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TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED




Mr WELLS has also written the following novels:

Love and Mr Lewisham.
Kipps.
Mr Polly.
The Wheels of Chance.
The New Machiavelli.
Ann Veronica.
Tono-Bungay.
The Research Magnificent.
Marriage.
Bealby.
The Passionate Friends.
The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman.
Mr Britling Sees It Through.
The Soul of a Bishop.
John and Peter.
The Undying Fire.
The Secret Places of the Heart.


The following fantastic and imaginative romances:

The War of the Worlds.
The Time Machine.
The Wonderful Visit.
The Island of Dr Moreau.
The Sea Lady.
When the Sleeper Wakes.
The Food of the Gods.
The War in the Air.
The First Men in the Moon.
In the Days of the Comet.
The World Set Free.
The Invisible Man.


Numerous short stories collected under the following titles:

The Country of the Blind.
Tales of Space and Time.
The Stolen Bacillus.
The Plattner Story.
Twelve Stories and a dream.


A series of books on social, religious, and political questions:

Anticipations (1900).
Mankind in the Making.
First and Last Things.
New Worlds for Old.
A Modern Utopia.
The Future in America.
God the Invisible King.
The Outline of History.
Washington and the Hope of Peace.
The Salvaging of Civilisation.


And two little books about children’s play, called,

Floor Games and Little Wars.




TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED

BY
H. G. WELLS

[Illustration]

LONDON: 48 PALL MALL
W. COLLINS SONS & CO. LTD.
GLASGOW   MELBOURNE   AUCKLAND


_Manufactured in Great Britain_




CONTENTS

                                         PAGE
THE REMARKABLE CASE OF DAVIDSON’S EYES      7

THE MOTH                                   20

THE STORY OF THE LATE MR ELVESHAM          33

UNDER THE KNIFE                            54

THE PLATTNER STORY                         71

THE CRYSTAL EGG                            96

THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES           118

A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON                     140

THE NEW ACCELERATOR                       172

THE DOOR IN THE WALL                      190

THE APPLE                                 211

THE TEMPTATION OF HARRINGAY               221

SKELMERSDALE IN FAIRYLAND                 228

THE INEXPERIENCED GHOST                   245

THE STOLEN BODY                           261




THE REMARKABLE CASE OF DAVIDSON’S EYES


I

The transitory mental aberration of Sidney Davidson, remarkable
enough in itself, is still more remarkable if Wade’s explanation is
to be credited. It sets one dreaming of the oddest possibilities of
inter-communication in the future, of spending an intercalary five
minutes on the other side of the world, or being watched in our most
secret operations by unsuspected eyes. It happened that I was the
immediate witness of Davidson’s seizure, and so it falls naturally to
me to put the story upon paper.

When I say that I was the immediate witness of his seizure, I mean
that I was the first on the scene. The thing happened at the Harlow
Technical College, just beyond the Highgate Archway. He was alone in
the larger laboratory when the thing happened. I was in a smaller
room, where the balances are, writing up some notes. The thunderstorm
had completely upset my work, of course. It was just after one of the
louder peals that I thought I heard some glass smash in the other room.
I stopped writing, and turned round to listen. For a moment I heard
nothing; the hail was playing the devil’s tattoo on the corrugated zinc
of the roof. Then came another sound, a smash--no doubt of it this
time. Something heavy had been knocked off the bench. I jumped up at
once and went and opened the door leading into the big laboratory.

I was surprised to hear a queer sort of laugh, and saw Davidson
standing unsteadily in the middle of the room, with a dazzled look
on his face. My first impression was that he was drunk. He did not
notice me. He was clawing out at something invisible a yard in front
of his face. He put out his hand, slowly, rather hesitatingly, and
then clutched nothing. ‘What’s come to it?’ he said. He held up his
hands to his face, fingers spread out. ‘Great Scott!’ he said. The
thing happened three or four years ago, when every one swore by that
personage. Then he began raising his feet clumsily, as though he had
expected to find them glued to the floor.

‘Davidson!’ cried I. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ He turned round in
my direction and looked about for me. He looked over me and at me and
on either side of me, without the slightest sign of seeing me. ‘Waves,’
he said; ‘and a remarkably neat schooner. I’d swear that was Bellow’s
voice. _Hallo!_’ He shouted suddenly at the top of his voice.

I thought he was up to some foolery. Then I saw littered about his feet
the shattered remains of the best of our electrometers. ‘What’s up,
man?’ said I. ‘You’ve smashed the electrometer!’

‘Bellows again!’ said he. ‘Friends left, if my hands are gone.
Something about electrometers. Which way _are_ you, Bellows?’ He
suddenly came staggering towards me. ‘The damned stuff cuts like
butter,’ he said. He walked straight into the bench and recoiled. ‘None
so buttery that!’ he said, and stood swaying.

I felt scared. ‘Davidson,’ said I, ‘what on earth’s come over you?’

He looked round him in every direction. ‘I could swear that was
Bellows. Why don’t you show yourself like a man, Bellows?’

It occurred to me that he must be suddenly struck blind. I walked
round the table and laid my hand upon his arm. I never saw a man more
startled in my life. He jumped away from me, and came round into an
attitude of self-defence, his face fairly distorted with terror. ‘Good
God!’ he cried. ‘What was that?’

‘It’s I--Bellows. Confound it, Davidson!’

He jumped when I answered him and stared--how can I express it?--right
through me. He began talking, not to me, but to himself. ‘Here in broad
daylight on a clear beach. Not a place to hide in.’ He looked about him
wildly. ‘Here! I’m _off_.’ He suddenly turned and ran headlong into
the big electro-magnet--so violently that, as we found afterwards, he
bruised his shoulder and jawbone cruelly. At that he stepped back a
pace, and cried out with almost a whimper, ‘What, in Heaven’s name, has
come over me?’ He stood, blanched with terror and trembling violently,
with his right arm clutching his left, where that had collided with the
magnet.

By that time I was excited and fairly scared. ‘Davidson,’ said I,
‘don’t be afraid.’

He was startled at my voice, but not so excessively as before. I
repeated my words in as clear and as firm a tone as I could assume.
‘Bellows,’ he said, ‘is that you?’

‘Can’t you see it’s me?’

He laughed. ‘I can’t even see it’s myself. Where the devil are we?’

‘Here,’ said I, ‘in the laboratory.’

‘The laboratory!’ he answered in a puzzled tone, and put his hand to
his forehead. ‘I _was_ in the laboratory--till that flash came, but I’m
hanged if I’m there now. What ship is that?’

‘There’s no ship,’ said I. ‘Do be sensible, old chap.’

‘No ship,’ he repeated, and seemed to forget my denial forthwith. ‘I
suppose,’ said he slowly, ‘we’re both dead. But the rummy part is I
feel just as though I still had a body. Don’t get used to it all at
once, I suppose. The old shop was struck by lightning, I suppose. Jolly
quick thing, Bellows--eh?’

‘Don’t talk nonsense. You’re very much alive. You are in the
laboratory, blundering about. You’ve just smashed a new electrometer. I
don’t envy you when Boyce arrives.’

He stared away from me towards the diagrams of cryohydrates. ‘I must be
deaf,’ said he. ‘They’ve fired a gun, for there goes the puff of smoke,
and I never heard a sound.’

I put my hand on his arm again, and this time he was less alarmed. ‘We
seem to have a sort of invisible bodies,’ said he. ‘By Jove! there’s a
boat coming, round the headland. It’s very much like the old life after
all--in a different climate.’

I shook his arm. ‘Davidson,’ I cried, ‘wake up!’


II

It was just then that Boyce came in. So soon as he spoke Davidson
exclaimed: ‘Old Boyce! Dead too! What a lark!’ I hastened to explain
that Davidson was in a kind of somnambulistic trance. Boyce was
interested at once. We both did all we could to rouse the fellow out of
his extraordinary state. He answered our questions, and asked us some
of his own, but his attention seemed distracted by his hallucination
about a beach and a ship. He kept interpolating observations concerning
some boat and the davits, and sails filling with the wind. It made one
feel queer, in the dusky laboratory, to hear him saying such things.

He was blind and helpless. We had to walk him down the passage, one
at each elbow, to Boyce’s private room, and while Boyce talked to
him there, and humoured him about this ship idea, I went along the
corridor and asked old Wade to come and look at him. The voice of our
Dean sobered him a little, but not very much. He asked where his hands
were, and why he had to walk about up to his waist in the ground. Wade
thought over him a long time--you know how he knits his brows--and then
made him feel the couch, guiding his hands to it. ‘That’s a couch,’
said Wade. ‘The couch in the private room of Professor Boyce. Horsehair
stuffing.’

Davidson felt about, and puzzled over it, and answered presently that
he could feel it all right, but he couldn’t see it.

‘What _do_ you see?’ asked Wade. Davidson said he could see nothing but
a lot of sand and broken-up shells. Wade gave him some other things to
feel, telling him what they were, and watching him keenly.

‘The ship is almost hull down,’ said Davidson presently, _apropos_ of
nothing.

‘Never mind the ship,’ said Wade. ‘Listen to me, Davidson. Do you know
what hallucination means?’

‘Rather,’ said Davidson.

‘Well, everything you see is hallucinatory.’

‘Bishop Berkeley,’ said Davidson.

‘Don’t mistake me,’ said Wade. ‘You are alive and in this room of
Boyce’s. But something has happened to your eyes. You cannot see; you
can feel and hear, but not see. Do you follow me?’

‘It seems to me that I see too much.’ Davidson rubbed his knuckles into
his eyes. ‘Well?’ he said.

‘That’s all. Don’t let it perplex you. Bellows here and I will take you
home in a cab.’

‘Wait a bit,’ Davidson thought. ‘Help me to sit down,’ said he
presently; ‘and now--I’m sorry to trouble you--but will you tell me all
that over again?’

Wade repeated it very patiently. Davidson shut his eyes, and pressed
his hands upon his forehead. ‘Yes,’ said he. ‘It’s quite right. Now my
eyes are shut I know you’re right. That’s you, Bellows, sitting by me
on the couch. I’m in England again. And we’re in the dark.’

Then he opened his eyes. ‘And there,’ said he, ‘is the sun just rising,
and the yards of the ship, and a tumbled sea, and a couple of birds
flying. I never saw anything so real. And I’m sitting up to my neck in
a bank of sand.’

He bent forward and covered his face with his hands. Then he opened his
eyes again. ‘Dark sea and sunrise! And yet I’m sitting on a sofa in old
Boyce’s room!... God help me!’


III

That was the beginning. For three weeks this strange affection of
Davidson’s eyes continued unabated. It was far worse than being blind.
He was absolutely helpless, and had to be fed like a newly-hatched
bird, and led about and undressed. If he attempted to move, he fell
over things or struck himself against walls or doors. After a day or
so he got used to hearing our voices without seeing us, and willingly
admitted he was at home, and that Wade was right in what he told him.
My sister, to whom he was engaged, insisted on coming to see him, and
would sit for hours every day while he talked about this beach of
his. Holding her hand seemed to comfort him immensely. He explained
that when we left the College and drove home--he lived in Hampstead
village--it appeared to him as if we drove right through a sandhill--it
was perfectly black until he emerged again--and through rocks and trees
and solid obstacles, and when he was taken to his own room it made
hh the fear of falling, because going
upstairs seemed to lift him thirty or forty feet above the rocks of his
imaginary island. He kept saying he should smash all the eggs. The end
was that he had to be taken down into his father’s consulting room and
laid upon a couch that stood there.

He described the island as being a bleak kind of place on the whole,
with very little vegetation, except some peaty stuff, and a lot of bare
rock. There were multitudes of penguins, and they made the rocks white
and disagreeable to see. The sea was often rough, and once there was
a thunderstorm, and he lay and shouted at the silent flashes. Once or
twice seals pulled up on the beach, but only on the first two or three
days. He said it was very funny the way in which the penguins used to
waddle right through him, and how he seemed to lie among them without
disturbing them.

I remember one odd thing, and that was when he wanted very badly to
smoke. We put a pipe in his hands--he almost poked his eye out with
it--and lit it. But he couldn’t taste anything. I’ve since found it’s
the same with me--I don’t know if it’s the usual case--that I cannot
enjoy tobacco at all unless I can see the smoke.

But the queerest part of his vision came when Wade sent him out in
a bath-chair to get fresh air. The Davidsons hired a chair, and got
that deaf and obstinate dependant of theirs, Widgery, to attend to it.
Widgery’s ideas of healthy expeditions were peculiar. My sister, who
had been to the Dogs’ Home, met them in Camden Town, towards King’s
Cross, Widgery trotting along complacently, and Davidson, evidently
most distressed, trying in his feeble, blind way to attract Widgery’s
attention.

He positively wept when my sister spoke to him. ‘Oh, get me out of
this horrible darkness!’ he said, feeling for her hand. ‘I must get out
of it, or I shall die.’ He was quite incapable of explaining what was
the matter, but my sister decided he must go home, and presently, as
they went uphill towards Hampstead, the horror seemed to drop from him.
He said it was good to see the stars again, though it was then about
noon and a blazing day.

‘It seemed,’ he told me afterwards, ‘as if I was being carried
irresistibly towards the water. I was not very much alarmed at first.
Of course it was night there--a lovely night.’

‘Of course?’ I asked, for that struck me as odd.

‘Of course,’ said he. ‘It’s always night there when it is day here....
Well, we went right into the water, which was calm and shining under
the moonlight--just a broad swell that seemed to grow broader and
flatter as I came down into it. The surface glistened just like a
skin--it might have been empty space underneath for all I could tell to
the contrary. Very slowly, for I rode slanting into it, the water crept
up to my eyes. Then I went under and the skin seemed to break and heal
again about my eyes. The moon gave a jump up in the sky and grew green
and dim, and fish, faintly glowing, came darting round me--and things
that seemed made of luminous glass; and I passed through a tangle of
seaweeds that shone with an oily lustre. And so I drove down into the
sea, and the stars went out one by one, and the moon grew greener
and darker, and the seaweed became a luminous purple-red. It was all
very faint and mysterious, and everything seemed to quiver. And all
the while I could hear the wheels of the bath-chair creaking, and the
footsteps of people going by, and a man in the distance selling the
special _Pall Mall_.

‘I kept sinking down deeper and deeper into the water. It became inky
black about me, not a ray from above came down into that darkness,
and the phosphorescent things grew brighter and brighter. The snaky
branches of the deeper weeds flickered like the flames of spirit-lamps;
but, after a time, there were no more weeds. The fishes came staring
and gaping towards me, and into me and through me, I never imagined
such fishes before. They had lines of fire along the sides of them as
though they had been outlined with a luminous pencil. And there was
a ghastly thing swimming backwards with a lot of twining arms. And
then I saw, coming very slowly towards me through the gloom, a hazy
mass of light that resolved itself as it drew nearer into multitudes
of fishes, struggling and darting round something that drifted. I
drove on straight towards it, and presently I saw in the midst of the
tumult, and by the light of the fish, a bit of splintered spar looming
over me, and a dark hull tilting over, and some glowing phosphorescent
forms that were shaken and writhed as the fish bit at them. Then it
was I began to try to attract Widgery’s attention. A horror came upon
me. Ugh! I should have driven right into those half-eaten----things.
If your sister had not come! They had great holes in them, Bellows,
and.... Never mind. But it was ghastly!’


IV

For three weeks Davidson remained in this singular state, seeing what
at the time we imagined was an altogether phantasmal world, and stone
blind to the world around him. Then, one Tuesday, when I called I met
old Davidson in the passage. ‘He can see his thumb!’ the old gentleman
said, in a perfect transport. He was struggling into his overcoat. ‘He
can see his thumb, Bellows!’ he said, with the tears in his eyes. ‘The
lad will be all right yet.’

I rushed in to Davidson. He was holding up a little book before his
face, and looking at it and laughing in a weak kind of way.

‘It’s amazing,’ said he. ‘There’s a kind of patch come there.’ He
pointed with his finger. ‘I’m on the rocks as usual, and the penguins
are staggering and flapping about as usual, and there’s been a whale
showing every now and then, but it’s got too dark now to make him out.
But put something _there_, and I see it--I do see it. It’s very dim and
broken in places, but I see it all the same, like a faint spectre of
itself. I found it out this morning while they were dressing me. It’s
like a hole in this infernal phantom world. Just put your hand by mine.
No--not there. Ah! Yes! I see it. The base of your thumb and a bit of
cuff! It looks like the ghost of a bit of your hand sticking out of the
darkling sky. Just by it there’s a group of stars like a cross coming
out.’

From that time Davidson began to mend. His account of the change, like
his account of the vision, was oddly convincing. Over patches of his
field of vision, the phantom world grew fainter, grew transparent, as
it were, and through these translucent gaps he began to see dimly the
real world about him. The patches grew in size and number, ran together
and spread until only here and there were blind spots left upon his
eyes. He was able to get up and steer himself about, feed himself once
more, read, smoke, and behave like an ordinary citizen again. At first
it was very confusing for him to have these two pictures overlapping
each other like the changing views of a lantern, but in a little while
he began to distinguish the real from the illusory.

At first he was unfeignedly glad, and seemed only too anxious to
complete his cure by taking exercise and tonics. But as that odd island
of his began to fade away from him, he became queerly interested in
it. He wanted particularly to go down in the deep sea again, and would
spend half his time wandering about the low-lying parts of London,
trying to find the water-logged wreck he had seen drifting. The glare
of real daylight very soon impressed him so vividly as to blot out
everything of his shadowy world, but of a night-time, in a darkened
room, he could still see the white-splashed rocks of the island, and
the clumsy penguins staggering to and fro. But even these grew fainter
and fainter, and, at last, soon after he married my sister, he saw them
for the last time.


V

And now to tell of the queerest thing of all. About two years after
his cure I dined with the Davidsons, and after dinner a man named
Atkins called in. He is a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, and a pleasant,
talkative man. He was on friendly terms with my brother-in-law, and
was soon on friendly terms with me. It came out that he was engaged
to Davidson’s cousin, and incidentally he took out a kind of pocket
photograph case to show us a new rendering of his _fiancée_. ‘And,
by-the-by,’ said he, ‘here’s the old _Fulmar_.’

Davidson looked at it casually. Then suddenly his face lit up. ‘Good
heavens!’ said he. ‘I could almost swear----’

‘What?’ said Atkins.

‘That I had seen that ship before.’

‘Don’t see how you can have. She hasn’t been out of the South Seas for
six years, and before then----’

‘But,’ began Davidson, and then, ‘Yes--that’s the ship I dreamt of; I’m
sure that’s the ship I dreamt of. She was standing off an island that
swarmed with penguins, and she fired a gun.’

‘Good Lord!’ said Atkins, who had now heard the particulars of the
seizure. ‘How the deuce could you dream that?’

And then, bit by bit, it came out that on the very day Davidson
was seized, H.M.S. _Fulmar_ had actually been off a little rock to
the south of Antipodes Island. A boat had landed overnight to get
penguins’ eggs, had been delayed, and a thunderstorm drifting up, the
boat’s crew had waited until the morning before rejoining the ship.
Atkins had been one of them, and he corroborated word for word, the
descriptions Davidson had given of the island and the boat. There is
not the slightest doubt in any of our minds that Davidson has really
seen the place. In some unaccountable way, while he moved hither and
thither in London, his sight moved hither and thither in a manner that
corresponded, about this distant island. _How_ is absolutely a mystery.

That completes the remarkable story of Davidson’s eyes. It’s perhaps
the best authenticated case in existence of real vision at a distance.
Explanation there is none forthcoming, except what Professor Wade has
thrown out. But his explanation invokes the Fourth Dimension, and a
dissertation on theoretical kinds of space. To talk of there being
‘a kink in space’ seems mere nonsense to me; it may be because I am
no mathematician. When I said that nothing would alter the fact that
the place is eight thousand miles away, he answered that two points
might be a yard away on a sheet of paper, and yet be brought together
by bending the paper round. The reader may grasp his argument, but I
certainly do not. His idea seems to be that Davidson, stooping between
the poles of the big electro-magnet, had some extraordinary twist given
to his retinal elements through the sudden change in the field of
force due to the lightning.

He thinks, as a consequence of this, that it may be possible to live
visually in one part of the world, while one lives bodily in another.
He has even made some experiments in support of his views; but, so
far, he had simply succeeded in blinding a few dogs. I believe that is
the net result of his work, though I have not seen him for some weeks.
Latterly I have been so busy with my work in connection with the Saint
Pancras installation that I have had little opportunity of calling to
see him. But the whole of his theory seems fantastic to me. The facts
concerning Davidson stand on an altogether different footing, and I can
testify personally to the accuracy of every detail I have given.




THE MOTH


Probably you have heard of Hapley--not W. T. Hapley, the son, but the
celebrated Hapley, the Hapley of _Periplaneta Hapliia_, Hapley the
entomologist.

If so you know at least of the great feud between Hapley and Professor
Pawkins, though certain of its consequences may be new to you. For
those who have not, a word or two of explanation is necessary, which
the idle reader may go over with a glancing eye, if his indolence so
incline him.

It is amazing how very widely diffused is the ignorance of such really
important matters as this Hapley-Pawkins feud. Those epoch-making
controversies, again, that have convulsed the Geological Society are,
I verily believe, almost entirely unknown outside the fellowship of
that body. I have heard men of fair general education, even refer to
the great scenes at these meetings as vestry-meeting squabbles. Yet
the great hate of the English and Scotch geologists has lasted now
half a century, and has ‘left deep and abundant marks upon the body of
the science.’ And this Hapley-Pawkins business, though perhaps a more
personal affair, stirred passions as profound, if not profounder. Your
common man has no conception of the zeal that animates a scientific
investigator, the fury of contradiction you can arouse in him. It is
the _odium theologicum_ in a new form. There are men, for instance,
who would gladly burn Professor Ray Lankester at Smithfield for
his treatment of the Mollusca in the Encyclopædia. That fantastic
extension of the Cephalopods to cover the Pteropods.... But I wander
from Hapley and Pawkins.

It began years and years ago, with a revision of the Microlepidoptera
(whatever these may be) by Pawkins, in which he extinguished a new
species created by Hapley. Hapley, who was always quarrelsome, replied
by a stinging impeachment of the entire classification of Pawkins.[1]
Pawkins in his ‘Rejoinder’[2] suggested that Hapley’s microscope was as
defective as his power of observation, and called him an ‘irresponsible
meddler’--Hapley was not a professor at that time. Hapley in his
retort,[3] spoke of ‘blundering collectors,’ and described, as if
inadvertently, Pawkins’ revision as a ‘miracle of ineptitude.’ It was
war to the knife. However, it would scarcely interest the reader to
detail how these two great men quarrelled, and how the split between
them widened until from the Microlepidoptera they were at war upon
every open question in entomology. There were memorable occasions.
At times the Royal Entomological Society meetings resembled nothing
so much as the Chamber of Deputies. On the whole, I fancy Pawkins
was nearer the truth than Hapley. But Hapley was skilful with his
rhetoric, had a turn for ridicule rare in a scientific man, was endowed
with vast energy, and had a fine sense of injury in the matter of the
extinguished species; while Pawkins was a man of dull presence, prosy
of speech, in shape not unlike a water-barrel, over conscientious
with testimonials, and suspected of jobbing museum appointments. So
the young men gathered round Hapley and applauded him. It was a long
struggle, vicious from the beginning and growing at last to pitiless
antagonism. The successive turns of fortune, now an advantage to one
side and now to another--now Hapley tormented by some success of
Pawkins, and now Pawkins outshone by Hapley, belong rather to the
history of entomology than to this story.

But in 1891 Pawkins, whose health had been bad for some time, published
some work upon the ‘mesoblast’ of the Death’s Head Moth. What the
mesoblast of the Death’s Head Moth may be does not matter a rap in this
story. But the work was far below his usual standard, and gave Hapley
an opening he had coveted for years. He must have worked night and day
to make the most of his advantage.

In an elaborate critique he rent Pawkins to tatters--one can fancy
the man’s disordered black hair, and his queer dark eyes flashing
as he went for his antagonist--and Pawkins made a reply, halting,
ineffectual, with painful gaps of silence, and yet malignant. There was
no mistaking his will to wound Hapley, nor his incapacity to do it. But
few of those who heard him--I was absent from that meeting--realised
how ill the man was.

Hapley got his opponent down, and meant to finish him. He followed with
a simply brutal attack upon Pawkins, in the form of a paper upon the
development of moths in general, a paper showing evidence of a most
extraordinary amount of mental labour, and yet couched in a violently
controversial tone. Violent as it was, an editorial note witnesses that
it was modified. It must have covered Pawkins with shame and confusion
of face. It left no loophole; it was murderous in argument, and utterly
contemptuous in tone; an awful thing for the declining years of a man’s
career.

The world of entomologists waited breathlessly for the rejoinder from
Pawkins. He would try one, for Pawkins had always been game. But when
it came it surprised them. For the rejoinder of Pawkins was to catch
influenza, proceed to pneumonia, and die.

It was perhaps as effectual a reply as he could make under the
circumstances, and largely turned the current of feeling against
Hapley. The very people who had most gleefully cheered on those
gladiators became serious at the consequence. There could be no
reasonable doubt the fret of the defeat had contributed to the death
of Pawkins. There was a limit even to scientific controversy, said
serious people. Another crushing attack was already in the Press and
appeared on the day before the funeral. I don’t think Hapley exerted
himself to stop it. People remembered how Hapley had hounded down his
rival, and forgot that rival’s defects. Scathing satire reads ill over
fresh mould. The thing provoked comment in the daily papers. This it
was that made me think that you had probably heard of Hapley and this
controversy. But, as I have already remarked, scientific workers live
very much in a world of their own; half the people, I dare say, who go
along Piccadilly to the Academy every year, could not tell you where
the learned societies abide. Many even think that research is a kind of
happy-family cage in which all kinds of men lie down together in peace.

In his private thoughts Hapley could not forgive Pawkins for dying.
In the first place, it was a mean dodge to escape the absolute
pulverisation Hapley had in hand for him, and in the second, it left
Hapley’s mind with a queer gap in it. For twenty years he had worked
hard, sometimes far into the night, and seven days a week, with
microscope, scalpel, collecting-net, and pen, and almost entirely with
reference to Pawkins. The European reputation he had won had come as
an incident in that great antipathy. He had gradually worked up to a
climax in this last controversy. It had killed Pawkins, but it had also
thrown Hapley out of gear, so to speak, and his doctor advised him to
give up work for a time, and rest. So Hapley went down into a quiet
village in Kent, and thought day and night of Pawkins, and good things
it was now impossible to say about him.

At last Hapley began to realise in what direction the pre-occupation
tended. He determined to make a fight for it, and started by trying to
read novels. But he could not get his mind off Pawkins, white in the
face and making his last speech--every sentence a beautiful opening for
Hapley. He turned to fiction--and found it had no grip on him. He read
the _Island Nights’ Entertainments_ until his sense of causation was
shocked beyond endurance by the Bottle Imp. Then he went to Kipling,
and found he ‘proved nothing,’ besides being irreverent and vulgar.
These scientific people have their limitations. Then, unhappily, he
tried Besant’s _Inner House_, and the opening chapter set his mind upon
learned societies and Pawkins at once.

So Hapley turned to chess, and found it a little more soothing. He
soon mastered the moves and the chief gambits and commoner closing
positions, and began to beat the Vicar. But then the cylindrical
contours of the opposite king began to resemble Pawkins standing up and
gasping ineffectually against check-mate, and Hapley decided to give up
chess.

Perhaps the study of some new branch of science would after all be
better diversion. The best rest is change of occupation. Hapley
determined to plunge at diatoms, and had one of his smaller microscopes
and Halibut’s monograph sent down from London. He thought that perhaps
if he could get up a vigorous quarrel with Halibut, he might be able to
begin life afresh and forget Pawkins. And very soon he was hard at work
in his habitual strenuous fashion, at these microscopic denizens of the
wayside pool.

It was on the third day of the diatoms that Hapley became aware of
a novel addition to the local fauna. He was working late at the
microscope, and the only light in the room was the brilliant little
lamp with the special form of green shade. Like all experienced
microscopists, he kept both eyes open. It is the only way to avoid
excessive fatigue. One eye was over the instrument, and bright and
distinct before that was the circular field of the microscope, across
which a brown diatom was slowly moving. With the other eye Hapley saw,
as it were, without seeing. He was only dimly conscious of the brass
side of the instrument, the illuminated part of the table-cloth, a
sheet of notepaper, the foot of the lamp, and the darkened room beyond.

Suddenly his attention drifted from one eye to the other. The
table-cloth was of the material called tapestry by shopmen, and rather
brightly coloured. The pattern was in gold, with a small amount of
crimson and pale blue upon a grayish ground. At one point the pattern
seemed displaced, and there was a vibrating movement of the colours at
this point.

Hapley suddenly moved his head back and looked with both eyes. His
mouth fell open with astonishment.

It was a large moth or butterfly; its wings spread in butterfly fashion!

It was strange it should be in the room at all, for the windows were
closed. Strange that it should not have attracted his attention when
fluttering to its present position. Strange that it should match the
table-cloth. Stranger far that to him, Hapley, the great entomologist,
it was altogether unknown. There was no delusion. It was crawling
slowly towards the foot of the lamp.

‘New Genus, by heavens! And in England!’ said Hapley, staring.

Then he suddenly thought of Pawkins. Nothing would have maddened
Pawkins more.... And Pawkins was dead!

Something about the head and body of the insect became singularly
suggestive of Pawkins, just as the chess king had been.

‘Confound Pawkins!’ said Hapley. ‘But I must catch this.’ And looking
round him for some means of capturing the moth, he rose slowly out
of his chair. Suddenly the insect rose, struck the edge of the
lamp-shade--Hapley heard the ‘ping’--and vanished into the shadow.

In a moment Hapley had whipped off the shade, so that the whole room
was illuminated. The thing had disappeared, but soon his practised
eye detected it upon the wall-paper near the door. He went towards
it poising the lamp-shade for capture. Before he was within striking
distance, however, it had risen and was fluttering round the room.
After the fashion of its kind, it flew with sudden starts and turns,
seeming to vanish here and reappear there. Once Hapley struck, and
missed; then again.

The third time he hit his microscope. The instrument swayed, struck and
overturned the lamp, and fell noisily upon the floor. The lamp turned
over on the table and, very luckily, went out. Hapley was left in the
dark. With a start he felt the strange moth blunder into his face.

It was maddening. He had no lights. If he opened the door of the
room the thing would get away. In the darkness he saw Pawkins quite
distinctly laughing at him. Pawkins had ever an oily laugh. He swore
furiously and stamped his foot on the floor.

There was a timid rapping at the door.

Then it opened, perhaps a foot, and very slowly. The alarmed face of
the landlady appeared behind a pink candle flame; she wore a night-cap
over her gray hair and had some purple garment over her shoulders.
‘What _was_ that fearful smash?’ she said. ‘Has anything----’ The
strange moth appeared fluttering about the chink of the door. ‘Shut
that door!’ said Hapley, and suddenly rushed at her.

The door slammed hastily. Hapley was left alone in the dark. Then, in
the pause, he heard his landlady scuttle upstairs, lock her door, and
drag something heavy across the room and put against it.

It became evident to Hapley that his conduct and appearance had been
strange and alarming. Confound the moth! and Pawkins! However, it was a
pity to lose the moth now. He felt his way into the hall and found the
matches, after sending his hat down upon the floor with a noise like
a drum. With the lighted candle he returned to the sitting-room. No
moth was to be seen. Yet once for a moment it seemed that the thing was
fluttering round his head. Hapley very suddenly decided to give up the
moth and go to bed. But he was excited. All night long his sleep was
broken by dreams of the moth, Pawkins, and his landlady. Twice in the
night he turned out and soused his head in cold water.

One thing was very clear to him. His landlady could not possibly
understand about the strange moth, especially as he had failed to catch
it. No one but an entomologist would understand quite how he felt. She
was probably frightened at his behaviour, and yet he failed to see how
he could explain it. He decided to say nothing further about the events
of last night. After breakfast he saw her in her garden, and decided
to go out and talk to reassure her. He talked to her about beans and
potatoes, bees, caterpillars, and the price of fruit. She replied in
her usual manner, but she looked at him a little suspiciously, and kept
walking as he walked, so that there was always a bed of flowers, or a
row of beans, or something of the sort, between them. After a while he
began to feel singularly irritated at this, and to conceal his vexation
went indoors and presently went out for a walk.

The moth, or butterfly, trailing an odd flavour of Pawkins with it,
kept coming into that walk, though he did his best to keep his mind off
it. Once he saw it quite distinctly, with its wings flattened out, upon
the old stone wall that runs along the west edge of the park, but going
up to it he found it was only two lumps of gray and yellow lichen.
‘This,’ said Hapley, ‘is the reverse of mimicry. Instead of a butterfly
looking like a stone, here is a stone looking like a butterfly!’ Once
something hovered and fluttered round his head, but by an effort of
will he drove that impression out of his mind again.

In the afternoon Hapley called upon the Vicar, and argued with him
upon theological questions. They sat in the little arbour covered with
brier, and smoked as they wrangled. ‘Look at that moth!’ said Hapley,
suddenly, pointing to the edge of the wooden table.

‘Where?’ said the Vicar.

‘You don’t see a moth on the edge of the table there?’ said Hapley.

‘Certainly not,’ said the Vicar.

Hapley was thunderstruck. He gasped. The Vicar was staring at him.
Clearly the man saw nothing. ‘The eye of faith is no better than the
eye of science,’ said Hapley awkwardly.

‘I don’t see your point,’ said the Vicar, thinking it was part of the
argument.

That night Hapley found the moth crawling over his counterpane. He sat
on the edge of the bed in his shirt sleeves and reasoned with himself.
Was it pure hallucination? He knew he was slipping, and he battled
for his sanity with the same silent energy he had formerly displayed
against Pawkins. So persistent is mental habit, that he felt as if it
were still a struggle with Pawkins. He was well versed in psychology.
He knew that such visual illusions do come as a result of mental
strain. But the point was, he did not only _see_ the moth, he had heard
it when it touched the edge of the lamp-shade, and afterwards when it
hit against the wall, and he had felt it strike his face in the dark.

He looked at it. It was not at all dreamlike, but perfectly clear and
solid-looking in the candle-light. He saw the hairy body, and the short
feathery antennæ, the jointed legs, even a place where the down was
rubbed from the wing. He suddenly felt angry with himself for being
afraid of a little insect.

His landlady had got the servant to sleep with her that night, because
she was afraid to be alone. In addition she had locked the door, and
put the chest of drawers against it. They listened and talked in
whispers after they had gone to bed, but nothing occurred to alarm
them. About eleven they had ventured to put the candle out, and had
both dozed off to sleep. They woke up with a start, and sat up in bed,
listening in the darkness.

Then they heard slippered feet going to and fro in Hapley’s room. A
chair was overturned, and there was a violent dab at the wall. Then a
china mantel ornament smashed upon the fender. Suddenly the door of
the room opened, and they heard him upon the landing. They clung to
one another, listening. He seemed to be dancing upon the staircase.
Now he would go down three or four steps quickly, then up again, then
hurry down into the hall. They heard the umbrella stand go over, and
the fanlight break. Then the bolt shot and the chain rattled. He was
opening the door.

They hurried to the window. It was a dim gray night; an almost unbroken
sheet of watery cloud was sweeping across the moon, and the hedge
and trees in front of the house were black against the pale roadway.
They saw Hapley, looking like a ghost in his shirt and white trousers,
running to and fro in the road, and beating the air. Now he would stop,
now he would dart very rapidly at something invisible, now he would
move upon it with stealthy strides. At last he went out of sight up
the road towards the down. Then, while they argued who should go down
and lock the door, he returned. He was walking very fast, and he came
straight into the house, closed the door carefully, and went quietly up
to his bedroom. Then everything was silent.

‘Mrs Colville,’ said Hapley, calling down the staircase next morning,
‘I hope I did not alarm you last night.’

‘You may well ask that!’ said Mrs Colville.

‘The fact is, I am a sleep-walker, and the last two nights I have been
without my sleeping mixture. There is nothing to be alarmed about,
really. I am sorry I made such an ass of myself. I will go over the
down to Shoreham, and get some stuff to make me sleep soundly. I ought
to have done that yesterday.’

But half-way over the down, by the chalk pits, the moth came upon
Hapley again. He went on, trying to keep his mind upon chess problems,
but it was no good. The thing fluttered into his face, and he struck
at it with his hat in self-defence. Then rage, the old rage--the rage
he had so often felt against Pawkins--came upon him again. He went
on, leaping and striking at the eddying insect. Suddenly he trod on
nothing, and fell headlong.

There was a gap in his sensations, and Hapley found himself sitting on
the heap of flints in front of the opening of the chalk-pits, with a
leg twisted back under him. The strange moth was still fluttering round
his head. He struck at it with his hand, and turning his head saw two
men approaching him. One was the village doctor. It occurred to Hapley
that this was lucky. Then it came into his mind with extraordinary
vividness, that no one would ever be able to see the strange moth
except himself, and that it behoved him to keep silent about it.

Late that night, however, after his broken leg was set, he was feverish
and forgot his self-restraint. He was lying flat on his bed, and he
began to run his eyes round the room to see if the moth was still
about. He tried not to do this, but it was no good. He soon caught
sight of the thing resting close to his hand, by the nightlight, on the
green table-cloth. The wings quivered. With a sudden wave of anger he
smote at it with his fist, and the nurse woke up with a shriek. He had
missed it.

‘That moth!’ he said; and then, ‘It was fancy. Nothing!’

All the time he could see quite clearly the insect going round the
cornice and darting across the room, and he could also see that the
nurse saw nothing of it and looked at him strangely. He must keep
himself in hand. He knew he was a lost man if he did not keep himself
in hand. But as the night waned the fever grew upon him, and the very
dread he had of seeing the moth made him see it. About five, just as
the dawn was gray, he tried to get out of bed and catch it, though his
leg was afire with pain. The nurse had to struggle with him.

On account of this, they tied him down to the bed. At this the moth
grew bolder, and once he felt it settle in his hair. Then, because he
struck out violently with his arms, they tied these also. At this the
moth came and crawled over his face, and Hapley wept, swore, screamed,
prayed for them to take it off him, unavailingly.

The doctor was a blockhead, a just-qualified general practitioner, and
quite ignorant of mental science. He simply said there was no moth.
Had he possessed the wit, he might still, perhaps, have saved Hapley
from his fate by entering into his delusion, and covering his face
with gauze, as he prayed might be done. But, as I say, the doctor was
a blockhead, and until the leg was healed Hapley was kept tied to his
bed, and with the imaginary moth crawling over him. It never left him
while he was awake and it grew to a monster in his dreams. While he was
awake he longed for sleep, and from sleep he awoke screaming.

So now Hapley is spending the remainder of his days in a padded room,
worried by a moth that no one else can see. The asylum doctor calls it
hallucination; but Hapley, when he is in his easier mood, and can talk,
says it is the ghost of Pawkins, and consequently a unique specimen and
well worth the trouble of catching.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] “Remarks on a Recent Revision of Microlepidoptera.” _Quart. Journ.
Entomological Soc._, 1863.

[2] “Rejoinder to certain Remarks,” etc. _Ibid._ 1864.

[3] “Further Remarks,” etc. _Ibid._




THE STORY OF THE LATE MR ELVESHAM


I set this story down, not expecting it will be believed, but, if
possible, to prepare a way of escape for the next victim. He, perhaps,
may profit by my misfortune. My own case, I know, is hopeless, and I am
now in some measure prepared to meet my fate.

My name is Edward George Eden. I was born at Trentham, in
Staffordshire, my father being employed in the gardens there. I lost my
mother when I was three years old, and my father when I was five, my
uncle, George Eden, then adopting me as his own son. He was a single
man, self-educated, and well-known in Birmingham as an enterprising
journalist; he educated me generously, fired my ambition to succeed
in the world, and at his death, which happened four years ago, left
me his entire fortune, a matter of about five hundred pounds after
all outgoing charges were paid. I was then eighteen. He advised me
in his will to expend the money in completing my education. I had
already chosen the profession of medicine, and through his posthumous
generosity and my good fortune in a scholarship competition, I became
a medical student at University College, London. At the time of the
beginning of my story I lodged at 11A University Street in a little
upper room, very shabbily furnished and draughty, overlooking the back
of Shoolbred’s premises. I used this little room both to live in and
sleep in, because I was anxious to eke out my means to the very last
shillingsworth.

I was taking a pair of shoes to be mended at a shop in the Tottenham
Court Road when I first encountered the little old man with the yellow
face, with whom my life has now become so inextricably entangled. He
was standing on the kerb, and staring at the number on the door in
a doubtful way, as I opened it. His eyes--they were dull gray eyes,
and reddish under the rims--fell to my face, and his countenance
immediately assumed an expression of corrugated amiability.

‘You come,’ he said, ‘apt to the moment. I had forgotten the number of
your house. How do you do, Mr Eden?’

I was a little astonished at his familiar address, for I had never set
eyes on the man before. I was a little annoyed, too, at his catching me
with my boots under my arm. He noticed my lack of cordiality.

‘Wonder who the deuce I am, eh? A friend, let me assure you. I have
seen you before, though you haven’t seen me. Is there anywhere where I
can talk to you?’

I hesitated. The shabbiness of my room upstairs was not a matter for
every stranger. ‘Perhaps,’ said I, ‘we might walk down the street. I’m
unfortunately prevented----’ My gesture explained the sentence before I
had spoken it.

‘The very thing,’ he said, and faced this way, and then that. ‘The
street? Which way shall we go?’ I slipped my boots down in the passage.
‘Look here!’ he said abruptly; ‘this business of mine is a rigmarole.
Come and lunch with me, Mr Eden. I’m an old man, a very old man, and
not good at explanations, and what with my piping voice and the clatter
of the traffic----’

He laid a persuasive skinny hand that trembled a little upon my arm.

I was not so old that an old man might not treat me to a lunch. Yet at
the same time I was not altogether pleased by this abrupt invitation.
‘I had rather----’ I began. ‘But I had rather,’ he said, catching me
up, ‘and a certain civility is surely due to my gray hairs.’

And so I consented, and went with him.

He took me to Blavitiski’s; I had to walk slowly to accommodate myself
to his paces; and over such a lunch as I had never tasted before,
he fended off my leading question, and I took a better note of his
appearance. His clean-shaven face was lean and wrinkled, his shrivelled
lips fell over a set of false teeth, and his white hair was thin and
rather long; he seemed small to me--though indeed, most people seemed
small to me--and his shoulders were rounded and bent. And watching him,
I could not help but observe that he too was taking note of me, running
his eyes, with a curious touch of greed in them, over me, from my broad
shoulders to my sun-tanned hands, and up to my freckled face again.
‘And now,’ said he, as we lit our cigarettes, ‘I must tell you of the
business in hand.

‘I must tell you, then, that I am an old man, a very old man.’ He
paused momentarily. ‘And it happens that I have money that I must
presently be leaving, and never a child have I to leave it to.’ I
thought of the confidence trick, and resolved I would be on the alert
for the vestiges of my five hundred pounds. He proceeded to enlarge on
his loneliness, and the trouble he had to find a proper disposition
of his money. ‘I have weighed this plan and that plan, charities,
institutions, and scholarships, and libraries, and I have come to this
conclusion at last,’--he fixed his eyes on my face--‘that I will find
some young fellow, ambitious, pure-minded, and poor, healthy in body
and healthy in mind, and, in short, make him my heir, give him all
that I have.’ He repeated, ‘Give him all that I have. So that he will
suddenly be lifted out of all the trouble and struggle in which his
sympathies have been educated, to freedom and influence.’

I tried to seem disinterested. With a transparent hypocrisy I said,
‘And you want my help, my professional services maybe, to find that
person.’

He smiled, and looked at me over his cigarette, and I laughed at his
quiet exposure of my modest pretence.

‘What a career such a man might have!’ he said. ‘It fills me with envy
to think how I have accumulated that another man may spend----

‘But there are conditions, of course, burdens to be imposed. He must,
for instance, take my name. You cannot expect everything without some
return. And I must go into all the circumstances of his life before I
can accept him. He _must_ be sound. I must know his heredity, how his
parents and grandparents died, have the strictest inquiries made into
his private morals.’

This modified my secret congratulations a little.

‘And do I understand,’ said I, ‘that I----’

‘Yes,’ he said, almost fiercely. ‘You. _You._’

I answered never a word. My imagination was dancing wildly, my innate
scepticism was useless to modify its transports. There was not a
particle of gratitude in my mind--I did not know what to say nor how to
say it. ‘But why me in particular?’ I said at last.

He had chanced to hear of me from Professor Haslar, he said, as a
typically sound and sane young man, and he wished, as far as possible,
to leave his money where health and integrity were assured.

That was my first meeting with the little old man. He was mysterious
about himself; he would not give his name yet, he said, and after I had
answered some questions of his, he left me at the Blavitiski portal.
I noticed that he drew a handful of gold coins from his pocket when
it came to paying for the lunch. His insistence upon bodily health
was curious. In accordance with an arrangement we had made I applied
that day for a life policy in the Loyal Insurance Company for a large
sum, and I was exhaustively overhauled by the medical advisers of that
company in the subsequent week. Even that did not satisfy him, and he
insisted I must be re-examined by the great Doctor Henderson.

It was Friday in Whitsun week before he came to a decision. He called
me down, quite late in the evening--nearly nine it was--from cramming
chemical equations for my Preliminary Scientific examination. He was
standing in the passage under the feeble gas-lamp, and his face was a
grotesque interplay of shadows. He seemed more bowed than when I had
first seen him, and his cheeks had sunk in a little.

His voice shook with emotion. ‘Everything is satisfactory, Mr Eden,’ he
said. ‘Everything is quite, quite satisfactory. And this night of all
nights, you must dine with me and celebrate your--accession.’ He was
interrupted by a cough. ‘You won’t have long to wait, either,’ he said,
wiping his handkerchief across his lips, and gripping my hand with his
long bony claw that was disengaged. ‘Certainly not very long to wait.’

We went into the street and called a cab. I remember every incident of
that drive vividly, the swift, easy motion, the vivid contrast of gas
and oil and electric light, the crowds of people in the streets, the
place in Regent Street to which we went, and the sumptuous dinner we
were served with there. I was disconcerted at first by the well-dressed
waiter’s glances at my rough clothes, bothered by the stones of the
olives, but as the champagne warmed my blood, my confidence revived. At
first the old man talked of himself. He had already told me his name in
the cab; he was Egbert Elvesham, the great philosopher, whose name I
had known since I was a lad at school. It seemed incredible to me that
this man, whose intelligence had so early dominated mine, this great
abstraction, should suddenly realise itself as this decrepit, familiar
figure. I dare say every young fellow who has suddenly fallen among
celebrities has felt something of my disappointment. He told me now of
the future that the feeble streams of his life would presently leave
dry for me, houses, copyrights, investments; I had never suspected that
philosophers were so rich. He watched me drink and eat with a touch of
envy. ‘What a capacity for living you have!’ he said; and then with a
sigh, a sigh of relief I could have thought it, ‘it will not be long.’

‘Ay,’ said I, my head swimming now with champagne; ‘I have a future
perhaps--of a passing agreeable sort, thanks to you. I shall now have
the honour of your name. But you have a past. Such a past as is worth
all my future.’

He shook his head and smiled, as I thought, with half sad appreciation
of my flattering admiration. ‘That future,’ he said, ‘would you
in truth change it?’ The waiter came with liqueurs. ‘You will not
perhaps mind taking my name, taking my position, but would you
indeed--willingly--take my years?’

‘With your achievements,’ said I gallantly.

He smiled again. ‘Kummel--both,’ he said to the waiter, and turned
his attention to a little paper packet he had taken from his pocket.
‘This hour,’ said he, ‘this after-dinner hour is the hour of small
things. Here is a scrap of my unpublished wisdom.’ He opened the packet
with his shaking yellow fingers, and showed a little pinkish powder
on the paper. ‘This,’ said he--‘well, you must guess what it is. But
Kummel--put but a dash of this powder in it--is Himmel.’

His large grayish eyes watched mine with an inscrutable expression.

It was a bit of a shock to me to find this great teacher gave his mind
to the flavour of liqueurs. However, I feigned an interest in his
weakness, for I was drunk enough for such small sycophancy.

He parted the powder between the little glasses, and, rising suddenly,
with a strange unexpected dignity, held out his hand towards me. I
imitated his action, and the glasses rang. ‘To a quick succession,’
said he, and raised his glass towards his lips.

‘Not that,’ I said hastily. ‘Not that.’

He paused with the liqueur at the level of his chin, and his eyes
blazing into mine.

‘To a long life,’ said I.

He hesitated. ‘To a long life,’ said he, with a sudden bark of
laughter, and with eyes fixed on one another we tilted the little
glasses. His eyes looked straight into mine, and as I drained the stuff
off, I felt a curiously intense sensation. The first touch of it set my
brain in a furious tumult; I seemed to feel an actual physical stirring
in my skull, and a seething humming filled my ears. I did not notice
the flavour in my mouth, the aroma that filled my throat; I saw only
the gray intensity of his gaze that burnt into mine. The draught, the
mental confusion, the noise and stirring in my head, seemed to last an
interminable time. Curious vague impressions of half-forgotten things
danced and vanished on the edge of my consciousness. At last he broke
the spell. With a sudden explosive sigh he put down his glass.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘It’s glorious,’ said I, though I had not tasted the stuff.

My head was spinning. I sat down. My brain was chaos. Then my
perception grew clear and minute as though I saw things in a concave
mirror. His manner seemed to have changed into something nervous and
hasty. He pulled out his watch and grimaced at it. ‘Eleven-seven! And
to-night I must--Seven-twenty-five. Waterloo! I must go at once.’ He
called for the bill, and struggled with his coat. Officious waiters
came to our assistance. In another moment I was wishing him good-bye,
over the apron of a cab, and still with an absurd feeling of minute
distinctness, as though--how can I express it?--I not only saw but
_felt_ through an inverted opera-glass.

