CHAPTER V

"Question!"

What with the physical shocks incidental to my first interview with

Professor Challenger and the mental ones which accompanied the second,

I was a somewhat demoralized journalist by the time I found myself in

Enmore Park once more. In my aching head the one thought was throbbing

that there really was truth in this man's story, that it was of

tremendous consequence, and that it would work up into inconceivable

copy for the Gazette when I could obtain permission to use it. A

taxicab was waiting at the end of the road, so I sprang into it and

drove down to the office. McArdle was at his post as usual.

"Well," he cried, expectantly, "what may it run to? I'm thinking,

young man, you have been in the wars. Don't tell me that he assaulted

you."

"We had a little difference at first."

"What a man it is! What did you do?"

"Well, he became more reasonable and we had a chat. But I got nothing

out of him--nothing for publication."

"I'm not so sure about that. You got a black eye out of him, and

that's for publication. We can't have this reign of terror, Mr.

Malone. We must bring the man to his bearings. I'll have a leaderette

on him to-morrow that will raise a blister. Just give me the material

and I will engage to brand the fellow for ever. Professor

Munchausen--how's that for an inset headline? Sir John Mandeville

redivivus--Cagliostro--all the imposters and bullies in history. I'll

show him up for the fraud he is."

"I wouldn't do that, sir."

"Why not?"

"Because he is not a fraud at all."

"What!" roared McArdle. "You don't mean to say you really believe this

stuff of his about mammoths and mastodons and great sea sairpents?"

"Well, I don't know about that. I don't think he makes any claims of

that kind. But I do believe he has got something new."

"Then for Heaven's sake, man, write it up!"

"I'm longing to, but all I know he gave me in confidence and on

condition that I didn't." I condensed into a few sentences the

Professor's narrative. "That's how it stands."

McArdle looked deeply incredulous.

"Well, Mr. Malone," he said at last, "about this scientific meeting

to-night; there can be no privacy about that, anyhow. I don't suppose

any paper will want to report it, for Waldron has been reported already

a dozen times, and no one is aware that Challenger will speak. We may

get a scoop, if we are lucky. You'll be there in any case, so you'll

just give us a pretty full report. I'll keep space up to midnight."

My day was a busy one, and I had an early dinner at the Savage Club

with Tarp Henry, to whom I gave some account of my adventures. He

listened with a sceptical smile on his gaunt face, and roared with

laughter on hearing that the Professor had convinced me.

"My dear chap, things don't happen like that in real life. People

don't stumble upon enormous discoveries and then lose their evidence.

Leave that to the novelists. The fellow is as full of tricks as the

monkey-house at the Zoo. It's all bosh."

"But the American poet?"

"He never existed."

"I saw his sketch-book."

"Challenger's sketch-book."

"You think he drew that animal?"

"Of course he did. Who else?"

"Well, then, the photographs?"

"There was nothing in the photographs. By your own admission you only

saw a bird."

"A pterodactyl."

"That's what HE says. He put the pterodactyl into your head."

"Well, then, the bones?"

"First one out of an Irish stew. Second one vamped up for the

occasion. If you are clever and know your business you can fake a bone

as easily as you can a photograph."

I began to feel uneasy. Perhaps, after all, I had been premature in my

acquiescence. Then I had a sudden happy thought.

"Will you come to the meeting?" I asked.

Tarp Henry looked thoughtful.

"He is not a popular person, the genial Challenger," said he. "A lot

of people have accounts to settle with him. I should say he is about

the best-hated man in London. If the medical students turn out there

will be no end of a rag. I don't want to get into a bear-garden."

"You might at least do him the justice to hear him state his own case."

"Well, perhaps it's only fair. All right. I'm your man for the

evening."

When we arrived at the hall we found a much greater concourse than I

had expected. A line of electric broughams discharged their little

cargoes of white-bearded professors, while the dark stream of humbler

pedestrians, who crowded through the arched door-way, showed that the

audience would be popular as well as scientific. Indeed, it became

evident to us as soon as we had taken our seats that a youthful and

even boyish spirit was abroad in the gallery and the back portions of

the hall. Looking behind me, I could see rows of faces of the familiar

medical student type. Apparently the great hospitals had each sent

down their contingent. The behavior of the audience at present was

good-humored, but mischievous. Scraps of popular songs were chorused

with an enthusiasm which was a strange prelude to a scientific lecture,

and there was already a tendency to personal chaff which promised a

jovial evening to others, however embarrassing it might be to the

recipients of these dubious honors.

