Dracula

for this sort of thing was work, I went down amongst the pa-

tients. I picked out one who has afforded me a study of much

interest. He is so quaint that I am determined to understand him

as well as I can. To-day I seemed to get nearer than ever before

to the heart of his mystery.

I questioned him more fully than I had ever done, with a

view to making myself master of the facts of his hallucination..

In my manner of doing it there was, I now see, something of

cruelty. I seemed to wish to keep him to the point of his madness

a thing which I avoid with the patients as I would the mouth

of hell.

(Mem., under what circumstances would I not avoid the pit

of hell?) Omnia Ronuz venalia sunt. Hell has its price! verb. sap.

If there be anything behind this instinct it will be valuable to

trace it afterwards accurately, so I had better commence to do

so, therefore

R. M. Renfield, aetat 59. Sanguine temperament; R great

physical strength; morbidly excitable; periods of gloom, ending

in some fixed idea which I cannot make out. I presume that the

sanguine temperament itself and the disturbing influence end

in a mentally-accomplished finish; a possibly dangerous man,

probably dangerous if unselfish. In selfish men caution is as

secure an armour for their foes as for themselves. What I think

of on ^this point is, when self is the fixed point the centripetal

force is balanced with the centrifugal; when duty, a cause, etc, f

58 Dracula

is the fixed point, the latter force is paramount, and only acci*

dent or a series of accidents can balance it.

Letter, Quincey P. Morris to Hon. Arthur Holmwood.

11 25 May.

f>: My dear Art,

«We’ve told yarns by the camp-fire in the prairies; and dressed

one another’s wounds after trying a landing at the Marquesas;

and drunk healths on the shore of Titicaca. There are more

yarns to be told, and other wounds to be healed, and another

health to be drunk. Won’t you let this be at my camp-fire to-

morrow night? I have no hesitation hi asking you, as I know a

certain lady is engaged to a certain dinner-party, and that you

are free. There will only be one other, our old pal at the Korea,

Jack Seward. He’s coming, too, and we both want to mingle our

weeps over the wine-cup, and to dr-ink a health with all our

hearts to the happiest man in all the wide world, who has won

the noblest heart that God has made and the best worth whining.

We promise you a hearty welcome, and a loving greeting, and a

health as true as your own right hand. We shall both swear to

leave you at home if you drink too deep to a certain pair of eyes.

Come!

«Yours, as ever and always,

«QUINCEY P. MORRIS.»»

Telegram from Arthur Holmwood to Quincey P. Morris.

«26 May.

u Count me in every time. I bear messages which will make

both your ears tingle.

CHAPTER VI

MINA MURRAY’S JOURNAL

24 July. Whitby. Lucy met me at the station, jookingsweeter

and loj/elie^thaiLe^er, and we drove up to the houseTftnTCres-

cen t irTwhlcf they have rooms. This is a lovely place. The little

river, the Esk, runs through a deep valley, which broadens out

as it comes near the harbour. A great viaduct runs across, with

high piers, through which the view seems somehow further away

than it really is. The valley is beautifully green, and it is so

steep that when you are on the high land on either side you look

right across it, unless you are near enough to see down. The

houses of the old town the side away from us are all red-

roofed, and seem piled up one over the other anyhow, like the

pictures we see of Nuremberg. Right over the town is the ruin

of Whitby Abbey, which was sacked by the Danes, and which

is the scene of part of «Marmion,» where the girl was built up

in the wall. It is a most noble ruin, of immense size, and full of

beautiful and romantic bits; there is a legend that a white lady

is seen in one of the windows. Between it and the town there is

another church, the parish one, round which is a big graveyard,

all full of tombstones. This is to my mind the nicest spot in

Whitby, for it lies right over the town, and has a full view of

the harbour and all up the bay to where the headland called

Kettleness stretches out into the sea. It descends so steeply

over the harbour that part of the bank has fallen away, and some

of the graves have been destroyed. In one place part of the

stonework of the graves stretches out over the sandy pathway

far below. There are walks, with seats beside them, through

the churchyard; and people go and sit there all day long looking

at the beautiful view and enjoying the breeze. I shall come

and sit here very often myself and work. Indeed, I am writing

now, with my book on my knee, and listening to the talk of three

old men who are sitting beside me. They seem to do nothing

all day but sit up here and talk.

