Mrs. Lambert was face to face with a decision of almost equal moment—was, indeed, in the midst of formulating the question which perplexed her, in order that she might lay it before her invisible guides for their consideration. She had just written upon a slate these words: "Shall I take Viola and go East, or shall I send her on alone?" when Clarke's foot was heard outside her door. Hastily hiding the slate, she rose to meet her visitor.
He was very pale, and something in his glance made her aware that his call was of no ordinary intent.
"Where is Viola?" he asked, abruptly.
"She has gone to the street with a friend. She will return soon."
"I am glad you are alone; I want to talk with you. I don't like the condition of mind Viola is in to-day. The coming of this Eastern professor seems to have stirred her to another fit of restless desire to go away. I can't think of this, Julia; she is too precious to me to lose. She has become a part of my very heart's blood, and I am afraid to let her go out of my sight. She is young and very impressionable. If she goes awayinto the city we may both lose her forever. The time has come to tell you that I love her—not precisely as I loved Adele, but deeply, passionately. I want her as my wife. I ask your consent to tell her so—to-night. Will you give that permission?"
Mrs. Lambert gazed up at him with such fixity of surprise that the rush of his forthright appeal weakened towards its end. She was overwhelmed by the intensity of passion in his voice, as well as by surprise that he, so soon after his bitter loss, could turn to another—to her daughter, a child. And, at last, she whispered, "What willtheysay, Anthony?"
This question he had anticipated, and his reply was ready. "Theywill advise it, I am sure. For does it not fit to their purpose? Does not my great book depend on Viola's daily co-operation? I have no fear oftheiranswer; I fear what she will say." He began to pace up and down the room. "What, fromtheirpoint of view, does her musical education signify? Think of it! She holds the key to the gates of death. On her the hopes of millions hang. She is the most wonderful organism in this world—so normal in all other ways, so trustworthy. She will convince all who come into her presence; and then, have not her 'controls' chosen me to publish their discoveries to the world? It is ordained that we work together in this way. She must not go to New York, that vast caldron which destroys all that is spiritual. She should go only when closely guarded by those who love her and understand her exquisite nature, her gifts. Someday I will take her there. Alone she will be prevented from her grand mission, her message lost, her faith destroyed. Can't you see she must not go?"
"I have done my best to keep her."
"I know you have," he answered, quickly; "and now you must give me authority over her—the authority of a husband. I am willing to put the whole matter to the test this night. She knows that I love her, and I think she honors and respects me—perhaps she may already love me, unworthy as I am."
The mother began now to tremble. "I don't know, Anthony; she thought—we all understood—that you—"
"I know what you mean," he irritably exclaimed. "Why will you persist in misreading me? I am not disloyal to Adele. Can't you see that my devotion for her remains, and that my regard for Viola is no treason to the dead? Adele will understand how vital, how necessary, Viola is to me, for does she not know that I could not even communicate with her if Viola went away? I do not love Viola as a boy loves, but as a man who understands himself and her—as one who understands her duties. It is a different love, but it is just as true, and it is high and holy. Without her I would have gone mad. She saved me from despair. Her union with me will make her an evangel to the earth-bound millions."
Flattered as well as awed by this disclosure of her daughter's power, the mother consented to his demand. Marriage with him would safe-harbor Viola,would establish her in life, and would also carry forward the work which she, too, considered of greater importance than any other concern of her life.
"I don't know her mind, Anthony," she said, after a silence. "She worries and puzzles me lately by her opposition to all our plans; but I don't think she is attached to any of the young men she knows. Still, she is not one to speak of such things. And if she consents—"
"When she comes, leave her to me," answered he, with returning confidence. Deep in the man's egotistic soul lay the thought, "I know why this girl is restless and uneasy—I know why she seeks afar off; it is because she thinks me indissolubly bound to Adele. When she finds that I love her, that I want her for my wife, she will come—her vague rebellions will cease. Her longings will close round me—"
When the door opened and Viola stepped into the room, so tall, so vivid, so tingling with life, the very force of his desire rendered Clarke outwardly humble, drove him to a feigning of sadness and to the voicing of desolate weakness. After the mother left them alone he began speaking in a low voice with deep-dropping cadences.
"Viola, I have something important to say to you. I am much disturbed over your renewed determination to go away. In the face of the great work which is yours to do I do not understand how you can think of dropping it in mid-air, so to speak, to go away on an errand which is essentially selfish—as well as mostunwise and full of danger. I don't understand this renewal of restlessness on your part."
The girl's face was clouded, for she had just learned of Serviss's departure and was deeply hurt. She drew the pin from her hat and silently laid it on the table, and in this gesture was something of the resolution of the warrior who divests himself of his cumbering plumed helmet. "It's very simple," she curtly answered. "I want to get away from here for a while. I can't endure my life here any longer."
"Why not? Why are you so unhappy?" he asked, with an accent of stern reproof. "It is a beautiful land—you are among your own people, you have your music, your work, and you are young. You ought to be happy."
"That's just it," she interrupted, quite fiercely. "It is because I am young that I want to do something. It seems to me to-day as if I were losing the best years of my life here in this little town, and I want to get away. Imustget away!"
