Mirrikh, or, A Woman from Mars/Chapter 7
CHAPTER VII.
A DRY DISCOURSE ON MARRIAGE AND OTHER THINGS.
“Marriage,” said the Rev. Miles Philpot, “it's a snare and a delusion. The world were better off without it. Better with such easy matrimonial relations as obtain among these people and other Eastern nations. That is my firm conviction, based upon an experience which, believe me, has been by no means small.”
We were still seated around the fire in the old stone tower and as the storm without was raging with unabated fury, it seemed altogether probable that we should be forced to continue there for the remainder of the night.
Really I cannot say how our conversation came to drift into this channel. I have no doubt, however, that Philpot himself started it. Maurice had been defending the marriage relation when it reached this point, while for my own part, finding the subject entirely distasteful, I had thus far kept quietly to my pipe and made no remark.
“I don’t agree with you all,” replied Maurice. “It is a well known fact that the nations most advanced in civilization are those among whom the marriage relation is held to be sacred. Am I not right, George?”
“Of course you are,” I replied. “A happy conjugal union is”
“Slavery,” interrupted Philpot, “mere slavery. A wife tied down by pinafores and household cares is in much the same situation as an enterprising oyster, who can’t get off its bed no matter how hard it tries. As for the husband, ask any poor devil who has been there if slavery is not preferable. Besides that, marriage breeds deceit in any man who is a man. A bachelor may and does do as he pleases and don’t give a rap who knows it; but a married man must perpetually dissemble if he would keep the peace. It is a known fact that our greatest minds have been those untrammeled by domestic cares.”
“Have you ever been married yourself?” I asked, abruptly.
“No, thank God, nor never intend to be; though I have spliced at least a great gross of idiots in my time.”
“Which gives you no claim to an intimate knowledge of the conjugal relation, however.”
“Bah! The French manage things after my notion. There you have an enlightened race upon whom the sanctity of the marriage relation rests with feathery lightness. Don’t trust the woman unless you want to have your heart turned inside out, and your faith in human nature destroyed. Hasn’t such been your experience, Mr. Wylde?”
“Unfortunately it has, and probably you know it,” I answered, “but, for all that, I am not shallow enough to fancy that because I have been unfortunate, there are no true women in the world.”
“I know nothing about your private affairs,” he replied, hastily. “Pardon me if I have probed an unhealed wound.”
“I assure you, George, that he don’t,” Maurice hastened to say. “I never told him a solitary thing.”
“I don’t care whether he knows or not,” I said, for I felt in just that mood. “Look here, Doctor, my wife made life a hell while she lived with me, and wound up by running off with another man.”
“Indeed!”
“It is true. I”
He raised his hand and gave one of his disagreeable laughs.
“Pray spare me the details, Wylde. I have no doubt you were as much to blame as she was. Now with an easy divorce law, all this might have been avoided. As it is, your life is broken, your happiness destroyed, or at least you think so, for I have not the least doubt you will be idiot enough to try it again.”
“Thank you for the compliment—no. I’ve had enough of married life, but because I’ve been bitten it don’t follow that marriage has brought the same unhappiness to every other man who has been bold enough to take the risk.”
“Oh, of course not. Nobody claims that. But a woman must be the husband’s slave to bring conjugal happiness. De Veber, ain’t that so?”
“Don’t ask me. I’ve never been married, and doubt if I ever shall be,” laughed Maurice.
“Take my advice,” said Philpot, “and you never will be; but just the same I’d like to have your ideas on the subject.”
“You’d only laugh at them if I were to undertake to express them.”
“Indeed no. I’m a bit cynical, I own, but every man has a right to his opinion.”
“I don’t think the marriage relation has ever been properly understood.”
“And why so? I labored under the delusion that it was something which scarcely called for instruction.”
“Doctor,” said Maurice, slowly, “which was created first, the man or the woman?”
“Adam was the first man, Eve was the t’other, Cain was a wicked man, ’cause he killed his brother,” laughed the Doctor. “That’s the way the old rhyme runs.”
“In which there is more truth than you may fancy. But I put Genesis aside, for it has nothing whatever to do with the conclusion I have reasoned myself into.”
“Which is? ”
“Substantially this,” replied Maurice, lighting his cheroot by pressing it against a glowing coal. I don’t know that I shall be able to express myself, but I will try.”
“I’m all attention, my dear fellow.”
“Well then, here goes. There must have been a beginning, and in that beginning I believe that man and woman were actually one, being a complete object, a harmonious whole.”
“On what do you base such a fancy, if not upon the Adamic tradition?”
“I can hardly tell you, but it is nevertheless my belief. Woman is but the half of a perfect human creation—you cannot look at her in any other way.”
“Physically?”
