Austin and His Friends

by Frederic Henry Balfour

"Novels!" exclaimed Austin scornfully. "How can people read novels, when there are so many other books in the world?"

"Well, what have you been reading, then?" enquired St Aubyn, lighting a cigarette.

"I've been dipping into one of the most puzzling, fascinating, bothering books I ever came across," replied Austin, following his example. "I mean 'The Garden of Cyrus,' by Sir Thomas Browne. I can't follow him a bit, and yet, somehow, he drags me along with him. All that about the quincunx is most baffling. He seems to begin with the arrangement of a garden, and then to lead one on through a maze of arithmetical progressions till one finds oneself landed in a mystical philosophy of life and creation, and I don't know what all. If I could only understand him better I should probably enjoy him more."

St Aubyn smiled. "Well, of course, it all sounds very fanciful," he said. "One must read him as one reads all those curious old mediæval authors, who are full of pseudo-science and theories based on fables. His great charm to me is his style, which is singularly rich and chaste. But I've no doubt whatever, myself, that a great deal of this ancient lore, which we have been accustomed to regard as so much sciolism, not to say pure nonsense, had a germ of truth in it, and that truth I believe we are gradually beginning to re-discover. You see, one mustn't always take the formulas employed by these old writers in their literal sense. Many were purely symbolic, and concealed occult meanings. Now the philosopher's stone, to take a familiar example, was not a stone at all. The word was no more than a symbol, and covered a search for one of the great secrets—the origin of life, or the nature of matter, or the attainment of immortality. They seem to us to have taken a very roundabout route in their investigations, but their object was often very much the same as that of every chemist and biologist of the present day. Take alchemy, again, which is supposed by people generally to have been nothing but an attempt to turn the baser metals into gold. According to the Rosicrucians, who may be supposed to have known something about it, alchemy was the science of guiding the invisible processes of life for the purpose of attaining certain results in both the physical and spiritual spheres. Chemistry deals with inanimate substances, alchemy with the principle of life itself. The highest aim of the alchemist was the evolution of a divine and immortal being out of a mortal and semi-animal man; the development, in short, of all those hidden properties which lie latent in man's nature."

"That is a very valuable thing to know," observed Austin, greatly interested. "Every day I live, the more I realise the truth that everything we see is on the surface, and that there's a whole world of machinery—I can't think of a better term—working at the back of it. It's like a clock. The face and the hands are all we see, but it's the works inside that we can't see that make it go."

"Excellently put," returned St Aubyn. "There are influences and forces all round us of which we only notice the effects, and how far these forces are intelligent is a very curious question. I see nothing unscientific myself in the hypothesis that they may be."

"I wonder!" exclaimed Austin. "Do you know—I have had some very funny experiences myself lately, that can't be explained on any other ground that I can think of. The first occurred the very day that I was here first. Would you mind if I told you about them? Would it bother you very much?"

"On the contrary! I shall listen with the greatest interest, I assure you," replied St Aubyn, with a smile.

So Austin began at the beginning, and gave his friend a clear, full, circumstantial account of the three occurrences which had made so deep an impression on his mind. The story of the bricks riveted the attention of his hearer, who questioned him closely about a number of significant details; then he went on to the incident of Aunt Charlotte's proposed journey, the mysterious warning he had received, and the desperate measures to which he had been driven to keep her from going out. St Aubyn shouted with laughter as Austin gravely described how he had locked her up in her bedroom, and how lustily she had banged and screamed to be released before it was too late to catch the train. The sequel seemed to astonish him, and he fell into a musing silence.

"You tell your story remarkably well," he said at last, "and I don't mind confessing that the abnormal character of the whole thing strikes me as beyond question. Any attempt to explain such sequences by the worn-out old theory of imagination or coincidence would be manifestly futile. Such coincidences, like miracles, do not happen. Many things have happened that people call miracles, by which they mean a sort of divine conjuring-trick that is performed or brought about by violating or annihilating natural laws. That, of course, is absurd. Nothing happens but in virtue of natural laws, laws just as natural and inherent in the universal scheme of things as gravitation or the precession of the equinoxes, only outside our extremely limited knowledge of the universe. That, under certain conditions, such interpositions affecting physical organisms may be produced by invisible agencies is, in my view, eminently conceivable. It is purely a question of evidence."