The Magician Part 8

They went through a prim French dining-room, with much woodwork and heavy scarlet hangings, to the library. This was a large room, but the bookcases that lined the walls, and a large writing-table heaped up with books, much diminished its size. There were books everywhere. They were stacked on the floor and piled on every chair. There was hardly s.p.a.ce to move. Susie gave a cry of delight.

'Now you mustn't talk to me. I want to look at all your books.'

'You could not please me more,' said Dr Porhoet, 'but I am afraid they will disappoint you. They are of many sorts, but I fear there are few that will interest an English young lady.'

He looked about his writing-table till he found a packet of cigarettes.

He gravely offered one to each of his guests. Susie was enchanted with the strange musty smell of the old books, and she took a first glance at them in general. For the most part they were in paper bindings, some of them neat enough, but more with broken backs and dingy edges; they were set along the shelves in serried rows, untidily, without method or plan.

There were many older ones also in bindings of calf and pigskin, treasure from half the bookshops in Europe; and there were huge folios like Prussian grenadiers; and tiny Elzevirs, which had been read by patrician ladies in Venice. Just as Arthur was a different man in the operating theatre, Dr Porhoet was changed among his books. Though he preserved the amiable serenity which made him always so attractive, he had there a diverting brusqueness of demeanour which contrasted quaintly with his usual calm.

'I was telling these young people, when you came in, of an ancient Koran which I was given in Alexandria by a learned man whom I operated upon for cataract.' He showed her a beautifully-written Arabic work, with wonderful capitals and headlines in gold. 'You know that it is almost impossible for an infidel to acquire the holy book, and this is a particularly rare copy, for it was written by Kat Bey, the greatest of the Mameluke Sultans.'

He handled the delicate pages as a lover of flowers would handle rose-leaves.

'And have you much literature on the occult sciences?' asked Susie.

Dr Porhoet smiled.

'I venture to think that no private library contains so complete a collection, but I dare not show it to you in the presence of our friend Arthur. He is too polite to accuse me of foolishness, but his sarcastic smile would betray him.'

Susie went to the shelves to which he vaguely waved, and looked with a peculiar excitement at the mysterious array. She ran her eyes along the names. It seemed to her that she was entering upon an unknown region of romance. She felt like an adventurous princess who rode on her palfrey into a forest of great bare trees and mystic silences, where wan, unearthly shapes pressed upon her way.

'I thought once of writing a life of that fantastic and grandiloquent creature, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Paracelsus Bombast von Hohenheim,' said Dr Porhoet, 'and I have collected many of his books.'

He took down a slim volume in duodecimo, printed in the seventeenth century, with queer plates, on which were all manner of cabbalistic signs. The pages had a peculiar, musty odour. They were stained with iron-mould.

'Here is one of the most interesting works concerning the black art.

It is the _Grimoire of Honorius_, and is the princ.i.p.al text-book of all those who deal in the darkest ways of the science.'

Then he pointed out the _Hexameron_ of Torquemada and the _Tableau de l'Inconstance des Demons_, by Delancre; he drew his finger down the leather back of Delrio's _Disquisitiones Magicae_ and set upright the _Pseudomonarchia Daemonorum_ of Wierus; his eyes rested for an instant on Hauber's _Acta et Scripta Magica_, and he blew the dust carefully off the most famous, the most infamous, of them all, Sprenger's _Malleus Malefikorum_.

'Here is one of my greatest treasures. It is the _Clavicula Salomonis_; and I have much reason to believe that it is the identical copy which belonged to the greatest adventurer of the eighteenth century, Jacques Casanova. You will see that the owner's name had been cut out, but enough remains to indicate the bottom of the letters; and these correspond exactly with the signature of Casanova which I have found at the Bibliotheque Nationale. He relates in his memoirs that a copy of this book was seized among his effects when he was arrested in Venice for traffic in the black arts; and it was there, on one of my journeys from Alexandria, that I picked it up.'

He replaced the precious work, and his eye fell on a stout volume bound in vellum.

'I had almost forgotten the most wonderful, the most mysterious, of all the books that treat of occult science. You have heard of the Kabbalah, but I doubt if it is more than a name to you.'

'I know nothing about it at all,' laughed Susie, 'except that it's all very romantic and extraordinary and ridiculous.'

'This, then, is its history. Moses, who was learned in all the wisdom of Egypt, was first initiated into the Kabbalah in the land of his birth; but became most proficient in it during his wanderings in the wilderness.

Here he not only devoted the leisure hours of forty years to this mysterious science, but received lessons in it from an obliging angel. By aid of it he was able to solve the difficulties which arose during his management of the Israelites, notwithstanding the pilgrimages, wars, and miseries of that most unruly nation. He covertly laid down the principles of the doctrine in the first four books of the Pentateuch, but withheld them from Deuteronomy. Moses also initiated the Seventy Elders into these secrets, and they in turn transmitted them from hand to hand. Of all who formed the unbroken line of tradition, David and Solomon were the most deeply learned in the Kabbalah. No one, however, dared to write it down till Schimeon ben Jochai, who lived in the time of the destruction of Jerusalem; and after his death the Rabbi Eleazar, his son, and the Rabbi Abba, his secretary, collected his ma.n.u.scripts and from them composed the celebrated treatise called _Zohar_.'