"Does your work with me seem of no value?" His glowing eyes sought hers. He approached her. "Do I weary you? Am I an irritation?"
Her face softened. "No, you have helped me very much. I couldn't have endured this life without you and my music; but this other life—these sittings—I can't go on with them."
"Don't you feel that you must? Don't you feel their enormous importance?"
"No, I don't! I begin to doubt myself—everybody. What havetheydone for you, for anybody, that I should sacrifice nay whole life to them and their wishes?"
"They brought me healing; they made Dr. Randall happy in his last years; they are a daily solace to your mother; they will comfort millions through our agency." He bent towards her. "Viola, my girl, God has designed for you and me a closer union than even this. You say I have comforted you, that I have made life happier for you. I have come to-night to tell you that I love you, and that I want you to be my wife."
The girl recoiled from the touch of his hand, uttering a low cry of surprise, of question.
He went on: "Yes, I have grown to care for you beyond any other human being. You are my staff, my stay. God sent you to my spiritual healing. I should have gone mad but for you." He bent upon her a look of passion and command. "You must not think of going away. You belong to me." Her face warned him that his appeal was being misinterpreted, and he added, quickly: "I know this comes to you abruptly, and yet you must have felt my love, you must have read my heart."
"Not in that way," she answered, in a low voice. "I thought you—I always understood—" The memory of his professed suffering, his oft-expressed adoration for the dead Adele, checked her, filled her with a storm of doubt, and she could not finish her accusation.
He caught up the thread she dropped. "Ididlove Adele, I love her still—a holy, mysterious love—a loveyou cannot understand; my feeling for you is different, but no less high. It is the cry of a lonely, desolate man. Come to me, Viola; do not question; follow your heart's leadings, as I do." The light of her accusing young eyes pierced the armor of his defence, and he fell upon his knees before her. "I can't explain it, but it is true, Viola. I have not deceived you. I loved her—I love her still. She is vital in my life. I was sincere in all I said; but you are flesh and she is spirit. Don't you see? You can comfort me—assist me, work with me as she cannot."
As he poured out his passionate plea, a sense of injury, of disillusionment, overran the girl. She revolted from the touch of his head against her knee. "You must not talk to me that way—you belong to her." She pushed him away. "Get up. Go away from me. I hate you now."
There was something so final, so convicting in her gesture of repulsion that the man's head dropped. He covered his face and uttered a groaning cry, and so lay silently sobbing, while she looked down at him—woman-grown in that instant. His passion moved her to pity, not to love, and she put him aside gently and left the room without further word. Her master, her highest earthly guide, had fallen from his lofty place and lay grovelling at her feet. This conception, vague but massive, oppressed her heart, and lay upon her brain like a leaden cap.
At the moment she, too, despaired of life and knew not where to turn for aid.
The Bacteriologic Department of the Corlear Medical School stood at this time on one of the cross-streets of the old East Side, not far from Corlear Park. It was a large, old-fashioned brick building, worn of threshold, and as ugly in line as a livery barn. Its entrance was merely a gap in the wall, its windows rectangular openings to let in the light. Not one touch of color or grace, not one dignified line could be detected throughout its whole exterior. It was constructed for use, not ornament.
Interiorly it was quite as utilitarian. Its halls, bare and cheerless, echoed to the tread and were repellent as those of a barracks. The visitor felt chilled, disappointed, as if he had been met by the insolent servant of an indifferent hostess. It seemed the home of the mathematical, the mechanical, the material; but this was a mistake. It was a house of dreams. The right knock at one of those ugly doors would permit one to step into the presence of the most cheery, the most learned, the most imaginative of individuals—the man of germs, poet, dreamer, and experimentalist, absorbed in the pursuit of the unattainable, concerned withthe ultimate structure of organic life, baffled, yet toiling on for love of his work, while the sick of the world believe in him as an angel of altruism.
The far-away rivers of the world have all been traversed and mapped, but the streams of blood in the arteries of man are filled with the unknown. The habits of the Esquimaux, the customs of the dwarfs of Central Africa, the ways of the baboons of Sumatra are minutely set to book, but the wars of the phagocytes remain indeterminate, unexplained. With microscope to his eye the bacteriologist is now examining the constituent parts of the blood, isolating, breeding, and minutely studying the germs of fevers, the growths of tumors, and other elemental forms of human parasites, in order to discover their antagonisms, their likings; for in these jungles of the flesh the war of races proceeds quite as in the Amazonian forests—the white cells against the red, devouring, destroying.
The men behind these bald, bleak doors are tireless workers as well as seers and sages. They toil (at ridiculously low salaries) in the avowed hope of eradicating diseases. They do not pause in dismay of the insoluble. They—or such as they—discovered the cure for small-pox, for hydrophobia, diphtheria, and for yellow-fever. They and their like brought chloroform to the woman in travail, and ether to the wounded soldier. They have enormously reduced the number of those who die on the battle-field by their antiseptic dressings, and by one discovery after another have made infantile diseases less destructive. They alreadycontrol yellow-fever and are about to eradicate typhoid—yet they say "our work is but begun."
