And the Dead Spake by E.

F.

Benson.

There is not in all London a quieter spot, or one apparently more withdrawn from the heat and bustle of life, than Newsome Terrace.

It is a cul de sac, for at the upper end the roadway between its two lines of square, compact little residences is brought to an end by a high brick wall, while at the lower end the only access to it is through Newsom Square, that small, discreete oblong of Georgian houses, a relic of the time when Kensington was a suburban village sundered from the metropolis by a stretch of pastures stretching to the river.

Both Square and Terrace are most inconveniently situated for those whose ideal environment includes a rank of taxi cabs immediately opposite the door, a spate of buses roaring down the street, and a procession of underground trains accessible by a station a few yards away, shaking and rattling the cutlery and so on a dining tables.

In consequence.

Newsome Terrace had come two years ago to be inhabited by leisurely and retired folk, or by those who wished to pursue their work in quiet and tranquility.

Children with hoops and scooters are phenomena rarely encountered in the terrace, and dogs are equally uncommon.

In front of each of the couple of dozen houses of which the terrace is composed lies a little square of railinged garden, in which you may often see the middle aged or elderly mistress of the residence, horticulturally employed.

By five o'clock of a winter's evening, the pavements will generally be empty of all passengers, except the policeman, who, with felted step at intervals throughout the night, peers with his bull's eye into these small front gardens, and never finds anything more suspicious there than an early crocus or an aconite.

For by the time it is dark, the inhabitants of the terrace of got themselves home, where behind drawn curtains and bolted shutters they will pass a domestic and uninterrupted evening.

No funeral up to the time I speak of had I ever seen leave the terrace.

No marriage party had strewed its pavements with confetti, and perambulators were unknown.

It and its inhabitants seemed to be quietly mellowing, like bottles of sound wine.

No doubt there were stored within them the sunshine and summer of youth long past, and now dozing in a cool place, they waited for the turn of the key and the cellar door, and the entry of one who would draw them forth and see what they were worth.

Yet, after the time of which I shall now speak, I have never passed down its pavement without wondering whether each house, so seemingly tranquil is not like some dynamo, softly and smoothly bringing to being vast and terrible forces, such as those I once saw at work in the last house at the upper end of the terrace.

The quietest you would have said of all the row, had you observed it with continuous scrutiny for all the length of a summer day.

It is quite possible that you might have only seen issue from it in the morning, an elderly woman, whom you would have rightly conjectured to be the housekeeper, with her basket for marketing on her arm, who returned an hour later.

Except for her, the entire day might often pass without there being either ingress or egress from the door Occasionally a middle aged man, lean and wiry, came swiftly down the pavement, but his exit was by no means a daily occurrence, and indeed, when he did emerge, he broke the almost universal usage of the terrace for his appearances took place when such they were between nine and ten in the evening.

At that hour, sometimes he would come round to my house in Newsoun Square to see if I was at home, and incline for a talk a little later on for the sake of air and exercise.

He would then have an hour's tramp through the lit and noisy streets, and return about ten, still pale and unflushed, for one of those talks which rood have an absorbing fascination for me.

More rarely through the telephone, I proposed that I should drop in on him.

This I did not often do, since I found that if he did not come out himself, it implied that he was busy with some investigation, And though he made me welcome, I could easily see that he burned for my departure so that he might get busy with his batteries and pieces of tissue, hot on the track of discoveries that never yet had presented themselves to the mind of man as coming within the horizon of possibility.

My last sentence made have led the reader to guess that I am indeed speaking of none other than that recluse and mysterious physicist, Sir James Horton, with whose death a hundred half hewn avenues into the dark forest from which life comes must wait completion till another pioneer as bold as he takes up the axe which hitherto none but himself has been able to wield.

Probably there was never a man to whom humanity owed more, and of whom humanity knew less.

He seemed utterly independent of the race to whom, though indeed with no service of love, he devoted himself.

For years he lived aloof and apart in his house at the end of the terrace.

Men and women were to him like fossils to the geologist, things to be tapped and hammered and dissected and studied, with a view not only to the reconstruction upon past ages, but to construction in the future.

It is known, for instance, that he made an artificial being formed of the tissue still living of animals lately killed with the brain of an ape, and the heart of a bullock, and a sheep's thyroid, and so forth over that I can give no first hand account.

