THE BEGINNING OF A NEW LIFE
On the morning of March 15th, Clifford Matheson lit a blazing fire in
the laboratory of a tumbledown villa in Neuilly in order to destroy the
clothes and other identity marks of the financier.
For some months past he had been leading a double life--as Clifford
Matheson the financier, and as John Rivière the recluse scientist. He
had chosen to take up the name of his dead half-brother because he had
been taking up the latter's life-work.
The motives that had urged him to this strange double life were such as
a Lars Larssen could scarcely comprehend. Every man has his mental as
well as his physical limitations. The keenest brain, if trained on some
specialized line, will fail to understand what to the dabbler in many
lines seems perfectly natural and reasonable. Larssen, a master-mind,
had his peculiar limitations as well as smaller men. His brain had been
trained to see the world as an ant-heap into which some Power External
had stamped an iron heel. The ants fought blindly with one another to
reach the surface--to live. That was the law of life as he saw it--to
fight one's way to the open.
The world he looked upon breathed in money through eager nostrils.
Money was the oxygen of civilization. Without money a man slowly
asphyxiated. It must be every man's ambition to own big money--to
breathe it in himself with full-lunged, lustful, intoxicating gulps, and
to dole it out as master to dependents pleading for their ration of
life. That was the meaning of power: to give or withhold the essentials
of life at one's pleasure.
Consequently he had failed to read the riddle of Matheson's motive at
that crucial interview in the financier's office on the Rue Laffitte. He
had failed to realize that a man might be as eager to give as to grasp.
He had failed to reckon on altruism as a possible dominating factor in
the decisions of a successful man of business.
Further than that, it lay entirely outside Lars Larssen's plane of
thought that a man who had fought his way up to worldly success from a
clerk's stool in a Montreal broker's office, who had made himself a
power in the world of London and Paris finance, could voluntarily give
up money and power and bury himself in obscurity.
Larssen judged that Matheson had been murdered and robbed by the
_apaches_. It was possible, though extremely improbable, that he might
have committed suicide. Which it was, mattered nothing to the shipowner.
But he did not dream for one instant that Matheson might have thrown up
place and power to disappear into voluntary exile.
* * * * *
Clifford Matheson had set himself from the age of eighteen to achieve a
money success. At thirty-seven, he had achieved it. He had slashed out
for himself a path to power in the financial world. He was rich enough
to satisfy the desires of most men.
Five years ago he had married into a well-known English family, and the
doors of society had been opened wide to him. But his marriage had been
a ghastly mistake. Olive, after marriage, had showed herself entirely
out of sympathy with the idealism that formed so large a part of the
complex character of her husband. She wanted money and power, and she
drove spurs into her husband that he might obtain for her more and more
money, more and more power. Any other ambition in Clifford she tried to
sneer down with the ruthlessness of an utterly mercenary woman.
He had come to loathe the sensuous artificiality of his life. He had
come to loathe the ruthless selfishness of finance. He was sick with the
callousness of that stratum of the world in which he moved.
In the last couple of years he had found himself drawn powerfully
towards the calm, passionless atmosphere of science in which his elder
brother, John Rivière, had found his life-work. Rivière had made no
worldly success for himself. The scientific researches he had undertaken
made no stir when they found light in the pages of obscure quarterlies
circulating amongst a few dozen other men engaged in similar research.
Rivière had not the temperament to push himself or the children of his
brain. He had settled into a solitary bachelor life in a small Canadian
college--an unknown, unrecognized man--and yet the calm, steady purpose
and the calm, passionless happiness of the life had made a deep
impression on Clifford Matheson.
Rivière had come to an accidental death on a holiday with his brother in
the wilds of northern Canada. Few knew of it beyond Matheson.
The financier had been drawn towards one special problem of science, and
on this he had studied deeply the last few years. From his studies, an
idea had developed which could only be worked out by experiments. Many
years of patient research would be needed, for this thought-child of
Matheson's was a master-idea, an idea which meant the exploring of a
practically uncharted sea of knowledge.
In brief, it was an attack of root-problem of human disease. Doctors and
pathologists had hitherto been viewing disease from the aspect of its
myriad effects on the highly complex human being. It was as though one
were to attempt to understand the subtleties of some full-grown language
without first learning its elementary grammar--the foundations on which
its super-structure is reared.
