Part 9 (1/2)
”Come now, are you going to be more careful and not rap out your letters anyhow?”
Muhamed obstinately goes his own way and strikes an R. Then Krall's open face lights up:
”He's right,” he says. ”You understand: H E R, standing for Herr.
He wanted to give you the t.i.tle to which every man wearing a top hat or a bowler has the right. He does it only very rarely and I had forgotten all about it. He probably heard me call you Herr Maeterlinck and wanted to get it perfectly. This special politeness and this excess of zeal augur a particularly good lesson. You've done very well, Mohammed, my child; you've done very well and I beg your pardon. Now kiss me and go on.”
But Mohammed, after giving his master a hearty kiss, still seems to be hesitating. Then Krall, to put him on the right track observes that the first letter of my name is the same as the first letter of his own. Mohammed strikes a K, evidently thinking of his master's name. At last, Krall draws a big M on the black-board, whereupon the horse, like one suddenly remembering a word which he could not think of, raps out, one after the other and without stopping, the letters M A Z R L K, which, stripped of useless vowels, represent the curious corruption which my name has undergone, since the morning, in a brain that is not a human brain. He is told that this is not correct. He seems to agree, gropes about a little and writes, M A R Z L E G K. Krall repeats my name and asks which is the first letter to be altered. The stallion marks an R.
”Good, but what letter will you put instead?”
Mohammed strikes an N.
”No, do be careful!”
He strikes a T.
”Very good, but in what place will the T come?”
”In the third,” replies the horse; and the corrections continue until my patronomic comes out of its strange adventure almost unscathed.
And the spelling, the questioning, the sums, the problems are resumed and follow upon one another, as wonderful, as bewildering as before, but already a little dimmed by familiarity, like any other prolonged miracle. It is important, besides, to notice that the instances which I have given are not to be cla.s.sed among the most remarkable feats of our magic horses. Today's is a good ordinary lesson, a respectable lesson, not illumined by flashes of genius. But in the presence of other witnesses the horses performed more startling exploits which broke down even more decisively the barrier, which is undoubtedly an imaginary one, between animal and human nature. One day, for instance, Zarif; the scamp of the party, suddenly stopped in the middle of his lesson. They asked him the reason.
”Because I am tired.”
Another time, he answered:
”Pain in my leg.”
They recognize and identify pictures shown to them, distinguish colours and scents. I have made a point of stating only what I saw with my own eyes and heard with my own ears; and I declare that I have done so with the same scrupulous accuracy as though I were reporting a criminal trial in which a man's life depended on my evidence.
But I was practically convinced of the truth of the incidents before going to Elberfeld; and it was not to check them that I made the journey. I was anxious to make certain if the telepathic theory, which was the only one that I considered admissible, would withstand the tests which I intended to apply to it. I opened my mind on the subject to Krall, who at first did not quite grasp what I was asking. Like most men who have not made a special study of the questions, he imagined that telepathy meant above all a deliberate and conscious transmission of thought; and he a.s.sured me that he never made any effort to transmit his and that, for the most part, the horses gave a reply which was the exact opposite of what he was expecting. I did not doubt this for a moment; in fact, direct and deliberate transmission of thought is, even among men, a very rare, difficult and uncertain, phenomenon, whereas involuntary, unpremeditated and unsuspected communications between one subconsciousness and another can no longer be denied except by those who of set purpose ignore studies and experiments that are within the reach of any one who will take the trouble to engage in them. I was persuaded therefore that the horses acted exactly like the ”tipping-tables”
which simply translate the subliminal ideas of one or another of those present by the aid of conventional little taps. When all is said, it is much less surprising to see a horse than a table lift its foot and much more natural that the living substance of an animal rather than the inert matter of a thing should be sensitive and susceptible to the mysterious influence of a medium. I knew quite well that experiments had been made in order to eliminate this theory. People, for instance, prepared a certain number of questions and put them in sealed envelopes.
Then, on entering the presence of the horse, they would take one of the envelopes at random, open it and write down the problem on the black-board; and Mohammed or Zarif would answer with the same facility and the same readiness as though the solution had been known to all the onlookers. But was it really unknown to their subconsciousness? Who could say for certain? Tests of this kind require extraordinary precautions and a special dexterity; for the action of the subconsciousness is so subtle, takes such unexpected turns, delves in the museum of so many forgotten treasures and operates at such distances that one is never sure of escaping it. Were those precautions taken? I was not convinced that they were; and, without pretending to decide the question, I said to myself that my blissful ignorance of mathematics might perhaps be of service in shedding light upon some part of it.
