I SHOULD like some time to tell how Tetherby came to his end;
he, too, was a victim of materialism, as his father had been before
him; but when he died, he left this story, addressed among his papers
to me; and I am sure he meant that all the world (or such part of it as
cares to think) should know it. He had told it, or partly told it, to
us before; in fragments, in suggestions, in those midnight talks that
earnest young men still have in college, or had, in 1870.
Tetherby came from that strange, cold, Maine coast, washed in its
fjords and beaches by a clear, cold sea, which brings it fogs of winter
but never haze of summer; where men eat little, think much, drink
only water, and yet live intense lives; where the village people, in
their long winters away from the world, in an age of revivals had
their waves of atheism, and would transform, in those days, their pine
meeting-houses into Shakspere clubs, and logically make a cult of
infidelity; now, with railways, I suppose all that has ceased; they
read Shakspere as little as the scriptures, and the Sunday newspaper
replaces both. Such a story--such an imagination--as Tetherby’s, could
not happen now--perhaps. But they take life earnestly in that remote,
ardent province; they think coldly; and, when you least expect it,
there comes in their lives, so hard and sharp and practical, a burst of
passion.
He came to Newbridge to study law, and soon developed a strange
faculty for debate. The first peculiarity was his name--which first
appeared and was always spelled, C. S. J. J. Tetherby in the catalogue,
despite the practice, which was to spell one’s name in full. Of
course, speculation was rife as to the meaning of this portentous
array of initials; and soon, after his way of talk was known, arose a
popular belief that they stood for nothing less than Charles Stuart
Jean Jacques. Nothing less would justify the intense leaning of his
mind, radical as it was, for all that was mystical, ideal, old. But
afterwards we learned that he had been so named by his curious father,
Colonel Sir John Jones, after a supposed loyalist ancestor, who had
flourished in the time of the Revolution, and had gone to Maine to get
away from it; Tetherby’s father being evidently under the impression
that the two titles formed a component part of the ancestor’s identity.
Rousseau Tetherby, as he continued to be called, was a tall, thin,
broad-shouldered fellow, of great muscular strength and yet with feeble
health, given to hallucinations and morbid imaginations which he would
recount to you in that deep monotone of twang that seemed only fit
to sell a horse in. The boys made fun of Tetherby; he bore it with a
splendid smile and a twinkle in his ice-blue eye, until one day it
went too far, and then he tackled the last offender and chucked him
off the boat-house float into the river. He would have rowed upon the
university crew, but that his digestion gave out; strong as he was in
mind and body, nothing, that went for the nutrition and fostering of
life, was well with him. Such men as he are repellent to the sane, and
are willed by the world to die alone.
* * * * *
Some one on that night, I remember, had said something derogatory about
Goethe’s theory of colors. A dry subject, an abstruse subject, a
useless subject--as one might think--but it roused Tetherby to sudden
fury. He made a vehement defence of the great poet-philosopher against
the dry, barren mathematics of the Newtonian science.
“Do you cipherers think all that is reducible to numbers? to so many
beats per second, like your own dry hearts? Sound may be nothing but a
quicker rattle--is it but a rattle, the music in your souls? If light
is but the impact of more rapid molecules, does MAN bring nothing
else, when he worships the glory of the dawn? You say, tones are a
few thousand beats per second, and colors a few billion beats per
second--what becomes of all the numbers left between? If colored lights
count all these billions, up from red to violet, and white light is
the sum of all the colors, what can be its number but infinity? But is
a white light GOD? Or would you cipherers make of God a cipher? Smoke
looks yellow against the sky, and blue against the forest--but how can
its _number_ change? You, who make all to a number, as governments
do to convicts in a prison! I tell you, this rage for machinery will
bear Dead Sea fruit. You confound man’s highest emotions with the
tickling of the gray matter in his brain; that way lies death and
suicide of the soul----”
We stared; we thought he had gone crazy.
“Goethe and Dante still know more about this universe than any
cipherer,” he said, more calmly. And then he told us this story; we
fancied it a nightmare, or a morbid dream; but earnestly he told it,
and slowly, surely, he won our hearts at least to some believing in the
terror of the tale.
When he was through, we parted, with few words, thinking poor Tetherby
mad. But when he died it was found among his papers, addressed to
me. Materialism had conquered him, but not subdued him; “say not the
struggle naught availed him” though he left but this one tract behind.
