Atlas Nightshade

Day 45

"It is like poor Lucy's."

"And what do you make of it?"

"Simply that there is some cause in common. Whatever it was that injured

her has injured them." I did not quite understand his answer:--

"That is true indirectly, but not directly."

"How do you mean, Professor?" I asked. I was a little inclined to take

his seriousness lightly--for, after all, four days of rest and freedom

from burning, harrowing anxiety does help to restore one's spirits--but

when I saw his face, it sobered me. Never, even in the midst of our

despair about poor Lucy, had he looked more stern.

"Tell me!" I said. "I can hazard no opinion. I do not know what to

think, and I have no data on which to found a conjecture."

"Do you mean to tell me, friend John, that you have no suspicion as to

what poor Lucy died of; not after all the hints given, not only by

events, but by me?"

"Of nervous prostration following on great loss or waste of blood."

"And how the blood lost or waste?" I shook my head. He stepped over and

sat down beside me, and went on:--

"You are clever man, friend John; you reason well, and your wit is bold;

but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears

hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to

you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand,

and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But

there are things old and new which must not be contemplate by men's

eyes, because they know--or think they know--some things which other men

have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to

explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to

explain. But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs,

which think themselves new; and which are yet but the old, which pretend

to be young--like the fine ladies at the opera. I suppose now you do not

believe in corporeal transference. No? Nor in materialisation. No? Nor

in astral bodies. No? Nor in the reading of thought. No? Nor in

hypnotism----"

"Yes," I said. "Charcot has proved that pretty well." He smiled as he

went on: "Then you are satisfied as to it. Yes? And of course then you

understand how it act, and can follow the mind of the great

Charcot--alas that he is no more!--into the very soul of the patient

that he influence. No? Then, friend John, am I to take it that you

simply accept fact, and are satisfied to let from premise to conclusion

be a blank? No? Then tell me--for I am student of the brain--how you

accept the hypnotism and reject the thought reading. Let me tell you, my

friend, that there are things done to-day in electrical science which

would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered

electricity--who would themselves not so long before have been burned

as wizards. There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that

Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and 'Old Parr' one hundred and

sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men's blood in her poor

veins, could not live even one day? For, had she live one more day, we

could have save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do

you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the

qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me

why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived

for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew,

till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps? Can

you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that

come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their

veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang

on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant

nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that

it is hot, flit down on them, and then--and then in the morning are

found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?"

"Good God, Professor!" I said, starting up. "Do you mean to tell me that

Lucy was bitten by such a bat; and that such a thing is here in London

in the nineteenth century?" He waved his hand for silence, and went

on:--

"Can you tell me why the tortoise lives more long than generations of

men; why the elephant goes on and on till he have seen dynasties; and

why the parrot never die only of bite of cat or dog or other complaint?

Can you tell me why men believe in all ages and places that there are

some few who live on always if they be permit; that there are men and

women who cannot die? We all know--because science has vouched for the

fact--that there have been toads shut up in rocks for thousands of

years, shut in one so small hole that only hold him since the youth of

the world. Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to die

and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it, and the

corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again, and then men

come and take away the unbroken seal and that there lie the Indian

fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as before?" Here

I interrupted him. I was getting bewildered; he so crowded on my mind

his list of nature's eccentricities and possible impossibilities that my

imagination was getting fired. I had a dim idea that he was teaching me

some lesson, as long ago he used to do in his study at Amsterdam; but

he used then to tell me the thing, so that I could have the object of

thought in mind all the time. But now I was without this help, yet I

wanted to follow him, so I said:--

"Professor, let me be your pet student again. Tell me the thesis, so

that I may apply your knowledge as you go on. At present I am going in

my mind from point to point as a mad man, and not a sane one, follows an

idea. I feel like a novice lumbering through a bog in a mist, jumping

from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to move on without

knowing where I am going."

"That is good image," he said. "Well, I shall tell you. My thesis is

this: I want you to believe."

"To believe what?"

"To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once

of an American who so defined faith: 'that faculty which enables us to

believe things which we know to be untrue.' For one, I follow that man.

He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of

truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway

truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value

him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in

the universe."

"Then you want me not to let some previous conviction injure the

receptivity of my mind with regard to some strange matter. Do I read

your lesson aright?"

"Ah, you are my favourite pupil still. It is worth to teach you. Now

that you are willing to understand, you have taken the first step to

understand. You think then that those so small holes in the children's

throats were made by the same that made the hole in Miss Lucy?"

"I suppose so." He stood up and said solemnly:--

"Then you are wrong. Oh, would it were so! but alas! no. It is worse,

far, far worse."

"In God's name, Professor Van Helsing, what do you mean?" I cried.

He threw himself with a despairing gesture into a chair, and placed his

elbows on the table, covering his face with his hands as he spoke:--

"They were made by Miss Lucy!"

CHAPTER XV

DR. SEWARD'S DIARY--_continued_.

For a while sheer anger mastered me; it was as if he had during her life

struck Lucy on the face. I smote the table hard and rose up as I said to

him:--

"Dr. Van Helsing, are you mad?" He raised his head and looked at me, and

somehow the tenderness of his face calmed me at once. "Would I were!" he

said. "Madness were easy to bear compared with truth like this. Oh, my

friend, why, think you, did I go so far round, why take so long to tell

you so simple a thing? Was it because I hate you and have hated you all

my life? Was it because I wished to give you pain? Was it that I wanted,

now so late, revenge for that time when you saved my life, and from a

fearful death? Ah no!"

"Forgive me," said I. He went on:--

"My friend, it was because I wished to be gentle in the breaking to you,

for I know you have loved that so sweet lady. But even yet I do not

expect you to believe. It is so hard to accept at once any abstract

truth, that we may doubt such to be possible when we have always

believed the 'no' of it; it is more hard still to accept so sad a

concrete truth, and of such a one as Miss Lucy. To-night I go to prove

it. Dare you come with me?"

This staggered me. A man does not like to prove such a truth; Byron

excepted from the category, jealousy.

"And prove the very truth he most abhorred."

He saw my hesitation, and spoke:--

"The logic is simple, no madman's logic this time, jumping from tussock

to tussock in a misty bog. If it be not true, then proof will be relief;

at worst it will not harm. If it be true! Ah, there is the dread; yet

very dread should help my cause, for in it is some need of belief. Come,

I tell you what I propose: first, that we go off now and see that child

in the hospital. Dr. Vincent, of the North Hospital, where the papers

say the child is, is friend of mine, and I think of yours since you were

in class at Amsterdam. He will let two scientists see his case, if he

will not let two friends. We shall tell him nothing, but only that we

wish to learn. And then----"

"And then?" He took a key from his pocket and held it up. "And then we

spend the night, you and I, in the churchyard where Lucy lies. This is

the key that lock the tomb. I had it from the coffin-man to give to

Arthur." My heart sank within me, for I felt that there was some fearful

ordeal before us. I could do nothing, however, so I plucked up what

heart I could and said that we had better hasten, as the afternoon was

passing....