The Pools of Silence.
by H. de Vere Stacpoole.
PART ONE
CHAPTER I
A LECTURE OF THENARD"S
The sun was setting over Paris, a blood-red and violent-looking sun, like the face of a bully staring in at the window of a vast chill room.
The bank of cloud above the west, corrugated by the wind, seemed not unlike the lowermost slats of a Venetian blind; one might have fancied that a great finger had tilted them up whilst the red, callous, cruel face took a last peep at the frost-bitten city, the frost-bound country--Montmartre and its windows, winking and bloodshot; Bercy and its barges; Notre Dame, where icicles, large as carrots, hung from the lips of the gargoyles, and the Seine clipping the _cite_ and flowing to the clean but distant sea.
It was the fourth of January and the last day of Felix Thenard"s post-graduate course of lectures at the Beaujon Hospital.
Post-graduate lectures are intended not for students, using the word in its limited sense, but for fully fledged men who wish for extra training in some special subject, and Thenard, the famous neurologist of the Beaujon, had a cla.s.s which practically represented the whole continent of Europe and half the world. Men from Vienna and Madrid, Germany and j.a.pan, London and New York, crowded the benches of his lecture room. Even the Republic of Liberia was represented by a large gentleman, who seemed carved from solid night and polished with palm oil.
Dr. Paul Quincy Adams, one of the representatives of America at the lectures of Thenard, was just reaching the entrance of the Beaujon as the last rays of sunset were touching the heights of Montmartre and the first lamps of Paris were springing alight.
He had walked all the way from his rooms in the Rue Dijon, for omnibuses were slow and uncomfortable, cabs were dear, and money was, just at present, the most unpleasant thing that money can convert itself into--an object.
Adams was six feet two, a Vermonter, an American gentleman whose chest measurements were big, almost, as his instincts were fine. He had fought his way up, literally from the soil, putting in terms as seaside _cafe_ waiter to help to pay his college fees; putting aside everything but honour in his grand struggle to freedom and individual existence, and finishing his college career with a travelling scholarship which brought him to Paris.
Individualism, the thing that lends something of greatness to each American, but which does not tend to the greatness of the nation, was the mainspring of this big man whom Nature had undoubtedly designed with her eye on the vast plains, virgin forests, and unfordable rivers, and across whose shoulder one half divined the invisible axe of the pioneer.
He was just twenty-three years of age, yet he looked thirty: plain enough as far as features go, his face was a face to remember in time of trouble.
It was of the American type that approximates to the Red Indian, and you guessed the power that lay behind it by the set of the cheek-bones, the breadth of the chin and the restfulness of the eyes. Like the Red Indian, Paul Quincy Adams was slow of speech. A silent man with his tongue.
He entered the hospital and pa.s.sed down a long corridor to the cloakroom, where he left his overcoat and from there, by another corridor, he found his way to the swing-door of the lecture theatre. It wanted five minutes to the hour. He peeped over the m.u.f.fing of the gla.s.s; the place was nearly full, so he went in and took his seat, choosing one at the right hand end of the first row of the stalls--students" vernacular for the lowest row of the theatre benches.
The theatre was lit with gas. It had whitewashed walls bare as the walls of a barn; a permanent blackboard faced the audience, and the air was suffocatingly hot after the crisp, cold air of the streets. It would be like this till about the middle of the lecture, when Alphonse the porter would pull the rope of the skylight and ventilate the place with an arctic blast.
This room, which had once been an anatomical theatre, and always a lecture room, had known the erect form of Lisfranc; the stooping shoulders of Majendie had cast their shadow on its walls; Flourens had lectured here on that subject of which he had so profound a knowledge--the brain; the echoes of this room had heard the foundations of Medicine shift and change, the rank heresies of yesterday voiced as the facts of to-day--and _vice versa_.
Adams, having opened his notebook and sharpened his pencil, sat listening to the gas sizzling above his head; then he turned for a moment and glanced at the men behind him: the doctor from Vienna in a broadly braided frock-coat with satin facings, betraying himself to all men by the end of the clinical thermometer protruding from his waistcoat pocket; the two j.a.panese gentlemen--brown, incurious, and inscrutable--men from another world, come to look on; the republican from Liberia, and the rest. Then he turned his head, for the door on the floor of the theatre had opened, giving entrance to Thenard.
Thenard was a smallish man in a rather shabby frock-coat; his beard was scant, pointed, and gray-tinged; he had a depressed expression, the general air of a second-rate tradesman on the verge of bankruptcy; and as he entered and crossed to the _estrade_ where the lecture table stood and the gla.s.s of water, he shouted some words vehemently and harshly to Alphonse, the theatre attendant, who, it seemed, had forgotten to place the box of coloured chalks on the table--the sacred chalks which the lecturer used for colouring his diagrams on the blackboard.
