The talkers

It being Saturday, and a half day down town, Stuart went to the Fireside on pretense of lunching, but particularly to find Casimir Sadoul.

From his office he had tried to get Gilda on the telephone, but she was still asleep. Then he called up Sadoul at his apartment and at the offices of one or two periodicals, without finding him.

Now, at the Fireside, he learned that Pockman and Sadoul, much the worse for wear, had breakfasted there about noon and had gone away together.

He had left word for Gilda to call him when she awoke. She had not done so. After lunch he telephoned again. Freda informed him that her mistress was still asleep.

Stuart had had no sleep, having arrived home only in time to bathe and change for the office.

But it was the nerve-shattering experience with Gilda which so disorganized him that he could scarcely hold a fork or lift a glass of water to his lips.

“Where do you suppose I could find Sadoul?” he asked Dr. Lyken, later, in the cloak-room.

“He’s usually at Pockman’s research laboratory in the afternoon. Have you ever been there, Sutton?”

“No.”

“Some laboratory! You know what they’re up to, don’t you?”

“I know, vaguely, what Pockman is doing.”

“Glands. And Sadoul has taken the other end, now. He writes his vitriolic stuff in the morning, and investigates psychic phenomena all the afternoon. Pockman staked him.”

“Staked him?”

“Yes. Pockman has given Sadoul several rooms in the laboratory and has fitted them up. He must believe in such things, or he wouldn’t have spent all that money on quarters and apparatus for that clever fakir, Sadoul. Why don’t you go over and take a slant at the place?”

“Where is it?”

“Over toward Fifty-seventh Street and the East River. Of course, I can’t bring myself to subscribe to such theories and procedure, although, like the majority of scientific men, I’m on the fence and ready to be convinced.... I couldn’t tell you whether there is anything in it or not. I don’t mean Pockman’s work: that’s sound; I mean Sadoul’s psycho-physical research.... If you’re going over, I’m walking that way as far as Third Avenue.”

They turned east at Fifty-seventh Street.

“It’s quite a laboratory, Sadoul’s,” continued Lyken. “He’s got one machine there invented, I understand, by Sir Oliver Lodge. It’s an amazingly delicate affair. It keeps a record of all muscular effort on the part of a medium during tests. Any loss of weight, any addition, is accurately noted. It gives a continuous chart of temperature, pulse, breathing. It notes all mental activity; it even photographs visualisation when concentration is sufficient——”

“That’s impossible!” ejaculated Stuart.

“No, it really isn’t,” said the other. “Sensitized plates wrapped in opaque coverings have been tried out. When the subject concentrates on any object there is a very good photograph of it on the plate. Which seems to prove that thought-waves are really projected——”

“Have you seen any?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Made by Sadoul?”

“Yes.”

After a silence, Lyken went on:

“Sadoul uses ultra-violet rays and quartz lenses when he takes a movie of any psychic proceedings.

“He’s well equipped with x-ray apparatus, radium tubes—the latest and most delicate instruments.... You know you can’t help respecting a man who is so patiently trying out evidence.”

Sutton walked along in silence beside the garrulous Lyken, understanding little of what the latter was saying.

“I’m on the fence,” repeated Lyken, “but I’m no bigot, and I’m quite in favour of research experiments along those lines—if anybody has the time and the courage.”

“I suppose experimenters are ridiculed.”

“Not so much, now. Too many great names are associated with the investigations—Lodge, Wallace, Crookes, Edison, Imoda, Van Zeist, Matla, Zaalberg—too many tremendous names to scoff at.”

“What do they want to do?”

“Here’s their programme: experiments in, and investigation of, clairvoyance, materialization, dual projection, levitation, soul photography, subconscious mind, human polarity——”

“I don’t know what those are,” interrupted Stuart bluntly.

“Nobody does. We don’t even know what the electric fluid is; we know only that it’s there.”

“At least we can see it.”

