CHAPTER IV
A CAT AND FRANK HOOPER
In relation to the every-day affairs of life, Karl Grier had nerves of iron, controlled by a well-ordered brain.
“As soon as I recovered my wits,” he said, laughingly, afterwards, “I closed the window, examined the injury to my hand, which was painful but of little account, undressed, and went to bed, resolutely determined to sleep. I knew I was overwrought, and that the worst thing I could do was to strive uselessly to read the puzzle of the trance, or vision, I had just experienced. I estimated that it had lasted nearly a quarter of an hour. During those fifteen minutes I had seemingly paid a visit to the United States. That would suffice for one evening. I closed my eyes, endeavored to construct equipotential lines on an imaginary surface containing two electrified spheres, and, as a consequence, was soon sound asleep.”
This time, be it noted, there was no sanguinary result of the spell cast upon him. Sir William Macpherson, in the work already alluded to, guardedly called attention to the symptoms of bleeding at the nose and ears, and came to the conclusion that Karl presented a hitherto unrecorded phase of hypertrophy of the brain. There were periodical expansions of the encephalon, or, in simple language, the nerve-cells, nerve-tubes, and the rest of the marvelous apparatus which constitute the mental and govern the physical equipment of man, increased in number and power, and, consequently, to a slight extent, in size. All cases previously noted had revealed deficiency of intellect. Either the skull could not accommodate its unwieldy tenant, or the heart could not nourish it. Grier, exercising unknown faculties in childhood, received the requisite nutriment without effort, and growth was permitted by the occasional bursting of a distended membrane.
Obviously, a full scientific explanation of the phenomenon is impossible here. Not one scientist in ten thousand would even admit its existence, and the few who do believe would demand a bulky tome to set forth their reasons.
Karl, untroubled by such considerations, overslept himself, was late for chapel, and was reprimanded for his somnolence! He retained the liveliest impression of all that had taken place, and, being convinced that he had seen some well-known seaside resort in North America, invited to his rooms a young New Yorker, who was taking a degree at Oxford. He merely described the scene, without any explanation of its significance, and his friend recognized it at once.
“That is Manhattan Beach,” he cried, “one of the places where New York dines when the weather is hot. Society goes to the Beach, the crowd to Coney Island. They are not far apart, as the crow flies, but miles asunder in every other respect. Say, I thought you had never been to the States?”
“Nor have I, to my present knowledge,” said Karl with a smile. “I have, so to speak, constructed the picture, by force of imagination, let us say.”
“I congratulate you. Personally, I never fail to ‘construct’ places I have not seen, but I find invariably that the reality differs from the conception as greatly--well, as radically as my version of that cat’s plaintive remarks might differ from their true inwardness.”
It was night again, and the two were sitting near the open window. Somewhere beneath in the quad a seemingly disconsolate feline was mewing its aspirations. There was a moment’s silence while they listened, the American blithely unconscious that he had done aught save utter a harmless pleasantry.
“Tell me what you think the cat is saying,” said Karl, quietly.
“I am not strong on cat,” was the reply. “Like Lord Roberts, I detest the whole tribe. Away back in the origin of species I must have an affinity with either the cat’s mortal enemy, or its prey. But, as a guess, I should credit puss with remarking that he, or she, is waiting in the gy-arden ne-ow. ‘It’s a fine ne-ight; oh, won’t ye-ou come over the we-all,’ is my version.”
Your true American can do that sort of thing and preserve the face of a sphinx. His natural drawl lent an adroit buffoonery to his joke. He had not the least notion that his friend was speaking in earnest. But he pricked his ears, metaphorically, when Grier said, beginning in a low monotone, but ending excitedly:
“You are mistaken. That cat is using a chant of defiance. It is old as the hills, the product of the wind-mutterings of storm and the crash of thunder. Listen:
Who art thou who seest with fire, snake-creeping among the bushes? Think not thou art hidden. I also have eyes of flame. Beware! I am young and strong; I can bite and tear. I spring far to conquest. My claws are sharp. Fly, ere I rend thee! Comest thou yet? Kill then, kill!”