‘That stuff,’ he said. He put his hand to his forehead. ‘I ought not
to have given it to you. It will make your head split to-morrow. Wait
a minute. Here.’ He handed me out a little flat thing like a seidlitz
powder. ‘Take that in water as you are going to bed. The other thing
was a drug. Not till you’re ready to go to bed, mind. It will clear
your head. That’s all. One more shake--Futurus!’

I gripped his shrivelled claw. ‘Good-bye,’ he said, and by the droop of
his eyelids I judged he too was a little under the influence of that
brain-twisting cordial.

He recollected something else with a start, felt in his breast-pocket,
and produced another packet, this time a cylinder the size and shape
of a shaving-stick. ‘Here,’ said he. ‘I’d almost forgotten. Don’t open
this until I come to-morrow--but take it now.’

It was so heavy that I wellnigh dropped it. ‘All ri’!’ said I, and he
grinned at me through the cab window as the cabman flicked his horse
into wakefulness. It was a white packet he had given me, with red seals
at either end and along its edge. ‘If this isn’t money,’ said I, ‘it’s
platinum or lead.’

I stuck it with elaborate care into my pocket, and with a whirling
brain walked home through the Regent Street loiterers and the dark back
streets beyond Portland Road. I remember the sensations of that walk
very vividly, strange as they were. I was still so far myself that I
could notice my strange mental state, and wonder whether this stuff
I had had was opium--a drug beyond my experience. It is hard now to
describe the peculiarity of my mental strangeness--mental doubling
vaguely expresses it. As I was walking up Regent Street I found in my
mind a queer persuasion that it was Waterloo Station, and had an odd
impulse to get into the Polytechnic as a man might get into a train. I
put a knuckle in my eye, and it was Regent Street. How can I express
it? You see a skilful actor looking quietly at you, he pulls a grimace,
and lo!--another person. Is it too extravagant if I tell you that it
seemed to me as if Regent Street had, for the moment, done that? Then,
being persuaded it was Regent Street again, I was oddly muddled about
some fantastic reminiscences that cropped up. ‘Thirty years ago,’
thought I, ‘it was here that I quarrelled with my brother.’ Then I
burst out laughing, to the astonishment and encouragement of a group of
night prowlers. Thirty years ago I did not exist, and never in my life
had I boasted a brother. The stuff was surely liquid folly, for the
poignant regret for that lost brother still clung to me. Along Portland
Road the madness took another turn. I began to recall vanished shops,
and to compare the street with what it used to be. Confused, troubled
thinking is comprehensible enough after the drink I had taken, but what
puzzled me were these curiously vivid phantasm memories that had crept
into my mind, and not only the memories that had crept in, but also
the memories that had slipped out. I stopped opposite Stevens’s, the
natural history dealer’s, and cudgelled my brains to think what he had
to do with me. A ’bus went by, and sounded exactly like the rumbling
of a train. I seemed to be dipping into some dark, remote pit for the
recollection. ‘Of course,’ said I, at last, ‘he has promised me three
frogs to-morrow. Odd I should have forgotten.’

Do they still show children dissolving views? In those I remember one
view would begin like a faint ghost, and grow and oust another. In just
that way it seemed to me that a ghostly set of new sensations was
struggling with those of my ordinary self.

I went on through Euston Road to Tottenham Court Road, puzzled, and a
little frightened, and scarcely noticed the unusual way I was taking,
for commonly I used to cut through the intervening network of back
streets. I turned into University Street, to discover that I had
forgotten my number. Only by a strong effort did I recall 11A, and even
then it seemed to me that it was a thing some forgotten person had told
me. I tried to steady my mind by recalling the incidents of the dinner,
and for the life of me I could conjure up no picture of my host’s face;
I saw him only as a shadowy outline, as one might see oneself reflected
in a window through which one was looking. In his place, however, I
had a curious exterior vision of myself, sitting at a table, flushed,
bright-eyed, and talkative.

‘I must take this other powder,’ said I. ‘This is getting impossible.’

I tried the wrong side of the hall for my candle and the matches, and
had a doubt of which landing my room might be on. ‘I’m drunk,’ I said,
‘that’s certain,’ and blundered needlessly on the staircase to sustain
the proposition.

At the first glance my room seemed unfamiliar. ‘What rot!’ I said, and
stared about me. I seemed to bring myself back by the effort, and the
odd phantasmal quality passed into the concrete familiar. There was the
old glass still, with my notes on the albumens stuck in the corner of
the frame, my old everyday suit of clothes pitched about the floor. And
yet it was not so real after all. I felt an idiotic persuasion trying
to creep into my mind, as it were, that I was in a railway carriage in
a train just stopping, that I was peering out of the window at some
unknown station. I gripped the bed-rail firmly to reassure myself.
‘It’s clairvoyance, perhaps,’ I said. ‘I must write to the Psychical
Research Society.’

I put the rouleau on my dressing-table, sat on my bed, and began to
take off my boots. It was as if the picture of my present sensations
was painted over some other picture that was trying to show through.
‘Curse it!’ said I; ‘my wits are going, or am I in two places at once?’
Half-undressed, I tossed the powder into a glass and drank it off. It
effervesced, and became a fluorescent amber colour. Before I was in bed
my mind was already tranquillised. I felt the pillow at my cheek, and
thereupon I must have fallen asleep.


I awoke abruptly out of a dream of strange beasts, and found myself
lying on my back. Probably every one knows that dismal, emotional
dream from which one escapes, awake indeed, but strangely cowed. There
was a curious taste in my mouth, a tired feeling in my limbs, a sense
of cutaneous discomfort. I lay with my head motionless on my pillow,
expecting that my feeling of strangeness and terror would pass away,
and that I should then doze off again to sleep. But instead of that, my
uncanny sensations increased. At first I could perceive nothing wrong
about me. There was a faint light in the room, so faint that it was
the very next thing to darkness, and the furniture stood out in it as
vague blots of absolute darkness. I stared with my eyes just over the
bedclothes.

It came into my mind that some one had entered the room to rob me of my
rouleau of money, but after lying for some moments, breathing regularly
to simulate sleep, I realised this was mere fancy. Nevertheless, the
uneasy assurance of something wrong kept fast hold of me. With an
effort I raised my head from the pillow, and peered about me at the
dark. What it was I could not conceive. I looked at the dim shapes
around me, the greater and lesser darknesses that indicated curtains,
table, fireplace, bookshelves, and so forth. Then I began to perceive
something unfamiliar in the forms of the darkness. Had the bed turned
round? Yonder should be the bookshelves, and something shrouded and
pallid rose there, something that would not answer to the bookshelves,
however I looked at it. It was far too big to be my shirt thrown on a
chair.

Overcoming a childish terror, I threw back the bedclothes and thrust my
leg out of bed. Instead of coming out of my truckle-bed upon the floor,
I found my foot scarcely reached the edge of the mattress. I made
another step, as it were, and sat up on the edge of the bed. By the
side of my bed should be the candle, and the matches upon the broken
chair. I put out my hand and touched--nothing. I waved my hand in the
darkness, and it came against some heavy hanging, soft and thick in
texture, which gave a rustling noise at my touch. I grasped this and
pulled it; it appeared to be a curtain suspended over the head of my
bed.

I was now thoroughly awake, and beginning to realise that I was
in a strange room. I was puzzled. I tried to recall the overnight
circumstances, and I found them now, curiously enough, vivid in my
memory: the supper, my reception of the little packages, my wonder
whether I was intoxicated, my slow undressing, the coolness to my
flushed face of my pillow. I felt a sudden distrust. Was that last
night, or the night before? At any rate, this room was strange to
me, and I could not imagine how I had got into it. The dim, pallid
outline was growing paler, and I perceived it was a window, with the
dark shape of an oval toilet-glass against the weak intimation of the
dawn that filtered through the blind. I stood up, and was surprised
by a curious feeling of weakness and unsteadiness. With trembling
hands outstretched, I walked slowly towards the window, getting,
nevertheless, a bruise on the knee from a chair by the way. I fumbled
round the glass, which was large, with handsome brass sconces, to find
the blind-cord. I could not find any. By chance I took hold of the
tassel, and with the click of a spring the blind ran up.

I found myself looking out upon a scene that was altogether strange
to me. The night was overcast, and through the flocculent gray of the
heaped clouds there filtered a faint half-light of dawn. Just at the
edge of the sky the cloud-canopy had a blood-red rim. Below, everything
was dark and indistinct, dim hills in the distance, a vague mass of
buildings running up into pinnacles, trees like spilt ink, and below
the window a tracery of black bushes and pale gray paths. It was so
unfamiliar that for the moment I thought myself still dreaming. I felt
the toilet-table; it appeared to be made of some polished wood, and was
rather elaborately furnished--there were little cut-glass bottles and a
brush upon it. There was also a queer little object, horse-shoe shape
it felt, with smooth, hard projections, lying in a saucer. I could find
no matches nor candlestick.

I turned my eyes to the room again. Now the blind was up, faint
spectres of its furnishing came out of the darkness. There was a huge
curtained bed, and the fireplace at its foot had a large white mantel
with something of the shimmer of marble.

I leant against the toilet-table, shut my eyes and opened them again,
and tried to think. The whole thing was far too real for dreaming. I
was inclined to imagine there was still some hiatus in my memory, as a
consequence of my draught of that strange liqueur; that I had come into
my inheritance perhaps, and suddenly lost my recollection of everything
since my good fortune had been announced. Perhaps if I waited a
little, things would be clearer to me again. Yet my dinner with old
Elvesham was now singularly vivid and recent. The champagne, the
observant waiters, the powder, and the liqueurs--I could have staked my
soul it all happened a few hours ago.

And then occurred a thing so trivial and yet so terrible to me that I
shiver now to think of that moment. I spoke aloud. I said, ‘How the
devil did I get here?’ ... _And the voice was not my own._

It was not my own, it was thin, the articulation was slurred, the
resonance of my facial bones was different. Then, to reassure myself
I ran one hand over the other, and felt loose folds of skin, the
bony laxity of age. ‘Surely,’ I said, in that horrible voice that
had somehow established itself in my throat, ‘surely this thing is a
dream!’ Almost as quickly as if I did it involuntarily, I thrust my
fingers into my mouth. My teeth had gone. My finger-tips ran on the
flaccid surface of an even row of shrivelled gums. I was sick with
dismay and disgust.

I felt then a passionate desire to see myself, to realise at once in
its full horror the ghastly change that had come upon me. I tottered to
the mantel, and felt along it for matches. As I did so, a barking cough
sprang up in my throat, and I clutched the thick flannel nightdress I
found about me. There were no matches there, and I suddenly realised
that my extremities were cold. Sniffing and coughing, whimpering a
little, perhaps, I fumbled back to bed. ‘It is surely a dream,’ I
whispered to myself as I clambered back, ‘surely a dream.’ It was a
senile repetition. I pulled the bedclothes over my shoulders, over my
ears, I thrust my withered hand under the pillow, and determined to
compose myself to sleep. Of course it was a dream. In the morning the
dream would be over, and I should wake up strong and vigorous again to
my youth and studies. I shut my eyes, breathed regularly, and, finding
myself wakeful, began to count slowly through the powers of three.

But the thing I desired would not come. I could not get to sleep.
And the persuasion of the inexorable reality of the change that had
happened to me grew steadily. Presently I found myself with my eyes
wide open, the powers of three forgotten, and my skinny fingers upon
my shrivelled gums. I was, indeed, suddenly and abruptly, an old man.
I had in some unaccountable manner fallen through my life and come to
old age, in some way I had been cheated of all the best of my life, of
love, of struggle, of strength, and hope. I grovelled into the pillow
and tried to persuade myself that such hallucination was possible.
Imperceptibly, steadily, the dawn grew clearer.

At last, despairing of further sleep, I sat up in bed and looked
about me. A chill twilight rendered the whole chamber visible. It
was spacious and well-furnished, better furnished than any room I
had ever slept in before. A candle and matches became dimly visible
upon a little pedestal in a recess. I threw back the bedclothes,
and, shivering with the rawness of the early morning, albeit it was
summer-time, I got out and lit the candle. Then, trembling horribly,
so that the extinguisher rattled on its spike--I tottered to the glass
and saw--_Elvesham’s face_! It was none the less horrible because I
had already dimly feared as much. He had already seemed physically
weak and pitiful to me, but seen now, dressed only in a course flannel
nightdress, that fell apart and showed the stringy neck, seen now as
my own body, I cannot describe its desolate decrepitude. The hollow
cheeks, the straggling tail of dirty gray hair, the rheumy bleared
eyes, the quivering, shrivelled lips, the lower displaying a gleam of
the pink interior lining, and those horrible dark gums showing. You
who are mind and body together, at your natural years, cannot imagine
what this fiendish imprisonment meant to me. To be young and full of
the desire and energy of youth, and to be caught, and presently to be
crushed in this tottering ruin of a body....

But I wander from the course of my story. For some time I must have
been stunned at this change that had come upon me. It was daylight when
I did so far gather myself together as to think. In some inexplicable
way I had been changed, though how, short of magic, the thing had been
done, I could not say. And as I thought, the diabolical ingenuity of
Elvesham came home to me. It seemed plain to me that as I found myself
in his, so he must be in possession of _my_ body, of my strength, that
is, and my future. But how to prove it? Then, as I thought, the thing
became so incredible, even to me, that my mind reeled, and I had to
pinch myself, to feel my toothless gums, to see myself in the glass,
and touch the things about me, before I could steady myself to face the
facts again. Was all life hallucination? Was I indeed Elvesham, and he
me? Had I been dreaming of Eden overnight? Was there any Eden? But if
I was Elvesham, I should remember where I was on the previous morning,
the name of the town in which I lived, what happened before the dream
began. I struggled with my thoughts. I recalled the queer doubleness of
my memories overnight. But now my mind was clear. Not the ghost of any
memories but those proper to Eden could I raise.

‘This way lies insanity!’ I cried in my piping voice. I staggered to my
feet, dragged my feeble, heavy limbs to the washhand-stand, and plunged
my gray head into a basin of cold water. Then, towelling myself, I
tried again. It was no good. I felt beyond all question that I was
indeed Eden, not Elvesham. But Eden in Elvesham’s body!

Had I been a man of any other age, I might have given myself up to my
fate as one enchanted. But in these sceptical days miracles do not pass
current. Here was some trick of psychology. What a drug and a steady
stare could do, a drug and a steady stare, or some similar treatment,
could surely undo. Men have lost their memories before. But to exchange
memories as one does umbrellas! I laughed. Alas! not a healthy laugh,
but a wheezing, senile titter. I could have fancied old Elvesham
laughing at my plight, and a gust of petulant anger, unusual to me,
swept across my feelings. I began dressing eagerly in the clothes I
found lying about on the floor, and only realised when I was dressed
that it was an evening suit I had assumed. I opened the wardrobe
and found some more ordinary clothes, a pair of plaid trousers, and
an old-fashioned dressing-gown. I put a venerable smoking-cap on my
venerable head, and, coughing a little from my exertions, tottered out
upon the landing.

It was then, perhaps, a quarter to six, and the blinds were closely
drawn and the house quite silent. The landing was a spacious one, a
broad, richly-carpeted staircase went down into the darkness of the
hall below, and before me a door ajar showed me a writing-desk, a
revolving bookcase, the back of a study chair, and a fine array of
bound books, shelf upon shelf.

‘My study,’ I mumbled, and walked across the landing. Then at the sound
of my voice a thought struck me, and I went back to the bedroom and put
in the set of false teeth. They slipped in with the ease of old habit.
‘That’s better,’ said I, gnashing them, and so returned to the study.

The drawers of the writing-desk were locked. Its revolving top was also
locked. I could see no indications of the keys and there were none in
the pockets of my trousers. I shuffled back at once to the bedroom,
and went through the dress-suit, and afterwards the pockets of all the
garments I could find. I was very eager, and one might have imagined
that burglars had been at work, to see my room when I had done. Not
only were there no keys to be found, but not a coin, nor a scrap of
paper--save only the receipted bill of the overnight dinner.

A curious weariness asserted itself. I sat down and stared at the
garments flung here and there, their pockets turned inside out. My
first frenzy had already flickered out. Every moment I was beginning
to realise the immense intelligence of the plans of my enemy, to see
more and more clearly the hopelessness of my position. With an effort I
rose and hurried hobbling into the study again. On the staircase was a
housemaid pulling up the blinds. She stared, I think, at the expression
of my face. I shut the door of the study behind me, and, seizing a
poker, began an attack upon the desk. That is how they found me. The
cover of the desk was split, the lock smashed, the letters torn out of
the pigeon-holes and tossed about the room. In my senile rage I had
flung about the pens and other such light stationery, and overturned
the ink. Moreover, a large vase upon the mantel had got broken--I do
not know how. I could find no cheque-book, no money, no indications of
the slightest use for the recovery of my body. I was battering madly at
the drawers, when the butler, backed by two women-servants, intruded
upon me.

That simply is the story of my change. No one will believe my frantic
assertions. I am treated as one demented, and even at this moment I
am under restraint. But I am sane, absolutely sane, and to prove it I
have sat down to write this story minutely as the things happened to
me. I appeal to the reader, whether there is any trace of insanity in
the style or method of the story he has been reading. I am a young man
locked away in an old man’s body. But the clear fact is incredible to
every one. Naturally I appear demented to those who will not believe
this, naturally I do not know the names of my secretaries, of the
doctors who come to see me, of my servants and neighbours, of this
town (wherever it is) where I find myself. Naturally I lose myself in
my own house, and suffer inconveniences of every sort. Naturally I ask
the oddest questions. Naturally I weep and cry out, and have paroxysms
of despair. I have no money and no cheque-book. The bank will not
recognise my signature, for I suppose that, allowing for the feeble
muscles I now have, my handwriting is still Eden’s. These people about
me will not let me go to the bank personally. It seems, indeed, that
there is no bank in this town, and that I have an account in some part
of London. It seems that Elvesham kept the name of his solicitor secret
from all his household. I can ascertain nothing. Elvesham was, of
course, a profound student of mental science, and all my declarations
of the facts of the case merely confirm the theory that my insanity
is the outcome of overmuch brooding upon psychology. Dreams of the
personal identity indeed! Two days ago I was a healthy youngster, with
all life before me; now I am a furious old man, unkempt, and desperate,
and miserable, prowling about a great, luxurious, strange house,
watched, feared, and avoided as a lunatic by every one about me. And in
London is Elvesham beginning life again in a vigorous body, and with
all the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of threescore and ten. He has
stolen my life.

What has happened I do not clearly know. In the study are volumes
of manuscript notes referring chiefly to the psychology of memory,
and parts of what may be either calculations or ciphers in symbols
absolutely strange to me. In some passages there are indications that
he was also occupied with the philosophy of mathematics. I take it he
has transferred the whole of his memories, the accumulation that makes
up his personality, from this old withered brain of his to mine, and,
similarly, that he has transferred mine to his discarded tenement.
Practically, that is, he has changed bodies. But how such a change
may be possible is without the range of my philosophy. I have been a
materialist for all my thinking life, but here, suddenly, is a clear
case of man’s detachability from matter.

One desperate experiment I am about to try. I sit writing here
before putting the matter to issue. This morning, with the help
of a table-knife that I had secreted at breakfast, I succeeded
in breaking open a fairly obvious secret drawer in this wrecked
writing-desk. I discovered nothing save a little green glass phial
containing a white powder. Round the neck of the phial was a label,
and thereon was written this one word, ‘_Release_.’ This may be--is
most probably--poison. I can understand Elvesham placing poison in
my way, and I should be sure that it was his intention so to get rid
of the only living witness against him, were it not for this careful
concealment. The man has practically solved the problem of immortality.
Save for the spite of chance, he will live in my body until it has
aged, and then, again, throwing aside, he will assume some other
victim’s youth and strength. When one remembers his heartlessness, it
is terrible to think of the ever-growing experience that.... How long
has he been leaping from body to body?... But I tire of writing. The
powder appears to be soluble in water. The taste is not unpleasant.


There the narrative found upon Mr Elvesham’s desk ends. His dead body
lay between the desk and the chair. The latter had been pushed back,
probably by his last convulsions. The story was written in pencil,
and in a crazy hand, quite unlike his usual minute characters. There
remain only two curious facts to record. Indisputably there was some
connection between Eden and Elvesham, since the whole of Elvesham’s
property was bequeathed to the young man. But he never inherited. When
Elvesham committed suicide, Eden was, strangely enough, already dead.
Twenty-four hours before, he had been knocked down by a cab and killed
instantly, at the crowded crossing at the intersection of Gower Street
and Euston Road. So that the only human being who could have thrown
light upon this fantastic narrative is beyond the reach of questions.
Without further comment I leave this extraordinary matter to the
reader’s individual judgment.




UNDER THE KNIFE


‘What if I die under it?’ The thought recurred again and again, as I
walked home from Haddon’s. It was a purely personal question. I was
spared the deep anxieties of a married man, and I knew there were few
of my intimate friends but would find my death troublesome chiefly on
account of their duty of regret. I was surprised indeed, and perhaps
a little humiliated, as I turned the matter over, to think how few
could possibly exceed the conventional requirement. Things came
before me stripped of glamour, in a clear dry light, during that walk
from Haddon’s house over Primrose Hill. There were the friends of my
youth: I perceived now that our affection was a tradition, which we
foregathered rather laboriously to maintain. There were the rivals
and helpers of my later career: I suppose I had been cold-blooded or
undemonstrative--one perhaps implies the other. It may be that even the
capacity for friendship is a question of physique. There had been a
time in my own life when I had grieved bitterly enough at the loss of
a friend; but as I walked home that afternoon the emotional side of my
imagination was dormant. I could not pity myself, nor feel sorry for my
friends, nor conceive of them as grieving for me.

I was interested in this deadness of my emotional nature--no doubt
a concomitant of my stagnating physiology; and my thoughts wandered
off along the line it suggested. Once before, in my hot youth, I
had suffered a sudden loss of blood, and had been within an ace of
death. I remembered now that my affections as well as my passions had
drained out of me, leaving scarce anything but a tranquil resignation,
a dreg of self-pity. It had been weeks before the old ambitions
and tendernesses and all the complex moral interplay of a man had
reasserted themselves. It occurred to me that the real meaning of
this numbness might be a gradual slipping away from the pleasure-pain
guidance of the animal man. It has been proven, I take it, as
thoroughly as anything can be proven in this world, that the higher
emotions, the moral feelings, even the subtle unselfishness of love,
are evolved from the elemental desires and fears of the simple animal:
they are the harness in which man’s mental freedom goes. And it may be
that as death overshadows us, as our possibility of acting diminishes,
this complex growth of balanced impulse, propensity and aversion, whose
interplay inspires our acts, goes with it. Leaving what?

I was suddenly brought back to reality by an imminent collision with
the butcher-boy’s tray. I found that I was crossing the bridge over the
Regent’s Park Canal, which runs parallel with that in the Zoological
Gardens. The boy in blue had been looking over his shoulder at a black
barge advancing slowly, towed by a gaunt white horse. In the Gardens
a nurse was leading three happy little children over the bridge. The
trees were bright green; the spring hopefulness was still unstained by
the dusts of summer; the sky in the water was bright and clear, but
broken by long waves, by quivering bands of black, as the barge drove
through. The breeze was stirring; but it did not stir me as the spring
breeze used to do.

Was this dullness of feeling in itself an anticipation? It was
curious that I could reason and follow out a network of suggestion
as clearly as ever; so, at least, it seemed to me. It was calmness
rather than dullness that was coming upon me. Was there any ground
for the belief in the presentiment of death? Did a man near to death
begin instinctively to withdraw himself from the meshes of matter and
sense, even before the cold hand was laid upon his? I felt strangely
isolated--isolated without regret--from the life and existence about
me. The children playing in the sun and gathering strength and
experience for the business of life, the park-keeper gossiping with a
nursemaid, the nursing mother, the young couple intent upon each other
as they passed me, the trees by the wayside spreading new pleading
leaves to the sunlight, the stir in their branches--I had been part of
it all, but I had nearly done with it now.

Some way down the Broad Walk I perceived that I was tired, and that
my feet were heavy. It was hot that afternoon, and I turned aside and
sat down on one of the green chairs that line the way. In a minute I
had dozed into a dream, and the tide of my thoughts washed up a vision
of the resurrection. I was still sitting in the chair, but I thought
myself actually dead, withered, tattered, dried, one eye (I saw) pecked
out by birds. ‘Awake!’ cried a voice; and incontinently the dust of the
path and the mould under the grass became insurgent. I had never before
thought of Regent’s Park as a cemetery, but now, through the trees,
stretching as far as eye could see, I beheld a flat plain of writhing
graves and heeling tombstones. There seemed to be some trouble; the
rising dead appeared to stifle as they struggled upward, they bled in
their struggles, the red flesh was torn away from the white bones.
‘Awake!’ cried a voice; but I determined I would not rise to such
horrors. ‘Awake!’ They would not let me alone. ‘Wike up!’ said an angry
voice. A cockney angel! The man who sells the tickets was shaking me,
demanding my penny.

I paid my penny, pocketed my ticket, yawned, stretched my legs, and,
feeling now rather less torpid, got up and walked on towards Langham
Place. I speedily lost myself again in a shifting maze of thoughts
about death. Going across Marylebone Road into that crescent at the end
of Langham Place, I had the narrowest escape from the shaft of a cab,
and went on my way with a palpitating heart and a bruised shoulder. It
struck me that it would have been curious if my meditations on my death
on the morrow had led to my death that day.

But I will not weary you with more of my experiences that day and
the next. I knew more and more certainly that I should die under the
operation; at times I think I was inclined to pose to myself. The
doctors were coming at eleven, and I did not get up. It seemed scarce
worth while to trouble about washing and dressing, and though I read
my newspapers and the letters that came by the first post, I did not
find them very interesting. There was a friendly note from Addison,
my old school-friend, calling my attention to two discrepancies and
a printer’s error in my new book, with one from Langridge venting
some vexation over Minton. The rest were business communications. I
breakfasted in bed. The glow of pain at my side seemed more massive.
I knew it was pain, and yet, if you can understand, I did not find it
very painful. I had been awake and hot and thirsty in the night, but in
the morning bed felt comfortable. In the night-time I had lain thinking
of things that were past; in the morning I dozed over the question of
immortality. Haddon came, punctual to the minute with a neat black
bag; and Mowbray soon followed. Their arrival stirred me up a little.
I began to take a more personal interest in the proceedings. Haddon
moved the little octagonal table close to the bedside, and, with his
broad back to me, began taking things out of his bag. I heard the light
click of steel upon steel. My imagination, I found, was not altogether
stagnant. ‘Will you hurt me much?’ I said in an off-hand tone.

‘Not a bit,’ Haddon answered over his shoulder. ‘We shall chloroform
you. Your heart’s as sound as a bell.’ And as he spoke, I had a whiff
of the pungent sweetness of the anæsthetic.

They stretched me out, with a convenient exposure of my side, and,
almost before I realised what was happening, the chloroform was being
administered. It stings the nostrils, and there is a suffocating
sensation at first. I knew I should die--that this was the end of
consciousness for me. And suddenly I felt that I was not prepared for
death: I had a vague sense of a duty overlooked--I knew not what. What
was it I had not done? I could think of nothing more to do, nothing
desirable left in life; and yet I had the strangest disinclination
to death. And the physical sensation was painfully oppressive. Of
course the doctors did not know they were going to kill me. Possibly
I struggled. Then I fell motionless, and a great silence, a monstrous
silence, and an impenetrable blackness came upon me.

There must have been an interval of absolute unconsciousness, seconds
or minutes. Then with a chilly, unemotional clearness, I perceived that
I was not yet dead. I was still in my body; but all the multitudinous
sensations that come sweeping from it to make up the background of
consciousness had gone, leaving me free of it all. No, not free of
it all; for as yet something still held me to the poor stark flesh
upon the bed--held me, yet not so closely that I did not feel myself
external to it, independent of it, straining away from it. I do not
think I saw, I do not think I heard; but I perceived all that was going
on, and it was as if I both heard and saw. Haddon was bending over me,
Mowbray behind me; the scalpel--it was a large scalpel--was cutting
my flesh at the side under the flying ribs. It was interesting to
see myself cut like cheese, without a pang, without even a qualm. The
interest was much of a quality with that one might feel in a game of
chess between strangers. Haddon’s face was firm and his hand steady;
but I was surprised to perceive (_how_ I know not) that he was feeling
the gravest doubt as to his own wisdom in the conduct of the operation.

Mowbray’s thoughts, too, I could see. He was thinking that Haddon’s
manner showed too much of the specialist. New suggestions came up like
bubbles through a stream of frothing meditation, and burst one after
another in the little bright spot of his consciousness. He could not
help noticing and admiring Haddon’s swift dexterity, in spite of his
envious quality and his disposition to detract. I saw my liver exposed.
I was puzzled at my own condition. I did not feel that I was dead, but
I was different in some way from my living self. The gray depression,
that had weighed on me for a year or more and coloured all my thoughts,
was gone. I perceived and thought without any emotional tint at all. I
wondered if every one perceived things in this way under chloroform,
and forgot it again when he came out of it. It would be inconvenient to
look into some heads, and not forget.

Although I did not think that I was dead, I still perceived quite
clearly that I was soon to die. This brought me back to the
consideration of Haddon’s proceedings. I looked into his mind, and
saw that he was afraid of cutting a branch of the portal vein. My
attention was distracted from details by the curious changes going on
in his mind. His consciousness was like the quivering little spot of
light which is thrown by the mirror of a galvanometer. His thoughts ran
under it like a stream, some through the focus bright and distinct,
some shadowy in the half-light of the edge. Just now the little glow
was steady; but the least movement on Mowbray’s part, the slightest
sound from outside, even a faint difference in the slow movement of
the living flesh he was cutting, set the light-spot shivering and
spinning. A new sense-impression came rushing up through the flow of
thoughts; and lo! the light-spot jerked away towards it, swifter than
a frightened fish. It was wonderful to think that upon that unstable,
fitful thing depended all the complex motions of the man; that for
the next five minutes, therefore, my life hung upon its movements.
And he was growing more and more nervous in his work. It was as if a
little picture of a cut vein grew brighter, and struggled to oust from
his brain another picture of a cut falling short of the mark. He was
afraid: his dread of cutting too little was battling with his dread of
cutting too far.

Then, suddenly, like an escape of water from under a lock-gate, a
great uprush of horrible realisation set all his thoughts swirling,
and simultaneously I perceived that the vein was cut. He started back
with a hoarse exclamation, and I saw the brown-purple blood gather
in a swift bead, and run trickling. He was horrified. He pitched the
red-stained scalpel on to the octagonal table; and instantly both
doctors flung themselves upon me, making hasty and ill-conceived
efforts to remedy the disaster. ‘Ice!’ said Mowbray, gasping. But I
knew that I was killed, though my body still clung to me.

I will not describe their belated endeavours to save me, though I
perceived every detail. My perceptions were sharper and swifter
than they had ever been in life; my thoughts rushed through my mind
with incredible swiftness, but with perfect definition. I can only
compare their crowded clarity to the effects of a reasonable dose
of opium. In a moment it would all be over, and I should be free. I
knew I was immortal, what would happen I did not know. Should I drift
off presently, like a puff of smoke from a gun, in some kind of
half-material body, an attenuated version of my material self? Should
I find myself suddenly among the innumerable hosts of the dead, and
know the world about me for the phantasmagoria it had always seemed?
Should I drift to some spiritualistic _séance_, and there make foolish,
incomprehensible attempts to affect a purblind medium? It was a
state of unemotional curiosity, of colourless expectation. And then
I realised a growing stress upon me, a feeling as though some huge
human magnet was drawing me upward out of my body. The stress grew and
grew. I seemed an atom for which monstrous forces were fighting. For
one brief, terrible moment sensation came back to me. That feeling of
falling headlong which comes in nightmares, that feeling a thousand
times intensified, that and a black horror swept across my thoughts in
a torrent. Then the two doctors, the naked body with its cut side, the
little room, swept away from under me and vanished, as a speck of foam
vanishes down an eddy.

I was in mid-air. Far below was the West End of London, receding
rapidly--for I seemed to be flying swiftly upward--and as it receded,
passing westward like a panorama. I could see, through the faint haze
of smoke, the innumerable roofs chimney-set, the narrow roadways,
stippled with people and conveyances, the little specks of squares,
and the church steeples like thorns sticking out of the fabric. But it
spun away as the earth rotated on its axis, and in a few seconds (as
it seemed) I was over the scattered clumps of town about Ealing, the
little Thames a thread of blue to the south, and the Chiltern Hills and
the North Downs coming up like the rim of a basin, far away and faint
with haze. Up I rushed. And at first I had not the faintest conception
what this headlong rush upward could mean.

Every moment the circle of scenery beneath me grew wider and wider,
and the details of town and field, of hill and valley, got more and
more hazy and pale and indistinct, a luminous gray was mingled more
and more with the blue of the hills and the green of the open meadows;
and a little patch of cloud, low and far to the west, shone ever more
dazzlingly white. Above, as the veil of atmosphere between myself and
outer space grew thinner, the sky, which had been a fair springtime
blue at first, grew deeper and richer in colour, passing steadily
through the intervening shades, until presently it was as dark as
the blue sky of midnight, and presently as black as the blackness of
a frosty starlight, and at last as black as no blackness I had ever
beheld. And first one star, and then many, and at last an innumerable
host broke out upon the sky: more stars than any one has ever seen from
the face of the earth. For the blueness of the sky is the light of the
sun and stars sifted and spread abroad blindingly: there is diffused
light even in the darkest skies of winter, and we do not see the stars
by day only because of the dazzling irradiation of the sun. But now I
saw things--I know not how; assuredly with no mortal eyes--and that
defect of bedazzlement blinded me no longer. The sun was incredibly
strange and wonderful. The body of it was a disc of blinding white
light: not yellowish, as it seems to those who live upon the earth, but
livid white, all streaked with scarlet streaks and rimmed about with a
fringe of writhing tongues of red fire. And shooting half-way across
the heavens from either side of it and brighter than the Milky Way,
were two pinions of silver white, making it look more like those winged
globes I have seen in Egyptian sculpture than anything else I can
remember upon earth. These I knew for the solar corona, though I had
never seen anything of it but a picture during the days of my earthly
life.

When my attention came back to the earth again, I saw that it
had fallen very far away from me. Field and town were long since
indistinguishable, and all the varied hues of the country were merging
into a uniform bright gray, broken only by the brilliant white of the
clouds that lay scattered in flocculent masses over Ireland and the
west of England. For now I could see the outlines of the north of
France and Ireland, and all this Island of Britain, save where Scotland
passed over the horizon to the north, or where the coast was blurred or
obliterated by cloud. The sea was a dull gray and darker than the land;
and the whole panorama was rotating slowly towards the east.

All this had happened so swiftly that until I was some thousand miles
or so from the earth I had no thought for myself. But now I perceived I
had neither hands nor feet, neither parts nor organs, and that I felt
neither alarm nor pain. All about me I perceived that the vacancy (for
I had already left the air behind) was cold beyond the imagination of
man; but it troubled me not. The sun’s rays shot through the void,
powerless to light or heat until they should strike on matter in their
course. I saw things with a serene self-forgetfulness, even as if I
were God. And down below there, rushing away from me--countless miles
in a second--where a little dark spot on the gray marked the position
of London, two doctors were struggling to restore life to the poor
hacked and outworn shell I had abandoned. I felt then such release,
such serenity as I can compare to no mortal delight I have ever known.

It was only after I had perceived all these things that the meaning of
that headlong rush of the earth grew into comprehension. Yet it was
so simple, so obvious, that I was amazed at my never anticipating the
thing that was happening to me. I had suddenly been cut adrift from
matter: all that was material of me was there upon earth, whirling
away through space, held to the earth by gravitation, partaking of the
earth-inertia, moving in its wreath of epicycles round the sun, and
with the sun and the planets on their vast march through space. But
the immaterial has no inertia, feels nothing of the pull of matter for
matter: where it parts from its garments of flesh, there it remains (so
far as space concerns it any longer) immovable in space. _I_ was not
leaving the earth: the earth was leaving _me_, and not only the earth
but the whole solar system was streaming past. And about me in space,
invisible to me, scattered in the wake of the earth upon its journey,
there must be an innumerable multitude of souls, stripped like myself
of the material, stripped like myself of the passions of the individual
and the generous emotions of the gregarious brute, naked intelligences,
things of new-born wonder and thought, marvelling at the strange
release that had suddenly come on them!

As I receded faster and faster from the strange white sun in the black
heavens, and from the broad and shining earth upon which my being had
begun, I seemed to grow in some incredible manner vast: vast as regards
this world I had left, vast as regards the moments and periods of a
human life. Very soon I saw the full circle of the earth, slightly
gibbous, like the moon when she nears her full, but very large; and
the silvery shape of America was now in the noonday blaze wherein (as
it seemed) little England had been basking but a few minutes ago. At
first the earth was large; and shone in the heavens, filling a great
part of them; but every moment she grew smaller and more distant. As
she shrank, the broad moon in its third quarter crept into view over
the rim of her disc. I looked for the constellations. Only that part of
Aries directly behind the sun and the Lion, which the earth covered,
were hidden. I recognised the tortuous, tattered band of the Milky
Way with Vega very bright between sun and earth; and Sirius and Orion
shone splendid against the unfathomable blackness in the opposite
quarter of the heavens. The Pole Star was overhead, and the Great Bear
hung over the circle of the earth. And away beneath and beyond the
shining corona of the sun were strange groupings of stars I had never
seen in my life--notably a dagger-shaped group that I knew for the
Southern Cross. All these were no larger than when they had shone on
earth, but the little stars that one scarce sees shone now against the
setting of black vacancy as brightly as the first-magnitudes had done,
while the larger worlds were points of indescribable glory and colour.
Aldebaran was a spot of blood-red fire, and Sirius condensed to one
point the light of innumerable sapphires. And they shone steadily: they
did not scintillate, they were calmly glorious. My impressions had an
adamantine hardness and brightness: there was no blurring softness, no
atmosphere, nothing but infinite darkness set with the myriads of these
acute and brilliant points and specks of light. Presently when I looked
again, the little earth seemed no bigger than the sun, and it dwindled
and turned as I looked, until in a second’s space (as it seemed to
me), it was halved; and so it went on swiftly dwindling. Far away in
the opposite direction, a little pinkish pin’s head of light, shining
steadily, was the planet Mars. I swam motionless in vacancy, and,
without a trace of terror or astonishment, watched the speck of cosmic
dust we call the world fall away from me.

Presently it dawned upon me that my sense of duration had changed; that
my mind was moving not faster but infinitely slower, that between each
separate impression there was a period of many days. The moon spun once
round the earth as I noted this; and I perceived clearly the motion
of Mars in his orbit. Moreover, it appeared as if the time between
thought and thought grew steadily greater, until at last a thousand
years was but a moment in my perception.

At first the constellations had shone motionless against the black
background of infinite space; but presently it seemed as though the
group of stars about Hercules and the Scorpion was contracting, while
Orion and Aldebaran and their neighbours were scattering apart.
Flashing suddenly out of the darkness there came a flying multitude
of particles of rock, glittering like dust-specks in a sunbeam, and
encompassed in a faintly luminous cloud. They swirled all about me,
and vanished again in a twinkling far behind. And then I saw that a
bright spot of light, that shone a little to one side of my path, was
growing very rapidly larger, and perceived that it was the planet
Saturn rushing towards me. Larger and larger it grew, swallowing up
the heavens behind it, and hiding every moment a fresh multitude of
stars. I perceived its flattened, whirling body, its disc-like belt,
and seven of its little satellites. It grew and grew, till it towered
enormous; and then I plunged amid a streaming multitude of clashing
stones and dancing dust-particles and gas-eddies, and saw for a moment
the mighty triple belt like three concentric arches of moonlight above
me, its shadow black on the boiling tumult below. These things happened
in one-tenth of the time it takes to tell them. The planet went by like
a flash of lightning; for a few seconds it blotted out the sun, and
there and then became a mere black, dwindling, winged patch against the
light. The earth, the mother mote of my being, I could no longer see.

So with a stately swiftness, in the profoundest silence the solar
system fell from me as it had been a garment, until the sun was a mere
star amid the multitude of stars, with its eddy of planet-specks lost
in the confused glittering of the remoter light. I was no longer a
denizen of the solar system: I had come to the outer Universe, I seemed
to grasp and comprehend the whole world of matter. Ever more swiftly
the stars closed in about the spot where Antares and Vega had vanished
in a phosphorescent haze, until that part of the sky had the semblance
of a whirling mass of nebulæ, and ever before me yawned vaster gaps
of vacant blackness, and the stars shone fewer and fewer. It seemed
as if I moved towards a point between Orion’s belt and sword; and
the void about that region opened vaster and vaster every second, an
incredible gulf of nothingness into which I was falling. Faster and
ever faster the universe rushed by, a hurry of whirling motes at last,
speeding silently into the void. Stars glowing brighter and brighter,
with their circling planets catching the light in a ghostly fashion as
I neared them, shone out and vanished again into inexistence; faint
comets, clusters of meteorites, winking specks of matter, eddying
light-points, whizzed past, some perhaps a hundred millions of miles or
so from me at most, few nearer, travelling with unimaginable rapidity,
shooting constellations, momentary darts of fire, through that black,
enormous night. More than anything else it was like a dusty draught,
sunbeam-lit. Broader and wider and deeper grew the starless space, the
vacant Beyond, into which I was being drawn. At last a quarter of the
heavens was black and blank, and the whole headlong rush of stellar
universe closed in behind me like a veil of light that is gathered
together. It drove away from me like a monstrous jack-o’-lantern driven
by the wind. I had come out into the wilderness of space. Ever the
vacant blackness grew broader, until the hosts of the stars seemed
only like a swarm of fiery specks hurrying away from me, inconceivably
remote, and the darkness, the nothingness and emptiness, was about me
on every side. Soon the little universe of matter, the cage of points
in which I had begun to be, was dwindling, now to a whirling disc of
luminous glittering, and now to one minute disc of hazy light. In a
little while it would shrink to a point, and at last would vanish
altogether.

Suddenly feeling came back to me--feeling in the shape of overwhelming
terror; such a dread of those dark vastitudes as no words can describe,
a passionate resurgence of sympathy and social desire. Were there
other souls, invisible to me as I to them, about me in the blackness?
or was I indeed, even as I felt, alone? Had I passed out of being
into something that was neither being nor not-being? The covering
of the body, the covering of matter, had been torn from me, and the
hallucinations of companionship and security. Everything was black and
silent. I had ceased to be. I was nothing. There was nothing, save only
that infinitesimal dot of light that dwindled in the gulf. I strained
myself to hear and see, and for a while there was naught but infinite
silence, intolerable darkness, horror, and despair.

Then I saw that about the spot of light into which the whole world of
matter had shrunk there was a faint glow. And in a band on either side
of that the darkness was not absolute. I watched it for ages, as it
seemed to me, and through the long waiting the haze grew imperceptibly
more distinct. And then about the band appeared an irregular cloud
of the faintest, palest brown. I felt a passionate impatience; but
the things grew brighter so slowly that they scarce seemed to change.
What was unfolding itself? What was this strange reddish dawn in the
interminable night of space?

The cloud’s shape was grotesque. It seemed to be looped along its lower
side into four projecting masses, and, above, it ended in a straight
line. What phantom was it? I felt assured I had seen that figure
before; but I could not think what, nor where, nor when it was. Then
the realisation rushed upon me. _It was a clenched Hand._ I was alone
in space, alone with this huge, shadowy Hand, upon which the whole
Universe of Matter lay like an unconsidered speck of dust. It seemed
as though I watched it through vast periods of time. On the forefinger
glittered a ring; and the universe from which I had come was but a spot
of light upon the ring’s curvature. And the thing that the hand gripped
had the likeness of a black rod. Through a long eternity I watched this
Hand, with the ring and the rod, marvelling and fearing and waiting
helplessly on what might follow. It seemed as though nothing could
follow: that I should watch for ever, seeing only the Hand and the
thing it held, and understanding nothing of its import. Was the whole
universe but a refracting speck upon some greater Being? Were our
worlds but the atoms of another universe, and those again of another,
and so on through an endless progression? And what was I? Was I indeed
immaterial? A vague persuasion of a body gathering about me came into
my suspense. The abysmal darkness about the Hand filled with impalpable
suggestions, with uncertain, fluctuating shapes.

Then, suddenly, came a sound, like the sound of a tolling bell: faint,
as if infinitely far; muffled, as though heard through thick swathings
of darkness: a deep, vibrating resonance, with vast gulfs of silence
between each stroke. And the Hand appeared to tighten on the rod. And
I saw far above the Hand, towards the apex of the darkness, a circle
of dim phosphorescence, a ghostly sphere whence these sounds came
throbbing; and at the last stroke the Hand vanished, for the hour had
come, and I heard a noise of many waters. But the black rod remained
as a great band across the sky. And then a voice, which seemed to run
to the uttermost parts of space, spoke, saying, ‘There will be no more
pain.’

At that an almost intolerable gladness and radiance rushed in upon
me, and I saw the circle shining white and bright, and the rod black
and shining, and many things else distinct and clear. And the circle
was the face of the clock, and the rod the rail of my bed. Haddon was
standing at the foot, against the rail, with a small pair of scissors
on his fingers; and the hands of my clock on the mantel over his
shoulder were clasped together over the hour of twelve. Mowbray was
washing something in a basin at the octagonal table, and at my side I
felt a subdued feeling that could scarce be spoken of as pain.

The operation had not killed me. And I perceived, suddenly, that the
dull melancholy of half a year was lifted from my mind.




THE PLATTNER STORY


Whether the story of Gottfried Plattner is to be credited or not is
a pretty question in the value of evidence. On the one hand, we have
seven witnesses--to be perfectly exact, we have six and a half pairs
of eyes, and one undeniable fact; and on the other we have--what is
it?--prejudice, common sense, the inertia of opinion. Never were there
seven more honest-seeming witnesses; never was there a more undeniable
fact than the inversion of Gottfried Plattner’s anatomical structure,
and--never was there a more preposterous story than the one they
have to tell! The most preposterous part of the story is the worthy
Gottfried’s contribution (for I count him as one of the seven). Heaven
forbid that I should be led into giving countenance to superstition by
a passion for impartiality, and so come to share the fate of Eusapia’s
patrons! Frankly, I believe there is something crooked about this
business of Gottfried Plattner; but what that crooked factor is, I
will admit as frankly, I do not know. I have been surprised at the
credit accorded to the story in the most unexpected and authoritative
quarters. The fairest way to the reader, however, will be for me to
tell it without further comment.

Gottfried Plattner is, in spite of his name, a freeborn Englishman.
His father was an Alsatian who came to England in the ’sixties,
married a respectable English girl of unexceptional antecedents, and
died, after a wholesome and uneventful life (devoted, I understand,
chiefly to the laying of parquet flooring), in 1887. Gottfried’s age is
seven-and-twenty. He is, by virtue of his heritage of three languages,
Modern Languages Master in a small private school in the south of
England. To the casual observer he is singularly like any other Modern
Languages Master in any other small private school. His costume is
neither very costly nor very fashionable, but, on the other hand, it
is not markedly cheap or shabby; his complexion, like his height and
his bearing, is inconspicuous. You would notice, perhaps, that, like
the majority of people, his face was not absolutely symmetrical, his
right eye a little larger than the left, and his jaw a trifle heavier
on the right side. If you, as an ordinary careless person, were to bare
his chest and feel his heart beating, you would probably find it quite
like the heart of any one else. But here you and the trained observer
would part company. If you found his heart quite ordinary, the trained
observer would find it quite otherwise. And once the thing was pointed
out to you, you too would perceive the peculiarity easily enough. It is
that Gottfried’s heart beats on the right side of his body.

Now, that is not the only singularity of Gottfried’s structure,
although it is the only one that would appeal to the untrained mind.
Careful sounding of Gottfried’s internal arrangements by a well-known
surgeon seems to point to the fact that all the other unsymmetrical
parts of his body are similarly misplaced. The right lobe of his liver
is on the left side, the left on his right; while his lungs, too, are
similarly contraposed. What is still more singular, unless Gottfried is
a consummate actor, we must believe that his right hand has recently
become his left. Since the occurrences we are about to consider (as
impartially as possible), he has found the utmost difficulty in
writing, except from right to left across the paper with his left hand.
He cannot throw with his right hand, he is perplexed at meal-times
between knife and fork, and his ideas of the rule of the road--he is
a cyclist--are still a dangerous confusion. And there is not a scrap
of evidence to show that before these occurrences Gottfried was at all
left-handed.

There is yet another wonderful fact in this preposterous business.
Gottfried produces three photographs of himself. You have him at the
age of five or six, thrusting fat legs at you from under a plaid frock,
and scowling. In that photograph his left eye is a little larger than
his right, and his jaw is a trifle heavier on the left side. This
is the reverse of his present living condition. The photograph of
Gottfried at fourteen seems to contradict these facts, but that is
because it is one of those cheap ‘Gem’ photographs that were then in
vogue, taken direct upon metal, and therefore reversing things just
as a looking-glass would. The third photograph represents him at
one-and-twenty, and confirms the record of the others. There seems here
evidence of the strongest confirmatory character that Gottfried has
exchanged his left side for his right. Yet how a human being can be so
changed, short of a fantastic and pointless miracle, it is exceedingly
hard to suggest.

In one way, of course, these facts might be explicable on the
supposition that Plattner has undertaken an elaborate mystification,
on the strength of his heart’s displacement. Photographs may be
faked, and left-handedness imitated. But the character of the man
does not lend itself to any such theory. He is quiet, practical,
unobtrusive, and thoroughly sane, from the Nordau standpoint. He likes
beer, and smokes moderately, takes walking exercise daily, and has a
healthily high estimate of the value of his teaching. He has a good
but untrained tenor voice, and takes a pleasure in singing airs of a
popular and cheerful character. He is fond, but not morbidly fond, of
reading--chiefly fiction pervaded with a vaguely pious optimism--sleeps
well, and rarely dreams. He is, in fact, the very last person to
evolve a fantastic fable. Indeed, so far from forcing this story upon
the world, he has been singularly reticent on the matter. He meets
inquirers with a certain engaging--bashfulness is almost the word, that
disarms the most suspicious. He seems genuinely ashamed that anything
so unusual has occurred to him.

