That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the DayDehan, Richard
General
That Which Hath Wings: A Novel of the Day
Dehan, Richard
World War, 1914-1918 -- Fiction
We scoff, thought Saxham, at the ignorance of those men of the Dark
Ages, yet in this enlightened era the eye of newt and toe of frog, the
salted earthworms, and the _Pulvis Bezoardicus Magistralis_ or _Pulvis
Sanctus_, dissolved in the liquor of herbs gathered under a propitious
conjunction of their ruling planets with the Moon—have but given place
to extract of the dried thyroid gland of the sheep, the ovaries of the
guinea-pig, the spinal cord and brain of rabbits and mice and other
small mammalia, with—instead of broth of vipers, liquor distilled from
the parotid secretion of the tropical toad; identical with the reptile
administered in boluses to Pagan patients by the Greek Hippocrates.
With other remedies hideously akin to the hell-brews that whipped the
sated desires of Tiberius and Nero.... Such as the pastelloids
frequently prescribed by bland-mannered, frock-coated, twentieth-century
physicians—professing Christians who pay West-End pew-rents, and deplore
the abnormal drop in the birth-rate—for the spurring of the sense of
debilitated Hedonists.
Thus, summed Saxham, we have rediscovered Organotherapy. We have
harnessed the bacillus to Hygeia’s silver chariot. In Surgery the Short
Circuit is the latest word. It is wonderful to know how well one can get
on, at a pinch, without organs hitherto deemed indispensable to
existence. Radiology reveals to us the inner mysteries of the human
machine, alive and palpitating. The splintered bone, the bullet or the
shell-splinter embedded in the muscle or the osseous structure, can be
detected and photographed by the teleradiographic apparatus. The
electro-magnet automatically carried out the removal of such fragments,
provided only that they are of steel. Ah yes! We are very clever in
this twentieth century, reflected the Dop Doctor. Modern Science has
even weighed the Soul.
Could Dee and Lilly have bettered that? Debate—consider.... This
quenchless spark of Being, kindled in Saxham’s breast and in yours and
mine by the Supreme Will of the Divine Creator—this Ego for whose
eternal salvation Christ died upon the bitter Cross, dips the scale at
precisely one-sixteenth of an ounce avoirdupois. The expiring man,
weighed a moment previously to dissolution, and again immediately
afterwards, was found to have lost so much and no more.
The dying world is in the scales to-day, thought Saxham, bitterly and
sorrowfully. Religious Faith being the soul of the world, one wonders,
when the last thin hymn shall have died upon the fierce irrespirable
air; when the last human sigh shall have exhaled from Earth, how much in
ponderability shall be lacking to the acorn-shaped lump of whirling
matter. Will the result proportionate with the moribund’s sixteenth of
an ounce?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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