Flames

"Then who the devil's in the room with us?"

Valentine also, convinced that Julian had not been joking, was appalled. He switched on the light, and saw Julian standing opposite to him, looking very white. They both threw a rapid glance upon the room, whose dull green draperies returned their inquiry with the complete indifference of artistic inanimation.

"Who the devil's got in here?" Julian repeated, with the savage accent of extreme uneasiness.

"Nobody," Valentine replied. "You know the thing's impossible."

"Impossible or not, somebody has found means to get in."

Valentine shook his head.

"Then you were lying?"

"Julian, what are you saying? Don't go too far."

"Either you were, or else a man has been sitting at that table between us, and I have held his hand, the hand of some stranger. Ouf!"

He shook his broad shoulders in an irrepressible shudder.

"I was not lying, Julian. I tell you so, and I mean it."

Valentine's eyes met Julian's, and Julian believed him.

"Put your hands on the table again," Julian said.

Valentine obeyed, and Julian laid his beside them, linking one of his little fingers tightly in one of Valentine's, and at the same time shutting his eyes. After a long pause he grew visibly whiter, and hastily unlinked his finger.

"No, damn it, Val, I hadn't hold of your hand. The hand I touched was much harder, and the finger was bigger, thicker. I say, this is ghastly."

Again he shook himself, and cast a searching glance upon the little room.

"Somebody has been in here with us, sitting between us in the dark," he repeated. "Good God, who is it?"

Valentine looked doubtful, but uneasy too.

"Let us go through the rooms," he said.

They took a candle, and, as on the previous night, searched, but in vain. They found no trace of any alien presence in the flat. No book, no ornament, had been moved. No door stood open. There was no sound of any footsteps except their own. When they came to Valentine's bedroom, Rip leaped to greet them, and seemed in excellent spirits. He showed no excitement until he had followed them back into the tentroom. But, arrived there, he suddenly stood still, raised one white paw from the ground, and emitted a long and dreary howl. The young men stared at him, and then at each other.

"Rip knows somebody has been here," Julian said.

Valentine was much more uncomfortably impressed by the demeanour of the dog than by Julian's declaration and subsequent agitation. He had been inclined to attribute the whole affair to a trick of his friend's nerves. But the nervous system of a fox-terrier was surely, under such circumstances as these, more truth-telling than that of a man.

"But the thing is absolutely impossible," he repeated, with some disturbance of manner.

"Is anything that we can't investigate straight away absolutely impossible?"

Valentine did not reply directly.

"Here is a cigarette," he said. "Let us sit down, soothe our nerves, and talk things over calmly and openly. We have not been quite frank with each other about these sittings yet."

Julian accepted Valentine's offer with his usual readiness. The fire was relit with some difficulty. Rip was coaxed into silence.

Presently, as the smoke curled upward with its lazy demeanour, the horror that had hung like a thin vapour in the atmosphere seemed to be dissipated.

"Now I think we are ourselves again, and can be reasonable," Valentine began. "Don't let us be hysterical. Spiritualists always suffer from hysteria."

"The sceptics say, Val."

"And probably they are generally right. Now—yes, do drink some more of that brandy and soda. Now, Julian, do you still believe that a hand held yours just now?"

Julian answered quietly, showing no irritation at the question:

"I simply know it as surely as I know that I am sitting with you at this moment. And,—look here, you may laugh at me as much as you. like,—although I supposed the hand to be yours, until you denied it I had previously felt the most curious sensation."

"Of what?"

"Well, that something was coming, even had actually come, into the room."

Valentine answered nothing to this, so Julian went on.

"I thought it was a trick of the nerves, and determined to drive it away, and I succeeded. And then, just as I was internally laughing at myself, this hand, as if groping about in the dark, was first laid on mine, full on it, Val, and then slid off onto the table and linked its little finger tightly in mine. I, of course, supposed the hand was yours, and this finger was crooked round mine for fully five minutes, I should say. After you spoke, thinking that you were trying to deceive me for a joke, I caught the hand in mine, and pinched it with all my strength until it was forcibly dragged away."

"Strange," Valentine murmured.

"Deucedly strange! and, what's more, diabolically unpleasant."

"I wonder what that fellow, Marr, would say to this."

"Marr! By Jove, is this one of the manifestations which he spoke about so vaguely?"

"It seems like it."

"But describe your sensations. You say you felt horribly afraid. Why was that?"

"I can't tell. That, I think, made part of the horror. There was a sort of definite vagueness, if you can imagine such a seeming contradiction, in my state of mind. But the feeling is really indescribable. That it was more strange and more terrible than anything I have known is certain. I should like to ask Dr. Levillier about all this."

