Fatal Inheritance (6 page)
Authors: Catherine Shaw
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Historical, #Women Sleuths
‘The story is about a monk who asked himself the same question that you are asking about the secret of heredity, and who actually devised a way to make a scientific investigation of the answer, by studying plants in the monastery garden! It is the story of a monk who spent years making the most extraordinary, intelligent controlled experiments and painstaking notes of the results, then analysing their mathematical meaning with the brilliance of genius, to come to a final result. A result which is, to my mind, one of the most astounding scientific discoveries of our century, in no way inferior to Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.’ Here he broke off and glanced at the men at the sideboard, hoping, no doubt, that he had said nothing to offend the sons of the eminent naturalist. But they were paying no attention to him, so he went on.
‘And finally, it is the story of a monk who, on becoming the abbot of his monastery, ceased to pursue his research, and whose notes were burnt at his death by his successor, who had no understanding of the genius contained therein. His name was Gregor Mendel, and it has been the crowning glory of my professional life to be the one to rediscover that old, forgotten published paper, the only remaining trace of all his careful work, and to recognise its potential importance. I gave myself the task of reproducing his experiments in order to confirm his astounding theory, and have met with total success. And therefore, I can now trumpet the work of Gregor Mendel to the entire world:
heredity is governed by the laws of chance
! A sentence which must be properly understood, of course, since to the layman it may sound like heredity is a matter of chance. But that is not what is meant at all; the laws of chance, which are mathematically known as the laws of probability, are strict, and they govern heredity according to fully understood rules. This, by my reproduction of Mendel’s work, has now been definitively proven!’
‘The descent from theory to experiment is always liable to render a theoretical idea more accessible to the layman’s mind,’ I said. ‘Would it be possible to describe your experiments?’
‘Nothing could be easier,’ he said. ‘The experiments themselves were so simple that you could do them yourself, if you were interested. They are based on the careful study of pea plants. Do you cultivate vegetables?’
‘I do, in fact,’ I said, glancing automatically out the window at the Darwins’ garden, whose wintry aspect left all visions of peas and the usual tomatoes and beans entirely to the imagination. ‘At least, I do in the springtime, but nothing is happening there now, unfortunately.’
‘But still, I will tell you how the experiments are done, and you can try them for yourself. But please do not forget to pay careful attention to the fact that the beauty of the theory is not in the experiments themselves, but in the fact that Mendel was able to see that he might be able to deduce the secret laws of heredity from making sufficiently many of these experiments, and carefully observing the results. He never claimed to understand
how
the traits are passed from one generation to the next – that delicate mechanism still remains beyond our knowledge. But he created an experiment to test the laws governing the frequency at which certain given features will be inherited by the offspring, and this is a shining example of genius.’
I agreed to bear this in mind. Professor Francis Darwin, catching the mention of plants even from some distance away, now came towards us and sat down to listen.
Professor Correns continued, ‘Mendel began by making a careful examination of the common pea plant,
pisum sativum,
that grew abundantly in the monastery kitchen garden, and he noticed that, unlike the human being, in which each physical trait (for instance, the colour of the eyes) can take a myriad of different shades and hues, many distinguishing traits of the pea plant took just two possible forms. For instance, the flowers of the pea plant always grow either at the top of the plant, or on the side, never both. The plants are either noticeably tall or noticeably short; there does not seem to be the possibility of every kind of height, as with humans. The colour of the pods on a given plant are either all green or all yellow, never some of each or some strange greenish-yellow combination, and the pods themselves are either smooth or pinched in between each pea. Finally, the peas themselves are either green or yellow, either round or wrinkled. Mendel studied these properties, and the first observation he made was this: if you take a single pea plant and write down all of its properties (for instance, tall with flowers at the top, smooth green pods and round green peas), and you take a pea from this plant, plant it and observe the plant that then grows, it will have all the same properties exactly, and so on down the generations.’
‘So in fact, a pea plant is a creature that has but a single parent,’ I observed. ‘I was wondering about that. Does Mother Earth really play no role in the genesis of the new plant?’
‘None at all. The pea is naturally a monoparental plant practising self-fertilisation, but it can be made to have two parents by the method of cross-fertilisation. This is the experiment that Mendel made.’
