CHAPTER VII

“BLOOD IS A VERY PECULIAR JUICE”

You know what people think when a man screams out that a shark is threatening him from the black depths of the parquet flooring of a fashionable dining-room. And a shark is a most uncommon feature of such manifestations. Usually the disturbing vision is a rat, or a green imp with red eyes, or even a squirming snake. Indeed, reptiles figure so often in alcoholic apparitions that I have often wondered why there are not more frequent “scenes” in the London Strand, owing to the presence on the kerb of a number of street vendors who cause make-believe serpents to wriggle all day long on a small board.

Several ladies rose with startled cries. A passing waiter was so unnerved that he dropped a laden tray, and the crash added to the alarm of those seated at a distance, to whom the hubbub, but not its cause, was audible. The band stopped playing, a clarionet breaking off with a funny squeak in the middle of a cadenza, and, adding fuel each instant to the wild-fire commotion, Constantine sprawled over the table and yelled for succor.

Wilhelm Steindal, convinced that his companion had suddenly gone mad, showed that he was endowed with some of the grit essential to a scoundrel of any real importance. He picked up a carafe of iced water, and dashed the contents into the Armenian’s gray-green face, being prepared to follow up the attack with the bottle itself, if needful. He acted better than he knew. The physical shock of the liquid dissipated the magnetic influence which Karl had unwittingly exercised on the man he had rescued from the Bay of Bengal. Forthwith, Constantine recovered his self-possession. He mopped his dripping face with a serviette, apologized to the astounded manager and those diners seated near, and went out, followed by Steindal.

The latter was too flustered to garnish his speech with Spanish phrases, a habit he affected in order to disguise the Polish-Jew element in his composition. Indeed, his language now savored more of the Bowery than of Spanish America.

“Wot’n hell did you go’n kick up that sort of circus for?” he growled, his shining face exuding oil in his excitement.

“I couldn’t help it. I was overpowered by a--by a memory.”

“It was a tomfool performance, anyhow. Seems to me it’ll be all round N’York that Steindal was out at a skate wid some flea-sucked blighter who had brought into the country a new variety of jim-jams!”

“Look here, Steindal, I may be afraid of some things, but I have no fear of you. If you talk to me in that fashion, I’ll smash your face.”

Constantine looked so murderous that the stout man retreated a pace, and a stalwart hall-porter moved ponderously forward. The Jew felt he had gone too far. The Armenian was too rich a prize to be flung aside because he had created a scene in a restaurant and spoiled a good dinner.

So he cried, with ready complacency:

“Don’t get mad with me, dere’s a good fella. I only wanted to shake up your wits a bit. Come on! Here’s your hat. Let’s walk round to your hotel. You’ll soon be all right. _Carramba!_ You scared me worse’n you scared yourself.”

Up-town in New York you can turn out of a brilliantly lighted and crowded avenue into a side-street of utmost quietude. The two passed into one of these convenient thoroughfares, and were instantly removed from the glare of the restaurant.

Steindal halted to light a cigarette. He eyed the Armenian covertly.

“Tell you what,” he chuckled, “thinkin’ of that girl has put you off your base.”

“No, you are mistaken. Something altogether different upset me. I can’t explain matters to you here. Wait till I’ve had a highball in my room. Then I’ll give you the lines of it. You need have no fear of a further outbreak. I’m all right now. And you’ve got strong nerves, eh?”

“I need ’em my boy, in my business. I’m a peach on nerves. In the profession they call me ‘The electrocutioner,’ because I can stiffen a contract in five seconds. _Por Dios!_ Nerves!”

His gurgling laugh surged in Karl’s ears as Hooper awakened him. Steindal and Constantine had not yet reached Sixth Avenue from Broadway ere the two young men in far-away Oxford were eagerly discussing the incidents of the preceding hour and a quarter in New York.

For once, the scientific necromancy of Karl’s flights through space failed to enlist all their attention. Hooper, no less than Grier, was thrilled by the thought that his friend had been drawn by some subtle magnetic influence to participate, in many ways save actual presence, in a conclave of such grave significance to a girl whose fortunes already interested them.

