Tales of Men and Ghosts

THE third winter I was off collecting in Central America, and didn’t get back till Dredge’s course had been going for a couple of months.  The very day I turned up in town Archie Lanfear descended on me with a summons from his mother.  I was wanted at once at a family council.

I found the Lanfear ladies in a state of incoherent distress, which Archie’s own indignation hardly made more intelligible.  But gradually I put together their fragmentary charges, and learned that Dredge’s lectures were turning into an organized assault on his master’s doctrine.

“It amounts to just this,” Archie said, controlling his women with the masterful gesture of the weak man.  “Galen has simply turned round and betrayed my father.”

“Just for a handful of silver he left us,” Mabel sobbed in parenthesis, while Mrs. Lanfear tearfully cited Hamlet.

Archie silenced them again.  “The ugly part of it is that he must have had this up his sleeve for years.  He must have known when he was asked to succeed my father what use he meant to make of his opportunity.  What he’s doing isn’t the result of a hasty conclusion:  it means years of work and preparation.”

Archie broke off to explain himself.  He had returned from Europe the week before, and had learned on arriving that Dredge’s lectures were stirring the world of science as nothing had stirred it since Lanfear’s “Utility and Variation.”  And the incredible outrage was that they owed their sensational effect to the fact of being an attempted refutation of Lanfear’s great work.

I own that I was staggered:  the case looked ugly, as Archie said.  And there was a veil of reticence, of secrecy, about Dredge, that always kept his conduct in a half-light of uncertainty.  Of some men one would have said off-hand:  “It’s impossible!” But one couldn’t affirm it of him.

Archie hadn’t seen him as yet; and Mrs. Lanfear had sent for me because she wished me to be present at the interview between the two men.  The Lanfear ladies had a touching belief in Archie’s violence:  they thought him as terrible as a natural force.  My own idea was that if there were any broken bones they wouldn’t be Dredge’s; but I was too curious as to the outcome not to be glad to offer my services as moderator.

First, however, I wanted to hear one of the lectures; and I went the next afternoon.  The hall was jammed, and I saw, as soon as Dredge appeared, what increased security and ease the interest of his public had given him.  He had been clear the year before, now he was also eloquent.  The lecture was a remarkable effort:  you’ll find the gist of it in Chapter VII of “The Arrival of the Fittest.”  Archie sat at my side in a white rage; he was too clever not to measure the extent of the disaster.  And I was almost as indignant as he when we went to see Dredge the next day.

I saw at a glance that the latter suspected nothing; and it was characteristic of him that he began by questioning me about my finds, and only afterward turned to reproach Archie for having been back a week without notifying him.

“You know I’m up to my neck in this job.  Why in the world didn’t you hunt me up before this?”

The question was exasperating, and I could understand Archie’s stammer of wrath.

“Hunt you up?  Hunt you up?  What the deuce are you made of, to ask me such a question instead of wondering why I’m here now?”

Dredge bent his slow calm scrutiny on his friend’s quivering face; then he turned to me.

“What’s the matter?” he said simply.

“The matter?” shrieked Archie, his clenched fist hovering excitedly above the desk by which he stood; but Dredge, with unwonted quickness, caught the fist as it descended.

“Careful—­I’ve got a Kallima in that jar there.”  He pushed a chair forward, and added quietly:  “Sit down.”

Archie, ignoring the gesture, towered pale and avenging in his place; and Dredge, after a moment, took the chair himself.

“The matter?” Archie reiterated with rising passion.  “Are you so lost to all sense of decency and honour that you can put that question in good faith?  Don’t you really know what’s the matter?”

Dredge smiled slowly.  “There are so few things one really knows.”

“Oh, damn your scientific hair-splitting!  Don’t you know you’re insulting my father’s memory?”

Dredge stared again, turning his spectacles thoughtfully from one of us to the other.

“Oh, that’s it, is it?  Then you’d better sit down.  If you don’t see at once it’ll take some time to make you.”

