"But we are getting away from the question, which was not personal," he said. "I contend that doctors, as a body, are bound to combat these modern Athenians, who are inclined to attribute everything to some obscure action of the mind. For, if their beliefs are founded on rock, and if they can themselves sufficiently, by asceticism, or by following any other fixed course of life which they may select as the right one, train their minds to do that which they believe can be done, the profession of doctors may in time be abolished. Mind will be the universal medicine; will, not simply the cure, but the preventive, of disease."
"And of death?" the doctor asked quietly. "Will man be able to think himself into an eternity on earth?"
Valentine looked at him very strangely.
"You ask that question seriously?" he said.
"I ask seriously whether you think so."
It was evident that the doctor meant to make the question above all things a personal one. This time Valentine accepted that condition. He sat for a moment twisting his champagne-glass about in his long fingers, and glancing rapidly from the doctor to Cuckoo, who heard this conversation without very well understanding it. Indeed, she sat beneath her bell of violets in much confusion, distraite in her desire to command intellectual faculties which she did not possess. Valentine watched her narrowly, though he seemed unattentive to her. Perhaps he thought of his delivery of his gospel to her, and wondered if she recalled it at this moment; or perhaps once more he began to rejoice in her mental distress and alienation.
"Wade," he said "the champagne to Mr. Addison. Well, doctor, suppose I acknowledged that I did so—mind, I don't acknowledge it!—you might, on your side, think something too—that I am mad, for instance. Ah! Miss Bright has knocked over her glass!"
Cuckoo murmured a stumbling apology, gazing with nervous intentness at
Valentine. It seemed to her that he had a gift of divination. Doctor
Levillier laughed gently.
"I am not inclined to suppose all my opponents in thought mad," he said. "Still, such a belief would certainly indicate in the holder of it the possession of a mind so uncommon, so unique, I may say, that it would naturally rouse one to very close attention and observation of it."
"Exactly," Valentine rejoined.
A certain audacity was slowly creeping into his demeanour and growing while he talked. It manifested itself in slight gesticulations, conceited movements of the hand and head, in the colour of the voice and the blunt directness of his glances.
"Exactly. Attention and observation directed towards the object of satisfying yourself that the man—myself, let us say—was mad? You don't reply. Let me ask you a question. Why should a profound belief in human power of will indicate madness?"
"A belief that is not based on any foundation or proof—that is my point. An extraordinary belief, personal to one person, rejected by mankind in the mass, and founded upon nothing, no fact, no inference even, in the history of mankind, is decidedly a strong indication of dementia."
"But suppose it is a belief founded upon a fact?"
"Of course that would entirely alter the matter."
The two men looked across at one another with a long and direct glance full in the eyes. Cuckoo watched them anxiously. Julian sat with his eyes cast down. He seemed unaware that there was any one near him, any conversation going on around him. Wade moved softly about, ministering to the wants of his master's guests. Course succeeded course.
"Do you propose to give me a fact proving the reasonableness of entertaining a belief that a man, by his own deliberate action of the will, can compass immortality on earth, or even prolong his life in such a way as this, for instance; by the successful domination, or banishment, of any disease recognized as mortal?—For I acknowledge that the will to live may prolong for a certain time a life threatened merely by the sapping action of old age.—Do you propose to give me a fact to prove that?"
"I do not say that I intend to give it to you," Valentine answered, with scarcely veiled insolence.
"But you know of such a fact?" said the doctor, ignoring his host's tone.
"Possibly."
The voice of Valentine thrilled with triumph as he spoke the word. Again he glanced at the lady of the feathers.
"Cannot you convert the doctor?" he asked her, in tones full of sarcastic meaning. "You know something of my theories, something of their putting into practice."
"I don't know—I don't understand," she murmured helplessly.
She looked down at her plate, flushing scarlet with a sense of shame at her own complete mental impotence.
"What's the matter, Cuckoo?"
The words came slowly from the lips of Julian, whose heavy eyes were now raised and fixed with a stare of lethargic wonder upon Cuckoo.
"What are they saying to you?"
His look travelled on, still slow and unwieldy, to the doctor and to
Valentine.
"I won't have Cuckoo worried," he said. And then he relapsed with a mechanical abruptness upon the consideration of his food. Valentine seemed about to make some laughing rejoinder, but, after a glance at Julian, he apparently resigned the idea as absurd, and, turning again to the doctor, remarked:
"It is sometimes injudicious to state all that one knows."
"Still more so all that one does not know. But I have no desire to press you," the doctor said, lightly. "This is wonderful wine. Where did you get it?"
"At the Cercle Blanc sale," Valentine answered quickly.
It seemed that he was slightly irritated. He frowned and cast a glance that was almost threatening upon the doctor.
"Would you assume weakness in every strong man who refuses to take off his coat, roll up his shirt sleeve and display the muscle of his arm?" he said, harshly.
"The case is not analogous. That muscle exists in the world is a proved fact. When I was at Eton, I was knocked down by a boy stronger than I was. Since then I acknowledge the power of muscle."
"And have you never been knocked down mentally?"
"Not in the way you suggest."
Valentine shifted in his seat. It did not escape the doctor that he had the air of a man longing to either say or do something startling, but apparently held back by tugging considerations of prudence or of expediency.
"Some day you may be," he said at last, obviously conquered by this prompting prudence.
"When I am, the 'Christian scientist' who once declared to me that she cured a sprained ankle by walking on it many miles a day, and thinking it was well while she walked, shall receive my respectful apologies," the doctor answered, laughing.
Valentine handed the lady of the feathers some strawberries. On her nervous refusal of them he exclaimed:
"I see you have finished your wine, doctor. No more? Really? Nor you,
Julian?"
Julian made no reply. He simply pushed his glass a little away from him.
"Then shall we accompany Miss Bright into the tentroom? I thought we would have coffee there. You have never seen the tentroom," he added to Cuckoo, getting up from his seat as he spoke.
"I usually sit in it when I am alone or with Julian. You will not mind our cigarettes, I know."
He led the way down the scented corridor, scented with the thin, gently bright scent of violets.
"The tentroom has a history," he continued to Cuckoo, opening a door on the left. "It was once the scene of an—an absurd experiment. Eh, doctor?"
They entered the room. As they did so the hot, sticky scent of the hidden hyacinths poured out to meet them. For a moment it seemed overwhelming, and Cuckoo hung back with an almost unconquerable sensation of aversion and even of fear. The aspect of this small room astonished her; she had never seen any chamber so arranged. Certainly, it looked very unusual to-night. The small fire was hidden by a large screen of white wood, with panels of dull green brocade. Only one of the electric lamps was turned on, and that was shaded, so that the diffused light was faint, a mere unflickering twilight. The masses of tulips hung like quantities of monotonously similar shadows from the tented ceiling, and the flood of scent caused the room to seem even smaller than it really was, a tiny temple dedicated to the uncommon, perhaps to the sinister.
