Unorna let herself sink into a chair. She stared almost vacantly at
Keyork, then glanced uneasily at the motionless specimens, then stared
at him again.
“Yes,” she said at last. “Perhaps I was a little nervous. Why did you
lock me in? I would have gone with you. I would have helped you.”
“An accident--quite an accident,” answered Keyork, divesting himself of
his fur coat. “The lock is a peculiar one, and in my hurry I forgot to
show you the trick of it.”
“I tried to get out,” said Unorna with a forced laugh. “I tried to
break the door down with a club. I am afraid I have hurt one of your
specimens.”
She looked about the room. Everything was in its usual position, except
the body of the African. She was quite sure that when she had head that
unearthly cry, the dead faces had all been turned towards her.
“It is no matter,” replied Keyork in a tone of indifference which was
genuine. “I wish somebody would take my collection off my hands. I
should have room to walk about without elbowing a failure at every
step.”
“I wish you would bury them all,” suggested Unorna, with a slight
shudder.
Keyork looked at her keenly.
“Do you mean to say that those dead things frightened you?” he asked
incredulously.
“No; I do not. I am not easily frightened. But something odd
happened--the second strange thing that has happened this evening. Is
there any one concealed in this room?”
“Not a rat--much less a human being. Rats dislike creosote and corrosive
sublimate, and as for human beings----”
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled.
“Then I have been dreaming,” said Unorna, attempting to look relieved.
“Tell me about him. Where is he?”
“In bed--at his hotel. He will be perfectly well to-morrow.”
“Did he wake?” she asked anxiously.
“Yes. We talked together.”
“And he was in his right mind?”
“Apparently. But he seems to have forgotten something.”
“Forgotten? What? That I had made him sleep?”
“Yes. He had forgotten that too.”
“In Heaven’s name, Keyork, tell me what you mean! Do not keep me--”
“How impatient women are!” exclaimed Keyork with exasperating calm.
“What is it that you most want him to forget?”
“You cannot mean----”
“I can, and I do. He has forgotten Beatrice. For a witch--well, you are
a very remarkable one, Unorna. As a woman of business----” He shook his
head.
“What do you mean, this time? What did you say?” Her questions came in
a strained tone and she seemed to have difficulty in concentrating her
attention, or in controlling her emotions, or both.
“You paid a large price for the information,” observed Keyork.
“What price? What are you speaking of? I do not understand.”
“Your soul,” he answered, with a laugh. “That was what you offered to
any one who would tell you that the Wanderer was safe. I immediately
closed with your offer. It was an excellent one for me.”
Unorna tapped the table impatiently.
“It is odd that a man of your learning should never be serious,” she
said.
“I supposed that you were serious,” he answered. “Besides, a bargain
is a bargain, and there were numerous witnesses to the transaction,” he
added, looking round the room at his dead specimens.
Unorna tried to laugh with him.
“Do you know, I was so nervous that I fancied all those creatures were
groaning and shrieking and gibbering at me, when you came in.”
“Very likely they were,” said Keyork Arabian, his small eyes twinkling.
“And I imagined that the Malayan woman opened her mouth to scream, and
that the Peruvian savages turned their heads; it was very strange--at
first they groaned, and then they wailed, and then they howled and
shrieked at me.”
“Under the circumstances, that is not extraordinary.”
Unorna stared at him rather angrily. He was jesting, of course, and she
had been dreaming, or had been so overwrought by excitement as to have
been made the victim of a vivid hallucination. Nevertheless there was
something disagreeable in the matter-of-fact gravity of his jest.
“I am tired of your kind of wit,” she said.
“The kind of wit which is called wisdom is said to be fatiguing,” he
retorted.
“I wish you would give me an opportunity of being wearied in that way.”
“Begin by opening your eyes to facts, then. It is you who are trying
to jest. It is I who am in earnest. Did you, or did you not, offer your
soul for a certain piece of information? Did you, or did you not, hear
those dead things moan and cry? Did you, or did you not, see them move?”
“How absurd!” cried Unorna. “You might as well ask whether, when one
is giddy, the room is really going round? Is there any practical
difference, so far as sensation goes, between a mummy and a block of
wood?”
