Part 15

For a long moment the girl hesitated. Then, with stealthy, feline step, her shoulders crouched, she commenced to move along the hall. Her gaze, a gaze of wide-open eyes set in the horror of some torture of the soul, was fixed as though fascinated upon those heavy curtains which she approached. She attained them, stopped, stood with one hand in a final hesitation upon the folds, her bosom heaving with fiercely primitive emotions. Then, in a violent determination, she flung them aside.

Beyond, in a small torch-lit apartment, the prince reclined in company with another woman. His head turned in sudden anger to the intruder. Before he could make a movement of defence or escape, the dancing-girl had sprung upon him, with a bound like a tigress, a long knife flashing in her hand....

Even as they gasped their horror, they found themselves once more staring at the milky cloud suffusing the depths of the crystal globe.

“Oh, Jim!” she breathed, in an awe-stricken recognition, “that was _my_ crime--the crime for which you punished me----”

“Look!” he murmured. “Look! It is not finished yet.”

In fact, the cloud was parting once more, parting this time over a scene in ancient Egypt. Once more they recognized themselves, princess and priest of a temple, in a drama that passed vaguely, too quickly in its remoteness to be fully grasped, before their sight.

Scene after scene unfolded itself in the depths of the crystal, in a succession of varying settings, in an ever-briefer duration, an ever more vague drama of relationship, whose blurred outlines were perhaps the effect of their fatigued attention, no longer able to follow in their details visions possibly as minutely exhibited as the first. Always their two personalities, in ever-changing incarnations, met and reacted in wild passions that claimed them fully. In the eternal history of their lives, all was possible, all had happened, every variation of experience--save only indifference to each other. An unseen link held them always, tightened into contact from the moment of propinquity. On islands in a blue sea furrowed by long-oared and primitive galleys; in cities of Cyclopean masonry that glittered, as if vitrified, in a burning sun; in dark forests where skin-clad savages went furtively with stone-barbed spears and knelt in worship of the animal that they had just slain; by the side of reedy lakes where hairy, scarce-human creatures crouched and gnawed the bones they plucked from the embers--always they two met and always they were lovers, fortunate sometimes, tragic sometimes, but always lovers.

Beyond humanity, far into the mists of time where strange shapes bodied themselves, unrecognizable, and were dissipated into others yet more strange, the visions continued in ever-increasing recession--leading back into a distance where they lost all sense of personal participation among vague and formless shadows.

They watched, in a breathless fascination.

Still farther back, beyond those shadows, something began to glow in the depths of a night that cleared to transparent blackness, a ball of fire, of living light that pulsed with intense incandescence in an uttermost remoteness. And, as they watched, it divided itself, split into two smaller spheres that circled about each other, throwing out flames that reached like clutching arms in vain endeavour to reëstablish unity. For an incomputable period--it seemed æons to those souls who watched--they circled, held in mutual attraction and yet still apart despite the reaching streamers. And then slowly, slowly, they approached--their light heightening to a yet more vivid brightness as they drew near....

The crystal globe slipped from numbed fingers into the fireplace. As though roused from a dream by the crash of its contact with the brass curb, the girl started and turned to her companion. He picked up the crystal, starred and fissured with its fall--henceforth useless.

“Oh, Jim!” she cried in poignant regret. “We shall not see---- What is going to happen _this_ time?”

She held his hand between her two, gazed up into his face in fond anxiety, yearned out to him.

He put down the crystal, drew her close, enfolded her.

“Love!” he answered. “Love--once more and for always! And, to us, dear, nothing else matters. It is the one reality.”

In each other’s eyes they saw, with a perception transcending physical vision, the divine light of those sundered spheres that drew together.

HELD IN BONDAGE

Two French officers, wearing the red velvet bands of the medical service upon their caps, followed an old woman down the staircase of a pleasant villa-residence on the outskirts of Mainz.

“The bedrooms will suit perfectly,” said the elder of the two officers, a major, in German. “And now a sitting-room?”

The old woman led them along a passage and, without a word, threw open the door of a room lined with books. The two officers entered, looked about them.

They were startled by a man’s voice behind them.