As the concluding words rang through the room there came from without the spitting and snarling of a pair of frenzied cats. There was a rush and a scurry, and all was still.
The American leaped to his feet with a somewhat hysterical laugh.
“Say, Grier,” he cried, “that’s one against me. But how, in the name of the father of all cats, did you manage to wind up your epic of the Tertiary Period at the exact moment the fur began to fly?”
“Sit down, please. I am translating freely, but accurately enough. Animals contrive to enfold many parts of speech in a single sound.”
“Do you mean to tell me you _understood_ that cat’s mewing?”
“I--I think so.”
“Your thinking is uncommonly realistic.”
“Try to credit me, Hooper. I am not romancing. Somewhere at the back of my head I have a language code which explains these things. If Max Müller can declare with conviction that every thought which ever passed through a human brain may be expressed in one hundred and twenty-one radical concepts, if the earth and the heavens can be composed of sixty chemical substances, surely it is not outrageously impossible for a lower animal organism to contrive a large vocabulary out of a few elementary sounds?”
Hooper produced a cigar.
“This requires profound smoke,” he said.
“I want help,” murmured Karl. “Criticize and question as much as you like, but scoffing will serve no purpose.”
“The deuce a scoff. I am far too interested. To begin at the beginning: What is the cat, or cattish, for ‘seeing with fire,’ and ‘snake-creeping,’ both exceedingly apt phrases, by the way?”
“I cannot tell you. I only know that these are handy symbols of root-ideas. Musicians would comprehend a mental condition of definite thought without syllabic form. Mendelssohn wrote: ‘It is exactly at that moment when language is unable to voice the experiences of the soul that the vocation of music opens to us; if all that passes in us were capable of expression in words I should write no more music.’ Wagner goes to the extreme of assigning a measured musical phrase to a given idea. Were I not deficient in the parrot’s skill of sound-reproduction, I could most certainly converse, in crude suggestion, with many animals. What is speech? Merely the trick of conveying ideas by articulate sounds. Can it be affirmed that man alone is gifted with the power? I once heard a gamekeeper calling a corn-crake by using a little mechanical instrument. The bird came, in response to the fancied cry of its mate. It was shot for its credulity. Were my vocal cords differently shaped I could have warned it against danger. Is not that speech?”
“Unless I am greatly mistaken, you are expounding a new thesis of life, Grier,” said the American. “Is there any limit? Do you go down the scale? How about insects, reptiles, fishes?”
Karl paused a little while. “Would that I might answer!” he cried at last. “Who am I that I should add unknown words to the sparse total which serves human needs? Think what it means, that list of Müller’s! Six score root-ideas, from which we have named 245,000 species of living animals, classified nearly 100,000 fossils, produced the works of Shakespeare and Milton! Yet I swear to you that many a time, in India, lying awake and listening to the croaking of innumerable frogs, I could distinguish the one final shriek of agony of a frog seized by a snake from the million-voiced chorus of its fellows.”
“Are these unknown languages always recognizable? If a dog yelps because he has been booted, do you hear him say: ‘Stop that, you two-legged ruffian! What have I done, I should like to know?’ If so, you must have a lively time of it at a cattle-fair, for instance.”
Karl laughed. He rose, pulled down the blind, and switched on the electric light.
“I am quite serious,” protested his friend. “For goodness’ sake don’t be vexed if my questions seem idiotic. When I came here to-night I did not expect you to play ‘Hail Columbia’ with all my preconceived notions.”
“Vexed! Why should I be vexed with so strenuous a listener? No, I do not gather up all these animal utterances, else I should go mad. The exercise of my peculiar faculties requires effort. I am like a loaded camera. To take a picture I must raise the shutter.”
“You speak in the plural. Was your description of Manhattan Beach based on some other intuition?”
“Yes. If you care to listen I will tell you some strange things. But first I must have your pledge of inviolable secrecy.”
Hooper gave ready assurance, and Karl acquainted him with a good many, substantially all the main points, of the facts I have previously recorded.
