CHAPTER II - THE GREAT EXPERIMENT
Since Sir Spofforth was a little infirm, and leaned on my arm to make his slow ascent of the stairs, we entered the drawing-room a full minute after the others. The room was empty; Esther and Lazaroff had gone into the big conservatory that opened out of the south side. I heard the rustle of the girl’s dress as she moved among the palms, and Lazaroff speaking earnestly in a low voice.
“Sit down, Arnold,” said Sir Spofforth, subsiding stiffly into his arm chair. “Thank you, my boy. I feel old age coming swiftly upon me nowadays. No, I am not self-deceived. It is strange, this sense of the daily diminution of the physical powers, and not at all unpleasant, either. It seems familiar, too, as if one had passed through it plenty of times before. It is something like bedtime, Arnold, but I hope and believe there will be a tomorrow, for I assure you I have an almost boyish zest for life, though rather contemplative than energetic for a while, till I have rested. There is a little forgetfulness of names and places, but memory seems to become more luminous as it falls back upon itself. Well, some day you will experience this. You two must carry on the work of the Institute. Herman is an able fellow, in spite of his mechanistic notions. But I wonder whether any woman could be happy with him?”
He watched me rather keenly as he said that.
“There’s only one thing makes me want to live a little longer, Arnold,” he continued, “and that is Esther’s future. It would be a great satisfaction to me to see her settled happily before I go. Forgive an old man’s frankness if I say that sometimes I have almost thought you two cared for each other.”
“You are quite right in part, sir,” I replied. “I do care for Esther a good deal.”
“And she, I am sure, has a very warm feeling for you, Arnold. There is nobody whom I would rather have for Esther’s husband than yourself.”
“Well, sir, the fact is, we are not sure that our views are altogether harmonious,” I confessed. “I am, as you know, rather sceptical about the newest views for revolutionizing woman’s status, while Esther—”
“Is a full-fledged suffragist and has exalted notions about the race of the future. Tush, my boy! Never hold back proposing marriage because of intellectual differences. The race spirit, sitting up aloft and pulling the strings, is laughing at you.”
“But, Sir Spofforth, to be candid, it was not I who held back,” I answered.
“Hum! I see!” he answered, nodding his head. Then, very seriously, “My boy, I want you to win her. It would embitter my last days to see my daughter the wife of Herman Lazaroff. I have watched and tried to study him: it isn’t his materialism, Arnold, it’s his infernal will. He’ll break everything and everybody that conflicts with it when he wakes up and knows his powers. Now he doesn’t understand himself at all. He can see nothing interiorly, as good old Swedenborg would say. I tell you, Herman Lazaroff, able fellow as he is, and splendid brain, is a machine of devilish energy, and, unfortunately, fashioned for purely destructive purposes.”
Like most old men, he had the habit of falling into soliloquy, and toward the end of his speech his voice dropped, and he spoke rather to himself than to me. Though I remembered his words afterward, at the time I regarded his indictment as the prejudice of an octogenarian. He was in his eightieth year, and there was no doubt his keen mind was failing. I was searching for a reply when Esther and Lazaroff came back from the conservatory.
Esther’s face was flushed and she looked utterly miserable. But I was amazed to see the expression upon Lazaroff’s. He was deathly white, and his black eyes seemed to gleam with infernal resolution. At that moment it did occur to me that Sir Spofforth might be wiser in his judgment than I. Lazaroff came forward quietly and sat down, and I tried to make the occasion for conversation. But he, seated motionless and abstracted, seemed hardly to hear me, and rose from his chair after a few moments, looking toward Esther, who was standing near the conservatory entrance. Her brown-colored gown gleamed golden in the lamplight.
“Sir Spofforth, Miss Esther is interested in our new freezing-plant,” he said. “I thought, with your permission, that I would take her to see it lit up by electricity. You’ll come too, Pennell?”
“Wouldn’t daytime be better, Lazaroff?” I suggested, and I did not know what was the cause of the vaguely felt distrust that prompted my words. Certainly I had no fears of any sort, or reason for any. Yet, looking at Lazaroff’s face, now flushed and somehow sinister, I remembered Sir Spofforth’s words again.
“Let us go tonight,” said Esther, and it seemed to me that there was a note of penitence in her voice, as if she wished to make Lazaroff amends.
She came slowly across the room toward us. She looked at Lazaroff—I thought remorsefully, and at me with an expression of understanding that I never had seen in her eyes before. My heart leaped up to meet that message. But that was the instant signal-flash of souls, and the next moment I detected in her glance the same sense of foreboding that mine must have shown her.
It is strange how instantaneously such complexities present themselves with convincing power. Though the knowledge lay latent in my mind, I am sure now I was aware that I should never set eyes upon Sir Spofforth, in life or death, again.
He rose up slowly. “Don’t be long, my dear,” he said to Esther. “I shall not wait up for you. Good night, Herman. Good night, Arnold.” He passed the door and began to ascend the stairs. He turned. “Arnold!” he began. “No, never mind. I will tell you tomorrow.”