Now Matheson, coming to the problem with a strong, fresh mind unhampered
by the swaddling clothes of a college training, saw it from a view-point
entirely different to that of the doctors. He wanted to know the
elementary grammar of human disease. He found that no book dealt with
it--nor attempted to deal with it. No recognized department of a medical
course took as its province the root-causes of disease. Pathology was a
study of effects. Bacteriology--that again was merely a study of
effects.
He had read widely amongst a variety of scientific research-matter, and
had found that here and there an isolated attack was being made on the
problem of causes. But nothing strong-planned--as any one of his
financial schemes would be planned--nothing co-ordinated. The researches
of the day were starting at points too complex, before the basic
conditions of the problem were known.
He wanted to learn, and to give to the world, the basic facts.
Disease, as he viewed it, was primarily the result of abnormal
conditions of living. His idea was to study it in its simplest possible
form. To study the effects of abnormal conditions of life on the lowest
living organisms--the microscopic blobs of life whose structure is
elemental. From his wide reading of the last couple of years, he knew
what little was already known and the vast field that was unexplored
territory. He need not waste time over what others had already dealt
with--the new territory offered sufficient field for a life-work.
Once he could get at the basic facts of disease as it related to the
very simplest organisms, he could progress upwards to the higher
organisms, and so eventually to man. What could be learnt from the
pathological condition of an amoeba might lay the foundations for the
conquering of cancer in man, and a hundred other diseases as well.
Matheson's idea was a revolutionary one--a master-idea like a
master-patent. It held limitless possibilities for the alleviation of
human pain and suffering.
It was an idea to which a man might well devote his whole intellect and
energies.
* * * * *
Some months before, the financier had bought, in the name of John
Rivière, a tumbledown villa on the outskirts of Neuilly. In it he had
fitted up a research laboratory in which to pursue the experimental end
of the problem which had such vital interest for him.
A high wall surrounded a garden overgrown with weeds and a villa falling
to decay. At one time, no doubt, the house had formed a nest for the
_petite amie_ of some rich Parisian, but now the owner of the property
was only too glad to sell it at any price, and without asking any but
the most perfunctory questions of the man who had offered to buy. In the
solitude of the ruined villa, Matheson had been pursuing his scientific
research at such times as he could snatch from his financial business.
He had been leading a "double life"--from a motive far different to the
double life of other married men. There was no woman in the case. There
was no secret scheme of money-making. There was no solitary pandering to
the senses with drink or drugs.
But the financier had been finding that the leading of a double life
bristled with practical difficulties. Apart from the calls of his
business, there were the insistent demands of his wife. The position
was becoming an intolerable one. He had to choose between the life of
the money-maker or that of the creator of a new field of knowledge.
On the night of 14th March the conversation on the platform of the Gare
de Lyon and the fight with Lars Larssen had brought the question of
decision to a head. He had grappled with it in his office, pacing to and
fro long after the shipowner had left. He had turned his steps towards
the heights of Montmartre so that he might carry his problem up to the
solitude of a high place, in the peace of the eternal stars.
He was deep in the question of decision when the two apaches had
attacked him in the narrow lane leading to the Basilique of the Sacred
Heart. Matheson was a man of considerable strength and alertness. He had
felled one of the two _apaches_ with his heavy gold-mounted stick; the
other one had sent through the fur-lined coat a knife-thrust which had
grazed his ribs. Matheson had beaten him off, and had then continued his
path to the Basilique.
But the attack had brought a vivid inspiration for the solution of his
personal problem.
He would slip off the personality of Clifford Matheson and take up
completely that of John Rivière. He would leave his overcoat and stick
by the riverside at Neuilly, and 'phone information about them to the
police or to a newspaper. That knife-slit in his overcoat would be taken
as evidence of murder. They would judge him murdered, with robbery as
motive. The courts would give leave for Olive to presume death. She
would be freed; she would come into her husband's fortune; she could
marry again if she chose to.
Surely that was the solution of his personal problem!
For his part he could live his life unshackled, and there was sufficient
money already standing in the name of Rivière at a Paris bank to give
him a modest income on which to keep himself and pay for the materials
of research.
No one would be the worse for his disappearance; his wife would be the
gainer; and mankind, he hoped, would be the gainer through the research
to which he could henceforth devote his life.
Yes, that was assuredly _the_ solution.