Читать книгу The Crystal Button - Chauncey Thomas - Страница 8

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From the time of that accident on Christmas Eve, Paul Prognosis never spoke an intelligible word, and never showed a sign of recognition of those about him, for a period of ten years. His life was spared, and his general health continued good, but the current of his thought was broken. Was it broken, or merely diverted? Could a man, having the intelligence and training of Paul Prognosis, lose all power of connected thought while the engine of his heart still performed its functions, and his brain, apparently uninjured, continued to receive its full supply of vitalized fluid? Could concussion of the brain mean death to its tissues, while every other part of his body throbbed with vigorous life?

From boyhood, he had displayed a degree of mechanical knowledge that was closely allied to the intuition of a genius. His friends called him such; if he had foes, they probably thought him a "crank," but no one ever heard that term applied to him. The small competency his father left him, he had devoted to gaining instruction in his chosen pursuit. He had next worked in the car-shops, and been gradually promoted until he became master-mechanic, and then mechanical engineer. In every position he occupied, he soon became master of it. The more abstruse the problem presented to him, the greater the pleasure he found in solving it. His inventions were numbered by scores, and many of these were patented; but he seldom took much further interest in a question he had once answered to his own satisfaction. He would hand the patent-papers to his wife, saying: "Well, Molly, you're a better hand than I am at keeping things safe and snug. Put this where you can find it, and it may perhaps come handy some rainy day."

Later, he began to be called on by corporations all over the country to act as an expert in matters requiring mechanical keenness, and he finally left the car-shops, to become a contractor on his own account. Thus far, he had not realized the profits he deserved. But his fame was worth a fortune, and he was just beginning to understand how it might be coined. And now, to be struck down in his thirty-fifth year, with the best part of his life before him and everything to live for,--and from no fault of his own, but the reverse,--all who knew him agreed that it was one of those dispensations of Providence that are unintelligible to those who have confidence in divine justice and compassion.

For a time his friends showed active sympathy for him and for the woman who was well-nigh a widow, and also for the daughter who might as well have been fatherless. But the months became years, and calls for sympathy in other directions were many and pressing, and people gradually ceased to remember the Boss's misfortune--all but Dr. Clarkson. Oh! old Jake, he never forgot; but he was too old and too poor to do more than look and speak his sympathy.

And the wife? She hoped against hope until it died in her heart, and then set herself to work to eke out the small quarterly income she received from his annuity, and to give her daughter such training as she knew he would have approved.

So the years slowly wore on, bringing many another Christmas eve and morn, but the man who had been a master among men now looked upon the faces of his nearest and dearest, and knew them not; looked upon the electrical engine which his own hands had made, and which at last began to find work wherever there was work to do, and saw not that it was an engine; gazed from undulled eyes, and with a contented smile upon his lips, but gave no sign of recognition to anything around him. He spoke--spoke often and connectedly, but seldom responsively. "Thank you," he would say to Dr. Clarkson; "your conversation, Professor, interests me exceedingly. I do not think I fully follow you in your description, but the mechanical progress you indicate suggests wonderful development since the plodding steps of inquiry pursued in my day." The Doctor often sought to lead him further when he spoke in this manner; but he would branch off into some irrelevant remark, such as: "Wonderful, indeed! but it precisely fills a need that we felt in the nineteenth century. I see that it means economy of energy as well as of time."

When, in the later years, the Doctor's son Will became a frequent visitor at the house, he always addressed him as Marco, and often appealed to the young man for information in regard to the workings of anything he happened to hold in his hand, seeming to regard it as some mechanical wonder. To his imagination, a waste-basket became a colossal tower; a toy wagon, a railway train; his wife's jewel-box, a mammoth tenement house; or so it seemed to those around him, judging from his fragmentary comments. All faces, all things, were changed to him, but apparently in no way unpleasantly. He took untiring interest in every new object to which his attention was called, and the same object always retained the new guise in which he first viewed it. The same waste-basket was always the same colossal tower. The only living thing that seemed to maintain quite the same relations in his inner as in his outer world, and that he always called correctly by name, was his dog Smudge. Smudge was his constant companion, both in the street and in the house; and the intelligent devotion of the dog was such that Dr. Clarkson was wont to remark that "Smudge evidently lives in dreamland as well as his master. And," he would add, "it must be a pleasant sort of place to live in, for a happier couple of friends you won't find in all Boston."

It was quite clear that the windows of Paul's mental dwelling-place were closely shuttered. But inside those darkened shutters--what was going on there? There was life still there. And why not? If nothing material can be utterly destroyed--not even the delicate fabric of this rice-paper, which burns and leaves no ash--how much less should we expect to see the immaterial blotted out of existence. Was the precious knowledge, so laboriously stored beneath the white dome of Paul's rugged forehead, thus instantaneously annihilated? Might not the swift current of his mental activity, accidentally diverted from its normal confines, have made for itself an underground course, where no eye, however sympathetic, could follow its secret windings? Might not his former projects in the realm of mechanics, and his prophecies that others had considered wild fancies,--might not these, when no longer fettered by limitations of matter and mechanical means, have finally materialized? Might not his could be of yesterday have become the now is? Might not all possibilities he formerly dreamed have thrown aside their shadowy veils and become realized, in the domain he now occupied, where thought could be continued uninterruptedly and unhindered? Might not the occasional mutterings of his lips, although unintelligible to his hearers, be vague hints from a world unseen and unknown to those around him, yet none the less real to him? So Dr. Clarkson sometimes thought, and so he once told the weeping wife when she confessed to him that all hope had left her. Was it not within reason to consider that last greeting: "Good-night, darling!" a token that life still flickered in the paralyzed brain after the injury, and a prophecy that, under favorable conditions, it might some time flash again and disclose the guest of the darkened chamber once more himself--once more Paul Prognosis, the mechanical expert--with a "Good-morning!" on his lips?