The Black Charade. John Burke
Members of Parliament might have said there was nothing unusual in this: it was held by many, on both sides of the House, that the length and narrowness of his skull accounted for the narrowness of his opinions and the thinness of his voice. Here in his club, as so often in the House, he could not tear himself away from debate; but suffered by remaining.
‘A repeat performance. Invited to amplify the whole subject to the British Association in the autumn. Invited? Ha. Well-nigh commanded. What d’you think of that, Joseph?’
Sir Andrew Thornhill was mightily pleased with himself. His lecture to the Royal Society two evenings ago had been a success: that is to say, it had already stirred up a great deal of argument, which was always one of Thonhill’s aims. Hinde’s patent disapproval served only to provoke a mischievous pleasure in his restless blue eyes. He was heavier than either of his companions, with broad shoulders swelling beneath the spread of his cheviot coat, and a broad head weighted with a casque of silver hair, his side whiskers seeming to clamp it to his cheeks; but his eagerness and his constant wild gestures made him appear light and feathery, about to fly off across whatever room or platform he was dominating at the time.
‘The British Association,’ he repeated. ‘Hey, Joseph? A pretty contrast, hey, Caspian? There’ll be my estimable brother-in-law’—it was as if over the distance between them he were archly nudging an elbow into Hinde’s ribs—‘tramping the north giving speeches on traditional morality, whilst I demonstrate that all the old ideas are being constantly transformed into the new.’
‘Constantly distorted.’ Hinde did not look round, but could not suppress a dour response.
‘You weren’t even at my lecture, Joseph.’
‘We sat late at the House.’
‘If you’d heard what I actually said, you would realize there’s no question of distortion.’
‘What I’ve heard,’ said Hinde, ‘was that you’ve been preaching the possibility of the artificial creation of life.’
‘You see? False reports. Overstatement. I was talking about the prolongation of life. Quite a different thing. And why artificial? If it can be achieved within the natural order of things, then that makes it natural and not artificial, hmm?’
Hinde would not be drawn again. He moved an inch nearer the window.
Thornhill tried a wide conspiratorial grin at the third member of the group. ‘Don’t have to tell you, Caspian, a scientific man yourself, Etheric energy conversion: we all accept now that that’s what keeps us going. Energy can’t be lost. Can’t be created—there, Joseph, how’s that for an admission?—but it can’t be lost. And it can be refashioned. Always being refashioned. Nothing is destroyed, merely changed into another form.’ His right hand sketched soaring concepts in the air. ‘If matter and energy are indestructible, never suffering anything worse than conversion into another equally vital form, then human life is not a transitory thing.’
Dr. Alexander Caspian said carefully: ‘Obviously, the race as a race can continue to regenerate itself. The physical matter of our universe will change but cannot dwindle. One accepts that. But the prolongation of individual life...no, I’m afraid I have many reservations.’
‘Damn it,’ Thornhill burst out, ‘how can we ever make substantial progress if the best brains in the country are cut off in their prime?’
‘We make progress by drawing from what one might call a collective knowledge, amassed over the centuries. Each gifted individual is in fact gifted by his awareness of those sources and his ability to interpret them. The collective progress of the race and its philosophy—’
‘Damn collective progress! I want to see things for myself, and to go on contributing to them. Why should a man who has spent so long developing his skills have to give way, often at the height of his powers, to an infant who has to start the whole learning process all over again? If energy itself continues, why should not an existing formation of that energy continue? I’m convinced that the discovery of some regenerative process is waiting, just round the corner, so that those who don’t want to be transmuted into other matter may continue in their present shape, with their present faculties. And I want to live to see it. To see how our new knowledge is expanded and perfected.’
Caspian said: ‘Such desires are not new. And the knowledge is not new. This all-pervading ether to which you physicists ascribe the behaviour of all natural forces is similar to the Aksashic Record of Hindu mysticism. Paracelsus, too, wrote of just that astral power to which you have given a modern name.’
There was an odd hush. Caspian had half expected a burst of materialistic argument. Instead, Thornhill glanced covertly at him as if wondering what unspoken secrets they shared.
‘Perhaps,’ said Thornhill with unusual deference, ‘the old alchemists knew more than we like to admit.’
‘So that’s it!’ Hinde swung round. ‘Gibberish, just as I thought. Pagan superstition. A return to the Dark Ages.’
‘I meant merely that if we take those old concepts symbolically rather than literally, they often turn out to be remarkably close to what we’re now discovering by purely scientific experimentation.’
‘Such theories are bound to arouse opposition from some of your colleagues,’ said Caspian.
‘I expect it.’ Thornhill was gleeful again. ‘I could tell you here and now the names of enemies who’ll write scathing denunciations in Nature. And a lot of other places.’ He glanced past Caspian and raised a hand in greeting. ‘Speak of the devil. Or one of them. Old Walton—a bit restive the other evening. I really must go and find out what he made of it.’
He slapped Hinde on the arm and left them, eager for the stimulus of further battle.
Hinde looked grimly at a point somewhere in a vacuum, a yard or so from his nose. Then, slowly and stiffly, he said: ‘I was sorry to hear you encouraging his confusions.’
‘Confusions?’
‘Speaking of ancient charlatans such as Paracelsus in the same breath as modern science. All this Hindu nonsense, too: all the fakirs and fakements being inflicted on us nowadays.’ His bleached aquiline features were as unyielding as those of some Old Testament prophet. ‘So many of our current social problems derive from such rubbish. Such dangerous rubbish. That, to be frank, was what I was hoping to speak about to you. To consult you. Now....’
He was too polite to say he was already having doubts. Caspian waited. It would take the man a moment or two to bring himself to confide in a near stranger.
Then it came, hesitantly. ‘I am given to understand that you yourself take quite an interest in...ah....’ A longer hesitation, and a fastidious pinching of the words: ‘Psychic phenomena.’
‘In dispelling misconceptions about them, yes.’
‘I heard you exposed two fraudulent mediums a month ago. Admirable. Yet the gullible still attend the meetings of these abominable charlatans. People who ought to know better.’
Hinde’s lips were bitten in so tightly that they almost disappeared.
After a moment Caspian prompted: ‘You have someone particular in mind?’
‘I have indeed. I can trust your discretion, Dr. Caspian?’
‘If you have any doubts on that score, better not confide in me.’
Hinde stared full into his face. ‘I apologize. I would not have ventured to approach you if I had not heard the highest praise of your methods, from people I respect. And my own judgment tells me I can rely on you.’ He cleared his throat, still unsure. ‘A glass of wine, sir?’
‘When we’ve finished, perhaps.’ It was another gentle nudge.
‘Very well. Dr. Caspian, I am a widower. I had one son, killed in the Zulu wars. And I have one daughter, Laura. She is growing strange. I fear she has fallen into evil company.’
‘What