BENEATH THIS TREE
LIES THE BODY
OF
JOHN OAKHURST,
WHO STRUCK A STREAK OF BAD LUCK
ON THE 23D OF NOVEMBER, 1850,
AND
HANDED IN HIS CHECKS
ON THE 7TH DECEMBER, 1850.

And pulseless and cold, with a derringer by his side and a bullet in his heart, though still calm as in life, beneath the snow lay he who was at once the strongest and yet the weakest of the outcasts of Poker Flat.

IX.  MARKHEIM[*] (1884)

[* From “The Merry Men.”  Used by permission of Charles Scribner’s Sons, authorized American publishers of Stevenson’s Works.]

BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON (1850-1894)

[Setting.  There is no finer model for the study of setting than this story affords.  It is three o’clock in the afternoon of a foggy Christmas Day in London.  If Markheim’s manner and the dimly lighted interior of the antique shop suggest murder, the garrulous clocks, the nodding shadows, and the reflecting mirrors seem almost to compel confession and surrender.  “And still as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him, with a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design.  He should have chosen a more quiet hour.”  So he should for the murder; but for the self-confession, which is Stevenson’s ultimate design, no time or place could have been better.

Plot.  There is little action in the plot.  A man commits a dastardly murder and then, being alone and undetected, begins to think, think, think.  It is the turning point in his life and he knows it.  Instead of seizing the treasure and escaping, he submits his past career to a rigid scrutiny and review.  This brooding over his past life and present outlook becomes so absorbing that what bade fair to be a soliloquy becomes a dialogue, a dialogue between the old self that committed the murder and the new self that begins to revolt at it.  The old self bids him follow the line of least resistance and go on as he has begun; the newly awakened self bids him stop at once, check the momentum of other days, take this last chance, and be a man.  His better nature wins.  Markheim finds that though his deeds have been uniformly evil, he can still “conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyrdoms.”  Though the active love of good seems too weak to be reckoned as an asset, he still has a “hatred of evil”; and on this twin foundation, ability to think great thoughts and to hate evil deeds, he builds at last his culminating resolve.

The story is powerfully and yet subtly told.  It sweeps the whole gamut of the moral law.  Many stories develop the same theme but none just like this.  Stevenson himself is drawn again to the same problem a little later in “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”  Hawthorne tried it in “Howe’s Masquerade,” in which the cloaked figure is the phantom or reduplication of Howe himself.  In Poe’s “William Wilson,” to which Stevenson is plainly indebted, the evil nature triumphs over the good.  But “Markheim,” by touching more chords and by sounding lower depths, makes the triumph at the end seem like a permanent victory for universal human nature.