CHAPTER XLITHE RETURN OF CAPTAIN BERSELIUS
Berselius, for the last fortnight, had been going back, slowly going from bad to worse, and keeping the fact to himself.
Sulphonal, trional, morphia, each tried in turn had no power to prevent him from dreaming. Sleep as soundly as he would, just as he was awaking, the black blanket of slumber, turned up at a corner or an edge by some mysterious hand, would reveal a dream or part of one.
There was nothing in these dreams to terrify him when he was dreaming them; in them, he was just the old brave Berselius that nothing could terrify, but there was often a good deal to terrify him when he awoke.
Many of them were quite innocent and as fatuous as dreams are wont to be, but even these innocent dreams fretted the soul of the waking man, for in every scrap and vestige of them he recognized the mind of that other personality.
After the first few days, his intellect, so severe and logical, began to lose its severity and logic, and to take up sides with his heart and to cry aloud against the injustice of this persecution.
Why should he be haunted like this? He felt notrace of remorse now for the past; the sense of injustice swallowed all that. Every day seemed to drive that past further off, and to increase the sense of detachment from that other man and his works; yet every night a hand, like the hand of some remorseless chess player, put things back in their places.
With the falling of the curtain of sleep he became metamorphosed.
Then came the day when the evil he was suffering from declared itself in a physical manner and Thénard was called in.
Thénard found his patient in bed. His mind was quite clear, but the pupils of his eyes were unequal; there was numbness in the left arm and want of grip in the hand. He had been prepared for the change evident in Berselius’s face and manner, for Maxine had told him in a few words of the accident and loss of memory, and as he took his seat by the bedside he was about to put some questions relative to the injury, when Berselius forestalled him.
Berselius knew something about medicine. He guessed the truth about his own case, and he gave a succinct account of the accident and the loss of memory following it.
“This is due to the result of the injury, is it not?” said Berselius, pointing to his left arm when he had finished.
“I am afraid so,” said TThénard, who knew his patient, and that plain speaking would be best.
“Some pressure?”
“So I imagine.”
“Oh, don’t be afraid of speaking out. I don’t mind the worst. Will an operation remove that pressure?”
“If, as I imagine, there is some pressure from the inner table of the skull on the brain, it will.”
“Well, now,” said Berselius, “I want you to listen to me attentively; ever since that accident, or, at least, since I regained memory, I have felt that I am not the same man. Only in sleep do I become myself again—do you understand me? I have quite different aims and objects; my feelings about things are quite different; my past before the accident is ruled off from my present—that is, when I am awake.
“When I dream I become my old self again—is that not strange?”
“No,” said Thénard, “every man is double. We have numerous cases where, from accident or other circumstances, a man’s personality changes; one side of his nature is suppressed. There is one strange point about your case, though, and that is the waking up of the suppressed personality so vividly during sleep; but in your case it is perhaps not so strange.”
“Why not?”
“Because, and excuse me for being personal even though I am complimentary, your personality as I knew you before your accident was so profound, and vivid, and powerful, that even though it is suppressed it must speak. And it speaks in dreams.”
“So!—perhaps you are right. Now tell me, if you operate and remove the pressure, may I become myself again?”
“You may.”
“Even after all this time?”
“The mind,” said Thénard, “has nothing to do with time. At the Battle of the Nile, a sea captain, one of those iron-headed Englishmen, was struck on his iron head with fragment of shell. He lost his memory. Eight months after he was trephined; he awoke from the operation completing the order he was giving to his sailors when the accident cut him short——”
“I would be the same man. I would not be tormented with the other self which is me, now?”
“Possibly—I do not say probably, but possibly.”
“Then,” said Berselius, “for God’s sake, operate at once.”
“I would like to wait for another twelve hours,” said Thénard, rising and re-examining the slight dent of his patient’s skull.
“Why?”
“Well, to see if things may be cleared up a bit, and the necessity for operation be removed.”
“Operate.”
“You know, in every operation, however slight, there is an element of danger to life.”