“No, spiritually; or, if you like it better, mentally. In the man the reasoning principle is uppermost and strongest; in the woman the principle of affection. Wisdom, knowledge, combined with the power of utilizing that knowledge and combined again with love, which embraces all the finer sentiments of human nature, is the power which controls the world. In God we have such a combination of qualifications. Man, made in the image of God, must, therefore, originally have possessed these qualities so combined. The necessities of man’s future existence on this earth demanded a separation, and it was given. Hence we have men and women. The one possessed with wisdom, the other with affection. Marriage, therefore, becomes a positive necessity; for without it, man must ever remain an uncompleted work,”
“Rubbish!” broke out the Doctor. “You have been reading the works of some mediaeval mystic. I think I could name him if I chose.”
“On the contrary, I have never read a line which conveys such notions. It is solely by thought and observation that I have reached these conclusions. A married man who is uncongenially mated, is simply one of the mistakes, and in no way affects my theory; an unmarried man is a half developed creature, and invariably a selfish one, full of evil qualities which, had he entered the true conjugal relation, would, to a great or less extent, have been eradicated. I’m afraid I don’t make myself very plain.”
“Your proposition is plain enough, but I can’t endorse it,” replied the Doctor. “How is it with you, Wylde?”
“Oh, it’s too deep a thought for me.” I answered. “I have never considered marriage in that light; but it is a known fact, that happily married persons grow to resemble one another in the course of years.”
“Of course it is,” replied Maurice. “Not only in outward appearance, but mentally to a far greater degree.”
“Then you think that in the Milenium, men and women will actually become one? Two souls dwelling in one body?”
“Now you are quizzing,” replied Maurice, “and ’tis time to call a halt. I don’t claim that my theory has the virtue of novelty”
“You’d better not. It’s been written upon again and again.”
“Yet, I repeat, I never read a line which helped me to my way of thinking. Do you know I’ve often wondered if, perhaps, on some of the planets such a state of affairs did not actually exist.”
“What a dreamy chap you are, to be sure, De Veber,” said Philpot, yawning. “It would be a deuced disagreeable state of affairs if a fellow had to carry his wife about with him wherever he went. But I’m sick of the discussion, and my pipe is out. After I fill up—my dear boy I shall have to trouble you again for the tobacco bag—suppose we turn our attention to Mirrikh. A union of souls or a union of bodies is scarcely worth considering, but a union of black and white, or black and yellow, in a man’s face we have seen to-night, and I, for one, am puzzled to death to understand what it means.”
“And we might puzzle ourselves over it to all eternity, and then not understand it,” said Maurice.
“Just so. Could you spare another nip of that brandy, De Veber? Ah, thanks! Yours truly! It shall be only a little one, for there’s precious little left. Devilish good liquor that! I’ll warrant you had it sent out to you from New York. Some favorite brand that you had been accustomed to drinking, no doubt.”
“On the contrary, I bought it in Panompin,” replied Maurice, “We Americans don’t all drink spirits as the English do. I never tasted liquor until after I left for the East.”
“Come now, that’s pretty good!” exclaimed the Doctor. “Americans don’t drink spirits like the English. Why man, I never knew the capacity of the human system to dispose of alcohol until I visited your Chicago, and that is not to be compared with some of the Canadian cities. But speaking of spirits, brings us by natural and easy stages to Spiritualism. Ardent spirits wandering down a fellow’s gullet naturally suggests wandering spirits from another sphere ardently seeking to return to the scene of their earthly pains and pleasures. There, I throw down the gauntlet, boys. Spiritualism—Mirrikh. Mirrikh—Spiritualism. I don’t care which is on top. Let the chairman of the committee on manifestations, materializations and mediumistic humbuggery, take it up and express his views.”
“Bless my soul, Mr. Philpot, how you do rattle on,” I answered, half angrily, as I threw a few fresh sticks on the fire. “What in the name of sense has Spiritualism got to do with Mirrikh? You don’t consider him a ghost, I suppose?”
“I’m not so sure, Wylde. Not so sure.”
“What do you mean? How can an agnostic believe in ghosts?”
“He cannot, as you understand the meaning of the word ghost, as the world understands it; but, like De Veber and his marriage views, I have an odd theory of my own on the subject of ghosts.”
“And you are just dying to let it out, I suppose. Good; by all means let us have the great Philpot ghost theory. If it will explain the levitations of Mirrikh, the medal of the Angkor theosophical club is fairly yours.”
“That’s right, George. I’m glad to see you brightening up. Come, Philpot, let’s have it. You claim that when man dies he goes to dust and there’s the end of him, and now you profess to believe in ghosts. I am curious to see how you propose to reconcile all this.”
“I go to show you, boys,” was the Doctor’s answer. “Hitherto I have maintained a discreet silence about this Mirrikh business, for I wanted to actually see the man before I expressed an opinion. Now that I have seen him I am ready to talk. Let us begin with the proposition, what is a ghost?”
