Project Gutenberg Australia


Title: The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (1927)
Author: H. G. Wells
* A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook *
eBook No.: 0609221.txt
Language:  English
Date first posted: December 2006
Date most recently updated: December 2006


PRODUCTION NOTES:

'The Beautiful Suit' is also known as 'A Moonlight Fable'.

'The Red Room' is also known as 'The Ghost of Fear'.

'In The Modern Vein: An Unsympathetic Love Story' is also known as 'A
Bardlet's Romance'. In this story I have replaced "published on three
several occasions" with "published on three separate occasions".

'The Sad Story of a Dramatic Critic' is also known as 'The Obliterated Man'.

'The Reconciliation' is also known as 'The Bulla'.

'The Man Who Could Work Miracles' is also known as 'The Miracle Maker'.

Subtitles that appear before the titles such as 'Story The First,'
'Story the Second,' and so on, have been removed.



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Title: The Short Stories of H. G. Wells (1927)
Author: H. G. Wells



CONTENTS

The Time Machine And Other Stories--
The Time Machine
The Empire Of The Ants
A Vision Of Judgment
The Land Ironclads
The Beautiful Suit
The Door In The Wall
The Pearl Of Love
The Country Of The Blind

The Stolen Bacillus And Other Stories--
The Stolen Bacillus
The Flowering Of The Strange Orchid
In The Avu Observatory
The Triumphs Of A Taxidermist
A Deal In Ostriches
Through A Window
The Temptation Of Harringay
The Flying Man
The Diamond Maker
Aepyornis Island
The Remarkable Case Of Davidson's Eyes
The Lord Of The Dynamos
The Hammerpond Park Burglary
The Moth
The Treasure In The Forest

The Plattner Story And Others--
The Plattner Story
The Argonauts Of The Air
The Story Of The Late Mr. Elvesham
In The Abyss
The Apple
Under The Knife
The Sea Raiders
Pollock And The Porroh Man
The Red Room
The Cone
The Purple Pileus
The Jilting Of Jane
In The Modern Vein: An Unsympathetic Love Story
A Catastrophe
The Lost Inheritance
The Sad Story Of A Dramatic Critic
A Slip Under The Microscope
The Reconciliation
My First Aeroplane
Little Mother Up The Morderberg
The Story Of The Last Trump
The Grisly Folk

Tales Of Time And Space--
The Crystal Egg
The Star
A Story Of The Stone Age
A Story Of The Days To Come
The Man Who Could Work Miracles

Twelve Stories And A Dream--
Filmer
The Magic Shop
The Valley Of Spiders
The Truth About Pyecraft
Mr. Skelmersdale In Fairyland
The Inexperienced Ghost
Jimmy Goggles The God
The New Accelerator
Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation
The Stolen Body
Mr. Brisher's Treasure
Miss Winchelsea's Heart
A Dream Of Armageddon


* * * * *




THE TIME MACHINE AND OTHER STORIES--



THE TIME MACHINE


1.

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was
expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled,
and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned
brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies
of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses. Our
chairs, being his patents, embraced and caressed us rather than
submitted to be sat upon, and there was that luxurious after-dinner
atmosphere, when thought roams gracefully free of the trammels of
precision. And he put it to us in this way--marking the points with a
lean forefinger--as we sat and lazily admired his earnestness over this
new paradox (as we thought it) and his fecundity.

"You must follow me carefully. I shall have to controvert one or two
ideas that are almost universally accepted. The geometry, for instance,
they taught you at school is founded on a misconception."

"Is not that rather a large thing to expect us to begin upon?" said
Filby, an argumentative person with red hair.

"I do not mean to ask you to accept anything without reasonable ground
for it. You will soon admit as much as I need from you. You know of
course that a mathematical line, a line of thickness nil, has no real
existence. They taught you that? Neither has a mathematical plane. These
things are mere abstractions."

"That is all right," said the Psychologist.

"Nor, having only length, breadth, and thickness, can a cube have a real
existence."

"There I object," said Filby. "Of course a solid body may exist. All
real things--"

"So most people think. But wait a moment. Can an instantaneous cube
exist?"

"Don't follow you," said Filby.

"Can a cube that does not last for any time at all, have a real
existence?"

Filby became pensive. "Clearly," the Time Traveller proceeded, "any real
body must have extension in four directions: it must have Length,
Breadth, Thickness, and--Duration. But through a natural infirmity of
the flesh, which I will explain to you in a moment, we incline to
overlook this fact. There are really four dimensions, three which we
call the three planes of Space, and a fourth, Time. There is, however, a
tendency to draw an unreal distinction between the former three
dimensions and the latter, because it happens that our consciousness
moves intermittently in one direction along the latter from the
beginning to the end of our lives."

"That," said a very young man, making spasmodic efforts to relight his
cigar over the lamp; "that... very clear indeed."

"Now, it is very remarkable that this is so extensively overlooked,"
continued the Time Traveller, with a slight accession of cheerfulness.
"Really this is what is meant by the Fourth Dimension, though some
people who talk about the Fourth Dimension do not know they mean it. It
is only another way of looking at Time. There is no difference between
time and any of the three dimensions of space except that our
consciousness moves along it. But some foolish people have got hold of
the wrong side of that idea. You have all heard what they have to say
about this Fourth Dimension?"

"I have not," said the Provincial Mayor.

"It is simply this. That Space, as our mathematicians have it, is spoken
of as having three dimensions, which one may call Length, Breadth, and
Thickness, and is always definable by reference to three planes, each at
right angles to the others. But some philosophical people have been
asking why three dimensions particularly--why not another direction at
right angles to the other three--? And have even tried to construct a
Four-Dimension geometry. Professor Simon Newcomb was expounding this to
the New York Mathematical Society only a month or so ago. You know how
on a flat surface, which has only two dimensions, we can represent a
figure of a three-dimensional solid, and similarly they think that by
models of thee dimensions they could represent one of four--if they
could master the perspective of the thing. See?"

"I think so," murmured the Provincial Mayor; and knitting his brows, he
lapsed into an introspective state, his lips moving as one who repeats
mystic words. "Yes, I think I see it now," he said after some time,
brightening in a quite transitory manner.

"Well, I do not mind telling you I have been at work upon this geometry
of Four Dimensions for some time. Some of my results are curious. For
instance, here is a portrait of a man at eight years old, another at
fifteen, another at seventeen, another at twenty-three, and so on. All
these are evidently sections, as it were, Three-Dimensional
representations of his Four-Dimensioned being, which is a fixed and
unalterable thing.

"Scientific people," proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause
required for the proper assimilation of this, "know very well that Time
is only a kind of Space. Here is a popular scientific diagram, a weather
record. This line I trace with my finger shows the movement of the
barometer. Yesterday it was so high, yesterday night it fell, then this
morning it rose again, and so gently upward to here. Surely the mercury
did not trace this line in any of the dimensions of Space generally
recognized? But certainly it traced such a line, and that line,
therefore, we must conclude was along the Time-Dimension."

"But," said the Medical Man, staring hard at a coal in the fire, "if
Time is really only a fourth dimension of Space, why is it, and why has
it always been, regarded as something different? And why cannot we move
in Time as we move about in the other dimensions of Space?"

The Time Traveller smiled. "Are you sure we can move freely in Space?
Right and left we can go, backward and forward freely enough, and men
always have done so. I admit we move freely in two dimensions. But how
about up and down? Gravitation limits us there."

"Not exactly," said the Medical Man. "There are balloons."

"But before the balloons, save for spasmodic jumping and the
inequalities of the surface, man had no freedom of vertical movement."

"Still they could move a little up and down," said the Medical Man.

"Easier, far easier down than up."

"And you cannot move at all in Time, you cannot get away from the
present moment."

"My dear sir, that is just where you are wrong. That is just where the
whole world has gone wrong. We are always getting away from the present
movement. Our mental existences, which are immaterial and have no
dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity
from the cradle to the grave. Just as we should travel down if we began
our existence fifty miles above the earth's surface."

"But the great difficulty is this," interrupted the Psychologist. "You
can move about in all directions of Space, but you cannot move about in
Time."

"That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that
we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an
incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I
become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we
have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a
savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a
civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go
up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that
ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the
Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?"

"Oh, this," began Filby, "is all--"

"Why not?" said the Time Traveller.

"It's against reason," said Filby.

"What reason?" said the Time Traveller.

"You can show black is white by argument," said Filby, "but you will
never convince me."

"Possibly not," said the Time Traveller. "But now you begin to see the
object of my investigations into the geometry of Four Dimensions. Long
ago I had a vague inkling of a machine--"

"To travel through Time!" exclaimed the Very Young Man.

"That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space and Time, as
the driver determines."

Filby contented himself with laughter.

"But I have experimental verification," said the Time Traveller.

"It would be remarkably convenient for the historian," the Psychologist
suggested. "One might travel back and verify the accepted account of the
Battle of Hastings, for instance!"

"Don't you think you would attract attention?" said the Medical Man.
"Our ancestors had no great tolerance for anachronisms."

"One might get one's Greek from the very lips of Homer and Plato," the
Very Young Man thought.

"In which case they would certainly plough you for the Little-go. The
German scholars have improved Greek so much."

"Then there is the future," said the Very Young Man. "Just think! One
might invest all one's money, leave it to accumulate at interest, and
hurry on ahead!"

"To discover a society," said I, "erected on a strictly communistic
basis."

"Of all the wild extravagant theories!" began the Psychologist.

"Yes, so it seemed to me, and so I never talked of it until--"

"Experimental verification!" cried I. "You are going to verify that?"

"The experiment!" cried Filby, who was getting brain-weary.

"Let's see your experiment anyhow," said the Psychologist, "though it's
all humbug, you know."

The Time Traveller smiled round at us. Then still smiling faintly, and
with his hands deep in his trousers pockets, he walked slowly out of the
room, and we heard his slippers shuffling down the long passage to his
laboratory.

The Psychologist looked at us. "I wonder what he's got?"

"Some sleight-of-hand trick or other," said the Medical Man, and Filby
tried to tell us about a conjurer he had seen at Burslem; but before he
had finished his preface the Time Traveller came back, and Filby's
anecdote collapsed.

The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering metallic
framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately made.
There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance. And
now I must be explicit, for this that follows--unless his explanation is
to be accepted--is an absolutely unaccountable thing. He took one of the
small octagonal tables that were scattered about the room, and set it in
front of the fire, with two legs on the hearth rug. On this table he
placed the mechanism. Then he drew up a chair, and sat down. The only
other object on the table was a small shaded lamp, the bright light of
which fell upon the model. There were also perhaps a dozen candles
about, two in brass candlesticks upon the mantel and several in sconces,
so that the room was brilliantly illuminated. I sat in a low armchair
nearest the fire, and I drew this forward so as to be almost between the
Time Traveller and the fireplace. Filby sat behind him, looking over his
shoulder. The Medical Man and the Provincial Mayor watched him in
profile from the right, the Psychologist from the left. The Very Young
Man stood behind the Psychologist. We were all on the alert. It appears
incredible to me that any kind of trick, however subtly conceived and
however adroitly done, could have been played upon us under these
conditions.

The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism. "Well?" said
the Psychologist.

"This little affair," said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows upon
the table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus, "is only
a model. It is my plan for a machine to travel through time. You will
notice that it looks singularly askew, and that there is an odd
twinkling appearance about this bar, as though it was in some way
unreal." He pointed to the part with his finger. "Also, here is one
little white lever, and here is another."

The Medical Man got up out of his chair and peered into the thing. "It's
beautifully made," he said.

"It took two years to make," retorted the Time Traveller. Then when we
had all imitated the action of the Medical Man, he said: "Now I want you
clearly to understand that this lever, being pressed over, sends the
machine gliding into the future, and this other reverses the motion.
This saddle represents the seat of a time traveller. Presently I am
going to press the lever, and off the machine will go. It will vanish,
pass into future Time, and disappear. Have a good look at the thing.
Look at the table too, and satisfy yourselves there is no trickery. I
don't want to waste this model, and then be told I'm a quack."

There was a minute's pause perhaps. The Psychologist seemed about to
speak to me, but changed his mind. Then the Time Traveller put forth his
finger towards the lever. "No," he said suddenly. "Lend me your hand."
And turning to the Psychologist, he took that individual's hand in his
own and told him to put out his forefinger. So that it was the
Psychologist himself who sent forth the model Time Machine on its
interminable voyage. We all saw the lever turn. I am absolutely certain
there was no trickery. There was a breath of wind, and the lamp flame
jumped. One of the candles on the mantel was blown out, and the little
machine suddenly swung round, became indistinct, was seen as a ghost for
a second perhaps, as an eddy of faintly glittering brass and ivory; and
it was gone--vanished! Save for the lamp the table was bare.

Everyone was silent for a minute. Then Filby said he was damned.

The Psychologist recovered from his stupor, and suddenly looked under
the table. At that the Time Traveller laughed cheerfully. "Well?" he
said, with a reminiscence of the Psychologist. Then, getting up, he went
to the tobacco jar on the mantel, and with his back to us began to fill
his pipe.

We stared at each other. "Look here," said the Medical Man, "are you in
earnest about this? Do you seriously believe that, that machine has
travelled into time?"

"Certainly," said the Time Traveller, stooping to light a spill at the
fire. Then he turned, lighting his pipe, to look at the Psychologist's
face. (The Psychologist, to show that he was not unhinged, helped
himself to a cigar and tried to light it uncut.) "What is more, I have a
big machine nearly finished in there--" he indicated the laboratory--
"and when that is put together I mean to have a journey on my own
account."

"You mean to say that, that machine has travelled into the future?" said
Filby.

"Into the future or the past--I don't, for certain, know which."

After an interval the Psychologist had an inspiration. "It must have
gone into the past if it has gone anywhere," he said.

"Why?" said the Time Traveller.

"Because I presume that it has not moved in space, and if it travelled
into the future it would still be here all this time, since it must have
travelled through this time."

"But," I said, "if it travelled into the past it would have been visible
when we came first into this room; and last Thursday when we were here;
and the Thursday before that; and so forth!"

"Serious objections," remarked the Provincial Mayor, with an air of
impartiality, turning towards the Time Traveller.

"Not a bit," said the Time Traveller, and to the Psychologist: "You
think. You can explain that. It's presentation below the threshold, you
know, diluted presentation."

"Of course," said the Psychologist, and reassured us. "That's a simple
point of psychology. I should have thought of it. It's plain enough, and
helps the paradox delightfully. We cannot see it, nor can we appreciate
this machine, any more than we can the spoke of a wheel spinning, or a
bullet flying through the air. If it is travelling through time fifty
times or a hundred times faster than we are, if it gets through a minute
while we get through a second, the impression it creates will of course
be only one-fiftieth or one-hundredth of what it would make if it were
not travelling in time. That's plain enough." He passed his hand through
the space in which the machine had been. "You see?" he said, laughing.

We sat and stared at the vacant table for a minute or so. Then the Time
Traveller asked us what we thought of it all.

"It sounds plausible enough to-night," said the Medical Man; "but wait
until to-morrow. Wait for the common sense of the morning."

"Would you like to see the Time Machine itself?" asked the Time
Traveller. And therewith, taking the lamp in his hand, he led the way
down the long, draughty corridor to his laboratory. I remember vividly
the flickering light, his queer, broad head in silhouette, the dance of
the shadows, how we all followed him, puzzled but incredulous, and how
there in the laboratory we beheld a larger edition of the little
mechanism which we had seen vanish from before our eyes. Parts were of
nickel, parts of ivory, parts had certainly been filed or sawn out of
rock crystal. The thing was generally complete, but the twisted
crystalline bars lay unfinished upon the bench beside some sheets of
drawings, and I took one up for a better look at it. Quartz it seemed to
be.

"Look here," said the Medical Man, "are you perfectly serious? Or is
this a trick--like that ghost you showed us last Christmas?"

"Upon that machine," said the Time Traveller, holding the lamp aloft, "I
intend to explore time. Is that plain? I was never more serious in my
life."

None of us quite knew how to take it.

I caught Filby's eye over the shoulder of the Medical Man, and he winked
at me solemnly.


2.

I think that at that time none of us quite believed in the Time
Machine. The fact is, the Time Traveller was one of those men who are
too clever to be believed: you never felt that you saw all round him;
you always suspected some subtle reserve, some ingenuity in ambush,
behind his lucid frankness. Had Filby shown the model and explained the
matter in the Time Traveller's words, we should have shown him far less
scepticism. For we should have perceived his motives; a pork butcher
could understand Filby. But the Time Traveller had more than a touch of
whim among his elements, and we distrusted him. Things that would have
made the frame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a
mistake to do things too easily. The serious people who took him
seriously never felt quite sure of his deportment; they were somehow
aware that trusting their reputations for judgment with him was like
furnishing a nursery with egg-shell china. So I don't think any of us
said very much about time travelling in the interval between that
Thursday and the next, though its odd potentialities ran, no doubt, in
most of our minds: its plausibility, that is, its practical
incredibleness, the curious possibilities of anachronism and of utter
confusion it suggested. For my own part, I was particularly preoccupied
with the trick of the model. That I remember discussing with the Medical
Man, whom I met on Friday at the Linnaean. He said he had seen a similar
thing at Tubingen, and laid considerable stress on the blowing out of
the candle. But how the trick was done he could not explain.

The next Thursday I went again to Richmond--I suppose I was one of the
Time Traveller's most constant guests--and arriving late, found four or
five men already assembled in his drawing-room. The Medical Man was
standing before the fire with a sheet of paper in one hand and his watch
in the other. I looked round for the Time Traveller, and--"It's half
past seven now," said the Medical Man. "I suppose we'd better have
dinner?"

"Where's ----?" said I, naming our host.

"You've just come? It's rather odd. He's unavoidably detained. He asks
me in this note to lead off with dinner at seven if he's not back. Says
he'll explain when he comes."

"It seems a pity to let the dinner spoil," said the Editor of a
well-known daily paper; and thereupon the Doctor rang the bell.

The Psychologist was the only person besides the Doctor and myself who
had attended the previous dinner. The other men were Blank, the Editor
aforementioned, a certain journalist, and another--a quiet, shy man with
a beard--whom I didn't know, and who, as far as my observation went,
never opened his mouth all the evening. There was some speculation at
the dinner table about the Time Traveller's absence, and I suggested
time travelling, in a half jocular spirit. The Editor wanted that
explained to him, and the Psychologist volunteered a wooden account of
the "ingenious paradox and trick" we had witnessed that day week. He was
in the midst of his exposition when the door from the corridor opened
slowly and without noise. I was facing the door, and saw it first.
"Hallo!" I said. "At last!" And the door opened wider, and the Time
Traveller stood before us. I gave a cry of surprise. "Good heavens! Man,
what's the matter?" cried the Medical Man, who saw him next. And the
whole tableful turned towards the door.

He was in an amazing plight. His coat was dusty and dirty, and smeared
with green, down the sleeves; his hair disordered, and as it seemed to
me greyer--either with dust and dirt or because its colour had actually
faded. His face was ghastly pale; his chin had a brown cut on it--a cut
half healed; his expression was haggard and drawn, as by intense
suffering. For a moment he hesitated in the doorway, as if he had been
dazzled by the light. Then he came into the room. He walked with just
such a limp as I have seen in footsore tramps. We stared at him in
silence, expecting him to speak.

He said not a word, but came painfully to the table, and made a motion
towards the wine. The Editor filled a glass of champagne, and pushed it
towards him. He drained it, and it seemed to do him good: for he looked
round the table, and the ghost of his old smile flickered across his
face. "What on earth have you been up to, man?" said the Doctor. The
Time Traveller did not seem to hear. "Don't let me disturb you," he
said, with a certain faltering articulation. "I'm all right." He
stopped, held out his glass for more, and took it off at a draught.
"That's good," he said. His eyes grew brighter, and a faint colour came
into his cheeks. His glance flickered over our faces with a certain dull
approval, and then went round the warm and comfortable room. Then he
spoke again, still as it were feeling his way among his words. "I'm
going to wash and dress, and then I'll come down and explain things...
Save me some of that mutton. I'm starving for a bit of meat."

He looked across at the Editor, who was a rare visitor, and hoped he was
all right. The Editor began a question. "Tell you presently," said the
Time Traveller. "I'm--funny! Be all right in a minute."

He put down his glass, and walked towards the staircase door. Again I
remarked his lameness and the soft padding sound of his footfall, and
standing up in my place, I saw his feet as he went out. He had nothing
on them but a pair of tattered bloodstained socks. Then the door closed
upon him. I had half a mind to follow, till I remembered how he detested
any fuss about himself. For a minute, perhaps, my mind was wool
gathering. Then, "Remarkable Behaviour of an Eminent Scientist," I heard
the Editor say, thinking (after his wont) in headlines. And this brought
my attention back to the bright dinner table.

"What's the game?" said the Journalist. "Has he been doing the Amateur
Cadger? I don't follow." I met the eye of the Psychologist, and read my
own interpretation in his face. I thought of the Time Traveller limping
painfully upstairs. I don't think any one else had noticed his lameness.

The first to recover completely from this surprise was the Medical Man,
who rang the bell--the Time Traveller hated to have servants waiting at
dinner--for a hot plate. At that the Editor turned to his knife and fork
with a grunt, and the Silent Man followed suit. The dinner was resumed.
Conversation was exclamatory for a little while, with gaps of
wonderment; and then the Editor got fervent in his curiosity. "Does our
friend eke out his modest income with a crossing? Or has he his
Nebuchadnezzar phases?" he inquired. "I feel assured it's this business
of the Time Machine," I said, and took up the Psychologist's account of
our previous meeting. The new guests were frankly incredulous. The
Editor raised objections. "What was this time travelling? A man couldn't
cover himself with dust by rolling in a paradox, could he?" And then, as
the idea came home to him, he resorted to caricature. Hadn't they any
clothes-brushes in the Future? The Journalist too, would not believe at
any price, and joined the Editor in the easy work of heaping ridicule on
the whole thing. They were both the new kind of journalist--very joyous,
irreverent young men. "Our Special Correspondent in the Day after
To-morrow reports," the Journalist was saying--or rather shouting--when
the Time Traveller came back. He was dressed in ordinary evening
clothes, and nothing save his haggard look remained of the change that
had startled me.

"I say," said the Editor hilariously, "these chaps here say you have
been travelling into the middle of next week! Tell us all about little
Rosebery, will you? What will you take for the lot?"

The Time Traveller came to the place reserved for him without a word. He
smiled quietly, in his old way. "Where's my mutton?" he said. "What a
treat it is to stick a fork into meat again!"

"Story!" cried the Editor.

"Story be damned!" said the Time Traveller. "I want something to eat. I
won't say a word until I get some peptone into my arteries. Thanks. And
the salt."

"One word," said I. "Have you been time travelling?"

"Yes," said the Time Traveller, with his mouth full, nodding his head.

"I'd give a shilling a line for a verbatim note," said the Editor. The
Time Traveller pushed his glass towards the Silent Man and rang it with
his finger nail; at which the Silent Man, who had been staring at his
face, started convulsively, and poured him wine. The rest of the dinner
was uncomfortable. For my own part, sudden questions kept on rising to
my lips, and I dare say it was the same with the others. The Journalist
tried to relieve the tension by telling anecdotes of Hettie Potter. The
Time Traveller devoted his attention to his dinner, and displayed the
appetite of a tramp. The Medical Man smoked a cigarette, and watched the
Time Traveller through his eyelashes. The Silent Man seemed even more
clumsy than usual, and drank champagne with regularity and determination
out of sheer nervousness. At last the Time Traveller pushed his plate
away, and looked round us. "I suppose I must apologize," he said. "I was
simply starving. I've had a most amazing time." He reached out his hand
for a cigar, and cut the end. "But come into the smoking-room. It's too
long a story to tell over greasy plates." And ringing the bell in
passing, he led the way into the adjoining room.

"You have told Blank, and Dash, and Chose about the machine?" he said to
me, leaning back in his easy chair and naming the three new guests.

"But the thing's a mere paradox," said the Editor.

"I can't argue to-night. I don't mind telling you the story, but I can't
argue. I will," he went on, "tell you the story of what has happened to
me, if you like, but you must refrain from interruptions. I want to tell
it. Badly. Most of it will sound like lying. So be it! It's true--every
word of it, all the same. I was in my laboratory at four o'clock, and
since then... I've lived eight days... such days as no human being ever
lived before! I'm nearly worn out, but I shan't sleep till I've told
this thing over to you. Then I shall go to bed. But no interruptions! Is
it agreed?"

"Agreed," said the Editor, and the rest of us echoed "Agreed." And with
that the Time Traveller began his story as I have set it forth. He sat
back in his chair at first, and spoke like a weary man. Afterwards he
got more animated. In writing it down I feel with only too much keenness
the inadequacy of pen and ink--and above all, my own inadequacy--to
express its quality. You read, I will suppose, attentively enough; but
you cannot see the speaker's white, sincere face in the bright circle of
the little lamp, nor hear the intonation of his voice. You cannot know
how his expression followed the turns of his story! Most of us hearers
were in shadow, for the candles in the smoking-room had not been
lighted, and only the face of the Journalist and the legs of the Silent
Man from the knees downward were illuminated. At first we glanced now
and again at each other. After a time we ceased to do that, and looked
only at the Time Traveller's face.


3.

"I told some of you last Thursday of the principles of the Time
Machine, and showed you the actual thing itself, incomplete in the
workshop. There it is now, a little travel-worn, truly; and one of the
ivory bars is cracked, and a brass rail bent; but the rest of it's sound
enough. I expected to finish it on Friday, but on Friday, when the
putting together was nearly done, I found that one of the nickel bars
was exactly one inch too short, and this I had to get remade; so that
the thing was not complete until this morning. It was at ten o'clock
to-day that the first of all Time Machines began its career. I gave it a
last tap, tried all the screws again, put one more drop of oil on the
quartz rod, and sat myself in the saddle. I suppose a suicide who holds
a pistol to his skull feels much the same wonder at what will come next
as I felt then. I took the starting lever in one hand and the stopping
one in the other, pressed the first, and almost immediately the second.
I seemed to reel; I felt a nightmare sensation of falling; and looking
round, I saw the laboratory exactly as before. Had anything happened?
For a moment I suspected that my intellect had tricked me. Then I noted
the clock. A moment before, as it seemed, it had stood at a minute or so
past ten; now it was nearly half past three!

"I drew a breath, set my teeth, gripped the starting lever with both
hands, and went off with a thud. The laboratory got hazy and went dark.
Mrs. Watchett came in and walked, apparently without seeing me, towards
the garden door. I suppose it took her a minute or so to traverse the
place, but to me she seemed to shoot across the room like a rocket. I
pressed the lever over to its extreme position. The night came like the
turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came to-morrow. The
laboratory grew faint and hazy, then fainter and ever fainter. To-morrow
night came black, then day again, night again, day again, faster and
faster still. An eddying murmur filled my ears, and a strange, dumb
confusedness descended on my mind.

"I am afraid I cannot convey the peculiar sensations of time travelling.
They are excessively unpleasant. There is a feeling exactly like that
one has upon a switchback--of a helpless headlong motion! I felt the
same horrible anticipation too, of an imminent smash. As I put on pace,
night followed day like the flapping of a black wing. The dim suggestion
of the laboratory seemed presently to fall away from me, and I saw the
sun hopping swiftly across the sky, leaping it every minute, and every
minute marking a day. I supposed the laboratory had been destroyed and I
had come into the open air. I had a dim impression of scaffolding, but I
was already going too fast to be conscious of any moving things. The
slowest snail that ever crawled dashed by too fast for me. The twinkling
succession of darkness and light was excessively painful to the eye.
Then in the intermittent darknesses, I saw the moon spinning swiftly
through her quarters from new to full, and had a faint glimpse of the
circling stars. Presently, as I went on, still gaining velocity, the
palpitation of night and day merged into one continuous greyness; the
sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue, a splendid luminous colour
like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a
brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I
could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle
flickering in the blue.

"The landscape was misty and vague. I was still on the hillside upon
which this house now stands, and the shoulder rose above me grey and
dim. I saw trees growing and changing like puffs of vapour, now brown,
now green; they grew, spread, shivered, and passed away. I saw huge
buildings rise up faint and fair, and pass like dreams. The whole
surface of the earth seemed changed--melting and flowing under my eyes.
The little hands upon the dials that registered my speed raced round
faster and faster. Presently I noted that the sun belt swayed up and
down, from solstice to solstice, in a minute or less, and that
consequently my pace was over a year a minute; and minute by minute the
white snow flashed across the world, and vanished, and was followed by
the bright, brief green of spring.

"The unpleasant sensations of the start were less poignant now. They
merged at last into a kind of hysterical exhilaration. I remarked indeed
a clumsy swaying of the machine, for which I was unable to account. But
my mind was too confused to attend to it, so with a kind of madness
growing upon me, I flung myself into futurity. At first I scarce thought
of stopping, scarce thought of anything but these new sensations. But
presently a fresh series of impressions grew up in my mind--a certain
curiosity and therewith a certain dread--until at last they took
complete possession of me. What strange developments of humanity, what
wonderful advances upon our rudimentary civilization, I thought, might
not appear when I came to look nearly into the dim elusive world that
raced and fluctuated before my eyes! I saw great and splendid
architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own
time, and yet, as it seemed, built of glimmer and mist. I saw a richer
green flow up the hillside, and remain there, without any wintry
intermission. Even through the veil of my confusion the earth seemed
very fair. And so my mind came round to the business of stopping.

"The peculiar risk lay in the possibility of my finding some substance
in the space which I, or the machine, occupied. So long as I travelled
at a high velocity through time, this scarcely mattered; I was, so to
speak, attenuated--was slipping like a vapour through the interstices of
intervening substances! But to come to a stop involved the jamming of
myself, molecule by molecule, into whatever lay in my way; meant
bringing my atoms into such intimate contact with those of the obstacle
that a profound chemical reaction--possibly a far-reaching
explosion--would result, and blow myself and my apparatus out of all
possible dimensions--into the Unknown. This possibility had occurred to
me again and again while I was making the machine; but then I had
cheerfully accepted it as an unavoidable risk--one of the risks a man
has got to take! Now the risk was inevitable, I no longer saw it in the
same cheerful light. The fact is that insensibly, the absolute
strangeness of everything, the sickly jarring and swaying of the
machine, above all, the feeling of prolonged falling, had absolutely
upset my nerve. I told myself that I could never stop, and with a gust
of petulance I resolved to stop forthwith. Like an impatient fool, I
lugged over the lever, and incontinently the thing went reeling over,
and I was flung headlong through the air.

"There was the sound of a clap of thunder in my ears. I may have been
stunned for a moment. A pitiless hail was hissing round me, and I was
sitting on soft turf in front of the overset machine. Everything still
seemed grey, but presently I remarked that the confusion in my ears was
gone. I looked round me. I was on what seemed to be a little lawn in a
garden, surrounded by rhododendron bushes, and I noticed that their
mauve and purple blossoms were dropping in a shower under the beating of
the hailstones. The rebounding, dancing hail hung in a cloud over the
machine, and drove along the ground like smoke. In a moment I was wet to
the skin. 'Fine hospitality,' said I, 'to a man who has travelled
innumerable years to see you.'

"Presently I thought what a fool I was to get wet. I stood up and looked
round me. A colossal figure, carved apparently in some white stone,
loomed indistinctly beyond the rhododendrons through the hazy downpour.
But all else of the world was invisible.

"My sensations would be hard to describe. As the columns of hail grew
thinner, I saw the white figure more distinctly. It was very large, for
a silver birch-tree touched its shoulder. It was of white marble, in
shape something like a winged sphinx, but the wings, instead of being
carried vertically at the sides, were spread so that it seemed to hover.
The pedestal, it appeared to me, was of bronze, and was thick with
verdigris. It chanced that the face was towards me; the sightless eyes
seemed to watch me; there was the faint shadow of a smile on the lips.
It was greatly weather-worn, and that imparted an unpleasant suggestion
of disease. I stood looking at it for a little space--half a minute
perhaps, or half an hour. It seemed to advance and to recede as the hail
drove before it denser or thinner. At last I tore my eyes from it for a
moment and saw that the hail curtain had worn threadbare, and that the
sky was lightening with the promise of the sun.

"I looked up again at the crouching white shape, and the full temerity
of my voyage came suddenly upon me. What might appear when that hazy
curtain was altogether withdrawn? What might not have happened to men?
What if cruelty had grown into a common passion? What if in this
interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into
something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might
seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting
for our common likeness--a foul creature to be incontinently slain.

"Already I saw other vast shapes--huge buildings with intricate parapets
and tall columns, with a wooded hillside dimly creeping in upon me
through the lessening storm. I was seized with a panic fear. I turned
frantically to the Time Machine, and strove hard to readjust it. As I
did so the shafts of the sun smote through the thunderstorm. The grey
downpour was swept aside and vanished like the trailing garments of a
ghost. Above me, in the intense blue of the summer sky, some faint brown
shreds of cloud whirled into nothingness. The great buildings about me
stood out clear and distinct, shining with the wet of the thunderstorm,
and picked out in white by the unmelted hailstones piled along their
courses. I felt naked in a strange world. I felt as perhaps a bird may
feel in the clear air, knowing the hawk wings above and will swoop. My
fear grew to frenzy. I took a breathing space, set my teeth, and again
grappled fiercely, wrist and knee, with the machine. It gave under my
desperate onset and turned over. It struck my chin violently. One hand
on the saddle, the other on the lever, I stood panting heavily in
attitude to mount again.

"But with this recovery of a prompt retreat my courage recovered. I
looked more curiously and less fearfully at this world of the remote
future. In a circular opening, high up in the wall of the nearer house,
I saw a group of figures clad in rich soft robes. They had seen me, and
their faces were directed towards me.

"Then I heard voices approaching me. Coming through the bushes by the
White Sphinx were the heads and shoulders of men running. One of these
emerged in a pathway leading straight to the little lawn upon which I
stood with my machine. He was a slight creature--perhaps four feet
high--clad in a purple tunic, girdled at the waist with a leather belt.
Sandals or buskins--I could not clearly distinguish which--were on his
feet; his legs were bare to the knees, and his head was bare. Noticing
that, I noticed for the first time how warm the air was.

"He struck me as being a very beautiful and graceful creature, but
indescribably frail. His flushed face reminded me of the more beautiful
kind of consumptive--that hectic beauty of which we used to hear so
much. At the sight of him I suddenly regained confidence. I took my
hands from the machine."


4.

"In another moment we were standing face to face, I and this fragile
thing out of futurity. He came straight up to me and laughed into my
eyes. The absence from his bearing of any sign of fear struck me at
once. Then he turned to the two others who were following him and spoke
to them in a strange and very sweet and liquid tongue."

"There were others coming, and presently a little group of perhaps eight
or ten of these exquisite creatures were about me. One of them addressed
me. It came into my head, oddly enough, that my voice was too harsh and
deep for them. So I shook my head, and pointing to my ears, shook it
again. He came a step forward, hesitated, and then touched my hand. Then
I felt other soft little tentacles upon my back and shoulders. They
wanted to make sure I was real. There was nothing in this at all
alarming. Indeed there was something in these pretty little people that
inspired confidence--a graceful gentleness, a certain childlike ease.
And besides, they looked so frail that I could fancy myself flinging the
whole dozen of them about like nine-pins. But I made a sudden motion to
warn them when I saw their little pink hands feeling at the Time
Machine. Happily then, when it was not too late, I thought of a danger I
had hitherto forgotten, and reaching over the bars of the machine I
unscrewed the little levers that would set it in motion, and put these
in my pocket. Then I turned again to see what I could do in the way of
communication.

"And then, looking more nearly into their features, I saw some further
peculiarities in their Dresden-china type of prettiness. Their hair,
which was uniformly curly, came to a sharp end at the neck and cheek;
there was not the faintest suggestion of it on the face, and their ears
were singularly minute. The mouths were small, with bright red, rather
thin lips, and the little chins ran to a point. The eyes were large and
mild; and--this may seem egotism on my part--I fancied even that there
was a certain lack of the interest, I might have expected, in them.

"As they made no effort to communicate with me, but simply stood round
me smiling and speaking in soft cooing notes to each other, I began the
conversation. I pointed to the Time Machine and to myself. Then
hesitating for a moment how to express time, I pointed to the sun. At
once a quaintly pretty little figure in chequered purple and white
followed my gesture, and then astonished me by imitating the sound of
thunder.

"For a moment I was staggered, though the import of his gesture was
plain enough. The question had come into my mind abruptly: were these
creatures fools? You may hardly understand how it took me. You see I had
always anticipated that the people of the year Eight Hundred and Two
Thousand odd {or so}, would be incredibly in front of us in knowledge,
art, everything. Then one of them suddenly asked me a question that
showed him to be on the intellectual level of one of our five-year-old
children--asked me, in fact, if I had come from the sun in a
thunderstorm! It let loose the judgment I had suspended upon their
clothes, their frail light limbs, and fragile features. A flow of
disappointment rushed across my mind. For a moment I felt that I had
built the Time Machine in vain.

"I nodded, pointed to the sun, and gave them such a vivid rendering of a
thunderclap as startled them. They all withdrew a pace or so and bowed.
Then came one laughing towards me, carrying a chain of beautiful flowers
altogether new to me, and put it about my neck. The idea was received
with melodious applause; and presently they were all running to and fro
for flowers, and laughingly flinging them upon me until I was almost
smothered with blossom. You who have never seen the like can scarcely
imagine what delicate and wonderful flowers countless years of culture
had created. Then someone suggested that their plaything should be
exhibited in the nearest building, and so I was led past the sphinx of
white marble, which had seemed to watch me all the while with a smile at
my astonishment, towards a vast grey edifice of fretted stone. As I went
with them the memory of my confident anticipations of a profoundly grave
and intellectual posterity came, with irresistible merriment, to my
mind.

"The building had a huge entry, and was altogether of colossal
dimensions. I was naturally most occupied with the growing crowd of
little people, and with the big open portals that yawned before me
shadowy and mysterious. My general impression of the world I saw over
their heads was a tangled waste of beautiful bushes and flowers, a
long-neglected and yet weedless garden. I saw a number of tall spikes of
strange white flowers, measuring a foot perhaps across the spread of the
waxen petals. They grew scattered, as if wild, among the variegated
shrubs, but as I say, I did not examine them closely at this time. The
Time Machine was left deserted on the turf among the rhododendrons.

"The arch of the doorway was richly carved, but naturally I did not
observe the carving very narrowly, though I fancied I saw suggestions of
old Phoenician decorations as I passed through, and it struck me that
they were very badly broken and weather-worn. Several more brightly clad
people met me in the doorway, and so we entered, I, dressed in dingy
nineteenth-century garments, looking grotesque enough, garlanded with
flowers, and surrounded by an eddying mass of bright, soft-coloured
robes and shining white limbs, in a melodious whirl of laughter and
laughing speech.

"The big doorway opened into a proportionately great hall hung with
brown. The roof was in shadow, and the windows, partially glazed with
coloured glass and partially unglazed, admitted a tempered light. The
floor was made up of huge blocks of some very hard white metal, not
plates nor slabs--, blocks, and it was so much worn, as I judged by the
going to and fro of past generations, as to be deeply channelled along
the more frequented ways. Transverse to the length were innumerable
tables made of slabs of polished stone, raised perhaps a foot from the
floor, and upon these were heaps of fruits. Some I recognized as a kind
of hypertrophied raspberry and orange, but for the most part they were
strange.

"Between the tables was scattered a great number of cushions. Upon these
my conductors seated themselves, signing for me to do likewise. With a
pretty absence of ceremony they began to eat the fruit with their hands,
flinging peel and stalks, and so forth, into the round openings in the
sides of the tables. I was not loath to follow their example, for I felt
thirsty and hungry. As I did so I surveyed the hall at my leisure.

"And perhaps the thing that struck me most was its dilapidated look. The
stained-glass windows, which displayed only a geometrical pattern, were
broken in many places, and the curtains that hung across the lower end
were thick with dust. And it caught my eye that the corner of the marble
table near me was fractured. Nevertheless, the general effect was
extremely rich and picturesque. There were perhaps, a couple of hundred
people dining in the hall, and most of them, seated as near to me as
they could come, were watching me with interest, their little eyes
shining over the fruit they were eating. All were clad in the same soft
and yet strong, silky material.

"Fruit, by the by, was all their diet. These people of the remote future
were strict vegetarians, and while I was with them, in spite of some
carnal cravings, I had to be frugivorous also. Indeed I found afterwards
that horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, had followed the Ichthyosaurus into
extinction. But the fruits were very delightful; one in particular, that
seemed to be in season all the time I was there--a floury thing in a
three-sided husk--was especially good, and I made it my staple. At first
I was puzzled by all these strange fruits, and by the strange flowers I
saw, but later I began to perceive their import.

"However I am telling you of my fruit dinner in the distant future now.
So soon as my appetite was a little checked, I determined to make a
resolute attempt to learn the speech of these new men of mine. Clearly
that was the next thing to do. The fruits seemed a convenient thing to
begin upon, and holding one of these up I began a series of
interrogative sounds and gestures. I had some considerable difficulty in
conveying my meaning. At first my efforts met with a stare of surprise
or inextinguishable laughter, but presently a fair-haired little
creature seemed to grasp my intention and repeated a name. They had to
chatter and explain the business at great length to each other, and my
first attempts to make the exquisite little sounds of their language
caused an immense amount of amusement. However, I felt like a
schoolmaster amidst children, and persisted, and presently I had a score
of noun substantives at least at my command; and then I got to
demonstrative pronouns, and even the verb "to eat." But it was slow
work, and the little people soon tired and wanted to get away from my
interrogations, so I determined, rather of necessity, to let them give
their lessons in little doses when they felt inclined. And very little
doses, I found they were before long, for I never met people more
indolent or more easily fatigued.

"A queer thing I soon discovered about my little hosts, and that was
their lack of interest. They would come to me with eager cries of
astonishment, like children, but like children they would soon stop
examining me and wander away after some other toy. The dinner and my
conversational beginnings ended, I noted for the first time that almost
all those who had surrounded me at first were gone. It is odd too, how
speedily I came to disregard these little people. I went out through the
portal into the sunlit world again as soon as my hunger was satisfied. I
was continually meeting more of these men of the future, who would
follow me a little distance, chatter and laugh about me, and having
smiled and gesticulated in a friendly way, leave me again to my own
devices.

"The calm of evening was upon the world as I emerged from the great
hall, and the scene was lit by the warm glow of the setting sun. At
first things were very confusing. Everything was so entirely different
from the world I had known--even the flowers. The big building I had
left was situated on the slope of a broad river valley, but the Thames
had shifted perhaps a mile from its present position. I resolved to
mount to the summit of a crest perhaps a mile and a half away, from
which I could get a wider view of this our planet in the year Eight
Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and One A.D. For that, I should
explain, was the date the little dials of my machine recorded.

"As I walked I was watching for every impression that could possibly
help to explain the condition of ruinous splendour in which I found the
world--for ruinous it was. A little way up the hill, for instance, was a
great heap of granite, bound together by masses of aluminium, a vast
labyrinth of precipitous walls and crumpled heaps, amidst which were
thick heaps of very beautiful pagoda-like plants--nettles possibly--but
wonderfully tinted with brown about the leaves, and incapable of
stinging. It was evidently the derelict remains of some vast structure,
to what end built I could not determine. It was here that I was
destined, at a later date, to have a very strange experience--the first
intimation of a still stranger discovery--but of that I will speak in
its proper place.

"Looking round with a sudden thought, from a terrace on which I rested
for a while, I realized that there were no small houses to be seen.
Apparently the single house, and possibly even the household, had
vanished. Here and there among the greenery were palace-like buildings,
but the house and the cottage, which form such characteristic features
of our own English landscape, had disappeared.

"'Communism,' said I to myself.

"And on the heels of that came another thought. I looked at the
half-dozen little figures that were following me. Then in a flash, I
perceived that all had the same form of costume, the same soft hairless
visage, and the same girlish rotundity of limb. It may seem strange
perhaps, that I had not noticed this before. But everything was so
strange. Now I saw the fact plainly enough. In costume, and in all the
differences of texture and bearing that now mark off the sexes from each
other, these people of the future were alike. And the children seemed to
my eyes to be but the miniatures of their parents. I judged then, that
the children of that time were extremely precocious, physically at
least, and I found afterwards abundant verification of my opinion.

"Seeing the ease and security in which these people were living, I felt
that this close resemblance of the sexes was after all what one would
expect; for the strength of a man and the softness of a woman, the
institution of the family, and the differentiation of occupations are
mere militant necessities of an age of physical force; where population
is balanced and abundant, much child-bearing becomes an evil rather than
a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and offspring
are secure, there is less necessity--indeed there is no necessity--for
an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference
to their children's needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this
even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete. This I
must remind you, was my speculation at the time. Later I was to
appreciate how far it fell short of the reality.

"While I was musing upon these things, my attention was attracted by a
pretty little structure, like a well under a cupola. I thought in a
transitory way of the oddness of wells still existing, and then resumed
the thread of my speculations. There were no large buildings towards the
top of the hill, and as my walking powers were evidently miraculous, I
was presently left alone for the first time. With a strange sense of
freedom and adventure I pushed on up to the crest.

"There I found a seat of some yellow metal that I did not recognize,
corroded in places with a kind of pinkish rust and half smothered in
soft moss, the arm-rests cast and filed into the resemblance of
griffins' heads. I sat down on it, and I surveyed the broad view of our
old world under the sunset of that long day. It was as sweet and fair a
view as I have ever seen. The sun had already gone below the horizon and
the west was flaming gold, touched with some horizontal bars of purple
and crimson. Below was the valley of the Thames, in which the river lay
like a band of burnished steel. I have already spoken of the great
palaces dotted about among the variegated greenery, some in ruins and
some still occupied. Here and there rose a white or silvery figure in
the waste garden of the earth, here and there came the sharp vertical
line of some cupola or obelisk. There were no hedges, no signs of
proprietary rights, no evidences of agriculture; the whole earth had
become a garden.

"So watching, I began to put my interpretation upon the things I had
seen, and as it shaped itself to me that evening, my interpretation was
something in this way. (Afterwards I found I had got only a
half-truth--or only a glimpse of one facet of the truth.)

"It seemed to me that I had happened upon humanity upon the wane. The
ruddy sunset set me thinking of the sunset of mankind. For the first
time I began to realize an odd consequence of the social effort in which
we are at present engaged. And yet, come to think, it is a logical
consequence enough. Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a
premium on feebleness. The work of ameliorating the conditions of
life--the true civilizing process that makes life more and more
secure--had gone steadily on to a climax. One triumph of a united
humanity over Nature had followed another. Things that are now mere
dreams had become projects deliberately put in hand and carried forward.
And the harvest was what I saw!

"After all, the sanitation and the agriculture of to-day are still in
the rudimentary stage. The science of our time has attacked but a little
department of the field of human disease, but even so, it spreads its
operations very steadily and persistently. Our agriculture and
horticulture destroy a weed just here and there and cultivate perhaps a
score or so of wholesome plants, leaving the greater number to fight out
a balance as they can. We improve our favourite plants and animals--and
how few they are--gradually by selective breeding; now a new and better
peach, now a seedless grape, now a sweeter and larger flower, now a more
convenient breed of cattle. We improve them gradually, because our
ideals are vague and tentative, and our knowledge is very limited;
because Nature too, is shy and slow in our clumsy hands. Some day all
this will be better organized, and still better. That is the drift of
the current in spite of the eddies. The whole world will be intelligent,
educated, and co-operating; things will move faster and faster towards
the subjugation of Nature. In the end, wisely and carefully we shall
readjust the balance of animal and vegetable me to suit our human
needs.

"This adjustment, I say, must have been done, and done well; done indeed
for all Time, in the space of Time across which my machine had leaped.
The air was free from gnats, the earth from weeds or fungi; everywhere
were fruits and sweet and delightful flowers; brilliant butterflies flew
hither and thither. The ideal of preventive medicine was attained.
Diseases had been stamped out. I saw no evidence of any contagious
diseases during all my stay. And I shall have to tell you later that
even the processes of putrefaction and decay had been profoundly
affected by these changes.

"Social triumphs too, had been effected. I saw mankind housed in
splendid shelters, gloriously clothed, and as yet I had found them
engaged in no toil. There were no signs of struggle, neither social nor
economical struggle. The shop, the advertisement, traffic, all that
commerce which constitutes the body of our world, was gone. It was
natural on that golden evening that I should jump at the idea of a
social paradise. The difficulty of increasing population had been met, I
guessed, and population had ceased to increase.

"But with this change in condition comes inevitably adaptations to the
change. What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the
cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions
under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to
the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of
capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the
institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the
fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion,
all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the
young. Now, where are these imminent dangers? There is a sentiment
arising, and it will grow, against connubial jealousy, against fierce
maternity, against passion of all sorts; unnecessary things now, and
things that make us uncomfortable, savage survivals, discords in a
refined and pleasant life.

"I thought of the physical slightness of the people, their lack of
intelligence, and those big abundant ruins, and it strengthened my
belief in a perfect conquest of Nature. For after the battle comes
Quiet. Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had
used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it
lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.

"Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless
energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness. Even in our own
time certain tendencies and desires, once necessary to survival, are a
constant source of failure. Physical courage and the love of battle, for
instance, are no great help--may even be hindrances--to a civilized man.
And in a state of physical balance and security, power, intellectual as
well as physical, would be out of place. For countless years I judged
there had been no danger of war or solitary violence, no danger from
wild beasts, no wasting disease to require strength of constitution, no
need of toil. For such a life, what we should call the weak are as well
equipped as the strong, are indeed no longer weak. Better equipped
indeed they are, for the strong would be fretted by an energy for which
there was no outlet. No doubt the exquisite beauty of the buildings I
saw was the outcome of the last surgings of the now purposeless energy
of mankind before it settled down into perfect harmony with the
conditions under which it lived--the flourish of that triumph which
began the last great peace. This has ever been the fate of energy in
security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and
decay.

"Even this artistic impetus would at last die away--had almost died in
the Time I saw. To adorn themselves with flowers, to dance, to sing in
the sunlight: so much was left of the artistic spirit, and no more. Even
that would fade in the end into a contented inactivity. We are kept keen
on the grindstone of pain and necessity, and it seemed to me, that here
was that hateful grindstone broken at last!

"As I stood there in the gathering dark I thought that in this simple
explanation I had mastered the problem of the world--mastered the whole
secret of these delicious people. Possibly the checks they had devised
for the increase of population had succeeded too well, and their numbers
had rather diminished than kept stationary. That would account for the
abandoned ruins. Very simple was my explanation, and plausible
enough--as most wrong theories are!"


5.

"As I stood there musing over this, too perfect triumph of man, the
full moon, yellow and gibbous, came up out of an overflow of silver
light in the north-east. The bright little figures ceased to move about
below, a noiseless owl flitted by, and I shivered with the chill of the
night. I determined to descend and find where I could sleep.

"I looked for the building I knew. Then my eye travelled along to the
figure of the White Sphinx upon the pedestal of bronze, growing distinct
as the light of the rising moon grew brighter. I could see the silver
birch against it. There was the tangle of rhododendron bushes, black in
the pale light, and there was the little lawn. I looked at the lawn
again. A queer doubt chilled my complacency. "No," said I stoutly to
myself, "that was not the lawn. But it was the lawn. For the white
leprous face of the sphinx was towards it. Can you imagine what I felt
as this conviction came home to me? But you cannot. The Time Machine
was gone!

"At once, like a lash across the face, came the possibility of losing my
own age, of being left helpless in this strange new world. The bare
thought of it was an actual physical sensation. I could feel it grip me
at the throat and stop my breathing. In another moment I was in a
passion of fear and running with great leaping strides down the slope.
Once I fell headlong and cut my face; I lost no time in stanching the
blood, but jumped up and ran on, with a warm trickle down my cheek and
chin. All the time I ran I was saying to myself: 'They have moved it a
little, pushed it under the bushes out of the way.' Nevertheless, I ran
with all my might. All the time, with the certainty that sometimes comes
with excessive dread, I knew that such assurance was folly, knew
instinctively that the machine was removed out of my reach. My breath
came with pain. I suppose I covered the whole distance from the hill
crest to the little lawn, two miles perhaps, in ten minutes. And I am
not a young man. I cursed aloud, as I ran, at my confident folly in
leaving the machine, wasting good breath thereby. I cried aloud, and
none answered. Not a creature seemed to be stirring in that moonlit
world.

"When I reached the lawn my worst fears were realized. Not a trace of
the thing was to be seen. I felt faint and cold when I faced the empty
space among the black tangle of bushes. I ran round it furiously, as if
the thing might be hidden in a corner, and then stopped abruptly, with
my hands clutching my hair. Above me towered the sphinx, upon the bronze
pedestal, white, shining, leprous, in the light of the rising moon. It
seemed to smile in mockery of my dismay.

"I might have consoled myself by imagining the little people had put the
mechanism in some shelter for me, had I not felt assured of their
physical and intellectual inadequacy. That is what dismayed me: the
sense of some hitherto unsuspected power, through whose intervention my
invention had vanished. Yet for one thing I felt assured: unless some
other age had produced its exact duplicate, the machine could not have
moved in time. The attachment of the levers--I will show you the method
later--prevented any one from tampering with it in that way when they
were removed. It had moved, and was hid, only in space. But then, where
could it be?

"I think I must have had a kind of frenzy. I remember running violently
in and out among the moonlit bushes all round the sphinx, and startling
some white animal that, in the dim light, I took for a small deer. I
remember too, late that night, beating the bushes with my clenched fist
until my knuckles were gashed and bleeding from the broken twigs. Then
sobbing and raving in my anguish of mind, I went down to the great
building of stone. The big hall was dark, silent, and deserted. I
slipped on the uneven floor, and fell over one of the malachite tables,
almost breaking my shin. I lit a match and went on past the dusty
curtains, of which I have told you.

"There I found a second great hall covered with cushions, upon which,
perhaps a score or so of the little people were sleeping. I have no
doubt they found my second appearance strange enough, coming suddenly
out of the quiet darkness with inarticulate noises and the splutter and
flare of a match. For they had forgotten about matches. "Where is my
Time Machine?" I began, bawling like an angry child, laying hands upon
them and shaking them up together. It must have been very queer to them.
Some laughed, most of them looked sorely frightened. When I saw them
standing round me, it came into my head that I was doing as foolish a
thing as it was possible for me to do under the circumstances, in trying
to revive the sensation of fear. For, reasoning from their daylight
behaviour, I thought that fear must be forgotten.

"Abruptly, I dashed down the match, and knocking one of the people over
in my course, went blundering across the big dining-hall again, out
under the moonlight. I heard cries of terror and their little feet
running and stumbling this way and that. I do not remember all I did as
the moon crept up the sky. I suppose it was the unexpected nature of my
loss that maddened me. I felt hopelessly cut off from my own kind--a
strange animal in an unknown world. I must have raved to and fro,
screaming and crying upon God and Fate. I have a memory of horrible
fatigue, as the long night of despair wore away; of looking in this
impossible place and that; of groping among moonlit ruins and touching
strange creatures in the black shadows; at last, of lying on the ground
near the sphinx and weeping with absolute wretchedness. I had nothing
left but misery. Then I slept, and when I woke again it was full day,
and a couple of sparrows were hopping round me on the turf within reach
of my arm.

"I sat up in the freshness of the morning, trying to remember how I had
got there, and why I had such a profound sense of desertion and despair.
Then things came clear in my mind. With the plain, reasonable daylight,
I could look my circumstances fairly in the face. I saw the wild folly
of my frenzy overnight, and I could reason with myself. 'Suppose the
worst?' I said. 'Suppose the machine altogether lost--perhaps destroyed?
It behoves me to be calm and patient, to learn the way of the people, to
get a clear idea of the method of my loss, and the means of getting
materials and tools; so that in the end, perhaps, I may make another.'
That would be my only hope, perhaps but better than despair. And after
all, it was a beautiful and curious world.

"But probably, the machine had only been taken away. Still I must be
calm and patient, find its hiding-place, and recover it by force or
cunning. And with that I scrambled to my feet and looked about me,
wondering where I could bathe. I felt weary, stiff, and travel-soiled.
The freshness of the morning made me desire an equal freshness. I had
exhausted my emotion. Indeed as I went about my business, I found myself
wondering at my intense excitement overnight. I made a careful
examination of the ground about the little lawn. I wasted some time in
futile questionings, conveyed, as well as I was able, to such of the
little people as came by. They all failed to understand my gestures;
some were simply stolid, some thought it was a jest and laughed at me. I
had the hardest task in the world to keep my hands off their pretty
laughing faces. It was a foolish impulse, but the devil begotten of fear
and blind anger was ill curbed and still eager to take advantage of my
perplexity. The turf gave better counsel. I found a groove ripped in it,
about midway between the pedestal of the sphinx and the marks of my feet
where, on arrival, I had struggled with the overturned machine. There
were other signs of removal about, with queer narrow footprints like
those I could imagine made by a sloth. This directed my closer attention
to the pedestal. It was, as I think I have said, of bronze. It was not a
mere block, but highly decorated with deep framed panels on either side.
I went and rapped at these. The pedestal was hollow. Examining the
panels with care I found them discontinuous with the frames. There were
no handles or keyholes, but possibly the panels, if they were doors, as
I supposed, opened from within. One thing was clear enough to my mind.
It took no very great mental effort to infer that my Time Machine was
inside that pedestal. But how it got there was a different problem.

"I saw the heads of two orange-clad people coming through the bushes and
under some blossom-covered apple-trees towards me. I turned smiling to
them and beckoned them to me. They came, and then pointing to the bronze
pedestal, I tried to intimate my wish to open it. But at my first
gesture towards this they behaved very oddly. I don't know how to convey
their expression to you. Suppose you were to use a grossly improper
gesture to a delicate-minded woman--it is how she would look. They went
off as if they had received the last possible insult. I tried a
sweet-looking little chap in white next, with exactly the same result.
Somehow, his manner made me feel ashamed of myself. But as you know, I
wanted the Time Machine, and I tried him once more. As he turned off,
like the others, my temper got the better of me. In three strides I was
after him, had him by the loose part of his robe round the neck, and
began dragging him towards the sphinx. Then I saw the horror and
repugnance of his face, and all of a sudden I let him go.

"But I was not beaten yet. I banged with my fist at the bronze panels. I
thought I heard something stir inside--to be explicit, I thought I heard
a sound like a chuckle--but I must have been mistaken. Then I got a big
pebble from the river, and came and hammered till I had flattened a coil
in the decorations, and the verdigris came off in powdery flakes. The
delicate little people must have heard me hammering in gusty outbreaks a
mile away on either hand, but nothing came of it. I saw a crowd of them
upon the slopes, looking furtively at me. At last, hot and tired, I sat
down to watch the place. But I was too restless to watch long; I am too
Occidental for a long vigil. I could work at a problem for years, but to
wait inactive for twenty-four hours--that is another matter.

"I got up after a time, and began walking aimlessly through the bushes
towards the hill again. 'Patience,' said I to myself. 'If you want your
machine again you must leave that sphinx alone. If they mean to take
your machine away, it's little good your wrecking their bronze panels,
and if they don't, you will get it back as soon as you can ask for it.
To sit among all those unknown things before a puzzle like that is
hopeless. That way lies monomania. Face this world. Learn its ways,
watch it, be careful of too hasty guesses at its meaning. In the end you
will find clues to it all.' Then suddenly the humour of the situation
came into my mind: the thought of the years I had spent in study and
toil to get into the future age, and now my passion of anxiety to get
out of it. I had made myself the most complicated and the most hopeless
trap that ever a man devised. Although it was at my own expense, I could
not help myself. I laughed aloud.

"Going through the big palace, it seemed to me that the little people
avoided me. It may have been my fancy, or it may have had something to
do with my hammering at the gates of bronze. Yet I felt tolerably sure
of the avoidance. I was careful however, to show no concern and to
abstain from any pursuit of them, and in the course of a day or two
things got back to the old footing. I made what progress I could in the
language, and in addition I pushed my explorations here and there.
Either I missed some subtle point or their language was excessively
simple--almost exclusively composed of concrete substantives and verbs.
There seemed to be few, if any, abstract terms, or little use of
figurative language. Their sentences were usually simple and of two
words, and I failed to convey or understand any but the simplest
propositions. I determined to put the thought of my Time Machine and the
mystery of the bronze doors under the sphinx as much as possible in a
corner of memory, until my growing knowledge would lead me back to them
in a natural way. Yet a certain feeling, you may understand, tethered me
in a circle of a few miles round the point of my arrival.

"So far as I could see, all the world displayed the same exuberant
richness as the Thames valley. From every hill I climbed I saw the same
abundance of splendid buildings, endlessly varied in material and style,
the same clustering thickets of evergreens, the same blossom-laden trees
and tree-ferns. Here and there water shone like silver, and beyond, the
land rose into blue undulating hills, and so faded into the serenity of
the sky. A peculiar feature, which presently attracted my attention, was
the presence of certain circular wells, several, as it seemed to me, of
a very great depth. One lay by the path up the hill, which I had
followed during my first walk. Like the others, it was rimmed with
bronze, curiously wrought, and protected by a little cupola from the
rain. Sitting by the side of these wells, and peering down into the
shafted darkness, I could see no gleam of water, nor could I start any
reflection with a lighted match. But in all of them I heard a certain
sound: a thud--thud--thud, like the beating of some big engine; and I
discovered, from the flaring of my matches, that a steady current of air
set down the shafts. Further, I threw a scrap of paper into the throat
of one, and instead of fluttering slowly down, it was at once sucked
swiftly out of sight.

"After a time too, I came to connect these wells with tall towers
standing here and there upon the slopes; for above them there was often
just such a flicker in the air as one sees on a hot day above a
sun-scorched beach. Putting things together, I reached a strong
suggestion of an extensive system of subterranean ventilation, whose
true import it was difficult to imagine. I was at first inclined to
associate it with the sanitary apparatus of these people. It was an
obvious conclusion, but it was absolutely wrong.

"And here I must admit that I learned very little of drains and bells
and modes of conveyance, and the like conveniences, during my time in
this real future. In some of these visions of Utopias and coming times
which I have read, there is a vast amount of detail about building, and
social arrangements, and so forth. But while such details are easy
enough to obtain when the whole world is contained in one's imagination,
they are altogether inaccessible to a real traveller amid such realities
as I found here. Conceive the tale of London which a negro, fresh from
Central Africa, would take back to his tribe! What would he know of
railway companies, of social movements, of telephone and telegraph
wires, of the Parcels Delivery Company, and postal orders and the like?
Yet we, at least, should be willing enough to explain these things to
him! And even of what he knew, how much could he make his untravelled
friend either apprehend or believe? Then think how narrow the gap
between a negro and a white man of our own times, and how wide the
interval between myself and these of the Golden Age! I was sensible of
much which was unseen, and which contributed to my comfort; but save for
a general impression of automatic organization, I fear I can convey very
little of the difference to your mind.

"In the matter of sepulture, for instance, I could see no signs of
crematoria nor anything suggestive of tombs. But it occurred to me that,
possibly, there might be cemeteries (or crematoria) somewhere beyond the
range of my explorings. This again, was a question I deliberately put to
myself, and my curiosity was at first entirely defeated upon the point.
The thing puzzled me, and I was led to make a further remark, which
puzzled me still more: that aged and infirm among this people there were
none.

"I must confess that my satisfaction with my first theories of an
automatic civilization and a decadent humanity did not long endure. Yet
I could think of no other. Let me put {mention} my difficulties. The
several big palaces I had explored were mere living places, great
dining-halls and sleeping apartments. I could find no machinery, no
appliances of any kind. Yet these people were clothed in pleasant
fabrics that must at times need renewal, and their sandals, though
undecorated, were fairly complex specimens of metal-work. Somehow such
things must be made. And the little people displayed no vestige of a
creative tendency. There were no shops, no workshops, no sign of
importations among them. They spent all their time in playing gently, in
bathing in the river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in
eating fruit and sleeping. I could not see how things were kept going.

"Then again, about the Time Machine: something, I knew not what, had
taken it into the hollow pedestal of the White Sphinx. Why? For the life
of me I could not imagine. Those waterless wells, too, those flickering
pillars. I felt I lacked a clue. I felt--how shall I put it? Suppose you
found an inscription, with sentences here and there in excellent plain
English, and interpolated therewith, others made up of words, of letters
even, absolutely unknown to you? Well on the third day of my visit, that
was how the world of Eight Hundred and Two Thousand Seven Hundred and
One presented itself to me!

"That day too, I made a friend--of a sort. It happened that, as I was
watching some of the little people bathing in a shallow, one of them was
seized with cramp and began drifting downstream. The main current ran
rather swiftly, but not too strongly for even a moderate swimmer. It
will give you an idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these
creatures, when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to
rescue the weakly crying little thing which was drowning before their
eyes. When I realized this, I hurriedly slipped off my clothes, and
wading in at a point lower down, I caught the poor mite and drew her
safe to land. A little rubbing of the limbs soon brought her round, and
I had the satisfaction of seeing she was all right before I left her. I
had got to such a low estimate of her kind that I did not expect any
gratitude from her. In that however, I was wrong.

"This happened in the morning. In the afternoon I met my little woman,
as I believe it was, as I was returning towards my centre from an
exploration, and she received me with cries of delight and presented me
with a big garland of flowers--evidently made for me and me alone. The
thing took my imagination. Very possibly I had been feeling desolate. At
any rate I did my best to display my appreciation of the gift. We were
soon seated together in a little stone arbour, engaged in conversation,
chiefly of smiles. The creature's friendliness affected me exactly as a
child's might have done. We passed each other flowers, and she kissed my
hands. I did the same to hers. Then I tried talk, and found that her
name was Weena, which though I don't know what it meant, somehow seemed
appropriate enough. That was the beginning of a queer friendship which
lasted a week, and ended--as I will tell you!

"She was exactly like a child. She wanted to be with me always. She
tried to follow me everywhere, and on my next journey out and about it
went to my heart to tire her down, and leave her at last, exhausted and
calling after me rather plaintively. But the problems of the world had
to be mastered. I had not, I said to myself, come into the future to
carry on a miniature flirtation. Yet her distress when I left her was
very great, her expostulations at the parting were sometimes frantic,
and I think, altogether, I had as much trouble as comfort from her
devotion. Nevertheless she was, somehow, a very great comfort. I thought
it was mere childish affection that made her cling to me. Until it was
too late, I did not clearly know what I had inflicted upon her when I
left her. Nor until it was too late did I clearly understand what she
was to me. For by merely seeming fond of me, and showing in her weak,
futile way that she cared for me, the little doll of a creature
presently gave my return to the neighbourhood of the White Sphinx almost
the feeling of coming home; and I would watch for her tiny figure of
white and gold so soon as I came over the hill.

"It was from her too, that I learned that fear had not yet left the
world. She was fearless enough in the daylight, and she had the oddest
confidence in me; for once, in a foolish moment, I made threatening
grimaces at her, and she simply laughed at them. But she dreaded the
dark, dreaded shadows, dreaded black things. Darkness to her was the one
thing dreadful. It was a singularly passionate emotion, and it set me
thinking and observing. I discovered then, among other things, that
these little people gathered into the great houses after dark, and slept
in droves. To enter upon them without a light was to put them into a
tumult of apprehension. I never found one out of doors, or one sleeping
alone within doors, after dark. Yet I was still such a blockhead that I
missed the lesson of that fear, and in spite of Weena's distress I
insisted upon sleeping away from these slumbering multitudes.

"It troubled her greatly, but in the end her odd affection for me
triumphed, and for five of the nights of our acquaintance, including the
last night of all, she slept with her head pillowed on my arm. But my
story slips away from me as I speak of her. It must have been the night
before her rescue that I was awakened about dawn. I had been restless,
dreaming most disagreeably that I was drowned, and that sea-anemones
were feeling over my face with their soft palps. I woke with a start,
and with an odd fancy that some greyish animal had just rushed out of
the chamber. I tried to get to sleep again, but I felt restless and
uncomfortable. It was that dim grey hour when things are just creeping
out of darkness, when everything is colourless and clear cut, and yet
unreal. I got up, and went down into the great hall, and so out upon the
flagstones in front of the palace. I thought I would make a virtue of
necessity, and see the sunrise.

"The moon was setting, and the dying moonlight and the first pallor of
dawn were mingled in a ghastly half-light. The bushes were inky black,
the ground a sombre grey, the sky colourless and cheerless. And up the
hill I thought I could see ghosts. There several times, as I scanned the
slope, I saw white figures. Twice I fancied I saw a solitary white,
ape-like creature running rather quickly up the hill, and once near the
ruins I saw a leash of them carrying some dark body. They moved hastily.
I did not see what became of them. It seemed that they vanished among
the bushes. The dawn was still indistinct, you must understand. I was
feeling that chill, uncertain, early-morning feeling you may have known.
I doubted my eyes.

"As the eastern sky grew brighter, and the light of the day came on and
its vivid colouring returned upon the world once more, I scanned the
view keenly. But I saw no vestige of my white figures. They were mere
creatures of the half-light. 'They must have been ghosts,' I said; 'I
wonder whence they dated.' For a queer notion of Grant Allen's came into
my head, and amused me. If each generation die and leave ghosts, he
argued, the world at last will get overcrowded with them. On that theory
they would have grown innumerable some Eight Hundred Thousand Years
hence, and it was no great wonder to see four at once. But the jest was
unsatisfying, and I was thinking of these figures all the morning, until
Weena's rescue drove them out of my head. I associated them in some
indefinite way with the white animal I had startled in my first
passionate search for the Time Machine. But Weena was a pleasant
substitute. Yet all the same, they were soon destined to take far
deadlier possession of my mind.

"I think I have said how much hotter than our own was the weather of
this Golden Age. I cannot account for it. It may be that the sun was
hotter, or the earth nearer the sun. It is usual to assume that the sun
will go on cooling steadily in the future. But people, unfamiliar with
such speculations as those of the younger Darwin, forget that the
planets must ultimately fall back one by one into the parent body. As
these catastrophes occur, the sun will blaze with renewed energy; and it
may be that some inner planet had suffered this fate. Whatever the
reason, the fact remains that the sun was very much hotter than we know
it.

"Well, one very hot morning--my fourth, I think--as I was seeking
shelter from the heat and glare in a colossal ruin near the great house
where I slept and fed, there happened this strange thing: Clambering
among these heaps of masonry, I found a narrow gallery, whose end and
side windows were blocked by fallen masses of stone. By contrast with
the brilliancy outside, it seemed at first impenetrably dark to me. I
entered it groping, for the change from light to blackness made spots of
colour swim before me. Suddenly I halted spellbound. A pair of eyes,
luminous by reflection against the daylight without, was watching me out
of the darkness.

"The old instinctive dread of wild beasts came upon me. I clenched my
hands and steadfastly looked into the glaring eyeballs. I was afraid to
turn. Then the thought of the absolute security in which humanity
appeared to be living came to my mind. And then I remembered that
strange terror of the dark. Overcoming my fear to some extent, I
advanced a step and spoke. I will admit that my voice was harsh and
ill-controlled. I put out my hand and touched something soft. At once
the eyes darted sideways, and something white ran past me. I turned with
my heart in my mouth, and saw a queer little ape-like figure, its head
held down in a peculiar manner, running across the sunlit space behind
me. It blundered against a block of granite, staggered aside, and in a
moment was hidden in a black shadow beneath another pile of ruined
masonry.

"My impression of it is, of course, imperfect; but I know it was a dull
white, and had strange large greyish-red eyes; also that there was
flaxen hair on its head and down its back. But as I say, it went too
fast for me to see distinctly. I cannot even say whether it ran on
all-fours, or only with its forearms held very low. After an instant's
pause I followed it into the second heap of ruins. I could not find it
at first; but after a time in the profound obscurity, I came upon one of
those round well-like openings of which I have told you, half closed by
a fallen pillar. A sudden thought came to me. Could this Thing have
vanished down the shaft? I lit a match, and looking down, I saw a small,
white, moving creature, with large bright eyes which regarded me
steadfastly as it retreated. It made me shudder. It was so like a human
spider! It was clambering down the wall, and now I saw for the first
time a number of metal foot and hand rests forming a kind of ladder down
the shaft. Then the light burned my fingers and fell out of my hand,
going out as it dropped, and when I had lit another the little monster
had disappeared.

"I do not know how long I sat peering down that well. It was not for
some time that I could succeed in persuading myself that the thing I had
seen was human. But gradually, the truth dawned on me: that Man had not
remained one species, but had differentiated into two distinct animals:
that my graceful children of the Upper World were not the sole
descendants of our generation, but that this bleached, obscene,
nocturnal Thing, which had flashed before me, was also heir to all the
ages.

"I thought of the flickering pillars and of my theory of an underground
ventilation. I began to suspect their true import. And what, I wondered,
was this Lemur doing in my scheme of a perfectly balanced organization?
How was it related to the indolent serenity of the beautiful
Upper-worlders? And what was hidden down there, at the foot of that
shaft? I sat upon the edge of the well telling myself that, at any rate,
there was nothing to fear, and that there I must descend for the
solution of my difficulties. And withal I was absolutely afraid to go!
As I hesitated, two of the beautiful Upper-World people came running in
their amorous sport across the daylight into the shadow. The male
pursued the female, flinging flowers at her as he ran.

"They seemed distressed to find me, my arm against the overturned
pillar, peering down the well. Apparently it was considered bad form to
remark these apertures; for when I pointed to this one, and tried to
frame a question about it, in their tongue, they were still more visibly
distressed and turned away. But they were interested by my matches, and
I struck some to amuse them. I tried them again about the well, and
again I failed. So presently I left them, meaning to go back to Weena,
and see what I could get from her. But my mind was already in
revolution; my guesses and impressions were slipping and sliding to a
new adjustment. I had now a clue to the import of these wells, to the
ventilating towers, to the mystery of the ghosts; to say nothing of a
hint at the meaning of the bronze gates and the fate of the Time
Machine! And very vaguely there came a suggestion towards the solution
of the economic problem that had puzzled me.

"Here was the new view. Plainly this second species of Man was
subterranean. There were three circumstances in particular which made me
think that its rare emergence above ground was the outcome of a
long-continued underground habit. In the first place, there was the
bleached look common in most animals that live largely in the dark--the
white fish of the Kentucky caves, for instance. Then those large eyes,
with that capacity for reflecting light, are common features of
nocturnal things--witness the owl and the cat. And last of all, that
evident confusion in the sunshine, that hasty yet fumbling awkward
flight towards dark shadow, and that peculiar carriage of the head while
in the light--all reinforced the theory of an extreme sensitiveness of
the retina.

"Beneath my feet then, the earth must be tunnelled enormously, and these
tunnellings were the habitat of the new race. The presence of
ventilating shafts and wells along the hill slopes--everywhere, in fact
except along the river valley--showed how universal were its
ramifications. What so natural, then as to assume, that it was in this
artificial underworld that such work, as was necessary to the comfort of
the daylight race, was done? The notion was so plausible that I at once
accepted it, and went on to assume the how of this splitting of the
human species. I dare say you will anticipate the shape of my theory;
though, for myself, I very soon felt that it fell far short of the
truth.

"At first, proceeding from the problems of our own age, it seemed clear
as daylight to me that the gradual widening of the present merely
temporary and social difference between the Capitalist and the Labourer,
was the key to the whole position. No doubt it will seem grotesque
enough to you--and wildly incredible--! And yet even now there are
existing circumstances to point that way. There is a tendency to utilize
underground space for the less ornamental purposes of civilization;
there is the Metropolitan Railway in London, for instance, there are new
electric railways, there are subways, there are underground workrooms
and restaurants, and they increase and multiply. Evidently I thought,
this tendency had increased till Industry had gradually lost its
birthright in the sky. I mean that it had gone deeper and deeper into
larger and ever larger underground factories, spending a
still-increasing amount of its time therein, till in the end--! Even
now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as
practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?

"Again, the exclusive tendency of richer people--due, no doubt to the
increasing refinement of their education, and the widening gulf between
them and the rude violence of the poor--is already leading to the
closing, in their interest, of considerable portions of the surface of
the land. About London, for instance, perhaps half the prettier country
is shut in, against intrusion. And this same widening gulf--which is due
to the length and expense of the higher educational process and the
increased facilities for and temptations towards refined habits on the
part of the rich--will make that exchange between class and class, that
promotion by intermarriage which at present retards the splitting of our
species along lines of social stratification, less and less frequent. So
in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and
comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting
continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were
there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for
the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve
or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to
be miserable and rebellious would die; and in the end, the balance being
permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions
of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-World
people were to theirs. As it seemed to me, the refined beauty and the
etiolated pallor followed naturally enough.

"The great triumph of Humanity I had dreamed of took a different shape
in my mind. It had been no such triumph of moral education and general
co-operation as I had imagined. Instead I saw a real aristocracy, armed
with a perfected science and working to a logical conclusion the
industrial system of to-day. Its triumph had not been simply a triumph
over Nature, but a triumph over Nature and the fellowman. This I must
warn you, was my theory at the time. I had no convenient cicerone in the
pattern of the Utopian books. My explanation may be absolutely wrong. I
still think it is the most plausible one. But even on this supposition
the balanced civilization that was at last attained must have long since
passed its zenith, and was now far fallen into decay. The too-perfect
security of the Upper-Worlders had led them to a slow movement of
degeneration, to a general dwindling in size, strength, and
intelligence. That I could see clearly enough already. What had happened
to the Undergrounders I did not yet suspect; but from what I had seen of
the Morlocks--that by the by, was the name by which these creatures were
called--I could imagine that the modification of the human type was even
far more profound than among the 'Eloi,' the beautiful race that I
already knew.

"Then came troublesome doubts. Why had the Morlocks taken my Time
Machine? For I felt sure it was they who had taken it. Why too, if the
Eloi were masters, could they not restore the machine to me? And why
were they so terribly afraid of the dark? I proceeded, as I have said,
to question Weena about this Under World, but here again I was
disappointed. At first she would not understand my questions, and
presently she refused to answer them. She shivered as though the topic
was unendurable. And when I pressed her, perhaps a little harshly, she
burst into tears. They were the only tears, except my own, I ever saw in
that Golden Age. When I saw them I ceased abruptly to trouble about the
Morlocks, and was only concerned in banishing these signs of the human
inheritance from Weena's eyes. And very soon she was smiling and
clapping her hands, while I solemnly burned a match."


6.

"It may seem odd to you, but it was two days before I could follow up
the new-found clue in what was manifestly the proper way. I felt a
peculiar shrinking from those pallid bodies. They were just the
half-bleached colour of the worms and things one sees preserved in
spirit in a zoological museum. And they were filthily cold to the touch.
Probably my shrinking was largely due to the sympathetic influence of
the Eloi, whose disgust of the Morlocks I now began to appreciate.

"The next night I did not sleep well. Probably my health was a little
disordered. I was oppressed with perplexity and doubt. Once or twice I
had a feeling of intense fear for which I could perceive no definite
reason. I remember creeping noiselessly into the great hall where the
little people were sleeping in the moonlight--that night Weena was among
them--and feeling reassured by their presence. It occurred to me even
then, that in the course of a few days the moon must pass through its
last quarter, and the nights grow dark, when the appearances of these
unpleasant creatures from below, these whitened Lemurs, this new vermin
that had replaced the old, might be more abundant. And on both these
days I had the restless feeling of one who shirks an inevitable duty. I
felt assured that the Time Machine was only to be recovered by boldly
penetrating these underground mysteries. Yet I could not face the
mystery. If only I had, had a companion it would have been different.
But I was so horribly alone, and even to clamber down into the darkness
of the well appalled me. I don't know if you will understand my feeling,
but I never felt quite safe at my back.

"It was this restlessness, this insecurity perhaps, that drove me
further and further afield in my exploring expeditions. Going to the
south-westward towards the rising country that is now called Combe Wood,
I observed far off, in the direction of nineteenth-century Banstead, a
vast green structure, different in character from any I had hitherto
seen. It was larger than the largest of the palaces or ruins I knew, and
the facade had an Oriental look: the face of it having the lustre, as
well as the pale-green tint, a kind of bluish-green, of a certain type
of Chinese porcelain. This difference in aspect suggested a difference
in use, and I was minded to push on and explore. But the day was growing
late, and I had come upon the sight of the place after a long and tiring
circuit; so I resolved to hold over the adventure for the following day,
and I returned to the welcome and the caresses of little Weena. But next
morning I perceived clearly enough that my curiosity regarding the
Palace of Green Porcelain was a piece of self-deception, to enable me to
shirk, by another day, an experience I dreaded. I resolved I would make
the descent without further waste of time, and started out in the early
morning towards a well near the ruins of granite and aluminium.

"Little Weena ran with me. She danced beside me to the well, but when
she saw me lean over the mouth and look downward, she seemed strangely
disconcerted. 'Good-bye, Little Weena,' I said, kissing her; and then
putting her down, I began to feel over the parapet for the climbing
hooks. Rather hastily, I may as well confess, for I feared my courage
might leak away! At first she watched me in amazement. Then she gave a
most piteous cry, and running to me, she began to pull at me with her
little hands. I think her opposition nerved me rather to proceed. I
shook her off, perhaps a little roughly, and in another moment I was in
the throat of the well. I saw her agonized face over the parapet, and
smiled to reassure her. Then I had to look down at the unstable hooks to
which I clung."

"I had to clamber down a shaft of perhaps two hundred yards. The descent
was effected by means of metallic bars projecting from the sides of the
well, and these being adapted to the needs of a creature much smaller
and lighter than myself, I was speedily cramped and fatigued by the
descent. And not simply fatigued! One of the bars bent suddenly under my
weight, and almost swung me off into the blackness beneath. For a moment
I hung by one hand, and after that experience I did not dare to rest
again. Though my arms and back were presently acutely painful, I went on
clambering down the sheer descent with as quick a motion as possible.
Glancing upward, I saw the aperture, a small blue disk, in which a star
was visible, while little Weena's head showed as a round black
projection. The thudding sound of a machine below grew louder and more
oppressive. Everything save that little disk above was profoundly dark,
and when I looked up again Weena had disappeared."

"I was in an agony of discomfort. I had some thought of trying to go up
the shaft again, and leave the Under World alone. But even while I turned
this over in my mind I continued to descend. At last, with intense
relief, I saw dimly coming up, a foot to the right of me, a slender
loophole in the wall. Swinging myself in, I found it was the aperture of
a narrow horizontal tunnel in which I could lie down and rest. It was
not too soon. My arms ached, my back was cramped, and I was trembling
with the prolonged terror of a fall. Besides this, the unbroken darkness
had had a distressing effect upon my eyes. The air was full of the
throb and hum of machinery pumping air down the shaft.

"I do not know how long I lay. I was roused by a soft hand touching my
face. Starting up in the darkness I snatched at my matches, and hastily
striking one, I saw three stooping white creatures similar to the one I
had seen above ground in the ruin, hastily retreating before the light.
Living as they did, in what appeared to me impenetrable darkness, their
eyes were abnormally large and sensitive, just as are the pupils of the
abysmal fishes, and they reflected the light in the same way. I have no
doubt they could see me in that rayless obscurity, and they did not seem
to have any fear of me apart from the light. But so soon as I struck a
match in order to see them, they fled incontinently, vanishing into dark
gutters and tunnels, from which their eyes glared at me in the strangest
fashion.

"I tried to call them, but the language they had was apparently
different from that of the Overworld people; so that I was needs left to
my own unaided efforts, and the thought of flight before exploration was
even then in my mind. But I said to myself, 'You are in for it now,' and
feeling my way along the tunnel, I found the noise of machinery grow
louder. Presently the walls fell away from me, and I came to a large
open space, and striking another match, saw that I had entered a vast
arched cavern, which stretched into utter darkness beyond the range of
my light. The view I had of it was as much as one could see in the
burning of a match.

"Necessarily my memory is vague. Great shapes like big machines rose out
of the dimness, and cast grotesque black shadows, in which dim spectral
Morlocks sheltered from the glare. The place, by the by, was very stuffy
and oppressive, and the faint halitus of freshly shed blood was in the
air. Some way down the central vista was a little table of white metal,
laid with what seemed a meal. The Morlocks at any rate were carnivorous!
Even at the time, I remember wondering what large animal could have
survived to furnish the red joint I saw. It was all very indistinct: the
heavy smell, the big unmeaning shapes, the obscene figures lurking in
the shadows, and only waiting for the darkness to come at me again! Then
the match burned down, and stung my fingers, and fell, a wriggling red
spot in the blackness.

"I have thought since how particularly ill-equipped I was for such an
experience. When I had started with the Time Machine, I had started with
the absurd assumption that the men of the Future would certainly be
infinitely ahead of ourselves in all their appliances. I had come
without arms, without medicine, without anything to smoke--at times I
missed tobacco frightfully--even without enough matches. If only I had
thought of a Kodak! I could have flashed that glimpse of the Under World
in a second, and examined it at leisure. But as it was, I stood there
with only the weapons and the powers that Nature had endowed me
with--hands, feet, and teeth; these, and four safety-matches that still
remained to me.

"I was afraid to push my way in among all this machinery in the dark,
and it was only with my last glimpse of light I discovered that my store
of matches had run low. It had never occurred to me until that moment
that there was any need to economize them, and I had wasted almost half
the box in astonishing the Upper-Worlders, to whom fire was a novelty.
Now as I say, I had four left, and while I stood in the dark, a hand
touched mine, lank fingers came feeling over my face, and I was sensible
of a peculiar unpleasant odour. I fancied I heard the breathing of a
crowd of those dreadful little beings about me. I felt the box of
matches in my hand being gently disengaged, and other hands behind me
plucking at my clothing. The sense of these unseen creatures examining
me was indescribably unpleasant. The sudden realization of my ignorance
of their ways of thinking and doing came home to me very vividly in the
darkness. I shouted at them as loudly as I could. They started away, and
then I could feel them approaching me again. They clutched at me more
boldly, whispering odd sounds to each other. I shivered violently, and
shouted again--rather discordantly. This time they were not so seriously
alarmed, and they made a queer laughing noise as they came back at me. I
will confess I was horribly frightened. I determined to strike another
match and escape under the protection of its glare. I did so, and eking
out the flicker with a scrap of paper from my pocket, I made good my
retreat to the narrow tunnel. But I had scarce entered this when my
light was blown out and in the blackness I could hear the Morlocks
rustling like wind among leaves, and pattering like the rain, as they
hurried after me.

"In a moment I was clutched by several hands, and there was no mistaking
that they were trying to haul me back. I struck another light, and waved
it in their dazzled faces. You can scarce imagine how nauseatingly
inhuman they looked--those pale, chinless faces and great, lidless,
pinkish-grey eyes--! As they stared in their blindness and bewilderment.
But I did not stay to look, I promise you: I retreated again, and when
my second match had ended, I struck my third. It had almost burned
through when I reached the opening into the shaft. I lay down on the
edge, for the throb of the great pump below made me giddy. Then I felt
sideways for the projecting hooks, and, as I did so, my feet were
grasped from behind, and I was violently tugged backward. I lit my last
match... and it incontinently went out. But I had my hand on the
climbing bars now, and kicking violently, I disengaged myself from the
clutches of the Morlocks and was speedily clambering up the shaft, while
they stayed peering and blinking up at me: all but one little wretch who
followed me for some way, and well-nigh secured my boot as a trophy.

"That climb seemed interminable to me. With the last twenty or thirty
feet of it a deadly nausea came upon me. I had the greatest difficulty
in keeping my hold. The last few yards was a frightful struggle against
this faintness. Several times my head swam, and I felt all the
sensations of falling. At last, however I got over the well-mouth
somehow, and staggered out of the ruin into the blinding sunlight. I
fell upon my face. Even the soil smelt sweet and clean. Then I remember
Weena kissing my hands and ears, and the voices of others among the
Eloi. Then for a time, I was insensible."


7.

"Now indeed, I seemed in a worse case than before. Hitherto, except
during my night's anguish at the loss of the Time Machine, I had felt a
sustaining hope of ultimate escape, but that hope was staggered by these
new discoveries. Hitherto I had merely thought myself impeded by the
childish simplicity of the little people, and by some unknown forces
which I had only to understand to overcome; but there was an altogether
new element in the sickening quality of the Morlocks--a something
inhuman and malign. Instinctively I loathed them. Before I had felt as a
man might feel who had fallen into a pit: my concern was with the pit
and how to get out of it. Now I felt like a beast in a trap, whose enemy
would come upon him soon.

"The enemy I dreaded may surprise you. It was the darkness of the new
moon. Weena had put this into my head by some at first incomprehensible
remarks about the Dark Nights. It was not now such a very difficult
problem to guess what the coming Dark Nights might mean. The moon was on
the wane: each night there was a longer interval of darkness. And I now
understood to some slight degree at least the reason of the fear of the
little Upper-World people for the dark. I wondered vaguely what foul
villainy it might be that the Morlocks did under the new moon. I felt
pretty sure now that my second hypothesis was all wrong. The Upper-World
people might once have been the favoured aristocracy, and the Morlocks
their mechanical servants: but that had long since passed away. The two
species that had resulted from the evolution of man were sliding down
towards, or had already arrived at, an altogether new relationship. The
Eloi, like the Carolingian kings, had decayed to a mere beautiful
futility. They still possessed the earth on sufferance: since the
Morlocks, subterranean for innumerable generations, had come at last to
find the daylit surface intolerable. And the Morlocks made their
garments, I inferred, and maintained them in their habitual needs,
perhaps through the survival of an old habit of service. They did it as
a standing horse paws with his foot, or as a man enjoys killing animals
in sport: because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on
the organism. But clearly, the old order was already in part reversed.
The Nemesis of the delicate ones was creeping on apace. Ages ago,
thousands of generations ago, man had thrust his brother man out of the
ease and the sunshine. And now that brother was coming back--changed!
Already the Eloi had begun to learn one old lesson anew. They were
becoming reacquainted with Fear. And suddenly there came into my head
the memory of the meat I had seen in the Under World. It seemed odd how
it floated into my mind: not stirred up as it were by the current of my
meditations, but coming in almost like a question from outside. I tried
to recall the form of it. I had a vague sense of something familiar, but
I could not tell what it was at the time.

"Still, however helpless the little people in the presence of their
mysterious Fear, I was differently constituted. I came out of this age
of ours, this ripe prime of the human race, when Fear does not paralyse
and mystery has lost its terrors. I at least would defend myself.
Without further delay I determined to make myself arms and a fastness
where I might sleep. With that refuge as a base, I could face this
strange world with some of that confidence I had lost in realizing to
what creatures night by night I lay exposed. I felt I could never sleep
again until my bed was secure from them. I shuddered with horror to
think how they must already have examined me.

"I wandered during the afternoon along the valley of the Thames, but
found nothing that commended itself to my mind as inaccessible. All the
buildings and trees seemed easily practicable to such dexterous climbers
as the Morlocks, to judge by their wells, must be. Then the tall
pinnacles of the Palace of Green Porcelain and the polished gleam of its
walls came back to my memory; and in the evening, taking Weena like a
child upon my shoulder, I went up the hills towards the south-west. The
distance, I had reckoned, was seven or eight miles, but it must have
been nearer eighteen. I had first seen the place on a moist afternoon
when distances are deceptively diminished. In addition, one of my shoes
was loose, and a nail was working through the sole--they were
comfortable old shoes I wore about indoors--so that I was lame. And it
was already long past sunset when I came in sight of the palace,
silhouetted black against the pale yellow of the sky.

"Weena had been hugely delighted when I began to carry her, but after a
while she desired me to let her down, and ran along by the side of me,
occasionally darting off on either hand to pick flowers to stick in my
pockets. My pockets had always puzzled Weena, but at the last she had
concluded that they were an eccentric kind of vase for floral
decoration. At least she utilized them for that purpose. And that
reminds me! In changing my jacket I found..."

The Time Traveller paused, put his hand into his pocket, and silently
placed two withered flowers, not unlike very large white mallows, upon
the little table. Then he resumed his narrative.

"As the hush of evening crept over the world and we proceeded over the
hill crest towards Wimbledon, Weena grew tired and wanted to return to
the house of grey stone. But I pointed out the distant pinnacles of the
Palace of Green Porcelain to her, and contrived to make her understand
that we were seeking a refuge there from her Fear. You know that great
pause that comes upon things before the dusk? Even the breeze stops in
the trees. To me there is always an air of expectation about that
evening stillness. The sky was clear, remote, and empty save for a few
horizontal bars far down in the sunset. Well, that night, the
expectation took the colour of my fears. In that darkling calm my senses
seemed preternaturally sharpened. I fancied I could even feel the
hollowness of the ground beneath my feet: could indeed, almost see
through it the Morlocks on their ant-hill going hither and thither and
waiting for the dark. In my excitement I fancied that they would receive
my invasion of their burrows as a declaration of war. And why had they
taken my Time Machine?

"So we went on in the quiet, and the twilight deepened into night. The
clear blue of the distance faded, and one star after another came out.
The ground grew dim and the trees black. Weena's fears and her fatigue
grew upon her. I took her in my arms and talked to her and caressed her.
Then as the darkness grew deeper, she put her arms round my neck, and
closing her eyes, tightly pressed her face against my shoulder. So we
went down a long slope into a valley, and there in the dimness I almost
walked into a little river. This I waded, and went up the opposite side
of the valley, past a number of sleeping houses, and by a statue--a
Faun, or some such figure, minus the head. Here too were acacias. So far
I had seen nothing of the Morlocks, but it was yet early in the night,
and the darker hours before the old moon rose were still to come.

"From the brow of the next hill I saw a thick wood spreading wide and
black before me. I hesitated at this. I could see no end to it, either
to the right or the left. Feeling tired--my feet, in particular, were
very sore--I carefully lowered Weena from my shoulder as I halted, and
sat down upon the turf. I could no longer see the Palace of Green
Porcelain, and I was in doubt of my direction. I looked into the
thickness of the wood and thought of what it might hide. Under that
dense tangle of branches one would be out of sight of the stars. Even
were there no other lurking danger--a danger I did not care to let my
imagination loose upon--there would still be all the roots to stumble
over and the tree-boles to strike against.

"I was very tired too, after the excitements of the day; so I decided
that I would not face it, but would pass the night upon the open hill.

"Weena, I was glad to find, was fast asleep. I carefully wrapped her in
my jacket, and sat down beside her to wait for the moonrise. The
hillside was quiet and deserted, but from the black of the wood there
came now and then a stir of living things. Above me shone the stars, for
the night was very clear. I felt a certain sense of friendly comfort in
their twinkling. All the old constellations had gone from the sky,
however: that slow movement which is imperceptible in a hundred human
lifetimes, had long since rearranged them in unfamiliar groupings. But
the Milky Way, it seemed to me, was still the same tattered streamer of
star-dust as of yore. Southward (as I judged it) was a very bright red
star that was new to me; it was even more splendid than our own green
Sirius. And amid all these scintillating points of light one bright
planet shone kindly and steadily like the face of an old friend."

"Looking at these stars suddenly dwarfed my own troubles and all the
gravities of terrestrial life. I thought of their unfathomable distance,
and the slow inevitable drift of their movements out of the unknown
past, into the unknown future. I thought of the great precessional cycle
that the pole of the earth describes. Only forty times had that silent
revolution occurred during all the years that I had traversed. And
during these few revolutions all the activity, all the traditions, the
complex organizations, the nations, languages, literatures, aspirations,
even the mere memory of Man as I knew him, had been swept out of
existence. Instead were these frail creatures who had forgotten their
high ancestry, and the white Things of which I went in terror. Then I
thought of the Great Fear that was between the two species, and for the
first time, with a sudden shiver, came the clear knowledge of what the
meat I had seen might be. Yet it was too horrible! I looked at little
Weena sleeping beside me, her face white and starlike under the stars,
and forthwith dismissed the thought.

"Through that long night I held my mind off the Morlocks as well as I
could, and whiled away the time by trying to fancy I could find signs of
the old constellations in the new confusion. The sky kept very clear,
except for a hazy cloud or so. No doubt I dozed at times. Then, as my
vigil wore on, came a faintness in the eastward sky, like the reflection
of some colourless fire, and the old moon rose, thin and peaked and
white. And close behind, and overtaking it, and overflowing it, the dawn
came, pale at first, and then growing pink and warm. No Morlocks had
approached us. Indeed I had seen none upon the hill that night. And in
the confidence of renewed day it almost seemed to me that my fear had
been unreasonable. I stood up and found my foot with the loose heel
swollen at the ankle and painful under the heel; so I sat down again,
took off my shoes, and flung them away.

"I awakened Weena, and we went down into the wood, now green and
pleasant instead of black and forbidding. We found some fruit wherewith
to break our fast. We soon met others of the dainty ones, laughing and
dancing in the sunlight as though there was no such thing in nature as
the night. And then I thought once more of the meat that I had seen. I
felt assured now of what it was, and from the bottom of my heart I
pitied this last feeble rill from the great flood of humanity. Clearly
at some time in the Long-Ago of human decay the Morlocks' food had run
short. Possibly they had lived on rats and suchlike vermin. Even now man
is far less discriminating and exclusive in his food than he was--far
less than any monkey. His prejudice against human flesh is no
deep-seated instinct. And so these inhuman sons of men--! I tried to
look at the thing in a scientific spirit. After all, they were less
human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four
thousand years ago. And the intelligence that would have made this state
of things a torment had gone. Why should I trouble myself? These Eloi
were mere fatted cattle, which the ant-like Morlocks preserved and
preyed upon--probably saw to the breeding of. And there was Weena
dancing at my side!

"Then I tried to preserve myself from the horror that was coming upon
me, by regarding it as a rigorous punishment of human selfishness. Man
had been content to live in ease and delight upon the labours of his
fellowman, had taken Necessity as his watchword and excuse, and in the
fullness of time Necessity had come home to him. I even tried a
Carlyle-like scorn of this wretched aristocracy in decay. But this
attitude of mind was impossible. However great their intellectual
degradation, the Eloi had kept too much of the human form not to claim
my sympathy, and to make me perforce a sharer in their degradation and
their Fear.

"I had at that time very vague ideas as to the course I should pursue.
My first was to secure some safe place of refuge, and to make myself
such arms of metal or stone as I could contrive. That necessity was
immediate. In the next place, I hoped to procure some means of fire, so
that I should have the weapon of a torch at hand, for nothing, I knew,
would be more efficient against these Morlocks. Then I wanted to arrange
some contrivance to break open the doors of bronze under the White
Sphinx. I had in mind a battering-ram. I had a persuasion that if I
could enter those doors and carry a blaze of light before me I should
discover the Time Machine and escape. I could not imagine the Morlocks
were strong enough to move it far away. Weena I had resolved to bring
with me to our own time. And turning such schemes over in my mind I
pursued our way towards the building which my fancy had chosen as our
dwelling."


8.

"I found the Palace of Green Porcelain, when we approached it about
noon, deserted and falling into ruin. Only ragged vestiges of glass
remained in its windows, and great sheets of the green facing had fallen
away from the corroded metallic framework. It lay very high upon a turfy
down, and looking north-eastward before I entered it, I was surprised to
see a large estuary, or even creek, where I judged Wandsworth and
Battersea must once have been. I thought then--though I never followed
up the thought--of what might have happened, or might be happening, to
the living things in the sea.

"The material of the Palace proved on examination to be indeed
porcelain, and along the face of it I saw an inscription in some unknown
character. I thought, rather foolishly, that Weena might help me to
interpret this, but I only learned that the bare idea of writing had
never entered her head. She always seemed to me, I fancy, more human
than she was, perhaps because her affection was so human.

"Within the big valves of the door--which were open and broken--we
found, instead of the customary hall, a long gallery lit by many side
windows. At the first glance I was reminded of a museum. The tiled floor
was thick with dust, and a remarkable array of miscellaneous objects was
shrouded in the same grey covering. Then I perceived, standing strange
and gaunt in the centre of the hall, what was clearly the lower part of
a huge skeleton. I recognized by the oblique feet that it was some
extinct creature after the fashion of the Megatherium. The skull and the
upper bones lay beside it in the thick dust, and in one place, where
rain-water had dropped through a leak in the roof, the thing itself had
been worn away. Further in the gallery was the huge skeleton barrel of a
Brontosaurus. My museum hypothesis was confirmed. Going towards the side
I found what appeared to be sloping shelves, and clearing away the thick
dust, I found the old familiar glass cases of our own time. But they
must have been air-tight to judge from the fair preservation of some of
their contents.

"Clearly we stood among the ruins of some latter-day South Kensington!
Here, apparently, was the Palaeontological Section, and a very splendid
array of fossils it must have been, though the inevitable process of
decay that had been staved off for a time, and had, through the
extinction of bacteria and fungi, lost ninety-nine hundredths of its
force, was nevertheless, with extreme sureness if with extreme slowness
at work again upon all its treasures. Here and there I found traces of
the little people in the shape of rare fossils broken to pieces or
threaded in strings upon reeds. And the cases had in some instances been
bodily removed--by the Morlocks as I judged. The place was very silent.
The thick dust deadened our footsteps. Weena, who had been rolling a
sea-urchin down the sloping glass of a case, presently came, as I stared
about me, and very quietly took my hand and stood beside me.

"And at first I was so much surprised by this ancient monument of an
intellectual age, that I gave no thought to the possibilities it
presented. Even my preoccupation about the Time Machine receded a little
from my mind.

"To judge from the size of the place, this Palace of Green Porcelain had
a great deal more in it than a Gallery of Palaeontology; possibly
historical galleries; it might be, even a library! To me, at least in my
present circumstances, these would be vastly more interesting than this
spectacle of old-time geology in decay. Exploring, I found another short
gallery running transversely to the first. This appeared to be devoted
to minerals, and the sight of a block of sulphur set my mind running on
gunpowder. But I could find no saltpetre; indeed, no nitrates of any
kind. Doubtless they had deliquesced ages ago. Yet the sulphur hung in
my mind, and set up a train of thinking. As for the rest of the contents
of that gallery, though on the whole they were the best preserved of all
I saw, I had little interest. I am no specialist in mineralogy, and I
went on down a very ruinous aisle running parallel to the first hall I
had entered. Apparently this section had been devoted to natural
history, but everything had long since passed out of recognition. A few
shrivelled and blackened vestiges of what had once been stuffed animals,
desiccated mummies in jars that had once held spirit, a brown dust of
departed plants: that was all! I was sorry for that, because I should
have been glad to trace the patent readjustments by which the conquest
of animated nature had been attained. Then we came to a gallery of
simply colossal proportions, but singularly ill-lit, the floor of it
running downward at a slight angle from the end at which I entered. At
intervals white globes hung from the ceiling--many of them cracked and
smashed--which suggested that originally the place had been artificially
lit. Here I was more in my element, for rising on either side of me were
the huge bulks of big machines, all greatly corroded and many broken
down, but some still fairly complete. You know I have a certain weakness
for mechanism, and I was inclined to linger among these; the more so as
for the most part they had the interest of puzzles, and I could make
only the vaguest guesses at what they were for. I fancied that if I
could solve their puzzles I should find myself in possession of powers
that might be of use against the Morlocks.

"Suddenly Weena came very close to my side. So suddenly that she
startled me. Had it not been for her I do not think I should have
noticed that the floor of the gallery sloped at all.* The end I had come
in at was quite above ground, and was lit by rare slit-like windows. As
you went down the length, the ground came up against these windows,
until at last there was a pit like the 'area' of a London house before
each, and only a narrow line of daylight at the top. I went slowly
along, puzzling about the machines, and had been too intent upon them to
notice the gradual diminution of the light, until Weena's increasing
apprehensions drew my attention. Then I saw that the gallery ran down at
last into a thick darkness. I hesitated, and then, as I looked round me,
I saw that the dust was less abundant and its surface less even. Further
away towards the dimness, it appeared to be broken by a number of small
narrow footprints. My sense of the immediate presence of the Morlocks
revived at that. I felt that I was wasting my time in the academic
examination of machinery. I called to mind that it was already far
advanced in the afternoon, and that I had still no weapon, no refuge,
and no means of making a fire. And then down in the remote blackness of
the gallery I heard a peculiar pattering, and the same odd noises I had
heard down the well."

[* It may be, of course, that the floor did not slope, but that the
museum was built into the side of a hill.--Editor.]

"I took Weena's hand. Then struck with a sudden idea, I left her and
turned to a machine from which projected a lever not unlike those in a
signal-box. Clambering upon the stand, and grasping this lever in my
hands, I put all my weight upon it sideways. Suddenly Weena, deserted in
the central aisle, began to whimper. I had judged the strength of the
lever pretty correctly, for it snapped after a minute's strain, and I
rejoined her with a mace in my hand more than sufficient, I judged, for
any Morlock skull I might encounter. And I longed very much to kill a
Morlock or so. Very inhuman, you may think, to want to go killing one's
own descendants! But it was impossible, somehow, to feel any humanity in
the things. Only my disinclination to leave Weena, and a persuasion that
if I began to slake my thirst for murder my Time Machine might suffer,
restrained me from going straight down the gallery and killing the
brutes I heard.

"Well, mace in one hand and Weena in the other, I went out of that
gallery and into another and still larger one, which at the first glance
reminded me of a military chapel hung with tattered flags. The brown and
charred rags that hung from the sides of it, I presently recognized as
the decaying vestiges of books. They had long since dropped to pieces,
and every semblance of print had left them. But here and there were
warped boards and cracked metallic clasps that told the tale well
enough. Had I been a literary man I might, perhaps, have moralised upon
the futility of all ambition. But as it was, the thing that struck me
with keenest force was the enormous waste of labour to which this sombre
wilderness of rotting paper testified. At the time I will confess that I
thought chiefly of the philosophical transactions and my own seventeen
papers upon physical optics.

"Then, going up a broad staircase, we came to what may once have been a
gallery of technical chemistry. And here I had not a little hope of
useful discoveries. Except at one end where the roof had collapsed, this
gallery was well preserved. I went eagerly to every unbroken case. And
at last, in one of the really air-tight cases, I found a box of matches.
Very eagerly I tried them. They were perfectly good. They were not even
damp. I turned to Weena. 'Dance,' I cried to her in her own tongue. For
now I had a weapon indeed against the horrible creatures we feared. And
so, in that derelict museum, upon the thick soft carpeting of dust, to
Weena's huge delight, I solemnly performed a kind of composite dance,
whistling 'The Land of the Leal' as cheerfully as I could. In part it
was a modest cancan, in part a step-dance, in part a skirt-dance (so far
as my tail-coat permitted), and in part original. For I am naturally
inventive, as you know.

"Now, I still think that for this box of matches to have escaped the
wear of time for immemorial years was a most strange, as for me it was a
most fortunate thing. Yet oddly enough, I found a far unlikelier
substance, and that was camphor. I found it in a sealed jar, that by
chance, I suppose, had been really hermetically sealed. I fancied at
first that it was paraffin wax, and smashed the glass accordingly. But
the odour of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay this
volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many
thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once
seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and
become fossilised millions of years ago. I was about to throw it away,
but I remembered that it was inflammable and burned with a good bright
flame--was in fact, an excellent candle--and I put it in my pocket. I
found no explosives, however nor any means of breaking down the bronze
doors. As yet my iron crowbar was the most helpful thing I had chanced
upon. Nevertheless I left that gallery greatly elated.

"I cannot tell you all the story of that long afternoon. It would
require a great effort of memory to recall my explorations in at all the
proper order. I remember a long gallery of rusting stands of arms, and
how I hesitated between my crowbar and a hatchet or a sword. I could not
carry both however, and my bar of iron promised best against the bronze
gates. There were numbers of guns, pistols, and rifles. The most were
masses of rust, but many were of some new metal, and still fairly sound.
But any cartridges or powder there may once have been had rotted into
dust. One corner I saw was charred and shattered; perhaps, I thought, by
an explosion among the specimens. In another place was a vast array of
idols--Polynesian, Mexican, Grecian, Phoenician, every country on earth
I should think. And here, yielding to an irresistible impulse, I wrote
my name upon the nose of a steatite monster from South America that
particularly took my fancy.

"As the evening drew on, my interest waned. I went through gallery after
gallery, dusty, silent, often ruinous, the exhibits sometimes mere heaps
of rust and lignite, sometimes fresher. In one place I suddenly found
myself near the model of a tin-mine, and then by the merest accident I
discovered, in an air-tight case, two dynamite cartridges! I shouted
'Eureka!' and smashed the case with joy. Then came a doubt. I hesitated.
Then, selecting a little side gallery, I made my essay. I never felt
such a disappointment as I did in waiting five, ten, fifteen minutes for
an explosion that never came. Of course the things were dummies, as I
might have guessed from their presence. I really believe that had they
not been so, I should have rushed off incontinently and blown Sphinx,
bronze doors, and (as it proved) my chances of finding the Time Machine,
all together into non-existence.

"It was after that, I think, that we came to a little open court within
the palace. It was turfed, and had three fruit-trees. So we rested and
refreshed ourselves. Towards sunset I began to consider our position.
Night was creeping upon us, and my inaccessible hiding-place had still
to be found. But that troubled me very little now. I had in my
possession a thing that was, perhaps, the best of all defences against
the Morlocks--I had matches! I had the camphor in my pocket too, if a
blaze were needed. It seemed to me that the best thing we could do would
be to pass the night in the open, protected by a fire. In the morning
there was the getting of the Time Machine. Towards that, as yet, I had
only my iron mace. But now, with my growing knowledge, I felt very
differently towards those bronze doors. Up to this, I had refrained from
forcing them, largely because of the mystery on the other side. They had
never impressed me as being very strong, and I hoped to find my bar of
iron not altogether inadequate for the work."


9.

"We emerged from the palace while the sun was still in part above the
horizon. I was determined to reach the White Sphinx early the next
morning, and ere the dusk I purposed pushing through the woods that had
stopped me on the previous journey. My plan was to go as far as possible
that night, and then, building a fire, to sleep in the protection of its
glare. Accordingly, as we went along I gathered any sticks or dried
grass I saw, and presently had my arms full of such litter. Thus loaded,
our progress was slower than I had anticipated, and besides Weena was
tired. And I began to suffer from sleepiness too; so that it was full
night before we reached the wood. Upon the shrubby hill of its edge
Weena would have stopped, fearing the darkness before us; but a singular
sense of impending calamity, that should indeed have served me as a
warning, drove me onward. I had been without sleep for a night and two
days, and I was feverish and irritable. I felt sleep coming upon me, and
the Morlocks with it.

"While we hesitated, among the black bushes behind us, and dim against
their blackness, I saw three crouching figures. There was scrub and long
grass all about us, and I did not feel safe from their insidious
approach. The forest, I calculated, was rather less than a mile across.
If we could get through it to the bare hillside, there as it seemed to
me, was an altogether safer resting-place; I thought that with my
matches and my camphor I could contrive to keep my path illuminated
through the woods. Yet it was evident that if I was to flourish matches
with my hands I should have to abandon my firewood; so, rather
reluctantly, I put it down. And then it came into my head that I would
amaze our friends behind by lighting it. I was to discover the atrocious
folly of this proceeding, but it came to my mind as an ingenious move
for covering our retreat."

"I don't know if you have ever thought what a rare thing flame must be
in the absence of man and in a temperate climate. The sun's heat is
rarely strong enough to burn, even when it is focused by dewdrops, as is
sometimes the case in more tropical districts. Lightning may blast and
blacken, but it rarely gives rise to widespread fire. Decaying
vegetation may occasionally smoulder with the heat of its fermentation,
but this rarely results in flame. In this decadence, too, the art of
fire-making had been forgotten on the earth. The red tongues that went
licking up my heap of wood were an altogether new and strange thing to
Weena.

"She wanted to run to it and play with it. I believe she would have cast
herself into it had I not restrained her. But I caught her up, and in
spite of her struggles, plunged boldly before me into the wood. For a
little way the glare of my fire lit the path. Looking back presently, I
could see, through the crowded stems, that from my heap of sticks the
blaze had spread to some bushes adjacent, and a curved line of fire was
creeping up the grass of the hill. I laughed at that, and turned again
to the dark trees before me. It was very black, and Weena clung to me
convulsively, but there was still, as my eyes grew accustomed to the
darkness, sufficient light for me to avoid the stems. Overhead it was
simply black, except where a gap of remote blue sky shone down upon us
here and there. I struck none of my matches because I had no hand free.
Upon my left arm I carried my little one, in my right hand I had my iron
bar.

"For some way I heard nothing but the crackling twigs under my feet, the
faint rustle of the breeze above, and my own breathing and the throb of
the blood-vessels in my ears. Then I seemed to know of a pattering about
me. I pushed on grimly. The pattering grew more distinct, and then I
caught the same queer sound and voices I had heard in the Under World.
There were evidently several of the Morlocks, and they were closing in
upon me. Indeed, in another minute I felt a tug at my coat, then
something at my arm. And Weena shivered violently, and became quite
still.

"It was time for a match. But to get one I must put her down. I did so,
and as I fumbled with my pocket, a struggle began in the darkness about
my knees, perfectly silent on her part and with the same peculiar cooing
sounds from the Morlocks. Soft little hands too, were creeping over my
coat and back, touching even my neck. Then the match scratched and
fizzed. I held it flaring, and saw the white backs of the Morlocks in
flight amid the trees. I hastily took a lump of camphor from my pocket,
and prepared to light it as soon as the match should wane. Then I looked
at Weena. She was lying clutching my feet and quite motionless, with her
face to the ground. With a sudden fright I stooped to her. She seemed
scarcely to breathe. I lit the block of camphor and flung it to the
ground, and as it split and flared up and drove back the Morlocks and
the shadows, I knelt down and lifted her. The wood behind seemed full of
the stir and murmur of a great company!

"She seemed to have fainted. I put her carefully upon my shoulder and
rose to push on, and then there came a horrible realization. In
manoeuvring with my matches and Weena, I had turned myself about several
times, and now I had not the faintest idea in what direction lay my
path. For all I knew, I might be facing back towards the Palace of Green
Porcelain. I found myself in a cold sweat. I had to think rapidly what
to do. I determined to build a fire and encamp where we were. I put
Weena, still motionless, down upon a turfy bole, and very hastily, as my
first lump of camphor waned, I began collecting sticks and leaves. Here
and there out of the darkness round me the Morlocks' eyes shone like
carbuncles.

"The camphor flickered and went out. I lit a match, and as I did so, two
white forms that had been approaching Weena dashed hastily away. One was
so blinded by the light that he came straight for me, and I felt his
bones grind under the blow of my fist. He gave a whoop of dismay,
staggered a little way, and fell down. I lit another piece of camphor,
and went on gathering my bonfire. Presently I noticed how dry was some
of the foliage above me, for since my arrival on the Time Machine, a
matter of a week, no rain had fallen. So instead of casting about among
the trees for fallen twigs, I began leaping up and dragging down
branches. Very soon I had a choking smoky fire of green wood and dry
sticks, and could economize my camphor. Then I turned to where Weena lay
beside my iron mace. I tried what I could to revive her, but she lay
like one dead. I could not even satisfy myself whether or not she
breathed.

"Now the smoke of the fire beat over towards me, and it must have made
me heavy of a sudden. Moreover, the vapour of camphor was in the air. My
fire would not need replenishing for an hour or so. I felt very weary
after my exertion, and sat down. The wood too, was full of a slumbrous
murmur that I did not understand. I seemed just to nod and open my eyes.
But all was dark, and the Morlocks had their hands upon me. Flinging off
their clinging fingers I hastily felt in my pocket for the match-box,
and--it had gone! Then they gripped and closed with me again. In a
moment I knew what had happened. I had slept, and my fire had gone out,
and the bitterness of death came over my soul. The forest seemed full of
the smell of burning wood. I was caught by the neck, by the hair, by the
arms, and pulled down. It was indescribably horrible in the darkness to
feel all these soft creatures heaped upon me. I felt as if I was in a
monstrous spider's web. I was overpowered, and went down. I felt little
teeth nipping at my neck. I rolled over, and as I did so my hand came
against my iron lever. It gave me strength. I struggled up, shaking the
human rats from me, and holding the bar short, I thrust where I judged
their faces might be. I could feel the succulent giving of flesh and
bone under my blows, and for a moment I was free.

"The strange exultation that so often seems to accompany hard fighting
came upon me. I knew that both I and Weena were lost, but I determined
to make the Morlocks pay for their meat. I stood with my back to a tree,
swinging the iron bar before me. The whole wood was full of the stir and
cries of them. A minute passed. Their voices seemed to rise to a higher
pitch of excitement, and their movements grew faster. Yet none came
within reach. I stood glaring at the blackness. Then suddenly came hope.
What if the Morlocks were afraid? And close on the heels of that came a
strange thing. The darkness seemed to grow luminous. Very dimly I began
to see the Morlocks about me--three battered at my feet--and then I
recognized, with incredulous surprise, that the others were running, in
an incessant stream, as it seemed, from behind me, and away through the
wood in front. And their backs seemed no longer white, but reddish. As I
stood agape, I saw a little red spark go drifting across a gap of
starlight between the branches, and vanish. And at that I understood the
smell of burning wood, the slumbrous murmur that was growing now into a
gusty roar, the red glow, and the Morlocks' flight.

"Stepping out from behind my tree and looking back, I saw through the
black pillars of the nearer trees, the flames of the burning forest. It
was my first fire coming after me. With that I looked for Weena, but she
was gone. The hissing and crackling behind me, the explosive thud as
each fresh tree burst into flame, left little time for reflection. My
iron bar still gripped, I followed in the Morlocks' path. It was a close
race. Once the flames crept forward so swiftly on my right as I ran that
I was outflanked and had to strike off to the left. But at last I
emerged upon a small open space, and as I did so, a Morlock came
blundering towards me, and past me, and went on straight into the fire!

"And now I was to see the most weird and horrible thing, I think, of all
that I beheld in that future age. This whole space was as bright as day
with the reflection of the fire. In the centre was a hillock or tumulus,
surmounted by a scorched hawthorn. Beyond this was another arm of the
burning forest, with yellow tongues already writhing from it, completely
encircling the space with a fence of fire. Upon the hillside were some
thirty or forty Morlocks, dazzled by the light and heat, and blundering
hither and thither against each other in their bewilderment. At first I
did not realize their blindness, and struck furiously at them with my
bar, in a frenzy of fear, as they approached me, killing one and
crippling several more. But when I had watched the gestures of one of
them groping under the hawthorn against the red sky, and heard their
moans, I was assured of their absolute helplessness and misery in the
glare, and I struck no more of them.

"Yet every now and then one would come straight towards me, setting
loose a quivering horror that made me quick to elude him. At one time
the flames died down somewhat, and I feared the foul creatures would
presently be able to see me. I was thinking of beginning the fight by
killing some of them before this should happen; but the fire burst out
again brightly, and I stayed my hand. I walked about the hill among them
and avoided them, looking for some trace of Weena. But Weena was gone.

"At last I sat down on the summit of the hillock, and watched this
strange incredible company of blind things groping to and fro, and
making uncanny noises to each other, as the glare of the fire beat on
them. The coiling uprush of smoke streamed across the sky, and through
the rare tatters of that red canopy, remote as though they belonged to
another universe, shone the little stars. Two or three Morlocks came
blundering into me, and I drove them off with blows of my fists,
trembling as I did so.

"For the most part of that night I was persuaded it was a nightmare. I
bit myself and screamed in a passionate desire to awake. I beat the
ground with my hands, and got up and sat down again, and wandered here
and there, and again sat down. Then I would fall to rubbing my eyes and
calling upon God to let me awake. Thrice I saw Morlocks put their heads
down in a kind of agony and rush into the flames. But at last, above the
subsiding red of the fire, above the streaming masses of black smoke and
the whitening and blackening tree stumps, and the diminishing numbers of
these dim creatures, came the white light of the day.

"I searched again for traces of Weena, but there were none. It was plain
that they had left her poor little body in the forest. I cannot describe
how it relieved me to think that it had escaped the awful fate to which
it seemed destined. As I thought of that, I was almost moved to begin a
massacre of the helpless abominations about me, but I contained myself.
The hillock, as I have said, was a kind of island in the forest. From
its summit I could now make out through a haze of smoke the Palace of
Green Porcelain, and from that I could get my bearings for the White
Sphinx. And so, leaving the remnant of these damned souls still going
hither and thither and moaning, as the day grew clearer, I tied some
grass about my feet and limped on across smoking ashes and among black
stems, that still pulsated internally with fire, towards the
hiding-place of the Time Machine. I walked slowly, for I was almost
exhausted, as well as lame, and I felt the intensest wretchedness for
the horrible death of little Weena. It seemed an overwhelming calamity.
Now in this old familiar room, it is more like the sorrow of a dream
than an actual loss. But that morning it left me absolutely lonely
again--terribly alone. I began to think of this house of mine, of this
fireside, of some of you, and with such thoughts came a longing that was
pain.

"But as I walked over the smoking ashes under the bright morning sky, I
made a discovery. In my trouser pocket were still some loose matches.
The box must have leaked before it was lost."


10.

"About eight or nine in the morning I came to the same seat of
yellow metal from which I had viewed the world upon the evening of my
arrival. I thought of my hasty conclusions upon that evening and could
not refrain from laughing bitterly at my confidence. Here was the same
beautiful scene, the same abundant foliage, the same splendid palaces
and magnificent ruins, the same silver river running between its fertile
banks. The gay robes of the beautiful people moved hither and thither
among the trees. Some were bathing in exactly the place where I had
saved Weena, and that suddenly gave me a keen stab of pain. And like
blots upon the landscape rose the cupolas above the ways to the
Under World. I understood now what all the beauty of the Overworld
people covered. Very pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of
the cattle in the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and
provided against no needs. And their end was the same.

"I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been.
It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort
and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its
watchword, it had attained its hopes--to come to this at last. Once life
and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been
assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and
work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed
problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had
followed.

"It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the
compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in
harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never
appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is
no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only
those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety
of needs and dangers.

"So, as I see it, the Upper-World man had drifted towards his feeble
prettiness, and the Under-World to mere mechanical industry. But that
perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical
perfection--absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding
of the UnderWorld, however it was effected, had become disjointed.
Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came
back again, and she began below. The Under-World being in contact with
machinery, which however perfect, still needs some little thought
outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if
less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat
failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden. So I
say I saw it in my last view of the world of Eight Hundred and Two
Thousand Seven Hundred and One. It may be as wrong an explanation as
mortal wit could invent. It is how the thing shaped itself to me, and as
that I give it to you.

"After the fatigues, excitements, and terrors of the past days, and in
spite of my grief, this seat and the tranquil view and the warm sunlight
were very pleasant. I was very tired and sleepy, and soon my theorizing
passed into dozing. Catching myself at that, I took my own hint, and
spreading myself out upon the turf I had a long and refreshing sleep.

"I awoke a little before sunsetting. I now felt safe against being
caught napping by the Morlocks, and stretching myself, I came on down
the hill towards the White Sphinx. I had my crowbar in one hand, and the
other hand played with the matches in my pocket.

"And now came a most unexpected thing. As I approached the pedestal of
the sphinx I found the bronze valves were open. They had slid down into
grooves.

"At that I stopped short before them, hesitating to enter.

"Within was a small apartment, and on a raised place in the corner of
this was the Time Machine. I had the small levers in my pocket. So here,
after all my elaborate preparations for the siege of the White Sphinx,
was a meek surrender. I threw my iron bar away, almost sorry not to use
it.

"A sudden thought came into my head as I stooped towards the portal. For
once, at least, I grasped the mental operations of the Morlocks.
Suppressing a strong inclination to laugh, I stepped through the bronze
frame and up to the Time Machine. I was surprised to find it had been
carefully oiled and cleaned. I have suspected since that the Morlocks
had even partially taken it to pieces while trying in their dim way to
grasp its purpose.

"Now as I stood and examined it, finding a pleasure in the mere touch of
the contrivance, the thing I had expected happened. The bronze panels
suddenly slid up and struck the frame with a clang. I was in the
dark--trapped. So the Morlocks thought. At that I chuckled gleefully.

"I could already hear their murmuring laughter as they came towards me.
Very calmly I tried to strike the match. I had only to fix on the levers
and depart then like a ghost. But I had overlooked one little thing. The
matches were of that abominable kind that light only on the box.

