by E. Nesbit
‘What’s behind that door,’ said Wroxham, abruptly – ‘that door downstairs?’
‘Specimens,’ the doctor answered, ‘preserved specimens. My line is physiological research. You understand?’
So that was it.
‘I feel quite well, you know,’ said Wroxham, laboriously explaining – ‘fit as any man – only I can’t sleep.’
‘I see,’ said the doctor.
‘It’s the scent from your specimens, I think,’ Wroxham went on; ‘there’s something about that scent—’
‘Yes,’ said the doctor.
‘It’s very odd.’ Wroxham was leaning his elbow on his knee and his chin on his hand. ‘I feel so frightfully well – and yet – there’s a strange feeling—’
‘Yes,’ said the doctor. ‘Yes, tell me exactly what you feel.’
‘I feel,’ said Wroxham, slowly, ‘like a man on the crest of a wave.’
The doctor stood up. ‘You feel well, happy, full of life and energy – as though you could walk to the world’s end, and yet—’
‘And yet,’ said Roger, ‘as though my next step might be my last – as though I might step into my grave.’
He shuddered.
‘Do you,’ asked the doctor, anxiously – ‘do you feel thrills of pleasure – something like the first waves of chloroform – thrills running from your hair to your feet?’
‘I felt all that,’ said Roger, slowly, ‘downstairs before I opened the window.’
The doctor looked at his watch, frowned, and got up quickly. ‘There is very little time,’ he said.
Suddenly Roger felt an unexplained opposition stiffen his mind.
The doctor went to a long laboratory bench with bottle-filled shelves above it, and on it crucibles and retorts, test tubes, beakers – all a chemist’s apparatus – reached a bottle from a shelf, and measured out certain drops into a graduated glass, added water, and stirred it with a glass rod.
‘Drink that,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Roger, and as he spoke a thrill like the first thrill of the first chloroform wave swept through him, and it was a thrill, not of pleasure, but of pain. ‘No,’ he said, and ‘Ah!’ for the pain was sharp.
‘If you don’t drink,’ said the doctor, carefully, ‘you are a dead man.’
‘You may be giving me poison,’ Roger gasped, his hands at his heart.
‘I may,’ said the doctor. ‘What do you suppose poison makes you feel like? What do you feel like now?’
‘I feel,’ said Roger, ‘like death.’
Every nerve, every muscle thrilled to a pain not too intense to be underlined by a shuddering nausea.
‘Then drink,’ cried the doctor, in tones of such cordial entreaty, such evident anxiety, that Wroxham half held his hand out for the glass. ‘Drink! Believe me, it is your only chance.’
Again the pain swept through him like an electric current. The beads of sweat sprang out on his forehead.
‘That wound,’ the doctor pleaded, standing over him with the glass held out. ‘For God’s sake, drink! Don’t you understand, man? You are poisoned. Your wound—’
‘The knife?’ Wroxham murmured, and as he spoke, his eyes seemed to swell in his head, and his head itself to grow enormous. ‘Do you know the poison – and its antidote?’
‘I know all.’ The doctor soothed him. ‘Drink, then, my friend.’
As the pain caught him again in a clasp more close than any lover’s he clutched at the glass and drank. The drug met the pain and mastered it. Roger, in the ecstasy of pain’s cessation, saw the world fade and go out in a haze of vivid violet.
II
Faint films of lassitude, shot with contentment, wrapped him round. He lay passive as a man lies in the convalescence that follows a long fight with Death. Fold on fold of white peace lay all about him.
‘I’m better now,’ he said, in a voice that was a whisper – tried to raise his hand from where it lay helpless in his sight, failed, and lay looking at it in confident repose – ‘much better.’
‘Yes,’ said the doctor, and his pleasant, soft voice had grown softer, pleasanter. ‘You are now in the second stage. An interval is necessary before you can pass to the third. I will enliven the interval by conversation. Is there anything you would like to know?’
‘Nothing,’ said Roger; ‘I am quite contented.’
‘This is very interesting,’ said the doctor. ‘Tell me exactly how you feel.’
