Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, precocious author of Frankenstein, very competently recounted the problems of a man who had drunk an alchemist’s elixir in The Mortal Immortal (Keepsake, 1834) and the problems he met with his aging wife; only three years later Nathaniel Hawthorne had published under the title of The Fountain of Youth in The Salem Gazette (1837) his well-known Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment, a story of four people momentarily made young again.
The theme would range hauntingly through the work of generations of writers, to be featured even by the mass circulation publication Cosmopolitan, which in its January 1903 issue ran Dr. Cox’s Discovery by Herbert D. Ward, wherein a vaccine that restores youth is discovered and administered to a middle-aged woman on behest of her daughter, with the unusual result of both of them competing for the attentions of the inventor.
Amazing Stories in its September 1929 issue was still running the same basic type of immortality story in The Young Old Man by Earl L. Bell, placing an ageless man who has formulated and drunk an elixir formula of Roger Bacon in a secluded small village in the Ozarks. This pattern revived the immortality theme for modern authors like Robert A. Heinlein, whose long-lived Gramps Schneider dwelled among the Amish (Astounding Science-Fiction, August 1942), and Clifford D. Simak, whose 163-year-old hillbilly, Joe, is still an adolescent (Census, Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1944), both placing the unusual individual in an out-of-the-way part of society, where his presence might not have been noted by the mainstream.
The science fiction plot based on longevity will never disappear, because it is one of the most ardent expressions of man’s wish fulfillment. A great number of the stories of prolonged life or of youth restoration eventually focus on the negative aspects of such a condition. This is sour grapes. Knowing its unattainability, the author tells the reader: “You wouldn’t like it if you had it.”
This ambivalent attitude of science fiction writers toward immortality is unintentionally satirized in the short poem The Immortal by Robert Sanders Shaw (Amateur Correspondent, November-December 1937), which crudely but effectively sums up the traditional plot line:
I have seen mountains and valleys so low,
And I’ve drunk from fountains ‘neath a ship’s bow—
Marble carved fountains, where grey giants grow,
‘Mid the pained throes of Atlantean woe.
I have flown spaceways, myself, all alone
In a star-studded ship, shaped like a cone.
I’ve cursed at those silent stars—brilliant, cold;
They know that I shall never become old.
I’ve solved a secret which men yearn to know;
I am immortal, a demigod—Lo!
Tired, though, of living, I long to return;
Withal my cursed gift, one thing I’ll not learn
Though it’s a secret which all men can know—
When through the dark ports of Death they shall go.
IN ONE of those quaint-looking, cage-work houses, of which only a few decaying specimens now remain in Dublin, lived Doctor Humphry Rutherford. He was so old, that no person born within the past three generations could form even a general estimate of his age. He lived apart from society, and wore a costume that brought the minds of those who saw him back to the days when Jonathan Swift was still an infant in arms.
He was, indeed, a queer old man; and no wonder that some of his poorer and more superstitious neighbours regarded him as a restless ghost who had come back to re-visit the scenes of his former life. That old fashioned peruke, those curious-looking shoe-buckles, those ruffles recalling the reign of Charles the Second, had nothing in common with the latter half of the nineteenth century; and so, if most people avoided him as something weird, uncanny, and phantom-like, they were, after all, only acting upon one of the most universal and deeply-rooted instincts of human nature.
This strange old personage had only one servant, who, curiously enough, was of foreign extraction. His features were of a tawny hue, and there was something of the Zingari about his entire appearance. He was far from being as old as the Doctor; and yet his thick hair was quite white, and his dark skin was creased with wrinkles. The name by which his master called him, was Hafiz, apparently indicating that he was a Persian by birth. He was, indeed, the only connecting link between Doctor Rutherford and the outer world; and it must be admitted that very little, if anything at all, could be ascertained through him concerning his master’s private life, for a more uncommunicative type of servant never existed.
