Horror Stories Page 9

  What she saw seemed not quite to reach the height of the dressing-room door handle. Her eyes followed it down, down – widening and widening. Mine followed them – all the nerves of them seemed strained to the uttermost – and I almost saw – or did I quite see? I can’t be certain. But we all heard the long-drawn, quivering sigh. And to each of us it seemed to be breathed just behind us.

  It was I who caught up the candle – it dripped all over my trembling hand – and was dragged by Miss Eastwich to the girl who had fainted during the second extra. But it was the youngest of all whose lean arms were round the housekeeper when we turned away, and that have been round her many a time since, in the new home where she keeps house for the youngest of us.

  The doctor who came in the morning said that Mabel’s daughter had died of heart disease – which she had inherited from her mother. It was that that had made her faint during the second extra. But I have sometimes wondered whether she may not have inherited something from her father. I have never been able to forget the look on her dead face.

  The Five Senses

  Professor Boyd Thompson’s services to the cause of science are usually spoken of as inestimable, and so indeed they probably are, since in science, as in the rest of life, one thing leads to another, and you never know where anything is going to stop. At any rate, inestimable or not, they are world-renowned, and he with them. The discoveries which he gave to his time are a matter of common knowledge among biological experts, and the sudden ending of his experimental activities caused a few days’ wonder in even lay circles. Quite unintelligent people told each other that it seemed a pity, and persons on omnibuses exchanged commonplaces starred with his name.

  But the real meaning and cause of that ending have been studiously hidden, as well as the events which immediately preceded it. A veil has been drawn over all the things that people would have liked to know, and it is only now that circumstances so arrange themselves as to make it possible to tell the whole story. I propose to avail myself of this possibility.

  It will serve no purpose for me to explain how the necessary knowledge came into my possession; but I will say that the story was only in part pieced together by me. Another hand is responsible for much of the detail, and for a certain occasional emotionalism which is, I believe, wholly foreign to my own style. In my original statement of the following facts I dealt fully, as I am, I may say without immodesty, qualified to do, with all the scientific points of the narrative. But these details were judged, unwisely as I think, to be needless to the expert, and unintelligible to the ordinary reader, and have therefore been struck out; the merest hints have been left as necessary links in the story. This appears to me to destroy most of its interest, but I admit that the elisions are perhaps justified. I have no desire to assist or encourage callow students in such experiments as those by which Professor Boyd Thompson brought his scientific career to an end.

  Incredible as it may appear, Professor Boyd Thompson was once a little boy who wore white embroidered frocks and blue sashes; in that state he caught flies and pulled off their wings to find out how they flew. He did not find out, and Lucilla, his little girl-cousin, also in white frocks, cried over the dead, dismembered flies, and buried them in little paper coffins. Later, he wore a holland blouse with a belt of leather, and watched the development of tadpoles in a tin bath in the stable yard. A microscope was, on his eighth birthday, presented to him by an affluent uncle. The uncle showed him how to surprise the secrets of a drop of pond water, which, limpid to the eye, confessed under the microscope to a whole cosmogony of strenuous and undesirable careers. At the age of ten, Arthur Boyd Thompson was sent to a private school, its Head-master an acolyte of Science, who esteemed himself to be a high priest of Huxley and Tyndall, a devotee of Darwin. Thence to the choice of medicine as a profession was, when the choice was insisted on by the elder Boyd Thompson, a short, plain step. Inorganic chemistry failed to charm, and under the cloak of Medicine and Surgery the growing fever of scientific curiosity could be sated on bodies other than the cloak-wearer’s. He became a medical student and an enthusiast for vivisection.

  The bow of Apollo was not always bent. In a rest-interval, the summer vacation, to be exact, he met again the cousin – second, once removed – Lucilla, and loved her. They were betrothed. It was a long, bright summer full of sunshine, garden-parties, picnics, archery – a decaying amusement – and croquet, then coming to its own. He exulted in the distinction already crescent in his career, but some half-formed wholly-unconscious desire to shine with increased lustre in the eyes of the beloved, caused him to invite, for the holidays’ ultimate week, a fellow student, one who knew and could testify to the quality of the laurels already encircling the head of a young scientist. The friend came, testified, and in a vibrating interview under the lime-trees of Lucilla’s people’s garden, Mr Boyd Thompson learned that Lucilla never could, never would love or marry a vivisectionist.

