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(February — April 1892)
Publications:
- The Path, vol. VI, no. 11, February 1892, pp. 332-338
- The Path, vol. VI, no. 12, March 1892, pp. 370-376
- The Path, vol. VII, no. 1, April 1892, pp. 2-8
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CTD entry in Russian: Барнетт, Матильда Дж. - Консультации профессора Дина
DATA
Title for references: Barnett MJ - Professor Deans Consultations
Short description: A short story in three instalments: anxious parents consult, in turn, a family doctor and a pastor a...
332 "Walter," said Mrs. Dean, hesitatingly advancing into her husband's study, "may I speak to you a moment?"
"Y-e-s," replied the professor, laying the palm of his hand upon the page before him as if to keep the subject from slipping away during the domestic interview.
"I am much troubled about our Vera," said the mother of his only child as she faced him with an anxious countenance.
She dropped into a chair and extended her arms out upon the desk towards him in a helpless imploring way. "What shall we do about it?" she asked for at least the fortieth time. "She is nine years old and has not outgrown it yet. I have threatened to punish her, I have cried over her, I have prayed over her, and you remember how many hours you have spent in trying to argue her out of her fancies; yet, in the face of all these reasonable methods of cure, she still persists in seeing strange things and in talking to herself in the most fantastic way. What can we do about it?"
As if in response to the question, the subject under discussion appeared in the doorway hand in hand with Dr. Clement, the family physician.
333 "You have come at the right moment," said the professor, "pray be seated! and Vera, dear, don't you want to run and play in the garden?"
"Oh"—cried the child disappointedly. Clinging closely to the doctor she bent a pair of large pleading grey eyes upon her father, mutely waiting for him to revoke the unwelcome sentence.
To one who noted only the upper part of the child's face with the little vertical line already set between her straight heavy brows, she would have appeared serious almost to grimness. But this expression was contradicted by a mouth with a decided upward curve and a dimpled chin.
"Vera," interposed her mother, "could you take the basket to poor Mrs. Green?"
"May I?" cried the child, letting go her hold upon the doctor's hand and standing erect in her expectancy. And her slender little form, which though having no appearance of leanness was yet not burdened with one ounce of superfluous flesh, seemed now in its unwonted buoyancy almost to rise from the floor. As the word of permission fell from her mother's lips she darted from the room.
"Dr.," began the professor solemnly, "the skeleton still remains in our closet. The symptoms of the disease are if anything aggravated. You must make her body more healthy so that it may build up a more sound mind," he said, with his inverse method of deduction.
"I tell you now as I have told you before," replied the doctor, "that the child is all right. Children will have their cranks and their notions. If it is a disease she will outgrow it, and if it is not a disease you don't want her to outgrow it. If she sees only agreeable things what harm can it do?"
"She generally sees beautiful things," said Mrs. Dean. "She sees little beings that she calls fairies, and she says they love to help her. But one day when she was angry, she said that all sorts of dreadful little things were dancing around her. She cried out for her good fairies but they did not seem to come. She does not dare to be angry any more."
"Surely the cerebral disturbance that creates such hallucinations ought to be looked into," observed the professor. "Leaving her to outgrow334it may be giving her up to insanity. There is no taint of that sort in my family. So far as I know, none of the Deans, even in their most diseased conditions, have ever been troubled with seeing what did not exist," he concluded, proud of his descent from a long line of scholars.
"How do you know what exists?" queried the doctor. "We did not know that some of the stars existed until the telescope helped us see them, yet they were there just as much before we saw them as after. Who knows what telescopes nature may be able to help us to?"
"Oh—well," said the professor, "if my child discovered more stars or if her explorations proceeded in the line of any of our verified sciences I might believe that she was only blessed with rare perspicacity. But her statements are at variance with the laws of nature, therefore we have reason to infer that she is diseased."
"Who knows the laws of nature? Look at her now!" responded the doctor, drawing the father to the window to see his child leaping and bounding through the garden with a basket on her arm.
"What a pity! she has taken the large basket," said the anxious mother. "And I have no doubt it is full."
"But see how delightfully she carries it!" remarked the doctor. "It does not matter what our burdens are, you know, it matters only how we are able to carry them."
"She persists in saying that they help her carry it, so that a large basket is no heavier than a small one, but I'm sure I don't know," added the mother sadly.
"Could a sickly child look like that?" continued the doctor, pursuing his own train of thoughts. "Why, there's health in every movement! I tell you, let the girl alone! It is both of you who are diseased instead of her."
