Reversing the
process of mind which seems to lead so many medical students to atheism,
Dr. Levillier had found that the more he understood the weaknesses, the
nastinesses, the dreary failures, the unimaginable impulses of the flesh,
the more he grew to believe in the existence, within it, of the soul. One
day a worn-out dyspeptic, famous for his intellectual acquirements over
two continents, sat with the little great doctor in his consulting-room.
The author, with dry, white lips, had been recounting a series of sordid
symptoms, and, as the recital grew, their sordidness seemed suddenly to
strike him with a mighty disgust.
"Ah, doctor," he said. "And do you know there are people thousands of
miles away from Harley Street who actually admire me, who are stirred
and moved by what I write, who make a cult and a hero of me. They say I
have soul, forsooth. But I am all body; you know that. You doctors know
that it is only body that we put on paper, body that lifts us high, or
drags us low. Why, my best romances come straight from my liver. My
pathos springs from its condition of disorder, and my imaginative force
is only due to an unnatural state of body which I can deliberately
produce by drinking tea that has stood a long while and become full of
tannin.
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