"We will see the old year out and drink our café noir here," said
Valentine. "Where will you sit, Miss Bright?"
"I don't mind. It's all one to me," murmured Cuckoo. "What a funny room, though!" she could not help adding. "It ain't like a room at all."
"Imagine it an Arab tent, the home of a Bedouin Sheik in a desert of Nubia," said Valentine. "This divan is very comfortable. Let me arrange the cushions for you."
As he bent over her to do so, he murmured in her ear:
"And you, having tossed your will away, are nothing!"
They had been the last words of his gospel, proclaimed to her that night on which she prayed!
The lady of the feathers looked up at him with a new knowledge, the knowledge of her recent lonely nights, of which he knew nothing as yet; the knowledge of that glancing spectre of want whom, by her own action, she summoned while she feared its gaunt presence; the knowledge of the doctor's trust in her; the knowledge of her great love for Julian; the knowledge, perhaps, that leaning her arms upon the slippery horse-hair sofa in her little room, she had once thrown a muttered prayer, incoherent, unfinished, yet sincere, out into the great darkness that encompasses the beginning, the progress, and the ending of all human lives with mystery. She looked up at him with this world of mingling knowledge in her eyes, and Valentine drew away from her with a stifling sensation of frigid awe.
"What—what?" he began. Then, recovering himself, he turned suddenly away.
"Sit down, doctor. Do you like my flowers? Julian, are you still tired? The coffee will wake you up. A cigarette, doctor, or a cigar? Here are the matches."
Julian came over heavily and sat down on the divan by Cuckoo. His unnatural lethargy was gradually passing away into a more explicable fatigue, no longer speechless. Leaning on his elbow, he looked into her face with his weary eyes, in which to-night there was a curious dim pathos. It seemed that the only thing which had so far struck him during the evening was still Cuckoo's confusion over her own misunderstanding at dinner, for he now again referred to it.
"Have they been chaffing you, Cuckoo?" he said, striking a match on the heel of his shoe and lighting a cigarette. "Have they been worrying you? Never mind. It's only Val's fun. He doesn't mean anything by it. I say, how awfully pale you look to-night, and thin."
He paused, considering her with a glance that was almost severe.
"I'm all right," said Cuckoo, trying to repress the agitation she always felt now when speaking to Julian. "I ain't ill. Why don't you come to see me now?" she added. "You don't never come."
Julian glanced over to Valentine, who was standing by the hearth talking to the doctor, who sat in an armchair.
"I've been busy," he said. "I've had a lot of things to do. Do you miss me, Cuckoo, when I don't come?"
"Yes," she replied, but without softness. Then she added, lowering her voice almost to a whisper:
"Don't he want you to come?"
Julian did not reply, but puffed rather moodily at his cigarette, glancing towards Valentine. He was thinking of the conversation at the Savoy and of the antagonism between Valentine and Cuckoo. Suddenly there came into his mind a dull wish to reconcile these two on the last night of the year, to—in Valentine's own words—bury the hatchet. He sat meditating over his plan and trying to revolve different and dramatic methods of accomplishing it. Presently he said:
"Cuckoo, you and Val have got to be friends from to-night."
She started, stirring uneasily on the great cushions that were heaped at her back.
"We are," she said.
He shook his head.
"Not real friends."
"Oh, we are all right."
"D'you hate him still?"
"He don't like me," she answered, evasively.
"Yet he invites you here," Julian said. "Why does he do that?"
"I dunno," Cuckoo said.
She wondered why. Not so the doctor, to whom it had become evident that Valentine had asked his guests out of vanity, and with a view to some peculiar and monstrous display of his power over Julian. While Cuckoo and Julian talked together on the divan Valentine came over to the doctor. His eyes still held an expression of awe created in him by the strange new glance of the lady of the feathers. He sought to conquer this sensation of awe, which fought fiercely against his intended blatant triumph of to-night.
"Your cigarette all right, doctor?" he said, in a quick voice.
"A delicious one, thanks."
Valentine began touching the ornaments on the mantelpiece with nervous fingers.
"We didn't quite finish our conversation at dinner," he said.
"No?"
"I did not give you a reason for my belief."
A deep interest woke in the doctor, but he did not show it. He thought:
"So, he must insanely return to this one subject, round which his brain makes an eternal tour."
"No," he said aloud; "you have a reason then?"
"Yes."
Valentine's voice vibrated with arrogance. His hand still darted to and fro on the mantelpiece while he stood looking down at the doctor. There was something in his manner that suggested a mixture of triumph and fighting anxiety in his mind. But, as he continued to speak, the former got the upper hand.
"A reason that might convince even you if you knew it."
"Convince me, of exactly what?" the doctor asked, indifferently.
His indifference seemed to pique Valentine, who replied with energy:
"That human will can be cultivated, has been developed, until it has moved the mountain, achieved the thing men call a miracle."
"By whom has it been so developed?"
Valentine hesitated almost like one who fears to be led into a trap. The doctor could see "By me!" trembling upon his lips. He didn't actually utter it, but instead exclaimed with a laugh:
"Some day you will discover."
And as he spoke he looked at Julian and the lady of the feathers. The doctor was anxious to lead him on, and leaning easily back in his comfortable chair, occupied himself with his cigarette for a minute, as a man calmly at ease. Between his whiffs he presently threw out carelessly:
"This man has compassed eternity by his own will?"
"Oh, I did not say that."
"He has contented himself with curing a sprained ankle by walking upon it, like my Christian scientist?"
"Now you fly to the other extreme—from the very great to the very little. Take a middle course."
"Where would that lead me?"
Valentine threw a glance round the dim, hot, scented little room, then once more his eyes rested on Julian and Cuckoo.
"What if I said—To this little room, to Julian and that girl, to myself?" he answered in a low voice.
"And the miracle?" said the doctor.
The door opened. Wade appeared with coffee.
CHAPTER III
THE HEALTH OF THE NEW YEAR
Valentine turned quickly, with an air of mingled irritation and relief at the interruption.
"We must all take coffee," he cried. "It will give us impetus, vitality, so that as the old year dies we may live more swiftly, more strongly. I like to feel that my life is increasing while that of another—the old year for instance—is decreasing."
But the doctor noticed that his eyes had rested with a curiously significant expression upon Julian as he spoke the last sentence.
"Leave the coffee-pot on that little table," he added to Wade, when the man had filled all four cups. "We may want it."
Wade obeyed him and disappeared.