The professor, in no way convinced, continued lengthily to advance his usual argument on his usual premise, that what we do not see does not exist, and the doctor with his wonted good-natured impatience continued to set aside rather than confute such arguments, and in doing so cleared the atmosphere so that when he withdrew the two parents were the better for the consultation. They could not, however, have specified wherein they had derived comfort.
"Is it safe to follow his counsel?" inquired the professor, reluctantly yielding to a mitigation of his anxiety. "He is an ignorant man. I don't believe he could for the life of him show a diploma. The fellow has never seen the inside of a college."
"But he has pulled you through some pretty severe attacks," replied his wife, "and after the learned Dr. Grandmere had made a failure of it too."
335 "It is true", was the reply. "By some strange chance the fellow seems frequently to hit it. It is his luck, I suppose. But when it is only luck and not learning, how do we know at what moment it may desert him? Knowledge is the only substantial, reliable thing there is."
"But is all knowledge a matter of the intellect?" timidly inquired his wife.
"Certainly. Without a cultivation of the intellect knowledge is impossible. We positively know of nothing beyond the intellect."
"Yet," she ventured, "without Latin or other learning, and whether he gives medicine or advice or reproof or seemingly nothing at all, Dr. Clement always benefits his patients. That is what I call the true gift of healing."
"Why then doesn't he cure Vera?" asked the professor.
"I don't know," was the faltering reply. "He says there's nothing the matter with her. Perhaps someone else would understand her case better."
"Then we'll try some one else," said the professor, reseating himself at his desk to signify that the domestic interview was over.
Mrs. Dean had for some time hesitated to yield to the insistence of her conscience, which urged her to consult her pastor concerning her perplexity. At length deciding to hesitate no longer, she wrote him a note requesting him to call for an interview.
The Rev. Mr. Pendergast promptly responded by presenting himself for service.
When he entered the room he impressively advanced to Mrs. Dean and slowly folded her hand between his own, then after greeting the professor he turned imposingly to Vera.
The child recoiled from him and with unwonted discourtesy ran from the room.
As the pastor's eyes followed her they seemed to gleam beneath his shaggy brows, while the straightening of his full lips in a long line above his massive chin added to the severity of a usually none too gentle countenance.
"We wished to consult you about her", said Mrs. Dean, flushing with maternal humiliation at the rudeness of her child. "We fear there is something wrong with her."
"That is an evident fact," was the sententious reply.
Mrs. Dean carefully and at considerable length proceeded to state the case as she had begun to acquire the habit of doing, and she was so absorbed in her subject that she failed to note the strong gaze which was the only response of the listener.
336 "Have you prayed for her in fear and trembling?" inquired the pastor when she had concluded.
"Perhaps it is because I have prayed with so much fear and trembling that my prayers are unanswered," she replied.
"It is evidently some kind of evil possession," he rejoined. "It may be hallucination, or it may be one of those sad cases of persistent mendacity."
"Mendacity!" repeated Mrs. Dean, for a moment unable to catch his drift. "Do you mean that it may be that my child is untruthful, that she does not really think she sees what she pretends to see?"
"My dear Mrs. Dean, such cases are not as rare as you may suppose."
"So far as I know," interposed the professor, drawing himself up proudly, "the Deans have never had a liar among them, and my child inherits the nobility of her race."
Mrs. Dean's lip quivered. "I named her Vera," she said, "because I hoped that above all things she might be truthful. I have never thought it possible for her to be untruthful. She is frankness itself. She never conceals a thought from me."
"But", interposed the professor, turning to the pastor with mollifying grace, "may we not suppose that, without intending to be untruthful, she is not quite responsible for what she says, her mind being a little astray on this one subject?"
"May we not suppose it possible for her to see things that we cannot see?", timidly suggested Mrs. Dean.
"She could not see what does not exist unless she were diseased," replied her husband, confident that his stock argument would as usual prove an unanswerable one.
"There are mysteries that we do not understand," murmured Mrs. Dean.
"If the child is prying into God's mysteries she is justly punished for her audacity," said the parson.
"But it is only we who are distressed about it," replied Mrs. Dean. "The child is very happy."
"She has no right to be happy," was the response. "Have you ever tried fasting with her? Three or four days without food might bring her to her senses. You cannot deal too severely with her. The Lord loveth whom he chasteneth. Let us pray!"
The pastor rose erect and folded together his large white hands and fixed his eyes upon the ceiling.