Roger faintly and slowly told him.
‘Ah!’ the doctor said, ‘I have not before heard this. You are the only one of them all who ever passed the first stage. The others—’
‘The others?’ said Roger, but he did not care much about the others.
‘The others,’ said the doctor frowning, ‘were unsound. Decadent students, degenerate, Apaches. You are highly trained – in fine physical condition. And your brain! God be good to the Apaches, who so delicately excited it to just the degree of activity needed for my purpose.’
‘The others?’ Wroxham insisted.
‘The others? They are in the room whose door was locked. Look – you should be able to see them. The second drug should lay your consciousness before me, like a sheet of white paper on which I can write what I choose. If I choose that you should see my specimens – Allons donc. I have no secrets from you now. Look – look – strain your eyes. In theory, I know all that you can do and feel and see in this second stage. But practically – enlighten me – look – shut your eyes and look!’
Roger closed his eyes and looked. He saw the gaunt, uncarpeted staircase, the open doors of the big rooms, passed to the locked door, and it opened at his touch. The room inside was like the others, spacious and panelled. A lighted lamp with a blue shade hung from the ceiling, and below it an effect of spread whiteness. Roger looked. There were things to be seen.
With a shudder he opened his eyes on the doctor’s delightful room, the doctor’s intent face.
‘What did you see?’ the doctor asked. ‘Tell me!’
‘Did you kill them all?’ Roger asked back.
‘They died – of their own inherent weakness,’ the doctor said. ‘And you saw them?’
‘I saw,’ said Roger, ‘the quiet people lying all along the floor in their death clothes – the people who have come in at that door of yours that is a trap – for robbery, or curiosity, or shelter, and never gone out anymore.’
‘Right,’ said the doctor. ‘Right. My theory is proved at every point. You can see what I choose you to see. Yes, decadents all. It was in embalming that I was a specialist before I began these other investigations.’
‘What,’ Roger whispered – ‘what is it all for?’
‘To make the superman,’ said the doctor. ‘I will tell you.’
He told. It was a long story – the story of a man’s life, a man’s work, a man’s dreams, hopes, ambitions.
‘The secret of life,’ the doctor ended. ‘That is what all the alchemists sought. They sought it where Fate pleased. I sought it where I have found it – in death.’
Roger thought of the room behind the locked door.
‘And the secret is?’ he asked.
‘I have told you,’ said the doctor impatiently; ‘it is in the third drug that life – splendid, superhuman life – is found. I have tried it on animals. Always they became perfect, all that an animal should be. And more, too – much more. They were too perfect, too near humanity. They looked at me with human eyes. I could not let them live. Such animals it is not necessary to embalm. I had a laboratory in those days – and assistants. They called me the Prince of Vivisectors.’
The man on the sofa shuddered.
‘I am naturally,’ the doctor went, ‘a tender-hearted man. You see it in my face; my voice proclaims it. Think what I have suffered in the sufferings of these poor beasts who never injured me. My God! Bear witness that I have not buried my talent. I have been faithful. I have laid down all – love, and joy, and pity, and the little beautiful things of life
– all, all, on the altar of science, and seen them consume away. I deserved my heaven, if ever man did. And now by all the saints in heaven I am near it!’
‘What is the third drug?’ Roger asked, lying limp and flat on his couch.
‘It is the Elixir of Life,’ said the doctor. ‘I am not its discoverer; the old alchemists knew it well, but they failed because they sought to apply the elixir to a normal – that is, a diseased and faulty – body. I knew better. One must have first a body abnormally healthy, abnormally strong. Then, not the elixir, but the two drugs that prepare. The first excites prematurely the natural conflict between the principles of life and death, and then, just at the point where Death is about to win his victory, the second drug intensifies life so that it conquers – intensifies, and yet chastens. Then the whole life of the subject, risen to an ecstasy, falls prone in an almost voluntary submission to the coming super-life. Submission – submission! The garrison must surrender before the splendid conqueror can enter and make the citadel his own. Do you understand? Do you submit?’
