THE SAVING OF CONSTANTINE
Though others might calmly dismiss the child’s vision as an
extraordinarily accurate delusion--“an unusually elaborate series of
coincidences,” the policeman termed it--not so his parents. A man from
Inverness, a woman from the Schwartz Wald, may be dour and stolid to
outward seeming, but they are highly imaginative by nature.
An ancestor of Grier’s, a warrior bard, took service with the
Elector-Palatine, and this remote link led to the Indian tea-planter
marrying a stout and pretty Gretchen from the borders of the Black
Forest. Karl, named after his German grandfather, not altogether
without an eye to the main chance, I regret to say, was their only
child, and were he the ugliest duckling ever hatched he would yet
have been their greatest treasure. But he was a very good-looking,
merry-eyed, manly little fellow, with a face like one of Murillo’s
angels, and eyes with the blue of the Red Sea in them. If you are in
doubt as to the true blend of sapphire and ultramarine meant by that
tint, ask any sailor-man of your acquaintance, and he will tell you
that the blue of the Red Sea is a deep, unvarying, steadfast color,
while the blue of the Mediterranean is, often as not, a steely mistral
gray.
In a word, Mr. and Mrs. Grier secretly worshiped their bonny chick, and
it was a great shock to them to discover that his developing brains
held compartments not within common ken. Therefore, although Karl ate
his meals heartily, and throve apace, they kept a close eye on him,
and compared notes whenever any curious action or utterance caught
their attention. And what eagle-like intensity there is in that wistful
parental glance! How it detects and interprets signs and portents! What
degenerates must be the father and mother whose first warning of danger
to their young comes from a nurse!
So it came to pass that once, aged seven, Karl had the earache.
“Goodness me!” cries the experienced matron, “that is nothing to
cause domestic flutterings. A pinch of bicarbonate of soda dissolved
in a teaspoonful of hot water, or, in severe attacks, a few drops of
laudanum on cotton-wool, will deaden the pain and induce sleep.”
Yes, madam, but if your little Tom, Dick, or Harry remarked that “the
music was doing it,” and, when pressed for details, began to explain
that some one was playing a flute, thus--whereupon Karl softly hummed
part of the obligato to the nightingale song from the “Marriage of
Jeannette”--if, moreover, your budding genius went on:
“There is a lady singing now. Listen:
Au bord du chemin qui passe ma porte
Fleurit un bel aubépin, un bel aubépin....”
and you knew quite well that the Commissioner’s niece, helped by a
love-sick subaltern who fluted, was probably singing that identical
song in a house over a mile distant, what would you do?
Send for the doctor, of course.
The doctor came, a hard-headed Scot--they thrive in India, those
Scotsmen--and heard the story. At first he was inclined to place
a mother’s vagaries firmly on one side, but, when a _chuprassi_
(messenger) brought a reply to Mrs. Grier’s note, and he read what the
Commissioner’s niece had written, he stroked his long nose silently.
For this was the answer:
“Yes, Mr. Browne was here for luncheon. About two o’clock he ran
through the ‘Rossignol’ song with me, first without the voice,
afterwards with all the frills. But what on earth made you guess it?
Mr. Browne is so amazed that he is staying to tea. _Do_ come and tell
us all about it.”
“And ye say ye mentioned the chune yerself, Mrs. Grier?” said he
meditatively.
“Yes, indeed. I heard Miss Nicholls sing it at the Gloucesters’ concert
and Karl was not there. What can it all mean, doctor?”
“I wish I could read that riddle. Ye would see all the letters of the
alphabet afther me name. But trouble not yer head about Karl, Mrs.
Grier. A slight discharge is beginning, and that brings instant relief.”
He sought Grier in the big drying-room of the tea factory.
“That boy of yours is a pheenomenon,” he said. “The sensory zone of his
brain is, I should imagine, of remarkable size and unique capacity.
With care, and ordinary luck, he should grow into a marvelous man. But
yer wife must not fret if he puzzles her at times. He has the digestion
of an ostrich, and the stamina of a young bull.”
“Is there any way of accounting for his queer faculties?” asked the
planter.
“How can the normal account for the abnormal?” answered the doctor.