As he proceeded, his sonorous voice fell jarringly upon the ears of the tender mother, and seemed to fill the little room with dark forebodings. Her agitation of heart and mind interfered with that close attention to the337words which the pastor's manner called for; but at its close, when the "Amen" came, she felt a sense of relief, and would gladly have escaped the further discussion for which the professor seemed disposed.
"We thought of trying what an oculist could do for her," he remarked.
"Any means which may be successful are worthy of trial," replied the pastor. "I confess that I incline to a belief that it is a visual disorder. If the optic nerve is in some way diseased it may produce ocular illusions that are easily mistaken by the ignorant or superstitious for supernatural visitations."
So Dr. Ingersoll Payne, the eminent oculist, was consulted, and, after a careful examination, he explained that the child's eyes were slightly affected with an insufficiency of the recti interni; causing a slight strabismus, so that maintaining the necessary convergence creates a certain fatigue in those muscles which may result in nervous derangement capable of manifesting itself in a variety of ailments. The operation is short and painless. A preparation of coca is applied in order to deaden sensation. When ready for the operation, which, you see, is really a beautiful one, the lids are held apart by a speculum, the eye-ball is seized with the fixation forceps, near the cornea and opposite the muscle to be divided, then the eye-ball is rolled over into a position that leaves freedom for operation. Above the tendon of the muscle, or a little in front of it, the forceps seize the conjunctiva and lift it into a fold, and then make in it an incision which by being parallel with the direction of the muscle causes the wound to gape less after the operation and
338 —"Why Isabel! What is the matter?"
With unprofessional and unscientific haste the alarmed husband darted from the room and returned with a glass of water, which he vainly attempted to administer to his fainting wife. He carried her to the lounge and then flew to open the window.
It was some time before she recovered full consciousness, and when she did so she fell to weeping violently.
The professor was not able to discover any adequate cause for so much emotion, but he instinctively refrained from mentioning the subject of the operation again that day.
The next morning at the breakfast table he gently, very gently, remarked that the oculist had given him a long list of references among his patients who had been cured of chronic disorders by a slight operation upon the eyes.
"Walter, with my consent," said Mrs. Dean with unusual decision, "my child's beautiful eyes shall never be tampered with."
For some moments the repulsed husband sipped his coffee in silence, now and then glancing up furtively at his wife's flushed countenance.
When he thought her excitement sufficiently abated, he began blandly—
370
"It is exceedingly interesting from a scientific point of view to learn how many of us have an almost imperceptible convergence or divergence of one eye. Why, my friend says," he continued, warming with his subject, "that there is not one person out of a hundred whose eyes are perfectly true in position."
"Well, what of that?" rejoined Mrs. Dean with asperity. "Is not nature able to adjust herself to such slight irregularities without any interference on our part? There is perhaps not one person out of a hundred whose other features are not a little one-sided, yet what harm does it do?"
"But, my dear, can't you understand that with the eyes it is quite a371different thing? Thousands of ailing people have this little strain upon their nerves without suspecting the cause."
"Your oculist would have us believe that we are a squint-eyed race," she replied.
"When a man has a specialty his opinions in his own line are valuable," he said.
"When a man has a specialty he is quite likely to fall into a rut," retorted Mrs. Dean.
The professor reflectively folded his napkin and rose from the table. "To-night I may be a little late," he said as he departed.
In referring to his list of references he found that the only case of hallucination was that of a young girl who lived five hundred miles distant, so learning the particulars of that case was quite out of the question. But near by lived a man who had been cured of epilepsy. He resolved to call there on his way home.
Somehow the usually self-contained professor of mathematics found that day that he could not keep his attention fixed upon the problems presented to him. His classes were less interesting than usual. He seemed to inoculate his pupils with his own incapable condition of mind, so that even the Asses' Bridge with its glibly running statement failed to be on the square and carry the boys safely over to the next theorem. He found himself discovering any number of slight discrepancies in the pairs of eyes now facing him, and he felicitated himself upon the advance of physical science, which held the key to the mysteries of mind, and within whose province it was to control a riotous imagination. Perhaps some of these very boys among his students, whose obliquity of vision under his newly acquired discernment assumed so startling an aspect, perhaps they might be in need of the very surgical operation that he still coveted for his child. Perhaps thereby might be worked so great a mental change as seriously to affect the scholarship of the unsuspecting victims before him.
