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VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE
by
E. F. BENSON . . Author of
“Dodo Wonders,” “Miss Mapp,” “Colin,” etc. :: ::
London: Hutchinson and Co.
Paternoster Row, E.C.
Printed in Great Britain
at the Pitman Press, Bath
CONTENTS
PAGE
“AND THE DEAD SPAKE----” 7
THE OUTCAST 37
THE HORROR-HORN 63
MACHAON 83
NEGOTIUM PERAMBULANS 107
AT THE FARMHOUSE 131
INSCRUTABLE DECREES 155
THE GARDENER 177
MR. TILLY’S SÉANCE 199
MRS. AMWORTH 223
IN THE TUBE 247
RODERICK’S STORY 269
“And the Dead Spake----”
“And the Dead Spake----”
There is not in all London a quieter spot, or one, apparently, more
withdrawn from the heat and bustle of life than Newsome Terrace. It is
a cul-de-sac, for at the upper end the roadway between its two lines
of square, compact little residences is brought to an end by a high
brick wall, while at the lower end, the only access to it is through
Newsome Square, that small discreet oblong of Georgian houses, a relic
of the time when Kensington was a suburban village sundered from the
metropolis by a stretch of pastures stretching to the river. Both
square and terrace are most inconveniently situated for those whose
ideal environment includes a rank of taxicabs immediately opposite
their door, a spate of ’buses roaring down the street, and a procession
of underground trains, accessible by a station a few yards away,
shaking and rattling the cutlery and silver on their dining tables. In
consequence Newsome Terrace had come, two years ago, to be inhabited
by leisurely and retired folk or by those who wished to pursue their
work in quiet and tranquillity. Children with hoops and scooters are
phenomena rarely encountered in the Terrace and dogs are equally
uncommon.
In front of each of the couple of dozen houses of which the Terrace
is composed lies a little square of railinged garden, in which you
may often see the middle-aged or elderly mistress of the residence
horticulturally employed. By five o’clock of a winter’s evening
the pavements will generally be empty of all passengers except the
policeman, who with felted step, at intervals throughout the night,
peers with his bull’s-eye into these small front gardens, and never
finds anything more suspicious there than an early crocus or an
aconite. For by the time it is dark the inhabitants of the Terrace have
got themselves home, where behind drawn curtains and bolted shutters
they will pass a domestic and uninterrupted evening. No funeral (up to
the time I speak of) had I ever seen leave the Terrace, no marriage
party had strewed its pavements with confetti, and perambulators were
unknown. It and its inhabitants seemed to be quietly mellowing like
bottles of sound wine. No doubt there was stored within them the
sunshine and summer of youth long past, and now, dozing in a cool
place, they waited for the turn of the key in the cellar door, and the
entry of one who would draw them forth and see what they were worth.
Yet, after the time of which I shall now speak, I have never
passed down its pavement without wondering whether each house, so
seemingly-tranquil, is not, like some dynamo, softly and smoothly
bringing into being vast and terrible forces, such as those I once
saw at work in the last house at the upper end of the Terrace, the
quietest, you would have said, of all the row. Had you observed it with
continuous scrutiny, for all the length of a summer day, it is quite
possible that you might have only seen issue from it in the morning
an elderly woman whom you would have rightly conjectured to be the
housekeeper, with her basket for marketing on her arm, who returned
an hour later. Except for her the entire day might often pass without
there being either ingress or egress from the door. Occasionally a
middle-aged man, lean and wiry, came swiftly down the pavement, but
his exit was by no means a daily occurrence, and indeed when he did
emerge, he broke the almost universal usage of the Terrace, for his
appearances took place, when such there were, between nine and ten in
the evening. At that hour sometimes he would come round to my house
in Newsome Square to see if I was at home and inclined for a talk a
little later on. For the sake of air and exercise he would then have an
hour’s tramp through the lit and noisy streets, and return about ten,
still pale and unflushed, for one of those talks which grew to have
an absorbing fascination for me. More rarely through the telephone I
proposed that I should drop in on him: this I did not often do, since I
found that if he did not come out himself, it implied that he was busy
with some investigation, and though he made me welcome, I could easily
see that he burned for my departure, so that he might get busy with his
batteries and pieces of tissue, hot on the track of discoveries that
never yet had presented themselves to the mind of man as coming within
the horizon of possibility.
My last sentence may have led the reader to guess that I am indeed
speaking of none other than that recluse and mysterious physicist Sir
James Horton, with whose death a hundred half-hewn avenues into the
dark forest from which life comes must wait completion till another
pioneer as bold as he takes up the axe which hitherto none but
himself has been able to wield. Probably there was never a man to whom
humanity owed more, and of whom humanity knew less. He seemed utterly
independent of the race to whom (though indeed with no service of love)
he devoted himself: for years he lived aloof and apart in his house
at the end of the Terrace. Men and women were to him like fossils to
the geologist, things to be tapped and hammered and dissected and
studied with a view not only to the reconstruction of past ages, but
to construction in the future. It is known, for instance, that he made
an artificial being formed of the tissue, still living, of animals
lately killed, with the brain of an ape and the heart of a bullock,
and a sheep’s thyroid, and so forth. Of that I can give no first-hand
account; Horton, it is true, told me something about it, and in his
will directed that certain memoranda on the subject should on his death
be sent to me. But on the bulky envelope there is the direction, “Not
to be opened till January, 1925.” He spoke with some reserve and, so I
think, with slight horror at the strange things which had happened on
the completion of this creature. It evidently made him uncomfortable
to talk about it, and for that reason I fancy he put what was then a
rather remote date to the day when his record should reach my eye.
