With characteristic impetuosity the two young men had thrown themselves heart and soul into their new enterprise. They haunted police courts and places of entertainment. They lived for a while in a great industrial center; they listened to the hoa.r.s.e, tragic undernote of the millions underneath. They made their bow at the reception of a d.u.c.h.ess, and spent a whole Bank Holiday dancing upon Hampstead Heath. These and many other phases of life they had encountered with an amus.e.m.e.nt, in Powers" case partly genuine, in Trowse"s wholly tolerant. For all the time they kept strenuously in view their real end. They wanted to understand the causes of all that they saw; they wanted to discover laws.
The end of their enterprise came suddenly. A disaster in his family left Trowse unexpectedly poor. It was necessary for him to take at once some wage-earning position. The two young men parted, curiously enough, without regret. Powers, though no sentimentalist, possessed his due share of the affections, had an innate love for the beautiful, and a longing for a catholic and universal understanding of his fellows. Where Trowse would gaze with unmoved face, and pursue his calm calculations, Powers could only peer with barely veiled horror. They held together through those three years of unorthodox study, but toward the end of it they had drawn wide apart. Trowse entered the ranks of his profession a man of steel, without nerves or sentiment or pity. Powers, with his fuller understanding of life, had no longer any desire for a regular career. Possessed of ample means, the necessity for it had never existed. He left England almost at once, and entered upon a somewhat restless but comprehensive scheme of travel.
At last, shortly after his return home, one afternoon fate cast into his way on the Edgware Road the very subject that he sought. It was in the fringe of a city fog; the sky was heavy with clouds, the pavements were sloppy with recent rains; the broad thoroughfare was almost deserted when there glided by him the figure of a woman who held herself with a distinction oddly at variance with her shabby clothes. There was in her eyes the look of one in extremity--of a woman who had none of the ordinary fear of death and who would dare great things to pa.s.s from the evil place in which fate had set her to even a momentary draft from the cup of life.
Sir Powers Fiske approached her. His eyes held hers--they were bright with a certain steely radiance. She felt her heart beating fast, the noise of the traffic beyond seemed to her to come from some distance. He spoke to her, and her eyes which mirrored dark months lost resentment after a moment and seemed to understand.
They gazed steadfastly at one another--something greater than their surroundings, greater even than themselves seemed to pa.s.s between them.
With swift intelligence, she felt him to be no more a boulevardier than she was light. He murmured a few conventionalities and when he asked her to have tea with him she accepted. Inside the warm little tea-room, he told her of his work and of himself, and once secure in the knowledge of the mere unit of humanity she represented to him, she told him of herself. The human note was strong in all she said, and he declared in all her talk the marks of a cultured intellect that must have rendered beyond endurance the shoddy environment of a draper"s establishment where she pa.s.sed her days. He offered her the means of escape from her present slavery by becoming his subject for experiment and she did not shrink. On her own testimony she stood alone in the world and upon her sudden removal from her present life there would be no one with even the right to search for her. He looked into her frail beautiful face marveling at the depth of misery which produced this brave despair and rising held out his hand.
"I must thank you very much for your society--and for your confidence,"
he said, "I have your address and I will write to you."
To-night he was in a curiously disturbed mood. All the evening Eleanor Surtoes had figured in his thoughts. He had seen her several times since that first meeting on the Edgware Road. She was one of the more tragic figures in that world which he had spent so much strenuous effort seeking to understand. The possibilities in connection with her loomed large in his imagination. He was oppressed with fears which were altogether new to him. Fortune could never have provided him with a human creature modeled more exactly according to his requirements. He knew her life and the ways of it. The confidence which he felt as to her ultimate decision was not exaggerated. She would come to him for an explanation of his words, and she would accept his proposition. Yet never since his idea had first begun to loom large in his thoughts did he look upon it with less enthusiasm than at this moment. A few hours ago he had written to her--asked her to spend a day upon the river with him. He knew that she would come. The crisis was close at hand. He hoped to be able to delay it.
The door was quietly opened. His servant stood upon the threshold.
"There is a young lady asking for you, Sir Powers--the name, I believe, is Surtoes."
"Show her in at once."
The man bowed. A moment later he ushered Eleanor in. Her hat was beaten about with wind and rain, even her hair was disordered. She was breathless with rapid walking, her cheeks were wet, and the raindrops hung about her clothes. Powers held out his hand and drew her toward the fire.
"So you have come to see me," he said, in a tone as nearly matter-of-fact as he could make it. "I am delighted! I was just looking forward to a lonely and a particularly dull evening."
He wheeled an easy chair to the fire, and placed her in it. He saw that she was nervous and embarra.s.sed, and he continued to talk.
"To-night," he said, "is one of the most horrible instances of our marvelous climate. I had just written to ask you to have a day upon the river with me. Imagine it."
She smiled, and the color began to reappear in her cheeks.
"I want you, please, to tell me the exact truth," she said. "My coming here, I know, is very foolish. I want to know whether it inconveniences you in any way--whether your mother or any one else might think it strange?"
He laughed rea.s.suringly.
"Mine is entirely a bachelor establishment," he declared. "My mother and sister live in Berkeley Square. There is no one here to whom your visit would be even a subject of remark."
She gave a little sigh of relief, and leaned back in her chair. The warmth and comfort of the room after that dreary walk through the rain and hail outside were like a strong, sweet sedative. A curious sense of rest, of finality, took possession of her. With the closing of the front door, with the first breath of that air of indefinable luxury which everywhere pervaded her new surroundings, she seemed to pa.s.s into a new order of things. There had been a single moment of breathless excitement, of trembling speculation as to the nature of his greeting, but his welcome had been so easy and natural that her fears had been all dispelled by his first few words.