‘He was not alone to make such experiments,’ interjected Francis Darwin suddenly. ‘My father did many such, over a period of years, and even published a book called
The Effects of Cross and Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom.’
‘But of course,’ rejoined Professor Correns placatingly, then added, ‘your father’s book is a classic of the subject, and his methods are certainly similar to those of Mendel. Cross-fertilisation and breeding of plants has been practised by gardeners for hundreds of years. Mendel’s research took place several years earlier than Darwin’s, of course, since he published his article in 1865 and that already followed years of research, whereas your father’s book, if I am not mistaken, appeared in 1876. But that is not the point. Mendel’s particularity was the mathematical study of the results, and the mathematical theory he devised to explain them. It is in this that he differed from all who preceded and followed him in the study of cross-fertilisation of plants.’
His father’s honour saved, Francis Darwin subsided, and, with the true interest of the scientist, prepared to listen as attentively as I to the German professor’s explanations.
‘To return to your point,’ he began, ‘Mother Earth certainly plays a role in the genesis of plants, since a plant could not be born and grow without nutrients. But she plays no role in their hereditary properties. Father Plant, Mother Earth – it is a beautiful analogy, but it is not correct here. There is a proper analogy within the pea plant itself to the role of both mother and father, and it takes place within the flower. You see, within the petals of the flower of the pea plant, like most common flowers such as crocuses and tulips, there are two organs, the pistil which is the centre part, and the stamens which are the tiny stems containing a little yellow spot on the top of each. It is the stamens which play the role of the male organ, as their pollen ferti—?’
The professor’s voice ground to a halt as his attention was drawn to the strange behaviour of my neighbour upon the sofa, Mrs Bates. For some moments already she had been fanning herself vigorously with a Chinese fan decorated with pagodas and flying herons, from which depended a green tassel decorated with a bead, and now she leant back, closed her eyes and slipped into a near faint. Her pale lips murmured something that I didn’t catch, since I was paying attention to the maid, who was already hastening forward holding out smelling salts. I took them and agitated them under Mrs Bates’ nose, and she revived somewhat and remonstrated in a voice of deep dismay.
‘I cannot stand it – such language! I have never heard such a conversation. The stamens – the male – indeed! I cannot bear it – I am sorry – I am not accustomed …’
Her voice trailed away in a show of weakness, but her husband, rushing forward to her aid, added his protests to hers.
‘Whatever have you been saying to shock my wife so deeply?’
‘Oh, the conversation took a turn – dear Thomas, I know that it is science, but I really could not hear it!’
‘Well, it shan’t go on, my dear. Would you like me to take you home?’
‘No, no,’ said Mrs Darwin soothingly. ‘Here, dear Mrs Bates, do have your tea, it will revive you in a moment. We shan’t have any more scientific conversation, shall we? Let us all speak of ordinary things!’
Calm returned to the company, and everyone present was relieved that the moment of tension had passed. Everyone, that is, except for myself. I was overcome by a great wave of anger and frustration, so powerful that it risked entirely ruining the atmosphere of a pleasant social occasion, and leaving an unpleasant trace and strained relations behind. My delight at being asked to tea had been uniquely due to the possibility of having my questions answered, and now the tea party had transformed itself into an obstacle blocking my way to the knowledge I so dearly wanted. Even though Mrs Bates’ fainting spell was genuine enough, I could not help feeling that there was something hateful about it – something artificial and untruthful; not that she herself was counterfeiting her emotion – I did not think that of her – but yet how in Heaven’s name could the words ‘male organ’, pronounced in the most abstract scientific manner, on the subject of the stamens of a flower, cause such an effect upon a woman who was a wife and very probably a mother? Whence exactly came the shock to her nervous system upon hearing those words? Certainly not in the actual fact of the existence of the corresponding object! What hypocrisy, that the pronunciation of a word should cause a shock where the thing itself presumably caused none! I was truly suffused with rage and unable to pronounce a single word, for I saw that not only was Professor Correns’ fascinating discourse destined to be interrupted, but there should be no chance of its being resumed at any time during the course of the party, which at once became a dreary duty that I must perform, puppet-like, while hiding my feelings to the best of my ability.
By a miracle of the same kind of intuition that had allowed him to sense the importance of Gregor Mendel’s published but utterly unrecognised work, Professor Correns detected my thoughts and drew me aside.