“That, my dear lady, is precisely what we do not know, and what we most
wish to know. Death is not the change which takes place at a moment
which is generally clearly defined, when the heart stops beating, and
the eye turns white, and the face changes colour. Death comes some time
after that, and we do not know exactly when. It varies very much in
different individuals. You can only define it as the total and final
cessation of perception and apperception, both functions depending on
the nerves. In ordinary cases Nature begins of herself to destroy the
nerves by a sure process. But how do you know what happens when decay
is not only arrested but prevented before it has begun? How can you
foretell what may happen when a skilful hand has restored the tissues of
the body to their original flexibility, or preserved them in the state
in which they were last sensitive?”
“Nothing can ever make me believe that a mummy can suddenly hear and
understand,” said Unorna. “Much less that it can move and produce
a sound. I know that the idea has possessed you for many years, but
nothing will make me believe it possible.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing short of seeing and hearing.”
“But you have seen and heard.”
“I was dreaming.”
“When you offered your soul?”
“Not then, perhaps. I was only mad then.”
“And on the ground of temporary insanity you would repudiate the
bargain?”
Unorna shrugged her shoulders impatiently and did not answer. Keyork
relinquished the fencing.
“It is of no importance,” he said, changing his tone. “Your dream--or
whatever it was--seems to have been the second of your two experiences.
You said there were two, did you not? What was the first?”
Unorna sat silent for some minutes, as though collecting her thoughts.
Keyork, who never could have enough light, busied himself with another
lamp. The room was now brighter than it generally was in the daytime.
Unorna watched him. She did not want to make confidences to him, and yet
she felt irresistibly impelled to do so. He was a strange compound of
wisdom and levity, in her opinion, and his light-hearted moods were
those which she most resented. She was never sure whether he was in
reality tactless, or frankly brutal. She inclined to the latter view of
his character, because he always showed such masterly skill in excusing
himself when he had gone too far. Neither his wisdom nor his love of
jesting explained to her the powerful attraction he exercised over her
whole nature, and of which she was, in a manner, ashamed. She could
quarrel with him as often as they met, and yet she could not help being
always glad to meet him again. She could not admit that she liked him
because she dominated him; on the contrary, he was the only person she
had ever met over whom she had no influence whatever, who did as he
pleased without consulting her, and who laughed at her mysterious power
so far as he himself was concerned. Nor was her liking founded upon any
consciousness of obligation. If he had helped her to the best of his
ability in the great experiment, it was also clear enough that he had
the strongest personal interest in doing so. He loved life with a mad
passion for its own sake, and the only object of his study was to find
a means of living longer than other men. All the aims and desires and
complex reasonings of his being tended to this simple expression--the
wish to live. To what idolatrous self-worship Keyork Arabian might be
capable of descending, if he ever succeeded in eliminating death from
the equation of his immediate future, it was impossible to say. The
wisdom of ages bids us beware of the man of one idea. He is to be feared
for his ruthlessness, for his concentration, for the singular strength
he has acquired in the centralization of his intellectual power, and
because he has welded, as it were, the rough metal of many passions and
of many talents into a single deadly weapon which he wields for a single
purpose. Herein lay, perhaps, the secret of Unorna’s undefined fear of
Keyork and of her still less definable liking for him.
She leaned one elbow on the table and shaded her eyes from the brilliant
light.
“I do not know why I should tell you,” she said at last. “You will only
laugh at me, and then I shall be angry, and we shall quarrel as usual.”
“I may be of use,” suggested the little man gravely. “Besides, I have
made up my mind never to quarrel with you again, Unorna.”
“You are wise, my dear friend. It does no good. As for your being of use
in this case, the most I can hope is that you may find me an explanation
of something I cannot understand.”
“I am good at that. I am particularly good at explanations--and,
generally, at all _post facto_ wisdom.”
“Keyork, do you believe that the souls of the dead can come back and be
visible to us?”
Keyork Arabian was silent for a few seconds.
“I know nothing about it,” he answered.
“But what do you think?”