His speculations upon the subject, however, were brought to a sudden close by the noise and disorder that had gradually crept into his class until it had now become worthy of reprimand, and the professor realized that an alert rather than a reflective condition of mind was needed to sustain his reputation as a disciplinarian.
As soon as his class work was over, however, his thoughts returned to the charge. It was with alacrity that on his way home he rang the bell of the tenement occupied by Mrs. Dobbins, whose husband was said to have been cured of epilepsy by an operation on the eyes. The woman herself answered the bell and ushered him into an unpretending room.
He made known his errand. She seemed to bristle up with indignation.
372 "It may be true," she said, "that my poor husband has not had the fits so often since he had his eyes cut, but now he is in bed with his spine."
The literal professor wondered how she expected a man to go to bed without his spine, but he only waited in respectful silence for her to proceed.
"I don't believe in curing one disease by making another," she continued. "My husband had just as good eyes as you'd wish to see before that doctor meddled with them, but now they trouble him. As for his spine, he had never felt it before. For my part I should prefer the fits. They never lasted long, and did not keep him in bed."
"Now, my good lady," said the professor, endeavoring to let himself down to her level, "he had the fits, as you call them. His eyes were operated upon, and since that operation he has had them less frequently. Is my statement correct?"
"That doctor did him more harm than good," she rejoined. "It is of no use telling me that cutting into a pair of sound eyes will do anybody good, for I don't believe it."
"But, my good lady, according to your own statement, the end that the oculist had in view has been gained, which proves that his scientific efforts have proceeded in the right line."
"I don't know nor care anything about scientific efforts. I only know that my husband is worse than he was before," she concluded, as she opened the door for him to pass out.
"How impossible it is to make any logical headway with ignorant people," thought the professor as he disgustedly turned his back upon her and passed out into the street.
After dinner that evening he chose a favorable moment to describe the interview to Isabel. In doing so, however, he omitted all that superfluous collateral information with which the "good lady" had confused her statement, and the operation stood out as a bold and clear success.
Isabel, however, failed to be duly impressed. After an hour's discussion of the subject she still maintained her first attitude, and the disappointed husband felt that he must give up all thoughts of the operation and try some other expediency for the child's cure.
Some months had passed by when one evening the professor attended a medical banquet. He chanced to sit beside a learned M. D. whose specialty was diseases of the liver. Becoming eloquent and confidential over the Pâté de foie gras, this liver doctor imparted the information that not only heart and other organic difficulties, but even many of the brain disturbances resulting in hallucination, had their origin in abnormal conditions of the liver. Indeed from his point of view it appeared that the liver373was broad enough to cover almost everything included in pathology. He asserted that a perfectly normal and sound liver was a thing not to be expected until science should become more advanced; and when the professor asked him why diseases increased in number with advancing science, he made it clear to the questioner that the increase of diseases was only a seeming which resulted from advancing skill in diagnosis and classification.
The professor was greatly impressed, and returned his confidence to the extent of laying Vera's case before him. He received great encouragement from the doctor in the statement that one may have serious derangement of the liver without manifesting any symptoms that would be apparent to the unskilled.
But then when the guests withdrew from the table the professor was introduced to a noted aurist, who in the course of conversation told him that no indication of abnormal hearing should be disregarded, that disturbance in this delicate organ might extend to the brain and result in serious mental derangement that in certain cases had been known to take the form of hallucination.
This at once so appealed to the professor that deranged eyes and disordered livers retired to the background, for did not Vera seem to be a little hard of hearing? To be sure her mother called it inattention, and said that when the child gazed at you with that far-off expression and the words addressed to her seemed to fall upon deaf ears, it was only that her mind was absent. But why should a child with no learning in its little head be absent-minded? It was not natural. Vera must be a little deaf. That explained everything.
But then he also remembered that, even though she heard as well as saw what did not exist, she at other times evinced an abnormal acuteness in hearing what did exist. She had, for example, many a time told him of the approach of a band of musicians before he himself had been able to perceive a sound from them. Might there not be such a thing as periodical or intermittent deafness?
The aurist thought most decidedly that there might, and that in such cases a slight operation would remedy the ill.
The professor ardently desired but did not dare to propose taking the child to him for examination. He recalled his wife's repugnance to any kind of an operation, and her firm resolve to follow Dr. Clement's advice and let the child alone.
