25 September, 6:30 P.M.
"My dear Dr. Van Helsing,
"A thousand thanks for your kind letter, which has taken a great
weight off my mind. And yet, if it be true, what terrible things
there are in the world, and what an awful thing if that man,
that monster, be really in London! I fear to think.
I have this moment, whilst writing, had a wire from Jonathan,
saying that he leaves by the 6:25 tonight from Launceston and
will be here at 10:18, so that I shall have no fear tonight.
Will you, therefore, instead of lunching with us, please come
to breakfast at eight o'clock, if this be not too early for you?
You can get away, if you are in a hurry, by the 10:30 train,
which will bring you to Paddington by 2:35. Do not answer this,
as I shall take it that, if I do not hear, you will
come to breakfast.
"Believe me,
"Your faithful and grateful friend,
"Mina Harker."
JONATHAN HARKER'S JOURNAL
26 September.--I thought never to write in this diary again,
but the time has come. When I got home last night Mina
had supper ready, and when we had supped she told me of Van
Helsing's visit, and of her having given him the two diaries
copied out, and of how anxious she has been about me.
She showed me in the doctor's letter that all I wrote down was true.
It seems to have made a new man of me. It was the doubt
as to the reality of the whole thing that knocked me over.
I felt impotent, and in the dark, and distrustful.
But, now that I know, I am not afraid, even of the Count.
He has succeeded after all, then, in his design in getting
to London, and it was he I saw. He has got younger, and how?
Van Helsing is the man to unmask him and hunt him out, if he is
anything like what Mina says. We sat late, and talked it over.
Mina is dressing, and I shall call at the hotel in a few
minutes and bring him over.
He was, I think, surprised to see me. When I came into the room whee he was,
and introduced myself, he took me by the shoulder, and turned my face round
to the light, and said, after a sharp scrutiny,
"But Madam Mina told me you were ill, that you had had a shock."
It was so funny to hear my wife called ‘Madam Mina' by this kindly,
strong-faced old man. I smiled, and said, "I was ill, I have had a shock,
but you have cured me already."
"And how?"
"By your letter to Mina last night. I was in doubt, and then everything
took a hue of unreality, and I did not know what to trust, even the evidence
of my own senses. Not knowing what to trust, I did not know what to do,
and so had only to keep on working in what had hitherto been the groove
of my life. The groove ceased to avail me, and I mistrusted myself.
Doctor, you don't know what it is to doubt everything, even yourself.
No, you don't, you couldn't with eyebrows like yours."
He seemed pleased, and laughed as he said, "So! You are a physiognomist.
I learn more here with each hour. I am with so much pleasure coming
to you to breakfast, and, oh, sir, you will pardon praise from an old man,
but you are blessed in your wife."
I would listen to him go on praising Mina for a day, so I simply
nodded and stood silent.
"She is one of God's women, fashioned by His own hand
to show us men and other women that there is a heaven
where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth.
So true, so sweet, so noble, so little an egoist, and that,
let me tell you, is much in this age, so sceptical and selfish.
And you, sir... I have read all the letters to poor Miss Lucy,
and some of them speak of you, so I know you since some days
from the knowing of others, but I have seen your true self
since last night. You will give me your hand, will you not?
And let us be friends for all our lives."
We shook hands, and he was so earnest and so kind that it made
me quite choky.
"and now," he said, "may I ask you for some more help?
I have a great task to do, and at the beginning it is to know.
You can help me here. Can you tell me what went before
your going to Transylvania? Later on I may ask more help,
and of a different kind, but at first this will do."
"Look here, Sir," I said, "does what you have to do concern the Count?"
"It does," he said solemnly."
"Then I am with you heart and soul. As you go by the 10:30 train,
you will not have time to read them, but I shall get the bundle of papers.
You can take them with you and read them in the train."
After breakfast I saw him to the station. When we were parting he said,
"Perhaps you will come to town if I send for you, and take Madam Mina too."
"We shall both come when you will," I said.
