Twelve Stories and a Dream (14 page)

"Now, I don't want to crack myself up as a god beyond my merits, but I
must confess that while I was god to these people they was extraordinary
successful. I don't say there's anything in it, mind you. They won
a battle with another tribe—I got a lot of offerings I didn't want
through it—they had wonderful fishing, and their crop of pourra was
exceptional fine. And they counted the capture of the brig among the
benefits I brought 'em. I must say I don't think that was a poor record
for a perfectly new hand. And, though perhaps you'd scarcely credit it,
I was the tribal god of those beastly savages for pretty nearly four
months....

"What else could I do, man? But I didn't wear that diving-dress all the
time. I made 'em rig me up a sort of holy of holies, and a deuce of a
time I had too, making them understand what it was I wanted them to do.
That indeed was the great difficulty—making them understand my wishes.
I couldn't let myself down by talking their lingo badly—even if I'd
been able to speak at all—and I couldn't go flapping a lot of gestures
at them. So I drew pictures in sand and sat down beside them and hooted
like one o'clock. Sometimes they did the things I wanted all right,
and sometimes they did them all wrong. They was always very willing,
certainly. All the while I was puzzling how I was to get the confounded
business settled. Every night before the dawn I used to march out in
full rig and go off to a place where I could see the channel in which
the Ocean Pioneer lay sunk, and once even, one moonlight night, I tried
to walk out to her, but the weeds and rocks and dark clean beat me. I
didn't get back till full day, and then I found all those silly niggers
out on the beach praying their sea-god to return to them. I was that
vexed and tired, messing and tumbling about, and coming up and going
down again, I could have punched their silly heads all round when they
started rejoicing. I'm hanged if I like so much ceremony.

"And then came the missionary. That missionary! It was in the afternoon,
and I was sitting in state in my outer temple place, sitting on that old
black stone of theirs when he came. I heard a row outside and jabbering,
and then his voice speaking to an interpreter. 'They worship stocks and
stones,' he said, and I knew what was up, in a flash. I had one of my
windows out for comfort, and I sang out straight away on the spur of
the moment. 'Stocks and stones!' I says. 'You come inside,' I says, 'and
I'll punch your blooming head.' There was a kind of silence and more
jabbering, and in he came, Bible in hand, after the manner of them—a
little sandy chap in specks and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me
sitting there in the shadows, with my copper head and my big goggles,
struck him a bit of a heap at first. 'Well,' I says, 'how's the trade in
calico?' for I don't hold with missionaries.

"I had a lark with that missionary. He was a raw hand, and quite
outclassed with a man like me. He gasped out who was I, and I told him
to read the inscription at my feet if he wanted to know. Down he goes
to read, and his interpreter, being of course as superstitious as any of
them, took it as an act of worship and plumped down like a shot. All my
people gave a howl of triumph, and there wasn't any more business to be
done in my village after that journey, not by the likes of him.

"But, of course, I was a fool to choke him off like that. If I'd had any
sense I should have told him straight away of the treasure and taken him
into Co. I've no doubt he'd have come into Co. A child, with a few hours
to think it over, could have seen the connection between my diving-dress
and the loss of the Ocean Pioneer. A week after he left I went out
one morning and saw the Motherhood, the salver's ship from Starr Race,
towing up the channel and sounding. The whole blessed game was up, and
all my trouble thrown away. Gummy! How wild I felt! And guying it in
that stinking silly dress! Four months!"

The sunburnt man's story degenerated again. "Think of it," he said, when
he emerged to linguistic purity once more. "Forty thousand pounds worth
of gold."

"Did the little missionary come back?" I asked.

"Oh, yes! Bless him! And he pledged his reputation there was a man
inside the god, and started out to see as much with tremendous ceremony.
But there wasn't—he got sold again. I always did hate scenes and
explanations, and long before he came I was out of it all—going home to
Banya along the coast, hiding in bushes by day, and thieving food from
the villages by night. Only weapon, a spear. No clothes, no money.
Nothing. My face was my fortune, as the saying is. And just a squeak
of eight thousand pounds of gold—fifth share. But the natives cut up
rusty, thank goodness, because they thought it was him had driven their
luck away."