Haughton, it is true, told me something about it, and in his will directed that certain memoranda on the subject should, on his death be sent to me.

But on the bulky envelope there is the direction not to be opened till January nineteen twenty five.

He spoke with some reserve, and so I think with slight horror at the strange things which had happened on the completion of this creature.

It evidently made him uncomfortable to talk about it, and for that reason I fancy he put what was then a rather remote date to the day when his record should reach my eye.

Finally, in these preliminaries, for the last five years before the war, he had scarcely entered for the sake of companionship any house other than his own and mine.

Ours was a friendship dating from school days, which he had never suffered to drop entirely.

But I doubt if in those years he spoke except on matters of business, to half a dozen other people.

He had already retired from surgical practice, in which his skill was unapproached, and most completely now did he avoid the slightest intercourse with his colleagues, whom he regarded as ignorant pedants without courage or the rudiments of knowledge.

Now and then he would write an epoch making little monograph which he flung to them like a bone to a starving dog, But for the most part, utterly absorbed in his own investigations, he left them to grope along unaided.

He frankly told me that he enjoyed talking to me about such subjects, since I was utterly unacquainted with them.

It clarified his mind to be obliged to put his theories and guesses and confirmations with such simplicity that any one could understand them.

I well remember his coming in to see me on the evening of the fourth of August nineteen fourteen.

So the war has broken out, he said, and the streets are impassable with excited crowds.

Odd isn't it just as if each of us already was not a far more murderous battlefield than any which can be conceived between warring nations.

How's that said?

I let me try to put it plainly, though it isn't that I want to talk about.

Your blood is one eternal battlefield.

It is full of armies eternally marching and countermarching.

As long as the armies friendly to you are in a superior position, you remain in good health.

If a detachment of microbes that, if suffered to establish themselves, would give you a cold in the head and trench themselves in your mucous membrane, the commander in chief sends a regiment down and drives them out.

He doesn't give his orders from your brain.

Mind you, those aren't his headquarters, for your brain knows nothing about the landing of the enemy till they have made good their position and given you a cold.

He paused a moment.

There isn't one headquarters inside you, he said, There are many.

For instance, I killed a frog this morning.

At least most people would say I killed it.

But had I killed it though its head lay in one place and its severed body in another, not a bit.

I had only killed a piece of it, for I opened the body afterwards and took out the heart, which I put in a sterilized chamber of suitable temperature, so that it wouldn't get cold or be infected by any microbe.

That was about twelve o'clock to day, And when I came out just now, the heart was beating still.

It was alive.

In fact, that's full of suggestions, you know, come and see it.

The terrace had been stirred into volcanic activity by news of the war.

The vendor of some late edition had penetrated into its quietude, and there were half a dozen parlor maids fluttering about like black and white moths.

But once inside Haughton's door, isolation, as of an arctic night, seemed to close round me.

He had forgotten his latch key.

But his housekeeper, then newly come to him, who became so regular and familiar a figure in the terrace, must have hurt his step, for before he rang the bell, she had opened the door and stood with his forgotten latch key in her hand.

Thanks missus, Gabriel, said he, and without a sound the door shut behind us.

Both her name and face, as reproduced in some illustrated daily paper, seemed familiar, rather terribly familiar.

But before I had time to grope for the association, Haughton supplied it tried for the murder of her husband.

Six months ago, he said, odd case.

The point is that she is the one perfect housekeeper.

I once had four servants and everything was all mucky, as we used to say at school.

Now I live in amazing comfort and propriety with one.

She does everything.

She is cook, valet, housemaid, butler, and won't have anyone to help her.

No doubt, she killed her husband, but she planned it so well that she could not be convicted.

She told me quite frankly who she was when I engaged her.

Of course, I remembered the whole trial vividly.

Now.

Her husband, a mora rose quarrelsome fellow tipsy as often as sober, had, according to the defense, cut his own throat whilst shaving.

According to the prosecution, she had done that for him.

There was the usual discrepancy of evidence as to whether the wound could have been self inflicted, and the prosecution tried to prove that the face had been lathed after his throat had been cut.

So singular an exhibition of forethought and a nerve had hurt rather than helped their case, and after prolonged deliberation on the part of the jury, she had been acquitted.