The harbour lies below me, with, on the far side, one long

granite wall stretching out into the sea, with a curve outwards

at the end of it, in the middle of which is a lighthouse. A heavy

sea-wall runs along outside of it. On the near side, the sea-wall

59

60 Dracula

makes an elbow crooked inversely, and its end too has a light-

house. Between the two piers there is a narrow opening into the

harbour, which then suddenly widens.

It is nice at high water; but when the tide is out it shoals

away to nothing, and there is merely the stream of the Esk,

running between banks of sand, with rocks here and there.

Outside the harbour on this side there rises for about half a

mile a great reef, the sharp edge of which runs straight out

from behind the south lighthouse. At the end of it is a buoy

with a bell, which swings in bad weather, and sends in a mourn-

ful sound on the wind. They have a legend here that when a ship

is lost bells are heard out at sea. I must ask the old man about

this; he is coming this way….

He is a funny old man. He must be awfully old, for his face is

all gnarled and twisted like the bark of a tree. He tells me that he

is nearly a hundred, and that he was a sailor in the Greenland

fishing fleet when Waterloo was fought. He is, I am afraid, a very

sceptical person, for when I asked him about the bells at sea and

the White Lady at the abbey he said very brusquely:

«I wouldn’t fash maseP about them, miss. Them things be

all wore out. Mind, I don’t say that they never was, but I do say

that they wasn’t in my time. They be all very well for comers and

trippers, an’ the like, but not for a nice young lady like you. Them

feet-folks from York and -Leeds that be always eatin’ cured

herrin’s an’ drinkin’ tea an’ lookin’ out to buy cheap jet would

creed aught. I wonder masel’ who’d be bothered tellin’ lies to

them even the newspapers, which is full of fool- talk.» I thought

he would be a good person to learn interesting things from, so I

asked him if he would mind telling me something about the

whale-fishing in the old days. He was just settling himself to

begin when the clock struck six, whereupon he laboured to get up,

and said:

«I must gang ageeanwards home now, miss. My grand-

daughter doesn’t like to be kept waitin’ when the tea is ready,

for it takes me time to crammle aboon the grees, for there be a

many of ’em; an’, miss, I lack belly- timber sairly by the clock.»

He hobbled away, and I could see him hurrying, as well as he

could, down the steps. The steps are a great feature on the place.

They lead from the town up to the church, there are hundreds of

them I do not know how many and they wind up in a delicate

curve; the slope is so gentle that a horse could easily walk up

and down them. I think they must originally have had some-

thing to do with the abbey. I shall go home too. Lucy went out

Mina Murray’s Journal 61

visiting with her mother, and as they were only duty calls, I did

not go. They will be home by this.

i August. I came up here an hour ago with Lucy, and we had

a most interesting talk with my old friend and the two others

who always come and join him. He is evidently the Sir Oracle

of them, and I should think must have been in his time a most

dictatorial person. He will not admit anything, and downfaces

everybody. If he can’t out-argue them he bullies them, and then

takes their silence for agreement with his views. Lucy was looking

sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock; she has got a beautiful

colour since she has been here. I noticed that the old men did not

lose any tune in coming up and sitting near her when we sat

down. She is so sweet with old people; I think they all fell in love

with her on the spot. Even my old man succumbed and did not

contradict her, but gave me. double share instead. I got him on

the subject of the legends, and he went off at once into a sort of

sermon. I must try to remember it and put it down:

«It be all fool-talk, lock, stock, and barrel; that’s what it be,

an’ nowt else. These bans an 7 wafts an’ boh-ghosts an’ barguests

an’ bogles an’ all anent them is only fit to set bairns an’ dizzy

women a-belderin’. They be nowt but air-blebs. They, an’ all

grims an’ signs an’ warnin’s, be all invented by parsons an’ illsome

beuk-bodies an’ railway touters to skeer an’ scunner hafflin’s, an’

to get folks to do somethin’ that they don’t other incline to. It

makes me ireful to think o j them. Why, it’s them that, not

content with printin’ lies on paper an’ preachin’ them out of

pulpits, does want to be cuttin’ them on the tombstones. Look

here all around you in what airt ye will; all them steans, holdin’

up their heads as well as they can out of their pride, is acant

simply tumblin’ down with the weight o’ the lies wrote on them,

«Here lies the body’ or «Sacred to the memory’ wrote on all of

them, an’ yet in nigh half of them there bean’t no bodies at all;

an’ the memories of them bean’t cared a pinch of snuff about,

much less sacred. Lies all of them, nothin’ but lies of one kind or

another! My gog, but it’ll be a quare scowderrnent at the Day

of Judgment when they come tumblin’ up hi their death-sarks,

all jouped together an’ tryin’ to drag their tombsteans with them

to prove how good they was; some of them trimrnlin’ and

ditherin’, with their hands that dozzened an’ slippy from lyin 7

in the sea that they can’t even keep their grup o’ them.»

I could see from the old fellow’s self-satisfied air and

the way in which he looked round for the approval of his cronies

62 Dracula

that he was «showing off,» so I put in a word to keep him

going:

«Oh, Mr. Swales, you can’t be serious. Surely these tomb-

stones are not all wrong?»

«Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin :

where they make out the people too good; for there be folk

that do think a balm-bowl be like the sea, if only it be their

own. The whole thing be only lies. Now look you here; you come

here a stranger, an’ you see this kirk-garth.» I nodded, for I

thought it better to assent, though I did not quite understand

his dialect. I knew it had something to do with the church. He

went on: «And you consate that all these steans be aboon folk

that be happed here, snod an’ snog?“ I assented again. „Then

that be just where the lie comes in. Why, there be scores of

these lay-beds that be toom as old Dun’s ’bacca-box on

Friday night.» He nudged one of his companions, and they all

laughed. «And my gog! how could they be otherwise? Look at

that one, the aftest abaft the bier-bank: read it!» I went over

and read:

«Edward Spencelagh, master mariner, murdered by pirates

off the coast of Andres, April, 1854, set. 30.» When I came back

Mr. Swales went on:

«Who brought him home, I wonder, to hap him here? Murdered

off the coast of Andres! an’ you consated his body lay under!

Why, I could name ye a dozen whose bones lie in the Greenland

seas above“ he pointed northwards „or where the currents

may have drifted them. There be the steans around ye. Ye can,

with your young eyes, read the small-print of the lies from here.

This Braithwaite Lowrey I knew his father, lost in the Lively off

Greenland in ’20; or Andrew Woodhouse, drowned in the same

seas in 1777; or John Paxton, drowned off Cape Farewell a year

later; or old John Rawlings, whose grandfather sailed with me,

drowned in the Gulf of Finland in ’50. Do ye think that all these

men will have to make a rush to Whitby when the trumpet

sounds? I have me antherums aboot it! I tell ye that when they

got here they’d be jommlin’ an’ jostlin’ one another that way

that it ’ud be like a fight up on the ice in the old days, when we’d

be at one another from daylight to dark, an’ tryin’ to tie up our

cuts by the light of the aurora borealis.» This was evidently local

pleasantry, for the old man cackled over it, and his cronies joined

in with gusto.

«But,» I said, «surely you are not quite correct, for you start

on the assumption that all the poor people, or their spirits, will

Mina Murray’s Journal 63

have to take their tombstones with them on the Day of Judg-

ment. Do you think that will be really necessary?»

«Well, what else be they tombstones for? Answer me that,

miss!»

«To please their relatives, I suppose.»

