The Pools of Silence

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Title: The Pools of Silence

Author: H. de Vere Stacpoole

Release Date: October 12, 2008 [EBook #26889]

Language: English

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THE

POOLS OF SILENCE

BY

H. de VERE STACPOOLE

AUTHOR OF

THE BLUE LAGOON, THE CRIMSON AZALEAS,

GARRYOWEN, ETC.

NEW YORK

DUFFIELD & COMPANY

1910

Copyright, 1910, by

DUFFIELD & COMPANY

Published, July, 1910

THE TROW PRESS, NEW YORK

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PART ONE

CHAPTER I

A LECTURE OF THENARD’S

The sun was setting over Paris, a blood-red and violent-looking sun, like the face of a bully staring in at the window of a vast chill room.

The bank of cloud above the west, corrugated by the wind, seemed not unlike the lowermost slats of a Venetian blind; one might have fancied that a great finger had tilted them up whilst the red, callous, cruel face took a last peep at the frost-bitten city, the frost-bound country—Montmartre and its windows, winking and bloodshot; Bercy and its barges; Notre Dame, where icicles, large as carrots, hung from the lips of the gargoyles, and the Seine clipping the cité and flowing to the clean but distant sea.

It was the fourth of January and the last day of Félix Thénard’s post-graduate course of lectures at the Beaujon Hospital.

Post-graduate lectures are intended not for students, using the word in its limited sense, but for fully fledged men who wish for extra training in some special subject, and Thénard, the famous neurologist of the Beaujon, had a class which practically represented the whole continent of Europe and half the world. Men from Vienna and Madrid, Germany and Japan, London and New York, crowded the benches of his lecture room. Even the Republic of Liberia was represented by a large gentleman, who seemed carved from solid night and polished with palm oil.

Dr. Paul Quincy Adams, one of the representatives of America at the lectures of Thénard, was just reaching the entrance of the Beaujon as the last rays of sunset were touching the heights of Montmartre and the first lamps of Paris were springing alight.

He had walked all the way from his rooms in the Rue Dijon, for omnibuses were slow and uncomfortable, cabs were dear, and money was, just at present, the most unpleasant thing that money can convert itself into—an object.

Adams was six feet two, a Vermonter, an American gentleman whose chest measurements were big, almost, as his instincts were fine. He had fought his way up, literally from the soil, putting in terms as seaside café waiter to help to pay his college fees; putting aside everything but honour in his grand struggle to freedom and individual existence, and finishing his college career with a travelling scholarship which brought him to Paris.

Individualism, the thing that lends something of greatness to each American, but which does not tend to the greatness of the nation, was the mainspring of this big man whom Nature had undoubtedly designed with her eye on the vast plains, virgin forests, and unfordable rivers, and across whose shoulder one half divined the invisible axe of the pioneer.

He was just twenty-three years of age, yet he looked thirty: plain enough as far as features go, his face was a face to remember in time of trouble. It was of the American type that approximates to the Red Indian, and you guessed the power that lay behind it by the set of the cheek-bones, the breadth of the chin and the restfulness of the eyes. Like the Red Indian, Paul Quincy Adams was slow of speech. A silent man with his tongue.

He entered the hospital and passed down a long corridor to the cloakroom, where he left his overcoat and from there, by another corridor, he found his way to the swing-door of the lecture theatre. It wanted five minutes to the hour. He peeped over the muffing of the glass; the place was nearly full, so he went in and took his seat, choosing one at the right hand end of the first row of the stalls—students’ vernacular for the lowest row of the theatre benches.

The theatre was lit with gas. It had whitewashed walls bare as the walls of a barn; a permanent blackboard faced the audience, and the air was suffocatingly hot after the crisp, cold air of the streets. It would be like this till about the middle of the lecture, when Alphonse the porter would pull the rope of the skylight and ventilate the place with an arctic blast.

This room, which had once been an anatomical theatre, and always a lecture room, had known the erect form of Lisfranc; the stooping shoulders of Majendie had cast their shadow on its walls; Flourens had lectured here on that subject of which he had so profound a knowledge—the brain; the echoes of this room had heard the foundations of Medicine shift and change, the rank heresies of yesterday voiced as the facts of to-day—and vice versa.

