The Legion Lost – Part III

by Timothy J Jarvis

Part III of ‘The Legion Lost’. The first part can be found here.

We went on to the end of the trail – Duncan, the two remaining Indians, and I – and, after a good day and a half’s slog on from the top of the Chilkoot pass, reached Lake Bennett. During that time my dislike of Duncan fast turned to regard, and my regard quickly burgeoned into friendship; he was, in truth, a congenial fellow – I discovered a good heart lay beneath his preachy vesture.

On the shores of the frozen lake, towered over by hoar-dredged mountains and hemmed in by tenebrous pines, vast numbers of dun-colored tents, brindled here and there with snow, had sprouted up, like toadstools after heavy rain. As we walked down the path into the encampment we passed many men whipsawing logs into planks for boat-building; it looked wearisome work.

On reaching the camp, Duncan suggested we take a stroll among the tents. Everywhere we walked he pointed out brutishness and squalor: men brawling, women smoking and spitting, children suffered to run underfoot, besmirched with filth. We saw one man hack another’s ear clean from his skull with a bowie knife, and a withered prostitute lifted her skirts to us.

It seemed the good were outnumbered by the low, the violent, the snarling, and the bestial. Whether I would have seen this, had Duncan not directed my gaze to it, I do not know – possibly I might still have been bleary eyed with dreams of making my fortune – but, whatever the case may be, I realized that, were there gold still in the Klondike, there would be a horrid scuffle over it, one I did not have the stomach for; scrabbling in the frozen earth with men such as the men in the camp on the shores of Lake Bennett was not for me, not even for a fortune the like of Hearst’s.

Further, we learnt, from conversations overheard, that the ice had formed on the Yukon early that year, making the river impassable till the Spring thaw, at least four months off.

I decided to return to Skagway and secure passage on a boat bound for a port further down the western seaboard. When I announced this intention to Duncan, he said, if I would have him along, he would like to postpone his trip to Dawson City and accompany me. I was touched, told him I would be glad of his company. He then asked if I had any objection to going back by way of the White Pass Trail, and trying if we could do any good there. He explained that, though the route was less severe than the Chilkoot Trail, in some ways conditions on it were worse, largely because thieves and grifters preyed on wayfarers. I assented, and, after I sold off my gear (sadly at a great loss) and dismissed my Indians, we set out.

I will not bore you with the details of that fatiguing and fretful journey. The route did not come to be known as the Dead Horse Trail for nothing – the frozen carcasses of horses, ponies, and mules strewed it; they lay on their backs, four legs stiff in the air like stovepipe hats, hides partially flayed by the wind, ribs poking through like the timbers of wrecked coracles. Our toils were, in small part, recompensed by the fact we aided some stampeders in straits, though we were unable to convince any of the idiocy of continuing into Canada.

Not long after gaining Skagway, I managed to talk the captain of a steamer, bound for Seattle, into taking me on. I tried to persuade Duncan to likewise seek a working berth, but he said he preferred to stay on in the frozen North and continue his humanitarian enterprise, meant to head back down the trail once more, make it all the way to Dawson City this time. His eyes filled with sentimental tears when he talked of this duty, which, despite the high esteem I, by that stage, held him in, still irked a mite.

We spent our last evening together in a saloon – a seamy, noisy, sawdust-and-rotgut establishment typical of that place – over a bottle of cheap whiskey (Duncan’s scruples did not extend to temperance). After a few glasses of the acrid liquor, an enigmatic phrase my friend had employed when we first met, and which I had hitherto forgotten, returned to me, prompting me to ask him a question, ‘You mentioned before you were led astray by the lure of riches. What did you mean by that?’

‘Do you believe there are things that, though beyond the ordinary ken of man, nevertheless mould our lives, weird forces at work?’

‘No, I do not.’

‘Neither did I once. Back then I would have scorned such notions, but now…’

‘You have your belief. I’m not a religious man.’

‘It was not to God I adverted.’

Duncan was silent a moment, peering at me through the fug in that place.

‘Will you permit to tell a tale? It is true, and concerns things that befell me back when I was a rash youth.’

‘Of course. I enjoy hearing a yarn spun.’

