THE ISLE OF LIES.
If what has so far been given by Professor Reid be read as a sort of
prologue, nearly nineteen years may well be passed over in silence,
till, patching artfully into one a number of letters of Dr. Lepsius to
the professor, we watch what then befell. The doctor writes:
The bubble’s burst then. We two, Shan Healy and I, have passed over to
the island of Barra in the boat, this being the first time for over
seven years that I have left the shores of Shunter; and at Barra we
now are, my head bound in a handkerchief, aching, and this same fond
Shan Healy looking as sad-hearted as a man handed over to be hanged. We
really lack the grit for the moment to go to the mainland, or to take
any course to get the matter looked into. But you, Reid, will do what
you can at once. I am sure the police should be disposed to take an
interest in it, if you can make them know the peril implied both to the
public and to the poor fellow himself. And there can be no mistaking
him! Middle-sized, swarthy, kind of dusky sallow, blackened over cheek,
chin and lip by a bluish shade of hair which he would oftentimes shave
twice a day—he’s so mighty hairy; and by the smile you should know the
beggar—that cruel smile which hardly departs from his lips, and those
dark eyes, with a glance, Reid, just so wild and sharp, I assure you,
as the glance of the rupicapra gazelle. For the rest, no jacket, rough
shirt of bauge-like stuff—but where’s the good? No police could ever
get nigh him, I suppose. He’s gone, perhaps he’s drowned—he may be, I
doubt it; but God knows. On the sands of the little bay at the north
_a lady’s handkerchief_ has been found; can’t tell how it or she came
there.
My friend, it was just on his nineteenth birthday, the 21st of July,
that, strange to say, it was to happen; the day which I had long
determined in my own mind as that on which I should present him the
little stele to read.
All was as usual the evening before; we ran the usual race. For the
past two years, you know, his highest ambition in life has been to be
able to beat me at running—I, a poor old wreck of sixty-four years!
I believe that this was his great dream and hope of glory. For four
years an almost daily race has taken place, and Mr. Hannibal has once
or twice come gallantly nigh victory, but has never won. Well, at
7.30 p.m. this eve of his birthday, down he bounds from his study,
and stands in the castle courtyard, waiting for me to come, with
the impulse, I dare say, to dart away pricking in his high health.
The climate of these Outer Hebrides is a great deal too humid to be
ideal; the ground is mostly of gneiss, too shallow for much culture,
so drammach, with some barley, potatoes, and buckies, have formed the
main part of our maintenance, apart from what provisions Shan Healy has
brought over in the boat from Barra once every four months. But on this
thin gruel my man has greatly thrived; is fully grown now, having the
shoulders of a man, but a shape as limber as a Grace, sir, and about as
supple as any greyhound pup.
Well then, aware that he is below waiting, I pull myself together now,
put a bit of go into my gait and glance, and down I go to him; together
we stand at the gate of our little home—alas, for the last time—my grey
head reaching little higher than his shoulder, Reid, for the old spine
bows a bit now, you know; and from the kitchen Shan Healy looks up to
watch the race for the thousandth time, while away in the west the sun
is going down all in a wild of clouds and glories, as often in this wet
place. The sea is dead, just lapping the beach in a weary way; the sky
grey, with a curlew or two skirling under it. It gives a little relief
to live it over again....
There then, we stand, ready to renew the old, old trial of thews. You
know that it has ever been my policy to speak as few words as possible
to this creature, so now I only say to him, “Well, ready?”
“Ready, sir,” answers my man.
“Then one, two—_Three!_”
We are away, he to the left, I to the right, the goal of the race being
a little flag-staff standing on the sands to the north of the island,
two miles off, and so placed that the boy going over the east shore,
and I over the west, we should run about equally far, the castle, our
starting-point, being right at the rim of a bluff of rock at the south
of the island. A very few instants after we start, we are quite hidden
from each other behind the saddle of the hill, which, being all hard
rock just by there, makes hardly any record of the foot-prints of this
part of the race. So now, no sooner has my man lost sight of me than
I pull up, and pant, and wipe my old brow, and turn back, just in
time to catch a glimpse of the flying heels of Asahel going thirteen
to the dozen round a corner—a sight, Reid, fit to make soft the eyes
of an artist at so much charm of form, and such a pelting puissance
of swiftness. Well, I imagine that you have already heard the rest of
the business, how I climb back at my leisure to the ridge of the hill,
where Shan Healy makes me the wink which means that the mare is ready,
and how I descend to the bush in which she is trained to await me
without budging, and take her quietly in my hand to the entrance of the
tunnel, where I mount and am away. You may be aware that what we call
the tunnel is a sort of gut or gorge, which, half natural, and half due
to my re-organisation of the features of the island during the fellow’s
first youth, was specially arranged for the purposes of this race. It
runs pretty straight across the island, from south-west to north-east;
is thick with peat-moss, so that hardly a sound of the mare’s hoofs is
to be made out in it, and is fairly shut in by bushes at both ends. So,
having galloped straight across to the north-east end, I get off, give
the mare her hint to go back to Shan Healy, dive sharply and quietly
through the growth of leaves, and am off like the devil afoot for the
goal, only some seventy feet distant, but still hidden from me behind a
bluff of rock: and as my right hand claps the flag-staff, with the wild
eyes of a hart Hannibal darts into view, to fling his flying impetus at
the post—a good half-minute or so too late.
