"We shall meet at Philippi": Six contes cruels by Robert Barr (1849-1912)

    'Of course I don't expect you to take my word for it. If you were any judge of human nature you would see I am not a vagabond. Still that's neither here nor there. Choose three of your own friends. I will lay my proofs before them, and abide by their decision. Come, nothing could be fairer than that, now could it?'

     'Go to the courts, I tell you.'

     'Oh, certainly. But only as a last resort. No wise man goes to law if there is another course open. But what is the use of taking such an absurd position? You know I'm your cousin. I'll take you blindfold into every room in the place.'

     'Any discharged servant could do that. I have had enough of you. I am not a man to be blackmailed. Will you leave the house yourself, or shall I call the servants to put you out?'

     'I should be sorry to trouble you,' said Heaton, rising. 'That is your last word, I take it?'

     'Absolutely.'

     'Then goodbye. We shall meet at Philippi.'

-- "The Vengeance of the Dead"

Robert Barr (1849-1912) is known to posterity for creating one of the "rivals of Sherlock Holmes." I would be the first to give that collection, The Triumphs of

Eugène Valmont, pride of place next to The Dorrington Deed-Box by Arthur Morrison and A Prince of Swindlers by Guy Boothby. These three collections really do rival Conan Doyle's great pre-Reichenbach Holmes stories; the Valmont outing "The Absent-Minded Coterie" is itself peerless, one to be reread and savored, like Boothby's Simon Carne story "The Duchess of Wiltshire's Diamonds."

Barr did not restrict himself to mystery stories. In April I wrote about his science fiction tale "Within an Ace of the End of the World," which has been retconned as Steampunk by no less an anthologist  than Mike Ashley.

Hugh Lamb collected half a dozen Barr horror stories into his troika anthology Three Men in the Dark: Tales of Terror by Jerome K. Jerome, Barry Pain & Robert Barr. I was not aware Barr had worked in the horror mode, but as a writer of popular fiction at the turn of the century, it would have been unusual had he not.

Hugh Lamb notes in his introduction:

....Robert Barr was born in Glasgow on 16 September 1850 and his family emigrated to Canada when he was four years old. He was educated in Toronto and he started work as a teacher. It is reported that he was the headmaster of a public school at Windsor, Canada until 1876 (which meant he was a young headmaster indeed). In 1876 he married, and around this time, moved over the border into America, taking up a job as a reporter on the Detroit Free Press. He made such a success of it that the proprietors sent him to Britain in 1881 to set up a British edition. It is hard to believe that, even in the 1880s when papers were avidly read in all kinds of forms, a newspaper called the Detroit Free Press would be a major success in the Home Counties but it does seem that Barr made a go of it.

     Barr used the pseudonym Luke Sharp for much of his journalism, as well as a splendid send-up of a famous detective, in The Adventures of Sherlaw Kombs (1892), and it was under this nom de plume that he published his first book Strange Happenings (1883). He mainly used his own name thereafter and quickly built up a reputation for his writing, generally in magazines but also in an interestingly long list of books.

     It was nine years before he published another book under his own name, the skilled collection of stories From a Steamer Chair (1892). He is now mainly remembered, by crime fiction enthusiasts, for his crime novels and detective stories. He invented the renowned sleuth Eugene Valmont, claimed to have been the model for Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot. He kept up his output of books right up to his somewhat early death on 21 October 1912....

It would be useful at this point to reacquaint ourselves with Brian Stableford's definition of conte cruel in his The A to Z of Fantasy Literature. Most shorthand definitions of the conte cruel focus on its presumed authorial sadism toward protagonist and reader. 

CONTE CRUEL.  A short-story genre that takes its name from an 1883 collection by Villiers de l'Isle Adam, although previous examples had been provided by such writers as Edgar Allan Poe. Some critics use the label to refer only to nonsupernatural horror stories, especially those that have nasty climactic twists, but it is applicable to any story whose conclusion exploits the cruel aspects of "the irony of fate." There is a conte cruel element in many traditional folktales, lovingly extrapolated by many 19th-century writers in that vein, including Hans Christian Andersen, Jean Lorrain, and Oscar Wilde.

