CHAPTER XVI

WOMEN CALLED HIM “THE MAGNET”

Nevertheless, there must be some more convincing explanation of the telegram which brought me from Heidelberg than Karl’s matrimonial intentions.

“Doesn’t the engagement meet with your approval?” I asked.

“Most decidedly. It is a suitable match in every way. Karl has been nursing a constituency for a year or more. He is sure to win the seat at the next election. Lord Sandilands has such interest that his son-in-law will be quite a personage in the parliamentary world if he has any brains at all, and no one can deny Karl’s gifts in that direction.”

“It would be difficult indeed. I think I have heard that Lord Sandilands himself is--er--”

“A noodle, to put it mildly. But his daughter is a fine woman, an amazingly fine woman when one sees her father. They tell me his wife was an actress, and a great beauty; so perhaps the only wise thing his lordship ever did was to marry her. Nora is an only child. Both title and estates will pass to her son if she has one. So you see--”

“I can see everything except the _raison d’être_ of my presence in London to-night.”

“For an expert in telegnomy--if that is what you call the thing--you are surprisingly slow to grasp my meaning. Never since we said good-by to you in Lime Street Station has this spook business troubled Karl in the least. He has done some remarkable things, it is true. I have seen him make people jump nearly out of their skins, but only by way of a joke. The women call him ‘The Magnet,’ you know. Oh, you hadn’t heard that? There is nothing in it but sheer fun. He wouldn’t look at a girl until I spoke to him seriously a couple of months ago, and then he told me that he was quite ready to marry the first girl I chose for him. So Sandilands and I fixed matters.”

“Did you?”

There must have been a note of irony in my voice. Grier bounced round in the carriage, and I may mention, as a matter of personal observation, that the accumulation of riches tends to shorten a man’s temper.

“Yes, we did,” he snapped, “and, what is more, we fixed matters uncommonly well. Karl cared as much for Nora as for any other nice young woman of his acquaintance, while she was infatuated about him. Just the right combination, to my thinking, in a marriage which is intended to start a man on a great career.”

“Ach Himmel!” I murmured. “Where is the planter of my youth? Does Mrs. Grier subscribe to that sentiment?”

Even as I spoke, I felt sorry for the bantering tone I was adopting. It may be that I was tired after my journey, or that my old friend’s sudden announcement of his son’s engagement had driven all other considerations from my mind, but assuredly I would not have wrung a father’s heart if I had guessed how he was suffering.

He caught my arm, and the glare of light from the hotel entrance, at which the carriage was then pulling up, showed me a face haggard and convulsed with pain.

“Don’t!” he almost sobbed. “I can’t stand it. My God, have you forgotten how Constantine died?”

“My dear fellow--” I began, but a Swiss hall-porter in the undress uniform of a British field-marshal was at the open door.

Though wretchedly ashamed of myself, what could I say? I was tongue-tied with surprise. Had things reached such a pitch that Grier was trembling for his son’s sanity? Nothing short of some terrible crisis could have wrung that cry of despair from a man of the money-making temperament. To be sure, we are apt to err greatly when we describe a millionaire as “callous,” “steel-nerved,” and other foolish epithets of that ilk. Constantine was a millionaire, and he was as sensitive as a plate full of iron filings exposed to the influence of static electricity. And then, look at A. and B., men whom you hear of daily; their hyper-nervousness is a matter of common knowledge.

Of course I put things right with Grier when we were alone once more. By that time, the momentary rift in the cloud which revealed the grim abyss had vanished. His face was impenetrable as a dense fog; the cold intellect had subdued the throbbing heart.

Calmly and carefully, with the precision he would exercise if recounting the assets of one of his companies, he went through the full history of recent events. It is not necessary to repeat his statements here. Karl, when I met him, was more explicit, because he explained causes as well as effects. Grier asked my help as a friend and trustworthy counsellor. My mission was to win his son back to a more rational view of life. As in many another desperate plight, of nations as well as individuals, the _status quo ante_ was the one desirable solution of the difficulty.

I promised to co-operate to the best of my ability, and I was pleased then to think, as I am now to know, that my distressed friend quitted me in a more hopeful mood than he had experienced during the previous month. It was no child’s task he imposed. A week earlier Karl had promised his father, on his word of honor, that he would commit no rash or desperate act until four weeks had passed. Seven days had gone already, and the extraordinary circumstances which lay behind that sinister promise were more potent than ever. “Young fool!” the cynic may mutter, but even a cynic can be asked to suspend judgment until he has heard the facts.

