home mentally and physically exhausted and thrown himself on the
library lounge; and in that gloomy room, little by little, the faithful
sister had taken in the almost incredible news. Her consolations were
instantaneous and tender, and she made him realize how vast, though
unconscious, a tribute to his greatness the attacks, persecution,
and dismissal all were. He had tried to cultivate the indifference
she preached, and could have done so had personal dignity alone been
involved. But the loss of scientific opportunity was more than he could
calmly bear, and he sighed again and again as he repeated how three
months more of study in the prison might have given him at last the
long-sought bacillus which would make all fever a thing of the past.
Then Georgina tried another mode of cheering, and told him that surely
the prison board would send for him again if the fever did not abate,
or if it broke out with increased force. But even this was ineffective,
and Clarendon answered only in a string of bitter, ironic, and
half-meaningless little sentences whose tone showed all too clearly how
deeply despair and resentment had bitten.
"Abate? Break out again? Oh, it'll abate all right! At least, they'll
think it has abated. They'd think anything, no matter what happens!
Ignorant eyes see nothing, and bunglers are never discoverers. Science
never shows her face to that sort. And they call themselves doctors!
Best of all, fancy that ass Jones in charge!"
Ceasing with a quick sneer, he laughed so demoniacally that Georgina
shivered.
The days that followed were dismal ones indeed at the Clarendon
mansion. Depression, stark and unrelieved, had taken hold of the
doctor's usually tireless mind; and he would even have refused food had
not Georgina forced it upon him. His great notebook of observations
lay unopened on the library table, and his little gold syringe of
anti-fever serum--a clever device of his own, with a self-contained
reservoir, attached to a broad gold finger ring, and single-pressure
action peculiar to itself--rested idly in a small leather case beside
it. Vigor, ambition, and the desire for study and observation seemed to
have died within him; and he made no inquiries about his clinic, where
hundreds of germ cultures stood in their orderly phials awaiting his
attention.
The countless animals held for experiments played, lively and well-fed,
in the early spring sunshine; and as Georgina strolled out through
the rose-arbor to the cages she felt a strangely incongruous sense of
happiness about her. She knew, though, how tragically transient that
happiness must be; since the start of new work would soon make all
these small creatures unwilling martyrs to science. Knowing this, she
glimpsed a sort of compensating element in her brother's inaction,
and encouraged him to keep on in a rest he needed so badly. The eight
Tibetan servants moved noiselessly about, each as impeccably effective
as usual; and Georgina saw to it that the order of the household did
not suffer because of the master's relaxation.
Study and starward ambition laid aside in slippered and dressing-gowned
indifference, Clarendon was content to let Georgina treat him as an
infant. He met her maternal fussiness with a slow, sad smile, and
always obeyed her multitude of orders and precepts. A kind of faint,
wistful felicity came over the languid household, amidst which the
only dissenting note was supplied by Surama. He indeed was miserable,
and looked often with sullen and resentful eyes at the sunny serenity
in Georgina's face. His only joy had been the turmoil of experiment,
and he missed the routine of seizing the fated animals, bearing them
to the clinic in clutching talons, and watching them with hot brooding
gaze and evil chuckles as they gradually fell into the final coma
with wide-opened, red-rimmed eyes, and swollen tongue lolling from
froth-covered mouth.
Now he was seemingly driven to desperation by the sight of the carefree
creatures in their cages, and frequently came to ask Clarendon if there
were any orders. Finding the doctor apathetic and unwilling to begin
work, he would go away muttering under his breath and glaring curses
upon everything; stealing with catlike tread to his own quarters in
the basement, where his voice would sometimes ascend in deep, muffled
rhythms of blasphemous strangeness and uncomfortably ritualistic
suggestion.
All this wore on Georgina's nerves, but not by any means so gravely as
her brother's continued lassitude itself. The duration of the state
alarmed her, and little by little she lost the air of cheerfulness
which had so provoked the clinic-man. Herself skilled in medicine, she
found the doctor's condition highly unsatisfactory from an alienist's
point of view; and she now feared as much from his absence of interest
and activity as she had formerly feared from his fanatical zeal and
overstudy. Was lingering melancholy about to turn the once brilliant
man of intellect into an innocuous imbecile?
