by Frank Norris
Anselm took up Lauth’s hand and scrutinized it; the nails were yet white, but on his holding the hand against the light, the delicate web of flesh between the roots of each finger could be seen faintly tinged with red. A strange and overwhelming excitement began to grow upon them all. Chavannes and Talhouet worked steadily at the pump, while Anselm and Marcellot, at the latter’s suggestion, chafed the cold limbs with feverish energy. The body was now quite warm.
At half-past three, one of the sheep staggered and fell. The circumstance smote them with an apprehension so painful that it plainly showed to each how much his hopes and expectations had been bound up in the result of the experiment. Should both the sheep die ere circulation could be established, all their labour would be in vain.
“Work!” exclaimed Chavannes; but hardly had he spoken when he and his two companions were startled by a sharp cry from Marcellot. His hand had been over the left breast of the body; he drew it quickly away. Each in his turn put his hand over the spot, and each distinctly felt the breast beneath it throb with a great, though as yet an irregular movement.
Trembling and with eyes ablaze, they watched the change coming on. At a sign from Chavannes, Marcellot ceased to press down Lauth’s chest after each artificial inhalation, and it was seen that the lungs, by their own elasticity, were now sufficient to relapse and exhale the air.
But the sheep that had fallen was soon dead, and the second now began to totter. A cessation of even the forced circulation would at this crisis prove fatal. But, forgetful of all consequences in his excitement, Chavannes sprang up, gave up the charge of the air-pump to Anselm, and opening a vein in his forearm thrust in the end of the tube which he had torn from the dead sheep’s neck.
The hour that then ensued was one of the most intense excitement to them all. Again and again Chavannes’s powerful drug was administered in ever-increasing quantities. Brandy, wine, and other stimulants, were forced down Lauth’s throat, and strychnine injected into the blood now flowing freely.
Little by little the change, at first indefinable and of the greatest delicacy, became distinctly apparent. Though there was no movement of the limbs the body did not look dead. At length Talhouet and Anselm withdrew the tube and the air-pump attached to it from the nostrils. Straightway the breast shook with a great gasp, respiration ceased entirely, and then feebly recommenced. So absorbed were his three companions that it was not until Chavannes tottered against Marcellot that they remarked his weakness and pallor. Anselm supported him to a chair, and as he did so the second sheep pitched dead to the floor, dragging the tube out from the neck of the body.
All connections with the outer world were now severed; nothing more could be done. The impetus had been given. It remained to be seen if Nature could carry it forward. The group collected about Chavannes’s chair, and waited with eyes fixed on the table. Day had dawned for already two hours, although in their closely shuttered chamber they made no thought of it, when they saw the body slowly turn upon its side and then roll over, face downward, upon the table.
Chavannes cried out in a loud voice: “Vivit!” Anselm sprang to his feet with a terrible cry: “Horrible, horrible!” he shrieked, and rushed from the room.
IV
Lauth was alive, and though for many weeks he rolled and yelled and gibbered upon his bed in the grip of a disease for which the combined science of the four doctors could find no name, yet Chavannes was satisfied.
“I was right,” he said to Anselm. “Are you convinced now that your so-called soul has no part in the animation of physical being? Life, and life only, is the stay and promoter of existence.”
And Anselm bowed his head and seemed to grow older. The success of Chavannes’s experiment had produced a terrible effect upon him. All his ideas and beliefs that he had inherited in common with the world from thousands of past ages, and that were so firmly rooted in his conceptions as to have become a part and parcel of him, had been ruthlessly and suddenly torn up and cast to the winds. Everything had been a mistake, then — civilization, beliefs, society, religion, heaven, and Christ Himself — all were myths or founded upon falsity. Where could he turn for anything certain? Where was there anything true? What could he now believe? He was mentally lost, as one in a whirlwind — landmarks all down, lights obliterated — all was chaos and confusion. Everything was to be commenced over again upon a new basis. Of Lauth, in his present condition, he had a horror that at times sent his mind spinning toward the very verge of insanity.
