It has been so in D------"s case. A mistake has been made."
"By Providence?" I interrupted, with, perhaps, just a _soupcon_ of sarcasm in my voice.
The Professor smiled.
"Suppose we imitate Thomas Hardy, and say by the President of the Immortals, who makes sport with more humans than Tess," he answered.
"Mistakes may be deliberate, just as their reverse may be accidental.
Even a mighty power may condescend sometimes to a very practical joke.
To a thinker the world is full of apple-pie beds, and cold wet sponges fall on us from at least half the doors we push open. The soul-juggleries of the before-mentioned President are very curious, but people will not realize that soul transference from body to body is as much a plain fact as the daily rising of the sun on one half of the world and its nightly setting on the other."
"Do you mean that souls pa.s.s on into the world again on the death of the particular body in which they have been for the moment confined?" I asked.
"Precisely: I have no doubt of it. Sometimes a woman"s soul goes into a man"s body; then the man acts woman, and people cry against him for effeminacy. The soul colours the body with actions, the body does not colour the soul, or not in the same degree."
"But we are not irresponsible. We can command ourselves."
The Professor smiled dryly.
"You think so?" he said. "I sometimes doubt it."
"And I doubt your theory of soul transference."
"That shows me--pardon the apparent impertinence--that you have never really examined the soul question with any close attention. Do you suppose that D------ really likes being so noticeably different from other men? Depend upon it," he has noticed in himself what we have noticed in him. Depend upon it, he has tried to be ordinary, and found it impossible. His soul manages him as a strong nature manages a weak one, and his soul is a female, not a male. For souls have s.e.xes, otherwise what would be the sense of talking about wedded souls? I have no doubt whatever of the truth of reincarnation on earth. Souls go on and on following out their object of development."
"You believe that every soul is reincarnated?"
"A certain number of times."
"That even in the animal world the soul of one animal pa.s.ses into the body of another?"
"Wait a minute. Now we are coming to something that tends to prove my theory true. Animals have souls, as you imply. Who can know them intimately and doubt it for an instant? Souls as immortal--or as mortal--as ours. And their souls, too, pa.s.s on."
"Into other animals?"
"Possibly. And eventually, in the process of development, into human beings."
I laughed, perhaps a little rudely. "My dear Professor, I thought that old notion was quite exploded in these modern scientific days."
"I found my beliefs upon my own minute observations," he said rather frigidly. "I notice certain animals masquerading--to some extent--as human beings, and I draw my own conclusions. If they happen to fit in at all with the conclusions of Pythagoras--or anyone else, for that matter--well and good. If not, I am not much concerned. Surely you notice the animal--and not merely the animal, but definite animals--reproduced in man. There are men whose whole demeanour suggests the monkey. I have met women who in manner, appearance, and even character, were intensely like cats."
I uttered a slight exclamation, which did not interrupt him.
"Now, I have made a minute study of cats. Of all animals they interest me the most. They have less apparent intensity, less uttered pa.s.sion, than dogs, but in my opinion more character. Their subtlety is extraordinary, their sensitiveness wonderful. Will you understand me when I say that all dogs are men, all cats women? That remark expresses the difference between them."
He paused a moment.
"Go on--go on," I said, leaning forward, with my eyes fixed upon his keen, puckered face.
He seemed pleased with my suddenly-aroused interest..
"Cats are as subtle and as difficult to understand as the most complex woman, and almost as full of intuitions. If they have been well treated, there is often a certain gracious, condescending suavity in their demeanour at first, even towards a total stranger; but if that stranger is ill disposed toward them, they seem instinctively to read his soul, and they are in arms directly. Yet they dissemble their fears in a cold indifference and reserve. They do not take action: they merely abstain from action. They withdraw the soul that has peeped out, as they can withdraw their claws into the pads upon their feet. They do not show fight as a dog might, they do not become aggressive, nor do they whine and put their tails between their legs. They are simply on guard, watchful, mistrustful. Is not all this woman?"
"Possibly," I answered, with a painful effort to a.s.sume indifference.
"A woman intuitively knows who is her friend and who is her enemy--so long, at least, as her heart is not engaged; then she runs wild, I allow. A woman---- But I need not pursue the parallel. Besides, perhaps it is scarcely to the point, for my object is not to bolster up an absurd contention that all women have the souls of cats. No; but I have met women so strangely like cats that their souls have, as I said before souls do, coloured their bodies in actions. They have had the very look of cats in their faces. They have moved like them. Their demeanour has been patently and strongly feline. Now, I see nothing ridiculous in the a.s.sumption that such women"s bodies may contain souls--in process of development, of course--that formerly were merely cat souls, but that are now gaining humanity gradually, are working their way upwards in the scale. After all, we are not so much above the animals, and in our lapses we often become merely animals. The soul retrogrades for the moment."
He paused again and looked at me. I was biting my lips, and my gla.s.s of wine was untouched. He took my agitation as a compliment, I suppose, for he smiled and said:
"Are you in process of conversion?"
I half shook my head. Then I said, with an effort: "It is a curious and interesting idea, of course. But there is much to explain. Now, I should like to ask you this: Do you--do you believe that a soul, if it pa.s.ses on as you think, carries its memory with it, its memory of former loves and--and hates? Say that a cat"s soul goes to a woman"s body, and that the cat has been--has been--well, tortured--possibly killed, by someone--say some man, long ago, would the woman, meeting that man, remember and shrink from him?"