“Here we have a set of nerves the functions of which are ill
understood. We know that unilateral destruction of a center will
partially abolish sensation on the opposite side of the body. A
bilatereal lesion will destroy all sensation. In simple language, if
the hearing nerves are damaged on the right side, you are somewhat deaf
in the left ear; but general destruction means total deafness. That is
what happens when the ordinary appliances are deranged. It is beyond me
to explain the process whereby those same appliances obtain a tenfold,
perhaps a thousand-fold, activity.”
“Is such a thing possible?”
The Civil Surgeon selected a cigar from five exactly similar weeds in
his case with a care that betokened a nice discrimination.
“One does not discuss these matters with womenfolk, Grier; they
think ye are flying in the face of Providence,” he said. “Therefore,
keep my opeenion for yer own lug, so to speak. I have a theory, a
pipe-and-tobacco bit of pheelosophy, mind you, that human inventiveness
is bounded only by the latent powers of the human brain. The limits are
absolute, but they are far beyond our dimmest comprehension, as yet. I
suppose you never saw an epileptic lunatic?”
“No.”
The tea-planter disliked the abrupt question. When you come to think of
it, it had a disagreeable sound in a discussion of a pretty child’s
simple ailment. Doctors are apt to forget their hearers’ unscientific
feelings.
“It provides a most interesting study,” said Dr. Macpherson, with
a grim glee. “Such a case is frequently accompanied by sensory
hallucinations and certain subjective sensations, such as unseen
flashes of light and color, strange, and often offensive, tastes and
smells, the result of some morbid irritation of the cortical sensory
centers, which are the anatomical subtrata of ideation.”
“What the--what has all this got to do with Karl?” demanded Grier, with
rising wrath.
“Softly, noo, ma man. Before ye build ye mun have a foundation. I am
one of those who think that insanity is closely akin to genius. An
extra dense membrane may convert a potential Isaac Newton into an
actual eediot. The other day, a clever Frenchman--they are daring
deevils, the French--opened an imbecile’s skull, rearranged his brain
lobes, and provided space for expansion. The imbecile went through all
the processes of intellectual growth, and is now a sane man. Why should
not nature go one better than the surgeon, and suddenly irradiate her
wide realm by some lightning gleam? In other days her efforts in that
direction led her subjects to martyrdom or sanctity, by the sheer
chance of their being on the winning or losing side. Mostly, both then
and now, she sends her unfortunate failures to the mad-house.”
“Look here, Macpherson,” interrupted Grier hotly, “you are talking
about my boy, remember.”
“Deed, ay! He’s a credit to ye, but he wouldn’t have the earache if ye
hadn’t dowered him wi’a thick cranium.”
And the doctor hurried away, sore because his grains of science had
fallen on such unreceptive soil.
Karl, of course, recovered speedily, and the more he learnt to
appreciate a Manipur pony, a brace of sporting fox-terriers, and an
air-gun, the less prone was he to uncanny manifestations. As the sway
of Mathilde declined, the more did he unconsciously acquire the lore of
the jungle, until, at ten years of age, he had the wisdom and beauty of
a young god, though he could scarce write his name, and spelled as a
Scotchman jokes.
So a family council sat many times, and there came a day when Mrs.
Grier and Karl leaned against the rail of the P. & O. steamer,
_Ganges_, and watched the form of the stalwart planter until he, and
the Calcutta Ghaut, and the busy banks of the Hughli River, dissolved
in a mist of tears.
For India is an evil land in which to rear tender plants of European
stock, and Karl must go home, not to see the glowing east again until
he was a man. His mother went with him, and, if God favored the loving
family, they would all be reunited when Grier sold his tea-garden in
its highest state of efficiency some three years later. These partings
yield the sternest test of an imperial race. Hearts which do not break
suffer the fiercer strain.
Karl, who had forgotten the sea, being scarce able to toddle when his
parents quitted Britain, quickly merged his sorrows in the marvels of
the Bay of Bengal. His mother, choking her grief each day until the
boy slept, watched him narrowly. She was a very intelligent woman,
and, although her formula was wordless, she had a definite belief that
the immensity of the ocean, its far-flung silence, might affect her
extraordinary son in some unexpected manner.
Luckily, Dr. Macpherson, time-expired and pensioned, was on board, and
in him she had a sympathetic friend also who was a skilled observer. He
concurred with her that repression or secrecy was not to be thought of
in connection with Karl. The boy’s insatiable curiosity about ships
and their ways was not denied such information as was obtainable. The
captain, attracted one morning by his joyous laugh, took him up to
the chart-house, showed him how to take an observation, explained the
curvature of the earth, and, finally, made him pull the cord of the
siren, thereby summoning all hands to collision quarters for inspection.