When the terrible spasms at length departed from Lauth’s body, and when his strength came back, he was allowed to get up and walk about; when given nourishment, he ate and drank; when led by Chavannes to his great chair in the window, he sat for entire days motionless, just as he had been placed, and when spoken to he answered, but after long intervals, and inarticulately, disjointedly, often relapsing into silence in the midst of his speech — if his guttural noises could be called speech.
Thus he remained for a long time, and it was not until after many weeks of the most careful treatment that his condition seemed to change for the better. At length, however, he appeared to grow more rational, and Chavannes imagined he could even detect characteristics of the old Lauth beginning to show themselves in his resuscitated body; but often this was mere fancy. Thus far the only features apparent were that he ate, slept, and knew when he was spoken to. As yet his existence was purely negative. Chavannes and his companions watched eagerly for some positive manifestations of character, and Chavannes himself especially laboured to induce each. He talked long to Lauth of pursuits and occupations that had interested him before his death, placed in his way old books and familiar objects, and read to him from his favourite studies. Whether Lauth heard and comprehended, he could not tell.
Anselm and his two fellow doctors seldom left Chavannes’s house, and the minutest watch was kept over Lauth and his every movement. At length one day the bonds seemed to be loosed. Lauth began to speak. He addressed them severally and coherently, although it was impossible to say whether or not he distinguished between them. His talk was upon topics that they knew had been near to him in his first life. The speech, the intonation, the gesture, all were those of the old Lauth. Chavannes was exultant. He began to look forward not only to a complete restoration of the former Lauth, but even to talk of giving the great discovery to the world. Entire days now often passed upon which, had they occurred before the time of the riot, they would have noticed nothing strange in Lauth’s looks or demeanour.
Then after this there came a peculiar relapse, a strange and unaccountable change. Lauth talked less, and an expression of daily deepening perplexity overcast his face. He seemed as one lost in mind and grasping for some hidden clue. The look of anxiety in his eyes was sometimes all but agonized, and often he clasped his head with both hands, as though to steady some mental process.
Until at last, upon one memorable day, when he had been sitting for upward of an hour lost in the mazes of the deepest thought, he leaped suddenly to his full height, and while a glance of almost supreme intelligence flashed, meteorlike, across his face, called out in a fearful voice:
“This is not I; where am I? For God’s sake, tell me where I am!”
After which he fell in a fit upon the floor, foaming and wallowing.
And now commenced the opening stages of a process whose contemplation filled them with horror and loathing beyond all utterance. That cry, unearthly in tone as well as in significance, seemed to mark the highest point of Lauth’s second life. Now he began to decline.
The fits passed off, but he relapsed into a dull, brutish torpor, out of which it was impossible to rouse him, and which was totally different and far more revolting than his original lethargy. The former seemed more intelligence held in abeyance, but the latter was the absence of any intelligence whatever.
The only break in the brutal numbness of mind and body into which he had sunk came in the shape of those positive manifestations for which Chavannes had so eagerl
y watched. But these were now no longer human.
One evening, as Chavannes brought him his accustomed meal and set it upon the night table at his bedside, Lauth of a sudden snarled out and snapped at his hand with thorough apish savagery; and then, as though terrified, threw himself back into the farthest bed corner grinding his teeth and trembling.
From this time on the process of decay became rapidly more apparent; what little lustre yet lurked in the eye went out, leaving it dull and fishlike; the expression of the face lost all semblance to humanity; the hair grew out long and coarse and fell matted over the eyes. The nails became claws, the teeth fangs, and one morning upon entering the room assigned to Lauth, Chavannes and Anselm found him quite stripped, grovelling on all fours in one corner of the room, making a low, monotonous growling sound, his teeth rattling and snapping together.
There it was, locked in that room to which they alone possessed the key, and about whose entrance they kept unceasing watch. At the least sound or movement from the inside they opened the door, and standing upon the threshold watched it as it ran back and forth on all fours, wagging its shaggy head from side to side, and venting unnatural mutterings. At a sudden movement on their part it would pause, sit back upon its heels, observe them long and unwinkingly, and then suddenly, and with the most surprising agility, scuttle back under the bed.
