Leonard Hess

“ After our marriage, Kane was a frequent guest over week-ends. But we saw little of him, except at meals, because he secluded himself in his room, where he wrote, hour after hour, on his new book. He would call it, he said, The Irrefutable.
“By George!” I laughed, when I was alone with Emma. “He doesn’t lack conceit, does he?”
She looked reproachful.
“You,” she said quietly, “are working in your laboratory for what you believe to be the good of your fellow-men. Howard is working upstairs—for the same end. Each in his own way, James.” ”

“ Will the sceptics bow to this?”
“Read,” she said, in the same compelling voice.
For an hour I read, while Emma, motionless, | watched my face. There was a quality in her gaze that made me, from time to time, look quickly up at her. I could not define that quality.
“So,” I said inwardly, “this is what the hereafter is like. Grass and meadows and flowers, and ineffable peace and complete understanding. And the soul, when it arrives, for a few moments is dazed, and then the new life begins and——”
I looked at Emma.
“But dear, isn't this very like what Kane has written before? ”

“ The body suffers here, before the spirit is released to the hereafter.
Emma comes to me often while I work, and I am the better for her presence. I know she is waiting for me, and that she knows my feelings. ”

“ I tell you I shall convince you and your sceptics!”
“But my dear Kane,” I replied quietly, as I tried to soothe him, “—why kill yourself for us sceptics? Are we worth it?”
His eyes went vacant, and he did not answer. What he saw, I cannot tell. It must have been something which we could not see.
Emma too, now, I was sure, feared for his sanity.
“Please come home with us now, Howard,” she pleaded. “You need a rest. You'll work better when you get back.” ”

“ That this body of flesh and blood and bone, this mechanism which, after a few years under ground, falls into dust and is food for worms and dissolution, is animated by some force, spirit, soul—call it what you will—which continues its existence after the earthly envelope is corrupted—that I would not credit. ”

“ I stated nothing as fact which, in my laboratory, I had not checked.
I have dissected many a poor body. No, not as a medical student—I am a bacteriologist.
I have seen in my test-tubes the deadly germs of typhoid, of tuberculosis, of countless dread maladies that strike men down to disease and death. ”

“ Yet there were those who scoffed at my science, telling me that no man can know the truth, that science is a half-truth—if it is worth anything at all—while they gabbed on about their ghosts and apparitions and voices and manifestations, and what not!
On a winter night, one such rabid believer, my excellent friend, Fuller, regaled me with such discourse into the late hours. He cited instances of his “other world" from Flammarion, Lodge, Doyle, and a dozen others. He read to me from their books to convince me that this world is not all—that we live again in the hereafter. ”

“ A skeptic scientist rests on his desk, wearing a lab coat and holding a notepad I was incurring a hundred dangers from infection—to what end? To aid the flesh so that it might escape illness and remain a little longer on this earth. ”

“ But the next afternoon, when Emma, ready to go, knocked at my laboratory door, I was in the midst of a difficult piece of work that I could not, without losing my cultures, put aside.
“Go alone, dear,” I said. “I'll be busy for hours. Tell Kane I’m sorry. ”

“ Emma replied.
“I can’t see it. I mean—— You must please permit us—the sceptics—still to doubt. You see——”
“Jimmie,” she said, softly, “there can be no doubt of it. It is authentic—that account there, you have.”
Her tone arrested me. I looked at her. Again that strange-quality in the gaze she returned.
“Hear what happened, Jimmie. When I came to Howard Kane's cottage, Howard was not there. On his desk, under a weight, lay this manuscript. But, as I say, Howard was not there. Then I found a note from him. It read:
To find my Irrefutable I have crossed voluntarily to the other life. ”