THEFORBIDDENGARDEN

by The Forbidden Garden(Lit)

  "Your coming has brought me the only peace I have known since I entered this place. It is more than I deserve. Before you condemn me, hear why I have tried to make such restitution to humanity as is possible – by immuring myself and all these people.

  "My letter to Charles, I felt certain, would be equivalent in his eyes to an announcement of my death. I had no intention of dying, slowly or otherwise. While he was suffering the tortures of conscience in brooding over my lingering death, I would be living like a normal human being where he would never dream of looking for me. I planned to make my way through China to a seaport, work my passage to America, and begin life anew. I would forget the money in the Bombay Bank. But the valley, with its marvellous flowers that I could not understand, with its misshapen weeds of human beings that I do not yet understand, and with all the evil mysteries of its deadly spores, intrigued me, and, yielding to an irresistable impulse, I decided to explore it thoroughly before setting my face toward China. When the last of my caravan disappeared over a distant pass, I made my way back to this place with my books and my microscope.

  "Within two weeks after my return I realized what I had done. To recall the letter was impossible; it would have reached London months before I could cross China and cable Charles not to open it. You may ask why I did not attempt to return to India. I do not know how you came, but by the way I took, that also would have been impossible. No man travelling alone, with only such food and water as he himself could carry, could possibly make his way through the wilderness of mountains and deserts that we crossed on our journey here. I could only pray that such mischief as Charles might do with those accursed seeds would be localized and controlled, and not escape to scourge the world, as it well might from ignorance or carelessness. For the rest, trusting in Providence to undo what I had done, I devoted my life and my reason to making this hell forever inaccessible to mankind.

  "I ask you, am I guilty of a crime against humanity, or not guilty? My intention was to destroy Charles, as he had sought to destroy me. Only his incompetence has saved the world."

  CHAPTER 20

  SETTLED

  "My vote would be not guilty," Marjorie replied in a low tone. "And I'm sure the others will agree with me. You have done everything humanly possible to correct your mistake."

  "I have," James asserted. "On my word of honor, I did not know the real character, in all its devilishness, of those spores when I sent them to Charles. You are something of a botanist, of course, after all your years at Brassey House?" Marjorie nodded. James handed her one of the scarlet flowers from the centre piece. "Take a look at that, as a botanist, and tell me what you think it is."

  "I have been looking at it carefully all the time you were speaking. As a botanist, I would say it is impossible. Yet, here it is."

  "I agree," James declared emphatically. "As you know, I also worked at Brassey House, expecting to take over the business some day, before my exile. Studied plants thoroughly. In fact," he recalled with a touch of pride, "I was once offered a chair in the University of London. If I had accepted," he continued with a grim smile, "I shouldn't be here now. Charles was jealous of me, wanted the business for himself. All his puttering at biology was a pretense. From the very beginning I suspected him, and when he turned against me, I knew my suspicions were well grounded. But let that go. Charles has what he wants, and I'm here – for life. To get back to this flower. It is only one of thousands of species, each as impossible as this. And yet, as you say, here it is."

  "Where did it come from?" Vartan asked curiously.

  "Presently," James replied. "All in good time and in proper order. You mustn't hurry me, or irritate me, or I shall lose my temper. That would he bad for all of us."

  Marjorie shot Vartan a warning glance, which Jamieson also interpreted correctly. They let James talk himself out in his own way.

  "Like you, Miss Driscott," he resumed, "I didn't believe my own eyes. But I had my microscope and half a dozen good biologist and botanies that I had carted through the hills with me, expecting to throw them all away when I made my final dash alone for China. When I changed my mind, and came in here to explore for a bit, I brought the lot. And I'm glad I did. They have been a tremendous help. Not believing my own eyes, I used the microscope. I'm pretty good at it, you know.

  "When I finally did understand what I was seeing, I almost went mad – long before I did. Mr. Jamieson, here, is a policeman of some sort, I gather, so he won't know what a cell is. Although I don't pretend to know myself, in any fundamental scientific sense, I can give a definition that will satisfy a policeman. For his benefit, let us think of a cell as one of the smallest organized units of living matter. Plants are built up out of millions and millions of cells, just as animals are. When I left England, cells and their embedded chromosomes were all the rage among the students of evolution and heredity. I well remember Professor Bolton, in a lecture before the Royal Society, closing his magnificent address with these words: 'Ask the cell, and it will tell you what you are, what your ancestors were, and what your descendants will become. Millions of years of past evolution are recorded in the intricate records of the cell, and in its invisible, ultra-microscopic bodies; billions of years, possibly, of the undreamed history of the future of our race are compressed into that tiny volume which our successors, if not we ourselves, will read to its last letter. We are what our cells make us.'

  "Remembering Professor Bolton's address, I was convinced at first that my microscope was lying. It showed me scores of impossibilities at one look. Almost anyone, even an amateur, can distinguish at a glance between a plant cell and an animal cell under the microscope. What I saw were certainly cells. Yet they were neither plant nor animal cells. In spite of myself I was driven by my demon to accept the working hypothesis that these cells were intermediate between plant cells and animals cells, as they shared the characteristics of both.