"You may imagine how all my calm vanished. The little brutes were close
upon me. One touched me. I made a sweeping blow in the dark at them with
the levers, and began to scramble into the saddle of the machine. Then
came one hand upon me and then another. Then I had simply to fight
against their persistent fingers for my levers, and at the same time
feel for the studs over which these fitted. Once indeed, they almost got
away from me. As it slipped from my hand, I had to butt in the dark with
my head--I could hear the Morlock's skull ring--to recover it. It was a
nearer thing than the fight in the forest, I think, this last scramble.

"But at last the lever was fitted and pulled over. The clinging hands
slipped from me. The darkness presently fell from my eyes. I found
myself in the same grey light and tumult I have already described."


11.

"I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes
with time travelling. And this time I was not seated properly in the
saddle, but sideways and in an unstable fashion. For an indefinite time
I clung to the machine as it swayed and vibrated, quite unheeding how I
went, and when I brought myself to look at the dials again I was amazed
to find where I had arrived. One dial records days, and another
thousands of days, another millions of days, and another thousands of
millions. Now, instead of reversing the levers, I had pulled them over
so as to go forward with them, and when I came to look at these
indicators I found that the thousands hand was sweeping round as fast as
the seconds hand of a watch--into futurity.

"As I drove on, a peculiar change crept over the appearance of things.
The palpitating greyness grew darker; then--though I was still
travelling with prodigious velocity--the blinking succession of day and
night, which was usually indicative of a slower pace, returned, and grew
more and more marked. This puzzled me very much at first. The
alternations of night and day grew slower and slower, and so did the
passage of the sun across the sky, until they seemed to stretch through
centuries. At last a steady twilight brooded over the earth, a twilight
only broken now and then when a comet glared across the darkling sky.
The band of light that had indicated the sun had long since disappeared;
for the sun had ceased to set--it simply rose and fell in the west, and
grew ever broader and more red. All trace of the moon had vanished. The
circling of the stars, growing slower and slower, had given place to
creeping points of light. At last, some time before I stopped, the sun,
red and very large, halted motionless upon the horizon, a vast dome
glowing with a dull heat, and now and then suffering a momentary
extinction. At one time it had for a little while glowed more
brilliantly again, but it speedily reverted to its sullen red heat. I
perceived by this slowing down of its rising and setting that the work
of the tidal drag was done. The earth had come to rest with one face to
the sun, even as in our own time the moon faces the earth. Very
cautiously, for I remembered my former headlong fall, I began to reverse
my motion. Slower and slower went the circling hands until the thousands
one seemed motionless and the daily one was no longer a mere mist upon
its scale. Still slower, until the dim outlines of a desolate beach grew
visible. I stopped very gently and sat upon the Time Machine, looking
round. The sky was no longer blue. North-eastward it was inky black, and
out of the blackness shone brightly and steadily the pale white stars.
Overhead it was a deep Indian red and starless, and south-eastward it
grew brighter to a glowing scarlet where, cut by the horizon, lay the
huge hull of the sun, red and motionless. The rocks about me were of a
harsh reddish colour, and all the trace of life that I could see at
first was the intensely green vegetation that covered every projecting
point on their south-eastern face. It was the same rich green that one
sees on forest moss or on the lichen in caves: plants which like these
grow in a perpetual twilight.

"The machine was standing on a sloping beach. The sea stretched away to
the south-west, to rise into a sharp bright horizon against the wan sky.
There were no breakers and no waves, for not a breath of wind was
stirring. Only a slight oily swell rose and fell like a gentle
breathing, and showed that the eternal sea was still moving and living.
And along the margin where the water sometimes broke was a thick
incrustation of salt--pink under the lurid sky. There was a sense of
oppression in my head, and I noticed that I was breathing very fast. The
sensation reminded me of my only experience of mountaineering, and from
that I judged the air to be more rarefied than it is now.

"Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw a thing
like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up into the sky
and, circling, disappear over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of its
voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly upon
the machine. Looking round me again, I saw that, quite near, what I had
taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me. Then I
saw the thing was really a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you imagine
a crab as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving slowly and
uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antennae, like carters'
whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at you on
either side of its metallic front? Its back was corrugated and
ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched it
here and there. I could see the many palps of its complicated mouth
flickering and feeling as it moved.

"As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felt a
tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to brush
it away with my hand, but in a moment it returned, and almost
immediately came another by my ear. I struck at this, and caught
something threadlike. It was drawn swiftly out of my hand. With a
frightful qualm, I turned, and I saw that I had grasped the antenna of
another monster crab that stood just behind me. Its evil eyes were
wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was all alive with appetite, and
its vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime, were descending
upon me. In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed a month
between myself and these monsters. But I was still on the same beach,
and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped. Dozens of them
seemed to be crawling here and there, in the sombre light, among the
foliated sheets of intense green.

"I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the
world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea,
the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the
uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air
that hurts one's lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved
on a hundred years, and there was the same red sun--a little larger, a
little duller--the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same
crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and
the red rocks. And in the westward sky, I saw a curved pale line like a
vast new moon.

"So I travelled, stopping ever and again, in great strides of a thousand
years or more, drawn on by the mystery of the earth's fate, watching
with a strange fascination the sun grow larger and duller in the
westward sky, and the life of the old earth ebb away. At last, more than
thirty million years hence, the huge red-hot dome of the sun had come to
obscure nearly a tenth part of the darkling heavens. Then I stopped once
more, for the crawling multitude of crabs had disappeared, and the red
beach, save for its livid green liverworts and lichens, seemed lifeless.
And now it was flecked with white. A bitter cold assailed me. Rare white
flakes ever and again came eddying down. To the north-eastward, the
glare of snow lay under the starlight of the sable sky and I could see
an undulating crest of hillocks pinkish white. There were fringes of ice
along the sea margin, with drifting masses further out; but the main
expanse of that salt ocean, all bloody under the eternal sunset, was
still unfrozen.

"I looked about me to see if any traces of animal life remained. A
certain indefinable apprehension still kept me in the saddle of the
machine. But I saw nothing moving, in earth or sky or sea. The green
slime on the rocks alone testified that life was not extinct. A shallow
sand-bank had appeared in the sea and the water had receded from the
beach. I fancied I saw some black object flopping about upon this bank,
but it became motionless as I looked at it, and I judged that my eye had
been deceived, and that the black object was merely a rock. The stars in
the sky were intensely bright and seemed to me to twinkle very little.

"Suddenly I noticed that the circular westward outline of the sun had
changed; that a concavity, a bay, had appeared in the curve. I saw this
grow larger. For a minute perhaps I stared aghast at this blackness that
was creeping over the day, and then I realized that an eclipse was
beginning. Either the moon or the planet Mercury was passing across the
sun's disk. Naturally, at first I took it to be the moon, but there is
much to incline me to believe that what I really saw was the transit of
an inner planet passing very near to the earth.

"The darkness grew apace; a cold wind began to blow in freshening gusts
from the east, and the showering white flakes in the air increased in
number. From the edge of the sea came a ripple and whisper. Beyond these
lifeless sounds the world was silent. Silent? It would be hard to convey
the stillness of it. All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the
cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background
of our lives--all that was over. As the darkness thickened, the eddying
flakes grew more abundant, dancing before my eyes; and the cold of the
air more intense. At last, one by one, swiftly, one after the other, the
white peaks of the distant hills vanished into blackness. The breeze
rose to a moaning wind. I saw the black central shadow of the eclipse
sweeping towards me. In another moment the pale stars alone were
visible. All else was rayless obscurity. The sky was absolutely black."

"A horror of this great darkness came on me. The cold, that smote to my
marrow, and the pain I felt in breathing, overcame me. I shivered, and a
deadly nausea seized me. Then like a red-hot bow in the sky appeared the
edge of the sun. I got off the machine to recover myself. I felt giddy
and incapable of facing the return journey. As I stood sick and confused
I saw again the moving thing upon the shoal--there was no mistake now
that it was a moving thing--against the red water of the sea. It was a
round thing, the size of a football perhaps, or, it may be, bigger, and
tentacles trailed down from it; it seemed black against the weltering
blood-red water, and it was hopping fitfully about. Then I felt I was
fainting. But a terrible dread of lying helpless in that remote and
awful twilight sustained me while I clambered upon the saddle."


12.

"So I came back. For a long time I must have been insensible upon
the machine. The blinking succession of the days and nights was resumed,
the sun got golden again, the sky blue. I breathed with greater freedom.
The fluctuating contours of the land ebbed and flowed. The hands spun
backward upon the dials. At last I saw again the dim shadows of houses,
the evidences of decadent humanity. These too, changed and passed, and
others came. Presently, when the million dial was at zero, I slackened
speed. I began to recognize our own petty and familiar architecture, the
thousands hand ran back to the starting-point, the night and day flapped
slower and slower. Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me.
Very gently, now, I slowed the mechanism down.

"I saw one little thing that seemed odd to me. I think I have told you
that when I set out, before my velocity became very high, Mrs. Watchett
had walked across the room, travelling, as it seemed to me, like a
rocket. As I returned, I passed again across that minute when she
traversed the laboratory. But now her every motion appeared to be the
exact inversion of her previous ones. The door at the lower end opened,
and she glided quietly up the laboratory, back foremost, and disappeared
behind the door by which she had previously entered. Just before that I
seemed to see Hillyer for a moment; but he passed like a flash.

"Then I stopped the machine, and saw about me again the old familiar
laboratory, my tools, my appliances just as I had left them. I got off
the thing very shaky, and sat down upon my bench. For several minutes I
trembled violently. Then I became calmer. Around me was my old workshop
again, exactly as it had been. I might have slept there, and the whole
thing have been a dream.

"And yet, not exactly! The thing had started from the south-east corner
of the laboratory. It had come to rest again in the north-west, against
the wall where you saw it. That gives you the exact distance from my
little lawn to the pedestal of the White Sphinx, into which the Morlocks
had carried my machine.

"For a time my brain went stagnant. Presently I got up and came through
the passage here, limping, because my heel was still painful, and
feeling sorely begrimed. I saw the 'Pall Mall Gazette' on the table by
the door. I found the date was indeed to-day, and looking at the
timepiece, saw the hour was almost eight o'clock. I heard your voices
and the clatter of plates. I hesitated--I felt so sick and weak. Then I
sniffed good wholesome meat, and opened the door on you. You know the
rest. I washed, and dined, and now I am telling you the story.

"I know," he said, after a pause, "that all this will be absolutely
incredible to you. To me the one incredible thing is that I am here
to-night in this old familiar room looking into your friendly faces and
telling you these strange adventures."

He looked at the Medical Man. "No, I cannot expect you to believe it.
Take it as a lie--or a prophecy. Say I dreamed it in the workshop.
Consider I have been speculating upon the destinies of our race until I
have hatched this fiction. Treat my assertion of its truth as a mere
stroke of art to enhance its interest. And taking it as a story, what do
you think of it?"

He took up his pipe, and began, in his old accustomed manner, to tap
with it nervously upon the bars of the grate. There was a momentary
stillness. Then chairs began to creak and shoes to scrape upon the
carpet. I took my eyes off the Time Traveller's face, and looked round
at his audience. They were in the dark, and little spots of colour swam
before them. The Medical Man seemed absorbed in the contemplation of our
host. The Editor was looking hard at the end of his cigar--the sixth.
The Journalist fumbled for his watch. The others, as far as I remember,
were motionless.

The Editor stood up with a sigh. "What a pity it is you're not a writer
of stories!" he said, putting his hand on the Time Traveller's shoulder.

"You don't believe it?"

"Well--"

"I thought not."

The Time Traveller turned to us. "Where are the matches?" he said. He
lit one and spoke over his pipe, puffing. "To tell you the truth... I
hardly believe it myself... And yet..."

His eye fell with a mute inquiry upon the withered white flowers upon
the little table. Then he turned over the hand holding his pipe, and I
saw he was looking at some half-healed scars on his knuckles.

The Medical Man rose, came to the lamp, and examined the flowers. "The
gynaeceum's odd," he said. The Psychologist leant forward to see,
holding out his hand for a specimen.

"I'm hanged if it isn't a quarter to one," said the Journalist. "How
shall we get home?"

"Plenty of cabs at the station," said the Psychologist.

"It's a curious thing," said the Medical Man; "but I certainly don't
know the natural order of these flowers. May I have them?"

The Time Traveller hesitated. Then suddenly: "Certainly not."

"Where did you really get them?" said the Medical Man.

The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was
trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. "They were put into my
pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time." He stared round the room.
"I'm damned if it isn't all going. This room and you and the atmosphere
of every day is too much for my memory. Did I ever make a Time Machine,
or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream? They say life
is a dream, a precious poor dream at times--but I can't stand another
that won't fit. It's madness. And where did the dream come from...? I
must look at that machine. If there is one!"

He caught up the lamp swiftly, and carried it, flaring red, through the
door into the corridor. We followed him. There in the flickering light
of the lamp was the machine sure enough, squat, ugly, and askew; a thing
of brass, ebony, ivory, and translucent glimmering quartz. Solid to the
touch--for I put out my hand and felt the rail of it--and with brown
spots and smears upon the ivory, and bits of grass and moss upon the
lower parts, and one rail bent awry.

The Time Traveller put the lamp down on the bench, and ran his hand
along the damaged rail. "It's all right now," he said. "The story I told
you was true. I'm sorry to have brought you out here in the cold." He
took up the lamp, and in an absolute silence, we returned to the
smoking-room.

He came into the hall with us and helped the Editor on with his coat.
The Medical Man looked into his face and, with a certain hesitation,
told him he was suffering from overwork, at which he laughed hugely. I
remember him standing in the open doorway, bawling good-night.

I shared a cab with the Editor. He thought the tale a "gaudy lie." For
my own part I was unable to come to a conclusion. The story was so
fantastic and incredible, the telling so credible and sober. I lay awake
most of the night thinking about it. I determined to go next day and see
the Time Traveller again. I was told he was in the laboratory, and being
on easy terms in the house, I went up to him. The laboratory, however
was empty. I stared for a minute at the Time Machine and put out my hand
and touched the lever. At that the squat substantial-looking mass swayed
like a bough shaken by the wind. Its instability startled me extremely,
and I had a queer reminiscence of the childish days when I used to be
forbidden to meddle. I came back through the corridor. The Time
Traveller met me in the smoking-room. He was coming from the house. He
had a small camera under one arm and a knapsack under the other. He
laughed when he saw me, and gave me an elbow to shake. "I'm frightfully
busy," said he, "with that thing in there."

"But is it not some hoax?" I said. "Do you really travel through time?"

"Really and truly I do." And he looked frankly into my eyes. He
hesitated. His eye wandered about the room. "I only want half an hour,"
he said. "I know why you came, and it's awfully good of you. There's
some magazines here. If you'll stop to lunch I'll prove you this time
travelling up to the hilt, specimen and all. If you'll forgive my
leaving you now?"

I consented, hardly comprehending then the full import of his words, and
he nodded and went on down the corridor. I heard the door of the
laboratory slam, seated myself in a chair, and took up a daily paper.
What was he going to do before lunchtime? Then suddenly I was reminded
by an advertisement that I had promised to meet Richardson, the
publisher, at two. I looked at my watch, and saw that I could barely
save that engagement. I got up and went down the passage to tell the
Time Traveller.

As I took hold of the handle of the door I heard an exclamation, oddly
truncated at the end, and a click and a thud. A gust of air whirled
round me as I opened the door, and from within came the sound of broken
glass falling on the floor. The Time Traveller was not there. I seemed
to see a ghostly, indistinct figure sitting in a whirling mass of black
and brass for a moment--a figure so transparent that the bench behind
with its sheets of drawings was absolutely distinct; but this phantasm
vanished as I rubbed my eyes. The Time Machine had gone. Save for a
subsiding stir of dust, the further end of the laboratory was empty. A
pane of the skylight had, apparently, just been blown in.

I felt an unreasonable amazement. I knew that something strange had
happened, and for the moment could not distinguish what the strange
thing might be. As I stood staring, the door into the garden opened, and
the man-servant appeared.

We looked at each other. Then ideas began to come. "Has Mr. ---- gone out
that way?" said I.

"No, sir. No one has come out this way. I was expecting to find him
here."

At that I understood. At the risk of disappointing Richardson I stayed
on, waiting for the Time Traveller; waiting for the second, perhaps
still stranger story, and the specimens and photographs he would bring
with him. But I am beginning now to fear that I must wait a lifetime.
The Time Traveller vanished three years ago. And, as everybody knows
now, he has never returned.


Epilogue One cannot choose but wonder. Will he ever return? It may be
that he swept back into the past, and fell among the blood-drinking,
hairy savages of the Age of Unpolished Stone; into the abysses of the
Cretaceous Sea; or among the grotesque saurians, the huge reptilian
brutes of the Jurassic times. He may even now--if I may use the
phrase--be wandering on some plesiosaurus-haunted Oolitic coral reef, or
beside the lonely saline lakes of the Triassic Age. Or did he go
forward, into one of the nearer ages, in which men are still men, but
with the riddles of our own time answered and its wearisome problems
solved? Into the manhood of the race: for I, for my own part cannot
think that these latter days of weak experiment, fragmentary theory, and
mutual discord are indeed man's culminating time! I say, for my own
part. He, I know--for the question had been discussed among us long
before the Time Machine was made--thought but cheerlessly of the
Advancement of Mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only
a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its
makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it
were not so. But to me the future is still black and blank--is a vast
ignorance, lit at a few casual places by the memory of his story. And I
have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers--shrivelled now,
and brown and flat and brittle--to witness that even when mind and
strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in
the heart of man.




THE EMPIRE OF THE ANTS


1.

When Captain Gerilleau received instructions to take his new gunboat,
the Benjamin Constant, to Badama on the Batemo arm of the Guaramadema
and there assist the inhabitants against a plague of ants, he suspected
the authorities of mockery. His promotion had been romantic and
irregular, the affections of a prominent Brazilian lady and the
captain's liquid eyes had played a part in the process, and the Diario
and O Futuro had been lamentably disrespectful in their comments. He
felt he was to give further occasion for disrespect.

He was a Creole, his conceptions of etiquette and discipline were
pure-blooded Portuguese, and it was only to Holroyd, the Lancashire
engineer, who had come over with the boat, and as an exercise in the use
of English--his "th" sounds were very uncertain--that he opened his
heart.

"It is in effect," he said, "to make me absurd! What can a man do
against ants? Dey come, dey go."

"They say," said Holroyd, "that these don't go. That chap you said was a
Sambo--"

"Zambo--it is a sort of mixture of blood."

"Sambo. He said the people are going!"

The captain smoked fretfully for a time. "Dese things 'ave to happen,"
he said at last. "What is it? Plagues of ants and suchlike as God wills.
Dere was a plague in Trinidad--the like ants that carry leaves. Orl der
oranges-trees, all der mangoes! What does it matter? Sometimes ant
armies come into your houses--fighting ants; a different sort. You go
and they clean the house. Then you come back again;--the house is clean,
like new! No cockroaches, no fleas, no jiggers in the floor."

"That Sambo chap," said Holroyd, "says these are a different sort of
ant."

The captain shrugged his shoulders, fumed, and gave his attention to a
cigarette.

Afterwards he reopened the subject. "My dear 'Olroyd, what am I to do
about des infernal ants?"

The captain reflected. "It is ridiculous," he said. But in the afternoon
he put on his full uniform and went ashore, and jars and boxes came back
to the ship and subsequently he did. And Holroyd sat on deck in evening
coolness and smoked profoundly and marvelled at Brazil. They were six
days up the Amazon, some hundreds of miles from the ocean, and east and
west of him there was horizon like the sea, and to the south nothing but
a sand-bank island with some tufts of scrub. The water was always
running like a sluice, thick with dirt, animated with crocodiles and
hovering birds, and fed by some inexhaustible source of tree trunks; and
the waste of it, the headlong waste of it, filled his soul. The town of
Alemquer, with its meagre church, its thatched sheds for houses, its
discoloured ruins of ampler days, seemed a little thing lost in this
wilderness of Nature, a sixpence dropped on Sahara. He was a young man,
this was his first site of the tropics, he came straight from England,
where Nature is hedged, ditched, and drained into the perfection of
submission, and he had suddenly discovered the insignificance of man.
For six days they had been steaming up the sea by unfrequented channels,
and man had been as rare as a rare butterfly. One saw one day a canoe,
another day a distant station, the next no men at all. He began to
perceive that man is indeed a rare animal, having but a precarious hold
upon this land.

He perceived it more clearly as the days passed, and he made his devious
way to the Batemo, in the company of this remarkable commander, who
ruled over one big gun, and was forbidden to waste his ammunition.
Holroyd was learning Spanish industriously, but he was still in the
present tense and substantive stage of speech, and the only other person
who had any words of English was a negro stoker, who had them all wrong.
The second in command was a Portuguese, da Cunha, who spoke French, but
it was a different sort of French from the French Holroyd had learned in
Southport, and their intercourse was confined to politenesses and simple
propositions about weather. And the weather, like everything else in
this amazing new world, the weather had no human aspect, and was hot by
night and hot by day, and the air steam, even the wind was hot steam,
smelling of vegetation in decay: and the alligators and the strange
birds, the flies of many sorts and sizes, the beetles, the ants, the
snakes and monkeys seemed to wonder what man was doing in an atmosphere
that had no gladness in its sunshine and no coolness in its night. To
wear clothing was intolerable, but to cast it aside was to scorch by
day, and expose an ampler area to the mosquitoes by night; to go on deck
by day was to be blinded by glare and to stay below was to suffocate.
And in the daytime came certain flies, extremely clever and noxious
about one's wrist and ankle. Captain Gerilleau, who was Holroyd's sole
distraction from these physical distresses, developed into a formidable
bore, telling the simple story of his heart's affections day by day, a
string of anonymous women, as if he was telling beads. Sometimes he
suggested sport, and they shot at alligators, and at rare intervals they
came to human aggregations in the waste of trees, and stayed for a day
or so, and drank and sat about; and one night, danced with Creole girls,
who found Holroyd's poor elements of Spanish, without either past tense
or future, amply sufficient for their purposes. But these were mere
luminous chinks in the long grey passage of the streaming river, up
which the throbbing engines beat. A certain liberal heathen deity, in
the shape of demi-john, held seductive court aft, and it is probable,
forward.

But Gerilleau learned things about the ants, more things and more, at
this stopping-place and that, and became interested in his mission.

"Dey are a new sort of ant," he said. "We have got to be--what do you
call it--? Entomologie? Big. Five centimetres! Some bigger! It is
ridiculous. We are like monkeys--sent to pick insects... But dey are
eating up the country."

He burst out indignantly. "Suppose--suddenly, there are complications
with Europe. Here am I--soon we shall be above the Rio Negro--and my gun,
useless!"

He nursed his knee and mused.

"Dose people who were dere at de dancing place, dey 'ave come down. Dey
'ave lost all they got. De ants come to deir house one afternoon.
Everyone run out. You know when de ants come one must--every one runs
out and they go over the house. If you stayed they'd eat you. See? Well,
presently dey go back; dey say, 'The ants 'ave gone...' De ants 'aven't
gone. Dey try to go in--de son, 'e gose in. De ants fight."

"Swarm over him?"

"Bite 'im. Presently he comes out again--screaming and running. He runs
past them to river. See? He get into de water and drowns de ants--yes."
Gerilleau paused, brought his liquid eyes close to Holroyd's face,
tapped Holroyd's knee with his knuckle. "That night he dies, just as if
he was stung by snake."

"Poisoned--by the ants?"

"Who knows?" Gerilleau shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps they bit him
badly... When I joined dis service I joined to fight men. Dese things,
dese ants, dey come and go. It is no business for men."

After that he talked frequently of ants to Holroyd, and whenever they
chanced to drift against any speck of humanity in that waste of water
and sunshine and distant trees, Holroyd's improving knowledge of the
language enabled him to recognise the ascendant word Sauba, more and
more completely dominating the whole.

He perceived the ants were becoming interesting, and the nearer he drew
to them the more interesting they became. Gerilleau abandoned his old
themes almost suddenly, and the Portuguese lieutenant became a
conversational figure; he knew something about the leaf-cutting ant, and
expanded his knowledge. Gerilleau sometimes rendered what he had to tell
to Holroyd. He told of the little workers that swarm and fight, and the
big workers that command and rule, and how these latter always crawled
to the neck and how their bites drew blood. He told how they cut leaves
and made fungus beds, and how their nests in Caracas are sometimes a
hundred yards across. Two days the three men spent disputing whether
ants have eyes. The discussion grew dangerously heated on the second
afternoon, and Holroyd saved the situation by going ashore in a boat to
catch ants and see. He captured various specimens and returned and some
had eyes and some hadn't. Also, they argued, do ants bite or sting?

"Dese ants," said Gerilleau, after collecting information at a rancho,
"have big eyes. They don't run about blind--not as most ants do. No! Dey
get in corners and watch what you do."

"And they sting?" asked Holroyd.

"Yes. Dey sting. Dere is poison in the sting." He meditated. "I do not
see what men can do against ants. Dey come and go."

"But these don't go."

"They will," said Gerilleau.

Past Tamandu there is a long low coast of eighty miles without any
population, and then ones comes to the confluence of the main river and
the Batemo arm, like a great lake, and then the forest came nearer, came
at last intimately near. The character of the channel changes, snags
abound, and the Benjamin Constant moored by a cable that night, under
the very shadow of dark trees. For the first time for many days came a
spell of coolness, and Holroyd and Gerilleau sat late, smoking cigars
and enjoying this delicious sensation. Gerilleau's mind was full of ants
and what they could do. He decided to sleep at last, and lay down on a
mattress on deck, a man hopelessly perplexed; his last words, when he
already seemed asleep, were to ask, with a flourish of despair: "What
can one do with ants...? De whole thing is absurd."

Holroyd was left to scratch his bitten wrists, and meditate alone.

He sat on the bulwark and listened to changes in Gerilleau's breathing
until he was fast asleep, and then the ripple and lap of stream took his
mind, and brought back that sense of immensity that had been growing
upon him since first he had left Para and come up the river. The monitor
showed but one small light, and there was first a little talking forward
and then stillness. His eyes went from the dim black outlines of the
middle works of the gunboat towards the bank, to the black overwhelming
mysteries of forest, lit now and then by a fire-fly, and never still
from the murmur of alien and mysterious activities...

It was the inhuman immensity of this land that astonished and oppressed
him. He knew the skies were empty of men, the stars were specks in an
incredible vastness of space; he knew the ocean was enormous and
untamable, but in England he had come to think of the land as man's. In
England it is indeed man's, the wild things live by sufferance, grow on
lease, everywhere the roads, the fences, and absolute security runs. In
an atlas, too, the land is man's, and all coloured to show his claim to
it--in vivid contrast to the universal independent blueness of the sea.
He had taken it for granted that a day would come when everywhere about
the earth, plough and culture, light tramways, and good roads, an
ordered security, would prevail. But now he doubted.

This forest was interminable, it had an air of being invincible, and Man
seemed at best an infrequent precarious intruder. One travelled for
miles amidst the still silent struggle of giant trees, of strangulating
creepers, of assertive flowers, everywhere the alligator, the turtle,
and endless varieties of bird and insects seemed at home, dwelt
irreplaceable--but man, man at most held a footing upon resentful
clearings, fought weeds, fought beasts and insects for the barest
foothold, fell a prey to snake and beast, insects and fever, and was
presently carried away. In many places down the river he had been
manifestly driven back, this deserted creek or that preserved the name
of a casa, and here and there ruinous white walls and shattered towers
enforced the lesson. The puma, the jaguar, were more the masters here...

Who are the real masters?

In a few miles of this forest there must be more ants than there are men
in the world! This seemed to Holroyd a perfectly new idea. In a few
thousand years men had emerged from barbarism to a stage of civilisation
that made them feel lords of the future and masters of earth! But what
was to prevent ants evolving also? Such ants as one knew lived in little
communities of a few thousand individuals, made no concerted efforts
against the greater world. But they had a language, they had an
intelligence! Why should things stop at that any more then men had
stopped at the barbaric stage? Suppose presently the ants began to store
knowledge, just as men had done by means of books and records, use
weapons, form great empires, sustain a planned and organised war?

Things came back to him that Gerilleau had gathered about these ants
they were approaching. They used a poison like the poison of snakes.
They obeyed greater leaders even as the leaf-cutting ants do. They were
carnivorous, and where they came they stayed...

The forest was very still. The water lapped incessantly against the
side. About the lantern overhead there eddied a noiseless whirl of
phantom moths.

Gerilleau stirred in the darkness and sighed. "What can one do?" he
murmured, and turned over and was still again.

Holroyd was roused from meditations that were becoming sinister by the
hum of a mosquito.


2.

The next morning Holroyd learned they were within forty kilometers of
Badama, and his interest in the banks intensified. He came up whenever
an opportunity offered to examine his surroundings. He could see no
signs of human occupation whatever, save for a weedy ruin of a house and
green-stained facade of the long-deserted monastery at Moju, with a
forest tree growing out of a vacant window space, and great creepers
netted across its vacant portals. Several flights of strange yellow
butterflies with semi-transparent wings crossed the river that morning,
and many alighted on the monitor and were killed by men. It was towards
afternoon that they came upon the derelict cuberta.

She did not at first appear to be derelict; both her sails were set and
hanging slack in the afternoon calm, and there was the figure of a man
sitting on the fore planking beside the shipped sweeps. Another man
appeared to be sleeping face downwards on the sort of longitudinal
bridge, these big canoes have in the waist. But it was presently
apparent, from the sway of her rudder and the way she drifted into the
course of the gunboat, that something was out of order with her.
Gerilleau surveyed her through a field-glass, and became interested in
queer darkness of the face of the sitting man, a red-faced man he
seemed, without a nose--crouching he was rather than sitting, and the
longer the captain looked the less he liked to look at him, and the less
able he was to take his glasses away.

But he did so at last, and went a little way to call up Holroyd. Then he
went back to hail the cuberta. He hailed her again, and so she drove
past him. Santa Rosa stood out clearly as her name.

As she came by and into the wake of the monitor, she pitched a little,
and suddenly the figure of the crouching man collapsed as though all
it's joints had given way. His hat fell off, his head was not nice to
look at, and his body flopped lax and rolled out of sight behind the
bulwarks.

"Caramba!" cried Gerilleau, and resorted to Holroyd forthwith.

Holroyd was halfway up the companion. "Did you see dat?" said the
captain.

"Dead!" said Holroyd. "Yes. You'd better send a boat aboard. There's
something wrong."

"Did you--by any chance--see his face?"

"What was it like?"

"It was--ugh--! I have no words." And the captain suddenly turned his
back on Holroyd and became a active and strident commander.

The gunboat came about, steamed parallel to the erratic course of the
canoe, and dropped the boat with Lieutenant da Cunha and three sailors
to board her. Then the curiosity of the captain made him draw up almost
alongside as the lieutenant got aboard, so that the whole of the Santa
Rosa deck and hold, was visible to Holroyd.

He saw now clearly that the sole crew of the vessel was these two dead
men, and though he could not see their faces, he saw by their
outstretched hands, which were all of ragged flesh, that they had been
subjected to some strange exceptional process of decay. For a moment his
attention, concentrated on these two enigmatical bundles of dirty cloths
and laxly flung limbs, and then his eyes went forward to discover the
open hold piled high with trunks and cases, and aft, to where the little
cabin gaped inexplicably empty. Then he became aware that the planks of
the middle decking were dotted with moving black specks.

His attention was riveted by these specks. They were all walking in
directions radiating from the fallen man in a manner--the image came
unsought to his mind--like the crowd dispersing from a bull-fight.

He became aware of Gerilleau beside him. "Capo," he said, "have you your
glasses? Can you focus as closely as those planks there?"

Gerilleau made an effort, grunted, and handed him the glasses.

There followed a moment of scrutiny. "It's ants," said the Englishman,
and handed the focused field-glasses back to Gerilleau.

His impression of them was of a crowd of large black ants, very like
ordinary ants except for size, and for the fact some of the larger of
them bore a sort of clothing of grey. But at the time his inspection was
too brief for particulars. The head of Lieutenant da Cunha appeared over
the side of the cuberta, and a brief colloquy ensued.

"You must go aboard," said Gerilleau.

The lieutenant objected that the boat was full of ants.

"You have your boots," said Gerilleau.

The lieutenant changed the subject. "How did these men die?" he asked.

Captain Gerilleau embarked upon speculation that Holroyd could not
follow, and the two men disputed with a certain vehemence. Holroyd took
up the field-glass and resumed his scrutiny, first of ants and then of
the dead man amidships.

He has described these ants to me very particularly.

He says they were as large as any ants he has ever seen, black and
moving with a steady deliberation very different from the mechanical
fussiness of the common ant. About one in twenty was much larger than
it's fellows, and with an exceptionally large head. These reminded him
at once of the master workers who are said to rule over the leaf-cutter
ants; like them they seemed to be directing and co-ordinating the
general movements. They tilted their bodies back in a manner altogether
singular, as if they made some use of the fore feet. And he had a
curious fancy, that he was too far off to verify, that most of these
ants of both kinds were wearing accoutrements, had things strapped about
their bodies by bright white bands like white metal threads...

He put down the glasses abruptly, realising that the question of
discipline between the captain and his subordinate had become acute.

"It is your duty," said the captain, "to go aboard. It is my
instructions."

The lieutenant seemed on the verge of refusing. The head of one of the
mulatto sailors appeared beside him.

"I believe these men were killed by ants," said Holroyd abruptly in
English.

The captain burst into rage. He made no answer to Holroyd. "I have
commanded you to go aboard," he screamed to his subordinate in
Portuguese. "If you do not go aboard forthwith it is mutiny--rank
mutiny. Mutiny and cowardice! Where is the courage that should animate
us? I will have you in irons, I will have you shot like a dog." He began
a torrent of abuse and curses, he danced to and fro. He shook his fists,
he behaved as if beside himself with rage, and the lieutenant, white and
still, stood looking at him. The crew appeared forward, with amazed
faces.

Suddenly, in a pause of this outbreak, the lieutenant came to some
heroic decision, saluted, drew himself together and clambered upon the
deck of the cuberta.

"Ah!" said Gerilleau, and his mouth shut like a trap. Holroyd saw the
ants retreating before da Cunha's boots. The Portuguese walked slowly to
the fallen man, stooped down, hesitated, clutched his coat and turned
him over. A black swarm of ants rushed out of the clothes, and da Cunha
stepped back very quickly and trod two or three times on the deck.

Holroyd put up the glasses. He saw the scattered ants about the
invader's feet, and doing what he had never seen ants doing before. They
had nothing of the blind movements of the common ant; they were looking
at him--as a rallying crowd of men might look at some gigantic monster
that had dispersed it.

"How did he die?" the captain shouted.

Holroyd understood the Portuguese to say the body was too much eaten to
tell.

"What is there forward?" asked Gerilleau.

The lieutenant walked a few paces, and began his answer in Portuguese.
He stopped abruptly and beat off something from his leg. He made some
peculiar steps as if he was trying to stamp on something invisible, and
went quickly towards the side. Then he controlled himself, turned about,
walked deliberately forward to the hold, clambered up to the fore
decking, from which the sweeps are worked, stooped for a time over the
second man, groaned audibly, and made his way back and aft to the cabin;
moving very rigidly. He turned and began a conversation with his
captain, cold and respectful in tone on either side, contrasting vividly
with the wrath and insult of a few moments before. Holroyd gathered only
fragments of it's purport.

He reverted to the field-glass, and was surprised to find the ants had
vanished from all exposed surfaces of the deck. He turned towards the
shadow beneath the decking, and it seemed to him they were full of
watching eyes.

The cuberta, it was agreed, was derelict, but too full of ants to put
men aboard to sit and sleep: it must be towed. The lieutenant went
forward to take in and adjust the cable, and the men in the boat stood
up to be ready to help him. Holroyd's glasses searched the canoe.

He became more and more impressed by the fact that a great if minute and
furtive activity was going on. He perceived that a number of gigantic
ants--they seemed nearly a couple of inches in length--carrying
oddly-shaped burthens for which he could imagine no use--were moving in
rushes from one point of obscurity to another. They did not move in
columns across the exposed places, but in open, spaced-out lines, oddly
suggestive of the rushes of modern infantry advancing under fire. A
number were taking cover under the dead man's clothes, and a perfect
swarm was gathering along the side over which da Cunha must presently
go.

He did not see them actually rush for the lieutenant as he returned, but
he has no doubt they did make a concerted rush. Suddenly the lieutenant
was shouting and cursing and beating at his legs. "I'm stung!" he
shouted, with a face of hate and accusation towards Gerilleau.

Then he vanished over the side, dropped into his boat, and plunged at
once into the water. Holroyd heard the splash.

The three men in the boat pulled him out and brought him aboard, and
that night he died.


3.

Holroyd and the captain came out of the cabin in which the swollen
and contorted body of the lieutenant lay, and stood together at the
stern of the monitor, staring at the sinister vessel they trailed behind
them. It was a close, dark night that had only phantom flickers of sheet
lightning to illuminate it. The cuberta, a vague black triangle, rocked
about in the steamer's wake, her sails bobbing and flapping, and the
black smoke from the funnels, spark-lit ever and again, streamed over
her swaying masts.

Gerilleau's mind was inclined to run on the unkind things the lieutenant
had said in the heat of his last fever.

"He says I murdered 'im," he protested. "It is simply absurd. Someone 'ad
to go aboard. Are we to run away from these confounded ants whenever
they show up?"

Holroyd said nothing. He was thinking of a disciplined rush of little
black shapes across bare sunlit planking.

"It was his place to go," harped Gerilleau. "He died in the execution of
his duty. What has he to complain of? Murdered...! But the poor fellow
was--what is it--? Demented. He was not in his right mind. The poison
swelled him... U'm."

They came to a long silence.

"We will sink that canoe--burn it."

"And then?"

The inquiry irritated Gerilleau. His shoulders went up, his hands flew
out at right angles from his body. "What is one to do?" he said, his
voice going up to an angry squeak.

"Anyhow," he broke out vindictively, "every ant in dat cuberta--! I will
burn dem alive!"

Holroyd was not moved to conversation. A distant ululation of howling
monkeys filled the sultry night with foreboding sounds, and as the
gunboat drew near the black mysterious banks this was reinforced by a
depressing clamour of frogs.

"What is one to do?" the captain repeated after a vast interval, and
suddenly becoming active and savage and blasphemous, decided to burn the
Santa Rosa without further delay. Everyone aboard was pleased by that
idea, everyone helped with zest; they pulled in the cable, cut it, and
dropped the boat and fired her with tow and kerosene, and soon the
cuberta was crackling and flaring merrily amidst the immensities of the
tropical night. Holroyd watched the mounting yellow flare against the
blackness, and the livid flashes of sheet lightning that came and went
above the forest summits, throwing them into momentary silhouette, and
his stoker stood behind him watching also.

The stoker was stirred to the depths of his linguistics. "Sauba go pop,
pop," he said. "Wahaw!" and laughed richly.

But Holroyd was thinking that these little creatures on the decked canoe
had also eyes and brains.

The whole thing impressed him as incredibly foolish and wrong, but--what
was one to do? This question came back enormously reinforced on the
morrow, when at last the gunboat reached Badama.

This place, with its leaf-thatch-covered houses and sheds, its
creeper-invaded sugar-mill, its little jetty of timber and canes, was
very still in the morning heat, and showed never a sign of living men.
Whatever ants there were at that distance were too small to see.

"All the people have gone," said Gerilleau, "but we will do one thing
anyhow. We will 'oot and vissel."

So Holroyd hooted and whistled.

Then the captain fell into a doubting fit of the worst kind. "Dere is
one thing we can do," he said presently.

"What's that?" said Holroyd.

"'Oot and vissel again."

So they did.

The captain walked his deck and gesticulated to himself. He seemed to
have many things on his mind. Fragments of speeches came from his lips.
He appeared to be addressing some imaginary public tribunal either in
Spanish or Portuguese. Holroyd's improving ear detected something about
ammunition. He came out of these preoccupations suddenly into English.
"My dear 'Olroyd!" he cried, and broke off with "But what can one do?"

They took the boat and field-glasses, and went close in to examine the
place. They made out a number of big ants, whose still postures had a
certain effect of watching them, dotted about the edge of the rude
embarkation jetty. Gerilleau tried ineffectual pistol shots at these.
Holroyd thinks he distinguished curious earthworks running between the
nearer houses, that may have been the work of insect conquerors of those
human habitations. The explorers pulled past the jetty, and became aware
of a human skeleton wearing a loin cloth, and very bright and clean and
shining, lying beyond. They came to a pause regarding this...

"I 'ave all dose lives to consider," said Gerilleau suddenly.

Holroyd turned and stared at the captain, realising slowly that he
referred to the unappetising mixture of races that constituted his crew.

"To send a landing party--it is impossible--impossible. They will be
poisoned, they will swell, they will swell up and abuse me and die. It
is totally impossible... If we land, I must land alone, alone in thick
boots and with my life in my hand. Perhaps I should live. Or again--I
might not land. I do not know. I do not know."

Holroyd thought he did, but he said nothing.

"De whole thing," said Gerilleau suddenly, "'as been got up to make me
ridiculous. De whole thing!"

They paddled about and regarded the clean white skeleton from various
points of view, and then they returned to the gunboat. Then Gerilleau's
indecisions became terrible. Steam was got up, and in the afternoon the
monitor went on up the river with an air of going to ask somebody
something, and by sunset came back again, and anchored. A thunderstorm
gathered and broke furiously, and then the night became beautifully cool
and quiet and everyone slept on deck. Except Gerilleau, who tossed about
and muttered. In the dawn he awakened Holroyd.

"Lord!" said Holroyd, "what now?"

"I have decided," said the captain.

"What--to land?" said Holroyd, sitting up brightly.

"No!" said the captain, and was for a time very reserved. "I have
decided," he repeated, and Holroyd manifested symptoms of impatience.

"Well--yes," said the captain. "I shall fire de big gun!"

And he did! Heaven knows what the ants thought of it, but he did. He
fired it twice with great sternness and ceremony. All the crew had
wadding in their ears, and there was effect of going into action about
the whole affair, and first hit and wrecked the old sugar-mill, and then
they smashed the abandoned store behind the jetty. And then Gerilleau
experienced the inevitable reaction.

"It is no good," he said to Holroyd; "no good at all. No sort of bally
good. We must go back--for instructions. Dere will be de devil of a row
about dis ammunition--oh! De devil of a row! You don't know, 'Olroyd..."

He stood regarding the world in infinite perplexity for a space.

"But what else was there to do?" he cried.

In the afternoon the monitor started down stream again, and in the
evening a landing party took the body of the lieutenant and buried it on
the bank upon which the new ants have so far not appeared...


4.

I heard this story in a fragmentary state from Holroyd not three
weeks ago. These new ants have got into his brain, and he has come back
to England with the idea, as he says, of "exciting people" about them
"before it is too late." He says they threaten British Guiana, which
cannot be much over a trifle of a thousand miles from their present
sphere of activity, and that the Colonial Office ought to get to work
upon them at once. He declaims with great passion: "These are
intelligent ants. Just think what that means!"

There can be no doubt they are a serious pest, and that the Brazilian
Government is well advised in offering a prize of five hundred pounds
for some effectual method of extirpation. It is certain too, that since
they first appeared in the hills beyond Badama, about three years ago,
they have achieved extraordinary conquests. The whole of the south bank
of the Batemo River, for nearly sixty miles, they have in their
effectual occupation; they have driven men out completely, occupied
plantations and settlements, and boarded and captured at least one ship.
It is even said they have in some inexplicable way bridged the very
considerable Capuarana arm and pushed many miles towards the Amazon
itself. There can be little doubt that they are far more reasonable and
with a far better social organisation then any previously known ant
species; instead of being dispersed societies they are organised into
what is in effect a single nation; but their peculiar and immediate
formidableness lies not so much in this as in the intelligent use they
make of poison against their enemies. It would seem this poison of
theirs is closely akin to snake poison, and it is highly probable they
actually manufacture it, and that the larger individuals among them
carry the needle-like crystals of it in their attacks upon men.

Of course it is extremely difficult to get any detailed information
about these new competitors for sovereignty of the globe. No
eye-witnesses of their activity, except for such glimpses as Holroyd's,
have survived the encounter. The most extraordinary legends of their
prowess and capacity are in circulation in the region of the Upper
Amazon, and grow daily as the steady advance of the invader stimulates
men's imaginations through their fears. These strange little creatures
are credited not only with the use of implements and knowledge of fire
and metals and with organised feats of engineering that stagger our
Northern minds--used as we are to such feats as that of the Saubas of
Rio de Janeiro, who, in 1841, drove a tunnel under Parahyba, where it is
as wide as the Thames at London Bridge--but with an organised and
detailed method of record and communication analogous to our books. So
far their action has been a steady progressive settlement, involving the
flight or slaughter of every human being in the new areas they invade.
They are increasing rapidly in numbers, and Holroyd at least is firmly
convinced that they will finally dispossess man over the whole of
tropical South America.

And why should they stop at tropical South America?

Well, there they are, anyhow. By 1911 or thereabouts, if they go on as
they are going, they ought to strike the Capuarana Extension Railway,
and force themselves upon the attention of the European capitalist.

By 1920 they will be halfway down the Amazon. I fix 1950 or '60 at least
for the discovery of Europe.




A VISION OF JUDGMENT


1.

Bru-a-a-a.

I listened, not understanding. Wa-ra-ra-ra.

"Good Lord!" said I, still only half awake. "What an infernal shindy!"
Ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra-ra Ta-ra-rra-ra.

"It's enough," said I, "to wake--" and stopped short. Were was I?
Ta-rra-rara--louder and louder.

"It's either some new invention--" Toora-toora-toora! Deafening!

"No," said I, speaking loud in order to hear myself. "That's the Last
Trump." Tooo-rraa!


2.

The last note jerked me out of my grave like a hooked minnow.

I saw my monument (rather a mean little affair, and I wished I knew
who'd done it), and the old elm tree and the sea view vanished like a
puff of steam, and then all about me--a multitude no man could number,
nations, tongues, kingdoms, peoples--children of all ages, in an
amphitheatral space as vast as the sky. And over against us, seated on a
throne of dazzling white cloud, the Lord God and all the host of his
angels. I recognised Azreal by his darkness and Michael by his sword,
and the great angel who had blown the trumpet stood with the trumpet
still half raised.


3.

"Prompt," said the little man beside me. "Very prompt. Do you see the
angel with the book?"

He was ducking and craning his head about to see over and under and
between the souls that crowded round us. "Everybody's here," he said.
"Everybody. And now we shall know--"

"There's Darwin," he said, going off at a tangent. "He'll catch it! And
there--you see--? That tall, important-looking man trying to catch the
eye of the Lord God, that's the Duke. But there's a lot of people one
doesn't know.

"Oh! There's Priggles, the publisher. I have always wondered about
printers' overs. Priggles was a clever man... But we shall know
now--even about him.

"I shall hear all that. I shall get most of the fun before... My
letter's S."

He drew the air in between his teeth.

"Historical characters, too. See? That's Henry the Eighth. There'll be a
good bit of evidence. Oh, damn! He's Tudor."

He lowered his voice. "Notice this chap, just in front of us, all
covered with hair. Paleolithic, you know. And there again--"

But I did not heed him, because I was looking at the Lord God.


4.

"Is this all?" asked the Lord God.

The angel at the book--it was one of countless volumes, like the British
Museum Reading-room Catalogue, glanced at us and seemed to count us in
the instant.

"That's all," he said, and added: "It was, O God, a very little planet."

The eyes of God surveyed us.

"Let us begin," said the Lord God.


5.

The angel opened the book and read a name. It was a name full of A's,
and the echoes of it came back out of the uttermost parts of space. I
did not catch it clearly, because the little man beside me said, in a
sharp jerk, "What's that?" It sounded like "Ahab" to me; but it could
not have been the Ahab of Scripture.

Instantly a small black figure was lifted up to a puffy cloud at the
very feet of God. It was a stiff little figure, dressed in rich
outlandish robes and crowned, and it folded its arms and scowled.

"Well?" said God, looking down at him.

We were privileged to hear the reply, and indeed the acoustic properties
of the place were marvellous.

"I plead guilty," said the little figure.

"Tell them what you have done," said the Lord God.

"I was a king," said the little figure, "a great king, and I was lustful
and proud and cruel. I made wars, I devastated countries, I built
palaces, and the mortar was the blood of men. Hear, O God, the witnesses
against me, calling to you for vengeance. Hundreds and thousands of
witnesses." He waved his hands towards us. "And worse! I took a
prophet--one of your prophets--"

"One of my prophets," said the Lord God.

"And because he would not bow to me, I tortured him for four days and
nights, and in the end he died. I did more, O God, I blasphemed. I
robbed you of your honours--"

"Robbed me of my honours," said the Lord God.

"And caused myself to be worshipped in your stead. No evil was there,
but I practised it; no cruelty wherewith I did not stain my soul. And at
last you smote me, O God!"

God raised his eyebrows slightly.

"And I was slain in battle. And so I stand before you, meet for your
nethermost Hell! Out of your greatness daring no lies, daring no pleas,
but telling the truth of my iniquities before all mankind."

He ceased. His face I saw distinctly, and it seemed to me white and
terrible and proud and strangely noble. I thought of Milton's Satan.

"Most of that is from the Obelisk," said the recording Angel, finger on
page.

"It is," said the Tyrannous Man, with a faint touch of surprise.

Then suddenly God bent forward and took this man in his hand, and held
him up on his palm as if to see him better. He was just a little dark
stroke in the middle of God's palm.

"Did he do all this?" said the Lord God.

The recording angel flattened his book with his hand.

"In a way," said the recording angel, carelessly.

Now when I looked again at the little man his face had changed in a very
curious manner. He was looking at the recording angel with strange
apprehension in his eyes, and one hand fluttered to his mouth. Just the
movement of a muscle or so, and all that dignity of defiance was gone.

"Read," said the Lord God.

And the angel read, explaining very carefully and fully all the
wickedness of the Wicked Man. It was quite a intellectual treat--A
little "daring" in places, I thought, but of course Heaven has its
privileges...


6.

Everybody was laughing. Even the prophet of the Lord whom the Wicked
Man had tortured had a smile on his face. The Wicked Man was really such
a preposterous little fellow.

"And then," reading the recording angel, with a smile that set us all
agog, "one day, when he was a little irascible from over-eating, he--"

"Oh, not that," cried the Wicked Man, "nobody knew of that."

"It didn't happen," screamed the Wicked Man. "I was bad--I was really
bad. Frequently bad, but there was nothing so silly--so absolutely
silly--"

The angel went on reading.

"O God!" cried the Wicked Man. "Don't let them know that! I'll repent!
I'll apologise..."

The Wicked Man on God's hand began to dance and weep. Suddenly shame
overcame him. He made a wild rush to jump off the ball of God's little
finger, but God stopped him by a dexterous turn of the wrist. Then he
made a rush for a gap between hand and thumb, but thumb closed. And all
the while the angel went on reading--reading. The Wicked Man rushed to
and fro across God's palm, and then suddenly turned about and fled up
the sleeve of God.

I expected God would turn him out, but the mercy of God is infinite.

The recording angel paused.

"Eh?" said the recording angel.

"Next," said God, and before the recording angel could call upon the
name, a hairy creature in filthy rags stood upon God's palm.


7.

"Has God got Hell up his sleeve then?" said the little man beside me.

"Is there a Hell?" I asked.

"If you notice," he said--he peered between the feet of the great
angels--"there's no particular indication of the Celestial City."

"Ssh!" said a little woman near us, scowling. "Hear this blessed Saint!"


8.

"He was Lord of the Earth, but I was the prophet of the God of
Heaven," cried the Saint, "and all the people marvelled at the sign. For
I, O God, knew of the glories of thy Paradise. No pain, no hardship,
gashing with knives, splinters thrust under my nails, strips of flesh
flayed off, all for the glory and honour of God."

God smiled.

"And at last I went, I in my rags and sores, smelling of my holy
discomforts--"

Gabriel laughed abruptly.

"And lay outside his gates, as a sign, as a wonder--"

"As a perfect nuisance," said the recording angel, and began to read,
heedless of the fact that the Saint was still speaking of gloriously
unpleasant things he had done that Paradise might be his.

And behold, in that book the record of the Saint also was a revelation,
a marvel.

It seemed not ten seconds before the Saint, also, was rushing to and fro
over the great palm of God. Not ten seconds! And at last he also
shrieked beneath that pitiless and cynical exposition, and fled also,
even as the Wicked Man had fled, into the shadow of the sleeve. And it
was permitted us to see into the shadow of the sleeve. And the two sat
side by side, stark of all delusions, in the shadow of the robe of God's
charity, like brothers.

And thither also I fled in my turn.


9.

"And now," said God, as he shook us out of his sleeve upon the planet
he had given us to live upon, the planet that whirled about green Sirius
for a sun, "now that you understand me and each other a little better...
try again."

Then he and his great angels turned themselves about and suddenly had
vanished.

The Throne had vanished.

All about me was a beautiful land, more beautiful than any I had ever
seen before--waste, austere, and wonderful; and all about me were the
enlightened souls of men in new clean bodies...




THE LAND IRONCLADS (FIRST PUBLISHED IN DECEMBER, 1903.)


1.

The young lieutenant lay beside the war correspondent and admired the
idyllic calm of the enemy's lines through his field-glass.

"So far as I can see," he said at last, "one man."

"What's he doing?" asked the war correspondent.

"Field-glass at us," said the young lieutenant.

"And this is War!"

"No," said the young lieutenant; "it's Bloch."

"The game's a draw."

"No! They've got to win or else they lose. A draw's a win for our side."

They had discussed the political situation fifty times or so, and the
war correspondent was weary of it. He stretched out his limbs. "Aaai
s'pose it is!" he yawned.

Flut!

"What was that?"

"Shot at us."

The war correspondent shifted to a slightly lower position. "No one shot
at him," he complained.

"I wonder if they think we shall get so bored we shall go home?"

The war correspondent made no reply.

"There's the harvest, of course..."

They had been there a month. Since the first brisk movements after the
declaration of war things had gone slower and slower, until it seemed as
though the whole machine of events must have run down. To begin with,
they had, had almost a scampering time; the invader had come across the
frontier on the very dawn of the war in half-a-dozen parallel columns
behind a cloud of cyclists and cavalry, with a general air of coming
straight on the capital, and the defender horsemen had held him up, and
peppered him and forced him to open out to outflank, and had then bolted
to the next position in the most approved style, for a couple of days,
until in the afternoon, bump! They had the invader against their
prepared lines of defence. He did not suffer so much as had been hoped
and expected: he was coming on, it seemed, with his eyes open, his
scouts winded the guns, and down he sat at once without the shadow of an
attack and began grubbing trenches for himself, as though he meant to
sit down there to the very end of time. He was slow, but much more wary
than the world had been led to expect, and he kept convoys tucked in and
shielded his slow-marching infantry sufficiently well to prevent any
heavy adverse scoring.

"But he ought to attack," the young lieutenant had insisted.

"He'll attack us at dawn, somewhere along the lines. You'll get the
bayonets coming into the trenches just about when you see," the war
correspondent had held until a week ago.

The young lieutenant winked when he said that.

When one early morning the men the defenders sent to lie out five
hundred yards before the trenches, with a view to the unexpected
emptying of magazines into any night attack, gave way to causeless panic
and blazed away at nothing for ten minutes, the war correspondent
understood the meaning of that wink.

"What would you do if you were the enemy?" said the war correspondent,
suddenly.

"If I had men like I've got now?"

"Yes."

"Take those trenches."

"How?"

"Oh--dodges! Crawl out halfway at night before moonrise and get into
touch with the chaps we send out. Blaze at 'em if they tried to shift,
and so bag some of 'em in the daylight. Learn that patch of ground by
heart, lie all day in squatty holes, and come on nearer next night.
There's a bit over there, lumpy ground, where they could get across to
rushing distance--easy. In a night or so. It would be a mere game for
our fellows; it's what they're made for... Guns? Shrapnel and stuff
wouldn't stop good men who meant business."

"Why don't they do that?

"Their men aren't brutes enough; that's the trouble. They're a crowd of
devitalised townsmen, and that's the truth of the matter. They're
clerks, they're factory hands, they're students, they're civilised men.
They can write, they can talk, they can make and do all sorts of things,
but they're poor amateurs at war. They've got no physical staying power,
and that's the whole thing. They've never slept in the open one night in
their lives; they've never drunk anything but the purest water-company
water; they've never gone short of three meals a day since they left
their feeding-bottles. Half their cavalry never cocked leg over horse
till it enlisted six months ago. They ride their horses as though they
were bicycles--you watch 'em! They're fools at the game, and they know
it. Our boys of fourteen can give their grown men points... Very well--"

The war correspondent mused on his face with his nose between his
knuckles.

"If a decent civilisation," he said, "cannot produce better men for war
than--"

He stopped with belated politeness. "I mean--"

"Than our open-air life," said the young lieutenant.

"Exactly," said the war correspondent. "The civilisation has to stop."

"It looks like it," the young lieutenant admitted.

"Civilisation has science, you know," said the war correspondent. "It
invented and it makes the rifles and guns and things you use."

"Which our nice healthy hunters and stockmen and so on, rowdy-dowdy
cowpunchers and nigger-whackers, can use ten times better than--What's
that?"

"What?" said the war correspondent, and then seeing his companion busy
with his field-glass he produced his own: "Where?" said the war
correspondent, sweeping the enemy's lines.

"It's nothing," said the young lieutenant, still looking.

"What's nothing?"

The young lieutenant put down his glass and pointed. "I thought I saw
something there, behind the stems of those trees. Something black. What
it was I don't know."

The war correspondent tried to get even by intense scrutiny.

"It wasn't anything," said the young lieutenant, rolling over to regard
the darkling evening sky, and generalised: "There never will be anything
any more for ever. Unless--"

The war correspondent looked inquiry.

"They may get their stomachs wrong, or something--living without proper
drains."

A sound of bugles came from the tents behind. The war correspondent slid
backward down the sand and stood up. "Boom!" came from somewhere far
away to the left. "Halloa!" he said, hesitated, and crawled back to peer
again. "Firing at this time is jolly bad manners."

The young lieutenant was uncommunicative for a space.

Then he pointed to the distant clump of trees again. "One of our big
guns. They were firing at that," he said.

"The thing that wasn't anything?"

"Something over there, anyhow."

Both men were silent, peering through their glasses for a space. "Just
when it's twilight," the lieutenant complained. He stood up.

"I might stay here a bit," said the war correspondent.

The lieutenant shook his head. "There's nothing to see," he apologised,
and then went down to where his little squad of sun-brown, loose-limbed
men had been yarning in the trench. The war correspondent stood up also,
glanced for a moment at the businesslike bustle below him, gave perhaps
twenty seconds to those enigmatical trees again, then turned his face
toward the camp.

He found himself wondering whether his editor would consider the story
of how somebody thought he saw something black behind a clump of trees,
and how a gun was fired at this illusion by somebody else, too trivial
for public consumption.

"It's the only gleam of a shadow of interest," said the war
correspondent, "for ten whole days."

"No," he said presently; "I'll write that other article, 'Is War Played
Out?'"

He surveyed the darkling lines in perspective, the tangle of trenches
one behind another, one commanding another, which the defender had made
ready. The shadows and mists swallowed up their receding contours, and
here and there a lantern gleamed, and here and there knots of men were
busy about small fires. "No troops on earth could do it," he said...

He was depressed. He believed that there were other things in life
better worth having than proficiency in war; he believed that in the
heart of civilisation, for all its stresses, its crushing concentrations
of forces, its injustice and suffering, there lay something that might
be the hope of the world; and the idea that any people, by living in the
open air, hunting perpetually, losing touch with books and art and all
the things that intensify life, might hope to resist and break that
great development to the end of time, jarred on his civilised soul.

Apt to his thought came a file of the defender soldiers, and passed him
in the gleam of a swinging lamp that marked the way.

He glanced at their red-lit faces, and one shone out for a moment, a
common type of face in the defender's ranks: ill-shaped nose, sensuous
lips, bright clear eyes full of alert cunning, slouch hat cocked on one
side and adorned with the peacock's plume of the rustic Don Juan turned
soldier, a hard brown skin, a sinewy frame, an open, tireless stride,
and a master's grip on his rifle.

The war correspondent returned their salutations and went on his way.

"Louts," he whispered. "Cunning, elementary louts. And they are going to
beat the townsmen at the game of war!"

From the red glow among the nearer tents came first one and then
half-a-dozen hearty voices, bawling in a drawling unison the words of a
particularly slab and sentimental patriotic song.

"Oh, go it!" muttered the war correspondent, bitterly.


2.

It was opposite the trenches called after Hackbone's Hut that the
battle began. There the ground stretched broad and level between the
lines, with scarcely shelter for a lizard, and it seemed to the
startled, just-awakened men who came crowding into the trenches that
this was one more proof of that inexperience of the enemy of which they
had heard so much. The war correspondent would not believe his ears at
first, and swore that he and the war artist, who, still imperfectly
roused, was trying to put on his boots by the light of a match held in
his hand, were the victims of a common illusion. Then, after putting his
head in a bucket of cold water, his intelligence came back as he
towelled. He listened. "Gollys!" he said; "that's something more than
scare firing this time. It's like ten thousand carts on a bridge of tin."

There came a sort of enrichment to that steady uproar. "Machine-guns!"

Then, "Guns!"

The artist, with one boot on, thought to look at his watch, and went to
it hopping.

"Half an hour from dawn," he said. "You were right about their
attacking, after all..."

The war correspondent came out of the tent, verifying the presence of
chocolate in his pocket as he did so. He had to halt for a moment or so
until his eyes were toned down to the night a little. "Pitch!" he said.
He stood for a space to season his eyes before he felt justified in
striking out for a black gap among the adjacent tents. The artist coming
out behind him fell over a tent-rope. It was half-past two o'clock in
the morning of the darkest night in time, and against a sky of dull
black silk the enemy was talking search-lights, a wild jabber of
search-lights. "He's trying to blind our riflemen," said the war
correspondent with a flash, and waited for the artist and then set off
with a sort of discreet haste again. "Whoa!" he said, presently.
"Ditches!"

They stopped.

"It's the confounded search-lights," said the war correspondent.

They saw lanterns going to and fro, near by, and men falling in to march
down to the trenches. They were for following them, and then the artist
began to get his night eyes. "If we scramble this," he said, "and it's
only a drain, there's a clear run up to the ridge." And that way they
took. Lights came and went in the tents behind, as the men turned out,
and ever and again they came to broken ground and staggered and
stumbled. But in a little while they drew near the crest. Something that
sounded like the impact of a tremendous railway accident happened in the
air above them, and the shrapnel bullets seethed about them like a
sudden handful of hail. "Right-ho!" said the war correspondent, and soon
they judged they had come to the crest and stood in the midst of a world
of great darkness and frantic glares, whose principal fact was sound.

Right and left of them and all about them was the uproar, an army-full
of magazine fire, at first chaotic and monstrous, and then, eked out by
little flashes and gleams and suggestions, taking the beginnings of a
shape. It looked to the war correspondent as though the enemy must have
attacked in line and with his whole force--in which case he was either
being or was already annihilated.

"Dawn and the dead," he said, with his instinct for headlines. He said
this to himself, but afterwards by means of shouting he conveyed an idea
to the artist, "They must have meant it for a surprise," he said.

It was remarkable how the firing kept on. After a time he began to
perceive a sort of rhythm in this inferno of noise. It would
decline--decline perceptibly, droop towards something that was
comparatively a pause--a pause of inquiry. "Aren't you all dead yet?"
this pause seemed to say. The flickering fringe of rifle-flashes would
become attenuated and broken, and the whack-bang of enemy's big guns two
miles away there would come up out of the deeps. Then suddenly, east or
west of them, something would startle the rifles to a frantic outbreak
again.

The war correspondent taxed his brain for some theory of conflict that
would account for this, and was suddenly aware that the artist and he
were vividly illuminated. He could see the ridge on which they stood,
and before them in black outline a file of riflemen hurrying down
towards the nearer trenches. It became visible that a light rain was
falling, and farther away towards the enemy was a clear space with
men--"our men--?" Running across it in disorder. He saw one of those men
throw up his hands and drop. And something else black and shining loomed
up on the edge of the beam-coruscating flashes; and behind it and far
away a calm, white eye regarded the world. "Whit, whit, whit," sang
something in the air, and then the artist was running for cover, with
the war correspondent behind him. Bang came shrapnel, bursting close at
hand as it seemed, and our two men were lying flat in a dip in the
ground, and the light and everything had gone again, leaving a vast note
of interrogation upon the light.

The war correspondent came within brawling range. "What the deuce was
it? Shooting our men down!"

"Black," said the artist, "and like a fort. Not two hundred yards from
the first trench."

He sought for comparison in his mind. "Something between a big
blockhouse and a giant's dish-cover," he said.

"And they were running!" said the war correspondent.

"You'd run if a thing like that, with a search-light to help it, turned
up like a prowling nightmare in the middle of the night."

They crawled to what they judged the edge of the dip and lay regarding
the unfathomable dark. For a space they could distinguish nothing, and
then a sudden convergence of the search-lights of both sides brought the
strange thing out again.

In that flickering pallor it had the effect of a large and clumsy black
insect, an insect the size of an iron-clad cruiser, crawling obliquely
to the first line of trenches and firing shots out port-holes in its
side. And on its carcass the bullets must have been battering with more
than the passionate violence of hail on a roof of tin.

Then in the twinkling of an eye the curtain of the dark had fallen again
and the monster had vanished, but the crescendo of musketry marked its
approach to the trenches.

They were beginning to talk about the thing to each other, when a flying
bullet kicked dirt into the artist's face, and they decided abruptly to
crawl down into the cover of the trenches. They had got down with an
unobtrusive persistence into the second line, before the dawn had grown
clear enough for anything to be seen. They found themselves in a crowd
of expectant riflemen, all noisily arguing about what would happen next.
The enemy's contrivance had done execution upon the outlying men, it
seemed, but they did not believe it would do any more. "Come the day and
we'll capture the lot of them," said a burly soldier.

"Them?" said the war correspondent.

"They say there's a regular string of 'em, crawling along the front of
our lines... Who cares?"

The darkness filtered away so imperceptibly that at no moment could one
declare decisively that one could see. The search-lights ceased to sweep
hither and thither. The enemy's monsters were dubious patches of
darkness upon the dark, and then no longer dubious, and so they crept
out into distinctness. The war correspondent, munching chocolate
absent-mindedly, beheld at last a spacious picture of battle under the
cheerless sky, whose central focus was an array of fourteen or fifteen
huge clumsy shapes lying in perspective on the very edge of the first
line trenches, at intervals of perhaps three hundred yards, and
evidently firing down upon the crowded riflemen. They were so close in
that the defender's guns had ceased, and only the first line of trenches
was in action.

The second line commanded the first, and as the light grew, the war
correspondent could make out the riflemen who were fighting these
monsters, crouched in knots and crowds behind the transverse banks that
crossed the trenches against the eventuality of an enfilade. The
trenches close to the big machines were empty save for the crumpled
suggestions of dead and wounded men; the defenders had been driven right
and left as soon as the prow of land ironclad had loomed up over the
front of the trench. The war correspondent produced his field-glass, and
was immediately a centre of inquiry from the soldiers about him.

They wanted to look, they asked questions, and after he had announced
that the men across the traverses seemed unable to advance or retreat,
and were crouching under cover rather than fighting, he found it
advisable to loan his glasses to a burly and incredulous corporal. He
heard a strident voice, and found a lean and sallow soldier at his back
talking to the artist.

"There's chaps down there caught" the men was saying. "If they retreat
they got to expose themselves, and the fire's too straight..."

"They aren't firing much, but every shot's a hit."

"Who?"

"The chaps in that thing. The men who're coming up--"

"Coming up where?"

"We're evacuating them trenches where we can. Our chaps are coming back
up the zigzags... No end of 'em hit... But when we get clear our turn'll
come. Rather! Those things won't be able to cross a trench or get into
it; and before they can get back our guns'll smash 'em up. Smash 'em
right up. See?" A brightness came into his eyes. "Then we'll have a go
at the beggars inside," he said.

The war correspondent thought for a moment, trying to realise the idea.
Then he set himself to recover his field-glasses from the burly
corporal.

The daylight was getting clearer now. The clouds were lifting, and a
gleam of lemon-yellow amidst the level masses to the east portended
sunrise. He looked again at the land ironclad. As he saw it in the
bleak, grey dawn, lying obliquely upon the slope and on the very lip of
the foremost trench, the suggestion of a stranded vessel was very strong
indeed. It might have been from eighty to a hundred feet long--it was
about two hundred and fifty yards away--its vertical side was ten feet
high or so, smooth for that height, and then with a complex patterning
under the eaves of its flattish turtle cover. This patterning was a
close interlacing of port-holes, rifle barrels, and telescope
tubes--sham and real--indistinguishable one from the other. The thing
had come into such a position as to enfilade the trench, which was empty
now, so far as he could see, except for two or three crouching knots of
men and the tumbled dead. Behind it, across the plain, it had scored the
grass with a train of linked impressions, like the dotted tracings
sea-things leave in sand. Left and right of that track dead men and
wounded men were scattered--men it had picked off as they fled back from
their advanced positions in the search-light glare from the invader's
lines. And now it lay with its head projecting a little over the trench
it had won, as if it were a single sentient thing planning the next
phase of its attack...

He lowered his glasses and took a more comprehensive view of the
situation. These creatures of night had evidently won the first line of
trenches and the fight had come to a pause. In the increasing light he
could make out by a stray shot or a chance exposure that the defender's
marksmen were lying thick in the second and third line of trenches up
towards the low crest of the position, and in such of the zigzags as
gave them a chance of a converging fire. The men about him were talking
of guns. "We're in the line of big guns at the crest, but they'll soon
shift one to pepper them" the lean man said, reassuringly.

"Whup," said the corporal.

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Whir-r-r-r-r!" it was a sort of nervous jump, and all
the rifles were going off by themselves. The war correspondent found
himself and artist, two idle men crouching behind a line of preoccupied
backs, of industrious men discharging magazines. The monster had moved.
It continued to move regardless of the hail that splashed its skin with
bright new specks of lead. It was singing a mechanical little ditty to
itself, "Tuf-tuf, tuf-tuf, tuf-tuf," and squirting out little jets of
steam behind. It had humped itself up, as a limpet does before it
crawls; it had its skirt and displayed along the length of it--feet!
They were thick, stumpy feet, between knobs and buttons in shape--flat,
broad things, reminding one of the feet of elephants or the legs of
caterpillars; and then, as the skirt rose higher, the war correspondent,
scrutinising the thing through his glasses again, saw that these feet
hung, as it were, on the rims of wheels. His thoughts whirled back to
Victoria Street, Westminster, and he saw himself in the piping times of
peace, seeking matter for an interview.

"Mr.--Mr. Diplock," he said; "and he called them Pedrails... Fancy
meeting them here!"

The marksman beside him raised his head and shoulders in a speculative
mood to fire more certainly--it seemed so natural to assume the
attention of the monster must be distracted by this trench before
it--and was suddenly knocked backwards by a bullet through his neck. His
feet flew up, and he vanished out of the margin of the watcher's field
of vision. The war correspondent grovelled tighter, but after a glance
behind him at a painful little confusion, he resumed his field-glass,
for the thing was putting down its feet one after the other, and
hoisting itself farther and farther over the trench. Only a bullet in
the head could have stopped him looking just then.

The lean man with the strident voice ceased firing to turn and reiterate
his point. "They can't possibly cross," he bawled. "They--"

"Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang--!" Drowned everything.

The lean man continued speaking for a word or so, then gave it up, shook
his head to enforce the impossibility of anything crossing a trench like
the one below, and resumed business once more.

And all the while that great bulk was crossing. When the war
correspondent turned his glass on it again it had bridged the trench,
and its queer feet were rasping away at the farther bank, in the attempt
to get a hold there. It got its hold. It continued to crawl until the
greater bulk of it was over the trench--until it was all over. Then it
paused for a moment, adjusted its skirt a little nearer the ground, gave
an unnerving "toot, toot," and came on abruptly at a pace of, perhaps,
six miles an hour straight up the gentle slope towards our observer.

The war correspondent raised himself on his elbow and looked a natural
inquiry at the artist.

For a moment the men about him stuck to their position and fired
furiously. Then the lean man in a mood of precipitancy slid backwards,
and the war correspondent said "Come along," to the artist, and led the
movement along the trench.

As they dropped down, the vision of a hillside of trench being rushed by
a dozen vast cockroaches disappeared for a space, and instead was one of
a narrow passage, crowded with men, for the most part receding, through
one or two turned or halted. He never turned back to see the nose of the
monster creep over the brow of the trench; he never even troubled to
keep in touch with the artist. He heard the "whit" of bullets about him
soon enough, and saw a man before him stumble and drop, and then he was
one of a furious crowd fighting to get into a transverse zigzag ditch
that enabled the defenders to get under cover up and down the hill. It
was like a theatre panic. He gathered from signs and fragmentary words
that on ahead another of these monsters had also won to the second
trench.

He lost his interest in the general course of the battle for a space
altogether; he became simply a modest egotist, in a mood of hasty
circumspection, seeking the farthest rear, amidst a dispersed multitude
of disconcerted riflemen similarly employed. He scrambled down through
trenches, he took his courage in both hands and sprinted across the
open, he had moments of panic when it seemed madness not to be
quadrupedal, and moments of shame when he stood up and faced about to
see how the fight was going. And he was one of many thousand very
similar men that morning. On the ridge he halted in a knot of scrub, and
was for a few minutes almost minded to stop and see things out.

The day was now fully come. The grey sky had changed to blue, and of all
the cloudy masses of dawn there remained only a few patches of
dissolving fleeciness. The world below was bright and singularly clear.
The ridge was not, perhaps, more than a hundred feet or so above the
general plain, but in this flat region it sufficed to give the effect of
extensive view. Away on the north side of the ridge, little and far,
were the camps, the ordered wagons, all the gear of a big army; with
officers galloping about and men doing aimless things. Here and there
men were falling in, however, and the cavalry was forming up on the
plain beyond the tents. The bulk of men who had been in the trenches
were still on the move to the rear, scattered like sheep without a
shepherd over the farther slopes. Here and there were little rallies and
attempts to wait and do--something vague; but the general drift was away
from any concentration. There on the southern side was the elaborate
lacework of trenches and defences, across which these iron turtles,
fourteen of them spread out over a line of perhaps three miles, were now
advancing as fast as a man could trot, and methodically shooting down
and breaking up any persistent knots of resistance. Here and there stood
little clumps of men, outflanked and unable to get away, showing the
white flag, and the invader's cyclist infantry was advancing now across
the open, in open order, but unmolested, to complete the work of the
machines. Surveyed at large, the defenders already looked a beaten army.
A mechanism that was effectually ironclad against bullets, that could at
a pinch cross a thirty-foot trench, and that seemed able to shoot out
rifle-bullets with unerring precision, was clearly an inevitable victor
against anything but rivers, precipices, and guns.

He looked at his watch. "Half-past four! Lord! What thing can happen in
two hours. Here's the whole blesses army being walked over, and at
half-past two--"

"And even now our blessed louts haven't done a thing with their guns!"

He scanned the ridge right and left of him with his glasses. He turned
again to the nearest land ironclad, advancing now obliquely to him and
not three hundred yards away, and then scanned the ground over which he
must retreat if he was not to be captured.

"They'll do nothing," he said, and glanced at the enemy.

And then from far away to the left came the thud of a gun, followed very
rapidly by a rolling gun-fire.

He hesitated and decided to stay.


3.

The defender had relied chiefly upon his rifles in the event of an
assault. His guns he kept concealed at various points upon and behind
the ridge ready to bring them into action against any artillery
preparations for an attack on the part of his antagonist. The situation
had rushed upon him with the dawn, and by the time the gunners had their
guns ready for motion, the land ironclads were already in among the
foremost trenches. There is a natural reluctance to fire into one's own
broken men, and many of the guns, being intended simply to fight an
advance of the enemy's artillery, were not in positions to hit anything
in the second line of trenches. After that the advance of the land
ironclads was swift. The defender-general found himself suddenly called
upon to invent a new sort of warfare, in which guns were to fight alone
amidst broken and retreating infantry. He had scarcely thirty minutes in
which to think it out. He did not respond to call, and what happened
that morning was that the advance of the land ironclads forced the
fight, and each gun and battery made what play its circumstance
dictated. For the most part it was poor play.

Some of the guns got in two or three shots, some one or two, and the
percentage of misses was unusually high. The howitzers, of course, did
nothing. The land ironclads in each case followed much the same tactics.
As soon as a gun came into play the monster turned itself almost end-on,
so as to minimise the chances of a square hit, and made not for the gun,
but for the nearest point on its flank from which the gunners could be
shot down. Few of the hits scored were very effectual; only one of the
things was disabled, and that was the one that fought the three
batteries attached to the brigade on the left wing. Three that were hit
when close upon the guns were clean shot through without being put out
of action. Our war correspondent did not see that one momentary arrest
of the tide of victory on the left; he saw only the very ineffectual
fight of half-battery 96B close at hand upon his right. This he watched
some time beyond the margin of safety.

Just after he heard the three batteries opening up upon his left he
became aware of the thud of horses' hoofs from the sheltered side of the
slope, and presently saw first one and then two other guns galloping
into position along the north side of the ridge, well out of sight of
the great bulk that was now creeping obliquely towards the crest and
cutting up the lingering infantry beside it and below, as it came.

The half-battery swung round into line--each gun describing its
curve--halted, unlimbered, and prepared for action...

"Bang!"

The land ironclad had become visible over the brow of the hill, and just
visible as a long black back to the gunners. It halted, as though it
hesitated.

The two remaining guns fired, and then their big antagonist had swung
round and was in full view, end-on, against the sky, coming at a rush.

The gunners became frantic in their haste to fire again. They were so
near the war correspondent could see the expression of their excited
faces through his field-glass. As he looked he saw a man drop, and
realised for the first time that the ironclad was shooting.

For a moment the big black monster crawled with an accelerated pace
towards the furiously active gunners. Then, as if moved by a generous
impulse, it turned its full broadside to their attack, and scarcely
forty yards away from them. The war correspondent turned his field-glass
back to the gunners and perceived it was now shooting down the men about
the guns with the most deadly rapidity.

Just for a moment it seemed splendid, and then it seemed horrible. The
gunners were dropping in heaps about their guns. To lay a hand on a gun
was death. "Bang!" went the gun on the left, a hopeless miss, and that
was the only second shot the half-battery fired. In another moment
half-a-dozen surviving artillerymen were holding up their hands amidst a
scattered muddle of dead and wounded men, and the fight was done.

The war correspondent hesitated between stopping in his scrub and
waiting for an opportunity to surrender decently, or taking to an
adjacent gully he had discovered. If he surrendered it was certain he
would get no copy off; while, he escaped, there were all sorts of
chances. He decided to follow the gully, and take the first offer in the
confusion beyond the camp of picking up a horse.


4.

Subsequent authorities have found fault with the first land ironclads
in many particulars, but assuredly they served their purpose on the day
of their appearance. They were essentially long, narrow, and very strong
steel frameworks carrying the engines, and borne upon eight pairs of big
pedrail wheels, each about ten feet in diameter, each a driving wheel
and set upon long axles free to swivel round a common axis. This
arrangement gave them the maximum of adaptability to the contours of the
ground. They crawled level along the ground with one foot high upon a
hillock and another deep in a depression, and they could hold themselves
erect and steady sideways upon even a steep hillside. The engineers
directed the engines under the command of the captain, who had lookout
points at small ports all round the upper edge of the adjustable skirt
of twelve-inch iron-plating which protected the whole affair, and who
could also raise or depress a conning-tower set about the port-holes
through the centre of the iron top cover. The riflemen each occupied a
small cabin of peculiar construction, and these cabins were slung along
the sides of and before and behind the great main framework, in a manner
suggestive of the slinging of the seats of an Irish jaunting-car. Their
rifles, however, were very different pieces of apparatus from the simple
mechanisms in the hands of their adversaries.

These were in the first place automatic, ejected their cartridges and
loaded again from a magazine each time they fired, until the ammunition
store was at an end, and they had the most remarkable sights imaginable,
sights which threw a bright little camera-obscura picture into the
light-tight box in which the riflemen sat below. This camera-obscura
picture was marked with two crossed lines, and whatever was covered by
the intersection of these two lines, that the rifle hit. The sighting
was ingeniously contrived. The rifleman stood at the table with a like
an elaboration of a draughtsman's dividers in his hand, and he opened
and closed these dividers, so that they were always at the apparent
height--if it was an ordinary-sized man--of the man he wanted to kill. A
little twisted strand of wire like an electric-light wire ran from this
implement up to the gun, and as the dividers opened and shut the sights
went up or down. Changes in the clearness of the atmosphere, due to
changes of moisture, were met by an ingenious use of that
meteorologically sensitive substance, catgut, and when the land ironclad
moved forward the sights got a compensatory deflection in the direction
of its motion. The rifleman stood up in his pitch-dark chamber and
watched the little picture before him. One hand held the dividers for
judging distance, and the other grasped a big knob like a door-handle.
As he pushed this knob about the rifle above swung to correspond, and
the picture passed to and fro like an agitated panorama. When he saw a
man he wanted to shoot he brought him up to the cross-lines, and then
pressed a finger upon a little push like an electric bell-push,
conveniently placed in the centre of the knob. Then the man was shot. If
by any chance the rifleman missed his target he moved the knob a trifle,
or readjusted his dividers, pressed the push, and got him the second
time.

This rifle and its sights protruded from a port-hole, exactly like a
great number of other port-holes that ran in a triple row under the
eaves of the cover of the land ironclad. Each port-hole displayed a
rifle and sight in dummy, so that the real ones could only be hit by a
chance shot, and if one was, then the young man below said "Pshaw!"
turned on an electric light, lowered the injured instrument into his
camera, replaced the injured part, or put up a new rifle if the injury
was considerable.

You must conceive these cabins as hung clear above the swing of the
axles, and inside the big wheels upon which the great elephant-like feet
were hung, and behind these cabins along the centre of the monster ran a
central gallery into which they opened, and along which worked the big
compact engines. It was like a long passage into which this throbbing
machinery had been packed, and the captain stood about the middle, close
to the ladder that led to his conning-tower, and directed the silent,
alert engineers--for the most part by signs. The throb and noise of the
engines mingled with the reports of the rifles and the intermittent
clangour of the bullet hail upon the armour. Ever and again he would
touch the wheel that raised his conning-tower, step up his ladder until
his engineers could see nothing of him above the waist, and then come
down again with orders. Two small electric lights were all the
illumination of this space--they were placed to make him most clearly
visible to his subordinates; the air was thick with the smell of oil and
petrol, and had the war correspondent been suddenly transferred from the
spacious dawn outside to the bowels of this apparatus he would have
thought himself fallen into another world.

The captain, of course, saw both sides of the battle. When he raised his
head into his conning-tower there were the dewy sunrise, the amazed and
disordered trenches, the flying and falling soldiers, the
depressed-looking groups of prisoners, the beaten guns; when he bent
down again to signal "half speed," "quarter speed," "half circle, round
toward the right," or what not, he was in the oil-smelling twilight of
the ill-lit engine-room. Close beside him on either side was the
mouth-piece of a speaking-tube, and ever and again he would direct one
side or other of his strange craft to "concentrate fire forward on
gunners," or to "clear out trench about a hundred yards on our right
front."

He was a young man, healthy enough but by no means sun-tanned, and of a
type of feature and expression that prevails in His Majesty's Navy:
alert, intelligent, quiet. He and his engineers and riflemen all went
about their work, calm and reasonable men. They had none of that
flapping strenuousness of the half-wit in a hurry, that excessive strain
upon the blood-vessels, that hysteria of effort which is so frequently
regarded as the proper state of mind for heroic deeds.

For the enemy these young engineers were defeating they felt a certain
qualified pity and a quite unqualified contempt. They regarded these
big, healthy men they were shooting down precisely as these same big,
healthy men might regard some inferior kind of nigger. They despised
them for making war; despised their brawling patriotisms and their
emotionality profoundly; despised them, above all, for the petty cunning
and the almost brutish want of imagination their method of fighting
displayed. "If they must make war," these young men thought, "Why in
thunder don't they do it like sensible men?" They resented the
assumption that their own side was too stupid to do anything more than
play their enemy's game, that they were going to play this costly folly
according to the rules of unimaginative men. They resented being forced
to the trouble of making man-killing machinery; resented the alternative
of having to massacre these people or endure their truculent yappings;
resented the whole unfathomable imbecility of war.

Meanwhile, with something of the mechanical precision of a good clerk
posting a ledger, the rifleman moved their knobs and pressed their
buttons...

The captain of Land Ironclad Number Three had halted on the crest close
to his captured half-battery. His lined up prisoners stood hard by and
waited for the cyclists behind to come for them. He surveyed the
victorious morning through his conning-tower.

He read the general's signals. "Five and Four are to keep among the guns
to the left and prevent any attempt to recover them. Seven and Eleven
and Twelve, stick to the guns you have got; Seven, got into position to
command the guns taken by Three. Then we're to do something else, are
we? Six and One, quicken up to about ten miles an hour and walk round
behind that camp to the levels near the river--we shall bag the whole
crowd of them," interjected the young man. "Ah, here we are! Two and
Three, Eight and Nine, Thirteen and Fourteen, space out to a thousand
yards, wait for the word, and then go slowly to cover the advance of the
cyclist infantry against any change of mounted troops. That's all right.
But where's Ten? Halloa! Ten to repair and get movable as soon as
possible. They've broken up Ten!"

The discipline of the new war machines was business-like rather than
pedantic, and the head of the captain came down out of the conning-tower
to tell his men: "I say, you chaps there. They've broken up Ten. Not
badly, I think; but anyhow, he's stuck."

But that still left thirteen of the monsters in action to finish up the
broken army.

The war correspondent stealing down his gully looked back and saw them
all lying along the crest and talking fluttering congratulatory flags to
one another. Their iron sides were shining golden in the light of the
rising sun.


5.

The private adventures of the war correspondent terminated in
surrender about one o'clock in the afternoon, and by that time he had
stolen a horse, pitched off it, and narrowly escaped being rolled upon;
found the brute had broken its leg, and shot it with his revolver. He
had spent some hours in the company of a squad of dispirited riflemen,
had quarrelled with them about topography at last, and gone off by
himself in a direction that should have brought him to the banks of the
river and didn't. Moreover, he had eaten all his chocolate and found
nothing in the whole world to drink. Also, it had become extremely hot.
From behind a broken, but attractive, stone wall he had seen far away in
the distance the defender-horsemen trying to charge cyclists in open
order, with land ironclads outflanking them on either side. He had
discovered that cyclists could retreat over open turf before horsemen
with a sufficient margin of speed to allow of frequent dismounts and
much terribly effective sharp-shooting, and he had a sufficient
persuasion that those horsemen, having charged their hearts out, had
halted just beyond his range of vision and surrendered. He had been
urged to sudden activity by a forward movement of one of those machines
that had threatened to enfilade his wall. He had discovered a fearful
blister on his heel.

He was now in a scrubby gravelly place, sitting down and meditating on
his pocket-handkerchief, which had in some extraordinary way become in
the last twenty-four hours extremely ambiguous in hue. "It's the whitest
thing I've got," he said.

He had known all along that the enemy was east, west and south of him,
but when he heard land ironclads Number One and Six talking in their
measured, deadly way not half a mile to the north he decided to make his
own little unconditional peace without any further risks. He was for
hoisting his white flag to a brush and taking up a position of modest
obscurity near it until some one came along. He became aware of voices,
clatter, and the distinctive noises of a body of horses, quite near, and
he put his handkerchief in his pocket again and went to see what was
going forward.

The sound of firing ceased, and then as he drew near he heard the deep
sounds of many simple, coarse, but hearty and noble-hearted soldiers of
the old school swearing with vigour.

He emerged from his scrub upon a big level plain, and far away a fringe
of trees marked the banks of the river.

In the centre of the picture was a still intact road bridge, and big
railway bridge a little to the right. Two land ironclads rested, with a
general air of being long, harmless sheds, in a pose of anticipatory
peacefulness right and left of the picture, completely commanding two
miles and more of the river levels. Emerged and halted a few yards from
the scrub was the remainder of the defender's cavalry, dusty, a little
disordered and obviously annoyed, but still a very fine show of men. In
the middle distance three or four men and horses were receiving medical
attendance, and nearer a knot of officers regarded the distant novelties
in mechanism with profound distaste. Every one was very distinctly aware
of the twelve other ironclads, and of the multitude of townsmen
soldiers, on bicycles or afoot, encumbered now by prisoners and captured
war-gear, but otherwise thoroughly effective, who were sweeping like a
great net in their rear.

"Checkmate," said the war correspondent, walking out into the open. "But
I surrender in the best of company. Twenty-four hours ago I thought war
was impossible--and these beggars have captured the whole blessed army!
Well! Well!" He thought of his talk with the young lieutenant. "If
there's no end to the surprises of science, the civilised people have
it, of course. As long as their science keeps going they will
necessarily be ahead of open-country men. Still..." He wondered for a
space what might have happened to the young lieutenant.

The war correspondent was one of those inconsistent people who always
want the beaten side to win. When he saw all these burly, sun-tanned
horsemen, disarmed and dismounted and lined up; when he saw their horses
unskilfully led away by the singularly not equestrian cyclists to whom
they had surrendered; when he saw these truncated Paladins watching this
scandalous sight, he forgot altogether that he had called these men
"cunning louts" and wished them beaten not four-and-twenty hours ago. A
month ago he had seen that regiment in its pride going forth to war, and
had told of its terrible prowess, how it could charge in open order with
each man firing from his saddle, and sweep before it anything else that
ever came out to battle in any sort of order, foot or horse. And it had,
had to fight a few score of young men in atrociously unfair machines!

"Manhood versus Machinery" occurred to him as a suitable headline.
Journalism curdles all one's mind to phrases.

He strolled as near the lined-up prisoners as the sentinels seemed
disposed to permit, and surveyed them and compared their sturdy
proportions with those of their lightly built captors.

"Smart degenerates," he muttered. "Anaemic cockneydom."

The surrendered officers came quite close to him presently, and he could
hear the colonel's high-pitched tenor. The poor gentleman had spent
three years of arduous toil upon the best material in the world
perfecting that shooting from the saddle charge, and he was inquiring
with phrases of blasphemy, natural in the circumstances, what one could
be expected to do against this suitably consigned ironmongery.

"Guns," said some one.

"Big guns they can walk around. You can't shift big guns to keep pace
with them, and little guns in the open they rush. I saw 'em rushed. You
might do a surprised now and then--assassinate the brutes, perhaps--"

"You might make things like 'em."

"What? More ironmongery? Us...?"

"I'll call my article," meditated the war correspondent, "'Mankind
versus Ironmongery,' and quote the old boy at the beginning."

And he was much too good a journalist to spoil his contrast by remarking
that the half-dozen comparatively slender young men in blue pyjamas who
were standing about their victorious land ironclad, drinking coffee and
eating biscuits, had also in their eyes and carriage something not
altogether degraded below the level of a man.




THE BEAUTIFUL SUIT


There was once a little man whose mother made him a beautiful suit of
clothes. It was green and gold, and woven so that I can not describe how
delicate and fine it was, and there was a tie of orange fluffiness that
tied up under his chin. And the buttons in their newness shone like
stars. He was proud and pleased by his suit beyond measure, and stood
before the long looking-glass when first he put it on, so astonished and
delighted with it that he could hardly turn himself away.

He wanted to wear it everywhere, and show it to all sorts of people. He
thought over all the places he had ever visited, and all the scenes he
had ever heard described, and tried to imagine what the feel of it would
be if he were to go now to those scenes and places wearing his shining
suit, and he wanted to go out forthwith into the long grass and hot
sunshine of the meadow wearing it. Just to wear it! But his mother told
him "No," She told him he must take great care of his suit, for never
would he have another nearly so fine; he must save it and save it, and
only wear it on rare great occasions. It was his wedding-suit, she said.
And she took the buttons and twisted them up with tissue paper for fear
their bright newness should be tarnished, and she tacked little guards
over the cuffs and elbows, and wherever the suit was most likely to come
to harm. He hated and resisted these things, but what could he do? And
at last her warnings and persuasions had effect, and he consented to
take off his beautiful suit and fold it into its proper creases, and put
it away. It was almost as though he gave it up again. But he was always
thinking of wearing it, and of the supreme occasions when some day it
might be worn without the guards, without the tissue paper on the
buttons, utterly and delightfully, never caring, beautiful beyond
measure.

One night, when he was dreaming of it after his habit, he dreamt he took
the tissue paper from one of the buttons, and found its brightness a
little faded, and that distressed him mightily in his dream. He polished
the poor faded button and polished it, and if anything, it grew duller.
He woke up and lay awake, thinking of the brightness slightly dulled,
and wondering how he would feel if perhaps when the great occasions
(whatever it might be) should arrive, one button should chance to be
ever so little short of its first glittering freshness, and for days and
days that thought remained with him distressingly. And when next his
mother let him wear his suit, he was tempted and nearly gave way to the
temptation just to fumble off a bit of tissue paper and see if indeed
the buttons were keeping as bright as ever.

He went trimly along on his way to church, full of this wild desire. For
you must know his mother did, with repeated and careful warnings, let
him wear his suit at times, on Sundays, for example, to and fro from
church, when there was no threatening of rain, no dust blowing, nor
anything to injure it, with its buttons covered and its protections
tacked upon it, and a sunshade in his hand to shadow it, if there seemed
too strong a sunlight for its colours. And always, after such occasions,
he brushed it over and folded it exquisitely as she had taught him, and
put it away again.

Now all these restrictions his mother set to the wearing of his suit he
obeyed, always he obeyed them, until one strange night he woke up and
saw the moonlight shining outside his window. It seemed to him the
moonlight was not common moonlight, nor the night a common night, and
for a while he lay quite drowsily, with this odd persuasion in his mind.
Thought joined on to thought like things that whisper warmly in the
shadows. Then he sat up in his little bed suddenly very alert, with his
heart beating very fast, and a quiver in his body from top to toe. He
had made up his mind. He knew that now he was going to wear his suit as
it should be worn. He had no doubt in the matter. He was afraid,
terribly afraid, but glad, glad.

He got out of his bed and stood for a moment by the window looking at
the moonshine-flooded garden, and trembling at the thing he meant to do.
The air was full of a minute clamour of crickets and murmurings, of the
infinitesimal shouting of little living things. He went very gently
across the creaking boards, for fear that he might wake the sleeping
house, to the big dark clothes-press wherein his beautiful suit lay
folded, and he took it out garment by garment, and softly and very
eagerly tore off its tissue-paper covering and its tacked protections
until there it was, perfect and delightful as he had seen it when first
his mother had given it to him--a long time it seemed ago. Not a button
had tarnished, not a thread had faded on this dear suit of his; he was
glad enough for weeping, as in a noiseless hurry he put it on. And then
back he went, soft and quick, to the window that looked out upon the
garden, and stood there for a minute, shining in the moonlight, with his
buttons twinkling like stars, before he got out on the sill, and making
as little of a rustling as he could, clambered down to the garden path
below. He stood before his mother's house, and it was white and nearly
as plain as by day, with every window-blind but his own shut like an eye
that sleeps. The trees cast still shadows like intricate black lace upon
the wall.

The garden in the moonlight was very different from the garden by day;
moonshine was tangled in hedges and stretched in phantom cobwebs from
spray to spray. Every flower was gleaming white or crimson black, and
the air was a-quiver with the thridding of small crickets and
nightingales singing unseen in the depths of the trees.

There was no darkness in the world, but only warm, mysterious shadows,
and all the leaves and spikes were edged and lined with iridescent
jewels of dew. The night was warmer than any other night had ever been;
the heavens by some miracle at once vaster and nearer, and in spite of
the great ivory-tinted moon that ruled the world, the sky was full of
stars.

The little man did not shout nor sing for all his infinite gladness. He
stood for a time like one awe-stricken, and then with a queer small cry
and holding out his arms, he ran out as if he would embrace at once the
whole round immensity of the world. He did not follow the neat set paths
that cut the garden squarely, but thrust across the beds and through the
wet, tall, scented herbs, though the night-stock and the nicotine and
the clusters of phantom white mallow flowers and through the thickets of
southernwood and lavender, and knee-deep across a wide space of
mignonette. He came to the great hedge, and he thrust his way through
it; and though the thorns of the brambles scored him deeply and tore
threads from his wonderful suit, and though burrs and goose-grass and
havers caught and clung to him, he did not care. He did not care, for he
knew it was all part of the wearing for which he had longed. "I am glad
I put on my suit," he said; "I am glad I wore my suit."

Beyond the hedge he came to the duck-pond, or at least to what was the
duck-pond by day. But by night it was a great bowl of silver moonshine
all noisy with singing frogs, of wonderful silver moonshine twisted and
clotted with strange patternings, and the little man ran down into its
waters between the thin black rushes, knee-deep and waist-deep and to
his shoulders, smiting the water to black and shining wavelets with
either hand, swaying and shivering wavelets, amidst which the stars were
netted in the tangled reflections of the brooding trees upon the bank.
He waded until he swam, and so he crossed the pond and came out upon the
other side, trailing, as it seemed to him, not duckweed, but very silver
in long, clinging, dripping masses. And up he went through the
transfigured tangles of the willow-herb and the uncut seeding grasses of
the farther bank. He came glad and breathless into the high road. "I am
glad," he said, "beyond measure, that I had clothes that fitted this
occasion."

The high-road ran straight as an arrow flies, straight into the
deep-blue pit of the sky beneath the moon, a white and shining road
between the singing nightingales, and along it he went, running now and
leaping, and now walking and rejoicing, in the clothes his mother had
made for him with tireless, loving hands. The road was deep in dust, but
that for him was only soft whiteness; and as he went a great dim moth
came fluttering round his wet and shimmering and hastening figure. At
first he did not heed the moth, and then he waved his hands at it, and
made a sort of dance with it, as it circled round his head. "Soft moth!"
he cried, "Dear moth! And wonderful night, wonderful night of the world!
Do you think my clothes are beautiful, dear moth? As beautiful as your
scales and all this silver vesture of the earth and sky?"

And the moth circled closer and closer until at last its velvet wings
just brushed his lips...

And next morning they found him dead, with his neck broken, in the
bottom of the stone pit, with his beautiful clothes a little bloody, and
foul and stained with the duckweed from the pond. But his face was a
face of such happiness that, had you seen it, you would have understood
indeed how that he had died happy, never knowing that cool and streaming
silver for the duckweed in the pond.




THE DOOR IN THE WALL


1.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As his memory of that remote childish experience ran, he did at the very
first sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction, a
desire to get to the door and open it and walk in.

And at the same time he had the clearest conviction that either it was
unwise or it was wrong of him--he could not tell which--to yield to this
attraction. He insisted upon it as a curious thing that he knew from the
very beginning--unless memory has played him the queerest trick--that
the door was unfastened, and that he could go in as he chose.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He paused.

"Go on," I said.

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

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

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

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

Wallace paused gravely--looked at me doubtfully.

"Go on," I said. "I understand."

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh! The wretchedness of that return!" he murmured.

"Well?" I said after a minute or so.

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

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

"I tried to tell them, and my father gave me my first thrashing for
telling lies. When afterwards I tried to tell my aunt, she punished me
again for my wicked persistence. Then as I said, everyone was forbidden
to listen to me, to hear a word about it. Even my fairy tale books were
taken away from me for a time--because I was too 'imaginative.' Eh? Yes,
they did that! My father belonged to the old school... And my story was
driven back upon myself. I whispered it to my pillow--my pillow that was
often damp and salt to my whispering lips with childish tears. And I
added always to my official and less fervent prayers this one heartfelt
request: 'Please God I may dream of the garden. Oh! Take me back to my
garden! Take me back to my garden!'

"I dreamt often of the garden. I may have added to it, I may have
changed it; I do not know... All this you understand is an attempt to
reconstruct from fragmentary memories a very early experience. Between
that and the other consecutive memories of my boyhood there is a gulf. A
time came when it seemed impossible I should ever speak of that wonder
glimpse again."

I asked an obvious question.

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

"Rather!"

"I didn't show any signs did I in those days of having a secret dream?"


2.

He looked up with a sudden smile.

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

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

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

He paused.

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

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

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

"I told--What was his name--? A ferrety-looking youngster we used to
call Squiff."

"Young Hopkins," said I.

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

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

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

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

"We never found the white wall and the green door..."

"You mean--?"

"I mean I couldn't find it. I would have found it if I could.

"And afterwards when I could go alone I couldn't find it. I never found
it. I seem now to have been always looking for it through my school-boy
days, but I've never come upon it--again."

"Did the fellows--make it disagreeable?"

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

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


3.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The garden?"

"No--The door! And I haven't gone in!"

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

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

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

"'I've made a great sacrifice,' I told the whip as I got in. 'They all
have,' he said, and hurried by.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"How do you know?"

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

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


4.

I can see now his rather pallid face, and the unfamiliar sombre fire
that had come into his eyes. I see him very vividly to-night. I sit
recalling his words, his tones, and last evening's Westminster Gazette
still lies on my sofa, containing the notice of his death. At lunch
to-day the club was busy with him and the strange riddle of his fate.

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

My mind is darkened with questions and riddles.

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

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

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

We see our world fair and common, the hoarding and the pit. By our
daylight standard he walked out of security into darkness, danger and
death. But did he see like that?




THE PEARL OF LOVE


The pearl is lovelier than the most brilliant of crystalline stones, the
moralist declares, because it is made through the suffering of a living
creature. About that I can say nothing because I feel none of the
fascination of pearls. Their cloudy lustre moves me not at all. Nor can
I decide for myself upon that age-long dispute whether the Pearl of Love
is the cruellest of stories or only a gracious fable of the immortality
of beauty.

Both the story and the controversy will be familiar to students of
mediaeval Persian prose. The story is a short one, though the commentary
upon it is a respectable part of the literature of that period. They
have treated it as a poetic invention and they have treated it as an
allegory meaning this, that, or the other thing. Theologians have had
their copious way with it, dealing with it particularly as concerning
the restoration of the body after death, and it has been greatly used as
a parable by those who write about aesthetics. And many have held it to
be the statement of a fact, simply and baldly true.

The story is laid in North India, which is the most fruitful soil for
sublime love stories of all the lands in the world. It was in a country
of sunshine and lakes and rich forests and hills and fertile valleys;
and far away the great mountains hung in the sky, peaks, crests, ridges
of inaccessible and eternal snow. There was a young prince, lord of all
the land; and he found a maiden of indescribable beauty and
delightfulness and he made her his queen and laid his heart at her feet.
Love was theirs, full of joys and sweetness, full of hope, exquisite,
brave and marvellous love, beyond anything you have ever dreamt of love.
It was theirs for a year and part of a year, and then suddenly, because
of some venomous sting that came to her in a thicket, she died.

She died and for a while the prince was utterly prostrated. He was
silent and motionless with grief. They feared he might kill himself, and
he had neither sons nor brothers to succeed him. For two days and nights
he lay upon his face, fasting, across the foot of the couch which bore
her calm and lovely body. Then he arose and ate, and went about very
quietly like one who has taken a great resolution. He caused her body to
be put in a coffin of lead mixed with silver, and for that he had an
outer coffin made of the most precious and scented woods wrought with
gold, and about that there was to be a sarcophagus of alabaster, inlaid
with precious stones. And while these things were being done he spent
his time for the most part by the pools and in the garden-houses and
pavilions and groves and in those chambers in the palace where they two
had been most together, brooding upon her loveliness. He did not rend
his garments nor defile himself with ashes and sackcloth as the custom
was, for his love was too great for such extravagances. At last he came
forth again among his councillors and before the people, and told them
what he had a mind to do.

He said he could never more touch woman, he could never more think of
them, and so he would find a seemly youth to adopt for his heir and
train him to his task, and that he would do his princely duties as
became him; but that for the rest of it, he would give himself with all
his power and all his strength and all his wealth, all that he could
command, to make a monument worthy of his incomparable, dear, lost
mistress. A building it should be of perfect grace and beauty, more
marvellous than any other building had ever been or could ever be, so
that to the end of time it should be a wonder, and men would treasure it
and speak of it and desire to see it and come from all lands of the
earth to visit and recall the name and memory of his queen. And this
building he said was to be called the Pearl of Love.

And this his councillors and people permitted him to do, and so he did.

Year followed year, and all the years he devoted himself to building and
adorning the Pearl of Love. A great foundation was hewn out of the
living rock in a place whence one seemed to be looking at the snowy
wilderness of the great mountains across the valley of the world.
Villages and hills there were, a winding river, and very far away three
great cities. Here they put the sarcophagus of alabaster beneath a
pavilion of cunning workmanship; and about it there were set pillars of
strange and lovely stone and wrought and fretted walls, and a great
casket of masonry bearing a dome and pinnacles and cupolas, as exquisite
as a jewel. At first the design of Pearl of Love was less bold and
subtle than it became later. At first it was smaller and more wrought
and encrusted; there were many pierced screens and delicate clusters of
rosy-hued pillars, and the sarcophagus lay like a child that sleeps
among flowers. The first dome was covered with green tiles, framed and
held together by silver, but this was taken away again because it seemed
close, because it did not soar grandly enough for the broadening
imagination of the prince.

For by this time he was no longer the graceful youth who had loved the
girl queen. He was now a man, grave and intent, wholly set upon the
building of the Pearl of Love. With every year of effort he had learnt
new possibilities in arch and wall and buttress; he had acquired greater
power over the material he had to use and he had learnt of a hundred
stones and hues and effects that he could never have thought of in the
beginning. His sense of colour had grown finer and colder; he cared no
more for the enamelled gold-lined brightness that had pleased him first,
the brightness of an illuminated missal; he sought now for blue
colouring like the sky and for the subtle hues of great distances, for
recondite shadows and sudden broads floods of purple opalescence and for
grandeur and space. He wearied altogether of carvings and pictures and
inlaid ornamentation and all the little careful work of men. "Those were
pretty things," he said of his earlier decorations; and had them put
aside into subordinate buildings where they would not hamper his main
design. Greater and greater grew his artistry. With awe and amazement
people saw the Pearl of Love sweeping up from its first beginnings to a
superhuman breadth and height and magnificence. They did not know
clearly what they had expected, but never had they expected so sublime a
thing as this. "Wonderful are the miracles," they whispered, "that love
can do," and all the women in the world, whatever other loves they had,
loved the prince for the splendour of his devotion.

Through the middle of the building ran a great aisle, a vista, that the
prince came to care for more and more. From the inner entrance of the
building he looked along the length of an immense pillared gallery and
across the central area from which the rose-hued columns had long since
vanished, over the top the pavilion under which lay the sarcophagus,
through a marvellously designed opening, to the snowy wilderness of the
great mountain, the lord of all mountains, two hundred miles away. The
pillars and arches and buttresses and galleries soared and floated on
either side, perfect yet unobtrusive, like great archangels waiting in
the shadows about the presence of God. When men saw that austere beauty
for the first time they were exalted, and then they shivered and their
hearts bowed down. Very often would the prince come to stand there and
look at that vista, deeply moved and not yet fully satisfied. The Pearl
of Love had still something for him to do, he felt, before his task was
done. Always he would order some little alteration to be made or some
recent alteration to be put back again. And one day he said that the
sarcophagus would be clearer and simpler without the pavilion; and after
regarding it very steadfastly for a long time, he had the pavilion
dismantled and removed.

The next day he came and said nothing, and the next day and the next.
Then for two days he stayed away altogether. Then he returned, bringing
with him an architect and two master craftsmen and a small retinue.

All looked, standing together silently in a little group, amidst the
serene vastness of their achievement. No trace of toil remained in its
perfection. It was as if God of nature's beauty had taken over their
offspring to himself.

Only one thing there was to mar the absolute harmony. There was a
certain disproportion about the sarcophagus. It had never been enlarged,
and indeed how could it have been enlarged since the early days? It
challenged the eye; it nicked the streaming lines. In that sarcophagus
was the casket of lead and silver, and in the casket of lead and silver
was the queen, the dear immortal cause of all this beauty. But now that
sarcophagus seemed no more than a little dark oblong that lay
incongruously in the great vista of the Pearl of Love. It was as if
someone had dropped a small valise upon the crystal sea of heaven.

Long the prince mused, but no one knew the thoughts that passed through
his mind.

At last he spoke. He pointed.

"Take that thing away," he said.




THE COUNTRY OF THE BLIND


Three hundred miles and more from Chimborazo, one hundred from the snows
of Cotopaxi, in the wildest wastes of Ecuador's Andes, there lies that
mysterious mountain valley, cut off from all the world of men, the
Country of the Blind. Long years ago that valley lay so far open to the
world that men might come at last through frightful gorges and over an
icy pass into its equable meadows, and thither indeed men came, a family
or so of Peruvian half-breeds fleeing from the lust and tyranny of an
evil Spanish ruler. Then came the stupendous outbreak of Mindobamba,
when it was night in Quito for seventeen days, and the water was boiling
at Yaguachi and all the fish floating dying even as far as Guayaquil;
everywhere along the Pacific slopes there were landslips and swift
thawings and sudden floods, and one whole side of the old Arauca crest
slipped and came down in thunder, and cut off the Country of the Blind
for ever from the exploring feet of men. But one of these early settlers
had chanced to be on the hither side of the gorges when the world had so
terribly shaken itself, and he perforce had to forget his wife and his
child and all the friends and possessions he had left up there, and
start life over again in the lower world. He started it again but ill,
blindness overtook him, and he died of punishment in the mines; but the
story he told begot a legend that lingers along the length of the
Cordilleras of the Andes to this day.

He told of his reason for venturing back from that fastness, into which
he had first been carried lashed to a llama, beside a vast bale of gear,
when he was a child. The valley, he said, had in it all that the heart
of man could desire--sweet water, pasture, an even climate, slopes of
rich brown soil with tangles of a shrub that bore an excellent fruit,
and on one side great hanging forests of pine that held the avalanches
high. Far overhead, on three sides, vast cliffs of grey-green rock were
capped by cliffs of ice; but the glacier stream came not to them, but
flowed away by the farther slopes, and only now and then huge ice masses
fell on the valley side. In this valley it neither rained nor snowed,
but the abundant springs gave a rich green pasture, that irrigation
would spread over all the valley space. The settlers did well indeed
there. Their beasts did well and multiplied, and but one thing marred
their happiness. Yet it was enough to mar it greatly. A strange disease
had come upon them and had made all the children born to them there--and
indeed, several older children also--blind. It was to seek some charm or
antidote against this plague of blindness that he had with fatigue and
danger and difficulty returned down the gorge. In those days, in such
cases, men did not think of germs and infections, but of sins, and it
seemed to him that the reason of this affliction must he in the
negligence of these priestless immigrants to set up a shrine so soon as
they entered the valley. He wanted a shrine--a handsome, cheap,
effectual shrine--to be erected in the valley; he wanted relics and
suchlike potent things of faith, blessed objects and mysterious medals
and prayers. In his wallet he had a bar of native silver for which he
would not account; he insisted there was none in the valley with
something of the insistence of an inexpert liar. They had all clubbed
their money and ornaments together, having little need for such treasure
up there, he said, to buy them holy help against their ill. I figure
this dim-eyed young mountaineer, sunburnt, gaunt, and anxious, hat brim
clutched feverishly, a man all unused to the ways of the lower world,
telling this story to some keen-eyed, attentive priest before the great
convulsion; I can picture him presently seeking to return with pious and
infallible remedies against that trouble, and the infinite dismay with
which he must have faced the tumbled vastness where the gorge had once
come out. But the rest of his story of mischances is lost to me, save
that I know of his evil death after several years. Poor stray from that
remoteness! The stream that had once made the gorge now bursts from the
mouth of a rocky cave, and the legend his poor, ill-told story set going
developed into the legend of a race of blind men somewhere "over there"
one may still hear to-day.

And amidst the little population of that now isolated and forgotten
valley the disease ran its course. The old became groping, the young saw
but dimly, and the children that were born to them never saw at all. But
life was very easy in that snow-rimmed basin, lost to all the world,
with neither thorns nor briers, with no evil insects nor any beasts save
the gentle breed of llamas they had lugged and thrust and followed up
the beds of the shrunken rivers in the gorges up which they had come.
The seeing had become purblind so gradually that they scarcely noticed
their loss. They guided the sightless youngsters hither and thither
until they knew the whole valley marvellously, and when at last sight
died out among them the race lived on. They had even time to adapt
themselves to the blind control of fire, which they made carefully in
stoves of stone. They were a simple strain of people at the first,
unlettered, only slightly touched with the Spanish civilisation, but
with something of a tradition of the arts of old Peru and of its lost
philosophy. Generation followed generation. They forgot many things;
they devised many things. Their tradition of the greater world they came
from became mythical in colour and uncertain. In all things save sight
they were strong and able, and presently chance sent one who had an
original mind and who could talk and persuade among them, and then
afterwards another. These two passed, leaving their effects, and the
little community grew in numbers and in understanding, and met and
settled social and economic problems that arose. Generation followed
generation. Generation followed generation. There came a time when a
child was born who was fifteen generations from that ancestor who went
out of the valley with a bar of silver to seek God's aid, and who never
returned. There about it chanced that a man came into this community
from the outer world. And this is the story of that man.


He was a mountaineer from the country near Quito, a man who had been
down to the sea and had seen the world, a reader of books in an original
way, an acute and enterprising man, and he was taken on by a party of
Englishmen who had come out to Ecuador to climb mountains, to replace
one of their three Swiss guides who had fallen ill. He climbed here and
he climbed there, and then came the attempt on Parascotopetl, the
Matterhorn of the Andes, in which he was lost to the outer world. The
story of that accident has been written a dozen times. Pointer's
narrative is the best. He tells how the little party worked their
difficult and almost vertical way up to the very foot of the last and
greatest precipice, and how they built a night shelter amidst the snow
upon a little shelf of rock, and with a touch of real dramatic power,
how presently they found Nunez had gone from them. They shouted, and
there was no reply; shouted and whistled, and for the rest of that night
they slept no more.

As the morning broke they saw the traces of his fall. It seems
impossible he could have uttered a sound. He had slipped eastward
towards the unknown side of the mountain; far below he had struck a
steep slope of snow, and ploughed his way down it in the midst of a snow
avalanche. His track went straight to the edge of a frightful precipice,
and beyond that everything was hidden. Far, far below, and hazy with
distance, they could see trees rising out of a narrow, shut-in
valley--the lost Country of the Blind. But they did not know it was the
lost Country of the Blind, nor distinguish it in any way from any other
narrow streak of upland valley. Unnerved by this disaster, they
abandoned their attempt in the afternoon, and Pointer was called away to
the war before he could make another attack. To this day Parascotopetl
lifts an unconquered crest, and Pointer's shelter crumbles unvisited
amidst the snows.

And the man who fell survived.

At the end of the slope he fell a thousand feet, and came down in the
midst of a cloud of snow upon a snow slope even steeper than the one
above. Down this he was whirled, stunned and insensible, but without a
bone broken in his body; and then at last came to gentler slopes, and at
last rolled out and lay still, buried amidst a softening heap of the
white masses that had accompanied and saved him. He came to himself with
a dim fancy that he was ill in bed; then realized his position with a
mountaineer's intelligence and worked himself loose and, after a rest or
so, out until he saw the stars. He rested flat upon his chest for a
space, wondering where he was and what had happened to him. He explored
his limbs, and discovered that several of his buttons were gone and his
coat turned over his head. His knife had gone from his pocket and his
hat was lost, though he had tied it under his chin. He recalled that he
had been looking for loose stones to raise his piece of the shelter
wall. His ice-axe had disappeared.

He decided he must have fallen, and looked up to see, exaggerated by the
ghastly light of the rising moon, the tremendous flight he had taken.
For a while he lay, gazing blankly at the vast, pale cliff towering
above, rising moment by moment out of a subsiding tide of darkness. Its
phantasmal, mysterious beauty held him for a space, and then he was
seized with a paroxysm of sobbing laughter...

After a great interval of time he became aware that he was near the
lower edge of the snow. Below, down what was now a moonlit and
practicable slope, he saw the dark and broken appearance of rock-strewn
turf. He struggled to his feet, aching in every joint and limb, got down
painfully from the heaped loose snow about him, went downward until he
was on the turf, and there dropped rather than lay beside a boulder,
drank deep from the flask in his inner pocket, and instantly fell
asleep...

He was awakened by the singing of birds in the trees far below.

He sat up and perceived he was on a little alp at the foot of a vast
precipice that sloped only a little in the gully down which he and his
snow had come. Over against him another wall of rock reared itself
against the sky. The gorge between these precipices ran east and west
and was full of the morning sunlight, which lit to the westward the mass
of fallen mountain that closed the descending gorge. Below him it seemed
there was a precipice equally steep, but behind the snow in the gully he
found a sort of chimney-cleft dripping with snow-water, down which a
desperate man might venture. He found it easier than it seemed, and came
at last to another desolate alp, and then after a rock climb of no
particular difficulty, to a steep slope of trees. He took his bearings
and turned his face up the gorge, for he saw it opened out above upon
green meadows, among which he now glimpsed quite distinctly a cluster of
stone huts of unfamiliar fashion. At times his progress was like
clambering along the face of a wall, and after a time the rising sun
ceased to strike along the gorge, the voices of the singing birds died
away, and the air grew cold and dark about him. But the distant valley
with its houses was all the brighter for that. He came presently to
talus, and among the rocks he noted--for he was an observant man--an
unfamiliar fern that seemed to clutch out of the crevices with intense
green hands. He picked a frond or so and gnawed its stalk, and found it
helpful.

About midday he came at last out of the throat of the gorge into the
plain and the sunlight. He was stiff and weary; he sat down in the
shadow of a rock, filled up his flask with water from a spring and drank
it down, and remained for a time, resting before he went on to the
houses.

They were very strange to his eyes, and indeed the whole aspect of that
valley became, as he regarded it, queerer and more unfamiliar. The
greater part of its surface was lush green meadow, starred with many
beautiful flowers, irrigated with extraordinary care, and bearing
evidence of systematic cropping piece by piece. High up and ringing the
valley about was a wall, and what appeared to be a circumferential
water-channel, from which the little trickles of water that fed the
meadow plants came, and on the higher slopes above this flocks of llamas
cropped the scanty herbage. Sheds, apparently shelters or feeding-places
for the llamas, stood against the boundary wall here and there. The
irrigation streams ran together into a main channel down the centre of
the valley, and this was enclosed on either side by a wall breast high.
This gave a singularly urban quality to this secluded place, a quality
that was greatly enhanced by the fact that a number of paths paved with
black and white stones, and each with a curious little kerb at the side,
ran hither and thither in an orderly manner. The houses of the central
village were quite unlike the casual and higgledy-piggledy agglomeration
of the mountain villages he knew; they stood in a continuous row on
either side of a central street of astonishing cleanness, here and there
their parti-coloured facade was pierced by a door, and not a solitary
window broke their even frontage. They were parti-coloured with
extraordinary irregularity, smeared with a sort of plaster that was
sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimes slate-coloured or dark brown;
and it was the sight of this wild plastering first brought the word
"blind" into the thoughts of the explorer. "The good man who did that,"
he thought, "must have been as blind as a bat."

He descended a steep place, and so came to the wall and channel that ran
about the valley, near where the latter spouted out its surplus contents
into the deeps of the gorge in a thin and wavering thread of cascade. He
could now see a number of men and women resting on piled heaps of grass,
as if taking a siesta, in the remoter part of the meadow, and nearer the
village a number of recumbent children, and then nearer at hand three
men carrying pails on yokes along a little path that ran from the
encircling wall towards the houses. These latter were clad in garments
of llama cloth and boots and belts of leather, and they wore caps of
cloth with back and ear flaps. They followed one another in single file,
walking slowly and yawning as they walked, like men who have been up all
night. There was something so reassuringly prosperous and respectable in
their bearing that after a moment's hesitation Nunez stood forward as
conspicuously as possible upon his rock, and gave vent to a mighty shout
that echoed round the valley.

The three men stopped, and moved their heads as though they were looking
about them. They turned their faces this way and that, and Nunez
gesticulated with freedom. But they did not appear to see him for all
his gestures, and after a time, directing themselves towards the
mountains far away to the right, they shouted as if in answer. Nunez
bawled again, and then once more, and as he gestured ineffectually the
word "blind" came up to the top of his thoughts. "The fools must be
blind," he said.

When at last, after much shouting and wrath, Nunez crossed the stream by
a little bridge, came through a gate in the wall, and approached them,
he was sure that they were blind. He was sure that this was the Country
of the Blind of which the legends told. Conviction had sprung upon him,
and a sense of great and rather enviable adventure. The three stood side
by side, not looking at him, but with their ears directed towards him,
judging him by his unfamiliar steps. They stood close together like men
a little afraid, and he could see their eyelids closed and sunken, as
though the very balls beneath had shrunk away. There was an expression
near awe on their faces.

"A man," one said, in hardly recognisable Spanish--"A man it is--a man
or a spirit--coming down from the rocks."

But Nunez advanced with the confident steps of a youth who enters upon
life. All the old stories of the lost valley and the Country of the
Blind had come back to his mind, and through his thoughts ran this old
proverb, as if it were a refrain--

"In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King."

"In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is King."

And very civilly he gave them greeting. He talked to them and used his
eyes.

"Where does he come from, brother Pedro?" asked one.

"Down out of the rocks."

"Over the mountains I come," said Nunez, "out of the country beyond
there--where men can see. From near Bogota, where there are a hundred
thousands of people, and where the city passes out of sight."

"Sight?" muttered Pedro. "Sight?"

"He comes," said the second blind man, "out of the rocks."

The cloth of their coats, Nunez saw was curious fashioned, each with a
different sort of stitching.

They startled him by a simultaneous movement towards him, each with a
hand outstretched. He stepped back from the advance of these spread
fingers.

"Come hither," said the third blind man, following his motion and
clutching him neatly.

And they held Nunez and felt him over, saying no word further until they
had done so.

"Carefully," he cried, with a finger in his eye, and found they thought
that organ, with its fluttering lids, a queer thing in him. They went
over it again.

"A strange creature, Correa," said the one called Pedro. "Feel the
coarseness of his hair. Like a llama's hair."

"Rough he is as the rocks that begot him," said Correa, investigating
Nunez's unshaven chin with a soft and slightly moist hand. "Perhaps he
will grow finer."

Nunez struggled a little under their examination, but they gripped him
firm.

"Carefully," he said again.

"He speaks," said the third man. "Certainly he is a man."

"Ugh!" said Pedro, at the roughness of his coat.

"And you have come into the world?" asked Pedro.

"Out of the world. Over mountains and glaciers; right over above there,
halfway to the sun. Out of the great, big world that goes down, twelve
days' journey to the sea."

They scarcely seemed to heed him. "Our fathers have told us men may be
made by the forces of Nature," said Correa. "It is the warmth of things,
and moisture, and rottenness--rottenness."

"Let us lead him to the elders," said Pedro.

"Shout first," said Correa, "lest the children be afraid. This is a
marvellous occasion."

So they shouted, and Pedro went first and took Nunez by the hand to lead
him to the houses.

He drew his hand away. "I can see," he said.

"See?" said Correa.

"Yes; see," said Nunez, turning towards him, and stumbled against
Pedro's pail.

"His senses are still imperfect," said the third blind man. "He
stumbles, and talks unmeaning words. Lead him by the hand."

"As you will," said Nunez, and was led along laughing.

It seemed they knew nothing of sight.

Well, all in good time he would teach them.

He heard people shouting, and saw a number of figures gathering together
in the middle roadway of the village.

He found it tax his nerve and patience more than he had anticipated,
that first encounter with the population of the Country of the Blind.
The place seemed larger as he drew near to it, and the smeared
plasterings queerer, and a crowd of children and men and women (the
women and girls he was pleased to note had, some of them, quite sweet
faces, for all that their eyes were shut and sunken) came about him,
holding on to him, touching him with soft, sensitive hands, smelling at
him, and listening at every word he spoke. Some of the maidens and
children, however, kept aloof as if afraid, and indeed his voice seemed
coarse and rude beside their softer notes. They mobbed him. His three
guides kept close to him with an effect of proprietorship, and said
again and again, "A wild man out of the rocks."