‘I submit,’ said Roger, for, indeed, he did. ‘But – soon – quite soon – I will not submit.’
He was too weak to be wise, or those words had remained unspoken.
The doctor sprang to his feet.
‘It works too quickly!’ he cried. ‘Everything works too quickly with you. Your condition is too perfect. So now I bind you.’
From a drawer beneath the bench where the bottles gleamed, the doctor drew rolls of bandages – violet, like the haze that had drowned, at the urgency of the second drug, the consciousness of Roger. He moved, faintly resistant, on his couch. The doctor’s hands, most gently, most irresistibly, controlled his movement.
‘Lie still,’ said the gentle, charming voice. ‘Lie still; all is well.’ The clever, soft hands were unrolling the bandages – passing them round arms and throat – under and over the soft narrow couch. ‘I cannot risk your life, my poor boy. The least movement of yours might ruin everything. The third drug, like the first, must be offered directly to the blood which absorbs it. I bound the first drug as an unguent upon your knife-wound.’
The swift hands, the soft bandages, passed back and forth, over and under – flashes of violet passed to and fro in the air, like the shuttle of a weaver through his warp. As the bandage clasped his knees, Roger moved.
‘For God’s sake, no!’ the doctor cried; ‘the time is so near. If you cease to submit it is death.’
With an incredible, accelerated swiftness he swept the bandages round and round knees and ankles, drew a deep breath – stood upright.
‘I must make an incision,’ he said – ‘in the head this time. It will not hurt. See! I spray it with the Constantia Nepenthe; that also I discovered. My boy, in a moment you know all things – you are as God. For God’s sake, be patient. Preserve your submission.’
And Roger, with life and will resurgent hammering at his heart, preserved it.
He did not feel the knife that made the cross-cut on his temple, but he felt the hot spurt of blood that followed the cut; he felt the cool flap of a plaster, spread with some sweet, clean-smelling unguent that met the blood and stanched it. There was a moment – or was it hours? – of nothingness. Then from that cut on his forehead there seemed to radiate threads of infinite length, and of a strength that one could trust to – threads that linked one to all knowledge past and present. He felt that he controlled all wisdom, as a driver controls his four-in-hand. Knowledge, he perceived, belonged to him, as the air belongs to the eagle. He swam in it, as a great fish in a limitless ocean.
He opened his eyes and met those of the doctor, who sighed as one to whom breath has grown difficult.
‘Ah, all goes well. Oh, my boy, was it not worth it? What do you feel?’
‘I. Know. Everything,’ said Roger, with full stops between the words.
‘Everything? The future?’
‘No. I know all that man has ever known.’
‘Look back – into the past. See someone. See Pharaoh. You see him – on his throne?’
‘Not on his throne. He is whispering in a corner of his great gardens to a girl, who is the daughter of a water-carrier.’
‘Bah! Any poet of my dozen decadents, who lie so still could have told me that. Tell me secrets – the Masque de Fer.’
The other told a tale, wild and incredible, but it satisfied the teller.
‘That too – it might be imagination. Tell me the name of the woman I loved and—’
The echo of the name of the anaesthetic came to Roger; ‘Constantia,’ said he, in an even voice.
‘Ah,’ the doctor cried, ‘now I see you know all things. It was not murder. I hoped to dower her with all the splendours of the superlife.’
‘Her bones lie under the lilacs, where you used to kiss her in the spring,’ said Roger, quite without knowing what it was that he was going to say.
‘It is enough,’ the doctor cried. He sprang up, ranged certain bottles and glasses on a table convenient to his chair. ‘You know all things. It was not a dream, this, the dream of my life. It is true. It is a fact accomplished. Now I, too, will know all things. I will be as the gods.’
He sought among leather cases on a far table, and came back swiftly into the circle of light that lay below the green-shaded lamp.
Roger, floating contentedly on the new sea of knowledge that seemed to support him, turned eyes on the trouble that had driven him out of that large, empty studio so long ago, so far away. His new-found wisdom laughed at that problem, laughed and solved it. ‘To end that trouble I must do so-and-so, say such-and-such,’ Roger told himself again and again.
