Chapter 10

"But I decline to take leaps in the dark like--" Here he mentioned a well-known man of science--"and I decline to reject evidence like--" Here he named a professor even more famous.

The mention of the last name evidently excited Chichester's curiosity.

"What evidence has he rejected?" he exclaimed.

"Last week he held a sitting to examine the pretensions of Mrs. Groeber, the German medium. Westcott was also present, a man on whose word the very devil--if there is such a person, which I don't yet know--would rely. Some apparently remarkable phenomena occurred.--" Here he mentioned the professor--"was convinced that they could only have been brought about by supernormal means. Unfortunately, or fortunately, Westcott had seen the trickery which produced them. When the séance was over he explained what it was to ----. What did this _so-called_ man of science do? Refused to accept Westcott's evidence, clung to his own ridiculous belief,--savage's fetish belief, nothing more,--and will include the Groeber manifestations as evidence of supernormal powers in his next volume. And I say, I say"--he raised his forefinger--"that clergymen are doing much the same thing pretty nearly every day of their lives. Seek for truth quietly, inexorably, and you may get it; but don't prod men into falsehood, or try to, as you've been trying to in this very room."

"I!" cried out Chichester.

"You. I told you I had no reason to give you as to why you attracted my attention in the street. Were you satisfied with that? Not at all. You must needs come here,--very glad to see you!--and say, 'I feel sure you must be able to give me a reason. What is it?' You clamor for a lie. And that's what men are perpetually doing--clamoring for lies. And they get 'em, from clergymen, from mediums, from so-called scientific men, and from the dear delightful politicians. There now!"

And the professor dropped his forefinger and flung himself back in his chair.

"And"--Chichester in his turn leaned forward, but he spoke with some hesitation--"and suppose I were to tell you a truth, a strange, an amazing truth?"

He paused.

"Go on!" said the professor.

"Wouldn't you do just the opposite? You say men accept lies. I say you would probably reject truth."

"_Cela dépend_. What you believed to be truth might not be truth at all. It might be hysteria, it might be nervous dyspepsia, it might be overwork, it might be a dozen things."

"Just what I say," exclaimed Chichester. "Men of science delight in nothing so much as in finding excuses for rejecting the greatest truths."

"Do you mean the greatest truths in the possession of Anglican clergymen?"

"I dare say you think it impossible that a clergyman should know more than a scientific man?"

"Oh, no. But he's out for faith, and I happen to be out for facts. I like hard facts that can be set down with a fountain-pen in my note-book, and that, taken together, are convincing to all men of reasonable intellect. Very dull, no doubt; but there you have it. Clergymen, as a rule, move in what are called lofty regions--the realms of heart, conscience, and what not. Now, I'm very fond of the region of gray matter--gray matter."

"And yet you are one of the chief of the investigators in the field of psychical research."

"Do you think there's no room for pencil and note-book there? What about Podmore,--there's a loss!--and a dozen others? Psychic matters have got to be lifted out of the hands of credulous fetish-worshiping fools, and the sooner the better."

"It's easy to call people credulous," said Chichester, with decided heat. "By being so readily contemptuous, Professor Stepton, you may often keep back evidence that might be of inestimable value to your cause. A man in possession of a great truth may keep it to himself for fear of being laughed at or called a liar."

"Then all I can say is that he's a coward--an arrant abject coward."

Chichester sat in silence. Again he was looking down. Now that his eyes were hidden by their drooping lids, and that he was no longer speaking, the sadness of his aspect seemed more profound. It dignified his rather insignificant features. It even seemed, in some mysterious way, to infuse power into his slight and unimportant figure. After sitting thus for perhaps three minutes he raised his head and got up from his chair.

"I must not take up your time any longer," he said. "It was very good of you to see me at all." He held out his hand, which Stepton took, and added, "I'll just say one thing."

"Do!"

"It isn't always cowardice which causes a man to keep a secret--a secret which might be of value to the world."

"I never said it was."