"Bogota," he said. "Bogota. Over the mountain crests."

"A wild man--using wild words," said Pedro. "Did you hear that--Bogota?
His mind has hardly formed yet. He has only the beginnings of speech."

A little boy nipped his hand. "Bogota!" he said mockingly.

"Aye! A city to your village. I come from the great world--where men
have eyes and see."

"His name's Bogota," they said.

"He stumbled," said Correa, "stumbled twice as we came hither."

"Bring him in to the elders."

And they thrust him suddenly through a doorway into a room as black as
pitch, save at the end there faintly glowed a fire. The crowd closed in
behind him and shut out all but the faintest glimmer of day, and before
he could arrest himself he had fallen headlong over the feet of a seated
man. His arm, outflung, struck the face of someone else as he went down;
he felt the soft impact of features and heard a cry of anger, and for a
moment he struggled against a number of hands that clutched him. It was
a one-sided fight. An inkling of the situation came to him and he lay
quiet.

"I fell down," he said; "I couldn't see in this pitchy darkness."

There was a pause as if the unseen persons about him tried to understand
his words. Then the voice of Correa said: "He is but newly formed. He
stumbles as he walks and mingles words that mean nothing with his
speech."

Others also said things about him that he heard or understood
imperfectly.

"May I sit up?" he asked, in a pause. "I will not struggle against you
again."

They consulted and let him rise.

The voice of an older man began to question him, and Nunez found himself
trying to explain the great world out of which he had fallen, and the
sky and mountains and suchlike marvels, to these elders who sat in
darkness in the Country of the Blind. And they would believe and
understand nothing whatever that he told them, a thing quite outside his
expectation. They would not even understand many of his words. For
fourteen generations these people had been blind and cut off from all
the seeing world; the names for all the things of sight had faded and
changed; the story of the outer world was faded and changed to a child's
story; and they had ceased to concern themselves with anything beyond
the rocky slopes above their circling wall. Blind men of genius had
arisen among them and questioned the shreds of belief and tradition they
had brought with them from their seeing days, and had dismissed all
these things as idle fancies and replaced them with new and saner
explanations. Much of their imagination had shrivelled with their eyes,
and they had made for themselves new imaginations with their ever more
sensitive ears and finger-tips. Slowly Nunez realised this: that his
expectation of wonder and reverence at his origin and his gifts was not
to be borne out; and after his poor attempt to explain sight to them had
been set aside as the confused version of a new-made being describing
the marvels of his incoherent sensations, he subsided, a little dashed,
into listening to their instruction. And the eldest of the blind men
explained to him life and philosophy and religion, how that the world
(meaning their valley) had been first an empty hollow in the rocks, and
then had come first inanimate things without the gift of touch, and
llamas and a few other creatures that had little sense, and then men,
and at last angels, whom one could hear singing and making fluttering
sounds, but whom no one could touch at all, which puzzled Nunez greatly
until he thought of the birds.

He went on to tell Nunez how this time had been divided into the warm
and the cold, which are the blind equivalents of day and night, and how
it was good to sleep in the warm and work during the cold, so that now,
but for his advent, the whole town of the blind would have been asleep.
He said Nunez must have been specially created to learn and serve the
wisdom they had acquired, and that for all his mental incoherency and
stumbling behaviour he must have courage and do his best to learn, and
at that all the people in the doorway murmured encouragingly. He said
the night--for the blind call their day night--was now far gone, and it
behooved everyone to go back to sleep. He asked Nunez if he knew how to
sleep, and Nunez said he did, but that before sleep he wanted food.

They brought him food--llama's milk in a bowl and rough salted
bread--and led him into a lonely place to eat out of their hearing, and
afterwards to slumber until the chill of the mountain evening roused
them to begin their day again. But Nunez slumbered not at all.

Instead, he sat up in the place where they had left him, resting his
limbs and turning the unanticipated circumstances of his arrival over
and over in his mind.

Every now and then he laughed, sometimes with amusement and sometimes
with indignation.

"Unformed mind!" he said. "Got no senses yet! They little know they've
been insulting their heaven-sent king and master. I see I must bring
them to reason. Let me think--Let me think."

He was still thinking when the sun set.

Nunez had an eye for all beautiful things, and it seemed to him that the
glow upon the snowfields and glaciers that rose about the valley on
every side was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. His eyes went
from that inaccessible glory to the village and irrigated fields, fast
sinking into the twilight, and suddenly a wave of emotion took him, and
he thanked God from the bottom of his heart that the power of sight had
been given him.

He heard a voice calling to him from out of the village.

"Ya ho there, Bogota! Come hither!"

At that he stood up, smiling. He would show these people once and for
all what sight would do for a man. They would seek him, but not find
him.

"You move not, Bogota," said the voice.

He laughed noiselessly and made two stealthy steps aside from the path.

"Trample not on the grass, Bogota; that is not allowed."

Nunez had scarcely heard the sound he made himself. He stopped, amazed.

The owner of the voice came running up the piebald path towards him.

He stepped back into the pathway. "Here I am," he said.

"Why did you not come when I called you?" said the blind man. "Must you
be led like a child? Cannot you hear the path as you walk?"

Nunez laughed. "I can see it," he said.

"There is no such word as see," said the blind man, after a pause.
"Cease this folly and follow the sound of my feet."

Nunez followed, a little annoyed.

"My time will come," he said.

"You'll learn," the blind man answered. "There is much to learn in the
world."

"Has no one told you, 'In the Country of the Blind the One-Eyed Man is
King'?"

"What is blind?" asked the blind man, carelessly, over his shoulder.

Four days passed and the fifth found the King of the Blind still
incognito, as a clumsy and useless stranger among his subjects.

It was, he found, much more difficult to proclaim himself than he had
supposed, and in the meantime, while he meditated his coup d'etat, he
did what he was told and learnt the manners and customs of the Country
of the Blind. He found working and going about at night a particularly
irksome thing, and he decided that, that should be the first thing he
would change.

They led a simple, laborious life, these people, with all the elements
of virtue and happiness as these things can be understood by men. They
toiled, but not oppressively; they had food and clothing sufficient for
their needs; they had days and seasons of rest; they made much of music
and singing, and there was love among them and little children.

It was marvellous with what confidence and precision they went about
their ordered world. Everything, you see, had been made to fit their
needs; each of the radiating paths of the valley area had a constant
angle to the others, and was distinguished by a special notch upon its
kerbing; all obstacles and irregularities of path or meadow had long
since been cleared away; all their methods and procedure arose naturally
from their special needs. Their senses had become marvellously acute;
they could hear and judge the slightest gesture of a man a dozen paces
away--could hear the very beating of his heart. Intonation had long
replaced expression with them, and touches gesture, and their work with
hoe and spade and fork was as free and confident as garden work can be.
Their sense of smell was extraordinarily fine; they could distinguish
individual differences as readily as a dog can, and they went about the
tending of llamas, who lived among the rocks above and came to the wall
for food and shelter, with ease and confidence. It was only when at last
Nunez sought to assert himself that he found how easy and confident
their movements could be.

He rebelled only after he had tried persuasion.

He tried at first on several occasions to tell them of sight. "Look you
here, you people," he said. "There are things you do not understand in
me."

Once or twice one or two of them attended to him; they sat with faces
downcast and ears turned intelligently towards him, and he did his best
to tell them what it was to see. Among his hearers was a girl, with
eyelids less red and sunken than the others, so that one could almost
fancy she was hiding eyes, whom especially he hoped to persuade. He
spoke of the beauties of sight, of watching the mountains, of the sky
and the sunrise, and they heard him with amused incredulity that
presently became condemnatory. They told him there were indeed no
mountains at all, but that the end of the rocks where the llamas grazed
was indeed the end of the world; thence sprang a cavernous roof of the
universe, from which the dew and the avalanches fell; and when he
maintained stoutly the world had neither end nor roof such as they
supposed, they said his thoughts were wicked. So far as he could
describe sky and clouds and stars to them it seemed to them a hideous
void, a terrible blankness in the place of the smooth roof to things in
which they believed--it was an article of faith with them that the
cavern roof was exquisitely smooth to the touch. He saw that in some
manner he shocked them, and gave up that aspect of the matter
altogether, and tried to show them the practical value of sight. One
morning he saw Pedro in the path called Seventeen and coming towards the
central houses, but still too far off for hearing or scent, and he told
them as much. "In a little while," he prophesied, "Pedro will be here."
An old man remarked that Pedro had no business on path Seventeen, and
then, as if in confirmation, that individual as he drew near turned and
went transversely into path Ten, and so back with nimble paces towards
the outer wall. They mocked Nunez when Pedro did not arrive, and
afterwards, when he asked Pedro questions to clear his character, Pedro
denied and outfaced him, and was afterwards hostile to him.

Then he induced them to let him go a long way up the sloping meadows
towards the wall with one complaisant individual, and to him he promised
to describe all that happened among the houses. He noted certain goings
and comings, but the things that really seemed to signify to these
people happened inside of or behind the windowless houses--the only
things they took note of to test him by--and of those he could see or
tell nothing; and it was after the failure of this attempt, and the
ridicule they could not repress, that he resorted to force. He thought
of seizing a spade and suddenly smiting one or two of them to earth, and
so in fair combat showing the advantage of eyes. He went so far with
that resolution as to seize his spade, and then he discovered a new
thing about himself, and that was that it was impossible for him to hit
a blind man in cold blood.

He hesitated, and found them all aware that he had snatched up the
spade. They stood all alert, with their heads on one side, and bent ears
towards him for what he would do next.

"Put that spade down," said one, and he felt a sort of helpless horror.
He came near obedience.

Then he had thrust one backwards against a house wall, and fled past him
and out of the village.

He went athwart one of their meadows, leaving a track of trampled grass
behind his feet, and presently sat down by the side of one of their
ways. He felt something of the buoyancy that comes to all men in the
beginning of a fight, but more perplexity. He began to realise that you
cannot even fight happily with creatures who stand upon a different
mental basis to yourself. Far away he saw a number of men carrying
spades and sticks come out of the street of houses and advance in a
spreading line along the several paths towards him. They advanced
slowly, speaking frequently to one another, and ever and again the whole
cordon would halt and sniff the air and listen.

The first time they did this Nunez laughed. But afterwards he did not
laugh.

One struck his trail in the meadow grass and came stooping and feeling
his way along it.

For five minutes he watched the slow extension of the cordon, and then
his vague disposition to do something forthwith became frantic. He stood
up, went a pace or so towards the circumferential wall, turned, and went
back a little way. There they all stood in a crescent, still and
listening.

He also stood still, gripping his spade very tightly in both hands.
Should he charge them?

The pulse in his ears ran into the rhythm of "In the Country of the
Blind the One-Eyed Man is King."

Should he charge them?

He looked back at the high and unclimbable wall behind--unclimbable
because of its smooth plastering, but withal pierced with many little
doors and at the approaching line of seekers. Behind these others were
now coming out of the street of houses.

Should he charge them?

"Bogota!" called one. "Bogota! Where are you?"

He gripped his spade still tighter and advanced down the meadows towards
the place of habitations, and directly he moved they converged upon him.
"I'll hit them if they touch me," he swore; "by Heaven, I will. I'll
hit." He called aloud, "Look here, I'm going to do what I like in this
valley! Do you hear? I'm going to do what I like and go where I like."

They were moving in upon him quickly, groping, yet moving rapidly. It
was like playing blind man's buff with everyone blindfolded except one.
"Get hold of him!" cried one. He found himself in the arc of a loose
curve of pursuers. He felt suddenly he must be active and resolute.

"You don't understand," he cried, in a voice that was meant to be great
and resolute, and which broke. "You are blind and I can see. Leave me
alone!"

"Bogota! Put down that spade and come off the grass!"

The last order, grotesque in its urban familiarity, produced a gust of
anger. "I'll hurt you," he said, sobbing with emotion. "By Heaven, I'll
hurt you! Leave me alone!"

He began to run, not knowing clearly where to run. He ran from the
nearest blind man, because it was a horror to hit him. He stopped, and
then made a dash to escape from their closing ranks. He made for where a
gap was wide, and the men on either side, with a quick perception of the
approach of his paces, rushed in on one another. He sprang forward, and
then saw he must be caught, and Swish! The spade had struck. He felt the
soft thud of hand and arm, and the man was down with a yell of pain, and
he was through.

Through! And then he was close to the street of houses again, and blind
men, whirling spades and stakes, were running with a reasoned swiftness
hither and thither.

He heard steps behind him just in time, and found a tall man rushing
forward and swiping at the sound of him. He lost his nerve, hurled his
spade a yard wide of this antagonist, and whirled about and fled, fairly
yelling as he dodged another.

He was panic-stricken. He ran furiously to and fro, dodging when there
was no need to dodge, and in his anxiety to see on every side of him at
once, stumbling. For a moment he was down and they heard his fall. Far
away in the circumferential wall a little doorway looked like Heaven,
and he set off in a wild rush for it. He did not even look round at his
pursuers until it was gained, and he had stumbled across the bridge,
clambered a little way among the rocks, to the surprise and dismay of a
young llama, who went leaping out of sight, and lay down sobbing for
breath.

And so his coup d'etat came to an end.

He stayed outside the wall of the valley of the blind for two nights and
days without food or shelter, and meditated upon the unexpected. During
these meditations he repeated very frequently and always with a
profounder note of derision the exploded proverb: "In the Country of the
Blind the One-Eyed Man is King." He thought chiefly of ways of fighting
and conquering these people, and it grew clear that for him no
practicable way was possible. He had no weapons, and now it would be
hard to get one.

The canker of civilisation had got to him even in Bogota, and he could
not find it in himself to go down and assassinate a blind man. Of
course, if he did that, he might then dictate terms on the threat of
assassinating them all. But--Sooner or later he must sleep...!

He tried also to find food among the pine trees, to be comfortable under
pine boughs while the frost fell at night, and--with less confidence--to
catch a llama by artifice in order to try to kill it--perhaps by
hammering it with a stone--and so finally, perhaps, to eat some of it.
But the llamas had a doubt of him and regarded him with distrustful
brown eyes and spat when he drew near. Fear came on him the second day
and fits of shivering. Finally he crawled down to the wall of the
Country of the Blind and tried to make his terms. He crawled along by
the stream, shouting, until two blind men came out to the gate and
talked to him.

"I was mad," he said. "But I was only newly made."

They said that was better.

He told them he was wiser now, and repented of all he had done.

Then he wept without intention, for he was very weak and ill now, and
they took that as a favourable sign.

They asked him if he still thought he could see."

"No," he said. "That was folly. The word means nothing--less than
nothing!"

They asked him what was overhead.

"About ten times ten the height of a man there is a roof above the
world--of rock--and very, very smooth..." He burst again into hysterical
tears. "Before you ask me any more, give me some food or I shall die!"

He expected dire punishments, but these blind people were capable of
toleration. They regarded his rebellion as but one more proof of his
general idiocy and inferiority, and after they had whipped him they
appointed him to do the simplest and heaviest work they had for anyone
to do, and he, seeing no other way of living, did submissively what he
was told.

He was ill for some days and they nursed him kindly. That refined his
submission. But they insisted on his lying in the dark, and that was a
great misery. And blind philosophers came and talked to him of the
wicked levity of his mind, and reproved him so impressively for his
doubts about the lid of rock that covered their cosmic casserole that he
almost doubted whether indeed he was not the victim of hallucination in
not seeing it overhead.

So Nunez became a citizen of the Country of the Blind, and these people
ceased to be a generalised people and became individualities to him, and
familiar to him, while the world beyond the mountains became more and
more remote and unreal. There was Yacob, his master, a kindly man when
not annoyed; there was Pedro, Yacob's nephew; and there was
Medina-sarote, who was the youngest daughter of Yacob. She was little
esteemed in the world of the blind, because she had a clear-cut face and
lacked that satisfying, glossy smoothness that is the blind man's ideal
of feminine beauty, but Nunez thought her beautiful at first, and
presently the most beautiful thing in the whole creation. Her closed
eyelids were not sunken and red after the common way of the valley, but
lay as though they might open again at any moment; and she had long
eyelashes, which were considered a grave disfigurement. And her voice
was weak and did not satisfy the acute hearing of the valley swains. So
that she had no lover.

There came a time when Nunez thought that, could he win her, he would be
resigned to live in the valley for all the rest of his days.

He watched her; he sought opportunities of doing her little services and
presently he found that she observed him. Once at a rest-day gathering
they sat side by side in the dim starlight, and the music was sweet. His
hand came upon hers and he dared to clasp it. Then very tenderly she
returned his pressure. And one day, as they were at their meal in the
darkness, he felt her hand very softly seeking him, and as it chanced
the fire leapt then, and he saw the tenderness of her face.

He sought to speak to her.

He went to her one day when she was sitting in the summer moonlight
spinning. The light made her a thing of silver and mystery. He sat down
at her feet and told her he loved her, and told her how beautiful she
seemed to him. He had a lover's voice, he spoke with a tender reverence
that came near to awe, and she had never before been touched by
adoration. She made him no definite answer, but it was clear his words
pleased her.

After that he talked to her whenever he could take an opportunity. The
valley became the world for him, and the world beyond the mountains
where men lived by day seemed no more than a fairy tale he would some
day pour into her ears. Very tentatively and timidly he spoke to her of
sight.

Sight seemed to her the most poetical of fancies, and she listened to
his description of the stars and the mountains and her own sweet
white-lit beauty as though it was a guilty indulgence. She did not
believe, she could only half understand, but she was mysteriously
delighted, and it seemed to him that she completely understood.

His love lost its awe and took courage. Presently he was for demanding
her of Yacob and the elders in marriage, but she became fearful and
delayed. And it was one of her elder sisters who first told Yacob that
Medina-sarote and Nunez were in love.

There was from the first very great opposition to the marriage of Nunez
and Medina-sarote; not so much because they valued her as because they
held him as a being apart, an idiot, incompetent thing below the
permissible level of a man. Her sisters opposed it bitterly as bringing
discredit on them all; and old Yacob, though he had formed a sort of
liking for his clumsy, obedient serf, shook his head and said the thing
could not be. The young men were all angry at the idea of corrupting the
race, and one went so far as to revile and strike Nunez. He struck back.
Then for the first time he found an advantage in seeing, even by
twilight, and after that fight was over no one was disposed to raise a
hand against him. But they still found his marriage impossible.

Old Yacob had a tenderness for his last little daughter, and was grieved
to have her weep upon his shoulder.

"You see, my dear, he's an idiot. He has delusions; he can't do anything
right."

"I know," wept Medina-sarote. "But he's better than he was. He's getting
better. And he's strong, dear father, and kind--stronger and kinder than
any other man in the world. And he loves me--and father, I love him."

Old Yacob was greatly distressed to find her inconsolable, and
besides--what made it more distressing--he liked Nunez for many things.
So he went and sat in the windowless council-chamber with the other
elders and watched the trend of the talk, and said, at the proper time,
"He's better than he was. Very likely, some day, we shall find him as
sane as ourselves."

Then afterwards one of the elders, who thought deeply, had an idea. He
was a great doctor among these people, their medicine-man, and he had a
very philosophical and inventive mind, and the idea of curing Nunez of
his peculiarities appealed to him. One day when Yacob was present he
returned to the topic of Nunez. "I have examined Nunez," he said, "and
the case is clearer to me. I think very probably he might be cured."

"This is what I have always hoped," said old Yacob.

"His brain is affected," said the blind doctor.

The elders murmured assent.

"Now, what affects it?"

"Ah!" said old Yacob.

"This," said the doctor, answering his own question. "Those queer things
that are called the eyes, and which exist to make an agreeable
depression in the face, are diseased, in the case of Nunez, in such a
way as to affect his brain. They are greatly distended, he has
eyelashes, and his eyelids move, and consequently his brain is in a
state of constant irritation and distraction."

"Yes?" said old Yacob. "Yes?"

"And I think I may say with reasonable certainty that, in order to cure
him complete, all that we need to do is a simple and easy surgical
operation--namely, to remove these irritant bodies."

"And then he will be sane?"

"Then he will be perfectly sane, and a quite admirable citizen."

"Thank Heaven for science!" said old Yacob, and went forth at once to
tell Nunez of his happy hopes.

But Nunez's manner of receiving the good news struck him as being cold
and disappointing.

"One might think," he said, "from the tone you take that you did not
care for my daughter."

It was Medina-sarote who persuaded Nunez to face the blind surgeons.

"You do not want me," he said, "to lose my gift of sight?"

She shook her head.

"My world is sight."

Her head drooped lower.

"There are the beautiful things, the beautiful little things--the
flowers, the lichens amidst the rocks, the light and softness on a piece
of fur, the far sky with its drifting dawn of clouds, the sunsets and
the stars. And there is you. For you alone it is good to have sight, to
see your sweet, serene face, your kindly lips, your dear, beautiful
hands folded together... It is these eyes of mine you won, these eyes
that hold me to you, that these idiots seek. Instead, I must touch you,
hear you, and never see you again. I must come under that roof of rock
and stone and darkness, that horrible roof under which your imaginations
stoop... No; you would not have me do that?"

A disagreeable doubt had arisen in him. He stopped and left the thing a
question.

"I wish," she said, "sometimes--" She paused.

"Yes?" he said, a little apprehensively.

"I wish sometimes--you would not talk like that."

"Like what?"

"I know it's pretty--it's your imagination. I love it, but now--"

He felt cold. "Now?" he said, faintly.

She sat quite still.

"You mean--you think--I should be better, better perhaps--"

He was realising things very swiftly. He felt anger perhaps, anger at
the dull course of fate, but also sympathy for her lack of
understanding--a sympathy near akin to pity.

"Dear," he said, and he could see by her whiteness how tensely her
spirit pressed against the things she could not say. He put his arms
about her, he kissed her ear, and they sat for a time in silence.

"If I were to consent to this?" he said at last, in a voice that was
very gentle.

She flung her arms about him, weeping wildly. "Oh, if you would," she
sobbed, "if only you would!"

For a week before the operation that was to raise him from his servitude
and inferiority to the level of a blind citizen Nunez knew nothing of
sleep, and all through the warm, sunlit hours, while the others
slumbered happily, he sat brooding or wandered aimlessly, trying to
bring his mind to bear on his dilemma. He had given his answer, he had
given his consent, and still he was not sure. And at last work-time was
over, the sun rose in splendour over the golden crests, and his last day
of vision began for him. He had a few minutes with Medina-sarote before
she went apart to sleep.

"To-morrow," he said, "I shall see no more."

"Dear heart!" she answered, and pressed his hands with all her strength.

"They will hurt you but little," she said; "and you are going through
this pain--you are going through it, dear lover, for me... Dear, if a
woman's heart and life can do it, I will repay you. My dearest one, my
dearest with the tender voice, I will repay."

He was drenched in pity for himself and her.

He held her in his arms, and pressed his lips to hers and looked on her
sweet face for the last time. "Good-bye!" he whispered to that dear
sight, "Good-bye!"

And then in silence he turned away from her.

She could hear his slow retreating footsteps, and something in the
rhythm of them threw her into a passion of weeping.

He walked away.

He had fully meant to go to a lonely place where the meadows were
beautiful with white narcissus, and there remain until the hour of his
sacrifice should come, but as he walked he lifted up his eyes and saw
the morning, the morning like an angel in golden armour, marching down
the steeps...

It seemed to him that before this splendour he and this blind world in
the valley, and his love and all, were no more than a pit of sin.

He did not turn aside as he had meant to do, but went on and passed
through the wall of the circumference and out upon the rocks, and his
eyes were always upon the sunlit ice and snow.

He saw their infinite beauty, and his imagination soared over them to
the things beyond he was now to resign for ever!

He thought of that great free world that he was parted from, the world
that was his own, and he had a vision of those further slopes, distance
beyond distance, with Bogota, a place of multitudinous stirring beauty,
a glory by day, a luminous mystery by night, a place of palaces and
fountains and statues and white houses, lying beautifully in the middle
distance. He thought how for a day or so one might come down through
passes drawing ever nearer and nearer to its busy streets and ways. He
thought of the river journey, day by day, from great Bogota to the still
vaster world beyond, through towns and villages, forest and desert
places, the rushing river day by day, until its banks receded, and the
big steamers came splashing by and one had reached the sea--the
limitless sea, with its thousand islands, its thousands of islands, and
its ships seen dimly far away in their incessant journeyings round and
about that greater world. And there, unpent by mountains, one saw the
sky--the sky, not such a disc as one saw it here, but an arch of
immeasurable blue, a deep of deeps in which the circling stars were
floating...

His eyes scrutinised the great curtain of the mountains with a keener
inquiry.

For example; if one went so, up that gully and to that chimney there,
then one might come out high among those stunted pines that ran round in
a sort of shelf and rose still higher and higher as it passed above the
gorge. And then? That talus might be managed. Thence perhaps a climb
might be found to take him up to the precipice that came below the snow;
and if that chimney failed, then another farther to the east might serve
his purpose better. And then? Then one would be out upon the amber-lit
snow there, and halfway up to the crest of those beautiful desolations.
And suppose one had good fortune!

He glanced back at the village, then turned right round and regarded it
with folded arms.

He thought of Medina-sarote, and she had become small and remote.

He turned again towards the mountain wall down which the day had come to
him.

Then very circumspectly he began his climb.

When sunset came he was no longer climbing, but he was far and high. His
clothes were torn, his limbs were blood-stained, he was bruised in many
places, but he lay as if he were at his ease, and there was a smile on
his face.

From where he rested the valley seemed as if it were in a pit and nearly
a mile below. Already it was dim with haze and shadow, though the
mountain summits around him were things of light and fire. The mountain
summits around him were things of light and fire, and the little things
in the rocks near at hand were drenched with light and beauty, a vein of
green mineral piercing the grey, a flash of small crystal here and
there, a minute, minutely beautiful orange lichen close beside his face.
There were deep, mysterious shadows in the gorge, blue deepening into
purple, and purple into a luminous darkness, and overhead was the
illimitable vastness of the sky. But he heeded these things no longer,
but lay quite still there, smiling as if he were content now merely to
have escaped from the Valley of the Blind, in which he had thought to be
King. And the glow of the sunset passed, and the night came, and still
he lay there, under the cold, clear stars.




THE STOLEN BACILLUS AND OTHER STORIES--



THE STOLEN BACILLUS


"This again," said the Bacteriologist, slipping a glass slide under the
microscope, "is a preparation of the celebrated Bacillus of cholera--the
cholera germ."

The pale-faced man peered down the microscope. He was evidently not
accustomed to that kind of thing, and held a limp white hand over his
disengaged eye. "I see very little," he said.

"Touch this screw," said the Bacteriologist; "perhaps the microscope is
out of focus for you. Eyes vary so much. Just the fraction of a turn
this way or that."

"Ah! Now I see," said the visitor. "Not so very much to see after all.
Little streaks and shreds of pink. And yet those little particles, those
mere atomies, might multiply and devastate a city! Wonderful!"

He stood up, and releasing the glass slip from the microscope, held it
in his hand towards the window. "Scarcely visible," he said,
scrutinising the preparation. He hesitated. "Are these--alive? Are they
dangerous now?"

"Those have been stained and killed," said the Bacteriologist. "I wish,
for my own part, we could kill and stain every one of them in the
universe."

"I suppose," the pale man said with a slight smile, "that you scarcely
care to have such things about you in the living--in the active state?"

"On the contrary, we are obliged to," said the Bacteriologist. "Here,
for instance--" He walked across the room and took up one of several
sealed tubes. "Here is the living thing. This is a cultivation of the
actual living disease bacteria." He hesitated. "Bottled cholera, so to
speak."

A slight gleam of satisfaction appeared momentarily in the face of the
pale man.

"It's a deadly thing to have in your possession," he said, devouring the
little tube with his eyes. The Bacteriologist watched the morbid
pleasure in his visitor's expression. This man, who had visited him that
afternoon with a note of introduction from an old friend, interested him
from the very contrast of their dispositions. The lank black hair and
deep grey eyes, the haggard expression and nervous manner, the fitful
yet keen interest of his visitor were a novel change from the phlegmatic
deliberations of the ordinary scientific worker with whom the
Bacteriologist chiefly associated. It was perhaps natural, with a hearer
evidently so impressionable to the lethal nature of his topic, to take
the most effective aspect of the matter.

He held the tube in his hand thoughtfully. "Yes, here is the pestilence
imprisoned. Only break such a little tube as this into a supply of
drinking-water, say to these minute particles of life that one must
needs stain and examine with the highest powers of the microscope even
to see, and that one can neither smell nor taste--say to them, 'Go
forth, increase and multiply, and replenish the cisterns,' and
death--mysterious, untraceable death, death swift and terrible, death
full of pain and indignity--would be released upon this city, and go
hither and thither seeking his victims. Here he would take the husband
from the wife, here the child from its mother, here the statesman from
his duty, and here the toiler from his trouble. He would follow the
water-mains, creeping along streets, picking out and punishing a house
here and a house there where they did not boil their drinking-water,
creeping into the wells of the mineral-water makers, getting washed into
salad, and lying dormant in ices. He would wait ready to be drunk in the
horse-troughs, and by unwary children in the public fountains. He would
soak into the soil, to reappear in springs and wells at a thousand
unexpected places. Once start him at the water supply, and before we
could ring him in, and catch him again, he would have decimated the
metropolis."

He stopped abruptly. He had been told rhetoric was his weakness.

"But he is quite safe here, you know--quite safe."

The pale-faced man nodded. His eyes shone. He cleared his throat. "These
Anarchist--rascals," said he, "are fools, blind fools--to use bombs when
this kind of thing is attainable. I think--"

A gentle rap, a mere light touch of the finger-nails was heard at the
door. The Bacteriologist opened it. "Just a minute, dear," whispered his
wife.

When he re-entered the laboratory his visitor was looking at his watch.
"I had no idea I had wasted an hour of your time," he said. "Twelve
minutes to four. I ought to have left here by half-past three. But your
things were really too interesting. No, positively I cannot stop a
moment longer. I have an engagement at four."

He passed out of the room reiterating his thanks, and the Bacteriologist
accompanied him to the door, and then returned thoughtfully along the
passage to his laboratory. He was musing on the ethnology of his
visitor. Certainly the man was not a Teutonic type nor a common Latin
one. "A morbid product, anyhow, I am afraid," said the Bacteriologist to
himself. "How he gloated on those cultivations of disease-germs!" A
disturbing thought struck him. He turned to the bench by the
vapour-bath, and then very quickly to his writing-table. Then he felt
hastily in his pockets, and then rushed to the door. "I may have put it
down on the hall table," he said.

"Minnie!" he shouted hoarsely in the hall.

"Yes, dear," came a remote voice.

"Had I anything in my hand when I spoke to you, dear, just now?"

Pause.

"Nothing, dear, because I remember--"

"Blue ruin!" cried the Bacteriologist, and incontinently ran to the
front door and down the steps of his house to the street.

Minnie, hearing the door slam violently, ran in alarm to the window.
Down the street a slender man was getting into a cab. The
Bacteriologist, hatless, and in his carpet slippers, was running and
gesticulating wildly towards this group. One slipper came off, but he
did not wait for it. "He has gone mad!" said Minnie; "It's that horrid
science of his"; and opening the window, would have called after him.
The slender man, suddenly glancing round, seemed struck with the same
idea of mental disorder. He pointed hastily to the Bacteriologist, said
something to the cabman, the apron of the cab slammed, the whip swished,
the horse's feet clattered, and in a moment cab, and Bacteriologist
hotly in pursuit, had receded up the vista of the roadway and
disappeared round the corner.

Minnie remained straining out of the window for a minute. Then she drew
her head back into the room again. She was dumbfounded. "Of course he is
eccentric," she meditated. "But running about London--in the height of
the season, too--in his socks!" A happy thought struck her. She hastily
put her bonnet on, seized his shoes, went into the hall, took down his
hat and light overcoat from the pegs, emerged upon the doorstep, and
hailed a cab that opportunely crawled by. "Drive me up the road and
round Havelock Crescent, and see if we can find a gentleman running
about in a velveteen coat and no hat."

"Velveteen coat, ma'am, and no 'at. Very good, ma'am." And the cabman
whipped up at once in the most matter-of-fact way, as if he drove to
this address every day in his life.

Some few minutes later the little group of cabmen and loafers that
collects round the cabmen's shelter at Haverstock Hill were startled by
the passing of a cab with a ginger-coloured screw of a horse, driven
furiously.

They were silent as it went by, and then as it receded--"That's 'Arry
'Icks. Wot's he got?" said the stout gentleman known as old Tootles.

"He's a-using his whip, he is, to rights," said the ostler boy.

"Hullo!" said poor old Tommy Byles; "here's another bloomin' loonatic.
Blowed if there ain't."

"It's old George," said old Tootles, "and he's drivin' a loonatic, as
you say. Ain't he a-clawin' out of the keb? Wonder if he's after 'Arry
'Icks?"

The group round the cabmen's shelter became animated. Chorus: "Go it,
George!" "It's a race." "You'll ketch 'em!" "Whip up!"

"She's a goer, she is!" said the ostler boy.

"Strike me giddy!" cried old Tootles. "Here! I'm a-goin' to begin in a
minute. Here's another comin'. If all the kebs in Hampstead ain't gone
mad this morning!"

"It's a fieldmale this time," said the ostler boy.

"She's a followin' him," said old Tootles. "Usually the other way
about."

"What's she got in her 'and?"

"Looks like a 'igh 'at."

"What a bloomin' lark it is! Three to one on old George," said the
ostler boy. "Nexst!"

Minnie went by in a perfect roar of applause. She did not like it but
she felt that she was doing her duty, and whirled on down Haverstock
Hill and Camden Town High Street with her eyes ever intent on the
animated back view of old George, who was driving her vagrant husband so
incomprehensibly away from her.

The man in the foremost cab sat crouched in the corner, his arms tightly
folded, and the little tube that contained such vast possibilities of
destruction gripped in his hand. His mood was a singular mixture of fear
and exultation. Chiefly he was afraid of being caught before he could
accomplish his purpose, but behind this was a vaguer but larger fear of
the awfulness of his crime. But his exultation far exceeded his fear. No
Anarchist before him had ever approached this conception of his.
Ravachol, Vaillant, all those distinguished persons whose fame he had
envied dwindled into insignificance beside him. He had only to make sure
of the water supply, and break the little tube into a reservoir. How
brilliantly he had planned it, forged the letter of introduction and got
into the laboratory, and how brilliantly he had seized his opportunity!
The world should hear of him at last. All those people who had sneered
at him, neglected him, preferred other people to him, found his company
undesirable, should consider him at last. Death, death, death! They had
always treated him as a man of no importance. All the world had been in
a conspiracy to keep him under. He would teach them yet, what it is to
isolate a man. What was this familiar street? Great Saint Andrew's
Street, of course! How fared the chase? He craned out of the cab. The
Bacteriologist was scarcely fifty yards behind. That was bad. He would
be caught and stopped yet. He felt in his pocket for money, and found
half-a-sovereign. This he thrust up through the trap in the top of the
cab into the man's face. "More," he shouted, "if only we get away."

The money was snatched out of his hand. "Right you are," said the
cabman, and the trap slammed, and the lash lay along the glistening side
of the horse. The cab swayed, and the Anarchist, half-standing under the
trap, put the hand containing the little glass tube upon the apron to
preserve his balance. He felt the brittle thing crack, and the broken
half of it rang upon the floor of the cab. He fell back into the seat
with a curse, and stared dismally at the two or three drops of moisture
on the apron.

He shuddered.

"Well! I suppose I shall be the first. Phew! Anyhow, I shall be a
Martyr. That's something. But it is a filthy death, nevertheless. I
wonder if it hurts as much as they say."

Presently a thought occurred to him--he groped between his feet. A
little drop was still in the broken end of the tube, and he drank that
to make sure. It was better to make sure. At any rate, he would not
fail.

Then it dawned upon him that there was no further need to escape the
Bacteriologist. In Wellington Street he told the cabman to stop, and got
out. He slipped on the step, and his head felt queer. It was rapid stuff
this cholera poison. He waved his cabman out of existence, so to speak,
and stood on the pavement with his arms folded upon his breast awaiting
the arrival of the Bacteriologist. There was something tragic in his
pose. The sense of imminent death gave him a certain dignity. He greeted
his pursuer with a defiant laugh.

"Vive l'Anarchie! You are too late, my friend. I have drunk it. The
cholera is abroad!"

The Bacteriologist from his cab beamed curiously at him through his
spectacles. "You have drunk it! An Anarchist! I see now." He was about
to say something more, and then checked himself. A smile hung in the
corner of his mouth. He opened the apron of his cab as if to descend, at
which the Anarchist waved him a dramatic farewell and strode off towards
Waterloo Bridge, carefully jostling his infected body against as many
people as possible. The Bacteriologist was so preoccupied with the
vision of him that he scarcely manifested the slightest surprise at the
appearance of Minnie upon the pavement with his hat and shoes and
overcoat. "Very good of you to bring my things," he said, and remained
lost in contemplation of the receding figure of the Anarchist.

"You had better get in," he said, still staring. Minnie felt absolutely
convinced now that he was mad, and directed the cabman home on her own
responsibility. "Put on my shoes? Certainly dear," said he, as the cab
began to turn, and hid the strutting black figure, now small in the
distance, from his eyes. Then suddenly something grotesque struck him,
and he laughed. Then he remarked, "It is really very serious, though.

"You see, that man came to my house to see me, and he is an Anarchist.
No--don't faint, or I cannot possibly tell you the rest. And I wanted to
astonish him, not knowing he was an Anarchist, and took up a cultivation
of that new species of Bacterium I was telling you of, that infest, and
I think cause, the blue patches upon various monkeys; and like a fool, I
said it was Asiatic cholera. And he ran away with it to poison the water
of London, and he certainly might have made things look blue for this
civilised city. And now he has swallowed it. Of course, I cannot say
what will happen, but you know it turned that kitten blue, and the three
puppies--in patches, and the sparrow--bright blue. But the bother is, I
shall have all the trouble and expense of preparing some more.

"Put on my coat on this hot day! Why? Because we might meet Mrs. Jabber.
My dear, Mrs. Jabber is not a draught. But why should I wear a coat on a
hot day because of Mrs. ----? Oh! Very well."




THE FLOWERING OF THE STRANGE ORCHID


The buying of orchids always has in it a certain speculative flavour.
You have before you the brown shrivelled lump of tissue, and for the
rest you must trust your judgment, or the auctioneer, or your good-luck,
as your taste may incline. The plant may be moribund or dead, or it may
be just a respectable purchase, fair value for your money, or
perhaps--for the thing has happened again and again--there slowly
unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day,
some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum,
or some subtler coloration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and
profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and it may be, even
immortality. For the new miracle of Nature may stand in need of a new
specific name, and what so convenient, as that of its discoverer?
"Johnsmithia!" There have been worse names.

It was perhaps the hope of some such happy discovery that made
Winter-Wedderburn such a frequent attendant at these sales--that hope,
and also, maybe, the fact that he had nothing else of the slightest
interest to do in the world. He was a shy, lonely, rather ineffectual
man, provided with just enough income to keep off the spur of necessity,
and not enough nervous energy to make him seek any exacting employments.
He might have collected stamps or coins, or translated Horace, or bound
books, or invented new species of diatoms. But, as it happened, he grew
orchids, and had one ambitious little hothouse.

"I have a fancy," he said over his coffee, "that something is going to
happen to me to-day." He spoke--as he moved and thought--slowly.

"Oh, don't say that!" said his housekeeper--who was also his remote
cousin. For "something happening" was a euphemism that meant only one
thing to her.

"You misunderstand me. I mean nothing unpleasant, though what I do mean
I scarcely know.

"To-day," he continued, after a pause, "Peters' are going to sell a
batch of plants from the Andamans and the Indies. I shall go up and see
what they have. It may be I shall buy something good, unawares. That may
be it."

He passed his cup for his second cupful of coffee.

"Are these the things collected by that poor young fellow you told me of
the other day?" asked his cousin as she filled his cup.

"Yes," he said, and became meditative over a piece of toast.

"Nothing ever does happen to me," he remarked presently, beginning to
think aloud. "I wonder why? Things enough happen to other people. There
is Harvey. Only the other week--on Monday he picked up sixpence, on
Wednesday his chicks all had the staggers, on Friday his cousin came
home from Australia, and on Saturday he broke his ankle. What a whirl of
excitement--! Compared to me."

"I think I would rather be without so much excitement," said his
housekeeper. "It can't be good for you."

"I suppose it's troublesome. Still... you see, nothing ever happens to
me. When I was a little boy I never had accidents. I never fell in love
as I grew up. Never married... I wonder how it feels to have something
happen to you, something really remarkable.

"That orchid-collector was only thirty-six--twenty years younger than
myself--when he died. And he had been married twice, and divorced once;
he had, had malarial fever four times, and once he broke his thigh. He
killed a Malay once, and once he was wounded by a poisoned dart. And in
the end he was killed by jungle-leeches. It must have all been very
trouble-some, but then it must have been very interesting, you
know--except, perhaps, the leeches."

"I am sure it was not good for him," said the lady, with conviction.

"Perhaps not." And then Wedderburn looked at his watch. "Twenty-three
minutes past eight. I am going up by the quarter to twelve train, so
that there is plenty of time. I think I shall wear my alpaca jacket--it
is quite warm enough--and my grey felt hat and brown shoes. I suppose--"

He glanced out of the window at the serene sky and sunlit garden, and
then nervously at his cousin's face.

"I think you had better take an umbrella if you are going to London,"
she said, in a voice that admitted of no denial. "There's all between
here and the station coming back."

When he returned he was in a state of mild excitement. He had made a
purchase. It was rare that he could make up his mind quickly enough to
buy, but this time he had done so.

"These are Vandas," he said, "and a Dendrobe and some Palaeonopsis." He
surveyed his purchases lovingly as he consumed his soup. They were laid
out on the spotless tablecloth before him, and he was telling his cousin
all about them as he slowly meandered through his dinner. It was his
custom to live all his visits to London over again in the evening for
her and his own entertainment.

"I knew something would happen to-day. And I have bought all these. Some
of them--some of them--I feel sure, do you know, that some of them will
be remarkable. I don't know how it is, but I feel just as sure as if
someone had told me that some of these will turn out remarkable.

"That one--" he pointed to a shrivelled rhizome--"was not identified. It
may be a Palaeonopsis or it may not. It may be a new species, or even a
new genus. And it was the last that poor Batten ever collected."

"I don't like the look of it," said his housekeeper. "It's such an ugly
shape."

"To me it scarcely seems to have a shape."

"I don't like those things that stick out," said his housekeeper.

"It shall be put away in a pot to-morrow."

"It looks," said the housekeeper, "like a spider shamming dead."

Wedderburn smiled and surveyed the root with his head on one side. "It
is certainly not a pretty lump of stuff. But you can never judge of
these things from their dry appearance. It may turn out to be a very
beautiful orchid indeed. How busy I shall be to-morrow! I must see
to-night, just exactly what to do with these things, and to-morrow I
shall set to work.

"They found poor Batten lying dead, or dying, in a mangrove swamp--I
forget which," he began again presently, "with one of these very orchids
crushed up under his body. He had been unwell for some days with some
kind of native fever, and I suppose he fainted. These mangrove swamps
are very unwholesome. Every drop of blood, they say, was taken out of
him by the jungle-leeches. It may be that very plant that cost him his
life to obtain."

"I think none the better of it for that."

"Men must work, though women may weep," said Wedderburn, with profound
gravity.

"Fancy dying away from every comfort in a nasty swamp! Fancy being ill
of fever with nothing to take but chlorodyne and quinine--if men were
left to themselves they would live on chlorodyne and quinine--and no one
round you but horrible natives! They say the Andaman islanders are most
disgusting wretches--and anyhow, they can scarcely make good nurses, not
having the necessary training. And just for people in England to have
orchids!"

"I don't suppose it was comfortable, but some men seem to enjoy that
kind of thing," said Wedderburn. "Anyhow, the natives of his party were
sufficiently civilised to take care of all his collection until his
colleague, who was an ornithologist, came back again from the interior;
though they could not tell the species of the orchid and had let it
wither. And it makes these things more interesting."

"It makes them disgusting. I should be afraid of some of the malaria
clinging to them. And just think, there has been a dead body lying
across that ugly thing! I never thought of that before. There! I declare
I cannot eat another mouthful of dinner!"

"I will take them off the table if you like, and put them in the
window-seat. I can see them just as well there."

The next few days he was indeed singularly busy in his steamy little
hothouse, fussing about with charcoal, lumps of teak, moss, and all the
other mysteries of the orchid cultivator. He considered he was having a
wonderfully eventful time. In the evening he would talk about these new
orchids to his friends, and over, and over again he reverted to his
expectation of something strange.

Several of the Vandas and the Dendrobium died under his care, but
presently the strange orchid began to show signs of life. He was
delighted and took his housekeeper right away from jam-making to see it
at once, directly he made the discovery.

"That is a bud," he said, "and presently there will be a lot of leaves
there and those little things coming out here are aerial rootlets."

"They look to me like little white fingers poking out of the brown,"
said his housekeeper. "I don't like them.

"Why not?"

"I don't know. They look like fingers trying to get at you. I can't help
my likes and dislikes."

"I don't know for certain, but I don't think there are any orchids I
know that have aerial rootlets quite like that. It may be my fancy, of
course. You see they are a little flattened at the ends."

"I don't like 'em," said his housekeeper, suddenly shivering and turning
away. "I know it's very silly of me--and I'm very sorry, particularly as
you like the thing so much. But I can't help thinking of that corpse."

"But it may not be that particular plant. That was merely a guess of
mine."

His housekeeper shrugged her shoulders. "Anyhow I don't like it," she
said.

Wedderburn felt a little hurt at her dislike to the plant. But that did
not prevent his talking to her about orchids generally, and this orchid
in particular, whenever he felt inclined.

"There are such queer things about orchids," he said one day; "such
possibilities of surprises. You know, Darwin studied their
fertilisation, and showed that the whole structure of an ordinary
orchid-flower was contrived in order that moths might carry the pollen
from plant to plant. Well, it seems that there are lots of orchids
known, the flower of which cannot possibly be used for fertilisation in
that way. Some of the Cypripediums, for instance; there are no insects
known that can possibly fertilise them, and some of them have never been
found with seed."

"But how do they form new plants?"

"By runners and tubers, and that kind of outgrowth. That is easily
explained. The puzzle is, what are the flowers for?

"Very likely," he added, "my orchid may be something extraordinary in
that way. If so, I shall study it. I have often thought of making
researches as Darwin did. But hitherto I have not found the time, or
something else has happened to prevent it. The leaves are beginning to
unfold now. I do wish you would come and see them!"

But she said that the orchid-house was so hot it gave her the headache.
She had seen the plant once again, and the aerial rootlets, which were
now some of them more than a foot long, had unfortunately reminded her
of tentacles reaching out after something; and they got into her dreams,
growing after her with incredible rapidity. So that she had settled to
her entire satisfaction that she would not see that plant again, and
Wedderburn had to admire its leaves alone. They were of the ordinary
broad form, and a deep glossy green, with splashes and dots of deep red
towards the base. He knew of no other leaves quite like them. The plant
was placed on a low bench near the thermometer, and close by was a
simple arrangement by which a tap dripped on the hot-water pipes and
kept the air steamy. And he spent his afternoons now with some
regularity meditating on the approaching flowering of this strange
plant.

And at last the great thing happened. Directly he entered the little
glass house he knew that the spike had burst out, although his great
Palaeonopsis Lowii hid the corner where his new darling stood. There was
a new odour in the air, a rich, intensely sweet scent, that overpowered
every other in that crowded, steaming little greenhouse.

Directly he noticed this he hurried down to the strange orchid. And,
behold! The trailing green spikes bore now three great splashes of
blossom, from which this overpowering sweetness proceeded. He stopped
before them in an ecstasy of admiration.

The flowers were white, with streaks of golden orange upon the petals;
the heavy labellum was coiled into an intricate projection, and a
wonderful bluish purple mingled there with the gold. He could see at
once that the genus was altogether a new one. And the insufferable
scent! How hot the place was! The blossoms swam before his eyes.

He would see if the temperature was right. He made a step towards the
thermometer. Suddenly everything appeared unsteady. The bricks on the
floor were dancing up and down. Then the white blossoms, the green
leaves behind them, the whole green house, seemed to sweep sideways, and
then in a curve upward.


At half-past four his cousin made the tea, according to their invariable
custom. But Wedderburn did not come in for his tea. "He is worshipping
that horrid orchid," she told herself, and waited ten minutes. "His
watch must have stopped. I will go and call him."

She went straight to the hothouse, and, opening the door, called his
name. There was no reply. She noticed that the air was very close, and
loaded with an intense perfume. Then she saw something lying on the
bricks between the hot-water pipes.

For a minute, perhaps, she stood motionless.

He was lying, face upward, at the foot of the strange orchid. The
tentacle-like aerial rootlets no longer swayed freely in the air, but
were crowded together, a tangle of grey ropes, and stretched tight, with
their ends closely applied to his chin and neck and hands.

She did not understand. Then she saw from one of the exultant tentacles
upon his cheek there trickled a little thread of blood.

With an inarticulate cry she ran towards him, and tried to pull him away
from the leech-like suckers. She snapped two of these tentacles, and
their sap dripped red.

Then the overpowering scent of the blossom began to make her head reel.
How they clung to him! She tore at the tough ropes, and he and the white
inflorescence swam about her. She felt she was fainting, knew she must
not. She left him and hastily opened the nearest door, and after she had
panted for a moment in the fresh air, she had a brilliant inspiration.
She caught up a flower-pot and smashed in the windows at the end of the
greenhouse. Then she re-entered. She tugged now with renewed strength at
Wedderburn's motionless body, and brought the strange orchid crashing to
the floor. It still clung with the grimmest tenacity to its victim. In a
frenzy, she lugged it and him into the open air.

Then she thought of tearing through the sucker rootlets one by one, and
in another minute she had released him, and was dragging him away from
the horror.

He was white and bleeding from a dozen circular patches.

The odd-job man was coming up the garden, amazed at the smashing of
glass, and saw her emerge, hauling the inanimate body with red-stained
hands. For a moment he thought impossible things.

"Bring some water!" she cried, and her voice dispelled his fancies.
When, with unnatural alacrity, he returned with the water, he found her
weeping with excitement, and with Wedderburn's head upon her knee,
wiping the blood from his face.

"What's the matter?" said Wedderburn, opening his eyes feebly, and
closing them again at once.

"Go and tell Annie to come out here to me, and then go for Doctor Haddon
at once," she said to the odd-job man so soon as he had brought the
water; and added, seeing he hesitated, "I will tell you all about it
when you come back."

Presently, Wedderburn opened his eyes again, and seeing that he was
troubled by the puzzle of his position, she explained to him, "You
fainted in the hothouse."

"And the orchid?"

"I will see to that," she said.

Wedderburn had lost a good deal of blood, but beyond that he had
suffered no very great injury. They gave him brandy mixed with some pink
extract of meat, and carried him upstairs to bed. His housekeeper told
her incredible story in fragments to Dr. Haddon. "Come to the
orchid-house and see," she said.

The cold outer air was blowing in through the open door, and the sickly
perfume was almost dispelled. Most of the torn aerial rootlets lay
already withered amidst a number of dark stains upon the bricks. The
stem of the inflorescence was broken by the fall of the plant, and the
flowers were growing limp and brown at the edges of the petals. The
doctor stooped towards it, then saw that one of the aerial rootlets
still stirred feebly, and hesitated.

The next morning the strange orchid still lay there, black now and
putrescent. The door banged intermittently in the morning breeze, and
all the array of Wedderburn's orchids was shrivelled and prostrate. But
Wedderburn himself was bright and garrulous upstairs in the glory of his
strange adventure.




IN THE AVU OBSERVATORY


The observatory at Avu, in Borneo, stands on the spur of the mountain.
To the north rises the old crater, black at night against the
unfathomable blue of the sky. From the little circular building, with
its mushroom dome, the slopes plunge steeply downward into the black
mysteries of the tropical forest beneath. The little house in which the
observer and his assistant live is about, fifty yards from the
observatory, and beyond this are the huts of their native attendants.

Thaddy, the chief observer, was down with a slight fever. His assistant,
Woodhouse, paused for a moment in silent contemplation of the tropical
night before commencing his solitary vigil. The night was very still.
Now and then voices and laughter came from the native huts, or the cry
of some strange animal was heard from the midst of the mystery of the
forest. Nocturnal insects appeared in ghostly fashion out of the
darkness, and fluttered round his light. He thought, perhaps, of all the
possibilities of discovery that still lay in the black tangle beneath
him; for to the naturalist the virgin forests of Borneo are still a
wonderland full of strange questions and half-suspected discoveries.
Woodhouse carried a small lantern in his hand, and its yellow glow
contrasted vividly with the infinite series of tints between
lavender-blue and black in which the landscape was painted. His hands
and face were smeared with ointment against the attacks of the
mosquitoes.

Even in these days of celestial photography, work done in a purely
temporary erection, and with only the most primitive appliances, in
addition to the telescope, still involves a very large amount of cramped
and motionless watching. He sighed as he thought of the physical
fatigues before him, stretched himself, and entered the observatory.

The reader is probably familiar with the structure of an ordinary
astronomical observatory. The building is usually cylindrical in shape,
with a very light hemispherical roof capable of being turned round from
the interior. The telescope is supported upon a stone pillar in the
centre, and a clockwork arrangement compensates for the earth's
rotation, and allows a star once found to be continuously observed.
Besides this, there is a compact tracery of wheels and screws about its
point of support, by which the astronomer adjusts it. There is, of
course, a slit in the movable roof which follows the eye of the
telescope in its survey of the heavens. The observer sits or lies on a
sloping wooden arrangement, which he can wheel to any part of the
observatory as the position of the telescope may require. Within it is
advisable to have things as dark as possible, in order to enhance the
brilliance of the stars observed.

The lantern flared as Woodhouse entered his circular den, and the
general darkness fled into black shadows behind the big machine, from
which it presently seemed to creep back over the whole place again as
the light waned. The slit was a profound transparent blue, in which six
stars shone with tropical brilliance, and their light lay, a pallid
gleam, along the black tube of the instrument. Woodhouse shifted the
roof, and then proceeding to the telescope, turned first one wheel and
then another, the great cylinder slowly swinging into a new position.
Then he glanced through the finder, the little companion telescope,
moved the roof a little more, made some further adjustments, and set the
clockwork in motion. He took off his jacket, for the night was very hot,
and pushed into position the uncomfortable seat to which he was
condemned for the next four hours. Then with a sigh, he resigned himself
to his watch upon the mysteries of space.

There was no sound now in the observatory, and the lantern waned
steadily. Outside there was the occasional cry of some animal in alarm
or pain, or calling to its mate, and the intermittent sounds of the
Malay and Dyak servants. Presently one of the men began a queer chanting
song, in which the others joined at intervals. After this it would seem
that they turned in for the night, for no further sound came from their
direction, and the whispering stillness became more and more profound.

The clockwork ticked steadily. The shrill hum of a mosquito explored the
place, and grew shriller in indignation at Woodhouse's ointment. Then
the lantern went out and all the observatory was black.

Woodhouse shifted his position presently, when the slow movement of the
telescope had carried it beyond the limits of his comfort.

He was watching a little group of stars in the Milky Way, in one of
which his chief had seen or fancied a remarkable colour variability. It
was not a part of the regular work for which the establishment existed,
and for that reason perhaps Woodhouse was deeply interested. He must
have forgotten things terrestrial. All his attention was concentrated
upon the great blue circle of the telescope field--a circle powdered, so
it seemed, with an innumerable multitude of stars, and all luminous
against the blackness of its setting. As he watched he seemed to himself
to become incorporeal, as if he too were floating in the ether of space.
Infinitely remote was the faint red spot he was observing.

Suddenly the stars were blotted out. A flash of blackness passed, and
they were visible again.

"Queer," said Woodhouse. "Must have been a bird."

The thing happened again, and immediately after the great tube shivered
as though it had been struck. Then the dome of the observatory resounded
with a series of thundering blows. The stars seemed to sweep aside as
the telescope--which had been unclamped--swung round and away from the
slit in the roof.

"Great Scott!" cried Woodhouse. "What's this?"

Some huge vague black shape, with a flapping something like a wing,
seemed to be struggling in the aperture of the roof. In another moment
the slit was clear again, and the luminous haze of the Milky Way shone
warm and bright.

The interior of the roof was perfectly black, and only a scraping sound
marked the whereabouts of the unknown creature.

Woodhouse had scrambled from the seat to his feet. He was trembling
violently and in a perspiration, with the suddenness of the occurrence.
Was the thing, whatever it was, inside or out? It was big, whatever else
it might be. Something shot across the skylight, and the telescope
swayed. He started violently and put his arm up. It was in the
observatory then, with him. It was clinging to the roof apparently. What
the devil was it? Could it see him?

He stood for perhaps a minute in a state of stupefaction. The beast,
whatever it was, clawed at the interior of the dome, and then something
flapped almost into his face, and he saw the momentary gleam of
starlight on a skin like oiled leather. His water-bottle was knocked off
his little table with a smash.

The sense of some strange bird-creature hovering a few yards from his
face in the darkness was indescribably unpleasant to Woodhouse. As his
thought returned he concluded that it must be some night-bird or large
bat. At any risk he would see what it was, and pulling a match from his
pocket, he tried to strike it on the telescope seat. There was a smoking
streak of phosphorescent light, the match flared for a moment, and he
saw a vast wing sweeping towards him, a gleam of grey-brown fur, and
then he was struck in the face and the match knocked out of his hand.
The blow was aimed at his temple, and a claw tore sideways down to his
cheek. He reeled and fell, and he heard the extinguished lantern smash.
Another blow followed as he fell. He was partly stunned, he felt his own
warm blood stream out upon his face. Instinctively he felt his eyes had
been struck at, and turning over on his face to save them, tried to
crawl under the protection of the telescope.

He was struck again upon the back, and he heard his jacket rip, and then
the thing hit the roof of the observatory. He edged as far as he could
between the wooden seat and the eyepiece of the instrument, and turned
his body round so that it was chiefly his feet that were exposed. With
these he could at least kick. He was still in a mystified state. The
strange beast banged about in the darkness, and presently clung to the
telescope, making it sway and the gear rattle. Once it flapped near him,
and he kicked out madly and felt a soft body with his feet. He was
horribly scared now. It must be a big thing to swing the telescope like
that. He saw for a moment the outline of a head black against the
starlight, with sharply-pointed upstanding ears and a crest between
them. It seemed to him to be as big as a mastiff's. Then he began to
bawl out as loudly as he could for help.

At that the thing came down upon him again. As it did so his hand
touched something beside him on the floor. He kicked out, and the next
moment his ankle was gripped and held by a row of keen teeth. He yelled
again, and tried to free his leg by kicking with the other. Then he
realised he had the broken water-bottle at his hand, and snatching it,
he struggled into a sitting posture, and feeling in the darkness towards
his foot, gripped a velvety ear, like the ear of a big cat. He had
seized the water-bottle by its neck and brought it down, with a
shivering crash upon the head of the strange beast. He repeated the
blow, and then stabbed and jabbed with the jagged end of it, in the
darkness, where he judged the face might be.

The small teeth relaxed their hold, and at once Woodhouse pulled his leg
free and kicked hard. He felt the sickening feel of fur and bone giving
under his boot. There was a tearing bite at his arm, and he struck over
it at the face, as he judged, and hit damp fur.

There was a pause; then he heard the sound of claws; and the dragging of
a heavy body away from him over the observatory floor. Then there was
silence, broken only by his own sobbing breathing, and a sound like
licking. Everything was black except the parallelogram of the blue
skylight with the luminous dust of stars, against which the end of the
telescope now appeared in silhouette. He waited, as it seemed, an
interminable time.

Was the thing coming on again? He felt in his trouser-pocket for some
matches, and found one remaining. He tried to strike this, but the floor
was wet, and it spat and went out. He cursed. He could not see where the
door was situated. In his struggle he had quite lost his bearings. The
strange beast, disturbed by the splutter of the match, began to move
again. "Time!" called Woodhouse, with a sudden gleam of mirth, but the
thing was not coming at him again. He must have hurt it, he thought,
with the broken bottle. He felt a dull pain in his ankle. Probably he
was bleeding there. He wondered if it would support him if he tried to
stand up. The night outside was very still. There was no sound of any
one moving. The sleepy fools had not heard those wings battering upon
the dome, nor his shouts. It was no good wasting strength in shouting.
The monster flapped its wings and startled him into a defensive
attitude. He hit his elbow against the seat, and it fell over with a
crash. He cursed this, and then he cursed the darkness.

Suddenly the oblong patch of starlight seemed to sway to and fro. Was he
going to faint? It would never do to faint. He clenched his fists and
set his teeth to hold himself together. Where had the door got to? It
occurred to him he could get his bearings by the stars visible through
the skylight. The patch of stars he saw was in Sagittarius and
south-eastward; the door was north--or was it north by west? He tried to
think. If he could get the door open he might retreat. It might be the
thing was wounded. The suspense was beastly. "Look here!" he said, "If
you don't come on, I shall come at you."

Then the thing began clambering up the side of the observatory, and he
saw its black outline gradually blot out the skylight. Was it in
retreat? He forgot about the door, and watched as the dome shifted and
creaked. Somehow he did not feel very frightened or excited now. He felt
a curious sinking sensation inside him. The sharply-defined patch of
light, with the black form moving across it, seemed to be growing
smaller and smaller. That was curious. He began to feel very thirsty,
and yet he did not feel inclined to get anything to drink. He seemed to
be sliding down a long funnel.

He felt a burning sensation in his throat, and then he perceived it was
broad daylight, and that one of the Dyak servants was looking at him
with a curious expression. Then there was the top of Thaddy's face
upside down. Funny fellow, Thaddy, to go about like that! Then he
grasped the situation better, and perceived that his head was on
Thaddy's knee, and Thaddy was giving him brandy. And then he saw the
eyepiece of the telescope with a lot of red smears on it. He began to
remember.

"You've made this observatory in a pretty mess," said Thaddy.

The Dyak boy was beating up an egg in brandy. Woodhouse took this and
sat up. He felt a sharp twinge of pain. His ankle was tied up, so were
his arm and the side of his face. The smashed glass, red-stained, lay
about the floor, the telescope seat was overturned, and by the opposite
wall was a dark pool. The door was open, and he saw the grey summit of
the mountain against a brilliant background of blue sky.

"Pah!" said Woodhouse. "Who's been killing calves here? Take me out of
it."

Then he remembered the Thing, and the fight he had, had with it.

"What was it?" he said to Thaddy--"The Thing I fought with?".

"You know that best," said Thaddy. "But, anyhow, don't worry yourself
now about it. Have some more to drink."

Thaddy, however, was curious enough, and it was a hard struggle between
duty and inclination to keep Woodhouse quiet until he was decently put
away in bed, and had slept upon the copious dose of meat extract Thaddy
considered advisable. They then talked it over together.

"It was," said Woodhouse, "more like a big bat than anything else in the
world. It had sharp, short ears, and soft fur, and its wings were
leathery. Its teeth were little but devilish sharp, and its jaw could
not have been very strong or else it would have bitten through my
ankle."

"It has pretty nearly," said Thaddy.

"It seemed to me to hit out with its claws pretty freely. That is about
as much as I know about the beast. Our conversation was intimate, so to
speak, and yet not confidential."

"The Dyak chaps talk about a Big Colugo, a Klangutang--whatever that may
be. It does not often attack man, but I suppose you made it nervous.
They say there is a Big Colugo and a Little Colugo, and a something else
that sounds like gobble. They all fly about at night. For my own part, I
know there are flying foxes and flying lemurs about here, but they are,
none of them very big beasts."

"There are more things in heaven and earth," said Woodhouse--and Thaddy
groaned at the quotation--"and more particularly in the forests of
Borneo, than are dreamt of in our philosophies. On the whole, if the
Borneo fauna is going to disgorge any more of its novelties upon me, I
should prefer that it did so when I was not occupied in the observatory
at night and alone."




THE TRIUMPHS OF A TAXIDERMIST


Here are some of the secrets of taxidermy. They were told me by the
taxidermist in a mood of elation. He told me them in the time between
the first glass of whisky and the fourth, when a man is no longer
cautious and yet not drunk. We sat in his den together; his library it
was, his sitting and his eating-room--separated by a bead curtain, so
far as the sense of sight went, from the noisome den where he plied his
trade.

He sat on a deck chair, and when he was not tapping refractory bits of
coal with them, he kept his feet--on which he wore, after the manner of
sandals, the holey relics of a pair of carpet slippers--out of the way
upon the mantelpiece, among the glass eyes. And his trousers,
by-the-bye--though they have nothing to do with his triumphs--were a
most horrible yellow plaid, such as they made when our fathers wore
side-whiskers and there were crinolines in the land. Further, his hair
was black, his face rosy, and his eye a fiery brown; and his coat was
chiefly of grease upon a basis of velveteen. And his pipe had a bowl of
china showing the Graces, and his spectacles were always askew, the left
eye glaring nakedly at you, small and penetrating; the right, seen
through a glass darkly, magnified and mild. Thus his discourse ran:
"There never was a man who could stuff like me, Bellows, never. I have
stuffed elephants and I have stuffed moths, and the things, have looked
all the livelier and better for it. And I have stuffed human
beings--chiefly amateur ornithologists. But I stuffed a nigger once.

"No, there is no law against it. I made him with all his fingers out and
used him as a hat-rack, but that fool Homersby got up a quarrel with him
late one night and spoilt him. That was before your time. It is hard to
get skins, or I would have another.

"Unpleasant? I don't see it. Seems to me taxidermy is a promising third
course to burial or cremation. You could keep all your dear ones by you.
Bric-a-brac of that sort stuck about the house would be as good as most
company, and much less expensive. You might have them fitted up with
clockwork to do things.

"Of course they would have to be varnished, but they need not shine more
than lots of people do naturally. Old Manningtree's bald head... Anyhow,
you could talk to them without interruption. Even aunts. There is a
great future before taxidermy, depend upon it. There is fossils
again...."

He suddenly became silent.

"No, I don't think I ought to tell you that." He sucked at his pipe
thoughtfully. "Thanks, yes. Not too much water."

"Of course, what I tell you now will go no further. You know I have made
some dodos and a great auk? No! Evidently you are an amateur at
taxidermy. My dear fellow, half the great auks in the world are about as
genuine as the handkerchief of Saint Veronica, as the Holy Coat of
Treves. We make 'em of grebes' feathers and the like. And the great
auk's eggs too!"

"Good heavens!"

"Yes, we make them out of fine porcelain. I tell you it is worth while.
They fetch--one fetched L300 only the other day. That one was really
genuine, I believe, but of course one is never certain. It is very fine
work, and afterwards you have to get them dusty, for no one who owns one
of these precious eggs has ever the temerity to clean the thing. That's
the beauty of the business. Even if they suspect an egg they do not like
to examine it too closely. It's such brittle capital at the best.

"You did not know that taxidermy rose to heights like that. My boy, it
has risen higher. I have rivalled the hands of Nature herself. One of
the genuine great auks--" his voice fell to a whisper--"one of the
genuine great auks was made by me.

"No. You must study ornithology, and find out which it is yourself. And
what is more, I have been approached by a syndicate of dealers to stock
one of the unexplored skerries to the north of Iceland with specimens. I
may--some day. But I have another little thing in hand just now. Ever
heard of the dinornis?

"It is one of those big birds recently extinct in New Zealand. 'Moa' is
its common name, so called because extinct: there is no moa now. See?
Well, they have got bones of it, and from some of the marshes even
feathers and dried bits of skin. Now, I am going to--well, there is no
need to make any bones about it--going to forge a complete stuffed moa.
I know a chap out there who will pretend to make the find in a kind of
antiseptic swamp, and say he stuffed it at once, as it threatened to
fall to pieces. The feathers are peculiar, but I have got a simply
lovely way of dodging up singed bits of ostrich plume. Yes, that is the
new smell you noticed. They can only discover the fraud with a
microscope, and they will hardly care to pull a nice specimen to bits
for that.

"In this way, you see, I give my little push in the advancement of
science.

"But all this is merely imitating Nature. I have done more than that in
my time. I have--beaten her."

He took his feet down from the mantel-board, and leant over
confidentially towards me. "I have created birds," he said in a low
voice. "New birds. Improvements. Like no birds that was ever seen
before."

He resumed his attitude during an impressive silence.

"Enrich the universe; rather. Some of the birds I made were new kinds
of humming birds, and very beautiful little things, but some of them
were simply rum. The rummest, I think, was the Anomalopteryx Jejuna.
Jejunus-a-um--empty--so called because there was really nothing in it; a
thoroughly empty bird--except for stuffing. Old Javvers has the thing
now, and I suppose he is almost as proud of it as I am. It is a
masterpiece, Bellows. It has all the silly clumsiness of your pelican,
all the solemn want of dignity of your parrot, all the gaunt
ungainliness of a flamingo, with all the extravagant chromatic conflict
of a mandarin duck. Such a bird. I made it out of the skeletons of a
stork and a toucan and a job lot of feathers. Taxidermy of that kind is
just pure joy, Bellows, to a real artist in the art.

"How did I come to make it? Simple enough, as all great inventions are.
One of those young genii who write us Science Notes in the papers got
hold of a German pamphlet about the birds of New Zealand, and translated
some of it by means of a dictionary and his mother-wit--he must have
been one of a very large family with a small mother--and he got mixed
between the living apteryx and the extinct anomalopteryx; talked about a
bird five feet high, living in the jungles of the North Island, rare,
shy, specimens difficult to obtain, and so on. Javvers, who even for a
collector, is a miraculously ignorant man, read these paragraphs, and
swore he would have the thing at any price. Raided the dealers with
enquiries. It shows what a man can do by persistence--will-power. Here
was a bird-collector swearing he would have a specimen of a bird that
did not exist, that never had existed, and which for very shame of its
own profane ungainliness, probably would not exist now if it could help
itself. And he got it. He got it.

"Have some more whisky, Bellows?" said the taxidermist, rousing himself
from a transient contemplation of the mysteries of will-power and the
collecting turn of mind. And, replenished, he proceeded to tell me of
how he concocted a most attractive mermaid, and how an itinerant
preacher, who could not get an audience because of it, smashed it
because it was idolatry, or worse, at Burslem Wakes. But as the
conversation of all the parties to this transaction, creator, would-be
preserver, and destroyer, was uniformly unfit for publication, this
cheerful incident must still remain unprinted.

The reader unacquainted with the dark ways of the collector may perhaps
be inclined to doubt my taxidermist, but so far as great auks' eggs, and
the bogus stuffed birds are concerned, I find that he has the
confirmation of distinguished ornithological writers. And the note about
the New Zealand bird certainly appeared in a morning paper of
unblemished reputation, for the taxidermist keeps a copy and has shown
it to me.




A DEAL IN OSTRICHES


"Talking of the prices of birds, I've seen an ostrich that cost three
hundred pounds," said the taxidermist, recalling his youth of travel.
"Three hundred pounds!"

He looked at me over his spectacles. "I've seen another that was refused
at four."

"No," he said, "it wasn't any fancy points. They was just plain
ostriches. A little off colour, too--owing to dietary. And there wasn't
any particular restriction of the demand either. You'd have thought five
ostriches would have ruled cheap on an East Indiaman. But the point was,
one of 'em had swallowed a diamond.

"The chap it got it off was Sir Mohini Padishah, a tremendous swell, a
Piccadilly swell you might say up to the neck of him, and then an ugly
black head and a whopping turban, with this diamond in it. The blessed
bird pecked suddenly and had it, and when the chap made a fuss, it
realised it had done wrong, I suppose, and went and mixed itself with
the others to preserve its incog. It all happened in a minute. I was
among the first to arrive, and there was this heathen going over his
gods, and two sailors and the man who had charge of the birds laughing,
fit to split. It was a rummy way of losing a jewel, come to think of it.
The man in charge hadn't been about just at the moment, so that he
didn't know which bird it was. Clean lost, you see. I didn't feel half
sorry, to tell you the truth. The beggar had been swaggering over his
blessed diamond ever since he came aboard.

"A thing like that goes from stem to stern of a ship in no time. Every
one was talking about it. Padishah went below to hide his feelings. At
dinner--he pigged at a table by himself, him and two other Hindoos--the
captain kind of jeered at him about it, and he got very excited. He
turned round and talked into my ear. He would not buy the birds; he
would have his diamond. He demanded his rights as a British subject. His
diamond must be found. He was firm upon that. He would appeal to the
House of Lords. The man in charge of the birds was one of those
wooden-headed chaps you can't get a new idea into anyhow. He refused any
proposal to interfere with the birds by way of medicine. His
instructions were to feed them so-and-so and treat them so-and-so, and
it was as much as his place was worth not to feed them so-and-so and
treat them so-and-so. Padishah had wanted a stomach-pump--though you
can't do that to a bird, you know. This Padishah was full of bad law,
like most of these blessed Bengalis, and talked of having a lien on the
birds, and so forth. But an old boy, who said his son was a London
barrister, argued that what a bird swallowed became ipso facto part of
the bird, and that Padishah's only remedy lay in an action for damages,
and even then it might be possible to show contributory negligence. He
hadn't any right of way about an ostrich that didn't belong to him. That
upset Padishah extremely, the more so as most of us expressed an opinion
that, that was the reasonable view. There wasn't any lawyer aboard to
settle the matter, so we all talked pretty free. At last, after Aden, it
appears that he came round to the general opinion, and went privately to
the man in charge and made an offer for all five ostriches.

"The next morning there was a fine shindy at breakfast. The man hadn't
any authority to deal with the birds, and nothing on earth would induce
him to sell; but it seems he told Padishah that a Eurasian named Potter
had already made him an offer, and on that Padishah denounced Potter
before us all. But I think the most of us thought it rather smart of
Potter, and I know that when Potter said that he'd wired at Aden to
London to buy the birds, and would have an answer at Suez, I cursed
pretty richly at a lost opportunity.

"At Suez, Padishah gave way to tears--actual wet tears--when Potter
became the owner of the birds, and offered him two hundred and fifty
right off for the five, being more than two hundred percent on what
Potter had given. Potter said he'd be hanged if he parted with a feather
of them--that he meant to kill them off one by one and find the diamond;
but afterwards, thinking it over, he relented a little. He was a
gambling hound, was this Potter, a little queer at cards, and this kind
of prize-packet business must have suited him down to the ground.
Anyhow, he offered, for a lark, to sell the birds separately to separate
people by auction at a starting price of L80 for a bird. But one of
them, he said, he meant to keep for luck.

"You must understand this diamond was a valuable one--a little Jew chap,
a diamond merchant, who was with us, had put it at three or four
thousand when Padishah had shown it to him--and this idea of an ostrich
gamble caught on. Now it happened that I'd been having a few talks on
general subjects with the man who looked after these ostriches, and
quite incidentally he'd said one of the birds was ailing, and he fancied
it had indigestion. It had one feather in its tail almost all white, by
which I knew it, and so when, next day, the auction started with it, I
capped Padishah's eighty-five by ninety. I fancy I was a bit too sure
and eager with my bid, and some of the others spotted the fact that I
was in the know. And Padishah went for that particular bird like an
irresponsible lunatic. At last the Jew diamond merchant got it for L175,
and Padishah said L180 just after the hammer came down--so Potter
declared. At any rate the Jew merchant secured it, and there and then he
got a gun and shot it. Potter made a Hades of a fuss because he said it
would injure the sale of the other three, and Padishah, of course,
behaved like an idiot; but all of us were very much excited. I can tell
you I was precious glad when that dissection was over, and no diamond
had turned up--precious glad. I'd gone to one-forty on that particular
bird myself.

"The little Jew was like most Jews--he didn't make any great fuss over
bad luck; but Potter declined to go on with the auction until it was
understood that the goods could not be delivered until the sale was
over. The little Jew wanted to argue that the case was exceptional, and
as the discussion ran pretty even, the thing was postponed until the
next morning. We had a lively dinner-table that evening, I can tell you,
but in the end Potter got his way, since it would stand to reason he
would be safer if he stuck to all the birds, and that we owed him some
consideration for his sportsmanlike behaviour. And the old gentleman
whose son was a lawyer said he'd been thinking the thing over and that
it was very doubtful if, when a bird had been opened and the diamond
recovered, it ought not to be handed back to the proper owner. I
remember I suggested it came under the laws of treasure-trove--which was
really the truth of the matter. There was a hot argument, and we settled
it was certainly foolish to kill the bird on board the ship. Then the
old gentleman, going at large through his legal talk, tried to make out
the sale was a lottery and illegal, and appealed to the captain; but
Potter said he sold the birds as ostriches. He didn't want to sell any
diamonds, he said, and didn't offer that as an inducement. The three
birds he put up, to the best of his knowledge and belief, did not
contain a diamond. It was in the one he kept--so he hoped.

"Prices ruled high next day all the same. The fact that now there were
four chances instead of five of course caused a rise. The blessed birds
averaged L227, and, oddly enough, this Padishah didn't secure one of
'em--not one. He made too much shindy, and when he ought to have been
bidding he was talking about liens, and besides, Potter was a bit down
on him. One fell to a quiet little officer chap, another to the little
Jew, and the third was syndicated by the engineers. And then Potter
seemed suddenly sorry for having sold them, and said he'd flung away a
clear thousand pounds, and that very likely he'd draw a blank and that
he always had been a fool, but when I went and had a bit of a talk to
him, with the idea of getting him to hedge on his last chance, I found
he'd already sold the bird he'd reserved to a political chap that was on
board, a chap who'd been studying Indian morals and social questions in
his vacation. That last was the three hundred pounds bird. Well, they
landed three of the blessed creatures at Brindisi--though the old
gentleman said it was a breach of the Customs regulations--and Potter
and Padishah landed too. The Hindoo seemed half mad as he saw his
blessed diamond going this way and that, so to speak. He kept on saying
he'd get an injunction--he had injunction on the brain--and giving his
name and address to the chaps who'd bought the birds, so that they'd
know where to send the diamond. None of them wanted his name and
address, and none of them would give their own. It was a fine row I can
tell you--on the platform. They all went off by different trains. I came
on to Southampton, and there I saw the last of the birds, as I came
ashore; it was the one the engineers bought, and it was standing up near
the bridge, in a kind of crate, and looking as leggy and silly a setting
for a valuable diamond as ever you saw--if it was a setting for a
valuable diamond.

"How did it end? Oh! Like that. Well--perhaps. Yes, there's one more
thing that may throw light on it. A week or so after landing I was down
Regent Street doing a bit of shopping, and who should I see arm-in-arm
and having a purple time of it but Padishah and Potter. If you come to
think of it--

"Yes. I've thought that. Only, you see, there's no doubt the diamond was
real. And Padishah was an eminent Hindoo. I've seen his name in the
papers--often. But whether the bird swallowed the diamond certainly is
another matter, as you say."




THROUGH A WINDOW


After his legs were set, they carried Bailey into the study and put him
on a couch before the open window. There he lay, a live--even a feverish
man down to the loins, and below that a double-barrelled mummy swathed
in white wrappings. He tried to read, even tried to write a little, but
most of the time he looked out of the window.

He had thought the window cheerful to begin with, but now he thanked God
for it many times a day. Within, the room was dim and grey, and in the
reflected light, the wear of the furniture showed plainly. His medicine
and drink stood on the little table, with such litter as the bare
branches of a bunch of grapes, or the ashes of a cigar upon a green
plate, or a day old evening paper. The view outside was flooded with
light, and across the corner of it came the head of the acacia, and at
the foot, the top of the balcony-railing of hammered iron. In the
foreground was the weltering silver of the river, never quiet and yet
never tiresome. Beyond was the reedy bank, a broad stretch of meadow
land, and then a dark line of trees ending in a group of poplars at the
distant bend of the river, and upstanding behind them, a square church
tower.

Up and down the river, all day long, things were passing. Now a string
of barges drifting down to London, piled with lime or barrels of beer;
then a steam-launch, disengaging heavy masses of black smoke, and
disturbing the whole width of the river with long rolling waves; then an
impetuous electric launch, and then a boatload of pleasure-seekers, a
solitary sculler, or a four from some rowing club. Perhaps the river was
quietest of a morning or late at night. One moonlight night some people
drifted down singing, and with a zither playing--it sounded very
pleasantly across the water.

In a few days Bailey began to recognise some of the craft; in a week he
knew the intimate history of half-a-dozen. The launch Luzon, from
Fitzgibbon's, two miles up, would go fretting by, sometimes three or
four times a day, conspicuous with its colouring of Indian-red and
yellow, and its two Oriental attendants; and one day, to Bailey's vast
amusement, the house-boat Purple Emperor came to a stop outside, and
breakfasted in the most shameless domesticity. Then one afternoon, the
captain of a slow-moving barge began a quarrel with his wife as they
came into sight from the left, and had carried it to personal violence
before he vanished behind the window-frame to the right. Bailey regarded
all this as an entertainment got up to while away his illness, and
applauded all the more, these moving incidents. Mrs. Green, coming in at
rare intervals with his meals, would catch him clapping his hands or
softly crying, "Encore!" But the river players had other engagements,
and his encore went unheeded.

"I should never have thought I could take such an interest in things
that did not concern me," said Bailey to Wilderspin, who used to come
in, in his nervous, friendly way and try to comfort the sufferer by
being talked to. "I thought this idle capacity was distinctive of little
children and old maids. But it's just circumstances. I simply can't
work, and things have to drift; it's no good to fret and struggle. And
so I lie here and am as amused as a baby with a rattle, at this river
and its affairs.

"Sometimes, of course, it gets a bit dull, but not often.

"I would give anything, Wilderspin, for a swamp--just one swamp--once.
Heads swimming and a steam launch to the rescue, and a chap or so hauled
out with a boat-hook... There goes Fitzgibbon's launch! They have a new
boat-hook, I see, and the little blackie is still in the dumps. I don't
think he's very well, Wilderspin. He's been like that for two or three
days, squatting sulky-fashion and meditating over the churning of the
water. Unwholesome for him to be always staring at the frothy water
running away from the stern."

They watched the little steamer fuss across the patch of sunlit river,
suffer momentary occultation from the acacia, and glide out of sight
behind the dark window-frame.

"I'm getting a wonderful eye for details," said Bailey: "I spotted that
new boat-hook at once. The other nigger is a funny little chap. He never
used to swagger with the old boat-hook like that."

"Malays, aren't they?" said Wilderspin.

"Don't know," said Bailey. "I thought one called all that sort of
mariner Lascar."

Then he began to tell Wilderspin what he knew of the private affairs of
the house-boat, Purple Emperor. "Funny," he said, "how these people come
from all points of the compass--from Oxford and Windsor, from Asia and
Africa--and gather and pass opposite the window just to entertain me.
One man floated out of the infinite the day before yesterday, caught one
perfect crab opposite, lost and recovered a scull, and passed on again.
Probably he will never come into my life again. So far as I am
concerned, he has lived and had his little troubles, perhaps
thirty--perhaps forty--years on the earth, merely to make an ass of
himself for three minutes in front of my window. Wonderful thing,
Wilderspin, if you come to think of it."

"Yes," said Wilderspin; "isn't it?"

A day or two after this Bailey had a brilliant morning. Indeed, towards
the end of the affair, it became almost as exciting as any window show,
very well could be. We will, however begin at the beginning.

Bailey was all alone in the house, for his housekeeper had gone into the
town three miles away to pay bills, and the servant had her holiday. The
morning began dull. A canoe went up about half-past nine, and later a
boatload of camping men came down. But this was mere margin. Things
became cheerful about ten o'clock.

It began with something white fluttering in the remote distance where
the three poplars marked the river bend. "Pocket-handkerchief," said
Bailey, when he saw it "No, too big! Flag perhaps."

However, it was not a flag, for it jumped about. "Man in whites running
fast, and this way," said Bailey. "That's luck! But his whites are
precious loose!"

Then a singular thing happened. There was a minute pink gleam among the
dark trees in the distance, and a little puff of pale grey that began to
drift and vanish eastward. The man in white jumped and continued
running. Presently the report of the shot arrived.

"What the devil!" said Bailey. "Looks as if someone was shooting at
him."

He sat up stiffly and stared hard. The white figure was coming along the
pathway through the corn. "It's one of those niggers from the
Fitzgibbon's," said Bailey; "or may I be hanged! I wonder why he keeps
sawing with his arm."

Then three other figures became indistinctly visible against the dark
background of the trees.

Abruptly on the opposite bank a man walked into the picture. He was
black-bearded, dressed in flannels, had a red belt, and a vast, grey
felt hat. He walked, leaning very much forward and with his hands
swinging before him. Behind him one could see the grass swept by the
towing-rope of the boat he was dragging. He was steadfastly regarding
the white figure that was hurrying through the corn. Suddenly he
stopped. Then, with a peculiar gesture, Bailey could see that he began
pulling in the tow-rope hand over hand. Over the water could be heard
the voices of the people in the still invisible boat.

"What are you after, Hagshot?" said someone.

The individual with the red belt shouted something that was inaudible,
and went on lugging in the rope, looking over his shoulder at the
advancing white figure as he did so. He came down the bank, and the rope
bent a lane among the reeds and lashed the water between his pulls.

Then just the bows of the boat came into view, with the towing-mast and
a tall, fair-haired man standing up and trying to see over the bank. The
boat bumped unexpectedly among the reeds, and the tall, fair-haired man
disappeared suddenly, having apparently fallen back into the invisible
part of the boat. There was a curse and some indistinct laughter.
Hagshot did not laugh, but hastily clambered into the boat and pushed
off. Abruptly the boat passed out of Bailey's sight.

But it was still audible. The melody of voices suggested that its
occupants were busy telling each other what to do.

The running figure was drawing near the bank. Bailey could now see
clearly that it was one of Fitzgibbon's Orientals, and began to realise
what the sinuous thing the man carried in his hand might be. Three other
men followed one another through the corn, and the foremost carried what
was probably the gun. They were perhaps two hundred yards or more behind
the Malay.

"It's a man hunt, by all that's holy!" said Bailey.

The Malay stopped for a moment and surveyed the bank to the right. Then
he left the path, and breaking through the corn, vanished in that
direction. The three pursuers followed suit, and their heads and
gesticulating arms above the corn, after a brief interval, also went out
of Bailey's field of vision.

Bailey so far forgot himself as to swear. "Just as things were getting
lively!" he said. Something like a woman's shriek came through the air.
Then shouts, a howl, a dull whack upon the balcony outside that made
Bailey jump, and then the report of a gun.

"This is precious hard on an invalid," said Bailey.

But more was to happen yet in his picture. In fact, a great deal more.
The Malay appeared again, running now along the bank up stream. His
stride had more swing and less pace in it than before. He was
threatening someone ahead with the ugly krees he carried. The blade,
Bailey noticed, was dull--it did not shine as steel should.

Then came the tall, fair man, brandishing a boat-hook, and after him
three other men in boating costume, running clumsily with oars. The man
with the grey hat and red belt was not with them. After an interval the
three men with the gun reappeared, still in the corn, but now near the
river bank. They emerged upon the towing-path, and hurried after the
others. The opposite bank was left blank and desolate again.

The sick-room was disgraced by more profanity. "I would give my life to
see the end of this," said Bailey. There were indistinct shouts up
stream. Once they seemed to be coming nearer, but they disappointed him.

Bailey sat and grumbled. He was still grumbling when his eye caught
something black and round among the waves. "Hullo!" he said. He looked
narrowly and saw two triangular black bodies frothing every now and then
about a yard in front of this.

He was still doubtful when the little band of pursuers came into sight
again, and began to point to this floating object. They were talking
eagerly. Then the man with the gun took aim.

"He's swimming the river, by George!" said Bailey.

The Malay looked round, saw the gun, and went under. He came up so close
to Bailey's bank of the river that one of the bars of the balcony hid
him for a moment. As he emerged the man with the gun fired. The Malay
kept steadily onward--Bailey could see the wet hair on his forehead now
and the krees between his teeth--and was presently hidden by the
balcony.

This seemed to Bailey an unendurable wrong. The man was lost to him for
ever now, so he thought. Why couldn't the brute have got himself
decently caught on the opposite bank, or shot in the water?

"It's worse than Edwin Drood," said Bailey.

Over the river, too, things had become an absolute blank. All seven men
had gone down stream again, probably to get the boat and follow across.
Bailey listened and waited. There was silence. "Surely it's not over
like this," said Bailey.

Five minutes passed--ten minutes. Then a tug with two barges went up
stream. The attitudes of the men upon these were the attitudes of those
who see nothing remarkable in earth, water, or sky. Clearly the whole
affair had passed out of sight of the river. Probably the hunt had gone
into the beech woods behind the house.

"Confound it!" said Bailey. "To be continued again, and no chance this
time of the sequel. But this is hard on a sick man."

He heard a step on the staircase behind him and looking round saw the
door open. Mrs. Green came in and sat down, panting. She still had her
bonnet on, her purse in her hand, and her little brown basket upon her
arm. "Oh, there!" she said, and left Bailey to imagine the rest.

"Have a little whisky and water, Mrs. Green, and tell me about it," said
Bailey.

Sipping a little, the lady began to recover her powers of explanation.

One of those black creatures at the Fitzgibbon's had gone mad, and was
running about with a big knife, stabbing people. He had killed a groom,
and stabbed the under-butler, and almost cut the arm off a boating
gentleman.

"Running amuck with a krees," said Bailey. "I thought that was it."

And he was hiding in the wood when she came through it from the town.

"What! Did he run after you?" asked Bailey, with a certain touch of glee
in his voice.

"No, that was the horrible part of it." Mrs. Green explained. She had
been right through the woods and had never known he was there. It was
only when she met young Mr. Fitzgibbon carrying his gun in the shrubbery
that she heard anything about it. Apparently, what upset Mrs. Green was
the lost opportunity for emotion. She was determined, however, to make
the most of what was left her.

"To think he was there all the time!" she said, over and over again.

Bailey endured this patiently enough for perhaps ten minutes. At last he
thought it advisable to assert himself. "It's twenty past one, Mrs.
Green," he said. "Don't you think it time you got me something to eat?"

This brought Mrs. Green suddenly to her knees.

"Oh Lord, sir!" she said. "Oh! Don't go making me go out of this room
sir, till I know he's caught. He might have got into the house, sir. He
might be creeping, creeping, with that knife of his, along the passage
this very--"

She broke off suddenly and glared over him at the window. Her lower jaw
dropped. Bailey turned his head sharply.

For the space of half a second things seemed just as they were. There
was the tree, the balcony, the shining river, the distant church tower.
Then he noticed that the acacia was displaced about a foot to the right,
and that it was quivering, and the leaves were rustling. The tree was
shaken violently, and a heavy panting was audible.

In another moment a hairy brown hand had appeared and clutched the
balcony railings, and in another the face of the Malay was peering
through these at the man on the couch. His expression was an unpleasant
grin, by reason of the krees he held between his teeth, and he was
bleeding from an ugly wound in his cheek. His hair wet to drying stuck
out like horns from his head. His body was bare save for the wet
trousers that clung to him. Bailey's first impulse was to spring from
the couch, but his legs reminded him that this was impossible.

By means of the balcony and tree, the man slowly raised himself until he
was visible to Mrs. Green. With a choking cry she made for the door and
fumbled with the handle.

Bailey thought swiftly and clutched a medicine bottle in either hand.
One he flung, and it smashed against the acacia. Silently and
deliberately, and keeping his bright eyes fixed on Bailey, the Malay
clambered into the balcony. Bailey, still clutching his second bottle,
but with a sickening, sinking feeling about his heart, watched first one
leg come over the railing and then the other.

It was Bailey's impression that the Malay took about an hour to get his
second leg over the rail. The period that elapsed before the sitting
position was changed to a standing one seemed enormous--days, weeks,
possibly a year or so. Yet Bailey had no clear impression of anything
going on in his mind during that vast period, except a vague wonder at
his inability to throw the second medicine bottle. Suddenly the Malay
glanced over his shoulder. There was the crack of a rifle. He flung up
his arms and came down upon the couch. Mrs. Green began a dismal shriek
that seemed likely to last until Doomsday. Bailey stared at the brown
body with its shoulder blade driven in, that writhed painfully across
his legs and rapidly staining and soaking the spotless bandages. Then he
looked at the long krees, with the reddish streaks upon its blade, that
lay an inch beyond the trembling brown fingers upon the floor. Then at
Mrs. Green, who had backed hard against the door and was staring at the
body and shrieking in gusty outbursts as if she would wake the dead. And
then the body was shaken by one last convulsive effort.

The Malay gripped the krees, tried to raise himself with his left hand,
and collapsed. Then he raised his head, stared for a moment at Mrs.
Green, and twisting his face round looked at Bailey. With a gasping
groan the dying man succeeded in clutching the bed clothes with his
disabled hand, and by a violent effort, which hurt Bailey's legs
exceedingly, writhed sideways towards what must be his last victim. Then
something seemed released in Bailey's mind and he brought down the
second bottle with all his strength on to the Malay's face. The krees
fell heavily upon the floor.


"Easy with those legs," said Bailey, as young Fitzgibbon and one of the
boating party lifted the body off him.

Young Fitzgibbon was very white in the face. "I didn't mean to kill
him," he said.

"It's just as well," said Bailey.





THE TEMPTATION OF HARRINGAY


It is quite impossible to say whether this thing really happened. It
depends entirely on the word of R.M. Harringay, who is an artist.

Following his version of the affair, the narrative deposes that
Harringay went into his studio about ten o'clock to see what he could
make of the head, that he had been working at the day before. The head
in question was that of an Italian organ-grinder, and Harringay
thought--but was not quite sure--that the title would be the "Vigil." So
far he is frank, and his narrative bears the stamp of truth. He had seen
the man expectant for pennies, and with a promptness that suggested
genius, had, had him in at once.

"Kneel. Look up at that bracket," said Harringay. "As if you expected
pennies.

"Don't grin!" said Harringay. "I don't want to paint your gums. Look as
though you were unhappy."

Now, after a night's rest, the picture proved decidedly unsatisfactory.
"It's good work," said Harringay. "That little bit in the neck... But."

He walked about the studio and looked at the thing from this point and
from that. Then he said a wicked word. In the original the word is
given.

"Painting," he says he said. "Just a painting of an organ-grinder--a
mere portrait. If it was a live organ-grinder I wouldn't mind. But
somehow I never make things alive. I wonder if my imagination is wrong."
This, too, has a truthful air. His imagination is wrong.

"That creative touch! To take canvas and pigment and make a man--as Adam
was made of red ochre! But this thing! If you met it walking about the
streets you would know it was only a studio production. The little boys
would tell it to 'Garnome and git frimed.' Some little touch... Well--it
won't do as it is."

He went to the blinds and began to pull them down. They were made of
blue holland with the rollers at the bottom of the window, so that you
pull them down to get more light. He gathered his palette, brushes, and
mahl stick from his table. Then he turned to the picture and put a speck
of brown in the corner of the mouth; and shifted his attention thence to
the pupil of the eye. Then he decided that the chin was a trifle too
impassive for a vigil.

Presently he put down his impedimenta, and lighting a pipe surveyed the
progress of his work. "I'm hanged if the thing isn't sneering at me,"
said Harringay, and he still believes it sneered.

The animation of the figure had certainly increased, but scarcely in the
direction he wished. There was no mistake about the sneer. "Vigil of the
Unbeliever," said Harringay. "Rather subtle and clever that! But the
left eyebrow isn't cynical enough."

He went and dabbed at the eyebrow, and added a little to the lobe of the
ear to suggest materialism. Further consideration ensued. "Vigil's off,
I'm afraid," said Harringay. "Why not Mephistopheles? But that's a bit
too common. 'A Friend of the Doge--' not so seedy. The armour won't do,
though. Too Camelot. How about a scarlet robe and call him 'One of the
Sacred College'? Humour in that, and an appreciation of Middle Italian
History.

"There's always Benvenuto Cellini," said Harringay; "with a clever
suggestion of a gold cup in one corner. But that would scarcely suit the
complexion."

He describes himself as babbling in this way in order to keep down an
unaccountably unpleasant sensation of fear. The thing was certainly
acquiring anything but a pleasing expression. Yet it was as certainly
becoming far more of a living thing than it had been--if a sinister
one--far more alive than anything he had ever painted before. "Call it
'Portrait of a Gentleman,'" said Harringay; "'A Certain Gentleman.'

"Won't do," said Harringay, still keeping up his courage. "Kind of thing
they call Bad Taste. That sneer will have to come out. That gone, and a
little more fire in the eye--never noticed how warm his eye was
before--and he might do for--? What price Passionate Pilgrim? But that
devilish face won't do--this, side of the Channel.

"Some little inaccuracy does it," he said; "eyebrows probably too
oblique--" therewith pulling the blind lower to get a better light, and
resuming palette and brushes.

The face on the canvas seemed animated by a spirit of its own. Where the
expression of diablerie came in he found impossible to discover.
Experiment was necessary. The eyebrows--it could scarcely be the
eyebrows? But he altered them. No, that was no better; in fact, if
anything, a trifle more satanic. The corner of the mouth? Pah! More than
ever a leer--and now, retouched, it was ominously grim. The eye, then?
Catastrophe! He had filled his brush with vermilion instead of brown,
and yet he had felt sure it was brown! The eye seemed now to have rolled
in its socket, and was glaring at him an eye of fire. In a flash of
passion, possibly with something of the courage of panic, he struck the
brush full of bright red, athwart the picture; and then a very curious
thing, a very strange thing indeed, occurred--if it did occur.

The diabolified Italian before him shut both his eyes, pursed his mouth,
and wiped the colour off his face with his hand.

Then the red eye opened again, with a sound like the opening of lips,
and the face smiled. "That was rather hasty of you," said the picture.

Harringay states that, now that the worst had happened, his
self-possession returned. He had a saving persuasion that devils were
reasonable creatures.

"Why do you keep moving about then," he said, "making faces and all
that--sneering and squinting, while I am painting you?"

"I don't," said the picture.

"You do," said Harringay.

"It's yourself," said the picture.

"It's not myself," said Harringay.

"It is yourself," said the picture. "No! Don't go hitting me with paint
again, because it's true. You have been trying to fluke an expression on
my face all the morning. Really, you haven't an idea what your picture
ought to look like."

"I have," said Harringay.

"You have not," said the picture: "You never have with your pictures.
You always start with the vaguest presentiment of what you are going to
do; it is to be something beautiful--you are sure of that--and devout,
perhaps, or tragic; but beyond that it is all experiment and chance. My
dear fellow! You don't think you can paint a picture like that?"

Now it must be remembered that for what follows we have only Harringay's
word.

"I shall paint a picture exactly as I like," said Harringay, calmly.

This seemed to disconcert the picture a little. "You can't paint a
picture without an inspiration," it remarked.

"But I had an inspiration--for this."

"Inspiration!" sneered the sardonic figure; "A fancy that came from your
seeing an organ-grinder looking up at a window! Vigil! Ha, ha! You just
started painting on the chance of something coming--that's what you did.
And when I saw you at it I came. I want a talk with you!

"Art, with you," said the picture--, "it's a poor business. You potter.
I don't know how it is, but you don't seem able to throw your soul into
it. You know too much. It hampers you. In the midst of your enthusiasms
you ask yourself whether something like this has not been done before.
And..."

"Look here," said Harringay, who had expected something better than
criticism from the devil. "Are you going to talk studio to me?" He
filled his number twelve hoghair with red paint.

"The true artist," said the picture, "is always an ignorant man. An
artist who theorises about his work is no longer artist but critic.
Wagner... I say--! What's that red paint for?"

"I'm going to paint you out," said Harringay. "I don't want to hear all
that Tommy Rot. If you think just because I'm an artist by trade I'm
going to talk studio to you, you make a precious mistake."

"One minute," said the picture, evidently alarmed. "I want to make you
an offer--a genuine offer. It's right what I'm saying. You lack
inspirations. Well. No doubt you've heard of the Cathedral of Cologne,
and the Devil's Bridge, and--"

"Rubbish," said Harringay. "Do you think I want to go to perdition
simply for the pleasure of painting a good picture, and getting it
slated. Take that."

His blood was up. His danger only nerved him to action, so he says. So
he planted a dab of vermilion in his creature's mouth. The Italian
spluttered and tried to wipe it off--evidently horribly surprised. And
then--according to Harringay--there began a very remarkable struggle,
Harringay splashing away with the red paint, and the picture wriggling
about and wiping it off as fast as he put it on. "Two masterpieces,"
said the demon. "Two indubitable masterpieces for a Chelsea artist's
soul. It's a bargain?" Harringay replied with the paint brush.

For a few minutes nothing could be heard but the brush going and the
spluttering and ejaculations of the Italian. A lot of the strokes he
caught on his arm and hand, though Harringay got over his guard often
enough. Presently the paint on the palette gave out and the two
antagonists stood breathless, regarding each other. The picture was so
smeared with red that it looked as if it had been rolling about a
slaughterhouse, and it was painfully out of breath and very
uncomfortable with the wet paint trickling down its neck. Still, the
first round was in its favour on the whole. "Think," it said, sticking
pluckily to its point, "two supreme masterpieces--in different styles.
Each equivalent to the Cathedral..."

"I know," said Harringay, and rushed out of the studio and along the
passage towards his wife's boudoir.

In another minute he was back with a large tin of enamel--Hedge
Sparrow's Egg Tint, it was, and a brush. At the sight of that the
artistic devil with the red eye began to scream. "Three
masterpieces--culminating masterpieces."

Harringay delivered cut two across the demon, and followed with a thrust
in the eye. There was an indistinct rumbling. "Four masterpieces," and a
spitting sound.

But Harringay had the upper hand now and meant to keep it. With rapid,
bold strokes he continued to paint over the writhing canvas, until at
last it was a uniform field of shining Hedge Sparrow tint. Once the
mouth reappeared and got as far as "Five master--" before he filled it
with enamel; and near the end the red eye opened and glared at him
indignantly. But at last nothing remained save a gleaming panel of
drying enamel. For a little while a faint stirring beneath the surface
puckered it slightly here and there, but presently even that died away
and the thing was perfectly still.

Then Harringay--according to Harringay's account--lit his pipe and sat
down and stared at the enamelled canvas, and tried to make out clearly
what had happened. Then he walked round behind it, to see if the back of
it was at all remarkable. Then it was he began to regret he had not
photographed the Devil before he painted him out.

This is Harringay's story--not mine. He supports it by a small canvas
(24 by 20) enamelled a pale green, and by violent asseverations. It is
also true that he never has produced a masterpiece, and in the opinion
of his intimate friends probably never will.




THE FLYING MAN


The Ethnologist looked at the bhimraj feather thoughtfully. "They seemed
loth to part with it," he said.

"It is sacred to the Chiefs," said the lieutenant; "just as yellow silk,
you know, is sacred to the Chinese Emperor."

The Ethnologist did not answer. He hesitated. Then opening the topic
abruptly, "What on earth is this cock-and-bull story they have of a
flying man?"

The lieutenant smiled faintly. "What did they tell you?"

"I see," said the Ethnologist, "that you know of your fame."

The lieutenant rolled himself a cigarette. "I don't mind hearing about
it once more. How does it stand at present?"

"It's so confoundedly childish," said the Ethnologist, becoming
irritated. "How did you play it off upon them?"

The lieutenant made no answer, but lounged back in his folding-chair,
still smiling.

"Here am I, come four hundred miles out of my way to get what is left of
the folk-lore of these people, before they are utterly demoralised by
missionaries and the military, and all I find are a lot of impossible
legends about a sandy-haired scrub of an infantry lieutenant. How he is
invulnerable--how he can jump over elephants--how he can fly. That's the
toughest nut. One old gentleman described your wings, said they had
black plumage and were not quite as long as a mule. Said he often saw
you by moonlight hovering over the crests out towards the Shendu
country. Confound it, man!"

The lieutenant laughed cheerfully. "Go on," he said. "Go on."

The Ethnologist did. At last he wearied. "To trade so," he said, "on
these unsophisticated children of the mountains. How could you bring
yourself to do it, man?"

"I'm sorry," said the lieutenant, "but truly the thing was forced upon
me. I can assure you I was driven to it. And at the time I had not the
faintest idea of how the Chin imagination would take it. Or curiosity. I
can only plead it was an indiscretion and not malice that made me
replace the folk-lore by a new legend. But as you seem aggrieved, I will
try and explain the business to you.

"It was in the time of the last Lushai expedition but one, and Walters
thought these people, you have been visiting, were friendly. So, with an
airy confidence in my capacity for taking care of myself, he sent me up
the gorge--fourteen miles of it--with three of the Derbyshire men and
half a dozen Sepoys, two mules, and his blessing, to see what popular
feeling was like at that village you visited. A force of ten--not
counting the mules--fourteen miles, and during a war! You saw the road?"

"Road!" said the Ethnologist.

"It's better now than it was. When we went up, we had to wade in the
river for a mile, where the valley narrows, with a smart stream frothing
round our knees and the stones as slippery as ice. There it was I
dropped my rifle. Afterwards the Sappers blasted the cliff with dynamite
and made the convenient way you came by. Then below, where those very
high cliffs come, we had to keep on dodging across the river--I should
say we crossed it a dozen times in a couple of miles.

"We got in sight of the place early the next morning. You know how it
lies, on a spur halfway between the big hills, and as we began to
appreciate how wickedly quiet the village lay under the sunlight, we
came to a stop to consider.

"At that they fired a lump of filed brass idol at us, just by way of a
welcome. It came twanging down the slope to the right of us where the
boulders are, missed my shoulder by an inch or so, and plugged the mule
that carried all the provisions and utensils. I never heard such a
death-rattle before or since. And at that we became aware of a number of
gentlemen carrying matchlocks, and dressed in things like plaid dusters,
dodging about along the neck between the village and the crest to the
east.

"'Right about face,' I said. 'Not too close together.'

"And with that encouragement my expedition of ten men came round and set
off at a smart trot down the valley again hitherward. We did not wait to
save anything our dead had carried, but we kept the second mule with
us--he carried my tent and some other rubbish--out of a feeling of
friendship.

"So ended the battle--ingloriously. Glancing back, I saw the valley
dotted with the victors, shouting and firing at us. But no one was hit.
These Chins and their guns are very little good except at a sitting
shot. They will sit and finick over a boulder for hours taking aim, and
when they fire running it is chiefly for stage effect. Hooker, one of
the Derbyshire men, fancied himself rather with the rifle, and stopped
behind for half a minute to try his luck as we turned the bend. But he
got nothing.

"I'm not a Xenophon to spin much of a yarn about my retreating army. We
had to pull the enemy up twice in the next two miles when he became a
bit pressing, by exchanging shots with him, but it was a fairly
monotonous affair--hard breathing chiefly--until we got near the place
where the hills run in towards the river and pinch the valley into a
gorge. And there we very luckily caught a glimpse of half a dozen round
black heads coming slanting-ways over the hill to the left of us--the
east that is--and almost parallel with us.

"At that I called a halt. 'Look here,' says I to Hooker and the other
Englishmen; 'what are we to do now?' and I pointed to the heads.

"'Headed orf, or I'm a nigger,' said one of the men."

"'We shall be,' said another. 'You know the Chin way, George?'

"'They can pot every one of us at fifty yards,' says Hooker, 'in the
place where the river is narrow. It's just suicide to go on down.'

"I looked at the hill to the right of us. It grew steeper lower down the
valley, but it still seemed climbable. And all the Chins we had seen
hitherto had been on the other side of the stream.

"'It's that or stopping,' says one of the Sepoys.

"So we started slanting up the hill. There was something faintly
suggestive of a road running obliquely up the face of it, and that we
followed. Some Chins presently came into view up the valley, and I heard
some shots. Then I saw one of the Sepoys was sitting down about thirty
yards below us. He had simply sat down without a word, apparently not
wishing to give trouble. At that I called a halt again; I told Hooker to
try another shot, and went back and found the man was hit in the leg. I
took him up, carried him along to put him on the mule--already pretty
well laden with the tent and other things which we had no time to take
off. When I got up to the rest with him, Hooker had his empty Martini in
his hand, and was grinning and pointing to a motionless black spot up
the valley. All the rest of the Chins were behind boulders or back round
the bend. 'Five hundred yards,' says Hooker, 'if an inch. And I'll swear
I hit him in the head.'

"I told him to go and do it again, and with that we went on again.

"Now the hillside kept getting steeper as we pushed on, and the road we
were following more and more of a shelf. At last it was mere cliff above
and below us. 'It's the best road I have seen yet in Chin Lushai land,'
said I to encourage the men, though I had a fear of what was coming.

"And in a few minutes the way bent round a corner of the cliff. Then,
finis! The ledge came to an end.

"As soon as he grasped the position one of the Derbyshire men fell
a-swearing at the trap we had fallen into. The Sepoys halted quietly.
Hooker grunted and reloaded, and went back to the bend.

"Then two of the Sepoy chaps helped their comrade down and began to
unload the mule.

"Now, when I came to look about me, I began to think we had not been so
very unfortunate after all. We were on a shelf perhaps ten yards across
it at widest. Above it the cliff projected so that we could not be shot
down upon, and below was an almost sheer precipice of perhaps two or
three hundred feet. Lying down we were invisible to anyone across the
ravine. The only approach was along the ledge, and on that one man was
as good as a host. We were in a natural stronghold, with only one
disadvantage, our sole provision against hunger and thirst was one live
mule. Still we were at most eight or nine miles from the main
expedition, and no doubt, after a day or so, they would send up after us
if we did not return.

"After a day or so ..."

The lieutenant paused. "Ever been thirsty, Graham?"

"Not that kind," said the Ethnologist.

"H'm. We had the whole of that day, the night, and the next day of it,
and only a trifle of dew we wrung out of our clothes and the tent. And
below us was the river going giggle, giggle, round a rock in mid stream.
I never knew such a barrenness of incident, or such a quantity of
sensation. The sun might have had Joshua's command still upon it for all
the motion one could see; and it blazed like a near furnace. Towards the
evening of the first day one of the Derbyshire men said
something--nobody heard what--and went off round the bend of the cliff.
We heard shots, and when Hooker looked round the corner he was gone. And
in the morning the Sepoy whose leg was shot was in delirium, and jumped
or fell over the cliff. Then we took the mule and shot it, and that must
needs go over the cliff too in its last struggles, leaving eight of us.

"We could see the body of the Sepoy down below, with the head in the
water. He was lying face downwards, and so far as I could make out was
scarcely smashed at all. Badly as the Chins might covet his head, they
had the sense to leave it alone until the darkness came.

"At first we talked of all the chances there were of the main body
hearing the firing, and reckoned whether they would begin to miss us,
and all that kind of thing, but we dried up as the evening came on. The
Sepoys played games with bits of stone among themselves, and afterwards
told stories. The night was rather chilly. The second day nobody spoke.
Our lips were black and our throats afire, and we lay about on the ledge
and glared at one another. Perhaps it's as well we kept our thoughts to
ourselves. One of the British soldiers began writing some blasphemous
rot on the rock with a bit of pipeclay, about his last dying will, until
I stopped it. As I looked over the edge down into the valley and saw the
river rippling I was nearly tempted to go after the Sepoy. It seemed a
pleasant and desirable thing to go rushing down through the air with
something to drink--or no more thirst at any rate--at the bottom. I
remembered in time, though, that I was the officer in command, and my
duty to set a good example, and that kept me from any such foolishness.

"Yet, thinking of that, put an idea into my head. I got up and looked at
the tent and tent ropes, and wondered why I had not thought of it
before. Then I came and peered over the cliff again. This time the
height seemed greater and the pose of the Sepoy rather more painful. But
it was that or nothing. And to cut it short, I parachuted.

"I got a big circle of canvas out of the tent, about three times the
size of that table-cover, and plugged the hole in the centre, and I tied
eight ropes round it to meet in the middle and make a parachute. The
other chaps lay about and watched me as though they thought it was a new
kind of delirium. Then I explained my notion to the two British soldiers
and how I meant to do it, and as soon as the short dusk had darkened
into night, I risked it. They held the thing high up, and I took a run
the whole length of the ledge. The thing filled with air like a sail,
but at the edge I will confess I funked and pulled up.

"As soon as I stopped I was ashamed of myself--as well I might be in
front of privates--and went back and started again. Off I jumped this
time--with a kind of sob, I remember--clean into the air, with the big
white sail bellying out above me.

"I must have thought at a frightful pace. It seemed a long time before I
was sure that the thing meant to keep steady. At first it heeled
sideways. Then I noticed the face of the rock which seemed to be
streaming up past me, and me motionless. Then I looked down and saw in
the darkness the river and the dead Sepoy rushing up towards me. But in
the indistinct light I also saw three Chins, seemingly aghast at the
sight of me, and that the Sepoy was decapitated. At that I wanted to go
back again.

"Then my boot was in the mouth of one, and in a moment he and I were in
a heap with the canvas fluttering down on the top of us. I fancy I
dashed out his brains with my foot. I expected nothing more than to be
brained myself by the other two, but the poor heathen had never heard of
Baldwin, and incontinently bolted.

"I struggled out of the tangle of dead Chin and canvas, and looked
round. About ten paces off lay the head of the Sepoy staring in the
moonlight. Then I saw the water and went and drank. There wasn't a sound
in the world but the footsteps of the departing Chins, a faint shout
from above, and the gluck of the water. So soon as I had drunk my full I
started off down the river.

"That about ends the explanation of the flying man story. I never met a
soul the whole eight miles of the way. I got to Walters' camp by ten
o'clock, and a born idiot of a sentinel had the cheek to fire at me as I
came trotting out of the darkness. So soon as I had hammered my story
into Winter's thick skull, about fifty men started up the valley to
clear the Chins out and get our men down. But for my own part I had too
good a thirst to provoke it, by going with them.

"You have heard what kind of a yarn the Chins made of it. Wings as long
as a mule, eh--? And black feathers! The gay lieutenant bird! Well,
well."

The lieutenant meditated cheerfully for a moment. Then he added, "You
would scarcely credit it, but when they got to the ridge at last, they
found two more of the Sepoys had jumped over."

"The rest were all right?" asked the Ethnologist.

"Yes," said the lieutenant; "the rest were all right, barring a certain
thirst, you know."

And at the memory he helped himself to soda and whisky again.




THE DIAMOND MAKER


Some business had detained me in Chancery Lane, until nine in the
evening, and thereafter, having some inkling of a headache, I was
disinclined either for entertainment or further work. So much of the sky
as the high cliffs of that narrow canon of traffic left visible, spoke
of a serene night, and I determined to make my way down to the
Embankment, and rest my eyes and cool my head by watching the variegated
lights upon the river. Beyond comparison the night is the best time for
this place; a merciful darkness hides the dirt of the waters, and the
lights of this transitional age, red glaring orange, gas-yellow, and
electric white, are set in shadowy outlines of every possible shade
between grey and deep purple. Through the arches of Waterloo Bridge a
hundred points of light mark the sweep of the Embankment, and above its
parapet rise the towers of Westminster, warm grey against the starlight.
The black river goes by with only a rare ripple breaking its silence,
and disturbing the reflections of the lights that swim upon its surface.

"A warm night," said a voice at my side.

I turned my head, and saw the profile of a man who was leaning over the
parapet beside me. It was a refined face, not unhandsome, though pinched
and pale enough, and the coat collar turned up and pinned round the
throat marked his status in life as sharply as a uniform. I felt I was
committed to the price of a bed and breakfast if I answered him.

I looked at him curiously. Would he have anything to tell me worth the
money, or was he the common incapable--incapable even of telling his own
story? There was a quality of intelligence in his forehead and eyes, and
a certain tremulousness in his nether lip that decided me.

"Very warm," said I; "but not too warm for us here."

"No," he said, still looking across the water, "it is pleasant enough
here... just now.

"It is good," he continued after a pause, "to find anything so restful
as this in London. After one has been fretting about business all day,
about getting on, meeting obligations, and parrying dangers, I do not
know what one would do if it were not for such pacific corners." He
spoke with long pauses between the sentences. "You must know a little of
the irksome labour of the world, or you would not be here. But I doubt
if you can be so brain-weary and footsore as I am... Bah! Sometimes I
doubt if the game is worth the candle. I feel inclined to throw the
whole thing over--name, wealth and position--and take to some modest
trade. But I know if I abandoned my ambition--hardly as she uses me--I
should have nothing but remorse left for the rest of my days."

He became silent. I looked at him in astonishment. If ever I saw a man
hopelessly hard-up it was the man in front of me. He was ragged and he
was dirty, unshaven and unkempt; he looked as though he had been left in
a dust-bin for a week. And he was talking to me of the irksome worries
of a large business. I almost laughed outright. Either he was mad or
playing a sorry jest on his own poverty.

"If high aims and high positions," said I, "have their drawbacks of hard
work and anxiety, they have their compensations. Influence, the power of
doing good, of assisting those weaker and poorer than ourselves; and
there is even a certain gratification in display."

My banter under the circumstances was in very vile taste. I spoke on the
spur of the contrast of his appearance and speech. I was sorry even
while I was speaking.

He turned a haggard but very composed face upon me. Said he: "I forgot
myself. Of course you would not understand."

He measured me for a moment. "No doubt it is very absurd. You will not
believe me even when I tell you, so that it is fairly safe to tell you.
And it will be a comfort to tell someone. I really have a big business
in hand, a very big business. But there are troubles just now. The fact
is... I make diamonds."

"I suppose," said I, "you are out of work just at present?"

"I am sick of being disbelieved," he said impatiently, and suddenly
unbuttoning his wretched coat he pulled out a little canvas bag that was
hanging by a cord round his neck. From this he produced a brown pebble.
"I wonder if you know enough, to know what that is?" He handed it to me.

Now, a year or so ago, I had occupied my leisure in taking a London
science degree, so that I have a smattering of physics and mineralogy.
The thing was not unlike an uncut diamond of the darker sort, though far
too large, being almost as big as the top of my thumb. I took it, and
saw it had the form of a regular octahedron, with the curved faces
peculiar to the most precious of minerals. I took out my penknife and
tried to scratch it--vainly. Leaning forward towards the gas-lamp, I
tried the thing on my watch-glass, and scored a white line across that,
with the greatest ease.

I looked at my interlocutor with rising curiosity. "It certainly is
rather like a diamond. But, if so, it is a Behemoth of diamonds. Where
did you get it?"

"I tell you I made it," he said. "Give it back to me."

He replaced it hastily and buttoned his jacket. "I will sell it to you
for one hundred pounds," he suddenly whispered eagerly. With that my
suspicions returned. The thing might, after all, be merely a lump of
that almost equally hard substance, corundum, with an accidental
resemblance in shape to the diamond. Or if it was a diamond, how came he
by it, and why should he offer it at a hundred pounds?

We looked into one another's eyes. He seemed eager, but honestly eager.
At that moment I believed it was a diamond he was trying to sell. Yet I
am a poor man, a hundred pounds would leave a visible gap in my fortunes
and no sane man would buy a diamond by gaslight from a ragged tramp on
his personal warranty only. Still, a diamond that size conjured up a
vision of many thousands of pounds. Then, thought I, such a stone could
scarcely exist without being mentioned in every book on gems, and again
I called to mind the stories of contraband and light-fingered Kaffirs at
the Cape. I put the question of purchase on one side.

"How did you get it?" said I.

"I made it."

I had heard something of Moissan, but I knew his artificial diamonds
were very small. I shook my head.

"You seem to know something of this kind of thing. I will tell you a
little about myself. Perhaps then you may think better of the purchase."
He turned round with his back to the river, and put his hands in his
pockets. He sighed. "I know you will not believe me."

"Diamonds," he began--and as he spoke his voice lost its faint flavour
of the tramp and assumed something of the easy tone of an educated
man--"are to be made by throwing carbon out of combination in a suitable
flux and under a suitable pressure; the carbon crystallises out, not as
black-lead or charcoal-powder, but as small diamonds. So much has been
known to chemists for years, but no one yet had hit upon exactly the
right flux in which to melt up the carbon, or exactly the right pressure
for the best results. Consequently the diamonds made by chemists are
small and dark, and worthless as jewels. Now I, you know, have given up
my life to this problem--given my life to it."

"I began to work at the conditions of diamond making when I was
seventeen, and now I am thirty-two. It seemed to me that it might take
all the thought and energies of a man for ten years, or twenty years,
but, even if it did, the game was still worth the candle. Suppose one to
have at last just hit the right trick before the secret got out and
diamonds became as common as coal, one might realize millions.
Millions!"

He paused and looked for my sympathy. His eyes shone hungrily. "To
think," said he, "that I am on the verge of it all, and here!

"I had," he proceeded, "about a thousand pounds when I was twenty-one,
and this, I thought, eked out by a little teaching, would keep my
researches going. A year or two was spent in study, at Berlin chiefly,
and then I continued on my own account. The trouble was the secrecy. You
see, if once I had let out what I was doing, other men might have been
spurred on by my belief in the practicability of the idea; and I do not
pretend to be such a genius as to have been sure of coming in first, in
the case of a race for the discovery. And you see it was important that
if I really meant to make a pile, people should not know it was an
artificial process and capable of turning out diamonds by the ton. So I
had to work all alone. At first I had a little laboratory, but as my
resources began to run out I had to conduct my experiments in a wretched
unfurnished room in Kentish Town, where I slept at last on a straw
mattress on the floor among all my apparatus. The money simply flowed
away. I grudged myself everything except scientific appliances. I tried
to keep things going by a little teaching, but I am not a very good
teacher, and I have no university degree, nor very much education except
in chemistry, and I found I had to give a lot of time and labour for
precious little money. But I got nearer and nearer the thing. Three
years ago I settled the problem of the composition of the flux, and got
near the pressure by putting this flux of mine and a certain carbon
composition into a closed-up gun-barrel, filling up with water, sealing
tightly, and heating."

He paused.

"Rather risky," said I.

"Yes. It burst, and smashed all my windows and a lot of my apparatus;
but I got a kind of diamond powder nevertheless. Following out the
problem of getting a big pressure upon the molten mixture from which the
things were to crystallise, I hit upon some researches of Daubree's at
the Paris Laboratorie des Poudres et Salpetres. He exploded dynamite in
a tightly screwed steel cylinder, too strong to burst, and I found he
could crush rocks into a muck not unlike the South African bed in which
diamonds are found. It was a tremendous strain on my resources, but I
got a steel cylinder made for my purpose after his pattern. I put in all
my stuff and my explosives, built up a fire in my furnace, put the whole
concern in, and--went out for a walk."

I could not help laughing at his matter-of-fact manner. "Did you not
think it would blow up the house? Were there other people in the place?"

"It was in the interest of science," he said, ultimately. "There was a
costermonger family on the floor below, a begging-letter writer in the
room behind mine, and two flower-women were upstairs. Perhaps it was a
bit thoughtless. But possibly some of them were out.

"When I came back the thing was just where I left it, among the
white-hot coals. The explosive hadn't burst the case. And then I had a
problem to face. You know time is an important element in
crystallisation. If you hurry the process the crystals are small--it is
only by prolonged standing that they grow to any size. I resolved to let
this apparatus cool for two years, letting the temperature go down
slowly during the time. And I was now quite out of money; and with a big
fire and the rent of my room, as well as my hunger to satisfy, I had
scarcely a penny in the world.

"I can hardly tell you all the shifts I was put to while I was making
the diamonds. I have sold newspapers, held horses, opened cab-doors. For
many weeks I addressed envelopes. I had a place as assistant to a man
who owned a barrow, and used to call down one side of the road while he
called down the other.

"Once for a week I had absolutely nothing to do, and I begged. What a
week that was! One day the fire was going out and I had eaten nothing
all day, and a little chap taking his girl out, gave me sixpence--to
show-off. Thank heaven for vanity! How the fish-shops smelt! But I went
and spent it all on coals, and had the furnace bright red again, and
then--Well, hunger makes a fool of a man.

