“BLOOD IS A VERY PECULIAR JUICE”
You know what people think when a man screams out that a shark is
threatening him from the black depths of the parquet flooring of a
fashionable dining-room. And a shark is a most uncommon feature of such
manifestations. Usually the disturbing vision is a rat, or a green imp
with red eyes, or even a squirming snake. Indeed, reptiles figure so
often in alcoholic apparitions that I have often wondered why there are
not more frequent “scenes” in the London Strand, owing to the presence
on the kerb of a number of street vendors who cause make-believe
serpents to wriggle all day long on a small board.
Several ladies rose with startled cries. A passing waiter was so
unnerved that he dropped a laden tray, and the crash added to the alarm
of those seated at a distance, to whom the hubbub, but not its cause,
was audible. The band stopped playing, a clarionet breaking off with a
funny squeak in the middle of a cadenza, and, adding fuel each instant
to the wild-fire commotion, Constantine sprawled over the table and
yelled for succor.
Wilhelm Steindal, convinced that his companion had suddenly gone
mad, showed that he was endowed with some of the grit essential to a
scoundrel of any real importance. He picked up a carafe of iced water,
and dashed the contents into the Armenian’s gray-green face, being
prepared to follow up the attack with the bottle itself, if needful. He
acted better than he knew. The physical shock of the liquid dissipated
the magnetic influence which Karl had unwittingly exercised on the man
he had rescued from the Bay of Bengal. Forthwith, Constantine recovered
his self-possession. He mopped his dripping face with a serviette,
apologized to the astounded manager and those diners seated near, and
went out, followed by Steindal.
The latter was too flustered to garnish his speech with Spanish
phrases, a habit he affected in order to disguise the Polish-Jew
element in his composition. Indeed, his language now savored more of
the Bowery than of Spanish America.
“Wot’n hell did you go’n kick up that sort of circus for?” he growled,
his shining face exuding oil in his excitement.
“I couldn’t help it. I was overpowered by a--by a memory.”
“It was a tomfool performance, anyhow. Seems to me it’ll be all round
N’York that Steindal was out at a skate wid some flea-sucked blighter
who had brought into the country a new variety of jim-jams!”
“Look here, Steindal, I may be afraid of some things, but I have no
fear of you. If you talk to me in that fashion, I’ll smash your face.”
Constantine looked so murderous that the stout man retreated a pace,
and a stalwart hall-porter moved ponderously forward. The Jew felt he
had gone too far. The Armenian was too rich a prize to be flung aside
because he had created a scene in a restaurant and spoiled a good
dinner.
So he cried, with ready complacency:
“Don’t get mad with me, dere’s a good fella. I only wanted to shake up
your wits a bit. Come on! Here’s your hat. Let’s walk round to your
hotel. You’ll soon be all right. _Carramba!_ You scared me worse’n you
scared yourself.”
Up-town in New York you can turn out of a brilliantly lighted and
crowded avenue into a side-street of utmost quietude. The two passed
into one of these convenient thoroughfares, and were instantly removed
from the glare of the restaurant.
Steindal halted to light a cigarette. He eyed the Armenian covertly.
“Tell you what,” he chuckled, “thinkin’ of that girl has put you off
your base.”
“No, you are mistaken. Something altogether different upset me. I can’t
explain matters to you here. Wait till I’ve had a highball in my room.
Then I’ll give you the lines of it. You need have no fear of a further
outbreak. I’m all right now. And you’ve got strong nerves, eh?”
“I need ’em my boy, in my business. I’m a peach on nerves. In the
profession they call me ‘The electrocutioner,’ because I can stiffen a
contract in five seconds. _Por Dios!_ Nerves!”
His gurgling laugh surged in Karl’s ears as Hooper awakened him.
Steindal and Constantine had not yet reached Sixth Avenue from Broadway
ere the two young men in far-away Oxford were eagerly discussing the
incidents of the preceding hour and a quarter in New York.
For once, the scientific necromancy of Karl’s flights through space
failed to enlist all their attention. Hooper, no less than Grier, was
thrilled by the thought that his friend had been drawn by some subtle
magnetic influence to participate, in many ways save actual presence,
in a conclave of such grave significance to a girl whose fortunes
already interested them.
