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Twelve Stories and a Dream
by H. G. Wells
May, 1999 [Etext #1743]
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TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM
BY H. G. WELLS
CONTENTS
1. Filmer
2. The Magic Shop
3. The Valley of Spiders
4. The Truth About Pyecraft
5. Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland
6. The Story of the Inexperienced Ghost
7. Jimmy Goggles the God
8. The New Accelerator
9. Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation
10. The Stolen Body
11. Mr. Brisher's Treasure
12. Miss Winchelsea's Heart
13. A Dream of Armageddon
1. FILMER
In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men--
this man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only
one vigorous intellectual effort was needed to finish the work.
But the inexorable injustice of the popular mind has decided
that of all these thousands, one man, and that a man who never flew,
should be chosen as the discoverer, just as it has chosen to
honour Watt as the discoverer of steam and Stephenson of the
steam-engine. And surely of all honoured names none is so
grotesquely and tragically honoured as poor Filmer's, the timid,
intellectual creature who solved the problem over which the world
had hung perplexed and a little fearful for so many generations,
the man who pressed the button that has changed peace and warfare
and well-nigh every condition of human life and happiness. Never
has that recurring wonder of the littleness of the scientific man
in the face of the greatness of his science found such an amazing
exemplification. Much concerning Filmer is, and must remain,
profoundly obscure--Filmers attract no Boswells--but the essential
facts and the concluding scene are clear enough, and there are
letters, and notes, and casual allusions to piece the whole together.
And this is the story one makes, putting this thing with that,
of Filmer's life and death.
The first authentic trace of Filmer on the page of history is
a document in which he applies for admission as a paid student
in physics to the Government laboratories at South Kensington,
and therein he describes himself as the son of a "military bootmaker"
("cobbler" in the vulgar tongue) of Dover, and lists his various
examination proofs of a high proficiency in chemistry and
mathematics. With a certain want of dignity he seeks to enhance
these attainments by a profession of poverty and disadvantages,
and he writes of the laboratory as the "gaol" of his ambitions,
a slip which reinforces his claim to have devoted himself exclusively
to the exact sciences. The document is endorsed in a manner that
shows Filmer was admitted to this coveted opportunity; but until
quite recently no traces of his success in the Government institution
could be found.
It has now, however, been shown that in spite of his professed zeal
for research, Filmer, before he had held this scholarship a year,
was tempted, by the possibility of a small increase in his immediate
income, to abandon it in order to become one of the nine-pence-an-hour
computers employed by a well-known Professor in his vicarious
conduct of those extensive researches of his in solar physics--researches
which are still a matter of perplexity to astronomers. Afterwards,
for the space of seven years, save for the pass lists of the
London University, in which he is seen to climb slowly to a double
first class B.Sc., in mathematics and chemistry, there is no evidence
of how Filmer passed his life. No one knows how or where he lived,
though it seems highly probable that he continued to support
himself by teaching while he prosecuted the studies necessary for
this distinction. And then, oddly enough, one finds him mentioned
in the correspondence of Arthur Hicks, the poet.
"You remember Filmer," Hicks writes to his friend Vance; "well,
HE hasn't altered a bit, the same hostile mumble and the nasty
chin--how CAN a man contrive to be always three days from shaving?
-- and a sort of furtive air of being engaged in sneaking in front
of one; even his coat and that frayed collar of his show no further
signs of the passing years. He was writing in the library and
I sat down beside him in the name of God's charity, whereupon
he deliberately insulted me by covering up his memoranda. It seems
he has some brilliant research on hand that he suspects me of all
people--with a Bodley Booklet a-printing!--of stealing. He has taken
remarkable honours at the University--he went through them with
a sort of hasty slobber, as though he feared I might interrupt him
before he had told me all--and he spoke of taking his D.Sc. as one
might speak of taking a cab. And he asked what I was doing--with
a sort of comparative accent, and his arm was spread nervously,
positively a protecting arm, over the paper that hid the precious
idea--his one hopeful idea.
"'Poetry,' he said, 'Poetry. And what do you profess to teach
in it, Hicks?'
"The thing's a Provincial professorling in the very act of budding,
and I thank the Lord devoutly that but for the precious gift
of indolence I also might have gone this way to D.Sc. and
destruction . . ."
A curious little vignette that I am inclined to think caught Filmer
in or near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was wrong in
anticipating a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse
of him is lecturing on "rubber and rubber substitutes," to the
Society of Arts--he had become manager to a great plastic-substance
manufactory--and at that time, it is now known, he was a member
of the Aeronautical Society, albeit he contributed nothing to the
discussions of that body, preferring no doubt to mature his great
conception without external assistance. And within two years
of that paper before the Society of Arts he was hastily taking out
a number of patents and proclaiming in various undignified ways
the completion of the divergent inquiries which made his flying
machine possible. The first definite statement to that effect
appeared in a halfpenny evening paper through the agency of a man
who lodged in the same house with Filmer. His final haste after
his long laborious secret patience seems to have been due to
a needless panic, Bootle, the notorious American scientific quack,
having made an announcement that Filmer interpreted wrongly as
an anticipation of his idea.
Now what precisely was Filmer's idea? Really a very simple one.
Before his time the pursuit of aeronautics had taken two divergent
lines, and had developed on the one hand balloons--large apparatus
lighter than air, easy in ascent, and comparatively safe in descent,
but floating helplessly before any breeze that took them; and on
the other, flying machines that flew only in theory--vast flat
structures heavier than air, propelled and kept up by heavy engines
and for the most part smashing at the first descent. But, neglecting
the fact that the inevitable final collapse rendered them impossible,
the weight of the flying machines gave them this theoretical
advantage, that they could go through the air against a wind,
a necessary condition if aerial navigation was to have any practical
value. It is Filmer's particular merit that he perceived the way
in which the contrasted and hitherto incompatible merits of balloon
and heavy flying machine might be combined in one apparatus,
which should be at choice either heavier or lighter than air.
He took hints from the contractile bladders of fish and the pneumatic
cavities of birds. He devised an arrangement of contractile
and absolutely closed balloons which when expanded could lift
the actual flying apparatus with ease, and when retracted by the
complicated "musculature" he wove about them, were withdrawn
almost completely into the frame; and he built the large framework
which these balloons sustained, of hollow, rigid tubes, the air
in which, by an ingenious contrivance, was automatically pumped
out as the apparatus fell, and which then remained exhausted
so long as the aeronaut desired. There were no wings or propellers
to his machine, such as there had been to all previous aeroplanes,
and the only engine required was the compact and powerful little
appliance needed to contract the balloons. He perceived that such
an apparatus as he had devised might rise with frame exhausted
and balloons expanded to a considerable height, might then contract
its balloons and let the air into its frame, and by an adjustment
of its weights slide down the air in any desired direction. As it fell
it would accumulate velocity and at the same time lose weight,
and the momentum accumulated by its down-rush could be utilised
by means of a shifting of its weights to drive it up in the air again
as the balloons expanded. This conception, which is still the
structural conception of all successful flying machines, needed,
however, a vast amount of toil upon its details before it could
actually be realised, and such toil Filmer--as he was accustomed
to tell the numerous interviewers who crowded upon him in
the heyday of his fame--"ungrudgingly and unsparingly gave."
His particular difficulty was the elastic lining of the contractile
balloon. He found he needed a new substance, and in the discovery
and manufacture of that new substance he had, as he never failed
to impress upon the interviewers, "performed a far more arduous
work than even in the actual achievement of my seemingly greater
discovery."
But it must not be imagined that these interviews followed hard
upon Filmer's proclamation of his invention. An interval of nearly
five years elapsed during which he timidly remained at his rubber
factory--he seems to have been entirely dependent on his small
income from this source--making misdirected attempts to assure
a quite indifferent public that he really HAD invented what he had
invented. He occupied the greater part of his leisure in the
composition of letters to the scientific and daily press, and
so forth, stating precisely the net result of his contrivances,
and demanding financial aid. That alone would have sufficed for
the suppression of his letters. He spent such holidays as he could
arrange in unsatisfactory interviews with the door-keepers of
leading London papers--he was singularly not adapted for inspiring
hall-porters with confidence--and he positively attempted to induce
the War Office to take up his work with him. There remains a
confidential letter from Major-General Volleyfire to the Earl of Frogs.
"The man's a crank and a bounder to boot," says the Major-General
in his bluff, sensible, army way, and so left it open for the Japanese
to secure, as they subsequently did, the priority in this side
of warfare--a priority they still to our great discomfort retain.
And then by a stroke of luck the membrane Filmer had invented for his
contractile balloon was discovered to be useful for the valves
of a new oil-engine, and he obtained the means for making a trial
model of his invention. He threw up his rubber factory appointment,
desisted from all further writing, and, with a certain secrecy
that seems to have been an inseparable characteristic of all his
proceedings, set to work upon the apparatus. He seems to have
directed the making of its parts and collected most of it in a room
in Shoreditch, but its final putting together was done at Dymchurch,
in Kent. He did not make the affair large enough to carry a man,
but he made an extremely ingenious use of what were then called
the Marconi rays to control its flight. The first flight of this
first practicable flying machine took place over some fields
near Burford Bridge, near Hythe, in Kent, and Filmer followed
and controlled its flight upon a specially constructed motor tricycle.
The flight was, considering all things, an amazing success.
The apparatus was brought in a cart from Dymchurch to Burford Bridge,
ascended there to a height of nearly three hundred feet, swooped
thence very nearly back to Dymchurch, came about in its sweep,
rose again, circled, and finally sank uninjured in a field behind
the Burford Bridge Inn. At its descent a curious thing happened.
Filmer got off his tricycle, scrambled over the intervening dyke,
advanced perhaps twenty yards towards his triumph, threw out
his arms in a strange gesticulation, and fell down in a dead faint.
Every one could then recall the ghastliness of his features and
all the evidences of extreme excitement they had observed throughout
the trial, things they might otherwise have forgotten. Afterwards
in the inn he had an unaccountable gust of hysterical weeping.
Altogether there were not twenty witnesses of this affair, and
those for the most part uneducated men. The New Romney doctor
saw the ascent but not the descent, his horse being frightened
by the electrical apparatus on Filmer's tricycle and giving him
a nasty spill. Two members of the Kent constabulary watched
the affair from a cart in an unofficial spirit, and a grocer calling
round the Marsh for orders and two lady cyclists seem almost
to complete the list of educated people. There were two reporters
present, one representing a Folkestone paper and the other being
a fourth-class interviewer and "symposium" journalist, whose
expenses down, Filmer, anxious as ever for adequate advertisement
--and now quite realising the way in which adequate advertisement
may be obtained--had paid. The latter was one of those writers
who can throw a convincing air of unreality over the most credible
events, and his half-facetious account of the affair appeared
in the magazine page of a popular journal. But, happily for Filmer,
this person's colloquial methods were more convincing. He went
to offer some further screed upon the subject to Banghurst,
the proprietor of the New Paper, and one of the ablest and most
unscrupulous men in London journalism, and Banghurst instantly
seized upon the situation. The interviewer vanishes from the narrative,
no doubt very doubtfully remunerated, and Banghurst, Banghurst himself,
double chin, grey twill suit, abdomen, voice, gestures and all,
appears at Dymchurch, following his large, unrivalled journalistic nose.
He had seen the whole thing at a glance, just what it was and
what it might be.
At his touch, as it were, Filmer's long-pent investigations exploded
into fame. He instantly and most magnificently was a Boom. One turns
over the files of the journals of the year 1907 with a quite incredulous
recognition of how swift and flaming the boom of those days could be.
The July papers know nothing of flying, see nothing in flying,
state by a most effective silence that men never would, could or
should fly. In August flying and Filmer and flying and parachutes
and aerial tactics and the Japanese Government and Filmer and again
flying, shouldered the war in Yunnan and the gold mines of
Upper Greenland off the leading page. And Banghurst had given
ten thousand pounds, and, further, Banghurst was giving five thousand
pounds, and Banghurst had devoted his well-known, magnificent
(but hitherto sterile) private laboratories and several acres of land
near his private residence on the Surrey hills to the strenuous
and violent completion--Banghurst fashion--of the life-size
practicable flying machine. Meanwhile, in the sight of privileged
multitudes in the walled-garden of the Banghurst town residence
in Fulham, Filmer was exhibited at weekly garden parties putting
the working model through its paces. At enormous initial cost,
but with a final profit, the New Paper presented its readers
with a beautiful photographic souvenir of the first of these occasions.
Here again the correspondence of Arthur Hicks and his friend Vance
comes to our aid.
"I saw Filmer in his glory," he writes, with just the touch of envy
natural to his position as a poet passe. "The man is brushed
and shaved, dressed in the fashion of a Royal-Institution-Afternoon
Lecturer, the very newest shape in frock-coats and long patent shoes,
and altogether in a state of extraordinary streakiness between
an owlish great man and a scared abashed self-conscious bounder
cruelly exposed. He hasn't a touch of colour in the skin of his face,
his head juts forward, and those queer little dark amber eyes of his
watch furtively round him for his fame. His clothes fit perfectly
and yet sit upon him as though he had bought them ready-made.
He speaks in a mumble still, but he says, you perceive indistinctly,
enormous self-assertive things, he backs into the rear of groups
by instinct if Banghurst drops the line for a minute, and when
he walks across Banghurst's lawn one perceives him a little out
of breath and going jerky, and that his weak white hands are clenched.
His is a state of tension--horrible tension. And he is the Greatest
Discoverer of This or Any Age--the Greatest Discoverer of This
or Any Age! What strikes one so forcibly about him is that he didn't
somehow quite expect it ever, at any rate, not at all like this.
Banghurst is about everywhere, the energetic M.C. of his great
little catch, and I swear he will have every one down on his lawn
there before he has finished with the engine; he had bagged
the prime minister yesterday, and he, bless his heart! didn't look
particularly outsize, on the very first occasion. Conceive it! Filmer!
Our obscure unwashed Filmer, the Glory of British science!
Duchesses crowd upon him, beautiful, bold peeresses say in their
beautiful, clear loud voices--have you noticed how penetrating
the great lady is becoming nowadays?--'Oh, Mr. Filmer, how DID
you do it?'
"Common men on the edge of things are too remote for the answer.
One imagines something in the way of that interview, 'toil ungrudgingly
and unsparingly given, Madam, and, perhaps--I don't know--but perhaps
a little special aptitude.'"
So far Hicks, and the photographic supplement to the New Paper is in
sufficient harmony with the description. In one picture the machine
swings down towards the river, and the tower of Fulham church
appears below it through a gap in the elms, and in another, Filmer
sits at his guiding batteries, and the great and beautiful of the earth
stand around him, with Banghurst massed modestly but resolutely
in the rear. The grouping is oddly apposite. Occluding much of
Banghurst, and looking with a pensive, speculative expression
at Filmer, stands the Lady Mary Elkinghorn, still beautiful,
in spite of the breath of scandal and her eight-and-thirty years,
the only person whose face does not admit a perception of the camera
that was in the act of snapping them all.
So much for the exterior facts of the story, but, after all,
they are very exterior facts. About the real interest of the business
one is necessarily very much in the dark. How was Filmer feeling
at the time? How much was a certain unpleasant anticipation present
inside that very new and fashionable frock-coat? He was in the
halfpenny, penny, six-penny, and more expensive papers alike,
and acknowledged by the whole world as "the Greatest Discoverer
of This or Any Age." He had invented a practicable flying machine,
and every day down among the Surrey hills the life-sized model
was getting ready. And when it was ready, it followed as a clear
inevitable consequence of his having invented and made it--everybody
in the world, indeed, seemed to take it for granted; there wasn't
a gap anywhere in that serried front of anticipation--that he would
proudly and cheerfully get aboard it, ascend with it, and fly.
But we know now pretty clearly that simple pride and cheerfulness
in such an act were singularly out of harmony with Filmer's private
constitution. It occurred to no one at the time, but there the fact is.
We can guess with some confidence now that it must have been
drifting about in his mind a great deal during the day, and, from
a little note to his physician complaining of persistent insomnia,
we have the soundest reason for supposing it dominated his nights,
--the idea that it would be after all, in spite of his theoretical
security, an abominably sickening, uncomfortable, and dangerous
thing for him to flap about in nothingness a thousand feet or so
in the air. It must have dawned upon him quite early in the period
of being the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age, the vision
of doing this and that with an extensive void below. Perhaps
somewhen in his youth he had looked down a great height or fallen
down in some excessively uncomfortable way; perhaps some habit of
sleeping on the wrong side had resulted in that disagreeable falling
nightmare one knows, and given him his horror; of the strength
of that horror there remains now not a particle of doubt.
Apparently he had never weighed this duty of flying in his earlier
days of research; the machine had been his end, but now things
were opening out beyond his end, and particularly this giddy whirl
up above there. He was a Discoverer and he had Discovered.
But he was not a Flying Man, and it was only now that he was beginning
to perceive clearly that he was expected to fly. Yet, however much
the thing was present in his mind he gave no expression to it until
the very end, and meanwhile he went to and fro from Banghurst's
magnificent laboratories, and was interviewed and lionised, and
wore good clothes, and ate good food, and lived in an elegant flat,
enjoying a very abundant feast of such good, coarse, wholesome
Fame and Success as a man, starved for all his years as he had been
starved, might be reasonably expected to enjoy.
After a time, the weekly gatherings in Fulham ceased. The model
had failed one day just for a moment to respond to Filmer's guidance,
or he had been distracted by the compliments of an archbishop.
At any rate, it suddenly dug its nose into the air just a little
too steeply as the archbishop was sailing through a Latin quotation
for all the world like an archbishop in a book, and it came down
in the Fulham Road within three yards of a 'bus horse. It stood
for a second perhaps, astonishing and in its attitude astonished,
then it crumpled, shivered into pieces, and the 'bus horse was
incidentally killed.
Filmer lost the end of the archiepiscopal compliment. He stood up
and stared as his invention swooped out of sight and reach of him.
His long, white hands still gripped his useless apparatus.
The archbishop followed his skyward stare with an apprehension
unbecoming in an archbishop.
Then came the crash and the shouts and uproar from the road
to relieve Filmer's tension. "My God!" he whispered, and sat down.
Every one else almost was staring to see where the machine had
vanished, or rushing into the house.
The making of the big machine progressed all the more rapidly
for this. Over its making presided Filmer, always a little slow
and very careful in his manner, always with a growing preoccupation
in his mind. His care over the strength and soundness of the apparatus
was prodigious. The slightest doubt, and he delayed everything
until the doubtful part could be replaced. Wilkinson, his senior
assistant, fumed at some of these delays, which, he insisted, were
for the most part unnecessary. Banghurst magnified the patient
certitude of Filmer in the New Paper, and reviled it bitterly
to his wife, and MacAndrew, the second assistant, approved Filmer's
wisdom. "We're not wanting a fiasco, man," said MacAndrew. "He's
perfectly well advised."
And whenever an opportunity arose Filmer would expound to Wilkinson
and MacAndrew just exactly how every part of the flying machine
was to be controlled and worked, so that in effect they would be
just as capable, and even more capable, when at last the time came,
of guiding it through the skies.
Now I should imagine that if Filmer had seen fit at this stage
to define just what he was feeling, and to take a definite line
in the matter of his ascent, he might have escaped that painful
ordeal quite easily. If he had had it clearly in his mind he could
have done endless things. He would surely have found no difficulty
with a specialist to demonstrate a weak heart, or something gastric
or pulmonary, to stand in his way--that is the line I am astonished
he did not take,--or he might, had he been man enough, have
declared simply and finally that he did not intend to do the thing.
But the fact is, though the dread was hugely present in his mind,
the thing was by no means sharp and clear. I fancy that all through
this period he kept telling himself that when the occasion came
he would find himself equal to it. He was like a man just gripped
by a great illness, who says he feels a little out of sorts, and expects
to be better presently. Meanwhile he delayed the completion of
the machine, and let the assumption that he was going to fly it
take root and flourish exceedingly about him. He even accepted
anticipatory compliments on his courage. And, barring this secret
squeamishness, there can be no doubt he found all the praise and
distinction and fuss he got a delightful and even intoxicating draught.
The Lady Mary Elkinghorn made things a little more complicated
for him.
How THAT began was a subject of inexhaustible speculation to Hicks.
Probably in the beginning she was just a little "nice" to him
with that impartial partiality of hers, and it may be that to her eyes,
standing out conspicuously as he did ruling his monster in the upper air,
he had a distinction that Hicks was not disposed to find. And somehow
they must have had a moment of sufficient isolation, and the great
Discoverer a moment of sufficient courage for something just
a little personal to be mumbled or blurted. However it began,
there is no doubt that it did begin, and presently became quite
perceptible to a world accustomed to find in the proceedings
of the Lady Mary Elkinghorn a matter of entertainment. It complicated
things, because the state of love in such a virgin mind as Filmer's
would brace his resolution, if not sufficiently, at any rate
considerably towards facing a danger he feared, and hampered him
in such attempts at evasion as would otherwise be natural and congenial.
It remains a matter for speculation just how the Lady Mary felt
for Filmer and just what she thought of him. At thirty-eight one
may have gathered much wisdom and still be not altogether wise,
and the imagination still functions actively enough in creating
glamours and effecting the impossible. He came before her eyes
as a very central man, and that always counts, and he had powers,
unique powers as it seemed, at any rate in the air. The performance
with the model had just a touch of the quality of a potent incantation,
and women have ever displayed an unreasonable disposition to imagine
that when a man has powers he must necessarily have Power. Given
so much, and what was not good in Filmer's manner and appearance
became an added merit. He was modest, he hated display, but given
an occasion where TRUE qualities are needed, then--then one would see!
The late Mrs. Bampton thought it wise to convey to Lady Mary her opinion
that Filmer, all things considered, was rather a "grub." "He's certainly
not a sort of man I have ever met before," said the Lady Mary,
with a quite unruffled serenity. And Mrs. Bampton, after a swift,
imperceptible glance at that serenity, decided that so far as saying
anything to Lady Mary went, she had done as much as could be expected
of her. But she said a great deal to other people.
And at last, without any undue haste or unseemliness, the day
dawned, the great day, when Banghurst had promised his public--
the world in fact--that flying should be finally attained and overcome.
Filmer saw it dawn, watched even in the darkness before it dawned,
watched its stars fade and the grey and pearly pinks give place
at last to the clear blue sky of a sunny, cloudless day. He watched it
from the window of his bedroom in the new-built wing of Banghurst's
Tudor house. And as the stars were overwhelmed and the shapes and
substances of things grew into being out of the amorphous dark,
he must have seen more and more distinctly the festive preparations
beyond the beech clumps near the green pavilion in the outer park,
the three stands for the privileged spectators, the raw, new fencing
of the enclosure, the sheds and workshops, the Venetian masts
and fluttering flags that Banghurst had considered essential,
black and limp in the breezeless dawn, and amidst all these things
a great shape covered with tarpauling. A strange and terrible
portent for humanity was that shape, a beginning that must surely
spread and widen and change and dominate all the affairs of men,
but to Filmer it is very doubtful whether it appeared in anything
but a narrow and personal light. Several people heard him pacing
in the small hours--for the vast place was packed with guests
by a proprietor editor who, before all understood compression.
And about five o'clock, if not before, Filmer left his room and
wandered out of the sleeping house into the park, alive by that time
with sunlight and birds and squirrels and the fallow deer. MacAndrew,
who was also an early riser, met him near the machine, and they went
and had a look at it together.
It is doubtful if Filmer took any breakfast, in spite of the urgency
of Banghurst. So soon as the guests began to be about in some number
he seems to have retreated to his room. Thence about ten he went
into the shrubbery, very probably because he had seen the Lady Mary
Elkinghorn there. She was walking up and down, engaged in conversation
with her old school friend, Mrs. Brewis-Craven, and although Filmer
had never met the latter lady before, he joined them and walked
beside them for some time. There were several silences in spite
of the Lady Mary's brilliance. The situation was a difficult one,
and Mrs. Brewis-Craven did not master its difficulty. "He struck me,"
she said afterwards with a luminous self-contradiction, "as a very
unhappy person who had something to say, and wanted before all things
to be helped to say it. But how was one to help him when one didn't
know what it was?"
