The Mystery is a novel of the sea and of an island, written by Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams and published in the first decade of the twentieth century. Its action begins in the empty reaches of the Pacific, where a United States cruiser hunts derelicts and then turns aside to chase a vanished schooner, and it carries its narrator from a San Francisco waterfront to a volcanic island and back again. The book is assembled from three linked movements — “The Sea Riddle,” “The Brass Bound Chest,” and “The Maroon” — which together follow one question to its answer.
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The engine of the plot is a scientific secret. Dr. Karl Augustus Schermerhorn, a physicist of genuine originality, charters the schooner Laughing Lass for a voyage whose object he refuses to name, and vanishes with a brass-bound chest and a crew of hard cases. A free-lance writer named Ralph Slade ships aboard under an assumed name to find out what the doctor is about. What he finds, on a lonely island, is a substance called celestium, a compound that releases a radiance which draws men irresistibly into the sea.
From a Derelict in the Pacific to the Secret of the Chest
The Derelict and the Sea Riddle
A hulk wallows in the Pacific, three hundred miles north of the Yokohama–Honolulu route, with the cruiser Wolverine standing by and a cutter hovering half a mile east. The officers on the quarter-deck debate how to sink it: Ives says such floaters resist hammering, Billy Edwards wants six-inch shells, Carter insists on placed charges, and Ives names Barnett as the man for results. The hulk goes up in a great explosion that kills the gay-hued open-sea fish, and Barnett, the ordnance officer, takes his compliment from Carter. The wreck proves to be the Caroline Lemp, a three-masted schooner lost three years earlier in an Aleutian ice field, some of her crew frozen, some ashore, some unaccounted for and said to have turned native. Talk drifts to the classic sea mysteries—the City of Boston, the Great Queensland with her five hundred and sixty-nine souls, the Naronic and her empty lifeboats, the Huronian sailing the same day, date, and port and leaving no trace—along with Newfoundland captains, one-stroke lightning clouds of the Indian Ocean, burnings, piracies, pest ships, earthquake waves, mysterious suctions, and panic desertions.
The Laughing Lass and Doctor Schermerhorn
Billy Edwards lets slip the name Laughing Lass, and Barnett asks how he hit on her. Edwards says she was last seen in these waters and that, from something heard ashore, he judges the cruiser has a commission to watch for her as well as destroy derelicts. McGuire wants to know more. Edwards invokes the disappearance of Doctor Schermerhorn—Karl Augustus, whose experiments to identify telepathy with Marconi wireless waves made a furore. Barnett corrects him: that was a by-product; Schermerhorn was an original investigator in physics, chemistry, and most natural sciences, and the government cares because of his work in aerial photography. Edwards recounts that the doctor left San Francisco two years ago on a hundred-foot schooner with an assistant, a big brass-bound chest, and a ragamuffin crew; a newspaper man named Slade, who dropped out of the world about the same time, is supposed to have gone along. The schooner was last sighted about 450 miles northeast of Oahu, in good shape, bound westward. Barnett identifies Slade as Ralph Slade, a free-lance writer and artist he knew in the Philippines on the North Dakota, and finds it strange he never connected him with the Laughing Lass. Ives asks the object of the voyage; Barnett says buried treasure was the story, though Edwards thinks it likelier a scientific expedition, since Schermerhorn cared nothing for treasure. Barnett agrees an unknown island’s flora and fauna would suit him, and suggests natives may have collected the professor.
