DOCTOR BERSONIN
The Ambassador received his caller in his study. From across the hall,
Barbara, through the half-open door, could see the expert's huge form
filling an arm-chair, where the limpid light of the desk-lamp fell on
his heavy, colorless face. The walls were lined with bookshelves and
curtains of low tone, and against this formless background his big
profile stood out pallid and hawk-like. She could hear his voice
distinctly. Its even, dead flatness affected her curiously; it was not
harsh, but absolutely without tone-quality or sympathy.
For some time the talk was on casual topics and she occupied herself
listlessly with a tray of photographs on the table. She read their
titles, smiling at the extraordinary intricacies of "English as she is
Japped" by the complaisant oriental photographer: _The Picking Sea-Ear
at Enoshima_; _East-looking Panorama of Fuji Mount_; _Geisha in the
Famous Dance of Maple-Leaf_.
The smile left her face. Something had been said in the farther room
which caught her attention and in a moment she found herself listening
intently.
"I understand the trials of the new powder have been very successful,"
the Ambassador was saying. "Is it destined to revolutionize warfare, do
you think?"
"It is too soon to tell yet," was the reply, "just what the result will
be. It will enormously increase the range of projectiles, as Your
Excellency may guess, and its area of destruction will nearly double
that of lyddite."
Barbara felt, rather than saw, that the Ambassador gave a little
shudder. "I can imagine what that means," he said. "I saw Port Arthur
after the siege. So war is to grow more dreadful still! When will it
cease, I wonder."
"Never," Bersonin answered, with a cold smile. "It is the love of power
that makes war, and that, in man, is inherent and ineradicable. A nation
is only the individual in the aggregate, and selfishness is the guiding
gospel of both."
To Barbara the words seemed coldly, cruelly repellant. She felt a sudden
quiver of dislike run over her.
"You paint a sorry picture," said the Ambassador. "Can human ingenuity
go much further, then? What, in your opinion, will be the fighting
engine of the future?"
"The engine of the future"--Bersonin spoke deliberately--"will be along
other lines. It will be an atomic one. It will employ no projectile and
no armor plate will resist it. The discoverer will have harnessed the
law of molecular vibration. As there is a positive force that binds
atoms together, so there must be a negative force that, under certain
conditions, can drive them apart!"
He spoke with what seemed an extraordinary conviction. His manner had
subtly changed. For the first time his tone had gathered something like
feeling, and the dry, metallic voice seemed to Barbara to vibrate with a
curious, gloating triumph.
"Granted such a force," he went on, "and a machine to generate and
direct it, and of what value is the most powerful battle-ship, the most
stupendous fort? Mere silly shreds of steel and stone! Why, such an
engine might be carried in a single hand, and yet the nation that
possessed it could be master of the world!"
A dark flush had risen to his pallid cheek, and on the arm of his chair
Barbara saw the massive fingers of one huge hand clench and unclench
with a furtive, nervous gesture. The sight gave her a sharp sense of
recoil as if from the touch of something sinister and evilly suggestive.
"No!" said the Ambassador vehemently. "Humanity would revolt. Such a
discovery would be worth less than nothing! Its use by any warring
nation would call down the execration of civilization, and the man who
knew the secret would be too dangerous to be at large!"
There was dead silence for a moment. Bersonin sat motionless, staring
straight before him. Very slowly the color seemed to fade from his
cheek. When he spoke again his voice had regained its dead level of
tonelessness.
"That has occurred to me," he said. "I think Your Excellency is right.
Invention may do its work too well. However--no doubt we speak of
scientific impossibilities; let us hope so, at any rate."
Barbara pushed the photographs aside and slipped into the next room,
closing the door and drawing the heavy portières that hung over it. She
had had for a moment a vague, almost childish, sense of shrinking as if
from something monstrous and uncanny--such a sensation as the naked
diver may have, when, peering through his water-glass, he sees a dim
grisly shape glide, stealthy and cold, through the opaque depths. She
was growing absurdly fanciful, she thought. She did not turn on the
electric light, but threw open one of the long, French windows. There
was a new moon and a pale radiance flooded the room, with a sudden odor
of wistaria and plum-blossoms. The window gave on to a porch running the
length of the house, and this made her think suddenly of home. Yet the
air was too humid for California, too moist and rich even for Florida.
And suddenly she found herself pitying the people there to whom the East
would always be a closed book. Yet how dim and vague Japan had been to
her a month before!
A grand piano stood open by the window and in the dim light she sat down
and let her fingers wander idly in long arpeggios. She could see one
side of the Japanese garden, with a glimpse of a tiny dry lake and a
pebbled rivulet spanned by an arching bridge of red lacquer. It ended in
a sharp, sloping hill covered with shrubbery. On the ridge far above she
distinguished the outlines of native houses and flanking them the
curved, Tartar-like gables of a gray old temple. Somewhere, beyond that
little hill, perhaps, stood the Chapel erected to her father's memory,
which she had yet to see. As her fingers strayed over the ivory keys,
she thought of him, of his vivid, aberrant career and untimely end.
There are nights in the Japanese spring when the landscape, in its
wondrous delicacy of tones, seems only an envelope of something subtler
and unseen, the filmy covering of a beauty that is wholly spiritual.
To-night it seemed so to Barbara. The close was very still, wrapped in a
dreamy haze as soft as sleep, the mountains on the horizon wan shapes of
silver mist, semi-diaphanous. It seemed to her that in this living,
sentient breath of Japan, her father was nearer to her than he had ever
been before.
The thought brought to her vague memories of her mother and of her
childhood. Old airs began to mingle with the chords, and on the shrill
fairy sound-carpet woven by the myriad insect-looms of the garden, the
bits of melody went treading softly out across the perfume of the
wistaria.