«To please their relatives, you suppose!» This he said with

intense scorn. «How will it pleasure their relatives to know

that lies is wrote over them, and that everybody in the place

knows that they be lies? "He pointed to a stone at our feet which

had been laid down as a slab, on which the seat was rested, close

to the edge of the cliff. «Read the lies on that thruff-stean,» he

said. The letters were upside down to me from where I sat, but

Lucy was more opposite to them, so she leant over and read:

«Sacred to the memory of George Canon, who died, in the

hope of a glorious resurrection, on July, 29, 1873, falling from

the rocks at Kettleness. This tomb was erected by his sorrowing

mother to her dearly beloved son. «He was the only son of his

mother, and she was a widow.» Really, Mr. Swales, I don’t

see anything very funny in that!» She spoke her comment very

gravely and somewhat severely.

«Ye don’t see aught funny! Ha! ha! But that’s because ye

don’t gawm the sorrowin’ mother was a hell-cat that hated him

because he was acrewk’d a regular lamiter he was an’ he

hated her so that he committed suicide in order that she mightn’t

get an insurance she put on his life. He blew nigh the top of his

head off with an old musket that they had for scarin’ the crows

with. «Twarn’t for crows then, for it brought the clegs’ and the

dowps to him. That’s the way he fell off the rocks. And, as to

hopes of a glorious resurrection, I’ve often heard him say masel’

that he hoped he’d go to hell, for his mother was so pious that

she’d be sure to go to heaven, an’ he didn’t want to addle where

she was. Now isn’t that stean at any rate" he hammered it with

his stick as he spoke «a pack of lies? and won’t it make Gabriel

keckle when Geordie comes pantin’ up the grees with the tomb-

stean balanced on his hump, and asks it to be took as evidence!»

I did not know what to say, but Lucy turned the conversation

as she said, rising up:

«Oh, why did you tell us of this? It is my favourite seat, and

I cannot leave it; and now I find I must go on sitting over the

grave of a suicide.»

«That won’t harm ye, my pretty; an’ it may make poor Geor-

die gladsome to have so trim a lass sittin’ on his lap. That won’t

hurt ye. Why, I’ve sat here off an’ on for nigh twenty years past.

64 Dracula

an’ it hasn’t done me no harm. Don’t ye fash about them as lies

under ye, or that doesn’ lie there either! It’ll be time for ye to be

getting scart when ye see the tombsteans all run away with, and

the place as bare as a stubble-field. There’s the clock, an’ I must

gang. My service to ye, ladies!» And off he hobbled.

Lucy and I sat awhile, and it was all so beautiful before us that

we took hands as we sat; and she told me all over again about

Arthur and their coming marriage. That made me just a little

heart-sick, for I haven’t heard from Jonathan for a whole month.

The same day. I came up here alone, for I am very sad. There

was no letter for me. I hope there cannot be anything the matter

with Jonathan. The clock has just struck nine. I see the lights

scattered all over the town, sometimes in rows where the streets

are, and sometimes singly; they run right up the Esk and die

away in the curve of the valley. To my left the view is cut off

by a black line of roof of the old house next the abbey. The sheep

and lambs are bleating in the fields away behind me, and there

is a clatter of a donkey’s hoofs up the paved road below. The

band on the pier is playing a harsh waltz in good time, and

further along the quay there is a Salvation Army meeting in a

back street. Neither of the bands hears the other, but up here I

hear and see them both. I wonder where Jonathan is and if he is

thinking of me! I wish he were here.

Dr. Seward’s Diary.

5 June. The case of Renfield grows more interesting the more

I get to understand the man. He has certain qualities very largely

developed; selfishness, secrecy, and purpose. I wish I could get

at what is the object of the latter. He seems to have some settled

scheme of his own, but what it is I do not yet know. His redeem-

ing quality is a love of animals, though, indeed, he has such

curious turns in it that I sometimes imagine he is only abnorm-

ally cruel. His pets are of odd sorts. Just now his hobby is catch-

ing flies. He has at present such a quantity that I have had

myself to expostulate. To my astonishment, he did not break

out into a fury, as I expected, but took the matter in simple

seriousness. He thought for a moment, and then said: «May I

have three days? I shall clear them away.» Of course, I said that

would do. I must watch him.

