Karl Grier

CHAPTER I. The Affair of the Tea-Garden

THE AFFAIR OF THE TEA-GARDEN

The chief actor in the singular, perhaps unprecedented, incidents herein recorded now leads a sedate existence of British top-hatted respectability. Many reputable citizens of London and Edinburgh, not to mention cosmopolitan Paris and New York, to whom he is personally known, would be exceedingly surprised were they to recognize, through the thin disguise of places and people, the popular man of the world whose extraordinary career is now set forth for the first time.

Some few there are who dimly comprehend Karl Grier’s secret. They, for reasons that shall be obvious, will keep their amazed imaginings locked in their own hearts. Others, men of precise science for the most part, who have been approached in order that certain remarkable phenomena might be sanely investigated, refute with scorn the suggestion that such a person ever lived. That is to say, they cannot deny Karl Grier, with his giant frame and his hearty whole-souled laugh, but they do deny most emphatically that he ever possessed the unknown power which he exercised in a marvelous way during several eventful years.

If aught could make Karl angry, it is the stupid agnosticism of these learned critics, true children of the dull tribe which began, ages ago, to create its own unbending gods of stone and wood, and has been setting up barriers to knowledge ever since, building dogmatic walls the crossing of which is forbidden by bell, book, and candle.

Yet it is not within my province to rail against these infallibles, who smile at the density which imprisoned Galileo in the sixteen hundreds, but refuse to-day’s evidence of a new realm in man’s mental activity. Sometimes Karl has been tempted, with me, his biographer, as tempter, to place before an astounded world such an array of facts as must convert these scoffers into perfervid disciples. He has been deterred--and here I may claim some credit, too--by personal considerations, by dread of the fierce light of publicity being shed on those near and dear to him, and, in lesser degree, by the fact that a settled, happy existence has stifled the weird and subtle sense which was vouchsafed to him during the growth and plentitude of his bodily and spiritual powers. So, peace be to the critics. “Eppur si muove!” sighed the astronomer, recanting the truth to save his life.

For, without further preamble be it said, my friend Grier was endowed with, or permitted by Providence to use, a sixth sense, which he and I, seeking its correct classification in after years, named telegnomy, or far-knowing. That is the nearest the vocabulary of our times will approach to the description of his mysterious faculty. Strictly speaking, it was not a new sense, as one differentiates seeing from hearing, or taste from touch. Purists in words may even quarrel with me for using the term “sense” to denote a transcendental union of reason with physical attributes. But, in writing a quaint, almost sensational, narrative of actual occurrences, it is well to be content with the simple phraseology of every-day life, and, in that well-defined vehicle of plain thought, the faculty vouchsafed to Karl Grier was a sense.

Its stupendous range, its curiously rational limitations, will be grasped only by an intelligent reading of these memoirs. So a truce to the “Yea” and “Nay” of theorists. Let the story, or group of queer incidents, as it may be termed, speak for itself.

“I have always thought,” said Karl, musing once in analytical mood, “that my sixth sense owed its inception to the Babel-like jargon of languages which surrounded my youthful years. I remember distinctly being attired, on my fourth birthday, in a new sailor suit, which showed to an admiring family circle that I was rated as a first-class A.B. on His Majesty’s ship Victorious. We lived then in India, where my father grew tea on a Darjeeling plantation. I had a half-caste French nurse from Trichinopoly, a Mahomedan bearer, or male servant, a Scottish father and a German mother, and each member of our little republic spoke his or her own tongue when the heart was stirred. In my jubilation I endeavored to climb a creeper, and fell off the low veranda on to a path covered with sharp flints. Both I and the suit were damaged at all points of contact with the globe. My mother shrieked: ‘Ach, Himmel!’ but, being a woman of steady nerves, she soon perceived that little real mischief had resulted, and she went on: ‘Er ist zum seemann nicht geboren’ (He is not cut out for a sailor). My father said, with a laugh: ‘We should hae kepit the bairn in a cutty sark.’ The nurse flew to my assistance, crying: ‘Pauvre p’tit! Tu n’es pas assez adroit!’ whilst Abdul Khan, my bearer, tried to console my grief with his ‘Kuchparwani, batcha, mainne mitai lata!’ (Never mind, little one, I have some sweets for you.) Now, these varied exclamations, conveying many distinct ideas in four languages, of which the Eastern differed in every respect from the European, were instantly intelligible to me. Abdul Khan alone comforted me--the others hurt my pride. But the real point is that I understood them all to the finest shade of meaning. To put it plainly, sounds, and not words, conveyed clear ideas. It was the first unknown step along an uncharted road; the step a fox-terrier takes when he grasps the inflections of his master’s voice.”

