and freedom from burning, harrowing, anxiety does help to restore
one's spirits, but when I saw his face, it sobered me. Never, even
in the midst of our despair about poor Lucy, had he looked more
stern.
"Tell me!" I said. "I can hazard no opinion. I do not know what
to think, and I have no data on which to found a conjecture."
"Do you mean to tell me, friend John, that you have no suspicion
as to what poor Lucy died of, not after all the hints given, not
only by events, but by me?"
"Of nervous prostration following a great loss or waste of
blood."
"And how was the blood lost or wasted?" I shook my head.
He stepped over and sat down beside me, and went on,"You are a
clever man, friend John. You reason well, and your wit is bold, but
you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears
hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account
to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot
understand, and yet which are,that some people see things that
others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be
contemplated by men's eyes, because they know, or think they know,
some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of
our science that it wants to explain all, and if it explain not,
then it says there is nothing to explain. But yet we see around us
every day the growth of new beliefs, which think themselves new,
and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young, like the
fine ladies at the opera. I suppose now you do not believe in
corporeal transference. No? Nor in materialization. No? Nor in
astral bodies. No? Nor in the reading of thought. No? Nor in
hypnotism … "
"Yes," I said. "Charcot has proved that pretty well."
He smiled as he went on, "Then you are satisfied as to it. Yes?
And of course then you understand how it act, and can follow the
mind of the great Charcot, alas that he is no more, into the very
soul of the patient that he influence. No? Then, friend John, am I
to take it that you simply accept fact, and are satisfied to letto take it that you simply accept fact, and are satisfied to let
from premise to conclusion be a blank? No? Then tell me, for I am a
student of the brain, how you accept hypnotism and reject the
thought reading. Let me tell you, my friend, that there are things
done today in electrical science which would have been deemed
unholy by the very man who discovered electricity, who would
themselves not so long before been burned as wizards. There are
always mysteries in life. Why was it that Methuselah lived nine
hundred years, and `Old Parr'one hundred and sixty-nine, and yet
that poor Lucy, with four men's blood in her poor veins, could not
live even one day? For, had she live one more day, we could save
her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do you know the
altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the
qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you
tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great
spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church
and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink the oil of
all the church lamps? Can you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and
elsewhere, there are bats that come out at night and open the veins
of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins, how in some islands
of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees all day,
and those who have seen describe as like giant nuts or pods, and
that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot,
flit down on them and then, and then in the morning are found dead
men, white as even Miss Lucy was?"
"Good God, Professor!" I said, starting up. "Do you mean to tell
me that Lucy was bitten by such a bat, and that such a thing is
here in London in the nineteenth century?"
He waved his hand for silence, and went on,"Can you tell me why
the tortoise lives more long than generations of men, why the
elephant goes on and on till he have sees dynasties, and why the
parrot never die only of bite of cat of dog or other complaint? Canparrot never die only of bite of cat of dog or other complaint? Can
you tell me why men believe in all ages and places that there are
men and women who cannot die? We all know, because science has
vouched for the fact, that there have been toads shut up in rocks
for thousands of years, shut in one so small hole that only hold
him since the youth of the world. Can you tell me how the Indian
fakir can make himself to die and have been buried, and his grave
sealed and corn sowed on it, and the corn reaped and be cut and
sown and reaped and cut again, and then men come and take away the
unbroken seal and that there lie the Indian fakir, not dead, but
that rise up and walk amongst them as before?"
Here I interrupted him. I was getting bewildered. He so crowded
on my mind his list of nature's eccentricities and possible
impossibilities that my imagination was getting fired. I had a dim
idea that he was teaching me some lesson, as long ago he used to do
in his study at Amsterdam. But he used them to tell me the thing,
so that I could have the object of thought in mind all the time.
But now I was without his help, yet I wanted to follow him, so I
said,
"Professor, let me be your pet student again. Tell me the
thesis, so that I may apply your knowledge as you go on. At present
I am going in my mind from point to point as a madman, and not a
sane one, follows an idea. I feel like a novice lumbering through a
bog in a midst, jumping from one tussock to another in the mere
blind effort to move on without knowing where I am going."
"That is a good image," he said. "Well, I shall tell you. My
thesis is this, I want you to believe."
"To believe what?"
"To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I
heard once of an American who so defined faith, `that fac ulty
which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.' For
one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind,
and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of the big truth,and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of the big truth,
like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth
first. Good! We keep him, and we value him, but all the same we
must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe."
"Then you want me not to let some previous conviction inure the
receptivity of my mind with regard to some strange matter. Do I
read your lesson aright?"
"Ah, you are my favorite pupil still. It is worth to teach you.
Now that you are willing to understand, you have taken the first
step to understand. You think then that those so small holes in the
children's throats were made by the same that made the holes in
Miss Lucy?"
"I suppose so."
He stood up and said solemnly, "Then you are wrong. Oh, would it
were so! But alas! No. It is worse, far, far worse."
"In God's name, Professor Van Helsing, what do you mean?" I
cried.
He threw himself with a despairing gesture into a chair, and
placed his elbows on the table, covering his face with his hands as
he spoke.
"They were made by Miss Lucy!"