Since the arrival of Isaac Laquedem, the monks had seen their Father Superior act strangely, and, at times, they suspected, even a little out of harmony with the rules of their sacred order. They could not rebel, however, for they were unable to specify their grievances. To see, therefore, the Holy Father run out of breath, a pair of shoes in one hand and telegrams in the other, seemed only one more strange episode in a long chain of extravagant happenings.
They stopped in their work or in their prayers, looked at one another, shrugged their shoulders, and muttered mainly to themselves: “Since those foreigners came here, everything is topsy-turvy.”—”The Lord Jesus will punish us, I am sure.”—”Everything is going to the dogs.”—”I never used to lose one count of my rosaries. Nowadays I must go over them five times before I do the right number—and then I am not sure!”
Father Ambrose had meanwhile reached the door of Professor Bassermann’s room. He placed the shoes upon the floor and rapped nervously. The Professor, already dressed, opened.
“Ah, Father Ambrose, good morning.”
“The Lord be with you, my son.”
“What makes you so matinal, Father? As for me, I could not sleep the whole night through. There was something restless in the air. I finally dressed and was about to go out for a walk in your beautiful gardens.”
Father Ambrose stared at him. “I too found it impossible to sleep and when, at last, I did fall asleep for a half hour or so, I had the wildest dreams.”
“Our experiments are very fatiguing, Father. We should take a rest for a few days.”
“We shall take a much longer rest than that, Professor.” Father Ambrose pointed to the shoes.
The door of Aubrey’s room opened and the young scientist appeared.
“Good morning, gentlemen. Up so early too? I could not sleep and thought of taking a walk.”
Father Ambrose crossed himself. “What a fool man is, gentlemen, and how little he understands the hidden meaning of things! During the last half hour of my restless sleep, I dreamt continually of wings flapping and enormous gates opening and closing. It was a warning.”
“A warning of what?” questioned Aubrey.
Father Ambrose pointed to the shoes. “Isaac Laquedem and his valet Kotikokura are gone!”
Professor Bassermann smiled sarcastically.
“Impossible!” exclaimed Aubrey, “his story is still unfinished. There are loose ends and contradictions that will plague us forever, unless he gives the key. Have you looked everywhere?”
“Everywhere, my son. Everywhere. The only things he left us are this pair of shoes and these two telegrams which, in my excitement, I have not even read. It’s incredible!”
All three bent over, their brows knit.
“These are not so easy to decipher, gentlemen,” Bassermann said. “Let us sit down and analyze each one, for I am certain that the secret of Isaac Laquedem is disclosed in these missives.”
“What can this mean?” Father Ambrose said. “It looks like a diagram, not a message. There are two lines– —”
“Why!” Aubrey exclaimed, “the two parallel lines have met, without awaiting infinity…”
“Yes, yes!” Father Ambrose remarked.
Professor Bassermann laughed. “How credulous both of you are, my friends! A bit of trickery characteristic of Isaac Laquedem. This is no telegraph blank. Where does it come from? What stamp does it bear?”
The others looked closely. Everything was erased except in the corner a water mark that looked like a tortoise. “Why do you think it is a piece of trickery, Professor?” Aubrey asked.
“It is not an ordinary telegram,” Father Ambrose admitted. “But how could the message have reached him?”
“Some more hocus-pocus,” Professor Bassermann snorted.
“What makes you say so?”
“Because I think this other telegram is a real one which he did not mean to leave behind him. It is signed Nicolai Lenin. It was sent from Moscow. The language is a corruption of Sanskrit.”
“What does it say?”
Professor Bassermann’s eyes glued themselves upon the message. “It is susceptible of several interpretations. If I read aright it says:
“ ‘All is ready. Come. The Red Dawn is rising.’
“I was right all along. Isaac Lequedem is a Russian revolutionist! This is the Lenin to whom he referred last night.”
“And the shoes?” Father Ambrose asked.
“A clownish trick!”
“Do you mean to say, Professor, that our analysis was absolutely futile, that he only made believe– —”
“No, no, Aubrey. He revealed himself in his analysis when he told us his dreams and his day dreams. Even our lies are a self-revelation. The more deliberate the lie the more damning the confession! He retold the history of the world as it reflects itself in one man’s mind. His story is an erotic interpretation of history. There is nothing in his recital that any educated man could not distill from his reading. His memory is nothing to brag of. It cannot compare with that of the servant girl who remembered whole speeches in Greek to which her subconscious mind had listened while she was dusting the bookshelves in the house of one of my colleagues. Isaac Laquedem is undoubtedly a thinker and a remarkably well-read man, but he is also a charlatan and an adventurer.”
“I do not think,” Father Ambrose insisted, “that you can explain Isaac Laquedem in terms of the laboratory or of empiric psychology. Too many occult events are associated with both his coming and with his going. How do you explain the strange unrest that kept us awake last night?”
“Our sleeplessness may be the aftermath of our exciting labors. Or it may be induced by the influence of atmospheric conditions,” Bassermann replied.
“What of my dream, professor?” Father Ambrose asked.
