An Eddy on the Floor

An Eddy on the Floor by Bernard Capes

Bernard Capes's "An Eddy on the Floor" opens as a first-person narrative by "Polyhistor," a young man of literary pretensions living in shabby lodgings and combating a life of "practical dispensing" while awaiting his rise to prosperity. He recalls a gathering at the house of his distant connection Lady Barbara Grille, where he had argued about prison reform with a masculine woman called "Charlie," who condemns modern humanitarian softness toward criminals. Their argument was overheard by a notable stranger, who then calls on Polyhistor: Major James Shrike, Governor of D— gaol. Shrike, a short, vulgar-looking cockney of great earnestness, explains his prison-reform philosophy — that criminals must be led to a "divine egotism" and self-respect rather than broken by cant and punishment — and offers Polyhistor the post of resident doctor at the gaol, which he accepts. The narrative resumes forty years later. Polyhistor recounts his time under Shrike, whom he comes to respect deeply for his humane, resourceful system, abolishing crank and treadmill and solitary confinement. Shrike had once endured a devastating typhoid outbreak that emptied the prison for over a year. One evening, discussing a newly arrived prisoner (a fraudulent spiritualist medium named F—), Shrike voices scorn for spiritualism and supernatural fear, insisting on stoic dutifulness even toward a haunting conscience. Polyhistor visits F— in his cell, who is terrified, insisting the neighboring cell, number 47, though officially empty, is not — and begs to be moved. The warder, Johnson, refuses to open it and is oddly hostile. That night, playing piquet with Shrike, Polyhistor notices Shrike reading Bacon on revenge, then glimpses in a mirror a monstrous, disfigured reflection of Shrike's face where his ordinary face should be. Rattled, Polyhistor stumbles on an old title page revealing Shrike once published a work of poems; Shrike reacts with sudden fury, snatches and destroys it, then apologizes, calling it a sore subject. Later that night F— is found in a fit, raving about the locked cell. Polyhistor examines the sealed, screwed-shut door of cell 47 and presses Johnson for answers, but is rebuffed. Consumed by morbid curiosity, Polyhistor sneaks out at night, unscrews the cell's trap, and is seized by Johnson, enraged at his prying. Forced into a struggle, they end up dragged into the cell itself, where Johnson shows him, by lantern light, a small unnatural eddy of dust circling the floor and slowly advancing on them — a phenomenon of dread beyond ordinary draughts. Terrified, Polyhistor breaks free; Johnson falls in a fit as the door slams shut. The next morning, Shrike is found dead, his face jammed into the cell's grating, his features obliterated into a "featureless plate" of flesh — the same horror Polyhistor had glimpsed in the mirror. Polyhistor collapses into a period of nervous prostration and amnesia-like numbness, tended by a colleague, Hammond, who conducts the post-mortem and reports nothing supernatural, attributing the facial damage to muscular contraction against the bars. Polyhistor recovers during a restorative stay in the country. There he receives, via Hammond, a sealed letter that the dying Johnson (who never recovered from his seizure) had insisted be forwarded to him alone. Johnson's letter forms an extended confession. He reveals Shrike's secret history: as a young officer, Shrike had aspired to be a poet, publishing a volume of verse that was ignored, then years later found and viciously mocked in print by a "grey-faced" journalist who had wormed out his confidence and betrayed it. Shrike nursed a controlled, undying hatred for this man. Years later, during the prison's long emptied interval after the typhoid outbreak, the journalist visited Shrike to inspect his reform system. Shrike lured him into cell 47, locked him in, and revealed his true purpose — revenge for the old review. Over months, with Johnson's forced complicity, Shrike returned repeatedly to whip the imprisoned journalist and force him to "dance," reducing him to a broken, mute animal. Eventually the journalist died alone in the cell, scratching the words "An Eddy on the Floor" on the wall before death. Johnson and Shrike buried him under the prison wall among executed murderers, and Shrike, unrepentant, resolved that "he has paid the penalty, and we call quits." But afterward, revisiting the sealed cell before renovation, the two men saw an eddying, dancing manifestation on the floor and fled, after which Shrike ordered the cell permanently screwed shut and never spoke of it again — until Polyhistor's intrusion reopened it, with fatal consequences for both Shrike and Johnson. Johnson's letter closes begging Polyhistor's prayers for both men's souls, and asserting that Polyhistor, however unwittingly, was the instrument that unleashed the buried truth. The text ends with Polyhistor's brief closing reflection, expressing horrified doubt that a journalist could vanish so completely without inquiry, yet unable to dismiss what he himself had witnessed.

By Bernard Capes · First published 1920 · Genre: Mystery, Suspense, Crime · 17,167 words

First lines

I

OF POLYHISTOR'S NARRATIVE WRITTEN FOR, BUT NEVER INSERTED IN, THE - FAMILY MAGAZINE

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psychological thriller · mystery · suspense · detective story · crime fiction · thriller · literary fiction · contemporary literature · British literature · modernist literature · experimental fiction · postmodernism

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