American Gothic, page 86
By and by, in the smaller watches of the night, he found himself looking at the question from another point of view. All forms of life were but the same; the vivifying spark that had once fired the body of Lauth was, in nature, no way different from that which flashed in the eye of a spirited horse, which gleamed in all the lower forms of animal life, which smouldered in the trees and vines, and slumbered, sluggish and all but extinguished, in the mollusk and the sponge. Man did but possess life in its highest development. Soul? There was no soul. What mankind called soul was but life. There was no more hope for man than for the horse, the trees, or the fish. The life each enjoyed was the common life of all; each but possessed it in greater fullness than his fellow next lower to him in the scale of creation.
There was no soul but life. Immortality was a myth.
Such was, and long had been, his creed; but now, in the solitude of the night, as he sat there in the presence of the dead, old doubts, old perplexities, old uncertainties, sprang up to vex and to harass him. What went with life after death? It must go somewhere, for life was a force, and force was inexhaustible. And yet he could not believe in immortality. His whole nature, training, and mode of thought, revolted from such an idea. Yet in the case of sudden death like that of Lauth, where had gone that life that but a few days ago had so gloriously and perfectly filled his body and mind? Something more than a span below the breast was a little hole, blue around the edges, and scarce larger than a finger tip. There was no blood, no ghastly display of torn and mangled flesh; and yet this ounce of metal in this tiny puncture had blotted out his friend from existence among men; had in an instant annihilated and rendered naught an intellect, the highest and last development of creation, which countless prehistoric ages had been building up; and of a being who loved, hoped, remembered, and thought, had made a mass of perishable matter, a dead and lifeless weight, which a few hours would turn to putrefaction. What was it that had gone forth from that small circular opening and had left him thus! Something must have gone forth. That something must be either the soul or life.
But the theory of the soul he at once rejected. “It is, it must be life, and life alone,” he said aloud. Yet life was an inexhaustible, immortal force, and he would not accept the doctrine of immortality. How was he to reconcile these two theories? Again and again he put this question to himself. If life and not the soul animated the body, if there was no hereafter, and if, indeed, death ended all, where, after death, went that eternal force called life?
At length he found himself driven to a last conclusion. Rising to his feet he said aloud: “If, then, life is eternal, and if it cannot exist after death, then must it exist in death itself.”
Life, then, even after apparent death, must exist in the body. Impossible! Yet, hold – was this impossible? The proof of such theory must be the resuscitation of a physical body after apparent death, and twice this had already been done. But God had accomplished this, no man. Yet was this conclusive proof that man could not do the same? If man could end life, why could he not begin it afresh?
As some lightless and limitless ocean the great “Perhaps” slowly unrolled itself before him. Might it not be so? Might not the dead be recalled to life? Might not the world be tending toward some such stupendous discovery that was to uproot and overthrow the whole fabric of society?
Once let a body be resuscitated after death, and the two theories of the soul and life would not be difficult of reconciliation. Here then would be the logical realization of those dreams of immortality to which men so obstinately clung, and an immortality to which, as adjustable to the laws of science and reason, Chavannes would cheerfully subscribe. Indeed, might not all those mysteries and conflicting prophecies of the scriptures regarding life after death be pointing directly toward this conclusion? The grandeur of the conception filled him with a certain terror, and before it he remained almost appalled as the Magus before the being himself has evoked.
By earliest morning he was immutably convinced that Lauth was not dead.
But if, then, life existed in death, with what awful responsibility were the living weighted! It remained for them to revive and rekindle the embers of existence before it was too late. How many millions of human beings at that moment lay crumbling in the earth for the want of that very knowledge upon the part of the living! But he saw clearly enough now what he must do.
He turned and looked upon the corpse of Lauth.
Yes, even if he failed, the trial must be made. The blast of duty never called louder than this.
He had uttered these thoughts aloud, and as he spoke the last words, the white dawn came growing upward over the towers of Notre Dame and stealing athwart the lozenges of the deep-set window, expanded throughout the room like an almost perceptible presence.
