He addressed it to—­

“Doctor Hermann Levillier,
“Harley Street, W.,”

and laid it on his writing-table, so that it might be posted early the next morning.

CHAPTER VI

A CONVERSATION AT THE CLUB

Doctor Levillier was not a materialist, although he concerned himself much with the functions of the body, and with that strange spider’s web of tingling threads which we call the nervous system.  The man who sweeps out the temple, who polishes the marble steps and dusts the painted windows, may yet find time to bend in prayer before the altars he helps to keep beautiful, may yet find a heart to wonder at the spirit which the temple holds as an envelope holds a letter.  Reversing the process of mind which seems to lead so many medical students to atheism, Dr. Levillier had found that the more he understood the weaknesses, the nastinesses, the dreary failures, the unimaginable impulses of the flesh, the more he grew to believe in the existence, within it, of the soul.  One day a worn-out dyspeptic, famous for his intellectual acquirements over two continents, sat with the little great doctor in his consulting-room.  The author, with dry, white lips, had been recounting a series of sordid symptoms, and, as the recital grew, their sordidness seemed suddenly to strike him with a mighty disgust.

“Ah, doctor,” he said.  “And do you know there are people thousands of miles away from Harley Street who actually admire me, who are stirred and moved by what I write, who make a cult and a hero of me.  They say I have soul, forsooth.  But I am all body; you know that.  You doctors know that it is only body that we put on paper, body that lifts us high, or drags us low.  Why, my best romances come straight from my liver.  My pathos springs from its condition of disorder, and my imaginative force is only due to an unnatural state of body which I can deliberately produce by drinking tea that has stood a long while and become full of tannin.  When my prose glows with fiery beauty, the tea is getting well hold of my digestive organs, and by the time it has begun to prove its power by giving me a violent pain in the stomach, I have wrung from it a fine scene which will help to consolidate my fame.  When a man wins the Victoria Cross, his healthy body has done the deed, unprompted by anything higher.  Good air, or a muscular life, has strung his nerves strongly so that he can’t, even if he would, appreciate danger.  On the other hand, when a man shows funk, turns tail and bolts, and is dubbed a coward, it’s his beastly body again.  Some obscure physical misfortune is the cause of his disgrace, and if he’d only been to you he would have won the Cross too.  Isn’t it so?  How you doctors must laugh at mystics, and at those who are ascetics, save for sake of their health.  Why, I suppose even the saint owes his so-called goodness to some analyzable proceeding that has gone on in his inside, and that you could diagnose.  Eh?”