Now, the raucous blast of the fog-horn spoke to the youngster as the
voice of the ship. It probed boundless depths in Karl’s soul. He heard
the tremulous waves of sound speeding over the face of the waters long
after the steam breath was dry in the whistle. He heard, though he knew
it not, the solemn echoes as the rolling harmony was sent up from sea
to clouds and back to the sea again.
And he began to “dream.” Mrs. Grier, fearful of the outcome, would have
distracted his attention, but Dr. Macpherson, who had never seen the
boy in the actual state of exaltation, besought her not to check him.
The day passed without incident. After dinner they were on deck,
enjoying the glorious tropical moon, “that orbèd maiden, with white
fire laden,” which some globe-trotting impressionist has described as
yellow! Macpherson, thinking Karl’s visionary mood had passed without
result, pointed out such planets as were ascendant, and added the
information that several hundreds of smaller bodies were invisible,
save to astronomers.
“I can see a good many,” said Karl, instantly.
“Nonsense. Those are stars,” smiled the doctor.
“No. I mean round black things, like balloons. Some of them are shiny
on one side.”
“By gad!” muttered the man under his breath. He gazed up at the
glittering firmament.
“That big fellow there is Jupiter,” he said. “Can you discover anything
peculiar about him?”
“Yes,” said Karl, instantly. “There are three little dots quite near.
They look like pins stuck in a blue cloth.”
“Karl, did anybody ever tell you that Jupiter had three moons?”
“I never heard of Jupiter before, but I have often seen the three
moons,” was the amazing answer.
“That is true,” interposed Mrs. Grier. “We kept such problems from his
ken.”
What Dr. Macpherson might have said will never be known. They were
standing on the port side, well forward. On a clear space aft some
light-hearted people were waltzing. In utter disobedience of the
ship’s rules, a young Armenian, scion of a great commercial house in
London and Calcutta, was sitting on the rail. Some one cannoned against
him and he fell, yelling, into the sea.
Instantly there was a hubbub of screams and rushing feet. A cool-headed
man threw a life-buoy after the unfortunate youth, and others shouted
to the officer of the watch. Very speedily the steamer’s way was
stopped and the engines reversed.
The ship’s framework throbbed under the agony of the giant machines
thus rudely checked in their work. British quartermasters and lithe
Lascars worked like fiends to clear a boat’s hamper and swing out the
davits. But it was a hopeless task. Great steamers slip through a mile
of water with such rapidity, and the course was so interfered with by
reversing the propellers, that nothing short of a miracle would reveal
the whereabouts of the hapless Armenian, even if he still floated and
retained consciousness.
“Mrs. Grier--” began Macpherson.
“I know what you would say,” she cried bravely. “Yes, let Karl help,
and let me try to thank God he has the power.”
Were it not for Macpherson’s great reputation and personal popularity
the captain would scarcely have listened to him in that confused
moment. Even as it was, he only understood the doctor to say that
Constantine, the Armenian, could be found, and he gave permission in a
dazed way for the man and the boy to be seated in the boat before it
was lowered.
Then Macpherson had to convince a sceptical third officer, and,
greatest difficulty of all, he had to bend Karl’s excited wits to the
task in hand, for the child was delighted with the adventure.
The plash of the oars, the stealing away of the huge black hull of the
_Ganges_, the earnest words of Macpherson, soon had their effect. Karl
commenced to know what was expected of him.
“Yes,” he said, standing up on a seat in his eagerness, and pointing to
a different course, “he is there, crying out loud. He is calling for
his mother.”
Not the best sailor of them all could see or hear aught. Yet, for want
of other guide, the third officer swung round the boat’s head.
Ever and anon Karl told them where the Armenian was, and even shouted,
in his shrill treble, to encourage him.
At last, after twenty minutes of strenuous tugging, a quartermaster in
the bows roared hoarsely, “By the Lord, I can see him!”
“Of course,” chirrupped Karl. “He was there all the time!”
So a half-drowned, wholly hysterical Constantine, clinging desperately
to a buoy which he refused to abandon, was dragged into the boat, and
Karl was restored to his weeping mother’s arms, while strange tales ran
through the ship when the screw jogged merrily onwards once more.
That saving of Constantine meant a good deal to Karl, as shall be seen.