"It is perhaps very foolish of me to come here," she said, "but I have never quite forgotten what you said to me in the tea-room. It was probably nonsense. If so, please tell me, and let me go."
His brows went up in vague surprise; then ignoring her words, he lighted a cigarette, and stood thoughtfully puffing it, his elbow resting on the broad oaken mantelpiece.
"I must tell you something more about myself," he said, presently. "It chanced that when I was at Calcutta several years ago, I met a native Indian doctor to whom I was fortunate enough to be of some service. My meeting with this man was the most wonderful thing which has ever happened to me. I shall never cease to be grateful to him. If the world knew his name and what he has made possible to science, he would be the most famous man of this or any generation. He reawakened all my old interest in my profession."
His pale face had become fervid, the bright light of the enthusiast was burning in his dark eyes. Eleanor felt that she had become once more only a unit in his eyes, a mere atom of humanity, whose interest to him was purely scientific and impersonal. She found herself trembling. What had these things to do with her? She was afraid of what might come. She remembered that he had spoken of death.
"Oh, that wonderful East," he continued, in a low tone. "How puny it makes us feel with our new civilization, our shoddiness, our materialism, which is only another name for hopeless ignorance. What treasures of art lie buried there, what strange secrets sleep forever in the tombs of their wise men. Halkar told me that he was but the disciple of one immeasurably greater, who had died, indeed, with many of the primal secrets of existence locked in his bosom because there was no one left behind with whom he dared to trust them."
"Tell me about these secrets," Eleanor said. "Were they of the past, or of the future? And what have you or I to do with them?"
"We are children of the ages," he answered, "and it is our heritage to learn. Halkar taught me much. He set me down at the gate of that wonderful inner world. He placed in my hands the key. With your aid, it is possible that I may pa.s.s inside."
"With my aid!" Eleanor exclaimed breathlessly. "How can that be? What could I do?"
He smiled at her, and Eleanor felt again that vague fear stirring in her heart.
"One day Halkar took me to a native village. We went to the house of a rich man. We found him at home, just returned from hunting. He was handsome, hospitable, and, it seemed to me, intelligent. But just before we left Halkar asked him a question about the great storm which laid waste the village and the whole countryside only a year before. He looked puzzled, answered us courteously, but vaguely. He remembered nothing."
He paused.
"There was an English nurse-girl," he continued. "Halkar took me to see her. She was plump, rosy, and good-natured. She was engaged to be married to a gentleman"s servant, and she chattered away gaily, and told me all about it. A year before a mad fakir had run amuck, had killed a soldier to whom she was to have been married the next day, and both the children who had been in her charge. The shock had nearly sent her mad.
Yet when Halkar spoke to her of these things she looked puzzled. She remembered nothing."
"Well?" Eleanor asked.
"Their memory," he said slowly, "was gone. Their reason was saved.
Halkar was the physician."
She shivered, and sat looking into the fire with eyes full of fear.
"Halkar," he said, "had learned much, but there was more still. It has taken me many years, but at last I believe that I have learned the secret which baffled him all his days. All that I need is a subject."
There was a short, tense silence. Eleanor sat quite still, nervously clasping and unclasping her hands, her eyes steadfastly fixed upon the fire. He watched her covertly.
"You know so little of me," she murmured, "I am almost a stranger to you. How can you tell whether I should be suitable--even if I were willing?"
"You will remember the two cases which I have mentioned to you," he answered. "The man was chosen by Halkar because in the great storm he had lost wife, and friends, and children, and in his grief he prayed for forgetfulness. The girl was chosen because the tragedy which she had witnessed had driven her far along the road to madness, and this merciful loss of memory was her salvation, also. The reason you have been chosen is because I looked into your eyes, and it seemed to me that I saw there more than the ordinary weariness of life. Then I heard you speak, and in your tone, too, was more than the ordinary bitterness of misfortune. Listen, I will tell you more. I will tell you what as yet I have not breathed to a living soul."
She caught his enthusiasm--a fierce, compelling thing.
"You are a Christian?" he asked.
"I have tried to be," she faltered.
"You believe, at least, in the eternity of human life? You must believe in it. In nature there is no death, no annihilation. All that takes place is trans.m.u.tation! That is obvious," he declared.
"Well?"
"So in human life! The body rots; the spirit pa.s.ses--where?"
He continued with scarcely a moment"s pause:
"Down the broad avenues of time, to appear in a thousand different forms and shapes. A king in one age is a serf in another, a savage this century is a scholar in the next. Has there never been a moment in your life when a sense of unreality has seized you? You doubt for a moment your own ident.i.ty, you are haunted by miragelike thoughts, beautiful, or sad; you are strangely out of touch with your surroundings. Watch a great concourse of people. It is the most fascinating thing in the world.
"You will see a beggar who has now and then some trick of carriage or gesture or speech which has survived his body"s degradation, and which reminds you of a king. Or you will see one of the great ones of the earth, if you watch closely enough, do some small thing, or speak some chance word which has crept out unheeded, very likely repeated, yet which could have no kinship with his present state.
"There are people who have visited a strange country for the first time in their lives, and found there a street-corner, a shop, or byway which has awakened a peculiar and inexplicable sense of familiarity. They have never been there before, never read of the place, yet the sense of familiarity is there. I have seen a boy fall asleep, and heard him croon an old Mexican war-song, a song of the time of Cortez and the Incas, in an almost forgotten language--a boy who awake is a messenger at a draper"s, unimaginative, ignorant, stupid. The secret of these things will one day be yielded up to science. You and I together may become immortal."