And it is, perhaps requisite, here and now, to protest against the
smile of supercilious incredulity with which some may read of the
earnestness betrayed by these youthful collegians.
It is a fact of common knowledge that a telephone company, sufficiently
enlightened to endeavor to please its customers, has arranged for
a board of directors, consisting of three men in New York, two in
Baltimore, and one in Philadelphia, to sit in their respective offices,
holding the combined receiver and transmitter to ear and mouth, and
conduct a board meeting, to all intents and purposes as efficiently
as if they were gathered in the same room. Company directors, or
others resident in London, Birmingham, and Liverpool, could do exactly
the same thing if the British telephone officials did not require
an earthquake followed by a month’s deliberation before they would
undertake to provide the necessary facilities.
It is exceedingly probable that, in a few years, the same instrument
which permits speech and hearing over practically unlimited distance
will carry a “seeing” apparatus as well. Will the scientific miracle be
any the more explicable because a certain quantity of insulated copper
wire intervenes between the persons seeing, hearing, and speaking
to each other? I am tempted into this disquisition because, as it
happens, the direct outcome of the conversations between the two sets
of men (than whom the English-speaking world could scarce produce four
persons more opposed in personal characteristics) was the introduction
of myself, the writer of this memoir, into the affair. Early in life,
journalism had taken me to India, where I met Karl’s father. He was a
man after my own heart. Many times, when the business of his tea estate
brought him to Calcutta, I had dined with him in the “Wilson-’otel,”
the strange name by which alone the _gharri-wala_ knows the Great
Eastern Hotel, or he had been carried off from the Red Road by me to
my own sanctum overlooking Chowringhee and the smooth, tree-dotted
_maidàn_ that stretches towards Fort William and the river.
And you will guess readily what we poor exiles talked of while the
ice clinked in the long glasses and the blue smoke-rings of Bangalore
cheroots rose to the ceiling. He of his wife and child, I of a deluded
girl waiting in England until the rupee recovered from the heat-wave
which melted silver--Heavens! How we flung those topics back and forth,
like two tennis-players battering a ball. And we never bored each
other. Each man was far too thankful to have a sympathetic listener to
be weary of the other’s stories.
So, in that way, I knew a great deal of Karl, and when, years having
passed, and the aforesaid girl (the rupee having long since steadied
itself at 1_s._ 4_d._) being gone to visit her mother in Devonshire
with our young hopeful, I decided to indulge in a long deferred trip to
Oxford, it was only natural that I should seek out the son of my old
Indian crony, and ask him to guide my steps along the ancient paths of
“the home of lost causes and impossible beliefs.”
The odd thing was that no man in Britain was more prepared to give
credence to Karl’s “visions” than myself. I had long since read Sir
William Macpherson’s book, and constructed Frank Hooper’s theory of the
definite bounds of human inventiveness out of my own thought-producing
laboratory. “Blut ist ein ganz besondrer saft!” said old Mephisto, when
he wheedled Faust into signing his soul away with his own blood, and
the same “peculiar juice” of the Celtic stream ran in Grier’s veins
and in my own. Moreover, Grier _père_ had told me of the adventures
of Grier _fils_ in the matter of the Hutchinson Raid and the saving
of Constantine, so it was another of the strange coincidences of life
that brought a note from me, ensconced in the Mitre Inn, to Karl at his
college on the morning after his excursion to Steindal’s office and the
Broadway restaurant.
Grier and Hooper come to me during the afternoon. Instead of admiring
the glories of Oxford, I had the recital of recent events poured into
my willing ears as we sat together in my private sitting-room on the
first floor. Dear me! how the years slipped back as I listened. The
rounded tree-tops and gracious spires of the English University town
did not differ so greatly from the dim outlines of the palatial city
on the left bank of the Hughli. What a mere hand-span is a vanished
decade! The magic carpet of Tangu, which instantaneously transported
its possessor whither he wished to go, was not a more wonderful vehicle
than a man’s memory. And Karl, even thus early in life, had a way of
talking that compelled attention. He spoke to the point, in simple
words. Evidently he had a horror of exaggeration. His explanations were
clear, logical, as a proposition of Euclid, and he was hardly ever at a
loss for a simile when illustrating one of the less easily understood
features of his new and extraordinary force.
