1In Which Our Special Commissioners Make A Start
THE great Professor Challenger has been very improperly and imperfectly used in fiction. A daring author placed him in impossible and romantic situations in order to see how he would react to them. He reacted to the extent of a libel action an abortive appeal for suppression a riot in Sloane Street two personal assaults and the loss of his position as lecturer upon Physiology at the London School of SubTropical Hygiene. Otherwise the matter passed more peaceably than might have been expected.
But he was losing something of his fire. Those huge shoulders were a little bowed. The spadeshaped Assyrian beard showed tangles of grey amid the black his eyes were a trifle less aggressive his smile less selfcomplacent his voice as monstrous as ever but less ready to roar down all opposition. Yet he was dangerous as all around him were painfully aware. The volcano was not extinct and constant rumblings threatened some new explosion. Life had much yet to teach him but he was a little less intolerant in learning.
There was a definite date for the change which had been wrought in him. It was the death of his wife. That little bird of a woman had made her nest in the big mans heart. He had all the tenderness and chivalry which the strong can have for the weak. By yielding everything she had won everything as a sweetnatured tactful woman can. And when she died suddenly from virulent pneumonia following influenza the man staggered and went down. He came up again smiling ruefully like the stricken boxer and ready to carry on for many a round with Fate. But he was not the same man and if it had not been for the help and comradeship of his daughter Enid he might have never rallied from the blow. She it was who with clever craft lured him into every subject which would excite his combative nature and infuriate his mind until he lived once more in the present and not the past. It was only when she saw him turbulent in controversy violent to pressmen and generally offensive to those around him that she felt he was really in a fair way to recovery.
Enid Challenger was a remarkable girl and should have a paragraph to herself. With the ravenblack hair of her father and the blue eyes and fresh colour of her mother she was striking if not beautiful in appearance. She was quiet but she was very strong. From her infancy she had either to take her own part against her father or else to consent to be crushed and to become a mere automaton worked by his strong fingers. She was strong enough to hold her own in a gentle elastic fashion which bent to his moods and reasserted itself when they were past. Lately she had felt the constant pressure too oppressive and she had relieved it by feeling out for a career of her own. She did occasional odd jobs for the London press and did them in such fashion that her name was beginning to be known in Fleet Street. In finding this opening she had been greatly helped by an old friend of her father and possibly of the reader Mr. Edward Malone of the Daily Gazette
Malone was still the same athletic Irishman who had once won his international cap at Rugby but life had toned him down also and made him a more subdued and thoughtful man. He had put away a good deal when last his footballboots had been packed away for good. His muscles may have wilted and his joints stiffened but his mind was deeper and more active. The boy was dead and the man was born. In person he had altered little but his moustache was heavier his back a little rounded and some lines of thought were tracing themselves upon his brow. Postwar conditions and new world problems had left their mark. For the rest he had made his name in journalism and even to a small degree in literature. He was still a bachelor though there were some who thought that his hold on that condition was precarious and that Miss Enid Challengers little white fingers could disengage it. Certainly they were very good chums.
It was a Sunday evening in October and the lights were just beginning to twinkle out through the fog which had shrouded London from early morning. Professor Challengers flat at Victoria West Gardens was upon the third floor and the mist lay thick upon the windows while the low hum of the attenuated Sunday traffic rose up from an invisible highway beneath which was outlined only by scattered patches of dull radiance. Professor Challenger sat with his thick bandy legs outstretched to the fire and his hands thrust deeply into trouser pockets. His dress had a little of the eccentricity of genius for he wore a loosecollared shirt a large knotted marooncoloured silk tie and a black velvet smokingjacket which with his flowing beard gave him the appearance of an elderly and Bohemian artist. On one side of him ready for an excursion with bowl hat shortskirted dress of black and all the other fashionable devices with which women contrive to deform the beauties of nature there sat his daughter while Malone hat in hand waited by the window.
I think we should get off Enid. It is nearly seven said he.
They were writing joint articles upon the religious denominations of London and on each Sunday evening they sallied out together to sample some new one and get copy for the next weeks issue of the Gazette.
Its not till eight Ted. We have lots of time.
Sit down sir! Sit down! boomed Challenger tugging at his beard as was his habit if his temper was rising. there is nothing annoys me more than having anyone standing behind me. A relic of atavism and the fear of a dagger but still persistent. Thats right. For heavens sake put your hat down! You have a perpetual air of catching a train.
Thats the journalistic life said Malone. If we dont catch the perpetual train we get left. Even Enid is beginning to understand that. But still as you say there is time enough.
How far have you got? asked Challenger.
Enid consulted a businesslike little reporters notebook. We have done seven. There was Westminster Abbey for the Church in its most picturesque form and Saint Agatha for the High Church and Tudor Place for the Low. Then there was the Westminster Cathedral for Catholics Endell Street for Presbyterians and Gloucester Square for Unitarians. But tonight we are trying to introduce some variety. We are doing the
Spiritualists.
Challenger snorted like an angry buffalo.
Next week the lunatic asylums I presume said he. You dont mean to tell me Malone that these ghost people have got churches of their own.
Ive been looking into that said Malone. I always look up cold facts and figures before I tackle a job. They have over four hundred registered churches in Great Britain.
Challengers snorts now sounded like a whole herd of buffaloes.
There seems to me to be absolutely no limit to the inanity and credulity of the human race. Homo Sapiens! Homo idioticus! Who do they pray to the ghosts?
Well thats what we want to find out. We should get some copy out of them. I need not say that I share your view entirely but Ive seen something of Atkinson of St. Marys Hospital lately. He is a rising surgeon you know.
Ive heard of him cerebrospinal.
Thats the man. He is levelheaded and is looked on as an authority on psychic research as they call the new science which deals with these matters.
Science indeed!
Well that is what they call it. He seems to take these people seriously. I consult him when I want a reference for he has the literature at his fingers end. Pioneers of the Human Race that was his description.
Pioneering them to Bedlam growled Challenger. And literature! What literature have they?
Well that was another surprise. Atkinson has five hundred volumes but complains that his psychic library is very imperfect. You see there is French German Italian as well as our own.
Well thank God all the folly is not confined to poor old England.
Pestilential nonsense!
Have you read it up at all Father? asked Enid.
Read it up! I with all my interests and no time for onehalf of them! Enid you are too absurd.
Sorry Father. You spoke with such assurance I thought you knew something about it.
Challengers huge head swung round and his lions glare rested upon his daughter.
Do you conceive that a logical brain a brain of the first order needs to read and to study before it can detect a manifest absurdity? Am I to study mathematics in order to confute the man
