Читать книгу Doctor Hudson's Secret Journal - Lloyd C. Douglas - Страница 6

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AT nine o'clock I was at Randolph's door... When these words are read I shall be unable to answer any queries as to my motive in going there that night. And that will be fortunate; for I have no explanation further than to say (and this will unquestionably be regarded with distrust and disappointment) that I was propelled there against my wishes. I had no thought of going; went in response to some urge over which I had no control... I was downtown to dinner, that evening; returned home at eight; went immediately to bed—quite contrary to my custom, for I never retired before midnight—and began reading a book, unable to concentrate on a line of it. I could not keep my eyes off the clock. It ticked louder and louder and my heart beat faster and faster until the two of them seemed synchronized. At length, becoming so nervous I could no longer contain myself, I rose, dressed hastily, dashed out for my car, and drove to Randolph's address without regard to boulevard stops or angry traffic officers. My mouth was dry, my heart thumping.

"You had not intended to come, had you?" inquired Randolph, taking my hat.

"No!" I replied, sourly.

"That's what I feared," he said, gently, "but I felt so sure you needed to have a talk with me that I—"

"That is what I want to know!" I demanded. "What did you do?"

He grinned slyly, rubbed his hands together softly, satisfiedly, and said, "Well—I earnestly wanted you here; and, as I told you, this morning, whatever I earnestly want—it comes! I wanted you here! You came!"

He motioned me to a seat—I was glad enough to accept it for my knees were wobbly—in a living-room furnished in exquisite taste. His daughter, whom he had gracefully presented, promptly excused herself, and left us alone. Offering me a cigar, he leisurely filled a long-stemmed churchwarden pipe for himself, and drew his chair closer. In his velvet jacket, at his ease, he was all artist; quite grizzled, wore a short Van Dyke beard; had a clear, clean, gray eye that came at you a bit shyly and tentatively, but left you no way of escape.

He lost no time in preliminary manoeuvres. Reaching to a small book-table, at his elbow, he took up a limp-leather Bible. I knew then that I was in for it. Impetuously, I resolved upon an immediate, if inglorious exit. Savagely, I put up a protesting hand and said firmly, "Now—if it's that, I don't care to hear about it!"

To my surprise, he put the book back on the table, and calmly puffed at his pipe, thoughtfully, for a while; then replied, "Well—neither do I—except as it's really an important history of a great religious system. Quite useful, I presume; but I'm not specially interested in it—except one page—" He blew a few smoke rings, his head tilted far back against his tall chair, "—And I have cut that page out... I just wanted you to see this particular copy of the Bible. I was about to say—when you plunged in with your impatient remark—that this copy of the Bible lacks the secret formula for power. I keep that one page elsewhere!"

"What's on it?" I inquired, annoyed at my own confession of interest.

"Oh—" he replied casually, "it's just the rules for getting whatever you want, and doing whatever you wish to do, and being whatever you would like to be. But—you're not interested in that; so we'll talk about something else."

"What is on that page?" I demanded—my voice sounding rather shrill.

"Do you really want to know?" he challenged, leaning forward and fixing me intently with his gaze.

"Yes!" I barked.

His next words came slowly, incisively, single-file.

"More - than - you - have - ever - wanted - to - know - anything - before?"

"Yes!" I admitted—and meant it.

"Say it!" he commanded.

I repeated it: "More - than - I - have - ever - wanted - to - know - anything - before!"

His manner changed instantly.

"Good! Now we can talk!"

He went down into an inside pocket and produced a morocco wallet. From the wallet, he extracted a folded page. I did not leave Randolph's house until four o'clock, and when I finally went out into the dark, considerably shaken, I was aware that my life would never be the same again. Whatever of success has come to me in my profession dates from that hour and can be explained in terms of the mysterious potentiality which Randolph communicated to me that night. I had reached out my hand greedily for the page Randolph unfolded, but he shook his head.

"Not just yet," he said, smiling at my eagerness. "I mean to let you see it; but I must tell you something about it, first. This page contains the rules for generating that mysterious power I mentioned. By following these instructions to the letter, you can have anything you want, do anything you wish to do, be whatever you would like to be. I have tried it. It works. It worked for me. It will work for you!"

Combined impatience and incredulity brought a chuckle from me which he did not resent.

"You saw that piece I was working on when you came in this morning?"

"Beautiful!" I exclaimed—sincerely.

"You liked it that much?" He was pleased with my enthusiasm.

"Nothing short of a masterpiece!"