It is to be regretted that Plattner’s aversion to the idea of
post-mortem dissection may postpone, perhaps for ever, the positive
proof that his entire body has had its left and right sides transposed.
Upon that fact mainly the credibility of his story hangs. There is no
way of taking a man and moving him about in space as ordinary people
understand space, that will result in our changing his sides. Whatever
you do, his right is still his right, his left his left. You can do
that with a perfectly thin and flat thing, of course. If you were to
cut a figure out of paper, any figure with a right and left side, you
could change its sides simply by lifting it up and turning it over.
But with a solid it is different. Mathematical theorists tell us that
the only way in which the right and left sides of a solid body can be
changed is by taking that body clean out of space as we know it--taking
it out of ordinary existence, that is, and turning it somewhere
outside space. This is a little abstruse, no doubt, but any one with
any knowledge of mathematical theory will assure the reader of its
truth. To put the thing in technical language, the curious inversion
of Plattner’s right and left sides is proof that he has moved out of
our space into what is called the Fourth Dimension, and that he has
returned again to our world. Unless we choose to consider ourselves
the victims of an elaborate and motiveless fabrication, we are almost
bound to believe that this has occurred.

So much for the tangible facts. We come now to the account of the
phenomena that attended his temporary disappearance from the world.
It appears that in the Sussexville Proprietary School, Plattner not
only discharged the duties of Modern Languages Master, but also taught
chemistry, commercial geography, bookkeeping, shorthand, drawing, and
any other additional subject to which the changing fancies of the
boys’ parents might direct attention. He knew little or nothing of
these various subjects, but in secondary as distinguished from Board
or elementary schools, knowledge in the teacher is, very properly, by
no means so necessary as high moral character and gentlemanly tone.
In chemistry he was particularly deficient, knowing, he says, nothing
beyond the Three Gases (whatever the three gases may be). As, however,
his pupils began by knowing nothing, and derived all their information
from him, this caused him (or any one) but little inconvenience for
several terms. Then a little boy named Whibble joined the school, who
had been educated (it seems) by some mischievous relative into an
inquiring habit of mind. This little boy followed Plattner’s lessons
with marked and sustained interest, and in order to exhibit his zeal
on the subject, brought, at various times, substances for Plattner to
analyse. Plattner, flattered by this evidence of his power of awakening
interest, and trusting to the boy’s ignorance, analysed these, and even
made general statements as to their composition. Indeed, he was so far
stimulated by his pupil as to obtain a work upon analytical chemistry,
and study it during his supervision of the evening’s preparation. He
was surprised to find chemistry quite an interesting subject.

So far the story is absolutely commonplace. But now the greenish
powder comes upon the scene. The source of that greenish powder
seems, unfortunately, lost. Master Whibble tells a tortuous story of
finding it done up in a packet in a disused limekiln near the Downs.
It would have been an excellent thing for Plattner, and possibly for
Master Whibble’s family, if a match could have been applied to that
powder there and then. The young gentleman certainly did not bring it
to school in a packet, but in a common eight-ounce graduated medicine
bottle, plugged with masticated newspaper. He gave it to Plattner at
the end of the afternoon school. Four boys had been detained after
school prayers in order to complete some neglected tasks, and Plattner
was supervising these in the small class-room in which the chemical
teaching was conducted. The appliances for the practical teaching of
chemistry in the Sussexville Proprietary School, as in most small
schools in this country, are characterised by a severe simplicity. They
are kept in a small cupboard standing in a recess, and having about the
same capacity as a common travelling trunk. Plattner, being bored with
his passive superintendence, seems to have welcomed the intervention of
Whibble with his green powder as an agreeable diversion, and, unlocking
this cupboard, proceeded at once with his analytical experiments.
Whibble sat, luckily for himself, at a safe distance, regarding him.
The four malefactors, feigning a profound absorption in their work,
watched him furtively with the keenest interest. For even within the
limits of the Three Gases, Plattner’s practical chemistry was, I
understand, temerarious.

They are practically unanimous in their account of Plattner’s
proceedings. He poured a little of the green powder into a test-tube,
and tried the substance with water, hydrochloric acid, nitric acid,
and sulphuric acid in succession. Getting no result, he emptied out
a little heap--nearly half the bottleful, in fact--upon a slate and
tried a match. He held the medicine bottle in his left hand. The stuff
began to smoke and melt, and then exploded with deafening violence and
a blinding flash.

The five boys, seeing the flash and being prepared for catastrophes,
ducked below their desks, and were none of them seriously hurt. The
window was blown out into the playground, and the blackboard on its
easel was upset. The slate was smashed to atoms. Some plaster fell
from the ceiling. No other damage was done to the school edifice or
appliances, and the boys at first, seeing nothing of Plattner, fancied
he was knocked down and lying out of their sight below the desks. They
jumped out of their places to go to his assistance, and were amazed to
find the space empty. Being still confused by the sudden violence of
the report, they hurried to the open door, under the impression that he
must have been hurt, and have rushed out of the room. But Carson, the
foremost, nearly collided in the doorway with the principal, Mr Lidgett.

Mr Lidgett is a corpulent, excitable man with one eye. The boys
describe him as stumbling into the room mouthing some of those tempered
expletives irritable schoolmasters accustom themselves to use--lest
worse befall. ‘Wretched mumchancer!’ he said. ‘Where’s Mr Plattner?’
The boys are agreed on the very words. (‘Wobbler,’ ‘snivelling puppy,’
and ‘mumchancer’ are, it seems, among the ordinary small change of Mr
Lidgett’s scholastic commerce.)

Where’s Mr Plattner? That was a question that was to be repeated many
times in the next few days. It really seemed as though that frantic
hyperbole, ‘blown to atoms,’ had for once realised itself. There was
not a visible particle of Plattner to be seen; not a drop of blood nor
a stitch of clothing to be found. Apparently he had been blown clean
out of existence and left not a wrack behind. Not so much as would
cover a sixpenny piece, to quote a proverbial expression! The evidence
of his absolute disappearance as a consequence of that explosion is
indubitable.

It is not necessary to enlarge here upon the commotion excited in the
Sussexville Proprietary School, and in Sussexville and elsewhere, by
this event. It is quite possible, indeed, that some of the readers of
these pages may recall the hearing of some remote and dying version
of that excitement during the last summer holidays. Lidgett, it would
seem, did everything in his power to suppress and minimise the story.
He instituted a penalty of twenty-five lines for any mention of
Plattner’s name among the boys, and stated in the schoolroom that he
was clearly aware of his assistant’s whereabouts. He was afraid, he
explains, that the possibility of an explosion happening, in spite of
the elaborate precautions taken to minimise the practical teaching of
chemistry, might injure the reputation of the school; and so might any
mysterious quality in Plattner’s departure. Indeed, he did everything
in his power to make the occurrence seem as ordinary as possible. In
particular, he cross-examined the five eye-witnesses of the occurrence
so searchingly that they began to doubt the plain evidence of their
senses. But, in spite of these efforts, the tale, in a magnified
and distorted state, made a nine days’ wonder in the district, and
several parents withdrew their sons on colourable pretexts. Not the
least remarkable point in the matter is the fact that a large number
of people in the neighbourhood dreamed singularly vivid dreams of
Plattner during the period of excitement before his return, and that
these dreams had a curious uniformity. In almost all of them Plattner
was seen, sometimes singly, sometimes in company, wandering about
through a coruscating iridescence. In all cases his face was pale and
distressed, and in some he gesticulated towards the dreamer. One or
two of the boys, evidently under the influence of nightmare, fancied
that Plattner approached them with remarkable swiftness, and seemed to
look closely into their very eyes. Others fled with Plattner from the
pursuit of vague and extraordinary creatures of a globular shape. But
all these fancies were forgotten in inquiries and speculations when on
the Wednesday next but one after the Monday of the explosion, Plattner
returned.

The circumstances of his return were as singular as those of his
departure. So far as Mr Lidgett’s somewhat choleric outline can be
filled in from Plattner’s hesitating statements, it would appear that
on Wednesday evening, towards the hour of sunset, the former gentleman,
having dismissed evening preparation, was engaged in his garden,
picking and eating strawberries, a fruit of which he is inordinately
fond. It is a large old-fashioned garden, secured from observation,
fortunately, by a high and ivy-covered red-brick wall. Just as he was
stooping over a particularly prolific plant, there was a flash in the
air and a heavy thud, and before he could look round, some heavy body
struck him violently from behind. He was pitched forward, crushing the
strawberries he held in his hand, and that so roughly, that his silk
hat--Mr Lidgett adheres to the older ideas of scholastic costume--was
driven violently down upon his forehead, and almost over one eye.
This heavy missile, which slid over him sideways and collapsed into a
sitting posture among the strawberry plants, proved to be our long-lost
Mr Gottfried Plattner, in an extremely dishevelled condition. He was
collarless and hatless, his linen was dirty, and there was blood
upon his hands. Mr Lidgett was so indignant and surprised that he
remained on all-fours, and with his hat jammed down on his eye, while
he expostulated vehemently with Plattner for his disrespectful and
unaccountable conduct.

This scarcely idyllic scene completes what I may call the exterior
version of the Plattner story--its exoteric aspect. It is quite
unnecessary to enter here into all the details, of his dismissal by Mr
Lidgett, such details, with the full names and dates and references,
will be found in the larger report of these occurrences that was laid
before the Society for the Investigation of Abnormal Phenomena. The
singular transposition of Plattner’s right and left sides was scarcely
observed for the first day or so, and then first in connection with
his disposition to write from right to left across the blackboard. He
concealed rather than ostended this curious confirmatory circumstance,
as he considered it would unfavourably affect his prospects in a new
situation. The displacement of his heart was discovered some months
after, when he was having a tooth extracted under anæsthetics. He then,
very unwillingly, allowed a cursory surgical examination to be made of
himself, with a view to a brief account in the _Journal of Anatomy_.
That exhausts the statement of the material facts; and we may now go on
to consider Plattner’s account of the matter.

But first let us clearly differentiate between the preceding portion
of this story and what is to follow. All I have told thus far is
established by such evidence as even a criminal lawyer would approve.
Every one of the witnesses is still alive; the reader, if he have the
leisure, may hunt the lads out to-morrow, or even brave the terrors
of the redoubtable Lidgett, and cross-examine and trap and test to
his heart’s content; Gottfried Plattner himself, and his twisted
heart and his three photographs, are producible. It may be taken as
proved that he did disappear for nine days as the consequence of an
explosion; that he returned almost as violently, under circumstances
in their nature annoying to Mr Lidgett, whatever the details of
those circumstances may be; and that he returned inverted, just as
a reflection returns from a mirror. From the last fact, as I have
already stated, it follows almost inevitably that Plattner, during
those nine days, must have been in some state of existence altogether
out of space. The evidence to these statements is, indeed, far
stronger than that upon which most murderers are hanged. But for
his own particular account of where he had been, with its confused
explanations and wellnigh self-contradictory details, we have only
Mr Gottfried Plattner’s word. I do not wish to discredit that, but I
must point out--what so many writers upon obscure psychic phenomena
fail to do--that we are passing here from the practically undeniable
to that kind of matter which any reasonable man is entitled to believe
or reject as he thinks proper. The previous statements render it
plausible; its discordance with common experience tilts it towards
the incredible. I would prefer not to sway the beam of the reader’s
judgment either way, but simply to tell the story as Plattner told it
to me.

He gave me his narrative, I may state, at my house at Chislehurst, and
so soon as he had left me that evening, I went into my study and wrote
down everything as I remembered it. Subsequently he was good enough to
read over a typewritten copy, so that its substantial correctness is
undeniable.

He states that at the moment of the explosion he distinctly thought he
was killed. He felt lifted off his feet and driven forcibly backward.
It is a curious fact for psychologists that he thought clearly during
his backward flight, and wondered whether he should hit the chemistry
cupboard or the blackboard easel. His heels struck ground, and he
staggered and fell heavily into a sitting position on something soft
and firm. For a moment the concussion stunned him. He became aware at
once of a vivid scent of singed hair, and he seemed to hear the voice
of Lidgett asking for him. You will understand that for a time his mind
was greatly confused.

At first he was under the impression that he was still standing in the
class-room. He perceived quite distinctly the surprise of the boys and
the entry of Mr Lidgett. He is quite positive upon that score. He did
not hear their remarks; but that he ascribed to the deafening effect
of the experiment. Things about him seemed curiously dark and faint,
but his mind explained that on the obvious but mistaken idea that the
explosion had engendered a huge volume of dark smoke. Through the
dimness the figures of Lidgett and the boys moved, as faint and silent
as ghosts. Plattner’s face still tingled with the stinging heat of the
flash. He was, he says, ‘all muddled.’ His first definite thoughts
seem to have been of his personal safety. He thought he was perhaps
blinded and deafened. He felt his limbs and face in a gingerly manner.
Then his perceptions grew clearer, and he was astonished to miss the
old familiar desks and other schoolroom furniture about him. Only dim,
uncertain, gray shapes stood in the place of these. Then came a thing
that made him shout aloud, and awoke his stunned faculties to instant
activity. _Two of the boys, gesticulating, walked one after the other
clean through him!_ Neither manifested the slightest consciousness of
his presence. It is difficult to imagine the sensation he felt. They
came against him, he says, with no more force than a wisp of mist.

Plattner’s first thought after that was that he was dead. Having been
brought up with thoroughly sound views in these matters, however, he
was a little surprised to find his body still about him. His second
conclusion was that he was not dead, but that the others were: that the
explosion had destroyed the Sussexville Proprietary School and every
soul in it except himself. But that, too, was scarcely satisfactory. He
was thrown back upon astonished observation.

Everything about him was profoundly dark: at first it seemed to have
an altogether ebony blackness. Overhead was a black firmament. The
only touch of light in the scene was a faint greenish glow at the edge
of the sky in one direction, which threw into prominence a horizon of
undulating black hills. This, I say, was his impression at first. As
his eye grew accustomed to the darkness, he began to distinguish a
faint quality of differentiating greenish colour in the circumambient
night. Against this background the furniture and occupants of the
class-room, it seems, stood out like phosphorescent spectres, faint
and impalpable. He extended his hand, and thrust it without an effort
through the wall of the room by the fireplace.

He describes himself as making a strenuous effort to attract attention.
He shouted to Lidgett, and tried to seize the boys as they went to
and fro. He only desisted from these attempts when Mrs Lidgett, whom
he (as an Assistant Master) naturally disliked, entered the room. He
says the sensation of being in the world and yet not a part of it, was
an extraordinarily disagreeable one. He compared his feelings, not
inaptly, to those of a cat watching a mouse through a window. Whenever
he made a motion to communicate with the dim, familiar world about him,
he found an invisible, incomprehensible barrier preventing intercourse.

He then turned his attention to his solid environment. He found the
medicine bottle still unbroken in his hand, with the remainder of the
green powder therein. He put this in his pocket, and began to feel
about him. Apparently he was sitting on a boulder of rock covered with
a velvety moss. The dark country about him he was unable to see, the
faint, misty picture of the schoolroom blotting it out, but he had a
feeling (due perhaps to a cold wind) that he was near the crest of a
hill, and that a steep valley fell away beneath his feet. The green
glow along the edge of the sky seemed to be growing in extent and
intensity. He stood up, rubbing his eyes.

It would seem that he made a few steps, going steeply downhill, and
then stumbled, nearly fell, and sat down again upon a jagged mass of
rock to watch the dawn. He became aware that the world about him was
absolutely silent. It was as still as it was dark, and though there was
a cold wind blowing up the hill-face, the rustle of grass, the soughing
of the boughs that should have accompanied it, were absent. He could
hear, therefore, if he could not see, that the hillside upon which he
stood was rocky and desolate. The green grew brighter every moment, and
as it did so a faint, transparent blood-red mingled with, but did not
mitigate, the blackness of the sky overhead and the rocky desolations
about him. Having regard to what follows, I am inclined to think that
that redness may have been an optical effect due to contrast. Something
black fluttered momentarily against the livid yellow-green of the lower
sky, and then the thin and penetrating voice of a bell rose out of the
black gulf below him. An oppressive expectation grew with the growing
light.

It is probable that an hour or more elapsed while he sat there, the
strange green light growing brighter every moment, and spreading
slowly, in flamboyant fingers, upward towards the zenith. As it grew,
the spectral vision of _our_ world became relatively or absolutely
fainter. Probably both, for the time must have been about that of our
earthly sunset. So far as his vision of our world went, Plattner, by
his few steps downhill, had passed through the floor of the class-room,
and was now, it seemed, sitting in mid-air in the larger schoolroom
downstairs. He saw the boarders distinctly, but much more faintly
than he had seen Lidgett. They were preparing their evening tasks,
and he noticed with interest that several were cheating with their
Euclid riders by means of a crib, a compilation whose existence he had
hitherto never suspected. As the time passed, they faded steadily, as
steadily as the light of the green dawn increased.

Looking down into the valley, he saw that the light had crept far
down its rocky sides, and that the profound blackness of the abyss
was now broken by a minute green glow, like the light of a glow-worm.
And almost immediately the limb of a huge heavenly body of blazing
green rose over the basaltic undulations of the distant hills, and
the monstrous hill-masses about him came out gaunt and desolate, in
green light and deep, ruddy black shadows. He became aware of a vast
number of ball-shaped objects drifting as thistledown drifts over
the high ground. There were none of these nearer to him than the
opposite side of the gorge. The bell below twanged quicker and quicker,
with something like impatient insistence, and several lights moved
hither and thither. The boys at work at their desks were now almost
imperceptibly faint.

This extinction of our world, when the green sun of this other universe
rose, is a curious point upon which Plattner insists. During the
Other-World night it is difficult to move about, on account of the
vividness with which the things of this world are visible. It becomes a
riddle to explain why, if this is the case, we in this world catch no
glimpse of the Other-World. It is due, perhaps, to the comparatively
vivid illumination of this world of ours. Plattner describes the
midday of the Other-World, at its brightest, as not being nearly so
bright as this world at full moon, while its night is profoundly
black. Consequently, the amount of light, even in an ordinary dark
room, is sufficient to render the things of the Other-World invisible,
on the same principle that faint phosphorescence is only visible in
the profoundest darkness. I have tried, since he told me his story,
to see something of the Other-World by sitting for a long space in a
photographer’s dark room at night. I have certainly seen indistinctly
the form of greenish slopes and rocks, but only, I must admit, very
indistinctly indeed. The reader may possibly be more successful.
Plattner tells me that, since his return he has dreamt and seen and
recognised places in the Other-World, but this is probably due to
his memory of these scenes. It seems quite possible that people with
unusually keen eyesight may occasionally catch a glimpse of this
strange Other-World about us.

However, this is a digression. As the green sun rose, a long street of
black buildings became perceptible though only darkly and indistinctly,
in the gorge, and after some hesitation, Plattner began to clamber
down the precipitous descent towards them. The descent was long and
exceedingly tedious, being so not only by the extraordinary steepness,
but also by reason of the looseness of the boulders with which the
whole face of the hill was strewn. The noise of his descent--now
and then his heels struck fire from the rocks--seemed now the only
sound in the universe, for the beating of the bell had ceased. As he
drew nearer, he perceived that the various edifices had a singular
resemblance to tombs and mausoleums and monuments, saving only that
they were all uniformly black instead of being white, as most
sepulchres are. And then he saw, crowding out of the largest building,
very much as people disperse from church, a number of pallid, rounded,
pale-green figures. These dispersed in several directions about
the broad street of the place, some going through side alleys and
reappearing upon the steepness of the hill, others entering some of the
small black buildings which lined the way.

At the sight of these things drifting up towards him, Plattner stopped,
staring. They were not walking, they were indeed limbless, and they
had the appearance of human heads, beneath which a tadpole-like body
swung. He was too astonished at their strangeness, too full, indeed,
of strangeness, to be seriously alarmed by them. They drove towards
him, in front of the chill wind that was blowing uphill, much as
soap-bubbles drive before a draught. And as he looked at the nearest
of those approaching, he saw it was indeed a human head, albeit with
singularly large eyes, and wearing such an expression of distress and
anguish as he had never seen before upon mortal countenance. He was
surprised to find that it did not turn to regard him, but seemed to be
watching and following some unseen moving thing. For a moment he was
puzzled, and then it occurred to him that this creature was watching
with its enormous eyes something that was happening in the world he had
just left. Nearer it came, and nearer, and he was too astonished to
cry out. It made a very faint fretting sound as it came close to him.
Then it struck his face with a gentle pat--its touch was very cold--and
drove past him, and upward towards the crest of the hill.

An extraordinary conviction flashed across Plattner’s mind that this
head had a strong likeness to Lidgett. Then he turned his attention
to the other heads that were now swarming thickly up the hill-side.
None made the slightest sign of recognition. One or two, indeed, came
close to his head and almost followed the example of the first, but he
dodged convulsively out of the way. Upon most of them he saw the same
expression of unavailing regret he had seen upon the first, and heard
the same faint sounds of wretchedness from them. One or two wept, and
one rolling swiftly uphill wore an expression of diabolical rage. But
others were cold, and several had a look of gratified interest in their
eyes. One, at least, was almost in an ecstasy of happiness. Plattner
does not remember that he recognised any more likenesses in those he
saw at this time.

For several hours, perhaps, Plattner watched these strange things
dispersing themselves over the hills, and not till long after they
had ceased to issue from the clustering black buildings in the gorge,
did he resume his downward climb. The darkness about him increased so
much that he had a difficulty in stepping true. Overhead the sky was
now a bright, pale green. He felt neither hunger nor thirst. Later,
when he did he found a chilly stream running down the centre of the
gorge, and the rare moss upon the boulders, when he tried it at last in
desperation, was good to eat.

He groped about among the tombs that ran down the gorge, seeking
vaguely for some clue to these inexplicable things. After a long
time he came to the entrance of the big mausoleum-like building from
which the heads had issued. In this he found a group of green lights
burning upon a kind of basaltic altar, and a bell-rope from a belfry
overhead hanging down into the centre of the place. Round the wall
ran a lettering of fire in a character unknown to him. While he was
still wondering at the purport of these things, he heard the receding
tramp of heavy feet echoing far down the street. He ran out into the
darkness again, but he could see nothing. He had a mind to pull the
bell-rope, and finally decided to follow the footsteps. But, although
he ran far, he never overtook them; and his shouting was of no avail.
The gorge seemed to extend an interminable distance. It was as dark
as earthly starlight throughout its length, while the ghastly green
day lay along the upper edge of its precipices. There were none of the
heads, now, below. They were all, it seemed, busily occupied along the
upper slopes. Looking up, he saw them drifting hither and thither, some
hovering stationary, some flying swiftly through the air. It reminded
him, he said, of ‘big snowflakes’; only these were black and pale green.

In pursuing the firm, undeviating footsteps that he never overtook, in
groping into new regions of this endless devil’s dyke, in clambering up
and down the pitiless heights, in wandering about the summits, and in
watching the drifting faces, Plattner states that he spent the better
part of seven or eight days. He did not keep count, he says. Though
once or twice he found eyes watching him, he had word with no living
soul. He slept among the rocks on the hillside. In the gorge things
earthly were invisible, because, from the earthly standpoint, it was
far underground. On the altitudes, so soon as the earthly day began,
the world became visible to him. He found himself sometimes stumbling
over the dark green rocks, or arresting himself on a precipitous brink,
while all about him the green branches of the Sussexville lanes were
swaying; or, again, he seemed to be walking through the Sussexville
streets, or watching unseen the private business of some household.
And then it was he discovered, that to almost every human being in our
world there pertained some of these drifting heads; that every one in
the world is watched intermittently by these helpless disembodiments.

What are they--these Watchers of the Living? Plattner never learned.
But two, that presently found and followed him, were like his
childhood’s memory of his father and mother. Now and then other faces
turned their eyes upon him: eyes like those of dead people who had
swayed him, or injured him, or helped him in his youth and manhood.
Whenever they looked at him, Plattner was overcome with a strange
sense of responsibility. To his mother he ventured to speak, but she
made no answer. She looked sadly, steadfastly, and tenderly--a little
reproachfully, too, it seemed--into his eyes.

He simply tells this story: he does not endeavour to explain. We are
left to surmise who these Watchers of the Living may be, or, if they
are indeed the Dead, why they should so closely and passionately watch
a world they have left for ever. It may be--indeed to my mind it seems
just--that, when our life has closed, when evil or good is no longer
a choice for us, we may still have to witness the working out of the
train of consequences we have laid. If human souls continue after
death, then surely human interests continue after death. But that is
merely my own guess at the meaning of the things seen. Plattner offers
no interpretation, for none was given him. It is well the reader should
understand this clearly. Day after day, with his head reeling, he
wandered about this strange lit world outside the world, weary and,
towards the end, weak and hungry. By day--by our earthly day, that
is--the ghostly vision of the old familiar scenery of Sussexville, all
about him, irked and worried him. He could not see where to put his
feet, and ever and again with a chilly touch one of these Watching
Souls would come against his face. And after dark the multitude of
these Watchers about him, and their intent distress, confused his mind
beyond describing. A great longing to return to the earthly life that
was so near and yet so remote consumed him. The unearthliness of things
about him produced a positively painful mental distress. He was worried
beyond describing by his own particular followers. He would shout at
them to desist from staring at him, scold at them, hurry away from
them. They were always mute and intent. Run as he might over the uneven
ground, they followed his destinies.

On the ninth day, towards evening, Plattner heard the invisible
footsteps approaching, far away down the gorge. He was then wandering
over the broad crest of the same hill upon which he had fallen in his
entry into this strange Other-World of his. He turned to hurry down
into the gorge, feeling his way hastily, and was arrested by the sight
of the thing that was happening in a room in a back street near the
school. Both of the people in the room he knew by sight. The windows
were open, the blinds up, and the setting sun shone clearly into it, so
that it came out quite brightly at first, a vivid oblong of room, lying
like a magic-lantern picture upon the black landscape and the livid
green dawn. In addition to the sunlight, a candle had just been lit in
the room.

On the bed lay a lank man, his ghastly white face terrible upon the
tumbled pillow. His clenched hands were raised above his head. A little
table beside the bed carried a few medicine bottles, some toast and
water, and an empty glass. Every now and then the lank man’s lips fell
apart, to indicate a word he could not articulate. But the woman did
not notice that he wanted anything, because she was busy turning out
papers from an old-fashioned bureau in the opposite corner of the room.
At first the picture was very vivid indeed, but as the green dawn
behind it grew brighter and brighter, so it became fainter and more and
more transparent.

As the echoing footsteps paced nearer and nearer, those footsteps
that sound so loud in that Other-World and come so silently in this,
Plattner perceived about him a great multitude of dim faces gathering
together out of the darkness and watching the two people in the room.
Never before had he seen so many of the Watchers of the Living.
A multitude had eyes only for the sufferer in the room, another
multitude, in infinite anguish, watched the woman as she hunted with
greedy eyes for something she could not find. They crowded about
Plattner, they came across his sight and buffeted his face, the noise
of their unavailing regrets was all about him. He saw clearly only
now and then. At other times the picture quivered dimly, through the
veil of green reflections upon their movements. In the room it must
have been very still, and Plattner says the candle flame streamed
up into a perfectly vertical line of smoke, but in his ears each
footfall and its echoes beat like a clap of thunder. And the faces!
Two, more particularly near the woman’s: one a woman’s also, white
and clear-featured, a face which might have once been cold and hard,
but which was now softened by the touch of a wisdom strange to earth.
The other might have been the woman’s father. Both were evidently
absorbed in the contemplation of some act of hateful meanness, so it
seemed, which they could no longer guard against and prevent. Behind
were others, teachers, it may be, who had taught ill, friends whose
influence had failed. And over the man, too--a multitude, but none
that seemed to be parents or teachers! Faces that might once have
been coarse, now purged to strength by sorrow! And in the forefront
one face, a girlish one, neither angry nor remorseful, but merely
patient and weary, and, as it seemed to Plattner, waiting for relief.
His powers of description fail him at the memory of this multitude of
ghastly countenances. They gathered on the stroke of the bell. He saw
them all in the space of a second. It would seem that he was so worked
on by his excitement that, quite involuntarily, his restless fingers
took the bottle of green powder out of his pocket and held it before
him. But he does not remember that.

Abruptly the footsteps ceased. He waited for the next, and there was
silence, and then suddenly, cutting through the unexpected stillness
like a keen, thin blade, came the first stroke of the bell. At that the
multitudinous faces swayed to and fro, and a louder crying began all
about him. The woman did not hear; she was burning something now in the
candle flame. At the second stroke everything grew dim, and a breath of
wind, icy cold, blew through the host of watchers. They swirled about
him like an eddy of dead leaves in the spring, and at the third stroke
something was extended through them to the bed. You have heard of a
beam of light. This was like a beam of darkness, and looking again at
it, Plattner saw that it was a shadowy arm and hand.

The green sun was now topping the black desolations of the horizon,
and the vision of the room was very faint. Plattner could see that
the white of the bed struggled, and was convulsed; and that the woman
looked round over her shoulder at it, startled.

The cloud of watchers lifted high like a puff of green dust before the
wind, and swept swiftly downward towards the temple in the gorge. Then
suddenly Plattner understood the meaning of the shadowy black arm that
stretched across his shoulder and clutched its prey. He did not dare
turn his head to see the Shadow behind the arm. With a violent effort,
and covering his eyes, he set himself to run, made, perhaps, twenty
strides, then slipped on a boulder, and fell. He fell forward on his
hands; and the bottle smashed and exploded as he touched the ground.

In another moment he found himself, stunned and bleeding, sitting face
to face with Lidgett in the old walled garden behind the school.


There the story of Plattner’s experiences ends. I have resisted, I
believe successfully, the natural disposition of a writer of fiction
to dress up incidents of this sort. I have told the thing as far
as possible in the order in which Plattner told it to me. I have
carefully avoided any attempt at style, effect, or construction.
It would have been easy, for instance, to have worked the scene of
the death-bed into a kind of plot in which Plattner might have been
involved. But, quite apart from the objectionableness of falsifying a
most extraordinary true story, any such trite devices would spoil, to
my mind, the peculiar effect of this dark world, with its livid green
illumination and its drifting Watchers of the Living, which, unseen and
unapproachable to us, is yet lying all about us.

It remains to add that a death did actually occur in Vincent Terrace,
just beyond the school garden, and, so far as can be proved, at
the moment of Plattner’s return. Deceased was a rate-collector and
insurance agent. His widow, who was much younger than himself, married
last month a Mr Whymper, a veterinary surgeon of Allbeeding. As the
portion of this story given here has in various forms circulated orally
in Sussexville, she has consented to my use of her name, on condition
that I make it distinctly known that she emphatically contradicts every
detail of Plattner’s account of her husband’s last moments. She burnt
no will, she says, although Plattner never accused her of doing so;
her husband made but one will, and that just after their marriage.
Certainly, from a man who had never seen it, Plattner’s account of the
furniture of the room was curiously accurate.

One other thing, even at the risk of an irksome repetition, I must
insist upon, lest I seem to favour the credulous, superstitious view.
Plattner’s absence from the world for nine days is, I think, proved.
But that does not prove his story. It is quite conceivable that even
outside space hallucinations may be possible. That, at least, the
reader must bear distinctly in mind.




THE CRYSTAL EGG


There was, until a year ago, a little and very grimy-looking shop near
Seven Dials, over which, in weatherworn yellow lettering, the name
of ‘C. Cave, Naturalist and Dealer in Antiquities,’ was inscribed.
The contents of its window were curiously variegated. They comprised
some elephant tusks and an imperfect set of chessmen, beads and
weapons, a box of eyes, two skulls of tigers and one human, several
moth-eaten stuffed monkeys (one holding a lamp), an old-fashioned
cabinet, a fly-blown ostrich egg or so, some fishing-tackle, and an
extraordinarily dirty, empty glass fish-tank. There was also, at the
moment the story begins, a mass of crystal, worked into the shape of an
egg and brilliantly polished. And at that two people who stood outside
the window were looking, one of them a tall, thin clergyman, the other
a black-bearded young man of dusky complexion and unobtrusive costume.
The dusky young man spoke with eager gesticulation, and seemed anxious
for his companion to purchase the article.

While they were there, Mr Cave came into his shop, his beard still
wagging with the bread and butter of his tea. When he saw these men and
the object of their regard, his countenance fell. He glanced guiltily
over his shoulder, and softly shut the door. He was a little old man,
with pale face and peculiar watery blue eyes; his hair was a dirty
gray, and he wore a shabby blue frock-coat, an ancient silk hat, and
carpet slippers very much down at heel. He remained watching the two
men as they talked. The clergyman went deep into his trouser pocket,
examined a handful of money, and showed his teeth in an agreeable
smile. Mr Cave seemed still more depressed when they came into the shop.

The clergyman, without any ceremony, asked the price of the crystal
egg. Mr Cave glanced nervously towards the door leading into the
parlour, and said five pounds. The clergyman protested that the price
was high, to his companion as well as to Mr Cave--it was, indeed,
very much more than Mr Cave had intended to ask when he had stocked
the article--and an attempt at bargaining ensued. Mr Cave stepped
to the shop door, and held it open. ‘Five pounds is my price,’ he
said, as though he wished to save himself the trouble of unprofitable
discussion. As he did so, the upper portion of a woman’s face appeared
above the blind in the glass upper panel of the door leading into the
parlour, and stared curiously at the two customers. ‘Five pounds is my
price,’ said Mr Cave, with a quiver in his voice.

The swarthy young man had so far remained a spectator, watching Cave
keenly. Now he spoke. ‘Give him five pounds,’ he said. The clergyman
glanced at him to see if he were in earnest, and when he looked at
Mr Cave again, he saw that the latter’s face was white. ‘It’s a lot
of money,’ said the clergyman, and, diving into his pocket, began
counting his resources. He had little more than thirty shillings, and
he appealed to his companion, with whom he seemed to be on terms of
considerable intimacy. This gave Mr Cave an opportunity of collecting
his thoughts, and he began to explain in an agitated manner that the
crystal was not, as a matter of fact, entirely free for sale. His
two customers were naturally surprised at this, and inquired why he
had not thought of that before he began to bargain. Mr Cave became
confused, but he stuck to his story, that the crystal was not in the
market that afternoon, that a probable purchaser of it had already
appeared. The two, treating this as an attempt to raise the price still
further, made as if they would leave the shop. But at this point the
parlour door opened, and the owner of the dark fringe and the little
eyes appeared.

She was a coarse-featured, corpulent woman, younger and very much
larger than Mr Cave; she walked heavily, and her face was flushed.
‘That crystal _is_ for sale,’ she said. ‘And five pounds is a good
enough price for it. I can’t think what you’re about, Cave, not to take
the gentleman’s offer!’

Mr Cave, greatly perturbed by the irruption, looked angrily at her over
the rims of his spectacles, and, without excessive assurance, asserted
his right to manage his business in his own way. An altercation began.
The two customers watched the scene with interest and some amusement,
occasionally assisting Mrs Cave with suggestions. Mr Cave, hard driven,
persisted in a confused and impossible story of an inquiry for the
crystal that morning, and his agitation became painful. But he stuck to
his point with extraordinary persistence. It was the young Oriental who
ended this curious controversy. He proposed that they should call again
in the course of two days--so as to give the alleged inquirer a fair
chance. ‘And then we must insist,’ said the clergyman. ‘Five pounds.’
Mrs Cave took it on herself to apologise for her husband, explaining
that he was sometimes ‘a little odd,’ and as the two customers left,
the couple prepared for a free discussion of the incident in all its
bearings.

Mrs Cave talked to her husband with singular directness. The poor
little man, quivering with emotion, muddled himself between his
stories, maintaining on the one hand that he had another customer in
view, and on the other asserting that the crystal was honestly worth
ten guineas. ‘Why did you ask five pounds?’ said his wife. ‘_Do_ let me
manage my business my own way!’ said Mr Cave.

Mr Cave had living with him a stepdaughter and a stepson, and at
supper that night the transaction was re-discussed. None of them had a
high opinion of Mr Cave’s business methods, and this action seemed a
culminating folly.

‘It’s my opinion he’s refused that crystal before,’ said the stepson, a
loose-limbed lout of eighteen.

‘But _Five Pounds_!’ said the stepdaughter, an argumentative young
woman of six-and-twenty.

Mr Cave’s answers were wretched; he could only mumble weak assertions
that he knew his own business best. They drove him from his half-eaten
supper into the shop, to close it for the night, his ears aflame and
tears of vexation behind his spectacles. Why had he left the crystal in
the window so long? The folly of it! That was the trouble closest in
his mind. For a time he could see no way of evading sale.

After supper his stepdaughter and stepson smartened themselves up and
went out and his wife retired upstairs to reflect upon the business
aspects of the crystal, over a little sugar and lemon and so forth in
hot water. Mr Cave went into the shop, and stayed there until late,
ostensibly to make ornamental rockeries for gold-fish cases, but really
for a private purpose that will be better explained later. The next
day Mrs Cave found that the crystal had been removed from the window,
and was lying behind some second-hand books on angling. She replaced
it in a conspicuous position. But she did not argue further about it,
as a nervous headache disinclined her from debate. Mr Cave was always
disinclined. The day passed disagreeably. Mr Cave was, if anything,
more absent-minded than usual, and uncommonly irritable withal. In the
afternoon, when his wife was taking her customary sleep, he removed the
crystal from the window again.

The next day Mr Cave had to deliver a consignment of dog-fish at one
of the hospital schools, where they were needed for dissection. In his
absence Mrs Cave’s mind reverted to the topic of the crystal, and the
methods of expenditure suitable to a windfall of five pounds. She had
already devised some very agreeable expedients, among others a dress
of green silk for herself and a trip to Richmond, when a jangling of
the front door bell summoned her into the shop. The customer was an
examination coach who came to complain of the non-delivery of certain
frogs asked for the previous day. Mrs Cave did not approve of this
particular branch of Mr Cave’s business, and the gentleman, who had
called in a somewhat aggressive mood, retired after a brief exchange of
words--entirely civil, so far as he was concerned. Mrs Cave’s eye then
naturally turned to the window; for the sight of the crystal was an
assurance of the five pounds and of her dreams. What was her surprise
to find it gone!

She went to the place behind the locker on the counter where she had
discovered it the day before. It was not there; and she immediately
began an eager search about the shop.

When Mr Cave returned from his business with the dogfish, about a
quarter to two in the afternoon, he found the shop in some confusion,
and his wife, extremely exasperated and on her knees behind the
counter, routing among his taxidermic material. Her face came up hot
and angry over the counter, as the jangling bell announced his return,
and she forthwith accused him of ‘hiding it.’

‘Hid _what_?’ asked Mr Cave.

‘The crystal!’

At that Mr Cave, apparently much surprised, rushed to the window.
‘Isn’t it here?’ he said. ‘Great Heavens! what has become of it?’

Just then Mr Cave’s stepson re-entered the shop from the inner room--he
had come home a minute or so before Mr Cave--and he was blaspheming
freely. He was apprenticed to a second-hand furniture dealer down the
road, but he had his meals at home, and he was naturally annoyed to
find no dinner ready.

But when he heard of the loss of the crystal, he forgot his meal, and
his anger was diverted from his mother to his stepfather. Their first
idea, of course, was that he had hidden it. But Mr Cave stoutly denied
all knowledge of its fate, freely offering his bedabbled affidavit
in the matter--and at last was worked up to the point of accusing,
first, his wife and then his stepson of having taken it with a view
to a private sale. So began an exceedingly acrimonious and emotional
discussion, which ended for Mrs Cave in a peculiar nervous condition
midway between hysterics and amuck, and caused the stepson to be half
an hour late at the furniture establishment in the afternoon. Mr Cave
took refuge from his wife’s emotions in the shop.

In the evening the matter was resumed, with less passion and in a
judicial spirit, under the presidency of the stepdaughter. The supper
passed unhappily and culminated in a painful scene. Mr Cave gave way
at last to extreme exasperation, and went out banging the front door
violently. The rest of the family, having discussed him with the
freedom his absence warranted, hunted the house from garret to cellar,
hoping to light upon the crystal.

The next day the two customers called again. They were received by
Mrs Cave almost in tears. It transpired that no one _could_ imagine
all that she had stood from Cave at various times in her married
pilgrimage.... She also gave a garbled account of the disappearance.
The clergyman and the Oriental laughed silently at one another, and
said it was very extraordinary. As Mrs Cave seemed disposed to give
them the complete history of her life they made to leave the shop.
Thereupon Mrs Cave, still clinging to hope, asked for the clergyman’s
address, so that, if she could get anything out of Cave, she might
communicate it. The address was duly given, but apparently was
afterwards mislaid. Mrs Cave can remember nothing about it.

In the evening of that day the Caves seem to have exhausted their
emotions, and Mr Cave, who had been out in the afternoon, supped in
a gloomy isolation that contrasted pleasantly with the impassioned
controversy of the previous days. For some time matters were very
badly strained in the Cave household, but neither crystal nor customer
reappeared.

Now, without mincing the matter, we must admit that Mr Cave was a
liar. He knew perfectly well where the crystal was. It was in the
rooms of Mr Jacoby Wace, Assistant Demonstrator at St Catherine’s
Hospital, Westbourne Street. It stood on the sideboard partially
covered by a black velvet cloth, and beside a decanter of American
whisky. It is from Mr Wace, indeed, that the particulars upon which
this narrative is based were derived. Cave had taken off the thing to
the hospital hidden in the dog-fish sack, and there had pressed the
young investigator to keep it for him. Mr Wace was a little dubious
at first. His relationship to Cave was peculiar. He had a taste for
singular characters, and he had more than once invited the old man to
smoke and drink in his rooms, and to unfold his rather amusing views of
life in general and of his wife in particular. Mr Wace had encountered
Mrs Cave, too, on occasions when Mr Cave was not at home to attend to
him. He knew the constant interference to which Cave was subjected, and
having weighed the story judicially, he decided to give the crystal
a refuge. Mr Cave promised to explain the reasons for his remarkable
affection for the crystal more fully on a later occasion, but he spoke
distinctly of seeing visions therein. He called on Mr Wace the same
evening.

He told a complicated story. The crystal he said had come into his
possession with other oddments at the forced sale of another curiosity
dealer’s effects, and not knowing what its value might be, he had
ticketed it at ten shillings. It had hung upon his hands at that price
for some months, and he was thinking of ‘reducing the figure,’ when he
made a singular discovery.

At that time his health was very bad--and it must be borne in mind
that, throughout all this experience his physical condition was
one of ebb--and he was in considerable distress by reason of the
negligence, the positive ill-treatment even, he received from his wife
and stepchildren. His wife was vain, extravagant, unfeeling, and had
a growing taste for private drinking; his stepdaughter was mean and
over-reaching; and his stepson had conceived a violent dislike for him,
and lost no chance of showing it. The requirements of his business
pressed heavily upon him, and Mr Wace does not think that he was
altogether free from occasional intemperance. He had begun life in a
comfortable position, he was a man of fair education, and he suffered,
for weeks at a stretch, from melancholia and insomnia. Afraid to
disturb his family, he would slip quietly from his wife’s side, when
his thoughts became intolerable, and wander about the house. And about
three o’clock one morning, late in August, chance directed him into the
shop.

The dirty little place was impenetrably black except in one spot, where
he perceived an unusual glow of light. Approaching this, he discovered
it to be the crystal egg, which was standing on the corner of the
counter towards the window. A thin ray smote through a crack in the
shutters, impinged upon the object, and seemed as it were to fill its
entire interior.

It occurred to Mr Cave that this was not in accordance with the laws of
optics as he had known them in his younger days. He could understand
the rays being refracted by the crystal and coming to a focus in its
interior, but this diffusion jarred with his physical conceptions.
He approached the crystal nearly, peering into it and round it, with
a transient revival of the scientific curiosity that in his youth
had determined his choice of a calling. He was surprised to find the
light not steady, but writhing within the substance of the egg, as
though that object was a hollow sphere of some luminous vapour. In
moving about to get different points of view, he suddenly found that
he had come between it and the ray, and that the crystal none the less
remained luminous. Greatly astonished, he lifted it out of the light
ray and carried it to the darkest part of the shop. It remained bright
for some four or five minutes, when it slowly faded and went out. He
placed it in the thin streak of daylight, and its luminousness was
almost immediately restored.

So far, at least, Mr Wace was able to verify the remarkable story
of Mr Cave. He has himself repeatedly held this crystal in a ray of
light (which had to be of a less diameter than one millimetre). And
in a perfect darkness, such as could be produced by velvet wrapping,
the crystal did undoubtedly appear very faintly phosphorescent. It
would seem, however, that the luminousness was of some exceptional
sort, and not equally visible to all eyes; for Mr Harbinger--whose
name will be familiar to the scientific reader in connection with the
Pasteur Institute--was quite unable to see any light whatever. And
Mr Wace’s own capacity for its appreciation was out of comparison
inferior to that of Mr Cave’s. Even with Mr Cave the power varied
very considerably: his vision was most vivid during states of extreme
weakness and fatigue.

Now, from the outset, this light in the crystal exercised a curious
fascination upon Mr Cave. And it says more for his loneliness of soul
than a volume of pathetic writing could do, that he told no human
being of his curious observations. He seems to have been living in
such an atmosphere of petty spite that to admit the existence of a
pleasure would have been to risk the loss of it. He found that as the
dawn advanced, and the amount of diffused light increased, the crystal
became to all appearance non-luminous. And for some time he was unable
to see anything in it, except at night-time, in dark corners of the
shop.

But the use of an old velvet cloth, which he used as a background for
a collection of minerals, occurred to him, and by doubling this, and
putting it over his head and hands, he was able to get a sight of the
luminous movement within the crystal even in the day-time. He was
very cautious lest he should be thus discovered by his wife, and he
practised this occupation only in the afternoons, while she was asleep
upstairs, and then circumspectly in a hollow under the counter. And one
day, turning the crystal about in his hands, he saw something. It came
and went like a flash, but it gave him the impression that the object
had for a moment opened to him the view of a wide and spacious and
strange country; and turning it about, he did, just as the light faded,
see the same vision again.

Now it would be tedious and unnecessary to state all the phases of Mr
Cave’s discovery from this point. Suffice that the effect was this: the
crystal, being peered into at an angle of about 137 degrees from the
direction of the illuminating ray, gave a clear and consistent picture
of a wide and peculiar countryside. It was not dream-like at all: it
produced a definite impression of reality, and the better the light
the more real and solid it seemed. It was a moving picture: that is to
say, certain objects moved in it, but slowly in an orderly manner like
real things, and, according as the direction of the lighting and vision
changed, the picture changed also. It must, indeed, have been like
looking through an oval glass at a view, and turning the glass about to
get at different aspects.

Mr Cave’s statements, Mr Wace assures me, were extremely
circumstantial, and entirely free from any of that emotional quality
that taints hallucinatory impressions. But it must be remembered that
all the efforts of Mr Wace to see any similar clarity in the faint
opalescence of the crystal were wholly unsuccessful, try as he would.
The difference in intensity of the impressions received by the two men
was very great, and it is quite conceivable that what was a view to Mr
Cave was a mere blurred nebulosity to Mr Wace.

The view, as Mr Cave described it, was invariably of an extensive
plain, and he seemed always to be looking at it from a considerable
height, as if from a tower or a mast. To the east and to the west the
plain was bounded at a remote distance by vast reddish cliffs, which
reminded him of those he had seen in some picture; but what the picture
was Mr Wace was unable to ascertain. These cliffs passed north and
south--he could tell the points of the compass by the stars that were
visible of a night--receding in an almost illimitable perspective and
fading into the mists of the distance before they met. He was nearer
the eastern set of cliffs; on the occasion of his first vision the
sun was rising over them, and black against the sunlight and pale
against their shadow appeared a multitude of soaring forms that Mr
Cave regarded as birds. A vast range of buildings spread below him; he
seemed to be looking down upon them; and as they approached the blurred
and refracted edge of the picture they became indistinct. There were
also trees curious in shape, and in colouring a deep mossy green and an
exquisite gray, beside a wide and shining canal. And something great
and brilliantly coloured flew across the picture. But the first time Mr
Cave saw these pictures he saw only in flashes, his hands shook, his
head moved, the vision came and went, and grew foggy and indistinct.
And at first he had the greatest difficulty in finding the picture
again once the direction of it was lost.

His next clear vision, which came about a week after the first, the
interval having yielded nothing but tantalising glimpses and some
useful experience, showed him the view down the length of the valley.
The view was different, but he had a curious persuasion, which his
subsequent observations abundantly confirmed, that he was regarding
the strange world from exactly the same spot, although he was looking
in a different direction. The long façade of the great building, whose
roof he had looked down upon before, was now receding in perspective.
He recognised the roof. In the front of the façade was a terrace of
massive proportions and extraordinary length, and down the middle of
the terrace, at certain intervals, stood huge but very graceful masts,
bearing small shiny objects which reflected the setting sun. The import
of these small objects did not occur to Mr Cave until some time after,
as he was describing the scene to Mr Wace. The terrace overhung a
thicket of the most luxuriant and graceful vegetation, and beyond this
was a wide grassy lawn on which certain broad creatures, in form like
beetles but enormously larger, reposed. Beyond this again was a richly
decorated causeway of pinkish stone; and beyond that, and lined with
dense red weeds, and passing up the valley exactly parallel with the
distant cliffs, was a broad and mirror-like expanse of water. The air
seemed full of squadrons of great birds, manœuvring in stately curves;
and across the river was a multitude of splendid buildings, richly
coloured and glittering with metallic tracery and facets, among a
forest of moss-like and lichenous trees. And suddenly something flapped
repeatedly across the vision, like the fluttering of a jewelled fan or
the beating of a wing, and a face, or rather the upper part of a face
with very large eyes, came as it were close to his own and as if on the
other side of the crystal. Mr Cave was so startled and so impressed
by the absolute reality of these eyes that he drew his head back from
the crystal to look behind it. He had become so absorbed in watching
that he was quite surprised to find himself in the cool darkness of his
little shop, with its familiar odour of methyl, mustiness, and decay.
And as he blinked about him, the glowing crystal faded and went out.