Then, as we sat there, at the counter, staring into our tumblers like crones scrying for auguries, Duncan told me a bizarre story as will shock you, and grume your blood. The version I set down here is accurate in its essentials; the narrative was so steeped in the weird it has been forever seared into my brain. However, it was long ago, and I cannot recall Duncan’s words exactly, so I have used my own. Poor though they are, it is hoped they will suffice to convey the awful air of dread with which Duncan imbued his narrative.

‘I was born in Glasgow,’ he began, ‘spent my early childhood in a tenement flat in the Gorbals. My family was right poor, real kirk mice. My father worked on the ships, shipbuilding, you know, down on the Clyde, but what he earned wasn’t really enough to keep life and limb together…’

To keep his family fed and warm, he was forced to steal bread from bins behind bakeries and fill his pockets with lumps of coke intended for the smelting furnaces down at the docks. When Duncan was five his mother found work as a maidservant – worn-out clothes and shoes were replaced, and, for a time, the larder was abundantly stocked and, every evening, coals crackled and spat cheerily in the grate. Unfortunately, this period of plenty was short-lived – the mother’s employer, a lawyer, came across her alone, below stairs, and propositioned her. She recoiled in horror, spurned the unwelcome advances, was sacked on the spot.

After that, things got worse and worse: increasing mechanisation at the docks put Duncan’s father’s job under threat and the slum landlords raised rents.

Then, one day, a few weeks after his ninth birthday, Duncan returned home from the laundry where he had been put to work to find the door forced, left hanging off its hinges, and his family butchered. His father – who had been introduced to the writings of Marx and Engels by students who drank in the whisky shop he patronized – had been agitating his fellow workers, advocating a suspension of their labor in protest over conditions. Thugs in the pay of the shipyard owners had broken in: Duncan’s parents sprawled in pools of slowly clotting blood in the living-room, skulls battered with pick-handles; his older sister, who had been taking a bath, had been brutally raped, then drowned in the tin tub; the youngest, only four, lay where she had been sleeping in her cot, smothered with her blanket.

Duncan joined a gang of homeless street urchins who slept in an abandoned hotel, the Great Eastern – a building whose respectable, foursquare exterior concealed a riot of squalid life. The children ran errands for petty criminals and snatched purses on Sauchiehall Street and in George Square. Life was very hard for them. Most had no choice but to turn to prostitution on reaching adolescence.

An aptitude for sleight of hand provided a means of escape for Duncan.

About the time of his fourteenth birthday – he had forgotten the exact date, but knew the month in which he was born – one of the other children gave him a stolen pack of playing cards. He decided to teach himself a few simple tricks. After many weeks of diligent practice his act was good enough to take onto the streets. He set up his stall, a cardboard box draped with an old blanket, on St Enoch Square, next to the colorful tents of the fortune tellers. He rigged games of Blackjack and Find the Lady, fleecing drunks and gullible yokels in town for market day, and performed conjuring tricks for small change. His income was soon enough to enable him to leave the Great Eastern and pay rent on a tiny bedsit in Maryhill. Then­, as his popularity increased, he was able to purchase a booth with a blue awning, and a costume of top hat and tails. By his twenty-third birthday he was a well-known street performer – always surrounded by a throng making fevered and ill-advised bets on the turn of the cards – and was living in relative comfort in the newly prosperous area of Kelvinbridge. He enjoyed many of the pleasures a modicum of wealth could buy, including some that were more or less illicit – opium, gambling, and women.

Eventually, though, he became too well-known, and the gamers began to shun him. He realized he would have to embark on another career, decided he would turn his hand to mediumship: a potentially lucrative trade, to which, as an accomplished showman and skilled at legerdemain, he was well-suited. Putting aside some of his earnings, he saved until he had enough to buy the tools of the profession, foremost among which were a spirit cabinet with velvet drapes, which he had specially constructed for him; a mechanism for tilting tables; and a complicated system of pulleys and fishing wire that, in an ill-lit room, would allow him to give the impression certain objects were floating in the air. He had a craftsman, who made props for the theatre, fashion for him a cunning Cartesian devil in the form of a goblin bobbing in a carboy of dusky spirit, blinking its sorrowful eyes.

In his spare time, he practiced the skills he thought would prove essential, but which he did not already possess – mimicry, ventriloquism, and escapology, the latter for use in spirit-cabinet channellings.

