Jorge Luis Borges - Collected Fictions Part 1
COLLECTED FICTIONS.
Jorge Luis Borges.
Translated by Andrew Hurley.
A Universal History of Iniquity (1935).
I inscribe this book to S.D.-English, innumerable, and an Angel.
Also: I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow-the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams, and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
Preface to the First Edition
The exercises in narrative prose that const.i.tute this book were performed from 1933 to 1934. They are derived, I think, from my rereadings of Steven- son and Chesterton, from the first films ofvon Sternberg,and perhaps from a particular biography of the Argentine poetEvaristo Carriego.*Certain techniques are overused: mismatched lists, abrupt transitions, the reduction of a person's entire life to two or three scenes. (It is this pictorial intention that also governs the story called "Man on Pink Corner.") The stories are not, nor do they attempt to be, psychological.
With regard to the examples of magic that close the book, the only right I can claim to them is that of translator and reader. I sometimes think that good readers are poets as singular, and as awesome, as great authors them- selves. No one will deny that the pieces attributed byValeryto his pluperfect MonsieurEdmond Testeare worth notoriously less than those of his wife and friends.
Reading, meanwhile, is an activity subsequent to writing-more re- signed, more civil, more intellectual.
J.L.B.
Buenos Aires May 27,1935
Preface to the 1954 Edition
I would define the baroque as that style that deliberately exhausts (or tries to exhaust) its own possibilities, and that borders on self-caricature. In vain did Andrew Lang attempt, in the eighteen-eighties, to imitate Pope'sOdyssey; it was already a parody, and so defeated the parodist's attempt to exaggerate its tautness."Baroco" was a term used for one of the modes of syllogistic reasoning; the eighteenth century applied it to certain abuses in seventeenth-century architecture and painting. I would venture to say that the baroque is the final stage in all art, when art flaunts and squanders its resources. The baroque is intellectual, and Bernard Shaw has said that all in- tellectual labor is inherently humorous. This humor is unintentional in the works...o...b..ltasar Gradan*but intentional, even indulged, in the works of John Donne.The extravagant t.i.tle of this volume proclaims its baroque nature. Soft- ening its pages would have been equivalent to destroying them; that is why I have preferred, this once, to invoke the biblical wordsquod scripsi, scripsi (John 19:22), and simply reprint them, twenty years later, as they first ap- peared. They are the irresponsible sport of a shy sort of man who could not bring himself to write short stories, and so amused himself by changing and distorting (sometimes without aesthetic justification) the stories of other men. From these ambiguous exercises, he went on to the arduous composi- tion of a straightforward short story-"Man on Pink Corner"-which he signed with the name of one of his grandfather's grandfathers, FranciscoBustos;the story has had a remarkable, and quite mysterious, success.
In that text, which is written in the accents of the toughs and petty criminals of theBuenosAires underworld, the reader will note that I have interpolated a number of "cultured" words -entrails, conversion , etc. I did this because the tough, the knife fighter, the thug, the type that Buenos Aires calls thecompadreorcompadrito,aspires to refinement, or (and this reason excludes the other, but it may be the true one) becausecompadresare individuals and don't always talk like TheCompadre,which is a Platonic ideal.
The learned doctors of the Great Vehicle teach us that the essential characteristic of the universe is its emptiness. They are certainly correct with respect to the tiny part of the universe that is this book.
Gallows and pirates fill its pages, and that wordiniquity strikes awe in its t.i.tle, but under all the storm and lightning, there is nothing. It is all just appearance, a sur- face of images-which is why readers may, perhaps, enjoy it. The man who made it was a pitiable sort of creature, but he found amus.e.m.e.nt in writing it; it is to be hoped that some echo of that pleasure may reach its readers.
In the section calledEtceteraI have added three new pieces.
J.L.B.
The Cruel RedeemerLazarusMorell
THE REMOTE CAUSE.
In 1517,Fray Bartolome de las Casas,feeling great pity for the Indians who grew worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines, proposed to Emperor Charles V that Negroes be brought to the isles of the Caribbean, so thatthey might grow worn and lean in the drudging infernos of the Antillean gold mines. To that odd variant on the speciesphilan- thropist we owe an infinitude of things:W.