The Dory from the Sea
At twilight a lookout reports a boat containing a stranger—not Ives, McGuire, or anyone in the crew. The dory is brought alongside. One occupant lies dead under sailcloth, a protuberance at his breast suggesting deformity; the other is a ragged, bearded scarecrow in a stained semi-turban, whose appearance provokes hysterical laughter from Forsythe. Roused by an order from between decks, the stranger mechanically raises himself and sings “The High Barbaree.” Trendon recognizes the song, recalling a New Zealand beach-comber with a steel hook who sang it in fever. The dead man is Timmins, bo’s’n’s mate of the vanished first crew, wearing a life preserver. Trendon examines the survivor—scalp gash, fever, thirst, exhaustion, nervous shock—and berths him in Edwards’s vacant room. Timmins did not drown, the surgeon reports: no water in his lungs, and he would diagnose death by inhaled flames. When Barnett helps give brandy, the man says “Prosit, Barnett,” and is recognized as Ralph Slade of the Laughing Lass. Slade says he picked up the dead sailor drifting. He asks about the schooner; Barnett reports sighting her two days ago, apparently deserted, putting a crew aboard under an ensign, then finding her deserted again. Slade says he left three or four nights ago and never heard of Billy Edwards. At mention of a strange light he cries “Lost; all lost!” and faints. Reviving, he asks about the volcano, says “Stand by!” and collapses.
Slade Takes the Deck
The Wolverine slows and holds head to the waves. Next afternoon Trendon pronounces Slade recovered; he comes on deck, sees the volcanic smoke, and urges heading for the island, saying a man named Percy Darrow is there. Captain Parkinson orders the quartermaster to head for the volcano and invites Slade to tell his story after mess.
The Rookeries and the Boss Bull
Each rookery, the narrator explains, is a small kingdom: one huge bull stands as a living army, surrounded by lesser bulls descended from him, cows, and pups. The champion holds his ground by force. When a stranger bull appears opposite the rookery and issues his peculiar challenge, the resident never refuses; he slides into the sea and the two fight in the blue water, gashing each other deeply. The winner keeps the ground, the loser moves on—or, if the stranger wins, the old bull abandons the rookery and the newcomer swims in to try his title against the younger bulls. This is why the hunting never ended: a boss bull killed on Tuesday would be replaced by Thursday at the latest.
The narrator took little pleasure in the killing itself—so large an animal for so small a spoil—but the stalking served his all-absorbing end, and lying belly-down on sun-warmed grass above the surge under a clear sky was pleasant enough. While they waited for the big bull’s return, they watched the others’ daily affairs, and even the unresponsive Thrackles was struck by their almost human intelligence: seals kiss one another and weep tears when grieved. The men discussed the narrow, dry cave where the animals were practically penned in. A great killing could be made there, they agreed, but the darkness made it impossible to tell bulls from cows, and that deterred them.
Months of Drift
Days, weeks, and months slipped past; events had passed beyond the narrator’s control. He had embarked on a journalistic enterprise whose purpose was now out of reach. Up the valley Dr. Schermerhorn and his assistant pursued an experiment whose nature he still did not know and likely never would: the precautions against interference by the men worked equally against him, and any investigation on his part would be radically misinterpreted, to his own danger. He might as well have been in London. So he evolved another plan. On the voyage home, if nothing prevented, he would tell his story to Percy Darrow and throw himself on his mercy; the results would probably then be ready for the public, and his sincerity would be unquestionable. Two years or more of service, he hoped, would tickle the doctor’s sense of his own importance. The plan seemed so adequate that he gave up thinking on the subject.
His whole life now lay on the shores; he was not again permitted aboard the Laughing Lass. He saw Captain Selover twice at a distance, and both times the captain seemed rather uncertain, though the men did not remark it. The narrator relapsed into a dreamlike state: they were to hunt seals, fish, pry bivalves from the rocks at low tide, build fires, talk, and alternate between suspicion and security, between the danger of sedition and the insanity of men without defined purpose, world without end.
Old Scrubs Comes Ashore
Then the inevitable happened. At noon Pulz, pulling whiskers from evil-smelling masks, asked how many they had. Thrackles said about three hundred and fifty, and Pulz declared he was sick of the job, which stank. They cast the masks aside with one accord. Pulz growled that it was not such a hell of a fortune and that there were other things worth all the seal trimmings of the islands; the Nigger gloomed “Diamon’s,” and Solomon said he had hit it. Idleness descended again. They grew touchy over little things—a misplaced plate, a shortage of firewood, too deep a draught at the nearly empty bucket. Bickering became as constant as the surf; the way a man spat, ate, slept, or breathed irritated every other member. They stood the outrage as long as they could, then objected in a wild, ridiculous explosion that communicated its heat to the object of their wrath; then there was a fight. Only liquor was needed to complete the deplorable state.
