If he was staggered with the compliment of being called a doctor, he was still more intoxicated by the topic which his visitor put before him. Like all old men, and most fallen men, he lived in the past; and it seemed to him for one incredible moment that the past was again present. For that dark room, in which he was sealed up and forgotten like a dead man in a tomb, had heard once more a human voice asking for Hendry’s Illumination Colours.
He rose on his thin and wavering legs and went without a word to a shelf on which stood a number of highly incompatible objects, and took down an old tin box which he brought to the table and began rather tremulously to open. It contained two or three round and squat glass bottles covered with dust; and when he saw them it seemed as if his tongue was loosened.
“They should be used with the vehicle in the box,” he said. “Many people try to use them with oil or water, or all sorts of things”; though indeed it was at least thirty years since anybody had ever tried to use them with anything.
“I will tell my friend to be careful,” said Murrel, with a smile. “I know she wants to work on the old lines.”
“Ah, quite so,” said the old man, suddenly lifting his head with quite a consequential air. “I shall always be ready to give any advice . . . any advice that can be of any use, I’m sure.” He cleared his throat with quite a formidable return of fullness in his voice. “The thing to remember, first of all, of course, is that this type of colouring is in its nature opaque. So many people confuse the fact that it is brilliant with some notion of its being transparent. I myself have always seen that the confusion arose through the parallel of stained glass. Both, of course, were typically medieval crafts, and Morris was very keen on both of them. But I remember how wild he used to be if anybody forgot that glass is transparent. ‘If anybody paints a single thing in a window that looks really solid,’ he used to say, ‘he ought to be made to sit on it.’”
Murrel resumed his enquiry.
“I suppose, Dr. Hendry,” he said, “that your old chemical studies helped you a great deal in making these colours?”
The old gentleman shook his head thoughtfully.
“Chemistry alone would hardly have taught me all I know,” he said. “It is a question of optics. It is a question of physiology.” He suddenly thrust his beard across the table and said rapidly in a hissing voice, “It is even more a question of pathological psychology.”
“Oh,” said the visitor, and waited for what would happen next.
“Do you know,” said Hendry with a sudden sobriety of tone, “do you know why I lost all of my customers? Do you know why I have come down to this?”
“As far as I can make out,” said Murrel with a certain surly energy that was a surprise to himself, “You seem to have been damnably badly treated by a lot of people who wanted to sell their own goods.”
The expert gently smiled and shook his head.
“It is a matter of science,” he said. “It is not very easy for a doctor to explain it all to a layman. This friend of yours, now, I think you said she was the daughter of my old friend Ashley. Now there you have an exceptionally sound stock still surviving. Probably with no trace of the affliction at all.”
While these remarks, which were totally unintelligible to him, were being uttered with the same donnish and disdainful benevolence, the attention of the visitor was fixed on something else. He was studying with much more attention the girl in the background.
The face itself was much more interesting than he had supposed from the glimpse in the gloom of the doorway. She had tossed back the black elf-locks that had hung over her eyes like plumes on a hearse. Her profile was what is called aquiline and its thinness made it a little too literally like an eagle. But she did not cease to seem young even when she might almost be said to seem dead or dying. There was a taut and alert quality about her and her eyes were very watchful; especially at that moment. For it seemed clear that she did not like the direction that the talk was taking.
“There are two plain principles of physiology,” her father went on in his easy explanatory style, “which I never could get my colleagues to understand. One is that a malady may affect a majority. It may affect a whole generation, as a pestilence affects a whole countryside. The second is that maladies affecting the chief senses are akin to maladies of the mind. Why should colour-blindness be any exception?”
“Oh,” said Murrel, sitting up suddenly with a jump, and a half-light breaking on his bewilderment. “Oh. Yes. Colour-blindness. You mean that all this has arisen because nearly everybody is colour-blind.”
“Nearly everybody subjected to the peculiar conditions of this period of the earth’s history,” corrected the doctor in a kindly manner. “As to the duration of the epidemic, or its possible periodicity, that is another matter. If you would care to see a number of notes I have compiled–”
“You mean to say,” said Murrel, “that that big shop all the way down the street was built in a sort of passion of colour-blindness; and poor old Wister had his portrait put on ten thousand leaflets to celebrate the occasion of his becoming colour-blind.”
“It is obvious that the matter has some traceable scientific origin,” said Dr. Hendry, “and it seems to me that my hypothesis holds the field.”
“It seems to me that the big shop holds the field,” said Murrel, “and I wonder whether that shop girl who offered me chalks and red ink knows about her scientific origin.”
“I remember my old friend Potter used to say,” observed the other, gazing at the ceiling, “that when you had found the scientific origin, it was always quite a simple origin. In this case, for instance, anybody looking at the surface of the situation would naturally say that the whole of humanity had gone mad. Anybody who says the paints they advertise in that leaflet are better than my paints obviously must be mad. And so, in a sense, most of these people really are mad. What the scientific men of the age have failed altogether to investigate adequately is why they are mad. Now by my theory the unmistakable symptom of colour-blindness is connected with–”
“I’m afraid you must excuse my father talking any more,” said the young woman in a voice that was at once harsh and refined. “I think he is a little tired.”
“Oh, certainly,” said Murrel, and got up in a rather dazed fashion. He was moving towards the door, when he was suddenly stopped by an almost startling transformation in the young lady. She still stood in a rather rigid fashion behind her father’s chair. But her eyes, which were both dark and bright, shifted and shot, as it were, in a shining obliquity towards the window; and every line in her not ungraceful figure turned into a straight line like a steel rod. In the dead silence a sound could be heard through the half-open window. It was the sound of the large and lumbering wheels of the antiquated hansom cab drawing up at the door.
Murrel, still full of embarrassment, opened the door of the room and went out on to the dark landing. When he turned he found, with a certain surprise, that the girl had followed him.
“Do you know what that means?” she asked. “That brute there has come for father.”
A dim premonition of the probable state of affairs began to pass across his mind. He knew that a number of new and rather sweeping laws, which in practice only swept over the poor streets, had given medical and other officials very abrupt and arbitrary powers over people supposed to fall short of the full efficiency of the manager of the stores. He thought it only too likely that the discoverer of the remarkable scientific theory of colour-blindness as a cause of social decay might appear to fall short of that efficiency. Indeed, it would even seem that his own daughter thought so, from her desperate efforts to steer the poor old gentleman away from the topic. In plain words, somebody was going to treat the eccentric as a lunatic. And as he was not an eccentric millionaire or an eccentric squire, or even in these days regarded as an eccentric gentleman, it was probable enough that the new classification could be effected rapidly and without a hitch. Murrel felt what he had never felt fully since he was a boy, a sudden and boiling rage. He opened his mouth to speak, but the girl had already struck in with her voice of steel.