But the worst was yet to come. Little by little the thing became less active. Where once it had shown a ravenous appetite for food it now allowed it to stand for days untouched. It no longer seemed to feel heat or cold. At length all motion of its limbs ceased; the sense of hearing died out; in a few weeks it was utterly blind. Bodily sensations no longer affected it; a thin bodkin run through the fleshy part of the thumb by Chavannes produced no apparent sensation. One by one the senses perished. It was already blind and deaf; now its vocal organs seemed to wither, and the unbroken silence of the shaggy yellow lips was even more revolting than its former inhuman noises.
But still it lived.
Either it could not die or else was dying slowly. In course of time all likeness to the human form disappeared from the body. By some unspeakable process the limbs, arms, and features slowly resolved themselves into one another. A horrible, shapeless mass lay upon the floor. And yet, until decomposition had set in, some kind of life was contained in it. It lived, but lived not as do the animals or the trees, but as the protozoa, the jellyfish, and those strange lowest forms of existence wherein the line between vegetable and animal cannot be drawn.
When this last, feeble spark of life died down and vanished they could not say, but at last one day the bulk upon the floor began to smell badly.
“It is over now,” said Chavannes.
Decomposition had commenced; the thing was dead.
“And now what does it all mean?” said Anselm to Chavannes, about a week after the body — if such it could be called — was disposed of. “What does it all mean? Hear me, Chavannes, this is what I think: I think now that both of us were in part wrong, in part right. You said and believed that life alone was the energy of existence, I, the soul; I think now that it is both. Life cannot exist without the soul any more than the soul, at least upon this earth, can exist without life. Body, soul, and life, three in one; this is a trinity.
“Chavannes, there is no such thing as man existing as a type by himself. No: that which we call man is half animal, half God, a being on one hand capable of rising to the sublimest heights of intellectual grandeur, equal almost to his Maker; on the other hand, sinking at times to the last level of ignominy and moral degradation. Take life away from this being and at once the soul mounts upward to the God that first gave it. Take from him his soul — that part of him that is God — and straightway he sinks down to the level of the lowest animal — we have just seen it. Chavannes, follow me for a moment. Lauth died; life and the soul departed together from the body; you found means to call back life; the soul you could not recall; mark what followed. For a time Lauth lived, but the soul being taken away, as though it had been a mainstay and a support, the whole body with the life it contained began successively to drop back to the lower forms of existence. At first, if you remember, Lauth existed merely as a dull and imbruted man; soon he fell to the stage of those unfortunates whose minds are impaired or wholly gone; he became an idiot. At the time when he so savagely bit and snarled at you he had reached the level of the ape; from that stage he fell to that of a lower animal, walking upon all fours, savage, untamable; thence he passed into those lowest known forms of life such as possessed by the sponge and the polyp, and thence to a second and final death.
“What that mystery in him was which drove him to cry out that day, ‘This is not I!’ is beyond our power to say.
“No, Chavannes, the soul of man is the chiefest energy of his existence; take that away and he is no longer a man. The presence and absence of the soul was just the difference between the old Lauth and the new. It is just the difference between man and brute; follow the scale of creation up from its lowest forms; the gradation is easy until you come to man. In the sponge and polyp we find the gradation between the vegetable and the animal; and the animal life, too, rises by scarcely perceptible degrees until it reaches man. There is no gradation here; there is no life half human, half animal. The most brutish man still is immeasurably higher than the most human brute. What is the difference? Chavannes, it is the Soul.”
Overland Monthly, March, 1893.
TRAVIS HALLETT’S HALF BACK
WHOSE ball?” shouted a man at Miss Travis Hallett’s elbow, to anyone that would listen to him.
Travis did not know this man, and this man did not know her. They did not look at each other at all. They both kept their attention fixed with very painful intensity on the field.
“Whose ball?” cried the man again bitterly. “The other side’s?”
“No,” shouted Travis, so as to be heard above the noise, “no, our ball, I think; that was the fourth down.” Then rapidly, “Yes, yes, there goes their full back down the field. Our ball! Our ball! Rah, rah...”