C.Handy's blues; the success achieved in Paris by the Uruguayan attorney-painter PedroFigari*;the fine runaway-slave prose of the likewise Uruguayan Vicente Rossi*; the mytho- logical stature of Abraham Lincoln; the half-million dead of the War of Se- cession; the $3.3 billion spent on military pensions; the statue of the imaginary semblance of Antonio(Falucho)Ruiz*; the inclusion of the verb "lynch" in respectable dictionaries; the impetuous King Vidor filmHallelu- jah; the stout bayonet charge of the regiment of "Blacks and Tans" (the color of their skins, not their uniforms) against that famous hill near Monte- video*; the gracefulness of certain elegant young ladies; the black man who killedMartin Fierro;that deplorable rumbaThe Peanut-Seller; the arrested and imprisoned Napoleonism ofToussaintL'Ouverture;the cross and the serpent in Haiti; the blood of goats whose throats are slashed by thepapalois machete; thehabanera that is the mother of the tango; thecandombe.And yet another thing: the evil and magnificent existence of the cruel redeemer Lazarus Morell.*
THE PLACE.
The Father of Waters, the Mississippi, the grandest river in the world, was the worthy stage for the deedsofthatincomparable blackguard. (AlvarezdePineda discovered this great river, though it was first explored byHernando de Soto,conqueror of Peru, who whiled away his months in the prison of theInca Atahualpateaching his jailer chess. Whende Sotodied, the river's waters were his grave.) The Mississippi is a broad-chested river, a dark and infinite brother of theParana,the Uruguay, the Amazon, and the Orinoco. It is a river of mulatto-hued water; more than four hundred million tons of mud, carried by that water, insult the Gulf of Mexico each year. All that venerable and an- cient waste has created a delta where gigantic swamp cypresses grow from the slough of a continent in perpetualdissolution and where labyrinths of clay, dead fish, and swamp reeds push out the borders and extend the peace of their fetid empire. Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottom- lands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, p.r.o.ne to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.
THE MEN.
In the early nineteenth century (the period that interests us) the vast cotton plantations on the riverbanks were worked from sunup to sundown by Ne- gro slaves. They slept in wooden cabins on dirt floors.
Apart from the mother-child relationship, kinship was conventional and murky; the slaves had given names, but not always surnames. They did not know how to read. Their soft falsetto voices sang an English of drawn-out vowels. They worked in rows, stooped under the overseer's lash. They would try to escape, and men with full beards would leap astride beautiful horses to hunt them down with baying dogs.
Onto an alluvium of beastlike hopefulness and African fear there had sifted the words of the Scripture; their faith, therefore, was Christian.Go down, Moses, they would sing, low and in unison. The Mississippi served them as a magnificent image of the sordid Jordan.
The owners of that hard-worked land and those bands of Negroes were idlers, greedy gentlemen with long hair who lived in wide-fronted mansions that looked out upon the river-their porches always pseudo-Greek with columns made of soft white pine. Good slaves cost a thousand dollars, b.u.t.they didn't last long. Some were so ungrateful as to sicken and die. A man had to get the most he could out of such uncertain investments. That was why the slaves were in the fields from sunup to sundown; that was why the fields were made to yield up their cotton or tobacco or sugarcane every year. The female soil, worn and haggard from bearing that impatient culture's get, was left barren within a few years, and a formless, clayey desert crept into the plantations.
On broken-down farms, on the outskirts of the cities, in dense fields of sugarcane, and on abject mud flats lived the "poor whites"; they were fisher- men, sometime hunters, horse thieves. They would sometimes even beg pieces of stolen food from the Negroes. And yet in their prostration they held one point of pride-their blood, untainted by "the cross of color" and unmixed. Lazarus Morell was one of these men.
THE MAN.
The daguerreotypes printed in American magazines are not actually of Morell. That absence of a genuine likeness of a man as memorable and fa- mous as Morell cannot be coincidental. It is probably safe to a.s.sume that Morell refused to sit for the silvered plate-essentially, so as to leave no pointless traces; incidentally, so as to enhance his mystery.... We do know, however, that he was not particularly good-looking as a young man and that his close-set eyes and thin lips did not conspire in his favor. The years, as time went on, imparted to him that peculiar majesty that white-haired blackguards, successful (and unpunished) criminals, seem generally to pos- sess. He was a Southern gentleman of the old school, in spite of his impov- erished childhood and his shameful life. He was not ignorant of the Scriptures, and he preached with singular conviction. "I once saw Lazarus Morell in the pulpit," wrote the owner of a gambling house in Baton Rouge, "and I heard his edifying words and saw the tears come to his eyes. I knew he was a fornicator, a n.i.g.g.e.r-stealer, and a murderer in the sight of the Lord, but tears came to my eyes too."