Smaller things worried them more and more. A harmless cricket or tree-toad chirped near the cabin; the narrator caught himself listening for its irregular recurrence with every nerve aquiver, and when it piped up its feeble strain struck to his heart cold and paralysing like a dagger. One night—only last week, yet seeming ages ago—he did not sleep at all. The moon had risen and mounted the heavens, and by the fretwork of its radiance through the chinks of the rudely built cabin he marked off the hours. A thunderstorm rumbled and flashed hull down over the horizon, many miles distant, yet he did not doubt its electrical influence had dried the moisture of their equanimity, leaving them rattling husks for the winds of destiny. He could remember no other time when he felt more on edge, more choked with restless, purposeless nervous energy that leaves a man’s tongue parched and his eyes staring. Still the infernal cricket chirped.
An Invitation to Stay
The narrator thanks Dr. and Miss Blentwood for their exceeding kindness, at a loss how to repay it, and confesses his voice trembles as he speaks, unable to accept that this place of charming associations is not his home and that he must leave within hours. Dr. Blentwood takes both his hands, calls him “my dear sir and brother,” and insists he stay the day—it would not be prudent to go. After an hour in his study, he proposes that Ethel show the narrator the scene of the rescue. Reading welcome in her eyes, he agrees to remain until tomorrow. The doctor pats his shoulder, calls tomorrow “a doubtful quantity,” hopes the house may serve his health and convenience as long as needed, and retires.
On Goodness Kept Secret
Miss Blentwood adjusts her father’s necktie and exchanges a kiss with him. The narrator says he is much in love with her father and feels he knows him thoroughly; she calls him always transparent and true, never wearing an exterior different from his inmost feeling. He quotes that the doctor does good by stealth and would blush to find it fame, and she says he never knows his own good deeds. Talk turns to the Scripture injunction not to let the left hand know what the right does: keeping our good from ourselves guards against spiritual pride, as with the Pharisees. She describes the chill of homes ruled by the opposite principle, likening them to the house of death. He argues that Adam died the moment he selfishly desired the forbidden fruit—selfishness is moral death—and distinguishes physical death, the soul’s separation from the body, from spiritual death, separation from God. Asked whether the farthest from God is the most selfish, saint or sinner, he affirms it as self-evident, then explains apparent selfishness among Christians: the name is often misapplied, satanic selfishness may wear the garb of benevolence, and motives vary. Jesus’s “By their fruits ye shall know them” is the test; some begin the Christian life very low down, so old selfishness may still appear.
The Blush
She thanks him for clearing difficulties and making charity toward the lowest Christian easier, though she finds the cross-grained hard to love. He says she cannot love the unlovely by will-power, and God does not either: He sees the embryonic seed as fully developed and loves the perfect germ, loving the impenitent only with pity, not complacency. He notices a blush on her countenance and speculates she may recently have heard “I love,” which pains him; the blush returns, and she excuses herself and retires. Alone, he calls her the most beautiful girl he ever saw mentally, morally, spiritually and physically, and shudders at the thought she might be tied to a dead man, then reassures himself her judgment will draw her to one good and true.
A Walk with Ethel
Dr. Blentwood proposes the outing, but a caller detains him at the door, so Ethel and the narrator walk on slowly. Her voice fascinates him like music. Seeing the house’s exterior for the first time, he says he likes the inside better—the interior’s warm heart-welcome against the exterior’s quaintness—and she wishes their home talked as she would like. He says a home should not lie, contrasting houses whose costly furnishings say “look, admire, and go about your business,” making one sigh for a great-coat in July. Sensitiveness to a home’s moral atmosphere, he argues, comes from the character of its inmates, the walls reflecting the spirit of the life lived there; skill of the heart, not the head, makes home attractive. The logic of the heart outruns the logic of the head, as the loving John outran Peter to the tomb. She says an admirable act loses beauty when prompted by evil purpose.