The American was shrewd and precise. He was studying Roman Law and Jurisprudence at the English University, his avowed object being to devote his life to the codification of his own country’s laws. Therefore, among the young men of his college, Karl could have found none of quicker and clearer perceptiveness.
When the recital reached the previous night’s inexplicable events he checked each item as though it were a section of a statute.
“There is one feature of your unparalleled experiences which stands out in bold relief,” he commented, at the close of Grier’s story. “You can see and hear only that which is taking place at the precise moment of your trance, as we shall call it. You can look into neither the past nor the future. Last night, allowing for a difference of five hours, you actually saw people dining and listening to the band at Manhattan Beach. It is noteworthy that you saw only, and did not hear. Yet you heard the Armenian yelling for help when he was a mile from the ship. The deduction is obvious. The electric waves, or whatever they are, which convey impressions to your brain, follow the known laws of the transmission of light and sound. If I were poetically inclined, I might put it that you can see the spheres but you cannot hear their music. Now, I am going to ask you, straight out, if you will oblige me by ringing up that young lady again.”
“Now?”
“Right now. It is not far from the same hour.”
“I will try,” said Karl, simply.
In order to reproduce kindred conditions he extinguished the light, raised the blind and the window, and looked out.
“Last night,” he said, “I nearly fell into the quad in my excitement.”
“No fear of that unless I fall too,” was the emphatic reply.
Karl focused his thoughts on Maggie Hutchinson. He found it easy to follow the trend of circumstances which led up to the vision of the preceding day. Soon there came the now almost familiar darkening of the air and the instantaneous disappearance of surrounding objects, to be succeeded by a well-defined view of a somewhat dimly lighted but spacious apartment. It was a very large room, with an unusually low ceiling, but the decorations, carpets, panels, and queer little windows were fashioned or conceived with much taste. At the farther end was a grand piano. In the center of the floor was a sunken space, guarded by rails. Seated on a sort of divan which ran round the walls were a great many ladies and some half-dozen gentlemen. They were reading, talking, or lying comfortably ensconced in cushions. But the odd thing was that the room and its inhabitants absolutely defied the law of gravity. No earthquake that ever shook the globe could make a house sway in such fashion without causing irretrievable ruin.
Yet the people in this uncanny apartment appeared to be in no wise disturbed by its vagaries, and, most amazing thing of all, when any individual crossed the room, or entered, or quitted it, he or she walked with a ridiculous disregard for either the changing angles of the room or Newton’s theory. So astonished was Karl by the spectacle that it took him a long time to realize that he was looking at the saloon drawing-room of a big Atlantic liner, which was evidently ploughing through a stiff gale. He saw the ship’s name, the _Merlin_, on a printed notice swinging on the wall, and he laughed so heartily at the antics of a fat man who essayed to carry a shawl to a lady on the opposite side of the vessel, that he regained his wits to find Hooper holding his arm and eagerly demanding:
“Well, what have you seen? Why are you laughing?”
Grier, not bewildered in the slightest degree by the sudden transition from the saloon of an ocean-going steamship to his chambers in an Oxford College, told his attentive friend what had transpired.
Like every up-to-date American, Hooper knew most of the great liners, and kept track of their sailings. An Englishman drops a letter into the pillar-box and trusts to Heaven and the Postmaster-General that it will reach its destination, but the average New Yorker would wonder what was wrong with him if he could not follow the missive by sea and rail, with precise details of the journey from start to finish.
So Hooper ejaculated: “The _Merlin_! Great Scott! She sailed from New York to-day. Was the girl on board?”
“I do not know,” admitted Karl. “I did not even look for her, so greatly was I mystified by the wobbliness of everything.”
“Well, I guess we’ve done enough for one _séance_,” said the other. “I’ve read and heard of some top-notch clairvoyants, but I give you best. To-morrow evening, after Hall, I shall have the tangle a bit less knotted, if pen and paper will follow its twists. You were away somewhere for nearly twenty minutes, your eyes were closed, and you reeled so that I thought you would have fallen. Guess you felt the deck heaving! But, say, old man, do you sleep well after this kind of circus?”
“Sleep! I sleep like a healthy navvy!” said Karl.