18 June. He has turned his mind now to spiders, and has got

several very big fellows in a box. He keeps feeding them with his

Mina Murray’s Journal 65

flies, and the number of the latter is becoming sensibly dimin-

ished, although he has used half his food in attracting more flies

from outside to his room.

j July. His spiders are now becoming as great a nuisance as

his flies, and to-day I told him that he must get rid of them. He

looked very sad at this, so I said that he must clear out some of

them, at all events. He cheerfully acquiesced in this, and I gave

him the same time as before for reduction. He disgusted me much

while with him, for when a horrid blow-fly, bloated with some

carrion food, buzzed into the room, he caught it, held it exult-

antly for a few moments between his finger and thumb, and,

before I knew what he was going to do, put it in his mouth and

ate it. I scolded him for it, but he argued quietly that it was very

good and very wholesome; that it was life, strong life, and gave

fife to him. This gave me an idea, or the rudiment of one. I must

watch how he gets rid of his spiders. He has evidently some deep

problem in his mind, for he keeps a little note-book in which he

is always jotting down something. Whole pages of it are filled

with masses of figures, generally single numbers added up in

batches, and then the totals added in batches again, as though he

were «focussing» some account, as the auditors put it.

8 Jiily. There is a method in his madness, and the rudimen-

tary idea in my mind is growing. It will be a whole idea soon, and

then, oh, unconscious cerebration! you will have to give the

wall to your conscious brother. I kept away from my friend for

a few days, so that I might notice if there were any change.

Things remain as they were except that he has parted with

some of his pets and got a new one. He has managed to get a

sparrow, and has already partially tamed it. His means of taming

is simple, for already the spiders have diminished. Those that

do remain, however, are well fed, for he still brings in the flies

by tempting them with his food.

ig July. We are progressing. My friend has now a whole

colony of sparrows, and his flies and spiders are almost obliter-

ated. When I came in he ran to me and said he wanted to ask

me a great favour a very, very great favour; and as he spoke he

fawned on me like a dog. I asked him what it was, and he said,

with a sort of rapture in his voice and bearing:

«A kitten, a nice little, sleek playful kitten, that I can play

with, and teach, and feed and feed and feed!» I was not

66 Dracula

unprepared for this request, for I had noticed how his pets wef. t

on increasing in size and vivacity, but I did not care that his

pretty family of tame sparrows should be wiped out in the same

manner as the flies and the spiders; so I said I would see about it,

and asked him if he would not rather have a cat than a kitten.

His eagerness betrayed him as he answered:

«Oh, yes, I would like a cat! I only asked for a kitten lest you

should refuse me a cat. No one would refuse me a kitten, would

they?» I shook my head, and said that at present I feared it

would not be possible, but that I would see about it. His face

fell, and I could see a warning of danger in it, for there was a

sudden fierce, sidelong look which meant killing. The man is an

undeveloped homicidal maniac. I shall test him with his present

craving and see how it will work out; then I shall know more.

10 p. m. I have visited him again and found him sitting in a

corner brooding. When I came in he threw himself on his knees

before me and implored me to let him have a cat; that his salva-

tion depended upon it. I was firm, however, and told him that

he could not have it, whereupon he went without a word, and

sat down, gnawing his fingers, in the corner where I had found

him. I shall see him in the morning early.

20 July. Visited Renfield very early, before the attendant

went his rounds. Found him up and humming a tune. He was

spreading out his sugar, which he had saved, in the window, and

was manifestly beginning his fly-catching again; and beginning

it cheerfully and with a good grace. I looked around for his birds,

and not seeing them, asked him where they were. He replied,

without turning round, that they had all flown away. There were

a few feathers about the room and on his pillow a drop of blood.

I said nothing, but went and told the keeper to report to me if

there were anything odd about him during the day.

11 a. m. The attendant has just been to me to say that

Renfield has been very sick and has disgorged a whole lot of

feathers. «My belief is, doctor,» he said, «that he has eaten his

birds, and that he just took and ate them raw!»

ii p. m. I gave Renfield a strong opiate to-night, enough

to make even him sleep, and took away his pocket-book to

look at it. The thought that has been buzzing about my brain

lately is complete, and the theory proved. My homicidal maniac

is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification