The Feminine Future: Early Science Fiction by Women Writers (Dover Thrift Editions) Read online

“Nothing,” said Roger; “I am quite contented.”

  “This is very interesting,” said the doctor. “Tell me exactly how you feel.”

  Roger faintly and slowly told him.

  “Ah!” the doctor said, “I have not before heard this. You are the only one of them all who ever passed the first stage. The others—”

  “The others? said Roger, but he did not care much about the others.

  “The others,” said the doctor frowning, “were unsound. Decadent students, degenerates, Apaches. You are highly trained— in fine physical condition. And your brain! God be good to the Apaches, who so delicately excited it to just the degree of activity needed for my purpose.”

  “The others?” Wroxham insisted.

  “The others? They are in the room whose door was locked. Look—you should be able to see them. The second drug should lay your consciousness before me, like a sheet of white paper on which I can write what I choose. If I choose that you should see my specimens—Allons donc. I have no secrets from you now. Look—look—strain your eyes. In theory, I know all that you can do and feel and see in this second stage. But practically—enlighten me—look—shut your eyes and look!”

  Roger closed his eyes and looked. He saw the gaunt, uncarpeted staircase, the open doors of the big rooms, passed to the locked door, and it opened at his touch. The room inside was like the others, spacious and panelled. A lighted lamp with a blue shade hung from the ceiling, and below it an effect of spread whiteness. Roger looked. There were things to be seen.

  With a shudder he opened his eyes on the doctor’s delightful room, the doctor’s intent face.

  “What did you see?” the doctor asked. “Tell me!”

  “Did you kill them all?” Roger asked back.

  “They died—of their own inherent weakness,” the doctor said. “And you saw them?”

  “I saw,” said Roger, “the quiet people lying all along the floor in their death clothes—the people who have come in at that door of yours that is a trap—for robbery, or curiosity, or shelter, and never gone out any more.”

  “Right,” said the doctor. “Right. My theory is proved at every point. You can see what I choose you to see. Yes, decadents all. It was in embalming that I was a specialist before I began these other investigations.”

  “What,” Roger whispered—“what is it all for?”

  “To make the superman,” said the doctor. “I will tell you.”

  He told. It was a long story—the story of a man’s life, a man’s work, a man’s dreams, hopes, ambitions.

  “The secret of life,” the doctor ended. “This is what all the alchemists sought. They sought it where Fate pleased. I sought it where I have found it—in death.”

  Roger thought of the room behind the locked door.

  “And the secret is?” he asked.

  “I have told you,” said the doctor impatiently; “it is in the third drug that life—splendid, superhuman life—is found. I have tried it on animals. Always they became perfect, all that an animal should be. And more, too—much more. They were too perfect, too near humanity. They looked at me with human eyes. I could not let them live. Such animals it is not necessary to embalm. I had a laboratory in those days—and assistants. They called me the Prince of Vivisectors.”

  The man on the sofa shuddered.

  “I am naturally,” the doctor went on, “a tender-hearted man. You see it in my face; my voice proclaims it. Think what I have suffered in the sufferings of these poor beasts who never injured me. My God! Bear witness that I have not buried my talent. I have been faithful. I have laid down all—love, and joy, and pity, and the little beautiful things of life—all, all, on the altar of science, and seen them consume away. I deserve my heaven, if ever man did. And now by all the saints in heaven I am near it!”

  “What is the third drug?” Roger asked, lying limp and flat on his couch.

  “It is the Elixir of Life,” said the doctor. “I am not its discoverer; the old alchemists knew it well, but they failed because they sought to apply the elixir to a normal—that is, a diseased and faulty— body. I knew better. One must have first a body abnormally healthy, abnormally strong. Then, not the elixir, but the two drugs that prepare. The first excites prematurely the natural conflict between the principles of life and death, and then, just at the point where Death is about to win his victory, the second drug intensifies life so that it conquers—intensifies, and yet chastens. Then the whole life of the subject, risen to an ecstasy, falls prone in an almost voluntary submission to the coming super-life. Submission—submission! The garrison must surrender before the splendid conqueror can enter and make the citadel his own. Do you understand? Do you submit?”