It is only as a sermon that it needs preserving, though the story of
poor Althea Hardy was, I believe, in all essentials true.
* * * * *
I was born and lived, until I came to this university, in a small town
in Maine. My father was a graduate of B---- College, and had never
wholly dissolved his connection with that place; probably because
he was there are not unfavorably know to more acquaintances, and
better people, than he elsewhere found. The town is one of those
gentle-mannered, ferocious-minded, white wooden villages, common
to Maine; with two churches, a brick town-hall, a stucco lyceum, a
narrow railway station, and a spacious burying-ground. It is divided
into two classes of society: one which institutes church-sociables,
church-dances, church-sleighing parties; which twice a week, and
critically, listens to a long and ultra-Protestant, almost mundane,
essay-sermon; and which comes to town with, and takes social position
from, pastoral letters of introduction, that are dated in other
places and exhibited like marriage certificates. I have known the
husbands at times get their business employments on the strength
of such encyclicals (but the ventures of these were not rarely
attended with financial disaster, as passports only hinder honest
travellers); the other class falling rather into Shakespeare clubs,
intensely free-thinking, but calling Sabbath Sunday, and pretending
to the slightly higher social position of the two. This is Maine, as
I knew it; it may have changed since. Both classes were in general
Prohibitionists, but the latter had wine to drink at home.
In this town were many girls with pretty faces; there, under that
cold, concise sky of the North, they grew up; their intellects
preternaturally acute, their nervous systems strung to breaking
pitch, their physical growth so backward that at twenty their figures
would be flat. We were intimate with them in a mental fellowship. Not
that we boys of twenty did not have our preferences, but they were
preferences of mere companionship; so that the magnanimous confidence
of English America was justified; and anyone of us could be alone with
her he preferred from morn to midnight, if he chose, and no one be
the wiser or the worse. But there was one exceptional girl in B----,
Althea Hardy. Her father was a rich ship-builder; and his father, a
sea-captain, had married her grandmother in Catania, island of Sicily.
With Althea Hardy, I think, I was in love.
In the winter of my second year at college there came to town a certain
Dr. Materialismus--a German professor, scientist, socialist--ostensibly
seeking employment as a German instructor at the college; practising
hypnotism, magnetism, mesmerism, and mysticism; giving lectures on
Hegel, believing in Hartmann, and in the indestructibility of matter
and the destructibility of the soul; and his soul was a damned one, and
he cared not for the loss of it.
Not that I knew this, then; I also was fascinated by him, I suppose.
There was something so bold about his intellectuality, that excited my
admiration. Althea and I used to dispute about it; she said she did
not like the man. In my enthusiasm, I raved to her of him; and then, I
suppose, I talked to him of her more than I should have done. Mind you,
I had no thought of marriage then; nor, of course, of love. Althea was
my most intimate friend--as a boy might have been. Sex differences were
fused in the clear flame of the intellect. And B---- College itself was
a co-educational institution.
The first time they met was at a coasting party; on a night of
glittering cold, when the sky was dusty azure and the stars burned
like blue fires. I had a double-runner, with Althea; and I asked the
professor to come with us, as he was unused to the sport, and I feared
lest he should be laughed at. I, of course, sat in front and steered
the sled; then came Althea; then he; and it was his duty to steady her,
his hands upon her waist.
We went down three times with no word spoken. The girls upon the other
sleds would cry with exultation as they sped down the long hill; but
Althea was silent. On the long walk up--it was nearly a mile--the
professor and I talked; but I remember only one thing he said. Pointing
to a singularly red star, he told us that two worlds were burning
there, with people in them; they had lately rushed together, and, from
planets, had become one burning sun. I asked him how he knew; it was
all chemistry, he said. Althea said, how terrible it was to think of
such a day of judgment on that quiet night; and he laughed a little, in
his silent way, and said she was rather too late with her pity, for it
had all happened some eighty years ago. “I don’t see that you cry for
Marie Antoinette,” he said; “but that red ray you see left the star in
1789.”
We left Althea at her home, and the professor asked me down to his.
He lived in a strange place; the upper floor of a warehouse, upon a
business street, low down in the town, above the Kennebec. He told me
that he had hired it for the power; and I remembered to have noticed
there a sign “To Let--One Floor, with Power.” And sure enough, below
the loud rush of the river, and the crushing noise made by the cakes of
ice that passed over the falls, was a pulsing tremor in the house, more
striking than a noise; and in the loft of his strange apartment rushed
an endless band of leather, swift and silent. “It’s furnished by the
river,” he said, “and not by steam. I thought it might be useful for
some physical experiments.”
