Number 87

by Harrington Hext

  General Fordyce applauded these British sentiments; his brother did not.

  “We found the chemists to win the war, and shall we not find the chemists to win the peace?” asked Jack Smith.

  “A very pertinent question,” answered Sir Bruce, “for when the radio-activity that lies in hiding comes actually within our reach and we discover also the power to apply it, then the world will be faced with one alternative alone to universal peace; and that is universal destruction. It follows that to let our young men of promise identify themselves with stranger nations is to reduce our hopes in the supreme direction.”

  “We must assume that England will discover the secret,” declared General Fordyce; “for we are the only nation who can be trusted not to make a mess of it when we have. In fact such a power is unthinkable in any other hands than ours, and be sure Providence knows this as well as we do.”

  CHAPTER III

  WHAT HAS DONE IT?

  IT was the third evening after the introduction of Paul Strossmayer to our little circle, that poor Alexander Skeat had honored us with his company at dinner — and lectured us afterwards. For that is the only way to describe his minatory harangue. He treated us like a parcel of rather unsatisfactory children and, for my part, I doubted not that to his luminous and far-reaching mind the bulk of his fellow men appeared little removed from the immaturity of youth. Indeed we should have all conceded the point, if he had not been at such rather ill-bred pains to rub it in.

  As Bishop Blore said, “Most men know well enough that they are mediocre; but they resent being told so by superior and scornful strangers.”

  I recollect that Mr. Skeat was troubled about the art of the country, and he cursed it in good set terms. Art was a subject whereon we were very willing to learn, and though General Fordyce, his brother and others paid no great attention, a dozen members — Jacobs and myself included — listened with interest and found the famous publicist convincing and suggestive. It was left for our latest comer, Mr. Strossmayer, to turn the monologue into a discussion when he asked civilly but pointedly, why Art, in the mind of the visitor, shut out all greater present demands and immediate needs.

  Skeat had just flouted Nature with hearty contempt.

  “If she can be personified in human terms, then only a lunatic would applaud her hideous manifestations,” he said, “since she destroys with one hand what she creates with the other. To Art we must look for any rational interpretation of Nature, or human nature either.”

  “But where are Art’s rational interpretations?” asked Strossmayer. “Surely art is dead, or shall we say in a state of suspended animation? The hard times have killed it. Only minor poets twitter; the painters have rushed pell-mell into a blind alley, whence there is no escape save by the way back to Nature and her forms, which on the whole are more beautiful than any they attempt to make; music is in the hands of faddists and becomes as bodiless as dead wine; only the imitators of Tchekov and Ibsen exist as serious dramatists; while the novelists are all bogged in psycho-analysis, which is a pathological rather than an artistic advance. So why not give weary Art a rest until wide-awake Science has had her say? Then, when Art is convalescent again, with a normal temperature and clear vision, she may find the world a place ripe for a new renaissance worthy of decent men and decent art.”

  “Idiot!” cried Alexander Skeat furiously. “Do you not understand that only through cleansing torrents and cathartic hurricanes of art the world can ever again become a place for anybody — decent or otherwise — to live in?”

  He thundered on for full ten minutes, while his heavy eyebrows and bristling moustache vibrated with his emotion and his great jaw, like a bulldog’s, seemed to grow squarer and squarer. He deluged us and the Jugo-Slav in a storm of hurtling and ferocious words; and finally challenged Strossmayer to elaborate his opinions. His anger was doubtless in part theatrical, but when the foreigner described his own views and purposes, theories of applied science and ambitions to forward that application, Skeat became still more incensed.

  “I shall oppose you heart and soul!” he promised. “I shall make public your pretensions and warn our young men to resist your malignant appeals. We are not yet a people to be suborned with Balkan gold.”

  “As a guest member of this club I speak to you; and you, too, are a guest member for this evening, therefore I have a right to demand confidence,” replied Strossmayer quietly.