Yet not less singular was Haughton's selection of a probable murderess, however efficient as housekeeper.

He anticipated this reflection.

Apart from the wonderful comfort of having a perfectly appointed and absolutely silent house, he said, I regard Missus Gabriel as a sort of insurance against my being murdered.

If you had been tried for your life, you would take very especial care not to find yourself in suspicious proximity to a murdered body.

Again, no more deaths in your house.

If you could help it, come through to my laboratory and look at my little instance of life after death.

Certainly, it was amazing to see that little piece of tissue still pulsating with what must be called life.

It contracted and expanded faintly, indeed, but perceptibly, though for nine hours now it had been severed from the rest of the organization.

All by itself.

It went on living.

And if the heart could go on living with nothing, you would say, to feed and stimulate its energy.

There must also so reason, Haughton, reside in all the other vital organs of the body, other independent focuses of life.

Of course, a severed organ like that, he said, well, run down quicker than if it had the co operation of the others.

And presently I shall apply a gentle electric stimulus to it.

If I can keep that glass bowl under which it beats at the temperature of a frog's body in sterilized air, I don't see why it should not go on living food.

Of course, there's the question of feeding it.

Do you see what that opens up in the way of surgery.

Imagine a shop with glass cases containing healthy organs taken from the dead.

Say a man dies of pneumonia, he should, as soon as ever the breath is out of his body, be dissected.

And though they would of course destroy his lungs, as they will be full of new macochai, his liver and digestive organs are probably healthy.

Take them out, keep them in a sterilized atmosphere with the temperature at ninety eight point four, and sell the liver.

Let us say to another poor devil who has cancer, there fit him with a healthy new livery.

And insert the brain of someone who has died of heart disease into the skull of a genital idiot.

I asked, yes, perhaps, but the brains tirelessly complicated in its connections, and the joining up of the nerves.

You know, surgery will have to learn a lot before it fits new brains in.

And the brain has got such a lot of functions, all thinking, all inventing, seem to belong to it, though as you have seen, the heart can get on quite well without it.

But there are other functions of the brain I want to study first.

I have been trying some experiments already.

He made some little readjustment to the flame of the spirit lamp, which kept at the right temperature the water that surrounded the sterilized receptacle in which the frog's heart was beating.

Start with the more simple, learned mechanical uses of the brain, he said.

Primarily, it is a sort of record office, a diary.

Say that I wrap your knuckles with that ruler.

What happens?

The nerves there send a message to the of course, saying how can I put it?

Most simply saying somebody is hurting me, And the eye sends another saying I perceive a ruler hitting my knuckles, and the ear sends another saying I hear the rap of it.

But leaving all that alone, what else happens?

Why the brain records it?

It makes a note of your knuckles having been hit.

He had been moving about the room as he spoke, taking off his coat and waistcoat, and putting on in their place a thin black dressing gown.

And by now he was seated in his favorite attitude, cross legged upon the hearth rug, looking like some magician, or perhaps the affrit of which a magician of black hearts has caused to appear.

He was thinking intently now, passing through his fingers his string of amber beads, and talking more to himself than to me.

And how does it make that note?

He went on, Why, in the manner in which phonograph records are made, there are millions of minute dots, depressions, pockmarks on your brain, which certainly record what you remember, what you have enjoyed or disliked, or done or said.

The surface of the brain, anyhow, is large enough to furnish writing paper for the record of all these things, of all your memories.

If the impression of an experience has not been acute, the dot is not sharply impressed, and the record fades.

In other words, you come to forget it.

But if it has been vividly impressed, the record is never obliterated.

Missus Gabrieloff, for instance, won't lose the impression of how she lathered her husband's face after she had cut his throat.

That's to say, if she did it.

Now, do you see what I'm driving at?

Of course you do.

There is stored within a man's head the complete record of all the memorable things he has done and said.

There are all his thoughts there, and all his speeches, and most well marked of all his habitual thoughts and the things he has often said for habit.

There is reason to believe wears a sort of rat in the brain, so that the life principle, whatever it is, as it gropes and steels around the brain, is continually stumbling into it.

There's your record, your gramophone plate.

Already.