“It is an omen,” he said.
III
“But, in spite of that,” said Anselm, “I must condemn the whole thing as altogether repulsive and wicked. Still, though I do not believe in your success, I nevertheless confess to no little curiosity to witness the attempt. Yes, I will help you – but, remember, even if you should succeed in – whatever happens, I shall regard it from a purely scientific, not from a religious standpoint. To me it is an experiment in physiology, not in psychology. I believe the soul, and only the soul, is the motor of existence.”
“No,” answered Chavannes, “it is life. I do not claim,” he went on, “any mysterious or wonderful qualities for the draught I propose to administer. It is merely a compound of natural stimulants, so combined as to produce the strongest possible effect. It is not an elixir in any sense of the word; for, understand me, I do not propose to create but to recall life. You know yourself that when your patient has fainted or momentarily lost consciousness certain drugs will revive and reinvigorate him. I consider death as only a certain more pronounced form of unconsciousness. We may fail in this experiment, Anselm, or if we succeed, our success may be only partial. Our means are limited. Medical science is in its earliest infancy. But that we shall recall some kind of life to this seemingly inert body I am firmly persuaded. But even if restored in all its fullness, who can say what manner of life it shall be? Will the new remember the old? Does the moth remember the chrysalis? Will the new creature retain its former personality? Will it look, think, and act, like the old? Or will he return to us out of this terrible ordeal a perfectly new being, having an entirely different nature, character, and personality? Who shall say?”
Anselm shaded his eyes with his hand and was silent. After a moment Chavannes continued:
“I know that I have grasped this great truth but imperfectly. We are here in this world, Anselm, as in a deep and rayless cavern, full of crossing passages. I do not know – who can tell why? – but some mysterious impulse drives us to seek the paths that lead upward. We can but grope. All is dark and obscure, but we feel the ground rise or fall beneath our feet, and we know whether we are holding toward the right or wrong. The passages may be circuitous, difficult, and at times apparently tending directly away from that direction that we can but feebly guess to be the right; but only our path be tending upward, and leave the rest to that mysterious Being who first implanted in our hearts the desire to seek it. Anselm, I am on such a path now; I feel the ground rising under my feet as I advance; I cannot see the end. The blackness moves before me as I go and closes fast about my footsteps behind. Everything is dark and vague and very terrible; but go on, go on always, for, thank God, the path is leading upward.”
Anselm rose and thoughtfully paced the floor for a few moments; then he came and stood before Chavannes: “Who shall say?” he repeated in a low voice. “All science is perhaps.”
For several minutes neither of them spoke; then Anselm said suddenly, as though breaking into a train of perplexing thought:
“Ah, well – at what time do you expect your friends?”
“Very shortly. Talhouet holds a lecture at the École de Chartres until ten; Marcellot was to come with him. They will be here in a little while.”
A large crate stood in the middle of the floor by the dissecting table. From it, while Chavannes spoke, there came the sound of a slight movement, and a low, muffled, and very plaintive cry. Anselm crossed the floor and stood looking down thoughtfully between the willow bars and withes.
“Poor, gentle little creatures,” he said. “What right have we to sacrifice your lives? The God that made us made you as well. If it is as you say, Chavannes,” he continued without turning, “if all life is the same in its nature, men may do murder upon these innocent sufferers as well as upon each other.”
“But, do you not see,” answered Chavannes, “where in some cases the death of a man by his fellow is not only justifiable but even praiseworthy? What is the death of a man or sheep provided such a tremendous principle as that which we now have at stake is evolved and proved?”
“Then why not inject human blood into the veins, as they say they did to our eleventh Louis, instead of that drawn from these sheep?”