‘I perceive your deep interest in these questions,’ he said, ‘and that you do not suffer from the sensitivity of certain English ladies with regard to certain somewhat delicate questions. Or perhaps it is that you, like myself, belong to a new and younger generation. So, I would propose, if you wish, that we meet again, perhaps to take a quiet walk through one of Cambridge’s lovely parks, and discuss these things in privacy and at leisure. It would afford me great pleasure to do so.’
The world returned to rights, and I felt a great smile of gratefulness spread over my face as I accepted joyfully and fixed a date that unfortunately could not, due to other obligations, be nearer than two days hence. But the professor’s understanding compensated for the delay, and, thanks to his words, I was able to resume the tea-drinking and the now relentlessly proper and correct conversation that ensued, with everyone gathered round the tea table together, and nothing left to chance, the husbands apparently not ready to abandon their wives once again to the unknown dangers of science.
In which Vanessa reads a book in German and one chapter in particular
The art of automatic writing,
I wrote, painstakingly translating the foreword to Dr Bernstein’s book in the hopes of developing an honest interest in the material, and thus providing myself with a perfect reason to ask for an introduction to the good doctor at the very next SPR meeting in London –
is one of the most mysterious and ill-understood phenomena of our time. This is partly due to the many aspects of the phenomenon and the deep divergences of opinion of observers as to its origin and meaning. The major trends of popular beliefs could be listed as follows:
1. Swindle, pure and simple, for the gain of attention or even financial advantage.
2. Communication from otherworldly spirits whether dead, distant or planetary.
In this case, two currents of thought are to be noted:
2.a. The communication is made in order to carry messages from the spirit to our world, through the medium;
2.b. The communication is made in order for the all-wise spirit (possibly identified with the Lord or one of his angels) to teach the medium, if she is willing to listen, hidden but important aspects of herself.
3. Fragmented impressions produced from the unconscious brain, not unlike the images produced in dreams.
In this case again, two possibilities present themselves, as for dreams:
3.a. Haphazard and fragmentary reproductions, in arbitrary arrangements, of sights, physical experiences, or mental experiences (such as anxiety over a particular coming event or over a type of event in general) from the daily life of the subject;
3.b. Mental constructions which are totally meaningful according to a logic which is different from that of the conscious mind, but which merely requires possessing the key to unlock its mysteries entirely.
The purpose of the present volume is, by the study of various cases, to indicate that true automatic writing does exist, independently of the many cases of imitation for purposes of gain, and to provide some case histories that may provide evidence for the last of these interpretations. In spite of intensive
personal study of one of the cases presented in this book, the author has not yet discovered the key to unlock the meaning of her writings, yet so strong is the impression of hidden meaning that the author is convinced that all who read the writings selected here must share it, and he writes this book in order to present it to the world, in the hopes that some more experienced or more enlightened colleague may use it as a springboard to reach the ultimate truth.
Each chapter of the book was devoted to a different case history, but from the first few lines of each, it was clear that the doctor had not personally analysed most of the cases, if he had even actually met them. Thus, his ability to link their writings (often quite coherent in themselves) to a deeper meaning connected to the unconscious personal life of the writer was in the majority of chapters limited by his lack of knowledge of even the quite basic facts of that life. For this reason, it made sense that the final and longest chapter should be devoted to the one case that was actually a patient of his own: a British subject named Lydia K. I skipped over the other chapters and went straight to Lydia K.
I treated Lydia K. for a period of nearly four years, of which she spent the first part residing in my clinic for mental patients, and then the final years in my home, for I came to the conclusion that she did not belong in the clinic, being in no way insane, but a very lovely young woman.
