“I had a very interesting visit today with a young medic and his wife—the Dawsons—” his second page began; but, after looking at the words critically for a moment, he crumpled the page and started a fresh one with no mention of the Dawsons.
“Have you ever deciphered the rest of the journal?”
He had sent it back to her with the brief statement that he didn’t care to bother any farther with it … He wasn’t the right type to pursue any such philosophy with hope of pleasure or profit, he said, and it really wasn’t sporting to read it for curiosity’s sake—especially after Doctor Hudson’s request that one stop when one’s personal interest had flagged.
“Perhaps you will tell me, at least in a general way, how it all came out if you completed it … I learn, in reading about unusual obsessions, that a marked mystical tendency occasionally shows up in the minds of very materialistic people who deal practically, otherwise, with all their interests. I dare say Doctor Hudson was a typical case.”
Two days later he had her reply.
“Mrs. Hudson has the journal now, along with all the other things we kept for her in the office safe. I doubt if she has made any effort to discover what it’s about. Perhaps she hasn’t opened the box in which she received them. At all events, she has not queried me, as she might have done if she had been mystified by the code … I feel confident she would let you have the book, now that your interest in it is revived.
“Yes, I deciphered the rest of it … An amazing record! … If it were done into a book, it would sell a hundred thousand! People would pronounce it utterly incredible, of course; but they would read it—and heartily wish it were true. And I have a notion they would be sneaking off to make experiments, no matter how they might have giggled when discussing the theory with their friends.
“I wish I dared tell you … you know why I cannot … about the quite startling experiences I myself have had lately … It’s all true, Bobby. You do get what you want that way, if what you want contributes to the larger expression of yourself in constructive service … You even get letters that had been so long delayed you wondered if you’d been forgotten … Does that sound foolish?”
It sounded foolish.
“I’m sorry,” mused Bobby, folding the letter. “Nancy had such an interesting mind. Now she’ll be goofy for the rest of her life … Glad I stopped the bally nonsense before it got me.”
He smiled bitterly over Nancy’s suggestion that he ask Mrs. Hudson for the journal … His contrite note of apology, dated December first, had not been answered. For the first two weeks, he had shadowed the postman.
On the Sunday morning that young Mrs. Dawson and the baby were taken to the country, Bobby, on pressing invitation, joined the party.
The place they had chosen was a quiet cottage owned by a middle-aged widow, a few hundred yards from the shady shore of Pleasant Lake—an hour’s railroad trip to the north.
Relieved of his long anxiety, Jack Dawson had lost his pallor. His step was elastic; his shoulders were squared. As for Marion, she was radiant.
They made a picnic of it, and ate their lunch on the lake shore—Jack, junior, left in the custody of Mrs. Plimpton who, immediately on being alone with him, decided he would be all the better for a bit of old-fashioned rocking and a few Gospel songs.
“Now—none o’ that!” declared Marion, setting out the contents of their basket. “You two old doctors have plenty of chances to talk wisely about disabled gizzards, all through the week. It makes me sick to eat my meals off the operating table, anyway.”
Apparently they had known nothing of Bobby’s wealth before he had interested himself in them. Doubtless they knew now. But the Dawsons’ attitude toward him was unchanged. There was not a trace of shyness or sycophancy. Thoroughbreds—they were. He wished he had a sister exactly like Marion Dawson.
The men took a late afternoon train back to town, separating at the station.
“So long, Bobby,” said Dawson. “Thanks much for coming along. See you soon. Glad the stuff’s going better for you. You’ve certainly given me a shot in the arm!”
“It’s been good for both of us,” said Bobby.
That night he carried out a decision he had resolved upon the day before. Randolph had seemed able to get all the information he wanted from a certain important page of the Galilean report on the one man who apparently knew the principles imperative to an expanded personality. Bobby considered himself entirely capable of pursuing such research as Randolph had made.
He had never owned a copy of the Bible. Yesterday he had bought a testament. The salesman had laid out quite an assortment. Bobby had chosen a copy that looked more like an ordinary secular book than the black ones with limp leather covers. His choice was based upon his expectation of treating it as he would any other book.
He leafed in it, back and forth, for a long time before he came upon the particular thesis which the sculptor had considered important to a man’s quest of a dynamic personality. He read it with as much intensity of concentration as he might have studied the map of a strange country through which he expected to travel.
There was a certain quaintness of phrase that intrigued him and commanded his interest. On and on he read, far into the night, without weariness. The little book amazed him. When and if he had thought about it at all, he had considered this ancient document a jumble of soporific platitudes, floating about in a solution of Jewish superstitions, and accepted by simple-minded people as a general cure-all for their petty anxieties and a numbing narcotic to dull their sense of wanting what they couldn’t have.
It was rapidly becoming apparent to him that here was one of the most fascinatingly