What we want, and what I am trying to arrive at is a needle which, as it traces its minute way over these dots, will come across words or sentences which the dead have uttered, and will reproduce them.

My word, what judgment?

Books?

What a resurrection?

Here in this withdrawn situation, no remotest echo of the excitement which was seething through the streets, penetrated through the open window there came in only the tide of the midnight silence.

But from somewhere closer at hand, through the wall, surely of the laboratory, there came a low, somewhat persistent murmur.

Perhaps our needle unhappily not yet invented, as it passed over the record of speech in the brain might induce even facial expression, he said.

Enjoyment or horror might even pass over dead features.

There might be gestures and movements even as the words were reproduced in our gramophone of the dead.

Some people, when they want to think intensely, walk about some there's an instance of it audible.

Now talk to themselves aloud.

He held up his finger for silence.

Yes, that's missus Gabriel, he said.

She talks to herself by the hour together.

She's always done that, she tells me.

I shouldn't wonder if she has plenty to talk about.

It was that night when, first of all, the notion of intense activity going on below the placid house trants of the terrace occurred to me.

None looked more quiet than this, And yet there was seething here, a volcanic activity and intensity of living, both in the man who sat cross legged on the floor, and behind that voice just audible through the partition wall.

But I thought of that no more.

For Houghton began speaking of the brain gramophone again.

Were it possible to trace those infinitesimal dots and pock marks in the brain by some needle exquisitely fine, it might follow that, by the aid of some contrivance has translated the pock marks on a gramophone record into sound, some audible rendering of speed.

Each might be recovered from the brain of a dead man.

It was necessary, so he pointed out to me that this strange gramophone record should be new.

It must be that of one lately dead, for corruption and decay would soon obliterate these infinitesimal markings.

He was not of opinion that unspoken thought could be thus recovered.

The utmost he hoped for from his pioneering work was to be able to recapture actual speech, especially when such speech had habitually dwelt on one subject, and thus had worn a rut on that part of the brain known as the speech center.

Let me get, for instance, he said, the brain of a railway porter, newly dead, who has been accustomed for years to call out the name of a station, and I do not despair of hearing his voice through my gramophone trumpet.

Or again, given that Missus Gabriel, in all her interminable conversation with herself, talks about one subject, I might, in similar circumstances recapture what she has been constantly saying.

Of course, my instrument must be of a power and delicacy still unknown, one of which the needle can trace the minutist irregularities of surface, and of which the trumpet must be of immense magnifying power, able to translate the smallest whisper into a shout.

But just as a microscope will show you the details of an object invisible to the eye, so there are instruments which act in the same way on sound.

Here, for instance, is one of remarkable magnifying power.

Try it if you like.

He took me over to a table on which was standing an electric battery connected with a round steel globe, out of the side of which sprang a gramophone trumpet of curious construction.

He adjusted the battery and directed me to click my fingers quite gently opposite and aperture in the globe, and the noise ordinarily scarcely audible resounded through the room like a thunderclap.

Something of that sort might permit us to hear the record on a brain, he said.

After this night, my visits to Haughton became far more common than they had hitherto been.

Having once admitted me into the region of his strange explorations, he seemed to welcome me there, partly as he had said it clarified his own thought to put it into simple language, partly as he subsequently admitted, he was beginning to penetrate into such lonely fields of knowledge, by paths so utterly untrodden, that even he, the most aloof and independent of mankind, wanted some human presence near him, despite his utter indifference to the issues of the war, for in his regard, issues far more crucial demanded his energies.

He offered himself a surgeon to a London hospital for operations on the brain, and his services naturally were welcomed, for none brought knowledge or skill like his to such work.

Occupied all day, he performed miracles of healing with bold and dexterous excisions which none but he would have dared to attempt.

He would operate, often successfully, for lesions that seemed certainly fatal, and all the time he was learning, he refused to accept any salary.

He only asked in cases where he had removed pieces of brain matter, to take these away in order by further examination and dissection, to add to the knowledge and manipulative skill which he devoted to the wounded.

He wrapped these morsels in sterilized lint and took them back to the terrace in a box electrically heated to maintain the normal temperature of a man's blood.

His fragment might, then, so he reasoned, keep some sort of indepay life of its own, even as the severed heart of a frog had continued to beat for hours without connection with the rest of the body.