Finally, in these preliminaries, for the last five years before the
war, he had scarcely entered, for the sake of companionship, any
house other than his own and mine. Ours was a friendship dating from
school-days, which he had never suffered to drop entirely, but I doubt
if in those years he spoke except on matters of business to half a
dozen other people. He had already retired from surgical practice in
which his skill was unapproached, and most completely now did he avoid
the slightest intercourse with his colleagues, whom he regarded as
ignorant pedants without courage or the rudiments of knowledge. Now
and then he would write an epoch-making little monograph, which he
flung to them like a bone to a starving dog, but for the most part,
utterly absorbed in his own investigations, he left them to grope along
unaided. He frankly told me that he enjoyed talking to me about such
subjects, since I was utterly unacquainted with them. It clarified his
mind to be obliged to put his theories and guesses and confirmations
with such simplicity that anyone could understand them.
I well remember his coming in to see me on the evening of the 4th of
August, 1914.
“So the war has broken out,” he said, “and the streets are impassable
with excited crowds. Odd, isn’t it? Just as if each of us already was
not a far more murderous battlefield than any which can be conceived
between warring nations.”
“How’s that?” said I.
“Let me try to put it plainly, though it isn’t that I want to talk
about. Your blood is one eternal battlefield. It is full of armies
eternally marching and counter-marching. As long as the armies friendly
to you are in a superior position, you remain in good health; if a
detachment of microbes that, if suffered to establish themselves,
would give you a cold in the head, entrench themselves in your mucous
membrane, the commander-in-chief sends a regiment down and drives them
out. He doesn’t give his orders from your brain, mind you--those aren’t
his headquarters, for your brain knows nothing about the landing of the
enemy till they have made good their position and given you a cold.”
He paused a moment.
“There isn’t one headquarters inside you,” he said, “there are many.
For instance, I killed a frog this morning; at least most people would
say I killed it. But had I killed it, though its head lay in one place
and its severed body in another? Not a bit: I had only killed a piece
of it. For I opened the body afterwards and took out the heart, which
I put in a sterilised chamber of suitable temperature, so that it
wouldn’t get cold or be infected by any microbe. That was about twelve
o’clock to-day. And when I came out just now, the heart was beating
still. It was alive, in fact. That’s full of suggestions, you know.
Come and see it.”
The Terrace had been stirred into volcanic activity by the news of war:
the vendor of some late edition had penetrated into its quietude, and
there were half a dozen parlour-maids fluttering about like black and
white moths. But once inside Horton’s door isolation as of an Arctic
night seemed to close round me. He had forgotten his latch-key, but
his housekeeper, then newly come to him, who became so regular and
familiar a figure in the Terrace, must have heard his step, for before
he rang the bell she had opened the door, and stood with his forgotten
latch-key in her hand.
“Thanks, Mrs. Gabriel,” said he, and without a sound the door shut
behind us. Both her name and face, as reproduced in some illustrated
daily paper, seemed familiar, rather terribly familiar, but before I
had time to grope for the association, Horton supplied it.
“Tried for the murder of her husband six months ago,” he said. “Odd
case. The point is that she is the one and perfect housekeeper. I once
had four servants, and everything was all mucky, as we used to say
at school. Now I live in amazing comfort and propriety with one. She
does everything. She is cook, valet, housemaid, butler, and won’t have
anyone to help her. No doubt she killed her husband, but she planned it
so well that she could not be convicted. She told me quite frankly who
she was when I engaged her.”
Of course I remembered the whole trial vividly now. Her husband, a
morose, quarrelsome fellow, tipsy as often as sober, had, according
to the defence cut his own throat while shaving; according to the
prosecution, she had done that for him. There was the usual discrepancy
of evidence as to whether the wound could have been self-inflicted,
and the prosecution tried to prove that the face had been lathered
after his throat had been cut. So singular an exhibition of forethought
and nerve had hurt rather than helped their case, and after prolonged
deliberation on the part of the jury, she had been acquitted. Yet not
less singular was Horton’s selection of a probable murderess, however
efficient, as housekeeper.
He anticipated this reflection.
“Apart from the wonderful comfort of having a perfectly appointed and
absolutely silent house,” he said, “I regard Mrs. Gabriel as a sort
of insurance against my being murdered. If you had been tried for
your life, you would take very especial care not to find yourself in
suspicious proximity to a murdered body again: no more deaths in your
house, if you could help it. Come through to my laboratory, and look at
my little instance of life after death.”
Certainly it was amazing to see that little piece of tissue still
pulsating with what must be called life; it contracted and expanded
faintly indeed but perceptibly, though for nine hours now it had been
severed from the rest of the organisation. All by itself it went on
living, and if the heart could go on living with nothing, you would
say, to feed and stimulate its energy, there must also, so reasoned
Horton, reside in all the other vital organs of the body other
independent focuses of life.