  "Do you wonder that I suspected for a moment that Charles might have been right in forcing me to leave England?

  "As a serious student of plant biology in my work at Brassey House, and as a not wholly fatuous amateur in animal biology, I realized that I was in the presence of a form of life which is alien to this earth. Animal-plants, or plant-animals, in any real sense such as I had just discovered, are unknown in the whole history of terrestrial evolution as we know it. I do not refer, of course, to such childish analogies as that of the pitcher plant, which is said to consume small insects for its food, and which is therefore often superficially said to be partly plant and partly animal. No; my hybrids were genuine plant-animals. The slightest accidental variations of temperature, or of moisture, or of atmospheric electricity, or of a dozen other physical causes, might well start the spores of these abominations along their evolutions to a fully organized plant or to a perfect animal.

  "More, the same chance fluctuations may easily tip the germinating seed of one specimen definitely toward the animals or the plants. The matured thing developed from one of these spores may be, as far as I can see, either a foul fungus, condemned to spend its rooted existence clinging to one dank spot, or it may become an aggressive animal, wandering at will over all the earth.

  "You may imagine that I did not spend all of my days and nights with my eye on the microscope. These people had to be governed, to be taught to isolate themselves like a city with the plague, and to see that no decent human being ever discovered their hellish paradise. Much of my time went in mastering their language, and in instructing them by dumb show, until I had learned to speak their jargon, how to make their Eden inaccessible to outsiders. In this work I became familiar with my subjects in all of their shocking deformities, from the shaggy deaf mutes to the shapeless lumps of protoplasm infesting these infernal bogs, that are neither man nor beast, plant nor animal, but obscene things half way between plants and animals that yet are cursed with the spark of life, and the power of reproducing their horrible kind, either by division or by seeding. Even now I cannot look on one of these travestie
s of life without my gorge rising. They are unnatural and unclean, because their life is the life of things which were not first evolved on this earth, but possibly millions of light years away on blighted planets circling dying suns.

  "In one of these early expeditions to the seething marshes that seem to stretch indefinitely in all directions under the roots of these mountains – I have not yet explored the half of them – I made my second discovery. By some mishap one of those lumbering human creatures, like the ones you saw, had slipped and cut itself on the sharp rocks. To my horror I saw that its blood was a vivid green, like the condensed coloring matter of leaves. Thinking I had gone mad, I deliberately gashed another with a flint – these poor creatures seem to have no nerves in the ordinary sense – and watched it bleed. Its blood was purplish. Trying again, several times, on others of the herd, I finally found one whose blood was red, like an animal's. Thereafter I experimented for days, observing the same creatures constantly as they dragged themselves from one part of the caves to another, testing their blood frequently, and noting the effects of exercise, of light and darkness, on the coloring matter.

  "I found that the blood of each one of those poor creatures varied from green to red and back again to green, depending upon exercise, food, and light. When the blood was green, the thing was inert as a lump of jelly, wallowing motionless for days in the marsh. As the spores began to grow on its hide covering it with a dense paste, the creature, absorbing some kind of nourishment through the pores of its skin, would gradually quicken into motion and become a living animal. Then it would swim out of the muck, the hard jelly on its hide multiplying itself like a forest of fungi, and slowly make its way up to the driest rocks, to bask and ripen the growing food on its body. Did you see them feeding up yonder? Then you know the rest. When one is thoroughly cleaned of all its food, it finds its way back to the black marshes, wallows far out into the slime, and gradually ceases to be an animal, although it is still living. So the rhythm of these abominations goes, from plant life to animal life, and back to plant life.

  "They, and more distressing perversions of life which, I trust, you will never see, seem to be practically immortal. In my first month here I tried in mercy to kill one, by cutting it to pieces. I was discovered by two of the natives just as I finished. From the blank horror on their faces I learned that these people do not kill. The next day I understood why they are so unmerciful. Each of the lumps into which I had cut the poor creature was healing in the black muck of the marsh and growing into a new abomination like the one I had destroyed. Fire alone can end their unnatural existence.

  "But is it unnatural? Are these repulsive scarlet flowers not as beautiful, as natural in their own way, which is not our way nor the way of our own flowers, as the manifestations of life to which we have been accustomed? While I am as I am now, and can remember an English bean field, or the whins on a common, and when the faces of the young people I knew rise up fresh and living before me, I see only horror in the mad plant-animals which multiply like bacteria in these caves. But when I forget what I once was, and dream only that I am ill, these flowers become as beautiful as the blooms of a forgotten life remembered in a dream, and the loathsome hulks in the marshes are my familiar friends from long ago.

  "I have not been idle in my prison. To understand what I see, and to account for it on rational grounds, has been the passion of my life. Let us forget the things which crawl over these stone floors, or swell and breathe in the marshes, and ask the secret only of the flowerlike things that grow like fungi in this smoky light, and of the less repulsive fruits and weeds of the valley. If you had been trained as I was in the evolution of dead and living spores of plants, you would say at once that these growing things of ours defy the laws of terrestrial evolution. They never could have come into being on our earth. I say, then, that this Eden of hell and all the plants in it, are a fragment of a garden from another world.