Certainly, if ever a man found a guinea when he was looking for a pin
it is my good friend Professor Gibberne. I have heard before of
investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the extent that
he has done. He has really, this time at any rate, without any touch of
exaggeration in the phrase, found something to revolutionise human life.
And that when he was simply seeking an all-round nervous stimulant to
bring languid people up to the stresses of these pushful days. I have
tasted the stuff now several times, and I cannot do better than describe
the effect the thing had on me. That there are astonishing experiences
in store for all in search of new sensations will become apparent
enough.

Professor Gibberne, as many people know, is my neighbour in Folkestone.
Unless my memory plays me a trick, his portrait at various ages has
already appeared in The Strand Magazine—I think late in 1899; but I am
unable to look it up because I have lent that volume to some one who has
never sent it back. The reader may, perhaps, recall the high forehead
and the singularly long black eyebrows that give such a Mephistophelian
touch to his face. He occupies one of those pleasant little detached
houses in the mixed style that make the western end of the Upper
Sandgate Road so interesting. His is the one with the Flemish gables and
the Moorish portico, and it is in the little room with the mullioned bay
window that he works when he is down here, and in which of an evening
we have so often smoked and talked together. He is a mighty jester, but,
besides, he likes to talk to me about his work; he is one of those men
who find a help and stimulus in talking, and so I have been able to
follow the conception of the New Accelerator right up from a very early
stage. Of course, the greater portion of his experimental work is not
done in Folkestone, but in Gower Street, in the fine new laboratory next
to the hospital that he has been the first to use.

As every one knows, or at least as all intelligent people know, the
special department in which Gibberne has gained so great and deserved a
reputation among physiologists is the action of drugs upon the nervous
system. Upon soporifics, sedatives, and anaesthetics he is, I am told,
unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable eminence, and I suppose
in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles that centres about the
ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are little cleared places of
his making, little glades of illumination, that, until he sees fit to
publish his results, are still inaccessible to every other living man.
And in the last few years he has been particularly assiduous upon this
question of nervous stimulants, and already, before the discovery of the
New Accelerator, very successful with them. Medical science has to thank
him for at least three distinct and absolutely safe invigorators
of unrivalled value to practising men. In cases of exhaustion the
preparation known as Gibberne's B Syrup has, I suppose, saved more lives
already than any lifeboat round the coast.

"But none of these little things begin to satisfy me yet," he told me
nearly a year ago. "Either they increase the central energy without
affecting the nerves or they simply increase the available energy by
lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are unequal and local
in their operation. One wakes up the heart and viscera and leaves
the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain champagne fashion and does
nothing good for the solar plexus, and what I want—and what, if it's an
earthly possibility, I mean to have—is a stimulant that stimulates all
round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head to the
tip of your great toe, and makes you go two—or even three—to everybody
else's one. Eh? That's the thing I'm after."

"It would tire a man," I said.

"Not a doubt of it. And you'd eat double or treble—and all that. But
just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself with a little
phial like this"—he held up a little bottle of green glass and marked
his points with it—"and in this precious phial is the power to think
twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice as much work in a given
time as you could otherwise do."

"But is such a thing possible?"

"I believe so. If it isn't, I've wasted my time for a year. These
various preparations of the hypophosphites, for example, seem to show
that something of the sort... Even if it was only one and a half times
as fast it would do."

"It WOULD do," I said.

"If you were a statesman in a corner, for example, time rushing up
against you, something urgent to be done, eh?"

"He could dose his private secretary," I said.

"And gain—double time. And think if YOU, for example, wanted to finish
a book."

"Usually," I said, "I wish I'd never begun 'em."

"Or a doctor, driven to death, wants to sit down and think out a case.
Or a barrister—or a man cramming for an examination."