“Your dream was due to the noise of the gate as Laquedem opened it. Your room is near it, is it not?”
“But the watchmen saw no one go out, professor,” the priest insisted.
“Watchmen,” Basserrnann laughed ironically, “are sleepy-heads. If you wish a house to be robbed, employ a watchman.”
Suddenly the whir of an aeroplane overhead startled the three scientists. They rushed out. Over the crest of Mount Athos an aeroplane glided for a few moments, then disappeared in the clouds like a fantastic bird.
“It was he! I could wager my life on it!” Professor Bassermann exclaimed. “Isaac Laquedem would not relinquish the sensation of flying above the monastery on his way to Russia. He knows that we are watching him now and are speaking about him.”
The monks knelt and prayed, their heads raised towards the spot where the aeroplane had been. They rose, glared at the three men, and grumbled.
“I think we have outstayed our welcome. It is time we left this retreat, Father Ambrose,” Bassermann whispered.
“Your passports arrived with the visa this morning. In my excitement I kept the documents in my pocket.” He extricated from his cassock two passports, adorned fantastically with many seals.
“I welcome the long delay,” he added. “Who knows whether we shall meet again this side of Paradise? But let us elucidate, if we can, before your departure, the mystery of our guest.”
“I,” Aubrey remarked, “am convinced that Isaac Laquedem has lived nearly two thousand years, and that, except for obvious lapses and exaggerations, his story is true.”
“How can you reconcile that supposition with your scientific conscience?” Professor Bassermann derisively asked.
“Like Laquedem, I reject the occult interpretation of his extraordinary experience. He himself supplies the clue to the mystery,” replied Aubrey Lowell. “Isaac Laquedem suffered a severe psychological shock on his way to the crucifixion of Jesus. The shock mysteriously disarrayed the mechanism of his metabolism. It over-stimulated his glands to such an extent that they were able to eliminate completely the byproduct of life, the waste which, accumulating in the channels of our body, produces old age and death. Death, I a
m convinced, is not a biological necessity. The experiments of Carrel have established that tissue may renew itself indefinitely.”
“He has,” Professor Bassermann growled, “established only the immortality of the chicken heart!”
“The immortality of Isaac Laquedem rests on an analogeus process. Carrel keeps the tissue young by constantly purging it of all impurities. Isaac Laquedem’s system in some way which I cannot explain, performs for him naturally the functions which Carrel’s test tubes and chemical reagents perform for his tissue. Nature, anticipating Steinach, accelerated the internal at the expense of the external secretions of his glands. She made him a great lover but denied him progeny. The internal secretions stimulate his metabolism enormously. Every tissue of Laquedem’s body, including his brain, is uncannily alive. We have barely touched the accumulations of his memory…”
“But how,” Professor Bassermann asked, “do you explain the longevity of Kotikokura, who was exposed to no such psychic shock.”
“Laquedem transferred to Kotikokura certain hormones with his blood. Kotikokura’s body offered a favorable soil to these hormones; they accentuated the activity of his glands in the same manner in which they quickened the vital processes of his master. For some mysterious physialogical reason Laquedem’s blood thrived in the missing link, but was fatal to Damis. It is a hypothesis by no means to be rejected that the venom of the snake bite may have acted as an antidote to certain toxins in Laquedem’s blood. Perhaps Kotikokura’s robust constitution was sufficient in itself to neutralize the poisonous substance.”
“Very ingenious!” Bassermann exclaimed. “But how do you explain the inaccuracies and anachronisms with which Laquedem’s tale abounds? He confuses historical characters and juggles with time. I doubt if he could pass successfully a college entrance examination in history!”
“Probably not,” Aubrey remarked. “Laquedem is as human as we are. His brain is subject to the same errors as ours. His recollections are colored by his own personality. It takes two years to perform an ordinary analysis. It would take fifty years to analyze Laquedem in such a way as to unravel all the complexes which constitute his personality and to eliminate from his recollections the factor of human error. Incidentally,” Aubrey laughed, “the joke is on us.”
“How so?” Bassermann asked.
“We wished to discover whether the memory of the race can be reached through the subconscious. Unfortunately, of all beings in the world, we selected for our experiments the one man whose memory extends over two thousand years! We reached the end of his conscious life, but have hardly opened the portals of his subconscious.”
“Then,” Father Ambrose remarked, “you would say the experiment failed.”
“No. Like Columbus we set out to discover one thing and discovered another. What is your opinion of our experiment, Father?”
“I agree with you that Isaac Laquedem told the truth. He is indeed the Wandering Jew. I cannot tell how God wrought the miracle, but it is a miracle. By every sign and token he, Isaac Laquedem, is Ahasuerus.”
“Nonsense,” Bassermann exclaimed irritably, “he is a Russian conspirator.”
“Have you forgotten the sudden storm on his arrival? Do you recall the seven plovers and the broken bell? Don’t you remember how the wounds of the Crucified reopened when he entered the room? He is unquestionably the Wandering Jew.”
“Fiddlesticks,” Bassermann thundered. “He is a Russian spy!”