At half-past eleven the enclosures for the public in the outer park
were crammed, there was an intermittent stream of equipages along
the belt which circles the outer park, and the house party was dotted
over the lawn and shrubbery and the corner of the inner park,
in a series of brilliantly attired knots, all making for the
flying machine. Filmer walked in a group of three with Banghurst,
who was supremely and conspicuously happy, and Sir Theodore Hickle,
the president of the Aeronautical Society. Mrs. Banghurst was close
behind with the Lady Mary Elkinghorn, Georgina Hickle, and the Dean
of Stays. Banghurst was large and copious in speech, and such
interstices as he left were filled in by Hickle with complimentary
remarks to Filmer. And Filmer walked between them saying not a word
except by way of unavoidable reply. Behind, Mrs. Banghurst listened
to the admirably suitable and shapely conversation of the Dean
with that fluttered attention to the ampler clergy ten years
of social ascent and ascendency had not cured in her; and the Lady Mary
watched, no doubt with an entire confidence in the world's
disillusionment, the drooping shoulders of the sort of man she had
never met before.
There was some cheering as the central party came into view of
the enclosures, but it was not very unanimous nor invigorating cheering.
They were within fifty yards of the apparatus when Filmer took
a hasty glance over his shoulder to measure the distance of the ladies
behind them, and decided to make the first remark he had initiated
since the house had been left. His voice was just a little hoarse,
and he cut in on Banghurst in mid-sentence on Progress.
"I say, Banghurst," he said, and stopped.
"Yes," said Banghurst.
"I wish--" He moistened his lips. "I'm not feeling well."
Banghurst stopped dead. "Eh?" he shouted.
"A queer feeling." Filmer made to move on, but Banghurst was immovable.
"I don't know. I may be better in a minute. If not--perhaps . . .
MacAndrew--"
"You're not feeling WELL?" said Banghurst, and stared at his white face.
"My dear!" he said, as Mrs. Banghurst came up with them, "Filmer
says he isn't feeling WELL."
"A little queer," exclaimed Filmer, avoiding the Lady Mary's eyes.
"It may pass off--"
There was a pause.
It came to Filmer that he was the most isolated person in the world.
"In any case," said Banghurst, "the ascent must be made. Perhaps
if you were to sit down somewhere for a moment--"
"It's the crowd, I think," said Filmer.
There was a second pause. Banghurst's eye rested in scrutiny
on Filmer, and then swept the sample of public in the enclosure.
"It's unfortunate," said Sir Theodore Hickle; but still--I suppose--
Your assistants--Of course, if you feel out of condition and disinclined--"
"I don't think Mr. Filmer would permit THAT for a moment," said Lady Mary.
"But if Mr. Filmer's nerve is run--It might even be dangerous for him
to attempt--" Hickle coughed.
"It's just because it's dangerous," began the Lady Mary, and felt
she had made her point of view and Filmer's plain enough.
Conflicting motives struggled for Filmer.
"I feel I ought to go up," he said, regarding the ground. He looked
up and met the Lady Mary's eyes. "I want to go up," he said, and
smiled whitely at her. He turned towards Banghurst. "If I could
just sit down somewhere for a moment out of the crowd and sun--"
Banghurst, at least, was beginning to understand the case. "Come
into my little room in the green pavilion," he said. "It's quite
cool there." He took Filmer by the arm.
Filmer turned his face to the Lady Mary Elkinghorn again. "I shall
be all right in five minutes," he said. "I'm tremendously sorry--"
The Lady Mary Elkinghorn smiled at him. "I couldn't think--" he
said to Hickle, and obeyed the compulsion of Banghurst's pull.
The rest remained watching the two recede.
"He is so fragile," said the Lady Mary.
"He's certainly a highly nervous type," said the Dean, whose weakness
it was to regard the whole world, except married clergymen with
enormous families, as "neurotic."
"Of course," said Hickle, "it isn't absolutely necessary for him
to go up because he has invented--"
"How COULD he avoid it?" asked the Lady Mary, with the faintest
shadow of scorn.
"It's certainly most unfortunate if he's going to be ill now," said
Mrs. Banghurst a little severely.
"He's not going to be ill," said the Lady Mary, and certainly
she had met Filmer's eye.
"YOU'LL be all right," said Banghurst, as they went towards the pavilion.
"All you want is a nip of brandy. It ought to be you, you know.
You'll be--you'd get it rough, you know, if you let another man--"
"Oh, I want to go," said Filmer. "I shall be all right. As a matter
of fact I'm almost inclined NOW--. No! I think I'll have that nip
of brandy first."
Banghurst took him into the little room and routed out an empty
decanter. He departed in search of a supply. He was gone perhaps
five minutes.
The history of those five minutes cannot be written. At intervals
Filmer's face could be seen by the people on the easternmost
of the stands erected for spectators, against the window pane
peering out, and then it would recede and fade. Banghurst vanished
shouting behind the grand stand, and presently the butler appeared
going pavilionward with a tray.
The apartment in which Filmer came to his last solution was a pleasant
little room very simply furnished with green furniture and an old
bureau--for Banghurst was simple in all his private ways. It was
hung with little engravings after Morland and it had a shelf of books.
But as it happened, Banghurst had left a rook rifle he sometimes
played with on the top of the desk, and on the corner of the mantelshelf
was a tin with three or four cartridges remaining in it. As Filmer
went up and down that room wrestling with his intolerable dilemma
he went first towards the neat little rifle athwart the blotting-pad
and then towards the neat little red label
".22 LONG."
The thing must have jumped into his mind in a moment.
Nobody seems to have connected the report with him, though the gun,
being fired in a confined space, must have sounded loud, and there
were several people in the billiard-room, separated from him only
by a lath-and-plaster partition. But directly Banghurst's butler
opened the door and smelt the sour smell of the smoke, he knew,
he says, what had happened. For the servants at least of Banghurst's
household had guessed something of what was going on in Filmer's mind.
All through that trying afternoon Banghurst behaved as he held
a man should behave in the presence of hopeless disaster, and his guests
for the most part succeeded in not insisting upon the fact--though
to conceal their perception of it altogether was impossible--that
Banghurst had been pretty elaborately and completely swindled
by the deceased. The public in the enclosure, Hicks told me, dispersed
"like a party that has been ducking a welsher," and there wasn't a soul
in the train to London, it seems, who hadn't known all along that flying
was a quite impossible thing for man. "But he might have tried it,"
said many, "after carrying the thing so far."
In the evening, when he was comparatively alone, Banghurst broke
down and went on like a man of clay. I have been told he wept,
which must have made an imposing scene, and he certainly said
Filmer had ruined his life, and offered and sold the whole apparatus
to MacAndrew for half-a-crown. "I've been thinking--" said MacAndrew
at the conclusion of the bargain, and stopped.
The next morning the name of Filmer was, for the first time, less
conspicuous in the New Paper than in any other daily paper in the world.
The rest of the world's instructors, with varying emphasis, according
to their dignity and the degree of competition between themselves
and the New Paper, proclaimed the "Entire Failure of the New Flying
Machine," and "Suicide of the Impostor." But in the district of North
Surrey the reception of the news was tempered by a perception of unusual
aerial phenomena.
Overnight Wilkinson and MacAndrew had fallen into violent argument
on the exact motives of their principal's rash act.
"The man was certainly a poor, cowardly body, but so far as his
science went he was NO impostor," said MacAndrew, "and I'm prepared
to give that proposition a very practical demonstration, Mr. Wilkinson,
so soon as we've got the place a little more to ourselves. For I've
no faith in all this publicity for experimental trials."
And to that end, while all the world was reading of the certain
failure of the new flying machine, MacAndrew was soaring and curvetting
with great amplitude and dignity over the Epsom and Wimbledon divisions;
and Banghurst, restored once more to hope and energy, and regardless
of public security and the Board of Trade, was pursuing his gyrations
and trying to attract his attention, on a motor car and in his pyjamas--
he had caught sight of the ascent when pulling up the blind of his
bedroom window--equipped, among other things, with a film camera
that was subsequently discovered to be jammed. And Filmer
was lying on the billiard table in the green pavilion with a sheet
about his body.
2. THE MAGIC SHOP
I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed
it once or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic
balls, magic hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material
of the basket trick, packs of cards that LOOKED all right, and all
that sort of thing, but never had I thought of going in until one day,
almost without warning, Gip hauled me by my finger right up to
the window, and so conducted himself that there was nothing for it
but to take him in. I had not thought the place was there, to tell
the truth--a modest-sized frontage in Regent Street, between
the picture shop and the place where the chicks run about just
out of patent incubators, but there it was sure enough. I had fancied
it was down nearer the Circus, or round the corner in Oxford Street,
or even in Holborn; always over the way and a little inaccessible
it had been, with something of the mirage in its position; but here
it was now quite indisputably, and the fat end of Gip's pointing
finger made a noise upon the glass.
"If I was rich," said Gip, dabbing a finger at the Disappearing Egg,
"I'd buy myself that. And that"--which was The Crying Baby, Very Human
--and that," which was a mystery, and called, so a neat card asserted,
"Buy One and Astonish Your Friends."
"Anything," said Gip, "will disappear under one of those cones.
I have read about it in a book.
"And there, dadda, is the Vanishing Halfpenny--, only they've put it
this way up so's we can't see how it's done."
Gip, dear boy, inherits his mother's breeding, and he did not propose
to enter the shop or worry in any way; only, you know, quite unconsciously
he lugged my finger doorward, and he made his interest clear.
"That," he said, and pointed to the Magic Bottle.
"If you had that?" I said; at which promising inquiry he looked up
with a sudden radiance.
"I could show it to Jessie," he said, thoughtful as ever of others.
"It's less than a hundred days to your birthday, Gibbles," I said,
and laid my hand on the door-handle.
Gip made no answer, but his grip tightened on my finger, and so
we came into the shop.
It was no common shop this; it was a magic shop, and all the prancing
precedence Gip would have taken in the matter of mere toys was wanting.
He left the burthen of the conversation to me.
It was a little, narrow shop, not very well lit, and the door-bell
pinged again with a plaintive note as we closed it behind us.
For a moment or so we were alone and could glance about us.
There was a tiger in papier-mache on the glass case that covered
the low counter--a grave, kind-eyed tiger that waggled his head
in a methodical manner; there were several crystal spheres, a china
hand holding magic cards, a stock of magic fish-bowls in various
sizes, and an immodest magic hat that shamelessly displayed its springs.
On the floor were magic mirrors; one to draw you out long and thin,
one to swell your head and vanish your legs, and one to make you short
and fat like a draught; and while we were laughing at these the shopman,
as I suppose, came in.
At any rate, there he was behind the counter--a curious, sallow,
dark man, with one ear larger than the other and a chin like
the toe-cap of a boot.
"What can we have the pleasure?" he said, spreading his long,
magic fingers on the glass case; and so with a start we were aware
of him.
"I want," I said, "to buy my little boy a few simple tricks."
"Legerdemain?" he asked. "Mechanical? Domestic?"
"Anything amusing?" said I.
"Um!" said the shopman, and scratched his head for a moment as if
thinking. Then, quite distinctly, he drew from his head a glass ball.
"Something in this way?" he said, and held it out.
The action was unexpected. I had seen the trick done at entertainments
endless times before--it's part of the common stock of conjurers--
but I had not expected it here.
"That's good," I said, with a laugh.
"Isn't it?" said the shopman.
Gip stretched out his disengaged hand to take this object and found
merely a blank palm.
"It's in your pocket," said the shopman, and there it was!
"How much will that be?" I asked.
"We make no charge for glass balls," said the shopman politely.
"We get them,"--he picked one out of his elbow as he spoke--"free."
He produced another from the back of his neck, and laid it beside
its predecessor on the counter. Gip regarded his glass ball sagely,
then directed a look of inquiry at the two on the counter, and finally
brought his round-eyed scrutiny to the shopman, who smiled.
"You may have those too," said the shopman, "and, if you DON'T mind,
one from my mouth. SO!"
Gip counselled me mutely for a moment, and then in a profound silence
put away the four balls, resumed my reassuring finger, and nerved
himself for the next event.
"We get all our smaller tricks in that way," the shopman remarked.
I laughed in the manner of one who subscribes to a jest. "Instead
of going to the wholesale shop," I said. "Of course, it's cheaper."
"In a way," the shopman said. "Though we pay in the end. But not
so heavily--as people suppose. . . . Our larger tricks, and our daily
provisions and all the other things we want, we get out of that hat. . .
And you know, sir, if you'll excuse my saying it, there ISN'T
a wholesale shop, not for Genuine Magic goods, sir. I don't know
if you noticed our inscription--the Genuine Magic shop." He drew
a business-card from his cheek and handed it to me. "Genuine,"
he said, with his finger on the word, and added, "There is absolutely
no deception, sir."
He seemed to be carrying out the joke pretty thoroughly, I thought.
He turned to Gip with a smile of remarkable affability. "You, you know,
are the Right Sort of Boy."
I was surprised at his knowing that, because, in the interests
of discipline, we keep it rather a secret even at home; but Gip
received it in unflinching silence, keeping a steadfast eye on him.
"It's only the Right Sort of Boy gets through that doorway."
And, as if by way of illustration, there came a rattling at the door,
and a squeaking little voice could be faintly heard. "Nyar! I WARN 'a
go in there, dadda, I WARN 'a go in there. Ny-a-a-ah!" and then
the accents of a down-trodden parent, urging consolations and
propitiations. "It's locked, Edward," he said.
"But it isn't," said I.
"It is, sir," said the shopman, "always--for that sort of child,"
and as he spoke we had a glimpse of the other youngster, a little,
white face, pallid from sweet-eating and over-sapid food, and
distorted by evil passions, a ruthless little egotist, pawing
at the enchanted pane. "It's no good, sir," said the shopman,
as I moved, with my natural helpfulness, doorward, and presently
the spoilt child was carried off howling.
"How do you manage that?" I said, breathing a little more freely.
"Magic!" said the shopman, with a careless wave of the hand, and behold!
sparks of coloured fire flew out of his fingers and vanished into
the shadows of the shop.
"You were saying," he said, addressing himself to Gip, "before
you came in, that you would like one of our 'Buy One and Astonish
your Friends' boxes?"
Gip, after a gallant effort, said "Yes."
"It's in your pocket."
And leaning over the counter--he really had an extraordinarily
long body--this amazing person produced the article in the customary
conjurer's manner. "Paper," he said, and took a sheet out of
the empty hat with the springs; "string," and behold his mouth was
a string-box, from which he drew an unending thread, which when
he had tied his parcel he bit off--and, it seemed to me, swallowed
the ball of string. And then he lit a candle at the nose of one
of the ventriloquist's dummies, stuck one of his fingers (which
had become sealing-wax red) into the flame, and so sealed the parcel.
"Then there was the Disappearing Egg," he remarked, and produced
one from within my coat-breast and packed it, and also The Crying
Baby, Very Human. I handed each parcel to Gip as it was ready,
and he clasped them to his chest.
He said very little, but his eyes were eloquent; the clutch of
his arms was eloquent. He was the playground of unspeakable emotions.
These, you know, were REAL Magics. Then, with a start, I discovered
something moving about in my hat--something soft and jumpy. I whipped
it off, and a ruffled pigeon--no doubt a confederate--dropped out
and ran on the counter, and went, I fancy, into a cardboard box
behind the papier-mache tiger.
"Tut, tut!" said the shopman, dexterously relieving me of my headdress;
"careless bird, and--as I live--nesting!"
He shook my hat, and shook out into his extended hand two or three
eggs, a large marble, a watch, about half-a-dozen of the inevitable
glass balls, and then crumpled, crinkled paper, more and more and more,
talking all the time of the way in which people neglect to brush
their hats INSIDE as well as out, politely, of course, but with
a certain personal application. "All sorts of things accumulate,
sir. . . . Not YOU, of course, in particular. . . . Nearly every
customer. . . . Astonishing what they carry about with them. . . ."
The crumpled paper rose and billowed on the counter more and more
and more, until he was nearly hidden from us, until he was altogether
hidden, and still his voice went on and on. "We none of us know
what the fair semblance of a human being may conceal, sir. Are we
all then no better than brushed exteriors, whited sepulchres--"
His voice stopped--exactly like when you hit a neighbour's gramophone
with a well-aimed brick, the same instant silence, and the rustle
of the paper stopped, and everything was still. . . .
"Have you done with my hat?" I said, after an interval.
There was no answer.
I stared at Gip, and Gip stared at me, and there were our distortions
in the magic mirrors, looking very rum, and grave, and quiet. . . .
"I think we'll go now," I said. "Will you tell me how much all this
comes to? . . . .
"I say," I said, on a rather louder note, "I want the bill; and
my hat, please."
It might have been a sniff from behind the paper pile. . . .
"Let's look behind the counter, Gip," I said. "He's making fun of us."
I led Gip round the head-wagging tiger, and what do you think
there was behind the counter? No one at all! Only my hat on the floor,
and a common conjurer's lop-eared white rabbit lost in meditation,
and looking as stupid and crumpled as only a conjurer's rabbit
can do. I resumed my hat, and the rabbit lolloped a lollop or so
out of my way.
"Dadda!" said Gip, in a guilty whisper.
"What is it, Gip?" said I.
"I DO like this shop, dadda."
"So should I," I said to myself, "if the counter wouldn't suddenly
extend itself to shut one off from the door." But I didn't call
Gip's attention to that. "Pussy!" he said, with a hand out to
the rabbit as it came lolloping past us; "Pussy, do Gip a magic!"
and his eyes followed it as it squeezed through a door I had
certainly not remarked a moment before. Then this door opened wider,
and the man with one ear larger than the other appeared again.
He was smiling still, but his eye met mine with something between
amusement and defiance. "You'd like to see our show-room, sir," he
said, with an innocent suavity. Gip tugged my finger forward. I
glanced at the counter and met the shopman's eye again. I was
beginning to think the magic just a little too genuine. "We haven't
VERY much time," I said. But somehow we were inside the show-room
before I could finish that.
"All goods of the same quality," said the shopman, rubbing his
flexible hands together, "and that is the Best. Nothing in the place
that isn't genuine Magic, and warranted thoroughly rum. Excuse me, sir!"
I felt him pull at something that clung to my coat-sleeve, and then
I saw he held a little, wriggling red demon by the tail--the little
creature bit and fought and tried to get at his hand--and in a moment
he tossed it carelessly behind a counter. No doubt the thing was
only an image of twisted indiarubber, but for the moment--! And his
gesture was exactly that of a man who handles some petty biting bit
of vermin. I glanced at Gip, but Gip was looking at a magic rocking-
horse. I was glad he hadn't seen the thing. "I say," I said, in an
undertone, and indicating Gip and the red demon with my eyes, "you
haven't many things like THAT about, have you?"
"None of ours! Probably brought it with you," said the shopman--
also in an undertone, and with a more dazzling smile than ever.
"Astonishing what people WILL carry about with them unawares!"
And then to Gip, "Do you see anything you fancy here?"
There were many things that Gip fancied there.
He turned to this astonishing tradesman with mingled confidence
and respect. "Is that a Magic Sword?" he said.
"A Magic Toy Sword. It neither bends, breaks, nor cuts the fingers.
It renders the bearer invincible in battle against any one under
eighteen. Half-a-crown to seven and sixpence, according to size. These
panoplies on cards are for juvenile knights-errant and very useful--
shield of safety, sandals of swiftness, helmet of invisibility."
"Oh, daddy!" gasped Gip.
I tried to find out what they cost, but the shopman did not heed me.
He had got Gip now; he had got him away from my finger; he had
embarked upon the exposition of all his confounded stock, and nothing
was going to stop him. Presently I saw with a qualm of distrust
and something very like jealousy that Gip had hold of this person's
finger as usually he has hold of mine. No doubt the fellow was
interesting, I thought, and had an interestingly faked lot of stuff,
really GOOD faked stuff, still--
I wandered after them, saying very little, but keeping an eye
on this prestidigital fellow. After all, Gip was enjoying it.
And no doubt when the time came to go we should be able to go
quite easily.
It was a long, rambling place, that show-room, a gallery broken up
by stands and stalls and pillars, with archways leading off to other
departments, in which the queerest-looking assistants loafed and
stared at one, and with perplexing mirrors and curtains. So perplexing,
indeed, were these that I was presently unable to make out the door
by which we had come.
The shopman showed Gip magic trains that ran without steam or clockwork,
just as you set the signals, and then some very, very valuable boxes
of soldiers that all came alive directly you took off the lid
and said--. I myself haven't a very quick ear and it was a tongue-
twisting sound, but Gip--he has his mother's ear--got it in no time.
"Bravo!" said the shopman, putting the men back into the box
unceremoniously and handing it to Gip. "Now," said the shopman, and in
a moment Gip had made them all alive again.
"You'll take that box?" asked the shopman.
"We'll take that box," said I, "unless you charge its full value.
In which case it would need a Trust Magnate--"
"Dear heart! NO!" and the shopman swept the little men back again,
shut the lid, waved the box in the air, and there it was, in brown
paper, tied up and--WITH GIP'S FULL NAME AND ADDRESS ON THE PAPER!
The shopman laughed at my amazement.
"This is the genuine magic," he said. "The real thing."
"It's a little too genuine for my taste," I said again.
After that he fell to showing Gip tricks, odd tricks, and still
odder the way they were done. He explained them, he turned them
inside out, and there was the dear little chap nodding his busy bit
of a head in the sagest manner.
I did not attend as well as I might. "Hey, presto!" said the Magic
Shopman, and then would come the clear, small "Hey, presto!"
of the boy. But I was distracted by other things. It was being
borne in upon me just how tremendously rum this place was; it was,
so to speak, inundated by a sense of rumness. There was something
a little rum about the fixtures even, about the ceiling, about the
floor, about the casually distributed chairs. I had a queer feeling
that whenever I wasn't looking at them straight they went askew, and
moved about, and played a noiseless puss-in-the-corner behind my back.
And the cornice had a serpentine design with masks--masks altogether
too expressive for proper plaster.
Then abruptly my attention was caught by one of the odd-looking
assistants. He was some way off and evidently unaware of my presence--
I saw a sort of three-quarter length of him over a pile of toys
and through an arch--and, you know, he was leaning against a pillar
in an idle sort of way doing the most horrid things with his features!
The particular horrid thing he did was with his nose. He did it
just as though he was idle and wanted to amuse himself. First of all
it was a short, blobby nose, and then suddenly he shot it out
like a telescope, and then out it flew and became thinner and thinner
until it was like a long, red, flexible whip. Like a thing in
a nightmare it was! He flourished it about and flung it forth
as a fly-fisher flings his line.
My instant thought was that Gip mustn't see him. I turned about,
and there was Gip quite preoccupied with the shopman, and thinking
no evil. They were whispering together and looking at me. Gip was
standing on a little stool, and the shopman was holding a sort of
big drum in his hand.
"Hide and seek, dadda!" cried Gip. "You're He!"
And before I could do anything to prevent it, the shopman had clapped
the big drum over him. I saw what was up directly. "Take that off,"
I cried, "this instant! You'll frighten the boy. Take it off!"
The shopman with the unequal ears did so without a word, and held
the big cylinder towards me to show its emptiness. And the little
stool was vacant! In that instant my boy had utterly disappeared? . . .
You know, perhaps, that sinister something that comes like a hand
out of the unseen and grips your heart about. You know it takes
your common self away and leaves you tense and deliberate, neither
slow nor hasty, neither angry nor afraid. So it was with me.
I came up to this grinning shopman and kicked his stool aside.
"Stop this folly!" I said. "Where is my boy?"
"You see," he said, still displaying the drum's interior, "there is
no deception---"
I put out my hand to grip him, and he eluded me by a dexterous
movement. I snatched again, and he turned from me and pushed open
a door to escape. "Stop!" I said, and he laughed, receding. I leapt
after him--into utter darkness.
THUD!
"Lor' bless my 'eart! I didn't see you coming, sir!"
I was in Regent Street, and I had collided with a decent-looking
working man; and a yard away, perhaps, and looking a little
perplexed with himself, was Gip. There was some sort of apology,
and then Gip had turned and come to me with a bright little smile,
as though for a moment he had missed me.
And he was carrying four parcels in his arm!
He secured immediate possession of my finger.
For the second I was rather at a loss. I stared round to see
the door of the magic shop, and, behold, it was not there!
There was no door, no shop, nothing, only the common pilaster
between the shop where they sell pictures and the window with
the chicks! . . .
I did the only thing possible in that mental tumult; I walked straight
to the kerbstone and held up my umbrella for a cab.
"'Ansoms," said Gip, in a note of culminating exultation.
I helped him in, recalled my address with an effort, and got in also.
Something unusual proclaimed itself in my tail-coat pocket, and
I felt and discovered a glass ball. With a petulant expression
I flung it into the street.
Gip said nothing.
For a space neither of us spoke.
"Dada!" said Gip, at last, "that WAS a proper shop!"
I came round with that to the problem of just how the whole thing
had seemed to him. He looked completely undamaged--so far, good;
he was neither scared nor unhinged, he was simply tremendously
satisfied with the afternoon's entertainment, and there in his arms
were the four parcels.