Adams, having opened his notebook and sharpened his pencil, sat listening to the gas sizzling above his head; then he turned for a moment and glanced at the men behind him: the doctor from Vienna in a broadly braided frock-coat with satin facings, betraying himself to all men by the end of the clinical thermometer protruding from his waistcoat pocket; the two Japanese gentlemen—brown, incurious, and inscrutable—men from another world, come to look on; the republican from Liberia, and the rest. Then he turned his head, for the door on the floor of the theatre had opened, giving entrance to Thénard.

Thénard was a smallish man in a rather shabby frock-coat; his beard was scant, pointed, and gray-tinged; he had a depressed expression, the general air of a second-rate tradesman on the verge of bankruptcy; and as he entered and crossed to the estrade where the lecture table stood and the glass of water, he shouted some words vehemently and harshly to Alphonse, the theatre attendant, who, it seemed, had forgotten to place the box of coloured chalks on the table—the sacred chalks which the lecturer used for colouring his diagrams on the blackboard.

One instantly took a dislike to this shabby-looking bourgeois, with the harsh, irritable voice, but after awhile, as the lecture went on, one forgot him. It was not the profundity of the man’s knowledge, great though it was, that impressed one; or the subtlety of his reasoning or the lucidity of his expression, but his earnestness, his obvious disregard for everything earthly but Truth.

This was borne in on one by every expression of his face, every gesture of his body, every word and every tone and inflection of his voice.

This was the twelfth and last lecture of the course. It was on the Brain Conceived as a Machine Pure and Simple.

It was a cold and pitiless lecture, striking at the root of poetry and romance, speaking of religions, not religion, and utterly ignoring the idea which stands poised like a white-winged Victory over all other ideas—the Soul.

It was pitiless because it did these things, and it was terrible because it was spoken by Thénard, for he was just standing there, a little, oldish man, terribly convincing in his simplicity, absolutely without prejudice, as ready to acknowledge the soul and its attributes as to refuse them, standing there twiddling his horsehair watch-chain, and speaking from the profundity of his knowledge with, at his elbow, a huge army of facts, instances, and cases, not one of which did not support his logical deductions.

I wish I could print his lecture in full. I can only give some few sentences taken at haphazard from the peroration.

"The fundamental basis of all morality can be expressed by the words Left—or Right. ‘Shall I take the path to the right, when my child is being threatened with death by a pterodactyl, or shall I take the path to the left when a mastodon is threatening to put a foot on my dinner?’

"The prehistoric man asking himself that question in the dawn of time laid the foundation of the world’s morality. Do we know how he answered it? Yes—undoubtedly he saved his dinner.

"The prehistoric woman crouching in the ferns, wakened from sleep by the cries of her child on the left and the shouting of her man on the right, found herself face to face with the question, ‘Shall I court self-destruction in attempting to save It, or shall I seek safety with Him?’ Do we know how she answered that question? Undoubtedly she took the path to the left.

"The woman’s Right was the man’s Left, and she took it not from any motive of goodness but just because her child appealed to her as powerfully as his dinner appealed to the man. And which was the nobler instinct? In prehistoric times, gentlemen, they were both equally noble, for the instinct of the man was as essential to the fact that you and I are here gathered together in enlightened Paris, as the instinct of the woman.

"Right or Left? That is still the essence of morals—all the rest is embroidery. Whilst I am talking to you now, service is being held at the Madeleine, the Bourse is closed (looking at his watch), but other gaming houses are opening. The Café de Paris is filling, the Little Sisters of the Poor are visiting the sick.

"We feel keenly that some people are doing good and some people are doing evil. We wonder at the origin of it all, and the answer comes from the prehistoric forest.

"‘I am Determination. I can choose the Right or I can choose the Left. Whilst dwelling in the man’s heart my choice lies that way, in the woman’s heart that way.

"‘I am not religion, but between the man and the woman I have created an essential antagonism of motive which will be the basis of all future religions and systems of ethics. I have already dimly demarcated a line between ferocity and greed, and a thing which has yet no name, but which will in future ages be called Love.

"‘I am a constant quantity, but the dim plan I have traced in the plastic brain will be used by the ever-building years; spires and domes shall fret the skies, priests unroll their scrolls of papyri, infinite developments of the simple basic Right and Left laid down by me shall combine to build a Pantheon of a million shrines to a million gods—who are yet only three: the tramp of the mastodon, the cry of the child in the pterodactyl’s grip, and myself, who in future years shall be the only surviving god of the three—Determination.’

