The Nameless Shame by Edgar Saltus
In the Duchess of Kincardine's Hill Street drawing room, gossip over tea turns to the sudden death of Lord Henry Grafton Ferrol, whose engagement to the American heiress Miss Rivers had been broken off only the day before. The Honorable Eric Yorke reports the news casually: Ferrol was found dead on his floor, apparently strangled — Simpson, the family physician, attributes it to compression of the carotid artery. The gathered company, including Lady Massingbird and Lady Silverstairs, speculates freely about the cause, with Lady Massingbird assuming Miss Rivers must be implicated. The narrator, who knew Ferrol slightly through the British Museum and knew Miss Rivers as well, recalls Ferrol as a scholar of Indian literature, author of a respected commentary on the sutras of Patanjali, a man he considered above sordid entanglements. Yorke relays details from the inquest: Ferrol had dismissed his servant for the night; the man found him dead on the floor the next morning, eyes and mouth open. The housekeeper, returning from a music hall around one o'clock, had noticed Ferrol's door open and heard a woman's skirt rustling on the stairs above, though she saw no one. The servant also testifies that in the days before his death, Ferrol had grown uneasy and ordered him to throw out anyone caught trying to enter. Miss Rivers, unsuspected of any crime, has gone to Paris. Scotland Yard and the press are consumed by the mystery, and even an unnamed exalted personage takes an interest. Lord Nevis, the duchess's son, who knows Miss Rivers well, is enlisted to approach her diplomatically. He reports her explanation for breaking the engagement: Ferrol had told her he was being persecuted by a yogi named Anagarika, who had written from Benares threatening him with visitation by "the parapoutra" (which the narrator jokingly calls "the nameless shame") unless Ferrol publicly retracted claims made in his book about Indian philosophy. Ferrol described seeing a man seated at his library table, writing, who vanished — "broke like a bubble" — when approached, leaving the name Anagarika written on the paper. Frightened by this apparent madness, Miss Rivers ended the engagement. Lord Nevis then announces his own engagement to Miss Rivers. The narrator, walking home, muses at length on the Patanjali sutras' teachings about union with the supersensible and yogic powers of exteriorization and materialization, entertaining the possibility that a yogi's projected spirit crossed the seas and strangled Ferrol, or alternatively that Ferrol, deranged by the threat and the broken engagement, induced his own death by swallowing his tongue — a method he distinguishes from Simpson's mistaken medical explanation of heart failure from carotid compression. At a later dinner, Lady Silverstairs punctures this theory with cool rationalism, telling the narrator she has been informed the truth is far more mundane: a woman — not a demirep but a woman of their own class — was in Ferrol's rooms that night, the same whose skirt rustled on the stairs. Lady Silverstairs' understanding is that this woman had expected to become Lady Ferrol, had first frightened Miss Rivers into breaking the engagement, and then, failing to persuade Ferrol to renew an earlier pledge to her, lost her temper, with fatal results. She adds that this woman is under surveillance and expected to be arrested imminently, and that this same mundane explanation is already accepted at Sandringham. The narrator, disappointed to see his elaborate occult hypothesis displaced by a "stupid crime," calls the deflation itself a kind of swindle — "a nameless shame."
By Edgar Saltus · First published 1921 · Genre: Mystery, Detective Fiction, Occult Fiction · 5,296 words
First lines
"It is most unusual! " said the Duchess of Kincardine. "Most! " she added. Then, rallying, she exclaimed: "What is the world coming to?"
There had been a stupid discussion that had arisen, how, the Lord only knows, apropos of the tea things, perhaps, on the subject of poached eggs. I had ventured to state that it was sinful to poach them in water, that no one with any sense of self-respect would touch an egg that had not been cooked in milk and mushrooms.
"Why not in champagne and pineapples? " Agatha, the duchess' daughter, had suggested. "Yes, why not?"
But here solemnities were interrupted. Yorke -- the Honorable Eric -- a beautifully preserved young man of forty, glided in.
What this Textopian page supports
The Nameless Shame is listed on Textopian as a short story by Edgar Saltus, dated 1921 CE.
This source record anchors work identity, reading entry points, and catalog context for checking claims about the work.
- Work type: Short story
- Author: Edgar Saltus
- Date: 1921 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Mystery, Detective Fiction, Occult Fiction, Psychological Thriller, Literary Fiction
- Length: 5,296 words
- Structure: 1 section, 101 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)
Good citation fit
- Work identity for The Nameless Shame by Edgar Saltus
- Canonical title URL and first readable passage URL
- Genre and topic classification from the Textopian catalog
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Genres
- Mystery — The narrative centers on an unsolved murder with mounting evidence, shifting suspicions, and ambiguous clues that drive the plot as an intricate puzzle remaining ultimately unresolved.
- Detective Fiction — Scotland Yard investigation, crime scene examination, and systematic police procedure structure the narrative, establishing detective fiction conventions despite the case never reaching conclusive resolution.
- Occult Fiction — The yogi Anagarika, Patanjali sutras, supernatural powers, astral projection, and the mysterious parapoutra are central to the murder explanation, grounding the narrative in esoteric Eastern philosophy and metaphysical possibility.
- Psychological Thriller — The narrative emphasizes Ferrol's mental deterioration, hallucinations, paranoia induced by occult threat, and the possibility of suicide through psychological torment, treating perception and mental instability as primary concerns.
Tags
decadent · fin-de-siècle · psychological · dark-romance · societal-critique · moral-ambiguity · mystery · gothic-elements · urban-setting · character-driven · emotional-complexity · social-satire