Here one comes upon their dreams. Calm and contained as their words are, their hearts are aflame with passion for the undiscovered. They are akin to those who seek the theoretic poles of the earth, undaunted by endless defeats. With quickening breath they watch the electrons flame and fall, seeing the ultimate constitution of matter almost within their grasp, and yet they do not permit their dreams to blind or weaken them in their wearisome, hopeless quest.
They have their heroism for humanity, too. They meet death face to face, as they pry close into the cause of decay, the secret of morbid growth. There is more danger in certain germs than in lions. Blood-poisoning is to the surgeon a more constant menace than hunger to an Arctic explorer. These students never know what destroyer they may unwittingly unloose. Cross-section of abnormal tissue is more entrancing than a rose-leaf, a cluster of bacilli more beautiful than a snowflake. They have gone past all creeds, these calm young men, but they bow before the unspeakable majesty of the unknown. To them the Hebrew Scriptures are but the tales of minstrels in the childhood of the race, Mohammed a dreamer of baseless visions, and Christ but incarnate love in an age of war. The Creator they conceive is too profound to admit of any attribute. He neither thinks nor feels, and the life that pulses at the base of the first faintcell is a part of the same power that binds the stars to their circling suns.
Notwithstanding their daily contact with the most appalling cases of disease and death, they come and go briskly with jocular greetings on the stair-ways. They return to their homes each night to read, to smoke their pipes, deporting themselves like commonplace fathers and brothers and husbands. They even make love like other men; but, nevertheless, they may be overtaken in muse like alchemists, subject to fear and hope like children. To the business-man their ways are ways of silence and sorcery. Their deep-hid convictions are at variance with all theories of Christian redemption, and the realities of their realm more startling than any romance of war or peace. To them matter is as insoluble as the transforming forces which emanate from it. They play with nerves, laying bare the beating heart of life, forever finding, yet forever failing.
To this big, bare building, to one of these barren rooms, Morton Serviss returned after eight weeks study of the sands and the stars and the cave-dwellings of vanished men. From the infinitely lonely and huge and beautiful he cloistered himself to pore upon the habits of the infinitely small, to listen to the swarming, diminished tumult of the protozoa. He came back, as usual, brown, alert, and keen-eyed—eager for work, confident of some new victory, for he was an investigator of weight and standing among the younger men of science. On the street he wasindistinguishable from other debonair young men of good social position; in his laboratory he was a master, absorbed, reticent, and precise of plan.
His chief, a little, gray, bent, brusque German, greeted him with absent-minded smile, remarked briefly upon his good health, and then they set to work. In thirty seconds he had forgotten the desert, the face of Viola, all his energies concentrated on the segment of cancer beneath his eye. A newly developed germ, a thousandth part the stature of a gnat's toe, shut out the valley of the Colorow. All day he moved among a wilderness of tubes, jars, and copper ovens, peering, observing—and in a sense happy.
But at night, when alone with his pipe in his study, the lavender sands, the violet peaks, the vivid saffron skies returned with power. Viola, too, came back to bewitch him from his reading, to make his microscopic world of shadowy substance and the smell of his laboratory a hateful thing.
He heard nothing further of her. Britt wrote once or twice, but did not allude to either Clarke or the Lamberts, and Serviss did not care to ask particularly about them. It was better for him not to be concerned further with the girl's singular history. He hated the irregular, the pretentious. His own life, so clear, so well regulated, made her daily performances the more monstrous. The whole had become so foolish in retrospect that he refrained from speaking of it, even to his sister.
It was not quite true that he saw little of New York,for his sister, Mrs. Rice—a widow with two children—who kept his house, or, rather, his double flat, was a social soul, and not merely went about freely, but entertained regularly. They lived handsomely, and the world in which they moved was crowded with duties as well as with sane pleasures. They entertained at their table artists from Paris, savans from Berlin, and literary lesser lights from London, and they enjoyed all this, envying the richer and more ostentatious families of the city as little as they despised the poor of Hester Street. The one quality which they insisted upon in their guests was intellectual cleverness. Perhaps they were a little severe on bores.
Their ways were quite as remote from the so-called captains of industry as from the farmers of Jersey, and the roar of Broad Street was so far away it reached them but as the hum of hornets outside their window-pane. To the explorer of Tibet this life was narrow. To the gay dinner-parties of upper Fifth Avenue it would have seemed dull. To the wrecker of railroads on Wall Street it was indubitably petty. To the merchant it was unprofitable, and yet they were quite content with it, and looked out upon the bustling throngs of fashion and the hustling world of business with equal word of good-natured contempt.
"We can't all be biologists," Serviss was accustomed to say, "and I suppose somebody must continue to steal and murder."