  “I submit,” said Roger, for, indeed, he did. “But—soon—quite soon—I will not submit.”

  He was too weak to be wise, or those words had remained unspoken.

  The doctor sprang to his feet.

  “It works too quickly!” he cried. “Everything works too quickly with you. Your condition is too perfect. So now I bind you.”

  From a drawer beneath the bench where the bottles gleamed, the doctor drew rolls of bandages—violet, like the haze that had drowned, at the urgence of the second drug, the consciousness of Roger. He moved, faintly resistant, on his couch. The doctor’s hands, most gently, most irresistibly, controlled his movement.

  “Lie still,” said the gentle, charming voice. “Lie still; all is well.” The clever, soft hands were unrolling the bandages—passing them round arms and throat—under and over the soft narrow couch. “I cannot risk your life, my poor boy. The least movement of yours might ruin everything. The third drug, like the first, must be offered directly to the blood which absorbs it. I bound the first drug as an unguent upon your knife-wound.”

  The swift hands, the soft bandages, passed back and forth, over and under—flashes of violet passed to and fro in the air, like the shuttle of a weaver through his warp. As the bandages clasped his knees, Roger moved.

  “For God’s sake, no!” the doctor cried; “the time is so near. If you cease to submit it is death.”

  With an incredible, accelerated swiftness he swept the bandages round and round knees and ankles, drew a deep breath—stood upright.

  “I must make an incision,” he said—“in the head this time. It will not hurt. See! I spray it with the Constantia Nepenthe; that also I discovered. My boy, in a moment you know all things—you are as God. For God’s sake, be patient. Preserve your submission.”

  And Roger, with life and will resurgent hammering at his heart, preserved it.

  He did not feel the knife that made the cross-cut on his temple, but he felt the hot spurt of blood that followed the cut; he felt the cool flap of a plaster, spread with some sweet, clean-smelling unguent that met the blood and stanched it. There was a moment—or was it hours?—of nothingness. Then from that cut on his forehead there seemed to radiate threads of infinite length, and of a strength that one could trust to—threads that linked one to all knowledge past and present. He felt that he controlled all wisdom, as a driver controls his four-in-hand. Knowledge, he perceived, belonged to him, as the air belongs to the eagle. He swam in it, as a great fish in a limitless ocean.

  He opened his eyes and met those of the doctor, who sighed as one to whom breath has grown difficult.

  “Ah, all goes well. Oh, my boy, was it not worth it? What do you feel?”

  “I. Know. Everything,” said Roger, with full stops between the words.

  “Everything? The future?”

  “No. I know all that man has ever known.”

  “Look back—into the past. See someone. See Pharaoh. You see him—on his throne?”

  “Not on his throne. He is whispering in a corner of his great gardens to a girl, who is the daughter of a water-carrier.”

  “Bah! Any poet of my dozen decadents, who lie so still could have told me that. Tell me secrets—the Masque de Fer.”

  The other told a tale, wild and incredibl
e, but it satisfied the teller.

  “That too—it might be imagination. Tell me the name of the woman I loved and——”

  The echo of the name of the anæsthetic came to Roger; “Constantia,” said he, in an even voice.

  “Ah,” the doctor cried, “now I see you know all things. It was not murder. I hoped to dower her with all the splendours of the superlife.”

  “Her bones lie under the lilacs, where you used to kiss her in the spring,” said Roger, quite without knowing what it was that he was going to say.

  “It is enough,” the doctor cried. He sprang up, ranged certain bottles and glasses on a table convenient to his chair. “You know all things. It is not a dream, this, the dream of my life. It is true. It is a fact accomplished. Now I, too, will know all things. I will be as the gods.”

  He sought among leather cases on a far table, and came back swiftly into the circle of light that lay below the green-shaded lamp.

