The Double Life Of Mr. Alfred Burton Part 34

"There are cells in one's memory," he muttered. "I don't understand--I don't know how they get there--but don't you remember that time last summer when I was picnicking with my common friends? We were drinking beer out of a stone jug, we were singing vulgar songs, we were revelling in the silly puerilities of a bank holiday out of doors. And I saw your face and something came to me. I saw for a moment over the wall. Dear, I am very sure that if I go back there will be times when I shall see over the wall, and my heart will ache and the whole taste of life will be like dust between my teeth."

She leaned towards him.

"It is your fault if I say this," she whispered. "It is you yourself who have prepared the way. Why not make sure of riches? The world can give so much to the rich. You can buy education, manners, taste.

Anything, surely, would be better than taking up the life of an auctioneer's clerk once more? With riches you can at least get away from the most oppressive forms of vulgarity."

"I wish I could believe it," he replied. "The poor man is, as a rule, natural. The rich man has the taste of other things on his palate; he has looked over the wrong wall, he apes what he sees in the wrong garden."

"Not always," she pleaded. "Don't you believe that something will remain of these splendid months of yours--some will power, some faint impulse towards the choicer ways of life? Oh, it really must be so!"

she went on, more confidently. "I am sure of it. I think of you as you are now, how carefully you control even your emotions, how sensitive you always are in your speech, and I know that you could never revert entirely to those other days. You may slip back, and slip back a long way, but there would always be something to keep you from the depths."

Her eyes were glowing. Her fingers deliberately touched his for a moment.

"It is wonderful to hope that it may be so," he sighed. "Even as I sit here and remember that awful picnic party, I remember, too, that something drew me a little away from the others to gaze into your garden and at you. There was something, even then, which kept me from being with them while I looked, and I know that at that moment, at the moment I looked up and met your eyes, I know that there was no vulgar thought in my heart."

"Dear," she said, "with every word you make me the more inclined to persist. I honestly believe that father and Mr. Bomford are right. It is your duty. You owe it to yourself to accept their offer."

He sat for several minutes without speech.

"If I could only make you understand!" he went on at last. "Somehow, I feel as though it would be making almost a vulgar use of something which is to me divine. These strange little things which Mr. Bomford would have me barter for money, brought me out of the unclean world and showed me how beautiful life might be--showed me, indeed, what beauty really is. There is no religion has ever brought such joy to the heart of a man, nor any love, nor any of the great pa.s.sions of the world have opened such gates as they have done for me. You can't imagine what the hideous life is like--the life of vulgar days, of ugly surroundings, the dull and ceaseless trudge side by side with the mult.i.tude across the sterile plain, without the power to raise one's eyes, without the power to stretch out one's arms and feel the throb of freedom in one's pulses.

If I die to-morrow, I shall at least have lived for a little time, thanks to these. Can you wonder that I think of them with reverence?

Yet you ask me to make use of one of them to help launch upon the world a patent food, something built upon the credulity of fools, something whose praises must be sung in blatant advertis.e.m.e.nts, desecrating the pages of magazines, gaping from the h.o.a.rdings, thrust inside the c.h.i.n.ks of human simplicity by the art of the advertising agent. Edith, it is a hard thing, this. Do try and realize how hard it is. If there be anything in the world divine, if there be anything sacred at all, anything to lift one from the common way, it is what you ask me to sacrifice."

"You are such a sentimentalist, dear," she whispered. "You need have no share in the commercial part of this. The money can simply keep you while you write, or help you to travel."

"It will lead that other fellow," he groaned, "into no end of mischief."

The professor and Mr. Bomford returned. They talked for a little time together and then the party broke up. As they waited for Edith to get her cloak, Burton spoke the few words which they were both longing to hear.

"Mr. Bomford," he announced, "and professor, I should like to see you to-morrow. I am going to think over this matter to-night once more. It is very possible that I may see my way clear to do as you ask."

"Mr. Burton, sir," the professor said, grasping his hand, "I congratulate you. I felt sure that your common sense would a.s.sert itself. Let me a.s.sure you of one thing, too. Indirectly you will be the cause of marvelous discoveries, enlightening discoveries, being made as to the source of some of that older civilization which still bewilders the student of prehistoric days."

Mr. Bomford had less to say but he was quite as emphatic.

"If you only think hard enough, Mr. Burton," he declared, "you can't make a mistake."

He saw them into the motor, Edith in a cloak of lace which made her seem like some dainty, fairylike creature as she stepped from the pavement into a corner of the landaulette. Afterwards, he walked with uplifted heart through the streets and back to his rooms. He let himself in with a mechanical turn of the key. On the threshold he stood still in sudden amazement. The lights were all turned on, the room was in rank disorder. Simmering upon the hearth were the remains of his novel; upset upon the table several pots of paint. Three chairs were lashed together with a piece of rope. On a fourth sat Alfred, cracking a home-made whip. His hands were covered with coal-dust, traces of which were smeared upon his cheeks. There were spots of ink all down his clothes, his eyes seemed somehow to have crept closer together. There were distinct signs of a tendency on the part of his hair to curl over a certain spot on his forehead. He looked at his father like a whipped hound but he said never a word.

"What on earth have you been doing, Alfred?" Burton faltered.

The boy dropped his whip and put his finger in his mouth. He was obviously on the point of howling.

"You left me here all alone," he said, in an aggrieved tone. "There was no one to play with, nothing to do. I want to go back to mother; I want Ned and d.i.c.k to play with. Don't want to stop here any longer."