“Of course a severed organ like that,” he said, “will run down quicker
than if it had the co-operation of the others, and presently I shall
apply a gentle electric stimulus to it. If I can keep that glass bowl
under which it beats at the temperature of a frog’s body, in sterilised
air, I don’t see why it should not go on living. Food--of course
there’s the question of feeding it. Do you see what that opens up in
the way of surgery? Imagine a shop with glass cases containing healthy
organs taken from the dead. Say a man dies of pneumonia. He should, as
soon as ever the breath is out of his body, be dissected, and though
they would, of course, destroy his lungs, as they will be full of
pneumococci, his liver and digestive organs are probably healthy. Take
them out, keep them in a sterilised atmosphere with the temperature
at 98·4, and sell the liver, let us say, to another poor devil who has
cancer there. Fit him with a new healthy liver, eh?”
“And insert the brain of someone who has died of heart disease into the
skull of a congenital idiot?” I asked.
“Yes, perhaps; but the brain’s tiresomely complicated in its
connections and the joining up of the nerves, you know. Surgery will
have to learn a lot before it fits new brains in. And the brain has got
such a lot of functions. All thinking, all inventing seem to belong to
it, though, as you have seen, the heart can get on quite well without
it. But there are other functions of the brain I want to study first.
I’ve been trying some experiments already.”
He made some little readjustment to the flame of the spirit lamp which
kept at the right temperature the water that surrounded the sterilised
receptacle in which the frog’s heart was beating.
“Start with the more simple and mechanical uses of the brain,” he said.
“Primarily it is a sort of record office, a diary. Say that I rap your
knuckles with that ruler. What happens? The nerves there send a message
to the brain, of course, saying--how can I put it most simply--saying,
‘Somebody is hurting me.’ And the eye sends another, saying ‘I perceive
a ruler hitting my knuckles,’ and the ear sends another, saying ‘I hear
the rap of it.’ But leaving all that alone, what else happens? Why, the
brain records it. It makes a note of your knuckles having been hit.”
He had been moving about the room as he spoke, taking off his coat and
waistcoat and putting on in their place a thin black dressing-gown,
and by now he was seated in his favourite attitude cross-legged on the
hearthrug, looking like some magician or perhaps the afrit which a
magician of black arts had caused to appear. He was thinking intently
now, passing through his fingers his string of amber beads, and talking
more to himself than to me.
“And how does it make that note?” he went on. “Why, in the manner in
which phonograph records are made. There are millions of minute dots,
depressions, pockmarks on your brain which certainly record what you
remember, what you have enjoyed or disliked, or done or said. The
surface of the brain anyhow is large enough to furnish writing-paper
for the record of all these things, of all your memories. If the
impression of an experience has not been acute, the dot is not sharply
impressed, and the record fades: in other words, you come to forget it.
But if it has been vividly impressed, the record is never obliterated.
Mrs. Gabriel, for instance, won’t lose the impression of how she
lathered her husband’s face after she had cut his throat. That’s to
say, if she did it.”
“Now do you see what I’m driving at? Of course you do. There is stored
within a man’s head the complete record of all the memorable things
he has done and said: there are all his thoughts there, and all his
speeches, and, most well-marked of all, his habitual thoughts and the
things he has often said; for habit, there is reason to believe, wears
a sort of rut in the brain, so that the life-principle, whatever it is,
as it gropes and steals about the brain, is continually stumbling into
it. There’s your record, your gramophone plate all ready. What we want,
and what I’m trying to arrive at, is a needle which, as it traces its
minute way over these dots, will come across words or sentences which
the dead have uttered, and will reproduce them. My word, what Judgment
Books! What a resurrection!”
Here in this withdrawn situation no remotest echo of the excitement
which was seething through the streets penetrated; through the open
window there came in only the tide of the midnight silence. But from
somewhere closer at hand, through the wall surely of the laboratory,
there came a low, somewhat persistent murmur.
“Perhaps our needle--unhappily not yet invented--as it passed over the
record of speech in the brain, might induce even facial expression,” he
said. “Enjoyment or horror might even pass over dead features. There
might be gestures and movements even, as the words were reproduced
in our gramophone of the dead. Some people when they want to think
intensely walk about: some, there’s an instance of it audible now, talk
to themselves aloud.”
He held up his finger for silence.
“Yes, that’s Mrs. Gabriel,” he said. “She talks to herself by the hour
together. She’s always done that, she tells me. I shouldn’t wonder if
she has plenty to talk about.”
It was that night when, first of all, the notion of intense activity
going on below the placid house-fronts of the Terrace occurred to me.
None looked more quiet than this, and yet there was seething here
a volcanic activity and intensity of living, both in the man who
sat cross-legged on the floor and behind that voice just audible
through the partition wall. But I thought of that no more, for Horton
began speaking of the brain-gramophone again.... Were it possible to
trace those infinitesimal dots and pockmarks in the brain by some
needle exquisitely fine, it might follow that by the aid of some such
contrivance as translated the pockmarks on a gramophone record into
sound, some audible rendering of speech might be recovered from the
brain of a dead man. It was necessary, so he pointed out to me, that
this strange gramophone record should be new; it must be that of one
lately dead, for corruption and decay would soon obliterate these
infinitesimal markings. He was not of opinion that unspoken thought
could be thus recovered: the utmost he hoped for from his pioneering
work was to be able to recapture actual speech, especially when such
speech had habitually dwelt on one subject, and thus had worn a rut on
that part of the brain known as the speech-centre.