Being his senior by a good many years, I thought it my duty to point
out the hazardous nature of these excursions into the unknown. I was
fascinated by his story, of course, together with Hooper’s singularly
definite corroboration of its chief features, yet I feared lest such
playing with nervous excitability might result in paralysis or mental
trouble.
But Karl’s cheery laugh reassured me.
“I have taken a very precise set of notes of a lecture on Seismic Waves
this morning,” he said, “and at this very moment I could break that
poker across my knee. There’s little wrong with my brains, and still
less with my muscles, I can assure you.”
He leaned forward, picked up the poker, and examined it critically.
It was an old-fashioned, heavy implement, with its point sharpened by
years of forgetfulness, which, in pokerdom, takes the form of slow
consumption in sulky fires.
“Now that I come to examine it, I don’t think I can break it. Being
honest wrought iron, it will bend into a hoop. But I’ll polarize it, by
way of a change.”
He pulled up his coat sleeves, and turned back the cuffs of his shirt
so as to bare his wrists. Then holding the poker point downwards on the
hearthrug, he began to stroke it softly with the tips of his fingers
and thumbs. His hands were white, long-fingered, and finely molded,
his wrists square and hard. Looking at him, watching the smile playing
on his eager face, and the athletic poise of his body as he kept the
poker from falling, I was struck by his physical resemblance to the
Vatican Discobolus, with its wonderful combination of repose at the
completion of the backward movement of the thrower, and of action at
the commencement of the powerful forward cast.
But such thoughts were dispelled by the uncanny antics of the poker. It
was broad daylight, and any sleight-of-hand performance was out of the
question in every sense. Yet both Hooper and I myself saw Karl withdraw
his support from the poker, continuing the stroking movement in the
air, and gradually widening the distance between his hands.
And the poker did not fall! It stood there immovable, as though its
point were stuck in the floor through the rug. At first I candidly
admit that I was certain Grier had found a hole in the carpet which
coincided with a crack in the flooring. But when he inclined the
imaginary axis of his hands, thus changing the direction of the
magnetic current that flowed between them, the poker adjusted its
poise to the new line of force. It described circles, leaned over at
impossible angles, lifted itself fully a foot in the air, and twice
traced in space the figure of a Maltese cross. I lay stress on this
simple yet peculiar manifestation of Karl’s powers, because it was the
first instance of them which had actually come under my personal notice.
Certainly I was amazed, and even Hooper, notwithstanding the marvels
he had witnessed, expressed his surprise at the new feature of his
friend’s astounding qualities.
“I can’t explain why I should have the gift of magnetic induction,”
laughed Karl. “I discovered it accidentally one day when I was making
an experiment with a freely suspended needle to determine a magnetic
meridian. I became very interested, the adjustment required delicate
manipulation, and suddenly my hands went cold, while the needle
followed their movements. Feel my hands now!”
I caught his right hand. It was so icy to the touch that I believe I
started.
“I really think I could magnetize your hands,” he went on. “Shall I
try?”
Naturally, I agreed. Without permitting the poker to fall, he commenced
to stroke my hands from the finger-tips to the wrists. Soon I felt a
sensation akin to plunging them into snow. And behold, when he quitted
me, that most eccentric of pokers yielded to _my_ blandishments!
But in my case a more orthodox circulation quickly shattered the
magnetic axis. In a few seconds the poker tottered, and would have
fallen had I not caught it. The marked diminution of temperature
experienced while I was under the influence of Karl’s electric energy
was not the least interesting feature of a curious incident, seeing
that it is an axiom of the classroom that all magnetic phenomena vanish
completely if a magnet be made red-hot!
All this has astonishingly little to do with the more exciting personal
affairs of a charming young lady like Maggie Hutchinson. But it is
reasonable to suppose that Karl, anxious to secure the counsel of an
older man, thought fit to show this imaginary Solomon how necessary
faith was to the performance of good works, and it is in this same
spirit of convincing the incredulous that I have related the trivial
yet quite extraordinary poker-balancing of that summer’s afternoon in
the Mitre Hotel, Oxford.