32
THEY were alone till the afternoon, when Sir Richard and his daughter, both a trifle constrained, came over to the island with Fulke. The sight of those three restored to Lychnis a sense of reality. In the morning she had been drawn into the realms of Yuan’s vast interior life, fascinated, hardly conscious that her identity was submerged. Now in the afternoon, with her friends by, she could look on him as an object, a man with whom she could enter on given relations, regard being had to other considerations, as, for example, his race, her father’s wishes, the pull of her home in England. She became happy, contented that she should be in that frame of mind.
There was to be a water-party after sundown, and they spent the afternoon making a promised inspection of some of Yuan’s laboratories hidden in the rock. There they saw various matters in their several stages of advancement.
“What funny old frights!” whispered Ruby, when she saw the artificers at work. “I really believe they are the twelve men we saw looking so idiotic on that rock.”
And certainly the twelve ancient or middle-aged gentlemen, who were achieving machines of extreme delicacy out of an apparently vacant stupor, did seem to be the same. For Sir Richard, when he saw the artificers at work, the problem as to how Yuan procured his apparatus was solved. “I wondered whether you sent plans to Europe,” he explained.
Yuan smiled. “I do not want to lay Europe in ruins. No. I indicate the nature of my mechanical problems to these friends of mine, and they work out the details in contemplation. They know the inner secrets of platinum and ebonite and wood.”
“You are kind to Europe.” Sir Richard’s upper lip was firm. It is inconvenient that the amateur should know more than the professor, and it was only because of the paramount claims of science that he endeavoured to draw Yuan into a discussion. The two gentlemen talked at great length, while Lychnis listened entranced, and Ruby yawned. But discussion was not easy, because Yuan was dealing in symbols that were entirely strange and in realms of experience where his companion had never been. Some formulæ that he wrote down were excessively pleasing; to Sir Richard they meant as much as the experiences of a mystic, while Lychnis recognized that they were indeed precisely that.
From the laboratories they went to the gardens and hot-houses, full of unfamiliar plants and insects; from the gardens and hot-houses to the breeding-grounds; and it was here that even Sir Richard’s scientific mind shrank a little at sight of some of the monsters Yuan had created, in what seemed an irresponsible way. In particular a frightful cross between an ape and a tiger shocked his moral sense. But Yuan took no pains to justify himself, and only replied that all those who help in the great work of creation will have their jokes from time to time.
Towards evening Yuan left them to make his preparations for the water-party, and Sir Richard sat by the Lake with the two girls pondering deeply on the afternoon’s talk. He evidently desired to unburden himself, and found a certain difficulty in speaking to Lychnis, the only possible listener. But in the end, if he was displeased with her, the contents of his mind were too much for him.
“That man could alter the world,” he said, turning to her somewhat constrainedly at last. “I do not pretend to be an expert in more than one or two of the sciences we touched on, but I know enough to recognize that what he says is of first-class importance. Do you understand, my dear girl, that he has discovered all we know in physiology by pure contemplation? I would go farther and guess that physiology is no problem to him at all; he simply perceives the nature of the body, and it is my opinion that he will live for ever. There seems practically no nervous expenditure. He avails himself of some sort of cosmical energy and forgets about his own organization, which has become merely the sphere, so to speak, in which the energy I speak of is present. And I don’t mind confessing that I am completely baffled in my own branch. He talks, Lychnis, as if he had experienced everything he knows, as if he actually saw, felt, even heard, physical reality. He proceeds, as it were, from insight; and, really, there doesn’t seem to be anything hidden. Odd, if reality should, after all, be something more than a state of affairs in a field of electrical stresses. It is profoundly disconcerting. It is as if the most refined discoveries of science should prove to be familiar to an ape or to an idiot. They are ape-like, these friends of yours, and a trifle idiotic. I am not an anthropologist—not an expert—but I perceive something orangoid in your friends, in the disposition, for example, of the lower limbs horizontally, in the posture of the hands.”
Sir Richard, forgetting his constraint, seemed to ask for sympathy; but she was angry with him for his frame of mind towards her, and made only some brief reply.