“Let me get, for instance,” he said, “the brain of a railway porter,
newly dead, who has been accustomed for years to call out the name
of a station, and I do not despair of hearing his voice through my
gramophone trumpet. Or again, given that Mrs. Gabriel, in all her
interminable conversations with herself, talks about one subject, I
might, in similar circumstances, recapture what she had been constantly
saying. Of course my instrument must be of a power and delicacy still
unknown, one of which the needle can trace the minutest irregularities
of surface, and of which the trumpet must be of immense magnifying
power, able to translate the smallest whisper into a shout. But just as
a microscope will show you the details of an object invisible to the
eye, so there are instruments which act in the same way on sound. Here,
for instance, is one of remarkable magnifying power. Try it if you
like.”
He took me over to a table on which was standing an electric battery
connected with a round steel globe, out of the side of which sprang a
gramophone trumpet of curious construction. He adjusted the battery,
and directed me to click my fingers quite gently opposite an aperture
in the globe, and the noise, ordinarily scarcely audible, resounded
through the room like a thunderclap.
“Something of that sort might permit us to hear the record on a brain,”
he said.
* * * * *
After this night my visits to Horton became far more common than they
had hitherto been. Having once admitted me into the region of his
strange explorations, he seemed to welcome me there. Partly, as he had
said, it clarified his own thought to put it into simple language,
partly, as he subsequently admitted, he was beginning to penetrate
into such lonely fields of knowledge by paths so utterly untrodden,
that even he, the most aloof and independent of mankind, wanted some
human presence near him. Despite his utter indifference to the issues
of the war--for, in his regard, issues far more crucial demanded his
energies--he offered himself as surgeon to a London hospital for
operations on the brain, and his services, naturally, were welcomed,
for none brought knowledge or skill like his to such work. Occupied
all day, he performed miracles of healing, with bold and dexterous
excisions which none but he would have dared to attempt. He would
operate, often successfully, for lesions that seemed certainly fatal,
and all the time he was learning. He refused to accept any salary;
he only asked, in cases where he had removed pieces of brain matter,
to take these away, in order by further examination and dissection,
to add to the knowledge and manipulative skill which he devoted to
the wounded. He wrapped these morsels in sterilised lint, and took
them back to the Terrace in a box, electrically heated to maintain
the normal temperature of a man’s blood. His fragment might then, so
he reasoned, keep some sort of independent life of its own, even as
the severed heart of a frog had continued to beat for hours without
connection with the rest of the body. Then for half the night he would
continue to work on these sundered pieces of tissue scarcely dead,
which his operations during the day had given him. Simultaneously, he
was busy over the needle that must be of such infinite delicacy.
One evening, fatigued with a long day’s work, I had just heard with a
certain tremor of uneasy anticipation the whistles of warning which
heralded an air-raid, when my telephone bell rang. My servants,
according to custom, had already betaken themselves to the cellar,
and I went to see what the summons was, determined in any case not to
go out into the streets. I recognised Horton’s voice. “I want you at
once,” he said.
“But the warning whistles have gone,” said I, “And I don’t like
showers of shrapnel.”
“Oh, never mind that,” said he. “You must come. I’m so excited that I
distrust the evidence of my own ears. I want a witness. Just come.”
He did not pause for my reply, for I heard the click of his receiver
going back into its place. Clearly he assumed that I was coming, and
that I suppose had the effect of suggestion on my mind. I told myself
that I would not go, but in a couple of minutes his certainty that I
was coming, coupled with the prospect of being interested in something
else than air-raids, made me fidget in my chair and eventually go to
the street door and look out. The moon was brilliantly bright, the
square quite empty, and far away the coughings of very distant guns.
Next moment, almost against my will, I was running down the deserted
pavements of Newsome Terrace. My ring at his bell was answered by
Horton, before Mrs. Gabriel could come to the door, and he positively
dragged me in.
“I shan’t tell you a word of what I am doing,” he said. “I want you to
tell me what you hear. Come into the laboratory.”
The remote guns were silent again as I sat myself, as directed, in a
chair close to the gramophone trumpet, but suddenly through the wall I
heard the familiar mutter of Mrs. Gabriel’s voice. Horton, already busy
with his battery, sprang to his feet.
“That won’t do,” he said. “I want absolute silence.”
He went out of the room, and I heard him calling to her. While he was
gone I observed more closely what was on the table. Battery, round
steel globe, and gramophone trumpet were there, and some sort of a
needle on a spiral steel spring linked up with the battery and the
glass vessel, in which I had seen the frog’s heart beat. In it now
there lay a fragment of grey matter.
Horton came back in a minute or two, and stood in the middle of the
room listening.
“That’s better,” he said. “Now I want you to listen at the mouth of the
trumpet. I’ll answer any questions afterwards.”