"The Pineal Gland had no known function, so Descartes declared it to be the seat of the soul. ‘There is nothing in here. Let us put something in,’ and he put in the idea of the soul. That was the old method.

Morphology teaches us now that the Pineal Gland is the last vestige of an eye which once belonged to a reptile long extinct. That is the new method; the results are not so pretty, but they are more exact.

You have finished your post-graduate work, and I suppose you are about to leave Paris like the others. Have you any plans?

The lecture was over, the audience was pouring out of the theatre, and Adams was talking to Thénard, whom he knew personally.

Well, no, said Adams. None very fixed just at present. Of course I shall practise in my own country, but I can’t quite see the opening yet.

CHAPTER II

DR. DUTHIL

Thénard, with his case-book and a bundle of papers under his arm, stood for a moment in thought. Then he suddenly raised his chin.

How would you like to go on a big-game shooting expedition to the Congo?

Ask a child would it like pie, said the American, speaking in English. Then, in French, Immensely, monsieur. Only it is impossible.

Why?

Money.

Ah, that’s just it, said Thénard. A patient of mine, Captain Berselius, is starting on a big-game shooting expedition to the Congo. He requires a medical man to accompany him, and the salary is two thousand francs a month and all things found——

Adams’s eyes lit up.

Two thousand a month!

"Yes; he is a very rich man. His wife is a patient of mine. When I was visiting her yesterday the Captain put the thing before me—in fact, gave me carte blanche to choose for him. He requires the services of a medical man—an Englishman if possible——"

But I’m an American, said Adams.

It is the same thing, replied Thénard, with a little laugh. You are all big and strong and fond of guns and danger.

He had taken Adams by the arm and was leading him down the passage toward the entrance hall of the hospital.

The primitive man is strong in you all, and that is why you are so vital and important, you Anglo-Saxons, Anglo-Celts, and Anglo-Teutons. Come in here.

He opened the door of one of the house-surgeon’s rooms.

A youngish looking man, with a straw-coloured beard, was seated before the fire, with a cigarette between his lips.

He rose to greet Thénard, was introduced to Adams, and, drawing an old couch a bit from the wall, he bade his guests be seated.

The armchair he retained himself. One of the legs was loose, and he was the only man in the Beaujon who had the art of sitting on it without smashing it. This he explained whilst offering cigarettes.

Thénard, like many another French professor, unofficially was quite one with the students. He would snatch a moment from his work to smoke a cigarette with them; he would sometimes look in at their little parties. I have seen him at a birthday party where the cakes and ale, to say nothing of the cigarettes and the unpawned banjo, were the direct products of a pawned microscope. I have seen him, I say, at a party like this, drinking a health to the microscope as the giver of all the good things on the table—he, the great Thénard, with an income of fifteen to twenty thousand pounds a year, and a reputation solid as the four massive text-books that stood to his name.

Duthil, said Thénard, I have secured, I believe, a man for our friend Berselius. He indicated Adams with a half laugh, and Dr. Duthil, turning in his chair, regarded anew the colossus from the States. The great, large-hewn, cast-iron visaged Adams, beside whom Thénard looked like a shrivelled monkey and Duthil like a big baby with a beard.

Good, said Duthil.

A better man than Bauchardy, said Thénard.

Much, replied Duthil.

Who, then, was Bauchardy? asked Adams, amused rather by the way in which the two others were discussing him.

Bauchardy? said Duthil. Why, he was the last man Berselius killed.

Silence, said Thénard, then turning to Adams, "Berselius is a perfectly straight man. On these hunting expeditions of his he invariably takes a doctor with him; he is not a man who fears death in the least, but he has had bitter experience of being without medical assistance, so he takes a doctor. He pays well and is entirely to be trusted to do the right thing, as far as money goes. On that side the contract is all right. But there is another side—the character of Berselius. A man, to be the companion of Captain Berselius, needs to be big and strong in body and mind, or he would be crushed by the hand of Captain Berselius. Yes, he is a terrible man in a way—un homme affreux—a man of the tiger type—and he is going to the country of the big baboons, where there is the freedom of action that the soul of such a man desires——"

In fact, said Adams, he is a villain, this Captain Berselius?

Oh, no, said Thénard, not in the least. Be quiet, Duthil, you do not know the man as I do. I have studied him; he is a Primitive——

An Apache, said Duthil. Come, dear master, confess that from the moment you heard that this Berselius was intent on another expedition, you determined to throw a foreigner into the breach. ‘No more French doctors, if possible,’ said you. Is not that so?