One instantly took a dislike to this shabby-looking _bourgeois_, with the harsh, irritable voice, but after awhile, as the lecture went on, one forgot him. It was not the profundity of the man"s knowledge, great though it was, that impressed one; or the subtlety of his reasoning or the lucidity of his expression, but his earnestness, his obvious disregard for everything earthly but Truth.
This was borne in on one by every expression of his face, every gesture of his body, every word and every tone and inflection of his voice.
This was the twelfth and last lecture of the course. It was on the "Brain Conceived as a Machine Pure and Simple."
It was a cold and pitiless lecture, striking at the root of poetry and romance, speaking of religions, not religion, and utterly ignoring the idea which stands poised like a white-winged Victory over all other ideas--the Soul.
It was pitiless because it did these things, and it was terrible because it was spoken by Thenard, for he was just standing there, a little, oldish man, terribly convincing in his simplicity, absolutely without prejudice, as ready to acknowledge the soul and its attributes as to refuse them, standing there twiddling his horsehair watch-chain, and speaking from the profundity of his knowledge with, at his elbow, a huge army of facts, instances, and cases, not one of which did not support his logical deductions.
I wish I could print his lecture in full. I can only give some few sentences taken at haphazard from the peroration.
"The fundamental basis of all morality can be expressed by the words Left--or Right. "Shall I take the path to the right, when my child is being threatened with death by a pterodactyl, or shall I take the path to the left when a mastodon is threatening to put a foot on my dinner?"
"The prehistoric man asking himself that question in the dawn of time laid the foundation of the world"s morality. Do we know how he answered it?
Yes--undoubtedly he saved his dinner.
"The prehistoric woman crouching in the ferns, wakened from sleep by the cries of her child on the left and the shouting of her man on the right, found herself face to face with the question, "Shall I court self-destruction in attempting to save _It_, or shall I seek safety with _Him_?" Do we know how she answered that question? Undoubtedly she took the path to the left.
"The woman"s Right was the man"s Left, and she took it not from any motive of goodness but just because her child appealed to her as powerfully as his dinner appealed to the man. And which was the n.o.bler instinct? In prehistoric times, gentlemen, they were both equally n.o.ble, for the instinct of the man was as essential to the fact that you and I are here gathered together in enlightened Paris, as the instinct of the woman.
"Right or Left? That is still the essence of morals--all the rest is embroidery. Whilst I am talking to you now, service is being held at the Madeleine, the Bourse is closed (looking at his watch), but other gaming houses are opening. The _Cafe de Paris_ is filling, the Little Sisters of the Poor are visiting the sick.
"We feel keenly that some people are doing good and some people are doing evil. We wonder at the origin of it all, and the answer comes from the prehistoric forest.
""I am Determination. I can choose the Right or I can choose the Left.
Whilst dwelling in the man"s heart my choice lies _that_ way, in the woman"s heart _that_ way.
""I am not religion, but between the man and the woman I have created an essential antagonism of motive which will be the basis of all future religions and systems of ethics. I have already dimly demarcated a line between ferocity and greed, and a thing which has yet no name, but which will in future ages be called Love.
""_I_ am a constant quant.i.ty, but the dim plan I have traced in the plastic brain will be used by the ever-building years; spires and domes shall fret the skies, priests unroll their scrolls of papyri, infinite developments of the simple basic Right and Left laid down by me shall combine to build a Pantheon of a million shrines to a million G.o.ds--who are yet only three: the tramp of the mastodon, the cry of the child in the pterodactyl"s grip, and myself, who in future years shall be the only surviving G.o.d of the three--Determination."
"The Pineal Gland had no known function, so Descartes declared it to be the seat of the soul. "There is nothing in here. Let us put something in,"
and he put in the idea of the soul. That was the old method.
"Morphology teaches us now that the Pineal Gland is the last vestige of an eye which once belonged to a reptile long extinct. That is the new method; the results are not so pretty, but they are more exact."
"You have finished your post-graduate work, and I suppose you are about to leave Paris like the others. Have you any plans?"
The lecture was over, the audience was pouring out of the theatre, and Adams was talking to Thenard, whom he knew personally.
"Well, no," said Adams. "None very fixed just at present. Of course I shall practise in my own country, but I can"t quite see the opening yet."
CHAPTER II
DR. DUTHIL
Thenard, with his case-book and a bundle of papers under his arm, stood for a moment in thought. Then he suddenly raised his chin.
"How would you like to go on a big-game shooting expedition to the Congo?"