With my ear turned to the trumpet, I could see nothing of what he was
doing, and I listened till the silence became a rustling in my ears.
Then suddenly that rustling ceased, for it was overscored by a whisper
which undoubtedly came from the aperture on which my aural attention
was fixed. It was no more than the faintest murmur, and though no words
were audible, it had the timbre of a human voice.
“Well, do you hear anything?” asked Horton.
“Yes, something very faint, scarcely audible.”
“Describe it,” said he.
“Somebody whispering.”
“I’ll try a fresh place,” said he.
The silence descended again; the mutter of the distant guns was still
mute, and some slight creaking from my shirt front, as I breathed,
alone broke it. And then the whispering from the gramophone trumpet
began again, this time much louder than it had been before--it was
as if the speaker (still whispering) had advanced a dozen yards--but
still blurred and indistinct. More unmistakable, too, was it that the
whisper was that of a human voice, and every now and then, whether
fancifully or not, I thought I caught a word or two. For a moment it
was silent altogether, and then with a sudden inkling of what I was
listening to I heard something begin to sing. Though the words were
still inaudible there was melody, and the tune was “Tipperary.” From
that convolvulus-shaped trumpet there came two bars of it.
“And what do you hear now?” cried Horton with a crack of exultation in
his voice. “Singing, singing! That’s the tune they all sang. Fine music
that from a dead man. Encore! you say? Yes, wait a second, and he’ll
sing it again for you. Confound it, I can’t get on to the place. Ah!
I’ve got it: listen again.”
Surely that was the strangest manner of song ever yet heard on the
earth, this melody from the brain of the dead. Horror and fascination
strove within me, and I suppose the first for the moment prevailed, for
with a shudder I jumped up.
“Stop it!” I said. “It’s terrible.”
His face, thin and eager, gleamed in the strong ray of the lamp which
he had placed close to him. His hand was on the metal rod from which
depended the spiral spring and the needle, which just rested on that
fragment of grey stuff which I had seen in the glass vessel.
“Yes, I’m going to stop it now,” he said, “or the germs will be getting
at my gramophone record, or the record will get cold. See, I spray it
with carbolic vapour, I put it back into its nice warm bed. It will
sing to us again. But terrible? What do you mean by terrible?”
Indeed, when he asked that I scarcely knew myself what I meant. I had
been witness to a new marvel of science as wonderful perhaps as any
that had ever astounded the beholder, and my nerves--these childish
whimperers--had cried out at the darkness and the profundity. But
the horror diminished, the fascination increased as he quite shortly
told me the history of this phenomenon. He had attended that day and
operated upon a young soldier in whose brain was embedded a piece of
shrapnel. The boy was _in extremis_, but Horton had hoped for the
possibility of saving him. To extract the shrapnel was the only chance,
and this involved the cutting away of a piece of brain known as the
speech-centre, and taking from it what was embedded there. But the hope
was not realised, and two hours later the boy died. It was to this
fragment of brain that, when Horton returned home, he had applied the
needle of his gramophone, and had obtained the faint whisperings which
had caused him to ring me up, so that he might have a witness of this
wonder. Witness I had been, not to these whisperings alone, but to the
fragment of singing.
“And this is but the first step on the new road,” said he. “Who knows
where it may lead, or to what new temple of knowledge it may not be the
avenue? Well, it is late: I shall do no more to-night. What about the
raid, by the way?”
To my amazement I saw that the time was verging on midnight. Two hours
had elapsed since he let me in at his door; they had passed like a
couple of minutes. Next morning some neighbours spoke of the prolonged
firing that had gone on, of which I had been wholly unconscious.
Week after week Horton worked on this new road of research, perfecting
the sensitiveness and subtlety of the needle, and, by vastly increasing
the power of his batteries, enlarging the magnifying power of his
trumpet. Many and many an evening during the next year did I listen to
voices that were dumb in death, and the sounds which had been blurred
and unintelligible mutterings in the earlier experiments, developed,
as the delicacy of his mechanical devices increased, into coherence
and clear articulation. It was no longer necessary to impose silence
on Mrs. Gabriel when the gramophone was at work, for now the voice we
listened to had risen to the pitch of ordinary human utterance, while
as for the faithfulness and individuality of these records, striking
testimony was given more than once by some living friend of the dead,
who, without knowing what he was about to hear, recognised the tones
of the speaker. More than once also, Mrs. Gabriel, bringing in syphons
and whisky, provided us with three glasses, for she had heard, so she
told us, three different voices in talk. But for the present no fresh
phenomenon occurred: Horton was but perfecting the mechanism of his
previous discovery and, rather grudging the time, was scribbling at a
monograph, which presently he would toss to his colleagues, concerning
the results he had already obtained. And then, even while Horton was on
the threshold of new wonders, which he had already foreseen and spoken
of as theoretically possible, there came an evening of marvel and of
swift catastrophe.
I had dined with him that day, Mrs. Gabriel deftly serving the meal
that she had so daintily prepared, and towards the end, as she was
clearing the table for our dessert, she stumbled, I supposed, on a
loose edge of carpet, quickly recovering herself. But instantly Horton
checked some half-finished sentence, and turned to her.