Then for half the night he would continue to work on these sundered pieces of tissue, scarcely dead, which his operations during the day had given him.

Simultaneously, he was busy over the needle that must be of such infinite delicacy.

One evening, fatigued with a long day's work, I had just heard, with a certain tremor of uneasy anticipation, the whistles of warning which heralded an air raid.

When my telephone bell rang.

My servants, according to custom, had already betaken themselves to the cellar, and I went to see what the summons was.

Determined, in any case, not to go out into the streets.

I recognized Hawton's voice.

I want you at once, he said, But the warning whistles have gone, said I, and I don't like showers of shrapnel.

Oh never mind that, said he You must come.

I am so excited that I distrust the evidence of my own ears.

I want a witness.

Just come.

He did not pause for my reply, for I heard the click of his receiver going back into its place.

Clearly he assumed that I was coming, and that, I suppose, had the effect of suggestion on my mind.

I told myself that I would not go, But within a couple of minutes, his certainty that I was coming, coupled with the prospect of being interested in something else than air raids, made me fidget in my chair and eventually go to the street door and look out.

The moon was brilliantly bright, the square quite empty, and far away the coughings of very distant guns.

Next moment, almost against my will, I was running down the deserted pavements of newsome terrace.

My ring at his bell was answered by Haughton before Missus Gabriel could come to the door, and he positively dragged me in.

I shan't tell you a word what I am doing, he said, I want you to tell me what you here.

Come into the laboratory.

The remote guns were silent again as I sat myself as directed in a chair close to the gramophone trumpet.

But suddenly through the wall I heard the familiar mutter of Missus Gabriel's voice.

Haughton, already busy with his battery, sprang to his feet.

That won't do, he said, I want absolute silence.

He went out of the room, and I heard him calling to her.

While he was gone, I observed more closely what was on the table.

Battery, brown steel globe, and gramophone trumpet were there, and some sort of a needle on a spiral steel spring linked up with the battery and the glass vessel in which I had seen the frog's heart beat in it.

Now there lay a fragment of gray matter.

Haughton came back in a minute or two and stood in the middle of the room listening.

That's better, he said.

Now I want you to listen at the mouth of the trumpet, I'll answer any questions afterwards.

With my ear turned to the trumpet, I could see nothing of what he was doing, and I listened till the silence became a rustling in my ears.

Then suddenly that rustling ceased, for it was overscored by a whisper, which undoubtedly came from the aperture on which my oral attention was fixed.

It was no more than the faintest murmur, and though no words were audible, it had the timber of a human voice.

Well do you hear anything, asked Harton.

Yes, something very faint, scarcely audible.

Describe it, said he, somebody whispering.

I'll try a fresh place, said he.

The silence descended again.

The mutter of the distant guns was still mute, and some slight creaking from my shirt front as I breathed alone broke it.

And then the whispering from the gramophone trumpet began again, this time much louder than it had been before.

It was as if the speaker, still whispering, had advanced a dozen yards, but still blurred and indistinct.

More unmistakable, too, was it that the whisper was that of a human voice, and every now and then, whether fancifully or not, I thought I caught a word or two.

For a moment it was silent altogether.

And then with a sudden inkling of what I was listening to, I heard something begin to sing.

Though the words were still inaudible, there was melody, and the tune was tipperary.

From that convolvulous shaped trumpet.

There came two bars of it.

And what do you hear?

Now, cried Haughton, with a crack of exultation in his voice, singing, singing, that's the tune.

They all sang, fine music that from a dead man.

Encore.

You say, yes, wait a second and he'll sing it again for you.

Confound it.

I can't get on to the place.

Ah, I've got it.

Listen again.

Surely that was the strangest manner of song ever yet heard on the earth, this melody from the brain of the dead.

Horror and fascination strove within me, and I suppose the first for the moment prevailed, for with a shudder, I jumped up, Stop it, I said, it's terrible.

His face, thin and eager, gleamed in the strong ray of the lamp, which he had placed close to him.

His hand was on the metal rod from which depended the spiral spring, and the needle which just rested on that fragment of gray stuff which I had seen in the glass vessel.

Yes, I'm going to stop it now, or the germs will be getting at my gramophone record, or the record will get cold.

See I spray it with carbolic vapor.

