THE SOUL-HUNTER






                               THE SOUL-HUNTER1


I BOUGHT his body for ten francs.  Months before I had bought his soul, bought
it for the first glass of the poison ___ the first glass of the new series of
horrors since his discharge, cured ___ cured! ___ from the "retreat."  Yes, I
tempted him, I, a doctor!  Bound by the vows ___ faugh!  I needed his body!
His soul? pah! but an incident in the bargain.  For soul is but a word, a vain
word ___ a battlefield of the philosopher fools, the theologian fools, since
Anaximander and Gregory Nanzianus.  A toy.  But the consciousness?  That is
what we mean by "soul," we others.  That then must live somewhere.  But is it,
as Descartes thought, atomic? or fluid, now here, now there?  Or is it but a
word for the totality of bodily sense?  As Weir Mitchell supposed.  Well, we
should see.  I would buy a brain and hunt this elusive consciousness.  Just
so, luck follows skill; the brain of Jules Foreau was the very pick of the
world's brains.  The most self-conscious man in Europe!  Intellectual to an
incredible point, introspective beyond the Hindus, "and" with the fatal craving
which made him mine.  Jules Foreau, you might have been a statesman; you
became a sot ___ but you shall make the name of doctor Arthur Lee famous for
ever, and put an end to the great {121} problem of the ages.  Aha, my friend,
how mad of me to fill my diary with this cheap introspective stuff!  I feel
somehow that the affair will end badly.  I am writing my "defence."  Certainly
that excuses the form.  A jury can never understand plain facts ___ the cold
light of science chills them; they need eloquence, sentiment. ... Well, I must
pay a lawyer for that, if trouble should really arise  How should it?  I have
made all safe ___ trust me!
   I gave him the drug yesterday.  The atropine was a touch of almost
superhuman cleverness; the fixed, glassy stare deader than death itself.  I
complied with the foolish formulae of the law; in three hours I had the body
in my laboratory.  In the present absurd state of the law there is really
nobody trustworthy in a business of this sort.  "Tant pis!"  I must cook my own
food for a month or so.  For no doubt there will be a good deal of noise.  No
doubt a good deal of noise.  I must risk that.  I dare not touch anything but
the brain; it might vitiate the whole experiment.  Bad enough this plaster of
Paris affair.  You see a healthy man of thirteen stone odd in his prime will
dislike any deep interference with his brain ___ resent it.  Chains are
useless; nothing keeps a man still.  Bar anaesthesia.  And anaesthesia is the
one thing barred.  He must feel, he must talk, he must be as normal as
possible.  So I have simply built his neck, shoulders, and arms into plaster.
He can yell and he can kick.  If it does him any good he is welcome.  So ___
to business.

