A long, long silence....
At first I struggled with all my soul to keep cool and indifferent,
preserving on my features the mask of disdain which I had somehow
imprinted there. But little by little I could feel that the hold I had
on my nerves was growing steadily weaker. My Adventure was beginning
to show a semi-supernatural aspect the very indefiniteness of which
gradually paralyzed my courage as my motor centers had been paralyzed
an hour or more before. So much so that eventually I grew alarmed
lest my captors perceive the uncontrollable anxiety that was taking
possession of me: I suddenly arose, and with the idea of hiding the
expression on my face, I walked several steps away down the room.
Still without moving, asleep perhaps, the Marquis Gaspard seemed not
to notice. Not so the Count François nor the Vicomte Antoine, however.
They, with a perfection of courtesy and with no trace of irony so
far as I could see, inquired as to whether I were tired, or indeed
impatient.
“Monsieur,” the count spoke up solicitously, “be so kind as to excuse
the slowness of all this. If I have accurately divined my father’s
idea, I assure you it is a very bold one, and care in preparation is a
matter of unavoidable necessity. We have before us, unless I am quite
mistaken, one of the most delicate operations magnetic science knows;
and the Marquis Gaspard, with a proper caution, is summoning every
particle of energy at his command. Believe me, Monsieur: he will need
it all!”
I had stopped, and was looking at the man as he began speaking; but my
eyes now turned instinctively toward the strange apparatus which he and
his son had but recently put in position on the easel.
“That lens which you are examining,” the Vicomte Antoine explained, “is
used for concentrating the magnetic flow on the spot desired. It is
made of a special compound invented by the Count de Saint Germain, and
it has the power of refracting electrical waves just as glass refracts
rays of light. By such inventions and after numberless unsuccessful
experiments, the famous count, and my grandfather in his footsteps,
were enabled to master the natural magnetism they possessed in their
own bodies, and in consequence to obtain results which are rivalled
by nothing that your alienists, your psychiatrists--that is what you
call them, is it not?--nor even your wonder-working mediums, have ever
dreamed of. You will soon be convinced, I warrant you. The operation
that is probably to be tried tonight will furnish you with a prodigious
demonstration!”
In spite of my ghastly desperation, I raised my eyebrows inquiringly.
The vicomte shook his head, with a significant nod towards his
grandfather.
“The marquis did not deem fit to discuss his project with us, nor
even to reveal it in any precise detail to you. I should hardly
regard myself as authorized to go into the matter more fully at
present; but without divulging anything essential, I may ask
whether you are familiar with a term from the jargon of the occult
sciences--‘exteriorization’? You must have witnessed, at one time or
another, the evocation of a so-called spirit by a medium?”
The question seemed so utterly inane that I did not answer.
“I have, anyway,” the vicomte continued, overlooking my silence. “I
remember having seen something of the sort with my own eyes. Two
fairly skillful performers, one of whom called himself a medium, were
entertaining a number of people, myself among them, in a darkened room
in Paris; and one day they actually succeeded in producing a luminous
shadow of an approximately human form; and this, they claimed, was
the ghost of I forget what famous personage. That part of it was all
a hoax, of course; though the shadow itself was not by any means. You
could see it as plain as day, and almost touch it. There is no doubt in
my mind that the practitioner in question was in possession of some of
the same processes which we are using all the time, and got this shadow
from his colleague by a kind of ‘exteriorization,’ as they call it.
This, to be sure, was all a very crude affair; but it does suggest some
of the things we do in getting our life-workers to surrender a certain
number of their cells or atoms to us; and it resembles more closely
still the method we shall employ in a few moments ... but I think I
have said too much already....”
He stopped, with an expression of mortification on his face; and the
Count François spoke up, as though to detract attention from his son’s
last words:
“Monsieur, it is hardly worth while to discuss that subject now,
inasmuch as you will have full light upon it soon. I am going to seize
this opportunity to congratulate you. Whatever you may be thinking of
your experiences this night, it is really a piece of singular good
fortune that has befallen you. Here you are an ordinary mortal, thrown
by accident into the company of the Ever-living Men and forced, by an
equally fortunate train of events, to share their lives for a certain
length of time. Oh no, I beg of you--do not imagine I am bantering!
Just consider! You people can count on less than a hundred years of
life; and you are obliged, in consequence, to live in a perpetual
hurry, thinking, talking, acting forever in a rush, bolting your
daily bread, so to speak. Since you have to live rapidly in order to
live at all, you never really know what living means, nor do you ever
taste the infinite sweetness that life holds at bottom. Monsieur,
the besetting thought that death is nearer by each moment must quite
inhibit meditation and soil every leisure hour; and thoughtful idleness
I regard as the one true delight, which far outstrips in consoling
power the false and disappointing joys of sensuous indulgence. In
enjoining on us to perpetuate not our youth but our maturer manhood,
the Count de Saint Germain thought he was imposing on us a painful
sacrifice that would, however, in the end prove well worth while.
Over a long period of years, he himself had never tired of a most
stormy voyage on the seas of human passion; and he ended in shipwreck
on the shoals laid in his course by a tress of golden hair. I wonder
if he ever realized that he was missing the haven of real happiness
through fundamental misapprehension on his own part of the relative
value of things? Now to judge by the interest you seem to show in a
certain woman--a good-looking woman, I grant you, but noteworthy in no
other way that I can see--you must still be ignorant of the fatuity
of carnal satisfactions, when these are compared with the joys that
purely spiritual pleasures bring--through eyes, for example, that have
learned to sense the simple yet sublime beauties of a sky reddened by
the setting sun or of clouds touched with silver by a rising moon!”
The Vicomte Antoine raised an arm in a gesture of sanguine enthusiasm:
“The savor of such enjoyments never cloys, Monsieur; and while you
are our guest, I hope to have the opportunity of revealing to you two
wonders that Mortal Men have never learned to taste: Night, Monsieur,
and Day. The age to which you belong has stubbornly and blindly limited
its vision to the mechanical arts, seeking an absurd perfection of
bodily comfort and well-being which is useless and contemptible once
it has been attained. Your generation has quite lost sight of the
gratifications that naturally come to life; and, losing these from
view, it has of course lost the power to appreciate them. You, for
instance, just a few hours ago, were walking with me out on the
heath. It was raining and the night was menacing with storm. I am sure
your mind was engrossed with the slippery muddy path, the cold wet
bushes--all the discomforts, in short. Did you once raise your eyes to
the romantic splendors with which we were surrounded--those frowning
brows of the hills, their crests piercing the pearly mantle of mist and
fog in aspiration toward that upper wrapping of transparent silver that
Nature throws over her chilly shoulders?...”
I listened on in an amazement that for the moment quite mastered my
anxiety. These atrocious demons, these vampires, cannibals indeed since
they lived, after all, on human flesh and blood--how could they bring
themselves to affect such delicate and poetic hypocrisies? And my
thoughts went out to all the pitiable victims who entered that accursed
House of the Secret, strong robust young men and women, and left it
pale, fainting, emaciated invalids; all to the end that three beasts
of prey might eschew “the false and disappointing joys of sensuous
indulgence” for the higher ones that “purely spiritual pleasures bring.”