Mark Twain's Medieval Romance (34 page)

She shook her head slowly. “No,” she said. “No. Not this feeling I had.”

“All the same, that is the true explanation.”

Deep inside her she knew the psychologist was wrong; she felt, peculiarly, that she was at bay.

“Prove it,” she challenged, and saw the professor smile delightedly. “Of what particular complex of mine was this landscape symbolic?”

“Just a minute,” said Dr. Penner, and smiled in his turn. “It can’t be done on the spur of the moment—that would be unscientific. No, before I come to a conclusion, I might have to ask you a great many questions.”

“What sort of questions?”

“Oh, various things. The impressions that came into your mind when you first saw the scene—”

“I’ll tell you that. It was as though the valley was untouched, as though humanity had never set foot there. There is a phrase for what I mean, but I just can’t think of it.”

“Virgin forest?” suggested the professor.

“Yes. Virgin forest. Next question, doctor?”

But Dr. Penner held up his hand placatingly. “Not now,” he said, “and not here. If you feel tomorrow that you still want to know, I’ll do my best to oblige you. Only,” he said, “we must be alone. How can anyone do a serious scientific investigation with the professor grinning like a Cheshire cat?”

“All right—but just tell me one thing. The movements which made me turn my camera, and now this consuming curiosity to see the prints—is all that psychological? Does it all spring from within myself?”

“Yes.”

“I find it very difficult to believe that,” she said.

S
HE TOSSED AND
turned for hours that night, and when she did sleep there was all the time a pressing urgency in her to wake up. She dressed early, long before breakfast, and went out to sit on the broad veranda.

The manager came over to chat to her, and she asked him if he knew where she could obtain the use of a photographic dark room.

“Why, yes,” he said. “I have a friend, and I am sure that he will help you, but he will not be up yet, you understand? I will telephone him later and let you know.”

He came to her later, just as the breakfast gong was booming, and handed her a slip of paper on which was written an address.

“You may go at any time,” he told her, and gave her detailed directions how to get there.

The dark room was attached to a studio on an island in the lagoon, and she hired a skiff to carry her across. She was glad to find the photographer was not curious; he showed her where to go and disappeared somewhere in the back of the building.

Carefully she removed the film from the camera and developed it. She made contact prints, took them still wet from the fixing bath, and carried them to the light.

The tiny rectangles were very dark; still, something of what she had photographed was apparent.

She put both negatives under the enlarger and made large prints. The two photographs were not of the same spot, although they must have been adjacent to each other. She examined the first carefully, and then put it aside. In the second she thought she saw something, and peered at it through a powerful magnifying glass.

In an ecstasy of certainty she marked out a portion of the picture on the negative—square of about two inches—and put it back to enlarge to whole-plate size.

The definition, of course, suffered badly. What had appeared on the original as solid black was now vague and full of blurs and uncertain lines—a rain-on-the-glass pattern of distortion.

But she knew what she was looking for—the form in the formlessness—and traced it out with the naked eye. It was magnificent, yet terrifying and unmistakable.

The head!

Trembling with a cold fever, she went back to the hotel.

S
HE FOUND THE
professor and Dr. Penner on a settee in the corner of the lounge, and took the easy chair facing them.

Penner asked, with an amused glint in his eye, “Developed your photographs yet?”

She nodded, very seriously. “Yes. This is an enlargement of a portion of the original print. I’d like you to look at it very carefully.”

They bent their heads together, studying it. Her impatience got the better of her. “Can’t you see it?”

Penner leaned back and shook his head regretfully. “I’m sorry. I can’t make head or tail out of it. It looks like a jigsaw puzzle to me.”

She felt frustrated and desolate. “And you, Professor?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Of course, my eyes are not what they used to be.”

She checked herself from protesting. “Just a minute,” she said, and with a pencil on the back of another photograph she sketched what she had seen, divorced from the background, but of the same size and in the same position as on the original.

