Peregrine crossed to the table, mounted it, and peered through the slit. The storm had spent itself. The world lay in still whiteness without. Overhead the sky was star-sprinkled, powdered with myriads of waking eyes. Peregrine felt strange comfort in their watchfulness.
CHAPTER XX
VIBRATIONS
TIME being the panacea for most ills as we are told, so we may well regard custom as the panacea for most distastes. It is certain it proved a panacea for Peregrine’s. Active dislike being presently dulled to indifference, interest anon awakened.
You cannot long remain in the company of an ardent believer without receiving some touch of his beliefs, be they in God, the Devil, or himself. Menippus believed in the two last, more particularly in himself, being fully persuaded that while the Devil lent him some little aid he could most readily have dispensed with his services altogether, have relied entirely upon his own power. Doubtless the Devil, his master, being most politic, endorsed this theory, the while he laughed in his sleeve.
Peregrine, exceeding open to influences, sucked up the mental atmosphere around him as a sponge sucks up water. He had no notion of his own tendency. An’ he had, he might have been the better on his guard, though here a man’s own skill is of little avail, he needs truly to put on the armour of light, as the Scriptures have it.
Being permeated, then, with the atmosphere, he lost his distaste, found interest awakening. This latter was small wonder: an’ you had conquered dislike there is little doubt that attraction would follow. There was mystery enough in the Sage’s doings to stir curiosity, marvel enough to carry one forward, and a certain matter-of-fact exactitude, withal, which threw any hint of pure charlatanism aside, forced reality to the front, even while it brought dread with it.
At the first he merely instilled certain teachings. Here are some of them.
“Vibration,” he said, elaborating on the outline he had formerly given Peregrine, “is the first law to study. There is no single thing in the universe which does not emit vibrations,—matter, colour, light, and sound. To comprehend the whole riddle of life is but to attune oneself to the reception of these vibrations, and interpret them rightly. Like rushes to like. To make my meaning clearer, sound—the crash of a falling tree for example—emits vibrations to the ether. They travel across it till they reach some instrument attuned to receive them. Such is the normal human ear within a normal distance of the falling tree. The vibrations lessen in force the further they travel. Beyond a certain distance the physical ear is not sufficiently sensitive to receive them. But it is only on their reception by the instrument that the sound becomes interpreted in terms of fact. To an ear beyond the normal distance of sensing the vibrations, there would be no sound, because of the lack of its sensitiveness in receiving and recording them as they weaken. This would not prove their non-existence in the ether, but merely the defect in the instrument which might have received them. Have you followed me?”
Peregrine frowning somewhat, but not uninterested, made known that he had done so.