"At last, three weeks ago, I let the fire out. I took my cylinder and
unscrewed it while it was still so hot that it punished my hands, and I
scraped out the crumbling lava-like mass with a chisel, and hammered it
into a powder upon an iron plate. And I found three big diamonds and
five small ones. As I sat on the floor hammering, my door opened, and my
neighbour, the begging-letter writer came in. He was drunk--as he
usually is, 'Nerchist,' said he. 'You're drunk,' said I. 'Structive
scoundrel,' said he. 'Go to your father,' said I, meaning the Father of
Lies. 'Never you mind,' said he, and gave me a cunning wink, and
hiccupped, and leaning up against the door, with his other eye against
the doorpost, began to babble of how he had been prying in my room, and
how he had gone to the police that morning, and how they had taken down
everything he had to say--'siffiwas a ge'm,' said he. Then I suddenly
realised I was in a hole. Either I should have to tell these police my
little secret, and get the whole thing blown upon, or be lagged as an
Anarchist. So I went up to my neighbour and took him by the collar, and
rolled him about a bit, and then I gathered up my diamonds and cleared
out. The evening newspapers called my den the Kentish-Town Bomb Factory.
And now I cannot part with the things for love or money.

"If I go in to respectable jewellers they ask me to wait, and go and
whisper to a clerk to fetch a policeman, and then I say I cannot wait.
And I found out a receiver of stolen goods, and he simply stuck to the
one I gave him and told me to prosecute if I wanted it back. I am going
about now with several hundred thousand pounds-worth of diamonds round
my neck, and without either food or shelter. You are the first person I
have taken into my confidence. But I like your face and I am
hard-driven."

He looked into my eyes.

"It would be madness," said I, "for me to buy a diamond under the
circumstances. Besides, I do not carry hundreds of pounds about in my
pocket. Yet I more than half believe your story. I will, if you like, do
this: come to my office to-morrow..."

"You think I am a thief!" said he keenly. "You will tell the police. I
am not coming into a trap."

"Somehow I am assured you are no thief. Here is my card. Take that,
anyhow. You need not come to any appointment. Come when you will."

He took the card, and an earnest of my good-will.

"Think better of it and come," said I.

He shook his head doubtfully. "I will pay back your half-crown with
interest some day--such interest as will amaze you," said he. "Anyhow,
you will keep the secret...? Don't follow me."

He crossed the road and went into the darkness towards the little steps
under the archway leading into Essex Street, and I let him go. And that
was the last I ever saw of him.

Afterwards I had two letters from him asking me to send bank-notes--not
cheques--to certain addresses. I weighed the matter over and took what I
conceived to be the wisest course. Once he called upon me when I was
out. My urchin described him as a very thin, dirty, and ragged man, with
a dreadful cough. He left no message. That was the finish of him so far
as my story goes. I wonder sometimes what has become of him. Was he an
ingenious monomaniac, or a fraudulent dealer in pebbles, or has he
really made diamonds as he asserted? The latter is just sufficiently
credible to make me think at times that I have missed the most brilliant
opportunity of my life. He may of course be dead, and his diamonds
carelessly thrown aside--one, I repeat, was almost as big as my thumb.
Or he may be still wandering about trying to sell the things. It is just
possible he may yet emerge upon society, and, passing athwart my heavens
in the serene altitude sacred to the wealthy and the well-advertised,
reproach me silently for my want of enterprise. I sometimes think I
might at least have risked five pounds.




AEPYORNIS ISLAND


The man with the scarred face leant over the table and looked at my
bundle.

"Orchids?" he asked.

"A few," I said.

"Cypripediums," he said.

"Chiefly," said I.

"Anything new? I thought not. I did these islands
twenty-five--twenty-seven years ago. If you find anything new
here--well, it's brand new. I didn't leave much."

"I'm not a collector," said I.

"I was young then," he went on. "Lord! How I used to fly round." He
seemed to take my measure. "I was in the East Indies two years, and in
Brazil seven. Then I went to Madagascar."

"I know a few explorers by name," I said, anticipating a yarn. "Whom did
you collect for?"

"Dawson's. I wonder if you've heard the name of Butcher ever?"

"Butcher--Butcher?" The name seemed vaguely present in my memory; then I
recalled Butcher vs. Dawson. "Why!" said I, "You are the man who sued
them for four years' salary--got cast away on a desert island..."

"Your servant," said the man with the scar, bowing. "Funny case, wasn't
it? Here was me, making a little fortune on that island, doing nothing
for it neither, and them quite unable to give me notice. It often used
to amuse me thinking over it while I was there. I did calculations of
it--big--all over the blessed atoll in ornamental figuring."

"How did it happen?" said I. "I don't rightly remember the case."

"Well... You've heard of the Aepyornis?"

"Rather. Andrews was telling me of a new species he was working on only
a month or so ago. Just before I sailed. They've got a thigh-bone, it
seems, nearly a yard long. Monster the thing must have been!"

"I believe you," said the man with the scar. "It was a monster.
Sindbad's roc was just a legend of 'em. But when did they find these
bones?"

"Three or four years ago--'91, I fancy. Why?"

"Why? Because I found them--Lord--! It's nearly twenty years ago. If
Dawson's hadn't been silly about that salary they might have made a
perfect ring in 'em... I couldn't help the infernal boat going adrift."

He paused. "I suppose it's the same place. A kind of swamp about ninety
miles north of Antananarivo. Do you happen to know? You have to go to it
along the coast by boats. You don't happen to remember, perhaps?"

"I don't. I fancy Andrews said something about a swamp."

"It must be the same. It's on the east coast. And somehow there's
something in the water that keeps things from decaying. Like creosote it
smells. It reminded me of Trinidad. Did they get any more eggs? Some of
the eggs I found were a foot and a half long. The swamp goes circling
round, you know, and cuts off this bit. It's mostly salt, too. Well...
What a time I had of it! I found the things quite by accident. We went
for eggs, me and two native chaps, in one of those rum canoes all tied
together, and found the bones at the same time. We had a tent and
provisions for four days, and we pitched on one of the firmer places. To
think of it brings that odd tarry smell back even now. It's funny work.
You go probing into the mud with iron rods, you know. Usually the egg
gets smashed. I wonder how long it is since these Aepyornises really
lived. The missionaries say the natives have legends about when they
were alive, but I never heard any such stories myself.* But certainly
those eggs we got were as fresh as if they had been new laid. Fresh!
Carrying them down to the boat one of my nigger chaps dropped one on a
rock and it smashed. How I lammed into the beggar! But sweet it was, as
if it was new laid, not even smelly, and its mother dead these four
hundred years, perhaps. Said a centipede had bit him. However, I'm
getting off the straight with the story. It had taken us all day to dig
into the slush and get these eggs out unbroken, and we were all covered
with beastly black mud, and naturally I was cross. So far as I knew they
were the only eggs that have ever been got out, not even cracked. I went
afterwards to see the ones they have at the Natural History Museum in
London; all of them were cracked and just stuck together like a mosaic,
and bits missing. Mine were perfect, and I meant to blow them when I got
back. Naturally I was annoyed at the silly duffer dropping three hours'
work just on account of a centipede. I hit him about rather."

[* No European is known to have seen a live Aepyornis, with the doubtful
exception of Macer, who visited Madagascar in 1745.--H. G. W.]

The man with the scar took out a clay pipe. I placed my pouch before
him. He filled up absent-mindedly.

"How about the others? Did you get those home? I don't remember--"

"That's the queer part of the story. I had three others. Perfectly fresh
eggs. Well, we put 'em in the boat, and then I went up to the tent to
make some coffee, leaving my two heathens down by the beach--the one
fooling about with his sting and the other helping him. It never
occurred to me that the beggars would take advantage of the peculiar
position I was in to pick a quarrel. But I suppose the centipede poison
and the kicking I had given him had upset the one--he was always a
cantankerous sort--and he persuaded the other."

"I remember I was sitting and smoking and boiling up the water over a
spirit-lamp, business I used to take on these expeditions. Incidentally
I was admiring the swamp under the sunset. All black and blood-red it
was, in streaks--a beautiful sight. And up beyond the land rose grey and
hazy to the hills, and the sky behind them red, like a furnace mouth.
And fifty yards behind the back of me was these blessed heathens--quite
regardless of the tranquil air of things--plotting to cut off with the
boat and leave me all alone with three days' provisions and a canvas
tent, and nothing to drink whatsoever beyond a little keg of water. I
heard a kind of yelp behind me, and there they were in this canoe
affair--it wasn't properly a boat--and, perhaps, twenty yards from land.
I realised what was up in a moment. My gun was in the tent, and besides,
I had no bullets--only duck shot. They knew that. But I had a little
revolver in my pocket, and I pulled that out as I ran down to the
beach.

"'Come back!' says I, flourishing it.

"They jabbered something at me, and the man that broke the egg jeered. I
aimed at the other--because he was unwounded and had the paddle, and I
missed. They laughed. However, I wasn't beat. I knew I had to keep cool,
and I tried him again and made him jump with the whang of it. He didn't
laugh that time. The third time I got his head, and over he went, and
the paddle with him. It was a precious lucky shot for a revolver. I
reckon it was fifty yards. He went right under. I don't know if he was
shot, or simply stunned and drowned. Then I began to shout to the other
chap to come back, but he huddled up in the canoe and refused to answer.
So I fired out my revolver at him and never got near him.

"I felt a precious fool, I can tell you. There I was on this rotten,
black beach, flat swamp all behind me, and the flat sea, cold after the
sun set, and just this black canoe drifting steadily out to sea. I tell
you I damned Dawson's and Jamrach's and Museums and all the rest of it
just to rights. I bawled to this nigger to come back, until my voice
went up into a scream.

"There was nothing for it but to swim after him and take my luck with
the sharks. So I opened my clasp-knife and put it in my mouth, and took
off my clothes and waded in. As soon as I was in the water I lost sight
of the canoe, but I aimed, as I judged, to head it off. I hoped the man
in it was too bad to navigate it, and that it would keep on drifting in
the same direction. Presently it came up over the horizon again to the
south-westward, about. The afterglow of sunset was well over now and the
dim of night creeping up. The stars were coming through the blue. I swum
like a champion, though my legs and arms were soon aching.

"However, I came up to him by the time the stars were fairly out. As it
got darker I began to see all manner of glowing things in the
water--phosphorescence, you know. At times it made me giddy. I hardly
knew which was stars and which was phosphorescence, and whether I was
swimming on my head or my heels. The canoe was as black as sin, and the
ripple under the bows like liquid fire. I was naturally chary of
clambering up into it. I was anxious to see what he was up to first. He
seemed to be lying cuddled up in a lump in the bows, and the stern was
all out of water. The thing kept turning round slowly as it
drifted--kind of waltzing, don't you know. I went to the stern and
pulled it down, expecting him to wake up. Then I began to clamber in
with my knife in my hand, and ready for a rush. But he never stirred. So
there I sat in the stern of the little canoe, drifting away over the
calm phosphorescent sea, and with all the host of the stars above me,
waiting for something to happen.

"After a long time I called him by name, but he never answered. I was
too tired to take any risks by going along to him. So we sat there. I
fancy I dozed once or twice. When the dawn came I saw he was as dead as
a door-nail and all puffed up and purple. My three eggs and the bones
were lying in the middle of the canoe, and the keg of water and some
coffee and biscuits wrapped in a Cape Argus by his feet, and a tin of
methylated spirit underneath him. There was no paddle, nor in fact,
anything except the spirit tin that I could use as one, so I settled to
drift until I was picked up. I held an inquest on him, brought in a
verdict against some snake, scorpion, or centipede unknown, and sent him
overboard.

"After that I had a drink of water and a few biscuits, and took a look
round. I suppose a man low down as I was don't see very far; leastways,
Madagascar was clean out of sight, and any trace of land at all. I saw a
sail going south-westward--looked like a schooner but her hull never
came up. Presently the sun got high in the sky and began to beat down
upon me. Lord! It pretty near made my brains boil. I tried dipping my
head in the sea, but after a while my eye fell on the Cape Argus, and I
lay down flat in the canoe and spread this over me. Wonderful things
these newspapers! I never read one through thoroughly before, but it's
odd what you get up to when you're alone, as I was. I suppose I read
that blessed old Cape Argus twenty times. The pitch in the canoe simply
reeked with the heat and rose up into big blisters.

"I drifted ten days," said the man with the scar. "It's a little thing
in the telling, isn't it? Every day was like the last. Except in the
morning and the evening I never kept a lookout even--the blaze was so
infernal. I didn't see a sail after the first three days, and those I
saw took no notice of me. About the sixth night a ship went by scarcely
half a mile away from me, with all its lights ablaze and its ports open,
looking like a big firefly. There was music aboard. I stood up and
shouted and screamed at it. The second day I broached one of the
Aepyornis eggs, scraped the shell away at the end bit by bit, and tried
it, and I was glad to find it was good enough to eat. A bit
flavoury--not bad, I mean--but with something of the taste of a duck's
egg. There was a kind of circular patch, about six inches across, on one
side of the yoke, and with streaks of blood and a white mark like a
ladder in it that I thought queer, but I did not understand what this
meant at the time, and I wasn't inclined to be particular. The egg
lasted me three days, with biscuits and a drink of water. I chewed
coffee-berries too--invigorating stuff. The second egg I opened about
the eighth day, and it scared me."

The man with the scar paused. "Yes," he said, "Developing.

"I daresay you find it hard to believe. I did, with the thing before me.
There the egg had been, sunk in that cold black mud, perhaps three
hundred years. But there was no mistaking it. There was the--what is
it--? Embryo, with its big head and curved back, and its heart beating
under its throat, and the yolk shrivelled up and great membranes
spreading inside of the shell and all over the yolk. Here was I hatching
out the eggs of the biggest of all extinct birds, in a little canoe in
the midst of the Indian Ocean. If old Dawson had known that! It was
worth four years' salary. What do you think?

"However, I had to eat that precious thing up, every bit of it, before I
sighted the reef, and some of the mouthfuls were beastly unpleasant. I
left the third one alone. I held it up to the light, but the shell was
too thick for me to get any notion of what might be happening inside;
and though I fancied I heard blood pulsing, it might have been the
rustle in my own ears, like what you listen to in a seashell.

"Then came the atoll. Came out of the sunrise, as it were, suddenly,
close up to me. I drifted straight towards it until I was about half a
mile from shore, not more, and then the current took a turn, and I had
to paddle as hard as I could with my hands and bits of the Aepyornis
shell to make the place. However, I got there. It was just a common
atoll about four miles round, with a few trees growing and a spring in
one place, and the lagoon full of parrot-fish. I took the egg ashore and
put it in a good place, well above the tide lines and in the sun, to
give it all the chance I could, and pulled the canoe up safe, and loafed
about prospecting. It's rum how dull an atoll is. As soon as I had found
a spring all the interest seemed to vanish. When I was a kid I thought
nothing could be finer or more adventurous than the Robinson Crusoe
business, but that place was as monotonous as a book of sermons. I went
round finding eatable things and generally thinking; but I tell you I
was bored to death before the first day was out. It shows my luck--the
very day I landed the weather changed. A thunderstorm went by to the
north and flicked its wing over the island, and in the night there came
a drencher and a howling wind slap over us. It wouldn't have taken much,
you know, to upset that canoe.

"I was sleeping under the canoe, and the egg was luckily among the sand
higher up the beach, and the first thing I remember was a sound like a
hundred pebbles hitting the boat at once, and a rush of water over my
body. I'd been dreaming of Antananarivo, and I sat up and halloaed to
Intoshi to ask her what the devil was up, and clawed out at the chair
where the matches used to be. Then I remembered where I was. There were
phosphorescent waves rolling up as if they meant to eat me, and all the
rest of the night as black as pitch. The air was simply yelling. The
clouds seemed down on your head almost, and the rain fell as if heaven
was sinking and they were baling out the waters above the firmament. One
great roller came writhing at me, like a fiery serpent, and I bolted.
Then I thought of the canoe, and ran down to it as the water went
hissing back again; but the thing had gone. I wondered about the egg
then, and felt my way to it. It was all right and well out of reach of
the maddest waves, so I sat down beside it and cuddled it for company.
Lord! What a night that was!

"The storm was over before the morning. There wasn't a rag of cloud left
in the sky when the dawn came, and all along the beach there were bits
of plank scattered--which was the disarticulated skeleton, so to speak,
of my canoe. However, that gave me something to do, for, taking
advantage of two of the trees being together, I rigged up a kind of
storm-shelter with these vestiges. And that day the egg hatched.

"Hatched, sir, when my head was pillowed on it and I was asleep. I heard
a whack and felt a jar and sat up, and there was the end of the egg
pecked out and a rum little brown head looking out at me. 'Lord!' I
said, 'You're welcome'; and with a little difficulty he came out.

"He was a nice friendly little chap at first, about the size of a small
hen--very much like most other young birds, only bigger. His plumage was
a dirty brown to begin with, with a sort of grey scab that fell off it
very soon, and scarcely feathers--a kind of downy hair. I can hardly
express how pleased I was to see him. I tell you, Robinson Crusoe don't
make near enough of his loneliness. But here was interesting company. He
looked at me and winked his eye from the front backwards, like a hen,
and gave a chirp and began to peck about at once, as though being
hatched three hundred years too late was just nothing. 'Glad to see you,
Man Friday!' says I, for I had naturally settled he was to be called Man
Friday if ever he was hatched, as soon as ever, I found the egg in the
canoe had developed. I was a bit anxious about his feed, so I gave him a
lump of raw parrot-fish at once. He took it, and opened his beak for
more. I was glad of that for, under the circumstances, if he'd been at
all fanciful, I should have had to eat him after all.

"You'd be surprised what an interesting bird that Aepyornis chick was.
He followed me about from the very beginning. He used to stand by me and
watch while I fished in the lagoon, and go shares in anything I caught.
And he was sensible, too. There were nasty green warty things, like
pickled gherkins, used to lie about on the beach, and he tried one of
these and it upset him. He never even looked at any of them again.

"And he grew. You could almost see him grow. And as I was never much of
a society man, his quiet, friendly ways suited me to a T. For nearly two
years we were as happy as we could be on that island. I had no business
worries, for I knew my salary was mounting up at Dawsons'. We would see
a sail now and then, but nothing ever came near us. I amused myself,
too, by decorating the island with designs worked in sea-urchins and
fancy shells of various kinds. I put 'Aepyornis Island' all round the
place very nearly, in big letters, like what you see done with coloured
stones at railway stations in the old country, and mathematical
calculations and drawings of various sorts. And I used to lie watching
the blessed bird stalking round and growing, growing; and think how I
could make a living out of him by showing him about if I ever got taken
off. After his first moult he began to get handsome, with a crest and a
blue wattle, and a lot of green feathers at the behind of him. And then
I used to puzzle whether Dawsons' had any right to claim him or not.
Stormy weather and in the rainy season we lay snug under the shelter, I
had made out of the old canoe, and I used to tell him lies about my
friends at home. And after a storm we would go round the island together
to see if there was any drift. It was a kind of idyll, you might say. If
only I had, had some tobacco it would have been simply just like
heaven.

"It was about the end of the second year our little paradise went wrong.
Friday was then about fourteen feet high to the bill of him, with a big,
broad head like the end of a pickaxe, and two huge brown eyes with
yellow rims, set together like a man's--not out of sight of each other
like a hen's. His plumage was fine--none of the half-mourning style of
your ostrich--more like a cassowary as far as colour and texture go. And
then it was he began to cock his comb at me and give himself airs, and
show signs of a nasty temper...

"At last came a time when my fishing had been rather unlucky, and he
began to hang about me in a queer, meditative way. I thought he might
have been eating sea-cucumbers or something, but it was really just
discontent on his part. I was hungry too, and when at last I landed a
fish I wanted it for myself. Tempers were short that morning on both
sides. He pecked at it and grabbed it, and I gave him a whack on the
head to make him leave go. And at that he went for me. Lord...!

"He gave me this in the face." The man indicated his scar. "Then he
kicked me. It was like a cart-horse. I got up, and seeing he hadn't
finished, I started off full tilt with my arms doubled up over my face.
But he ran on those gawky legs of his faster than a race-horse, and kept
landing out at me with sledgehammer kicks, and bringing his pickaxe down
on the back of my head. I made for the lagoon, and went in up to my
neck. He stopped at the water, for he hated getting his feet wet, and
began to make a shindy, something like a peacock's, only hoarser. He
started strutting up and down the beach. I'll admit I felt small to see
this blessed fossil lording it there. And my head and face were all
bleeding, and--well, my body just one jelly of bruises.

"I decided to swim across the lagoon and leave him alone for a bit,
until the affair blew over. I shinned up the tallest palm-tree, and sat
there thinking of it all. I don't suppose I ever felt so hurt by
anything before or since. It was the brutal ingratitude of the creature.
I'd been more than a brother to him. I'd hatched him, educated him. A
great gawky, out-of-date bird! And me a human being--heir of the ages
and all that.

"I thought after a time he'd begin to see things in that light himself,
and feel a little sorry for his behaviour. I thought if I was to catch
some nice little bits of fish, perhaps, and go to him presently in a
casual kind of way, and offer them to him, he might do the sensible
thing. It took me some time to learn how unforgiving and cantankerous an
extinct bird can be. Malice!

"I won't tell you all the little devices I tried to get that bird round
again, I simply can't. It makes my cheek burn with shame even now to
think of the snubs and buffets I had from this infernal curiosity. I
tried violence. I chucked lumps of coral at him from a safe distance,
but he only swallowed them. I shied my open knife at him and almost lost
it, though it was too big for him to swallow. I tried starving him out
and struck fishing, but he took to picking along the beach at low water
after worms, and rubbed along on that. Half my time I spent up to my
neck in the lagoon, and the rest up the palm-trees. One of them was
scarcely high enough, and when he caught me up it he had a regular Bank
Holiday with the calves of my legs. It got unbearable. I don't know if
you have ever tried sleeping up a palm-tree. It gave me the most
horrible nightmares. Think of the shame of it, too! Here was this
extinct animal mooning about my island like a sulky duke, and me not
allowed to rest the sole of my foot on the place. I used to cry with
weariness and vexation. I told him straight that I didn't mean to be
chased about a desert island by any damned anachronisms. I told him to
go and peck a navigator of his own age. But he only snapped his beak at
me. Great ugly bird, all legs and neck!

"I shouldn't like to say how long that went on altogether. I'd have
killed him sooner if I'd known how. However, I hit on a way of settling
him at last. It is a South American dodge. I joined all my fishing-lines
together with stems of seaweed and things, and made a stoutish string,
perhaps twelve yards in length or more, and I fastened two lumps of
coral rock to the ends of this. It took me some time to do, because
every now and then I had to go into the lagoon or up a tree as the fancy
took me. This I whirled rapidly round my head, and then let it go at
him. The first time I missed, but the next time the string caught his
legs beautifully, and wrapped round them again and again. Over he went.
I threw it standing waist-deep in the lagoon, and as soon as he went
down I was out of the water and sawing at his neck with my knife...

"I don't like to think of that even now. I felt like a murderer while I
did it, though my anger was hot against him. When I stood over him and
saw him bleeding on the white sand, and his beautiful great legs and
neck writhing in his last agony... Pah!

"With that tragedy loneliness came upon me like a curse. Good Lord! You
can't imagine how I missed that bird. I sat by his corpse and sorrowed
over him, and shivered as I looked round the desolate, silent reef. I
thought of what a jolly little bird he had been when he was hatched, and
of a thousand pleasant tricks he had played before he went wrong. I
thought if I'd only wounded him I might have nursed him round into a
better understanding. If I'd had any means of digging into the coral
rock I'd have buried him. I felt exactly as if he was human. As it was,
I couldn't think of eating him, so I put him in the lagoon, and the
little fishes picked him clean. I didn't even save the feathers. Then
one day a chap cruising about in a yacht had a fancy to see if my atoll
still existed.

"He didn't come a moment too soon, for I was about sick enough of the
desolation of it, and only hesitating whether I should walk out into the
sea and finish up the business that way, or fall back on the green
things...

"I sold the bones to a man named Winslow--a dealer near the British
Museum, and he says he sold them to old Havers. It seems Havers didn't
understand they were extra large, and it was only after his death they
attracted attention. They called 'em Aepyornis--what was it?"

"Aepyornis vastus," said I. "It's funny, the very thing was mentioned to
me by a friend of mine. When they found an Aepyornis, with a thigh a
yard long, they thought they had reached the top of the scale, and
called him Aepyornis maximus. Then some one turned up another thigh-bone
four feet six or more, and that they called Aepyornis titan. Then your
vastus was found after old Havers died, in his collection, and then a
vastissimus turned up."

"Winslow was telling me as much," said the man with the scar. "If they
get any more Aepyornises, he reckons some scientific swell will go and
burst a blood-vessel. But it was a queer thing to happen to a man,
wasn't it--altogether?"




THE REMARKABLE CASE OF DAVIDSON'S EYES


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

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

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

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

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

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

I felt scared. "Davidson," said I, "what on earth's come over you?"

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

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

"It's I--Bellows. Confound it, Davidson!"

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

By that time I was excited, and fairly excited. "Davidson," said I,
"don't be afraid."

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

"Can't you see it's me?"

He laughed. "I can't even see it's myself. Where the devil are we?"
"Here," said I, "in the laboratory."

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

"There's no ship," said I. "Do be sensible, old chap."

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

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

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

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

I shook his arm. "Davidson," I cried, "wake up!"

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

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

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

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

"The ship is almost hull down," said Davidson, presently, apropos of
nothing. "Never mind the ship," said Wade. "Listen to me, Davidson. Do
you know what hallucination means?"

"Rather," said Davidson.

"Well, everything you see is hallucinatory."

"Bishop Berkeley," said Davidson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?" said Atkins.

"That I had seen that ship before."

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

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

"Good Lord!" said Atkins, who had never heard the particulars of the
seizure. "How the deuce could you dream that?"

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

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

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




THE LORD OF THE DYNAMOS


The chief attendant of the three dynamos that buzzed and rattled at
Camberwell, and kept the electric railway going, came out of Yorkshire,
and his name was James Holroyd. He was a practical electrician, but fond
of whisky, a heavy red-haired brute with irregular teeth. He doubted the
existence of the Deity, but accepted Carnot's cycle, and he had read
Shakespeare and found him weak in chemistry. His helper came out of the
mysterious East, and his name was Azuma-zi. But Holroyd called him
Pooh-bah. Holroyd liked a nigger help because he would stand kicking--a
habit with Holroyd--and did not pry into the machinery and try to learn
the ways of it. Certain odd possibilities of the negro mind brought into
abrupt contact with the crown of our civilisation Holroyd never fully
realised, though just at the end he got some inkling of them.

To define Azuma-zi was beyond ethnology. He was, perhaps, more negroid
than anything else, though his hair was curly rather than frizzy, and
his nose had a bridge. Moreover, his skin was brown rather than black,
and the whites of his eyes were yellow. His broad cheek-bones and narrow
chin gave his face something of the viperine V. His head too, was broad
behind, and low and narrow at the forehead, as if his brain had been
twisted round in the reverse way to a European's. He was short of
stature and still shorter of English. In conversation he made numerous
odd noises of no known marketable value, and his infrequent words were
carved and wrought into heraldic grotesqueness. Holroyd tried to
elucidate his religious beliefs, and--especially after whisky--lectured
to him against superstition and missionaries. Azuma-zi, however, shirked
the discussion of his gods, even though he was kicked for it.

Azuma-zi had come, clad in white but insufficient raiment, out of the
stoke-hole of the Lord Clive, from the Straits Settlements, and beyond,
into London. He had heard even in his youth of the greatness and riches
of London, where all the women are white and fair, and even the beggars
in the streets are white, and he arrived, with newly-earned gold coins
in his pocket, to worship at the shrine of civilisation. The day of his
landing was a dismal one; the sky was dun, and a wind-worried drizzle
filtered down to the greasy streets, but he plunged boldly into the
delights of Shadwell, and was presently cast up, shattered in health,
civilised in costume, penniless and, except in matters of the direst
necessity, practically a dumb animal, to toil for James Holroyd and to
be bullied by him in the dynamo shed at Camberwell. And to James Holroyd
bullying was a labour of love.

There were three dynamos with their engines at Camberwell. The two that
had been there since the beginning were small machines; the larger one
was new. The smaller machines made a reasonable noise; their straps
hummed over the drums, every now and then the brushes buzzed and
fizzled, and the air churned steadily, whoo! Whoo! Whoo! Between their
poles. One was loose in its foundations and kept the shed vibrating. But
the big dynamo drowned these little noises altogether with the sustained
drone of its iron core, which somehow set part of the ironwork humming.
The place made the visitor's head reel with the throb, throb, throb of
the engines, the rotation of the big wheels, the spinning ball-valves,
the occasional spittings of the steam, and over all the deep, unceasing,
surging note of the big dynamo. This last noise was from an engineering
point of view a defect, but Azuma-zi accounted it unto the monster for
mightiness and pride.

If it were possible we would have the noises of that shed always about
the reader as he reads, we would tell all our story to such an
accompaniment. It was a steady stream of din, from which the ear picked
out first one thread and then another; there was the intermittent
snorting, panting, and seething of the steam-engines, the suck and thud
of their pistons, the dull beat on the air as the spokes of the great
driving wheels came round, a note the leather straps made as they ran
tighter and looser, and a fretful tumult from the dynamos; and over all,
sometimes inaudible, as the ear tired of it, and then creeping back upon
the senses again, was this trombone note of the big machine. The floor
never felt steady and quiet beneath one's feet, but quivered and jarred.
It was a confusing, unsteady place, and enough to send anyone's thoughts
jerking into odd zigzags. And for three months, while the big strike of
the engineers was in progress, Holroyd, who was a blackleg, and
Azuma-zi, who was a mere black, were never out of the stir and eddy of
it, but slept and fed in the little wooden shanty between the shed and
the gates.

Holroyd delivered a theological lecture on the text of his big machine
soon after Azuma-zi came. He had to shout to be heard in the din. "Look
at that," said Holroyd; "where's your 'eathen idol to match 'im?" And
Azuma-zi looked. For a moment Holroyd was inaudible, and then Azuma-zi
heard: "Kill a hundred men. Twelve per cent. on the ordinary shares,"
said Holroyd, "and that's something like a Gord!"

Holroyd was proud of his big dynamo, and expatiated upon its size and
power to Azuma-zi until heaven knows what odd currents of thought, that
and the incessant whirling and shindy, set up within the curly black
cranium. He would explain in the most graphic manner the dozen or so
ways in which a man might be killed by it, and once he gave Azuma-zi a
shock as a sample of its quality. After that, in the breathing times of
his labour--it was heavy labour, being not only his own, but most of
Holroyd's--Azuma-zi would sit and watch the big machine. Now and then
the brushes would sparkle and spit blue flashes, at which Holroyd would
swear, but all the rest was as smooth and rhythmic as breathing. The
band ran shouting over the shaft, and ever behind one as one watched was
the complacent thud of the piston. So it lived all day in this big airy
shed, with him and Holroyd to wait upon it; not prisoned up and slaving
to drive a ship as the other engines he knew--mere captive devils of the
British Solomon--had been, but a machine enthroned. Those two smaller
dynamos, Azuma-zi by force of contrast despised; the large one he
privately christened the Lord of the Dynamos. They were fretful and
irregular, but the big dynamo was steady. How great it was! How serene
and easy in its working! Greater and calmer even than the Buddhas he had
seen at Rangoon, and yet not motionless, but living! The great black
coils spun, spun, spun, the rings ran round under the brushes, and the
deep note of its coil steadied the whole. It affected Azuma-zi queerly.

Azuma-zi was not fond of labour. He would sit about and watch the Lord
of the Dynamos while Holroyd went away to persuade the yard porter to
get whisky, although his proper place was not in the dynamo shed but
behind the engines and, moreover if Holroyd caught him skulking he got
hit for it with a rod of stout copper wire. He would go and stand close
to the colossus and look up at the great leather band running overhead.
There was a black patch on the band that came round, and it pleased him
somehow among all the clatter to watch this return again and again. Odd
thoughts spun with the whirl of it. Scientific people tell us that
savages give souls to rocks and trees--and a machine is a thousand times
more alive than a rock or a tree. And Azuma-zi was practically a savage
still; the veneer of civilisation lay no deeper than his slop suit, his
bruises, and the coal grime on his face and hands. His father before him
had worshipped a meteoric stone, kindred blood it may be had splashed
the broad wheels of Juggernaut.

He took every opportunity Holroyd gave him of touching and handling the
great dynamo that was fascinating him. He polished and cleaned it until
the metal parts were blinding in the sun. He felt a mysterious sense of
service in doing this. He would go up to it and touch its spinning coils
gently. The gods he had worshipped were all far away. The people in
London hid their gods.

At last his dim feelings grew more distinct, and took shape in thoughts
and at last in acts. When he came into the roaring shed one morning he
salaamed to the Lord of the Dynamos, and then when Holroyd was away, he
went and whispered to the thundering machine that he was its servant,
and prayed it to have pity on him and save him from Holroyd. As he did
so a rare gleam of light came in through the open archway of the
throbbing machine-shed, and the Lord of the Dynamos, as he whirled and
roared, was radiant with pale gold. Then Azuma-zi knew that his service
was acceptable to his Lord. After that he did not feel so lonely as he
had done, and he had indeed been very much alone in London. And even
when his work-time was over, which was rare, he loitered about the shed.

The next time Holroyd maltreated him, Azuma-zi went presently to the
Lord of the Dynamos and whispered, "Thou seest, O my Lord!" and the
angry whir of the machinery seemed to answer him. Thereafter it appeared
to him that whenever Holroyd came into the shed a different note mingled
with the sounds of the dynamo. "My Lord bides his time," said Azuma-zi
to himself. "The iniquity of the fool is not yet ripe." And he waited
and watched for the day of reckoning. One day there was evidence of
short circuiting, and Holroyd, making an unwary examination--it was in
the afternoon--got a rather severe shock. Azuma-zi from behind the
engine saw him jump off and curse at the peccant coil.

"He is warned," said Azuma-zi to himself. "Surely my Lord is very
patient."

Holroyd had at first initiated his "nigger" into such elementary
conceptions of the dynamo's working as would enable him to take
temporary charge of the shed in his absence. But when he noticed the
manner in which Azuma-zi hung about the monster he became suspicious. He
dimly perceived his assistant was "up to something," and connecting him
with the anointing of the coils with oil that had rotted the varnish in
one place, he issued an edict, shouted above the confusion of the
machinery, "Don't 'ee go nigh that big dynamo any more, Pooh-bah, or
a'll take thy skin off!" Besides, if it pleased Azuma-zi to be near the
big machine, it was plain sense and decency to keep him away from it.

Azuma-zi obeyed at the time, but later he was caught bowing before the
Lord of the Dynamos. At which Holroyd twisted his arm and kicked him as
he turned to go away. As Azuma-zi presently stood behind the engine and
glared at the back of the hated Holroyd, the noises of the machinery
took a new rhythm, and sounded like four words in his native tongue.

It is hard to say exactly what madness is. I fancy Azuma-zi was mad. The
incessant din and whirl of the dynamo shed may have churned up his
little store of knowledge and his big store of superstitious fancy, at
last, into something akin to frenzy. At any rate, when the idea of
making Holroyd a sacrifice to the Dynamo Fetich was thus suggested to
him, it filled him with a strange tumult of exultant emotion.

That night the two men and their black shadows were alone in the shed
together. The shed was lit with one big arc-light that winked and
flickered purple. The shadows lay black behind the dynamos, the ball
governors of the engines whirled from light to darkness, and their
pistons beat loud and steady. The world outside seen through the open
end of the shed seemed incredibly dim and remote. It seemed absolutely
silent too, since the riot of the machinery drowned every external
sound. Far away was the black fence of the yard with grey shadowy houses
behind, and above was the deep blue sky and the pale little stars.
Azuma-zi suddenly walked across the centre of the shed above which the
leather bands were running, and went into the shadow by the big dynamo.
Holroyd heard a click, and the spin of the armature changed.

"What are you dewin' with that switch?" he bawled in surprise. "Han't I
told you--"

Then he saw the set expression of Azuma-zi's eyes as the Asiatic came
out of the shadow towards him.

In another moment the two men were grappling fiercely in front of the
great dynamo.

"You coffee-headed fool!" gasped Holroyd, with a brown hand at his
throat. "Keep off those contact rings." In another moment he was tripped
and reeling back upon the Lord of the Dynamos. He instinctively loosened
his grip upon his antagonist to save himself from the machine.


The messenger, sent in furious haste from the station, to find out what
had happened in the dynamo shed, met Azuma-zi at the porter's lodge by
the gate. Azuma-zi tried to explain something, but the messenger could
make nothing of the black's incoherent English, and hurried on to the
shed. The machines were all noisily at work, and nothing seemed to be
disarranged. There was, however, a queer smell of singed hair. Then he
saw an odd-looking crumpled mass clinging to the front of the big
dynamo, and approaching, recognised the distorted remains of Holroyd.

The man stared and hesitated a moment. Then he saw the face, and shut
his eyes convulsively. He turned on his heel before he opened them, so
that he should not see Holroyd again, and went out of the shed to get
advice and help.

When Azuma-zi saw Holroyd die in the grip of the Great Dynamo he had
been a little scared about the consequences of his act. Yet he felt
strangely elated, and knew that the favour of the Lord Dynamo was upon
him. His plan was already settled when he met the man coming from the
station, and the scientific manager who speedily arrived on the scene
jumped at the obvious conclusion of suicide. This expert scarcely
noticed Azuma-zi, except to ask a few questions. Did he see Holroyd kill
himself? Azuma-zi explained that he had been out of sight at the engine
furnace until he heard a difference in the noise from the dynamo. It was
not a difficult examination, being untinctured by suspicion.

The distorted remains of Holroyd, which the electrician removed from the
machine, were hastily covered by the porter with a coffee-stained
tablecloth. Somebody, by a happy inspiration, fetched a medical man. The
expert was chiefly anxious to get the machine at work again, for seven
or eight trains had stopped midway in the stuffy tunnels of the electric
railway. Azuma-zi, answering or misunderstanding the questions of the
people who had by authority or impudence come into the shed, was
presently sent back to the stoke-hole by the scientific manager. Of
course a crowd collected outside the gates of the yard--a crowd, for no
known reason, always hovers for a day or two near the scene of a sudden
death in London; two or three reporters percolated somehow into the
engine shed, and one even got to Azuma-zi; but the scientific expert
cleared them out again, being himself an amateur journalist.

Presently the body was carried away, and public interest departed with
it. Azuma-zi remained very quietly at his furnace, seeing over and over
again in the coals a figure that wriggled violently and became still. An
hour after the murder, to anyone coming into the shed it would have
looked exactly as if nothing had ever happened there. Peeping presently
from his engine-room the black saw the Lord Dynamo spin and whirl beside
his little brothers, and the driving-wheels were beating round, and the
steam in the pistons went thud, thud, exactly as it had been earlier in
the evening. After all, from the mechanical point of view, it had been a
most insignificant incident--the mere temporary deflection of a current.
But now the slender form and slender shadow of the scientific manager
replaced the sturdy outline of Holroyd travelling up and down the lane
of light upon the vibrating floor under the straps between the engines
and the dynamos.

"Have I not served my Lord?" said Azuma-zi inaudibly, from his shadow,
and the note of the great dynamo rang out full and clear. As he looked
at the big whirling mechanism the strange fascination of it that had
been a little in abeyance since Holroyd's death, resumed its sway.

Never had Azuma-zi seen a man killed so swiftly and pitilessly. The big
humming machine had slain its victim without wavering for a second from
its steady beating. It was indeed a mighty god.

The unconscious scientific manager stood with his back to him,
scribbling on a piece of paper. His shadow lay at the foot of the
monster.

"Was the Lord Dynamo still hungry? His servant was ready."

Azuma-zi made a stealthy step forward; then stopped. The scientific
manager suddenly ceased his writing, walked down the shed to the endmost
of the dynamos, and began to examine the brushes.

Azuma-zi hesitated, and then slipped across noiselessly into shadow by
the switch. There he waited. Presently the manager's footsteps could be
heard returning. He stopped in his old position, unconscious of the
stoker crouching ten feet away from him. Then the big dynamo suddenly
fizzled, and in another moment Azuma-zi had sprung out of the darkness
upon him.

The scientific manager was gripped round the body and swung towards the
big dynamo. Kicking with his knee and forcing his antagonist's head down
with his hands, he loosened the grip on his waist and swung round away
from the machine. Then the black grasped him again, putting a curly head
against his chest, and they swayed and panted as it seemed for an age or
so. Then the scientific manager was impelled to catch a black ear in his
teeth and bite furiously. The black yelled hideously.

They rolled over on the floor, and the black, who had apparently slipped
from the vice of the teeth or parted with some ear--the scientific
manager wondered which at the time--tried to throttle him. The
scientific manager was making some ineffectual attempts to claw
something with his hands and to kick, when the welcome sound of quick
footsteps sounded on the floor. The next moment Azuma-zi had left him
and darted towards the big dynamo. There was a splutter amid the roar.

The officer of the company who had entered, stood staring as Azuma-zi
caught the naked terminals in his hands, gave one horrible convulsion,
and then hung motionless from the machine, his face violently distorted.

"I'm jolly glad you came in when you did," said the scientific manager,
still sitting on the floor.

He looked at the still quivering figure.

"It's not a nice death to die, apparently--but it is quick."

The official was still staring at the body. He was a man of slow
apprehension.

There was a pause.

The scientific manager got up on his feet rather awkwardly. He ran his
fingers along his collar thoughtfully, and moved his head to and fro
several times.

"Poor Holroyd! I see now." Then almost mechanically he went towards the
switch in the shadow and turned the current into the railway circuit
again. As he did so the singed body loosened its grip upon the machine
and fell forward on its face. The core of the dynamo roared out loud and
clear, and the armature beat the air.

So ended prematurely the Worship of the Dynamo Deity, perhaps the most
short-lived of all religions. Yet withal it could at least boast a
Martyrdom and a Human Sacrifice.




THE HAMMERPOND PARK BURGLARY


It is a moot point whether burglary is to be considered as a sport, a
trade, or an art. For a trade, the technique is scarcely rigid enough,
and its claims to be considered an art, are vitiated by the mercenary
element that qualifies its triumphs. On the whole it seems to be most
justly ranked as sport, a sport for which no rules are at present
formulated, and of which the prizes are distributed in an extremely
informal manner. It was this informality of burglary that led to the
regrettable extinction of two promising beginners at Hammerpond Park.

The stakes offered in this affair consisted chiefly of diamonds and
other personal bric-a-brac belonging to the newly married Lady Aveling.
Lady Aveling, as the reader will remember, was the only daughter of Mrs.
Montague Pangs, the well-known hostess. Her marriage to Lord Aveling was
extensively advertised in the papers, the quantity and quality of her
wedding presents, and the fact that the honeymoon was to be spent at
Hammerpond. The announcement of these valuable prizes, created a
considerable sensation in the small circle in which Mr. Teddy Watkins
was the undisputed leader, and it was decided that, accompanied by a
duly qualified assistant, he should visit the village of Hammerpond in
his professional capacity.

Being a man of naturally retiring and modest disposition, Mr. Watkins
determined to make this visit incognito, and after due consideration of
the conditions of his enterprise, he selected the role of a landscape
artist and the unassuming surname of Smith. He preceded his assistant,
who, it was decided, should join him only on the last afternoon of his
stay at Hammerpond. Now the village of Hammerpond is perhaps one of the
prettiest little corners in Sussex; many thatched houses still survive,
the flint-built church with its tall spire nestling under the down is
one of the finest and least restored in the county, and the beech-woods
and bracken jungles through which the road runs to the great house are
singularly rich in what the vulgar artist and photographer call "bits."
So that Mr. Watkins, on his arrival with two virgin canvases, a
brand-new easel, a paint-box, portmanteau, an ingenious little ladder
made in sections (after the pattern of the late lamented master Charles
Peace), crowbar, and wire coils, found himself welcomed with effusion
and some curiosity by half-a-dozen other brethren of the brush. It
rendered the disguise he had chosen unexpectedly plausible, but it
inflicted upon him a considerable amount of aesthetic conversation for
which he was very imperfectly prepared.

"Have you exhibited very much?" said Young Person in the bar-parlour of
the "Coach and Horses," where Mr. Watkins was skilfully accumulating
local information, on the night of his arrival.

"Very little," said Mr. Watkins, "just a snack here and there."

"Academy?"

"In course. And the Crystal Palace."

"Did they hang you well?" said Porson.

"Don't rot," said Mr. Watkins; "I don't like it."

"I mean did they put you in a good place?"

"Whadyer mean?" said Mr. Watkins suspiciously. "One 'ud think you were
trying to make out I'd been put away."

Porson had been brought up by aunts, and was a gentlemanly young man
even for an artist; he did not know what being "put away" meant, but he
thought it best to explain that he intended nothing of the sort. As the
question of hanging seemed a sore point with Mr. Watkins, he tried to
divert the conversation a little.

"Do you do figure-work at all?"

"No, never had a head for figures," said Mr. Watkins, "my miss--Mrs.
Smith, I mean, does all that."

"She paints too!" said Porson. "That's rather jolly."

"Very," said Mr. Watkins, though he really did not think so, and feeling
the conversation was drifting a little beyond his grasp added, "I came
down here to paint Hammerpond House by moonlight."

"Really!" said Porson. "That's rather a novel idea."

"Yes," said Mr. Watkins, "I thought it rather a good notion when it
occurred to me. I expect to begin to-morrow night."

"What! You don't mean to paint in the open, by night?"

"I do, though."

"But how will you see your canvas?"

"Have a bloomin' cop's--" began Mr. Watkins, rising too quickly to the
question, and then realising this, bawled to Miss Durgan for another
glass of cheer. "I'm goin' to have a thing called a dark lantern," he
said to Porson.

"But it's about new moon now," objected Porson. "There won't be any
moon."

"There'll be the house," said Watkins, "at any rate. I'm goin', you see,
to paint the house first and the moon afterwards."

"Oh!" said Porson, too staggered to continue the conversation.

"They doo say," said old Durgan, the landlord, who had maintained a
respectful silence during the technical conversation, "as there's no
less than three p'licemen from 'Azelworth on dewty every night in the
house--'count of this Lady Aveling 'n her jewellery. One'm won
fower-and-six last night, off second footman--tossin'."

Towards sunset next day Mr. Watkins, virgin canvas, easel, and a very
considerable case of other appliances in hand, strolled up the pleasant
pathway through the beech-woods to Hammerpond Park, and pitched his
apparatus in a strategic position commanding the house. Here he was
observed by Mr. Raphael Sant, who was returning across the park from a
study of the chalk-pits. His curiosity having been fired by Person's
account of the new arrival, he turned aside with the idea of discussing
nocturnal art.

Mr. Watkins was apparently unaware of his approach. A friendly
conversation with Lady Hammerpond's butler had just terminated, and that
individual, surrounded by the three pet dogs, which it was his duty to
take for an airing after dinner had been served, was receding in the
distance. Mr. Watkins was mixing colour with an air of great industry.
Sant, approaching more nearly, was surprised to see the colour in
question was as harsh and brilliant an emerald green as it is possible
to imagine. Having cultivated an extreme sensibility to colour from his
earliest years, he drew the air in sharply between his teeth at the very
first glimpse of this brew. Mr. Watkins turned round. He looked annoyed.

"What on earth are you going to do with that beastly green?" said Sant.

Mr. Watkins realised that his zeal to appear busy in the eyes of the
butler had evidently betrayed him into some technical error. He looked
at Sant and hesitated.

"Pardon my rudeness," said Sant; "but really, that green is altogether
too amazing. It came as a shock. What do you mean to do with it?"

Mr. Watkins was collecting his resources. Nothing could save the
situation but decision. "If you come here interrupting my work," he
said, "I'm a-goin' to paint your face with it."

Sant retired, for he was a humorist and a peaceful man. Going down the
hill he met Porson and Wainwright. "Either that man is a genius or he is
a dangerous lunatic," said he. "Just go up and look at his green." And
he continued his way, his countenance brightened by a pleasant
anticipation of a cheerful affray round an easel in the gloaming, and
the shedding of much green paint.

But to Person and Wainwright Mr. Watkins was less aggressive, and
explained that the green was intended to be the first coating of his
picture. It was, he admitted in response to a remark, an absolutely new
method, invented by himself. But subsequently he became more reticent;
he explained he was not going to tell every passer-by the secret of his
own particular style, and added some scathing remarks upon the meanness
of people "hanging about" to pick up such tricks of the masters as they
could, which immediately relieved him of their company.

Twilight deepened, first one then another star appeared. The rooks amid
the tall trees to the left of the house had long since lapsed into
slumbrous silence, the house itself lost all the details of its
architecture and became a dark grey outline, and then the windows of the
salon shone out brilliantly, the conservatory was lighted up, and here
and there a bedroom window burnt yellow. Had anyone approached the easel
in the park it would have been found deserted. One brief uncivil word in
brilliant green sullied the purity of its canvas. Mr. Watkins was busy
in the shrubbery with his assistant, who had discreetly joined him from
the carriage-drive.

Mr. Watkins was inclined to be self-congratulatory upon the ingenious
device by which he had carried all his apparatus boldly, and in the
sight of all men, right up to the scene of operations. "That's the
dressing-room," he said to his assistant, "and, as soon as the maid
takes the candle away and goes down to supper, we'll call in. My! How
nice the house do look, to be sure, against the starlight, and with all
its windows and lights! Swopme, Jim, I almost wish I was a painter-chap.
Have you fixed that there wire across the path from the laundry?"

He cautiously approached the house until he stood below the
dressing-room window, and began to put together his folding ladder. He
was much too experienced a practitioner to feel any unusual excitement.
Jim was reconnoitring the smoking-room. Suddenly, close beside Mr.
Watkins in the bushes, there was a violent crash and a stifled curse.
Someone had tumbled over the wire which his assistant had just arranged.
He heard feet running on the gravel pathway beyond. Mr. Watkins, like
all true artists, was a singularly shy man, and he incontinently dropped
his folding ladder and began running circumspectly through the
shrubbery. He was indistinctly aware of two people hot upon his heels,
and he fancied that he distinguished the outline of his assistant in
front of him. In another moment he had vaulted the low stone wall
bounding the shrubbery, and was in the open park. Two thuds on the turf
followed his own leap.

It was a close chase in the darkness through the trees. Mr. Watkins was
a loosely-built man and in good training, and he gained hand-over-hand
upon the hoarsely panting figure in front. Neither spoke, but as Mr.
Watkins pulled up alongside, a qualm of awful doubt came over him. The
other man turned his head at the same moment and gave an exclamation of
surprise. "It's not Jim," thought Mr. Watkins, and simultaneously the
stranger flung himself, as it were, at Watkins' knees, and they were
forthwith grappling on the ground together. "Lend a hand, Bill," cried
the stranger as the third man came up. And Bill did--two hands in fact,
and some accentuated feet. The fourth man, presumably Jim, had
apparently turned aside and made off in a different direction. At any
rate, he did not join the trio.

Mr. Watkins' memory of the incidents of the next two minutes is
extremely vague. He has a dim recollection of having his thumb in the
corner of the mouth of the first man, and feeling anxious about its
safety, and for some seconds at least he held the head of the gentleman
answering to the name of Bill, to the ground by the hair. He was also
kicked in a great number of different places, apparently by a vast
multitude of people. Then the gentleman who was not Bill got his knee
below Mr. Watkins' diaphragm, and tried to curl him up upon it.

When his sensations became less entangled he was sitting upon the turf,
and eight or ten men--the night was dark, and he was rather too confused
to count--standing round him, apparently waiting for him to recover. He
mournfully assumed that he was captured, and would probably have made
some philosophical reflections on the fickleness of fortune, had not his
internal sensations disinclined him for speech.

He noticed very quickly that his wrists were not handcuffed, and then a
flask of brandy was put in his hands. This touched him a little--it was
such unexpected kindness.

"He's a-comin' round," said a voice which he fancied he recognised as
belonging to the Hammerpond second footman.

"We've got 'em, sir, both of 'em," said the Hammerpond butler, the man
who had handed him the flask. "Thanks to you."

No one answered this remark. Yet he failed to see how it applied to him.

"He's fair dazed," said a strange voice; "the villains half-murdered
him."

Mr. Teddy Watkins decided to remain fair dazed until he had a better
grasp of the situation. He perceived that two of the black figures round
him stood side-by-side with a dejected air, and there was something in
the carriage of their shoulders that suggested to his experienced eye,
hands that were bound together. Two! In a flash he rose to his position.
He emptied the little flask and staggered--obsequious hands assisting
him--to his feet. There was a sympathetic murmur.

"Shake hands, sir, shake hands," said one of the figures near him.
"Permit me to introduce myself. I am very greatly indebted to you. It
was the jewels of my wife, Lady Aveling, which attracted these
scoundrels to the house."

"Very glad to make your lordship's acquaintance," said Teddy Watkins.

"I presume you saw the rascals making for the shrubbery, and dropped
down on them?"

"That's exactly how it happened," said Mr. Watkins.

"You should have waited till they got in at the window," said Lord
Aveling; "they would get it hotter if they had actually committed the
burglary. And it was lucky for you two of the policemen were out by the
gates, and followed up the three of you. I doubt if you could have
secured the two of them--though it was confoundedly plucky of you, all
the same."

"Yes, I ought to have thought of all that," said Mr. Watkins; "but one
can't think of everything."

"Certainly not," said Lord Aveling. "I am afraid they have mauled you a
little," he added. The party was now moving towards the house. "You walk
rather lame. May I offer you my arm?"

And instead of entering Hammerpond House by the dressing-room window,
Mr. Watkins entered it--slightly intoxicated, and inclined now to
cheerfulness again--on the arm of a real live peer, and by the front
door. "This," thought Mr. Watkins, "is burgling in style!" The
"scoundrels," seen by the gaslight, proved to be mere local amateurs
unknown to Mr. Watkins, and they were taken down into the pantry and
there watched over by the three policemen, two gamekeepers with loaded
guns, the butler, an ostler, and a carman, until the dawn allowed of
their removal to Hazelhurst police-station. Mr. Watkins was made much of
in the salon. They devoted a sofa to him, and would not hear of a return
to the village that night. Lady Aveling was sure he was brilliantly
original, and said her idea of Turner was just such another rough,
half-inebriated, deep-eyed, brave, and clever man. Some one brought up a
remarkable little folding-ladder that had been picked up in the
shrubbery, and showed him how it was put together. They also described
how wires had been found in the shrubbery, evidently placed there to
trip-up unwary pursuers. It was lucky he had escaped these snares. And
they showed him the jewels.

Mr. Watkins had the sense not to talk too much, and in any
conversational difficulty fell back on his internal pains. At last he
was seized with stiffness in the back, and yawning. Everyone suddenly
awoke to the fact that it was a shame to keep him talking after his
affray, so he retired early to his room, the little red room next to
Lord Aveling's suite.


The dawn found a deserted easel bearing a canvas with a green
inscription, in the Hammerpond Park, and it found Hammerpond House in
commotion. But if the dawn found Mr. Teddy Watkins and the Aveling
diamonds, it did not communicate the information to the police.




THE MOTH


Probably you have heard of Hapley--not W.T. Hapley, the son, but the
celebrated Hapley, the Hapley of 'Periplaneta Hapliia,' Hapley the
entomologist.

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

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

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

[* "Remarks on a Recent Revision of Microlepidoptera," Quarterly Journal
Entomological Society, 1863.]

[** "Rejoinder to Certain Remarks," etc. Ibid. 1864.]

[*** "Further Remarks," etc. Ibid.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There was a timid rapping at the door.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Where?" said the Vicar.

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

"Certainly not," said the Vicar.

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

"You may well ask that!" said Mrs. Colville.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




THE TREASURE IN THE FOREST


The canoe was now approaching the land. The bay opened out, and a gap in
the white surf of the reef marked where the little river ran out to the
sea; the thicker and deeper green of the virgin forest showed its course
down the distant hill slope. The forest here came close to the beach.
Far beyond, dim and almost cloudlike in texture, rose the mountains,
like suddenly frozen waves. The sea was still save for an almost
imperceptible swell. The sky blazed.

The man with the carved paddle stopped. "It should be somewhere around
here," he said. He shipped the paddle and held his arms out straight
before him.

The other man had been in the fore part of the canoe, closely
scrutinising the land. He had a sheet of yellow paper on his knee.

"Come and look at this, Evans," he said.

Both men spoke in low tones, and their lips were hard and dry.

The man called Evans came swaying along the canoe until he could look
over his companion's shoulder.

The paper had the appearance of a rough map. By much folding it was
creased and worn to the pitch of separation, and the second man held the
discoloured fragments together where they had parted. On it one could
dimly make out, in almost obliterated pencil, the outline of the bay.

"Here," said Evans, "is the reef, and here is the gap." He ran his
thumb-nail over the chart.

"This curved and twisting line is the river--I could do with a drink
now--! And this star is the place."

"You see this dotted line," said the man with the map; "it is a straight
line, and runs from the opening of the reef to a clump of palm-trees.
The star comes just where it cuts the river. We must mark the place as
we go into the lagoon."

"It's queer," said Evans, after a pause, "what these little marks down
here are for. It looks like the plan of a house or something; but what
all these little dashes, pointing this way and that, may mean I can't
get a notion. And what's the writing?"

"Chinese," said the man with the map.

"Of course! He was a Chinese," said Evans.

"They all were," said the man with the map.

They both sat for some minutes staring at the land, while the canoe
drifted slowly. Then Evans looked towards the paddle.

"Your turn with the paddle now, Hooker," said he.

And his companion quietly folded up his map, put it in his pocket,
passed Evans carefully, and began to paddle. His movements were languid,
like those of a man whose strength was nearly exhausted.

Evans sat with his eyes half closed, watching the frothy breakwater of
the coral creep nearer and nearer. The sky was like a furnace now, for
the sun was near the zenith. Though they were so near the Treasure he
did not feel the exaltation he had anticipated. The intense excitement
of the struggle for the plan, and the long night voyage from the
mainland in the unprovisioned canoe had, to use his own expression,
"taken it out of him." He tried to arouse himself by directing his mind
to the ingots the Chinamen had spoken of, but it would not rest there;
it came back headlong to the thought of sweet water rippling in the
river, and to the almost unendurable dryness of his lips and throat. The
rhythmic wash of the sea upon the reef was becoming audible now, and it
had a pleasant sound in his ears; the water washed along the side of the
canoe, and the paddle dripped between each stroke. Presently he began to
doze.

He was still dimly conscious of the island, but a queer dream texture
interwove with his sensations. Once again it was the night when he and
Hooker had hit upon the Chinamen's secret; he saw the moonlit trees, the
little fire burning, and the black figures of the three
Chinamen--silvered on one side by moonlight, and on the other glowing
from the firelight--and heard them talking together in
pigeon-English--for they came from different provinces. Hooker had
caught the drift of their talk first, and had motioned to him to listen.
Fragments of the conversation were inaudible, and fragments
incomprehensible. A Spanish galleon from the Philippines hopelessly
aground, and its treasure buried against the day of return, lay in the
background of the story; a shipwrecked crew thinned by disease, a
quarrel or so, and the needs of discipline, and at last taking to their
boats never to be heard of again. Then Chang-hi, only a year since,
wandering ashore, had happened upon the ingots hidden for two hundred
years, had deserted his junk, and reburied them with infinite toil,
single-handed but very safe. He laid great stress on the safety--it was
a secret of his. Now he wanted help to return and exhume them. Presently
the little map fluttered and the voices sank. A fine story for two,
stranded British wastrels to hear! Evans' dream shifted to the moment
when he had Chang-hi's pigtail in his hand. The life of a Chinaman is
scarcely sacred like a European's. The cunning little face of Chang-hi,
first keen and furious like a startled snake, and then fearful,
treacherous, and pitiful, became overwhelmingly prominent in the dream.
At the end Chang-hi had grinned, a most incomprehensible and startling
grin. Abruptly things became very unpleasant, as they will do at times
in dreams. Chang-hi gibbered and threatened him. He saw in his dream
heaps and heaps of gold, and Chang-hi intervening and struggling to hold
him back from it. He took Chang-hi by the pigtail--how big the yellow
brute was, and how he struggled and grinned! He kept growing bigger,
too. Then the bright heaps of gold turned to a roaring furnace, and a
vast devil, surprisingly like Chang-hi, but with a huge black tail,
began to feed him with coals. They burnt his mouth horribly. Another
devil was shouting his name: "Evans, Evans, you sleepy fool--!" Or was
it Hooker?

He woke up. They were in the mouth of the lagoon.

"There are the three palm-trees. It must be in a line with that clump of
bushes," said his companion. "Mark that. If we, go to those bushes and
then strike into the bush in a straight line from here, we shall come to
it when we come to the stream."

They could see now where the mouth of the stream opened out. At the
sight of it Evans revived. "Hurry up, man," he said, "or by heaven I
shall have to drink sea water!" He gnawed his hand and stared at the
gleam of silver among the rocks and green tangle.

Presently he turned almost fiercely upon Hooker. "Give me the paddle,"
he said.

So they reached the river mouth. A little way up Hooker took some water
in the hollow of his hand, tasted it, and spat it out. A little further
he tried again. "This will do," he said, and they began drinking
eagerly.

"Curse this!" said Evans suddenly. "It's too slow." And, leaning
dangerously over the fore part of the canoe, he began to suck up the
water with his lips.

Presently they made an end of drinking, and, running the canoe into a
little creek, were about to land among the thick growth that overhung
the water.

"We shall have to scramble through this to the beach to find our bushes
and get the line to the place," said Evans.

"We had better paddle round," said Hooker.

So they pushed out again into the river and paddled back down it to the
sea, and along the shore to the place where the clump of bushes grew.
Here they landed, pulled the light canoe far up the beach, and then went
up towards the edge of the jungle until they could see the opening of
the reef and the bushes in a straight line. Evans had taken a native
implement out of the canoe. It was L-shaped, and the transverse piece
was armed with polished stone. Hooker carried the paddle. "It is
straight now in this direction," said he; "we must push through this
till we strike the stream. Then we must prospect."

They pushed through a close tangle of reeds, broad fronds, and young
trees, and at first it was toilsome going, but very speedily the trees
became larger and the ground beneath them opened out. The blaze of the
sunlight was replaced by insensible degrees by cool shadow. The trees
became at last, vast pillars that rose up to a canopy of greenery far
overhead. Dim white flowers hung from their stems, and ropy creepers
swung from tree to tree. The shadow deepened. On the ground, blotched
fungi and a red-brown incrustation became frequent.

Evans shivered. "It seems almost cold here after the blaze outside."

"I hope we are keeping to the straight," said Hooker.

Presently they saw, far ahead, a gap in the sombre darkness where white
shafts of hot sunlight smote into the forest. There also was brilliant
green undergrowth and coloured flowers. Then they heard the rush of
water.

"Here is the river. We should be close to it now," said Hooker.

The vegetation was thick by the river bank. Great plants, as yet
unnamed, grew among the roots of the big trees, and spread rosettes of
huge green fans towards the strip of sky. Many flowers and a creeper
with shiny foliage clung to the exposed stems. On the water of the
broad, quiet pool which the treasure seekers now overlooked there
floated big oval leaves and a waxen, pinkish-white flower not unlike a
water-lily. Further, as the river bent away from them, the water
suddenly frothed and became noisy in a rapid.

"Well?" said Evans.

"We have swerved a little from the straight," said Hooker. "That was to
be expected."

He turned and looked into the dim cool shadows of the silent forest
behind them. "If we beat a little way up and down the stream we should
come to something."

"You said--" began Evans.

"He said there was a heap of stones," said Hooker.

The two men looked at each other for a moment.

"Let us try a little down-stream first," said Evans.

They advanced slowly, looking curiously about them. Suddenly Evans
stopped. "What the devil's that?" he said.

Hooker followed his finger. "Something blue," he said. It had come into
view as they topped a gentle swell of the ground. Then he began to
distinguish what it was.

He advanced suddenly with hasty steps, until the body that belonged to
the limp hand and arm had become visible. His grip tightened on the
implement he carried. The thing was the figure of a Chinaman lying on
his face. The abandon of the pose was unmistakable.

The two men drew closer together, and stood staring silently at this
ominous dead body. It lay in a clear space among the trees. Near by was
a spade after the Chinese pattern, and further off lay a scattered heap
of stones, close to a freshly dug hole.

"Somebody has been here before," said Hooker, clearing his throat.

Then suddenly Evans began to swear and rave, and stamp upon the ground.

Hooker turned white but said nothing. He advanced towards the prostrate
body. He saw the neck was puffed and purple, and the hands and ankles
swollen. "Pah!" he said, and suddenly turned away and went towards the
excavation. He gave a cry of surprise. He shouted to Evans, who was
following him slowly.

"You fool! It's all right. It's here still." Then he turned again and
looked at the dead Chinaman, and then again at the hole.

Evans hurried to the hole. Already half exposed by the ill-fated wretch
beside them lay a number of dull yellow bars. He bent down in the hole,
and, clearing off the soil with his bare hands, hastily pulled one of
the heavy masses out. As he did so a little thorn pricked his hand. He
pulled the delicate spike out with his fingers and lifted the ingot.

"Only gold or lead could weigh like this," he said exultantly.

Hooker was still looking at the dead Chinaman. He was puzzled.

"He stole a march on his friends," he said at last. "He came here alone,
and some poisonous snake has killed him... I wonder how he found the
place."

Evans stood with the ingot in his hands. What did a dead Chinaman
signify? "We shall have to take this stuff to the mainland piecemeal,
and bury it there for a while. How shall we get it to the canoe?"

He took his jacket off and spread it on the ground, and flung two or
three ingots into it. Presently he found that another little thorn had
punctured his skin.

"This is as much as we can carry," said he. Then suddenly, with a queer
rush of irritation, "What are you staring at?"

Hooker turned to him. "I can't stand him..." He nodded towards the
corpse. "It's so like--"

"Rubbish!" said Evans. "All Chinamen are alike."

Hooker looked into his face. "I'm going to bury that, anyhow, before I
lend a hand with this stuff."

"Don't be a fool, Hooker," said Evans. "Let that mass of corruption
bide."

Hooker hesitated, and then his eye went carefully over the brown soil
about them. "It scares me somehow," he said.

"The thing is," said Evans, "what to do with these ingots. Shall we
re-bury them over here, or take them across the strait in the canoe?"

Hooker thought. His puzzled gaze wandered among the tall tree-trunks,
and up into the remote sunlit greenery overhead. He shivered again as
his eye rested upon the blue figure of the Chinaman. He stared
searchingly among the grey depths between the trees.

"What's come to you, Hooker?" said Evans. "Have you lost your wits?"

"Let's get the gold out of this place, anyhow," said Hooker.

He took the ends of the collar of the coat in his hands, and Evans took
the opposite corners, and they lifted the mass. "Which way?" said Evans.
"To the canoe?"

"It's queer," said Evans, when they had advanced only a few steps, "but
my arms ache still with that paddling.

"Curse it!" he said. "But they ache! I must rest."

They let the coat down, Evans' face was white, and little drops of sweat
stood out upon his forehead. "It's stuffy, somehow, in this forest."

Then with an abrupt transition to unreasonable anger: "What is the good
of waiting here all the day? Lend a hand, I say! You have done nothing
but moon since we saw the dead Chinaman."

Hooker was looking steadfastly at his companion's face. He helped raise
the coat bearing the ingots, and they went forward perhaps a hundred
yards in silence. Evans began to breathe heavily. "Can't you speak?" he
said.

"What's the matter with you?" said Hooker.

Evans stumbled, and then with a sudden curse flung the coat from him. He
stood for a moment staring at Hooker, and then with a groan clutched at
his own throat.

"Don't come near me," he said, and went and leant against a tree. Then
in a steadier voice, "I'll be better in a minute."

Presently his grip upon the trunk loosened, and he slipped slowly down
the stem of the tree until he was a crumpled heap at its foot. His hands
were clenched convulsively. His face became distorted with pain. Hooker
approached him.

"Don't touch me! Don't touch me!" said Evans in a stifled voice. "Put
the gold back on the coat."

"Can't I do anything for you?" said Hooker.

"Put the gold back on the coat."

As Hooker handled the ingots he felt a little prick on the ball of his
thumb. He looked at his hand and saw a slender thorn, perhaps two inches
in length.

Evans gave an inarticulate cry and rolled over.

Hooker's jaw dropped. He stared at the thorn for a moment with dilated
eyes. Then he looked at Evans, who was now crumpled together on the
ground, his back bending and straightening spasmodically. Then he looked
through the pillars of the trees and net-work of creeper stems, to where
in the dim grey shadow the blue-clad body of the Chinaman was still
indistinctly visible. He thought of the little dashes in the corner of
the plan, and in a moment he understood.

"God help me!" he said. For the thorns were similar to those the Dyaks
poison and use in their blowing-tubes. He understood now what Chang-hi's
assurance of the safety of his treasure meant. He understood that grin
now.

"Evans!" he cried.

But Evans was silent and motionless, save for a horrible spasmodic
twitching of his limbs. A profound silence brooded over the forest.

Then Hooker began to suck furiously at the little pink spot on the ball
of his thumb--sucking for dear life. Presently he felt a strange aching
pain in his arms and shoulders, and his fingers seemed difficult to
bend. Then he knew that sucking was no good.

Abruptly he stopped, and sitting down by the pile of ingots, and resting
his chin upon his hands and his elbows upon his knees, stared at the
distorted but still stirring body of his companion. Chang-hi's grin came
into his mind again. The dull pain spread towards his throat and grew
slowly in intensity. Far above him a faint breeze stirred the greenery,
and the white petals of some unknown flower came floating down through
the gloom.




THE PLATTNER STORY AND OTHERS--



THE PLATTNER STORY


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

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

Now, that is not the only singularity of Gottfried's structure, although
it is the only one that would appeal to the untrained mind. Careful
sounding of Gottfried's internal arrangements, by a well-known surgeon,
seems to point to the fact that all the other unsymmetrical parts of his
body are similarly misplaced. The right lobe of his liver is on the left
side, the left on his right; while his lungs too, are similarly
contraposed. What is still more singular, unless Gottfried is a
consummate actor, we must believe that his right hand has recently
become his left. Since the occurrences we are about to consider (as
impartially as possible), he has found the utmost difficulty in writing,
except from right to left across the paper with his left hand. He cannot
throw with his right hand, he is perplexed at meal times between knife
and fork, and his ideas of the rule of the road--he is a cyclist--are
still a dangerous confusion. And there is not a scrap of evidence to
show that before these occurrences Gottfried was at all left-handed.
There is yet another wonderful fact in this preposterous business.
Gottfried produces three photographs of himself. You have him at the age
of five or six, thrusting fat legs at you from under a plaid frock, and
scowling. In that photograph his left eye is a little larger than his
right, and his jaw is a trifle heavier on the left side. This is the
reverse of his present living conditions: The photograph of Gottfried at
fourteen seems to contradict these facts, but that is because it is one
of those cheap "Gem" photographs that were then in vogue, taken direct
upon metal, and therefore reversing things just as a looking-glass
would. A third photograph represents him at one-and-twenty and confirms
the record of the others. There seems here evidence of the strongest
confirmatory character that Gottfried has exchanged his left side for
his right. Yet how a human being can be so changed, short of a fantastic
and pointless miracle, it is exceedingly hard to suggest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At first he was distinctly under the impression that he was still in the
classroom. He perceived quite distinctly the surprise of the boys and
the entry of Mr. Lidgett. He is quite positive upon that score. He did
not hear their remarks; but that he ascribed to the deafening effect of
the experiment. Things about him seemed curiously dark and faint, but
his mind explained that on the obvious but mistaken idea that the
explosion had engendered a huge volume of dark smoke.

Through the dimness the figures of Lidgett and the boys moved, as faint
and silent as ghosts Plattner's face still tingled with the stinging
heat of the flash. He was, he says, "all muddled." His first definite
thoughts seem to have been of his personal safety. He thought he was
perhaps blinded and deafened. He felt his limbs and face in a gingerly
manner. Then his perceptions grew clearer, and he was astonished to miss
the old familiar desks and other schoolroom furniture about him. Only
dim, uncertain, grey shapes stood in the place of these. Then came a
thing that made him shout aloud, and awoke his stunned faculties to
instant activity. Two of the boys, gesticulating, walked one after the
other clean through him! Neither manifested the slightest consciousness
of his presence. It is difficult to imagine the sensation he felt. They
came against him, he says, with no more force than a wisp of mist.

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

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

He describes himself as making a strenuous effort to attract attention.
He shouted to Lidgett, and tried to seize the boys as they went to and
fro. He only desisted from these attempts when Mrs. Lidgett, whom he (as
an Assistant Master) naturally disliked, entered the room. He says the
sensation of being in the world, and yet not a part of it, was an
extraordinarily disagreeable one. He compared his feelings, not inaptly,
to those of a cat watching a mouse through a window. Whenever he made a
motion to communicate with the dim, familiar world about him, he found
an invisible, incomprehensible barrier preventing intercourse. He then
turned his attention to his solid environment. He found the medicine
bottle still unbroken in his hand, with the remainder of the green
powder therein. He put this in his pocket, and began to feel about him.
Apparently, he was sitting on a boulder of rock covered with a velvety
moss. The dark country about him, he was unable to see, the faint, misty
picture of the schoolroom blotting it out, but he had a feeling (due
perhaps to a cold wind) that he was near the crest of a hill, and that a
steep valley fell away beneath his feet. The green glow along the edge
of the sky seemed to be growing in extent and intensity. He stood up,
rubbing his eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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




THE ARGONAUTS OF THE AIR


One saw Monson's Flying Machine from the windows of the trains passing
either along the South-Western main line or along the line between
Wimbledon and Worcester Park--, to be more exact, one saw the huge
scaffolding which limited the flight of the apparatus. They rose over
the tree-tops, a massive alley of interlacing iron and timber, and an
enormous web of ropes and tackle, extending the best part of two miles.
From the Leatherhead branch this alley was foreshortened and in part
hidden by hill with villas; but from the main line one had it in
profile, a complex tangle of girders and curving bars, very impressive
to the excursionists from Portsmouth and Southampton and the West.
Monson had taken up the work where Maxim had left it, had gone on at
first with an utter contempt for the journalistic wit and ignorance that
had irritated and hampered his predecessor, and had spent (it was said)
rather more than half his immense fortune upon his experiments. The
results, to an impatient generation, seemed inconsiderable. When some
five years had passed after the growth of the colossal iron groves at
Worcester Park, and Monson still failed to put in a fluttering
appearance over Trafalgar Square, even the Isle of Wight trippers felt
their liberty to smile. And such intelligent people as did not consider
Monson a fool stricken with the mania for invention, denounced him as
being (for no particular reason) a self-advertising quack.

Yet now and again a morning trainload of season-ticket holders would see
a white monster rush headlong through the airy tracery of guides and
bars, and hear the further stays, nettings and buffers snap, creak, and
groan with the impact of the blow. Then there would be an efflorescence
of black-set white-rimmed faces along the sides of the train, and the
morning papers would be neglected for a vigorous discussion of the
possibility of flying (in which nothing new was ever said by any
chance), until the train reached Waterloo, and its cargo of
season-ticket holders dispersed themselves over London. Or the fathers
and mothers in some multitudinous train of weary excursionists returning
exhausted from a day of rest by the sea, would find the dark fabric,
standing out against the evening sky, useful in diverting some bilious
child from its introspection, and be suddenly startled by the swift
transit of a huge black flapping shape that strained upward against the
guides. It was a great and forcible thing beyond dispute, and excellent
for conversation; yet all the same, it was but flying in
leading-strings, and most of those who witnessed it scarcely counted its
flight as flying. More of a switchback it seemed to the run of the folk.

Monson, I say, did not trouble himself very keenly about the opinions of
the press at first. But possibly he, even had formed but a poor idea of
the time it would take before the tactics of flying were mastered, the
swift assured adjustment of the big soaring shape to every gust and
chance movement of the air; nor had he clearly reckoned the money this
prolonged struggle against gravitation would cost him. And he was not so
pachydermatous as he seemed. Secretly he had his periodical bundles of
cuttings sent him by Romeike, he had his periodical reminders from his
banker; and if he did not mind the initial ridicule and scepticism, he
felt the growing neglect as the months went by and the money dribbled
away. Time was when Monson had sent the enterprising journalist, keen
after readable matter, empty from his gates. But when the enterprising
journalist ceased from troubling, Monson was anything but satisfied in
his heart of hearts. Still day by day the work went on, and the
multitudinous subtle difficulties of steering diminished in number. Day
by day, too the money trickled away, until his balance was no longer a
matter of hundreds of thousands, but of tens. And at last came an
anniversary.

Monson, sitting in the little drawing-shed, suddenly noticed the date on
Woodhouse's calendar.

"It was five years ago to-day that we began," he said to Woodhouse
suddenly.

"Is it?" said Woodhouse.

"It's the alterations play the devil with us," said Monson, biting a
paper-fastener.

The drawings for the new vans to the hinder screw lay on the table
before him as he spoke. He pitched the mutilated brass paper-fastener
into the waste-paper basket and drummed with his fingers. "These
alterations! Will the mathematicians ever be clever enough to save us
all this patching and experimenting? Five years--learning by rule of
thumb, when one might think that it was possible to calculate the whole
thing out beforehand. The cost of it! I might have hired three senior
wranglers for life. But they'd only have developed some beautifully
useless theorems in pneumatics. What a time it has been, Woodhouse!"

"These mouldings will take three weeks," said Woodhouse. "At special
prices."

"Three weeks!" said Monson, and sat drumming.

"Three weeks certain," said Woodhouse, an excellent engineer, but no
good as a comforter. He drew the sheets towards him and began shading a
bar.

Monson stopped drumming, and began to bite his finger-nails, staring the
while at Woodhouse's head.

"How long have they been calling this Monson's Folly?" he said suddenly.

"Oh! Year or so," said Woodhouse carelessly, without looking up.

Monson sucked the air in between his teeth, and went to the window. The
stout iron columns carrying the elevated rails upon which the start of
the machine was made rose up close by, and the machine was hidden by the
upper edge of the window. Through the grove of iron pillars, red painted
and ornate with rows of bolts, one had a glimpse of the pretty scenery
towards Esher. A train went gliding noiselessly across the middle
distance, its rattle drowned by the hammering of the workmen overhead.
Monson could imagine the grinning faces at the windows of the carriages.
He swore savagely under his breath, and dabbed viciously at a blowfly
that suddenly became noisy on the window-pane.

"What's up?" said Woodhouse, staring in surprise at his employer.

"I'm about sick of this."

Woodhouse scratched his cheek. "Oh!" he said, after an assimilating
pause. He pushed the drawing away from him.

"Here these fools... I'm trying to conquer a new element--trying to do a
thing that will revolutionise life. And instead of taking an intelligent
interest, they grin and make their stupid jokes, and call me and my
appliances names."

"Asses!" said Woodhouse, letting his eye fall again on the drawing.

The epithet, curiously enough, made Monson wince. "I'm about sick of it,
Woodhouse, anyhow," he said, after a pause.

Woodhouse shrugged his shoulders.

"There's nothing for it but patience, I suppose," said Monson, sticking
his hands in his pockets. "I've started. I've made my bed, and I've got
to lie on it. I can't go back. I'll see it through, and spend every
penny I have and every penny I can borrow. But I tell you, Woodhouse,
I'm infernally sick of it, all the same. If I'd paid a tenth part of the
money towards some political greaser's expenses--I'd have been a baronet
before this."

Monson paused. Woodhouse stared in front of him with a blank expression
he always employed to indicate sympathy, and tapped his pencil-case on
the table. Monson stared at him for a minute.

"Oh, damn!" said Monson suddenly, and abruptly rushed out of the room.

Woodhouse continued his sympathetic rigour for perhaps half a minute.
Then he sighed and resumed the shading of the drawings. Something had
evidently upset Monson. Nice chap, and generous, but difficult to get on
with. It was the way with every amateur who had anything to do with
engineering--wanted everything finished at once. But Monson had usually
the patience of the expert. Odd he was so irritable. Nice and round that
aluminium rod did look now! Woodhouse threw back his head, and put it,
first this side and then that, to appreciate his bit of shading better.

"Mr. Woodhouse," said Hooper, the foreman of the labourers, putting his
head in at the door.

"Hullo!" said Woodhouse, without turning round.

"Nothing happened, sir?" said Hooper.

"Happened?" said Woodhouse.

"The governor just been up the rails swearing like a tornader."

"Oh!" said Woodhouse.

"It ain't like him, sir."

"No?"

"And I was thinking perhaps--"

"Don't think," said Woodhouse, still admiring the drawings.

Hooper knew Woodhouse, and shut the door suddenly with a vicious slam.
Woodhouse stared stonily before him for some further minutes, and then
made an ineffectual effort to pick his teeth with his pencil. Abruptly
he desisted, pitched that old, tried, and stumpy servitor across the
room, got up, stretched himself, and followed Hooper.

He looked ruffled--it was visible to every workman he met. When a
millionaire who has been spending thousands on experiments that employ
quite a little army of people suddenly indicates that he is sick of the
undertaking, there is almost invariably a certain amount of mental
friction in the ranks of the little army he employs. And even before he
indicates his intentions there are speculations and murmurs, a watching
of faces and a study of straws. Hundreds of people knew before the day
was out that Monson was ruffled, Woodhouse ruffled, Hooper ruffled. A
workman's wife, for instance (whom Monson had never seen), decided to
keep her money in the savings-bank instead of buying a velveteen dress.
So far-reaching are even the casual curses of a millionaire.

Monson found a certain satisfaction in going on the works and behaving
disagreeably to as many people as possible. After a time even that
palled upon him, and he rode off the grounds, to every one's relief
there, and through the lanes south-eastward, to the infinite tribulation
of his house steward at Cheam.


And the immediate cause of it all, the little grain of annoyance that
had suddenly precipitated all this discontent with his life-work
was--these trivial things that direct all our great decisions--! Half a
dozen ill-considered remarks made by a pretty girl, prettily dressed,
with a beautiful voice and something more than prettiness in
her soft grey eyes. And of these half-dozen remarks, two words
especially--"Monson's Folly." She had felt she was behaving charmingly
to Monson; she reflected the next day how exceptionally effective she
had been, and no one would have been more amazed than she, had she
learned the effect she had left on Monson's mind. I hope, considering
everything, that she never knew.

"How are you getting on with your flying-machine?" she asked. ("I wonder
if I shall ever meet any one with the sense not to ask that," thought
Monson.) "It will be very dangerous at first, will it not?" ("Thinks I'm
afraid.") "Jorgon is going to play presently; have you heard him
before?" ("My mania being attended to, we turn to rational
conversation.") Gush about Jorgon; gradual decline of conversation,
ending with--"You must let me know when your flying-machine is finished,
Mr. Monson, and then I will consider the advisability of taking a
ticket." ("One would think I was still playing inventions in the
nursery.") But the bitterest thing she said was not meant for Monson's
ears. To Phlox, the novelist, she was always conscientiously brilliant.
"I have been talking to Mr. Monson, and he can think of nothing,
positively nothing, but that flying-machine of his. Do you know, all his
workmen call that place of his 'Monson's Folly'? He is quite impossible.
It is really very, very sad. I always regard him myself in the light of
sunken treasure--the Lost Millionaire, you know."

She was pretty and well educated--, indeed, she had written an
epigrammatic novelette; but the bitterness was that she was typical. She
summarised what the world thought of the man who was working sanely,
steadily, and surely towards a more tremendous revolution in the
appliances of civilisation, a more far-reaching alteration in the ways
of humanity than has ever been effected since history began. They did
not even take his seriously. In a little while he would be proverbial.
"I must fly now," he said on his way home, smarting with a sense of
absolute social failure. "I must fly soon. If it doesn't come off soon,
by God! I shall run amuck."

He said that before he had gone through his pass-book and his litter of
papers. Inadequate as the cause seems, it was that girl's voice and the
expression of her eyes that precipitated his discontent. But certainly
the discovery that he had no longer even one hundred thousand pounds'
worth of realisable property behind him was the poison that made the
wound deadly.

It was the next day after this that he exploded upon Woodhouse and his
workmen, and thereafter his bearing was consistently grim for three
weeks, and anxiety dwelt in Cheam and Ewell, Maldon, Morden, and
Worcester Park, places that had thriven mightily on his experiments.

Four weeks after that first swearing of his, he stood with Woodhouse by
the reconstructed machine as it lay across the elevated railway, by
means of which it gained its initial impetus. The new propeller
glittered a brighter white than the rest of the machine, and a gilder,
obedient to a whim of Monson's was picking out the aluminium bars with
gold. And looking down the long avenue between the ropes (gilded now
with the sunset), one saw red signals, and two miles away an ant-hill of
workmen busy altering the last falls of the run into a rising slope.

"I'll come," said Woodhouse. "I'll come right enough. But I tell you
it's infernally foolhardy. If only you would give another year--"

"I tell you I won't. I tell you the thing works. I've given years
enough--"

"It's not that," said Woodhouse. "We're all right with the machine. But
it's the steering--"

"Haven't I been rushing, night and morning, backwards and forwards,
through the squirrel's cage? If the thing steers true here, it will
steer true all across England. It's just funk, I tell you, Woodhouse. We
could have gone a year ago. And besides--"

"Well?" said Woodhouse.

"The money!" snapped Monson over his shoulder.

"Hang it! I never thought of the money," said Woodhouse, and then,
speaking now in a very different tone to that with which he said the
words before, he repeated, "I'll come. Trust me."

Monson turned suddenly, and saw all that Woodhouse had not the dexterity
to say, shining on his sunset-lit face. He looked for a moment, then
impulsively extended his hand. "Thanks," he said.

"All right," said Woodhouse, gripping the hand, and with a queer
softening of his features. "Trust me."

Then both men turned to the big apparatus that lay with its flat wings
extended upon the carrier, and stared at it meditatively. Monson, guided
perhaps by a photographic study of flight of birds, and by Lilienthal's
methods, had gradually drifted from Maxim's shapes towards the bird form
again. The thing, however, was driven by a huge screw behind in the
place of the tail; and so hovering, which needs an almost vertical
adjustment of a flat tail, was rendered impossible. The body of the
machine was small, almost cylindrical, and pointed. Forward and aft on
the pointed ends were two small petroleum engines for the screw, and the
navigators sat deep in a canoe-like recess, the foremost one steering,
and being protected by a low screen, with two plate-glass windows, from
the blinding rush of air. On either side a monstrous flat framework with
a curved front border could be adjusted so as either to lie
horizontally, or to be tilted upward or down. These wings worked rigidly
together, or by releasing a pin, one could be tilted through a small
angle independently of its fellow. The front edge of either wing could
also be shifted back so as to diminish the wing-area about one-sixth.
The machine was not only not designed to hover, but it was also
incapable of fluttering. Monson's idea was to get into the air with the
initial rush of the apparatus, and then to skim, much as a playing-card
may be skimmed, keeping up the rush by means of the screw at the stern.
Rooks and gulls fly enormous distances in that way with scarcely a
perceptible movement of the wings. The bird really drives along on an
aerial switchback. It glides slanting downward for a space, until it has
gained considerable momentum, and then altering the inclination of its
wings, glides up again almost to its original altitude. Even a Londoner
who has watched the birds in the aviary in Regent's Park knows that.

But the bird is practising this art from the moment it leaves its nest.
It has not only the perfect apparatus, but the perfect instinct to use
it. A man off his feet has the poorest skill in balancing. Even the
simple trick of the bicycle costs him some hours of labour. The
instantaneous adjustments of the wings, the quick response to a passing
breeze, the swift recovery of equilibrium, the giddy, eddying movements
that require such absolute precision--all that he must learn, learn with
infinite labour and infinite danger, if ever he is to conquer flying.
The flying-machine that will start off some fine day, driven by neat
"little levers," with a nice open deck like a liner, and all loaded up
with bombshells and guns, is the easy dreaming of a literary man. In
lives and in treasure the cost of the conquest of the empire of air may
even exceed all that has been spent in man's great conquest of the sea.
Certainly it will be costlier than the greatest war that has ever
devastated the world.

No one knew these things better than these two practical men. And they
knew they were in the front rank of the coming army. Yet there is hope
even in a forlorn hope. Men are killed outright in the reserves
sometimes, while others who have been left for dead in the thickest
corner crawl out and survive.

"If we miss these meadows--" said Woodhouse presently in his slow way.

"My dear chap," said Monson, whose spirits had been rising fitfully
during the last few days, "we mustn't miss these meadows. There's a
quarter of a square mile for us to hit, fences removed, ditches
levelled. We shall come down all right--rest assured. And if we don't--"

"Ah!" said Woodhouse. "If we don't!"

Before the day of the start, the newspaper people got wind of the
alterations at northward end of the framework, and Monson was cheered by
a decided change in the comments Romeike forwarded him. "He will be off
some day," said the papers. "He will be off some day," said the
South-Western season-ticket holders one to another; the seaside
excursionists, the Saturday-to-Monday trippers from Sussex and Hampshire
and Dorset and Devon, the eminent literary people from Haslemere, all
remarked eagerly one to another, "He will be off some day," as the
familiar scaffolding came in sight. And actually, one bright morning, in
full view of the ten-past-ten train from Basingstoke, Monson's
flying-machine started on its journey.

They saw the carrier running swiftly along its rail, and the white and
gold screw spinning in the air. They heard the rapid rumble of wheels,
and thud as the carrier reached the buffers at the end of its run. Then
a whirr as the Flying-Machine was shot forward into the networks. All
that the majority of them had seen and heard before. The thing went with
a dropping flight through the framework and rose again, and then every
beholder shouted, or screamed, or yelled, or shrieked after his kind.
For instead of the customary concussion and stoppage, the Flying-Machine
flew out of its five years' cage like a bolt from a crossbow, and drove
slantingly upward into the air, curved round a little, so as to cross
the line, and soared in the direction of Wimbledon Common.

It seemed to hang momentarily in the air and grow smaller, then it
ducked and vanished over the clustering blue tree-tops to the east of
Coombe Hill, and no one stopped staring and gasping until long after it
had disappeared.

That was what the people in the train from Basingstoke saw. If you had
drawn a line down the middle of that train, from engine to guard's van,
you would not have found a living soul on the opposite side to the
flying-machine. It was a mad rush from window to window as the thing
crossed the line. And the engine-driver and stoker never took their eyes
off the low hills about Wimbledon, and never noticed that they had run
clean through Coombe and Malden and Raynes Park, until with returning
animation, they found themselves pelting, at the most indecent pace,
into Wimbledon station.

From the moment when Monson had started the carrier with a "Now!"
neither he nor Woodhouse said a word. Both men sat with clenched teeth.
Monson had crossed the line with a curve that was too sharp, and
Woodhouse had opened and shut his white lips; but neither spoke.
Woodhouse simply gripped his seat, and breathed sharply through his
teeth, watching the blue country to the west rushing past, and down, and
away from him. Monson knelt at his post forward, and his hands trembled
on the spoked wheel that moved the wings. He could see nothing before
him but a mass of white clouds in the sky.

The machine went slanting upward, travelling with an enormous speed
still, but losing momentum every moment. The land ran away underneath
with diminishing speed.

"Now!" said Woodhouse at last, and with a violent effort Monson wrenched
over the wheel and altered the angle of the wings. The machine seemed to
hang for half a minute motionless in mid-air, and then he saw the hazy
blue house-covered hills of Kilburn and Hampstead jump up before his
eyes and rise steadily, until the little sunlit dome of the Albert Hall
appeared through his windows. For a moment he scarcely understood the
meaning of this upward rush of the horizon, but as the nearer and nearer
houses came into view, he realised what he had done. He had turned the
wings over too far, and they were swooping steeply downward towards the
Thames.

The thought, the question, the realisation were all the business of a
second of time. "Too much!" gasped Woodhouse. Monson brought the wheel
halfway back with a jerk, and forthwith the Kilburn and Hampstead ridge
dropped again to the lower edge of his windows. They had been a thousand
feet above Coombe and Malden station; fifty seconds after they whizzed,
at a frightful pace, not eighty feet above the East Putney station, on
the Metropolitan District line, to the screaming astonishment of a
platformful of people. Monson flung up the vans against the air, and
over Fulham they rushed up their atmospheric switchback again,
steeply--too steeply. The 'buses went floundering across the Fulham
Road, the people yelled.

Then down again, too steeply still, and the distant trees and houses
about Primrose Hill leapt up across Monson's window, and then suddenly
he saw straight before him the greenery of Kensington Gardens and the
towers of the Imperial Institute. They were driving straight down upon
South Kensington. The pinnacles of the Natural History Museum rushed up
into view. There came one fatal second of swift thought, a moment of
hesitation. Should he try and clear the towers, or swerve eastward?

He made a hesitating attempt to release the right wing, left the catch
half released, and gave a frantic clutch at the wheel.

The nose of the machine seemed to leap up before him. The wheel pressed
his hand with irresistible force, and jerked itself out of his control.

Woodhouse, sitting crouched together, gave a hoarse cry, and sprang up
towards Monson. "Too far!" he cried, and then he was clinging to the
gunwale for dear life, and Monson had been jerked clean overhead, and
was falling backwards upon him.

So swiftly had the thing happened that barely a quarter of the people
going to and fro in Hyde Park, and Brompton Road, and the Exhibition
Road saw anything of the aerial catastrophe. A distant winged shape had
appeared above the clustering houses to the south, had fallen and risen,
growing larger as it did so; had swooped swiftly down towards the
Imperial Institute, a broad spread of flying wings, had swept round in a
quarter circle, dashed eastward, and then suddenly sprang vertically
into the air. A black object shot out of it, and came spinning downward.
A man! Two men clutching each other! They came whirling down, separated
as they struck the roof of Students' Club, and bounded off into the
green bushes on its southward side.

For perhaps half a minute, the pointed stem of the big machine still
pierced vertically upward, the screw spinning desperately. For one brief
instant, that yet seemed an age to all who watched, it had hung
motionless in mid-air. Then a spout of yellow flame licked up its length
from the stern engine, and swift, swifter, swifter, and flaring like a
rocket, it rushed down upon the solid mass of masonry which was formerly
the Royal College of Science. The big screw of white and gold touched
the parapet, and crumpled up like wet linen. Then the blazing
spindle-shaped body smashed and splintered, smashing and splintering in
its fall, upon the north-westward angle of the building.

But the crash, the flame of blazing paraffin that shot heavenward from
the shattered engines of the machine, the crushed horrors that were
found in the garden beyond the Students' Club, the masses of yellow
parapet and red brick that fell headlong into the roadway, the running
to and fro of people like ants in a broken ant-hill, the galloping of
fire-engines, the gathering of crowds--all these things do not belong to
this story, which was written only to tell how the first of all
successful flying-machines was launched and flew. Though he failed, and
failed disastrously, the record of Monson's work remains a sufficient
monument--to guide the next of that band of gallant experimentalists who
will sooner or later master this great problem of flying. And between
Worcester Park and Malden there still stands that portentous avenue of
iron-work, rusting now, and dangerous here and there, to witness to the
first desperate struggle for man's right of way through the air.




THE STORY OF THE LATE MR. ELVESHAM


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so I consented, and went with him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This modified my secret congratulations a little.

"And do I understand," said I, "that I--?"

"Yes," he said, almost fiercely. "You. You."

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

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

That was my first meeting with the little old man. He was mysterious
about himself; he would not give his name yet, he said, and after I had
answered some questions of his, he left me at the Blavitski portal. I
noticed that he drew a handful of gold coins from his pocket when it
came to paying for the lunch. His insistence upon bodily health was
curious. In accordance with an arrangement we had made I applied that
day for a life policy in the Loyal Insurance Company for a large sum,
and I was exhaustively overhauled by the medical advisers of that
company in the subsequent week. Even that did not satisfy him, and he
insisted I must be re-examined by the great Doctor Henderson. It was
Friday in Whitsun week before he came to a decision. He called me down,
quite late in the evening--, nearly nine it was--, from cramming
chemical equations for my Preliminary Scientific examination. He was
standing in the passage under the feeble gas-lamp, and his face was a
grotesque interplay of shadows. He seemed more bowed than when I had
first seen him, and his cheeks had sunk in a little.

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

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

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

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

"With your achievements," said I gallantly.

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

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

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

"Not that," I said hastily. "Not that."

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

"To a long life," said I.

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

"Well?" he said.

"It's glorious," said I, though I had not tasted the stuff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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


There the narrative found upon Mr. Elvesham's desk ends. His dead body
lay between the desk and the chair. The latter had been pushed back,
probably by his last convulsions. The story was written in pencil and in
a crazy hand, quite unlike his usual minute characters. There remain
only two curious facts to record. Indisputably there was some connection
between Eden and Elvesham, since the whole of Elvesham's property was
bequeathed to the young man. But he never inherited. When Elvesham
committed suicide, Eden was, strangely enough, already dead. Twenty-four
hours before, he had been knocked down by a cab and killed instantly, at
the crowded crossing at the intersection of Gower Street and Euston
Road. So that the only human being who could have thrown light upon this
fantastic narrative is beyond the reach of questions.




IN THE ABYSS


The lieutenant stood in front of the steel sphere and gnawed a piece of
pine splinter. "What do you think of it, Steevens?" he said.

"It's an idea," said Steevens, in the tone of one who keeps an open
mind.

"I believe it will smash--flat," said the lieutenant.

"He seems to have calculated it all out pretty well," said Steevens,
still impartial.

"But think of the pressure," said the lieutenant. "At the surface of the
water it's fourteen pounds to the inch, thirty feet down it's double
that; sixty, treble; ninety, four times; nine hundred, forty times; five
thousand, three hundred--that's a mile--it's two hundred and forty times
fourteen pounds; that's--let's see--thirty hundredweight--a ton and a
half, Steevens; a ton and a half to the square inch. And the ocean where
he's going is five miles deep. That's seven and a half--"

"Sounds a lot," said Steevens, "but it's jolly thick steel."

The lieutenant made no answer, but resumed his pine splinter. The object
of their conversation was a huge ball of steel, having an exterior
diameter of perhaps nine feet. It looked like the shot for some Titanic
piece of artillery. It was elaborately nested in a monstrous scaffolding
built into the framework of the vessel, and the gigantic spars that were
presently to sling it overboard gave the stern of the ship an appearance
that had raised the curiosity of every decent sailor who had sighted it,
from the Pool of London to the Tropic of Capricorn. In two places, one
above the other, the steel gave place to a couple of circular windows of
enormously thick glass, and one of these, set in steel frame of great
solidity, was now partially unscrewed. Both the men had seen the
interior of this globe for the first time that morning. It was
elaborately padded with air cushions, with little studs sunk between
bulging pillows to work the simple mechanism of the affair. Everything
was elaborately padded, even the Myers apparatus which was to absorb
carbonic acid and replace the oxygen inspired by its tenant, when he had
crept in by the glass manhole, and had been screwed in. It was so
elaborately padded that a man might have been fired from a gun in it
with perfect safety. And it had need to be, for presently a man was to
crawl in through that glass manhole, to be screwed up tightly, and to be
flung overboard, and to sink down--down--down, for five miles, even as
the lieutenant said. It had taken the strongest hold of his imagination;
it made him a bore at mess; and he found Steevens the new arrival
aboard, a godsend to talk to about it, over and over again.

"It's my opinion," said the lieutenant, "that, that glass will simply
bend in and bulge and smash, under a pressure of that sort. Daubree has
made rocks run like water under big pressures--and you mark my words--"

"If the glass did break in," said Steevens, "what then?"

"The water would shoot in like a jet of iron. Have you ever felt a
straight jet of high pressure water? It would hit as hard as a bullet.
It would simply smash him and flatten him. It would tear down his
throat, and into his lungs; it would blow in his ears--"

"What a detailed imagination you have!" protested Steevens, who saw
things vividly.

"It's a simple statement of the inevitable," said the lieutenant.

"And the globe?"

"Would just give out a few little bubbles, and it would settle down
comfortably against the Day of Judgment, among the oozes and the bottom
clay--with poor Elstead spread over his own smashed cushions like butter
over bread."

He repeated this sentence as though he liked it very much. "Like butter
over bread," he said.

"Having a look at the jigger?" said a voice, and Elstead stood behind
them, spick and span in white, with a cigarette between his teeth, and
his eyes smiling out of the shadow of his ample hat-brim. "What's that
about bread and butter, Weybridge? Grumbling as usual about the
insufficient pay of naval officers? It won't be more than a day now
before I start. We are to get the slings ready to-day. This clean sky
and gentle swell is just the kind of thing for swinging off a dozen tons
of lead and iron, isn't it?"

"It won't affect you much," said Weybridge.

"No. Seventy or eighty feet down, and I shall be there in a dozen
seconds, there's not a particle moving, though the wind shriek itself
hoarse up above, and the water lifts halfway to the clouds. No. Down
there--" He moved to the side of the ship and the other two followed
him. All three leant forward on their elbows and stared down into the
yellow-green water.

"Peace," said Elstead, finishing his thought aloud.

"Are you dead certain that clockwork will act?" asked Weybridge
presently.

"It has worked thirty-five times," said Elstead. "It's bound to work."

"But if it doesn't?"

"Why shouldn't it?"

"I wouldn't go down in that confounded thing," said Weybridge, "for
twenty thousand pounds."

"Cheerful chap you are," said Elstead, and spat sociably at a bubble
below.

"I don't understand yet how you mean to work the thing," said Steevens.

"In the first place, I'm screwed into the sphere," said Elstead, "and
when I've turned the electric light off on three times to show I'm
cheerful, I'm swung out over the stern by that crane, with all those big
lead sinkers slung below me. The top lead weight has a roller carrying a
hundred fathoms of strong cord rolled up, and that's all that joins the
sinkers to the sphere, except the slings that will be cut when the
affair is dropped. We use cord rather than wire rope because it's easier
to cut and more buoyant--necessary points, as you will see.

"Through each of these lead weights you notice there is a hole, and an
iron rod will be run through that and will project six feet on the lower
side. If that rod is rammed up from below, it knocks up a lever and sets
the clockwork in motion at the side of the cylinder on which the cord
winds.

"Very well. The whole affair is lowered gently into the water, and the
slings are cut. The sphere floats--, with the air in it, it's lighter
than water--, but the lead weights go down straight and the cord runs
out. When the cord is all paid out, the sphere will go down too, pulled
down by the cord."

"But why the cord?" asked Steevens. "Why not fasten the weights directly
to the sphere?"

"Because of the smash down below. The whole affair will go rushing down,
mile after mile, at a headlong pace at last. It would be knocked to
pieces on the bottom if it wasn't for that cord. But the weights will
hit the bottom, and directly they do, the buoyancy of the sphere will
come into play. It will go on sinking slower and slower; come to stop at
last, and then begin to float upward again.

"That's where the clockwork comes in. Directly the weights smash against
the sea bottom, the rod will be knocked through and will kick up the
clockwork, and the cord will be rewound on the reel. I shall be lugged
down to the sea bottom. There I shall stay for half an hour, with the
electric light on, looking about me. Then the clockwork will release a
spring knife, the cord will be cut, and up I shall rush again, like a
soda-water bubble. The cord itself will help the flotation."

"And if you should chance to hit a ship?" said Weybridge.

"I should come up at such a pace, I should go clean through it," said
Elstead, "like a cannon ball. You needn't worry about that."

"And suppose some nimble crustacean should wriggle into your
clockwork--"

"It would be a pressing sort of invitation for me to stop," said
Elstead, turning his back on the water and staring at the sphere.


They had swung Elstead overboard by eleven o'clock. The day was serenely
bright and calm, with the horizon lost in haze. The electric glare in
the little upper compartment beamed cheerfully three times. Then they
let him down slowly to the surface of the water, and a sailor in the
stern chains hung ready to cut the tackle that held the lead weights and
the sphere together. The globe, which had looked so large on deck,
looked the smallest thing conceivable under the stern of the ship. It
rolled a little, and its two dark windows, which floated uppermost,
seemed like eyes turned up in round wonderment at the people who crowded
the rail. A voice wondered how Elstead liked the rolling. "Are you
ready?" sang out the commander. "Ay, ay, sir!" "Then let her go!"

The rope of the tackle tightened against the blade and was cut, and an
eddy rolled over the globe in a grotesquely helpless fashion. Someone
waved a handkerchief, someone else tried an ineffectual cheer, a middy
was counting slowly, "Eight, nine, ten!" Another roll, then a jerk and a
splash the thing righted itself.

It seemed to be stationary for a moment, to grow rapidly smaller, and
then the water closed over it, and it became visible, enlarged by
refraction and dimmer, below the surface. Before one could count three
it had disappeared. There was a flicker of white light far down in the
water, that diminished to a speck and vanished. Then there was nothing
but a depth of water going down into blackness, through which a shark
was swimming.

Then suddenly the screw of the cruiser began to rotate, the water was
crickled, the shark disappeared in a wrinkled confusion, and a torrent
of foam rushed across the crystalline clearness that had swallowed up
Elstead. "What's the idea?" said one A.B. to another.

"We're going to lay off about a couple of miles, 'fear he should hit us
when he comes up," said his mate.

The ship steamed slowly to her new position. Aboard her almost everyone
who was unoccupied remained watching the breathing swell into which the
sphere had sunk. For the next half-hour it is doubtful if a word was
spoken that did not bear directly or indirectly on Elstead. The December
sun was now high in the sky, and the heat very considerable.

"He'll be cold enough down there," said Weybridge. "They say that below
a certain depth sea water's always just about freezing."

"Where'll he come up?" asked Steevens. "I've lost my bearings."

"That's the spot," said the commander, who prided himself on his
omniscience. He extended a precise finger south-eastward. "And this, I
reckon, is pretty nearly the moment," he said. "He's been thirty-five
minutes."

"How long does it take to reach the bottom of the ocean?" asked
Steevens.

"For a depth of five miles, and reckoning--as we did--an acceleration of
two feet per second, both ways, is just about three-quarters of a
minute."

"Then he's overdue," said Weybridge.

"Pretty nearly," said the commander. "I suppose it takes a few minutes
for that cord of his to wind in."

"I forgot that," said Weybridge, evidently relieved.

And then began the suspense. A minute slowly dragged itself out, and no
sphere shot out of the water. Another followed, and nothing broke the
low oily swell. The sailors explained to one another that little point
about the winding-in of the cord. The rigging was dotted with expectant
faces. "Come up, Elstead!" called one hairy-chested salt impatiently,
and the others caught it up, and shouted as though they were waiting for
the curtain of a theatre to rise.

The commander glanced irritably at them.

"Of course, if the acceleration's less than two," he said, "he'll be all
the longer. We aren't absolutely certain that was the proper figure. I'm
no slavish believer in calculations."

Steevens agreed concisely. No one on the quarter-deck spoke for a couple
of minutes. Then Steevens' watchcase clicked.

When, twenty-one minutes after the sun reached the zenith, they were
still waiting for the globe to reappear, and not a man aboard had dared
to whisper that hope was dead. It was Weybridge who first gave
expression to that realisation. He spoke while the sound of eight bells
still hung in the air. "I always distrusted that window," he said quite
suddenly to Steevens.

"Good God!" said Steevens; "you don't think--?"

"Well!" said Weybridge, and left the rest to his imagination.

"I'm no great believer in calculations myself," said the commander
dubiously, "so that I'm not altogether hopeless yet." And at midnight
the gunboat was steaming slowly in a spiral round the spot where the
globe had sunk, and the white beam of the electric light fled and halted
and swept discontentedly onward again over the waste of phosphorescent
waters under the little stars.

"If his window hasn't burst and smashed him," said Weybridge, "then it's
a cursed sight worse, for his clockwork has gone wrong, and he's alive
now, five miles under our feet, down there in the cold and dark,
anchored in that little bubble of his, where never a ray of light has
shone or a human being lived, since the waters were gathered together.
He's there without food, feeling hungry and thirsty and scared,
wondering whether he'll starve or stifle. Which will it be? The Myers
apparatus is running out, I suppose. How long do they last?"

"Good heavens!" he exclaimed; "What little things we are! What daring
little devils! Down there, miles and miles of water--all water, and all
this empty water about us and this sky. Gulfs!" He threw his hands out,
and as he did so, a little white streak swept noiselessly up the sky,
travelled more slowly, stopped, became a motionless dot, as though a new
star had fallen up into the sky. Then it went sliding back again and
lost itself amidst the reflections of the stars and the white haze of
the sea's phosphorescence.

At the sight he stopped, arm extended and mouth open. He shut his mouth,
opened it again, and waved his arms with an impatient gesture. Then he
turned, shouted "Elstead ahoy!" to the first watch, and went at a run
to Lindley and the search-light. "I saw him," he said "Starboard there!
His light's on, and he's just shot out of the water. Bring the light
round. We ought to see him drifting, when he lifts on the swell."

But they never picked up the explorer until dawn. Then they almost ran
him down. The crane was swung out and a boat's crew hooked the chain to
the sphere. When they had shipped the sphere, they unscrewed the manhole
and peered into the darkness of the interior (for the electric light
chamber was intended to illuminate the water about the sphere, and was
shut off entirely from its general cavity).

The air was very hot within the cavity, and the indiarubber at the lip
of the manhole was soft. There was no answer to their eager questions
and no sound of movement within. Elstead seemed to be lying motionless,
crumpled in the bottom of the globe. The ship's doctor crawled in and
lifted him out to the men outside. For a moment or so they did not know
whether Elstead was alive or dead. His face, in the yellow light of the
ship's lamps, glistened with perspiration. They carried him down to his
own cabin.

He was not dead, they found, but in a state of absolute nervous
collapse, and besides cruelly bruised. For some days he had to lie
perfectly still. It was a week before he could tell his experiences.

Almost his first words were that he was going down again. The sphere
would have to be altered, he said, in order to allow him to throw off
the cord if need be, and that was all. He had, had the most marvellous
experience. "You thought I should find nothing but ooze," he said. "You
laughed at my explorations, and I've discovered a new world!" He told
his story in disconnected fragments, and chiefly from the wrong end, so
that it is impossible to re-tell it in his words. But what follows is
the narrative of his experience.


It began atrociously, he said. Before the cord ran out, the thing kept
rolling over. He felt like a frog in a football. He could see nothing
but the crane and the sky overhead, with an occasional glimpse of people
on the ships rail. He couldn't tell a bit which way the thing would roll
next. Suddenly he would find his footing going up, and try to step, and
over he went rolling, head over heels, and just anyhow, on the padding.
Any other shape would have been more comfortable, but no other shape was
to be relied upon under the huge pressure of the nethermost abyss.

Suddenly the swaying ceased; the globe righted, and when he had picked
himself up, he saw the water all about him greeny-blue, with an
attenuated light filtering down from above, and a shoal of little
floating things went rushing up past him, as it seemed to him, towards
the light. And even as he looked, it grew darker and darker, until the
water above was as dark as the midnight sky, albeit of greener shade,
and the water below black. And little transparent things in the water
developed a faint glint of luminosity, and shot past him in faint
greenish streaks.

And the feeling of falling! It was just like the start of a lift, he
said, only it kept on. One has to imagine what that means, that keeping
on. It was then of all times that Elstead repented of his adventure. He
saw the chances against him in an altogether new light. He thought of
the big cuttle-fish people knew to exist in the middle waters, the kind
of things they find half digested in whales at times, or floating dead
and rotten and half eaten by fish. Suppose one caught hold and wouldn't
let go. And had the clockwork really been sufficiently tested? But
whether he wanted to go on or go back mattered not the slightest now.

In fifty seconds everything was as black as night outside, except where
the beam from his light struck through the waters, and picked out every
now and then some fish or scrap of sinking matter. They flashed by too
fast for him to see what they were. Once he thinks he passed a shark.
And then the sphere began to get hot by friction against the water. They
had underestimated this, it seems.

The first thing he noticed was that he was perspiring, and then he heard
a hissing growing louder under his feet, and saw a lot of little
bubbles--very little bubbles they were--rushing upward like a fan
through the water outside. Steam! He felt the window, and it was hot. He
turned on the minute glow-lamp that lit his own cavity, looked at the
padded watch by the studs, and saw he had been travelling now for two
minutes. It came into his head that the window would crack through the
conflict of temperatures, for he knew the bottom water is very near
freezing.

Then suddenly the floor of the sphere seemed to press against his feet,
the rush of bubbles outside grew slower and slower, and the hissing
diminished. The sphere rolled a little. The window had not cracked,
nothing had given, and he knew that the dangers of sinking, at any rate,
were over.

In another minute or so he would be on the floor of the abyss. He
thought, he said, of Steevens and Weybridge and the rest of them five
miles overhead, higher to him than the highest clouds that ever floated
over land are to us, steaming slowly and staring down and wondering what
had happened to him.

He peered out of the window. There were no more bubbles now, and the
hissing had stopped. Outside there was a heavy blackness--as black as
black velvet--except where the electric light pierced the empty water
and showed the colour of it--a yellow-green. Then three things like
shapes of fire swam into sight, following each other through the water.
Whether they were little and near or big and far off he could not tell.

Each was outlined in a bluish light almost as bright as the lights of a
fishing smack, a light which seemed to be smoking greatly, and all along
the sides of them were specks of this, like the lighter portholes of a
ship. Their phosphorescence seemed to go out as they came into the
radiance of his lamp, and he saw then that they were little fish of some
strange sort, with huge heads, vast eyes, and dwindling bodies and
tails. Their eyes were turned towards him, and he judged they were
following him down. He supposed they were attracted by his glare.

Presently others of the same sort joined them. As he went on down, he
noticed that the water became of a pallid colour, and that little specks
twinkled in his ray like motes in a sunbeam. This was probably due to
the clouds of ooze and mud that the impact of his leaden sinkers had
disturbed.

By the time he was drawn down to the lead weights he was in a dense fog
of white that his electric light failed altogether to pierce for more
than a few yards, and many minutes elapsed before the hanging sheets of
sediment subsided to any extent. Then, lit by his light and by the
transient phosphorescence of a distant shoal of fishes, he was able to
see under the huge blackness of the super-incumbent water an undulating
expanse of greyish-white ooze, broken here and there by tangled thickets
of a growth of sea lilies, waving hungry tentacles in the air.

Farther away were the graceful, translucent outlines of a group of
gigantic sponges. About this floor there were scattered a number of
bristling flattish tufts of rich purple and black, which he decided must
be some sort of sea-urchin, and small, large-eyed or blind things having
a curious resemblance, some to woodlice, and others to lobsters, crawled
sluggishly across the track of the light and vanished into the obscurity
again, leaving furrowed trails behind them.

Then suddenly the hovering swarm of little fishes veered about and came
towards him as a flight of starlings might do. They passed over him like
a phosphorescent snow, and then he saw behind them some larger creature
advancing towards the sphere.

At first he could see it only dimly, a faintly moving figure remotely
suggestive of a walking man, and then it came into the spray of light
that the lamp shot out. As the glare struck it, it shut its eyes,
dazzled. He stared in rigid astonishment.

It was a strange vertebrated animal. Its dark purple head was dimly
suggestive of a chameleon, but it had such a high forehead and such a
braincase as no reptile ever displayed before; the vertical pitch of its
face gave it a most extraordinary resemblance to a human being.

Two large and protruding eyes projected from sockets in chameleon
fashion, and it had a broad reptilian mouth with horny lips beneath its
little nostrils. In the position of the ears were two huge gill-covers,
and out of these floated a branching tree of coralline filaments, almost
like the tree-like gills that very young rays and sharks possess.

But the humanity of the face was not the most extraordinary thing about
the creature. It was a biped; its almost globular body was poised on a
tripod of two frog-like legs and a long thick tail, and its fore limbs,
which grotesquely caricatured the human hand, much as a frog's do,
carried a long shaft of bone, tipped with copper. The colour of the
creature was variegated; its head, hands and legs were purple; but its
skin, which hung loosely upon it, even as clothes might do, was a
phosphorescent grey. And it stood there blinded by the light.

At last this unknown creature of the abyss blinked its eyes open, and
shading them with its disengaged hand, opened its mouth and gave vent to
a shouting noise, articulate almost as speech might be, that penetrated
even the steel case and padded jacket of the sphere. How a shouting may
be accomplished without lungs Elstead does not profess to explain. It
then moved sideways out of the glare into the mystery of shadow that
bordered it on either side, and Elstead felt rather than saw that it was
coming towards him. Fancying the light had attracted it, he turned the
switch that cut off the current. In another moment something soft dabbed
upon the steel, and the globe swayed.

Then the shouting was repeated, and it seemed to him that a distant echo
answered it. The dabbing recurred, and the whole globe swayed and ground
against the spindle over which the wire was rolled. He stood in the
blackness and peered out into the everlasting night of the abyss. And
presently he saw, very faint and remote, other phosphorescent
quasi-human forms hurrying towards him.

Hardly knowing what he did, he felt about in his swaying prison for the
stud of the exterior electric light, and came by accident against his
own small glow-lamp in its padded recess. The sphere twisted, and then
threw him down; he heard shouts like shouts of surprise, and when he
rose to his feet, he saw two pairs of stalked eyes peering into the
lower window and reflecting his light.

In another moment hands were dabbing vigorously at his steel casing, and
there was a sound, horrible enough in his position, of the metal
protection of the clockwork being vigorously hammered. That indeed sent
his heart into his mouth, for if these strange creatures succeeded in
stopping that, his release would never occur. Scarcely had he thought as
much when he felt the sphere sway violently, and the floor of it press
hard against his feet. He turned off the small glow-lamp that lit the
interior, and sent the ray of the large light in the separate
compartment, out into the water. The sea-floor and the man-like
creatures had disappeared, and a couple of fish chasing each other
dropped suddenly by the window.

He thought at once that these strange denizens of the deep sea had broke
the rope, and that he had escaped. He drove up faster and faster, and
then stopped with a jerk that sent him flying against the padded roof of
his prison. For half a minute perhaps, he was too astonished to think.

Then he felt that the sphere was spinning slowly, and rocking, and it
seemed to him that it was also being drawn through the water. By
crouching close to the window, he managed to make his weight effective
and roll that part of the sphere downward, but he could see nothing save
the pale ray of his light striking down ineffectively into the darkness.
It occurred to him that he would see more if he turned the lamp off, and
allowed his eyes to grow accustomed to the profound obscurity.

In this he was wise. After some minutes the velvety blackness became a
translucent blackness, and then, far away, and as faint as zodiacal
light of an English summer evening, he saw shapes moving below. He
judged these creatures had detached his cable, and were towing him along
the sea bottom.

And then he saw something faint and remote across the undulations of the
submarine plain, a broad horizon of pale luminosity that extended this
way and that way as far as the range of his little window permitted him
to see. To this he was being towed, as a balloon might be towed by men
out of the open country into a town. He approached it very slowly, and
very slowly the dim irradiation was gathered together into more definite
shapes.

It was nearly five o'clock before he came over this luminous area, and
by that time he could make out an arrangement suggestive of streets and
houses grouped about a vast roofless erection that was grotesquely
suggestive of a ruined abbey. It was spread out like a map below him.
The houses were all roofless enclosures of walls, and their substance
being, as he afterwards saw, of phosphorescent bones, gave the place an
appearance as if it were built of drowned moonshine.

Among the inner caves of the place waving trees of crinoid stretched
their tentacles, and tall, slender, glassy sponges shot like shining
minarets and lilies of filmy light out of the general glow of the city.
In the open spaces of the place he could see a stirring movement as of
crowds of people, but he was too many fathoms above them to distinguish
the individuals in those crowds.

Then slowly they pulled him down, and as they did so, the details of the
place crept slowly upon his apprehension. He saw that the courses of the
cloudy buildings were marked out with beaded lines of round objects, and
then he perceived that at several points below him, in broad open
spaces, were forms like the encrusted shapes of ships.

Slowly and surely he was drawn down, and the forms below him became
brighter, clearer, more distinct. He was being pulled down, he
perceived, towards the large building in the centre of the town, and he
could catch a glimpse ever and again of the multitudinous forms that
were lugging at his cord. He was astonished to see that the rigging of
one of the ships, which formed such a prominent feature of the place,
was crowded with a host of gesticulating figures regarding him, and then
the walls of the great building rose about him silently, and hid the
city from his eyes.

And such walls they were, of water-logged wood, and twisted wire-rope,
and iron spars, and copper, and the bones and skulls of dead men. The
skulls ran in zigzag lines and spirals and fantastic curves over the
building; and in and out of their eye-sockets, and over the whole
surface of the place, lurked and played a multitude of silvery little
fishes.

Suddenly his ears were filled with a low shouting and a noise like the
violent blowing of horns, and this gave place to a fantastic chant. Down
the sphere sank, past the huge pointed windows, through which he saw
vaguely a great number of these strange, ghostlike people regarding him,
and at last he came to rest, as it seemed, on a kind of altar that stood
in the centre of the place.

And now he was at such a level that he could see these strange people of
the abyss plainly once more. To his astonishment, he perceived that they
were prostrating themselves before him, all save one, dressed as it
seemed in a robe of placoid scales, and crowned with a luminous diadem,
who stood with his reptilian mouth opening and shutting, as though he
led the chanting of the worshippers.

A curious impulse made Elstead turn on his small glow-lamp again, so
that he became visible to these creatures of the abyss, albeit the glare
made them disappear forthwith into night. At this sudden sight of him,
the chanting gave place to a tumult of exultant shouts; and Elstead,
being anxious to watch them, turned his light off again, and vanished
from before their eyes. But for a time he was too blind to make out what
they were doing, and when at last he could distinguish them, they were
kneeling again. And thus they continued worshipping him, without rest or
intermission, for a space of three hours.

Most circumstantial was Elstead's account of this astounding city and
its people, these people of perpetual night, who have never seen sun or
moon or stars, green vegetation, nor any living, air-breathing
creatures, who know nothing of fire, nor any light but the
phosphorescent light of living things.

Startling as is his story, it is yet more startling to find that
scientific men, of such eminence as Adams and Jenkins, find nothing
incredible in it. They tell me they see no reason why intelligent,
water-breathing, vertebrated creatures, inured to a low temperature and
enormous pressure, and of such a heavy structure, that neither alive nor
dead would they float, might not live upon the bottom of the deep sea,
and quite unsuspected by us, descendants like ourselves of the great
Theriomorpha of the New Red Sandstone age.

We should be known to them however, as strange, meteoric creatures, wont
to fall catastrophically dead out of the mysterious blackness of their
watery sky. And not only we ourselves, but our ships, our metals, our
appliances, would come raining down out of the night. Sometimes sinking
things would smite down and crush them, as if it were the judgment of
some unseen power above, and sometimes would come things of utmost
rarity or utility, or shapes of inspiring suggestion. One can
understand, perhaps, something of their behaviour at the descent of a
living man, if one thinks what a barbaric people might do, to whom an
enhaloed, shining creature came suddenly out of the sky.

At one time or another Elstead probably told the officers of the
'Ptarmigan' every detail of his strange twelve hours in the abyss. That
he also intended to write them down is certain, but he never did, and so
unhappily we have to piece together the discrepant fragments of his
story from the reminiscences of Commander Simmons, Weybridge, Steevens,
Lindley, and the others.

We see the thing darkly in fragmentary glimpses--the huge ghostly
building, the bowing, chanting people, with their dark chameleon-like
heads and faintly luminous clothing, and Elstead, with his light turned
on again, vainly trying to convey to their minds that the cord by which
the sphere was held was to be severed. Minute after minute slipped away,
and Elstead, looking at his watch, was horrified to find that he had
oxygen only for four hours more. But the chant in his honour kept on as
remorselessly as if it was the marching song of his approaching death.

The manner of his release he does not understand, but to judge by the
end of cord that hung from the sphere, it had been cut through by
rubbing against the edge of the altar. Abruptly the sphere rolled over,
and he swept up, out of their world, as an ethereal creature clothed in
a vacuum would sweep through our own atmosphere back to its native ether
again. He must have torn out of their sight as a hydrogen bubble hastens
upwards from our air. A strange ascension it must have seemed to them.

The sphere rushed up with even greater velocity than, when weighted with
the lead sinkers, it had rushed down. It became exceedingly hot. It
drove up with the windows uppermost, and he remembers the torrent of
bubbles frothing against the glass. Every moment he expected this to
fly. Then suddenly something like a huge wheel seemed to be released in
his head, the padded compartment began spinning about him, and he
fainted. His next recollection was of his cabin, and of the doctor's
voice.

