Flames Part 10

"Do you wish I hadn't told you?"

"No, of course not. But it is so extraordinary, so unnatural."

"It is utterly gone now, thank G.o.d. I say, we have resolved that we won't sit again, haven't we?"

"Yes; and what you have just told me makes me hate the whole thing. The game seems a game no longer."

When the door had closed upon Julian, Valentine sat down and wrote a note.

He addressed it to--

"Doctor Hermann Levillier, "Harley Street, W.,"

and laid it on his writing-table, so that it might be posted early the next morning.

CHAPTER VI

A CONVERSATION AT THE CLUB

Doctor Levillier was not a materialist, although he concerned himself much with the functions of the body, and with that strange spider's web of tingling threads which we call the nervous system. The man who sweeps out the temple, who polishes the marble steps and dusts the painted windows, may yet find time to bend in prayer before the altars he helps to keep beautiful, may yet find a heart to wonder at the spirit which the temple holds as an envelope holds a letter. Reversing the process of mind which seems to lead so many medical students to atheism, Dr. Levillier had found that the more he understood the weaknesses, the nastinesses, the dreary failures, the unimaginable impulses of the flesh, the more he grew to believe in the existence, within it, of the soul. One day a worn-out dyspeptic, famous for his intellectual acquirements over two continents, sat with the little great doctor in his consulting-room.

The author, with dry, white lips, had been recounting a series of sordid symptoms, and, as the recital grew, their sordidness seemed suddenly to strike him with a mighty disgust.

"Ah, doctor," he said. "And do you know there are people thousands of miles away from Harley Street who actually admire me, who are stirred and moved by what I write, who make a cult and a hero of me. They say I have soul, forsooth. But I am all body; you know that. You doctors know that it is only body that we put on paper, body that lifts us high, or drags us low. Why, my best romances come straight from my liver. My pathos springs from its condition of disorder, and my imaginative force is only due to an unnatural state of body which I can deliberately produce by drinking tea that has stood a long while and become full of tannin. When my prose glows with fiery beauty, the tea is getting well hold of my digestive organs, and by the time it has begun to prove its power by giving me a violent pain in the stomach, I have wrung from it a fine scene which will help to consolidate my fame. When a man wins the Victoria Cross, his healthy body has done the deed, unprompted by anything higher. Good air, or a muscular life, has strung his nerves strongly so that he can't, even if he would, appreciate danger. On the other hand, when a man shows funk, turns tail and bolts, and is dubbed a coward, it's his beastly body again. Some obscure physical misfortune is the cause of his disgrace, and if he'd only been to you he would have won the Cross too. Isn't it so? How you doctors must laugh at mystics, and at those who are ascetics, save for sake of their health. Why, I suppose even the saint owes his so-called goodness to some a.n.a.lyzable proceeding that has gone on in his inside, and that you could diagnose. Eh?"

Doctor Levillier was writing a prescription in which bis.m.u.th was an item.

He glanced up quietly.

"The more I know of the body, the more I think of and believe in the power of the soul," he said. "Have that made up. Take it three times a day and come to me again in a fortnight. Good-morning."

Indeed, this little man was writing prescriptions for the body and thinking prescriptions for the soul all day long. Within him there dwelt a double mind, the mind of a great doctor and the mind of a great priest, and these two minds linked hands and lived as friends. The one never strove against the other. There was never a moment of estrangement.

And if there were frequent arguments and discussions between the two, they were the arguments and discussions that make friendship firmer, not enmity more bitter. And, as Dr. Levillier very well knew, it was often the mind of the priest within him that gave to him his healing power over the body. It was the mind of the priest that had won him testimonial clocks and silver salvers from grateful patients. Often as he sat with some dingy-faced complainant, listening to a recital of sickness or uttering directions about avoidance of green meat, sauces, pastry, and liquids, till the atmosphere seemed that of a hospital, a pastry-cook's shop and a bar combined, he was silently examining the patient's soul, facing its probable vagaries, mapping out the tours it had taken, scheming for its welfare. And, perhaps, after the dietary was arranged and the prescription was written, he would say carelessly:

"Do you read much? What do you read? Ah! such and such books. Yes, very interesting. Do you know this book which has struck me greatly? No? Allow me to lend it to you. Good-bye."

And the patient departed, ignorant that he had received a pill for his soul from the priest as well as a pill for his body from the doctor.

In appearance Dr. Levillier was small, slight, and delicate looking.