Most enjoyable of his preparations was that of choosing the spirit guide through whom he would pretend to channel his ghosts. He decided to invoke Jean-Paul Marat, physician turned seditionist and hero of the French Revolution, who had actually visited Scotland in 1774. Marat’s death had been appropriately bizarre and brutal. He had contracted a virulent skin disease hiding in the sewers of Paris, the worsening torment of which finally forced him, in June 1793, to retire from the Convention and spend his days at home soaking in a medicinal bath, swaddled in soothing, calamine-smeared bandages, the only course he had found to bring any relief. Then, on the 13th July, he was visited by a young woman, Charlotte Corday, who claimed to have information regarding the whereabouts of a group of Girondins who had fled to Normandy. Marat agreed to an audience and Corday was brought to where he lay in his tub. But Corday, a Girondin herself, meant vengeance, and, after a fifteen minute interview, drew a kitchen knife from her corset and slew Marat. Duncan spent many hours perfecting the nasal accent he would employ.

The extrusion of ectoplasm from the spiritualist’s body was, he realized, crucial to creating the séance’s atmosphere. He experimented with different substances, rejecting cheesecloth and butter-muslin as unconvincing. Eventually he decided the best solution was to have a vial of Scarab Dust, a sweet effervescent powder sold for children, concealed in his shirt-cuff, and to, at an opportune moment, surreptitiously pour its contents into his mouth; he discovered when he swilled the confection around with his tongue, it generated a pallid froth.

Duncan anticipated the fact he was known to many as a conjurer would be a hindrance, but belief in spiritualism was, at that time, so widespread and fervent in Glaswegian society, that few questioned whether his ability to make contact with the dead was genuine or feigned, or saw any connection between the uncanny things that occurred during his séances and his former occupation.

He often began sittings by passing around the Cartesian Devil in its jar, while relating the story he had concocted about it. He claimed that, having come across, in a recondite manuscript, a description of the birthing of a homunculus, he had been seized by a desire to reproduce the experiment. For this he had required a mandrake’s root. Duncan described how, after a long search, he had located a patch of these plants growing on the shores of Loch Lomond, in the shadow of an olden yew. He explained that, as mandrakes emit a shriek perilous to humans on being unearthed, the alchemist who had produced the original prodigy had urged the precaution of training a dog to dig up the root, advice Duncan had followed, resulting in the death of a terrier pup. Duncan told his enthralled audience how he had then submerged the root in a bucket of mingled milk, honey, and goat’s blood, and left it in a warm nook by his fire for several weeks, during which time it transmuted into the creature they saw before them.

Duncan’s séances took one of two forms, depending on the circumstances, his assessment of the credulity of the gathering, and his mood. If he was feeling cautious he would make use of the spirit cabinet. He would request the host bind his hands tightly with rope, then enter the cabinet, and have the curtain drawn behind him. Then he could communicate with the spirits out of sight of skeptical eyes. He would free his hands from their bonds and retrieve, from a concealed compartment in the heel of his right shoe, a Jew’s harp of unusual design, whose eerie keening, under the heightened conditions of the séance, sounded to the sitters like the cries of the anguished dead. When bolder he would use a rite more calculated to inspire awe, would join his sitters at a table and channel in full view. When he asked all to clasp their neighbors’ hands, he was able, by a wile, to keep one of his own free without anyone realizing, something easy to achieve in the halflight. This enabled him to make use of his contraptions to tip the table, snuff candles, scrape chalk down a slate, and cause ladies’ gloves to dance in the air, and also allowed him to sprinkle some of the sherbet from his vial into his mouth.

But it was research that was the real key to the illusion of genuine psychomancy. Duncan paid close attention to the obituary columns and made sure he was well-informed about the deceased friends and relatives of those likely to attend his séances.

Duncan’s shrewdness and skill at chicanery ensured it was not long before he had risen to a position of eminence among Glasgow’s mediums and was in great demand. His choice of spirit guide also played a part in his success – there was something of a fad for rebellion among the aesthetes and decadents then. By that time his lifestyle was one of flagrant debauchery.

But the period of his success was only to last a season. A mere year after quitting his booth on St Enoch Square he conducted his last séance.

To be continued…