Archie burst into an ironic laugh.

“I rather think it will!” he conceded.

“Sit down, Archie,” I said, setting the example; and he obeyed, with a gesture that made his consent a protest.

Dredge seemed to notice nothing beyond the fact that his visitors were seated.  He reached for his pipe, and filled it with the care which the habit of delicate manipulations gave to all the motions of his long, knotty hands.

“It’s about the lectures?” he said.

Archie’s answer was a deep scornful breath.

“You’ve only been back a week, so you’ve only heard one, I suppose?”

“It was not necessary to hear even that one.  You must know the talk they’re making.  If notoriety is what you’re after—­”

“Well, I’m not sorry to make a noise,” said Dredge, putting a match to his pipe.

Archie bounded in his chair.  “There’s no easier way of doing it than to attack a man who can’t answer you!”

Dredge raised a sobering hand.  “Hold on.  Perhaps you and I don’t mean the same thing.  Tell me first what’s in your mind.”

The request steadied Archie, who turned on Dredge a countenance really eloquent with filial indignation.

“It’s an odd question for you to ask; it makes me wonder what’s in yours.  Not much thought of my father, at any rate, or you couldn’t stand in his place and use the chance he’s given you to push yourself at his expense.”

Dredge received this in silence, puffing slowly at his pipe.

“Is that the way it strikes you?” he asked at length.

“God!  It’s the way it would strike most men.”

He turned to me.  “You too?”

“I can see how Archie feels,” I said.

“That I’m attacking his father’s memory to glorify myself?”

“Well, not precisely:  I think what he really feels is that, if your convictions didn’t permit you to continue his father’s teaching, you might perhaps have done better to sever your connection with the Lanfear lectureship.”

“Then you and he regard the Lanfear lectureship as having been founded to perpetuate a dogma, not to try and get at the truth?”

“Certainly not,” Archie broke in.  “But there’s a question of taste, of delicacy, involved in the case that can’t be decided on abstract principles.  We know as well as you that my father meant the laboratory and the lectureship to serve the ends of science, at whatever cost to his own special convictions; what we feel—­and you don’t seem to—­is that you’re the last man to put them to that use; and I don’t want to remind you why.”

A slight redness rose through Dredge’s sallow skin.  “You needn’t,” he said.  “It’s because he pulled me out of my hole, woke me up, made me, shoved me off from the shore.  Because he saved me ten or twenty years of muddled effort, and put me where I am at an age when my best working years are still ahead of me.  Every one knows that’s what your father did for me, but I’m the only person who knows the time and trouble that it took.”

It was well said, and I glanced quickly at Archie, who was never closed to generous emotions.

“Well, then—?” he said, flushing also.

“Well, then,” Dredge continued, his voice deepening and losing its nasal edge, “I had to pay him back, didn’t I?”

The sudden drop flung Archie back on his prepared attitude of irony.  “It would be the natural inference—­with most men.”

“Just so.  And I’m not so very different.  I knew your father wanted a successor—­some one who’d try and tie up the loose ends.  And I took the lectureship with that object.”

“And you’re using it to tear the whole fabric to pieces!”

Dredge paused to re-light his pipe.  “Looks that way,” he conceded.  “This year anyhow.”

“_ This year_—?” Archie gasped at him.

“Yes.  When I took up the job I saw it just as your father left it.  Or rather, I didn’t see any other way of going on with it.  The change came gradually, as I worked.”

“Gradually?  So that you had time to look round you, to know where you were, to see you were fatally committed to undoing the work he had done?”

“Oh, yes—­I had time,” Dredge conceded.

“And yet you kept the chair and went on with the course?”

Dredge refilled his pipe, and then turned in his seat so that he looked squarely at Archie.

“What would your father have done in my place?” he asked.

“In your place—?”

“Yes:  supposing he’d found out the things I’ve found out in the last year or two.  You’ll see what they are, and how much they count, if you’ll run over the report of the lectures.  If your father’d been alive he might have come across the same facts just as easily.”