"Your man makes wonderful coffee," the doctor said, sipping.
"Yes. Julian, have you reached that café noir I spoke of the other day?" Valentine asked laughingly, returning to his simile of the greedy man and happiness.
"I don't know. Not yet, Val, I think," Julian answered. This coffee seemed to give him life at last. The heavy weariness disappeared from his face. His eyes gleamed with something of their old youthfulness and ardour.
"If so, I must be close on happiness," he added.
As he spoke he looked into the hollow eyes of Cuckoo, seeming, strangely, to seek in them the will-o'-the-wisp of which he spoke.
"Never look for it in unfurnished rooms," Valentine exclaimed with sudden violence.
This glance of Julian, so the doctor judged, precipitated his curious and subtle insanity towards an outburst.
"You will find it in the thing that is most definite, not in the thing that is most indefinite. Isn't it so, doctor? Happiness lies in the positive, not in the negative."
"Happiness lies in many places. Each finds it in a different house."
"Perhaps you can't tell where I should find it, Val," Julian interposed, with a certain sturdiness of manner.
"No," said Cuckoo, eagerly.
The coffee, it appeared, had an effect upon her too. There was a life, a keen intentness in her thin, white face, not visible there before. Valentine turned round upon her. He was holding his coffee cup in his right hand. With the other he put his cigarette to his lips.
"Can you tell us where Mr. Addison is likely to find happiness?" he said.
"Can you tell us, lady of the feathers?"
"No. He can tell himself. That's all," she said. "Let him find it himself."
"Each for himself and God for us all, eh?"
"I don't know about God," she said, looking towards the doctor as if for assistance.
"Each for another and God for us all is perhaps a better motto," the doctor interposed.
"Ah, Charity!"
Valentine took out his watch and looked at it.
"Charity! Midnight is approaching, and, of course, this is Charity's benefit-night by common consent. Thank you, doctor, for the hint. Did the dying old year prompt you with its husky voice full of the wind and of the snow?"
"Possibly."
"Let us have some more coffee. Julian, give me Miss Bright's cup. You shall have your absinthe presently. Wade has not forgotten it."
"Absinthe?" said the doctor.
"Julian drinks it every night. He has got tired of whiskey. Doctor, your cup too."
"We shall not sleep a wink to-night."
"All the better. Why should not we see the dawn in, as we did once before? You recollect."
"Ah, Val! on the night of your trance."
"Yes. You were not here then, lady of the feathers."
He spoke with a light mockery.
"I fainted, or died—the doctor was deceived into thinking so—and was born again in the dawn of the very day on which Julian first met you."
Cuckoo shivered with the recollection of Marr and her horror of that night.
"Why do you shiver?" Valentine continued. "Do you find the room cold?"
"No, no."
Indeed, the heat and the overpowering scent of the hyacinths had previously weighed upon her physique, and increased the malaise into which her curious new dutifulness, and the faint spectre which drew near to her, had brought her.
"Perhaps you shiver in the influence of this little room," he continued, persistently. "Julian and I once did so. Eh, Julian?"
"Yes, in those sittings."
"I didn't shiver," Cuckoo said, bluntly and very obviously lying.
She quickly drank some more coffee.
"If you had, it might not have been astonishing," said Valentine. "For this little room has seen marvels, and strange things that happen perhaps stamp their strange impression upon the places in which they happen. We ought to discuss the occult, doctor, on the last night of the year."
"By all means."
"How long ago it seems!" Julian said suddenly, with a sigh.
"Yes," Valentine answered. "Because so much has happened in the interval.
The greedy man has eaten so many courses, Julian."
He seemed to take a delight in throwing out allusions to one and the other of his guests, allusions which nobody but the person addressed could understand rightly. For he now went on, addressing himself to Cuckoo:
"In this little room was committed the great act of brigandage of which
I once spoke to you. Do you remember?"
She shook her head.
"Never mind. But, though you cannot remember, that might make you shiver."
"What act of brigandage, Valentine?" Julian asked.
"Oh, the attempt—my attempt to seize upon a different soul."
"But you failed."
"Did I? Do you think so, doctor?"
His apparent audacity seemed to increase. In the twilight of the scented room he drew himself up as he stood by the brocaded screen that hid the fire. He closed and unclosed rapidly his left hand which hung at his side. His foot tapped the thick carpet gently.
"Did you not?" the doctor answered quietly.
But Julian was roused to vivacity.
"What do you mean, Valentine?" he said. "Of course you may have changed, or developed, or whatever you like to call it, since then. But to say you have got a different soul!"
"Is absurd? Yes, you are right. Because if I had got a different soul the original 'I,' that was dissatisfied with itself, must have ceased to be. Since the soul of a man—his will to do things, his will to feel things—is the man himself, if I had a different soul I should be another man. The former man would have ceased to be."
"Or would be elsewhere."
It was the doctor who spoke, and he spoke without special interest, simply expressing his thought of what might happen in so whimsical an event as that harped upon by Valentine. But Valentine seemed painfully struck by the almost idle words.
"Elsewhere!" he exclaimed, with a lowering expression. "What do you mean, doctor? What do you imply?"
The doctor looked at him surprised.
"Merely that a thing expelled is not necessarily a thing slain. If you turn me out of this room I am not certain to expire on the doormat."
Valentine broke into a nervous and uneasy laugh, and cast a quick glance all around him, and especially on Cuckoo, who sat listening silently with her eyebrows drawn together in a pent frown of puzzled attention.
"I see, I see," he said hastily. And here Julian broke in.
"But the whole thing's impossible," he said with a laugh.
"You would say so, doctor?"
Valentine addressed this question to Doctor Levillier in a very marked and urgent manner.
"You would say so, since the will of man cannot perform miracles?"
"Certainly, I should say so, despite the triumphs of hypnotism. A man may change greatly through outside influence, or perform occasional acts foreign to his nature under the influence of 'suggestion' or hypnotism. But I do not believe he can change radically and permanently, except from one cause."
The last words were spoken after a moment of hesitation. Valentine rejoined quickly:
"What? What? One cause, you say! You allow that—wait, though! What is the cause?"
Doctor Levillier was silent. He was asking himself should he play this forcing card, make this sharp, cutting experiment. He resolved that he would make it.
"A man may change radically," he said, "if he becomes insane."
A short breath, like a sigh, came from Cuckoo. Valentine stood quite still, regarding the doctor closely for a moment. Then he said contemptuously:
"Mad! Oh, madmen don't interest me."
The doctor had gained nothing from his experiment. It was impossible to gather from Valentine's manner that he was in any way struck by this suggestion, and indeed he abandoned all allusion to it with careless haste, and returned to that other suggestion of which the doctor himself had thought nothing.