  Roger, floating contentedly on the new sea of knowledge that seemed to support him, turned eyes on the trouble that had driven him out of that large, empty studio so long ago, so far away. His new-found wisdom laughed at that problem, laughed and solved it. “To end that trouble I must do so-and-so, say such-and-such,” Roger told himself again and again.

  And now the doctor, standing by the table, laid on it his pale, plump hand outspread. He drew a knife from a case—a long, shiny knife—and scored his hand across and across its back, as a cook scores pork for cooking. The slow blood followed the cuts in beads and lines.

  Into the cuts he dropped a green liquid from a little bottle, replaced its stopper, bound up his hand and sat down.

  “The beginning of the first stage,” he said; “almost at once I shall begin to be a new man. It will work quickly. My body, like yours, is sane and healthy.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Oh, but this is good,” the doctor broke it to say. “I feel the hand of Life sweeping my nerves like harp-strings.”

  Roger had been thinking, the old common sense that guides an ordinary man breaking through this consciousness of illimitable wisdom. “You had better,” he said, “unbind me; when the hand of Death sweeps your nerves you may need help.”

  “No,” the doctor said, “and no, and no, and no many times. I am afraid of you. You know all things, and even in your body you are stronger than I. When I, too, am a god, and filled with the wine of knowledge, I will loose you, and together we will drink of the fourth drug—the mordant that shall fix the others and set us eternally on a level with the immortals.”

  “Just as you like, of course,” said Roger, with a conscious effort after commonplace. Then suddenly, not commonplace any more—

  “Loose me!” he cried; “loose me, I tell you! I am wiser than you.” “You are also stronger,” said the doctor, and then suddenly and irresistibly the pain caught him. Roger saw his face contorted with agony, his hands clench on the arm of his chair; and it seemed that, either this man was less able to bear pain than he, or that the pain was much more violent than had been his own. Between the grippings of the anguish the doctor dragged on his watch-chain; the watch leapt from his pocket, and rattled as his trembling hand laid it on the table.

  “Not yet,” he said, when he had looked at its face, “not yet, not yet, not yet.” It seemed to Roger, lying there bound, that the other man repeated those words for long days and weeks. And the plump, pale hand, writhing and distorted by anguish, again and again drew near to take the glass that stood ready on the table, and with convulsive self-restraint again and again drew back without it.

  The short May night was waning—the shiver of dawn rustled the leaves of the plant whose leaves were like red misshaped hearts.

  “Now!” The doctor screamed the word, grasped the glass, drained it and sank back in his chair. His hand struck the table beside him. Looking at his limp body and head thrown back, one could almost see the cessation of pain, the coming of kind oblivion.

  III

  The dawn had grown to daylight, a poor, gray, rain-stained daylight, not strong enough to pierce the curtains and persiennes, and yet not so weak but that it could mock the lamp, now burnt low and smelling vilely.

  Roger lay very still on his couch, a man wounded, anxious, and extravagantly tired. In those hours of long, slow dawning, face to face with the unconscious figure in the chair, he had felt, slowly and little by little, the recession of that sea of knowledge on which he had felt himself float in such content. The sea had withdrawn itself, leaving him high and dry on the shore of the normal. The only relic that he had clung to and that he still grasped was the answer to the problem of the trouble—the only wisdom that he had put into words. These words remained to him, and he knew that they held wisdom—very simple wisdom, too.

  “To end the trouble, I must do so-and-so and say such- and-such.”

  But of all that had seemed to set him on a pinnacle, had evened him with the immortals, nothing else was left. He was just Roger Wroxham—wounded, and bound, in a locked house, one of whose rooms was full of very quiet people, and in another room himself and a dead man. For now it was so long since the doctor had moved that it seemed he must be dead. He had got to know every line of that room, every fold of drapery, every flower on the wall-paper, the number of the books, the shapes and sizes of things. Now he could no longer look at these. He looked at the other man.

  Slowly a dampness spread itself over Wroxham’s forehead and tingled among the roots of his hair. He writhed in his bonds. They held fast. He could not move hand or foot. Only his head could turn a little, so that he could at will see the doctor or not see him. A shaft of desolate light pierced the persienne at its hinge and rested on the table, where an overturned glass lay.