Viola, too, came back to bewitch him from his reading"VIOLA, TOO, CAME BACK TO BEWITCH HIM FROM HIS READING"ToList
"VIOLA, TOO, CAME BACK TO BEWITCH HIM FROM HIS READING"ToList
They came of good stock, these Servisses, and knew it and felt it. Breeding was indicated in their well-setheads, in their shapely hands, and especially in their handsome noses. "We are inclined to be stubby, that's true, but we have the noses of aristocrats—they go back to the Aryans of the Danube," said Mrs. Rice to a friend. "Morton cannot consider a girl of questionable pedigree, no matter how rich or charming she may be. We believe in stock—not in family, butstrain; a family is an accident, a strain is a formation. The Mortons and the Servisses arestrains. Their union in my brother will yet make itself felt." Her confidence in his powers was absolute. "He is one of the greatest young men of his day. Time will show," she added, as if to clinch her argument.
The circle of their acquaintance included, first of all—and of course—the scientific group, then in successive widening waves the general literary and educational fraternities, the artistic and musical sets, and finally they kept in touch with the old New York families, their own school-mates and friends and those related. All the details and duties of the social side of his life Morton turned over to Kate, and such was her tact, and her skill and charm as hostess, that her rooms of a Tuesday afternoon were filled with a company of men and women as cheerful and as informal as they were clever and distinguished. Among these groups Serviss moved as detached of all responsibility as any of his guests, finding in this contact with bright minds one of the greatest pleasures of his life.
These various circles moved afar from isms. They prided themselves on their balance, theircommonsense, their fund of comparative ideas. True, some of the women had embraced Christian Science more or less openly, but they did not esteem it necessary to proselyte. Political creeds were but jocularly discussed. To advocate any special belief was to prick one's self down a bore, although some of those in the strictly university circles did at times become troublesomely learned in conversation. However, this was esteemed "old fogy-ism" by the younger men like Serviss, who alluded to "the days of the professional monologue" with smiling contempt. Conversation with them was a means of diversion, not of enlightenment as to any special subject.
Into these circles a thorough-going spiritualist never penetrated. To tell the truth, these modernists did not permit the hereafter to awe or affright them. Some of them went to church, but they did so calmly, patiently, as to a decorous function, and some may at times have prayed, through the medium of printed supplication, but, generally speaking, they had reached a sort of philosophic indifference as to the one-time burning question of heaven or hell. So far from acquiescing in the dictum that morality was but filthy rags, they esteemed good deeds and clean thoughts higher than any religion whatsoever.
Mrs. Rice expressed the convictions of many of her associates by saying, humorously: "No, I don't want to be saved. I'm not lost. I don't know as I care for immortality. Forever is a long time—I might get bored; anyhow, the future must take care of itself."
In all the drawing-rooms of his friends, Morton Servisswas a most welcome guest. His frank, boyish ways, his careless dress, his freedom from cant, his essential good-fellowship deceived the most of his acquaintances into thinking him a mere dabbler in science, a man of wealth amusing himself; but Weissmann, who was qualified to know, said: "He has persistency, concentration, a keen mind, a clear eye, and avoonderfulphysique."
He belonged, moreover, to the men of imagination, not to those who write books or poems, but to those who tunnel mountains, build vast bridges, invent new motors, and play with electrical currents as if they were ribbons. The novelist basing himself on what he knows of human nature projects himself into the unknown, just as the scientist who stands on the discoveries of those before him feels out into the darkness for new stars, new forces. And yet as Clarke and his party indignantly declared, "both novelist and scientist ignore the question most vital to us all—the question of the soul's survival after death"—ignore it till some loved one dies, then they, too, agonize in secret over the mystery for a space, only to rise and go back to their work, concealing the conviction which their hour of anguish brought to them.
Perhaps it was not chance, but deep design, which had brought this vigorous young investigator face to face with a mystery crying out for solution—certainly it was not without craft that the unseen powers had baited their hook with the almost irresistible allurement of a young and ardent girl. If there is logic in the shadow, fate was on Viola's side.
One morning in late March, while Serviss was still at his morning's mail, Dr. Britt's card came in, bringing with it instant, vivid recollection of Colorow. The beauty of his days there had by no means faded from his mind, although he had succeeded in putting his romance in the background of his working brain, and had given up all thought of ever seeing Viola again.
He greeted Britt most cordially. "So you turned up at last! How is the lung? Isn't this a raw time of the year for you?"
"Well, yes; but my father died a few days ago, and I had to come on, and being near I ran in to see how you and the 'bugs' were getting on."
"Oh, we're thriving. Their ways are quite absorbing. How is your own 'farm'?"
"All in ruins. The fact is I've neglected the poor little brutes. I had no time for germs after I went off into the study of 'spooks.'"
"You don't tell me you've turned investigator of spirits! What have you discovered?"
"Not a thing. It's the most elusive problem I ever tackled. You remember the Lamberts?"
"Very well. I was about to ask about them."
"They're here now."
"Here! In New York?"
"Yes. They went to Boston last fall—Boston is a hot-bed of spookism, as you may know. They spent the winter there among the brethren, and have come on here for a change."
"They'll get it. What is—the girl doing?"
"Spooking mainly. That's all her 'guides' will allow her to do. Clarke still dominates the household by the aid of the ghostly granddaddy—a grim old chap that. They hold regular 'séances' now."
"You don't mean it!" Serviss grew graver yet of countenance. "I had hoped they would spare her that humiliation. I haven't seen her name in the papers."