I put it back into its nice warm bed.

It will sing to us again.

Terrible?

What do you mean by terrible?

Indeed, when he asked that, I scarcely knew myself what I meant.

I had been witnessed to a new marvel of science, as wonderful, perhaps as any that had ever astounded the beholder and my nerves.

These childish whimperers had cried out at the darkness and the profundity.

But the horror diminished, the fascination increased, as he quite shortly told me the history of this phenomenon.

He had attended that day and operated upon a young soldier in whose brain was embedded a piece of shrapnel.

The boy was inextremists, but Haughton had hoped for the possibility of saving him.

To extract the shrapnel was the only chance, and this involved the cutting away of a piece of brain known as the speech center, and taking from it what was embedded there.

But the hope was not realized, and two hours later the boy died.

It was to this fragment of brain that when Haughton returned home, he had applied the needle of his gramophone and had obtained the faint whisperings which had caused him to ring me up, so that he might have a witness of this wonder witness.

I had been not to these whisperings alone, but to the fragment of singing.

And this is but the first step on the new road, said he who knows where it may lead, or to what new temple of knowledge?

It may not be the avenue.

Well, it is late, I shall do no more to night.

What about the raid by the way to my amazement, I saw that the time was verging on midnight.

Two hours had elapsed since he let me in at his door.

They had passed like a couple of minutes.

Next morning, some neighbor spoke of the prolonged firing that had gone on, of which I had been wholly unconscious.

Week after week Haughton worked on this new road of research, perfecting the sensitiveness and subtlety of the needle, and by vastly increasing the power of his batteries, enlarging the magnifying power of his trumpet.

Many and many an evening during the next year did I listen to voices that were dumb in death, and the sounds which had been blurred and unintelligible mutterings in the earlier experiments developed.

As the delicacy of his mechanical devices increased into coherence and clear articulation, it was no longer necessary to impose silence on Missus Gabriel when the gramophone was at work.

For now the voice we listened to had risen to the pitch of ordinary humor utterance.

While as for the faithfulness and individuality of these records, striking testimony was given more than once by some living friend of the dead, who, without knowing what he was about to hear, recognized the tones of the speaker.

More than once.

Also, Missus Gabriel, bringing in siphons and whiskey, provided us with three glasses, for she had heard so she told us three different voices in talk.

But for the present, no fresh phenomenon occurred.

Haughton was but perfecting the mechanism of his previous discovery, and rather grudging the time, was scribbling at a monograph which presently he would toss to his colleagues concerning the results he had already obtained.

And then, even while Haughton was on the threshold of new wonders which he had already foreseen and spoken of as theoretically possible, there came an evening of marvel and of swift catastrophe.

I had dined with him that day, Missus Gabriel, deftly serving the meal that she had so daintly prepared, and towards the end, as she was clearing the table for our dessert, she stumbled, I suppose, on a loose edge of carpet, quickly recovering herself, but instantly Haughton checked some half finished sentence and turned to her.

You're all right, Missus Gabriel, he asked quickly, Yes, sir, Thank you, she said, and went on with her serving.

As I was saying, began Houghton again, but his attention clearly wondered, and without concluding his narrative, he relapsed into silence till Missus Gabriel had given us our coffee and left the room.

I'm sadly afraid my domestic felicity may be disturbed, he said.

Missus Gabriel had an epileptic fit yesterday, and she confessed when she recovered that she had been subject to them when a child, and since then had occasionally experience against them dangerous.

Then I asked in themselves, not in the least, said he.

If she were sitting in her chair or lying in bed when one occurred, there would be nothing to trouble about.

But if one occurred while she was cooking my dinner or beginning to come downstairs, she might fall into the fire or tumble down the whole flight.

We'll hope no such deplorable calamity will happen.

Now, if you've finished your coffee, let us go into the laboratory.

Not that I've got anything very interesting in the way of new records, but I've introduced a second battery with a very strong induction coil into my apparatus.

I find that if I link it up with my record give them that the record is a fresh one, it stimulates certain nerve centers.

It's odd, isn't it that the same forces which so encouraged the dead to live, would certainly encourage the living to die.

If a man received the full current, one has to be careful in handling it.

Yes, and what then you ask?

The night was very hot, and he threw the windows wide before he settled himself cross legged on the floor.