     One way in which many modern fabulations seek to emphasize the fact that the velvet glove of fantasy is being used to clothe the iron fist of conscientious scepticism is by careful provision of climactic subversive twists typical of the conte cruel;  expert practitioners include John Collier and Donald Barthelme. [Emphasis added - J. R.]

To me this definition of conte cruel allows the reader to include writers like Bierce, Maupassant, and Saki under the canopy of bloodthirsty and urbane drollery. Robert Barr certainly works hard to achieve such effects in his modest short stories.

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Six cruel Barr stories

An Alpine Divorce (1893)

The Alps seem like a nice place to visit. E. F. Benson and Conan Doyle both wrote nonfiction about its splendors and winter sporting glories. (In their fiction, both painted a very different picture).

Robert Barr is not much for scenery, and this short-short tale follows his protagonist's careful game. "John Bodman had planned his crime as grimly and relentlessly, and as coolly, as ever he had concocted a deal on the Stock Exchange."

Bodman, alas, does not realize that there is another player in this game. 

     Whether John Bodman was sane or insane at the time he made up his mind to murder his wife will never be known, but there was certainly craftiness in the method he devised to make the crime appear the result of an accident. Nevertheless, cunning is often a quality in a mind that has gone wrong.

     Mrs Bodman well knew how much her presence afflicted her husband, but her nature was as relentless as his, and her hatred of him was, if possible, more bitter than his hatred of her. Wherever he went she accompanied him, and perhaps the idea of murder would never have occurred to him if she had not been so persistent in forcing her presence upon him at all times and on all occasions. So, when he announced to her that he intended to spend the month of July in Switzerland, she said nothing, but made her preparations for the journey. On this occasion he did not protest, as was usual with him, and so to Switzerland this silent couple departed.

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The Vengeance of the Dead (1894)

"The Vengeance of the Dead" deals blithely with inheritance and murder. Barr handles his material economically, and the story has a satisfying appointment-in-Samarra

tone. I only wish to remark on a coincidence of last lines.

"Markheim" by Robert Louis Stevenson (1885):

     He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.

     "You had better go for the police," said he: "I have killed your master."

"The Vengeance of the Dead" (1894):

     Allen crossed the room and, turning the key, flung open the door. 'I have murdered your master,' he said, handing the revolver butt forward to the nearest man. 'I give myself up. Go and get an officer.'

*     *     *

The Hour and the Man (1894)

"The Hour and the Man" is a pitiless, grim "torture by hope" tale about a brigand who thinks he has bribed a guard to show him an escape route, offering promise of eventual riches as payment. 

*     *     *

Not According to the Code (1895)

A businessman pursues his former partner; their showdown takes place far from their London base, against an empty Texas landscape. It is a tale of grim comedy.

     'I see you recognize me at last, Mr Danby. This is an unexpected meeting, is it not? You realize, I hope, that there are no judges, juries, nor lawyers, no mandamuses and no appeals. Nothing but a writ of ejectment from the barrel of a pistol and no legal way of staying the proceedings. In other words, no cursed quibbles and no damned law.'

     Danby, after several times moistening his pallid lips, found his voice.

     'Do you mean to give me a chance, or are you going to murder me?'

     'I am going to murder you.'

     Danby closed his eyes, let his hands drop to his sides, and swayed gently from side to side as a man does on the scaffold just before the bolt is drawn. Strong lowered his revolver and fired, shattering one knee of the doomed man. Danby dropped with a cry that was drowned by the second report. The second bullet put out his left eye, and the murdered man lay with his mutilated face turned up to the blue sky.

     A revolver report on the prairies is short, sharp, and echoless. The silence that followed seemed intense and boundless, as if nowhere on earth was there such a thing as sound. The man on his back gave an awesome touch of the eternal to the stillness.