But that is the substance of the extraordinary story that Elstead
related in fragments to the officers of the 'Ptarmigan'. He promised to
write it all down at a later date. His mind was chiefly occupied with
the improvement of his apparatus, which was effected at Rio.

It remains only to tell that on February 2, 1896, he made his second
descent into the ocean abyss, with the improvements his first experience
suggested. What happened we shall probably never knew. He never
returned. The 'Ptarmigan' beat about over the point of his submersion,
seeking him in vain for thirteen days. Then she returned to Rio, and the
news was telegraphed to his friends. So the matter remains for the
present. But it is hardly probable that no further attempt will be made
to verify his strange story of these hitherto unsuspected cities of the
deep sea.




THE APPLE


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

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

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

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

"Why not?" he said.

Mr. Hinchcliff coughed.

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

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

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

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

"You're so abrupt, you know," apologised Mr. Hinchcliff.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stranger paused. "Yes?" said Mr. Hinchcliff. "Yes?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Look at it," said the stranger.

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

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

"And you yourself," said Mr. Hinchcliff, "really believe that--"

"Is the Forbidden Fruit."

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

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

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

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

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

"Knowledge is power," said Mr. Hinchcliff.

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

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

"Suppose you saw into the hearts and minds of everyone about you, into
their most secret recesses--people you loved, whose love you valued?"

"You'd soon find out the humbugs," said Mr. Hinchcliff, greatly struck
by the idea.

"And worse--to know yourself, bare of your most intimate illusions. To
see yourself in your place. All that your lusts and weaknesses prevented
your doing. No merciful perspective."

"That might be an excellent thing too. 'Know thyself,' you know."

"You are young," said the stranger.

"If you don't care to eat it, and it bothers you, why don't you throw it
away?"

"There again, perhaps, you will not understand me. To me, how could one
throw away a thing like that, glowing, wonderful? Once one has it, one
is bound. But, on the other hand, to give it away! To give it away to
someone who thirsted after knowledge, who found no terror in the thought
of that clear perception--"

"Of course," said Mr. Hinchcliff thoughtfully, "it might be sort of
poisonous fruit."

And then his eye caught something motionless, the end of a white board
black-lettered outside the carriage window. "--mwood," he saw. He
started convulsively. "Gracious!" said Mr. Hinchcliff. "Holmwood--!" And
the practical present blotted out the mystic realisations that had been
stealing upon him.

In another moment he was opening the carriage-door, portmanteau in hand.
The guard was already fluttering his green flag. Mr. Hinchcliff jumped
out. "Here!" said a voice behind him, and he saw the dark eyes of the
stranger shining and the golden fruit, bright and bare, held out of the
open carriage-door. He took it instinctively, the train was already
moving.

"No!" shouted the stranger, and made a snatch at it as if to take it
back.

"Stand away," cried a country porter, thrusting forward to close the
door. The stranger shouted something Mr. Hinchcliff did not catch, head
and arm thrust excitedly out of the window, and then the shadow of the
bridge fell on him, and in a trice he was hidden. Mr. Hinchcliff stood
astonished, staring at the end of the last waggon receding round the
bend, and with the wonderful fruit in his hand. For the fraction of a
minute his mind was confused, and then he became aware that two or three
people on the platform were regarding him with interest. Was he not the
new Grammar School master making his debut? It occurred to him that, so
far as they could tell, the fruit might very well be the naive
refreshment of an orange. He flushed at the thought, and thrust the
fruit into his side pocket, where it bulged undesirably. But there was
no help for it, so he went towards them, awkwardly concealing his sense
of awkwardness, to ask the way to the Grammar School, and the means of
getting his portmanteau and the two tin boxes which lay up the platform
thither. Of all the odd and fantastic yarns to tell a fellow!

His luggage could be taken on a truck for sixpence, he found, and he
could precede it on foot. He fancied an ironical note in the voices. He
was painfully aware of his contour.

The curious earnestness of the man in the train, and the glamour of the
story he told, had for a time, diverted the current of Mr. Hinchcliff's
thoughts. It drove like a mist before his immediate concerns. Fires that
went to and fro! But the preoccupation of his new position, and the
impression he was to produce upon Holmwood generally, and the school
people in particular, returned upon him with reinvigorating power before
he left the station and cleared his mental atmosphere. But it is
extraordinary what an inconvenient thing the addition of a soft and
rather brightly-golden fruit, not three inches in diameter, may prove to
a sensitive youth on his best appearance. In the pocket of his black
jacket it bulged dreadfully, spoilt the lines altogether. He passed a
little old lady in black, and he felt her eye drop upon the excrescence
at once. He was wearing one glove and carrying the other, together with
his stick, so that to bear the fruit openly was impossible. In one
place, were the road into the town seemed suitably secluded, he took his
encumbrance out of his pocket and tried it in his hat. It was just too
large, the hat wobbled ludicrously, and just as he was taking it out
again, a butcher's boy came driving round the corner.

"Confound it!" said Mr. Hinchcliff.

He would have eaten the thing, and attained omniscience there and then,
but it would seem so silly to go into town sucking a juicy fruit--and it
certainly felt juicy. If one of the boys should come by, it might do him
a serious injury with his discipline so to be seen. And the juice might
make his face sticky and get upon his cuffs--or it might be an acid
juice as potent as lemon, and take all the colour out of his clothes.

Then round a bend in the lane came two pleasant sunlit girlish figures.
They were walking slowly towards the town and chattering--at any moment
they might look round and see a hot-faced young man behind them carrying
a kind of phosphorescent yellow tomato! They would be sure to laugh.

"Hang!" said Mr. Hinchcliff, and with a swift jerk sent the encumbrance
flying over the stone wall of an orchard that there abutted on the road.
As it vanished, he felt a faint twinge of loss that lasted scarcely a
moment. He adjusted the stick and glove in his hand, and walked on,
erect and self-conscious, to pass the girls.

But in the darkness of the night Mr. Hinchcliff had a dream, and saw the
valley, and the flaming swords, and the contorted trees, and knew that
it really was the Apple of the Tree of Knowledge that he had thrown
regardlessly away. And he awoke very unhappy.

In the morning his regret had passed, but afterwards it returned and
troubled him; never however when he was happy or busily occupied. At
last, one moonlight night about eleven, when all Holmwood was quiet, his
regrets returned with redoubled force, and therewith an impulse to
adventure. He slipped out of the house and over the playground wall,
went through the silent town to Station Lane, and climbed into the
orchard where he had thrown the fruit. But nothing was to be found of it
there among the dewy grass and the faint intangible globes of dandelion
down.




UNDER THE KNIFE


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

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

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

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

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

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

But I will not weary you with more of my experiences that day and the
next. I knew more and more certainly that I should die under the
operation; at times I think I was inclined to pose to myself. At home I
found everything prepared; my room cleared of needless objects and hung
with white sheets; a nurse installed and already at loggerheads with my
housekeeper. They wanted me to go to bed early, and after a little
resistance I obeyed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




THE SEA RAIDERS


1.

Until the extraordinary affair at Sidmouth, the peculiar species
Haploteuthis ferox was known to science only generically, on the
strength of a half-digested tentacle obtained near the Azores, and a
decaying body pecked by birds and nibbled by fish, found early in 1896
by Mr. Jennings, near Land's End.

In no department of zoological science, indeed are we quite so much in
the dark as with regard to the deep-sea cephalopods. A mere accident,
for instance, it was that led to the Prince of Monaco's discovery of
nearly a dozen new forms in the summer of 1895, a discovery in which the
before-mentioned tentacle was included. It chanced that a cachalot was
killed off Terceira by some sperm whalers, and in its last struggles
charged almost to the Prince's yacht, missed it, rolled under, and died
within twenty yards of his rudder. And in its agony it threw up a number
of large objects, which the Prince, dimly perceiving they were strange
and important, was by a happy expedient, able to secure before they
sank. He set his screws in motion, and kept them circling in the
vortices thus created until a boat could be lowered. And these specimens
were whole cephalopods and fragments of cephalopods, some of gigantic
proportions, and almost all of them unknown to science!

It would seem, indeed, that these large and agile creatures, living in
the middle depths of the sea, must to a large extent, for ever remain
unknown to us, since under water they are too nimble for nets, and it is
only by such rare, unlooked-for accidents that specimens can be
obtained. In the case of Haploteuthis ferox, for instance, we are still
altogether ignorant of its habitat, as ignorant as we are of the
breeding-ground of the herring or the sea-ways of the salmon. And
zoologists are altogether at a loss to account for its sudden appearance
on our coast. Possibly it was the stress of a hunger migration that
drove it hither out of the deep. But it will be, perhaps, better to
avoid necessarily inconclusive discussion, and to proceed at once with
our narrative.

The first human being to set eyes upon a living Haploteuthis--the first
human being to survive, that is, for there can be little doubt now that
the wave of bathing fatalities and boating accidents that travelled
along the coast of Cornwall and Devon in early May was due to this
cause--was a retired tea-dealer of the name of Fison, who was stopping
at a Sidmouth boarding-house. It was in the afternoon, and he was
walking along the cliff path between Sidmouth and Ladram Bay. The cliffs
in this direction are very high, but down the red face of them in one
place a kind of ladder staircase has been made. He was near this when
his attention was attracted by what at first he thought to be a cluster
of birds struggling over a fragment of food that caught the sunlight,
and glistened pinkish-white. The tide was right out, and this object was
not only far below him, but remote across a broad waste of rock reefs
covered with dark seaweed and interspersed with silvery shining tidal
pools. And he was, moreover dazzled by the brightness of the further
water.

In a minute, regarding this again, he perceived that his judgment was in
fault, for over this struggle circled a number of birds, jackdaws and
gulls for the most part, the latter gleaming blindingly when the
sunlight smote their wings, and they seemed minute in comparison with
it. And his curiosity was, perhaps aroused all the more strongly because
of his first insufficient explanations.

As he had nothing better to do than amuse himself, he decided to make
this object, whatever it was, the goal of his afternoon walk, instead of
Ladram Bay, conceiving it might perhaps be a great fish of some sort,
stranded by some chance, and flapping about in its distress. And so he
hurried down the long steep ladder, stopping at intervals of thirty feet
or so to take breath and scan the mysterious movement.

At the foot of the cliff he was, of course, nearer his object than he
had been; but, on the other hand, it now came up against the
incandescent sky, beneath the sun, so as to seem dark and indistinct.
Whatever was pinkish of it was now hidden by a skerry of weedy boulders.
But he perceived that it was made up of seven rounded bodies distinct or
connected, and that the birds kept up a constant croaking and screaming,
but seemed afraid to approach it too closely.

Mr. Fison, torn by curiosity, began picking his way across the wave-worn
rocks, and finding the wet seaweed that covered them thickly rendered
them extremely slippery, he stopped, removed his shoes and socks, and
rolled his trousers above his knees. His object was, of course, merely
to avoid stumbling into the rocky pools about him, and perhaps he was
rather glad, as all men are, of an excuse to resume, even for a moment,
the sensations of his boyhood. At any rate, it is to this, no doubt,
that he owes his life.

He approached his mark with all the assurance which the absolute
security of this country against all forms of animal life gives its
inhabitants. The round bodies moved to and fro, but it was only when he
surmounted the skerry of boulders, I have mentioned, that he realised
the horrible nature of the discovery. It came upon him with some
suddenness.

The rounded bodies fell apart as he came into sight over the ridge, and
displayed the pinkish object to be the partially devoured body of a
human being, but whether of a man or woman he was unable to say. And the
rounded bodies were new and ghastly-looking creatures, in shape somewhat
resembling an octopus, with huge and very long and flexible tentacles,
coiled copiously on the ground. The skin had a glistening texture,
unpleasant to see, like shiny leather. The downward bend of the
tentacle-surrounded mouth, the curious excrescence at the bend, the
tentacles, and the large intelligent eyes, gave the creatures a
grotesque suggestion of a face. They were the size of a fair-sized swine
about the body, and the tentacles seemed to him to be many feet in
length. There were, he thinks, seven or eight at least of the creatures.
Twenty yards beyond them, amid the surf of the now returning tide, two
others were emerging from the sea.

Their bodies lay flatly on the rocks, and their eyes regarded him with
evil interest; but it does not appear that Mr. Fison was afraid, or that
he realised that he was in any danger. Possibly his confidence is to be
ascribed to the limpness of their attitudes. But he was horrified, of
course, and intensely excited and indignant, at such revolting creatures
preying upon human flesh. He thought they had chanced upon a drowned
body. He shouted to them, with the idea of driving them off, and finding
they did not budge, cast about him, picked up a big rounded lump of
rock, and flung it at one.

And then, slowly uncoiling their tentacles, they all began moving
towards him--creeping at first deliberately, and making a soft purring
sound to each other.

In a moment Mr. Fison realised that he was in danger. He shouted again,
threw both his boots, and started off, with a leap, forthwith. Twenty
yards off he stopped and faced about, judging them slow, and behold! The
tentacles of their leader were already pouring over the rocky ridge on
which he had just been standing!

At that he shouted again, but this time not threatening, but a cry of
dismay, and began jumping, striding, slipping, wading across the uneven
expanse between him and the beach. The tall red cliffs seemed suddenly
at a vast distance, and he saw, as though they were creatures in another
world, two minute workmen engaged in the repair of the ladder-way, and
little suspecting the race for life that was beginning below them. At
one time he could hear the creatures splashing in the pools not a dozen
feet behind him, and once he slipped and almost fell.

They chased him to the very foot of the cliffs, and desisted only when
he had been joined by the workmen at the foot of the ladder-way up the
cliff. All three of the men pelted them with stones for a time, and then
hurried to the cliff top and along the path towards Sidmouth, to secure
assistance and a boat, and to rescue the desecrated body from the
clutches of these abominable creatures.


2.

And as if he had not already been in sufficient peril that day, Mr.
Fison went with the boat to point out the exact spot of his adventure.

As the tide was down, it required a considerable detour to reach the
spot, and when at last they came off the ladder-way, the mangled body
had disappeared. The water was now running in, submerging first one slab
of slimy rock and then another, and the four men in the boat--the
workmen, that is, the boatman, and Mr. Fison--now turned their attention
from the bearings off shore to the water beneath the keel.

At first they could see little below them, save a dark jungle of
laminaria, with an occasional darting fish. Their minds were set on
adventure, and they expressed their disappointment freely. But presently
they saw one of the monsters swimming through the water seaward, with a
curious rolling motion that suggested to Mr. Fison the spinning roll of
a captive balloon. Almost immediately after, the waving streamers of
laminaria were extraordinarily perturbed, parted for a moment, and three
of these beasts became darkly visible, struggling for what was probably
some fragment of the drowned man. In a moment the copious olive-green
ribbons had poured again over this writhing group.

At that all four men, greatly excited, began beating the water with oars
and shouting, and immediately they saw a tumultuous movement among the
weeds. They desisted to see more clearly, and as soon as the water was
smooth, they saw, as it seemed to them, the whole sea bottom among the
weeds set with eyes.

"Ugly swine!" cried one of the men. "Why, there's dozens!"

And forthwith the things began to rise through the water about them. Mr.
Fison has since described to the writer this startling eruption out of
the waving laminaria meadows. To him it seemed to occupy a considerable
time, but it is probable that really it was an affair of a few seconds
only. For a time nothing but eyes, and then he speaks of tentacles
streaming out and parting the weed fronds this way and that. Then these
things, growing larger, until at last the bottom was hidden by their
intercoiling forms, and the tips of tentacles rose darkly here and there
into the air above the swell of the waters.

One came up boldly to the side of the boat, and clinging to this with
three of its sucker-set tentacles, threw four others over the gunwale,
as if with an intention either of oversetting the boat or of clambering
into it. Mr. Fison at once caught up the boathook, and jabbing furiously
at the soft tentacles, forced it to desist. He was struck in the back
and almost pitched overboard by the boatman, who was using his oar to
resist a similar attack on the other side of the boat. But the tentacles
on either side at once relaxed their hold, slid out of sight, and
splashed into the water.

"We'd better get out of this," said Mr. Fison, who was trembling
violently. He went to the tiller, while the boatman and one of the
workmen seated themselves and began rowing. The other workman stood up
in the fore part of the boat, with the boathook, ready to strike any
more tentacles that might appear. Nothing else seems to have been said.
Mr. Fison had expressed the common feeling beyond amendment. In a
hushed, scared mood, with faces white and drawn, they set about escaping
from the position into which they had so recklessly blundered.

But the oars had scarcely dropped into the water before dark, tapering,
serpentine ropes had bound them, and were about the rudder; and creeping
up the sides of the boat with a looping motion came the suckers again.
The men gripped their oars and pulled, but it was like trying to move a
boat in a floating raft of weeds. "Help here!" cried the boatman, and
Mr. Fison and the second workman rushed to help lug at the oar.

Then the man with the boathook--his name was Ewan, or Ewen--sprang up
with a curse and began striking downward over the side, as far as he
could reach, at the bank of tentacles that now clustered along the
boat's bottom. And, at the same time, the two rowers stood up to get a
better purchase for the recovery of their oars. The boatman handed his
to Mr. Fison, who lugged desperately, and meanwhile, the boatman opened
a big clasp-knife, and leaning over the side of the boat, began hacking
at the spiralling arms upon the oar shaft.

Mr. Fison, staggering with the quivering rocking of the boat, his teeth
set, his breath coming short, and the veins starting on his hands as he
pulled at his oar, suddenly cast his eyes seaward. And there, not fifty
yards off, across the long rollers of the incoming tide, was a large
boat standing in towards them, with three women and a little child in
it. A boatman was rowing, and a little man in a pink-ribboned straw hat
and whites stood in the stern hailing them. For a moment, of course, Mr.
Fison thought of help, and then he thought of the child. He abandoned
his oar forthwith, threw up his arms in a frantic gesture, and screamed
to the party in the boat to keep away "for God's sake!" It says much for
the modesty and courage of Mr. Fison that he does not seem to be aware
that there was any quality of heroism in his action at this juncture.
The oar he had abandoned was at once drawn under, and presently
reappeared floating about twenty yards away.

At the same moment Mr. Fison felt the boat under him lurch violently,
and a hoarse scream, a prolonged cry of terror from Hill, the boatman,
caused him to forget the party of excursionists altogether. He turned,
and saw Hill crouching by the forward rowlock, his face convulsed with
terror, and his right arm over the side and drawn tightly down. He gave
now a succession of short, sharp cries, "Oh! Oh! Oh--! Oh!" Mr. Fison
believes that he must have been hacking at the tentacles below the
water-line, and have been grasped by them, but of course, it is quite
impossible to say now certainly what had happened. The boat was heeling
over, so that the gunwale was within ten inches of the water, and both
Ewan and the other labourer were striking down into the water, with oar
and boathook, on either side of Hill's arm. Mr. Fison instinctively
placed himself to counterpoise them.

Then Hill, who was a burly, powerful man, made a strenuous effort, and
rose almost to a standing position. He lifted his arm, indeed, clean out
of the water. Hanging to it was a complicated tangle of brown ropes, and
the eyes of one of the brutes that had hold of him, glaring straight and
resolute, showed momentarily above the surface. The boat heeled more and
more, and the green-brown water came pouring in a cascade over the side.
Then Hill slipped and fell with his ribs across the side, and his arm
and the mass of tentacles about it splashed back into the water. He
rolled over; his boot kicked Mr. Fison's knee as that gentleman rushed
forward to seize him, and in another moment fresh tentacles had whipped
about his waist and neck, and after a brief, convulsive struggle, in
which the boat was nearly capsized, Hill was lugged overboard. The boat
righted with a violent jerk that all but sent Mr. Fison over the other
side, and hid the struggle in the water from his eyes.

He stood staggering to recover his balance for a moment, and as he did
so he became aware that the struggle and the inflowing tide had carried
them close upon the weedy rocks again. Not four yards off a table of
rock still rose in rhythmic movements above the in-wash of the tide. In
a moment Mr. Fison seized the oar from Ewan, gave one vigorous stroke,
then dropping it, ran to the bows and leapt. He felt his feet slide over
the rock, and by a frantic effort, leapt again towards a further mass.
He stumbled over this, came to his knees, and rose again.

"Look out!" cried someone, and a large drab body struck him. He was
knocked flat into a tidal pool by one of the workmen, and as he went
down he heard smothered, choking cries, that he believed at the time
came from Hill. Then he found himself marvelling at the shrillness and
variety of Hill's voice. Someone jumped over him, and a curving rush of
foamy water poured over him, and passed. He scrambled to his feet
dripping, and without looking seaward, ran as fast as his terror would
let him shoreward. Before him, over the flat space of scattered rocks,
stumbled the two workmen--one a dozen yards in front of the other.

He looked over his shoulder at last, and seeing that he was not pursued,
faced about. He was astonished. From the moment of the rising of the
cephalopods out of the water he had been acting too swiftly to fully
comprehend his actions. Now it seemed to him as if he had suddenly
jumped out of an evil dream.

For there were the sky, cloudless and blazing with the afternoon sun,
the sea weltering under its pitiless brightness, the soft creamy foam of
the breaking water, and the low, long, dark ridges of rock. The righted
boat floated, rising and falling gently on the swell about a dozen yards
from shore. Hill and the monsters, all the stress and tumult of that
fierce fight for life, had vanished as though they had never been.

Mr. Fison's heart was beating violently; he was throbbing to the
finger-tips, and his breath came deep.

There was something missing. For some seconds he could not think clearly
enough what this might be. Sun, sky, sea, rocks--what was it? Then he
remembered the boatload of excursionists. It had vanished. He wondered
whether he had imagined it. He turned, and saw the two workmen standing
side by side under the projecting masses of the tall pink cliffs. He
hesitated whether he should make one last attempt to save the man Hill.
His physical excitement seemed to desert him suddenly, and leave him
aimless and helpless. He turned shoreward, stumbling and wading towards
his two companions.

He looked back again, and there were now two boats floating, and the one
farthest out at sea pitched clumsily, bottom upward.


3.

So it was Haploteuthis ferox made its appearance upon the Devonshire
coast. So far, this has been its most serious aggression. Mr. Fison's
account, taken together with the wave of boating and bathing casualties
to which I have already alluded, and the absence of fish from the
Cornish coasts that year, points clearly to a shoal of these voracious
deep-sea monsters prowling slowly along the sub-tidal coastline. Hunger
migration has, I know, been suggested as the force that drove them
hither; but, for my own part, I prefer to believe the alternative theory
of Hemsley. Hemsley holds that a pack or shoal of these creatures may
have become enamoured of human flesh by the accident of a foundered ship
sinking among them, and have wandered in search of it out of their
accustomed zone; first way-laying and following ships, and so coming to
our shores in the wake of the Atlantic traffic. But to discuss Hemsley's
cogent and admirably-stated arguments would be out of place here.

It would seem that the appetites of the shoal were satisfied by the
catch of eleven people--for, so far as can be ascertained, there were
ten people in the second boat, and certainly these creatures gave no
further signs of their presence off Sidmouth that day. The coast between
Seaton and Budleigh Salterton was patrolled all that evening and night
by four Preventive Service boats, the men in which were armed with
harpoons and cutlasses, and as the evening advanced, a number of more or
less similarly equipped expeditions, organised by private individuals,
joined them. Mr. Fison took no part in any of these expeditions.

About midnight excited hails were heard from a boat about a couple of
miles out at sea to the south-east of Sidmouth, and a lantern was seen
waving in a strange manner to and fro and up and down. The nearer boats
at once hurried towards the alarm. The venturesome occupants of the
boat, a seaman, a curate, and two schoolboys, had actually seen the
monsters passing under their boat. The creatures, it seems, like most
deep-sea organisms, were phosphorescent, and they had been floating,
five fathoms deep or so, like creatures of moonshine through the
blackness of the water, their tentacles retracted and as if asleep,
rolling over and over, and moving slowly in a wedge-like formation
towards the south-east.

These people told their story in gesticulated fragments, as first one
boat drew alongside and then another. At last there was a little fleet
of eight or nine boats collected together, and from them a tumult, like
the chatter of a marketplace, rose into the stillness of the night.
There was little or no disposition to pursue the shoal, the people had
neither weapons nor experience for such a dubious chase, and
presently--even with a certain relief, it may be--the boats turned
shoreward.

And now to tell what is perhaps the most astonishing fact in this whole
astonishing raid. We have not the slightest knowledge of the subsequent
movements of the shoal, although the whole south-west coast was now
alert for it. But it may, perhaps, be significant that a cachalot was
stranded off Sark on June 3. Two weeks and three days after this
Sidmouth affair, a living Haploteuthis came ashore on Calais sands. It
was alive, because several witnesses saw its tentacles moving in a
convulsive way. But it is probable that it was dying. A gentleman named
Pouchet obtained a rifle and shot it.

That was the last appearance of a living Haploteuthis. No others were
seen on the French coast. On the 15th of June a dead carcass, almost
complete, was washed ashore near Torquay, and a few days later a boat
from the Marine Biological station, engaged in dredging off Plymouth,
picked up a rotting specimen, slashed deeply with a cutlass wound. How
the former had come by its death it is impossible to say. And on the
last day of June, Mr. Egbert Caine, an artist, bathing near Newlyn,
threw up his arms, shrieked, and was drawn under. A friend bathing with
him made no attempt to save him, but swam at once for the shore. This is
the last fact to tell of this extraordinary raid from the deeper sea.
Whether it is really the last of these horrible creatures it is, as yet,
premature to say. But it is believed, and certainly it is to be hoped,
that they have returned now, and returned for good, to the sunless
depths of the middle seas, out of which they have so strangely and so
mysteriously arisen.




POLLOCK AND THE PORROH MAN


It was in a swampy village on the lagoon river behind the Turner
Peninsula that Pollock's first encounter with the Porroh man occurred.
The women of that country are famous for their good looks--they are
Gallinas with a dash of European blood that dates from the days of Vasco
da Gama and the English slave-traders, and the Porroh man too, was
possibly inspired by a faint Caucasian taint in his composition. (It's a
curious thing to think that some of us may have distant cousins eating
men on Sherboro Island or raiding with the Sofas.) At anyrate, the
Porroh man stabbed the woman to the heart as though he had been a mere
low-class Italian, and very narrowly missed Pollock. But Pollock, using
his revolver to parry the lightning stab which was aimed at his deltoid
muscle, sent the iron dagger flying, and firing, hit the man in the
hand.

He fired again and missed, knocking a sudden window out of the wall of
the hut. The Porroh man stooped in the doorway, glancing under his arm
at Pollock. Pollock caught a glimpse of his inverted face in the
sunlight, and then the Englishman was alone, sick and trembling with the
excitement of the affair, in the twilight of the place. It had all
happened in less time than it takes to read about it.

The woman was quite dead, and having ascertained this, Pollock went to
the entrance of the hut and looked out. Things outside were dazzling
bright. Half a dozen of the porters of the expedition were standing up
in a group near the green huts they occupied, and staring towards him,
wondering what the shots might signify. Behind the little group of men
was the broad stretch of black fetid mud by the river, a green carpet of
rafts of papyrus and water-grass, and then the leaden water. The
mangroves beyond the stream loomed indistinctly through the blue haze.
There were no signs of excitement in the squat village, whose fence was
just visible above the cane-grass.

Pollock came out of the hut cautiously and walked towards the river,
looking over his shoulder at intervals. But the Porroh man had vanished
Pollock clutched his revolver nervously in his hand.

One of his men came to meet him, and as he came, pointed to the bushes
behind the hut in which the Porroh man had disappeared. Pollock had an
irritating persuasion of having made an absolute fool of himself; he
felt bitter, savage, at the turn things had taken. At the same time, he
would have to tell Waterhouse--the moral, exemplary, cautious
Waterhouse--who would inevitably take the matter seriously. Pollock
cursed bitterly at his luck, at Waterhouse, and especially at the West
Coast of Africa. He felt consummately sick of the expedition. And in the
back of his mind all the time was a speculative doubt where precisely
within the visible horizon the Porroh man might be.

It is perhaps rather shocking, but he was not at all upset by the murder
that had just happened. He had seen so much brutality during the last
three months, so many dead women, burnt huts, drying skeletons, up the
Kittam River in the wake of the Sofa cavalry, that his senses were
blunted. What disturbed him was the persuasion that this business was
only beginning.

He swore savagely at the black, who ventured to ask a question, and went
on into the tent under the orange-trees where Waterhouse was lying,
feeling exasperatingly like a boy going into the headmaster's study.

Waterhouse was still sleeping off the effects of his last dose of
chlorodyne, and Pollock sat down on a packing-case beside him, and
lighting his pipe, waited for him to awake. About him were scattered the
pots and weapons Waterhouse had collected from the Mendi people, and
which he had been repacking for the canoe voyage to Sulyma.

Presently Waterhouse woke up, and after judicial stretching, decided he
was all right again. Pollock got him some tea. Over the tea, the
incidents of the afternoon were described by Pollock, after some
preliminary beating about the bush. Waterhouse took the matter even more
seriously than Pollock had anticipated. He did not simply disapprove, he
scolded, he insulted.

"You're one of those infernal fools who think a black man isn't a human
being," he said. "I can't be ill a day without you must get into some
dirty scrape or other. This is the third time in a month that you have
come crossways-on with a native, and this time you're in for it with a
vengance. Porroh, too! They're down upon you enough as it is, about that
idol you wrote your silly name on. And they're the most vindictive
devils on earth! You make a man ashamed of civilisation. To think you
come of a decent family! If ever I cumber myself up with a vicious,
stupid young lout like you again--"

"Steady on, now," snarled Pollock, in the tone that always exasperated
Waterhouse; "steady on."

At that Waterhouse became speechless. He jumped to his feet.

"Look here, Pollock," he said, after a struggle to control his breath.
"You must go home. I won't have you any longer. I'm ill enough as it is,
through you--"

"Keep your hair on," said Pollock, staring in front of him. "I'm ready
enough to go."

Waterhouse became calmer again. He sat down on the camp-stool. "Very
well," he said. "I don't want a row, Pollock you know, but it's
confoundedly annoying to have one's plans put out by this kind of thing.
I'll come to Sulyma with you, and see you safe aboard--"

"You needn't," said Pollock. "I can go alone. From here."

"Not far," said Waterhouse. "You don't understand this Porroh business."

"How should I know she belonged to a Porroh man?" said Pollock bitterly.

"Well, she did," said Waterhouse; "and you can't undo the thing. Go
alone, indeed! I wonder what they'd do to you. You don't seem to
understand that this Porroh hokey-pokey rules this country, is its law,
religion, constitution, medicine, magic... They appoint the chiefs. The
Inquisition, at its best, couldn't hold a candle to these chaps. He will
probably set Awajale, the chief here, on to us. It's lucky our porters
are Mendis. We shall have to shift this little settlement of ours...
Confound you, Pollock! And, of course, you must go and miss him."

He thought, and his thoughts seemed disagreeable. Presently he stood up
and took his rifle. "I'd keep close for a bit, if I were you," he said,
over his shoulder, as he went out. "I'm going out to see what I can find
out about it."

Pollock remained sitting in the tent, meditating. "I was meant for a
civilised life," he said to himself, regretfully, as he filled his pipe.
"The sooner I get back to London or Paris the better for me."

His eye fell on the sealed case in which Waterhouse had put the
featherless poisoned arrows they had bought in the Mendi country. "I
wish I had hit the beggar somewhere vital," said Pollock viciously.

Waterhouse came back after a long interval. He was not communicative,
though Pollock asked him questions enough. The Porroh man, it seems was
a prominent member of that mystical society. The village was interested,
but not threatening. No doubt the witch-doctor had gone into the bush.
He was a great witch-doctor. "Of course, he's up to something," said
Waterhouse, and became silent.

"But what can he do?" asked Pollock, unheeded.

"I must get you out of this. There's something brewing, or things would
not be so quiet," said Waterhouse, after a gap of silence. Pollock
wanted to know what the brew might be. "Dancing in a circle of skulls",
said Waterhouse; "brewing a stink in a copper pot." Pollock wanted
particulars. Waterhouse was vague, Pollock pressing. At last Waterhouse
lost his temper. "How the devil should I know?" he said to Pollock's
twentieth inquiry what the Porroh man would do. "He tried to kill you
off-hand in the hut. Now, I fancy he will try something more elaborate.
But you'll see fast enough. I don't want to help unnerve you. It's
probably all nonsense."

That night, as they were sitting at their fire, Pollock again tried to
draw Waterhouse out on the subject of Porroh methods. "Better get to
sleep," said Waterhouse, when Pollock's bent became apparent; "we start
early to-morrow. You may want all your nerve about you."

"But what line will he take?"

"Can't say. They're versatile people. They know a lot of rum dodges.
You'd better get that copper-devil, Shakespear, to talk."

There was a flash and a heavy bang, out of the darkness behind the huts,
and a clay bullet came whistling close to Pollock's head. This, at
least, was crude enough. The blacks and half-breeds sitting and yarning
round their own fire jumped up, and someone fired into the dark.

"Better go into one of the huts," said Waterhouse quietly, still sitting
unmoved.

Pollock stood up by the fire and drew his revolver. Fighting, at least,
he was not afraid of. But a man in the dark is in the best of armour.
Realising the wisdom of Waterhouse's advice, Pollock went into the tent
and lay down there.

What little sleep he had was disturbed by dreams, variegated dreams, but
chiefly of the Porroh man's face, upside down, as he went out of the
hut, and looked up under his arm. It was odd that this transitory
impression should have stuck so firmly in Pollock's memory. Moreover, he
was troubled by queer pains in his limbs.

In the white haze of the early morning, as they were loading the canoes,
a barbed arrow suddenly appeared quivering in the ground close to
Pollock's foot. The boys made a perfunctory effort to clear out the
thicket, but it led to no capture.

After these two occurrences, there was a disposition on the part of the
expedition to leave Pollock to himself, and Pollock became, for the
first time in his life, anxious to mingle with blacks. Waterhouse took
one canoe, and Pollock, in spite of a friendly desire to chat with
Waterhouse, had to take the other. He was left all alone in the front
part of the canoe, and he had the greatest trouble to make the men--who
did not love him--keep to the middle of the river, a clear hundred yards
or more from either shore. However, he made Shakespear, the Freetown
half-breed, come up to his own end of the canoe and tell him about
Porroh, which Shakespear, failing in his attempts to leave Pollock
alone, presently did with considerable freedom and gusto.

The day passed. The canoe glided swiftly along the ribbon of lagoon
water, between the drift of water-figs, fallen trees, papyrus, and
palm-wine palms, and with the dark mangrove swamp to the left, through
which one could hear now and then the roar of the Atlantic surf.
Shakespear told in his soft, blurred English of how the Porroh could
cast spells; how men withered up under their malice; how they could send
dreams and devils; how they tormented and killed the sons of Ijibu; how
they kidnapped a white trader from Sulyma who had maltreated one of the
sect, and how his body looked when it was found. And Pollock after each
narrative cursed under his breath at the want of missionary enterprise
that allowed such things to be, and at the inert British Government that
ruled over this dark heathendom of Sierra Leone. In the evening they
came to the Kasi Lake, and sent a score of crocodiles lumbering off the
island on which the expedition camped for the night.

The next day they reached Sulyma, and smelt the sea breeze, but Pollock
had to put up there for five days before he could get on to Freetown.
Waterhouse, considering him to be comparatively safe here, and within
the pale of Freetown influence, left him and went back with the
expedition to Gbemma, and Pollock became very friendly with Perera, the
only resident white trader at Sulyma--so friendly, indeed, that he went
about with him everywhere. Perera was a little Portuguese Jew, who had
lived in England, and he appreciated the Englishman's friendliness as a
great compliment.

For two days nothing happened out of the ordinary; for the most part
Pollock and Perera played Nap--the only game they had in common--and
Pollock got into debt. Then, on the second evening, Pollock had a
disagreeable intimation of the arrival of the Porroh man in Sulyma by
getting a flesh-wound in the shoulder from a lump of filed iron. It was
a long shot, and the missile had nearly spent its force when it hit him.
Still it conveyed its message plainly enough. Pollock sat up in his
hammock, revolver in hand, all that night, and next morning confided, to
some extent, in the Anglo-Portuguese.

Perera took the matter seriously. He knew the local customs pretty
thoroughly. "It is a personal question, you must know. It is revenge.
And of course he is hurried by your leaving de country. None of de
natives or half-breeds will interfere wid him very much--unless you make
it wort deir while. If you come upon him suddenly, you might shoot him.
But den he might shoot you.

"Den dere's dis--infernal magic," said Perera. "Of course, I don't
believe in it--superstition--but still it's not nice to tink dat
wherever you are, dere is a black man, who spends a moonlight night now
and den a-dancing about a fire to send you bad dreams... Had any bad
dreams?"

"Rather," said Pollock. "I keep on seeing the beggar's head upside down
grinning at me and showing all his teeth as he did in the hut, and
coming close up to me, and then going ever so far off, and coming back.
It's nothing to be afraid of, but somehow it simply paralyses me with
terror in my sleep. Queer things--dreams. I know it's a dream all the
time, and I can't wake up from it."

"It's probably only fancy," said Perera. "Den my niggers say Porroh men
can send snakes. Seen any snakes lately?"

"Only one. I killed him this morning, on the floor near my hammock.
Almost trod on him as I got up."

"Ah!" said Perera, and then, reassuringly, "Of course it is
a--coincidence. Still I would keep my eyes open. Den dere's pains in de
bones."

"I thought they were due to miasma," said Pollock.

"Probably dey are. When did dey begin?"

Then Pollock remembered that he first noticed them the night after the
fight in the hut. "It's my opinion he don't want to kill you," said
Perera--"at least not yet. I've heard deir idea is to scare and worry a
man wid deir spells, and narrow misses, and rheumatic pains, and bad
dreams, and all dat, until he's sick of life. Of course, it's all talk,
you know. You mustn't worry about it... But I wonder what he'll be up to
next."

"I shall have to be up to something first," said Pollock, staring
gloomily at the greasy cards that Perera was putting on the table. "It
don't suit my dignity to be followed about, and shot at, and blighted in
this way. I wonder if Porroh hokey-pokey upsets your luck at cards."

He looked at Perera suspiciously.

"Very likely it does," said Perera warmly, shuffling. "Dey are wonderful
people."

That afternoon Pollock killed two snakes in his hammock, and there was
also an extraordinary increase in the number of red ants that swarmed
over the place; and these annoyances put him in a fit temper to talk
over business with a certain Mendi rough he had interviewed before. The
Mendi rough showed Pollock a little iron dagger, and demonstrated where
one struck in the neck, in a way that made Pollock shiver, and in return
for certain considerations Pollock promised him a double-barrelled gun
with an ornamental lock.

In the evening, as Pollock and Perera were playing cards, the Mendi
rough came in through the doorway, carrying something in a blood-soaked
piece of native cloth.

"Not here!" said Pollock very hurriedly. "Not here!"

But he was not quick enough to prevent the man, who was anxious to get
to Pollock's side of the bargain, from opening the cloth and throwing
the head of the Porroh man upon the table. It bounded from there on to
the floor, leaving a red trail on the cards, and rolled into the corner,
where it came to rest upside down, but glaring hard at Pollock.

Perera jumped up as the thing fell among the cards, and began in his
excitement to gabble in Portuguese. The Mendi was bowing, with the red
cloth in his hand. "De gun!" he cried. Pollock stared back at the head
in the corner. It bore exactly the expression it had in his dreams.
Something seemed to snap in his own brain as he looked at it.

Then Perera found his English again.

"You got him killed?" he said. "You did not kill him yourself?"

"Why should I?" said Pollock.

"But he will not be able to take it off now!"

"Take what off?" said Pollock.

"And all dese cards are spoiled!"

"What do you mean by taking off?" said Pollock.

"You must send me a new pack from Freetown. You can buy dem dere.

"But--'take it off'?"

"It is only superstition. I forgot. De niggers say dat if de witches--he
was a witch--But it is rubbish... You must make de Porroh man take it
off, or kill him yourself... It is very silly."

Pollock swore under his breath, still staring hard at the head in the
corner.

"I can't stand that glare," he said. Then suddenly he rushed at the
thing and kicked it. It rolled some yards or so, and came to rest in the
same position as before, upside down, and looking at him.

"He is ugly," said the Anglo-Portuguese. "Very ugly. Dey do it on deir
faces with little knives."

Pollock would have kicked the head again, but the Mendi man touched him
on the arm. "De gun?" he said, looking nervously at the head.

"Two--if you will take that beastly thing away," said Pollock.

The Mendi shook his head, and intimated that he only wanted one gun now
due to him, and for which he would be obliged. Pollock found neither
cajolery nor bullying any good with him. Perera had a gun to sell (at a
profit of three hundred per cent), and with that the man presently
departed. Then Pollock's eyes, against his will, were recalled to the
thing on the floor.

"It is funny dat his head keeps upside down," said Perera, with an
uneasy laugh. "His brains must be heavy, like de weight in de little
images one sees dat keep always upright wid lead in dem. You will take
him wiv you when you go presently. You might take him now. De cards are
all spoilt. Dere is a man sell dem in Freetown. De room is in a filthy
mess as it is. You should have killed him yourself."

Pollock pulled himself together, and went and picked up the head. He
would hang it up by the lamp-hook in the middle of the ceiling of his
room, and dig a grave for it at once. He was under the impression that
he hung it up by the hair, but that must have been wrong, for when he
returned for it, it was hanging by the neck upside down.

He buried it before sunset on the north side of the shed he occupied, so
that he should not have to pass the grave after dark when he was
returning from Perera's. He killed two snakes before he went to sleep.
In the darkest part of the night he awoke with a start, and heard a
pattering sound and something scraping on the floor. He sat up
noiselessly, and felt under his pillow for his revolver. A mumbling
growl followed, and Pollock fired at the sound. There was a yelp, and
something dark passed for a moment across the hazy blue of the doorway.
"A dog!" said Pollock, lying down again.

In the early dawn he awoke again with a peculiar sense of unrest. The
vague pain in his bones had returned. For some time he lay watching the
red ants that were swarming over the ceiling, and then, as the light
grew brighter, he looked over the edge of his hammock and saw something
dark on the floor. He gave such a violent start that the hammock overset
and flung him out.

He found himself lying, perhaps, a yard away from the head of the Porroh
man. It had been disinterred by the dog, and the nose was grievously
battered. Ants and flies swarmed over it. By an odd coincidence, it was
still upside down, and with the same diabolical expression in the
inverted eyes.

Pollock sat paralysed, and stared at the horror for some time. Then he
got up and walked round it--giving it a wide berth--and out of the shed.
The clear light of the sunrise, the living stir of vegetation before the
breath of the dying land-breeze, and the empty grave with the marks of
the dog's paws, lightened the weight upon his mind a little.

He told Perera of the business as though it was a jest--a jest to be
told with white lips. "You should not have frighten de dog," said
Perera, with poorly simulated hilarity.

The next two days, until the steamer came, were spent by Pollock in
making a more effectual disposition of his possession. Overcoming his
aversion to handling the thing, he went down to the river mouth and
threw it into the sea-water, but by some miracle it escaped the
crocodiles, and was cast up by the tide on the mud a little way up the
river, to be found by an intelligent Arab half-breed, and offered for
sale to Pollock and Perera as a curiosity, just on the edge of night.
The native hung about in the brief twilight, making lower and lower
offers, and at last, getting scared in some way by the evident dread
these wise white men had for the thing, went off, and passing Pollock's
shed, threw his burden in there for Pollock to discover in the morning.

At this Pollock got into a kind of frenzy. He would burn the thing. He
went out straightway into the dawn, and had constructed a big pyre of
brushwood before the heat of the day. He was interrupted by the hooter
of the little paddle steamer from Monrovia to Bathurst, which was coming
through the gap in the bar. "Thank Heaven!" said Pollock, with infinite
piety, when the meaning of the sound dawned upon him. With trembling
hands he lit his pile of wood hastily, threw the head upon it, and went
away to pack his portmanteau and make his adieux to Perera.

That afternoon, with a sense of infinite relief, Pollock watched the
flat swampy foreshore of Sulyma grow small in the distance. The gap in
the long line of white surge became narrower and narrower. It seemed to
be closing in and cutting him off from his trouble. The feeling of dread
and worry began to slip from him bit by bit. At Sulyma belief in Porroh
malignity and Porroh magic had been in the air, his sense of Porroh had
been vast, pervading, threatening, dreadful. Now manifestly the domain
of Porroh was only a little place, a little black band between the sea
and the blue cloudy Mendi uplands.

"Good-bye, Porroh!" said Pollock. "Good-bye--certainly not au revoir."

The captain of the steamer came and leant over the rail beside him, and
wished him good-evening, and spat at the froth of the wake in token of
friendly ease.

"I picked up a rummy curio on the beach this go," said the captain.
"It's a thing I never saw done this side of Indy before."

"What might that be?" said Pollock.

"Pickled 'ed," said the captain.


"What!" said Pollock.

"'Ed--smoked. 'Ed of one of those Porroh chaps, all ornamented with
knife-cuts. Why! What's up? Nothing? I shouldn't have took you for a
nervous chap. Green in the face. By gosh! You're a bad sailor. All
right, eh? Lord, how funny you went...! Well, this 'ed I was telling you
of is a bit rum in a way. I've got it, along with some snakes, in a jar
of spirit in my cabin what I keeps for such curios, and I'm hanged if it
don't float upsy down. Hullo!"

Pollock had given an incoherent cry, and had his hands in his hair. He
ran towards the paddle-boxes with a half-formed idea of jumping into the
sea, and then he realised his position and turned back towards the
captain.

"Here!" said the captain. "Jack Philips, just keep him off me! Stand
off! No nearer, mister! What's the matter with you? Are you mad?"

Pollock put his hand to his head. It was no good explaining. "I believe
I am pretty nearly mad at times," he said. "It's a pain I have here.
Comes suddenly. You'll excuse me, I hope."

He was white and in a perspiration. He saw suddenly very clearly all the
danger he ran of having his sanity doubted. He forced himself to restore
the captain's confidence, by answering his sympathetic inquiries, noting
his suggestions, even trying a spoonful of neat brandy in his cheek, and
that matter settled, asking a number of questions about the captain's
private trade in curiosities. The captain described the head in detail.
All the while Pollock was struggling to keep under a preposterous
persuasion that the ship was as transparent as glass, and that he could
distinctly see the inverted face looking at him from the cabin beneath
his feet.

Pollock had a worse time almost on the steamer than he had at Sulyma.
All day he had to control himself in spite of his intense perception of
the imminent presence of that horrible head that was overshadowing his
mind. At night his old nightmare returned, until, with a violent effort,
he would force himself awake, rigid with the horror of it, and with the
ghost of a hoarse scream in his throat.

He left the actual head behind at Bathurst, where he changed ship for
Teneriffe, but not his dreams nor the dull ache in his bones. At
Teneriffe, Pollock transferred to a Cape liner, but the head followed
him. He gambled, he tried chess, he even read books, but he knew the
danger of drink. Yet whenever a round black shadow, a round black object
came into his range, there he looked for the head, and--saw it. He knew
clearly enough that his imagination was growing traitor to him, and yet
at times it seemed the ship he sailed in, his fellow-passengers, the
sailors, the wide sea, was all part of a filmy phantasmagoria that hung,
scarcely veiling it, between him and a horrible real world. Then the
Porroh man, thrusting his diabolical face through that curtain, was the
one real and undeniable thing. At that he would get up and touch things,
taste something, gnaw something, burn his hand with a match, or run a
needle into himself.

So, struggling grimly and silently with his excited imagination, Pollock
reached England. He landed at Southampton, and went on straight from
Waterloo to his banker's in Cornhill in a cab. There he transacted some
business with the manager in a private room, and all the while the head
hung like an ornament under the black marble mantel and dripped upon the
fender. He could hear the drops fall, and see the red on the fender.

"A pretty fern," said the manager, following his eyes. "But it makes the
fender rusty."

"Very," said Pollock; "a very pretty fern. And that reminds me. Can you
recommend me a physician for mind troubles? I've got a little--what is
it--? Hallucination."

The head laughed savagely, wildly. Pollock was surprised the manager did
not notice it. But the manager only stared at his face.

With the address of a doctor, Pollock presently emerged in Cornhill.
There was no cab in sight, and so he went on down to the western end of
the street, and essayed the crossing opposite the Mansion House. The
crossing is hardly easy even for the expert Londoner; cabs, vans,
carriages, mail-carts, omnibuses go by in one incessant stream; to
anyone fresh from the malarious solitudes of Sierra Leone it is a
boiling, maddening confusion. But when an inverted head suddenly comes
bouncing, like an indiarubber ball, between your legs, leaving distinct
smears of blood every time it touches the ground, you can scarcely hope
to avoid an accident. Pollock lifted his feet convulsively to avoid it,
and then kicked at the thing furiously. Then something hit him violently
in the back, and a hot pain ran up his arm.

He had been hit by the pole of an omnibus, and three of the fingers of
his left hand smashed by the hoof of one of the horses--the very
fingers, as it happened, that he shot from the Porroh man. They pulled
him out from between the horse's legs, and found the address of the
physician, in his crushed hand.

For a couple of days Pollock's sensations were full of the sweet,
pungent smell of chloroform, of painful operations that caused him no
pain, of lying still and being given food and drink. Then he had a
slight fever, and was very thirsty, and his old nightmare came back. It
was only when it returned that he noticed it had left him for a day.

"If my skull had been smashed instead of my fingers, it might have gone
altogether," said Pollock, staring thoughtfully at the dark cushion that
had taken on for the time the shape of the head.

Pollock at the first opportunity told the physician of his mind trouble.
He knew clearly that he must go mad unless something should intervene to
save him. He explained that he had witnessed a decapitation in Dahomey,
and was haunted by one of the heads. Naturally, he did not care to state
the actual facts. The physician looked grave.

Presently he spoke hesitatingly. "As a child, did you get very much
religious training?"

"Very little," said Pollock.

A shade passed over the physician's face. "I don't know if you have
heard of the miraculous cures--it may be, of course, they are not
miraculous--at Lourdes."

"Faith-healing will hardly suit me, I am afraid," said Pollock, with his
eye on the dark cushion.

The head distorted its scarred features in an abominable grimace. The
physician went upon a new track. "It's all imagination," he said,
speaking with sudden briskness. "A fair case for faith-healing, anyhow.
Your nervous system has run down, you're in that twilight state of
health when the bogles come easiest. The strong impression was too much
for you. I must make you up a little mixture that will strengthen your
nervous system--especially your brain. And you must take exercise."

"I'm no good for faith-healing," said Pollock.

"And therefore we must restore tone. Go in search of stimulating
air--Scotland, Norway, the Alps--"

"Jericho, if you like," said Pollock--"where Naaman went."

However, so soon as his fingers would let him, Pollock made a gallant
attempt to follow out the doctor's suggestion. It was now November. He
tried football, but to Pollock the game consisted in kicking a furious
inverted head about a field. He was no good at the game. He kicked
blindly, with a kind of horror, and when they put him back into goal,
and the ball came swooping down upon him, he suddenly yelled and got out
of its way. The discreditable stories that had driven him from England
to wander in the tropics shut him off from any but men's society, and
now his increasingly strange behaviour made even his man friends avoid
him. The thing was no longer a thing of the eye merely; it gibbered at
him, spoke to him. A horrible fear came upon him that presently, when he
took hold of the apparition, it would no longer become some mere article
of furniture, but would feel like a real dissevered head. Alone, he
would curse at the thing, defy it, entreat it; once or twice, in spite
of his grim self-control, he addressed it in the presence of others. He
felt the growing suspicion in the eyes of the people that watched
him--his landlady, the servant, his man.

One day early in December his cousin Arnold--his next of kin--came to
see him and draw him out, and watch his sunken yellow face with narrow
eager eyes. And it seemed to Pollock that the hat his cousin carried in
his hand was no hat at all, but a Gorgon head that glared at him upside
down, and fought with its eyes against his reason. However, he was still
resolute to see the matter out. He got a bicycle, and, riding over the
frosty road from Wandsworth to Kingston, found the thing rolling along
at his side, and leaving a dark trail behind it. He set his teeth and
rode faster. Then suddenly, as he came down the hill towards Richmond
Park, the apparition rolled in front of him and under his wheel, so
quickly that he had no time for thought, and, turning quickly to avoid
it, was flung violently against a heap of stones and broke his left
wrist.

The end came on Christmas morning. All night he had been in a fever, the
bandages encircling his wrist like a band of fire, his dreams more vivid
and terrible than ever. In the cold, colourless, uncertain light that
came before the sunrise, he sat up in his bed, and saw the head upon the
bracket in the place of the bronze jar that had stood there overnight.

"I know that is a bronze jar," he said, with a chill doubt at his heart.
Presently the doubt was irresistible. He got out of bed slowly,
shivering, and advanced to the jar with his hand raised. Surely he would
see now his imagination had deceived him, recognise the distinctive
sheen of bronze. At last, after an age of hesitation, his fingers came
down on the patterned cheek of the head. He withdrew them spasmodically.
The last stage was reached. His sense of touch had betrayed him.

Trembling, stumbling against the bed, kicking against his shoes with his
bare feet, a dark confusion eddying round him, he groped his way to the
dressing-table, took his razor from the drawer, and sat down on the bed
with this in his hand. In the looking-glass he saw his own face,
colourless, haggard, full of the ultimate bitterness of despair.

He beheld in swift succession the incidents in the brief tale of his
experience. His wretched home, his still more wretched schooldays, the
years of vicious life he had led since then, one act of selfish
dishonour leading to another; it was all clear and pitiless now, all its
squalid folly, in the cold light of the dawn. He came to the hut, to the
fight with the Porroh man, to the retreat down the river to Sulyma, to
the Mendi assassin and his red parcel, to his frantic endeavours to
destroy the head, to the growth of his hallucination. It was a
hallucination! He knew it was. A hallucination merely. For a moment he
snatched at hope. He looked away from the glass, and on the bracket, the
inverted head grinned and grimaced at him... With the stiff fingers of
his bandaged hand he felt at his neck for the throb of his arteries. The
morning was very cold, the steel blade felt like ice.




THE RED ROOM


"I can assure you," said I, "that it will take a very tangible ghost to
frighten me." And I stood up before the fire with my glass in my hand.

"It is your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm, and
glanced at me askance.

"Eight-and-twenty years," said I, "I have lived, and never a ghost have
I seen as yet."

The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale ayes wide open.
"Ay," she broke in; "and eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never
seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There's a many things to see,
when one's still but eight-and-twenty." She swayed her head slowly from
side to side. "A many things to see and sorrow for."

I half suspected the old people were trying to enhance the spiritual
terrors of their house by their droning insistence. I put down my empty
glass on the table and looked about the room, and caught a glimpse of
myself, abbreviated and broadened to an impossible sturdiness, in the
queer old mirror at the end of the room. "Well," I said, "if I see
anything tonight, I shall be so much the wiser. For I come to the
business with an open mind."

"It's your own choosing," said the man, with the withered arm, once
more.

I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the
passage outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man
entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He
supported himself by a single crutch, his eyes were covered by a shade,
and his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying
yellow teeth. He made straight for an armchair on the opposite side of
the table, sat down clumsily, and began to cough. The man with the
withered arm gave this new-comer a short glance of positive dislike; the
old woman took no notice of his arrival, but remained with her eyes
fixed steadily on the fire.

"I said--it's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm,
when the coughing had ceased for a while.

"It's my own choosing," I answered.

The man with the shade became aware of my presence for the first time,
and threw his head back for a moment and sideways, to see me. I caught a
momentary glimpse of his eyes, small and bright and inflamed. Then he
began to cough and splutter again.

"Why don't you drink?" said the man with the withered arm, pushing the
beer towards him. The man with the shade, poured out a glassful with a
shaky arm that splashed half as much again on the deal table. A
monstrous shadow of him crouched upon the wall and mocked his action as
he poured and drank. I must confess I had scarce expected these
grotesque custodians. There is to my mind something inhuman in senility,
something crouching and atavistic; the human qualities seem to drop from
old people insensibly day by day. The three of them made me feel
uncomfortable, with their gaunt silences, their bent carriage, their
evident unfriendliness to me and to one another.

"If," said I, "you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I will
make myself comfortable there."

The old man with the cough jerked his head back so suddenly that it
startled me, and shot another glance of his red eyes at me from under
the shade; but no one answered me. I waited a minute, glancing from one
to the other.

"If," I said a little louder, "if you will show me to this haunted room
of yours, I will relieve you from the task of entertaining me."

"There's a candle on the slab outside the door," said the man with the
withered arm, looking at my feet as he addressed me. "But if you go to
the red room to-night--"

("This night of all nights!" said the old woman.)

"You go alone."

"Very well," I answered. "And which way do I go?"

"You go along the passage for a bit," said he, "until you come to a
door, and through that is a spiral staircase, and halfway up that is a
landing and another door covered with baize. Go through that and down
the long corridor to the end, and the red room is on your left up the
steps."

"Have I got that right?" I said, and repeated his directions. He
corrected me in one particular.

"And are you really going?" said the man with the shade, looking at me
again for the third time, with that queer, unnatural tilting of the
face.

("This night of all nights!" said the old woman.)

"It is what I came for," I said, and moved towards the door. As I did
so, the old man with the shade rose and staggered round the table, so as
to be closer to the others and to the fire. At the door I turned and
looked at them, and saw they were all close together, dark against the
firelight, staring at me over their shoulders, with an intent expression
on their ancient faces.

"Good-night," I said, setting the door open.

"It's your own choosing," said the man with the withered arm.

I left the door wide open until the candle was well alight, and then I
shut them in and walked down the chilly, echoing passage.

I must confess that the oddness of these three old pensioners in whose
charge her ladyship had left the castle, and the deep-toned,
old-fashioned furniture of the housekeeper's room in which they
foregathered, affected me in spite of my efforts to keep myself at a
matter-of-fact phase. They seemed to belong to another age, an older
age, an age when things spiritual were different from this of ours, less
certain; an age when omens and witches were credible, and ghosts beyond
denying. Their very existence was spectral; the cut of their clothing,
fashions born in dead brains. The ornaments and conveniences of the room
about them were ghostly--the thoughts of vanished men, which still
haunted, rather than participated in the world of to-day. But with an
effort I sent such thoughts to the right-about. The long, draughty
subterranean passage was chilly and dusty, and my candle flared and made
the shadows cower and quiver. The echoes rang up and down the spiral
staircase, and a shadow came sweeping up after me, and one fled before
me into the darkness overhead. I came to the landing and stopped there
for a moment, listening to a rustling that I fancied I heard; then,
satisfied of the absolute silence, I pushed open the baize-covered door
and stood in the corridor.

The effect was scarcely what I expected, for the moonlight, coming in by
the great window on the grand staircase, picked out everything in vivid
black shadow or silvery illumination. Everything was in its place: the
house might have been deserted on the yesterday instead of eighteen
months ago. There were candles in the sockets of the sconces, and
whatever dust had gathered on the carpets or upon the polished flooring
was distributed so evenly as to be invisible in the moonlight. I was
about to advance, and stopped abruptly. A bronze group stood upon the
landing, hidden from me by the corner of the wall, but its shadow fell
with marvellous distinctness upon the white panelling, and gave me the
impression of someone crouching to waylay me. I stood rigid for half a
minute perhaps. Then, with my hand in the pocket that held my revolver,
I advanced, only to discover a Ganymede and Eagle glistening in the
moonlight. That incident for at time restored my nerve, and a porcelain
Chinaman on a buhl table, whose head rocked silently as I passed him,
scarcely startled me.

The door to the red room and the steps up to it were in a shadowy
corner. I moved my candle from side to side, in order to see clearly the
nature of the recess in which I stood before opening the door. Here it
was, thought I, that my predecessor was found, and the memory of that
story gave me a sudden twinge of apprehension. I glanced over my
shoulder at the Ganymede in the moonlight, and opened the door of the
red room rather hastily, with my face half turned to the pallid silence
of the landing.

I entered, closed the door behind me at once, turned the key I found in
the lock within, and stood with the candle held aloft, surveying the
scene of my vigil, the great red room of Lorraine Castle, in which the
young duke had died. Or rather, in which he had begun his dying, for he
had opened the door and fallen headlong down the steps I had just
ascended. That had been the end of his vigil, of his gallant attempt to
conquer the ghostly tradition of the place; and never, I thought, had
apoplexy better served the ends of superstition. And there were other
and older stories that clung to the room, back to the half-credible
beginning of it all, the tale of a timid wife and the tragic end that
came to her husband's jest of frightening her. And looking around that
large shadowy room, with its shadowy window bays, its recesses and
alcoves, one could well understand the legends that had sprouted in its
black corners, its germinating darkness. My candle was a little tongue
of flame in its vastness, that failed to pierce the opposite end of the
room, and left an ocean of mystery and suggestion beyond its island of
light.

I resolved to make a systematic examination of the place at once, and
dispel the fanciful suggestions of its obscurity before they obtained a
hold upon me. After satisfying myself of the fastening of the door, I
began to walk about the room, peering round each article of furniture,
tucking up the valances of the bed, and opening its curtains wide. I
pulled up the blinds and examined the fastenings of the several windows
before closing the shutters, leant forward and looked up the blackness
of the wide chimney, and tapped the dark oak panelling for any secret
opening. There were two big mirrors in the room, each with a pair of
sconces bearing candles, and on the mantelshelf too, were more candles
in china candlesticks. All these I lit one after the other. The fire was
laid--, an unexpected consideration from the old housekeeper--, and I
lit it, to keep down any disposition to shiver, and when it was burning
well, I stood round with my back to it and regarded the room again. I
had pulled up a chintz-covered armchair and a table, to form a kind of
barricade before me, and on this lay my revolver ready to hand. My
precise examination had done me good, but I still found the remoter
darkness of the place, and its perfect stillness, too stimulating for
the imagination. The echoing of the stir and crackling of the fire was
no sort of comfort to me. The shadow in the alcove at the end in
particular had that undefinable quality of a presence, that odd
suggestion of a lurking, living thing, that comes so easily in silence
and solitude. At last, to reassure myself, I walked with a candle into
it, and satisfied myself that there was nothing tangible there. I stood
that candle upon the floor of the alcove, and left it in that position.

By this time I was in a state of considerable nervous tension, although
to my reason there was no adequate cause for the condition. My mind,
however, was perfectly clear. I postulated quite unreservedly that
nothing supernatural could happen, and to pass the time I began to
string some rhymes together, Ingoldsby fashion, of the original legend
of the place. A few I spoke aloud, but the echoes were not pleasant. For
the same reason I also abandoned, after a time, a conversation with
myself upon the impossibility of ghosts and haunting. My mind reverted
to the three old and distorted people downstairs, and I tried to keep it
upon that topic. The sombre reds and blacks of the room troubled me;
even with seven candles the place was merely dim. The one in the alcove
flared in a draught, and the fire-flickering kept the shadows and
penumbra perpetually shifting and stirring. Casting about for a remedy,
I recalled the candles I had seen in the passage, and, with a slight
effort, walked out into the moonlight, carrying a candle and leaving the
door open, and presently returned with as many as ten. These I put in
various knick-knacks of china with which the room was sparsely adorned,
lit and placed where the shadows had lain deepest, some on the floor,
some in the window recesses, until at last my seventeen candles were so
arranged that not an inch of the room darkened, but had the direct light
of at least one of them. It occurred to me that when the ghost came, I
could warn him not to trip over them. The room was now quite brightly
illuminated. There was something very cheery and reassuring in these
little streaming flames, and snuffing them gave me an occupation, and
afforded a helpful sense of the passage of time. Even with that however,
the brooding expectation of the vigil weighed heavily upon me. It was
after midnight that the candle in the alcove suddenly went out, and the
black shadow sprang back to its place. I did not see the candle go out;
I simply turned and saw that the darkness was there, as one might start
and see the unexpected presence of a stranger. "By Jove!" said I aloud;
"That draught's a strong one!" and taking the matches from the table, I
walked across the room in a leisurely manner to relight the corner
again. My first match would not strike, and as I succeeded with the
second, something seemed to blink on the wall before me. I turned my
head involuntarily, and saw that the two candles on the little table by
the fireplace were extinguished. I rose at once to my feet.

"Odd!" I said. "Did I do that myself in a flash of absent-mindedness?"

I walked back, relit one, and as I did so, I saw the candle in the right
sconce of one of the mirrors wink and go right out, and almost
immediately its companion followed it. There was no mistake about it.
The flame vanished, as if the wicks had been suddenly nipped between a
finger and thumb, leaving the wick neither glowing nor smoking, but
black. While I stood gaping, the candle at the foot of the bed went out,
and the shadows seemed to take another step towards me.

"This won't do!" said I, and first one and then another candle on the
mantelshelf followed. "What's up?" I cried, with a queer high note
getting into my voice somehow. At that the candle on the wardrobe went
out, and the one I had relit in the alcove followed.

"Steady on!" I said. "These candles are wanted," speaking with a
half-hysterical facetiousness, and scratching away at a match, all the
while, for the mantel candlesticks. My hands trembled so much that twice
I missed the rough paper of the matchbox. As the mantel emerged from
darkness again, two candles in the remoter end of the window were
eclipsed. But with the same match I also relit the larger mirror
candles, and those on the floor near the doorway, so that for the moment
I seemed to gain on the extinctions. But then in a volley there vanished
four lights at once in different corners of the room, and I struck
another match in quivering haste, and stood hesitating whither to take
it.

As I stood undecided, an invisible hand seemed to sweep out the two
candles on the table. With a cry of terror, I dashed at the alcove, then
into the corner, and then into the window, relighting three, as two more
vanished by the fireplace; then, perceiving a better way, I dropped the
matches on the iron-bound deed-box in the corner, and caught up the
bedroom candlestick. With this I avoided the delay of striking matches;
but for all that the steady process of extinction went on, and the
shadows I feared and fought against returned, and crept in upon me,
first a step gained on this side of me and then on that. It was like a
ragged storm-cloud sweeping out of the stars. Now and then one returned
for a minute, and was lost again. I was now almost frantic with the
horror of the coming darkness, and my self-possession deserted me. I
leaped panting and dishevelled from candle to candle in a vain struggle
against that remorseless advance.

I bruised myself on the thigh against the table, I sent a chair
headlong, I stumbled and fell and whisked the cloth from the table in my
fall. My candle rolled away from me, and I snatched another as I rose.
Abruptly this was blown out, as I swung it off the table, by the wind of
my sudden movement, and immediately the two remaining candles followed.
But there was light still in the room, a red light that stayed off the
shadows from me. The fire! Of course I could still thrust my candle
between the bars and relight it!

I turned to where the flames were still dancing between the glowing
coals, and splashing red reflections upon the furniture, made two steps
towards the grate, and incontinently the flames dwindled and vanished,
the glow vanished, the reflections rushed together and vanished, and as
I thrust the candle between the bars darkness closed upon me like the
shutting of an eye, wrapped about me in a stifling embrace, sealed my
vision, and crushed the last vestiges of reason from my brain. The
candle fell from my hand. I flung out my arms in a vain effort to thrust
that ponderous blackness away from me, and, lifting up my voice,
screamed with all my might--once, twice, thrice. Then I think I must
have staggered to my feet. I know I thought suddenly of the moonlit
corridor and, with my head bowed and my arms over my face, made a run
for the door.

But I had forgotten the exact position of the door, and struck myself
heavily against the corner of the bed. I staggered back, turned, and was
either struck or struck myself against some other bulky furniture. I
have a vague memory of battering myself thus, to and fro in the
darkness, of a cramped struggle, and of my own wild crying as I darted
to and fro, of a heavy blow at last upon my forehead, a horrible
sensation of falling that lasted an age, of my last frantic effort to
keep my footing, and then I remember no more.


I opened my eyes in daylight. My head was roughly bandaged, and the man
with the withered arm was watching my face. I looked about me, trying to
remember what had happened, and for a space I could not recollect. I
turned to the corner, and saw the old woman, no longer abstracted,
pouring out some drops of medicine from a little blue phial into a
glass. "Where am I?" I asked; "I seem to remember you, and yet I cannot
remember who you are."

They told me then, and I heard of the haunted red room as one who hears
a tale. "We found you at dawn," said he, "and there was blood on your
forehead and lips."

It was very slowly I recovered my memory of my experience. "You believe
now," said the old man, "that the room is haunted?" He spoke no longer
as one who greets an intruder, but as one who grieves for a broken
friend.

"Yes," said I; "the room is haunted."

"And you have seen it. And we, who have lived here all our lives, have
never set eyes upon it. Because we have never dared... Tell us, is it
truly the old earl who--"

"No," said I; "it is not."

"I told you so," said the old lady, with the glass in her hand. "It is
his poor young countess who was frightened--"

"It is not," I said. "There is neither ghost of earl nor ghost of
countess in that room, there is no ghost there at all; but worse, far
worse--"

"Well?" they said.

"The worst of all the things that haunt poor mortal man," said I; "and
that is, in all its nakedness--Fear! Fear that will not have light nor
sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and
overwhelms. It followed me through the corridor, it fought against me in
the room--"

I stopped abruptly. There was an interval of silence. My hand went up to
my bandages.

Then the man with the shade sighed and spoke. "That is it," said he. "I
knew that was it. A power of darkness. To put such a curse upon a woman!
It lurks there always. You can feel it even in the daytime, even of a
bright summer's day, in the hangings, in the curtains, keeping behind
you however you face about. In the dusk it creeps along the corridor and
follows you, so that you dare not turn. There is Fear in that room of
hers--black Fear, and there will be--so long as this house of sin
endures."




THE CONE


The night was hot and overcast, the sky red, rimmed with the lingering
sunset of mid-summer. They sat at the open window, trying to fancy the
air was fresher there. The trees and shrubs of the garden stood stiff
and dark; beyond in the roadway a gas-lamp burnt, bright orange against
the hazy blue of the evening. Farther were the three lights of the
railway signal against the lowering sky. The man and woman spoke to one
another in low tones.

"He does not suspect?" said the man, a little nervously.

"Not he." She said peevishly, as though that too irritated her. "He
thinks of nothing but the works and the prices of fuel. He has no
imagination, no poetry."

"None of these men of iron have," he said sententiously. "They have no
hearts."

"He has not," she said. She turned her discontented face towards the
window. The distant sound of a roaring and rushing drew nearer and grew
in volume; the house quivered; one heard the metallic rattle of the
tender. As the train passed, there was a glare of light above the
cutting and a driving tumult of smoke; one, two, three, four, five, six,
seven, eight black oblongs--eight trucks--passed across the dim grey of
the embankment, and were suddenly extinguished one by one in the throat
of the tunnel, which with the last, seemed to swallow down train, smoke,
and sound in one abrupt gulp.

"This country was all fresh and beautiful once," he said; "and now--it
is Gehenna. Down that way--nothing but pot-banks and chimneys belching
fire and dust into the face of heaven... But what does it matter? An end
comes, an end to all this cruelty... To-morrow." He spoke the last word
in a whisper.

"To-morrow," she said, speaking in a whisper too, and still staring out
of the window.

"Dear!" he said, putting his hand on hers.

She turned with a start, and their eyes searched one another's. Hers
softened to his gaze. "My dear one!" she said, and then: "It seems so
strange--that you should have come into my life like this--to open--"
She paused.

"To open?" he said.

"All this wonderful world--" she hesitated, and spoke still more
softly--"this world of love to me."

Then suddenly the door clicked and closed. They turned their heads, and
he started violently back. In the shadow of the room stood a great
shadowy figure--silent. They saw the face dimly in the half-light, with
unexpressive dark patches under the penthouse brows. Every muscle in
Raut's body suddenly became tense. When could the door have opened? What
had he heard? Had he heard all? What had he seen? A tumult of questions.

The new-comer's voice came at last, after a pause that seemed
interminable. "Well?" he said.

"I was afraid I had missed you, Horrocks," said the man at the window,
gripping the window-ledge with his hand. His voice was unsteady.

The clumsy figure of Horrocks came forward out of the shadow. He made no
answer to Raut's remark. For a moment he stood above them.

The woman's heart was cold within her. "I told Mr. Raut it was just
possible you might come back," she said, in a voice that never quivered.

Horrocks, still silent, sat down abruptly in the chair by her little
work-table. His big hands were clenched; one saw now the fire of his
eyes under the shadow of his brows. He was trying to get his breath. His
eyes went from the woman he had trusted to the friend he had trusted,
and then back to the woman.

By this time and for the moment all three half understood one another.
Yet none dared say a word to ease the pent-up things that choked them.

It was the husband's voice that broke the silence at last.

"You wanted to see me?" he said to Raut.

Raut started as he spoke. "I came to see you," he said, resolved to lie
to the last.

"Yes," said Horrocks.

"You promised," said Raut, "to show me some fine effects of moonlight
and smoke."

"I promised to show you some fine effects of moonlight and smoke,"
repeated Horrocks in a colourless voice.

"And I thought I might catch you to-night before you went down to the
works," proceeded Raut, "and come with you."

There was another pause. Did the man mean to take the thing coolly? Did
he after all know? How long had he been in the room? Yet even at the
moment when they heard the door, their attitudes... Horrocks glanced at
the profile of the woman, shadowy pallid in the half-light. Then he
glanced at Raut, and seemed to recover himself suddenly. "Of course," he
said, "I promised to show you the works under their proper dramatic
conditions. It's odd how I could have forgotten."

"If I am troubling you--" began Raut.

Horrocks started again. A new light had suddenly come into the sultry
gloom of his eyes. "Not in the least," he said.

"Have you been telling Mr. Raut of all these contrasts of flame and
shadow you think so splendid?" said the woman, turning now to her
husband for the first time, her confidence creeping back again, her
voice just one half-note too high. "That dreadful theory of yours that
machinery is beautiful, and everything else in the world ugly. I thought
he would not spare you, Mr. Raut. It's his great theory, his one
discovery in art."

"I am slow to make discoveries," said Horrocks grimly, damping her
suddenly. "But what I discover..." He stopped.

"Well?" she said.

"Nothing;" and suddenly he rose to his feet.

"I promised to show you the works," he said to Raut, and put his big,
clumsy hand on his friend's shoulder. "And you are ready to go?"

"Quite," said Raut, and stood up also.

There was another pause. Each of them peered through the indistinctness
of the dusk at the other two. Horrocks' hand still rested on Raut's
shoulder. Raut half fancied still that the incident was trivial after
all. But Mrs. Horrocks knew her husband better, knew that grim quiet in
his voice, and the confusion in her mind took a vague shape of physical
evil. "Very well," said Horrocks, and dropping his hand, turned towards
the door.

"My hat?" Raut looked round in the half-light.

"That's my work-basket," said Mrs. Horrocks, with a gust of hysterical
laughter. Their hands came together on the back of the chair. "Here it
is!" he said. She had an impulse to warn him in an undertone, but she
could not frame a word. "Don't go!" and "Beware of him!" struggled in
her mind, and the swift moment passed.

"Got it?" said Horrocks, standing with the door half open.

Raut stepped towards him. "Better say good-bye to Mrs. Horrocks," said
the ironmaster, even more grimly quiet in his tone than before.

Raut started and turned. "Good-evening, Mrs. Horrocks," he said, and
their hands touched.

Horrocks held the door open with a ceremonial politeness unusual in him
towards men. Raut went out, and then, after a wordless look at her, her
husband followed. She stood motionless while Raut's light footfall and
her husband's heavy tread, like bass and treble, passed down the passage
together. The front door slammed heavily. She went to the window, moving
slowly, and stood watching--leaning forward. The two men appeared for a
moment at the gateway in the road, passed under the street-lamp, and
were hidden by the black masses of the shrubbery. The lamplight fell for
a moment on their faces, showing only unmeaning pale patches, telling
nothing of what she still feared, and doubted, and craved vainly to
know. Then she sank down into a crouching attitude in the big armchair,
her eyes wide open and staring out at the red lights from the furnaces
that flickered in the sky. An hour after she was still there, her
attitude scarcely changed.


The oppressive stillness of the evening weighed heavily upon Raut. They
went side by side down the road in silence, and in silence turned into
the cinder-made by-way that presently opened out the prospect of the
valley.

A blue haze, half dust, half mist, touched the long valley with mystery.
Beyond were Hanley and Etruria, grey and dark masses, outlined thinly by
the rare golden dots of the street-lamps, and here and there a gaslit
window, or the yellow glare of some late-working factory or crowded
public-house. Out of the masses, clear and slender against the evening
sky, rose a multitude of tall chimneys, many of them reeking, a few
smokeless during a season of "play." Here and there a pallid patch and
ghostly stunted beehive shapes showed the position of a pot-bank, or a
wheel, black and sharp against the hot lower sky, marked some colliery
where they raise the iridescent coal of the place. Nearer at hand was
the broad stretch of railway, and half invisible trains shunted--a
steady puffing and rumbling, with every run a ringing concussion and a
rhythmic series of impacts, and a passage of intermittent puffs of white
steam across the further view. And to the left, between the railway and
the dark mass of the low hill beyond, dominating the whole view,
colossal, inky-black, and crowned with smoke and fitful flames, stood
the great cylinders of the Jeddah Company Blast Furnaces, the central
edifices of the big ironworks of which Horrocks was the manager. They
stood heavy and threatening, full of an incessant turmoil of flames and
seething molten iron, and about the feet of them rattled the
rolling-mills, and the steam-hammer beat heavily and splashed the white
iron sparks hither and thither. Even as they looked, a truckful of fuel
was shot into one of the giants, and the red flames gleamed out, and a
confusion of smoke and black dust came boiling upwards towards the sky.

"Certainly you get some fine effects of colour with your furnaces," said
Raut, breaking a silence that had become apprehensive.

Horrocks grunted. He stood with his hands in his pockets, frowning down
at the dim steaming railway and the busy ironworks beyond, frowning as
if he were thinking out some knotty problem.

Raut glanced at him and away again. "At present your moonlight effect is
hardly ripe," he continued, looking upward. "The moon is still smothered
by the vestiges of daylight."

Horrocks stared at him with the expression of a man who has suddenly
awakened. "Vestiges of daylight...? Of course, of course." He too looked
up at the moon, pale still in the midsummer sky. "Come along," he said
suddenly, and gripping Raut's arm in his hand, made a move towards the
path that dropped from them to the railway.

Raut hung back. Their eyes met and saw a thousand things in a moment
that their eyes came near to say. Horrocks' hand tightened and then
relaxed. He let go, and before Raut was aware of it, they were arm in
arm, and walking, one unwillingly enough, down the path.

"You see the fine effect of the railway signals towards Burslem," said
Horrocks, suddenly breaking into loquacity, striding fast, and
tightening the grip of his elbow the while. "Little green lights and
red and white lights, all against the haze. You have an eye for effect,
Raut. It's a fine effect. And look at those furnaces of mine, how they
rise upon us as we come down the hill. That to the right is my
pet--seventy feet of him. I packed him myself, and he's boiled away
cheerfully with iron in his guts for five long years. I've a particular
fancy for him. That line of red there--a lovely bit of warm orange you'd
call it, Raut--that's the puddlers' furnaces, and there, in the hot
light, three black figures--did you see the white splash of the
steam-hammer then--? That's the rolling mills. Come along! Clang,
clatter, how it goes rattling across the floor! Sheet tin, Raut--,
amazing stuff. Glass mirrors are not in it when that stuff comes from
the mill. And squelch--! There goes the hammer again. Come along!"

He had to stop talking to catch at his breath. His arm twisted into
Raut's with benumbing tightness. He had come striding down the black
path towards the railway as though he was possessed.

Raut had not spoken a word, had simply hung back against Horrocks' pull
with all his strength.

"I say," he said now, laughing nervously, but with an undernote of snarl
in his voice, "why on earth are you nipping my arm off, Horrocks, and
dragging me along like this?"

At length Horrocks released him. His manner changed again. "Nipping your
arm off?" he said. "Sorry. But it's you taught me the trick of walking
in that friendly way."

"You haven't learnt the refinements of it yet then," said Raut, laughing
artificially again. "By Jove! I'm black and blue," Horrocks offered no
apology. They stood now near the bottom of the hill, close to the fence
that bordered the railway. The ironworks had grown larger and spread out
with their approach. They looked up to the blast furnaces now instead of
down; the further view of Etruria and Hanley had dropped out of sight
with their descent. Before them, by the stile rose a notice-board,
bearing still dimly visible, the words, "Beware Of The Trains," half
hidden by splashes of coaly mud.

"Fine effects," said Horrocks, waving his arm. "Here comes a train. The
puffs of smoke, the orange glare, the round eye of light in front of it,
the melodious rattle. Fine effects! But these furnaces of mine used to
be finer, before we shoved cones in their throats, and saved the gas."

"How?" said Raut. "Cones?"

"Cones, my man, cones. I'll show you one nearer. The flames used to
flare out of the open throats, great--what is it--? Pillars of cloud by
day, red and black smoke, and pillars of fire by night. Now we run it off
in pipes, and burn it to heat the blast, and the top is shut by a cone.
You'll be interested in that cone."

"But every now and then," said Raut, "you get a burst of fire and smoke
up there."

"The cone's not fixed, it's hung by a chain from a lever, and balanced
by an equipoise. You shall see it nearer. Else of course, there'd be no
way of getting fuel into the thing. Every now and then the cone dips,
and out comes the flare."

"I see," said Raut. He looked over his shoulder. "The moon gets
brighter," he said.

"Come along," said Horrocks abruptly, gripping his shoulder again, and
moving him suddenly towards the railway crossing. And then came one of
those swift incidents, vivid, but so rapid that they leave one doubtful
and reeling. Halfway across, Horrocks' hand suddenly clenched upon him
like a vice, and swung him backward and through a half-turn, so that he
looked up the line. And there a chain of lamp-lit carriage-windows
telescoped swiftly as it came towards them, and the red and yellow
lights of an engine grew larger and larger, rushing down upon them. As
he grasped what this meant, he turned his face to Horrocks, and pushed
with all his strength against the arm that held him back between the
rails. The struggle did not last a moment. Just as certain as it was
that Horrocks held him there, so certain was it that he had been
violently lugged out of danger.

"Out of the way," said Horrocks, with a gasp, as the train came rattling
by, and they stood panting by the gate into the ironworks.

"I did not see it coming," said Raut, still even in spite of his own
apprehensions, trying to keep up an appearance of ordinary intercourse.

Horrocks answered with a grunt. "The cone," he said, and then, as one
who recovers himself, "I thought you did not hear."

"I didn't," said Raut.

"I wouldn't have had you run over then, for the world," said Horrocks.

"For a moment I lost my nerve," said Raut.

Horrocks stood for half a minute, then turned abruptly towards the
ironworks again. "See how fine these great mounds of mine, these
clinker-heaps, look in the night! That truck yonder, up above there! Up
it goes, and out-tilts the slag. See the palpitating red stuff go
sliding down the slope. As we get nearer, the heap rises up and cuts the
blast furnaces. See the quiver up above the big one. Not that way! This
way, between the heaps. That goes to the puddling furnaces, but I want
to show you the canal first." He came and took Raut by the elbow, and so
they went along side by side. Raut answered Horrocks vaguely. What, he
asked himself, had really happened on the line? Was he deluding himself
with his own fancies, or had Horrocks actually held him back in the way
of the train? Had he just been within an ace of being murdered?

Suppose this slouching, scowling monster did know anything? For a minute
or two then Raut was really afraid for his life, but the mood passed as
he reasoned with himself. After all, Horrocks might have heard nothing.
At any rate, he had pulled him out of the way in time. His odd manner
might be due to the mere vague jealousy he had shown once before. He was
talking now of the ash-heaps and the canal. "Eigh?" said Horrocks.

"What?" said Raut. "Rather! The haze in the moonlight. Fine!"

"Our canal," said Horrocks, stopping suddenly. "Our canal by moonlight
and firelight is an immense effect. You've never seen it? Fancy that!
You've spent too many of your evenings philandering up in Newcastle
there. I tell you, for real florid effects--But you shall see. Boiling
water..."

As they came out of the labyrinth of clinker-heaps and mounds of coal
and ore, the noises of the rolling-mill sprang upon them suddenly, loud,
near, and distinct. Three shadowy workmen went by and touched their caps
to Horrocks. Their faces were vague in the darkness. Raut felt a futile
impulse to address them, and before he could frame his words, they
passed into the shadows. Horrocks pointed to the canal close before them
now: a weird-looking place it seemed, in the blood-red reflections of
the furnaces. The hot water that cooled the tuyeres came into it, some
fifty yards up--a tumultuous, almost boiling affluent, and the steam
rose up from the water in silent white wisps and streaks, wrapping
damply about them, an incessant succession of ghosts coming up from the
black and red eddies, a white uprising that made the head swim. The
shining black tower of the larger blast-furnace rose overhead out of the
mist, and its tumultuous riot filled their ears. Raut kept away from the
edge of the water, and watched Horrocks.

"Here it is red," said Horrocks, "blood-red vapour as red and hot as
sin; but yonder there, where the moonlight falls on it, and it drives
across the clinker-heaps, it is as white as death."

Raut turned his head for a moment, and then came back hastily to his
watch on Horrocks. "Come along to the rolling-mills," said Horrocks. The
threatening hold was not so evident that time, and Raut felt a little
reassured. But all the same, what on earth did Horrocks mean about
"white as death" and "red as sin"? Coincidence, perhaps?

They went and stood behind the puddlers for a little while, and then
through the rolling-mills, where amidst an incessant din the deliberate
steam-hammer beat the juice out of the succulent iron, and black,
half-naked Titans rushed the plastic bars, like hot sealing-wax, between
the wheels. "Come on," said Horrocks in Raut's ear, and they went and
peeped through the little glass hole behind the tuyeres, and saw the
tumbled fire writhing in the pit of the blast-furnace. It left one eye
blinded for a while. Then, with green and blue patches dancing across
the dark, they went to the lift by which the trucks of ore and fuel and
lime were raised to the top of the big cylinder.

And out upon the narrow rail that overhung the furnace, Raut's doubts
came upon him again. Was it wise to be here? If Horrocks did
know--everything! Do what he would, he could not resist a violent
trembling. Right under foot was a sheer depth of seventy feet. It was a
dangerous place. They pushed by a truck of fuel to get to the railing
that crowned the place. The reek of the furnace, a sulphurous vapour
streaked with pungent bitterness, seemed to make the distant hillside of
Hanley quiver. The moon was riding out now from among a drift of clouds,
halfway up the sky above the undulating wooded outlines of Newcastle.
The steaming canal ran away from below them under an indistinct bridge,
and vanished into the dim haze of the flat fields towards Burslem.

"That's the cone I've been telling you of," shouted Horrocks; "and,
below that, sixty feet of fire and molten metal, with the air of the
blast frothing through it like gas in soda-water."

Raut gripped the hand-rail tightly, and stared down at the cone. The
heat was intense. The boiling of the iron and the tumult of the blast
made a thunderous accompaniment to Horrocks' voice. But the thing had to
be gone through now. Perhaps, after all...

"In the middle," bawled Horrocks, "temperature near a thousand degrees.
If YOU were dropped into it... flash into flame like a pinch of
gunpowder in a candle. Put your hand out and feel the heat of his
breath. Why, even up here I've seen the rain-water boiling off the
trucks. And that cone there. It's a damned sight too hot for roasting
cakes. The top side of it's three hundred degrees."

"Three hundred degrees!" said Raut.

"Three hundred centigrade, mind!" said Horrocks. "It will boil the blood
out of you in no time."

"Eigh?" said Raut, and turned.

"Boil the blood out of you in... No, you don't!"

"Let me go!" screamed Raut. "Let go my arm!"

With one hand he clutched at the hand-rail, then with both. For a moment
the two men stood swaying. Then suddenly, with a violent jerk, Horrocks
had twisted him from his hold. He clutched at Horrocks and missed, his
foot went back into empty air; in mid-air he twisted himself, and then
cheek and shoulder and knee struck the hot cone together.

He clutched the chain by which the cone hung, and the thing sank an
infinitesimal amount as he struck it. A circle of glowing red appeared
about him, and a tongue of flame, released from the chaos within,
flickered up towards him. An intense pain assailed him at the knees, and
he could smell the singeing of his hands. He raised himself to his feet,
and tried to climb up the chain, and then something struck his head.
Black and shining with the moonlight, the throat of the furnace rose
about him.

Horrocks, he saw, stood above him by one of the trucks of fuel on the
rail. The gesticulating figure was bright and white in the moonlight,
and shouting, "Fizzle, you fool! Fizzle, you hunter of women! You
hot-blooded hound! Boil! Boil! Boil!"

Suddenly he caught up a handful of coal out of the truck, and flung it
deliberately, lump after lump, at Raut.

"Horrocks!" cried Raut. "Horrocks!"

He clung crying to the chain, pulling himself up from the burning of the
cone. Each missile Horrocks flung hit him. His clothes charred and
glowed, and as he struggled the cone dropped, and a rush of hot
suffocating gas whooped out and burned round him in a swift breath of
flame.

His human likeness departed from him. When the momentary red had passed,
Horrocks saw a charred, blackened figure, its head streaked with blood,
still clutching and fumbling with the chain, and writhing in agony--a
cindery animal, an inhuman, monstrous creature that began a sobbing
intermittent shriek.

Abruptly, at the sight, the ironmaster's anger passed. A deadly sickness
came upon him. The heavy odour of burning flesh came drifting up to his
nostrils. His sanity returned to him.

"God have mercy upon me!" he cried. "O God! What have I done?"

He knew the thing below him, save that it still moved and felt, was
already a dead man--that the blood of the poor wretch must be boiling in
his veins. An intense realisation of that agony came to his mind, and
overcame every other feeling. For a moment he stood irresolute, and
then, turning to the truck, he hastily tilted its contents upon the
struggling thing that had once been a man. The mass fell with a thud,
and went radiating over the cone. With the thud the shriek ended, and a
boiling confusion of smoke, dust, and flame came rushing up towards him.
As it passed, he saw the cone clear again.

Then he staggered back, and stood trembling, clinging to the rail with
both hands. His lips moved, but no words came to them.

Down below was the sound of voices and running steps. The clangour of
rolling in the shed ceased abruptly.




THE PURPLE PILEUS


Mr. Coombes was sick of life. He walked away from his unhappy home, and
sick not only of his own existence but of everybody else's, turned aside
down Gaswork Lane to avoid the town, and, crossing the wooden bridge
that goes over the canal to Starling's Cottages, was presently alone in
the damp pine woods and out of sight and sound of human habitation. He
would stand it no longer. He repeated aloud with blasphemies unusual to
him that he would stand it no longer.

He was a pale-faced little man, with dark eyes and a fine and very black
moustache. He had a very stiff, upright collar slightly frayed, that
gave him an illusory double chin, and his overcoat (albeit shabby) was
trimmed with astrachan. His gloves were a bright brown with black
stripes over the knuckles, and split at the finger ends. His appearance,
his wife had said once in the dear, dead days beyond recall--, before he
married her, that is--, was military. But now she called him--It seems a
dreadful thing to tell of between husband and wife, but she called him
"a little grub." It wasn't the only thing she had called him, either.

The row had arisen about that beastly Jennie again. Jennie was his
wife's friend, and by no invitation of Mr. Coombes, she came in every
blessed Sunday to dinner, and made a shindy all the afternoon. She was a
big, noisy girl, with a taste for loud colours and a strident laugh; and
this Sunday she had outdone all her previous intrusions by bringing in a
fellow with her, a chap as showy as herself. And Mr. Coombes, in a
starchy, clean collar and his Sunday frock-coat, had sat dumb and
wrathful at his own table, while his wife and her guests talked
foolishly and undesirably, and laughed aloud. Well, he stood that, and
after dinner (which, "as usual," was late), what must Miss Jennie do but
go to the piano and play banjo tunes, for all the world as if it were a
week-day! Flesh and blood could not endure such goings on. They would
hear next door, they would hear in the road, it was a public
announcement of their disrepute. He had to speak.

He had felt himself go pale, and a kind of rigour had affected his
respiration as he delivered himself. He had been sitting on one of the
chairs by the window--the new guest had taken possession of the
armchair. He turned his head. "Sun Day!" he said over the collar, in the
voice of one who warns. "Sun Day!" What people call a "nasty" tone, it
was.

Jennie had kept on playing, but his wife, who was looking through some
music that was piled on the top of the piano, had stared at him. "What's
wrong now?" she said; "Can't people enjoy themselves?"

"I don't mind rational 'njoyment, at all," said little Coombes, "but I
ain't a-going to have week-day tunes playing on a Sunday in this house."

"What's wrong with my playing now?" said Jennie, stopping and twirling
round on the music-stool with a monstrous rustle of flounces.

Coombes saw it was going to be a row, and opened too vigorously, as is
common with your timid, nervous men all the world over. "Steady on with
that music-stool!" said he; "It ain't made for 'eavy-weights."

"Never you mind about weights," said Jennie, incensed. "What was you
saying behind my back about my playing?"

"Surely you don't 'old with not having a bit of music on a Sunday, Mr.
Coombes?" said the new guest, leaning back in the armchair, blowing a
cloud of cigarette smoke and smiling in a kind of pitying way. And
simultaneously his wife said something to Jennie about "Never mind 'im.
You go on, Jinny."

"I do," said Mr. Coombes, addressing the new guest.

"May I arst why?" said the new guest, evidently enjoying both his
cigarette and the prospect of an argument. He was, by the bye, a lank
young man, very stylishly dressed in bright drab, with a white cravat
and a pearl and silver pin. It had been better taste to come in a black
coat, Mr. Coombes thought.

"Because," began Mr. Coombes, "it don't suit me. I'm a business man. I
'ave to study my connection. Rational 'njoyment--"

"His connection!" said Mrs. Coombes scornfully. "That's what he's always
a-saying. We got to do this, and we got to do that--"

"If you don't mean to study my connection," said Mr. Coombes, "what did
you marry me for?"

"I wonder," said Jennie, and turned back to the piano.

"I never saw such a man as you," said Mrs. Coombes.

"You've altered all round since we were married. Before--"

Then Jennie began at the tum, tum, tum again.

"Look here!" said Mr. Coombes, driven at last to revolt, standing up and
raising his voice. "I tell you I won't have that." The frock-coat heaved
with his indignation.

"No vi'lence, now," said the long young man in drab, sitting up.

"Who the juice are you?" said Mr. Coombes fiercely.

Whereupon they all began talking at once. The new guest said he was
Jennie's "intended," and meant to protect her, and Mr. Coombes said he
was welcome to do so anywhere but in his (Mr. Coombes') house; and Mrs.
Coombes said he ought to be ashamed of insulting his guests, and (as I
have already mentioned) that he was getting a regular little grub; and
the end was, that Mr. Coombes ordered his visitors out of the house, and
they wouldn't go, and so he said he would go himself. With his face
burning and tears of excitement in his eyes, he went into the passage,
and as he struggled with his overcoat--his frock-coat sleeves got
concertinaed up his arm--and gave a brush at his silk hat, Jennie began
again at the piano, and strummed him insultingly out of the house. Tum,
tum, tum. He slammed the shop door so that the house quivered. That
briefly, was the immediate making of his mood. You will perhaps begin to
understand his disgust with existence.

As he walked along the muddy path under the firs--, it was late October,
and the ditches and heaps of fir needles were gorgeous with clumps of
fungi--, he recapitulated the melancholy history of his marriage. It was
brief and commonplace enough. He now perceived with sufficient clearness
that his wife had married him out of a natural curiosity and in order to
escape from her worrying, laborious, and uncertain life in the workroom;
and, like the majority of her class, she was far too stupid to realise
that it was her duty to co-operate with him in his business. She was
greedy of enjoyment, loquacious, and socially-minded, and evidently
disappointed to find the restraints of poverty still hanging about her.
His worries exasperated her, and the slightest attempt to control her
proceedings resulted in a charge of "grumbling." Why couldn't he be
nice--as he used to be? And Coombes was such a harmless little man too,
nourished mentally on Self-Help, and with a meagre ambition of
self-denial and competition, that was to end in a "sufficiency." Then
Jennie came in as a female Mephistopheles, a gabbling chronicle of
"fellers," and was always wanting his wife to go to theatres, and "all
that." And in addition were aunts of his wife, and cousins (male and
female) to eat up capital, insult him personally, upset business
arrangements, annoy good customers, and generally blight his life. It
was not the first occasion by many that Mr. Coombes had fled his home in
wrath and indignation, and something like fear, vowing furiously and
even aloud that he wouldn't stand it, and so frothing away his energy
along the line of least resistance. But never before had he been quite
so sick of life as on this particular Sunday afternoon. The Sunday
dinner may have had its share in his despair--and the greyness of the
sky. Perhaps too, he was beginning to realise his unendurable
frustration as a business man as the consequence of his marriage.
Presently bankruptcy, and after that--Perhaps she might have reason to
repent when it was too late. And destiny, as I have already intimated,
had planted the path through the wood with evil-smelling fungi, thickly
and variously planted it, not only on the right side, but on the left.

A small shopman is in such a melancholy position, if his wife turns out
a disloyal partner. His capital is all tied up in his business, and to
leave her means to join the unemployed in some strange part of the
earth. The luxuries of divorce are beyond him altogether. So that the
good old tradition of marriage for better or worse holds inexorably for
him, and things work up to tragic culminations. Bricklayers kick their
wives to death, and dukes betray theirs; but it is among the small
clerks and shopkeepers nowadays that it comes most often to a cutting of
throats. Under the circumstances it is not so very remarkable--and you
must take it as charitably as you can--that the mind of Mr. Coombes ran
for a while on some such glorious close to his disappointed hopes, and
that he thought of razors, pistols, bread-knives, and touching letters
to the coroner denouncing his enemies by name, and praying piously for
forgiveness. After a time his fierceness gave way to melancholia. He had
been married in this very overcoat, in his first and only frock-coat
that was buttoned up beneath it. He began to recall their courting along
this very walk, his years of penurious saving to get capital, and the
bright hopefulness of his marrying days. For it all to work out like
this! Was there no sympathetic ruler anywhere in the world? He reverted
to death as a topic.

He thought of the canal he had just crossed, and doubted whether he
shouldn't stand with his head out, even in the middle, and it was while
drowning, was in his mind that the purple pileus caught his eye. He
looked at it mechanically for a moment, and stopped and stooped towards
it to pick it up, under the impression that it was some such small
leather object as a purse. Then he saw that it was the purple top of a
fungus, a peculiarly poisonous-looking purple: slimy, shiny, and
emitting a sour odour. He hesitated with his hand an inch or so from it,
and the thought of poison crossed his mind. With that he picked the
thing, and stood up again with it in his hand.

The odour was certainly strong--acrid, but by no means disgusting. He
broke off a piece, and the fresh surface was a creamy white, that
changed like magic in the space of ten seconds to a yellowish-green
colour. It was even an inviting-looking change. He broke off two other
pieces to see it repeated. They were wonderful things these fungi,
thought Mr. Coombes, and all of them the deadliest poisons, as his
father had often told him. Deadly poisons!

There is no time like the present for a rash resolve. Why not here and
now? Thought Mr. Coombes. He tasted a little piece, a very little piece
indeed--a mere crumb. It was so pungent that he almost spat it out
again, then merely hot and full-flavoured. A kind of German mustard with
a touch of horse-radish and--well, mushroom. He swallowed it in the
excitement of the moment. Did he like it or did he not? His mind was
curiously careless. He would try another bit. It really wasn't bad--it
was good. He forgot his troubles in the interest of the immediate
moment. Playing with death it was. He took another bite, and then
deliberately finished a mouthful. A curious, tingling sensation began in
his finger-tips and toes. His pulse began to move faster. The blood in
his ears sounded like a mill-race. "Try bi' more," said Mr. Coombes. He
turned and looked about him, and found his feet unsteady. He saw, and
struggled towards, a little patch of purple a dozen yards away. "Jol'
goo' stuff," said Mr. Coombes. "E--lomore ye'." He pitched forward and
fell on his face, his hands outstretched towards the cluster of pilei.
But he did not eat any more of them. He forgot forthwith.

He rolled over and sat up with a look of astonishment on his face. His
carefully brushed silk hat had rolled away towards the ditch. He pressed
his hand to his brow. Something had happened, but he could not rightly
determine what it was. Anyhow, he was no longer dull--he felt bright,
cheerful. And his throat was afire. He laughed in the sudden gaiety of
his heart. Had he been dull? He did not know; but at any rate he would
be dull no longer. He got up and stood unsteadily, regarding the
universe with an agreeable smile. He began to remember. He could not
remember very well, because of a steam roundabout that was beginning in
his head. And he knew he had been disagreeable at home, just because
they wanted to be happy. They were quite right; life should be as gay as
possible. He would go home and make it up, and reassure them. And why
not take some of this delightful toadstool with him, for them to eat? A
hatful, no less. Some of those red ones with white spots as well, and a
few yellow. He had been a dull dog, an enemy to merriment; he would make
up for it. It would be gay to turn his coat-sleeves inside out, and
stick some yellow gorse into his waistcoat pockets. Then
home--singing--for a jolly evening.


After the departure of Mr. Coombes, Jennie discontinued playing, and
turned round on the music-stool again. "What a fuss about nothing!" said
Jennie.

"You see, Mr. Clarence, what I've got to put up with," said Mrs.
Coombes.

"He is a bit hasty," said Mr. Clarence judicially.

"He ain't got the slightest sense of our position," said Mrs. Coombes;
"that's what I complain of. He cares for nothing but his old shop; and
if I have a bit of company, or buy anything to keep myself decent, or
get any little thing I want out of the housekeeping money, there's
disagreeables. 'Economy' he says; 'struggle for life,' and all that. He
lies awake of nights about it, worrying how he can screw me out of a
shilling. He wanted us to eat Dorset butter once. If once I was to give
in to him--there!"

"Of course," said Jennie.

"If a man values a woman," said Mr. Clarence, lounging back in the
armchair, "he must be prepared to make sacrifices for her. For my own
part," said Mr. Clarence, with his eye on Jennie, "I shouldn't think of
marrying till I was in a position to do the thing in style. It's
downright selfishness. A man ought to go through the rough-and-tumble by
himself, and not drag her--"

"I don't agree altogether with that," said Jennie. "I don't see why a
man shouldn't have a woman's help, provided he doesn't treat her meanly,
you know. It's meanness--"

"You wouldn't believe," said Mrs. Coombes. "But I was a fool to 'ave
'im. I might 'ave known. If it 'adn't been for my father, we shouldn't
'ave 'ad not a carriage to our wedding."

"Lord! He didn't stick out at that?" said Mr. Clarence, quite shocked.

"Said he wanted the money for his stock, or some such rubbish. Why, he
wouldn't have a woman in to help me once a week if it wasn't for my
standing out plucky. And the fusses he makes about money--comes to me
well, pretty near crying, with sheets of paper and figgers. 'If only we
can tide over this year,' he says, 'the business is bound to go.' 'If
only we can tide over this year,' I says; 'then it'll be, if only we can
tide over next year. I know you,' I says. 'And you don't catch me
screwing myself lean and ugly. Why didn't you marry a slavey?' I says,
'if you wanted one--instead of a respectable girl,' I says."

So Mrs. Coombes. But we will not follow this unedifying conversation
further. Suffice it that Mr. Coombes was very satisfactorily disposed
of, and they had a snug little time round the fire. Then Mrs. Coombes
went to get the tea, and Jennie sat coquettishly on the arm of Mr.
Clarence's chair until the tea-things clattered outside. "What was that
I heard?" asked Mrs. Coombes playfully, as she entered, and there was
badinage about kissing. They were just sitting down to the little
circular table when the first intimation of Mr. Coombes' return was
heard.

This was a fumbling at the latch of the front door.

"'Ere's my lord," said Mrs. Coombes. "Went out like a lion and comes
back like a lamb, I'll lay."

Something fell over in the shop: a chair, it sounded like. Then there
was a sound as of some complicated step exercise in the passage. Then
the door opened and Coombes appeared. But it was Coombes transfigured.
The immaculate collar had been torn carelessly from his throat. His
carefully-brushed silk hat, half-full of a crush of fungi, was under one
arm; his coat was inside out, and his waistcoat adorned with bunches of
yellow-blossomed furze. These little eccentricities of Sunday costume
however, were quite overshadowed by the change in his face; it was livid
white, his eyes were unnaturally large and bright, and his pale blue
lips were drawn back in a cheerless grin. "Merry!" he said. He had
stopped dancing to open the door. "Rational 'njoyment. Dance." He made
three fantastic steps into the room, and stood bowing.

"Jim!" shrieked Mrs. Coombes, and Mr. Clarence sat petrified, with a
dropping lower jaw.

"Tea," said Mr. Coombes. "Jol' thing, tea. Tose-stools, too. Brosher."

"He's drunk," said Jennie in a weak voice. Never before had she seen
this intense pallor in a drunken man, or such shining, dilated eyes.

Mr. Coombes held out a handful of scarlet agaric to Mr. Clarence. "Jo'
stuff," said he; "ta' some."

At that moment he was genial. Then at the sight of their startled faces
he changed, with the swift transition of insanity, into overbearing
fury. And it seemed as if he had suddenly recalled the quarrel of his
departure. In such a huge voice as Mrs. Coombes had never heard before,
he shouted, "My house. I'm master 'ere. Eat what I give yer!" He bawled
this, as it seemed, without an effort, without a violent gesture,
standing there as motionless as one who whispers, holding out a handful
of fungus.

Clarence approved himself a coward. He could not meet the mad fury in
Coombes' eyes; he rose to his feet, pushing back his chair, and turned,
stooping. At that Coombes rushed at him. Jennie saw her opportunity and,
with the ghost of a shriek, made for the door.

Mrs. Coombes followed her. Clarence tried to dodge. Over went the
tea-table with a smash as Coombes clutched him by the collar and tried
to thrust the fungus into his mouth. Clarence was content to leave his
collar behind him, and shot out into the passage with red patches of fly
agaric still adherent to his face. "Shut 'im in!" cried Mrs. Coombes,
and would have closed the door, but her supports deserted her; Jennie
saw the shop door open, and vanished thereby, locking it behind her,
while Clarence went on hastily into the kitchen. Mr. Coombes came
heavily against the door, and Mrs. Coombes, finding the key was inside,
fled upstairs and locked herself in the spare bedroom.

So the new convert to joie de vivre emerged upon the passage, his
decorations a little scattered, but that respectable hatful of fungi
still under his arm. He hesitated at the three ways, and decided on the
kitchen. Whereupon Clarence, who was fumbling with the key, gave up the
attempt to imprison his host, and fled into the scullery, only to be
captured before he could open the door into the yard. Mr. Clarence is
singularly reticent of the details of what occurred. It seems that Mr.
Coombes' transitory irritation had vanished again, and he was once more
a genial playfellow. And as there were knives and meat choppers about,
Clarence very generously resolved to humour him and so avoid anything
tragic. It is beyond dispute that Mr. Coombes played with Mr. Clarence
to his heart's content; they could not have been more playful and
familiar if they had known each other for years. He insisted gaily on
Clarence trying the fungi and, after a friendly tussle, was smitten with
remorse at the mess he was making of his guest's face. It also appears
that Clarence was dragged under the sink and his face scrubbed with the
blacking brush--, he being still resolved to humour the lunatic at any
cost--, and that finally, in a somewhat dishevelled, chipped, and
discoloured condition, he was assisted to his coat and shown out by the
back door, the shopway being barred by Jennie. Mr. Coombes' wandering
thoughts then turned to Jennie. Jennie had been unable to unfasten the
shop door, but she shot the bolts against Mr. Coombes' latchkey, and
remained in possession of the shop for the rest of the evening.

It would appear that Mr. Coombes then returned to the kitchen, still in
pursuit of gaiety, and, albeit a strict Good Templar, drank (or spilt
down the front of the first and only frock-coat) no less than five
bottles of the stout Mrs. Coombes insisted upon having for her health's
sake. He made cheerful noises by breaking off the necks of the bottles
with several of his wife's wedding-present dinner-plates, and during the
earlier part of this great drunk he sang divers merry ballads. He cut
his finger rather badly with one of the bottles--, the only bloodshed in
this story--, and what with that, and the systematic convulsion of his
inexperienced physiology by the liquorish brand of Mrs. Coombes' stout,
it may be the evil of the fungus poison was somehow allayed. But we
prefer to draw a veil over the concluding incidents of this Sunday
afternoon. They ended in the coal cellar, in a deep and healing sleep.


An interval of five years elapsed. Again it was a Sunday afternoon in
October, and again Mr. Coombes walked through the pine wood beyond the
canal. He was still the same dark-eyed, black-moustached little man that
he was at the outset of the story, but his double chin was now scarcely
so illusory as it had been. His overcoat was new, with a velvet lapel,
and a stylish collar with turn-down corners, free of any coarse
starchiness, had replaced the original all-round article. His hat was
glossy, his gloves newish--though one finger had split and been
carefully mended. And a casual observer would have noticed about him a
certain rectitude of bearing, a certain erectness of head that marks the
man who thinks well of himself. He was a master now, with three
assistants. Beside him walked a larger sunburnt parody of himself, his
brother Tom, just back from Australia. They were recapitulating their
early struggles, and Mr. Coombes had just been making a financial
statement.

"It's a very nice little business, Jim," said brother Tom. "In these
days of competition you're jolly lucky to have worked it up so. And
you're jolly lucky too, to have a wife who's willing to help like yours
does."

"Between ourselves," said Mr. Coombes, "it wasn't always so. It wasn't
always like this. To begin with, the missus was a bit giddy. Girls are
funny creatures."

"Dear me!

"Yes. You'd hardly think it, but she was downright extravagant, and
always having slaps at me. I was a bit too easy and loving, and all
that, and she thought the whole blessed show was run for her. Turned the
'ouse into a regular caravansery, always having her relations and girls
from business in, and their chaps. Comic songs a' Sunday, it was getting
to, and driving trade away. And she was making eyes at the chaps, too! I
tell you Tom, the place wasn't my own."

"Shouldn't 'a' thought it."

"It was so. Well--I reasoned with her. I said, 'I ain't a duke, to keep
a wife like a pet animal. I married you for 'elp and company.' I said,
'You got to 'elp and pull the business through.' She wouldn't 'ear of
it. 'Very well,' I says; 'I'm a mild man till I'm roused,' I says, 'and
it's getting to that.' But she wouldn't 'ear of no warnings."

"Well?"

"It's the way with women. She didn't think I 'ad it in me to be roused.
Women of her sort (between ourselves, Tom) don't respect a man until
they're a bit afraid of him. So I just broke out to show her. In comes a
girl named Jennie, that used to work with her, and her chap. We 'ad a
bit of a row, and I came out 'ere--it was just such another day as
this--and I thought it all out. Then I went back and pitched into them."

"You did?"

"I did. I was mad, I can tell you. I wasn't going to 'it 'er if I could
'elp it, so I went back and licked into this chap, just to show 'er what
I could do. 'E was a big chap, too. Well, I chucked him, and smashed
things about, and gave 'er a scaring, and she ran up and locked 'erself
into the spare room."

"Well?"

"That's all. I says to 'er the next morning, 'Now you know,' I says,
'what I'm like when I'm roused.' And I didn't have to say anything
more."

"And you've been happy ever after, eh?"

"So to speak. There's nothing like putting your foot down with them. If
it 'adn't been for that afternoon I should 'a' been tramping the roads
now, and she'd 'a' been grumbling at me, and all her family grumbling
for bringing her to poverty--I know their little ways. But we're all
right now. And it's a very decent little business, as you say."

They proceeded on their way meditatively. "Women are funny creatures,"
said Brother Tom. "They want a firm hand," says Coombes.

"What a lot of these funguses there are about here!" remarked Brother
Tom presently. "I can't see what use they are in the world."

Mr. Coombes looked. "I dessay they're sent for some wise purpose," said
Mr. Coombes.

And that was as much thanks as the purple pileus ever got for maddening
this absurd little man to the pitch of decisive action, and so altering
the whole course of his life.




THE JILTING OF JANE


As I sit writing in my study, I can hear our Jane bumping her way
downstairs with a brush and dustpan. She used to, in the old days, sing
hymn tunes, or the British national song, for the time being, to these
instruments, but latterly she has been silent and even careful over her
work. Time was when I prayed with fervour for such silence, and my wife
with sighs for such care, but now they have come, we are not so glad as
we might have anticipated we should be. Indeed, I would rejoice
secretly, though it may be unmanly weakness to admit it, even to hear
Jane sing "Daisy," or, by the fracture of any plate but one of
Euphemia's best green ones, to learn that the period of brooding has
come to an end.

Yet how we longed to hear the last of Jane's young man before we heard
the last of him! Jane was always very free with her conversation to my
wife, and discoursed admirably in the kitchen on a variety of topics--so
well, indeed, that I sometimes left my study door open--our house is a
small one--to partake of it. But after William came, it was always
William, nothing but William; William this and William that; and when we
thought William was worked out and exhausted altogether, then William
all over again. The engagement lasted altogether three years; yet how
she got introduced to William, and so became thus saturated with him,
was always a secret. For my part, I believe it was at the street corner
where the Reverend Barnabas Baux used to hold an open-air service after
evensong on Sundays. Young Cupids were wont to flit like moths round the
paraffin flare of that centre of High Church hymn-singing. I fancy she
stood singing hymns there, out of memory and her imagination, instead of
coming home to get supper, and William came up beside her and said,
"Hello!" "Hello yourself!" she said; and etiquette being satisfied, they
proceeded to converse.

As Euphemia has a reprehensible way of letting her servants talk to her,
she soon heard of him. "He is such a respectable young man, ma'am," said
Jane, "you don't know." Ignoring the slur cast on her acquaintance, my
wife inquired further about this William.

"He is second porter at Maynard's, the draper's," said Jane, "and gets
eighteen shillings--nearly a pound--a week, m'm; and when the head
porter leaves he will be head porter. His relatives are quite superior
people, m'm. Not labouring people at all. His father was a greengrosher,
m'm, and had a chumor, and he was bankrup' twice. And one of his sisters
is in a Home for the Dying. It will be a very good match for me, m'm,"
said Jane, "me being an orphan girl."

"Then you are engaged to him?" asked my wife.

"Not engaged, ma'am; but he is saving money to buy a ring--hammyfist."

"Well, Jane, when you are properly engaged to him you may ask him round
here on Sunday afternoons, and have tea with him in the kitchen;" for my
Euphemia has a motherly conception of her duty towards her
maid-servants. And presently the amethystine ring was being worn about
the house, even with ostentation, and Jane developed a new way of
bringing in the joint so that this gage was evident. The elder Miss
Maitland was aggrieved by it, and told my wife that servants ought not
to wear rings. But my wife looked it up in Enquire Within and Mrs.
Motherly's Book of Household Management, and found no prohibition. So
Jane remained with this happiness added to her love.

The treasure of Jane's heart appeared to me to be what respectable
people call a very deserving young man. "William, ma'am," said Jane one
day suddenly, with ill-concealed complacency, as she counted out the
beer bottles, "William, ma'am, is a teetotaller. Yes, m'm; and he don't
smoke. Smoking, ma'am," said Jane, as one who reads the heart, "do make
such a dust about. Beside the waste of money. And the smell. However, I
suppose it's necessary to some."

Possibly it dawned on Jane that she was reflecting a little severely
upon Euphemia's comparative ill-fortune, and she added kindly, "I'm sure
the master is a hangel when his pipe's alight. Compared to other times."

William was at first a rather shabby young man of the ready-made black
coat school of costume. He had watery gray eyes, and a complexion
appropriate to the brother of one in a Home for the Dying. Euphemia did
not fancy him very much, even at the beginning. His eminent
respectability was vouched for by an alpaca umbrella, from which he
never allowed himself to be parted.

"He goes to chapel," said Jane. "His papa, ma'am--"

"His what, Jane?"

"His papa, ma'am, was Church: but Mr. Maynard is a Plymouth Brother, and
William thinks it Policy, ma'am, to go there too. Mr. Maynard comes and
talks to him quite friendly when they ain't busy, about using up all the
ends of string, and about his soul. He takes a lot of notice, do Mr.
Maynard, of William, and the way he saves string and his soul, ma'am."

Presently we heard that the head porter at Maynard's had left, and that
William was head porter at twenty-three shillings a week. "He is really
kind of over the man who drives the van," said Jane, "and him married,
with three children." And she promised in the pride of her heart to make
interest for us with William to favour us so that we might get our
parcels of drapery from Maynard's with exceptional promptitude.

After this promotion a rapidly increasing prosperity came upon Jane's
young man. One day we learned that Mr. Maynard had given William a book.
"Smiles' Elp Yourself, it's called," said Jane; "but it ain't comic. It
tells you how to get on in the world, and some what William read to me
was lovely, ma'am."

Euphemia told me of this, laughing, and then she became suddenly grave.
"Do you know, dear," she said, "Jane said one thing I did not like. She
had been quiet for a minute, and then she suddenly remarked, 'William is
a lot above me, ma'am, ain't he?'"

"I don't see anything in that," I said, though later my eyes were to be
opened.

One Sunday afternoon about that time I was sitting at my
writing-desk--possibly I was reading a good book--when a something went
by the window. I heard a startled exclamation behind me, and saw
Euphemia with her hands clasped together and her eyes dilated. "George,"
she said in an awe-stricken whisper, "did you see?"

Then we both spoke to one another at the same moment, slowly and
solemnly: "A silk hat! Yellow gloves! A new umbrella!"

"It may be my fancy, dear," said Euphemia; "but his tie was very like
yours. I believe Jane keeps him in ties. She told me a little while ago,
in a way that implied volumes about the rest of your costume, 'The
master do wear pretty ties, ma'am.' And he echoes all your novelties."

The young couple passed our window again on their way to their customary
walk. They were arm in arm. Jane looked exquisitely proud, happy, and
uncomfortable, with new white cotton gloves, and William, in the silk
hat, singularly genteel!

That was the culmination of Jane's happiness. When she returned, "Mr.
Maynard has been talking to William, ma'am," she said, "and he is to
serve customers, just like the young shop gentlemen, during the next
sale. And if he gets on, he is to be made an assistant, ma'am, at the
first opportunity. He has got to be as gentlemanly as he can, ma'am; and
if he ain't, ma'am, he says it won't be for want of trying. Mr. Maynard
has took a great fancy to him."

"He is getting on, Jane," said my wife.

"Yes, ma'am," said Jane thoughtfully; "he is getting on."

And she sighed.

That next Sunday as I drank my tea I interrogated my wife. "How is this
Sunday different from all other Sundays, little woman? What has
happened? Have you altered the curtains, or rearranged the furniture, or
where is the indefinable difference of it? Are you wearing your hair in
a new way without warning me? I clearly perceive a change in my
environment, and I cannot for the life of me say what it is."

Then my wife answered in her most tragic voice, "George," she said,
"that--that William has not come near the place to-day! And Jane is
crying her heart out upstairs."

There followed a period of silence. Jane, as I have said, stopped
singing about the house, and began to care for our brittle possessions,
which struck my wife as being a very sad sign indeed. The next Sunday,
and the next, Jane asked to go out, "To walk with William," and my wife,
who never attempts to extort confidences, gave her permission, and asked
no questions. On each occasion Jane came back looking flushed and very
determined. At last one day she became communicative.

"William is being led away," she remarked abruptly, with a catching of
the breath, apropos of tablecloths. "Yes, ma'am. She is a milliner, and
she can play on the piano."

"I thought," said my wife, "that you went out with him on Sunday."

"Not out with him, m'm--after him. I walked along by the side of them,
and told her he was engaged to me."

"Dear me, Jane, did you? What did they do?"

"Took no more notice of me than if I was dirt. So I told her she should
suffer for it."

"It could not have been a very agreeable walk, Jane."

"Not for no parties, ma'am."

"I wish," said Jane, "I could play the piano, ma'am. But anyhow, I don't
mean to let her get him away from me. She's older than him, and her hair
ain't gold to the roots, ma'am."

It was on the August Bank Holiday that the crisis came. We do not
clearly know the details of the fray, but only such fragments as poor
Jane let fall. She came home dusty, excited, and with her heart hot
within her.

The milliner's mother, the milliner, and William had made a party to the
Art Museum at South Kensington, I think. Anyhow, Jane had calmly but
firmly accosted them somewhere in the streets, and asserted her right to
what, in spite of the consensus of literature, she held to be her
inalienable property. She did, I think, go so far as to lay hands on
him. They dealt with her in a crushingly superior way. They "called a
cab." There was a "scene," William being pulled away into the
four-wheeler by his future wife and mother-in-law from the reluctant
hands of our discarded Jane. There were threats of giving her "in
charge."

"My poor Jane!" said my wife, mincing veal as though she was mincing
William. "It's a shame of them. I would think no more of him. He is not
worthy of you."

"No, m'm," said Jane. "He is weak.

"But it's that woman has done it," said Jane. She was never known to
bring herself to pronounce "that woman's" name or to admit her
girlishness. "I can't think what minds some women must have--to try and
get a girl's young man away from her. But there, it only hurts to talk
about it," said Jane.

Thereafter our house rested from William. But there was something in the
manner of Jane's scrubbing the front doorstep or sweeping out the rooms,
a certain viciousness, that persuaded me that the story had not yet
ended.

"Please, m'm, may I go and see a wedding to-morrow?" said Jane one day.

My wife knew by instinct whose wedding. "Do you think it is wise, Jane?"
she said.

"I would like to see the last of him," said Jane.

"My dear," said my wife, fluttering into my room about twenty minutes
after Jane had started, "Jane has been to the boot-hole and taken all
the left-off boots and shoes, and gone off to the wedding with them in a
bag. Surely she cannot mean--"

"Jane," I said, "is developing character. Let us hope for the best."

Jane came back with a pale, hard face. All the boots seemed to be still
in her bag, at which my wife heaved a premature sigh of relief. We heard
her go upstairs and replace the boots with considerable emphasis.

"Quite a crowd at the wedding, ma'am," she said presently, in a purely
conversational style, sitting in our little kitchen, and scrubbing the
potatoes; "and such a lovely day for them." She proceeded to numerous
other details, clearly avoiding some cardinal incident.

"It was all extremely respectable and nice, ma'am; but her father didn't
wear a black coat, and looked quite out of place, ma'am. Mr.
Piddingquirk--"

"Who?"

"Mr. Piddingquirk--William that was, ma'am--had white gloves, and a coat
like a clergyman, and a lovely chrysanthemum. He looked so nice, ma'am.
And there was red carpet down, just like for gentlefolks. And they say
he gave the clerk four shillings, ma'am. It was a real kerridge they
had--not a fly. When they came out of church there was rice-throwing,
and her two little sisters dropping dead flowers. And someone threw a
slipper, and then I threw a boot--"

"Threw a boot, Jane!"

"Yes, ma'am. Aimed at her. But it hit him. Yes, ma'am, hard. Gev him a
black eye, I should think. I only threw that one. I hadn't the heart to
try again. All the little boys cheered when it hit him."

After an interval--"I am sorry the boot hit him."

Another pause. The potatoes were being scrubbed violently. "He always
was a bit above me, you know, ma'am. And he was led away."

The potatoes were more than finished. Jane rose sharply with a sigh, and
rapped the basin down on the table.

"I don't care," she said. "I don't care a rap. He will find out his
mistake yet. It serves me right. I was stuck up about him. I ought not
to have looked so high. And I am glad things are as things are."

My wife was in the kitchen, seeing to the cookery. After the confession
of the boot-throwing, she must have watched poor Jane fuming with a
certain dismay in those brown eyes of hers. But I imagine they softened
again very quickly, and then Jane's must have met them.

"Oh, ma'am," said Jane, with an astonishing change of note, "think of
all that might have been! Oh, ma'am, I could have been so happy! I ought
to have known, but I didn't know... You're very kind to let me talk to
you, ma'am... for it's hard on me, ma'am... it's har-r-r-r-d--"

And I gather that Euphemia so far forgot herself as to let Jane sob out
some of the fullness of her heart on a sympathetic shoulder. My
Euphemia, thank Heaven, has never properly grasped the importance of
"keeping up her position." And since that fit of weeping, much of the
accent of bitterness has gone out of Jane's scrubbing and brush-work.

Indeed, something passed the other day with the butcher-boy--but that
scarcely belongs to this story. However, Jane is young still, and time
and change are at work with her. We all have our sorrows, but I do not
believe very much in the existence of sorrows that never heal.