He never told me. He was gone, and we three went downstairs, out of the house, and crossed the garden toward the Institute, whose squat form blocked the view of the road. Croydon, in the distance, hummed like a huge dynamo. The Bear dipped slantingly above; the wind was shaking down the fading petals of the rambler roses. I remember the picture more vividly than I perceived it then; the intense darkness, the white lights of the distant town, the yellow lamp glow on the short grass, cut off squarely by the window-sash and trisected by the window-bars. Lazaroff led the way, walking a little distance in front of us, toward the annex, a building just completed, in which was the new freezing-plant, with our few guinea-pigs, and the monkeys that had been bought recently, out of our own money, for the great experiment. He drew a key from his pocket and began fumbling with the lock. Esther stopped in the shadows at my side.
“He asked me to marry him,” she said. “I told him never—never! That was the word I used. I used to think that I could care for him, Arnold, but in that instant I knew—yes, I knew my heart.”
I knew mine too, and I took her in my arms in the shadow of the Institute. She lifted her mouth to mine. All the while Lazaroff was fumbling with the lock. Yet I am sure he was aware, by virtue of that intuition which tells us all vital things.
When he had opened the door he turned a switch, and the interior leaped into view round twenty points of light that pierced the shadows.
“Come in, Arnold,” he said, turning to me—and I thought there was blood on his lip. “I will lead, and you and Miss Esther can follow me. Don’t be alarmed, Miss Esther, if you hear the monkeys screaming. They grow lonely at night.”
“Poor little things! How dreadful!” Esther said.
“We shall not keep them here very long,” Lazaroff answered in extenuation. He stooped over a cane chair and picked up a warm shawl. “You will need to put this about you,” he continued, standing back and leaving me to adjust it about Esther’s shoulders.
So he had planned to bring her here; his subtle mind had foreseen even this detail. He left nothing to the unexpected. He lived up to his principles.
We passed between two silent dynamos. The freezing-plant was already in operation, but George, the machinist, went off duty at six, after stopping the dynamos, and the temperature did not rise much during the night. It was very cold. The moisture on the brick walls had congealed to a thin film of ice, and a frosted network covered the ammonia pipes. Lazaroff stopped in front of a large wooden chest, with a glass door.
“In this very ordinary-looking icebox we keep our choicest specimens,” he said to Esther.
“Don’t open that!” I exclaimed.
He laughed disagreeably. “I had no intention of doing so,” he answered. “You applauded Sir Spofforth’s mediaeval vitalistic views tonight, Pennell, and the transition from the dream to the reality might prove too disturbing for your peace of mind. Dream on, by permission of those five missing centimeters. It is such an extinguisher of the soul theory to see parts of the organism flourishing in perfect health, all ready to work and grow, devoid of consciousness and brain attachments. We have two-fifths of a guinea-pig’s heart, Miss Esther, that is yearning to begin its pulsations as soon as it is placed in a suitable medium.”
He passed on. Esther’s fingers gripped my wrist tightly. “What an abominable man!” she whispered. “Arnold—my dear—to think I didn’t know my mind until an hour ago! When he asked me, something seemed to strip the mask from his face and the scales from my eyes. I hate him—but I’m afraid of him, Arnold.”
I drew her arm through mine and held her hand. Lazaroff preceded us down a flight of new concrete steps which had just dried. The cellar into which we descended had been used for storing packing-cases, and we had always gone down by a short ladder. It was here that the experiment was to be made. I had been shown nothing of Lazaroff’s preparations.
The cellar had been paved with concrete since my last visit, and I thought it looked smaller than formerly. As we went down we heard the monkeys begin to chatter. Lazaroff switched on a light. I saw a cage of guinea-pigs close at hand. They squealed and scurried among their straw. Two monkeys, awakened by the light, put their arms about each other and grimaced at me. A tiny marmoset stretched out its black, human-like arms between the bars appealingly. It looked very lonely and child-like as it blinked at us. What a terrific journey into the future Lazaroff, like some god, planned for that atom of flesh.
He stopped at the end of the cellar. I perceived now that the brick wall was new; it seemed to be an inner wall, bounding a partition; that was why the cellar looked smaller. The half-dried mortar clung flabbily to the interstices.
“Can you find the entrance, Arnold?” asked Lazaroff.
“The entrance?” The light was not strong, to be sure, but still it seemed impossible that there could be an ingress into that solid wall.
Lazaroff touched a brick, and a large mass swung inward, like a door. In fact, it was a door, with bricks facing it, the outer edge contiguous with the outer edge of the fixed rows, so that the deception was perfect.
“You didn’t tell me that the chamber was completed, Lazaroff!” I exclaimed in surprise.
“No, Arnold? Well, but I don’t tell you everything,” he answered.
We stepped through the doorway, and Lazaroff switched on a tiny light within. Now I perceived that we were standing in a long and very narrow space, with cement-faced walls and roof, making the chamber impervious to sound and light. It was below the level of the ground, and thus, as Lazaroff had said, earthquakes might happen above, and it would never be discovered, not even though the annex were pulled down, unless one blasted out the foundations.
