John Stannary hungrily paced his laboratory, awaiting an expected
advent. A brilliant coronal of candles, concentrated within a shade
and pendent from a black beam over the dissecting table, regularly
identified him as he came within its radiance, and as regularly, when
he had passed without it, returned to its scrutiny of the empty slab
beneath, as if it were trying to trace on that blank surface the
unwritten hieroglyphics of his development. Yet, if each of its
half-score fiery tongues had been as polyglot as the Apostles’ tongues
of flame, it could have found among them all no voice to dispute his
lifelong consistency with himself. From the hard, ungracious child,
who had rejoiced to discomfit the love which sought to hedge him; from
the cynic schoolboy, to whom to awaken and analyze pain in the living
had been the only absorbing sport; from the unimpassioned student, who
had walked the hospitals like a very spectre of moral insensibility;
from the calculating libertine, whose experimental phase of animalism
had been as brief as it was savage; from the lust of life, soon spent,
to the bloodless analysis of its organic motives; from the soulless
child to the virile monster of science; from nothingness to a great
early reputation, to honours, to a fine house, to his present self and
condition, in short, Professor Stannary’s progress had been entirely
and unerringly consistent. He was one of those born to account for
results, not by any means with a view to clearing the stream of
tendency by cleansing its source. On the contrary, he never would have
hesitated further to contaminate it, could he by so doing have evolved
some novel epidemic. His fight was not to win Nature to God, but to
the laboratory; and, if he had a conqueror’s ambition, it was to die
gloriously upon a protoplast, at that beginning of things which his
fathers had struggled through æons to forget. To have called him a
dog nosing back for a scent, would have been to libel the sorriest of
mongrels with an inch of tail to wag at a kind word. Yet he had
routled so much, nevertheless, that his eyes were inflamed, and his
features pimpled, and his nose itself sharpened as with much whetting
on carrion. And, still unappeased, he paced his shambles that evening
like a caged ravening jackal.
In those early decades of the nineteenth century, anthropophagous
science, especially when non-official, was often hard put to it for a
meal. The “ringing grooves of change” were sounding; discovery was a
new-risen star; ghoulish explorers shouldered one another in their
struggle for the scientific pabulum which the grave afforded. But the
supply, die as men would, was unequal to the demand. The hospitals
kept their own; the others, _à contre-cœur_, must keep the
resurrection-men. They pulled the blinds down on their consciences;
they were willing to accept the least plausible of explanations, for
the _Cause_ was paramount. But, indeed, we are all casuists when we
want to justify our lusts to ourselves. Still the material lacked,
only, according to the universal law of necessity, to evolve its more
desperate instruments of supply. And then at last, hard-driven, first
one, and after him another and another, had the panic courage to pull
up those blinds, and let in the light on some very shocking
suspicions—with the result that Burke was hanged in Edinburgh, and
Bishop and Williams in London.
Professor Stannary was not of these white-livers. He pulled up no
blind, for the simple reason that he had let none down. He would have
diagnosed conscience as a morbid disease characterized by a diathetic
condition, and peculiar to fools of both sexes and all ages. He would
have said that to ask any question in this world was to invite a lie,
and that in all his thirty years’ experience he had found none but the
dead to answer back the unswerving truth. Well, if they did? Did it
matter to them, being dead? But it mattered greatly to the cause of
science to get at the truth; and he, for one, was certainly not going
to question the means so long as the results came to justify them.
While yet, however, the blinds were down and the pitch-plaster but an
ugly suspicion, the competition for material had not so ceased of its
keenness but that Professor Stannary had found himself checked, one
day, under the very near-conquered crest of a physiological peak, for
want of the final clue to that crowning achievement—a clue which,
like Bluebeard’s key, turned upon nothing so intimately as dead
bodies. Step by step he had reasoned his way to this position, only,
when within touch of the end, to find himself held up, tantalized,
irritated by an inability to proceed farther until a nice necessity
should be provided. His material, in fact and in short, had given out
at the psychologic moment. His laboratory was already a museum of
shredded particles—the pickings from much inevitable waste of dead
humanity. There needed only the retraversing of certain nerves, or
ducts, or canals to put the finishing touches to a great discovery.
