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be a blank? No? Then tell me--for I am student of the brain--how you
accept the hypnotism and reject the thought reading. Let me tell you, my
friend, that there are things done to-day in electrical science which
would have been deemed unholy by the very men who discovered
electricity--who would themselves not so long before have been burned
as wizards. There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that
Methuselah lived nine hundred years, and 'Old Parr' one hundred and
sixty-nine, and yet that poor Lucy, with four men's blood in her poor
veins, could not live even one day? For, had she live one more day, we
could have save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death? Do
you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say wherefore the
qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others? Can you tell me
why, when other spiders die small and soon, that one great spider lived
for centuries in the tower of the old Spanish church and grew and grew,
till, on descending, he could drink the oil of all the church lamps? Can
you tell me why in the Pampas, ay and elsewhere, there are bats that
come at night and open the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their
veins; how in some islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang
on the trees all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant
nuts or pods, and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that
it is hot, flit down on them, and then--and then in the morning are
found dead men, white as even Miss Lucy was?"
"Good God, Professor!" I said, starting up. "Do you mean to tell me that
Lucy was bitten by such a bat; and that such a thing is here in London
in the nineteenth century?" He waved his hand for silence, and went
on:--
"Can you tell me why the tortoise lives more long than generations of
men; why the elephant goes on and on till he have seen dynasties; and
why the parrot never die only of bite of cat or dog or other complaint?
Can you tell me why men believe in all ages and places that there are
some few who live on always if they be permit; that there are men and
women who cannot die? We all know--because science has vouched for the
fact--that there have been toads shut up in rocks for thousands of
years, shut in one so small hole that only hold him since the youth of
the world. Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to die
and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it, and the
corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again, and then men
come and take away the unbroken seal and that there lie the Indian
fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk amongst them as before?" Here
I interrupted him. I was getting bewildered; he so crowded on my mind
his list of nature's eccentricities and possible impossibilities that my
imagination was getting fired. I had a dim idea that he was teaching me
some lesson, as long ago he used to do in his study at Amsterdam; but
he used then to tell me the thing, so that I could have the object of
thought in mind all the time. But now I was without this help, yet I
wanted to follow him, so I said:--
"Professor, let me be your pet student again. Tell me the thesis, so
that I may apply your knowledge as you go on. At present I am going in
my mind from point to point as a mad man, and not a sane one, follows an
idea. I feel like a novice lumbering through a bog in a mist, jumping
from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort to move on without
knowing where I am going."
"That is good image," he said. "Well, I shall tell you. My thesis is
this: I want you to believe."
"To believe what?"
"To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I heard once
of an American who so defined faith: 'that faculty which enables us to
believe things which we know to be untrue.' For one, I follow that man.
He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of
truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway
truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value
him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in
the universe."
"Then you want me not to let some previous conviction injure the
receptivity of my mind with regard to some strange matter. Do I read
your lesson aright?"
"Ah, you are my favourite pupil still. It is worth to teach you. Now
that you are willing to understand, you have taken the first step to
understand. You think then that those so small holes in the children's
throats were made by the same that made the hole in Miss Lucy?"
"I suppose so." He stood up and said solemnly:--
"Then you are wrong. Oh, would it were so! but alas! no. It is worse,
far, far worse."
"In God's name, Professor Van Helsing, what do you mean?" I cried.
He threw himself with a despairing gesture into a chair, and placed his
elbows on the table, covering his face with his hands as he spoke:--
"They were made by Miss Lucy!"
CHAPTER XV
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY--_continued_.
For a while sheer anger mastered me; it was as if he had during her life