"To the Dead
All Things
Are Clear"
By James Dufrey,
As told to Leonard Hess
That there is a life beyond this, I would not believe. That this body of flesh and blood and bone, this mechanism which, after a few years under ground, falls into dust and is food for worms and dissolution, is animated by some force, spirit, soul—call it what you will—which continues its existence after the earthly envelope is corrupted—that I would not credit.
Had I not often laid such a stark, dead body on a stone slab, and with a scalpel discovered its secret recesses, stripped its bones and bared its muscles and nerves and fibres—and had I ever, in the most hidden recesses, found the retreat of the something which, some said, had given the cold corpse life?
It was said that that Something had fled with the last breath. Was I to believe such a myth? For the theories I gave out, always I had some reasonable proof. I stated nothing as fact which, in my laboratory, I had not checked.
I have dissected many a poor body. No, not as a medical student—I am a bacteriologist.
I have seen in my test-tubes the deadly germs of typhoid, of tuberculosis, of countless dread maladies that strike men down to disease and death. I have seen these micro-organisms, malignantly wriggling under my lenses. I could have displayed them to those who believed so firmly in a life to come, and I could have said:
“Here—look! This is the beginning and the end. This is all there is to it. See, for instance, these streptococci. The flesh they enter turns in a few days to decay. I know it is so. I am showing you this. What have you, in return, to show me, of those future spheres you speak of?”
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I was incurring a hundred dangers from infection—to what end? To aid the flesh so that it might escape illness and remain a little longer on this earth. Yet there were those who scoffed at my science, telling me that no man can know the truth, that science is a half-truth—if it is worth anything at all—while they gabbed on about their ghosts and apparitions and voices and manifestations, and what not!
On a winter night, one such rabid believer, my excellent friend, Fuller, regaled me with such discourse into the late hours. He cited instances of his “other world" from Flammarion, Lodge, Doyle, and a dozen others. He read to me from their books to convince me that this world is not all—that we live again in the hereafter.
“It isn’t a matter of faith, either,” he said. “It’s an established fact.”
We sat in my study. Outside, a snow storm raged among the hills, and icy blasts rattled the Windows. The fire leaped redly up and down the chimney. I liked Fuller immensely, and so I listened.
I could see he was annoyed by my disbelief. Presently, at about two in the morning, he left me to go to bed, and I sat alone before the fire, not thinking of the unbelievable tales I had heard, but of a delicate experiment I was to perform on the morrow.
I must have drowsed before the warmth of the flames.
Fuller, I am sure, had shut the study door behind him.
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