XXVI
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.”