MENATOGEN, THE MIND FOOD
It had been a dinner of celebration. The professor had ransacked his
cellar and produced his best wine. He had drunk a good deal of it
himself--so had Mr. Bomford. A third visitor, Mr. Horace Bunsome, a
company promoter from the city, had been even more assiduous in his
attentions to a particular brand of champagne.
Burton had been conscious of a sense of drifting. The more human side
of him was paramount. The dinner was perfect; the long, low
dining-room, with its bowls of flowers and quaint decorations,
delightful; the wine and food the best of their sort. Edith, looking
like an exquisite picture, was sitting by his side. After all, if the
end of things were to come this way, what did it matter? She had no
eyes for any one else, her fingers had touched his more than once. The
complete joy of living was in his pulses. He, too, had yielded to the
general spirit.
Edith left them late and reluctantly. Then the professor raised his
glass. There was an unaccustomed color in his parchment-white cheeks.
His spectacles were sitting at a new angle, his black tie had wandered
from its usual precise place around to the side of his neck.
"Let us drink," he exclaimed, "to the new company! To the new Mind
Food, to the new scientific diet of the coming century! Let us drink to
ourselves, the pioneers of this wonderful discovery, the manufacturers
and owners-to-be of the new food, the first of its kind created and
designed to satisfy the moral appetite."
"We'll have a little of that in the prospectus," Mr. Horace Bunsome
remarked, taking out his notebook. "It sounds mighty good, professor."
"It sounds good because it is true, sir," Mr. Cowper asserted, a little
severely. "Your services, Mr. Bunsome, are necessary to us, but I beg
that you will not confound the enterprise in which you will presently
find yourself engaged, with any of the hazardous, will-o'-the-wisp
undertakings which spring up day by day, they tell me, in the city, and
which owe their very existence and such measure of success as they may
achieve, to the credulity of fools. Let me impress upon you, Mr.
Bunsome, that you are, on this occasion, associated with a genuine and
marvelous discovery--the scientific discovery, sir, of the age. You are
going to be one of those who will offer to the world a genuine--an
absolutely genuine tonic to the moral system."
Mr. Bunsome nodded approvingly.
"The more I hear you talk," he declared, "the more I like the sound of
it. People are tired of brain foods and nerve foods. A food for the
moral self! Professor, you're a genius."
"I am nothing of the sort, sir," the professor answered. "My share in
this is trifling. The discovery is the discovery of our friend here,"
he continued, indicating Burton. "The idea of exploiting it is the idea
of Mr. Bomford. . . . My young friend Burton, you, at least, must
rejoice with us to-night. You must rejoice, in your heart, that our
wise counsels have prevailed. You must feel that you have done a great
and a good action in sharing this inheritance of yours with millions of
your fellow-creatures."
Burton leaned a little forward in his place.
"Professor," he said, "remember that there are only two small beans,
each less than the size of a sixpence, which I have handed over to you.
As to the qualities which they possess, there is no shadow of doubt
about them for I myself am a proof. Yet you take one's breath away with
your schemes. How could you, out of two beans, provide a food for
millions?"
The professor smiled.
"Science will do it, my dear Mr. Burton," he replied, with some note of
patronage in his tone, "science, the highways of which to you are an
untrodden road. I myself am a chemist. I myself, before I felt the
call of Assyria, have made discoveries not wholly unimportant. This
afternoon I spent four hours in my laboratory with one of your beans. I
tell you frankly that I have discovered constituents in that small
article which absolutely stupefy me, qualities which no substance on
earth that I know of, in the vegetable or mineral world, possesses. Yet
within a week, the chemist whom I have engaged to come to my assistance
and I will assuredly have resolved that little bean into a definite
formula. When we have done that, the rest is easy. Its primary
constituents will form the backbone of our new food. If we are only
able to reproduce them in trifling quantities, then we must add a larger
proportion of some harmless and negative substance. The matter is
simple."
"No worry about that, that I can see," Mr. Bunsome remarked. "So long
as we have this testimony of Mr. Burton's, and the professor's
introduction and explanation, we don't really need the bean at all.
We've only got to print his story, get hold of some tasteless sort of
stuff that no one can exactly analyze, and the whole thing's done so far
as we are concerned. Of course, whether it takes on or not with the
public is always a bit of a risk, but the risk doesn't lie with us to
control. It depends entirely upon the advertisements. If we are able
to engage Rentoul, and raise enough money to give him a free hand for
the posters as well as the literary matter, why then, I tell you, this
moral food will turn out to be the greatest boom of the generation."
Mr. Cowper moved a little uneasily in his chair.
"Yours, Mr. Bunsome," he said, "is purely the commercial point of view.
So far as Mr. Burton and I are concerned, and Mr. Bomford, too, you
must please remember that we are profoundly and absolutely convinced of
the almost miraculous properties of this preparation. Its romantic
history is a thing we have thoroughly attested. Our only fear at the
present moment is that too large a quantity of the constituents of the
beans which Mr. Burton has handed over to me, may be found to be
distilled from Oriental herbs brought by that old student from the East.
However, of that in a few days' time we shall of course be able to speak
more definitely."
Mr. Bunsome coughed.
"Anyway," he declared, "that isn't my show. My part is to get the
particulars of this thing into shape, draft a prospectus, and engage
Rentoul if we can raise the money. I presume Mr. Burton will have no
objection to our using his photograph on the posters?"
Burton shivered.
