Мэтью Перл - The Dante Chamber

Of course, as a politician Morton feared exposure of his peculiar habit, and wore a raggedy black wig and false nose and mustache when he went to the flagellation den. When his wife found the wig and questioned him about it, he merely muttered that he was an “easy target,” by which he meant if anyone recognized him, he could end up in the gossip columns, but of course he could not explain to her where he was going, and the exchange left her more confused than before. Mrs. Morton, presuming a constituent must have been harassing or even threatening her husband in order for him to hide in this way, even reported her suspicions to the police.

In the meantime, Sibbie had urged Reverend Fallow to recruit followers for their settlement. They had initiated their mission by printing copies of The Dante Murders , humbly authored by the present writer, in order to demonstrate the vitality and power of Dante. (These were pirated copies, it must be noted, losing the present writer his rightful income, but I hasten to add, monetary gain must not be considered in relation to a glorious and obligatory spiritual calling.) They also searched out Londoners who already recognized their own sins that had to be purged, even if these citizens did not know how to do so in a true or fulfilling way. Remember the secret den Morton frequented, for example. Sibbie heard of this place where the frequenters actually longed for punishment, and began to watch the mixed-up souls who went in and out.

Sibbie called out to Morton as he was about to enter his familiar rendezvous. Sibbie did not crack a paddle onto him like the woman whom he’d come to see, but took hold of him in a different and more satisfying way; she spoke of Dante’s revelations — of how the time had come to extract sins from our souls and the collective soul of London. She described how punishment against ourselves was natural, not shameful, even necessary in an age of material comforts, and that the end result would be freedom and — as Virgil put it in stating Dante’s quest in Purgatory — liberty. Morton was not in control of his own actions or his body, for he belonged to God. For once, Morton felt he was speaking with someone who understood the peace that eluded him, and his entire being was liberated under Sibbie’s influence.

Morton began spending time at the Phillip Sanatorium — first occasionally, then frequently, until it seemed he vanished entirely and search parties started looking for him in Bristol. Morton and the other residents of the sanatorium who joined the group did not drink alcohol or use tobacco, though they were given opiates to drink to begin to forget and reject their past mistakes. Fallow had found that the greater the availability of this smuggled opium, the greater the obedience that was inspired.

Fallow would gather their growing number of followers in the large building that had been the machine shop when the property was a mill — now turned into a chapel — preaching of Dante’s revolutionary ideas of humanity’s purgatorial destiny.

As the settlement’s numbers increased, so did its requirements for opium. They had found a supplier in the figure of a man who had been called Hormazd in his own faraway country, but known around London as Ironhead Herman. Through Herman the organizers found Lillian Brenner, an opera prima donna who had come to rely on Herman’s steady supply of opium to block out her many anxieties about her future. Fallow had met Herman in the city to make a payment, and Miss Brenner was there in tears, both about needing opium and also about her rival whom she loathed, who was prettier and better than her and who made Brenner positively hate herself.

Fallow, pulling her aside, convinced her to visit the sanatorium, both as an escape from the city and to hear more about a brotherhood and sisterhood that helped clear away all the vices that tormented them, all while granting them the higher purpose of freeing humanity from its burdens. At the same time, Fallow mined his transient congregations of former and present soldiers, and found more members this way, including Reuben Loring, who every night suffered from nightmares of the murder he’d committed years before in a fit of rage against a soldier who had spoken offensively of the natives where they were stationed; from the groups of reformed prostitutes Fallow was invited to address around the city, he found half a dozen warmhearted but sad women.

Among the inhabitants and visitors, not so different from the impressive denizens of Dante’s Purgatory , were accomplished and highly esteemed engineers, writers, intellectuals, doctors. In Dante’s vision of Purgatory, the punishments are not merely carried out, they are memorialized in many artistic forms of images and sounds. So it was at the Phillip Sanatorium where their own artistic genius, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was sent to be witness and recorder of their purgations — just as Dante Alighieri before him was sent by Beatrice up the mountain with a similar purpose: to save himself and the world.

Sibbie would hold sessions, sometimes for hours at a time, with her followers, that became a sort of confession. Followers would tell her everything — their stories and sins, the stories and sins of others — without having to be asked. From Gabriel Rossetti’s stories, Sibbie learned of A. R. Gibson, who was plagued by inheriting his fortune without ever finding it in himself to exert himself to make his own name. He had no interest in business matters or in the women who harangued him to support children they claimed were his. Gibson would wander art galleries and stare at paintings and scenes of great battles and moments in history, wondering why he could not find his own such moments to live out. Sibbie appeared at one of these galleries in the dead of night, seeming as though she had just stepped out of a painting, or off of a sculpture’s pedestal. He met her glittering eyes, which saw right through him.

Gibson would become one of them and, Fallow made sure, would help replenish their precariously thin finances, as had money given by Morton and other followers.

Some who flocked to the Phillip Sanatorium were already devotees of Dante — Rossetti, of course, and Gibson, whom Rossetti had influenced to study Dante through his art and by loaning him Professore Rossetti’s visionary treatise — while others knew little about Dante before entering the sanatorium, or had read bits and pieces of the famous Longfellow translation. Fallow taught the words of Dante; Sibbie made all of it come alive.

Some of the members who gathered around Fallow and Sibbie had previously attempted spiritualism, occultism, Millerism, freemasonry, and secret orders of various kinds. But this place, this community erected on the property of the former textile mill, was different. It did not merely spread fear of the world ending, like the Millerites, it taught that sacrifices — their own sacrifices — would purge a declining world of the sins that were killing them all.

Sibbie anointed a brother or sister of the movement, one by one, to embody a purgatorial terrace to demonstrate to England — and, ultimately, to the larger world — that the time to enter upon a course to Paradise had come. Brother Morton was fitted with the burden of stone that embodied pride; Sister Brenner’s visions of envy were sewn into darkness. Witnesses from the movement were sent to each purgation, just as Dante Alighieri on his pilgrimage must pass through each and every terrace. Brother Rossetti and Brother Loring, as well as Sibbie, were among those who watched the remarkable purgations of Brother Morton and Sister Brenner.

Loring was preparing to embody his own chief sin — wrath — when he glimpsed visitors to Phillip Sanatorium he worried would try to stop him. Fallow had already warned him there were interlopers searching for him in London. Loring rushed away to enact his punishment earlier than he’d expected, locking himself into the drying shed, where noxious smoke would be released. Loring chanted — Agnus Dei — as a demonstration of the peacefulness that finally was overtaking him. Gabriel was witness, once again, and continued the chant as Brother Loring’s burdens were released. The mechanism to release the gas had been prepared by two of the residents who were engineers, who also collaborated with a resident shoemaker to invent the boots that Brother Gibson eagerly donned — the boots that would not allow him to stop and give way to his besetting sloth ever again.