The upper floor, which the doctor had rented, consisted mainly of a
long loft for manufacturing, and a square room beyond it, formerly the
counting-room. We had passed through the loft first (through which
ran the spinning leather band), and I had noticed a forest of glass
rods along the wall, but massed together like the pipes of an organ,
and opposite them a row of steel bars like levers. “A mere physical
experiment,” said the doctor, as we sank into couches covered with
white fur, in his inner apartment. Strangely disguised, the room in
the old factory loft, hung with silk and furs, glittering with glass
and gilding; there was no mirror, however, but, in front of me, one
large picture. It represented a fainting anchorite, wan and yellow
beneath his single sheepskin cloak, his eyes closing, the crucifix he
was bearing just fallen in the desert sand; supporting him, the arms
of a beautiful woman, roseate with perfect health, with laughing, red
lips, and bold eyes resting on his wearied lids. I never had seen such
a room; it realized what I had fancied of those sensuous, evil Trianons
of the older and corrupt world. And yet I looked upon this picture; and
as I looked, some tremor in the air, some evil influence in that place,
dissolved all my intellect in wild desire.
“You admire the picture?” said Materialismus. “I painted it; she was
my model.” I am conscious to-day that I looked at him with a jealous
envy, like some hungry beast. I had never seen such a woman. He laughed
silently, and going to the wall touched what I supposed to be a bell.
Suddenly my feelings changed.
“Your Althea Hardy,” went on the doctor, “who is she?”
“She is not _my_ Althea Hardy,” I replied, with an indignation
that I then supposed unreasoning. “She is the daughter of a retired
sea-captain, and I see her because she alone can rank me in the class.
Our minds are sympathetic. And Miss Hardy has a noble soul.”
“She has a fair body,” answered he; “of that much we are sure.”
I cast a fierce look upon the man; my eye followed his to that picture
on the wall; and some false shame kept me foolishly silent. I should
have spoken then.... But many such fair carrion must strew the path of
so lordly a vulture as this doctor was; unlucky if they thought (as he
knew better) that aught of soul they bore entangled in their flesh.
“You do not strain a morbid consciousness about a chemical reaction,”
said he. “Two atoms rush together to make a world, or burn one, as we
saw last night; it may be pleasure or it may be pain; conscious organs
choose the former.”
My distaste for the man was such that I hurried away, and went to
sleep with a strange sadness, in the mood in which, as I suppose,
believers pray; but that I was none. Dr. Materialismus had had a
plum-colored velvet smoking-jacket on, with a red fez (he was a sort of
beau), and I dreamed of it all night, and of the rushing leather band,
and of the grinding of the ice in the river. Something made me keep my
visit secret from Althea; an evil something, as I think it now.
The following day we had a lecture on light. It was one in a course
in physics, or natural philosophy, as it was called in B---- College;
just as they called Scotch psychology “Mental Philosophy,” with capital
letters; it was an archaic little place, and it was the first course
that the German doctor had prevailed upon the college government to
assign to him. The students sat at desks, ranged around the lecture
platform, the floor of the hall being a concentric inclined plane; and
Althea Hardy’s desk was next to mine. Materialismus began with a brief
sketch of the theory of sound; how it consisted in vibrations of the
air, the coarsest medium of space, but could not dwell in ether; and
how slow beats--blows of a hammer, for instance--had no more complex
intellectual effect, but were mere consecutive noises; how the human
organism ceased to detect these consecutive noises at about eight per
second, until they reappeared at sixteen per second, the lowest tone
which can be heard; and how, at something like thirty-two thousand
per second these vibrations ceased to be heard, and were supposed
unintelligible to humanity, being neither sound nor light--despite
their rapid movement, dark and silent. But was all this energy
wasted to mankind? Adverting one moment to the molecular, or rather
mathematical, theory--first propounded by Democritus, re-established by
Leibnitz, and never since denied--that the universe, both of mind and
matter, body and soul, was made merely by innumerable, infinitesimal
points of motion, endlessly gyrating among themselves--mere points,
devoid of materiality, devoid also of soul, but each a centre of
a certain force, which scientists entitle _gravitation_,
philosophers deem _will_, and poets name _love_--he went on
to Light. Light is a subtler emotion (he remarked here that he used
the word _emotion_ advisedly, as all emotions alike were, in
substance, the subjective result of merely material motion). Light is
a subtler emotion, dwelling in ether, but still nothing but a regular
continuity of motion or molecular impact; to speak more plainly,
successive beats or vibrations reappear intelligible to humanity as
light, at something like 483,000,000,000 beats per second in the red
ray. More exactly still, they appear first as _heat_; then as red,
orange, yellow, all the colors of the spectrum, until they disappear
again, through the violet ray, at something like 727,000,000,000
beats per second in the so-called chemical rays. “After that,” he
closed, “they are supposed unknown. The higher vibrations are supposed
unintelligible to man, just as he fancies there is no more subtle
medium than his (already hypothetical) ether. It is possible,” said
Materialismus, speaking in italics and looking at Althea, “_that
these higher, almost infinitely rapid vibrations may be what are called
the higher emotions or passions--like religion, love and hate--dwelling
in a still more subtle, but yet material, medium, that poets and
churches have picturesquely termed heart, conscience, soul_.” As he
said this I too looked at Althea. I saw her bosom heaving; her lips
were parted, and a faint rose was in her face. How womanly she was
growing!