He began to howl. Burton looked around once more at the scene of his desolation. He moved to the fireplace and gazed down at the charred remnants of his novel. The boy continued to howl.

CHAPTER XXIV

MENATOGEN, THE MIND FOOD

It had been a dinner of celebration. The professor had ransacked his cellar and produced his best wine. He had drunk a good deal of it himself--so had Mr. Bomford. A third visitor, Mr. Horace Bunsome, a company promoter from the city, had been even more a.s.siduous in his attentions to a particular brand of champagne.

Burton had been conscious of a sense of drifting. The more human side of him was paramount. The dinner was perfect; the long, low dining-room, with its bowls of flowers and quaint decorations, delightful; the wine and food the best of their sort. Edith, looking like an exquisite picture, was sitting by his side. After all, if the end of things were to come this way, what did it matter? She had no eyes for any one else, her fingers had touched his more than once. The complete joy of living was in his pulses. He, too, had yielded to the general spirit.

Edith left them late and reluctantly. Then the professor raised his gla.s.s. There was an unaccustomed color in his parchment-white cheeks.

His spectacles were sitting at a new angle, his black tie had wandered from its usual precise place around to the side of his neck.

"Let us drink," he exclaimed, "to the new company! To the new Mind Food, to the new scientific diet of the coming century! Let us drink to ourselves, the pioneers of this wonderful discovery, the manufacturers and owners-to-be of the new food, the first of its kind created and designed to satisfy the moral appet.i.te."

"We'll have a little of that in the prospectus," Mr. Horace Bunsome remarked, taking out his notebook. "It sounds mighty good, professor."

"It sounds good because it is true, sir," Mr. Cowper a.s.serted, a little severely. "Your services, Mr. Bunsome, are necessary to us, but I beg that you will not confound the enterprise in which you will presently find yourself engaged, with any of the hazardous, will-o'-the-wisp undertakings which spring up day by day, they tell me, in the city, and which owe their very existence and such measure of success as they may achieve, to the credulity of fools. Let me impress upon you, Mr.

Bunsome, that you are, on this occasion, a.s.sociated with a genuine and marvelous discovery--the scientific discovery, sir, of the age. You are going to be one of those who will offer to the world a genuine--an absolutely genuine tonic to the moral system."

Mr. Bunsome nodded approvingly.

"The more I hear you talk," he declared, "the more I like the sound of it. People are tired of brain foods and nerve foods. A food for the moral self! Professor, you're a genius."

"I am nothing of the sort, sir," the professor answered. "My share in this is trifling. The discovery is the discovery of our friend here,"

he continued, indicating Burton. "The idea of exploiting it is the idea of Mr. Bomford. . . . My young friend Burton, you, at least, must rejoice with us to-night. You must rejoice, in your heart, that our wise counsels have prevailed. You must feel that you have done a great and a good action in sharing this inheritance of yours with millions of your fellow-creatures."

Burton leaned a little forward in his place.

"Professor," he said, "remember that there are only two small beans, each less than the size of a sixpence, which I have handed over to you.

As to the qualities which they possess, there is no shadow of doubt about them for I myself am a proof. Yet you take one's breath away with your schemes. How could you, out of two beans, provide a food for millions?"

The professor smiled.

"Science will do it, my dear Mr. Burton," he replied, with some note of patronage in his tone, "science, the highways of which to you are an untrodden road. I myself am a chemist. I myself, before I felt the call of a.s.syria, have made discoveries not wholly unimportant. This afternoon I spent four hours in my laboratory with one of your beans. I tell you frankly that I have discovered const.i.tuents in that small article which absolutely stupefy me, qualities which no substance on earth that I know of, in the vegetable or mineral world, possesses. Yet within a week, the chemist whom I have engaged to come to my a.s.sistance and I will a.s.suredly have resolved that little bean into a definite formula. When we have done that, the rest is easy. Its primary const.i.tuents will form the backbone of our new food. If we are only able to reproduce them in trifling quant.i.ties, then we must add a larger proportion of some harmless and negative substance. The matter is simple."

"No worry about that, that I can see," Mr. Bunsome remarked. "So long as we have this testimony of Mr. Burton's, and the professor's introduction and explanation, we don't really need the bean at all.

We've only got to print his story, get hold of some tasteless sort of stuff that no one can exactly a.n.a.lyze, and the whole thing's done so far as we are concerned. Of course, whether it takes on or not with the public is always a bit of a risk, but the risk doesn't lie with us to control. It depends entirely upon the advertis.e.m.e.nts. If we are able to engage Rentoul, and raise enough money to give him a free hand for the posters as well as the literary matter, why then, I tell you, this moral food will turn out to be the greatest boom of the generation."

Mr. Cowper moved a little uneasily in his chair.

"Yours, Mr. Bunsome," he said, "is purely the commercial point of view.

So far as Mr. Burton and I are concerned, and Mr. Bomford, too, you must please remember that we are profoundly and absolutely convinced of the almost miraculous properties of this preparation. Its romantic history is a thing we have thoroughly attested. Our only fear at the present moment is that too large a quant.i.ty of the const.i.tuents of the beans which Mr. Burton has handed over to me, may be found to be distilled from Oriental herbs brought by that old student from the East.

However, of that in a few days' time we shall of course be able to speak more definitely."

Mr. Bunsome coughed.

"Anyway," he declared, "that isn't my show. My part is to get the particulars of this thing into shape, draft a prospectus, and engage Rentoul if we can raise the money. I presume Mr. Burton will have no objection to our using his photograph on the posters?"

Burton s.h.i.+vered.