"Levillier—yes. But he would—"

"Be reasonable about it, as he is about everything. Dear, sensible, odd, saintly, emotional, strong-headed, soft-hearted little doctor. He is unique."

They talked on for some time, arriving at no conclusion, until it seemed they had talked the whole matter thoroughly out. Yet Valentine, who was curiously instinctive, had, all the time, a secret knowledge that Julian was keeping something from him, was not being perfectly frank. The conviction pained him. At last Julian got up to go. He stood putting on his overcoat.

"Good-night," he said.

"Good-night, Julian."

"Now—is this to be our last sitting?"

Valentine hesitated.

"What do you wish?" he asked at length.

"What do you?"

"Well, I—yes, I think I would rather it was the last."

Julian caught his hand impulsively.

"So would I. Good-night."

"Good-night."

Julian went out into the hall, got as far as the front door, opened it, then suddenly called out:

"Valentine!"

"Yes."

"Come here for a moment."

Valentine went, and found him standing with his hand on the door, looking flushed and rather excited.

"There is one thing I haven't told you," he began.

"I knew that."

"I guessed you did. The most horrible sensation I have had. During our sitting to-night—don't be vexed—an extraordinary apprehension of—well, of you, came over me. There! Now I have told you."

Valentine was greatly astonished.

"Of me?" he said.

"Yes. There was a moment when the idea that I was alone with you made my blood run cold."

"Good heavens!"

"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 God. 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 analyzable proceeding that has gone on in his inside, and that you could diagnose. Eh?"

Doctor Levillier was writing a prescription in which bismuth 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 damnable 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 hell. 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 mêlée."

"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 assure 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. Passing 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?"

"No. He told me he considered temptation rather a curse than otherwise, and then he surprised me very much."

"He told you a secret?"

"Why, yes."

"The secret of your great influence over his life?"

"You knew of this secret, then?"

"He didn't tell it to me. Long ago I divined it. Addison is a very interesting fellow to a doctor, and the fact of his strong friendship with you has made him more interesting even than he would otherwise have been. His physique is tremendous. He has a quite unusual vitality, and stronger passions by far than most Englishmen. I confess that my knowledge of human nature led me to foresee a very troubled and too vehement future for him. My anticipation being utterly falsified led me naturally to look round for the reason of its falsification. I very soon found that reason in you."

"I had never suspected it."

"Your lack of suspicion was not the least reason of the influence you exercised."

"Possibly. He told me of the strength of his evil impulses, of how he hated their assaults, and of how being with me enabled him to conquer them. Apparently the contemplation of my unnatural nature is an armour to him."

"It is."

"Well, I continued to bewail my condition, which he envied, and it ended in our sitting down, in jest, to make an experiment to try to exchange our souls."

"What means did you take?"

And then Valentine told Dr. Levillier the exact circumstances of the three sittings, without embellishment, without omission of any kind. He listened with keen attention, and without attempting interruption or intruding comment. When Valentine had finished he made no remark.

"What do you think of it, doctor?"

"Of what part of it?"

"Of any part. Do you attach any importance to it?"

"I do, certainly."

"I thought you would laugh at the whole thing."

"Why should I? Why should I laugh at any circumstances which strongly affect men whom I know, or, indeed, any men?"

"But then, tell me, do you believe in some strange, unseen agency? Do you believe that Julian absolutely held the hand of some being dwelling in another sphere, some being attracted to us, or, say, enabled to come to us by such an action as our sitting at a table in the dark?"

"No. I don't believe that."

"You attribute the whole thing to bodily causes?"

"I am inclined to attribute it to the action and reaction of mind and body, undoubtedly. If you had sat in the light, for instance, I don't think Addison would have felt that hand. The hand is indeed the least of the circumstances you have related, in my opinion. The incidents of the dog and of the curtain are far more mysterious. You are positive the door was securely shut?"

"Quite positive."

"Could you, after having drawn the curtain, have allowed your hand to slip slightly back, pulling the curtain with it?"

"I don't think so. I feel sure not."

"You know we all constantly make involuntary motions—motions that our minds are quite unaware of."

"I do feel sure, nevertheless. And the dog? What do you say to that?"

"I don't know what to say. But dogs are extraordinarily sensitive. I do not think it beyond the bounds of possibility that the tumult of your nerves—for there was tumult; you confess it—communicated itself to him."

"And was the cause of his conduct?"

"Yes. In the course of my career I have been consulted by a great many patients whose nervous systems have been disastrously upset by the practices you describe, by so-called spiritualism, table-turning, and so forth. One man I knew, trying to cultivate himself onto what he called 'a higher plane,' cultivated himself into a lunatic asylum, where he still remains."

"Then you consider spiritualism—?"