“Good day, messieurs!”

They turned to see a tall civilian, pince-nez gleaming over exceptionally blue eyes, fair moustache, fair hair cut short and brushed up straight from a square forehead, smiling at them from the doorway.

“I am Doctor Breidenbach--at your service,” he said courteously in accentless French.

The major stepped forward.

“I am Major Chassaigne, monsieur. I--and my assistant, Lieutenant Vincent here--have been allotted quarters in your house. Here is the _billet de logement_.” He held out a piece of paper. “It is issued with the authority of the Army of Occupation and countersigned by your municipality. I regret to put you to inconvenience----”

“Not at all! not at all!” interposed the German, affably, taking the billeting order. As his face went serious in a scrutiny of the document, the two officers had an impression of extreme intelligence and ruthless will-power. He looked up again with a nod of assent, his smile masking everything behind its gleam of blue eyes and white teeth. “Perfectly correct, monsieur! Please consider my house at your disposition. I am charmed to be of assistance to any of my confrères.” He smiled recognition of their red cap-bands. “Although you wear another uniform than that which I myself have but recently quitted, we serve in a common cause--the cause of humanity, _n’est-ce pas_? which knows no national animosities.”

“We desired a sitting-room,” said Major Chassaigne, ignoring this somewhat unctuous profession of altruism.

The German waved his hand about the room.

“If this will suit you----?”

“Your library, monsieur?” queried the lieutenant.

“My work-room,” replied the doctor. “Before this deplorable war interrupted my studies, I had some little reputation in my special branch of mental therapeutics. If you are interested in psychology, normal and abnormal, you will find here a very complete collection of works upon the subject. Use them freely, by all means. Well, if you are satisfied, gentlemen, I will leave you, for I am a busy man. I was just about to visit some patients when you arrived. _Auf wiedersehen!_” He smiled and left them.

Vincent turned to his senior, with a puzzled expression.

“What is it about that man I do not like?”

The older man shrugged his shoulders.

“Too friendly by far. They are all the same, these _boches_--they would do anything to make us forget,” he said, divesting himself of his belt. “I am going to have a rest and a cigarette before we walk back into the town.”

The young man wandered around the room, scanning the titles of the books on the shelves, picking up the various bibelots scattered about. Suddenly he uttered a startled cry.

“_Mon Dieu!_ Look at this!”

The major turned to him. In his hand he held a small snapshot photograph. He stared at it, trembling violently.

“What is the matter?”

“Look!--_It is she!_” The young man’s face was a study in horrified astonishment.

Chassaigne looked over his comrade’s shoulder at the photograph. It represented their host arm in arm with a good-looking young woman.

“_She?_” he queried, with a tolerant smile. “Be a little more explicit, my dear Vincent.”

The young man turned on him.

“You remember the deportations from Lille? The women and girls the _boche_ snatched from their homes?--My fiancée was among them.” His voice checked at the painful memory. “Other women have been traced, returned to their relatives. She has never been heard of again.”

“My poor friend!” murmured the major, sympathetically.

Vincent stared once more, as if fascinated, at the photograph in his hand.

“It is she--in every detail! Yet----” his tone was puzzled. “No! I cannot believe it! It is some chance resemblance. This woman is obviously happy--content, at least.” He looked up, passed over the photograph. “Chassaigne, you are an analyst of the human mind. What relationship do you diagnose between those two people?”

The major took the print, scrutinized it critically.

“Friends, certainly--lovers, possibly,” was his sententious verdict.

“Then it cannot be!” cried the young man. “My fiancée was--is, I am sure of it--incapable of a faithless acquiescence in the wrong done to her.”

“Can one ever be sure about a woman?” said the major, with a gentle cynicism. “However, I agree with you that it is improbable that the person in the photograph is your lost friend. It is, as you say, a chance resemblance.”

“If I could only be certain of it!” The young man was obviously stirred to the depths. “I _must_ make sure, Chassaigne.--I must get to know this woman--find out who she is!”

Both men turned at the sound of the door opening behind them. A young woman, tall, dark, strikingly handsome, stood timidly upon the threshold. It was the woman of the photograph.