Another testimony to those holy outpourings is provided by Morell himself: "I opened the Bible at random, put my finger on the first verse that came to hand-St. Paul it was-and preached for an hour and twenty min- utes. Crenshaw and the boys didn't put that time to bad use, neither, for they rounded up all the folks' horses and made off with 'em. We sold 'em in the state of Arkansas, all but one bay stallion, the most spirited thing youever laid eyes on, that I kept for myself. Crenshaw had his eye on that horse, too, but I convinced him it warn't the horse for him."
THE METHODHorses stolen in one state and sold in another were but the merest digres- sion in Morell's criminal career, but they did prefigure the method that would a.s.sure him his place in a Universal History of Iniquity. His method was unique not only because of thesuigeneriscirc.u.mstances that shaped it, but also because of the depravity it required, its vile manipulation of trust, and its gradual evolution, like the terrifying unfolding of a nightmare.Al Caponeand BugsMoranoperate with lavish capital and subservient ma- chine guns in a great city, but their business is vulgar. They fight for a mo- nopoly, and that is the extent of it....
In terms of numbers, Morell at one time could command more than a thousand sworn confederates.
There were two hundred in the Heads, or General Council, and it was the Heads that gave the orders that the other eight hundred followed. These "strikers," as they were called, ran all the risk. If they stepped out of line, they would be handed over to the law or a rock would be tied to their feet and their bodies would be sunk in the swirling waters of the river. Often, these men were mulattoes. Their wicked mission was this: In a momentary wealth of gold and silver rings, to inspire respect, they would roam the vast plantations of the South. They would choose some wretched black man and offer him his freedom. They would tell him that if he'd run away from his master and allow them to resell him on another plantation far away, they would give him a share of the money and help him escape a second time. Then, they said, they'd convey him to free soil.... Money and freedom-ringing silver dollars and freedom to boot-what greater temptation could they hold out to him? The slave would work up the courage for his first escape.
The river was a natural highway. A canoe, the hold of a riverboat, a barge, a raft as big as the sky with a pilothouse on the bow or with a roof of canvas sheeting ... the place didn't matter; what mattered was knowing that you were moving, and that you were safe on the unwearying river.... They would sell him on another plantation. He would run away again, to the sugarcane fields or the gullies. And it would be then that the fearsome and terrible benefactors (whom he was beginning to distrust by now) would bring up obscure "expenses" and tell him they had to sell him onelast time. When he escaped the next time, they told him, they'd give him his percentage of the two sales, and his liberty. The man would let himself be sold, he would work for a while, and then he would risk the dogs and whips and try to escape on his own. He would be brought back b.l.o.o.d.y, sweaty, desperate, and tired.
THE FINAL FREEDOM.
We have not yet considered the legal aspect of the crime. The Negro would not be put up for sale by Morell's henchmen until his escape had been ad- vertised and a reward offered for his capture. At that point, anybody could lay hold of the slave. Thus, when he was later sold, it was only a breach of trust, not stealing, and it was pointless for the owner to go to law, since he'd never recover his losses.
All this was calculated to leave Morell's mind at ease, but not forever. The Negro could talk; the Negro was capable, out of pure grat.i.tude or mis- ery, of talking. A few drinks of rye whisky in a wh.o.r.ehouse in Cairo, Illinois, where the slave-born son of a b.i.t.c.h went to squander some of those silver dollars burning a hole in his pocket (and that they'd no reason to give him, when it came right down to it), and the cat would be out of the bag. The Abolitionist Party was making things hot in the North during this time-a mob of dangerous madmen who denied a man's right to his own property, preached the freeing of the blacks, and incited the slaves to rebellion. Morell was not about to let himself be confused with those anarchists. He was no Yankee, he was a Southerner, a white man, the son and grandson of white men, and he hoped someday to retire from his business and be a gentleman and possess his own league upon league of cotton fields and his own bow- backed rows of slaves. With his experience, he was not a man to take point- less risks.
The runaway expected his freedom. Therefore, the nebulous mulattoes of Lazarus Morell would give a sign (which might have been no more than a wink) and the runaway would be freed from sight, hearing, touch, daylight, iniquity, time, benefactors, mercy, air, dogs, the universe, hope, sweat-and from himself. A bullet, a low thrust with a blade, a knock on the head, and the turtles and catfish of the Mississippi would be left to keep the secret among themselves.