"Supposing the soul of a man to be expelled," he said, abruptly, "where—where do you suppose it would go, would be?"
It was obvious that he endeavoured to speak lightly, but there was a most peculiar anxiety visible in his manner. The doctor wondered from what cause it sprang.
"I have never formed a supposition on that matter," he said.
"Well—well—try to form one now. Yes, and you, Julian, too."
He did not address himself to the lady of the feathers, but he looked at her long and narrowly. The doctor lit another cigarette. He seemed to be seriously considering this odd question. Julian, whose lethargy was changing into an almost equally pronounced excitement, was not so hesitating. As if struck by a sudden flashing idea, he exclaimed:
"How if it was in the air? How if it was wandering about from place to place. By God, Val!" he cried, with emphasis, "do you know what I read in a book I took up from your shelves the other day—something about souls being like flames? It was in Rossetti: Flames!"
He turned to Cuckoo and stared into her eyes.
"I was half asleep when I read it," he said. "Why should I remember it now? That flame—I saw that flame months ago." He seemed like a man puzzling something out, trying to trace a way through a tangled maze of thought that yet might be clear. "It came from you, Val, that night, with a cry like a lost thing. A soul expelled, did you say?"
Suddenly his face was set in an awestruck gravity.
"Why—but then, if so, that flame would be you. Valentine, the flame that seemed to haunt me, that I have seen in—"
He looked at Cuckoo again and was silent.
"Yes, Julian?" Valentine said in a hard, thin voice. "Go on, I am listening."
Julian stared at him with strong excitement.
"And what are you, then, Valentine? Where do you come from?" he said slowly.
"From Marr."
The words came from the divan, from the dry lips of Cuckoo. Doctor Levillier knew not why, but he was thrilled to the very soul by them, as by a revelation throwing strong light upon the depths of things. Whether it was the influence of this strange scented room, in which strange things had happened, or the influence of the hour and the climax and death of the year, or a voice in his heart speaking to him with authority, he could not tell. Only he knew that on a sudden all his guiding reason, all his knowledge, all his cool contemplation of the physician and common sense of the man, were swept entirely away. His theory of insanity seemed in a moment the theory of a dwarf intellect trying to stick wretched, absurd pins through angels—white or black—that it thought butterflies. His conversation with Cuckoo on the Hampstead Heights seemed the vain babble of a tricked and impotent observer. His mind fell on its knees before the mind of the lady of the feathers. Reason was stricken by instinct. The confused feeling of the woman had conquered the logical inferences of the man. From that moment the doctor secretly abandoned the old landmarks which had guided him all his life, and entered into a new world—a world in which he would not have dreamed of permitting any of his patients to walk if he could help it. A strange magic floated round him like a mist blotting out the crude familiarities of the normal world. The tentroom, with its shadowy tulips, its scented warmth, its pale twilight, its quick silences when voices ceased, was a temple of wonder and a home of the miraculous. And those gathered in it, what were they? Men and a woman? Bodies? Earthly creatures? No. To his mind they were stripped bare of the clothes in which man—governed by decrees of some hidden power—must make his life pilgrimage. They were stripped bare and naked of their bodies. They were warm, stirring, disembodied things—they were flames leaping, waving, contending, aspiring. And he remembered the night when he sat alone in the drawing-room of Valentine, and saw the red walls glow, and the light deepen, and saw the stillness grow to movement, and the shadows come away from their background, and take forms—the forms of flames. Was that night a night of prophesy? Were those flames silent voices speaking to the ear of his mind? He looked around him like a man in a strange country, who takes a long breath and liberates his soul in wonder. He looked around, and the shadowy, thin girl leaning forward on the divan, with one arm outstretched as if she gave a message, was among the other flames as a flame upon an altar. At least his instinct had not played him false with regard to her. He knew it now. In the wild and sad streets, where feet of men tread ever, where tears of women flow ever, grow flowers of Paradise, strange flowers, leap flames from the eternal fires of heaven. And the voice of Cuckoo thrilled him as the voice of revelation.
Valentine turned upon the lady of the feathers, hearing her cry.
"Marr!" he said, "your lover who died! Ah!"
The brutality of the remark was so unexpected, so savage, that it struck all those who heard it like a whip. Cuckoo shrank back among her cushions trembling. Julian made a slight forward movement as if to stop Valentine. The doctor laid his hands on the arms of his chair and pressed them hard. He felt a need of physical energy. In the sudden silence Valentine touched the electric bell. Before any one spoke it was answered by Wade, who carried a tray on which stood various bottles and glasses.
"We must counteract the exciting effects of our café noir," Valentine said, addressing his guests in a group. "Otherwise we shall be strung up to a pitch of tension that will make us think the requiem of church bells, which we shall hear in a few minutes, the voices of spirits or of spectres. Julian, here is your absinthe. What will you drink, Miss Bright? Brandy, lemonade, whiskey?"
"Lemonade, please," Cuckoo said, almost in a whisper.
The tears were crowding in her eyes. She dared not look Julian in the face. Never before had her past risen up before her painted in such grim and undying colours. The reprise of Valentine had been as the reprise of a Maxim gun to a volley fired by a child from an air-tube. So Cuckoo felt. But how greatly was she deceived! Perhaps physical conditions played a subtle part in the terrible desolation that seized her now, after her outburst of daring and of excitement. The warmth and smallness of the room, the penetrating scent that filled it, even the movements of her companions, the sound of their voices, suddenly became almost insupportable to Cuckoo. She was the victim of a reaction that was so swift and so intense as to be unnatural. And in it both her mind and body were bound in chains. Then she was petrified. Her very heart felt cold and cramped, and then hard, icy, inhuman. Her tears did not fall, but were dried up in her eyes, like dew by a scorching sun. She looked at Julian, and felt as indifferent towards him as if he had been a shadow on the grass in the evening time. Then he became remote, with a removedness attained by no shadow even. For a shadow is in the world, and Julian seemed beyond the world to Cuckoo. She thought, even repeated, with tiny lip-movements, the cruel words of Valentine, and they seemed to her no longer cruel, or of any meaning, bad or good. For they came from too far away. They were as a cry of shrill music from a cave leagues onward beyond the caves of any winds.
Valentine poured out some lemonade and gave it to her. She accepted it mechanically. She even put it to her lips and drank some of it. But her palate was aware of no flavour, no coolness of liquid. And she continued sipping without tasting anything.
Meanwhile Julian was saying to Valentine:
"I don't think I'll take any absinthe to-night. Give me some lemonade too."
"Lemonade for you? Nonsense. I ordered the absinthe specially. You must have some. Here it is."