Thus, when old Doctor Meldrum, with his well-known curly-brimmed

opera-hat, appeared upon the platform, there was such a universal query

of "Where DID you get that tile?" that he hurriedly removed it, and

concealed it furtively under his chair. When gouty Professor Wadley

limped down to his seat there were general affectionate inquiries from

all parts of the hall as to the exact state of his poor toe, which

caused him obvious embarrassment. The greatest demonstration of all,

however, was at the entrance of my new acquaintance, Professor

Challenger, when he passed down to take his place at the extreme end of

the front row of the platform. Such a yell of welcome broke forth when

his black beard first protruded round the corner that I began to

suspect Tarp Henry was right in his surmise, and that this assemblage

was there not merely for the sake of the lecture, but because it had

got rumored abroad that the famous Professor would take part in the

proceedings.

There was some sympathetic laughter on his entrance among the front

benches of well-dressed spectators, as though the demonstration of the

students in this instance was not unwelcome to them. That greeting

was, indeed, a frightful outburst of sound, the uproar of the carnivora

cage when the step of the bucket-bearing keeper is heard in the

distance. There was an offensive tone in it, perhaps, and yet in the

main it struck me as mere riotous outcry, the noisy reception of one

who amused and interested them, rather than of one they disliked or

despised. Challenger smiled with weary and tolerant contempt, as a

kindly man would meet the yapping of a litter of puppies. He sat

slowly down, blew out his chest, passed his hand caressingly down his

beard, and looked with drooping eyelids and supercilious eyes at the

crowded hall before him. The uproar of his advent had not yet died

away when Professor Ronald Murray, the chairman, and Mr. Waldron, the

lecturer, threaded their way to the front, and the proceedings began.

Professor Murray will, I am sure, excuse me if I say that he has the

common fault of most Englishmen of being inaudible. Why on earth

people who have something to say which is worth hearing should not take

the slight trouble to learn how to make it heard is one of the strange

mysteries of modern life. Their methods are as reasonable as to try to

pour some precious stuff from the spring to the reservoir through a

non-conducting pipe, which could by the least effort be opened.

Professor Murray made several profound remarks to his white tie and to

the water-carafe upon the table, with a humorous, twinkling aside to

the silver candlestick upon his right. Then he sat down, and Mr.

Waldron, the famous popular lecturer, rose amid a general murmur of

applause. He was a stern, gaunt man, with a harsh voice, and an

aggressive manner, but he had the merit of knowing how to assimilate

the ideas of other men, and to pass them on in a way which was

intelligible and even interesting to the lay public, with a happy knack

of being funny about the most unlikely objects, so that the precession

of the Equinox or the formation of a vertebrate became a highly

humorous process as treated by him.

It was a bird's-eye view of creation, as interpreted by science, which,

in language always clear and sometimes picturesque, he unfolded before

us. He told us of the globe, a huge mass of flaming gas, flaring

through the heavens. Then he pictured the solidification, the cooling,

the wrinkling which formed the mountains, the steam which turned to

water, the slow preparation of the stage upon which was to be played

the inexplicable drama of life. On the origin of life itself he was

discreetly vague. That the germs of it could hardly have survived the

original roasting was, he declared, fairly certain. Therefore it had

come later. Had it built itself out of the cooling, inorganic elements

of the globe? Very likely. Had the germs of it arrived from outside

upon a meteor? It was hardly conceivable. On the whole, the wisest

man was the least dogmatic upon the point. We could not--or at least

we had not succeeded up to date in making organic life in our

laboratories out of inorganic materials. The gulf between the dead and

the living was something which our chemistry could not as yet bridge.

But there was a higher and subtler chemistry of Nature, which, working

with great forces over long epochs, might well produce results which

were impossible for us. There the matter must be left.

This brought the lecturer to the great ladder of animal life, beginning

low down in molluscs and feeble sea creatures, then up rung by rung

through reptiles and fishes, till at last we came to a kangaroo-rat, a

creature which brought forth its young alive, the direct ancestor of

all mammals, and presumably, therefore, of everyone in the audience.

