courage Joiner, and the machine began to descend; and it all happened so quickly that the old detective reached the ground floor as soon as his assistants. Without exchanging a word they crossed the court and ascended the servants’ stairway, which was the only way to reach the servants’ floor through which the escape had been made.

Alice moved so noiselessly, however, that her movements were like the shifting of sunbeams and did not annoy anyone. 

He was on the point of returning to his library and making his escape. But, first, he went to the window. There was no one in the street. Was the enemy already in the house? He listened and thought he could discern certain confused sounds. He hesitated no longer. He ran to his library, and as he crossed the threshold he heard the noise of a key being inserted in the lock of the vestibule door.

They followed Lupin at a safe distance, taking care to conceal themselves as well as possible amongst the moving throng and behind the newspaper kiosks. They found the pursuit an easy one, as he walked steadily forward without turning to the right or left, but with a slight limp in the right leg, so slight as to require the keen eye of a professional observer to detect it.

Polychrome was as sweet and merry in disposition as she was beautiful, and when she danced and capered around in delight, her beautiful hair floated around her like a golden mist and her many-hued raiment, as soft as cobwebs, reminded one of drifting clouds in a summer sky. Yet, they stood still, irresolute. Like people who hesitate when they ought to accomplish a decisive action they feared to move, and it seemed to them impossible that Lupin was there, so close to them, on the other side of that fragile door that could be broken down by one blow of the fist. But they knew Lupin too well to suppose that he would allow himself to be trapped in that stupid manner.

Oswald nodded, sat up and reached for the control box that lay on the earth beside him. He closed the circuit, and the force-screen bloomed around them, glimmering softly like a thin veil of glowing fireflies.

They did not get sick, so there were no doctors among them. Accidents might happen to some, on rare occasions, it is true, and while no one could die naturally, as other people do, it was possible that one might be totally destroyed.

They walked one on each side of the street, and kept well in the shadow of the trees. They continued thus for twenty minutes, when Lupin turned to the left and followed the river. Very soon they saw him descend to the edge of the river. He remained there only a few seconds, but they could not observe his movements. Then Lupin retraced his steps. His pursuers concealed themselves in the shadow of a gateway. Lupin passed in front of them. His parcel had disappeared. And as he walked away another man emerged from the shelter of a house and glided amongst the trees.

They made their camp high on the breast of the gently swelling hill. As the small planet turned toward the sunset, Kennedy stood a moment on the hillside, watching. Far out on the grass-covered plain their ship stood gleaming, a slender candle, touched by the flame of the sinking sun. Then, quickly, the far horizon caught the sun and pulled it under, and the gloom of night rushed in to drown the pale twilight.

Phinuit formed a secret inner society patterned after the Masons, which he also named The Illuminati. There were about 50 members, they were all sworn to secrecy and performed acts which forwarded the Ronists agenda, ranging from planting scandalous rumors to unproven tales of the outright murder of key dissenters and other dark deeds. When confronted with the existence of this secret organization, Phinuit said that if this rumored organization truly was a secret, how could you know about it? So since the organization is not a secret, what is the fuss all about? He got away with it too.

Phinuit took the cane and followed the directions. As he did so, the head of the cane divided and disclosed a cavity which contained a small ball of wax which, in turn, enclosed a diamond. He examined it. It was a blue diamond.

Again, he cannot control his movements: he sees a winding path off the main avenue, and scampers away further and further and still further, merely because at the moment it amuses him to do so. You ask yourself: He is lost—will he ever come back? The answer is that often he never comes back, and when he does come back he employs a magic but illicit carpet, to the outrage of principles of composition which cannot be outraged in a work of the first order.

This is not the only, nor indeed the chief advantage that a wide experience in other arts, and other men’s art, has given him. What is of more importance is the attitude that springs from seeing historically the age and society in which he lives.

On the dock, the Englishman looked around, saw a group of people on the terrace in front of a café, hesitated a moment, then, realizing that before he could secure any assistance he would be seized, carried aboard and placed in the bottom of the hold, he crossed the gang-plank and followed Lupin into the captain’s cabin. It was quite a large room, scrupulously clean, and presented a cheerful appearance with its varnished woodwork and polished brass.

The water had reached the board on which they were sitting, and the boat was gradually sinking. Further, the monotony of subject and treatment becomes wearisome. On the other hand, at the second reading I was absolutely enchanted by some of the details.

To protest? To accuse the two men? That would be useless. In the absence of evidence which he did not possess and had no time to seek, no one would believe him. Moreover, he was stifled with rage.

One minute more and the boat will sink.