From that time I felt a certain fierceness against this German doctor.
He had a way of patronizing me, of treating me as a man might treat
some promising school-boy, while his manner to Althea was that of an
equal--or a man of the world’s to a favored lady. It was customary for
the professors in B---- College to give little entertainments to their
classes once in the winter; these usually took the form of tea-parties;
but when it came to the doctor’s turn, he gave a sleighing party to the
neighboring city of A----, where we had an elaborate banquet at the
principal hotel, with champagne to drink; and returned driving down the
frozen river, the ice of which Dr. Mismus (for so we called him for
short) had had tested for the occasion. The probable expense of this
entertainment was discussed in the little town for many weeks after,
and was by some estimated as high as two hundred dollars. The professor
had hired, besides the large boat-sleigh, many single sleighs, in one
of which he had returned, leading the way, and driving with Althea
Hardy. It was then I determined to speak to her about her growing
intimacy with this man.
I had to wait many weeks for an opportunity. Our winter sports at
B---- used to end with a grand evening skating party on the Kennebec.
Bonfires were built on the river, the safe mile or two above the
falls was roped in with lines of Chinese lanterns, and a supper of
hot oysters and coffee was provided at the big central fire. It was
the fixed law of the place that the companion invited by any boy was
to remain indisputably his for the evening. No second man would ever
venture to join himself to a couple who were skating together on that
night. I had asked Althea many weeks ahead to skate with me, and she
had consented. The Doctor Materialismus knew this.
I, too, saw him nearly every day. He seemed to be fond of my company;
of playing chess with me, or discussing metaphysics. Sometimes
Althea was present at these arguments, in which I always took the
idealistic side. But the little college had only armed me with Bain
and Locke and Mill; and it may be imagined what a poor defence I
could make with these against the German doctor, with his volumes
of metaphysical realism and his knowledge of what Spinoza, Kant,
Schopenhauer, and other defenders of us from the flesh could say on my
side. Nevertheless, I sometimes appeared to have my victories. Althea
was judge; and one day I well remember, when we were discussing the
localization of emotion or of volition in the brain:
“Prove to me, if you may, even that every thought and hope and feeling
of mankind is accompanied always by the same change in the same part of
the cerebral tissue!” cried I. “Yet that physical change _is_ not
the soul-passion, but the effect of it upon the body; the mere trace in
the brain of its passage, like the furrow of a ship upon the sea.” And
I looked at Althea, who smiled upon me.
“But if,” said the doctor, “by the physical movement I produce the
psychical passion? by the change of the brain-atoms _cause_ the
act of will? by a mere bit of glass-and-iron mechanism set _first_
in motion, I make the prayer, or thought, or love, _follow_, in
plain succession, to the machine’s movement, on every soul that comes
within its sphere--will you then say that the metaphor of ship and wake
is a good one, when it is the wake that _precedes_ the ship?”
“No,” said I, smiling.
“Then come to my house to-night,” said the doctor; “unless,” he added
with a sneer, “you are afraid to take such risks before your skating
party.” And then I saw Althea’s lips grow bloodless, and my heart
swelled within me.
“I will come,” I muttered, without a smile.
“When?” said the professor.
“Now.”
Althea suddenly ran between us. “You will not hurt him?” she said,
appealingly to him. “Remember, oh, remember what he has before him!”
