At dinner, no doubt as a concession to the keen curiosity Helen had shown in regard to Mr. Wygram, she was taken in by him. Further acquaintance did but add to the interest he excited in her. Little passed between them that average people could have laid hold of as definitely enlarging the boundaries of human knowledge, but Helen felt all the same that her approach to certain subjects whose importance and value she could but vaguely surmise would from now on be more practical, more scientific, more expert.
“How far do you think it possible,” she ventured to ask, “for one mind, or for a group of minds, to act subconsciously upon the mind of another person, without coming into direct contact with it, in order to control its actions?”
“An interesting speculation!” Wygram spoke with the simple candor of one very much a master of his subject. “I think myself the science—and as one happens to know, a dark and terrible science it is, which the East has already brought to an uncanny perfection—of imposing one’s will upon the will of another is being developed to a point which threatens some very ugly developments.”
“That is just what one feels oneself,” said Helen.
“Only the other day,” said Wygram, “I was called in by the New York police to help in a terrible case which has made a great impression over there. It was that of a man, otherwise presumably sane, who committed a perfectly senseless and illogical crime because a deadly enemy, an expert practitioner of the new science, had been able to tamper with the mind of that man subconsciously while he slept.”
“How dreadful!”
Wygram agreed that the speculations opened up by a fact so sinister were not pleasant. “The whole world is on the down grade,” he said. “Man has played things up too high. For many years he has been dealing with unclean things—subtle poisons, high explosives, black magic. But to my mind this new science which has come out of the East is the worst of all, because it is by far the most elusive.”
“Can it be used, do you suppose, on a large scale?”
“The fear is that it can be,” said Wygram, “and that it will be. An unlucky signalman the other day at Hellington had a lapse of memory. The London express ran into a goods train that was being shunted out of a siding. Such a thing, in normal circumstances, should never occur. By reason of it, sixteen people were killed and sixty-eight injured. Among the killed were the Chancellor of the Exchequer and a Judge of the High Court. Accident, says the world. A rub of the green, say the directors of the railway company. Fate, say the newspapers. Call it what you will, but at the point the perverted mind of man has now reached, who shall say what the real cause was? Perhaps a certain very distinguished Chinese thinker now in this country might be able to throw a new light on a terrible occurrence.” At the look of horror in the eyes of the woman at his side, Wygram paused. “Mind you,” he said, “one does not for a moment accept all the implications that such a theory may open up. Let the possibility be advanced just for what it is worth. And I think”—his voice grew very gentle—“it would have been kinder, and perhaps wiser, not to have advanced such a possibility at all.”
“Your studies have made you pessimistic,” said Helen, hoping this was a straw to which she might cling.