IN THE MODERN VEIN: AN UNSYMPATHETIC LOVE STORY


Of course the cultivated reader has heard of Aubrey Vair. He has
published on three separate occasions, volumes of delicate verses--,
some indeed, border on indelicacy--, and his column, "Of Things
Literary" in the Climax, is well known. His Byronic visage and an
interview have appeared in the Perfect Lady. It was Aubrey Vair, I
believe, who demonstrated that the humour of Dickens was worse than his
sentiment, and who detected "a subtle bourgeois flavour" in Shakespeare.
However, it is not generally known that Aubrey Vair has had erotic
experiences as well as erotic inspirations. He adopted Goethe some
little time since as his literary prototype, and that may have had
something to do with his temporary lapse from sexual integrity.

For it is one of the commonest things that undermine literary men,
giving us landslips and picturesque effects along the otherwise even
cliff of their respectable life, ranking next to avarice, and certainly
above drink, this instability called genius, or more fully, the
consciousness of genius, such as Aubrey Vair possessed. Since Shelley
set the fashion, your man of gifts has been assured that his duty to
himself and his duty to his wife are incompatible, and his renunciation
of the Philistine has been marked by such infidelity as his means and
courage warranted. Most virtue is lack of imagination. At any rate, a
minor genius without his affections twisted into an inextricable muddle,
and who did not occasionally shed sonnets over his troubles, I have
never met.

Even Aubrey Vair did this, weeping the sonnets overnight into his
blotting-book, and pretending to write literary causerie when his wife
came down in her bath slippers to see what kept him up. She did not
understand him, of course. He did this before the other woman appeared,
so ingrained is conjugal treachery in the talented mind. Indeed, he
wrote more sonnets before the other woman came than after that event,
because thereafter he spent much of his leisure in cutting down the old
productions, retrimming them, and generally altering this ready-made
clothing of his passion to suit her particular height and complexion.

Aubrey Vair lived in a little red villa with a lawn at the back and a
view of the Downs behind Reigate. He lived upon discreet investment eked
out by literary work. His wife handsome, sweet, and gentle, and--such is
the tender humility of good married women--she found her life's
happiness in seeing that little Aubrey Vair had well cooked variety for
dinner, and that their house was the neatest and brightest of all the
houses they entered. Aubrey Vair enjoyed the dinners, and was proud of
the house, yet nevertheless he mourned because his genius dwindled.
Moreover, he grew plump, and corpulence threatened him.

We learn in suffering what we teach in song, and Aubrey Vair knew
certainly that his soul could give no creditable crops unless his
affections were harrowed. And how to harrow them was the trouble, for
Reigate is a moral neighbourhood.

So Aubrey Vair's romantic longings blew loose for a time, much as a
seedling creeper might, planted in the midst of a flower-bed. But at
last, in the fulness of time, the other woman came to the embrace of
Aubrey Vair's yearning heart-tendrils, and his romantic episode
proceeded as is here faithfully written down.

The other woman was really a girl, and Aubrey Vair met her first at a
tennis party at Redhill. Aubrey Vair did not play tennis after the
accident to Miss Morton's eye, and because latterly it made him pant and
get warmer and moister than even a poet should be; and this young lady
had only recently arrived in England, and could not play. So they
gravitated into the two vacant basket chairs beside Mrs. Bayne's deaf
aunt, in front of the hollyhocks, and were presently talking at their
ease together.

The other woman's name was unpropitious--, Miss Smith--, but you would
never have suspected it from her face and costume. Her parentage was
promising, she was an orphan, her mother was a Hindoo, and her father an
Indian civil servant; and Aubrey Vair--himself a happy mixture of Kelt
and Teuton, as indeed, all literary men have to be nowadays--naturally
believed in the literary consequences of a mixture of races. She was
dressed in white. She had finely moulded pale features, great depth of
expression, and a cloud of delicately frise black hair over her dark
eyes, and she looked at Aubrey Vair with a look half curious and half
shy, that contrasted admirably with the stereotyped frankness of your
common Reigate girl.

"This is a splendid lawn--the best in Redhill," said Aubrey Vair in the
course of the conversation; "and I like it all the better because the
daisies are spared." He indicated the daisies with a graceful sweep of
his rather elegant hand.

"They are sweet little flowers," said the lady in white, "and I have
always associated them with England, chiefly perhaps, through a picture
I saw 'over there' when I was very little, of children making daisy
chains. I promised myself that pleasure when I came home. But, alas! I
feel now rather too large for such delights."

"I do not see why we should not be able to enjoy these simple pleasures
as we grow older--why our growth should have in it so much forgetting.
For my own part--"

"Has your wife got Jane's recipe for stuffing trout?" asked Mrs. Bayne's
deaf aunt abruptly.

"I really don't know," said Aubrey Vair.

"That's all right," said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt. "It ought to please
even you."

"Anything will please me," said Aubrey Vair; "I care very little--"

"Oh, it's a lovely dish," said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt, and relapsed into
contemplation.

"I was saying," said Aubrey Vair, "that I think I still find my keenest
pleasures in childish pastimes. I have a little nephew that I see a
great deal of, and when we fly kites together, I am sure it would be
hard to tell which of us is the happier. By the bye, you should get at
your daisy chains in that way. Beguile some little girl."

"But I did. I took that Morton mite for a walk in the meadows, and
timidly broached the subject. And she reproached me suggesting
'frivolous pursuits.' It was a horrible disappointment."

"The governess here," said Aubrey Vair, "is robbing that child of its
youth in a terrible way. What will a life be that has no childhood at
the beginning?

"Some human beings are never young," he continued, "and they never grow
up. They lead absolutely colourless lives. They are--they are etiolated.
They never love, and never feel the loss of it. They are--for the moment
I can think of no better image--they are human flower-pots, in which no
soul has been planted. But a human soul properly growing must begin in a
fresh childishness."

"Yes," said the dark lady thoughtfully, "a careless childhood, running
wild almost. That should be the beginning."

"Then we pass through the wonder and diffidence of youth."

"To strength and action," said the dark lady. Her dreamy eyes were fixed
on the Downs, and her fingers tightened on her knees as she spoke. "Ah,
it is a grand thing to live--as a man does--self-reliant and free."

"And so at last," said Aubrey Vair, "come to the culmination and crown
of life." He paused and glanced hastily at her. Then he dropped his
voice almost to a whisper--"And the culmination of life is love."

Their eyes met for a moment, but she looked away at once. Aubrey Vair
felt a peculiar thrill and a catching in his breath, but his emotions
were too complex for analysis. He had a certain sense of surprise also,
at the way his conversation had developed.

Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt suddenly dug him in the chest with her
ear-trumpet, and someone at tennis bawled, "Love all!"

"Did I tell you Jane's girls have had scarlet fever?" asked Mrs. Bayne's
deaf aunt.

"No," said Aubrey Vair.

"Yes; and they are peeling now," said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt, shutting
her lips tightly, and nodding in a slow, significant manner at both of
them.

There was a pause. All three seemed lost in thought, too deep for words.

"Love," began Aubrey Vair presently, in a severely philosophical tone,
leaning back in his chair, holding his hands like a praying saint's in
front of him, and staring at the toe of his shoe--, "love is, I believe,
the one true and real thing in life. It rises above reason, interest, or
explanation. Yet I never read of an age when it was so much forgotten as
it is now. Never was love expected to run so much in appointed channels,
never was it so despised, checked, ordered, and obstructed. Policeman
say, 'This way, Eros!' As a result, we relieve our emotional
possibilities in the hunt for gold and notoriety. And after all, with
the best fortune in these, we only hold up the glided images of our
success, and are weary slaves, with unsatisfied hearts, in the pageant
of life."

Aubrey Vair sighed, and there was a pause. The girl looked at him out of
the mysterious darkness of her eyes. She had read many books, but Aubrey
Vair was her first literary man, and she took this kind of thing for
genius--as girls have done before.

"We are," continued Aubrey Vair, conscious of a favourable impression--,
"we are like fireworks, mere dead, inert things until the appointed
spark comes; and then--if it is not damp--the dormant soul blazes forth
in all its warmth and beauty. That is living. I sometimes think, do you
know, that we should be happier if we could die soon after that golden
time, like the Ephemerides. There is a decay sets in."

"Eigh?" said Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt startlingly. "I didn't hear you."

"I was on the point of remarking," shouted Aubrey Vair, wheeling the
array of his thoughts--, "I was on the point of remarking that few
people in Redhill could match Mrs. Morton's fine broad green."

"Others have noticed it." Mrs. Bayne's deaf aunt shouted back. "It is
since she has had in her new false teeth."

This interruption dislocated the conversation a little. However--

"I must thank you, Mr. Vair," said the dark girl, when they parted that
afternoon, "for having given me very much to think about."

And from her manner, Aubrey Vair perceived clearly he had not wasted his
time.


It would require a subtler pen than mine to tell how from that day a
passion for Miss Smith grew like Jonah's gourd in the heart of Aubrey
Vair. He became pensive, and in the prolonged absence of Miss Smith,
irritable. Mrs. Aubrey Vair felt the change in him, and put it down to
vitriolic Saturday Reviewer. Indisputably the Saturday does at times go
a little far. He re-read Elective Affinities, and lent it to Miss Smith.
Incredible as it may appear to members of the Areopagus Club, where we
know Aubrey Vair, he did also beyond all question inspire a sort of
passion in that sombre-eyed, rather clever, and really very beautiful
girl.

He talked to her a lot about love and destiny, and all that bric-a-brac
of the minor poet. And they talked together about his genius. He
elaborately, though discreetly, sought her society, and presented and
read to her the milder of his unpublished sonnets. We consider his
Byronic features pasty, but the feminine mind has its own laws. I
suppose, also where a girl is not a fool, a literary man has an enormous
advantage over anyone but a preacher, in the show he can make of his
heart's wares.

At last a day in that summer came when he met her alone, possibly by
chance, in a quiet lane towards Horley. There were ample hedges on
either side, rich with honeysuckle, vetch, and mullein.

They conversed intimately of his poetic ambitions, and then he read her
those verses of his subsequently published in 'Hobson's Magazine':
"Tenderly ever, since I have met thee." He had written these the day
before; and though I think the sentiment is uncommonly trite, there is a
redeeming note of sincerity about the lines not conspicuous in all
Aubrey Vair's poetry.

He read rather well, and a swell of genuine emotion crept into his voice
as he read, with one white hand thrown out to point the rhythm of the
lines. "Ever, my sweet, for thee," he concluded, looking up into her
face.

Before he looked up, he had been thinking chiefly of his poem and its
effect. Straightway he forgot it. Her arms hung limply before her, and
her hands were clasped together. Her eyes were very tender.

"Your verses go to the heart," she said softly.

Her mobile features were capable of wonderful shades of expression. He
suddenly forgot his wife and his position as a minor poet as he looked
at her. It is possible that his classical features may themselves have
undergone a certain transfiguration. For one brief moment--and it was
always to linger in his memory--destiny lifted him out of his vain
little self to a nobler level of simplicity. The copy of "Tenderly ever"
fluttered from his hand. Considerations vanished. Only one thing seemed
of importance.

"I love you," he said abruptly.

An expression of fear came into her eyes. The grip of her hands upon one
another tightened convulsively. She became very pale.

Then she moved her lips as if to speak, bringing her face slightly
nearer to his. There was nothing in the world at that moment for either
of them but one another. They were both trembling exceedingly. In a
whisper she said, "You love me?"

Aubrey Vair stood quivering and speechless, looking into her eyes. He
never seen such a light as he saw there before. He was in a wild tumult
of emotion. He was dreadfully scared at what he had done. He could not
say another word. He nodded.

"And this has come to me?" she said presently, in the same awe-stricken
whisper, and then, "Oh, my love, my love!"

And thereupon Aubrey Vair had her clasped to himself, her cheek upon his
shoulder and his lips to hers.

Thus it was that Aubrey Vair came by the cardinal memory of his life. To
this day it recurs in his works.

A little boy clambering in the hedge some way down the lane saw this
group with surprise, and then with scorn and contempt. Reckoning nothing
of his destiny, he turned away feeling that he at least could never come
to the unspeakable unmanliness of hugging girls. Unhappily for Reigate
scandal, his shame for his sex was altogether too deep for words.


An hour after, Aubrey Vair returned home in a hushed mood. There were
muffins after his own heart for his tea--Mrs. Aubrey Vair had had hers.
And there were chrysanthemums, chiefly white ones--, flowers he loved--,
set out in the china bowl he was wont to praise. And his wife came
behind him to kiss him as he sat eating.

"De lill Jummuns," she remarked, kissing him under the ear.

Then it came into the mind of Aubrey Vair with startling clearness,
while his ear was being kissed, and with his mouth full of muffin, that
life is a singularly complex thing.


The summer passed at last into the harvest-time, and the leaves began
falling. It was evening, the warm sunset light still touched the Downs,
but up the valley a blue haze was creeping. One or two lamps in Reigate
were already alight.

About halfway up the slanting road that scales the Downs, there is a
wooden seat where one may obtain a fine view of the red villas scattered
below, and of the succession of blue hills beyond. Here the girl with
the shadowy face was sitting.

She had a book on her knees, but it lay neglected. She was leaning
forward, her chin resting upon her hand, She was looking across the
valley into the darkening sky, with troubled eyes.

Aubrey Vair appeared through the hazel-bushes, and sat down beside her.
He held half a dozen dead leaves in his hand.

She did not alter her attitude. "Well?" she said.

"Is it to be flight?" he asked.

Aubrey Vair was rather pale. He had been having bad nights latterly,
with dreams of the Continental Express, Mrs. Aubrey Vair possibly even
in pursuit--, he always fancied her making the tragedy, ridiculous by
tearfully bringing additional pairs of socks, and any such trifles he
had forgotten, with her--, all Reigate and Redhill in commotion. He had
never eloped before, and he had visions of difficulties with hotel
proprietors. Mrs. Aubrey Vair might telegraph ahead. Even he had, had a
prophetic vision of a headline in a halfpenny evening newspaper: "Young
Lady abducts a Minor Poet." So there was a quaver in his voice as he
asked, "Is it to be flight?"

"As you will," she answered, still not looking at him.

"I want you to consider particularly how this will affect you. A man,"
said Aubrey Vair, slowly, and staring hard at the leaves in his hand,
"even gains a certain eclat in these affairs. But to a woman it is
ruin--social, moral."

"This is not love," said the girl in white.

"Ah, my dearest! Think of yourself."

"Stupid!" she said, under her breath.

"You spoke?"

"Nothing."

"But cannot we go on, meeting one another, loving one another, without
any great scandal or misery? Could we not--"

"That," interrupted Miss Smith, "would be unspeakably horrible."

"This is a dreadful conversation to me. Life is so intricate, such a web
of subtle strands binds us this way and that. I cannot tell what is
right. You must consider--"

"A man would break such strands."

"There is no manliness," said Aubrey Vair, with a sudden glow of moral
exaltation, "in doing wrong. My love--"

"We could at least die together, dearest," she said.

"Good Lord!" said Aubrey Vair. "I mean--consider my wife."

"You have not considered her hitherto."

"There is a flavour--of cowardice, of desertion, about suicide," said
Aubrey Vair. "Frankly, I have the English prejudice, and do not like any
kind of running away."

Miss Smith smiled very faintly. "I see clearly now what I did not see.
My love and yours are very different things."

"Possibly it is a sexual difference," said Aubrey Vair; and then,
feeling the remark inadequate, he relapsed into silence.

They sat for some time without a word. The two lights in Reigate below
multiplied to a score of bright points, and above, one star had become
visible. She began laughing, an almost noiseless, hysterical laugh that
jarred unaccountably upon Aubrey Vair.

Presently she stood up. "They will wonder where I am," she said. "I
think I must be going."

He followed her to the road. "Then this is the end?" he said, with a
curious mixture of relief and poignant regret.

"Yes, this is the end," she answered, and turned away.

There straightway dropped into the soul of Aubrey Vair a sense of
infinite loss. It was an altogether new sensation. She was perhaps
twenty yards away, when he groaned aloud with the weight of it, and
suddenly began running after her with his arms extended.

"Annie," he cried--, "Annie! I have been talking rot. Annie, now I know
I love you! I cannot spare you. This must not be. I did not understand."

The weight was horrible.

"Oh, stop, Annie!" he cried, with a breaking voice, and there were tears
on his face.

She turned upon him suddenly, and his arms fell by his side. His
expression changed at the sight of her pale face.

"You do not understand," she said. "I have said good-bye."

She looked at him; he was evidently greatly distressed, a little out of
breath, and he had just stopped blubbering. His contemptible quality
reached the pathetic. She came up close to him, and taking his damp
Byronic visage between her hands, she kissed him again and again.
"Good-bye, little man that I loved," she said; "and good-bye to this
folly of love."

Then, with something that may have been a laugh or a sob--, she herself,
when she came to write it all in her novel, did not know which--, she
turned and hurried away again, and went out of the path that Aubrey Vair
must pursue, at the cross-roads.

Aubrey Vair stood, where she had kissed him, with a mind as inactive as
his body, until her white dress had disappeared. Then he gave an
involuntary sigh, a large exhaustive expiration, and so awoke himself,
and began walking, pensively dragging his feet through the dead leaves,
home. Emotions are terrible things.


"Do you like the potatoes, dear?" asked Mrs. Aubrey Vair at dinner. "I
cooked them myself."

Aubrey Vair descended slowly from cloudy, impalpable meditations to the
level of fried potatoes. "These potatoes--" he remarked, after a pause
during which he was struggling with recollection. "Yes. These potatoes
have exactly the tints of the dead leaves of the hazel."

"What a fanciful poet it is!" said Mrs. Aubrey Vair. "Taste them. They
are very nice potatoes indeed."




A CATASTROPHE


The little shop was not paying. The realisation came insensibly. Winslow
was not the man for definite addition and subtraction and sudden
discovery. He became aware of the truth in his mind gradually, as though
it had always been there. A lot of facts had converged and led him
there. There was that line of cretonnes--four half-pieces--untouched,
save for half a yard sold to cover a stool. There were those shirting at
4 3/4d.--Bandersnatch, in the Broadway, was selling them at 2
3/4d.--under cost, in fact. (Surely Bandersnatch might let a man live!)
Those servants' caps, a selling line, needed replenishing, and that
brought back the memory of Winslow's sole wholesale dealers, Helter,
Skelter, and Grab. Why! How about their account?

Winslow stood with a big green box on the counter before him when he
thought of it. His pale grey eyes grew a little rounder; his pale,
straggling moustache twitched. He had been drifting along, day after
day. He went round to the ramshackle cash-desk in the corner--it was
Winslow's weakness to sell his goods over the counter, give his
customers a duplicate bill, and then dodge into the desk to receive the
money, as though he doubted his own honesty. His lank forefinger, with
the prominent joints, ran down the bright little calendar ("Clack's
Cottons last for All Time"). "One--two--three; three weeks an' a day!"
said Winslow, staring. "March! Only three weeks and a day. It can't be."

"Tea dear," said Mrs. Winslow, opening the door with the glass window
and the white blind that communicated with the parlour.

"One minute," said Winslow, and began unlocking the desk.

An irritable old gentleman, very hot and red about the face, and in a
heavy fur-lined coat, came in noisily. Mrs. Winslow vanished.

"Ugh!" said the old gentleman. "Pocket-handkerchief."

"Yes, sir," said Winslow. "About what price--"

"Ugh!" said the old gentleman. "Poggit-handkerchief, quig!"

Winslow began to feel flustered. He produced two boxes.

"These sir--" began Winslow.

"Sheed tin!" said the old gentleman, clutching the stiffness of the
linen. "Wad to blow my nose--not haggit about."

"A cotton one, p'raps, sir?" said Winslow.

"How much?" said the old gentleman over the handkerchief.

"Sevenpence, sir. There's nothing more I can show you? No ties,
braces--?"

"Damn!" said the old gentleman, fumbling in his ticket-pocket, and
finally producing half a crown. Winslow looked round for his metallic
duplicate-book which he kept in various fixtures, according to
circumstances, and then he caught the old gentleman's eye. He went
straight to the desk at once and got the change, with an entire
disregard of routine of the shop.

Winslow was always more or less excited by a customer. But the open desk
reminded him of his trouble. It did not come back to him all at once. He
heard a finger-nail softly tapping on the glass, and looking up saw
Minnie's eyes over the blind. It seemed like retreat opening. He shut
and locked the desk, and went into the back room to tea.

But he was preoccupied. Three weeks and a day! He took unusually large
bites of his bread and butter, and stared hard at the little pot of jam.
He answered Minnie's conversational advances distractedly. The shadow of
Helter, Skelter, and Grab lay upon the tea-table. He was struggling with
this new idea of failure, the tangible realisation that was taking shape
and substance, condensing, as it were, out of the misty uneasiness of
many days. At present it was simply one concrete fact; there were
thirty-nine pounds left in the bank, and that day three weeks Messrs.
Helter, Skelter, and Grab, those enterprising outfitters of young men,
would demand their eighty pounds.

After tea there was a customer or so--small purchases: some muslin and
buckram, dress-protectors, tape, and a pair of Lisle hose. Then, knowing
that Black Care was lurking in the dusky corners of the shop, he lit the
three lamps early and set to, refolding his cotton prints, the most
vigorous and least meditative proceeding of which he could think. He
could see Minnie's shadow in the other room as she moved about the
table. She was busy turning an old dress. He had a walk after supper,
looked in at the Y.M.C.A., but found no one to talk to, and finally went
to bed. Minnie was already there. And there too, waiting for him,
nudging him gently, until about midnight he was hopelessly awake, sat
Black Care.

He had, had one or two nights lately in that company, but this was much
worse. First came Messrs. Helter, Skelter, and Garb, and their demand
for eighty pounds--an enormous sum when your original capital was only a
hundred and seventy. They camped, as it were, before him, sat down and
beleaguered him. He clutched feebly at the circumambient darkness for
expedients. Suppose he had a sale, sold things for almost anything? He
tried to imagine a sale miraculously successful in some unexpected
manner, and mildly profitable, in spite of reductions below cost. Then
Bandersnatch Limited, 101, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107 Broadway, joined the
siege, a long caterpillar of frontage, a battery of shop fronts, wherein
things were sold at a farthing above cost. How could he fight such an
establishment? Besides, what had he to sell? He began to review his
resources. What taking line was there to bait the sale? Then straightway
came those pieces of cretonne, yellow and black, with a bluish-green
flower; those discredited skirtings, prints without buoyancy,
skirmishing haberdashery, some despairful four-button gloves by an
inferior maker--a hopeless crew. And that was his force against
Bandersnatch, Helter, Skelter, and Grab, and the pitiless world behind
them. Whatever had made him think a mortal would buy such things? Why
had he bought this and neglected that? He suddenly realised the
intensity of his hatred for Helter, Skelter, and Grab's salesman. Then
he drove towards an agony of self-reproach. He had spent too much on
that cash-desk. What real need was there of a desk? He saw his vanity of
that desk in a lurid glow of self-discovery. And the lamps? Five pounds!
Then suddenly, with what was almost physical pain, he remembered the
rent.

He groaned and turned over. And there, dim in the darkness, was the
hummock of Mrs. Winslow's shoulder. That set him off in another
direction. He became acutely sensible of Minnie's want of feeling. Here
he was, worried to death about business, and she sleeping like a little
child. He regretted having married, with that infinite bitterness that
only comes to the human heart in the small hours of the morning. That
hummock of white seemed absolutely without helpfulness, a burden, a
responsibility. What fools men were to marry! Minnie's inert repose
irritated his so much that he was almost provoked to wake her up and
tell her that they were "Ruined." She would have to go back to her
uncle; her uncle had always been against him: and as for his own future,
Winslow was exceedingly uncertain. A shop assistant who has once set up
for himself finds the utmost difficulty in getting into a situation
again. He began to figure himself "crib-hunting" once more, going from
this wholesale house to that, writing innumerable letters. How he hated
writing letters! "Sir--, Referring to your advertisement in the
Christian World." He beheld an infinite vista of discomfort and
disappointment, ending--in a gulf.

He dressed, yawning, and went down to open the shop. He felt tired
before the day began. As he carried the shutters in, he kept asking
himself what good he was doing. The end was inevitable, whether he
bothered or not. The clear daylight smote into the place, and showed how
old and rough and splintered was the floor, how shabby the second-hand
counter, how hopeless the whole enterprise. He had been dreaming these
past six months of a bright shop, of a happy couple, of a modest but
comely profit flowing in. He had suddenly awakened from his dream. The
braid that bound his decent black coat--it was a trifle loose--caught
against the catch of the shop door, and was torn away. This suddenly
turned his wretchedness to wrath. He stood quivering for a moment, then
with a spiteful clutch, tore the braid looser, and went in to Minnie.

"Here," he said, with infinite reproach; "look here! You might look
after a chap a bit."

"I didn't see it torn," said Minnie.

"You never do," said Winslow, with gross injustice, "until things are
too late."

Minnie looked suddenly at his face. "I'll sew it now, Sid, if you like."

"Let's have breakfast first," said Winslow, "and do things at their
proper time."

He was preoccupied at breakfast, and Minnie watched him anxiously. His
only remark was to declare his egg a bad one. It wasn't; it was
flavoury--, being one of those at fifteen a shilling--, but quite nice.
He pushed it away from him, and then, having eaten a slice of bread and
butter, admitted himself in the wrong by resuming the egg.

"Sid," said Minnie, as he stood up to go into the shop again, "you're
not well."

"I'm well enough." He looked at her as though he hated her.

"Then there's something else the matter. You aren't angry with me, Sid,
are you, about that braid? Do tell me what's the matter. You were just
like this at tea yesterday, and at supper-time. It wasn't the braid
then."

"And I'm likely to be."

She looked interrogation. "Oh, what is the matter?" she said.

It was too good a chance to miss, and he brought the evil news out with
dramatic force. "Matter?" he said. "I done my best, and here we are.
That's the matter! If I can't pay Helter, Skelter, and Grab eighty
pounds, this day three weeks--" Pause. "We shall be sold up! Sold up!
That's the matter, Min! Sold Up!"

"Oh, Sid!" began Minnie.

He slammed the door. For the moment he felt relieved of at least half
his misery. He began dusting boxes that did not require dusting, and
then reblocked a cretonne already faultlessly blocked. He was in a state
of grim wretchedness; a martyr under the harrow of fate. At anyrate, it
should not be said he failed for want of industry. And how he had
planned and contrived and worked! All to this end! He felt horrible
doubts. Providence and Bandersnatch--surely they were incompatible!
Perhaps he was being "tried"? That sent him off upon a new tack, a very
comforting one. The martyr pose, the gold-in-the-furnace attitude,
lasted all the morning.

At dinner--"potato pie--" he looked up suddenly, and saw Minnie's face
regarding him. Pale she looked, and a little red about the eyes.
Something caught him suddenly with a queer effect upon his throat. All
his thoughts seemed to wheel round into quite a new direction.

He pushed back his plate and stared at her blankly. Then he got up, went
round the table to her--she staring at him. He dropped on his knees
beside her without a word. "Oh, Minnie!" he said, and suddenly she knew
it was peace, and put her arms about him, as he began to sob and weep.

He cried like a little boy, slobbering on her shoulder that he was a
knave to have married her and brought her to this, that he hadn't the
wits to be trusted with a penny, that it was all his fault; that he "had
hoped so--" ending in a howl. And she, crying gently herself, patting
his shoulders, said "Ssh!" softly to his noisy weeping, and so soothed
the outbreak. Then suddenly the crazy bell upon the shop door began, and
Winslow had to jump to his feet, and be a man again.

After that scene they "talked it over" at tea, at supper, in bed, at
every possible interval in between, solemnly--quite inconclusively--with
set faces and eyes for the most part staring in front of them--and yet
with a certain mutual comfort. "What to do I don't know," was Winslow's
main proposition. Minnie tried to take a cheerful view of service--with
a probable baby. But she found she needed all her courage. And her uncle
would help her again, perhaps just at the critical time. It didn't do
for folks to be too proud. Besides, "something might happen," a
favourite formula with her.

One hopeful line was to anticipate a sudden afflux of customers.
"Perhaps," said Minnie, "you might get together fifty. They know you
well enough to trust you a bit." They debated that point. Once the
possibility of Helter, Skelter, and Grab giving credit was admitted, it
was pleasant to begin sweating the acceptable minimum. For some
half-hour over tea the second day after Winslow's discoveries they were
quite cheerful again, laughing even at their terrific fears. Even twenty
pounds to go on with might be considered enough. Then in some
mysterious way the pleasant prospect of Messrs. Helter, Skelter, and
Grab tempering the wind to the shorn retailer vanished--vanished
absolutely, and Winslow found himself again in the pit of despair.

He began looking about at the furniture, and wondering idly what it
would fetch. The chiffonier was good, anyhow, and there were Minnie's
old plates that her mother used to have. Then he began to think of
desperate expedients for putting off the evil day. He had heard
somewhere of Bills of Sale--there was to his ears something comfortingly
substantial in the phrase. Then, why not "Go to the Money-Lenders"?

One cheering thing happened on Thursday afternoon a little girl came in
with a pattern of "print," and he was able to match it. He had not been
able to match anything out of his meagre stock before. He went in and
told Minnie. The incident is mentioned lest the reader should imagine it
was uniform despair with him.

The next morning, and the next, after the discovery, Winslow opened shop
late. When one has been awake most of the night, and has no hope, what
is the good of getting up punctually? But as he went into the dark shop
on Friday he saw something lying on the floor, something lit by the
bright light that came under the ill-fitting door--a black oblong. He
stooped and picked up an envelope with a deep mourning edge. It was
addressed to his wife. Clearly a death in her family--perhaps her uncle.
He knew the man too well to have expectations. And they would have to
get mourning and go to the funeral. The brutal cruelty of people dying!
He saw it all in a flash--he always visualised his thoughts. Black
trousers to get, black crape, black gloves--none in stock--the railway
fares, the shop closed for the day.

"I'm afraid there's bad news, Minnie," he said.

She was kneeling before the fireplace, blowing the fire. She had her
housemaid's gloves on and the old country sun-bonnet she wore of a
morning, to keep the dust out of her hair. She turned, saw the envelope,
gave a gasp, and pressed two bloodless lips together.

"I'm afraid it's uncle," she said, holding the letter and staring with
eyes wide open into Winslow's face. "It's a strange hand!"

"The postmark's Hull," said Winslow.

"The postmark's Hull."

Minnie opened the letter slowly, drew it out, hesitated, turned it over,
saw the signature. "It's Mr. Speight!"

"What does he say?" said Winslow.

Minnie began to read. "Oh!" she screamed. She dropped the letter,
collapsed into a crouching heap, her hands covering her eyes. Winslow
snatched at it. "A most terrible accident has occurred," he read;
"Melchior's chimney fell down yesterday evening right on the top of your
uncle's house, and every living soul was killed--your uncle, your cousin
Mary, Will and Ned, and the girl--every one of them, and smashed--you
would hardly know them. I'm writing to you to break the news before you
see it in the papers--" The letter fluttered from Winslow's fingers. He
put out his hand against the mantel to steady himself.

All of them dead! Then he saw, as in a vision, a row of seven cottages,
each let at seven shillings a week, a timber yard, two villas, and the
ruins--still marketable--of the avuncular residence. He tried to feel a
sense of loss and could not. They were sure to have been left to
Minnie's aunt. All dead! 7x7x52÷20 began insensibly to work itself out
in his mind, but discipline was ever weak in his mental arithmetic;
figures kept moving from one line to another, like children playing at
Widdy, Widdy Way. Was it two hundred pounds about--or one hundred
pounds? Presently he picked up the letter again, and finished reading
it. "You being the next of kin," said Mr. Speight.

"How awful!" said Minnie in horror-struck whisper, and looking up at
last. Winslow stared back at her, shaking his head solemnly. There were
a thousand things running through his mind, but none that, even to his
dull sense, seemed appropriate as a remark. "It was the Lord's will," he
said at last.

"It seems so very, very terrible," said Minnie; "auntie, dear
auntie--Ted--poor, dear uncle--"

"It was the Lord's will, Minnie," said Winslow, with infinite feeling. A
long silence.

"Yes," said Minnie, very slowly, staring thoughtfully at the crackling
black paper in the grate. The fire had gone out. "Yes, perhaps it was
the Lord's will."

They looked gravely at one another. Each would have been terribly
shocked at any mention of the property by the other. She turned to the
dark fireplace and began tearing up an old newspaper slowly. Whatever
our losses may be, the world's work still waits for us. Winslow gave a
deep sigh and walked in a hushed manner towards the front door. As he
opened it, a flood of sunlight came streaming into the dark shadows of
the closed shop. Bandersnatch, Helter, Skelter, and Grab, had vanished
out of his mind like the mists before the rising sun.

Presently he was carrying in the shutters, and in the briskest way, the
fire in the kitchen was crackling exhilaratingly, with a little saucepan
walloping above it, for Minnie was boiling two eggs--, one for herself
this morning, as well as one for him--, and Minnie herself was audible,
laying breakfast with the great eclat. The blow was a sudden and
terrible one--but it behoves us to face such things bravely in this sad,
unaccountable world. It was quite midday before either of them mentioned
the cottages.




THE LOST INHERITANCE


"My uncle," said the man with the glass eye, "was what you might call a
hemi-semi-demi millionaire. He was worth about a hundred and twenty
thousand. Quite. And he left me all his money."

I glanced at the shiny sleeve of his coat, and my eye travelled up to
the frayed collar.

"Every penny," said the man with the glass eye, and I caught the active
pupil looking at me with a touch of offence.

"I've never had any windfalls like that," I said, trying to speak
enviously and propitiate him.

"Even a legacy isn't always a blessing," he remarked with a sigh, and
with an air of philosophical resignation he put the red nose and the
wiry moustache into his tankard for a space.

"Perhaps not," I said.

"He was an author, you see, and he wrote a lot of books."

"Indeed!"

"That was the trouble of it all." He stared at me with the available eye
to see if I grasped his statement, then averted his face a little and
produced a toothpick.

"You see," he said, smacking his lips after a pause, "it was like this.
He was my uncle--my maternal uncle. And he had--what shall I call it--?
A weakness for writing, edifying literature. Weakness is hardly the
word--downright mania is nearer the mark. He's been librarian in a
Polytechnic, and as soon as the money came to him he began to indulge
his ambition. It's a simply extraordinary and incomprehensible thing to
me. Here was a man of thirty-seven suddenly dropped into a perfect pile
of gold, and he didn't go--not a day's bust on it. One would think a
chap would go and get himself dressed a bit decent--say a couple of
dozen pair of trousers at a West End tailor's; but he never did. You'd
hardly believe it, but when he died he hadn't even a gold watch. It
seems wrong for people like that to have money. All he did was just to
take a house, and order in pretty nearly five tons of books and ink and
paper, and set to writing, edifying literature as hard as ever he could
write. I can't understand it! But he did. The money came to him,
curiously enough, through a maternal uncle of his, unexpected like, when
he was seven-and-thirty. My mother, it happened, was his only relation
in the wide, wide world, except some second cousins of his. And I was
her only son. You follow all that? The second cousins had one only son
too, but they brought him to see the old man too soon. He was rather a
spoilt youngster, was this son of theirs, and directly he set eyes on my
uncle, he began bawling out as hard as he could. 'Take 'im away--er,' he
says, 'take 'im away,' and so did for himself entirely. It was pretty
straight sailing, you'd think, for me, eh? And my mother, being a
sensible, careful woman, settled the business in her own mind long
before he did.

"He was a curious little chap, was my uncle, as I remember him. I don't
wonder at the kid being scared. Hair just like these Japanese dolls they
sell, black and straight and stiff all round the brim and none in the
middle, and below, a whitish kind of face and rather large dark grey
eyes moving about behind his spectacles. He used to attach a great deal
of importance to dress, and always wore a flapping overcoat and a
big-brimmed felt hat of a most extraordinary size. He looked a rummy
little beggar, I can tell you. Indoors it was, as a rule, a dirty red
flannel dressing-gown and a black skull-cap he had. That black skull-cap
made him look like the portraits of all kinds of celebrated people. He
was always moving about from house to house, was my uncle, with his
chair which had belonged to Savage Landor, and his two writing-tables,
one of Carlyle's and the other of Shelley's, so the dealer told him, and
the completest portable reference library in England, he said he
had--and he lugged the whole caravan, now to a house at Down, near
Darwin's old place, then to Reigate, near Meredith, then off to
Haslemere, then back to Chelsea for a bit, and then up to Hampstead. He
knew there was something wrong with his stuff, but he never knew there
was anything wrong with his brains. It was always the air, or the water,
or the altitude, or some tommy-rot like that. 'So much depends on
environment,' he used to say, and stare at you hard, as if he half
suspected you were hiding a grin at him somewhere under your face. 'So
much depends on environment to a sensitive mind like mine.'

"What was his name? You wouldn't know it if I told you. He wrote nothing
that anyone has ever read--nothing. No one could read it. He wanted to
be a great teacher, he said, and he didn't know what he wanted to teach
any more than a child. So he just blethered at large about Truth and
Righteousness, and the Spirit of History, and all that. Book after book
he wrote and published at his own expense. He wasn't quite right in his
head, you know really; and to hear him go on at the critics--not because
they slated him, mind you--he liked that--but because they didn't take
any notice of him at all. 'What do the nations want?' he would ask,
holding out his brown old claw. 'Why, teaching--guidance! They are
scattered upon the hills like sheep without a shepherd. There is War and
Rumours of War, the unlaid Spirit of Discord abroad in the land,
Nihilism, Vivisection, Vaccination, Drunkenness, Penury, Want,
Socialistic Error, Selfish Capital! Do you see the clouds, Ted--?' My
name, you know--'Do you see the clouds lowering over the land? and
behind it all--the Mongol waits!' He was always very great on Mongols,
and the Spectre of Socialism, and suchlike things.

"Then out would come his finger at me, and with his eyes all afire and
his skull-cap askew, he would whisper: 'And here am I. What did I want?
Nations to teach. Nations! I say it with all modesty, Ted, I could. I
would guide them; nay! But I will guide them to a safe haven, to the
land of Righteousness, flowing with milk and honey.'

"That's how he used to go on. Ramble, rave about the nations, and
righteousness, and that kind of thing. Kind of mincemeat of Bible and
blethers. From fourteen up to three-and-twenty, when I might have been
improving my mind, my mother used to wash me and brush my hair (at least
in the earlier years of it), with a nice parting down the middle, and
take me, once or twice a week, to hear this old lunatic jabber about
things he had read of in the morning papers, trying to do it as much
like Carlyle as he could, and I used to sit according to instructions,
and look intelligent and nice, and pretend to be taking it all in.
Afterwards I used to go of my own free will, out of a regard for the
legacy. I was the only person that used to go see him. He wrote, I
believe, to every man who made the slightest stir in the world, sending
him a copy or so of his books, and inviting him to come and talk about
the nations to him; but half of them didn't answer, and none ever came.
And when the girl let you in--she was an artful bit of goods, that
girl--there were heaps of letters on the hall-seat waiting to go off,
addressed to Prince Bismarck, the President of the United States, and
such-like people. And one went up the staircase and along the cobwebby
passage--, the housekeeper drank like fury, and his passages were always
cobwebby--, and found him at last, with books turned down all over the
room, and heaps of torn paper on the floor, and telegrams and newspapers
littered about, and empty coffee-cups and half-eaten bits of toast on
the desk and the mantel. You'd see his back humped up, and his hair
would be sticking out quite straight between the collar of that
dressing-gown thing and the edge of his skull-cap.

"'A moment!' he would say. 'A moment!' over his shoulder. 'The mot
juste, you know, Ted, le mot juste. Righteous thought righteously
expressed--Aah--! Concatenation. And now, Ted,' he'd say, spinning round
in his study chair, 'how's Young England?' That was his silly name for
me.

"Well, that was my uncle, and that was how he talked--to me, at any
rate. With others about he seemed a bit shy. And he not only talked to
me, but he gave me his books, books of six hundred pages or so, with
cock-eyed headings, 'The Shrieking Sisterhood,' 'The Behemoth of
Bigotry,' 'Crucibles and Cullenders,' and so on. All very strong, and
none of them original. The very last time, but one that I saw him, he
gave me a book. He was feeling ill even then, and his hand shook and he
was despondent. I noticed it because I was naturally on the look-out for
those little symptoms. 'My last book, Ted,' he said. 'My last book, my
boy; my last word to the deaf and hardened nations;' and I'm hanged if a
tear didn't go rolling down his yellow old cheek. He was regular crying
because it was so nearly over, and he hadn't only written about
fifty-three books of rubbish. 'I've sometimes thought, Ted--' he said,
and stopped.

"'Perhaps I've been a bit hasty and angry with this stiff-necked
generation. A little more sweetness, perhaps, and a little less blinding
light. I've sometimes thought--I might have swayed them. But I've done
my best, Ted.'

"And then, with a burst, for the first and last time in his life he
owned himself a failure. It showed he was really ill. He seemed to think
for a minute, and then he spoke quietly and low, as sane and sober as I
am now. 'I've been a fool, Ted,' he said. 'I've been flapping nonsense
all my life. Only He who readeth the heart knows whether this is
anything more than vanity. Ted, I don't. But He knows, He knows, and if
I have done foolishly and vainly, in my heart--in my heart--'

"Just like that he spoke, repeating himself, and he stopped quite short
and handed the book to me, trembling. Then the old shine came back into
his eye. I remember it all fairly well, because I repeated it and acted
it to my old mother when I got home, to cheer her up a bit. 'Take this
book and read it,' he said. 'It's my last word, my very last word. I've
left all my property to you, Ted, and may you use it better than I have
done.' And then he fell a-coughing.

"I remember that quite well even now, and how I went home cock-a-hoop,
and how he was in bed the next time I called. The housekeeper was
downstairs drunk, and I fooled about--as a young man will--with the girl
in the passage before I went to him. He was sinking fast. But even then
his vanity clung to him.

"'Have you read it?' he whispered.

"'Sat, up all night reading it,' I said in his ear to cheer him. 'It's
the last,' said I, and then, with a memory of some poetry or other in my
head, 'but it's the bravest and best.'

"He smiled a little and tried to squeeze my hand as a woman might do,
and left off squeezing in the middle, and lay still. 'The bravest and
the best,' said I again, seeing it pleased him. But he didn't answer. I
heard the girl giggle outside the door, for occasionally we'd had just a
bit of innocent laughter, you know, at his ways. I looked at his face,
and his eyes were closed, and it was just as if somebody had punched in
his nose on either side. But he was still smiling. It's queer to think
of--he lay dead, lay dead there, an utter failure, with the smile of
success on his face.

"That was the end of my uncle. You can imagine me and my mother saw that
he had a decent funeral. Then, of course, came the hunt for the will. We
began decent and respectful at first, and before the day was out we were
ripping chairs, and smashing bureau panels, and sounding walls. Every
hour we expected those others to come in. We asked the housekeeper, and
found she'd actually witnessed a will--on an ordinary half-sheet of
notepaper it was written, and very short, she said--not a month ago. The
other witness was the gardener, and he bore her out word for word. But
I'm hanged if there was that or any other will to be found. The way my
mother talked must have made him turn in his grave. At last a lawyer at
Reigate sprang one on us that had been made years ago during some
temporary quarrel with my mother. I'm blest if that wasn't the only will
to be discovered anywhere, and it left every penny he possessed to that
'Take 'im away' youngster of his second cousin's--a chap who'd never had
to stand his talking, not for one afternoon of his life."

The man with the glass eye stopped.

"I thought you said--" I began.

"Half a minute," said the man with the glass eye. "I had to wait for the
end of the story till this very morning, and I was a blessed sight more
interested than you are. You just wait a bit too. They executed the
will, and the other chap inherited, and directly he was one-and-twenty
he began to blew it. How he did blew it, to be sure! He bet, he drank,
he got in the papers for this and that. I tell you, it makes me wiggle
to think of the times he had. He blewed every ha'penny of it before he
was thirty, and the last I heard of him was--Holloway! Three years ago.

"Well, I naturally fell on hard times, because as you see, the only
trade I knew was legacy-cadging. All my plans were waiting over to
begin, so to speak, when the old chap died. I've had my ups and downs
since then. Just now it's a period of depression. I tell you frankly,
I'm on the look-out for help. I was hunting round my room to find
something to raise a bit on for immediate necessities, and the sight of
all those presentation volumes--no one will buy them, not to wrap butter
in, even--well, they annoyed me. I promised him not to part with them,
and I never kept a promise easier. I let out at them with my boot, and
sent them shooting across the room. One lifted at the kick, and spun
through the air. And out of it flapped--You guess?

"It was the will. He'd given it to me himself in that very last volume
of all."

He folded his arms on the table, and looked sadly with the active eye at
his empty tankard. He shook his head slowly, and said softly, "I'd never
opened the book, much more cut a page!" Then he looked up, with a bitter
laugh, for sympathy. "Fancy hiding it there! Eigh? Of all places."

He began to fish absently for a dead fly with a finger. "It just shows
you the vanity of authors," he said, looking up at me. "It wasn't no
trick of his. He'd meant perfectly fair. He'd really thought I was
really going home to read that blessed book of his through. But it shows
you, don't it--?" his eye went down to the tankard again--, "It shows
you too, how we poor human beings fail to understand one another."

But there was no misunderstanding the eloquent thirst of his eye. He
accepted with ill-feigned surprise. He said, in the usual subtle
formula, that he didn't mind if he did.




THE SAD STORY OF A DRAMATIC CRITIC


I was--you shall hear immediately why I am not now--Egbert Craddock
Cummins. The name remains. I am still (Heaven help me!) Dramatic Critic
to the 'Fiery Cross'. What I shall be in a little while I do not know. I
write in great trouble and confusion of mind. I will do what I can to
make myself clear in the face of terrible difficulties. You must bear
with me a little. When a man is rapidly losing his own identity, he
naturally finds a difficulty in expressing himself. I will make it
perfectly plain in a minute, when once I get my grip upon the story. Let
me see--where am I? I wish I knew. Ah, I have it! Dead self! Egbert
Craddock Cummins!

In the past I should have disliked writing anything quite so full of "I"
as this story must be. It is full of "I's" before and behind, like the
beast in Revelation--the one with a head like a calf, I am afraid. But
my tastes have changed since I became a Dramatic Critic and studied the
masters--G.R.S., G.B.S., G.A.S., and others. Everything has changed
since then. At least the story is about myself--so that there is some
excuse for me. And it is really not egotism, because as I say, since
those days my identity has undergone an entire alteration.

That past...! I was--in those days--rather a nice fellow, rather
shy--taste for grey in my clothes, weedy little moustache, face
"interesting," slight stutter which I had caught in early life from a
schoolfellow. Engaged to a very nice girl, named Delia. Fairly new, she
was--cigarettes--liked me because I was human and original. Considered I
was like Lamb--on the strength of the stutter, I believe. Father, an
eminent authority on postage stamps. She read a great deal in the
British Museum. (A perfect pairing ground for literary people, that
British Museum--you should read George Egerton and Justin Huntly
M'Carthy and Gissing and the rest of them.) We loved in our intellectual
way, and shared the brightest hopes. (All gone now.) And her father
liked me because I seemed honestly eager to hear about stamps. She had
no mother. Indeed, I had the happiest prospects a young man could have.
I never went to theatres in those days. My Aunt Charlotte before she
died had told me not to.

Then Barnaby, the editor of the 'Fiery Cross', made me--in spite of my
spasmodic efforts to escape--Dramatic Critic. He is a fine, healthy man,
Barnaby, with an enormous head of frizzy black hair and a convincing
manner, and he caught me on the staircase going to see Wembly. He had
been dining, and was more than usually buoyant. "Hullo, Cummins!" he
said. "The very man I want!" He caught me by the shoulder or collar or
something, ran me up the little passage, and flung me over the
waste-paper basket into the armchair in his office. "Pray be seated," he
said, as he did so. Then he ran across the room and came back with some
pink and yellow tickets and pushed them into my hand. "Opera Comique,"
he said, "Thursday; Friday, the Surrey; Saturday, the Frivolity. That's
all, I think."

"But--" I began.

"Glad you're free," he said, snatching some proofs off the desk and
beginning to read.

"I don't quite understand," I said.

"Eigh?" he said, at the top of his voice, as though he thought I had
gone, and was startled at my remark.

"Do you want me to criticise these plays?"

"Do something with 'em... Did you think it was a treat?"

"But I can't."

"Did you call me a fool?"

"Well, I've never been to a theatre in my life."

"Virgin soil."

"But I don't know anything about it, you know."

"That's just it. New view. No habits. No cliches in stock. Ours is a
live paper, not a bag of tricks. None of your clockwork professional
journalism in this office. And I can rely on your integrity--"

"But I've conscientious scruples--"

He caught me up suddenly and put me outside his door. "Go and talk to
Wembly about that," he said. "He'll explain."

As I stood perplexed, he opened the door again, said, "I forgot this,"
thrust a fourth ticket into my hand (it was for that night--in twenty
minutes' time) and slammed the door upon me. His expression was quite
calm, but I caught his eye.

I hate arguments. I decided that I would take his hint and become (to my
own destruction) a Dramatic Critic. I walked slowly down the passage to
Wembly. That Barnaby has a remarkably persuasive way. He has made few
suggestions during our very pleasant intercourse of four years that he
has not ultimately won me round to adopting. It may be, of course, that
I am of a yielding disposition; certainly I am too apt to take my colour
from my circumstances. It is, indeed, to my unfortunate susceptibility
to vivid impressions that all my misfortunes are due. I have already
alluded to the slight stammer I had acquired from a schoolfellow in my
youth. However, this is a digression... I went home in a cab to dress.

I will not trouble the reader with my thoughts about the first-night
audience, strange assembly as it is--, those I reserve for my Memoirs,
nor the humiliating story of how I got lost during the entr'acte in a
lot of red plush passages, and saw the third act from the gallery. The
only point upon which I wish to lay stress was the remarkable effect of
the acting upon me. You must remember I had lived a quite and retired
life, and had never been to the theatre before, and that I am extremely
sensitive to vivid impressions. At the risk of repetition I must insist
upon these points.

The first effect was a profound amazement, not untinctured by alarm. The
phenomenal unnaturalness of acting is a thing discounted in the minds of
most people by early visits to the theatre. They get used to the
fantastic gestures, the flamboyant emotions, the weird mouthings,
melodious snortings, agonising yelps, lip-gnawings, glaring horrors, and
other emotional symbolism of the stage. It becomes at least a mere
deaf-and-dumb language to them, which they read intelligently pari passu
with the hearing of the dialogue. But all this was new to me. The thing
was called a modern comedy, the people were supposed to be English and
were dressed like fashionable Americans of the current epoch, and I fell
into the natural error of supposing that the actors were trying to
represent human beings. I looked round on my first-night audience with a
kind of wonder, discovered--as all new Dramatic Critics do--that it
rested with me to reform the Drama, and after a supper choked with
emotion, went off to the office to write a column, piebald with "new
paragraphs" (as all my stuff is--it fills out so) and purple with
indignation. Barnaby was delighted.

But I could not sleep that night. I dreamt of actors--actors glaring,
actors smiting their chests, actors flinging out a handful of extended
fingers, actors smiling bitterly, laughing despairingly, falling
hopelessly, dying idiotically. I got up at eleven with a slight
headache, read my notice in the 'Fiery Cross', breakfasted, and went
back to my room to shave. (It's my habit to do so.) Then an odd thing
happened. I could not find my razor. Suddenly it occurred to me that I
had not unpacked it the day before.

"Ah!" said I, in front of the looking-glass. Then "Hullo!"

Quite involuntarily, when I had thought of my portmanteau, I had flung
up the left arm (fingers fully extended) and clutched at my diaphragm
with my right hand. I am an acutely self-conscious man at all times. The
gesture struck me as absolutely novel for me. I repeated it, for my own
satisfaction. "Odd!" Then (rather puzzled) I turned to my portmanteau.

After shaving, my mind reverted to the acting I had seen, and I
entertained myself before the cheval glass with some imitations of
Jafferay's more exaggerated gestures. "Really, one might think it a
disease." I said--, "Stage-Walkitis!" (There's many a truth spoken in
jest.) Then, if I remember rightly, I went off to see Wembly, and
afterwards lunched at the British Museum with Delia. We actually spoke
about our prospects, in the light of my new appointment.

But that appointment was the beginning of my downfall. From that day I
necessarily became a persistent theatre-goer, and almost insensibly I
began to change. The next thing I noticed after the gesture about the
razor, was to catch myself bowing ineffably when I met Delia, and
stooping in an old-fashioned, courtly way over her hand. Directly I
caught myself, I straightened myself up and became very uncomfortable. I
remember she looked at me curiously. Then, in the office, I found myself
doing "nervous business," fingers on teeth, when Barnaby asked me a
question I could not very well answer. Then, in some trifling difference
with Delia, I clasped my hand to my brow. And I pranced through my
social transactions at times singularly like an actor! I tried not
to--no one could be more keenly alive to the arrant absurdity of the
histrionic bearing. And I did!

It began to dawn on me what it all meant. The acting, I saw, was too
much for my delicately-strung nervous system. I have always, I know,
been too amenable to the suggestions of my circumstances. Night after
night of concentrated attention to the conventional attitudes and
intonation of the English stage was gradually affecting my speech and
carriage. I was giving way to the infection of sympathetic imitation.
Night after night my plastic nervous system took the print of some new
amazing gesture, some new emotional exaggeration--and retained it. A
kind of theatrical veneer threatened to plate over and obliterate my
private individuality altogether. I saw myself in a kind of vision.
Sitting by myself one night, my new self seemed to me to glide, posing
and gesticulating, across the room. He clutched his throat, he opened
his fingers, he opened his legs in walking like a high-class marionette.
He went from attitude to attitude. He might have been clockwork.
Directly after this I made an ineffectual attempt to resign my
theatrical work. But Barnaby persisted in talking about the Polywhiddle
Divorce all the time I was with him, and I could get no opportunity of
saying what I wished.

And then Delia's manner began to change towards me. The ease of our
intercourse vanished. I felt she was learning to dislike me. I grinned,
and capered, and scowled, and posed at her in a thousand ways, and
knew--with what a voiceless agony--! That I did it all the time. I tried
to resign again, and Barnaby talked about "X" and "Z" and "Y" in the New
Review, and gave me a strong cigar to smoke, and so routed me. And then
I walked up the Assyrian Gallery in the manner of Irving to meet Delia,
and so precipitated the crisis.

"Ah--! Dear!" I said, with more sprightliness and emotion in my voice
than had ever been in all my life before I became (to my own undoing) a
Dramatic Critic.

She held out her hand rather coldly, scrutinising my face as she did so.
I prepared, with a new-won grace, to walk by her side.

"Egbert," she said, standing still, and thought. Then she looked at me.

I said nothing. I felt what was coming. I tried to be the old Egbert
Craddock Cummins of shambling gait and stammering sincerity, whom she
loved, but I felt even as I did so that I was a new thing, a thing of
surging emotions and mysterious fixity--like no human being that ever
lived, except upon the stage. "Egbert," she said, "you are not
yourself."

"Ah!" Involuntarily I clutched my diaphragm and averted my head (as is
the way with them).

"There!" she said.

"What do you mean?" I said, whispering in vocal italics--you know how
they do it--turning on her, perplexity on face, right hand down, left on
brow. I knew quite well what she meant. I knew quite well the dramatic
unreality of my behaviour. But I struggled against it in vain. "What do
you mean?" I said, and in a kind of hoarse whisper, "I don't
understand!"

She really looked as though she disliked me. "What do you keep on posing
for?" she said. "I don't like it. You didn't used to."

"Didn't used to!" I said slowly, repeating this twice. I glared up and
down the gallery, with short, sharp glances. "We are alone," I said
swiftly. "Listen!" I poked my forefinger towards her, and glared at her.
"I'm under a curse."

I saw her hands tighten upon her sunshade. "You are under some bad
influence or other," said Delia. "You should give it up. I never knew
anyone change as you have done."

"Delia!" I said, lapsing into the pathetic. "Pity me. Augh! Delia!
Pit--y me!"

She eyed me critically. "Why you keep playing the fool like this I don't
know," she said. "Anyhow, I really cannot go about with a man who
behaves as you do. You made us both ridiculous on Wednesday. Frankly, I
dislike you, as you are now. I met you here to tell you so--as it's
about the only place where we can be sure of being alone together--"

"Delia!" said I, with intensity, knuckles of clenched hands white. "You
don't mean--"

"I do," said Delia. "A woman's lot is sad enough at the best of times.
But with you--"

I clapped my hand on my brow.

"So, good-bye," said Delia, without emotion.

"Oh, Delia!" I said. "Not this?"

"Good-bye, Mr. Cummins," she said.

By a violent effort I controlled myself and touched her hand. I tried to
say some word of explanation to her. She looked into my working face and
winced. "I must do it," she said hopelessly. Then she turned from me and
began walking rapidly down the gallery.

Heavens! How the human agony cried within me! I loved Delia. But nothing
found expression--I was already too deeply crusted with my acquired
self.

"Good-baye!" I said at last, watching her retreating figure. How I hated
myself for doing it! After she had vanished, I repeated in a dreamy way,
"Good-baye!" looking hopelessly round me. Then, with a kind of
heart-broken cry, I shook my clenched fists in the air, staggered to the
pedestal of a winged figure, buried my face in my arms, and made my
shoulders heave. Something within me said "Ass!" as I did so. (I had the
greatest difficulty in persuading the Museum policeman, who was
attracted by my cry of agony, that I was not intoxicated, but merely
suffering from a transient indisposition.)

But even this great sorrow has not availed to save me from my fate. I
see it, everyone sees it; I grow more "theatrical" every day. And no one
could be more painfully aware of the pungent silliness of theatrical
ways. The quite, nervous, but pleasing, E.C. Cummins vanishes. I cannot
save him. I am driven like a dead leaf before the winds of March. My
tailor even enters into the spirit of my disorder. He has a peculiar
sense of what is fitting. I tried to get a dull grey suit from him this
spring, and he foisted a brilliant blue upon me, and I see he has put
braid down the sides of my new dress trousers. My hairdresser insists
upon giving me a "wave."

I am beginning to associate with actors. I detest them, but it is only
in their company that I feel I am not glaringly conspicuous. Their talk
infects me. I notice a growing tendency to dramatic brevity, to dashes
and pauses in my style, to a punctuation of bows and attitudes. Barnaby
has remarked it too. I offended Wembly by calling him "Dear Boy"
yesterday. I dread the end, but cannot escape from it.

The fact is, I am being obliterated. Living a grey, retired life all my
youth, I came to the theatre a delicate sketch of a man, a thing of
tints and faint lines. Their gorgeous colouring has effaced me
altogether. People forget how much mode of expression, method of
movement, are a matter of contagion. I have heard of stage-struck people
before, and thought it a figure of speech. I spoke of it jestingly,
as a disease. It is no jest. It is a disease. And I have got it
bad! Deep down within me I protest against the wrong done to my
personality--unavailingly. For three hours or more a week I have to go
and concentrate my attention on some fresh play, and the suggestions of
the drama strengthen their awful hold upon me. My manners grow so
flamboyant, my passions so professional, that I doubt, as I said at the
outset, whether it is really myself that behaves in such a manner. I
feel merely the core of this dramatic casing, that grows thicker and
presses upon me--me and mine. I feel like King John's abbot in his cope
of lead.

I doubt, indeed, whether I should not abandon the struggle
altogether--leave this sad world of ordinary life for which I am so
ill-fitted, abandon the name of Cummins for some professional pseudonym,
complete my self-effacement, and--a thing of tricks and tatters, of
posing and pretence--go upon the stage. It seems my only resort--"to
hold mirror up to Nature." For in the ordinary life, I will confess, no
one now seems to regard me as both sane and sober. Only upon the stage,
I feel convinced, will people take me seriously. That will be the end of
it. I know that will be the end of it. And yet... I will frankly
confess... all that marks off your actor from your common man... I
detest. I am still largely of my Aunt Charlotte's opinion, that
playacting is unworthy of a pure-minded man's attention, much more
participation. Even now I would resign my dramatic criticism and try a
rest. Only I can't get hold of Barnaby. Letters of resignation he never
notices. He says it is against the etiquette of journalism to write to
your Editor. And when I go to see him, he gives me another big cigar and
some strong whisky and soda, and then something always turns up to
prevent my explanation.




A SLIP UNDER THE MICROSCOPE


Outside the laboratory windows was a watery-grey fog, and within a close
warmth and the yellow light of the green-shaded gas lamps that stood two
to each table down its narrow length. On each table stood a couple of
glass jars containing the mangled vestiges of the crayfish, mussels,
frogs, and guineapigs upon which the students had been working, and down
the side of the room, facing the windows, were shelves bearing bleached
dissections in spirits, surmounted by a row of beautifully executed
anatomical drawings in whitewood frames and overhanging a row of cubical
lockers. All the doors of the laboratory were panelled with blackboard,
and on these were the half-erased diagrams of the previous day's work.
The laboratory was empty, save for the demonstrator, who sat near the
preparation-room door, and silent, save for a low, continuous murmur and
the clicking of the rocker microtome at which he was working. But
scattered about the room were traces of numerous students: hand-bags,
polished boxes of instruments, in one place a large drawing covered by
newspaper, and in another a prettily bound copy of 'News from Nowhere',
a book oddly at variance with its surroundings. These things had been
put down hastily as the students had arrived and hurried at once to
secure their seats in the adjacent lecture theatre. Deadened by the
closed door, the measured accents of the professor sounded as a
featureless muttering.

Presently, faint through the closed windows came the sound of the
Oratory clock striking the hour of eleven. The clicking of the microtome
ceased, and the demonstrator looked at his watch, rose, thrust his hands
into his pockets, and walked slowly down the laboratory towards the
lecture theatre door. He stood listening for a moment, and then his eye
fell on the little volume by William Morris. He picked it up, glanced at
the title, smiled, opened it, looked at the name on the fly-leaf, ran
the leaves through with his hand, and put it down. Almost immediately
the even murmur of the lecturer ceased, there was a sudden burst of
pencils rattling on the desks in the lecture theatre, a stirring, a
scraping of feet, and a number of voices speaking together. Then a firm
footfall approached the door, which began to open, and stood ajar, as
some indistinctly heard question arrested the new-comer.

The demonstrator turned, walked slowly back past the microtome, and left
the laboratory by the preparation-room door. As he did so, first one,
and then several students carrying notebooks entered the laboratory from
the lecture theatre, and distributed themselves among the little tables,
or stood in a group about the doorway. They were an exceptionally
heterogeneous assembly, for while Oxford and Cambridge still recoil from
the blushing prospect of mixed classes, the College of Science
anticipated America in the matter years ago--mixed socially, too, for
the prestige of the College is high, and its scholarships, free of any
age limit, dredge deeper even than do those of the Scotch universities.
The class numbered one-and-twenty, but some remained in the theatre
questioning the professor, copying the blackboard diagrams before they
were washed off, or examining the special specimens he had produced to
illustrate the day's teaching. Of the nine who had come into the
laboratory three were girls, one of whom, a little fair woman, wearing
spectacles and dressed in greyish-green, was peering out of the window
at the fog, while the other two, both wholesome-looking, plain-faced
schoolgirls, unrolled and put on the brown holland aprons they wore
while dissecting. Of the men, two went down the laboratory to their
places, one a pallid, dark-bearded man, who had once been a tailor; the
other a pleasant-featured, ruddy young man of twenty, dressed in a
well-fitting brown suit; young Wedderburn, the son of Wedderburn, the
eye specialist. The others formed a little knot near the theatre door.
One of these, a dwarfed, spectacled figure, with a hunchback, sat on a
bent wood stool; two others, one a short, dark youngster, and the other
a flaxen-haired, reddish-complexioned young man, stood leaning side by
side against the slate sink, while the fourth stood facing them, and
maintained the larger share of the conversation.

This last person was named Hill. He was a sturdily built young fellow,
of the same age as Wedderburn; he had a white face, dark grey eyes, hair
of an indeterminate colour, and prominent, irregular features. He talked
rather louder than was needful, and thrust his hands deeply into his
pockets. His collar was frayed and blue with the starch of a careless
laundress, his clothes were evidently ready-made, and there was a patch
on the side of his boot near the toe. And as he talked or listened to
the others, he glanced now and again towards the lecture theatre door.
They were discussing the depressing peroration of the lecture they had
just heard, the last lecture it was in the introductory course in
zoology. "From ovum to ovum is the goal of the higher vertebrata," the
lecturer had said in his melancholy tones, and so had neatly rounded off
the sketch of comparative anatomy he had been developing. The spectacled
hunchback had repeated it, with noisy appreciation, had tossed it
towards the fair-haired student with an evident provocation, and had
started one of these vague, rambling discussions on generalities, so
unaccountably dear to the student mind all the world over.

"That is our goal, perhaps--I admit it, as far as science goes," said
the fair-haired student, rising to the challenge. "But there are things
above science."

"Science," said Hill confidently, "is systematic knowledge. Ideas that
don't come into the system--must anyhow--be loose ideas." He was not
quite sure whether that was a clever saying or a fatuity until his
hearers took it seriously.

"The thing I cannot understand," said the hunchback, at large, "is
whether Hill is a materialist or not."

"There is one thing above matter," said Hill promptly, feeling he had a
better thing this time; aware too, of someone in the doorway behind him,
and raising his voice a trifle for her benefit, "and that is, the
delusion that there is something above matter."

"So we have your gospel at last," said the fair student. "It's all a
delusion, is it? All our aspirations to lead something more than dogs'
lives, all our work for anything beyond ourselves. But see how
inconsistent you are. Your socialism, for instance. Why do you trouble
about the interests of the race? Why do you concern yourself about the
beggar in the gutter? Why are you bothering yourself to lend that
book--" he indicated William Morris by a movement of the head--"to
everyone in the lab.?"

"Girl," said the hunchback indistinctly, and glanced guiltily over his
shoulder.

The girl in brown, with the brown eyes, had come into the laboratory,
and stood on the other side of the table behind him, with her rolled-up
apron in one hand, looking over her shoulder, listening to the
discussion. She did not notice the hunchback, because she was glancing
from Hill to his interlocutor. Hill's consciousness of her presence
betrayed itself to her only in his studious ignorance of the fact; but
she understood that, and it pleased her. "I see no reason," said he,
"why a man should live like a brute because he knows of nothing beyond
matter, and does not expect to exist a hundred years hence."

"Why shouldn't he?" said the fair-haired student.

"Why should he?" said Hill.

"What inducement has he?"

"That's the way with all you religious people. It's all a business of
inducements. Cannot a man seek after righteousness for righteousness'
sake?"

There was a pause. The fair man answered, with a kind of vocal padding,
"But--you see--inducement--when I said inducement," to gain time. And
then the hunchback came to his rescue and inserted a question. He was a
terrible person in the debating society with his questions, and they
invariably took one form--a demand for a definition, "What's your
definition of righteousness?" said the hunchback at this stage.

Hill experienced a sudden loss of complacency at this question, but even
as it was asked, relief came in the person of Brooks, the laboratory
attendant, who entered by the preparation-room door, carrying a number
of freshly killed guineapigs by their hind legs. "This is the last batch
of material this session," said the youngster who had not previously
spoken.

Brooks advanced up the laboratory, smacking down a couple of guineapigs
at each table. The rest of the class, scenting the prey from afar, came
crowding in by the lecture theatre door, and the discussion perished
abruptly as the students who were not already in their places hurried to
them to secure the choice of a specimen. There was a noise of keys
rattling on split rings as lockers were opened and dissecting
instruments taken out. Hill was already standing by his table, and his
box of scalpels was sticking out of his pocket. The girl in brown came a
step towards him, and leaning over his table, said softly, "Did you see
that I returned your book, Mr. Hill?"

During the whole scene she and the book had been vividly present in his
consciousness; but he made a clumsy pretence of looking at the book and
seeing it for the first time. "Oh, yes," he said, taking it up. "I see.
Did you like it?"

"I want to ask you some questions about it--some time."

"Certainly," said Hill. "I shall be glad." He stopped awkwardly. "You
liked it?" he said.

"It's a wonderful book. Only some things I don't understand."

Then suddenly the laboratory was hushed by a curious, braying noise. It
was the demonstrator. He was at the blackboard ready to begin the day's
instruction, and it was his custom to demand silence by a sound midway
between the "Er" of common intercourse and the blast of a trumpet. The
girl in brown slipped back to her place: it was immediately in front of
Hill's, and Hill, forgetting her forthwith, took a notebook out of the
drawer of his table, turned over its leaves hastily, drew a stumpy
pencil from his pocket, and prepared to make a copious note of the
coming demonstration. For demonstrations and lectures are the sacred
text of the College students. Books, saving only the Professor's own,
you may--it is even expedient to--ignore.

Hill was the son of a Landport cobbler, and had been hooked by a chance
blue paper the authorities had thrown out to the Landport Technical
College. He kept himself in London on his allowance of a guinea a week,
and found that, with proper care, this also covered his clothing
allowance, an occasional waterproof collar, that is; and ink and needles
and cotton, and suchlike necessaries for a man about town. This was his
first year and his first session, but the brown old man in Landport had
already got himself detested in many public-houses by boasting of his
son, "the Professor." Hill was a vigorous youngster, with a serene
contempt for the clergy of all denominations, and a fine ambition to
reconstruct the world. He regarded his scholarship as a brilliant
opportunity. He had begun to read at seven, and had read steadily
whatever came in his way, good or bad, since then. His worldly
experience had been limited to the island of Portsea, and acquired
chiefly in the wholesale boot factory in which he had worked by day,
after passing the seventh standard of the Board school. He had a
considerable gift of speech, as the College Debating Society, which met
amidst the crushing machines and mine models in the metallurgical
theatre downstairs, already recognised--recognised by a violent
battering of desks whenever he rose. And he was just at that fine
emotional age when life opens at the end of a narrow pass like a broad
valley at one's feet, full of the promise of wonderful discoveries and
tremendous achievements. And his own limitations, save that he knew,
that he knew, neither Latin nor French, were all unknown to him.

At first his interest had been divided pretty equally between his
biological work at the College and social and theological theorising, an
employment which he took in deadly earnest. Of a night, when the big
museum library was not open, he would sit on the bed of his room in
Chelsea with his coat and a muffler on, and write out the lecture notes
and revise his dissection memoranda, until Thorpe called him out by a
whistle--the landlady objected to open the door to attic visitors--and
then the two would go prowling about the shadowy, shiny, gas-lit
streets, talking, very much in the fashion of the sample just given, of
the God idea, and Righteousness, and Carlyle, and the Reorganisation of
Society. And in the midst of it all Hill, arguing not only for Thorpe,
but for the casual passer-by, would lose the thread of his argument
glancing at some pretty painted face that looked meaningly at him as he
passed. Science and Righteousness! But once or twice lately there had
been signs that a third interest was creeping into his life, and he had
found his attention wandering from the fate of the mesoblastic somites
or the probable meaning of the blastopore, to the thought of the girl
with the brown eyes who sat at the table before him.

She was a paying student; she descended inconceivable social altitudes
to speak to him. At the thought of the education she must have had, and
the accomplishments she must possess, the soul of Hill became abject
within him. She had spoken to him first over a difficulty about the
alisphenoid of a rabbit's skull, and he had found that, in biology at
least, he had no reason for self-abasement. And from that, after the
manner of young people starting from any starting-point, they got to
generalities, and while Hill attacked her upon the question of
socialism--, some instinct told him to spare her a direct assault upon
her religion--she was gathering resolution to undertake what she told
herself was his aesthetic education. She was a year or two older than
he, though the thought never occurred to him. The loan of 'News from
Nowhere' was the beginning of a series of cross loans. Upon some absurd
first principle of his, Hill had never "wasted time" upon poetry, and it
seemed an appalling deficiency to her. One day in the lunch hour, when
she chanced upon him alone in the little museum where the skeletons were
arranged, shamefully eating the bun that constituted his midday meal,
she retreated, and returned to lend him, with a slightly furtive air, a
volume of Browning. He stood sideways towards her and took the book
rather clumsily, because he was holding the bun in the other hand. And
in the retrospect his voice lacked the cheerful clearness he could have
wished.

That occurred after the examination in comparative anatomy, on the day
before the College turned out its students, and was carefully locked up
by the officials, for the Christmas holidays. The excitement of cramming
for the first trial of strength had for a little while dominated Hill,
to the exclusion of his other interests. In the forecasts of the result
in which everyone indulged he was surprised to find that no one regarded
him as a possible competitor for the Harvey Commemoration Medal, of
which this and the two subsequent examinations disposed. It was about
this time that Wedderburn, who so far had lived inconspicuously on the
uttermost margin of Hill's perceptions, began to take on the appearance
of an obstacle. By a mutual agreement, the nocturnal prowlings with
Thorpe ceased for the three weeks before the examination, and his
landlady pointed out that she really could not supply so much lamp oil
at the price. He walked to and fro from the College with little slips of
mnemonics in his hand, lists of crayfish appendages, rabbits'
skull-bones, and vertebrate nerves, for example, and became a positive
nuisance to foot passengers in the opposite direction.

But by a natural reaction, Poetry and the girl with the brown eyes ruled
the Christmas holiday. The pending results of the examination became
such a secondary consideration that Hill marvelled at his father's
excitement. Even had he wished it, there was no comparative anatomy to
read in Landport, and he was too poor to buy books, but the stock of
poets in the library was extensive, and Hill's attack was magnificently
sustained. He saturated himself with the fluent numbers of Longfellow
and Tennyson, and fortified himself with Shakespeare; found a kindred
soul in Pope, and a master in Shelley, and heard and fled the siren
voices of Eliza Cook and Mrs. Hemans. But he read no more Browning,
because he hoped for the loan of other volumes from Miss Haysman when he
returned to London.

He walked from his lodgings to the College with that volume of Browning
in his shiny black bag, and his mind teeming with the finest general
propositions about poetry. Indeed, he framed first this little speech
and then that with which to grace the return. The morning was an
exceptionally pleasant one for London; there was a clear, hard frost and
undeniable blue in the sky, a thin haze softened every outline, and warm
shafts of sunlight struck between the house blocks and turned the sunny
side of the street to amber and gold. In the hall of the College he
pulled off his glove and signed his name with fingers so stiff with cold
that the characteristic dash under the signature he cultivated became a
quivering line. He imagined Miss Haysman about him everywhere. He turned
at the staircase, and there, below he saw a crowd struggling at the foot
of the notice-board. This possibly, was the biology list. He forgot
Browning and Miss Haysman for the moment, and joined the scrimmage. And
at last, with his cheek flattened against the sleeve of the man on the
step above him, he read the list--

CLASS 1 H. J. Somers Wedderburn William Hill

and thereafter followed a second class that is outside our present
sympathies. It was characteristic that he did not trouble to look for
Thorpe on the physics list, but backed out of the struggle at once, and
in a curious emotional state between pride over common second-class
humanity and acute disappointment at Wedderburn's success, went on his
way upstairs. At the top, as he was hanging up his coat in the passage,
the zoological demonstrator, a young man from Oxford, who secretly
regarded him as a blatant "mugger" of the very worst type, offered his
heartiest congratulations.

At the laboratory door Hill stopped for a second to get his breath, and
then entered. He looked straight up the laboratory and saw all five girl
students grouped in their places, and Wedderburn, the once retiring
Wedderburn, leaning rather gracefully against the window, playing with
the blind tassel and talking, apparently, to the five of them. Now, Hill
could talk bravely enough and even overbearingly to one girl, and he
could have made a speech to a roomful of girls, but this business of
standing at ease and appreciating, fencing, and returning quick remarks
round a group was, he knew, altogether beyond him. Coming up the
staircase his feelings for Wedderburn had been generous, a certain
admiration perhaps, a willingness to shake his hand conspicuously and
heartily as one who had fought but the first round. But before Christmas
Wedderburn had never gone up to that end of the room to talk. In a flash
Hill's mist of vague excitement condensed abruptly to a vivid dislike of
Wedderburn. Possibly his expression changed. As he came up to his place,
Wedderburn nodded carelessly to him, and the others glanced round. Miss
Haysman looked at him and away again, the faintest touch of her eyes. "I
can't agree with you, Mr. Wedderburn," she said.

"I must congratulate you on your first-class, Mr. Hill," said the
spectacled girl in green, turning round and beaming at him.

"It's nothing," said Hill, staring at Wedderburn and Miss Haysman
talking together, and eager to hear what they talked about.

"We poor folks in the second class don't think so," said the girl in
spectacles.

What was it Wedderburn was saying? Something about William Morris! Hill
did not answer the girl in spectacles, and the smile died out of his
face. He could not hear, and failed to see how he could "cut in."
Confound Wedderburn! He sat down, opened his bag, hesitated whether to
return the volume of Browning forthwith, in the sight of all, and
instead drew out his new notebooks for the short course in elementary
botany that was now beginning, and which would terminate in February. As
he did so, a fat, heavy man, with a white face and pale grey
eyes--Bindon, the professor of botany, who came up from Kew for January
and February--came in by the lecture theatre door, and passed, rubbing
his hands together and smiling, in silent affability down the
laboratory.


In the subsequent six weeks Hill experienced some very rapid and
curiously complex emotional developments. For the most part he had
Wedderburn in focus--a fact that Miss Haysman never suspected. She told
Hill (for in the comparative privacy of the museum she talked a good
deal to him of socialism and Browning and general propositions) that she
had met Wedderburn at the house of some people she knew, and "he's
inherited his cleverness; for his father, you know, is the great eye
specialist."

"My father is a cobbler," said Hill, quite irrelevantly, and perceived
the want of dignity even as he said it. But the gleam of jealousy did
not offend her. She conceived herself the fundamental source of it. He
suffered bitterly from a sense of Wedderburn's unfairness, and a
realisation of his own handicap. Here was this Wedderburn had picked up
a prominent man for a father, and instead of his losing so many marks on
the score of that advantage, it was counted to him for righteousness!
And while Hill had to introduce himself and talk to Miss Haysman
clumsily over mangled guineapigs in the laboratory, this Wedderburn, in
some backstairs way, had access to her social altitudes, and could
converse in a polished argot that Hill understood perhaps, but felt
incapable of speaking. Not of course, that he wanted to. Then it seemed
to Hill that for Wedderburn to come there day after day with cuffs
unfrayed, neatly tailored, precisely barbered, quietly perfect, was in
itself an ill-bred, sneering sort of proceeding. Moreover, it was a
stealthy thing for Wedderburn to behave insignificantly for a space, to
mock modesty, to lead Hill to fancy that he himself was beyond dispute
the man of the year, and then suddenly to dart in front of him, and
incontinently to swell up in this fashion. In addition to these things,
Wedderburn displayed an increasing disposition to join in any
conversational grouping that included Miss Haysman, and would venture,
and indeed seek occasion, to pass opinions derogatory to socialism and
atheism. He goaded Hill to incivilities by neat, shallow, and
exceedingly effective personalities about the socialist leaders, until
Hill hated Bernard Shaw's graceful egotisms, William Morris's limited
editions and luxurious wall-papers, and Walter Crane's charmingly absurd
ideal working men, about as much as he hated Wedderburn. The
dissertations in the laboratory, that had been his glory in the previous
term, became a danger, degenerated into inglorious tussles with
Wedderburn, and Hill kept to them only out of an obscure perception that
his honour was involved. In the debating society Hill knew quite clearly
that, to a thunderous accompaniment of banged desks, he could have
pulverised Wedderburn. Only Wedderburn never attended the debating
society to be pulverised, because--nauseous affectation--! He "dined
late."

You must not imagine that these things presented themselves in quite
such a crude form to Hill's perception. Hill was a born generaliser.
Wedderburn to him was not so much an individual obstacle as a type, the
salient angle of a class. The economic theories that, after infinite
ferment, had shaped themselves in Hill's mind, became abruptly concrete
at the contact. The world became full of easy-mannered, graceful,
gracefully-dressed, conversationally dexterous, finally shallow
Wedderburn's, Bishops Wedderburn, Wedderburn M.P.'s, Professors
Wedderburn, Wedderburn landlords, all with finger-bowl shibboleths and
epigrammatic cities of refuge from a sturdy debater. And everyone
ill-clothed or ill-dressed, from the cobbler to the cab-runner, was a
man and a brother, a fellow-sufferer, to Hill's imagination. So that he
became, as it were, a champion of the fallen and oppressed, albeit to
outward seeming only a self-assertive, ill-mannered young man, and an
unsuccessful champion at that. Again and again a skirmish over the
afternoon tea that the girl students had inaugurated left Hill with
flushed cheeks and a tattered temper, and the debating society noticed a
new quality of sarcastic bitterness in his speeches.

You will understand now how it was necessary, if only in the interests
of humanity, that Hill should demolish Wedderburn in the forthcoming
examination and outshine him in the eyes of Miss Haysman; and you will
perceive too, how Miss Haysman fell into some common feminine
misconceptions. The Hill-Wedderburn quarrel, for in his unostentatious
way Wedderburn reciprocated Hill's ill-veiled rivalry, became a tribute
to her indefinable charm; she was the Queen of Beauty in a tournament of
scalpels and stumpy pencils. To her confidential friend's secret
annoyance, it even troubled her conscience, for she was a good girl, and
painfully aware, from Ruskin and contemporary fiction, how entirely
men's activities are determined by women's attitudes. And if Hill never
by any chance mentioned the topic of love to her, she only credited him
with the finer modesty for that omission.

So the time came on for the second examination, and Hill's increasing
pallor confirmed the general rumour that he was working hard. In the
aerated bread shop near South Kensington Station you would see him,
breaking his bun and sipping his milk, with his eyes intent upon a paper
of closely written notes. In his bedroom there were propositions about
buds and stems round his looking-glass, a diagram to catch his eye, if
soap should chance to spare it, above his washing basin. He missed
several meetings of the debating society, but he found the chance
encounters with Miss Haysman in the spacious ways of the adjacent art
museum, or in the little museum at the top of the College, or in the
College corridors, more frequent and very restful. In particular, they
used to meet in a little gallery full of wrought-iron chests and gates,
near the art library, and there Hill used to talk, under the gentle
stimulus of her flattering attention, of Browning and his personal
ambitions. A characteristic she found remarkable in him was his freedom
from avarice. He contemplated quite calmly the prospect of living all
his life on an income below a hundred pounds a year. But he was
determined to be famous, to make, recognisably in his own proper person,
the world a better place to live in. He took Bradlaugh and John Burns
for his leaders and models, poor, even impecunious, great men. But Miss
Haysman thought that such lives were deficient on the aesthetic side, by
which, though she did not know it, she meant good wall-paper and
upholstery, pretty books, tasteful clothes, concerts, and meals nicely
cooked and respectfully served.

At last came the day of the second examination, and the professor of
botany, a fussy, conscientious man, rearranged all the tables in a long
narrow laboratory to prevent copying, and put his demonstrator on a
chair on a table (where he felt, he said, like a Hindoo god), to see all
the cheating, and stuck a notice outside the door, "Door closed," for no
earthly reason that any human being could discover. And all the morning
from ten till one the quill of Wedderburn shrieked defiance at Hill's,
and the quills of the others chased their leaders in a tireless pack,
and so also it was in the afternoon. Wedderburn was a little quieter
than usual, and Hill's face was hot all day, and his overcoat bulged
with textbooks and notebooks against the last moment's revision. And the
next day, in the morning and in the afternoon, was the practical
examination, when sections had to be cut and slides identified. In the
morning Hill was depressed because he knew he had cut a thick section,
and in the afternoon came the mysterious slip.

It was just the kind of thing that the botanical professor was always
doing. Like the income tax, it offered a premium to the cheat. It was a
preparation under the microscope, a little glass slip, held in its place
on the stage of the instrument by light steel clips, and the inscription
set forth that the slip was not to be moved. Each student was to go in
turn to it, sketch it, write in his book of answers what he considered
it to be, and return to his place. Now, to move such a slip is a thing
one can do by a chance movement of the finger, and in a fraction of a
second.

The professor's reason for decreeing that the slip should not be moved
depended on the fact that the object he wanted identified was
characteristic of a certain tree stem. In the position in which it was
placed it was a difficult thing to recognise, but once the slip was
moved so as to bring other parts of the preparation into view, its
nature was obvious enough.

Hill came to this, flushed from a contest with staining re-agents, sat
down on the little stool before the microscope, turned the mirror to get
the best light, and then, out of sheer habit, shifted the slips. At once
he remembered the prohibition, and with an almost continuous motion of
his hands, moved it back, and sat paralysed with astonishment at his
action.

Then slowly, he turned his head. The professor was out of the room; the
demonstrator sat aloft on his impromptu rostrum, reading the Quarterly
Journal Microbiology Science; the rest of the examinees were busy, and
with their backs to him. Should he own up to the accident now? He knew
quite clearly what the thing was. It was a lenticel, a characteristic
preparation from the elder-tree. His eyes roved over his intent
fellow-students, and Wedderburn suddenly glanced over his shoulder at
him with a queer expression in his eyes. The mental excitement that had
kept Hill at an abnormal pitch of vigour these two days gave way to a
curious nervous tension. His book of answers was beside him. He did not
write down what the thing was, but with one eye at the microscope he
began making a hasty sketch of it. His mind was full of this grotesque
puzzle in ethics that had suddenly been sprung upon him. Should he
identify it? Or should he leave this question unanswered? In that case
Wedderburn would probably come out first in the second result. How could
he tell now whether he might not have identified the thing without
shifting it? It was possible that Wedderburn had failed to recognise it,
of course. Suppose Wedderburn too had shifted the slide?

He looked up at the clock. There were fifteen minutes in which to make
up his mind. He gathered up his book of answers and the coloured pencils
he used in illustrating his replies and walked back to his seat.

He read through his manuscript, and then sat thinking and gnawing his
knuckle. It would look queer now if he owned up. He must beat
Wedderburn. He forgot the examples of those starry gentlemen, John Burns
and Bradlaugh. Besides, he reflected, the glimpse of the rest of the
slip he had, had was, after all, quite accidental, forced upon him by
chance, a kind of providential revelation rather than an unfair
advantage. It was not nearly so dishonest to avail himself of that as it
was of Broome, who believed in the efficacy of prayer, to pray daily for
a first-class. "Five minutes more," said the demonstrator, folding up
his paper and becoming observant. Hill watched the clock hands until two
minutes remained; then he opened the book of answers, and, with hot ears
and an affectation of ease, gave his drawing of the lenticel its name.

When the second pass list appeared, the previous positions of Wedderburn
and Hill were reversed, and the spectacled girl in green, who knew the
demonstrator in private life (where he was practically human), said that
in the result of the two examinations taken together Hill had the
advantage of a mark--167 to 166 out of a possible 200. Everyone admired
Hill in a way, though the suspicion of "mugging" clung to him. But Hill
was to find congratulations and Miss Haysman's enhanced opinion of him,
and even the decided decline in the crest of Wedderburn, tainted by an
unhappy memory. He felt a remarkable access of energy at first, and the
note of a democracy marching to triumph returned to his debating society
speeches; he worked at his comparative anatomy with tremendous zeal and
effect, and he went on with his aesthetic education. But through it all,
a vivid little picture was continually coming before his mind's eye--of
a sneakish person manipulating a slide.

No human being had witnessed the act, and he was cocksure that no higher
power existed to see, it; but for all that it worried him. Memories are
not dead things but alive; they dwindle in disuse, but they harden and
develop in all sorts of queer ways if they are being continually
fretted. Curiously enough, though at the time he perceived clearly that
the shifting was accidental, as the days wore on, his memory became
confused about it, until at last he was not sure--although he assured
himself that he was sure--whether the movement had been absolutely
involuntary. Then it is possible that Hill's dietary was conducive to
morbid conscientiousness; a breakfast frequently eaten in a hurry, a
midday bun, and at such hours after five as chanced to be convenient,
such meat as his means determined, usually in a chop-house in a back
street off the Brompton Road. Occasionally he treated himself to
threepenny or ninepenny classics, and they usually represented a
suppression of potatoes or chops. It is indisputable that outbreaks of
self-abasement and emotional revival have a distinct relation to periods
of scarcity. But apart from this influence on the feelings, there was in
Hill a distinct aversion to falsity that the blasphemous Landport
cobbler had inculcated by strap and tongue from his earliest years. Of
one fact about professed atheists I am convinced; they may be--they
usually are--fools, void of subtlety, revilers of holy institutions,
brutal speakers, and mischievous knaves, but they lie with difficulty.
If it were not so, if they had the faintest grasp of the idea of
compromise, they would simply be liberal churchmen. And moreover, this
memory poisoned his regard for Miss Haysman. For she now so evidently
preferred him to Wedderburn that he felt sure he cared for her, and
began reciprocating her attentions by timid marks of personal regard; at
one time he even bought a bunch of violets, carried it about in his
pocket, and produced it, with a stumbling explanation, withered and
dead, in the gallery of old iron. It poisoned too, the denunciation of
capitalist dishonesty that had been one of his life's pleasures. And
lastly, it poisoned his triumph in Wedderburn. Previously he had been
Wedderburn's superior in his own eyes, and had raged simply at a want of
recognition. Now he began to fret at the darker suspicion of positive
inferiority. He fancied he found justifications for his position in
Browning, but they vanished on analysis. At last--moved, curiously
enough, by exactly the same motive forces that had resulted in his
dishonesty--he went to Professor Bindon, and made a clean breast of the
whole affair. As Hill was a paid student, Professor Bindon did not ask
him to sit down, and he stood before the professor's desk as he made his
confession.

"It's a curious story," said Professor Bindon, slowly realising how the
thing reflected on himself, and then letting his anger rise--, "a most
remarkable story. I can't understand your doing it, and I can't
understand this avowal. You're a type of student--Cambridge men would
never dream--I suppose I ought to have thought--why did you cheat?"

"I didn't cheat," said Hill.

"But you have just been telling me you did."

"I thought I explained--"

"Either you cheated or you did not cheat--"

"I said my motion was involuntary."

"I am not a metaphysician, I am a servant of science--of fact. You were
told not to move the slip. You did move the slip. If that is not
cheating--"

"If I was a cheat," said Hill, with the note of hysterics in his voice,
"should I come here and tell you?"

"Your repentance, of course, does you credit," said Professor Bindon,
"but it does not alter the original facts."

"No, sir," said Hill, giving in, in utter self-abasement.

"Even now you cause an enormous amount of trouble. The examination list
will have to be revised."

"I suppose so, sir."

"Suppose so? Of course it must be revised. And I don't see how I can
conscientiously pass you."

"Not pass me?" said Hill. "Fail me?"

"It's the rule in all examinations. Or where should we be? What else did
you expect? You don't want to shirk the consequences of your own acts?"

"I thought, perhaps--" said Hill. And then, "Fail me? I thought, as I
told you, you would simply deduct the marks given for that slip."

"Impossible!" said Bindon. "Besides, it would still leave you above
Wedderburn. Deduct only the marks! Preposterous! The Departmental
Regulations distinctly say--"

"But it's my own admission, sir."

"The Regulations say nothing whatever of the manner in which the matter
comes to light. They simply provide--"

"It will ruin me. If I fail this examination, they won't renew my
scholarship."

"You should have thought of that before."

"But, sir, consider all my circumstances--"

"I cannot consider anything. Professors in this College are machines.
The Regulations will not even let us recommend our students for
appointments. I am a machine, and you have worked me. I have to do--"

"It's very hard, sir."

"Possibly it is."

"If I am to be failed this examination, I might as well go home at
once."

"That is as you think proper." Bindon's voice softened a little; he
perceived he had been unjust, and provided he did not contradict
himself, he was disposed to amelioration. "As a private person," he
said, "I think this confession of yours goes far to mitigate your
offence. But you have set the machinery in motion, and now it must take
its course. I--I am really sorry you gave way."

A wave of emotion prevented Hill from answering. Suddenly, very vividly,
he saw the heavily-lined face of the old Landport cobbler, his father.
"Good God! What a fool I have been!" he said hotly and abruptly.

"I hope," said Bindon, "that it will be a lesson to you."

But, curiously enough, they were not thinking of quite the same
indiscretion.

There was a pause.

"I would like a day to think, sir, and then I will let you know--about
going home, I mean," said Hill, moving towards the door.


The next day Hill's place was vacant. The spectacled girl in green was,
as usual, first with the news. Wedderburn and Miss Haysman were talking
of a performance of 'The Meistersingers' when she came up to them.

"Have you heard?" she said.

"Heard what?"

"There was cheating in the examination."

"Cheating!" said Wedderburn, with his face suddenly hot. "How?"

"That slide--"

"Moved? Never!"

"It was. That slide that we weren't to move--"

"Nonsense!" said Wedderburn. "Why! How could they find out? Who do they
say--?"

"It was Mr. Hill."

"Hill!"

"Mr. Hill!"

"Not--surely not the immaculate Hill?" said Wedderburn, recovering.

"I don't believe it," said Miss Haysman. "How do you know?"

"I didn't," said the girl in spectacles. "But I know it now for a fact.
Mr. Hill went and confessed to Professor Bindon himself."

"By Jove!" said Wedderburn. "Hill of all people. But I am always
inclined to distrust these philanthropists-on-principle--"

"Are you quite sure?" said Miss Haysman, with a catch in her breath.

"Quite. It's dreadful, isn't it? But, you know, what can you expect? His
father is a cobbler."

Then Miss Haysman astonished the girl in spectacles.

"I don't care. I will not believe it," she said, flushing darkly under
her warm-tinted skin. "I will not believe it until he has told me so
himself--face to face. I would scarcely believe it then," and abruptly
she turned her back on the girl in spectacles, and walked to her own
place.

"It's true, all the same," said the girl in spectacles, peering and
smiling at Wedderburn.

But Wedderburn did not answer her. She was indeed one of those people
who seemed destined to make unanswered remarks.




THE RECONCILIATION


Temple had scarcely been with Findlay five minutes before he felt his
old resentments, and the memory of that unforgettable wrong growing
vivid again. But with the infatuation of his good resolution still upon
him, he maintained the air of sham reconciliation that Findlay had
welcomed so eagerly. They talked of this and that, carefully avoiding
the matter of separation. Temple at first spoke chiefly of his travels.
He stood between the cabinet of minerals and the fireplace, his whisky
on the mantel-board, while Findlay sat with his chair pushed back from
his writing-desk, on which were scattered the dozen little skulls of
hedgehogs and shrew mice upon which he had been working.

Temple's eye fell upon them, and abruptly brought his mind round from
the topic of West Africa. "And you," said Temple. "While I have been
wandering I suppose you have been going on steadily."

"Drumming along," said Findlay.

"To the Royal Society and fame and all the things we used to dream
about--how long is it?"

"Five years--since our student days."

Temple glanced round the room, and his eye rested for a moment on a
round greyish-drab object that lay in a corner near the door. "The same
fat books and folios, only more of them, the same smell of old bones,
and dissection--is it the same one--? In the window. Fame is your
mistress?"

"Fame," said Findlay. "But it's hardly fame. The herd outside say,
'Eminence in comparative anatomy.'"

"Eminence in comparative anatomy. No marrying--no avarice."

"None," said Findlay, glancing askance at him.

"I suppose it's the happiest way of living. But it wouldn't be the thing
for me. Excitement--but, I say--!" his eye had fallen again on that
fungoid shape of drabbish-grey--, "there's a limit to scientific
inhumanity. You really mustn't keep your door open with a human
brainpan."

He went across the room as he spoke and picked the thing up. "Brainpan!"
said Findlay. "Oh, that! Man alive, that's not a brainpan. Where's your
science?"

"No. I see it's not," said Temple, carrying the object in his hand as he
came back to his former position and scrutinising it curiously. "But
what the devil is it?"

"Don't you know?" said Findlay.

The thing was about thrice the size of a man's hand, like a rough
watch-pocket of thick bone.

Findlay laughed almost naturally. "You have a bad memory--it's a whale's
ear-bone."

"Of course," said Temple, his appearance of interest vanishing. "The
bulla of a whale. I've forgotten a lot of these things."

He half turned, and put the thing on top of the cabinet beside Findlay's
dumb-bells.

"If you are serious in your music-hall proposal," he said, reverting to
a jovial suggestion of Findlay's, "I am at your service. I'm afraid--I
may find myself a little old for that sort of thing--I haven't tried one
for ages."

"But we are meeting to commemorate youth," said Findlay.

"And bury our early manhood," said Temple. "Well, well--yes, let us go
to the music-hall, by all means, if you desire it. It is trivial--and
appropriate. We want no tragic issues."


When the men returned to Findlay's study the little clock in the dimness
on the mantel-shelf was pointing to half-past one. After the departure
the little brown room, with its books and bones, was undisturbed, save
for the two visits Findlay's attentive servant paid, to see to the fire
and to pull down the blinds and draw the curtains. The ticking of the
clock was the only sound in the quiet. Now and then the fire flickered
and stirred, sending blood-red reflections chasing the shadows across
the ceiling, and bringing into ghostly transitory prominence some
grotesque grouping of animals' bones or skulls upon the shelves. At last
the stillness was broken by the unlatching and slamming of the heavy
street door and the sound of unsteady footsteps approaching along the
passage. Then the door opened, and the two men came into the warm
firelight.

Temple came in first, his brown face flushed with drink, his coat
unbuttoned, his hands deep in his trousers' pockets. His Christmas
resolution had long since dissolved in alcohol. He was a little puzzled
to find himself in Findlay's company. And his fuddled brain insisted
upon inopportune reminiscence. He walked straight to the fire and stood
before it, an exaggerated black figure, staring down into the red glow.
"After all," he said, "we are fools to quarrel--fools to quarrel about a
little thing like that. Damned fools!"

Findaly went to the writing-table and felt about for the matches with
quivering hands.

"It wasn't my doing," he said.

"It wasn't your doing," said Temple. "Nothing ever was your doing. You
are always in the right--Findlay the all-right."

Findlay's attention was concentrated upon the lamp. His hand was
unsteady, and he had some difficulty in turning up the wicks; one got
jammed down and the other flared furiously. When at last it was lit and
turned up, he came up to Temple. "Take your coat off, old man, and have
some more whisky," he said. "That was a ripping little girl in the skirt
dance."

"Fools to quarrel," said Temple slowly, and then woke up to Findlay's
words. "Heigh?"

"Take off your coat and sit down," said Findlay, moving up the little
metal table and producing cigars and a siphon and whisky. "That lamp
gives an infernally bad light, but it is all I have. Something wrong
with the oil. Did you notice the dodge of that stone-smashing trick?"

Temple remained erect and gloomy, staring into the fire. "Fools to
quarrel," he said. Findlay was now half drunk, and his finesse began to
leave him. Temple had been drinking heavily, and was now in a curious
rambling stage. And Findlay's one idea now was to close this curious
reunion.

"There's no woman worth a man's friendship," said Temple abruptly.

He sat down in an easy chair, poured out and drank a dose of whisky and
lithia. The idea of friendship took possession of him, and he became
reminiscent of student days and student adventures. For some time it
was, "Do you remember" this, and "Do you remember" that. And Findlay
grew cheerful again.

"They were glorious times," said Findlay, pouring whisky into Temple's
glass.

Then Temple startled him by abruptly reverting to that bitter quarrel.
"No woman in the world," he said. "Curse them!"

He began to laugh stupidly. "After all," he said, "in the end."

"Oh, damn!" said Findlay.

"All very well for you to swear," said Temple, "but you forget about me.
'Tain't your place to swear. If only you'd left things alone--"

"I thought the password was forget," said Findlay.

Temple stared into the fire for a space. "Forget," he said, and then
with a curious return to a clarity of speech, "Findlay, I'm getting
drunk."

"Nonsense, man, take some more."

Temple rose out of his chair with a look of one awakening. "There's no
reason why I should get drunk, because--"

"Drink," said Findlay, "and forget it."

"Faugh! I want to stick my head in water. I want to think. What the
deuce am I doing here, with you of all people?"

"Nonsense! Talk and forget it, if you won't drink. Do you remember old
Jason and the boxing-gloves? I wonder whether you could put up your
fives now."

Temple stood with his back to the fire, his brain spinning with drink,
and the old hatred of Findlay came back in flood. He sought in his mind
for some offensive thing to say, and his face grew dark. Findlay saw
that a crisis was upon him and he cursed under his breath. His air of
conviviality, his pose of hearty comforter, grew more and more
difficult. But what else was there to do?

"Old Jason--full of science and as slow as an elephant--! But he made
boxers of us. Do you remember our little set-to--at that place in Gower
Street?"

To show his innocent liveliness, his freedom from preoccupation, Findlay
pushed his chair aside, and stepped out into the middle of the room.
There he began to pose in imitation of Jason, and to give a colourable
travesty of the old prize-fighter's instructions. He picked up his
boxing-gloves from the shelf in the recess, and slipped them on. Temple,
lowering there on the brink of an explosion, was almost too much for his
nerves. He felt his display of high spirits was a mistake, but he must
go through with it now.

"Don't stand glooming there, man. You're in just that state when the
world looks black as ink. Drink yourself merry again. There's no woman
in the world worth a man's friendship--that's agreed upon. Come and have
a bout with these gloves of mine--four-ounce gloves. There's nothing
sets the blood and spirits stirring like that."

"All right," said Temple, quite mechanically. And then, waking up to
what he was doing, "Were are the other gloves?"

"Over there in the corner. On the top of the mineral cabinet. By Jove!
Temple, this is like old times!"

Temple, quivering strangely, went to the corner. He meant to thrash
Findlay, and knew that in spite of his lighter weight he would do it.
Yet it seemed puerile and inadequate to the pitch of absurdity, for the
wrong Findlay had done him was great. And putting his hand on something
pale in the shadow, he touched the bulla of the whale. The temptation
was like a lightning flash. He slipped one glove on his left hand, and
thrust the fingers of his right into the cavity of the bulla. It took
all his fingers, and covered his knuckles and the back of his hand. And
it was so oddly like a thumbless boxing glove! Just the very shape of
the padded part. His spirits rose abruptly at the sudden prospect of a
savage joke--how savage it would be, he did not know. Meanwhile Findlay,
with a nervous alacrity, moved the lamp into the corner behind the
armchair, and thrust his writing-desk into the window bay.

"Come on," said Findlay, behind him, and abruptly he turned.

Findlay looked straight into his eyes, on guard, his hands half open. He
did not see the strange substitute for a glove that covered Temple's
right hand. Both men were gone so far towards drunkenness that their
power of observation was obscured. For a moment they stood squaring at
one another, the host smiling, and his guest smiling also, but with his
teeth set; two dark figures swaying in the firelight and the dim
lamplight. Then Findlay struck at his opponent's face with his left
hand. As he did so Temple ducked slightly to the left, and struck
savagely over Findlay's shoulder at his temple with the bone-covered
fist. The blow was given with such tremendous force that it sent Findlay
reeling sideways, half stunned, and overcome with astonishment. The
thing struck his ear, and the side of his face went white at the blow.
He struggled to keep his footing, and as he did so Temple's gloved left
hand took him in the chest and sent him spinning to the foot of the
cigar cabinet.

Findlay's eyes were wide open with astonishment. Temple was a lighter
man by a stone or more than himself, and he did not understand how he
had been felled. He was not stunned, although he was so dulled by the
blow as not to notice the blood running down his cheek from his ear. He
laughed insincerely, and almost pulling the cigar cabinet over,
scrambled to his feet, made as if he would speak, and put up his hand
instinctively as Temple struck out at him again, a feint with the left
hand. Findlay was an expert boxer, and anticipating another right-hand
blow over the ear, struck sharply at once with his own left hand in
Temple's face, throwing his full weight into the blow, and dodging
Temple's reply.

Temple's upper lip was cut against his teeth, and the taste of blood and
the sight of it trickling down Findlay's cheek destroyed the last
vestiges of restraint that drink had left him, stripped of all that
education had ever done for him. There remained now only the savage
man-animal, the creature that thirsts for blood. With a half-bestial
cry, he flung himself upon Findlay as he jumped back, and with a sudden
sweep of his right arm cut down the defence, breaking Findlay's arm just
above the wrist, and following with three rapid blows of the bulla upon
the face. Findlay gave an inarticulate cry of astonishment, countered
weakly once, and then went down like a felled ox. As he fell, Temple
fell upon the top of him. There was a smash as the lamp went down.

The lamp was extinguished as it fell, and left the room red and black.
Findlay struck heavily at Temple's ribs, and Temple, with his left elbow
at Findlay's neck, swung up his right arm and struck down a
sledge-hammer blow upon the face, and again and yet again, until the
body beneath his knees had ceased to writhe.

Then suddenly his frenzy left him at the voice of a woman shrieking so
that it filled the room. He looked up and crouched motionless as he
heard and saw the study door closing and heard the patter of feet
retreating in panic. Then he looked down and saw the thing that had once
been the face of Findlay. For an awful minute he remained kneeling
agape.

Then he staggered to his feet and stood over Findlay's body in the glow
of the dying fire, like a man awakening from a nightmare. Suddenly he
perceived the bulla on his hand, covered with blood and hair, and began
to understand what had happened. In a sudden horror he flung the
diabolical thing from him. It struck the floor near the cigar cabinet,
rolled for a yard or so on its edge, and came to rest in almost the
position it had occupied when he had first set eyes on it. To Temple's
excited imagination it seemed to be lying at exactly the same spot, the
sole and sufficient cause of Findlay's death and his own.




MY FIRST AEROPLANE ("ALAUDA MAGNA")


My first aeroplane! What vivid memories of youth that recalls!

Far back it was in the spring of 1912, that I acquired "Alauda Magna,"
the great Lark, for so I christened her; and I was then a slender young
man of four-and-twenty, with hair--beautiful blond hair--all over my
adventurous young head. I was a dashing young fellow enough, in spite of
the slight visual defect that obliged me to wear spectacles on my
prominent, aquiline, but by no means shapeless nose--the typical flyer's
nose. I was a good runner and swimmer, a vegetarian as ever, an
all-wooler, and an ardent advocate of the extremist views in every
direction about everything. Precious little in the way of a movement got
started that I wasn't in. I owned two motor-bicycles, and an enlarged
photograph of me at that remote date, in leather skull-cap, goggles, and
gauntlets, still adorns my study fireplace. I was also a great flyer of
war-kites, and voluntary scout-master of high repute. From the first
beginnings of the boom in flying, therefore, I was naturally eager for
the fray.

I chafed against the tears of my widowed mother for a time, and at last
told her I could endure it no longer. "If I am not the first to fly in
Mintonchester," I said, "I leave Mintonchester. I'm your own son, mummy,
and that's me!"

And it didn't take me a week to place my order when she agreed.

I found one of the old price-lists the other day in a drawer, full of
queer woodcuts of still queerer contrivances. What a time that was! An
incredulous world had at last consented to believe that it could fly,
and in addition to the motor-car people and the bicycle people, and so
on, a hundred new, unheard-of firms were turning out aeroplanes of every
size and pattern to meet the demand. Amazing prices they got for them,
too--three hundred and fifty was cheap for the things! I find four
hundred and fifty, five hundred, five hundred guineas in this list of
mine; and many as capable of flight as oak trees! They were sold too,
without any sort of guarantee, and with merest apology for instructions.
Some of the early aeroplane companies paid nearly 200 per cent on their
ordinary shares in those early years.

How well I remember the dreams I had--and the doubts!

The dreams were all of wonder in the air. I saw myself raising
gracefully from my mother's paddock, clearing the hedge at the end,
circling up to get over the vicar's pear trees, and away between the
church steeple and the rise of Withycombe, towards the market-place.
Lord! How they would stare to see me! "Young Mr. Betts again!" they
would say. "We knew he'd do it."

I would circle and perhaps wave a handkerchief, and then I meant to go
over Lupton's gardens to the grounds of Sir Digby Foster. There a
certain fair denizen might glance from the window...

Ah, youth! Youth!

My doubts were all of the make I should adopt, the character of engines
I should choose...

I remember my wild rush on my motor-bike to London to see the things and
give my order, the day of muddy-traffic dodging as I went from one shop
to another, my growing exasperation at hearing everywhere the same
refrain, "Sold out! Can't undertake to deliver before the beginning of
April."

Not me!

I got "Alauda Magna" at last at a little place in Blackfriars Road. She
was an order thrown on the firm's hands at the eleventh hour by the
death of the purchaser through another maker, and I ran my modest bank
account into an overdraft to get her--to this day I won't confess the
price I paid for her. Poor little Mumsy! Within a week she was in my
mother's paddock, being put together after transport by a couple of
not-too-intelligent mechanics.

The joy of it! And a sort of adventurous tremulousness. I'd had no
lessons--all the qualified teachers were booked up at stupendous fees
for months ahead; but it wasn't in my quality to stick at a thing like
that! I couldn't have endured three day's delay. I assured my mother I
had, had lessons, for her peace of mind--it is a poor son who will not
tell a lie to keep his parent happy.

I remember the exultant turmoil of walking round the thing as it grew
into a credible shape, with the consciousness of half Mintonchester
peering at me though the hedge, and only deterred by our new
trespass-board and the disagreeable expression of Snape, our trusted
gardener, who was partly mowing the grass and partly on sentry-go with
his scythe, from swarming into the meadow. I lit a cigarette and watched
the workmen sagely, and we engaged an elderly unemployed named
Snorticombe to keep watch all night to save the thing from meddlers. In
those days, you must understand, an aeroplane was a sign and a wonder.

"Alauda Magna" was a darling for her time, though nowadays I suppose she
would be received with derisive laughter by every schoolboy in the land.
She was a monoplane, and roughly speaking, a Bleriot, and she had the
dearest, neatest seven-cylinder forty horse-power G.K.C. engine, with
its G.B.S. fly-wheel, that you can possibly imagine. I spent an hour or
so tuning her up--she had a deafening purr, rather like a machine-gun in
action--until the vicar sent round to say that he was writing a sermon
upon "Peace" and was unable to concentrate his mind on that topic until
I desisted. I took his objection in good part, and after a culminating
volley and one last lingering look, started for a stroll round the town.

In spite of every endeavour to be modest I could not but feel myself the
cynosure of every eye. I had rather carelessly forgotten to change my
leggings and breeches I had bought for the occasion, and I was also
wearing my leather skull-cap with ear-flaps carelessly adjusted, so that
I could hear what people were saying. I should think I had half the
population under fifteen at my heels before I was halfway down the High
Street.

"You going to fly, Mr. Betts?" says one cheeky youngster.

"Like a bird!" I said.

"Don't you fly till we comes out of school," says another.

It was a sort of Royal progress that evening for me. I visited old
Lupton, the horticulturist, and he could hardly conceal what a great
honour he thought it. He took me over his new greenhouse--he had now
got, he said three acres of surface under glass--and showed me all sorts
of clever dodges he was adopting in way of intensive culture, and
afterwards we went down to the end of his old flower-garden and looked
at his bees. When I came out my retinue of kids was still waiting for
me, reinforced. Then I went round by Paramors and dropped into the Bull
and Horses, just as if there wasn't anything particular up, for a lemon
squash. Everybody was talking about my aeroplane. They just shut up for
a moment when I came in, and then burst out with questions. It's odd
nowadays to remember all that excitement. I answered what they had to
ask me and refrained from putting on any side, and afterwards Miss
Flyteman and I went into the commercial-room and turned over the pages
of various illustrated journals and compared the pictures with my
machine in a quite, unassuming sort of way. Everybody encouraged me to
go up--everybody.

I lay stress on that because, as I was soon to discover, the tides and
ebbs of popular favour are among the most inexplicable and inconsistent
things in the world.

I particularly remember old Cheeseman, the pork-butcher, whose pigs I
killed, saying over and over again, in a tone of perfect satisfaction,
"You won't 'ave any difficulty in going up, you won't. There won't be
any difficulty 'bout going up." And winking and nodding to the other
eminent tradesmen there assembled.

I hadn't much difficulty in going up. "Alauda Magna" was a cheerful
lifter, and the roar and spin of her engine had hardly begun behind me
before she was off her wheels--snap, snap, they came up above the ski
gliders--and swaying swiftly across the meadows towards the vicarage
hedge. She had a sort of onward roll to her, rather like the movement of
a corpulent but very buoyant woman.

I had just a glimpse of brave little mother, trying not to cry, and full
of pride in me, on the veranda, with both the maids and old Snape beside
her, and then I had to give all my attention to the steering-wheel if I
didn't want to barge into the vicar's pear trees.

I'd felt the faintest of tugs just as I came up, and fancied I heard a
resounding whack on our new Trespassers will be Prosecuted board, and I
saw the crowd of people in the lane running this way and that from my
loud humming approach; but it was only after the flight was all over
that I realised what that fool Snorticombe had been up to. It would seem
he had thought the monster needed tethering--I won't attempt to explain
the mysteries of his mind--and he had tied about a dozen yards of rope
to the end of either wing and fixed them firmly to a couple of iron
guy-posts that belonged properly to the badminton net. Up they came at
the tug of "Alauda," and they were trailing and dancing and leaping
along behind me, and taking the most vicious dives and lunges at
everything that came within range of them. Poor old Templecom got it
hottest in the lane, I'm told--a frightful whack on his bald head; and
then we ripped up the vicar's cucumber frames, killed and scattered his
parrot, smashed the upper pane of his study window, and just missed the
housemaid as she stuck her head out of the upper bedroom window. I
didn't, of course, know anything of this at the time--it was on a lower
plane altogether from my proceedings. I was steering past his
vicarage--a narrow miss--and trying to come round to clear the pear
trees at the end of the garden--which I did with a graze--and the
trailers behind me sent leaves and branches flying this way and that. I
had reason to thank Heaven for sturdy little G.K.C.'s.

Then I was fairly up for a time.

I found it much more confusing, than I had expected; the engine made
such an infernal whir-r-row for one thing, and the steering tugged and
struggled like a thing alive. But I got her heading over the
market-place all right. We buzzed over Stunt's the greengrocer, and my
trailers hopped up his back premises and made a sanguinary mess of the
tiles on his roof, and sent an avalanche of broken chimney-pot into the
crowded street below. Then the thing dipped--I supposed one of the
guy-posts tried to anchor for a second in Stunt's rafters--and I had the
hardest job to clear the Bull and Horses stables. I didn't, as a matter
of fact, completely clear them. The ski-like alighting runners touched
the ridge for a moment and the left wing bent against the top of the
chimney-stack and floundered over it in an awkward, destructive manner.

I'm told that my trailers whirled about the crowded market-place in the
most diabolical fashion as I dipped and recovered, but I'm inclined to
think all this part of the story has been greatly exaggerated. Nobody
was killed, and I couldn't have been half a minute from the time I
appeared over Stunt's to the time when I slid off the stable roof and
among Lupton's glass. If people had taken reasonable care of themselves
instead of gaping at me, they wouldn't have got hurt. I had enough to do
without pointing out to people that they were likely to be hit by an
iron guy-post which had seen fit to follow me. If anyone ought to have
warned them it was that fool Snorticombe. Indeed, what with the
incalculable damage done to the left wing and one of the cylinders
getting out of rhythm and making an ominous catch in the whirr, I was
busy enough for anything on my own private personal account.

I suppose I am in manner of speaking responsible for knocking old Dudney
off the station bus, but I don't see that I can be held answerable for
subsequent evolutions of the bus, which ended after a charge among the
market stalls in Cheeseman's shop-window, nor do I see that I am to
blame because an idle and ill-disciplined crowd chose to stampede across
a stock of carelessly distributed earthenware and overturn a butter
stall. I was a mere excuse for all this misbehaviour.

I didn't exactly fall into Lupton's glass, and I didn't exactly drive
over it. I think ricochetting describes my passage across his premises
as well an any single word can.

It was the queerest sensation, being carried along by this big, buoyant
thing, which had, as it were, bolted with me, and feeling myself
alternately lifted up and then dropped with a scrunch upon a fresh
greenhouse-roof, in spite of all my efforts to control. And the infinite
relief when at last, at the fifth or sixth pounce, I rose--and kept on
rising!

I seemed to forget everything disagreeable instantly. The doubt whether
after all "Alauda Magna" was good for flying vanished. She was evidently
very good. We whirred over the wall at the end, with my trailers still
bumping behind, and beyond one of them hitting a cow, which died next
day, I don't think I did the slightest damage to anything or anybody all
across the breadth of Cheeseman's meadow. Then I began to rise, steadily
but surely, and getting the thing well in hand, came swooping round over
his piggeries to give Mintonchester a second taste of my quality.

I meant to go up in a spiral until I was clear of all the trees and
things and circle about the church spire. Hitherto I had been so
concentrated on plunges and tugs of the monster I was driving and so
deafened by the uproar of my engine, that I had noticed little of the
things that were going on below; but now I could make out a little lot
of people headed by Lupton with a garden fork, rushing obliquely across
the corner of Cheeseman's meadow. It puzzled me for a second to imagine
what they could think they were after.

Up I went, whirring and swaying, and presently got a glimpse down the
High Street of the awful tangle everything had got into in the
market-place. I didn't at the time connect that extraordinary smash-up
with my transit.

It was the jar of my whack against the weathercock that really stopped
my engines. I've never been able to make out quite how it was I hit the
unfortunate vane; perhaps the twist I had given my left wing on Stunt's
roof spoilt my steering; but anyhow, I hit the gaudy thing and bent it,
and for a lengthy couple of seconds I wasn't by any means sure whether I
wasn't going to dive straight down into the market-place. I got her
right by a supreme effort--I think the people I didn't smash might have
squeezed out one drop of gratitude for that--drove pitching at the
tree-tops of Withycombe, got round, and realised the engines were
stopping. There wasn't any time to survey the country and arrange for
suitable landing place; there wasn't any chance of clearing the course.
It wasn't my fault if a quarter of the population of Mintonchester was
swarming out over Cheeseman's meadows. It was the only chance I had to
land without a smash, and I took it. Down I came, a steep glide, doing
the best I could for myself.

Perhaps I did bowl a few people over; but progress is progress.

And I had to kill his pigs. It was a case of either dropping among the
pigs and breaking my rush, or going full tilt into the corrugated iron
piggeries beyond. I might have been cut to ribbons. And pigs are born to
die.

I stopped, and stood up stiffly upon the framework and looked behind me.
It didn't take me a moment to realise that Mintonchester meant to take
my poor efforts to give it an Aviation Day all to itself in a spirit of
ferocious ingratitude.

The air was full of the squealing of the two pigs I had pinned under my
machine and the bawling of the nearer spectators. Lupton occupied the
middle distance with a garden fork, with the evident intention of
jabbing it into my stomach. I am always pretty cool and quick-witted in
an emergency. I dropped off poor "Alauda Magna" like a shot, dodged
through the piggery, went up by Frobisher's orchard, nipped over the
yard wall of Hinks's cottages, and was into the police-station by the
back way before anyone could get within fifty feet of me.

"Halloa!" said Inspector Nenton; "Smashed the thing?"

"No," I said; "but people seem to have got something the matter with
them. I want to be locked in a cell..."

For a fortnight, do you know, I wasn't allowed to come near my own
machine. I went home from the police-station as soon as the first
excitement had blown over a little, going round by Love Lane and Chart
so as not to arouse any febrile symptoms. I found mother frightfully
indignant, you can be sure, at the way I had been treated. And there, as
I say, was I, standing a sort of siege in the upstairs rooms, and sturdy
little "Alauda Magna," away in Cheeseman's field, being walked round and
stared at by everybody in the world but me. Cheeseman's theory was that
he had seized her. There came a gale one night, and the dear thing was
blown clean over the hedge among Lupton's greenhouses again, and then
Lupton sent round a silly note to say that if we didn't remove her, she
would be sold to defray expenses, going off into a long tirade about
damages and his solicitor. So mother posted off to Clamps', the
furniture removers at Upnorton Corner, and they got hold of a
timber-waggon, and popular feeling had allayed sufficiently before that
arrived for me to go in person to superintend the removal. There she lay
like a great moth above the debris of some cultural projects of
Lupton's, scarcely damaged herself except for a hole or so and some bent
rods and stays in the left wing and a smashed skid. But she was
bespattered with pigs' blood and pretty dirty.

I went at once by instinct for the engines, and had them in perfect
going order before the timber-waggon arrived.

A sort of popularity returned to me with that procession home. With the
help of a swarm of men we got "Alauda Magna" poised on the waggon, and
then I took my seat to see she was balanced properly, and a
miscellaneous team of seven horses started to tow her home. It was
nearly one o'clock when we got to that, and all the children turned out
to shout and jeer. We couldn't go by Pook's Lane and the vicarage,
because the walls are too high and narrow, and so we headed across
Cheeseman's meadows for Stokes' Waste and the Common, to get round by
that detour.

I was silly, of course, to do what I did--I see that now--but sitting up
there on my triumphal car with all the multitude about me excited me. I
got a kind of glory on. I really only meant to let the propellers spin
as sort of hurrahing, but I was carried away. Whuz-z-z-z! It was like
something blowing up, and behold! I was sailing and plunging away from
my wain across the common for a second flight.

"Lord!" I said.

I fully meant to run up the air a little way, come about, and take her
home to our paddock, but those early aeroplanes were very uncertain
things.

After all, it wasn't such a very bad shot to land in the vicarage
garden, and that practically is what I did. And I don't see that it was
my fault that all the vicarage and a lot of his friends should be having
lunch on the lawn. They were doing that, of course, so as to be on the
spot without having to rush out of the house when "Alauda Magna" came
home again. Quiet exultation--that was their game. They wanted to gloat
over every particular of my ignominious return. You can see that from
the way they had arranged the table. I can't help it if Fate decided
that my return wasn't to be so ignominious as all that, and swooped me
down on the lot of them.

They were having their soup. They had calculated on me for the dessert,
I suppose.

To this day I can't understand how I didn't kill the vicar. The forward
edge of the left wing got him just under the chin and carried him back a
dozen yards. He must have had neck vertebrae like steel; and even then I
was amazed his head didn't come off. Perhaps he was holding on
underneath; but I can't imagine where. If it hadn't been for the
fascination of his staring face I think I could have avoided the
veranda, but as it was, that took me by surprise. That was a fair
crumple up. The wood must have just rotted away under its green paint;
but anyhow, it and the climbing roses and shingles above and everything
snapped and came down like stage scenery, and I and the engines and the
middle part drove clean through the French windows on to the
drawing-room floor. It was jolly luck for me, I think, that the French
windows weren't shut. There's no unpleasanter way of getting hurt in the
world than flying suddenly through thin window-glass; and I think I
ought to know. There was a frightful jawbation, but the vicar was out of
action, that was one good thing. Those deep, sonorous sentences! But
perhaps they would have calmed things...

That was the end of "Alauda Magna," my first aeroplane. I never even
troubled to take her away. I hadn't the heart to...

And then the storm burst.

The idea seems to have been to make mother and me pay for everything
that had ever tumbled down or got broken in Mintonchester since the
beginning of things. Oh! And for any animal that had died a sudden death
in the memory of the oldest inhabitant. The tariff ruled high, too. Cows
were twenty-five to thirty pounds and upward; pigs about a pound each,
with no reduction for killing a quantity; verandas--verandas were steady
at forty-five guineas. Dinner services, too, were up, and so were
tilting and branches of the building trade. It seemed to certain persons
in Mintonchester, I believe, that an era of unexampled prosperity had
dawned upon the place--only limited, in fact by the solvency of me and
mother. The vicar tried the old "sold to defray expenses" racket, but I
told him he might sell.

I pleaded defective machinery and the hand of God, did my best to shift
the responsibility on to the firm in Blackfriars Road, and as additional
precaution, filed my petition in bankruptcy. I really hadn't any
property in the world, thanks to mother's goodness, except my two
motor-bicycles, which the brutes took, my photographic dark-room, and a
lot of bound books on aeronautics and progress generally. Mother, of
course, wasn't responsible. She hadn't lifted a wing.

Well, for all that, disagreeables piled up so heavily on me, what with
being shouted after by a rag-tag and bobtail of schoolboys and golf
caddies and hobbledehoys when I went out doors, threatened with personal
violence by stupid people like old Lupton, who wouldn't understand that
a man can't pay what he hasn't got, pestered by the wives of various
gentlemen who saw fit to become out-of-works on the strength of alleged
injuries, and served with all sorts of silly summonses for all sorts of
fancy offences, such as mischievous mischief and manslaughter and wilful
damage and trespass, that I simply had to go away from Mintonchester to
Italy, and leave poor little mother to manage them in her own solid,
undemonstrative way. Which she did, I must admit, like a brick.

