_ CHAPTER XXIV. MENATOGEN, THE MIND FOOD
It had been a dinner of celebration. The professor had ransacked his cellar and produced his best wine. He had drunk a good deal of it himself--so had Mr. Bomford. A third visitor, Mr. Horace Bunsome, a company promoter from the city, had been even more assiduous in his attentions to a particular brand of champagne.
Burton had been conscious of a sense of drifting. The more human side of him was paramount. The dinner was perfect; the long, low dining-room, with its bowls of flowers and quaint decorations, delightful; the wine and food the best of their sort. Edith, looking like an exquisite picture, was sitting by his side. After all, if the end of things were to come this way, what did it matter? She had no eyes for any one else, her fingers had touched his more than once. The complete joy of living was in his pulses. He, too, had yielded to the general spirit.
Edith left them late and reluctantly. Then the professor raised his glass. There was an unaccustomed color in his parchment-white cheeks. His spectacles were sitting at a new angle, his black tie had wandered from its usual precise place around to the side of his neck.
"Let us drink," he exclaimed, "to the new company! To the new Mind Food, to the new scientific diet of the coming century! Let us drink to ourselves, the pioneers of this wonderful discovery, the manufacturers and owners-to-be of the new food, the first of its kind created and designed to satisfy the moral appetite."
"We'll have a little of that in the prospectus," Mr. Horace Bunsome remarked, taking out his notebook. "It sounds mighty good, professor."
"It sounds good because it is true, sir," Mr. Cowper asserted, a little severely. "Your services, Mr. Bunsome, are necessary to us, but I beg that you will not confound the enterprise in which you will presently find yourself engaged, with any of the hazardous, will-o'-the-wisp undertakings which spring up day by day, they tell me, in the city, and which owe their very existence and such measure of success as they may achieve, to the credulity of fools. Let me impress upon you, Mr. Bunsome, that you are, on this occasion, associated with a genuine and marvelous discovery--the scientific discovery, sir, of the age. You are going to be one of those who will offer to the world a genuine--an absolutely genuine tonic to the moral system."
Mr. Bunsome nodded approvingly.
"The more I hear you talk," he declared, "the more I like the sound of it. People are tired of brain foods and nerve foods. A food for the moral self! Professor, you're a genius."
"I am nothing of the sort, sir," the professor answered. "My share in this is trifling. The discovery is the discovery of our friend here," he continued, indicating Burton. "The idea of exploiting it is the idea of Mr. Bomford. . . . My young friend Burton, you, at least, must rejoice with us to-night. You must rejoice, in your heart, that our wise counsels have prevailed. You must feel that you have done a great and a good action in sharing this inheritance of yours with millions of your fellow-creatures."
Burton leaned a little forward in his place.
"Professor," he said, "remember that there are only two small beans, each less than the size of a sixpence, which I have handed over to you. As to the qualities which they possess, there is no shadow of doubt about them for I myself am a proof. Yet you take one's breath away with your schemes. How could you, out of two beans, provide a food for millions?"
The professor smiled.
"Science will do it, my dear Mr. Burton," he replied, with some note of patronage in his tone, "science, the highways of which to you are an untrodden road. I myself am a chemist. I myself, before I felt the call of Assyria, have made discoveries not wholly unimportant. This afternoon I spent four hours in my laboratory with one of your beans. I tell you frankly that I have discovered constituents in that small article which absolutely stupefy me, qualities which no substance on earth that I know of, in the vegetable or mineral world, possesses. Yet within a week, the chemist whom I have engaged to come to my assistance and I will assuredly have resolved that little bean into a definite formula. When we have done that, the rest is easy. Its primary constituents will form the backbone of our new food. If we are only able to reproduce them in trifling quantities, then we must add a larger proportion of some harmless and negative substance. The matter is simple."
"No worry about that, that I can see," Mr. Bunsome remarked. "So long as we have this testimony of Mr. Burton's, and the professor's introduction and explanation, we don't really need the bean at all. We've only got to print his story, get hold of some tasteless sort of stuff that no one can exactly analyze, and the whole thing's done so far as we are concerned. Of course, whether it takes on or not with the public is always a bit of a risk, but the risk doesn't lie with us to control. It depends entirely upon the advertisements. If we are able to engage Rentoul, and raise enough money to give him a free hand for the posters as well as the literary matter, why then, I tell you, this moral food will turn out to be the greatest boom of the generation."
Mr. Cowper moved a little uneasily in his chair.
"Yours, Mr. Bunsome," he said, "is purely the commercial point of view. So far as Mr. Burton and I are concerned, and Mr. Bomford, too, you must please remember that we are profoundly and absolutely convinced of the almost miraculous properties of this preparation. Its romantic history is a thing we have thoroughly attested. Our only fear at the present moment is that too large a quantity of the constituents of the beans which Mr. Burton has handed over to me, may be found to be distilled from Oriental herbs brought by that old student from the East. However, of that in a few days' time we shall of course be able to speak more definitely."
Mr. Bunsome coughed.
"Anyway," he declared, "that isn't my show. My part is to get the particulars of this thing into shape, draft a prospectus, and engage Rentoul if we can raise the money. I presume Mr. Burton will have no objection to our using his photograph on the posters?"
Burton shivered.