     Strong, now that it was all over, began to realize his position. Texas, perhaps, paid too little heed to life lost in fair fight, but she had an uncomfortable habit of putting a rope round the neck of a cowardly murderer. Strong was an inventor by nature. He proceeded to invent his justification. He took one of Danby's revolvers and fired two shots out of it into the empty air. This would show that the dead man had defended himself at least, and it would be difficult to prove that he had not been the first to fire. He placed the other pistol and the knife in their places in Danby's belt. He took Danby's right hand while it was still warm and closed the fingers around the butt of the revolver from which he had fired, placing the forefinger on the trigger of the cocked six-shooter. To give effect and naturalness to the tableau he was arranging for the benefit of the next traveller by that trail, he drew up the right knee and put revolver and closed hand on it as if Danby had been killed while just about to fire his third shot.

     Strong, with the pride of a true artist in his work, stepped back a pace or two for the purpose of seeing the effect of his work as a whole. As Danby fell, the back of his head had struck a lump of soil or a tuft of grass which threw the chin forward on the breast. As Strong looked at his victim his heart jumped, and a sort of hypnotic fear took possession of him and paralysed action at its source. Danby was not yet dead. His right eye was open, and it glared at Strong with a malice and hatred that mesmerized the murderer and held him there, although he felt rather than knew he was covered by the cocked revolver he had placed in what he thought was a dead hand. Danby's lips moved but no sound came from them. Strong could not take his fascinated gaze from the open eye. He knew he was a dead man if Danby had the strength to crook his finger, yet he could not take the leap that would bring him out of range. The fifth pistol-shot rang out and Strong pitched forward on his face.

*     *     *

Transformation (1896)

     If you grind castor sugar with an equal quantity of chlorate of potash, the result is an innocent-looking white compound, sweet to the taste, and sometimes beneficial in the case of a sore throat. But if you dip a glass rod into a small quantity of sulphuric acid, and merely touch the harmless-appearing mixture with the wet end of the rod, the dish which contains it becomes instantly a roaring furnace of fire, vomiting forth a fountain of burning balls, and filling the room with a dense, black, suffocating cloud of smoke.

     So strange a combination is that mystery which we term Human Nature, that a touch of adverse circumstance may transform a quiet, peaceable, law-abiding citizen into a malefactor whose heart is filled with a desire for vengeance, stopping at nothing to accomplish it....

The to-ing and fro-ing of a pair involved in bomb-making, and their various transformations. 

*     *     *

Purification (1896)

     'A man must live,' said Caspilier at last; 'and the profession of decadent poet is not a lucrative one. Of course there is undying fame in the future, but then we must have our absinthe in the present. Why did I marry her, you ask? I was the victim of my environment. I must write poetry; to write poetry, I must live; to live, I must have money; to get money, I was forced to marry. Valdorème is one of the best pastry-cooks in Paris; is it my fault, then, that the Parisians have a greater love for pastry than for poetry? Am I to blame that her wares are more sought for at her shop than are mine at the booksellers'? I would willingly have shared the income of the shop with her without the folly of marriage, but Valdorème has strange, barbaric notions which were not overturnable by civilized reason. Still my action was not wholly mercenary, nor indeed mainly so. There was a rhythm about her name that pleased me. Then she is a Russian, and my country and hers were at that moment in each other's arms, so I proposed to Valdorème that we follow the national example. But, alas! Henri, my friend, I find that even ten years' residence in Paris will not eliminate the savage from the nature of a Russian. In spite of the name that sounds like the soft flow of a rich mellow wine, my wife is little better than a barbarian. When I told her about Tenise, she acted like a mad woman – drove me into the streets.'

"Purification" is a useful warning for any poet trying to have his cake and eat it, too. Be wary if your wife hosts you and your mistress at breakfast in a dining room soaked in naphtha, and offers you your favorite cigarette after the meal.

*     *     *

Jay

17 September 2021

"Within an Ace of the End of the World" by Robert Barr (1900)

The 1900 story "Within an Ace of the End of the World" by Robert Barr (1849-1912) finds its drama in the sci-fi premise of industrial exploitation of nitrogen for food production by the Great Food Corporation (Limited).