They didn't get much out of her, anyhow but she had to break up our
little home at Mintonchester and join me at Arosa, in spite of her
dislike of Italian cooking. She found me already a bit of a celebrity
because I had made a record, so it seemed, by falling down three
separate crevasses on three successive days. But that's another story
altogether.

From start to finish I reckon that first aeroplane cost my mother over
nine hundred pounds. If I hadn't put my foot down, and she had stuck to
her original intention of paying all the damage, it would have cost her
three thousand... But it was worth it. It was worth it. I wish I could
live it all over again; and many an old codger like me sits at home now
and deplores those happy, vanished, adventurous times, when any lad of
spirit was free to fly--and go anywhere--and smashed anything--and
discuss the question afterwards of just what the damages amounted to and
what his legal liability might be.




LITTLE MOTHER UP THE MORDERBERG


I think I mentioned, when I was telling how I sailed my first aeroplane,
that I made a kind of record at Arosa by falling down three separate
crevasses on three successive days. That was before little mother
followed me out there. When she came, I could see at a glance she was
tired and jaded and worried, and so, instead of letting her fret about,
in the hotel and get into a wearing tangle of gossip, I packed her and
two knapsacks up, and started off on a long, refreshing, easy-going walk
northward, until a blister on her foot stranded us at the Magenruhe
Hotel on the Sneejoch. She was for going on, blister or no blister--I
never met pluck like mother's in all my life--but I said "No, This is a
mountaineering inn, and it suits me down to the ground--or if you prefer
it, up to the sky. You shall sit in the veranda by the telescope, and
I'll prance about among the peaks for a bit."

"Don't have accidents," she said.

"Can't promise that, little mother," I said; "but I'll always remember
I'm your only son."

So I pranced...

I need hardly say that in a couple of days I was at loggerheads with all
the mountaineers in that inn. They couldn't stand me. They didn't like
my neck with its strong, fine Adam's apple--being mostly men with their
heads jammed on--and they didn't like the way I bore myself and lifted
my aviator's nose to the peaks. They didn't like my being a vegetarian
and the way I evidently enjoyed it, and they didn't like the touch of
colour, orange and green, in my rough serge suit. They were all of the
dingy school--the sort of men I call gentlemanly owls--shy,
correct-minded creatures, mostly from Oxford, and as solemn over their
climbing as a cat frying eggs. Sage they were, great headnodders, and
"I-wouldn't-venture-to-do-a-thing-like-that--" -ers. They always did
what the books and guides advised, and they classed themselves by their
seasons; one was in his ninth season, and another in his tenth, and so
on. I was a novice and had to sit with my mouth open for bits of
humble-pie.

My style that! Rather!

I would sit in the smoking-room sucking away at a pipeful of hygienic
herb tobacco--they said it smelt like burning garden rubbish--and
waiting to put my spoke in and let a little into their minds. They set
aside their natural reticence altogether in their efforts to show how
much they didn't like me.

"You chaps take these blessed mountains too seriously," I said. "They're
larks, you've got to lark with them."

They just slued their eyes round me.

"I don't find the solemn joy in fussing you do. The old-style
mountaineers went up with alpenstocks and ladders and light hearts.
That's my idea of mountaineering."

"It isn't ours," said one red-boiled hero of the peaks, all blisters and
peeling skin, and he said it with an air of crushing me.

"It's the right idea," I said serenely, and puffed at my herb tobacco.

"When you've had a bit of experience you'll know better," said another,
an oldish young man with a small grey beard.

"Experience never taught me anything," I said.

"Apparently not," said someone, and left me one down and me to play. I
kept perfectly tranquil.

"I mean to do the Morderberg before I go down," I said quietly, and
produced a sensation.

"When are you going down?"

"Week or so," I answered, unperturbed.

"It's not the climb a man ought to attempt in his first year," said the
peeling gentleman.

"You particularly ought not to try it," said another.

"No guide will go with you."

"Foolhardy idea."

"Mere brag."

"Like to see him do it."

I just let them boil for a bit, and when they were back to the simmer I
dropped in, pensively, with, "Very likely I'll take that little mother
of mine. She's small, bless her, and she's as hard as nails."

But they saw they were being drawn by my ill-concealed smile; and this
time they contented themselves with a few grunts and grunt-like remarks,
and then broke up into little conversations in undertones that pointedly
excluded me. It had the effect of hardening my purpose. I'm a stiff man
when I'm put on my mettle, and I determined that the little mother
should go up the Morderberg, where half these solemn experts hadn't
been, even if I had to be killed or orphaned in the attempt. So I spoke
to her about it the next day. She was in a deck-chair on the veranda,
wrapped up in rugs and looking at the peaks.

"Comfy?" I said.

"Very," she said.

"Getting rested?"

"It's so nice."

I strolled to the rail of the veranda. "See that peak there, mummy?"

She nodded happily, with eyes half shut.

"That's the Morderberg. You and me have got to be up there the day after
to-morrow."

Her eyes opened a bit. "Wouldn't it be rather a climb, dearest?" she
said.

"I'll manage that all right," I said, and she smiled consentingly and
closed her eyes.

"So long as you manage it," she said.

I went down the valley that afternoon to Daxdam to get gear and guides
and porters, and I spent the next day in glacier and rock practice above
the hotel. That didn't add to my popularity. I made two little slips.
One took me down a crevasse--I've an extraordinary knack of going down
crevasses--and a party of three which was starting for the Kinderspitz
spent an hour and a half fishing me out; and the other led to my
dropping my ice-axe on a little string of people going for the Humpi
glacier. It didn't go within thirty inches of anyone, but you might have
thought from the row they made that I had knocked out the collective
brains of the party. Quite frightful language they used, and three
ladies with them, too!

The next day there was something very like an organised attempt to
prevent our start. They brought out the landlord, they remonstrated with
mother, they did their best to blacken the character of my two guides.
The landlord's brother had a first-class row with them.

"Two years ago," he said, "they lost their Herr!"

"No particular reason," I said, "why you shouldn't keep yours on is it?"

That settled him. He wasn't up to a polyglot pun, and it stuck in his
mind like a fishbone in the throat.

Then the peeling gentleman came along and tried to overhaul our
equipment. "Have you got this?" it was, and "Have you got that?"

"Two things," I said, looking at his nose pretty hard, "we haven't
forgotten. One's blue veils and the other vaseline."

I've still a bright little memory of the start, There was the pass a
couple of hundred feet or so below the hotel, and the hotel--all name
and windows--standing out in a great, desolate, rocky place against
lumpy masses of streaky green rock, flecked here and there with patches
of snow and dark shelves of rhododendron, and raising perhaps a thousand
feet towards the western spur of the massif. Our path ran before us,
meandering among the boulders down to stepping-stones over a rivulet,
and then upward on the other side of the stream towards the Magenruhe
glacier, where we had to go up the rocks to the left and then across the
icefall to shelves on the precipitous face on the west side. It was
dawn, the sun had still to rise, and everything looked very cold and
blue and vast about us. Everyone in the hotel had turned out to bear a
hand in the row--some of the deshabilles were disgraceful--and now they
stood in a silent group watching us recede. The last word I caught was,
"They'll have to come back."

"We'll come back all right," I answered. "Never fear."

And so we went our way, cool and deliberate, over the stream and up and
up towards the steep snowfields and icy shoulder of the Morderberg. I
remember that we went in absolute silence for a time, and then how
suddenly the landscape gladdened with sunrise, and in an instant, as if
speech had thawed, all our tongues were babbling.

I had one or two things in the baggage that I hadn't cared for the
people at the inn to see, and I had made no effort to explain why I had
five porters with the load of two and a half. But when we came to the
icefall I showed my hand a little, and unslung a stout twine hammock for
the mater. We put her in this with a rug round her, and sewed her in
with a few stitches; then we roped up in line, with me last but one and
a guide front and rear, and mummy in the middle carried by two of the
porters. I stuck my alpenstock through two holes I had made in the
shoulders of my jacket under my rucksack, T-shape to my body, so that
when I went down a crevasse, as I did ever and again, I just stuck in
its jaws and came up easy as the rope grew taut. And so, except for one
or two bumps that made the mater chuckle, we got over without
misadventure.

Then came the rock climb on the other side, requiring much judgment. We
had to get from ledge to ledge as opportunity offered, and here the
little mother was a perfect godsend. We unpacked her after we had slung
her over the big fissure--I forget what you call it--that always comes
between glacier and rock--and whenever we came to a bit of ledge within
eight feet of the one we were working along, the two guides took her and
slung her up, she being so light, and then she was able to give a foot
for the next man to hold by and hoist himself. She said we were all
pulling her leg, and that made her and me laugh so much that the whole
party had to wait for us.

It was pretty tiring altogether doing that bit of the climb--two hours
we had of it before we got to the loose masses of rock on the top of the
arete. "It's worse going down," said the elder guide.

I looked back for the first time, and I confess it did make me feel a
bit giddy. There was the glacier looking quite pretty, and with a black
gash between itself and the rocks.

For a time it was pretty fair going up the rocky edge of the arete, and
nothing happened of any importance, except that one of the porters took
to grousing because he was hit on the shin by a stone I dislodged.
"Fortunes of war," I said, but he didn't seem to see it, and when I just
missed him with a second he broke out into a long, whining discourse in
what I suppose he thought was German--I couldn't make head or tail of
it.

"He said you might have killed him," said little mother.

"They say," I quoted. "What say they? Let them say."

I was for stopping and filling him up with a feed, but the elder guide
wouldn't have it. We had already lost time, he said, and the traverse
round the other face of the mountain would be more and more subject to
avalanches as the sun got up. So we went on. As we went round the corner
to the other face I turned towards the hotel--it was the meanest little
oblong spot by now--and made a derisive gesture or so for the benefit of
anyone at the telescope.

We did get one rock avalanche that reduced the hindmost guide to audible
prayer, but nothing hit us except a few bits of snow. The rest of the
fall was a couple of yards and more from us. We were on rock just then
and overhung; before and afterwards we were edging along steps in an
ice-slope cut by the foremost guide, and touched up by the porters. The
avalanche was much more impressive before it came in sight, banging and
thundering overhead, and it made a tremendous uproar in the blue deeps
beneath, but in actual transit it seemed a mean show--mostly of stones
smaller than I am.

"All right?" said the guide.

"Toned up," I answered.

"You suppose it is safe, dear?" asked the little mother.

"Safe as Trafalgar Square," I said. "Hop along, mummykins."

Which she did with remarkable agility.

The traverse took us on to old snow at last, and here, we could rest for
lunch--and pretty glad we were both of lunch and rest. But here the
trouble with the guides and porters thickened. They were already a
little ruffled about my animating way with loose rocks, and now they
kicked up a tremendous shindy because instead of the customary brandy we
had brought non-alcoholic ginger cordial. Would they even try it? Not a
bit of it! It was a queer little dispute, high up in that rarefied air
about food values and the advantages of making sandwiches with nuttar.
They were an odd lot of men, invincibly set upon a vitiated and
vitiating dietary. They wanted meat, they wanted alcohol, they wanted
narcotics to smoke. You might have thought that men like these, living
in almost direct contact with Nature, would have liked "Nature" foods,
such as plasmon, protose, plobose, digestine, and so forth. Not them!
They just craved for corruption. When I spoke of drinking pure water one
of the porters spat in a marked, symbolic manner over the precipice.
From that point onward discontent prevailed.

We started again about half-past eleven, after a vain attempt on the
part of the head guide to induce us to turn back. We had now come to
what is generally the most difficult part of the Morderberg ascent, the
edge that leads up to the snowfield below the crest. But here we came
suddenly into a draught of warm air blowing from the south-west, and
everything, the guide said, was unusual. Usually the edge is a sheet of
ice over rock. To-day it was wet and soft, and one could kick steps in
it and get one's toes into rock with the utmost ease.

"This is where Herr Tomlinson's party fell," said one of the porters,
after we'd committed ourselves to the edge for ten minutes or so.

"Some people could fall out of a four-post bed," I said.

"It'll freeze hard again before we come back," said the second guide,
"and us with nothing but verdammt ginger inside of us."

"You keep your rope taut," said I.

A friendly ledge came to the help of mother in the nick of time, just as
she was beginning to tire, and we sewed her up all but the feet in her
hammock again, and roped her carefully. She bumped a bit, and at times
she was just hanging over immensity and rotating slowly, with everybody
else holding like grim death.

"My dear," she said, the first time this happened, "is it right for me
to be doing this?"

"Quite right," I said, "but if you can get a foothold presently
again--it's rather better style."

"You're sure there's no danger, dear?"

"Not a scrap."

"And I don't fatigue you?"

"You're a stimulant."

"The view," she said, "is certainly becoming very beautiful."

But presently the view blotted itself out, and we were in clouds and
thin drift of almost thawing snowflakes.

We reached the upper snowfield about half-past one, and the snow was
extraordinarily soft. The elder guide went in up to his armpits.

"Frog it," I said, and spread myself out flat, in a sort of swimming
attitude. So we bored our way up to the crest and along it. We went in
little spurts and then stopped for breath, and we dragged the little
mother after us in her hammock-bag. Sometimes the snow was so good we
fairly skimmed the surface; sometimes it was so rotten we plunged right
into it and splashed about. I went too near the snow cornice once and it
broke under me, but the rope saved me, and we reached the summit about
three o'clock without further misadventure. The summit was just bare
rock with the usual cairn and pole. Nothing to make a fuss about. The
drift of snow and cloudwisp had passed, the sun was blazing hot
overhead, and we seemed to be surveying all Switzerland. The Magenruhe
Hotel was at our toes, hidden, so to speak, by our chins. We squatted
about the cairn, and the guides and porters were reduced to ginger and
vegetarian ham-sandwiches. I cut and scratched an inscription, saying I
had climbed on simple food, and claiming a record.

Seen from the summit the snowfields on the north-east side of the
mountain looked extremely attractive, and I asked the head guide why
that way up wasn't used. He said something in his peculiar German about
precipices.

So far our ascent had been a fairly correct ascent in rather slow time.
It was in the descent that, that strain in me of almost unpremeditated
originality had play. I wouldn't have a rope returning across the upper
snowfield, because mother's feet and hands were cold, and I wanted her
to jump about a bit. And before I could do anything to prevent it she
had slipped, tried to get up by rolling over down the slope instead of
up, as she ought to have done, and was leading the way, rolling over and
over and over, down towards the guide's blessed precipices above the
lower snowfield.

I didn't lose an instant in flinging myself after her, axe up, in
glissading attitude. I'm not clear what I meant to do, but I fancy the
idea was to get in front of her and put on the brake. I did not succeed,
anyhow. In twenty seconds I had slipped, and was sitting down and going
down out of my own control altogether.

Now, most great discoveries are the result of accident, and I maintain
that in that instant mother and I discovered two distinct and novel ways
of coming down a mountain.

It is necessary that there should be first a snow slope above with a
layer of softish, rotten snow on the top of ice, then a precipice, with
a snow-covered talus sloping steeply at first and then less steeply,
then more snow-slopes and precipices according to taste, ending in a
snowfield or a not-too-greatly-fissured glacier, or a reasonable,
not-too-rocky slope. Then it all becomes as easy as chuting the chutes.

Mother hit on the sideways method. She rolled. With the snow in the
adhesive state it had got into, she had made the jolliest little
snowball of herself in half a minute, and the nucleus of as clean and
abundant a snow avalanche as anybody could wish. There was plenty of
snow going in front of her, and that's the very essence of both our
methods. You must fall on your snow, not your snow fall on you, or it
smashes you. And you mustn't mix yourself up with loose stones.

I, on the other hand, went down feet first, and rather like a
snow-plough; slower than she did, and if, perhaps, with less charm, with
more dignity. Also I saw more. But it was certainly a tremendous rush.
And I gave a sort of gulp when mummy bumped over the edge into the empty
air and vanished.

It was like a toboggan ride gone mad down the slope until I took off
from the edge of the precipice, and then it was like a dream.

I'd always thought falling must be horrible. It wasn't in the slightest
degree. I might have hung with my clouds and lumps of snow about me for
weeks, so great was my serenity. I had an impression then that I was as
good as killed--and that didn't matter. I wasn't afraid--that's
nothing--! But I wasn't a bit uncomfortable. Whack! We'd hit something,
and I expected to be flying to bits right and left. But we'd only got on
to the snow-slope below, at so steep an angle that it was merely
breaking the fall. Down we went again. I didn't see much of the view
after that because the snow was all round and over my head, but I kept
feet foremost and in a kind of sitting posture, and then I slowed and
then I quickened again and bumped rather, and then harder, and bumped
and then bumped again and came to rest. This time I was altogether
buried in snow, and twisted sideways with a lot of heavy snow on my
right shoulder.

I sat for a bit enjoying the stillness--and then I wondered what had
become of mother, and set myself to get out of the snow about me. It
wasn't so easy as you might think; the stuff was all in lumps and spaces
like a gigantic sponge, and I lost my temper and struggled and swore a
good deal, but at last I managed it. I crawled out and found myself on
the edge of heaped masses of snow quite close to the upper part of the
Magenruhe glacier. And far away, right up the glacier and near the other
side, was a little thing like a black-beetle struggling in the heart of
an immense split ball of snow.

I put my hands to my mouth and let out with my version of the yodel, and
presently I saw her waving her hand.

It took me nearly twenty minutes to get to her. I knew my weakness, and
I was very careful of every crevasse I came near. When I got up to her,
her face was anxious.

"What have you done with the guides?" she asked.

"They've got too much to carry," I said. "They're coming down another
way. Did you like it?"

"Not very much, dear," she said, "but I dare say I shall get used to
these things. Which way do we go now?"

I decided we'd find a snow-bridge across the bergschrund--that's the
word I forgot just now--and so get on to the rocks on the east side of
the glacier, and after that we had uneventful going right down to the
hotel...

Our return evoked such a strain of hostility and envy as I have never
met before or since. First they tried to make out we'd never been to the
top at all, but mother's little proud voice settled that sort of insult.
And besides, there was the evidence of the guides and porters following
us down. When they asked about the guides, "They're following your
methods," I said, "and I suppose they'll get back here to-morrow morning
sometime."

That didn't please them.

I claimed a record. They said my methods were illegitimate.

"If I see fit," I said, "to use an avalanche to get back by, what's that
to you? You tell me, me and mother can't do the confounded mountain
anyhow, and when we do you want to invent a lot of rules to disqualify
us. You'll say next one mustn't glissade. I've made a record, and you
know I've made a record, and you're about as sour as you can be. The
fact of it is, you chaps don't know your own silly business. Here's a
good, quick way of coming down a mountain, and you ought to know about
it--"

"The chance that both of you are not killed was one in a thousand."

"Nonsense! It's the proper way to come down for anyone who hasn't a
hide-bound mind. You chaps ought to practise falling great heights in
snow. It's perfectly easy and perfectly safe, if only you know how to
set about it."

"Look here, young man," said the oldish young man with the little grey
beard, "you don't seem to understand that you and that lady have been
saved by a kind of miracle--"

"Theory!" I interrupted. "I'm surprised you fellows ever come to
Switzerland. If I were your kind I'd just invent theoretical mountains
and play for points. However, you're tired, little mummy. It's time you
had some nice warm soup and tucked yourself up in bed. I shan't let you
get up for six-and-thirty hours."

But it's queer how people detest a little originality.




THE STORY OF THE LAST TRUMP


1.

The story of the Last Trump begins in Heaven and it ends in all sorts
of places round about the world...

Heaven, you must know, is a kindly place, and the blessed ones do not go
on for ever singing Alleluia, whatever you may have been told. For they
too are finite creatures, and must be fed with their eternity in little
bits, as one feeds a chick or a child. So that there are mornings and
changes and freshness, there is time to condition their lives. And the
children are still children, gravely eager about playing and ready
always for new things; just children they are, but blessed as you see
them in the pictures beneath the careless feet of the Lord God. And one
of these blessed children routing about in an attic--for Heaven is, of
course, full of the most heavenly attic, seeing that it has
children--came upon a number of instruments stored away, and laid its
little chubby hands upon them...

Now indeed I cannot tell what these instruments were, for to do so would
be to invade mysteries... But one I may tell of, and that was a great
brazen trumpet which the Lord God had made when He made the world--for
the Lord God finishes all His jobs--to blow when the time for our
Judgment came round. And He had made it and left it; there it was, and
everything was settled exactly as the Doctrine of Predestination
declares. And this blessed child conceived one of those unaccountable
passions of childhood for its smoothness and brassiness, and he played
with it and tried to blow it, and trailed it about with him out of the
attic into the gay and golden streets, and, after many fitful
wanderings, to those celestial battlements of crystal of which you
doubtless read. And there the blessed child fell to counting the stars,
and forgot all about the Trumpet beside him until a flourish of his
elbow sent it over...

Down fell the trump, spinning as it fell, and for a day or so, which
seemed but moments in heaven, the blessed child watched its fall until
it was a glittering little speck of brightness...

When it looked a second time the trump was gone...

I do not know what happened to that child when at last it was time for
Judgment Day and that shining trumpet was missed. I know that Judgment
Day is long overpassed, because of the wickedness of the world; I think
perhaps it was in A.D. 1000 when the expected Day should have dawned
that never came, but no other heavenly particulars do I know at all,
because now my scene change to the narrow ways of this Earth...

And the Prologue in Heaven ends.


2.

And now the scene is a dingy little shop in Caledonian Market, where
things of an incredible worthlessness lie in wait for such as seek after
an impossible cheapness. In the window, as though it had always been
there and never anywhere else, lies a long, battered, discoloured
trumpet of brass that no prospective purchaser has ever been able to
sound. In it mice shelter, and dust and fluff have gathered, after the
fashion of this world. The keeper of the shop is a very old man, and he
bought the shop long ago, but already this trumpet was there; he has no
idea whence it came, nor its country of origin, nor anything about it.
But once in a moment of enterprise that led to nothing he decided to
call it an Ancient Ceremonial Shawm, though he ought to have known that
a shawm may be the last thing it was likely to be is a trumpet, seeing
that they are always mentioned together. And above it hung concertinas
and melodeons and cornets and tin whistles and mouth-organs and all that
rubbish of musical instruments which delight the hearts of the poor.
Until one day two blackened young men from the big motor works in the
Pansophist Road stood outside the window and argued.

They argued about these instruments in stock and how you made these
instruments sound, because they were fond of argument, and one asserted
and the other denied that he could make every instrument in the place
sound a note. And the argument rose high, and led to a bet.

"Supposing, of course, that the instrument is in order," said Hoskin,
who was betting he could.

"That's understood," said Briggs.

And then they called as witnesses certain other young and black and
greasy men in the same employment, and after much argument and
discussion that lasted through the afternoon, they went in to the little
old dealer about teatime, just as he was putting a blear-eyed, stinking
paraffin-lamp, to throw an unfavourable light upon his always very
unattractive window. And after great difficulty they arranged that for
the sum of one shilling, paid in advance, Hoskin should have a try at
every instrument in the shop that Briggs chose to indicate.

And the trial began.

The third instrument that pitched upon by Briggs for trial was the
strange trumpet that lay at the bottom of the window, the trumpet that
you, who have read the Introduction, know was the trumpet for the Last
Trump. And Hoskin tried and tried again, and then, blowing desperately,
hurt his ears. But he could get no sound from the trumpet. Then he
examined the trumpet more carefully and discovered the mice and fluff
and other things in it, and demanded that it should be cleaned; and the
old dealer, nothing loth, knowing they were used to automobile-horns and
such-like instruments, agreed to let them clean it on condition that
they left it shiney. So the young men, after making a suitable deposit
(which, as you shall hear, was presently confiscated), went off with the
trumpet, proposing to clean it next day at the works and polish it with
the peculiarly excellent brass polish employed upon the honk-honk horns
of the firm. And this they did, and Hoskin tried again.

But he tried in vain. Whereupon there arose a great argument about the
trumpet, whether it was in order or not, whether it was possible for any
one to sound it. For if not, then clearly it was outside the condition
of the bet.

Others among the young men tried it, including two who played wind
instruments in a band and were musically knowing men. After their own
failure they were strongly on the side of Hoskin and strongly against
Briggs, and most of the other young men were of the same opinion.

"Not a bit of it," said Briggs, who was a man of resource. "I'll show
you it can be sounded."

And taking the instrument in his hand, he went towards a peculiarly
powerful foot blow-pipe that stood at the far end of the toolshed. "Good
old Briggs!" said one of the other young men, and opinion veered about.

Briggs removed the blow-pipe from its bellows and tube, and then
adjusted the tube very carefully to the mouthpiece of the trumpet. Then
with great deliberation he produced a piece of bees-waxed string from a
number of other strange and filthy content in his pocket and tied the
tube to the mouthpiece. And then he began to work the treadle of the
bellows.

"Good old Briggs!" said the one who had previously admired him.

And then something incomprehensible happened.

It was a flash. What ever else it was, it was a flash. And a sound that
seemed to coincide exactly with the flash.

Afterwards the young men agreed to it that the trumpet blew to bits. It
blew to bits and vanished, and they were all flung upon their faces--not
backward, be it noted, but on their faces--and Briggs was stunned and
scared. The toolshed windows were broken and the various apparatus and
cars around were much displaced, and no traces of the trumpet were ever
discovered.

That last particular puzzled and perplexed poor Briggs very much. It
puzzled and perplexed him the more because he had, had an impression, so
extraordinary, so incredible, that he was never able to describe it to
any other living person. But his impression was this: that the flash
that came with the sound came, not from the trumpet but to it, that it
smote down to it and took it, and its shape was in the exact likeness of
a hand and arm of fire.


3.

And that was not all, that was not the only strange thing about the
disappearance of that battered trumpet. There was something else, even
more difficult to describe, an effect as though for one instant
something opened...

The young men who worked with Hoskin and Briggs had that clearness of
mind which comes of dealing with machinery, and they all felt this
indescribable something else, as if for an instant the world wasn't the
world, but something lit and wonderful, larger--

This is what one of them said of it.

"I felt," he said, "just for a minute--as though I was blown to Kingdom
Come."

"It is just how it took me," said another. "'Lord,' I says, 'here's
Judgment Day!' and then there I was sprawling among the files..."

But none of the others felt that they could say anything more definite
than that.


4.

Moreover, there was a storm. All over the world there was a storm
that puzzled meteorology, a moment's gale that left the atmosphere in a
state of wild swaygog, rains, tornadoes, depressions, irregularities for
weeks. News came of it from all the quarters of the earth.

All over China, for example, that land of cherished graves, there was a
duststorm, dust leaped into the air. A kind of earthquake shook
Europe--an earthquake that seemed to have at heart the peculiar
interests of Mr. Algernon Ashton; everywhere it cracked mausoleums and
shivered the pavements of cathedrals, swished the flower-beds of
cemeteries, and tossed tombstones aside. A crematorium in Texas blew up.
The sea greatly agitated, and the beautiful harbour of Sydney, in
Australia, was seen to be littered with sharks floating upside down in
manifest distress...

And all about the world a sound was heard like the sound of a trumpet
instantly cut short.


5.

But this much is only the superficial dressing of the story. The
reality is something different. It is this: that in an instant, and for
an instant, the dead lived, and all that are alive in the world did for
a moment see the Lord God and all His powers, His hosts of angels, and
all His array looking down upon them. They saw Him as one sees by a
flash of lightning in the darkness, and then instantly the world was
opaque again, limited, petty, habitual. That is the tremendous reality
of this story. Such glimpses have happened in individual cases before.
The lives of the saints abound in them. Such a glimpse it was that came
to Devindranath Tagore upon the burning ghat at Benares. But this was
not an individual but a world experience; the flash came to every one.
Not always was it quite the same, and thereby the doubter found his
denials, when presently a sort of discussion broke out in the obscurer
Press. For this one testified that it seemed that "One stood very near
to me," and another saw "all the hosts of heaven flame up towards the
Throne."

And there were others who had a vision of brooding watchers, and others
who imagined great sentinels before a veiled figure, and some one who
felt nothing more divine than a sensation of happiness and freedom such
as one gets from a sudden burst of sunshine in the spring...

So that one is forced to believe that something more than wonderfully
wonderful, something altogether strange, was seen, and that all these
various things that people thought they saw were only interpretations
drawn from their experiences and their imaginations. It was a light, it
was beauty, it was high and solemn, it made this world seem a flimsy
transparency.

Then it had vanished...

And people were left with the question of what they had seen, and just
how much it mattered.


6.

A little old lady sat by the fire in a small sitting-room in West
Kensington. Her cat was in her lap, her spectacles were on her nose; she
was reading the morning's paper, and beside her, on a little occasional
table, was her tea and a buttered muffin. She had finished the crimes
and was reading about the Royal Family. When she had read all there was
to read about the Royal Family, she put down the paper, deposited the
cat on the hearthrug, and turned to her tea. She had poured out her
first cup and she had just taken up a quadrant of muffin when the trump
and flash came. Through its instant duration she remained motionless
with the quadrant of muffin poised halfway to her mouth. Then very
slowly she put the morsel down.

"Now what was that?" she said.

She surveyed the cat, but the cat was quite calm. Then she looked very,
very hard at her lamp. It was a patent safety lamp, and had always
behaved very well. Then she stared at the window, but the curtains were
drawn and everything was in order.

"One might think I was going to be ill," she said, and resumed her
toast.


7.

Not far away from this old lady, not more than three-quarters of a
mile at most, sat Mr. Parchester in his luxurious study, writing a
perfectly beautiful, sustaining sermon about the Need of Faith in God.
He was handsome, earnest, modern preacher, he was rector of one of our
big West End churches, and he had amassed a large, fashionable
congregation. Every Sunday, and at convenient intervals during the week,
he fought against Modern Materialism, Scientific Education, Excessive
Puritanism, Pragmatism, Doubt, Levity, Selfish Individualism, Further
Relaxation of the Divorce Laws, all the Evils of our Time--and anything
else that was unpopular. He believed quite simply, he said, in all the
old, simple, kindly things. He had the face of a saint, but he had
rendered this generally acceptable by growing side whiskers. And nothing
could tame the beauty of his voice.

He was an enormous asset in the spiritual life of the metropolis--to
give it no harsher name--and his fluent periods had restored faith and
courage to many a poor soul hovering on the brink of the dark river of
thought...

And just as beautiful Christian maidens played a wonderful part in the
last days of Pompeii, in winning proud Roman hearts to a hated and
despised faith, so Mr. Parchester's naturally graceful gestures, and his
simple, melodious, trumpet voice won back scores of our half-pagan rich
women to church attendance and the social work of which his church was
the centre...

And now by the light of an exquisitely shaded electric lamp he was
writing this sermon of quiet, confident belief (with occasional hard
smacks, perfect stingers in fact, at current unbelief and rival leaders
of opinion) in the simple, divine faith of our fathers...

When there came this truncated trump and his vision...


8.

Of all the innumerable multitudes who for the infinitesimal fraction
of a second had this glimpse of the Divinity, none were so blankly and
profoundly astonished as Mr. Parchester. For--it may be because of his
subtly spiritual nature--he saw, and seeing believed. He dropped his pen
and let it roll across his manuscript, he sat stunned, every drop of
blood fled from his face and his lips and his eyes dilated.

While he had just been writing and arguing about God, there was God!

The curtain had been snatched back for an instant; it had fallen again;
but his mind had taken a photographic impression of everything that he
had seen--the grave presences, the hierarchy, the effulgence, the vast
concourse, the terrible, gentle eyes. He felt it, as though the vision
still continued, behind the bookcases, behind the pictured wall and the
curtained window; even now there was judgment!

For quite a long time he sat, incapable of more than apprehending this
supreme realisation. His hands were held out limply upon the desk before
him. And then very slowly his staring eyes came back to immediate
things, and fell upon the scattered manuscript on which he had been
engaged. He read an unfinished sentence and slowly recovered its
intention. As he did so, a picture of his congregation came to him as he
saw it from the pulpit during his evening sermon, as he had intended to
see it on the Sunday evening that was at hand, with Lady Rupert in her
sitting and Lady Blex in hers and Mrs. Munbridge, the rich and in her
Jewish way very attractive Mrs. Munbridge, running them close in her
adoration, and each with one or two friends they had brought to adore
him, and behind them the Hexhams and the Wassinghams and behind them
others and others and others, ranks and ranks of people, and the
galleries on either side packed with worshippers of a less dominant
class, and the great organ and his magnificent choir waiting to support
him and supplement him, and the great altar to the left of him, and the
beautiful new Lady Chapel, done by Roger Fry and Wyndham Lewis and all
the latest people in Art, to the right. He thought of the listening
multitude, seen through the haze of the thousand electric candles, and
how he had planned the paragraphs of his discourse so that the notes of
his beautiful voice should float slowly down, like golden leaves in
autumn, into the smooth tarn of their silence, word by word, phrase by
phrase, until he came to--

"Now to God the Father, God the son--"

And all the time he knew that Lady Blex would watch his face and Mrs.
Munbridge, leaning those graceful shoulders of hers a little forward,
would watch his face...

Many people would watch his face.

All sorts of people would come to Mr. Parchester's services at times.
Once it was said Mr. Balfour had come. Just to hear him. After his
sermons, the strangest people would come and make confessions in the
beautifully furnished reception-room beyond the vestry. All sorts of
people. Once or twice he had asked people to come and listen to him; and
one of them had been a very beautiful woman. And often he had dreamt of
the people who might come; prominent people, influential people,
remarkable people. But never before had it occurred to Mr. Parchester
that, a little hidden from the rest of the congregation, behind the thin
veil of this material world, there was another auditorium. And that God
also, God also, watched his face.

And watched him through and through.

Terror seized upon Mr. Parchester.

He stood up, as though Divinity had come into the room before him. He
was trembling. He felt smitten and about to be smitten.

He perceived that it was hopeless to try and hide what he had written,
what he had thought, the unclean egotism he had become.

"I did not know," he said at last.

The click of the door behind him warned him that he was not alone. He
turned and saw Miss Skelton, his typist, for it was her time to come for
his manuscript and copy it out in the specially legible type he used.
For a moment he stared at her strangely.

She looked at him with those deep, adoring eyes of hers.

"Am I too soon, sir?" she asked in her slow, unhappy voice, and seemed
prepared for a noiseless departure.

He did not answer immediately. Then he said: "Miss Skelton, the Judgment
of God is close at hand!"

And seeing she stood perplexed, he said--

"Miss Skelton, how can you expect me to go on acting and mouthing this
Tosh when the Sword of Truth hangs over us?"

Something in her face made him ask a question.

"Did you see anything?" he asked.

"I thought it was because I was rubbing my eyes."

"Then indeed there is a God! And He is watching us now. And all this
about us, this sinful room, this foolish costume, this preposterous life
of blasphemous pretension--!"

He stopped short, with a kind of horror on his face.

With a hopeless gesture he rushed by her. He appeared wild-eyed upon the
landing before his man-servant, who was carrying a scuttle of coal
upstairs.

"Brompton," he said, "what are you doing?"

"Coal, sir."

"Put it down, man!" he said. "Are you not an immortal soul? God is here!
As close as my hand! Repent! Turn to Him! The Kingdom of Heaven is at
hand!"


9.

Now if you are a policeman perplexed by a sudden and unaccountable
collision between a taxicab and an electric standard, complicated by a
blinding flash and a sound like an abbreviated trump from an automobile
horn, you do not want to be bothered by a hatless clerical gentleman
suddenly rushing out of a handsome private house and telling you that
"the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand!" You are respectful to him because it
is the duty of a policeman to be respectful to Gentlemen, but you say to
him, "Sorry I can't attend to that now, sir. One thing at a time. I've
got this little accident to see to." And if he persists in dancing round
the gathering crowd and coming at you again, you say: "I'm afraid I must
ask you just to get away from here, sir. You aren't being a 'elp, sir."
And if, on the other hand, you are a well-trained clerical gentleman,
who knows his way about in the world, you do not go on pestering a
policeman on duty after he has said that, even although you think God is
looking at you and Judgment is close at hand. You turn away and go on, a
little damped, looking for some one else more likely to pay attention to
your tremendous tidings.

And so it happened to the Reverend Mr. Parchester.

He experienced a curious little recession of confidence. He went on past
quite a number of people without saying anything further, and the next
person he accosted was a flower-woman sitting by her basket at the
corner of Chexington Square. She was unable to stop him at once when he
began to talk to her because she was tying up a big bundle of white
chrysanthemums and had an end of string behind her teeth. And her
daughter who stood beside her was the sort of girl who wouldn't say
"Boo!" to a goose.

"Do you know, my good woman," said Mr. Parchester, "that while we poor
creatures of earth go about our poor business here, while we sin and
blunder and follow every sort of base end, close to us, above us, around
us, watching us, judging us, are God and His holy angels? I have had a
vision, and I am not the only one. I have seen. We are in the Kingdom of
Heaven now and here, and Judgment is all about us now! Have you seen
nothing? No light? No sound? No warning?"

By this time the old flower-seller had finished her bunch of flowers and
could speak. "I saw it," she said. "And Mary--she saw it."

"Well?" said Mr. Parchester.

"But Lord! It don't mean nothing!" said the old flower-seller.


10.

At that a kind of chill fell upon Mr. Parchester. He went on across
Chexington Square by his own inertia.

He was still about as sure that he had seen God as he had been in his
study, but now he was no longer sure that the world would believe that
he had. He felt perhaps that this idea of rushing out to tell people was
precipitate and inadvisable. After all, a priest in the Church of
England is only one unit in a great machine; and in a world-wide
spiritual crisis it should be the task of that great machine to act as
one resolute body. This isolated crying aloud in the street was unworthy
of a consecrated priest. It was a dissenting kind of thing to do. A
vulgar individualistic screaming. He thought suddenly that he would go
and tell his Bishop, the great Bishop Wampach. He called a taxicab, and
within half an hour he was in the presence of his commanding officer. It
was an extraordinarily difficult and painful interview...

You see, Mr. Parchester believed. The Bishop impressed him as being
quite angrily resolved not to believe. And for the first time in his
career Mr. Parchester realised just how much jealous hostility a
beautiful, fluent, and popular preacher may arouse in the minds of the
hierarchy. It wasn't, he felt, a conversation. It was like flinging
oneself into the paddock of a bull that has long been anxious to gore
one.

"Inevitably," said the Bishop, "this theatricalism, this star-turn
business, with its extreme spiritual excitements, its exaggerated soul
crisis and all the rest of it, leads to such a breakdown as afflicts
you. Inevitably! You were at least wise to come to me. I can see you are
only in the beginning of your trouble, that already in your mind fresh
hallucinations are gathering to overwhelm you, voices, special charges
and missions, strange revelations... I wish I had the power to suspend
you right away, to send you into retreat..."

Mr. Parchester made a violent effort to control himself. "But I tell
you," he said, "that I saw God!" He added, as if to reassure himself:
"More plainly, more certainly, than I see you."

"Of course," said the Bishop. "This is how strange new sects come into
existence; this is how false prophets spring out of the bosom of the
Church. Loose-minded, excitable men of your stamp--"

Mr. Parchester, to his own astonishment, burst into tears. "But I tell
you," he wept, "He is here. I have seen. I know."

"Don't talk such nonsense!" said the Bishop. "There is no one here but
you and I!"

Mr. Parchester expostulated. "But," he protested, "He is omnipotent."

The Bishop controlled an expression of impatience. "It is characteristic
of your condition," he said, "that you are unable to distinguish between
a matter of fact and a spiritual truth... Now listen to me. If you value
your sanity and public decency and discipline of the Church, go right
home from here and go to bed. Send for Broadhays, who will prescribe a
safe sedative. And read something calming and graceful and purifying.
For my own part, I should be disposed to recommend the 'Life of Saint
Francis of Assisi...'"


11.

Unhappily Mr. Parchester did not go home. He went out from the
Bishop's residence stunned and amazed, and suddenly upon his desolation
came the thought of Mrs. Munbridge...

She would understand...

He was shown up to her own little sitting-room. She had already gone up
to her room to dress, but when she heard that he had called, and wanted
very greatly to see her, she slipped on a loose, beautiful tea-gown
neglige thing, and hurried to him. He tried to tell her everything, but
she only kept saying, "There! There!" She was sure he wanted a cup of
tea, he looked so pale and exhausted. She rang to have the tea equipage
brought back; she put the dear saint in an armchair by the fire; she put
cushions about him, and ministered to him. And when she began partially
to comprehend what he had experienced, she suddenly realised that she
too had experienced it. That vision had been a brainwave between their
two linked and sympathetic brains. And that thought glowed in her as she
brewed his tea with her own hands. He had been weeping! How tenderly he
felt all these things! He was more sensitive than a woman. What madness
to have expected understanding from a Bishop! But that was just like his
unworldliness. He was not fit to take care of himself. A wave of
tenderness carried her away. "Here is your tea!" she said, bending over
him, and fully conscious of her fragrant warmth and sweetness, and
suddenly, she could never afterwards explain why she was so, she was
moved to kiss him on his brow...

How indescribable is the comfort of a true-hearted womanly friend! The
safety of it! The consolation...!

About half-past seven that evening Mr. Parchester returned to his own
home, and Brompton admitted him. Brompton was relieved to find his
employer looking quite restored and ordinary again. "Brompton," said Mr.
Parchester, "I will not have the usual dinner to-night. Just a single
mutton cutlet and one of those quarter-bottles of Perrier Jouet on a
tray in my study. I shall have to finish my sermon to-night."

(And he had promised Mrs. Munbridge he would preach that sermon
specially for her.)


12.

And as it was with Mr. Parchester and Brompton and Mrs. Munbridge,
and the taxi-driver and the policeman and the little old lady and the
automobile mechanics and Mr. Parchester's secretary and the Bishop, so
it was with all the rest of the world. If a thing is sufficiently
strange and great no one will perceive it. Men will go on in their own
ways though, one rose from the dead to tell them that the Kingdom of
Heaven was at hand, though the Kingdom itself and all its glory became
visible, blinding their eyes. They and their ways are one. Men will go
on in their ways as rabbits will go on feeding in their hutches within a
hundred yards of a battery of artillery. For rabbits are rabbits, and
made to eat and breed, and men are human beings and creatures of habit
and custom and prejudice; and what has made them, what will judge them,
what will destroy them--they may turn their eyes to it at times as
rabbits will glance at the concussion of the guns, but it will never
draw them away from eating their lettuce and sniffing after their
does...




THE GRISLY FOLK


"Can these bones live?"

Could anything be more dead, more mute and inexpressive to the inexpert
eye than the ochreous fragments of bone and the fractured lumps of flint
that constitute the first traces of something human in the world? We see
them in the museum cases, sorted out in accordance with principles we do
not understand, labelled with strange names. Chellean, Mousterian,
Solutrian and the like, taken mostly from the places Chelles, La
Moustier, Solutre, and so forth where the first specimens were found.
Most of us stare through the glass at them, wonder vaguely for a moment
at that half-savage, half-animal past of our race, and pass on.
Primitive man, we say. Flint implements. The mammoth used to chase him.
Few of us realise yet how much the subtle indefatigable
cross-examination of the scientific worker has been extracting from the
evidence of these rusty and obstinate witnesses during the last few
years.

One of the most startling results of this recent work is the gradual
realisation that great quantities of these flint implements and some of
the earlier fragments of bone that used to be ascribed to humanity are
the vestiges of creatures, very manlike in many respects, but not,
strictly speaking, belonging to the human species. Scientific men call
these vanished races man (Homo), just as they call lions and tigers cats
(Felis), but there are the soundest reasons for believing that these
earlier so-called men were not of our blood, not our ancestors, but a
strange and vanished animal, like us, akin to us, but different from us,
as the mammoth was like, and akin to, and yet different from, the
elephant. Flint and bone implements are found in deposits of very
considerable antiquity; some in our museums may be a million years old
or more, but the traces of really human creatures, mentally and
anatomically like ourselves, do not go back much earlier than twenty or
thirty thousand years ago. True men appeared in Europe then, and we do
not know whence they came. These other tool-using, fire-making animals,
the things that were like men and yet were not men, passed away before
the faces of the true men.

Scientific authorities already distinguish four species of these
pseudo-men, and it is probable that we shall learn from time to time of
other species. One strange breed made the implements called Chellean.
These are chiefly sole-shaped blades of stone found in deposits of
perhaps 300,000 or 400,000 years ago. Chellean implements are to be seen
in any great museum. They are huge implements, four or five times as big
as those made by any known race of true men, and they are not ill made.
Certainly some creature with an intelligent brain made them. Big clumsy
hands must have gripped and used these rocky chunks. But so far only one
small fragment of a skeleton of this age has been found, a very massive
chinless lower jawbone, with teeth rather more specialised than those of
men to-day. We can only guess what strange foreshadowing of the human
form once ate with that jaw, and struck at its enemies with those big
but not unhandy flint blades. It may have been a tremendous fellow,
probably much bigger in the body than a man. It may have been able to
take bears by the scruff and the sabre-toothed lion by the throat. We do
not know. We have just these great stone blades and that bit of a
massive jaw and--the liberty to wonder.

Most fascinating riddle of all these riddles of the ages of ice and
hardship, before the coming of the true men, is the riddle of the
Mousterian men, because they were perhaps still living in the world when
the true man came wandering into Europe. They lived much later than
those unknown Chellean giants. They lived thirty or forty thousand years
ago--a yesterday compared with the Chellean time. These Mousterians are
also called Neandertalers. Until quite recently it was supposed that
they were true men like ourselves. But now we begin to realise that they
were different, so different that it is impossible that they can be very
close relations of ours. They walked or shambled along with a peculiar
slouch, they could not turn their heads up to the sky, and their teeth
were very different from those of true men. One oddity about them is
that in one or two points they were less like apes than we are. The dog
tooth, the third tooth from the middle, which is so big in the gorilla,
and which in man is pointed and still quite distinct from the other
teeth, is not distinct at all in the Neandertaler. He had a very even
row of teeth, and his cheek teeth also were very unlike ours, and less
like the apes' than ours. He had more face and less brow than true men,
but that is not because he had a lesser brain; his brain was as big as a
modern man's but it was different, bigger behind and smaller in front,
so that probably he thought and behaved differently from us. Perhaps he
had a better memory and less reasoning power than real men, or perhaps
he had more nervous energy and less intelligence. He had no chin, and
the way his jawbones come together below make it very doubtful if he
could have used any such sounds in speech as we employ. Probably he did
not talk at all. He could not hold a pin between his finger and thumb.
The more we learn about this beast-man the stranger he becomes to us and
the less like the Australoid savage he was once supposed to be.

And as we realise the want of any close relationship between this ugly,
strong, ungainly, manlike animal and mankind, the less likely it becomes
that he had a naked skin and hair like ours and the more probable that
he was different, and perhaps bristly or hairy in some queer inhuman
fashion like the hairy elephant and the woolly rhinoceros who were his
contemporaries. Like them he lived in a bleak land on the edge of the
snows and glaciers that were even then receding northward. Hairy or
grisly, with a big face like a mask, great brow ridges and no forehead,
clutching an enormous flint, and running like a baboon with his head
forward and not, like a man, with his head up, he must have been a
fearsome creature for our forefathers to come upon.

Almost certainly they met, these grisly men and the true men. The true
man must have come into the habitat of the Neandertaler, and the two
must have met and fought. Some day we may come upon the evidences of
this warfare.

Western Europe, which is the only part of the world that has yet been
searched with any thoroughness for the remains of early men, was slowly
growing warmer age by age; the glaciers that had once covered half the
continent were receding, and wide stretches of summer pasture and thin
woods of pine and birch were spreading slowly over the once icy land.
South Europe then was like northern Labrador to-day. A few hardy beasts
held out amidst the snows; the bears hibernated. With the spring grass
and foliage came great herds of reindeer, wild horses, mammoth,
elephant, and rhinoceros, drifting northward from the slopes of the
great warm valley that is now filled up with water--the Mediterranean
Sea. It was in those days before the ocean waters broke into the
Mediterranean that the swallows and a multitude of other birds acquired
the habit of coming north, a habit that nowadays impels them to brave
the passage of the perilous seas that flow over and hide the lost
secrets of the ancient Mediterranean valleys. The grisly men rejoiced at
the return of life, came out of the caves in which they had lurked
during the winter, and took their toll of the beasts.

These grisly men must have been almost solitary creatures.

The winter food was too scanty for communities. A male may have gone
with a female or so; perhaps they parted in the winter and came together
in the summer; when his sons grew big enough to annoy him, the grisly
man killed them or drove them off. If he killed them he may have eaten
them. If they escaped him they may have returned to kill him. The grisly
folk may have had long unreasoning memories and very set purposes.

The true men came into Europe, we know not whence, out of the South.
When they appeared in Europe their hands were as clever as ours; they
could draw pictures we still admire, they could paint and carve; the
implements they made were smaller than the Mousterian ones, far smaller
than the Chellean, but better made and more various. They wore no
clothes worth speaking of, but they painted themselves and probably they
talked. And they came in little bands. They were already more social
than the Neandertaler; they had laws and self-restraints; their minds
had travelled a long way along that path of adaptation and
self-suppression which has led to the intricate mind of man to-day with
its concealed wishes, its confusions, and laughter and the fantasies and
reveries and dreams. They were already held together, these men, and
kept in order by the strange limitations of tabu.

They were still savages, very prone to violence and convulsive in their
lusts and desires; but to the best of their poor ability they obeyed
laws and customs already immemorably ancient, and they feared the
penalties of wrong-doing. We can understand something of what was going
on in their minds, those of us who can remember the fears, desires,
fancies and superstitions of our childhood. Their moral struggles were
ours--in cruder forms. They were our kind. But the grisly folk we cannot
begin to understand. We cannot conceive in our different minds the
strange ideas that chased one another through those queerly shaped
brains. As well might we try to dream and feel as a gorilla dreams and
feels.

We can understand how the true men drifted northward from the lost lands
of the Mediterranean valley into the high Spanish valleys and the south
and centre of France, and so on to what is now England--for there was no
Channel then between England and France--and eastward to the Rhineland
and over the broad wilderness which is now the North Sea, and the German
plain. They would leave the snowy wilderness of the Alps, far higher
then and covered with great glaciers, away on their right. These people
drifted northward for the very good reason that their kind was
multiplying and food diminishing. They would be oppressed by feuds and
wars. They had no settled homes; they were accustomed to drift with the
seasons, every now and then some band would be pushed by hunger and fear
a little farther northward into the unknown.

We can imagine the appearance of a little group of these wanderers, our
ancestors, coming over some grassy crest into these northern lands. The
time would be late spring or early summer, and they would probably be
following up some grazing beasts, a reindeer herd or horses.

By a score of different means our anthropologists have been able to
reconstruct the particulars of the appearance and habits of these early
pilgrim fathers of mankind.

They would not be a very numerous band, because if they were there would
be no reason why they should have been driven northward out of their
former roving grounds. Two or three older men of thirty or so, eight or
ten women and girls with a few young children, a few lads between
fourteen and twenty, might make up the whole community. They would be a
brownish brown-eyed people with wavy dark hair; the fairness of the
European and the straight blue-black hair of the Chinaman had still to
be evolved in the world. The older men would probably lead the band, the
women and children would keep apart from the youths and men, fenced off
by complex and definite tabus from any close companionship. The leaders
would be tracking the herd they were following. Tracking was then the
supreme accomplishment of mankind. By signs and traces that would be
invisible to any modern civilised eye, they would be reading the story
of the previous day's trek of the herd of sturdy little horses ahead of
them. They would be so expert that they would go on from one faint sign
to another with as little delay as a dog who follows a scent.

The horses they were following were only a little way ahead--so the
trackers read the signs--they were numerous and nothing had alarmed
them. They were grazing and moving only very slowly. There were no
traces of wild dog or other enemies to stampede them. Some elephants
were also going north, and twice our human tribe had crossed the spoor
of woolly rhinoceros roaming westward.

The tribe travelled light. They were mainly naked, but all of them were
painted with white and black and red and yellow ochre. At this distance
of time it is difficult to see whether they were tattooed. Probably they
were not. The babies and small children were carried by the women on
their backs in slings or bags made of animal skins, and perhaps some or
all of them wore mantles and loin bands of skin and had pouches and
belts of leather. The men had stone-pointed spears, and carried
sharpened flints in their hands.

There was no Old Man who was lord and master and father of this
particular crowd. Weeks ago the Old Man had been charged and trampled to
a jelly by a great bull in the swamp far away. Then two of the girls had
been waylaid and carried off by the young men of another larger tribe.
It was because of these losses that this remnant was now seeking new
hunting grounds.

The landscape that spread before the eyes of this little band as they
crested the hill was a bleaker, more desolate and altogether unkempt
version of the landscape of western Europe to-day. About them was a
grassy down athwart which a peewit flew with its melancholy cry. Before
them stretched a great valley ridged with transverse purple hills over
which the April cloud-shadows chased one another. Pinewoods and black
heather showed where these hills became sandy, and the valleys were full
of brown brushwood, and down their undrained troughs ran a bright green
band of peaty swamps and long pools of weedy water. In the valley
thickets many beasts lurked unseen, and where the winding streams had
cut into the soil there were cliffs and caves. Far away along the
northern slopes of the ridge that were now revealed, the wild ponies
were to be seen grazing.

At a sign from the two leaders the little straggle of menfolk halted,
and a woman who had been chattering in subdued tones to a little girl
became silent. The brothers surveyed the wide prospect earnestly.

"Ugh!" said one abruptly and pointed.

"Ugh!" cried his brother.

The eyes of the whole tribe swung round to the pointing finger.

The group became one rigid stare.

Every soul of them stood still, astonishment had turned them into a
tense group of statuettes.

Far away down the slope with his body in profile and his head turned
towards them, frozen by an equal amazement, stood a hunched grey figure,
bigger but shorter than a man. He had been creeping up behind a fold in
the ground to peer at the ponies; and suddenly he had turned his eyes
and seen the tribe. His head projected like a baboon's. In his hand he
carried what seemed to the menfolk a great rock.

For a little while this animal scrutiny held discoverers and discovered
motionless. Then some of the women and children began to stir and line
out to see the strange creature better. "Man!" said an old crone of
forty. "Man!" At the movement of the women the grisly man turned, ran
clumsily for a score of yards or so towards a thicket of birch and
budding thorn. Then he halted again for a moment to look at the
newcomers, waved an arm strangely, and then dashed into cover.

The shadows of the thicket swallowed him up, and by hiding him seemed to
make him enormous. It identified itself with him, and watched them with
his eyes. Its tree stems became long silvery limbs, and a fallen trunk
crouched and stared.

It was still early in the morning, and the leaders of the tribe had
hoped to come up with the wild ponies as the day advanced and perhaps
cut one off and drive it into difficulties among the bushes and swampy
places below, and wound it and follow it up and kill it. Then they would
have made a feast, and somewhere down in the valley they would have
found water and dry bracken for litter and a fire before night. It had
seemed a pleasant and hopeful morning to them until this moment. Now
they were disconcerted. This grey figure was as if the sunny morning had
suddenly made a horrible and inexplicable grimace.

The whole expedition stood gazing for a time, and then the two leaders
exchanged a few words. Waugh, the elder, pointed. Click, his brother,
nodded his head. They would go on, but instead of slanting down the
slopes towards the thickets they would keep round the ridge.

"Come," said Waugh, and the little band began to move again. But now it
marched in silence. When presently a little boy began a question his
mother silenced him by a threat. Everybody kept glancing at the thickets
below.

Presently a girl cried out sharply and pointed. All started and stopped
short.

There was the grisly thing again. It was running across an open space,
running almost on all fours, in joltering leaps. It was hunchbacked and
very big and low, a grey hairy wolf-like monster. At times its long arms
nearly touched the ground. It was nearer than it had been before. It
vanished amidst the bushes again. It seemed to throw itself down among
some red dead bracken...

Waugh and Click took counsel.

A mile away was the head of the valley where the thickets had their
beginning. Beyond stretched the woldy hills, bare of cover. The horses
were grazing up towards the sun, and away to the north the backs of a
herd of woolly rhinoceros were now visible on a crest--just the ridges
of their backs showing like a string of black beads.

If the tribe struck across those grassy spaces, then the lurking prowler
would have either to stay behind or come into the open. If he came into
the open the dozen youths and men of the tribe would know how to deal
with him.

So they struck across the grass. The little band worked round to the
head of the valley, and there the menfolk stayed at the crest while the
women and children pushed on ahead across the open.

For a time the watchers remained motionless, and then Waugh was moved to
gestures of defiance. Click was not to be outdone. There were shouts at
the hidden watcher, and then one lad, who was something of a clown,
after certain grimaces and unpleasant gestures, obliged with an
excellent imitation of the grey thing's lumbering run. At that, scare
gave place to hilarity.

In those days laughter was a social embrace. Men could laugh, but there
was no laughter in the grisly pre-man who watched and wondered in the
shadow. He marvelled. The men rolled about and guffawed and slapped
their thighs and one another. Tears ran down their faces.

Never a sign came from the thickets.

"Yahah," said the menfolk. "Yahah! Bzzzz. Yahah! Yah!"

They forgot altogether how frightened they had been.

And when Waugh thought the women and children had gone on a sufficient
distance, he gave the word for the men to follow them.

In some such fashion it was that men, our ancestors, had their first
glimpse of the pre-men of the wilderness of western Europe.

The two breeds were soon to come to closer quarters.

The newcomers were pushing their way into the country of these grisly
men. Presently came other glimpses of lurking semi-human shapes and grey
forms that ran in the twilight. In the morning Click found long narrow
footprints round the camp...

Then one day, one of the children, eating those little green thorn-buds
that rustic English children speak of as bread and cheese, ventured too
far from the others. There was a squeal and a scuffle and a thud, and
something grey and hairy made off through the thickets carrying its
victim, with Waugh and three of the younger men in hot pursuit. They
chased the enemy into a dark gully, very much overgrown. This time it
was not a solitary Neandertaler they had to deal with. Out of the bushes
a big male came at them to cover the retreat of his mate, and hurled a
rock that bowled over the youth it hit like a nine-pin, so that
thereafter he limped always. But Waugh with his throwing spear got the
grey monster in the shoulder, and he halted snarling.

No further sound came from the stolen child.

The female showed herself for a moment up the gully, snarling,
bloodstained, and horrible, and the menfolk stood about afraid to
continue their pursuit, and yet not caring to desist from it. One of
them was already hobbling off with his hand to his knee.

How did that first fight go?

Perhaps it went against the men of our race. Perhaps the big
Neandertaler male, his mane and beard bristling horribly, came down the
gully with a thunderous roar, with a great rock in either hand. We do
not know whether he threw those big discs of flint or whether he smote
with them. Perhaps it was then that Waugh was killed in the act of
running away. Perhaps it was bleak disaster then for the little tribe.
Short of two of its members it presently made off over the hills as fast
as it could go, keeping together for safety, and leaving the wounded
youth far behind to limp along its tracks in lonely terror.

Let us suppose that he got back to the tribe at last--after nightmare
hours.

Now that Waugh had gone, Click would become Old Man, and he made the
tribe camp that night and build their fire on the high ridges among the
heather far away from the thickets in which the grisly folk might be
lurking.

The grisly folk thought we knew not how about the menfolk, and the men
thought about the grisly folk in such ways as we can understand; they
imagined how their enemies might act in this fashion or that, and
schemed to circumvent them. It may have been Click who had the first dim
idea of getting at the gorge in which the Neandertalers had their lair,
from above. For as we have said, the Neandertaler did not look up. Then
the menfolk could roll a great rock upon him or pelt him with burning
brands and set the dry bracken alight.

One likes to think of a victory for the human side. This Click we have
conjured up had run in panic from the first onset of the grisly male,
but as he brooded by the fire that night, he heard again in imagination
the cry of the lost girl, and he was filled with rage. In his sleep the
grisly male came to him and Click fought in his dreams and started awake
stiff with fury. There was a fascination for him in that gorge in which
Waugh had been killed. He was compelled to go back and look again for
the grisly beasts, to waylay them in their tracks, and watch them from
an ambush. He perceived that the Neandertalers could not climb as easily
as the menfolk could climb, nor hear so quickly, nor dodge with the same
unexpectedness. These grisly men were to be dealt with as the bears were
dealt with, the bears before whom you run and scatter, and then come at
again from behind.

But one may doubt if the first human group to come into the grisly land
was clever enough to solve the problems of the new warfare. Maybe they
turned southward again to the gentler regions from which they had come,
and were killed by or mingled with their own brethren again. Maybe they
perished altogether in that new land of the grisly folk into which they
had intruded. Yet the truth may be that they even held their own and
increased. If they died there were others of their kind to follow them
and achieve a better fate.

That was the beginning of a nightmare age for the little children of the
human tribe. They knew they were watched.

Their steps were dogged. The legends of ogres and man-eating giants that
haunt the childhood of the world may descend to us from those ancient
days of fear. And for the Neandertalers it was the beginning of an
incessant war that could end only in extermination.

The Neandertalers, albeit not so erect and tall as men, were the
heavier, stronger creatures, but they were stupid, and they went alone
or in twos and threes; the menfolk were swifter, quicker-witted, and
more social--when they fought they fought in combination. They lined out
and surrounded and pestered and pelted their antagonists from every
side. They fought the men of that grisly race as dogs might fight a
bear. They shouted to one another what each should do, and the
Neandertaler had no speech; he did not understand. They moved too
quickly for him and fought too cunningly.

Many and obstinate were the duels and battles these two sorts of men
fought for this world in that bleak age of the windy steppes, thirty or
forty thousand years ago. The two races were intolerable to each other.
They both wanted the caves and the banks by the rivers where the big
flints were got. They fought over the dead mammoths that had been bogged
in the marshes, and over the reindeer stags that had been killed in the
rutting season. When a human tribe found signs of the grisly folk near
their cave and squatting place, they had perforce to track them down and
kill them; their own safety and the safety of their little ones was only
to be secured by that killing. The Neandertalers thought the little
children of men fair game and pleasant eating.

How long the grisly folk lived on in that chill world of pines and
silver birch between the steppes and the glaciers, after the true
menfolk came, we do not know. For ages they may have held out, growing
more cunning and dangerous as they became rare. The true men hunted them
down by their spoor and by their tracks, and watched for the smoke of
their fires, and made food scarce for them.

Great Paladins arose in that forgotten world, men who stood forth and
smote the grey man-beast face to face and slew him. They made long
spears of wood, hardened by fire at the tips; they raised shields of
skin against his mighty blows. They struck at him with stones on cords,
and slung them at him with slings. And it was not simply men who
withstood the grisly beast but women. They stood over their children;
they stood by their men against this eerie thing that was like and yet
not like mankind. Unless the savants read all the signs awry, it was the
women who were the makers of the larger tribes into which human families
were already growing in those ancient times. It was the woman's subtle,
love-guided wits which protected her sons from the fierce anger of the
Old Man, and taught them to avoid his jealousy and wrath, and persuaded
him to tolerate them and so have their help against the grisly enemy. It
was woman, says Atkinson, in the beginning of things human, who taught
the primary tabus, that a son must go aside out of the way of his
stepmother, and get himself a wife from another tribe, so as to keep the
peace within the family. She came between the fratricides, and was the
first peacemaker. Human societies in their beginnings were her work,
done against the greater solitariness, the lonely fierceness of the
adult male. Through her, men learnt the primary co-operation of sonship
and brotherhood. The grisly folk had not learnt even the rudest elements
of co-operation, and mankind had already spelt out the alphabet of a
unity that may some day comprehend the whole earth. The menfolk kept
together by the dozen and by the score. By ones and twos and threes
therefore the grisly folk were beset and slain, until there were no more
of them left in the world.

Generation after generation, age after age, that long struggle for
existence went on between these men who were not quite men and the men,
our ancestors, who came out of the South into western Europe. Thousands
of fights and hunts, sudden murders and headlong escapes there were
amidst the caves and thickets of that chill and windy world between the
last age of glaciers and our own warmer time. Until at length the last
poor grisly was brought to bay and faced the spears of his pursuers in
anger and despair.

What leapings of the heart were there not throughout that long warfare!
What moments of terror and triumph! What acts of devotion and desperate
wonders of courage! And the strain of the victors was our strain; we are
lineally identical with those sun-brown painted beings who ran and
fought and helped one another, the blood in our veins glowed in those
fights and chilled in those fears of the forgotten past. For it was
forgotten. Except perhaps for some vague terrors in our dreaming life
and for some lurking element of tradition in the legends and warnings of
the nursery, it has gone altogether out of the memory of our race. But
nothing is ever completely lost. Seventy or eighty years ago a few
curious savants began to suspect that there were hidden memories in
certain big chipped flints and scraps of bone they found in ancient
gravels. Much more recently others have begun to find hints of remote
strange experiences in the dreams and odd kinks in modern minds. By
degrees these dry bones begin to live again.

This restoration of the past is one of the most astonishing adventures
of the human mind. As humanity follows the gropings of scientific men
among these ancient vestiges, it is like a man who turns over the yellow
pages of some long-forgotten diary, some engagement book of his
adolescence. His dead youth lives again. Once more the old excitements
stir him, the old happiness returns. But the old passions that once
burnt, only warm him now, and the old fears and distresses signify
nothing.

A day may come when these recovered memories may grow as vivid as if we
in our own persons had been there and shared the thrill and the fear of
those primordial days; a day may come when the great beasts of the past
will leap to life again in our imaginations, when we shall walk again in
vanished scenes, stretch painted limbs we thought were dust, and feel
again the sunshine of a million years ago.




TALES OF TIME AND SPACE--



THE CRYSTAL EGG


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's my opinion he's refused that crystal before," said the step-son, a
loose-limbed lout of eighteen.

"But Five Pounds!" said the step-daughter, an argumentative young woman
of six-and-twenty.

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

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

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

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

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

"Hid what?" asked Mr. Cave.

"The crystal!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




THE STAR


It was on the first day of the New Year that the announcement was made,
almost simultaneously from three observatories, that the motion of the
planet Neptune, the outermost of all the planets that wheel about the
sun, had become very erratic. Ogilvy had already called attention to a
suspected retardation in its velocity in December. Such a piece of news
was scarcely calculated to interest a world the greater portion of whose
inhabitants were unaware of the existence of the planet Neptune, nor
outside the astronomical profession did the subsequent discovery of a
faint remote speck of light in the region of the perturbed planet cause
any very great excitement. Scientific people, however, found the
intelligence remarkable enough, even before it became known that the new
body was rapidly growing larger and brighter, that its motion was quite
different from the orderly progress of the planets, and that the
deflection of Neptune and its satellite was becoming now of an
unprecedented kind.

Few people without a training in science can realise the huge isolation
of the solar system. The sun with its specks of planets, its dust of
planetoids, and its impalpable comets, swims in a vacant immensity that
almost defeats the imagination. Beyond the orbit of Neptune there is
space, vacant so far as human observation has penetrated, without warmth
or light or sound, blank emptiness, for twenty million times a million
miles. That is the smallest estimate of the distance to be traversed
before the very nearest of the stars is attained. And saving a few
comets more unsubstantial than the thinnest flame, no matter had ever to
human knowledge crossed this gulf of space, until early in the twentieth
century this strange wanderer appeared. A vast mass of matter it was,
bulky, heavy, rushing without warning out of the black mystery of the
sky into the radiance of the sun. By the second day it was clearly
visible to any decent instrument, as a speck with a barely sensible
diameter, in the constellation Leo near Regulus. In a little while an
opera glass could attain it.

On the third day of the new year the newspaper readers of two
hemispheres were made aware for the first time of the real importance of
this unusual apparition in the heavens. "A Planetary Collision," one
London paper headed the news, and proclaimed Duchaine's opinion that
this strange new planet would probably collide with Neptune. The leader
writers enlarged upon the topic; so that in most of the capitals of the
world, on January 3rd, there was an expectation, however vague of some
imminent phenomenon in the sky; and as the night followed the sunset
round the globe, thousands of men turned their eyes skyward to see--the
old familiar stars just as they had always been.

Until it was dawn in London and Pollux setting and the stars overhead
grown pale. The Winter's dawn it was, a sickly filtering accumulation of
daylight, and the light of gas and candles shone yellow in the windows
to show where people were astir. But the yawning policeman saw the
thing, the busy crowds in the markets stopped agape, workmen going to
their work betimes, milkmen, the drivers of news-carts, dissipation
going home jaded and pale, homeless wanderers, sentinels on their beats,
and in the country, labourers trudging afield, poachers slinking home,
all over the dusky quickening country it could be seen--and out at sea
by seamen watching for the day--a great white star, come suddenly into
the westward sky!

Brighter it was than any star in our skies; brighter than the evening
star at its brightest. It still glowed out white and large, no mere
twinkling spot of light, but a small round clear shining disc, an hour
after the day had come. And where science has not reached, men stared
and feared, telling one another of the wars and pestilences that are
foreshadowed by these fiery signs in the Heavens. Sturdy Boers, dusky
Hottentots, Gold Coast negroes, Frenchmen, Spaniards, Portuguese, stood
in the warmth of the sunrise watching the setting of this strange new
star.

And in a hundred observatories there had been suppressed excitement,
rising almost to shouting pitch, as the two remote bodies had rushed
together; and a hurrying to and fro, to gather photographic apparatus
and spectroscope, and this appliance and that, to record this novel
astonishing sight, the destruction of a world. For it was a world, a
sister planet of our earth, far greater than our earth indeed, that had
so suddenly flashed into flaming death. Neptune it was, had been struck,
fairly and squarely, by the strange planet from outer space and the heat
of the concussion had incontinently turned two solid globes into one
vast mass of incandescence. Round the world that day, two hours before
the dawn, went the pallid great white star, fading only as it sank
westward and the sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it,
but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those
sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard
nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb
zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing of the
night.

And when next it rose over Europe everywhere were crowds of watchers on
hilly slopes, on house-roofs, in open spaces, staring eastward for the
rising of the great new star. It rose with a white glow in front of it,
like the glare of a white fire, and those who had seen it come into
existence the night before cried out at the sight of it. "It is larger,"
they cried. "It is brighter!" And, indeed the moon a quarter full and
sinking in the west was in its apparent size beyond comparison, but
scarcely in all its breadth had it as much brightness now as the little
circle of the strange new star.

"It is brighter!" cried the people clustering in the streets. But in the
dim observatories the watchers held their breath and peered at one
another. "It is nearer." They said. "Nearer!"

And voice after voice repeated, "It is nearer," and the clicking
telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a
thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. "It is nearer." Men
writing in offices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down their
pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque
possibility in those words, "It is nearer." It hurried along wakening
streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages;
men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in
yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passers-by. "It is nearer."
Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly
between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did not
feel. "Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever people must be
to find out things like that!"

Lonely tramps faring through the wintry night murmured those words to
comfort themselves--looking skyward. "It has need to be nearer, for the
night's as cold as charity. Don't seem much warmth from it, if it is
nearer, all the same."

"What is a new star to me?" cried the weeping woman kneeling beside her
dead.

The schoolboy, rising early for his examination work, puzzled it out for
himself--with the great white star shining broad and bright through the
frost-flowers of his window. "Centrifugal, centripetal." He said, with
his chin on his fist. "Stop a planet in its flight, rob it of its
centrifugal force, what then? Centripetal has it, and down it falls into
the sun! And this--!

"Do we come in the way? I wonder--"

The light of that day went the way of its brethren, and with the later
watches of the frosty darkness rose the strange star again. And it was
now so bright that the waxing moon seemed but a pale yellow ghost of
itself, hanging huge in the sunset. In a South African city a great man
had married, and the streets were alight to welcome his return with his
bride. "Even the skies have illuminated." Said the flatterer. Under
Capricorn, two negro lovers, daring the wild beasts and evil spirits,
for love of one another, crouched together in a cane brake where the
fire-flies hovered. "That is our star." They whispered, and felt
strangely comforted by the sweet brilliance of its light.

The master mathematician sat in his private room and pushed the papers
from him. His calculations were already finished. In a small white phial
there still remained a little of the drug that had kept him awake and
active for four long nights. Each day, serene, explicit, patient as
ever, he had given his lecture to his students, and then had come back
at once to this momentous calculation. His face was grave, a little
drawn and hectic from his drugged activity. For some time he seemed lost
in thought. Then he went to the window, and the blind went up with a
click. Half way up the sky, over the clustering roofs, chimneys and
steeples of the city, hung the star.

He looked at it as one might look into the eyes of a brave enemy. "You
may kill me," he said after a silence. "But I can hold you--and all the
universe for that matter--in the grip of this little brain. I would not
change. Even now."

He looked at the little phial. "There will be no need of sleep again,"
he said. The next day at noon, punctual to the minute, he entered his
lecture theatre, put his hat on the end of the table as his habit was,
and carefully selected a large piece of chalk. It was a joke among his
students that he could not lecture without that piece of chalk to fumble
in his fingers, and once he had been stricken to impotence by their
hiding his supply. He came and looked under his grey eyebrows at the
rising tiers of young fresh faces, and spoke with his accustomed studied
commonness of phrasing. "Circumstances have arisen--circumstances beyond
my control," he said and paused, "which will debar me from completing
the course I had designed. It would seem, gentlemen, if I may put the
thing clearly and briefly, that--Man has lived in vain."

The students glanced at one another. Had they heard aright? Mad? Raised
eyebrows and grinning lips there were, but one or two faces remained
intent upon his calm grey-fringed face. "It will be interesting," he was
saying, "to devote this morning to an exposition, so far as I can make
it clear to you, of the calculations that have led me to this
conclusion. Let us assume--"

He turned towards the blackboard, meditating a diagram in the way that
was usual to him. "What was that about 'lived in vain'?" whispered one
student to another. "Listen," said the other, nodding towards the
lecturer.

And presently they began to understand.

That night the star rose later, for its proper eastward motion had
carried it some way across Leo towards Virgo, and its brightness was so
great that the sky became a luminous blue as it rose, and every star was
hidden in its turn, save only Jupiter near the zenith, Capella,
Aldebaran, Sirius and the pointers of the Bear. It was very white and
beautiful. In many parts of the world that night a pallid halo encircled
it about. It was perceptibly larger; in the clear refractive sky of the
tropics it seemed as if it were nearly a quarter the size of the moon.
The frost was still on the ground in England, but the world was as
brightly lit as if it were midsummer moonlight. One could see to read
quite ordinary print by that cold clear light, and in the cities the
lamps burnt yellow and wan.

And everywhere the world was awake that night, and throughout
Christendom a sombre murmur hung in the keen air over the country side
like the belling of bees in the heather, and this murmurous tumult grew
to a clangour in the cities. It was the tolling of the bells in a
million belfry towers and steeples, summoning the people to sleep no
more, to sin no more, but to gather in their churches and pray. And
overhead, growing larger and brighter as the earth rolled on its way and
the night passed, rose the dazzling star.

And the streets and houses were alight in all the cities, the shipyards
glared, and whatever roads led to high country were lit and crowded all
night long. And in all the seas about the civilised lands, ships with
throbbing engines, and ships with bellying sails, crowded with men and
living creatures, were standing out to ocean and the north. For already
the warning of the master mathematician had been telegraphed all over
the world, and translated into a hundred tongues. The new planet and
Neptune, locked in a fiery embrace, were whirling headlong, ever faster
and faster towards the sun. Already every second this blazing mass flew
a hundred miles, and every second its terrific velocity increased. As it
flew now, indeed, it must pass a hundred million of miles wide of the
earth and scarcely affect it. But near its destined path, as yet only
slightly perturbed, spun the mighty planet Jupiter and his moons
sweeping splendid round the sun. Every moment now the attraction between
the fiery star and the greatest of the planets grew stronger. And the
result of that attraction? Inevitably Jupiter would be deflected from
its orbit into an elliptical path, and the burning star, swung by his
attraction wide of its sunward rush, would "describe a curved path" and
perhaps collide with, and certainly pass very close to, our earth.
"Earthquakes, volcanic outbreaks, cyclones, sea waves, floods, and a
steady rise in temperature to I know not what limit--" so prophesied the
master mathematician.

And overhead, to carry out his words, lonely and cold and livid, blazed
the star of the coming doom.

To many who stared at it that night until their eyes ached, it seemed
that it was visibly approaching. And that night, too the weather
changed, and the frost that had gripped all Central Europe and France
and England softened towards a thaw.

But you must not imagine because I have spoken of people praying through
the night and people going aboard ships and people fleeing toward
mountainous country that the whole world was already in a terror because
of the star. As a matter of fact, use and wont still ruled the world,
and save for the talk of idle moments and the splendour of the night,
nine human beings out of ten were still busy at their common
occupations. In all the cities the shops, save one here and there,
opened and closed at their proper hours, the doctor and the undertaker
plied their trades, the workers gathered in the factories, soldiers
drilled, scholars studied, lovers sought one another, thieves lurked and
fled, politicians planned their schemes. The presses of the newspapers
roared through the night, and many a priest of this church and that
would not open his holy building to further what he considered a foolish
panic. The newspapers insisted on the lesson of the year 1000--for then
too, people had anticipated the end. The star was no star--mere gas--a
comet; and were it a star it could not possibly strike the earth. There
was no precedent for such a thing. Common sense was sturdy everywhere,
scornful, jesting, a little inclined to persecute the obdurate fearful.
That night, at seven-fifteen by Greenwich time, the star would be at its
nearest to Jupiter. Then the world would see the turn things would take.
The master mathematician's grim warnings were treated by many as so much
mere elaborate self-advertisement. Common sense at last, a little heated
by argument, signified its unalterable convictions by going to bed. So
too, barbarism and savagery, already tired of the novelty, went about
their nightly business, and save for a howling dog here and there, the
beast world left the star unheeded.

And yet, when at last the watchers in the European States saw the star
rise, an hour later it is true, but no larger than it had been the night
before, there were still plenty awake to laugh at the master
mathematician--to take the danger as if it had passed.

But hereafter the laughter ceased. The star grew--it grew with a
terrible steadiness hour after hour, a little larger each hour, a little
nearer the midnight zenith, and brighter and brighter, until it had
turned night into a second day. Had it come straight to the earth
instead of in a curved path, had it lost no velocity to Jupiter, it must
have leapt the intervening gulf in a day, but as it was it took five
days altogether to come by our planet. The next night it had become a
third the size of the moon before it set to English eyes, and the thaw
was assured. It rose over America near the size of the moon, but
blinding white to look at, and hot; and a breath of hot wind blew now
with its rising and gathering strength, and in Virginia, and Brazil, and
down the St. Lawrence valley, it shone intermittently through a driving
reek of thunder-clouds, flickering violet lightning, and hail
unprecedented. In Manitoba was a thaw and devastating floods. And upon
all the mountains of the earth the snow and ice began to melt that
night, and all the rivers coming out of high country flowed thick and
turbid, and soon--in their upper reaches--with swirling trees and the
bodies of beasts and men. They rose steadily, steadily in the ghostly
brilliance, and came trickling over their banks at last, behind the
fleeing population of their valleys.

And along the coast of Argentina and up the South Atlantic the tides
were higher than had ever been in the memory of man, and the storms
drove the waters in many cases scores of miles inland, drowning whole
cities. And so great grew the heat during the night that the rising of
the sun was like the coming of a shadow. The earthquakes began and grew
until all down America from the Arctic Circle to Cape Horn, hillsides
were sliding, fissures were opening, and houses and walls crumbling to
destruction. The whole side of Cotopaxi slipped out in one vast
convulsion, and a tumult of lava poured out so high and broad and swift
and liquid that in one day it reached the sea.

So the star, with the wan moon in its wake, marched across the Pacific,
trailed the thunderstorms like the hem of a robe, and the growing tidal
wave that toiled behind it, frothing and eager, poured over island and
island and swept them clear of men. Until that wave came at last--in a
blinding light and with the breath of a furnace, swift and terrible it
came--a wall of water, fifty feet high, roaring hungrily, upon the long
coasts of Asia, and swept inland across the plains of China. For a space
the star, hotter now and larger and brighter than the sun in its
strength, showed with pitiless brilliance the wide and populous country;
towns and villages with their pagodas and trees, roads, wide cultivated
fields, millions of sleepless people staring in helpless terror at the
incandescent sky; and then, low and growing, came the murmur of the
flood. And thus it was with millions of men that night--a flight
no-whither, with limbs heavy with heat and breath fierce and scant, and
the flood like a wall swift and white behind. And then death.

China was lit glowing white, but over Japan and Java and all the islands
of Eastern Asia the great star was a ball of dull red fire because of
the steam and smoke and ashes the volcanoes were spouting forth to
salute its coming. Above was the lava, hot gases and ash, and below the
seething floods, and the whole earth swayed and rumbled with the
earthquake shocks. Soon the immemorial snows of Thibet and the Himalaya
were melting and pouring down by ten million deepening converging
channels upon the plains of Burmah and Hindostan. The tangled summits of
the Indian jungles were aflame in a thousand places, and below the
hurrying waters around the stems were dark objects that still struggled
feebly and reflected the blood-red tongues of fire. And in a rudderless
confusion a multitude of men and women fled down the broad river-ways to
that one last hope of men--the open sea.

Larger grew the star, and larger, hotter, and brighter with a terrible
swiftness now. The tropical ocean had lost its phosphorescence, and the
whirling steam rose in ghostly wreaths from the black waves that plunged
incessantly, speckled with storm-tossed ships.

And then came a wonder. It seemed to those who in Europe watched for the
rising of the star that the world must have ceased its rotation. In a
thousand open spaces of down and upland the people who had fled thither
from the floods and the falling houses and sliding slopes of hill
watched for that rising in vain. Hour followed hour through a terrible
suspense, and the star rose not. Once again men set their eyes upon the
old constellations they had counted lost to them forever. In England it
was hot and clear overhead, though the ground quivered perpetually, but
in the tropics, Sirius and Capella and Aldebaran showed through a veil
of steam. And when at last the great star rose near ten hours late, the
sun rose close upon it, and in the centre of its white heart was a disc
of black.

Over Asia it was the star had begun to fall behind the movement of the
sky, and then suddenly, as it hung over India, its light had been
veiled. All the plain of India from the mouth of the Indus to the mouths
of the Ganges was a shallow waste of shining water that night, out of
which rose temples and palaces, mounds and hills, black with people.
Every minaret was a clustering mass of people, who fell one by one into
the turbid waters, as heat and terror overcame them. The whole land
seemed a-wailing and suddenly there swept a shadow across that furnace
of despair, and a breath of cold wind, and a gathering of clouds, out of
the cooling air. Men looking up, near blinded, at the star, saw that a
black disc was creeping across the light. It was the moon, coming
between the star and the earth. And even as men cried to God at this
respite, out of the East with a strange inexplicable swiftness sprang
the sun. And then star, sun and moon rushed together across the heavens.

So it was that presently, to the European watchers, star and sun rose
close upon each other, drove headlong for a space and then slower, and
at last came to rest, star and sun merged into one glare of flame at the
zenith of the sky. The moon no longer eclipsed the star but was lost to
sight in the brilliance of the sky. And though those who were still
alive regarded it for the most part with that dull stupidity that
hunger, fatigue, heat and despair engender, there were still men who
could perceive the meaning of these signs. Star and earth had been at
their nearest, had swung about one another, and the star had passed.
Already it was receding, swifter and swifter, in the last stage of its
headlong journey downward into the sun.

And then the clouds gathered, blotting out the vision of the sky, the
thunder and lightning wove a garment round the world; all over the earth
was such a downpour of rain as men had never before seen, and where the
volcanoes flared red against the cloud canopy there descended torrents
of mud. Everywhere the waters were pouring off the land, leaving
mud-silted ruins, and the earth littered like a storm-worn beach with
all that had floated, and the dead bodies of the men and brutes, its
children. For days the water streamed off the land, sweeping away soil
and trees and houses in the way, and piling huge dykes and scooping out
Titanic gullies over the country side. Those were the days of darkness
that followed the star and the heat. All through them, and for many
weeks and months, the earthquakes continued.

But the star had passed, and men, hunger-driven and gathering courage
only slowly, might creep back to their ruined cities, buried granaries,
and sodden fields. Such few ships as had escaped the storms of that time
came stunned and shattered and sounding their way cautiously through the
new marks and shoals of once familiar ports. And as the storms subsided
men perceived that everywhere the days were hotter than of yore, and the
sun larger, and the moon, shrunk to a third of its former size, took now
fourscore days between its new, and next new moon.

But of the new brotherhood that grew presently among men, of the saving
of laws and books and machines, of the strange change that had come over
Iceland and Greenland and the shores of Baffin's Bay, so that the
sailors coming there presently found them green and gracious, and could
scarce believe their eyes, this story does not tell. Nor of the movement
of mankind now that the earth was hotter, northward and southward
towards the poles of the earth. It concerns itself only with the coming
and the passing of the Star.

The Martian astronomers--for there are astronomers on Mars, although
they are very different beings from men--were naturally profoundly
interested by these things. They saw them from their own standpoint of
course. "Considering the mass and temperature of the missile that was
flung through our solar system into the sun," one wrote, "it is
astonishing what a little damage the Earth, which it missed so narrowly,
has sustained. All the familiar continental markings and the masses of
the seas remain intact, and indeed the only difference seems to be a
shrinkage of the white discoloration (supposed to be frozen water) round
either pole." Which only shows how small the vastest of human
catastrophes may seem, at a distance of a few million miles.




A STORY OF THE STONE AGE


1. Ugh-lomi and Uya

This story is of a time beyond the memory of man, before the beginning
of history, a time when one might have walked dryshod from France (as we
call it now) to England, and when a broad and sluggish Thames flowed
through its marshes to meet its father Rhine, flowing through a wide and
level country that is under water in these latter days, and which we
know by the name of the North Sea. In that remote age the valley which
runs along the foot of the Downs did not exist, and the south of Surrey
was a range of hills, fir-clad on the middle slopes, and snow-capped the
better part of the year. The cores its summits still remain as Leith
Hill, and Pitch Hill, and Hindhead. On the lower slopes of the range
below the grassy spaces where the wild horses grazed were forests of yew
and sweet-chestnut and elm, and the thickets and dark places hid the
grizzly bear and the hyaena, and the grey apes clambered through the
branches. And still lower amidst the woodland and marsh and open grass
along the Wey did this little drama play itself out to the end that I
have to tell. Fifty thousand years ago it was, fifty thousand years--if
the estimates of the geologists are correct.

And in those days the spring-time was as joyful as it is now, and sent
the blood coursing in just the same fashion. The afternoon sky was blue
with piled white clouds sailing through it, and the south-west wind came
like a soft caress. The new-come swallows drove to and fro. The reaches
of the river were spangled with white ranunculus, the marshy places were
starred with lady's-smock and lit with marshmallow wherever the
regiments of the sedges lowered their swords, and the northward moving
hippopotami, shiny black monsters, sporting clumsily, came floundering
and blundering through it all, rejoicing dimly and possessed with one
clear idea, to splash the river muddy.

Up the river and well in sight of the hippopotami, a number of little
buff-coloured animals dabbled in the water. There was no fear, no
rivalry, and no enmity between them and the hippopotami. As the great
bulks came crashing through the reeds and smashed the mirror of the
water into silvery splashes, these little creatures shouted and
gesticulated with glee. It was the surest sign of high spring. "Boloo!"
they cried. "Baayah. Boloo!" They were the children of the men folk, the
smoke of whose encampment rose from the knoll at the river's bend.
Wild-eyed youngsters they were, with matted hair and little broad-nosed
impish faces, covered (as some children are covered even nowadays) with
a delicate down of hair. They were narrow in the loins and long in the
arms. And their ears had no lobes, and had little pointed tips, a thing
that still, in rare instances, survives. Stark-naked vivid little
gipsies, as active as monkeys and as full of chatter, though a little
wanting in words.

Their elders were hidden from the wallowing hippopotami by the crest of
the knoll. The human squatting-place was a trampled area among the dead
brown fronds of Royal Fern, through which the crosiers of this year's
growth were unrolling to tie light and warmth. The fire was a
smouldering heap of char, light grey and black, replenished by the old
women from time to time with brown leaves. Most of the men were
asleep--they slept sitting with their foreheads on their knees. They had
killed that morning a good quarry, enough for all, a deer that had been
wounded in a rutting fight; so that there had been no quarrelling among
them, and some of the women were still gnawing the bones that lay
scattered about. Others were making a heap of leaves and sticks to feed
Brother Fire when the darkness came again, that he might grow strong and
tall therewith, and guard them against the beasts. And two were piling
flints that they brought, an armful at a time, from the bend of the
river where the children were at play.

None of these buff-skinned savages were clothed, but some wore about
their hips rude girdles of adder-skin or crackling undressed hide, from
which depended little bags, not made, but torn from the paws of beasts,
and carrying the rudely-dressed flints that were men's chief weapons and
tools. And one woman, the mate of Uya the Cunning Man, wore a wonderful
necklace of perforated fossils--that others had worn before her. Beside
some of the sleeping men lay the big antlers of the elk, with the tines
chipped to sharp edges, and long sticks, hacked at the ends with flints
into sharp points. There was little else save these things and the
smouldering fire to mark these human beings off from the wild animals
that ranged the country. But Uya the Cunning did not sleep, but sat with
a bone in his hand and scraped busily thereon with a flint, a thing no
animal would do. He was the oldest man in the tribe, beetle-browed,
prognathous, lank-armed; he had a beard and his cheeks were hairy, and
his chest and arms were black with thick hair. And by virtue both of his
strength and cunning he was master of the tribe, and his share was
always the most and the best.

Eudena had hidden herself among the alders, because she was afraid of
Uya. She was still a girl, and her eyes were bright and her smile
pleasant to see. He had given her a piece of the liver, a man's piece,
and a wonderful treat for a girl to get; but as she took it the other
woman with the necklace had looked at her, an evil glance, and Ugh-lomi
had made a noise in his throat. At that, Uya had looked at him long and
steadfastly, and Ugh-lomi's face had fallen. And then Uya had looked at
her. She was frightened and she had stolen away, while the feeding was
still going on, and Uya was busy with the marrow of a bone. Afterwards
he had wandered about as if looking for her. And now she crouched among
the alders, wondering mightily what Uya might be doing with the flint
and the bone. And Ugh-lomi was not to be seen.

Presently a squirrel came leaping through the alders, and she lay so
quiet the little man was within six feet of her before he saw her.
Whereupon he dashed up a stem in a hurry and began to chatter and scold
her. "What are you doing here," he asked, "away from the other men
beasts?" "Peace," said Eudena, but he only chattered more, and then she
began to break off the little black cones to throw at him. He dodged and
defied her, and she grew excited and rose up to throw better, and then
she saw Uya coming down the knoll. He had seen the movement of her pale
arm amidst the thicket--he was very keen-eyed.

At that she forgot the squirrel and set off through the alders and reeds
as fast as she could go. She did not care where she went so long as she
escaped Uya. She splashed nearly knee-deep through a swampy place, and
saw in front of her a slope of ferns--growing more slender and greener
as they passed up out of the light into the shade of the young chestnut
trees. She was soon amidst the trees--she was very fleet of foot, and
she ran on and on, until the forest was old and the trees great, and the
vines about their stems where the light came were thick as young trees,
and the ropes of ivy stout and tight. On she went, and she doubled and
doubled again, and then at last lay down amidst some ferns in a hollow
place near a thicket, and listened with her heart beating in her ears.

She heard footsteps presently rustling among the dead leaves, far off,
and they died away and everything was still again, except the
scandalising of the midges--for the evening was drawing on--and the
incessant whisper of the leaves. She laughed silently to think the
cunning Uya should go by her. She was not frightened. Sometimes, playing
with the other girls and lads, she had fled into the wood, though never
so far as this. It was pleasant to be hidden and alone.

She lay a long time there, glad of her escape, and then she sat up
listening.

It was a rapid pattering growing louder and coming towards her, and in a
little while she could hear grunting noises and the snapping of twigs.
It was a drove of the lean grisly wild swine. She turned about her, for
a boar is an ill fellow to pass too closely, on account of the sideway
slash of his tusks, and she made off slantingly through the trees. But
the patter came nearer, they were not feeding as they wandered, but
going fast--or else they would not overtake her--and she caught the limb
of a tree, swung on to it, and ran up the stem with something of the
agility of a monkey.

Down below the sharp bristling backs of the swine were already passing
when she looked down. And she knew the short, sharp grunts they made
meant fear. What were they afraid of? A man? They were in a great hurry
for just a man.

And then, so suddenly it made her grip on the branch tighten
involuntarily, a fawn started in the brake and rushed after the swine.
Something else went by, low and grey, with a long body; she did not know
what it was, indeed she saw it only momentarily through the interstices
of the young leaves; and then there came a pause.

She remained stiff and expectant, rigid almost as though she was a part
of the tree she clung to, peering down.

Then far away among the trees, clear for a moment, then hidden, then
visible knee-deep in ferns, then gone again, ran a man. She knew it was
young Ugh-lomi by the fair colour of his hair, and there was red upon
his face. Somehow his frantic flight and that scarlet mark made her feel
sick. And then nearer, running heavily and breathing hard, came another
man also running. At first she could not see, and then she saw,
foreshortened and clear to her Uya, running with great strides and his
eyes staring. He was not going after Ugh-lomi. His face was white. It
was Uya--afraid! He passed, and was still loud hearing, when something
else, something large and with grizzled fur, swinging along with soft
swift strides, came rushing in pursuit of him.

Eudena suddenly became rigid, ceased to breathe, her clutch convulsive,
and her eyes starting.

She had never seen the thing before she did not even see him clearly
now, but she knew at once it was the Terror of the Woodshade. His name
was a legend, the children would frighten one another, frighten even
themselves with his name and run screaming to the squatting-place. No
man had ever killed any of his kind. Even the mighty mammoth feared his
Anger. It was the grizzly bear, the lord of world as the world went
then.

As he ran he made a continuous growling rumble. "Men in my very lair!
Fighting and blood. At the very mouth of my lair. Men, men, men.
Fighting and blood." For he was the lord of the wood and of the caves.

Long after he had passed she remained, a girl of stone, staring down
through the branches. All her power of action had gone from her. She
gripped by instinct with hands and knees and feet. It was some time
before she could think, and then only one thing was clear in her mind,
that the Terror was between her and the tribe--that it would be
impossible to descend.

Presently when her fear was a little abated she clambered into a more
comfortable position, where a great branch forked. The trees rose about
her, so that she could see nothing of Brother Fire, who is black by day.
Birds began to stir about her, and things that had gone into hiding for
fear of her movements crept out...

After a time the blue overhead deepened, and the taller branches flamed
out at the touch of the sunset. High overhead the rooks, who were wiser
than men, went cawing home to their squatting-places among the elms.
Looking down, things were clearer and darker. Eudena thought of going
back to the squatting-place; she let herself down some way, and then the
fear of the Terror of the Woodshade came again. While she hesitated a
rabbit squealed dismally, and she dared not descend farther.

The shadows gathered, and the deeps of the forest began stirring. Eudena
went up the tree again to be nearer the light. Down below the shadows
came out of their hiding-places and walked abroad. Overhead the blue
deepened. A dreadful stillness came, and then the leaves began
whispering.

Eudena shivered and thought of Brother Fire.

The shadows now were gathering in the trees, they sat on the branches
and watched her. Branches and leaves were turned to ominous, quiet black
shapes that would spring on her if she stirred. Then the white owl,
flitting silently, came ghostly through the shades. Darker grew the
world and darker, until the leaves and twigs against the sky were black,
and the ground was hidden.

She remained there all night, an age-long vigil, straining her ears for
the things that went on below in the darkness, and keeping motionless
lest some stealthy beast should discover her. Man in those days was
never alone in the dark, save for such rare accidents as this. Age after
age he had learnt the lesson of its terror--a lesson we poor children of
his have nowadays painfully to unlearn. Eudena, though in age a woman,
was in heart like a little child. She kept as still, poor little animal,
as a hare before it is started.

The stars gathered and watched her--her one grain of comfort. In one
bright one she fancied there was something like Ugh-lomi. Then she
fancied it was Ugh-lomi. And near him, red and duller, was Uya, and as
the night passed Ugh-lomi fled before him up the sky.

She tried to see Brother Fire, who guarded the squatting-place from
beasts, but he was not in sight. And far away she heard the mammoths
trumpeting as they went down to the drinking-place, and once some huge
bulk with heavy paces hurried along, making a noise like a calf, but
what it was she could not see. But she thought from the voice it was
Yaaa the rhinoceros, who stabs with his nose, goes always alone, and
rages without cause.

At last the little stars began to hide, and then the larger ones. It was
like all the animals vanishing before the Terror. The Sun was coming,
lord of the sky, as the grizzly was lord of the forest. Eudena wondered
what would happen if one star stayed behind. And then the sky paled to
the dawn.

When the daylight came the fear of lurking things passed, and she could
descend. She was stiff, but not so stiff as you would have been, dear
young lady (by virtue of your upbringing), and as she had not been
trained to eat at least once in three hours, but instead had often
fasted three days, she did not feel uncomfortably hungry. She crept down
the tree very cautiously, and went her way stealthily through the wood,
and not a squirrel sprang or deer started but the terror of the grizzly
bear froze her marrow.

Her desire was now to find her people again. Her dread of Uya the
Cunning was consumed by a greater dread of loneliness. But she had lost
her direction. She had run heedlessly overnight, and she could not tell
whether the squatting-place was sunward or where it lay. Ever and again
she stopped and listened, and at last, very far away, she heard a
measured chinking. It was so faint even in the morning stillness that
she could tell it must be far away. But she knew the sound was that of a
man sharpening a flint.

Presently the trees began to thin out, and then came a regiment of
nettles barring the way. She turned aside, and then she came to a fallen
tree that she knew, with a noise of bees about it. And so presently she
was in sight of the knoll, very far off, and the river under it, and the
children and the hippopotami just as they had been yesterday, and the
thin spire of smoke swaying in the morning breeze. Far away by the river
was the cluster of alders where she had hidden. And at the sight of that
the fear of Uya returned, and she crept into a thicket of bracken, out
of which a rabbit scuttled, and lay awhile to watch the squatting-place.

The men were mostly out of sight, saving Wau, the flint-chopper; and at
that she felt safer. They were away hunting food, no doubt. Some of the
women too, were down in the stream, stooping intent, seeking mussels,
crayfish, and water-snails, and at the sight of their occupation Eudena
felt hungry. She rose, and ran through the fern, designing to join them.
As she went she heard a voice among the bracken calling softly. She
stopped. Then suddenly she heard a rustle behind her, and turning, saw
Ugh-lomi rising out of the fern. There were streaks of brown blood and
dirt on his face, and his eyes were fierce, and the white stone of Uya,
the white Fire Stone, that none but Uya dared to touch, was in his hand.
In a stride he was beside her and gripped her arm. He swung her about,
and thrust her before him towards the woods. "Uya," he said, and waved
his arms about. She heard a cry, looked back, and saw all the women
standing up, and two wading out of the stream. Then came a nearer
howling, and the old woman with the beard, who watched the fire on the
knoll, was waving her arms, and Wau, the man who had been chipping the
flint, was getting to his feet. The little children too, were hurrying
and shouting.

"Come!" said Ugh-lomi, and dragged her by the arm.

She still did not understand.

"Uya," said Ugh-lomi, and she glanced back again at the screaming curve
of figures, and dimly understood.

Wau and all the women and children were coming towards them, a scattered
array of buff shock-headed figures, howling, leaping, and crying. Over
the knoll two youths hurried. Down among the ferns to the right came a
man, heading them off from the wood. Ugh-lomi left her arm, and the two
began running side by side, leaping the bracken and stepping clear and
wide. Eudena, knowing her fleetness and the fleetness of Ugh-lomi,
laughed aloud at the unequal chase. They were an exceptionally
straight-limbed couple for those days.

They soon cleared the open, and drew near the wood of chestnut-trees
again--neither afraid now because neither was alone. They slackened
their pace, already not excessive. And suddenly Eudena cried and swerved
aside, pointing, and looking up through the tree-stems. Ugh-lomi saw the
feet and legs of men running towards him. Eudena was already running off
at a tangent. And as he too turned to follow her they heard the voice of
Uya coming through the trees, and roaring out his rage at them.

Then terror came in their hearts, not the terror that numbs, but the
terror that makes one silent and swift. They were cut off now on two
sides. They were in a sort of corner of pursuit. On the right hand, and
near by them, came the men swift and heavy, with bearded Uya, antler in
hand, leading them; and on the left, scattered as one scatters corn,
yellow dashes among the fern and grass, ran Wau and the women; and even
the little children from the shallow had joined the chase. The two
parties converged upon them. Off they went, with Eudena ahead.

They knew there was no mercy for them. There was no hunting so sweet to
these ancient men as the hunting of men. Once the fierce passion of the
chase was lit, the feeble beginnings of humanity in them were thrown to
the winds. And Uya in the night had marked Ugh-lomi with the death word.
Ugh-lomi was the day's quarry.

They ran straight--it was their only chance--taking whatever ground came
in the way--a spread of stinging nettles, an open glade, a clump of
grass out of which a hyaena fled snarling. Then woods again, long
stretches of shady leaf-mould and moss under the green trunks. Then a
stiff slope, tree-clad, and long vistas of trees, a glade, a succulent
green area of black mud, a wide open space again, and then a clump of
lacerating brambles, with beast tracks through it. Behind them the chase
trailed out and scattered, with Uya ever at their heels. Eudena kept the
first place, running light and with her breath easy, for Ugh-lomi
carried the Fire Stone in his hand.

It told on his pace--not at first, but after a time. His footsteps
behind her suddenly grew remote. Glancing over her shoulder as they
crossed another open space, Eudena saw that Ugh-lomi was many yards
behind her, and Uya close upon him, with antler already raised in the
air to strike him down. Wau and the others were but just emerging from
the shadow of the woods.

Seeing Ugh-lomi in peril, Eudena ran sideways, looking back, threw up
her arms and cried aloud, just as the antler flew. And young Ugh-lomi,
expecting this and understanding her cry, ducked his head, so that the
missile merely struck his scalp lightly, making but a trivial wound, and
flew over him. He turned forthwith, the quartzite Fire Stone in both
hands, and hurled it straight at Uya's body as he ran loose from the
throw. Uya shouted, but could not dodge it. It took him under the ribs,
heavy and flat, and he reeled and went down without a cry. Ugh-lomi
caught up the antler--one tine of it was tipped with his own blood--and
came running on again with a red trickle just coming out of his hair.

Uya rolled over twice, and lay a moment before he got up, and then he
did not run fast. The colour of his face was changed. Wau overtook him,
and then others, and he coughed and laboured in his breath. But he kept
on.

At last the two fugitives gained the bank of the river, where the stream
ran deep and narrow, and they still had fifty yards in hand of Wau, the
foremost pursuer, the man who made the smiting stones. He carried one, a
large flint, the shape of an oyster and double the size, chipped to a
chisel edge, in either hand.

They sprang down the steep bank into the stream, rushed through the
water, swam the deep current in two or three strokes, and came out
wading again, dripping and refreshed, to clamber up the farther bank. It
was undermined, and with willows growing thickly therefrom, so that it
needed clambering. And while Eudena was still among the silvery branches
and Ugh-lomi still in the water--for the antler had encumbered him--Wau
came up against the sky on the opposite bank, and the smiting stone,
thrown cunningly, took the side of Eudena's knee. She struggled to the
top and fell.

They heard the pursuers shout to one another, and Ugh-lomi, climbing to
her and moving jerkily to mar Wau's aim, felt the second smiting stone
graze his ear, and heard the water splashing below him.

Then it was Ugh-lomi, the stripling, proved himself to have come to
man's estate. For running on, he found Eudena fell behind, limping, and
at that he turned, and crying savagely and with a face terrible with
sudden wrath and trickling blood, ran swiftly past her back to the bank,
whirling the antler round his head. And Eudena kept on, running stoutly
still, though she must needs limp at every step, and the pain was
already sharp.

So that Wau, rising over the edge and clutching the straight willow
branches, saw Ugh-lomi towering over him, gigantic against the blue; saw
his whole body swing round, and the grip of his hands upon the antler.
The edge of the antler came sweeping through the air, and he saw no
more. The water under the osiers whirled and eddied and went crimson six
feet down the stream. Uya following, stopped knee-high across the
stream, and the man who was swimming turned about.

The other men who trailed after--they were none of them very mighty men
(for Uya was more cunning than strong, brooking no sturdy rivals--)
slackened momentarily at the sight of Ugh-lomi standing there above the
willows, bloody and terrible, between them and the halting girl, with
the huge antler waving in his hand. It seemed as though he had gone into
the water a youth, and come out of it a man full grown.

He knew what there was behind him. A broad stretch of grass, and then a
thicket, and in that Eudena could hide. That was clear in his mind,
though his thinking powers were too feeble to see what should happen
thereafter. Uya stood knee-deep, undecided and unarmed. His heavy mouth
hung open, showing his canine teeth, and he panted heavily. His side was
flushed and bruised under the hair. The other man beside him carried a
sharpened stick. The rest of the hunters came up one by one to the top
of the bank, hairy, long-armed men clutching flints and sticks. Two ran
off along the bank down stream, and then clambered down to the water,
where Wau had come to the surface struggling weakly. They gibbered at
him without any sane attempt to help, and presently he went under again.
Two others threatened Ugh-lomi from the bank.

He answered back, shouts, vague insults, gestures. Then Uya, who had
been standing hesitating, roared with rage, and whirling his fists came
plunging through the water. His followers came splashing after him.

Ugh-lomi glanced over his shoulder and found Eudena already vanished
into the thicket. He would perhaps have waited for Uya, but Uya
preferred to spar in the water below him until the others were beside
him. Human tactics in those days, in all serious fighting, were the
tactics of the pack. Prey that turned at bay they gathered around and
rushed. Ugh-lomi felt the rush coming, and hurling the antler at Uya,
turned about and fled.

When he halted to look back from the shadow of the thicket, he found
only three of his pursuers had followed him across the river, and they
were going back again. Uya, with a bleeding mouth, was on the farther
side of the stream again, but lower down, and he held his hand to his
side. The others were in the river dragging something to shore. For a
time at least the chase was intermitted.

Ugh-lomi stood watching for a space, and snarled at the sight of Uya.
Then he turned and plunged into the thicket.

In a minute, Eudena came hastening to join him, and they went on hand in
hand. He dimly perceived the pain she suffered from the cut and bruised
knee, and chose the easier ways. But they went on all that day, mile
after mile, through wood and thicket, until at last they came to the
chalk land, open grass with rare woods of beech, and the birch growing
near water, and they saw the Wealden mountains nearer, and groups of
horses grazing together. They went circumspectly, keeping always near
thicket and cover, for this was a strange region--even its ways were
strange. Steadily the ground rose, until the chestnut forests spread
wide and blue below them, and the Thames marshes shone silvery, high and
far. They saw no men, for in those days men were still only just come
into this part of the world, and were moving but slowly along the
river-ways. Towards evening they came on the river again, but now it ran
in a gorge, between high cliffs of white chalk that sometimes overhung
it. Down the cliffs was a scrub of birches and there were many birds
there. And high up the cliff was a little shelf by a tree, whereon they
clambered to pass the night.

They had had scarcely any food; it was not the time of year for
berries, and they had no time to go aside to snare or waylay. They
tramped in a hungry weary silence, gnawing at twigs and leaves. But over
the surface of the cliffs were a multitude of snails, and in a bush were
the freshly laid eggs of a little bird, and then Ugh-lomi threw at and
killed a squirrel in a beech-tree, so that at last they fed well.
Ugh-lomi watched during the night, his chin on his knees; and he heard
young foxes crying hard by, and the noise of mammoths down the gorge,
and the hyaenas yelling and laughing far away. It was chilly, but they
dared not light a fire. Whenever he dozed, his spirit went abroad, and
straightway met with the spirit of Uya, and they fought. And always
Ugh-lomi was paralysed so that he could not smite nor run, and then he
would awake suddenly. Eudena too, dreamt evil things of Uya, so that
they both awoke with the fear of him in their hearts, and by the light
of the dawn they saw a woolly rhinoceros go blundering down the valley.

During the day they caressed one another and were glad of the sunshine,
and Eudena's leg was so stiff she sat on the ledge all day. Ugh-lomi
found great flints sticking out of the cliff face, greater than any he
had seen, and he dragged some to the ledge and began chipping, so as to
be armed against Uya when he came again. And at one he laughed heartily,
and Eudena laughed, and they threw it about in derision. It had a hole
in it. They stuck their fingers through it, it was very funny indeed.
Then they peeped at one another through it. Afterwards, Ugh-lomi got
himself a stick, and thrusting by chance at this foolish flint, the
stick went in and stuck there. He had rammed it in too tightly to
withdraw it. That was still stranger--scarcely funny, terrible almost,
and for a time Ugh-lomi did not greatly care to touch the thing. It was
as if the flint had bit and held with its teeth. But then he got
familiar with the odd combination. He swung it about, and perceived
dimly that the stick with the heavy stone on the end struck a better
blow than anything he knew. He went to and fro swinging it, and striking
with it; but later he tired of it and threw it aside. In the afternoon
he went up over the brow of the white cliff, and lay watching by a
rabbit-warren until the rabbits came out to play. There were no men
thereabouts, and the rabbits were heedless. He threw a smiting stone he
had made and got a kill.

That night they made a fire from flint sparks and bracken fronds, and
talked and caressed by it. And in their sleep Uya's spirit came again,
and suddenly, while Ugh-lomi was trying to fight vainly, the foolish
flint on the stick came into his hand, and struck Uya with it, and
behold! It killed him. But afterwards came other dreams of Uya--for
spirits take a lot of killing, and he had to be killed again. Then after
that the stone would not keep on the stick. He awoke tired and rather
gloomy, and was sulky all the forenoon, in spite of Eudena's kindliness,
and instead of hunting he sat chipping a sharp edge to the singular
flint, and looking strangely at her. Then he bound the perforated flint
on to the stick with strips of rabbit. And afterwards he walked up and
down the ledge, striking with it, and muttering to himself, and thinking
of Uya. It felt very fine and heavy in the hand.

Several days, more than there was any counting in those days, five days,
it may be, or six, did Ugh-lomi and Eudena stay on that shelf in the
gorge of the river, and they lost all fear of men, and their fire burnt
redly of a night. And they were very merry together; there was food
every day, sweet water, and no enemies. Eudena's knee was well in a
couple of days, for those ancient savages had quick-healing flesh.
Indeed, they were very happy.

On one of those days, although it has little to do with this story,
Ugh-lomi dropped a chunk of flint on the cliff. He saw it fall, and go
bounding across the river bank into the river, and after laughing and
thinking it over a little he tried another. This smashed a bush of hazel
in the most interesting way. They spent all the morning dropping stones
from the ledge and in the afternoon they discovered this new and
interesting pastime was also possible from the cliff brow. The next day
they had forgotten this delight. Or at least, it seemed they had
forgotten.

But Uya came in dreams to spoil the paradise. Three nights he came
fighting Ugh-lomi. In the morning after these dreams Ugh-lomi would walk
up and down, threatening him and swinging the axe, and at last came the
night after Ugh-lomi brained the otter, and they had feasted. Uya went
too far. Ugh-lomi awoke, scowling under his heavy brows, and he took his
axe, and extending his hand towards Eudena he bade her wait for him upon
the ledge. Then he clambered down the white declivity, glanced up once
from the foot of it and flourished his axe, and without looking back
again went striding along the river bank until the overhanging cliff at
the bend hid him.

Two days and nights did Eudena sit alone by the fire on the ledge
waiting, and in the night the beasts howled over the cliffs and down the
valley, and on the cliff over against her the hunched hyaenas prowled
black against the sky. But no evil thing came near her save fear. Once
far away, she heard the roaring of a lion, following the horses as they
came northward over the grass lands with the spring. All that time she
waited--the waiting that is pain.

And the third day Ugh-lomi came back, up the river. The plumes of a
raven were in his hair. The axe was red-stained, and had long dark hairs
upon it, and he carried the necklace that had marked the favourite of
Uya in his hand. He walked in the soft places, giving no heed to his
trail. Save a raw cut below his jaw there was not a wound upon him.
"Uya!" cried Ugh-lomi exultant, and Eudena saw it was well. He put the
necklace on Eudena, and they ate and drank together. And after eating he
began to rehearse the whole story from the beginning, when Uya had cast
his eyes on Eudena, and Uya and Ugh-lomi, fighting in the forest, had
been chased by the bear, eking out his scanty words with abundant
pantomime, springing to his feet and whirling the stone axe round when
it came to the fighting. The last fight was a mighty one, stamping and
shouting, and once a blow at the fire that sent a torrent of sparks up
into the night. And Eudena sat red in the light of the fire, gloating on
him, her face flushed and her eyes shining, and the necklace Uya had
made about her neck. It was a splendid time, and the stars that look
down on us looked down on her, our ancestor--who has been dead now these
fifty thousand years.


2. The Cave Bear

In the days when Eudena and Ugh-lomi fled from the people of Uya towards
the fir-clad mountains of the Weald, across the forests of sweet
chestnut and the grass-clad chalkland, and hid themselves at last in the
gorge of the river between the chalk cliffs, men were few and their
squatting-places far between. The nearest men to them were those of the
tribe, a full day's journey down the river, and up the mountains there
were none. Man was indeed a newcomer to this part of the world in that
ancient time, coming slowly along the rivers, generation after
generation, from one squatting-place to another, from the
south-westward. And the animals that held the land, the hippopotami and
rhinoceros of the river valleys, the horses of the grass plains, the
deer and swine of the woods, the grey apes in the branches, the cattle
of the uplands, feared him but little--let alone the mammoths in the
mountains and the elephants that came through the land in the
summer-time out of the south. For why should they fear him, with but the
rough, chipped flints that he had not learnt to haft and which he threw
but ill, and the poor spear of sharpened wood, as all his weapons
against hoof and horn, tooth and claw?

Andoo, the huge cave bear, who lived in the cave up the gorge, had never
even seen a man in all his wise and respectable life, until midway
through one night, as he was prowling down the gorge along the cliff
edge, he saw the glare of Eudena's fire upon the ledge, and Eudena red
and shining, and Ugh-lomi, with a gigantic shadow mocking him upon the
white cliff, going to and fro, shaking his mane of hair, and waving the
axe of stone--the first axe of stone--while he chanted of the killing of
Uya. The cave bear was far up the gorge, and he saw the thing
slanting-ways and far off. He was so surprised he stood quite still upon
the edge, sniffing the novel odour of burning bracken, and wondering
whether the dawn was coming up in the wrong place.

He was the lord of the rocks and caves, was the cave bear, as his
slighter brother, the grizzly, was lord of the thick woods below, and as
the dappled lion--the lion of those days was dappled--was lord of the
thorn-thickets, reed-beds, and open plains. He was the greatest of all
meat-eaters; he knew no fear, none preyed on him, and none gave him
battle; only the rhinoceros was beyond his strength. Even the mammoth
shunned his country. This invasion perplexed him. He noticed these new
beasts were shaped like monkeys, and sparsely hairy like young pigs.
"Monkey and young pig," said the cave bear. "It might not be so bad. But
that red thing that jumps, and the black thing jumping with it yonder!
Never in my life have I seen such things before."

He came slowly along the brow of the cliff towards them, stopping thrice
to sniff and peer, and the reek of the fire grew stronger. A couple of
hyaenas also were so intent upon the thing below that Andoo, coming soft
and easy, was close upon them before they knew of him or he of them.
They started guiltily and went lurching off. Coming round in a wheel, a
hundred yards off, they began yelling and calling him names for the
start they had had. "Ya-ha!" they cried. "Who can't grub his own
burrow? Who eats roots like a pig...? Ya-ha!" For even in those days the
hyaena's manners were just as offensive as they are now.

"Who answers the hyaena?" growled Andoo, peering through the midnight
dimness at them, and then going to look at the cliff edge.

There was Ugh-lomi still telling his story, and the fire getting low,
and the scent of the burning hot and strong.

Andoo stood on the edge of the chalk cliff for some time, shifting his
vast weight from foot to foot, and swaying his head to and fro, with his
mouth open, his ears erect and twitching, and the nostrils of his big,
black muzzle sniffing. He was very curious, was the cave bear, more
curious than any of the bears that live now, and the flickering fire and
the incomprehensible movements of the man, let alone the intrusion into
his indisputable province, stirred him with a sense of strange new
happenings. He had been after red deer fawn that night, for the cave
bear was a miscellaneous hunter, but this quite turned him from that
enterprise.

"Ya-ha!" yelled the hyaenas behind. "Ya-ha-ha!"

Peering through the starlight, Andoo saw there were now three or four
going to and fro against the grey hillside. "They will hang about me now
all the night until I kill," said Andoo. "Filth of the world!" And
mainly to annoy them, he resolved to watch the red flicker in the gorge
until the dawn came to drive the hyaena scum home. And after a time they
vanished, and he heard their voices, like a party of Cockney
bean-feasters, away in the beech-woods. Then they came slinking near
again. Andoo yawned and went on along the cliff, and they followed. Then
he stopped and went back.

It was a splendid night, beset with shining constellations, the same
stars, but not the same constellations we know, for since those days all
the stars have had time to move into new places. Far away across the
open space beyond where the heavy-shouldered, lean-bodied hyaenas
blundered and howled, was a beech-wood, and the mountain slopes rose
beyond, a dim mystery, until their snow-capped summits came out white
and cold and clear, touched by the first rays of the yet unseen moon. It
was a vast silence, save when the yell of the hyaenas flung a vanishing
discordance across its peace, or when from down the hills the trumpeting
of the new-come elephants came faintly on the faint breeze. And below
now, the red flicker had dwindled and was steady, and shone a deeper
red, and Ugh-lomi had finished his story and was preparing to sleep, and
Eudena sat and listened to the strange voices of unknown beasts, and
watched the dark eastern sky growing deeply luminous at the advent of
the moon. Down below, the river talked to itself, and things unseen went
to and fro.

After a time the bear went away, but in an hour he was back again. Then,
as if struck by a thought, he turned, and went up the gorge...

The night passed, and Ugh-lomi slept on. The waning moon rose and lit
the gaunt white cliff overhead with a light that was pale and vague. The
gorge remained in a deeper shadow, and seemed all the darker. Then by
imperceptible degrees the day came stealing in the wake of the
moonlight. Eudena's eyes wandered to the cliff brow overhead once, and
then again. Each time the line was sharp and clear against the sky, and
yet she had a dim perception of something lurking there. The red of the
fire grew deeper and deeper, grey scales spread upon it, its vertical
column of smoke became more and more visible, and up and down the gorge,
things that had been unseen grew clear in a colourless illumination. She
may have dozed.

Suddenly she started up from her squatting position, erect and alert,
scrutinising the cliff up and down.

She made the faintest sound, and Ugh-lomi too, light sleeping like an
animal, was instantly awake. He caught up his axe and came noiselessly
to her side.

The light was still dim, the world now all in black and dark grey, and
one sickly star still lingered overhead. The ledge they were on was a
little grassy space, six feet wide perhaps, and twenty feet long,
sloping outwardly, and with a handful of St. John's wort growing near
the edge. Below it, the soft white rock fell away in a steep slope of
nearly fifty feet to the thick bush of hazel that fringed the river.
Down the river this slope increased, until some way off a thin grass
held its own right up to the crest of the cliff. Overhead, forty or
fifty feet of rock bulged into the great masses characteristic of chalk,
but at the end of the ledge a gully, a precipitous groove of discoloured
chalk, slashed the face of the cliff, and gave a footing to a scrubby
growth, by which Eudena and Ugh-lomi went up and down.

They stood as noiseless as startled deer, with every sense expectant.
For a minute they heard nothing, and then came a faint rattling of dust
down the gully, and the creaking of twigs.

Ugh-lomi gripped his axe, and went to the edge of the ledge, for the
bulge of the chalk overhead had hidden the upper part of the gully. And
forthwith, with a sudden contraction of the heart, he saw the cave bear
halfway down from the brow, and making a gingerly backward step with his
flat hind-foot. His hind-quarters were towards Ugh-lomi, and he clawed
at the rocks and bushes so that he seemed flattened against the cliff.
He looked none the less for that. From his shining snout to his stumpy
tail he was a lion and a half, the length of two tall men. He looked
over his shoulder, and his huge mouth was open with the exertion of
holding up his great carcase, and his tongue lay out...

He got his footing, and came down slowly, a yard nearer.

"Bear," said Ugh-lomi, looking round with his face white.

But Eudena, with terror in her eyes, was pointing down the cliff.

Ugh-lomi's mouth fell open. For down below, with her big fore-feet
against the rock, stood another big brown-grey bulk--the she-bear. She
was not so big as Andoo, but she was big enough for all that.

Then suddenly Ugh-lomi gave a cry, and catching up a handful of the
litter of ferns that lay scattered on the ledge, he thrust it into the
pallid ash of the fire. "Brother Fire!" he cried, "Brother Fire!" And
Eudena, starting into activity, did likewise. "Brother Fire! Help, help!
Brother Fire!"

Brother Fire was still red in his heart, but he turned to grey as they
scattered him. "Brother Fire!" They screamed. But he whispered and
passed, and there was nothing but ashes. Then Ugh-lomi danced with anger
and struck the ashes with his fist. But Eudena began to hammer the
firestone against a flint. And the eyes of each were turning ever and
again towards the gully by which Andoo was climbing down. Brother Fire!

Suddenly the huge furry hind-quarters of the bear came into view,
beneath the bulge of the chalk that had hidden him. He was still
clambering gingerly down the nearly vertical surface. His head was yet
out of sight, but they could hear him talking to himself. "Pig and
monkey," said the cave bear. "It ought to be good."

Eudena struck a spark and blew at it; it twinkled brighter and
then--went out. At that she cast down flint and firestone and began
wringing her hands. Her face was wet with tears. Then she sprang to her
feet and scrambled a dozen feet up the cliff above the ledge. How she
hung on even for a moment I do not know, for the chalk was vertical and
without grip for a monkey. In a couple of seconds she had slid back to
the ledge again with bleeding hands.

Ugh-lomi was making frantic rushes about the ledge--now he would go to
the edge, now to the gully. He did not know what to do, he could not
think. The she-bear looked smaller than her mate--much. If they rushed
down on her together, one might live. "Eigh?" said the cave bear, and
Ugh-lomi turned again and saw his little eyes peering under the bulge of
the chalk. "Stand away!" said the bear; "I'm going to jump down."

Eudena, cowering at the end of the ledge, began to scream like a gripped
rabbit.

At that a sort of madness came upon Ugh-lomi. With a mighty cry, he
caught up his axe and began to clamber up the gully to the bear. He
uttered neither word nor cry. The monster gave a grunt of surprise. In a
moment Ugh-lomi was clinging to a bush right underneath the bear, and in
another he was hanging to its back half buried in fur, with one fist
clutched in the hair under its jaw. The bear was too astonished at this
fantastic attack to do more than cling passive. And then the axe, the
first of all axes, rang in its skull.

The bear's head twisted from side to side, and he began a petulant
scolding growl. The axe bit within an inch of the left eye, and the hot
blood blinded that side. At that the brute roared with surprise and
anger, and his teeth gnashed six inches from Ugh-lomi's face. Then the
axe, clubbed close, came down heavily on the corner of the jaw.

The next blow blinded the right side and called forth a roar, this time
of pain. Eudena saw the huge, flat feet slipping and sliding, and
suddenly the bear gave a clumsy leap sideways, as if for the ledge. Then
everything vanished, and the hazels smashed, and a roar of pain and a
tumult of shouts and growls came up from far below.

Eudena screamed and ran to the edge and peered over. For a moment, man
and bears were a heap together, Ugh-lomi uppermost; and then he had
sprung clear and was scaling the gully again, with the bears rolling and
striking at one another among the hazels. But he had left his axe below,
and three knob-ended streaks of carmine were shooting down his thigh.
"Up!" he cried, and in a moment Eudena was preceding him to the top of
the cliff.

In half a minute they were at the crest, their hearts pumping noisily,
with Andoo and his wife far and safe below them. Andoo was sitting on
his haunches, both paws at work, trying with quick exasperated movements
to wipe the blindness out of his eyes, and the she-bear stood on
all-fours a little way off, ruffled in appearance and growling angrily.
Ugh-lomi flung himself flat on the grass, and lay panting and bleeding
with his face on his arms.

For a second Eudena regarded the bears, then she came and sat beside
him, looking at him...