“Life! what do I care? I insist on your operating. Not another night shall pass——”
“As you will,” said Thénard.
“And now,” said Berselius, “make your preparations, and send me my secretary.”
At twelve o’clock that night, Maxine was seated in the library, with a book which she had beenvainly trying to read face downward on the floor beside her.
Thénard, his assistant surgeon, and two nurses, had arrived shortly after ten. Operating table, instruments, everything necessary had been brought, set up, and fixed by Thénard’s own man.
Adams had no part in the proceedings except as a looker-on. No man could assist Thénard in an operation who was not broken to the job, for, when operating Thénard became quite a different person to the every-day Thénard of lecture room and hospital ward.
That harsh voice which we noticed in him in the first pages of this book when on entering the lecture room of the Beaujon he could not find his coloured chalks, came out during an operation, and he would curse his assistant to the face for the slightest fault or fancied fault, and he would speak to the nurses as no Frenchman ever spoke to Frenchwoman unless with deliberate intent to insult. When the last stitch was in, all this changed; nurses and assistant forgot what had been said, and in the ease of released tension, worshipped more than ever the cadaverous genius who was now unwinding from his head and mouth the antiseptic gauze in which he always veiled them when operating.
The clock on the mantel pointed to a few minutes past the hour, when the door opened, and Adams came in.
Maxine rose to meet him.
She read both good and bad news in his face.
“The operation has been successful, but there is greatweakness.” He rolled an armchair for her to sit down, and then he told her as much as she could understand.
Thénard had found a slight depression of the inner table of the skull, and some congestion and thickening of the dura mater. It all dated from the accident. There would, without doubt, have been severe inflammation of the brain, but for Berselius’s splendid condition at the time of the accident, and the fact that Adams had bled him within an hour of the injury. Thénard had relieved the pressure by operation, but there was great weakness.
It was impossible to say what the result would be yet.
“Has he regained consciousness?”
“He is just recovering from the anæsthetic.”
The girl was silent for a moment, then she asked where Thénard was.
“He has left. He has to operate again to-night on a case which has just called for him by telephone. He asked me to tell you that everything possible has been done. He will call in the morning, and he has left everything till then in my hands.”
“I shall not go to bed,” said Maxine. “I could not sleep, and should my father want to see me, I shall be ready.”
“Yes,” said Adams, “perhaps it will be better so. I will go up and stay with him, and I will call you if it is necessary.”
He left the room, and Maxine took up the book she had dropped, but she could not read. Her eyes, travelling about the room, rested here and there on the trophies and the guns and the wild implements of destructioncollected by the hunter, who was now lying upstairs, like a child dandled on the dark knees of death.
The books on philosophy, natural history, oceanography, and history, in their narrow cases contrasted strangely with the weapons of destruction and the relics of the wild. The room was like a mirror of the mind of Berselius, that strange mind in which the savage dwelt with the civilized man, and the man of valour by the side of the philosopher.
But the strangest contrast in the room was effected by Maxine herself—the creation of Berselius—his child, blossoming like a beautiful and fragile flower, amidst the ruins of the things he had destroyed.
When, after daybreak, Adams came to find her, she was asleep.
Berselius, awaking from a sleep that had followed the effects of the anæsthetic, had asked for her.
Thénard had fixed upon the white marble bathroom adjoining Berselius’s sleeping chamber as his operating theatre, and after the operation the weakness of the patient was so great, and the night so hot, they determined to make up a bed for him there, as it was the coolest room in the house.
It was a beautiful room. Walls, pillars, floor and ceiling, of pure white Carrara marble, and in the floor, near the window, a sunk bath, which, when not in use, was covered by a grating of phosphor bronze, showing a design of sea serpents and seaweed. There were no basins or lavatory arrangements, nothing at all to break the pure and simple charm of this ideal bathing-placewhose open French window showed, beyond a balcony of marble, the tops of trees waving against the blue sky of early morning.