("No, no," from a sceptical student in the back row.) If the young

gentleman in the red tie who cried "No, no," and who presumably claimed

to have been hatched out of an egg, would wait upon him after the

lecture, he would be glad to see such a curiosity. (Laughter.) It was

strange to think that the climax of all the age-long process of Nature

had been the creation of that gentleman in the red tie. But had the

process stopped? Was this gentleman to be taken as the final type--the

be-all and end-all of development? He hoped that he would not hurt the

feelings of the gentleman in the red tie if he maintained that,

whatever virtues that gentleman might possess in private life, still

the vast processes of the universe were not fully justified if they

were to end entirely in his production. Evolution was not a spent

force, but one still working, and even greater achievements were in

store.

Having thus, amid a general titter, played very prettily with his

interrupter, the lecturer went back to his picture of the past, the

drying of the seas, the emergence of the sand-bank, the sluggish,

viscous life which lay upon their margins, the overcrowded lagoons, the

tendency of the sea creatures to take refuge upon the mud-flats, the

abundance of food awaiting them, their consequent enormous growth.

"Hence, ladies and gentlemen," he added, "that frightful brood of

saurians which still affright our eyes when seen in the Wealden or in

the Solenhofen slates, but which were fortunately extinct long before

the first appearance of mankind upon this planet."

"Question!" boomed a voice from the platform.

Mr. Waldron was a strict disciplinarian with a gift of acid humor, as

exemplified upon the gentleman with the red tie, which made it perilous

to interrupt him. But this interjection appeared to him so absurd that

he was at a loss how to deal with it. So looks the Shakespearean who

is confronted by a rancid Baconian, or the astronomer who is assailed

by a flat-earth fanatic. He paused for a moment, and then, raising his

voice, repeated slowly the words: "Which were extinct before the

coming of man."

"Question!" boomed the voice once more.

Waldron looked with amazement along the line of professors upon the

platform until his eyes fell upon the figure of Challenger, who leaned

back in his chair with closed eyes and an amused expression, as if he

were smiling in his sleep.

"I see!" said Waldron, with a shrug. "It is my friend Professor

Challenger," and amid laughter he renewed his lecture as if this was a

final explanation and no more need be said.

But the incident was far from being closed. Whatever path the lecturer

took amid the wilds of the past seemed invariably to lead him to some

assertion as to extinct or prehistoric life which instantly brought the

same bulls' bellow from the Professor. The audience began to

anticipate it and to roar with delight when it came. The packed

benches of students joined in, and every time Challenger's beard

opened, before any sound could come forth, there was a yell of

"Question!" from a hundred voices, and an answering counter cry of

"Order!" and "Shame!" from as many more. Waldron, though a hardened

lecturer and a strong man, became rattled. He hesitated, stammered,

repeated himself, got snarled in a long sentence, and finally turned

furiously upon the cause of his troubles.

"This is really intolerable!" he cried, glaring across the platform.

"I must ask you, Professor Challenger, to cease these ignorant and

unmannerly interruptions."

There was a hush over the hall, the students rigid with delight at

seeing the high gods on Olympus quarrelling among themselves.

Challenger levered his bulky figure slowly out of his chair.

"I must in turn ask you, Mr. Waldron," he said, "to cease to make

assertions which are not in strict accordance with scientific fact."

The words unloosed a tempest. "Shame! Shame!" "Give him a hearing!"

"Put him out!" "Shove him off the platform!" "Fair play!" emerged

from a general roar of amusement or execration. The chairman was on

his feet flapping both his hands and bleating excitedly. "Professor

Challenger--personal--views--later," were the solid peaks above his

clouds of inaudible mutter. The interrupter bowed, smiled, stroked his

beard, and relapsed into his chair. Waldron, very flushed and warlike,

continued his observations. Now and then, as he made an assertion, he

shot a venomous glance at his opponent, who seemed to be slumbering

deeply, with the same broad, happy smile upon his face.

At last the lecture came to an end--I am inclined to think that it was

a premature one, as the peroration was hurried and disconnected. The

thread of the argument had been rudely broken, and the audience was

restless and expectant. Waldron sat down, and, after a chirrup from

the chairman, Professor Challenger rose and advanced to the edge of the

platform. In the interests of my paper I took down his speech verbatim.