“Nothing. Either it is possible, or it is not, and until the one
proposition or the other is proved I suspend my judgment. Have you seen
a ghost?”
“I do not know. I have seen something----” She stopped, as though the
recollections were unpleasant.
“Then” said Keyork, “the probability is that you saw a living person.
Shall I sum up the question of ghosts for you?”
“I wish you would, in some way that I can understand.”
“We are, then, in precisely the same position with regard to the belief
in ghosts which we occupy towards such questions as the abolition of
death. The argument in both cases is inductive and all but conclusive.
We do not know of any case, in the two hundred generations of men, more
or less, with whose history we are in some degree acquainted, of any
individual who has escaped death. We conclude that all men must die.
Similarly, we do not know certainly--not from real, irrefutable evidence
at least--that the soul of any man or woman dead has ever returned
visibly to earth. We conclude, therefore, that none ever will. There
is a difference in the two cases, which throws a slight balance of
probability on the side of the ghost. Many persons have asserted that
they have seen ghosts, though none have ever asserted that men do not
die. For my own part, I have had a very wide, practical, and intimate
acquaintance with dead people--sometimes in very queer places--but I
have never seen anything even faintly suggestive of a ghost. Therefore,
my dear lady, I advise you to take it for granted that you have seen a
living person.”
“I never shivered with cold and felt my hair rise upon my head at the
sight of any living thing,” said Unorna dreamily, and still shading her
eyes with her hand.
“But might you not feel that if you chanced to see some one whom you
particularly disliked?” asked Keyork, with a gentle laugh.
“Disliked?” repeated Unorna in a harsh voice. She changed her position
and looked at him. “Yes, perhaps that is possible. I had not thought of
that. And yet--I would rather it had been a ghost.”
“More interesting, certainly, and more novel,” observed Keyork, slowly
polishing his smooth cranium with the palm of his hand. His head, and
the perfect hemisphere of his nose, reflected the light like ivory balls
of different sizes.
“I was standing before him,” said Unorna. “The place was lonely and
it was already night. The stars shone on the snow, and I could see
distinctly. Then she--that woman--passed softly between us. He cried
out, calling her by name, and then fell forward. After that, the woman
was gone. What was it that I saw?”
“You are quite sure that it was not really a woman?”
“Would a woman, and of all women that one, have come and gone without a
word?”
“Not unless she is a very singularly reticent person,” answered Keyork,
with a laugh. “But you need not go so far as the ghost theory for an
explanation. You were hypnotised, my dear friend, and he made you see
her. That is as simple as anything need be.”
“But that is impossible, because----” Unorna stopped and changed colour.
“Because you had hypnotised him already,” suggested Keyork gravely.
“The thing is not possible,” Unorna repeated, looking away from him.
“I believe it to be the only natural explanation. You had made him
sleep. You tried to force his mind to something contrary to its firmest
beliefs. I have seen you do it. He is a strong subject. His mind
rebelled, yielded, then made a final and desperate effort, and then
collapsed. That effort was so terrible that it momentarily forced your
will back upon itself, and impressed his vision on your sight. There are
no ghosts, my dear colleague. There are only souls and bodies. If the
soul can be defined as anything it can be defined as Pure Being in the
Mode of Individuality but quite removed from the Mode of Matter. As for
the body--well, there it is before you, in a variety of shapes, and in
various states of preservation, as incapable of producing a ghost as
a picture or a statue. You are altogether in a very nervous condition
to-day. It is really quite indifferent whether that good lady be alive
or dead.”
“Indifferent!” exclaimed Unorna fiercely. Then she was silent.
“Indifferent to the validity of the theory. If she is dead, you did not
see her ghost, and if she is alive you did not see her body, because,
if she had been there in the flesh, she would have entered into an
explanation--to say the least. Hypnosis will explain anything and
everything, without causing you a moment’s anxiety for the future.”
“Then I did not hear shrieks and moans, nor see your specimens moving
when I was here along just now?”
“Certainly not! Hypnosis again. Auto-hypnosis this time. You should
really be less nervous. You probably stared at the lamp without
realising the fact. You know that any shining object affects you in
that way, if you are not careful. It is a very bright lamp, too.
