CHAPTER II.

MOLLY O’HARA.

Professor S. S. Reid’s history thus continues:

Well, I saw old Lepsius very shortly after his return, when he showed me the little cylinder of basalt, and related to me for the first time, not the last, the details of his adventures. He was blithe and fit, if a bit bothered in mind about the three shot Abyssinians, and about the drowning of the aged prior’s body, due to his rage of research.

“And how about the stele,” said I to him; “have you made out the meaning?”

“I am going to,” was his answer.

“I suppose it is worth the pains?” said I.

“Reid,” says he, “it would be worth the pains, if all the Orientalists in the world applied their wits to nothing else than that one thing.”

“What makes you think that?” I asked.

“Well, but haven’t I already read part of the thing?” says he. “True, it is no cartouche of Darius, nor Rosetta-stone; its date can’t be earlier than the thirteenth century, and not only is it the oddest mix of Memphitic with hieroglyphs, but, what is really remarkable, this Coptic stone is the record of an Indian incident. Its comparative-philological value will hardly be high, perhaps, but I am convinced that, once deciphered, it will prove a priceless document from the historian’s point of view.”

Well, I wished him joy of his new toy, and we said adieu for that time.

Then for some few months I did not see much of Lepsius, nor, I imagine, did anyone else of his world, till his seclusion began to be remarked upon by one and another of the gossips. “Where was Lepsius, what was he pottering at at present, why the father of lies...?” and so on. On three or four of the occasions when I called upon him at his Hanover Square house, I found him looking far from so well and sprightly as usual, nor did the good fellow give himself the pains to hide from me that I was somewhat heavy upon him. I understood that he was in the grip of a fit of study—a certain grimness of his looks and gauntness of his face informed one of so much—and that in that same little stele lay the secret of this too great zeal. By this time the blessed stele had been reproduced and distributed among the savants everywhere, and it may be that a race was being run in its deciphering, I don’t know; but one thing was obvious, it made Lepsius lean many days, so that says Matthews to me, “serves him right for picking and _steling_, there’s some black spook in the basalt thing that’s paying him back, and making him its victim”; and, in truth, I never saw such a thing, for one by one Lepsius threw every social, every scientific obligation to the winds to give himself day and night to this one object. Such, however, was the man: whatsoever his hands found to do, he did it with a fraction more than all his might or right. Then all at once I learned that he had fallen ill and had gone off to his castle in Galway, from which region, after some weeks, he once only wrote me a few words.

On a sudden one morning, say ten months after his coming back from Abyssinia, Lepsius presents his old phiz before me, looking as brisk and light as you like, with a smile on the thin lips. He had got back from Ireland only the day before, and, after some gossip, said I to him, “Come now, one can really see that we have laid bare at last the secret of our basalt stele.”

“Do I look like it?” he asked rather sorrowfully.

“So I thought,” said I.

“Just failed, sir! just failed!” sighs he, tossing up his hand.

“Tell me about it,” said I.

“That’s all I’ve got to say,” says he; “I’ve only just failed. The epigraph, as you know, consists of signs of very diverse dates, with a quite hierogrammatic vowelling, but Memphitic aspirations, and a jumble of true idiographs and true rebuses. Well, within five months I had deciphered it all—every syllable—save fifteen signs, making, I think, three words at the very finish, which are purposely ‘secret’; but, as it chances, those three are the important ones.”

“That’s hard luck, certainly,” said I; “but why, then, are these three of such particular importance?”

“You know,” said he, “that the stele is the record of an accumulation of riches heaped up somewhere by a host of Hindu princes during the period of the Mohammedan deluge—this where and when is exactly what remains dark. Fix place and date, and you have sextupled the value of your stele as a piece of history, quite apart from the pile of lucre in question, supposing it still to exist.”

“Well, that’s tantalising,” I said. “Of course, Thibaut has seen it?”

“You may bet,” was his answer. “Who hasn’t seen it? They have all seen it. But the fellows _can’t make it out_! I question if any one of them has read as much of it as I have. Reid, there’s not one single living man who can do it!”

“So much for stolen goods, then,” said I. “Still, you seemed to me a good deal more like your old self just as you came in, quite a youthful step and jaunty air, I thought! so I made sure....”

He laughed, saying, “Well, perhaps you are right, for I _am_ relieved, and I have reason.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“Look you,” says he, “I am going to read every syllable of the writing on that stele.”

“You said just now that you couldn’t,” said I.

“I am going to, though,” says he, “for it can be done, if not by me, if not by any living man, still it can be done; and if I look relieved it is because I know the means of doing it, and because, two nights since, lying in my bed, I suddenly decided to use them.”

“Very good,” said I, swallowing my puzzlement; “and what _are_ the means?”

“I am going, Reid,” says Lepsius, “to make a man who will read the secret.”

Quite at a loss to make out what the deuce he would be at, no doubt I smiled, for he added quickly, “No, don’t smile in that fashion, as if you hadn’t known me until to-day, since I assure you quite seriously that I can and will successfully accomplish this job.”

“The making of a man?” said I: “those are your words.”