The effect of the drawing on the professor was electric, he sat up drew in the air sharply between his teeth, and traced an outline with his finger on the photograph. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.” And then, “I see it now. Quite clearly. It was these other blurs and lines which made me confused.” He handed the drawing and photograph to Penner.

“But what is it?” she asked. “What is it?”

The excitement in the professor’s voice, matched hers. “I know, but I am almost afraid to say it. It is a great scientific discovery. Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, when the world was very young, there existed enormous creatures of which you have heard—the brachiosaurus and others. There was one among them which preyed on the rest, which was stronger and fiercer than any of the others. It was called Tyrannosaurus Rex. It is the head of a tyrannosaurus that appears on your photograph.”

He paused only a second, and added, “We must go to this valley.”

“W
AIT A MOMENT,”
said Penner. “Before we start rushing into things, there are one or two objections I would like to make. First of all, I’m not perfectly satisfied that there is any sort of head in this photograph.”

“But I
see
it!” objected the professor.

“You see it now. You didn’t see it before. I also see it now, but I’m by no means convinced.”

She felt a great wave of irritation. “What do you mean?”

“Have you ever heard of
gestalt?
No, I see you haven’t. Well, let me explain it, then. Give a person an ordinary shapeless ink blot and ask him what he sees in it. Immediately his mind begins to view the blot in terms of a pattern, one common and familiar to him. If, at the same time, you suggest that there is a similarity to a donkey, he will be predisposed to look for a donkey. Here you have given us a sketch of a tyrannosaurus and a shapeless blur in which you say it is—and the chances are ten to one we will see a tyrannosaurus. Especially,” he added, “since one of us is an eminent naturalist, who’d probably give his right arm for sight of such a creature.”

“Theory,” said the professor, “and very torturous theory at that. There is a much simpler one which conforms more closely to the facts—that there is actually the head of a tyrannosaurus in the picture.”

Dr. Penner shrugged. “I said I was not certain. You may be right—but so may I.”

She broke in eagerly. “Don’t you see, Dr. Penner, that you
must
be wrong? I’m not a naturalist—I didn’t even know what the creature was—but I saw it all the same.”

“I have a theory about that too,” he said quietly, “but I won’t bring it up now. There’s another thing I want to query. Let’s assume there is a tyrannosaurus. Can you explain why this one is still alive when the rest of its species died thousands of centuries ago?”

“Alive?” expostulated the professor. “Who said anything about that? What Miss Carlton has photographed is a perfect or near-perfect fossil of the creature—a priceless scientific treasure!”

But she shook her head. “You’re wrong, Professor. It
is
alive! I feel it. And it’s got—no, intelligence isn’t quite what I mean—it has some form of mental power. I’ve felt it ever since I stopped to take those photographs—it forced me to go and develop the film. And now I can feel, deep inside me, an urge to return, to go back to the spot I photographed. How else can that be explained?”

Penner said abruptly, “You haven’t answered my question. How is it possible for this creature to be alive?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Isn’t just the fact of its existence enough? Perhaps—well, I told you my impression of the valley, that it had been isolated, untouched for centuries—perhaps they have never died out there. Or what do we know about how long their natural life-span was? Perhaps this is one of the original species?”

“And its mental power?” went on Penner, relentlessly. “As far as I remember, the tyrannosaurus had a brain about the size of a pea.”

“Aha!” said the professor triumphantly. “What has that got to do with it? Didn’t you tell me yourself the other night that the theory that intelligence depended on brain size could never be considered valid, because Anatole France had a brain smaller than a Bushman’s? Miss Carlton’s theories may be as imaginative as yours, but at least they are based on facts of experience. For myself, I believe there is a gigantic fossil in the valley—nothing more. But I have an open mind, and I am going there tomorrow to make sure.” “And I,” said Penner, “am going there to prove you wrong.”

T
HEY MADE PLANS
for the expedition over the lunch table, and the professor left to make the necessary preparations in the town.

She walked to the veranda and stood a long time staring at the glimpse of the lagoon down the road and at the little church with its graveyard opposite.