Over this period of time, I grew to know her
extremely well, in spite of the fact that my study of her case was somewhat handicapped by the fact that she had been forbidden to speak of her family or to give her true name. I communicated with the family through her legal guardian, who checked regularly on her well-being through the visits of a deputy who was sent to the clinic on a monthly basis, and also came regularly in June to bring Lydia home for the annual summer holidays. The family was clearly desirous of keeping her identity entirely secret. She had been instructed to refuse to answer any questions whatsoever about the subject, whether it be on her name, her parents, her siblings, or her more distant relatives. Aided by a natural tendency to discretion, she kept these promises faithfully, no doubt as convinced as the rest of the family of the shame that her ‘illness’ or ‘abnormality’ might afford to what I imagined must be a noble or prominent family. Throughout the time she spent in Basel, she was known to me as Lydia K., the K. standing for the name of her guardian, a name very widespread in England. I was quite certain that this name was not her real name, for she sometimes did not react to it very naturally, yet I never knew her by any other.Lydia’s greatest desire in life was to please others, and possessing a naturally sweet and compliant disposition, she was able to follow her family’s directives and the requirements of my own treatment perfectly insofar as they did not enter into conflict with each other. When they did, she invariably chose to keep faith with the promises made to her family.
Since she was a ward, I supposed her to be an orphan, and she eventually confirmed that this was the case, telling me that her father had died when she was four and her mother when she was fourteen. Apart from these bare facts, I was left in the most complete ignorance of many facts of her childhood that, I am certain, would have aided me to come to a deeper understanding of the ailment that afflicted her.Yet even without such information, I believe that as the years passed I was coming closer and closer to some kind of comprehension, and, at the same time, her own writings were evolving in interesting ways, although to a superficial eye they may not have appeared significantly different from those she produced from the very beginning of her stay at my clinic.
Although the guardian, Mr C. K., steadfastly refused to give me the information that I felt I needed to know on the subject of Lydia’s family, he was desirous that she should be cured, and willingly answered various other questions that I asked him during the course of an exchange of correspondence that lasted throughout the four years of her treatment (I never met him personally). He told me, for example, that according to the family she had no noticeable peculiarity of writing before reaching the age of fourteen, apart from a tendency to occasionally mar the margins of her copybooks with stray words, phrases or lines of poetry, but nothing which could in any way cause alarm, although to a trained mind these might have served as the first indications of the
direction that the subsequent abnormality was to follow. Lydia herself told me that as a child she had no consciousness of writing the stray words and was usually quite surprised to see them there when her governess had corrected her work. However, there was no cause for concern, and Lydia was able to complete her education altogether normally; indeed she was a cultivated and well-read young person.At the age of fourteen, coinciding in her case with the onset of puberty and (as I eventually learnt) following the death of her mother, Lydia’s tendency to absent-mindedness while writing began to increase noticeably, until it became necessary to stand over her and call her attention repeatedly to the matter at hand whenever she had to perform an ordinary writing task such as a letter or invitation. A moment’s inattention on the part of the governess would result in sentences turning, seemingly of their own accord, into something quite different from what was intended: snatches of poetry, confused images and the like. This tendency continued and intensified in spite of (perhaps partly because of) repeated scoldings and punishments, until Lydia could no longer take pen in hand without slipping into a state in which her hand alone functioned and her will could inject no sense at all into the process. By the age of nineteen or twenty she had reached a state of complete inability to write anything on purpose.
From our discussions I became convinced that, in spite of appearances, Lydia’s slow slide into automatic writing after her mother’s death represented a
progressive relief from repression rather than a descent into confusion. This reasoning was the first step towards my conviction that by her writing she was expressing inner thoughts that were totally inaccessible and incomprehensible to her conscious mind, and from that point on, my efforts were all bent on understanding the message itself. I believed that if I could understand it, I would hold the key to understanding the reason for which the message had been mentally suppressed, and something of the mechanism by which the human brain is able to accomplish such a feat. Everyone has the experience of forgetting something just when it is needed, only to have it spring into the mind at some entirely irrelevant moment, proving conclusively that the fact in question has not really been forgotten by the brain at all, but was only made temporarily unavailable. This phenomenon in itself is not mysterious, or, at least, it is familiar to everyone, but the mechanism which puts into direct opposition the brain’s intention of hiding something with the soul’s urgent desire to express that same thing, and the manifestation of this struggle by such rare and extraordinary phenomena as automatic writing, are mysteries, the unlocking of which would lead us deep into the secrets of human psychology.The patient came to me in the autumn of the year 1870, at the age of twenty-four. She had previously been living at home. I was not sure what particular event had motivated her suddenly being sent for treatment after six years of a stable although strange
condition. It occurred to me that the family probably saw her condition as an obstacle to marriage, for which she was in every other way entirely suitable, being a sweet-natured and very presentable young woman with polished manners. In the absence of any contact with pen and paper, it would have been nearly impossible to notice anything at all peculiar about her, were it not for a tendency to dreaminess and a certain lack of ability to reason efficiently, but these are of course traits shared by many young women and in no way prejudicial to her marrying happily and raising a family. Later, when I learnt that Lydia was an orphan, it occurred to me that she may have become a burden on her siblings for some reason, perhaps due to their own marriages into other families.I began Lydia’s treatment simply by a series of examinatory sessions, during which I gave her pen and paper and observed her writing with no interference.
