"For many years," answered the Doctor, as he lighted a cigarette and sank back in his chair with a sigh of comfort, "that troubled me, but as I grow older I find myself thinking less of death and clinging fast to life. Death! Bah! It does not frighten me. It may be a vast nothingness, or it may be a step to a higher existence. What does it matter? Our work is here; we have our friends to love, our duty to be done; that is life, and I like it."
"The body dies," went on Dr. Barnhelm, "but the soul, can that ever die? I doubt it! Every man of us who has a soul must doubt it."
"Every man of us," said Paul. "Ah! At least we, all of us, have that in common, I suppose."
"Naturally, to a greater or less degree. Your soul, my friend, may be big and fine; mine may be mean and small, but if in the human body there is such a thing, surely we all of us must have it."
"Do you know the theory of the 'Sixth Day Men,' Paul?"
"'The Sixth Day Men,'" repeated Paul, "no. It has a most effective title, this theory of yours; tell me of it."
"In the beginning, God created the Heaven and the Earth; for six days he labored, and on the seventh day he rested."
"I heard rumors to that effect," commented Dr. Crossett lightly.
"Days in that time," continued Dr. Barnhelm, not noticing his friend's interruption, "were not of twenty-four hours; they were Alous, cycles of time. During those periods animal life came, evolution went on, bit by bit, with thousands of years between each step of its progress. A man-thing came into the world."
"Before the seventh day," enquired Paul, with interest, for he dearly loved any discussion of this sort, and he knew that any theory considered worthy of attention by his old friend must at least hold points of interest.
"Yes," said Dr. Barnhelm. "Before the seventh day."
"Ah! This is interesting and new to me. Then our old friend Adam was not the first man?"
"Listen, Paul! After the seventh day 'God breathed the breath of life into Adam's nostrils.' He, therefore, was the first 'man,' for he had a God-given soul. In him was more of the divine than we can claim, for we are told that he could 'walk with God.' That was before the fall. Eve's fall, in the Garden of Eden, by this theory, was her guilty love for one of these soulless, earth-born 'men things,' and of them Cain was born. Born without a soul, and, as the Bible tells us, 'Cain went away and found himself a wife.' Where? Where else than from among these Sixth Day people, soulless, all of them, and their descendants could have brought into the world small trace of the divine. Meanwhile sons of Adam were beginning to people the earth, and later these two races mingled. There began a struggle between good and evil in the human heart, a struggle that has never ended. Sometimes will be born a human being in whom occurs a curious 'throw back' of generations to these soulless Sixth Day ancestors. Sometimes the good in us conquers the evil, and sometimes the evil conquers, kills the good, and the God-given soul leaves us and there is nothing left but an animal, a 'man thing,' a straight descendant of one of those Sixth Day horrors, whose blood has contaminated us since the fall of Eve."