  The moon hung low and yellow in the spacious calm of the sky; the hour was propitious, the lovers fond. Mr Boyd Thompson vowed that his scientific research should henceforth deal wholly with departments into which the emotions of the non-scientific cannot enter. He went back to London, and within the week bought four dozen frogs, twelve guinea-pigs, five cats, and a spaniel. His scientific aspirations met his love-longings, and did not fight them. You cannot fight beings of another world. He took part in a debate on ‘Blood Pressure’, which created some little stir in medical circles, spoke eloquently, and distinction surrounded him with a halo.

  He wrote to Lucilla three times a week, took his degree, and published that celebrated paper of his which set the whole scientific world by the ears, ‘The Action of Choline on the Nervous System’, I think its name was.

  Lucilla surreptitiously subscribed to a press-cutting agency for all snippets of print relating to her lover. Three weeks after the publication of that paper, which really was the beginning of Professor Boyd Thompson’s fame, she wrote to him from her home in Kent.

  ARTHUR – you have been doing it again. You know how I love you, and I believe you love me; but you must choose between loving me and torturing dumb animals. If you don’t choose right, then it’s goodbye, and God forgive you.

  Your Poor Lucilla, who loved you very dearly.

  He read the letter, and the human heart in him winced and whined. Yet not so deeply now, nor so loudly, but that he bethought himself to seek out a friend and pupil, who would watch certain experiments, attend to the cutting of certain sections, before he started for Tenterden, where she lived. There was no station at Tenterden in those days, but a twelve-mile walk did not dismay him.

  Lucilla’s home was one of those houses of brave proportions and an inalienable bourgeois stateliness, which stand back a little from the noble High Street of that most beautiful of Kentish towns. He came there pleasantly exercised, his boots dusty, and his throat dry, and stood on the snowy doorstep, beneath the Jacobean lintel. He looked down the wide, beautiful street, raised eyebrows and shrugged uneasy shoulders within his professional frock-coat.

  ‘It’s all so difficult,’ he said to himself.

  Lucilla received him in a drawing-room scented with last year’s rose leaves, and fresh with chintz that had been washed a dozen times. She stood, very pale and frail; her blonde hair was not teased into fluffiness, and rounded over the chignon of the period, but banded Madonna-wise, crowning her with heavy burnished plaits. Her gown was of white muslin, and round her neck black velvet passed, supporting a gold locket. He knew whose picture it held. The loose bell sleeves fell away from the slender arms with little black velvet bracelets, and she leaned one hand on a chiffonier of carved rosewood, on whose marble top stood, under a glass case, a Chinese pagoda, carved in ivory, and two Bohemian glass vases with medallions representing young women nursing pigeons. There were white curtains of darned net, in the fireplace white ravelled muslin spread a cascade brightened with threads of tinsel. A canary sang in a green cage, wainscoted with yello
w tarlatan, and two red rosebuds stood in lank specimen glasses on the mantelpiece.

  Every article of furniture in the room spoke eloquently of the sheltered life, the iron obstinacy of the well-brought-up.

  It was a scene that invaded his mental vision many a time, in the laboratory, in the lecture-room. It symbolised many things, all dear, and all impossible.

  They talked awkwardly, miserably. And always it came round to this same thing.

  ‘But you don’t mean it,’ he said, and at last came close to her.

  ‘I do mean it,’ she said, very white, very trembling, very determined.

  ‘But it’s my life,’ he pleaded, ‘it’s the life of thousands. You don’t understand.’

  ‘I understand that dogs are tortured. I can’t bear it.’

  He caught at her hand.

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘When I think what that hand does!’

  ‘Dearest,’ he said very earnestly, ‘which is the more important, a dog or a human being?’

