TEN MINUTE STORIES




                              TEN MINUTE
                                STORIES

                         BY ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

                     AUTHOR OF “JOHN SILENCE” ETC.


                               NEW YORK
                       E. P. DUTTON AND COMPANY
                              PUBLISHERS




                 _FIRST EDITION_      _February 1914_
                 _Reprinted_          _February 1914_


                         _All rights reserved_




PREFATORY NOTE


The Author wishes to thank the Editors of the _Morning Post_, the
_Westminster Gazette_, and _Country Life_ for permission to reprint in
this volume stories originally published in their papers.




CONTENTS


                                                                    PAGE

I. ACCESSORY BEFORE THE FACT                                           1

II. THE DEFERRED APPOINTMENT                                          12

III. THE PRAYER                                                       21

IV. STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF A BARONET                                32

V. THE SECRET                                                         43

VI. THE LEASE                                                         51

VII. UP AND DOWN                                                      59

VIII. FAITH CURE ON THE CHANNEL                                       69

IX. THE GOBLIN’S COLLECTION                                           76

X. IMAGINATION                                                        88

XI. THE INVITATION                                                    95

XII. THE IMPULSE                                                     103

XIII. HER BIRTHDAY                                                   111

XIV. TWO IN ONE                                                      116

XV. ANCIENT LIGHTS                                                   128

XVI. DREAM TRESPASS                                                  139

XVII. LET NOT THE SUN----                                            152

XVIII. ENTRANCE AND EXIT                                             162

XIX. YOU _MAY_ TELEPHONE FROM HERE                                   170

XX. THE WHISPERERS                                                   179

XXI. VIOLENCE                                                        189

XXII. THE HOUSE OF THE PAST                                          202

XXIII. JIMBO’S LONGEST DAY                                           211

XXIV. IF THE CAP FITS----                                            219

XXV. NEWS _v._ NOURISHMENT                                           229

XXVI. WIND                                                           238

XXVII. PINES                                                         245

XXVIII. THE WINTER ALPS                                              252

XXIX. THE SECOND GENERATION                                          260




TEN MINUTE STORIES




I

ACCESSORY BEFORE THE FACT


At the moorland cross-roads Martin stood examining the sign-post for
several minutes in some bewilderment. The names on the four arms were
not what he expected, distances were not given, and his map, he
concluded with impatience, must be hopelessly out of date. Spreading it
against the post, he stooped to study it more closely. The wind blew the
corners flapping against his face. The small print was almost
indecipherable in the fading light. It appeared, however--as well as he
could make out--that two miles back he must have taken the wrong
turning.

He remembered that turning. The path had looked inviting; he had
hesitated a moment, then followed it, caught by the usual lure of
walkers that it “might prove a short cut.” The short-cut snare is old
as human nature. For some minutes he studied the sign-post and the map
alternately. Dusk was falling, and his knapsack had grown heavy. He
could not make the two guides tally, however, and a feeling of
uncertainty crept over his mind. He felt oddly baffled, frustrated. His
thought grew thick. Decision was most difficult. “I’m muddled,” he
thought; “I must be tired,” as at length he chose the most likely arm.
“Sooner or later it will bring me to an inn, though not the one I
intended.” He accepted his walker’s luck, and started briskly. The arm
read, “Over Litacy Hill” in small, fine letters that danced and shifted
every time he looked at them; but the name was not discoverable on the
map. It was, however, inviting like the short cut. A similar impulse
again directed his choice. Only this time it seemed more insistent,
almost urgent.

And he became aware, then, of the exceeding loneliness of the country
about him. The road for a hundred yards went straight, then curved like
a white river running into space; the deep blue-green of heather lined
the banks, spreading upwards through the twilight; and occasional small
pines stood solitary here and there, all unexplained. The curious
adjective, having made its appearance, haunted him. So many things that
afternoon were similarly--unexplained: the short cut, the darkened map,
the names on the sign-post, his own erratic impulses, and the growing
strange confusion that crept upon his spirit. The entire country-side
needed explanation, though perhaps “interpretation” was the truer word.
Those little lonely trees had made him see it. Why had he lost his way
so easily? Why did he suffer vague impressions to influence his
direction? Why was he here--exactly _here_? And why did he go now “over
Litacy Hill”?

Then, by a green field that shone like a thought of daylight amid the
darkness of the moor, he saw a figure lying in the grass. It was a blot
upon the landscape, a mere huddled patch of dirty rags, yet with a
certain horrid picturesqueness too; and his mind--though his German was
of the schoolroom order--at once picked out the German equivalents as
against the English. _Lump_ and _Lumpen_ flashed across his brain most
oddly. They seemed in that moment right, and so expressive, almost like
onomatopœic words, if that were possible of sight. Neither “rags” nor
“rascal” would have fitted what he saw. The adequate description was in
German.

Here was a clue tossed up by the part of him that did not reason. But it
seems he missed it. And the next minute the tramp rose to a sitting
posture and asked the time of evening. In German he asked it. And
Martin, answering without a second’s hesitation, gave it, also in
German, “_halb sieben_”--half-past six. The instinctive guess was
accurate. A glance at his watch when he looked a moment later proved
it. He heard the man say, with the covert insolence of tramps, “T’ank
you; much opliged.” For Martin had not shown his watch--another
intuition subconsciously obeyed.

He quickened his pace along that lonely road, a curious jumble of
thoughts and feelings surging through him. He had somehow known the
question would come, and come in German. Yet it flustered and dismayed
him. Another thing had also flustered and dismayed him. He had expected
it in the same queer fashion: it was right. For when the ragged brown
thing rose to ask the question, a part of it remained lying on the
grass--another brown, dirty thing. There were two tramps. And he saw
both faces clearly. Behind the untidy beards, and below the old slouch
hats, he caught the look of unpleasant, clever faces that watched him
closely while he passed. The eyes followed him. For a second he looked
straight into those eyes, so that he could not fail to know them. And he
understood, quite horridly, that both faces were too sleek, refined, and
cunning for those of ordinary tramps. The men were not really tramps at
all. They were disguised.

“How covertly they watched me!” was his thought, as he hurried along the
darkening road, aware in dead earnestness now of the loneliness and
desolation of the moorland all about him.

Uneasy and distressed, he increased his pace. Midway in thinking what
an unnecessarily clanking noise his nailed boots made upon the hard
white road, there came upon him with a rush together the company of
these things that haunted him as “unexplained.” They brought a single
definite message: That all this business was not really meant for him at
all, and hence his confusion and bewilderment; that he had intruded into
someone else’s scenery, and was trespassing upon another’s map of life.
By some wrong _inner_ turning he had interpolated his person into a
group of foreign forces which operated in the little world of someone
else. Unwittingly, somewhere, he had crossed the threshold, and now was
fairly in--a trespasser, an eavesdropper, a Peeping Tom. He was
listening, peeping; overhearing things he had no right to know, because
they were intended for another. Like a ship at sea he was intercepting
wireless messages he could not properly interpret, because his Receiver
was not accurately tuned to their reception. And more--these messages
were warnings!

Then fear dropped upon him like the night. He was caught in a net of
delicate, deep forces he could not manage, knowing neither their origin
nor purpose. He had walked into some huge psychic trap elaborately
planned and baited, yet calculated for another than himself. Something
had lured him in, something in the landscape, the time of day, his mood.
Owing to some undiscovered weakness in himself he had been easily
caught. His fear slipped easily into terror.

What happened next happened with such speed and concentration that it
all seemed crammed into a moment. At once and in a heap it happened. It
was quite inevitable. Down the white road to meet him a man came swaying
from side to side in drunkenness quite obviously feigned--a tramp; and
while Martin made room for him to pass, the lurch changed in a second to
attack, and the fellow was upon him. The blow was sudden and terrific,
yet even while it fell Martin was aware that behind him rushed a second
man, who caught his legs from under him and bore him with a thud and
crash to the ground. Blows rained then; he saw a gleam of something
shining; a sudden deadly nausea plunged him into utter weakness where
resistance was impossible. Something of fire entered his throat, and
from his mouth poured a thick sweet thing that choked him. The world
sank far away into darkness.... Yet through all the horror and confusion
ran the trail of two clear thoughts: he realised that the first tramp
had sneaked at a fast double through the heather and so come down to
meet him; and that something heavy was torn from fastenings that clipped
it tight and close beneath his clothes against his body....

Abruptly then the darkness lifted, passed utterly away. He found himself
peering into the map against the sign-post. The wind was flapping the
corners against his cheek, and he was poring over names that now he saw
quite clear. Upon the arms of the sign-post above were those he had
expected to find, and the map recorded them quite faithfully. All was
accurate again and as it should be. He read the name of the village he
had meant to make--it was plainly visible in the dusk, two miles the
distance given. Bewildered, shaken, unable to think of anything, he
stuffed the map into his pocket unfolded, and hurried forward like a man
who has just wakened from an awful dream that had compressed into a
single second all the detailed misery of some prolonged, oppressive
nightmare.

He broke into a steady trot that soon became a run; the perspiration
poured from him; his legs felt weak, and his breath was difficult to
manage. He was only conscious of the overpowering desire to get away as
fast as possible from the sign-post at the cross-roads where the
dreadful vision had flashed upon him. For Martin, accountant on a
holiday, had never dreamed of any world of psychic possibilities. The
entire thing was torture. It was worse than a “cooked” balance of the
books that some conspiracy of clerks and directors proved at his
innocent door. He raced as though the country-side ran crying at his
heels. And always still ran with him the incredible conviction that none
of this was really meant for himself at all. He had overheard the
secrets of another. He had taken the warning for another into himself,
and so altered its direction. He had thereby prevented its right
delivery. It all shocked him beyond words. It dislocated the machinery
of his just and accurate soul. The warning was intended for another, who
could not--would not--now receive it.

The physical exertion, however, brought at length a more comfortable
reaction and some measure of composure. With the lights in sight, he
slowed down and entered the village at a reasonable pace. The inn was
reached, a bedroom inspected and engaged, and supper ordered with the
solid comfort of a large Bass to satisfy an unholy thirst and complete
the restoration of balance. The unusual sensations largely passed away,
and the odd feeling that anything in his simple, wholesome world
required explanation was no longer present. Still with a vague
uneasiness about him, though actual fear quite gone, he went into the
bar to smoke an after-supper pipe and chat with the natives, as his
pleasure was upon a holiday, and so saw two men leaning upon the counter
at the far end with their backs towards him. He saw their faces
instantly in the glass, and the pipe nearly slipped from between his
teeth. Clean-shaven, sleek, clever faces--and he caught a word or two
as they talked over their drinks--German words. Well dressed they were,
both men, with nothing about them calling for particular attention; they
might have been two tourists holiday-making like himself in tweeds and
walking-boots. And they presently paid for their drinks and went out. He
never saw them face to face at all; but the sweat broke out afresh all
over him, a feverish rush of heat and ice together ran about his body;
beyond question he recognised the two tramps, this time not
disguised--_not yet_ disguised.

He remained in his corner without moving, puffing violently at an
extinguished pipe, gripped helplessly by the return of that first vile
terror. It came again to him with an absolute clarity of certainty that
it was not with himself they had to do, these men, and, further, that he
had no right in the world to interfere. He had no _locus standi_ at all;
it would be immoral ... even if the opportunity came. And the
opportunity, he felt, would come. He had been an eavesdropper, and had
come upon private information of a secret kind that he had no right to
make use of, even that good might come--even to save life. He sat on in
his corner, terrified and silent, waiting for the thing that should
happen next.

But night came without explanation. Nothing happened. He slept soundly.
There was no other guest at the inn but an elderly man, apparently a
tourist like himself. He wore gold-rimmed glasses, and in the morning
Martin overheard him asking the landlord what direction he should take
for Litacy Hill. His teeth began then to chatter and a weakness came
into his knees. “You turn to the left at the cross-roads,” Martin broke
in before the landlord could reply; “you’ll see the sign-post about two
miles from here, and after that it’s a matter of four miles more.” How
in the world did he know, flashed horribly through him. “I’m going that
way myself,” he was saying next; “I’ll go with you for a bit--if you
don’t mind!” The words came out impulsively and ill-considered; of their
own accord they came. For his own direction was exactly opposite. _He
did not want the man to go alone._ The stranger, however, easily evaded
his offer of companionship. He thanked him with the remark that he was
starting later in the day.... They were standing, all three, beside the
horse-trough in front of the inn, when at that very moment a tramp,
slouching along the road, looked up and asked the time of day. And it
was the man with the gold-rimmed glasses who told him.

“T’ank you; much opliged,” the tramp replied, passing on with his slow,
slouching gait, while the landlord, a talkative fellow, proceeded to
remark upon the number of Germans that lived in England and were ready
to swell the Teutonic invasion which _he_, for his part, deemed
imminent.

But Martin heard it not. Before he had gone a mile upon his way he went
into the woods to fight his conscience all alone. His feebleness, his
cowardice, were surely criminal. Real anguish tortured him. A dozen
times he decided to go back upon his steps, and a dozen times the
singular authority that whispered he had no right to interfere prevented
him. How could he act upon knowledge gained by eavesdropping? How
interfere in the private business of another’s hidden life merely
because he had overheard, as at the telephone, its secret dangers? Some
inner confusion prevented straight thinking altogether. The stranger
would merely think him mad. He had no “fact” to go upon.... He smothered
a hundred impulses ... and finally went on his way with a shaking,
troubled heart.

The last two days of his holiday were ruined by doubts and questions and
alarms--all justified later when he read of the murder of a tourist upon
Litacy Hill. The man wore gold-rimmed glasses, and carried in a belt
about his person a large sum of money. His throat was cut. And the
police were hard upon the trail of a mysterious pair of tramps, said to
be--Germans.




II

THE DEFERRED APPOINTMENT


The little “Photographic Studio” in the side-street beyond Shepherd’s
Bush had done no business all day, for the light had been uninviting to
even the vainest sitter, and the murky sky that foreboded snow had hung
over London without a break since dawn. Pedestrians went hurrying and
shivering along the pavements, disappearing into the gloom of countless
ugly little houses the moment they passed beyond the glare of the big
electric standards that lit the thundering motor-buses in the main
street. The first flakes of snow, indeed, were already falling slowly,
as though they shrank from settling in the grime. The wind moaned and
sang dismally, catching the ears and lifting the shabby coat-tails of
Mr. Mortimer Jenkyn, “Photographic Artist,” as he stood outside and put
the shutters up with his own cold hands in despair of further trade. It
was five minutes to six.

With a lingering glance at the enlarged portrait of a fat man in masonic
regalia who was the pride and glory of his window-front, he fixed the
last hook of the shutter, and turned to go indoors. There was developing
and framing to be done upstairs, not very remunerative work, but better,
at any rate, than waiting in an empty studio for customers who did not
come--wasting the heat of two oil-stoves into the bargain. And it was
then, in the act of closing the street-door behind him, that he saw a
man standing in the shadows of the narrow passage, staring fixedly into
his face.

Mr. Jenkyn admits that he jumped. The man was so very close, yet he had
not seen him come in; and in the eyes was such a curiously sad and
appealing expression. He had already sent his assistant home, and there
was no other occupant of the little two-storey house. The man must have
slipped past him from the dark street while his back was turned. Who in
the world could he be, and what could he want? Was he beggar, customer,
or rogue?

“Good evening,” Mr. Jenkyn said, washing his hands, but using only half
the oily politeness of tone with which he favoured sitters. He was just
going to add “sir,” feeling it wiser to be on the safe side, when the
stranger shifted his position so that the light fell directly upon his
face, and Mr. Jenkyn was aware that he--recognised him. Unless he was
greatly mistaken, it was the second-hand bookseller in the main street.

“Ah, it’s you, Mr. Wilson!” he stammered, making half a question of it,
as though not quite convinced. “Pardon me; I did not quite catch your
face--er--I was just shutting up.” The other bowed his head in reply.
“Won’t you come in? Do, please.”

Mr. Jenkyn led the way. He wondered what was the matter. The visitor was
not among his customers; indeed, he could hardly claim to know him,
having only seen him occasionally when calling at the shop for slight
purchases of paper and what not. The man, he now realised, looked
fearfully ill and wasted, his face pale and haggard. It upset him
rather, this sudden, abrupt call. He felt sorry, pained. He felt uneasy.

Into the studio they passed, the visitor going first as though he knew
the way, Mr. Jenkyn noticing through his flurry that he was in his
“Sunday best.” Evidently he had come with a definite purpose. It was
odd. Still without speaking, he moved straight across the room and posed
himself in front of the dingy background of painted trees, facing the
camera. The studio was brightly lit. He seated himself in the faded
arm-chair, crossed his legs, drew up the little round table with the
artificial roses upon it in a tall, thin vase, and struck an attitude.
He meant to be photographed. His eyes, staring straight into the lens,
draped as it was with the black velvet curtain, seemed, however, to take
no account of the Photographic Artist. But Mr. Jenkyn, standing still
beside the door, felt a cold air playing over his face that was not
merely the winter cold from the street. He felt his hair rise. A slight
shiver ran down his back. In that pale, drawn face, and in those staring
eyes across the room that gazed so fixedly into the draped camera, he
read the signature of illness that no longer knows hope. It was Death
that he saw.

In a flash the impression came and went--less than a second. The whole
business, indeed, had not occupied two minutes. Mr. Jenkyn pulled
himself together with a strong effort, dismissed his foolish obsession,
and came sharply to practical considerations. “Forgive me,” he said, a
trifle thickly, confusedly, “but I--er--did not quite realise. You
desire to sit for your portrait, of course. I’ve had such a busy day,
and--’ardly looked for a customer so late.” The clock, as he spoke,
struck six. But he did not notice the sound. Through his mind ran
another reflection: “A man shouldn’t ’ave his picture taken when he’s
ill and next door to dying. Lord! He’ll want a lot of touching-up and
finishin’, too!”

He began discussing the size, price, and length--the usual rigmarole of
his “profession,” and the other, sitting there, still vouchsafed no
comment or reply. He simply made the impression of a man in a great
hurry, who wished to finish a disagreeable business without unnecessary
talk. Many men, reflected the photographer, were the same; being
photographed was worse to them than going to the dentist. Mr. Jenkyn
filled the pauses with his professional running talk and patter, while
the sitter, fixed and motionless, kept his first position and stared at
the camera. The photographer rather prided himself upon his ability to
make sitters look bright and pleasant; but this man was hopeless. It was
only afterwards Mr. Jenkyn recalled the singular fact that he never once
touched him--that, in fact, something connected possibly with his frail
appearance of deadly illness had prevented his going close to arrange
the details of the hastily assumed pose.

“It must be a flashlight, of course, Mr. Wilson,” he said, fidgeting at
length with the camera-stand, shifting it slightly nearer; while the
other moved his head gently yet impatiently in agreement. Mr. Jenkyn
longed to suggest his coming another time when he looked better, to
speak with sympathy of his illness; to say something, in fact, that
might establish a personal relation. But his tongue in this respect
seemed utterly tied. It was just this personal relation which seemed
impossible of approach--absolutely and peremptorily impossible. There
seemed a barrier between the two. He could only chatter the usual
professional commonplaces. To tell the truth, Mr. Jenkyn thinks he felt
a little dazed the whole time--not quite his usual self. And, meanwhile,
his uneasiness oddly increased. He hurried. He, too, wanted the matter
done with and his visitor gone.

At length everything was ready, only the flashlight waiting to be turned
on, when, stooping, he covered his head with the velvet cloth and peered
through the lens--at no one! When he says “at no one,” however, he
qualifies it thus: “There was a quick flash of brilliant white light and
a face in the middle of it--my gracious Heaven! But such a face--_’im_,
yet not _’im_--like a sudden rushing glory of a face! It shot off like
lightning out of the camera’s field of vision. It left me blinded, I
assure you, ’alf blinded, and that’s a fac’. It was sheer dazzling!”

It seems Mr. Jenkyn remained entangled a moment in the cloth, eyes
closed, breath coming in gasps, for when he got clear and straightened
up again, staring once more at his customer over the top of the camera,
he stared for the second time at--no one. And the cap that he held in
his left hand he clapped feverishly over the uncovered lens. Mr. Jenkyn
staggered ... looked hurriedly round the empty studio, then ran,
knocking a chair over as he went, into the passage. The hall was
deserted, the front door closed. His visitor had disappeared “almost as
though he hadn’t never been there at all”--thus he described it to
himself in a terrified whisper. And again he felt the hair rise on his
scalp; his skin crawled a little, and something put back the ice against
his spine.

After a moment he returned to the studio and somewhat feverishly
examined it. There stood the chair against the dingy background of
trees; and there, close beside it, was the round table with the flower
vase. Less than a minute ago Mr. Thomas Wilson, looking like death, had
been sitting in that very chair. “It wasn’t _all_ a sort of dreamin’,
then,” ran through his disordered and frightened mind. “I did see
something ...!” He remembered vaguely stories he had read in the
newspapers, stories of queer warnings that saved people from disasters,
apparitions, faces seen in dream, and so forth. “Maybe,” he thought with
confusion, “something’s going to ’appen to _me_!” Further than that he
could not get for some little time, as he stood there staring about him,
almost expecting that Mr. Wilson might reappear as strangely as he had
disappeared. He went over the whole scene again and again,
reconstructing it in minutest detail. And only then, for the first time,
did he plainly realise two things which somehow or other he had not
thought strange before, but now thought very strange. For his visitor,
he remembered, had not uttered a single word, nor had he, Mr. Jenkyn,
once touched his person.... And, thereupon, without more ado, he put on
his hat and coat and went round to the little shop in the main street
to buy some ink and stationery which he did not in the least require.

The shop seemed all as usual, though Mr. Wilson himself was not visible
behind the littered desk. A tall gentleman was talking in low tones to
the partner. Mr. Jenkyn bowed as he went in, then stood examining a case
of cheap stylographic pens, waiting for the others to finish. It was
impossible to avoid overhearing. Besides, the little shop had
distinguished customers sometimes, he had heard, and this evidently was
one of them. He only understood part of the conversation, but he
remembers all of it. “Singular, yes, these last words of dying men,” the
tall man was saying, “very singular. You remember Newman’s: ‘More
light,’ wasn’t it?” The bookseller nodded. “Fine,” he said, “fine,
that!” There was a pause. Mr. Jenkyn stooped lower over the pens. “This,
too, was fine in its way,” the gentleman added, straightening up to go;
“the old promise, you see, unfulfilled but not forgotten. Cropped up
suddenly out of the delirium. Curious, very curious! A good,
conscientious man to the last. In all the twenty years I’ve known him he
never broke his word....”

A motor-bus drowned a sentence, and then was heard in the bookseller’s
voice, as he moved towards the door: “...You see, he was half-way down
the stairs before they found him, always repeating the same thing, ‘I
promised the wife, I promised the wife.’ And it was a job, I’m told,
getting him back again ... he struggled so. That’s what finished him so
quick, I suppose. Fifteen minutes later he was gone, and his last words
were always the same, ‘I promised the wife’....”

The tall man was gone, and Mr. Jenkyn forgot about his purchases. “When
did it ’appen?” he heard himself asking in a voice he hardly recognised
as his own. And the reply roared and thundered in his ears as he went
down the street a minute later to his house: “Close on six o’clock--a
few minutes before the hour. Been ill for weeks, yes. Caught him out of
bed with high fever on his way to your place, Mr. Jenkyn, calling at the
top of his voice that he’d forgotten to see you about his picture being
taken. Yes, very sad, very sad indeed.”

But Mr. Jenkyn did not return to his studio. He left the light burning
there all night. He went to the little room where he slept out, and next
day gave the plate to be developed by his assistant. “Defective plate,
sir,” was the report in due course; “shows nothing but a flash of
light--uncommonly brilliant.” “Make a print of it all the same,” was the
reply. Six months later, when he examined the plate and print, Mr.
Jenkyn found that the singular streaks of light had disappeared from
both. The uncommon brilliance had faded out completely as though it had
never been there.




III

THE PRAYER


There was a glitter in the eye of O’Malley when they met. “I’ve got it!”
he said under his breath, holding out a tiny phial with the ominous red
label.

“Got what?” asked Jones, as though he didn’t know. Both were medical
students; both of a speculative and adventurous turn of mind as well;
the Irishman, however, ever the leader in mischief.

“The stuff!” was the reply. “The recipe the Hindu gave me. Your night’s
free, isn’t it? Mine, too. We’ll try it. Eh?”

They eyed the little bottle with its shouting label--Poison. Jones took
it up, fingered it, drew the cork, sniffed it. “Ugh!” he exclaimed,
“it’s got an awful smell. Don’t think I could swallow that!”

“You don’t swallow it,” answered O’Malley impatiently. “You sniff it up
through the nose--just a drop. It goes down the throat that way.”

“Irish swallowing, eh?” laughed Jones uneasily. “It looks wicked to
me.” He played with the bottle, till the other snatched it away.

“Look out, man! Begad, there’s enough there to kill a Cabinet Minister,
or a horse. It’s the real stuff, I tell you. I told him it was for a
psychical experiment. You remember the talk we had that night----”

“Oh, I remember well enough. But it’s not worth while in my opinion. It
will only make us sick.” He said it almost angrily. “Besides, we’ve got
enough hallucinations in life already without inducing others----”

O’Malley glanced up quickly. “Nothing of the sort,” he snapped. “You’re
backing out. You swore you’d try it with me if I got it. The effect----”

“Well, what is the effect?”

The Irishman looked keenly at him. He answered very low. Evidently he
said something he really believed. There was gravity, almost solemnity,
in his voice and manner.

“Opens the inner sight,” he whispered darkly. “Makes you sensitive to
thoughts and thoughtforces.” He paused a moment, staring hard into the
other’s eyes. “For instance,” he added slowly, earnestly, “if somebody’s
thinking hard about _you_, I should twig it. See? I should _see_ the
thought-stream getting at you--influencing you--making you do this and
that. The air is full of loose and wandering thoughts from other minds.
I should see these thoughts hovering about your mind like flies trying
to settle. Understand? The cause of a sudden change of mood in a man, an
inspiration, a helping thought--a temptation----!”

“Bosh!”

“Are you afraid?”

“No. But it’s a poisonous doctrine--that such experiments are worth
while even if--if----”

But O’Malley knew his pal.... They took the prescribed dose together,
laughing, scoffing, hoping. Then they went out to dine. “We must eat
very little,” explained the Irishman. “The stomach must be comparatively
empty. And drink nothing at all.”

“What a bore!” said Jones, who was always hungry, and usually thirsty.
The prescribed hour passed between the taking of the dose and dinner.
They felt nothing more than what Jones described as a “beastly
uncomfortable sort of inner heat.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Opposite them, at a table alone, sat a small man, over-dressed according
to their standards, and wearing diamond rings. His face had a curious
mixture of refinement and wickedness--like a man naturally sensitive
whom circumstances, indulgence, or some special temptation had led
astray. He did not notice their somewhat close attention because, in his
turn, he was closely watching--somebody else. He ate and drank soberly,
but drew his dinner out. The “somebody else” he watched, obviously
enough, was a country couple, up probably for the festivities due to the
presence of a foreign Potentate in town. They were bewildered by big
London. They carried hand-bags. From time to time the old man fingered
his breast-pocket. He looked about him nervously. The be-ringed man was
kind to them, lent them his newspaper, passed the salt, gave them scraps
of favoured, kind, and sympathetic conversation. He was very gentle with
them.

“Feel anything yet?” asked O’Malley for the tenth time, noticing a
curious, passing look on his companion’s face. “I don’t feel a blessed
thing meself! I believe that chemist fooled me, gave me diluted stuff or
something----” He stopped short, caught by the other’s eye. They had
been dining very sparingly, much to the disgust of the waiter, who
wanted their table for more remunerative customers.

“I do feel something, yes,” was the quiet reply. “Or, rather, I _see_
something. It’s odd; but I really do----”

“What? Out with it! Tell me!”

“A sort of wavy line of gold,” said Jones calmly, “gold and shining. And
sometimes it’s white. It flits about that fellow’s head--that fellow
over there.” He indicated the man with the rings. “Almost as if--it were
trying to get into him----”

“Bosh!” said O’Malley, who was ever the last to believe in the success
of his own experiments. “You swear it?”

The other’s face convinced him, and a thrill went down his Irish spine.

“Hush,” said Jones in a lower tone, “don’t shout. I see it right enough.
It’s like a little wavy stream of light. It’s going all about his head
and eyes. By gad, it’s lovely, though--it’s like a flower now, a
floating blossom--and now a strip of thin soft gold. It’s got him! By
George, I tell you, it’s got him----!”

“Got him?” echoed the Irishman, genuinely impressed.

“Got _into_ him, I meant. It’s disappeared--gone clean into his head.
Look!”

O’Malley looked hard, but saw nothing. “Me boy!” he cried, “the stuff
_was_ real. It’s working. Watch it. I do believe you’ve seen a
thought--a thought from somebody else--a wandering thought. It’s got
into his mind. It may affect his actions, movements, decisions. Good
Lord! The stuff was not diluted, after all. You’ve seen a
thought-force!” He was tremendously excited. Jones, however, was too
absorbed in what he saw to feel excitement. Whether it was due to the
drug or not, he knew he saw a real thing.

“Wonder if it’s a good one or a bad one!” whispered the Irishman.
“Wonder what sort of mind it comes from! Where? How far away?” He
wondered a number of things. He chattered below his breath like a dying
gramophone. But his companion just sat, staring in rapt silence.

“What are _you_ doing here?” said a voice from the table behind them
quietly. And O’Malley, turning--Jones was too preoccupied--recognised a
plain-clothes detective whom he chanced to know from having been
associated with him in a recent poisoning case.

“Nothing particular; just having dinner,” he answered. “And you?”

The detective made no secret of his object. “Watching the crowds for
their own safety,” he said, “that’s all. London’s full of prey just
now--all up from the country, with their bags in their hands, their
money in their breast-pockets, and good-natured folks ready everywhere
to help ’em, and help themselves at the same time.” He laughed, nodding
towards the man with the rings. “All the crooks are on the job,” he
added significantly. “There’s an old friend of ours. He doesn’t know
_me_, but I know him right enough. He’s usually made up as a clergyman;
and to-night he’s after that old couple at the nex’ table, or my name
ain’t Joe Leary! Don’t stare, or he’ll notice.” He turned his head the
other way.

O’Malley, however, was far too interested in hoping for a psychical
experience of his own, and in watching the “alleged phenomena” of his
companion, to feel much interest in a mere detective’s hunt for
pickpockets. He turned towards his friend again. “What’s up now?” he
asked, with his back to the detective; “see anything more?”

“It’s perfectly wonderful,” whispered Jones softly. “It’s out again. I
can see the gold thread, all shining and alive, clean down in the man’s
mind and heart, then out, then in again. It’s making him different--I
swear it is. By George, it’s like a blessed chemical experiment. I can’t
explain it as I see it, but he’s getting sort of bright within--golden
like the thread.” Jones was wrought up, excited, moved. It was
impossible to doubt his earnestness. He described a thing he really saw.
O’Malley listened with envy and resentment.

“Blast it all!” he exclaimed. “I see nothing. I didn’t take enough!” And
he drew the little phial out of his pocket.

“Look! He’s _changed_!” exclaimed Jones, interrupting the movement so
suddenly that O’Malley dropped the phial and it smashed to atoms against
the iron edge of the umbrella-stand. “His thought’s altered. He’s going
out. The gold has spread all through him----!”

“By gosh!” put in O’Malley, so loud that people stared, “it’s helped
him--made him a better man--turned him from evil. It’s that blessed
wandering thought! Follow it, follow it! Quick!” And in the general
confusion that came with the paying of bills, cleaning up the broken
glass, and the rest, the “crook” slipped out into the crowd and was
lost, the detective murmured something about “wonder what made him leave
so good a trail!” and the Irishman filled in the pauses with hurried,
nervous sentences--“Keep your eye on the line of gold! We’ll follow it!
We’ll trace it to its source. Never mind the tip! Hurry, hurry! Don’t
lose it!”

But Jones was already out, drawn by the power of his obvious conviction.
They went into the street. Regardless of the blaze of lights and blur of
shadows, the noise of traffic and the rush of the crowds, they followed
what Jones described as the “line of wavy gold.”

“Don’t lose it! For Heaven’s sake, don’t lose it!” O’Malley cried,
dodging with difficulty after the disappearing figure. “It’s a genuine
thought-force from another mind. Follow it! Trace it! We’ll track it to
its source--some noble thinker somewhere--some gracious woman--some
exalted, golden source, at any rate!” He was wholly caught away now by
the splendour of the experiment’s success. A thought that could make a
criminal change his mind must issue from a radiant well of rare and
purest thinking. He remembered the Hindu’s words: “You will see thoughts
in colour--bad ones, lurid and streaked--good ones, sweet and shining,
like a line of golden light--and if you follow, you may trace them to
the mind that sent them out.”

“It goes so fast!” Jones called back, “I can hardly keep up. It’s in the
air, just over the heads of the crowd. It leaves a trail like a meteor.
Come on, come on!”

“Take a taxi,” shouted the Irishman. “It’ll escape us!” They laughed,
and panted, dodged past the stream of people, crossed the street.

“Shut up!” answered Jones. “Don’t talk so much. I lose it when you talk.
It’s in my mind. I really see it, but your chatter blurs it. Come on,
come on!”

       *       *       *       *       *

And so they came at last to the region of mean streets, where the
traffic was less, the shadows deeper, the lights dim, streets that
visiting Emperors do not change. No match-sellers, bootlace venders, or
“dreadful shadows proffering toys,” blocked their way on the pavement
edge, because here were none to buy.

“It’s changed from gold to white,” Jones whispered breathlessly. “It
shines now--by gad, it shines--like a bit of escaped sunrise. And others
have joined it. Can’t you see ’em? Why, they’re like a network. They’re
rays--rays of glory. And--hullo!--I see where they come from now! It’s
that house over there. Look, man, look! They’re streaming like a river
of light out of that high window, that little attic window up there”--he
pointed to a dingy house standing black against the murk of the sky.
“They come out in a big stream, and then separate in all directions.
It’s simply wonderful!”

O’Malley gasped and panted. He said nothing. Jones, the phlegmatic,
heavy Jones, had got a real vision, whereas he who always imagined
“visions” got nothing. He followed the lead. Jones, he understood, was
taking his instinct where it led him. He would not interfere.

And the instinct led him to the door. They stopped dead, hesitating for
the first time. “Better not go in, you know,” said O’Malley, breaking
the decision he had just made. Jones looked up at him, slightly
bewildered. “I’ve lost it,” he whispered, “lost the line----” A taxi-cab
drew up with a rattling thunder just in front and a man got out, came up
to the door and stood beside them. It was the crook.

For a second or two the three men eyed each other. Clearly the new
arrival did not recognise them. “Pardon, gentlemen,” he said, pushing
past to pull the bell. They saw his rings. The taxi boomed away down the
little dark street that knew more of coal-carts than of motors. “You’re
coming in?” the man asked, as the door opened and he stepped inside.
O’Malley, usually so quick-witted, found no word to say, but Jones had a
question ready. The Irishman never understood how he asked it, and got
the answer, too, without giving offence. The instinct guided him in
choice of words and tone and gesture--somehow or other. He asked who
lived upstairs in the front attic room, and the man, as he quietly
closed the door upon them, gave the information--“My father.”

And, for the rest, all they ever learnt--by a little diligent inquiry up
and down the street, engineered by Jones--was that the old man,
bedridden for a dozen years, was never seen, and that an occasional
district-visitor, or such like, were his only callers. But they all
agreed that he was good. “They do say he lies there praying day and
night--jest praying for the world.” It was the grocer at the corner who
told them that.




IV

STRANGE DISAPPEARANCE OF A BARONET


His intrinsic value before the Eternities was exceedingly small, but he
possessed most things the world sets store by--presence, name,
wealth--and, above all, that high opinion of himself which saves it the
bother of a separate and troublesome valuation. Outside these
possessions he owned nothing of permanent value, or that could decently
claim to be worthy of immortality. The fact was he had never even
experienced that expansion of self commonly known as generosity. No
apology, however, is necessary for his amazing adventure, for these same
Eternities who judged him have made their affidavit that it was They who
stripped him bare and showed himself--to himself.

It all began with the receipt of that shattering letter from his
solicitors. He read and re-read it in his comfortable first-class
compartment as the express hurried him to town, exceedingly comfortable
among his rugs and furs, exceedingly distressed and ill at ease in his
mind. And in his private sitting-room of the big hotel that same
evening Mr. Smirles, more odious even than his letter, informed him
plainly that this new and unexpected claimant to his title and estates
was likely to be exceedingly troublesome--“even dangerous, Sir Timothy!
I am bound to say, since you ask me, that it might be wise to regard the
future--er--with a different scale of vision than the one you have been
accustomed to.”

Sir Timothy practically collapsed. Instinctively he perceived that the
lawyer’s manner already held less respect: the reflection was a shock to
his vain and fatuous personality. “After all, then, it wasn’t _me_ he
worshipped, but my position, and so forth ...!” If this nonsense
continued he would be no longer “Sir Timothy,” but simply “Mister”
Puffe, poor, a nobody. He seemed to shrink in size as he gazed at
himself in the mirror of the gorgeous, flamboyantly decorated room.
“It’s too preposterous and absurd! There’s nothing in it! Why, the whole
County would go to pieces without me!” He even thought of making his
secretary draft a letter to the _Times_--a letter of violent, indignant
protest.

He was a handsome, portly man, with a full-blown vanity justified by no
single item of soul or mind; not unkind, so much as empty; created and
kept alive by the small conventions and the ceaseless contemplation of
himself, the withdrawal of which might be expected to leave him flat as
a popped balloon.... Such a mass of pompous conceit obscured his vision
that he only slowly took in the fact that his very existence was at
stake. His thoughts rumbled on without direction, the sense of loss,
however, dreadfully sharp and painful all the time, till at length he
sought relief in something he could _really_ understand. He changed for
dinner! He would dine in his sitting-room alone. And, meanwhile, he rang
for the remainder of his voluminous luggage. But it was vastly annoying
to his diminishing pride to discover that the gorgeous Head Porter (he
remembered now having vaguely recognised him in the hall) was the same
poor relation to whom he had denied help a year ago. The vicissitudes of
life were indeed preposterous. He ought to have been protected from so
ridiculous an encounter. For the moment, of course, he merely pretended
not to see him--certainly he did not commend the excellently quick
delivery of the luggage. And to praise the young fellow’s pluck never
occurred to him for one single instant.

“The house valet, please,” he asked of the waiter who answered the bell
soon afterwards--and then directed somewhat helplessly the unpacking of
his emporium of exquisite clothes. “Yes, take everything
out--everything,” he said in reply to the man’s question--rather an
extraordinary, almost insolent question when he came to reflect upon
it, surely: “Is it worth while, perhaps, sir ...?” It flashed across his
dazed mind that the Head Porter had made the very same remark to his
subordinate in the passage when he asked if “everything” was to come in.
With a shrug of his gold-braided shoulders that poor relation had
replied, “Seems hardly worth while, but they may as well all go in,
yes.”

And, with the double rejoinder perplexingly in his mind, Sir Timothy
turned sharply upon the valet.

But the thing he was going to say faded on his lips. The man, holding
out in his arms a heap of clothes, suits and what not, seemed so much
taller than before. Sir Timothy had looked down upon him a moment ago,
whereas now their eyes stared level. It was passing strange.

“Will you want these, sir?”

“Not to-night, of course.”

“Want them at all, I meant, sir?”

Sir Timothy gasped. “Want them at all? Of course! What in the world are
you talking about?”

“Beg pardon, sir. Didn’t know if it was worth while now,” the man said,
with a quick flush. And, before the pompous and amazed baronet could get
any words between his quivering lips, the man was gone. The waiter, Head
Waiter it was, answered the bell almost immediately, and Sir Timothy
found consolation for his injured feelings in discussing food and wine.
He ordered an absurdly sumptuous meal for a man dining alone. He did so
with a vague feeling that it would spite somebody, perhaps; he hardly
knew whom. “The Pol Roger well iced, mind,” he added with a false
importance as the clever servant withdrew. But at the door the man
paused and turned, as though he had not heard. “_Large_ bottle, I said,”
repeated the other. The Head Waiter made an extraordinary gesture of
indifference. “As you wish, Sir Timothy, as you wish!” And he was gone
in his turn. But it was only the man’s adroitness that had chosen the
words instead of those others: “Is it really worth while?”

And at that very moment, while Sir Timothy stood there fuming inwardly
over the extraordinary words and ways of these people--veiled insolence,
_he_ called it--the door opened, and a tall young woman poked her head
inside, then followed it with her person. She was dignified, smart even
for a hotel like this, and uncommonly pretty. It was the upper
housemaid. Full in the eye she looked at him. In her face was a kind of
swift sympathy and kindness; but her whole presentment betrayed more
than anything else--terror.

“Make an effort, make an effort!” she whispered earnestly. “Before it’s
too late, make an effort!” And _she_ was gone. Sir Timothy, hardly
knowing what he meant to do, opened the door to dash after her and make
her explain this latest insolence. But the passage was dark, and he
heard the swish of skirts far away--too far away to overtake; while
running along the walls, as in a whispering gallery, came the words,
“Make an effort, make an effort!”

“Confound it all, then, I will!” he exclaimed to himself, as he stumbled
back into the room, feeling horribly bewildered. “I will make an
effort.” And he dressed to go downstairs and show himself in the halls
and drawing-rooms, give a few pompous orders, assert himself, and fuss
about generally. But that process of dressing without his valet was
chiefly and weirdly distressing because he had so amazingly--dwindled.
His sight was, of course, awry; disordered nerves had played tricks with
vision, proportion, perspective; something of the sort must explain why
he seemed so small to himself in the reflection. The pier-glass, which
showed him full length, he turned to the wall. But, none the less, to
complete his toilet, he had to stand upon a footstool before the other
mirror above the mantelpiece.

And go downstairs he did, his heart working with a strange and
increasing perplexity. Yet, wherever he went, there came that poor
relation, the Head Porter, to face him. Always big, he now looked bigger
than ever. Sir Timothy Puffe felt somehow ridiculous in his presence.
The young fellow had character, pluck, some touch of intrinsic value.
For all his failure in life, the Eternities considered him _real_. He
towered rather dreadfully in his gold braid and smart uniform--towered
in his great height all about the hall, like some giant in his own
palace. The other’s head scarcely came up to his great black belt where
the keys swung and jangled.

The Baronet went upstairs again to his room, strangely disconcerted. The
first thing he did as he left the lift was to stumble over the step. The
liftman picked him up as though he were a boy. Down the passage, now
well lighted, he went quickly, his feet almost pattering, his tread
light, and--so oddly short. His importance had gone. A voice behind each
door he passed whispered to him through the narrow crack as it
cautiously opened, “Make an effort, make an effort! Be yourself, be
real, be alive before it’s too late!” But he saw no one, and the first
thing he did on entering his room was to hide the smaller mirror by
turning it against the wall, just as he had done to the pier-glass. He
was so painfully little and insignificant now. As the externals and the
possessions dropped away one by one in his thoughts, the revelation of
the tiny little centre of activity within was horrible. He puffed
himself out in thought as of old, but there was no response. It was
degrading.

The fact was--he began to understand it now--his mind had been pursuing
possible results of his loss of title and estates to their logical
conclusion. The idea in all its brutal nakedness, of course, hardly
reached him--namely, that, without possessions, he was practically--nil!
All he grasped was that he was--_less_. Still, the notion did prey upon
him atrociously. He followed the advice of the strange housemaid and
“made an effort,” but without marked success. So empty, indeed, was his
life that, once stripped of the possessions, he would stand there as
useless and insignificant as an ownerless street dog. And the thought
appalled him. He had not even enough real interest in others to hold him
upright, and certainly not enough sufficiency of self, good or evil, to
stand alone before any tribunal. The discovery shocked him
inexpressibly. But what distressed him still more was to find a fixed
mirror in his sitting-room that he could _not_ take down, for in its
depths he saw himself shrunken and dwindled to the proportions of a....

The knock at the door and the arrival of his dinner broke the appalling
train of thought, but rather than be seen in his present diminutive
appearance--later, of course, he would surely grow again--he ran into
the bedroom. And when he came out again after the waiter’s departure he
found that his dinner shared the same abominable change. The food upon
the dishes was reduced to the minutest proportions--the toast like
children’s, the soup an egg-cupful, the tenderloin a little slice the
size of a visiting-card, and the bird not much larger than a
blackbeetle. And yet more than he could eat; more than sufficient! He
sat in the big chair positively lost, his feet dangling. Then,
mortified, frightened, and angry beyond expression, he undressed and
concealed himself beneath the sheets and blankets of his bed.

“Of course I’m going mad--that’s what it all means,” he exclaimed. “I’m
no longer of any account in the world. I could never go into my Club,
for instance, _like this_!”--and he surveyed the small outline that made
a little lump beneath the surface of the bed-clothes--“or read the
lessons having to stand upon a chair to reach the lectern.” And tears of
bleeding vanity and futile wrath mingled upon his pillow.... The
humiliation was agonising.

In the middle of which the door opened and in came the hotel valet,
bearing before him upon a silver salver what at first appeared to be
small, striped sandwiches, darkish in hue, but upon closer inspection
were seen to be several wee suits of clothes, neatly pressed and folded
for wearing. Glancing round the room and perceiving no one, the man
proceeded to put them away in the chest of drawers, soliloquising from
time to time as he did so.

“So the old buffer did go out after all!” he reflected, as he smoothed
the tiny trousers in the drawer. “’E’s nothing but a gas-bag, anyway!
Close with the coin, too--always was that!” He whistled, spat in the
grate, hunted about for a cigarette, and again found relief in speech.
My little dawg’s worth two of ’im all the time, and lots to spare. Tim’s
_real_ ...!” And other things, too, he said in similar vein. He was
utterly oblivious of Sir Timothy’s presence--serenely unconscious that
the thin, fading line beneath the sheets _was_ the very individual he
was talking about. “Even hides his cigarettes, does he? He’s right,
though. Take away what he’s got and there wouldn’t be enough left over
to stand upright at a poultry show!” And he guffawed merrily to himself.
But what brought the final horror into that vanishing Personality on the
bed was the singular fact that the valet made no remark about the absurd
and horrible size of those tiny clothes. _This, then, was how
others--even a hotel valet--saw him!_

All night long, it seemed, he lay in atrocious pain, the darkness
mercifully hiding him, though never from himself, and only towards
daylight did he pass off into a condition of unconsciousness. He must
have slept very late indeed, too, for he woke to find sunlight in the
room, and the housemaid--that tall, dignified girl who had tried to be
kind--dusting and sweeping energetically. He screamed to her, but his
voice was too feeble to make itself heard above the sweeping. The
high-pitched squeak was scarcely audible even to himself. Presently she
approached the bed and flung the sheets back. “That’s funny,” she
observed, “could’ve sworn I saw something move!” She gave a hurried
look, then went on sweeping. But in the process she had tossed his
person, now no larger than a starved mouse, out on to the carpet. He
cried aloud in his anguish, but the squeak was too faint to be audible.
“Ugh!” exclaimed the girl, jumping to one side, “there’s that ’orrid
mouse again! Dead, too, I do declare!” And then, without being aware of
the fact, she swept him up with the dust and bits of paper into her pan.

Whereupon Sir Timothy awoke with a bad start, and perceived that his
train was running somewhat uneasily into King’s Cross, and that he had
slept nearly the whole way.




V

THE SECRET


I saw him walking down the floor of the A.B.C. shop where I was
lunching. He was gazing about for a vacant seat with that vague stare of
puzzled distress he always wore when engaged in practical affairs. Then
he saw me and nodded. I pointed to the seat opposite; he sat down. There
was a crumb in his brown beard, I noticed. There had been one a year
ago, when I saw him last.

“What a long time since we met,” I said, genuinely glad to see him. He
was a most lovable fellow, though his vagueness was often perplexing to
his friends.

“Yes--er--h’mmm--let me see----”

“Just about a year,” I said.

He looked at me with an expression as though he did not see me. He was
delving in his mind for dates and proofs. His fierce eyebrows looked
exactly as though they were false--stuck on with paste--and I imagined
how puzzled he would be if one of them suddenly dropped off into his
soup. The eyes beneath, however, were soft and beaming; the whole face
was tender, kind, gentle, and when he smiled he looked thirty instead of
fifty.

“A year, is it?” he remarked, and then turned from me to the girl who
was waiting to take his order. This ordering was a terrible affair. I
marvelled at the patience of that never-to-be-tipped waitress in the
dirty black dress. He looked with confusion from me to her, from her to
the complicated bill of fare, and from this last to me again.

“Oh, have a cup of coffee and a bit of that lunch-cake,” I said with
desperation. He stared at me for a second, one eyebrow moving, the other
still as the grave. I felt an irresistible desire to laugh.

“All right,” he murmured to the girl, “coffee and a bit of that
lunch-cake.” She went off wearily. “And a pat of butter,” he whispered
after her, but looking at the wrong waitress. “And a portion of that
strawberry jam,” he added, looking at another waitress.

Then he turned to talk with me.

“Oh no,” he said, looking over his shoulder at the crowd of girls by the
counter; “_not_ the jam. I forgot I’d ordered that lunch-cake.”

Again he switched round in his chair--he always perched on the edge like
a bird--and made a great show of plunging into a long-deferred chat with
me. I knew what would come. He was always writing books and sending
them out among publishers and forgetting where they were at the moment.

“And how are _you_?” he asked. I told him.

“Writing anything these days?” I ventured boldly.

The eyebrows danced. “Well, the fact is, I’ve only just finished a
book.”

“Sent it anywhere?”

“It’s gone off, yes. Let me see--it’s gone to--er----” The coffee and
lunch-cake arrived without the pat of butter, but with two lots of
strawberry jam. “I won’t have jam, thank you. And will you bring a pat
of butter?” he muttered to the girl. Then, turning to me again--“Oh, I
really forget for the moment. It’s a good story, I think.” His novels
were, as a fact, extraordinarily good, which was the strange part of it
all.

“It’s about a woman, you see, who----” He proceeded to tell me the story
in outline. Once he got beyond the confused openings of talk the man
became interesting, but it took so long, and was so difficult to follow,
that I remembered former experiences and cut him short with a lucky
inspiration.

“Don’t spoil it for me by telling it. I shan’t enjoy it when it comes
out.”

He laughed, and both eyebrows dropped and hid his eyes. He busied
himself with the cake and butter. A second crumb went to join the first.
I thought of balls in golf bunkers, and laughed outright. For a time
the conversation flagged. I became aware of a certain air of mystery
about him. He was full of something besides the novel--something he
wanted to talk about but had probably forgotten “for the moment.” I got
the impression he was casting about in the upper confusion of his mind
for the cue.

“You’re writing something else now?” I ventured.

The question hit the bull’s-eye. Both eyebrows shot up, as though they
would vanish next minute on wires and fly up into the wings. The cake in
his hand would follow; and last of all he himself would go. The
children’s pantomime came vividly before me. Surely he was a made-up
figure on his way to rehearsal.

“I am,” he said; “but it’s a _great_ secret. I’ve got a _magnificent_
idea!”

“I promise not to tell. I’m safe as the grave. Tell me.”

He fixed his kindly, beaming eyes on my face and smiled charmingly.

“It’s a play,” he murmured, and then paused for effect, hunting about on
his plate for cake, where cake there was none.

“Another piece of that lunch-cake, please,” he said in a sudden loud
voice, addressed to the waitresses at large. “It came to me the other
day in the London Library--er--very fine idea----”

“Something really original?”

“Well, I think so, perhaps.” The cake came with a clatter of plates, but
he pushed it aside as though he had forgotten about it, and leaned
forward across the table. “I’ll tell you. Of course you won’t say
anything. I don’t want the idea to get about. There’s money in a good
play--and people do steal so, don’t they?”

I made a gesture, as much as to say, “Do I look like a man who would
repeat?” and he plunged into it with enthusiasm.

Oh! The story of that play! And those dancing eyebrows! And the bits of
the plot he forgot and went back for! And the awful, wild confusion of
names and scenes and curtains! And the way his voice rose and fell like
a sound carried to and fro by a gusty wind! And the feeling that
something was coming which would make it all clear--but which never
came!

“The woman, you see,”--all his stories began that way,--“is one of those
modern women who ... and when she dies she tells on her death-bed how
she knew all the time that Anna----”

“That’s the heroine, I think?” I asked keenly, after ten minutes’
exposition, hoping to Heaven my guess was right.

“No, no, she’s the widow, don’t you remember, of the clergyman who went
over to the Church of Rome to avoid marrying her sister--in the first
act--or didn’t I mention that?”

“You mentioned it, I think, but the explanation----”

“Oh, well, you see, the Anglican clergyman--he’s Anglican in the first
act--always suspected that Miriam had not died by her own hand, but had
been poisoned. In fact, he finds the incriminating letter in the
gas-pipe, and recognises the handwriting----”

“Oh, _he_ finds the letter?”

“Rather. _He_ finds the letter, don’t you see? and compares it with the
others, and makes up his mind who wrote it, and goes straight to Colonel
Middleton with his discovery.”

“So Middleton, of course, refuses to believe----”

“Refuses to believe that the second wife--oh, I forgot to mention that
the clergyman had married again in his own Church; married a woman who
turns out to be Anna’s--no, I mean Miriam’s--half-sister, who had been
educated abroad in a convent,--refuses to believe, you see, that _his_
wife had anything to do with it. Then Middleton has a splendid scene. He
and the clergyman have the stage to themselves. Wyndham’s the man for
Middleton, of course. Well, he declares that he has the proof--proof
that must convince everybody, and just as he waves it in the air in
comes Miriam, who is walking in her sleep, from her sick-bed. They
listen. She is talking in her sleep. By Jove, man, don’t you see it? She
is talking about the crime! She practically confesses it before their
very eyes.”

“Splendid!”

“And she never wakes up--I mean, not in that scene. She goes back to bed
and has no idea next day what she has said and done.”

“And the clergyman’s honour is saved?” I hazarded, amazed at my
rashness.

“No. _Anna_ is saved. You see, I forgot to tell you that in the second
act Miriam’s brother, Sir John, had----”

The waitress brought the little paper checks.

“Let’s go outside and finish. It’s getting frightfully stuffy here,” I
suggested desperately, picking up the bills.

We walked out together, he still talking against time with the most
terrible confusion of names and acts and scenes imaginable. He bumped
into everybody who came in his way. His beard was full of crumbs. His
eyebrows danced with excitement--I knew then positively they were
false--and his voice ran up and down the scale like a buzz-saw at work
on a tough board.

“By Jove, old man, that _is_ a play!”

He turned to me with absolute happiness in his face.

“But for Heaven’s sake, don’t let out a word of it. I must have a
copyright performance first before it’s really safe.”

“Not a word, I promise.”

“It’s a dead secret--till I’ve finished it, I mean--then I’ll come and
tell you the _dénouement_. The last curtain is simply magnificent. You
see, Middleton never hears----”

“I won’t tell a living soul,” I cried, running to catch a bus. “It’s a
secret--yours and mine!”

And the omnibus carried me away Westwards.

Meanwhile the play remains to this day a “dead secret,” known only to
the man who thinks he told it, and to the other man who knows he heard
it told.




VI

THE LEASE


The other day I came across my vague friend again. Last time it was in
an A.B.C. shop; this time it was in a bus. We always meet in humble
places.

He was vaguer than ever, fuddled and distrait; but delightfully
engaging. He had evidently not yet lunched, for he wore no crumb; but I
had a shrewd suspicion that beneath his green Alpine hat there lurked a
straw or two in his untidy hair. It would hardly have surprised me to
see him turn with his childlike smile and say, “Would you mind _very
much_ taking them out for me? You know they _do_ tickle so!”--half
mumbled, half shouted.

Instead, he tried to shake hands, and his black eyebrows danced. He
looked as loosely put together as a careless parcel. I imagined large
bits of him tumbling out.

“You’re off somewhere or other, I suppose?” he said; and the question
was so characteristic it was impossible not to laugh.

I mentioned the City.

“I’m going that way too,” he said cheerfully. He had come to the
conclusion that he could not shake hands with safety; there were too
many odds and ends about him--gloves, newspapers, half-open umbrella,
parcels. Evidently he had left the house uncertain as to where he was
going, and had brought all these things in case, like the White Knight,
he might find a use for them on the way. His overcoat was wrongly
buttoned, too, so that on one side the collar reached almost to his ear.
From the pockets protruded large envelopes, white and blue. I marvelled
again how he ever concentrated his mind enough to write plays and
novels; for in both the action was quick and dramatic; the dialogue
crisp, forcible, often witty.

“Going to the City!” I exclaimed. “_You?_” Museums, libraries,
second-hand book-shops were his usual haunts--places where he could be
vague and absent-minded without danger to anyone. I felt genuinely
curious. “Copy of some kind? Local colour for something, eh?” I laughed,
hoping to draw him out.

A considerable pause followed, during which he rearranged several of his
parcels, and his eyebrows shot up and down like two black-beetles
dancing a hornpipe.

“I’m helping a chap with his lease,” he replied suddenly, in such a very
loud voice that everybody in the bus heard and became interested.

He had this way of alternately mumbling and talking very loud--absurdly
loud; picking out unimportant words with terrific emphasis. He also had
this way of helping others. Indeed, it was difficult to meet him without
suspecting an errand of kindness--rarely mentioned, however.

“Chap with his lease,” he repeated in a kind of roar, as though he
feared someone had not heard him--the driver, possibly!

We were in a white Putney bus, going East. The policeman just then held
it up at Wellington Street.

“It’s jolly stopping like this,” he cried; “one can chat a bit without
having to shout.”

My curiosity about the lease, or rather about his part in it, prevented
an immediate reply. How he could possibly help in such a complicated
matter puzzled me exceedingly.

“Horrible things, leases!” I said at length. “Confusing, I mean, with
their endless repetitions and absence of commas. Legal language seems so
needlessly----”

“Oh, but this one is right enough,” he interrupted. “You see, my pal
hasn’t signed it yet. He’s in rather a muddle about it, to tell the
truth, and I’m going to get it straightened out by my solicitor.”

The bus started on with a lurch, and he rolled against me.

“It’s a three-year lease,” he roared, “with an option to renew, you
know--oh no, I’m wrong there, by the bye,” and he tapped my knee and
dropped a glove, and, when it was picked up and handed to him, tried to
stuff it up his sleeve as though it was a handkerchief--“I’m wrong
there--that’s the house he’s in at present, and his wife wants to break
_that_ lease because she doesn’t like it, and they’ve got more children
than they expected (these words whispered), and there’s no bathroom, and
the kitchen stairs are absurdly narrow----”

“But the lease--you were just saying----?”

“Quite so; I was,” and both eyebrows dropped so that the eyes were
almost completely hidden, “but _that_ lease _is_ all right. It’s the
other one I was talking about just then----”

“The house he’s in now, you mean, or----?” My head already swam. The
attention of the people opposite had begun to wander.

My friend pulled himself together and clutched several parcels.

“No, no, no,” he explained, smiling gently; “he likes _this_ one. It’s
the other I meant--the one his wife doesn’t approve of--the one with the
narrow bathroom stairs and no kitchen--I mean the narrow kitchen stairs
and no bathroom. It has so few cupboards, too, and the nursery chimneys
smoke every time the wind’s in the east. (Poor man! How devotedly he
must have listened while it was being drummed into his good-natured
ears!) So you see, Henry, my pal, thought of giving it up when the lease
fell in and taking this other house--the one I was just talking
about--and putting in a bathroom at his own expense, provided the
landlord----”

A man opposite who had been listening intently got up to leave the bus
with such a disappointed look that my friend thought it was the
conductor asking for another fare, and fumbled for coppers. Seeing his
mistake in time, he drew out instead a large blue envelope. Two other
papers, feeling neglected, came out at the same time and dropped upon
the floor. My friend and a working-man beside him stooped to pick them
up and knocked their heads violently in the process.

“I _beg_ your pardon,” exclaimed the vague one, very loud, with a
tremendous emphasis on the “beg.”

“Oh, that’s all right, guv’nor,” said the working-man, handing over the
papers. “Might ’appen to anybody, that!”

“I beg your pardon?” repeated my friend, not hearing him quite.

“I said a thing like that might ’appen to anyone,” repeated the other,
louder.

He turned to me with his happy smile. “I suppose it might, yes,” he
said, very low. Then he opened the blue envelope and began to hunt.

“Oh no, that’s the wrong envelope. It’s the other,” he observed vaguely.
“What a bore, isn’t it? This is merely a copy of his letters
to--er--to----”

He looked distressingly about him through the windows, as though he
hoped to find his words in the shop-letterings or among the
advertisements.

“Where are we, I wonder? Oh yes; there’s St. Paul’s. Good!” His mind
returned to the subject in hand. Several people got out, and swept the
papers from his knee to the ground; and the next few minutes he spent
gathering them up, stooping, clutching his coat, stuffing envelopes into
his pockets, and exclaiming “I _beg_ your pardon!” to the various folk
he collided with in the process.

At last some sort of order was restored.

“----merely the letters,” he resumed where he had left off, and in a
voice that might suitably have addressed a public meeting, “the letters
to his tenant. There’s a tenant in the other house. I forgot to mention
_that_, I think----”

“I think you did. But, I say, look here, my dear chap,” I burst out, at
length, in sheer self-preservation, “why in the world don’t you let the
fellow manage his own leases? It’s giving you a dreadful lot of trouble.
It’s the most muddled-up thing I ever heard.”

“That’s because you’ve got no head for business,” he whispered sweetly.
“Besides, it’s really a pleasure to me to help him. That’s the best part
of life, after all--helping people who get into muddles.” He looked at
me with his kindly smile. Then he turned and smiled at everybody in the
bus--vaguely, happily, his black eyebrows very fierce. Several people, I
fancied, smiled back at him.

“Let’s see,” he said, after a pause; “where was I?”

“You were saying something about a lease,” I told him; “but, honestly,
old man, I’m afraid I haven’t quite followed it.”

“That’s my fault,” he said; “all my fault. I feel a bit stupid to-day.
I’ve got the ’flue, you know, and a touch of fever with it. But I
promised Henry I would see to it for him, because he’s awfully busy----”

“Is he really!” I wished I knew Henry. I felt a strong desire to say
something to him.

“----packing up for a trip to Mexico, you know, or something; so, of
course, he finds it difficult to--er--to----” He looked gently about
him. “Where the deuce am I?” he asked in a very loud voice indeed.

Several people, myself among them, mentioned the Mansion House.

“Dear me!” he exclaimed, gathering up parcels, envelopes, and various
loose parts of his body--his aching body, “I’m afraid--I must be getting
out. I’m in the wrong bus. I wanted Essex Street--up there by the Law
Courts, you know.”

But I really couldn’t stand it any longer. I took him by the arm and
planted him, parcels, papers, and all, by my side in a taxi. We whizzed
back along Queen Victoria Street, and on the way I sorted him out,
buttoned his overcoat so that it no longer tickled his ear, rolled up
his umbrella so that the points no longer got caught, and made him put
on both gloves, so that he could not drop them any more. And I kept
tight hold of him until we reached Essex Street. He talked leases the
whole way.

“Thanks awfully,” he said at the end, smiling; “you’re always kind--if a
little rough. But I’ll keep on the taxi, I think, now. The fact is, I
find I’ve left the right lease at home after all--you know, the one
about the house without the----”

I heard the rest, alternately mumbled and shouted at me, as the taxi
whirred off into the Strand, bound for some unknown destination in
Chelsea. It was impossible to help him more. But I should like to have
heard what he said to (_a_) the chauffeur at the end of his journey,
(_b_) to the solicitor. I should also like to swear that when he got
back to his rooms he found the right lease had been in his pocket all
the time.

I met him again the following day, but I had not the courage to ask him
anything.




VII

UP AND DOWN


His vagueness, apparently, is only on the surface of his mind; down at
the centre the pulses of life throb with unusual vigour and decision.
And I think the explanation of his puzzled expression and dazed
manner--to say nothing of his idiotic replies--when addressed upon
ordinary topics is due to the fact that he prefers to live in that hot
and very active centre. He dislikes being called out of it.

Down there his creative imagination is for ever at work: he sees
clearly, thinks hard, acts even splendidly. But the moment you speak to
him about trivial things the mists gather about his eyes, his voice
hesitates, his hands make futile gestures, and he screws up his face
into an expression of puzzled alarm. Up he comes to the best of his
ability, but it is clear he is vexed at being disturbed.

“Oh yes, I think so--very,” he replied the other day as we met on our
way to the Club and I asked if he had enjoyed his holiday.

“Awful amount of rain, though, wasn’t there?”

“Was there, now? Yes, there must have been, of course. It _was_ a wet
summer.”

He looked at me as though I were a comparative stranger, although our
intimacy is of years’ standing, and our talks on life, literature, and
all the rest are a chief pleasure to each of us. We had not met for some
months. I wanted to pierce through to that hot centre where the real man
lived, and to find out what the real man had been doing during the
interval. He came up but slowly, however.

“You went to the mountains as usual, I suppose?” he asked, with his mind
obviously elsewhere. He hopped along the pavement with his quick,
bird-like motion.

“Mountains, yes. And you?”

He made no reply. From his face I could tell he had come about half-way
up, but was already on the way down again. Once he got back to that
centre of his I should get nothing out of him at all.

“And you?” I repeated louder. “Abroad, I suppose, somewhere?”

“Well--er--not exactly,” he mumbled. “That is to say--I--er--went to
Switzerland somewhere--Austria, I mean--down there on the way towards
Italy _beyond Bozen, you know_.” He ended the sentence very loud indeed,
with quite absurd emphasis, as his way is when he knows he hasn’t been
listening. “I found a quiet inn out of the tourist track and did a rare
lot of work there too.” His face cleared and the brown eyes began to
glow a little. It was like seeing the sun through opening mists. “Come
in, and I’ll tell you about it,” he added, in an eager whisper, as we
reached the Club doors.

At the same moment, however, the porter came down the steps and touched
his hat, and my vague friend, recognising a face he felt he ought to
know, stopped to ask him how he was, and whether So-and-so was back yet;
and while the porter replied briefly and respectfully I saw to my dismay
the mists settle down again upon the other’s face. A moment later the
porter touched his hat again and moved off down the street. My friend
looked round at me as though I had but just arrived upon the scene.

“Here we are,” he observed gently, “at the Club. I think I shall go in.
What are you going to do?”

“I’m coming in too,” I said.

“Good,” he murmured; “let’s go in together, then,” his thoughts working
away busily at something deep within him.

On our way to the hat-racks, and all up the winding stairs, he mumbled
away about the wet summer, and tourists, and his little mountain inn,
but never a word of the work I was so anxious to hear about, and he so
anxious really to tell. In the reading-room I manœuvred to get two
arm-chairs side by side before he could seize the heap of papers he
smothered his lap with, but never read.

“And where have _you_ been all the summer?” he asked, crossing his
little legs and speaking in a voice loud enough to have been heard in
the street. “Somewhere in the mountains, I suppose, as usual?”

“You were going to tell me about the work you got through up in your
lonely inn,” I insisted sharply. “Was it a play, or a novel, or
criticism, or what?” He looked so small and lost in the big arm-chair
that I felt quite ashamed of myself for speaking so violently. He turned
round on the slippery leather and offered me a cigarette. The glow came
back to his face.

“Well,” he said, “as a matter of fact it was both. That is, I was
preparing a stage version of my new novel.” All the mist had gone now;
he was alive at the centre, and thoroughly awake. He snapped his case to
and put it away before I had taken my cigarette. But, of course, he did
not notice that, and held out a lighted match to my lips as though there
was something there to light.

“No, thanks,” I said quickly, fearful that if I asked again for the
cigarette the mists would instantly gather once more and the real man
disappear.

“Won’t you _really_, though?” he said, blowing the match out and
forgetting to light his own cigarette at the same time. “I did the whole
scenario, and most of the first act. There was nothing else to do. It
rained all the time, and the place was quiet as the grave----”

A waiter brought him several letters on a tray. He took them
automatically. The face clouded a bit.

“What’ll you have?” he asked absent-mindedly, acting automatically upon
the presence of the waiter.

“Nothing, thanks.”

“Nor will I, then. Oh yes, I will, though--I’ll have some dry ginger
ale. Here, waiter! Bring me a small dry ginger ale.”

The waiter, with the force of habit, bent his head questioningly for my
order too.

“_You_ said----?” asked my exasperating friend. He was right down in the
mists now, and I knew I should never get him up again this side of
lunch.

“I said nothing, thanks.”

“Nothing, then, for this gentleman,” he continued, gazing up at the
waiter as though he were some monster seen for the first time, “and for
me--a dry ginger ale, please.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man, moving off.

“Small,” the other called after him.

“Yessir--small.”

“And a slice of lemon in it.”

The waiter inclined his head respectfully from the door. The other
turned to me, searching in his perturbed mind--I could tell it by the
way his eyes worked--for the trail of his vanished conversation. Before
he got it, however, he slithered round again on the leather seat towards
the door.

“A bit of ice too, don’t forget!”

The waiter’s head peeped round the corner, and from the movement of his
lips I gathered he repeated the remark about the bit of ice.

“I _did_ say ‘dry’?” my friend asked, looking anxiously at me; “didn’t
I?”

“You did.”

“And a bit of lemon?”

“And a slice of lemon.”

“And what are _you_ going to have, then? Upon my word, old man, I forgot
to ask you.” He looked so distressed that it was impossible to show
impatience.

“Nothing, thanks. You asked me, you know.”

A pause fell between us. I gave it up. He would talk when he wanted to,
but there was no forcing him. It struck me suddenly that he had a rather
fagged and weary look for a man who had been spending several weeks at a
mountain inn with work he loved. The pity and affection his presence
always wakes in me ran a neck-and-neck race. At that “centre” of his, I
knew full well, he was ever devising plans for the helping of others,
quite as much as creating those remarkable things that issued
periodically, illunderstood by a sensation-loving public, from the
press. A sharp telepathic suspicion flashed through my mind, but before
there was time to give it expression in words, up came the waiter with a
long glass of ginger ale fizzing on a tray.

He handed it to my vague friend, and my vague friend took it and handed
it to me.

“But it’s yours, my dear chap,” I suggested.

He looked puzzled for a second, and then his face cleared. “I forget
what _you_ ordered,” he observed softly, looking interrogatively at the
waiter and at me. We informed him simultaneously, “Nothing,” and the
waiter respectfully mentioned the price of the drink. My friend’s left
hand plunged into his trousers pocket, while his right carried the glass
to his lips. Perhaps his left hand did not know what his right was
about, or perhaps his mind was too far away to direct the motions of
either with safety. Anyhow, the result was deplorable. He swallowed an
uncomfortable gulp of air-bubbles and ginger--and choked--over me, over
the waiter and tray, over his beard and clothes. The floating lump of
ice bobbed up and hit his nose. I never saw a man look so surprised and
distressed in my life. I took the glass from him, and when his left hand
finally emerged with money he handed it first vaguely to me as though I
were the waiter--for which there was no real excuse, since we were not
in evening dress.

When, at length, order was restored and he was sipping quietly at the
remains of the fizzing liquid, he looked up at me over the brim of his
glass and remarked, with more concentration on the actual present than
he had yet shown:

“By the way, you know, I’m going away to-morrow--going abroad for my
holiday. Taking a lot of work with me, too----”

“But you’ve only just come back!” I expostulated, with a feeling very
like anger in my heart.

He shook his head with decision. Evidently that choking had choked him
into the living present. He was really “up” this time, and not likely to
go down again.

“No, no,” he replied; “I’ve been here all the summer in town looking
after old Podger----”

“Old Podger!” I remembered a dirty, down-at-heel old man I once met at
my friend’s rooms--a poet who had “smothered his splendid talent” in
drink, and who was always at starvation’s door. “What in the world was
the matter with Podger?”

“D.T. I’ve been nursing him through it. The poor devil nearly went under
this time. I’ve got him into a home down in the country at last, but all
August he was--well, we thought he was gone.”

_All August!_ So that was how my friend’s summer had been spent. With
never a word of thanks probably at that!

“But your mountain inn beyond Bozen! You said----”

“Did I? I must be wool-gathering,” he laughed, with that beautifully
tender smile that comes sometimes to his delicate, dreamy face. “That
was _last_ year. I spent my holidays last year up there. How stupid of
me to get so absurdly muddled!” He plunged his nose into the empty
glass, waiting for the last drop to trickle out, with his neck at an
angle that betrayed the collar to be undone and the tie sadly frayed at
the edges.

“But--all the work you said you did up there--the scenario and the first
act and--and----”

He turned upon me with such sudden energy that I fairly jumped. Then, in
a voice that mumbled the first half of his sentence, but shouted the end
like a German officer giving instructions involving life or death, I
heard:

“But, my dear good fellow, you don’t half listen to what I say! All that
work, as I told you just now, is what I expect and mean to do when I get
up there. _Now_--have you got it clear at last?”

He looked me up and down with great energy. By biting the inner side of
my lip I kept my face grave. Later we went down to lunch together, and I
heard details of the weeks of unselfish devotion he had lavished upon
“old Podger.” I would give a great deal to possess some of the driving
power for good that throbs and thrills at the real centre of my old
friend with the vague manner and the absent-minded surface. But he is a
singular contradiction, and almost always misunderstood. I should like
to know, too, what Podger thinks.




VIII

FAITH CURE ON THE CHANNEL


A letter from my vague friend was always a source of difficulty: it
allowed of so many interpretations--contradictory often. But this one
was comparatively plain sailing:--

     “You said you were going abroad about this time. So am I. Let’s go
     as far as Paris together. Send me a line to above address at once.
     Thursday or Friday would suit me.--Yours,

                                                               X. Y. Z.

     “P.S.--I enclose P.O. for that 10s. I owe you.”

I received this letter on a Wednesday morning.

It was written from the Club, but the Club address was carefully scored
out and no other given.

The “P.O.” was not enclosed.

In spite of these obstacles, however, we somehow met and arranged to
start on Saturday; and the night before we dined together in that
excellent little Soho restaurant--“there’s nothing,” my friend always
said, “between its cooking and the Ritz, except prices”--and discussed
our prospects, he going to finish a book at a Barbizon inn, I to inspect
certain machinery in various Continental dairies.

His heart, it was plain, however, was neither in the cooking nor the
book, nor in my wonderful machinery. Like a boy with a secret, he was
mysterious about something hitherto unshared. Happy, too, for he kept
smiling at nothing.

“The fact is,” he observed at last over coffee, “I’m really a vile,
simply a vile sailor.”

“I remember,” I said, for we had once been companions on the same yacht.

“And you,” he added, holding the black eyebrows steady, “you--are
another.” When dealing with simple truths he was often brutally frank.

“What’s the good of talking about it?”

“This,” he replied, paying the bill and giving me the amount of the
“P.O.,” “I’ll show you.”

He conducted me into a little box of a place bearing the legend outside
“Foreign Chemist,” and proceeded first to buy the most curious
assortment of strange medicines I ever heard of. Weird indeed must have
been his ailments. I had no time for reflection, however, on the point,
for suddenly turning to me by way of introduction, and allowing the
eyebrow next the chemist to dance and bristle so as to attract his
attention, he mumbled, “This is my seasick friend. We’re off to-morrow.
If you’ve got the stuff ready we might take it now.” And, before I had
time to ask or argue, he had pocketed a little package and we were in
the street again.

Never had I known him so brisk and practical. “It’s a new seasick cure,”
he explained darkly as we went home; “something quite new--just
invented, in fact; and that chap’s asking a few of his special customers
to try it and give their honest opinions. So I told him we were pretty
bad--vile, in fact--and I’ve got this for nothing. He only wants vile
sailors, you see, otherwise there’s no test----”

“Know what’s in it?”

He shook his head so violently that I was afraid for the eyebrows.

“But I believe in it. It’s simply wonderful stuff; no bromide, he
assured me, and no harmful drugs. Just a seasick cure; that’s all!”

“I’ll take it if you will,” I laughed. “I could take poison with
impunity before going on the Channel!”

He gave me one bottle. “Take a dose to-night,” he explained, “another
after breakfast in the morning, another in the train, and another the
moment you go on board.”

I gave my promise and we separated on his doorstep. It was a lot to
promise, but as I have explained, I could drink tar or prussic acid
before going on a steamer, and neither would have the time to work
injury. I marvelled greatly, however, at my vague friend’s fit of
abnormal lucidity, and in the night I dreamed of him surrounded by all
the medicine bottles he had bought to take abroad with him, swallowing
their contents one by one, and smiling while he did so, with eyebrows
grown to the size of hedges.

I took my doses faithfully, with the immediate result that in the train
I became aware of symptoms that usually had the decency to wait for the
steamer. My friend took his too. He was in excellent spirits, eyes
bright, full of confidence. The bottles were wrapped in neat white
paper, only the necks visible; and we drank our allotted quantity from
the mouths, without glasses.

“Not much taste,” I remarked.

“Wonderful stuff,” he replied. “I believe in it absolutely. It’s good
for other things, too; it made me sleep like a top, and I had the
appetite of a horse for breakfast. That chemist’ll make his fortune when
he brings it out. People will pay a pound a bottle, lots of ’em.”

At Newhaven the sea was agitated--hideously so; even in the harbour the
steamers rose and fell absurdly. Not all the fresh, salt winds in the
world, nor all the jolly sunshine and sparkling waves, nor all that
strong beauty that comes with the first glimpse of the sea and long
horizons, could lessen the sinking dread that was in my--my heart. Truth
to tell, I had no more belief in the elixir than if it had been chopped
hay and treacle.

My friend, however, was confidence personified. “The fact is,” he said,
laughing at the wind and sea, “the real fact is _I believe in that
chemist_. He told me this stuff was infallible; and I believe it is. The
trouble with you is funk--sheer blue funk.”

We stuck to our guns and swallowed the last prescribed dose just before
the syren announced our departure--and fifteen minutes later....

It was a degrading three hours; and the sting of it was that my friend,
with a hideous cap tied down about his ears, a smile that was in the
worst possible taste, and a jaunty confidence that was even more
insulting than he intended it to be, walked up and down that loathsome,
sliding, switchback deck the entire way. Not the entire way, though, for
half-way across he disappeared into the dining-room, and returned in due
course with that brown beard of his charged with bread-crumbs, and
between his lips actually--a pipe. And, without so much as speaking to
me, he paced to and fro before my chair, when a little of that
imagination he put so delightfully into his books would have led him
discreetly to pace the other deck where I could not see him. I thought
out endless revenges, but the fact was I never had time to think out
any single revenge properly to its conclusion. Something--something
unspeakably vile--always came to interfere; and the sight of my friend,
balancing up and down the rolling deck chatting to sailors, admiring the
sea and sky, and puffing hard at his pipe all the time, was, I think,
the most abominable thing I have ever seen.

“Simply marvellous, I call it,” he told me in the _douane_ at Dieppe.
“The stuff is a revolutionary discovery. It’s the first time I ever ate
a meal on a steamer in my life. Sorry you suffered so. Can’t understand
it,” he added, with a complacency that was insufferable. I was
positively delighted to see the Customs officer open _all_ his bags and
litter his things about in glorious confusion....

In Paris that night our little hotel was rather full, and we had to
share a big two-bedded room. My friend groaned a good deal between two
and three in the morning and kept me awake; and once, somewhere about
five a.m., I saw him with a lighted candle fumbling at the table among a
lot of little white paper packages which I recognised as his purchases
from that criminal London chemist who had concocted the seasick cure.

It was at nine o’clock, however, while he was down at his bath, that I
noticed something on the table by his bed that instantly arrested my
attention. Regardless of morals, I investigated. It was unmistakable. It
was his own bottle of the seasick cure. He had never taken it at all!

Then, just as his step sounded in the passage, it flashed across me. He
had made one of his usual muddles. He had mistaken the bottle. He had
swallowed the contents of some other phial instead.

Revenge is sweet; but I felt well again, and no longer harboured any
spite. There was just time to hide the bottle in my hand when he
entered.

“Awful headache I’ve got,” he said. “Can’t make out what’s wrong with
me. Such funny pains, too.”

“After-effects of the seasick cure, probably. They’ll pass in time,” I
suggested. But he remained in bed for a day and a night with all the
symptoms of _mal de mer_ on land.

It was many weeks later when I told him the truth, and showed the bottle
to prove it--just in time to prevent his telling the chemist, “I have
tried your seasick cure and found it absolutely efficacious,” etc.

“What cured you,” I said, “was far more wonderful than anything one can
buy in bottles. It was faith, sheer faith!”

“I believe you’re right,” he replied meekly. “I believed in that stuff
_absolutely_.” Then he added, “But, you know, I should like to find out
what it was I _did_ take.”




IX

THE GOBLIN’S COLLECTION


Dutton accepted the invitation for the feeble reason that he was not
quick enough at the moment to find a graceful excuse. He had none of
that facile brilliance which is so useful at week-end parties; he was a
big, shy, awkward man. Moreover, he disliked these great houses. They
swallowed him. The solemn, formidable butlers oppressed him. He left on
Sunday night when possible. This time, arriving with an hour to dress,
he went upstairs to an enormous room, so full of precious things that he
felt like an insignificant item in a museum corridor. He smiled
disconsolately as the underling who brought up his bag began to fumble
with the lock. But, instead of the sepulchral utterance he dreaded, a
delicious human voice with an unmistakable brogue proceeded from the
stooping figure. It was positively comforting. “It ’ull be locked, sorr,
but maybe ye have the key?” And they bent together over the disreputable
kit-bag, looking like a pair of ants knitting antennæ on the floor of
some great cave. The giant four-poster watched them contemptuously;
mahogany cupboards wore an air of grave surprise; the gaping, open
fireplace alone could have swallowed all his easels--almost, indeed, his
little studio. This human, Irish presence was distinctly consoling--some
extra hand or other, thought Dutton, probably.

He talked a little with the lad; then, lighting a cigarette, he watched
him put the clothes away in the capacious cupboards, noticing in
particular how neat and careful he was with the little things.
Nail-scissors, silver stud-box, metal shoe-horn, and safety razor, even
the bright cigar-cutter and pencil-sharpener collected loose from the
bottom of the bag--all these he placed in a row upon the dressing-table
with the glass top, and seemed never to have done with it. He kept
coming back to rearrange and put a final touch, lingering over them
absurdly. Dutton watched him with amusement, then surprise, finally with
exasperation. Would he never go? “Thank you,” he said at last; “that
will do. I’ll dress now. What time is dinner?” The lad told him, but
still lingered, evidently anxious to say more. “Everything’s out, I
think,” repeated Dutton impatiently; “all the loose things, I mean?” The
face at once turned eagerly. What mischievous Irish eyes he had, to be
sure! “I’ve put thim all together in a row, sorr, so that ye’ll not be
missing anny-thing at all,” was the quick reply, as he pointed to the
ridiculous collection of little articles, and even darted back to finger
them again. He counted them one by one. And then suddenly he added, with
a touch of personal interest that was _not_ familiarity, “It’s so easy,
ye see, sorr, to lose thim small bright things in this great room.” And
he was gone.

Smiling a little to himself, Dutton began to dress, wondering how the
lad had left the impression that his words meant more than they said. He
almost wished he had encouraged him to talk. “The small bright things in
this great room”--what an admirable description, almost a criticism! He
felt like a prisoner of state in the Tower. He stared about him into the
alcoves, recesses, deep embrasured windows; the tapestries and huge
curtains oppressed him; next he fell to wondering who the other guests
would be, whom he would take in to dinner, how early he could make an
excuse and slip off to bed; then, midway in these desultory thoughts,
became suddenly aware of a curiously sharp impression--that he was being
watched. Somebody, quite close, was looking at him. He dismissed the
fancy as soon as it was born, putting it down to the size and mystery of
the old-world chamber; but in spite of himself the idea persisted
teasingly, and several times he caught himself turning nervously to look
over his shoulder. It was not a ghostly feeling; his nature was not
accessible to ghostly things. The strange idea, lodged securely in his
brain, was traceable, he thought, to something the Irish lad had
said--grew out, rather, of what he had left unsaid. He idly allowed his
imagination to encourage it. Someone, friendly but curious, with
inquisitive, peeping eyes, was watching him. Someone very tiny was
hiding in the enormous room. He laughed about it; but he felt different.
A certain big, protective feeling came over him that he must go gently
lest he tread on some diminutive living thing that was soft as a kitten
and elusive as a baby mouse. Once, indeed, out of the corner of his eye,
he fancied he saw a little thing with wings go fluttering past the great
purple curtains at the other end. It was by a window. “A bird, or
something, outside,” he told himself with a laugh, yet moved thenceforth
more often than not on tiptoe. This cost him a certain effort: his
proportions were elephantine. He felt a more friendly interest now in
the stately, imposing chamber.

The dressing-gong brought him back to reality and stopped the flow of
his imagining. He shaved, and laboriously went on dressing then; he was
slow and leisurely in his movements, like many big men; very orderly,
too. But when he was ready to put in his collar stud it was nowhere to
be found. It was a worthless bit of brass, but most important; he had
only one. Five minutes ago it had been standing inside the ring of his
collar on the marble slab; he had carefully placed it there. Now it had
disappeared and left no trail. He grew warm and untidy in the search. It
was something of a business for Dutton to go on all fours. “Malicious
little beast!” he grunted, rising from his knees, his hand sore where he
had scraped it beneath the cupboard. His trouser-crease was ruined, his
hair was tumbled. He knew too well the elusive activity of similar small
objects. “It will turn up again,” he tried to laugh, “if I pay it no
attention. Mal----” he abruptly changed the adjective, as though he had
nearly said a dangerous thing--“naughty little imp!” He went on
dressing, leaving the collar to the last. He fastened the cigar-cutter
to his chain, but the nail-scissors, he noticed now, had also gone.
“Odd,” he reflected, “very odd!” He looked at the place where they had
been a few minutes ago. “Odd!” he repeated. And finally, in desperation,
he rang the bell. The heavy curtains swung inwards as he said, “Come
in,” in answer to the knock, and the Irish boy, with the merry, dancing
eyes, stood in the room. He glanced half nervously, half expectantly,
about him. “It’ll be something ye have lost, sorr?” he said at once, as
though he knew.

“I rang,” said Dutton, resenting it a little, “to ask you if you could
get me a collar stud--for this evening. Anything will do.” He did not
say he had lost his own. Someone, he felt, who was listening, would
chuckle and be pleased. It was an absurd position.

“And will it be a shtud like this, sorr, that yez wanting?” asked the
boy, picking up the lost object from inside the collar on the marble
slab.

“Like that, yes,” stammered the other, utterly amazed. He had overlooked
it, of course, yet it was in the identical place where he had left it.
He felt mortified and foolish. It was so obvious that the boy grasped
the situation--more, had expected it. It was as if the stud had been
taken and replaced deliberately. “Thank you,” he added, turning away to
hide his face as the lad backed out--with a grin, he imagined, though he
did not see it. Almost immediately, it seemed, then he was back again,
holding out a little cardboard box containing an assortment of ugly bone
studs. Dutton felt as if the whole thing had been prepared beforehand.
How foolish it was! Yet behind it lay something real and true
and--utterly incredible!

“_They_ won’t get taken, sorr,” he heard the lad say from the doorway.
“They’re not nearly bright enough.”

The other decided not to hear. “Thanks,” he said curtly; “they’ll do
nicely.”

There was a pause, but the boy did not go. Taking a deep breath, he said
very quickly, as though greatly daring, “It’s only the bright and
little lovely things he takes, sorr, if ye plaze. He takes thim for his
collection, and there’s no stoppin’ him at all.” It came out with a
rush, and Dutton, hearing it, let the human thing rise up in him. He
turned and smiled.

“Oh, he takes these things for his collection, does he?” he asked more
gently.

The boy looked dreadfully shame-faced, confession hanging on his lips.
“The little bright and lovely things, sorr, yes. I’ve done me best, but
there’s things he can’t resist at all. The bone ones is safe, though. He
won’t look at thim.”

“I suppose he followed you across from Ireland, eh?” the other inquired.

The lad hung his head. “I told Father Madden,” he said in a lower voice,
“but it’s not the least bit of good in the wurrld.” He looked as though
he had been convicted of stealing and feared to lose his place.
Suddenly, lifting his blue eyes, he added, “But if ye take no notice at
all he ginrelly puts everything back in its place agin. He only borrows
thim, just for a little bit of toime. Pretend ye’re not wantin’ thim at
all, sorr, and back they’ll come prisintly again, brighter than before
maybe.”

“I see,” answered Dutton slowly. “All right, then,” he dismissed him,
“and I won’t say a word downstairs. You needn’t be afraid,” as the lad
looked his gratitude and vanished like a flash, leaving the other with
a queer and eerie feeling, staring at the ugly bone studs. He finished
dressing hurriedly and went downstairs. He went on tiptoe out of the
great room, moving delicately and with care, lest he might tread on
something very soft and tiny, almost wounded, like a butterfly with a
broken wing. And from the corners, he felt positive, something watched
him go.

The ordeal of dinner passed off well enough; the rather heavy evening
too. He found the opportunity to slip off early to bed. The
nail-scissors were in their place again. He read till midnight; nothing
happened. His hostess had told him the history of his room, inquiring
kindly after his comfort. “Some people feel rather lost in it,” she
said; “I hope you found all you want,” and, tempted by her choice of
words--the “lost” and “found”--he nearly told the story of the Irish lad
whose goblin had followed him across the sea and “borrowed little bright
and lovely things for his collection.” But he kept his word; he told
nothing; she would only have stared, for one thing. For another, he was
bored, and therefore uncommunicative. He smiled inwardly. All that this
giant mansion could produce for his comfort and amusement were ugly bone
studs, a thieving goblin, and a vast bedroom where dead royalty had
slept. Next day, at intervals, when changing for tennis or back again
for lunch, the “borrowing” continued; the little things he needed at
the moment had disappeared. They turned up later. To ignore their
disappearance was the recipe for their recovery--invariably, too, just
where he had seen them last. There was the lost object shining in his
face, propped impishly on its end, just ready to fall upon the carpet,
and ever with a quizzical, malicious air of innocence that was truly
goblin. His collar stud was the favourite; next came the scissors and
the silver pencil-sharpener.

Trains and motors combined to keep him Sunday night, but he arranged to
leave on Monday before the other guests were up, and so got early to
bed. He meant to watch. There was a merry, jolly feeling in him that he
had established quasi-friendly relations with the little Borrower. He
might even see an object go--catch it in the act of disappearing! He
arranged the bright objects in a row upon the glass-topped
dressing-table opposite the bed, and while reading kept an eye slyly on
the array of tempting bait. But nothing happened. “It’s the wrong way,”
he realised suddenly. “What a blunderer I am!” He turned the light out
then. Drowsiness crept over him.... Next day, of course, he told himself
it was a dream....

The night was very still, and through the latticed windows stole faintly
the summer moonlight. Outside the foliage rustled a little in the wind.
A night-jar called from the fields, and a secret, furry owl made answer
from the copse beyond. The body of the chamber lay in thick darkness,
but a slanting ray of moonlight caught the dressing-table and shone
temptingly upon the silver objects. “It’s like setting a nightline,” was
the last definite thought he remembered--when the laughter that followed
stopped suddenly, and his nerves gave a jerk that turned him keenly
alert.

From the enormous open fireplace, gaping in darkness at the end of the
room, issued a thread of delicate sound that was softer than a feather.
A tiny flurry of excitement, furtive, tentative, passed shivering across
the air. An exquisite, dainty flutter stirred the night, and through the
heavy human brain upon the great four-poster fled this picture, as from
very far away, picked out in black and silver--of a wee knight-errant
crossing the frontiers of fairyland, high mischief in his tiny, beating
heart. Pricking along over the big, thick carpet, he came towards the
bed, towards the dressing-table, intent upon bold plunder. Dutton lay
motionless as a stone, and watched and listened. The blood in his ears
smothered the sound a little, but he never lost it altogether. The
flicking of a mouse’s tail or whiskers could hardly have been more
gentle than this sound, more wary, circumspect, discreet, certainly not
half so artful. Yet the human being in the bed, so heavily breathing,
heard it well. Closer it came, and closer, oh, so elegant and tender,
this bold attack of a wee Adventurer from another world. It shot swiftly
past the bed. With a little flutter, delicious, almost musical, it rose
in the air before his very face and entered the pool of moonlight on the
dressing-table. Something blurred it then; the human sight grew troubled
and confused a moment; a mingling of moonlight with the reflections from
the mirror, slab of glass, and shining objects obscured clear vision
somehow. For a second Dutton lost the proper focus. There was a tiny
rattle and a tiny click. He saw that the pencil-sharpener stood balanced
on the table’s very edge. It was in the act of vanishing.

But for his stupid blunder then, he might have witnessed more. He simply
could not restrain himself, it seems. He sprang, and at the same instant
the silver object fell upon the carpet. Of course his elephantine leap
made the entire table shake. But, anyhow, he was not quick enough. He
saw the reflection of a slim and tiny hand slide down into the mirrored
depths of the reflecting sheet of glass--deep, deep down, and swift as a
flash of light. This he thinks he saw, though the light, he admits, was
oddly confusing in that moment of violent and clumsy movement.

One thing, at any rate, was beyond all question: the pencil-sharpener
had disappeared. He turned the light up; he searched for a dozen
minutes, then gave it up in despair and went back to bed. Next morning
he searched again. But, having overslept himself, he did not search as
thoroughly as he might have done, for half-way through the tiresome
operation the Irish lad came in to take his bag for the train.

“Will ut be something ye’ve lost, sorr?” he asked gravely.

“Oh, it’s all right,” Dutton answered from the floor. “You can take the
bag--and my overcoat.” And in town that day he bought another
pencil-sharpener and hung it on his chain.




X

IMAGINATION


Having dined upon a beefsteak and a pint of bitter, Jones went home to
work. The trouble with Jones--his first name William--was that he
possessed creative imagination: that luggage upon which excess charges
have to be paid all through life--to the critic, the stupid, the
orthodox, the slower minds without the “flash.” He was alone in his
brother’s flat. It was after nine o’clock. He was half-way into a story,
and had--stuck! Sad to relate, the machinery that carries on the details
of an original inspiration had blocked. And to invent he knew not how.
Unless the imagination “produced” he would not allow his brain to devise
mere episodes--dull and lifeless substitutes. Jones, poor fool, was also
artist.

And the reason he had “stuck” was not surprising, for his story was of a
kind that might well tax the imagination of any sane man. He was writing
at the moment about a being who had survived his age--a study of one of
those rare and primitive souls who walk the earth to-day in a man’s
twentieth-century body, while yet the spirit belongs to the Golden Age
of the world’s history. You may come across them sometimes, rare,
ingenuous, delightful beings, the primal dews still upon their eyelids,
the rush and glow of earth’s pristine fires pulsing in their veins,
careless of gain, indifferent to success, lost, homeless,
exiled--_dépaysés_.... The idea had seized him. He had met such folk. He
burned to describe their exile, the pathos of their loneliness, their
yearnings and their wanderings--rejected by a world they had outlived.
And for his type, thus representing some power of unexpended
mythological values strayed back into modern life to find itself denied
and ridiculed--he had chosen a Centaur! For he wished it to symbolise
what he believed was to be the next stage in human evolution: Intuition
no longer neglected, but developed equally with Reason. His Centaur was
to stand for instinct (the animal body close to Nature) combined with,
yet not dominated by, the upright stature moving towards deity. The
conception was true and pregnant.

And--he had stuck. The detail that blocked him was the man’s
_appearance_. How would such a being look? In what details would he
betray that, though outwardly a man, he was inwardly this survival of
the Golden Age, escaped from some fair Eden, splendid, immense, simple,
and beneficent, yet--a Centaur?

Perhaps it was just as well he had “stuck,” for his brother would
shortly be in, and his brother was a successful business man with the
money-sense and commercial instincts strongly developed. He dealt in
rice and sugar. With his brother in the flat no Centaur could possibly
survive for a single moment. “It’ll come to me when I’m not thinking
about it,” he sighed, knowing well the waywardness of his particular
genius. He threw the reins upon the subconscious self and moved into an
arm-chair to read in the evening paper the things the public loved--that
public who refused to buy his books, pleading they were “queer.” He
waded down the list of immoralities, murders and assaults with a dreamy
eye, and had just reached the witness’s description of finding the
bloody head in the faithless wife’s bedroom, when there came a hurried,
pelting knock at the door, and William Jones, glad of the relief, went
to open it. There, facing him, stood the bore from the flat below.
Horrors!

It was not, however, a visit after all. “Jones,” he faltered, “there’s
an odd sort of chap here asking for you or your brother. Rang my bell by
mistake.”

Jones murmured some reply or other, and as the bore vanished with a
hurry unusual to him, there passed into the flat a queer shape, born
surely of the night and stars and desolate places. He seemed in some
undefinable way bent, humpbacked, very large. With him came a touch of
open spaces, winds, forests, long clean hills and dew-drenched fields.

“Come in, please....” said Jones, instantly aware that the man was not
for his brother. “You have something to--er----” he was going to use the
word “ask,” then changed it instinctively--“_say_ to me, haven’t you?”

The man was ragged, poor, outcast. Clearly it was a begging episode; and
yet he trembled violently, while in his veins ran fire. The caller
refused a seat, but moved over to the curtains by the window, drawing
them slightly aside so that he could see out. And the window was high
above old smoky London--open. It felt cold. Jones bent down, always
keeping his caller in view, and lit the gas-stove. “You wish to see me,”
he said, rising again to an upright position. Then he added more
hurriedly, stepping back a little towards the rack where the
walking-sticks were, “Please let me know what I can do for you!”

Bearded, unkempt, with massive shoulders and huge neck, the caller stood
a moment and stared. “Your name and address,” he said at length, “were
given to me”--he hesitated a moment, then added--“you know by whom.” His
voice was deep and windy and echoing. It made the stretched cords of the
upright piano ring against the wall. “He told me to call,” the man
concluded.

“Ah yes; of course,” Jones stammered, forgetting for the moment who or
where he was. “Let me see--where are you”--the word did not want to come
out--“staying?” The caller made an awful and curious movement; it seemed
so much bigger than his body. “In what way--er--can I be of assistance?”
Jones hardly knew what he said. The other volunteered so little. He was
frightened. Then, before the man could answer, he caught a dreadful
glimpse, as of something behind the outline. It moved. Was it shadow
that thus extended his form? Was it the glare of that ugly gas-stove
that played tricks with the folds of the curtain, driving bodily outline
forth into mere vacancy? For the figure of his strange caller seemed to
carry with it the idea of projections, extensions, growths, in
themselves not monstrous, fine and comely, rather--yet awful.

The man left the window and moved towards him. It was a movement both
swift and enormous. It was instantaneous.

“Who are you--_really_?” asked Jones, his breath catching, while he went
pluckily out to meet him, irresistibly drawn. “And what is it you
_really_ want of me?” He went very close to the shrouded form, caught
the keen air from the open window behind, sniffed a wind that was not
London’s stale and weary wind, then stopped abruptly, frozen with terror
and delight. The man facing him was splendid and terrific, exhaling
something that overwhelmed.

“What can I ... do ... for ... you?” whispered Jones, shaking like a
leaf. A delight of racing clouds was in him.

The answer came in a singular roaring voice that yet sounded far away,
as though among mountains. Wind might have brought it down.

“There is nothing you can do for me! But, by Chiron, there is something
I can do for you!”

“And that is?” asked Jones faintly, feeling something sweep against his
feet and legs like the current of a river in flood.

The man eyed him appallingly a moment.

“Let you see me!” he roared, while his voice set the piano singing
again, and his outline seemed to swim over the chairs and tables like a
fluid mass. “Show myself to you!”

The figure stretched out what looked like arms, reared gigantically
aloft towards the ceiling, and swept towards him. Jones saw the great
visage close to his own. He smelt the odour of caves, river-beds,
hillsides--space. In another second he would have been lost----

His brother made a great rattling as he opened the door. The atmosphere
of rice and sugar and office desks came in with him.

“Why, Billy, old man, you look as if you’d seen a ghost. You’re white!”

William Jones mopped his forehead. “I’ve been working rather hard,” he
answered. “Feel tired. Fact is--I got stuck in a story for a bit.”

“Too bad. Got it straightened out at last, I hope?”

“Yes, thanks. _It came to me_--in the end.”

The other looked at him. “Good,” he said shortly. “Rum thing,
imagination, isn’t it?” And then he began talking about his day’s
business--in tons and tons of food.




XI

THE INVITATION


They bumped into one another by the swinging doors of the little Soho
restaurant, and, recoiling sharply, each made a half-hearted pretence of
lifting his hat (it was French manners, of course, _inside_). Then,
discovering that they were English, and not strangers, they exclaimed,
“Sorry!” and laughed.

“Hulloa! It’s Smith!” cried the man with the breezy manner; “and when
did _you_ get back?” It sounded as though “Smith” and “_you_” were
different persons. “I haven’t seen you for months!” They shook hands
cordially.

“Only last Saturday--on the _Rollitania_,” answered the man with the
pince-nez. They were acquaintances of some standing. Neither was aware
of anything in the other he disliked. More positive cause for friendship
there was none. They met, however, not infrequently.

“Last Saturday! Did you really?” exclaimed the breezy one; and, after an
imperceptible pause which suggested nothing more vital, he added, “And
had a good time in America, eh?”

“Oh! not bad, thanks--not bad at all.” He likewise was conscious of a
rather barren pause. “Awful crossing, though,” he threw in a few seconds
later with a slight grimace.

“Ah! At this time of year, you know----” said Breezy, shaking his head
knowingly; “though _sometimes_, of course, one has better trips in
winter than in summer. I crossed once in December when it was like a
mill-pond the whole blessed way.”

They moved a little to one side to let a group of Frenchmen enter the
swinging doors.

“It’s a good line,” he added, in a voice that settled the reputation of
the steamship company for ever. “By Jove, it’s a good line.”

“Oh! it’s a good line, yes,” agreed Pince-nez, gratified to find his
choice approved. He shifted his glasses modestly. The discovery
reflected glory upon his judgment. “_And_ such an excellent table!”

Breezy agreed heartily. “I’d never cross now on any other,” he declared,
as though he meant the table. “You’re right.”

This happy little agreement about the food pleased them both; it showed
their judgment to be sound; also it established a ground of common
interest--a link--something that gave point to their little chat, and
made it seem worth while to have stopped and spoken. They rose in one
another’s estimation. The chance meeting ought to lead to something,
perhaps. Yet neither found the expected inspiration; for neither _au
fond_ had anything to say to the other beyond passing the time of day.

“Well,” said Pince-nez, lingeringly but very pleasantly, making a
movement towards the doors; “I suppose I must be going in.
You--er--you’ve had lunch, of course?”

“Thanks, yes, I have,” Breezy replied with a certain air of
disappointment, as though the question had been an invitation. He moved
a few steps backwards down the pavement. “But, now you’re back,” he
added more cheerfully, “we must try and see something of one another.”

“By all means. Do let’s,” said Pince-nez. His manner somehow suggested
that he too expected an invitation, perhaps. He hesitated a moment, as
though about to add something, but in the end said nothing.

“We must lunch together one day,” observed Breezy, with his jolly smile.
He glanced up at the restaurant.

“By all means--let’s,” agreed the other again, with one foot on the
steps. “Any day you like. Next week, perhaps. You let me know.” He
nodded cordially, and half turned to enter.

“Lemme see, where are you staying?” called Breezy by way of
after-thought.

“Oh! I’m at the X----,” mentioning an obscure hostel in the W.C.
district.

“Of course; yes, I remember. That’s where you stopped before, isn’t it?
Up in Bloomsbury somewhere----?”

“Rooms ain’t up to much, but the cooking’s _quite_ decent.”

“Good. Then we’ll lunch one day soon. What sort of time, by the bye,
suits you?” The breezy one, for some obscure reason, looked vigorously
at his watch.

“Oh! any time; one o’clock onwards, sort of thing, I suppose?” with an
air of “just let me know and I’ll be there.”

“Same here, yes,” agreed the other, with slightly less enthusiasm.

“That’s capital, then,” from Pince-nez. He paused a moment, not finding
precisely the suitable farewell phrase. Then, to his own undoing, he
added carelessly, “There are one or two things--er--I should like to
tell you about----”

“And luncheon _is_ the best time,” Breezy suggested at once, “for busy
men like us. You might bespeak a table, in fact.” He jerked his head
towards the restaurant.

The two acquaintances, one on the pavement, the other on the steps,
stood and stared at each other. The onus of invitation had somehow
shifted insensibly from Breezy to Pince-nez. The next remark would be
vital. Neither thought it worth while to incur the slight expense of a
luncheon that involved an hour in each other’s company. Yet it was
nothing stronger than a dread of possible boredom that dictated the
hesitancy.

“Not a bad idea,” agreed Pince-nez vaguely. “But I doubt if they’ll keep
a table after one o’clock, you know.”

“Never mind, then. You’re on the telephone, I suppose, aren’t you?”
called Breezy down the pavement, still moving slowly backwards.

“Yes, you’ll find it under the name of the hotel,” replied the other,
putting his head back round the door-post in the act of going in.

“My number’s not in the book!” Breezy cried back; “but it’s 0417
Westminster. Then you’ll ring me up one day? That’ll be very jolly
indeed. _Don’t forget the number!_” This shifting of telephonic
responsibility, he felt, was a master-stroke.

“Right-O. I’ll remember. So long, then, for the present,” Pince-nez
answered more faintly, disappearing into the restaurant.

“Decent fellow, that. I shall go to lunch if he asks me,” was the
thought in the mind of each. It lasted for perhaps half a minute, and
then--oblivion.

Ten days later they ran across one another again about luncheon-time in
Piccadilly; nodded, smiled, hesitated a second too long--and turned back
to shake hands.

“How’s everything?” asked the breezy one with gusto.

“First-rate, thanks. And how are _you_?”

“Jolly weather, isn’t it?” Breezy said, looking about him generally,
“this sunshine--by Jove----!”

“Nothing like it,” declared Pince-nez, shifting his glasses to look at
the sun, and concealing his lack of something to say by catching at the
hearty manner.

“Nothing,” agreed Breezy.

“In the world,” echoed Pince-nez.

Again the topic was a link. The stream of pedestrians jostled them. They
moved a few yards up Dover Street. Each was really on his way to
luncheon. A pause followed the move.

“Still at--er--that hotel up there?” The name had escaped him. He jerked
his head vaguely northwards.

“Yes; I thought you’d be looking in for lunch one day,” a faint memory
stirring in his brain.

“Delighted! Or--you’d better come to my Club, eh? Less out of the way,
you know,” declared Breezy.

“Very jolly. Thanks; that’d be first-rate.” Both paused a moment. Breezy
looked down the street as though expecting someone or something. They
ignored that it was luncheon hour.

“You’ll find me in the telephone book,” observed Pince-nez presently.

“Under X---- Hotel, I suppose?” from Breezy. “All right.”

“0995 Northern’s the number, yes.”

“And mine,” said Breezy, “is 0417 Westminster; or the Club”--with an air
of imparting valuable private information--“is 0866 Mayfair. Any day you
like. Don’t forget!”

“Rather not. Somewhere about one o’clock, eh?”

“Yes--or one-thirty.” And off they went again--each to his solitary
luncheon.

A fortnight passed, and once more they came together--this time in an
A.B.C. shop.

“Hulloa! There’s Smith,” thought Breezy “By Jove, I’ll ask him to lunch
with me.”

“Why, there’s that chap again,” thought Pince-nez. “I’ll invite him, I
think.”

They sat down at the same table. “But this is capital,” exclaimed both;
“you must lunch with me, of course!” And they laughed pleasantly. They
talked of food and weather. They compared Soho with A.B.C. Each offered
light excuses for being found in the latter.

“I was in a hurry to-day, and looked in by the merest chance for a cup
of coffee,” observed Breezy, ordering quite a lot of things at once,
absent-mindedly, as it were.

“I like the butter here so awfully,” mentioned Pince-nez later. “It’s
_quite_ the best in London, and the freshest, I always think.” As this
was not _the_ luncheon, they felt that only commonplace things were in
order. The special things they had to discuss must wait, of course.

The waitress got their paper checks muddled somehow. “I’ve put a
’alfpenny of yours on ’is,” she explained cryptically to Pince-nez.

“Oh,” laughed Breezy, “that’s nothing. This gentleman is lunching with
me, anyhow.”

“You’ll ’ave to make it all right when you get outside, then,” said the
girl gravely.

They laughed over her reply. At the paydesk both made vigorous search
for money. Pince-nez, being nimbler, produced a florin first. “This is
_my_ lunch, of course. I asked you, remember,” he said. Breezy demurred
with a good grace.

“You can be host another time, if you insist,” added Pince-nez,
pocketing twopence change.

“Rather,” said the other heartily. “You must come to the Club--any day
you like, you know.”

“I’ll come to-morrow, then,” said Pince-nez, quick as a flash. “I’ve got
the telephone number.”

“Do,” cried Breezy, very, very heartily indeed. “I shall be delighted!
One o’clock, remember.”




XII

THE IMPULSE


“My dear chap,” cried Jones, throwing his hands out in a gesture of
distress he thought was quite real, “nothing would give me greater
pleasure--if only I could manage it. But the fact is I’m as hard up as
yourself!”

The little pale-faced man of uncertain age opposite shrugged his
shoulders ever so slightly.

“In a month or so, perhaps----” Jones added, hedging instinctively, “If
it’s not too late then--I should be delighted----”

The other interrupted quickly, a swift flush emphasising momentarily the
pallor of his strained and tired face. Overworked, overweary he looked.

“Oh, thanks, but it’s really of no consequence. I felt sure you wouldn’t
mind my asking, though.” And Jones replied heartily that he only wished
he were “flush” enough to lend it. They talked weather and politics
then--after a pause, finished their drinks, Jones refusing the offer of
another, and, presently, the elder man said good-night and left the
Club. Jones, with a slight sigh of boredom, as though life went hard
with him, passed upstairs to the card-room to find partners for a game.

Jones was not a bad fellow really; he was untaught. Experience had
neglected him a little, so that his sympathies knew not those sweet
though difficult routes by which interest travels away from
self--towards others. He entirely lacked that acuter sense of life which
only comes to those who have known genuine want and hardship. A fat
income had always tumbled into his bank without effort on his part, the
harvest of another’s sweat; yet, as with many such, he imagined that he
earned his thousand a year, and figured somehow to himself that he
deserved it. He was neither evil-liver nor extravagant; he knew not
values, that was all--least of all money values; and at the moment when
his cousin asked for twenty pounds to help his family to a holiday, he
found that debts pressed a bit hard, that he owed still on his
motor-car, and that some recent speculations seemed suddenly very
doubtful. He was hard up, yes.... Perhaps, if the cards were lucky, he
might do it after all. But the cards were not lucky. Soon after midnight
he took a taxi home to his rooms in St. James’s Street. And then it was
he found a letter marked “Urgent” placed by his man upon the table by
the door so that he could not miss it.

The letter kept him awake most of the night in keen distress--for
himself. It was anonymous, signed “Your Well-wisher.” It warned him, in
words that proved the writer to be well informed, that the speculation
in which he, Jones, had plunged so recklessly a week before would mean a
total loss unless he instantly took certain steps to retrieve himself.
Such steps, moreover, were just possible, provided he acted immediately.

Jones, as he read it, turned pale, if such a thing were possible, all
over his body; then he turned hot and cold. He sweated, groaned, sighed,
raged; sat down and wrote urgent instructions to solicitors and others;
tore the letters up and wrote others. The loss of that money would
reduce his income by at least half, alter his whole plan and scale of
living, make him poor. He tried to reflect, but the calmness necessary
to sound reflection lay far from him. Action was what he needed, but
action was just then out of the question, for all the machinery of the
world slept--solicitors, company secretaries, influential friends,
lawcourts. The telephone on the wall merely grinned at him uselessly.
Sleep was as vain a remedy as the closed and silent banks. There was
absolutely nothing he could do till the morning; and he realised that
the letters he wrote were futile even while he wrote them--and tore them
up the next minute. Personal interviews the first thing in the morning,
energetic talk and action based upon the best possible advice, were the
only form relief could take, and these personal interviews he could
obtain even before the letters would be delivered, or as soon. For him
that money seemed as good as already lost ... and tossing upon his
sleepless bed he faced the change of life the loss involved--bitterly,
savagely, with keen pain: the lowered scale of self-indulgence, the
clipped selfishness, restricted pleasures, fewer clothes, cheaper rooms,
difficult and closely calculated travelling, and all the rest. It bit
him hard--this first grinding of the little wheels of possible
development in an ordinary selfish, though not evil, heart....

And then it was, as the grey dawn-light crept past the blinds, that the
sharpness of his pain and the keen flight of his stirred imagination,
projecting itself as by these forced marches into new, untried
conditions, produced a slight reaction. The swing of the weary pendulum
went a little beyond himself. He fell to wondering vaguely, and with
poor insight, yet genuinely, what other men might feel, and how they
managed on smaller incomes than his own--smaller than his would be even
with the loss. Gingerly, tentatively, he snatched fearful glimpses
(fearful, they seemed, to him, at least) into the enclosures of these
more restricted lives of others. He knew a mild and weak extension of
himself, as it were, that fringed the little maps of lives less happy
and indulgent than his own. And the novel sensation brought a faint
relief. The small, clogged wheels of sympathy acquired faster movement,
almost impetus. It seemed as though the heat and fire of his pain,
though selfish pain, generated some new energy that made them turn.

Jones, in all his useless life, had never _thought_; his mind had
reflected images perhaps, but had never taken hold of a real idea and
followed it by logical process to an end. His mind was heavy and
confused, for his nature, as with so many, only moved to calculated
action when a strong enough desire instinctively showed the quickest,
easiest way by which two and two could be made into four. His
reflections upon comparative poverty--the poverty he was convinced now
faced him cruelly--were therefore obscure and trivial enough, while
wholly honest. Wealth, he divined dimly, was relative, and money
represented the value of what is wanted, perhaps of what is needed
rather, and usually of what cannot be obtained. Some folk are poor
because they cannot afford a second motor-car, or spend more than £100
upon a trip abroad; others because the moors and sea are out of reach;
others, again, because they are glad of cast-off clothing and only dare
“the gods” one night a week or take the free standing-room at Sunday
concerts.... He suddenly recalled the story of some little penniless,
elderly governess in Switzerland who made her underskirts from the silk
of old umbrellas because she liked the frou-frou sound. Again and again
this thought for others slipped past the network of his own distress,
making his own selfish pain spread wider and therefore less acutely. For
even with a mere £500 his life, perhaps, need not be too hard and
unhappy.... The little wheels moved faster. His pain struck sparks. He
saw strange glimpses of a new, far country, a fairer land than he had
ever dreamed of, with endless horizons, and flowers, small and very
simple, yet so lovely that he would have liked to pick them for their
perfume. A sense of joy came for a moment on some soft wind of beauty,
fugitive, but sweet. It vanished instantly again, but the vision caught
for a moment, too tiny to be measured even by a fraction of a second,
had flamed like summer lightning through his heart. It almost seemed as
though his grinding selfish pain had burned the dense barriers that hid
another world, bringing a light that just flamed above those huge
horizons before they died. For they did die--and quickly, yet left
behind a touch of singular joy and peace that somehow glowed on through
all his subsequent self-pity....

And then, abruptly, with a vividness of detail that shocked him, he saw
the Club smoking-room, and the worn face of his cousin close before
him--the overworked hack-writer, who had asked a temporary £20, a
little sum he would assuredly have paid back before the end of the year,
a sum he asked, not for himself, but that he might send his wife and
children to the sea.

Impulse, usually deplored as weakness, may prove first seed of habit.
Whether Jones afterwards regretted his unconsidered action may be left
unrecorded--whether he _would_ have regretted it, rather, if the saving
of his dreaded loss had not subsequently been effected. As matters
stand, he only knew a sense or flattering self-congratulation that he
had slipped that letter--the only one he left untorn--into the
pillar-box at the corner before the sun rose, and that it contained a
pink bit of paper that should bring to another the relief he himself
had, for the first time in his life, known imaginatively upon that
sleepless bed. Before the day was over the letter reached its
destination, and his own affairs had been put right. And two days later,
when they met in the Club, and Jones noticed the obvious happiness in
the other’s eyes and manner, he only answered to his words of thanks:

“I wish I could have given it at once. The fact is I found letters on
getting home that night which--er--made it possible, you see ...!”

But in his heart, as he said it, flamed again quite suddenly the memory
of that fair land with endless horizons he had sighted for a second, and
the sentence that ran unspoken through his mind was: “By Jove, that’s
something I must do again. It’s worth it ...!”




XIII

HER BIRTHDAY


It was her birthday on the morrow, and I set forth to find a suitable
and worthy present. My means, judged by the standards of the big
merchants, seemed trivial; yet, could I but discover the right gift, no
matter how insignificant, I felt sure that it would please her, and so
make me doubly happy. And the kind of gift I already knew, for I had a
specimen of it in my humble lodgings; only of so poor a type that I was
ashamed to offer it. I must find somewhere a much, much better one, if
possible, perfect and without a single flaw. I went, therefore, into the
great shops and saw a thousand wonderful and lovely things....

So particular was I, however, and so difficult to suit, that I wearied
the salesfolk, and began to feel despondent. All that they showed me was
so wrong--so cheap. In the matter of actual expense there was no
disagreement, for I mentioned plainly beforehand the price that I would
pay, or, rather, that I was prepared to pay. But in the nature and
quality of the goods there was no satisfying me at all. Everything that
they spread before my eyes seemed ordinary, trifling, even spurious.
Marvellously fashioned, and of the most costly description, they yet
seemed somewhere counterfeit. The goods were sham. Already she possessed
far better. There was nowhere--and I went to the very best emporiums
where the rich and favoured of the world bought their offerings--there
was nowhere the little genuine thing I sought. The finest that was set
before me seemed unworthy. I compared one and all with the specimen,
broken yet authentic, that I had at home. And even the cleverest of the
salesfolk was unable to deceive me, because I _knew_.

“And this, for instance?” I asked at length, far from content, yet
thinking it might just do perhaps in place of anything better I could
find. “How much is this magnificent, jewelled thing, with its ingenious
little surprise for each day in the entire year? You mentioned----?”

“Ten million pounds, sir,” said the man obsequiously, while he eyed me
with a close and questioning glance.

“Ten million only!” And I laughed in his face.

“That was the price you named, sir,” he murmured.

I drew myself up, looking disdainfully, pityingly at him. And, though he
met my eye, he hesitated. Over his tired features there stole a soft
and marvellous expression. Something more tender than starlight shone in
his little eyes. And, as he answered in a gentle voice that was almost a
whisper, I saw him smile as a man may smile when he understands a
divine, unutterable thing. Glory touched him for an instant with high
radiance, and a hint of delicious awe hid shyly in his voice. I barely
caught the words, so low he murmured them:

“I fear, sir, that what you want is not to be had at all--in our
establishment. You will hardly find it. It is not in the market.” He
seemed to bow his head in reverence a moment. “It is not--for sale.”

And so I went back to my dingy lodgings, having made no single purchase.
I looked fondly at my own little specimen, trying to imagine it had
somehow gained in value, in beauty, almost in splendour. At least, I
said to myself, it is not spurious. It is real....

And, sitting down to my table, I dipped my broken pen into a penny
bottle of inferior ink, and began my birthday letter:--

“This is your birthday, dear, and I send you _all my love_----” Being
young, I underlined the words describing my little present, thinking to
increase its value thus.

But I did not complete the sentence, for there was another thing that I
must find to send her, or she would be disappointed. And a birthday
comes but once a year. But, again, though I already possessed a tiny
specimen of this other thing I sought, it did not seem to me nearly good
enough to offer. Though genuine, it was worn by frequent use. Its lustre
had dimmed a little, for I touched it daily. It seemed too ordinary and
common for a special present. I was ashamed to send it.

So I set out again and searched ... and searched ... in every likely and
unlikely place, even groping in the dark about the altars of the
churches where I found by chance the doors ajar, and penetrating to
those secret shrines where those who seek truth, it is said, go in to
pray. For I knew that there was this other little present from me that
she would look for--because she had need of it....

And my search was wonderful and full of high adventure, yet so long that
the moon had drawn the hood over the door of her silver tent, and the
stars were fading in the east behind the towers of the night, before I
returned home, footsore, aching, empty-handed, and very humble in my
heart. For nowhere had I been able to find this other little thing she
would be pleased to have from me. To my amazement, yet to my secret joy,
I found nothing better than what I had at home--nothing, that is,
indubitably genuine. In quantity it was not anywhere for sale. It was
more rare than I had guessed--and I felt delicious triumph in me.

I sat down, humble, reverent, but incommunicably proud and happy, to my
unfinished letter. Unless I posted it immediately she would not get it
when she woke upon her birthday morning. I finished it. I posted it just
as it was--brief, the writing a little shaky, the paper cheap, blot,
smudge, and all:

“..._and my worship_.”

And then, like a scrap of paper that enclosed the other gifts, yet need
not be noticed unless she wished it, I added (above the little foolish
name she knew me by) another tiny present--all that I had brought into
the world or could take out with me again when I left it:

I wrote: “Yours ever faith-fully.”




XIV

TWO IN ONE


Some idle talker, playing with half-truths, had once told him that he
was too self-centred to fall into love--out of himself; he was unwilling
to lose himself in another; and that was the reason he had never
married. But Le Maitre was not really more of an egoist than is
necessary to make a useful man. A too selfless person is ever
ineffective. The suggestion, nevertheless, had remained to distress, for
he was no great philosopher--merely a writer of successful tales--tales
of wild Nature chiefly; the “human interest” (a publisher’s term) was
weak; the great divine enigma of an undeveloped soul--certainly of a
lover’s or a woman’s soul--had never claimed his attention enough,
perhaps. He was somewhat too much detached from human life. Nature had
laid so powerful a spell upon his heart....

“I hope she won’t be late,” ran the practical thought across his mind as
he waited that early Sunday morning in the Great Central Station and
reflected that it was the cleanest, brightest, and most airy terminus
of all London. He had promised her the whole day out--a promise somewhat
long neglected. He was not conscious of doing an unselfish act, yet on
the whole, probably, he would rather--or just as soon--have been alone.

The air was fragrant, and the sunshine blazed in soft white patches on
the line. The maddening loveliness of an exceptional spring danced
everywhere into his heart. Yes, he rather wished he were going off into
the fields and woods alone, instead of with her. Only--she was really a
dear person, more, far more now, than secretary and typist; more, even,
than the devoted girl who had nursed him through that illness. A friend
she was; the years of their working together had made her that; and she
was wise and gentle. Oh, yes; it would be delightful to have her with
him. How she would enjoy the long sunny day!

Then he saw her coming towards him through the station. In a patch of
sunshine she came, as though the light produced her--came suddenly from
the middle of a group of men in flannels carrying golf-sticks. And he
smiled his welcome a little paternally, trying to kill the selfish
thought that he would rather have been alone. Soft things fluttered
about her. The big hat was becoming. She was dressed in brown, he
believed.

He bought a Sunday paper. “I must buy one too,” she laughed. She chose
one with pictures, chose it at random rather. He had never heard its
name even. And in a first-class carriage alone--he meant to do it really
well--they raced through a world of sunshine and brilliant fields to
Amersham. She was very happy. She tried every seat in turn; the blazing
sheets of yellow--such a spring for buttercups there had never
been--drew her from side to side. She put her head out, and nearly lost
her big hat, and that soft fluttering thing she wore streamed behind her
like the colour of escaping flowers. She opened both windows. The very
carriage held the perfume of may that floated over the whole
country-side.

He was very nice to her, but read his paper--though always ready with a
smile and answer when she asked for them. She teased and laughed and
chattered. The luncheon packages engaged her serious attention. Never
for a moment was she still, trying every corner in turn, putting her
feet up, and bouncing to enjoy the softness of the first-class cushions.
“You’ll be sitting in the rack next,” he suggested. But her head was out
of the window again and she did not hear him. She was radiant as a
child. His paper interested him--book reviews or something. “I’ve asked
you that three times, you know, already,” he heard her laughing
opposite. And with a touch of shame he tossed the paper through the
window. “There! I’d quite forgotten her again!” he thought, with a
touch of shame. “I must pull myself together.” For it was true. He had
for the moment--more than once--forgotten her existence, just as though
he really _were_ alone.

Together they strolled down through the beech wood towards Amersham, he
for ever dropping the luncheon packages, which she picked up again and
tried to stuff into his pockets. For she refused to carry anything at
all. “It’s _my_ day out, not yours, remember! _I_ do no work to-day!”
And he caught her happiness, pausing to watch her while she picked
flowers and leaves and all the rest, and disentangling without the least
impatience that soft fluttering thing she wore when it caught in thorns,
and even talking with her about this wild spring glory as though she
were just the companion that he needed out of all the world. He no
longer felt quite so conscious of her objective presence as at first. In
the train, for instance, he had felt so vividly aware that she was
there. Alternately he had forgotten and remembered her presence. Now it
was better. They were more together, as it were. “I wish I were alone,”
he thought once more as the beauty of the spring called to him
tumultuously and he longed to lie and dream it all, unhampered by
another’s presence. Then, even while thinking it, he realised that he
was--alone. It was curious.

This happened even in their first wood when they went downhill into
Amersham. As they left it and passed again into the open it came. And on
its heels, as he watched her moving here and there, light-footed as a
child or nymph, there came this other instinctive thought--“I wish I
were ten years younger than I am!”--the first time in all his life,
probably, that such a thought had ever bothered him. Apparently he said
it aloud, laughingly, as he watched her dancing movements. For she
turned and ran up to his side quickly, her little face quite grave
beneath the big hat’s rim. “You _are_!” That answer struck him as rather
wonderful. Who was she after all ...?

And in Amersham they hired from the Griffin a rickety old cart, drawn by
a still more rickety horse, to drive them to Penn’s Woods. She, with her
own money, bought stone-bottle ginger-beer--two bottles. It made her day
complete to have those bottles, though unless they had driven she would
have done without them. The street was deserted, drenched in blazing
sunshine. Rooks were cawing in the elms behind the church. Not a soul
was about as they crawled away from the houses and passed upwards
between hedges smothered in cow-parsley over the hill. She had kept her
picture-paper. It lay on her lap all the way. She never opened it or
turned a single page; but she held it in her lap. They drove in
silence. The old man on the box was like a faded, weather-beaten farmer
dressed in somebody else’s cast-off Sunday coat. He flicked the horse
with a tattered whip. Sometimes he grunted. Plover rose from the fields,
cuckoos called, butterflies danced sideways past the carriage, eyeing
them ... and, as they passed through Penn Street, Le Maitre started
suddenly and said something. For, again, he had quite forgotten she was
there. “What a selfish beast I am! Why can’t I forget myself and my own
feelings, and look after her and make her feel amused and happy? It’s
_her_ day out, not mine!” This, somehow, was the way he put it to
himself, just as any ordinary man would have put it. But, when he turned
to look at her, he received a shock. Here was something new and
unexpected. With a thud it dropped down into his mind--crash!

For at the sound of his voice she looked up confused and startled into
his face. She had forgotten _him_! For the first time in all the years
together, years of work, of semi-official attention to his least desire,
yet of personal devotion as well, because she respected him and thought
him wonderful--she had forgotten _he_ was there. She had forgotten his
existence beside her as a separate person. She, too, had been--alone.

It was here, perhaps, he first realised this singular thing that set
this day apart from every other day that he had ever known. In reality,
of course, it had come far sooner--begun with the exquisite spring dawn
before either of them was awake, had tentatively fluttered about his
soul even while he stood waiting for her in the station, come softly
nearer all the way in the train, dropped threads of its golden web about
him, especially in that first beech wood, then moved with its swifter
yet unhurried rush--until, here, now, in this startling moment, he
realised it fully. Thus steal those changes o’er the sky, perhaps, that
the day itself knows at sunrise, but that unobservant folk do not notice
till the sun bursts out with fuller explanation, and they say, “The
weather’s changed; how delightful! how unexpected!” Le Maitre had never
been observant very--of people.

And then in this deep, lonely valley, too full of sunshine to hold
anything else, it seemed, they stopped where the beech woods trooped to
the edge of the white road. No wind was here; it was still and silent;
the leaves glittered, motionless. They entered the thick trees together,
she carrying the ginger-beer bottles _and_ that picture-paper. He
noticed that: the way she held it, almost clutched it, still unopened.
Her face, he saw, was pale. Or was it merely the contrast of the shade?
The trees were very big and wonderful. No birds sang, the network of
dazzling sunshine-patches in the gloom bewildered a little.

At first they did not talk at all, and then in hushed voices. But it was
only when they were some way into the wood, and she had put down the
bottles--though not the paper--to pick a flower or spray of leaves, that
he traced the singular secret thrill to its source and understood why he
had felt--no, not uneasy, but so strangely moved. For he had asked the
sleepy driver of the way, and how they might best reach Beaconsfield
across these Penn Woods, and the old man’s mumbled answer took no note
of--her:

“It’s a bit rough, maybe, on t’other side, stony like and steep, but
that ain’t nothing for a gentleman--when he’s alone ...!”

The words disturbed him with a sense of darkness, yet of wonder. As
though the old man had not noticed her; almost as though he had seen
only one person--himself.

They lunched among heather and bracken just beside a pool of sunshine.
In front lay a copse of pines, with little beeches in between. The roof
was thick just there, the stillness haunting. All the country-side, it
seemed, this Sunday noon, had gone to sleep, he and she alone left out
of the deep, soft dream. He watched those pines, mothering the slim
young beeches, the brilliant fresh green of whose lower branches, he
thought, were like little platforms of level sunlight amid the general
gloom--patches that had left the ground to escape by the upper air and
had then been caught.

“Look,” he heard, “they make one think of laughter crept in unawares
among a lot of solemn monks--or of children lost among grave elder
beings whose ways are dull and sombre!” It was his own thought continued
... yet it was she, lying there beside him, who had said it....

And all that wonderful afternoon she had this curious way of picking the
thoughts out of his mind and putting them into words for him. “Look,”
she said again later, “you can always tell whether the wind loves a tree
or not by the way it blows the branches. If it loves them, it tries to
draw them out to go away with it. The others it merely shakes carelessly
as it passes!” It was the very thought in his own mind, too. Indeed, he
had been on the point of saying it, but had desisted, feeling she would
not understand--with the half wish--though far less strong than
before--that he were alone to enjoy it all in his own indulgent way.
Then, even more swiftly, came that other strange sensation that he _was_
alone all the time; more--that he was for the first time in his life
most wonderfully complete and happy, all sense of isolation gone.

He turned quickly the instant she had said it. But not quickly enough.
By the look in her great grey eyes, by the expression on the face where
the discarded hat no longer hid it, he read the same amazing enigma he
had half divined before. She, too, was--alone. She had forgotten him
again--forgotten his presence--radiant and happy without him, enjoying
herself in her own way. She had merely uttered her delightful thought
aloud, as if speaking to herself!

How the afternoon, with its long sunny hours, passed so quickly away, he
never understood, nor how they made their way eventually to Beaconsfield
through other woods and over other meadows. He remembers only that the
whole time he kept forgetting that she was with him, and then suddenly
remembering it again. And once on the grass, when they rested to drink
the cold tea from his rather musty flask, he lit his pipe, and after a
bit he--dozed. He actually slept; for ten minutes at her side, yes, he
slept. He heard her laughing at him, but the laughter was faint and very
far away; it might just as well have been the wind in the cow-parsley
that said, “If you sleep, I shall change you--change you while you
sleep!” And for some minutes after he woke again, it hardly seemed queer
to him that he did not see her, for when he noticed her coming towards
him from the hedgerow, her arms full of flowers and things, he only
thought, “Oh, there she is”--as though her absence, or his own absence
in sleep, were not quite the common absences of the world.

And he remembered that on the walk to the village her shoe hurt her, and
he offered to carry her, and that then she took her shoe off and ran
along the grass beside the lane the whole way. But it was at the inn
where they had their supper that the oddest thing of all occurred, for
the deaf and rather stupid servant girl would insist on laying the table
on the lawn for--one.

“Oh, expectin’ some one, are yer?” she said at last. “Is that it?” and
so brought plates and knives for two. The girl never once looked at his
companion--almost as though she did not see her and seemed unaware of
her presence. Le Maitre began to feel that he was dreaming. This was a
dream-country, where the people had curious sight. He remembered the
driver....

In the dusk they made their way to the station. They spoke no word. He
kept losing sight of her. Once or twice he forgot who he was. But the
whole amazing thing blazed into him most strongly, showing how it had
seized upon his mind, when he stood before the ticket-window and
hesitated--for a second--how many tickets he should buy. He stammered at
length for two first-class, but he was absurdly flustered for a second.
It had actually occurred to him that they needed only one ticket....

And suddenly in the train he understood--and his heart came up in his
throat. They were alone. He turned to her where she lay in the corner,
feet up, weary, crumpled among the leaves and flowers she had gathered.
Like a hedgerow flower she looked, tired by the sunshine and the wind.
In one hand was the picture-paper, still unopened and unread, symbol of
everyday reality. She was dozing certainly, if not actually asleep. So
he woke her with a touch, calling her name aloud.

There were no words at first. He looked at her, coming up very close to
do so, and she looked back at him--straight into his eyes--just as she
did at home when they were working and he was explaining something
important. And then her own eyes dropped, and a deep blush spread over
all her face.

“I wasn’t asleep--really,” she said, as he took her at last into his
arms; “I was wondering--when--you’d find out----”

“Come to myself, you mean?” he asked tremblingly.

“Well,” she hesitated, as soon as she got breath, “that I _am_
yourself--and that you are me. Of course, we’re really only one. I knew
it years--oh, years and years ago....”




XV

ANCIENT LIGHTS


From Southwater, where he left the train, the road led due west. That he
knew; for the rest he trusted to luck, being one of those born walkers
who dislike asking the way. He had that instinct, and as a rule it
served him well. “A mile or so due west along the sandy road till you
come to a stile on the right; then across the fields. You’ll see the red
house straight before you.” He glanced at the post-card’s instructions
once again, and once again he tried to decipher the scratched-out
sentence--without success. It had been so elaborately inked over that no
word was legible. Inked-out sentences in a letter were always enticing.
He wondered what it was that had to be so very carefully obliterated.

The afternoon was boisterous, with a tearing, shouting wind that blew
from the sea, across the Sussex weald. Massive clouds with rounded,
piled-up edges, cannoned across gaping spaces of blue sky. Far away the
line of Downs swept the horizon, like an arriving wave. Chanctonbury
Ring rode their crest--a scudding ship, hull down before the wind. He
took his hat off and walked rapidly, breathing great draughts of air
with delight and exhilaration. The road was deserted; no horsemen,
bicycles, or motors; not even a tradesman’s cart; no single walker. But
anyhow he would never have asked the way. Keeping a sharp eye for the
stile, he pounded along, while the wind tossed the cloak against his
face, and made waves across the blue puddles in the yellow road. The
trees showed their under leaves of white. The bracken and the high new
grass bent all one way. Great life was in the day, high spirits and
dancing everywhere. And for a Croydon surveyor’s clerk just out of an
office this was like a holiday at the sea.

It was a day for high adventure, and his heart rose up to meet the mood
of Nature. His umbrella with the silver ring ought to have been a sword,
and his brown shoes should have been top-boots with spurs upon the
heels. Where hid the enchanted Castle and the princess with the hair of
sunny gold? His horse....

The stile came suddenly into view and nipped adventure in the bud.
Everyday clothes took him prisoner again. He was a surveyor’s clerk,
middle-aged, earning three pounds a week, coming from Croydon to see
about a client’s proposed alterations in a wood--something to ensure a
better view from the dining-room window. Across the fields, perhaps a
mile away, he saw the red house gleaming in the sunshine; and resting on
the stile a moment to get his breath he noticed a copse of oak and
hornbeam on the right. “Aha,” he told himself, “so that must be the wood
he wants to cut down to improve the view? I’ll ’ave a look at it.” There
were boards up, of course, but there was an inviting little path as
well. “I’m not a trespasser,” he said; “it’s part of my business, this
is.” He scrambled awkwardly over the gate and entered the copse. A
little round would bring him to the field again.

But the moment he passed among the trees the wind ceased shouting and a
stillness dropped upon the world. So dense was the growth that the
sunshine only came through in isolated patches. The air was close. He
mopped his forehead and put his green felt hat on, but a low branch
knocked it off again at once, and as he stooped an elastic twig swung
back and stung his face. There were flowers along both edges of the
little path; glades opened on either side; ferns curved about in damper
corners, and the smell of earth and foliage was rich and sweet. It was
cooler here. What an enchanting little wood, he thought, turning down a
small green glade where the sunshine flickered like silver wings. How it
danced and fluttered and moved about! He put a dark blue flower in his
buttonhole. Again his hat, caught by an oak branch as he rose, was
knocked from his head, falling across his eyes. And this time he did
not put it on again. Swinging his umbrella, he walked on with uncovered
head, whistling rather loudly as he went. But the thickness of the trees
hardly encouraged whistling, and something of his gaiety and high
spirits seemed to leave him. He suddenly found himself treading
circumspectly and with caution. The stillness in the wood was so
peculiar.

There was a rustle among the ferns and leaves and something shot across
the path ten yards ahead, stopped abruptly an instant with head cocked
sideways to stare, then dived again beneath the underbrush with the
speed of a shadow. He started like a frightened child, laughing the next
second that a mere pheasant could have made him jump. In the distance he
heard wheels upon the road, and wondered why the sound was pleasant.
“Good old butcher’s cart,” he said to himself--then realised that he was
going in the wrong direction and had somehow got turned round. For the
road should be behind him, not in front.

And he hurriedly took another narrow glade that lost itself in greenness
to the right. “That’s my direction, of course,” he said; “the trees has
mixed me up a bit, it seems”--then found himself abruptly by the gate he
had first climbed over. He had merely made a circle. Surprise became
almost discomfiture then. And a man, dressed like a gamekeeper in browny
green, leaned against the gate, hitting his legs with a switch. “I’m
making for Mr. Lumley’s farm,” explained the walker. “This _is_ his
wood, I believe----” then stopped dead, because it was no man at all,
but merely an effect of light and shade and foliage. He stepped back to
reconstruct the singular illusion, but the wind shook the branches
roughly here on the edge of the wood and the foliage refused to
reconstruct the figure. The leaves all rustled strangely. And just then
the sun went behind a cloud, making the whole wood look otherwise. Yet
how the mind could be thus doubly deceived was indeed remarkable, for it
almost seemed to him the man had answered, spoken--or was this the
shuffling noise the branches made?--and had pointed with his switch to
the notice-board upon the nearest tree. The words rang on in his head,
but of course he had imagined them: “No, it’s not his wood. It’s ours.”
And some village wit, moreover, had changed the lettering on the
weather-beaten board, for it read quite plainly, “Trespassers will be
persecuted.”

And while the astonished clerk read the words and chuckled, he said to
himself, thinking what a tale he’d have to tell his wife and children
later--“The blooming wood has tried to chuck me out. But I’ll go in
again. Why, it’s only a matter of a square acre at most. I’m bound to
reach the fields on the other side if I keep straight on.” He
remembered his position in the office. He had a certain dignity to
maintain.

The cloud passed from below the sun, and light splashed suddenly in all
manner of unlikely places. The man went straight on. He felt a touch of
puzzling confusion somewhere; this way the copse had of shifting from
sunshine into shadow doubtless troubled sight a little. To his relief,
at last, a new glade opened through the trees and disclosed the fields
with a glimpse of the red house in the distance at the far end. But a
little wicket gate that stood across the path had first to be climbed,
and as he scrambled heavily over--for it would not open--he got the
astonishing feeling that it slid off sideways beneath his weight, and
towards the wood. Like the moving staircases at Harrod’s and Earl’s
Court, it began to glide off with him. It was quite horrible. He made a
violent effort to get down before it carried him into the trees, but his
feet became entangled with the bars and umbrella, so that he fell
heavily upon the farther side, arms spread across the grass and nettles,
boots clutched between the first and second bars. He lay there a moment
like a man crucified upside down, and while he struggled to get
disentangled--feet, bars, and umbrella formed a regular net--he saw the
little man in browny green go past him with extreme rapidity through the
wood. The man was laughing. He passed across the glade some fifty yards
away, and he was not alone this time. A companion like himself went
with him. The clerk, now upon his feet again, watched them disappear
into the gloom of green beyond. “They’re tramps, not gamekeepers,” he
said to himself, half mortified, half angry. But his heart was thumping
dreadfully, and he dared not utter all his thought.

He examined the wicket gate, convinced it was a trick gate somehow--then
went hurriedly on again, disturbed beyond belief to see that the glade
no longer opened into fields, but curved away to the right. What in the
world had happened to him? His sight was so utterly at fault. Again the
sun flamed out abruptly and lit the floor of the wood with pools of
silver, and at the same moment a violent gust of wind passed shouting
overhead. Drops fell clattering everywhere upon the leaves, making a
sharp pattering as of many footsteps. The whole copse shuddered and went
moving.

“Rain, by George,” thought the clerk, and feeling for his umbrella,
discovered he had lost it. He turned back to the gate and found it lying
on the farther side. To his amazement he saw the fields at the far end
of the glade, the red house, too, ashine in the sunset. He laughed then,
for, of course, in his struggle with the gate, he had somehow got turned
round--had fallen back instead of forwards. Climbing over, this time
quite easily, he retraced his steps. The silver band, he saw, had been
torn from the umbrella. No doubt his foot, a nail, or something had
caught in it and ripped it off. The clerk began to run; he felt
extraordinarily dismayed.

But, while he ran, the entire wood ran with him, round him, to and fro,
trees shifting like living things, leaves folding and unfolding, trunks
darting backwards and forwards, and branches disclosing enormous empty
spaces, then closing up again before he could look into them. There were
footsteps everywhere, and laughing, crying voices, and crowds of figures
gathering just behind his back till the glade, he knew, was thick with
moving life. The wind in his ears, of course, produced the voices and
the laughter, while sun and clouds, plunging the copse alternately in
shadow and bright dazzling light, created the figures. But he did not
like it, and he went as fast as ever his sturdy legs could take him. He
was frightened now. This was no story for his wife and children. He ran
like the wind. But his feet made no sound upon the soft mossy turf.

Then, to his horror, he saw that the glade grew narrow, nettles and
weeds stood thick across it, it dwindled down into a tiny path, and
twenty yards ahead it stopped finally and melted off among the trees.
What the trick gate had failed to achieve, this twisting glade
accomplished easily--carried him in bodily among the dense and crowding
trees.

There was only one thing to do--turn sharply and dash back again, run
headlong into the life that followed at his back, followed so closely
too that now it almost touched him, pushing him in. And with reckless
courage this was what he did. It seemed a fearful thing to do. He turned
with a sort of violent spring, head down and shoulders forward, hands
stretched before his face. He made the plunge; like a hunted creature he
charged full tilt the other way, meeting the wind now in his face.

Good Lord! The glade behind him had closed up as well; there was no
longer any path at all. Turning round and round, like an animal at bay,
he searched for an opening, a way of escape, searched frantically,
breathlessly, terrified now in his bones. But foliage surrounded him,
branches blocked the way; the trees stood close and still, unshaken by a
breath of wind; and the sun dipped that moment behind a great black
cloud. The entire wood turned dark and silent. It watched him.

Perhaps it was this final touch of sudden blackness that made him act so
foolishly, as though he had really lost his head. At any rate, without
pausing to think, he dashed headlong in among the trees again. There was
a sensation of being stiflingly surrounded and entangled, and that he
_must_ break out at all costs--out and away into the open of the blessed
fields and air. He did this ill-considered thing, and apparently charged
straight into an oak that deliberately moved into his path to stop him.
He saw it shift across a good full yard, and being a measuring man,
accustomed to theodolite and chain, he ought to know. He fell, saw
stars, and felt a thousand tiny fingers tugging and pulling at his hands
and neck and ankles. The stinging nettles, no doubt, were responsible
for this. He thought of it later. At the moment it felt diabolically
calculated.

But another remarkable illusion was not so easily explained. For all in
a moment, it seemed, the entire wood went sliding past him with a thick
deep rustling of leaves and laughter, myriad footsteps, and tiny little
active, energetic shapes; two men in browny green gave him a mighty
hoist--and he opened his eyes to find himself lying in the meadow beside
the stile where first his incredible adventure had begun. The wood stood
in its usual place and stared down upon him in the sunlight. There was
the red house in the distance as before. Above him grinned the
weather-beaten notice-board: “Trespassers will be prosecuted.”

Dishevelled in mind and body, and a good deal shaken in his official
soul, the clerk walked slowly across the fields. But on the way he
glanced once more at the post-card of instructions, and saw with dull
amazement that the inked-out sentence was quite legible after all
beneath the scratches made across it: “There _is_ a short cut through
the wood--the wood I want cut down--if you care to take it.” Only
“care” was so badly written, it looked more like another word; the “c”
was uncommonly like “d.”

“That’s the copse that spoils my view of the Downs, you see,” his client
explained to him later, pointing across the fields, and referring to the
ordnance map beside him. “I want it cut down and a path made so and so.”
His finger indicated direction on the map. “The Fairy Wood--it’s still
called, and it’s far older than this house. Come now, if you’re ready,
Mr. Thomas, we might go out and have a look at it....”




XVI

DREAM TRESPASS


The little feathers of the dusk were drifting through the autumn leaves
when we came so unexpectedly upon the inn that was not marked upon our
big-scaled map. And most opportunely, for Ducommun, my friend, was
clearly overtired. An irritability foreign to his placid temperament had
made the last few hours’ trudge a little difficult, and I felt we had
reached that narrow frontier which lies between non-success and failure.

“Another five miles to the inn we chose this morning,” I told him; “but
we’ll soon manage it at a steady pace.”

And he groaned, “I’m done! I simply couldn’t do it.”

He sank down upon the bit of broken wall to rest, while the darkness
visibly increased, and the wind blew damp and chill across the marshes
on our left. But behind the petulance of his tone, due to exhaustion
solely, lay something else as well, something that had been accumulating
for days. For our walking tour had not turned out quite to measure,
distances always under-calculated; the inns, moreover, bad; the people
surly and inhospitable; even the weather cross.

And Ducommun’s disappointment had in a sense been double, so that I felt
keen sympathy with him. For this was the country where his ancestors
once reigned as proprietors, grand seigneurs, and the rest; he had
always longed to visit it; and secretly in his imagination had cherished
a reconstructed picture in which he himself would somehow play some
high, distinguished rôle his proud blood entitled him to. Clerk to-day
in a mere insurance office, but descendant of romantic, ancient stock,
he knew the history of the period intimately; the holiday had been
carefully, lovingly planned; and--the unpleasantness of the inhabitants
had shattered his dream thus fostered and so keenly anticipated. The
breaking-point had been reached. Was not this inn we hoped to reach by
dark a portion of the very château--he had established it from musty
records enough--where once his family dwelt in old-time splendour? And
had he not indulged all manner of delightful secret dreaming in
advance?...

It was here, then, returning from a little private reconnoitring on my
own account, that I reported my brave discovery of an unexpected
half-way house, and found him almost asleep upon the stones, unwilling
to believe the short half-mile I promised. “Only another nest of
robbery and insolence,” he laughed sourly, “and, anyhow, not the inn we
counted on.” He dragged after me in silence, eyeing askance the tumbled,
ivy-covered shanty that stood beside the roadway, yet gladly going in
ahead of me to rest his weary limbs, and troubling himself no whit with
bargaining that he divined might be once more unpleasant.

Yet the inn proved a surprise in another way--it was entirely
delightful. There was a glowing fire of peat in a biggish hall, the
_patron_ and his wife were all smiles and pleasure, welcoming us with an
old-fashioned dignity that made bargaining impossible, and in ten
minutes we felt as much at home as if we had arrived at a country house
where we had been long expected.

“So few care to stop here now,” the old woman told us, with a gracious
gesture that was courtly rather than deferential, “we stand no longer
upon the old high road,” and showed in a hundred nameless ways that all
they had was entirely at our disposal. Till even Ducommun melted and
turned soft: “Only in France could this happen,” he whispered with a
touch of pride, as though claiming that this fragrance of gentle life,
now fast disappearing from the world, still lingered in the land of his
descent and in his own blood too. He patted the huge, rough deer-hound
that seemed to fill the little room where we awaited supper, and the
friendly creature, bounding with a kind of subdued affection, added
another touch of welcome. His face and manners were evidence of kind
treatment; he was proud of his owners and of his owners’ guests. I
thought of well-loved pets in our English country houses. “This beast,”
I laughed, “has surely lived with gentlemen.” And Ducommun took the
compliment to himself with personal satisfaction.

It is difficult to tell afterwards with accuracy the countless little
touches that made the picture all so gentle--they were so delicately
suggested, painted in silently with such deft spiritual discretion. It
stands out in my memory, set in some strange, high light, as the most
enchanting experience of many a walking tour; and yet, about it all,
like a veil of wonder that evades description, an atmosphere of
something at the same time--I use the best available word--truly
singular. This touch of something remote, indefinite, unique, began to
steal over me from the very first, bringing with it an incalculable,
queer charm. It lulled like a drug all possible suspicions. And in my
friend--detail of the picture nearest to my heart, that is--it first
betrayed itself, with a degree of surprise, moreover, not entirely
removed from shock.

For as he passed before me underneath that low-browed porch, quite
undeniably he--altered. This indefinable change clothed his entire
presentment to my eyes; to tired eyes, I freely grant, as also that it
was dusk, and that the transforming magic of the peat fire was behind
him. Yet, eschewing paragraphs of vain description, I may put a portion
of it crudely thus, perhaps: that his lankiness turned suddenly all
grace; the atmosphere of the London office stool, as of the clerk
a-holidaying, vanished; and that the way he bowed his head to enter the
dark-beamed lintel of the door was courtly and high bred, instinct with
native elegance, and in the real sense aristocratic. It came with an
instant and complete conviction. It was wonderful to see; and it gave me
a moment’s curious enchantment. All that I divined and loved in the man,
usually somewhat buried, came forth upon the surface. A note of
explanation followed readily enough, half explanation at any rate--that
houses alter people because, like dressing-up with women and children,
they furnish a new setting to the general appearance, and the points one
is accustomed to undergo a readjustment. Yet with him this subtle
alteration did not pass; it not only clung to him during the entire
evening, but most curiously increased. He maintained, indeed, his
silence the whole time, but it was a happy, dreaming silence holding the
charm of real companionship, his disappointment gone as completely as
the memory of our former cheerless inns and ill-conditioned people.

I cannot pretend, though, that I really watched him carefully, since an
attack from another quarter divided my attention equally, and the charm
of the daughter of the house, in whose eyes, it seemed to me, lay all
the quiet sadness of the country we had walked through--_triste, morne_,
forsaken land--claimed a great part of my observant sympathy. The old
people left us entirely to her care, and the way she looked after us,
divining our wants before we ventured to express them, was more
suggestive of the perfect hostess than merely of someone who would take
payment for all that she supplied. The question of money, indeed, did
not once intrude, though I cannot say whence came my impression that
this hospitality was, in fact, offered without the least idea of
remuneration in silver and gold. That it did come, I can swear; also,
that behind it lay no suggestion of stiff prices to be demanded at the
last moment on the plea that terms had not been settled in advance. We
were made welcome like expected guests, and my heart leaped to encounter
this spirit of old-fashioned courtesy that the greed of modern life has
everywhere destroyed.

“To-morrow or the next day, when you are rested,” said the maiden
softly, sitting beside us after supper and tending the fire, “I will
take you through the _Allée des tilleuls_ towards the river, and show
you where the fishing is so good.”

For it seemed natural that she should sit and chat with us, and only
afterwards I remembered sharply that the river was a good five miles
from where we housed, across marshes that could boast no trees at all,
_tilleuls_ least of all, and of avenues not a vestige anywhere.

“We’ll start,” Ducommun answered promptly, taking my breath a little,
“in the dawn”; and presently then made signs to go to bed.

She brought the candles, lit them for us with a spill of paper from the
peat, and handed one to each, a little smile of yearning in her deep,
soft eyes that I remember to this day.

“You will sleep long and well,” she said half shyly, accompanying us to
the foot of the stairs. “I made and aired the beds with my own hands.”

And the last I saw of her, as we turned the landing corner overhead, was
her graceful figure against the darkness, with the candle-light falling
upon the coiled masses of her dark-brown hair. She gazed up after us
with those large grey eyes that seemed to me so full of yearning, and
yet so sad, so patient, so curiously resigned....

Ducommun pulled me almost roughly by the arm. “Come,” he said with
sudden energy, and as though everything was settled. “We have an early
start, remember!”

I moved unwillingly; it was all so strange and dreamlike, the beauty of
the girl so enchanting, the change in himself so utterly perplexing.

“It’s like staying with friends in a country house,” I murmured,
lingering in a moment of bewilderment by his door. “Old family retainers
almost, proud and delighted to put one up, eh?”

And his answer was so wholly unexpected that I waited, staring blankly
into his altered eyes:

“I only hope we shall get away all right,” he muttered. “I mean, that
is--get off.”

Evidently his former mood had flashed a moment back. “You feel tired?” I
suggested sympathetically, “so do I.”

“Dog-tired, yes,” he answered shortly, then added in a slow, suggestive
whisper--“And I feel cold, too--extraordinarily cold.”

The significant, cautious way he said it made me start. But before I
could prate of chills and remedies, he quickly shut the door upon me,
leaving those last words ringing in my brain--“cold, extraordinarily
cold.” And an inkling stole over me of what he meant; uninvited and
unwelcome it came, then passed at once, leaving a vague uneasiness
behind. For the cold he spoke of surely was not bodily cold. About my
own heart, too, moved some strange touch of chill. Cold sought an
entrance. But it was not common cold. Rather it was in the mind and
thoughts, and settled down upon the spirit. In describing his own
sensations he had also described my own; for something at the very heart
of me seemed turning numb....

I got quickly into bed. The night was still and windless, but, though I
was tired, sleep held long away. Uneasiness continued to affect me. I
lay, listening to the blood hurrying along the thin walls of my veins,
singing and murmuring, and, when at length I dropped off, two vivid
pictures haunted me into unconsciousness--his face in the doorway as he
made that last remark, and the face of the girl as she had peered up so
yearningly at him over the shaded candle.

Then--at once, it seemed--I was wide awake again, aware, however, that
an interval had passed, but aware also of another thing that was
incredible, and somehow dreadful, namely, that while I slept, the house
had undergone a change. It caught me, shivering in my bed, utterly
unprepared, as though unfair advantage had been taken of me while I lay
unconscious. This startling idea of external alteration made me shudder.
How I so instantly divined it lies beyond all explanation. I somehow
realised that, while the room I woke in was the same as before, the
building of which it formed a little member had known in the darkness
some transmuting, substituting change that had turned it otherwise. My
terror I also cannot explain, nor why, almost immediately, instead of
increasing, it subtly shifted into that numbness I have already
mentioned--a curious, deep bemusement of the spirit that robbed it of
really acute distress. It seemed as if only a part of me--the wakened
part--knew what was going on, and that some other part remained in sleep
and ignorance.

For the house was now enormous. It _had_ experienced this weird
transformation. The roof, I somehow knew, rose soaring through the
darkness; the walls ran over acres; it had towers, wings, and
battlements, broad balconies, and magnificent windows. It had grown both
dignified and ancient ... and had swallowed up our little inn as
comfortably as a palace includes a single bedroom. The blackness about
me of course concealed it, but I _felt_ the yawning corridors, the gape
of lofty halls, high ceilings, spacious chambers, till I seemed lost in
the being of some stately building that extended itself with imposing
majesty upon the night.

Then came the instinct--more, perhaps, a driving impulse than a mere
suggestion--to go out and see. See what? I asked myself, as I made my
way towards the window gropingly, unwilling or afraid to strike a light.
And the answer, utterly without explanation, came hard and sharp like
this--

“To catch them on the lawn.”

And the curious phrase I knew was right, for the surroundings had
changed equally with the house. I drew aside the curtain and peered out
upon a lawn that a few hours ago had been surely a rather desolate,
plain roadway, and beyond it into spacious gardens, bounded by park-like
timber, where before had been but dreary, half-cultivated fields.

Through a risen mist the light of the moon shone faintly, and everywhere
my sight confirmed the singular impression of extension I have
mentioned, for away to the left another mass of masonry that was like
the wing of some great mansion rose dimly through the air, and beneath
my very eyes a projecting balcony obscured pathways and beds of flowers.
Next, where a gleam of moonlight caught it, I saw the broad, slow bend
of river edging the lawn through clumps of willows. Even the river had
come close. And while I stared, striving to force from so much illusion
a single fact that might explain, a little tree upon the lawn just
underneath moved slightly nearer, and I saw it was a human figure--a
figure that I recognised. Wrapped in some long, loose garment, the
daughter of the house stood there in an attitude of waiting. And the
waiting was at once explained, for another figure--this time the figure
of a man that seemed to me both strange and familiar at the same
time--emerged from the shadows of the house to join her. She slipped
into his arms. Then came a sound of horses neighing in their stalls, and
the couple moved away with sudden swiftness silently as ghosts,
disappearing in the mist while three minutes later I heard the crunch
of hoofs on gravel, dying rapidly away into the distance of the night.

And here a sudden, wild reaction, not easy of analysis, rushed over me,
as if that other part of me that had not waked now came sharply to the
rescue, set free from the inhibition of some drug. I felt anger,
disgust, resentment, and a wave of indignation that somehow I was being
tricked. Impulsively--there seemed no time for judgment or reflection--I
crossed the landing, now so oddly deep and lofty, and, without knocking,
ran headlong into my friend’s room. The bed, I saw at once, was empty,
the sheets not even lain in. The furniture was in disorder, garments
strewn about the floor, signs of precipitate flight in all directions.
And Ducommun, of course, was gone.

What happened next confuses me when I try to think of it, for my only
recollection is of hurrying distractedly to and fro between his bedroom
and my own. There was a rush and scuttling in the darkness, and then I
blundered heavily against walls or furniture or both, and the darkness
rose up over my mind with a smothering thick curtain that blinded
everything ... and I came to my senses in the open road, my friend
standing over me, enormous in the dusk, and the bit of broken wall where
he had rested while I reconnoitred, just behind us. The moon was rising,
the air was damp and chill, and he was shouting in my ear, “I thought
you were never coming back again. I’m rested now. We’d better hurry on
and do those beastly five miles to the inn.”

We started, walking so briskly that we reached it in something over
seventy minutes, and passing on the way no single vestige of a house nor
of any kind of building. I was the silent one, but when Ducommun talked
it was only to curse the desolate, sad country, and wonder why his
forbears had ever chosen such a wilderness to live in. And when at
length we put up at this inn which he made out was a part of his
original family estate, he spent the evening poring over maps and
papers, by means of which he admitted finally his calculations were all
wrong. “The house itself,” he said, “must have stood farther back along
the road we came by. The river, you see,” pointing to the dirty old
chart, “has changed its course a bit since then. Its older bed lay much
nearer to the château, flanking the garden lawn below the park.” And he
pointed again to the place with a finger that obviously now held office
pens.




XVII

LET NOT THE SUN----


It began delightfully: “Where are _you_ going for your holiday, Bill?”
his sister asked casually one day at tea, someone having mentioned a
trip to Italy; “climbing, I suppose, as usual?” And he had answered just
as casually, “Climbing, yes, as usual.”

They were both workers, she a rich woman’s secretary, and he keeping a
stool warm in an office. She was to have a month, he a bare three weeks,
and this summer it so happened, the times overlapped. To each the
holiday was of immense importance, looked forward to eagerly through
eleven months of labour, and looked back upon afterwards through another
long eleven months. Frances went either to Scotland or some little
pension in Switzerland, painting the whole time, and taking a friend of
similar tastes with her. He went invariably to the Alps. They had never
gone together as yet, because--well, because she painted and he climbed.
But this year a vague idea had come to each that they might combine,
choosing some place where both tastes might be satisfied. Since last
summer there had been deaths in the family; they realised loneliness,
felt drawn together like survivors of a wreck. He often went to tea with
her in her little flat, and she accompanied him sometimes to dinner in
his Soho restaurants. Fundamentally, however, they were not together,
for their tastes did not assimilate well, and their temperaments lacked
that sympathy which fuses emotion and thought in a harmonious blend.
Affection was real and deep, but strongest when they were apart.

Now, as he walked home to his lodgings on the other side of London, he
felt it would be nice if they _could_ combine their holidays for once.
Her casual question was a feeler in the same direction. A few days later
she repeated it in a postscript to a letter: “Why not go together this
year,” she wrote, “choosing some place where you can climb and Sybil and
I can paint? I leave on the 1st; you follow on the 15th. We could have
two weeks in the same hotel. It would be awfully jolly. Let me know what
you feel, and mind you are _quite_ frank about it.”

They exchanged letters, discussed places, differed mildly, and agreed to
meet for full debate. The stage of suggestion was past; it was a plan
now. They must decide, or go separately. One of them, that is to say,
must take the responsibility of saying No. Frances leaned to the
Engadine--Maloja--whereas her brother thought it “not a bad place, but
no good as a climbing centre. Still, Pontresina is within reach, and
there are several peaks I’ve never done round Pontresina. We’ll talk it
over.” The exchange of letters became wearisome and involved, because
each wrote from a different point of view and feeling, and each gave in
weakly to the other, yet left a hint of sacrifice behind. “It’s a very
lovely part,” she wrote of his proposal for the Dolomites, “only it’s a
long way off and expensive to get at, and the scenery is a bit
monotonous for painting. _You_ understand. Still, for two weeks----“;
while he criticised her alternative selections in the Rhone Valley as
“rather touristy and overcrowded, don’t you think?--the sort of thing
that everybody paints.” Both were busy, and wrote sometimes briefly, not
making themselves quite plain, each praising the other’s choice, then
qualifying it destructively at the end of apparently unselfish sentences
with a formidable and prohibitive “but.” The time was getting short
meanwhile. “We ought to take our rooms pretty soon,” wrote Frances.
“Immediately, in fact, if we want to get in anywhere,” he answered on a
letter-card. “Come and dine to-night at the Gourmet, and we’ll settle
everything.”

They met. And at first they talked of everything else in the world but
the one thing in their minds. They talked a trifle boisterously; but
the boisterousness was due to excitement, and the excitement to an
unnatural effort to feign absolute sympathy which did not exist
fundamentally. The bustle of humanity about them, food, and a glass of
red wine, gradually smoothed the edges of possible friction, however.

“You look tired, Bill.”

“I am rather,” he laughed. “We both need a holiday, don’t we?”

The ice was broken.

“Now, let’s talk of the Alps,” she said briskly. “It’s been so difficult
to explain in writing, hasn’t it?”

“Impossible,” he laughed, and pulled out of his pocket a sheet of
notepaper on which he had made some notes. Frances took a Baedeker from
her velvet bag on the hook above her head. “Capital,” he laughed; “we’ll
settle everything in ten minutes.”

“It will be so awfully jolly to go together for once,” she said, and
they felt so happy and sympathetic, so sure of agreement, so ready each
to give in to the other, that they began with a degree of boldness that
seemed hardly wise. “Say exactly what _you_ think--quite honestly,” each
said to the other. “We must be candid, you know. It’s too important to
pretend. It would be silly, wouldn’t it?” But neither realised that this
meant, “I’ll persuade you that my place is best and the only place where
I could really enjoy my holiday.” Bill cleared a space before him on
the table, lit a cigarette, and felt the joy of making plans in his
heart. Francis turned the pages to her particular map, equally full of
delight. What fun it was!

“All I want, Bill dear, is a place where I can paint--forests, streams,
and those lovely fields of flowers. Almost anywhere would do for me. You
understand, don’t you?”

“Rather,” he laughed, making a little more room for his own piece of
paper, “and you shall have it, too, old girl. All I want is some good
peaks within reach, and good guides on the spot. We’ll have our evenings
together, and when I’m not climbing, we’ll go for picnics while you
paint, and--and be awfully jolly all together. Sybil’s a nice girl. We
shall be a capital trio.” He put her Baedeker at the far corner of the
table for a moment.

“Oh, _please_ don’t lose my place in it,” she said, pulling the marker
across the page and leaving the tip out.

“I’m sorry,” he replied, and they laughed--less boisterously.

“You tell me your ideas first,” she decided, “and then I’ll tell you
mine. If we can’t agree then, we’re not fit to have a holiday at all!”

It worked up with deadly slowness to the rupture that was inevitable
from the beginning. Both were tired after, not a day’s, but a year’s
work; both felt selfish and secretly ashamed; both realised also that an
unsuccessful holiday was too grave a risk to run--it involved eleven
months’ disappointment and regret. Yet, if this plan failed, any future
holiday together would be impossible.

“After all,” sighed Frances peevishly at length, “perhaps we _had_
better go separately.”

It was so tiring, this endless effort to find the right place; their
reserve of vitality was not equal to the obstacles that cropped up
everywhere. Full, high spirits are necessary to see things whole. They
exaggerated details. “It’s funny,” he thought; “she _might_ realise that
climbing is what I need. One can paint everywhere!” But in her own mind
the reflection was the same, turned the opposite way: “Bill doesn’t
understand that one can’t paint _anything_. Yet, for climbing, one peak
is just as good as another.” He thought her obstinate and faddy; she
felt him stubborn and rather stupid.

“Now, old girl,” he said at length, pushing his papers aside with a
weary gesture of resignation, having failed to convince her how
admirable his choice had been, “let’s look at _your_ place.” He laughed
patiently, but the cushions provided by food and wine and excitement had
worn thin. Friction increased; words pricked; the tide of sympathy
ebbed--it had been forced really all along, pumped up; their tastes and
temperaments did _not_ amalgamate. Frances opened her Baedeker and
explained mechanically. She now saw clearly the insuperable
difficulties in the way, but for sentimental and affectionate reasons
declined to be the first to admit the truth. She was braver, bigger than
he was, but her heart prevented the outspoken honesty that would have
saved the situation. He, though unselfish as men go, could not conceal
his knowledge that he was so. Each vied with the other in the luxury of
giving up with apparent sweetness, only the luxury was really beyond the
means of either. With the Baedeker before them on the table, the ritual
was again gone through--from her point of view, while in sheer weariness
he agreed to conditions his strength could never fulfil when the time
came. They met half-way upon Champéry in the Valais Alps above the
Rhone. It satisfied neither of them. But speech was exhausted; energy
flagged; the restaurant, moreover, was emptying and lights being turned
out.

They put away Baedeker and paper, paid the bill, and rose to go, each
keenly disappointed, each feeling conscious of having made a big
sacrifice. On the steps he turned to help her put her coat on, and their
eyes met. They felt miles apart. “So much for my holiday,” he thought,
“after waiting eleven months!” and there was a flash of resentful anger
in his heart. He turned it unconsciously against his sister.

“Don’t write for rooms till the end of the week,” he suggested. “I
_may_ think of a better place after all.”

It was the tone that stung her nerves, perhaps. She really hated
Champéry--a crowded, touristy, ‘organised’ place. Her sacrifice had gone
for nothing. “Even now he’s not satisfied!” she realised with
bitterness.

“Oh, if you don’t feel it’ll do, Bill, dear,” she answered coolly, “I
really think we’d better give it up--going together, I mean.” Her force
was exhausted.

He felt sore, offended, injured. He looked sharply at her, almost
glared. A universe lay between them now. Before there was time to
reflect or choose his words, even to soften his tone, he had answered
coldly:

“Just as you like, Frances. I don’t want to spoil your holiday. You’re
right. We’d better go separately then.”

Nothing more was said. He saw her to the station of the Tube, but the
moment the train had gone he realised that the final wave of her little
hand betrayed somehow that tears were very close. She had not shown her
face again. He felt sad, ashamed, and bitter. Deeper than the
resentment, however, was a great ache in his heart that was pain.
Remorse surged over him. He thought of her year of toil, her tired
little face, her disappointment. Her brief holiday, so feverishly
yearned for, would now be tinged with sadness and regret, wherever she
went. Memory flashed back to their childhood together, when life smiled
upon them in that Kentish garden. They were the only two survivors. Yet
they could not manage even a holiday together....

Though so little had been said at the end, it was a rupture.... He went
home to bed, planning a splendid reconstruction. Before they went to
their respective work-places in the morning he would run over and see
her, put everything straight and sweet again, explaining his
selfishness, perhaps, on the plea that he was overtired. He wondered, as
he lay ashamed and sad upon his sleepless bed, what _she_ was thinking
and feeling now ... and fell asleep at last with his plan of
reconstruction all completed. His last conscious thought was--“I wish I
had not let her go like that ... without a nice good-bye!”

In the morning, however, he had not time to go; he postponed it to the
evening, sending her a telegram instead: “Come dinner to-night same
place and time. Have worked out perfect plan.” And all day long he
looked forward eagerly to their meeting. Those childhood thoughts
haunted him strangely--he remembered the enormous plans all had made
together years ago in that old Kentish garden where the hopfields peered
above the privet hedge and frightened them. There were five of them
then; now there were only two.

But plans, large or small, are not so easily made. Fate does not often
give two chances in succession. And Fate that day was very busy in and
out among the London traffic. Frances, hopeful and delighted, kept the
appointment,--and waited a whole hour before she went anxiously to his
flat to find out what was wrong. In the awful room she knew that Fate
had made a different plan, and had carried it out. She was too late for
him to recognise her, even. In the pocket of the coat he had been
wearing she found a sheet of paper giving the names of hotels at Maloja,
pension terms, and railway connections from London. She also found the
letter he had written engaging the rooms. The envelope was addressed and
stamped, but left open for her final approval. She keeps it still.

What she also keeps, however, more than the recollection of real, big
quarrels that had come into their lives at other times, is the memory of
the way they had left one another at that Tube station, and the horrid
fact that she had gone home with resentment and unforgiveness in her
heart. It was such a little thing at the moment. But the big, formidable
quarrels had been adjusted, made up, forgotten, whereas this other
regret would burn her till she died. “We were so cross and tired. But it
might so easily have been different. If only ... I had not left him ...
just like that ...!”




XVIII

ENTRANCE AND EXIT


These three--the old physicist, the girl, and the young Anglican parson
who was engaged to her--stood by the window of the country house. The
blinds were not yet drawn. They could see the dark clump of pines in the
field, with crests silhouetted against the pale wintry sky of the
February afternoon. Snow, freshly fallen, lay upon lawn and hill. A big
moon was already lighting up.

“Yes, that’s the wood,” the old man said, “and it was this very day
fifty years ago--February 13--the man disappeared from its shadows;
swept in this extraordinary, incredible fashion into invisibility--into
_some other place_. Can you wonder the grove is haunted?” A strange
impressiveness of manner belied the laugh following the words.

“Oh, please tell us,” the girl whispered; “we’re all alone now.”
Curiosity triumphed; yet a vague alarm betrayed itself in the
questioning glance she cast for protection at her younger companion,
whose fine face, on the other hand, wore an expression that was grave
and singularly “rapt.” He was listening keenly.

“As though Nature,” the physicist went on, half to himself, “here and
there concealed vacuums, gaps, holes in space (his mind was always
speculative; more than speculative, some said), through which a man
might drop into invisibility--a new direction, in fact, at right angles
to the three known ones--‘higher space,’ as Bolyai, Gauss, and Hinton
might call it; and what you, with your mystical turn”--looking toward
the young priest--“might consider a spiritual change of condition, into
a region where space and time do not exist, and where all dimensions are
possible--because they are _one_.”

“But, _please_, the story,” the girl begged, not understanding these
dark sayings, “although I’m not sure that Arthur ought to hear it. He’s
much too interested in such queer things as it is!” Smiling, yet uneasy,
she stood closer to his side, as though her body might protect his soul.

“Very briefly, then, you shall hear what I remember of this haunting,
for I was barely ten years old at the time. It was evening--clear and
cold like this, with snow and moonlight--when someone reported to my
father that a peculiar sound, variously described as crying, singing,
wailing, was being heard in the grove. He paid no attention until my
sister heard it too, and was frightened. Then he sent a groom to
investigate. Though the night was brilliant the man took a lantern. We
watched from this very window till we lost his figure against the trees,
and the lantern stopped swinging suddenly, as if he had put it down. It
remained motionless. We waited half an hour, and then my father,
curiously excited, I remember, went out quickly, and I, utterly
terrified, went after him. We followed his tracks, which came to an end
beside the lantern, the last step being a stride almost impossible for a
man to have made. All around the snow was unbroken by a single mark, but
the man himself had vanished. Then we heard him calling for help--above,
behind, beyond us; from all directions at once, yet from none, came the
sound of his voice; but though we called back he made no answer, and
gradually his cries grew fainter and fainter, as if going into
tremendous distance, and at last died away altogether.”

“And the man himself?” asked both listeners.

“Never returned--from that day to this has never been seen.... At
intervals for weeks and months afterwards reports came in that he was
still heard crying, always crying for help. With time, even these
reports ceased--for most of us,” he added under his breath; “and that is
all I know. A mere outline, as you see.”

The girl did not quite like the story, for the old man’s manner made it
too convincing. She was half disappointed, half frightened.

“See! there are the others coming home,” she exclaimed, with a note of
relief, pointing to a group of figures moving over the snow near the
pine trees. “Now we can think of tea!” She crossed the room to busy
herself with the friendly tray as the servant approached to fasten the
shutters. The young priest, however, deeply interested, talked on with
their host, though in a voice almost too low for her to hear. Only the
final sentences reached her, making her uneasy--absurdly so, she
thought--till afterwards.

“--for matter, as we know, interpenetrates matter,” she heard, “and two
objects may conceivably occupy the same space. The odd thing really is
that one should hear, but not see; that air-waves should bring the
voice, yet ether-waves fail to bring the picture.”

And then the older man: “--as if certain places in Nature, yes, invited
the change--places where these extraordinary forces stir from the earth
as from the surface of a living Being with organs--places like islands,
mountain-tops, pine-woods, especially pines isolated from their kind.
You know the queer results of digging absolutely virgin soil, of
course--and that theory of the earth’s being _alive_----” The voice
dropped again.

“States of mind also helping the forces of the place,” she caught the
priest’s reply in part; “such as conditions induced by music, by
intense listening, by certain moments in the Mass even--by ecstasy
or----”

“I say, what _do_ you think?” cried a girl’s voice, as the others came
in with welcome chatter and odours of tweeds and open fields. “As we
passed your old haunted pine-wood we heard _such_ a queer noise. Like
someone wailing or crying. Cæsar howled and ran; and Harry refused to go
in and investigate. He positively funked it!” They all laughed. “More
like a rabbit in a trap than a person crying,” explained Harry, a blush
kindly concealing his startling pallor. “I wanted my tea too much to
bother about an old rabbit.”

It was some time after tea when the girl became aware that the priest
had disappeared, and putting two and two together, ran in alarm to her
host’s study. Quite easily, from the hastily opened shutters, they saw
his figure moving across the snow. The moon was very bright over the
world, yet he carried a lantern that shone pale yellow against the white
brilliance.

“Oh, for God’s sake, quick!” she cried, pale with fear. “Quick! or we’re
too late! Arthur’s simply wild about such things. Oh, I might have
known--I might have guessed. And this is the very night. I’m terrified!”

By the time he had found his overcoat and slipped round the house with
her from the back door, the lantern, they saw, was already swinging
close to the pine-wood. The night was still as ice, bitterly cold.
Breathlessly they ran, following the tracks. Half-way his steps
diverged, and were plainly visible in the virgin snow by themselves.
They heard the whispering of the branches ahead of them, for pines cry
even when no airs stir. “Follow me close,” said the old man sternly. The
lantern, he already saw, lay upon the ground unattended; no human figure
was anywhere visible.

“See! The steps come to an end here,” he whispered, stooping down as
soon as they reached the lantern. The tracks, hitherto so regular,
showed an odd wavering--the snow curiously disturbed. Quite suddenly
they stopped. The final step was a very long one--a stride, almost
immense, “as though he was pushed forward from behind,” muttered the old
man, too low to be overheard, “or sucked forward from in front--as in a
fall.”

The girl would have dashed forward but for his strong restraining grasp.
She clutched him, uttering a sudden dreadful cry. “Hark! I hear his
voice!” she almost sobbed. They stood still to listen. A mystery that
was more than the mystery of night closed about their hearts--a mystery
that is beyond life and death, that only great awe and terror can summon
from the deeps of the soul. Out of the heart of the trees, fifty feet
away, issued a crying voice, half wailing, half singing, very faint.
“Help! help!” it sounded through the still night; “for the love of God,
pray for me!”

The melancholy rustling of the pines followed; and then again the
singular crying voice shot past above their heads, now in front of them,
now once more behind. It sounded everywhere. It grew fainter and
fainter, fading away, it seemed, into distance that somehow was
appalling.... The grove, however, was empty of all but the sighing wind;
the snow unbroken by any tread. The moon threw inky shadows; the cold
bit; it was a terror of ice and death and this awful singing cry....

“But why _pray_?” screamed the girl, distracted, frantic with her
bewildered terror. “Why _pray_? Let us _do_ something to help--_do_
something ...!” She swung round in a circle, nearly falling to the
ground. Suddenly she perceived that the old man had dropped to his knees
in the snow beside her and was--praying.

“Because the forces of prayer, of thought, of the will to help, alone
can reach and succour him where he now is,” was all the answer she got.
And a moment later both figures were kneeling in the snow, praying, so
to speak, their very heart’s life out....

The search may be imagined--the steps taken by police, friends,
newspapers, by the whole country in fact.... But the most curious part
of this queer “Higher Space” adventure is the end of it--at least, the
“end” so far as at present known. For after three weeks, when the winds
of March were a-roar about the land, there crept over the fields towards
the house the small dark figure of a man. He was thin, pallid as a
ghost, worn and fearfully emaciated, but upon his face and in his eyes
were traces of an astonishing radiance--a glory unlike anything ever
seen.... It may, of course, have been deliberate, or it may have been a
genuine loss of memory only; none could say--least of all the girl whom
his return snatched from the gates of death; but, at any rate, what had
come to pass during the interval of his amazing disappearance he has
never yet been able to reveal.

“And you must never ask me,” he would say to her--and repeat even after
his complete and speedy restoration to bodily health--“for I simply
cannot tell. I know no language, you see, that could express it. I was
near you all the time. But I was also--elsewhere and otherwise....”




XIX

YOU _MAY_ TELEPHONE FROM HERE


She sent the servant to bed at half-past ten, and sat up in the flat
alone. “I’ll let my cousin in,” she explained; “she may be rather late.”
She read, knitted, began a letter, poked the fire, and examined her
husband’s photographs on the mantelpiece; but most of the time she
looked about her nervously, sometimes going to the door to listen,
sometimes lifting the corner of the blind to look out upon the lights of
North Kensington struggling with the blackness. The fog was thicker than
ever. A rumble of traffic feeling its way floated up to her from below.

But at last the door-bell rang sharply, and she ran to let in the cousin
who had promised to spend the two nights with her during her husband’s
absence in Paris. They kissed. Both began talking at once.

“I thought you were _never_ coming, Sybil----!”

“The play was out late--and the fog’s bad. I sent on my box this
afternoon on purpose.”

“It came safely; and your room’s quite ready. I do hope you’ll manage
all right without a maid. Oh, I’m _so_ glad you’ve come, though!”

“Foolish little country mouse!”

“Oh, it’s not that so much, though I admit that London still terrifies
me at night rather; but you know this is the first time he’s been
away--and I suppose----”

“I know, dear; I understand perfectly.” The cousin was brisk and
cheerful. “You feel lonely, of course.” They kissed again. “Just unhook
me, will you?” she added, “and I’ll get into my dressing-gown, and then
we’ll be cosy over the fire.”

“I saw him off at Victoria at 8.45,” said the little wife when the
operation was over.

“Newhaven and Dieppe?”

“Yes. He gets to Paris at seven in the morning. He promised to telephone
the first thing.”

“You expensive little monkey!”

“Why?”

“It’s ten shillings for three minutes, or something like that, and you
have to go to the G.P.O. or the Mansion House or some such place, I
believe.”

“But I thought it was the usual long-distance thing direct here to the
flat. He never told me all that.”

“Probably you didn’t give him the chance!”

They laughed, and went on chatting, with feet on the fender and skirts
tucked up. The cousin lit her second cigarette. It was after midnight.

“I’m afraid I’m not the least bit sleepy,” said the wife apologetically.

“Nor am I, dear. For once the play excited me.” She began to describe it
vigorously. Half-way through the recital the telephone sounded in the
hall. It tinkled faintly, but gave no proper ring.

The other started. “There it is again! It’s always doing that--ever
since Harry put it in a week ago. I don’t quite like it.” She spoke in a
hushed voice.

The cousin looked at her curiously. “Oh, you mustn’t mind that,” she
laughed with a reassuring manner. “It’s a little way they have when the
line gets out of order. You’re not used to playing the telephone game
yet. You should call up the Exchange and complain. Always complain, you
know, in this world if you want----”

“There it goes again,” interrupted her friend nervously. “Oh, I do wish
it would stop. It’s so like someone standing out there in the hall and
trying to talk----”

The cousin jumped up. They went into the hall together, and the
experienced one briskly rang up the Exchange and asked if there was
anybody trying to “get through.” With fine indignation she complained
that no one in the flat could sleep for the noise. After a brief
conversation she turned, receiver in hand, to her companion.

“The operator says he’s very sorry, but your line’s a bit troublesome
to-night for some reason. Got mixed, or something. He can’t understand
it. Advises you to leave the receiver unhooked till the morning. Then it
can’t possibly ring, you see!”

They left the receiver swinging, and went back to the fire.

“I’m sorry I’m such a timid donkey,” the wife said, laughing a little;
“but I’m not used to it yet. There was no telephone at the farm, you
know.” She turned with a sudden start, as though she heard the bell
again. “And to-night,” she added in a lower voice, though with an
obvious effort at self-control, “for some reason or other I feel
uncomfortable, rather--excited, queer, I think.”

“How? Queer?”

“I don’t know exactly; almost as if there was someone else in the
flat--someone besides ourselves and the servant, I mean.”

The cousin moved abruptly. She switched on the electric lights in the
wall beside her.

“Yes; but it’s only imagination, _really_,” she said with decision.
“It’s natural enough. It’s the fog and the strangeness of London after
the loneliness of your farm-life, and your husband being away, and--and
all that. Once you analyse these queer feelings they always go----”

“Hark!” exclaimed the wife under her breath. “Wasn’t that a step in the
passage?” She sat bolt upright, her face pale, her eyes very bright.
They listened a moment. The night was utterly still about them.

“Rubbish!” cried the cousin loudly. “It was my foot knocking the fender;
like this--look!” She repeated the sound vigorously.

“I do believe it was,” the other said, only half convinced. “But it is
queer. You know I feel exactly as though someone had come into the
flat--quite recently, since _you_ came, I mean--just before that
tinkling began, in fact.”

“Come, come,” laughed the cousin, “you’ll give us both the jumps. At one
o’clock in the morning it’s easy to imagine anything. You’ll be hearing
elephants on the stairs next!” She looked sharply about her. “Let’s brew
our chocolate and get to bed,” she added. “We shall sleep like tops.”

“One o’clock already! Then Harry’s half-way across by now,” said the
wife, smiling at her friend’s language. “But I’m _so_ glad, oh, _so_
glad, you’re here,” she added; “and I think it’s most awfully sweet of
you to give up a comfy big house....” They kissed again and laughed.
Soon afterwards, having scalded their throats with hot chocolate, they
went to bed.

“It simply _can’t_ ring now!” remarked the cousin triumphantly as they
passed the receiver dangling in mid-air.

“That’s a relief,” her friend said. “I feel less nervous. Really, I’m
too ashamed of myself for anything.”

“Fog’s clearing, too,” Sybil added, peering for a moment through the
narrow window by the front door.

An hour later the little flat was still as the grave. No sound of
traffic was heard. Even the tinkling of the telephone seemed a whole
twenty-four hours away, when suddenly--it began again: first with little
soft tentative noises, very faint, troubled, hurried, buried almost out
of hearing inside the box; then louder and louder, with sharp
jerks--finally with a challenging and alarming peal. And the wife, who
had kept her door open, without pretence of sleep, heard it from the
very beginning. In a moment she found herself in the passage, and Sybil,
wakened by her cry, was at her heels. They turned up the lights and
stood facing one another. The hall smelt--as things only smell at
night--cold, musty....

“What’s the matter? You frightened me. I heard you scream----!”

“The telephone’s ringing again--violently,” the wife whispered, pale to
the lips. “Don’t you hear it? This time there’s someone
there--_really_!”

The cousin stared blankly at her. The laugh choked in her throat. “_I_
hear nothing,” she said defiantly, yet without confidence in her voice.
“Besides, the thing’s still disconnected. It _can’t_ ring--look!” She
pointed to the hanging receiver motionless against the wall. “You’re
white as a ghost, though,” she added, coming quickly forward. Her friend
moved suddenly to the instrument and picked up the receiver. “It’s
someone for me,” she said, with terror in her eyes. “It’s someone who
wants to talk to me! Oh, hark! hark how it rings!” Her voice shook. She
placed the little disc to her ear and waited while her friend stood by
and stared in amazement, uncertain what to do. _She_ had heard no
ringing!

“You, Harry!” whispered the wife into the telephone, with brief
intervals of silence for the replies. “_You?_ But how in the world so
soon?--Yes, I can just hear, but very faintly. Miles and miles away your
voice sounds--What?--A wonderful journey? And sooner than you
expected!--_Not_ in Paris? Where, then?--Oh! my darling boy--No, I don’t
quite hear; I can’t catch it--I don’t understand.... The pain of the sea
is nothing--is _what_?... You know nothing of _what_ ...?”

The cousin came boldly up. She took her arm. “But, child, there’s no one
there, bless you! You’re dreaming--you’re in fever or something----”

“Hush! For God’s sake, hush!” She held up a hand. In her face and eyes
was an expression indescribable--fear, love, bewilderment. Her body
swayed a little, leaning against the wall. “Hush! I hear him still; but,
oh! miles and miles away--He says--he’s been trying for hours to find
me. First he tried my brain direct, and then--then--oh! he says he may
not get back again to me--only he can’t understand, can’t explain
_why_--the cold, the awful cold, keeps his lips from---- Oh!”

She screamed aloud as she flung the receiver down and dropped in a heap
upon the floor. “I don’t understand--it’s death, death!” ...

And the collision in the Channel that night, as they learned in due
course, occurred a few minutes after one o’clock; while Harry himself,
who remained unconscious for several hours after the boat picked him up,
could only remember that his last desire as the wave caught him was an
intense wish to communicate with his wife and tell her what had
happened.... The next thing he knew was opening his eyes in a Dieppe
hotel.

And the other curious detail was furnished by the man who came to repair
the telephone next day. At the Exchange, he declared, the wire, from
midnight till nearly three in the morning, had emitted sparks and
flashes of light no one had been able to account for in any usual
manner.

“Queer!” said the man to himself, after tinkering and tapping for ten
minutes, “but there’s nothing wrong with it at _this_ end. It’s the
subscriber, most likely. It usually is!”




XX

THE WHISPERERS


To be too impressionable is as much a source of weakness as to be
hyper-sensitive: so many messages come flooding in upon one another that
confusion is the result; the mind chokes, imagination grows congested.

Jones, as an imaginative writing man, was well aware of this, yet could
not always prevent it; for if he dulled his mind to one impression, he
ran the risk of blunting it to all. To guard his main idea, and picket
its safe conduct through the seethe of additions that instantly flocked
to join it, was a psychological puzzle that sometimes overtaxed his
powers of critical selection. He prepared for it, however. An editor
would ask him for a story--“about five thousand words, you know”; and
Jones would answer, “I’ll send it you with pleasure--when it comes.” He
knew his difficulty too well to promise more. Ideas were never lacking,
but their length of treatment belonged to machinery he could not coerce.
They were alive; they refused to come to heel to suit mere editors.
Midway in a tale that started crystal clear and definite in its
original germ, would pour a flood of new impressions that either
smothered the first conception, or developed it beyond recognition.
Often a short story exfoliated in this bursting way beyond his power to
stop it. He began one, never knowing where it would lead him. It was
ever an adventure. Like Jack the Giant Killer’s beanstalk it grew
secretly in the night, fed by everything he read, saw, felt, or heard.
Jones was too impressionable; he received too many impressions, and too
easily.

For this reason, when working at a definite, short idea, he preferred an
empty room, without pictures, furniture, books, or anything suggestive,
and with a skylight that shut out scenery--just ink, blank paper, and
the clear picture in his mind. His own interior, unstimulated by the
geysers of external life, he made some pretence of regulating; though
even under these favourable conditions the matter was not too easy, so
prolifically does a sensitive mind engender.

His experience in the empty room of the carpenter’s house was a curious
case in point--in the little Jura village where his cousin lived to
educate his children. “We’re all in a pension above the Post Office
here,” the cousin wrote, “but just now the house is full, and besides is
rather noisy. I’ve taken an attic room for you at the carpenter’s near
the forest. Some things of mine have been stored there all the winter,
but I moved the cases out this morning. There’s a bed, writing-table,
wash-handstand, sofa, and a skylight window--otherwise empty, as I know
you prefer it. You can have your meals with us,” etc. And this just
suited Jones, who had six weeks’ work on hand for which he needed empty
solitude. His “idea” was slight and very tender; accretions would easily
smother clear presentment; its treatment must be delicate, simple,
unconfused.

The room really was an attic, but large, wide, high. He heard the wind
rush past the skylight when he went to bed. When the cupboard was open
he heard the wind there too, washing the outer walls and tiles. From his
pillow he saw a patch of stars peep down upon him. Jones knew the
mountains and the woods were close, but he could not see them. Better
still, he could not smell them. And he went to bed dead tired, full of
his theme for work next morning. He saw it to the end. He could almost
have promised five thousand words. With the dawn he would be up and “at
it,” for he usually woke very early, his mind surcharged, as though
subconsciousness had matured the material in sleep. Cold bath, a cup of
tea, and then--his writing-table; and the quicker he could reach the
writing-table the richer was the content of imaginative thought. What
had puzzled him the night before was invariably cleared up in the
morning. Only illness could interfere with the process and routine of
it.

But this time it was otherwise. He woke, and instantly realised, with a
shock of surprise and disappointment, that his mind was--groping. It was
groping for his little lost idea. There was nothing physically wrong
with him; he felt rested, fresh, clear-headed; but his brain was
searching, searching, moreover, in a crowd. Trying to seize hold of the
train it had relinquished several hours ago, it caught at an evasive,
empty shell. The idea had utterly changed; or rather it seemed smothered
by a host of new impressions that came pouring in upon it--new modes of
treatment, points of view, in fact development. In the light of these
extensions and novel aspects, his original idea had altered beyond
recognition. The germ had marvellously exfoliated, so that a whole
volume could alone express it. An army of fresh suggestions clamoured
for expression. His subconsciousness had grown thick with life; it
surged--active, crowded, tumultuous.

And the darkness puzzled him. He remembered the absence of accustomed
windows, but it was only when the candle-light brought close the face of
his watch, with two o’clock upon it, that he heard the sound of confused
whispering in the corners of the room, and realised with a little twinge
of fear that those who whispered had just been standing beside his very
bed. The room was full.

Though the candle-light proclaimed it empty--bare walls, bare floor,
five pieces of unimaginative furniture, and fifty stars peeping through
the skylight--it was undeniably thronged with living people whose minds
had called him out of heavy sleep. The whispers, of course, died off
into the wind that swept the roof and skylight; but the Whisperers
remained. They had been trying to get at him; waking suddenly, he had
caught them in the very act.... And all had brought new interpretations
with them; his thought had fundamentally altered; the original idea was
snowed under; new images brimmed his mind, and his brain was working as
it worked under the high pressure of creative moments.

Jones sat up, trembling a little, and stared about him into the empty
room that yet was densely packed with these invisible Whisperers. And he
realised this astonishing thing--that he was the object of their
deliberate assault, and that scores of other minds, deep, powerful, very
active minds, were thundering and beating upon the doors of his
imagination. The onset of them was terrific and bewildering, the attack
of aggressive ideas obliterating his original story beneath a flood of
new suggestions. Inspiration had become suddenly torrential, yet so vast
as to be unwieldy, incoherent, useless. It was like the tempest of
images that fever brings. His first conception seemed no longer
“delicate,” but petty. It had turned unreal and tiny, compared with this
enormous choice of treatment extension, development, that now
overwhelmed his throbbing brain.

Fear caught vividly at him, as he searched the empty attic-room in vain
for explanation. There was absolutely nothing to produce this tempest of
new impressions. People seemed talking to him all together, jumbled
somewhat, but insistently. It was obsession, rather than inspiration;
and so bitingly, dreadfully real.

“Who are you all?” his mind whispered to blank walls and vacant corners.

Back from the shouting floor and ceiling came the chorus of images that
stormed and clamoured for expression. Jones lay still and listened; he
let them come. There was nothing else to do. He lay fearful, negative,
receptive. It was all too big for him to manage, set to some scale of
high achievement that submerged his own small powers. It came, too, in a
series of impressions, all separate, yet all somehow interwoven.

In vain he tried to sort them out and sift them. As well sort out waves
upon an agitated sea. They were too self-assertive for direction or
control. Like wild animals, hungry, thirsty, ravening, they rushed from
every side and fastened on his mind.

Yet he perceived them in a certain sequence.

For, first, the unfurnished attic-chamber was full of human passion, of
love and hate, revenge and wicked cunning, of jealousy, courage,
cowardice, of every vital human emotion ever longed for, enjoyed, or
frustrated, all clamouring for--expression.

Flaming across and through these, incongruously threaded in and out, ran
next a yearning softness of incredible beauty that sighed in the empty
spaces of his heart, pleading for impossible fulfilment....

And, after these, carrying both one and other upon their surface, huge
questions flashed and dived and thundered in a patterned, wild
entanglement, calling to be unravelled and made straight. Moreover, with
every set came a new suggested treatment of the little clear idea he had
taken to bed with him five hours before.

Jones adopted each in turn. Imagination writhed and twisted beneath the
stress of all these potential modes of expression he must choose
between. His small idea exfoliated into many volumes, work enough to
fill a dozen lives. It was most gorgeously exhilarating, though so
hopelessly unmanageable. He felt like many minds in one....

Then came another chain of impressions, violent, yet steady owing to
their depth; the voices, questions, pleadings turned to pictures; and he
saw, struggling through the deeps of him, enormous quantities of people,
passing along like rivers, massed, herded, swayed here and there by some
outstanding figure of command who directed them like flowing water. They
shrieked, and fought, and battled, then sank out of sight, huddled and
destroyed in--blood....

And their places were taken instantly by white crowds with shining
eyes, and yearning in their faces, who climbed precipitous heights
towards some Radiance that kept ever out of sight, like sunrise behind
mountains that clouds then swallow.... The pelt and thunder of images
was destructive in its torrent; his little, first idea was drowned and
wrecked.... Jones sank back exhausted, utterly dismayed. He gave up all
attempt to make selection.

The driving storm swept through him, on and on, now waxing, now waning,
but never growing less, and apparently endless as the sky. It rushed in
circles, like the turning of a giant wheel. All the activities that
human minds have ever battled with since thought began came booming,
crashing, straining for expression against the imaginative stuff whereof
his mind was built. The walls began to yield and settle. It was like the
chaos that madness brings. He did not struggle against it; he let it
come, lying open and receptive, pliant and plastic to every detail of
the vast invasion. And the only time he attempted a complete obedience,
reaching out for the pencil and notebook that lay beside his bed, he
desisted instantly again, sinking back upon his pillows with a kind of
frightened laughter. For the tempest seemed then to knock him down and
bruise his very brain. Inextricable confusion caught him. He might as
well have tried to make notes of the entire Alexandrian Library in half
an hour....

Then, most singular of all, as he felt the sleep of exhaustion fall upon
his tired nerves, he heard that deep, prodigious sound. All that had
preceded, it gathered marvellously in, mothering it with a sweetness
that seemed to his imagination like some harmonious, geometrical skein
including all the activities men’s minds have ever known. Faintly he
realised it only, discerned from infinitely far away. Into the streams
of apparent contradiction that warred so strenuously about him, it
seemed to bring some hint of unifying, harmonious explanation.... And,
here and there, as sleep buried him, he imagined that chords lay
threaded along strings of cadences, breaking sometimes even into
melody--music that rose everywhere from life and wove Thought into a
homogeneous Whole....

“Sleep well?” his cousin inquired, when he appeared very late next day
for _déjeuner_. “Think you’ll be able to work in that room all right?”

“I slept, yes, thanks,” said Jones. “No doubt I shall work there right
enough--when I’m rested. By the bye,” he asked presently, “what has the
attic been used for lately? What’s been in it, I mean?”

“Books, only books,” was the reply. “I’ve stored my ‘library’ there for
months, without a chance of using it. I move about so much, you see.
Five hundred books were taken out just before you came. I often think,”
he added lightly, “that when books are unopened like that for long, the
minds that wrote them must get restless and----”

“What sort of books were they?” Jones interrupted.

“Fiction, poetry, philosophy, history, religion, music. I’ve got two
hundred books on music alone.”




XXI

VIOLENCE


“But what seems so odd to me, so horribly pathetic, is that such people
don’t resist,” said Leidall, suddenly entering the conversation. The
intensity of his tone startled everybody; it was so passionate, yet with
a beseeching touch that made the women feel uncomfortable a little. “As
a rule, I’m told, they submit willingly, almost as though----”

He hesitated, grew confused, and dropped his glance to the floor; and a
smartly dressed woman eager to be heard, seized the opening. “Oh, come
now,” she laughed; “one always hears of a man being _put_ into a strait
waistcoat. I’m sure he doesn’t slip it on as if he were going to a
dance!” And she looked flippantly at Leidall, whose casual manners she
resented. “People are _put_ under restraint. It’s not in human nature to
accept it--healthy human nature, that is?” But for some reason no one
took her question up. “That is so, I believe, yes,” a polite voice
murmured, while the group at tea in the Dover Street Club turned with
one accord to Leidall as to one whose interesting sentence still
remained unfinished. He had hardly spoken before, and a silent man is
ever credited with wisdom.

“As though--you were just saying, Mr. Leidall?” a quiet little man in a
dark corner helped him.

“As though, I meant, a man in that condition of mind is not insane--all
through,” Leidall continued stammeringly; “but that some wise portion of
him watches the proceeding with gratitude, and welcomes the protection
against himself. It seems awfully pathetic. Still,” again hesitating and
fumbling in his speech--“er--it seems queer to me that he should yield
quietly to enforced restraint--the waistcoat, handcuffs, and the rest.”
He looked round hurriedly, half suspiciously, at the faces in the
circle, then dropped his eyes again to the floor. He sighed, leaning
back in his chair. “I cannot understand it,” he added, as no one spoke,
but in a very low voice, and almost to himself. “One would expect them
to struggle furiously.”

Someone had mentioned that remarkable book, _The Mind that Found
Itself_, and the conversation had slipped into this serious vein. The
women did not like it. What kept it alive was the fact that the silent
Leidall, with his handsome, melancholy face, had suddenly wakened into
speech, and that the little man opposite to him, half invisible in his
dark corner, was assistant to one of London’s great hypnotic doctors,
who could, an’ he would, tell interesting and terrible things. No one
cared to ask the direct question, but all hoped for revelations,
possibly about people they actually knew. It was a very ordinary
tea-party indeed. And this little man now spoke, though hardly in the
desired vein. He addressed his remarks to Leidall across the
disappointed lady.

“I think, probably, your explanation _is_ the true one,” he said gently,
“for madness in its commoner forms is merely want of proportion; the
mind gets out of right and proper relations with its environment. The
majority of madmen are mad on one thing only, while the rest of them is
as sane as myself--or you.”

The words fell into the silence. Leidall bowed his agreement, saying no
actual word. The ladies fidgeted. Someone made a jocular remark to the
effect that most of the world was mad anyhow, and the conversation
shifted with relief into a lighter vein--the scandal in the family of a
politician. Everybody talked at once. Cigarettes were lit. The corner
soon became excited and even uproarious. The tea-party was a great
success, and the offended lady no longer ignored, led all the
skirmishes--towards herself. She was in her element. Only Leidall and
the little invisible man in the corner took small part in it; and
presently, seizing the opportunity when some new arrivals joined the
group, Leidall rose to say his adieux, and slipped away, his departure
scarcely noticed. Dr. Hancock followed him a minute later. The two men
met in the hall; Leidall already had his hat and coat on. “I’m going
West, Mr. Leidall. If that’s your way too, and you feel inclined for the
walk, we might go together.” Leidall turned with a start. His glance
took in the other with avidity--a keenly-searching, hungry glance. He
hesitated for an imperceptible moment, then made a movement towards him,
half inviting, while a curious shadow dropped across his face and
vanished. It was both pathetic and terrible. The lips trembled. He
seemed to say, “God bless you; _do_ come with me!” But no words were
audible.

“It’s a pleasant evening for a walk,” added Dr. Hancock gently; “clean
and dry under foot for a change. I’ll get my hat and join you in a
second.” And there was a hint, the merest flavour, of authority in his
voice.

That touch of authority was his mistake. Instantly Leidall’s hesitation
passed. “I’m sorry,” he said abruptly, “but I’m afraid I must take a
taxi. I have an appointment at the Club and I’m late already.” “Oh, I
see,” the other replied, with a kindly smile; “then I mustn’t keep you.
But if you ever have a free evening, won’t you look me up, or come and
dine? You’ll find my telephone number in the book. I should like to
talk with you about--those things we mentioned at tea.” Leidall thanked
him politely and went out. The memory of the little man’s kindly
sympathy and understanding eyes went with him.

“Who was that man?” someone asked, the moment Leidall had left the
tea-table. “Surely he’s not the Leidall who wrote that awful book some
years ago?”

“Yes--the _Gulf of Darkness_. Did you read it?”

They discussed it and its author for five minutes, deciding by a large
majority that it was the book of a madman. Silent, rude men like that
always had a screw loose somewhere, they agreed. Silence was invariably
morbid.

“And did you notice Dr. Hancock? He never took his eyes off him. That’s
why _he_ followed him out like that. I wonder if _he_ thought anything!”

“I know Hancock well,” said the lady of the wounded vanity. “I’ll ask
him and find out.” They chattered on, somebody mentioned a _risqué_
play, the talk switched into other fields, and in due course the
tea-party came to an end.

And Leidall, meanwhile, made his way towards the Park on foot, for he
had not taken a taxi after all. The suggestion of the other man,
perhaps, had worked upon him. He was very open to suggestion. With hands
deep in his overcoat pockets, and head sunk forward between his
shoulders, he walked briskly, entering the Park at one of the smaller
gates. He made his way across the wet turf, avoiding the paths and
people. The February sky was shining in the west; beautiful clouds
floated over the houses; they looked like the shore-line of some radiant
strand his childhood once had known. He sighed; thought dived and
searched within; self-analysis, that old, implacable demon, lifted its
voice; introspection took the reins again as usual. There seemed a
strain upon the mind he could not dispel. Thought circled poignantly. He
knew it was unhealthy, morbid, a sign of these many years of difficulty
and stress that had marked him so deeply, but for the life of him he
could not escape from the hideous spell that held him. The same old
thoughts bored their way into his mind like burning wires, tracing the
same unanswerable questions. From this torture, waking or sleeping,
there was no escape. Had a companion been with him it might have been
different. If, for instance, Dr. Hancock----

He was angry with himself for having refused--furious; it was that vile,
false pride his long loneliness had fostered. The man was sympathetic to
him, friendly, marvellously understanding; he could have talked freely
with him, and found relief. His intuition had picked out the little
doctor as a man in ten thousand. Why had he so curtly declined his
gentle invitation? Dr. Hancock _knew_; he guessed his awful secret. But
how? In what had he betrayed himself?

The weary self-questioning began again, till he sighed and groaned from
sheer exhaustion. He _must_ find people, companionship, someone to talk
to. The Club--it crossed his tortured mind for a second--was impossible;
there was a conspiracy among the members against him. He had left his
usual haunts everywhere for the same reason--his restaurants, where he
had his lonely meals; his music hall, where he tried sometimes to forget
himself; his favourite walks, where the very policemen knew and eyed
him. And, coming to the bridge across the Serpentine just then, he
paused and leaned over the edge, watching a bubble rise to the surface.

“I suppose there _are_ fish in the Serpentine?” he said to a man a few
feet away.

They talked a moment--the other was evidently a clerk on his way
home--and then the stranger edged off and continued his walk, looking
back once or twice at the sad-faced man who had addressed him. “It’s
ridiculous, that with all our science we can’t live under water as the
fish do,” reflected Leidall, and moved on round the other bank of the
water, where he watched a flight of duck whirl down from the darkening
air and settle with a long, mournful splash beside the bushy island. “Or
that, for all our pride of mechanism in a mechanical age, we cannot
really fly.” But these attempts to escape from self were never very
successful. Another part of him looked on and mocked. He returned ever
to the endless introspection and self-analysis, and in the deepest
moment of it--ran into a big, motionless figure that blocked his way. It
was the Park policeman, the one who always eyed him. He sheered off
suddenly towards the trees, while the man, recognising him, touched his
cap respectfully. “It’s a pleasant evening, sir; turned quite mild
again.” Leidall mumbled some reply or other, and hurried on to hide
himself among the shadows of the trees. The policeman stood and watched
him, till the darkness swallowed him. “He knows too!” groaned the
wretched man. And every bench was occupied; every face turned to watch
him; there were even figures behind the trees. He dared not go into the
street, for the very taxi-drivers were against him. If he gave an
address, he would not be driven to it; the man would _know_, and take
him elsewhere. And something in his heart, sick with anguish, weary with
the endless battle, suddenly yielded.

“There _are_ fish in the Serpentine,” he remembered the stranger had
said. “And,” he added to himself, with a wave of delicious comfort,
“they lead secret, hidden lives that no one can disturb.” His mind
cleared surprisingly. In the water he could find peace and rest and
healing. Good Lord! How easy it all was! Yet he had never thought of it
before. He turned sharply to retrace his steps, but in that very second
the clouds descended upon his thought again, his mind darkened, he
hesitated. Could he get out again when he had had enough? Would he rise
to the surface? A battle began over these questions. He ran quickly,
then stood still again to think the matter out. Darkness shrouded him.
He heard the wind rush laughing through the trees. The picture of the
whirring duck flashed back a moment, and he decided that the best way
was by air, and not by water. He would _fly_ into the place of rest, not
sink or merely float; and he remembered the view from his bedroom
window, high over old smoky London town, with a drop of eighty feet on
to the pavements. Yes, that was the best way. He waited a moment, trying
to think it all out clearly, but one moment the fish had it, and the
next the birds. It was really impossible to decide. Was there no one who
could help him, no one in all this enormous town who was sufficiently on
his side to advise him on the point? Some clear-headed, experienced,
kindly man?

And the face of Dr. Hancock flashed before his vision. He saw the gentle
eyes and sympathetic smile, remembered the soothing voice and the offer
of companionship he had refused. Of course, there was one serious
drawback: Hancock _knew_. But he was far too tactful, too sweet and good
a man to let that influence his judgment, or to betray in any way at
all that he did know.

Leidall found it in him to decide. Facing the entire hostile world, he
hailed a taxi from the nearest gate upon the street, looked up the
address in a chemist’s telephone-book, and reached the door in a
condition of delight and relief. Yes, Dr. Hancock was at home. Leidall
sent his name in. A few minutes later the two men were chatting
pleasantly together, almost like old friends, so keen was the little
man’s intuitive sympathy and tact. Only Hancock, patient listener though
he proved himself to be, was uncommonly full of words. Leidall explained
the matter very clearly. “Now, what is your decision, Dr. Hancock? Is it
to be the way of the fish or the way of the duck?” And, while Hancock
began his answer with slow, well-chosen words, a new idea, better than
either, leaped with a flash into his listener’s mind. It was an
inspiration. For where could he find a better hiding-place from all his
troubles than--inside Hancock himself? The man was kindly; he surely
would not object. Leidall this time did not hesitate a second. He was
tall and broad; Hancock was small; yet he was sure there would be room.
He sprang upon him like a wild animal. He felt the warm, thin throat
yield and bend between his great hands ... then darkness, peace and
rest, a nothingness that surely was the oblivion he had so long prayed
for. He had accomplished his desire. He had secreted himself for ever
from persecution--inside the kindliest little man he had ever
met--inside Hancock....

He opened his eyes and looked about him into a room he did not know. The
walls were soft and dimly coloured. It was very silent. Cushions were
everywhere. Peaceful it was, and out of the world. Overhead was a
skylight, and one window, opposite the door, was heavily barred.
Delicious! No one could get in. He was sitting in a deep and comfortable
chair. He felt rested and happy. There was a click, and he saw a tiny
window in the door drop down, as though worked by a sliding panel. Then
the door opened noiselessly, and in came a little man with smiling face
and soft brown eyes--Dr. Hancock.

Leidall’s first feeling was amazement. “Then I didn’t get into him
properly after all! Or I’ve slipped out again, perhaps! The dear, good
fellow!” And he rose to greet him. He put his hand out, and found that
the other came with it in some inexplicable fashion. Movement was
cramped. “Ah, then I’ve had a stroke,” he thought, as Hancock pressed
him, ever so gently, back into the big chair. “Do not get up,” he said
soothingly but with authority; “sit where you are and rest. You must
take it very easy for a bit; like all clever men who have
overworked----”

“I’ll get in the moment he turns,” thought Leidall. “I did it badly
before. It must be through the back of his head, of course, where the
spine runs up into the brain,” and he waited till Hancock should turn.
But Hancock never turned. He kept his face towards him all the time,
while he chatted, moving gradually nearer to the door. On Leidall’s face
was the smile of an innocent child, but there lay a hideous cunning
behind that smile, and the eyes were terrible.

“Are those bars firm and strong,” asked Leidall, “so that no one can get
in?” He pointed craftily, and the doctor, caught for a second unawares,
turned his head. That instant Leidall was upon him with a roar, then
sank back powerless into the chair, unable to move his arms more than a
few inches in any direction. Hancock stepped up quietly and made him
comfortable again with cushions.

And something in Leidall’s soul turned round and looked another way. His
mind became clear as daylight for a moment. The effort perhaps had
caused the sudden change from darkness to great light. A memory rushed
over him. “Good God!” he cried. “I am violent. I was going to do you an
injury--you who are so sweet and good to me!” He trembled dreadfully,
and burst into tears. “For the sake of Heaven,” he implored, looking up,
ashamed and keenly penitent, “put me under restraint. Fasten my hands
before I try it again.” He held both hands out willingly, beseechingly,
then looked down, following the direction of the other’s kind brown
eyes. His wrists, he saw, already wore steel handcuffs, and a strait
waistcoat was across his chest and arms and shoulders.




XXII

THE HOUSE OF THE PAST


One night a Dream came to me and brought with her an old and rusty key.
She led me across fields and sweet-smelling lanes, where the hedges were
already whispering to one another in the dark of the spring, till we
came to a huge, gaunt house with staring windows and lofty roof half
hidden in the shadows of very early morning. I noticed that the blinds
were of heavy black, and that the house seemed wrapped in absolute
stillness.

“This,” she whispered in my ear, “is the House of the Past. Come with me
and we will go through some of its rooms and passages; but quickly, for
I have not the key for long, and the night is very nearly over. Yet,
perchance, you shall remember!”

The key made a dreadful noise as she turned it in the lock, and when the
great door swung open into an empty hall and we went in, I heard sounds
of whispering and weeping, and the rustling of clothes, as of people
moving in their sleep and about to wake. Then, instantly, a spirit of
intense sadness came over me, drenching me to the soul; my eyes began to
burn and smart, and in my heart I became aware of a strange sensation as
of the uncoiling of something that had been asleep for ages. My whole
being, unable to resist, at once surrendered itself to the spirit of
deepest melancholy, and the pain in my heart, as the Things moved and
woke, became in a moment of time too strong for words....

As we advanced, the faint voices and sobbings fled away before us into
the interior of the House, and I became conscious that the air was full
of hands held aloft, of swaying garments, of drooping tresses, and of
eyes so sad and wistful that the tears, which were already brimming in
my own, held back for wonder at the sight of such intolerable yearning.

“Do not allow all this sadness to overwhelm you,” whispered the Dream at
my side, “It is not often They wake. They sleep for years and years and
years. The chambers are all full, and unless visitors such as we come to
disturb them, they will never wake of their own accord. But, when one
stirs, the sleep of the others is troubled, and they too awake, till the
motion is communicated from one room to another and thus finally
throughout the whole House.... Then, sometimes, the sadness is too great
to be borne, and the mind weakens. For this reason Memory gives to them
the sweetest and deepest sleep she has, and she keeps this old key
rusty from little use. But, listen now,” she added, holding up her hand;
“do you not hear all through the House that trembling of the air like
the distant murmur of falling water? And do you not now ... perhaps ...
_remember_?”

Even before she spoke, I had already caught faintly the beginning of a
new sound; and, now, deep in the cellars beneath our feet, and from the
upper regions of the great House as well, I heard the whispering, and
the rustling and the inward stirring of the sleeping Shadows. It rose
like a chord swept softly from huge unseen strings stretched somewhere
among the foundations of the House, and its tremblings ran gently
through all its walls and ceilings. And I knew that I heard the slow
awakening of the Ghosts of the Past.

Ah me, with what terrible inrushing of sadness I stood with brimming
eyes and listened to the faint dead voices of the long ago.... For,
indeed, the whole House was awakening; and there presently rose to my
nostrils the subtle, penetrating perfume of Age; of letters, long
preserved, with ink faded and ribbons pale; of scented tresses, golden
and brown, laid away, ah how tenderly! among pressed flowers that still
held the inmost delicacy of their forgotten fragrance; the scented
presence of lost memories--the intoxicating incense of the past. My eyes
o’erflowed, my heart tightened and expanded, as I yielded myself up
without reserve to these old, old influences of sound and smell. These
Ghosts of the Past--forgotten in the tumult of more recent
memories--thronged round me, took my hands in theirs, and, ever
whispering of what I had so long forgot, ever sighing, shaking from
their hair and garments the ineffable odours of the dead ages, led me
through the vast House, from room to room, from floor to floor.

And the Ghosts--were not all equally clear to me. Some had indeed but
the faintest life, and stirred me so little that they left only an
indistinct, blurred impression in the air; while others gazed half
reproachfully at me out of faded, colourless eyes, as if longing to
recall themselves to my recollection; and then, seeing they were not
recognised, floated back gently into the shadows of their room, to sleep
again undisturbed till the Final Day, when I should not fail to know
them.

“Many of them have slept so long,” said the Dream beside me, “that they
wake only with the greatest difficulty. Once awake, however, they know
and remember _you_ even though you fail to remember them. For it is the
rule in this House of the Past that, unless you recall them distinctly,
remembering precisely when you knew them and with what particular causes
in your past evolution they were associated, they cannot stay awake.
Unless you remember them when your eyes meet, unless their look of
recognition is returned by you, they are obliged to go back to their
sleep, silent and sorrowful, their hands unpressed, their voices
unheard, to sleep and dream, deathless and patient, till....”

At this moment, her words died away suddenly into the distance, and I
became conscious of an overpowering sensation of delight and happiness.
Something had touched me on the lips, and a strong, sweet fire flashed
down into my heart and sent the blood rushing tumultuously through my
veins. My pulses beat wildly, my skin glowed, my eyes grew tender, and
the terrible sadness of the place was instantly dispelled as if by
magic. Turning with a cry of joy, that was at once swallowed up in the
chorus of weeping and sighing round me, I looked ... and instinctively
stretched forth my arms in a rapture of happiness towards ... towards a
vision of a Face ... hair, lips, eyes; a cloth of gold lay about the
fair neck, and the old, old perfume of the East--ye stars, how long
ago--was in her breath. Her lips were again on mine; her hair over my
eyes; her arms about my neck, and the love of her ancient soul pouring
into mine out of eyes still starry and undimmed. Oh, the fierce tumult,
the untold wonder, if I could only remember!... That subtle,
mist-dispelling odour of many ages ago, once so familiar ... before the
Hills of Atlantis were above the blue sea, or the sands had begun to
form the bed of the Sphinx. Yet wait; it comes back; I begin to
remember. Curtain upon curtain rises in my soul, and I can almost see
beyond. But that hideous stretch of the years, awful and sinister,
thousands upon thousands.... My heart shakes, and I am afraid. Another
curtain rises and a new vista, farther than the others, comes into view,
interminable, running to a point among thick mists. Lo, they too are
moving, rising, lightening. At last, I shall see ... already I begin to
recall ... the dusky skin ... the Eastern grace, the wondrous eyes that
held the knowledge of Buddha and the wisdom of Christ before these had
even dreamed of attainment. As a dream within a dream, it steals over me
again, taking compelling possession of my whole being ... the slender
form ... the stars in that magical Eastern sky ... the whispering winds
among the palm trees ... the murmur of the river’s waves and the music
of the reeds where they bend and sigh in the shallows on the golden
sand. Thousands of years ago in some æonian distance. It fades a little
and begins to pass; then seems again to rise. Ah me, that smile of the
shining teeth ... those lace-veined lids. Oh, who will help me to
recall, for it is too far away, too dim, and I cannot wholly remember;
though my lips are still tingling, and my arms still outstretched, it
again begins to fade. Already there is the look of sadness too deep for
words, as she realises that she is unrecognised ... she, whose mere
presence could once extinguish for me the entire universe ... and she
goes back slowly, mournfully, silently to her dim, tremendous sleep, to
dream and dream of the day when I _must_ remember her and she _must_
come where she belongs....

She peers at me from the end of the room where the Shadows already cover
her and win her back with outstretched arms to her age-long sleep in the
House of the Past.

Trembling all over, with the strange odour still in my nostrils and the
fire in my heart, I turned away and followed my Dream up a broad
staircase into another part of the House.

As we entered the upper corridors I heard the wind pass singing over the
roof. Its music took possession of me until I felt as though my whole
body were a single heart, aching, straining, throbbing as if it would
break; and all because I heard the wind singing round this House of the
Past.

“But, remember,” whispered the Dream, answering my unspoken wonder,
“that you are listening to the song it has sung for untold ages into
untold myriad ears. It carries back so appallingly far; and in that
simple dirge, profound in its terrible monotony, are the associations
and recollections of the joys, griefs, and struggles of all your
previous existence. The wind, like the sea, speaks to the inmost
memory,” she added, “and that is why its voice is one of such deep
spiritual sadness. It is the song of things for ever incomplete,
unfinished, unsatisfying.”

As we passed through the vaulted rooms, I noticed that no one stirred.
There was no actual sound, only a general impression of deep, collective
breathing, like the heave of a muffled ocean. But the rooms, I knew at
once, were full to the walls, crowded, rows upon rows.... And, from the
floors below, rose ever the murmur of the weeping Shadows as they
returned to their sleep, and settled down again in the silence, the
darkness, and the dust. The dust.... Ah, the dust that floated in this
House of the Past, so thick, so penetrating; so fine, it filled the
throat and eyes without pain; so fragrant, it soothed the senses and
stilled the aching of the heart; so soft, it parched the tongue, without
offence; yet so silently falling, gathering, settling over everything,
that the air held it like a fine mist and the sleeping Shadows wore it
for their shrouds.

“And these are the oldest,” said my Dream, “the longest asleep,”
pointing to the crowded rows of silent sleepers. “None here have wakened
for ages too many to count; and even if they woke you would not know
them. They are, like the others, all your own, but they are the memories
of your earliest stages along the great Path of Evolution. Some day,
though, they will awake, and you must know them, and answer their
questions, for they cannot die till they have exhausted themselves
again through you who gave them birth.”

“Ah me,” I thought, only half listening to or understanding these last
words, “what mothers, fathers, brothers may then be asleep in this room;
what faithful lovers, what true friends, what ancient enemies! And to
think that some day they will step forth and confront me, and I shall
meet their eyes again, claim them, know them, forgive, and be forgiven
... the memories of all my Past....”

I turned to speak to the Dream at my side, but she was already fading
into dimness, and, as I looked again, the whole House melted away into
the flush of the eastern sky, and I heard the birds singing and saw the
clouds overhead veiling the stars in the light of coming day.




XXIII

JIMBO’S LONGEST DAY


The Longest Day has in it for children a strange, incommunicable thrill.
It begins so early in the morning, for one thing, that half of it--the
first half--belongs to the mystery of night. It steals upon the world as
though from Fairyland, a thing apart from the rush and scurry of
ordinary days; it is so long that nothing happens quickly in it; there
is a delicious leisure throughout its shining hours that makes it
possible to carry out a hundred schemes unhurried. No voice can call
“Time’s up!”; no one can urge “Be quick!”; it passes, true, yet passes
like a dream that flows in a circle, having neither proper beginning nor
definite end. Christmas Day and Easter Day seem short and sharp by
comparison. They are measurable. The Longest Day brims with a happy,
endless wonder from dawn to sunset. Exceptional happenings are its
prerogative.

All this, and something more no elder can quite grasp, lay stealthily in
Jimbo’s question: “Uncle, to-morrow’s the Longest Day. What shall we
do?” He glanced across the room at his mother, prepared for a
prohibitive remark of some sort. But mother, deep in a stolen book, paid
no attention. He looked back at me. “It’s all right; she’s not
listening; but we can go outside to discuss it, if you prefer,” his
expression said. I beckoned him over to me, however, for safety’s sake.
My position was fairly strong, I knew, because the stolen book was mine,
and had been taken from my work-table. Jimbo’s mother has this way with
books, her passion almost unmoral. If a book comes to me for review, if
a friend makes me a present of a book, if I buy or borrow one--the
instant it comes into the house she knows it. “I just looked in to see
if your room had been dusted,” she says; “I’m sorry to disturb you,” and
is gone again. But she has seen the new book. Her instinct is curious. I
used to think she bribed the postman. She smells a new arrival, and goes
straight for it. “Were you looking for _this_?” she will ask innocently
an hour later when I catch her with it, household account-books
neglected by her side. “I’m so sorry. I was just peeping into it.” And
she is incorrigible, as unashamed. No book is ever lost, at any rate.
“Mother’s got it,” indicates its hiding-place infallibly.

So I felt safe enough discussing plans for the Longest Day with Jimbo,
and talked openly with him, while I watched her turn the pages.

“It’s the _very_ beginning I like,” he said. “I want to see it start.
The sun rises at 3.44, you see. That’s a quarter to four--three hours
and a quarter before I usually get up. How shall we manage it, d’you
think?” He had worked it all out.

“There’s hardly any night either,” I said, “for the sun sets at 8.18,
and that leaves very little time for darkness. It’s light at two,
remember.”

He stared into my face. “Maria has an alarum clock. She wakes with that.
It’s by her bed in the attic room, you know.”

Mother turned a page noisily, but did not look up. There was no cause
for alarm, though we instinctively lowered our voices at once. I cannot
say how it was so swiftly, so deftly arranged between us that _I_ was to
steal the clock, set it accurately for two in the morning, rise, dress,
and come to fetch Jimbo. But the result was clear beyond equivocation,
and I had accepted the duty as a man should. Generously he left this
exciting thing to me. “And suppose it doesn’t go off and wake you,” he
inquired anxiously, “will you be sure to get up and _make_ it go off?
Because we might miss the beginning of the day unless you do.” I
explained something about the mechanism of the mind and the mechanism of
an alarum clock that seemed to satisfy him, and then he asked another
vital question: “What _is_ exactly the Longest Day, uncle? I thought
all days were about the same--like that,” and he stretched an imaginary
line in the air with one hand, so that Mac, the terrier, thought he
wanted to play a moment. I explained that too, to his satisfaction,
whereupon he nestled much closer to me, glancing first over his shoulder
at his mother, and inquired whether “everything knew it was the Longest
Day--birds, cows, and out-of-door things all over the world--rabbits, I
mean--like that? They know, I suppose?”

“They certainly must find it longer than other days, ordinary days, just
common days,” I said. “I’m sure of that.” And then I cleared my throat
so loudly that mother looked up from her book with an unmistakable
start. “Oh, I’m _so_ sorry,” she exclaimed, with unblushing mendacity,
“but d’you want your book? Were you looking for it? I just took a
peep----” And when I turned to leave the room with it beneath my arm
Jimbo had vanished, leaving no trace behind him.

That night he went to bed without a murmur at half-past eight. He
trusted me implicitly. There were no questions: “Have you got the
clock?” or “How did you get it?” or anything of the kind--just his
absolute confidence that I _had_ got it and that I _would_ wake him. At
the stairs, however, he turned and made a sign. Leading me through the
back door of the Sussex cottage, we found ourselves a moment in the
orchard together. And then, saying no word, he pointed. He pointed
everywhere; he stared about him, listening; he looked up into my face,
and then at the orchard, and then back into my face again. His whole
little person stood on tiptoe, observing, watching, listening. And at
first I was disappointed, for I noticed nothing unusual anywhere. “Well,
what is it?” my manner probably expressed. But neither of us said a
word. The saffron sky shone between the trunks of the apple trees;
swallows darted to and fro; a blackbird whistled out of sight; and over
the hedge a big cow thrust her head towards us, her body concealed. In
the foreground were beehives. The air was very still and scented. My
pipe smoke hung almost motionless. I moved from one foot to the other.

“Aha!” I said mysteriously below my breath, “aha!”

And that was sufficient for him. He knew I had seen and understood. He
came a step nearer to me, his face solemn and expectant.

“It’s begun already, you see. Isn’t it wonderful? Everything knows.”

“And is getting ready,” I added, “for its coming.”

“The Longest Day,” he whispered, looking about him with suppressed
excitement and ready, if necessary, to believe the earth would presently
stop turning. He gave one curious look at the sky, shuddered an instant
with intense delight, gave my hand a secret squeeze, and disappeared
like a goblin into the cottage. But behind him lingered something his
little presence had evoked. Wonder and expectation are true words of
power, and anticipation constructs the mould along which Imagination
later shall lead her fairy band. I realised what he had seen. The
orchard, the cow, the beehives _did_ look different. They were inviting,
as though something was on the way. The very sky, as the summer dusk
spread down it, wore colouring no ordinary June evening knew. Midsummer
Eve set free the fairies, and Jimbo knew it. The roses seemed to flutter
everywhere on wings.... The very lilac blooms had eyes.... I heard a
rustle as of skirts high up among the peeping stars....

How it came about is more than I can say, for I went to bed with a whirr
of wings and flowers in my head. The stillness of the night was magical,
four short hours of transparent darkness that seemed to gleam and
glimmer without hiding anything. Maria’s alarum clock was _not_ beside
my bed, for the simple reason that I had not asked for it. Jimbo and the
Longest Day between them had cast a glamour over me that had nothing to
do with hours, minutes, seconds. It was delicious and inexplicable. Yet
at other times I am an ordinary person, who knows that time is money and
money is difficult to come by without uncommon effort. All this came
for nothing. Jimbo did it.

And what did I do for Jimbo? I cannot say. His is the grand old magical
secret. He believed and wondered; he waited and asked no futile
questions; time and space obeyed his imperious little will; waking or
sleeping he dreamed, creating the world anew. I shut no eye that night.
I watched the wheeling constellations rise and pass. The whole, clear
summer night was rich with the silence of the gods. I dreamed, perhaps,
beside my open window, where the roses and the clematis climbed, shining
like lamps of starry beauty above the tiny lawn.... And at half-past
one, when the east began to whisper stealthily that Someone was on the
way, I left my chair and stole quietly down the narrow passage-way to
Jimbo’s room.... I was clever in my wickedness. I knew that if I waked
him, whispering that the Longest Day was about to break, he would open
half an eye, turn over in his thick childhood sleep, and murmur, as in
dream, “Then let it come.” And so, a little weary, if the truth be told,
I did all this, and--to my intense surprise--discovered Jimbo perched,
wide awake and staring, at the casement window. He had never closed an
eye, nor half an eye. He was watchful and alert, but undeniably tired
out, as I was.

“Jimbo,” I whispered, stealing in upon him, “the Longest Day is very
near. It’s so close you can hear it coming down the sky. It’s softer
than any dream you ever dreamed in your life. Come out--if you
will--we’ll see it from the orchard.”

He turned towards me in his little nightshirt like a goblin. His eyes
were very big, but the eyelids held open with an effort.

“Uncle,” he said in a tiny voice, “do you think it’s really come at
last? It’s been terribly slow, but I suppose that’s because it’s such an
awful length. Wasn’t it _wonderful_?”

And I tucked him up. Before the sheet was round his shoulder he was
asleep, ... and next morning when we met at breakfast, he just asked me
slyly, “Do you think mother guessed or saw anything of what _we_ saw?”
We glanced across the table, full of secret signs, together. Mother’s
letters were piled beside her plate, a book beneath them. It was my
stolen book. She had clearly sat up half the night devouring it.

“No,” I whispered, “I don’t think mother guesses anything at all.
Besides,” I added, “to-day is the Longest Day, so in any case she’d be a
very long time finding out.” And, as he seemed satisfied, I felt my
conscience clear, and said no more about it.




XXIV

IF THE CAP FITS----


Field-Martin, the naturalist, sat in his corner arm-chair at the Club
and watched them--this group of men that had drifted together round the
table just opposite and begun to talk. He did not wish to listen, but
was too near to help himself. The newspaper over which he had dozed lay
at his feet, and he bent forward to pick it up and make it crackle with
a pretence of reading.

“Then what _is_ psychometry?” was the question that first caught his
attention. It was Slopkins who asked it, the man with the runaway chin
and over-weighted, hooked nose, that seemed to bring forward all the top
of his face and made him resemble a large codfish for ever in the act of
rising to some invisible bait.

“Something to do with soul measuring, I suppose, unless my Greek has
gone utterly to pot,” said the jovial man beside him, pouring out his
tea from a height, as a waiter pours out flat beer when he wants to
force it to froth in the glass.

“Like those Yankee doctors, don’t you remember,” put in someone else,
with the irrelevance of casual conversation, “who weighed a human body
just before it died and just after, and made an affidavit that the
difference in ounces represented the weight of the soul.”

Several laughed. Field-Martin wheeled up his chair with vigorous strokes
of his heels and joined the group, accepting the offer of an extra cup
out of that soaring teapot. The particular subject under discussion
bored him, but he liked to sit and watch men talking, just as he liked
to sit and watch birds or animals in the open air, studying their
movements, learning their little habits, and the rest. The conversation
flowed on in desultory fashion in the way conversations usually do flow
on, one or two talkers putting in occasional real thoughts, the majority
merely repeating what they have heard others say.

“Yes, but what _is_ psychometry really?” repeated the codfish man, after
an interval during which the talk had drifted into an American story
that grew apparently out of the reference to American doctors. For that
particular invisible bait still hovered above the surface of his slow
mental stream, and he was making a second shot at it, after the manner
of his ilk.

The question was so obviously intended to be answered seriously that
this time no one guffawed or exercised his wit. For a moment, indeed,
no one answered at all. Then a man at the back of the group, a man with
a deep voice and a rather theatrical and enthusiastic manner, spoke.

“Psychometry, I take it,” he said with conviction, “is the quality
possessed by everything, even by inanimate objects, of sending out
vibrations which--which can put certain sensitive persons _en rapport_,
pictorially as it were, with all the events that have ever happened
within the ken of such objects----”

“Persons known as psychometrists, I suppose?” from the codfish man, who
seemed to like things labelled carefully.

The other nodded. “Psychometrist, I believe,” he continued, “is the name
of that very psychical and imaginative type that can ‘sense’ such
infinitely delicate vibrations. In reality, I suppose, they are
receptive folk who correspond to the sensitive photographic plate that
records vibrations of light in a similar way and results in a visible
picture.”

A man dropped his teaspoon with a clatter; another splashed noisily in
his cup, stirring it; a third plunged at the buttered toast of his
neighbour; and Field-Martin, the naturalist, gave an impatient kick with
his leg against the arm-chair opposite. He loathed this kind of talk.
The speaker evidently was one of those who knew by heart the “patter”
of psychical research, or what passes for it among credulous and
untrained minds--master of that peculiar jargon, quasi-scientific, about
vibrations and the rest, that such persons affect. But he was too lazy
to interrupt or disagree. Wondering vaguely who the speaker might be, he
drank his tea, and listened with laughter and disgust about equally
mingled in his mind. Others, besides the codfish, were asking questions.
Answers were not behindhand.

“You remember Denton’s experiments--Professor Denton, of Cambridge,
Mass.,” the enthusiastic man was saying, “who found that his wife was a
psychometrist, and how she had only to hold a thing in her hand, with
eyes blindfolded, to get pictures of scenes that had passed before it. A
bit of stone he gave her brought vivid and gorgeous pictures of
processions and pageants before her inner eye, I remember, and at the
end of the experiment her husband told her what the stone was.”

“By Jove! And what was it?” asked codfish.

“A fragment from an old temple at Thebes,” was the reply.

“Telepathy,” suggested someone.

“Quite possible,” was the reply. “But, another time, when he gave her
something wrapped up in a bit of paper, taken from a tray covered with
objects similarly wrapped up so that he could not know what particular
one he held at the moment, she took it for a second, then screamed out
that she was rushing, tearing, falling through space, and let it drop
with a gasp of breathless excitement----”

“And----?” asked one or two.

“It was a piece of meteorite,” was the answer. “You see, she had
psychometrised the sensations of the falling star. I know, for instance,
another woman who is so sensitive to the atmospheres of things and
people, that she can tell you every blessed thing about a stranger whose
just-vacated chair she sits down in. I’ve known her leave a bus, too,
when certain people have got in and sat next to her, because----”

Field-Martin paid for his neighbour’s tea by mistake and moved away,
hoping his contempt was not too clearly marked for politeness.

“----everything, you see, has an atmosphere charged with its own
individual associations. An object can communicate an emotion it has
borrowed by contact with someone living----” was a fragment of the last
sentence he heard as he left the room and went downstairs, spitting fire
internally against the speaker and all his kidney. He seized his hat and
hurried away. He walked home to his Chelsea flat, fuming inwardly,
wondering vaguely if there was any other club he could join where he
could have his tea without being obliged to listen to such stuff.... He
walked through the Park, meaning to cut through _via_ Queensgate, and as
he went he followed his usual custom of thinking out details of his
work: the next day, for instance, he was to lecture upon “English Birds
of Prey,” and in his mind he reviewed carefully the form and substance
of what he would say. He skirted the Serpentine, watching the sea-gulls
wheeling through the graceful figures of their evening dance against the
saffron sky. The exquisite tilt and balance of their bodies fascinated
him as usual. He stopped a moment to watch it. To a mind like his it was
full of suggestion, and instinctively he began comparing the method of
flight with that of the hawks; one or two points occurred to him that he
could make good use of in his lecture ... when he became aware that
something drew his attention down from the sky to the water, and that
the interest he felt in the birds was being usurped by thoughts of
another kind. Without apparent reason, reflections of a very different
order passed into the stream of his consciousness--somewhat urgently.
Sea-gulls, hawks, birds of prey, and the rest faded from his mental
vision; wings and details of flight departed; his eye, and with it his
thought, dropped from the sky to the surface of the water, shimmering
there beneath the last tints of the sunset. The emotion of the
“naturalist,” stirred into activity by the least symbol of his lifelong
study--a bird, an animal, an insect--had been curiously replaced; and
the transition was abrupt enough to touch him with a sense of
surprise--almost, perhaps, of shock.

Now, vigorous imagination, the kind that creates out of next to nothing,
was not an ingredient of his logical and “scientific” cast of mind, and
Field-Martin, slightly puzzled, was at a loss to explain this irregular
behaviour of his usually methodical system. He stepped back farther from
the brink where the little waves splashed ... yet, even as he did so, he
realised that the force dictating the impulse was of a protective
character, guiding, directing, almost warning. In words, had he been a
writer, he might have transposed it thus: “Be careful of that water!”
For the truth was it had suddenly made him _shrink_.

He continued his way, puzzled and disturbed. Of the mutinous forces that
lie so thinly screened behind life, dropping from time to time their
faint, wireless messages upon the soul, Field-Martin hardly discerned
the existence. And this passing menace of the water was disquieting--all
the more so because his temperament furnished him with no possible
instrument of measurement. A sense of deep water, cold, airless, still,
invaded his mind; he thought of its suffocating mass lying over mouth
and ears; he realised something of the struggle for breath, and the
frantic efforts to reach the surface and keep afloat that a drowning
man----

“But what nonsense is this? Where do these thoughts suddenly come
from?” he exclaimed, hurrying along. He had crossed the road now, so as
to put a greater distance, and a stretch of wholesome human traffic,
between him and that sheet of water lying like painted glass beneath the
fading sky. Yet it pulled and drew him back again to the shore, inviting
him with a curious, soft insistence that rendered necessary a distinct
effort of will to resist it successfully. Birds were utterly forgotten.
His very being was steeped in water--to the neck, to the eyes, his lungs
filled, his ears charged with the rushing noises of singing and drumming
that come to complete the dread bewilderment of the drowning man.
Field-Martin shook and trembled as he crossed the bridge by Kensington
Gardens.... That impulse to throw himself over the parapet was the most
outrageous and unaccountable thing that had ever come upon him ... and
as he hurried down Queensgate he tried to calculate whether there was
time for him to see his doctor that very night before dinner, or whether
he must postpone it to the first thing in the morning. For, assuredly,
this passing disorder of his brain must have immediate attention; such
results of overwork could not be seen to quickly enough. If necessary,
he would take a holiday at once....

He decided to say nothing to his wife ... and yet the odd thing was that
before dinner was half over the whole mood had vanished so completely,
and his normal wholesome balance of mind recovered such perfect control,
that he could afford to laugh at the whole thing, and _did_ laugh at
it--what was more, even made his wife laugh at it too. The fact remained
to puzzle and perplex, but the reality of it was gone.

But that night, when he went to the Club, the hall-porter stopped him:

“Beg pardon, sir, but Mr. Finsen thought you might have taken his hat by
mistake last night?”

“His hat?” The name “Finsen” was unknown to him.

“He wears a green felt hat like yours, sir, and they were on adjoining
pegs.”

Field-Martin took off his head-covering and discovered his mistake.
Finsen’s name was inside in small gold letters. He explained matters
with the porter, and left the necessary directions for the exchange to
be effected. Upstairs he ran into Slopkins.

“That chap Finsen was asking for you,” he remarked; “it seems you
exchanged hats last night by mistake, and the porter thought
possibly----”

“Who is Finsen?”

“You remember, he was talking so wonderfully last night about
psychometry----”

“Oh, is _that_ Finsen?”

“Yes,” replied the other. “Interesting man, but a bit queer, you know.
Gets melancholia and that sort of thing, I believe. It was only a week
or two ago, don’t you remember, that he tried to drown himself?”

“Indeed,” said Field-Martin dryly, and went upstairs to look at the
evening papers.




XXV

NEWS _v._ NOURISHMENT


The first thing I saw of him was the dome of his bald head and the strip
of wandering black hair that strayed across it like a bit of seaweed
left by an ebbing tide. The rest was hidden behind the opened newspaper
which he devoured while waiting for his luncheon. He was a little man. I
saw the tips of square boots with knobs on them projecting beneath the
table, and later I noted that his nose was aquiline, and that he had
large comfortable ears. He may have been something in a Forwarding
Office; he was not spruce enough for banking or insurance circles. He
read that evening edition as if the future of the race depended on it.

Then the girl, a lackadaisical, bird-like creature, brought his plate of
“braised beef an’ carruts” swimming in thick brown gravy, and set it
down with noisy clatter upon the marble table. He was so absorbed that
the dishes came as a surprise; and as he looked up, startled, the paper
descended softly upon the thick brown gravy. This was the first
disaster; for when he lifted it to find his place the columns of print
resembled a successful fly-paper. He looked round at everybody,
bewildered. For the moment, however, I was so interested in the
wandering strip of seaweed on his skull that I hardly noticed his
efforts to free the newspaper, himself, his neighbours, and the
cruet-stand from the adhesive entanglement of this portion of his
luncheon. There was a sound of scattering--then the girl had somehow
managed it for him with her grimy napkin. But that remnant of a tide
forgotten, as I came to regard it, fascinated me. It strayed, lonely as
a cloud; it was so admirably fastened down; the angle, curve, and
general adjustment had been evidently chosen with so much care. Its
“lie” upon that dome of silence had been calculated to a nicety, so that
it should relieve with the best possible effect the open waste around
it. It was like a mathematical problem. Only when his grave, dark eyes
met mine did I realise that I was staring rudely.

But long before my own hurried luncheon came, the difficulties in which
this stranger opposite was involved had fascinated me afresh. The
contents of the now mutilated evening paper absorbed him to the point of
positive conflict. It may have been the racing news, police reports, or
a breach of promise case; it may have been some special article and
leader, or it may have been merely advertisements, perhaps; I cannot
say. But his efforts to read and eat at the same time made me wonder
with a growing excitement for the final issue of the battle. Had I not
been alone, I would have laid a bet--with odds, I think, against
“braised beef an’ carruts.”

He did it all so gravely and so earnestly, aware of the claims of both
contestants, yet determined to be conscientious. Determined he most
certainly was. A man doing anything with all his heart is always
interesting to watch, but a man solemnly doing two things at once wins
admiration and respect as well. My sympathies went out to him. I longed
to give him hints. And the only time my attention wandered from this
contest between news and nourishment was when I watched that strip of
lonely seaweed rise and fall, vanish and reappear, with the movement of
his head in eating. The way it dived to meet the fork, then rose again
to greet the paper, was like the motion of a swimmer among waves.

He arranged his sight so cleverly, dividing it in some swift,
extraordinary manner, yet without squinting, between the occupants of
the arena. An eye and a half on each alternately seemed to be the plan,
the extra half left over being free to bring immediate first-aid when
needed; but his mind, I felt, was really with the paper all along. The
nourishment was pleasure, the news was duty. There was heroism in this
little man.

He would heap his fork with a marvellously balanced pyramid of beef and
carrots and bread, smear it over with thick gravy, top it with a dash of
salt--all with one hand, this!--then leave it hovering above the plate
while he looked back keenly at the paper, searching to find his place.
For between mouthfuls he always lost his place. It distressed me till he
found it again, my interest centred on the piled-up fork. But what
distressed me even more was that every time he found it and shot an eye
back again to the loaded implement--that pyramid tumbled! Three times
out of four, at least, it dropped its burden in this way; and the look
of weariness, surprise, and disappointment on his face at each collapse
was almost more than I could bear--in silence. He looked at that fork as
some men look at a dog--with mortified astonishment. “I’m surprised at
you,” his expression said, “after all those years, too!” I longed to
ask, “Why _did_ you add that carrot to the top? You might have known by
this time----!” But his own expression said quite plainly, “I built you
up so very carefully--all with one hand, too. You really _might_ have
stayed!”

My own tension became too keen then for mere amusement. I found myself
taking sides alternately with the beef and paper. I was conscious of a
desire to steady the fork for him while he read, and then to guide it
straight into his mouth. For it next became most painfully obvious that
he rarely found the opening--at the first attempt. With that
over-loaded, over-balanced fork, a dripping carrot perched on the apex
of the pile, he jabbed successively his lower lip, his cheek, his chin,
and once at least the tip of his nose, before the proper terminus was
reached and delivery accomplished. Small beauty-spots of brown remained
dotted here and there to mark the inaccuracy of his aim and the firmness
of his persistence.

For he was so patient. Both jobs he did so thoroughly. I began to wonder
if he did two things at once at other times as well: whether, for
instance, he buttoned his collar with one hand while with the other he
led that strip of seaweed into safety for the day’s adventure. Surely,
it seemed, he must excel at those parlour tricks which involve patting
the breast with one hand and rubbing it up and down with the other
simultaneously. Something of the sort he surely practised. Although the
way, with a piece of bread speared on his fork, he groped all round the
table for the gravy that was cooling on his plate, made me question his
absolute skill sometimes.

He was too absorbed to notice things around him. The stout, bespectacled
woman, for instance, who sat beside him on the leather couch, might not
have existed at all. The way she looked him up and down, hinting for
more room, was utterly lost upon him. So was the way she moved her
glass of steaming milk and her under-sized bananas to and fro to dodge
the paper he constantly flapped beneath her very nose. He took far more
than his proper share of space, and she clearly resented it most
bitterly, yet was afraid to speak. The movements of her glass and fruit
were like a game of chess: he played the stronger gambit and forced her
moves. She sulked--and lost.

The girl came up and whisked his unfinished plate away, asking him with
a sideways bend of the head, bird-like rather, if he wished to order
anything else, and his face shot up above the edge of the paper as
though she had interrupted him in the midst of a serious business
transaction.

“Didn’t I order something, miss?” he was heard to inquire resentfully,
one eye glued still to the sheet.

“Nothing not yet,” came the disinterested reply.

“Bring me sultana pudding hot--no, cold, I mean--with sauce, please,” he
said, as if remembering some quotation learnt by heart--and down he
plunged once more beneath that sea of print.

But with the arrival of the cold sultana pudding came the crisis of the
battle. For the pudding was slippery. It stood on end amid its
paste-like sauce, impatient of amateur attack, inviting more skill than
evidently he possessed. He caught my warning eye once or twice upon
him, but disregarded it. These whole-hearted people never take advice.
Smothering the toppling form with sugar, he seized a fork and aimed;
but, before striking, buried his eyes again in the paper. The shot flew
wild. The pyramid of dough went slithering round the plate as though
alive, scattering sauce upon the marble table. A second shot, delivered
with impatience, took off the top and side. He speared the broken
piece--still without looking up to direct it properly--gathered a little
sauce and sugar on the way; then, flushed with success, the face turned
sideways towards the paper, rushed recklessly for his mouth--and bit an
empty fork. The load had slipped aside _en route_; or, rather, the
paper, holding the best position in the field, had taken it prisoner.
For it fell with a soft and sticky thud into the column nearest to his
waistcoat. This time he _spooned_ it up, and for a little time after
that he had success. The paper and the pudding ran neck and neck along
the home-stretch. He read with absorbing interest; he ate without waste
of attention. I watched him with amazement. This performance of a
divided personality must be given somewhere every day at the luncheon
hour. The mood of the afternoon hung probably upon its accomplishment
without disaster. The pudding had dwindled to its last titbit without
attempting further _ausflüge_, and his eyes had just begun to feast upon
a freshly turned page of the newspaper, when, crash, bang--there came
complete discomfiture.

Drunk with success, he made a violent misdirected shot. He had waited
long for that titbit, had nursed it carefully, keeping a little pool of
sauce and sugar especially for it, when this careless aim sent it flying
off the plate several inches into the middle of the table. The woman
with the milk and the banana gave a little scream--of indignation. He
turned abruptly, noticing her presence for the first time. He realised
that he had edged her almost off the couch. He also realised, with the
other eye, that the bit of pudding lay beyond redemption or recapture.
Several people were watching him. He could not possibly, without total
loss of dignity, restore it to an edible condition. He shunted down the
seat with the sideways movement of a penguin, quietly replaced the
errant morsel on his plate, called for his bill, then waited resignedly
with a sigh, a defeated man.

Our eyes met in that moment full and square across the room. “I told you
so,” mine said; “you were too reckless with it.” But in his own there
shone a look of misery and regret I shall not easily forget. For a
single instant his face vanished behind the crumpled but victorious
paper, to emerge, scarlet, a moment later with the strip of seaweed
drawn out of its normal bed into an unaccustomed route towards one
tilted eyebrow. In his distress the man had passed a hand
absent-mindedly across his forehead. The woman, putting on her
spectacles, eyed with relief his preparations for departure. He went.
But he took the paper with him.

And through the window I caught my final glimpse of him as he climbed
outside a passing omnibus. He was small and rotund. His eyes shone in a
flushed and disappointed face. His coat-tails spread sideways in the
wind. Like an irate and very swollen sparrow he looked, defeated in some
wretched gutter combat, yet eager for more, and certain to return to the
arena as long as life should last--about the luncheon hour.




XXVI

WIND


It is a curious reflection, though of course an obvious one, that wind
in itself is--silent; and that only from the friction against objects
set in its path comes the multiform music instantly associated with its
name. The fact, too, that so potent a force should be both silent and
invisible readily explains its common use as a simile, and a beautiful
one, for Spirit. Like flame, that other exquisite simile of spirit, how
clean it licks, how mysteriously it moves, how swiftly it penetrates!
And so subtly linked are they that the one almost seems to produce the
other--the swift hot winds that beat about a conflagration; the tongues
of fire that follow a fanning draught--“the wind that blew the stars to
flame!” True inspiration seems certainly born of this marriage of wind
and fire. How singular--have you ever thought?--would be the impressions
of a man to whom the motion of air, as wind, was unknown, when first he
witnessed the phenomenon of a twenty-knot breeze. Imagine a people that
knew not wind--how they would tremble to see the tree-tops bend; to
hear the roar, the whispers, the sweet singing of all Nature about them
for the first time; to know the sounds and movements of the myriad
objects that but for wind would be silent and motionless from one year’s
end to another! To me, it has always seemed that such a revelation might
be far more wonderful than the first torrent of light that beats upon
the eyes of a man who has been blind.

And so one comes to a further suggestive reflection: that objects all
possess their own particular sound or voice that the winds love to set
free; their essential note--that specific set of vibrations lying buried
in their form--of which, as some curious doctrines of the old magic
assert, their forms, indeed, are the visible expression. In this
region--pondering the relation between sound and shape--the imagination
may wander till it grows dizzy, for it leads very soon to the still more
wonderful world where sound and colour spin their puzzling web, and the
spiritual phenomena of music cry for further explanation. But, for the
moment, let only the sound of wind be in our ears; for in wind, I think,
there is a sweetness and a variety of music that no instruments invented
by men have yet succeeded in approaching so far as sheer thrill and
beauty are concerned.

Each lover of Nature knows, of course, the special voice of wind that
most appeals to him--the sighing of pines, the shouting of oaks, the
murmur of grasses, the whirring over a bare hillside, or the whistling
about the corners of the streets--the variety is endless; and there can
be no great interest in obtruding one’s own predilection. Only, to know
this music thoroughly, to catch all the overtones and undertones that
make it so wonderful, and to absorb its essential thrill and power, you
must listen, not for minutes, but for hours. If you want to learn the
secrets of the things themselves, betrayed in the varying response they
give back to the winds that sweep or caress them, lie leisurely for
hours at a time and--listen.

How, from the high desolation of mountain peaks it blows out--terror,
yet from the sea of bearded grain calls with soft whispering sounds such
as children use for their tales of mystery; from old buildings--the
melancholy of all dead human passion, yet from the rigging of ships the
abandon of wild and passionate adventure: wind, clapping its mighty
hands among the flapping sails, or running with weary little feet among
the ruined towers of broken habitations; sighing with long, gentle music
over English lawns, or rushing, full of dreams, across vast prairies
over-seas; kissing a garden into music, or blundering blind-eyed through
dark London squares; racing with thoughts of ice down precipices and
dropping, as through spaces of sleep, into little corners of oblivion
in waste lands of loneliness and desolation, or sighing with almost
human melody through the keyhole and down the farmhouse chimney.

From the curtained softness of the summer sky these viewless winds sift
silently into the heart, to wake yearnings infinite. From some high
attic window, perhaps, where you stand and watch, listen to that wind of
sighs that rises, almost articulate with the pains and sorrows, the
half-caught joys, too, from that crowded human world beneath the sea of
roofs and tiles. Winds of desire, winds of hope, winds of fear and love.
Ah! winds of all the spirit’s life and moods ... and, finally, the wind
of Death! And wind down a wet and deserted London street, shouting its
whistling song, its song of the triumphant desolation that has cleared
the way for it of human obstruction--how it sings the music of
magnificent poverty, of heavy luxury, and then of the loneliness bred by
both! And you see some solitary figure battling forwards, and hear that
curious whistling it makes over the dripping umbrella.... Ah! how _that_
wind summons pictures of courage in isolation, and of singing in a
wilderness! “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the
sound thereof, yet canst not tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth”
... for wind is, indeed, of the nature of spirit, and its music, crowded
with suggestion, as sometimes, too, with memory and association, is, in
the true sense, magical.

“Where is thy soul? Thou liest i’ the wind and rain,” says the poetess
to the “Beloved Dead”; and in another passage the sound of wind brings
back for her the phantom face of the departed: “But who shall drive a
mournful face from the sad winds about my door?” Shelley, more than any
other, perhaps, loved wind and wind-voices, and has the most marvellous
and subtle descriptions of it in his work. Though he so often speaks of
the “viewless wind,” one cannot help thinking that in his imagination
lay some mental picture of wind--in the terms of sight. He _saw_ the
wind. For him it had colour as well as shape. He saw bright
sylphs--spirits of air--which “star the winds with points of coloured
light, as they rain through them,” and “wind-enchanted shapes of
wandering mist” that for his inner vision were “snow-white and swift as
wind nursed among lilies near a brimming stream.” And, alone among poets
so far as I know, he had that delightful conception of solid, smooth
surfaces of wind upon which it is possible to run and dance and sleep.
His verse is alive with spirits “trampling the wind”; “trampling the
slant winds on high with golden-sandalled feet”; or climbing the hills
of wind that run up into the highest peaks of heaven. The “Witch of
Atlas” not only rode “singing through the shoreless air,” but also “ran
upon the platforms of the wind, and laughed to hear the fireballs roar
behind.” And it is the Chorus in _Prometheus Unbound_ that so
exquisitely “weaves the dance on the floor of the breeze.”

But for less gifted mortals there are certain effects of wind that seem
to me to approach uncommonly close to actual sight, or at least to a
point where one may imagine what wind _ought_ to look like. Watch the
gusts of a northwest wind as they fall in rapid succession upon a
standing field of high barley, beating the surface into long curved
shadows that bring to mind Shelley’s “kindling within the strings of the
waved air, Æolian modulations.” One can see the velvet touch of those
soft, vast paws, and the immense stretch of the invisible footsteps that
press the long stalks down and as suddenly sweep away and set them free
again. And with the changing angle of the myriad yellow heads the colour
also changes, till gradually there swims upon the mind the impression of
some huge and shadowy image that flies above the field--some personal
deity of wind, some djin of air. One almost sees the spirit of the
wind....

It is fascinating, too, to stand opposite a slope of wooded mountains,
near enough to distinguish the individual swing of each separate tree,
yet far enough to note how the forest as a whole blows all one way--the
way of the wind. Also--to hear the chord of sound as a whole, yet mark
the different notes that pour out of the various trees composing it. In
some such way--one wonders, perhaps!--the Spirit of God moves over the
surface of men’s minds, each swinging apparently its own individual way,
yet when seen in proper perspective, all moving the one way--_to Him_.
And the voices of all these separate little stray winds--who shall
describe them? Creep with me now out of the house among these Jura
vineyards, and come up into the pine forests that encircle the village.
Put your ear against that bosom of the soft dark woods where the wind is
born--and listen! Find the words if you can----!




XXVII

PINES


All trees, doubtless, appeal in some measure to the sense of poetry,
even in those who are not strictly speaking lovers of Nature; but the
pine, for many, seems to have a message more vivid, more vital than the
rest: as though it possessed some occult quality that speaks not merely
to the imagination, or to the general love of Nature _per se_, but
directly to the soul. The oak for strength, the ash for mystery, the
birch for her feminine grace and so forth; but the pine, like a sharp
sword, pierces straight through to that inner sense of beauty which
accepts or rejects beyond all question of analysis. The personality of
this “common” tree touches the same sense of wonder that is stirred by
the presence of a human personality, strong beyond ordinary; and worship
is ever subtly linked with wonder.

The analogy is interesting. The pine plants its roots where more showy
trees faint and die; straight, strong, and sweet to the winds, it
flourishes where only gorse, heather, and toughly obstinate things can
live. Out of the rock, where there seems not earth enough to feed a
violet, it lifts its sombre head undaunted; scorched by the sun, torn by
the blast, peering into dreadful abysses, yet utterly fearless, and
yielding so little that the elements must pluck it up by the roots
before they can destroy it. Only lightning can break it. At a height
above the sea that means death to other trees, it climbs singing,
“rock-rooted, stretched athwart the vacancy”; and even when the main
army halts, stragglers are always to be seen, leading forlorn hopes into
the heart of desolation beyond. And if, amid the stress of conditions,
it cannot look well, it is content to look ill, showing a dwarfed and
stunted figure to the skies. Only then, ye elemental powers! what
strength in the gnarled roots, what iron resistance in the twisted
trunk, what dour endurance in the short, thick limbs! It assumes the
attitude of the fighting animal, back to the wall.

High mountains are full of vivid pictures of this courage
against Titanic odds. For the pine tree has the courage of its
convictions--fine, simple, tenacious--as it has also that other quality
of the strong soul: the power to stand alone. “Some say there is a
precipice where _one_ vast pine is frozen to ruin o’er piles of snow and
chasms of ice ’mid Alpine mountains.” No one who has canoed on Canadian
lakes and seen those frequent rocky islets, each with its solitary pine,
can have ignored that there is something strangely significant in
the sight of that slender spire rising out of the heart of
loneliness--something that thrills, and thrills deeply, into the region
beyond words. Unsheltered, beneath wide skies, remote from its own kind,
the tree stands there, splendid in its isolation, straight as a temple
column and prepared for any shock. “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam,” of
course--but there is more than the pathos of Heine’s poem in its
unapproachable loneliness: there is the spiritual suggestion of
personality--this upright, self-sufficing tree upon a rock, buffeted by
winds and waves, asking no sympathy and dreading no possible fate. The
picture, symbolic of the strong soul, conveys the inevitable parable.

Compared with other trees, too, the pine does not change. One knows, of
course, the tips of tender green that come with May and turn a pine wood
into a sea of bewildering beauty. But, though deciduous, one is never
aware that anything is lost; its branches never thin; it puts out,
properly speaking, no buds. And the monotony of a pine forest is merely
a defect of its great quality of constancy. In summer its shade is
deeper, its recesses more cool than those of other woods; and in winter,
just when most trees are leafless and unable to fight, it bears the full
weight of the snow and meets the whole force of the destroying winds. It
stands to face disaster when others faint or run. The analogy with man
is again striking and complete. Yet its qualities are not merely
negative. More than most, it gives out--without reward, often without
recognition; for the great forests that sweeten the world with their
balsam, and their life-giving odours, stand most often in the deserted
regions of the earth, unseen, unknown. And, by their death, they become
more useful still, journeying over all the seas. In the true sense, most
ascetic of trees, accepting discipline that good may come for others,
not for themselves!

Like the vital human personality, too, what “atmosphere” it has! What it
lends of suggestiveness to the commonest landscape--a few pines
clustered on the hill; a sombre group among the green trees in the
plain! In the suburban garden even, or rearing its dark crest against
the hoardings of the street, how its picturesqueness spreads about it!
It is the gipsy among trees, and its perfume, like the wood fire, sets
the blood aflame for wandering and for the lonely places of the world.
At the sight of it one thinks, perhaps, of the stone pine “into which
the forest has whispered its gravest and sweetest thought,” and at the
same instant is caught away to that other revelation where it stands by
the sea. For, by the shore of southern seas, it betrays a scarcely
suspected touch of melancholy, gentle and pathetic in its essence,
feminine almost, that makes the heart yearn for lovely and impossible
things. One sees it there, rooted among golden sands, and gazing across
a waste of purple sea, the wash of whose waves is hardly to be
distinguished from the wash of wind through its own branches....

The mystery of the pines, too, seems to hold a peculiar quality
unapproached elsewhere in Nature: it subdues without terrifying,
inspires awe without distress, and is more human than the mystery which
belongs to mountains, sea, or desert. The fairies come out from the pine
woods; for no other woods conceal so gently, yet hold within their
velvety recesses such possibilities of revelation. To meet them
unexpectedly is to experience a thrill of subtle suggestion. Among tamer
trees, suddenly to come upon these black, vigorous things, contemptuous
of soil, independent of sympathy, thriving where others droop or die, is
to know a leap of the imagination, an increase of vitality, as when,
among a crowd of common souls, one finds a man--strong, radiating
confidence and hope. Their very darkness stimulates. One cannot conceive
such trees stooping to any kind of show. “Lowland trees,” says the
author of _Modern Painters_, may “show themselves gay with blossoms and
glad with pretty charities of fruitfulness,” but the pines “have harder
work to do for man and must do it in close-set troops.” While other
trees “may turn their paleness to the sky if but a rush of rain passes
them by, the pines must live carelessly amidst the wrath of clouds,” and
“only wave their branches to and fro when a storm pleads with them, as
men toss their arms in a dream.... You cannot reach them, cannot cry to
them; these trees never heard human voice,” he says, speaking of their
inaccessible multitudes among the precipices; “they are far above all
sound but of the winds. No foot ever stirred fallen leaf of theirs. All
comfortless they stand, between the two eternities of Vacancy and the
Rock; yet with such iron will that the rock itself looks bent and
shattered beside them--fragile, weak, inconsistent, compared to their
dark energy of delicate life, and monotony of enchanted
pride--unnumbered, unconquerable.”

And there is no sound in Nature quite so wonderful as that faint
spiritual _singing_ of pine trees, that gentle whirring of a forest when
soft airs are moving--that _säuseln_, _susurrement_, whispering. Midway
in the wood, of course, a pine forest shouting in a free wind is simply
the sea shouting on a sandy shore; close the eyes, and it is impossible
to tell the difference; it is tumbling surf, mellowed by distance,
tossing, instead of spray, the flying odours of their needles’
frankincense. But when only stray puffs come a-wandering, and other
trees are silent, listen at the skirts of a pine grove, and hear those
ghosts of sound that fall from nowhere, that thin away to a mere ghost
of sighing, and then come running back to you over the motionless
crests. For pines can answer the wind apparently without moving. No
other sound can faint as this does--or sing alone; among the stragglers
at the edge of the wood you may hear distinct _solos_. Isolated pines
respond to a wind you cannot feel; and a tree at your side will sigh and
murmur, while another six feet away keeps silent. Almost as though the
wind can consciously pick and choose when and where it shall shake “the
clinging music from their boughs,” so that “low, sweet sounds, like the
farewell of ghosts,” are heard.

Wherever they are found, whether they “fledge the wild ridgéd mountain
steep by steep,” or gather in greater concourse like “fallen flakes and
fragments of the night, stayed in their solemn squares,” these trees,
for some imaginations at least, seem charged with a potent symbolism.
And, from the particular, they sweep the mind across continents to the
general. Their shadows rest upon a nation, as Ruskin puts it, and absorb
and mould the life of a race. “The Northern people, century after
century, lived under one or another of the two great powers of the Pine
and the Sea, both infinite.... Whatever elements of imagination, or of
warrior strength, or of domestic justice, were brought down by the
Norwegian and the Goth against the dissoluteness or degradation of the
South of Europe, were taught them under the green roofs and wild
penetralia of the pine.”




XXVIII

THE WINTER ALPS


With an audacity of outline denied to them in the softer seasons, the
Alps rear themselves aloft in Winter more grandly self-revealed than at
any other time--still with their brave and ancient pretence of being
unconquerable. The black and white become them best; and they know it:
the savage, iron black that seems pitiless, and that shining, silvery
white that dazzles so piercingly. They are really not summer things at
all, but creatures of the winter--the short, brilliant day of icy
keenness, and the long night of tempest, wind, and drifting snows. Then,
at least, clothed so simply in their robes of jet and ermine, they stand
in something of their old true majesty, solemn, forbidding, terrible.
Summer, as it were, over-dresses them, with its skirts of emerald-bright
meadows and fringe of purple forests, and all its flying scarves of
painted air and mist. The colours are so brilliant, the skies so soft,
the flowers climb so high. Then winter comes, undressing them slowly,
from the head and shoulders downwards, till they emerge, austere in
black and white, naked and unashamed beneath the skies.

The associations of summer, of course, help very largely to emphasise
the contrast. Those stubborn peaks that lie in January beneath forty
feet of packed and driven snow, on many a morning in July and August
carried twenty tourists prattling to one another of the sunrise, sucking
thermos flasks, giggling of the hotel dances to come, not a few having
been bodily dragged up, probably, by guides and porters overburdened
with the latest appliances for comfort and ease. And the mere thought of
them all somehow makes the Alps--dwindle a little. But in winter they
become free again, and hold uninterrupted converse with the winds and
stars. Their greatest characteristic becomes manifest--their _silence_.
For the silence of the Winter Alps is genuinely overwhelming. One feels
that the whole world of strife, clamour and bustle, and with it all the
clash of vulgar ambitions among men, has fallen away into some void
whence resurrection is impossible. Stand upon one of the upper slopes in
mid-winter and listen: all sound whatsoever has fled away into the
remotest comers of the universe. It seems as though such a thing had
never existed even, the silence is so enormous, yet at the same time
more stimulating than any possible music, more suggestive than the
sweetest instrument ever heard. It encompasses the sky and the earth
like an immense vacuum.

In summer, there would be bells, bells of goats and cows; voices, voices
of climbers, tourists, shepherds; people singing, pipes playing, an
occasional horn, and even the puffing and whistling of at least several
funiculaires in the valley. But now all these are hushed and gone
away--dead. Only silence reigns. Even above, among the precipices and
ridges, there is no crack and thunder of falling stones, for the sun has
hardly time to melt their fastenings and send them down; no hiss of
sliding snow, no roar of avalanches. The very wind, too, whirring over
this upper world too softly cushioned with thick snow to permit
“noise”--even the wind is muted and afraid to cry aloud. I know nothing
more impressive than the silence that overwhelms the world of these high
slopes. The faint “sishing” of the ski as one flies over the powdery
snow becomes almost loud in the ears by comparison. And with this
silence that holds true awe comes that other characteristic of the
Winter Alps--their _immobility_; that is, I mean, of course, the
immobility of the various items that crowd their surface in summer with
movement. All the engines that produce movement have withdrawn deep
within their frozen selves, and lie smothered and asleep. The waving
grasses are still, beneath three metres of snow; the shelves that in
July so busily discharge their weights of snow into the depths stand
rigid and fastened to the cliffs by nails of giant ice. Nothing moves,
slides, stirs, or bends; all is inflexible and fixed. The very trees,
loaded with piled-up masses of snow, stand like things of steel pinned
motionless against the background of running slope or blue-black sky.
Above all, the tumbling waters that fill the hollows of all these upper
valleys with their dance of foam and spray, and with their echoing sweet
thunder, are silent and invisible. One cannot even guess the place where
they have been. Here sit Silence and Immobility, terrifically enthroned
and close to heaven.

The Alps, tainted in summer with vulgarity, in winter are set free; for
the hordes of human beings that scuttle about the fields at their base
are ignored by the upper regions. Those few who dare the big peaks are
perforce worthy, and the bold ski-runners who challenge the hazards of
the long, high courses are themselves, like the birds, almost a part of
the mountain life. The Alps, as a whole, retire into their ancient
splendour.

Yet their winter moods hold moments of tenderness as well, and of
colour, too, that at first the strong black and white might seem to
deny. The monotony of the snow-world comes to reveal itself as a
monotony of surface only, thinly hiding an exquisite variety. The
shading is so delicate, however, that it eludes capture by words almost.
Half unearthly seem to me sometimes the faint veils of tinted blues,
greys, and silvers that lie caught upon those leagues of upper snow;
half hidden in the cuplike hollows, nestling just beneath the curved lip
of some big drift, or sifted like transparent coloured powder over half
a hill when the sun is getting low. Under boulders, often, they lie so
deep and thick that one might pick them up with the hands--rich, dark
blues that seem almost to hold substance. And the purple troops of them
that cloak the snow to the eastward of the pine forests surpass anything
that summer can ever dream of, much less give. The long icicles that
hang from branch or edge of stones, sparkling in the sun while they drip
with sounds like the ticking of a clock, flash with crowded colours of a
fairy world. And at the centre of the woods there are blacks that might
paint all London, yet without suffering loss.

At dawn, or towards sunset, the magic is bewildering. The wizardry of
dreams lies over the world. Even the village street becomes
transfigured. These winter mountains then breathe forth for a moment
something of the glory the world knew in her youth before the coming of
men. The ancient gods come close. One feels the awful potentialities of
this wonderful white and silent landscape. Into the terms of modern
life, however, it is with difficulty, if at all, translatable. Before
the task was half completed, someone would come along with weights and
scales in his hand and mention casually the exact mass and size and
composition of it all--and rob the wondrous scene of half its awe and
_all_ its wonder.

The gathering of the enormous drifts that begins in November and
continues until March is another winter fact that touches the
imagination. The sight of these vast curled waves of snow is undeniably
impressive--accumulating with every fresh fall for delivery in the
spring. The stored power along those huge steep slopes is prodigious,
for when it breaks loose with the first _Föhn_ wind of April, the trees
snap before it like little wooden matches, and the advance wind that
heralds its coming can blow down a solid châlet like a playing-card. One
finds these mighty drifts everywhere along the ridges, smooth as a
billiard-table along the surface, their projecting cornices running out
into extensions that alter the entire shape of the ridge which supports
them. They are delicately carved by the wind, curved and lined into
beautiful sweeping contours that suggest suddenly arrested movement.
Chamois tracks may be seen sometimes up to the very edge--the thin,
pointed edge that hangs over the abyss. One thinks of an Atlantic
suddenly changed into a solid frozen white, and as one whips by on ski
it often seems as though these gigantic waves ran flying after, just
about to break and overwhelm the valley. Outlined on a cloudless day
against the skies of deep wintry blue--seen thus from below--they
present a spectacle of weirdest beauty. And the silence, this thick,
white-coated silence that surrounds them, adds to their singular forms
an element of desolate terror that is close to sublimity.

The whole point of the Winter Alps, indeed, is that they then reveal
themselves with immensities of splendour and terror that the familiarity
of summer days conceals. The more gaunt and sombre peaks, perhaps,
change little from one season to another--like the sinister tooth of the
old Matterhorn, for instance, that is too steep for snow to gather and
change its aspect. But the general run of summits stand aloof in winter
with an air of inaccessibility that adds vastly to their essential
majesty. The five peaks of the Dent du Midi, to take a well-known group,
that smile a welcome to men and women by the score in August, retreat
with the advent of the short dark days into a remoter heaven, whence
they frown down, genuinely terrific, with an aspect that excites worship
rather than attack. In their winter seclusion, dressed in black and
white, they belong to the clouds and tempests, rather than to the fields
and woods out of which they grow. Watch them, for instance, on a January
morning in the dawn, when the wild winds toss the frozen powdery snow
hundreds of feet into the air from all their summits, and upon this
exaggerated outline of the many-toothed ridge the sunrise strikes in red
and gold--and you may see a sight that is not included in the very
finest of the summer’s repertoire.

But it is at night, beneath the moon, that the Winter Alps become really
supreme. The shadows are pitch black, the snow dazzling as with a
radiance of its own, the “battlements that on their front bear stars”
loom awfully out of the sky. In close-shuttered châlets the peasants
sleep. In the brilliant over-heated salons of hotels hundreds of little
human beings dance and make music and play bridge. But out there, in
this silent world of ice and stars, the enormous mountains dream
solemnly upon their ancient thrones, unassailable, alone in the heavens,
forgotten. The Alps, in these hours of the long winter night, come
magnificently into their own.




XXIX

THE SECOND GENERATION


Sometimes, in a moment of sharp experience, comes that vivid flash of
insight that makes a platitude suddenly seem a revelation: its full
content is abruptly realised. “Ten years _is_ a long time, yes,” he
thought, as he walked up the drive to the great Kensington house where
she still lived.

Ten years--long enough, at any rate, for her to have married and for her
husband to have died. More than that he had not heard, in the outlandish
places where life had cast him in the interval. He wondered whether
there had been any children. All manner of thoughts and questions,
confused a little, passed across his mind. He was well-to-do now, though
probably his entire capital did not amount to her income for a single
year. He glanced at the huge, forbidding mansion. Yet that pride was
false which had made of poverty an insuperable obstacle. He saw it now.
He had learned values in his long exile.

But he was still ridiculously timid. This confusion of thought, of
mental images rather, was due to a kind of fear, since worship ever is
akin to awe. He was as nervous as a boy going up for a _viva voce_; and
with the excitement was also that unconquerable sinking--that horrid
shrinking sensation that excessive shyness brings. Why in the world had
he come? Why had he telegraphed the very day after his arrival in
England? Why had he not sent a tentative, tactful letter, feeling his
way a little?

Very slowly he walked up the drive, feeling that if a reasonable chance
of escape presented itself he would almost take it. But all the windows
stared so hard at him that retreat was really impossible now; and though
no faces were visible behind the curtains, all had seen him. Possibly
she herself--his heart beat absurdly at the extravagant suggestion. Yet
it was odd; he felt so certain of being seen, and that someone watched
him. He reached the wide stone steps that were clean as marble, and
shrank from the mark his boots must make upon their spotlessness. In
desperation, then, before he could change his mind, he touched the bell.
But he did not hear it ring--mercifully; that irrevocable sound must
have paralysed him altogether. If no one came to answer, he might still
leave a card in the letter-box and slip away. Oh, how utterly he
despised himself for such a thought! A man of thirty with such a chicken
heart was not fit to protect a child, much less a woman. And he
recalled with a little stab of pain that the man she married had been
noted for his courage, his determined action, his inflexible firmness in
various public situations, head and shoulders above lesser men. What
presumption on his own part ever to dream ...! He remembered, too, with
no apparent reason in particular, that this man had a grown-up son
already, by a former marriage.

And still no one came to open that huge, contemptuous door with its so
menacing, so hostile air. His back was to it, as he carelessly twirled
his umbrella, but he “felt” its sneering expression behind him while it
looked him up and down. It seemed to push him away. The entire mansion
focused its message through that stern portal: Little timid men are not
welcomed here.

How well he remembered the house! How often in years gone by had he not
stood and waited just like this, trembling with delight and
anticipation, yet terrified lest the bell should be answered and the
great door actually swung wide! Then, as now, he would have run, had he
dared. He was still afraid; his worship was so deep. But in all these
years of exile in wild places, farming, mining, working for the position
he had at last attained, her face and the memory of her gracious
presence had been his comfort and support, his only consolation, though
never his actual joy. There was so little foundation for it all, yet
her smile, and the words she had spoken to him from time to time in
friendly conversation, had clung, inspired, kept him going. For he knew
them all by heart. And, more than once, in foolish optimistic moods, he
had imagined, greatly daring, that she possibly had meant more....

He touched the bell a second time--with the point of his umbrella. He
meant to go in, carelessly as it were, saying as lightly as might be,
“Oh, I’m back in England again--if you haven’t _quite_ forgotten my
existence--I could not forgo the pleasure of saying how do you do, and
hearing that you are well ...,” and the rest; then presently bow himself
easily out--into the old loneliness again. But he would at least have
seen her; he would have heard her voice, and looked into her gentle,
amber eyes; he would have touched her hand. She might even ask him to
come in another day and see her! He had rehearsed it all a hundred
times, as certain feeble temperaments do rehearse such scenes. And he
came rather well out of that rehearsal, though always with an aching
heart, the old great yearnings unfulfilled. All the way across the
Atlantic he had thought about it, though with lessening confidence as
the time drew near. The very night of his arrival in London, he wrote;
then, tearing up the letter (after sleeping over it), he had telegraphed
next morning, asking if she would be in. He signed his surname--such a
very common name, alas! but surely she would know--and her reply,
“Please call 4.30,” struck him as oddly worded--rather.... Yet here he
was.

There was a rattle of the big door knob, that aggressive, hostile knob
that thrust out at him insolently like a fist of bronze. He started,
angry with himself for doing so. But the door did not open. He became
suddenly conscious of the wilds he had lived in for so long; his clothes
were hardly fashionable; his voice probably had a twang in it, and he
used tricks of speech that must betray the rough life so recently left.
What would she think of him--now? He looked much older, too. And how
brusque it was to have telegraphed like that! He felt awkward, gauche,
tongue-tied, hot and cold by turns. The sentences, so carefully
rehearsed, fled beyond recovery.

Good heavens--the door was open! It had been open for some minutes. It
moved on big hinges noiselessly. He acted automatically--just like an
automaton; he heard himself asking if her ladyship was at home, though
his voice was nearly inaudible. The next moment he was standing in the
great, dim hall, so poignantly familiar, and the remembered perfume
almost made him sway. He did not hear the door close, but he knew. He
was caught. The butler betrayed an instant’s surprise--or was it
overwrought imagination again?--when he gave his name. It seemed to
him, though only later did he grasp the significance of that curious
intuition--that the man had expected another caller instead. The man
took his card respectfully, and disappeared. These flunkeys, of course,
were so marvellously trained. He was too long accustomed to straight
question and straight answer; but here, in the Old Country, privacy was
jealously guarded with such careful ritual.

And, almost immediately, the butler returned with his expressionless
face again, and showed him into the large drawing-room on the ground
floor that he knew so well. Tea was on the table--tea for one. He felt
puzzled. “If you will have tea first, sir, her ladyship will see you
afterwards,” was what he heard. And though his breath came thickly, he
asked the question that forced itself up and out. Before he knew what he
was saying, he asked it: “Is she ill?” Oh no, her ladyship was “quite
well, thank you, sir. If you will have tea first, sir, her ladyship will
see you afterwards.” The horrid formula was repeated, word for word. He
sank into an arm-chair and mechanically poured out his own tea. What he
felt he did not exactly know. It seemed so unusual, so utterly
unexpected, so unnecessary, too. Was it a special attention, or was it
merely casual? That it could mean anything else did not occur to him.
How was she busy, occupied--not here to give him tea? He could not
understand it. It seemed such a farce, having tea alone like this; it
was like waiting for an audience; it was like a doctor’s or a dentist’s
room. He felt bewildered, ill at ease, cheap.... But after ten years in
primitive lands ... perhaps London usages had changed in some
extraordinary manner. He recalled his first amazement at the
motor-omnibuses, taxicabs, and electric tubes. All were new. London was
otherwise than when he left it. Piccadilly and the Marble Arch
themselves had altered. And, with his reflection, a shade more
confidence stole in. She knew that he was there; and presently she would
come in and speak with him, explaining everything by the mere fact of
her delicious presence. He was ready for the ordeal; he would see
her--and drop out again. It was worth all manner of pain, even of
mortification. He was in her house, drinking her tea, sitting in a chair
she even perhaps used herself. Only--he would never dare to say a word,
or make a sign that might betray his changeless secret. He still felt
the boyish worshipper, worshipping in dumbness from a distance, one of a
group of many others like himself. Their dreams had faded, his had
continued, that was the difference. Memories tore and raced and poured
upon him. How sweet and gentle she had always been to him! He used to
wonder sometimes.... Once, he remembered, he had rehearsed a
declaration--but, while rehearsing, the big man had come in and captured
her, though he had only read the definite news long after by chance in
the Arizona paper....

He gulped his tea down. His heart alternately leaped and stood still. A
sort of numbness held him most of that dreadful interval, and no clear
thought came at all. Every ten seconds his head turned towards the door
that rattled, seemed to move, yet never opened. But any moment now it
_must_ open, and he would be in her very presence, breathing the same
air with her. He would see her, charge himself with her beauty once more
to the brim, and then go out again into the wilderness--the wilderness
of life--without her--and not for a mere ten years, but for always. She
was so utterly beyond his reach. He felt like a backwoodsman. He was a
backwoodsman.

For one thing only was he duly prepared--though he thought about it
little enough: she would, of course, have changed. The photograph he
owned, cut from an illustrated paper, was not true now. It might even be
a little shock perhaps. He must remember that. Ten years cannot pass
over a woman without----

Before he knew it, then, the door was open, and she was advancing
quietly towards him across the thick carpet that deadened sound. With
both hands outstretched she came, and with the sweetest welcoming smile
upon her parted lips he had seen in any human face. Her eyes were soft
with joy. His whole heart leaped within him; for the instant he saw her
it all flashed clear as sunlight--that she knew and understood. His
being melted in the utter bliss of it; shyness vanished. She had always
known, had always understood. Speech came easily to him in a flood, had
he needed it. But he did not need it. It was all so adorably easy,
simple, natural, and true. He just took her hands--those welcoming,
outstretched hands in both his own, and led her to the nearest sofa. He
was not even surprised at himself. Inevitable, out of depths of truth,
this meeting came about. And he uttered a little, foolish commonplace,
because he feared the huge revulsion that his sudden glory brought, and
loved to taste it slowly:

“So you live here still?”

“Here, and here,” she answered softly, touching his heart, and then her
own. “I am attached to this house, too, because _you_ used to come and
see me here, and because it was here I waited so long for you, and still
wait. I shall never leave it--unless you change. You see, we live
together here.”

He said nothing. He leaned forward to take and hold her. The abrupt
knowledge of it all somehow did not seem abrupt--as though he had known
it always; and the complete disclosure did not seem disclosure
either--rather as though she told him something he had inexplicably left
unrealised, yet not forgotten. He felt absolutely master of himself,
yet, in a curious sense, outside of himself at the same time. His arms
were already open--when she gently held her hands up to prevent. He
heard a faint sound outside the door.

“But you are free,” he cried, his great passion breaking out and
flooding him, yet most oddly well controlled, “and I----”

She interrupted him in the softest, quietest whisper he had ever heard:

“You are not free, as I am free--not yet.”

The sound outside came suddenly closer. It was a step. There was a faint
click on the handle of the door. In a flash, then, came the dreadful
shock that overwhelmed him--the abrupt realisation of the truth that was
somehow horrible: that Time, all these years, had left no mark upon her,
and that she _had not changed_. Her face was young as when he saw her
last.

With it there came cold and darkness into the great room that turned it
instantly otherwise. He shivered with cold, but an alien, unaccountable
cold. Some great shadow dropped upon the entire earth. And though but a
second could have passed before the handle actually turned, and the
other person entered, it seemed to him like several minutes. He heard
her saying this amazing thing that was question, answer, and forgiveness
all in one. This, at least, he divined before the ghastly interruption
came:

“But, George--if you had only spoken----!”

With ice in his blood, he heard the butler saying that her ladyship
would be “pleased” to see him now if he had finished his tea and would
he be “so good as to bring the papers and documents upstairs with him.”
He had just sufficient control of certain muscles to stand upright and
murmur that he would come. He rose from a sofa that held no one but
himself. But, all at once, he staggered. He really did not know exactly
then what happened, or how he managed to stammer out the medley of
excuses and semi-explanations that battered their way through his brain
and issued somehow in definite words from his lips. Somehow or other he
accomplished it. The sudden attack, the faintness, the collapse!... He
vaguely remembered afterwards--with amazement, too--the suavity of the
butler, as he suggested telephoning for a doctor, and that he just
managed to forbid it, refusing the offered glass of brandy as well, and
that he contrived to stumble into the taxi-cab and give his hotel
address, with a final explanation that he would call another day and
“bring the papers.” It was quite dear that his telegram had been
attributed to someone else--someone “with papers”--perhaps a solicitor
or architect. His name was such an ordinary one. There were so many
Smiths. It was also clear that she he had come to see, and _had_ seen,
no longer lived here--in the flesh....

And, just as he left the hall, he had the vision--mere fleeting glimpse
it was--of a tall, slim, girlish figure on the stairs asking if anything
was wrong, and realised vaguely through his atrocious pain that she was,
of course, the wife of the son who had inherited....


_Printed by_
MORRISON & GIBB LIMITED
_Edinburgh_




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Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

have wintessed more.=> have witnessed more. {pg 86}

old’s man’s mumbled answer=> old man’s mumbled answer {pg 123}

I know Hanock well=> I know Hancock well {pg 193}

which acepts or rejects=> which accepts or rejects {pg 245}

The black and white becomes them best=> The black and white become them
best {pg 252}