“Doctor--Doctor Breidenbach?” she faltered, as though disconcerted by an unexpected meeting with strangers.

Vincent stared at her, held in a suspense of the faculties where he seemed not to breathe. At last he found his voice.

“_Hélène!_” he cried. “Hélène! It _is_ you!” He sprang to her, clutched her arm. “What are you doing here?”

With a frightened gesture of repulsion, the young woman disengaged herself from his grasp. She drew herself up, looked at him without the faintest recognition in her eyes.

“_Ich spreche nicht französisch, mein Herr!_” she said in a tone of cold rebuff.

“Hélène!”

She shrank back in obviously offended dignity, and, without another word, haughtily left the room.

Vincent reeled away from the closed door, his hands to his head.

“My God!” he groaned. “Am I going mad?”

Then, ceding to a sudden impulse, he eluded his friend’s restraining grasp, dashed to the door.

“Hélène!”

He found himself confronted by the smiling figure of Doctor Breidenbach.

“Pardon the unintended intrusion, messieurs!” he said, good-humouredly apologetic and taking no notice of Vincent’s excited appearance. “My ward, Fräulein Rosenhagen, was unaware that I had guests.--I merely wished to reassure myself that you require nothing before I go into the town. Is there anything you desire of me?”

“Nothing, thank you,” interposed Chassaigne, quickly, before Vincent could speak.

“_A tantôt_, then!” He nodded amicably and went out.

“We ought to have questioned him!” cried Vincent, resentful of the missed opportunity.

“We ought to do nothing of the kind, my dear Vincent,” replied Chassaigne. “Calm yourself. Be sensible. What question could we possibly ask that would not be ridiculous? You may be utterly wrong.”

“_It is she!_ I swear it!” asserted the young man, vehemently. “Do you think I cannot recognize a woman I have known all my life?”

He commenced to pace up and down the room in wild agitation. His friend contemplated him with a gaze of genuine solicitude.

“You may be mistaken for all that,” he said, gently. “Doubles, although rare, exist----”

Vincent stared at him in exasperation.

“My fiancée had three little moles just above her right wrist--I looked for those three moles when I held that woman’s arm just now--_and I found them_! Are doubles so exactly reproduced as that?” he asked, furiously.

“It sounds incredible, certainly,” agreed Chassaigne. “But her attitude----”

“I know,” said Vincent, recommencing his pacing up and down the room. “She looked at me like a complete stranger. But,” he ground his teeth in jealous rage, “if she has consented to live with that man--she might have pretended--to hide her shame----”

“My friend,” said Chassaigne, seriously, “in that young woman was neither shame nor pretence. I observed her closely. She genuinely did not recognize any acquaintance in you. She genuinely did not even know French. She was genuinely resentful of your familiarity. That was no play-acting performance. She was taken by surprise. She had no time to prepare herself for it.”

The young man beat his brow.

“Oh, I am going mad!” he cried. “It was she, I swear it!--and yet--she did not know me! It baffles me.” He stopped for a moment, then looked up with a new idea. “Chassaigne! You are an authority on these things. It is possible--by hypnotism or anything of the sort--to change a personality completely--so that they forget everything--start afresh?”

Chassaigne met his glance, hesitated.

“It is--perhaps--possible,” he said, slowly. He went up to his friend, put his hand on his shoulder, drew him to a chair. “Sit down, my dear fellow. Let us be calm and think this out. If you are right--if this young woman is indeed your--your friend--your suggestion might _perhaps_ be the key to the enigma. But we shall achieve nothing by getting excited.”

Vincent allowed himself to be gently forced into the chair. He looked white and ill, thoroughly shaken. His friend, contemplating him, was impressed by his appearance. Could such a shock be produced by a merely imagined resemblance? He felt that it could not--and then those three moles! His mind reverted to the young woman, to her indubitably genuine non-recognition, and he felt more than ever puzzled. With a quiet deliberation he drew up a chair and seated himself close to his comrade.

“Now let us analyze this problem,” he said. He spoke in a calm, consulting-room voice which eliminated in advance all emotion from the discussion.