"Perhaps I should be more grateful for that compliment. doctor; but I really have had very little to do with it... You may be interested to learn that I was an ordinary stonecutter until about three years ago, hacking out stamped letters with a compression chisel. From my youth, I had cherished an ambition to do something important in stone. But there was never any money for training; never any time for experiment. Such crude and hasty attempts as I had made, from time to time, had netted nothing but discouragement.

"One day I went to the church my little girl attended, and heard a preacher read what is on this page. It evidently meant nothing to him, for he read it in a dull, monotonous chant. And the congregation sat glassy-eyed, the words apparently making no impression. As for me, I was profoundly stirred. The remainder of the hour was torture, for I wanted out where I could think.

"Hurrying home to our bare little house, I found—with considerable difficulty, for I was not familiar with the Bible—that page from which the minister had read. There it was—in black and white—the exact process for achieving power to do, be and have what you want! I experimented."

With that, Randolph handed me the magic page. Some twenty lines of it were heavily underscored in red ink. In silence he puffed his pipe while my eye traversed the cryptic paragraphs, and when I looked up, inquiringly, he said:

"Of course, you will not realize the full importance of all this, instantly. It seems simple because it was spoken dispassionately, with no oratorical bombast or prefatory warning that the formula he was about to state was the key to power!"

Edging his chair closer to mine, he laid a long hand on my knee and looked me squarely in the eyes.

"Doctor Hudson—if you had a small, inadequate brick house, and decided to give yourself more room, what would you need for your building?... More brick... If you had a small, inadequate steam-engine, you would want more steel to construct larger cylinders—not a different kind of steel to house a different kind of steam, but merely more room for expansion... Now—if you had a small, inadequate personality, and wanted to give it a chance to be something more important, where would you find the building materials?"

He seemed waiting for a reply, so I humoured him.

"Well—according to the drift of your argument, I presume I would have to build it out of other personalities. Is that what you're driving at?"

"Precisely!" he shouted. "But—not 'out of'!... Into!... Glad you said that, though; for it gives me a chance to show you the exact difference between the right and wrong methods of making use of other people's personalities in improving one's own... Everybody is aware, instinctively, that his personality is modified by others. Most people go about imitating various scraps and phases of the personalities that have attracted them—copying one man's walk, another's accent, another's laugh, another's trick of gesture—making mere monkeys of themselves... This theory I am talking about doesn't ask you to build your personality out of other personalities, but into them!"

"I'm afraid all that's too deep for me," I admitted befuddledly.

He rose and stamped back and forth in front of the grate, shaking his shaggy mop of grizzled hair, and waving his long-stemmed pipe as if trying to conjure a better explanation.

"See here! You know all about blood transfusion. That's in your line. Superb!... One man puts his life into another man.... Doctor—how do you accomplish a blood transfusion? Tell me in detail!"

I explained the principles of transfusion, briefly, and Randolph seemed mightily pleased, especially with that feature of it which concerned the problem of coagulation.

"You will notice there," pointing to the page in my hand, "that this first step toward the achievement of power is an expansion—a projection of one's self into other personalities. You will see that it has to be done with such absolute secrecy that if, by any chance, the contact is not immediate and direct—if, by any chance, there is a leak along the line of transfer—the whole effect of it is wasted! You have to do it so stealthily that even your own left hand—"

Randolph returned to his chair, and went on, in a lowered voice:

"Hudson—the first time I tried it—I can tell you the incident freely because nothing ever came of it, although it had cost me more than I could afford, at the time, to do it—the chap was so grateful he told a neighbour of mine, in spite of my swearing him in. He had been out of work and there had been a long run of sickness in the family, and he was too shabby and down at heel to make a presentable appearance in asking for a job. I outfitted him. He told it. A neighbour felicitated me, next day. So there was more than sixty dollars of my hard-earned cash squandered!"

"Squandered!" I shouted, in amazement. "How squandered? Didn't he get the job?"

Randolph sighed.

"Oh, yes," he said. "He found a job. I was glad enough for that, of course. But—that didn't do me any good! You'd better believe—the next time I made an outlay I informed the fellow that if I ever heard of his telling anybody, I would break his neck."

He laughed merrily at the remembrance of the incident.

"The man thought I was crazy!" he added, wiping his eyes.

"And you weren't?" I inquired, in a tone that sobered him.

"Really—it does sound foolish, doesn't it? I mean—when you first hear of it. I don't wonder you're perplexed."

"I am worse than perplexed," I admitted, bluntly. "I'm disgusted!"