Thénard laughed the laugh of cynical confession, buttoning his overcoat at the same time and preparing to go.

Well, there may be something in what you say, Duthil. However, there the offer is—a sound one financially. Yes. I must say I dread that two thousand francs a month will prove a fatal attraction, and, if Mr. Adams does not go, some weaker man will. Well, I must be off.

One moment, said Adams. Will you give me this man’s address? I don’t say I will take the post, but I might at least go and see him.

Certainly, replied Thénard, and taking one of his own cards from his pocket, he scribbled on the back of it—

CAPTAIN ARMAND BERSELIUS

14 AVENUE MALAKOFF

Then he went off to a consultation at the Hotel Bristol on a Balkan prince, whose malady, hitherto expressed by evil living, had suddenly taken an acute and terrible turn and Adams found himself alone with Dr. Duthil.

That is Thénard all over, said Duthil. "He is the high priest of modernism. He and all the rest of the neurologists have divided up devilment into provinces, and labelled each province with names all ending in enia or itis. Berselius is a Primitive, it seems; this Balkan prince is—I don’t know what they call him—sure to be something Latin, which does not interfere in the least with the fact that he ought to be boiled alive in an antiseptic solution. Have another cigarette."

Do you know anything special against Captain Berselius? asked Adams, taking the cigarette.

I have never even seen the man, replied Duthil, but from what I have heard, he is a regular buccaneer of the old type, who values human life not one hair. Bauchardy, that last doctor he took with him, was a friend of mine. Perhaps that is why I feel vicious about the man, for he killed Bauchardy as sure as I didn’t.

Killed him?

Yes; with hardship and overwork.

Overwork?

"Mon Dieu, yes. Dragged him through swamps after his infernal monkeys and tigers, and Bauchardy died in the hospital at Marseilles of spinal meningitis, brought on by the hardships of the expedition—died as mad as Berselius himself."

As mad as Berselius?

"Yes; this infernal Berselius seemed to have infected him with his own hunting fever, and Bauchardy—mon Dieu, you should have seen him during his illness, shooting imaginary elephants, and calling for Berselius."

What I want to get at is this, said Adams. Was Bauchardy driven into these swamps you speak of, and made to hunt against his will—treated cruelly, in fact—or did Berselius take his own share of the hardships?

His own share! Why, from what I can understand, he did all the hunting. A man of iron with the ferocity of a tiger—a very devil, who made others follow him as poor Bauchardy did, to his death——

Well, said Adams, this man interests me somehow, and I intend to have a look at him.

The pay is good, said Duthil, but I have warned you fully, if Thénard hasn’t. Good evening.

The Rue Dijon, where Adams lived, was a good way from the Beaujon. He made his way there on foot, studying the proposition as he went.

The sporting nature of the proposal coming from the sedate Thénard rather tickled him.

He wants to pit me against this Berselius, said Adams to himself, "same as if we were dogs. That’s the long and short of it. Yes, I can understand his meaning in part; he’s afraid if Berselius engages some week-kneed individual, he’ll give the weak-kneed individual more than he can take. He wants to stick a six-foot Yankee in the breach, instead of a five-foot froggie, all absinthe and cigarette ends. Well, he was frank, at all events. Hum, I don’t like the proposition—and yet there’s something—there’s something—there’s something about it I do like. Then there’s the two thousand francs a month, and not a penny out of pocket, and there’s the Congo, and the guggly-wuggly alligators, and the great big hairy apes, and the feel of a gun in one’s hand again. Oh, my!"

All the same, it’s funny, he went on, as he drew near the Boulevard St. Michel. When Thénard spoke of Berselius there was something more than absence of friendship in his tone. Can old man Thénard have a down on this Berselius and does he in his heart of hearts imagine that by allotting P. Quincy Adams to the post of physician extraordinary to the expedition, he will get even with the Captain? My friend, remember that hymn the English Salvationists were yelling last Sunday outside the American Presbyterian Church in the Rue de Berry—‘Christian, walk carefully, danger is near.’ Not a bad motto for Paris, and I will take it.

He walked into the Café d’Italie, which, as everyone knows, is next to Mouton’s, the pork shop, on the left-hand side of the Boul’ Miche, as you go from