Such were the first general impressions of Mr Cave. The story is
curiously direct and circumstantial. From the outset, when the valley
first flashed momentarily on his senses, his imagination was strangely
affected, and as he began to appreciate the details of the scene he
saw, his wonder rose to the point of a passion. He went about his
business listless and distraught, thinking only of the time when he
should be able to return to his watching. And then a few weeks after
his first sight of the valley came the two customers, the stress and
excitement of their offer, and the narrow escape of the crystal from
sale, as I have already told.

Now, while the thing was Mr Cave’s secret, it remained a mere wonder,
a thing to creep to covertly and peep at, as a child might peep upon a
forbidden garden. But Mr Wace has, for a young scientific investigator,
a particularly lucid and consecutive habit of mind. Directly the
crystal and its story came to him, and he had satisfied himself, by
seeing the phosphorescence with his own eyes, that there really was a
certain evidence for Mr Cave’s statements, he proceeded to develop the
matter systematically. Mr Cave was only too eager to come and feast his
eyes on this wonderland he saw, and he came every night from half-past
eight until half-past ten, and sometimes, in Mr Wace’s absence, during
the day. On Sunday afternoons, also, he came. From the outset Mr Wace
made copious notes, and it was due to his scientific method that the
relation between the direction from which the initiating ray entered
the crystal and the orientation of the picture were proved. And, by
covering the crystal in a box perforated only with a small aperture to
admit the exciting ray, and by substituting black holland for his buff
blinds, he greatly improved the conditions of the observations; so that
in a little while they were able to survey the valley in any direction
they desired.

So having cleared the way, we may give a brief account of this
visionary world within the crystal. The things were in all cases seen
by Mr Cave, and the method of working was invariably for him to watch
the crystal and report what he saw, while Mr Wace (who as a science
student had learnt the trick of writing in the dark) wrote a brief
note of his report. When the crystal faded, it was put into its box in
the proper position and the electric light turned on. Mr Wace asked
questions, and suggested observations to clear up difficult points.
Nothing, indeed, could have been less visionary and more matter-of-fact.

The attention of Mr Cave had been speedily directed to the bird-like
creatures he had seen so abundantly present in each of his earlier
visions. His first impression was soon corrected, and he considered
for a time that they might represent a diurnal species of bat. Then
he thought, grotesquely enough, that they might be cherubs. Their
heads were round and curiously human, and it was the eyes of one
of them that had so startled him on his second observation. They
had broad, silvery wings, not feathered, but glistening almost as
brilliantly as new-killed fish and with the same subtle play of colour,
and these wings were not built on the plan of bird-wing or bat, Mr
Wace learned, but supported by curved ribs radiating from the body.
(A sort of butterfly wing with curved ribs seems best to express
their appearance.) The body was small, but fitted with two bunches
of prehensile organs, like long tentacles, immediately under the
mouth. Incredible as it appeared to Mr Wace, the persuasion at last
became irresistible that it was these creatures which owned the great
quasi-human buildings and the magnificent garden that made the broad
valley so splendid. And Mr Cave perceived that the buildings, with
other peculiarities, had no doors, but that the great circular windows,
which opened freely, gave the creatures egress and entrance. They would
alight upon their tentacles, fold their wings to a smallness almost
rod-like, and hop into the interior. But among them was a multitude of
smaller-winged creatures, like great dragon-flies and moths and flying
beetles, and across the greensward brilliantly-coloured gigantic
ground-beetles crawled lazily to and fro. Moreover, on the causeways
and terraces, large-headed creatures similar to the greater winged
flies, but wingless, were visible, hopping busily upon their hand-like
tangle of tentacles.

Allusion has already been made to the glittering objects upon masts
that stood upon the terrace of the nearer building. It dawned upon
Mr Cave, after regarding one of these masts very fixedly on one
particularly vivid day that the glittering object there was a crystal
exactly like that into which he peered. And a still more careful
scrutiny convinced him that each one in a vista of nearly twenty
carried a similar object.

Occasionally one of the large flying creatures would flutter up to
one, and folding its wings and coiling a number of its tentacles about
the mast, would regard the crystal fixedly for a space--sometimes for
as long as fifteen minutes. And a series of observations, made at the
suggestion of Mr Wace, convinced both watchers that, so far as this
visionary world was concerned, the crystal into which they peered
actually stood at the summit of the endmost mast on the terrace,
and that on one occasion at least one of these inhabitants of this
other world had looked into Mr Cave’s face while he was making these
observations.

So much for the essential facts of this very singular story. Unless
we dismiss it all as the ingenious fabrication of Mr Wace, we have to
believe one of two things: either that Mr Cave’s crystal was in two
worlds at once, and that while it was carried about in one, it remained
stationary in the other, which seems altogether absurd; or else that it
had some peculiar relation of sympathy with another and exactly similar
crystal in this other world, so that what was seen in the interior of
the one in this world was, under suitable conditions, visible to an
observer in the corresponding crystal in the other world; and _vice
versa_. At present, indeed, we do not know of any way in which two
crystals could so come _en rapport_, but nowadays we know enough to
understand that the thing is not altogether impossible. This view of
the crystals as _en rapport_ was the supposition that occurred to Mr
Wace, and to me at least it seems extremely plausible....

And where was this other world? On this, also, the alert intelligence
of Mr Wace speedily threw light. After sunset, the sky darkened
rapidly--there was a very brief twilight interval indeed--and the stars
shone out. They were recognisably the same as those we see, arranged
in the same constellations. Mr Cave recognised the Bear, the Pleiades,
Aldebaran, and Sirius; so that the other world must be somewhere in the
solar system, and, at the utmost, only a few hundreds of millions of
miles from our own. Following up this clue, Mr Wace learned that the
midnight sky was a darker blue even than our midwinter sky, and that
the sun seemed a little smaller. _And there were two small moons!_
‘like our moon but smaller, and quite differently marked,’ one of which
moved so rapidly that its motion was clearly visible, as one regarded
it. These moons were never high in the sky, but vanished as they rose:
that is, every time they revolved they were eclipsed because they were
so near their primary planet. And all this answers quite completely,
although Mr Cave did not know it, to what must be the condition of
things on Mars.

Indeed, it seems an exceedingly plausible conclusion that peering
into this crystal Mr Cave did actually see the planet Mars and its
inhabitants. And if that be the case, then the evening star that shone
so brilliantly in the sky of that distant vision was neither more nor
less than our own familiar earth.

For a time the Martians--if they were Martians--do not seem to
have known of Mr Cave’s inspection. Once or twice one would come to
peer, and go away very shortly to some other mast, as though the
vision was unsatisfactory. During this time Mr Cave was able to watch
the proceedings of these winged people without being disturbed by
their attentions, and although his report is necessarily vague and
fragmentary, it is nevertheless very suggestive. Imagine the impression
of humanity a Martian observer would get who, after a difficult process
of preparation and with considerable fatigue to the eyes, was able to
peer at London from the steeple of St Martin’s Church for stretches,
at longest, of four minutes at a time. Mr Cave was unable to ascertain
if the winged Martians were the same as the Martians who hopped about
the causeways and terraces, and if the latter could put on wings at
will. He several times saw certain clumsy bipeds, dimly suggestive of
apes, white and partially translucent, feeding among certain of the
lichenous trees, and once some of these fled before one of the hopping,
round-headed Martians. The latter caught one in its tentacles, and
then the picture faded suddenly and left Mr Cave most tantalisingly in
the dark. On another occasion a vast thing, that Mr Cave thought at
first was some gigantic insect, appeared advancing along the causeway
beside the canal with extraordinary rapidity. As this drew nearer
Mr Cave perceived that it was a mechanism of shining metals and of
extraordinary complexity. And then, when he looked again, it had passed
out of sight.

After a time Mr Wace aspired to attract the attention of the Martians,
and the next time that the strange eyes of one of them appeared close
to the crystal Mr Cave cried out and sprang away, and they immediately
turned on the light and began to gesticulate in a manner suggestive of
signalling. But when at last Mr Cave examined the crystal again the
Martian had departed.

Thus far these observations had progressed in early November, and then
Mr Cave, feeling that the suspicions of his family about the crystal
were allayed, began to take it to and fro with him in order that, as
occasion arose in the daytime or night, he might comfort himself with
what was fast becoming the most real thing in his existence.

In December Mr Wace’s work in connection with a forthcoming examination
became heavy, the sittings were reluctantly suspended for a week, and
for ten or eleven days--he is not quite sure which--he saw nothing of
Cave. He then grew anxious to resume these investigations, and, the
stress of his seasonal labours being abated, he went down to Seven
Dials. At the corner he noticed a shutter before a bird fancier’s
window, and then another at a cobbler’s. Mr Cave’s shop was closed.

He rapped and the door was opened by the stepson in black. He at once
called Mrs Cave, who was, Mr Wace could not but observe, in cheap but
ample widow’s weeds of the most imposing pattern. Without any very
great surprise Mr Wace learnt that Cave was dead and already buried.
She was in tears, and her voice was a little thick. She had just
returned from Highgate. Her mind seemed occupied with her own prospects
and the honourable details of the obsequies, but Mr Wace was at last
able to learn the particulars of Cave’s death. He had been found dead
in his shop in the early morning, the day after his last visit to Mr
Wace, and the crystal had been clasped in his stone-cold hands. His
face was smiling, said Mrs Cave, and the velvet cloth from the minerals
lay on the floor at his feet. He must have been dead five or six hours
when he was found.

This came as a great shock to Wace, and he began to reproach himself
bitterly for having neglected the plain symptoms of the old man’s
ill-health. But his chief thought was of the crystal. He approached
that topic in a gingerly manner, because he knew Mrs Cave’s
peculiarities. He was dumbfounded to learn that it was sold.

Mrs Cave’s first impulse, directly Cave’s body had been taken upstairs,
had been to write to the mad clergyman who had offered five pounds
for the crystal, informing him of its recovery; but after a violent
hunt, in which her daughter joined her, they were convinced of the
loss of his address. As they were without the means required to mourn
and bury Cave in the elaborate style the dignity of an old Seven Dials
inhabitant demands, they had appealed to a friendly fellow-tradesman
in Great Portland Street. He had very kindly taken over a portion of
the stock at a valuation. The valuation was his own, and the crystal
egg was included in one of the lots. Mr Wace, after a few suitable
condolences, a little offhandedly proffered perhaps, hurried at once to
Great Portland Street. But there he learned that the crystal egg had
already been sold to a tall, dark man in gray. And there the material
facts in this curious, and to me at least very suggestive, story come
abruptly to an end. The Great Portland Street dealer did not know who
the tall dark man in gray was, nor had he observed him with sufficient
attention to describe him minutely. He did not even know which way this
person had gone after leaving the shop. For a time Mr Wace remained in
the shop, trying the dealer’s patience with hopeless questions, venting
his own exasperation. And at last, realising abruptly that the whole
thing had passed out of his hands, had vanished like a vision of the
night, he returned to his own rooms, a little astonished to find the
notes he had made still tangible and visible upon his untidy table.

His annoyance and disappointment were naturally very great. He made
a second call (equally ineffectual) upon the Great Portland Street
dealer, and he resorted to advertisements in such periodicals as
were likely to come into the hands of a _bric-a-brac_ collector. He
also wrote letters to _The Daily Chronicle_ and _Nature_, but both
those periodicals, suspecting a hoax, asked him to reconsider his
action before they printed, and he was advised that such a strange
story, unfortunately so bare of supporting evidence, might imperil
his reputation as an investigator. Moreover, the calls of his proper
work were urgent. So that after a month or so, save for an occasional
reminder to certain dealers, he had reluctantly to abandon the quest
for the crystal egg, and from that day to this it remains undiscovered.
Occasionally, however, he tells me, and I can quite believe him, he has
bursts of zeal, in which he abandons his more urgent occupation and
resumes the search.

Whether or not it will remain lost for ever, with the material and
origin of it, are things equally speculative at the present time. If
the present purchaser is a collector, one would have expected the
inquiries of Mr Wace to have reached him through the dealers. He has
been able to discover Mr Cave’s clergyman and ‘Oriental’--no other than
the Rev. James Parker and the young Prince of Bosso-Kuni in Java. I
am obliged to them for certain particulars. The object of the Prince
was simply curiosity--and extravagance. He was so eager to buy because
Cave was so oddly reluctant to sell. It is just as possible that the
buyer in the second instance was simply a casual purchaser, and not
a collector at all, and the crystal egg, for all I know, may at the
present moment be within a mile of me, decorating a drawing-room or
serving as a paper-weight--its remarkable functions all unknown.
Indeed, it is partly with the idea of such a possibility that I have
thrown this narrative into a form that will give it a chance of being
read by the ordinary consumer of fiction.

My own ideas in the matter are practically identical with those of Mr
Wace. I believe the crystal on the mast in Mars and the crystal egg of
Mr Cave’s to be in some physical, but at present quite inexplicable,
way _en rapport_, and we both believe further that the terrestrial
crystal must have been--possibly at some remote date--sent hither from
that planet, in order to give the Martians a near view of our affairs.
Possibly the fellows to the crystals on the other masts are also on our
globe. No theory of hallucination suffices for the facts.




THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES

A PANTOUM IN PROSE


It is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I
think it came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a
sceptic, and did not believe in miraculous powers. And here, since
it is the most convenient place, I must mention that he was a little
man, and had eyes of a hot brown, very erect red hair, a moustache
with ends that he twisted up, and freckles. His name was George
McWhirter Fotheringay--not the sort of name by any means to lead to
any expectation of miracles--and he was clerk at Gomshott’s. He was
greatly addicted to assertive argument. It was while he was asserting
the impossibility of miracles that he had his first intimation of his
extraordinary powers. This particular argument was being held in the
bar of the Long Dragon, and Toddy Beamish was conducting the opposition
by a monotonous but effective ‘So _you_ say,’ that drove Mr Fotheringay
to the very limit of his patience.

There were present, besides these two, a very dusty cyclist, landlord
Cox, and Miss Maybridge, the perfectly respectable and rather portly
barmaid of the Dragon. Miss Maybridge was standing with her back to Mr
Fotheringay, washing glasses; the others were watching him, more or
less amused by the present ineffectiveness of the assertive method.
Goaded by the Torres Vedras tactics of Mr Beamish, Mr Fotheringay
determined to make an unusual rhetorical effort. ‘Looky here, Mr
Beamish,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Let us clearly understand what a
miracle is. It’s something contrariwise to the course of nature,
done by power of will, something what couldn’t happen without being
specially willed.’

‘So _you_ say,’ said Mr Beamish, repulsing him.

Mr Fotheringay appealed to the cyclist, who had hitherto been a silent
auditor, and received his assent--given with a hesitating cough and
a glance at Mr Beamish. The landlord would express no opinion, and
Mr Fotheringay, returning to Mr Beamish, received the unexpected
concession of a qualified assent to his definition of a miracle.

‘For instance,’ said Mr Fotheringay, greatly encouraged. ‘Here would be
a miracle. That lamp, in the natural course of nature, couldn’t burn
like that upsy-down, could it, Beamish?’

‘_You_ say it couldn’t,’ said Beamish.

‘And you?’ said Fotheringay. ‘You don’t mean to say--eh?’

‘No,’ said Beamish reluctantly. ‘No, it couldn’t.’

‘Very well,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Then here comes some one, as it
might be me, along here, and stands as it might be here, and says
to that lamp, as I might do, collecting all my will--Turn upsy-down
without breaking, and go on burning steady, and--Hallo!’

It was enough to make any one say ‘Hallo!’ The impossible, the
incredible, was visible to them all. The lamp hung inverted in the
air, burning quietly with its flame pointing down. It was as solid, as
indisputable as ever a lamp was, the prosaic common lamp of the Long
Dragon bar.

Mr Fotheringay stood with an extended forefinger and the knitted brows
of one anticipating a catastrophic smash. The cyclist, who was sitting
next the lamp, ducked and jumped across the bar. Everybody jumped,
more or less. Miss Maybridge turned and screamed. For nearly three
seconds the lamp remained still. A faint cry of mental distress came
from Mr Fotheringay. ‘I can’t keep it up,’ he said, ‘any longer.’ He
staggered back, and the inverted lamp suddenly flared, fell against the
corner of the bar, bounced aside, smashed upon the floor, and went out.

It was lucky it had a metal receiver, or the whole place would have
been in a blaze. Mr Cox was the first to speak, and his remark,
shorn of needless excrescences, was to the effect that Fotheringay
was a fool. Fotheringay was beyond disputing even so fundamental a
proposition as that! He was astonished beyond measure at the thing that
had occurred. The subsequent conversation threw absolutely no light on
the matter so far as Fotheringay was concerned; the general opinion
not only followed Mr Cox very closely but very vehemently. Every one
accused Fotheringay of a silly trick, and presented him to himself as a
foolish destroyer of comfort and security. His mind was in a tornado of
perplexity, he was himself inclined to agree with them, and he made a
remarkably ineffectual opposition to the proposal of his departure.

He went home flushed and heated, coat-collar crumpled, eyes smarting,
and ears red. He watched each of the ten street lamps nervously as
he passed it. It was only when he found himself alone in his little
bedroom in Church Row that he was able to grapple seriously with his
memories of the occurrence, and ask, ‘What on earth happened?’

He had removed his coat and boots, and was sitting on the bed with
his hands in his pockets repeating the text of his defence for the
seventeenth time, ‘_I_ didn’t want the confounded thing to upset,’
when it occurred to him that at the precise moment he had said the
commanding words he had inadvertently willed the thing he said, and
that when he had seen the lamp in the air he had felt that it depended
on him to maintain it there without being clear how this was to be
done. He had not a particularly complex mind, or he might have stuck
for a time at that ‘inadvertently willed,’ embracing, as it does, the
abstrusest problems of voluntary action; but as it was, the idea came
to him with a quite acceptable haziness. And from that, following, as I
must admit, no clear logical path, he came to the test of experiment.

He pointed resolutely to his candle and collected his mind, though he
felt he did a foolish thing. ‘Be raised up,’ he said. But in a second
that feeling vanished. The candle was raised, hung in the air one
giddy moment, and as Mr Fotheringay gasped, fell with a smash on his
toilet-table, leaving him in darkness save for the expiring glow of its
wick.

For a time Mr Fotheringay sat in the darkness, perfectly still. ‘It did
happen, after all,’ he said. ‘And ’ow _I’m_ to explain it I _don’t_
know.’ He sighed heavily, and began feeling in his pockets for a match.
He could find none, and he rose and groped about the toilet-table. ‘I
wish I had a match,’ he said. He resorted to his coat, and there was
none there, and then it dawned upon him that miracles were possible
even with matches. He extended a hand and scowled at it in the dark.
‘Let there be a match in that hand,’ he said. He felt some light object
fall across his palm and his fingers closed upon a match.

After several ineffectual attempts to light this, he discovered it was
a safety match. He threw it down, and then it occurred to him that he
might have willed it lit. He did, and perceived it burning in the midst
of his toilet-table mat. He caught it up hastily, and it went out. His
perception of possibilities enlarged, and he felt for and replaced the
candle in its candlestick. ‘Here! _you_ be lit,’ said Mr Fotheringay,
and forthwith the candle was flaring, and he saw a little black hole in
the toilet-cover, with a wisp of smoke rising from it. For a time he
stared from this to the little flame and back, and then looked up and
met his own gaze in the looking-glass. By this help he communed with
himself in silence for a time.

‘How about miracles now?’ said Mr Fotheringay at last, addressing his
reflection.

The subsequent meditations of Mr Fotheringay were of a severe but
confused description. So far, he could see it was a case of pure
willing with him. The nature of his experiences so far disinclined
him for any further experiments, at least until he had reconsidered
them. But he lifted a sheet of paper, and turned a glass of water
pink and then green, and he created a snail, which he miraculously
annihilated, and got himself a miraculous new tooth-brush. Somewhere
in the small hours he had reached the fact that his will-power must be
of a particularly rare and pungent quality, a fact which he had indeed
had inklings before, but no certain assurance. The scare and perplexity
of his first discovery was now qualified by pride in this evidence of
singularity and by vague intimations of advantage. He became aware
that the church clock was striking one, and as it did not occur to him
that his daily duties at Gomshott’s might be miraculously dispensed
with, he resumed undressing, in order to get to bed without further
delay. As he struggled to get his shirt over his head, he was struck
with a brilliant idea. ‘Let me be in bed,’ he said, and found himself
so. ‘Undressed,’ he stipulated; and, finding the sheets cold, added
hastily, ‘and in my nightshirt--no, in a nice soft woollen nightshirt.
Ah!’ he said with immense enjoyment. ‘And now let me be comfortably
asleep....’

He awoke at his usual hour and was pensive all through breakfast-time,
wondering whether his overnight experience might not be a particularly
vivid dream. At length his mind turned again to cautious experiments.
For instance, he had three eggs for breakfast; two his landlady had
supplied, good, but shoppy, and one was a delicious fresh goose egg,
laid, cooked, and served by his extraordinary will. He hurried off to
Gomshott’s in a state of profound but carefully concealed excitement,
and only remembered the shell of the third egg when his landlady
spoke of it that night. All day he could do no work because of this
astonishing new self-knowledge, but this caused him no inconvenience,
because he made up for it miraculously in his last ten minutes.

As the day wore on his state of mind passed from wonder to elation,
albeit the circumstances of his dismissal from the Long Dragon were
still disagreeable to recall, and a garbled account of the matter that
had reached his colleagues led to some badinage. It was evident he must
be careful how he lifted frangible articles, but in other ways his gift
promised more and more as he turned it over in his mind. He intended
among other things to increase his personal property by unostentatious
acts of creation. He called into existence a pair of very splendid
diamond studs, and hastily annihilated them again as young Gomshott
came across the counting-house to his desk. He was afraid young
Gomshott might wonder how he had come by them. He saw quite clearly
the gift required caution and watchfulness in its exercise, but so far
as he could judge the difficulties attending its mastery would be no
greater than those he had already faced in the study of cycling. It was
that analogy, perhaps, quite as much as the feeling that he would be
unwelcome in the Long Dragon, that drove him out after supper into the
lane beyond the gasworks, to rehearse a few miracles in private.

There was possibly a certain want of originality in his attempts, for,
apart from his will-power, Mr Fotheringay was not a very exceptional
man. The miracle of Moses’ rod came to his mind, but the night was
dark and unfavourable to the proper control of large miraculous
snakes. Then he recollected the story of ‘Tannhäuser’ that he had
read on the back of the Philharmonic programme. That seemed to him
singularly attractive and harmless. He stuck his walking-stick--a very
nice Poona-Penang lawyer--into the turf that edged the footpath, and
commanded the dry wood to blossom. The air was immediately full of the
scent of roses, and by means of a match he saw for himself that this
beautiful miracle was indeed accomplished. His satisfaction was ended
by advancing footsteps. Afraid of a premature discovery of his powers,
he addressed the blossoming stick hastily: ‘Go back.’ What he meant was
‘Change back’; but of course he was confused. The stick receded at a
considerable velocity, and incontinently came a cry of anger and a bad
word from the approaching person. ‘Who are you throwing brambles at,
you fool?’ cried a voice. ‘That got me on the shin.’

‘I’m sorry, old chap,’ said Mr Fotheringay, and then, realising the
awkward nature of the explanation, caught nervously at his moustache.
He saw Winch, one of the three Immering constables, advancing.

‘What d’yer mean by it?’ asked the constable. ‘Hallo! it’s you, is it?
The gent that broke the lamp at the Long Dragon!’

‘I don’t mean anything by it,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘What d’yer do it for then?’

‘Oh, bother!’ said Mr Fotheringay.

‘Bother indeed! D’yer know that stick hurt? What d’yer do it for, eh?’

For the moment Mr Fotheringay could not think what he had done it for.
His silence seemed to irritate Mr Winch. ‘You’ve been assaulting the
police, young man, this time. That’s what _you_ done.’

‘Look here, Mr Winch,’ said Mr Fotheringay, annoyed and confused. ‘I’m
sorry, very. The fact is----’

‘Well?’

He could think of no way but the truth. ‘I was working a miracle.’ He
tried to speak in an offhand way, but try as he would he couldn’t.

‘Working a----! ’Ere, don’t you talk rot. Working a miracle, indeed!
Miracle! Well, that’s downright funny! Why, you’s the chap that
don’t believe in miracles.... Fact is, this is another of your silly
conjuring tricks--that’s what this is. Now, I tell you----’

But Mr Fotheringay never heard what Mr Winch was going to tell him. He
realised he had given himself away, flung his valuable secret to all
the winds of heaven. A violent gust of irritation swept him to action.
He turned on the constable swiftly and fiercely. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘I’ve
had enough of this, I have! I’ll show you a silly conjuring trick, I
will! Go to Hades! Go, now!’

He was alone!

Mr Fotheringay performed no more miracles that night, nor did he
trouble to see what had become of his flowering stick. He returned
to the town, scared and very quiet, and went to his bedroom. ‘Lord!’
he said, ‘it’s a powerful gift--an extremely powerful gift. I didn’t
hardly mean as much as that. Not really.... I wonder what Hades is
like!’

He sat on the bed taking off his boots. Struck by a happy thought
he transferred the constable to San Francisco, and without any more
interference with normal causation went soberly to bed. In the night he
dreamt of the anger of Winch.

The next day Mr Fotheringay heard two interesting items of news. Some
one had planted a most beautiful climbing rose against the elder Mr
Gomshott’s private house in the Lullaborough Road, and the river as far
as Rawling’s Mill was to be dragged for Constable Winch.

Mr Fotheringay was abstracted and thoughtful all that day, and
performed no miracles except certain provisions for Winch, and the
miracle of completing his day’s work with punctual perfection in spite
of all the bee-swarm of thoughts that hummed through his mind. And the
extraordinary abstraction and meekness of his manner was remarked by
several people, and made a matter for jesting. For the most part he was
thinking of Winch.

On Sunday evening he went to chapel, and, oddly enough, Mr Maydig, who
took a certain interest in occult matters, preached about ‘things that
are not lawful.’ Mr Fotheringay was not a regular chapel-goer, but
the system of assertive scepticism, to which I have already alluded,
was now very much shaken. The tenor of the sermon threw an entirely
new light on these novel gifts, and he suddenly decided to consult Mr
Maydig immediately after the service. So soon as that was determined he
found himself wondering why he had not done so before.

Mr Maydig, a lean, excitable man with quite remarkably long wrists and
neck, was gratified at a request for a private conversation from a
young man whose carelessness in religious matters was a subject for
general remark in the town. After a few necessary delays, he conducted
him to the study of the manse, which was contiguous to the chapel,
seated him comfortably, and, standing in front of a cheerful fire--his
legs threw a Rhodian arch of shadow on the opposite wall--requested Mr
Fotheringay to state his business.

At first Mr Fotheringay was a little abashed, and found some difficulty
in opening the matter. ‘You will scarcely believe me, Mr Maydig, I am
afraid’--and so forth for some time. He tried a question at last, and
asked Mr Maydig his opinion of miracles.

Mr Maydig was still saying ‘Well’ in an extremely judicial tone, when
Mr Fotheringay interrupted again: ‘You don’t believe, I suppose, that
some common sort of person--like myself, for instance--as it might be
sitting here now, might have some sort of twist inside him that made
him able to do things by his will.’

‘It’s possible,’ said Mr Maydig. ‘Something of the sort, perhaps, is
possible.’

‘If I might make free with something here, I think I might show you by
a sort of experiment,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Now, take that tobacco-jar
on the table, for instance. What I want to know is whether what I am
going to do with it is a miracle or not. Just half a minute, Mr Maydig,
please.’

He knitted his brows, pointed to the tobacco-jar and said: ‘Be a bowl
of vi’lets.’

The tobacco-jar did as it was ordered.

Mr Maydig started violently at the change, and stood looking from
the thaumaturgist to the bowl of flowers. He said nothing. Presently
he ventured to lean over the table and smell the violets; they were
fresh-picked and very fine ones. Then he stared at Mr Fotheringay
again.

‘How did you do that?’ he asked.

Mr Fotheringay pulled his moustache. ‘Just told it--and there you are.
Is that a miracle, or is it black art, or what is it? And what do you
think’s the matter with me? That’s what I want to ask.’

‘It’s a most extraordinary occurrence.’

‘And this day last week I knew no more that I could do things like that
than you did. It came quite sudden. It’s something odd about my will, I
suppose, and that’s as far as I can see.’

‘Is that--the only thing. Could you do other things besides that?’

‘Lord, yes!’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Just anything.’ He thought, and
suddenly recalled a conjuring entertainment he had seen. ‘Here!’ he
pointed, ‘change into a bowl of fish--no, not that--change into a glass
bowl full of water with goldfish swimming in it. That’s better! You see
that, Mr Maydig?’

‘It’s astonishing. It’s incredible. You are either a most
extraordinary.... But no----’

‘I could change it into anything,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Just anything.
Here! be a pigeon, will you?’

In another moment a blue pigeon was fluttering round the room and
making Mr Maydig duck every time it came near him. ‘Stop there, will
you?’ said Mr Fotheringay; and the pigeon hung motionless in the air.
‘I could change it back to a bowl of flowers,’ he said, and after
replacing the pigeon on the table worked that miracle. ‘I expect you
will want your pipe in a bit,’ he said, and restored the tobacco-jar.

Mr Maydig had followed all these later changes in a sort of ejaculatory
silence. He stared at Mr Fotheringay and in a very gingerly manner
picked up the tobacco-jar, examined it, replaced it on the table.
‘_Well!_’ was the only expression of his feelings.

‘Now, after that it’s easier to explain what I came about,’ said Mr
Fotheringay; and proceeded to a lengthy and involved narrative of his
strange experiences, beginning with the affair of the lamp in the Long
Dragon and complicated by persistent allusions to Winch. As he went on,
the transient pride Mr Maydig’s consternation had caused passed away;
he became the very ordinary Mr Fotheringay of everyday intercourse
again. Mr Maydig listened intently, the tobacco-jar in his hand, and
his bearing changed also with the course of the narrative. Presently,
while Mr Fotheringay was dealing with the miracle of the third egg, the
minister interrupted with a fluttering, extended hand.

‘It is possible,’ he said. ‘It is credible. It is amazing, of course,
but it reconciles a number of amazing difficulties. The power to work
miracles is a gift--a peculiar quality like genius or second sight;
hitherto it has come very rarely and to exceptional people. But in
this case.... I have always wondered at the miracles of Mahomet, and
at Yogi’s miracles, and the miracles of Madame Blavatsky. But, of
course---- Yes, it is simply a gift! It carries out so beautifully the
arguments of that great thinker’--Mr Maydig’s voice sank--‘his Grace
the Duke of Argyll. Here we plumb some profounder law--deeper than the
ordinary laws of nature. Yes--yes. Go on. Go on!’

Mr Fotheringay proceeded to tell of his misadventure with Winch, and Mr
Maydig, no longer overawed or scared, began to jerk his limbs about and
interject astonishment. ‘It’s this what troubled me most,’ proceeded
Mr Fotheringay; ‘it’s this I’m most mijitly in want of advice for; of
course he’s at San Francisco--wherever San Francisco may be--but of
course it’s awkward for both of us, as you’ll see, Mr Maydig. I don’t
see how he can understand what has happened, and I dare say he’s
scared and exasperated something tremendous, and trying to get at me.
I dare say he keeps on starting off to come here. I send him back, by
a miracle, every few hours, when I think of it. And of course, that’s
a thing he won’t be able to understand, and it’s bound to annoy him;
and, of course, if he takes a ticket every time it will cost him a
lot of money. I done the best I could for him, but, of course, it’s
difficult for him to put himself in my place. I thought afterwards that
his clothes might have got scorched, you know--if Hades is all it’s
supposed to be--before I shifted him. In that case I suppose they’d
have locked him up in San Francisco. Of course I willed him a new suit
of clothes on him directly I thought of it. But, you see, I’m already
in a deuce of a tangle----’

Mr Maydig looked serious. ‘I see you are in a tangle. Yes, it’s a
difficult position. How you are to end it....’ He became diffuse and
inconclusive.

‘However, we’ll leave Winch for a little and discuss the larger
question. I don’t think this is a case of the black art or anything of
the sort. I don’t think there is any taint of criminality about it at
all, Mr Fotheringay--none whatever, unless you are suppressing material
facts. No, it’s miracles--pure miracles--miracles, if I may say so, of
the very highest class.’

He began to pace the hearthrug and gesticulate, while Mr Fotheringay
sat with his arm on the table and his head on his arm, looking worried.
‘I don’t see how I’m to manage about Winch,’ he said.

‘A gift of working miracles--apparently a very powerful gift,’ said Mr
Maydig, ‘will find a way about Winch--never fear. My dear sir, you are
a most important man--a man of the most astonishing possibilities. As
evidence, for example! And in other ways, the things you may do....’

‘Yes, _I’ve_ thought of a thing or two,’ said Mr Fotheringay.
‘But--some of the things came a bit twisty. You saw that fish at first?
Wrong sort of bowl and wrong sort of fish. And I thought I’d ask some
one.’

‘A proper course,’ said Mr Maydig, ‘a very proper course--altogether
the proper course.’ He stopped and looked at Mr Fotheringay. ‘It’s
practically an unlimited gift. Let us test your powers, for instance.
If they really _are_.... If they realty are all they seem to be.’

And so, incredible as it may seem, in the study of the little house
behind the Congregational Chapel, on the evening of Sunday, Nov. 10,
1896, Mr Fotheringay, egged on and inspired by Mr Maydig, began to work
miracles. The reader’s attention is specially and definitely called to
the date. He will object, probably has already objected, that certain
points in this story are improbable, that if any things of the sort
already described had indeed occurred, they would have been in all the
papers at that time. The details immediately following he will find
particularly hard to accept, because among other things they involve
the conclusion that he or she, the reader in question, must have been
killed in a violent and unprecedented manner more than a year ago. Now
a miracle is nothing if not improbable, and as a matter of fact the
reader _was_ killed in a violent and unprecedented manner in 1896.
In the subsequent course of this story that will become perfectly
clear and credible, as every right-minded and reasonable reader will
admit. But this is not the place for the end of the story, being
but little beyond the hither side of the middle. And at first the
miracles worked by Mr Fotheringay were timid little miracles--little
things with the cups and parlour fitments, as feeble as the miracles
of Theosophists, and, feeble as they were, they were received with
awe by his collaborator. He would have preferred to settle the Winch
business out of hand, but Mr Maydig would not let him. But after they
had worked a dozen of these domestic trivialities, their sense of power
grew, their imagination began to show signs of stimulation, and their
ambition enlarged. Their first larger enterprise was due to hunger
and the negligence of Mrs Minchin, Mr Maydig’s housekeeper. The meal
to which the minister conducted Mr Fotheringay was certainly ill-laid
and uninviting as refreshment for two industrious miracle-workers; but
they were seated, and Mr Maydig was descanting in sorrow rather than
in anger upon his housekeeper’s shortcomings, before it occurred to Mr
Fotheringay that an opportunity lay before him. ‘Don’t you think, Mr
Maydig,’ he said, ‘if it isn’t a liberty, _I_----’

‘My dear Mr Fotheringay! Of course! No--I didn’t think.’

Mr Fotheringay waved his hand. ‘What shall we have?’ he said, in a
large, inclusive spirit, and, at Mr Maydig’s order, revised the supper
very thoroughly. ‘As for me,’ he said, eyeing Mr Maydig’s selection,
‘I am always particularly fond of a tankard of stout and a nice Welsh
rarebit, and I’ll order that. I ain’t much given to Burgundy,’ and
forthwith stout and Welsh rarebit promptly appeared at his command.
They sat long at their supper, talking like equals, as Mr Fotheringay
presently perceived, with a glow of surprise and gratification, of all
the miracles they would presently do. ‘And, by-the-by, Mr Maydig,’ said
Mr Fotheringay. ‘I might perhaps be able to help you--in a domestic
way.’

‘Don’t quite follow,’ said Mr Maydig, pouring out a glass of miraculous
old Burgundy.

Mr Fotheringay helped himself to a second Welsh rarebit out of
vacancy, and took a mouthful. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, ‘I might be
able (_chum, chum_) to work (_chum, chum_) a miracle with Mrs Minchin
(_chum, chum_)--make her a better woman.’

Mr Maydig put down the glass and looked doubtful. ‘She’s---- She
strongly objects to interference, you know, Mr Fotheringay. And--as a
matter of fact--it’s well past eleven and she’s probably in bed and
asleep. Do you think, on the whole----’

Mr Fotheringay considered these objections. ‘I don’t see that it
shouldn’t be done in her sleep.’

For a time Mr Maydig opposed the idea, and then he yielded. Mr
Fotheringay issued his orders, and a little less at their ease,
perhaps, the two gentlemen proceeded with their repast. Mr Maydig was
enlarging on the changes he might expect in his housekeeper next day,
with an optimism that seemed even to Mr Fotheringay’s supper senses
a little forced and hectic, when a series of confused noises from
upstairs began. Their eyes exchanged interrogations, and Mr Maydig
left the room hastily. Mr Fotheringay heard him calling up to his
housekeeper and then his footsteps going softly up to her.

In a minute or so the minister returned, his step light, his face
radiant. ‘Wonderful!’ he said, ‘and touching! Most touching!’

He began pacing the hearthrug. ‘A repentance--a most touching
repentance--through the crack of the door. Poor woman! A most wonderful
change! She had got up. She must have got up at once. She had got up
out of her sleep to smash a private bottle of brandy in her box. And to
confess it too!... But this gives us--it opens--a most amazing vista of
possibilities. If we can work this miraculous change in _her_....’

‘The thing’s unlimited seemingly,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘And about Mr
Winch----’

‘Altogether unlimited.’ And from the hearthrug Mr Maydig, waving
the Winch difficulty aside, unfolded a series of wonderful
proposals--proposals he invented as he went along.

Now what those proposals were does not concern the essentials of
this story. Suffice it that they were designed in a spirit of
infinite benevolence, the sort of benevolence that used to be called
post-prandial. Suffice it, too, that the problem of Winch remained
unsolved. Nor is it necessary to describe how far that series got
to its fulfilment. There were astonishing changes. The small hours
found Mr Maydig and Mr Fotheringay careering across the chilly market
square under the still moon, in a sort of ecstasy of thaumaturgy, Mr
Maydig all flap and gesture, Mr Fotheringay short and bristling, and
no longer abashed at his greatness. They had reformed every drunkard
in the Parliamentary division, changed all the beer and alcohol to
water (Mr Maydig had overruled Mr Fotheringay on this point); they
had, further, greatly improved the railway communication of the place,
drained Flinder’s swamp, improved the soil of One Tree Hill, and cured
the vicar’s wart. And they were going to see what could be done with
the injured pier at South Bridge. ‘The place,’ gasped Mr Maydig, ‘won’t
be the same place to-morrow. How surprised and thankful every one will
be!’ And just at that moment the church clock struck three.

‘I say,’ said Mr Fotheringay, ‘that’s three o’clock! I must be getting
back. I’ve got to be at business by eight. And besides, Mrs Wimms----’

‘We’re only beginning,’ said Mr Maydig, full of the sweetness of
unlimited power. ‘We’re only beginning. Think of all the good we’re
doing. When people wake----’

‘But----’ said Mr Fotheringay.

Mr Maydig gripped his arm suddenly. His eyes were bright and wild. ‘My
dear chap,’ he said, ‘there’s no hurry. Look’--he pointed to the moon
at the zenith--‘Joshua!’

‘Joshua?’ said Mr Fotheringay.

‘Joshua,’ said Mr Maydig. ‘Why not? Stop it.’

Mr Fotheringay looked at the moon.

‘That’s a bit tall,’ he said, after a pause.

‘Why not?’ said Mr Maydig. ‘Of course it doesn’t stop. You stop the
rotation of the earth, you know. Time stops. It isn’t as if we were
doing harm.’

‘H’m!’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Well,’ he sighed, ‘I’ll try. Here!’

He buttoned up his jacket and addressed himself to the habitable globe,
with as good an assumption of confidence as lay in his power. ‘Jest
stop rotating, will you?’ said Mr Fotheringay.

Incontinently he was flying head over heels through the air at the rate
of dozens of miles a minute. In spite of the innumerable circles he was
describing per second he thought; for thought is wonderful--sometimes
as sluggish as flowing pitch, sometimes as instantaneous as light. He
thought in a second, and willed. ‘Let me come down safe and sound.
Whatever else happens let me down safe and sound.’

He willed it only just in time, for his clothes, heated by his rapid
flight through the air, were already beginning to singe. He came down
with a forcible, but by no means injurious, bump in what appeared to
be a mound of fresh-turned earth. A large mass of metal and masonry,
extraordinarily like the clock-tower in the middle of the market
square, hit the earth near him, ricochetted over him, and flew into
stonework, bricks, and cement, like a bursting bomb. A hurtling cow hit
one of the larger blocks and smashed like an egg. There was a crash
that made all the most violent crashes of his past life seem like the
sound of falling dust, and this was followed by a descending series
of lesser crashes. A vast wind roared throughout earth and heaven,
so that he could scarcely lift his head to look. For a while he was
too breathless and astonished even to see where he was or what had
happened. And his first movement was to feel his head and reassure
himself that his streaming hair was still his own.

‘Lord!’ gasped Mr Fotheringay, scarce able to speak for the gale, ‘I’ve
had a squeak! What’s gone wrong? Storms and thunder. And only a minute
ago a fine night. It’s Maydig set me on to this sort of thing. _What_
a wind! If I go on fooling in this way I’m bound to have a thundering
accident!...’

‘Where’s Maydig?’

‘What a confounded mess everything’s in!’

He looked about him so far as his flapping jacket would permit. The
appearance of things was really extremely strange. ‘The sky’s all
right anyhow,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘And that’s about all that is all
right. And even there it looks like a terrific gale coming up. And even
there’s the moon overhead. Just as it was just now. Bright as midday.
But as for the rest---- Where’s the village? Where’s--where’s any
thing? And what on earth set this wind a-blowing? _I_ didn’t order no
wind.’

Mr Fotheringay struggled to get to his feet in vain, and after one
failure, remained on all fours, holding on. He surveyed the moonlit
world to leeward, with the tails of his jacket streaming over his head.
‘There’s something seriously wrong,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘And what it
is--goodness knows.’

Far and wide nothing was visible in the white glare through the haze of
dust that drove before a screaming gale but tumbled masses of earth and
heaps of inchoate ruins, no trees, no houses, no familiar shapes, only
a wilderness of disorder, vanishing at last into the darkness beneath
the whirling columns and streamers, the lightnings and thunderings of
a swiftly rising storm. Near him in the livid glare was something that
might once have been an elm-tree, a smashed mass of splinters, shivered
from boughs to base, and further a twisted mass of iron girders--only
too evidently the viaduct--rose out of the piled confusion.

You see, when Mr Fotheringay had arrested the rotation of the solid
globe, he had made no stipulation concerning the trifling movables
upon its surface. And the earth spins so fast that the surface at its
equator is travelling at rather more than a thousand miles an hour, and
in these latitudes at more than half that pace.

So that the village, and Mr Maydig, and Mr Fotheringay, and everybody
and everything had been jerked violently forward at about nine miles
per second--that is to say, much more violently than if they had been
fired out of a cannon. And every human being, every living creature,
every house, and every tree--all the world as we know it--had been so
jerked and smashed and utterly destroyed. That was all.

These things Mr Fotheringay did not, of course, fully appreciate. But
he perceived that his miracle had miscarried, and with that a great
disgust of miracles came upon him. He was in darkness now, for the
clouds had swept together and blotted out his momentary glimpse of
the moon, and the air was full of fitful struggling tortured wraiths
of hail. A great roaring of wind and waters filled earth and sky, and
peering under his hand through the dust and sleet to windward, he saw
by the play of the lightnings a vast wall of water pouring towards him.

‘Maydig!’ screamed Mr Fotheringay’s feeble voice amid the elemental
uproar. ‘Here!--Maydig!’

‘Stop!’ cried Mr Fotheringay to the advancing water. ‘Oh, for goodness’
sake, stop!

‘Just a moment,’ said Mr Fotheringay to the lightnings and thunder.
‘Stop jest a moment while I collect my thoughts.... And now what shall
I do?’ he said. ‘What _shall_ I do? Lord! I wish Maydig was about.’

‘I know,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘And for goodness’ sake let’s have it
right _this_ time.’

He remained on all fours, leaning against the wind, very intent to have
everything right.

‘Ah!’ he said. ‘Let nothing what I’m going to order happen until I say
“Off!” ... Lord! I wish I’d thought of that before!’

He lifted his little voice against the whirlwind, shouting louder and
louder in the vain desire to hear himself speak. ‘Now then!--here goes!
Mind about that what I said just now. In the first place, when all
I’ve got to say is done, let me lose my miraculous power, let my will
become just like anybody else’s will, and all these dangerous miracles
be stopped. I don’t like them. I’d rather I didn’t work ’em. Ever so
much. That’s the first thing. And the second is--let me be back just
before the miracles begin; let everything be just as it was before that
blessed lamp turned up. It’s a big job, but it’s the last. Have you got
it? No more miracles, everything as it was--me back in the Long Dragon
just before I drank my half-pint. That’s it! Yes.’

He dug his fingers into the mould, closed his eyes, and said ‘Off!’

Everything became perfectly still. He perceived that he was standing
erect.

‘So _you_ say,’ said a voice.

He opened his eyes. He was in the bar of the Long Dragon, arguing about
miracles with Toddy Beamish. He had a vague sense of some great thing
forgotten that instantaneously passed. You see that, except for the
loss of his miraculous powers, everything was back as it had been, his
mind and memory therefore were now just as they had been at the time
when this story began. So that he knew absolutely nothing of all that
is told here--knows nothing of all that is told here to this day. And
among other things, of course, he still did not believe in miracles.

‘I tell you that miracles, properly speaking, can’t possibly happen,’
he said, ‘whatever you like to hold. And I’m prepared to prove it up to
the hilt.’

‘That’s what _you_ think,’ said Toddy Beamish, and ‘Prove it if you
can.’

‘Looky here, Mr Beamish,’ said Mr Fotheringay. ‘Let us clearly
understand what a miracle is. It’s something contrariwise to the course
of nature done by power of Will....’




A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON


The man with the white face entered the carriage at Rugby. He moved
slowly in spite of the urgency of his porter, and even while he was
still on the platform I noted how ill he seemed. He dropped into the
corner over against me with a sigh, made an incomplete attempt to
arrange his travelling shawl, and became motionless, with his eyes
staring vacantly. Presently he was moved by a sense of my observation,
looked up at me, and put out a spiritless hand for his newspaper. Then
he glanced again in my direction.

I feigned to read. I feared I had unwittingly embarrassed him, and in a
moment I was surprised to find him speaking.

‘I beg your pardon?’ said I.

‘That book,’ he repeated, pointing a lean finger, ‘is about dreams.’

‘Obviously,’ I answered, for it was Fortnum-Roscoe’s _Dream States_,
and the title was on the cover.

He hung silent for a space as if he sought words. ‘Yes,’ he said, at
last, ‘but they tell you nothing.’

I did not catch his meaning for a second.

‘They don’t know,’ he added.

I looked a little more attentively at his face.

‘There are dreams,’ he said, ‘and dreams.’

That sort of proposition I never dispute.

‘I suppose----’ he hesitated. ‘Do you ever dream? I mean vividly.’

‘I dream very little,’ I answered. ‘I doubt if I have three vivid
dreams in a year.’

‘Ah!’ he said, and seemed for a moment to collect his thoughts.

‘Your dreams don’t mix with your memories?’ he asked abruptly. ‘You
don’t find yourself in doubt: did this happen or did it not?’

‘Hardly ever. Except just for a momentary hesitation now and then. I
suppose few people do.’

‘Does _he_ say----’ he indicated the book.

‘Says it happens at times and gives the usual explanation about
intensity of impression and the like to account for its not happening
as a rule. I suppose you know something of these theories----’

‘Very little----except that they are wrong.’

His emaciated hand played with the strap of the window for a time. I
prepared to resume reading, and that seemed to precipitate his next
remark. He leant forward almost as though he would touch me.

‘Isn’t there something called consecutive dreaming--that goes on night
after night?’

‘I believe there is. There are cases given in most books on mental
trouble.’

‘Mental trouble! Yes. I dare say there are. It’s the right place for
them. But what I mean----’ He looked at his bony knuckles. ‘Is that
sort of thing always dreaming? _Is_ it dreaming? Or is it something
else? Mightn’t it be something else?’

I should have snubbed his persistent conversation but for the drawn
anxiety of his face. I remember now the look of his faded eyes and the
lids red stained--perhaps you know that look.

‘I’m not just arguing about a matter of opinion,’ he said. ‘The thing’s
killing me.’

‘Dreams?’

‘If you call them dreams. Night after night. Vivid!--so vivid ...
this----’ (he indicated the landscape that went streaming by the
window) ‘seems unreal in comparison! I can scarcely remember who I am,
what business I am on....’

He paused. ‘Even now----’

‘The dream is always the same--do you mean?’ I asked.

‘It’s over.’

‘You mean?’

‘I died.’

‘Died?’

‘Smashed and killed, and now so much of me as that dream was is dead.
Dead for ever. I dreamt I was another man, you know, living in a
different part of the world and in a different time. I dreamt that
night after night. Night after night I woke into that other life. Fresh
scenes and fresh happenings--until I came upon the last----’

‘When you died?’

‘When I died.’

‘And since then----’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Thank God! that was the end of the dream....’

It was clear I was in for this dream. And, after all, I had an hour
before me, the light was fading fast, and Fortnum-Roscoe has a dreary
way with him. ‘Living in a different time,’ I said: ‘do you mean in
some different age?’

‘Yes?

‘Past?’

‘No, to come--to come.’

‘The year three thousand, for example?’