Instantaneous effect--bodies appear to move and you hear unearthly
yells--you offer your soul for sale and I buy it, appearing in the nick
of time? If your condition had lasted ten seconds longer you would have
taken me for his majesty and lived, in imagination, through a dozen
years or so of sulphurous purgatorial treatment under my personal
supervision, to wake up and find yourself unscorched--and unredeemed, as
ever.”
“You are a most comforting person, Keyork,” said Unorna, with a faint
smile. “I only wish I could believe everything you tell me.”
“You must either believe me or renounce all claim to intelligence,”
answered the little man, climbing from his chair and sitting upon the
table at her elbow. His short, sturdy legs swung at a considerable
height above the floor, and he planted his hands firmly upon the board
on either side of him. The attitude was that of an idle boy, and was
so oddly out of keeping with his age and expression that Unorna almost
laughed as she looked at him.
“At all events,” he continued, “you cannot doubt my absolute sincerity.
You come to me for an explanation. I give you the only sensible one that
exists, and the only one which can have a really sedative effect upon
your excitement. Of course, if you have any especial object in
believing in ghosts--if it affords you any great and lasting pleasure to
associate, in imagination, with spectres, wraiths, and airily-malicious
shadows, I will not cross your fancy. To a person of solid nerves
a banshee may be an entertaining companion, and an apparition in a
well-worn winding-sheet may be a pretty toy. For all I know, it may be
a delight to you to find your hair standing on end at the unexpected
appearance of a dead woman in a black cloak between you and the person
with whom you are engaged in animated conversation. All very well, as
a mere pastime, I say. But if you find that you are reaching a point on
which your judgment is clouded, you had better shut up the magic lantern
and take the rational view of the case.”
“Perhaps you are right.”
“Will you allow me to say something very frank, Unorna?” asked Keyork
with unusual diffidence.
“If you can manage to be frank without being brutal.”
“I will be short, at all events. It is this. I think you are becoming
superstitious.” He watched her closely to see what effect the speech
would produce. She looked up quickly.
“Am I? What is superstition?”
“Gratuitous belief in things not proved.”
“I expected a different definition from you.”
“What did you expect me to say?”
“That superstition is belief.”
“I am not a heathen,” observed Keyork sanctimoniously.
“Far from it,” laughed Unorna. “I have heard that devils believe and
tremble.”
“And you class me with those interesting things, my dear friend?”
“Sometimes: when I am angry with you.”
“Two or three times a day, then? Not more than that?” inquired the sage,
swinging his heels, and staring at the rows of skulls in the background.
“Whenever we quarrel. It is easy for you to count the occasions.”
“Easy, but endless. Seriously, Unorna, I am not the devil. I can prove
it to you conclusively on theological grounds.”
“Can you? They say that his majesty is a lawyer, and a successful one,
in good practice.”
“What caused Satan’s fall? Pride. Then pride is his chief
characteristic. Am I proud, Unorna? The question is absurd, I have
nothing to be proud of--a little old man with a gray beard, of whom
nobody ever heard anything remarkable. No one ever accused me of pride.
How could I be proud of anything? Except of your acquaintance, my dear
lady,” he added gallantly, laying his hand on his heart, and leaning
towards her as he sat.
Unorna laughed at the speech, and threw back her dishevelled hair with a
graceful gesture. Keyork paused.
“You are very beautiful,” he said thoughtfully, gazing at her face and
at the red gold lights that played in the tangled tresses.
“Worse and worse!” she exclaimed, still laughing. “Are you going to
repeat the comedy you played so well this afternoon, and make love to me
again?”
“If you like. But I do not need to win your affections now.”
“Why not?”
“Have I not bought your soul, with everything in it, like a furnished
house?” he asked merrily.
“Then you are the devil after all?”
“Or an angel. Why should the evil one have a monopoly in the
soul-market? But you remind me of my argument. You would have distracted
Demosthenes in the heat of a peroration, or Socrates in the midst of his
defence, if you had flashed that hair of yours before their old eyes.