The sight of pen and paper produced an immediate although scarcely visible effect on her; her eyes developed a dreamy look, almost as though they were covered by a film, and she appeared to look inwards inside herself. She confirmed to me that she saw and heard nothing while writing, nor could she recall any thoughts that went through her head. She spontaneously wrote for periods of time that would typically last from one to several minutes, after which she would appear to awaken. When she read what she had written, she used to shake her head with a
laugh, exclaiming ‘What nonsense!’ in a casual tone I felt certain that she had been taught, probably by family usage. Her writings were all very similar to each other in tone and in vocabulary, with a very small number of continuously recurring themes. Here is one example from the earliest days of her treatment.
Sky arches overhead, clouds over trees, world is large, world is vast, sky covers all, world and sky contain all. Nothing is more secret than any other thing to the eye of God, which knows and sees all equally like the sky covers all equally. God the Father made that which is Natural and that which is Unnatural thus the Unnatural is as natural as the Natural and pain is as natural as joy and all comes from the Father. Joy and abomination are both expressions of the love of the Father. Not one thing is right and one wrong but all are equal being sent by God as they are equal under the sky.
Attempting to analyse writings such as this one together led us far along the path of religious investigation, as we explored the writings of Calvin and the roots of Protestantism. However, Lydia repeatedly told me that these writings did not express her own consciously-held religious and moral views, and that she was herself shocked by reading ‘Not one thing is right and one wrong but all are equal’ which in no way corresponded to the manner in which she had been brought up. She was occasionally tempted to believe that a spirit from outside herself was
dictating such words to her, but her belief in this theory was and had always been tempered by the complete absence of any kind of self-identification of the said spirit (unlike in many of the other cases cited in this book). Of herself, Lydia made no attempt to comprehend her own writings, dismissing them as nonsense as observed above.Having obtained a grasp of her habitual procedure when writing, I began to make a series of very gentle experiments with her. My goal early on in the treatment was exclusively one of curing a peculiar and rare disease for which no kind of treatment had yet been developed; I was not, at that stage, as profoundly fascinated by the disease itself as I later became. In the desire to restore to her, little by little, control over her own writing, I began by suggesting that she include certain specific words in her texts. Before handing her the pen and paper or even showing them to her, I would impress upon her that she should attempt to write down a certain word, for example ‘house’, as many times as possible within her text. However, these efforts bore no fruit whatsoever. The moment the pen was in her hand, she lost contact with the conscious world and all memory of my request to her was effaced.
The next strategy I adopted, after some weeks of trial and reflection, had more success, although of an unpredictable and confusing nature. By its very nature, this technique could only be used rarely, as it could be easily recognised and I did not wish her to know my intentions. It occurred to me that if
her writings were reflecting a repressed reality, then perhaps if I gave her some knowledge purposely destined to be somehow repressed, echoes of it might emerge in her writing. I decided to make her the confidante of a secret – not an important one, of course; indeed one that I invented for the occasion – yet I told it to her with no reference whatsoever to its relevance to her treatment, but rather as though I wished to ask her advice, and I repeated to her many times the necessity for complete secrecy and discretion, which she of course whole-heartedly promised. The story I told her was one of a slightly embarrassing skin ailment, asking for her opinion as to whether I should inform my wife of it, or visit a doctor. In order to perceive the traces of my effort, I chose a topic – ‘skin’ – which had not yet made an appearance in any of her writings.I was immediately rewarded by the emergence in the following treatment sessions of the new word in her automatic writing, yet so disguised as to keep the secret perfectly. The word ‘skin’ now appeared occasionally, but in contexts not even remotely associated to the secret I had confided to her, and so disguised that, had I not been especially on the lookout for it, I would have missed its presence entirely.