"Ladies and Gentlemen," he began, amid a sustained interruption from

the back. "I beg pardon--Ladies, Gentlemen, and Children--I must

apologize, I had inadvertently omitted a considerable section of this

audience" (tumult, during which the Professor stood with one hand

raised and his enormous head nodding sympathetically, as if he were

bestowing a pontifical blessing upon the crowd), "I have been selected

to move a vote of thanks to Mr. Waldron for the very picturesque and

imaginative address to which we have just listened. There are points

in it with which I disagree, and it has been my duty to indicate them

as they arose, but, none the less, Mr. Waldron has accomplished his

object well, that object being to give a simple and interesting account

of what he conceives to have been the history of our planet. Popular

lectures are the easiest to listen to, but Mr. Waldron" (here he beamed

and blinked at the lecturer) "will excuse me when I say that they are

necessarily both superficial and misleading, since they have to be

graded to the comprehension of an ignorant audience." (Ironical

cheering.) "Popular lecturers are in their nature parasitic." (Angry

gesture of protest from Mr. Waldron.) "They exploit for fame or cash

the work which has been done by their indigent and unknown brethren.

One smallest new fact obtained in the laboratory, one brick built into

the temple of science, far outweighs any second-hand exposition which

passes an idle hour, but can leave no useful result behind it. I put

forward this obvious reflection, not out of any desire to disparage Mr.

Waldron in particular, but that you may not lose your sense of

proportion and mistake the acolyte for the high priest." (At this point

Mr. Waldron whispered to the chairman, who half rose and said something

severely to his water-carafe.) "But enough of this!" (Loud and

prolonged cheers.) "Let me pass to some subject of wider interest.

What is the particular point upon which I, as an original investigator,

have challenged our lecturer's accuracy? It is upon the permanence of

certain types of animal life upon the earth. I do not speak upon this

subject as an amateur, nor, I may add, as a popular lecturer, but I

speak as one whose scientific conscience compels him to adhere closely

to facts, when I say that Mr. Waldron is very wrong in supposing that

because he has never himself seen a so-called prehistoric animal,

therefore these creatures no longer exist. They are indeed, as he has

said, our ancestors, but they are, if I may use the expression, our

contemporary ancestors, who can still be found with all their hideous

and formidable characteristics if one has but the energy and hardihood

to seek their haunts. Creatures which were supposed to be Jurassic,

monsters who would hunt down and devour our largest and fiercest

mammals, still exist." (Cries of "Bosh!" "Prove it!" "How do YOU know?"

"Question!") "How do I know, you ask me? I know because I have visited

their secret haunts. I know because I have seen some of them."

(Applause, uproar, and a voice, "Liar!") "Am I a liar?" (General

hearty and noisy assent.) "Did I hear someone say that I was a liar?

Will the person who called me a liar kindly stand up that I may know

him?" (A voice, "Here he is, sir!" and an inoffensive little person in

spectacles, struggling violently, was held up among a group of

students.) "Did you venture to call me a liar?" ("No, sir, no!"

shouted the accused, and disappeared like a jack-in-the-box.) "If any

person in this hall dares to doubt my veracity, I shall be glad to have

a few words with him after the lecture." ("Liar!") "Who said that?"

(Again the inoffensive one plunging desperately, was elevated high into

the air.) "If I come down among you----" (General chorus of "Come,

love, come!" which interrupted the proceedings for some moments, while

the chairman, standing up and waving both his arms, seemed to be

conducting the music. The Professor, with his face flushed, his

nostrils dilated, and his beard bristling, was now in a proper Berserk

mood.) "Every great discoverer has been met with the same

incredulity--the sure brand of a generation of fools. When great facts

are laid before you, you have not the intuition, the imagination which

would help you to understand them. You can only throw mud at the men

who have risked their lives to open new fields to science. You

persecute the prophets! Galileo! Darwin, and I----" (Prolonged

cheering and complete interruption.)

All this is from my hurried notes taken at the time, which give little

notion of the absolute chaos to which the assembly had by this time

been reduced. So terrific was the uproar that several ladies had

already beaten a hurried retreat. Grave and reverend seniors seemed to

have caught the prevailing spirit as badly as the students, and I saw

white-bearded men rising and shaking their fists at the obdurate

Professor. The whole great audience seethed and simmered like a

boiling pot. The Professor took a step forward and raised both his

hands. There was something so big and arresting and virile in the man

that the clatter and shouting died gradually away before his commanding

gesture and his masterful eyes. He seemed to have a definite message.

They hushed to hear it.

"I will not detain you," he said. "It is not worth it. Truth is

truth, and the noise of a number of foolish young men--and, I fear I

must add, of their equally foolish seniors--cannot affect the matter.