“The making of a man,” says he, “who will not merely read the rebus, but do it without difficulty—without effort.”

“Quite so, Lepsius,” said I, “for though you choose to express yourself in terms of x, I am quite sure that in due course some explanation will be offered by you of the matter which you meditate, and of your meaning when you speak of ‘making a man’ to read this stele.”

“Lord,” exclaims Lepsius, “what a speech! How sweet the smile, but how icy the meaning! as if I were some rash, fantastic talker. No! at present I haven’t the time to go into prolonged explanations, moreover doubting Thomas ought to be tortured; but in about four days I shall probably lay my plan fully before you, when I shall have seen the initial stages of it well under way: and meanwhile, I invite you to take part with me in watching the accomplishment of these stages.”

“Where?” said I.

“You come,” said he.

“To the end of the world,” said I, “if you are serious and scientific.”

“I am quite serious and strictly scientific,” says he.

Well, I went with him. First we drove to his club in Piccadilly, where we took two seats at a window to look down upon the passers on the pavement beneath, as to whom Lepsius remarked that we might have to keep an eye on them for two, three, four hours, and—did I mind? “No, didn’t mind,” I replied, feebly chewing my foolish feeling. However, after half an hour of this watch, he changed his mind, said that that was hardly the proper place for his object, and suggested that we should drive to Westminster Bridge, if I would. I should, I said: so thither we drove, and there by the parapet of the bridge we stood, under the July blaze of the sun, two hours. I was at first simply amused by this open-air sentry of two venerable persons like ourselves, then I became a little vexed. However, I stuck to my task, while of the river of people that passed by every one stared at us two standing stupidly there, Lepsius speaking of everything except of what had brought us into this exhibition, mainly, I remember, of the necessity, by a law of probability, that every variety of human type should move past us within a number of time-units equal to the number of type-varieties which exist in the city. At last, when it was close on two o’clock, he stopped suddenly in his talk, and pointed.

“There, I think,” he says, “comes the right age, the right race, the right trade, the right body and being—the very lady.”

It was a passing woman at whom he pointed, a woman of the lower orders, with black hair, black eyes, high cheek-bones, very cheaply dressed, but not unclean, long in the leg, lean and fit, some twenty-five years old. Her nose was not red, her teeth were regular. She was going, under a heap of soiled clothes, toward the Surrey side, and one could make quite sure that she was an Irish washerwoman.

Well, Lepsius stepped out and addressed the woman. She was startled! I heard her say, “Sure, then, it isn’t me that has the time to be showing your worship around the town this day.”

I remained waiting at the parapet, absolutely astonished, much amused, while Lepsius walked on with the woman, talking pressingly, quite a confab, one could see, taking place between them, he all suave insistence, the woman curtseying, till, presently turning, he beckons me to come. So I ran and overtook them, to find them already fast friends; and Lepsius effusively introduced me to “Miss Molly O’Hara.”

This woman turned out to be the heartiest, best soul in the world, and in some half-hour we had won from her the whole simple history of one who was orphaned and friendless, save for a sister, a fruit-seller, who lived at Ballihooly. In the course of our discourse it was discovered that she had never visited the Tower, the Crown Jewels, nor the whispering-gallery at St. Paul’s, so we soon got from her an engagement to meet us on the Bridge the next day, in order to go with us to inspect these glories. She showed us the slum and the house in Southwark in which she occupied a room, and we parted.

Well then, the next day, at one o’clock, behold Molly standing in holiday garb with her landlady for guardian, and the pair of professors before them with doffed hats, like characters in an opera! We had lunch in a restaurant, and I spent a pestilent day in the “chamber of horrors” and other suchlike places, winding up with a play in the evening; after which, at about midnight, we sent our ladies home in a cab, and Lepsius, coming back to my house with me, disclosed to me that night the design that underlay his conduct during the last two days, so that we were still talking in my study when the dawn stole in. When I said to him that I had well earned his secret, and asked what in the world he meant to do with this Molly O’Hara, his answer was, “I mean to make her read my stele for me.” “Quite so,” said I, “but then, Lepsius, you persist in speaking to me in riddles.” “I mean to marry her,” says Lepsius.

I was so startled, I couldn’t help crying out a “No!”

“And why not?” says the doctor coldly.

“Oh, Lepsius,” I couldn’t help saying, half laughing, and half shrinking with reproach, “this is ridiculous, this is absurd.”

“Ridiculous enough, certainly,” says he, “but very far from absurd. We differ there.”

“But, Lepsius,” said I.

“Pooh, man,” says he, “don’t be excessive; there’s no law to prevent me taking a female to the altar, if I like, and, as to the particular lass in question, if it isn’t the right of men like you and me to look at facts in their true light, where’s the use of us? Molly O’Hara is a better human being than I, you may bet, with all my learning, sound from her top-knot to her toes; I don’t doubt she will make a pretty fairish wife—and a most splendid mother.”

“Well, I never was so astonished,” I said.

“That,” he answered, “is due to the fact that you have not yet acquired a scientific interest in my motive, for as soon as ever you have, your interest will quite quash your astonishment.”

