The figure moved across. He seemed interested in the buckets, for he examined them with some attention. Then he dipped one of his hands into that which the doctor had indicated.
«Excellent!» cried Maupuis, his voice shrill with excitement. «Now, sir, might I ask you to have the kindness to dip the same hand into the cold water of the other bucket.»
The form did so.
«Now, sir, you would bring our experiment to complete success if you would lay your hand upon the table, and while it is resting there you would yourself dematerialize and return into the medium.»
The figure bowed its comprehension and assent. Then it slowly advanced towards the table, stooped over it, extended its hand – and vanished. The heavy breathing of the medium ceased and he moved uneasily as if about to wake. Maupuis turned on the white light, and threw up his hands with a loud cry of wonder and joy which was echoed by the company.
On the shining wooden surface of the table there lay a delicate yellow-pink glove of paraffin, broad at the knuckles, thin at the wrist, two of the fingers bent down to the palm. Maupuis was beside himself with delight. He broke off a small bit of the wax from the wrist and handed it to an assistant, who hurried from the room.
«It is final!» he cried. «What can they say now? Gentlemen, I appeal to you. You have seen what occurred. Clan any of you give any rational explanation of that paraffin mould, save that it was the result of dematerialization of the hand within it?»
«I can see no other solution,» Richet answered. «But you have to do with very obstinate and very prejudiced people. If they cannot deny it, they will probably ignore it.»
«The Press is here and the Press represents the public,» said Maupuis. «For the Press Engleesh, Monsieur Malone,» he went on in his broken way. «Is it that you can see any answer?»
«I can see none,» Malone answered.
«And you, monsieur?» addressing the representative of the Matin.»
The Frenchman shrugged his shoulders.
«For us who had the privilege of being present it was indeed convincing,» said he, «and yet you will certainly be met with objections. They will not realize how fragile this thing is. They will say that the medium brought it on his person and laid it upon the table.»
Maupuis clapped his hands triumphantly. His assistant had just brought him a slip of paper from the next room.
«Your objection is already answered,» he cried, waving the paper in the air. «I had foreseen it and I had put some cholesterine among the paraffin in the zinc pail. You may have observed that I broke off a corner of the mould. It was for purpose of chemical analysis. This has now been done. It is here and cholesterine has been detected.»
«Excellent!» said the French journalist. «You have closed the last hole. But what next?»
«What we have done once we can do again,» Maupuis answered. «I will prepare a number of these moulds. In some cases I will have fists and hands. Then I will have plaster casts made from them. I will run the plaster inside the mould. It is delicate, but it can be done. I will have dozens of them so treated, and I will send them broadcast to every capital in the world that people may see with their own eyes. Will that not at last convince them of the reality of our conclusions?»
«Do not hope for too much, my poor friend,» said Richet, with his hand upon the shoulder of the enthusiast. «You have not yet realized the enormous vis inertioe of the world. But as you have said, 'Vous marchez – vous marchez toujours'.»
«And our march is regulated,» said Mailey. «There is a gradual release to accommodate it to the receptivity of mankind.»
Richet smiled and shook his head.
«Always transcendental, Monsieur Mailey! Always seeing more than meets the eye and changing science into philosophy! I fear you are incorrigible. Is your position reasonable?»
«Professor Richet,» said Mailey, very earnestly, «I would beg you to answer the same question. I have a deep respect for your talents and complete sympathy with your caution, but have you not come to the dividing of the ways? You are now in the position that you admit – you must admit – that an intelligent apparition in human form, built up from the substance which you have yourself named ectoplasm, can walk the room and carry out instructions while the medium lay senseless under our eyes, and yet you hesitate to assert that spirit has an independent existence. Is that reasonable?»
Richet smiled and shook his head. Without answering he turned and bid farewell to Dr. Maupuis, and to offer him his congratulations. A few minutes later the company had broken up and our friends were in a taxi speeding towards their hotel.
Malone was deeply impressed with what he had seen, and he sat up half the night drawing up a full account of it for the Central News, with the names of those who had endorsed the result – honourable names which no one in the world could associate with folly or deception.
«Surely, surely, this will be a turning point and an epoch.» So ran his dream. Two days later he opened the great London dailies one after the other. Columns about football. Columns about golf. A full page as to the value of shares. A long and earnest correspondence in The Times about the habits of the lapwing. Not one word in any of them as to the wonders which he had seen and reported. Mailey laughed at his dejected face.
«A mad world, my masters,» said he. «A crazy world! But the end is not yet!»
13. In Which Professor Challenger Goes Forth to Battle
PROFESSOR CHALLENGER was in a bad humour, and when that was so his household were made aware of it. Neither were the effects of his wrath confined to those around him, for most of those terrible letters which appeared from time to time in the Press, flaying and scarifying some unhappy opponent, were thunderbolt flashes from an offended Jove who sat in sombre majesty in his study-throne on the heights of a Victoria flat. Servants would hardly dare to enter the room where, glooming and glowering, the maned and bearded head looked up from his papers as a lion from a bone. Only Enid could dare him at such a time, and even she felt occasionally that sinking of the heart which the bravest of tamers may experience as he unbars the gate of the cage. She was not safe from the acridity of his tongue but at least she need not fear physical violence, which was well within the possibilities for others.
Sometimes these berserk fits of the famous Professor arose from material causes. «Hepatic, sir, hepatic!» he would explain in extenuation after some aggravated assault. But on this particular occasion he had a very definite cause for discontent. It was Spiritualism!
He never seemed to get away from the accursed superstition – a thing which ran counter to the whole work and philosophy of his lifetime. He attempted to pooh-pooh it, to laugh at it, to ignore it with contempt, but the confounded thing would insist upon obtruding itself once more. On Monday he would write it finally off his books, and before Saturday he would be up to his neck in it again. And the thing was so absurd! It seemed to him that his mind was being drawn from the great pressing material problems of the Universe in order to waste itself upon Grimm's fairy tales or the ghosts of a sensational novelist.
Then things grew worse. First Malone, who had in his simple fashion been an index figure representing the normal clear-headed human being, had in some way been bedevilled by these people and had committed himself to their pernicious views. Then Enid, his wee-lamb, his one real link with humanity, had also been corrupted. She had agreed with Malone's conclusions. She had even hunted up a good deal of evidence of her own. In vain he had himself investigated a case and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the medium was a designing villain who brought messages from a widow's dead husband in order to get the woman into his power. It was a clear case and Enid admitted it. But neither she nor Malone would allow any general application. «There are rogues in every line of life,» they would say. «We must judge every movement by the best and not by the worst.»