  “I never listen to anybody in confidence,” answered Skeat. “I am no longer a man. I am a European institution, and it is my function to survey the world from the watch-tower of my own abnormal intelligence and proclaim my discoveries and opinions in all ears. These are perilous times for civilization, as I point out daily, and no man who approaches me must imagine the least respect for his intentions, or privacy for his plans. On your own showing you would rob the United Kingdom of an asset — an asset which I take leave to observe you grossly over-value — for not by the road of Science and Reason shall man rise to the light, since Art and the Divine Afflatus are to be masters of the world. But nevertheless you do active wrong to tempt our youth, just as you err to suppose that the brute forces concealed in Nature will ever conquer man. It is a debased ideal and I shall fulminate against you.”

  Paul Strossmayer did not answer. He was annoyed and a flame lit his dark eyes for a moment; but he kept himself in hand and permitted Skeat to discuss another subject.

  Somebody — I think the bishop — discussed wealth, and Skeat took him up.

  “I despair of showing people how to use wealth,” he said. “They think because I choose to be poor, that I cannot possibly be an authority.”

  “Nobody knows how to use wealth,” asserted General Fordyce, and for once the visitor found himself in agreement.

  “Probably you are right, and the most well-meaning are among our deepest failures,” he answered. “Your Rockefellers and Carnegies do their best, as I honestly think; but their best is vitiated by domestic predilections and superstitions. Such men cannot remotely vision what belongs to the best. The problem is how, with increasing raw material — namely wealth — to turn it into that immaterial and precious finished product we understand by happiness.”

  “But if wealth cannot produce individual happiness, as every millionaire knows, how are we to turn it into universal happiness?” asked Leon Jacobs.

  “By transforming it into human sympathy and understanding,” answered Skeat. “Wealth admittedly puts the mind above a certain sort of primitive want. It wins security for the candlestick of the body, and enables us to turn our attention to the light of the soul, which should burn before all men from that candlestick. Having secured for the mass of humanity physical conditions long familiar to every pet dog, we proceed — ”

  “To what?” asked Strossmayer, who had bided his time.

  “To Art.”

  The Jugo-Slav shook his head.

  “Not so,” he answered. “Not so, Mr. Alexander Skeat. To Science we must turn for the true application of wealth, just as we must look to Science for the creation of it.”

  “Pure Science is a selfless activity — the highest and noblest upon which a man’s mind can concentrate,” declared Jacobs.

  Strossmayer applauded him and continued.

  “What we in Jugo-Slavia want, is a development of social science, inspired by the new possibilities, and a scientific application of the new wealth now being wickedly and fruitlessly squandered around us. The power of wealth is still terrific, and far the greater part is running to waste, even as the heat of the sun, or the forces of the tides.”

  “The wisdom of school children,” retorted Skeat, “and to attempt to make you comprehend is vain, since you have not yet reached the starting point of reality, that only spirit quickeneth.”

  He rose then, declared that he must catch his train, enveloped himself in a great cloak and challenging hat, and prepared to depart.

  “Read me,” he said to Jacobs and myself as he bade us farewell. “Read me
humbly; read what I have written; read with the determination to understand. Much you will not; much you may.”

  A week later, some of us were dining with General Fordyce at his private house, and the death of Skeat occupied our thoughts to the exclusion of all other subjects. Indeed there were probably not a dozen intelligent men met together in England, or the Continent, who did not find the mystery absorb their minds. Two prime considerations challenged mankind: first the manner of this departure and secondly the significance of Alexander Skeat himself as a force in the affairs of humanity.

  Upon the second problem I recollect that Leon Jacobs spoke while the general’s dinner party was in progress. There were present our host and his brother, Merrivale Medland, Bishop Blore, Jacobs and myself.