You have almost taken the life out of my argument. I was going to say
that my peculiarity is not less exclusive than Lucifer’s, though it
takes a different turn. I was going to confess with the utmost frankness
and the most sincere truth that my only crime against Heaven is a most
perfect, unswerving, devotional love for my own particular Self. In that
attachment I have never wavered yet--but I really cannot say what may
become of Keyork Arabian if he looks at you much longer.”
“He might become a human being,” suggested Unorna.
“How can you be so cruel as to suggest such a horrible possibility?”
cried the gnome with a shudder, either real or extremely well feigned.
“You are betraying yourself, Keyork. You must control your feelings
better, or I shall find out the truth about you.”
He glanced keenly at her, and was silent for a while. Unorna rose slowly
to her feet, and standing beside him, began to twist her hair into a
great coil upon her head.
“What made you let it down?” asked Keyork with some curiosity, as he
watched her.
“I hardly know,” she answered, still busy with the braids. “I was
nervous, I suppose, as you say, and so it got loose and came down.”
“Nervous about our friend?”
She did not reply, but turned from him with a shake of the head and took
up her fur mantle.
“You are not going?” said Keyork quietly, in a tone of conviction.
She started slightly, dropped the sable, and sat down again.
“No,” she said, “I am not going yet. I do not know what made me take my
cloak.”
“You have really no cause for nervousness now that it is all over,”
remarked the sage, who had not descended from his perch on the table.
“He is very well. It is one of those cases which are interesting as
being new, or at least only partially investigated. We may as well speak
in confidence, Unorna, for we really understand each other. Do you not
think so?”
“That depends on what you have to say.”
“Not much--nothing that ought to offend you. You must consider, my
dear,” he said, assuming an admirably paternal tone, “that I might be
your father, and that I have your welfare very much at heart, as well as
your happiness. You love this man--no, do not be angry, do not interrupt
me. You could not do better for yourself, nor for him. I knew him years
ago. He is a grand man--the sort of man I would like to be. Good. You
find him suffering from a delusion, or a memory, whichever it be. Not
only is this delusion--let us call it so--ruining his happiness and
undermining his strength, but so long as it endures, it also completely
excludes the possibility of his feeling for you what you feel for him.
Your own interest coincides exactly with the promptings of real, human
charity. And yours is in reality a charitable nature, dear Unorna,
though you are sometimes a little hasty with poor old Keyork. Good
again. You, being moved by a desire for this man’s welfare, most kindly
and wisely take steps to cure him of his madness. The delusion is
strong, but your will is stronger. The delusion yields after a violent
struggle during which it has even impressed itself upon your own senses.
The patient is brought home, properly cared for, and disposed to
rest. Then he wakes, apparently of his own accord, and behold! he is
completely cured. Everything has been successful, everything is perfect,
everything has followed the usual course of such mental cures by means
of hypnosis. The only thing I do not understand is the waking. That is
the only thing which makes me uneasy for the future, until I can see it
properly explained. He had no right to wake without your suggestion, if
he was still in the hypnotic state; and if he had already come out of
the hypnotic state by a natural reaction, it is to be feared that the
cure may not be permanent.”
Unorna had listened attentively, as she always did when Keyork delivered
himself of a serious opinion upon a psychiatric case. Her eyes gleamed
with satisfaction as he finished.
“If that is all that troubles you,” she said, “you may set your mind
at rest. After he had fallen, and while the watchman was getting the
carriage, I repeated my suggestion and ordered him to wake without pain
in an hour.”
“Perfect! Splendid!” cried Keyork, clapping his hands loudly together.
“I did you an injustice, my dear Unorna. You are not so nervous as I
thought, since you forgot nothing. What a woman! Ghost-proof, and able
to think connectedly even at such a moment! But tell me, did you not
take the opportunity of suggesting something else?” His eyes twinkled
merrily, as he asked the question.
“What do you mean?” inquired Unorna, with sudden coldness.
“Oh, nothing so serious as you seem to think. I was only wondering
whether a suggestion of reciprocation might not have been wise.”
She faced him fiercely.
“Hold your peace, Keyork Arabian!” she cried.
