by E. F. Benson
Surely that was the strangest manner of song ever yet heard on the earth, this melody from the brain of the dead. Horror and fascination strove within me, and I suppose the first for the moment prevailed, for with a shudder I jumped up.
“Stop it!” I said. “It’s terrible.”
His face, thin and eager, gleamed in the strong ray of the lamp which he had placed close to him. His hand was on the metal rod from which depended the spiral spring and the needle, which just rested on that fragment of grey stuff which I had seen in the glass vessel.
“Yes, I’m going to stop it now,” he said, “or the germs will be getting at my gramophone record, or the record will get cold. See, I spray it with carbolic vapour, I put it back into its nice warm bed. It will sing to us again. But terrible? What do you mean by terrible?”
Indeed, when he asked that I scarcely knew myself what I meant. I had been witness to a new marvel of science as wonderful perhaps as any that had ever astounded the beholder, and my nerves—these childish whimperers—had cried out at the darkness and the profundity.
But the horror diminished, the fascination increased as he quite shortly told me the history of this phenomenon. He had attended that day and operated upon a young soldier in whose brain was embedded a piece of shrapnel. The boy was in extremis, but Horton had hoped for the possibility of saving him. To extract the shrapnel was the only chance, and this involved the cutting away of a piece of brain known as the speech-centre, and taking from it what was embedded there. But the hope was not realised, and two hours later the boy died. It was to this fragment of brain that, when Horton returned home, he had applied the needle of his gramophone, and had obtained the faint whisperings which had caused him to ring me up, so that he might have a witness of this wonder. Witness I had been, not to these whisperings alone, but to the fragment of singing.
“And this is but the first step on the new road,” said he. “Who knows where it may lead, or to what new temple of knowledge it may not be the avenue? Well, it is late: I shall do no more tonight.”
“What about the raid, by the way?”
To my amazement I saw that the time was verging on midnight. Two hours had elapsed since he let me in at his door; they had passed like a couple of minutes. Next morning some neighbours spoke of the prolonged firing that had gone on, of which I had been wholly unconscious.
Week after week Horton worked on this new road of research, perfecting the sensitiveness and subtlety of the needle, and, by vastly increasing the power of his batteries, enlarging the magnifying power of his trumpet. Many and many an evening during the next year did I listen to voices that were dumb in death, and the sounds which had been blurred and unintelligible mutterings in the earlier experiments, developed, as the delicacy of his mechanical devices increased, into coherence and clear articulation. It was no longer necessary to Impose silence on Mrs. Gabriel when the gramophone was at work, or now the voice we listened to had risen to the pitch of ordinary human utterance, while as for the faithfulness and individuality of these records, striking testimony was given more than once by some living friend of the dead, who, without knowing what he was about to hear, recognised the tones of the speaker. More than once also, Mrs. Gabriel, bringing in syphons and whisky, provided us with three glasses, for she had heard, so she told us, three different voices in talk. But for the present no fresh phenomenon occurred; Horton was but perfecting the mechanism of his previous discovery and, rather grudging the time, was scribbling at a monograph, which presently he would toss to his colleagues, concerning the results he had already obtained. And then, even while Horton was on he threshold of new wonders, which he had already foreseen and spoken of as theoretically possible, there came an evening of marvel and of swift catastrophe.
I had dined with him that day, Mrs. Gabriel deftly serving the meal that she had so daintily prepared, and towards the end, as she was clearing the table for our dessert, she stumbled, I supposed, on a loose edge of carpet, quickly recovering herself. But instantly Horton checked some half-finished sentence, and turned to her.
“You’re all right, Mrs. Gabriel?” he asked quickly.
“Yes, sir, thank you,” said she, and went on with her serving.
“As I was saying,” began Horton again, but his attention clearly wandered, and without concluding his narrative, he relapsed into silence, till Mrs. Gabriel had given us our coffee and left the room.
