The Soul Stealer

"The world will know very soon, Mr. Megbie," Gouldesbrough answered pleasantly. "In about a fortnight's time I am sending out some invitations to some of our leading people to witness the result of my experiments in my laboratories. I hope I may have the pleasure of seeing you there also. But if you wish it, I will certainly give you a slight idea of the work. Since the public seem interested in what I am doing, and something seems to have leaked out, I am quite willing that they should know more. And of course there is no one to whom I would rather say anything than yourself."

Megbie bowed. He was tremendously excited. Brother writers who did not make a tenth of his income and had not a quarter of his eminence were wont to say that his ears twitched when in the presence of a great celebrity. This no doubt was calumny, but the journalist stood in an attitude of strained attention – as well a man might stand when the secret of the hour was about to be revealed to him in preference to all other men.

Gouldesbrough bowed to Lord Malvin.

"I'm going to have half-an-hour's conversation with Mr. Megbie," he said. "Meanwhile, my lord, I wonder if you would give Sir Harold Oliver a slight technical outline of my processes? And of course, as I understand this is to be in some sense a night on which your friends are to be given some general information, I shall place myself entirely in your hands as to any revelations you may think proper to make."

He moved off with the journalist, leaving the two other men already fallen into deep talk.

"Where shall we go, Mr. Megbie?" he said, as they came out into a large room hung with old Flemish tapestry and full of people.

"There is a little conservatory down a corridor here," Megbie answered. "I expect we should be quite undisturbed there. Moreover, we could smoke, and I know that you are like me, Sir William, a cigarette-smoker."

"That will do very well, then," Gouldesbrough answered, and they walked away together. Every one saw them go. Ladies nodded and whispered, gentlemen whispered and nodded to each other. The occasion was perfectly well understood. Sir William was telling Donald Megbie! By supper time it would be all over the rooms and the Eastminster Gazette to-morrow afternoon would have all the details.

"Megbie is always chosen in affairs of this sort." "That's Megbie, the writing Johnny, who sort of stage-manages all these things." "The ubiquitous Donald has got him in his grip, and we shall soon know all the details" – these were the remarks made upon every side as the two men strolled through the rooms.

Then an incident that was much commented on next day in society, occurred quite suddenly. It created quite a little sensation and gave rise to a great deal of gossip.

Sir William and Mr. Megbie came to a part of the room where Lady Poole and her daughter Marjorie were standing talking to General Mayne of the War Office.

Lady Poole saw the scientist.

"Ah, William!" she said, somewhat loudly, and quite in her old manner of the days when Sir William and Marjorie were engaged. "So here you are, blazing with triumph. Every one's talking of you, and every one has been asking Marjorie if she knows what it is you've invented this time!"

Megbie, who knew both Lady Poole and her daughter, but did not wish to enter into a conversation just at this important moment, bowed, smiled at the old lady and the girl, and stood a little aside.

Gouldesbrough took Lady Poole by the hand and bent over it, saying something in a low voice to her. And once more society nodded and whispered as it saw the flush of pleasure in the lady's face and her gratified smile. Again society whispered and nodded as it saw Marjorie Poole shake hands with her ex-fiancé, and marked the brightness of her beautiful eyes and saw the proud lips moving in words of friendship and congratulation.

What Gouldesbrough said in answer to Marjorie was this —

"It is so kind and good of you to be pleased, Marjorie. Nothing is more valuable to me than that. I am going to have half-an-hour with Donald Megbie now. I find that it's usual to tell the general public something at this stage. So I'm doing it through Megbie. He's safe, you know, and he understands one. But after that, will you let me take you in to have some supper? Do please let me! It would just make everything splendid, be the final joy, you know!"

"I should be very churlish to refuse you anything to-night, William," she answered sadly, but with great pride for him in her voice. "Haven't you done almost everything for me? You've done what no other living man would have done. I shall be very glad and feel very proud if you will come back here for me after you have talked to Donald Megbie."

Gouldesbrough went away with the journalist. In five minutes every one in Lord Malvin's house was saying that Marjorie Poole was engaged to Sir William Gouldesbrough once more.

Marjorie watched the two men go away. Her heart was full of pride and pain. She rejoiced that all this had come to the chivalrous gentleman who had been her lover and plighted husband. She felt each incident of his growing triumph with intense sympathy and pleasure. He had been so good to her! From the very first he had been splendid. If only she could have loved him, how happy would her lot have been as mate and companion to such a man as this! She was not worldly, but she was of the world and knew it well. She realized most completely all the advantages, the subtle pleasures that would belong to the wife of this great man. The love of power and dominion, the sense of a high intellectual correspondence with the finest brain of the day, the incense of a lofty and chivalrous devotion – all these, yes, all these, would be for the girl Sir William loved and wedded.