There was a silence which Archie at last broke by saying:  “But he didn’t, and you did.  There’s the difference.”

“The difference?  What difference?  Would your father have suppressed the facts if he’d found them?  It’s you who insult his memory by implying it!  And if I’d brought them to him, would he have used his hold over me to get me to suppress them?”

“Certainly not.  But can’t you see it’s his death that makes the difference?  He’s not here to defend his case.”

Dredge laughed, but not unkindly.  “My dear Archie, your father wasn’t one of the kind who bother to defend their case.  Men like him are the masters, not the servants, of their theories.  They respect an idea only as long as it’s of use to them; when it’s usefulness ends they chuck it out.  And that’s what your father would have done.”

Archie reddened.  “Don’t you assume a good deal in taking it for granted that he would have had to in this particular case?”

Dredge reflected.  Yes:  I was going too far.  Each of us can only answer for himself.  But to my mind your father’s theory is refuted.”

“And you don’t hesitate to be the man to do it?”

“Should I have been of any use if I had?  And did your father ever ask anything of me but to be of as much use as I could?”

It was Archie’s turn to reflect.  “No.  That was what he always wanted, of course.”

“That’s the way I’ve always felt.  The first day he took me away from East Lethe I knew the debt I was piling up against him, and I never had any doubt as to how I’d pay it, or how he’d want it paid.  He didn’t pick me out and train me for any object but to carry on the light.  Do you suppose he’d have wanted me to snuff it out because it happened to light up a fact he didn’t fancy?  I’m using his oil to feed my torch with:  yes, but it isn’t really his torch or mine, or his oil or mine:  they belong to each of us till we drop and hand them on.”

Archie turned a sobered glance on him.  “I see your point.  But if the job had to be done I don’t see that you need have done it from his chair.”

“There’s where we differ.  If I did it at all I had to do it in the best way, and with all the authority his backing gave me.  If I owe your father anything, I owe him that.  It would have made him sick to see the job badly done.  And don’t you see that the way to honour him, and show what he’s done for science, was to spare no advantage in my attack on him—­that I’m proving the strength of his position by the desperateness of my assault?” Dredge paused and squared his lounging shoulders.  “After all,” he added, “he’s not down yet, and if I leave him standing I guess it’ll be some time before anybody else cares to tackle him.”

There was a silence between the two men; then Dredge continued in a lighter tone:  “There’s one thing, though, that we’re both in danger of forgetting:  and that is how little, in the long run, it all counts either way.”  He smiled a little at Archie’s outraged gesture.  “The most we can any of us do—­even by such a magnificent effort as your father’s—­is to turn the great marching army a hair’s breadth nearer what seems to us the right direction; if one of us drops out, here and there, the loss of headway’s hardly perceptible.  And that’s what I’m coming to now.”

He rose from his seat, and walked across to the hearth; then, cautiously resting his shoulder-blades against the mantel-shelf jammed with miscellaneous specimens, he bent his musing spectacles on Archie.

“Your father would have understood why I’ve done, what I’m doing; but that’s no reason why the rest of you should.  And I rather think it’s the rest of you who’ve suffered most from me.  He always knew what I was there for, and that must have been some comfort even when I was most in the way; but I was just an ordinary nuisance to you and your mother and Mabel.  You were all too kind to let me see it at the time, but I’ve seen it since, and it makes me feel that, after all, the settling of this matter lies with you.  If it hurts you to have me go on with my examination of your father’s theory, I’m ready to drop the lectures to-morrow, and trust to the Lanfear Laboratory to breed up a young chap who’ll knock us both out in time.  You’ve only got to say the word.”

There was a pause while Dredge turned and laid his extinguished pipe carefully between a jar of embryo sea-urchins and a colony of regenerating planarians.

Then Archie rose and held out his hand.

“No,” he said simply; “go on.”