As he spoke he poured some of the opalescent liquid into a tumbler and handed it to Julian. While he did so his eyes were on the doctor and they gleamed again with a sort of audacity or triumph. He seemed recovering himself, returning to his former mood and veiled intentions. And Doctor Levillier thought he saw the flame of Valentine's soul glow more deeply and fiercely. The three men, as if with one accord, ignored the lady of the feathers at this period of the evening. Valentine, having shot his bolt, left his victim to shudder in the dust. Julian and the doctor, full of pity or of wonder, were drawn instinctively to leave her for the moment outside of the circle of intimacy, lest the conflict should be renewed. They did not know how far outside of it she felt; how dim the twilight was becoming to her eyes; how dim the voices to her ears. She lay back on her pillows, in the shadow of the divan, and they supposed her to be listening, as before, to what they said; to be drawing into her nostrils the scent of the hyacinths, and into her soul—it might be—some fragments of their uttered thoughts. But for the moment they seemed to put her outside the door.
Julian did not protest against the absinthe. He took it and placed it on a little table beside him, and as he talked he occasionally drank a little of it, till his glass was empty. Valentine had again looked at his watch.
"The flame of the year is flickering very low," he said.
This simile of the flame of the year, so ordinary, he had spoken against his will. He asked himself angrily why he had said flame, and again the doctor saw the flame of Valentine's soul trying to leap higher, to aspire to some strange and further region than that in which it seemed to dwell. Julian sat looking at Valentine with a gaze that was surely new in his eyes, the dawning gaze of inquiry which a man directs upon a stranger just come into his life. He had not alluded in any way to Cuckoo's startling and vehement interposition. Valentine had killed that conversation with one blow, it seemed. They buried it by deserting it. Yet the thought of it was obviously with them, making quick interchange of words on another subject difficult. Valentine had seized again on the poor, prostrate year; yet he carried even to it the memory of that which seemed to encompass them as with a ring of fire, and that despite himself.
"We shall hear the bells directly," he added. "I hate bells at night.
They will sound odd in this room."
"Very odd," the doctor said.
"We ought to sit reviewing our past year," Valentine went on.
"Our past year and all it has done for us."
"Do you think it has done much for you, Addison?" the doctor asked. And, despite his intention, there was a certain significance in his tone.
Julian looked rather grave and moody, yet excited too, like a man who might burst into either gaiety or anger at a moment's notice.
"I suppose it has," he answered. "Yes, more than any year since I was quite a boy."
"It has taught you how to live," Valentine said quickly.
"Or how to—die," the doctor could not resist saying.
"Why do you say that, doctor?" Valentine asked sharply. "Julian is neither sick nor sad; are you, Julian?"
"Oh, I don't know. Don't bother about me."
But Valentine seemed suddenly determined that Julian should state in precise terms his contentment with his present fate.
"You are making your grand tour towards happiness," he exclaimed.
"Dessert, café noir—then the cigarette and contentment."
"I have had the café noir," Julian said, indicating his empty cup, which Wade had by accident omitted to clear away. "I have had the cigarette."
"Well. What then? Are you unhappy?"
"I tell you I don't know. Give me some more absinthe."
The doctor watched his excitement growing as he drank. It seemed an excitement adverse to Valentine.
"One may have too much black coffee," he suddenly said.
"And that exerts a very depressing effect upon the nerves," said the doctor, taking him literally. "Neither you nor I are likely to sleep well to-night, Addison."
"I never sleep well now, doctor," Julian said.
All this time he continued to regard Valentine in the peculiar, observant manner of a stranger who is trying to make up his mind about the unfamiliar man at whom he looks.
"Then you should not drink black coffee."
As he spoke a very faint sound of bells penetrated to the tentroom.
"The psychological moment!" said Valentine.
And then they were all silent, listening.
To the doctor, the prey of magic art since the soft cry of the lady of the feathers, the bells seemed magical and strange to-night, thin and dreamy and remote. They rang outside the circle of the flames, yet they, too, had an eerie meaning. Nor did their music come, he thought, from any church tower, from any belfry, summoned by the tugging hands of men. Very softly they rang. Their sound was deadened by the thick draperies. They ceased.
"My year is born," Valentine said.
"Your year?" the doctor repeated.
"Yes. I feel that in this year I shall culminate; I shall touch a point; I shall put the corner-stone to the temple of my ambition. No one can prevent me now, no one. Look, she has fainted!"
He had been watching Cuckoo, and had seen her posture of mere rest change, almost imperceptibly, to the prostration of insensibility.
The doctor sprang up from his chair. Julian uttered an exclamation. Valentine only smiled. The door was opened. A fan was used. Air was let into the room. Presently Cuckoo stirred and sat up. The three men were gathered round her, and suddenly Valentine said:
"My trance over again. The lady of the feathers imitates me."
Julian turned round to him with abrupt irritation.
"That's not so," he said. "Cuckoo is herself always." He turned again to her.
"Are you better?" he asked, touching her hand gently.
"Yes, I'm all right. It was—them."
She glanced vaguely round at the tulips, as if searching for the cause of the scent which filled the room.
"There are hyacinths somewhere," the doctor said.
"Yes, they are hidden!" said Valentine. "A hidden power is the greatest power. But now you may see them."
And he drew from a nook, guarded by some large ferns, a pot of red hyacinths.
Cuckoo sat up and drank a little brandy, which the doctor gave to her.
Some colour came into her pale and thin cheeks.
"I'm as right as ninepence now," she said, with an effort after brightness.
The bells began again.
"What's that?" she asked. "Not New Year, is it?"
"Yes," answered Valentine. "A happy New Year to you, lady of the feathers."
Julian was struck by a sudden thought.
"Val," he said, "Cuckoo, I want you to be real friends this year."
He caught hold of Valentine's hand and placed it in Cuckoo's. But then, again, a bewilderment seemed to take hold of him, for even as he touched Valentine's hand he looked at him askance, and the eagerness died away from his face.
"I don't know," he muttered to himself, and getting up from the end of the divan, where he had been sitting, he moved away towards the fire, leaving Cuckoo's hand in the hand of Valentine.
Valentine smiled coldly on Cuckoo.
"Lady of the feathers," he said, "we are to be allies."
"What's that?" she asked, pulling her hand away, directly Julian had turned his back upon them.
"When people fight together against a common enemy they are allies."
"Then we ain't," she whispered, "New Year or not."
"You defy me," he said, raising his voice so that the doctor might hear the words.
"Yes," she said.
"Doctor, do you hear?"
He seemed suddenly bent on forcing a quarrel. Doctor Levillier felt again that sense of dread and horror which had attacked him now more than once of late in Valentine's presence. This time the sensation was so acute that he could scarcely combat it sufficiently to reply.