I had got him the morning papers and the London papers of the
previous night, and while we were talking at the carriage window,
waiting for the train to start, he was turning them over.
His eyes suddenly seemed to catch something in one of them,
"The Westminster Gazette", I knew it by the color,
and he grew quite white. He read something intently,
groaning to himself, "Mein Gott! Mein Gott! So soon!
So soon!" I do not think he remembered me at the moment.
Just then the whistle blew, and the train moved off.
This recalled him to himself, and he leaned out of the window
and waved his hand, calling out, "Love to Madam Mina.
I shall write so soon as ever I can."
DR. SEWARD'S DIARY
26 September.--Truly there is no such thing as finality.
Not a week since I said "Finis," and yet here I am
starting fresh again, or rather going on with the record.
Until this afternoon I had no cause to think of what is done.
Renfield had become, to all intents, as sane as he ever was.
He was already well ahead with his fly business, and he had
just started in the spider line also, so he had not been of any
trouble to me. I had a letter from Arthur, written on Sunday,
and from it I gather that he is bearing up wonderfully well.
Quincey Morris is with him, and that is much of a help,
for he himself is a bubbling well of good spirits.
Quincey wrote me a line too, and from him I hear that Arthur
is beginning to recover something of his old buoyancy, so as
to them all my mind is at rest. As for myself, I was settling
down to my work with the enthusiasm which I used to have for it,
so that I might fairly have said that the wound which poor
Lucy left on me was becoming cicatrised.
Everything is, however, now reopened, and what is to be the end
God only knows. I have an idea that Van Helsing thinks he knows,
too, but he will only let out enough at a time to whet curiosity.
He went to Exeter yesterday, and stayed there all night.
Today he came back, and almost bounded into the room at about
half-past five o'clock, and thrust last night's "Westminster Gazette"
into my hand.
"What do you think of that?" he asked as he stood back and folded his arms.
I looked over the paper, for I really did not know what he meant,
but he took it from me and pointed out a paragraph about children being
decoyed away at Hampstead. It did not convey much to me, until I reached
a passage where it described small puncture wounds on their throats.
An idea struck me, and I looked up.
"Well?" he said.
"It is like poor Lucy's."
"And what do you make of it?"
"Simply that there is some cause in common. Whatever it was that injured
her has injured them." I did not quite understand his answer.
"That is true indirectly, but not directly."
"How do you mean, Professor?" I asked. I was a little inclined
to take his seriousness lightly, for, after all, four days
of rest and freedom from burning, harrowing, anxiety does help
to restore one's spirits, but when I saw his face, it sobered me.
Never, even in the midst of our despair about poor Lucy,
had he looked more stern.
"Tell me!" I said. "I can hazard no opinion. I do not know what to think,
and I have no data on which to found a conjecture."
"Do you mean to tell me, friend John, that you have no suspicion
as to what poor Lucy died of, not after all the hints given,
not only by events, but by me?"
"Of nervous prostration following a great loss or waste of blood."
"And how was the blood lost or wasted?" I shook my head.
He stepped over and sat down beside me, and went on, "You are a clever man,
friend John. You reason well, and your wit is bold, but you are
too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear,
and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you.
Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand,
and yet which are, that some people see things that others cannot?
But there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men's eyes,
because they know, or think they know, some things which other men have
told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all,
and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain.
But yet we see around us every day the growth of new beliefs, which think
themselves new, and which are yet but the old, which pretend to be young,
like the fine ladies at the opera. I suppose now you do not believe
in corporeal transference. No? Nor in materialization. No? Nor in
astral bodies. No? Nor in the reading of thought. No? Nor in hypnotism.
.."
"Yes," I said. "Charcot has proved that pretty well."