And here Althea burst into a passion of weeping, and I looked in wild
bewilderment from her to him.
“I vill go,” said the doctor to me. “I vill leafe you to gonsole her.”
He spoke in his stronger German accent, and as he went out he beckoned
me to the door. His sneer was now a leer, and he said:
“I vould kiss her there, if I vere you.”
I slammed the door in his face, and when I turned back to Althea her
passion of tears had not ceased, and her beautiful bright hair lay in
masses over the poor, shabby desk. I did kiss her, on her soft face
where the tears were. I did not dare to kiss her lips, though I think
I could have done it before I had known this doctor. She checked her
tears at once.
“Now I must go to the doctor’s,” I said. “Don’t be afraid; he can do me
or my soul no harm; and remember to-morrow night.” I saw Althea’s lips
blanch again at this; but she looked at me with dry eyes, and I left
her.
The winter evening was already dark, and as I went down the streets
toward the river I heard the crushing of the ice over the falls. The
old street where the doctor lived was quite deserted. Trade had been
there in the old days, but now was nothing. Yet in the silence, coming
along, I heard the whirr of steam, or, at least, the clanking of
machinery and whirling wheels.
I toiled up the crazy staircase. The doctor was already in his room--in
the same purple velvet he had worn before. On his study table was a
smoking supper.
“I hope,” he said, “you have not supped on the way?”
“I have not,” I said. Our supper at our college table consisted of
tea and cold meat and pie. The doctor’s was of oysters, sweetbreads,
and wine. After it he gave me an imported cigar, and I sat in his
reclining-chair and listened to him. I remember that this chair
reminded me, as I sat there, of a dentist’s chair; and I good-naturedly
wondered what operations he might perform on me--I helpless, passive
with his tobacco and his wine.
“Now I am ready,” said he. And he opened the door that led from his
study into the old warehouse-room, and I saw him touch one of the
steel levers opposite the rows of glass rods. “You see,” he said, “my
mechanism is a simple one. With all these rods of different lengths,
and the almost infinite speed of revolution that I am able to gif them
with the power that comes from the river applied through a chain of
belted wheels, is a rosined leather tongue, like that of a music-box
or the bow of a violin, touching each one; and so I get any number of
beats per second that I will.” (He always said _will_, this man,
and never _wish_.)
“Now, listen,” he whispered; and I saw him bend down another lever in
the laboratory, and there came a grand bass note--a tone I have heard
since only in 32-foot organ pipes. “Now, you see, it is Sound.” And he
placed his hand, as he spoke, upon a small crank or governor; and, as
he turned it slowly, note by note the sound grew higher. In the other
room I could see one immense wheel, revolving in an endless leather
band, with the power that was furnished by the Kennebec, and as each
sound rose clear, I saw the wheel turn faster.
Note by note the tones increased in pitch, clear and elemental. I
listened, recumbent. There was a marvellous fascination in the strong
production of those simple tones.
“You see I hafe no overtones,” I heard the doctor say. “All is simple,
because it is mechanism. It is the exact reproduction of the requisite
mathematical number. I hafe many hundreds of rods of glass, and then
the leather band can go so fast as I will, and the tongue acts upon
them like the bow upon the violin.”
I listened, I was still at peace; all this I could understand, though
the notes came strangely clear. Undoubtedly, to get a definite
finite number of beats per second was a mere question of mathematics.
Empirically, we have always done it, with tuning-forks, organ-pipes,
bells.
He was in the middle of the scale already; faster whirled that distant
wheel, and the intense tone struck C in alt. I felt a yearning for
some harmony; that terrible, simple, single tone was so elemental,
so savage; it racked my nerves and strained them to unison, like
the rosined bow drawn close against the violin-string itself. It
grew intensely shrill; fearfully, piercingly shrill; shrill to the
rending-point of the tympanum; and then came silence.
I looked. In the dusk of the adjoining warehouse the huge wheel was
whirling more rapidly than ever.
The German professor gazed into my eyes, his own were bright with
triumph, on his lips a curl of cynicism. “Now,” he said, “you will have
what you call emotions. But, first, I must bind you close.”
I shrugged my shoulders amiably, smiling with what at the time I
thought contempt, while he deftly took a soft white rope and bound me
many times to his chair. But the rope was very strong, and I now saw
that the frame-work of the chair was of iron. And even while he bound
me, I started as if from a sleep, and became conscious of the dull
whirring caused by the powerful machinery that abode within the house,
and suddenly a great rage came over me.