The Doctor had long since ceased to practise his profession openly, though he spent much of his time in compounding strange mixtures out of ingredients, some of which had been for many years in his possession, while others were procured by Hafiz, his dusky retainer, at some chemist’s shop in their immediate neighbourhood. A laboratory had been specially fitted up for this purpose in one wing of the house; and the old physician, as he bent over the vessel in which he heated the mysterious decoction, might not inaptly have been compared to an alchemist, eagerly brooding over his marvellous task of transmuting the baser metals into gold.
But, in truth, the Doctor’s experiment was even more daring and far-reaching than any of the feats performed, or supposed to have been performed, by the believers in alchemy; and, incredible as it may seem, his efforts had hitherto been attended with apparent success. The old man had, many years before, conceived the idea of prolonging life indefinitely by judiciously extracting the vital properties of plants and combining them with the essence of the most potent minerals. The notion was not quite original; and modern science, if, indeed, it had ever seriously entertained it, had discarded it as a wild and baseless dream. To Doctor Rutherford’s mind, however, the possibility of repelling the approach of death had presented itself as something quite within the scope of the physician’s art; and the great age to which he had already attained, seemed to show that his speculations were not entirely chimerical.
One evening, in the month of October, the doctor was engaged in his favourite occupation in the laboratory, while Hafiz respectfully watched his movements in the background. In the midst of the silence, which neither the old man nor his attendant seemed disposed to break, could be distinctly heard the simmering of the peculiarly-shaped antique-looking vessel suspended above the glowing fire.
All at once, the Doctor, lifting up the cover of the vessel, and peering down into its interior, uttered a hoarse cry of alarm.
“Gracious God!” he exclaimed, “what is this? The Elixir has lost its natural colour. It is as red as blood!”
“Nay, master,” said Hafiz, pronouncing the words with a distinctly foreign accent, “you must be wrong, I swear. By the prophet, you must be wrong!”
“How dare you contradict me, sirrah?” burst out the Doctor, with an expression partly of anger and partly of fear on his withered countenance. “I tell you, knave, I see my fate in this mixture to-night.”
Hafiz grinned, but speedily stifled any tendency towards mirth, as he scanned his master’s face.
“Perhaps there is something forgotten,” he said at length.
“No, no,” said the Doctor; “I have put in all the ingredients. What can it be? I cannot have made a mistake; and yet—and yet—”
He paused, and stared into the fire with glistening eyes.
“Were it not better, master,” Hafiz ventured to suggest, “not to touch a drop of the Elixir to-night?”
“Nay, you white-livered rascal,” rejoined the Doctor, with a contemptuous sneer; “I am not afraid of consequences, I have suffered too much during my long life to shrink from what most men call disaster. If I have gained a lengthened lease of life what has it availed me? My years, for nearly two full centuries, have been but a dreary waste.” As he uttered the last words, a deep sigh came forth, as it were, from the caverns of his aged heart.
The Asiatic, now assuming a more serious look, advanced a few steps, and rather diffidently asked:
“Might I, too, look at it, master, to s
ee it is all right?”
“Yes, Hafiz, you may look; and then, perhaps, your shallow brain may realize that I am not labouring under any delusion.”
The keen vision of Hafiz quickly detected that his master had unconsciously distorted the fact, when he said that the mysterious contents of the vessel were “as red as blood.” They had, certainly, an entirely different colour from that which they had always exhibited before, on similar occasions; and the impression conveyed by a close inspection was that the compound was gradually assuming a crimson hue, which, when it began to cool, might be easily mistaken for blood.
“Now, Hafiz, are you satisfied?” said Doctor Rutherford, as the Asiatic drew back with an almost imperceptible shudder. “—Was I right, or not, in thinking that a strange transformation has taken place in the Elixir?”
Hafiz was now genuinely alarmed.
“Master,” he said eagerly, laying his swarthy hand on the Doctor’s arm, “drink none of it to-night. Some demon has turned it into blood!”
“Folly! Folly!” said Doctor Rutherford, with a frown. “I have carefully compounded it; and, if any change is to come to-night, it must be part of Nature’s inscrutable designs, and cannot be averted by human agency. As for me, I am ready to meet my destiny. By the use of the precious Elixir, I have lived more than two hundred years, and I will not cast it away now, whatever may befall me.”