THE CATASTROPHEManned by trustworthy fellows, the business was bound to prosper. By early 1834, some seventy Negro slaves had been "emanc.i.p.ated" by Morell, and others were ready to follow their fortunate forerunners. The zone of opera- tions was larger now, and new members had to be admitted to the gang.
Among those who took the oath, there was one young man, Virgil Stewart, from Arkansas, who very soon distinguished himself by his cruelty. This boy was the nephew of a gentleman who had lost a great number of slaves. In August of 1834, he broke his vow and denounced Morell and the others. Morell's house in New Orleans was surrounded by the authorities, but Morell somehow (owing to some oversight -or a bribe in the right quar- ters) managed to escape.
Three days pa.s.sed. Morell hid for that period in an old house with vine-covered courtyards and statues, on Toulouse Street. Apparently he had almost nothing to eat and spent his days roaming barefoot through the large, dark rooms, smoking a thoughtful cheroot. Through a slave in the house, he sent two letters to Natchez and another to Red River. On the fourth day, three men entered the house; they sat talking things over with Morell until almost daybreak. On the fifth day, Morell got out of bed at nightfall, borrowed a ra- zor, and carefully shaved off his beard. He then dressed and left the house. Slowly and calmly he made his way through the northern outskirts of the city. When he reached open country, out in the bottomlands of the Missis- sippi, he breathed easier.
His plan was one of drunken courage. He proposed to exploit the last men that still owed him respect: the accommodating Negroes of the South- land themselves. These men had seen their comrades run away, and had not seen them brought back. They thought, therefore, that they'd found free- dom. Morell's plan called for a general uprising of the Negroes, the capture and sack of New Orleans, and the occupation of the territory. A pitiless and depraved man, and now almost undone by treachery, Morell planned a re- sponse of continental proportions-a response in which criminality would become redemptive, and historic. To that end, he headed for Natchez, where his strength ran deeper. I reproduce his own narration of that journey: "I walked four days," he reported, "and no opportunity offered for me to get a horse. The fifth day, I had ... stopped at a creek to get some water and rest a while. While I was sitting on a log, looking down the road the way that I had come, a man came in sight riding on a good-looking horse. The very moment I saw him, I was determined to have his horse.... I arose anddrew an elegant rifle pistol on him and ordered him to dismount. He did so, and I took his horse by the bridle and pointed down the creek, and ordered him to walk before me. He went a few hundred yards and stopped. I ... made him undress himself, all to his shirt and drawers, and ordered him to turn his back to me. He said, 'If you are determined to kill me, let me have time to pray before I die.' I told him I had no time to hear him pray.
He turned around and dropped on his knees, and I shot him through the back of the head. I ripped open his belly and took out his entrails, and sunk him in the creek. I then searched his pockets, and found four hundred dollars and thirty-seven cents, and a number of papers that I did not take time to examine. I sunk the pocket-book and papers and his hat, in the creek. His boots were bran-new, and fitted me genteelly; and I put them on and sunk my old shoes in the creek....
"I mounted as fine a horse as ever I straddled, and directed my course for Natchez."*
THE INTERRUPTION.
Morell leading uprisings of Negroes that dreamed of hanging him ... Morell hanged by armies of Negroes that he had dreamed of leading ... it pains me to admit that the history of the Mississippi did not seize upon those rich opportunities. Nor, contrary to all poetic justice (and poetic sym- metry), did the river of his crimes become his tomb. On the 2nd of January, 1835, Lazarus Morell died of pulmonary congestion in the hospital at Natchez, where he'd been admitted under the name Silas Buckley. Another man in the ward recognized him. On that day, and on the 4th of January, slaves on scattered plantations attempted to revolt, but they were put down with no great loss of blood.
The Improbable Impostor Tom Castro
I give him that name because it was by that name he was known (in 1850 or thereabouts) on the streetsand in the houses of Talcahuano, SantiaG.o.deChile, and Valparaiso, and it seems only fair that he take it again, now that he has returned to those lands-even if only as a ghost, or a Sat.u.r.day-night amus.e.m.e.nt.
1.
I have chosen this metaphor in order to remind the reader that these vile biogra- phies appeared in the Sat.u.r.day supplement of an evening newspaper The birth register in Wapping calls him Arthur Orton, and gives the date of his birth as June 7, 1834.