I claim that I have opened a new field of science. You dispute it."

(Cheers.) "Then I put you to the test. Will you accredit one or more

of your own number to go out as your representatives and test my

statement in your name?"

Mr. Summerlee, the veteran Professor of Comparative Anatomy, rose among

the audience, a tall, thin, bitter man, with the withered aspect of a

theologian. He wished, he said, to ask Professor Challenger whether

the results to which he had alluded in his remarks had been obtained

during a journey to the headwaters of the Amazon made by him two years

before.

Professor Challenger answered that they had.

Mr. Summerlee desired to know how it was that Professor Challenger

claimed to have made discoveries in those regions which had been

overlooked by Wallace, Bates, and other previous explorers of

established scientific repute.

Professor Challenger answered that Mr. Summerlee appeared to be

confusing the Amazon with the Thames; that it was in reality a somewhat

larger river; that Mr. Summerlee might be interested to know that with

the Orinoco, which communicated with it, some fifty thousand miles of

country were opened up, and that in so vast a space it was not

impossible for one person to find what another had missed.

Mr. Summerlee declared, with an acid smile, that he fully appreciated

the difference between the Thames and the Amazon, which lay in the fact

that any assertion about the former could be tested, while about the

latter it could not. He would be obliged if Professor Challenger would

give the latitude and the longitude of the country in which prehistoric

animals were to be found.

Professor Challenger replied that he reserved such information for good

reasons of his own, but would be prepared to give it with proper

precautions to a committee chosen from the audience. Would Mr.

Summerlee serve on such a committee and test his story in person?

Mr. Summerlee: "Yes, I will." (Great cheering.)

Professor Challenger: "Then I guarantee that I will place in your

hands such material as will enable you to find your way. It is only

right, however, since Mr. Summerlee goes to check my statement that I

should have one or more with him who may check his. I will not

disguise from you that there are difficulties and dangers. Mr.

Summerlee will need a younger colleague. May I ask for volunteers?"

It is thus that the great crisis of a man's life springs out at him.

Could I have imagined when I entered that hall that I was about to

pledge myself to a wilder adventure than had ever come to me in my

dreams? But Gladys--was it not the very opportunity of which she

spoke? Gladys would have told me to go. I had sprung to my feet. I

was speaking, and yet I had prepared no words. Tarp Henry, my

companion, was plucking at my skirts and I heard him whispering, "Sit

down, Malone! Don't make a public ass of yourself." At the same time I

was aware that a tall, thin man, with dark gingery hair, a few seats in

front of me, was also upon his feet. He glared back at me with hard

angry eyes, but I refused to give way.

"I will go, Mr. Chairman," I kept repeating over and over again.

"Name! Name!" cried the audience.

"My name is Edward Dunn Malone. I am the reporter of the Daily

Gazette. I claim to be an absolutely unprejudiced witness."

"What is YOUR name, sir?" the chairman asked of my tall rival.

"I am Lord John Roxton. I have already been up the Amazon, I know all

the ground, and have special qualifications for this investigation."

"Lord John Roxton's reputation as a sportsman and a traveler is, of

course, world-famous," said the chairman; "at the same time it would

certainly be as well to have a member of the Press upon such an

expedition."

"Then I move," said Professor Challenger, "that both these gentlemen be

elected, as representatives of this meeting, to accompany Professor

Summerlee upon his journey to investigate and to report upon the truth

of my statements."

And so, amid shouting and cheering, our fate was decided, and I found

myself borne away in the human current which swirled towards the door,

with my mind half stunned by the vast new project which had risen so

suddenly before it. As I emerged from the hall I was conscious for a

moment of a rush of laughing students--down the pavement, and of an arm

wielding a heavy umbrella, which rose and fell in the midst of them.

Then, amid a mixture of groans and cheers, Professor Challenger's

electric brougham slid from the curb, and I found myself walking under

the silvery lights of Regent Street, full of thoughts of Gladys and of

wonder as to my future.

Suddenly there was a touch at my elbow. I turned, and found myself

looking into the humorous, masterful eyes of the tall, thin man who had

volunteered to be my companion on this strange quest.

"Mr. Malone, I understand," said he. "We are to be companions--what?

My rooms are just over the road, in the Albany. Perhaps you would have

the kindness to spare me half an hour, for there are one or two things

that I badly want to say to you."