  “I don’t think it matters a button to the world whether he was in it or not,” said Leon. “I speak impartially and recognize his genius. But, as a man, we have seen with our own eyes that he was absurdly vain, ill-mannered and discourteous. As an intellectual force he was a bully, and for his success relied on satire — a poor vehicle for preaching at best.”

  “Even so judged,” declared the bishop, “Pope or Voltaire, Swift or Anatole France excel him both in art and poignancy.”

  “He destroyed, but created nothing,” continued Jacobs. “And, after all, what do his lectures and books amount to? What is the sum total of his message? Only that most people are born fools; which we knew already.”

  I contested this sweeping criticism and endeavored to show how Skeat had influenced modern thought; but none supported me and General Fordyce pointed out that the dead man had always stood outside life and been contented to laugh at the show from a comfortable seat in the auditorium.

  “His real value and significance cannot be judged by his own generation,” declared Medland, “and whether he will interest the next is exceedingly doubtful. Most likely the principal attraction that he will offer is the manner of his death; and I, for one, by no means discredit the policeman’s description of a strange beast. There’s no smoke without fire, and the creature known as a vampire didn’t win its universal fame through superstition alone. Be sure there’s something in it. A skeptical generation wants shaking up, and to be reminded that there are more things, even on earth still, than are dreamed of in our philosophy.”

  We chaffed the wine merchant, who was addicted to spiritualism and of a credulous mind in everything except his own business; but General Fordyce reminded us how Medland stood not alone in his belief, — that some unknown animal might, after all, be responsible for the extraordinary wound by which Skeat had perished. Policeman Syme’s description of a huge bird, or bat, seen dimly through the midnight murk of the park obtained a certain measure of credence; for the vulpine smell, reported by four other independent witnesses beside himself, suggested a possibility of some monstrous, flying reptile, or mammal, failing any more plausible explanation.

  We challenged Sir Bruce, as an authority second to none, upon the subject, and, to my surprise, he did not express himself with any certainty. He was guarded, but preserved an open mind.

  “You know more about bats and such creatures than any living man, Sir Bruce,” said Bishop Blore. “Can you conceive of the possibility of some survival from geological days reappearing in the twentieth century?”

  “So stated, the phenomena sound more mad than ever,” declared Jacobs; but the man of science showed no impatience before the fantastic problem.

  “Common sense naturally inclines one to laugh the proposition out of court,” he said; “but reason is always guarded, and because a thing on the face of it looks grotesque, impossible, or absurd, Science will not be contented to leave it at that. Much appears grotesque and absurd from a human point of view, which in itself is perfectly rational, logical and seemly. The deep-sea creatures have faces that are hideous, or absurd, in the eyes of unthinking man, or child. I remember myself, in tender youth, finding a crab in a pool, whose countenance haunted me and produced nightmares for six weeks. Yet it was without doubt a face perfectly adapted to the requirements of the bearer. The face of an octopus appears to us beyond measure sinister and forbidding. We loathe its parrot beak and cold, inhuman eye; but only because it is in another category of creation than our own and its manner of life and method of taking food repulse us. A spider is no more horrible.

  “I am not prepared entirely to discard the possible existence of living beings outside our own experience and as yet unreported in nature. There have always been giants in the world of unconscious life, as there have been among human beings; and we know that only recently rumors have reached Science, from out-of-the-way regions in central Africa and South America, of gigantic living creatures — possible survivals of prehistoric forms. There may be life in the uttermost depths of the sea, in the equatorial jungles, and in remote polar regions, as yet undiscovered by man. It is not contrary to reason to suspect that much; nor is it wholly beyond possibility that some, individual of an unknown species might break from its environment and appear for the first time to conscious eyes. Such achievement would of course be easier for a winged mammal, or reptile, than any other creature.”

  Medland was delighted.

  “If we believers in a dragon have you on our side — ” he began, but Sir Bruce stopped him.

  “You must not say that I am on your side. Every reasonable supposition points to a contrary conclusion from yours; and in any case we may very safely suspend judgment; for, supposing that this is not a phantom of the policeman’s imagination, but a living thing, what follows?”

