"Take any hack and come at once," was the message that concluded their conversation, and Virdow came! In the impulsive continental style, he threw himself into Edward's arms when the latter opened the door of the carriage.
Slender, his thin black clothes hanging awkwardly upon him, his trousers too short, the breadth of his round German face, the knobs on his shining bald forehead exaggerated by the puffy gathering of the hair over his ears, his candid little eyes shining through the round, double-power glasses, his was a figure one had to know for a long time in order to look upon it without smiling.
Long the two sat with their cigars and ran over the old days together. Then the professor told of wondrous experiments in sound, of the advance knowledge into the regions of psychology, of the marvels of heredity. His old great theme was still his ruling passion. "If the mind has no memory, then much of the phenomena of life is worse than bewildering. Prove its memory," he was wont to say, "and I will prove immortality through that memory."
It was the same old professor. He was up now and every muscle working as he struggled and gesticulated, and wrote invisible hieroglyphics in the air about him and made geometrical figures with palms and fingers. But the professor had advanced in speculation.
"The time will come, my young friend," he said at last, "when the mind will give us its memories complete. We shall learn the secrets of creation by memory. In its perfection we shall place a man yonder and by vibration get his mind memory to work; theoretically he will first write of his father and then his grandfather, describing their mental lives. He will go back along the lines of his ancestry. He will get into Latin, then Greek, then Hebrew, then Chaldean, then into cuneiform inscriptions, then into figure representation. He will be an artist or musician or sculptor, and possibly all if the back trail of his memory crosses such talents. Aye," he continued, enthusiastically, "lost nations will live again. The portraits of our ancestors will hang in view along the corridors of all times! This will come by vibratory force, but how?"
Edward leaned forward, breathless almost with emotion.
"You say the time is come; what has been done?"
"Little and much! The experiments——"
"Tell me, in all your experiments, have you known where a child, separated from a parent since infancy, without aid of description, or photograph, or information derived from a living person, could see in memory or imagination the face of that parent, see it with such distinctness as to enable him, an artist, to reproduce it in all perfection?"
The professor wiped his glasses nervously and kept his gaze upon his questioner.