"I have too much respect for the soul, too much belief in its great destiny, Cresswell, to juggle with it, or to play tricks with it. When one meets a genius one does not want to have a game at puss-in-the-corner with him. One is rather anxious to hear him talk seriously and display his mind. When I come into contact with a soul, I don't want to try to detach it from the home in which a divine power has placed it for a time. I glory in many limitations against which it is the prevailing fashion to fight uselessly. The soul can do all its work where it is—in the body. The influence you exercise over your friend Addison convinces me of the existence of spirits, things which will eventually be freed from the body, more certainly than any amount of material manifestations, sights, sounds, apparent physical sensations. Why should we not be satisfied with remaining, for a time, as we are? I consider that you and Addison were ill-advised in making this—no doubt absurd—experiment. Supposing it to be absurd, the raison d'être of the sittings is gone at once. Supposing it not to be—"

"Yes. What, then?"

"Then the danger is great. Imagine yourself with Addison's soul or nature, him with yours. To what might not you be led? How do you know that your nature in him would exert any control over his nature in you?"

"Why should it not?"

"There comes in the power of the body, which is very great. I believe, as you know, absolutely in the existence of the soul, and in its immortal destiny; but that does not blind me to the extraordinary influence, the extraordinary kingship, which a mere body, a mere husk and shell, as some good people call it—I don't feel with them—can obtain not only over another body, but, strangely, over the soul which is in that body. Your influence over Addison has been, and is, immense. Do you imagine that it is simply your nature which governs him?"

"I suppose so."

"Your mere appearance may have an immense deal to do with the matter. You have the look, the expression, of one who has not sinned. It is partly that which keeps Addison from giving the reins to his impulses. I consider that if it were possible for your nature to change secretly and for your face to remain unchanged, if you sinned perpetually and retained your exact appearance, and if Addison did not know you sinned, you could still be his guardian, while, really, yourself far worse in every way than him."

"But surely that fights against your theory that the existence of a soul is proved by such an influence as I possess over Addison?"

"Not at all. I said if it were possible for the body not to express the soul, if—but that's just the difficulty, it is not possible. The body manifests the soul. Supposing it were not so, the power of evil, the devil, if you choose to name it and imply a personal existence for it, might have hold of the world even more tightly than now. Just conceive, under such conditions, how you might lure Addison to destruction if you desired to do so. Looking at you, and seeing the same face in which he has learned to see what he thinks entire goodness, he would be unable to believe that any action you could suggest and take part in could be evil. You could wreck his future with a perfect ease. But, as things are, did your nature change and become malignant, your face would change too, and you might quickly cease to exercise a strong influence over Addison. He might even, having now been unconsciously trained into a curious integrity, learn to hate and to despise you. You remember our conversation to-night about that symphony?"

"Yes."

"I said that the soul which could reproduce hell should be able to reproduce heaven."

"I know."

"Well, my boy—for you are a boy to me—the reverse of that might happen also."

"Perhaps. But I don't quite see."

"The application—to you?"

"To me?"

"Yes, to you, Cresswell. You have been given a strangely perfect nature. As you say, you seem to have nothing to do with the matter. You have even been inclined to rebel against your gift. But, take my advice. Cherish it. Don't play with it, as you have been playing. Remember, if you lose heaven, the space once filled by heaven will not be left empty."

"Ah! now I see. You think that I—"

"Might swing from a great height to an equally great depth. That has been my experience—that the man who is once extreme is always extreme, but not always in the same way. The greatest libertines have made the greatest ascetics. But, within my own experience, I have known the reverse process to obtain. And you, if you changed, might carry Addison with you."

"But then, doctor, you do believe in these manifestations?"

"Not necessarily. But I believe that the minds of men are often very carefully, very deftly, poised, and that a little push can send them one way or the other. Have you ever balanced one billiard-ball on the top of another?"

"Yes."

"Then you know that a breath will upset it and send it rolling. Be careful. Your mind, your very nature, may be poised like that billiard-ball. Addison's may be the same. Indeed, I feel sure Addison's is. That curious dread of you which overcame him at your last sitting is a sign of it. The whole thing is wrong—bad for body and for mind."

"Perhaps. Well, we have definitely agreed to give it up."

"That's well. Eleven o'clock! I must be going. Are you doing anything to-morrow night?"

"No."

"I have got a box for this new play at the Duke's Theatre. Will you come?"

"With pleasure."

"I will ask Addison also."

They put on their overcoats, and walked a little way along Pall Mall before they parted. Near the Atheneaum they passed a tall, thin man, who was coming in the opposite direction. He turned round as they went by, and stood directly regarding them till they were out of sight.

CHAPTER VII

THE REGENT STREET EPISODE

The things we do apparently by chance often have a curious applicability to the things we have thought. John the Baptist was sent to prepare the way of the Lord. These thoughts are the John the Baptists of the mind, and prepare the way for facts that often startlingly illustrate them. It is as if our thoughts were gradually materialized by the action of the mind; as if, by the act of thinking, we projected them.

