Why did Father smile to himself, why did his eyes turn up, misty, in a parody of mock admiration? Who can tell? Did he foresee the coarse trick, the vulgar intrigue, the transparent machinations behind the amazing manifestations of the secret force? Yet that moment marked a turning point: it was then that Father began his laboratory experiments.

Father's laboratory equipment was simple: a few spools of wire, a few bottles of acid, zinc, lead, and carbon— these constituted the workshop of that very strange esot-erist. "Matter," he said, modestly lowering his eyes and stifling a cough, "Matter, gentlemen—" He did not finish his sentence, he left his listeners guessing that he was about to expose a big swindle, that all we who sat there were being taken for a ride. With downcast eyes my father quietly sneered at that age-long fetish. "Panta rei!" he exclaimed, and indicated with a movement of his hands the eternal circling of substance. For a long time he had wanted to mobilize the forces hidden in it, to make its stififness melt, to pave its way to universal penetration, to transfusion, to universal circulation in accordance with its true nature.

"Principium individuationis—my foot," he used to say, thus expressing his limitless contempt for that guiding human principle. He threw out these words in passing, while running from wire to wire. He half-closed his eyes and touched delicately various points of the circuit, feeling for the slight differences in potential. He made incisions in the wire, leaned over it, listening, and immediately moved ten steps farther, to repeat the same gestures at another point of the circuit. He seemed to have a dozen hands and twenty senses. His brittle attention wandered to a hundred places at once. No point in space was free from his suspicions. He leaned over to pierce the wire at some place and then, with a sudden jump backward, he pounced at another like a cat on its prey and, missing, became confused. "I am sorry," he would say, addressing himself unexpectedly to the astonished onlooker. "I am sorry, I am concerned with that section of space which you are filling. Couldn't you move a little to one side for a minute?" And he quickly made some lightning measurements, agile and nimble as a canary twitching efficiently under the impulses of its sympathetic system.

The metals dipped in acid solutions, salty and rusting in that painful bath, began to conduct in darkness. Awakened from their stiff lifelessness, they hummed monotonously, sang metallically, shone molecularly in the incessant dusk of those mournful and late days. Invisible charges rose in the poles and swamped them, escaping into the circling darkness. An imperceptible tickling, a blind prickly current traversed the space polarized into concentric lines of energy, into circles and spirals of a magnetic field. Here and there an awakened apparatus would give out signals, another would reply a moment later, out of turn, in hopeless monosyllables, dash-dot-dash in the intervals of a dull lethargy. My father stood among those wandering currents, a smile of suffering on his face, impressed by that stammering articulation, by the misery, shut in once and for all, irrevocably, which was monotonously signaling in crippled half-syllables from the unliberated depths.

As a consequence of these researches, my father achieved amazing results. He proved, for instance, that an electric bell, built on the principle of Neeffs hammer, is an ordinary mystification. It was not man who had broken into the laboratory of nature, but nature that had drawn him into its machinations, achieving through his experiments its own obscure aims. During dinner my father would touch the nail of his thumb with the handle of a spoon dipped in soup, and suddenly Neeffs bell would begin to rattle inside the lamp. The whole apparatus was quite superfluous, quite unnecessary: Neeffs bell was the point of convergence of certain impulses of matter, which used man's ingenuity for its own purposes. It was Nature that willed and worked, man was nothing more than an oscillating arrow, the shuttle of a loom, darting here or there according to Nature's will. He was himself only a component, a part of Neeff's hammer.

Somebody once mentioned "mesmerism" and my father took this up too, immediately. The circle of his theories had closed, he had found the missing link. According to his theory, man was only a transit station, a temporary junction of mesmeric currents, wandering hither and thither within the lap of eternal matter. All the inventions in which he took such pride were traps into which nature had enticed him, were snares of the unknown. Father's experiments began to acquire the character of magic and legerdemain, of a parody of juggling. I won't mention the numerous experiments with pigeons, which, by manipulating a wand, he multiplied into two, four, or ten, only to enclose them, with visible effort, back again into the wand.