"I hear," he murmured.
"Julian!" Valentine called. "Julian, come here. Miss Bright wishes to tell you something."
Julian turned round.
"Now, lady of the feathers!"
But Cuckoo burst into a shrill little laugh. Her head was spinning again.
"I've nothing—nothing to say," she cried out. "Give me some more brandy."
"Very well. Let us all drink to the health of the New Year."
Valentine filled the glasses—Julian's with absinthe—and gave the toast:
"The New Year!"
They all raised their glasses to their lips simultaneously. One fell with a crash to the ground and was broken. It was Julian's.
"I won't drink it," he said, doggedly, looking at Valentine.
There was a silence. Then Valentine said, calmly:
"Have you an animus against the thing you don't yet know?"
It was sufficiently obvious that he alluded to the year just coming in upon London. But the words were taken by the doctor, and apparently by Julian, in a hidden and different sense.
"Perhaps because I don't yet know it thoroughly, and had thought I did," Julian answered, staring him full in the face still with that strange glance of mingled interrogation and bewilderment.
Valentine watched him.
"You are treating the poor thing—and my carpet—scurvily, Julian," he said. "And you have startled Miss Bright."
Cuckoo's eyes were shining.
"No," she ejaculated.
Valentine rang the bell and directed Wade to collect the fragments of glass. While the man was doing so silence again reigned, and the little room seemed full of uneasiness. Only Valentine either was or affected to be nonchalant. As soon as Wade had gone he said to the doctor:
"This room is destined to be dedicated to strange uses, and to influence those who come within it. Julian is not himself to-night."
"Are you?" Julian asked.
"Myself?"
"Yes."
"My dear Julian, we shall be forced to think the absinthe has been at work too busily in your brain. What is the matter?"
"Nothing."
"One would think we had been having a sitting, you are so excited."
Julian suddenly drew his breath sharply, as if struck by a shot of an idea.
"Let us have one," he cried.
The distant bells rang faintly. The doctor thrilled to the suggestion, still bound by magic, surely. For now, since the inspiring exclamation of Cuckoo, which had broken his theories on the wheel and swept his reason like a dead flower along the wind, he no longer condemned, as a danger only, that which had produced the trance from which, as from a strange prison, had come the new Valentine. The former sitting had, it seemed, beckoned that trance, and with the trance had beckoned an incredibly evil and powerful thing. What if that which had the power to give had also the power to take away? Often it is so in ordinary conditions of life. Why not also in extraordinary conditions? So his thoughts ran, fantastically enough, to the sound of the far-off bells.
"A good notion," he said on the spur of the moment and this quick reflection.
"You think so?" said Valentine. "You who condemned us, even wrung a promise from us against sitting."
His regard was suspicious.
"Perhaps I have changed my mind. Perhaps I take the matter less seriously," said the doctor.
He had never been more near lying, nor was he ashamed of his dissimulation. There are creatures against which we must, whatever our principles, take up the nearest weapon that comes to hand. The doctor looked at Julian and at Valentine, and could have perjured himself a thousand times to wrest the one from the other.
"But Miss Bright is ill," said Valentine.
"No, I ain't. I'm all right now," Cuckoo said.
She did not understand what was being proposed, but she gathered that the doctor desired it. That was enough for her. Valentine looked at them all three with eyes that plainly betokened a busy mind, then a smile flickered over his lips. It was the smile of one in power watching his slaves creeping at their work—for him. He touched the point—of which he had spoken earlier in the evening—in that smile, a point of delirium.
"Let them try to break me," his mind said within itself. "Their very trial shall consolidate my empire."
And then his eyes left the others and rested only on Julian.
"Very well, we will sit," he said.
CHAPTER IV
THE SIXTH SITTING
Julian was painfully excited, but he strove to repress all evidences of his inward turmoil as he began to pull out a table and arrange it in the centre of the room. This act threw him with a jerk back into the days of the past, recalling so vividly the former life of himself and Valentine that he could not help saying:
"This is like last year."
"Like the year that the locust hath eaten," Valentine answered. "We must push our empty white years down into the water, Julian."
Julian made no reply. The table was soon arranged, the screen was drawn more closely round the fire, which had been allowed to burn low. Four chairs were set. Valentine turned to Cuckoo, who sat hunched on the divan staring with wide open eyes at these preparations.
"Will you come?" he said, with his hands on the back of one of the chairs.
"Whatever are we going to do?" she asked nervously.
"Something very simple—and perhaps very foolish," said the doctor, wondering, indeed, now the moment for beginning the phantasy was arrived, whether he was not to blame for encouraging a thing that in his under mind he so thoroughly disapproved of. "We are going to sit round that table in the dark with our hands upon it, and wait."
"Whatever for?"
Her simple and blatant question caused the doctor actually to blush. His confusion was quite obvious, but it was covered by Julian, who exclaimed, rather roughly:
"Now, Cuckoo, don't chatter, but come here and sit quiet."
He drew her from the divan into a chair and sat down beside her.
Valentine glided swiftly into the chair on her other side and said:
"Oh, doctor, I forgot the light. Do you mind turning it out?"
The doctor obeyed, felt his way to the chair opposite Cuckoo and sat down.
Almost at the moment he turned out the light the bells that rang, "Le roi est mort, vive le roi," ceased. Cuckoo was directed to lay her hands on the table, and to touch with her fingers the fingers of her companions. She did so, trembling. This was a new experience to her, and her entire lack of knowledge of what was expected to happen filled the darkness with immoderate possibilities, and her soul with awe and with confusion. Then, to sit between the man she loved and the man she loathed, thus in the blackness, was a nerve-shaking experience which her preceding fainting-fit did not deprive of its normal terrors. The hand of Valentine and the hand of Julian were as ice and as fire to her. The darkness seemed crowded with nameless things. She could fancy that she heard it whisper incessantly in her ear.