“I’m sadly afraid my domestic felicity may be disturbed,” he said. “Mrs. Gabriel had an epileptic fit yesterday, and she confessed when she recovered that she had been subject to them when a child, and since then had occasionally experienced them.”
“Dangerous, then?” I asked.
“In themselves not in the least,” said he. “If she was sitting in her chair or lying in bed when one occurred, there would be nothing to trouble about. But if one occurred while she was cooking my dinner or beginning to come downstairs, she might fall into the fire or tumble down the whole flight. We’ll hope no such deplorable calamity will happen. Now, if you’ve finished your coffee, let us go into the laboratory. Not that I’ve got anything very interesting in the way of new records. But I’ve introduced a second battery with a very strong induction coil into my apparatus. I find that if I link it up with my record, given that the record is a—a fresh one, it stimulates certain nerve centres. It’s odd, isn’t it, that the same forces which so encourage the dead to live would certainly encourage the living to die, if a man received the full current. One has to be careful in handling it. Yes, and what then? you ask.”
The night was very hot, and he threw the windows wide before he settled himself cross-legged on the floor.
“I’ll answer your question for you,” he said, “though I believe we’ve talked of it before.
“Supposing I had not a fragment of brain-tissue only, but a whole head, let us say, or best of all, a complete corpse, I think I could expect to produce more than mere speech through the gramophone. The dead lips themselves perhaps might utter—God! what’s that?”
From close outside, at the bottom of the stairs leading from the dining room which we had just quitted to the laboratory where we now sat, there came a crash of glass followed by the fall as of something heavy which bumped from step to step, and was finally flung on the threshold against the door with the sound as of knuckles rapping at it, and demanding admittance. Horton sprang up and threw the door open, and there lay, half inside the room and half on the landing outside, the body of Mrs. Gabriel. Round her were splinters of broken bottles and glasses, and from a cut in her forehead, as she lay ghastly with face upturned, the blood trickled into her thick grey hair.
Horton was on his knees beside her, dabbing his handkerchief on her forehead.
“Ah! that’s not serious,” he said; “there’s neither vein nor artery cut. I’ll just bind that up first.”
He tore his handkerchief into strips which he tied together, and made a dexterous bandage covering the lower part of her forehead, but leaving her eyes unobscured. They stared with a fixed meaningless steadiness, and he scrutinised them closely.
“But there’s worse yet,” he said. “There’s been some severe blow on the head. Help me to carry her into the laboratory. Get ’round to her feet and lift underneath the knees when I am ready. There! Now put your arm right under her and carry her.”
Her head swung limply back as he lifted her shoulders, and he propped it up against his knee, where it mutely nodded and bowed, as his leg moved, as if in silent assent to what we were doing, and the mouth, at the extremity of which there had gathered a little lather, lolled open. He still supported her shoulders as I fetched a cushion on which to place her head, and presently she was lying close to the low table on which stood the gramophone of the dead. Then with light deft fingers he passed his hands over her skull, pausing as he came to the spot just above and behind her right ear. Twice and again his fingers groped and lightly pressed, while with shut eyes and concentrated attention he interpreted wha
t his trained touch revealed.
“Her skull is broken to fragments just here,” he said. “In the middle there is a piece completely severed from the rest, and the edges of the cracked pieces must be pressing on her brain.”
Her right arm was lying palm upwards on the floor, and with one hand he felt her wrist with fingertips.
“Not a sign of…,” he said. “She’s dead in the ordinary sense of the word. But life persists in an extraordinary manner, you may remember. She can’t be wholly dead: no one is wholly dead in a moment, unless every organ is blown to bits. But she soon will be dead, if we don’t relieve the pressure on the brain. That’s the first thing to be done. While I’m busy at that, shut the window, will you, and make up the fire. In this sort of case the vital heat, whatever that is, leaves the body very quickly. Make the room as hot as you can—fetch an oil-stove, and turn on the electric radiator, and stoke up a roaring fire. The hotter the room is the more slowly will the heat of life leave her.”
