He paused, as if to let me guess, but I said nothing.
“By no means all his fortune, but what was, in those days, to a young man still dependent on his mother, a fortune. At first I could not believe it. I knew that he had liked me, that he had come perhaps to look on me rather as an uncle on a nephew. But so much money. And so much hazard. Because I played one day with opened windows. Because a peasant girl laughed too loud… all hazard. The world began in hazard. And will end in it. Though I should in any case have been rich. My father was hardly poor. When o Pap pous died in 1924 he also left everything to my mother. And he was very far from poor.
But I promised to tell you the words de Deukans also left me, with his money and his memory. No message. But one fragment of Latin. I have never been able to trace its source. It sounds Greek. Ionian or Alexandrian. It was this. Utram bibis?Aquam an undam? Which are you drinking? The water or the wave?”
“He drank the wave?”
“We all drink both. But he meant the question should always be asked. It is not a precept. But a mirror.”
I thought; could not decide which I was drinking.
“What happened to the man who set fire to the house?”
“The law had its revenge.”
“And you went on living in Paris?”
“I still have his apartment. And the instruments he kept there are now in my own château in the Auvergne.”
“Did you discover where his money came from?”
“He had large estates in Belgium. Investments in France and Germany. But the great bulk of his money was in various enterprises in the Congo. Givray-le-Duc, like the Parthenon, was built on a heart of darkness.”
“Is Bourani built on it?”
“Would you leave at once if I said it was?”
“No.”
“Then you have no right to ask.”
He smiled, as if to tell me not to take him too seriously, and stood up, as if to nip any further argument in the bud. “To bed now. Take your envelope.”
He led the way through to my room, and lit my lamp, and wished me good night. But in his own door he turned and looked back towards me. For once his face showed a moment’s doubt, a glimpse of a lasting uncertainty.
“The water or the wave?”
Then he went.
30
I waited. I went to the window. I sat on the bed. I lay on the bed. I went to the window again. In the end I began to read the two pamphlets. Both were in French, and the first had evidently once been pinned up; there were holes and rustmarks.
THE SOCIETY FOR REASON
We, doctors and students of the faculties of medicine of the universities of France, declare that we believe:
1. Mankind can progress only by using his reason.
2. The first duty of science is to eradicate unreason, in whatever form, from public and international affairs.
3. Adherence to reason is more important than adherence to any other ethos whatever, whether it be of family, caste, country, race or religion.
4. The only frontier of reason is the human frontier; all other frontiers are signs of unreason.
5. The world can never be better than the countries that constitute it, and the countries can never be better than the individuals that constitute them.
6. It is the duty of all who agree with these statements to join the Society for Reason.
—————
Membership of the Society is obtained by signing the formula below.
1. I promise to give one-tenth of my annual income to the Society for Reason for the furtherance of its aims.
2. I promise to introduce reason at all times and places into my own life.
3. I shall never obey unreason, whatever the consequences; I shall never remain silent or inactive in front of it.
4. I recognize that the doctor is the spearhead of humanity. I shall do my utmost to understand my own physiology and psychology, and to control my life rationally according to those knowledges.
5. I solemnly acknowledge that my first duty is always to reason.
—————
Brother and sister human beings, we appeal to you to join in the struggle against the forces of unreason that caused the blood-dementia of the last decade. Help to make our society powerful in the world against the conspiracies of the priests and the politicians. Our society will one day be the greatest in the history of the human race. Join it now. Be among the first who saw, who joined, who stood!
Across the last paragraph someone a long time before had scrawled the word merde.
Both text and comment, in view of what had happened since 1920, seemed to me pathetic; like two little boys caught fighting at the time of an atomic explosion. We were equally tired, in midcentury, of cold sanity and hot blasphemy; of the overcerebral and of the overfecal; the way out lay somewhere else. Words had lost their power, either for good or for evil; still hung, like a mist, over the reality of action, distorting, misleading, castrating; but at least since Hitler and Hiroshima they were seen to be a mist, a flimsy superstructure.
I listened to the house and the night outside. Silence; and turned to the other, bound, pamphlet. Once again, the cheap browning paper and the old-fashioned type showed it to be unmistakably a genuine prewar relic.
ON COMMUNICATION WITH OTHER WORLDS
To arrive at even the nearest stars man would have to travel for millions of years at the speed of light. Even if we had the means to travel at the speed of light we could not go to, and return from, any other inhabited area of the universe in any one lifetime; nor can we communicate by other scientific means, such as some gigantic heliograph or by radio waves. We are f orever isolated, or so it appears, in our little bubble of time.
How futile all our excitement over airplanes! How stupid this fictional literature by writers like Verne and Wells about the peculiar beings that inhabit other planets!
But it is without doubt that there are other planets round other stars, that life obeys universal norms, and that in the cosmos there are beings who have evolved in the same way and with the same aspirations as ourselves. Are we then condemned never to communicate with them?
Only one method of communication is not dependent on time. Some deny that it exists. But there are many cases, reliably guaranteed by reputable and scientific witnesses, of thoughts being communicated at PRECISELY THE MOMENT they were conceived. Among certain primitive cultures, such as the Lapp, this phenomenon is so frequent, so accepted, that it is used as a matter of everyday convenience, as we in France use the telegraph or telephone.
Not all powers have to be discovered; some have to be regained.
This is the only means we shall ever have of communicating with mankind in other worlds. Sic itur ad astra.
This potential simultaneity of awareness in conscious beings operates as the pantograph does. As the hand draws, the copy is made.
The writer of this pamphlet is not a spiritualist and is not interested in spiritualism. He has for some years been investigating telepathic and other phenomena on the fringe of normal medical science. His interests are purely scientific. He repeats that he does not believe in the “supernatural"; in Rosicrucianism, hermetism, and other such aberrations.
He maintains that already more advanced worlds than our own are trying to communicate with us, and that a whole category of noble and beneficial mental behavior, which appears in our societies as good conscience, humane deeds, artistic inspiration, scientific genius, is really dictated by half-understood telepathic messages from other worlds. He believes that the Muses are not a poetic fiction, but a classical insight into scientific reality we moderns should do well to investigate.
He pleads for more public money and cooperation in research into telepathy and allied phenomena; above all he pleads for more scientists in this field.