"You might well be," admitted Randolph, "if I were trying to get power, that way, to stack up a lot of money for my own pleasure. All I wanted was the effective release of my latent ability to do something fine!... And, as for being disgusted because I requested the man not to tell anybody what I had done for him, if that offends you, you wouldn't like the Lord himself!... For he often said that to people he had helped."

"I'm sure I don't know," I said... "Not very well acquainted with what he said... Go ahead with your story."

"Thanks... But, first let me lead you just a little farther into the general philosophy of this... On the night of the day I made my first successful projection of my personality—I cannot tell you what that was—I dare not—I went literally into a closet in my house, and shut the door. That's the next step in the program, as you have read there on that page. You see—I was very much in earnest about this matter; and, having already bungled one attempt, I was resolved to obey the rules to the letter... Later, I discovered that the principle will work elsewhere than in a closet. Just so you're insulated."

"Oh—Randolph—for God's sake!" I exploded. "What manner of wild talk is this?"

"I confess I can't understand," said Randolph, impatiently, "why you find this so hard to accept! Why—it's in line with our experience of every other energy we use! Either we meet its terms, or we don't get the power. What did Volta's battery or Faraday's dynamo amount to, practically, until Du Fay discovered an insulation that would protect the current from being dissipated through contacts with other things than the object to be energized?... Most personalities are just grounded! That's all that ails them!

"So, I went into a closet; shut the door; closed my eyes; quietly put myself into a spiritually receptive mood; and said, confidently, addressing the Major Personality—I have fulfilled all the conditions required of me for receiving power! I am ready to have it! I want it! I want the capacity to do just one creditable work of statuary!

"Now—you may be inclined to believe that I experienced a queer delusion, at that moment. As a scientific man, you may think that my mental state can easily be accounted for by principles well known to psychology. If you think that, I have no objection. The fact that a process of achieving power by the expansion of the human personality admits of an explanation, in scientific terms, does not damage its value at all, in my opinion. I dare say the time will come when this matter is made a subject of scientific inquiry.

"But—whether it is explicable or not, I can truthfully assure you that upon finishing my experiment in that closet, I received—as definitely as one receives a shock from an electrode, or a sudden glare of light by opening a tightly shuttered room—a strange inner illumination!

"It was late in the night. I came out of that dark, stifling little closet with a curious sense of mastery. It put me erect, flexed the muscles of my jaw, made my step resilient. I wanted to laugh! I tried to sleep; and, failing of it, walked the streets until dawn. At eight-thirty, I approached the manager of the factory and asked for six months' leave. When he inquired my reason, I told him I had it in mind to attempt a piece of statuary.

" 'Something we might use, perhaps?' he asked.

" 'I am confident of it,' I said, surprised at my own audacity. It was enough that I had determined to survive somehow, without wages, for six months; but now I had made an extravagant promise to the manager. He was thoughtful for a while and then said:

" 'I'll give you a chance to try it. For the present, you are to have your usual pay, and a studio to yourself. If you produce something we can place, you will share in the sale. Your hours will be your own business. I should be glad if you succeeded.'

"I began work at once in a flutter of excitement. The clay seemed alive in my hands! That first day was a revelation. It was as if I had never really lived before! All colours were more vivid. I want you to remember that, Hudson. See if you have the same reaction. Grass is greener; the sky is bluer; you hear the birds more distinctly. It sharpens the senses—like cocaine.

"That night, I went into my closet again, and was immediately conscious of a peculiar intimacy between myself and That Other; but it was not so dynamic as on the previous night. I decided that if I was to get any more power that way, I would have to make some further adjustments of my own spiritual equipment.

"That was on a Friday, the tenth of June. On the first day of September, I invited the manager in to see the cast I had made. He looked at it for a long time without any remark. Then he said, quietly, 'I have some people who may be interested in this.'

"It was the figure of a child, a chubby little fellow about four years old. The boy was posed on one knee. He had just raised up from his play with a little dog that stood tensely alert, in front of him, with a ball in his mouth, waiting for the child to notice him. The boy's shirt was open at the throat. His tight little knickers were buttoned to broad suspenders. The legs were bare to the knee. He was looking straight aloft, his little face all squinted up with baffled amazement, wonderment, curiosity. His small square hand shaded his eyes against a light almost too bright for him, the head tilted at an angle indicating that he had heard something he could not quite understand and was listening for it to be repeated.

"The next afternoon, the manager's clients came in—a man and his wife. She was in black. They had recently lost their little boy. She cried at first, heart-breakingly. But, after a while, she smiled. It made me very happy when she smiled. I knew then that I had been able to express my thought.

"I was told to go on with my project and put it into white marble... Quite incidentally, the people adopted the boy I had used for a model."