The Tyranny of the Dark Part 45

"We have our own observation, joined to the report of Crookes and Richet."

"But Crookes is discredited on this score. He belongs to what Haeckel calls 'the imaginative scientists.' So do Von Hartmann, Lombroso, Wallace, and Lodge."

"Why should that be? Why should we accept their testimony on gases and the spectrum, and exclude it when it comes to a question of phenomena new to us? 'This man is a great chemist and physicist,' you say,'but a crazy a.s.s when he sets to work to examine the claims of spiritism,'

which is absurd and unjust. So far as I can see, he examined the phenomena of spiritism quite as a scientist should."

Morton believed that his chief was taking the opposing side out of perversity and replied: "I admit that as you read, they seem reasonable, and I also admit that the experiments with Eusapia, especially the recent ones, ought to be conclusive to my mind, but they are not. That is the singular thing--they do not convince."

"That is because we do not clear our minds of prejudice. These men are far-sighted and profound in their own lines. They have exposed themselves to sneers by going into these new fields. They are to be honored as pioneers. Why not believe the phenomena they discuss are at least worth our attention?"

"That is Clarke's plea."

"Precisely! And he is right. I am less critical of him to-day than I was last night. He gave his psychic over into our hands. What more could we ask?"

"He might have absented himself."

"He may do that next time."

"No; he was furious when I suggested the idea."

"My interest is awakened. It may be, as Clarke says, that this young lady is about to give the world of science a new outlook. It may be that she is to out-do Home and Eusapia."

Morton's face was cold and his voice firm as he said: "Not if I can prevent it. My zeal as an investigator does not go so far as that. I intend to free her from all connection with this uneasy world, and to that end I have wired her step-father to come on, and with his a.s.sistance I hope to end Clarke's control of her and set to work upon the cure she expects of me."

Weissmann smiled indulgently. "The scientist is defeated by the lover.

I see; you would exclude all others from the sitting. Very well! that shall be as you wish; but it seems a shame now when we have such a wonderful chance to duplicate the Crookes' experiments. But, as you say, it would be too much to ask of a young and lovely girl. We will sacrifice only men and the ugly crones, eh?" Morton smiled faintly and his chief went on: "Well, now, in case you find yourself sitting--" he held up a warning hand--"I say if you find yourself unable to stop these trances--"

"I have no doubt of that--provided I can take her out of her present a.s.sociations."

"Very good! I was about to say that all, or nearly all, of the phenomena of last night took place within a limited radius of the psychic. The books all came from behind her. The horn hovered near her--all of which would support the arguments of the 'psychic force'

advocates. Lombroso and Tamburini both suggest that it is not absurd to say that possibly the subconscious mind may be able not merely to transmit energy, but to produce phantasmal forms, and I wondered last night whether there might not be some supernormal elongation of the psychic's arms which might enable her to seize and manipulate the horn at a distance beyond her normal reach."

"It is easier for me to believe that Mrs. Lambert did it. I am convinced that Clarke in some way played us false."

"I'm not sure of that. I am willing to grant that it is possible for the mind to alter the circulation of the blood, even to accelerate or decrease the up-building processes among the cells. If the mind can produce a pathologic process like a blister, it can also remove warts or cancer, as the hypnotists of the Charcot school claim. If the mind can move a book or a pencil without the intervention of any known form of matter, then Clarke (as well as his psychic) may be innocent, and all that happened last night be due to thought-transference and telekinesis."

The young man shrugged his shoulders. "To admit a single one of your premises would turn all our science upside down."

Weissmann smiled musingly. "So said the Ptolmaic philosophers when Copernicus came. Yet nothing was destroyed but error--they established the truth."

"I didn't mean what I said, exactly. I meant that the whole theory is opposed to every known law of physics."

"I'm not so certain of that, I can imagine a subtler form of force than magnetism. I can imagine the mind reacting upon matter, creating in its own right by the displacement and rearrangement of the molecules of a substance--say of wood. What is a wine-gla.s.s but an appearance? No, no! It will not do to be dogmatic. We must not a.s.sume too much. We must keep open minds. Are we not advancing? Is any one nearing the farther wall? No, my boy, each year should make us less arrogant. Ten thousand years from now men will still be discovering new laws of nature just as they were ten thousand years ago. It is childish to suppose that we or any other generation will know all that is to be known. Infinite research is before us just as infinite painful groping is behind us. I do not a.s.sume to say what the future will bring to mankind. Perhaps soon--very soon, science will shift its entire battle-line from matter to mind. To say the mind is conditioned in a certain way to-day does not mean that these conditions may not utterly change to-morrow. Great discoveries wait in the future."

"But you would not say that a new way of squaring the circle would appear--or that perpetual motion--"

"Oh no, no! Error is not a product of enlightenment. I only say that the problem which is insoluble to you and to me may be quite simple to the biologist of the twenty-second century. Once I thought I might come to know much of the universe, now I am quite certain I shall never know but a few processes--never the mystery itself."

As the old man talked with the light of prophecy in his gaunt face, the young man's imagination took wing into the future, that mighty and alluring void, black as night, yet teeming with transcendent, potential unborn men and women, and his brain grew numb with the effort and his heart humble with the moments' prophetic glance. Ay, it was true! He in his turn would seem a child of the foolish past--a fond old man to the wise future. His complacence was lost. His faith in his authorities violently shaken. He recalled a line from Whitman: "Beyond every victory there are other battles to be fought, other victories to be won." And his eyes grew dim and his thought filled with reverence for those seers of the future, and with awe of the inscrutable and ever-beckoning and ever-retiring mystery of life.