“You’re all right, Mrs. Gabriel?” he asked quickly.
“Yes, sir, thank you,” said she, and went on with her serving.
“As I was saying,” began Horton again, but his attention clearly
wandered, and without concluding his narrative, he relapsed into
silence, till Mrs. Gabriel had given us our coffee and left the room.
“I’m sadly afraid my domestic felicity may be disturbed,” he said.
“Mrs. Gabriel had an epileptic fit yesterday, and she confessed when
she recovered that she had been subject to them when a child, and since
then had occasionally experienced them.”
“Dangerous, then?” I asked.
“In themselves not in the least,” said he. “If she was sitting in
her chair or lying in bed when one occurred, there would be nothing
to trouble about. But if one occurred while she was cooking my dinner
or beginning to come downstairs, she might fall into the fire or
tumble down the whole flight. We’ll hope no such deplorable calamity
will happen. Now, if you’ve finished your coffee, let us go into the
laboratory. Not that I’ve got anything very interesting in the way of
new records. But I’ve introduced a second battery with a very strong
induction coil into my apparatus. I find that if I link it up with my
record, given that the record is a--a fresh one, it stimulates certain
nerve centres. It’s odd, isn’t it, that the same forces which so
encourage the dead to live would certainly encourage the living to die,
if a man received the full current. One has to be careful in handling
it. Yes, and what then? you ask.”
The night was very hot, and he threw the windows wide before he settled
himself cross-legged on the floor.
“I’ll answer your question for you,” he said, “though I believe we’ve
talked of it before. Supposing I had not a fragment of brain-tissue
only, but a whole head, let us say, or best of all, a complete corpse,
I think I could expect to produce more than mere speech through the
gramophone. The dead lips themselves perhaps might utter--God! what’s
that?”
From close outside, at the bottom of the stairs leading from the dining
room which we had just quitted to the laboratory where we now sat,
there came a crash of glass followed by the fall as of something heavy
which bumped from step to step, and was finally flung on the threshold
against the door with the sound as of knuckles rapping at it, and
demanding admittance. Horton sprang up and threw the door open, and
there lay, half inside the room and half on the landing outside, the
body of Mrs. Gabriel. Round her were splinters of broken bottles and
glasses, and from a cut in her forehead, as she lay ghastly with face
upturned, the blood trickled into her thick grey hair.
Horton was on his knees beside her, dabbing his handkerchief on her
forehead.
“Ah! that’s not serious,” he said; “there’s neither vein nor artery
cut. I’ll just bind that up first.”
He tore his handkerchief into strips which he tied together, and made a
dexterous bandage covering the lower part of her forehead, but leaving
her eyes unobscured. They stared with a fixed meaningless steadiness,
and he scrutinised them closely.
“But there’s worse yet,” he said. “There’s been some severe blow on the
head. Help me to carry her into the laboratory. Get round to her feet
and lift underneath the knees when I am ready. There! Now put your arm
right under her and carry her.”
Her head swung limply back as he lifted her shoulders, and he propped
it up against his knee, where it mutely nodded and bowed, as his leg
moved, as if in silent assent to what we were doing, and the mouth, at
the extremity of which there had gathered a little lather, lolled open.
He still supported her shoulders as I fetched a cushion on which to
place her head, and presently she was lying close to the low table on
which stood the gramophone of the dead. Then with light deft fingers he
passed his hands over her skull, pausing as he came to the spot just
above and behind her right ear. Twice and again his fingers groped and
lightly pressed, while with shut eyes and concentrated attention he
interpreted what his trained touch revealed.
“Her skull is broken to fragments just here,” he said. “In the middle
there is a piece completely severed from the rest, and the edges of the
cracked pieces must be pressing on her brain.”
Her right arm was lying palm upwards on the floor, and with one hand he
felt her wrist with finger-tips.
“Not a sign of pulse,” he said. “She’s dead in the ordinary sense
of the word. But life persists in an extraordinary manner, you may
remember. She can’t be wholly dead: no one is wholly dead in a moment,
unless every organ is blown to bits. But she soon will be dead, if we
don’t relieve the pressure on the brain. That’s the first thing to
be done. While I’m busy at that, shut the window, will you, and make
up the fire. In this sort of case the vital heat, whatever that is,
leaves the body very quickly. Make the room as hot as you can--fetch an
oil-stove, and turn on the electric radiator, and stoke up a roaring
fire. The hotter the room is the more slowly will the heat of life
leave her.”
Already he had opened his cabinet of surgical instruments, and taken
out of it two drawers full of bright steel which he laid on the floor
beside her. I heard the grating chink of scissors severing her long
grey hair, and as I busied myself with laying and lighting the fire
in the hearth, and kindling the oil-stove, which I found, by Horton’s
directions, in the pantry, I saw that his lancet was busy on the
exposed skin. He had placed some vaporising spray, heated by a spirit
lamp close to her head, and as he worked its fizzing nozzle filled the
air with some clean and aromatic odour. Now and then he threw out an
order.
“Bring me that electric lamp on the long cord,” he said. “I haven’t
got enough light. Don’t look at what I’m doing if you’re squeamish, for
if it makes you feel faint, I shan’t be able to attend to you.”