Vincent looked up, his eyes miserable.

“Have you ever known of such a case?”

“Of a personality _permanently_ changed? No.”

“Is it hypothetically possible?”

“Hypothetically--yes.”

“By hypnotism?”

“By hypnotism and suggestion.”

“But a woman cannot be hypnotized against her will, can she?”

“No--technically not--but her will may be stunned, so to speak, into abeyance by a sudden shock or by terror and then, virtually, she might be hypnotized against her will. It is possible.”

The young man took a deep breath.

“That acquits her moral responsibility. But you say it is hypothetically possible to change a personality _permanently_? It sounds fantastic to me. Would you please explain?”

Chassaigne leaned back in his chair and lightly joined the finger-tips of his two hands. He spoke in the impersonal tone of a professor elucidating a thesis.

“Well, my dear fellow, to begin at the beginning we should have to analyze personality--and human personality is a mystery I confess myself unable to explore. You are aware, however, that there are people who have double personalities--even triple and multiple personalities--which differ utterly. For some reason which eludes us, one of these submerged personalities in an individual may suddenly come to the top. He, or she, entirely forgets the personality which was theirs up to that moment, forgets name, relations, every circumstance of life--and is completely someone else, quite new. There is a recent case, exhaustively studied, of a young woman with four such personalities--over which she has not the slightest control, and which differ profoundly, mentally and morally. I mention this merely to show you how unstable personality may be.”

“These are pathological cases,” interposed Vincent. “My fiancée was a thoroughly well-balanced woman.”

Chassaigne nodded.

“Before the war when you last saw her. She must have gone through great stress since. But let us continue. Under hypnotism a person is extraordinarily susceptible to the suggestions of the operator. He will carry out perfectly any rôle indicated to him. The reason is that in the hypnotic condition the conscious personality is put to sleep and the subjective mind--the dream-creating consciousness which is independent of the will--is paramount. That subjective mind possesses little if any power of origination, but it has a startling faculty of dramatizing any suggestion made to it. Tell a hypnotic that he is President Wilson at the Peace Conference and he will get up and make a speech perfectly in character, amazingly apposite, expressing ideas that are normally perhaps quite alien to his temperament. Tell him that he is Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo and he will act the part with a reality that is impressive. He believes himself actually to be Napoleon. Under hypnotism, then, the personality which is mirrored in the Ego--which you believe to be the essential, unchanging you--may be utterly changed----”

“Yes,” objected Vincent. “But that is only during the hypnotic trance. It is not permanent.”

“Wait a moment,” said Chassaigne. “Suggestions made during the hypnotic trance may and do persist after the subject has awakened from it. I may, for example, suggest to the hypnotized person that when he wakes he will have forgotten his native language--and he will forget it. If he knows no other, he will remain dumb until I remove the suggestion. I may suggest to him that a person actually in the room is not there--and he will not perceive him. I may suggest that in a week, a month, a year, at such and such an hour, he will perform some absurd action--and punctually to the moment, without understanding the source of his impulse, he will perform it. Post-hypnotic persistence of suggestion is a scientific fact.”

“Then--in this case?”

“In this case we have to do with a clever and possibly unscrupulous man who is a specialist in manipulating the human mind. Of course, he practises hypnotic suggestion as a part of his profession--it is the chief agent in modern mental therapeutics. _It is possible_ that by some means he got this young woman into his power after she was dragged from her home. It is possible that he was violently attracted to her, and finding that she did not reciprocate his sentiments, proceeded to subject her individuality to his. How would he do this? He would drug or stun her volition by terror--as, for example, a bird is helplessly fascinated in fear of the snake. Then, using some common mechanical means such as the revolving mirror--staring into her eyes--anything that would fatigue the sensory centres of sight--he would induce a hypnotic trance. In that trance he would suggest to her that her name was no longer Hélène whatever it was--but Fräulein Rosenhagen, that she was a German woman ignorant of French, that she was perfectly happy and contented in his society. In the supernormally receptive state of the hypnotized mind he could give her lessons in German, which would be learned with a speed and accuracy far surpassing that of ordinary education. He would suggest to her that all his lessons persisted after waking. Finally, he would constantly reiterate these suggestions in a succession of hypnotic trances--once the first has been induced, it is easy to bring about the second--until he had reconstructed her personality, or rather imposed a new one upon her consciousness.