“We can see one phase of it. The vast, overwhelming forces—energy and its sources—are invisible. We know them only by their results. I don’t see why these tremendous psychic forces should be visible, either. One thing is certain: they’re there, and we know it because of their results. The thing to do is to find out what these forces really are—physical or psychical—manifestations of the psychical ego, the mental, or the spiritual.”

They paused at Third Avenue.

“I’m taking the Elevated,” remarked Lyken. “Are you going to swap yarns with Sadoul?”

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with Sadoul,” returned Stuart unsmilingly.

Pockman’s laboratory consisted of several shabby old houses converted into a single rambling structure facing the river.

A young woman in nurse’s uniform admitted him and showed him to a dingy waiting-room. Pockman presently appeared in white operating costume, which became him as cerements become a corpse.

“Glad to see you,” he smirked. “What the hell put it into your blond head to come over here?”

“I’m looking for Sadoul,” replied Stuart.

“He’s in his own section. I’ll send him in——”

“Pockman—just a second.... I want to ask you something—and I don’t know how to put it.... Is there any actual—any scientific basis—anything to be taken seriously in these psycho-hypnotic tricks that Sadoul does?”

Pockman hunched his bony shoulders and began to walk about the room in his jerky, cockroach way.

“I don’t know how he does the things he does,” he said. “Maybe he’s faking; I can’t tell.... But there seem to be phenomena along those lines worth investigating.... I’ve given him a place of his own in the next house.... If you want to talk to him——”

“Yes, I mean to talk to him.... But you’re a graduate physician, Pockman—a specialist in certain lines of research—and your standing is high, according to all I hear about you.

“And so I desire to ask such a man as yourself about these disquieting and somewhat unpleasant performances of Sadoul’s——”

“Which one in particular?”

“In particular I’m thinking of his meddling with little Miss Greenway.”

“I supposed you had her in mind.” Pockman cracked his knuckles, resumed his pacing, arms dangling and jerking: “She’s a morbid subject,” he said. “Otherwise he couldn’t have snapped her up over there.... God knows what one human mind can do to another, Sutton. No use asking me; I can’t tell you.... We don’t know anything yet. You tell ’em! We don’t know the alphabet of life. We don’t know what life is, how, where, when it originated.... But we’re going to know. You tell ’em that, too!”

He burst into a harsh twitter and went racking on around the room like some spavined thing, his arms jerking.

“I want to ask you,” said Stuart in a low voice, “do you think Sadoul really has any psychic control over Miss Greenway?”

“Well, by God, I don’t know!” almost shouted Pockman, coming to a stop in front of Sutton, his long arms flying about uncertainly:

“Here’s a theory: we all have dual personalities—many of us have multiple. Personality is that indestructible identity which persists after bodily death. Call it a soul. It’s a short word.

“Now, take little Miss Greenway’s case. That girl’s body died and remained physically dead for hours. No doubt about it, Sutton.

“But what happened to her soul I don’t know of my own knowledge. That indestructible identity which was Gilda Greenway certainly returned as her body’s tenant; but whether it found another lodger in possession and has had to put up a continual fight, as Miss Greenway says——”

“Did she tell you that?”

“Yes, she told me.”

“When?”

“She speaks of it every time she comes here——”

“Here? Does Gilda come here?”

Pockman’s flat face was all glistening with sweat; he wiped it, but the ghastly smirk remained.

“Say,” he said, “you and Sadoul and Derring and Harry Stayr do nothing but camp on that kid’s trail.

“I’m trying to keep tabs on her, and she’s decent enough to see the scientific importance of submitting to daily observation. But you’re all chasing her and keeping her excited and nervous, and where the hell do I come in?”

