“But why have you kept it a secret? It would have made you famous.”
“I have had many reasons for keeping it a secret. You yourself have named one of them: it is a terrible power. I have not thought it prudent as yet to put it into the hands of the faculty at large; but it will be published after, if not before, my death.”
“You say you can do this. Have you ever done it?”
“Upon a human being—no. Upon animals—upon dogs, monkeys, and horses—yes; often, and with unvarying success.”
“Animals, indeed!” She smiled. “But never upon a human being. It is a descent from the sublime to the grotesque. You are anxious to obtain a subject?”
“I will not deny that I should be glad to obtain a subject, if it pleases you to put it in that downright way. I have never performed the operation upon a human being; but I can predict with absolute assurance just what its consequences upon a human being would be.”
“Let me hear your prediction.”
“Well, to begin with, let me tell you the circumstances of an actual case, which came under my observation, where the thing happened accidentally. The patient was a Frenchman, thirty-two years old, in robust health. I think, from the point of view of morals, he was the most depraved wretch it was ever my bad fortune to encounter. He was a brute, a sot, a liar, a thief—a bad lot all round. I chanced to know a good deal about him, because he was the husband of a servant in my family. The affair occurred more than thirty years ago. I say he was a depraved wretch. What does that mean? It means that, like every mother's son of us, he came into this world a bundle of potentialities, of latent spiritual potentialities, inherited from his million or more of ancestors, some of these potentialities being for good, others of them for evil; and it means that his environment had been such, and had so acted upon him, as to develop those that were for evil, and to leave dormant those that were for good. That wants to be borne in mind. Very well. He was the husband of a servant in my family, a most respectable and virtuous woman, also French, who would have nothing to do with him; but whom it was his pleasantest amusement to torment by hanging around our house, seeking to waylay her when she went abroad, striving to gain admittance when she was within doors. Late one evening we above stairs were surprised by the noise of a disturbance in the kitchen: a man's voice, a woman's voice, loud in altercation. I hurried down to learn the occasion of it. Halfway there, my ears were startled by the sudden short sound of a pistol-shot, followed by dead silence. I entered the kitchen, but arrived a moment too late. Our woman servant stood in the centre of the floor, holding a smoking revolver in her hand. Her husband lay prostrate, unconscious, perhaps dead, at her feet. I demanded an explanation. It appeared that he had stolen into the kitchen, where his wife sat alone, and, coming upon her suddenly, had attempted to abduct and carry her off by main force. The foolish woman confessed that some days before she had bought herself a pistol, with a view to just such an emergency as this; and now she had used it. Well, I examined the man, and I found, to my great relief, that he was not dead, and that, she being but an indifferent marks-woman, the ball had not even entered his body. It had struck him on the head at an oblique angle, and had glanced off. However, it had injured him quite seriously enough, having, indeed, fractured his skull at a certain point. We carried him upstairs, and put him to bed. For upwards of sixty hours—nearly three days—he lay in total unconsciousness. For six weeks he lay in a stupor just a hair's breadth removed from total unconsciousness; but by-and-by his wound had healed, and he was convalescent. Now, however, what was his mental condition? Precisely that of a new-born baby! His memory had been utterly destroyed. He had forgotten the simplest primary functions of life: how to speak, how to eat, how to walk, how to use his fingers. He could not remember his name; he could not recognise his wife. He had all the lessons of experience to learn anew. But you must recollect that, being an adult, his brain, as an organ, was full-grown, was mature. Therefore, he acquired knowledge with astonishing rapidity—learning almost as much in a fortnight as a child learns in a year. At the end of one month after we began his education, he could walk, feed himself, dress himself, and was beginning to talk. At the end of six months he spoke as fluently as I do—English, mind you, not French, which had been his mother-tongue. At the end of a year he read without difficulty, and wrote a good hand. What was most remarkable, however, though entirely natural, his moral nature had undergone a complete transformation. In a new environment, treated with kindness, surrounded by wholesome influences, 'trained up in the way he should go,' and absolutely oblivious of every fact, event, circumstance, and association of his past, he became a new, another, an entirely different man. Now, of the million spiritual potentialities, predispositions, that heredity had implanted in him, those that made for good were vivified, those that made for bad left dormant. He was as decent and as honest a fellow as one could wish to meet, and he had plenty of intelligence and common sense. I kept him in my service, as a sort of general factotum, for more than twenty years; then he died. Before his death he made a will, bequeathing to me the only thing of especial value that he had to leave behind him. Here it is.”
I unlocked a cabinet, and produced from it a skull.
“Let me see it,” she said eagerly.