Well, Grier had gone. I was going out for a light supper at a quiet restaurant--the full-dress magnificence of the hotel dining-rooms was distasteful to an Ishmael in tweed--when a waiter came with a card: “Mr. Karl Grier!”

Honestly, it did not occur to me at once how Karl became aware of my presence, in view of his father’s assurance that the telegram to Heidelberg was an absolute secret. Every man has his limitations, and the use of a sixth sense in the ordinary affairs of life was ever new to me. Nevertheless, here was Karl himself, and his appearance gave me a shock productive of that imaginary shakiness which elderly ladies of considerable weight describe when they say:

“You might have knocked me down with a feather!”

Light literature, helped by the stage, must have created a lean, hollow-eyed, somewhat consumptive type of person when the ravages of passion, aided and abetted by darkly mysterious natural attributes, come to be portrayed. Of course, I last saw Karl in the heyday of youth and physical perfection, when face and figure might have served Phidias as model for the sculpture of Helios, the sungod. I am not exaggerating. Even the famous Greek, contemplating some chryselephantine marvel, found no higher ideal than the human form at its best, and nature, having determined to break the fetters of that long-imprisoned extra sense, took good care to select a notable subject for its display.

Therefore, while such a fine combination of athlete and thinker could scarce have fallen to the poor standard of the popular novelist’s cataleptic hero, the elder Grier’s revelations had prepared me, by inference, for a wasted and shrunken Karl, a six-foot volcano whose inner fire had wofully consumed the outer substance. Indeed, I may ask what _you_ would have thought if told piteously to remember the manner of Constantine’s death, and bidden to strive and avert a tragedy with a definite date assigned to it. How would such facts look on a life insurance proposal, for instance?

Hence, the pleasant voice and outstretched hand of a Karl who had the physique of one of Ouida’s Horse-Guard captains came as an agreeable but nevertheless bewildering surprise. Here was a man whose splendid proportions would attract attention anywhere. He was faultlessly dressed, so far as modern fashion may garb the mere male. He carried himself with the ease of good society. His eager face had the bronze of the open air and the clear texture of healthy living. Altogether, there could be no more astounding contrast submitted to a stubborn intelligence than this fine-looking young man, with his distinguished air, his happy insouciance, and his gray-haired father pleading for a son’s life.

“You didn’t expect to see me, eh?” cried he, throwing aside his overcoat and subsiding into a chair. “Poor old dad! I’m a dreadful worry to him just now, and I knew he had some scheme in his mind last night when he kept glancing at me under those deep eyebrows of his. So to-night, when he was late for dinner, I sent a telegnomic ray after him. I was just as glad to see you step out of the train as he was. And you are far more sympathetic. I simply can’t get him to realize that I am unable to control my unhappy faculties at times. He thinks you can cut off the sixth sense as one switches out the light. By Jove! I wish I knew the electrician who could disconnect me!”

“I don’t understand you, but I am delighted to find you looking so well,” said I. “From your father’s brief report--”

“You expected to meet a most wobegone individual. Well, I’m not. I was never better in my life. But the pace cannot last. Unless something happens, some planet-sent intervention which I fail to foresee, I am condemned like any felon. Was I right in warning the old man of a pending catastrophe? I think so. The news of my sudden death might be fatal to him. Now, at any rate, he is prepared for it.”

He caught my critical, not to say suspicious, glance and laughed. Never did a “condemned felon” regard his doom so cheerfully.

“That is quite right,” he said. “See if you can detect any signs of insanity. Sir Harley Dresser did the same thing when, to please my father, I went to him. He abandoned the idea, however, and gave me some fever mixture, as he fancied I might have caught a chill after some hard chukkars at polo.”

“You have no need to convince _me_ that you are a phenomenon,” I protested.

“No. I should think not, indeed, after poor Constantine’s affair. Nevertheless, you absolutely refuse to believe--and I am speaking only of rational, scientific belief--that this most unpleasant telegnomy may kill me as it killed him.”

“Did it kill him?”