Berselius was lying on the bed which had been arranged for him near the door; his eyes were fixed on the waving tree tops. He turned his head slightly when Maxine entered, and looked at her long and deliberately.
In that one glance Maxine saw all. He was himself again. The old, imperious expression had returned; just a trace of the half-smile was visible about his lips.
The great weakness of the man, far from veiling the returned personality, served as a background which made it more visible. One could see the will dominating the body, and the half-helpless hands lying on the coverlet presented a striking contrast to the inextinguishable fire of the eye.
Maxine sat down on the chair by the bed. She did not attempt to stroke the hand near her, and she smothered whatever emotion she felt, for she knew the man who had returned.
“Your mother?” said Berselius, who had just sufficient voice to convey interrogation as well as words.
“She has not returned yet; we telegraphed for her, she will be here to-day.”
“Ah!”
The sick man turned his head again, and fixed his eyes on the tree tops.
The hot, pure, morning air came through the open window, bringing with it the chirruping and bickering of sparrows; a day of splendour and great heat wasbreaking over Paris. Life and the joy of life filled the world, the lovely world which men contrive to make so terrible, so full of misery, so full of tears.
Suddenly Berselius turned his head, and his eyes found Adams with a not unkindly gaze in them.
“Well, doctor,” he said, in a voice stronger than the voice with which he had spoken to Maxine. “This is the end of our hunting, it seems.”
Adams, instead of replying, took the hand that was lying on the coverlet, and Berselius returned the pressure, and then relinquished his hold.
Just a handshake, yet it told Adams in some majestic way, that the man on the bed knew that all was up with him, and that this was good-bye.
Berselius then spoke for a while to Maxine on indifferent things. He did not mention his wife’s name, and he spoke in a cold and abstracted voice. He seemed to Adams as though he were looking at death, perfectly serenely, and with that level gaze which never in this world had been lowered before man or brute.
Then he said he was tired, and wished to sleep.
Maxine rose, but the woman in her had to speak. She took the hand on the coverlet, and Berselius, who was just dozing off, started awake again.
“Ah!” said he, as though he had forgotten something, then he raised the little hand of Maxine and touched it with his lips.
Then he asked that his wife should be sent to him on her return.
Alone, he closed his eyes and one might have fanciedthat he slept, yet every now and then his eyelids would lift, and his eyes, unveiled by drowsiness, would fix themselves on some point in the room with the intent gaze of a person who is listening; so in the forest, or on the plain, or by the cane brake had he often listened at night, motionless, gun in hand and deadly, for the tiger or the water buck.
Half an hour passed and then from the adjoining room came a footstep, the door opened gently, and Madame Berselius entered. She was dressed just as she had traveled from Vaux. She had only just arrived, to find death in the house, and as she looked at the figure on the bed she fancied she beheld it indeed.
Closing the door gently she approached the bed. No, it was not death but sleep. He was breathing evenly and rhythmically, sleeping, apparently, as peacefully as a child.
She was about to turn away when, like a bather who has ventured into some peaceful tropic rock pool wherein lurks an octopus, she found herself seized and held. Berselius’s eyes were open, he was not asleep. His gaze was fixed on hers, and he held her with his eyes as the cat holds the bird or the python the man.
He had been waiting for her with the patience and the artfulness of the hunter, but no game had ever inspired such ferocity in him as this woman, vile and little, who yet had abased him to the earth.
He was dying, but what beast full of life is more dangerous than the dying tiger?
As Berselius gazed at the woman, she, with all herwill urging her body to retreat, approached him. Then, her knees touching the bed, she fell on her knees beside him and his hand fell on her shoulder.
Holding her thus, he gazed on her coldly, dispassionately, and critically, as an emperor of old might have gazed on a defaulting slave. Then, as though his anger had turned to disgust, as though disdaining to waste a word on her, he struck her full in the face with the back of his right hand, a blow that caused her to cry out and sent her groveling on the marble floor, where a moment after the nurse on duty, attracted by the cry, found her.