  ‘They’re all God’s creatures,’ she flashed, unorthodoxly orthodox. ‘They’re all God’s creatures,’ with much more that he heard, and pitied, and smiled at miserably in his heart.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ he kept saying, stemming the flood of her rhetorical pleadings. ‘Spencer Wells alone has found out wonderful things, just with experiments on rabbits.’

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ she said, ‘I don’t want to hear.’

  The conventions of their day forbade that he should tell her anything plainly. He took refuge in generalities. ‘Spencer Wells, that operation he perfected, it’s restored thousands of women to their husbands – saved thousands of women for their children.’

  ‘I don’t care what he’s done – it’s wrong if it’s done in that way.’

  It was on that day that they parted, after more than an hour and more than two, of mutual misunderstood reiteration. He, she said, was brutal. And besides it was plain that he did not love her. To him, she seemed unreasonable, narrow, prejudiced, blind to the high ideals of the new science.

  ‘Then it’s goodbye,’ he said at last. ‘If I gave way, you’d only despise me. Because I should despise myself. It’s no good. Goodbye, dear.’

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said. ‘I know I’m right. You’ll know I am, some day.’

  ‘Never,’ he answered, more moved and in a more diffused sense than he had ever believed he could be. ‘I can’t set my pleasure in you against the good of the whole world.’

  ‘If that’s all you think of me,’ she said, and her silk and her muslin whirled from the room.

  He walked back to Staplehurst, thrilled with the conflict. The thrill died down, went out, and left as ashes a cold resolve.

  That was the end of Mr Boyd Thompson’s engagement.

  It was quite by accident that he made his greatest discovery. There are those who hold that all great discoveries are accident – or Providence. The terms are in this connection, interchangeable. He plunged into work to wash away the traces of his soul’s wounds, as a man plunges into water to wash off red blood. And he swam there, perhaps, a little blindly. The injection with which he treated that white rabbit was not compounded of the drugs he had intended to use. He could not lay his hand on the thing he wanted, and in that sort of frenzy of experiment, to which no scientific investigator is wholly a stranger, he cast about for a new idea. The thing that came to his hand was a drug that he had never in his normal mind intended to use – an unaccredited, wild, magic, medicine obtained by a missionary from some savage South Sea tribe and brought home as an example of the ignorance of the heathen.

  And it worked a miracle.

  He had been fighting his way through the unbending opposition of known facts, he had been struggling in the shadows, and this discovery was like the blinding light that meets a man’s eyes when his pickaxe knocks a hole in a dark cave, and he finds himself face to face with the sun. The effect was undoubted. Now it behoved him to make sure of the cause, to eliminate all those other factors to which that effect might have been due. He experimented cautiously, slowly. These things take years, and the years he did not grudge. He was never tired, never impatient; the slightest variations, the least indications, were eagerly observed, faithfully recorded.

  His whole soul was in his work, Lucilla was the one beautiful memory of his life. But she was a memory. The reality was this discovery, the accident, the Providence.

  Day followed day, all alike, and yet each taking, almost unperceived, one little step forward; or stumbling into sudden sloughs, those losses and lapses that take days and weeks to retrieve. He was Professor, and his hair was grey at the temples before his achievement rose before him, beautiful, inevitable, austere in its completed splendour, as before the triumphant artist rises the finished work of his art.

  He had found out one of the secrets with which Nature has crammed her dark hiding-places. He had discovered the hidden possibilities of sensation. In plain English, his researches had led him thus far; he had found – by accident or by Providence – the way to intensify sensation. Vaguely, incredulously, he had perceived his discovery; the rabbits and guinea-pigs had demonstrated it plainly enough. Then there was a night when he became aware that those results must be checked by something else. He must work out in marble the form he had worked out in clay. He knew that by this drug, which had, so to speak, thrust itself upon him, he could intensify the five senses of any of the inferior animals. Could he intensify those senses in man? If so, worlds beyond the grasp of his tired mind opened themselves before him. If so, he would have achieved a discovery, made a contribution to the science he had loved so well and followed at such a cost, a discovery equal to any that any man had ever made.