We know that he was the son of a butcher, that his childhood was spent in the gray meanness of the London slums, and that he harkened to the call of the sea.That story is not an un- common one; "running away to sea" was the traditional English way to break with parental authority-the heroic ritual of initiation. Geography recommended such a course, as did the Scriptures themselves:"They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep" (Psalms 107:23-24). Orton fled his de- plorable, dingy-pink-colored suburb and went down to the sea in a ship; with ingrained disappointment he regarded the Southern Cross, and he jumped ship at Valparaiso. He was a gentle idiot. Though by all logic he could (and should) have starved to death, his muddle-headed joviality, his permanent grin, and his infinite docility earned him the favor of a certain family named Castro, whose patronym he took ever after as his own. No traces of his stay in South America remain, but we know that his grat.i.tude never flagged: in 1861 he turned up in Australia, still bearing the name Tom Castro.
In Sydney he made the acquaintance of a man named Ebenezer Bogle, aNegroservant. Bogle, though not handsome, had that reposeful and monu- mental air, that look of well-engineered solidity, often possessed by a black man of a certain age, a certain corporeal substance, a certain authority. Bogle had another quality, as well-though some textbooks in anthropol- ogy deny the attribute to his race: he was possessed of genius. (We shall see the proof of that soon enough.) He was a temperate, decent man, the an- cient African appet.i.tes in him corrected by the customs and excesses of Calvinism. Aside from the visitations from his G.o.d (which we shall describe below), he was normal in every way; his only eccentricity was a deep-seated and shamefaced fear that made him hesitate at street corners and at cross - ings, survey east, west, north, and south, and try to outguess the violent vehicle that he was certain would end his days.
Orton came upon his future friend one afternoon as Bogle was stand- ing on a run-down corner in Sydney trying to screw up the courage to face his imagined death. After watching him for several minutes, Orton offered him his arm, and the two astounded men crossed the inoffensive street. Out of that now-bygone evening a protectorate was forged: the monumental, unsure Negro over the obese Wapping simpleton.
In September of 1865, the two men read a heartbreaking piece of news in the local paper.
THE ADORED ONE DECEASED.
In the waning days of April, 1854 (as Orton was inspiring the effusions of Chilean hospitality, which was as welcoming as that country's patios), there had sunk in the waters of the Atlantic a steamship christened theMermaid, bound fromRio deJaneiro to Liverpool. Among the drowned had been one Roger Charles Tichborne, an English military officer brought up in France, and the firstborn son of one of England's leading Catholic families. How- ever improbable it may seem, the death of this Frenchified young man (a young man who had spoken English with the most cultured of Parisian ac- cents and who had inspired the unparalleled envy that can only be aroused by French intelligence, grace, and affectation) was an event of supreme im- portance in the destiny of Arthur Orton, who had never so much as laid eyes on him. Lady Tichborne, Roger's horrified mother, refused to believe the reports of his death. She published heartrending advertis.e.m.e.nts in all the major newspapers, and one of those advertis.e.m.e.nts fell into the soft, fu- nereal hands of Ebenezer Bogle, who conceived a brilliant plan.
THE VIRTUES OF UNLIKENESS.
Tichborne had been a slim, genteel young man with a reserved and some- what self-absorbed air. He had sharp features, straight black hair, tawny skin, sparkling eyes, and an irritatingly precise way of speaking.
Orton was an irrepressible rustic, a "yokel," with a vast belly, features of infinite vague- ness, fair and freckled skin, wavy light-brown hair, sleepy eyes, and no, or ir- relevant, conversation. Bogle decided that.i.t was Orion's duty to take the first steamer for Europe and realize Lady Tichborne's hope that her son had not perished-by declaring himself to be that son. The plan had an irra- tional genius to it. Let me give a simple example: If an impostor had wanted to pa.s.s himself off as the emperor of Germany and king of Prussia in 1914, the first thing he'd have done would be fake the upturned mustaches, the lifeless arm, the authoritarian scowl, the gray cape, the ill.u.s.trious and much-decorated chest, and the high helmet.