  Wroxham thrilled from head to foot. The body in the chair stirred—hardly stirred—shivered rather—and a very faint, faraway voice said:—

  “Now the third—give me the third.”

  “What?” said Roger, stupidly; and he had to clear his throat twice before he could say even that.

  “The moment is now,” said the doctor. “I remember all. I made you a god. Give me the third drug.”

  “Where is it?” Roger asked.

  “It is at my elbow,” the doctor murmured. “I submit—I submit. Give me the third drug, and let me be as you are.”

  “As I am?” said Roger. “You forget. I am bound.”

  “Break your bonds,” the doctor urged, in a quick, small voice. “I trust you now. You are stronger than all men, as you are wiser. Stretch your muscles, and the bandages will fall asunder like snow-wreaths.”

  “It is too late,” Wroxham said, and laughed; “all that is over. I am not wise any more, and I have only the strength of a man. I am tired and wounded. I cannot break your bonds—I cannot help you!”

  “But if you cannot help me—it is death,” said the doctor.

  “It is death,” said Roger. “Do you feel it coming on you?”

  “I feel life returning,” said the doctor; “it is now the moment— the one possible moment. And I cannot reach it. Oh, give it me— give it me!”

  Then Roger cried out suddenly, in a loud voice: “Now, by God in heaven, you damned decadent, I am glad that I cannot give it. Yes, if it costs me my life, it’s worth it, you madman, so that your life ends too. Now be silent, and die like a man, if you have it in you.”

  Only one word seemed to reach the man in the chair.

  “A decadent!” he repeated. “I? But no, I am like you—I see what I will. I close my eyes, and I see—no—not that—ah!—not that!” He writhed faintly in his chair, and to Roger it seemed that for that writhing figure there would be no return of power and life and will.

  “Not that,” he moaned. “Not that,” and writhed in a gasping anguish that bore no more words.

  Roger lay and watched him, and presently he writhed from the chair to the floor, tearing feebly at it with his fingers, moaned, shuddered, and lay very still.

  Of all that bef
ell Roger in that house, the worst was now. For now he knew that he was alone with the dead, and between him and death stretched certain hours and days. For the porte cochère was locked; the doors of the house itself were locked—heavy doors and the locks new.

  “I am alone in the house,” the doctor had said. “No one comes here but me.”

  No one would come. He would die there—he, Roger Wroxham—“poor old Roger Wroxham, who was no one’s enemy but his own.” Tears pricked his eyes. He shook his head impatiently and they fell from his lashes.

  “You fool,” he said, “can’t you die like a man either?”

  Then he set his teeth and made himself lie still. It seemed to him that now Despair laid her hand on his heart. But, to speak truth, it was Hope whose hand lay there. This was so much more than a man should be called on to bear—it could not be true. It was an evil dream. He would wake presently. Or if it were, indeed, real— then someone would come, someone must come. God could not let nobody come to save him.

  And late at night, when heart and brain had been stretched to the point where both break and let in the sea of madness, someone came.

  The interminable day had worn itself out. Roger had screamed, yelled, shouted till his throat was dried up, his lips baked and cracked. No one heard. How should they? The twilight had thickened and thickened, till at last it made a shroud for the dead man on the floor by the chair. And there were other dead men in that house; and as Roger ceased to see the one he saw the others—the quiet, awful faces, the lean hands, the straight, stiff limbs laid out one beyond another in the room of death. They at least were not bound. If they should rise in their white wrappings and, crossing that empty sleeping chamber very softly, come slowly up the stairs—

  A stair creaked.

  His ears, strained with hours of listening, thought themselves befooled. But his cowering heart knew better.

  Again a stair creaked. There was a hand on the door.

  “Then it is all over,” said Roger in the darkness, “and I am mad.”

  The door opened very slowly, very cautiously. There was no light. Only the sound of soft feet and draperies that rustled.