The few that thought of the matter said: “They’ll track that money down. It’s got to be somewhere, and they’ll trace it. The FBI will throw out a net.” But in point of fact, Little Dominic and MacGinnis being dead, no one had a clue to its whereabouts. It was buried treasure.
For years previous to the execution of Rurik Duncan, Dr. Holliday had been performing fabulous feats of eye surgery. To him the grafting of corneal tissue from the eye of a man recently dead to the eye of a living child was a routine affair which he regarded much as a tailor regards the stitching of a collar—good sewing was essential, as a matter of course, but the thing had to fit. And, somewhat like certain fierce tailors of the old school, he was at once savagely possessive, devilishly proud and bitterly contemptuous of the craft to which he was married. I know an old tailor who never tired of sneering at himself, who would have nothing to do with his fellow craftsmen because they were, in his opinion, mere tailors; but who ordered King Edward VII to get out of his shop and stay out, because His Majesty questioned the hang of a sleeve. Dr. Holliday was a man of this character—dissatisfied, arbitrary, unsatisfying, ill-natured, impossible to please. He had something like a contemptuous familiarity with the marvelous mechanism of the human eye, but would allow nobody but himself to talk lightly of it. He became famous when he grafted his first cornea. When the reporters came to interview him he appeared to be angry with the world for admiring him.
Irritable, disdainful, his face set in a look of intense distaste, and talking in an overemphasized reedy voice, he could make the most casual remark offensive. Reminded of his services to humanity, Dr. Holliday said, “Human eyes, sheep’s eyes—they are all one to me. As eyes, a fly’s eyes are far more remarkable. Your eye is nothing but a makeshift arrangement for receiving light rays upon a sensitive surface. A camera with an automatic shutter, and damned inefficient at that. They do better in the factories. I have repaired a camera. Well?”
A reporter said, “But you’ve restored sight, Dr. Holliday. A camera can’t see without an eye behind it.”
Dr. Holliday snapped, “Neither can an eye see, as anybody but an absolute fool must know.”
“Well, you can’t see without your eyes,” another reporter said.
“You can’t see with them,” said Dr. Holliday. “Even if I had the time to explain to you the difference between looking and seeing, you have not the power to understand me; and even if you had, how would you convey what you understood to the louts who buy your journal? Let it be sufficient for me to say, therefore, that the grafting of a cornea, to one who knows how to do it, is probably less difficult than an invisible darning job done to hide a cigarette burn in your trousers. Vision comes from behind the eye.”
One of the reporters who wrote up things like viruses and astronomy for the Sunday supplement said: “Optic nerve—” at which Dr. Holliday swooped at him like a sparrow hawk.
“What do you know about the optic nerve, if I may ask? Oh, I love these popular scientists, I love them! Optic nerve. That’s all there is to it, isn’t it? A wiring job, so to speak, eh? Plug it in, switch it on, turn a knob—is that the idea? Splice it, like a rope, eh? My dear sir, you know nothing about the tiniest and most insignificant nerve in your body, let alone how it is motivated—and neither do I, and neither does anybody else. But you will suck on your scientific jargon, just as a weaning baby sucks on an unhygienic rubber pacifier. It is an impertinence, sir, to talk so glibly to me! ‘Optic nerve’—as if I were a chorus girl! Can you name me thirty parts, say, of the mere eye—just name them—that you talk with such facility of optic nerves? Have you considered the extraordinary complexity of the optic nerve? The microscopic complications of cellular tissues and blood vessels?”
The reporter, abashed, said, “I’m sorry, Dr. Holliday. I was only going to ask if it might be possible—I don’t mean in our time, but some time—really to graft a whole eye and, as you put it, splice an optic nerve?”
In his disagreeable way, unconsciously mocking the hesitancy of the reporter’s voice—this was another of his unpleasant mannerisms—Dr. Holliday said, “Yes sir, and no sir. One thing is impossible and that is to predict what may or may not be surgically possible or impossible in our time. But I can tell you this, sir, as expert to expert: it is about as possible to graft a whole eye as it might be to graft a whole head. As every schoolboy must know, nervous tissue does not regenerate itself in the vertebrate, except in the case of the salamander in whom the regenerative process remains a mystery.”
A lady reporter asked, “Aren’t salamanders those lizards that are supposed to live in fire, or something?”
Dr. Holliday started to snap but, meeting the wide gaze of this young woman, liked her irises and, gently for him, explained, “The salamander resembles a lizard but it is an amphibian, with a long tail. An amphibian lives both in and out of water. Have you never seen a salamander? I’ll show you one . . .” And he led the way to an air-conditioned room that smelled somewhat of dead vegetation, through which ran a miniature river bordered with mud. In this mud languid little animals stirred.
A man from the south said, “Heck, they’re mud-eels!”
At him Dr. Holliday curled a lip, saying, “Same thing.”
The Sunday supplement man said, “Dr. Holliday, may I ask whether you are studying the metabolic processes of the salamander with a view to their application—”
“No, you may not.”
The lady reporter said, “I think they’re cute. Where can I get one?”
Majestically, Dr. Holliday called to an assistant: “Everington, put a couple of salamanders in a jar for the lady!”
Next day there were photographs of a salamander in the papers, and headlines like this:
HEAD GRAFT NEXT?
MYSTERY OF SALAMANDER
After that Dr. Holliday would not speak to anybody connected with the press and was dragged into the limelight again only when he grafted the right eye of Rurik into the head of a four-year-old boy named Dicky Aldous, son of Richard Aldous, a wealthy paint manufacturer of Greenwich, Connecticut.
It was not one operation, but eight, over a period of about six weeks, during which time the child’s eye was kept half-in and half-out of a certain fluid which Dr. Holliday has refused to discuss. The Sunday supplement writer, the “sensationalist,” has hinted that this stuff is derived from the lizard-like amphibian salamander which, alone among vertebrates, has the power to regenerate nervous tissue. It is not for me to express an opinion in this matter. Only I will insist that sensationalists all too often are right.
Jules Verne was a sensationalist; and now we are discussing man-powered rockets to the moon. H.G. Wells was a sensationalist; but there really are such things as heavier-than-air aircraft, automatic sights and atomic bombs. I, for one, refuse to discount the surmises of the Sunday supplement man who put it as a conjecture that Dr. Holliday was using, as a regenerative principle, some hormone extracted from the humble salamander. Why not? Alexander Fleming found penicillin in the mold on lemon rind. Believe me, if it were not for such cranks, medicine would still be witch-doctoring, and brain surgery a hole in the head to let the devils out.
Anyway, Dr. Holliday grafted Rurik Duncan’s right eye into the head of the four-year-old Dicky Aldous. It is not true that the father, Richard Aldous, paid Dr. Holliday a hundred thousand dollars for the operation; Mr. Aldous donated this sum, and more, to the Holliday Foundation, of which every schoolboy has heard.