But the man was not listening to her any more. He had put his hat upon the end of his stick, and had climbed up in his seat, and was trying to make a noise that he could himself hear. For all the sounds that he or Travis could utter were drowned in a roar from the bleachers that split the drizzling atmosphere and set the canvas awnings vibrating, so that they shook down the rain drippings upon the crowd beneath. No one thought of sitting down. Everyone stood up all the time, and not only stood, but stood on the seats of the bleachers; and when a gain was made jumped up and down, and yelled, and threw things into the air.
Back of the fence, along the side lines, the crowd was banked half-a-dozen deep; and from time to time the coachers and others that were upon the field would impatiently gesture toward that quarter, crying out that the noise of the shouting prevented the teams from hearing the signals. Then, if one were sufficiently near, he could hear in the moment’s succeeding quiet the grind of the canvas jackets upon each other, as the lines bent shoulder to shoulder, or could catch the indifferent voice of the referee droning out, “second down, three yards to gain!” or again could hear the sharp, quick tones of the captains, calling the signals; the sound of heavy bodies striking together; the quick, laboured breathing; the occasional brief, hoarse shouts, muffled by the nose guards; and then the dull and jarring crash, as the whirling wedge smashed its way through the line.
The twenty-two men and the opposing elevens were fouled and reeking with soil and sweat, their long hair was flung back and forth over their eyes and foreheads as they swayed and struggled.
By simple or whirling wedges, by end runs behind interference, or by downright dogged smashing through the centre, with eyes and teeth closed, Travis’s side was carrying the ball down the field. And now they were on the twenty-five-yard line, and now on the twenty, and now their left half back had advanced the ball six yards around the end, and now the whirling wedge had crushed through for five y
ards more, and the goal was only a few steps away.
The crowd behind the side lines was beyond all control now; they swayed back and forth with every fluctuation of the ball, tense and white with that excitement that hurts and sickens. Over the barrier of the fence they leaned, with outstretched arms and clenched fists, screaming and cursing as though in the battle themselves, exhorting, imploring, or applauding, by turns. Back of them on the bleachers the air was alive with the winning colours, the shouting was incessant now, and the roar of the college yell was coming up through the chaos of sounds like the rhythmic pulse of a great surge.
A man standing near the five-yard line heard the captain of the losing team cry out, “They’re coming again, boys, you must stop them. For God’s sake, brace up. It’s the last ditch now!”
A few yards more and the goal was theirs. But suddenly the whirling wedge seemed to have struck a solid wall, and was thrown back upon itself, spent and broken. The other side had rallied.
“First down — no gain!” droned the referee.
Again it massed against the opposing team, moved forward, struck the line, and came to a deadlock; the teams became wedged in a solid mass that for a moment paused, wavered, and then came toppling backward to the earth.
“No gain!”
A few seconds more, and the other side had the ball on downs, and from far away at the other end of the field, where were the bleachers of the rival college, sprang up a great bellow of exultation as the ball shot high into the air from out the brown of the battle and went careering down the field for fifty yards.
The opposing full back caught it near the middle of the field but was flung before he could gain.
“Our ball again, anyhow!” screamed Travis, shaking her colours.
The ball was now in the middle of the field, close under where Travis and her party were sitting. Suddenly, as the scrimmage broke up and fell apart, she saw it passed out and one of the men behind her team running with it. This only she saw; she did not see the cunning manner in which a way was opened for him. She did not see the quick, clever building up of the interference that closed around and ran with him, and that threw off the tackles of the other side as they came plunging through the line. She did not see how carefully he kept with them, adjusting his pace with theirs, and with his hand upon the nearest shoulder, twisting and turning so as to keep one man at least between him and the enemy’s tackles. She only saw that a runner of her side had the ball and was gaining ground. By the time he had gotten clear of the end all but one of his interferes had left him — either downed or broken up. For a moment he was lost sight of beneath half a dozen of the opposing side, who flung themselves headlong upon him, but the next instant he reappeared upon the other side of the group, tearing his way free of them, the ball still tightly gripped under his arm. The one remaining tackle he met with a straight arm guard that sent him reeling backward, and then, with a splendid burst of speed, headed down the field.
