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Dredge's hypothesis will be contested, may one day be disproved; but at least it has swept out of the way all previous conjectures, including of course Lanfear's magnificent attempt; and for our generation of scientific investigators it will serve as the first safe bridge across a murderous black whirlpool.
Lanfear's vision, of course, was sharper than mine; and the next morning he had carried Dredge off to the Biological Station. And that was the way it began. Dredge is the son of a Baptist minister. He comes from East Lethe, New York State, and was working his way through college waiting at White Mountain hotels in summer when Archie Lanfear ran across him.
He was full, in those days, of raw enthusiasms, which he forced on any one who would listen when his first shyness had worn off. You can't picture him spouting sentimental poetry, can you? Yet I've seen him petrify a whole group of Mrs. Lanfear's callers by suddenly discharging on them, in the strident drawl of Western New York, "Barbara Frietchie" or "The Queen of the May."
He nearly knocked his shock head against the low doorway, and in dodging this peril trod heavily on Mabel Lanfear's foot, and became hopelessly entangled in her mother's draperies though how he managed it I never knew, for Mrs. Lanfear's dowdy muslins ran to no excess of train.
Lanfear, of course, had been struck from the first by his gift of accurate observation, and by the fact that his eagerness to learn was offset by his reluctance to conclude. I remember Lanfear's telling me that he had never known a lad of Dredge's age who gave such promise of uniting an aptitude for general ideas with the plodding patience of the accumulator of facts.
"If you mean the psychopathic line, without being exactly an alienist, well, yes," Lanfear admitted. "That's exactly what I mean," the elder said, with renewed hopefulness. "I'm quite willing to risk myself with a man of the same name as Dr. Lanfear. I should like," he said, hurrying on, as if to override any further reluctance of Lanfear's, "to tell you her story, and then "
He murmured back: "No. She's better. She's not so strong." "Yes," the father murmured. "I understand." What Gerald understood by Lanfear's words might not have been their meaning, but what Lanfear meant was that there was now an interfusion of the past and present in her daily experience.
And the incredible outrage was that they owed their sensational effect to the fact of being an attempted refutation of Lanfear's great work. I own that I was staggered: the case looked ugly, as Archie said. And there was a veil of reticence, of secrecy, about Dredge, that always kept his conduct in a half-light of uncertainty. Of some men one would have said off-hand: "It's impossible!"
He wuz dretful excited, so I hearn, about Metilda's case thought it wuz highly incumbient on the meetin' house to have her made a example of, so's to try to abolish such wicked doin's as snickerin' out in meetin'. "I wonder how he would have liked it to have had Charley Lanfear's mother set on him?
When I hear pretty women lamenting that they can't coax Professor Dredge out of his laboratory I remember Mabel Lanfear's cry to me: "If Galen would only keep away!" When Mabel fell on the ice and broke her leg, Galen walked seven miles in a blizzard to get a surgeon; but if he did her this service one day in the year, he bored her by being in the way for the other three hundred and sixty-four.
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