No change in the smile, but a shadow now in the eyes, and I know just
how my man is meditating in his head, thinking in himself, “It is so,
then, that ‘Man’ can run, and how far beneath Him must _I_ be, when
this old being, who is one of ‘Man’ can beat me, a youth, can beat me
always and completely at running and at all else”: for it was never so
much with _me_, I’m sure, that the fellow fought for victory as with
“Man,” those angels and giants inhabiting the sunset of whose existence
he knew, whom eye of his had never viewed, at the idea of whom in their
lurid rule over nature his soul swooned with self-disdain.
Darkness was beginning to fall rapidly, the winds to pipe up a bit,
as he and I together strolled back homeward in silence all over the
western shores, upon which the waters were just moving themselves to
moan and spume. I willed it so always, for along the eastern shores,
where I was believed to have passed, there was ever a certain absence
of foot-prints! And Mr. Hannibal often seemed to have the knack of
seeing in the dark.
Have I done well? Have I done right? Never did a question of that sort
arise in my mind till within the twelve months gone, when I have had to
ask myself, “Have I, who forgot nothing, forgotten one thing—one thing
needful?” God Almighty forgive His faulty ones. I am an old man now,
with the back bowing down, and a head of white hairs, meekly aware of
my own weaknesses and achings....
You know, my friend, something of the kind of life that during eighteen
years nearly has whiled itself away on that island of delusion: like
the shadow of a vapour it is vanished now. Not without the sacrifice
of my career did I tackle it, Reid: but because of the thousand
eyes and the acrobat activities of mind by which alone it could be
accomplished, the years have been so packed with interest, and have
passed so far from unhappily, that though the task has too soon done
for me, yet when I look back over them they look to me more like two
years than like eighteen; and, if after all one’s travail, one could
only be certain that the work has been truly good, that one has not
somewhere mishandled and bungled, then one could go to bed. Indeed, in
some points, there need be no fear as to the meeds of my toils, for in
his intellectual and physical features at least there breathes on the
earth to-day (if he still breathes!) the highest human feat, a peerless
being, at whose feet all the peoples of this planet may very well
kneel, and wail because of him, crying, “Here is what we might have
been.”
But oh, the web of imposture to which this being owes his soul! He
is the child of lies—and I am his father. At _every_ moment of his
life, from the age of four and before, the fellow has known my mould.
Nothing was left undone, nothing for me was a bore, or more than I
could afford. You know that his books alone cost me a sum of more than
£14,000: for, owing to my purpose that his notions of the soul of
“Man” should grow from his study of only the most glorious of human
works, and owing to the fact that even those works as they stood would
never do for those pure eyes, his whole library was formed solely of
purged volumes, specially prepared for him, almost before he opened
his eyes upon this world; and when he was old enough to study them,
it was sown into his skull that only men made of very poor stuff ever
wrote books. And so in everything; everywhere the same whip of deceit:
the mass of principles, for instance, which we call mathematics, due
to the shrewdness of fifty thinkers, adding and adding, each of them,
to the achievements of the past, was for Hannibal, his books were so
doctored, the discovery of a single ordinary wit, a certain “Peter
Pitt,” who, as I had to give the lad to believe, lived in the ancient
ages. His study of history, above all, was minutely nursed: wide, yet
much pruned. The story of the ingenuity, zeal, and success of masterly
adventurers like Alexander, Cæsar, Napoleon, he knew by heart: but he
had no suspicion of their chutes; doesn’t even now know that Cæsar
was assassinated, nor that Napoleon was plucked down at last, so that
their victoriousness and force remain measureless in his imagination.
He knew well the proportions of the pyramids of Shufu and Shafra, but
he was not allowed to know how many multitudes, nor how many moons,
were used to build them. And so on. It was dropped into his ear at a
very early age that among men some few may be born with feeble bodies
and wits, that these are called “idiots,” and that poor Shan Healy, who
in reality is a rather sharp chap, is one of the feeblest of these: so
Shan has always passed with us under the name of “The Idiot.” As to
myself, Hannibal now at the age of nineteen cherishes, if he lives, a
belief, ploughed into his brain by ten thousand stratagems, that I can
shoot like doom, can swim like a fish, can run like a roe, can watch
like a dog, can see like an eagle; and that this skull is the dome of
all skill and of all wisdom.