Confound it! what could be in them?
"Um!" I said. "Little boys can't go to shops like that every day."
He received this with his usual stoicism, and for a moment I was sorry
I was his father and not his mother, and so couldn't suddenly there,
coram publico, in our hansom, kiss him. After all, I thought,
the thing wasn't so very bad.
But it was only when we opened the parcels that I really began to be
reassured. Three of them contained boxes of soldiers, quite ordinary
lead soldiers, but of so good a quality as to make Gip altogether
forget that originally these parcels had been Magic Tricks of the only
genuine sort, and the fourth contained a kitten, a little living
white kitten, in excellent health and appetite and temper.
I saw this unpacking with a sort of provisional relief. I hung about
in the nursery for quite an unconscionable time. . . .
That happened six months ago. And now I am beginning to believe
it is all right. The kitten had only the magic natural to all kittens,
and the soldiers seem as steady a company as any colonel could
desire. And Gip--?
The intelligent parent will understand that I have to go cautiously
with Gip.
But I went so far as this one day. I said, "How would you like
your soldiers to come alive, Gip, and march about by themselves?"
"Mine do," said Gip. "I just have to say a word I know before
I open the lid."
"Then they march about alone?"
"Oh, QUITE, dadda. I shouldn't like them if they didn't do that."
I displayed no unbecoming surprise, and since then I have taken
occasion to drop in upon him once or twice, unannounced, when
the soldiers were about, but so far I have never discovered them
performing in anything like a magical manner.
It's so difficult to tell.
There's also a question of finance. I have an incurable habit of
paying bills. I have been up and down Regent Street several times,
looking for that shop. I am inclined to think, indeed, that in that
matter honour is satisfied, and that, since Gip's name and address
are known to them, I may very well leave it to these people,
whoever they may be, to send in their bill in their own time.
3. THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS
Towards mid-day the three pursuers came abruptly round a bend in
the torrent bed upon the sight of a very broad and spacious valley.
The difficult and winding trench of pebbles along which they had
tracked the fugitives for so long, expanded to a broad slope,
and with a common impulse the three men left the trail, and rode
to a little eminence set with olive-dun trees, and there halted,
the two others, as became them, a little behind the man with
the silver-studded bridle.
For a space they scanned the great expanse below them with eager eyes.
It spread remoter and remoter, with only a few clusters of sere
thorn bushes here and there, and the dim suggestions of some now
waterless ravine, to break its desolation of yellow grass. Its purple
distances melted at last into the bluish slopes of the further hills--
hills it might be of a greener kind--and above them invisibly
supported, and seeming indeed to hang in the blue, were the snowclad
summits of mountains that grew larger and bolder to the north-westward
as the sides of the valley drew together. And westward the valley
opened until a distant darkness under the sky told where the forests
began. But the three men looked neither east nor west, but only
steadfastly across the valley.
The gaunt man with the scarred lip was the first to speak. "Nowhere,"
he said, with a sigh of disappointment in his voice. "But after all,
they had a full day's start."
"They don't know we are after them," said the little man on the white
horse.
"SHE would know," said the leader bitterly, as if speaking to himself.
"Even then they can't go fast. They've got no beast but the mule,
and all to-day the girl's foot has been bleeding---"
The man with the silver bridle flashed a quick intensity of rage
on him. "Do you think I haven't seen that?" he snarled.
"It helps, anyhow," whispered the little man to himself.
The gaunt man with the scarred lip stared impassively. "They can't
be over the valley," he said. "If we ride hard--"
He glanced at the white horse and paused.
"Curse all white horses!" said the man with the silver bridle,
and turned to scan the beast his curse included.
The little man looked down between the mclancholy ears of his steed.
"I did my best," he said.
The two others stared again across the valley for a space. The gaunt
man passed the back of his hand across the scarred lip.
"Come up!" said the man who owned the silver bridle, suddenly.
The little man started and jerked his rein, and the horse hoofs
of the three made a multitudinous faint pattering upon the withered
grass as they turned back towards the trail. . . .
They rode cautiously down the long slope before them, and so came
through a waste of prickly, twisted bushes and strange dry shapes
of horny branches that grew amongst the rocks, into the levels below.
And there the trail grew faint, for the soil was scanty, and the only
herbage was this scorched dead straw that lay upon the ground.
Still, by hard scanning, by leaning beside the horses' necks and
pausing ever and again, even these white men could contrive to follow
after their prey.
There were trodden places, bent and broken blades of the coarse
grass, and ever and again the sufficient intimation of a footmark.
And once the leader saw a brown smear of blood where the half-caste
girl may have trod. And at that under his breath he cursed her for
a fool.
The gaunt man checked his leader's tracking, and the little man
on the white horse rode behind, a man lost in a dream. They rode
one after another, the man with the silver bridle led the way,
and they spoke never a word. After a time it came to the little man
on the white horse that the world was very still. He started out
of his dream. Besides the little noises of their horses and equipment,
the whole great valley kept the brooding quiet of a painted scene.
Before him went his master and his fellow, each intently leaning
forward to the left, each impassively moving with the paces of his
horse; their shadows went before them--still, noiseless, tapering
attendants; and nearer a crouched cool shape was his own. He looked
about him. What was it had gone? Then he remembered the reverberation
from the banks of the gorge and the perpetual accompaniment of
shifting, jostling pebbles. And, moreover--? There was no breeze.
That was it! What a vast, still place it was, a monotonous afternoon
slumber. And the sky open and blank, except for a sombre veil of haze
that had gathered in the upper valley.
He straightened his back, fretted with his bridle, puckered his lips
to whistle, and simply sighed. He turned in his saddle for a time,
and stared at the throat of the mountain gorge out of which they
had come. Blank! Blank slopes on either side, with never a sign
of a decent beast or tree--much less a man. What a land it was!
What a wilderness! He dropped again into his former pose.
It filled him with a momentary pleasure to see a wry stick of purple
black flash out into the form of a snake, and vanish amidst the brown.
After all, the infernal valley WAS alive. And then, to rejoice him
still more, came a little breath across his face, a whisper that
came and went, the faintest inclination of a stiff black-antlered
bush upon a little crest, the first intimations of a possible breeze.
Idly he wetted his finger, and held it up.
He pulled up sharply to avoid a collision with the gaunt man, who
had stopped at fault upon the trail. Just at that guilty moment
he caught his master's eye looking towards him.
For a time he forced an interest in the tracking. Then, as they rode
on again, he studied his master's shadow and hat and shoulder,
appearing and disappearing behind the gaunt man's nearer contours.
They had ridden four days out of the very limits of the world into
this desolate place, short of water, with nothing but a strip
of dried meat under their saddles, over rocks and mountains,
where surely none but these fugitives had ever been before--for THAT!
And all this was for a girl, a mere wilful child! And the man
had whole cityfuls of people to do his basest bidding--girls, women!
Why in the name of passionate folly THIS one in particular? asked
the little man, and scowled at the world, and licked his parched lips
with a blackened tongue. It was the way of the master, and that
was all he knew. Just because she sought to evade him. . . .
His eye caught a whole row of high plumed canes bending in unison,
and then the tails of silk that hung before his neck flapped and fell.
The breeze was growing stronger. Somehow it took the stiff stillness
out of things--and that was well.
"Hullo!" said the gaunt man.
All three stopped abruptly.
"What?" asked the master. "What?"
"Over there," said the gaunt man, pointing up the valley.
"What?"
"Something coming towards us."
And as he spoke a yellow animal crested a rise and came bearing
down upon them. It was a big wild dog, coming before the wind,
tongue out, at a steady pace, and running with such an intensity
of purpose that he did not seem to see the horsemen he approached.
He ran with his nose up, following, it was plain, neither scent
nor quarry. As he drew nearer the little man felt for his sword.
"He's mad," said the gaunt rider.
"Shout!" said the little man, and shouted.
The dog came on. Then when the little man's blade was already out,
it swerved aside and went panting by them and past. The eyes of
the little man followed its flight. "There was no foam," he said.
For a space the man with the silver-studded bridle stared up
the valley. "Oh, come on!" he cried at last. "What does it matter?"
and jerked his horse into movement again.
The little man left the insoluble mystery of a dog that fled from
nothing but the wind, and lapsed into profound musings on human
character. "Come on!" he whispered to himself. "Why should it be
given to one man to say 'Come on!' with that stupendous violence
of effect. Always, all his life, the man with the silver bridle
has been saying that. If _I_ said it--!" thought the little man.
But people marvelled when the master was disobeyed even in the wildest
things. This half-caste girl seemed to him, seemed to every one,
mad--blasphemous almost. The little man, by way of comparison,
reflected on the gaunt rider with the scarred lip, as stalwart as
his master, as brave and, indeed, perhaps braver, and yet for him
there was obedience, nothing but to give obedience duly and stoutly. . .
Certain sensations of the hands and knees called the little man back
to more immediate things. He became aware of something. He rode up
beside his gaunt fellow. "Do you notice the horses?" he said in an
undertone.
The gaunt face looked interrogation.
"They don't like this wind," said the little man, and dropped behind
as the man with the silver bridle turned upon him.
"It's all right," said the gaunt-faced man.
They rode on again for a space in silence. The foremost two rode
downcast upon the trail, the hindmost man watched the haze that
crept down the vastness of the valley, nearer and nearer, and noted
how the wind grew in strength moment by moment. Far away on the left
he saw a line of dark bulks--wild hog perhaps, galloping down
the valley, but of that he said nothing, nor did he remark again upon
the uneasiness of the horses.
And then he saw first one and then a second great white ball,
a great shining white ball like a gigantic head of thistle-down,
that drove before the wind athwart the path. These balls soared
high in the air, and dropped and rose again and caught for a moment,
and hurried on and passed, but at the sight of them the restlessness
of the horses increased.
Then presently he saw that more of these drifting globes--and then
soon very many more--were hurrying towards him down the valley.
They became aware of a squealing. Athwart the path a huge boar rushed,
turning his head but for one instant to glance at them, and then
hurling on down the valley again. And at that, all three stopped
and sat in their saddles, staring into the thickening haze that
was coming upon them.
"If it were not for this thistle-down--" began the leader.
But now a big globe came drifting past within a score of yards
of them. It was really not an even sphere at all, but a vast, soft,
ragged, filmy thing, a sheet gathered by the corners, an aerial
jelly-fish, as it were, but rolling over and over as it advanced,
and trailing long, cobwebby threads and streamers that floated
in its wake.
"It isn't thistle-down," said the little man.
"I don't like the stuff," said the gaunt man.
And they looked at one another.
"Curse it!" cried the leader. "The air's full of it up there.
If it keeps on at this pace long, it will stop us altogether."
An instinctive feeling, such as lines out a herd of deer at the
approach of some ambiguous thing, prompted them to turn their horses
to the wind, ride forward for a few paces, and stare at that advancing
multitude of floating masses. They came on before the wind with a sort
of smooth swiftness, rising and falling noiselessly, sinking to earth,
rebounding high, soaring--all with a perfect unanimity, with a still,
deliberate assurance.
Right and left of the horsemen the pioneers of this strange army
passed. At one that rolled along the ground, breaking shapelessly
and trailing out reluctantly into long grappling ribbons and bands,
all three horses began to shy and dance. The master was seized
with a sudden unreasonable impatience. He cursed the drifting globes
roundly. "Get on!" he cried; "get on! What do these things matter?
How CAN they matter? Back to the trail!" He fell swearing at his horse
and sawed the bit across its mouth.
He shouted aloud with rage. "I will follow that trail, I tell you!"
he cried. "Where is the trail?"
He gripped the bridle of his prancing horse and searched amidst
the grass. A long and clinging thread fell across his face, a grey
streamer dropped about his bridle-arm, some big, active thing
with many legs ran down the back of his head. He looked up to discover
one of those grey masses anchored as it were above him by these things
and flapping out ends as a sail flaps when a boat comes, about--
but noiselessly.
He had an impression of many eyes, of a dense crew of squat bodies,
of long, many-jointed limbs hauling at their mooring ropes to bring
the thing down upon him. For a space he stared up, reining in his
prancing horse with the instinct born of years of horsemanship.
Then the flat of a sword smote his back, and a blade flashed overhead
and cut the drifting balloon of spider-web free, and the whole mass
lifted softly and drove clear and away.
"Spiders!" cried the voice of the gaunt man. "The things are full
of big spiders! Look, my lord!"
The man with the silver bridle still followed the mass that drove away.
"Look, my lord!"
The master found himself staring down at a red, smashed thing
on the ground that, in spite of partial obliteration, could still
wriggle unavailing legs. Then when the gaunt man pointed to another
mass that bore down upon them, he drew his sword hastily. Up the
valley now it was like a fog bank torn to rags. He tried to grasp the
situation.
"Ride for it!" the little man was shouting. "Ride for it down the
valley."
What happened then was like the confusion of a battle. The man
with the silver bridle saw the little man go past him slashing
furiously at imaginary cobwebs, saw him cannon into the horse
of the gaunt man and hurl it and its rider to earth. His own horse
went a dozen paces before he could rein it in. Then he looked up
to avoid imaginary dangers, and then back again to see a horse
rolling on the ground, the gaunt man standing and slashing over it
at a rent and fluttering mass of grey that streamed and wrapped
about them both. And thick and fast as thistle-down on waste land
on a windy day in July, the cobweb masses were coming on.
The little man had dismounted, but he dared not release his horse.
He was endeavouring to lug the struggling brute back with the strength
of one arm, while with the other he slashed aimlessly, The tentacles
of a second grey mass had entangled themselves with the struggle,
and this second grey mass came to its moorings, and slowly sank.
The master set his teeth, gripped his bridle, lowered his head,
and spurred his horse forward. The horse on the ground rolled over,
there were blood and moving shapes upon the flanks, and the gaunt man,
suddenly leaving it, ran forward towards his master, perhaps ten paces.
His legs were swathed and encumbered with grey; he made ineffectual
movements with his sword. Grey streamers waved from him; there was
a thin veil of grey across his face. With his left hand he beat at
something on his body, and suddenly he stumbled and fell. He struggled
to rise, and fell again, and suddenly, horribly, began to howl,
"Oh--ohoo, ohooh!"
The master could see the great spiders upon him, and others upon
the ground.
As he strove to force his horse nearer to this gesticulating,
screaming grey object that struggled up and down, there came a
clatter of hoofs, and the little man, in act of mounting, swordless,
balanced on his belly athwart the white horse, and clutching its mane,
whirled past. And again a clinging thread of grey gossamer swept
across the master's face. All about him, and over him, it seemed
this drifting, noiseless cobweb circled and drew nearer him. . . .
To the day of his death he never knew just how the event of that moment
happened. Did he, indeed, turn his horse, or did it really of its
own accord stampede after its fellow? Suffice it that in another
second he was galloping full tilt down the valley with his sword
whirling furiously overhead. And all about him on the quickening
breeze, the spiders' airships, their air bundles and air sheets,
seemed to him to hurry in a conscious pursuit.
Clatter, clatter, thud, thud--the man with the silver bridle rode,
heedless of his direction, with his fearful face looking up now right,
now left, and his sword arm ready to slash. And a few hundred yards
ahead of him, with a tail of torn cobweb trailing behind him, rode
the little man on the white horse, still but imperfectly in the saddle.
The reeds bent before them, the wind blew fresh and strong, over his
shoulder the master could see the webs hurrying to overtake. . . .
He was so intent to escape the spiders' webs that only as his horse
gathered together for a leap did he realise the ravine ahead. And then
he reaIised it only to misunderstand and interfere. He was leaning
forward on his horse's neck and sat up and back all too late.
But if in his excitement he had failed to leap, at any rate he had
not forgotten how to fall. He was horseman again in mid-air.
He came off clear with a mere bruise upon his shoulder, and his horse
rolled, kicking spasmodic legs, and lay still. But the master's sword
drove its point into the hard soil, and snapped clean across, as
though Chance refused him any longer as her Knight, and the splintered
end missed his face by an inch or so.
He was on his feet in a moment, breathlessly scanning the onrushing
spider-webs. For a moment he was minded to run, and then thought
of the ravine, and turned back. He ran aside once to dodge one drifting
terror, and then he was swiftly clambering down the precipitous sides,
and out of the touch of the gale.
There under the lee of the dry torrent's steeper banks he might
crouch, and watch these strange, grey masses pass and pass in safety
till the wind fell, and it became possible to escape. And there
for a long time he crouched, watching the strange, grey, ragged
masses trail their streamers across his narrowed sky.
Once a stray spider fell into the ravine close beside him--a full
foot it measured from leg to leg, and its body was half a man's hand--
and after he had watched its monstrous alacrity of search and escape
for a little while, and tempted it to bite his broken sword, he lifted
up his iron-heeled boot and smashed it into a pulp. He swore as he did
so, and for a time sought up and down for another.
Then presently, when he was surer these spider swarms could not
drop into the ravine, he found a place where he could sit down,
and sat and fell into deep thought and began after his manner
to gnaw his knuckles and bite his nails. And from this he was moved
by the coming of the man with the white horse.
He heard him long before he saw him, as a clattering of hoofs,
stumbling footsteps, and a reassuring voice. Then the little man
appeared, a rueful figure, still with a tail of white cobweb trailing
behind him. They approached each other without speaking, without
a salutation. The little man was fatigued and shamed to the pitch
of hopeless bitterness, and came to a stop at last, face to face with
his seated master. The latter winced a little under his dependant's
eye. "Well?" he said at last, with no pretence of authority.
"You left him?"
"My horse bolted."
"I know. So did mine."
He laughed at his master mirthlessly.
"I say my horse bolted," said the man who once had a silver-studded
bridle.
"Cowards both," said the little man.
The other gnawed his knuckle through some meditative moments,
with his eye on his inferior.
"Don't call me a coward," he said at length.
"You are a coward like myself."
"A coward possibly. There is a limit beyond which every man must fear.
That I have learnt at last. But not like yourself. That is where
the difference comes in."
"I never could have dreamt you would have left him. He saved
your life two minutes before. . . . Why are you our lord?"
The master gnawed his knuckles again, and his countenance was dark.
"No man calls me a coward," he said. "No. A broken sword is better
than none. . . . One spavined white horse cannot be expected to carry
two men a four days' journey. I hate white horses, but this time
it cannot be helped. You begin to understand me? . . . I perceive
that you are minded, on the strength of what you have seen and fancy,
to taint my reputation. It is men of your sort who unmake kings.
Besides which--I never liked you."
"My lord!" said the little man.
"No," said the master. "NO!"
He stood up sharply as the little man moved. For a minute perhaps
they faced one another. Overhead the spiders' balls went driving.
There was a quick movement among the pebbles; a running of feet,
a cry of despair, a gasp and a blow. . . .
Towards nightfall the wind fell. The sun set in a calm serenity,
and the man who had once possessed the silver bridle came at last
very cautiously and by an easy slope out of the ravine again; but now
he led the white horse that once belonged to the little man.
He would have gone back to his horse to get his silver-mounted
bridle again, but he feared night and a quickening breeze might
still find him in the valley, and besides he disliked greatly
to think he might discover his horse all swathed in cobwebs
and perhaps unpleasantly eaten.
And as he thought of those cobwebs and of all the dangers he
had been through, and the manner in which he had been preserved
that day, his hand sought a little reliquary that hung about his neck,
and he clasped it for a moment with heartfelt gratitude. As he did so
his eyes went across the valley.
"I was hot with passion," he said, "and now she has met her reward.
They also, no doubt--"
And behold! Far away out of the wooded slopes across the valley,
but in the clearness of the sunset distinct and unmistakable,
he saw a little spire of smoke.
At that his expression of serene resignation changed to an amazed
anger. Smoke? He turned the head of the white horse about, and
hesitated. And as he did so a little rustle of air went through the
grass about him. Far away upon some reeds swayed a tattered sheet of
grey. He looked at the cobwebs; he looked at the smoke.
"Perhaps, after all, it is not them," he said at last.
But he knew better.
After he had stared at the smoke for some time, he mounted the white
horse.
As he rode, he picked his way amidst stranded masses of web. For some
reason there were many dead spiders on the ground, and those that
lived feasted guiltily on their fellows. At the sound of his horse's
hoofs they fled.
Their time had passed. From the ground without either a wind to carry
them or a winding sheet ready, these things, for all their poison,
could do him little evil. He flicked with his belt at those
he fancied came too near. Once, where a number ran together over
a bare place, he was minded to dismount and trample them with his boots,
but this impulse he overcame. Ever and again he turned in his saddle,
and looked back at the smoke.
"Spiders," he muttered over and over again. "Spiders! Well, well. . . .
The next time I must spin a web."
4. THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT
He sits not a dozen yards away. If I glance over my shoulder
I can see him. And if I catch his eye--and usually I catch his eye--
it meets me with an expression.
It is mainly an imploring look--and yet with suspicion in it.
Confound his suspicion! If I wanted to tell on him I should have told
long ago. I don't tell and I don't tell, and he ought to feel at his
ease. As if anything so gross and fat as he could feel at ease! Who
would believe me if I did tell?
Poor old Pyecraft! Great, uneasy jelly of substance! The fattest
clubman in London.
He sits at one of the little club tables in the huge bay by the fire,
stuffing. What is he stuffing? I glance judiciously and catch him
biting at a round of hot buttered tea-cake, with his eyes on me.
Confound him!--with his eyes on me!
That settles it, Pyecraft! Since you WILL be abject, since you WILL
behave as though I was not a man of honour, here, right under your
embedded eyes, I write the thing down--the plain truth about Pyecraft.
The man I helped, the man I shielded, and who has requited me
by making my club unendurable, absolutely unendurable, with his
liquid appeal, with the perpetual "don't tell" of his looks.
And, besides, why does he keep on eternally eating?
Well, here goes for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth!
Pyecraft--. I made the acquaintance of Pyecraft in this very smoking-
room. I was a young, nervous new member, and he saw it. I was sitting
all alone, wishing I knew more of the members, and suddenly he came,
a great rolling front of chins and abdomina, towards me, and grunted
and sat down in a chair close by me and wheezed for a space,
and scraped for a space with a match and lit a cigar, and then
addressed me. I forget what he said--something about the matches
not lighting properly, and afterwards as he talked he kept stopping
the waiters one by one as they went by, and telling them about
the matches in that thin, fluty voice he has. But, anyhow, it was
in some such way we began our talking.
He talked about various things and came round to games. And thence
to my figure and complexion. "YOU ought to be a good cricketer,"
he said. I suppose I am slender, slender to what some people would
call lean, and I suppose I am rather dark, still--I am not ashamed
of having a Hindu great-grandmother, but, for all that, I don't want
casual strangers to see through me at a glance to HER. So that
I was set against Pyecraft from the beginning.
But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.
"I expect," he said, "you take no more exercise than I do, and
probably you eat no less." (Like all excessively obese people
he fancied he ate nothing.) "Yet,"--and he smiled an oblique smile--
"we differ."
And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness;
all he did for his fatness and all he was going to do for his fatness;
what people had advised him to do for his fatness and what he had
heard of people doing for fatness similar to his. "A priori," he said,
"one would think a question of nutrition could be answered by dietary
and a question of assimilation by drugs." It was stifling. It was
dumpling talk. It made me feel swelled to hear him.
One stands that sort of thing once in a way at a club, but a time
came when I fancied I was standing too much. He took to me altogether
too conspicuously. I could never go into the smoking-room but
he would come wallowing towards me, and sometimes he came and
gormandised round and about me while I had my lunch. He seemed
at times almost to be clinging to me. He was a bore, but not so
fearful a bore as to be limited to me; and from the first there
was something in his manner--almost as though he knew, almost as
though he penetrated to the fact that I MIGHT--that there was a remote,
exceptional chance in me that no one else presented.
"I'd give anything to get it down," he would say--"anything,"
and peer at me over his vast cheeks and pant.
Poor old Pyecraft! He has just gonged, no doubt to order another
buttered tea-cake!
He came to the actual thing one day. "Our Pharmacopoeia," he said,
"our Western Pharmacopoeia, is anything but the last word of medical
science. In the East, I've been told--"
He stopped and stared at me. It was like being at an aquarium.
I was quite suddenly angry with him. "Look here," I said, "who told
you about my great-grandmother's recipes?"
"Well," he fenced.
"Every time we've met for a week," I said, "and we've met pretty
often--you've given me a broad hint or so about that little secret
of mine."
"Well," he said, "now the cat's out of the bag, I'll admit, yes,
it is so. I had it--"
"From Pattison?"
"Indirectly," he said, which I believe was lying, "yes."
"Pattison," I said, "took that stuff at his own risk."
He pursed his mouth and bowed.
"My great-grandmother's recipes," I said, "are queer things to handle.
My father was near making me promise--"
"He didn't?"
"No. But he warned me. He himself used one--once."
"Ah! . . . But do you think--? Suppose--suppose there did happen
to be one--"
"The things are curious documents," I said.
"Even the smell of 'em. . . . No!"
But after going so far Pyecraft was resolved I should go farther.
I was always a little afraid if I tried his patience too much he would
fall on me suddenly and smother me. I own I was weak. But I was
also annoyed with Pyecraft. I had got to that state of feeling
for him that disposed me to say, "Well, TAKE the risk!" The little
affair of Pattison to which I have alluded was a different matter
altogether. What it was doesn't concern us now, but I knew, anyhow,
that the particular recipe I used then was safe. The rest I didn't
know so much about, and, on the whole, I was inclined to doubt
their safety pretty completely.
Yet even if Pyecraft got poisoned--
I must confess the poisoning of Pyecraft struck me as an immense
undertaking.
That evening I took that queer, odd-scented sandalwood box out of
my safe and turned the rustling skins over. The gentleman who wrote
the recipes for my great-grandmother evidently had a weakness for skins
of a miscellaneous origin, and his handwriting was cramped to the last
degree. Some of the things are quite unreadable to me--though my family,
with its Indian Civil Service associations, has kept up a knowledge
of Hindustani from generation to generation--and none are absolutely
plain sailing. But I found the one that I knew was there soon enough,
and sat on the floor by my safe for some time looking at it.
"Look here," said I to Pyecraft next day, and snatched the slip away
from his eager grasp.
"So far as I--can make it out, this is a recipe for Loss of Weight.
("Ah!" said Pyecraft.) I'm not absolutely sure, but I think it's that.
And if you take my advice you'll leave it alone. Because, you know--
I blacken my blood in your interest, Pyecraft--my ancestors on
that side were, so far as I can gather, a jolly queer lot. See?"
"Let me try it," said Pyecraft.
I leant back in my chair. My imagination made one mighty effort
and fell flat within me. "What in Heaven's name, Pyecraft," I asked,
"do you think you'll look like when you get thin?"
He was impervious to reason. I made him promise never to say a word
to me about his disgusting fatness again whatever happened--never,
and then I handed him that little piece of skin.
"It's nasty stuff," I said.
"No matter," he said, and took it.
He goggled at it. "But--but--" he said.
He had just discovered that it wasn't English.
"To the best of my ability," I said, "I will do you a translation."
I did my best. After that we didn't speak for a fortnight. Whenever he
approached me I frowned and motioned him away, and he respected
our compact, but at the end of a fortnight he was as fat as ever.
And then he got a word in.
"I must speak," he said. "It isn't fair. There's something wrong.
It's done me no good. You're not doing your great-grandmother justice."
"Where's the recipe?"
He produced it gingerly from his pocket-book.
I ran my eye over the items. "Was the egg addled?" I asked.
"No. Ought it to have been?"
"That," I said, "goes without saying in all my poor dear
great-grandmother's
recipes. When condition or quality is not specified you must get
the worst. She was drastic or nothing. . . . And there's one or two
possible alternatives to some of these other things. You got FRESH
rattlesnake venom."
"I got a rattlesnake from Jamrach's. It cost--it cost--"
"That's your affair, anyhow. This last item--"
"I know a man who--"
"Yes. H'm. Well, I'll write the alternatives down. So far as I know
the language, the spelling of this recipe is particularly atrocious.
By-the-bye, dog here probably means pariah dog."
For a month after that I saw Pyecraft constantly at the club and
as fat and anxious as ever. He kept our treaty, but at times he broke
the spirit of it by shaking his head despondently. Then one day
in the cloakroom he said, "Your great-grandmother--"
"Not a word against her," I said; and he held his peace.
I could have fancied he had desisted, and I saw him one day talking
to three new members about his fatness as though he was in search
of other recipes. And then, quite unexpectedly, his telegram came.
"Mr. Formalyn!" bawled a page-boy under my nose, and I took the telegram
and opened it at once.
"For Heaven's sake come.--Pyecraft."
"H'm," said I, and to tell the truth I was so pleased at the
rehabilitation of my great grandmother's reputation this evidently
promised that I made a most excellent lunch.
I got Pyecraft's address from the hall porter. Pyecraft inhabited the
upper half of a house in Bloomsbury, and I went there so soon as I
had done my coffee and Trappistine. I did not wait to finish my cigar.
"Mr. Pyecraft?" said I, at the front door.
They believed he was ill; he hadn't been out for two days.
"He expects me," said I, and they sent me up.
I rang the bell at the lattice-door upon the landing.
"He shouldn't have tried it, anyhow," I said to myself. "A man who
eats like a pig ought to look like a pig."
An obviously worthy woman, with an anxious face and a carelessly
placed cap, came and surveyed me through the lattice.
I gave my name and she let me in in a dubious fashion.
"Well?" said I, as we stood together inside Pyecraft's piece of the
landing.
"'E said you was to come in if you came," she said, and regarded me,
making no motion to show me anywhere. And then, confidentially,
"'E's locked in, sir."
"Locked in?"
"Locked himself in yesterday morning and 'asn't let any one in since,
sir. And ever and again SWEARING. Oh, my!"
I stared at the door she indicated by her glances.
"In there?" I said.
"Yes, sir."
"What's up?"
She shook her head sadly, "'E keeps on calling for vittles, sir.
'EAVY vittles 'e wants. I get 'im what I can. Pork 'e's 'ad,
sooit puddin', sossiges, noo bread. Everythink like that. Left outside,
if you please, and me go away. 'E's eatin', sir, somethink AWFUL."
There came a piping bawl from inside the door: "That Formalyn?"
"That you, Pyecraft?" I shouted, and went and banged the door.
"Tell her to go away."
I did.
Then I could hear a curious pattering upon the door, almost like
some one feeling for the handle in the dark, and Pyecraft's familiar
grunts.
"It's all right," I said, "she's gone."
But for a long time the door didn't open.
I heard the key turn. Then Pyecraft's voice said, "Come in."
I turned the handle and opened the door. Naturally I expected to see
Pyecraft.
Well, you know, he wasn't there!
I never had such a shock in my life. There was his sitting-room
in a state of untidy disorder, plates and dishes among the books
and writing things, and several chairs overturned, but Pyecraft--
"It's all right, o' man; shut the door," he said, and then I
discovered him.
There he was right up close to the cornice in the corner by the door,
as though some one had glued him to the ceiling. His face was anxious
and angry. He panted and gesticulated. "Shut the door," he said.
"If that woman gets hold of it--"
I shut the door, and went and stood away from him and stared.
"If anything gives way and you tumble down," I said, "you'll break
your neck, Pyecraft."
"I wish I could," he wheezed.
"A man of your age and weight getting up to kiddish gymnastics--"
"Don't," he said, and looked agonised.
"I'll tell you," he said, and gesticulated.
"How the deuce," said I, "are you holding on up there?"
And then abruptly I realised that he was not holding on at all,
that he was floating up there--just as a gas-filled bladder might
have floated in the same position. He began a struggle to thrust
himself away from the ceiling and to clamber down the wall to me.
"It's that prescription," he panted, as he did so. "Your great-gran--"
He took hold of a framed engraving rather carelessly as he spoke
and it gave way, and he flew back to the ceiling again, while
the picture smashed onto the sofa. Bump he went against the ceiling,
and I knew then why he was all over white on the more salient curves
and angles of his person. He tried again more carefully, coming
down by way of the mantel.
It was really a most extraordinary spectacle, that great, fat,
apoplectic-looking man upside down and trying to get from the ceiling
to the floor. "That prescription," he said. "Too successful."
"How?"
"Loss of weight--almost complete."
And then, of course, I understood.
"By Jove, Pyecraft," said I, "what you wanted was a cure for fatness!
But you always called it weight. You would call it weight."
Somehow I was extremely delighted. I quite liked Pyecraft for the time.
"Let me help you!" I said, and took his hand and pulled him down.
He kicked about, trying to get a foothold somewhere. It was very like
holding a flag on a windy day.
"That table," he said, pointing, "is solid mahogany and very heavy.
If you can put me under that---"
I did, and there he wallowed about like a captive balloon, while
I stood on his hearthrug and talked to him.
I lit a cigar. "Tell me," I said, "what happened?"
"I took it," he said.
"How did it taste?"
"Oh, BEASTLY!"
I should fancy they all did. Whether one regards the ingredients
or the probable compound or the possible results, almost all of
my great-grandmother's remedies appear to me at least to be
extraordinarily uninviting. For my own part--
"I took a little sip first."
"Yes?"
"And as I felt lighter and better after an hour, I decided to take
the draught."
"My dear Pyecraft!"
"I held my nose," he explained. "And then I kept on getting lighter
and lighter--and helpless, you know."
He gave way to a sudden burst of passion. "What the goodness am I
to DO?" he said.
"There's one thing pretty evident," I said, "that you mustn't do.
If you go out of doors, you'll go up and up." I waved an arm upward.
"They'd have to send Santos-Dumont after you to bring you down again."
"I suppose it will wear off?"
I shook my head. "I don't think you can count on that," I said.
And then there was another burst of passion, and he kicked out
at adjacent chairs and banged the floor. He behaved just as I should
have expected a great, fat, self-indulgent man to behave under trying
circumstances--that is to say, very badly. He spoke of me and
my great-grandmother with an utter want of discretion.
"I never asked you to take the stuff," I said.
And generously disregarding the insults he was putting upon me,
I sat down in his armchair and began to talk to him in a sober,
friendly fashion.
I pointed out to him that this was a trouble he had brought upon
himself, and that it had almost an air of poetical justice. He had
eaten too much. This he disputed, and for a time we argued the point.
He became noisy and violent, so I desisted from this aspect
of his lesson. "And then," said I, "you committed the sin of euphuism.
You called it not Fat, which is just and inglorious, but Weight. You--"
He interrupted to say he recognised all that. What was he to DO?
I suggested he should adapt himself to his new conditions. So we
came to the really sensible part of the business. I suggested that
it would not be difficult for him to learn to walk about on the ceiling
with his hands--
"I can't sleep," he said.
But that was no great difficulty. It was quite possible, I pointed out,
to make a shake-up under a wire mattress, fasten the under things
on with tapes, and have a blanket, sheet, and coverlet to button
at the side. He would have to confide in his housekeeper, I said;
and after some squabbling he agreed to that. (Afterwards it was
quite delightful to see the beautifully matter-of-fact way with which
the good lady took all these amazing inversions.) He could have
a library ladder in his room, and all his meals could be laid on
the top of his bookcase. We also hit on an ingenious device by which
he could get to the floor whenever he wanted, which was simply to put
the British Encyclopaedia (tenth edition) on the top of his open
shelves. He just pulled out a couple of volumes and held on, and down
he came. And we agreed there must be iron staples along the skirting,
so that he could cling to those whenever he wanted to get about the
room on the lower level.
As we got on with the thing I found myself almost keenly interested.
It was I who called in the housekeeper and broke matters to her,
and it was I chiefly who fixed up the inverted bed. In fact, I spent
two whole days at his flat. I am a handy, interfering sort of man
with a screw-driver, and I made all sorts of ingenious adaptations
for him--ran a wire to bring his bells within reach, turned all
his electric lights up instead of down, and so on. The whole affair
was extremely curious and interesting to me, and it was delightful
to think of Pyecraft like some great, fat blow-fly, crawling about
on his ceiling and clambering round the lintels of his doors
from one room to another, and never, never, never coming to
the club any more. . . .
Then, you know, my fatal ingenuity got the better of me. I was
sitting by his fire drinking his whisky, and he was up in his
favourite corner by the cornice, tacking a Turkey carpet to the
ceiling, when the idea struck me. "By Jove, Pyecraft!" I said, "all
this is totally unnecessary."
And before I could calculate the complete consequences of my notion
I blurted it out. "Lead underclothing," said I, and the mischief was
done.
Pyecraft received the thing almost in tears. "To be right ways up
again--" he said. I gave him the whole secret before I saw where
it would take me. "Buy sheet lead," I said, "stamp it into discs.
Sew 'em all over your underclothes until you have enough. Have
lead-soled boots, carry a bag of solid lead, and the thing is done!
Instead of being a prisoner here you may go abroad again, Pyecraft;
you may travel--"
A still happier idea came to me. "You need never fear a shipwreck.
All you need do is just slip off some or all of your clothes, take the
necessary amount of luggage in your hand, and float up in the air--"
In his emotion he dropped the tack-hammer within an ace of my head.
"By Jove!" he said, "I shall be able to come back to the club again."
The thing pulled me up short. "By Jove!" I said faintly. "Yes.
Of course--you will."
He did. He does. There he sits behind me now, stuffing--as I live!--
a third go of buttered tea-cake. And no one in the whole world knows--
except his housekeeper and me--that he weighs practically nothing;
that he is a mere boring mass of assimilatory matter, mere clouds
in clothing, niente, nefas, the most inconsiderable of men. There
he sits watching until I have done this writing. Then, if he can,
he will waylay me. He will come billowing up to me. . . .
He will tell me over again all about it, how it feels, how it
doesn't feel, how he sometimes hopes it is passing off a little.
And always somewhere in that fat, abundant discourse he will say,
"The secret's keeping, eh? If any one knew of it--I should be
so ashamed. . . . Makes a fellow look such a fool, you know.
Crawling about on a ceiling and all that. . . ."
And now to elude Pyecraft, occupying, as he does, an admirable
strategic position between me and the door.
5. 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
shirt-sleeves 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--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 a propos
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 northwest 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. Larvae,
perhaps, or crickets, or the little beetles that elude us so abundantly.
There was a place where water splashed and gigantic king-cups 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 her gently--
that he was engaged!
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 times. 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 'adn'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 him
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. . . .
Anyow, 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 sharply 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.
6. 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
the 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 and here--so! And a little, meanish head
with scrubby hair--And rather bad ears. Shoulders bad, narrower
than the hips; turn-down 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 corners
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 his hands, so, and so, and so, and then with a rush
came to the last gesture of 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
nothingl 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 penknife 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 in 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 tole 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!
7. JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD
"It isn't every one who's been a god," said the sunburnt man. "But
it's happened to me. Among other things."
I intimated my sense of his condescension.
"It don't leave much for ambition, does it?" said the sunburnt man.
"I was one of those men who were saved from the Ocean Pioneer.
Gummy! how time flies! It's twenty years ago. I doubt if you'll
remember anything of the Ocean Pioneer?"
The name was familiar, and I tried to recall when and where I had
read it. The Ocean Pioneer? "Something about gold dust," I said
vaguely, "but the precise--"
"That's it," he said. "In a beastly little channel she hadn't no
business in--dodging pirates. It was before they'd put the kybosh
on that business. And there'd been volcanoes or something and all
the rocks was wrong. There's places about by Soona where you fair
have to follow the rocks about to see where they're going next.
Down she went in twenty fathoms before you could have dealt for whist,
with fifty thousand pounds worth of gold aboard, it was said,
in one form or another."
"Survivors?"
"Three."
"I remember the case now," I said. "There was something about salvage--"
But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so
extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast. He came down to more
ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. "Excuse me,"
he said, "but--salvage!"
He leant over towards me. "I was in that job," he said. "Tried to make
myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my feelings--
"It ain't all jam being a god," said the sunburnt man, and for some
time conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms.
At last he took up his tale again.
"There was me," said the sunburnt man, "and a seaman named Jacobs,
and Always, the mate of the Ocean Pioneer. And him it was that set
the whole thing going. I remember him now, when we was in the
jolly-boat, suggesting it all to our minds just by one sentence.
He was a wonderful hand at suggesting things. 'There was forty
thousand pounds,' he said, 'on that ship, and it's for me to say
just where she went down.' It didn't need much brains to tumble
to that. And he was the leader from the first to the last. He got
hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they were brothers, and
the brig was the Pride of Banya, and he it was bought the diving-dress--
a second-hand one with a compressed air apparatus instead of pumping.
He'd have done the diving too, if it hadn't made him sick going down.
And the salvage people were mucking about with a chart he'd cooked up,
as solemn as could be, at Starr Race, a hundred and twenty miles away.
"I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and drink
and bright hopes all the time. It all seemed so neat and clean
and straightforward, and what rough chaps call a 'cert.' And we
used to speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers,
who'd started two days before us, were getting on, until our sides
fairly ached. We all messed together in the Sanderses' cabin--it
was a curious crew, all officers and no men--and there stood the
diving-dress waiting its turn. Young Sanders was a humorous sort of
chap, and there certainly was something funny in the confounded
thing's great fat head and its stare, and he made us see it too.
'Jimmie Goggles,' he used to call it, and talk to it like a Christian.
Asked if he was married, and how Mrs. Goggles was, and all the little
Goggleses. Fit to make you split. And every blessed day all of us
used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in rum, and unscrew his eye
and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead of that nasty
mackintosheriness, he smelt as nice in his inside as a cask of rum.
It was jolly times we had in those days, I can tell you--little
suspecting, poor chaps! what was a-coming.
"We weren't going to throw away our chances by any blessed hurry,
you know, and we spent a whole day sounding our way towards where
the Ocean Pioneer had gone down, right between two chunks of ropy
grey rock--lava rocks that rose nearly out of the water. We had
to lay off about half a mile to get a safe anchorage, and there was
a thundering row who should stop on board. And there she lay just
as she had gone down, so that you could see the top of the masts
that was still standing perfectly distinctly. The row ending in
all coming in the boat. I went down in the diving-dress on Friday
morning directly it was light.
"What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly.
It was a queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People
over here think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore
and palm trees and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance,
wasn't a bit that way. Not common rocks they were, undermined
by waves; but great curved banks like ironwork cinder heaps,
with green slime below, and thorny shrubs and things just waving
upon them here and there, and the water glassy calm and clear,
and showing you a kind of dirty grey-black shine, with huge flaring
red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and darting
things going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and pools
and the heaps was a forest on the mountain flank, growing again after
the fires and cinder showers of the last eruption. And the other way
forest, too, and a kind of broken--what is it?--ambytheatre of black
and rusty cinders rising out of it all, and the sea in a kind of bay
in the middle.
"The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour
about things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight
up or down the channel. Except the Pride of Banya, lying out beyond
a lump of rocks towards the line of the sea.
"Not a human being in sight," he repeated, and paused.
"I don't know where they came from, not a bit. And we were feeling
so safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing.
I was in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet. 'Easy,' says Always,
'there's her mast.' And after I'd had just one squint over the gunwale,
I caught up the bogey and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought
the boat round. When the windows were screwed and everything was
all right, I shut the valve from the air belt in order to help
my sinking, and jumped overboard, feet foremost--for we hadn't
a ladder. I left the boat pitching, and all of them staring down
into the water after me, as my head sank down into the weeds and
blackness that lay about the mast. I suppose nobody, not the most
cautious chap in the world, would have bothered about a lookout
at such a desolate place. It stunk of solitude.
"Of course you must understand that I was a greenhorn at diving.
None of us were divers. We'd had to muck about with the thing to get
the way of it, and this was the first time I'd been deep. It feels
damnable. Your ears hurt beastly. I don't know if you've ever hurt
yourself yawning or sneezing, but it takes you like that, only ten
times worse. And a pain over the eyebrows here--splitting--and a
feeling like influenza in the head. And it isn't all heaven in your
lungs and things. And going down feels like the beginning of a lift,
only it keeps on. And you can't turn your head to see what's above you,
and you can't get a fair squint at what's happening to your feet
without bending down something painful. And being deep it was dark,
let alone the blackness of the ashes and mud that formed the bottom.
It was like going down out of the dawn back into the night, so to speak.
"The mast came up like a ghost out of the black, and then a lot of
fishes, and then a lot of flapping red seaweed, and then whack I came
with a kind of dull bang on the deck of the Ocean Pioneer, and the
fishes that had been feeding on the dead rose about me like a swarm of
flies from road stuff in summer time. I turned on the compressed air
again--for the suit was a bit thick and mackintoshery after all, in
spite of the rum--and stood recovering myself. It struck coolish down
there, and that helped take off the stuffiness a bit.
"When I began to feel easier, I started looking about me. It was
an extraordinary sight. Even the light was extraordinary, a kind
of reddy-coloured twilight, on account of the streamers of seaweed
that floated up on either side of the ship. And far overhead just
a moony, deep green-blue. The deck of the ship, except for a slight
list to starboard, was level, and lay all dark and long between
the weeds, clear except where the masts had snapped when she rolled,
and vanishing into black night towards the forecastle. There wasn't
any dead on the decks, most were in the weeds alongside, I suppose;
but afterwards I found two skeletons lying in the passengers' cabins,
where death had come to them. It was curious to stand on that deck
and recognise it all, bit by bit; a place against the rail where I'd
been fond of smoking by starlight, and the corner where an old chap
from Sydney used to flirt with a widow we had aboard. A comfortable
couple they'd been, only a month ago, and now you couldn't have
got a meal for a baby crab off either of them.
"I've always had a bit of a philosophical turn, and I dare say I
spent the best part of five minutes in such thoughts before I went
below to find where the blessed dust was stored. It was slow work
hunting, feeling it was for the most part, pitchy dark, with confusing
blue gleams down the companion. And there were things moving about,
a dab at my glass once, and once a pinch at my leg. Crabs, I expect.
I kicked a lot of loose stuff that puzzled me, and stooped and
picked up something all knobs and spikes. What do you think?
Backbone! But I never had any particular feeling for bones. We
had talked the affair over pretty thoroughly, and Always knew just
where the stuff was stowed. I found it that trip. I lifted a box
one end an inch or more."
He broke off in his story. "I've lifted it," he said, "as near as
that! Forty thousand pounds worth of pure gold! Gold! I shouted
inside my helmet as a kind of cheer and hurt my ears. I was getting
confounded stuffy and tired by this time--I must have been down
twenty-five minutes or more--and I thought this was good enough.
I went up the companion again, and as my eyes came up flush with
the deck, a thundering great crab gave a kind of hysterical jump
and went scuttling off sideways. Quite a start it gave me. I stood
up clear on deck and shut the valve behind the helmet to let the air
accumulate to carry me up again--I noticed a kind of whacking
from above, as though they were hitting the water with an oar,
but I didn't look up. I fancied they were signalling me to come up.
"And then something shot down by me--something heavy, and stood
a-quiver in the planks. I looked, and there was a long knife I'd
seen young Sanders handling. Thinks I, he's dropped it, and I was
still calling him this kind of fool and that--for it might have hurt
me serious--when I began to lift and drive up towards the daylight.
Just about the level of the top spars of the Ocean Pioneer, whack!
I came against something sinking down, and a boot knocked in front
of my helmet. Then something else, struggling frightful. It was
a big weight atop of me, whatever it was, and moving and twisting
about. I'd have thought it a big octopus, or some such thing, if it
hadn't been for the boot. But octopuses don't wear boots. It was
all in a moment, of course. I felt myself sinking down again, and
I threw my arms about to keep steady, and the whole lot rolled
free of me and shot down as I went up--"
He paused.
"I saw young Sanders's face, over a naked black shoulder, and a spear
driven clean through his neck, and out of his mouth and neck what
looked like spirts of pink smoke in the water. And down they went
clutching one another, and turning over, and both too far gone
to leave go. And in another second my helmet came a whack, fit
to split, against the niggers' canoe. It was niggers! Two canoes full.
"It was lively times, I tell you! Overboard came Always with three
spears in him. There was the legs of three or four black chaps
kicking about me in the water. I couldn't see much, but I saw
the game was up at a glance, gave my valve a tremendous twist,
and went bubbling down again after poor Always, in as awful a state
of scare and astonishment as you can well imagine. I passed young
Sanders and the nigger going up again and struggling still a bit,
and in another moment I was standing in the dim again on the deck
of the Ocean Pioneer.
"'Gummy,' thinks I, 'here's a fix!' Niggers? At first I couldn't see
anything for it but Stifle below or Stabs above. I didn't properly
understand how much air there was to last me, but I didn't feel like
standing very much more of it down below. I was hot and frightfully
heady--quite apart from the blue funk I was in. We'd never repined
with these beastly natives, filthy Papuan beasts. It wasn't any good,
coming up where I was, but I had to do something. On the spur
of the moment, I clambered over the side of the brig and landed
among the weeds, and set off through the darkness as fast as I could.
I just stopped once and knelt, and twisted back my head in the helmet
and had a look up. It was a most extraordinary bright green-blue above,
and the two canoes and the boat floating there very small and distant
like a kind of twisted H. And it made me feel sick to squint up at it,
and think what the pitching and swaying of the three meant.
"It was just about the most horrible ten minutes I ever had, blundering
about in that darkness, pressure something awful, like being buried
in sand, pain across the chest, sick with funk, and breathing nothing
as it seemed but the smell of rum and mackintosh. Gummy! After a bit,
I found myself going up a steepish sort of slope. I had another
squint to see if anything was visible of the canoes and boats,
and then kept on. I stopped with my head a foot from the surface,
and tried to see where I was going, but, of course, nothing was
to be seen but the reflection of the bottom. Then out I dashed like
knocking my head through a mirror. Directly I got my eyes out of
the water, I saw I'd come up a kind of beach near the forest. I had a
look round, but the natives and the brig were both hidden by a big,
hummucky heap of twisted lava, the born fool in me suggested a run
for the woods. I didn't take the helmet off, but eased open one of
the windows, and, after a bit of a pant, went on out of the water.
You'd hardly imagine how clean and light the air tasted.
"Of course, with four inches of lead in your boot soles, and your
head in a copper knob the size of a football, and been thirty-five
minutes under water, you don't break any records running. I ran like
a ploughboy going to work. And half way to the trees I saw a dozen
niggers or more, coming out in a gaping, astonished sort of way
to meet me.
"I just stopped dead, and cursed myself for all the fools out of
London. I had about as much chance of cutting back to the water as
a turned turtle. I just screwed up my window again to leave my hands
free, and waited for them. There wasn't anything else for me to do.
"But they didn't come on very much. I began to suspect why. 'Jimmy
Goggles,' I says, 'it's your beauty does it.' I was inclined to be a
little light-headed, I think, with all these dangers about and the
change in the pressure of the blessed air. 'Who're ye staring at?' I
said, as if the savages could hear me. 'What d'ye take me for? I'm
hanged if I don't give you something to stare at,' I said, and with
that I screwed up the escape valve and turned on the compressed air
from the belt, until I was swelled out like a blown frog. Regular
imposing it must have been. I'm blessed if they'd come on a step;
and presently one and then another went down on their hands and knees.
They didn't know what to make of me, and they was doing the extra
polite, which was very wise and reasonable of them. I had half a mind
to edge back seaward and cut and run, but it seemed too hopeless. A
step back and they'd have been after me. And out of sheer desperation
I began to march towards them up the beach, with slow, heavy steps,
and waving my blown-out arms about, in a dignified manner. And inside
of me I was singing as small as a tomtit.
"But there's nothing like a striking appearance to help a man over a
difficulty,--I've found that before and since. People like ourselves,
who're up to diving-dresses by the time we're seven, can scarcely
imagine the effect of one on a simple-minded savage. One or two
of these niggers cut and run, the others started in a great hurry
trying to knock their brains out on the ground. And on I went as
slow and solemn and silly-looking and artful as a jobbing plumber.
It was evident they took me for something immense.
"Then up jumped one and began pointing, making extraordinary gestures
to me as he did so, and all the others began sharing their attention
between me and something out at sea. 'What's the matter now?' I said.
I turned slowly on account of my dignity, and there I saw, coming
round a point, the poor old Pride of Banya towed by a couple of canoes.
The sight fairly made me sick. But they evidently expected some
recognition, so I waved my arms in a striking sort of non-committal
manner. And then I turned and stalked on towards the trees again.
At that time I was praying like mad, I remember, over and over again:
'Lord help me through with it! Lord help me through with it!' It's
only fools who know nothing of dangers can afford to laugh at praying.
"But these niggers weren't going to let me walk through and away
like that. They started a kind of bowing dance about me, and sort of
pressed me to take a pathway that lay through the trees. It was
clear to me they didn't take me for a British citizen, whatever
else they thought of me, and for my own part I was never less anxious
to own up to the old country.
"You'd hardly believe it, perhaps, unless you're familiar with
savages, but these poor misguided, ignorant creatures took me
straight to their kind of joss place to present me to the blessed
old black stone there. By this time I was beginning to sort of realise
the depth of their ignorance, and directly I set eyes on this deity
I took my cue. I started a baritone howl, 'wow-wow,' very long
on one note, and began waving my arms about a lot, and then very
slowly and ceremoniously turned their image over on its side and
sat down on it. I wanted to sit down badly, for diving-dresses ain't
much wear in the tropics. Or, to put it different like, they're
a sight too much. It took away their breath, I could see, my sitting
on their joss, but in less time than a minute they made up their
minds and were hard at work worshipping me. And I can tell you
I felt a bit relieved to see things turning out so well, in spite
of the weight on my shoulders and feet.
"But what made me anxious was what the chaps in the canoes might
think when they came back. If they'd seen me in the boat before
I went down, and without the helmet on--for they might have been
spying and hiding since over night--they would very likely take
a different view from the others. I was in a deuce of a stew about
that for hours, as it seemed, until the shindy of the arrival began.
"But they took it down--the whole blessed village took it down.
At the cost of sitting up stiff and stern, as much like those sitting
Egyptian images one sees as I could manage, for pretty nearly
twelve hours, I should guess at least, on end, I got over it. You'd
hardly think what it meant in that heat and stink. I don't think
any of them dreamt of the man inside. I was just a wonderful leathery
great joss that had come up with luck out of the water. But the fatigue!
the heat! the beastly closeness! the mackintosheriness and the rum!
and the fuss! They lit a stinking fire on a kind of lava slab there
was before me, and brought in a lot of gory muck--the worst parts
of what they were feasting on outside, the Beasts--and burnt it
all in my honour. I was getting a bit hungry, but I understand now
how gods manage to do without eating, what with the smell of burnt
offerings about them. And they brought in a lot of the stuff they'd
got off the brig and, among other stuff, what I was a bit relieved
to see, the kind of pneumatic pump that was used for the compressed
air affair, and then a lot of chaps and girls came in and danced
about me something disgraceful. It's extraordinary the different ways
different people have of showing respect. If I'd had a hatchet handy
I'd have gone for the lot of them--they made me feel that wild.
All this time I sat as stiff as company, not knowing anything better
to do. And at last, when nightfall came, and the wattle joss-house
place got a bit too shadowy for their taste--all these here savages
are afraid of the dark, you know--and I started a sort of 'Moo' noise,
they built big bonfires outside and left me alone in peace in the
darkness of my hut, free to unscrew my windows a bit and think
things over, and feel just as bad as I liked. And, Lord! I was sick.
"I was weak and hungry, and my mind kept on behaving like a beetle
on a pin, tremendous activity and nothing done at the end of it.
Come round just where it was before. There was sorrowing for the other
chaps, beastly drunkards certainly, but not deserving such a fate,
and young Sanders with the spear through his neck wouldn't go out
of my mind. There was the treasure down there in the Ocean Pioneer,
and how one might get it and hide it somewhere safer, and get away
and come back for it. And there was the puzzle where to get anything
to eat. I tell you I was fair rambling. I was afraid to ask by signs
for food, for fear of behaving too human, and so there I sat and
hungered until very near the dawn. Then the village got a bit quiet,
and I couldn't stand it any longer, and I went out and got some stuff
like artichokes in a bowl and some sour milk. What was left of these
I put away among the other offerings, just to give them a hint
of my tastes. And in the morning they came to worship, and found
me sitting up stiff and respectable on their previous god, just as
they'd left me overnight. I'd got my back against the central pillar
of the hut, and, practically, I was asleep. And that's how I became
a god among the heathen--a false god no doubt, and blasphemous,
but one can't always pick and choose.
"Now, I don't want to crack myself up as a god beyond my merits,
but I must confess that while I was god to these people they was
extraordinary successful. I don't say there's anything in it,
mind you. They won a battle with another tribe--I got a lot of
offerings I didn't want through it--they had wonderful fishing,
and their crop of pourra was exceptional fine. And they counted
the capture of the brig among the benefits I brought 'em. I must
say I don't think that was a poor record for a perfectly new hand.
And, though perhaps you'd scarcely credit it, I was the tribal god
of those beastly savages for pretty nearly four months. . . .
"What else could I do, man? But I didn't wear that diving-dress
all the time. I made 'em rig me up a sort of holy of holies, and
a deuce of a time I had too, making them understand what it was
I wanted them to do. That indeed was the great difficulty--making
them understand my wishes. I couldn't let myself down by talking their
lingo badly--even if I'd been able to speak at all--and I couldn't
go flapping a lot of gestures at them. So I drew pictures in sand
and sat down beside them and hooted like one o'clock. Sometimes
they did the things I wanted all right, and sometimes they did them
all wrong. They was always very willing, certainly. All the while
I was puzzling how I was to get the confounded business settled.
Every night before the dawn I used to march out in full rig and go off
to a place where I could see the channel in which the Ocean Pioneer
lay sunk, and once even, one moonlight night, I tried to walk out
to her, but the weeds and rocks and dark clean beat me. I didn't get
back till full day, and then I found all those silly niggers out on
the beach praying their sea-god to return to them. I was that vexed
and tired, messing and tumbling about, and coming up and going down
again, I could have punched their silly heads all round when they
started rejoicing. I'm hanged if I like so much ceremony.
"And then came the missionary. That missionary! It was in the afternoon,
and I was sitting in state in my outer temple place, sitting on
that old black stone of theirs when he came. I heard a row outside
and jabbering, and then his voice speaking to an interpreter.
'They worship stocks and stones,' he said, and I knew what was up,
in a flash. I had one of my windows out for comfort, and I sang out
straight away on the spur of the moment. 'Stocks and stones!' I says.
'You come inside,' I says, 'and I'll punch your blooming head.'
There was a kind of silence and more jabbering, and in he came,
Bible in hand, after the manner of them--a little sandy chap in specks
and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me sitting there in
the shadows, with my copper head and my big goggles, struck him
a bit of a heap at first. 'Well,' I says, 'how's the trade in calico?'
for I don't hold with missionaries.
"I had a lark with that missionary. He was a raw hand, and quite
outclassed with a man like me. He gasped out who was I, and I told
him to read the inscription at my feet if he wanted to know. Down
he goes to read, and his interpreter, being of course as superstitious
as any of them, took it as an act of worship and plumped down like
a shot. All my people gave a howl of triumph, and there wasn't
any more business to be done in my village after that journey,
not by the likes of him.
"But, of course, I was a fool to choke him off like that. If I'd had
any sense I should have told him straight away of the treasure
and taken him into Co. I've no doubt he'd have come into Co. A child,
with a few hours to think it over, could have seen the connection
between my diving-dress and the loss of the Ocean Pioneer. A week
after he left I went out one morning and saw the Motherhood, the
salver's ship from Starr Race, towing up the channel and sounding.
The whole blessed game was up, and all my trouble thrown away. Gummy!
How wild I felt! And guying it in that stinking silly dress! Four
months!"
The sunburnt man's story degenerated again. "Think of it," he said,
when he emerged to linguistic purity once more. "Forty thousand
pounds worth of gold."
"Did the little missionary come back?" I asked.
"Oh, yes! Bless him! And he pledged his reputation there was a man
inside the god, and started out to see as much with tremendous
ceremony. But there wasn't--he got sold again. I always did hate
scenes and explanations, and long before he came I was out of it
all--going home to Banya along the coast, hiding in bushes by day,
and thieving food from the villages by night. Only weapon, a spear.
No clothes, no money. Nothing. My face was my fortune, as the saying
is. And just a squeak of eight thousand pounds of gold--fifth share.
But the natives cut up rusty, thank goodness, because they thought
it was him had driven their luck away."
8. 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 anaesthetics
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-a-banc-ful of people
turned and stared at us in unison after the manner of people in
chars-a-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-a-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-a-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. "Let's 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 lap-dog 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 have "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 clothe's 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-a-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 of 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.
9. MR. LEDBETTER'S VACATION
My friend, Mr. Ledbetter, is a round-faced little man, whose natural
mildness of eye is gigantically exaggerated when you catch the beam
through his glasses, and whose deep, deliberate voice irritates
irritable people. A certain elaborate clearness of enunciation has
come with him to his present vicarage from his scholastic days, an
elaborate clearness of enunciation and a certain nervous determination
to be firm and correct upon all issues, important and unimportant
alike. He is a sacerdotalist and a chess player, and suspected by many
of the secret practice of the higher mathematics--creditable rather
than interesting things. His conversation is copious and given
much to needless detail. By many, indeed, his intercourse is
condemned, to put it plainly, as "boring," and such have even done
me the compliment to wonder why I countenance him. But, on the other
hand, there is a large faction who marvel at his countenancing
such a dishevelled, discreditable acquaintance as myself. Few appear
to regard our friendship with equanimity. But that is because they
do not know of the link that binds us, of my amiable connection
via Jamaica with Mr. Ledbetter's past.
About that past he displays an anxious modesty. "I do not KNOW what
I should do if it became known," he says; and repeats, impressively,
"I do not know WHAT I should do." As a matter of fact, I doubt if
he would do anything except get very red about the ears. But that
will appear later; nor will I tell here of our first encounter,
since, as a general rule--though I am prone to break it--the end
of a story should come after, rather than before, the beginning.
And the beginning of the story goes a long way back; indeed, it is
now nearly twenty years since Fate, by a series of complicated and
startling manoeuvres, brought Mr. Ledbetter, so to speak, into my
hands.
In those days I was living in Jamaica, and Mr. Ledbetter was a
schoolmaster in England. He was in orders, and already recognisably
the same man that he is to-day: the same rotundity of visage,
the same or similar glasses, and the same faint shadow of surprise
in his resting expression. He was, of course, dishevelled when
I saw him, and his collar less of a collar than a wet bandage,
and that may have helped to bridge the natural gulf between us--but
of that, as I say, later.
The business began at Hithergate-on-Sea, and simultaneously with
Mr. Ledbetter's summer vacation. Thither he came for a greatly
needed rest, with a bright brown portmanteau marked "F. W. L.",
a new white-and-black straw hat, and two pairs of white flannel
trousers. He was naturally exhilarated at his release from school--
for he was not very fond of the boys he taught. After dinner he
fell into a discussion with a talkative person established in the
boarding-house to which, acting on the advice of his aunt, he had
resorted. This talkative person was the only other man in the house.
Their discussion concerned the melancholy disappearance of wonder
and adventure in these latter days, the prevalence of globe-trotting,
the abolition of distance by steam and electricity, the vulgarity
of advertisement, the degradation of men by civilisation, and many
such things. Particularly was the talkative person eloquent on
the decay of human courage through security, a security Mr. Ledbetter
rather thoughtlessly joined him in deploring. Mr. Ledbetter, in the
first delight of emancipation from "duty," and being anxious, perhaps,
to establish a reputation for manly conviviality, partook, rather
more freely than was advisable, of the excellent whisky the talkative
person produced. But he did not become intoxicated, he insists.
He was simply eloquent beyond his sober wont, and with the finer
edge gone from his judgment. And after that long talk of the brave
old days that were past forever, he went out into moonlit Hithergate--
alone and up the cliff road where the villas cluster together.
He had bewailed, and now as he walked up the silent road he still
bewailed, the fate that had called him to such an uneventful life
as a pedagogue's. What a prosaic existence he led, so stagnant,
so colourless! Secure, methodical, year in year out, what call was
there for bravery? He thought enviously of those roving, mediaeval
days, so near and so remote, of quests and spies and condottieri
and many a risky blade-drawing business. And suddenly came a doubt,
a strange doubt, springing out of some chance thought of tortures,
and destructive altogether of the position he had assumed that evening.
Was he--Mr. Ledbetter--really, after all, so brave as he assumed?
Would he really be so pleased to have railways, policemen, and
security vanish suddenly from the earth?
The talkative man had spoken enviously of crime. "The burglar,"
he said, "is the only true adventurer left on earth. Think of his
single-handed fight against the whole civilised world!" And Mr.
Ledbetter had echoed his envy. "They DO have some fun out of life,"
Mr. Ledbetter had said. "And about the only people who do. Just
think how it must feel to wire a lawn!" And he had laughed wickedly.
Now, in this franker intimacy of self-communion he found himself
instituting a comparison between his own brand of courage and that of
the habitual criminal. He tried to meet these insidious questionings
with blank assertion. "I could do all that," said Mr. Ledbetter.
"I long to do all that. Only I do not give way to my criminal impulses.
My moral courage restrains me." But he doubted even while he told
himself these things.
"Mr. Ledbetter passed a large villa standing by itself. Conveniently
situated above a quiet, practicable balcony was a window, gaping
black, wide open. At the time he scarcely marked it, but the picture
of it came with him, wove into his thoughts. He figured himself
climbing up that balcony, crouching--plunging into that dark,
mysterious interior. "Bah! You would not dare," said the Spirit
of Doubt. "My duty to my fellow-men forbids," said Mr. Ledbetter's
self-respect.
It was nearly eleven, and the little seaside town was already very
still. The whole world slumbered under the moonlight. Only one
warm oblong of window-blind far down the road spoke of waking life.
He turned and came back slowly towards the villa of the open window.
He stood for a time outside the gate, a battlefield of motives.
"Let us put things to the test," said Doubt. "For the satisfaction
of these intolerable doubts, show that you dare go into that house.
Commit a burglary in blank. That, at any rate, is no crime." Very
softly he opened and shut the gate and slipped into the shadow
of the shrubbery. "This is foolish," said Mr. Ledbetter's caution.
"I expected that," said Doubt. His heart was beating fast, but he
was certainly not afraid. He was NOT afraid. He remained in that
shadow for some considerable time.
The ascent of the balcony, it was evident, would have to be done
in a rush, for it was all in clear moonlight, and visible from
the gate into the avenue. A trellis thinly set with young, ambitious
climbing roses made the ascent ridiculously easy. There, in that
black shadow by the stone vase of flowers, one might crouch and
take a closer view of this gaping breach in the domestic defences,
the open window. For a while Mr. Ledbetter was as still as the night,
and then that insidious whisky tipped the balance. He dashed forward.
He went up the trellis with quick, convulsive movements, swung his
legs over the parapet of the balcony, and dropped panting in the
shadow even as he had designed. He was trembling violently, short
of breath, and his heart pumped noisily, but his mood was exultation.
He could have shouted to find he was so little afraid.
A happy line that he had learnt from Wills's "Mephistopheles" came
into his mind as he crouched there. "I feel like a cat on the tiles,"
he whispered to himself. It was far better than he had expected--
this adventurous exhilaration. He was sorry for all poor men to whom
burglary was unknown. Nothing happened. He was quite safe. And
he was acting in the bravest manner!
And now for the window, to make the burglary complete! Must he dare do
that? Its position above the front door defined it as a landing or
passage, and there were no looking-glasses or any bedroom signs about
it, or any other window on the first floor, to suggest the possibility
of a sleeper within. For a time he listened under the ledge, then
raised his eyes above the sill and peered in. Close at hand, on
a pedestal, and a little startling at first, was a nearly life-size
gesticulating bronze. He ducked, and after some time he peered
again. Beyond was a broad landing, faintly gleaming; a flimsy fabric
of bead curtain, very black and sharp, against a further window; a
broad staircase, plunging into a gulf of darkness below; and another
ascending to the second floor. He glanced behind him, but the
stillness of the night was unbroken. "Crime," he whispered, "crime,"
and scrambled softly and swiftly over the sill into the house. His
feet fell noiselessly on a mat of skin. He was a burglar indeed!
He crouched for a time, all ears and peering eyes. Outside was
a scampering and rustling, and for a moment he repented of his
enterprise. A short "miaow," a spitting, and a rush into silence,
spoke reassuringly of cats. His courage grew. He stood up. Every
one was abed, it seemed. So easy is it to commit a burglary, if one
is so minded. He was glad he had put it to the test. He determined
to take some petty trophy, just to prove his freedom from any abject
fear of the law, and depart the way he had come.
He peered about him, and suddenly the critical spirit arose again.
Burglars did far more than such mere elementary entrance as this:
they went into rooms, they forced safes. Well--he was not afraid.
He could not force safes, because that would be a stupid want
of consideration for his hosts. But he would go into rooms--he would
go upstairs. More: he told himself that he was perfectly secure;
an empty house could not be more reassuringly still. He had to clench
his hands, nevertheless, and summon all his resolution before he
began very softly to ascend the dim staircase, pausing for several
seconds between each step. Above was a square landing with one
open and several closed doors; and all the house was still. For
a moment he stood wondering what would happen if some sleeper
woke suddenly and emerged. The open door showed a moonlit bedroom,
the coverlet white and undisturbed. Into this room he crept in three
interminable minutes and took a piece of soap for his plunder--
his trophy. He turned to descend even more softly than he had
ascended. It was as easy as--
Hist! . . .
Footsteps! On the gravel outside the house--and then the noise of a
latchkey, the yawn and bang of a door, and the spitting of a match
in the hall below. Mr. Ledbetter stood petrified by the sudden
discovery of the folly upon which he had come. "How on earth am
I to get out of this?" said Mr. Ledbetter.
The hall grew bright with a candle flame, some heavy object bumped
against the umbrella-stand, and feet were ascending the staircase. In
a flash Mr. Ledbetter realised that his retreat was closed. He stood
for a moment, a pitiful figure of penitent confusion. "My goodness!
What a FOOL I have been!" he whispered, and then darted swiftly
across the shadowy landing into the empty bedroom from which he
had just come. He stood listening--quivering. The footsteps reached
the first-floor landing.
Horrible thought! This was possibly the latecomer's room! Not a moment
was to be lost! Mr. Ledbetter stooped beside the bed, thanked Heaven
for a valance, and crawled within its protection not ten seconds
too soon. He became motionless on hands and knees. The advancing
candle-light appeared through the thinner stitches of the fabric, the
shadows ran wildly about, and became rigid as the candle was put down.
"Lord, what a day!" said the newcomer, blowing noisily, and it seemed
he deposited some heavy burthen on what Mr. Ledbetter, judging
by the feet, decided to be a writing-table. The unseen then went
to the door and locked it, examined the fastenings of the windows
carefully and pulled down the blinds, and returning sat down upon
the bed with startling ponderosity.
"WHAT a day!" he said. "Good Lord!" and blew again, and Mr. Ledbetter
inclined to believe that the person was mopping his face. His boots
were good stout boots; the shadows of his legs upon the valance
suggested a formidable stoutness of aspect. After a time he removed
some upper garments--a coat and waistcoat, Mr. Ledbetter inferred--
and casting them over the rail of the bed remained breathing less
noisily, and as it seemed cooling from a considerable temperature.
At intervals he muttered to himself, and once he laughed softly. And
Mr. Ledbetter muttered to himself, but he did not laugh. "Of all the
foolish things," said Mr. Ledbetter. "What on earth am I to do now?"
His outlook was necessarily limited. The minute apertures between
the stitches of the fabric of the valance admitted a certain amount
of light, but permitted no peeping. The shadows upon this curtain,
save for those sharply defined legs, were enigmatical, and intermingled
confusingly with the florid patterning of the chintz. Beneath the edge
of the valance a strip of carpet was visible, and, by cautiously
depressing his eye, Mr. Ledbetter found that this strip broadened
until the whole area of the floor came into view. The carpet was
a luxurious one, the room spacious, and, to judge by the castors
and so forth of the furniture, well equipped.
What he should do he found it difficult to imagine. To wait until
this person had gone to bed, and then, when he seemed to be sleeping,
to creep to the door, unlock it, and bolt headlong for that balcony
seemed the only possible thing to do. Would it be possible to jump
from the balcony? The danger of it! When he thought of the chances
against him, Mr. Ledbetter despaired. He was within an ace of thrusting
forth his head beside the gentleman's legs, coughing if necessary
to attract his attention, and then, smiling, apologising and explaining
his unfortunate intrusion by a few well-chosen sentences. But he
found these sentences hard to choose. "No doubt, sir, my appearance
is peculiar," or, "I trust, sir, you will pardon my somewhat ambiguous
appearance from beneath you," was about as much as he could get.
Grave possibilities forced themselves on his attention. Suppose
they did not believe him, what would they do to him? Would his
unblemished high character count for nothing? Technically he was
a burglar, beyond dispute. Following out this train of thought,
he was composing a lucid apology for "this technical crime I have
committed," to be delivered before sentence in the dock, when
the stout gentleman got up and began walking about the room. He
locked and unlocked drawers, and Mr. Ledbetter had a transient hope
that he might be undressing. But, no! He seated himself at the
writing-table, and began to write and then tear up documents.
Presently the smell of burning cream-laid paper mingled with the odour
of cigars in Mr. Ledbetter's nostrils.
"The position I had assumed," said Mr. Ledbetter when he told me of
these things, "was in many respects an ill-advised one. A transverse
bar beneath the bed depressed my head unduly, and threw a
disproportionate share of my weight upon my hands. After a time, I
experienced what is called, I believe, a crick in the neck. The
pressure of my hands on the coarsely-stitched carpet speedily became
painful. My knees, too, were painful, my trousers being drawn tightly
over them. At that time I wore rather higher collars than I do now--two
and a half inches, in fact--and I discovered what I had not remarked
before, that the edge of the one I wore was frayed slightly under
the chin. But much worse than these things was an itching of my face,
which I could only relieve by violent grimacing--I tried to raise
my hand, but the rustle of the sleeve alarmed me. After a time
I had to desist from this relief also, because--happily in time--
I discovered that my facial contortions were shifting my glasses
down my nose. Their fall would, of course, have exposed me, and as it
was they came to rest in an oblique position of by no means stable
equilibrium. In addition I had a slight cold, and an intermittent
desire to sneeze or sniff caused me inconvenience. In fact, quite
apart from the extreme anxiety of my position, my physical discomfort
became in a short time very considerable indeed. But I had to stay
there motionless, nevertheless."
After an interminable time, there began a chinking sound. This
deepened into a rhythm: chink, chink, chink--twenty-five chinks--
a rap on the writing-table, and a grunt from the owner of the stout
legs. It dawned upon Mr. Ledbetter that this chinking was the chinking
of gold. He became incredulously curious as it went on. His curiosity
grew. Already, if that was the case, this extraordinary man must
have counted some hundreds of pounds. At last Mr. Ledbetter could
resist it no longer, and he began very cautiously to fold his arms
and lower his head to the level of the floor, in the hope of peeping
under the valance. He moved his feet, and one made a slight scraping
on the floor. Suddenly the chinking ceased. Mr. Ledbetter became
rigid. After a while the chinking was resumed. Then it ceased again,
and everything was still, except Mr. Ledbetter's heart--that organ
seemed to him to be beating like a drum.
The stillness continued. Mr. Ledbetter's head was now on the floor,
and he could see the stout legs as far as the shins. They were
quite still. The feet were resting on the toes and drawn back,
as it seemed, under the chair of the owner. Everything was quite
still, everything continued still. A wild hope came to Mr. Ledbetter
that the unknown was in a fit or suddenly dead, with his head upon
the writing-table. . . .
The stillness continued. What had happened? The desire to peep
became irresistible. Very cautiously Mr. Ledbetter shifted his hand
forward, projected a pioneer finger, and began to lift the valance
immediately next his eye. Nothing broke the stillness. He saw now
the stranger's knees, saw the back of the writing-table, and then--
he was staring at the barrel of a heavy revolver pointed over
the writing-table at his head.
"Come out of that, you scoundrel!" said the voice of the stout
gentleman in a tone of quiet concentration. "Come out. This side,
and now. None of your hanky-panky--come right out, now."
Mr. Ledbetter came right out, a little reluctantly perhaps, but
without any hanky-panky, and at once, even as he was told.
"Kneel," said the stout gentleman. "and hold up your hands."
The valance dropped again behind Mr. Ledbetter, and he rose from
all-fours and held up his hands. "Dressed like a parson," said
the stout gentleman. "I'm blest if he isn't! A little chap, too!
You SCOUNDREL! What the deuce possessed you to come here to-night?
What the deuce possessed you to get under my bed?"
He did not appear to require an answer, but proceeded at once to
several very objectionable remarks upon Mr. Ledbetter's personal
appearance. He was not a very big man, but he looked strong to Mr.
Ledbetter: he was as stout as his legs had promised, he had rather
delicately-chiselled small features distributed over a considerable
area of whitish face, and quite a number of chins. And the note
of his voice had a sort of whispering undertone.
"What the deuce, I say, possessed you to get under my bed?"
Mr. Ledbetter, by an effort, smiled a wan propitiatory smile. He
coughed. "I can quite understand--" he said.
"Why! What on earth? It's SOAP! No!--you scoundrel. Don't you move
that hand."
"It's soap," said Mr. Ledbetter. "From your washstand. No doubt it--"
"Don't talk," said the stout man. "I see it's soap. Of all incredible
things."
"If I might explain--"
"Don't explain. It's sure to be a lie, and there's no time for
explanations. What was I going to ask you? Ah! Have you any mates?"
"In a few minutes, if you--"
"Have you any mates? Curse you. If you start any soapy palaver
I'll shoot. Have you any mates?"
"No," said Mr. Ledbetter.
"I suppose it's a lie," said the stout man. "But you'll pay for it
if it is. Why the deuce didn't you floor me when I came upstairs?
You won't get a chance to now, anyhow. Fancy getting under the bed!
I reckon it's a fair cop, anyhow, so far as you are concerned."
"I don't see how I could prove an alibi," remarked Mr. Ledbetter,
trying to show by his conversation that he was an educated man.
There was a pause. Mr. Ledbetter perceived that on a chair beside
his captor was a large black bag on a heap of crumpled papers,
and that there were torn and burnt papers on the table. And in front
of these, and arranged methodically along the edge were rows and
rows of little yellow rouleaux--a hundred times more gold than Mr.
Ledbetter had seen in all his life before. The light of two candles,
in silver candlesticks, fell upon these. The pause continued. "It is
rather fatiguing holding up my hands like this," said Mr. Ledbetter,
with a deprecatory smile.
"That's all right," said the fat man. "But what to do with you
I don't exactly know."
"I know my position is ambiguous."
"Lord!" said the fat man, "ambiguous! And goes about with his own
soap, and wears a thundering great clerical collar. You ARE a blooming
burglar, you are--if ever there was one!"
"To be strictly accurate," said Mr. Ledbetter, and suddenly his
glasses slipped off and clattered against his vest buttons.
The fat man changed countenance, a flash of savage resolution
crossed his face, and something in the revolver clicked. He put
his other hand to the weapon. And then he looked at Mr. Ledbetter,
and his eye went down to the dropped pince-nez.
"Full-cock now, anyhow," said the fat man, after a pause, and his
breath seemed to catch. "But I'll tell you, you've never been so
near death before. Lord! I'M almost glad. If it hadn't been that
the revolver wasn't cocked you'd be lying dead there now."
Mr. Ledbetter said nothing, but he felt that the room was swaying.
"A miss is as good as a mile. It's lucky for both of us it wasn't.
Lord!" He blew noisily. "There's no need for you to go pale-green
for a little thing like that."
"If I can assure you, sir--" said Mr. Ledbetter, with an effort.
"There's only one thing to do. If I call in the police, I'm bust--
a little game I've got on is bust. That won't do. If I tie you up
and leave you again, the thing may be out to-morrow. Tomorrow's
Sunday, and Monday's Bank Holiday--I've counted on three clear
days. Shooting you's murder--and hanging; and besides, it will bust
the whole blooming kernooze. I'm hanged if I can think what to do--
I'm hanged if I can."
"Will you permit me--"
"You gas as much as if you were a real parson, I'm blessed if you
don't. Of all the burglars you are the--Well! No!--I WON'T permit
you. There isn't time. If you start off jawing again, I'll shoot
right in your stomach. See? But I know now-I know now! What we're
going to do first, my man, is an examination for concealed arms--
an examination for concealed arms. And look here! When I tell you
to do a thing, don't start off at a gabble--do it brisk."
And with many elaborate precautions, and always pointing the pistol
at Mr. Ledbetter's head, the stout man stood him up and searched
him for weapons. "Why, you ARE a burglar!" he said "You're a perfect
amateur. You haven't even a pistol-pocket in the back of your
breeches. No, you don't! Shut up, now."
So soon as the issue was decided, the stout man made Mr. Ledbetter
take off his coat and roll up his shirt-sleeves, and, with the revolver
at one ear, proceed with the packing his appearance had interrupted.
From the stout man's point of view that was evidently the only
possible arrangement, for if he had packed, he would have had
to put down the revolver. So that even the gold on the table was
handled by Mr. Ledbetter. This nocturnal packing was peculiar.
The stout man's idea was evidently to distribute the weight of
the gold as unostentatiously as possible through his luggage. It was
by no means an inconsiderable weight. There was, Mr. Ledbetter says,
altogether nearly L18,000 in gold in the black bag and on the table.
There were also many little rolls of L5 bank-notes. Each rouleau
of L25 was wrapped by Mr. Ledbetter in paper. These rouleaux were
then put neatly in cigar boxes and distributed between a travelling
trunk, a Gladstone bag, and a hatbox. About L600 went in a tobacco
tin in a dressing-bag. L10 in gold and a number of L5 notes the stout
man pocketed. Occasionally he objurgated Mr. Ledbetter's clumsiness,
and urged him to hurry, and several times he appealed to Mr.
Ledbetter's watch for information.
Mr. Ledbetter strapped the trunk and bag, and returned the stout man
the keys. It was then ten minutes to twelve, and until the stroke of
midnight the stout man made him sit on the Gladstone bag, while he
sat at a reasonably safe distance on the trunk and held the revolver
handy and waited. He appeared to be now in a less aggressive mood,
and having watched Mr. Ledbetter for some time, he offered a few
remarks.
"From your accent I judge you are a man of some education," he said,
lighting a cigar. "No--DON'T begin that explanation of yours. I know
it will be long-winded from your face, and I am much too old a liar
to be interested in other men's lying. You are, I say, a person
of education. You do well to dress as a curate. Even among educated
people you might pass as a curate."
"I AM a curate," said Mr. Ledbetter, "or, at least--"
"You are trying to be. I know. But you didn't ought to burgle.
You are not the man to burgle. You are, if I may say it--the thing
will have been pointed out to you before--a coward."
"Do you know," said Mr. Ledbetter, trying to get a final opening,
"it was that very question--"
The stout man waved him into silence.
"You waste your education in burglary. You should do one of two
things. Either you should forge or you should embezzle. For my
own part, I embezzle. Yes; I embezzle. What do you think a man
could be doing with all this gold but that? Ah! Listen! Midnight! . . .
Ten. Eleven. Twelve. There is something very impressive to me
in that slow beating of the hours. Time--space; what mysteries
they are! What mysteries. . . . It's time for us to be moving.
Stand up!"
And then kindly, but firmly, he induced Mr. Ledbetter to sling the
dressing bag over his back by a string across his chest, to shoulder
the trunk, and, overruling a gasping protest, to take the Gladstone
bag in his disengaged hand. So encumbered, Mr. Ledbetter struggled
perilously downstairs. The stout gentleman followed with an overcoat,
the hatbox, and the revolver, making derogatory remarks about Mr.
Ledbetter's strength, and assisting him at the turnings of the stairs.
"The back door," he directed, and Mr. Ledbetter staggered through
a conservatory, leaving a wake of smashed flower-pots behind him.
"Never mind the crockery," said the stout man; "it's good for trade.
We wait here until a quarter past. You can put those things down. You
have!"
Mr. Ledbetter collapsed panting on the trunk. "Last night," he gasped,
"I was asleep in my little room, and I no more dreamt--"
"There's no need for you to incriminate yourself," said the stout
gentleman, looking at the lock of the revolver. He began to hum.
Mr. Ledbetter made to speak, and thought better of it.
There presently came the sound of a bell, and Mr. Ledbetter was
taken to the back door and instructed to open it. A fair-haired man
in yachting costume entered. At the sight of Mr. Ledbetter he started
violently and clapped his hand behind him. Then he saw the stout
man. "Bingham!" he cried, "who's this?"
"Only a little philanthropic do of mine--burglar I'm trying to reform.
Caught him under my bed just now. He's all right. He's a frightful
ass. He'll be useful to carry some of our things."
The newcomer seemed inclined to resent Mr. Ledbetter's presence
at first, but the stout man reassured him.
"He's quite alone. There's not a gang in the world would own him.
No!--don't start talking, for goodness' sake."
They went out into the darkness of the garden with the trunk still
bowing Mr. Ledbetter's shoulders. The man in the yachting costume
walked in front with the Gladstone bag and a pistol; then came
Mr. Ledbetter like Atlas; Mr. Bingham followed with the hat-box,
coat, and revolver as before. The house was one of those that have
their gardens right up to the cliff. At the cliff was a steep wooden
stairway, descending to a bathing tent dimly visible on the beach.
Below was a boat pulled up, and a silent little man with a black face
stood beside it. "A few moments' explanation," said Mr. Ledbetter;
"I can assure you--" Somebody kicked him, and he said no more.
They made him wade to the boat, carrying the trunk, they pulled
him aboard by the shoulders and hair, they called him no better
name than "scoundrel" and "burglar" all that night. But they spoke
in undertones so that the general public was happily unaware of his
ignominy. They hauled him aboard a yacht manned by strange,
unsympathetic Orientals, and partly they thrust him and partly he
fell down a gangway into a noisome, dark place, where he was to
remain many days--how many he does not know, because he lost count
among other things when he was seasick. They fed him on biscuits and
incomprehensible words; they gave him water to drink mixed with
unwished-for rum. And there were cockroaches where they put him,
night and day there were cockroaches, and in the night-time there
were rats. The Orientals emptied his pockets and took his watch--
but Mr. Bingham, being appealed to, took that himself. And five or
six times the five Lascars--if they were Lascars--and the Chinaman
and the negro who constituted the crew, fished him out and took him
aft to Bingham and his friend to play cribbage and euchre and three-
anded whist, and to listen to their stories and boastings in an
interested manner.
Then these principals would talk to him as men talk to those who
have lived a life of crime. Explanations they would never permit,
though they made it abundantly clear to him that he was the rummiest
burglar they had ever set eyes on. They said as much again and again.
The fair man was of a taciturn disposition and irascible at play;
but Mr. Bingham, now that the evident anxiety of his departure
from England was assuaged, displayed a vein of genial philosophy.
He enlarged upon the mystery of space and time, and quoted Kant
and Hegel--or, at least, he said he did. Several times Mr. Ledbetter
got as far as: "My position under your bed, you know--," but then
he always had to cut, or pass the whisky, or do some such intervening
thing. After his third failure, the fair man got quite to look for
this opening, and whenever Mr. Ledbetter began after that, he would
roar with laughter and hit him violently on the back. "Same old start,
same old story; good old burglar!" the fair-haired man would say.
So Mr. Ledbetter suffered for many days, twenty perhaps; and one
evening he was taken, together with some tinned provisions, over
the side and put ashore on a rocky little island with a spring.
Mr. Bingham came in the boat with him, giving him good advice
all the way, and waving his last attempts at an explanation aside.
"I am really NOT a burglar," said Mr. Ledbetter.
"You never will be," said Mr. Bingham. "You'll never make a burglar.
I'm glad you are beginning to see it. In choosing a profession
a man must study his temperament. If you don't, sooner or later
you will fail. Compare myself, for example. All my life I have
been in banks--I have got on in banks. I have even been a bank
manager. But was I happy? No. Why wasn't I happy? Because it did
not suit my temperament. I am too adventurous--too versatile.
Practically I have thrown it over. I do not suppose I shall ever
manage a bank again. They would be glad to get me, no doubt;
but I have learnt the lesson of my temperament--at last. . . .
No! I shall never manage a bank again.
"Now, your temperament unfits you for crime--just as mine unfits
me for respectability. I know you better than I did, and now I do
not even recommend forgery. Go back to respectable courses, my man.
YOUR lay is the philanthropic lay--that is your lay. With that voice--
the Association for the Promotion of Snivelling among the Young--
something in that line. You think it over.
"The island we are approaching has no name apparently--at least,
there is none on the chart. You might think out a name for it while
you are there--while you are thinking about all these things. It has
quite drinkable water, I understand. It is one of the Grenadines--
one of the Windward Islands. Yonder, dim and blue, are others of
the Grenadines. There are quantities of Grenadines, but the majority
are out of sight. I have often wondered what these islands are
for--now, you see, I am wiser. This one at least is for you. Sooner
or later some simple native will come along and take you off.
Say what you like about us then--abuse us, if you like--we shan't
care a solitary Grenadine! And here--here is half a sovereign's
worth of silver. Do not waste that in foolish dissipation when
you return to civilisation. Properly used, it may give you a fresh
start in life. And do not--Don't beach her, you beggars, he can
wade!--Do not waste the precious solitude before you in foolish
thoughts. Properly used, it may be a turning-point in your career.
Waste neither money nor time. You will die rich. I'm sorry, but
I must ask you to carry your tucker to land in your arms. No; it's
not deep. Curse that explanation of yours! There's not time.
No, no, no! I won't listen. Overboard you go!"
And the falling night found Mr. Ledbetter--the Mr. Ledbetter who
had complained that adventure was dead--sitting beside his cans
of food, his chin resting upon his drawn-up knees, staring through
his glasses in dismal mildness over the shining, vacant sea.
He was picked up in the course of three days by a negro fisherman
and taken to St. Vincent's, and from St. Vincent's he got, by
the expenditure of his last coins, to Kingston, in Jamaica. And there
he might have foundered. Even nowadays he is not a man of affairs,
and then he was a singularly helpless person. He had not the remotest
idea what he ought to do. The only thing he seems to have done was
to visit all the ministers of religion he could find in the place
to borrow a passage home. But he was much too dirty and incoherent--
and his story far too incredible for them. I met him quite by chance.
It was close upon sunset, and I was walking out after my siesta
on the road to Dunn's Battery, when I met him--I was rather bored,
and with a whole evening on my hands--luckily for him. He was trudging
dismally towards the town. His woebegone face and the quasi-clerical
cut of his dust-stained, filthy costume caught my humour. Our eyes met.
He hesitated. "Sir," he said, with a catching of the breath, "could
you spare a few minutes for what I fear will seem an incredible story?"
"Incredible!" I said.
"Quite," he answered eagerly. "No one will believe it, alter it
though I may. Yet I can assure you, sir--"
He stopped hopelessly. The man's tone tickled me. He seemed an odd
character. "I am," he said, "one of the most unfortunate beings alive."
"Among other things, you haven't dined?" I said, struck with an idea.
"I have not," he said solemnly, "for many days."
"You'll tell it better after that," I said; and without more ado led
the way to a low place I knew, where such a costume as his was
unlikely to give offence. And there--with certain omissions which
he subsequently supplied--I got his story. At first I was incredulous,
but as the wine warmed him, and the faint suggestion of cringing
which his misfortunes had added to his manner disappeared, I began
to believe. At last, I was so far convinced of his sincerity that
I got him a bed for the night, and next day verified the banker's
reference he gave me through my Jamaica banker. And that done, I took
him shopping for underwear and such like equipments of a gentleman
at large. Presently came the verified reference. His astonishing
story was true. I will not amplify our subsequent proceedings.
He started for England in three days' time.
"I do not know how I can possibly thank you enough," began the letter
he wrote me from England, "for all your kindness to a total stranger,"
and proceeded for some time in a similar strain. "Had it not been
for your generous assistance, I could certainly never have returned
in time for the resumption of my scholastic duties, and my few
minutes of reckless folly would, perhaps, have proved my ruin.
As it is, I am entangled in a tissue of lies and evasions, of the most
complicated sort, to account for my sunburnt appearance and my
whereabouts. I have rather carelessly told two or three different
stories, not realising the trouble this would mean for me in the end.
The truth I dare not tell. I have consulted a number of law-books
in the British Museum, and there is not the slightest doubt that
I have connived at and abetted and aided a felony. That scoundrel
Bingham was the Hithergate bank manager, I find, and guilty of
the most flagrant embezzlement. Please, please burn this letter
when read--I trust you implicitly. The worst of it is, neither my aunt
nor her friend who kept the boarding-house at which I was staying
seem altogether to believe a guarded statement I have made them
practically of what actually happened. They suspect me of some
discreditable adventure, but what sort of discreditable adventure
they suspect me of, I do not know. My aunt says she would forgive me
if I told her everything. I have--I have told her MORE than everything,
and still she is not satisfied. It would never do to let them know
the truth of the case, of course, and so I represent myself as having
been waylaid and gagged upon the beach. My aunt wants to know
WHY they waylaid and gagged me, why they took me away in their yacht.
I do not know. Can you suggest any reason? I can think of nothing.
If, when you wrote, you could write on TWO sheets so that I could
show her one, and on that one if you could show clearly that I really
WAS in Jamaica this summer, and had come there by being removed
from a ship, it would be of great service to me. It would certainly
add to the load of my obligation to you--a load that I fear I can
never fully repay. Although if gratitude . . ." And so forth.
At the end he repeated his request for me to burn the letter.
So the remarkable story of Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation ends. That breach
with his aunt was not of long duration. The old lady had forgiven him
before she died.
10. 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 one's self 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 left and right 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 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 seances, 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 excavn. . . .
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 feet 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, 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 forever 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 shadowland, 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
painmaking violent movements and casting his body about.
And at that Mr. Bessel returned with redoubled earnestness to the
room where the seance 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 seance
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 seance 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 seance 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.
11. MR. BRISHER'S TREASURE
"You can't be TOO careful WHO you marry," said Mr. Brisher, and
pulled thoughtfully with a fat-wristed hand at the lank moustache
that hides his want of chin.
"That's why--" I ventured.
"Yes," said Mr. Brisher, with a solemn light in his bleary, blue-grey
eyes, moving his head expressively and breathing alcohol INTIMATELY
at me. "There's lots as 'ave 'ad a try at me--many as I could name
in this town--but none 'ave done it--none."
I surveyed the flushed countenance, the equatorial expansion,
the masterly carelessness of his attire, and heaved a sigh to think
that by reason of the unworthiness of women he must needs be the last
of his race.
"I was a smart young chap when I was younger," said Mr. Brisher.
"I 'ad my work cut out. But I was very careful--very. And I got
through . . ."
He leant over the taproom table and thought visibly on the subject
of my trustworthiness. I was relieved at last by his confidence.
"I was engaged once," he said at last, with a reminiscent eye on
the shuv-a'penny board.
"So near as that?"
He looked at me. "So near as that. Fact is--" He looked about him,
brought his face close to mine, lowered his voice, and fenced off an
unsympathetic world with a grimy hand. "If she ain't dead or married
to some one else or anything--I'm engaged still. Now." He confirmed
this statement with nods and facial contortions. "STILL," he said,
ending the pantomime, and broke into a reckless smile at my surprise.
"ME!"
"Run away," he explained further, with coruscating eyebrows.
"Come 'ome.
"That ain't all.
"You'd 'ardly believe it," he said, "but I found a treasure. Found
a regular treasure."
I fancied this was irony, and did not, perhaps, greet it with proper
surprise. "Yes," he said, "I found a treasure. And come 'ome. I tell
you I could surprise you with things that has happened to me."
And for some time he was content to repeat that he had found
a treasure--and left it.
I made no vulgar clamour for a story, but I became attentive to Mr.
Brisher's bodily needs, and presently I led him back to the deserted
lady.
"She was a nice girl," he said--a little sadly, I thought. "AND
respectable."
He raised his eyebrows and tightened his mouth to express extreme
respectability--beyond the likes of us elderly men.
"It was a long way from 'ere. Essex, in fact. Near Colchester.
It was when I was up in London--in the buildin' trade. I was a smart
young chap then, I can tell you. Slim. 'Ad best clo'es 's good
as anybody. 'At--SILK 'at, mind you." Mr. Brisher's hand shot above
his head towards the infinite to indicate it silk hat of the highest.
"Umbrella--nice umbrella with a 'orn 'andle. Savin's. Very careful
I was. . . ."
He was pensive for a little while, thinking, as we must all come
to think sooner or later, of the vanished brightness of youth.
But he refrained, as one may do in taprooms, from the obvious moral.
"I got to know 'er through a chap what was engaged to 'er sister.
She was stopping in London for a bit with an aunt that 'ad a 'am
an' beef shop. This aunt was very particular--they was all very
particular people, all 'er people was--and wouldn't let 'er sister
go out with this feller except 'er other sister, MY girl that is,
went with them. So 'e brought me into it, sort of to ease the crowding.
We used to go walks in Battersea Park of a Sunday afternoon. Me in
my topper, and 'im in 'is; and the girl's--well--stylish. There wasn't
many in Battersea Park 'ad the larf of us. She wasn't what you'd
call pretty, but a nicer girl I never met. _I _ liked 'er from
the start, and, well--though I say it who shouldn't--she liked me.
You know 'ow it is, I dessay?"
I pretended I did.
"And when this chap married 'er sister--'im and me was great
friends--what must 'e do but arst me down to Colchester, close by
where She lived. Naturally I was introjuced to 'er people, and well,
very soon, her and me was engaged."
He repeated "engaged."
"She lived at 'ome with 'er father and mother, quite the lady, in a
very nice little 'ouse with a garden--and remarkable respectable
people they was. Rich you might call 'em a'most. They owned their
own 'ouse--got it out of the Building Society, and cheap because
the chap who had it before was a burglar and in prison--and they 'ad
a bit of free'old land, and some cottages and money 'nvested--all
nice and tight: they was what you'd call snug and warm. I tell you,
I was On. Furniture too. Why! They 'ad a pianner. Jane--'er name
was Jane--used to play it Sundays, and very nice she played too.
There wasn't 'ardly a 'im toon in the book she COULDN'T play . . .
"Many's the evenin' we've met and sung 'ims there, me and 'er
and the family.
"'Er father was quite a leadin' man in chapel. You should ha' seen
him Sundays, interruptin' the minister and givin' out 'ims. He had
gold spectacles, I remember, and used to look over 'em at you while
he sang hearty--he was always great on singing 'earty to the Lord--
and when HE got out o' toon 'arf the people went after 'im--always.
'E was that sort of man. And to walk be'ind 'im in 'is nice black
clo'es--'is 'at was a brimmer--made one regular proud to be engaged
to such a father-in-law. And when the summer came I went down there
and stopped a fortnight.
"Now, you know there was a sort of Itch," said Mr. Brisher. "We wanted
to marry, me and Jane did, and get things settled. But 'E said I 'ad
to get a proper position first. Consequently there was a Itch.
Consequently, when I went down there, I was anxious to show that
I was a good useful sort of chap like. Show I could do pretty nearly
everything like. See?"
I made a sympathetic noise.
"And down at the bottom of their garden was a bit of wild part like.
So I says to 'im, 'Why don't you 'ave a rockery 'ere?' I says.
'It 'ud look nice.'
"'Too much expense,' he says.
"'Not a penny,' says I. 'I'm a dab at rockeries. Lemme make you one.'
You see, I'd 'elped my brother make a rockery in the beer garden
be'ind 'is tap, so I knew 'ow to do it to rights. 'Lemme make you
one,' I says. 'It's 'olidays, but I'm that sort of chap, I 'ate doing
nothing,' I says. 'I'll make you one to rights.' And the long and
the short of it was, he said I might.
"And that's 'ow I come on the treasure."
"What treasure?" I asked.
"Why!" said Mr. Brisher, "the treasure I'm telling you about, what's
the reason why I never married."
"What!--a treasure--dug up?"
"Yes--buried wealth--treasure trove. Come out of the ground. What
I kept on saying--regular treasure. . . ." He looked at me with
unusual disrespect.
"It wasn't more than a foot deep, not the top of it," he said.
"I'd 'ardly got thirsty like, before I come on the corner."
"Go on," I said. "I didn't understand."
"Why! Directly I 'it the box I knew it was treasure. A sort of instinct
told me. Something seemed to shout inside of me--'Now's your chance--
lie low.' It's lucky I knew the laws of treasure trove or I'd 'ave been
shoutin' there and then. I daresay you know--"
"Crown bags it," I said, "all but one per cent. Go on. It's a shame.
What did you do?"
"Uncovered the top of the box. There wasn't anybody in the garden
or about like. Jane was 'elping 'er mother do the 'ouse. I WAS
excited--I tell you. I tried the lock and then gave a whack at
the hinges. Open it came. Silver coins--full! Shining. It made me
tremble to see 'em. And jest then--I'm blessed if the dustman didn't
come round the back of the 'ouse. It pretty nearly gave me 'eart
disease to think what a fool I was to 'ave that money showing. And
directly after I 'eard the chap next door--'e was 'olidaying, too--
I 'eard him watering 'is beans. If only 'e'd looked over the fence!"
"What did you do?"
"Kicked the lid on again and covered it up like a shot, and went
on digging about a yard away from it--like mad. And my face, so
to speak, was laughing on its own account till I had it hid. I tell
you I was regular scared like at my luck. I jest thought that it
'ad to be kep' close and that was all. 'Treasure,' I kep' whisperin'
to myself, 'Treasure' and ''undreds of pounds, 'undreds, 'undreds
of pounds.' Whispering to myself like, and digging like blazes. It
seemed to me the box was regular sticking out and showing, like your
legs do under the sheets in bed, and I went and put all the earth
I'd got out of my 'ole for the rockery slap on top of it. I WAS
in a sweat. And in the midst of it all out toddles 'er father.
He didn't say anything to me, jest stood behind me and stared,
but Jane tole me afterwards when he went indoors, 'e says, 'That
there jackanapes of yours, Jane'--he always called me a jackanapes
some'ow--'knows 'ow to put 'is back into it after all.' Seemed quite
impressed by it, 'e did."
"How long was the box?" I asked, suddenly.
"'Ow long?" said Mr. Brisher.
"Yes--in length?"
"Oh! 'bout so-by-so." Mr. Brisher indicated a moderate-sized trunk.
"FULL?" said I.
"Full up of silver coins--'arf-crowns, I believe."
"Why!" I cried, "that would mean--hundreds of pounds."
"Thousands," said Mr. Brisher, in a sort of sad calm. "I calc'lated it
out."
"But how did they get there?"
"All I know is what I found. What I thought at the time was this.
The chap who'd owned the 'ouse before 'er father 'd been a regular
slap-up burglar. What you'd call a 'igh-class criminal. Used to drive
'is trap--like Peace did." Mr. Brisher meditated on the difficulties
of narration and embarked on a complicated parenthesis. "I don't
know if I told you it'd been a burglar's 'ouse before it was my girl's
father's, and I knew 'e'd robbed a mail train once, I did know that.
It seemed to me--"
"That's very likely," I said. "But what did you do?"
"Sweated," said Mr. Brisher. "Regular run orf me. All that morning,"
said Mr. Brisher, "I was at it, pretending to make that rockery
and wondering what I should do. I'd 'ave told 'er father p'r'aps,
only I was doubtful of 'is honesty--I was afraid he might rob me of
it like, and give it up to the authorities--and besides, considering
I was marrying into the family, I thought it would be nicer like
if it came through me. Put me on a better footing, so to speak.
Well, I 'ad three days before me left of my 'olidays, so there
wasn't no hurry, so I covered it up and went on digging, and tried
to puzzle out 'ow I was to make sure of it. Only I couldn't.
"I thought," said Mr. Brisher, "AND I thought. Once I got regular
doubtful whether I'd seen it or not, and went down to it and 'ad it
uncovered again, just as her ma came out to 'ang up a bit of washin'
she'd done. Jumps again! Afterwards I was just thinking I'd 'ave
another go at it, when Jane comes to tell me dinner was ready.
'You'll want it,' she said, 'seeing all the 'ole you've dug.'
"I was in a regular daze all dinner, wondering whether that chap
next door wasn't over the fence and filling 'is pockets. But in
the afternoon I got easier in my mind--it seemed to me it must 'ave
been there so long it was pretty sure to stop a bit longer--and
I tried to get up a bit of a discussion to dror out the old man
and see what 'E thought of treasure trove."
Mr. Brisher paused, and affected amusement at the memory.
"The old man was a scorcher," he said; "a regular scorcher."
"What!" said I; "did he--?"
"It was like this," explained Mr. Brisher, laying a friendly hand
on my arm and breathing into my face to calm me. "Just to dror
'im out, I told a story of a chap I said I knew--pretendin', you
know--who'd found a sovring in a novercoat 'e'd borrowed. I said
'e stuck to it, but I said I wasn't sure whether that was right
or not. And then the old man began. Lor'! 'e DID let me 'ave it!"
Mr. Brisher affected an insincere amusement. "'E was, well--what you
might call a rare 'and at Snacks. Said that was the sort of friend
'e'd naturally expect me to 'ave. Said 'e'd naturally expect that
from the friend of a out-of-work loafer who took up with daughters
who didn't belong to 'im. There! I couldn't tell you 'ARF 'e said.
'E went on most outrageous. I stood up to 'im about it, just to dror
'im out. 'Wouldn't you stick to a 'arf-sov', not if you found it in
the street?' I says. 'Certainly not,' 'e says; 'certainly I wouldn't.'
'What! not if you found it as a sort of treasure?' 'Young man,'
'e says, 'there's 'i'er 'thority than mine--Render unto Caesar'--
what is it? Yes. Well, he fetched up that. A rare 'and at 'itting
you over the 'ed with the Bible, was the old man. And so he went on.
'E got to such Snacks about me at last I couldn't stand it. I'd
promised Jane not to answer 'im back, but it got a bit TOO thick.
I--I give it 'im . . ."
Mr. Brisher, by means of enigmatical facework, tried to make me
think he had had the best of that argument, but I knew better.
"I went out in a 'uff at last. But not before I was pretty sure I
'ad to lift that treasure by myself. The only thing that kep' me up
was thinking 'ow I'd take it out of 'im when I 'ad the cash."
There was a lengthy pause.
"Now, you'd 'ardly believe it, but all them three days I never
'ad a chance at the blessed treasure, never got out not even
a 'arf-crown. There was always a Somethink--always.
"'Stonishing thing it isn't thought of more," said Mr. Brisher.
"Finding treasure's no great shakes. It's gettin' it. I don't
suppose I slep' a wink any of those nights, thinking where I was
to take it, what I was to do with it, 'ow I was to explain it.
It made me regular ill. And days I was that dull, it made Jane
regular 'uffy. 'You ain't the same chap you was in London,' she
says, several times. I tried to lay it on 'er father and 'is Snacks,
but bless you, she knew better. What must she 'ave but that I'd
got another girl on my mind! Said I wasn't True. Well, we had
a bit of a row. But I was that set on the Treasure, I didn't seem
to mind a bit Anything she said.
"Well, at last I got a sort of plan. I was always a bit good at
planning, though carrying out isn't so much in my line. I thought it
all out and settled on a plan. First, I was going to take all my
pockets full of these 'ere 'arf-crowns--see?--and afterwards as I
shall tell.
"Well, I got to that state I couldn't think of getting at the Treasure
again in the daytime, so I waited until the night before I had to go,
and then, when everything was still, up I gets and slips down
to the back door, meaning to get my pockets full. What must I do
in the scullery but fall over a pail! Up gets 'er father with a gun--'e
was a light sleeper was 'er father, and very suspicious and there
was me: 'ad to explain I'd come down to the pump for a drink because
my water-bottle was bad. 'E didn't let me off a Snack or two over
that bit, you lay a bob."
"And you mean to say--" I began.
"Wait a bit," said Mr. Brisher. "I say, I'd made my plan. That put
the kybosh on one bit, but it didn't 'urt the general scheme not a bit.
I went and I finished that rockery next day, as though there wasn't
a Snack in the world; cemented over the stones, I did, dabbed
it green and everythink. I put a dab of green just to show where
the box was. They all came and looked at it, and sai 'ow nice
it was--even 'e was a bit softer like to see it, and all he said was,
"It's a pity you can't always work like that, then you might get
something definite to do," he says.
"'Yes,' I says--I couldn't 'elp it--'I put a lot in that rockery,'
I says, like that. See? 'I put a lot in that rockery'--meaning--"
"I see," said I--for Mr. Brisher is apt to overelaborate his jokes.
"_'E_ didn't," said Mr. Brisher. "Not then, anyhow.
"Ar'ever--after all that was over, off I set for London. . . .
Orf I set for London."
Pause.
"On'y I wasn't going to no London," said Mr. Brisher, with sudden
animation, and thrusting his face into mine. "No fear! What do YOU
think?
"I didn't go no further than Colchester--not a yard.
"I'd left the spade just where I could find it. I'd got everything
planned and right. I 'ired a little trap in Colchester, and pretended
I wanted to go to Ipswich and stop the night, and come back next
day, and the chap I 'ired it from made me leave two sovrings on it
right away, and off I set.
"I didn't go to no Ipswich neither.
"Midnight the 'orse and trap was 'itched by the little road that ran
by the cottage where 'e lived--not sixty yards off, it wasn't--and
I was at it like a good 'un. It was jest the night for such
games--overcast--but a trifle too 'ot, and all round the sky there
was summer lightning and presently a thunderstorm. Down it came.
First big drops in a sort of fizzle, then 'ail. I kep'on. I whacked
at it--I didn't dream the old man would 'ear. I didn't even trouble
to go quiet with the spade, and the thunder and lightning and 'ail
seemed to excite me like. I shouldn't wonder if I was singing. I got
so 'ard at it I clean forgot the thunder and the 'orse and trap. I
precious soon got the box showing, and started to lift it . . . ."
"Heavy?" I said.
"I couldn't no more lift it than fly. I WAS sick. I'd never thought
of that I got regular wild--I tell you, I cursed. I got sort of
outrageous. I didn't think of dividing it like for the minute,
and even then I couldn't 'ave took money about loose in a trap.
I hoisted one end sort of wild like, and over the whole show went
with a tremenjous noise. Perfeck smash of silver. And then right
on the heels of that, Flash! Lightning like the day! and there was
the back door open and the old man coming down the garden with
'is blooming old gun. He wasn't not a 'undred yards away!
"I tell you I was that upset--I didn't think what I was doing.
I never stopped-not even to fill my pockets. I went over the fence
like a shot, and ran like one o'clock for the trap, cussing and
swearing as I went. I WAS in a state. . . .
"And will you believe me, when I got to the place where I'd left
the 'orse and trap, they'd gone. Orf! When I saw that I 'adn't
a cuss left for it. I jest danced on the grass, and when I'd danced
enough I started off to London. . . . I was done."
Mr. Brisher was pensive for an interval. "I was done," he repeated,
very bitterly.
"Well?" I said.
"That's all," said Mr. Brisher.
"You didn't go back?"
"No fear. I'd 'ad enough of THAT blooming treasure, any'ow for a bit.
Besides, I didn't know what was done to chaps who tried to collar
a treasure trove. I started off for London there and then. . . ."
"And you never went back?"
"Never."
"But about Jane? Did you write?"
"Three times, fishing like. And no answer. We'd parted in a bit
of a 'uff on account of 'er being jealous. So that I couldn't make
out for certain what it meant.
"I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know whether the old man
knew it was me. I sort of kep' an eye open on papers to see when he'd
give up that treasure to the Crown, as I hadn't a doubt 'e would,
considering 'ow respectable he'd always been."
"And did he?"
Mr. Brisher pursed his mouth and moved his head slowly from side
to side. "Not 'IM," he said.
"Jane was a nice girl," he said, "a thorough nice girl mind you,
if jealous, and there's no knowing I mightn't 'ave gone back to 'er
after a bit. I thought if he didn't give up the treasure I might 'ave
a sort of 'old on 'im. . . . Well, one day I looks as usual under
Colchester--and there I saw 'is name. What for, d'yer think?"
I could not guess.
Mr. Brisher's voice sank to a whisper, and once more he spoke behind
his hand. His manner was suddenly suffused with a positive joy.
"Issuing counterfeit coins," he said. "Counterfeit coins!"
"You don't mean to say--?"
"Yes-It. Bad. Quite a long case they made of it. But they got 'im,
though he dodged tremenjous. Traced 'is 'aving passed, oh!--nearly
a dozen bad 'arf-crowns."
"And you didn't--?"
"No fear. And it didn't do 'IM much good to say it was treasure trove."
12. MISS WINCHELSEA'S HEART
Miss Winchelsea was going to Rome. The matter had filled her mind
for a month or more, and had overflowed so abundantly into her
conversation that quite a number of people who were not going to Rome,
and who were not likely to go to Rome, had made it a personal
grievance against her. Some indeed had attempted quite unavailingly
to convince her that Rome was not nearly such a desirable place
as it was reported to be, and others had gone so far as to suggest
behind her back that she was dreadfully "stuck up" about "that Rome
of hers." And little Lily Hardhurst had told her friend Mr. Binns
that so far as she was concerned Miss Winchelsea might "go to her
old Rome and stop there; SHE (Miss Lily Hardhurst) wouldn't grieve."
And the way in which Miss Winchelsea put herself upon terms of personal
tenderness with Horace and Benvenuto Cellini and Raphael and Shelley
and Keats--if she had been Shelley's widow she could not have professed
a keener interest in his grave--was a matter of universal astonishment.
Her dress was a triumph of tactful discretion, sensible, but not too
"touristy"--Miss Winchelsea, had a great dread of being "touristy"--
and her Baedeker was carried in a cover of grey to hide its glaring
red. She made a prim and pleasant little figure on the Charing Cross
platform, in spite of her swelling pride, when at last the great
day dawned, and she could start for Rome. The day was bright,
the Channel passage would be pleasant, and all the omens promised
well. There was the gayest sense of adventure in this unprecedented
departure.
She was going with two friends who had been fellow-students with her
at the training college, nice honest girls both, though not so good
at history and literature as Miss Winchelsea. They both looked up
to her immensely, though physically they had to look down, and she
anticipated some pleasant times to be spent in "stirring them up"
to her own pitch of aesthetic and historical enthusiasm. They had
secured seats already, and welcomed her effusively at the carriage
door. In the instant criticism of the encounter she noted that Fanny
had a slightly "touristy" leather strap, and that Helen had succumbed
to a serge jacket with side pockets, into which her hands were thrust.
But they were much too happy with themselves and the expedition
for their friend to attempt any hint at the moment about these things.
As soon as the first ecstasies were over--Fanny's enthusiasm was
a little noisy and crude, and consisted mainly in emphatic repetitions
of "Just FANCY! we're going to Rome, my dear!--Rome!"--they gave
their attention to their fellow-travellers. Helen was anxious to
secure a compartment to themselves, and, in order to discourage
intruders, got out and planted herself firmly on the step. Miss
Winchelsea peeped out over her shoulder, and made sly little remarks
about the accumulating people on the platform, at which Fanny laughed
gleefully.
They were travelling with one of Mr. Thomas Gunn's parties--fourteen
days in Rome for fourteen pounds. They did not belong to the personally
conducted party of course--Miss Winchelsea had seen to that--but
they travelled with it because of the convenience of that arrangement.
The people were the oddest mixture, and wonderfully amusing.
There was a vociferous red-faced polyglot personal conductor in
a pepper-and-salt suit, very long in the arms and legs and very
active. He shouted proclamations. When he wanted to speak to people he
stretched out an arm and held them until his purpose was accomplished.
One hand was full of papers, tickets, counterfoils of tourists.
The people of the personally conducted party were, it seemed,
of two sorts; people the conductor wanted and could not find,
and people he did not want and who followed him in a steadily
growing tail up and down the platform. These people seemed, indeed,
to think that their one chance of reaching Rome lay in keeping
close to him. Three little old ladies were particularly energetic
in his pursuit, and at last maddened him to the pitch of clapping
them into a carriage and daring them to emerge again. For the rest
of the time, one, two, or three of their heads protruded from
the window wailing enquiries about "a little wickerwork box"
whenever he drew near. There was a very stout man with a very stout
wife in shiny black; there was a little old man like an aged hostler.
"What CAN such people want in Rome?" asked Miss Winchelsea. "What
can it mean to them?" There was a very tall curate in a very small
straw hat, and a very short curate encumbered by a long camera
stand. The contrast amused Fanny very much. Once they heard some
one calling for "Snooks." "I always thought that name was invented
by novelists," said Miss Winchelsea. "Fancy! Snooks. I wonder which
IS Mr. Snooks." Finally they picked out a very stout and resolute
little man in a large check suit. "If he isn't Snooks, he ought
to be," said Miss Winchelsea.
Presently the conductor discovered Helen's attempt at a corner
in carriages. "Room for five," he bawled with a parallel translation
on his fingers. A party of four together--mother, father, and two
daughters--blundered in, all greatly excited. "It's all right, Ma,
you let me," said one of the daughters, hitting her mother's bonnet
with a handbag she struggled to put in the rack. Miss Winchelsea
detested people who banged about and called their mother "Ma."
A young man travelling alone followed. He was not at all "touristy"
in his costume, Miss Winchelsea observed; his Gladstone bag was
of good pleasant leather with labels reminiscent of Luxembourg and
Ostend, and his boots, though brown, were not vulgar. He carried
an overcoat on his arm. Before these people had properly settled
in their places, came an inspection of tickets and a slamming
of doors, and behold! they were gliding out of Charing Cross
station on their way to Rome.
"Fancy!" cried Fanny, "we are going to Rome, my dear! Rome! I don't
seem to believe it, even now."
Miss Winchelsea suppressed Fanny's emotions with a little smile,
and the lady who was called "Ma" explained to people in general
why they had "cut it so close" at the station. The two daughters
called her "Ma" several times, toned her down in a tactless effective
way, and drove her at last to the muttered inventory of a basket
of travelling requisites. Presently she looked up. "Lor'!" she said,
"I didn't bring THEM!" Both the daughters said "Oh, Ma!" but what
"them" was did not appear. Presently Fanny produced Hare's Walks
in Rome, a sort of mitigated guide-book very popular among Roman
visitors; and the father of the two daughters began to examine
his books of tickets minutely, apparently in a search after English
words. When he had looked at the tickets for a long time right way up,
he turned them upside down. Then he produced a fountain pen and
dated them with considerable care. The young man, having completed
an unostentatious survey of his fellow travellers, produced a book and
fell to reading. When Helen and Fanny were looking out of the window
at Chiselhurst--the place interested Fanny because the poor dear
Empress of the French used to live there--Miss Winchelsea took
the opportunity to observe the book the young man held. It was not
a guide-book, but a little thin volume of poetry--BOUND. She glanced
at his face--it seemed a refined pleasant face to her hasty glance.
He wore a little gilt pince-nez. "Do you think she lives there
now?" said Fanny, and Miss Winchelsea's inspection came to an end.
For the rest of the journey Miss Winchelsea talked little, and what
she said was as pleasant and as stamped with refinement as she
could make it. Her voice was always low and clear and pleasant,
and she took care that on this occasion it was particularly low and
clear and pleasant. As they came under the white cliffs the young
man put his book of poetry away, and when at last the train stopped
beside the boat, he displayed a graceful alacrity with the impedimenta
of Miss Winchelsea and her friends. Miss Winchelsea hated nonsense,
but she was pleased to see the young man perceived at once that
they were ladies, and helped them without any violent geniality;
and how nicely he showed that his civilities were to be no excuse
for further intrusions. None of her little party had been out
of England before, and they were all excited and a little nervous
at the Channel passage. They stood in a little group in a good place
near the middle of the boat--the young man had taken Miss Winchelsea's
carry-all there and had told her it was a good place--and they watched
the white shores of Albion recede and quoted Shakespeare and made
quiet fun of their fellow travellers in the English way.
They were particularly amused at the precautions the bigger-sized
people had taken against the little waves--cut lemons and flasks
prevailed, one lady lay full-length in a deck chair with a handkerchief
over her face, and a very broad resolute man in a bright brown
"touristy" suit walked all the way from England to France along
the deck, with his legs as widely apart as Providence permitted. These
were all excellent precautions, and, nobody was ill. The personally
conducted party pursued the conductor about the deck with enquiries
in a manner that suggested to Helen's mind the rather vulgar image
of hens with a piece of bacon peel, until at last he went into hiding
below. And the young man with the thin volume of poetry stood
at the stern watching England receding, looking rather lonely
and sad to Miss Winchelsea's eye.
And then came Calais and tumultuous novelties, and the young man
had not forgotten Miss Winchelsea's hold-all and the other little
things. All three girls, though they had passed government examinations
in French to any extent, were stricken with a dumb shame of their
accents, and the young man was very useful. And he did not intrude.
He put them in a comfortable carriage and raised his hat and went
away. Miss Winchelsea thanked him in her best manner--a pleasing,
cultivated manner--and Fanny said he was "nice" almost before he
was out of earshot. "I wonder what he can be," said Helen. "He's
going to Italy, because I noticed green tickets in his book."
Miss Winchelsea almost told them of the poetry, and decided not
to do so. And presently the carriage windows seized hold upon them
and the young man was forgotten. It made them feel that they were
doing an educated sort of thing to travel through a country whose
commonest advertisements were in idiomatic French, and Miss Winchelsea
made unpatriotic comparisons because there were weedy little sign-board
advertisements by the rail side instead of the broad hoardings that
deface the landscape in our land. But the north of France is really
uninteresting country, and after a time Fanny reverted to Hare's Walks
and Helen initiated lunch. Miss Winchelsea awoke out of a happy
reverie; she had been trying to realise, she said, that she was
actually going to Rome, but she perceived at Helen's suggestion
that she was hungry, and they lunched out of their baskets very
cheerfully. In the afternoon they were tired and silent until Helen
made tea. Miss Winchelsea might have dozed, only she knew Fanny
slept with her mouth open; and as their fellow passengers were
two rather nice critical-looking ladies of uncertain age--who knew
French well enough to talk it--she employed herself in keeping Fanny
awake. The rhythm of the train became insistent, and the streaming
landscape outside became at last quite painful to the eye. They were
already dreadfully tired of travelling before their night's stoppage
came.
The stoppage for the night was brightened by the appearance of
the young man, and his manners were all that could be desired and
his French quite serviceable. His coupons availed for the same hotel
as theirs, and by chance as it seemed he sat next Miss Winchelsea
at the table d'hote. In spite of her enthusiasm for Rome, she had
thought out some such possibility very thoroughly, and when he
ventured to make a remark upon the tediousness of travelling--he
let the soup and fish go by before he did this--she did not simply
assent to his proposition, but responded with another. They were
soon comparing their journeys, and Helen and Fanny were cruelly
overlooked in the conversation. It was to be the same journey,
they found; one day for the galleries at Florence--"from what I
hear," said the young man, "it is barely enough,"--and the rest
at Rome. He talked of Rome very pleasantly; he was evidently quite
well read, and he quoted Horace about Soracte. Miss Winchelsea had
"done" that book of Horace for her matriculation, and was delighted
to cap his quotation. It gave a sort of tone to things, this
incident--a touch of refinement to mere chatting. Fanny expressed
a few emotions, and Helen interpolated a few sensible remarks, but
the bulk of the talk on the girls' side naturally fell to Miss
Winchelsea.
Before they reached Rome this young man was tacitly of their party.
They did not know his name nor what he was, but it seemed he taught,
and Miss Winchelsea had a shrewd idea he was an extension lecturer.
At any rate he was something of that sort, something gentlemanly
and refined without being opulent and impossible. She tried once
or twice to ascertain whether he came from Oxford or Cambridge,
but he missed her timid importunities. She tried to get him to make
remarks about those places to see if he would say "come up" to them
instead of "go down"--she knew that was how you told a 'Varsity man.
He used the word "'Varsity"--not university--in quite the proper way.
They saw as much of Mr. Ruskin's Florence as the brief time permitted;
he met them in the Pitti Gallery and went round with them, chatting
brightly, and evidently very grateful for their recognition. He knew
a great deal about art, and all four enjoyed the morning immensely.
It was fine to go round recognising old favourites and finding
new beauties, especially while so many people fumbled helplessly
with Baedeker. Nor was he a bit of a prig, Miss Winchelsea said,
and indeed she detested prigs. He had a distinct undertone of humour,
and was funny, for example, without being vulgar, at the expense of
the quaint work of Beato Angelico. He had a grave seriousness beneath
it all, and was quick to seize the moral lessons of the pictures.
Fanny went softly among these masterpieces; she admitted "she knew
so little about them," and she confessed that to her they were "all
beautiful." Fanny's "beautiful" inclined to be a little monotonous,
Miss Winchelsea thought. She had been quite glad when the last
sunny Alp had vanished, because of the staccato of Fanny's admiration.
Helen said little, but Miss Winchelsea had found her a little wanting
on the aesthetic side in the old days and was not surprised; sometimes
she laughed at the young man's hesitating delicate little jests and
sometimes she didn't, and sometimes she seemed quite lost to the art
about them in the contemplation of the dresses of the other visitors.
At Rome the young man was with them intermittently. A rather
"touristy" friend of his took him away at times. He complained
comically to Miss Winchelsea. "I have only two short weeks in Rome,"
he said, "and my friend Leonard wants to spend a whole day at Tivoli,
looking at a waterfall."
"What is your friend Leonard?" asked Miss Winchelsea abruptly.
"He's the most enthusiastic pedestrian I ever met," the young man
replied, amusingly, but a little unsatisfactorily, Miss Winchelsea
thought. They had some glorious times, and Fanny could not think
what they would have done without him. Miss Winchelsea's interest
and Fanny's enormous capacity for admiration were insatiable. They
never flagged--through pictures and sculpture galleries, immense
crowded churches, ruins and museums, Judas trees and prickly pears,
wine carts and palaces, they admired their way unflinchingly. They
never saw a stone pine or a eucalyptus but they named and admired it;
they never glimpsed Soracte but they exclaimed. Their common ways
were made wonderful by imaginative play. "Here Caesar may have
walked," they would say. "Raphael may have seen Soracte from this
very point." They happened on the tomb of Bibulus. "Old Bibulus,"
said the young man. "The oldest monument of Republican Rome!"
said Miss Winchelsea.
"I'm dreadfully stupid," said Fanny, "but who WAS Bibulus?"
There was a curious little pause.
"Wasn't he the person who built the wall?" said Helen.
The young man glanced quickly at her and laughed. "That was Balbus,"
he said. Helen reddened, but neither he nor Miss Winchelsea threw
any light upon Fanny's ignorance about Bibulus.
Helen was more taciturn than the other three, but then she was
always taciturn, and usually she took care of the tram tickets
and things like that, or kept her eye on them if the young man took
them, and told him where they were when he wanted them. Glorious times
they had, these young people, in that pale brown cleanly city of
memories that was once the world. Their only sorrow was the shortness
of the time. They said indeed that the electric trams and the '70
buildings, and that criminal advertisement that glares upon the Forum,
outraged their aesthetic feelings unspeakably; but that was only part
of the fun. And indeed Rome is such a wonderful place that it made
Miss Winchelsea forget some of her most carefully prepared enthusiasms
at times, and Helen, taken unawares, would suddenly admit the beauty
of unexpected things. Yet Fanny and Helen would have liked a shop
window or so in the English quarter if Miss Winchelsea's uncompromising
hostility to all other English visitors had not rendered that district
impossible.
The intellectual and aesthetic fellowship of Miss Winchelsea and
the scholarly young man passed insensibly towards a deeper feeling.
The exuberant Fanny did her best to keep pace with their recondite
admiration by playing her "beautiful," with vigour, and saying "Oh!
LET'S go," with enormous appetite whenever a new place of interest
was mentioned. But Helen developed a certain want of sympathy
towards the end, that disappointed Miss Winchelsea a little. She
refused to "see anything" in the face of Beatrice Cenci--Shelley's
Beatrice Cenci!--in the Barberini gallery; and one day, when they
were deploring the electric trams, she said rather snappishly that
"people must get about somehow, and it's better than torturing
horses up these horrid little hills." She spoke of the Seven Hills
of Rome as "horrid little hills!"
And the day they went on the Palatine--though Miss Winchelsea
did not know of this--she remarked suddenly to Fanny, "Don't hurry
like that, my dear; THEY don't want us to overtake them. And we
don't say the right things for them when we DO get near."
"I wasn't trying to overtake them," said Fanny, slackening her
excessive pace; "I wasn't indeed." And for a minute she was short of
breath.
But Miss Winchelsea had come upon happiness. It was only when she
came to look back across an intervening tragedy that she quite
realised how happy she had been, pacing among the cypress-shadowed
ruins, and exchanging the very highest class of information the human
mind can possess, the most refined impressions it is possible
to convey. Insensibly emotion crept into their intercourse, sunning
itself openly and pleasantly at last when Helen's modernity was not
too near. Insensibly their interest drifted from the wonderful
associations about them to their more intimate and personal feelings.
In a tentative way information was supplied; she spoke allusively
of her school, of her examination successes, of her gladness that
the days of "Cram" were over. He made it quite clear that he also
was a teacher. They spoke of the greatness of their calling, of the
necessity of sympathy to face its irksome details, of a certain
loneliness they sometimes felt.
That was in the Colosseum, and it was as far as they got that day,
because Helen returned with Fanny--she had taken her into the upper
galleries. Yet the private dreams of Miss Winchelsea, already vivid
and concrete enough, became now realistic in the highest degree.
She figured that pleasant young man, lecturing in the most edifying
way to his students, herself modestly prominent as his intellectual
mate and helper; she figured a refined little home, with two bureaus,
with white shelves of high-class books, and autotypes of the pictures
of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, with Morris's wall papers and flowers in
pots of beaten copper. Indeed she figured many things. On the Pincio
the two had a few precious moments together, while Helen marched
Fanny off to see the muro Torto, and he spoke at once plainly. He
said he hoped their friendship was only beginning, that he already
found her company very precious to him, that indeed it was more than
that.
He became nervous, thrusting at his glasses with trembling fingers
as though he fancied his emotions made them unstable. "I should
of course," he said, "tell you things about myself. I know it is
rather unusual my speaking to you like this. Only our meeting has
been so accidental--or providential--and I am snatching at things.
I came to Rome expecting a lonely tour . . . and I have been so very
happy, so very happy. Quite recently I found myself in a position--
I have dared to think--. And--"
He glanced over his shoulder and stopped. He said "Damn!" quite
distinctly--and she did not condemn him for that manly lapse into
profanity. She looked and saw his friend Leonard advancing. He drew
nearer; he raised his hat to Miss Winchelsea, and his smile was
almost a grin. "I've been looking for you everywhere, Snooks," he
said. "You promised to be on the Piazza steps half an hour ago."
Snooks! The name struck Miss Winchelsea like a blow in the face.
She did not hear his reply. She thought afterwards that Leonard
must have considered her the vaguest-minded person. To this day
she is not sure whether she was introduced to Leonard or not, nor
what she said to him. A sort of mental paralysis was upon her.
Of all offensive surnames--Snooks!
Helen and Fanny were returning, there were civilities, and the young
men were receding. By a great effort she controlled herself to face
the enquiring eyes of her friends. All that afternoon she lived
the life of a heroine under the indescribable outrage of that name,
chatting, observing, with "Snooks" gnawing at her heart. From the
moment that it first rang upon her ears, the dream of her happiness
was prostrate in the dust. All the refinement she had figured was
ruined and defaced by that cognomen's unavoidable vulgarity.
What was that refined little home to her now, spite of autotypes,
Morris papers, and bureaus? Athwart it in letters of fire ran an
incredible inscription: "Mrs. Snooks." That may seem a little thing to
the reader, but consider the delicate refinement of Miss Winchelsea's
mind. Be as refined as you can and then think of writing yourself
down:--"Snooks." She conceived herself being addressed as Mrs. Snooks
by all the people she liked least, conceived the patronymic touched
with a vague quality of insult. She figured a card of grey and silver
bearing "Winchelsea," triumphantly effaced by an arrow, Cupid's arrow,
in favour of "Snooks." Degrading confession of feminine weakness! She
imagined the terrible rejoicings of certain girl friends, of certain
grocer cousins from whom her growing refinement had long since
estranged her. How they would make it sprawl across the envelope
that would bring their sarcastic congratulations. Would even his
pleasant company compensate her for that? "It is impossible,"
she muttered; "impossible! SNOOKS!"
She was sorry for him, but not so sorry as she was for herself.
For him she had a touch of indignation. To be so nice, so refined,
while all the time he was "Snooks," to hide under a pretentious
gentility of demeanour the badge sinister of his surname seemed
a sort of treachery. To put it in the language of sentimental science
she felt he had "led her on."
There were of course moments of terrible vacillation, a period even
when something almost like passion bid her throw refinement to
the winds. And there was something in her, an unexpurgated vestige
of vulgarity, that made a strenuous attempt at proving that Snooks
was not so very bad a name after all. Any hovering hesitation flew
before Fanny's manner, when Fanny came with an air of catastrophe to
tell that she also knew the horror. Fanny's voice fell to a whisper
when she said SNOOKS. Miss Winchelsea would not give him any answer
when at last, in the Borghese, she could have a minute with him;
but she promised him a note.
She handed him that note in the little book of poetry he had lent
her, the little book that had first drawn them together. Her refusal
was ambiguous, allusive. She could no more tell him why she rejected
him than she could have told a cripple of his hump. He too must
feel something of the unspeakable quality of his name. Indeed he
had avoided a dozen chances of telling it, she now perceived. So she
spoke of "obstacles she could not reveal"--"reasons why the thing he
spoke of was impossible." She addressed the note with a shiver, "E. K.
Snooks."
Things were worse than she had dreaded; he asked her to explain.
How COULD she explain? Those last two days in Rome were dreadful.
She was haunted by his air of astonished perplexity. She knew she
had given him intimate hopes, she had not the courage to examine
her mind thoroughly for the extent of her encouragement. She knew
he must think her the most changeable of beings. Now that she was
in full retreat, she would not even perceive his hints of a possible
correspondence. But in that matter he did a thing that seemed to her
at once delicate and romantic. He made a go-between of Fanny.
Fanny could not keep the secret, and came and told her that night
under a transparent pretext of needed advice. "Mr. Snooks," said
Fanny, "wants to write to me. Fancy! I had no idea. But should I let
him?" They talked it over long and earnestly, and Miss Winchelsea was
careful to keep the veil over her heart. She was already repenting his
disregarded hints. Why should she not hear of him sometimes--painful
though his name must be to her? Miss Winchelsea decided it might
be permitted, and Fanny kissed her good-night with unusual emotion.
After she had gone Miss Winchelsea sat for a long time at the window
of her little room. It was moonlight, and down the street a man
sang "Santa Lucia" with almost heart-dissolving tenderness. . . .
She sat very still.
She breathed a word very softly to herself. The word was "SNOOKS."
Then she got up with a profound sigh, and went to bed. The next morning
he said to her meaningly, "I shall hear of you through your friend."
Mr. Snooks saw them off from Rome with that pathetic interrogative
perplexity still on his face, and if it had not been for Helen
he would have retained Miss Winchelsea's hold-all in his hand
as a sort of encyclopaedic keepsake. On their way back to England
Miss Winchelsea on six separate occasions made Fanny promise
to write to her the longest of long letters. Fanny, it seemed, would
be quite near Mr. Snooks. Her new school--she was always going
to new schools--would be only five miles from Steely Bank, and
it was in the Steely Bank Polytechnic, and one or two first-class
schools, that Mr. Snooks did his teaching. He might even see her
at times. They could not talk much of him--she and Fanny always
spoke of "him," never of Mr. Snooks,--because Helen was apt to say
unsympathetic things about him. Her nature had coarsened very much,
Miss Winchelsea perceived, since the old Training College days;
she had become hard and cynical. She thought he had a weak face,
mistaking refinement for weakness as people of her stamp are apt
to do, and when she heard his name was Snooks, she said she had
expected something of the sort. Miss Winchelsea was careful to spare
her own feelings after that, but Fanny was less circumspect.
The girls parted in London, and Miss Winchelsea returned, with
a new interest in life, to the Girls' High School in which she had
been an increasingly valuable assistant for the last three years.
Her new interest in life was Fanny as a correspondent, and to give her
a lead she wrote her a lengthy descriptive letter within a fortnight
of her return. Fanny answered, very disappointingly. Fanny indeed
had no literary gift, but it was new to Miss Winchelsea to find
herself deploring the want of gifts in a friend. That letter was
even criticised aloud in the safe solitude of Miss Winchelsea's
study, and her criticism, spoken with great bitterness, was "Twaddle!"
It was full of just the things Miss Winchelsea's letter had been
full of, particulars of the school. And of Mr. Snooks, only this
much: "I have had a letter from Mr. Snooks, and he has been over
to see me on two Saturday afternoons running. He talked about Rome
and you; we both talked about you. Your ears must have burnt, my
dear. . . ."
Miss Winchelsea repressed a desire to demand more explicit information,
and wrote the sweetest long letter again. "Tell me all about yourself,
dear. That journey has quite refreshed our ancient friendship,
and I do so want to keep in touch with you." About Mr. Snooks she
simply wrote on the fifth page that she was glad Fanny had seen
him, and that if he SHOULD ask after her, she was to be remembered
to him VERY KINDLY (underlined). And Fanny replied most obtusely
in the key of that "ancient friendship," reminding Miss Winchelsea
of a dozen foolish things of those old schoolgirl days at the training
college, and saying not a word about Mr. Snooks!
For nearly a week Miss Winchelsea was so angry at the failure
of Fanny as a go-between that she could not write to her. And then
she wrote less effusively, and in her letter she asked point-blank,
"Have you seen Mr. Snooks?" Fanny's letter was unexpectedly
satisfactory. "I HAVE seen Mr. Snooks," she wrote, and having once
named him she kept on about him; it was all Snooks--Snooks this and
Snooks that. He was to give a public lecture, said Fanny, among other
things. Yet Miss Winchelsea, after the first glow of gratification,
still found this letter a little unsatisfactory. Fanny did not report
Mr. Snooks as saying anything about Miss Winchelsea, nor as looking
a little white and worn, as he ought to have been doing. And behold!
before she had replied, came a second letter from Fanny on the same
theme, quite a gushing letter, and covering six sheets with her loose
feminine hand.
And about this second letter was a rather odd little thing that
Miss Winchelsea only noticed as she re-read it the third time.
Fanny's natural femininity had prevailed even against the round
and clear traditions of the training college; she was one of those
she-creatures born to make all her m's and n's and u's and r's and e's
alike, and to leave her o's and a's open and her i's undotted. So that
it was only after an elaborate comparison of word with word that Miss
Winchelsea felt assured Mr. Snooks was not really "Mr. Snooks"
at all! In Fanny's first letter of gush he was Mr. "Snooks," in her
second the spelling was changed to Mr. "Senoks." Miss Winchelsea's
hand positively trembled as she turned the sheet over--it meant
so much to her. For it had already begun to seem to her that even
the name of Mrs. Snooks might be avoided at too great a price,
and suddenly--this possibility! She turned over the six sheets,
all dappled with that critical name, and everywhere the first letter
had the form of an E! For a time she walked the room with a hand
pressed upon her heart.
She spent a whole day pondering this change, weighing a letter
of inquiry that should be at once discreet and effectual, weighing
too what action she should take after the answer came. She was
resolved that if this altered spelling was anything more than
a quaint fancy of Fanny's, she would write forthwith to Mr. Snooks.
She had now reached a stage when the minor refinements of behaviour
disappear. Her excuse remained uninvented, but she had the subject
of her letter clear in her mind, even to the hint that "circumstances
in my life have changed very greatly since we talked together." But
she never gave that hint. There came a third letter from that fitful
correspondent Fanny. The first line proclaimed her "the happiest
girl alive."
Miss Winchelsea crushed the letter in her hand--the rest unread--and
sat with her face suddenly very still. She had received it just before
morning school, and had opened it when the junior mathematicians were
well under way. Presently she resumed reading with an appearance of
great calm. But after the first sheet she went on reading the third
without discovering the error:--"told him frankly I did not like his
name," the third sheet began. "He told me he did not like it himself
--you know that sort of sudden frank way he has"--Miss Winchelsea
did know. "So I said 'Couldn't you change it?' He didn't see it
at first. Well, you know, dear, he had told me what it really meant;
it means Sevenoaks, only it has got down to Snooks--both Snooks
and Noaks, dreadfully vulgar surnames though they be, are really
worn forms of Sevenoaks. So I said--even I have my bright ideas
at times--'if it got down from Sevenoaks to Snooks, why not get it
back from Snooks to Sevenoaks?' And the long and the short of it
is, dear, he couldn't refuse me, and he changed his spelling there
and then to Senoks for the bills of the new lecture. And afterwards,
when we are married, we shall put in the apostrophe and make it
Se'noks. Wasn't it kind of him to mind that fancy of mine, when
many men would have taken offence? But it is just like him all over;
he is as kind as he is clever. Because he knew as well as I did
that I would have had him in spite of it, had he been ten times
Snooks. But he did it all the same."
The class was startled by the sound of paper being viciously torn,
and looked up to see Miss Winchelsea white in the face, and with
some very small pieces of paper clenched in one hand. For a few
seconds they stared at her stare, and then her expression changed
back to a more familiar one. "Has any one finished number three?" she
asked in an even tone. She remained calm after that. But impositions
ruled high that day. And she spent two laborious evenings writing
letters of various sorts to Fanny, before she found a decent
congratulatory vein. Her reason struggled hopelessly against the
persuasion that Fanny had behaved in an exceedingly treacherous manner.
One may be extremely refined and still capable of a very sore heart.
Certainly Miss Winchelsea's heart was very sore. She had moods
of sexual hostility, in which she generalised uncharitably about
mankind. "He forgot himself with me," she said. "But Fanny is pink
and pretty and soft and a fool--a very excellent match for a Man."
And by way of a wedding present she sent Fanny a gracefully bound
volume of poetry by George Meredith, and Fanny wrote back a grossly
happy letter to say that it was "ALL beautiful." Miss Winchelsea
hoped that some day Mr. Senoks might take up that slim book and
think for a moment of the donor. Fanny wrote several times before
and about her marriage, pursuing that fond legend of their "ancient
friendship," and giving her happiness in the fullest detail. And
Miss Winchelsea wrote to Helen for the first time after the Roman
journey, saying nothing about the marriage, but expressing very
cordial feelings.
They had been in Rome at Easter, and Fanny was married in the
August vacation. She wrote a garrulous letter to Miss Winchelsea,
describing her home-coming, and the astonishing arrangements
of their "teeny weeny" little house. Mr. Se'noks was now beginning
to assume a refinement in Miss Winchelsea's memory out of all
proportion to the facts of the case, and she tried in vain to imagine
his cultured greatness in a "teeny weeny" little house. "Am busy
enamelling a cosey corner," said Fanny, sprawling to the end of her
third sheet, "so excuse more." Miss Winchelsea answered in her
best style, gently poking fun at Fanny's arrangements and hoping
intensely that Mr. Sen'oks might see the letter. Only this hope
enabled her to write at all, answering not only that letter but
one in November and one at Christmas.
The two latter communications contained urgent invitations for her
to come to Steely Bank on a Visit during the Christmas holidays.
She tried to think that HE had told her to ask that, but it was
too much like Fanny's opulent good-nature. She could not but believe
that he must be sick of his blunder by this time; and she had more
than a hope that he would presently write her a letter beginning
"Dear Friend." Something subtly tragic in the separation was
a great support to her, a sad misunderstanding. To have been jilted
would have been intolerable. But he never wrote that letter beginning
"Dear Friend."
For two years Miss Winchelsea could not go to see her friends,
in spite of the reiterated invitations of Mrs. Sevenoaks--it became
full Sevenoaks in the second year. Then one day near the Easter
rest she felt lonely and without a soul to understand her in the
world, and her mind ran once more on what is called Platonic
friendship. Fanny was clearly happy and busy in her new sphere
of domesticity, but no doubt HE had his lonely hours. Did he ever
think of those days in Rome--gone now beyond recalling? No one
had understood her as he had done; no one in all the world. It
would be a sort of melancholy pleasure to talk to him again, and
what harm could it do? Why should she deny herself? That night
she wrote a sonnet, all but the last two lines of the octave--which
would not come, and the next day she composed a graceful little note
to tell Fanny she was coming down.
And so she saw him again.
Even at the first encounter it was evident he had changed; he seemed
stouter and less nervous, and it speedily appeared that his
conversation had already lost much of its old delicacy. There even
seemed a justification for Helen's description of weakness in his
face--in certain lights it WAS weak. He seemed busy and preoccupied
about his affairs, and almost under the impression that Miss Winchelsea
had come for the sake of Fanny. He discussed his dinner with Fanny
in an intelligent way. They only had one good long talk together,
and that came to nothing. He did not refer to Rome, and spent some
time abusing a man who had stolen an idea he had had for a text-book.
It did not seem a very wonderful idea to Miss Winchelsea. She
discovered he had forgotten the names of more than half the painters
whose work they had rejoiced over in Florence.
It was a sadly disappointing week, and Miss Winchelsea was glad
when it came to an end. Under various excuses she avoided visiting
them again. After a time the visitor's room was occupied by their
two little boys, and Fanny's invitations ceased. The intimacy of
her letters had long since faded away.
13. 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 dearly 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 dream-like--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 at 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 grey
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 catchwords--
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 grey 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 grey 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."
"I 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 Evesham had made. Now, Evesham 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 reawakened 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 Evesham been saying?'
"And with that the man began, nothing loath, and I must confess
even I was struck by Evesham'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 Evesham'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 you 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 Evesham 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 Evesham 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, inspite
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 do no 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 Castellamare 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 Rhinemouth were manoeuvring
now in the eastward sky. Evesham 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 then even 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 Evesham'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 grey 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
grey 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 halfway 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 spearheads 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 Evesham'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 didn't 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 Evesham'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--Evesham'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 awhirl
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 aquiver 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."
"Southwest," 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 dreamstuff,
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 believed 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 grey;
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 grey, 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 southwest.
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 southeastern 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 Evesham'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 southeast 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. O, 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 Paestum,
where those great temples stand alone. I had some vague idea that
by Paestum 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 Paestum, 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 those 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 these 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 something flashed 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 Paestum
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 then 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 grey 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 truckload 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."
End of the Project Gutenberg etext of Twelve Stories and a Dream by H.G.
Wells