When Doctor Levillier got a box for the first night of the new play at the Duke's Theatre, and when he invited Valentine and Julian to make up his party, he had no idea what the subject of the piece was, no notion that it would have anything to do with the conversation which took place between him and Valentine at the club. But the plot applied with almost amazing fidelity to much that he had said upon that occasion. The play was a modern allegory of the struggle between good and evil, which has been illustrated in so many different ways since the birth of the Faust legend. But the piece had a certain curious originality which sprang from the daring of the author. Instead of showing one result of the struggle, a good man drawn gradually down, or a bad man drawn gradually up, he set forth, with a great deal of detail, a great deal of vividness, a modern wobbler, a human pendulum, and simply noted down, as it were, his slow swinging backwards and forwards. His hero, an evil liver, a modern man of wrath in the first act, dominated by a particular vice, was drawn, by an outside personal influence, from the mire in which he was wallowing, to purity, to real elevation. But his author, having led him up to the pinnacle, had no intention of leaving him there, blessed by the proclaimed admiration of the gods in the gallery. In the succeeding acts he introduced a second personal influence, exerted this time on the side of evil, and permitted it to act upon his central figure successfully. The man fell again into the mire, and was left there at the conclusion of the piece, but hugging a different sin, not the sin he had been embracing when the curtain rose upon the first act. This dramatic scheme took away the breath of the house for a moment, but only for a moment. Then the lungs once more did their accustomed duty, and enabled a large number of excited persons to hiss with a wonderful penetration. Their well-meant efforts did not have the effect of terrorizing the author. On the contrary, he quickly responded to the hostile uproar, and, coming forward in a very neat Jaeger suit, a flannel shirt, and a pair of admirably fitting doeskin gloves, bowed with great gravity and perfect self-possession. The hisses thereupon suddenly faded into piercing entreaties for a speech, in which a gallery lady with a powerful soprano voice became notorious as the leader. But the Jaeger author was not to be prevailed upon. He waved the doeskin gloves in token of adieu, and retreated once more into the excited obscurity of the wings, where his manager was trembling like an aspen, in the midst of a perspiring company. The lights were turned down. The orchestra burst into a tuneful jig, and the lingering audience at length began to disperse.

Dr. Levillier, Julian, and Valentine left their box in silence. It seemed that this odd play, which dared to be natural, had impressed them. They walked into the vestibule without a word, and, avoiding many voluble friends who were letting off the steam as they gathered their coats and hats from a weary lady in a white cap, they threaded their way through the crowd and emerged into the street. Just as they reached the portico, Julian suddenly started and laid his hand on Valentine's arm.

"What is it?" asked Valentine, looking round.

"Ah! you're just too late. He's gone!"

"He—who?"

"Marr."

"Oh," Valentine said, showing considerable interest; "I wish I had seen him. Where was he sitting?"

"I haven't an idea. Didn't know he was in the theatre."

Doctor Levillier made an exception to his rule of being in bed by twelve o'clock that night, and accepted Valentine's invitation to sup in Victoria Street. He had always been greatly drawn to Valentine, attracted by the latter's exceptional clarity of character, and he was scarcely less interested in Julian. Nor did the considerable difference between his age and the ages of the two youths in any way interfere with their pleasant intercourse. For Levillier had a heart that was ageless. The corroding years did not act as acid upon it. All his sympathies were as keen, all his power of enjoyment was as great, as when he had been a delightfully gay and delightfully pleasant boy at school. Youth always loved him, and age always respected him. He possessed the great secret of a beautiful life. He was absolutely genuine, and he meant nothing but good to all with whom he was brought into contact.

The three friends spoke but little as they went back to the flat, but when they had sat down to supper, and Dr. Levillier had expressed his complete satisfaction with the champagne that Valentine's butler had politely insinuated into his glass, the silence took to itself wings and lightly departed. They talked of the play, and it appeared that they were all impressed by it, but in slightly different ways, and for different reasons. Valentine, who was intensely, but sometimes almost coldly, artistic, appreciated it, he said, because it did not obviously endeavour to work out a problem or to teach a lesson. It simply, with a great deal of literary finish and dramatic force, stated a curiously human character, showed the nature of a man at work, and left him, after some scenes of his life, still at work upon his own salvation or destruction, not telling the audience what his end would be, scarcely even trying to imply his innate tendency one way or the other. This satisfied Valentine. This had made him feel as if he had seen a block cut out of life.

"I do not want to learn what becomes of that man," he said. "I have known him, good and bad. That is enough. That satisfies me more than the sight of a thousand bombastic heroes, a thousand equally bombastic villains. Life is neither ebony nor ivory. That man is something to my mind forever, as Ibsen's 'Master Builder' is something. I can never forget the one or the other."