Frauds. But the outcome, I say, is (or was!) without doubt a success,
something of a success. What the father feigned to be, that the lad
was led to be. I fancy that an average acrobat, after regarding some
of the pranks of this young man, would be asking from what moon the
beggar had gadded; he has a damnable habit of chucking about little
dynamite or other bombs, which he turns out himself, and carries in
his pocket—five, ten times a day for years have the curlews heard the
burstings of this turbulent being’s play—and I am pretty sure that any
other runner than he would long since have been shattered to the deuce
by it. As to his mere knowledge, it is of a vastness which you would
certainly call marvellous, though to me, who know the cause of it,
it is hardly so: for if, for instance, he knows a good deal of most
languages from Japanese and the Dravidic dialects to Portuguese, it
is because he never, I think, forgets a word or thing which has once
come within his consciousness, and so has learned a language within
some weeks. I remember to have heard it said that Lord Macaulay could
repeat word for word a book once read, a statement the truth of which I
beg leave to disbelieve: but, even if true, his lordship differed from
Hannibal here, that Hannibal, I imagine, is not quite clear with regard
to the meaning of “forgetting”; I never heard him utter such a word;
certainly, he never heard such a word escape _my_ lips. _Forgetting_
is, in fact, mainly a loose habit into which humanity has lapsed,
for to observe vividly is to retain rigidly; and Hannibal, with his
over-manly mental habit, observes each fact presented to him with a
vividness which seems to be pretty absolute.
You will say, then, to yourself, my friend, that it was a strange pair
of men that paced by the seashore in silence that evening, the eve of
the young man’s nineteenth birthday—old Jack and his young giant; the
giant in the meekest subjection to his Jack because of delusion, as all
a world will sometimes meekly lie in shackles under the will of the
weakest lie. My thoughts as I walked were of the morrow, of that dawn
toward which for long years I had looked forward, when I should hand
over to Hannibal my old problem of the stele to conquer for me, and I
wondered in what manner the young man would manage it. Little doubt,
however, had I as to the outcome, seeing that I am even now about to
compile into a book quite a crowd of new scientific principles dropped
from the mouth of my man in the course of his studies, with a thousand
little observations about things in general, most of them bound, I
should imagine, to astound you. So, then, that my man would read the
stele I could readily believe; but indeed, Reid, I was no longer deeply
interested in this miserable bit of a stele; I’m afraid it is too true
that my interest had all shifted from the lifeless thing to the living
fellow, all too much so, all too much for my peace....
Sometimes lately, Reid, I may avow to you, I have stolen out of my
room in the dead of night and stood before his door, stood for hours,
hearkening for a sound; couldn’t at all tell you why—bound there
somehow—and I have shaken my poor head, saying to myself, “No, surely,
I have to cure myself of this folly: a purely scientific interest in
this savage, nothing more”; but still I have stuck at his door.
Do you understand that this boy is in some points an idiot? It is
only lately that the amazingness of it all has struck and made me a
wrecked man! To a thousand throes and heartburns, learned in a thousand
social niceties by men who dwell with men, he remains a stranger. The
different ways in which one should bend the mind toward one’s brother,
toward one’s mother, one’s friend, and so on, seem to be unknown to
him; I don’t know who is to blame. Never a little tenderness, never
a sign. I _couldn’t_, of course, bring his mind into contact with
the Christian faith from the very nature of the case, the Man of
Christianity being a sorrowful type, while the Man of his fancy was
bound to be a type of power; so that the name of Christ he has never
heard; but his mind was presented with such naïve nature-worship as
that of the Rig-Vedas, Genesis and Job: I thought that it was well....
But to return to this birthday-eve of his. We two had made our way back
together in silence, nearly to the castle-gate, when out darts Shan
Healy, wringing hands and crying, “Oh, Master Hannibal, do forgive me,
sir, the glass pot has boiled all over, while I was attending to the
dinner”; whereat Master Hannibal, without waiting to hear another word,
threw Shan out of his way, and rushed into the house, no doubt to see
for himself how the matter stood, for he seems to have left some mess
simmering in his laboratory, had bid Shan look to it, and the thing had
had some mischance.
“Now, here’s a go for a poor chap, doctor,” says Shan to me, in great
distress; “believe me, I couldn’t avoid it, the thing boiled over so
quick, and what’ll Master Hannibal say now?”
“Say?” said I, for I was angry, “what can he dare say? Let him go
to the devil, you couldn’t help it, and I order you not to distress
yourself in the slightest.”
“Ah, doctor, it’s all very well for you to talk,” says he.
