Tales of Men and Ghosts

FROM that day Dredge’s progress continued steadily.  If not always perceptible to the untrained eye, in Lanfear’s sight it never deviated, and the great man began to associate Dredge with his work, and to lean on him more and more.  Lanfear’s health was already failing, and in my confidential talks with him I saw how he counted on Galen Dredge to continue and amplify his doctrine.  If he did not describe the young man as his predestined Huxley, it was because any such comparison between himself and his great predecessors would have been repugnant to his taste; but he evidently felt that it would be Dredge’s role to reveal him to posterity.  And the young man seemed at that time to take the same view of his calling.  When he was not busy about Lanfear’s work he was recording their conversations with the diligence of a biographer and the accuracy of a naturalist.  Any attempt to question or minimize Lanfear’s theories roused in his disciple the only flashes of wrath I have ever seen a scientific discussion provoke in him.  In defending his master he became almost as intemperate as in the early period of his literary passions.

Such filial dedication must have been all the more precious to Lanfear because, about that time, it became evident that Archie would never carry on his father’s work.  He had begun brilliantly, you may remember, by a little paper on Limulus Polyphemus that attracted a good deal of notice when it appeared in the Central Blatt; but gradually his zoological ardour yielded to an absorbing passion for the violin, which was followed by a sudden plunge into physics.  At present, after a side-glance at the drama, I understand he’s devoting what is left of his father’s money to archaeological explorations in Asia Minor.

“Archie’s got a delightful little mind,” Lanfear used to say to me, rather wistfully, “but it’s just a highly polished surface held up to the show as it passes.  Dredge’s mind takes in only a bit at a time, but the bit stays, and other bits are joined to it, in a hard mosaic of fact, of which imagination weaves the pattern.  I saw just how it would be years ago, when my boy used to take my meaning in a flash, and answer me with clever objections, while Galen disappeared into one of his fathomless silences, and then came to the surface like a dripping retriever, a long way beyond Archie’s objections, and with an answer to them in his mouth.”

It was about this time that the crowning satisfaction of Lanfear’s career came to him:  I mean, of course, John Weyman’s gift to Columbia of the Lanfear Laboratory, and the founding, in connection with it, of a chair of Experimental Evolution.  Weyman had always taken an interest in Lanfear’s work, but no one had supposed that his interest would express itself so magnificently.  The honour came to Lanfear at a time when he was fighting an accumulation of troubles:  failing health, the money difficulties resulting from his irrepressible generosity, his disappointment about Archie’s career, and perhaps also the persistent attacks of the new school of German zoologists.

“If I hadn’t Galen I should feel the game was up,” he said to me once, in a fit of half-real, half-mocking despondency.  “But he’ll do what I haven’t time to do myself, and what my boy can’t do for me.”

That meant that he would answer the critics, and triumphantly affirm Lanfear’s theory, which had been rudely shaken, but not displaced.

“A scientific hypothesis lasts till there’s something else to put in its place.  People who want to get across a river will use the old bridge till the new one’s built.  And I don’t see any one who’s particularly anxious, in this case, to take a contract for the new one,” Lanfear ended; and I remember answering with a laugh:  “Not while Horatius Dredge holds the other.”

It was generally known that Lanfear had not long to live, and the Laboratory was hardly opened before the question of his successor in the chair of Experimental Evolution began to be a matter of public discussion.  It was conceded that whoever followed him ought to be a man of achieved reputation, some one carrying, as the French say, a considerable “baggage.”  At the same time, even Lanfear’s critics felt that he should be succeeded by a man who held his views and would continue his teaching.  This was not in itself a difficulty, for German criticism had so far been mainly negative, and there were plenty of good men who, while they questioned the permanent validity of Lanfear’s conclusions, were yet ready to accept them for their provisional usefulness.  And then there was the added inducement of the Laboratory!  The Columbia Professor of Experimental Evolution has at his disposal the most complete instrument of biological research that modern ingenuity has yet produced; and it’s not only in theology or politics que Paris vaut bien une messe! There was no trouble about finding a candidate; but the whole thing turned on Lanfear’s decision, since it was tacitly understood that, by Weyman’s wish, he was to select his successor.  And what a cry there was when he selected Galen Dredge!

Not in the scientific world, though.  The specialists were beginning to know about Dredge.  His remarkable paper on Sexual Dimorphism had been translated into several languages, and a furious polemic had broken out over it.  When a young fellow can get the big men fighting over him his future is pretty well assured.  But Dredge was only thirty-four, and some people seemed to feel that there was a kind of deflected nepotism in Lanfear’s choice.

“If he could choose Dredge he might as well have chosen his own son,” I’ve heard it said; and the irony was that Archie—­will you believe it?—­actually thought so himself!  But Lanfear had Weyman behind him, and when the end came the Faculty at once appointed Galen Dredge to the chair of Experimental Evolution.

For the first two years things went quietly, along accustomed lines.  Dredge simply continued the course which Lanfear’s death had interrupted.  He lectured well even then, with a persuasive simplicity surprising in the slow, inarticulate creature one knew him for.  But haven’t you noticed that certain personalities reveal themselves only in the more impersonal relations of life?  It’s as if they woke only to collective contacts, and the single consciousness were an unmeaning fragment to them.

If there was anything to criticize in that first part of the course, it was the avoidance of general ideas, of those brilliant rockets of conjecture that Lanfear’s students were used to seeing him fling across the darkness.  I remember once saying this to Archie, who, having recovered from his absurd disappointment, had returned to his old allegiance to Dredge.

“Oh, that’s Galen all over.  He doesn’t want to jump into the ring till he has a big swishing knock-down argument in his fist.  He’ll wait twenty years if he has to.  That’s his strength:  he’s never afraid to wait.”

I thought this shrewd of Archie, as well as generous; and I saw the wisdom of Dredge’s course.  As Lanfear himself had said, his theory was safe enough till somebody found a more attractive one; and before that day Dredge would probably have accumulated sufficient proof to crystallize the fluid hypothesis.