But the real interest of this sitting, to any little demon gifted with a miraculous power of pushing its detective way into the minds of the sitters, would have lain, perhaps, chiefly in the mind of Doctor Levillier. It has been said that, suddenly struck to the soul by the conviction with which the instinctive Cuckoo pronounced those words, "From Marr," Doctor Levillier entered into a new world, abandoning old landmarks. He remained in this new world of the senses certainly, but already he was becoming accustomed to it, clear-headed, keen-sighted, even reasonable in it. Moved by some strange conviction that he was in the presence of an inexplicable mystery, he no longer tried to explain it in some ordinary fashion. He abandoned his theory of insanity, or it abandoned him. In any case, it was dead, buried, whether he would or no. He recognized a mystery at present beyond his capacity to understand or to explain. Having got thus far, and having entered, at Julian's word, into this present circumstance of sitting, table-turning, or rapping, or whatever you may choose to call it, he cleared any ordinary furniture of doctor's prejudices right out of his mind—made a clean sweep of them. That done—and the doing of it required some strong effort—his mind was receptive, ready for anything, odd or ordinary, that might come along. There he sat with his empty room waiting to be filled—the only reasonable way of waiting for that of which we have no knowledge. He did not clamour "I won't," or "I will." He said nothing at all, only waited with the strict desire and intention of recognizing things to be what they truly were, neither dressing them up nor tearing their garments off their backs. When he put out the light and sat down, what he expected—so far as he expected anything—was this, that the addition of darkness would add a cloud to his mind, and endeavour to give various finishing-touches to any spurious excitement created in him, however much against his will, by the enemy's doings. In this expectation he was entirely deceived. The falling of darkness drew a veil from his mind, leaving his mental sight singularly, even preternaturally, clear. The falling of silence gave an amazing acuteness to his inner sense of hearing. Certain people are so made that they can, under certain conditions, and at certain moments, hear the workings of their neighbours' minds, as you and I can hear the whirr of machinery, or the cry of a child in the street. An ordinary man or woman can only hear a mind when lips, teeth, and tongue utter it with living sounds that set the air in vibration. These abnormal people hear, in these abnormal moments, the silent murmurs of the mind making no effort at all to utter itself through the usual speech apparatus. Till this moment the doctor had supposed himself to be an entirely normal man, but he had been sitting only a very short time before he began to become aware of the silent murmurs of these three minds around him. The darkness set his own mind free from clouds of excitement and from mists of unreason. That was the first step. But it did more. It developed in him this marvellous faculty of the hearing of silence, called by some divination. All his senses were rendered amazingly acute. A perfectly distinct impression of the precise feelings of Cuckoo, of Valentine, and of Julian respectively came to him as he sat there, although he could neither see nor hear them. Each of them seemed to pour his or her thoughts into the doctor's mind. Thus, at first, did his empty room become furnished with the thoughts of his companions. He was sitting in the circle between Julian and Valentine and held their hands. And it was Valentine who forged the first link in this strange chain of unuttered communication. As the darkness cleared the doctor's mind, and set him once more on his feet—although in a new world—an aroma of triumph floated to him softly, like a scent in a damp wood at night. He heard then the mind of Valentine murmuring in the stillness the Litany of its glory, a long and an ornate Litany, deep and full, and he knew that he had been right in supposing that Valentine had invited him to witness that glory. But the doctor became aware, too, that at moments the Litany faltered, hesitated, as if the mind of Valentine grew uncertain or was assailed by vague fears. And these fears ran like little pale furtive things to Valentine from the lady of the feathers. By degrees the doctor could imagine that he actually saw them stealing back and forth. Now one would come alone as if to listen to the Litany, and then another would follow, and another, and, growing brave, they would combine against it. Then Valentine would waver and become uneasy, as one who hears little voices crying against him in the night, and knows not whence they come or from whom. But the Litany would begin again, and Valentine would triumph over the pale fears and they would shrink away. And in the Litany one name recurred again and again—the name of Julian. Over him was the triumph. In his ruin and fall and ultimate destruction the glory lived. To witness the complete possibility of this ruin, the complete sovereignty of this glory, the doctor and the lady of the feathers were there. And the doctor grew to feel that only some outside circumstance, alarming Valentine to anxiety and waking Julian to a new observation, had hindered the intended triumph. What circumstance was that? He looked back along the past evening and found it in himself, in his theory that a soul expelled was not necessarily a soul dead. The rift in the glory of the Litany came with that. Valentine was trying to close it by this act of sitting, to impress the strength of his will upon his companions in the darkness. The doctor felt his effort like a continually repeated blow, stealthy and hard and merciless.
And now, in the darkness and in the silence, the doctor heard the mind of Julian. Another scent floated through that imagined damp and breathing wood from another—but how different—soul-flower. No Litany of triumph murmured in the blackness where Julian sat, but a hoarse and broken solo, part despair, part fear, part anger, and all perplexed and flooded with bewilderment and with excitement. The doctor drew into him the murmur of Julian's mind until it seemed to become, for the time, the murmur of his own mind. He was conscious of a dreadful turmoil of doubt, and dread and perplexity, so strong, so painful, that it lay upon him like a dense and a suffocating burden. In that moment he knew utterly that the greatest load in the world laid on any man is the load of his own, perhaps beloved, sin. He was staggering wearily with Julian away from the light. His eyes were dim—with the eyes of Julian. His ears, like Julian's, were assailed with the dastard clamour of the calling sin. "Listen! Listen! you want me. I am here. Take me! Take me!" And the weltering seas of heavy flooding impotence rolled round him as they rolled round Julian. He grew numb and vacant and inert, then—alive ever to the murmur of Julian's mind—caught a glimpse, through the waters of that whelming sea, of far-away light, and heard that the voices of the importunate sins grew fainter. But whether the voices were loud or low, whether the seas flowed above his head or sank and failed, he was always conscious of the dominating mood of almost wild perplexity and a madness of bewilderment. For Julian stirred under the yoke that Valentine had laid upon him, as if at last conscious distinctly that it was indeed a yoke, and that it galled him; as if at last conscious, too, that without that yoke was freedom. And he shot against Valentine in the darkness arrows of inquiry. But always he lived in doubt and almost in terror.
And then, detaching himself from the triumph, touched with anxiety, of Valentine, and from the wild turmoil of Julian, Dr. Levillier opened the door of his mind wide, and the lady of the feathers entered in.
He heard the thoughts of a woman.
That was strangest of all—the most fantastic, eerie, wayward, wonderful music the doctor had dreamed of.