‘I don’t know what year it was. I did when I was asleep, when I was
dreaming, that is, but not now--not now that I am awake. There’s a lot
of things I have forgotten since I woke out of these dreams, though
I knew them at the time when I was--I suppose it was dreaming. They
called the year differently from our way of calling the year.... What
_did_ they call it?’ He put his hand to his forehead. ‘No,’ said he, ‘I
forget.’

He sat smiling weakly. For a moment I feared he did not mean to tell
me his dream. As a rule, I hate people who tell their dreams, but this
struck me differently. I proffered assistance even. ‘It began----’ I
suggested.

‘It was vivid from the first. I seemed to wake up in it suddenly. And
it’s curious that in these dreams I am speaking of I never remembered
this life I am living now. It seemed as if the dream life was enough
while it lasted. Perhaps---- But I will tell you how I find myself when
I do my best to recall it all. I don’t remember anything clearly until
I found myself sitting in a sort of loggia looking out over the sea.
I had been dozing, and suddenly I woke up--fresh and vivid--not a bit
dreamlike--because the girl had stopped fanning me.’

‘The girl?’

‘Yes, the girl. You must not interrupt or you will put me out.’

He stopped abruptly. ‘You won’t think I’m mad?’ he said.

‘No,’ I answered; ‘you’ve been dreaming. Tell me your dream.’

‘I woke up, I say, because the girl had stopped fanning me. I was
not surprised to find myself there or anything of that sort, you
understand. I did not feel I had fallen into it suddenly. I simply
took it up at that point. Whatever memory I had of _this_ life, this
nineteenth-century life, faded as I woke, vanished like a dream. I knew
all about myself, knew that my name was no longer Cooper but Hedon,
and all about my position in the world. I’ve forgotten a lot since I
woke--there’s a want of connection--but it was all quite clear and
matter-of-fact then.’

He hesitated again, gripping the window strap, putting his face
forward, and looking up to me appealingly.

‘This seems bosh to you?’

‘No, no!’ I cried. ‘Go on. Tell me what this loggia was like.’

‘It was not really a loggia--I don’t know what to call it. It faced
south. It was small. It was all in shadow except the semicircle above
the balcony that showed the sky and sea and the corner where the girl
stood. I was on a couch--it was a metal couch with light striped
cushions--and the girl was leaning over the balcony with her back to
me. The light of the sunrise fell on her ear and cheek. Her pretty
white neck and the little curls that nestled there, and her white
shoulder were in the sun, and all the grace of her body was in the
cool blue shadow. She was dressed--how can I describe it? It was easy
and flowing. And altogether there she stood, so that it came to me how
beautiful and desirable she was, as though I had never seen her before.
And when at last I sighed and raised myself upon my arm she turned her
face to me----’

He stopped.

‘I have lived three-and-fifty years in this world. I have had mother,
sisters, friends, wife and daughters--all their faces, the play of
their faces, I know. But the face of this girl--it is much more real
to me. I can bring it back into memory so that I see it again--I could
draw it or paint it. And after all----’

He stopped--but I said nothing.

‘The face of a dream--the face of a dream. She was beautiful. Not that
beauty which is terrible, cold, and worshipful, like the beauty of
a saint; nor that beauty that stirs fierce passions; but a sort of
radiation, sweet lips that softened into smiles, and grave gray eyes.
And she moved gracefully, she seemed to have part with all pleasant and
gracious things----’

He stopped, and his face was downcast and hidden. Then he looked up
at me and went on, making no further attempt to disguise his absolute
belief in the reality of his story.

‘You see, I had thrown up my plans and ambitions, thrown up all I had
ever worked for or desired, for her sake. I had been a master man away
there in the north, with influence and property and a great reputation,
but none of it had seemed worth having beside her. I had come to the
place, this city of sunny pleasures, with her, and left all those
things to wreck and ruin just to save a remnant at least of my life.
While I had been in love with her before I knew that she had any care
for me, before I had imagined that she would dare--that we should
dare--all my life had seemed vain and hollow, dust and ashes. It _was_
dust and ashes. Night after night, and through the long days I had
longed and desired--my soul had beaten against the thing forbidden!

‘But it is impossible for one man to tell another just these things.
It’s emotion, it’s a tint, a light that comes and goes. Only while it’s
there, everything changes, everything. The thing is I came away and
left them in their crisis to do what they could.’

‘Left whom?’ I asked, puzzled.

‘The people up in the north there. You see--in this dream, anyhow--I
had been a big man, the sort of man men come to trust in, to group
themselves about. Millions of men who had never seen me were ready to
do things and risk things because of their confidence in me. I had
been playing that game for years, that big laborious game, that vague,
monstrous political game amidst intrigues and betrayals, speech and
agitation. It was a vast weltering world, and at last I had a sort
of leadership against the Gang--you know it was called the Gang--a
sort of compromise of scoundrelly projects and base ambitions and
vast public emotional stupidities and catch-words--the Gang that kept
the world noisy and blind year by year, and all the while that it was
drifting, drifting towards infinite disaster. But I can’t expect you to
understand the shades and complications of the year--the year something
or other ahead. I had it all--down to the smallest details--in my
dream. I suppose I had been dreaming of it before I awoke, and the
fading outline of some queer new development I had imagined still hung
about me as I rubbed my eyes. It was some grubby affair that made me
thank God for the sunlight. I sat up on the couch and remained looking
at the woman, and rejoicing--rejoicing that I had come away out of all
that tumult and folly and violence before it was too late. After all,
I thought, this is life--love and beauty, desire and delight, are they
not worth all those dismal struggles for vague, gigantic ends? And I
blamed myself for having ever sought to be a leader when I might have
given my days to love. But then, thought I, if I had not spent my early
days sternly and austerely, I might have wasted myself upon vain and
worthless women, and at the thought all my being went out in love and
tenderness to my dear mistress, my dear lady, who had come at last and
compelled me--compelled me by her invincible charm for me--to lay that
life aside.

‘“You are worth it,” I said, speaking without intending her to hear;
“you are worth it, my dearest one; worth pride and praise and all
things. Love! to have _you_ is worth them all together.” And at the
murmur of my voice she turned about.

‘“Come and see,” she cried--I can hear her now--“come and see the
sunrise upon Monte Solaro.”

‘I remember how I sprang to my feet and joined her at the balcony. She
put a white hand upon my shoulder and pointed towards great masses
of limestone flushing, as it were, into life. I looked. But first I
noted the sunlight on her face caressing the lines of her cheeks and
neck. How can I describe to you the scene we had before us? We were at
Capri----’

‘I have been there,’ I said. ‘I have clambered up Monte Solaro and
drunk _vero Capri_--muddy stuff like cider--at the summit.’

‘Ah!’ said the man with the white face; ‘then perhaps you can tell
me--you will know if this was indeed Capri. For in this life I have
never been there. Let me describe it. We were in a little room, one of
a vast multitude of little rooms, very cool and sunny, hollowed out of
the limestone of a sort of cape, very high above the sea. The whole
island, you know, was one enormous hotel, complex beyond explaining,
and on the other side there were miles of floating hotels, and huge
floating stages to which the flying machines came. They called it a
Pleasure City. Of course, there was none of that in your time--rather,
I should say, _is_ none of that _now_. Of course. Now!--yes.

‘Well, this room of ours was at the extremity of the cape, so that
one could see east and west. Eastward was a great cliff--a thousand
feet high perhaps, coldly gray except for one bright edge of gold, and
beyond it the Isle of the Sirens, and a falling coast that faded and
passed into the hot sunrise. And when one turned to the west, distinct
and near was a little bay, a little beach still in shadow. And out of
that shadow rose Solaro, straight and tall, flushed and golden-crested,
like a beauty throned, and the white moon was floating behind her in
the sky. And before us from east to west stretched the many-tinted sea
all dotted with little sailing-boats.

‘To the eastward, of course, these little boats were gray and very
minute and clear, but to the westward they were little boats of
gold--shining gold--almost like little flames. And just below us was a
rock with an arch worn through it. The blue sea-water broke to green
and foam all round the rock, and a galley came gliding out of the arch.’

‘I know that rock,’ I said. ‘I was nearly drowned there. It is called
the Faraglioni.’

‘_Faraglioni?_ Yes, _she_ called it that,’ answered the man with the
white face. ‘There was some story--but that----’

He put his hand to his forehead again. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I forget that
story.

‘Well, that is the first thing I remember, the first dream I had, that
little shaded room and the beautiful air and sky and that dear lady
of mine, with her shining arms and her graceful robe, and how we sat
and talked in half whispers to one another. We talked in whispers,
not because there was any one to hear, but because there was still
such a freshness of mind between us that our thoughts were a little
frightened, I think, to find themselves at last in words. And so they
went softly.

‘Presently we were hungry, and we went from our apartment, going by
a strange passage with a moving floor, until we came to the great
breakfast-room--there was a fountain and music. A pleasant and joyful
place it was, with its sunlight and splashing, and the murmur of
plucked strings. And we sat and ate and smiled at one another, and I
would not heed a man who was watching me from a table near by.

‘And afterwards we went on to the dancing-hall. But I cannot describe
that hall. The place was enormous, larger than any building you have
ever seen--and in one place there was the old gate of Capri, caught
into the wall of a gallery high overhead. Light girders, stems and
threads of gold, burst from the pillars like fountains, streamed
like an Aurora across the roof and interlaced, like--like conjuring
tricks. All about the great circle for the dancers there were beautiful
figures, strange dragons, and intricate and wonderful grotesques
bearing lights. The place was inundated with artificial light that
shamed the newborn day. And as we went through the throng the people
turned about and looked at us, for all through the world my name and
face were known, and how I had suddenly thrown up pride and struggle
to come to this place. And they looked also at the lady beside me,
though half the story of how at last she had come to me was unknown or
mistold. And few of the men who were there, I know, but judged me a
happy man, in spite of all the shame and dishonour that had come upon
my name.

‘The air was full of music, full of harmonious scents, full of the
rhythm of beautiful motions. Thousands of beautiful people swarmed
about the hall, crowded the galleries, sat in a myriad recesses; they
were dressed in splendid colours and crowned with flowers; thousands
danced about the great circle beneath the white images of the ancient
gods, and glorious processions of youths and maidens came and went.
We two danced, not the dreary monotonies of your days--of this time,
I mean--but dances that were beautiful, intoxicating. And even now I
can see my lady dancing--dancing--joyously. She danced, you know, with
a serious face; she danced with a serious dignity, and yet she was
smiling at me and caressing me--smiling and caressing with her eyes.

‘The music was different,’ he murmured. ‘It went--I cannot describe it;
but it was infinitely richer and more varied than any music that has
ever come to me awake.

‘And then--it was when we had done dancing--a man came to speak to
me. He was a lean, resolute man, very soberly clad for that place, and
already I had marked his face watching me in the breakfasting hall, and
afterwards as we went along the passage I had avoided his eye. But now,
as we sat in a little alcove smiling at the pleasure of all the people
who went to and fro across the shining floor, he came and touched me,
and spoke to me so that I was forced to listen. And he asked that he
might speak to me for a little time apart.

‘“No,” I said. “I have no secrets from this lady. What do you want to
tell me?”

‘He said it was a trivial matter, or at least a dry matter, for a lady
to hear.

‘“Perhaps for me to hear,” said I.

‘He glanced at her, as though almost he would appeal to her. Then he
asked me suddenly if I had heard of a great and avenging declaration
that Gresham had made. Now, Gresham had always before been the man next
to myself in the leadership of that great party in the north. He was a
forcible, hard, and tactless man, and only I had been able to control
and soften him. It was on his account even more than my own, I think,
that the others had been so dismayed at my retreat. So this question
about what he had done re-awakened my old interest in the life I had
put aside just for a moment.

‘“I have taken no heed of any news for many days,” I said. “What has
Gresham been saying?”

‘And with that the man began, nothing loath, and I must confess even
I was struck by Gresham’s reckless folly in the wild and threatening
words he had used. And this messenger they had sent to me not only told
me of Gresham’s speech, but went on to ask counsel and to point out
what need they had of me. While he talked, my lady sat a little forward
and watched his face and mine.

‘My old habits of scheming and organising reasserted themselves. I
could even see myself suddenly returning to the north, and all the
dramatic effect of it. All that this man said witnessed to the disorder
of the party indeed, but not to its damage. I should go back stronger
than I had come. And then I thought of my lady. You see--how can I tell
you? There were certain peculiarities of our relationship--as things
are I need not tell about that--which would render her presence with
me impossible. I should have had to leave her; indeed, I should have
had to renounce her clearly and openly, if I was to do all that I could
do in the north. And the man knew _that_, even as he talked to her and
me, knew it as well as she did, that my steps to duty were--first,
separation, then abandonment. At the touch of that thought my dream
of a return was shattered. I turned on the man suddenly, as he was
imagining his eloquence was gaining ground with me.

‘“What have I to do with these things now?” I said. “I have done with
them. Do you think I am coquetting with your people in coming here?”

‘“No,” he said; “but----”

‘“Why cannot you leave me alone? I have done with these things. I have
ceased to be anything but a private man.”

‘“Yes,” he answered. “But have you thought?--this talk of war, these
reckless challenges, these wild aggressions----”

‘I stood up.

‘“No,” I cried. “I won’t hear you. I took count of all those things, I
weighed them--and I have come away.”

‘He seemed to consider the possibility of persistence. He looked from
me to where the lady sat regarding us.

‘“War,” he said, as if he were speaking to himself, and then turned
slowly from me and walked away.

‘I stood, caught in the whirl of thoughts his appeal had set going.

‘I heard my lady’s voice.

‘“Dear,” she said; “but if they have need of you----”

‘She did not finish her sentence, she let it rest there. I turned to
her sweet face, and the balance of my mood swayed and reeled.

‘“They want me only to do the thing they dare not do themselves,” I
said. “If they distrust Gresham they must settle with him themselves.”

‘She looked at me doubtfully.

‘“But war----” she said.

‘I saw a doubt on her face that I had seen before, a doubt of herself
and me, the first shadow of the discovery that, seen strongly and
completely, must drive us apart for ever.

‘Now, I was an older mind than hers, and I could sway her to this
belief or that.

‘“My dear one,” I said, “you must not trouble over these things. There
will be no war. Certainly there will be no war. The age of wars is
past. Trust me to know the justice of this case. They have no right
upon me, dearest, and no one has a right upon me. I have been free to
choose my life, and I have chosen this.”

‘“But _war_----” she said.

‘I sat down beside her. I put an arm behind her and took her hand in
mine. I set myself to drive that doubt away--I set myself to fill her
mind with pleasant things again. I lied to her, and in lying to her I
lied also to myself. And she was only too ready to believe me, only too
ready to forget.

‘Very soon the shadow had gone again, and we were hastening to our
bathing-place in the Grotta del Bovo Marino, where it was our custom to
bathe every day. We swam and splashed one another, and in that buoyant
water I seemed to become something lighter and stronger than a man. And
at last we came out dripping and rejoicing and raced among the rocks.
And then I put on a dry bathing-dress, and we sat to bask in the sun,
and presently I nodded, resting my head against her knee, and she put
her hand upon my hair and stroked it softly and I dozed. And behold! as
it were with the snapping of the string of a violin, I was awakening,
and I was in my own bed in Liverpool, in the life of to-day.

‘Only for a time I could not believe that all these vivid moments had
been no more than the substance of a dream.

‘In truth, I could not believe it a dream, for all the sobering reality
of things about me. I bathed and dressed as it were by habit, and as
I shaved I argued why I of all men should leave the woman I loved to
go back to fantastic politics in the hard and strenuous north. Even if
Gresham did force the world back to war, what was that to me? I was a
man, with the heart of a man, and why should I feel the responsibility
of a deity for the way the world might go?

‘You know that is not quite the way I think about affairs, about my
real affairs. I am a solicitor, you know, with a point of view.

‘The vision was so real, you must understand, so utterly unlike a
dream, that I kept perpetually recalling little irrelevant details;
even the ornament of a book-cover that lay on my wife’s sewing-machine
in the breakfast-room recalled with the utmost vividness the gilt line
that ran about the seat in the alcove where I had talked with the
messenger from my deserted party. Have you ever heard of a dream that
had a quality like that?’

‘Like----?’

‘So that afterwards you remembered little details you had forgotten.’

I thought. I had never noticed the point before, but he was right.

‘Never,’ I said. ‘That is what you never seem to do with dreams.’

‘No,’ he answered. ‘But that is just what I did. I am a solicitor, you
must understand, in Liverpool, and I could not help wondering what the
clients and business people I found myself talking to in my office
would think if I told them suddenly I was in love with a girl who would
be born a couple of hundred years or so hence, and worried about the
politics of my great-great-great-grandchildren. I was chiefly busy that
day negotiating a ninety-nine-year building lease. It was a private
builder in a hurry, and we wanted to tie him in every possible way. I
had an interview with him, and he showed a certain want of temper that
sent me to bed still irritated. That night I had no dream. Nor did I
dream the next night, at least, to remember.

‘Something of that intense reality of conviction vanished. I began to
feel sure it _was_ a dream. And then it came again.

‘When the dream came again, nearly four days later, it was very
different. I think it certain that four days had also elapsed in
the dream. Many things had happened in the north, and the shadow of
them was back again between us, and this time it was not so easily
dispelled. I began, I know, with moody musings. Why, in spite of all,
should I go back, go back for all the rest of my days, to toil and
stress, insults, and perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds
of millions of common people, whom I did not love, whom too often I
could not do other than despise, from the stress and anguish of war and
infinite misrule? And, after all, I might fail. _They_ all sought their
own narrow ends, and why should not I--why should not I also live as a
man? And out of such thoughts her voice summoned me, and I lifted my
eyes.

‘I found myself awake and walking. We had come out above the Pleasure
City, we were near the summit of Monte Solaro and looking towards the
bay. It was the late afternoon and very clear. Far away to the left
Ischia hung in a golden haze between sea and sky, and Naples was coldly
white against the hills, and before us was Vesuvius with a tall and
slender streamer feathering at last towards the south, and the ruins of
Torre dell’ Annunziata and Castellammare glittering and near.’

I interrupted suddenly: ‘You have been to Capri, of course?’

‘Only in this dream,’ he said, ‘only in this dream. All across the bay
beyond Sorrento were the floating palaces of the Pleasure City moored
and chained. And northward were the broad floating stages that received
the aeroplanes. Aeroplanes fell out of the sky every afternoon, each
bringing its thousands of pleasure-seekers from the uttermost parts of
the earth to Capri and its delights. All these things, I say, stretched
below.

‘But we noticed them only incidentally because of an unusual sight
that evening had to show. Five war aeroplanes that had long slumbered
useless in the distant arsenals of the Rhine-mouth were manœuvring now
in the eastward sky. Gresham had astonished the world by producing
them and others, and sending them to circle here and there. It was
the threat material in the great game of bluff he was playing, and it
had taken even me by surprise. He was one of those incredibly stupid,
energetic people who seem sent by heaven to create disasters. His
energy to the first glance seemed so wonderfully like capacity! But he
had no imagination, no invention, only a stupid, vast, driving force of
will and a mad faith in his stupid idiot “luck” to pull him through.
I remember how we stood out upon the headland watching the squadron
circling far away, and how I weighed the full meaning of the sight,
seeing clearly the way things must go. And even then it was not too
late. I might have gone back, I think, and saved the world. The people
of the north would follow me, I knew, granted only that in one thing I
respected their moral standards. The east and south would trust me as
they would trust no other northern man. And I knew I had only to put it
to her and she would have let me go.... Not because she did not love me!

‘Only I did not want to go; my will was all the other way about. I had
so newly thrown off the incubus of responsibility: I was still so fresh
a renegade from duty that the daylight clearness of what I _ought_ to
do had no power at all to touch my will. My will was to live, to gather
pleasures, and make my dear lady happy. But though this sense of vast
neglected duties had no power to draw me, it could make me silent and
preoccupied, it robbed the days I had spent of half their brightness
and roused me into dark meditations in the silence of the night. And as
I stood and watched Gresham’s aeroplanes sweep to and fro--those birds
of infinite ill omen--she stood beside me, watching me, perceiving the
trouble indeed, but not perceiving it clearly--her eyes questioning my
face, her expression shaded with perplexity. Her face was gray because
the sunset was fading out of the sky. It was no fault of hers that she
held me. She had asked me to go from her, and again in the night-time
and with tears she had asked me to go.

‘At last it was the sense of her that roused me from my mood. I turned
upon her suddenly and challenged her to race down the mountain slopes.
“No,” she said, as if I jarred with her gravity, but I was resolved to
end that gravity and made her run--no one can be very gray and sad
who is out of breath--and when she stumbled I ran with my hand beneath
her arm. We ran down past a couple of men, who turned back staring
in astonishment at my behaviour--they must have recognised my face.
And half-way down the slope came a tumult in the air--clang-clank,
clang-clank--and we stopped, and presently over the hill-crest those
war things came flying one behind the other.’

The man seemed hesitating on the verge of a description.

‘What were they like?’ I asked.

‘They had never fought,’ he said. ‘They were just like our ironclads
are nowadays; they had never fought. No one knew what they might do,
with excited men inside them; few even cared to speculate. They were
great driving things shaped like spear-heads without a shaft, with a
propeller in the place of the shaft?

‘Steel?’

‘Not steel.’

‘Aluminium?’

‘No, no, nothing of that sort. An alloy that was very common--as common
as brass, for example. It was called--let me see----’ He squeezed his
forehead with the fingers of one hand. ‘I am forgetting everything,’ he
said.

‘And they carried guns?’

‘Little guns, firing high explosive shells. They fired the guns
backwards, out of the base of the leaf, so to speak, and rammed with
the beak. That was the theory, you know, but they had never been
fought. No one could tell exactly what was going to happen. And
meanwhile I suppose it was very fine to go whirling through the air
like a flight of young swallows, swift and easy. I guess the captains
tried not to think too clearly what the real thing would be like. And
these flying war machines, you know, were only one sort of the endless
war contrivances that had been invented and had fallen into abeyance
during the long peace. There were all sorts of these things that people
were routing out and furbishing up; infernal things, silly things;
things that had never been tried; big engines, terrible explosives,
great guns. You know the silly way of these ingenious sort of men who
make these things; they turn ’em out as beavers build dams, and with no
more sense of the rivers they’re going to divert and the lands they’re
going to flood!

‘As we went down the winding stepway to our hotel again in the twilight
I foresaw it all: I saw how clearly and inevitably things were driving
for war in Gresham’s silly, violent hands, and I had some inkling of
what war was bound to be under these new conditions. And even then,
though I knew it was drawing near the limit of my opportunity, I could
find no will to go back.’

He sighed.

‘That was my last chance.

‘We did not go into the city until the sky was full of stars, so we
walked out upon the high terrace, to and fro, and--she counselled me to
go back.

‘“My dearest,” she said, and her sweet face looked up to me, “this is
Death. This life you lead is Death. Go back to them, go back to your
duty----”

‘She began to weep, saying between her sobs, and clinging to my arm as
she said it, “Go back--go back.”

‘Then suddenly she fell mute, and glancing down at her face, I read in
an instant the thing she had thought to do. It was one of those moments
when one _sees_.

‘“No!” I said.

‘“No?” she asked, in surprise, and I think a little fearful at the
answer to her thought.

‘“Nothing,” I said, “shall send me back. Nothing! I have chosen. Love,
I have chosen, and the world must go. Whatever happens, I will live
this life--I will live for _you_! It--nothing shall turn me aside;
nothing, my dear one. Even if you died--even if you died----”

‘“Yes?” she murmured, softly.

‘“Then--I also would die.”

‘And before she could speak again I began to talk, talking
eloquently--as I _could_ do in that life--talking to exalt love, to
make the life we were living seem heroic and glorious; and the thing I
was deserting something hard and enormously ignoble that it was a fine
thing to set aside. I bent all my mind to throw that glamour upon it,
seeking not only to convert her but myself to that. We talked, and she
clung to me, torn too between all that she deemed noble and all that
she knew was sweet. And at last I did make it heroic, made all the
thickening disaster of the world only a sort of glorious setting to
our unparalleled love, and we two poor foolish souls strutted there at
last, clad in that splendid delusion, drunken rather with that glorious
delusion, under the still stars.

‘And so my moment passed.

‘It was my last chance. Even as we went to and fro there, the leaders
of the south and east were gathering their resolve, and the hot answer
that shattered Gresham’s bluffing for ever took shape and waited. And
all over Asia, and the ocean, and the south, the air and the wires were
throbbing with their warnings to prepare--prepare.

‘No one living, you know, knew what war was; no one could imagine,
with all these new inventions, what horror war might bring. I believe
most people still believed it would be a matter of bright uniforms and
shouting charges and triumphs and flags and bands--in a time when half
the world drew its food-supply from regions ten thousand miles away----’

The man with the white face paused. I glanced at him, and his face was
intent on the floor of the carriage. A little railway station, a string
of loaded trucks, a signal-box, and the back of a cottage shot by the
carriage window, and a bridge passed with a clap of noise, echoing the
tumult of the train.

‘After that,’ he said, ‘I dreamt often. For three weeks of nights that
dream was my life. And the worst of it was there were nights when I
could not dream, when I lay tossing on a bed in _this_ accursed life;
and _there_--somewhere lost to me--things were happening--momentous,
terrible things.... I lived at nights--my days, my waking days, this
life I am living now, became a faded, far-away dream, a drab setting,
the cover of the book.’

He thought.

‘I could tell you all, tell you every little thing in the dream, but as
to what I did in the daytime--no. I could not tell--I do not remember.
My memory--my memory has gone. The business of life slips from me----’

He leant forward, and pressed his hands upon his eyes. For a long time
he said nothing.

‘And then?’ said I.

‘The war burst like a hurricane.’

He stared before him at unspeakable things.

‘And then?’ I urged again.

‘One touch of unreality,’ he said, in the low tone of a man who speaks
to himself, ‘and they would have been nightmares. But they were not
nightmares--they were not nightmares. _No!_’

He was silent for so long that it dawned upon me that there was a
danger of losing the rest of the story. But he went on talking again in
the same tone of questioning self-communion.

‘What was there to do but flight? I had not thought the war would
touch Capri--I had seemed to see Capri as being out of it all, as
the contrast to it all; but two nights after the whole place was
shouting and bawling, every woman almost and every other man wore a
badge--Gresham’s badge--and there was no music but a jangling war-song
over and over again, and everywhere men enlisting, and in the dancing
halls they were drilling. The whole island was a-whirl with rumours; it
was said, again and again, that fighting had begun. I had not expected
this. I had seen so little of the life of pleasure that I had failed to
reckon with this violence of the amateurs. And as for me, I was out of
it. I was like a man who might have prevented the firing of a magazine.
The time had gone. I was no one; the vainest stripling with a badge
counted for more than I. The crowd jostled us and bawled in our ears;
that accursed song deafened us; a woman shrieked at my lady because no
badge was on her, and we two went back to our own place again, ruffled
and insulted--my lady white and silent, and I a-quiver with rage. So
furious was I, I could have quarrelled with her if I could have found
one shade of accusation in her eyes.

‘All my magnificence had gone from me. I walked up and down our rock
cell, and outside was the darkling sea and a light to the southward
that flared and passed and came again.

‘“We must get out of this place,” I said over and over. “I have made my
choice, and I will have no hand in these troubles. I will have nothing
of this war. We have taken our lives out of all these things. This is
no refuge for us. Let us go.”

‘And the next day we were already in flight from the war that covered
the world.

‘And all the rest was Flight--all the rest was Flight.’

He mused darkly.

‘How much was there of it?’

He made no answer.

‘How many days?’

His face was white and drawn and his hands were clenched. He took no
heed of my curiosity.

I tried to draw him back to his story with questions.

‘Where did you go?’ I said.

‘When?’

‘When you left Capri.’

‘South-west,’ he said, and glanced at me for a second. ‘We went in a
boat.’

‘But I should have thought an aeroplane?’

‘They had been seized.’

I questioned him no more. Presently I thought he was beginning again.
He broke out in an argumentative monotone:--

‘But why should it be? If, indeed, this battle, this slaughter and
stress, _is_ life, why have we this craving for pleasure and beauty?
If there _is_ no refuge, if there is no place of peace, and if all
our dreams of quiet places are a folly and a snare, why have we such
dreams? Surely it was no ignoble cravings, no base intentions, had
brought us to this; it was love had isolated us. Love had come to me
with her eyes and robed in her beauty, more glorious than all else in
life, in the very shape and colour of life, and summoned me away. I had
silenced all the voices, I had answered all the questions--I had come
to her. And suddenly there was nothing but War and Death!’

I had an inspiration. ‘After all,’ I said, ‘it could have been only a
dream.’

‘A dream!’ he cried, flaming upon me, ‘a dream--when, even now----’

For the first time he became animated. A faint flush crept into his
cheek. He raised his open hand and clenched it, and dropped it to his
knee. He spoke, looking away from me, and for all the rest of the time
he looked away. ‘We are but phantoms,’ he said, ‘and the phantoms of
phantoms, desires like cloud shadows and wills of straw that eddy
in the wind; the days pass, use and wont carry us through as a train
carries the shadow of its lights--so be it? But one thing is real and
certain, one thing is no dream stuff, but eternal and enduring. It is
the centre of my life, and all other things about it are subordinate or
altogether vain. I loved her, that woman of a dream. And she and I are
dead together!

‘A dream! How can it be a dream, when it drenched a living life with
unappeasable sorrow, when it makes all that I have lived for and cared
for worthless and unmeaning?

‘Until that very moment when she was killed I believe we had still a
chance of getting away,’ he said. ‘All through the night and morning
that we sailed across the sea from Capri to Salerno we talked of
escape. We were full of hope, and it clung about us to the end, hope
for the life together we should lead, out of it all, out of the battle
and struggle, the wild and empty passions, the empty, arbitrary “thou
shalt” and “thou shalt not” of the world. We were uplifted, as though
our quest was a holy thing, as though love for one another was a
mission....

‘Even when from our boat we saw the fair face of that great rock
Capri--already scarred and gashed by the gun emplacements and
hiding-places that were to make it a fastness--we reckoned nothing of
the imminent slaughter, though the fury of preparation hung about in
puffs and clouds of dust at a hundred points amidst the gray; but,
indeed, I made a text of that and talked. There, you know, was the
rock, still beautiful for all its scars, with its countless windows and
arches and ways, tier upon tier, for a thousand feet, a vast carving of
gray, broken by vine-clad terraces, and lemon and orange groves, and
masses of agave and prickly pear, and puffs of almond blossom. And out
under the archway that is built over the Piccola Marina other boats
were coming; and as we came round the cape and within sight of the
mainland, another little string of boats came into view, driving before
the wind towards the south-west. In a little while a multitude had come
out, the remoter just little specks of ultramarine in the shadow of the
eastward cliff.

‘“It is love and reason,” I said, “fleeing from all this madness of
war.”

‘And though we presently saw a squadron of aeroplanes flying across
the southern sky we did not heed it. There it was--a line of little
dots in the sky--and then more, dotting the south-eastern horizon, and
then still more, until all that quarter of the sky was stippled with
blue specks. Now they were all thin little strokes of blue, and now
one and now a multitude would heel and catch the sun and become short
flashes of light. They came, rising and falling, and growing larger,
like some huge flight of gulls or rooks or such-like birds, moving
with a marvellous uniformity, and ever as they drew nearer they spread
over a greater width of sky. The southward wing flung itself in an
arrow-headed cloud athwart the sun. And then suddenly they swept round
to the eastward and streamed eastward, growing smaller and smaller and
clearer and clearer again until they vanished from the sky. And after
that we noted to the northward, and very high, Gresham’s fighting
machines hanging high over Naples like an evening swarm of gnats.

‘It seemed to have no more to do with us than a flight of birds.

‘Even the mutter of guns far away in the south-east seemed to us to
signify nothing....

‘Each day, each dream after that, we were still exalted, still seeking
that refuge where we might live and love. Fatigue had come upon us,
pain and many distresses. For though we were dusty and stained by our
toilsome tramping, and half starved, and with the horror of the dead
men we had seen and the flight of the peasants--for very soon a gust of
fighting swept up the peninsula--with these things haunting our minds
it still resulted only in a deepening resolution to escape. Oh, but she
was brave and patient! She who had never faced hardship and exposure
had courage for herself--and me. We went to and fro seeking an outlet,
over a country all commandeered and ransacked by the gathering hosts of
war. Always we went on foot. At first there were other fugitives, but
we did not mingle with them. Some escaped northward, some were caught
in the torrent of peasantry that swept along the main roads; many gave
themselves into the hands of the soldiery and were sent northward. Many
of the men were impressed. But we kept away from these things; we had
brought no money to bribe a passage north, and I feared for my lady
at the hands of these conscript crowds. We had landed at Salerno, and
we had been turned back from Cava, and we had tried to cross towards
Taranto by a pass over Mount Alburno, but we had been driven back for
want of food, and so we had come down among the marshes by Pæstum,
where those great temples stand alone. I had some vague idea that by
Pæstum it might be possible to find a boat or something, and take once
more to sea. And there it was the battle overtook us.

‘A sort of soul-blindness had me. Plainly I could see that we were
being hemmed in; that the great net of that giant Warfare had us in its
toils. Many times we had seen the levies that had come down from the
North going to and fro, and had come upon them in the distance amidst
the mountains making ways for the ammunition and preparing the mounting
of the guns. Once we fancied they had fired at us, taking us for
spies--at any rate a shot had gone shuddering over us. Several times
we had hidden in woods from hovering aeroplanes.

‘But all these things do not matter now, these nights of flight and
pain.... We were in an open place near those great temples at Pæstum,
at last, on a blank stony place dotted with spiky bushes, empty and
desolate and so flat that a grove of eucalyptus far away showed to the
feet of its stems. How I can see it! My lady was sitting down under
a bush resting a little, for she was very weak and weary, and I was
standing up watching to see if I could tell the distance of the firing
that came and went. They were still, you know, fighting far from each
other, with these terrible new weapons that had never before been used:
guns that would carry beyond sight, and aeroplanes that would do----
What _they_ would do no man could foretell.

‘I knew that we were between the two armies, and that they drew
together. I knew we were in danger, and that we could not stop there
and rest!

‘Though all those things were in my mind, they were in the background.
They seemed to be affairs beyond our concern. Chiefly, I was thinking
of my lady. An aching distress filled me. For the first time she had
owned herself beaten and had fallen a-weeping. Behind me I could hear
her sobbing, but I would not turn round to her because I knew she had
need of weeping, and had held herself so far and so long for me. It was
well, I thought, that she would weep and rest, and then we would toil
on again, for I had no inkling of the thing that hung so near. Even now
I can see her as she sat there, her lovely hair upon her shoulder, can
mark again the deepening hollow of her cheek.

‘“If we had parted,” she said, “if I had let you go----”

‘“No,” said I. “Even now I do not repent. I will not repent; I made my
choice, and I will hold on to the end.”

‘And then----

‘Overhead in the sky flashed something and burst, and all about us
I heard the bullets making a noise like a handful of peas suddenly
thrown. They chipped the stones about us, and whirled fragments from
the bricks and passed....’

He put his hand to his mouth and then moistened his lips.

‘At the flash I had turned about....

‘You know--she stood up----

‘She stood up, you know, and moved a step towards me----

‘As though she wanted to reach me----

‘And she had been shot through the heart.’

He stopped and stared at me. I felt all that foolish incapacity an
Englishman feels on such occasions. I met his eyes for a moment, and
then stared out of the window. For a long space we kept silence. When
at last I looked at him he was sitting back in his corner, his arms
folded and his teeth gnawing at his knuckles.

He bit his nail suddenly, and stared at it.

‘I carried her, he said, ‘towards the temples, in my arms--as though it
mattered. I don’t know why. They seemed a sort of sanctuary, you know,
they had lasted so long, I suppose.

‘She must have died almost instantly. Only--I talked to her--all the
way.’

Silence again.

‘I have seen those temples,’ I said abruptly, and indeed he had brought
those still, sunlit arcades of worn sandstone very vividly before me.

‘It was the brown one, the big brown one. I sat down on a fallen pillar
and held her in my arms.... Silent after the first babble was over.
And after a little while the lizards came out and ran about again, as
though nothing unusual was going on, as though nothing had changed....
It was tremendously still there, the sun high and the shadows still;
even the shadows of the weeds upon the entablature were still--in spite
of the thudding and banging that went all about the sky.

‘I seem to remember that the aeroplanes came up out of the south, and
that the battle went away to the west. One aeroplane was struck, and
overset and fell. I remember that--though it didn’t interest me in
the least. It didn’t seem to signify. It was like a wounded gull, you
know--flapping for a time in the water. I could see it down the aisle
of the temple--a black thing in the bright blue water.

‘Three or four times shells burst about the beach, and then that
ceased. Each time that happened all the lizards scuttled in and hid
for a space. That was all the mischief done, except that once a stray
bullet gashed the stone hard by--made just a fresh bright surface.

‘As the shadows grew longer, the stillness seemed greater.

‘The curious thing,’ he remarked, with the manner of a man who makes
a trivial conversation, ‘is that I didn’t _think_--I didn’t think
at all. I sat with her in my arms amidst the stones--in a sort of
lethargy--stagnant.

‘And I don’t remember waking up. I don’t remember dressing that day.
I know I found myself in my office, with my letters all slit open in
front of me, and how I was struck by the absurdity of being there,
seeing that in reality I was sitting, stunned, in that Pæstum Temple
with a dead woman in my arms. I read my letters like a machine. I have
forgotten what they were about.’

He stopped, and there was a long silence.

Suddenly I perceived that we were running down the incline from Chalk
Farm to Euston. I started at this passing of time. I turned on him
with a brutal question with the tone of ‘Now or never.’

‘And did you dream again?’

‘Yes.’

He seemed to force himself to finish. His voice was very low.

‘Once more, and as it were only for a few instants. I seemed to have
suddenly awakened out of a great apathy, to have risen into a sitting
position, and the body lay there on the stones beside me. A gaunt body.
Not her, you know. So soon--it was not her....

‘I may have heard voices. I do not know. Only I knew clearly that men
were coming into the solitude and that that was a last outrage.

‘I stood up and walked through the temple, and there came into
sight--first one man with a yellow face, dressed in a uniform of dirty
white, trimmed with blue, and then several, climbing to the crest of
the old wall of the vanished city, and crouching there. They were
little bright figures in the sunlight, and there they hung, weapon in
hand, peering cautiously before them.

‘And further away I saw others, and then more at another point in the
wall. It was a long lax line of men in open order.

‘Presently the man I had first seen stood up and shouted a command, and
his men came tumbling down the wall and into the high weeds towards
the temple. He scrambled down with them and led them. He came facing
towards me, and when he saw me he stopped.

‘At first I had watched these men with a mere curiosity, but when I had
seen they meant to come to the temple I was moved to forbid them. I
shouted to the officer.

“‘You must not come here,” I cried, “_I_ am here, I am here with my
dead.”

‘He stared, and then shouted a question back to me in some unknown
tongue.

‘I repeated what I had said.

‘He shouted again, and I folded my arms and stood still. Presently he
spoke to his men and came forward. He carried a drawn sword.

‘I signed to him to keep away, but he continued to advance. I told him
again very patiently and clearly: “You must not come here. These are
old temples, and I am here with my dead.”

‘Presently he was so close I could see his face clearly. It was a
narrow face, with dull gray eyes, and a black moustache. He had a scar
on his upper lip, and he was dirty and unshaven. He kept shouting
unintelligible things, questions perhaps, at me.

‘I know now that he was afraid of me, but at the time that did not
occur to me. As I tried to explain to him he interrupted me in
imperious tones, bidding me, I suppose, stand aside.

‘He made to go past me, and I caught hold of him.

‘I saw his face change at my grip.

‘“You fool,” I cried. “Don’t you know? She is dead!”

‘He started back. He looked at me with cruel eyes. I saw a sort of
exultant resolve leap into them--delight. Then suddenly, with a scowl,
he swept his sword back--_so_--and thrust.’

He stopped abruptly.

I became aware of a change in the rhythm of the train. The brakes
lifted their voices and the carriage jarred and jerked. This present
world insisted upon itself, became clamorous. I saw through the
steamy window huge electric lights glaring down from tall masts upon
a fog, saw rows of stationary empty carriages passing by, and then a
signal-box, hoisting its constellation of green and red into the murky
London twilight, marched after them. I looked again at his drawn
features.

‘He ran me through the heart. It was with a sort of astonishment--no
fear, no pain--but just amazement, that I felt it pierce me, felt the
sword drive home into my body. It didn’t hurt, you know. It didn’t hurt
at all.’

The yellow platform lights came into the field of view, passing first
rapidly, then slowly, and at last stopping with a jerk. Dim shapes of
men passed to and fro without.

‘Euston!’ cried a voice.

‘Do you mean----?’

‘There was no pain, no sting or smart. Amazement and then darkness
sweeping over everything. The hot, brutal face before me, the face
of the man who had killed me, seemed to recede. It swept out of
existence----’

‘Euston!’ clamoured the voices outside; ‘Euston!’

The carriage door opened, admitting a flood of sound, and a porter
stood regarding us. The sounds of doors slamming, and the hoof-clatter
of cab-horses, and behind these things the featureless remote roar of
the London cobble-stones, came to my ears. A truck-load of lighted
lamps blazed along the platform.

‘A darkness, a flood of darkness that opened and spread and blotted out
all things.’

‘Any luggage, sir?’ said the porter.

‘And that was the end?’ I asked.

He seemed to hesitate. Then, almost inaudibly, he answered, ‘_No_.’

‘You mean?’

‘I couldn’t get to her. She was there on the other side of the
temple---- And then----’

‘Yes,’ I insisted. ‘Yes?’

‘Nightmares,’ he cried; ‘nightmares indeed! My God! Great birds that
fought and tore.’




THE NEW ACCELERATOR


Certainly, if ever a man found a guinea when he was looking for a
pin, it is my good friend Professor Gibberne. I have heard before of
investigators overshooting the mark, but never quite to the extent
that he has done. He has really, this time at any rate, without any
touch of exaggeration in the phrase, found something to revolutionise
human life. And that when he was simply seeking an all-round nervous
stimulant to bring languid people up to the stresses of these pushful
days. I have tasted the stuff now several times, and I cannot do
better than describe the effect the thing had on me. That there are
astonishing experiences in store for all in search of new sensations
will become apparent enough.

Professor Gibberne, as many people know, is my neighbour in Folkestone.
Unless my memory plays me a trick, his portrait at various ages has
already appeared in _The Strand Magazine_--I think late in 1899; but
I am unable to look it up because I have lent that volume to some
one who has never sent it back. The reader may, perhaps, recall the
high forehead and the singularly long black eyebrows that give such a
Mephistophelian touch to his face. He occupies one of those pleasant
little detached houses in the mixed style that make the western end
of the Upper Sandgate Road so interesting. His is the one with the
Flemish gables and the Moorish portico, and it is in the little room
with the mullioned bay window that he works when he is down here, and
in which of an evening we have so often smoked and talked together.
He is a mighty jester, but, besides, he likes to talk to me about his
work; he is one of those men who find a help and stimulus in talking,
and so I have been able to follow the conception of the New Accelerator
right up from a very early stage. Of course, the greater portion of his
experimental work is not done in Folkestone, but in Gower Street, in
the fine new laboratory next to the hospital that he has been the first
to use.

As every one knows, or at least as all intelligent people know, the
special department in which Gibberne has gained so great and deserved a
reputation among physiologists is the action of drugs upon the nervous
system. Upon soporifics, sedatives, and anæsthetics he is, I am told,
unequalled. He is also a chemist of considerable eminence, and I
suppose in the subtle and complex jungle of riddles that centres about
the ganglion cell and the axis fibre there are little cleared places of
his making, little glades of illumination, that, until he sees fit to
publish his results, are still inaccessible to every other living man.
And in the last few years he has been particularly assiduous upon this
question of nervous stimulants, and already, before the discovery of
the New Accelerator, very successful with them. Medical science has to
thank him for at least three distinct and absolutely safe invigorators
of unrivalled value to practising men. In cases of exhaustion the
preparation known as Gibberne’s B Syrup has, I suppose, saved more
lives already than any lifeboat round the coast.

‘But none of these little things begin to satisfy me yet,’ he told me
nearly a year ago. ‘Either they increase the central energy without
affecting the nerves, or they simply increase the available energy by
lowering the nervous conductivity; and all of them are unequal and
local in their operation. One wakes up the heart and viscera and leaves
the brain stupefied, one gets at the brain champagne fashion, and does
nothing good for the solar plexus, and what I want--and what, if it’s
an earthly possibility, I mean to have--is a stimulant that stimulates
all round, that wakes you up for a time from the crown of your head
to the tip of your great toe, and makes you go two--or even three--to
everybody else’s one. Eh? That’s the thing I’m after.’

‘It would tire a man,’ I said.

‘Not a doubt of it. And you’d eat double or treble--and all that. But
just think what the thing would mean. Imagine yourself with a little
phial like this’--he held up a little bottle of green glass and marked
his points with it--‘and in this precious phial is the power to think
twice as fast, move twice as quickly, do twice as much work in a given
time as you could otherwise do.’

‘But is such a thing possible?’

‘I believe so. If it isn’t, I’ve wasted my time for a year. These
various preparations of the hypophosphites, for example, seem to show
that something of the sort.... Even if it was only one and a half times
as fast it would do.’

‘It _would_ do,’ I said.

‘If you were a statesman in a corner, for example, time rushing up
against you, something urgent to be done, eh?’

‘He could dose his private secretary,’ I said.

‘And gain--double time. And think if _you_, for example, wanted to
finish a book.’

‘Usually,’ I said, ‘I wish I’d never begun ’em.’

‘Or a doctor, driven to death, wants to sit down and think out a case.
Or a barrister--or a man cramming for an examination.’

‘Worth a guinea a drop,’ said I, ‘and more--to men like that.’

‘And in a duel, again,’ said Gibberne, ‘where it all depends on your
quickness in pulling the trigger.’

‘Or in fencing,’ I echoed.

‘You see,’ said Gibberne, ‘if I get it as an all-round thing, it will
really do you no harm at all--except perhaps to an infinitesimal degree
it brings you nearer old age. You will just have lived twice to other
people’s once----’

‘I suppose,’ I meditated, ‘in a duel--it would be fair?’

‘That’s a question for the seconds,’ said Gibberne.

I harked back further. ‘And you really think such a thing _is_
possible?’ I said.

‘As possible,’ said Gibberne, and glanced at something that went
throbbing by the window, ‘as a motor-bus. As a matter of fact----’

He paused and smiled at me deeply, and tapped slowly on the edge of his
desk with the green phial. ‘I think I know the stuff.... Already I’ve
got something coming.’ The nervous smile upon his face betrayed the
gravity of his revelation. He rarely talked of his actual experimental
work unless things were very near the end. ‘And it may be, it may be--I
shouldn’t be surprised--it may even do the thing at a greater rate than
twice.’

‘It will be rather a big thing,’ I hazarded.

‘It will be, I think, rather a big thing.’

But I don’t think he quite knew what a big thing it was to be, for all
that.

I remember we had several talks about the stuff after that. ‘The New
Accelerator’ he called it, and his tone about it grew more confident
on each occasion. Sometimes he talked nervously of unexpected
physiological results its use might have, and then he would get a
little unhappy; at others he was frankly mercenary, and we debated
long and anxiously how the preparation might be turned to commercial
account. ‘It’s a good thing,’ said Gibberne, ‘a tremendous thing. I
know I’m giving the world something, and I think it only reasonable
we should expect the world to pay. The dignity of science is all very
well, but I think somehow I must have the monopoly of the stuff for,
say, ten years. I don’t see why _all_ the fun in life should go to the
dealers in ham.’

My own interest in the coming drug certainly did not wane in the time.
I have always had a queer little twist towards metaphysics in my
mind. I have always been given to paradoxes about space and time, and
it seemed to me that Gibberne was really preparing no less than the
absolute acceleration of life. Suppose a man repeatedly dosed with such
a preparation: he would live an active and record life indeed, but he
would be an adult at eleven, middle-aged at twenty-five, and by thirty
well on the road to senile decay. It seemed to me that so far Gibberne
was only going to do for any one who took his drug exactly what Nature
has done for the Jews and Orientals, who are men in their teens and
aged by fifty, and quicker in thought and act than we are all the time.
The marvel of drugs has always been great to my mind; you can madden
a man, calm a man, make him incredibly strong and alert or a helpless
log, quicken this passion and allay that, all by means of drugs, and
here was a new miracle to be added to this strange armoury of phials
the doctors use! But Gibberne was far too eager upon his technical
points to enter very keenly into my aspect of the question.

It was the 7th or 8th of August when he told me the distillation that
would decide his failure or success for a time was going forward as we
talked, and it was on the 10th that he told me the thing was done and
the New Accelerator a tangible reality in the world. I met him as I was
going up the Sandgate Hill towards Folkestone--I think I was going to
get my hair cut, and he came hurrying down to meet me--I suppose he was
coming to my house to tell me at once of his success. I remember that
his eyes were unusually bright and his face flushed, and I noted even
then the swift alacrity of his step.

‘It’s done,’ he cried, and gripped my hand, speaking very fast; ‘it’s
more than done. Come up to my house and see.’

‘Really?’

‘Really!’ he shouted. ‘Incredibly! Come up and see.’

‘And it does--twice?’

‘It does more, much more. It scares me. Come up and see the stuff.
Taste it! Try it! It’s the most amazing stuff on earth.’ He gripped
my arm and, walking at such a pace that he forced me into a trot,
went shouting with me up the hill. A whole _char-à-banc_-full of
people turned and stared at us in unison after the manner of people in
_chars-à-banc_. It was one of those hot, clear days that Folkestone
sees so much of, every colour incredibly bright and every outline hard.
There was a breeze, of course, but not so much breeze as sufficed under
these conditions to keep me cool and dry. I panted for mercy.

‘I’m not walking fast, am I?’ cried Gibberne, and slackened his pace to
a quick march.

‘You’ve been taking some of this stuff,’ I puffed.

‘No,’ he said. ‘At the utmost a drop of water that stood in a beaker
from which I had washed out the last traces of the stuff. I took some
last night, you know. But that is ancient history now.’