10.30. A.M.  He is decidedly under the new drug ___ eta "; yet he does not
       move.  He takes longer to come back to life than I supposed. {122}
10.40. Warmth to extremities.  Inhalations of lambda .  He cannot speak yet, I
       think.  The glare of eyes is not due to hate, but to the atropine.
10.45. He has noticed the plaster arrangement and the nature of the room.  I
       think he guesses.  A gurgle.  I light a cigarette and put it in his
       mouth.  He spits it out.  He seems hardly to understand my good-humour.
10.47. The first word ___ "What is it, you devil?"  I show him the knife, "et"
       "cetera," and urge him to keep calm and self-collected .
10.50. A laugh, not too nervous.  A good sigh.  "By George, you amuse me!"
       Then with a sort of wistful sigh, "I thought you just meant to poison
       me in some new patent kind of way."  Bad; he wants to die.  Must cheer
       him up.
        1   Unpublished pages from the diary of Dr. Arthur Lee --- "the
          Montrouge Vampire."
11.0.  I have given my little scientific lecture.  The patient unimpressed.
       The absinthe has damaged his reasoning faculty.  He cannot see the "a"
       "priori" necessity of the experiment.  Strange!
11.10. Lord, how funny! ___ he thinks I may be mad, and is trying all the old
       dodges to "humour" me!  I must sober him.
11.15. Sobered him.  Showed him his own cranium ___ he had never missed it, of
       course.  Yet the fact seemed to surprise him.  Important, though, for
       my thesis.  Here at least is one part of the body whose absence in
       nowise diminishes the range of the sensorium ___ soul ___ what shall we
       call it?  "chi ."  Some important glands, of course, rule a man's
       whole life.  Others again ___ what use is a lymphatic to the soul?  To
       "chi "? {123}  Well, we must deal with the glands in detail, at the
       fountain-head, in the brain.
11.20. My writing seems to irritate him.  Daren't give drugs.  He flushes and
       pales too easily.  Absence of skull?  Now, a little cut and tie ___ and
       we shall see.
       N.B. ___ To keep this record very distinct from the pure surgery of the
       business.
11.22. A concentrated, sustained yell.  It has quite shaken me.  I never heard
       the like.  "All out" too, as we used to say on the Cam; he's physically
       exhausted ___ "e.g.", has stopped kicking.  Legs limp as possible.  Pure
       funk; I never hurt him.
11.25. A most curious thing: I feel an intense dislike of the man coming over
       me; and, with an almost insane fascination, the thought, "Suppose I
       were to "kiss" him?"  Followed by a shiver of physical loathing and
       disgust.  Such thoughts have no business here at all.  To work.
12.0.  I want a drink; there are most remarkable gaps in the consciousness ___
       not implying unconsciousness.  I am inclined to think that what we call
       continuous pain is a rhythmic beat, frequency of beat less than one in
       sixty.  The shrieks are simply heartbreaking.
12.5.  Silence, more terrible than the yells.  Afraid I had an accident.  He
       smiles, reassures me.  Speaks ___ "Look here, doctor, enough of this
       fooling; I'm annoyed with you, really don't know why ___ and I yell
       because I know it worries you.  But listen to this: under the drug I
       really died, though you thought I was simulating death.  On the
       contrary, it is now that {124} I am simulating life."  There seemed to
       me, and still seems, some essential absurdity in these words; yet I
       could not refute him.  I opened my mouth and closed it.  The voice went
       on: "It follows that your whole experiment is a childish failure."  I
       cut him short; this time I found words.  "You forget your position," I
       said hotly.  "It is against all precedent for the vivisectee to abuse
       his master.  Ingrate!"  So incensed was I that I strode angrily to the
       operating-chair and paralysed the ganglia governing the muscles of
       speech.  Imagine my surprise when he proceeded, entirely incommoded:
       "On the contrary, it is you who are dead, Arthur Lee."  The voice came
       from behind me, from far off.  "Until you die you never know it, but
       you have been dead all along."  My nerve is clearly gone; this must be
       a case of pure hallucination.  I begin to remember that I am alone ___
       alone in the big house with the ... patient.  Suppose I were to fall
       ill? ... Was this thought written in my face?  He laughed harsh and
       loud.  Disgusting beast!
12.15. A pretty fool I am, tying the wrong nerve.  No wonder he could go on
       talking!  A nasty slip in such an experiment as this.  Must check the
       whole thing through again. ...
 1.0.  O.K. now.  Must get some lunch.  Oddly enough, I am pretty sure he was
       telling the truth.  He feels no pain, and only yells to annoy me.
