The Square Pegs by Irving Wallace Read Free Book Online

to have invented baseball, and Thomas A. Edison, inventor of almost everything else, led the list of her followers.
    Baron Harden-Hickey seems to have been equally enamored. After meeting her, he threw off Catholicism, and after traveling halfway around the earth to visit the land of her Masters (“During a fairly long stay I made in India, I have been able to personally ascertain the occult power of the Tibetan adepts”), he returned to France to put his new ideas on religion to paper. In 1890 L. Sauvaitre of Paris published Theosophy , by Saint-Patrice. Harden-Hickey’s soul-searching foreword, addressed to his French Catholic public, advises readers to emulate him in forsaking the Church of Rome. “You were born in France, from an aristocratic or bourgeois family, and you were most certainly Catholic. The influences that presided over your education have no doubt been created by this double origin. So far, you have perhaps been right in following your faith. But now it is your duty to educate yourself and submit to a cold-blooded analysis, free of foregone conclusions, of the creed which composes your intellectual baggage. I believe, to start with, that the highest aim in life should not be possession of faith, but comprehension of truth.”
    In the first six chapters of Theosophy , Harden-Hickey lashes Christianity with the new Darwinism. “The considerable amount of good achieved in the Occident by Christianity has been offset by its evil and by the infamous doctrine that claims that honest disbelief in dogmas is a moral offense, a deadly sin.” From this, Harden-Hickey goes into his last six chapters, explaining Buddhism and Theosophy and examining them also in the light of Evolution. He concludes by quoting heavily from a house organ called The Theosophist and enthusiastically praising Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society.
    Less than one year later, a volume called Bible Plagiarisms , by Saint-Patrice, appeared in the Paris book-stalls. In its pages Harden-Hickey argues: “As to being a historical work, the Bible is inferior to Perrault’s fairy tales; as a literary work, it is inferior to Ohnet; as to obscenity, it is worse than the Marquis de Sade.” He adds that Genesis is a plagiarism of the Indian Vedas, the Old Testament a steal from Brahmanisrn, and Christianity a weak copy of Buddhism.
    This conversion, however, was not the main product of Harden-Hickey ‘s twenty-four-month journey around the world. Early during this trip occurred the accident that was to provide him with his raison d’être . Before departing he arranged that his young son and daughter, both of whom he controlled under the antiquated French divorce laws, be placed under the guardianship of his closest Parisian friend, Count de la Boissière, who had supported himself as a clerk in the Colonial Office, as a curbstone broker, and as a wine merchant, and who had in common with him a love for affaires d’honneur and the Bourbon way of life.
    Harden-Hickey sailed on a British merchant ship, the Astoria , commanded by a Captain Jackson, which was bound west for Cape Horn en route to India. About seven hundred miles off Brazil a storm drove the Astoria into refuge behind a small mountainous island called Trinidad. This was not the larger British West Indian island of Trinidad, six miles off Venezuela, populated by a half-million, and renowned for its asphalt lake. What Harden-Hickey saw from his rolling merchantman was a coral-ridged, barren, uninhabited thumb of land isolated from and almost forgotten by the rest of the world. “One of the most uncanny and dispiriting spots on earth,” E. F. Knight of the London Times had remarked in 1881, after observing the heavy vapors and mists that hung shroudlike over Trinidad’s ravines, cliffs, and lava deposits.
    Harden-Hickey requested permission of Captain Jackson to go ashore. From the Captain and crew he had heard the standard romantic stories of burried treasure on the island.