"You must not think of such a thing!" he said, harshly.
Mr. Bunsome was disappointed.
"A picture of yourself as you were as an auctioneer's clerk," he
remarked, thoughtfully,--"a little gay in the costume, perhaps,
rakish-looking hat and tie, you know, and that sort of thing, leaning
over the bar, say, of a public-house--and a picture of yourself as you
are now, writing in a library one of those little articles of yours--the
two together, now, one each side, would have a distinct and convincing
effect."
Burton rose abruptly to his feet.
"These details," he said, "I must leave to Mr. Cowper. You have the
beans. I have done my share."
The professor caught hold of his arm.
"Sit down, my dear fellow--sit down," he begged. "We have not finished
our discussion. The whole subject is most engrossing. We cannot have
you hurrying away. Mr. Bunsome's suggestion is, of course, hideously
Philistine, but, after all, we want the world to know the truth."
"But the truth about me," Burton protested, "may not be the truth about
this food. How do you know that you can reproduce the beans at all
in an artificial manner?"
"Science, my young friend--science," the professor murmured. "I tell
you that the problem is already nearly solved."
"Supposing you do solve it," Burton continued, "supposing you do produce
a food which will have the same effect as the beans, do you realize what
you are doing? You will create a revolution. You will break up
life-long friendships, you will revolutionize business, you will swamp
the divorce courts, you will destroy the whole fabric of social life for
at least a generation. Truth is the most glorious thing which the brain
of man ever conceived, but I myself have had some experience of the
strange position one occupies who has come under its absolutely
compelling influence. The world as it is run to-day could never exist
for a week without its leaven of lies."
Mr. Bunsome looked mystified. The professor, however, inclined his
head sympathetically.
"It is my intention," he remarked, "in drafting my final prescription,
that the action of the food shall not be so violent. If the quantities
are less strenuously mixed, the food, as you can surmise, will be so
much the milder. A gentle preference for truth, a dawning appreciation
of beauty, a gradual withdrawal from the grosser things of life--these
may, perhaps, be conceived after a week's trial of the food. Then a
regular course of it--say for six months or so--would build up these
tendencies till they became a part of character. The change, as you
see, would not be too sudden. That is my idea, Bomford. We have not
heard much from you this evening. What do you think?"
"I agree with you entirely, professor," Mr. Bomford pronounced. "For
many reasons it will be as well, I think, to render the food a little
less violent in its effects."
Mr. Bunsome began to chuckle to himself. An imperfectly developed
sense of humor was asserting itself.
"It's a funny idea!" he exclaimed. "The more one thinks of it, the
funnier it becomes. Supposing for a moment--you all take it so
seriously--supposing for a moment that the food were to turn out to
really have in it some of these qualities, what a mess a few days of it
would make of the Stock Exchange! It would mean chaos, sir!"
"It is our hope," the professor declared, sternly, "our profound hope,
that this enterprise of ours will not only bring great fortunes to
ourselves but will result in the moral elevation of the whole world.
There are medicines--patent medicines, too--which have cured thousands
of bodily diseases. Why should we consider ourselves too sanguine when
we hope that ours, the first real attempt to minister to the physical
side of morals, may be equally successful?"
Burton stole away. In the garden he found Edith. They sat together
upon a seat and she allowed her hand to remain in his.
"I never knew father so wrapped up in anything as he is in this new
scheme," she whispered. "He is even worse than Mr. Bomford."
Burton shivered a little as he leaned back and closed his eyes.
"It is a nightmare!" he groaned. "Have you seen all those
advertisements of brain foods? The advertisement columns of our
magazines and newspapers are full of them. Their announcements grin
down upon us from every hoarding. Do you know that we are going to do
the same thing? We are going to contribute our share to the defilement
of journalism. We are going to make a similar appeal to the quack
instincts of the credulous."
She laughed softly at him.
"You foolish person," she murmured. "Father has been talking to me
about it for hours at a time. You are taking it for granted that they
will not be able to transmit the qualities of the bean into this new
food, but father is sure that they will. Supposing they succeed, why
should you object? Why should not the whole world share in this thing
which has come to you?"
"I do not know," he answered, a little wearily, "and yet nothing seems
to be able to alter the way I feel about it. It seems as though we were
committing sacrilege. Your father and Mr. Bomford, and now this man
Bunsome, are entirely engrossed in the commercial side of it. If it
were to be a gift to the world, a real philanthropic enterprise, it
would be different."
"The world wasn't made for philanthropists, dear," she reminded him.
"We are only poor human beings, and in our days we have to eat and drink
and love."
"If only Mr. Bomford--" he began--
She laid her fingers warningly upon his arm. Mr. Bomford was coming
across the lawn towards them. "If you go off alone with him," Burton
whispered, "I'll get back the beans and swamp the enterprise. I swear
it."
"If you leave us alone together," she answered softly, "I'll never speak
to you again."
She sprang lightly to her feet.
"Come," she declared, "it is chilly out here to-night. We are all going
back into the drawing-room. I am going to make you listen while I
sing."
Mr. Bomford looked dissatisfied. He was flushed with wine and he spoke
a little thickly.
"If I could have five minutes--" he began.
Edith shook her head.
"I am much too cold," she objected. "Besides, I want to hear Mr.
Bunsome talk about the new discovery. Have you found a title for the
food yet?"
She walked rapidly on with Burton. Mr. Bomford followed them.
"We have decided," he said, "to call it Menatogen."