“But—but—oh! dear master,” said Hafiz, with trembling lips, “what if you should die?”
“If I should die?” repeated the Doctor, with a ghastly smile. “Ha! ha! ha! and what then, Hafiz? What is death? Release from the bondage of the flesh—the emancipation of the enslaved soul. Is life so dear a thing to me that I should choose to dwell imprisoned in the body for ever? Have I not told you more than once that in the scroll of Fate there is affixed to my name these cabalistic words: ‘Through death he shall regain his lost happiness, and even from the grave love shall bloom again?’ Ah! Hafiz, what a thought—to be reunited to one without whom the world is a desert and existence a curse! For this have I lived—for this I would gladly die. Yes, yes, the Elixir has been my friend, my sustainer all these years, and to-night, perhaps, it may bring me that happiness I have vainly yearned for. The goblet, man—the goblet. Hasten, hasten; I can tarry in suspense no longer!”
The Asiatic dared not disobey this peremptory command. He rushed over to a corner of the laboratory, and, snatching up a silver goblet, beautifully chased, silently handed it to his master. Then, at a gesture from the Doctor, he removed the vessel from its position above the fire, and poured into it a goodly portion of the mysterious fluid.
As the old physician raised the goblet to his lips, its contents bubbled up in crimson globules.
The Doctor’s dark grey eyes flashed from beneath his shaggy eye-brows with almost the fire of youth.
“The time has come!” he murmured. “Even if I should lose the great gift of extended life, the fruit of long research and occult knowledge, what does it matter if she comes back to me?”
Hafiz looked on amazed and almost terror-stricken at his master, who drained the goblet to the dregs.
Scarcely had the old physician finished the draught, when he suddenly laid his hand upon his heart.
“Oh! wonderful! wonderful! wonderful!” he exclaimed, with a look of exultation; “my youth is returning—the shadows of old age are fading away from me, like night before the dawn!”
The attendant silently took the goblet extended towards him by his master.
“Pour out a fresh draught,” said the Doctor, eagerly. “Let not the precious Elixir be wasted! Drink of it, too, yourself, Hafiz! Drink, drink, poor, wavering fool!”
The Asiatic shook his head with an air of mild protest.
“What, Hafiz,” said Doctor Rutherford, with an odd smile, “do you not wish, too, to renew your youth, to be happy, to be loved?”
“No, no, master,’ said the Asiatic, with a scared look in his dusky face. “I need it not. I am satisfied to remain as I am. The Elixir to-night has such a blood-red colour that it frightens me. I cannot bring myself to drink it, master. I feel that it would kill me!”
“Then live, wretch, and wither!” exclaimed his master, fiercely.
“I envy you not, even though you were to exist in earthly misery for ten thousand years. Better one hour of true happiness than countless centuries of loneliness and gloom!”
The old man’s face had by this time become quite radiant with glowing rapture. It seemed as if he were anticipating some great event, which was to be the crowning glory of his life.
“Light me to the Blue Room, Hafiz,” he said, waving his hand with unwonted gaiety toward his dark-faced attendant, “and bring with you the golden candlesticks which were presented to me by Lord Berkeley, in the year 1670. For to-night at least my spirit shall rejoice, and the shadows of the past shall vanish.”
The Asiatic automatically obeyed, leading the way up a broad staircase to a large, wainscoted chamber, whose ceiling and panelling were painted in light blue, so as to present a very curious and somewhat fantastic aspect. Immediately above the massive chimney-piece hung the portrait of a lady in the dress of a bygone day. She looked quite young, and there was an indefinable expression at once wistful, wayward, and winsome in her dreamy, wide-open eyes, and in her chaste, flower-shaped lips, that seemed to tremble on the verge of speech.
The Doctor gazed up for a moment at this portrait, and then, with a low murmur of satisfaction, dropped down upon a kind of couch, whereon he lay for some moments, apparently wrapt in a delicious reverie.