* * * * *
Then, toward the end of May, came the sudden change. Georgina always
recalled the smallest details connected with it; details as trivial as
the box delivered to Surama the day before, postmarked Algiers, and
emitting a most unpleasant odor; and the sharp, sudden thunderstorm,
rare in the extreme for California, which sprang up that night as
Surama chanted his rituals behind his locked basement door in a droning
chest-voice louder and more intense than usual.
It was a sunny day, and she had been in the garden gathering flowers
for the dining-room. Re-entering the house, she glimpsed her brother
in the library, fully dressed and seated at the table, alternately
consulting the notes in his thick observation book, and making fresh
entries with brisk assured strokes of the pen. He was alert and vital,
and there was a satisfying resilience about his movements as he now and
then turned a page, or reached for a book from the rear of the great
table. Delighted and relieved, Georgina hastened to deposit her flowers
in the dining-room and return; but when she reached the library again
she found that her brother was gone.
She knew, of course, that he must be in the clinic at work, and
rejoiced to think that his old mind and purpose had snapped back into
place. Realizing it would be of no use to delay the luncheon for him,
she ate alone and set aside a bite to be kept warm in case of his
return at an odd moment. But he did not come. He was making up for lost
time, and was still in the great, stout-planked clinic when she went
for a stroll through the rose-arbor.
As she walked among the fragrant blossoms she saw Surama fetching
animals for the test. She wished she could notice him less, for he
always made her shudder; but her very dread had sharpened her eyes and
ears where he was concerned. He always went hatless around the yard,
and the total hairlessness of his head enhanced his skeletonlike aspect
horribly. Now she heard a faint chuckle as he took a small monkey from
its cage against the wall and carried it to the clinic, his long, bony
fingers pressing so cruelly into its furry sides that it cried out in
frightened anguish. The sight sickened her, and brought her walk to
an end. Her inmost soul rebelled at the ascendancy this creature had
gained over her brother, and she reflected bitterly that the two had
almost changed places as master and servant.
Night came without Clarendon's return to the house, and Georgina
concluded that he was absorbed in one of his very longest sessions,
which meant total disregard of time. She hated to retire without a talk
with him about his sudden recovery; but finally, feeling it would be
futile to wait up, she wrote a cheerful note and propped it before his
chair on the library table; then started resolutely for bed.
She was not quite asleep when she heard the outer door open and shut.
So it had not been an all-night session after all! Determined to see
that her brother had a meal before retiring, she rose, slipped on a
robe, and descended to the library, halting only when she heard voices
from behind the half-opened door. Clarendon and Surama were talking,
and she waited till the clinic-man might go.
Surama, however, showed no inclination to depart; and indeed, the
whole heated tenor of the discourse seemed to bespeak absorption and
promise length. Georgina, though she had not meant to listen, could
not help catching a phrase now and then, and presently became aware of
a sinister undercurrent which frightened her very much without being
wholly clear to her. Her brother's voice, nervous, incisive, held her
notice with disquieting persistence.
"But anyway," he was saying, "we haven't enough animals for another
day, and you know how hard it is to get a decent supply at short
notice. It seems silly to waste so much effort on comparative trash
when human specimens could be had with just a little extra care."
Georgina sickened at the possible implication, and caught at the hall
rack to steady herself. Surama was replying in that deep, hollow tone
which seemed to echo with the evil of a thousand ages and a thousand
planets.
"Steady, steady--what a child you are with your haste and impatience!
You crowd things so! When you've lived as I have, so that a whole life
will seem only an hour, you won't be so fretful about a day or week or
month! You work too fast. You've plenty of specimens in the cages for a
full week if you'll only go at a sensible rate. You might even begin on
the other material if you'd be sure not to overdo it."
"Never mind my haste!" the reply was snapped out sharply; "I have
my own methods. I don't want to use our material if I can help it,
for I prefer them as they are. And you'd better be careful of them
anyway--you know the knives those sly dogs carry."
Surama's deep chuckle came.