The sole contents were three large cylinders of metal, looking like giant thermos bottles. Each was about six feet long—too long for a monkey, it seemed to me—and had a glass plate in front. Lazaroff drove his heel against the glass of the nearest cylinder with all his might.
“It is quite unbreakable, you see,” he said. “It will turn a rifle bullet. ‘Suffragette glass,’ the maker calls it.”
“But what are these for?” asked Esther.
“These, Miss Esther, are to convey three monkeys into the twenty-first century,” answered Lazaroff. “By instantaneously suspending animation at a temperature of twenty-five degrees, we hope to maintain the bodily organism without change until the time for their awakening comes. The problem is, whether that mysterious by-product of matter called consciousness will return.”
“How dreadful!” exclaimed Esther, shuddering.
“But the temperature will rise, Lazaroff,” I interposed, “and however carefully your cylinders are made it is impossible to hope to maintain the internal heat at only twenty-five degrees during a century.”
“You forget that our monkeys will be sealed in a vacuum,” he answered. “There is an inner and an outer case of vanadium steel mixed with a secret composition which will resist even thermite. And even if the temperature does rise—well, if a homely instance may be allowed—you are aware that canned beef, as the Americans term it, will remain fresh in an air-tight tin even in the tropics. That is dead matter, while our monkeys will be millions of living cells. The vacuum is created by simply screwing on this cap.”
“But not a perfect vacuum,” I interposed. “That is impossible.”
“Sufficiently near to eliminate the aerobic bacilli which flourish on oxygen, and the infinitesimal amount of that remaining in the cylinder is probably absorbed and transmuted by the surface capillaries and lungs, leaving simply carbon dioxide, neon, crypton, et cetera.”
I examined the cylinder nearest me with interest. A small dial was set into its cap. Lazaroff anticipated my question.
“That is the most ingenious part of the mechanism,” he explained. “It is a hundred-year clock, made specially for me by Jurgensen, of Copenhagen, and, to salve your conscience, paid for, like the cylinders, out of my private purse. It runs true to within three-tenths of a second. The alarm can be set to any year, if necessary. A good alarm clock for lazy people, Miss Esther. This one, you see, I have already set to a hundred years ahead. This is at sixty-five; I shall set that to a hundred presently, for we don’t want one of our monkeys to awaken several generations ahead of his friends. This one is not set. Now, observe, I turn the hands on the dials. The large figures are years. The smaller ones are days. Now as soon as the cap is screwed on, the internal vacuum causes this lever to fall, catching this cam and starting the mechanism. We have then a bottled monkey in an indestructible shell, for really I do not know what could make much impression on steel of this thickness, which is both resistant and malleable, and fireproof too. It is impossible, in short, to release the inmate before the appointed time, and, even then, immediate death would ensue.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because resuscitation must be gradual. I base my hopes upon the chance that the lungs and heart will automatically resume their functions, being in their most perfect medium. But if air were admitted before the bodily machine had become, so to say, synchronized, the swarm of micro-organisms would make short work of our subject. Besides, the hasty respiration produced by this rush of air would produce immediate death by its transformation into carbon dioxide. The air must enter under slight pressure, in minute quantities, during a period of about ten days. Very well! As the timepiece gradually runs down, the cap slowly unscrews, and a tiny quantity of filtered air leaks in. It is so arranged that, at the exact end of the period, the cap flies off, and the subject awakes.”
“Herman,” said Esther, hurriedly, “I don’t like this. It isn’t right. And I am sure my father does not know about it.”
“My dear Miss Esther, I assure you that it is a very ordinary scientific experiment,” Lazaroff answered, laughing. “Come, Arnold,” he added, “why not get in yourself and try how it feels? You are not afraid?”
“In my clothes?”
“Certainly.”
“Arnold, I don’t want you to get into that thing,” Esther protested.
“Of course, if our friend is afraid that I am going to screw him up for a century—” began Lazaroff.
“I am not at all afraid,” I returned, a little nettled. “How do I get in?”
“I’ll have to help you,” Lazaroff answered. “It was not made for a big man in clothes. Button your coat. Now—put your arms down by your sides.” He rolled a cylinder upon the floor, and I put my feet inside rather reluctantly and squeezed down to the bottom. Lazaroff looked at me and burst into loud laughter.
“Not much room to turn round, is there?” he said, raising the cylinder with an effort and standing it on its base again.
“Come out, Arnold,” pleaded Esther; and I saw that her face was white with fear.
But I was quite helpless, and above me I saw Lazaroff, smiling at my predicament.
“Now if I were going to be so unkind as to send you into the next century,” he said, “to be the only animist, with a defective skull, in a world of vile materialism—”
“Please, Herman, for my sake!” Esther implored.
“I should put on the cap,” he said, and fitted it.
He must have touched some mechanism that I had not seen, for instantly the cap began to whir on the screw. Through the glass face I caught a last glimpse of Esther’s terrified eyes. The image blurred and vanished as my breath dimmed the glass and frosted it. I heard the swift jar of the cap mechanism end in a jarring click. I gasped for air; there was none. My head swam, my throat was closed; the blackness was pricked into flecks of fire. I groped for memory through unconsciousness—and ceased.
