crossed it. Just as we were crossing it some men in a boat below
discovered the body of a possible suicide, in the water, days old and
discolored, but still intact and with the clothes of a man of at least
middle-class means. I was for leaving, being made a little sick by the
mere sight. Not so Peter. He was for joining in the effort which brought
the body to shore, and in a moment was back with the small group of
watermen, speculating and arguing as to the condition and character of
the dead man, making himself really one of the group. Finally he was
urging the men to search the pockets while some one went for the police.
But more than anything, with a hard and yet in its way humane realism
which put any courage of mine in that direction to the blush, he was all
for meditating on the state and nature of man, his chemical
components--chlorine, sulphuric acid, phosphoric acid, potassium,
sodium, calcium, magnesium, oxygen--and speculating as to which
particular chemicals in combination gave the strange metallic blues,
greens, yellows and browns to the decaying flesh! He had a great stomach
for life. The fact that insects were at work shocked him not at all. He
speculated as to _these_, their duties and functions! He asserted
boldly that man was merely a chemical formula at best, that something
much wiser than he had prepared him, for some not very brilliant purpose
of his or its own perhaps, and that he or it, whoever or whatever he or
it was, was neither good nor bad, as we imagined such things, but both.
He at once went off into the mysteries--where, when with me at least, he
seemed to prefer to dwell--talked of the divinations of the Chaldeans,
how they studied the positions of the stars and the entrails of dead
animals before going to war, talked of the horrible fetiches of the
Africans, the tricks and speculations of the priests of Greek and Roman
temples, finally telling me the story of the ambitious eel-seller who
anchored the dead horse in the stream in order to have plenty of eels
every morning for market. I revolted. I declared he was sickening.