The Pools of Silence

by H. De Vere Stacpoole

Dr. Paul Quincy Adams, one of the representatives of America at the lectures of Thénard, 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 café 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 passed 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 muffing of the glass; 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 Japanese 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 Thénard.

Thénard 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 glass 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.