I suppose that violent interest in what he was doing overcame any qualm
that I might have had, for I looked quite unflinching over his shoulder
as I moved the lamp about till it was in such a place that it threw its
beam directly into a dark hole at the edge of which depended a flap
of skin. Into this he put his forceps, and as he withdrew them they
grasped a piece of blood-stained bone.
“That’s better,” he said, “and the room’s warming up well. But there’s
no sign of pulse yet. Go on stoking, will you, till the thermometer on
the wall there registers a hundred degrees.”
When next, on my journey from the coal-cellar, I looked, two more
pieces of bone lay beside the one I had seen extracted, and presently
referring to the thermometer, I saw that between the oil-stove and
the roaring fire and the electric radiator, I had raised the room to
the temperature he wanted. Soon, peering fixedly at the seat of his
operation, he felt for her pulse again.
“Not a sign of returning vitality,” he said, “and I’ve done all I can.
There’s nothing more possible that can be devised to restore her.”
As he spoke the zeal of the unrivalled surgeon relaxed, and with a sigh
and a shrug he rose to his feet and mopped his face. Then suddenly the
fire and eagerness blazed there again. “The gramophone!” he said. “The
speech centre is close to where I’ve been working, and it is quite
uninjured. Good heavens, what a wonderful opportunity. She served me
well living, and she shall serve me dead. And I can stimulate the motor
nerve-centre, too, with the second battery. We may see a new wonder
to-night.”
Some qualm of horror shook me.
“No, don’t!” I said. “It’s terrible: she’s just dead. I shall go if you
do.”
“But I’ve got exactly all the conditions I have long been wanting,”
said he. “And I simply can’t spare you. You must be witness: I must
have a witness. Why, man, there’s not a surgeon or a physiologist in
the kingdom who would not give an eye or an ear to be in your place
now. She’s dead. I pledge you my honour on that, and it’s grand to be
dead if you can help the living.”
Once again, in a far fiercer struggle, horror and the intensest
curiosity strove together in me.
“Be quick, then,” said I.
“Ha! That’s right,” exclaimed Horton. “Help me to lift her on to the
table by the gramophone. The cushion too; I can get at the place more
easily with her head a little raised.”
He turned on the battery and with the movable light close beside him,
brilliantly illuminating what he sought, he inserted the needle of the
gramophone into the jagged aperture in her skull. For a few minutes,
as he groped and explored there, there was silence, and then quite
suddenly Mrs. Gabriel’s voice, clear and unmistakable and of the normal
loudness of human speech, issued from the trumpet.
“Yes, I always said that I’d be even with him,” came the articulated
syllables. “He used to knock me about, he did, when he came home
drunk, and often I was black and blue with bruises. But I’ll give him a
redness for the black and blue.”
The record grew blurred; instead of articulate words there came from
it a gobbling noise. By degrees that cleared, and we were listening to
some dreadful suppressed sort of laughter, hideous to hear. On and on
it went.
“I’ve got into some sort of rut,” said Horton. “She must have laughed a
lot to herself.”
For a long time we got nothing more except the repetition of the words
we had already heard and the sound of that suppressed laughter. Then
Horton drew towards him the second battery.
“I’ll try a stimulation of the motor nerve-centres,” he said. “Watch
her face.”
He propped the gramophone needle in position, and inserted into the
fractured skull the two poles of the second battery, moving them about
there very carefully. And as I watched her face, I saw with a freezing
horror that her lips were beginning to move.
“Her mouth’s moving,” I cried. “She can’t be dead.”
He peered into her face.
“Nonsense,” he said. “That’s only the stimulus from the current. She’s
been dead half an hour. Ah! what’s coming now?”
The lips lengthened into a smile, the lower jaw dropped, and from her
mouth came the laughter we had heard just now through the gramophone.
And then the dead mouth spoke, with a mumble of unintelligible words, a
bubbling torrent of incoherent syllables.
“I’ll turn the full current on,” he said.
The head jerked and raised itself, the lips struggled for utterance,
and suddenly she spoke swiftly and distinctly.
“Just when he’d got his razor out,” she said, “I came up behind him,
and put my hand over his face, and bent his neck back over his chair
with all my strength. And I picked up his razor and with one slit--ha,
ha, that was the way to pay him out. And I didn’t lose my head, but I
lathered his chin well, and put the razor in his hand, and left him
there, and went downstairs and cooked his dinner for him, and then an
hour afterwards, as he didn’t come down, up I went to see what kept
him. It was a nasty cut in his neck that had kept him----”
Horton suddenly withdrew the two poles of the battery from her head,
and even in the middle of her word the mouth ceased working, and lay
rigid and open.
“By God!” he said. “There’s a tale for dead lips to tell. But we’ll get
more yet.”
Exactly what happened then I never knew. It appeared to me that as he
still leaned over the table with the two poles of the battery in his
hand, his foot slipped, and he fell forward across it. There came a
sharp crack, and a flash of blue dazzling light, and there he lay face
downwards, with arms that just stirred and quivered. With his fall the
two poles that must momentarily have come into contact with his hand
were jerked away again, and I lifted him and laid him on the floor. But
his lips as well as those of the dead woman had spoken for the last
time.