  “It follows that the beggar was hungry, perhaps, and didn’t kill poor Skeat for wickedness, but supper,” suggested General Fordyce.

  “Exactly, Hugh,” replied his brother. “Assuming that we deal with an animal, then we must suppose the brute was hunting for food. It strikes down its prey — sublimely unaware of the distinguished fellow creature it has destroyed — and is about to make its meal when interrupted.”

  “Just what I think,” declared Medland. “That’s my theory. The thing kills Skeat in some peculiar way, by a sort of stab with a beak or claw, and then is going to devour him, or far more likely suck his blood. For everything points to a vampire. But I go farther and ask who is to say that the creature is not controlled by a discarnate human will that inhabits it?”

  We laughed loudly; while Medland, who was read in all manner of mediæval nonsense on this subject, poured chapter and verse into our ears.

  “One would think that you had been on intimate terms with vampires,” I said.

  Then Leon Jacobs asked a question.

  “To come back from fairy tales to facts — what, if anything, is known about blood-sucking animals, Sir Bruce! One has heard, of course, of vampire bats, but do such things exist in reality? And if so, have they been known to touch a human being? Medland vows his mass of evidence must stand for more than myth; but you cannot winnow grain out of chaff alone — however large the quantity of chaff. What is the truth on the subject?”

  “Bats there certainly are that suck blood,” admitted Sir Bruce, “and other bats, of more ferocious appearance and greater size, that have an evil reputation which they never earned. Vampyrus spectrum, the false vampire, and others belonging to the genus phyllostoma are perfectly harmless, ‘leaf-nosed’ bats from South America. The true vampires are also South American. Their incisors and canine teeth are modified for flesh cutting; their stomachs are small and their intestines short and not adapted for any other food than blood. There is, however, no mystery about the way these vamparines feed, and I must record one unfortunate fact: the most famous and authentic bloodsucker of man, Desmodus rufus, a red-brown, tailless bat, is only three inches long — one of the smallest species. Its bite carries no venom and is less dangerous than that of a rat.”

  “We certainly cannot imagine a specimen of Desmodus rufus swelled to the size of a bullock,” said Bishop Blore. Then he continued.

  “One thing is pretty obvious. If the c
reature exists, food he must certainly eat, and if his provender depends upon other animals, we shall hear of him again before long. In the event of such a monster appearing among us, it will demand not merely a pint of blood occasionally, but pretty deep draughts. It follows that we shall meet the wretch again tolerably soon; and if we do not, then we may agree with the majority — that no such abominable thing has in reality been seen.”

  “And the manner of Skeat’s death would then be illuminated,” declared Merrivale Medland. “I mean if other victims occur; for then we shall probably learn what is the cause and nature of this strange wound and end by catching the bat itself. Already the creature may have killed sheep, or cattle in lonely places and drunk its fill.”

  We laughed again at the wine merchant’s idea, and ere long the party broke up. Medland and the bishop went one way, while Jacobs and I saw Sir Bruce to his bungalow, which stood on the hillside in its own small grounds. It was a building of one story with a flat roof, partly glazed, and in summertime we often spent an evening on the top of it under awnings; for an observatory with a good equatorial telescope occupied one end, Sir Bruce being an amateur astronomer among his other activities.

  He spoke as we went along of Medland’s credulity and sighed for human nature, that so willingly preserved its legends and follies sprung from the childhood of mankind.

  “Education cannot kill what most of us learn at our mother’s knees,” he said. “That is the receptive period, and just in the vital years, when reason should be honored, we load the infant mind with supernatural nonsense, which unhappily sticks in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred. A really reasonable man might appear to most of us almost as inhuman as the octopus of which we spoke; for his attitude to life would infallibly be guided by ideals and arguments still foreign to our best hopes. Reason is stifled and choked off at every turn.”