“There is nothing more certain. I tell you that because you know I was in no way responsible. I simply burnt him up, fused him, as the motor-men say, and it was his own fault, because he persisted in getting in my way. You know that resistance is the principle of the incandescent electric lamp. Of malice aforethought, the electrician sticks a thin carbon filament in the middle of a thick wire which will carry a certain current. The filament cannot carry the load, so it becomes red-hot and shrivels, the process being retarded by the creation of a vacuum. Constantine was the filament; that is all.”

“Have you--er--are there other human filaments--”

“I hope not. I have not encountered any, I am glad to say; but there is a reason for everything if only we can discover it, and my current is not murderous unless it has a certain direction and intensity. Both of those conditions have been absent for five years, so there are no other crimes, even involuntary ones, to my charge.”

“I hope you are overrating your power, even in the case of Constantine,” I said.

“It may be so. I am only guessing vaguely at a theory, and using the analogy of known things. But Macpherson was right when he described me as an induction coil. I give off magnetism at a terrific voltage. Apply this interesting mechanism to the ordinary means of seeing and hearing, which you may liken to a bar of soft iron, and you have the first feasible definition of telegnomy.”

“I shall be only too glad to hear an intelligent scientific explanation of your sixth sense when the fog which has settled steadily over my wits since I reached London has cleared away,” I broke in. “What I am really concerned with now is the alarm which your father is experiencing on your account, and quite needlessly, I suppose.”

He leaned confidentially nearer, his arms resting on his knees; and his finely chiseled face thrust forward with keen intentness.

“You had better follow the track I am providing,” he said. “I have the consoling belief that you will ultimately comprehend me, and that will be something gained. Since we tried experiments in polarization in the _Mitre_ at Oxford I have advanced somewhat in knowledge. Of course it is difficult to describe thought in language adapted to mechanical apparatus, though, when comparisons are set up, the similarity of the body to a steam engine driving a dynamo, to which certain electrical devices are attached, is simply amazing. Have you ever studied electricity?”

“No,” I said.

“Well, then, I must explain two things to you. In the first place, you can imagine a current passing along a wire from one side of a room to the other. When a circuit is made a bell rings. Now, the wire which carries that current may be insulated thoroughly, yet it diffuses around it a certain quantity of static electricity, or magnetism, which constitutes an aura.”

“Ah, an old friend, met in many a clairvoyant novel and mesmeric séance!”

“Yet the aura has dynamic existence apart from fiction. Place a smaller wire, equipped with an electro-magnet yielding to one tenth of the force carried by wire No. 1, in the same field, but wholly separate, and you will find that by completing the first circuit the resultant magnetism affects the second wire, and _its_ bell rings also, only with considerable diminished strength. Well, sweep away your visible appliances, regard me as wire No. 1, and mankind in general as wire No. 2, and you have a fairly accurate notion of the manner in which I can ascertain, and even control, other people’s words and movements at any given moment.”

“How about me?” I demanded. “I was exceedingly anxious to communicate with you the other evening, but nothing happened, to _my_ knowledge.”

“Had I known your wish, and you had given voice to it, it would have been different. But that brings me to my second illustration. The force, whatever it is, which travels forth comes back again with absolutely unimpaired vigor, though possibly in some other form. You can prove that little recognized fact by experiment with any sparking machine. Now, there is only one human being alive, so far as I know, who can actually supply the full magnetic complement of my electric field. In different words, there is but one other creature on earth tuned to my pitch. Owing to certain impending circumstances I fear a collapse for her, or through her, which will, beyond question, be accompanied by a more complete catastrophe for me.”

Karl was speaking so seriously, his words were so evidently the outcome of deep reflection, that I found myself as profoundly imbued with the vital importance of the matter as he was himself.

“Are you alluding to the Honorable Nora Cazenove or to Miss Margaret Hutchinson?” I asked.

The bewildering pendulum-swing from talk of sudden and unprovided death back to light-hearted and careless gaiety was not the least puzzling feature of Karl’s present attitude; he straightened himself in his chair and laughed gleefully.

“I wonder if you can discover the answer unaided!” he cried. “I’ll tell you what. There’s a reception at Sandilands’ house to-night. Just slip on your regulation clothes, and I’ll take you there. After you have seen Nora, you shall give me your opinion!”