She half-wondered if such devotion as his had proved to be ought to go unrewarded.

Was it right? Had any girl a real excuse for making a man like William Gouldesbrough unhappy? Guy Rathbone had faded utterly out of life. The greatest skill, the most active and prolonged inquiry had failed to throw the slightest light upon his disappearance.

As a person, Guy had ceased to exist. He lived only as a memory in her heart. A dear memory, bitter-sweet – ah, sweet and bitter! – but no more a thing of flesh and blood. A phantom, a shadow now and for evermore!

Sir William and Donald Megbie sat in a small palm house talking earnestly together. A tiny fountain sent up its glittering whip of water from a marble pool on which water-lilies were floating, while tiny iridescent fish swum slowly round their roots. There was a silence and fragrance in the pleasant remote place, the perfume of exotic flowers, the grateful green of giant cacti which rested the eye.

Concealed electric lights shed their radiance upon fern, flower, and sparkling water, and both men felt that here was a place for confidences and a fit spot in which matters of import might be unfolded.

Both men were smoking, and in the still warm air, the delicate grey spirals from the thick Turkish cigarettes rose with a fantastic grace of curve that only the pencil of a Flaxman could have given its true value.

"I am all attention, Sir William," Megbie said.

"Well, then, I will put the thing to you in a nutshell, and as simply as possible. When you come to the demonstration at my house in a few days' time, you will be able to gather all the details and have them explained to you. I am going to give you a simple broad statement here and now. For years I have been investigating the nature of thought. I have been seeking to discover what thought really is, how it takes place, what is its mechanical as well as its psychical value. Now, I claim that I have discovered the active principle of thought. I have discovered how to measure it, how to harness it, so to speak; how to use it, in fact, just as other investigators in the past have harnessed and utilized electricity!"

Megbie started. "I think I see," he said hurriedly. "I think I see something – but go on, Sir William, go on!"

Gouldesbrough smiled, pleased with the agitation the man who sat by him showed so plainly.

He went on – "Hitherto that which observes – I mean the power of thought, has never been able, strictly speaking, to observe itself. It can never look on at itself from the outside, or view itself as one of the multitude of things that come under its review. It is itself the origin of vision, and the eye cannot see its own power of seeing. I have altered all this. Thought is a fluid just as electricity is, or one may say that it is a peculiar form of motion just as light is. The brain is the machine that creates the motion. I have discovered that the brain gives off definite rays or vibrations which rise from it as steam rises from a boiling pot. That is the reason why one brain can act upon another, can influence another. It explains personal magnetism, hypnotism and so on. What I have done is this: I have perfected a means by which these rays can be collected and controlled. I can place an apparatus upon your head which will collect the thought vibrations as you think and produce them."

"And then, Sir William?"

"Then I can conduct those rays along a wire for any distance in the form of an electric current. Finally, by means of a series of sensitive instruments which I will show you at the forthcoming demonstration, I can transmute these vibrations into actual pictures or words, and throw them upon a screen for all the world to see. That is to say, in actual words, whatever any one is thinking is reproduced exactly as he thinks it, without his having any power to prevent it. Thought, which had hitherto been locked up in the brain of the thinker and only reaches us through his words with whatever modification he likes to make, will now be absolutely naked and bare."

There was a silence of a minute or two as Sir William stopped speaking.

The journalist was thinking deeply, his head bowed upon his hands.

He looked up at last and his face was very pale. Little beads of perspiration stood out upon his forehead. His eyes were luminous.

"It is too big to take in all at once," he said. "But I see some things. In the first instance, your discovery means the triumph of TRUTH! Think of it! the saying that 'truth shall prevail' will be justified at last!"

Gouldesbrough nodded, and the writer went on, his voice warming into enthusiasm as he continued, his words pouring out in a flood. "No one will lie any more because every one will realize that lying will be useless, when your machine can search out their inmost secrets! In two generations deceit will have vanished from the world. We shall invest in no company unless the directors submit themselves to the scrutiny of your invention. We shall be able to test the genuineness of every enterprise before embarking upon it! Again, your invention means the triumph of JUSTICE! There will be no more cases of wrongful imprisonment. No man will suffer for a crime he did not commit! Oh, it's wonderful, beyond thinking! The cumbrous machinery of the law-courts will be instantly swept away. The criminal will try himself in spite of himself, he will give the secret of his actions to the world! The whole of life will be changed and made bright! We shall witness the final triumph of all —THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE! Man or maid will be each able to test the reality and depth of each other's affection! There will be no more mercenary marriages, no betrayals of trusting women. And from these unions of love, pure and undefiled by worldly considerations, a new and finer race will spring up, noble, free and wise! And you, you the man sitting here by my side, have done all this!"