By herself like that, she had content, a mind crowded with a patient ecstasy of anticipation. Then Dr. Penner came to join her, and she felt lonely and afraid.

He must have sensed something of this, because his first words were almost an apology. “I must speak to you,” he said.

“Yes?”

“About this trip tomorrow. There are things I feel I should tell you.”

“Yes?”

“Do you remember our conversation last night, when you asked me to analyze your complex? May I do that now?”

She hesitated. “All right—if it amuses you. But don’t expect me to accept your theories unconditionally. What do you want me to do?”

“I’m going to ask you a few questions—personal ones. I want you to answer them candidly and truthfully. How old are you, Miss Carlton?”

There was just a shade of defiance in her voice. “Thirty-five.”

“I take it, at your age, you’re continually thinking about getting married?”

“You’re not quite right there. Naturally, I do think about it sometimes—but ‘continually’ is definitely an overstatement. I want you to understand, also, that I am single today by my own choice, not through any lack of opportunity.”

“That, of course, is obvious—you’re a very attractive woman. Let me say rather that Mr. Right has not yet come along, but that you wish he would?”

“Yes, that’s more accurate.”

“Then I want to go further and suggest that when you decided to come here on holiday, the hope of meeting Mr. Right was one of your deeper motives?”

“Yes, one of them. Another, and much more important one, was that I’d been overworking and needed a holiday.”

She waited for his next question, but this time his voice did not rise in query at the end of the sentence. It was conversational, casual, a bare statement of fact.

“St. George and the dragon,” he said.

The remark was so out of context, so apparently inconsequential, she should have felt amused, and was annoyed at herself because she wasn’t. Behind her annoyance was a prickle of shock.

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Your complex. Oh, it’s very plain to me, but I must make it just as plain to you. Listen. What you are fixated on is the idea of romance—that very young and childish idea. The maiden rescued by the Knight from terrible peril. St. George and the dragon.”

“Do you really believe this nonsense?”

“It’s the truth. Let me show you step by step. Why did the valley attract your attention? You couldn’t think of the phrase to describe it—remember?—and that’s also significant. Virgin forest. Two meanings there—land untrodden by man, and the forest where the virgin is in peril of the dragon. Don’t sneer. That’s what your unconscious mind thought. That’s why you moved involuntarily—so you could photograph a portion of the landscape where there was little or no definition. To satisfy your complex you had to find a dragon, and that was the only way. You found one because you were looking for it.”

She repeated, “Nonsense,” but he kept on speaking.

“I’m telling you this because I’m afraid for you. Afraid of the strength of your obsession. Afraid of what it may do to you tomorrow when you find no trace whatever of the tyrannosaurus. Oh, you don’t believe me, but think it over. Now. Tonight. And especially tomorrow.”

She felt angry but quite cold, and her voice slapped him in the face. “Dr. Penner, do you know you’re behaving like an overwrought schoolboy? I have never in my life heard such preposterous nonsense as your analysis of me. You’ve disobeyed all the laws of logic in your theory, given the wrong values to some facts and completely disregarded others, because they don’t fit in with your preconceived ideas. Like the fact that although I’ve never seen a picture of a tyrannosaurus, or even heard the name of the creature, I was able to make a recognizable sketch of it.”

“You’ve forgotten—but of course you had seen a drawing somewhere. You
must
have! You may not even have been conscious of it—just caught a glimpse somewhere—but enough for your unconscious mind to perceive the dragon symbolism.”

She laughed out loud. “Your logic astounds me. Because you don’t see another reason, therefore, there cannot be another reason. Tell me, Doctor, what makes you take so much trouble over me? Why is it so necessary for you to pry into my mind?”

He looked at her very gravely. “I will tell you some day—but not now.”

“You won’t or you cannot? I wonder. You see, Doctor, you’ve also got a complex, which is just as obvious to me as mine seems to you. A psychology complex. Everything you see and hear is distorted by you in terms of your pet subject. More than a complex, Dr. Penner—an obsession.”