"Don't worry about that. The brutes eat, don't they? Well, I can get
you one any time you need it. But go slow--with the boy gone, there are
only eight, and now that you've lost San Quentin it'll be hard to get
new ones by the wholesale. I'd advise you to start in on Tsanpo--he's
the least use to you as he is, and----"
But that was all Georgina heard. Transfixed by a hideous dread from
the thoughts this talk excited, she nearly sank to the floor where she
stood, and was scarcely able to drag herself up the stairs and into
her room. What was the evil monster Surama planning? Into what was he
guiding her brother? What monstrous circumstances lay behind these
cryptic sentences? A thousand phantoms of darkness and menace danced
before her eyes, and she flung herself upon the bed without hope of
sleep. One thought above the rest stood out with fiendish prominence,
and she almost screamed aloud as it beat itself into her brain with
renewed force. Then nature, kinder than she expected, intervened at
last. Closing her eyes in a dead faint, she did not awake till morning,
nor did any fresh nightmare come to join the lasting one which the
overheard words had brought.
* * * * *
With the morning sunshine came a lessening of the tension. What happens
in the night when one is tired often reaches the consciousness in
distorted forms, and Georgina could see that her brain must have given
strange color to scraps of common medical conversation. To suppose her
brother--only son of the gentle Frances Schuyler Clarendon--guilty of
savage sacrifices in the name of science would be to do an injustice
to their blood, and she decided to omit all mention of her trip
downstairs, lest Alfred ridicule her fantastic notions.
When she reached the breakfast table she found that Clarendon was
already gone, and regretted that not even this second morning had
given her a chance to congratulate him on his revived activity.
Quietly taking the breakfast served by stone-deaf old Margarita, the
Mexican cook, she read the morning paper and seated herself with some
needlework by the sitting-room window overlooking the great yard. All
was silent out there, and she could see that the last of the animal
cages had been emptied. Science was served, and the lime pit held all
that was left of the once pretty and lively little creatures. This
slaughter had always grieved her, but she had never complained, since
she knew it was all for humanity. Being a scientist's sister, she used
to say to herself, was like being the sister of a soldier who kills to
save his countrymen from their foes.
After luncheon Georgina resumed her post by the window, and had been
busily sewing for some time when the sound of a pistol shot from the
yard caused her to look out in alarm. There, not far from the clinic,
she saw the ghastly form of Surama, a revolver in his hand, and his
skull-face twisted into a strange expression as he chuckled at a
cowering figure robed in black silk and carrying a long Tibetan knife.
It was the servant Tsanpo, and as she recognized the shriveled face,
Georgina remembered horribly what she had overheard the night before.
The sun flashed on the polished blade, and suddenly Surama's revolver
spat once more. This time the knife flew from the Mongol's hand, and
Surama glanced greedily at his shaking and bewildered prey.
Then Tsanpo, glancing quickly at his unhurt hand and at the fallen
knife, sprang nimbly away from the stealthily approaching clinic-man
and made a dash for the house. Surama, however, was too swift for
him, and caught him in a single leap, seizing his shoulder and almost
crushing him. For a moment the Tibetan tried to struggle, but Surama
lifted him like an animal by the scruff of the neck and bore him off
toward the clinic. Georgina heard him chuckling and taunting the man
in his own tongue, and saw the yellow face of the victim twist and
quiver with fright. Suddenly realizing against her own will what was
taking place, a great horror mastered her and she fainted for the
second time within twenty-four hours.
When consciousness returned, the golden light of late afternoon was
flooding the room. Georgina, picking up her fallen work-basket and
scattered materials, was lost in a daze of doubt; but finally felt
convinced that the scene which had overcome her must have been all too
tragically real. Her worst fears, then, were horrible truths. What
to do about it, nothing in her experience could tell her; and she
was vaguely thankful that her brother did not appear. She must talk
to him, but not now. She could not talk to anybody now. And thinking
shudderingly of the monstrous happening behind those barred clinic
windows, she crept into bed for a long night of anguished sleeplessness.
* * * * *
Rising haggardly on the following day, Georgina saw the doctor for the
first time since his recovery. He was bustling about preoccupiedly,
circulating between the house and the clinic, and paying little
attention to anything besides his work. There was no chance for the
dreaded interview, and Clarendon did not even notice his sister's
worn-out aspect and hesitant manner.