"No; but still--you spoke just now of my sermons. I preached one not very long ago which I have typed myself. If I send it to you do you think you could find time to read it?"

"Certainly."

"I will send it, then. Good night."

"I'll come down with you."

The professor let Chichester out. The rain was still falling in torrents. Shrouded in his mackintosh, protected by his umbrella, the curate walked away. Looking after him, Stepton thought:

"Very odd! It isn't only in the face. Even the figure, all covered up and umbrella-roofed, seems to have something--he'll send me the sermon of the man and his double to-morrow."

And on the morrow that sermon came by the first post. Having read it, the professor promptly returned it to Chichester with the following note:

_The White House, Westminster.

Dear Mr. Chichester:_

Very glad to have had the opportunity of reading your interesting discourse. If I had not known it was yours, and a sermon, I should have said "a posthumous work of Robert Louis Stevenson." It does credit to your imagination. If you care to publish, I should suggest "The Cornhill." I know nothing about their terms.

Yours faithfully,

_G.R.E. Stepton._

By return of post, there came an urgent invitation to the professor to visit Chichester's rooms in Hornton Street, "to continue a discussion which has a special interest for me at this moment."

"Discussion!" thought Stepton, sitting down to accept, "What my man wants is for me to goad him into revelation; and I'll do it."

The professor knew enough of psychology to be aware that in the very depths of the human heart there is a desire which may perhaps be called socialistic--the desire to share truth with one's fellow-men. Chichester was scourged by this desire. But whether what he wished to share was truth, or only what he believed to be truth, was the question. Anyhow, Stepton was determined to make him speak. And he set off to Hornton Street little doubting that he would find means to carry his determination into effect.

He arrived about half-past five. He did not turn the corner into Kensington High Street on his homeward way until darkness had fallen, having passed through some of the most extraordinary moments that had ever been his.

When he was shown into the curate's sitting-room, his first remark was:

"Sent that very interesting story to 'The Cornhill' yet?"

"I don't think you quite understand, Professor," replied Chichester. "I did not type it with a view to sending it in anywhere for publication. You'll have tea with me, I hope? Here it is, all ready."

"Thank you."

"Oh, Ellen!"

Chichester went to the door, and Stepton heard the words, "Nobody, you understand," following on a subdued murmuring.

"And Mr. Harding, sir?" said the maid's voice outside.

"Mr. Harding won't come to-day. That will do, Ellen."

The professor heard steps descending. His host shut the door and returned.

"You typed it for your own use?" said Stepton.

"That sermon? Yes. I wished to keep it by me as a record."

He sat down, and poured out the tea.

"A record of an imagined experience. Exactly. Then why not publish?"

"It is not fiction."

"Well, it isn't fact."

The professor drank his tea, looking at his host narrowly over the cup.

"Do you say such an experience as that described in my sermon is impossible?"

"Do you say it is possible?"

"If I were to say so would you believe me?"

"Certainly not, unless I could make an investigation and personally satisfy myself that what you said was true. You wouldn't expect anything else, I'm sure."

"You can believe nothing on the mere word of another?"

"Very little. I am an investigator. I look for proof."

"With your pencil in one hand, your note-book in the other."

In Chichester's last remark there was a note of sarcasm which thoroughly roused Stepton, for it sounded like the sarcasm of knowledge addressed to ignorance. Stepton had a temper. This touch of superiority, not vulgar, but very definite, fell on it like a lash.

"Now I'll go for the reverend gentleman of St. Joseph's!" he thought.

And for a moment he forgot his aim in remembering himself. Afterward, in thinking matters over, he offered a pinch of incense at the altar of his egoism.

"So, the modern clergyman still believes in slip-slop, does he?" he exclaimed in his most aggressive manner. "Even now hasn't he learnt the value of the matter-of-fact? The clergyman is the doctor of the soul, isn't he? And the doctor, isn't he the clergyman of the body? I wonder, I do wonder, how long the average doctor would keep together his practice if he worked with no more precision than the average clergyman. The contempt of the pencil and note-book! The contempt of proper care in getting together and coordinating facts! The contempt of proof--the appeal to reason! And so we get to the contempt of reason. And let me tell you--" he struck the tea-table with his lean hand till the curate's cups jumped--"that scarcely ever have I heard a sermon in which was not to be found somewhere the preacher's contempt for reason, the bread of the intellect of man."