Berselius was dead, but the mocking smile on his lips remained, almost justified by the words of the nurse imploring the woman on the floor to calm herself and restrain her grief.
Whatever his life may have been, his death affected Adams strangely. The magnetism of the man’s character had taken a strong hold upon him, fascinating him with the fascination that strength alone can exercise. And the man he regretted was not the ambiguous being, the amended Berselius, so obviously a failure, but the real Berselius who had returned to meet death.
CHAPTER XLIIAMIDST THE LILIES
One day in March, nine months later, at Champrosay, in the garden of a little cottage near the Paris road, Maxine Berselius stood directing the movements of an old man in a blue blouse—Father Champardy by name, and a gardener by profession.
On the death of her father, Maxine had come to an arrangement with her mother, eminently suited to the minds and tastes of both women.
Maxine absolutely refused to touch any part of the colossal fortune left by her father. She knew how it had been come by, and as she had a small fortune of her own, a very small fortune of some ten thousand francs a year settled on her by an uncle at her birth, she determined to live on it, and go her own way in life.
Art was to her far preferable to society, and in a little cottage with one woman for a servant, ten thousand francs a year were affluence.
Madame Berselius, who had no scruple in using money obtained in any way whatsoever, fell in with her daughter’s views after a few formal objections.
Gillette had furnished the cottage as only a French firm can furnish a cottage, and the garden, which hadgone to decay, Maxine had furnished herself with the help of Father Champardy.
Adams, after the death of Berselius, had lingered on in Paris to settle up his affairs, going back to the Rue Dijon and taking up his old life precisely at the point where he had broken it off.
But he was richer by three things. Two days after Berselius’s death, news came to him from America of the death of an uncle whom he had never seen and the fact that he had inherited his property. It was not very much as money goes in America, but it was real estate in New York City and would bring in some seven or eight hundred pounds a year. He was richer by the experience he had gained and the Humanity he had discovered in himself, and he was richer by his love for Maxine.
But love itself was subordinate in the mind of Adams to the burning question that lay at his heart. He had put his hand to the plough, and he was not the man to turn aside till the end of the furrow was reached. He would have time to go to America, in any event, to look after his property. He decided to stay some months in England; to attack the British Lion in its stronghold; to explain the infamies of the Congo, and then cross the Atlantic and put the matter before the American Eagle.
He did.
For seven months he had been away, and every week he had written to Maxine, saying little enough about the progress of his work, and frequently using the cryptic statement, “I will tell you everything when I come back.”
And “He will be back to-day,” murmured Maxine,as she stood in the little garden watching the old man at his work.
The newness and the freshness of spring were in the air, snow that had fallen three days ago was nearly gone, just a trace of it lay on the black earth of the flower beds; white crocuses, blue crocuses, snow-drops, those first trumpeters of spring, blew valiantly in the little garden, the air was sharp and clear, and the sky above blue and sparkling. Great masses of white cloud filled the horizon, sun-stricken, fair, and snow-bright, solid as mountains, and like far-off mountains filled with the fascination and the call of distance.
“Spring is here,” cried the birds from the new-budding trees.
The blackbird in Dr. Pons’s garden to the left, answered a rapturous thrush in the trees across the way, children’s voices came from the Paris road and the sounds of wheels and hoofs.
A sparrow with a long straw in its beak flew right across Maxine’s garden, a little winged poem, a couplet enclosing the whole story of spring.
Maxine smiled as it vanished, then she turned; the garden gate had clicked its latch, and a big man was coming up the path.
There was only Father Champardy to see; and as his back was turned, he saw nothing and as he was deaf, he heard nothing. The old man, bent and warped by the years, deaf, and blind to the little love-scene behind him, was, without knowing it, also a poem of spring; but not so joyous as the poem of the sparrow.