"Your life is ivory, Val," Julian said.

He had liked the play because the violent struggle between good and evil woke up many responsive memories in his mind. The hero of the play had been shown feeling precisely as Julian had often felt. That was enough. He did not very much care for the brilliant artifice, which Valentine had remarked with so much pleasure. He did not specially note the peculiar effect of nature produced by the simplicity and thoughtful directness of the dialogue. He only knew that he had seen somebody whose nature was akin to his own nature, although placed in different, perhaps more dramatic, circumstances.

Dr. Levillier combined, to some appreciable extent, the different joys of his two companions, and obtained another that was quite his own. He had seen two horses running in double harness that night, the body and mind of the hero, and had taken delight in observing what had practically escaped the definite notice of his companions, the ingenuity and subtlety with which the author, without being obtrusive or insistent, had displayed their liaison; the effect of each upon the other, their answering excursions and alarums, their attempts at separate amours, amours that always had an inevitable effect upon the one which the other had, for the moment, endeavoured to exclude from its life. The doctor in him and the priest in him had both enjoyed a glorious evening of bracing activity. As they discussed the piece, and each advanced his reason of pleasure, the doctor expanded into a sort of saintly geniality, which was peculiarly attractive even to sinners. And when supper was over, and they strolled into the drawing-room to smoke and to make music, he sank into a chair, stretched out his polished boots with a sigh, and said:

"And people say there is so little joy in life!"

Julian laughed at the satisfied whimsicality of his exclamation and of the expression which shadowed it.

"Light up, doctor," he cried. "You are a boon to this modern world. For you see all the sorrows of life, I suppose, and yet you always manage to convey the impression that the joys win the battle after all."

Valentine had gone over to the piano and was dreamily opening it. He did not seem to hear what they were saying. The doctor obeyed the injunction to light up. He was one of the hardest and most assiduous toilers in all London, and he appreciated a good cigar and a comfortable arm-chair more than some men could appreciate Paradise, or some women appreciate love.

"And I believe that joy will win the battle in the end," he said, with a puff that proved successful.

"Why?"

"I see evidences of it, or think I do. The colour will fade out of bad acts, Addison, but the colour of a good act is eternal. A noble deed will never emulate a Sir Joshua Reynolds—never. Play to us, Cresswell."

"Yes, but I wish you to talk. I want to improvise to-night. The murmur of your conversation will help me."

Julian sat down by the doctor. He, too, looked very happy. It was a pleasant hour. Sympathy was in that pretty room, complete human sympathy, and a sympathy that sprang from their vitality, avoiding the dusky dumbness of the phlegmatic. Valentine sat down at the piano and began gently to play. The smoke from the cigars curled away towards the watching pictures; the room was full of soft music.

"Yes, Addison," Doctor Levillier continued, in a low voice, "I am perpetually sitting with sorrow, communing with disease. That consulting-room of mine is as a pool of Bethesda, only not all who come to it, alas! can be healed. I sit day by day in my confessional—I like to call it that; perhaps I was meant to be a priest—and I read the stories of the lives of men and of women, most of them necessarily, from the circumstances which bring them to me, sad. And yet I have a belief in joy and its triumph which nothing can ever shake, a belief in the final glory of good which nothing can ever conquer."

"That's fine, doctor. But do you know why you have it?"

"I daresay that question is difficult to answer. I often seek for my reasons, Addison, and I find many, though I can hardly say which is the best, or whether any quite explains the faith that is always in me. Apropos of this evening, by the bye, I long ago found one of my reasons in the theatre, the theatre which some really good men hate and condemn."

"What was that?"

"Oh, a very simple one. I believe that men in the mass express eternal truths more readily, more certainly, than men as individuals. Put a lot of bad men, or—we won't call them bad, why should we?—loose, careless, thoughtless men, together in the pit of a theatre. Many of them, perhaps, drink, and are rendered cruel by drink. Many of them care nothing for morality, and have wounded, in the worst way, the souls of women. Many of them show incessant hardness in most of the relations of life. What, then, is it, that makes all these individuals respond so directly, so certainly, to every touch of goodness, and gentleness, and unselfishness, and purity, and faith, that is put before them upon the stage? I think it must be that eternal truth—the rocks of good that lie forever beneath the wild seas of evil. Those men don't know themselves; don't know that it is all useless for them to try to hide the nobility which has been put into them, to thrust it down, and, metaphorically, to dance on it. They can't get rid of it, do what they will. I like to think of goodness as the shadow of evil through life, the shadow that, at death, or perhaps long after death, becomes the substance."

"You think we cannot kill the good that is in us?"