Sutton, astonished and troubled, said nothing; Pockman flourished his flail-like arms:

“I’m trying to keep a record of the only case on record. My God, can’t you fellows show some decency and self-control—you, taking her about town at all hours and driving Sadoul insane with jealousy—Gilda claiming that Sadoul is having her shadowed by a disincarnate, homeless and malicious soul that has no morals and wants to drive out her own soul and get in—Sadoul, licking his chops as though it were true, and hopeful that there might be something for him with a new tenant in possession of Gilda’s pretty body—and all those other johnnies chasing about, sending her flowers and fruit from Florida and ducks from——”

He went rocking and teetering around the room again, shaking his bony hands above his head:

“How am I going to observe the results of transplanting a nymphalic gland into a corpse with all this feverish hullabaloo going on in that child’s life? What do you suppose it does to her?—all this excitement——”

“Wait a moment!” said Stuart, detaining him as he rambled past, and holding him by one flapping arm: “All I want you to tell me is whether, in your opinion, it is scientifically possible for Sadoul to meddle spiritually—or in any occult way—with what you call that indestructible identity which is Gilda Greenway’s soul?”

“I’m telling you I don’t know!” shouted Pockman. “He seems to be able to do things to identities. He materializes them, weighs them, takes their pulses, temperatures, blood-pressure—he photographs them, measures them, listens to their lung action—— There seems to be no end to what we are learning about those disincarnate personalities vulgarly known as ‘spirits’ and so long exploited by psychic crooks and fake ‘mejums.’”

He wiped his unhealthy skin with the sleeve of his operating robe.

“That’s all very fine,” he said. “Let others go to it. The nymphalic gland is my job——”

“You haven’t answered my question, Pockman.”

“Which one? Oh! Do I think it possible for Sadoul to encourage some homeless but more sensual spirit to enter little Miss Greenway and ultimately drive out her real identity?”

“That’s what I asked you.”

“Sutton, I don’t know. I know he has always tried to arouse in the girl some response to his own morbid, lovesick importunities. Normally the girl always seems to have been fascinated by his brilliant intellectual equipment—seems, in a way, to have fallen a victim to it—probably aided by hypnosis.

“But for the rest—I guess not. No—I’ve studied her. She isn’t that kind. The girl is, when let alone, perfectly normal in everything.

“The new nymphalic has put her in superb physical condition—a magnificent young animal!—that’s what the girl is.... And as far as I can see she has, normally, a vigourous, healthy mind to control her every emotion.... And yet, she does break loose—like the other night at Fantozzi’s.... But that’s exuberance—letting off steam——”

“Do you call that normal, Pockman?”

“Well, no, I don’t.... And she tells me—with some very wild and breathless tears—that it isn’t natural for her to kick over the traces and raise the devil in that fashion.”

“It would almost look, then, as though——” Stuart hesitated, his haunted eyes fixed on Pockman.

The latter said:

“Well, she claims it’s what she calls the Other One that creeps in when she’s asleep, or off her guard—at some psychological moment when her subconscious self is off duty.... I don’t know. We’ve read ‘Jekyll and Hyde,’ and ‘Peter Ibbetson,’ and ‘The Brushwood Boy’—and a score of other clever tales. This business of Gilda Greenway sounds like another volume of the same series.... And then, again”—he shrugged his bony shoulders—“the story of Gilda Greenway may be as true as anything in the world.... The world itself being only a big lie told to amuse a lot of gods—somewhere yonder—beyond the outer stars—and all laughing like hell——”

He stood rocking on heels and toes with the irresponsible movement of something inanimate swept by tempests.

“No,” he muttered, wiping his clammy visage, “we don’t know anything, so far.... My God, no.... Are you going in to talk to Sadoul?”

“Another time.”

“Oh! From your face I thought you were looking for him to kill him.”

“I’m not the killing sort, Pockman.”

“Oh! Well, he is. It’s a tip—if you ever mean to mix it with Casimir Sadoul.”

Stuart looked neither interested nor surprised.

“I haven’t yet decided what I want of Sadoul,” he said without a trace of threat, yet with a simplicity that seemed to make no question of getting whatever he might wish for.

Pockman looked at him long out of fishy eyes. Then he snickered.

“Some day,” he said, “if you and little Miss Greenway are good to me and let me observe her in peace, I’ll tell you both something about Sadoul that will make it easier for you to put a crimp in him.”

“No, thanks,” said Stuart coldly.

“As you choose, Sutton.... Drop in again and look over my assortment of glands—all alive and guaranteed to start any corpse two-stepping....”