‘And it goes twice?’ I said, nearing his doorway in a grateful
perspiration.

‘It goes a thousand times, many thousand times!’ cried Gibberne, with a
dramatic gesture, flinging open his Early English carved oak gate.

‘Phew!’ said I, and followed him to the door.

‘I don’t know how many times it goes,’ he said, with his latch-key in
his hand.

‘And you----’

‘It throws all sorts of light on nervous physiology, it kicks the
theory of vision into a perfectly new shape.... Heaven knows how many
thousand times. We’ll try all that after---- The thing is to try the
stuff now.’

‘Try the stuff?’ I said, as we went along the passage.

‘Rather,’ said Gibberne, turning on me in his study. ‘There it is in
that little green phial there! Unless you happen to be afraid?’

I am a careful man by nature, and only theoretically adventurous. I
_was_ afraid. But on the other hand, there is pride.

‘Well,’ I haggled. ‘You say you’ve tried it?’

‘I’ve tried it,’ he said, ‘and I don’t look hurt by it, do I? I don’t
even look livery, and I _feel_----’

I sat down. ‘Give me the potion,’ I said. ‘If the worst comes to the
worst it will save having my hair cut, and that, I think, is one of the
most hateful duties of a civilised man. How do you take the mixture?’

‘With water,’ said Gibberne, whacking down a carafe.

He stood up in front of his desk and regarded me in his easy-chair;
his manner was suddenly affected by a touch of the Harley Street
specialist. ‘It’s rum stuff, you know,’ he said.

I made a gesture with my hand.

‘I must warn you, in the first place, as soon as you’ve got it down
to shut your eyes, and open them very cautiously in a minute or so’s
time. One still sees. The sense of vision is a question of length of
vibration, and not of multitude of impacts; but there’s a kind of shock
to the retina, a nasty giddy confusion just at the time if the eyes are
open. Keep ’em shut.’

‘Shut,’ I said. ‘Good!’

‘And the next thing is, keep still. Don’t begin to whack about. You
may fetch something a nasty rap if you do. Remember you will be going
several thousand times faster than you ever did before, heart, lungs,
muscles, brain--everything--and you will hit hard without knowing it.
You won’t know it, you know. You’ll feel just as you do now. Only
everything in the world will seem to be going ever so many thousand
times slower than it ever went before. That’s what makes it so deuced
queer.’

‘Lor,’ I said. ‘And you mean----’

‘You’ll see,’ said he, and took up a little measure. He glanced at the
material on his desk. ‘Glasses,’ he said, ‘water. All here. Mustn’t
take too much for the first attempt.

The little phial glucked out its precious contents. ‘Don’t forget what
I told you,’ he said, turning the contents of the measure into a glass
in the manner of an Italian waiter measuring whisky. ‘Sit with the eyes
tightly shut and in absolute stillness for two minutes,’ he said. ‘Then
you will hear me speak.’

He added an inch or so of water to the little dose in each glass.

‘By-the-by,’ he said, ‘don’t put your glass down. Keep it in your hand
and rest your hand on your knee. Yes--so. And now----’

He raised his glass.

‘The New Accelerator,’ I said.

‘The New Accelerator,’ he answered, and we touched glasses and drank,
and instantly I closed my eyes.

You know that blank non-existence into which one drops when one has
taken ‘gas.’ For an indefinite interval it was like that. Then I heard
Gibberne telling me to wake up, and I stirred and opened my eyes. There
he stood as he had been standing, glass still in hand. It was empty,
that was all the difference.

‘Well?’ said I.

‘Nothing out of the way?’

‘Nothing. A slight feeling of exhilaration, perhaps. Nothing more.’

‘Sounds?’

‘Things are still,’ I said. ‘By Jove! yes! They _are_ still. Except the
sort of faint pat, patter, like rain falling on different things. What
is it?’

‘Analysed sounds,’ I think he said, but I am not sure. He glanced at
the window. ‘Have you ever seen a curtain before a window fixed in that
way before?’

I followed his eyes, and there was the end of the curtain, frozen, as
it were, corner high, in the act of flapping briskly in the breeze.

‘No,’ said I; ‘that’s odd.’

‘And here,’ he said, and opened the hand that held the glass. Naturally
I winced, expecting the glass to smash. But so far from smashing, it
did not even seem to stir; it hung in mid-air--motionless. ‘Roughly
speaking,’ said Gibberne, ‘an object in these latitudes falls 16 feet
in the first second. This glass is falling 16 feet in a second now.
Only, you see, it hasn’t been falling yet for the hundredth part of a
second. That gives you some idea of the pace of my Accelerator.’

And he waved his hand round and round, over and under the slowly
sinking glass. Finally he took it by the bottom, pulled it down and
placed it very carefully on the table. ‘Eh?’ he said to me, and laughed.

‘That seems all right,’ I said, and began very gingerly to raise myself
from my chair. I felt perfectly well, very light and comfortable, and
quite confident in my mind. I was going fast all over. My heart, for
example, was beating a thousand times a second, but that caused me no
discomfort at all. I looked out of the window. An immovable cyclist,
head down and with a frozen puff of dust behind his driving-wheel,
scorched to overtake a galloping _char-à-banc_ that did not stir. I
gaped in amazement at this incredible spectacle. ‘Gibberne,’ I cried,
‘how long will this confounded stuff last?’

‘Heaven knows!’ he answered. ‘Last time I took it I went to bed and
slept it off. I tell you, I was frightened. It must have lasted some
minutes, I think--it seemed like hours. But after a bit it slows down
rather suddenly, I believe.’

I was proud to observe that I did not feel frightened--I suppose
because there were two of us. ‘Why shouldn’t we go out?’ I asked.

‘Why not?’

‘They’ll see us.’

‘Not they. Goodness, no! Why, we shall be going a thousand times faster
than the quickest conjuring trick that was ever done. Come along! Which
way shall we go? Window, or door?’

And out by the window we went.

Assuredly of all the strange experiences that I have ever had, or
imagined, or read of other people having or imagining, that little raid
I made with Gibberne on the Folkestone Leas, under the influence of the
New Accelerator, was the strangest and maddest of all. We went out by
his gate into the road, and there we made a minute examination of the
statuesque passing traffic. The tops of the wheels and some of the
legs of the horses of this _char-à-banc_, the end of the whip-lash and
the lower jaw of the conductor--who was just beginning to yawn--were
perceptibly in motion, but all the rest of the lumbering conveyance
seemed still. And quite noiseless except for a faint rattling that came
from one man’s throat. And as parts of this frozen edifice there were
a driver, you know, and a conductor, and eleven people! The effect
as we walked about the thing began by being madly queer and ended by
being--disagreeable. There they were, people like ourselves and yet not
like ourselves, frozen in careless attitudes, caught in mid-gesture. A
girl and a man smiled at one another, a leering smile that threatened
to last for evermore; a woman in a floppy capelline rested her arm on
the rail and stared at Gibberne’s house with the unwinking stare of
eternity; a man stroked his moustache like a figure of wax, and another
stretched a tiresome stiff hand with extended fingers towards his
loosened hat. We stared at them, we laughed at them, we made faces at
them, and then a sort of disgust of them came upon us, and we turned
away and walked round in front of the cyclist towards the Leas.

‘Goodness!’ cried Gibberne, suddenly; ‘look there!’

He pointed, and there at the tip of his finger and sliding down the air
with wings flapping slowly and at the speed of an exceptionally languid
snail--was a bee.

And so we came out upon the Leas. There the thing seemed madder than
ever. The band was playing in the upper stand, though all the sound it
made for us was a low-pitched, wheezy rattle, a sort of prolonged last
sigh that passed at times into a sound like the slow, muffled ticking
of some monstrous clock. Frozen people stood erect, strange, silent,
self-conscious-looking dummies hung unstably in mid-stride, promenading
upon the grass. I passed close to a little poodle dog suspended in the
act of leaping, and watched the slow movement of his legs as he sank to
earth. ‘Lord, look _here_!’ cried Gibberne, and we halted for a moment
before a magnificent person in white faint-striped flannels, white
shoes, and a Panama hat, who turned back to wink at two gaily dressed
ladies he had passed. A wink, studied with such leisurely deliberation
as we could afford, is an unattractive thing. It loses any quality of
alert gaiety, and one remarks that the winking eye does not completely
close, that under its drooping lid appears the lower edge of an eyeball
and a little line of white. ‘Heaven give me memory,’ said I, ‘and I
will never wink again.’

‘Or smile,’ said Gibberne, with his eye on the lady’s answering teeth.

‘It’s infernally hot, somehow,’ said I, ‘Lets go slower.’

‘Oh, come along!’ said Gibberne.

We picked our way among the bath-chairs in the path. Many of the people
sitting in the chairs seemed almost natural in their passive poses, but
the contorted scarlet of the bandsmen was not a restful thing to see.
A purple-faced little gentleman was frozen in the midst of a violent
struggle to refold his newspaper against the wind; there were many
evidences that all these people in their sluggish way were exposed to
a considerable breeze, a breeze that had no existence so far as our
sensations went. We came out and walked a little way from the crowd,
and turned and regarded it. To see all that multitude changed to a
picture, smitten rigid, as it were, into the semblance of realistic
wax, was impossibly wonderful. It was absurd, of course; but it filled
me with an irrational, an exultant sense of superior advantage.
Consider the wonder of it! All that I had said, and thought, and done
since the stuff had begun to work in my veins had happened, so far as
those people, so far as the world in general went, in the twinkling of
an eye. ‘The New Accelerator----’ I began, but Gibberne interrupted me.

‘There’s that infernal old woman!’ he said.

‘What old woman?’

‘Lives next door to me,’ said Gibberne. ‘Has a lapdog that yaps. Gods!
The temptation is strong!’

There is something very boyish and impulsive about Gibberne at times.
Before I could expostulate with him he had dashed forward, snatched the
unfortunate animal out of visible existence, and was running violently
with it towards the cliff of the Leas. It was most extraordinary. The
little brute, you know, didn’t bark or wriggle or make the slightest
sign of vitality. It kept quite stiffly in an attitude of somnolent
repose, and Gibberne held it by the neck. It was like running about
with a dog of wood. ‘Gibberne,’ I cried, ‘put it down!’ Then I said
something else. ‘If you run like that, Gibberne,’ I cried, ‘you’ll set
your clothes on fire. Your linen trousers are going brown as it is!’

He clapped his hand on his thigh and stood hesitating on the verge.
‘Gibberne,’ I cried, coming up, ‘put it down. This heat is too much!
It’s our running so! Two or three miles a second! Friction of the air!’

‘What?’ he said, glancing at the dog.

‘Friction of the air,’ I shouted. ‘Friction of the air. Going too fast.
Like meteorites and things. Too hot. And, Gibberne! Gibberne! I’m all
over pricking and a sort of perspiration. You can see people stirring
slightly. I believe the stuff’s working off! Put that dog down.’

‘Eh?’ he said.

‘It’s working off,’ I repeated. ‘We’re too hot and the stuff’s working
off! I’m wet through.’

He stared at me, then at the band, the wheezy rattle of whose
performance was certainly going faster. Then with a tremendous sweep of
the arm he hurled the dog away from him and it went spinning upward,
still inanimate, and hung at last over the grouped parasols of a knot
of chattering people. Gibberne was gripping my elbow. ‘By Jove!’ he
cried, ‘I believe it is! A sort of hot pricking and--yes. That man’s
moving his pocket-handkerchief! Perceptibly. We must get out of this
sharp.’

But we could not get out of it sharply enough. Luckily, perhaps! For we
might have run, and if we had run we should, I believe, have burst into
flames! Almost certainly we should have burst into flames! You know we
had neither of us thought of that.... But before we could even begin to
run the action of the drug had ceased. It was the business of a minute
fraction of a second. The effect of the New Accelerator passed like
the drawing of a curtain, vanished in the movement of a hand. I heard
Gibberne’s voice in infinite alarm. ‘Sit down,’ he said, and flop,
down upon the turf at the edge of the Leas I sat--scorching as I sat.
There is a patch of burnt grass there still where I sat down. The whole
stagnation seemed to wake up as I did so, the disarticulated vibration
of the band rushed together into a blast of music, the promenaders
put their feet down and walked their ways, the papers and flags began
flapping, smiles passed into words, the winker finished his wink and
went on his way complacently, and all the seated people moved and spoke.

The whole world had come alive again, was going as fast as we were, or
rather we were going no faster than the rest of the world. It was like
slowing down as one comes into a railway station. Everything seemed to
spin round for a second or two, I had the most transient feeling of
nausea, and that was all. And the little dog, which had seemed to hang
for a moment when the force of Gibberne’s arm was expended, fell with
a swift acceleration clean through a lady’s parasol!

That was the saving of us. Unless it was for one corpulent old
gentleman in a bath-chair, who certainly did start at the sight of
us, and afterwards regarded us at intervals with a darkly suspicious
eye, and, finally, I believe, said something to his nurse about us,
I doubt if a solitary person remarked our sudden appearance among
them. Plop! We must have appeared abruptly. We ceased to smoulder
almost at once, though the turf beneath me was uncomfortably hot. The
attention of every one--including even the Amusements’ Association
band, which on this occasion, for the only time in its history, got out
of tune--was arrested by the amazing fact, and the still more amazing
yapping and uproar caused by the fact, that a respectable, over-fed
lapdog sleeping quietly to the east of the bandstand should suddenly
fall through the parasol of a lady on the west--in a slightly singed
condition due to the extreme velocity of its movements through the air.
In these absurd days, too, when we are all trying to be as psychic, and
silly, and superstitious as possible! People got up and trod on other
people, chairs were overturned, the Leas policeman ran. How the matter
settled itself I do not know--we were much too anxious to disentangle
ourselves from the affair and get out of range of the eye of the old
gentleman in the bath-chair to make minute inquiries. As soon as we
were sufficiently cool and sufficiently recovered from our giddiness
and nausea and confusion of mind to do so we stood up, and skirting
the crowd, directed our steps back along the road below the Metropole
towards Gibberne’s house. But amidst the din I heard very distinctly
the gentleman who had been sitting beside the lady of the ruptured
sunshade using quite unjustifiable threats and language to one of those
chair-attendants who had ‘Inspector’ written on their caps: ‘If you
didn’t throw the dog,’ he said, ‘who _did_?’

The sudden return of movement and familiar noises, and our natural
anxiety about ourselves (our clothes were still dreadfully hot, and
the fronts of the thighs of Gibberne’s white trousers were scorched a
drabbish brown), prevented the minute observations I should have liked
to make on all these things. Indeed, I really made no observations of
any scientific value on that return. The bee, of course, had gone.
I looked for that cyclist, but he was already out of sight as we
came into the Upper Sandgate Road or hidden from us by traffic; the
_char-à-banc_, however, with its people now all alive and stirring, was
clattering along at a spanking pace almost abreast of the nearer church.

We noted, however, that the window-sill on which we had stepped in
getting out of the house was slightly singed, and that the impressions
of our feet on the gravel on the path were unusually deep.

So it was I had my first experience of the New Accelerator. Practically
we had been running about and saying and doing all sorts of things in
the space of a second or so of time. We had lived half an hour while
the band had played, perhaps, two bars. But the effect it had upon us
was that the whole world had stopped for our convenient inspection.
Considering all things, and particularly considering our rashness
in venturing out of the house, the experience might certainly have
been much more disagreeable than it was. It showed, no doubt, that
Gibberne has still much to learn before his preparation is a manageable
convenience, but its practicability it certainly demonstrated beyond
all cavil.

Since that adventure he has been steadily bringing its use under
control, and I have several times, and without the slightest bad
result, taken measured doses under his direction; though I must
confess I have not yet ventured abroad again while under its influence.
I may mention, for example, that this story has been written at one
sitting and without interruption, except for the nibbling of some
chocolate, by its means. I began at 6.25, and my watch is now very
nearly at the minute past the half-hour. The convenience of securing
a long, uninterrupted spell of work in the midst of a day full of
engagements cannot be exaggerated. Gibberne is now working at the
quantitative handling of his preparation, with especial reference
to its distinctive effects upon different types of constitution.
He then hopes to find a Retarder, with which to dilute its present
rather excessive potency. The Retarder will, of course, have the
reverse effect to the Accelerator; used alone it should enable the
patient to spread a few seconds over many hours of ordinary time,
and so to maintain an apathetic inaction, a glacier-like absence of
alacrity, amidst the most animated or irritating surroundings. The
two things together must necessarily work an entire revolution in
civilised existence. It is the beginning of our escape from that Time
Garment of which Carlyle speaks. While this Accelerator will enable
us to concentrate ourselves with tremendous impact upon any moment or
occasion that demands our utmost sense and vigour, the Retarder will
enable us to pass in passive tranquillity through infinite hardship
and tedium. Perhaps I am a little optimistic about the Retarder, which
has indeed still to be discovered, but about the Accelerator there is
no possible sort of doubt whatever. Its appearance upon the market in
a convenient, controllable, and assimilable form is a matter of the
next few months. It will be obtainable of all chemists and druggists,
in small green bottles, at a high but, considering its extraordinary
qualities, by no means excessive price. Gibberne’s Nervous Accelerator
it will be called, and he hopes to be able to supply it in three
strengths: one in 200, one in 900, and one in 2000, distinguished by
yellow, pink, and white labels respectively.

No doubt its use renders a great number of very extraordinary things
possible; for, of course, the most remarkable and, possibly, even
criminal proceedings may be effected with impunity by thus dodging, as
it were, into the interstices of time. Like all potent preparations,
it will be liable to abuse. We have, however, discussed this aspect
of the question very thoroughly, and we have decided that this is
purely a matter of medical jurisprudence and altogether outside our
province. We shall manufacture and sell the Accelerator, and as for the
consequences--we shall see.




THE DOOR IN THE WALL


I

One confidential evening, not three months ago, Lionel Wallace told me
this story of the Door in the Wall. And at the time I thought that so
far as he was concerned it was a true story.

He told it me with such a direct simplicity of conviction that I
could not do otherwise than believe in him. But in the morning, in my
own flat, I woke to a different atmosphere, and as I lay in bed and
recalled the things he had told me, stripped of the glamour of his
earnest slow voice, denuded of the focused, shaded table light, the
shadowy atmosphere that wrapped about him and me, and the pleasant
bright things, the dessert and glasses and napery of the dinner we had
shared, making them for the time a bright little world quite cut off
from everyday realities, I saw it all as frankly incredible. ‘He was
mystifying!’ I said, and then: ‘How well he did it!... It isn’t quite
the thing I should have expected him, of all people, to do well.’

Afterwards as I sat up in bed and sipped my morning tea, I found myself
trying to account for the flavour of reality that perplexed me in his
impossible reminiscences, by supposing they did in some way suggest,
present, convey--I hardly know which word to use--experiences it was
otherwise impossible to tell.

Well, I don’t resort to that explanation now. I have got over my
intervening doubts. I believe now, as I believed at the moment of
telling, that Wallace did to the very best of his ability strip the
truth of his secret for me. But whether he himself saw, or only
thought he saw, whether he himself was the possessor of an inestimable
privilege or the victim of a fantastic dream, I cannot pretend to
guess. Even the facts of his death, which ended my doubts for ever,
throw no light on that.

That much the reader must judge for himself.

I forget now what chance comment or criticism of mine moved so reticent
a man to confide in me. He was, I think, defending himself against an
imputation of slackness and unreliability I had made in relation to a
great public movement, in which he had disappointed me. But he plunged
suddenly. ‘I have,’ he said, ‘a preoccupation----

‘I know,’ he went on, after a pause, ‘I have been negligent. The fact
is--it isn’t a case of ghosts or apparitions--but--it’s an odd thing to
tell of, Redmond--I am haunted. I am haunted by something--that rather
takes the light out of things, that fills me with longings....’

He paused, checked by that English shyness that so often overcomes
us when we would speak of moving or grave or beautiful things. ‘You
were at Saint Æthelstan’s all through,’ he said, and for a moment
that seemed to me quite irrelevant. ‘Well,’--and he paused. Then very
haltingly at first, but afterwards more easily, he began to tell of the
thing that was hidden in his life, the haunting memory of a beauty and
a happiness that filled his heart with insatiable longings, that made
all the interests and spectacle of worldly life seem dull and tedious
and vain to him.

Now that I have the clue to it, the thing seems written visibly in his
face. I have a photograph in which that look of detachment has been
caught and intensified. It reminds me of what a woman once said of
him--a woman who had loved him greatly. ‘Suddenly,’ she said, ‘the
interest goes out of him. He forgets you. He doesn’t care a rap for
you--under his very nose....’

Yet the interest was not always out of him, and when he was holding
his attention to a thing Wallace could contrive to be an extremely
successful man. His career, indeed, is set with successes. He left me
behind him long ago: he soared up over my head, and cut a figure in the
world that I couldn’t cut--anyhow. He was still a year short of forty,
and they say now that he would have been in office and very probably in
the new Cabinet if he had lived. At school he always beat me without
effort--as it were by nature. We were at school together at Saint
Æthelstan’s College in West Kensington for almost all our school-time.
He came into the school as my co-equal, but he left far above me, in a
blaze of scholarships and brilliant performance. Yet I think I made a
fair average running. And it was at school I heard first of the ‘Door
in the Wall’--that I was to hear of a second time only a month before
his death.

To him at least the Door in the Wall was a real door, leading through a
real wall to immortal realities. Of that I am now quite assured.

And it came into his life quite early, when he was a little fellow
between five and six. I remember how, as he sat making his confession
to me with a slow gravity, he reasoned and reckoned the date of it.
‘There was,’ he said, ‘a crimson Virginia creeper in it--all one bright
uniform crimson, in a clear amber sunshine against a white wall. That
came into the impression somehow, though I don’t clearly remember how,
and there were horse-chestnut leaves upon the clean pavement outside
the green door. They were blotched yellow and green, you know, not
brown nor dirty, so that they must have been new fallen. I take it that
means October. I look out for horse-chestnut leaves every year and I
ought to know.

‘If I’m right in that, I was about five years and four months old.’

He was, he said, rather a precocious little boy--he learnt to talk at
an abnormally early age, and he was so sane and ‘old-fashioned,’ as
people say, that he was permitted an amount of initiative that most
children scarcely attain by seven or eight. His mother died when he was
two, and he was under the less vigilant and authoritative care of a
nursery governess. His father was a stern, preoccupied lawyer, who gave
him little attention, and expected great things of him. For all his
brightness he found life a little gray and dull, I think. And one day
he wandered.

He could not recall the particular neglect that enabled him to get
away, nor the course he took among the West Kensington roads. All that
had faded among the incurable blurs of memory. But the white wall and
the green door stood out quite distinctly.

As his memory of that childish experience ran, he did at the very
first sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction,
a desire to get to the door and open it and walk in. And at the same
time he had the clearest conviction that either it was unwise or it was
wrong of him--he could not tell which--to yield to this attraction.
He insisted upon it as a curious thing that he knew from the very
beginning--unless memory has played him the queerest trick--that the
door was unfastened, and that he could go in as he chose.

I seem to see the figure of that little boy, drawn and repelled. And it
was very clear in his mind, too, though why it should be so was never
explained, that his father would be very angry if he went in through
that door.

Wallace described all these moments of hesitation to me with the
utmost particularity. He went right past the door, and then, with
his hands in his pockets and making an infantile attempt to whistle,
strolled right along beyond the end of the wall. There he recalls a
number of mean dirty shops, and particularly that of a plumber and
decorator with a dusty disorder of earthenware pipes, sheet lead,
ball taps, pattern books of wall paper, and tins of enamel. He stood
pretending to examine these things, and _coveting_, passionately
desiring, the green door.

Then, he said, he had a gust of emotion. He made a run for it, lest
hesitation should grip him again; he went plump with outstretched hand
through the green door and let it slam behind him. And so, in a trice,
he came into the garden that has haunted all his life.

It was very difficult for Wallace to give me his full sense of that
garden into which he came.

There was something in the very air of it that exhilarated, that gave
one a sense of lightness and good happening and well-being; there
was something in the sight of it that made all its colour clean and
perfect and subtly luminous. In the instant of coming into it one was
exquisitely glad--as only in rare moments, and when one is young and
joyful one can be glad in this world. And everything was beautiful
there....

Wallace mused before he went on telling me. ‘You see,’ he said, with
the doubtful inflection of a man who pauses at incredible things,
‘there were two great panthers there.... Yes, spotted panthers. And I
was not afraid. There was a long wide path with marble-edged flower
borders on either side, and these two huge velvety beasts were playing
there with a ball. One looked up and came towards me, a little curious
as it seemed. It came right up to me, rubbed its soft round ear very
gently against the small hand I held out, and purred. It was, I tell
you, an enchanted garden. I know. And the size? Oh! it stretched far
and wide, this way and that. I believe there were hills far away.
Heaven knows where West Kensington had suddenly got to. And somehow it
was just like coming home.

‘You know, in the very moment the door swung to behind me, I forgot
the road with its fallen chestnut leaves, its cabs and tradesmen’s
carts, I forgot the sort of gravitational pull back to the discipline
and obedience of home, I forgot all hesitations and fear, forgot
discretion, forgot all the intimate realities of this life. I became
in a moment a very glad and wonder-happy little boy--in another world.
It was a world with a different quality, a warmer, more penetrating
and mellower light, with a faint clear gladness in its air, and wisps
of sun-touched cloud in the blueness of its sky. And before me ran
this long wide path, invitingly, with weedless beds on either side,
rich with untended flowers, and these two great panthers. I put my
little hands fearlessly on their soft fur, and caressed their round
ears and the sensitive corners under their ears, and played with them,
and it was as though they welcomed me home. There was a keen sense of
home-coming in my mind, and when presently a tall, fair girl appeared
in the pathway and came to meet me, smiling, and said “Well?” to me,
and lifted me, and kissed me, and put me down, and led me by the hand,
there was no amazement, but only an impression of delightful rightness,
of being reminded of happy things that had in some strange way been
overlooked. There were broad red steps, I remember, that came into
view between spikes of delphinium, and up these we went to a great
avenue between very old and shady dark trees. All down this avenue, you
know, between the red chapped stems, were marble seats of honour and
statuary, and very tame and friendly white doves....

‘Along this cool avenue my girl-friend led me, looking down--I
recall the pleasant lines, the finely-modelled chin of her sweet kind
face--asking me questions in a soft, agreeable voice, and telling me
things, pleasant things I know, though what they were I was never able
to recall.... Presently a little Capuchin monkey, very clean, with a
fur of ruddy brown and kindly hazel eyes, came down a tree to us and
ran beside me, looking up at me and grinning, and presently leapt to my
shoulder. So we two went on our way in great happiness.’

He paused.

‘Go on,’ I said.

‘I remember little things. We passed an old man musing among laurels,
I remember, and a place gay with paroquets, and came through a broad
shaded colonnade to a spacious cool palace, full of pleasant fountains,
full of beautiful things, full of the quality and promise of heart’s
desire. And there were many things and many people, some that still
seem to stand out clearly and some that are a little vague; but all
these people were beautiful and kind. In some way--I don’t know how--it
was conveyed to me that they all were kind to me, glad to have me
there, and filling me with gladness by their gestures, by the touch of
their hands, by the welcome and love in their eyes. Yes----’

He mused for a while. ‘Playmates I found there. That was very much to
me, because I was a lonely little boy. They played delightful games
in a grass-covered court where there was a sun-dial set about with
flowers. And as one played one loved....

‘But--it’s odd--there’s a gap in my memory. I don’t remember the games
we played. I never remembered. Afterwards, as a child, I spent long
hours trying, even with tears, to recall the form of that happiness. I
wanted to play it all over again--in my nursery--by myself. No! All I
remember is the happiness and two dear playfellows who were most with
me.... Then presently came a sombre dark woman, with a grave, pale
face, and dreamy eyes, a sombre woman, wearing a soft long robe of pale
purple, who carried a book, and beckoned and took me aside with her
into a gallery above a hall--though my playmates were loath to have me
go, and ceased their game and stood watching as I was carried away.
“Come back to us!” they cried. “Come back to us soon!” I looked up at
her face, but she heeded them not at all. Her face was very gentle and
grave. She took me to a seat in the gallery, and I stood beside her,
ready to look at her book as she opened it upon her knee. The pages
fell open. She pointed, and I looked, marvelling, for in the living
pages of that book I saw myself; it was a story about myself, and in it
were all the things that had happened to me since ever I was born....

‘It was wonderful to me, because the pages of that book were not
pictures, you understand, but realities.’

Wallace paused gravely--looked at me doubtfully.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

‘They were realities--yes, they must have been; people moved and things
came and went in them; my dear mother, whom I had near forgotten;
then my father, stern and upright, the servants, the nursery, all the
familiar things of home. Then the front door and the busy streets, with
traffic to and fro. I looked and marvelled, and looked half doubtfully
again into the woman’s face and turned the pages over, skipping this
and that, to see more of this book and more, and so at last I came to
myself hovering and hesitating outside the green door in the long white
wall, and felt again the conflict and the fear.

‘“And next?” I cried, and would have turned on, but the cool hand of
the grave woman delayed me.

‘“Next?” I insisted, and struggled gently with her hand, pulling up her
fingers with all my childish strength, and as she yielded and the page
came over she bent down upon me like a shadow and kissed my brow.

‘But the page did not show the enchanted garden, nor the panthers, nor
the girl who had led me by the hand, nor the playfellows who had been
so loath to let me go. It showed a long gray street in West Kensington,
in that chill hour of afternoon before the lamps are lit, and I was
there, a wretched little figure, weeping aloud, for all that I could
do to restrain myself, and I was weeping because I could not return to
my dear playfellows who had called after me, “Come back to us! Come
back to us soon!” I was there. This was no page in a book, but harsh
reality; that enchanted place and the restraining hand of the grave
mother at whose knee I stood had gone--whither had they gone?’

He halted again, and remained for a time staring into the fire.

‘Oh! the woefulness of that return!’ he murmured.

‘Well?’ I said, after a minute or so.

‘Poor little wretch I was!--brought back to this gray world again!
As I realised the fullness of what had happened to me, I gave way
to quite ungovernable grief. And the shame and humiliation of that
public weeping and my disgraceful home-coming remain with me still. I
see again the benevolent-looking old gentleman in gold spectacles who
stopped and spoke to me--prodding me first with his umbrella. “Poor
little chap,” said he; “and are you lost then?”--and me a London boy
of five and more! And he must needs bring in a kindly young policeman
and make a crowd of me, and so march me home. Sobbing, conspicuous, and
frightened, I came back from the enchanted garden to the steps of my
father’s house.

‘That is as well as I can remember my vision of that garden--the
garden that haunts me still. Of course, I can convey nothing of that
indescribable quality of translucent unreality, that _difference_
from the common things of experience that hung about it all; but
that--that is what happened. If it was a dream, I am sure it was a
daytime and altogether extraordinary dream.... H’m!--naturally there
followed a terrible questioning, by my aunt, my father, the nurse, the
governess--every one....

‘I tried to tell them, and my father gave me my first thrashing for
telling lies. When afterwards I tried to tell my aunt, she punished
me again for my wicked persistence. Then, as I said, every one
was forbidden to listen to me, to hear a word about it. Even my
fairy-tale books were taken away from me for a time--because I was too
“imaginative.” Eh? Yes, they did that! My father belonged to the old
school.... And my story was driven back upon myself. I whispered it to
my pillow--my pillow that was often damp and salt to my whispering lips
with childish tears. And I added always to my official and less fervent
prayers this one heartfelt request: “Please God I may dream of the
garden. Oh! take me back to my garden!” Take me back to my garden! I
dreamt often of the garden. I may have added to it, I may have changed
it; I do not know.... All this, you understand, is an attempt to
reconstruct from fragmentary memories a very early experience. Between
that and the other consecutive memories of my boyhood there is a gulf.
A time came when it seemed impossible I should ever speak of that
wonder glimpse again.’

I asked an obvious question.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember that I ever attempted to find my way
back to the garden in those early years. This seems odd to me now, but
I think that very probably a closer watch was kept on my movements
after this misadventure to prevent my going astray. No, it wasn’t till
you knew me that I tried for the garden again. And I believe there
was a period--incredible as it seems now--when I forgot the garden
altogether--when I was about eight or nine it may have been. Do you
remember me as a kid at Saint Æthelstan’s?’

‘Rather!’

‘I didn’t show any signs, did I, in those days of having a secret
dream?’


II

He looked up with a sudden smile.

‘Did you ever play North-West Passage with me?... No, of course you
didn’t come my way!’

‘It was the sort of game,’ he went on, ‘that every imaginative child
plays all day. The idea was the discovery of a North-West Passage to
school. The way to school was plain enough; the game consisted in
finding some way that wasn’t plain, starting off ten minutes early
in some almost hopeless direction, and working my way round through
unaccustomed streets to my goal. And one day I got entangled among some
rather low-class streets on the other side of Campden Hill, and I began
to think that for once the game would be against me and that I should
get to school late. I tried rather desperately a street that seemed
a _cul-de-sac_, and found a passage at the end. I hurried through
that with renewed hope. “I shall do it yet,” I said, and passed a row
of frowsy little shops that were inexplicably familiar to me, and
behold! there was my long white wall and the green door that led to the
enchanted garden!

‘The thing whacked upon me suddenly. Then, after all, that garden, that
wonderful garden, wasn’t a dream!’

He paused.

‘I suppose my second experience with the green door marks the world
of difference there is between the busy life of a schoolboy and the
infinite leisure of a child. Anyhow, this second time I didn’t for
a moment think of going in straight away. You see---- For one thing,
my mind was full of the idea of getting to school in time--set on not
breaking my record for punctuality. I must surely have felt _some_
little desire at least to try the door--yes. I must have felt that....
But I seem to remember the attraction of the door mainly as another
obstacle to my overmastering determination to get to school. I was
immensely interested by this discovery I had made, of course--I went
on with my mind full of it--but I went on. It didn’t check me. I ran
past, tugging out my watch, found I had ten minutes still to spare, and
then I was going downhill into familiar surroundings. I got to school,
breathless, it is true, and wet with perspiration, but in time. I can
remember hanging up my coat and hat.... Went right by it and left it
behind me. Odd, eh?’

He looked at me thoughtfully. ‘Of course I didn’t know then that it
wouldn’t always be there. Schoolboys have limited imaginations. I
suppose I thought it was an awfully jolly thing to have it there,
to know my way back to it, but there was the school tugging at me.
I expect I was a good deal distraught and inattentive that morning,
recalling what I could of the beautiful strange people I should
presently see again. Oddly enough I had no doubt in my mind that they
would be glad to see me.... Yes, I must have thought of the garden that
morning just as a jolly sort of place to which one might resort in the
interludes of a strenuous scholastic career.

‘I didn’t go that day at all. The next day was a half holiday, and that
may have weighed with me. Perhaps, too, my state of inattention brought
down impositions upon me, and docked the margin of time necessary for
the detour. I don’t know. What I do know is that in the meantime the
enchanted garden was so much upon my mind that I could not keep it to
myself.

‘I told. What was his name?--a ferrety-looking youngster we used to
call Squiff.’

‘Young Hopkins,’ said I.

‘Hopkins it was. I did not like telling him. I had a feeling that
in some way it was against the rules to tell him, but I did. He was
walking part of the way home with me; he was talkative, and if we
had not talked about the enchanted garden we should have talked of
something else, and it was intolerable to me to think about any other
subject. So I blabbed.

‘Well, he told my secret. The next day in the play interval I found
myself surrounded by half a dozen bigger boys, half teasing, and
wholly curious to hear more of the enchanted garden. There was that
big Fawcett--you remember him?--and Carnaby and Morley Reynolds. You
weren’t there by any chance? No, I think I should have remembered if
you were....

‘A boy is a creature of odd feelings. I was, I really believe, in spite
of my secret self-disgust, a little flattered to have the attention of
these big fellows. I remember particularly a moment of pleasure caused
by the praise of Crawshaw--you remember Crawshaw major, the son of
Crawshaw the composer?--who said it was the best lie he had ever heard.
But at the same time there was a really painful undertow of shame at
telling what I felt was indeed a sacred secret. That beast Fawcett made
a joke about the girl in green----’

Wallace’s voice sank with the keen memory of that shame. ‘I pretended
not to hear,’ he said. ‘Well, then Carnaby suddenly called me a young
liar, and disputed with me when I said the thing was true. I said I
knew where to find the green door, could lead them all there in ten
minutes. Carnaby became outrageously virtuous, and said I’d have
to--and bear out my words or suffer. Did you ever have Carnaby twist
your arm? Then perhaps you’ll understand how it went with me. I swore
my story was true. There was nobody in the school then to save a chap
from Carnaby, though Crawshaw put in a word or so. Carnaby had got his
game. I grew excited and red-eared, and a little frightened. I behaved
altogether like a silly little chap, and the outcome of it all was
that instead of starting alone for my enchanted garden, I led the way
presently--cheeks flushed, ears hot, eyes smarting, and my soul one
burning misery and shame--for a party of six mocking, curious, and
threatening schoolfellows.

‘We never found the white wall and the green door....’

‘You mean----?’

‘I mean I couldn’t find it. I would have found it if I could.

‘And afterwards when I could go alone I couldn’t find it. I never found
it. I seem now to have been always looking for it through my schoolboy
days, but I never came upon it--never.’

‘Did the fellows--make it disagreeable?’

‘Beastly.... Carnaby held a council over me for wanton lying. I
remember how I sneaked home and upstairs to hide the marks of my
blubbering. But when I cried myself to sleep at last it wasn’t for
Carnaby, but for the garden, for the beautiful afternoon I had hoped
for, for the sweet friendly women and the waiting playfellows, and the
game I had hoped to learn again, that beautiful forgotten game....

‘I believed firmly that if I had not told--.... I had bad times after
that--crying at night and wool-gathering by day. For two terms I
slackened and had bad reports. Do you remember? Of course you would! It
was _you_--your beating me in mathematics that brought me back to the
grind again.’


III

For a time my friend stared silently into the red heart of the fire.
Then he said: ‘I never saw it again until I was seventeen.

‘It leapt upon me for the third time--as I was driving to Paddington on
my way to Oxford and a scholarship I had just one momentary glimpse.
I was leaning over the apron of my hansom smoking a cigarette, and no
doubt thinking myself no end of a man of the world, and suddenly there
was the door, the wall, the dear sense of unforgettable and still
attainable things.

‘We clattered by--I too taken by surprise to stop my cab until we were
well past and round a corner. Then I had a queer moment, a double and
divergent movement of my will: I tapped the little door in the roof of
the cab, and brought my arm down to pull out my watch. “Yes, sir!” said
the cabman, smartly. “Er--well--it’s nothing,” I cried. “_My_ mistake!
We haven’t much time! Go on!” And he went on....

‘I got my scholarship. And the night after I was told of that I sat
over my fire in my little upper room, my study, in my father’s house,
with his praise--his rare praise--and his sound counsels ringing in
my ears, and I smoked my favourite pipe--the formidable bulldog of
adolescence--and thought of that door in the long white wall. “If I had
stopped,” I thought, “I should have missed my scholarship, I should
have missed Oxford--muddled all the fine career before me! I begin to
see things better!” I fell musing deeply, but I did not doubt then this
career of mine was a thing that merited sacrifice.

‘Those dear friends and that clear atmosphere seemed very sweet to me,
very fine but remote. My grip was fixing now upon the world. I saw
another door opening--the door of my career.’

He stared again into the fire. Its red light picked out a stubborn
strength in his face for just one flickering moment, and then it
vanished again.

‘Well,’ he said and sighed, ‘I have served that career. I have
done--much work, much hard work. But I have dreamt of the enchanted
garden a thousand dreams, and seen its door, or at least glimpsed
its door, four times since then. Yes--four times. For a while this
world was so bright and interesting, seemed so full of meaning
and opportunity, that the half-effaced charm of the garden was by
comparison gentle and remote. Who wants to pat panthers on the way to
dinner with pretty women and distinguished men? I came down to London
from Oxford, a man of bold promise that I have done something to
redeem. Something--and yet there have been disappointments....

‘Twice I have been in love--I will not dwell on that--but once, as I
went to some one who, I knew, doubted whether I dared to come, I took a
short cut at a venture through an unfrequented road near Earl’s Court,
and so happened on a white wall and a familiar green door. “Odd!”
said I to myself, “but I thought this place was on Campden Hill. It’s
the place I never could find somehow--like counting Stonehenge--the
place of that queer daydream of mine.” And I went by it intent upon my
purpose. It had no appeal to me that afternoon.

‘I had just a moment’s impulse to try the door, three steps aside
were needed at the most--though I was sure enough in my heart that it
would open to me--and then I thought that doing so might delay me on
the way to that appointment in which I thought my honour was involved.
Afterwards I was sorry for my punctuality--I might at least have peeped
in, I thought, and waved a hand to those panthers, but I knew enough
by this time not to seek again belatedly that which is not found by
seeking. Yes, that time made me very sorry....

‘Years of hard work after that, and never a sight of the door. It’s
only recently it has come back to me. With it there has come a sense
as though some thin tarnish had spread itself over my world. I
began to think of it as a sorrowful and bitter thing that I should
never see that door again. Perhaps I was suffering a little from
overwork--perhaps it was what I’ve heard spoken of as the feeling of
forty. I don’t know. But certainly the keen brightness that makes
effort easy has gone out of things recently, and that just at a
time--with all these new political developments--when I ought to be
working. Odd, isn’t it? But I do begin to find life toilsome, its
rewards, as I come near them, cheap. I began a little while ago to want
the garden quite badly. Yes--and I’ve seen it three times.’

‘The garden?’

‘No--the door! And I haven’t gone in!’

He leant over the table to me, with an enormous sorrow in his voice as
he spoke. ‘Thrice I have had my chance--_thrice!_ If ever that door
offers itself to me again, I swore, I will go in, out of this dust
and heat, out of this dry glitter of vanity, out of these toilsome
futilities. I will go and never return. This time I will stay.... I
swore it, and when the time came--_I didn’t go_.

‘Three times in one year have I passed that door and failed to enter.
Three times in the last year.

‘The first time was on the night of the snatch division on the Tenants’
Redemption Bill, on which the Government was saved by a majority of
three. You remember? No one on our side--perhaps very few on the
opposite side--expected the end that night. Then the debate collapsed
like eggshells. I and Hotchkiss were dining with his cousin at
Brentford; we were both unpaired, and we were called up by telephone,
and set off at once in his cousin’s motor. We got in barely in time,
and on the way we passed my wall and door--livid in the moonlight,
blotched with hot yellow as the glare of our lamps lit it, but
unmistakable. “My God!” cried I. “What?” said Hotchkiss, “Nothing!” I
answered, and the moment passed.

‘“I’ve made a great sacrifice,” I told the whip as I got in. “They all
have,” he said, and hurried by.

‘I do not see how I could have done otherwise then. And the next
occasion was as I rushed to my father’s bedside to bid that stern old
man farewell. Then, too, the claims of life were imperative. But the
third time was different; it happened a week ago. It fills me with hot
remorse to recall it. I was with Gurker and Ralphs--it’s no secret now,
you know, that I’ve had my talk with Gurker. We had been dining at
Frobisher’s, and the talk had become intimate between us. The question
of my place in the reconstructed Ministry lay always just over the
boundary of the discussion. Yes--yes. That’s all settled. It needn’t be
talked about yet, but there’s no reason to keep a secret from you....
Yes--thanks! thanks! But let me tell you my story.

‘Then, on that night things were very much in the air. My position was
a very delicate one. I was keenly anxious to get some definite word
from Gurker, but was hampered by Ralphs’ presence. I was using the
best power of my brain to keep that light and careless talk not too
obviously directed to the point that concerned me. I had to. Ralphs’
behaviour since has more than justified my caution.... Ralphs, I knew,
would leave us beyond the Kensington High Street, and then I could
surprise Gurker by a sudden frankness. One has sometimes to resort to
these little devices.... And then it was that in the margin of my field
of vision I became aware once more of the white wall, the green door
before us down the road.

‘We passed it talking. I passed it. I can still see the shadow of
Gurker’s marked profile, his opera hat tilted forward over his
prominent nose, the many folds of his neck wrap going before my shadow
and Ralphs’ as we sauntered past.

‘I passed within twenty inches of the door. “If I say good-night to
them, and go in,” I asked myself, “what will happen?” And I was all
a-tingle for that word with Gurker.

‘I could not answer that question in the tangle of my other
problems. “They will think me mad,” I thought. “And suppose I vanish
now!--Amazing disappearance of a prominent politician!” That weighed
with me. A thousand inconceivably petty worldlinesses weighed with me
in that crisis.’

Then he turned on me with a sorrowful smile, and, speaking slowly,
‘Here I am!’ he said.

‘Here I am!’ he repeated, ‘and my chance has gone from me. Three times
in one year the door has been offered me--the door that goes into
peace, into delight, into a beauty beyond dreaming, a kindness no man
on earth can know. And I have rejected it, Redmond, and it has gone----’

‘How do you know?’

‘I know. I know. I am left now to work it out, to stick to the
tasks that held me so strongly when my moments came. You say I have
success--this vulgar, tawdry, irksome, envied thing. I have it.’ He
had a walnut in his big hand. ‘If that was my success,’ he said, and
crushed it, and held it out for me to see.

‘Let me tell you something, Redmond. This loss is destroying me. For
two months, for ten weeks nearly now, I have done no work at all,
except the most necessary and urgent duties. My soul is full of
inappeasable regrets. At nights--when it is less likely I shall be
recognised--I go out. I wander. Yes. I wonder what people would think
of that if they knew. A Cabinet Minister, the responsible head of that
most vital of all departments, wandering alone--grieving--sometimes
near audibly lamenting--for a door, for a garden!’


IV

I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire
that had come into his eyes. I see him very vividly to-night. I sit
recalling his words, his tones, and last evening’s _Westminster
Gazette_ still lies on my sofa, containing the notice of his death. At
lunch to-day the club was busy with his death. We talked of nothing
else.

They found his body very early yesterday morning in a deep excavation
near East Kensington Station. It is one of two shafts that have been
made in connection with an extension of the railway southward. It is
protected from the intrusion of the public by a hoarding upon the high
road, in which a small doorway has been cut for the convenience of
some of the workmen who live in that direction. The doorway was left
unfastened through a misunderstanding between two gangers, and through
it he made his way....

My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.

It would seem he walked all the way from the House that night--he has
frequently walked home during the past Session--and so it is I figure
his dark form coming along the late and empty streets, wrapped up,
intent. And then did the pale electric lights near the station cheat
the rough planking into a semblance of white? Did that fatal unfastened
door awaken some memory?

Was there, after all, ever any green door in the wall at all?

I do not know. I have told his story as he told it to me. There are
times when I believe that Wallace was no more than the victim of the
coincidence between a rare but not unprecedented type of hallucination
and a careless trap, but that indeed is not my profoundest belief. You
may think me superstitious, if you will, and foolish; but, indeed, I
am more than half convinced that he had, in truth, an abnormal gift,
and a sense, something--I know not what--that in the guise of wall and
door offered him an outlet, a secret and peculiar passage of escape
into another and altogether more beautiful world. At any rate, you
will say, it betrayed him in the end. But did it betray him? There you
touch the inmost mystery of these dreamers, these men of vision and the
imagination. We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the
pit. By our daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness,
danger, and death.

But did he see like that?




THE APPLE


‘I must get rid of it,’ said the man in the corner of the carriage,
abruptly breaking the silence.

Mr Hinchcliff looked up, hearing imperfectly. He had been lost in
the rapt contemplation of the college cap tied by a string to his
portmanteau handles--the outward and visible sign of his newly-gained
pedagogic position--in the rapt appreciation of the college cap and
the pleasant anticipations it excited. For Mr Hinchcliff had just
matriculated at London University, and was going to be junior assistant
at the Holmwood Grammar School--a very enviable position. He stared
across the carriage at his fellow-traveller.

‘Why not give it away?’ said this person. ‘Give it away! Why not?’

He was a tall, dark, sunburnt man with a pale face. His arms were
folded tightly, and his feet were on the seat in front of him. He was
pulling at a lank black moustache. He stared hard at his toes.

‘Why not?’ he said.

Mr Hinchcliff coughed.

The stranger lifted his eyes--they were curious, dark-gray eyes--and
stared blankly at Mr Hinchcliff for the best part of a minute, perhaps.
His expression grew to interest.

‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘Why not? And end it.’

‘I don’t quite follow you, I’m afraid,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, with
another cough.

‘You don’t quite follow me?’ said the stranger quite mechanically,
his singular eyes wandering from Mr Hinchcliff to the bag with its
ostentatiously displayed cap, and back to Mr Hinchcliff’s downy face.

‘You’re so abrupt, you know,’ apologised Mr Hinchcliff.

‘Why shouldn’t I?’ said the stranger, following his thoughts. ‘You are
a student?’ he said, addressing Mr Hinchcliff.

‘I am--by Correspondence--of the London University said Mr Hinchcliff,
with irrepressible pride, and feeling nervously at his tie.

‘In pursuit of knowledge,’ said the stranger, and suddenly took
his feet off the seat, put his fist on his knees, and stared at Mr
Hinchcliff as though he had never seen a student before. ‘Yes,’ he
said, and flung out an index finger. Then he rose, took a bag from
the hat-rack, and unlocked it. Quite silently he drew out something
round and wrapped in a quantity of silver-paper, and unfolded this
carefully. He held it out towards Mr Hinchcliff--a small, very smooth,
golden-yellow fruit.

Mr Hinchcliff’s eyes and mouth were open. He did not offer to take this
object--if he was intended to take it.

‘That,’ said this fantastic stranger, speaking very slowly, ‘is the
Apple of the Tree of Knowledge. Look at it--small, and bright, and
wonderful--Knowledge--and I am going to give it to you.’

Mr Hinchcliff’s mind worked painfully for a minute, and then the
sufficient explanation, ‘Mad!’ flashed across his brain, and
illuminated the whole situation, One humoured madmen. He put his head a
little on one side.