"Not quite. But I think we can go near to killing it, so near that it will take longer to recover and to be itself again, longer far than the most relapsing typhoid patient."

"And have you other reasons for your belief?"

"Perhaps. But some of them are difficult to define, and would carry no conviction to any one but myself. There is one in this very room with us."

Julian glanced up, surprised.

"What is that, doctor?" he said.

"You ought to know better than I," Levillier answered.

He was looking at Valentine, who, apparently quite unconscious of their presence, was still playing rather softly. Julian followed his eyes.

The light in the room was dim, a carefully manufactured twilight. It is strange how many things, and how slight, stir, control, influence in one direction or another, the emotions. Light and the absence of light can divert a heart as easily as the pressing of a button can give a warship to the sea. Twilight and music can change a beast into a man, a man into an angel, for the moment. Long after that evening was dead, both Julian and Doctor Levillier anxiously, and in their different ways analytically, considered it. They submitted it to a secret process of probing, such as many men enforce upon what they imagine to be great causes in their lives. That hour became an hour of wonder, an hour of amazement, viewed in the illumination of subsequent events. They found in it a curious climax of misunderstanding, a culmination of all deceptive things.

And yet, in that hour they only watched a young man of London, a modern intellectual youth, playing in a Victoria Street drawing-room upon a Steinway grand piano.

They were sitting sideways to Valentine, and a little behind him. Therefore he could not easily see them unless he slightly turned his head. But they could observe him, and, obeying Doctor Levillier's mute injunction, Julian now did so.

Valentine was gazing straight before him over the top, of the piano, and his eyes seemed to be fixed upon the dim figure of Christ in the picture of "The Merciful Knight." Was he not playing to the picture, playing to that figure in it? And did not his musical imagination seek to reproduce in sound the vision of the life of that mailed knight who never lived and died? The purity of his expression, always consummate, was to-night more peculiar, more unearthly, than before in any place, at any moment. And, as mere line can convey to the senses of man a conception of a great virtue or of a great vice, the actual shape of his features, thus seen in profile, was the embodiment of an exquisitely ascetic purity, as much an embodiment as is a drop of water pierced by a sunbeam. This struck both Doctor Levillier and Julian, and the doctor was amazed anew at the silent decree that the invisible shall be made visible in forms comprehensible to the commonest minds. Sin would surely flee from a temple sculptured in such a shape as the body of Valentine, as a vampire would flee from the bloodless courts of the heaven of the Revelation. Lust cannot lie at ease on a crystal couch, or rest its dark head upon a pillow of pale ivory. And the message of this strange, unearthly youth now given in music, and to the air and the dust—for Valentine had lost knowledge of his friends—was crystalline too. In his improvisation he journeyed through many themes of varying characters. He hymned the knight's temptation no less than his triumph. But purity was in the hymn even at the hour of temptation, and sang like a bird in every scene of the life,—a purity classical, detached, so refined as to be almost physically cold.

"I understand you," Julian whispered to the little doctor. "Yes, you are right. He is a great reason why what you think may be true. And yet"—here Julian lowered his voice to a breath, lest he might disturb the player—"he is not religious, as—as—well, as you are. Forgive the allusion—."

"Are the angels religious?" said Doctor Levillier. "Why should you refrain, my dear boy? But you are right. There is a curious unconsciousness about Cresswell—about Valentine—which seems to exclude even definite religious belief as something in a way self-conscious, and so impossible to him. There is an extraordinary strain of the child in Cresswell, such as I conceive to be in unearthly beings, who have never had the power to sin. And the best-behaved, sweetest child in the world might catch flies or go to sleep during the Litany or a sermon. This very absence of controversial or dogmatic religion gives Valentine much of his power, seems positively to lift him higher than religionists of any creed."

"You think—you think that perhaps it is something in him of which he is unconscious which does so much for me?"

"Perhaps it is."

Valentine now glided into an accompaniment, and began to sing. And the doctor and Julian ceased to talk. Valentine certainly did not sing with such peculiar skill as he showed in playing, but he had a charming voice which he used with great ease, and he never sang a single note, or phrased a passage, without complete intelligence and understanding of his composer. Only he lacked power. This scarcely interfered with the pleasure he could give in a drawing-room, and to-night both Levillier and Julian were rather in a mood for supreme delicacy than for great passion. They listened with silent pleasure for a time. Then Levillier said:

"Do you remark how wonderfully the timbre of Cresswell's voice expresses the timbre of his mind? The parallel is exact."

Julian nodded.

"That is his soul written in sound," the doctor added.

It was at this point that Valentine ceased and got up from the piano.

"I must smoke too," he said. "No, not a cigar, I'll have a cigarette to-night."

"You are fond of that picture, Cresswell?" said Doctor Levillier as
Valentine sat down.