  "Not, I say, from a meteorite or from some wandering member of our own solar system, but from the wreck of a world, ages ago, in the depths of space. On that world, shattered perhaps before our own came into existence, life had already progressed far along its evolution in a groove different from that which our living things have followed. The very elements which coalesced to form the first living cells may have been different, in some way which we cannot guess, from the carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and the rest that gave us our own first living cells. Who can deny," he concluded defiantly, "that such another world may have existed? Can you?"

  He had fixed Vartan with his glittering eyes, perhaps unwittingly.

  "I wouldn't venture either to contradict your hypothesis or to affirm it," Vartan replied. He spoke as straightforwardly as if he were addressing a scientific colleague. "As for the origin of the valley, and of these caves, I had already suggested your explanation to Miss Driscott. Beyond a doubt all this curious formation has been caused as you say. Millions of years ago the earth was hit, full-on, by a colossal fragment of highly radioactive rock and compacted dirt from the depths of interstellar space. Why shouldn't it have carried the spores of life with it, even if the journey through space, until it struck our earth, took millions of years?

  "It is not impossible that the spores of living things, say these plant-animals of yours, could retain life that long. We freeze cold-blooded frogs and fishes solid for months in ice, and they are as lively as ever when they thaw out. Your 'plant-animals', I suspect, are 'cold blooded', like frogs. The spores might well have retained their vitality in the absolute cold of interstellar space. When the fragment struck our earth, the warmth revived the spores, and they began to live again. They had brought with them one of the conditions necessary to their natural life – the high radioactivity of the soil. As that lessened with the lapse of time, the plants gradually adapted themselves to the change. What we find now in your caves and valley are the slowly evolved descendants of those remote spores, that lived on a world that went to smash before ours cooled."

  "And my other speculation," James inquired, "about all this having started from chemical elements different from the ones we know?"

  "Again, I see no reason for saying it is impossible. Physicists have begun to learn something in the years since you left England. Perhaps this will interest you. Only a few years ago the astronomers and physicists proved that a certain star – the Companion to Sirius – is made of a gas – a gas, mind you – which is so dense that a cubic inch of it would weigh about a ton. Is that 'chemical matter' in the way they used to mean the term? It is not. Imagine that almost unbelievably dense little dwarf of a sun, or one like it, as the lord of your spore bearing planet, and you have what you want. However, to my mind, the vital thing is that all this has happened somehow. Here it is."

  "I knew you were a sensible man," James sighed, "the moment I set eyes on you. Does Mr. Jamieson know any science?"

  "Not much," Jamieson admitted humbly. "For my part, I should like to hear how Mr. Vartan explains these ghastly squid things, that you say are human. I don't believe they are. Mr. Vartan is so good at explaining," he concluded with a maddening resumption of his long horse-faced manner, "that I am sure his theory will be as good as yours, Mr. Brassey, of the plants was. You must pardon me, gentlemen, but I am only a police officer, as one of you kindly put it. But I am always eager to learn facts that may be of value in the discharge of my somewhat unpleasant duties." His tone was not wholly free of irony.

  "Tomorrow will do," James answered briefly. "I've had enough talk for one evening." He rubbed one taloned hand across his puzzled forehead. "What's the matter with me? Something at dinner must have disagreed with my stomach. I beg you to excuse me. Will you make yourselves comfortable if I retire? The servants will be here presently to show you to your rooms. You are here for life, you know, like me. So make yourselves at home."

  He lurched to his feet, and stood swaying unsteadily with his hands resting on the triangular table.

  "Quick!" Jamieson snapped, rising to support
him. "He's going again, and he may be out of his head for months. The excitement has worn off. We've got to make him talk before he goes. Mr. Brassey," he demanded in a loud voice, "do you know us?"

  James stared uncomprehendingly into the face peering into his own.

  "You are," he stammered, "you are–. Blest if I can remember your name."

  "Jamieson. I've come here to take you home to your brother Charles. In London. Tell us how to get out of this place. There must be an easier way than the one we came. I'll take you home. Miss Driscott is Charles' agent, and Mr. Vartan came with her for the same purpose. How do we get out?"

  "There is no way," James answered thickly. "I told you all that."

  "Then we must go back alone and leave you here."

  "How? You can't. Can't. Let me sleep."

  "In a moment. If you don't tell us, we shall elude your spies, and find our way up the precipices somehow. It can he done. Are you going to let us take you home, or will you stay here and die?"

  James suddenly sat down, heavily.

  "Let me think," he muttered. "Let me think. You go. I die. Can't live forever." He clutched a large handful of the dried flowers and leaves on the table. "I die. You go. How will you go?"

  "I have told you," Jamieson insisted. "Vartan and I are experienced travellers. We can find a way up, if we must. And we shall. Tell us the other way out. There must be one."

  "Isn't. Don't bother me. I die. You go. Oh, my God!"

  He sunk his face on his arms and burst into horrible sobbing. Marjorie hastened to his side and laid a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  "We won't leave you, Mr. Brassey. You must come with us."

  "Can't," he groaned. "No way."

  "We'll find a way," Vartan promised, "if we have to fly. I've been in worse messes than this, and I always got out somehow or another."