“Foedric is a scholar,” said Thorwald, “and is engaged just now in writing a treatise on the color of sounds.”
This announcement was a double surprise, for we would have said, if he was writing anything, that it must be something about ballooning—the application of electricity to flying machinery, perhaps. But Thorwald further enlightened us, the talk going on in Foedric’s presence:
“He was attracted to that subject by the fact that he possesses in a striking degree the faculty of hearing color, which belongs only to refined minds. We all have this power to some extent, but in this, as in so many other things, there are great differences among us. As an example of this power, if you will excuse me, Doctor, I will tell you that your voice is dark blue, while yours,” he continued, turning to me, “is yellow. Foedric, a true son of Mars, speaks red, and as for Zenith, her soft, pink voice has always been to me one of her principal charms, and though it would be folly to deny that she has changed some in appearance (not for the worse, however) since I first knew her, her voice has retained the same tone or color. I will ask Foedric if I am correct in my impressions.”
“Quite correct,” answered Foedric. “When I first heard your friend, the doctor, speak I thought his voice was brown, but it has changed since to such an extent that I think as you do—that the prevailing tinge is a deep blue. Such cases are not unknown among us, but they are not frequent.”
“If the color of my voice sympathizes with my thoughts,” said the doctor, “I do not wonder that your quick ears have noticed a change.”
“I ought to say,” resumed Foedric, “that I have to rely on my friends to tell me the shade of my own voice, for to my ears it is as colorless as a piece of the clearest glass, and this is the common experience.”
“I would like to ask about the color of Antonia’s voice,” I said, “and Avis’s, too.”
“Antonia’s is a beautiful green,” answered Foedric, looking with a smile at the fair one, “and Avis, both in song and speech, has your color—yellow.”
“Foedric,” said Thorwald, “tell our friends what you and others are trying to discover in connection with the air vibrations. It may be suggestive to them.”
“I can claim but little part in the work,” Foedric responded, “but it is this. Our ears report to our brain the air waves until they reach a frequency of forty thousand in a second, and we call the sensation sound. When the vibrations of the ether are more rapid than that, we have no sense with which to receive the impression until they reach the great number of four hundred million millions in a second. Then they affect the eye and produce red light, and as they increase still more the color becomes orange, then yellow, green, blue, and violet. Perhaps your limitations are not the same as ours, but our scientists are trying to discover some means by which we can arrest and make use of a small part at least of those waves which strike our bodies at a frequency between forty thousand and four hundred million millions. It is still an unsolved problem, this search for another sense, and we are now looking forward for help in the task to the studies of the civilization represented in our comet.”