"'The Merciful Knight'? Yes, I love it. Have you told Julian your opinion of our sittings, doctor?"

"No. He didn't ask me for it."

"I should be glad to have it, all the same," Julian said.

"Well, my opinion is entirely adverse to your proceedings," Levillier said, with his usual frankness.

"You are, in fact, at the opposite pole from Marr," Julian answered.

"Marr! Who is Marr? I never heard of him."

"Nor I, until the other evening," Julian said. "But now I see him every day. He was at the theatre to-night. I saw him as we came out."

"What is he, a spiritualist? A professional?"

"Oh dear, no! He calls himself an occultist. He goes out in society a great deal, apparently. I met him at dinner first. Since then he has taken the keenest interest in my sittings with Valentine."

"Indeed! You know him, Cresswell?"

Valentine shook his head, and Julian laughed.

"The fun of it is that Marr doesn't wish to know Valentine," he said.

"Why?" the doctor asked.

Julian told him the words Marr had used in reference to Valentine, and gave a fairly minute description of Marr's attitude towards their proceedings. Levillier listened with great attention.

"Then this man urges you to go on with your sittings?" he said when
Julian had finished.

"Scarcely that. But he certainly seems anxious that we should."

"You have both resolved to give them up, haven't you?"

"Certainly, doctor," Valentine replied.

"Does Marr know that?" Levillier asked of Julian.

"No. I haven't seen him to speak to since our final sitting."

The little doctor sat in apparent meditation for two or three minutes.
Then he remarked, with abruptness:

"Addison, will you think me an impertinent elderly person if I give you a piece of advice?"

"You—doctor! Of course not. What is it?"

"Well, you young fellows know me, know that I am not a mere sentimentalist or believer in every humbug that is the fashion of the moment. But one thing I do firmly believe, that certain people are born with a power to command, or direct others, which amounts to force. The world doesn't completely recognize this. The law doesn't recognize, perhaps ought not to recognize it. Some call it hypnotism. I call it suggestion."

He paused, as if he had finished.

"But your advice, doctor?" Julian said, wondering.

"Oh, h'm! I don't mean to give it to you, after all."

"Why?"

Doctor Levillier became enigmatic.

"Because I have just remembered that to warn is often to supply a cause of stumbling," he said.

Dr. Levillier and Julian drove together as far as the latter's chambers that evening, and, after bidding Julian good-night, the doctor dismissed the cab and set out to walk to Harley Street. He proceeded at a leisurely pace along Piccadilly, threading his way abstractedly among the wandering wisps of painted humanity that dye the London night with rouge. Occasionally a passing man in evening dress would bid him good-night, for he was universally known in the town. But he did not reply. With his firm round chin pressed down upon his fur coat, and his eyelids lowered, he moved thoughtfully. The problem of the relations existing between youth and life eternally fascinated him. He pondered over them now. What a strange, complicated liaison it was, sometimes so happy, sometimes so disastrous, always, to him, pathetic. Youth sets up house with life as a lover sets up house with his mistress, takes an attic near the stars, or builds a mansion that amazes the street-urchins. And they dwell together. And youth strives in every way to know his mistress. He tests her, tries her, kisses and cuffs her, gives her presents, weeps at her knees. And at first she is magical, and a wonder, and a dream, and eternity. And then, perhaps, she is a faded creature, and terrible as a lost girl whom one has known in innocence. She is grim and arid. She fills youth with a great horror and with a great fear. He dare not kiss her any more. And then, perhaps, at last he prays, "Deliver me from this bondage!" And he thinks that he knows his mistress. But, happy or sad, does he ever quite know her? Is she not always a mystery, this life, a sphinx who jealously guards a great secret?

His evening with the two boys, for so the doctor called them in his thoughts, had set him musing thus definitely. Was there not a wonder and a secret in their dual life of friendship? For is not the potent influence of one soul over another one of the marvels of time? The doctor loved Valentine as a human saint loves another saint. But he loved Julian as a saint loves a sinner. Not that he named Julian sinner, but it was impossible to be with him, observantly, sensitively, and not to feel the thrill of his warm, passionate humanity, which cried aloud for governance, for protection. Julian could be great, with the greatness only attained by purged humanity, superior surely to the peaceful purity of angels. But he could be a castaway, oh! as much a castaway as the fainting shipwrecked man whom the hoarse surf rolls to the sad island of a desert sea.

Without Valentine what might he not have been? And the little doctor let his imagination run loose until his light eyes were dim with absurd tears. He winked them away as he turned into Regent Street. The hour was nearly two, and the great curved thoroughfare was rather deserted. Those few persons who were about had a curious aspect of wolves. Their eyes were watchful; their gait denoted a ghastly readiness for pause, for colloquy. Poor creatures! What was their liaison with life? A thing like a cry for help in the dark. The doctor longed to be a miracle-worker, to lift up his hands, just there where he was by the New Gallery, and to say, "Be ye healed!" He had a true love for every human thing. And that love sometimes seared his heart, despite his fervent faith and hope.