The Fall as Falling Up
At an outdoor dinner, Dr. Blentwood argues that conscious progress from ignorance and selfish passion to righteous peace is essential to man’s permanency in goodness; the first man lacked this experience, which explains his fall, and children raised ignorant of sin are moral infants with no resisting power. Dr. Lightheart, laughing, asks whether Beecher’s remark that the race “fell up” is correct. Blentwood insists Adam was simply innocent like a child, with no positive holiness; taking possession of himself, he lost even that negative innocence and had to go down before rising, like a climber descending into a depression to ascend higher. Through the inborn spirit of Christ man rises infinitely higher—into permanent freedom in goodness. No one reaches the highest manhood without Christ’s disposition; whatever the creed, only one who shows the love of Jesus, creating warmth in home and society, is rightly called a Christian.
Keeping on the Safe Side
Aboard the boat, Elbert Bloomfield lays out his creed of prudence: never stand near a precipice, never take the first intoxicating drink, never borrow a penny without consultation, never flirt with the faintest approach to falsehood. Charley Lightheart approves but presses him—is a worldly safety won by pure strategy, with no moral crookedness in it, really desirable? Elbert praises the strategy by which Charley once escaped a whipping. Charley counters with his boyhood prank of tying a pail to a cow’s tail, certain Elbert would side with the cow rather than the fun. Elbert admits his sense of justice spoils any sport made from another creature’s suffering. Pressed to say plainly whether the pail was wrong, he answers yes, if it frightened and hurt the beast. Charley then triumphantly produces the mule: a withe on its tail, used as a ship’s helm. Elbert distinguishes the cases—the cow must be kept quiet for milk, the mule must be made to go—and calls it a case where duty and fun kissed each other.
Talk turns to a profession. Elbert confesses he is like a donkey pulled equally by several callings and hopes to discover what he is fitted for. They argue whether happiness should be pursued at all. Elbert holds that it should not: seeking happiness or misery as an end is mere selfishness, and the hero, as Emerson has it, is not fed on sweets. Happiness is a coy maiden who will not be caught by direct pursuit; the highest comes obliquely. He applies this to marriage—couples who wed to be made happy often find wedlock grievous, while one who weds to give happiness through unselfish devotion usually wins it unsought. Charley sighs that wings seem to be sprouting from Elbert’s shoulder-blades, and asks him not to outpace him. Elbert answers that Charley’s own gift—making people forget themselves—is a grand power, the same in effect as Ethel’s steadier gentleness, and he credits both with hastening his recovery.
A Picnic Party and a Douche-Bath
The wind freshens and the craft throws spray; Charley complains his starboard eye is drowned and his port ear has shipped a cargo of liquid. When the fun palls they drop sail, and the wind dies. The river becomes a flawless mirror; the two sit becalmed in a hollow sphere of heat, fit only for day-dreams. Roused by the hour, Charley asks where they shall dine, and Elbert points to a grassy slope. A gay party of ten is already picnicking under that very tree and waves handkerchiefs. Charley marches up and delivers a comic speech—great minds agree, kindred spirits know each other without preliminary quarantine, they have met by providential appointment—and is answered with laughter and clapping. Their host declares they will all be brothers, sisters, cousins, and aunts.
Seminaries, Prayer-Meetings, and the School of Christ
The talk widens into argument. Bloomfield contends that theological seminaries turn out preachers with their backs to the future, all cast in one pattern, running in denominational grooves. Thornton concedes they might teach the science of Christian living better but will not hear of destroying them. Bloomfield proposes that wealthy laymen endow professorships of applied Christianity, and Miss Thornton, sparkling, urges him to give the first lectures; her brother offers to bear the printing. Bloomfield demurs as a stripling, then agrees to consider it in the autumn.