‘The Apple of the Tree of Knowledge, eh!’ said Mr Hinchcliff, regarding
it with a finely assumed air of interest, and then looking at the
interlocutor. ‘But don’t you want to eat it yourself? And besides--how
did you come by it?’

‘It never fades. I have had it now three months. And it is ever bright
and smooth and ripe and desirable, as you see it.’ He laid his hand
on his knee and regarded the fruit musingly. Then he began to wrap it
again in the papers, as though he had abandoned his intention of giving
it away.

‘But how did you come by it?’ said Mr Hinchcliff, who had his
argumentative side. ‘And how do you know that it _is_ the Fruit of the
Tree?’

‘I bought this fruit,’ said the stranger, ‘three months ago--for a
drink of water and a crust of bread. The man who gave it to me--because
I kept the life in him--was an Armenian. Armenia! that wonderful
country, the first of all countries, where the ark of the Flood remains
to this day, buried in the glaciers of Mount Ararat. This man, I say,
fleeing with others from the Kurds who had come upon them, went up into
desolate places among the mountains--places beyond the common knowledge
of men. And fleeing from imminent pursuit, they came to a slope high
among the mountain-peaks, green with a grass like knife-blades, that
cut and slashed most pitilessly at any one who went into it. The Kurds
were close behind, and there was nothing for it but to plunge in, and
the worst of it was that the paths they made through it at the price of
their blood served for the Kurds to follow. Every one of the fugitives
was killed save this Armenian and another. He heard the screams and
cries of his friends, and the swish of the grass about those who were
pursuing them--it was tall grass rising overhead. And then a shouting
and answers, and when presently he paused, everything was still. He
pushed out again, not understanding, cut and bleeding, until he came
out on a steep slope of rocks below a precipice, and then he saw the
grass was all on fire, and the smoke of it rose like a veil between
him and his enemies.’

The stranger paused. ‘Yes?’ said Mr Hinchcliff. ‘Yes?’

‘There he was, all torn and bloody from the knife-blades of the grass,
the rocks blazing under the afternoon sun--the sky molten brass--and
the smoke of the fire driving towards him. He dared not stay there.
Death he did not mind, but torture! Far away beyond the smoke he heard
shouts and cries. Women screaming. So he went clambering up a gorge in
the rocks--everywhere were bushes with dry branches that stuck out like
thorns among the leaves--until he clambered over the brow of a ridge
that hid him. And then he met his companion, a shepherd, who had also
escaped. And, counting cold and famine and thirst as nothing against
the Kurds, they went on into the heights, and among the snow and ice.
They wandered three whole days.

‘The third day came the vision. I suppose hungry men often do see
visions, but then there is this fruit.’ He lifted the wrapped globe in
his hand. ‘And I have heard it, too, from other mountaineers who have
known something of the legend. It was in the evening time, when the
stars were increasing, that they came down a slope of polished rock
into a huge dark valley all set about with strange, contorted trees,
and in these trees hung little globes like glow-worm spheres, strange
round yellow lights.

‘Suddenly this valley was lit far away, many miles away, far down it,
with a golden flame marching slowly athwart it, that made the stunted
trees against it black as night, and turned the slopes all about them
and their figures to the likeness of fiery gold. And at the vision
they, knowing the legends of the mountains, instantly knew that it was
Eden they saw, or the sentinel of Eden, and they fell upon their faces
like men struck dead.

‘When they dared to look again the valley was dark for a space, and
then the light came again--returning, a burning amber.

‘At that the shepherd sprang to his feet, and with a shout began to run
down towards the light, but the other man was too fearful to follow
him. He stood stunned, amazed, and terrified, watching his companion
recede towards the marching glare. And hardly had the shepherd set out
when there came a noise like thunder, the beating of invisible wings
hurrying up the valley, and a great and terrible fear; and at that
the man who gave me the fruit turned--if he might still escape. And
hurrying headlong up the slope again, with that tumult sweeping after
him, he stumbled against one of these stunted bushes, and a ripe fruit
came off it into his hand. This fruit. Forthwith, the wings and the
thunder rolled all about him. He fell and fainted, and when he came to
his senses, he was back among the blackened ruins of his own village,
and I and the others were attending to the wounded. A vision? But the
golden fruit of the tree was still clutched in his hand. There were
others there who knew the legend, knew what that strange fruit might
be.’ He paused. ‘And this is it,’ he said.

It was a most extraordinary story to be told in a third-class carriage
on a Sussex railway. It was as if the real was a mere veil to the
fantastic, and here was the fantastic poking through. ‘Is it?’ was all
Mr Hinchcliff could say.

‘The legend,’ said the stranger, ‘tells that those thickets of dwarfed
trees growing about the garden sprang from the apple that Adam carried
in his hand when he and Eve were driven forth. He felt something in
his hand, saw the half-eaten apple, and flung it petulantly aside.
And there they grow, in that desolate valley, girdled round with the
everlasting snows, and there the fiery swords keep war against the
Judgment Day.’

‘But I thought these things were’--Mr Hinchcliff
paused--‘fables--parables rather. Do you mean to tell me that there in
Armenia----’

The stranger answered the unfinished question with the fruit in his
open hand.

‘But you don’t know,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, ‘that that _is_ the fruit of
the Tree of Knowledge. The man may have had--a sort of mirage, say.
Suppose----’

‘Look at it,’ said the stranger.

It was certainly a strange-looking globe, not really an apple, Mr
Hinchcliff saw, and a curious glowing golden colour, almost as though
light itself was wrought into its substance. As he looked at it, he
began to see more vividly the desolate valley among the mountains, the
guarding swords of fire, the strange antiquities of the story he had
just heard. He rubbed a knuckle into his eye. ‘But’--said he.

‘It has kept like that, smooth and full, three months. Longer than that
it is now by some days. No drying, no withering, no decay.’

‘And you yourself,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, ‘really believe that----’

‘Is the Forbidden Fruit.’

There was no mistaking the earnestness of the man’s manner and his
perfect sanity. ‘The Fruit of Knowledge,’ he said.

‘Suppose it was?’ said Mr Hinchcliff, after a pause, still staring
at it. ‘But after all,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, ‘it’s not my kind of
knowledge--not the sort of knowledge. I mean, Adam and Eve have eaten
it already.’

‘We inherit their sins--not their knowledge,’ said the stranger.
‘That would make it all clear and bright again. We should see
into everything, through everything, into the deepest meaning of
everything----’

‘Why don’t you eat it, then?’ said Mr Hinchcliff, with an inspiration.

‘I took it intending to eat it,’ said the stranger. ‘Man has fallen.
Merely to eat again could scarcely----’

‘Knowledge is power,’ said Mr Hinchcliff.

‘But is it happiness? I am older than you--more than twice as old. Time
after time I have held this in my hand, and my heart has failed me at
the thought of all that one might know, that terrible lucidity--Suppose
suddenly all the world became pitilessly clear?’

‘That, I think, would be a great advantage,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, ‘on
the whole.’

‘Suppose you saw into the hearts and minds of every one about you, into
their most secret recesses--people you loved, whose love you valued?’

‘You’d soon find out the humbugs,’ said Mr Hinchcliff, greatly struck
by the idea.

‘And worse--to know yourself, bare of your most intimate illusions.
To see yourself in your place. All that your lusts and weaknesses
prevented your doing. No merciful perspective.’

‘That might be an excellent thing too. “Know thyself,” you know.’

‘You are young,’ said the stranger.

‘If you don’t care to eat it, and it bothers you, why don’t you throw
it away?’

‘There again, perhaps, you will not understand me. To me, how could one
throw away a thing like that, glowing, wonderful? Once one has it, one
is bound. But, on the other hand, to _give_ it away! To give it away
to some one who thirsted after knowledge, who found no terror in the
thought of that clear perception----’

‘Of course,’ said Mr Hinchcliff thoughtfully, ‘it might be some sort of
poisonous fruit.

And then his eye caught something motionless, the end of a white board
black-lettered outside the carriage window. ‘--MWOOD,’ he saw. He
started convulsively. ‘Gracious!’ said Mr Hinchcliff. ‘Holmwood!’--and
the practical present blotted out the mystic realisations that had been
stealing upon him.

In another moment he was opening the carriage-door, portmanteau in
hand. The guard was already fluttering his green flag. Mr Hinchcliff
jumped out. ‘Here!’ said a voice behind him, and he saw the dark eyes
of the stranger shining and the golden fruit, bright and bare, held
out of the open carriage-door. He took it instinctively, the train was
already moving.

‘_No!_’ shouted the stranger, and made a snatch at it as if to take it
back.

‘Stand away,’ cried a country porter, thrusting forward to close the
door. The stranger shouted something Mr Hinchcliff did not catch, head
and arm thrust excitedly out of the window, and then the shadow of the
bridge fell on him, and in a trice he was hidden. Mr Hinchcliff stood
astonished, staring at the end of the last wagon receding round the
bend, and with the wonderful fruit in his hand. For the fraction of
a minute his mind was confused, and then he became aware that two or
three people on the platform were regarding him with interest. Was he
not the new Grammar School master making his debut? It occurred to him
that, so far as they could tell, the fruit might very well be the naïve
refreshment of an orange. He flushed at the thought, and thrust the
fruit into his side pocket, where it bulged undesirably. But there was
no help for it, so he went towards them, awkwardly concealing his sense
of awkwardness, to ask the way to the Grammar School, and the means of
getting his portmanteau and the two tin boxes which lay up the platform
thither. Of all the odd and fantastic yarns to tell a fellow!

His luggage could be taken on a truck for sixpence, he found, and he
could precede it on foot. He fancied an ironical note in the voices. He
was painfully aware of his contour.

The curious earnestness of the man in the train, and the glamour of the
story he told, had, for a time, diverted the current of Mr Hinchcliff’s
thoughts. It drove a mist before his immediate concerns. Fires that
went to and fro! But the preoccupation of his new position, and the
impression he was to produce upon Holmwood generally, and the school
people in particular, returned upon him with reinvigorating power
before he left the station and cleared his mental atmosphere. But it
is extraordinary what an inconvenient thing the addition of a soft and
rather brightly-golden fruit, not three inches in diameter, may prove
to a sensitive youth on his best appearance. In the pocket of his black
jacket it bulged dreadfully, spoilt the lines altogether. He passed a
little old lady in black, and he felt her eye drop upon the excrescence
at once. He was wearing one glove and carrying the other, together with
his stick, so that to bear the fruit openly was impossible. In one
place, where the road into the town seemed suitably secluded, he took
his encumbrance out of his pocket and tried it in his hat. It was just
too large, the hat wobbled ludicrously, and just as he was taking it
out again, a butcher’s boy came driving round the corner.

‘Confound it!’ said Mr Hinchcliff.

He would have eaten the thing, and attained omniscience there and
then, but it would seem so silly to go into the town sucking a juicy
fruit--and it certainly felt juicy. If one of the boys should come by,
it might do him a serious injury with his discipline so to be seen.
And the juice might make his face sticky and get upon his cuffs--or it
might be an acid juice as potent as lemon, and take all the colour out
of his clothes.

Then round a bend in the lane came two pleasant sunlit girlish
figures. They were walking slowly towards the town and chattering--at
any moment they might look round and see a hot-faced young man behind
them carrying a kind of phosphorescent yellow tomato! They would be
sure to laugh.

‘_Hang!_’ said Mr Hinchcliff, and with a swift jerk sent the
encumbrance flying over the stone wall of an orchard that there abutted
on the road. As it vanished, he felt a faint twinge of loss that lasted
scarcely a moment. He adjusted the stick and glove in his hand, and
walked on, erect and self-conscious, to pass the girls.


But in the darkness of the night Mr Hinchcliff had a dream, and saw the
valley, and the flaming swords; and the contorted trees, and knew that
it really was the Apple of the Tree of Knowledge that he had thrown
regardlessly away. And he awoke very unhappy.

In the morning his regret had passed, but afterwards it returned and
troubled him; never, however, when he was happy or busily occupied. At
last, one moonlight night about eleven, when all Holmwood was quiet,
his regrets returned with redoubled force, and therewith an impulse to
adventure. He slipped out of the house and over the playground wall,
went through the silent town to Station Lane, and climbed into the
orchard where he had thrown the fruit. But nothing was to be found
of it there among the dewy grass and the faint intangible globes of
dandelion down.




THE TEMPTATION OF HARRINGAY


It is quite impossible to say whether this thing really happened. It
depends entirely on the word of R. M. Harringay, who is an artist.

Following his version of the affair, the narrative deposes that
Harringay went into his studio about ten o’clock to see what he could
make of the head that he had been working at the day before. The
head in question was that of an Italian organ-grinder, and Harringay
thought--but was not quite sure--that the title would be the ‘Vigil.’
So far he is frank, and his narrative bears the stamp of truth. He
had seen the man expectant for pennies, and with a promptness that
suggested genius, had had him in at once.

‘Kneel. Look up at that bracket,’ said Harringay. ‘As if you expected
pennies.’

‘Don’t _grin_!’ said Harringay. ‘I don’t want to paint your gums. Look
as though you were unhappy.’

Now, after a night’s rest, the picture proved decidedly unsatisfactory.
‘It’s good work,’ said Harringay. ‘That little bit in the neck.... But.’

He walked about the studio and looked at the thing from this point and
from that. Then he said a wicked word. In the original the word is
given.

‘Painting,’ he says he said. ‘Just a painting of an organ-grinder--a
mere portrait. If it was a live organ-grinder I wouldn’t mind. But
somehow I never make things alive. I wonder if my imagination is
wrong.’ This, too, has a truthful air. His imagination _is_ wrong.

‘That creative touch! To take canvas and pigment and make a man--as
Adam was made of red ochre! But this thing! If you met it walking about
the streets you would know it was only a studio production. The little
boys would tell it to “Garnome and git frimed.” Some little touch....
Well--it won’t do as it is.’

He went to the blinds and began to pull them down. They were made of
blue holland with the rollers at the bottom of the window, so that you
pull them down to get more light. He gathered his palette, brushes,
and mahl stick from his table. Then he turned to the picture and put a
speck of brown in the corner of the mouth; and shifted his attention
thence to the pupil of the eye. Then he decided that the chin was a
trifle too impassive for a vigil.

Presently he put down his impedimenta, and lighting a pipe surveyed the
progress of his work. ‘I’m hanged if the thing isn’t sneering at me,’
said Harringay, and he still believes it sneered.

The animation of the figure had certainly increased, but scarcely in
the direction he wished. There was no mistake about the sneer. ‘Vigil
of the Unbeliever,’ said Harringay. ‘Rather subtle and clever that! But
the left eyebrow isn’t cynical enough.’

He went and dabbed at the eyebrow, and added a little to the lobe of
the ear to suggest materialism. Further consideration ensued. ‘Vigil’s
off, I’m afraid,’ said Harringay. ‘Why not Mephistopheles? But that’s
a bit _too_ common. “A Friend of the Doge,”--not so seedy. The armour
won’t do, though. Too Camelot. How about a scarlet robe and call him
“One of the Sacred College”? Humour in that, and an appreciation of
Middle Italian History.’

‘There’s always Benvenuto Cellini,’ said Harringay; ‘with a clever
suggestion of a gold cup in one corner. But that would scarcely suit
the complexion.’

He describes himself as babbling in this way in order to keep down an
unaccountably unpleasant sensation of fear. The thing was certainly
acquiring anything but a pleasing expression. Yet it was as certainly
becoming far more of a living thing than it had been--if a sinister
one--far more alive than anything he had ever painted before. ‘Call it
“Portrait of a Gentleman,’” said Harringay--‘A Certain Gentleman.’

‘Won’t do,’ said Harringay, still keeping up his courage. ‘Kind of
thing they call Bad Taste. That sneer will have to come out. That gone,
and a little more fire in the eye--never noticed how warm his eye was
before--and he might do for--? What price Passionate Pilgrim? But that
devilish face won’t do--_this_ side of the Channel.

‘Some little inaccuracy does it,’ he said; ‘eyebrows probably too
oblique,’--therewith pulling the blind lower to get a better light, and
resuming palette and brushes.

The face on the canvas seemed animated by a spirit of its own.
Where the expression of diablerie came in he found impossible to
discover--Experiment was necessary. The eyebrows--it could scarcely be
the eyebrows? But he altered them. No, that was no better; in fact, if
anything, a trifle more satanic. The corner of the mouth? Pah! more
than ever a leer--and now, retouched, it was ominously grim. The eye,
then? Catastrophe! he had filled his brush with vermilion instead of
brown, and yet he had felt sure it was brown! The eye seemed now to
have rolled in its socket, and was glaring at him an eye of fire. In
a flash of passion, possibly with something of the courage of panic,
he struck the brush full of bright red athwart the picture; and then a
very curious thing, a very strange thing indeed, occurred--if it _did_
occur.

_The diabolified Italian before him shut both his eyes, pursed his
mouth, and wiped the colour off his face with his hand._

Then the _red eye_ opened again, with a sound like the opening of lips,
and the face smiled. ‘That was rather hasty of you,’ said the picture.

Harringay states that, now that the worst had happened, his
self-possession returned. He had a saving persuasion that devils were
reasonable creatures.

‘Why do you keep moving about then,’ he said, ‘making faces and all
that--sneering and squinting, while I am painting you?’

‘I don’t,’ said the picture.

‘You _do_,’ said Harringay.

‘It’s yourself,’ said the picture.

‘It’s _not_ myself,’ said Harringay.

‘It _is_ yourself,’ said the picture. ‘No! don’t go hitting me with
paint again, because it’s true. You have been trying to fluke an
expression on my face all the morning. Really, you haven’t an idea what
your picture ought to look like.’

‘I have,’ said Harringay.

‘You have _not_,’ said the picture: ‘You _never_ have with your
pictures. You always start with the vaguest presentiment of what
you are going to do; it is to be something beautiful--you are sure
of that--and devout, perhaps, or tragic; but beyond that it is all
experiment and chance. My dear fellow! you don’t think you can paint a
picture like that?’

Now it must be remembered that for what follows we have only
Harringay’s word.

‘I shall paint a picture exactly as I like,’ said Harringay calmly.

This seemed to disconcert the picture a little. ‘You can’t paint a
picture without an inspiration,’ it remarked.

‘But I _had_ an inspiration--for this.’

‘Inspiration!’ sneered the sardonic figure; ‘a fancy that came from
your seeing an organ-grinder looking up at a window! Vigil! Ha, ha! You
just started painting on the chance of something coming--that’s what
you did. And when I saw you at it I came. I want a talk with you!’

‘Art, with you,’ said the picture--‘it’s a poor business. You potter. I
don’t know how it is, but you don’t seem able to throw your soul into
it. You know too much. It hampers you. In the midst of your enthusiasms
you ask yourself whether something like this has not been done before.
And ...’

‘Look here,’ said Harringay, who had expected something better than
criticism from the devil. ‘Are you going to talk studio to me?’ He
filled his number twelve hoghair with red paint.

‘The true artist,’ said the picture, ‘is always an ignorant man. An
artist who theorises about his work is no longer artist but critic.
Wagner ... I say!--What’s that red paint for?’

‘I’m going to paint you out,’ said Harringay. ‘I don’t want to hear all
that Tommy Rot. If you think just because I’m an artist by trade I’m
going to talk studio to you, you make a precious mistake.’

‘One minute,’ said the picture, evidently alarmed. ‘I want to make
you an offer--a genuine offer. It’s right what I’m saying. You lack
inspirations. Well. No doubt you’ve heard of the Cathedral of Cologne,
and the Devil’s Bridge, and----’

‘Rubbish,’ said Harringay. ‘Do you think I want to go to perdition
simply for the pleasure of painting a good picture, and getting it
slated. Take that.’

His blood was up. His danger only nerved him to action, so he says.
So he planted a dab of vermilion in his creature’s mouth. The Italian
spluttered and tried to wipe it off--evidently horribly surprised. And
then--according to Harringay--there began a very remarkable struggle,
Harringay splashing away with the red paint, and the picture wriggling
about and wiping it off as fast as he put it on. ‘_Two_ masterpieces,’
said the demon. ‘Two indubitable masterpieces for a Chelsea artist’s
soul. It’s a bargain?’ Harringay replied with the paint brush.

For a few minutes nothing could be heard but the brush going and the
spluttering and ejaculations of the Italian. A lot of the strokes
he caught on his arm and hand, though Harringay got over his guard
often enough. Presently the paint on the palette gave out and the
two antagonists stood breathless, regarding each other. The picture
was so smeared with red that it looked as if it had been rolling
about a slaughterhouse, and it was painfully out of breath and very
uncomfortable with the wet paint trickling down its neck. Still, the
first round was in its favour on the whole. ‘Think,’ it said, sticking
pluckily to its point, ‘two supreme masterpieces--in different styles.
Each equivalent to the Cathedral....’

‘_I_ know,’ said Harringay, and rushed out of the studio and along the
passage towards his wife’s boudoir.

In another minute he was back with a large tin of enamel--Hedge
Sparrow’s Egg Tint, it was, and a brush. At the sight of that
the artistic devil with the red eye began to scream. ‘_Three_
masterpieces--culminating masterpieces.’

Harringay delivered out two across the demon, and followed with
a thrust in the eye. There was an indistinct rumbling. ‘_Four_
masterpieces,’ and a spitting sound.

But Harringay had the upper hand now and meant to keep it. With rapid,
bold strokes he continued to paint over the writhing canvas, until at
last it was a uniform field of shining Hedge Sparrow tint. Once the
mouth reappeared and got as far as ‘Five master--’ before he filled it
with enamel; and near the end the red eye opened and glared at him
indignantly. But at last nothing remained save a gleaming panel of
drying enamel. For a little while a faint stirring beneath the surface
puckered it slightly here and there, but presently even that died away
and the thing was perfectly still.

Then Harringay--according to Harringay’s account--lit his pipe and sat
down and stared at the enamelled canvas, and tried to make out clearly
what had happened. Then he walked round behind it, to see if the back
of it was at all remarkable. Then it was he began to regret he had not
photographed the Devil before he painted him out.

This is Harringays’ story--not mine. He supports it by a small canvas
(24 by 20) enamelled a pale green, and by violent asseverations. It is
also true that he never has produced a masterpiece, and in the opinion
of his intimate friends probably never will.




MR SKELMERSDALE IN FAIRYLAND


‘There’s a man in that shop,’ said the Doctor, ‘who has been in
Fairyland.’

‘Nonsense!’ I said, and stared back at the shop. It was the usual
village shop, post office, telegraph wire on its brow, zinc pans and
brushes outside, boots, shirtings, and potted meats in the window.
‘Tell me about it,’ I said, after a pause.

‘_I_ don’t know,’ said the Doctor. ‘He’s an ordinary sort of
lout--Skelmersdale is his name. But everybody about here believes it
like Bible truth.’

I reverted presently to the topic.

‘I know nothing about it,’ said the Doctor, ‘and I don’t _want_ to
know. I attended him for a broken finger--Married and Single cricket
match--and that’s when I struck the nonsense. That’s all. But it shows
you the sort of stuff I have to deal with, anyhow, eh? Nice to get
modern sanitary ideas into a people like this!’

‘Very,’ I said in a mildly sympathetic tone, and he went on to tell
me about that business of the Bonham drain. Things of that kind, I
observe, are apt to weigh on the minds of Medical Officers of Health. I
was as sympathetic as I knew how, and when he called the Bonham people
“asses,” I said they were “thundering asses,” but even that did not
allay him.

Afterwards, later in the summer, an urgent desire to seclude myself,
while finishing my chapter on Spiritual Pathology--it was really, I
believe, stiffer to write than it is to read--took me to Bignor. I
lodged at a farmhouse, and presently found myself outside that little
general shop again, in search of tobacco. ‘Skelmersdale,’ said I to
myself at the sight of it, and went in.

I was served by a short, but shapely, young man, with a fair downy
complexion, good, small teeth, blue eyes, and a languid manner.
I scrutinised him curiously. Except for a touch of melancholy in
his expression, he was nothing out of the common. He was in the
shirtsleeves and tucked-up apron of his trade, and a pencil was thrust
behind his inoffensive ear. Athwart his black waistcoat was a gold
chain, from which dangled a bent guinea.

‘Nothing more to-day, sir?’ he inquired. He leant forward over my bill
as he spoke.

‘Are you Mr Skelmersdale?’ said I.

‘I am, sir,’ he said, without looking up.

‘Is it true that you have been in Fairyland?’

He looked up at me for a moment with wrinkled brows, with an aggrieved,
exasperated face. ‘O shut it!’ he said, and, after a moment of
hostility, eye to eye, he went on adding up my bill. ‘Four, six and a
half,’ he said, after a pause. ‘Thank you, sir.’

So, unpropitiously, my acquaintance with Mr Skelmersdale began.

Well, I got from that to confidence--through a series of toilsome
efforts. I picked him up again in the Village Room, where of a night
I went to play billiards after my supper, and mitigate the extreme
seclusion from my kind that was so helpful to work during the day. I
contrived to play with him and afterwards to talk with him. I found
the one subject to avoid was Fairyland. On everything else he was open
and amiable in a commonplace sort of way, but on that he had been
worried--ion that he had been
worried--it was a manifest taboo. Only once in the room did I hear the
slightest allusion to his experience in his presence, and that was
by a cross-grained farm hand who was losing to him. Skelmersdale had
run a break into double figures, which, by the Bignor standards, was
uncommonly good play. ‘Steady on!’ said his adversary. ‘None of your
fairy flukes!’

Skelmersdale stared at him for a moment, cue in hand, then flung it
down and walked out of the room.

‘Why can’t you leave ’im alone?’ said a respectable elder who had been
enjoying the game, and in the general murmur of disapproval, the grin
of satisfied wit faded from the ploughboy’s face.

I scented my opportunity. ‘What’s this joke,’ said I, ‘about Fairyland?’

‘Tain’t no joke about Fairyland, not to young Skelmersdale,’ said the
respectable elder, drinking.

A little man with rosy cheeks was more communicative. ‘They _do_ say,
sir,’ he said, ‘that they took him into Aldington Knoll an’ kep’ him
there a matter of three weeks.’

And with that the gathering was well under weigh. Once one sheep had
started, others were ready enough to follow, and in a little time I
had at least the exterior aspect of the Skelmersdale affair. Formerly,
before he came to Bignor, he had been in that very similar little shop
at Aldington Corner, and there whatever it was did happen had taken
place. The story was clear that he had stayed out late one night on
the Knoll and vanished for three weeks from the sight of men, and had
returned with ‘his cuffs as clean as when he started’ and his pockets
full of dust and ashes. He returned in a state of moody wretchedness
that only slowly passed away, and for many days he would give no
account of where it was he had been. The girl he was engaged to at
Clapton Hill tried to get it out of him, and threw him over partly
because he refused, and partly because as she said, he fairly gave
her the ‘’ump.’ And then when, some time after, he let out to some one
carelessly that he had been in Fairyland and wanted to go back, and
when the thing spread and the simple badinage of the countryside came
into play, he threw up his situation abruptly, and came to Bignor to
get out of the fuss. But as to what had happened in Fairyland none of
these people knew. There the gathering in the Village Room went to
pieces like a pack at fault. One said this, and another said that.

Their air in dealing with this marvel was ostensibly critical and
sceptical, but I could see a considerable amount of belief showing
through their guarded qualifications. I took a line of intelligent
interest, tinged with a reasonable doubt of the whole story.

‘If Fairyland’s inside Aldington Knoll,’ I said, ‘why don’t you dig it
out?’

‘That’s what I says,’ said the young ploughboy.

‘There’s a-many have tried to dig on Aldington Knoll,’ said the
respectable elder, solemnly, ‘one time and another. But there’s none as
goes about to-day to tell what they got by digging.’

The unanimity of vague belief that surrounded me was rather impressive;
I felt there must surely be _something_ at the root of so much
conviction, and the already pretty keen curiosity I felt about the real
facts of the case was distinctly whetted. If these real facts were to
be got from any one, they were to be got from Skelmersdale himself;
and I set myself, therefore, still more assiduously to efface the
first bad impression I had made and win his confidence to the pitch of
voluntary speech. In that endeavour I had a social advantage. Being a
person of affability and no apparent employment, and wearing tweeds and
knickerbockers, I was naturally classed as an artist in Bignor, and in
the remarkable code of social precedence prevalent in Bignor an artist
ranks considerably higher than a grocer’s assistant. Skelmersdale, like
too many of his class, is something of a snob; he had told me to ‘SHUT
it’ only under sudden, excessive provocation, and with, I am certain,
a subsequent repentance; he was, I knew, quite glad to be seen walking
about the village with me. In due course he accepted the proposal of a
pipe and whisky in my rooms readily enough, and there, scenting by some
happy instinct that there was trouble of the heart in this, and knowing
that confidences beget confidences, I plied him with much of interest
and suggestion from my real and fictitious past. And it was after the
third whisky of the third visit of that sort, if I remember rightly,
that _apropos_ of some artless expansion of a little affair that had
touched and left me in my teens that he did at last, of his own free
will and motion, break the ice. ‘It was like that with me,’ he said,
‘over there at Aldington. It’s just that that’s so rum. First I didn’t
care a bit and it was all her, and afterwards, when it was too late, it
was, in a manner of speaking, all me.’

I forbore to jump upon this allusion, and so he presently threw out
another, and in a little while he was making it as plain as daylight
that the one thing he wanted to talk about now was this Fairyland
adventure he had sat tight upon for so long. You see, I’d done the
trick with him, and from being just another half-incredulous, would-be
facetious stranger, I had, by all my wealth of shameless self-exposure,
become the possible confidant. He had been bitten by the desire to show
that he, too, had lived and felt many things, and the fever was upon
him.

He was certainly confoundedly allusive at first, and my eagerness
to clear him up with a few precise questions was only equalled
and controlled by my anxiety not to get to this sort of thing too
soon. But in another meeting or so the basis of confidence was
complete; and from first to last I think I got most of the items and
aspects--indeed, I got quite a number of times over almost everything
that Mr Skelmersdale, with his very limited powers of narration, will
ever be able to tell. And so I come to the story of his adventure, and
I piece it all together again. Whether it really happened, whether he
imagined it or dreamt it, or fell upon it in some strange hallucinatory
trance, I do not profess to say. But that he invented it I will not for
one moment entertain. The man simply and honestly believes the thing
happened as he says it happened; he is transparently incapable of any
lie so elaborate and sustained, and in the belief of the simple, yet
often keenly penetrating, rustic minds about him I find a very strong
confirmation of his sincerity. He believes--and nobody can produce
any positive fact to falsify his belief. As for me, with this much of
endorsement, I transmit his story--I am a little old now to justify or
explain.

He says he went to sleep on Aldington Knoll about ten o’clock one
night--it was quite possibly Midsummer night, though he has never
thought of the date, and he cannot be sure within a week or so--and
it was a fine night and windless, with a rising moon. I have been at
the pains to visit this Knoll thrice since his story grew up under my
persuasions, and once I went there in the twilight summer moonrise on
what was, perhaps, a similar night to that of his adventure. Jupiter
was great and splendid above the moon, and in the north and north-west
the sky was green and vividly bright over the sunken sun. The Knoll
stands out bare and bleak under the sky, but surrounded at a little
distance by dark thickets, and as I went up towards it there was a
mighty starting and scampering of ghostly or quite invisible rabbits.
Just over the crown of the Knoll, but nowhere else, was a multitudinous
thin trumpeting of midges. The Knoll is, I believe, an artificial
mound, the tumulus of some great prehistoric chieftain, and surely
no man ever chose a more spacious prospect for a sepulchre. Eastward
one sees along the hills to Hythe, and thence across the Channel to
where, thirty miles and more, perhaps, away, the great white lights
by Gris Nez and Boulogne wink and pass and shine. Westward lies the
whole tumbled valley of the Weald, visible as far as Hindhead and
Leith Hill, and the valley of the Stour opens the Downs in the north
to interminable hills beyond Wye. All Romney Marsh lies southward at
one’s feet, Dymchurch and Romney and Lydd, Hastings and its hill are in
the middle distance, and the hills multiply vaguely far beyond where
Eastbourne rolls up to Beachy Head.

And out upon all this it was that Skelmersdale wandered, being troubled
in his earlier love affair, and as he says, ‘not caring _where_ he
went.’ And there he sat down to think it over, and so, sulking and
grieving, was overtaken by sleep. And so he fell into the fairies’
power.

The quarrel that had upset him was some trivial matter enough between
himself and the girl at Clapton Hill to whom he was engaged. She was a
farmer’s daughter, said Skelmersdale, and ‘very respectable,’ and no
doubt an excellent match for him; but both girl and lover were very
young and with just that mutual jealousy, that intolerantly keen edge
of criticism, that irrational hunger for a beautiful perfection, that
life and wisdom do presently and most mercifully dull. What the precise
matter of quarrel was I have no idea. She may have said she liked men
in gaiters when he hadn’t any gaiters on, or he may have said he liked
her better in a different sort of hat, but however it began, it got by
a series of clumsy stages to bitterness and tears. She no doubt got
tearful and smeary, and he grew dusty and drooping, and she parted
with invidious comparisons, grave doubts whether she ever had _really_
cared for him, and a clear certainty she would never care again. And
with this sort of thing upon his mind he came out upon Aldington
Knoll grieving, and presently, after a long interval, perhaps, quite
inexplicably, fell asleep.

He woke to find himself on a softer turf than ever he had slept on
before, and under the shade of very dark trees that completely hid the
sky. Always, indeed, in Fairyland the sky is hidden, it seems. Except
for one night when the fairies were dancing, Mr Skelmersdale, during
all his time with them, never saw a star. And of that night I am in
doubt whether he was in Fairyland proper or out where the rings and
rushes are, in those low meadows near the railway line at Smeeth.

But it was light under these trees for all that, and on the leaves
and amidst the turf shone a multitude of glow-worms, very bright and
fine. Mr Skelmersdale’s first impression was that he was _small_, and
the next that quite a number of people still smaller were standing
all about him. For some reason, he says, he was neither surprised nor
frightened, but sat up quite deliberately and rubbed the sleep out
of his eyes. And there all about him stood the smiling elves who had
caught him sleeping under their privileges and had brought him into
Fairyland.

What these elves were like I have failed to gather, so vague and
imperfect is his vocabulary, and so unobservant of all minor detail
does he seem to have been. They were clothed in something very light
and beautiful, that was neither wool, nor silk, nor leaves, nor the
petals of flowers. They stood all about him as he sat and waked, and
down the glade towards him, down a glow-worm avenue and fronted by a
star, came at once that Fairy Lady who is the chief personage of his
memory and tale. Of her I gathered more. She was clothed in filmy
green, and about her little waist was a broad silver girdle. Her hair
waved back from her forehead on either side; there were curls not
too wayward and yet astray, and on her brow was a little tiara, set
with a single star. Her sleeves were some sort of open sleeves that
gave little glimpses of her arms; her throat, I think, was a little
displayed, because he speaks of the beauty of her neck and chin. There
was a necklace of coral about her white throat, and in her breast a
coral-coloured flower. She had the soft lines of a little child in her
chin and cheeks and throat. And her eyes, I gather, were of a kindled
brown, very soft and straight and sweet under her level brows. You
see by these particulars how greatly this lady must have loomed in Mr
Skelmersdale’s picture. Certain things he tried to express and could
not express; ‘the way she moved,’ he said several times; and I fancy a
sort of demure joyousness radiated from this Lady.

And it was in the company of this delightful person, as the guest and
chosen companion of this delightful person, that Mr Skelmersdale set
out to be taken into the intimacies of Fairyland. She welcomed him
gladly and a little warmly--I suspect a pressure of his hand in both of
hers and a lit face to his. After all, ten years ago young Skelmersdale
may have been a very comely youth. And once she took his arm, and once,
I think she led him by the hand adown the glade that the glow-worms lit.

Just how things chanced and happened there is no telling from Mr
Skelmersdale’s disarticulated skeleton of description. He gives little
unsatisfactory glimpses of strange corners and doings, of places
where there were many fairies together, of ‘toadstool things that
shone pink,’ of fairy food, of which he could only say ‘you should
have tasted it!’ and of fairy music, ‘like a little musical box,’
that came out of nodding flowers. There was a great open place where
fairies rode and raced on ‘things,’ but what Mr Skelmersdale meant by
‘these here things they rode,’ there is no telling. Larvæ, perhaps, or
crickets, or the little beetles that elude us so abundantly. There was
a place where water splashed and gigantic kingcups grew, and there in
the hotter times the fairies bathed together. There were games being
played and dancing and much elvish love-making too, I think, among the
moss branch thickets. There can be no doubt that the Fairy Lady made
love to Mr Skelmersdale, and no doubt either that this young man set
himself to resist her. A time came, indeed, when she sat on a bank
beside him, in a quiet secluded place ‘all smelling of vi’lets,’ and
talked to him of love.

‘When her voice went low and she whispered,’ said Mr Skelmersdale, ‘and
laid ’er ’and on my ’and, you know, and came close with a soft, warm
friendly way she ’ad, it was as much as I could do to keep my ’ead.’

It seems he kept his head to a certain limited unfortunate extent. He
saw ‘’ow the wind was blowing,’ he says, and so, sitting there in a
place all smelling of violets, with the touch of this lovely Fairy Lady
about him, Mr Skelmersdale broke it to h

She had told him she loved him dearly, that he was a sweet human lad
for her, and whatever he would ask of her he should have--even his
heart’s desire.

And Mr Skelmersdale, who, I fancy, tried hard to avoid looking at her
little lips as they just dropped apart and came together, led up to the
more intimate question by saying he would like enough capital to start
a little shop. He’d just like to feel, he said, he had money enough
to do that. I imagine a little surprise in those brown eyes he talked
about, but she seemed sympathetic for all that, and she asked him many
questions about the little shop, ‘laughing like’ all the time. So he
got to the complete statement of his affianced position, and told her
all about Millie.

‘All?’ said I.

‘Everything,’ said Mr Skelmersdale, ‘just who she was, and where she
lived, and everything about her. I sort of felt I ’ad to all the time,
I did.’

‘“Whatever you want you shall have,” said the Fairy Lady. “That’s as
good as done. You _shall_ feel you have the money just as you wish. And
now, you know--_you must kiss me_.”’

And Mr Skelmersdale pretended not to hear the latter part of her
remark, and said she was very kind. That he really didn’t deserve she
should be so kind. And----

The Fairy Lady suddenly came quite close to him and whispered ‘Kiss me!’

‘And,’ said Mr Skelmersdale, ‘like a fool, I did.’

There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite
the other sort from Millie’s resonant signals of regard. There was
something magic in that kiss; assuredly it marked a turning point. At
any rate, this is one of the passages that he thought sufficiently
important to describe most at length. I have tried to get it right, I
have tried to disentangle it from the hints and gestures through which
it came to me, but I have no doubt that it was all different from my
telling and far finer and sweeter, in the soft filtered light and the
subtly stirring silences of the fairy glades. The Fairy Lady asked him
more about Millie, and was she very lovely, and so on--a great many
tunes. As to Millie’s loveliness, I conceive him answering that she
was ‘all right.’ And then, or on some such occasion, the Fairy Lady
told him she had fallen in love with him as he slept in the moonlight,
and so he had been brought into Fairyland, and she had thought, not
knowing of Millie, that perhaps he might chance to love her. ‘But now
you know you can’t,’ she said, ‘so you must stop with me just a little
while, and then you must go back to Millie.’ She told him that, and you
know Skelmersdale was already in love with her, but the pure inertia
of his mind kept him in the way he was going. I imagine him sitting
in a sort of stupefaction amidst all these glowing beautiful things,
answering about his Millie and the little shop he projected and the
need of a horse and cart.... And that absurd state of affairs must have
gone on for days and days. I see this little lady, hovering about him
and trying to amuse him, too dainty to understand his complexity and
too tender to let him go. And he, you know, hypnotised as it were by
his earthly position, went his way with her hither and thither, blind
to everything in Fairyland but this wonderful intimacy that had come
to him. It is hard, it is impossible, to give in print the effect of
her radiant sweetness shining through the jungle of poor Skelmersdale’s
rough and broken sentences. To me, at least, she shone clear amidst the
muddle of his story like a glow-worm in a tangle of weeds.

There must have been many days of things while all this was
happening--and once, I say, they danced under the moonlight in the
fairy rings that stud the meadows near Smeeth--but at last it all came
to an end. She led him into a great cavernous place, lit by ‘a red
nightlight sort of thing,’ where there were coffers piled on coffers,
and cups and golden boxes, and a great heap of what certainly seemed
to all Mr Skelmersdale’s senses--coined gold. There were little gnomes
amidst this wealth, who saluted her at her coming, and stood aside. And
suddenly she turned on him there with brightly shining eyes.

‘And now,’ she said, ‘you have been kind to stay with me so long, and
it is time I let you go. You must go back to your Millie. You must go
back to your Millie, and here--just as I promised you--they will give
you gold.’

‘She choked like,’ said Mr Skelmersdale. ‘At that, I had a sort of
feeling----’ (he touched his breastbone) ‘as though I was fainting
here. I felt pale, you know, and shivering, and even then--I hadn’t a
thing to say.

He paused. ‘Yes,’ I said.

The scene was beyond his describing. But I know that she kissed him
good-bye.

‘And you said nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I stood like a stuffed calf. She just looked
back once, you know, and stood smiling like and crying--I could see
the shine of her eyes--and then she was gone, and there was all these
little fellows bustling about me, stuffing my ’ands and my pockets and
the back of my collar and everywhere with gold.’

And then it was, when the Fairy Lady had vanished, that Mr Skelmersdale
really understood and knew. He suddenly began plucking out the gold
they were thrusting upon him, and shouting out at them to prevent
their giving him more. ‘“I don’t _want_ yer gold,” I said. “I ’aven’t
done yet. I’m not going. I want to speak to that Fairy Lady again.” I
started off to go after her and they held me back. Yes, stuck their
little ’ands against my middle and shoved me back. They kept giving me
more and more gold until it was running all down my trouser legs and
dropping out of my ’ands. “I don’t _want_ yer gold,” I says to them, “I
want just to speak to the Fairy Lady again.”’

‘And did you?’

‘It came to a tussle.’

‘Before you saw her?’

‘I didn’t see her. When I got out from them she wasn’t anywhere to be
seen.’

So he ran in search of her out of this red-lit cave, down a long
grotto, seeking her, and thence he came out in a great and desolate
place athwart which a swarm of will-o’-the-wisps were flying to and
fro. And about him elves were dancing in derision, and the little
gnomes came out of the cave after him, carrying gold in handfuls and
casting it after him, shouting, ‘Fairy love and fairy gold! Fairy love
and fairy gold!’

And when he heard these words, came a great fear that it was all over,
and he lifted up his voice and called to her by her name, and suddenly
set himself to run down the slope from the mouth of the cavern, through
a place of thorns and briers, calling after her very loudly and often.
The elves danced about him unheeded, pinching and pricking him, and
the will-o’-the-wisps circled round him and dashed into his face, and
the gnomes pursued him shouting and pelting him with fairy gold. As he
ran with all this strange rout about him and distracting him, suddenly
he was knee-deep in a swamp, and suddenly he was amidst thick twisted
roots, and he caught his foot in one and stumbled and fell....

He fell and he rolled over, and in that instant he found himself
sprawling upon Aldington Knoll, all lonely under the stars.

He sat up sharply at once, he says, and found he was very stiff and
cold, and his clothes were damp with dew. The first pallor of dawn
and a chilly wind were coming up together. He could have believed the
whole thing a strangely vivid dream until he thrust his hand into his
side pocket and found it stuffed with ashes. Then he knew for certain
it was fairy gold they had given him. He could feel all their pinches
and pricks still, though there was never a bruise upon him. And in that
manner, and so suddenly, Mr Skelmersdale came out of Fairyland back
into this world of men. Even then he fancied the thing was but the
matter of a night until he returned to the shop at Aldington Corner and
discovered amidst their astonishment that he had been away three weeks.

‘Lor! the trouble I ’ad!’ said Mr Skelmersdale.

‘How?’

‘Explaining. I suppose you’ve never had anything like that to explain.’

‘Never,’ I said, and he expatiated for a time on the behaviour of this
person and that. One name he avoided for a space.

‘And Millie?’ said I at last.

‘I didn’t seem to care a bit for seeing Millie,’ he said.

‘I expect she seemed changed?’

‘Every one was changed. Changed for good. Every one seemed big, you
know, and coarse. And their voices seemed loud. Why, the sun, when it
rose in the morning, fair hit me in the eye!’

‘And Millie?’

‘I didn’t want to see Millie.’

‘And when you did?’

‘I came up against her Sunday, coming out of church. “Where you been?”
she said, and I saw there was a row. _I_ didn’t care if there was. I
seemed to forget about her even while she was there a-talking to me.
She was just nothing. I couldn’t make out whatever I ’ad seen in ’er
ever, or what there could ’ave been. Sometimes when she wasn’t about, I
did get back a little, but never when she was there. Then it was always
the other came up and blotted her out.... Any’ow, it didn’t break her
heart.’

‘Married?’ I asked.

‘Married ’er cousin,’ said Mr Skelmersdale, and reflected on the
pattern of the tablecloth for a space.

When he spoke again it was clear that his former sweetheart had clean
vanished from his mind, and that the talk had brought back the Fairy
Lady triumphant in his heart. He talked of her--soon he was letting out
the oddest things, queer love secrets it would be treachery to repeat.
I think, indeed, that was the queerest thing in the whole affair, to
hear that neat little grocer man after his story was done, with a glass
of whisky beside him and a cigar between his fingers, witnessing, with
sorrow still, though now, indeed, with a time blunted anguish, of the
inappeasable hunger of the heart that presently came upon him. ‘I
couldn’t eat,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t sleep. I made mistakes in orders
and got mixed with change. There she was day and night, drawing me and
drawing me. Oh, I wanted her. Lord! how I wanted her! I was up there,
most evenings I was up there on the Knoll, often even when it rained.
I used to walk over the Knoll and round it and round it, calling for
them to let me in. Shouting. Near blubbering I was at times. Daft I was
and miserable. I kept on saying it was all a mistake. And every Sunday
afternoon I went up there, wet and fine, though I knew as well as you
do it wasn’t no good by day. And I’ve tried to go to sleep there.’

He stopped abruptly and decided to drink some whisky.

‘I’ve tried to go to sleep there,’ he said, and I could swear his
lips trembled. ‘I’ve tried to go to sleep there often and often.
And, you know, I couldn’t, sir--never. I’ve thought if I could go to
sleep there, there might be something.... But I’ve sat up there and
laid up there, and I couldn’t--not for thinking and longing. It’s the
longing.... I’ve tried----’

He blew, drank up the rest of his whisky spasmodically, stood up
suddenly and buttoned his jacket, staring closely and critically at the
cheap oleographs beside the mantel meanwhile. The little black notebook
in which he recorded the orders of his daily round projected stiffly
from his breast pocket. When all the buttons were quite done, he patted
his chest and turned on me suddenly. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I must be going.’

There was something in his eyes and manner that was too difficult for
him to express in words. ‘One gets talking,’ he said at last at the
door, and smiled wanly, and so vanished from my eyes. And that is the
tale of Mr Skelmersdale in Fairyland just as he told it to me.




THE STORY OF THE INEXPERIENCED GHOST


The scene amidst which Clayton told his last story comes back very
vividly to my mind. There he sat, for the greater part of the time,
in the corner of the authentic settle by the spacious open fire,
and Sanderson sat beside him smoking the Broseley clay that bore
his name. There was Evans, and that marvel among actors, Wish, who
is also a modest man. We had all come down to the Mermaid Club that
Saturday morning, except Clayton, who had slept there overnight--which
indeed gave him the opening of his story. We had golfed until golfing
was invisible; we had dined, and we were in that mood of tranquil
kindliness when men will suffer a story. When Clayton began to tell
one, we naturally supposed he was lying. It may be that indeed he was
lying--of that the reader will speedily be able to judge as well as I.
He began, it is true, with an air of matter-of-fact anecdote, but that
we thought was only the incurable artifice of the man.

‘I say!’ he remarked, after a long consideration of the upward rain of
sparks from the log that Sanderson had thumped, ‘you know I was alone
here last night?’

‘Except for the domestics,’ said Wish.

‘Who sleep in the other wing,’ said Clayton. ‘Yes. Well----’ He pulled
at his cigar for some little time as though he still hesitated about
his confidence. Then he said, quite quietly, ‘I caught a ghost!’

‘Caught a ghost, did you?’ said Sanderson. ‘Where is it?’

And Evans, who admires Clayton immensely and has been four weeks in
America, shouted, ‘_Caught_ a ghost, did you, Clayton? I’m glad of it!
Tell us all about it right now.’

Clayton said he would in a minute, and asked him to shut the door.

He looked apologetically at me. ‘There’s no eavesdropping, of course,
but we don’t want to upset our very excellent service with any rumours
of ghosts in the place. There’s too much shadow and oak panelling to
trifle with that. And this, you know, wasn’t a regular ghost. I don’t
think it will come again--ever.’

‘You mean to say you didn’t keep it?’ said Sanderson.

‘I hadn’t the heart to,’ said Clayton.

And Sanderson said he was surprised.

We laughed, and Clayton looked aggrieved. ‘I know,’ he said, with a
flicker of a smile, ‘but the fact is it really _was_ a ghost, and I’m
as sure of it as I am that I am talking to you now. I’m not joking. I
mean what I say.’

Sanderson drew deeply at his pipe, with one reddish eye on Clayton, and
then emitted a thin jet of smoke more eloquent than many words.

Clayton ignored the comment. ‘It is the strangest thing that has ever
happened in my life. You know I never believed in ghosts or anything of
the sort, before, ever; and then, you know, I bag one in a corner; and
the whole business is in my hands.’

He meditated still more profoundly and produced and began to pierce a
second cigar with a curious little stabber he affected.

‘You talked to it?’ asked Wish.

‘For the space, probably, of an hour.’

‘Chatty?’ I said, joining the party of the sceptics.

‘The poor devil was in trouble,’ said Clayton, bowed over his
cigar-end and with the very faintest note of reproof.

‘Sobbing?’ some one asked.