The Outcast
The Outcast
When Mrs. Acres bought the Gate-house at Tarleton, which had stood so
long without a tenant, and appeared in that very agreeable and lively
little town as a resident, sufficient was already known about her past
history to entitle her to friendliness and sympathy. Hers had been a
tragic story, and the account of the inquest held on her husband’s
body, when, within a month of their marriage, he had shot himself
before her eyes, was recent enough, and of as full a report in the
papers as to enable our little community of Tarleton to remember and
run over the salient grimness of the case without the need of inventing
any further details--which, otherwise, it would have been quite capable
of doing.
Briefly, then, the facts had been as follows. Horace Acres appeared to
have been a heartless fortune-hunter--a handsome, plausible wretch,
ten years younger than his wife. He had made no secret to his friends
of not being in love with her but of having a considerable regard for
her more than considerable fortune. But hardly had he married her than
his indifference developed into violent dislike, accompanied by some
mysterious, inexplicable dread of her. He hated and feared her, and on
the morning of the very day when he had put an end to himself he had
begged her to divorce him; the case he promised would be undefended,
and he would make it indefensible. She, poor soul, had refused to grant
this; for, as corroborated by the evidence of friends and servants,
she was utterly devoted to him, and stated with that quiet dignity
which distinguished her throughout this ordeal, that she hoped that he
was the victim of some miserable but temporary derangement, and would
come to his right mind again. He had dined that night at his club,
leaving his month-old bride to pass the evening alone, and had returned
between eleven and twelve that night in a state of vile intoxication.
He had gone up to her bedroom, pistol in hand, had locked the door,
and his voice was heard screaming and yelling at her. Then followed
the sound of one shot. On the table in his dressing-room was found a
half-sheet of paper, dated that day, and this was read out in court.
“The horror of my position,” he had written, “is beyond description
and endurance. I can bear it no longer: my soul sickens....” The
jury, without leaving the court, returned the verdict that he had
committed suicide while temporarily insane, and the coroner, at their
request, expressed their sympathy and his own with the poor lady, who,
as testified on all hands, had treated her husband with the utmost
tenderness and affection.
For six months Bertha Acres had travelled abroad, and then in the
autumn she had bought Gate-house at Tarleton, and settled down to the
absorbing trifles which make life in a small country town so busy and
strenuous.
* * * * *
Our modest little dwelling is within a stone’s throw of the Gate-house;
and when, on the return of my wife and myself from two months in
Scotland, we found that Mrs. Acres was installed as a neighbour, Madge
lost no time in going to call on her. She returned with a series of
pleasant impressions. Mrs. Acres, still on the sunny slope that leads
up to the table-land of life which begins at forty years, was extremely
handsome, cordial, and charming in manner, witty and agreeable, and
wonderfully well dressed. Before the conclusion of her call Madge,
in country fashion, had begged her to dispose with formalities, and,
instead of a frigid return of the call, to dine with us quietly next
day. Did she play bridge? That being so, we would just be a party of
four; for her brother, Charles Alington, had proposed himself for a
visit....
I listened to this with sufficient attention to grasp what Madge was
saying, but what I was really thinking about was a chess-problem which
I was attempting to solve. But at this point I became acutely aware
that her stream of pleasant impressions dried up suddenly, and she
became stonily silent. She shut speech off as by the turn of a tap, and
glowered at the fire, rubbing the back of one hand with the fingers of
another, as is her habit in perplexity.
“Go on,” I said.
She got up, suddenly restless.
“All I have been telling you is literally and soberly true,” she said.
“I thought Mrs. Acres charming and witty and good-looking and friendly.
What more could you ask from a new acquaintance? And then, after I had
asked her to dinner, I suddenly found for no earthly reason that I very
much disliked her; I couldn’t bear her.”
“You said she was wonderfully well dressed,” I permitted myself to
remark.... If the Queen took the Knight----
“Don’t be silly!” said Madge. “I am wonderfully well dressed too.
But behind all her agreeableness and charm and good looks I suddenly
felt there was something else which I detested and dreaded. It’s no
use asking me what it was, because I haven’t the slightest idea. If
I knew what it was, the thing would explain itself. But I felt a
horror--nothing vivid, nothing close, you understand, but somewhere in
the background. Can the mind have a ‘turn,’ do you think, just as the
body can, when for a second or two you suddenly feel giddy? I think it
must have been that--oh! I’m sure it was that. But I’m glad I asked her
to dine. I mean to like her. I shan’t have a ‘turn’ again, shall I?”
“No, certainly not,” I said.... If the Queen refrained from taking the
tempting Knight----
“Oh, do stop your silly chess-problem!” said Madge. “Bite him, Fungus!”
Fungus, so called because he is the son of Humour and Gustavus
Adolphus, rose from his place on the hearthrug, and with a horse laugh
nuzzled against my leg, which is his way of biting those he loves. Then
the most amiable of bull-dogs, who has a passion for the human race,
lay down on my foot and sighed heavily. But Madge evidently wanted to
talk, and I pushed the chessboard away.
“Tell me more about the horror,” I said.
“It was just horror,” she said--“a sort of sickness of the soul.”...