His chief resumed: "No, we pretend to larger knowledge of living organisms; but how will our text-books be regarded by the teachers of the future? Will they not read us and smile over us as curious mixtures of truth and error--valuable as showing the state of science in our day? Do you dream of solving the mystery of life? Of bridging the chasm between the crystal and the non-nucleated cell? I do not. As I sat alone last night unable to sleep, my eyes ran over the backs of the books on my shelves--they were all there, all the great ones, Laplace, Spinoza, Descartes, Goethe, Spencer, Hegel, Kant, Darwin, all the wonder-workers. How masterful each had been in his time. How complacent of praise; how critical of the past! But here now they all stood gathering dust, and I thought: so will the unborn philosophers of the next century fold me up and put me away beside the other mouldy ones--curious but no longer useful. My book will be but an empty sh.e.l.l on the reef of human history. Of such cruelty are the makers of scientific advance."

Morton was profoundly moved by the note of pathos, of disillusionment in the old man's voice. "Would you have me believe that these men we doubt to-day are forerunners of the future?"

"I feel so. The materialists have had their day. Some subtler expression of matter is about to be given to the world, not as Kant gave it, but through experiment, and to men like Myers and Sir William Crookes may come great honor some day."

"You would not have us weaken in our method?"

Weissmann's manner changed. He resumed his most peremptory tone. "By no means. We must not relax our vigilant scrutiny of fact one atom's weight, but we must keep our minds open to new messages--no matter how repulsive the source."

Morton sat for a moment in deep study, then said: "If I fail to stop the public announcement of Miss Lambert's powers, if Clarke's challenge is issued in spite of my protest, I shall ask the privilege of heading the committee in order to be present and shield her. If it comes to this, will you join me and support me?"

"With pleasure."

"But suppose the president and our board object?"

"What right have they to object? So long as I do not neglect my duties they will not dare to object."

"They will be scandalized. Two of us going into an investigation of this sort will seem to involve the whole school, and they may insist on our keeping out of it, so long as we are connected with the inst.i.tution. If they ask for our resignation, the public will side with us, but all other inst.i.tutions, and probably the bulk of our colleagues, will go against us. I hesitate, therefore, to ask you to take up this work. It is not a matter of bread and b.u.t.ter to me. I can resign, and I am thinking this is my best plan. At the same time I hope, for Miss Lambert's sake, that the public test will not be made."

Weissmann's s.h.a.ggy old head lifted like that of a musing lion. "What is this opposition to me? I too can resign. What my colleagues say will not matter if I feel that I am advancing the cause of science.

Their flames will scorch, but I have a thick skin. Besides, I am old, with only a few more years to work, and if I felt I could better serve the world by going into this investigation than by remaining in the one in which I now am, I would gladly do it. I will not utterly starve."

"Not while I am able to share a crust," quickly exclaimed Serviss. "If they ask for your resignation, give it and come with me. Together we will found an inst.i.tute for the study of the supra-normal. What do you say?"

Weissmann's eyes glowed with the quenchless zeal of the experimentalist. "My dear boy, I would resign now for that purpose; but I hope it will not be necessary, for your sake."

They shook hands like two adventurers setting out on their joint exploration of a distant and difficult country; but this moment of exaltation was followed in Serviss's mind by a sense of having in some way dedicated Viola to the advancement of science rather than to the security of the fireside and to the joys of wife and mother.

XVIII

LAMBERT INTERVENES

Upon his return to his desk Serviss was delighted to find a telegram from Lambert, stating the time of his arrival, and asking for a meeting. There was a note of decision, almost command, in the wording of the despatch, which denoted that the miner had taken his warning to heart and was prepared for prompt and authoritative action.

The time of the train being near, Serviss closed the lid of his desk and took a car for the station--immensely relieved of responsibility, yet worn and troubled by a mult.i.tude of confused and confusing speculations. All the way to the depot, and while he stood waiting outside the gates, he pondered on the surprising change in Weissmann's thought, and also upon the momentous covenant between them. More than ever before he felt the burden and the mystery of organic life. Around him flowed an endless stream of humankind, rushing, spreading--each drop in the flood an immortal soul (according to the spiritist), attended by invisible guardians, watching, upholding, warning--"and the whole earth swarms with a billion other similar creatures with the same needs, the same destiny; for, after all, the difference between a Zulu and a Greek is not much greater than that between a purple-green humming-bird and a canary; and to think that this wave of man appearing to-day on the staid old earth, like the swarms of innumerable insects of June, is but one of a million other waves of a million other years. To consider, furthermore, that all those who have lived and died are still sentient! What a staggering, monstrous conception! Nor is this all. According to the monist conception there is no line at which we can say here the animal stops and the soul of man begins, so that ants and apes are claimants for immortality. If the individual man persists after death, why not his faithful collie?

No, this theory will not do. It is far less disturbing to think of all these hurrying bipeds as momentary nodes of force--minute eddies on the boundless stream of ether."

The gates opened and another river of travellers, presumably from the great plains of the Middle West, poured forth, quite undistinguishable in general appearance from those which had preceded them; and, dropping his speculation, Morton peered among these faces, not quite sure that he would know Lambert if he saw him. As a matter of fact, he would have missed him had not the miner laid a hand upon his arm, saying, quaintly: "Howdy, professor, howdy! What's the state of the precinct?"

He was quite conventional in all outward signs, save for his red-brown complexion and the excessive newness of his hand-bag. "How are all the folks?" he went on to ask, with a keen glance.

"They were quite well when I saw them, but they need you. You're not an hour too soon."

"Is it as bad as that?" he exclaimed, anxiously. "What is it all about?"