His voice failed him for a moment, and the burning torrent of his words was still. In the rush and clamour of the new ideas, in the immeasurable vastness of the conception, speech would not go on. Then he started, and his face grew paler than before. "Forgive me," he said, "forgive me if I seem to doubt. It is all so incredibly wonderful. But you have really done this, Sir William? You are not merely hoping to do it some day? You are not merely advancing along the road which may some day lead to it?"

"I have actually done it, Mr. Megbie, completely, utterly, certainly. And in a few days you shall judge for yourself. But it is certain."

"But it is infinite in its possibilities!" the journalist went on. "Another thing that I see quite clearly will result is this. The right man in the right place will be an accomplished fact in the future. We shall find out early in the life of a child exactly in what direction its true power lies. To-day we find that circumstance and the mistakes of parents and guardians are constantly putting children into walks of life for which they are not in the least fitted. The result is a dreadful waste of power. We see on every side clergymen who ought to be business men, business men who ought to be painters or musicians, clerks who are bad clerks, but who would make excellent soldiers. Your marvellous discovery will change all this for ever. Every day the growing brain of the child will be tested. We shall find out exactly what its true thoughts are; children will cease to be inarticulate and unable to give us a true idea of themselves as they so often are at present. Teaching will become an exact science, because every schoolmaster will be able to find out how much his teaching is appreciated and understood, and how little, as the case may be. And we shall discover other and even more portentous secrets! We shall know what is passing in the minds of the dying who cannot speak to us! We shall know the truth about a future state, inasmuch as we shall be able to find out whether the mind does indeed receive warnings and hintings of the other world at the moment of passing! Then, also, I suppose that we shall be able to penetrate into a world that has been closed to us since the human species began! We shall know at last in what strange way animals think! The pictures that pass into the brain of the dog, the horse, the tiger, through the physical eyes, will be made clear for us to see! We shall wrest his secret from the eagle and see the memories of the primeval forest which linger in the minds of the jaguar and ape!"

The little fountain in the centre of the conservatory tinkled merrily. The electric bulbs in the glass roof shed a soft light upon the broad green leaves of the tropical plants, which seemed as if they had been cunningly japanned. Two men in modern evening dress sat talking together, while distant sounds of talk and laughter floated in to them from the great and fashionable drawing-rooms beyond. It was an ordinary picture enough, and to the superficial eye one without special significance or meaning.

Yet, at that moment and in that place, a stupendous revelation was being made. A tale which the wildest imagination would have hesitated to give a place in the mind was being poured into the ears of one who was the mouthpiece of the public. To-morrow all the world would be thinking the thoughts, experiencing the same mental disturbance, that Donald Megbie was experiencing now. The cables would be flashing the news through vast cities and over the beds of mighty oceans to the furthest corner of the habitable globe.

Megbie realized something of this. "I feel my responsibility very acutely," he said. "You have put into my hands one of the greatest chances that any writer for the public press has ever had. Before I begin to write anything, I must be alone to think things over. You may well imagine how all this has startled me. For the thinking man it almost has an element of terror. One feels an awe that may in any moment change to fear! When I first saw Mount Blanc I felt as I do now."

Sir William gazed keenly at his companion. Megbie was obviously unstrung. It was curious to see how this revelation had gripped and influenced the keen, cool-headed man of the world, curious and full of a thrill, exquisite in its sense of power and dominion. The tall figure of the scientist towered over that of the other man. Gouldesbrough had risen, the usual reserve of his manner had dropped away from him, and great tides of exultation seemed to carry him swiftly and irresistibly to the very heart of human things. During the long years of experiment and toil, Gouldesbrough had occasionally known these moments of savage ecstasy. But never had he known a moment so poignant, so supreme as this. As he stood there the thought came to him that he alone stood apart from all created men in the supremacy of intellect, in the majesty of an utter sovereignty over the minds of mankind.

The rush of furious emotion mastered him for a moment, so terrible was it in its intensity and strength.

"Yes," he cried, with a wild gesture of his arm and in a high vibrating voice. "Yes! You are right! You have said what all the world is about to say. I have stormed the heights of the unknown! The secrets of all men's hearts are mine, and I claim an absolute knowledge of the soul, even as God claims it!"

Megbie started from his reverie. He stared at the tall, swaying figure with fascinated eyes as he heard the bold and terrible words. Was it not thus that Lucifer himself had spoken in Milton's mighty poem?

And how had the star of the morning fallen?

Once more the thought flashed into his mind that there was something of madness in those blazing eyes. However great things this man had done, were not these words of tremendous arrogance the symptom of a brain destined to blaze up for a moment in mighty triumph and then to pass into the dark?