He smiled as he went on, "Then you are satisfied as to it. Yes? And of
course then you understand how it act, and can follow the mind
of the great Charcot, alas that he is no more, into the very soul
of the patient that he influence. No? Then, friend John,
am I to take it that you simply accept fact, and are satisfied
to let from premise to conclusion be a blank? No? Then tell me,
for I am a student of the brain, how you accept hypnotism
and reject the thought reading. Let me tell you, my friend,
that there are things done today in electrical science which would
have been deemed unholy by the very man who discovered electricity,
who would themselves not so long before been burned as wizards.
There are always mysteries in life. Why was it that Methuselah
lived nine hundred years, and ‘Old Parr'one hundred and sixty-nine,
and yet that poor Lucy, with four men's blood in her poor veins,
could not live even one day? For, had she live one more day,
we could save her. Do you know all the mystery of life and death?
Do you know the altogether of comparative anatomy and can say
wherefore the qualities of brutes are in some men, and not in others?
Can you tell me why, when other spiders die small and soon,
that one great spider lived for centuries in the tower of the old
Spanish church and grew and grew, till, on descending, he could drink
the oil of all the church lamps? Can you tell me why in the Pampas,
ay and elsewhere, there are bats that come out at night and open
the veins of cattle and horses and suck dry their veins, how in some
islands of the Western seas there are bats which hang on the trees
all day, and those who have seen describe as like giant nuts or pods,
and that when the sailors sleep on the deck, because that it is hot,
flit down on them and then, and then in the morning are found dead men,
white as even Miss Lucy was?"
"Good God, Professor!" I said, starting up. "Do you mean
to tell me that Lucy was bitten by such a bat, and that such
a thing is here in London in the nineteenth century?"
He waved his hand for silence, and went on, "Can you tell me
why the tortoise lives more long than generations of men,
why the elephant goes on and on till he have sees dynasties,
and why the parrot never die only of bite of cat of dog
or other complaint? Can you tell me why men believe in all
ages and places that there are men and women who cannot die?
We all know, because science has vouched for the fact, that there
have been toads shut up in rocks for thousands of years, shut in one
so small hole that only hold him since the youth of the world.
Can you tell me how the Indian fakir can make himself to die
and have been buried, and his grave sealed and corn sowed on it,
and the corn reaped and be cut and sown and reaped and cut again,
and then men come and take away the unbroken seal and that there
lie the Indian fakir, not dead, but that rise up and walk
amongst them as before?"
Here I interrupted him. I was getting bewildered.
He so crowded on my mind his list of nature's eccentricities and
possible impossibilities that my imagination was getting fired.
I had a dim idea that he was teaching me some lesson,
as long ago he used to do in his study at Amsterdam.
But he used them to tell me the thing, so that I could
have the object of thought in mind all the time.
But now I was without his help, yet I wanted to follow him,
so I said,
"Professor, let me be your pet student again. Tell me
the thesis, so that I may apply your knowledge as you go on.
At present I am going in my mind from point to point
as a madman, and not a sane one, follows an idea.
I feel like a novice lumbering through a bog in a midst,
jumping from one tussock to another in the mere blind effort
to move on without knowing where I am going."
"That is a good image," he said. "Well, I shall tell you.
My thesis is this, I want you to believe."
"To believe what?"
"To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate.
I heard once of an American who so defined faith, ‘that faculty
which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.'
For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an
open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush
of the big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck.
We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we
value him, but all the same we must not let him think himself
all the truth in the universe."
"Then you want me not to let some previous conviction inure
the receptivity of my mind with regard to some strange matter.
Do I read your lesson aright?"
"Ah, you are my favorite pupil still. It is worth to teach you. Now that you
are willing to understand, you have taken the first step to understand.
You think then that those so small holes in the children's throats were made
by the same that made the holes in Miss Lucy?"
"I suppose so."
He stood up and said solemnly, "Then you are wrong. Oh, would it were so!
But alas! No. It is worse, far, far worse."
"In God's name, Professor Van Helsing, what do you mean?" I cried.
He threw himself with a despairing gesture into a chair,
and placed his elbows on the table, covering his face with his
hands as he spoke.
"They were made by Miss Lucy!"