And it is, perhaps requisite, here and now, to protest against the smile of supercilious incredulity with which some may read of the earnestness betrayed by these youthful collegians.

It is a fact of common knowledge that a telephone company, sufficiently enlightened to endeavor to please its customers, has arranged for a board of directors, consisting of three men in New York, two in Baltimore, and one in Philadelphia, to sit in their respective offices, holding the combined receiver and transmitter to ear and mouth, and conduct a board meeting, to all intents and purposes as efficiently as if they were gathered in the same room. Company directors, or others resident in London, Birmingham, and Liverpool, could do exactly the same thing if the British telephone officials did not require an earthquake followed by a month’s deliberation before they would undertake to provide the necessary facilities.

It is exceedingly probable that, in a few years, the same instrument which permits speech and hearing over practically unlimited distance will carry a “seeing” apparatus as well. Will the scientific miracle be any the more explicable because a certain quantity of insulated copper wire intervenes between the persons seeing, hearing, and speaking to each other? I am tempted into this disquisition because, as it happens, the direct outcome of the conversations between the two sets of men (than whom the English-speaking world could scarce produce four persons more opposed in personal characteristics) was the introduction of myself, the writer of this memoir, into the affair. Early in life, journalism had taken me to India, where I met Karl’s father. He was a man after my own heart. Many times, when the business of his tea estate brought him to Calcutta, I had dined with him in the “Wilson-’otel,” the strange name by which alone the _gharri-wala_ knows the Great Eastern Hotel, or he had been carried off from the Red Road by me to my own sanctum overlooking Chowringhee and the smooth, tree-dotted _maidàn_ that stretches towards Fort William and the river.

And you will guess readily what we poor exiles talked of while the ice clinked in the long glasses and the blue smoke-rings of Bangalore cheroots rose to the ceiling. He of his wife and child, I of a deluded girl waiting in England until the rupee recovered from the heat-wave which melted silver--Heavens! How we flung those topics back and forth, like two tennis-players battering a ball. And we never bored each other. Each man was far too thankful to have a sympathetic listener to be weary of the other’s stories.

So, in that way, I knew a great deal of Karl, and when, years having passed, and the aforesaid girl (the rupee having long since steadied itself at 1_s._ 4_d._) being gone to visit her mother in Devonshire with our young hopeful, I decided to indulge in a long deferred trip to Oxford, it was only natural that I should seek out the son of my old Indian crony, and ask him to guide my steps along the ancient paths of “the home of lost causes and impossible beliefs.”

The odd thing was that no man in Britain was more prepared to give credence to Karl’s “visions” than myself. I had long since read Sir William Macpherson’s book, and constructed Frank Hooper’s theory of the definite bounds of human inventiveness out of my own thought-producing laboratory. “Blut ist ein ganz besondrer saft!” said old Mephisto, when he wheedled Faust into signing his soul away with his own blood, and the same “peculiar juice” of the Celtic stream ran in Grier’s veins and in my own. Moreover, Grier _père_ had told me of the adventures of Grier _fils_ in the matter of the Hutchinson Raid and the saving of Constantine, so it was another of the strange coincidences of life that brought a note from me, ensconced in the Mitre Inn, to Karl at his college on the morning after his excursion to Steindal’s office and the Broadway restaurant.

Grier and Hooper come to me during the afternoon. Instead of admiring the glories of Oxford, I had the recital of recent events poured into my willing ears as we sat together in my private sitting-room on the first floor. Dear me! how the years slipped back as I listened. The rounded tree-tops and gracious spires of the English University town did not differ so greatly from the dim outlines of the palatial city on the left bank of the Hughli. What a mere hand-span is a vanished decade! The magic carpet of Tangu, which instantaneously transported its possessor whither he wished to go, was not a more wonderful vehicle than a man’s memory. And Karl, even thus early in life, had a way of talking that compelled attention. He spoke to the point, in simple words. Evidently he had a horror of exaggeration. His explanations were clear, logical, as a proposition of Euclid, and he was hardly ever at a loss for a simile when illustrating one of the less easily understood features of his new and extraordinary force.