As he was passing along out of the room revolving the subject in his mind, his attention was attracted to a knot of gentlemen near the door. They were discussing a case of hallucination. He quietly lingered near and heard many curious theories gleaned from the most advanced medical treatises to account for such diseases, as they termed them. He learned374that while such manifestations were usually a concomitant of ill health, more especially nervous derangement, yet in the case under discussion the subject had lived to a good old age in apparently perfect health. There were as many opinions concerning the non-apparent physical cause of this particular mental derangement, as there were medical practitioners each with a peculiar bias.
The name of the man, who in spite of his hallucinations was hale and hearty at sixty years of age, fell upon the professor's ears with a familiar sound.
John Graham. Surely he had heard that name before.
In another moment he learned that the man was a resident of his own town.
If this person really were on such a pinnacle of learning that he could with impunity indulge in hallucinations — for what but a knowledge of science could protect one in an abnormal condition of mind? — he would call upon him and learn his secret.
"John Graham," he repeated to himself on the way home. The learned men of the town were few, and it was very strange that he was not already on familiar terms with this one.
When the professor mentioned John Graham to his wife, she smiled significantly and said that she believed him to be just the man that could help them. But when she added that John Graham was none other than the old man who repaired their clocks, his countenance fell.
"What! that ignorant fellow?" he exclaimed. "What does he know about psychological or mental law? Why, he has lived down the street here all his life," he added, offering much the same arguments as were employed against the great spiritual teacher of 1800 years ago by those who thought that a carpenter's son who had lived among them could not tell them anything worth knowing.
Mrs. Dean confessed that John Graham was only a clock repairer and that he was still further guilty of living down the street. But she added with unwonted self-confidence that she believed him to be the one person who could understand Vera's case.
The professor turned and looked squarely into his wife's face. He discovered therein a new expression, and he now remembered that for some months she had been a different woman. She had appeared like one whose mind was pregnant with serious but most satisfying thought. Several times after passing a sleepless night she had said that the hours had passed like seconds, and that the whole twenty-four hours a day were none too many for her to think out what was in her mind. What could it be that she had been thinking about, and upon which she had not asked his opinion?
375 "My good little woman," he said, "what nonsense have you in your head?"
Mrs. Dean winced. If there was one thing more than another that she disliked being, it was a "good little woman", for it always indicated that her husband was vexed with her.
"I scarcely know how to tell you what I think," she replied, "but I am convinced that there are many, many things that we do not know, and that what we think we know may be all a mistake."
"Speak for yourself, Isabel. Do not, if you please, include me in your category."
"Walter, I cannot talk well about it because it is all so new and strange to me, but it is beautiful and I am sure it is true. It accounts for so many things. It makes life so much easier. It shows us how very little we know."
"Indeed! What is this great — you are talking about?" he inquired loftily.
"Why — this thought — these ideas — this knowledge — this truth. John Graham can tell you all about it. He has lived alone for forty years and thought it all out. It was all inside of himself. It is within all of us, and as soon as we bring it out we shall know about it: then there are teachers and books."
The professor took up a book from the table and glanced at its title page.
"Yes, he lent me that," she said boldly.
"Astral Light. Astral Bosh," he muttered contemptuously, dropping the volume with a thud. "Isabel, if I were the kind of man to do such a thing, I should forbid you to read that book, or to have anything more to say to that fellow Graham; but I am not, I am not that sort of a man," he added, as if he regretted the fact. "There are men who forbid their wives to do things, and not bad men either," he continued, lingering on the dangerous ground, "but I have never done such a thing."
"And if you did so in this case I should not obey you," she quietly replied.
"Wouldn't you, really? Would you conceal the book and read it in spite of my command?"
She returned his frowning glance with a steady, unflinching gaze. "If I thought the book contained a truth for me and it was right for me to read it, I should simply and without concealment read it. I should have a perfect right to do so."
Her husband's frown melted away into an expression of speechless amazement.
"Isabel," he said at length, "I do not recognize you. When have you seen this Graham? Have you ever permitted him to see Vera?"
376 "I have seen a great deal of him during the last few months. He and Vera have been good friends for a long time. He walks home from school with her nearly every day."
"And you have known this and permitted it, Isabel?"
"Why not?"
"A man whose abnormal condition has for years been an enigma to the medical faculty, and who, since he has no knowledge of science to protect him, must be classed with unreliable, non-responsible beings — why, how do we know what moral and mental effect he may have upon our child?"
"The effect has been only good," she replied. "I am able to recognize a good man. He has a true, noble heart. He is our brother and our equal, if not our superior."
"Does he help you to these communistic ideas?"