"The soul is not the intellect."

"Don't you think it higher?"

"I do."

"And so you put it on slops!"

The professor got up from his chair, and began to sidle up and down the small room.

"You put it on slops, as if it were a thing with a disordered stomach. That's your way of showing it respect. You approach the shrine with an offering of water gruel. Now look ye here!"--The professor paused beside the tea-table--"The soul wants its bread, depends upon it, as much as the body, and the church that is free with the loaves is the church to get a real hold on real men. Flummery is no good to anybody. Rhetoric's no good to anybody. Claptrap and slipslop only make heads swim and stomachs turn. The pencil and note-book, observation and the taking down of it, these bring knowledge to the doors of men. And when you sneer at them, you sneer at bread, on the eating of which--or its equivalent, basis-nourishment--life depends."

"I wonder whether you, and such as you, really know on what the true life of the soul depends," said Chichester, with an almost dreadful quietness.

The professor sat down again.

"Such as I?" he said. "You are good enough to do me the honor of putting me in a class?"

"As you have so far honored me," returned Chichester.

"Ha!" ejaculated Stepton.

He had quite got the better of his egoism, but he by no means regretted his outburst.

"Do you claim to stand outside the ranks of the clergy?" he asked.

"Do you claim to stand outside the ranks of the scientists?"

"Oh, dear, no. And now--you?"

Chichester said nothing for a moment. Then, lifting up his head, and gazing at the professor with a sort of sternness of determination, he said:

"Remember this! You yourself told me that in a crowd of a thousand you must have fixed your attention on me."

For a moment the professor had it in his mind to say that this statement of his had been a lie invented to make an impression on Chichester. But he resisted the temptation to score--and lose. He preferred not to score, and to win, if possible.

"I did," he said.

"Could this be so if I were like other men, other clergymen?"

"Well, then, what is the mighty difference between you and your reverend brethren--between you, let us say, and your rector, Mr. Harding?"

Very casually and jerkily the professor threw out this question.

Not casually did Chichester receive it. He moved almost like a man who had been unexpectedly struck, then seemed to recover himself, and to nerve himself for some ordeal. Leaning forward, and holding the edge of the table with one hand, he said:

"How well do you know Mr. Harding?"

"Pretty well. Not intimately."

"You have seen him since he--altered?"

"I saw him only the other day when I was at a specialist's in Harley Street."

"A specialist's?"

"For nervous dyspepsia."

Again the look of contempt flickered over Chichester's face.

"Do you think the alteration in Mr. Harding may be due to nervous dyspepsia?"

"Probably. There are few maladies that so sap the self-confidence of a man."

Chichester laughed.

For the first time since he had entered the little room the professor felt a cold sensation of creeping uneasiness.

"Apparently you don't agree with me," he said.

"I am not a doctor, and I know very little about that matter."

"Then I'm bound to say I don't know what you find to laugh at."

"For a man who has spent so much time in psychical research you seem to have a rather material outlook upon--"

"Mr. Harding?"

"And all that he represents."

"Suppose we stick to Mr. Harding," said the professor, grittily. "He is typical enough, even if you are not."

"In what respect do you consider Mr. Harding typical?"

"I am speaking of the Harding before the fall into the abysses of nervous dyspepsia."

"Very well. In what respects was Mr. Harding typical?"

"In the sublime self-confidence with which he proclaimed as facts, things that have never been proved to be facts."

"Do men want facts?" said Chichester, almost as one speaking alone to himself.

"I do. I want nothing else. Possibly Mr. Harding had none to give me. I don't blame him."

"Perhaps it is a greater thing to give men faith than to give them facts."

"Give them the first by giving them the second, if you can! And that, by the way, is the last thing the average clergyman is able to do."