"Worth a guinea a drop," said I, "and more to men like that."

"And in a duel, again," said Gibberne, "where it all depends on your
quickness in pulling the trigger."

"Or in fencing," I echoed.

"You see," said Gibberne, "if I get it as an all-round thing it will
really do you no harm at all—except perhaps to an infinitesimal degree
it brings you nearer old age. You will just have lived twice to other
people's once—"

"I suppose," I meditated, "in a duel—it would be fair?"

"That's a question for the seconds," said Gibberne.

I harked back further. "And you really think such a thing IS possible?"
I said.

"As possible," said Gibberne, and glanced at something that went
throbbing by the window, "as a motor-bus. As a matter of fact—"

He paused and smiled at me deeply, and tapped slowly on the edge of his
desk with the green phial. "I think I know the stuff.... Already I've
got something coming." The nervous smile upon his face betrayed the
gravity of his revelation. He rarely talked of his actual experimental
work unless things were very near the end. "And it may be, it may be—I
shouldn't be surprised—it may even do the thing at a greater rate than
twice."

"It will be rather a big thing," I hazarded.

"It will be, I think, rather a big thing."

But I don't think he quite knew what a big thing it was to be, for all
that.

I remember we had several talks about the stuff after that. "The New
Accelerator" he called it, and his tone about it grew more confident on
each occasion. Sometimes he talked nervously of unexpected physiological
results its use might have, and then he would get a little unhappy; at
others he was frankly mercenary, and we debated long and anxiously how
the preparation might be turned to commercial account. "It's a good
thing," said Gibberne, "a tremendous thing. I know I'm giving the world
something, and I think it only reasonable we should expect the world to
pay. The dignity of science is all very well, but I think somehow I must
have the monopoly of the stuff for, say, ten years. I don't see why ALL
the fun in life should go to the dealers in ham."

My own interest in the coming drug certainly did not wane in the time.
I have always had a queer little twist towards metaphysics in my mind. I
have always been given to paradoxes about space and time, and it seemed
to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less than the absolute
acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such a
preparation: he would live an active and record life indeed, but he
would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty
well on the road to senile decay. It seemed to me that so far Gibberne
was only going to do for any one who took his drug exactly what Nature
has done for the Jews and Orientals, who are men in their teens and aged
by fifty, and quicker in thought and act than we are all the time. The
marvel of drugs has always been great to my mind; you can madden a man,
calm a man, make him incredibly strong and alert or a helpless log,
quicken this passion and allay that, all by means of drugs, and here was
a new miracle to be added to this strange armoury of phials the doctors
use! But Gibberne was far too eager upon his technical points to enter
very keenly into my aspect of the question.

It was the 7th or 8th of August when he told me the distillation that
would decide his failure or success for a time was going forward as we
talked, and it was on the 10th that he told me the thing was done and
the New Accelerator a tangible reality in the world. I met him as I was
going up the Sandgate Hill towards Folkestone—I think I was going to
get my hair cut, and he came hurrying down to meet me—I suppose he was
coming to my house to tell me at once of his success. I remember that
his eyes were unusually bright and his face flushed, and I noted even
then the swift alacrity of his step.

"It's done," he cried, and gripped my hand, speaking very fast; "it's
more than done. Come up to my house and see."

"Really?"

"Really!" he shouted. "Incredibly! Come up and see."

"And it does—twice?

"It does more, much more. It scares me. Come up and see the stuff. Taste
it! Try it! It's the most amazing stuff on earth." He gripped my arm
and, walking at such a pace that he forced me into a trot, went shouting
with me up the hill. A whole char-a-banc-ful of people turned and stared
at us in unison after the manner of people in chars-a-banc. It was one
of those hot, clear days that Folkestone sees so much of, every colour
incredibly bright and every outline hard. There was a breeze, of course,
but not so much breeze as sufficed under these conditions to keep me
cool and dry. I panted for mercy.