 2.10. Excellent!  I suppress all the senses but smell, and give him his
       wife's handkerchief.  He bubbles over with amorous drivel; I should
       love to tell him what she {125} died of, and who. ... A curious trait,
       that last remark.  Why do I "dislike" the man?  I used to get on A1 with
       him.  (N.B. to stitch eyelids with silk.  Damn the glare.)
 2.20. Theism!  The convolution with the cause-idea lying too close to the
       convolution with the fear-idea.  And imagination at work on the nexus!
       About 24 mu  between Charles Bradlaugh and Cardinal Newman!
 2.50. So for faith and doubt?  Sceptical criticism of my whole experiment
       boils up in me.  What is "normality"?  Even so, what possible relation
       is there between things and the evidence of them recorded in the brain?
       Evidence of something, maybe.  A thermometer chart gives a curve; yet
       the mercury has only moved up and down.  What about the time dimension?
       But it is not a dimension; it is only a word to explain multiplicity of
       sensation.  Words! words! words!  This is the last straw.  There is no
       conceivable standard whereby we may measure anything whatever; and it
       is useless to pretend there is.
 3.3.  In short, we are all mad.  Yet all this is but the expression of the
       doubt-stop in the human organ.  Let me pull out his faith-stop!
 4.45. Done; the devil's own job.  He seems to be a Pantheist Antinomian with
       leanings towards Ritualism.  Not impressive.  My observation-stop (= my
       doubt-stop nearly) is full out.  (Funny that we should fall into the
       old faculty jargon.)  Perhaps if one's own faith-stop were out there
       would be a fight; if one's reception-of-new-ideas-stop, a conversion.
       {126}
 5.12. I only wish I had two of them to test the "tuning-up" theory of
       collective Hallucination and the like.  Out of the question; we must
       wait for Socialism.  But enough for the day is the research thereof.
       I've matter for a life's work already.
 7.50. An excellent scratch dinner ___ none too soon.  Turtle soup, potted
       char, Yorkshire pie, Stilton, burgundy.  Better than nothing.  To-
       morrow the question of putrefactive changes in the limbs and their
       relation to the brain.
 3.1.  Planted bacilli in left foot.  Will leave him to sleep.  No difficulty
       there; the brute's as tired as I am.  Too tired to curse.  I recited
       "Abide with Me" throughout to soothe him.  Some lines distinctly
       humorous under the circumstances.  Will have a smoke in the study and
       check through the surg. record.  Too dazed to realise everything, but I
       am assuredly an epoch.  Whaur's your Robbie Pasteur noo?
12.20. So I've been on a false trail all day!  The course of the
 A.M.  research has let right away from the "chi -hunt."  The byways have
       obscured the main road.  Valuable though; very very valuable.  In the
       morning success.  Bed!
12.30. Yells and struggles again when I went in to say good-night.  As I had
       carefully paralysed "all" sensory avenues (to ensure perfect rest), how
       was he aware of my presence?  The memory of the scented handkerchief,
       too, very strong; talked a lot of his wife, thinking here with him.
       Pah! what beasts some men must be!  Disgusting fellow!  I'm no prude
       either!  If ever I do a woman I'll stop the Filth-gutter.  "Ce serait"
       "trop." {127}
12.40  Maybe he did "not" know of my presence; merely remembered me.  He has
       cause.  How much there is in one's mind of the merely personal idea of
       scoring off the bowlers.  And every man is a batsman in a world of
       bowlers.  Like that leg-cricket game, what did we call it?  Oh! bed,
       bed!
 5.0.  Patient seriously ill; plaster irks breathing; all sorts of troubles
       expected and unexpected.  Putrefaction of left foot well advanced:
       promises well for the day's work if I can check collapse.
 5.31. Patient very much better; paralysed motor ganglia; safe to remove
       plaster.  Too much time wasted on these foolish mechanical details of
       life when one is looking for the Master of the Machine.
 6.12. Patient in excellent fettle; now to find "chi " ___ the soul!
11.55. Worn out; no "chi " yet.  Patient well, normal; have checked shrieks,
       ingenious dodge.
 2.15. No time for food; brandy.  Patient fighting fit.  No "chi ."
 3.1.  "Dead!!!"  No cause in the world ___ I must have cut right into the
       "chi ," the soul.
       The meningeal ---

   [Dr. Lee's diary breaks off abruptly at this point.  His researches were
never published.  It will be remembered that he was convicted of causing the
death of his mistress, Jeannette Pheyron, under mysterious circumstances, some
six months after the date of the above.  The surgical record referred to has
not been found. ___ EDITOR.]

{128}