Being his senior by a good many years, I thought it my duty to point out the hazardous nature of these excursions into the unknown. I was fascinated by his story, of course, together with Hooper’s singularly definite corroboration of its chief features, yet I feared lest such playing with nervous excitability might result in paralysis or mental trouble.

But Karl’s cheery laugh reassured me.

“I have taken a very precise set of notes of a lecture on Seismic Waves this morning,” he said, “and at this very moment I could break that poker across my knee. There’s little wrong with my brains, and still less with my muscles, I can assure you.”

He leaned forward, picked up the poker, and examined it critically. It was an old-fashioned, heavy implement, with its point sharpened by years of forgetfulness, which, in pokerdom, takes the form of slow consumption in sulky fires.

“Now that I come to examine it, I don’t think I can break it. Being honest wrought iron, it will bend into a hoop. But I’ll polarize it, by way of a change.”

He pulled up his coat sleeves, and turned back the cuffs of his shirt so as to bare his wrists. Then holding the poker point downwards on the hearthrug, he began to stroke it softly with the tips of his fingers and thumbs. His hands were white, long-fingered, and finely molded, his wrists square and hard. Looking at him, watching the smile playing on his eager face, and the athletic poise of his body as he kept the poker from falling, I was struck by his physical resemblance to the Vatican Discobolus, with its wonderful combination of repose at the completion of the backward movement of the thrower, and of action at the commencement of the powerful forward cast.

But such thoughts were dispelled by the uncanny antics of the poker. It was broad daylight, and any sleight-of-hand performance was out of the question in every sense. Yet both Hooper and I myself saw Karl withdraw his support from the poker, continuing the stroking movement in the air, and gradually widening the distance between his hands.

And the poker did not fall! It stood there immovable, as though its point were stuck in the floor through the rug. At first I candidly admit that I was certain Grier had found a hole in the carpet which coincided with a crack in the flooring. But when he inclined the imaginary axis of his hands, thus changing the direction of the magnetic current that flowed between them, the poker adjusted its poise to the new line of force. It described circles, leaned over at impossible angles, lifted itself fully a foot in the air, and twice traced in space the figure of a Maltese cross. I lay stress on this simple yet peculiar manifestation of Karl’s powers, because it was the first instance of them which had actually come under my personal notice.

Certainly I was amazed, and even Hooper, notwithstanding the marvels he had witnessed, expressed his surprise at the new feature of his friend’s astounding qualities.

“I can’t explain why I should have the gift of magnetic induction,” laughed Karl. “I discovered it accidentally one day when I was making an experiment with a freely suspended needle to determine a magnetic meridian. I became very interested, the adjustment required delicate manipulation, and suddenly my hands went cold, while the needle followed their movements. Feel my hands now!”

I caught his right hand. It was so icy to the touch that I believe I started.

“I really think I could magnetize your hands,” he went on. “Shall I try?”

Naturally, I agreed. Without permitting the poker to fall, he commenced to stroke my hands from the finger-tips to the wrists. Soon I felt a sensation akin to plunging them into snow. And behold, when he quitted me, that most eccentric of pokers yielded to _my_ blandishments!

But in my case a more orthodox circulation quickly shattered the magnetic axis. In a few seconds the poker tottered, and would have fallen had I not caught it. The marked diminution of temperature experienced while I was under the influence of Karl’s electric energy was not the least interesting feature of a curious incident, seeing that it is an axiom of the classroom that all magnetic phenomena vanish completely if a magnet be made red-hot!

All this has astonishingly little to do with the more exciting personal affairs of a charming young lady like Maggie Hutchinson. But it is reasonable to suppose that Karl, anxious to secure the counsel of an older man, thought fit to show this imaginary Solomon how necessary faith was to the performance of good works, and it is in this same spirit of convincing the incredulous that I have related the trivial yet quite extraordinary poker-balancing of that summer’s afternoon in the Mitre Hotel, Oxford.