Chichester sat silent for nearly a minute looking at the professor with a strange expression, almost fiery, yet meditative, as if he were trying to appraise him, were weighing him in a balance.

"Professor," he said at last, "I suppose your passion for facts has led men to put a great deal of faith in you. Hasn't it?"

"I dare say my word carries some weight. I really don't know," responded Stepton, with an odd hint of something like modesty.

"I had thought of Malling first," almost murmured Chichester.

"What's that about Malling?"

"I think he would have accepted what I have to give more readily than you would. There seems to me something in him which stretches out arms toward those things in which mystics believe. In you there seems to me something which would almost rather repel such things."

"I beg your pardon. I am quiescent. I neither seek to summon nor to repel."

"I couldn't tell Malling," said Chichester. "His readiness stopped me. It struck me like a blow."

"Malling prides himself on being severely neutral in mind."

"And you on being skeptical?"

"I await facts."

"Shall I give you some strange facts, the strangest perhaps you have ever met with?"

Stepton smiled dryly.

"You'll forgive me, but some such remark has been the prelude to so many figments."

"Figments?"

"Of the imagination."

An expression of anger--almost like a noble anger it seemed--transformed Chichester's face. It was as a fine wrath which looked down from a height, and in an instant it melted into pity.

"How much you must have missed because of your skepticism!" he said. "But I shall not let it affect me. You are a man of note-book and pencil. Will you promise me one thing? Will you give me your word not to share what I shall tell you with any one, unless, later on, I am willing that you should?"

"Oh, dear, yes!" said the professor.

And again he smiled. For even now he believed the curate to be wavering, swayed by conflicting emotions, and felt sure that a flick of the whip to his egoism would be likely to hasten the coming of what he, the professor, wanted.

A loud call rose up from the street. A wandering vender of something was crying his ware. In his voice was a sound of fierce melancholy. Chichester went to the window and shut it down.

"I wish it was night," he said as he turned.

The professor jerked out his watch.

"It must be getting late," he observed. "Past six! by Jove!"

He made an abrupt movement.

"What?" said Chichester. "You are going!"

He came up to the table.

"Sometimes I think," he said, "that men hate and dread nothing as they hate and dread facts which may upset the theories they cherish."

"You're perfectly right. Well, very glad to have seen you in your own room." The professor got up. "By their rooms shall ye know them." He glanced round.

"Ah, I see you have Rossetti's delightfully anemic Madonna, and Holman Hunt's 'Light of the World.' A day or two ago I was talking to a lady who pronounced that--" he extended his finger toward the Hunt--"the greatest work of art produced in the last hundred years. Her reason? Its comforting quality. I am sure you agree with her. Good-by."

He made a sidling movement toward the door. Perhaps it was that movement which finally decided the curate to speak.

"Professor," he said, "I don't want you to go yet."

"Why not?" jerked out Stepton, with one hand on the door-knob.

"You collect 'cases.' I have a case for you. You are a skeptic: you say men should be brought to faith by facts. Sit down. I will give you some facts."

The professor came slowly back, looking dry and cold, and sat down by the table, facing the Rossetti Madonna.

"Always ready for facts," he said.

XI

"You have heard of doubles, of course, Professor?" said Chichester, leaning his arms on the table and putting his hands one against the other, as if making a physical effort to be very calm.

"Of course. There was an account of one in that sermon of yours."

"Have you ever seen a double?"

"No; not to my knowledge."

"I suppose you disbelieve in them?"

"I have no reason to believe in them. I have not collected enough evidence to convince me that there are such manifestations."

"You know a double at this moment."

"Do I, indeed? And may I ask the manifestation's name?"

"Marcus Harding."

"Marcus Harding is a double, you say. Whose?"

"Mine," said Chichester in a low voice.

He clasped and unclasped his hands.

"I don't understand you," said Stepton, rather disdainfully.