“The disembodied spirit of some deceased person, of course,” answered Maurice.
“There you are wrong. It is usually so considered, but it is by no means necessarily so. Indeed, if you were to investigate this subject as closely as I have done, you would find that the ghosts of living persons have as frequently put in an appearance as the so-called disembodied spirits of the dead.”
“I have heard something of this before,” said Maurice. “Indeed I had a friend who claimed to have repeatedly seen the shades of living people of whose presence at distant points at the time of their appearance he was most positive.”
“Very good, my boy. Your friend is not alone in that. I, myself, have experienced the same thing. Hundreds of others have experienced it. Were such things recorded to the extent that similar appearances of dead persons have been, I firmly believe the world would be astounded. Take, for instance, the case of an old aunt of mine. When I was a boy, and living in London, she resided in Bristol. I was her favorite, and I must confess to a fondness for the dear old lady which I never felt for any one else. My father died before I was born, and she was his sister, which, perhaps, accounts for it. But as I was about to say, I used occasionally to take a run down to Bristol to see my aunt. At first I always notified her of my intended visit, but upon one occasion I omitted to do so, and dropping in upon her one morning quite unexpectedly, was astonished to find a room all ready for me and breakfast prepared. ‘I knew you were coming, Miles,’ she said. ‘You were here in this room last evening and told me so.’ I was amazed; but never after that did I notify my aunt of my intended visits and never did I fail to find everything ready for my reception.”
“Oh such impressions are common enough,” said Maurice.
“I could duplicate that story and give half a dozen more just like it.”
“No doubt. So could almost any one. Let us admit, therefore, that a certain degree of intensity of thought may command the presence of the spirit of an absent living friend—I use the word spirit solely for want of another as expressive—why, then, may we not conclude that a still greater intensity of thought can produce the same phenomena on a grander scale? Why not admit that it can produce, not actual presence, perhaps—that would be levitation, and I don’t admit levitation—but something so nearly akin to it that not only is our sense of sight deceived, but our senses of hearing and feeling as well.”
“It would be almost as easy to admit levitation and be done with it,” I said.
“Not at all. Bodily levitation is a manifest impossibility, but thought transference to the extent of deceiving each one of man’s senses into the belief that he can actually see, hear, and feel the person who appears before him, is almost, if not quite, a proven fact.”
“I cannot admit any such statement,” said I.
“But if you knew the Indian Buddhists as I know them you would be forced into the admission,” he replied. “I tell you the things they actually do are wonderful—totally unexplainable. Either we must admit the existence of a spiritual world which is all around us, or fall back on some such theory as this. I tell you, gentlemen, it is no uncommon thing for some of these adepts to summon into their presence not only living persons from great distances, but material forms of those who have been long dead. That I have seen myself; hundreds of others have seen it. When I said I have never seen levitation I meant what I said, for I never did see a living man taken up by invisible force and carried from one place to another, nor do I ever expect to see it: but I have seen forms of persons both living and dead, persons whom I knew and had known in life, produced before me by more than one adept, and that brings me to my ghost theory again.”
“Which I am more than anxious to hear,” said I. “Though your statements thus far are strong and your reasoning subtile, you have proved nothing. If there is no such thing as a disembodied spirit, how can you reason out the existence of ghosts?”
“In this way. Mesmerism, hypnotism, or whatever you are pleased to call it, is, of course, an admitted fact. There is a power existing in certain mental organizations enabling them to control weaker ones, and to deprive them for the time being of their individuality; to make them believe that black is white; that they are not themselves, but other people—living people, or dead people, it matters not which. Given such a mind, or such a mental state—for I believe that under certain favoring conditions a weak mind may possess this power quite as much as a strong one—and we have a force which can summon to our presence not only apparitions of living people but of dead ones. For instance, A possessed of this power desires to see B who is dead. The force leaves him just as the electric current leaves a battery. It cannot reach B because there is no B, but it does strike upon the mental receiver of C’s organization, because C is of a receptive nature. Then C appears to A, but instead of appearing as C he appears as B, because A, by his intensity of thought, has transformed him into B. Thus while the shade of B is apparently raised, while it looks, acts and even speaks like B, it is, after all, nothing but a transfer of individuality. That, gentlemen, is my theory of ghosts. I fear it is not very clearly expressed.”
“As clear as mud,” I replied, sneeringly. “Frankly I got so befogged before you were half through that I could not follow you. How such a theory could possibly account for the strange disappearances of Mr. Mirrikh, I fail to see.”
“Oh, I don’t claim that it does,” protested Philpot. “Of course it can’t, unless, to go a step further, Mirrikh possesses the power I speak of to such an extent as to be able to make us believe that we saw him on top of that tower when actually he was not there.”