"Oh, they don't go quite so far as that. The circles are 'very select.' Only the priests of the faith and their friends are invited—no admission fee—you understand?"
"I'm glad of that. It would be too bad to put that child forward in the double rôle of fakir and money-breeder; but, tell me, have you any fresh light on the subject of her mediumship?"
"Well, yes. I've changed my point of view slightly. I'm inclined to think there is pretty generally some basis for the faith. The literature of the subject is immense, and some of it is as well authenticated as any physical treatise. I'm convinced that Miss Lambert has no intent to deceive—she has no possiblemotive to do so—but Clarke has, and yet I cannot connect him directly with the phenomena."
"How is her health?"
"Very good, apparently. She is quite as blooming as when you saw her, and is immensely more mature mentally."
"Is she resigned to her life?"
"Sometimes she is and sometimes not. She is very sensitive to influences, and at times when Clarke is near she grows almost as enthusiastic as he—at other times she bitterly complains. I tried to free her from Clarke, but she wouldn't give me the authority necessary."
"What do you mean by that?"
There was something both sad and mocking in Britt's face as he answered: "I offered to marry her—wasn't that generous of me? She spurned my humble offer, intimating that there was small choice between me and Clarke and the spooks. No, I'll be honest, she was very nice and kind about it, and added that perhaps Mr. Clarke was right—her duty in the world was to 'convince people of the reality of the forces,' or something like that. 'I shall never marry,' she added, to soften the blow, and really she does seem a person set apart."
Serviss looked down at his book. "I suppose she imagines herself stricken with a mortal illness. I confess I sometimes think of her in that way. I can't understand why her parents—" He checked himself. "Where are they stopping?"
"They're housed over near the Riverside Drivewith a wild enthusiast who has oodles and wads of money—old Simeon Pratt."
"I've heard of Simeon—Uncle Simeon the reporters call him on 'the Street.' I remember now about his spiritualism. He had some remarkable experiences after his wife's death—drowned, wasn't she?"
"You can't afford to be indefinite about Simeon's sorrows, doctor, for they made him what he is. I find these believers all start in about the same way. Simeon's wife and two daughters were lost in the English Channel. Simeon became a believer the following Monday—or maybe it was Tuesday."
"I recall the story of his life now. It was all very tragic. I wonder he didn't become a maniac."
"Some people think he did," answered Britt, dryly.
"So they're with Simeon. He lives gorgeously, I'm told."
"About like a lone American guest in a twenty-franc-per-day hotel in Paris. Why, yes, they're very comfortable there—all but the girl. She's discontented and unhappy, if I'm any judge, and is besieged day and night by the mourning faithful, not to speak of certain amorous males."
This hurt, and Serviss shifted ground. "Does she keep up her music?"
Again Britt smiled, but not humorously. "She plays the harp—in the dark."
"You mean—"
"She's taken on a lot more of the regulationtricks—materializing flowers, slate-writing, music without hands, etc."
"You don't mean it! I can hardly associate such doings with her," sorrow and indignation mingled in his voice.
"I assure you I was there last night at a 'circle,' and these things took place with Clarke as ring-master. There wasn't a particle of originality—it was the same old mill, and the same old grist, yet I don't hold her responsible in any harmful degree. I can't believe she designedly tricks, but she's surrounded now by a gang of chattering, soft-pated women, and men with bats in their belfry, who unite in assuring her that her God-given powers must be fostered. They've cut her off from any decent marriage—she's virtually a prisoner to their whims. What they may induce her to do next I don't know. I'm going to hang round here for a week or two and see." A violent fit of coughing interrupted him. When he recovered he looked up sidewise. "Isn't this a peach of a climate? Wouldn't you think they'd build at least one of their big cities where microbes couldn't fatten on genius?"
"What led Clarke to consent to leaving the West? When I was there he bitterly opposed her going."
"Oh, it's very simple. He has written a book onThe Physical Proof of Immortality, and, being anxious for a publisher, withdrew his opposition to her plan, and declared himself willing to go to Boston—at Lambert's expense."
"Is he out of the Church?"
"Absolutely. You should have heard his farewell sermon. It really was as dramatic a speech as I ever heard. He went on to declare that the Hebrews were not the only seers, that the wells of inspiration were not yet dry, that revelation was waiting upon every soul to-day, and that he had been led by sorrow to listen at the key-hole, and so on. I trembled for the girl's secret, but he had himself in hand, and did not betray her. No one out there knows for certain what her abnormalities are."
"How about Lambert? Why didn't he take a hand?"
"He seemed bewildered by it all, and overawed by Clarke and the girl's 'controls.' 'It's all above timber-line for me,' he said, but he didn't like their coming away a little bit. He was angry with Clarke for breaking up his home, and if the girl had been his own I think he would have stopped the business long ago. Then there was a young fellow, Clinton Ward, who was working for Lambert, a fine young fellow—"
"I remember him."