“Because it is not my object to refresh the body with new blood, but only to restore and assist the circulation of the old, held in check by death. The forced injection of any healthy blood whatever will drive his own to flow again. This once accomplished, and the vitality which I hold is still within the body will be sufficient to carry it on. Remember,” he continued with emphasis, “I do not pretend to induce life of any kind by my own exertions. I merely arouse and assist those forces that are now held bound and inert. Have you ever seen the rescue and revival of a half-drowned man? Apparently he is dead. To all ends and purposes he is dead. He has ceased to breathe; the heart no longer beats; and yet if sufficient impulse be given to the wheels of life, they will finally carry on, of their own accord, those motions and functions of existence that at first were artificial. Such theory I propose to put into practice in this case.”
“You may recall life of some kind – that is, you may induce the limbs to move by their own volition, the blood to flow, the lungs to inhale; but the brain, the soul, that which loves, which remembers …”
“There is no soul; has a dog a soul? And yet is he not capable of a love that at times may well put man to shame? Has a bird a soul? Yet see how they remember the precise location of the last year’s nest. But here are our friends.”
Hour after hour through the lengthening watches of that night the lights burned low in Chavannes’s lecture room. Around him and his three companions rose the tiers of empty benches, while on the dissecting table lay the body of Lauth, worked over and watched by them with the most intense interest. How long the operation might continue none of them could guess. It might last hours or days; they did not know.
From a small metal bottle which he kept tightly corked, and which at times he warmed between his hands, Chavannes administered to Lauth a pungent, thick, and colourless liquid. It was the draught of which he had spoken to Anselm. The two sheep, their feet tied together and a narrow strip of leather wound around their muzzles, were placed near at hand.
A large air pump was set at the head of Lauth, and his nostrils connected with it by a tube of light steel. Then, while Talhouet placed his palm firmly over the dead man’s mouth, Chavannes grasped the handle of the air pump, depressed it, and sent a volume of air into the lifeless lungs. Talhouet removed his hand, and all bending over the body watched and listened. No returning exhalation came from between the lips, and the dead chest lay cold and inert. But on the third trial the entrance of the outer air perceptibly swelled the breast, and Marcellot, placing his hand thereon and pressing it slowly down, made the blue lips at first pout and then part, while through the tightly clenched teeth came a faint hissing of escaping air.
“Open his teeth,” said Chavannes. Marcellot did so, but the shrunken maxillary snapped them together like a spring. Chavannes passed him the handle of a broken scalpel, and with this he wedged the teeth apart.
The operation was recommenced and continued as before; as soon as Chavannes had pumped enough air into the body, Marcellot aided the lungs to discharge it by pressing down the chest, as one would expel the air from a filled bellows.
When this had gone on for upward of an hour, Chavannes raised his head and said to Talhouet, “Now … the sheep.”
Talhouet drew them out from the crate, cut the thongs from their feet, allowed them to stand, and tethered them to the leg of the dissecting table.
Marcellot, who had been busy with his instrument case, approached Lauth, and with a delicate lancets opened the carotid artery, close up under the ear. The end of a thin tube was inserted in the opening, and the other end passed to Talhouet. In another incision, made under the right arm-pit, a second tube was inserted.
The critical point of the experiment had now arrived. The wool had been sheared away from the neck of one of the sheep, and as Anselm held fast the struggling, terrified creature, Marcellot laid open one of the larger veins in its throat.
“Quick,” said Talhouet.
Marcellot caught the end of one of the tubes, thrust it well into the opened vein, and bound the outer flesh tightly around the tube itself.
The sheep bleated out piteously.
“Poor little brute!” said Anselm.
The other sheep was treated in the same fashion.
It was now well past midnight. They had nothing left to do but to wait, and each felt a creep almost of horror as he thought for what.
Marcellot cleansed his hands and, returning to the table, touched one of the tubes. It was already warm: the blood was flowing freely.
The hours dragged slowly past; two and three o’clock sounded from the neighbouring chimes of St. Germain. The four hardly spoke among themselves, and no sound was heard but the faint movements of the air pump, or an occasional half-stifled cry from one of the lambs. The neck and face of Lauth immediately about Marcellot’s incision had long been warm, and at length the heat began to spread to the neck and shoulders.