In the evening she heard him in the library, talking to himself in a
fashion most unusual for him, and she felt that he was under a great
strain which might culminate in the return of his apathy. Entering
the room, she tried to calm him without referring to any trying
subject, and forced a steadying cup of bouillon upon him. Finally she
asked gently what was distressing him, and waited anxiously for his
reply, hoping to hear that Surama's treatment of the poor Tibetan had
horrified and outraged him.
There was a note of fretfulness in his voice as he responded.
"What's distressing me? Good God, Georgina, what _isn't_? Look at the
cages and see if you have to ask again! Cleaned out--milked dry--not
a cursed specimen left; and a line of the most important bacterial
cultures incubating in their tubes without a chance to do an ounce of
good! Days' work wasted--whole program set back--it's enough to drive a
man mad! How shall I ever get anywhere if I can't scrape up some decent
subjects?"
Georgina stroked his forehead.
"I think you ought to rest a while, Al dear."
He moved away.
"Rest? That's good! That's damn good! What else have I been doing but
resting and vegetating and staring blankly into space for the last
fifty or a hundred or a thousand years? Just as I manage to shake off
the clouds, I have to run short of material--and then I'm told to lapse
back again into drooling stupefaction! God! And all the while some
sneaking thief is probably working with my data and getting ready to
come out ahead of me with the credit for my own work. I'll lose by a
neck--some fool with the proper specimens will get the prize, when one
week more with even half-adequate facilities would see me through with
flying colors!"
His voice rose querulously, and there was an overtone of mental strain
which Georgina did not like. She answered softly, yet not so softly as
to hint at the soothing of a psychopathic case.
"But you're killing yourself with this worry and tension, and if you're
dead, how can you do your work?"
He gave a smile that was almost a sneer.
"I guess a week or a month--all the time I need--wouldn't quite
finish me, and it doesn't much matter what becomes of me or any other
individual in the end. Science is what must be served--science--the
austere cause of human knowledge. I'm like the monkeys and birds
and guinea-pigs I use--just a cog in the machine, to be used to the
advantage of the whole. They had to be killed--I may have to be
killed--what of it? Isn't the cause we serve worth that and more?"
Georgina sighed. For a moment she wondered whether, after all, this
ceaseless round of slaughter really was worth while.
"But are you absolutely sure your discovery will be enough of a boon to
humanity to warrant these sacrifices?"
Clarendon's eyes flashed dangerously.
"Humanity! What the deuce is humanity? Science! Dolts! Just
individuals over and over again! Humanity is made for preachers
to whom it means the blindly credulous. Humanity is made for the
predatory rich to whom it speaks in terms of dollars and cents.
Humanity is made for the politician to whom it signifies collective
power to be used to his advantage. What is humanity? Nothing! Thank
God that crude illusion doesn't last! What a grown man worships is
truth--knowledge--science--light--the rending of the veil and the
pushing back of the shadow. Knowledge, the juggernaut! There is death
in our own ritual. We must kill--dissect--destroy--and all for the sake
of discovery--the worship of the ineffable light. The goddess Science
demands it. We test a doubtful poison by killing. How else? No thought
for self--just knowledge--the effect must be known."
His voice trailed off in a kind of temporary exhaustion, and Georgina
shuddered slightly.
"But this is horrible, Al! You shouldn't think of it that way!"
Clarendon cackled sardonically, in a manner which stirred odd and
repugnant associations in his sister's mind.
"Horrible? You think what _I_ say is horrible? You ought to hear
Surama! I tell you, things were known to the priests of Atlantis
that would make you drop dead of fright if you heard a hint of them.
Knowledge was knowledge a hundred thousand years ago, when our especial
forebears were shambling about Asia as speechless semi-apes! They know
something of it in the Hoggar region--there are rumors in the farther
uplands of Tibet--and once I heard an old man in China calling on
Yog-Sothoth----"
He turned pale, and made a curious sign in the air with his extended
forefinger. Georgina felt genuinely alarmed, but became somewhat calmer
as his speech took a less fantastic form.