"I will try to make you." And Chichester began to speak, at first in a low, level voice. "That sermon of mine," he said, "was a sort of shadow of a truth that I wanted to reveal,--that I dared not fully reveal. Already I had tried to tell Evelyn Malling something of it. I had failed. When the moment came, when Malling was actually before me, I could not speak out. His mind was trying to track the truth that was in me. He got, as it were, upon the trail. Once he even struck into the truth. Then he went away to Marcus Harding. I remained in London. When I knew that those two were together I felt a sort of jealous fear of Malling. For there was pity in him. Despite his intense curiosity he had a capacity for pity. I realized that it might possibly interfere with--with something that I was doing. And I recalled Marcus Harding to London. From that moment I have avoided Malling. I could never tell him. But you, hard searcher after truth as you are--you could never find it in you to drag away another from the contemplation of truth. Could you? Could you?"

"Probably not," said Stepton. "I usually let folks alone even when they're glaring at falsehood. Ha!"

He settled himself in his chair, looking sidewise toward Chichester.

"You, like every one else, have noticed the tremendous change in Marcus Harding," Chichester went on. "That change, the whole of that change, is solely owing to me."

"Very glad to have your explanation of that."

"I am going to give it you. The beginning of that change came about through the action of Marcus Harding. He wished for facts that are, perhaps,--indeed, probably,--withheld deliberately from the cognizance of man. You have sneered at those who live by faith, you have sneered at priests. Well, you can let that Marcus Harding go free of your sarcasm. Although a clergyman he was not a faithful man. And he wanted facts to convince him that there was a life beyond the grave. Henry Chichester--"

"You! You!" interjected Stepton, harshly.

"I, then, came into his life. He thought he would use me to further his purpose. He constrained me to sittings such as you have often taken part in, with a view to sending me into a trance and employing me, when in that condition, as a means of communication with the other world--if there was one. We sat secretly in this room, at this table."

"You need not give me ordinary details of your sittings," said the professor. "I am familiar with them, of course."

"Henry Chichester--"

"You! You! Don't complicate matters!"

"I never was entranced; but presently I felt myself changing subtly."

"People very often imagine they are developing into something wonderful at séances. Nothing new in that."

"Please try to realize the facts of my case without assuming that it resembles a thousand others. I believe, I feel sure, that it resembles no other case that has come under your observation. To grasp it you must grasp the characters of two men, Marcus Harding as he was--and myself, as I was."

"Put them before me, then."

"That Marcus Harding you knew. He was the type of the man who, sublimely self-confident, imposes his view of himself upon other men and especially upon women. He had strength--strength of body and strength of mind. And he had the strength which a devouring ambition sheds through a man. A fine type of the worldly clergyman he was, of the ardent climber up the ladder of preferment. To him the church was a career, and he meant to succeed in it. If he had to begin as a curate he meant to end as a bishop, perhaps as an archbishop. And he had will to help him, and vitality to help him, and the sort of talent that brings quick notice on a man. And he had also a woman to help him, his wife, Lady Sophia. He chose well when he chose her for his helpmate, though he may not think so now. He should have been content with what he had. But he wanted more, and he thought he might perhaps get what he wanted through me. Marcus Harding was a full-blooded type of the clerical autocrat. I once was an equally complete type of the clerical slave--slave to conscience, slave to humble-mindedness, slave to my rector as soon as I knew him.

"St. Francis of Assisi was the character I worshiped. I strove after simple goodness. I desired no glories of this world, no praises of men. I did not wish to be clever or to shine, but only to do my duty to my fellow-men, and so toward God. When I was first to make the acquaintance of Marcus Harding, with a view to becoming his senior curate if he thought fit, I felt some alarm. I had heard so much of his great energy and his remarkable talents. The day came. I paid my visit to Onslow Gardens. For the first time I saw--" Chichester paused. His face became distorted. He turned toward the window as if anxious to hide his face from the professor's small, keen eyes. "I saw--that man," he continued, in a withdrawn and husky voice, and still looking away.

Stepton sat motionless and silent, sidewise, with his arms hanging.

Chichester, after another long pause, again faced him.