“Well, I am all ears,” says I: “what _is_ your motive?”

“You know, Reid,” was his answer, “that whatever else I may or may not be, I am by nature an educationist; the world calls me educationist, and with justice, if a lifetime’s work and warmth are worth ought; and you know, too, my notion that no son of Adam so far has ever been educated, or been half educated—that education is an affair of the future. Well, my thought, cherished for many years, and now brought to a head by this stele, is to turn out by certain quite sure modes of education, a man, or why not a woman? who shall be not so much a man as a kind of—god. The methods, however, have to be such, that I should not venture to employ them upon another man’s boy, nor, unless the child were in my absolute power from a very early age, would they be of any use. You now observe where my Molly comes nicely in: the first needful work for a man who would build a mansion or a fane is to make sure that his marble and beams are at least good.”

“I see,” said I: “given fair materials to start with, you undertake what you say.”

“Aye,” says he, “and without so much as the shadow of a doubt as to the result.”

“What an enterprise!” I cried. “But as to the means.”

“The means,” says he, “will be simple enough, being based purely upon the known fact that human beings are what their environment makes of them. We know that an English child, abandoned by its guardians in China, will grow up, hardly a mental Englishman, but a mental Chinaman: never by any effort will he be able to row like a Cambridge-man, or do business like a jobber; but he will, without effort, make finer porcelain than could be turned out by the life’s devotion of ten thousand Cambridge-men or jobbers; it is a question of environment, of the mental hue and house about you. Be sure that every brat born into ancient Athens was straightway an artist, and if children to-day were born into a world in which everybody as a matter of course played violins with perfect skill, then _every_ average child would without conscious effort be a pretty perfect fiddle-player—and, indeed, _is_ so in some regions of the Bas-Pyrennees. It is a question of environment.”

“Quite so,” said I, “and, if you add heredity——”

“No,” says he, “let one get on; what I am trying to tell you is that the faculties of a human child’s mind and body can be made to stretch _a hundred miles_—almost indefinitely—I half said infinitely—according to the ideal, the standard and life-idea, that he finds about him; and I should doubt almost any limit which you chose to lay down to the possible activity, exactness, and acumen of the human mind and senses; we here are limited merely by habit, by the iron rod of mean ideals. Primitive man in his atmosphere of reindeer could run very like a deer; he had his hound’s scent, could speed his spear with the sureness of a machine—and without toil, that’s the point, without dreaming that he did anything astounding. A modern British child, abandoned in Africa to that same atmosphere and life-ideal, would also run like the devil, shoot like a machine, track like a dog; born into a world of gods or godlike beings, he, too, would in general be stretched into a god or godlike being; if he believed that everybody about him could read rebuses without effort, then he, too, would read them without effort. It is an affair of environment.”

“Quite so,” said I; “one has no difficulty in following you so far, for even monkeys that have lived long in an environment of men become manlike, and get to do many things; so, given your ‘environment of gods,’ your undertaking looks all in bloom. But where, then, do you mean to find this environment of gods? On the moon? In Venus?”

“Oh, as to that,” says Lepsius, “surely that much is simplicity itself. The environment may be real or it may be merely imagined. A child placed in isolation may be made to believe in an environment, a world, which does not exist, and so long as he never comes into actual contact with the imperfect world, and has no suspicion that it is not a perfect one, you will have all the elements of success: his life-ideal and standard, his idea and atmosphere, will remain quite unaffected by the actual world round about him; and having been made to conceive man as a god, he will not himself be vastly inferior to his conception.”

“By George,” I cried, “I see what you are at!... But, my friend, aren’t you preparing a nice little shock for some poor devil of a child, supposing he ever does come into contact with his actual, as distinct from his fancied, environment?”

“May be,” says Lepsius, with a shrug; “or may be the shock will be to the environment, not to the child—‘so much the worse for the coo,’ as old Stephenson said; but really, Reid, that’s looking too far forward for me; the practical point for us is to make out the meaning of our stele.... Lord! it is broad day, I’m away.”

Such is something of the gist of my talk with this radical mind that morning. I can’t recall a hundredth part of his ratiocinations, but when he had finished I was convinced. I made him stay till with our own hands we had found and cooked some coffee on my tripod, whereupon the doctor went home.

As to the end of this business, I have already, under September 13th, 1869, recorded the doctor’s marriage with Molly O’Hara in the church at Lambeth. As usual with him, Lepsius has given himself up heart and soul to the grip of his caprice, the married pair going off at once to his Galway castle, where, for the past twelvemonth, they have lived. Some months since I received tidings that Lepsius was in a fair way to be a parent, and that he had then leased the island of Shunter (one of the uninhabited islands of the Hebrides), which he was busily preparing at a crazy cost for the habitation of the child shortly to be born. Now this morning comes the joyful news that a boy was actually born about two weeks ago, and with it the gloomy news that our poor good Molly is no more. She died of milk-fever five days ago, and it had been better for the good woman not to have passed over Westminster Bridge just at that particular hour of that day twelve months ago. However, so it was to be. The fellow who is to read the famous stele is to be named Hannibal ... etc., etc.