I'll answer your question for you, he said, though I believe we've talked of it before.

Supposing I had not a fragment of brain tissue only, but a whole head, let us say, or best of all, a complete corpse, I think I could expect to produce more than mere speech through the gramophone.

The dead lips themselves perhaps might utter, God, what's that?

From close outside, at the bottom of the stairs leading from the dining room, which we had just quitted to the laboratory where we now sat, there came a crash of glass, followed by the fall as something heavy, which bumped from step to step, and was finally flung on the threshold against the door, with the sound as of knuckles rapping at it and demanding admittance.

Haughton sprang up and threw the door open, and there lay half inside the room and half on the landing outside the body of Missus Gabriel.

Round her were splinters of broken bottles and glasses, and from a cut in her forehead.

As she lay ghastly with face upturned, the blood trickled into her thick gray hair.

Haughton was on his knees beside her, dabbing his handkerchief on her forehead.

Ah, that's not serious, he said, there's neither vein nor artery cut.

I'll just bind that up first.

He tore his handkerchief into strips, which he tied together and made a dexterous bandage, covering the lower part of her forehead, but leaving her eyes unobscured.

They stared with a fixed, meaningless steadiness, and his scrutinized them closely.

But there's worse yet, he said, there's been some severe blow on the head.

Help me carry her into the laboratory.

Get round to her feet and lift underneath the knees when I am ready there, Now, put your arm right under her and carry her.

Her head swung limply back as he lifted her shoulders, and he propped it up against his knee, where it mutely nodded and bowed, and his leg moved as if in silent assent to what we were doing, and the mouth at the extremity of which they had gathered a little larva, lolled open.

He still supported her shoulders as I fetched a cushion on which to place her head.

And presently she was lying close to the low table on which stood the gramophone of the dead.

Then, with light, deft fingers, he passed his hands over her skull, pausing as he came to the spot just above and behind her right ear.

Twice and again, his fingers groped and lightly pressed, while with shut eyes and concentrated attention, he interpreted what his trained touch revealed.

Her skull is broken to fragments.

Just here, he said, in the middle, there is a piece completely severed from the rest, and the edges of the cracked pieces must be pressing on her brain.

Her right arm was lying palm upwards on the floor, and with one hand he felt her wrist with fingertips.

Not a sign of a pulse, he said.

She's dead in the ordinary sense of the word, but life persists in an extraordinary manner.

You may remember, she can't be wholly dead.

No one is wholly dead in a moment unless every organ is blown to bits.

But she soon will be dead if we don't relieve the pressure on the brain.

That's the first thing to be done.

While i'm is it that shut the wind?

Will you and make up the fire.

In this sort of case, the vital heat, whatever that is, leaves the body very quickly.

Make the room as hot as you can.

Fetch an oil stove, and turn on the electric radiator, and stoke up a roaring fire.

The hotter the room is, the more slowly will the heat of life leave her.

Already he had opened his cabinet of surgical instruments and taken out of it two drawers full of bright steel, which he laid on the floor beside her.

I heard the grating chink of scissors severing her long gray hair.

And as I busied myself with laying and lighting the fire in the hearth and kindling the oil stove, which I found by Haughton's directions in the pantry, I saw that his lancet was busy on the exposed skin.

He had placed some vaporizing spray, heated by a spirit lamp, close to her head, and as he worked, its fizzing nozzle filled the air with some clean and aromatic odor now, and then he threw out an order bring me that electric lamb on the long cord.

He said, I haven't got enough light.

Don't look at what I'm doing if you're squeamish, For if it makes you feel faint, I shan't be able to attend to you.

I suppose that violent interest in what he was doing overcame any qualm that I might have had, for I looked quite unflinching over his shoulder as I moved the lamp about till it was in such a place that it threw its beam directly into a dark hole, at the edge of which depended a flap of skin.

Into this he put his forceps, and as he withdrew them, they grasped a piece of blood stained bone.

That's better, he said, And the room's warming up well, but there's no sign of Pulsehet go on stoking.

Will you tell the thermometer on the wall there registers a hundred degrees.

When next, on my journey from the coal cellar, I looked to two more pieces of bone lay beside the one I had seen extracted, and presently referring to the thermometer, I saw that between the oil stove and the roaring fire, and the electric radiator.