"He helps me to a true ethics such as I never dreamed of before, and, Walter, if you would let him he would help you also."
"Help me! What help do I need? Isabel, are you demented? He is an impertinent fellow to insinuate himself into the confidence of my wife and child," he said, flushing angrily.
"You are not yourself at this moment," replied his wife.
When he had become a little cooled she began again. "Walter, if you knew one-half of the noble deeds he has done you would glorify him, you who so appreciate and admire an unselfish act, and who are always so kind to those whom you consider your inferiors."
"I do not want to be hard on him," he replied, somewhat softened. "If it is your wish I will even see him," he added with heroic effort. "Of course I am perfectly willing to hear what he has to say for himself."
"You will find that he will say very little for himself," said Mrs. Dean, "but he may say something that will interest you and throw light upon Vera's case. The clock in your study needs attention; suppose we send for him to come professionally to-morrow afternoon. You will be courteous to him, Walter, will you not?"
"Why, certainly. What do you take me for?"
Mrs. Dean had quietly opened the door of her husband's study and now paused before the picture that presented itself.
A small, young old man with a fresh glowing countenance and white hair, was seated before a little table upon which stood a dismantled clock. The child standing beside him, with her golden-brown curls falling against his snowy locks, was peering curiously into the machinery under examination. The time piece was going at that alarming speed possible only when the pendulum has been removed.
( Concluded. )
2 Neither of the two so busily engaged had perceived the intrusion.
"How it goes!" said Vera. "It is angry because you have taken its tongue off."
"Yes, clocks are like people," responded John Graham, "they don't like to be meddled with. The more you can let a clock alone the better."
"Clocks are people," asserted Vera, with a silvery little laugh. "They say a great many things to you when you listen."
"Yes," he replied indulgently, "they are people. You let me hear a man speak and I can tell you just what kind of a man he is; so you let me hear a clock tick and I can tell you just what kind of a clock it is. Of course, if you can see the man or the clock, so much the better."
"Or if you can feel it," rejoined Vera, "I mean feel it right inside without touching it, that's best of all, because then you see right through it. I felt Mr. Pendergast, the minister, come in the front door one day when I was in the garden. I wasn't happy. When I feel you coming I'm very happy. Do you like Mr. Pendergast? I never see you in church."
"Well, you see," he replied, hesitating, as he hung on the pendulum for a moment to keep the clock more quiet, "Mr. Pendergast and I are not as good friends as we shall be perhaps when we come again. Just now we're going different ways, that's all."
"Were you good friends when you came before?" she enquired.
"Perhaps so," he replied. "You know it isn't necessary for us to chum together every time we come, even if we are all brothers."
"I guess we chummed together the last time and a good many times," she said, "for, do you know, sometimes I almost remem3ber, then all at once I can't. When I tell father that I remember things or see things, he says it's because I'm sick. But he was awful sick one day and he said he didn't see anything at all, — I mean the things that I see. Queer, isn't it? Do you see any fairies around this clock now?"
"Yes, I do," he replied promptly. "But as I've said before, it's no good telling anybody about it, for what they can't see they can't see, and what you see is only for you, and 'taint for anybody else that doesn't see it."
John Graham raised his head and cast a fond, benignant glance upon the child, and as he did so he discovered Mrs. Dean in the doorway. He rose respectfully and greeted her.
"After you have finished the clock we would like to have a little talk with you," he said with the familiarity of a long domestic acquaintance. As she turned away her eyes filled with tears, which, however, were from joy rather than pain.
A few hours later, when John Graham found himself face to face with Prof. Dean, he experienced an unwonted confusion of mind. He did not know exactly what was expected of him, but Mrs. Dean was smiling upon him and the Professor was in one of his most gracious and tolerant moods, for the man before him was uneducated and lowly in station, both which misfortunes appealed to his generosity and touched his radically kind heart.
When the Professor asked John Graham for his diagnosis of and his remedy for Vera's ailment, he experienced the helpless feeling of a warrior brought face to face with an impregnable wall against which his most skilful weapons must fall powerless. He was, in his own undefined way, conscious of the utter hopelessness of an endeavor to meet one who was not on the same road with himself. However much they might both advance, each on his own road, they could never come together. His explanation of Vera's condition would be like bidding the Professor to perceive the odor of a flower by means of the sense of hearing. What could he say that would be comprehensible to this scholar in his unreadiness for the truth as he himself saw it? As is usually the case, it was the more spiritually-unfolded man who was abashed before the less spiritually-developed but self-assured man of mere intellect.