"Well, it seems that his father is a partner in a publishing firm in Boston, and Clarke tried to make use of him to get his book published, and I believe his firm is to take it. Meanwhile the young fellow is in love with Viola, and willing to marry her and take chances, but his family is very properly aghast. Viola, knowing this—or for some other reason—refuses him. And there you are! The girl seems cursed on all sides,and, worst of all, has to endure Clarke and his ravings twelve hours of every mortal day."
"What is her relation to Clarke?" asked Serviss, hesitatingly.
"Well, now, I don't know. Sometimes I think he controls her by some infernal hypnotic power; and then again, from some phrase of her own, I think she considers her mind diseased, and marriage with any one else impossible."
"I don't see how the mother can stand by and see her daughter's life burned away."
"She, in her turn, seems enslaved to the dead. She has often told me that her father's spirit is leading her every movement."
"That particular ghost is Clarke—don't you think?"
Britt's eyes narrowed. "I don't know. I have never been able to connect him directly with a single one of these manifestations, and yet he must be at the bottom of part of it."
"It all comes back, then, to the girl herself."
Britt rose uneasily. "I repeat I am completely at sea. I have studied every line of old Randall's notes till I'm 'dopy' myself. Everything has conspired to make the girl hysterical—to fasten some accursed mental weakness upon her. If I could have stopped it two years ago she might have outgrown it. Every year now makes it less easy for her to shake it off—whatever it is."
"Atrocious!" exclaimed Serviss. "Has no one authority to act?"
Britt shrugged his shoulders. "What would you do when both parents—the living and the dead—consent? Only a husband could intervene, and Clarke seems to be about to claim that place. No, I see no hope for the girl. She may be right, after all, in joining Clarke."
Serviss rose to release the emotional tension under which he had kept his limbs. "You don't know their present plans?"
"No, only that Clarke is going to publish soon." He looked round the room. "What a development since my time! Bacteriology and auto-transportation are neck and neck in their amazing expansion."
Thereupon they dropped all reference to the Lamberts and their trials, and turned their minds upon phagocytes and other ravening mites whose likes and dislikes, minute as they are, work more devastation than cannon.
Serviss's work was over for that day; after Britt went away he sat idly at his desk, his mind busy with the revolting pictures called up by what he had heard of Viola. "They are destroying a beautiful soul," he exclaimed, bitterly, as he recalled the charm of her face and voice on that ride to the mine. "They are forcing a charming girl into an abominable life, they are warping her moral fibre into ugliness and death—and Clarke is the fanatic devil of the scheme."
The desire to see her, to talk with her, to measure the change in her grew very strong—so strong that he meditated a call, but the thought of Clarke cut theresolution off before it was fully formed. "Probably Britt is right—Clarke's rotten soul has fatally infected hers."
When Weissmann came in Serviss turned to him and said: "Doctor, I want to ask you a very unusual question."
"Proceed," replied the old man, who spoke with a little touch of the German now and then.
"What do you think of the claims of spiritualism?"
Weissmann did not smile as Serviss had expected. He became grave. "I am not qualified to judge. Speaking generally, I would say there are many phases to be considered. There are some millions of people who believe in it—which would argue some small basis of truth to start with. On the other hand, the extraordinary credulity of these people is to be taken into account."
"You mean they are those bereaved and anxious to believe?"
"Precisely. Again, speaking generally, I find few things impossible in this world of mystery. To take an old metaphor, I would not be surprised to find a grain of wheat in all this bushel of chaff. Every genuine phenomenon in the world stands related to every other phenomenon, and I believe that the truth or falsity of the spiritualistic hypothesis can be determined in accordance with physical science. If I were young and strong like you I would devote myself to the study of this delusion. It should be studied by one like yourself—to whom death is no nearpresence; as for me, I have two sons and one wife dead; my judgment would be vitiated therewith. You have no dead; you would make an admirable student of these spirit-voices and signs."
Serviss, though a little awed by the old man's unexpectedly solemn manner, ventured further. "Have you ever witnessed any of these unaccountable doings which Crookes and Zöllner instance?"
"I have had them in my own chamber." The old man's eyes twinkled. "Once, as I was dozing on my bed, one morning early, a faint cloud, like a puff of smoke, began to form above my head. It became pendulous, reaching towards me, and out of it a hand developed and extended. I said: 'It is an hallucination—very curious! I will touch it and it will vanish.' I reached—I grasped the hand—it was warm and solid!I leaped from my bed with a yell." He chuckled at his keenly remembered discomfiture.
"How do you account for it? It was an illusion, of course. You thought the illusion only ocular—it extended to the sense of touch."
Weissmann's eyes gleamed speculatively. "We will let it go so. The world of sense and the world of spirit curiously intermingle—as we know."
"But these manifestations, so far as I have any knowledge, are so foolish and childish—"
"Well, so many foolish and childish persons have gone to the other world. Death is not the beginning of wisdom. I am an old man, Serviss, and already many of my loved ones are dead. I should like tobelieve they are still sentient, and maybe they are. I am German. The blood of Kant is in my veins." He seemed to be speaking partly to himself. "I do not dogmatize so gladly as I once did. As I do not know the essence of matter, it would be folly for me to assume to fathom the depth of spirit. The essential hopelessness of science is coming to render me humble. Spiritualism certainly is a comfortable belief. I would gladly embrace it if I could. I suspend judgment. This desire for another life may be only a survival of a more unreasoning time, something we will outgrow."