And then—the summit, the tribune, as it were, from which he was
engaged to announce on the morrow to the Royal Society the triumphant
term to his investigations.
Already, pacing to and fro, eager and impatient, in the silent room,
he foresaw himself the recipient of the highest honour it was in the
power of that body to bestow. He was not above desiring it. He was not
himself so superlatively rational but he could covet applause for
knocking yet another long nail into the coffin of irrationality; could
expect the recognition of the world for his services in helping to
reduce it, its passions and its hopes and its pathetic fallacies, to
some mathematical formulæ. There is nothing so incomprehensible to
the men of science as the reluctance of the unscientific to part with
their doting illusions. To be content to rejoice or sorrow in things
as they seem, and not to wish to know them as they are—that, they
think, is so foolish as to justify their hardest castigation of the
folly. At least so thought John Stannary, as, with his lips set
sourly, he paused, and consulted his watch, and listened for a sound
of expected footsteps shuffling down the hang-dog passage which
skirted that wall of the house, and into which his laboratory door
conveniently opened.
Not a whisper, however, rewarded him. He put his ear to the panels.
Even then, the surf-like murmur of distant traffic—or the thud of his
own excited heart, he could not tell which—was the only articulate
sound. He glanced up angrily at the shortening candles before resuming
his tramp. As he passed to and fro, from dusk to light, and into dusk
again, he seemed to be demonstrating to a theatre of spectral
monstrosities the hieroglyphics of that same empty slab. For the
central core of radiance, concentrating itself with deadly expectancy
upon its surface, had, nevertheless, its own ghostly halo—a dim
auditorium, tier over tier, peopled with shadows of misbegotten
horrors. Sets of surgical steel in the pit, arrayed symmetrically on
a table as if for a dinner party of vampires; nameless writhed
specimens on cards or in bottles, standing higher behind the dry sleek
of glass; over all, murderous busts in the gallery, the dust on their
heads and upper features giving them the appearance of standing above
some infernal sort of footlights—with such shapes, watchful and
gloating in suggestion, was the man hemmed in. They touched his nerves
with just such an emotion as the ordinary citizen feels towards his
domestic _lares_; they affected him in just such proportion as he was
moved by the thought of the possible manner in which an order he had
given to some friends of his that morning might be executed. That is
to say, his feeling towards these dead members, as towards the means
taken by others to procure him the use of them, was utterly
impersonal. He had had at this pass a great truth to demonstrate. “A
body, this night, at any cost,” he had simply ordered, and had
straightway shut the door on his caterers. He had had no thought of
scruple. His responsibility in these matters was to the ages; never to
the individual.
A low tap sounded at the door. He was there in three strides, and
opening swiftly, let in two men, the one shouldering a sack, the other
hovering about his comrade in a sort of anxious moral support.
Professor Stannary, without a word, pointed to the table. The laden
one, as mutely, shuffled across, backed, heaved his burden down, and
stood to take off his hat and mop his brow. He was a burly,
humorous-looking fellow, with a sort of cheerful popularity written
across his face—an expression in strong contrast with that of the
other, who, tall and stealthy, stood lank behind him, like his shadow
at a distance, watching the persuasive effect of his principal on the
customer. It was he who had closed the door gently upon them all as
soon as they were in, and now stood, his teeth and eyeballs the
prominent things in him, softly twirling his hat in his hand.
“Take away the sack,” said the Professor quietly.
The burly man obeyed, sliding it off like a petticoat; and revealed
the body of a young woman. Lowering and rubbing his jaw, the Professor
stood some moments pondering the vision. Then he turned sharply.
“You are late. I expected you sooner.”
“The notice was short, sir,” answered the man coolly. “These ’ere
matters can’t be accommodated in a moment. As it is she’s warm. I
bought the body off of——”