The whole gist of the matter lay in making the Professor see what he could not see. All argument must be based upon the — to him — impossible premise that there existed all around him things not perceptible by means of his physical senses.
"Do not be afraid to give your opinion," said the Professor encouragingly. "You are not before a bar of justice. You will4not be held responsible to the Academy of Science or to the Psychical Research Society for what you say to me..."
Reassured by the Professor's kindly feeling rather than by his words, John Graham began. "Suppose, only just suppose that little Vera, like the rest of us, has lived a great many times on this earth, and that in these lives she has believed in a world that she could not see, and has loved to think about it, and has studied so much into it that now she is able to see what she could only imagine at first. You know the more you study arithmetic the more you see into it."
"Well" — said the Professor, filling in a pause, and with a smile broadening until it became mirthful.
"Suppose," continued John Graham, losing consciousness of an antagonist in the importance of the subject, "suppose that there are such things as what Vera calls fairies, and that whenever she is good the good ones come to her, and that they love to serve her. Now if she does not try to bring them, and if she does not give up her own will to them, but only tries to be as good as possible, then the good ones will be sure to be there and the bad ones cannot harm her. It cannot harm her to see things that you cannot see, but you can harm her if you do not understand it."
The speaker now turned his glance away from the Professor's perplexed countenance to the more interested and sympathetic face of his wife. "Once," he continued, "I thought my life was ruined because I was different from other people. I saw things that others did not see. I was a hearty lad and loved companionship, but I learned not to speak of my visions, and so I kept my friends. But when I grew older and was about to be married to a young girl who was heart of my heart, I told her everything. She was terribly troubled about it and told her parents. They prevented her marriage with a man who wasn't like other people. They said I wasn't quite right. She believed them. It was the greatest blow I ever had." Here the narrator passed his hand across his glistening eyes as if to wipe away the memory of forty years ago. "I thought about it day and night until I myself believed that I was not quite right. I could not understand it. I took a little house and lived alone. I felt that I needed a whole lifetime to think it out. I thought and I thought, but I was always grieving and my thinking did not do me any good. One day I met a gentleman who lent me some books, on Theosophy, you know."
Mrs. Dean assented smilingly. "Yes," said the Professor, "I know. It is a science of the supernatural built on the logic of lunacy. I have thoroughly investigated it. There is really nothing in it."
5 "I read the books," continued John Graham, with his eyes riveted upon Mrs. Dean as if she were the only listener. "I devoured them. It was a revelation. From that time I began to live. I felt that I had everything to live for, and from that time I seemed to be needed wherever I went. For years I had worked at clock-making in a factory, and had been more of a machine than the senseless things I worked upon. My fellow-workmen had been nothing to me, for I was always silent and trying to think it out. But now I saw how much I could do for them, and knew how blind I had been not to see it before. I no longer grieved, for I knew that what came to me was all right, and I was willing to reap what I must have sown, but I did not sow any more of that same kind of seed. I loved everybody and, bless your heart! from that time to this everybody has come to me with all sorts of troubles, and my little home is a shelter for anyone who needs it. Many's the time I've left clocks I took in to work upon, and instead have worked day and night to regulate some poor brother that did not go quite right, for you see there's no more real wickedness in people than there is in clocks; they only need regulating. You think I live down the street here all by myself, but I'm never alone. I'm so thankful I've been able to think it out. When I come again I may begin better."
"Do you mean to say that you intend to be reincarnated, as they call it?" enquired the Professor.
"I don't know about intending," said John Graham, suddenly conscious of an unsympathizing listener. "I think it is law that intends, and I only do what I must do. It is like this: a clock goes until it has run down, and if it goes well it is sure to be put in a good place."
"What a disagreeable idea!" rejoined the Professor, shifting uneasily in his chair. "I don't like it. I have no desire to come here again."
John Graham looked thoughtfully over the Professor's head to the window beyond. The figure between himself and the strong light was distinct only in outline. Crowning the bald top of the Professor's head was a large wen of many years' standing, which was now defined with unusual boldness against the green background of the garden foliage beyond.
John Graham regarded the excrescence for a moment in silence, then in sudden inspiration he said, "Pardon me, but perhaps you do not, for example, like that swelling on the top of your head."
"I loathe it," responded the Professor promptly, as he suddenly6recalled tittering pupils, and slyly-wrought sketches of himself with an exaggerated mound on the top of his head.