Serviss was profoundly surprised by his chief's attitude. He had expected a large, calm, and rather contemptuous reply to his question. In place of decision he encountered a doubt, a hesitancy, which betrayed weakness. Rudolph Weissmann, great as he was, belonged to the innumerable throng of the bereaved whose judgments are clouded by passion. He, too, was growing old, his all-embracing mind had yielded to an hallucination.
The young man's respect for his chief did not diminish, but a feeling of sadness swept over him as he realized that another renowned and fearless investigator was nearing the end of his great usefulness, and that upon the clear blue steel of his intelligence the rust of age had begun to fall. Truly the power of his early training, his worship of Kant and his school was still vital.
Then he pondered his words. "If I were a youngman like you I would investigate this thing," and recalled that no young man of science had ever devoted himself to it. "They all came to it late in life, after bereavement."
The bereaved! The whole stupendous delusion seemed to rest upon the overmastering desire of the bereaved for their beloved. The great and good men and women among the believers (he was willing to admit there were such) came to investigation weakened by sorrow, made illogical by loss. They put their sane judgment, their strength, their calm patience aside and grasped eagerly at the lying comfort extended to them. They were not merely deceived, they developed fraud by their blindness, by their hunger for consolation, and by their crass credulity. He was still young enough to have inexorable theories—to be of single-hearted loyalty to his creed. To him as a monist, the soul (as an entity apart from the body) did not exist. Consciousness was a physical disturbance of the higher nerve centres, and thought a secretion of the brain. He acknowledged no line of demarcation between the crystal and the monera—and no chasm (of course) between man and the animals. The universe was a unit—and all its forms and forces differentiations of one substance and that substance too mysterious to be analyzed or named. In such a philosophy as this there could be no room for any hypothesis which even so much as squinted towards dualism, or that permitted a conception so childish as the persistence of the individuality after death.
However, he did not carry his implacable principles into the homes of his friends, and seldom permitted them to interfere with his enjoyment of wines or good dinners, the theatre or the drawing-room. This fact, from a cynical point of view, proved his faith to have been as truly of his laboratory as that of a bishop, with Spencer and Darwin and Koch and Haeckel as the founders of its articles.
He went home that night with the words of both Weissmann and Britt intermingling in his mind, strongly tempted to tell Viola's story to his sister, and so enlist her sympathy for the poor girl.
But it happened that an engagement to dine filled Kate's mind, and he had no time to open the subject till they were on the way, and by that time he had concluded not to involve her in his perplexity.
By a curious coincidence one of the guests at the dinner brought a hush of expectancy over the entire company by relating a series of experiences he had been privileged to share with a "psychic" some years before. He told of his mystification with a laugh in his eyes and with racy vigor of tongue, but Serviss, newly alive to the topic, could not but marvel at the intensity of interest manifested by every soul present. "Disguise it as we may," said the narrator, "this question of the life beyond the grave is chief of all our problems. It is the sovereign mystery, after all."
At this the hostess spoke: "I wishwecould see some of these things. You make us shudder deliciously. Can't you sometime bring thisremarkable young woman—they're always women, aren't they?"
"Oh no," laughingly replied the young fellow. "One of the most amusing 'stunts' I ever saw was that of a man in Washington, who made a banjo play behind a curtain while holding both your hands."
"Whydothe spirits do such foolish things? I should think they'd be ashamed to act so 'frivolous like.'"
"They always talk like Indians, don't they? It's a pity. Why aren't they dignified and sincere?"
The young story-teller went on. "That's just it. The mediums are so nonchalant while causing these marvels that they fail to convince. Why, when I was holding a slate in order that they might write upon it, I minded the scratching no more than a clock a-ticking, they had made me that careless of their hocus-pocus. A voice in my ear can't make me start, and nothing, absolutely nothing, can now 'rouse my fell of hair.' You put a potato in the ashes of the hearth and it will ultimately pop into something to eat. You put a medium in a dark place and she will set your soul's nerves a-tingle."
Under all this banter Serviss perceived the pulse of an interest which laid hold on the most secret hopes and fears of the youngest and shook the eldest with an elemental dread and longing. It was as if the flood-gates of a sea of doubt and wonder had been turned in upon a dozen minds hitherto as well kept as lawns. Questions popped like corks and answers were asvivacious as the gurgle of wine, but the topic remained indeterminate—the argument inconclusive.
On their way home, Serviss said to his sister: "Did you notice how profound the silence became when Ralph started that discussion of the occult?"
"It is always so."
"Is it, really? I hadn't noticed it particularly."
"That's because people are afraid to talk such things before you scientists. Why, every woman there has been to a palmist or mind-reader or something."
"You astonish me. Have you?"
"Of course! I go every little while just for fun. We all pretend that we don't believe in it, but we do. I'm scared blue every time I go to a new one—they're all such creepy creatures. The last one I went to was positively weird."