I, fool, and this man! I swelled and strained at the soft white ropes
that bound me, but in vain.... By God, I could have killed him then and
there!... And he looked at me and grinned, twisting his face to fit his
crooked soul. I strained at the ropes, and I think one of them slipped
a bit, for his face blanched; and then I saw him go into the other room
and press the last lever back a little, and it seemed to me the wheel
revolved more slowly.
Then, in a moment, all was peace again, and it was as if I heard a low,
sweet sound, only that there was no sound, but something like what you
might dream the music of the spheres to be. He came to my chair again
and unbound me.
My momentary passion had vanished. “Light your cigar,” he said, “it has
gone out.” I did so. I had a strange, restful feeling, as of being at
one with the world, a sense of peace, between the peace of death and
that of sleep.
“This,” he said, “is the pulse of the world; and it is Sleep. You
remember, in the Nibelung-saga, when Erda, the Earth spirit, is
invoked, unwillingly she appears, and then she says, _Lass mich
schlafen_--let me sleep on--to Wotan, king of the gods? Some of
the old myths are true enough, though not the Christian ones, most
always.... This pulse of the earth seems to you dead silence, yet the
beats are pulsing thousands a second faster than the highest sound....
For emotions are subtler things than sound, as you sentimental ones
would say; you poets that talk of ‘heart’ and ‘soul.’ We men of science
say it this way: That those bodily organs that answer to your myth of a
soul are but more widely framed, more nicely textured, so as to respond
to the impact of a greater number of movements in the second.”
While he was speaking he had gone into the other room, and was bending
the lever down once more; I flew at his throat. But even before I
reached him my motive changed; seizing a Spanish knife that was on the
table, I sought to plunge it in my breast. But, with a quick stroke of
the elbow, as if he had been prepared for the attempt, he dashed the
knife from my hand to the floor, and I sank in despair back into his
arm-chair.
“Yes-s,” said he, with a sort of hiss of content like a long-drawn
sigh of relief. “Yes-s-s--I haf put my mechanik quickly through the
Murder-motif without binding you again, after I had put it back to
sleep.”
“What do you mean?” I said, languidly. How could I ever hope to win
Althea away from this man’s wiles?
“When man’s consciousness awakes from the sleep of the world, its first
motive is Murder,” said he; “you remember the Hebrew myth of Cain?” and
he laughed silently. “Its next is Suicide; its third, Despair. This
time I have put my mechanik quickly through the Murder movement, so
your wish to kill me was just now but momentary.”
There was an evil gleam in his eye as he said this.
“I leafe a dagger on the table, because if I left a pistol the subject
would fire it, and that makes noise. Then at the motion of Suicide
you tried to kill yourself: the suicide is one grade higher than the
murderer. And now, you are in Despair.”
He bent the lever further down and touched a small glass rod.
“And now, I will gife to you--I alone--all the emotions of which
humanity is capable.”
How much time followed, I know not; nor whether it was not all a dream,
only that a dream can hardly be more vivid--as this was--than my life
itself. First, a nightmare came of evil passions; after murder and
suicide and despair came revenge, envy, hatred, greed of money, greed
of power, lust. I say “came,” for each one came on me with all the
force the worst of men can feel. Had I been free, in some other place,
I should inexorably have committed the crimes these evil passions
breed, and there was always some pretext of a cause. Now it was revenge
on Materialismus himself for his winning of Althea Hardy; now it was
envy of his powers, or greed of his possessions; and then my roving
eye fell on that strange picture of his I mentioned before; the face
of the woman now seemed to be Althea’s. In a glance all the poetry,
all the sympathy of my mind or soul that I thought bound me to her had
vanished, and in their place I only knew desire. The doctor’s leer
seemed to read my thoughts; he let the lever stay long at this speed,
and then he put it back again to that strange rhythm of Sleep.
“So--I must rest you a little between times,” he said. “Is my fine poet
convinced?”
But I was silent, and he turned another wheel.
“All these are only evil passions,” said I, “there may well be
something physical in them.”
“Poh--I can gife you just so well the others,” he sneered. “I tell you
why I do not gife you all at once----”
“You can produce lust,” I answered, “but not love.”
“Poh--it takes but a little greater speed. What you call love is but
the multiple of lust and cosmic love, that is, gravitation.”