“Weak! Weak as water! Does that explain his disappearance in the Panompin alley? ”
“I am constrained to admit, Wylde, that it does not.”
“Then, as I understand it,” said Maurice, who had until now maintained silence, “you claim the existence of a natural force, a mental magnetic current, which is capable of producing all the so-called spiritualistic phenomena with which the history of the world teems?”
“That’s it! That’s it! I firmly believe that just such a force exists and is as controlable as the electric current by those who understand its nature,”
“And understood by the Buddhist adepts?”
“I believe it.”
“Is it not just as easy to believe that they possess the secret of some natural force which can overcome the attraction of gravatation?”
“Scarcely.”
“It seems so to me. I have great difficulty in following your reasoning, but I understand the point toward which you are aiming, and was amazed at the labor you were at to get there. Just admit the existence of a spiritual world surrounding the natural world, and you have the easiest sort of solution of the whole matter.”
“But I won’t.”
“But the Buddhists do.”
“I know it.”
“They do wonderful things, Doctor.”
“I admit it.”
“Many of our modern Spiritualists do similar things.”
“I know that.”
“As I said before, history teems with the relations of such occurences. You cannot name a nation where there are not individuals who claim free intercourse with the spirits of the dead.”
“True again, but their claims are yet to be proved.”
“I don’t know,” said Maurice dreamily. “I have puzzled my brains over the problem until I can think no more. Like you, Philpot, I demand proof; but this much I will say:. I have reached the firm conclusion that there exist laws in nature, call them physical, or call them spiritual, understood only by certain persons, or exercised without being fully comprehended by ignorant persons, that do produce phenomena, the true nature of which we are as yet wholly unable to comprehend.”
“And by these laws you would explain the levitations of Mirrikh?” I yawned, for I was growing entirely sick of this lengthy discussion.
“I see no other way of explaining them.”
“If we could only read this, we might get some light upon the subject,” said the Doctor.
He thrust his hand into his coat pocket as he spoke, and pulled out the book which he had taken from Mr. Mirrikh’s bag.
I was amazed—indignant.
“What? You can’t have had the impudence to appropriate that book after all I said?” I angrily cried.
“There, there, Wylde, don’t lose your temper again! I did keep it. I was curious to study it. I”
“Give it to me! ” I exclaimed, holding out my hand. “Until it is delivered to its owner, it is my property. Give it to me at once.”
“Take it then, since you are going to be so savage about it,” he replied sulkily; and he just tossed the book across the fire to my side. I tried to catch it, but failing, it went sprawling open upon the floor. Indeed, it had partly opened before he threw it, for I saw an envelope drop from between the leaves at Philpot’s feet. When I picked the book up, he had already possessed himself of the envelope, and with the idea of stirring me still further, no doubt, coolly opened it, and now I saw him draw out a letter and hold it close to the fire’s light.
“What is that?” asked Maurice. Philpot, who was glancing at the contents of the letter, did not immediately reply.
“Give it to me!” I cried. “It came out of the book.”
“So it did. Astonishing!”
“What’s astonishing?” asked Maurice.
“His impudence,” said I. “Mr. Philpot, I demand that letter.”
“Shut up, George!” cried Maurice. “Read it, Doctor; if it throws the least light upon the mystery of Mirrikh, read it by all means.”
“On the contrary, my dear fellow, it only increases it. Wylde will you behave yourself?”
He pushed me aside when I reached over and attempted to possess myself of the letter, and did it with an ugly look in his eyes which warned me it was time to desist. Besides Maurice was against me, and I drew back sulkily to my own side of the fire and listened while Philpot read the following:—
“Dear Friend:—I greet you. Business of an important nature has kept me from fulfilling my promise to visit you this month. I have about completed my observations on the manners and social customs of China and Farther India, and now propose to visit that ancient shrine of the illuminati, Angkor, after which I shall probably return to Mars by way of Thibet. If you have any communication which you may desire to forward to the brethern in that planet, it would be well for you to embrace this opportunity, for there is no telling when another may occur. Prepare whatever may suggest itself, and I will drop in on you sometime before I depart for Thibet, but cannot at the present writing say just when. Would that you could be persuaded to accompany me, but I presume it would be quite useless to urge you further.
Yours, ever in the faith,
Written at Panompin.
Mr. Radma Gungeet, Benares.
“There, Wylde, is your letter; you may have it now if you want it so bad. Since it is written in Hindustanee, it is not likely that I shall be contradicted by you as to the nature of its contents. Singular name that. Now I come to think of it, in Hindustanee, it means the planet Mars.”
As the Doctor spoke, he tossed the sheet across the fire, just as the thunder, which for some time had been silent, came crashing about the tower with a rattle and roar which sent us all three to our feet.