Part 5 (2/2)
Well, here, at last, was the long expected, impossible, amazing reality.
When I had deciphered the last word, when I had it borne fully in upon me, the significance of it all, I turned to the one natural effort to answer this Martian communication. I sent out from the battery of our transmitter the longest wave of magnetic oscillation I could emit. The message was simple: ”Have received all. Await more. Transmission perfect.”
CHAPTER IV.
Again for weeks I watched the station. My a.s.sistants relieved me, and amongst them was now included Miss Dodan. It was only a few days after the Dodans found me at the register, absorbed in receiving my father's message, that Miss Dodan called. She ran toward me at the open door of the station, her face fixed in an anxious expression of half-alarmed expectation.
”Did you really, Mr. Dodd, hear anything? Is it true that something came from your father. Oh, tell me, can it be possible?”
I took her clasped hands in my own, looked into her face and told her everything. She was the first visitor to the station since the day of the marvellous experience. My a.s.sistants had promised secrecy, which I reinforced effectively by doubling their salaries. I felt I ought not to have revealed this thing to Miss Dodan, and when in the first impulse of confidence everything so unwittingly pa.s.sed my lips, I took her arm in mine and walked out upon the broad plateau toward the opposite end where our smaller experimenting station had been built.
”Miss Dodan,” I said, ”I am going to ask a great favor of you.”
”Yes,” she answered, half musingly, for the tremendous fact I had related had half robbed her of her consciousness of pa.s.sing things.
”I want you solemnly for the present to promise me not to reveal the strange thing I have told you. It would hardly be believed. No, I am sure it would be laughed at, and I would become in the eyes of everyone a foolish, impossible dreamer. This would give me a deep sorrow. My father's name would be dragged into the mire of this common ridicule.
You revered my father.”
I bent more closely over her, I felt her breath upon my cheeks, her eyes seemed fixed in mine, and then I did what I had never done before, I kissed the lips of a woman and it was also the lips of the woman I loved. There was no resistance, no withdrawal; a tremor--was it pleasure?--seemed to disturb her for a moment and again I kissed her.
This time with a quiet effort toward release she separated herself from me, and while I still held her hands, our walk stopped and we faced each other, just where looking westward the spires, and flocking houses of Christ Church came fully in view.
”Miss Dodan,” I began, fearful to use her first name through a reluctance that was itself the expression of the deep love I bore her, ”Miss Dodan, I may for some time yet be engaged in this now imperative work. I cannot, you know, now leave it. It is the most marvellous thing the world has ever known. It means so much to me, indeed to us all.
These messages are erratic--fitful. I have now waited for weeks for a renewal of these strange communications and there is nothing. But in the midst of this, a distracting love for you seems to unnerve and torment me. I beg you to wait until those days may come when I can show you all the devotion I yearn now to give you, but must not, for every moment that voice may reach me from beyond the grave, and I would be recreant to the most sacred obligations, and deep responsibilities that seem now to shape themselves before me, to our common humanity, if I forfeited an instant of inattention. I beg you to remember all this and wait, wait, until the depthless power of my love for you can be made clear.”
I would have sunk upon my knees in the abas.e.m.e.nt and pa.s.sion of my desire for her, had she not suddenly drawn me to her, flung her arms about my neck and placed her head where--well, I am no connoisseur in love scenes--but that day Agnes Dodan, without a syllable of sound gave her heart to me.
We pa.s.sed back in silence, and when she left me the fluttering handkerchief that had so often waved back its salutation on the winding distant road was now in my hands, and its signals sent by me came to her from the plateau. It was the simple pledge of our mutual love, a pledge that even now as I prepare these last pages of a ma.n.u.script that is a testament to the world, soothes my pain and renews the happiness of that day, forever and forever lost.
