The Scarlet Band

"Oh, my dear fellow!" Helms exclaimed. "Where reason and childish phantasms collide, which will you choose? In what sort of state would mankind be if it rejected reason?"

"In what sort of state is mankind now?" the good doctor returned.

Helms began to answer, then checked himself; the question held an unpleasant and poignant cogency. At last, he said, "Is mankind in that parlous state because of reason or in despite of it?"

"I don't know," Walton said. "Perhaps you might do better to inquire of Professor Nietzsche, who has published provocative works upon the subject."

Again, Helms found no quick response. This time, a man sitting behind him spoke up before he could say anything at all: "Pardon me, gents, but I couldn't help overhearing you, like. You ask me, Darwin is going straight to hell, and everybody who believes his lies'll end up there, too. The Good Book says it, I believe it, and by God that settles it." He spoke in Atlantean accents, and in particularly self-satisfied ones, too.

"Did God tell you this personally, Mr...?" Helms inquired.

"My name is Primrose, sir, Henry David Primrose," the man said, ignoring Helms' irony. "God gave me my head to think with and the Bible to think from, and I don't need anything more. Neither does anyone else, I say, and that goes double for your precious Darwin."

Dr. Walton was at first inclined to listen to Henry David Primrose with unusual attention, being struck by the matching initial consonants of his last name and the word preacher. He did not need long to conclude, however, that Mr. Primrose was not, in fact, their mysterious and elusive quarry. Mr. Primrose was a crazy man, or, in the Atlantean idiom, a nut. He wasn't even a follower of the House of Universal Devotion--he was a Methodist, which, to the Englishmen, made him a boring nut. The way he used the Bible to justify the ignorant views he already held would have converted the Pope to Darwinism. And he would not shut up.

"I will write a check for a million eagles to either one of you gentlemen if you can show me a single place where the Good Book is mistaken--even a single place, mind you," he said, much too loudly.

Athelstan Helms stirred. He and Walton had had this discussion; both men knew there were such places. Walton, however, was seized by the strong conviction that this was not the occasion to enumerate them. "What say we visit the smoking car, eh, Helms?" he said with patently false joviality.

"Very well," Helms replied. "I am sure Mr. Primrose does not indulge, tobacco being unmentioned in the Holy Scriptures--if not an actual error, surely a grievous omission."

That set Mr. Primrose spluttering anew, but he did not pursue the two Englishmen as they rose and walked down the central aisle. Dr. Walton had accomplished his purpose. "I dread our return," Walton said. "He'll serenade us some more."

"Ah, well," Helms said. "Perhaps he will leave us at peace if we avoid topics zoological and theological."

"And if he doesn't, we can always kill him." Dr. Walton was not inclined to feel charitable.

Despite the thickness of the atmosphere, the smoking car proved more salubrious than the ordinary passenger coach. It boasted couches bolted to the floor rather than the row upon row of hard seats in the other car. Walton lit a cigar, while Athelstan Helms puffed on his pipe. They improved the aroma of the smoke in the car, as most of the gentlemen there smoked harsh, nasty cigarettes.

A stag and a doe watched the train rattle past. They must have been used to the noisy mechanical monsters, for they did not bound off in terror. "More immigrants," Helms remarked.

"I beg your pardon?" his traveling companion said.

"The deer," Helms replied. "But for a few bats--many of them peculiar even by the standards of the Chiroptera--Atlantis was devoid of mammalia before those fishermen chanced upon its shores. In the absence of predators other than men with rifles, the deer have flourished mightily."

"Not an unhandsome country, even if it is foreign," Dr. Walton said--as much praise as any non-English locale this side of heaven was likely to get from him.

"Hard winters on this side of the Green Ridge Mountains, I'm given to understand," Helms said. "We would notice it more if the majority of the trees were deciduous rather than coniferous--bare branches do speak to the seasons of the year."

"That's so," Walton agreed. "I suppose most of the ancestors of the deciduous plants had not yet, ah, evolved when some geological catastrophe first caused Atlantis to separate from Terranova."

"It seems very likely," Helms said. "Mr. Primrose might tell us it was Noah's flood."

Dr. Walton expressed an opinion of Mr. Primrose's intimate personal habits on which he was unlikely to have any exact knowledge from such a brief acquaintance. Athelstan Helms' pipe sent up a couple of unusually large plumes of smoke. Had the great detective not been smoking it, one could almost suspect that he might have chuckled.