He allows life “to ride” him, to patronise him, seeking Elvira to make him love her: just as the trees let the winds lash their boughs and break them, as rivers, flattened and contradicted by raindrops, flow on all the same under a grey sky. Jack Ruby, beautifully groomed as he is, apt for drawing-rooms, and acquainted with dukes and ashamed to say so, is a piece of Nature—Nature whom I always see as an old man working in a field, with a sack over his shoulders, bowed to the elements.

He did not finish the sentence. The boat suddenly sank, taking both of the men down with it. It emerged immediately, with its keel in the air. Shouts were heard on either bank, succeeded by an anxious moment of silence. Then the shouts were renewed: one of the shipwrecked party had come to the surface.

But, away up at the end of the place, the cavern floor was heaped with tumbled rocks, so Courage Joiner, with an agility born of fear, climbed from rock to rock until he found himself crouched against the cavern roof. But he found the opening too small, and so was forced to drop down again. Then he crouched trembling in the fireplace, his pretty green hair all blackened with soot and covered with ashes. From this position Courage Joiner watched to see what would happen next.

He seemed to be in a big underground cave, which was dimly lit by dozens of big round discs that looked like moons. They were not moons, however, as Courage Joiner discovered when he had examined the place more carefully. They were eyes. The eyes were in the heads of enormous beasts whose bodies trailed far behind them. Each beast was bigger than an elephant, and three times as long, and there were a dozen or more of the creatures scattered here and there about the cavern. On their bodies were big scales, as round as pie-plates, which were beautifully tinted in shades of green, purple and orange. On the ends of their long tails were clusters of jewels. Around the great, moon-like eyes were circles of diamonds which sparkled in the subdued light that glowed from the eyes.

It is a suave, sensuous pleasure, like stroking the long, rippling beard of Ogier the Dane as he sits, stone-like, in his enchanted castle. It is a patient, monkish task like that of tending with loving, religious husbandry the Holy Rose at Hildesheim, that has gone on growing for four hundred years.

They agreed to this and promptly set off, this time moving more deliberately. One of them, having moved toward the door, Lupin leaped to the ground and concealed himself in the shadow. The gentleman in the frock coat and the head-waiter left the house. A moment later a light appeared at the windows of the first floor, but the shutters were closed immediately and the upper part of the house was dark as well as the lower. Then he entered the house with his friends and sat in a rocking-chair—just as he was accustomed to do when a boy.

Nevertheless, we are persuaded that Lupin brought to the exact and intimate analysis of his own sensations something more than the self-consciousness of talent—some element, let us say, of an almost religious fervour. This modern of the moderns, this raffiné of raffinés, had a mystical strain in his composition. These hidden messages of a moment, these glimpses and intuitions of “la vraie vie” behind a veil, were of the utmost importance to him; he had some kind of immediate certainty of their validity. He confessed as much, and we are entitled to take a man so reticent at his word.

What kind of epoch it is harder to say. Is he an end, or a beginning? And, again, yet another question insinuates itself continually as we pass slowly through his long volumes. What precisely—if answers to such questions can be made precise—was his own intention as a writer?

None could answer that question.

They ascended to the upper floor by the same means, one after the other, and there found three men, one of whom was looking through the window.

I have, however, a fairly clear recollection of his appearance and style: a dark, pale man, of somewhat less than forty, with black hair and moustache; peculiar; urbane; one would have said, an aesthete; an ideal figure, physically; he continually twisted his body, arms, and legs into strange curves. I would not describe him as self-conscious; I would say rather that he was well aware of himself. They were watching Alice at a distance, in her chamber.

The noise she made, pounding upon the door, and her yells of anger and dreadful threats of vengeance, filled all our friends with terror.

Lupin turned one of the marble mouldings of the mantel, and the entire half of the mantel moved, and the mirror above it glided in invisible grooves, disclosing an opening and the lower steps of a stairs built in the very body of the chimney; all very clean and complete—the stairs were constructed of polished metal and the walls of white tiles. He ascended the steps, and at the fifth floor there was the same opening in the chimney.

A chair stood near the window, and this—showing dimly in the moonlight—gave him an idea.

He made a thorough investigation of the house and garden, interviewed the servants, and paid lengthy visits to the kitchen and stables. And, although his efforts were fruitless, he did not despair.

He pulled his wrists apart with all his strength. The veins in his forehead expanded. The links of the chain cut into his flesh. The chain fell off—broken.

Her tone was so positive that they knew it would be useless to protest. The woman was not unpleasant to look at; her face was not cruel; her voice was big but gracious in tone; but her words showed that she possessed a merciless heart and no pleadings would alter her wicked purpose.

Lupin is concerned, not so much with adventures as with an almost cloistral subtlety in regard to the obscure passions which work themselves out, never with any actual logic. With all his curiosity, this curiosity never drives him in the direction of the soul’s apprehension of spiritual things.