For this ignorance, however deplorable from other points of view, gave me a rare advantage in this case. It was in fact extremely unlikely that my subliminal consciousness, which had never known what a cubic root was or the root of any other power, could help the horse. I therefore took from a table a list containing several problems, all different and all equally unpleasant looking, covered up the solutions, asked Krall to leave the stable and, when alone with Zarif, copied out one of them on the black-board. In order not to overload these pages with details which would only be a repet.i.tion of one another, I will at once say that none of the ant.i.telepathic tests succeeded that day. It was the end of the lesson and late in the afternoon; the horses were tired and irritable; and, whether Krall was there or not, whether the problem was elementary or difficult, they gave only absurd replies, wilfully ”putting their foot in it,” as one might say with very good reason. But, next morning, on resuming their task, when I proceeded as described above, Mohammed and Zarif, doubtless in a better temper and already more accustomed to their new examiner, gave in rapid succession correct answers to nearly every problem set them. I am bound in fairness to say that there was no appreciable difference between these results and those which are obtained in the presence of Krall or other onlookers who, consciously or unconsciously, are already aware of the answer required.
I next thought of another and much simpler test, but one which, by virtue of its very simplicity, could not be exposed to any elaborate and farfetched suspicions. I saw on one of the shelves in the stable a panel of cards, about the size of an octavo volume, each bearing an arabic numeral on one of its sides. I once more asked my good friend Krall, whose courtesy is inexhaustible, to leave me alone with his pupil. I then shuffled the cards and put three of them in a row on the spring-board in front of the horse, without looking at them myself. There was therefore, at that moment, not a human soul on earth who knew the figures spread at the feet of my companion, this creature so full of mystery that already I no longer dare call him an animal.
Without hesitation and unasked, he rapped out correctly the number formed by the cards. The experiment succeeded, as often as I cared to try it, with Hanschen, Mohammed and Zarif alike.
Mohammed did even more: as each figure was of a different colour, I asked him to tell me the colour--of which I myself was absolutely ignorant--of the first letter on the right. With the aid of the conventional alphabet, he replied that it was blue, which proved to be the case. Of course, I ought to have multiplied these experiments and made them more exhaustive and complicated by combining, with the aid of the cards and under the same conditions, exercises in multiplication, division and the extracting of roots. I had not the time; but, a few days after I left, the subject was resumed and completed by Dr. H. Hamel. I will sum up his report of the experiments: the doctor, alone in the stable with the home (Krall was away, travelling), puts down on the black-board the sign + and then places before and after this sign, without looking at either of them, a card marked with a figure which he does not know. He next asks Mohammed to add up the two numbers. Mohammed at first gives a few heedless taps with his hoof. He is called to order and requested to be serious and to attend. He then gives fifteen distinct taps. The doctor next replaces the sign + by X and, again without looking at them, places two cards on the blackboard and asks the horse not to add up the two figures this time, but to multiply them. Mohammed taps out, ”27,” which is right, for the black-board says, ”9 X 3.” The same success follows with other multiplication sums: 9 X 2, 8 X 6. Then the doctor takes from an envelope a problem of which he does not know the solution: fourth root of 7890481. Mohammed replies, ”53.” The doctor looks at the back of the paper: once more, the answer is perfectly correct.
16
Does this mean that every risk of telepathy is done away with? It would perhaps be rash to make a categorical a.s.sertion. The power and extent of telepathy are as yet, we cannot too often repeat, indefinite, indiscernible, untraceable and unlimited. We have but quite lately discovered it, we know only that its existence can no longer be denied; but, as for all the rest, we are at much the same stage as that whereat Galvani was when he gave life to the muscles of his dead frogs with two little plates of metal which roused the jeers of the scientists of his time, but contained the germ of all the wonders, of electricity.
Nevertheless, as regards telepathy in the sense in which we understand and know it to-day, my mind is made up. I am persuaded that it is not in this direction that we must seek for an explanation of the phenomenon; or, if we are determined to find it there, the explanation becomes complicated with so many subsidiary mysteries that it is better to accept the prodigy as it stands, in its original obscurity and simplicity. When, for instance, I was copying out one of the grisly problems which I have mentioned, it is quite certain that my conscious intelligence could make neither head nor tail of it. I did not so much as know what it meant or whether the exponent 3. 4. 5 called for a multiplication, a division or some other mathematical operation which I did not even try to imagine; and, rack MY memory as I may, I cannot remember any moment in my life when I knew more about it than I do now. We should therefore have to admit that MY subliminal self is a born mathematician, quick, infallible and endowed with boundless learning. It is possible and I feel a certain pride at the thought. But the theory simply s.h.i.+fts the miracle by making it pa.s.s from the horse's soul to mine; and the miracle becomes no clearer by the transfer, which, for that matter, does not sound probable. I need hardly add that, a fortiori, Dr. Hamel's experiments and many others which I have not here the s.p.a.ce to describe finally dispose of the theory.
17
Let us see how those who have interested themselves in these extraordinary manifestations have attempted to explain them.