And now the doctor, standing by the table, laid on it his pale, plump hand outspread. He drew a knife from a case – a long, shiny knife – and scored his hand across and across its back, as a cook scores pork for cooking. The slow blood followed the cuts in beads and lines.
Into the cuts he dropped a green liquid from a little bottle, replaced its stopper, bound up his hand, and sat down.
‘The beginning of the first stage,’ he said, ‘almost at once I shall begin to be a new man. It will work quickly. My body, like yours, is sane and healthy.’
There was a long silence.
‘Oh, but this is good,’ the doctor broke it to say. ‘I feel the hand of Life sweeping my nerves like harp-strings.’
Roger had been thinking, the old common sense that guides an ordinary man breaking through this consciousness of illimitable wisdom. ‘You had better,’ he said, ‘unbind me; when the hand of Death sweeps your nerves, you may need help.’
‘No,’ the doctor said, ‘and no, and no, and no many times. I am afraid of you. You know all things, and even in your body you are stronger than I. When I, too, am a god, and filled with the wine of knowledge, I will loose you, and together we will drink of the fourth drug – the mordant that shall fix the others and set us eternally on a level with the immortals.’
‘Just as you like, of course,’ said Roger, with a conscious effort after commonplace. Then suddenly, not commonplace anymore:
‘Loose me!’ he cried; ‘loose me, I tell you! I am wiser than you.’
‘You are also stronger,’ said the doctor, and then suddenly and irresistibly the pain caught him. Roger saw his face contorted with agony, his hands clench on the arm of his chair; and it seemed that, either this man was less able to bear pain than he, or that the pain was much more violent than had been his own. Between the grippings of the anguish the doctor dragged on his watch-chain; the watch leapt from his pocket, and rattled as his trembling hand laid it on the table.
‘Not yet,’ he said, when he had looked at its face, ‘not yet, not yet, not yet.’ It seemed to Roger, lying there bound, that the other man repeated those words for long days and weeks. And the plump, pale hand, writhing and distorted by anguish, again and again drew near to take the glass that stood ready on the table, and with convulsive self-restraint again and again drew back without it.
The short May night was waning – the shiver of dawn rustled the leaves of the plant whose leaves were like red misshaped hearts.
‘Now!’ The doctor screamed the word, grasped the glass, drained it, and sank back in his chair. His hand struck the table beside him. Looking at his limp body and head thrown back, one could almost see the cessation of pain, the coming of kind oblivion.
III
The dawn had grown to daylight, a poor, grey, rain-stained daylight, not strong enough to pierce the curtains and persiennes; and yet not so weak but that it could mock the lamp, now burnt low and smelling vilely.
Roger lay very still on his couch, a man wounded, anxious, and extravagantly tired. In those hours of long, slow dawning, face to face with the unconscious figure in the chair, he had felt, slowly and little by little, the recession of that sea of knowledge on which he had felt himself float in such content. The sea had withdrawn itself, leaving him high and dry on the shore of the normal. The only relic that he had clung to and that he still grasped was the answer to the problem of the trouble – the only wisdom that he had put into words. These words remained to him, and he knew that they held wisdom – very simple wisdom, too.
‘To end the trouble, I must do so-and-so and say such-and-such.’
But of all that had seemed to set him on a pinnacle, had evened him with the immortals, nothing else was left. He was just Roger Wroxham – wounded, and bound, in a locked house, one of whose rooms was full of very quiet people, and in another room himself and a dead man. For now it was so long since the doctor had moved that it seemed he must be dead. He had got to know every line of that room, every fold of drapery, every flower on the wallpaper, the number of the books, the shapes and sizes of things. Now he could no longer look at these. He looked at the other man.
Slowly a dampness spread itself over Wroxham’s forehead and tingled among the roots of his hair. He writhed in his bonds. They held fast. He could not move hand or foot. Only his head could turn a little, so that he could at will see the doctor or not see him. A shaft of desolate light pierced the persienne at its hinge and rested on the table, where an overturned glass lay.