“I suppose that is what people mean when they say that you can never really speak a language well until you learn to think in that language?” said I.

Karl laughed gently, and a dreamy look came into his eyes. At one time this would have been the certain prelude to a condition which, for want of a more accurate term, we called a “trance,” though it was far removed from the muscular or mental subjection induced by mesmerism or clairvoyance. Now he simply dropped his eyelids, took a whiff or two of his pipe, and, when he glanced at me again, there was quiet humor, not fantasy, in his big blue orbs.

“No,” he answered, “the states may be kin, but they differ, as the visual powers of a daisy, which can see the sun, differ from those of man. Education, by its necessary artificiality, tends to destroy natural gifts. The daily growth of a living language supplies adequate proof of this truism. The first sounds uttered by man, quite apart from signs and symbols, implied a want or an emotion. Those primary words run in unbroken gamut through all variations of speech or dialect. Of course, they vary, but not greatly, no more than the bark of the Indian dog, the grunt of the Indian pig, the caw of the Indian crow--I could recite hundreds of examples--vary from the typical cries of their European congeners. To my childish intelligence, sounds were all sufficing. I knew the voices of nature. The whinney of a horse told me whether he was hungry or thirsty, afraid or angered. I heard the kites whistling their fellow-ghouls to the feast. I could actually distinguish the answering bleat of a kid to the hoarse summons of its dam amidst a flock of goats. Good heavens! if only my baby mind could have uttered its knowledge, and found a scientific recorder, what undeciphered mysteries of human development might I not have solved!”

Although this train of reminiscence was somewhat removed from the far more curious and complex sense he developed afterwards, it was interesting as showing a tendency towards the abnormal.

“Have you any reason to believe that animals ever knew you possessed the key to their utterances?” I asked.

“Not in a convincing degree. Oddly enough, my intelligence was more receptive than creative. Certainly my dogs, ponies, birds, and other so-called dumb creatures with which I was brought in contact were in extraordinary sympathy with me. But such human and animal collusions are far from rare. And I could not speak to them with effect. Our physical appliances are fashioned by use, remember. If the nasal sounds of French will change the shape of the roof of a Frenchman’s mouth, or singing develop the singer’s throat in a single lifetime, how much more profoundly must untold generations of ordered language have modified the vocal organs. So my four-footed friends could not understand my harsh imitations. They were too far down the scale. I could plumb their depths, but they could only gaze at me wistfully, as men look at the stars.”

He went on to tell how he startled his father, one day, by the information that a colony of minahs (the Indian starling) had found a snake in a flower-bed, which was true, though none could guess how the child knew it; and he made me shake with merriment as he described the antics of a monkey, whose chattering rage he did succeed in burlesquing with some degree of realism. But these are not serious contributions to science, and I am truly endeavoring to help forward my fellow-men along the path which Morse, Edison, Marconi, and many another earnest worker, each in a separate sphere, yet each striving for the same goal, have indicated to a world not yet ready to advance. I pass, therefore, to the first recorded use of his sixth sense. In all probability there were minor instances, which were unnoticed either by his parents or by the child himself. This one could not be gainsaid. It verified itself most dramatically.

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