His complexion was clear and white. His eyes were blue. What hair he possessed was rather soft, fluffy and reddish, with a dash of light brown in it. He wore neither beard nor moustache, was always very neatly and simply dressed, and was remarkable for his polished boots, said to be the most perfectly varnished in London. Although he must have been nearly fifty-five, he had never married, and some people declared that he had the intention of starting a new "order" of medical celibates, who would be father-confessors as well as physicians, and who would pray for the souls of their patients after tending their bodily needs.

For some years Valentine had been very intimate with the doctor, whom he admired for his intellect and loved for his nature. So now he resolved to lay the case of the sittings with Julian before him and hear his opinion of the matter. In all their conversations Valentine could not remember that they had ever discussed spiritualism or occultism. As a rule, they talked about books, painting, or music, of which Dr. Levillier was a devoted lover. Valentine's note asked the doctor to dine with him that night at his club. The messenger brought back an acceptance.

They dined at a corner table and the room was rather empty. A few men chatted desultorily of burlesques, horses, the legs of actresses, the chances of politics. The waiters moved quietly about with pathetic masks of satisfied servitude. Valentine and the doctor conversed earnestly.

At first they spoke of a new symphony composed by a daring young Frenchman, who had striven to reproduce vices in notes and to summon up visions of things d.a.m.nable by harmonic progressions which frequently defied the laws of harmony. Levillier gently condemned him for putting a great art to a small and degraded use.

"His very success makes me regret the waste of his time more deeply, Cresswell," he said. "He is a marvellous painter in sound. He has improved upon Berlioz, if it is improvement to cry sin with a clearer, more determinate voice. Think what a heaven that man could reproduce in music."

"Because he has reproduced a h.e.l.l. But do you think that follows? Can the man who wallows with force and originality soar with force and originality too?"

"I believe he could learn to. The main thing is to possess genius in any form, the genius to imagine, to construct, to present things that seize upon the minds of men. But to possess genius is only a beginning.

We have to train it, to lead it, to coax it even, until it learns to be obedient."

"Genius and obedience. Don't the two terms quarrel?"

"They should not. Obedience is a very magnificent thing, Cresswell, just as to have to struggle, to be obliged to fight, is a very magnificent thing."

"Yes," Valentine answered, thoughtfully. "I believe you are right. But, if you are right, I have missed a great deal."

"How do you deduce that?"

"In this way. I have never had to be obedient. I have never had to struggle."

"Surely the latter," the little doctor said, fixing his clear, kind eyes on Valentine's face. "I don't think, in all my experience, that I have ever met a man who lived a fine, pure life without fixing the bayonet and using the sword at moments. There must be an occasional _melee_."

"Indeed not; that is to say," Valentine rather hastily added, "as regards the pure life. For I cannot lay claim to anything fine. But I a.s.sure you that my life has been pure without a struggle."

"Without one? Think!"

"Without one. Perhaps that is what wearies me at moments, doctor, the completeness of my coldness. Perhaps it is this lack of necessity to struggle that has at last begun to render me dissatisfied."

"I thought you were free from that evil humour of dissatisfaction, that evil humour which crowds my consulting-rooms and wastes away the very tissues of the body."

"I have been, until quite lately. I have been neither pessimist nor optimist--just myself, and I believe happy."

"And what is this change? and what has it led to?"

"It was to tell you that I asked you here to-night."

They had finished dinner, and rose from the table. Pa.s.sing through the hall of the club, they went into a huge high room, papered with books.

Valentine led the way to a secluded corner, and gave the doctor a cigar.

When he had lit it and settled himself comfortably, his rather small feet, in their marvellously polished boots, lightly crossed, his head reposing serenely on the back of his chair, Valentine continued, answering his attentive silence.

"It has led to what I suppose you would call an absurdity. But first, the change itself. A sort of dissatisfaction has been creeping over me, perhaps for a long while, I being unconscious of it. At length I became conscious. I found that I was weary of being so free from the impulse to sin--to sin, I mean, in definite, active ways, as young men sin. It seemed to me that I was missing a great deal, missing the delight sin is said to give to natures, or at least missing the invigorating necessity you have just mentioned, the necessity to fight, to wage war against impulses."

"I understand."

"And one night I expressed this feeling to Julian."

"To Addison?" the doctor said, an expression of keen interest sliding into his face. "I should much like to know how he received it."

"He said, of course, that such a dissatisfaction was rather monstrous."

"Was that all?"