'And how much do you believe of this marvellous story?' asked Arthur Burdon.

'Not a word,' answered Dr Porhoet, with a smile. 'Criticism has shown that _Zohar_ is of modern origin. With singular effrontery, it cites an author who is known to have lived during the eleventh century, mentions the Crusades, and records events which occurred in the year of Our Lord 1264. It was some time before 1291 that copies of _Zohar_ began to be circulated by a Spanish Jew named Moses de Leon, who claimed to possess an autograph ma.n.u.script by the reputed author Schimeon ben Jochai. But when Moses de Leon was gathered to the bosom of his father Abraham, a wealthy Hebrew, Joseph de Avila, promised the scribe's widow, who had been left dest.i.tute, that his son should marry her daughter, to whom he would pay a handsome dowry, if she would give him the original ma.n.u.script from which these copies were made. But the widow (one can imagine with what gnashing of teeth) was obliged to confess that she had no such ma.n.u.script, for Moses de Leon had composed _Zohar_ out of his own head, and written it with his own right hand.'

Arthur got up to stretch his legs. He gave a laugh.

'I never know how much you really believe of all these things you tell us. You speak with such gravity that we are all taken in, and then it turns out that you've been laughing at us.'

'My dear friend, I never know myself how much I believe,' returned Dr Porhoet.

'I wonder if it is for the same reason that Mr Haddo puzzles us so much,'

said Susie.

'Ah, there you have a case that is really interesting,' replied the doctor. 'I a.s.sure you that, though I know him fairly intimately, I have never been able to make up my mind whether he is an elaborate practical joker, or whether he is really convinced he has the wonderful powers to which he lays claim.'

'We certainly saw things last night that were not quite normal,' said Susie. 'Why had that serpent no effect on him though it was able to kill the rabbit instantaneously? And how are you going to explain the violent trembling of that horse, Mr. Burdon?'

'I can't explain it,' answered Arthur, irritably, 'but I'm not inclined to attribute to the supernatural everything that I can't immediately understand.'

'I don't know what there is about him that excites in me a sort of horror,' said Margaret. 'I've never taken such a sudden dislike to anyone.'

She was too reticent to say all she felt, but she had been strangely affected last night by the recollection of Haddo's words and of his acts.

She had awakened more than once from a nightmare in which he a.s.sumed fantastic and ghastly shapes. His mocking voice rang in her ears, and she seemed still to see that vast bulk and the savage, sensual face. It was like a spirit of evil in her path, and she was curiously alarmed. Only her reliance on Arthur's common sense prevented her from giving way to ridiculous terrors.

'I've written to Frank Hurrell and asked him to tell me all he knows about him,' said Arthur. 'I should get an answer very soon.'

'I wish we'd never come across him,' cried Margaret vehemently. 'I feel that he will bring us misfortune.'

'You're all of you absurdly prejudiced,' answered Susie gaily. 'He interests me enormously, and I mean to ask him to tea at the studio.'

'I'm sure I shall be delighted to come.'

Margaret cried out, for she recognized Oliver Haddo's deep bantering tones; and she turned round quickly. They were all so taken aback that for a moment no one spoke. They were gathered round the window and had not heard him come in. They wondered guiltily how long he had been there and how much he had heard.

'How on earth did you get here?' cried Susie lightly, recovering herself first.

'No well-bred sorcerer is so dead to the finer feelings as to enter a room by the door,' he answered, with his puzzling smile. 'You were standing round the window, and I thought it would startle you if I chose that mode of ingress, so I descended with incredible skill down the chimney.'

'I see a little soot on your left elbow,' returned Susie. 'I hope you weren't at all burned.'

'Not at all, thanks,' he answered, gravely brushing his coat.

'In whatever way you came, you are very welcome,' said Dr Porhoet, genially holding out his hand.

But Arthur impatiently turned to his host.

'I wish I knew what made you engage upon these studies,' he said. 'I should have thought your medical profession protected you from any tenderness towards superst.i.tion.'

Dr Porhoet shrugged his shoulders.

'I have always been interested in the oddities of mankind. At one time I read a good deal of philosophy and a good deal of science, and I learned in that way that nothing was certain. Some people, by the pursuit of science, are impressed with the dignity of man, but I was only made conscious of his insignificance. The greatest questions of all have been threshed out since he acquired the beginnings of civilization and he is as far from a solution as ever. Man can know nothing, for his senses are his only means of knowledge, and they can give no certainty. There is only one subject upon which the individual can speak with authority, and that is his own mind, but even here he is surrounded with darkness. I believe that we shall always be ignorant of the matters which it most behoves us to know, and therefore I cannot occupy myself with them. I prefer to set them all aside, and, since knowledge is unattainable, to occupy myself only with folly.'

'It is a point of view I do not sympathize with,' said Arthur.

'Yet I cannot be sure that it is all folly,' pursued the Frenchman reflectively. He looked at Arthur with a certain ironic gravity. 'Do you believe that I should lie to you when I promised to speak the truth?'

'Certainly not.'