Mr. Y - - did his best to look unconcerned, but still, when the
tactless Miss X - - came to him, expressing her loud indignation
at all these superstitions of an inferior race, he at least seemed
to remember that our host knew English perfectly, and he did not
encourage her farther expressions of sympathy. He made no answer,
but smiled contemptuously. Our host approached the colonel with
respectful salaams and invited us to follow him.
"No doubt he is going to ask us to leave his house immediately!"
was my uncomfortable impression.
But my apprehension was not justified. At this epoch of my Indian
pilgrimage I was far, as yet, from having fathomed the metaphysical
depth of a Hindu heart.
Sham Rao began by delivering a very far-fetched, eloquent preface.
He reminded us that he, personally, was an enlightened man, a man
who possessed all the advantages of a Western education. He said
that, owing to this, he was not quite sure that the body of the
vampire was actually inhabited by his late brother. Darwin, of course,
and some other great naturalists of the West, seemed to believe in
the transmigration of souls, but, as far as he understood, they
believed in it in an inverse sense; that is to say, if a baby had
been born to his mother exactly at the moment of the vampire's death,
this baby would indubitably have had a great likeness to a vampire,
owing to the decaying atoms of the vampire being so close to her.
"Is not this an exact interpretation of the Darwinian school?" he asked.
We modestly answered that, having traveled almost incessantly during
the last year, we could not help being a bit behindhand in the
questions of modern science, and that we were not able to follow
its latest conclusions.
"But I have followed them!" rejoined the good-natured Sham Rao,
with a touch of pomposity. "And so I hope I may be allowed to say
that I have understood and duly appreciated their most recent
developments. I have just finished studying the magnificent
Anthropogenesis of Haeckel, and have carefully discussed in my
own mind his logical, scientific explanations of the origin of
man from inferior animal forms through transformation. And what
is this transformation, pray, if not the transmigration of the
ancient and modern Hindus, and the metempsychosis of the Greeks?"
We had nothing to say against the identity, and even ventured to
observe that, according to Haeckel, it does look like it.
"Exactly!" exclaimed he joyfully. "This shows that our conceptions
are neither silly nor superstitious, as is maintained by some
opponents of Manu. The great Manu, anticipated Darwin and Haeckel.
Judge for yourself; the latter derives the genesis of man from a
group of plastides, from the jelly-like moneron; this moneron,
through the ameoba, the ascidian, the brainless and heartless
amphioxus, and so on, transmigrates in the eighth remove into the
lamprey, is transformed, at last, into a vertebrate amniote, into
a premammalian, into a marsupial animal.... The vampire, in its turn,
belongs to the species of vertebrates.