The next message came a few days after my interview with Miss Dodan. It was a rainy day in November--the spring time of that Southern land. The register was heard by one of my a.s.sistants, Jack Jobson, a man who had unremittingly taken my place when I was absent, and who seemed more than anyone else dazed and wonder stricken over the experience we had. He came running to me, a wild terror in his face, exclaiming, ”It's going again, sir. Hurry! It's running slow.” I sprang upstairs, and before I had reached it heard the telltale clicks. It was not altogether a sheltered position, and as I reached the table I felt the bleak and chilly air penetrating the crevices of the window, a raw ocean breeze that in a few instants crept through my bones. But I was again unconscious of everything; that marvellous ticking obliterated all thought of earth, its affairs, accidents, dangers, loves, hopes, despairs, all forgotten, swallowed up in the immeasurable revelation I was about to receive.
The second message began at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon of November 25, 1893, two months exactly after the first. Its very opening sentences I failed to get. It lasted late into the morning of the next day. The strain of taking it was somehow singularly intense upon me. I was taken from the table the next morning unconscious. I had fainted at the close.
It began, as I received it, a few opening sentences having been lost:
”...was sent to you I was in the City of Light, and now I am in the City of Scandor.
”The morning of that wonderful night in which I became a flesh and blood Martian, strong and young and beautiful, dawned fair. My friend came for me, and we went together to the great 'Commons' of the Patenta, a superb hall where all the professors, investigators, and students in the great Academy sit at many tables. This huge dining room is at the center of the group of buildings which make up the Patenta. Corridors lead into it from the four sections of the Patenta, and as we entered, from the different sides there were many men and some women taking the ivory chairs at the side's of the long tables of marble, on which rose in beautiful confusion of color crowded vases of fruits.
”Surrounding the room are niches instead of windows, and in each niche one n.o.ble symbolic figure in white or colored marble.
”Light fell in a torrent of glory through the faintly opalescent gla.s.s compartments of the ceiling, from which, at the intersection of the broad and long rafters of blue metal, hung chandeliers formed in branching arms with cup-like extremities, and holding spheres of the omnipresent _phosphori_.
”I stood a moment with my companion at the entrance of the great dining room, and watched the groups and individual arrivals, as they a.s.sorted themselves into companies or engaged in some short interchange of greetings. It was a very beautiful scene. The faces of all were wonderfully clear and strong, and in the commingling of forms, the bold, intellectual features of some, the more rare, delicate outlines of other faces, the flowing of the graceful tunics and robes, the pleasant, musical confusion of voices, with the quick, glancing movements of attendants, the heaped up chalices and baskets, vases and broad spreading plates of fruit, the many carelessly arranged and profuse bunches of radiant flowers in tall receptacles of gla.s.s or alabaster, in all this, with the strong, simple architectural features of the Hall, the eye and mind and senses seemed equally stimulated and satisfied.
”Amongst the glorious throng my companion pointed out to me many of those great men and women whom I seemed to know by their writings and portraits when on the earth. At one table sat Mary Somerville, Leverrier, Adams, La Place, Gauss and Helmholz; at another Dalton, Schonbeim, Davy, Tyndall, Berthollet, Berzelius, Priestly, Lavoisier, and Liebig; here were groups of physicists--Faraday, Volta, Galvani, Ampere, Fahrenheit, Henry, Draper, Biot, Chladini, Black, Melloni, Senarmont, Regnault, Daniells, Fresnel, Fizeau, Mariotte, Deville, Troost, Gay-Lussac, Foucault, Wheatstone, and many, many more. At a small table immediately beneath a dome of gla.s.s, through whose softly opaline texture an aureole of light seemed to embrace them, sat Franklin, Galileo and Newton. It would be impossible to describe to you my amazement at the astonis.h.i.+ng picture.
”It almost seemed as if the air vibrated with the excitement of its impact and use, as these giant minds conversed together. Endowed again with youth, scintillating, brilliant, the flush of a semi-immortality impressed upon their faces, which again bespoke the eminence of their intellects, in picturesque and effective, almost pictorial groupings, this wondrous gathering filled me with new rapture. My comrade led me to other branching halls similarly occupied. Chemists were here conspicuous--Chevreuil, Talbot, Wedgewood, Daguerre, Cooke, Fresenius, Schmidt, Avogadro, Liebig, Davy, Berthollet, and many, many more.
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