"A. E. Merritt - Three Lines of Old French" - читать интересную книгу автора (Merritt A. E)

will manifest the hidden depths of spirit--how could it have been otherwise in that steadily maintained
crescendo of emotion?" McAndrews spoke.
"Just which psychological region do you mean, Hawtry?" he asked.

There were four of us in front of the fireplace of the Science Club--Hawtry, who rules the chair of
psychology in one of our greatest colleges, and whose name is an honored one throughout the world;
Latour, an immortal of France; McAndrews, the famous American surgeon whose work during the war
has written a new page in the shining book of science; and myself. These are not the names of the three,
but they are as I have described them; and I am pledged to identify them no further.

"I mean the field of suggestion," replied the psychologist.

"The mental reactions which reveal themselves as visions--an accidental formation in the clouds that
becomes to the over-wrought imaginations of the beholders the so-eagerly-prayed-for hosts of Joan of
Arc marching out from heaven; moonlight in the cloud rift that becomes to the besieged a fiery cross held
by the hands of archangels; the despair and hope that are transformed into such a legend as the bowmen
of Mons, ghostly archers who with their phantom shafts overwhelm the conquering enemy; wisps of
cloud over No Man's Land that are translated by the tired eyes of those who peer out into the shape of
the Son of Man himself walking sorrowfully among the dead. Signs, portents, and miracles, the hosts of
premonitions, of apparitions of loved ones--all dwellers in this land of suggestion; all born of the tearing
loose of the veils of the subconscious. Here, when even a thousandth part is gathered, will be work for
the psychological analyst for twenty years."

"And the boundaries of this region?" asked McAndrews.

"Boundaries?" Hawtry plainly was perplexed.

McAndrews for a moment was silent. Then he drew from his pocket a yellow slip of paper, a cablegram.

"Young Peter Laveller died today," he said, apparently irrelevantly. "Died where he had set forth to
pass--in the remnants of the trenches that cut through the ancient domain of the Seigniors of Tocquelain,
up near Bethune."

"Died there!" Hawtry's astonishment was profound. "But I read that he had been brought home; that,
indeed, he was one of your triumphs, McAndrews!"

"I said he went there to die," repeated the surgeon slowly.

So that explained the curious reticence of the Lavellers as to what had become of their soldier son--a
secrecy which had puzzled the press for weeks. For young Peter Laveller was one of the nation's heroes.
The only boy of old Peter Laveller--and neither is that the real name of the family, for, like the others, I
may not reveal it--he was the heir to the grim old coal king's millions, and the secret, best loved pulse of
his heart.

Early in the war he had enlisted with the French. His father's influence might have abrogated the law of
the French army that every man must start from the bottom up--I do not know--but young Peter would
have none of it. Steady of purpose, burning with the white fire of the first Crusaders, he took his place in
the ranks.

Clean-cut, blue-eyed, standing six feet in his stocking feet, just twenty-five, a bit of a dreamer, perhaps,