THREE:As the doctor concentrated upon a delayed tea, his mind lapsed into its usual condition of fretful scepticism. Gregg's idea that the Clockwork man represented a mystery, if not a miracle, enraged him. At forty a man does not readily welcome discoveries that may upset his own world of accepted facts, and Allingham had long since given up the habit of following the latest results of scientific investigation. Years ago he had made his own small researches, only to discover that others were making them at the same time. He had had his gleamings in common with all the other students of his year. Everybody was having gleamings then of vast possibilities in medical science, especially in the direction of nervous pathology and the study of morbid diseases resulting from highly complex methods of living. There had been much sound work, a good deal of irresponsible mud-raking, and, in Allingham's case, a growing suspicion that the human organism was not standing very well the strains imposed upon it by modern civilisation. He had wondered then if some experiments would not be made some day in[Pg 45] the pursuit of evolutionary doctrines as applied to physiological progressbut that had been the most ephemeral of all his gleams.Upon whatever fundamental scheme we perseveringly concentrate our powers, upon whatever main road of occupation we take life's journey,--art, politics, commerce, science,--if only we will take its upper fork as often as the road divides, then will that road itself, and not necessarily any cross-road, lead us to the noblest, truest plane of convictions, affections, aspirations. Such a frame of mind may be quite without religiosity, as unconscious as health; but the proof of its religious reality will be that, as if it were a lighthouse light and we its keeper, everybody else, or at any rate everybody out on the deep, will see it plainer than we. Such is the gist of what this young man was saying to me, when our speculations were brought to an end by our overtaking a man well mounted, and a woman whose rough-gaited was followed by a colt.