"You do not like it," continued John Graham, "but still it is there. You never wanted it, but for all that it came. You hate it, but still it keeps on growing."
"Yes, I hate it, but still it is there," said the Professor thoughtfully, passing his hand slowly over it as if to verify his last assertion. And as his mind pursued the train of thought just set in motion, he was astonished to discover how many conditions and circumstances of his life he disliked and yet seemed powerless to alter. The circle of necessity seemed to contract and close up tightly around him. For an instant he almost realized that he was under the action of laws beyond his present conception.
"Although there are some things that we cannot control," continued John Graham, falling in with his line of reflection, "yet we can do everything that is necessary for ourselves. We can do so well while we are here this time, that it will make things better for the next time."
"What right has anyone to assert such things when they can't be scientifically proved?" asked the Professor, recovering what he considered his lost balance.
John Graham fell back hopelessly in his chair and made no reply.
"Walter," said Mrs. Dean, coming to the rescue, "can you not imagine that there might be certain advanced human beings who have proofs of what our friend asserts? Can you not understand that there are also some things we feel within and that therefore require no external proof?"
"Feeling and sentiment are as often false as true," he replied. "The fact is, reason is our only salvation. Intellect is the only ballast we have. My reason tells me that I have never lived before. I have no recollection of any other life."
"Do you remember the first two years of this life?" asked John Graham.
"Of course you do not," said Mrs. Dean, "and yet your mother says that you were very precocious and evinced strong characteristic traits during that period. You played with books instead of toys, and took newspapers to bed with you."
"Did I, really?" he asked with a pleased smile, "I do not remember it, that is true. But then, what has all this to do with Vera's case?"
"It has everything to do with it," she replied with a glowing countenance. "As John Graham can tell you, our little Vera has,7in the course of her many lives, developed a little differently from us. She has developed powers that are as yet only latent in us. Her finer perceptions open to her a realm invisible to us."
"But we have no scientific authority for believing that there is such a realm," he said.
"And, Walter," she continued, ignoring his interruption, "it behooves us to guard and cherish her most tenderly in this dangerous development. During these last few months I have been growing into a realization of our serious responsibility in the charge of our child. She is on perilous ground, but it is beautiful to feel that we have a glimmer of light on the subject, and that, if we live fully up to it, more will be sure to come in upon us as we need it. Let us endeavor to strengthen her will, so that she may never lend herself as a passive instrument to any extraneous influence that she ought to resist, that she may never be under the mesmeric dominion of intelligences in or out of the flesh. Let us try to cultivate her spiritual nature so that it may mount guard over her psychical development."
The Professor swung himself around in his chair and regarded his wife in mingled admiration and astonishment. The flush that mantled her cheeks and the deep lustre of her eyes attested her sincerity and earnestness of purpose. He had never before heard her speak so after the manner of a learned woman, but the manner or form of her speech was the only thing that impressed him; the essence he failed to perceive. It was to him the jargon of a fancied learning; nevertheless he found himself listening to her with a kindly indulgence of which he would not previously have believed himself capable.
"I know you cannot view it as I do," she continued, "but will you not promise me that you will let me manage Vera's case, and that you will not interfere with anything I see fit to do? I know it is a great deal to ask, but I must ask it," she urged.
At this point, John Graham, feeling that the case was in good hands, quietly stole out of the room. "The mainspring has started and the machinery will go," he said to himself with a satisfied smile. "She was ready for it. He cannot see it. The sun cannot get into the room until the blinds are open."
"Isabel," began the Professor after a thoughtful pause, and with a respectful trust born of his wife's new attitude towards him, "I promise to leave Vera wholly in your hands."
She approached him and with an arm around his neck laid her flushed cheek against his, to express the thanks and deep gratification which she dared not at this moment trust to speech.
8 He remained silent and reflective. After she had retired to the other side of the room she heard him murmuring to himself.
"I hate it and yet it is there," he said, as he made the coronal exploration. "It is true, I remember nothing of my babyhood. But science surely can explain all this. We do not need to turn to the supernatural. It is all bosh. Theosophy — pshaw! there's nothing in it. But Isabel is dreadfully in earnest, and I must let her have full swing."
The next day he met the physician of the Nervine Hospital and from sheer force of habit was about to lay Vera's case before him, but checked himself in time.
"No more consultations," he said to himself, in a spirit of heroic self-denial.
M. J. Barnett, F.T.S.
Footnotes