Anselm took up Lauth’s hand and scrutinized it; the nails were yet white, but on his holding the hand against the light, the delicate web of flesh between the roots of each finger could be seen faintly tinged with red. A strange and overwhelming excitement began to grow upon them all. Chavannes and Talhouet worked steadily at the pump, while Anselm and Marcellot, at the latter’s suggestion, chafed the cold limbs with feverish energy. The body was now quite warm.
At half-past three, one of the sheep staggered and fell. The circumstance smote them with an apprehension so painful that it plainly showed to each how much his hopes and expectations had been bound up in the result of the experiment. Should both the sheep die ere circulation could be established, all their labour would be in vain.
“Work!” exclaimed Chavannes; but hardly had he spoken when he and his two companions were startled by a sharp cry from Marcellot. His hand had been over the left breast of the body; he drew it quickly away. Each in his turn put his hand over the spot, and each distinctly felt the breast beneath it throb with a great, though as yet an irregular movement.
Trembling and with eyes ablaze, they watched the change coming on. At a sign from Chavannes, Marcellot ceased to press down Lauth’s chest after each artificial inhalation, and it was seen that the lungs, by their own elasticity, were now sufficient to relapse and exhale the air.
But the sheep that had fallen was soon dead, and the second now began to totter. A cessation of even the forced circulation would at this crisis prove fatal. But, forgetful of all consequences in his excitement, Chavannes sprang up, gave up the charge of the air-pump to Anselm, and opening a vein in his forearm thrust in the end of the tube which he had torn from the dead sheep’s neck.
The hour that then ensued was one of the most intense excitement to them all. Again and again Chavannes’s powerful drug was administered in ever-increasing quantities. Brandy, wine, and other stimulants, were forced down Lauth’s throat, and strychnine injected into the blood now flowing freely.
Little by little the change, at first indefinable and of the greatest delicacy, became distinctly apparent. Though there was no movement of the limbs the body did not look dead. At length Talhouet and Anselm withdrew the tube and the air-pump attached to it from the nostrils. Straightway the breast shook with a great gasp, respiration ceased entirely, and then feebly recommenced. So absorbed were his three companions that it was not until Chavannes tottered against Marcellot that they remarked his weakness and pallor. Anselm supported him to a chair, and as he did so the second sheep pitched dead to the floor, dragging the tube out from the neck of the body.
All connections with the outer world were now severed; nothing more could be done. The impetus had been given. It remained to be seen if Nature could carry it forward. The group collected about Chavannes’s chair, and waited with eyes fixed on the table. Day had dawned for already two hours, although in their closely shuttered chamber they made no thought of it, when they saw the body slowly turn upon its side and then roll over, face downward, upon the table.
Chavannes cried out in a loud voice: “Vivit!”6
Anselm sprang to his feet with a terrible cry: “Horrible, horrible!” he shrieked, and rushed from the room.
IV
Lauth was alive, and though for many weeks he rolled and yelled and gibbered upon his bed in the grip of a disease for which the combined science of the four doctors could find no name, yet Chavannes was satisfied.
“I was right,” he said to Anselm. “Are you convinced now that your so-called soul has no part in the animation of physical being? Life, and life only, is the stay and promoter of existence.”
And Anselm bowed his head and seemed to grow older. The success of Chavannes’s experiment had produced a terrible effect upon him. All his ideas and beliefs that he had inherited in common with the world from thousands of past ages, and that were so firmly rooted in his conceptions as to have become a part and parcel of him, had been ruthlessly and suddenly torn up and cast to the winds. Everything had been a mistake, then – civilization, beliefs, society, religion, heaven, and Christ Himself – all were myths or founded upon falsity. Where could he turn for anything certain? Where was there anything true? What could he now believe? He was mentally lost, as one in a whirlwind – landmarks all down, lights obliterated – all was chaos and confusion. Everything was to be commenced over again upon a new basis. Of Lauth, in his present condition, he had a horror that at times sent his mind spinning toward the very verge of insanity.