"You must not think of such a thing!" he said, harshly.
Mr. Bunsome was disappointed.
"A picture of yourself as you were as an auctioneer's clerk," he remarked, thoughtfully,--"a little gay in the costume, perhaps, rakish-looking hat and tie, you know, and that sort of thing, leaning over the bar, say, of a public-house--and a picture of yourself as you are now, writing in a library one of those little articles of yours--the two together, now, one each side, would have a distinct and convincing effect."
Burton rose abruptly to his feet.
"These details," he said, "I must leave to Mr. Cowper. You have the beans. I have done my share."
The professor caught hold of his arm.
"Sit down, my dear fellow--sit down," he begged. "We have not finished our discussion. The whole subject is most engrossing. We cannot have you hurrying away. Mr. Bunsome's suggestion is, of course, hideously Philistine, but, after all, we want the world to know the truth."
"But the truth about me," Burton protested, "may not be the truth about this food. How do you know that you can reproduce the beans at all in an artificial manner?"
"Science, my young friend--science," the professor murmured. "I tell you that the problem is already nearly solved."
"Supposing you do solve it," Burton continued, "supposing you do produce a food which will have the same effect as the beans, do you realize what you are doing? You will create a revolution. You will break up life-long friendships, you will revolutionize business, you will swamp the divorce courts, you will destroy the whole fabric of social life for at least a generation. Truth is the most glorious thing which the brain of man ever conceived, but I myself have had some experience of the strange position one occupies who has come under its absolutely compelling influence. The world as it is run to-day could never exist for a week without its leaven of lies."
Mr. Bunsome looked mystified. The professor, however, inclined his head sympathetically.
"It is my intention," he remarked, "in drafting my final prescription, that the action of the food shall not be so violent. If the quantities are less strenuously mixed, the food, as you can surmise, will be so much the milder. A gentle preference for truth, a dawning appreciation of beauty, a gradual withdrawal from the grosser things of life--these may, perhaps, be conceived after a week's trial of the food. Then a regular course of it--say for six months or so--would build up these tendencies till they became a part of character. The change, as you see, would not be too sudden. That is my idea, Bomford. We have not heard much from you this evening. What do you think?"
"I agree with you entirely, professor," Mr. Bomford pronounced. "For many reasons it will be as well, I think, to render the food a little less violent in its effects."
Mr. Bunsome began to chuckle to himself. An imperfectly developed sense of humor was asserting itself.
"It's a funny idea!" he exclaimed. "The more one thinks of it, the funnier it becomes. Supposing for a moment--you all take it so seriously--supposing for a moment that the food were to turn out to really have in it some of these qualities, what a mess a few days of it would make of the Stock Exchange! It would mean chaos, sir!"
"It is our hope," the professor declared, sternly, "our profound hope, that this enterprise of ours will not only bring great fortunes to ourselves but will result in the moral elevation of the whole world. There are medicines--patent medicines, too--which have cured thousands of bodily diseases. Why should we consider ourselves too sanguine when we hope that ours, the first real attempt to minister to the physical side of morals, may be equally successful?"
Burton stole away. In the garden he found Edith. They sat together upon a seat and she allowed her hand to remain in his.
"I never knew father so wrapped up in anything as he is in this new scheme," she whispered. "He is even worse than Mr. Bomford."
Burton shivered a little as he leaned back and closed his eyes.
"It is a nightmare!" he groaned. "Have you seen all those advertisements of brain foods? The advertisement columns of our magazines and newspapers are full of them. Their announcements grin down upon us from every hoarding. Do you know that we are going to do the same thing? We are going to contribute our share to the defilement of journalism. We are going to make a similar appeal to the quack instincts of the credulous."
She laughed softly at him.
"You foolish person," she murmured. "Father has been talking to me about it for hours at a time. You are taking it for granted that they will not be able to transmit the qualities of the bean into this new food, but father is sure that they will. Supposing they succeed, why should you object? Why should not the whole world share in this thing which has come to you?"
"I do not know," he answered, a little wearily, "and yet nothing seems to be able to alter the way I feel about it. It seems as though we were committing sacrilege. Your father and Mr. Bomford, and now this man Bunsome, are entirely engrossed in the commercial side of it. If it were to be a gift to the world, a real philanthropic enterprise, it would be different."
"The world wasn't made for philanthropists, dear," she reminded him. "We are only poor human beings, and in our days we have to eat and drink and love."
"If only Mr. Bomford--" he began--
She laid her fingers warningly upon his arm. Mr. Bomford was coming across the lawn towards them. "If you go off alone with him," Burton whispered, "I'll get back the beans and swamp the enterprise. I swear it."
"If you leave us alone together," she answered softly, "I'll never speak to you again."
She sprang lightly to her feet.
"Come," she declared, "it is chilly out here to-night. We are all going back into the drawing-room. I am going to make you listen while I sing."
Mr. Bomford looked dissatisfied. He was flushed with wine and he spoke a little thickly.
"If I could have five minutes--" he began.
Edith shook her head.
"I am much too cold," she objected. "Besides, I want to hear Mr. Bunsome talk about the new discovery. Have you found a title for the food yet?"
She walked rapidly on with Burton. Mr. Bomford followed them.
"We have decided," he said, "to call it Menatogen." _