But now, as he pursued his way, a physical sensation intruded itself upon his mind, and gradually excluded all his reflections. A sense of bodily uneasiness came upon him, of a curious irritation and contempt, mingled with fear. He at first ascribed it to the coffee he had imprudently drunk at Valentine's flat, and to the strength of the two cigars he had smoked, or to some ordinary, trifling cause of diet. But by the time he crossed Oxford Street, and was in the desert of Vere Street, he felt that there was a reason for his distress, outside of him.

"I am being followed," he said to himself. "I am being followed, and by some utterly abominable person."

He went by the Chapel, and struck across to the right, not looking behind him, but analyzing his feelings. Being strongly intuitive, he had no need to turn his head. He knew now for certain the cause of his uneasiness. Some dreadful human being was very near to him, full of hateful thoughts, sinister recollections, possibly evil intentions. Something, the very vibrations of the night air, it might be, carried, as a telegraph wire conveys a message, the soul-aroma of this human being to the doctor. As he walked on, not hurrying, he mutely diagnosed the heart of this unseen being. It seemed full of deadly disease. Never had he suspected man or woman of such wickedness as he divined here; never had he felt from any of his kind such a sick repulsion as from this unseen monster who was journeying steadily in his steps. Doctor Levillier was puzzled at the depth of the horror which beleaguered him. He remembered once driving a staid, well-behaved horse in a country lane. The animal ambled forward at a gentle pace, flicking its ears lazily to circumvent the flies, apparently at ease with its driver and with the world. But suddenly it raised its head, drew the air into its distended nostrils, stopped, quivered in every limb, and then, with a strange cry, bolted like a mad thing. Far away a travelling menagerie was encamping. It had scented the wild animals.

Doctor Levillier felt like that horse. A longing to bolt for his life came upon him. He had an impulse to cry out, to run forward, to escape out of the atmosphere created by this evil nature, this deadly life. He could have crept like a coward into the shadow of one of the areas of Henrietta Street, and sheltered there till the thing went past. And, just because he had this almost overmastering desire to flee, he stood still, paused abruptly, and, without turning his head, listened. At a distance, and he judged, round the corner of the street he heard the sound of a quickening footstep advancing in his direction. He waited, under the obligation of exerting all his powers of self-control; for his limbs trembled to movement, his heart beat to the march, and every separate vein, every separate hair of his body, seemed crying out piercingly to begone. The footstep approached. Doctor Levillier heard it turning the corner.

"Now," thought he, "this person will see me waiting here. Will he come on? Will he pass me? And if he does, shall I be able to await, to endure the incident?"

And he listened, as a scout might listen in the night for sounds of the hidden enemy. Upon turning the corner, the footsteps advanced a pace or two, faltered, slackened, stopped. For an instant there was silence. The doctor knew that the man had been struck by his attentive figure, and was pausing to regard it, to consider it. What would be the result of the inspection? In a moment the doctor knew. The footsteps sounded again, this time in retreat.

On this the impulse of the doctor to flee changed, giving way to a strict desire and determination. He was resolved to interview this night-wanderer, to see his face. A greedy anxiety for view, for question, of this person came upon him. He, too, wheeled round, and followed hastily in pursuit. The man had already escaped from his sight into Vere Street, and the doctor broke into a soft run until he reached the corner, skirting which, the man was immediately in his view, but at a considerable distance from him. As the doctor sprang upon the pavement the man turned round, and, evidently observing that he was pursued, quickened his steps impulsively. The doctor was now absolutely determined to address him, and began openly to run. And he was not far from coming up with the fellow when he suddenly whistled a passing hansom, bounded in, and thrust up the trapdoor in the roof. The direction given was sufficiently obvious, for the cabby glanced round at the doctor, lifted his whip, brought it down with a sweep over the horse's loins, and the cab disappeared down Oxford Street at a rocking gallop.

The doctor paused. He was breathing hard, and the perspiration stood upon his face. His disappointment was absurdly keen, and for an instant he had even some idea of hailing another cab, and of following in pursuit. But, upon reflection, he deemed it more reasonable to return upon his steps, and to seek his bed in Harley Street. This accordingly he did, wondering what had moved him so strangely, and wondering, also, not a little, at the abrupt flight of the unknown person. In the brief and distant view of him, which was all that the doctor had obtained, he judged him to be tall, spare, and pale of countenance, with the figure of a gentleman. The aspect of his face had not been revealed before the shelter of the cab concealed him.