Have you listened to far-off and mingling melodies at night—melodies of things opposed and differing, yet drawn together, in strange places far from your home? Have you heard a woman wailing over some abominable sorrow in a dark house, and an organ—before which filthy children dance fantastically—playing a merry Neapolitan tune in front of it, while the mutter of scowling men comes from the blazing corner where the gin-palace faces the night? There you have sorrow, sunshine, crime, singing together in a great city. Or have you stood in a land not your own, and gleaned the whisper of an ancient river, the sough of a desert wind, the hoarse and tuneless song of a black man at a waterwheel, the soprano ballad of a warbling hotel English lady, and the remote and throbbing roar of a savage Soudanese hymn and beaten drums from the golden Eastern night? There you have nature, toil, shrill civilization and war claiming you with one effort in a sad and sweet country. Or have you, in a bright and dewy morning, heard the "murmur of folk at their prayers," the drone of a church organ, and, beyond the hedgerow, two graceless lovers quarrelling, and an atheist, leaning over the church gate, sneering to his fellow at the devotion of deluded Sabbath-keepers? There you have love of the hidden and faith, love of the visible and distrust, hatred of hidden love and faithlessness, making a symphony for you. Such mingled music is strange—strange as life. But to the doctor the music of this girl, Cuckoo, in the dark seemed stranger and more eerie far. Her mind sang to him of a thousand things in a moment, as is the fashion of women. Only men normally hear but one, at most two or three, of the many feminine melodies. And now Doctor Levillier heard them all, as a man may hear those differing songs already recounted, simultaneously and clearly. Degradation and the hopelessness that catches it by the hand, passion and the strength and purity of passion, hatred, fear, physical fatigue, ignorant nervousness, grossness of the gutter, which will cling even to a soul capable of great devotion and noble effort, and accompany it on the upward journey, very far and very high, resolve and shrinking, mere street-boy virulence of enmity, and mere angel tenderness of pity—all these sang their song from the mind and heart of Cuckoo to the mind and heart of the doctor. It was a chorus of women in one woman, as it so often is in the dearest women we know. In that choir a harlot sat, hating, by a girl who was all love and reverence. And they sang out of the same hymn-book. Jenny joined her voice with Susannah, Mary Magdalene with Mary Mother, so near together in one thing, so far apart in another—alike in this, that both were singing. And in that choir—celestial and infernal—sang the jealous woman with grey cheeks and haggard eyes, and the timorous woman, and she of the fearless face, and the woman who could scale the stars for the creature she worshipped, and the woman who could lie down in the mud and let the world see her there, and the woman who had sold her soul for food, and a thin woman, such a thin, almost transparent, wistful creature, who was facing the thing men call with bated breath—starvation. She sang too, but, of all these women, she was the only one the doctor could not rightly hear nor rightly see. For she, as yet, was remote, far down the level line of that choir, hardly perhaps one with it yet, faint of voice, dim of outline.
The doctor heard the choir sing, and then—
His mind, as the time of the darkness grew longer, continued to grow more and more clear, until he felt thoroughly, and was able to try to analyze its unnatural condition. Scales had fallen from him and from his companions for him. Their bodies were clothed, their souls, their flames, seemed stripped bare and offered to him naked. He had examined them with this greedy, yet sane, attention and curiosity. He had led them into the empty room and stayed with them there. He had heard the Litany of the Glory of Valentine, and the suffocation, and the anger, and the stirring beneath his yoke of Julian. He had heard the many women sing in the heart of the lady of the feathers. But all this seemed leading him forward and onward, step by step, as to a threshold beyond which was some greater, some more importunate, thing. And he took the last step with Cuckoo. It was as if he was handed on from one room to another, as is the fashion in the palace of a great king, his name being called in each, and sent before, like a voice sent on the wind, and as if Cuckoo was in the last anteroom that gave upon the audience-chamber. Now he had arrived, and suddenly a great wave of mysterious expectation ran over him and filled the cup of his soul. He felt that he stood still and waited. The sense of Cuckoo, of all she felt and thought in the darkness, gradually dropped away from him, like leaves from a tree, till every branch was leafless. And this autumnal ravishment, like the ravishment of nature, was but a preparation surely for a future spring.
The doctor waited outside that door, beyond which, perhaps, spring blossomed and sang. He lost at last all sense of being in a company of people, and felt as one feels who is entirely alone, expectant, calm, ready. And still only the darkness and the silence. Nothing more at first. But presently what seemed to him a marvel.
He had by this time grown at ease with his power of thought-reading, at ease with this new sense of the hearing of silence. The differing scents of these three flowers hidden in the night had been breathed out to him. With infallible certainty he had recognized each one, differentiated the one from the other. And as the scent of one flower had failed, the scent of another had risen upon him, until he had known the heart of each of the three. Then for a while was the night scentless, silent, blank, empty. But presently the doctor was aware of an uneasiness and of an anxiety stealing upon him. Whence it came he could not tell. Only this he knew, that he received it from something, but that it came neither from the lady of the feathers, from Valentine, nor from Julian. From whom, then, could it emanate, this weird eagerness, this fluttering, pulsing fear, and hope, and intention? From himself only? He asked himself that question. Was he communing in the dark with his own soul? He knew that he was not. The scent of this new and unknown flower grew stronger in the night, more penetrating and intentional. Yet was it vaguer, more distant, than that emitted by those other three flowers. The exact impression received by the doctor at this moment was very subtle. Precisely it was this: It seemed to him that he was gradually coming into communication with a fourth mind, or soul; that this soul was actually more strong, more vehement, even more determined, than the souls of his three companions, but that some barrier removed it from him, set it very far of. The flame of a match held to a man's eyes may dazzle him more than the flame of a great fire on the horizon. This new flame was as the latter in comparison to match-flames that had been flaring in the doctor's eyes. And this great and distant flame burned slowly in a smoke of mystery and upon the verge of dense darkness.
Never had the doctor known so peculiar, and even awe-striking, an experience as that which he now underwent. What utterly bewildered him was the circumstance of this undoubted new and definite personality enclosed in this tiny room with him and with his three companions. He was receiving the impression of the thoughts of a stranger. Yet there was no stranger in the chamber. And he was vexed and curiously irritated by the fact of the impression being at the same time very vague and very violent, like the cry of a man which reaches you faintly from a very long distance, but which you feel instinctively to have been uttered with the frantic force of death or of despair. And the mind of this stranger was tugging at the doctor's mind, anxiously, insistently. There was a depth of distress in it that was as no mere human distress, and that moved the doctor to a mood beyond the mood of tears or of prayers. There came over him an awful sense of pity for this stranger-soul. What had it done? How was it circumstanced? In what ghastly train of events did it move? It was surely powerful and helpless at the same time; a cripple with a mind on fire with fight; Samson blind. He felt that it wanted something—of him, or of his companions, some light in its severe desolation. Deeper and deeper grew his horror and pity for it, deeper and deeper his sense of its ill fate. The woe of it was unearthly, yet more than earthly woe. Similes came to the doctor to compare with its dreadful circumstance: a child motherless in a world all winter; a saint devoted to hell by some great error of God; even one more blasphemous, and more bizarre still—God worsted by humanity, and, at the last, helpless to reclaim the souls to which He had Himself given being; lonely God in a lonely heaven, seeing far-off hell bursting with the countless multitudes of the writhing lost. This last simile stayed with him. He fancied, he felt—not heard—the voice of this frustrate God calling to him: "Do what I could not do. Strive to help My impotence. A little—a little—and even yet hell would stand empty, the vacant courts of heaven be filled. Act—act—act."