“Why?” he asked with a bland smile, swinging his little legs and
stroking his long beard.
“There is a limit! Must you for ever be trying to suggest, and trying
to guide me in everything I do? It is intolerable! I can hardly call my
soul my own!”
“Hardly, considering my recent acquisition of it,” returned Keyork
calmly.
“That wretched jest is threadbare.”
“A jest! Wretched? And threadbare, too? Poor Keyork! His wit is failing
at last.”
He shook his head in mock melancholy over his supposed intellectual
dotage. Unorna turned away, this time with the determination to leave
him.
“I am sorry if I have offended you,” he said, very meekly. “Was what I
said so very unpardonable?”
“If ignorance is unpardonable, as you always say, then your speech
is past forgiveness,” said Unorna, relenting by force of habit, but
gathering her fur around her. “If you know anything of women--”
“Which I do not,” observed the gnome in a low-toned interruption.
“Which you do not--you would know how much such love as you advise me to
manufacture by force of suggestion could be worth in a woman’s eyes. You
would know that a woman will be loved for herself, for her beauty, for
her wit, for her virtues, for her faults, for her own love, if you will,
and by a man conscious of all his actions and free of his heart; not by
a mere patient reduced to the proper state of sentiment by a trick of
hypnotism, or psychiatry, or of whatever you choose to call the effect
of this power of mine which neither you, nor I, nor any one can explain.
I will be loved freely, for myself, or not at all.”
“I see, I see,” said Keyork thoughtfully, “something in the way Israel
Kafka loves you.”
“Yes, as Israel Kafka loves me, I am not afraid to say it. As he loves
me, of his own free will, and to his own destruction--as I should have
loved him, had it been so fated.”
“So you are a fatalist, Unorna,” observed her companion, still stroking
and twisting his beard. “It is strange that we should differ upon so
many fundamental questions, you and I, and yet be such good friends. Is
it not?”
“The strangest thing of all is that I should submit to your exasperating
ways as I do.”
“It does not strike me that it is I who am quarrelling this time,” said
Keyork.
“I confess, I would almost prefer that to your imperturbable coolness.
What is this new phase? You used not to be like this. You are planning
some wickedness. I am sure of it.”
“And that is all the credit I get for keeping my temper! Did I not say a
while ago that I would never quarrel with you again?”
“You said so, but--”
“But you did not expect me to keep my word,” said Keyork, slipping from
his seat on the table with considerable agility and suddenly standing
close before her. “And do you not yet know that when I say a thing I do
it, and that when I have got a thing I keep it?”
“So far as the latter point is concerned, I have nothing to say. But you
need not be so terribly impressive; and unless you are going to break
your word, by which you seem to set such store, and quarrel with me, you
need not look at me so fiercely.”
Keyork suddenly let his voice drop to its deepest and most vibrating
key.
“I only want you to remember this,” he said. “You are not an ordinary
woman, as I am not an ordinary man, and the experiment we are making
together is an altogether extraordinary one. I have told you the truth.
I care for nothing but my individual self, and I seek nothing but the
prolongation of life. If you endanger the success of the great trial
again, as you did to-day, and if it fails, I will never forgive you.
You will make an enemy of me, and you will regret it while you live,
and longer than that, perhaps. So long as you keep the compact there
is nothing I will not do to help you--nothing within the bounds of your
imagination. And I can do much. Do you understand?”
“I understand that you are afraid of losing my help.”
“That is it--of losing your help. I am not afraid of losing you--in the
end.”
Unorna smiled rather scornfully at first, as she looked down upon the
little man’s strange face and gazed fearlessly into his eyes. But as she
looked, the smile faded, and the colour slowly sank from her face,
until she was very pale. And as she felt herself losing courage before
something which she could not understand, Keyork’s eyes grew brighter
and brighter till they glowed like drops of molten metal. A sound as of
many voices wailing in agony rose and trembled and quavered in the air.
With a wild cry, Unorna pressed her hands to her ears and fled towards
the entrance.
“You are very nervous to-night,” observed Keyork, as he opened the door.
Then he went silently down the stairs by her side and helped her into
the carriage, which had been waiting since his return.