Serviss was severe. "Kate, I am ashamed of you. To think that you, a woman of penetration, associating with people of rare intelligence like myself—"
"But why don't you people of rare intelligence look into these things? Why do you leave us poor untrained emotional creatures to suffer befoolment when you could so easily instruct us and shield us?"
"Because, while we could easily prove you befooled, you would still follow after your saw-dust idols. We prefer to save you from yourbodilyinfirmities and contagions, and so react on your minds."
She laughed. "That's very clever of you, and very decent. Stay with your germs, rob us of our diseases, but leave us, oh, leave us our deliciousthrills!" Shebecame grave. "The fact is, Morton, we all have moments when we feel the presence of the dead. I do. Father and mother never seem away off in our Graceland vault; sometimes they seem to be in the room with me. It's all a fancy, you'll say, and very foolish, but I believe mother actually comes to help me with Georgie when he is ill. Sometimes in the deep of the night I thrill as if she touched me."
He was not unsympathetic as he said: "You never hinted at this before."
"I was afraid to do so. If mother exists somewhere, and in some etherealized form, why can't she come back? Why couldn't her mind act on mine and produce the sensation of her presence?"
"Perhaps it could. Only there is no proof of its ever happening."
"Now see here, Morton, so long as we are on this subject at last, I want to ask you, do you believe mother is gone—absolutely blotted out of existence?" She waited in tense silence, and as they passed a street-lamp, and the light fell on his face, he seemed to have grown suddenly pale. "Do you believe Darwin and Spencer and Victor Hugo have gone to nothingness?"
"No, at the bottom of my heart I can't think that, and yet theoretically I cannot conceive of the existence of any soul apart from the body. Think of it! If mother lives, so do all the billions of cannibals, negroes, Bushmen—you can't draw a line and say 'here begins the immortal souls.'"
"That isn't the question. I do not believe that father and mother and Hayward have vanished into a handful of dust, I cling to a belief in their living selves, not because the bishop and the prayer-books say so, but just because my own mind says so. I won't surrender them, that's all."
"And yet a faith springing from such a desire is not well based. I want to tell you about some people I met last summer. They will interest you." Thereupon he pictured his first meeting with Viola. He described the mother and Clarke. He told of his interview with Britt and of Randall's revelations concerning Viola's life. "And now they have convinced the girl that she should extend her sphere of influence and bring her chicanery to bear on the metropolis."
"How do you know it is chicanery?"
"Britt said—"
"I don't care what Britt said. You found the mother sweet, and you admit the girl is charming. I'll trust your instinct in such matters, Mort; you've never been one to run after frumps and minxes. She had good eyes?"
"Beautiful eyes, steady, blue-gray, wistful. She quite enchanted me at first—"
"And you're sentimental over her still?"
"I didn't say that I was sentimental over her at any time."
"I don't care what you said. I can tell by your voice that she is a lost, sweet dream. What do you want me to do?"
"Nothing."
"Yes, you do. You want me to see her and find out what she's doing here. It is Kate to the rescue! I will go to-morrow."
"You are too precipitate! You might wait and get my mind."
"I have your mind already, and I believe in doing things vigorously. Besides, you've roused my curiosity. After all these years of waiting to see you get interested in something besides your 'bugs'!—I'm delighted to know you're human, and that there is one woman in the world who can make you moan. You are hit—don't deny it! You've been brooding on that girl all this time. I've known you were hit, but I thought I would wait till you cared to speak. I'm crazy to see her. I shall act at once."
"It's too much to ask of you, but I hope you will consider me to the extent—"
"If your theory is correct that girl ought to be snatched away before the mob of occultists, freaks, and flatterers of this city utterly spoil her. Anyhow, I'm going to look into her case on my own account." And in this determination she snuggled into the corner of the carriage and became silent.
Serviss found that sharing his experience with his sister had enormously increased the weight and importance of his doubt. Viola and her singular beleaguerment had suddenly grown to be a vital problem—something to be immediately seized upon, and he casually added: "It is only fair to say that theLamberts are above the need of taking money for any display of 'psychic force.'"
Suddenly Kate sat up. "Suppose the girl reallyhasthese powers?"
"That is impossible!"
"Why impossible? Do you men of science pretend to knowallthere is to know?"
"Certainly not; but think what such an admission involves."
"No matterwhatit involves. You don't ask what the X-ray involves; you ask, first of all, is it a fact? If the girl has these powers, then what? You don't even know what she claims, do you?"
"Not in detail."
"Well, then, don't condemn her till you know what you're condemning her for."
"Kate, you amaze me. I thought you would commend my cool judgment, my sanity, and lo and behold! as Aunt Celina says, you have become the girl's advocate and the assailant of science."
"Not at all. I merely say you scientific people should not be so insultingly sure that people with a faith are fools."
"We don't say fools—we merely say misinformed."
"Anyhow, you've interested me in this medium—"
"For Heaven's sake, don't call her that if you're going to see her. To apply such a name to that sweet child is an outrage."
Kate's voice was exultant as she cried out: "Now I know you're in love with her."
"Mrs. Rice, you are a very wise woman."
"I hope I shall not find you a very silly scientist," she replied, with several implications of superiority in both words and tone.