I had raised the room to the temperature he wanted.

Soon, Peering fixedly at the seat of his operation, he felt for her pulse again, not a sign of returning vitality, he said, I've done all I can.

There's nothing more possible that can be devised to restore her.

As he spoke, the zeal of the unrivaled surgeon relaxed, and with a sigh and a shrug, he rose to his feet and mocked his face.

Then suddenly the fire and eagerness blazed there again the gramophone, he said.

The speech center is close to where I've been working, and it is quite uninjured.

Good Heavens, what a wonderful opportunity she served me well living, she shall serve me dead.

And I can stimulate the motor nerve center too.

With the second battery.

We may see a new wonder tonight.

Some qualm of horror shook me.

No, don't, I said, it's terrible.

She's just dead.

I shall go if you do.

But I've got exactly all the conditions I have long been wanting, said he, And I simply can't spare you.

You must be witness.

I must have a witness.

Why, man, there's not a surgeon or a physiologist in the kingdom who would not give an eye or ear to be in your place.

Now she's dead.

I pledge you on my honor that, and it's grand to be dead if you can help the living once again in a far fiercer struggle, Horror and the the intensest curiosity strove together in me.

Be quick, then said I ha, that's right, exclaimed Hawton.

Help me to lift her on to the table by the gramophone the cushion too.

I can get at the place more easily with a head a little waist.

He turned on the battery, and, with the movable light close beside him, brilliantly illuminating what he sought, he inserted the needle of the gramophone into the jagged aperture in her skull.

For a few minutes, as he groped and explored there there was silence, and then quite suddenly missus Gabriel's voice, clear and unmistakable and of the normal loudness of human speech, issued from the trumpet.

Yes, I always said that I'd be even with him, came the articulated syllables he used to knock me about he did when he came home drunk and often I was black and blue with bruises, but ah give him a redness for their black and blue.

The record grew blurred.

Instead of articulate words, there came from it a gobbling noise by degrees that cleared, and we were listening to some dreadful, suppressed sort of laughter, hideous to hear.

On and on it went.

I've got into some sort of rut, said Haughton.

She must have laughed a lot to herself for a long time.

We got nothing more except the repetition of the words we had already heard, and the sound of that suppressed laughter.

Then Haughton drew towards him the second battery.

I'll try a stimulation of the motor nerve centers, he said, Watch her face.

He propped the gramophone needle in position and inserted into the fractured skull the two poles of the second battery, moving them about there very carefully.

And as I watched her face, I saw with a freezing horror that her lips were beginning to move.

Her mouth's moving, I cried, she can't be dead, he peered into her face.

Nonsense, he said, that's only the stimulus from the current.

She's been dead half an hour.

Ah, what's coming now?

The lips lengthened into a smile.

The lower jaw dropped, and from her mouth came the laughter we had heard just now through the gramophone.

And then the dead mouth spoke with a mumble of unintelligible words, a bubbling torrent of incoherent syllables.

I'll turn the full current on, he said.

The head jerked and raised itself.

The lips struggled for utterance, and suddenly she spoke, swiftly and distinctly.

Just when he got his raiser out, she said, I came up behind him and put my hand over his face and bent his neck back over his chair with all all my strength, and I picked up his razor and with one slit.

Ha, that was the way to pay him out.

And I didn't lose my head, but I laughed his chin well and put the razor in his hand and left him there and went downstairs and cooked his dinner for him.

And then an hour afterwards, as he didn't come down up, I went to see what kept him.

It was a nasty cut on his neck that kept him.

Hawton suddenly withdrew the two poles of the battery from her head, and even in the middle of her word, the mouth seized working and lay rigid and open.

By God, he said, there's a tale for dead lips to tell, but we'll get more yet.

Exactly what happened then, I never knew.

It appeared to me that as he still leaned over the table with the two poles of the battery in his hand, his foot slipped and he fell forward across it.

There came a sharp crack and a flash of blue dazzling light, and there he lay, face downwards, with arms that just stirred and quivered with his fall.

The two poles that must momentarily have come into contact with his hand were jerked away again, and I lifted him and laid him on the floor.

But his lips, as well as those of the dead woman, had spoken for the last time.

End of and the dead spake