“There, my dear Vincent, presuming that you are correct in your recognition of this young lady, is a theoretical explanation of the phenomenon which confronts us. For that the young woman genuinely did not recognize you, I am certain.”

“She is held in the most diabolical slavery ever conceived, then!” cried Vincent, in despair. “A slavery of the soul! But can nothing be done?”

Chassaigne shrugged his shoulders.

“Something can be attempted, my dear fellow. I promise nothing.” He rose from his chair. “Now, I want you to promise to keep quiet--not to interfere. Fortunately, I speak German, and can talk to her in the language she believes to be her own. Wait a minute.” He roved round the room, opening the cupboards under the bookcases, the drawers in the writing-table by the window. “Ah, here we are!” he ejaculated. He held up a small silver mirror which revolved quickly upon its single support under the motion of his fingers. “I expected that our friend the doctor would possess this little instrument.” He smiled. “Very considerate of him to go out and leave us to ourselves! Now we will try and profit by the circumstance. I am going to find that young lady and bring her to you. You will maintain the attitude of a complete stranger who regrets an impulsive familiarity for which a mistake in identity is responsible. Master yourself!” He put the little mirror on the table and went out of the room.

A few moments later he returned, held the door wide open for the young woman to enter. He spoke in fluent German.

“My young friend, Fräulein, will not be consoled until he has had the opportunity of a personal apology!”

The young woman inclined her head gravely, and somewhat shyly advanced to the centre of the room. Vincent rose to his feet, his face deadly white, trembling in every limb, and bowed. Ignorant of German, he could not utter a word. Chassaigne turned to him, spoke to him in French.

“Look closely at Fräulein Rosenhagen, _mon ami_--and satisfy yourself.”

The muscles of his face tense under the effort to repress his emotion, to appear normal, the young man looked at her for a long moment. She returned his gaze without a quiver of the eyelids, smiled with the kindliness which sets a stranger at his ease.

“It is she--it is she,” he muttered, hoarsely. “I swear it!”

Chassaigne turned to the young woman.

“My young friend is much affected by your extraordinary resemblance to a lady he knew, Fräulein,” he said, smilingly, in German. “But he perceives now that he was mistaken. You will, I am sure, pardon an emotion that a person of your charm will readily understand. My friend was greatly attached to the lady he thought he recognised in you.”

The young woman smiled upon Vincent in feminine sympathy for a lover.

“Is she a German?” she asked in a rich deep voice that made him start.

Chassaigne replied for him.

“No, Fräulein--she is a Frenchwoman brought to Germany against her will.”

He observed her narrowly as he spoke. Her face remained calm. His words, evidently, awakened no latent memory in her.

“How dreadful!” she said. Her rich voice vibrated on a note of unfeigned sympathy which was, nevertheless, impersonal. “Poor man! And he does not know where she is!”

“He has no idea, Fräulein,” replied Chassaigne. “But let us leave this painful subject. Will you not keep us company for a few minutes? We are strangers in a strange land.” With a gallant courtesy, which, however, omitted to wait for her assent, he took her right hand and led her to a chair. His quick eyes noted the three moles upon her wrist. She seated herself almost automatically. He registered, in support of his theory, her easy susceptibility to a quietly insistent suggestion. “Will you not tell us what is most worth seeing in Mainz?” he asked, smilingly.

She looked up at him.

“Alas, mein Herr, I cannot!” she said. “I have never been in the city.”

“Indeed?” He expressed mild but courteous surprise. “Perhaps you have only recently come to live here yourself?”

“Yes--er--no!” She smiled at her own confusion. “I mean we have been here some time--but we travelled so much before we came here--that I--I have really lost count----”

Chassaigne made a reassuring little gesture which relegated the matter to a limbo of indifference.

“You travelled with Doctor Breidenbach, I presume?” he asked, casually.

“Yes. We went to a great many places. He was in the army then.”