Already he had opened his cabinet of surgical instruments, and taken out of it two drawers full of bright steel which he laid on the floor beside her. I heard the grating chink of scissors severing her long grey hair, and as I busied myself with laying and lighting the fire in the hearth, and kindling the oil-stove, which I found, by Horton’s directions, in the pantry, I saw that his lancet was busy on the exposed skin. He had placed some vaporising spray, heated by a spirit lamp close to her head, and as he worked its fizzing nozzle filled the air with some clean and aromatic odour. Now and then he threw out an order.
“Bring me that electric lamp on the long cord,” he said. “I haven’t got enough light. Don’t look at what I’m doing if you’re squeamish, for if it makes you feel faint, I shan’t be able to attend to you.”
I suppose that violent interest in what he was doing overcame any qualm that I might have had, for I looked quite unflinching over his shoulder as I moved the lamp about till it was in such a place that it threw its beam directly into a dark hole at the edge of which depended a flap of skin. Into this he put his forceps, and as he withdrew them they grasped a piece of blood-stained bone.
“That’s better,” he said, “and the room’s warming up well. But there’s no sign of pulse yet.
“Go on stoking, will you, till the thermometer on the wall there registers a hundred degrees.”
When next, on my journey from the coal-cellar, I looked, two more pieces of bone lay beside the one I had seen extracted, and presently referring to the thermometer, I saw, that between the oil-stove and the roaring fire and the electric radiator, I had raised the room to the temperature he wanted. Soon, peering fixedly at the seat of his operation, he felt for her pulse again.
“Not a sign of returning vitality,” he said, “and I’ve done all I can. There’s nothing more possible that can be devised to restore her.”
As he spoke the zeal of the unrivalled surgeon relaxed, and with a sigh and a shrug he rose to his feet and mopped his face. Then suddenly the fire and eagerness blazed there again. “The gramophone!” he said. “The speech centre is close to where I’ve been working, and it is quite uninjured. Good heavens, what a wonderful opportunity. She served me well living, and she shall serve me dead. And I can stimulate the motor nerve-centre, too, with the second battery. We may see a new wonder tonight.”
Some qualm of horror shook me.
“No, don’t!” I said. “It’s terrible: she’s just dead. I shall go if you do.”
“But I’ve got exactly all the conditions I have long been wanting,” said he. “And I simply can’t spare you. You must be witness: I must have a witness. Why, man, there’s not a surgeon or a physiologist in the kingdom who would not give an eye or an ear to be in your place now.
“She’s dead. I pledge you my honour on that, and it’s grand to be dead if you can help the living.”
Once again, in a far fiercer struggle, horror and the intensest curiosity strove together in me.
“Be quick, then,” said I.
“Ha! That’s right,” exclaimed Horton. “Help me to lift her on to the table by the gramophone. The cushion too; I can get at the place more easily with her head a little raised.”
He turned on the battery and with the movable light close beside him, brilliantly illuminating what he sought, he inserted the needle of the gramophone into the jagged aperture in her skull.
For a few minutes, as he groped and explored there, there was silence, and then quite suddenly Mrs. Gabriel’s voice, clear and unmistakable and of the normal loudness of human speech, issued from the trumpet. “Yes, I always said that I’d be even with him,” came the articulated syllables. “He used to knock me about, he did, when he came home drunk, and often I was black and blue with bruises.
“But I’ll give him a redness for the black and blue.”
The record grew blurred; instead of articulate words there came from it a gobbling noise. By degrees that cleared, and we were listening to some dreadful suppressed sort of laughter, hideous to hear. On and on it went.
“I’ve got into some sort of rut,” said Horton. “She must have laughed a lot to herself.”
For a long time we got nothing more except the repetition of the words we had already heard and the sound of that suppressed laughter. Then Horton drew towards him the second battery.