“Perhaps, master,” interposed the Asiatic, stealthily approaching him, “you might wish to see some eminent man in the profession? The effects of the Elixir might be dangerous.”
He emphasized the last word in the most significant manner, as if he were anxious to arouse in the Doctor’s breast a sense of fear which would naturally impel him to seek the necessary antidote at once.
“Hence, hence, prating fool!” said the old physician, “I am happy, and I know I shall be happier still. Go!—leave me to myself. I feel that I could laugh and be glad at this moment, even though the world weir splintered into fragments in the morning!”
Hafiz stole out of the room; but a parting glance at the Doctor convinced him that this unnatural exuberance was only the forerunner of some sudden fatality. Attached as he was to his master, and desirous of saving him, if possible, from the consequences of what he regarded as a rash and desperate act, he resolved in this emergency to take a decisive step. He flung a kind of cloak across his shoulders, drew a hat over his dark brows, and rushed off precipitately in the direction of Fitzwilliam Square.
He had frequently, in the course of his wanderings through the city, heard Doctor Hugh Melville spoken of as not only a distinguished physician but a perfect master of the science of chemistry. In many cases where persons had been suspected of secret poisoning, Doctor Melville’s examination of the dead bodies had settled the question of “yea” or “nay,” though some of his brother physicians had failed to determine the exact cause of death. Though not yet quite fifty years of age, he had reached the front rank in his profession,, and had gained quite a European reputation. His book on Vitality was considered a masterpiece of scientific investigation and profound physiological research. He was, moreover, a man of the most courteous and obliging disposition. He often attended the poorest class of patients in their own dingy homes without any hope of remuneration, manifesting sincere sympathy with them in their distress, and giving them a great deal of his valuable time.
It may, therefore, be seen that Hafiz was wise in seeking the assistance and counsel of this excellent man.
Without delay, Doctor Melville ordered out his own carriage, late as the hour was, and drove rapidly towards the residence of the eccentric, old recluse, whose very existence he had never heard of before. Such thorough goodness of heart, such spontaneous kindness, we do not frequently find amongst the medical men of our time. Les
s than half-an-hour had elapsed since Hafiz had left the Blue Room, when the old man, who was lying in a state of semi-consciousness on the couch, whereon he had flung himself, was roused by the sound of an opening door.
He started up, and exclaimed, in a half-stupefied fashion:
“Hafiz, are you there? Is that you, Hafiz?”
“No, sir,” replied the newcomer; “it is a stranger, who has heard of your sudden indisposition, and has come to prescribe for you, and let us hope, to restore you to your usual health.”
The old man stared somewhat haughtily at Doctor Melville.
“My good friend,” he said, in a slightly disdainful tone, “you are, I presume, a physician. So am I; but we differ in this—that you belong to the present age—an age of superficial science, and vain half-knowledge, while I have studied in the old-world school, which professed to solve all the mysteries of man’s complex nature. You who, perhaps, regard Paracelsus as a mediaeval quack, must know very little about the Elixir of Life.”
The younger physician shook his head and smiled.
“I am afraid, my dear sir,” he said, “your Paracelsus was a foolish dreamer. Modern physiology has explained away such folly.”
“There you err egregiously,” returned Doctor Rutherford, who had now raised himself to a sitting posture on the couch. “Come, now, tell me how long do you think I have lived by the use of a rare decoction?”
“I should say you are a very old man, sir.”
“Just two hundred and forty-five years. That is all.”
Doctor Melville raised his eyebrows incredulously.
“I fear there must be a slight mistake somehow,” he said, with great suavity.
“Not a bit of it,” said the other; “and if you want to know something more of my private history, just cast your eyes at that portrait over the chimney-piece there. That was my wife, and we were married in this city in the year 1670. I was then quite a young man, and had only just entered the medical profession. I may mention that, on the occasion, the Viceroy, Lord Berkeley, for whom I had acted as an amanuensis for some months, made me a present of that pair of golden candlesticks on the table there before your eyes.”
Science Fiction by Gaslight: A History and Anthology of Science Fiction in the Popular Magazines, 1891-1911 Page 43