Well, we went into the house, and Shan went down to his kitchen; but
I still hung about the bottom of the stair, being a bit anxious as to
what this being might take it into his nut to do now about his blessed
chemical. All was still during some time, so presently I called sharply
up to him, “What are you at, Hannibal?” No answer, no sound; only the
faint sounds of Shan’s preparations for dinner downstairs. So now I
ran very thievishly up the stairs, and peeped into the laboratory,
but he wasn’t there, and I can only think now that at the sounds of my
steps on the stair, faint as they were, the monkey must have passed
out of the laboratory window, and slipped down the turret by the ivy;
anyway, the next thing that I heard were Shan’s howls coming up out of
the kitchen, upon which I ran down, to find myself locked out, and to
hear within the kitchen the sounds of a head being beaten against the
ground, mingled with Shan Healy’s exclaimings.
Beside myself with anger, I pounded upon the door, and now at once the
row stopped, and in a moment Shan opened, saying despondently to me,
poor chap, “Oh, doctor, he do use me cruel, sir, cruel, cruel, cruel.
Oh, my poor head—what does he think anybody is made of?”
My own head was hung with shame; I could do nothing but silently pat my
old companion on his shoulder.
“Where is he now?” said I.
“Gone like a shadow through the window, doctor, and down to the shore,
the minute he heard you pounding,” says Shan. “He held me down on the
floor with one hand, and with the other he banged my poor head ...
cruel, cruel. I shouldn’t mind if it was done in a rage, but smiling
as cool as a cucumber, as if anybody’s head was a block of wood he was
playing with.”
“Well,” I said bitterly, “all your own fault, Shan Healy; you’re too
faithful and good.” And I left him there and went up.
Well, I dined by myself, my fellow keeping culpably aloof perhaps; and
during the rest of the evening I saw or heard nothing of him till, near
ten in the night, I heard some long way off the bursting of one of
his bombs. A gale was then raging, and it had grown coldish, with that
wet chill which marks this part. So I went to seek a little sleep, but
at about three in the morning rose and went softly to stand outside
the observatory door, to see if I could detect a sound of his through
the row of the storm; and as I so stood, to my surprise, he called to
me, praying me to enter. I did so, to find him sitting at a window,
looking out at all the dark strife of the winds and waters, and at the
bethundered bluff down there below: whereat, without the least mention
of Shan Healy, my man began to blab about the moon, which just then
struggled through into a channel between two cloud-bogs, saying that
our globe, as it seemed to him, might have been made a more suitable
place for living beings, if provided with two moons instead of one.
Being grum and out of sorts at the moment, I told him not to trouble
his small head about that, that things were well as they were, and I
quoted dogmatically to him that “God made two great lights, the greater
light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.” At this
my chap turns up at me a gaze of the greatest astonishment, asking if
I did really think that some purpose of providing a lamp to the night
had anything to do with the birth and being of the moon. I said yes, I
did think so; on which he anew turns at me a certain searching look of
astonishment, and murmurs something about not daring to question the
truth of my words, but that as a lamp the moon undoubtedly appeared to
be a failure, since she did not shine most nights; sometimes shone for
a short hour only; sometimes shone uselessly during the day, but left
the night orbless—a rather mad sort of lamp—whereas _two_ moons with
such and such parallaxes, of such and such masses.... “Well, never
you mind that,” said I shortly to him, for I thought that I’d better
be mum as to the moon. But he was moon-struck that night, and after
saying that just as she then was, near her full, but not quite, she
reminded him of “The Idiot’s” face when he had gum-boil and swollen-jaw
some years ago—for he’s as simple as a baby in some respects, mind you,
and many things said by the boy that you might think said in fun, are,
in fact, quite grave statements, devoid of any grain of humour on his
part; for though he smiles ever, he hardly ever laughs, so that one’s
cheeks are apt to puff out on a sudden with laughter at his words, as
at the artless freaks of a child’s remarks. Anyhow, after likening the
moon to Shan’s gum-boil face, my boy goes on now to wonder for the
thousandth time how it is that his “Man” never managed to range so
high into space as the moon, for I had soon found myself compelled to
confess to him that man had never yet landed on the satellite, nor did
all the reasons which I could adduce for this fact, such as the absence
of an atmosphere on the moon, and so on, ever suffice to abate his
wonder that the moon should remain unvisited: for little did the man
dream that even the north and south poles of our own planet remain even
now all unknown, let alone the moon!
Well, sir, he was thus droning to himself as to the moon, and
specifying the modes by which her surface appeared to him attainable,
when in a foolish heat of tenderness I, standing behind him, let my
hand fall on the flesh of his neck, inside the broad flap of his
shirt-collar, and I allowed myself to murmur the word “Boy,” about to
say, “Boy, I am fond of you,” or some such futility, when my fellow
gave me such a gaze of Arctic-cold astonishment—for sheet-lightning
and the strangled moonshine both beshone the darkness of the room, so
that one could see anon—such a gaze, that I was glad to slip away to
conceal the wet in my poor eyes, and I went to sleep.