“I’ll try a stimulation of the motor nerve-centres,” he said. “Watch her face.”
He propped the gramophone needle in position, and inserted into the fractured skull the two poles of the second battery, moving them about there very carefully. And as I watched her face, I saw with a freezing horror that her lips were beginning to move.
“Her mouth’s moving,” I cried. “She can’t be dead.”
He peered into her face.
“Nonsense,” he said. “That’s only the stimulus from the current. She’s been dead half an hour. Ah! what’s coming now?”
The lips lengthened into a smile, the lower jaw dropped, and from her mouth came the laughter we had heard just now through the gramophone. And then the dead mouth spoke, with a mumble of unintelligible words, a bubbling torrent of incoherent syllables.
“I’ll turn the full current on,” he said.
The head jerked and raised itself, the lips struggled for utterance, and suddenly she spoke swiftly and distinctly.
“Just when he’d got his razor out,” she said, “I came up behind him, and put my hand over his face, and bent his neck back over his chair with all my strength. And I picked up his razor and with one slit—ha, ha, that was the way to pay him out. And I didn’t lose my head, but I lathered his chin well, and put the razor in his hand, and left him there, and went downstairs and cooked his dinner for him, and then an hour afterwards, as he didn’t come down, up I went to see what kept him. It was a nasty cut in his neck that had kept him—”
Horton suddenly withdrew the two poles of the battery from her head, and even in the middle of her word the mouth ceased working, and lay rigid and open.
“By God!” he said. “There’s a tale for dead lips to tell. But we’ll get more yet.”
Exactly what happened then I never knew. It appeared to me that as he still leaned over the table with the two poles of the battery in his hand, his foot slipped, and he fell forward across it.
There came a sharp crack, and a flash of blue dazzling light, and there he lay face downwards, with arms that just stirred and quivered. With his fall the two poles that must momentarily have come into contact with his hand were jerked away again, and I lifted him and laid him on the floor. But his lips as well as those of the dead woman had spoken for the last time.
NEGOTIUM PERAMBULANS
The casual tourist in West Cornwall may just possibly have noticed, as he bowled along over the bare high plateau between Penzance and the Land’s End, a dilapidated signpost pointing down a steep lane and bearing on its battered finger the faded inscription “Polearn 2 miles,” but probably very few have had the curiosity to traverse those two miles i
n order to see a place to which their guide-books award so cursory a notice. It is described there, in a couple of unattractive lines, as a small fishing village with a church of no particular interest except for certain carved and painted wooden panels (originally belonging to an earlier edifice) which form an altar-rail. But the church at St. Creed (the tourist is reminded) has a similar decoration far superior in point of preservation and interest, and thus even the ecclesiastically disposed are not lured to Polearn. So meagre a bait is scarce worth swallowing, and a glance at the very steep lane which in dry weather presents a carpet of sharp-pointed stones, and after rain a muddy watercourse, will almost certainly decide him not to expose his motor or his bicycle to risks like these in so sparsely populated a district. Hardly a house has met his eye since he left Penzance, and the possible trundling of a punctured bicycle for half a dozen weary miles seems a high price to pay for the sight of a few painted panels.
Polearn, therefore, even in the high noon of the tourist season, is little liable to invasion, and for the rest of the year I do not suppose that a couple of folk a day traverse those two miles (long ones at that) of steep and stony gradient. I am not forgetting the postman in this exiguous estimate, for the days are few when, leaving his pony and cart at the top of the hill, he goes as far as the village, since but a few hundred yards down the lane there stands a large white box, like a sea-trunk, by the side of the road, with a slit for letters and a locked door. Should he have in his wallet a registered letter or be the bearer of a parcel too large for insertion in the square lips of the sea-trunk, he must needs trudge down the hill and deliver the troublesome missive, leaving it in person on the owner, and receiving some small reward of coin or refreshment for his kindness.