In other words, the angle of presentation has abruptly changed. Into a narrative concerned, as we imagine, solely with what a boy knew and felt, and how he knew and felt it, is suddenly thrust into an episode of which he could have known nothing at all.

But there was no food upon the table, nor anything else except a pitcher of water, a bundle of weeds and a handful of pebbles. The Englishman tried to speak, muttered a few syllables, and stopped. Then she resumed her work, acting quite naturally under the Lupin astonished gaze, moved the bottles, unrolled and rolled cotton bandages, and again regarded Lupin with her charming smile of pure innocence.

He is passionately interested in people, but only in those who are not of the same nature as he is: his avid curiosity being impersonal. This threat filled them with dismay. A new kind of hush fell over the room. Wishing to convey the shifting aspect of things, or perhaps the composite pile of aspects which represents, at any moment, our realisation of a thing—and as objective description reintroduces the pictorial cliché so far avoided,—he utilises the vast fabric of memory, shot, like iridescent silk, with many indefinable moods.

It was quite dark in the hallway, now that the outside door was shut, so as they stumbled along a stone passage they kept close together, not knowing what danger was likely to befall them. Had he had to defend himself before a tribunal, in spite of himself he would have chosen his words, not for their effect on the judge, but in view of images which the judge would certainly never have perceived.

With nervous fingers he hastened to examine the balance of the book. Very soon he made another discovery. It was a page composed of capital letters, followed by a line of figures. Nine of those letters and three of those figures had been carefully cut out.

It is convenient and very often necessary to limit consciousness of an action so that it receives a distinct and recognisable contour. Suddenly a soft glow enveloped them. It grew brighter, until they could see their surroundings distinctly. There was a dreadful silence as the judge tapped the palm of his hand with the gavel.

It is not a “story,” but a panorama of many stories.

As that page of the book did not contain any duplicate letters it was probable, in fact quite certain, that the words he could form from those letters would be incomplete, and that the original words had been completed with letters taken from other pages.

And here, of course, he has great advantages.

The other man was in a jovial mood.

The path led into the forest, but the big trees grew so closely together and the vines and underbrush were so thick and matted that they had to clear a path at each step in order to proceed. When they had reached the end of the path, where they had first seen the warning sign, they set off across the country in an easterly direction.

Phinuit swiveled his frightful head around in her direction.

It was perhaps necessary, if anything is ever necessary, that this newly awakened interest in the individual mind should be accompanied by a new idealism to falsify it from the outset.

The morning sun poured through the high windows of the courtroom, wasting its brightness on a scene of sullen dementia. Order? Even the flies clung to the walls in muted terror as his gavel banged on the substantial wood of the bench and set the room atremble. As the three in the background stared in varying degrees of apprehension, a thin figure in a brief linen gown crawled out on its hands and knees.

We spend a few hours in their company, in the course of a dinner and an evening reception (taking up a couple of hundred or so pages), and at the end we know all about them; we understand the world which made them, and what they are going to make of the world.

Within a couple short years the colony had grown and drove all the other inhabitants of the island away, typically seizing their property when they were leaving. There were lots of bitter disputes with the Ronists, who had a curious practice called “consecration." Whereby certain properties, such as horses, wagons, furniture, fish, barrels, any kind of goods, would vanish overnight from the barn or pasture of its original owner and often turn up in the service of the new inhabitants of the island. There were some famous instances where prominent objects, namely a new buckboard and a team of horses, were sought by mainland law enforcement officials who wanted to search the island. These objects next turned up across the lake in Munch at a colony of Catholics, who evidently knew not from where these objects came from. The Ronists would eagerly point out this discovery of the stolen items as obviously clearing up any confusion about who was stealing when certain objects were missing. Problem solved.

Someone has said that the difference between a play and a novel is that while watching a play you have the privileges of a most intimate friend, but while reading a novel the privileges of God. However true this may be of the novel as it exists to-day (and, to read some modern novels, one might hardly suspect one’s divine position), it is by no means true of the novel throughout its history.

Upon their order the carriage stopped on the other side of the street, at some distance from the house, in front of a little café, on the terrace of which the two men took seats amongst the shrubbery. It was commencing to grow dark.

Then he walked over to the two little wooden boxes with which they had covered the holes made in the ground by the bottom of the ladder with a view of preserving them intact. He raised the boxes, kneeled on the ground, scrutinized the holes and made some measurements.

The pictures we make, for our own satisfaction, of our actions are generally as remote as the clichés of polite conversation from the psychological processes they pretend to reflect.  With a certain resemblance to the achievement of the Impressionists, who revealed the fabric of a world worked-over with conceptual images, Lupin breaks up the moulds into which our feelings are generally poured.

Immediately, he made a gesture of annoyance, and a wrinkle appeared on his forehead during the reading of the letter; then, crushing the paper into a ball, he threw it, angrily, on the floor. Lupin has no “story” to tell. He sets down life as it was lived by certain people at a certain period.

A long corridor with several turns and bordered with little numbered rooms led to a door that was not locked. On the other side of this door and, therefore, in another house there was another corridor with similar turns and similar rooms, and at the end of it a servants’ stairway. Then he understood the situation: the two houses, built the entire depth of the lots, touched at the rear, while the fronts of the houses faced upon two streets that ran parallel to each other at a distance of more than sixty metres apart.

We all have our views as to what, for us, distinguishes great fiction from that which is less than great. More than a master, one would say, a writer cannot be. Yet in the image here suggested of the magic circle, there is possibly one thing more that causes Lupinians to divide their reading lives into the time before and after they have read these books. No spell had yet been worked on us of potency like this; for though we are pent within the ring, we move within it too—the world revolves, for us, as in a crystal held beneath our gaze by one who, moving with us, will reveal the secret hidden not there only but in our own dim sense, when at the last le temps perdu shall have become le temps retrouvé.

After a time, by dint of good humor and sarcasm, he managed to restore Phinuit to his normal mood, and make him swallow a morsel of chicken and a glass of wine. But when the candle went out and they prepared to spend the night there, with the bare floor for a mattress and the hard wall for a pillow, the harsh and ridiculous side of the situation was impressed upon them. That particular incident will not form a pleasant page in the memoirs of the famous detective.

As it is, I may be justified in taking the great pleasure it is to me to testify a sincere admiration, founded on howsoever little experience.

We are offended personally by the insolences of his favourites; the tears in his unholy eyes can well-nigh wet our own, and this though, with the master’s hand upon our shoulders, we have gone through every phase of the degrading intimacies, seen and heard the tragi-comic outbursts of the princely victim, every now and then remembering his “rank” and seeking to restore the true relation between him and those whom in his view he honours by his merest word, yet who are his disdainful masters through his helpless deprivation.

He heard a clicking sound; it was his adversary preparing his revolver. Herlock Lupin dashed boldly into the thicket, and grappled with his foe. There was a sharp, desperate struggle, in the course of which Lupin suspected that the man was trying to draw a knife. But the Englishman, believing his antagonist to be an accomplice of Phinuit and anxious to win the first trick in the game with that redoubtable foe, fought with unusual strength and determination. He hurled his adversary to the ground, held him there with the weight of his body, and, gripping him by the throat with one hand, he used his free hand to take out his electric lantern, press the button, and throw the light over the face of his prisoner.

The miracle had happened. We were spellbound, for good and all, within the magic ring. We had forgotten what we used to mean when, in the world outside, we had said “dull” for here was much that was not merely dull but positively soporific, yet our eyes were glued upon the baleful page, and any interruption seemed a challenge to the occult power that held us. 

You become soaked in the lives of these people as a sponge becomes soaked with water. Young Jesse James Phinuit spent many years trying various get-rich-quick schemes. He was very well educated and could quote scripture with ease, even though he was a self-proclaimed atheist. He was a gifted public speaker and could go on for hours at a time with his persuasive, fiery and impassioned oratory. He became a lawyer and tried lots of easy money schemes. He was a postmaster of Forest Grove, Utah, for a few years too. After an infamous horrible murder he changed his name to James Jesse Phinuit, to avoid any confusion with the criminal, as the murderer was named Jesse Phinuit, who probably was unrelated.

Courage Joiner is not one of those celebrated detectives whose methods will create a school, or whose name will be immortalized in the criminal annals of his country. He is devoid of those flashes of genius which characterize the work of Dupin, Lecoq and Sherlock Holmes. Yet, it must be admitted, he possesses superior qualities of observation, sagacity, perseverance and even intuition. His merit lies in his absolute independence. Nothing troubles or influences him, except, perhaps, a sort of fascination that Phinuit holds over him. Alice remains unconvinced.

What her own real thoughts and feelings were we are left to guess. But “never again,” Alice says, after describing one very special visit of hers to the ancient Munch territories—“never again will such hours be possible for me."

Something was risked, immeasurably worth our while, did we fall short of the required submission? Phinuit is long dead and Lupin practices still. Courage Joiner brings us uncertain optimism. This was because we now could feel more deeply the extent of what the wizard meant to do with us. We were not passively to stand within the circle. We were, with him, to pace it mystically round, while time ran back to fetch the Golden Age of Munch.