Clayton heaved a realistic sigh at the memory. ‘Good Lord!’ he said;
‘yes.’ And then, ‘Poor fellow! yes.’

‘Where did you strike it?’ asked Evans, in his best American accent.

‘I never realised,’ said Clayton, ignoring him, ‘the poor sort of thing
a ghost might be,’ and he hung us up again for a time, while he sought
for matches in his pocket and lit and warmed to his cigar.

‘I took an advantage,’ he reflected at last.

We were none of us in a hurry. ‘A character,’ he said, ‘remains
just the same character for all that it’s been disembodied. That’s
a thing we too often forget. People with a certain strength or
fixity of purpose may have ghosts of a certain strength and fixity
of purpose--most haunting ghosts, you know, must be as one-idea’d as
monomaniacs and as obstinate as mules to come back again and again.
This poor creature wasn’t.’ He suddenly looked up rather queerly, and
his eye went round the room. ‘I say it,’ he said, ‘in all kindliness,
but that is the plain truth of the case. Even at the first glance he
struck me as weak.’

He punctuated with the help of his cigar.

‘I came upon him, you know, in the long passage. His back was towards
me and I saw him first. Right off I knew him for a ghost. He was
transparent and whitish; clean through his chest I could see the
glimmer of the little window at the end. And not only his physique but
his attitude struck me as being weak. He looked, you know, as though he
didn’t know in the slightest whatever he meant to do. One hand was on
the panelling and the other fluttered to his mouth. Like--_so!_’

‘What sort of physique?’ said Sanderson.

‘Lean. You know that sort of young man’s neck that has two great
flutings down the back, here an here--so! And a little, meanish head
with scrubby hair and rather bad ears. Shoulders bad, narrower than the
hips; turndown collar, ready-made short jacket, trousers baggy and a
little frayed at the heels. That’s how he took me. I came very quietly
up the staircase. I did not carry a light, you know--the candles are
on the landing table and there is that lamp--and I was in my list
slippers, and I saw him as I came up. I stopped dead at that--taking
him in. I wasn’t a bit afraid. I think that in most of these affairs
one is never nearly so afraid or excited as one imagines one would be.
I was surprised and interested. I thought, “Good Lord! Here’s a ghost
at last! And I haven’t believed for a moment in ghosts during the last
five-and-twenty years.”’

‘Um,’ said Wish.

‘I suppose I wasn’t on the landing a moment before he found out I was
there. He turned on me sharply, and I saw the face of an immature young
man, a weak nose, a scrubby little moustache, a feeble chin. So for an
instant we stood--he looking over his shoulder at me--and regarded one
another. Then he seemed to remember his high calling. He turned round,
drew himself up, projected his face, raised his arms, spread his hands
in approved ghost fashion--came towards me. As he did so his little jaw
dropped, and he emitted a faint, drawn-out “Boo.” No, it wasn’t--not a
bit dreadful. I’d dined. I’d had a bottle of champagne, and being all
alone, perhaps two or three--perhaps even four or five--whiskies, so I
was as solid as rocks and no more frightened than if I’d been assailed
by a frog. “Boo!” I said. “Nonsense. You don’t belong to _this_ place.
What are you doing here?”

‘I could see him wince. “Boo-oo,” he said.

‘“Boo--be hanged! Are you a member?” I said: and just to show I didn’t
care a pin for him I stepped through a corner of him and made to light
my candle. “Are you a member?” I repeated, looking at him sideways.

‘He moved a little so as to stand clear of me, and his bearing became
crestfallen. “No,” he said, in answer to the persistent interrogation
of my eye; “I’m not a member--I’m a ghost.”

‘“Well, that doesn’t give you the run of the Mermaid Club. Is there
any one you want to see, or anything of that sort?” And doing it as
steadily as possible for fear that he should mistake the carelessness
of whisky for the distraction of fear, I got my candle alight. I turned
on him, holding it. “What are you doing here?” I said.

‘He had dropped his hands and stopped his booing, and there he stood,
abashed and awkward, the ghost of a weak, silly, aimless young man.
“I’m haunting,” he said.

‘“You haven’t any business to,” I said in a quiet voice.

‘“I’m a ghost,” he said, as if in defence.

‘“That may be, but you haven’t any business to haunt here. This is
a respectable private club; people often stop here with nursemaids
and children, and, going about in the careless way you do, some poor
little mite could easily come upon you and be scared out of her wits. I
suppose you didn’t think of that?”

‘“No sir,” he said, “I didn’t.”

‘“You should have done. You haven’t any claim on the place, have you?
Weren’t murdered here, or anything of that sort?”

‘“None, sir; but I thought as it was old and oak-panelled----”

‘“That’s _no_ excuse.” I regarded him firmly. “Your coming here is a
mistake,” I said, in a tone of friendly superiority. I feigned to see
if I had my matches, and then looked up at him frankly. “If I were you
I wouldn’t wait for cock-crow--I’d vanish right away.”

‘He looked embarrassed. “The fact _is_, sir----” he began.

‘“I’d vanish,” I said, driving it home.

‘“The fact is, sir, that--somehow--I can’t.”

‘“You _can’t_?”

‘“No, sir. There’s something I’ve forgotten. I’ve been hanging about
here since midnight last night, hiding in the cupboards of the empty
bedrooms and things like that. I’m flurried. I’ve never come haunting
before, and it seems to put me out.”

‘“Put you out?”

‘“Yes, sir. I’ve tried to do it several times, and it doesn’t come off.
There’s some little thing has slipped me, and I can’t get back.”

‘That, you know, rather bowled me over. He looked at me in such an
abject way that for the life of me I couldn’t keep up quite the high,
hectoring vein I had adopted. “That’s queer,” I said, and as I spoke I
fancied I heard some one moving about down below. “Come into my room
and tell me more about it,” I said. “I didn’t, of course, understand
this,” and I tried to take him by the arm. But, of course, you might
as well have tried to take hold of a puff of smoke! I had forgotten my
number, I think; anyhow, I remember going into several bedrooms--it was
lucky I was the only soul in that wing--until I saw my traps. “Here we
are,” I said, and sat down in the arm-chair; “sit down and tell me all
about it. It seems to me you have got yourself into a jolly awkward
position, old chap.”

‘Well, he said he wouldn’t sit down; he’d prefer to flit up and down
the room if it was all the same to me. And so he did, and in a little
while we were deep in a long and serious talk. And presently, you
know, something of those whiskies and sodas evaporated out of me,
and I began to realise just a little what a thundering rum and weird
business it was that I was in. There he was, semi-transparent--the
proper conventional phantom, and noiseless except for his ghost of
a voice--flitting to and fro in that nice, clean, chintz-hung old
bedroom. You could see the gleam of the copper candlesticks through
him, and the lights on the brass fender, and the comers of the framed
engravings on the wall, and there he was telling me all about this
wretched little life of his that had recently ended on earth. He hadn’t
a particularly honest face, you know, but being transparent, of course,
he couldn’t avoid telling the truth?

‘Eh?’ said Wish, suddenly sitting up in his chair.

‘What?’ said Clayton.

‘Being transparent--couldn’t avoid telling the truth--I don’t see it,’
said Wish.

‘_I_ don’t see it,’ said Clayton, with inimitable assurance. ‘But it
_is_ so, I can assure you nevertheless. I don’t believe he got once
a nail’s breadth off the Bible truth. He told me how he had been
killed--he went down into a London basement with a candle to look for a
leakage of gas--and described himself as a senior English master in a
London private school when that release occurred.’

‘Poor wretch!’ said I.

‘That’s what I thought, and the more he talked the more I thought it.
There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He talked
of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who had ever
been anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too sensitive,
too nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly or understood
him, he said. He had never had a real friend in the world, I think; he
had never had a success. He had shirked games and failed examinations.
“It’s like that with some people,” he said; “whenever I got into the
examination-room or anywhere everything seemed to go.” Engaged to be
married of course--to another over-sensitive person, I suppose--when
the indiscretion with the gas escape ended his affairs. “And where are
you now?” I asked. “Not in----?”

‘He wasn’t clear on that point at all. The impression he gave me was
of a sort of vague, intermediate state, a special reserve for souls
too non-existent for anything so positive as either sin or virtue. _I_
don’t know. He was much too egotistical and unobservant to give me
any clear idea of the kind of place, kind of country, there is on the
Other Side of Things. Wherever he was he seems to have fallen in with
a set of kindred spirits: ghosts of weak Cockney young men, who were
on a footing of Christian names, and among these there was certainly
a lot of talk about “going haunting” and things like that. Yes--going
haunting! They seemed to think “haunting” a tremendous adventure, and
most of them funked it all the time. And so primed, you know, he had
come.’

‘But really!’ said Wish to the fire.

‘These are the impressions he gave me, anyhow,’ said Clayton modestly.
‘I may, of course, have been in a rather uncritical state, but that
was the sort of background he gave to himself. He kept flitting up and
down, with his thin voice going--talking, talking about his wretched
self, and never a word of clear, firm statement from first to last. He
was thinner and sillier and more pointless than if he had been real
and alive. Only then, you know, he would not have been in my bedroom
here--if he _had_ been alive. I should have kicked him out.’

‘Of course,’ said Evans, ‘there _are_ poor mortals like that.’

‘And there’s just as much chance of their having ghosts as the rest of
us,’ I admitted.

‘What gave a sort of point to him, you know, was the fact that he did
seem within limits to have found himself out. The mess he had made
of haunting had depressed him terribly. He had been told it would be
a “lark”; he had come expecting it to be a “lark,” and here it was,
nothing but another failure added to his record! He proclaimed himself
an utter out-and-out failure. He said, and I can quite believe it, that
he had never tried to do anything all his life that he hadn’t made
a perfect mess of--and through all the wastes of eternity he never
would. If he had had sympathy, perhaps---- He paused at that, and stood
regarding me. He remarked that, strange as it might seem to me, nobody,
not any one, ever, had given him the amount of sympathy I was doing
now. I could see what he wanted straight away, and I determined to head
him off at once. I may be a brute, you know, but being the Only Real
Friend, the recipient of the confidences of one of these egotistical
weaklings, ghost or body, is beyond my physical endurance. I got up
briskly. “Don’t you brood on these things too much,” I said. “The thing
you’ve got to do is to get out of this--get out of this sharp. You pull
yourself together and _try_.” “I can’t,” he said. “You try,” I said,
and try he did.’

‘Try!’ said Sanderson. ‘_How?_’

‘Passes,’ said Clayton.

‘Passes?’

‘Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That’s how
he had come in and that’s how he had to get out again. Lord! what a
business I had!’

‘But how could _any_ series of passes----’ I began.

‘My dear man,’ said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis
on certain words, ‘you want _everything_ clear. _I_ don’t know _how_.
All I know is that you _do_--that _he_ did, anyhow, at least. After
a fearful time, you know, he got his passes right and suddenly
disappeared.’

‘Did you,’ said Sanderson, slowly, ‘observe the passes?’

‘Yes,’ said Clayton, and seemed to think. ‘It was tremendously queer,’
he said. ‘There we were, I and this thin vague ghost, in that silent
room, in this silent, empty inn, in this silent little Friday-night
town. Not a sound except our voices and a faint panting he made
when he swung. There was the bedroom candle, and one candle on the
dressing-table alight, that was all--sometimes one or other would flare
up into a tall, lean, astonished flame for a space. And queer things
happened. “I can’t,” he said; “I shall never----!” And suddenly he sat
down on a little chair at the foot of the bed and began to sob and sob.
Lord! what a harrowing, whimpering thing he seemed!

‘“You pull yourself together,” I said, and tried to pat him on the
back, and ... my confounded hand went through him! By that time, you
know, I wasn’t nearly so--massive as I had been on the landing. I
got the queerness of it full. I remember snatching back my hand out
of him, as it were, with a little thrill, and walking over to the
dressing-table. “You pull yourself together,” I said to him, “and try.”
And in order to encourage and help him I began to try as well.’

‘What!’ said Sanderson, ‘the passes?’

‘Yes, the passes.’

‘But----’ I said, moved by an idea that eluded me for a space.

‘This is interesting,’ said Sanderson, with his finger in his
pipe-bowl. ‘You mean to say this ghost of yours gave away----’

‘Did his level best to give away the whole confounded barrier? _Yes._’

‘He didn’t,’ said Wish; ‘he couldn’t. Or you’d have gone there too.’

‘That’s precisely it,’ I said, finding my elusive idea put into words
for me.

‘That _is_ precisely it,’ said Clayton, with thoughtful eyes upon the
fire.

For just a little while there was silence.

‘And at last he did it?’ said Sanderson.

‘At last he did it. I had to keep him up to it hard, but he did it at
last--rather suddenly. He despaired, we had a scene, and then he got
up abruptly and asked me to go through the whole performance, slowly,
so that he might see. “I believe,” he said, “if I could _see_ I should
spot what was wrong at once.” And he did. “_I_ know,” he said. “What do
you know?” said I. “_I_ know,” he repeated. Then he said, peevishly,
“I _can’t_ do it if you look at me--I really _can’t_; it’s been that,
partly, all along. I’m such a nervous fellow that you put me out.”
Well, we had a bit of an argument. Naturally I wanted to see; but he
was as obstinate as a mule, and suddenly I had come over as tired as a
dog--he tired me out. “All right,” I said, “_I_ won’t look at you,” and
turned towards the mirror, on the wardrobe, by the bed.

‘He started off very fast. I tried to follow him by looking in the
looking-glass, to see just what it was had hung. Round went his arms
and hands, so, and so, and so, and then with a rush came to the last
gesture off all--you stand erect and open out your arms--and so, don’t
you know, he stood. And then he didn’t! He didn’t! He wasn’t! I wheeled
round from the looking-glass to him. There was nothing! I was alone
with the flaring candles and a staggering mind. What had happened? Had
anything happened? Had I been dreaming?... And then, with an absurd
note of finality about it, the clock upon the landing discovered the
moment was ripe for striking _one_. So!--Ping! And I was as grave and
sober as a judge, with all my champagne and whisky gone into the vast
serene. Feeling queer, you know--confoundedly _queer_! Queer! Good
Lord!’

He regarded his cigar-ash for a moment. ‘That’s all that happened,’ he
said.

‘And then you went to bed?’ asked Evans.

‘What else was there to do?’

I looked Wish in the eye. We wanted to scoff, and there was something,
something perhaps in Clayton’s voice and manner, that hampered our
desire.

‘And about these passes?’ said Sanderson.

‘I believe I could do them now.’

‘Oh!’ said Sanderson, and produced a pen-knife and set himself to grub
the dottel out of the bowl of his clay.

‘Why don’t you do them now?’ said Sanderson, shutting his pen-knife
with a click.

‘That’s what I’m going to do,’ said Clayton.

‘They won’t work,’ said Evans.

‘If they do----’ I suggested.

‘You know, I’d rather you didn’t,’ said Wish, stretching out his legs.

‘Why?’ asked Evans.

‘I’d rather he didn’t,’ said Wish.

‘But he hasn’t got ’em right,’ said Sanderson, plugging too much
tobacco into his pipe.

‘All the same, I’d rather he didn’t,’ said Wish.

We argued with Wish. He said that for Clayton to go through
those gestures was like mocking a serious matter. ‘But you don’t
believe----?’ I said. Wish glanced at Clayton, who was staring into the
fire, weighing something in his mind. ‘I do--more than half, anyhow, I
do,’ said Wish.

‘Clayton,’ said I, ‘you’re too good a liar for us. Most of it was all
right. But that disappearance ... happened to be convincing. Tell us,
it’s a tale of cock and bull.’

He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug, and
faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and then for
all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall, with an
intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level of his
eyes and so began....

Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings,
which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the
mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this
lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton’s motions
with a singular interest in his reddish eye. ‘That’s not bad,’ he
said, when it was done. ‘You really do, you know, put things together,
Clayton, in a most amazing fashion. But there’s one little detail out.’

‘I know,’ said Clayton. ‘I believe I could tell you which.’

‘Well?’

‘This,’ said Clayton, and did a queer little twist and writhing and
thrust of the hands.

‘Yes.’

‘That, you know, was what _he_ couldn’t get right,’ said Clayton. ‘But
how do _you_----?’

‘Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it, I don’t
understand at all,’ said Sanderson, ‘but just that phase--I do.’ He
reflected. ‘These happen to be a series of gestures--connected with a
certain branch of esoteric Masonry---- Probably you know. Or else----
_How?_’ He reflected still further. ‘I do not see I can do any harm in
telling you just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if
you don’t, you don’t.’

‘I know nothing,’ said Clayton, ‘except what the poor devil let out
last night.’

‘Well, anyhow,’ said Sanderson, and placed his churchwarden very
carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly he
gesticulated with his hands.

‘So?’ said Clayton, repeating.

‘So,’ said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.

‘Ah, _now_,’ said Clayton, ‘I can do the whole thing--right.’

He stood up before the waning fire and smiled at us all. But I think
there was just a little hesitation in his smile. ‘If I begin----’ he
said.

‘I wouldn’t begin,’ said Wish.

‘It’s all right!’ said Evans. ‘Matter is indestructible. You don’t
think any jiggery-pokery of this sort is going to snatch Clayton into
the world of shades. Not it! You may try, Clayton, so far as I’m
concerned, until your arms drop off at the wrists.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Wish, and stood up and put his arm on
Clayton’s shoulder. ‘You’ve made me half believe in that story somehow,
and I don’t want to see the thing done.’

‘Goodness!’ said I, ‘here’s Wish frightened!’

‘I am,’ said Wish, with real or admirably feigned intensity. ‘I believe
that if he goes through these motions right he’ll _go_.’

‘He’ll not do anything of the sort,’ I cried. ‘There’s only one way
out of this world for men, and Clayton is thirty years from that.
Besides.... And such a ghost! Do you think----?’

Wish interrupted me by moving. He walked out from among our chairs and
stopped beside the table and stood there. ‘Clayton,’ he said, ‘you’re a
fool.’

Clayton, with a humorous light in his eyes, smiled back at him. ‘Wish,’
he said, ‘is right and all you others are wrong. I shall go. I shall
get to the end of these passes, and as the last swish whistles through
the air, Presto!--this hearthrug will be vacant, the room will be blank
amazement, and a respectably dressed gentleman of fifteen stone will
plump into the world of shades. I’m certain. So will you be. I decline
to argue further. Let the thing be tried.’

‘_No_,’ said Wish, and made a step and ceased, and Clayton raised his
hands once more to repeat the spirit’s passing.

By that time, you know, we were all in a state of tension--largely
because of the behaviour of Wish. We sat all of us with our eyes on
Clayton--I, at least, with a sort of tight, stiff feeling about me as
though from the back of my skull to the middle of my thighs my body had
been changed to steel. And there, with a gravity that was imperturbably
serene, Clayton bowed and swayed and waved his hands and arms before
us. As he drew towards the end one piled up, one tingled in one’s
teeth. The last gesture, I have said, was to swing the arms out wide
open, with the face held up. And when at last he swung out to this
closing gesture I ceased even to breathe. It was ridiculous, of course,
but you know that ghost-story feeling. It was after dinner, in a queer,
old shadowy house. Would he, after all----?

There he stood for one stupendous moment, with his arms open and his
upturned face, assured and bright, in the glare of the hanging lamp.
We hung through that moment as if it were an age, and then came from
all of us something that was half a sigh of infinite relief and half a
reassuring ‘_No!_’ For visibly--he wasn’t going. It was all nonsense.
He had told an idle story, and carried it almost to conviction, that
was all!... And then in that moment the face of Clayton changed.

It changed, It changed as a lit house changes when its lights are
suddenly extinguished. His eyes were suddenly eyes that were fixed, his
smile was frozen on his lips, and he stood there still. He stood there,
very gently swaying.

That moment, too, was an age. And then, you know, chairs were scraping,
things were falling, and we were all moving. His knees seemed to give,
and he fell forward, and Evans rose and caught him in his arms....

It stunned us all. For a minute I suppose no one said a coherent thing.
We believed it, yet could not believe it.... I came out of a muddled
stupefaction to find myself kneeling beside him, and his vest and shirt
were torn open, and Sanderson’s hand lay on his heart....

Well--the simple fact before us could very well wait our convenience;
there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it
lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton
had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far
from our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man
may take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost’s
incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the
midst of an idle tale--as the coroner’s jury would have us believe--is
no matter for my judging; it is just one of those inexplicable riddles
that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall
come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very
instant, of concluding those passes, he changed, and staggered, and
fell down before us--dead!




THE STOLEN BODY


Mr Bessel was the senior partner in the firm of Bessel, Hart, and
Brown, of St Paul’s Churchyard, and for many years he was well known
among those interested in psychical research as a liberal-minded and
conscientious investigator. He was an unmarried man, and instead of
living in the suburbs, after the fashion of his class, he occupied
rooms in the Albany, near Piccadilly. He was particularly interested
in the questions of thought transference and of apparitions of the
living, and in November, 1896, he commenced a series of experiments in
conjunction with Mr Vincey, of Staple Inn, in order to test the alleged
possibility of projecting an apparition of oneself by force of will
through space.

Their experiments were conducted in the following manner: At a
pre-arranged hour Mr Bessel shut himself in one of his rooms in the
Albany and Mr Vincey in his sitting-room in Staple Inn, and each then
fixed his mind as resolutely as possible on the other. Mr Bessel
had acquired the art of self-hypnotism, and, so far as he could, he
attempted first to hypnotise himself and then to project himself as
a ‘phantom of the living’ across the intervening space of nearly two
miles into Mr Vincey’s apartment. On several evenings this was tried
without any satisfactory result, but on the fifth or sixth occasion
Mr Vincey did actually see or imagine he saw an apparition of Mr
Bessel standing in his room. He states that the appearance, although
brief, was very vivid and real. He noticed that Mr Bessel’s face
was white and his expression anxious, and, moreover, that his hair
was disordered. For a moment Mr Vincey, in spite of his state of
expectation, was too surprised to speak or move, and in that moment
it seemed to him as though the figure glanced over its shoulder and
incontinently vanished.

It had been arranged that an attempt should be made to photograph any
phantasm seen, but Mr Vincey had not the instant presence of mind to
snap the camera that lay ready on the table beside him, and when he
did so he was too late. Greatly elated, however, even by this partial
success, he made a note of the exact time, and at once took a cab to
the Albany to inform Mr Bessel of this result.

He was surprised to find Mr Bessel’s outer door standing open to the
night, and the inner apartments lit and in an extraordinary disorder.
An empty champagne magnum lay smashed upon the floor; its neck had
been broken off against the inkpot on the bureau and lay beside it.
An octagonal occasional table, which carried a bronze statuette and
a number of choice books, had been rudely overturned, and down the
primrose paper of the wall inky fingers had been drawn, as it seemed
for the mere pleasure of defilement. One of the delicate chintz
curtains had been violently torn from its rings and thrust upon the
fire, so that the smell of its smouldering filled the room. Indeed the
whole place was disarranged in the strangest fashion. For a few minutes
Mr Vincey, who had entered sure of finding Mr Bessel in his easy chair
awaiting him, could scarcely believe his eyes, and stood staring
helplessly at these unanticipated things.

Then, full of a vague sense of calamity, he sought the porter at the
entrance lodge. ‘Where is Mr Bessel?’ he asked. ‘Do you know that all
the furniture is broken in Mr Bessel’s room?’ The porter said nothing,
but, obeying his gestures, came at once to Mr Bessel’s apartment to see
the state of affairs. ‘This settles it,’ he said, surveying the lunatic
confusion. ‘I didn’t know of this. Mr Bessel’s gone off. He’s mad!’

He then proceeded to tell Mr Vincey that about half an hour previously,
that is to say, at about the time of Mr Bessel’s apparition in Mr
Vincey’s rooms, the missing gentleman had rushed out of the gates of
the Albany into Vigo Street, hatless and with disordered hair, and had
vanished into the direction of Bond Street. ‘And as he went past me,’
said the porter, ‘he laughed--a sort of gasping laugh, with his mouth
open and his eyes glaring--I tell you, sir, he fair scared me!--like
this.’

According to his imitation it was anything but a pleasant laugh. ‘He
waved his hand, with all his fingers crooked and clawing--like that.
And he said, in a sort of fierce whisper, “_Life!_” Just that one word,
“_Life!_”’

‘Dear me,’ said Mr Vincey. ‘Tut, tut,’ and ‘Dear me!’ He could think
of nothing else to say. He was naturally very much surprised. He
turned from the room to the porter and from the porter to the room
in the gravest perplexity. Beyond his suggestion that probably Mr
Bessel would come back presently and explain what had happened, their
conversation was unable to proceed. ‘It might be a sudden toothache,’
said the porter, ‘a very sudden and violent toothache, jumping on him
suddenly-like and driving him wild. I’ve broken things myself before
now in such a case....’ He thought. ‘If it was, why should he say
‘_life_’ to me as he went past?’

Mr Vincey did not know. Mr Bessel did not return, and at last Mr
Vincey, having done some more helpless staring, and having addressed
a note of brief inquiry and left it in a conspicuous position on the
bureau, returned in a very perplexed frame of mind to his own premises
in Staple Inn. This affair had given him a shock. He was at a loss to
account for Mr Bessel’s conduct on any sane hypothesis. He tried to
read, but he could not do so; he went for a short walk, and was so
preoccupied that he narrowly escaped a cab at the top of Chancery Lane;
and at last--a full hour before his usual time--he went to bed. For
a considerable time he could not sleep because of his memory of the
silent confusion of Mr Bessel’s apartment, and when at length he did
attain an uneasy slumber it was at once disturbed by a very vivid and
distressing dream of Mr Bessel.

He saw Mr Bessel gesticulating wildly, and with his face white and
contorted. And, inexplicably mingled with his appearance, suggested
perhaps by his gestures, was an intense fear, an urgency to act. He
even believes that he heard the voice of his fellow experimenter
calling distressfully to him, though at the time he considered this to
be an illusion. The vivid impression remained though Mr Vincey awoke.
For a space he lay awake and trembling in the darkness, possessed with
that vague, unaccountable terror of unknown possibilities that comes
out of dreams upon even the bravest men. But at last he roused himself,
and turned over and went to sleep again, only for the dream to return
with enhanced vividness.

He awoke with such a strong conviction that Mr Bessel was in
overwhelming distress and need of help that sleep was no longer
possible. He was persuaded that his friend had rushed out to some dire
calamity. For a time he lay reasoning vainly against this belief, but
at last he gave way to it. He arose, against all reason, lit his gas
and dressed, and set out through the deserted streets--deserted, save
for a noiseless policeman or so and the early news carts--towards Vigo
Street to inquire if Mr Bessel had returned.

But he never got there. As he was going down Long Acre some
unaccountable impulse turned him aside out of that street towards
Covent Garden, which was just waking to its nocturnal activities. He
saw the market in front of him--a queer effect of glowing yellow lights
and busy black figures. He became aware of a shouting, and perceived
a figure turn the corner by the hotel and run swiftly towards him. He
knew at once that it was Mr Bessel. But it was Mr Bessel transfigured.
He was hatless and dishevelled, his collar was torn open, he grasped
a bone-handled walking-cane near the ferrule end, and his mouth was
pulled awry. And he ran, with agile strides, very rapidly. Their
encounter was the affair of an instant. ‘Bessel!’ cried Vincey.

The running man gave no sign of recognition either of Mr Vincey or of
his own name. Instead, he cut at his friend savagely with the stick,
hitting him in the face within an inch of the eye. Mr Vincey, stunned
and astonished, staggered back, lost his footing, and fell heavily on
the pavement. It seemed to him that Mr Bessel leapt over him as he
fell. When he looked again Mr Bessel had vanished, and a policeman and
a number of garden porters and salesmen were rushing past towards Long
Acre in hot pursuit.

With the assistance of several passers-by--for the whole street was
speedily alive with running people--Mr Vincey struggled to his feet.
He at once became the centre of a crowd greedy to see his injury. A
multitude of voices competed to reassure him of his safety, and then to
tell him of the behaviour of the madman, as they regarded Mr Bessel.
He had suddenly appeared in the middle of the market screaming ‘_Life!
Life!_’ striking right and left with a blood-stained walking-stick,
and dancing and shouting with laughter at each successful blow. A lad
and two women had broken heads, and he had smashed a man’s wrist;
a little child had been knocked insensible, and for a time he had
driven every one before him, so furious and resolute had his behaviour
been. Then he made a raid upon a coffee stall, hurled its paraffin
flare through the window of the post office, and fled laughing, after
stunning the foremost of the two policemen who had the pluck to charge
him.

Mr Vincey’s first impulse was naturally to join in the pursuit of his
friend, in order if possible to save him from the violence of the
indignant people. But his action was slow, the blow had half stunned
him, and while this was still no more than a resolution came the news,
shouted through the crowd, that Mr Bessel had eluded his pursuers. At
first Mr Vincey could scarcely credit this, but the universality of the
report, and presently the dignified return of two futile policemen,
convinced him. After some aimless inquiries he returned towards Staple
Inn, padding a handkerchief to a now very painful nose.

He was angry and astonished and perplexed. It appeared to him
indisputable that Mr Bessel must have gone violently mad in the midst
of his experiment in thought transference, but why that should make him
appear with a sad white face in Mr Vincey’s dreams seemed a problem
beyond solution. He racked his brains in vain to explain this. It
seemed to him at last that not simply Mr Bessel, but the order of
things must be insane. But he could think of nothing to do. He shut
himself carefully into his room, lit his fire--it was a gas fire with
asbestos bricks--and, fearing fresh dreams if he went to bed, remained
bathing his injured face, or holding up books in a vain attempt to read
until dawn. Throughout that vigil he had a curious persuasion that Mr
Bessel was endeavouring to speak to him, but he would not let himself
attend to any such belief.

About dawn, his physical fatigue asserted itself, and he went to bed
and slept at last in spite of dreaming. He rose late, unrested and
anxious and in considerable facial pain. The morning papers had no news
of Mr Bessel’s aberration--it had come too late for them. Mr Vincey’s
perplexities, to which the fever of his bruise added fresh irritation,
became at last intolerable, and, after a fruitless visit to the Albany,
he went down to St Paul’s Churchyard to Mr Hart, Mr Bessel’s partner,
and so far as Mr Vincey knew, his nearest friend.

He was surprised to learn that Mr Hart, although he knew nothing of the
outbreak, had also been disturbed by a vision, the very vision that Mr
Vincey had seen--Mr Bessel, white and dishevelled, pleading earnestly
by his gestures for help. That was his impression of the import of
his signs. ‘I was just going to look him up in the Albany when you
arrived,’ said Mr Hart. ‘I was so sure of something being wrong with
him.’

As the outcome of their consultation the two gentlemen decided to
inquire at Scotland Yard for news of their missing friend. ‘He is
bound to be laid by the heels,’ said Mr Hart. ‘He can’t go on at that
pace for long.’ But the police authorities had not laid Mr Bessel by
the heels. They confirmed Mr Vincey’s overnight experiences and added
fresh circumstances, some of an even graver character than those he
knew--a list of smashed glass along the upper half of Tottenham Court
Road, an attack upon a policeman in Hampstead Road, and an atrocious
assault upon a woman. All these outrages were committed between
half-past twelve and a quarter to two in the morning, and between those
hours--and, indeed, from the very moment of Mr Bessel’s first rush
from his rooms at half-past nine in the evening--they could trace the
deepening violence of his fantastic career. For the last hour, at least
from before one, that is, until a quarter to two, he had run amuck
through London, eluding with amazing agility every effort to stop or
capture him.

But after a quarter to two he had vanished. Up to that hour witnesses
were multitudinous. Dozens of people had seen him, fled from him or
pursued him, and then things suddenly came to an end. At a quarter
to two he had been seen running down the Euston Road towards Baker
Street, flourishing a can of burning colza oil and jerking splashes of
flame therefrom at the windows of the houses he passed. But none of
the policemen on Euston Road beyond the Waxwork Exhibition, nor any of
those in the side streets down which he must have passed had he left
the Euston Road, had seen anything of him. Abruptly he disappeared.
Nothing of his subsequent doings came to light, in spite of the keenest
inquiry.

Here was a fresh astonishment for Mr Vincey. He had found considerable
comfort in Mr Hart’s conviction, ‘He is bound to be laid by the heels
before long,’ and in that assurance he had been able to suspend his
mental perplexities. But any fresh development seemed destined to add
new impossibilities to a pile already heaped beyond the powers of his
acceptance. He found himself doubting whether his memory might not
have played him some grotesque trick, debating whether any of these
things could possibly have happened; and in the afternoon he hunted up
Mr Hart again to share the intolerable weight on his mind. He found Mr
Hart engaged with a well-known private detective, but as that gentleman
accomplished nothing in this case, we need not enlarge upon his
proceedings.

All that day Mr Bessel’s whereabouts eluded an unceasingly active
inquiry, and all that night. And all that day there was a persuasion
in the back of Mr Vincey’s mind that Mr Bessel sought his attention,
and all through the night Mr Bessel with a tear-stained face of anguish
pursued him through his dreams. And whenever he saw Mr Bessel in his
dreams he also saw a number of other faces, vague but malignant, that
seemed to be pursuing Mr Bessel.

It was on the following day, Sunday, that Mr Vincey recalled certain
remarkable stories of Mrs Bullock, the medium, who was then attracting
attention for the first time in London. He determined to consult her.
She was staying at the house of that well-known inquirer, Dr Wilson
Paget, and Mr Vincey, although he had never met that gentleman before,
repaired to him forthwith with the intention of invoking her help.
But scarcely had he mentioned the name of Bessel when Doctor Paget
interrupted him. ‘Last night--just at the end,’ he said, ‘we had a
communication.’

He left the room, and returned with a slate on which were certain
words written in a handwriting, shaky indeed, but indisputably the
handwriting of Mr Bessel!

‘How did you get this?’ said Mr Vincey. ‘Do you mean?’----

‘We got it last night,’ said Doctor Paget. With numerous interruptions
from Mr Vincey, he proceeded to explain how the writing had been
obtained. It appears that in her _séances_, Mrs Bullock passes into a
condition of trance, her eyes rolling up in a strange way under her
eyelids, and her body becoming rigid. She then begins to talk very
rapidly, usually in voices other than her own. At the same time one
or both of her hands may become active, and if slates and pencils are
provided they will then write messages simultaneously with and quite
independently of the flow of words from her mouth. By many she is
considered an even more remarkable medium than the celebrated Mrs
Piper. It was one of these messages, the one written by her left hand,
that Mr Vincey now had before him. It consisted of eight words written
disconnectedly ‘George Bessel ... trial excav^n ... Baker Street ...
help ... starvation.’ Curiously enough, neither Doctor Paget nor the
two other inquirers who were present had heard of the disappearance
of Mr Bessel--the news of it appeared only in the evening papers of
Saturday--and they had put the message aside with many others of a
vague and enigmatical sort that Mrs Bullock has from time to time
delivered.

When Doctor Paget heard Mr Vincey’s story, he gave himself at once with
great energy to the pursuit of this clue to the discovery of Mr Bessel.
It would serve no useful purpose here to describe the inquiries of Mr
Vincey and himself; suffice it that the clue was a genuine one, and
that Mr Bessel was actually discovered by its aid.

He was found at the bottom of a detached shaft which had been sunk and
abandoned at the commencement of the work for the new electric railway
near Baker Street Station. His arm and leg and two ribs were broken.
The shaft is protected by a hoarding nearly 20 ft. high, and over this,
incredible as it seems, Mr Bessel, a stout, middle-aged gentleman, must
have scrambled in order to fall down the shaft. He was saturated in
colza oil, and the smashed tin lay beside him, but luckily the flame
had been extinguished by his fall. And his madness had passed from him
altogether. But he was, of course, terribly enfeebled, and at the sight
of his rescuers he gave way to hysterical weeping.

In view of the deplorable state of his flat, he was taken to the house
of Dr Hatton in Upper Baker Street. Here he was subjected to a sedative
treatment, and anything that might recall the violent crisis through
which he had passed was carefully avoided. But on the second day he
volunteered a statement.

Since that occasion Mr Bessel has several times repeated this
statement--to myself among other people--varying the details as the
narrator of real experiences always does, but never by any chance
contradicting himself in any particular. And the statement he makes is
in substance as follows.

In order to understand it clearly it is necessary to go back to his
experiments with Mr Vincey before his remarkable attack. Mr Bessel’s
first attempts at self-projection, in his experiments with Mr Vincey,
were, as the reader will remember, unsuccessful. But through all of
them he was concentrating all his power and will upon getting out of
the body--‘willing it with all my might,’ he says. At last, almost
against expectation, came success. And Mr Bessel asserts that he, being
alive, did actually, by an effort of will, leave his body and pass into
some place or state outside this world.

The release was, he asserts, instantaneous. ‘At one moment I was seated
in my chair, with my eyes tightly shut, my hands gripping the arms of
the chair, doing all I could to concentrate my mind on Vincey, and then
I perceived myself outside my body--saw my body near me, but certainly
not containing me, with the hands relaxing and the head drooping
forward on the breast.’

Nothing shakes him in his assurance of that release. He describes in a
quiet, matter-of-fact way the new sensation he experienced. He felt he
had become impalpable--so much he had expected, but he had not expected
to find himself enormously large. So, however, it would seem he became.
‘I was a great cloud--if I may express it that way--anchored to my
body. It appeared to me, at first, as if I had discovered a greater
self of which the conscious being in my brain was only a little part. I
saw the Albany and Piccadilly and Regent Street and all the rooms and
places in the houses, very minute and very bright and distinct, spread
out below me like a little city seen from a balloon. Every now and then
vague shapes like drifting wreaths of smoke made the vision a little
indistinct, but at first I paid little heed to them. The thing that
astonished me most, and which astonishes me still, is that I saw quite
distinctly the insides of the houses as well as the streets, saw little
people dining and talking in the private houses, men and women dining,
playing billiards, and drinking in restaurants and hotels, and several
places of entertainment crammed with people. It was like watching the
affairs of a glass hive.’

Such were Mr Bessel’s exact words as I took them down when he told
me the story. Quite forgetful of Mr Vincey, he remained for a space
observing these things. Impelled by curiosity, he says, he stooped down
and with the shadowy arm he found himself possessed of attempted to
touch a man walking along Vigo Street. But he could not do so, though
his finger seemed to pass through the man. Something prevented his
doing this, but what it was he finds it hard to describe. He compares
the obstacle to a sheet of glass.

‘I felt as a kitten may feel,’ he said, ‘when it goes for the first
time to pat its reflection in a mirror.’ Again and again, on the
occasion when I heard him tell this story, Mr Bessel returned to
that comparison of the sheet of glass. Yet it was not altogether a
precise comparison, because, as the reader will speedily see, there
were interruptions of this generally impermeable resistance, means
of getting through the barrier to the material world again. But,
naturally, there is a very great difficulty in expressing these
unprecedented impressions in the language of everyday experience.

A thing that impressed him instantly, and which weighed upon him
throughout all this experience, was the stillness of this place--he
was in a world without sound.

At first Mr Bessel’s mental state was an unemotional wonder. His
thought chiefly concerned itself with where he might be. He was out of
the body--out of his material body, at any rate--but that was not all.
He believes, and I for one believe also, that he was somewhere out of
space, as we understand it, altogether. By a strenuous effort of will
he had passed out of his body into a world beyond this world, a world
undreamt of, yet lying so close to it and so strangely situated with
regard to it that all things on this earth are clearly visible both
from without and from within in this other world about us. For a long
time, as it seemed to him, this realisation occupied his mind to the
exclusion of all other matters, and then he recalled the engagement
with Mr Vincey, to which this astonishing experience was, after all,
but a prelude.

He turned his mind to locomotion in this new body in which he found
himself. For a time he was unable to shift himself from his attachment
to his earthly carcass. For a time this new strange cloud body of his
simply swayed, contracted, expanded, coiled, and writhed with his
efforts to free himself, and then quite suddenly the link that bound
him snapped. For a moment everything was hidden by what appeared to
be whirling spheres of dark vapour, and then through a momentary gap
he saw his drooping body collapse limply, saw his lifeless head drop
sideways, and found he was driving along like a huge cloud in a strange
place of shadowy clouds that had the luminous intricacy of London
spread like a model below.

But now he was aware that the fluctuating vapour about him was
something more than vapour, and the temerarious excitement of his first
essay was shot with fear. For he perceived, at first indistinctly,
and then suddenly very clearly, that he was surrounded by _faces_!
that each roll and coil of the seeming cloud-stuff was a face. And
such faces! Faces of thin shadow, faces of gaseous tenuity. Faces like
those faces that glare with intolerable strangeness upon the sleeper
in the evil hours of his dreams. Evil, greedy eyes that were full of
a covetous curiosity, faces with knit brows and snarling, smiling
lips; their vague hands clutched at Mr Bessel as he passed, and the
rest of their bodies was but an elusive streak of trailing darkness.
Never a word they said, never a sound from the mouths that seemed to
gibber. All about him they pressed in that dreamy silence, passing
freely through the dim mistiness that was his body, gathering ever
more numerously about him. And the shadowy Mr Bessel, now suddenly
fear-stricken, drove through the silent, active multitude of eyes and
clutching hands.

So inhuman were these faces, so malignant their staring eyes, and
shadowy, clawing gestures, that it did not occur to Mr Bessel to
attempt intercourse with these drifting creatures. Idiot phantoms, they
seemed, children of vain desire, beings unborn and forbidden the boon
of being, whose only expressions and gestures told of the envy and
craving for life that was their one link with existence.

It says much for his resolution that, amidst the swarming cloud of
these noiseless spirits of evil, he could still think of Mr Vincey.
He made a violent effort of will and found himself, he knew not how,
stooping towards Staple Inn, saw Vincey sitting attentive and alert in
his arm-chair by the fire.

And clustering also about him, as they clustered ever about all that
lives and breathes, was another multitude of these vain voiceless
shadows, longing, desiring, seeking some loophole into life.

For a space Mr Bessel sought ineffectually to attract his friend’s
attention. He tried to get in front of his eyes, to move the objects in
his room, to touch him. But Mr Vincey remained unaffected, ignorant of
the being that was so close to his own. The strange something that Mr
Bessel has compared to a sheet of glass separated them impermeably.

And at last Mr Bessel did a desperate thing. I have told how that in
some strange way he could see not only the outside of a man as we see
him, but within. He extended his shadowy hand and thrust his vague
black fingers, as it seemed, through the heedless brain.

Then, suddenly, Mr Vincey started like a man who recalls his attention
from wandering thoughts, and it seemed to Mr Bessel that a little
dark-red body situated in the middle of Mr Vincey’s brain swelled and
glowed as he did so. Since that experience he has been shown anatomical
figures of the brain, and he knows now that this is that useless
structure, as doctors call it, the pineal eye. For, strange as it will
seem to many, we have, deep in our brains--where it cannot possibly
see any earthly light--an eye! At the time this, with the rest of the
internal anatomy of the brain, was quite new to him. At the sight of
its changed appearance, however, he thrust forth his finger, and,
rather fearful still of the consequences, touched this little spot. And
instantly Mr Vincey started, and Mr Bessel knew that he was seen.

And at that instant it came to Mr Bessel that evil had happened to his
body, and behold! a great wind blew through all that world of shadows
and tore him away. So strong was this persuasion that he thought no
more of Mr Vincey, but turned about forthwith, and all the countless
faces drove back with him like leaves before a gale. But he returned
too late. In an instant he saw the body that he had left inert and
collapsed--lying, indeed, like the body of a man just dead--had arisen
by virtue of some strength and will beyond his own. It stood with
staring eyes, stretching its limbs in dubious fashion.

For a moment he watched it in wild dismay, and then he stooped towards
it. But the pane of glass had closed against him again, and he was
foiled. He beat himself passionately against this, and all about
him the spirits of evil grinned and pointed and mocked. He gave way
to furious anger. He compares himself to a bird that has fluttered
heedlessly into a room and is beating at the window-pane that holds it
back from freedom.

And behold! the little body that had once been his was now dancing
with delight. He saw it shouting, though he could not hear its shouts;
he saw the violence of its movements grow. He watched it fling his
cherished furniture about in the mad delight of existence, rend his
books apart, smash bottles, drink heedlessly from the jagged fragments,
leap and smite in a passionate acceptance of living. He watched these
actions in paralysed astonishment. Then once more he hurled himself
against the impassable barrier, and then, with all that crew of mocking
ghosts about him, hurried back in dire confusion to Vincey to tell him
of the outrage that had come upon him.

But the brain of Vincey was now closed against apparitions, and the
disembodied Mr Bessel pursued him in vain as he hurried out into
Holborn to call a cab. Foiled and terror-stricken, Mr Bessel swept back
again, to find his desecrated body whooping in a glorious frenzy down
the Burlington Arcade....

And now the attentive reader begins to understand Mr Bessel’s
interpretation of the first part of this strange story. The being whose
frantic rush through London had inflicted so much injury and disaster
had indeed Mr Bessel’s body, but it was not Mr Bessel. It was an evil
spirit out of that strange world beyond existence, into which Mr Bessel
had so rashly ventured. For twenty hours it held possession of him, and
for all those twenty hours the dispossessed spirit-body of Mr Bessel
was going to and fro in that unheard-of middle world of shadows seeking
help in vain.

He spent many hours beating at the minds of Mr Vincey and of his friend
Mr Hart. Each, as we know, he roused by his efforts. But the language
that might convey his situation to these helpers across the gulf he did
not know; his feeble fingers groped vainly and powerlessly in their
brains. Once, indeed, as we have already told, he was able to turn Mr
Vincey aside from his path so that he encountered the stolen body in
its career, but he could not make him understand the thing that had
happened: he was unable to draw any help from that encounter....

All through those hours the persuasion was overwhelming in Mr Bessel’s
mind that presently his body would be killed by its furious tenant,
and he would have to remain in this shadow-land for evermore. So that
those long hours were a growing agony of fear. And ever as he hurried
to and fro in his ineffectual excitement innumerable spirits of that
world about him mobbed him and confused his mind. And ever an envious
applauding multitude poured after their successful fellow as he went
upon his glorious career.

For that, it would seem, must be the life of these bodiless things of
this world that is the shadow of our world. Ever they watch, coveting a
way into a mortal body, in order that they may descend, as furies and
frenzies, as violent lusts and mad, strange impulses, rejoicing in the
body they have won. For Mr Bessel was not the only human soul in that
place. Witness the fact that he met first one, and afterwards several
shadows of men, men like himself, it seemed, who had lost their bodies
even it may be as he had lost his, and wandered, despairingly, in that
lost world that is neither life nor death. They could not speak because
that world is silent, yet he knew them for men because of their dim
human bodies, and because of the sadness of their faces.

But how they had come into that world he could not tell, nor where
the bodies they had lost might be, whether they still raved about the
earth, or whether they were closed for ever in death against return.
That they were the spirits of the dead neither he nor I believe. But
Doctor Wilson Paget thinks they are the rational souls of men who are
lost in madness on the earth.

At last Mr Bessel chanced upon a place where a little crowd of such
disembodied silent creatures was gathered, and thrusting through them
he saw below a brightly-lit room, and four or five quiet gentlemen
and a woman, a stoutish woman dressed in black bombazine and sitting
awkwardly in a chair with her head thrown back. He knew her from her
portraits to be Mrs Bullock, the medium. And he perceived that tracts
and structures in her brain glowed and stirred as he had seen the
pineal eye in the brain of Mr Vincey glow. The light was very fitful;
sometimes it was a broad illumination, and sometimes merely a faint
twilight spot, and it shifted slowly about her brain. She kept on
talking and writing with one hand. And Mr Bessel saw that the crowding
shadows of men about him, and a great multitude of the shadow spirits
of that shadow-land, were all striving and thrusting to touch the
lighted regions of her brain. As one gained her brain or another was
thrust away, her voice and the writing of her hand changed. So that
what she said was disorderly and confused for the most part; now a
fragment of one soul’s message, and now a fragment of another’s, and
now she babbled the insane fancies of the spirits of vain desire. Then
Mr Bessel understood that she spoke for the spirit that had touch of
her, and he began to struggle very furiously towards her. But he was
on the outside of the crowd and at that time he could not reach her,
and at last, growing anxious, he went away to find what had happened
meanwhile to his body.

For a long time he went to and fro seeking it in vain and fearing that
it must have been killed, and then he found it at the bottom of the
shaft in Baker Street, writhing furiously and cursing with pain. Its
leg and an arm and two ribs had been broken by its fall. Moreover, the
evil spirit was angry because his time had been so short and because of
the pain--making violent movements and casting his body about.

And at that Mr Bessel returned with redoubled earnestness to the room
where the _séance_ was going on, and so soon as he had thrust himself
within sight of the place he saw one of the men who stood about the
medium looking at his watch as if he meant that the _séance_ should
presently end. At that a great number of the shadows who had been
striving turned away with gestures of despair. But the thought that the
_séance_ was almost over only made Mr Bessel the more earnest, and he
struggled so stoutly with his will against the others that presently he
gained the woman’s brain. It chanced that just at that moment it glowed
very brightly, and in that instant she wrote the message that Doctor
Wilson Paget preserved. And then the other shadows and the cloud of
evil spirits about him had thrust Mr Bessel away from her, and for all
the rest of the _séance_ he could regain her no more.

So he went back and watched through the long hours at the bottom of
the shaft where the evil spirit lay in the stolen body it had maimed,
writhing and cursing, and weeping and groaning, and learning the lesson
of pain. And towards dawn the thing he had waited for happened, the
brain glowed brightly and the evil spirit came out, and Mr Bessel
entered the body he had feared he should never enter again. As he did
so, the silence--the brooding silence--ended; he heard the tumult of
traffic and the voices of people overhead, and that strange world that
is the shadow of our world--the dark and silent shadows of ineffectual
desire and the shadows of lost men--vanished clean away.

He lay there for the space of about three hours before he was found.
And in spite of the pain and suffering of his wounds, and of the dim
damp place in which he lay; in spite of the tears--wrung from him by
his physical distress--his heart was full of gladness to know that he
was nevertheless back once more in the kindly world of men.


GLASGOW: W. COLLINS SONS AND CO. LTD.

 W. COLLINS SONS AND CO. LTD.