Bogle was more subtle: he would have brought forth a smooth-faced Kaiser with no military traits, no proud eagles whatsoever, and a left arm in unquestionable health. We have no need of the metaphor; we know for a fact that Bogle produced a fat, flabby Tichborne with the sweet smile of an idiot, light-brown hair, and a thoroughgoing ignorance of French. Bogle knew that a perfect facsimile of the beloved Roger Charles Tichborne was impossible to find; he knew as well that any similarities he might achieve would only underscore certain inevitable differences. He therefore gave up the notion of likeness alto- gether. He sensed that the vast inept.i.tude of his pretense would be a con- vincing proof that this was no fraud, for no fraud would ever have so flagrantly flaunted features that might so easily have convinced. We should also not overlook the all-powerful collaboration of time: the vicissitudes of fortune, and fourteen years of antipodean life, can change a man.
Another essential argument in favor of Bogle's plan: Lady Tichborne's repeated and irrational advertis.e.m.e.nts showed that she was certain that Roger Charles had not died, and that she would will herself to recognize him when he came.
THE MEETING.
Tom Castro, ever accommodating, wrote to Lady Tichborne. In order to prove his ident.i.ty, he invoked the irrefutable proof of the two moles near his left nipple and that painful and therefore unforgettable episode from his childhood when a swarm of bees had attacked him. The letter was briefand, in the image of Bogle and Tom Castro, free of any scruples as to the way words ought to be spelled. In her majestic solitude in herhotel particu- lierin Paris, Lady Tichborne read and reread the letter through happy tears, and in a few days she had recaptured the recollections her son had invoked.
On January 16, 1867, Roger Charles Tichborne called upon his mother. His respectful servant, Ebenezer Bogle, preceded him. It was a winter day of bright sunshine; Lady Tichborne's tired eyes were veiled with tears. The black man threw the windows open. The light served as a mask; the mother recognized the prodigal and opened her arms to him. Now that she had him in the flesh, she might do without his diary and the letters he had written her from Brazil-the treasured reflections of the son which had fed her loneliness through those fourteen melancholy years. She returned them to him proudly; not one was missing.
Bogle smiled discreetly; now he could research the gentle ghost of Roger Charles.
AD MAJOREM DEI GLORIAM.
That joyous recognition, which seems to obey the tradition of cla.s.sical tragedy, should be the crown of this story, leaving happiness a.s.sured (or at least more than possible) for the three persons of the tale-the true mother, the apocryphal and obliging son, and the conspirator repaid for the provi- dential apotheosis of his industry. But Fate (for such is the name that we give the infinite and unceasing operation of thousands of intertwined causes) would not have it. Lady Tichborne died in 1870, and the family brought charges against Arthur Orton for impersonation and usurpation of their dead kinsman's estate. As they themselves were afflicted with neither tears nor loneliness (though the same cannot be said of greed), they had never believed in the obese and almost illiterate lost son who had so inop- portunely reappeared from Australia.
Orton's claim was supported by the innumerable creditors who had de- cided that he was Tichborne; they wanted their bills paid. He also drew upon the friendship of the old family solicitor, Edward Hopkins, and that of an antiquary named Francis J. Baigent. But this, though much, was not enough. Bogle believed that if they were to win this round, a groundswell of public support was wanted. He called for his top hat and his black umbrella and he went out for a walk through the decorous streets of London, in search of inspiration. It was just evening; Bogle wandered about until ahoney-colored moon wasmirrored in the rectangular waters of the public fountains. And then he was visited by his G.o.d. Bogle whistled for a cab and had himself driven to the flat of the antiquaryBaigent. Baigentsent a long letter to theTimes, denouncing this "Tichborne claimant" as a brazen hoax. The letter was signed by FatherGoudron,of the Society of Jesus. Other, equally papist, denunciations followed. The effect was immediate: the right sort of person could not fail to see that Sir Roger Charles Tichborne was the target of a despicable Jesuit plot.
THE COACH.
The trial lasted one hundred ninety days. Some hundred witnesses swore that the accused was Roger Charles Tichborne-among them, four comrades-at-arms from the 6th Dragoons. Orton's supporters steadfastly maintained that he was no impostor-had he been, they pointed out, he would surely have attempted to copy the juvenile portraits of his model. And besides, Lady Tichborne had recognized and accepted him; clearly, in such matters, a mother does not err. All was going well, then-more or less- until an old sweetheart of Orton's was called to testify. Not a muscle of Bogle's face twitched at that perfidious maneuver by the "family"; he called for his black umbrella and his top hat and he went out into the deco- rous streets of London to seek a third inspiration. We shall never know whether he found it.