  Ferrier, and Leo, and Horsley; those he would outshine. Galileo, Newton, Harvey; he would rank with these.

  Could he find a human rabbit to submit to the test?

  The soul of the man Lucilla had loved, turned and revolted. No: he had experimented on guinea-pigs and rabbits, but when it came to experimenting on men, there was only one man on whom he chose to use his new-found powers. Himself.

  At least she would not have it to say that he was a coward, or unfair, when it came to the point of what a man could do and dare, could suffer and endure.

  His big laboratory was silent and deserted. His assistants were gone, his private pupils dispersed. He was alone with the tools of his trade. Shelf on shelf of smooth stoppered bottles, drugs and stains, the long bench gleaming with beakers, test tubes, and the glass mansions of costly apparatus. In the shadows at the far end of the room, where the last going assistant had turned off the electric lights, strange shapes lurked, wicker-covered carboys, kinographs, galvano-meters, the faintly threatening aspect of delicate complex machines all wires and coils and springs, the gaunt form of the pendulum myograph, and certain well-worn tables and copper troughs, for which the moment had no use.

  He knew that this drug with others, diversely compounded and applied, produced in animals an abnormal intensification of the senses; that it increased – nay, as it were magnified a thousandfold, the hearing, the sight, the touch – and he was almost sure, the senses of taste and smell. But of the extent of the increase he could form no exact estimate.

  Should he tonight put himself in the position of one able to speak on these points with authority? Or should he go to the Royal Society’s meeting, and hear that ass Netherby maunder yet once again about the Secretion of Lymph?

  He pulled out his notebook and laid it open on the bench. He went to the locked cupboard, unfastened it with the bright key that hung instead of seal or charm at his watch-chain. He unfolded a paper and laid it on the bench where no-one coming in could fail to see it. Then he took out little bottles, three, four, five, polished a graduated glass and dropped into it slow, heavy drops. A larger bottle yielded a medium in which all mingled. He hardly hesitated at all before turning up his sleeve and slipping the tiny needle into his arm. He pressed the end of the syringe. The injection wa
s made.

  Its effect, though not immediate, was sudden. He had to close his eyes, staggered indeed and was glad of the stool near him; for the drug coursed through him as a hunt in full cry might sweep over untrodden plains. Then suddenly everything seemed to settle; he was no longer the helpless scene of incredible meetings, but Professor Boyd Thompson who had injected a mixture of certain drugs, and was experiencing their effect.

  His fingers, still holding the glass syringe, sent swift messages to his brain. When he looked down at his fingers, he saw that what they grasped was the smooth, slender tube of clear glass. What he felt that they held was a tremendous cylinder, rough to the touch. He wondered, even at the moment, why, if his sense of touch were indeed magnified to this degree, everything did not appear enormous – his ring, his collar. He examined the new phenomenon with cold care. It seemed that only that was enlarged on which his attention, his mind, was fixed. He kept his hand on the glass syringe, and thought of his ring, got his mind away from the tube, back again in time to feel it small between his fingers, grow, increase, and become big once more.

  ‘So that’s a success,’ he said, and saw himself lay the thing down. It lay just in front of the rack of test tubes, to the eye just that little glass cylinder. To touch it was like a water-pipe on a house side, and the test tubes, when he touched them, like the pipes of a great organ.

  ‘Success,’ he said again, and mixed the antidote. For he had found the antidote in one of those flashes of intuition, imagination, genius, that light the ways of science as stars light the way of a ship in dark waters. The action of the antidote was enough for one night. He locked the cupboard, and, after all, was glad to listen to the maunderings of Netherby. It had been lonely there, in the atmosphere of complete success.

  One by one, day by day, he tested the action of his drugs on his other senses. Without being technical, I had perhaps better explain that the compelling drug was, in each case, one and the same. Its action was directed to this set of nerves or that by means of the other drugs mixed with it. I trust this is clear?