"That is a very interesting and curious problem, and one which I do not pretend to have solved. I can, therefore, only suggest what might be, what seems to me reasonable.
"I do not believe that the woman would remember positively, but I think she might have an intuition about the man. Our intuitions are, perhaps, sometimes only the fragmentary recollections of our souls, of what formerly happened to them when in other bodies. Why, otherwise, should we sometimes conceive an ardent dislike of some stranger--charming to all appearance--of whom we know no evil, whom we have never heard of nor met before? Intuitions, so called, are often only tattered memories.
And these intuitions might, I should fancy, be strengthened, given body, robustness, by a.s.sociations--of place, for example. Cats become intensely attached to localities, to certain spots, a particular house or garden, a particular fireside, apart from the people who may be there. Possibly, if the man and the woman of whom you speak could be brought together in the very place where the torture arid death occurred, the dislike of the woman might deepen into positive hatred.
It would, however, be always unreasoning hatred, I think, and even quite unaccountable to herself. Still----"
But here Lord Melchester rose from the table. The conversations broke into fragments. I felt that I was pale to the lips.
We pa.s.sed into the drawing-room. The ladies were grouped together at one end, near the piano. Margot was among them. She was, as usual, dressed in white, and round the bottom of her gown there was an edging of snow-white fur. As we came in, she moved away from the piano to a sofa at some distance, and sank down upon it. Professor Black, who had entered the room at my side, seized my arm gently.
"Now, that lady," he whispered in my ear--"I don"t know who she may be, but she is intensely cat-like. I observed it before dinner. Did you notice the way she moved just then--the soft, yielding, easy manner in which she sat down, falling at once, quite naturally, into a charming pose? And her china-blue eyes are----"
"She is my wife, Professor," I interrupted harshly.
He looked decidedly taken aback.
"I beg your pardon; I had no idea. I did not enter the drawing-room to-night till after you arrived. I believed that lady was one of my fellow-guests in the house. Let me congratulate you. She is very beautiful."
And then he mingled rather hastily in the group near the piano.
The man is mad, I know--mad as a hatter on one point, like so many clever men. He sees the animal in every person he meets just because his preposterous theory inclines him to do so. Having given in his adherence to it, he sees facts not as they are, but as he wishes them to be; but he shall not carry me with him. The theory is his, not mine. It does not hold water for a moment. I can laugh at it now, but that night I confess it did seize me for the time being. I could scarcely talk; I found myself watching Margot with a terrible intentness, and I found myself agreeing with the Professor to an extent that made me marvel at my own previous blindness.
There was something strangely feline about the girl I had married--the soft, white girl who was becoming terrible to me, dear though she still was and must always be. Her movements had the subtle, instinctive and certain grace of a cat"s. Her cushioned step, which had often struck me before, was like the step of a cat. And those china-blue eyes! A sudden cold seemed to pa.s.s over me as I understood why I had recognised them when I first met Margot. They were the eyes of the animal I had tortured, the animal I had killed. Yes, but that proved nothing, absolutely nothing. Many people had the eyes of animals--the soft eyes of dogs, the furtive, cruel eyes of tigers. I had known such people. I had even once had an affair with a girl who was always called the shot partridge, because her eyes were supposed to be like those of a dying bird. I tried to laugh to myself as I remembered this. But I felt cold, and my senses seemed benumbed as by a great horror. I sat like a stone, with my eyes fixed upon Margot, trying painfully to read into her all that the words of Professor Black had suggested to me--trying, but with the wish not to succeed. I was roused by Lady Melchester, who came toward me asking me to do something, I forget now what. I forced myself to be cheerful, to join in the conversation, to seem at my ease; but I felt like one oppressed with nightmare, and I could scarcely withdraw my eyes from the sofa where my wife was sitting. She was talking now to Professor Black, who had just been introduced to her; and I felt a sudden fury in my heart as I thought that he was perhaps dryly, coldly, studying her, little knowing what issues--far-reaching, it might be, in their consequences--hung upon the truth or falsehood of his strange theory. They were talking earnestly, and presently it occurred to me that he might be imbuing Margot with his pernicious doctrines, that he might be giving her a knowledge of her own soul which now she lacked.
The idea was insupportable. I broke off abruptly the conversation in which I was taking part, and hurried over to them with an impulse which must have astonished anyone who took note of me. I sat down on a chair, drew it forward almost violently, and thrust myself in between them.
"What are you two talking about?" I said, roughly, with a suspicious glance at Margot.
The Professor looked at me in surprise.
"I was instructing your wife in some of the mysteries of salmon-fishing," he said. "She tells me you have a salmon-river running through your grounds."
I laughed uneasily.
"So you are a fisherman as well as a romantic theorist!" I said, rather rudely. "How I wish I were as versatile! Come, Margot, we must be going now. The carriage ought to be here."
She rose quietly and bade the Professor good-night; but as she glanced up at me, in rising, I fancied I caught a new expression in her eyes.
A ray of determination, of set purpose, mingled with the gloomy fire of their despair.