Thornton asks why so many Christians show nothing of Christ’s disposition. Bloomfield answers with the soldier who boasted Christ was Captain of his salvation and was told he was a long way from headquarters. Conversion, he insists, is only entrance into the school of Christ—the turning point of a ball thrown upward, after which the Christian should rise faster still. He would reform the prayer-meeting into a school of experience, where subjects are given out beforehand and the thoughtful contribute ideas rather than sentiment. Thornton says he would join such a school as a learner, wanting less to be saved than to be fit to be saved; Bloomfield clasps his hand and calls him the man God wants.
Miss Thornton’s Confession
Left alone with Bloomfield, Theodocia Thornton asks what he would do with wealth. He answers in the spirit of Robert Falconer—practical, neglected work, pure benevolence without selfish motive. She has been wondering whether his professorship of Christian Living might be combined with her own long-cherished plan, but cannot see what is proper for a woman. Woman’s part, she says bitterly, is to wait and watch until too late to do. Bloomfield offers the comfort that work intended, hindered by no fault of ours, is work done.
A Sleepless Night and a Resolve
Stockmire has proposed to Ethel, and the narrator passes the night in torment, dreaming of plots to secure her hand. Beneath the man’s oily humility he sees a hard, unscrupulous hypocrite—a polished Pecksniff rather than a Uriah Heep. Stockmire is popular and holds high local office, yet the narrator suspects the methods behind his rise, and cannot explain what he feels. Meeting him by day, he finds him unusually cordial and flattering, and wonders whether Ethel has accepted; despair engulfs his hopes. He cannot believe her spiritual insight would fail to see through such false pretences, yet her nervousness and shaken state convince him that if she accepted, it was from a painful sense of duty, not love. He vows, “It must not, shall not be,” paces the study in frenzy, and prays to save her from a loveless marriage. That night, over his Greek Testament, he prays that her happiness be served whatever his loss, and dreams of angelic voices singing, “I will guide thee with mine eye.”
Tom as Diplomat
Tom reports that Stockmire wants his help at the store. The narrator sends him as his diplomat—eyes and ears open, but never letting Stockmire discover he is watched. Tom boasts of learning diplomacy among Southern slaves. Returning, he brings a note from the Elisons inviting the narrator to tea, and reports that Stockmire drew nearly everyone beyond earshot and talked suspiciously, once saying, “It’s too bad there be such a feeling ‘ginst Dr. Blentwood.” The narrator is amazed, since everybody loves the doctor; Tom vows to keep his “plomatic eye open.”
Tea at the Elisons’
Busy preparing two Sunday lectures and an address to the young people, the narrator takes exercise through unfrequented streets per Dr. Lightheart’s advice, hoping by accepting tea invitations to learn the parish mind. At Mr. Elison’s supper the hosts prove agreeable and intelligent, but Stockmire engages him in conversation to prevent confidential relations. He asks whether the narrator agrees with Dr. Blentwood in denying God caused the Mill River flood, saying the pastor’s position caused commotion among church members. The narrator answers that God permitted it as the natural penalty of broken law—water presses in proportion to height, unstable foundations wash away; both laws were violated in building and maintaining the Williamsburg dam, and God did not suspend the penalty, though His providence saved hundreds of innocent lives. Chagrined at explaining so simple a matter, he suspects Stockmire is feeling for a new wire to pull against the pastor or himself. He notes Stockmire’s attentiveness to Miss Elison, heir to a considerable fortune—if he cannot get Ethel, he is preparing to secure Miss Elison.
The Serpent’s Method
Charley Lightheart calls, now a reporter on a Boston daily, and the narrator unfolds his suspicions. Charley learns that Stockmire quotes others against the pastor while withholding his own opinion. At his store Stockmire tells Charley with apparent regret of a general desire for a change in the pastorate—some thinking him unsound in doctrine, others too old. Pressed to name malcontents, he names Mrs. Smithers, an old widow, who is greatly grieved and denies any dissatisfaction, praising the pastor as able, a comforter, a feeder to the hungry soul. Stockmire had asked if she’d want a pastor who held God took no interest in such disasters as the bursting of the Williamsburg dam; she answered no. Stockmire claimed church members so interpreted the pastor’s sermon and were demanding a change. Charley, furious, calls him a creeping, crawling serpent: Stockmire knows most people are not independent thinkers but are unconsciously led by others’ opinions, so he is creating public opinion by misrepresenting it—announcing as public sentiment what existed only in his own lying heart.
