“Good morning, gentlemen. Up so early too? I could not sleep and thought of taking a walk.”
Father Ambrose crossed himself. “What a fool man is, gentlemen, and how little he understands the hidden meaning of things! During the last half hour of my restless sleep, I dreamt continually of wings flapping and enormous gates opening and closing. It was a warning.”
“A warning of what?” questioned Aubrey.
Father Ambrose pointed to the shoes. “Isaac Laquedem and his valet Kotikokura are gone!”
Professor Bassermann smiled sarcastically.
“Impossible!” exclaimed Aubrey, “his story is still unfinished. There are loose ends and contradictions that will plague us forever, unless he gives the key. Have you looked everywhere?”
“Everywhere, my son. Everywhere. The only things he left us are this pair of shoes and these two telegrams which, in my excitement, I have not even read. It’s incredible!”
All three bent over, their brows knit.
“These are not so easy to decipher, gentlemen,” Bassermann said. “Let us sit down and analyze each one, for I am certain that the secret of Isaac Laquedem is disclosed in these missives.”
“What can this mean?” Father Ambrose said. “It looks like a diagram, not a message. There are two lines– —”
“Why!” Aubrey exclaimed, “the two parallel lines have met, without awaiting infinity…”
“Yes, yes!” Father Ambrose remarked.
Professor Bassermann laughed. “How credulous both of you are, my friends! A bit of trickery characteristic of Isaac Laquedem. This is no telegraph blank. Where does it come from? What stamp does it bear?”
The others looked closely. Everything was erased except in the corner a water mark that looked like a tortoise. “Why do you think it is a piece of trickery, Professor?” Aubrey asked.
“It is not an ordinary telegram,” Father Ambrose admitted. “But how could the message have reached him?”
“Some more hocus-pocus,” Professor Bassermann snorted.
“What makes you say so?”
“Because I think this other telegram is a real one which he did not mean to leave behind him. It is signed Nicolai Lenin. It was sent from Moscow. The language is a corruption of Sanskrit.”
“What does it say?”
Professor Bassermann’s eyes glued themselves upon the message. “It is susceptible of several interpretations. If I read aright it says:
“ ‘All is ready. Come. The Red Dawn is rising.’
“I was right all along. Isaac Lequedem is a Russian revolutionist! This is the Lenin to whom he referred last night.”
“And the shoes?” Father Ambrose asked.
“A clownish trick!”
“Do you mean to say, Professor, that our analysis was absolutely futile, that he only made believe– —”
“No, no, Aubrey. He revealed himself in his analysis when he told us his dreams and his day dreams. Even our lies are a self-revelation. The more deliberate the lie the more damning the confession! He retold the history of the world as it reflects itself in one man’s mind. His story is an erotic interpretation of history. There is nothing in his recital that any educated man could not distill from his reading. His memory is nothing to brag of. It cannot compare with that of the servant girl who remembered whole speeches in Greek to which her subconscious mind had listened while she was dusting the bookshelves in the house of one of my colleagues. Isaac Laquedem is undoubtedly a thinker and a remarkably well-read man, but he is also a charlatan and an adventurer.”
“I do not think,” Father Ambrose insisted, “that you can explain Isaac Laquedem in terms of the laboratory or of empiric psychology. Too many occult events are associated with both his coming and with his going. How do you explain the strange unrest that kept us awake last night?”
“Our sleeplessness may be the aftermath of our exciting labors. Or it may be induced by the influence of atmospheric conditions,” Bassermann replied.
“What of my dream, professor?” Father Ambrose asked.
“Your dream was due to the noise of the gate as Laquedem opened it. Your room is near it, is it not?”
“But the watchmen saw no one go out, professor,” the priest insisted.
“Watchmen,” Basserrnann laughed ironically, “are sleepy-heads. If you wish a house to be robbed, employ a watchman.”
Suddenly the whir of an aeroplane overhead startled the three scientists. They rushed out. Over the crest of Mount Athos an aeroplane glided for a few moments, then disappeared in the clouds like a fantastic bird.
“It was he! I could wager my life on it!” Professor Bassermann exclaimed. “Isaac Laquedem would not relinquish the sensation of flying above the monastery on his way to Russia. He knows that we are watching him now and are speaking about him.”
The monks knelt and prayed, their heads raised towards the spot where the aeroplane had been. They rose, glared at the three men, and grumbled.
“I think we have outstayed our welcome. It is time we left this retreat, Father Ambrose,” Bassermann whispered.
“Your passports arrived with the visa this morning. In my excitement I kept the documents in my pocket.” He extricated from his cassock two passports, adorned fantastically with many seals.
“I welcome the long delay,” he added. “Who knows whether we shall meet again this side of Paradise? But let us elucidate, if we can, before your departure, the mystery of our guest.”
“I,” Aubrey remarked, “am convinced that Isaac Laquedem has lived nearly two thousand years, and that, except for obvious lapses and exaggerations, his story is true.”
“How can you reconcile that supposition with your scientific conscience?” Professor Bassermann derisively asked.
“Like Laquedem, I reject the occult interpretation of his extraordinary experience. He himself supplies the clue to the mystery,” replied Aubrey Lowell. “Isaac Laquedem suffered a severe psychological shock on his way to the crucifixion of Jesus. The shock mysteriously disarrayed the mechanism of his metabolism. It over-stimulated his glands to such an extent that they were able to eliminate completely the byproduct of life, the waste which, accumulating in the channels of our body, produces old age and death. Death, I am convinced, is not a biological necessity. The experiments of Carrel have established that tissue may renew itself indefinitely.”
“He has,” Professor Bassermann growled, “established only the immortality of the chicken heart!”
“The immortality of Isaac Laquedem rests on an analogeus process. Carrel keeps the tissue young by constantly purging it of all impurities. Isaac Laquedem’s system in some way which I cannot explain, performs for him naturally the functions which Carrel’s test tubes and chemical reagents perform for his tissue. Nature, anticipating Steinach, accelerated the internal at the expense of the external secretions of his glands. She made him a great lover but denied him progeny. The internal secretions stimulate his metabolism enormously. Every tissue of Laquedem’s body, including his brain, is uncannily alive. We have barely touched the accumulations of his memory…”
“But how,” Professor Bassermann asked, “do you explain the longevity of Kotikokura, who was exposed to no such psychic shock.”
“Laquedem transferred to Kotikokura certain hormones with his blood. Kotikokura’s body offered a favorable soil to these hormones; they accentuated the activity of his glands in the same manner in which they quickened the vital processes of his master. For some mysterious physialogical reason Laquedem’s blood thrived in the missing link, but was fatal to Damis. It is a hypothesis by no means to be rejected that the venom of the snake bite may have acted as an antidote to certain toxins in Laquedem’s blood. Perhaps Kotikokura’s robust constitution was sufficient in itself to neutralize the poisonous substance.”