....Although the company proved one of the most lucrative investments ever undertaken in England, still it did not succeed in maintaining the monopoly it had at first attempted. In many countries the patents did not hold, some governments refusing to sanction a monopoly on which life itself depended, others deciding that, although there were certain ingenious novelties in Bonsel's processes, still the general principles had been well known for years, and so the final patents were refused. Nevertheless, these decisions did not interfere as much as might have been expected with the prosperity of The Great Food Producing Corporation (Limited). It had been first in the field, and its tremendous capitalization enabled it to crush opposition somewhat ruthlessly, aided by the advantage of having secured most of the available waterpower of the world. For a time there was reckless speculation in food manufacturing companies, and much money was lost in consequence. Agriculture was indeed killed, as Bonsel had predicted, but the farmers of Western America, in spite of the decline of soil tilling, continued to furnish much of the world's food. They erected windmills with which electricity was generated, and, drawing on the soil and the air, they manufactured nourishment almost as cheaply as the great waterpower corporation itself. This went on in every part of the world where the Bonsel patents were held invalid. In a year or two everyone became accustomed to the chemically compounded food, and even though a few old fogies kept proclaiming that they would never forsake the ancient wheaten loaf for its modern equivalent, yet nobody paid any attention to these conservatives; and presently even they could not get the wheaten loaf of bygone days, as grain was no longer grown except as a curiosity in some botanist's garden.

"Within an Ace of the End of the World'' looks forward to later UK sci-fi catastrophe  masterpieces by Wyndham, Ballard, and John Christopher. But what struck me most was the similarity to M. P. Shiel's sublime 1901 imagination of disaster, The Purple Cloud.

I HAVE now to speak of my great-grandfather, John Rule, who, at the beginning of the twentieth century, was a science student at Balliol College, Oxford, aged twenty-four. It is from the notes written by him and the newspaper clippings that he preserved that I am enabled to compile this imperfect account of the disaster of 1904 and the events leading to it. I append, without alteration or comment, his letter to the Times, which appeared the day after that paper's flippant references to the conduct of the Prime Minister and his colleagues.

    

 THE GUILDHALL INCIDENT

       To The Editor Of The Times:

       "Sir, — The levity of the Prime Minister's recent conduct; the levity of your own leading article thereon; the levity of foreign reference to the deplorable episode, indicate but too clearly the crisis which mankind is called upon to face, and to face, alas! under conditions which make the averting of the greatest calamity well-nigh impossible. To put it plainly, every man, woman, and child on this earth, with the exception of eight persons in the United States and eight in England, are drunk-not with wine, but with oxygen. The numerous factories all over the world that are working night and day, making fixed nitrates from the air, are rapidly depleting the atmosphere of its nitrogen. When this disastrous manufacture was begun, 100 parts of air, roughly speaking, contained 76.9 parts of nitrogen and 23.1 parts of oxygen. At the beginning of this year the atmosphere round Oxford was composed of nitrogen 53.218, oxygen 46.782. And here we have the explanation of the largely increased death-rate. Man is simply burning up. Today the normal proportions of the two gases in the air are nearly reversed, standing-nitrogen, 27.319, oxygen 72.681, a state of things simply appalling: due in a, great measure to the insane folly of Russia, Germany, and France competing with each other in raising mountain ranges of food products as a reserve in case of war, just as the same fear of a conflict brought their armies to such enormous proportions a few years ago. The nitrogen factories must be destroyed instantly, if the people of this earth are to remain alive. If this is done, the atmosphere will gradually become nitrogenized once more. I invite the editor of the Times to come to Oxford and live for a few days with us in our iron building, erected on Port Meadow, where a machine supplies us with nitrogen and keeps the atmosphere within the hut similar to that which once surrounded the earth. If he will direct the policy of the Times from this spot, he may bring an insane people to their senses. Oxford yesterday bestowed a degree of D.C.L. on a man who walked the whole length of the High on his hands; so it will be seen that it is time something was done. I am, sir, yours, etc."

       JOHN RULE

       "Balliol College, Oxford."

       The Times in an editorial note said that the world had always been well provided with alarmists, and that their correspondent, Mr. Rule, was a good example of the class. That newspaper, it added, had been for some time edited in Printing House Square, and it would be continued to be conducted in that quarter of London, despite the attractions of the sheet-iron house near Oxford.

    

THE TWO NITROGEN COLONIES

       THE coterie in the iron house consisted of the Rev. Mr. Hepburn, who was a clergyman and tutor; two divinity students, two science students, and three other undergraduates, all of whom had withdrawn from their colleges, awaiting with anxiety the catastrophe they were powerless to avert. Some years before, when the proposal to admit women to the Oxford colleges was defeated, the Rev. Mr. Hepburn and John Rule visited the United States to study the working of co-education in that country. There Mr. Rule became acquainted with Miss Sadie Armour, of Vassar College, on the Hudson, and the acquaintance speedily ripened into friendship, with a promise of the closer relationship that was yet to come. John and Sadie kept up a regular correspondence after his return to Oxford, and naturally he wrote to her regarding his fears for the future of mankind, should the diminution of the nitrogen in the air continue. He told her of the precautions he and his seven comrades had taken, and implored her to inaugurate a similar colony near Vassar. For a long time the English Nitrogenists, as they were called, hoped to be able to awaken the world to the danger that threatened; and by the time they recognized that their efforts were futile, it was too late to attempt the journey to America which had long been in John Rule's mind. Parties of students were in the habit of coming to the iron house and jeering at the inmates. Apprehending violence one day, the Rev. Mr. Hepburn went outside to expostulate with them. He began seriously, then paused, a comical smile lighting up his usually sedate face, and finally broke out into roars of laughter, inviting those he had left to come out and enjoy themselves. A moment later he began to turn somersaults round the iron house, all the students outside hilariously following his example, and screaming that he was a jolly good fellow. John Rule and one of the most stalwart of the divinity students rushed outside, captured the clergyman, and dragged him into the house by main force, the whirling students being too much occupied with their evolutions to notice the abduction. One of the students proposed that the party should return to Carfax by hand-springs, and thus they all set off, progressing like jumping-jacks across the meadow, the last human beings other than themselves that those within the iron house were to see for many a day. Rule and his companions had followed the example set by Continental Countries, and had, while there was yet time, accumulated a small mountain of food products inside and outside of their dwelling. The last letter Rule received from America informed him that the girls of Vassar had done likewise.

THE GREAT CATASTROPHE

       THE first intimation that the Nitrogenists had of impending doom was from the passage of a Great Western train running northward from Oxford. As they watched it, the engine suddenly burst into a brilliant flame, which was followed shortly by an explosion, and a moment later the wrecked train lay along the line blazing fiercely. As evening drew on they saw that Oxford was on fire, even the stonework of the college seeming to burn as if it had been blocks of wax. Communication with the outside world ceased, and an ominous silence held the earth. They did not know then that London, New York, Paris, and many other cities had been consumed by fire; but they surmised as much. Curiously enough, the carbon dioxide evolved by these numerous and widespread conflagrations made the outside air more breathable, notwithstanding the poisonous nature of this mitigant of oxygenic energy. For days they watched for any sign of human life outside their own dwelling, but no one approached. As a matter of fact, all the inhabitants of the world were dead except themselves and the little colony in America although it was long afterwards that those left alive became aware of the full extent of the calamity that had befallen their fellows. Day by day they tested the outside air, and were overjoyed to note that it was gradually resuming its former quality. This process, however, was so slow that the young men became impatient, and endeavoured to make their house movable, so that they might journey with it, like a snail, to Liverpool, for the one desire of each was to reach America and learn the fate of the Vassar girls. The moving of the house proved impracticable, and thus they were compelled to remain where they were until it became safe to venture into the outside air, which they did some time before it reached its normal condition.

     It seems to have been fortunate that they did so, for the difficulties they had to face might have proved insurmountable had they not been exhilarated by the excess of oxygen in the atmosphere. The diary that John Rule wrote showed that within the iron house his state of depression was extreme when he remembered that all communication between the countries was cut off, and that the girl to whom he was betrothed was separated from him by 3,000 miles of ocean, whitened by no sail. After the eight set out, the whole tone of his notes changed, an optimism scarcely justified by the circumstances taking the place of his former dismay. It is not my purpose here to dwell on the appalling nature of the foot journey to Liverpool over a corpse-strewn land. They found, as they feared, that Liverpool also had been destroyed by fire, only a fringe of the riverfront escaping the general conflagration. So enthusiastic were the young men, according to my great-grandfather's notes, that on the journey to the seaport they had resolved to walk to America by way of Behring Straits, crossing the English Channel in a row-boat, should they find that the shipping at Liverpool was destroyed. This seems to indicate a state of oxygen intoxication hardly less intense than that which had caused the Prime Minister to dance on the table.

    

 A VOYAGE TO RUINED NEW YORK

       THEY found the immense steamship Teutonic moored at the landing-stage, not apparently having had time to go to her dock when the universal catastrophe culminated. It is probable that the city was on fire when the steamer came in, and perhaps an attempt was made to board her, the ignorant people thinking to escape the fate that they felt overtaking them by putting out to sea. The landing-stage was packed with lifeless human beings, whole masses still standing up, so tightly were they wedged. Some stood transfixed, with upright arms above their heads, and death seemed to have come to many in a form like suffocation. The eight at first resolved to take the Teutonic across the Atlantic, but her coal bunkers proved nearly empty, and they had no way of filling them. Not one of them knew anything of navigation beyond theoretical knowledge, and Rule alone was acquainted with the rudiments of steam engineering. They selected a small steam yacht, and loaded her with the coal that was left in the Teutonic's bunkers. Thus they started for the West, the Rev. Mr. Hepburn acting as captain and John Rule as engineer. It was fourteen days before they sighted the coast of Maine, having kept much too far north. They went ashore at the ruins of Portland; but embarked again, resolved to trust rather to their yacht than undertake a long land journey through an unknown and desolated country. They skirted the silent shores of America until they came to New York, and steamed down the bay. My great-grandfather describes the scene as somber in the extreme. The Statue of Liberty seemed to be all of the handiwork of man that remained intact. Brooklyn Bridge was not entirely consumed, and the collapsed remains hung from two pillars of fused stone, the ragged ends of the structure that once formed the roadway dragging in the water. The city itself presented a remarkable appearance. It was one conglomerate mass of grey-toned, semi-opaque glass, giving some indication of the intense heat that had been evolved in its destruction. The outlines of its principal thoroughfares were still faintly indicated, although the melting buildings had flowed into the streets like lava, partly obliterating them. Here and there a dome of glass showed where an abnormally high structure once stood, and thus the contour of the city bore a weird resemblance to its former self — about such as the grim outlines of a corpse over which a sheet has been thrown bear to a living man. All along the shore lay the gaunt skeletons of half-fused steamships. The young men passed this dismal calcined graveyard in deep silence, keeping straight up the broad Hudson. No sign of life greeted them until they neared Poughkeepsie, when they saw, flying above a house situated on the top of a hill, that brilliant fluttering flag, the Stars and Stripes. Somehow its very motion in the wind gave promise that the vital spark had not been altogether extinguished in America. The great sadness that had oppressed the voyagers was lifted, and they burst forth into cheer after cheer. One of the young men rushed into the chart-room, and brought out the Union Jack, which was quickly hauled up to the mast-head, and the reverend captain pulled the cord that, for the first time during the voyage, let loose the roar of the steam whistle, rousing the echoes of the hills on either side of the noble stream. Instantly, on the verandah of the flag covered house, was seen the glimmer of a white summer dress, then of another and another and another, until eight were counted....

"Within an Ace of the End of the World" is available in the anthology Steampunk: Extraordinary Tales of Victorian Futurism, edited by Mike Ashley.

Jay

25 April, 2021