The Annual Meeting
The next Sunday the narrator reads a notice announcing the annual meeting of the Church and Society for Friday evening. His two lectures awaken interest among thinking listeners; dissent comes only from the Mrs. Lightheart class of minds, whose opinions have some influence but no value to a scholar. At the meeting there is a large attendance of Stockmire’s friends, unaccustomed to such gatherings, and a strong under-current of feeling. Appropriations for music and expenses pass without much opposition; but when the pastor’s salary is reached, Stockmire moves to adjourn, thinking that the best way to lead the pastor to resign. Charley Lightheart, present and still a Society member, moves that two hundred dollars be added to the salary. Stockmire opposes this in the interest, he pretends, of Dr.
The Narrator and the Men Around Him
Slade is the book’s central consciousness, and the novel is careful about what kind of man he is. He calls himself a reporter by choice and a detective by instinct, a free lance who follows his instincts and turns his stories to the Star. He is well off, curious, and vain enough about his own cleverness to sign on as a mate under the name Eagen and shave off his beard. His competence is real — he has a master’s certificate and a war correspondent’s history in the Philippines — but so is his vanity, and the book lets us see both. Much of the tension comes from the gap between what Slade thinks he controls and what he actually does.
Around him the crew is drawn with a hard, unsentimental hand. Captain Ezra Selover is a brute who beats a man for spitting on his quarter-deck and who, once ashore, loses his nerve entirely; the narrator watches courage give way to fear and decision to wavering, and understands that the ship’s peace depended on a man who no longer has any. Handy Solomon, with his steel hook and his alchemy, is the crew’s philosopher and its most dangerous member. The unnamed Black sailor called only “the Nigger” in the text is treated by the others as a oracle — when he says “Gold—treasure,” they take it as gospel — and the book’s casual use of that name, and a chapter title built on a racial slur, mark it plainly as a product of its time. Percy Darrow, Schermerhorn’s assistant, is the novel’s most interesting figure: sardonic, cigarette-smoking, watchful, given to taunting the crew with tales of vampires, and finally the man who explains what the chest was.
What the Chest Means
The celestium is the book’s one idea, and it is a good one. It is not a monster or a curse but a physical substance with a physical effect: it radiates, and the radiance pulls living bodies toward water. The horror of the Laughing Lass is that her crew did not mutiny or desert — they were dragged, as Darrow insists, “as by a tornado.” The novel returns again and again to the moment when the chest is opened and men leap overboard, and to the detail that the chest’s spring lock closes it again, so that the ship sails on empty and the thing happens a second time to the men sent to board her.
Darrow’s demonstration at the end makes the idea concrete: he floats a model ship in a tub, sets a phial of the stuff inside it, and the little craft glows, runs with light like a powder train, and dissolves into formless pulp. “So passed the Laughing Lass,” he says. The captain’s answer — “Let it lie. Has it not cost enough?” — is the book’s verdict on its own mystery.
A Novel of Its Moment
The book wears its period openly. There is the casual racism of the forecastle and the chapter headings; there is the earnest theological talk, in a long inserted passage, about the Fall, election, and whether refined people should labor among the coarse; there is the sense, common to adventure fiction of the era, that science is both wonderful and dangerous and that the men who pursue it are half-childish and half-divine. Schermerhorn is a genius who cannot be bothered to explain himself, and Darrow is the man who does the explaining. The novel’s real subject is not the treasure but the cost of curiosity — the professor’s, Slade’s, and the crew’s — and it ends not with a fortune recovered but with a chest left at the bottom of the sea, which is the right place for it.
