A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 102: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

. THREE LINES OF OLD FRENCH By A. Merritt Was there no radiant, elusive Lucie—save in his own tortured mind? Copyright 1919 by Popular Publications, Inc, gical science,” ended Hawtry, “opening up through mutilation and torture unexplored regions which the genius of man was quick to enter, and, entering, found ways to checkmate suffer- ing and death—for always, my friends, the distillate from the blood of sacrifice is progress—great as all this was, the world tragedy has opened yp still another region wherein even greater knowledge will be found. It was the clinic unsurpassed for the psychologist even more than for the surgeon.” Latour, the great little French doctor, drew himself out of the depths of the big chair; the light from the fireplace fell ruddily upon his keen face, “That is true,” he said. “Yes, that is true.There in the furnace the mind of man opened like a flower beneath a too glowing sun. Beaten about in that colossal tempest of primitive forces, caught in the chaos of energies both physical and psychi- eal—which, although man himself was its creator, made of their maker a moth in a whirlwind—all those obscure, those mys- terious factors of mind which men, for lack of knowledge, have named the soul, were stripped of their inhibitions and giv- en power to appear. “How could it have been otherwise— when men and women, gripped by one shattering sorrow or joy, will manifest the hidden depths of spirit—how could it have been otherwise in that steadily main- tained crescendo of emotion?” McAndrews spoke. “Just which psy- 102 4 ‘B UT rich as was the war for sur- chological 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; Me- Andrews, 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. “T mean the field of suggestion,” re- plied the psychologist. ‘‘The mental reac- tions which reveal themselves as visions— an accidental formation in the clouds that becomes to the overwrought 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» fantom 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 sugges- tion; all born of the tearing loose of the ~ Comicbooks.col