“I am inclined to agree with Father Ambrose,” Aubrey replied, “without accepting his supernatural implications. But if we are right, if he is the Wandering Jew, do you know what we have done– —?”
“Well?” Bassermann snapped.
“We have killed him. We have condemned him to death.”
“Killed him?” the other two added.
“Having traced the shock—the trauma of the psychologists—to its origin, we have broken the spell. The long chain snaps. The glands are restored to their normal function. The hypnotic command is dissolved. The curse, if it be a curse, is lifted. Henceforth Isaac Laquedem is like other mortals. His glands will function like ours. We have cured the patient. If our cure is effective, the patient will die…”
“No, my son, he will live on until Jesus returns. ‘Tarry thou till I come.’ Isaac Laquedem can find no peace until the Saviour returns to judge the quick and the dead.”
Father Ambrose made the sign of the cross. “Whatever our final judgment may be,” Aubrey said, “we have conducted together a phenomenal investigation.”
“That is no doubt true,” Bassermann said. “Laquedem’s analysis constitutes a complete mental chart of civilized man.”
“The world will be startled when we print our notes.”
“Startled and probably angered,” Bassermann added, rubbing his hands.
“Laquedem’s story,” Aubrey added, “sheds a new and colorful light on history, religion, sex, morality, occultism, rejuvenation, re-incarnation, recurrence of type. There is in Laquedem something of Don Juan and Casanova, and something of Faust. He is Faustian in that he attempts to face the problem of human life in its entirety.”
“Many writers have attempted to tell the story of Ahasuerus,” Bassermann remarked.
“Yes, but they confined themselves to one incident, or like Goethe, contented themselves with a fragment. This is the first time the story is told in his own words, and is told as a whole. Technically, especially in view of the manner in which we probed his memory by psychoanalysis, the recital of his tale presents almost insurmountable difficulties…”
“The story,” Bassermann remarked, “must be told backwards, or rather, it must be unfolded from the beginning. Isaac Laquedem told his life from maturity to youth. Such a procedure would be abstruse and difficult to follow. It is like reading through a mirror. We must begin with his youth and carry his life forward from its beginning to where it ends.”
“If it ends,” softly remarked Father Ambrose.
“Perhaps you are right,” Aubrey said. “His story can never end. The life of Isaac Laquedem is the history of human passion.”
“Will the Censor permit you to tell his story?” Father Ambrose remarked. “I hear that policemen in Boston and the chief of the lettercarriers in Washington are the arbiters of literature and morals in the United States.”
“We cannot destroy this most remarkable record in the history of psychology in deference to vulgar prudery,” Aubrey replied. “However bizarre Isaac Laquedem’s adventures may be, however curious the bypaths of his sensations, however exotic the labyrinths of his passion, there is nothing in his story that does not lurk somewhere in the subconscious of every one of us. His experiences are purely human. Nihil humanum…nothing human is alien to him.”
“I am less afraid,” Professor Bassermann remarked, “of the moralists than of religious zealots who may consider the confessions of Isaac Laquedem an attack upon all religion.”
“Only,” Father Ambrose interjected gravely, “if they do not read his confessions in their entirety. Every phase in his development is but a link in a chain. It may be the chain between man and God. Both mystic and rationalist will find in Laquedem’s confession the confirmation of their convictions.”
The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of three monks, pale and tottering. “These are the watchmen,” Father Ambrose remarked. “Now we shall hear how Isaac Laquedem escaped.”
The monks seemed to be unable to speak articulately.
Professor Bassermann looked into their eyes and examined their pulse. “These men are hypnotized,” he exclaimed. “It was thus that the Russian spy managed to get away.”
“This proves my contention. He is the Wandering Jew,” Father Ambrose asserted heatedly. “No one but a person with extraordinary psychic powers can hypnotize three men simultaneously. He has repeated for us the feat which freed him from the claws of the Inquisition. The Lord has given him supernatural powers to extricate himself from his predicaments that he may
continue his pilgrimage unhindered.”
The three scientists remained silent for a while, watching the monks recovering slowly from a state bordering closely on catalepsy.
“You will take your notes with you, gentlemen,” Father Ambrose said sadly. “May I keep the shoes and the telegrams?”
“Of course,” the two answered.
“It will not be easy to step into those shoes,” Aubrey Lowell said softly.
“You exaggerate the size of his feet,” Professor Bassermann laughed. “These shoes are by no means enormous. It seems to me that they are his evening slippers…”
“Come, gentlemen,” Father Ambrose remarked, reminding himself of his duties as a host, “breakfast is waiting.”
The three men walked slowly toward the monastery. Their shadows mingled as if the three great divisions of human thought, absolute faith, absolute denial and pragmatic acceptance, were at last reconciled.
The aeroplane had left the skies unruffled, but in its trail seven plovers disappeared in the distance.
The sun, rising from the Ægean, hurled spears of fire at the golden cross gleaming undimmed and undaunted on the marble peak of Mount Athos.
THE END
[The Wandering Jew 1] - My First Two Thousand Years the Autobiography of the Wandering Jew Page 53