"Yes, it may be horrible, but it's glorious, too. The pursuit of
knowledge, I mean. Certainly, there's no slovenly sentiment connected
with it. Doesn't nature kill--constantly and remorselessly--and are
any but fools horrified at the struggle? Killings are necessary.
They are the glory of science. We learn something from them, and we
can't sacrifice learning to sentiment. Hear the sentimentalists howl
against vaccination! They fear it will kill the child. Well, what if
it does? How else can we discover the laws of disease concerned? As a
scientist's sister you ought to know better than to prate sentiment.
You ought to help my work instead of hindering it!"
"But Al," protested Georgina, "I haven't the slightest intention of
hindering your work. Haven't I always tried to help as much as I could?
I am ignorant, I suppose, and can't help very actively; but at least
I'm proud of you--proud for my own sake and for the family's sake--and
I've always tried to smooth the way. You've given me credit for that
many a time."
Clarendon looked at her keenly.
"Yes," he said jerkily as he rose and strode from the room, "you're
right. You've always tried to help as best you knew. You may yet have a
chance to help still more."
Georgina, seeing him disappear through the front door, followed him
into the yard. Some distance away a lantern was shining through the
trees, and as they approached it they saw Surama bending over a large
object stretched on the ground. Clarendon, advancing, gave a short
grunt; but when Georgina saw what it was she rushed up with a shriek.
It was Dick, the great St. Bernard, and he was lying still with
reddened eyes and protruding tongue.
"He's sick, Al!" she cried. "Do something for him, quick!"
The doctor looked at Surama, who had uttered something in a tongue
unknown to Georgina.
"Take him to the clinic," he ordered; "I'm afraid Dick's caught the
fever."
Surama took up the dog as he had taken poor Tsanpo the day before, and
carried him silently to the building near the mall. He did not chuckle
this time, but glanced at Clarendon with what appeared to be real
anxiety. It almost seemed to Georgina that Surama was asking the doctor
to save her pet.
Clarendon, however, made no move to follow, but stood still for a
moment and then sauntered slowly toward the house. Georgina, astonished
at such callousness, kept up a running fire of entreaties on Dick's
behalf, but it was of no use. Without paying the slightest attention
to her pleas he made directly for the library and began to read in a
large old book which had lain face down on the table. She put her hand
on his shoulder as he sat there, but he did not speak or turn his head.
He only kept on reading, and Georgina, glancing curiously over his
shoulder, wondered in what strange alphabet this brass-bound tome was
written.
In the cavernous parlor across the hall, sitting alone in the dark a
quarter of an hour later, Georgina came to her decision. Something
was gravely wrong--just what, and to what extent, she scarcely dared
formulate to herself--and it was time that she called in some stronger
force to help her. Of course it must be James. He was powerful and
capable, and his sympathy and affection would show him the right thing
to do. He had known Al always, and would understand.
It was by this time rather late, but Georgina had resolved on action.
Across the hall the light still shone from the library, and she looked
wistfully at the doorway as she quietly donned a hat and left the
house. Outside the gloomy mansion and forbidding grounds, it was only a
short walk to Jackson Street, where by good luck she found a carriage
to take her to the Western Union telegraph office. There she carefully
wrote out a message to James Dalton in Sacramento, asking him to come
at once to San Francisco on a matter of the greatest importance to them
all.
5
Dalton was frankly perplexed by Georgina's sudden message. He had had
no word from the Clarendons since that stormy February evening when
Alfred had declared him an outsider to his home; and he in turn had
studiously refrained from communicating, even when he had longed to
express sympathy after the doctor's summary ousting from office. He had
fought hard to frustrate the politicians and keep the appointive power,
and was bitterly sorry to watch the unseating of a man who, despite
recent estrangements, still represented to him the ultimate ideal of
scientific competence.
Now, with this clearly frightened summons before him, he could not
imagine what had happened. He knew, though, that Georgina was not
one to lose her head or send forth a needless alarm; hence he wasted
no time, but took the Overland which left Sacramento within the hour,
going at once to his club and sending word to Georgina by a messenger
that he was in town and wholly at her service.