“And now tell me all,” said Maxine, as they sat in the chintz-hung sitting room before a bright fire of logs. They had finished their private affairs. The day was two hours older, and a sunbeam that had pointed at them through the diamond-paned window had travelled away and vanished. The day was darker outside, and it was as though spring had lost her sportive mood and then withdrawn, not wishing to hear the tale that Adams had to tell.
In Adams’s hand Papeete’s skull had been a talisman of terrible and magical power, for with it he had touched men, and the men touched had disclosed their worth and their worthlessness. It had been a lamp which showed him society as it is.
The life and death of Berselius had been an object lesson for him, teaching vividly the fact that evil is indestructible; that wash yourself with holy water or wash yourself with soap, you will never wash away the evil being that you have constructed by long years of evil-doing and evil-thinking.
His pilgrimage in search of mercy and redress for a miserable people had emphasized the fact.
The great crime of the Congo stood gigantic, like a shadowy engine for the murdering of souls.
“Destroy that,” said the devil triumphantly. “You cannot, for it is past destruction; it has passed into the world of the ideal. No man’s hand may touch it; it is beyond the reach like the real self of your friend Berselius. Sweep the Congo State away to-morrow; this will remain. A thing soul-destroying till the end of time. It begansmall in the brain of one ruinous man, God whom I hate! look at it now.
“It has slain ten million men and it will slay ten million more, that is nothing; it has ruined body and soul, the stokers who fed it and the engineers who worked it, that is nothing; it has tangled in its wheels and debased the consciences of five nations, that is nothing. It is eternal—that is everything.
“Since I was flung out of heaven, I have made many things, but this is my masterpiece. If I and all my works were swept away, leaving only this thing, it would be enough. In the fiftieth century it will still have its clutch on man, yea, and to the very end of time.”
Cause and effect, my friend, in those two words you have the genius of this machine which will exist forever in the world of consequence, a world beyond divine or human appeal.
In England, Adams had found himself confronted with the dull lethargy of the people, and the indifference of the Established Church. The two great divisions of Christ’s Church were at the moment at death grapples over the question of Education. Only amongst the Noncomformists could be found any real response to the question which was, and is, the test question which will disclose, according to its answer, whether Christianity is a living voice from on high, or an echo from the Pagan past; and a debased echo at that. Debased, for if Adams could have stood in the Agora of Athens and told his tale of horror and truth, could Demosthenes have taken up the story; could Leopold the Barbarian have beena king in those days, and have done in those days, under the mandate of a deluded Greece, what he has done under the mandate of a deluded England; what a living spirit would have run through Athens like a torch, how the phalanxes would have formed, and the beaked ships at Piræus torn themselves from their moorings, to bring to Athens in chains the ruffian who had murdered and tortured in her name!
To complete the situation and give it a touch of hopelessness, he found that others had striven well, yet almost vainly in the field. Men working for truth and justice as other men work for gold, had attacked the public with solid battalions of facts, tabulated infamies; there had been meetings, discussions, words,palabres, as they say in the south; but the murderer had calmly gone on with his work, and England had put out no hand to stay him.
But it was not till he reached America, that Adams found himself fighting the machine itself.
One great man with a living voice he found—Mark Twain—and one great paper, at least. These had raised their voices calling for Justice—with what result?
Two side facts the skull of Papeete showed to the searcher, as a lamp shows up other things than the things searched for. The deadness of the English Church to the spiritual, and the corruption of his own countrymen.
When he had finished, it was dark outside. The firelight lit up the little room. Glancing through the diamond-paned window at that happy interior, one would never have guessed that the man by the fire had beentelling the girl by his side not a love story, but the story of the world’s greatest crime.
Maxine, whose hand was resting on the hand of her companion, said nothing for a moment after he had ceased speaking. Then, in a half-whisper, and leaning her forehead on his hand, “Poor things,” sighed Maxine.
So attuned were her thoughts to the thoughts of her companion, that she voiced the very words that were in his mind, as gazing beyond his own happiness and a thousand miles of sea and forest, he saw again the moonlight on the mist of the Silent Pools, and the bleached and miserable bones.
THE END
THE END