Presently she put forth her hand timidly and touched him, and made the
guttural sound that was his name. He turned over and raised himself on
his arm. His face was pale, like the face of one who is afraid. He
looked at her steadfastly for a moment, and then suddenly he laughed.
"Waugh!" he said exultantly.

"Waugh!" said she--a simple but expressive conversation.

Then Ugh-lomi came and knelt beside her, and on hands and knees peered
over the brow and examined the gorge. His breath was steady now, and the
blood on his leg had ceased to flow, though the scratches the she-bear
had made were open and wide. He squatted up and sat staring at the
footmarks of the great bear as they came to the gully--they were as wide
as his head and twice as long. Then he jumped up and went along the
cliff face until the ledge was visible. Here he sat down for some time
thinking, while Eudena watched him.

At last Ugh-lomi rose, as one whose mind is made up. He returned towards
the gully, Eudena keeping close by him, and together they clambered to
the ledge. They took the firestone and a flint, and then Ugh-lomi went
down to the foot of the cliff very cautiously, and found his axe. They
returned to the cliff now as quietly as they could, and turning their
faces resolutely up-stream set off at a brisk walk. The ledge was a home
no longer, with such callers in the neighbourhood. Ugh-lomi carried the
axe and Eudena the firestone. So simple was a Palaeolithic removal.

They went up-stream, although it might lead to the very lair of the cave
bear, because there was no other way to go. Down the stream was the
tribe, and had not Ugh-lomi killed Uya and Wau? By the stream they had
to keep--because of drinking.

So they marched, through beech trees, with the gorge deepening until the
river flowed, a frothing rapid, five hundred feet below them. And of all
the changeful things in this world of change, the courses of rivers, in
deep valleys change least. It was the river Wey, the river we know
to-day, and they marched over the very spots where nowadays stand little
Guildford and Godalming--the first human beings to come into the land.
Once a grey ape chattered and vanished, and all along the cliff edge,
vast and even, ran the spoor of the great cave bear.

And then the spoor of the bear fell away from the cliff, showing,
Ugh-lomi thought, that he came from some place to the left, and keeping
to the cliff's edge, they presently came to an end. They found
themselves looking down on a great semi-circular space caused by the
collapse of the cliff. It had smashed right across the gorge, banking
the up-stream water back in a pool which overflowed in a rapid. The slip
had happened long ago. It was grassed over, but the face of the cliffs
that stood about the semi-circle was still almost fresh-looking and
white as on the day when the rock must have broken and slid down.
Starkly exposed and black under the foot of these cliffs were the mouths
of several caves. And as they stood there, looking at the space, and
disinclined to skirt it, because they thought the bears' lair lay
somewhere on the left in the direction they must needs take, they saw
suddenly first one bear and then two coming up the grass slope to the
right and going across the amphitheatre towards the caves. Andoo was
first, and he dropped a little on his fore-foot, and his mien was
despondent, and the she-bear came shuffling behind.

Eudena and Ugh-lomi stepped quite noiselessly back from the cliff until
they could just see the bears over the verge. Then Ugh-lomi stopped.
Eudena pulled his arm, but he turned with a forbidding gesture, and her
hand dropped. Ugh-lomi stood watching the bears, with his axe in his
hand, until they had vanished into the cave. He growled softly, and
shook the axe at the she-bear's receding quarters. Then to Eudena's
terror, instead of creeping off with her, he lay flat down and crawled
forward into such a position that he could just see the cave. It was
bears--and he did it as calmly as if it had been rabbits he was
watching!

He lay still, like a barked log, sun-dappled, in the shadow of the
trees. He was thinking. And Eudena had learnt, even when a little girl,
that when Ugh-lomi became still like that, jaw-bone on fist, novel
things presently began to happen.

It was an hour before the thinking was over; it was noon when the two
little savages had found their way to the cliff brow that overhung the
bears' cave. And all the long afternoon they fought desperately with a
great boulder of chalk; trundling it, with nothing but their unaided
sturdy muscles, from the gully where it had hung like a loose tooth,
towards the cliff top. It was full two yards about, it stood as high as
Eudena's waist, it was obtuse-angled and toothed with flints. And when
the sun set it was poised, three inches from the edge, above the cave of
the great cave bear.

In the cave, conversation languished during the afternoon. The she-bear
snoozed sulkily in her corner--for she was fond of pig and monkey--and
Andoo was busy licking the side of his paw and smearing his face to cool
the smart and inflammation of his wounds. Afterwards he went and sat
just within the mouth of the cave, blinking out at the afternoon sun
with his uninjured eye, and thinking.

"I never was so startled in my life," he said at last. "They are the
most extraordinary beasts. Attacking me!"

"I don't like them," said the she-bear, out of the darkness behind.

"A feebler sort of beast I never saw. I can't think what the world is
coming to. Scraggy, weedy legs... Wonder how they keep warm in winter?"

"Very likely they don't," said the she-bear.

"I suppose it's a sort of monkey gone wrong."

"It's a change," said the she-bear.

A pause.

"The advantage he had was merely accidental," said Andoo. "These things
will happen at times."

"I can't understand why you let go," said the she-bear.

That matter had been discussed before, and settled. So Andoo, being a
bear of experience, remained silent for a space. Then he resumed upon a
different aspect of the matter. "He has a sort of claw--a long claw that
he seemed to have first on one paw and then on the other. Just one claw.
They're very odd things. The bright thing too, they seemed to have--like
that glare that comes in the sky in daytime--only it jumps about--it's
really worth seeing. It's a thing with a root, too--like grass when it
is windy."

"Does it bite?" asked the she-bear. "If it bites it can't be a plant."

"No--I don't know," said Andoo. "But it's curious, anyhow."

"I wonder if they are good eating?" said the she-bear.

"They look it," said Andoo, with appetite--for the cave bear, like the
polar bear, was an incurable carnivore--no roots or honey for him.

The two bears fell into a meditation for a space. Then Andoo resumed his
simple attentions to his eye. The sunlight up the green slope before the
cave mouth grew warmer in tone and warmer, until it was a ruddy amber.

"Curious sort of thing--day," said the cave bear. "Lot too much of it, I
think. Quite unsuitable for hunting. Dazzles me always. I can't smell
nearly so well by day."

The she-bear did not answer, but there came a measured crunching sound
out of the darkness. She had turned up a bone. Andoo yawned. "Well," he
said. He strolled to the cave mouth and stood with his head projecting,
surveying the amphitheatre. He found he had to turn his head completely
round to see objects on his right-hand side. No doubt that eye would be
all right to-morrow.

He yawned again. There was a tap overhead, and a big mass of chalk flew
out from the cliff face, dropped a yard in front of his nose, and
starred into a dozen unequal fragments. It startled him extremely.

When he had recovered a little from his shock, he went and sniffed
curiously at the representative pieces of the fallen projectile. They
had a distinctive flavour, oddly reminiscent of the two drab animals of
the ledge. He sat up and pawed the larger lump, and walked round it
several times trying to find a man about it somewhere...

When night had come he went off down the river gorge to see if he could
cut off either of the ledge's occupants. The ledge was empty, there were
no signs of the red thing, but as he was rather hungry he did not loiter
long that night, but pushed on to pick up a red deer fawn. He forgot
about the drab animals. He found a fawn, but the doe was close by and
made an ugly fight for her young. Andoo had to leave the fawn, but as
her blood was up she stuck to the attack, and at last he got in a blow
of his paw at her nose, and so got hold of her. More meat but less
delicacy, and the she-bear, following, had her share. The next
afternoon, curiously enough, the very fellow of the first white rock
fell, and smashed precisely according to precedent.

The aim of the third, that fell the night after however, was better. It
hit Andoo's unspeculative skull with a crack that echoed up the cliff,
and the white fragments went dancing to all the points of the compass.
The she-bear coming after him and sniffing curiously at him, found him
lying in an odd sort of attitude, with his head wet and all out of
shape. She was a young she-bear, and inexperienced, and having sniffed
about him for some time and licked him a little, and so forth, she
decided to leave him until the odd mood had passed, and went on her
hunting alone.

She looked up the fawn of the red doe they had killed two nights ago,
and found it. But it was lonely hunting without Andoo, and she returned
caveward before dawn. The sky was grey and overcast, the trees up the
gorge were black and unfamiliar, and into her ursine mind came a dim
sense of strange and dreary happenings. She lifted up her voice and
called Andoo by name. The sides of the gorge re-echoed her.

As she approached the caves she saw in the half light, and heard, a
couple of jackals scuttle off, and immediately after a hyaena howled and
a dozen clumsy bulks went lumbering up the slope, and stopped and yelled
derision. "Lord of the rocks and caves--ya-ha!" Came down the wind. The
dismal feeling in the she-bear's mind became suddenly acute. She
shuffled across the amphitheatre.

"Ya-ha!" said the hyaenas, retreating. "Ya-ha!"

The cave bear was not lying quite in the same attitude, because the
hyaenas had been busy, and in one place his ribs showed white. Dotted
over the turf about him lay the smashed fragments of the three great
lumps of chalk. And the air was full of the scent of death.

The she-bear stopped dead. Even now, that the great and wonderful Andoo
was killed was beyond her believing. Then she heard far overhead a
sound, a queer sound, a little like the shout of a hyaena but fuller and
lower in pitch. She looked up, with her little dawn-blinded eyes, seeing
little, her nostrils quivering. And there, on the cliff edge, far above
her against the bright pink of dawn, were two little shaggy round dark
things, the heads of Eudena and Ugh-lomi, as they shouted derision at
her. But though she could not see them very distinctly she could hear,
and dimly she began to apprehend. A novel feeling as of imminent strange
evils came into her heart.

She began to examine the smashed fragments of chalk that lay about
Andoo. For a space she stood still, looking about her and making a low
continuous sound that was almost a moan. Then she went back
incredulously to Andoo to make one last effort to rouse him.


3. The First Horseman

In the days before Ugh-lomi killed the great cave bear there was little
trouble between the horses and men. Indeed they lived apart--the men in
the river swamps and thickets, the horses on the wide grassy uplands
between the chestnuts and the pines. Sometimes a pony would come
straying into the clogging marshes to make a flint-hacked meal, and
sometimes the tribe would find one, the kill of a lion, and drive off
the jackals, and feast heartily while the sun was high. These horses of
the old time were clumsy at the fetlock and dun-coloured, with a rough
tail and big head. They came every spring-time north-westward into the
country, after the swallows and before the hippopotami, as the grass on
the wide downland stretches grew long. They came only in small bodies
thus far, each herd, a stallion and two or three mares and a foal or so,
having its own stretch of country, and they went again when the
chestnut-trees were yellow and the wolves came down the Wealden
mountains.

It was their custom to graze right out in the open, going into cover
only in the heat of the day. They avoided the long stretches of thorn
and beechwood, preferring an isolated group of trees, void of ambuscade,
so that it was hard to come upon them. They were never fighters; their
heels and teeth were for one another, but in the clear country, once
they were started, no living thing came near them, though perhaps the
elephant might have done so, had he felt the need. And in those days man
seemed a harmless thing enough. No whisper of prophetic intelligence
told the species of the terrible slavery that was to come, of the whip
and spur and bearing-rein, the clumsy load and the slippery street, the
insufficient food, and the knacker's yard, that was to replace the wide
grass-land and the freedom of the earth.

Down in the Wey marshes Ugh-lomi and Eudena had never seen the horses
closely, but now they saw them every day as the two of them raided out
from their lair on the ledge in the gorge, raiding together in search of
food. They had returned to the ledge after the killing of Andoo; for of
the she-bear they were not afraid. The she-bear had become afraid of
them, and when she winded them she went aside. The two went together
everywhere; for since they had left the tribe Eudena was not so much
Ugh-lomi's woman as his mate; she learnt to hunt even--as much that is,
as any woman could. She was indeed a marvellous woman. He would lie for
hours watching a beast, or planning catches in that shock head of his,
and she would stay beside him, with her bright eyes upon him, offering
no irritating suggestions--as still as any man. A wonderful woman!

At the top of the cliff was an open grassy lawn and then beechwoods, and
going through the beechwoods one came to the edge of the rolling grassy
expanse, and in sight of the horses. Here on the edge of the wood and
bracken, were the rabbit-burrows, and here among the fronds Eudena and
Ugh-lomi would lie with their throwing-stones ready, until the little
people came out to nibble and play in the sunset. And while Eudena would
sit, a silent figure of watchfulness, regarding the burrows, Ugh-lomi's
eyes were ever away across the greensward at those wonderful grazing
strangers.

In a dim way he appreciated their grace and their supple nimbleness. As
the sun declined in the evening-time, and the heat of the day passed,
they would become active, would start chasing one another, neighing,
dodging, shaking their manes, coming round in great curves, sometimes so
close that the pounding of the turf sounded like hurried thunder. It
looked so fine that Ugh-lomi wanted to join in badly. And sometimes one
would roll over on the turf, kicking four hoofs heavenward, which seemed
formidable and was certainly much less alluring.

Dim imaginings ran through Ugh-lomi's mind as he watched--by virtue of
which two rabbits lived the longer. And sleeping, his brains were
clearer and bolder--for that was the way in those days. He came near the
horses, he dreamt, and fought, smiting-stone against hoof, but then the
horses changed to men or, at least, to men with horses' heads, and he
awoke in a cold sweat of terror.

Yet the next day in the morning, as the horses were grazing, one of the
mares whinnied, and they saw Ugh-lomi coming up the wind. They all
stopped their eating and watched him. Ugh-lomi was not coming towards
them, but strolling obliquely across the open, looking at anything in
the world but horses. He had stuck three fern-fronds into the mat of his
hair, giving him a remarkable appearance, and he walked very slowly.
"What's up now?" said the Master Horse, who was capable, but
inexperienced.

"It looks more like the first half of an animal than anything else in
the world," he said. "Fore-legs and no hind."

"It's only one of those pink monkey things," said the Eldest Mare.
"They're a sort of river monkey. They're quite common on the plains."

Ugh-lomi continued his oblique advance. The Eldest Mare was struck with
the want of motive in his proceedings.

"Fool!" said the Eldest Mare, in a quick conclusive way she had. She
resumed her grazing. The Master Horse and the Second Mare followed suit.

"Look! He's nearer," said the Foal with a stripe.

One of the younger foals made uneasy movements. Ugh-lomi squatted down
and sat regarding the horses fixedly. In a little while he was satisfied
that they meant neither flight nor hostilities. He began to consider his
next procedure. He did not feel anxious to kill, but he had his axe with
him, and the spirit of sport was upon him. How would one kill one of
these creatures--? These great beautiful creatures!

Eudena, watching him with a fearful admiration from the cover of the
bracken, saw him presently go on all fours, and so proceed again. But
the horses preferred him a biped to a quadruped, and the Master Horse
threw up his head and gave the word to move. Ugh-lomi thought they were
off for good, but after a minute's gallop they came round in a wide
curve, and stood winding him. Then as a rise in the ground hid him they
tailed out, the Master Horse leading and approached him spirally.

He was as ignorant of the possibilities of a horse as they were of his.
And at this stage it would seem he funked. He knew this kind of stalking
would make red deer or buffalo charge, if it was persisted in. At any
rate Eudena saw him jump up and come walking towards her with the fern
plumes held in his hand.

She stood up, and he grinned to show that the whole thing was an immense
lark, and that what he had done was just what he had planned to do from
the very beginning. So that incident ended. But he was very thoughtful
all that day.

The next day this foolish drab creature with the leonine mane, instead
of going about the grazing or hunting he was made for, was prowling
round the horses again. The Eldest Mare was all for silent contempt. "I
suppose he wants to learn something from us," she said, and "Let him."
The next day he was at it again. The Master Horse decided he meant
absolutely nothing. But as a matter of fact, Ugh-lomi, the first of men
to feel that curious spell of the horse that binds us even to this day,
meant a great deal. He admired them unreservedly. There was a rudiment
of the snob in him, I am afraid, and he wanted to be near these
beautifully-curved animals. Then here were vague conceptions of a kill.
If only they would let him come near them! But they drew the line, he
found, at fifty yards. If he came nearer than that they moved off--with
dignity. I suppose it was the way he had blinded Andoo that made him
think of leaping on the back of one of them. But though Eudena after a
time came out in the open too, and they did some unobtrusive stalking,
things stopped there.

Then one memorable day a new idea came to Ugh-lomi. The horse looks down
and level, but he does not look up. No animals look up--they have too
much common-sense. It was only that fantastic creature man, could waste
his wits skyward. Ugh-lomi made no philosophical deductions, but he
perceived the thing was so. So he spent a weary day in a beech that
stood in the open, while Eudena stalked. Usually the horses went into
the shade in the heat of the afternoon, but that day the sky was
overcast, and they would not, in spite of Eudena's solicitude.

It was two days after that, that Ugh-lomi had his desire. The day was
blazing hot, and the multiplying flies asserted themselves. The horses
stopped grazing before midday, and came into the shadow below him, and
stood in couples nose to tail, flapping.

The Master Horse, by virtue of his heels, came closest to the tree. And
suddenly there was a rustle and a creak, a thud... Then a sharp chipped
flint bit him on the cheek. The Master Horse stumbled, came on one knee,
rose to his feet, and was off like the wind. The air was full of the
whirl of limbs, the prance of hoofs, and snorts of alarm. Ugh-lomi was
pitched a foot in the air, came down again, up again, his stomach was
hit violently, and then his knees got a grip of something between them.
He found himself clutching with knees, feet, and hands, careering
violently with extraordinary oscillation through the air--his axe gone
heaven knows whither. "Hold tight," said Mother Instinct, and he did.

He was aware of a lot of coarse hair in his face, some of it between his
teeth, and of green turf streaming past in front of his eyes. He saw the
shoulder of the Master Horse, vast and sleek, with the muscles flowing
swiftly under the skin. He perceived that his arms were round the neck,
and that the violent jerkings he experienced had a sort of rhythm.

Then he was in the midst of a wild rush of tree-stems, and then there
were fronds of bracken about, and then more open turf. Then a stream of
pebbles rushing past, little pebbles flying sideways athwart the stream
from the blow of the swift hoofs. Ugh-lomi began to feel frightfully
sick and giddy, but he was not the stuff to leave go simply because he
was uncomfortable.

He dared not leave his grip, but he tried to make himself more
comfortable. He released his hug on the neck, gripping the mane instead.
He slipped his knees forward, and pushing back, came into a sitting
position where the quarters broaden.

It was nervous work, but he managed it, and at last he was fairly seated
astride, breathless indeed, and uncertain, but with that frightful
pounding of his body at any rate relieved.

Slowly the fragments of Ugh-lomi's mind got into order again. The pace
seemed to him terrific, but a kind of exultation was beginning to oust
his first frantic terror. The air rushed by, sweet and wonderful, the
rhythm of the hoofs changed and broke up and returned into itself again.
They were on turf now, a wide glade--the beech-trees a hundred yards
away on either side, and a succulent band of green starred with pink
blossom and shot with silver water here and there, meandered down the
middle. Far off was a glimpse of blue valley--far away. The exultation
grew. It was man's first taste of pace.

Then came a wide space dappled with flying fallow deer scattering this
way and that, and then a couple of jackals, mistaking Ugh-lomi for a
lion, came hurrying after him. And when they saw it was not a lion they
still came on out of curiosity. On galloped the horse, with his one idea
of escape, and after him the jackals, with pricked ears and
quickly-barked remarks. "Which kills which?" said the first jackal.
"It's the horse being killed," said the second. They gave the howl of
following, and the horse answered to it as a horse answers nowadays to
the spur.

On they rushed, a little tornado through the quiet day, putting up
startled birds, sending a dozen unexpected things darting to cover,
raising a myriad of indignant dung-flies, smashing little blossoms,
flowering complacently, back into their parental turf. Trees again, and
then splash, splash across a torrent; then a hare shot out of a tuft of
grass under the very hoofs of the Master Horse, and the jackals left
them incontinently. So presently they broke into the open again, a wide
expanse of turfy hillside--the very fellow of the grassy downs that fall
northward nowadays from the Epsom Stand.

The first hot bolt of the Master Horse was long since over. He was
falling into a measured trot, and Ugh-lomi, albeit bruised exceedingly
and quite uncertain of the future, was in a state of glorious enjoyment.
And now came a new development. The pace broke again, the Master Horse
came round on a short curve, and stopped dead...

Ugh-lomi became alert. He wished he had a flint, but the throwing flint
he had carried in a thong about his waist was--like the axe--heaven
knows where. The Master Horse turned his head, and Ugh-lomi became aware
of an eye and teeth. He whipped his leg into a position of security, and
hit at the cheek with his fist. Then the head went down somewhere out of
existence apparently, and the back he was sitting on flew up into a
dome. Ugh-lomi became a thing of instinct again--strictly prehensile; he
held by knees and feet, and his head seemed sliding towards the turf.
His fingers were twisted into the shock of mane, and the rough hair of
the horse saved him. The gradient he was on lowered again, and then--,
"Whup!" said Ugh-lomi astonished, and the slant was the other way up.
But Ugh-lomi was a thousand generations nearer the primordial than man:
no monkey could have held on better. And the lion had been training the
horse for countless generations against the tactics of rolling and
rearing back. But he kicked like a master, and buck-jumped rather
neatly. In five minutes Ugh-lomi lived a lifetime. If he came off, the
horse would kill him, he felt assured.

Then the Master Horse decided to stick to his old tactics again, and
suddenly went off at a gallop. He headed down the slope, taking the
steep places at a rush, swerving neither to the right nor to the left,
and as they rode down, the wide expanse of valley sank out of sight
behind the approaching skirmishers of oak and Hawthorn. They skirted a
sudden hollow with the pool of a spring, rank weeds and silver bushes.
The ground grew softer and the grass taller, and on the right-hand side
and the left came scattered bushes of May--still splashed with belated
blossom. Presently the bushes thickened until they lashed the passing
rider, and little flashes and gouts of blood came out on horse and man.
Then the way opened again.

And then came a wonderful adventure. A sudden squeal of unreasonable
anger rose amidst the bushes, the squeal of some creature bitterly
wronged. And crashing after them appeared a big, grey-blue shape. It was
Yaaa the big-horned rhinoceros, in one of those fits of fury of his,
charging full tilt, after the manner of his kind. He had been startled
at his feeding, and someone, it did not matter who, was to be ripped and
trampled therefore. He was bearing down on them from the left, with his
wicked little eye red, and his great horn down, and his little tail like
a jury-mast behind him. For a minute Ugh-lomi was minded to slip off and
dodge, and then behold! The staccato of the hoofs grew swifter, and the
rhinoceros and his stumpy hurrying little legs seemed to slide out at
the back corner of Ugh-lomi's eye. In two minutes they were through the
bushes of May, and out in the open, going fast. For a space he could
hear the ponderous paces in pursuit receding behind him, and then it was
just as if Yaaa had not lost his temper, as if Yaaa had never existed.

The pace never faltered, on they rode land on.

Ugh-lomi was now all exultation. To exult in those days was to insult.
"Ya-ha! Big nose," he said, trying to crane back and see some remote
speck of a pursuer. "Why don't you carry your smiting-stone in your
fist?" He ended with a frantic whoop.

But that whoop was unfortunate, for coming close to the ear of the
horse, and being quite unexpected, it startled the stallion extremely.
He shied violently. Ugh-lomi suddenly found himself uncomfortable again.
He was hanging on to the horse, he found, by one arm and one knee.

The rest of the ride was honourable but unpleasant. The view was chiefly
of blue sky, and that was combined with the most unpleasant physical
sensations. Finally a bush of thorn lashed him and he let go.

He hit the ground with his cheek and shoulder, and then, after a
complicated and extraordinarily rapid movement, hit it again with the
end of his backbone. He saw splashes and sparks of light and colour. The
ground seemed bouncing about just like the horse had done. Then he found
he was sitting on turf, six yards beyond the bush. In front of him was a
space of grass, growing greener and greener, and a number of human
beings in the distance, and the horse was going round at a smart gallop
quite a long way off to the right.

The human beings were on the opposite side of the river, some still in
the water, but they were all running away as hard as they could go. The
advent of a monster that took to pieces was not the sort of novelty they
cared for. For quite a minute Ugh-lomi sat regarding them in a purely
spectacular spirit. The bend of the river, the knoll among the reeds and
royal ferns, the thin streams of smoke going up to Heaven, were all
perfectly familiar to him. It was the squatting-place of the Sons of
Uya, of Uya from whom he had fled with Eudena, and whom he had waylaid
in the chestnut woods and killed with the First Axe.

He rose to his feet, still dazed from his fall, and as he did so the
scattering fugitives turned and regarded him. Some pointed to the
receding horse and chattered. He walked slowly towards them, staring. He
forgot the horse, he forgot his own bruises, in the growing interest of
this encounter. There were fewer of them than there had been--he
supposed the others must have hid--the heap of fern or the night fire
was not so high. By the flint heaps should have sat Wau--but then he
remembered he had killed Wau. Suddenly brought back to this familiar
scene, the gorge and the bears and Eudena seemed things remote, things
dreamt of.

He stopped at the bank and stood regarding the tribe. His mathematical
abilities were of the slightest, but it was certain there were fewer.
The men might be away, but there were fewer women and children. He gave
the shout of home-coming. His quarrel had been with Uya and Wau--not
with the others. "Children of Uya!" he cried. They answered with his
name, a little fearfully because of the strange way he had come.

For a space they spoke together. Then an old woman lifted a shrill voice
and answered him. "Our Lord is a Lion."

Ugh-lomi did not understand that saying. They answered him again several
together, "Uya comes again. He comes as a Lion. Our Lord is a Lion. He
comes at night. He slays whom he will. But none other may slay us,
Ugh-lomi. None other may slay us."

Still Ugh-lomi did not understand.

"Our Lord is a Lion. He speaks no more to men."

Ugh-lomi stood regarding them. He had had dreams--he knew that though
he had killed Uya, Uya still existed. And now they told him Uya was a
Lion.

The shrivelled old woman, the mistress of the fire-minders, suddenly
turned and spoke softly to those next to her. She was a very old woman
indeed, she had been the first of Uya's wives, and he had let her live
beyond the age to which it is seemly a woman should live. She had been
cunning from the first, cunning to please Uya and to get food. And now
she was great in counsel. She spoke softly, and Ugh-lomi watched her
shrivelled form across the river with a curious distaste. Then she
called aloud, "Come over to us, Ugh-lomi."

A girl suddenly lifted up her voice. "Come over to us, Ugh-lomi," she
said. And they all began crying, "Come over to us, Ugh-lomi."

It was strange how their manner changed after the old woman called.

He stood quite still watching them all. It was pleasant to be called,
and the girl who had called first was a pretty one. But she made him
think of Eudena.

"Come over to us, Ugh-lomi," they cried, and the voice of the shrivelled
old woman rose above them all. At the sound of her voice his hesitation
returned.

He stood on the river bank, Ugh-lomi--Ugh the Thinker--with his thoughts
slowly taking shape. Presently one and then another paused to see what
he would do. He was minded to go back, he was minded not to. Suddenly
his fear or his caution got the upper hand. Without answering them he
turned, and walked back towards the distant thorn-trees, the way he had
come. Forthwith the whole tribe started crying to him again very
eagerly. He hesitated and turned, then he went on, then he turned again,
and then once again, regarding them with troubled eyes as they called.
The last time he took two paces back, before his fear stopped him. They
saw him stop once more, and suddenly shake his head and vanish among the
hawthorn-trees.

Then all the women and children lifted up their voices together, and
called to him in one last vain effort.

Far down the river the reeds were stirring in the breeze, where
convenient for his new sort of feeding, the old lion, who had taken to
man-eating, had made his lair.

The old woman turned her face that way, and pointed to the hawthorn
thickets. "Uya," she screamed, "there goes thine enemy! There goes thine
enemy, Uya! Why do you devour us nightly? We have tried to snare him!
There goes thine enemy, Uya!"

But the lion who preyed upon the tribe was taking his siesta. The cry
went unheard. That day he had dined on one of the plumper girls, and his
mood was a comfortable placidity. He really did not understand that he
was Uya or that Ugh-lomi was his enemy.

So it was that Ugh-lomi rode the horse, and heard first of Uya the lion,
who had taken the place of Uya the Master, and was eating up the tribe.
And as he hurried back to the gorge, his mind was no longer full of the
horse, but of the thought that Uya was still alive, to slay or be slain.
Over and over again he saw the shrunken band of women and children
crying that Uya was a lion. Uya was a lion!

And presently, fearing the twilight might come upon him, Ugh-lomi began
running.


4. Uya the Lion

The old lion was in luck. The tribe had a certain pride in their ruler,
but that was all the satisfaction they got out of it. He came the very
night that Ugh-lomi killed Uya the Cunning, and so it was they named him
Uya. It was the old woman, the fire-minder, who first named him Uya. A
shower had lowered the fires to a glow, and made the night dark. And as
they conversed together, and peered at one another in the darkness, and
wondered fearfully what Uya would do to them in their dreams now that he
was dead, they heard the mounting reverberations of the lion's roar
close at hand. Then everything was still.

They held their breath, so that almost the only sounds were the patter
of the rain and the hiss of the raindrops in the ashes. And then, after
an interminable time, a crash, and a shriek of fear, and a growling.
They sprang to their feet, shouting, screaming, running this way and
that, but brands would not burn, and in a minute the victim was being
dragged away through the ferns. It was Irk, the brother of Wau.

So the lion came.

The ferns were still wet from the rain the next night, and he came and
took Click with the red hair. That sufficed for two nights. And then in
the dark, between the moons he came three nights, night after night, and
that, though they had good fires. He was an old lion with stumpy teeth,
but very silent and very cool; he knew of fires before; these were not
the first of mankind that had ministered to his old age. The third night
he came between the outer fire and the inner, and he leapt the flint
heap, and pulled down Irm the son of Irk, who had seemed like to be the
leader. That was a dreadful night, because they lit great flares of fern
and ran screaming, and the lion missed his hold of Irm. By the glare of
the fire they saw Irm struggle up, and run a little way towards them,
and then the lion in two bounds had him down again. That was the last of
Irm.

So fear came, and all the delight of spring passed out of their lives.
Already there were five gone out of the tribe, and four nights added
three more to the number. Food-seeking became spiritless, none knew who
might go next, and all day the women toiled, even the favourite women,
gathering litter and sticks for the night fires. And the hunters hunted
ill: in the warm spring-time hunger came again as though it was still
winter. The tribe might have moved, had they had a leader, but they had
no leader, and none knew where to go that the lion could not follow
them. So the old lion waxed fat and thanked heaven for the race of men.
Two of the children and a youth died while the moon was still new, and
then it was the shrivelled old fire-minder first bethought herself in a
dream of Eudena and Ugh-lomi, and of the way Uya, had been slain. She
had lived in fear of Uya all her days, and now she lived in fear of the
lion. That Ugh-lomi could kill Uya for good--Ugh-lomi whom she had seen
born--was impossible. It was Uya still seeking his enemy!

And then came the strange return of Ugh-lomi, a wonderful animal seen
galloping far across the river, that suddenly changed into two animals,
a horse and a man. Following this portent, the vision of Ugh-lomi on the
farther bank of the river... Yes, it was all plain to her. Uya was
punishing them, because they had not hunted down Ugh-lomi and Eudena.

The men came straggling back to the chances of the night while the sun
was still golden in the sky. They were received with the story of
Ugh-lomi. She went across the river with them and showed them his spoor
hesitating on the farther bank. Siss the Tracker knew the feet for
Ugh-lomi's. "Uya needs Ugh-lomi," cried the old woman, standing on the
left of the bend, a gesticulating figure of flaring bronze in the
sunset. Her cries were strange sounds, flitting to and fro on the
borderland of speech, but this was the sense they carried: "The lion
needs Eudena. He comes night after night seeking Eudena and Ugh-lomi.
When he cannot find Eudena and Ugh-lomi, he grows angry and he kills.
Hunt Eudena and Ugh-lomi, Eudena whom he pursued, and Ugh-lomi for whom
he gave the death-word! Hunt Eudena and Ugh-lomi!"

She turned to the distant reed-bed, as sometimes she had turned to Uya
in his life. "Is it not so, my lord?" she cried. And as if in answer,
the tall reeds bowed before a breath of wind.

Far into the twilight the sound of hacking was heard from the
squatting-places. It was the men sharpening their ashen spears against
the hunting of the morrow. And in the night, early before the moon rose,
the lion came and took the girl of Siss the Tracker.

In the morning before the sun had risen, Siss the Tracker, and the lad
Wau-hau, who now chipped flints, and One Eye, and Bo, and the
snail-eater, the two red-haired men, and Cat's-skin and Snake, all the
men that were left alive of the Sons of Uya, taking their ash spears and
their smiting-stones, and with throwing stones in the beast-paw bags,
started forth upon the trail of Ugh-lomi through the hawthorn thickets
where Yaaa the Rhinoceros and his brothers were feeding, and up the bare
downland towards the beechwoods.

That night the fires burnt high and fierce, as the waxing moon set, and
the lion left the crouching women and children in peace.

And the next day, while the sun was still high, the hunters
returned--all save One Eye, who lay dead with a smashed skull at the
foot of the ledge. (When Ugh-lomi came back that evening from stalking
the horses, he found the vultures already busy over him.) And with them
the hunters brought Eudena bruised and wounded, but alive. That had been
the strange order of the shrivelled old woman, that she was to be
brought alive--, "She is no kill for us. She is for Uya the Lion." Her
hands were tied with thongs, as though she had been a man, and she came
weary and drooping--her hair over her eyes and matted with blood. They
walked about her, and ever and again the Snail-Eater, whose name she had
given, would laugh and strike her with his ashen spear. And after he had
struck her with his spear, he would look over his shoulder like one who
had done an over-bold deed. The others too, looked over their shoulders
ever and again, and all were in a hurry save Eudena. When the old woman
saw them coming, she cried aloud with joy.

They made Eudena cross the river with her hands tied, although the
current was strong, and when she slipped the old woman screamed, first
with joy and then for fear she might be drowned. And when they had
dragged Eudena to shore, she could not stand for a time, albeit they
beat her sore. So they let her sit with her feet touching the water, and
her eyes staring before her, and her face set, whatever they might do or
say. All the tribe came down to the squatting-place, even curly little
Haha, who as yet could scarcely toddle, and stood staring at Eudena and
the old woman, as now we should stare at some strange wounded beast and
its captor.

The old woman tore off the necklace of Uya that was about Eudena's neck,
and put it on herself--she had been the first to wear it. Then she tore
at Eudena's hair, and took a spear from Siss and beat her with all her
might. And when she had vented the warmth of her heart on the girl she
looked closely into her face. Eudena's eyes were closed and her features
were set, and she lay so still that for a moment the old woman feared
she was dead until her nostrils quivered. At that the old woman slapped
her face and laughed and gave the spear to Siss again, and went a little
way off from her and began to talk and jeer at her after her manner.

The old woman had more words than any in the tribe. And her talk was a
terrible thing to hear. Sometimes she screamed and moaned incoherently,
and sometimes the shape of her guttural cries was the mere phantom of
thoughts. But she conveyed to Eudena, nevertheless, much of the things
that were yet to come, of the Lion and of the torment he would do her.
"And Ugh-lomi! Ha, ha! Ugh-lomi was slain?"

And suddenly Eudena's eyes opened and she sat up again, and her look met
the old woman's fair and level. "No," she said slowly, like one trying
to remember, "I did not see my Ugh-lomi slain. I did not see my Ugh-lomi
slain."

"Tell her," cried the old woman. "Tell her--he that killed him. Tell her
how Ugh-lomi was slain."

She looked, and all the women and children there looked, from man to
man.

None answered her. They stood shamefaced.

"Tell her," said the old woman. The men looked at one another.

Eudena's face suddenly lit.

"Tell her," she said. "Tell her, mighty men! Tell her the killing of
Ugh-lomi."

The old woman rose and struck her sharply across her mouth.

"We could not find Ugh-lomi," said Siss the Tracker, slowly. "Who hunts
two, kills none."

Then Eudena's heart leapt, but she kept her face hard. It was well, for
the old woman looked at her sharply, with murder in her eyes.

Then the old woman turned her tongue upon the men because they had
feared to go on after Ugh-lomi. She dreaded no one now Uya was slain.
She scolded them as one scolds children. And they scowled at her, and
began to accuse one another. Until suddenly Siss the Tracker raised his
voice and bade her hold her peace.

And so when the sun was setting they took Eudena and went--though their
hearts sank within them--along the trail the old lion had made in the
reeds. All the men went together. At one place was a group of alders,
and here they hastily bound Eudena where the lion might find her when he
came abroad in the twilight, and having done so they hurried back until
they were near the squatting-place. Then they stopped. Siss stopped
first and looked back again at the alders. They could see her head even
from the squatting-place, a little black shock under the limb of the
larger tree. That was as well.

All the women and children stood watching upon the crest of the mound.
And the old woman stood and screamed for the lion to take her whom he
sought, and counselled him on the torments he might do her.

Eudena was very weary now, stunned by beatings and fatigue and sorrow,
and only the fear of the thing that was still to come upheld her. The
sun was broad and blood-red between the stems of the distant chestnuts,
and the west was all on fire; the evening breeze had died to a warm
tranquillity. The air was full of midge swarms, the fish in the river
hard by would leap at times, and now and again a cockchafer would drone
through the air. Out of the corner of her eye Eudena could see a part of
the squatting-knoll, and little figures standing and staring at her.
And--a very little sound but very clear--she could hear the beating of
the firestone. Dark and near to her and very still was the reed-fringed
thicket of the lair.

Presently the firestone ceased. She looked for the sun and found he had
gone, and overhead and growing brighter was the waxing moon. She looked
towards the thicket of the lair, seeking shapes in the reeds, and then
suddenly she began to wriggle and wriggle, weeping and calling upon
Ugh-lomi.

But Ugh-lomi was far away. When they saw her head moving with her
struggles, they shouted together on the knoll, and then she desisted and
was still. And then came the bats, and the star that was like Ugh-lomi
crept out of its blue hiding-place in the west. She called to it, but
softly, because she feared the lion. And all through the coming of the
twilight the thicket was still.

So the dark crept upon Eudena, and the moon grew bright, and the shadows
of things that had fled up the hillside and vanished with the evening
came back to them short and black, And the dark shapes in the thicket of
reeds and alders where the lion lay, gathered, and a faint stir began
there. But nothing came out therefrom all through the gathering of the
darkness.

She looked at the squatting-place and saw the fires glowing smoky-red,
and the men and women going to and fro. The other way, over the river, a
white mist was rising. Then far away came the whimpering of young foxes
and the yell of a hyaena.

There were long gaps of aching waiting. After a long time some animal
splashed in the water, and seemed to cross the river at the ford beyond
the lair, but what animal it was she could not see. From the distant
drinking-pools she could hear the sound of splashing, and the noise of
elephants--so still was the night.

The earth was now a colourless arrangement of white reflections and
impenetrable shadows, under the blue sky. The silvery moon was already
spotted with the filigree crests of the chestnut woods, and over the
shadowy eastward bills the stars were multiplying. The knoll fires were
bright red now, and black figures stood waiting against them. They were
waiting for a scream... Surely it would be soon.

The night suddenly seemed full of movement. She held her breath. Things
were passing--one, two, three--subtly sneaking shadows... Jackals.

Then a long waiting again.

Then, asserting itself as real at once over all the sounds her mind had
imagined, came a stir in the thicket, then a vigorous movement. There
was a snap. The reeds crashed heavily, once, twice, thrice, and then
everything was still save a measured swishing. She heard a low tremulous
growl, and then everything was still again. The stillness
lengthened--would it never end? She held her breath; she bit her lips to
stop screaming. Then something scuttled through the undergrowth. Her
scream was involuntary. She did not hear the answering yell from the
mound.

Immediately the thicket woke up to vigorous movement again. She saw the
grass stems waving in the light of the setting moon, the alders swaying.
She struggled violently--her last struggle. But nothing came towards
her. A dozen monsters seemed rushing about in that little place for a
couple of minutes, and then again came silence. The moon sank behind the
distant chestnuts and the night was dark.

Then an odd sound, a sobbing panting, that grew faster and fainter. Yet
another silence, and then dim sounds and the grunting of some animal.

Everything was still again. Far away eastwards an elephant trumpeted,
and from the woods came a snarling and yelping that died away.

In the long interval the moon shone out again, between the stems of the
trees on the ridge, sending two great bars of light, and a bar of
darkness across the reedy waste. Then came a steady rustling, a splash,
and the reeds swayed wider and wider apart. And at last they broke open,
cleft from root to crest... The end had come.

She looked to see the thing that had come out of the reeds. For a moment
it seemed certainly the great head and jaw she expected, and then it
dwindled and changed. It was a dark low thing, that remained silent, but
it was not the lion. It became still--everything became still. She
peered. It was like some gigantic frog, two limbs and a slanting body.
Its head moved about searching the shadows...

A rustle, and it moved clumsily, with a sort of hopping. And as it moved
it gave a low groan.

The blood rushing through her veins was suddenly joy. "Ugh-lomi!" she
whispered.

The thing stopped. "Eudena," he answered softly with pain in his voice,
and peering into the alders.

He moved again, and came out of the shadow beyond the reeds into the
moonlight. All his body was covered with dark smears. She saw he was
dragging his legs, and that he gripped his axe, the first axe, in one
hand. In another moment he had struggled into the position of all fours,
and had staggered over to her. "The lion," he said in a strange mingling
of exultation and anguish. "Wau--! I have slain a lion. With my own
hand. Even as I slew the great bear." He moved to emphasise his words,
and suddenly broke off with a faint cry. For a space he did not move.

"Let me free," whispered Eudena...

He answered her no words but pulled himself up from his crawling
attitude by means of the alder stem, and hacked at her thongs with the
sharp edge of his axe. She heard him sob at each blow. He cut away the
thongs about her chest and arms, and then his hand dropped. His chest
struck against her shoulder and he slipped down beside her and lay
still.

But the rest of her release was easy. Very hastily she freed herself.
She made one step from the tree, and her head was spinning, Her last
conscious movement was towards him. She reeled, and suddenly fell
headlong beside him. Her hand fell upon his thigh. It was soft and wet,
and gave way under her pressure; he cried out at her touch, and writhed
and lay still again, with her hand upon him.

Presently a dark dog-like shape came very softly through the reeds. This
stopped dead and stood sniffing, hesitated, and at last turned and slunk
back into the shadows.

Long was the time they remained there motionless, with the light of the
setting moon shining on their limbs. Very slowly, as slowly as the
setting of the moon, did the shadow of the reeds towards the mound flow
over them. Presently their legs were hidden, and Ugh-lomi was but a bust
of silver. The shadow crept to his neck, crept over his face, and so at
last the darkness of the night swallowed them up.

The shadow became full of instinctive stirrings. There was a patter of
feet, and a faint snarling--the sound of a blow.


There was little sleep that night for the women and children at the
squatting-place until they heard Eudena scream. But the men were weary
and sat dozing. When Eudena screamed they felt assured of their safety,
and hurried to get the nearest places to the fires. The old woman
laughed at the scream, and laughed again because Si, the little sister
of Eudena, whimpered. Directly the dawn came, they were all alert and
looking towards the alders. They could see that Eudena had been taken.
They could not help feeling glad to think that Uya was appeased. But
across the minds of the men the thought of Ugh-lomi fell like a shadow.
They could understand revenge, for the world was old in revenge, but
they did not think of rescue. Suddenly a hyaena fled out of the thicket,
and came galloping across the reed space. His muzzle and paws were
dark-stained. At that sight all the men shouted and clutched at
throwing-stones and ran towards him, for no animal is so pitiful a
coward as the hyaena by day. All men hated the hyaena because he preyed
on children, and would come and bite when one was sleeping on the edge
of the squatting-place. And Cat's-skin, throwing fair and straight, hit
the brute shrewdly on the flank, whereat the whole tribe yelled with
delight.

At the noise they made there came a flapping of wings from the lair of
the lion, and three white-headed vultures rose slowly and circled and
came to rest amidst the branches of an alder, overlooking the lair. "Our
lord is abroad," said the old woman, pointing. "The vultures have their
share of Eudena." For a space they remained there, and then first one
and then another dropped back into the thicket.

Then over the eastern woods, and touching the whole world to life and
colour, poured, with the exaltation of a trumpet blast, the light of the
rising sun. At the sight of him the children shouted together, and
clapped their hands and began to race off towards the water. Only little
Si lagged behind and looked wonderingly at the alders where she had seen
the head of Eudena overnight.

But Uya, the old lion, was not abroad but at home, and he lay very
still, and a little on one side. He was not in his lair, but a little
way from it in a place of trampled grass. Under one eye was a little
wound, the feeble little bite of the first axe. But all the ground
beneath his chest was ruddy brown with a vivid streak, and in his chest
was a little hole that had been made by Ugh-lomi's stabbing-spear. Along
his side and at his neck the vultures had marked their claims. For so
Ugh-lomi had slain him, lying stricken under his paw and thrusting
haphazard at his chest. He had driven the spear in with all his strength
and stabbed the giant to the heart. So it was the reign of the lion, of
the second incarnation of Uya the Master, came to an end.

From the knoll the bustle of preparation grew, the hacking of spears and
throwing-stones. None spake the name of Ugh-lomi for fear that it might
bring him. The men were going to keep together, close together, in the
hunting for a day or so. And their hunting was to be Ugh-lomi, lest
instead he should come a-hunting them.

But Ugh-lomi was lying very still and silent, outside the lion's lair,
and Eudena squatted beside him, with the ash spear, all smeared with
lion's blood, gripped in her hand.


5. The Fight in the Lion's Thicket

Ugh-lomi lay still, his back against an alder, and his thigh was a red
mass terrible to see. No civilised man could have lived who had been so
sorely wounded, but Eudena got him thorns to close his wounds, and
squatted beside him day and night, smiting the flies from him with a fan
of reeds by day, and in the night threatening the hyaenas who came too
near with the first axe in her hand; and in a little while he began to
heal. It was high summer, and there was no rain. Little food they had,
during the first two days his wounds were open. In the low place where
they hid were no roots nor little beasts, and the stream, with its
water-snails and fish, was in the open, a hundred yards away. She could
not go abroad by day for fear of the tribe, her brothers and sisters,
nor by night for fear of the beasts, both on his account and hers. So
they shared the lion with the vultures. But there was a trickle of water
near by, and Eudena brought him plenty in her hands.

Where Ugh-lomi lay was well hidden from the tribe by a thicket of
alders, and all fenced about with bulrushes and tall reeds. The dead
lion he had killed lay near his old lair on a place of trampled reeds
fifty yards away, in sight through the reed-stems, and the vultures
fought each other for the choicest pieces and kept the jackals off him.
Very soon a cloud of flies that looked like bees hung over him, and
Ugh-lomi could hear their humming. And when Ugh-lomi's flesh was already
healing--and it was not many days before that began--only a few bones of
the lion remained scattered and shining white.

For the most part Ugh-lomi sat still during the day, looking before him
at nothing, sometimes he would mutter of the horses and bears and lions,
and sometimes he would beat the ground with the first axe and say the
names of the tribe--he seemed to have no fear of bringing the tribe--for
hours together. But chiefly he slept, dreaming little because of his
loss of blood and the slightness of his food. During the short summer
night both kept awake. All the while the darkness lasted things moved
about them, things they never saw by day. For some nights the hyaenas
did not come, and then one moonless night near a dozen came and fought
for what was left of the lion. The night was a tumult of growling, and
Ugh-lomi and Eudena could hear the bones snap in their teeth. But they
knew the hyaena dare not attack any creature alive and awake, and so
they were not greatly afraid.

Of a daytime Eudena would go along the narrow path, the old lion had
made in the reeds until she was beyond the bend, and then she would
creep into the thicket and watch the tribe. She would lie close by the
alders, where they had bound her to offer her up to the lion, and thence
she could see them on the knoll by the fire, little and clear, as she
had seen them that night. But she told Ugh-lomi little of what she saw,
because she feared to bring them by their names. For so they believed in
those days, that naming called.

She saw the men prepare stabbing-spears and throwing-stones on the
morning after Ugh-lomi had slain the lion, and go out to hunt him,
leaving the women and children on the knoll. Little they knew how near
he was as they tracked off in single file towards the hills, with Siss
the Tracker leading them. And she watched the women and children, after
the men had gone, gathering fern-fronds and twigs for the night fire,
and the boys and girls running and playing together. But the very old
woman made her feel afraid. After a long space towards noon, when most
of the others were down at the stream by the bend, she came and stood on
the hither side of the knoll, a gnarled brown figure, and gesticulated
so that Eudena could scarce believe she was not seen. Eudena lay like a
hare in its form, with shining eyes fixed on the bent witch away there,
and presently she dimly understood it was the lion the old woman was
worshipping--the lion Ugh-lomi had slain.

And the next day the hunters came back weary, carrying a fawn, and
Eudena watched the feast enviously. And then came a strange thing. She
saw--distinctly she heard--the old woman shrieking and gesticulating and
pointing towards her. She was afraid, and crept like a snake out of
sight again. But presently curiosity overcame her and she was back at
her spying-place, and as she peered her heart stopped, for there were
all the men, with their weapons in their hands, walking together towards
her from the knoll.

She dared not move lest her movement should be seen, but she pressed
herself close to the ground. The sun was low and the golden light was in
the faces of the men. She saw they carried a piece of rich red meat
thrust through by an ashen stake. Presently they stopped. "Go on!"
screamed the old woman. Cat's-skin grumbled, and they came on, searching
the thicket with sun-dazzled eyes. "Here!" said Siss. And they took the
ashen stake with the meat upon it and thrust it into the ground. "Uya!"
cried Siss, "Behold thy portion. And Ugh-lomi we have slain. Of a truth
we have slain Ugh-lomi. This day we slew Ugh-lomi, and to-morrow we will
bring his body to you." And the others repeated the words.

They looked at each other and behind them, and partly turned and began
going back. At first they walked half turned to the thicket, then facing
the mound they walked faster, looking over their shoulders, then faster;
soon they ran, it was a race at last, until they were near the knoll.
Then Siss who was hindmost was first to slacken his pace.

The sunset passed and the twilight came, the fires glowed red against
the hazy blue of the distant chestnut trees, and the voices over the
mound were merry. Eudena lay scarcely stirring, looking from the mound
to the meat and then to the mound. She was hungry, but she was afraid.
At last she crept back to Ugh-lomi.

He looked round at the little rustle of her approach. His face was in
shadow. "Have you got me some food?" he said.

She said she could find nothing, but that she would seek further, and
went back along the lion's path until she could see the mound again, but
she could not bring herself to take the meat; she had the brute's
instinct of a snare. She felt very miserable.

She crept back at last towards Ugh-lomi and heard him stirring and
moaning. She turned back to the mound again; then she saw something in
the darkness near the stake, and peering distinguished a jackal. In a
flash she was brave and angry; she sprang up, cried out, and ran towards
the offering. She stumbled and fell, and heard the growling of the
jackal going off.

When she arose only the ashen stake lay on the ground, the meat was
gone. So she went back, to fast through the night with Ugh-lomi; and
Ugh-lomi was angry with her, because she had no food for him; but she
told him nothing of the things she had seen.

Two days passed and they were near starving, when the tribe slew a
horse. Then came the same ceremony, and a haunch was left on the ashen
stake; but this time Eudena did not hesitate.

By acting and words she made Ugh-lomi understand, but he ate most of the
food before he understood; and then he grew merry with his food. "I am
Uya," he said; "I am the Lion. I am the Great Cave Bear, I who was only
Ugh-lomi. I am Wau the Cunning. It is well that they should feed me, for
presently I will kill them all."

Then Eudena's heart was light, and she laughed with him; and afterwards
she ate what he had left of the horseflesh with gladness.

After that it was he had a dream, and the next day he made Eudena bring
him the lion's teeth and claws--so much of them as she could find--and
hack him a club of alder, and he put the teeth and claws very cunningly
into the wood so that the points were outward. Very long it took him,
and he blunted two of the teeth hammering them in, and was very angry
and threw the thing away; but afterwards he dragged himself to where he
had thrown it and finished it--a club of a new sort set with teeth. That
day there was more meat for them both, an offering to the lion from the
tribe.

It was one day--more than a hand's fingers of days, more than anyone has
skill to count--after Ugh-lomi had made the club, that Eudena (while he
was asleep) was lying in the thicket watching the squatting-place. There
had been no meat for three days. And the old woman came and worshipped
after her manner. Now while she worshipped, Eudena's little sister Si
and another, the child of the first girl Siss had loved, came over the
knoll and stood regarding her skinny figure, and presently they began to
mock her. Eudena found this entertaining, but suddenly the old woman
turned on them quickly and saw them. For a moment she stood and they
stood motionless, and then with a shriek of rage she rushed towards
them, and all three disappeared over the crest of the knoll.

Presently the children reappeared among the ferns over the shoulder of
the hill. Little Si ran first, for she was an active girl, and the other
child ran squealing with the old woman close upon her. And over the
knoll came Siss with a bone in his hand, and Bo and Cat's-skin
obsequiously behind him, each holding a piece of food, and they laughed
aloud and shouted to see the old woman so angry. And with a shriek the
child was caught and the old woman set to work slapping and the child
screaming, and it was very good after-dinner fun for them. Little Si ran
on a little way and stopped at last between fear and curiosity.

And suddenly came the mother of the child, with hair streaming, panting,
and with a stone in her hand, and the old woman turned about like a wild
cat. She was the equal of any woman, was the old chief of the
fire-minders, in spite of her years; but before she could do anything
Siss shouted to her and the clamour rose loud. Other shock heads came
into sight. It seemed the whole tribe was at home and feasting. But the
old woman dared not go on wreaking herself on the child Siss befriended.
Nevertheless it was a fine row.

Everyone made noises and called names, even little Si. Abruptly the old
woman let go of the child she had caught and made a swift run at Si who
had no friends; and Si, realising her danger when it was almost upon
her, with a faint cry of terror made off headlong, not heeding whither
she ran, straight to the lair of the lion. She swerved aside into the
reeds presently, not realising whither she went.

But the old woman was a wonderful old woman, as active as she was
spiteful, and she caught Si by the streaming hair within thirty yards of
Eudena. All the tribe now was running down the knoll and shouting, ready
to see the fun.

Then something stirred in Eudena and, thinking all of little Si and
nothing of her fear, she sprang up from her ambush and ran swiftly
forward. The old woman did not see her, for she was busy beating little
Si's face with her hand, beating with all her heart, and suddenly
something hard and heavy struck her cheek. She went reeling, and saw
Eudena with flaming eyes and cheeks between her and little Si. She
shrieked with astonishment and terror, and little Si, not understanding,
set off towards the gaping tribe. They were quite close now, for the
sight of Eudena had driven their fading fear of the lion out of their
heads.

In a moment Eudena had turned from the cowering old woman and overtaken
Si. "Si!" she cried, "Si!" She caught the child up in her arms as it
stopped, pressed the nail-lined face to hers, and turned about to run
towards her lair, the lair of the old lion. The old woman stood
waist-high in the reeds, and screamed foul things and inarticulate rage,
but did not dare to intercept her; and at the bend of the path Eudena
looked back and saw all the men of the tribe crying to one another and
Siss coming at a trot along the lion's trail.

She ran straight along the narrow way through the reeds to the shady
place where Ugh-lomi sat with his healing thigh, just awakened by the
shouting and rubbing his eyes. She came to him, a woman, with little Si
in her arms. Her heart throbbed in her throat. "Ugh-lomi!" she cried,
"Ugh-lomi, the tribe comes!"

Ugh-lomi sat staring in stupid astonishment at her and Si.

She pointed with Si in one arm. She sought among her feeble store of
words to explain. She could hear the men calling. Apparently they had
stopped outside. She put down Si and caught up the new club with the
lion's teeth, and put it into Ugh-lomi's hand, and ran three yards and
picked up the first axe.

"Ah!" said Ugh-lomi, waving the new club, and suddenly he perceived the
occasion and, rolling over, began to struggle to his feet.

He stood, but clumsily. He supported himself by one hand against the
tree, and just touched the ground gingerly with the toe of his wounded
leg. In the other hand he gripped the new club. He looked at his healing
thigh; and suddenly the reeds began whispering, and ceased and whispered
again, and coming cautiously along the track among the reeds, bending
down and holding his fire-hardened stabbing-stick of ash in his hand,
appeared Siss. He stopped dead, and his eyes met Ugh-lomi's.

Ugh-lomi forgot he had a wounded leg. He stood firmly on both feet.
Something trickled. He glanced down and saw a little gout of blood had
oozed out along the edge of the healing wound. He rubbed his hand there
to give him the grip of his club, and fixed his eyes again on Siss. The
fighting spirit now swiftly and suddenly overflowed.

"Wau!" he cried, and sprang forward, and Siss, still stooping and
watchful, drove his stabbing-stick up very quickly in an ugly thrust. It
ripped Ugh-lomi's guarding arm and the club came down in a counter that
Siss was never to understand. He fell, as an ox falls to the pole-axe,
at Ugh-lomi's feet.

To Bo it seemed the strangest thing. He had a comforting sense of tall
reeds on either side, and an impregnable rampart, Siss, between him and
any danger. Snail-eater was close behind and there was no danger there.
He was prepared to shove behind and send Siss to death or victory. That
was his place as second man. He saw the blunt of the spear Siss carried
leap away from him, and suddenly a dull whack and the broad back fell
away forward, and he looked Ugh-lomi in the face over his prostrate
leader. It felt to Bo as if his heart had fallen down a well. He had a
throwing-stone in one hand and an ashen stabbing-stick in the other. He
did not live to the end of his momentary hesitation which to use.

Snail-eater was a readier man, and besides Bo did not fall forward as
Siss had done, but gave at his knees and hips, crumpling up with the
toothed club upon his head, smiting him down. The Snail-eater drove his
spear forward swift and straight, and took Ugh-lomi in the muscle of the
shoulder, and then he drove him hard with the smiting-stone in his other
and, shouting out as he did so. The new club swished ineffectually
through the reeds. Eudena saw Ugh-lomi come staggering back from the
narrow path into the open space, tripping over Siss and with a foot of
ashen stake sticking out of him over his arm, and then the Snail-eater,
whose name she had given, had his final injury from her, as his exultant
face came out of the reeds after his spear. For she swung the first axe
swift and high, and hit him fair and square on the temple; and down he
went on Siss at prostrate Ugh-lomi's feet.

But before Ugh-lomi could get to his feet, the two red-haired men were
tumbling out of the reeds, spears and smiting-stones ready, and Snake
hard behind them. One she struck on the neck, but not to fell him, and
he blundered aside and spoilt his brother's blow at Ugh-lomi's head. In
a moment Ugh-lomi dropped his club and had his assailant by the waist,
and had pitched him sideways sprawling. He snatched at his club again
and recovered it. The man Eudena had hit stabbed at her with his spear
as he stumbled from her blow, and involuntarily she gave ground to avoid
him. He hesitated between her and Ugh-lomi, half turned, gave a vague
cry at finding Ugh-lomi so near, and in a moment Ugh-lomi had him by the
throat, and the club had its third victim. As he went down Ugh-lomi
shouted--no words, but an exultant cry.

The other red-haired man was six feet from her with his back to her, and
a darker red streaking his head. He was struggling to his feet. She had
an irrational impulse to stop his rising. She flung the axe at him,
missed, saw his face in profile, and he had swerved beyond little Si,
and was running through the reeds. She had a transitory vision of Snake
standing in the throat of the path, half turned away from her, and then
she saw his back. She saw the club whirling through the air, and the
shock head of Ugh-lomi, with blood in the hair and blood upon the
shoulder, vanishing below the reeds in pursuit. Then she heard Snake
scream like a woman.

She ran past Si to where the handle of the axe stuck out of a clump of
fern, and turning, found herself panting and alone with three motionless
bodies. The air was full of shouts and screams. For a space she was sick
and giddy, and then it came into her head that Ugh-lomi was being killed
along the reed-path, and with an inarticulate cry she leapt over the
body of Bo and hurried after him. Snake's feet lay across the path, and
his head was among the reeds. She followed the path until it bent round
and opened out by the alders, and thence she saw all that was left of
the tribe in the open, scattering like dead leaves before a gale, and
going back over the knoll. Ugh-lomi was hard upon Cat's-skin.

But Cat's-skin was fleet of foot and got away, and so did young Wau-Hau
when Ugh-lomi turned upon him, and Ugh-lomi pursued Wau-Hau far beyond
the knoll before he desisted. He had the rage of battle on him now, and
the wood thrust through his shoulder stung him like a spear. When she
saw he was in no danger she stopped running and stood panting, watching
the distant active figures run up and vanish one by one over the knoll.
In a little time she was alone again. Everything had happened very
swiftly. The smoke of Brother Fire rose straight and steady from the
squatting-place, just as it had done ten minutes ago, when the old woman
had stood yonder worshipping the lion.

And after a long time, as it seemed, Ugh-lomi reappeared over the knoll,
and came back to Eudena, triumphant and breathing heavily. She stood,
her hair about her eyes and hot-faced, with the blood-stained axe in her
hand, at the place where the tribe had offered her as a sacrifice to the
lion. "Wau!" cried Ugh-lomi at the sight of her, his face alight with
the fellowship of battle, and he waved his new club, red now and hairy;
and at the sight of his glowing face her tense pose relaxed somewhat,
and she stood weeping and rejoicing.

Ugh-lomi had a queer unaccountable pang at the sight of her tears; but
he only shouted "Wau!" the louder and shook the axe east and west. He
called to her to follow him and turned back, striding, with the club
swinging in his hand, towards the squatting-place, as if he had never
left the tribe; and she stopped weeping and followed as a woman should.

So Ugh-lomi and Eudena came back to the squatting-place from which they
had fled many days before from the face of Uya; and by the
squatting-place lay a deer half eaten, just as there had been before
Ugh-lomi was man or Eudena woman. So Ugh-lomi sat down to eat, and
Eudena beside him like a man, and the rest of the tribe watched them
from safe hiding-places. And after a time one of the elder girls came
back timorously and carrying little Si in her arms, and Eudena called to
them by name, and offered them food. But the elder girl was afraid and
would not come, though Si struggled to come to Eudena. Afterwards, when
Ugh-lomi had eaten, he sat dozing, and at last he slept, and slowly the
others came out of the hiding-places and drew near. And when Ugh-lomi
woke, save that there were no men to be seen, it seemed as though he had
never left the tribe.

Now there is a thing strange but true: that all through this fight
Ugh-lomi forgot that he was lame, and was not lame, and after he had
rested behold! He was a lame man; and he remained a lame man to the end
of his days.

Cat's-skin and the second red-haired man and Wau-Hau, who chipped flints
cunningly, as his father had done before him, fled from the face of
Ugh-lomi, and none knew where they hid. But two days after they came and
squatted among the bracken under the chestnuts a good way off from the
knoll and watched. Ugh-lomi's rage had gone, he moved to go against them
and did not, and at sundown they went away. That day too, they found the
old woman among the ferns, where Ugh-lomi had blundered upon her when he
had pursued Wau-Hau. She was dead and more ugly than ever, but whole.
The jackals and vultures had tried her and left her--; she was ever a
wonderful old woman.

The next day the three men came again and squatted nearer, and Wau-Hau
had two rabbits to hold up, and the red-haired man a wood-pigeon, and
Ugh-Lomi stood before their women and mocked them.

The next day they sat again nearer--without stones or sticks, and with
the same offerings, and Cat's-skin had a trout. It was rare men caught
fish in those days but Cat's-skin would stand silently in the water for
hours and catch them with his hand. And the fourth day Ugh-lomi suffered
these three to come to the squatting-place in peace, with the food they
had with them. Ugh-lomi ate the trout. Thereafter for many moons
Ugh-lomi was master, and had his will in peace. And on the fulness of
time he was killed and eaten as Uya had been slain.




A STORY OF THE DAYS TO COME


1. The Cure for Love

The excellent Mr. Morris was an Englishman, and he lived in the days of
Queen Victoria the Good. He was a prosperous and very sensible man; he
read The Times and went to church, and as he grew towards middle age an
expression of quiet contented contempt for all who were not as himself
settled on his face. He was one of those people who do everything that
is right and proper and sensible with inevitable regularity. He always
wore just the right and proper clothes, steering the narrow way between
the smart and the shabby, always subscribed to the right charities, just
the judicious compromise between ostentation and meanness, and never
failed to have his hair cut to exactly the proper length.

Everything that it was right and proper for a man in his position to
possess, he possessed; and everything that it was not right and proper
for a man in his position to possess, he did not possess.

And among other right and proper possessions, this Mr. Morris had a wife
and children. They were the right sort of wife, and the right sort and
number of children, of course; nothing imaginative or highty-flighty
about any of them, so far as Mr. Morris could see; they wore perfectly
correct clothing, neither smart nor hygienic nor faddy in any way, but
just sensible; and they lived in a nice sensible house in the later
Victorian sham Queen Anne style of architecture, with sham
half-timbering of chocolate-painted plaster in the gables, Lincrusta
Walton sham carved oak panels, a terrace of terra cotta to imitate
stone, and cathedral glass in the front door. His boys went to good
solid schools, and were put to respectable professions; his girls, in
spite of a fantastic protest or so, were all married to suitable,
steady, oldish young men with good prospects. And when it was a fit and
proper thing for him to do so, Mr. Morris died. His tomb was of marble
and, without any art nonsense or laudatory inscription, quietly
imposing--such being the fashion of his time.

He underwent various changes according to the accepted custom in these
cases, and long before this story begins his bones even had become dust,
and were scattered to the four quarters of heaven. And his sons and his
grandsons and his great-grandsons and his great-great-grandsons, they
too were dust and ashes, and were scattered likewise. It was a thing he
could not have imagined, that a day would come when even his
great-great-grandsons would be scattered to the four winds of heaven. If
any one had suggested it to him he would have resented it. He was one of
those worthy people who take no interest in the future of mankind at
all. He had grave doubts indeed, if there was any future for mankind
after he was dead.

It seemed quite impossible and quite uninteresting to imagine anything
happening after he was dead. Yet the thing was so, and when even his
great-great-grandson was dead and decayed and forgotten, when the sham
half-timbered house had gone the way of all shams, and The Times was
extinct, and the silk hat a ridiculous antiquity, and the modestly
imposing stone that had been sacred to Mr. Morris had been burnt to make
lime for mortar, and all that Mr. Morris had found real and important
was sere and dead, the world was still going on, and people were still
going about it, just as heedless and impatient of the Future or, indeed,
of anything but their own selves and property, as Mr. Morris had been.

And, strange to tell, and much as Mr. Morris would have been angered if
any one had foreshadowed it to him, all over the world there scattered a
multitude of people, filled with the breath of life, in whose veins the
blood of Mr. Morris flowed. Just as some day the life which is gathered
now in the reader of this very story may also be scattered far and wide
about this world, and mingled with a thousand alien strains, beyond all
thought and tracing.

And among the descendants of this Mr. Morris was one almost as sensible
and clear-headed as his ancestor. He had just the same stout, short
frame as that ancient man of the nineteenth century, from whom his name
of Morris--he spelt it Mwres--came; he had the same half-contemptuous
expression of face. He was a prosperous person too, as times went, and
he disliked the "new-fangled," and bothers about the future and the
lower classes, just as much as the ancestral Morris had done. He did not
read The Times: indeed, he did not know there ever had been a
Times--that institution had foundered somewhere in the intervening gulf
of years; but the phonograph machine, that talked to him as he made his
toilet of a morning, might have been the voice of a reincarnated Blowitz
when it dealt with the world's affairs. This phonographic machine was
the size and shape of a Dutch clock, and down the front of it were
electric barometric indicators, and an electric clock and calendar, and
automatic engagement reminders, and where the clock would have been was
the mouth of a trumpet. When it had news the trumpet gobbled like a
turkey, "Galloop, galloop," and then brayed out its message as, let us
say, a trumpet might bray. It would tell Mwres in full, rich, throaty
tones about the overnight accidents to the omnibus flying-machines that
plied around the world, the latest arrivals at the fashionable resorts
in Tibet, and of all the great monopolist company meetings of the day
before, while he was dressing. If Mwres did not like hearing what it
said, he had only to touch a stud, and it would choke a little and talk
about something else.

Of course his toilet differed very much from that of his ancestor. It is
doubtful which would have been the more shocked and pained to find
himself in the clothing of the other. Mwres would certainly have sooner
gone forth to the world stark naked than in the silk hat, frock coat,
grey trousers and watch-chain that had filled Mr. Morris with sombre
self-respect in the past. For Mwres there was no shaving to do; a
skilful operator had long ago removed every hair-root from his face. His
legs he encased in pleasant pink and amber garments of an air-tight
material, which with the help of an ingenious little pump he distended
so as to suggest enormous muscles. Above this he also wore pneumatic
garments beneath an amber silk tunic, so that he was clothed in air and
admirably protected against sudden extremes of heat or cold. Over this
he flung a scarlet cloak with its edge fantastically curved. On his
head, which had been skilfully deprived of every scrap of hair, he
adjusted a pleasant little cap of bright scarlet, held on by suction and
inflated with hydrogen, and curiously like the comb of a cock. So his
toilet was complete and, conscious of being soberly and becomingly
attired, he was ready to face his fellow-beings with a tranquil eye.

This Mwres--the civility of "Mr." had vanished ages ago--was one of the
officials under the Wind Vane and Waterfall Trust, the great company
that owned every wind wheel and waterfall in the world, and which pumped
all the water and supplied all the electric energy that people in these
latter days required. He lived in a vast hotel near that part of London
called Seventh Way, and had very large and comfortable apartments on the
seventeenth floor. Households and family life had long since disappeared
with the progressive refinements of manners; and indeed the steady rise
in rents and land values, the disappearance of domestic servants, the
elaboration of cookery, had rendered the separate domicile of Victorian
times impossible, even had any one desired such a savage seclusion. When
his toilet was completed he went towards one of the two doors of his
apartment--there were doors at opposite ends, each marked with a huge
arrow pointing one way and one the other--touched a stud to open it, and
emerged on a wide passage, the centre of which bore chairs and was
moving at a steady pace to the left. On some of these chairs were seated
gaily-dressed men and women. He nodded to an acquaintance--it was not in
those days etiquette to talk before breakfast--and seated himself on one
of these chairs, and in a few seconds he had been carried to the doors
of a lift, by which he descended to the great and splendid hall in which
his breakfast would be automatically served.

It was a very different meal from a Victorian breakfast. The rude masses
of bread needing to be carved and smeared over with animal fat before
they could be made palatable, the still recognisable fragments of
recently killed animals, hideously charred and hacked, the eggs torn
ruthlessly from beneath some protesting hen--, such things as these,
though they constituted the ordinary fare of Victorian times, would have
awakened only horror and disgust in the refined minds of the people of
these latter days. Instead were pastes and cakes of agreeable and
variegated design, without any suggestion in colour or form of the
unfortunate animals from which their substance and juices were derived.
They appeared on little dishes sliding out upon a rail from a little box
at one side of the table. The surface of the table, to judge by touch
and eye, would have appeared to a nineteenth-century person to be
covered with fine white damask, but this was really an oxidised metallic
surface, and could be cleaned instantly after a meal. There were
hundreds of such little tables in the hall, and at most of them were
other latter-day citizen singly or in groups. And as Mwres seated
himself before his elegant repast, the invisible orchestra, which had
been resting during an interval, resumed and filled the air with music.

But Mwres did not display any great interest either in his breakfast or
the music; his eye wandered incessantly about the hall, as though he
expected a belated guest. At last he rose eagerly and waved his hand,
and simultaneously across the hall appeared a tall dark figure in a
costume of yellow and olive green. As this person, walking amidst the
tables with measured steps drew near, the pallid earnestness of his face
and the unusual intensity of his eyes became apparent. Mwres reseated
himself and pointed to a chair beside him.

"I feared you would never come," he said. In spite of the intervening
space of time, the English language was still almost exactly the same as
it had been in England under Victoria the Good. The invention of the
phonograph and suchlike means of recording sound, and the gradual
replacement of books by such contrivances, had not only saved the human
eyesight from decay, but had also by the establishment of a sure
standard arrested the process of change in accent that had hitherto been
so inevitable.

"I was delayed by an interesting case," said the man in green and
yellow. "A prominent politician--ahem--! Suffering from overwork." He
glanced at the breakfast and seated himself. "I have been awake for
forty hours."

"Eh dear!" said Mwres; "Fancy that! You hypnotists have your work to do."

The hypnotist helped himself to some attractive amber-coloured jelly. "I
happen to be a good deal in request," he said modestly.

"Heaven knows what we should do without you."

"Oh! We're not so indispensable as all that," said the hypnotist,
ruminating the flavour of the jelly. "The world did very well without us
for some thousands of years. Two hundred years ago even--not one! In
practice, that is... Physicians by the thousand, of course--frightfully
clumsy brutes for the most part, and following one another like
sheep--but doctors of the mind, except a few empirical flounderers there
were none."

He concentrated his mind on the jelly.

"But were people so sane--?" began Mwres.

The hypnotist shook his head. "It didn't matter then if they were a bit
silly or faddy. Life was so easy-going then. No competition worth
speaking of--no pressure. A human being had to be very lopsided before
anything happened. Then, you know, they clapped 'em away in what they
called a lunatic asylum."

"I know," said Mwres. "In these confounded historical romances that
every one is listening to, they always rescue a beautiful girl from an
asylum or something of the sort. I don't know if you attend to that
rubbish."

"I must confess I do," said the hypnotist. "It carries one out of
oneself to hear of those quaint, adventurous, half-civilised days of the
nineteenth century, when men were stout and women simple. I like a good
swaggering story before all things. Curious times they were, with their
smutty railways and puffing old iron trains, their rum little houses and
their horse vehicles. I suppose you don't read books?"

"Dear, no!" said Mwres. "I went to a modern school and we had none of
that old-fashioned nonsense. Phonographs are good enough for me."

"Of course," said the hypnotist, "of course," and surveyed the table for
his next choice. "You know," he said, helping himself to a dark blue
confection that promised well, "in those days our business was scarcely
thought of. I daresay if any one had told them that in two hundred
years' time a class of men would be entirely occupied in impressing
things upon the memory, effacing unpleasant ideas, controlling and
overcoming instinctive but undesirable impulses, and so forth, by means
of hypnotism, they would have refused to believe the thing possible. Few
people knew that an order made during a mesmeric trance, even an order
to forget or an order to desire, could be given so as to be obeyed after
the trance was over. Yet there were men alive then who could have told
them the thing was as absolutely certain to come about as--well, the
transit of Venus."

"They knew of hypnotism, then?"

"Oh, dear, yes! They used it--for painless dentistry and things like
that! This blue stuff is confoundedly good: what is it?"

"Haven't the faintest idea," said Mwres, "but I admit it's very good.
Take some more."

The hypnotist repeated his praises, and there was an appreciative pause.

"Speaking of these historical romances," said Mwres, with an attempt at
an easy, off-hand manner, "brings me--ah--to the matter I--ah--had in
mind when I asked you--when I expressed a wish to see you." He paused
and took a deep breath.

The hypnotist turned an attentive eye upon him, and continued eating.

"The fact is," said Mwres, "I have a--in fact a--daughter. Well, you
know I have given her--ah--every educational advantage. Lectures--not a
solitary lecturer of ability in the world but she has had a telephone
direct, dancing, deportment, conversation, philosophy, art criticism..."
He indicated catholic culture by a gesture of his hand. "I had intended
her to marry a very good friend of mine--Bindon of the Lighting
Commission--plain little man, you know, and a bit unpleasant in some of
his ways, but an excellent fellow really--an excellent fellow."

"Yes," said the hypnotist, "go on. How old is she?"

"Eighteen."

"A dangerous age. Well?"

"Well: it seems she has been indulging in these historical
romances--excessively. Excessively. Even to the neglect of her
philosophy. Filled her mind with unutterable nonsense about soldiers who
fight--what is it--? Etruscans?"

"Egyptians."

Egyptians--very probably. Hack about with swords and revolvers and
things--blood-shed galore--horrible--! And about young men on torpedo
catchers who blow up--Spaniards, I fancy--and all sorts of irregular
adventurers. And she has got it into her head that she must marry for
Love, and that poor little Bindon--"

"I've met similar cases," said the hypnotist. "Who is the other young
man?"

Mwres maintained an appearance of resigned calm. "You may well ask," he
said. "He is--," and his voice sank with shame--"a mere attendant upon
the stage on which the flying-machines from Paris alight. He has--as
they say in the romances--good looks. He is quite young and very
eccentric. Affects the antique--he can read and write! So can she. And
instead of communicating by telephone, like sensible people, they write
and deliver--what is it?"

"Notes?"

"No--not notes... Ah--poems."

The hypnotist raised his eyebrows. "How did she meet him?"

"Tripped coming down from the flying-machine from Paris--and fell into
his arms. The mischief was done in a moment!"

"Yes?"

"Well--that's all. Things must be stopped. That is what I want to
consult you about. What must be done? What can be done? Of course I'm
not a hypnotist; my knowledge is limited. But you--?"

"Hypnotism is not magic," said the man in green, putting both arms on
the table.

"Oh, precisely! But still--!"

"People cannot be hypnotised without their consent. If she is able to
stand out against marrying Bindon, she will probably stand out against
being hypnotised. But if once she can be hypnotised--even by somebody
else--the thing is done."

"You can--?"

"Oh, certainly! Once we get her amenable, then we can suggest that she
must marry Bindon--that, that is her fate; or that the young man is
repulsive, and that when she sees him, she will be giddy and faint, or
any little thing of that sort. Or if we can get her into a sufficiently
profound trance we can suggest that she should forget him altogether--"

"Precisely."

"But the problem is to get her hypnotised. Of course no sort of proposal
or suggestion must come from you--because no doubt she already distrusts
you in the matter."

The hypnotist leant his head upon his arm and thought.

"It's hard a man cannot dispose of his own daughter," said Mwres
irrelevantly.

"You must give me the name and address of the young lady," said the
hypnotist, "and any information bearing upon the matter. And, by the
bye, is there any money in the affair?"

Mwres hesitated.

"There's a sum--in fact, a considerable sum--invested in the Patent Road
Company. From her mother. That's what makes the thing so exasperating."

"Exactly," said the hypnotist. And he proceeded to cross-examine Mwres
on the entire affair.

It was a lengthy interview.

And meanwhile "Elizebe8 Mwres," as she spelt her name, or "Elizabeth
Morris," as a nineteenth-century person would have put it, was sitting
in a quite waiting-place beneath the great stage upon which the
flying-machine from Paris descended. And beside her sat her slender,
handsome lover reading her the poem he had written that morning while on
duty upon the stage. When he had finished they sat for a time in
silence; and then, as if for their special entertainment, the great
machine that had come flying through the air from America that morning
rushed down out of the sky.

At first it was a little oblong, faint and blue amidst the distant
fleecy clouds; and then it grew swiftly large and white, and larger and
whiter, until they could see the separate tiers of sails, each hundreds
of feet wide, and the lank body they supported, and at last even the
swinging seats of the passengers in a dotted row. Although it was
falling it seemed to them to be rushing up the sky, and over the
roof-spaces of the city below its shadow leapt towards them. They heard
the whistling rush of the air about it and its yelling siren, shrill and
swelling, to warn those who were on its landing-stage of its arrival.
And abruptly the note fell down a couple of octaves, and it had passed,
and the sky was clear and void, and she could turn her sweet eyes again
to Denton at her side.

Their silence ended; and Denton, speaking in a little language of broken
English that was, they fancied, their private possession--though lovers
have used such little languages since the world began--told her how they
too would leap into the air one morning out of all the obstacles and
difficulties about them, and fly to a sunlit city of delight he knew of
in Japan, halfway about the world.

She loved the dream, but she feared the leap; and she put him off with
"Some day, dearest one, some day," to all his pleading that it might be
soon; and at last came a shrilling of whistles, and it was time for him
to go back to his duties on the stage. They parted--as lovers have been
wont to part for thousands of years. She walked down a passage to a
lift, and so came to one of the streets of that latter-day London, all
glazed in with glass from the weather, and with incessant moving
platforms that went to all parts of the city. And by one of these she
returned to her apartments in the Hotel for Women where she lived, the
apartments that were in telephonic communication with all the best
lecturers in the world. But the sunlight of the flying stage was in her
heart, and the wisdom of all the best lecturers in the world seemed
folly in that light.

She spent the middle part of the day in the gymnasium, and took her
midday meal with two other girls and their common chaperone--for it was
still the custom to have a chaperone in the case of motherless girls of
the more prosperous classes. The chaperone had a visitor that day, a man
in green and yellow, with a white face and vivid eyes, who talked
amazingly. Among other things, he fell to praising a new historical
romance that one of the great popular story-tellers of the day had just
put forth. It was, of course, about the spacious times of Queen
Victoria; and the author, among other pleasing novelties, made a little
argument before each section of the story, in imitation of the chapter
headings of the old-fashioned books: as for example, "How the Cabmen of
Pimlico stopped the Victoria Omnibuses, and of the Great Fight in Palace
Yard," and "How the Piccadilly Policeman was slain in the midst of his
Duty." The man in green and yellow praised this innovation. "These pithy
sentences," he said, "are admirable. They show at a glance those
headlong, tumultuous times, when men and animals jostled in the filthy
streets, and death might wait for one at every corner. Life was life
then! How great the world must have seemed then! How marvellous! There
were still parts of the world absolutely unexplored. Nowadays we have
almost abolished wonder, we lead lives so trim and orderly that courage,
endurance, faith, all the noble virtues seem fading from mankind."

And so on, taking the girls' thoughts with him, until the life they led,
life in the vast and intricate London of the twenty-second century, a
life interspersed with soaring excursions to every part of the globe,
seemed to them a monotonous misery compared with daedal past.

At first Elizabeth did not join in the conversation, but after a time
the subject became so interesting that she made a few shy
interpolations. But he scarcely seemed to notice her as he talked. He
went on to describe a new method of entertaining people. They were
hypnotised, and then suggestions were made to them so skilfully that
they seemed to be living in ancient times again. They played out a
little romance in the past as vivid as reality, and when at last they
awakened they remembered all they had been through as though it were a
real thing.

"It is a thing we have sought to do for years and years," said the
hypnotist. "It is practically an artificial dream. And we know the way
at last. Think of all it opens out to us--the enrichment of our
experience, the recovery of adventure, the refuge it offers from this
sordid, competitive life in which we live! Think!"

"And you can do that!" said the chaperone eagerly.

"The thing is possible at last," the hypnotist said. "You may order a
dream as you wish."

The chaperone was the first to be hypnotised, and the dream, she said,
was wonderful, when she came to again.

The other two girls, encouraged by her enthusiasm, also placed
themselves in the hands of the hypnotist and had plunges into the
romantic past. No one suggested that Elizabeth should try this novel
entertainment; it was at her own request at last that she was taken into
that land of dreams where there is neither any freedom of choice nor
will...

And so the mischief was done.

One day, when Denton went down to that quiet seat beneath the flying
stage, Elizabeth was not in her wonted place. He was disappointed, and a
little angry. The next day she did not come, and the next also. He was
afraid. To hide his fears from himself, he set to work to write sonnets
for her when she should come again...

For three days he fought against his dread by such distraction, and then
the truth was before him clear and cold, and would not be denied. She
might be ill, she might be dead; but he would not believe that he had
been betrayed. There followed a week of misery. And then he knew she was
the only thing on earth worth having, and that he must seek her, however
hopeless the search, until she was found once more.

He had some small private means of his own, and so he threw over his
appointment on the flying stage, and set himself to find this girl who
had become at last all the world to him. He did not know where she
lived, and little of her circumstances; for it had been part of the
delight of her girlish romance that he should know nothing of her,
nothing of the difference of their station. The ways of the city opened
before him east and west, north and south. Even in Victorian days London
was a maze, that little London with its poor four millions of people;
but the London he explored, the London of the twenty-second century, was
a London of thirty million souls. At first he was energetic and
headlong, taking time neither to eat nor sleep. He sought for weeks and
months, he went through every imaginable phase of fatigue and despair,
over-excitement and anger. Long after hope was dead, by the sheer
inertia of his desire he still went to and fro, peering into faces and
looking this way and that, in the incessant ways and lifts and passages
of that interminable hive of men.

At last chance was kind to him, and he saw her.

It was in a time of festivity. He was hungry; he had paid the inclusive
fee and had gone into one of the gigantic dining-places of the city; he
was pushing his way among the tables and scrutinising by mere force of
habit every group he passed.

He stood still, robbed of all power of motion, his eyes wide, his lips
apart. Elizabeth sat scarcely twenty yards away from him, looking
straight at him. Her eyes were as hard to him, as hard and
expressionless and void of recognition, as the eyes of a statue.

She looked at him for a moment, and then her gaze passed beyond him.

Had he had only her eyes to judge by, he might have doubted if it was
indeed Elizabeth, but he knew her by the gesture of her hand, by the
grace of a wanton little curl that floated over her ear as she moved her
head. Something was said to her, and she turned smiling tolerantly to
the man beside her, a little man in foolish raiment knobbed and spiked
like some odd reptile with pneumatic horns--the Bindon of her father's
choice.

For a moment Denton stood white and wild-eyed; then came a terrible
faintness, and he sat before one of the little tables. He sat down with
his back to her, and for a time he did not dare to look at her again.
When at last he did, she and Bindon and two other people were standing
up to go. The others were her father and her chaperone.

He sat as if incapable of action until the four figures were remote and
small, and then he rose up possessed with the idea of pursuit. For a
space he feared he had lost them, and then he came upon Elizabeth and
her chaperone again in one of the streets of moving platforms that
intersected the city. Bindon and Mwres had disappeared.

He could not control himself to patience. He felt he must speak to her
forthwith, or die. He pushed forward to where they were seated, and sat
down beside them. His white face was convulsed with half-hysterical
excitement.

He laid his hand on her wrist. "Elizabeth?" he said.

She turned in unfeigned astonishment. Nothing but the fear of a strange
man showed in her face.

"Elizabeth," he cried, and his voice was strange to him: "dearest--you
know me?"

Elizabeth's face showed nothing but alarm and perplexity. She drew
herself away from him. The chaperone, a little grey-headed woman with
mobile features, lent forward to intervene. Her resolute bright eyes
examined Denton. "What do you say?" she asked.

"This young lady," said Denton--, "she knows me."

"Do you know him, dear?"

"No," said Elizabeth in a strange voice, and with a hand to her
forehead, speaking almost as one who repeats a lesson. "No, I do not
know him. I know--I do not know him."

"But--but... Not know me! It is I--Denton. Denton! To whom you used to
talk. Don't you remember the flying stages? The little seat in the open
air? The verses--"

"No" cried Elizabeth--, "no. I do not know him. I do not know him. There
is something... But I don't know. All I know is that I do not know him."
Her face was a face of infinite distress.

The sharp eyes of the chaperone flitted to and fro from the girl to the
man. "You see?" she said, with the faint shadow of a smile. "She does
not know you."

"I do not know you," said Elizabeth. "Of that I am sure."

"But, dear--the songs--the little verses--"

"She does not know you," said the chaperone. "You must not... You have
made a mistake. You must not go on talking to us after that. You must
not annoy us on the public ways."

"But--" said Denton, and for a moment his miserably haggard face
appealed against fate.

"You must not persist, young man," protested the chaperone.

"Elizabeth!" he cried.

Her face was the face of one who is tormented. "I do not know you," she
cried, hand to brow. "Oh, I do not know you!"

For an instant Denton sat stunned. Then he stood up and groaned aloud.

He made a strange gesture of appeal towards the remote glass roof of the
public way, then turned and went plunging recklessly from one moving
platform to another, and vanished amidst the swarms of people going to
and fro thereon. The chaperone's eyes followed him, and then she looked
at the curious faces about her.

"Dear," asked Elizabeth, clasping her hand, and too deeply moved to heed
observation, "who was that man? Who was that man?"

The chaperone raised her eyebrows. She spoke in a clear, audible voice.
"Some half-witted creature. I have never set eyes on him before."

"Never?"

"Never, dear. Do not trouble your mind about a thing like this."


And soon after this the celebrated hypnotist who dressed in green and
yellow had another client. The young man paced his consulting-room, pale
and disordered. "I want to forget," he cried. "I must forget."

The hypnotist watched him with quiet eyes, studied his face and clothes
and bearing. "To forget anything--pleasure or pain--is to be, by so
much--less. However, you know your own concern. My fee is high."

"If only I can forget--"

"That's easy enough with you. You wish it. I've done much harder things.
Quite recently. I hardly expected to do it: the thing was done against
the will of the hypnotised person. A love affair too--like yours. A
girl. So rest assured."

The young man came and sat beside the hypnotist. His manner was a forced
calm. He looked into the hypnotist's eyes. "I will tell you. Of course
you will want to know what it is. There was a girl. Her name was
Elizabeth Mwres. Well..."

He stopped. He had seen the instant surprise on the hypnotist's face. In
that instant he knew. He stood up. He seemed to dominate the seated
figure by his side. He gripped the shoulder of green and gold. For a
time he could not find words.

"Give her me back!" he said at last. "Give her me back!"

"What do you mean?" gasped the hypnotist.

"Give her me back."

"Give whom?"

"Elizabeth Mwres--the girl--"

The hypnotist tried to free himself; he rose to his feet. Denton's grip
tightened.

"Let go!" cried the hypnotist, thrusting an arm against Denton's chest.

In a moment the two men were locked in a clumsy wrestle. Neither had the
slightest training--for athleticism, except for exhibition and to afford
opportunity for betting, had faded out the earth--but Denton was not
only the younger but the stronger of the two. They swayed across the
room, and then the hypnotist had gone down under his antagonist. They
fell together...

Denton leaped to his feet, dismayed at his own fury; but the hypnotist
lay still, and suddenly from a little white mark where his forehead had
struck a stool, shot a hurrying band of red. For a space Denton stood
over him irresolute, trembling.

A fear of the consequences entered his gently nurtured mind. He turned
towards the door. "No," he said aloud, and came back to the middle of
the room. Overcoming the instinctive repugnance of one who had seen no
act of violence in all his life before, he knelt down beside his
antagonist and felt his heart. Then he peered at the wound. He rose
quickly and looked about him. He began to see more of the situation.

When presently the hypnotist recovered his senses, his head ached
severely, his back was against Denton's knees and Denton was sponging
his face.

The hypnotist did not speak. But presently he indicated by a gesture
that in his opinion he had been sponged enough. "Let me get up," he
said.

"Not yet," said Denton.

"You have assaulted me, you scoundrel!"

"We are alone," said Denton, "and the door is secure."

There was an interval of thought.

"Unless I sponge," said Denton, "your forehead will develop a tremendous
bruise."

"You can go on sponging," said the hypnotist sulkily.

There was another pause.

"We might be in the Stone Age," said the hypnotist. "Violence!
Struggle!"

"In the Stone Age no man dared to come between man and woman," said
Denton.

The hypnotist thought again.

"What are you going to do?" he asked.

"While you were insensible I found the girl's address on your tablets. I
did not know it before. I telephoned. She will be here soon. Then--"

"She will bring her chaperone."

"That is all right."

"But what--? I don't see. What do you mean to do?"

"I looked about for a weapon also. It is an astonishing thing how few
weapons there are nowadays. If you consider that in the Stone Age men
owned scarcely anything but weapons. I hit at last upon this lamp. I
have wrenched off the wires and things, and I hold it so." He extended
it over the hypnotist's shoulders. "With that I can quite easily smash
your skull. I will--unless you do as I tell you."

"Violence is no remedy," said the hypnotist, quoting from the "Modern
Man's Book of Moral Maxims."

"It's an undesirable disease," said Denton.

"Well?"

"You will tell that chaperone you are going to order the girl to marry
that knobby little brute with the red hair and ferrety eyes. I believe
that's how things stand?"

"Yes--that's how things stand."

"And, pretending to do that, you will restore her memory of me."

"It's unprofessional."

"Look here! If I cannot have that girl I would rather die than not. I
don't propose to respect your little fancies. If anything goes wrong you
shall not live five minutes. This is a rude makeshift of a weapon, and
it may quite conceivably be painful to kill you. But I will. It is
unusual, I know, nowadays to do things like this--mainly because there
is so little in life that is worth being violent about."

"The chaperone will see you directly she comes--"

"I shall stand in that recess. Behind you."

The hypnotist thought. "You are a determined young man," he said, "and
only half civilised. I have tried to do my duty to my client, but in
this affair you seem likely to get your own way..."

"You mean to deal straightly."

"I'm not going to risk having my brains scattered in a petty affair like
this."

"And afterwards?"

"There is nothing a hypnotist or doctor hates so much as a scandal. I at
least am no savage. I am annoyed... But in a day or so I shall bear no
malice..."

"Thank you. And that we understand each other, there is no necessity to
keep you sitting any longer on the floor."


2. The Vacant Country

The world, they say changed more between the year 1800 and the year 1900
than it had done in the previous five hundred years. That century, the
nineteenth century, was the dawn of a new epoch in the history of
mankind--the epoch of the great cities, the end of the old order of
country life.

In the beginning of the nineteenth century the majority of mankind still
lived upon the countryside, as their way of life had been for countless
generations. All over the world they dwelt in little towns and villages
then, and engaged either directly in agriculture, or in occupations that
were of service to the agriculturist. They travelled rarely, and dwelt
close to their work, because swift means of transit had not yet come.
The few who travelled went either on foot, or in slow sailing-ships, or
by means of jogging horses incapable of more than sixty miles a day.
Think of it--! Sixty miles a day. Here and there, in those sluggish
times, a town grew a little larger than its neighbours, as a port or as
a centre of government; but all the towns in the world with more than a
hundred thousand inhabitants could be counted on a man's fingers. So it
was in the beginning of the nineteenth century. By the end, the
invention of railways, telegraphs, steamships, and complex agricultural
machinery, had changed all these things: changed them beyond all hope of
return. The vast shops, the varied pleasures, the countless conveniences
of the larger towns were suddenly possible, and no sooner existed than
they were brought into competition with the homely resources of the
rural centres. Mankind were drawn to the cities by an overwhelming
attraction. The demand for labour fell with the increase of machinery,
the local markets were entirely superseded, and there was a rapid growth
of the larger centres at the expense of the open country.

The flow of population townward was the constant preoccupation of
Victorian writers. In Great Britain and New England, in India and China,
the same thing was remarked: everywhere a few swollen towns were visibly
replacing the ancient order. That this was an inevitable result of
improved means of travel and transport--that, given swift means of
transit, these things must be--was realised by few; and the most puerile
schemes were devised to overcome the mysterious magnetism of the urban
centres, and keep the people on the land.

Yet the developments of the nineteenth century were only the dawning of
the new order. The first great cities of the new time were horribly
inconvenient, darkened by smoky fogs, insanitary and noisy; but the
discovery of new methods of building, new methods of heating, changed
all this. Between 1900 and 2000 the march of change was still more
rapid; and between 2000 and 2100 the continually accelerated progress of
human invention made the reign of Victoria the Good seem at last an
almost incredible vision of idyllic tranquil days.

The introduction of railways was only the first step in that development
of those means of locomotion which finally revolutionised human life. By
the year 2000 railways and roads had vanished together. The railways,
robbed of their rails, had become weedy ridges and ditches upon the face
of the world; the old roads, strange barbaric tracks of flint and soil,
hammered by hand or rolled by rough iron rollers, strewn with
miscellaneous filth, and cut by iron hoofs and wheels into ruts and
puddles often many inches deep, had been replaced by patent tracks made
of a substance called Eadhamite. This Eadhamite--it was named after its
patentee--ranks with the invention of printing and steam as one of the
epoch-making discoveries of the world's history.

When Eadham discovered the substance, he probably thought of it as a
mere cheap substitute for indiarubber; it cost a few shillings a ton. But
you can never tell all an invention will do. It was the genius of a man
named Warming that pointed to the possibility of using it, not only for
the tires of wheels, but as a road substance, and who organised the
enormous network of public ways that speedily covered the world.

These public ways were made with longitudinal divisions. On the outer on
either side went feet cyclists and conveyances travelling at a less
speed than twenty-five miles an hour; in the middle, motors capable of
speed up to a hundred; and the inner, Warming (in the face of enormous
ridicule) reserved for vehicles travelling at speeds of a hundred miles
an hour and upward.

For ten years his inner ways were vacant. Before he died they were the
most crowded of all, and vast light frameworks with wheels of twenty and
thirty feet in diameter, hurled along them at paces that year after year
rose steadily towards two hundred miles an hour. And by the time this
revolution was accomplished, a parallel revolution had transformed the
ever-growing cities. Before the development of practical science the
fogs and filth of Victorian times vanished. Electric heating replaced
fires (in 2013 the lighting of a fire that did not absolutely consume
its own smoke was made an indictable nuisance), and all the city ways,
all public squares and places, were covered in with a recently invented
glass-like substance. The roofing of London became practically
continuous. Certain short-sighted and foolish legislation against tall
buildings was abolished, and London, from a squat expanse of petty
houses--feebly archaic in design--rose steadily towards the sky. To the
municipal responsibility for water, light, and drainage, was added
another, and that was ventilation.

But to tell of all the changes in human convenience that these two
hundred years brought about, to tell of the long foreseen invention of
flying, to describe how life in households was steadily supplanted by
life in interminable hotels, how at last even those who were still
concerned in agricultural work came to live in the towns and to go to
and fro to their work every day, to describe how at last in all England
only four towns remained, each with many millions of people, and how
there were left no inhabited houses in all the countryside: to tell all
this would take us far from our story of Denton and his Elizabeth. They
had been separated and reunited, and still they could not marry. For
Denton--it was his only fault--had no money. Neither had Elizabeth until
she was twenty-one, and as yet she was only eighteen. At twenty-one all
the property of her mother would come to her, for that was the custom of
the time. She did not know that it was possible to anticipate her
fortune, and Denton was far too delicate a lover to suggest such a
thing. So things stuck hopelessly between them. Elizabeth said that she
was very unhappy, and that nobody understood her but Denton, and that
when she was away from him she was wretched; and Denton said that his
heart longed for her day and night. And they met as often as they could
to enjoy the discussion of their sorrows.

They met one day at their little seat upon the flying stage. The precise
site of this meeting was where in Victorian times the road from
Wimbledon came out upon the common. They were, however, five hundred
feet above that point. Their seat looked far over London. To convey the
appearance of it all to a nineteenth-century reader would have been
difficult. One would have had to tell him to think of the Crystal
Palace, of the newly built "mammoth" hotels--as those little affairs
were called--of the larger railway stations of his time, and to imagine
such buildings enlarged to vast proportions and run together and
continuous over the whole metropolitan area. If then he was told that
this continuous roof-space bore a huge forest of rotating wind-wheels,
he would have begun very dimly to appreciate what to these young people
was the commonest sight in their lives.

To their eyes it had something of the quality of a prison, and they were
talking, as they had talked a hundred times before, of how they might
escape from it and be at last happy together: escape from it, that is
before the appointed three years were at an end. It was, they both
agreed, not only impossible but almost wicked, to wait three years.
"Before that," said Denton--and the notes of his voice told of a
splendid chest--"we might both be dead!"

Their vigorous young hands had to grip at this, and then Elizabeth had a
still more poignant thought that brought the tears from her wholesome
eyes and down her healthy cheeks. "One of us," she said, "one of us
might be--"

She choked; she could not say the word that is so terrible to the young
and happy.

Yet to marry and be very poor in the cities of that time was--for any
one who lived pleasantly--a very dreadful thing. In the old agricultural
days that had drawn to an end in the eighteenth century there had been a
pretty proverb of love in a cottage, and indeed in those days the poor
of the countryside had dwelt in flower-covered, diamond-windowed
cottages of thatch and plaster, with the sweet air and earth about them,
amidst tangled hedges and the song of birds, and with the ever-changing
sky overhead. But all this had changed (the change was already beginning
in the nineteenth century), and a new sort of life was opening for the
poor--in the lower quarters of the city.

In the nineteenth century the lower quarters were still beneath the sky;
they were areas of land on clay or other unsuitable soil, liable to
floods or exposed to the smoke of more fortunate districts,
insufficiently supplied with water, and as insanitary as the great fear
of infectious diseases felt by the wealthier classes permitted. In the
twenty-second century, however, the growth of the city storey above
storey, and the coalescence of buildings, had led to a different
arrangement. The prosperous people lived in a vast series of sumptuous
hotels in the upper storeys and halls of the city fabric; the industrial
population dwelt beneath in the tremendous ground-floor and basement, so
to speak, of the place.

In the refinement of life and manners these lower classes differed
little from their ancestors, the Eastenders of Queen Victoria's time;
but they had developed a distinct dialect of their own. In these under
ways they lived and died, rarely ascending to the surface except when
work took them there. Since for most of them this was the sort of life
to which they had been born, they found no great misery in such
circumstances; but for people like Denton and Elizabeth, such a plunge
would have seemed more terrible than death.

"And yet what else is there?" asked Elizabeth.

Denton professed not to know. Apart from his own feeling of delicacy, he
was not sure how Elizabeth would like the idea of borrowing on the
strength of her expectations.

The passage from London to Paris even, said Elizabeth, was beyond their
means; and in Paris, as in any other city in the world, life would be
just as costly and impossible as in London.

Well might Denton cry aloud: "If only we had lived in those days,
dearest! If only we had lived in the past! For to their eyes even
nineteenth-century Whitechapel was seen through a mist of romance.

"Is there nothing?" cried Elizabeth, suddenly weeping. "Must we really
wait for those three long years? Fancy three years--six-and-thirty
months!" The human capacity for patience had not grown with the ages.

Then suddenly Denton was moved to speak of something that had already
flickered across his mind. He had hit upon it at last. It seemed to him
so wild a suggestion that he made it only half seriously. But to put a
thing into words has ever a way of making it seem more real and possible
than it seemed before. And so it was with him.

"Suppose," he said, "we went into the country?"

She looked at him to see if he was serious in proposing such an
adventure.

"The country?"

"Yes--beyond there. Beyond the hills."

"How could we live?" she said. "Where could we live?"

"It is not impossible," he said. "People used to live in the country."

"But then there were houses."

"There are the ruins of villages and towns now. On the clay lands they
are gone, of course. But they are still left on the grazing land,
because it does not pay the Food Company to remove them. I know
that--for certain. Besides, one sees them from the flying machines, you
know. Well, we might shelter in some one of these, and repair it with
our hands. Do you know, the thing is not so wild as it seems. Some of
the men who go out every day to look after the crops and herds might be
paid to bring us food..."

She stood in front of him. "How strange it would be if one really
could..."

"Why not?"

"But no one dares."

"That is no reason."

"It would be--oh! It would be so romantic and strange. If only it were
possible."

"Why not possible?"

"There are so many things. Think of all the things we have, things that
we should miss."

"Should we miss them? After all, the life we lead is very unreal--very
artificial." He began to expand his idea, and as he warmed to his
exposition the fantastic quality of his first proposal faded away.

She thought. "But I have heard of prowlers--escaped criminals."

He nodded. He hesitated over his answer because he thought it sounded
boyish. He blushed. "I could get some one I know to make me a sword."

She looked at him with enthusiasm growing in her eyes. She had heard of
swords, had seen one in a museum; she thought of those ancient days when
men wore them as a common thing. His suggestion seemed an impossible
dream to her, and perhaps for that reason she was eager for more detail.
And inventing for the most part as he went along, he told her they might
live in the country as the old-world people had done. With every detail
her interest grew, for she was one of those girls for whom romance and
adventure have a fascination.

His suggestion seemed, I say, an impossible dream to her on that day,
but the next day they talked about it again, and it was strangely less
impossible.

"At first we should take food," said Denton. "We could carry food for
ten or twelve days." It was an age of compact artificial nourishment,
and such a provision had none of the unwieldy suggestion it would have
had in the nineteenth century.

"But--until our house," she asked--"until it was ready, where should we
sleep?"

"It is summer."

"But... What do you mean?"

"There was a time when there were no houses in the world; when all
mankind slept always in the open air."

"But for us! The emptiness! No walls--no ceiling!"

"Dear," he said "in London you have many beautiful ceilings. Artists
paint them and stud them with lights. But I have seen a ceiling more
beautiful than any in London..."

"But where?"

"It is the ceiling under which we two would be alone..."

"You mean...?"

"Dear," he said, "it is something the world has forgotten. It is Heaven
and all the host of stars."

Each time they talked the thing seemed more possible and more desirable
to them. In a week or so it was quite possible. Another week, and it was
the inevitable thing they had to do. A great enthusiasm for the country
seized hold of them and possessed them. The sordid tumult of the town,
they said, overwhelmed them. They marvelled that this simple way of
their troubles had never come upon them before.

One morning near Midsummer-day, there was a new minor official upon the
flying stage, and Denton's place was to know him no more.

Our two young people had secretly married, and were going forth manfully
out of the city in which they and their ancestors before them had lived
all their days. She wore a new dress of white cut in an old-fashioned
pattern, and he had a bundle of provisions strapped athwart his back,
and in his hand he carried--rather shamefacedly it is true, and under
his purple cloak--an implement of archaic form, a cross-hilted thing of
tempered steel.

Imagine that going forth! In their days the sprawling suburbs of
Victorian times with their vile roads, petty houses, foolish little
gardens of shrub and geranium, and all their futile, pretentious
privacies, had disappeared: the towering buildings of the new age, the
mechanical ways, the electric and water mains, all came to an end
together, like a wall, like a cliff, near four hundred feet in height,
abrupt and sheer. All about the city spread the carrot, swede, and
turnip fields of the Food Company, vegetables that were the basis of a
thousand varied foods, and weeds and hedgerow tangles had been utterly
extirpated. The incessant expense of weeding that went on year after
year in the petty, wasteful and barbaric farming of the ancient days,
the Food Company had economised for ever more by a campaign of
extermination. Here and there, however, neat rows of bramble standards
and apple trees with whitewashed stems, intersected the fields, and at
places groups of gigantic teazles reared their favoured spikes. Here and
there huge agricultural machines hunched under waterproof covers. The
mingled waters of the Wey and Mole and Wandle ran in rectangular
channels; and wherever a gentle elevation of the ground permitted a
fountain of deodorised sewage distributed its benefits athwart the land
and made a rainbow of the sunlight.

By a great archway in that enormous city wall emerged the Eadhamite road
to Portsmouth, swarming in the morning sunshine with an enormous traffic
bearing the blue-clad servants of the Food Company to their toil. A
rushing traffic, beside which they seemed two scarce-moving dots. Along
the outer tracks hummed and rattled the tardy little old-fashioned
motors of such as had duties within twenty miles or so of the city; the
inner ways were filled with vaster mechanisms--swift monocycles bearing
a score of men, lank multicycles, quadricycles sagging with heavy loads,
empty gigantic produce carts that would come back again filled before
the sun was setting, all with throbbing engines and noiseless wheels and
a perpetual wild melody of horns and gongs.

Along the very verge of the outermost way our young people went in
silence, newly wed and oddly shy of one another's company. Many were the
things shouted to them as they tramped along, for in 2100 a
foot-passenger on an English road was almost as strange a sight as a
motor car would have been in 1800. But they went on with steadfast eyes
into the country, paying no heed to such cries.

Before them in the south rose the Downs, blue at first, and as they came
nearer changing to green, surmounted by the row of gigantic wind-wheels
that supplemented the wind-wheels upon the roof-spaces of the city, and
broken and restless with the long morning shadows of those whirling
vanes. By midday they had come so near that they could see here and
there little patches of pallid dots--the sheep the Meat Department of
the Food Company owned. In another hour they had passed the clay and
root crops and the single fence that hedged them in, and the prohibition
against trespass no longer held: the levelled roadway plunged into a
cutting with all its traffic, and they could leave it and walk over the
greensward and up the open hillside.

Never had these children of the latter days been together in such a
lonely place.

They were both very hungry and footsore--for walking was a rare
exercise--and presently they sat down on the weedless, close-cropped
grass, and looked back for the first time at the city from which they
had come, shining wide and splendid in the blue haze of the valley of
the Thames.

Elizabeth was a little afraid of the unenclosed sheep away up the
slope--she had never been near big unrestrained animals before--but
Denton reassured her. And overhead a white-winged bird circled in the
blue.

They talked but little until they had eaten, and then their tongues were
loosened. He spoke of the happiness that was now certainly theirs, of
the folly of not breaking sooner out of that magnificent prison of
latter-day life, of the romantic days that had passed from the world
forever. And then he became boastful. He took up the sword that lay on
the ground beside him, and she took it from his hand and ran a tremulous
finger along the blade.

"And you could," she said, "you--could raise this and strike a man?"

"Why not? If there were need."

"But," she said, "it seems so horrible. It would slash... There would
be--" her voice sank--, "blood."

"In the old romances you have read often enough..."

"Oh, I know: in those--yes. But that is different. One knows it is not
blood, but just a sort of red ink... And you--killing!"

She looked at him doubtfully, and then handed him back the sword.

After they had rested and eaten, they rose up and went on their way
towards the hills. They passed quite close to a huge flock of sheep, who
stared and bleated at their unaccustomed figures. She had never seen
sheep before, and she shivered to think such gentle things must needs be
slain for food. A sheep-dog barked from a distance, and then a shepherd
appeared amidst the supports of the wind-wheels, and came down towards
them.

When he drew near he called out asking whither they were going.

Denton hesitated, and told him briefly that they sought some ruined
house among the Downs, in which they might live together. He tried to
speak in an off-hand manner, as though it was a usual thing to do. The
man stared incredulously.

"Have you done anything?" he asked.

"Nothing," said Denton. "Only we don't want to live in a city any
longer. Why should we live in cities?"

The shepherd stared more incredulously than ever. "You can't live here,"
he said.

"We mean to try."

The shepherd stared from one to the other. "You'll go back to-morrow,"
he said. "It looks pleasant enough in the sunlight... Are you sure
you've done nothing? We shepherds are not such great friends of the
police."

Denton looked at him steadfastly. "No," he said. "But we are too poor to
live in the city, and we can't bear the thought of wearing clothes of
blue canvas and doing drudgery. We are going to live a simple life here,
like the people of old."

The shepherd was a bearded man with a thoughtful face. He glanced at
Elizabeth's fragile beauty.

"They had simple minds," he said.

"So have we," said Denton.

The shepherd smiled.

"If you go along here," he said, "along the crest beneath the
wind-wheels, you will see a heap of mounds and ruins on your right-hand
side. That was once a town called Epsom. There are no houses there, and
bricks have been used for a sheep pen. Go on, and another heap on the
edge of the root-land is Leatherhead; and then the hill turns away along
the border of a valley, and there are woods of beech. Keep along the
crest. You will come to quite wild places. In some parts, in spite of
all the weeding that is done, ferns and bluebells and other such useless
plants are growing still. And through it all, underneath the
wind-wheels, runs a straight lane paved with stones, a roadway of the
Romans two thousand years old. Go to the right of that, down into the
valley and follow it along by the banks of the river. You come presently
to a street of houses, many with roofs still sound upon them. There you
may find shelter."

They thanked him.

"But it's a quiet place. There is no light after dark there, and I have
heard tell of robbers. It is lonely. Nothing happens there. The
phonographs of the story-tellers, the kinematograph entertainments, the
news machines--none of them are to be found there. If you are hungry
there is no food, if you are ill no doctor..." He stopped.

"We shall try it," said Denton, moving to go on. Then a thought struck
him, and he made an agreement with the shepherd, and learnt where they
might find him, to buy and bring them anything of which they stood in
need, out of the city.

And in the evening they came to the deserted village, with its houses
that seemed so small and odd to them: they found it golden in glory of
sunset, and desolate and still. They went from one deserted house to
another, marvelling at their quaint simplicity, and debating which they
should choose. And at last, in a sunlit corner of a room that had lost
its outer wall, they came upon a wild flower, a little flower of blue
that the weeders of the Food Company had overlooked.

That house they decided upon; but they did not remain in it long that
night, because they were resolved to feast upon nature. And moreover the
houses became very gaunt and shadowy after the sunlight had faded out of
the sky. So after they had rested a little time they went to the crest
of the hill again to see with their own eyes the silence of heaven set
with stars, about which the old poets had had so many things to tell.
It was a wonderful sight, and Denton talked like the stars, and when
they went down the hill at last the sky was pale with dawn. They slept
but little, and in the morning when they woke a thrush was singing in a
tree.

So these young people of the twenty-second century began their exile.
That morning they were busy exploring the resources of this new home in
which they were going to live the simple life. They did not explore very
fast or very far, because they went everywhere hand-in-hand; but they
found the beginnings of some furniture. Beyond the village was a store
of winter fodder for the sheep of the Food Company, and Denton dragged
great armfuls to the house to make a bed; and in several of the houses
were old fungus-eaten chairs and tables--rough, barbaric, clumsy
furniture, it seemed to them, and made of wood. They repeated many of
the things they had said on the previous day, and towards evening they
found another flower, a harebell. In the late afternoon some Company
shepherds went down the river valley riding on a big multicycle; they
hid from them, because their presence, Elizabeth said, seemed to spoil
the romance of this old-world place altogether.

In this fashion they lived a week. For all that week the days were
cloudless, and the nights, nights of starry glory, that were invaded
each a little more by a crescent moon.

Yet something of the first splendour of their coming faded--faded
imperceptibly day after day; Denton's eloquence became fitful, and
lacked fresh topics of inspiration; the fatigue of their long march from
London told in a certain stiffness of the limbs, and each suffered from
slight unaccountable cold. Moreover, Denton became aware of unoccupied
time. In one place among the carelessly heaped lumber of the old times
he found a rust-eaten spade, and with this he made a fitful attack on
the razed and grass-grown garden--though he had nothing to plant or sow.
He returned to Elizabeth with a sweat-streaming face, after half an hour
of such work.

"There were giants in those days," he said, not understanding what wont
and training will do. And their walk that led them along the hills until
they could see the city shimmering far away in the valley. "I wonder how
things are going on there," he said.

And then came a change in the weather. "Come out and see the clouds,"
she cried; and behold! They were a sombre purple in the north and east,
streaming up to the zenith. And they went up the hill, these hurrying
steamers blotted out the sunset. Suddenly the wind set the beech-trees
swaying and whispering, and Elizabeth shivered. And then far away the
lightning flashed, flashed like a sword that is drawn suddenly, and the
distant thunder marched about the sky, and even as they stood
astonished, pattering upon them came the first headlong raindrops of the
storm. In an instant the last streak of sunset was hidden by a falling
curtain of hail, and the lightning flashed again, and the voice of
thunder roared louder, and all about them the world scowled dark and
strange.

Seizing hands, these children of the city ran down the hill to their
home, in infinite astonishment. And ere they reached it, Elizabeth was
weeping with dismay, and the darkling ground about them was white and
brittle and active with the pelting hail.

Then began a strange and terrible night for them. For the first time in
their civilised lives they were in absolute darkness; they were wet and
cold and shivering, all about them hissed the hail, and through the long
neglected ceilings of the derelict home came noisy spouts of water and
formed pools and rivulets on the creaking floors. As the gusts of the
storm struck the worn-out building, it groaned and shuddered, and now a
mass of plaster from the wall would slide and smash, and now some
loosened tile would rattle down the roof and crash into the empty
greenhouse below. Elizabeth shuddered, and still; Denton wrapped his gay
and flimsy city cloak about her, and so they crouched in the darkness.
And ever the thunder broke louder and nearer, and ever more lurid
flashed the lightning, jerking into a momentary gaunt clearness the
steaming, dripping room in which they sheltered.

Never before had they been in the open air save when the sun was
shining. All their time had been spent in the warm and airy ways and
halls and rooms of the latter-day city. It was to them that night as if
they were in some other world, some disordered chaos of stress and
tumult, and almost beyond hoping that they should ever see the city ways
again.

The storm seemed to last interminably, until at last they dozed between
the thunderclaps, and then very swiftly it fell and ceased. And as the
last patter of rain died away they heard an unfamiliar sound.

"What is that?" cried Elizabeth.

It came again. It was the barking of dogs. It drove down the desert lane
and passed; and through the window, whitening the wall before them and
throwing upon it the shadow of the window-frame and of a tree in black
silhouette, shone the light of the waxing moon.

Just as the pale dawn was drawing the things about them into sight, the
fitful barking of dogs came near again, and stopped. They listened.
After a pause they heard the quick pattering of feet seeking round the
house, and short, half-smothered barks. Then again everything was still.

"Ssh!" whispered Elizabeth, and pointed to the door of their room.

Denton went halfway towards the door, and stood listening. He came back
with a face of affected unconcern. "They must be the sheep-dogs of the
Food Company," he said. "They will do us no harm."

He sat down again beside her. "What a night it has been!" he said, to
hide how keenly he was listening.

"I don't like dogs," answered Elizabeth, after a long silence.

"Dogs never hurt any one," said Denton. "In the old days--in the
nineteenth century--everybody had a dog."

"There was a romance I heard once. A dog killed a man."

"Not this sort of dog," said Denton confidently. "Some of those
romances--are exaggerated."

Suddenly a half bark and a pattering up the staircase; the sound of
panting. Denton sprang to his feet and drew the sword out of the damp
straw upon which they had been lying. Then in the doorway appeared a
gaunt sheep-dog, and halted there. Behind it stared another. For an
instant man and brute faced each other, hesitating.

Then Denton, being ignorant of dogs, made a sharp step forward. "Go
away," he said, with a clumsy motion of his sword.

The dog started and growled. Denton stopped sharply. "Good dog!" he
said.

The growling jerked into a bark.

"Good dog!" said Denton. The second dog growled and barked. A third out
of sight down the staircase took up the barking also. Outside others
gave tongue--a large number it seemed to Denton.

"This is annoying," said Denton, without taking his eyes off the brutes
before him. "Of course the shepherds won't come out of the city for
hours yet. Naturally these dogs don't quite make us out."

"I can't hear," shouted Elizabeth. She stood and came to him.

Denton tried again, but the barking still drowned his voice. The sound
had a curious effect upon his blood. Odd disused emotions began to stir;
his face changed as he shouted. He tried again; the barking seemed to
mock him, and one dog danced a pace forward, bristling. Suddenly he
turned, and uttering certain words in the dialect of the underways,
words incomprehensible to Elizabeth, he made for the dogs. There was a
sudden cessation of the barking, a growl and a snapping. Elizabeth saw
the snarling head of the foremost dog, its white teeth and retracted
ears, and the flash of the thrust blade. The brute leapt into the air
and was flung back.

Then Denton, with a shout, was driving the dogs before him. The sword
flashed above his head with a sudden new freedom of gesture, and then he
vanished down the staircase. She made six steps to follow him, and on
the landing there was blood. She stopped, and hearing the tumult of dogs
and Denton's shouts pass out of the house, ran to the window. Nine
wolfish sheep-dogs were scattering, one writhed before the porch; and
Denton, tasting that strange delight of combat that slumbers still in
the blood of even the most civilised man, was shouting and running
across the garden space. And then she saw something that for a moment he
did not see. The dogs circled round this way and that, and came again.
They had him in the open.

In an instant she divined the situation. She would have called to him.
For a moment she felt sick and helpless, and then, obeying a strange
impulse, she gathered up her white skirt and ran downstairs. In the hall
was the rusting spade. That was it! She seized it and ran out.

She came none too soon. One dog rolled before him, well-nigh slashed in
half; but a second had him by the thigh, a third gripped his collar
behind, and a fourth had the blade of the sword between his teeth,
tasting its own blood. He parried the leap of a fifth with his left arm.

It might have been the first century instead of the twenty-second, so
far as she was concerned. All the gentleness of her eighteen years of
city life vanished before this primordial need. The spade smote hard and
sure, and cleft a dog's skull. Another, crouching for a spring, yelped
with dismay at this unexpected antagonist, and rushed aside. Two wasted
precious moments on the binding of a feminine skirt.

The collar of Denton's cloak tore and parted as he staggered back; and
that dog too felt the spade, and ceased to trouble him. He sheathed his
sword in the brute at his thigh.

"To the wall!" cried Elizabeth; and in three seconds the fight was at an
end, and our young people stood side by side, while a remnant of five
dogs, with ears and tails of disaster, fled shamefully from the stricken
field.

For a moment they stood panting and victorious, and then Elizabeth,
dropping her spade, covered her face, and sank to the ground in a
paroxysm of weeping. Denton looked about him, thrust the point of his
sword into the ground so that it was at hand, and stooped to comfort
her.

At last their more tumultuous emotions subsided, and they could talk
again. She leant upon the wall, and he sat upon it so he could keep an
eye open for any returning dogs. Two, at any rate, were up on the
hillside and keeping up a vexatious barking.

She was tear-stained, but not very wretched now, because for half an
hour he had been repeating that she was brave and had saved his life.
But a new fear was growing in her mind.

"They are the dogs of the Food Company," she said. "There will be
trouble."

"I am afraid so. Very likely they will prosecute us for trespass."

A pause.

"In the old times," he said, "this sort of thing happened day after
day."

"Last night!" she said. "I could not live through another such night."

He looked at her. Her face was pale for want of sleep, and drawn and
haggard. He came to a sudden resolution. "We must go back," he said.

She looked at the dead dogs, and shivered. "We cannot stay here," she
said.

"We must go back," he repeated, glancing over his shoulder to see if the
enemy kept their distance. "We have been happy for a time... But the
world is too civilised. Ours is the age of cities. More of this will
kill us."

"But what are we to do? How can we live there?"

Denton hesitated. His heel kicked against the wall on which he sat,
"It's a thing I haven't mentioned before," he said, and coughed;
"but..."

"Yes?"

"You could raise money on your expectations," he said.

"Could I?" she said eagerly.

"Of course you could. What a child you are!"

She stood up, and her face was bright. "Why did you not tell me before?"
she asked. "And all this time we have been here!"

He looked at her for a moment, and smiled. Then the smile vanished. "I
thought it ought to come from you," he said. "I didn't like to ask for
your money. And besides--at first I thought this would be rather fine."

There was a pause.

"It has been fine," he said; and glanced once more over his shoulder.
"Until all this began."

"Yes," she said, "those first days. The first three days."

They looked for a space into one another's faces, and then Denton slid
down from the wall and took her hand.

"To each generation," he said, "the life of its time. I see it all
plainly now. In the city--that is the life to which we were born. To
live in any other fashion... Coming here was a dream, and this--is the
awakening."

"It was a pleasant dream," she said--, "in the beginning."

For a long space neither spoke.

"If we would reach the city before the shepherds come here, we must
start," said Denton. "We must get our food out of the house and eat as
we go."

Denton glanced about him again, and giving the dead dogs a wide berth,
they walked across the garden space and into the house together. They
found the wallet with their food, and descended the blood-stained stairs
again. In the hall Elizabeth stopped. "One minute," she said. "There is
something here."

She led the way into the room in which that one little blue flower was
blooming. She stooped to it, she touched it with her hand.

"I want it," she said; and then, "I cannot take it..."

Impulsively she stooped and kissed its petals.

Then silently, side by side, they went across the empty garden-space
into the old high road, and set their faces resolutely towards the
distant city--towards the complex mechanical city of those latter days,
the city that had swallowed up mankind.


3. The Ways of the City

Prominent if not paramount among world-changing inventions in the
history of man is that series of contrivances in locomotion that began
with the railway and ended for a century or more with the motor and the
patent road. That these contrivances, together with the device of
limited liability joint stock companies and the supersession of
agricultural labourers by skilled men with ingenious machinery, would
necessarily concentrate mankind in cities of unparalleled magnitude and
work an entire revolution in human life, became after the event, a thing
so obvious that it is a matter of astonishment it was not more clearly
anticipated. Yet that any steps should be taken to anticipate the
miseries such a revolution might entail does not appear even to have
been suggested; and the idea that moral prohibitions and sanctions, the
privileges and concessions, the conception of property and
responsibility, of comfort and beauty, that had rendered the mainly
agricultural states of the past prosperous and happy, would fail in the
rising torrent of novel opportunities and novel stimulations, never
seems to have entered the nineteenth-century mind. That a citizen,
kindly and fair in his ordinary life, could as a shareholder become
almost murderously greedy; that commercial methods that were reasonable
and honourable on the old-fashioned countryside, should on an enlarged
scale be deadly and overwhelming; that ancient charity was modern
pauperisation, and ancient employment modern sweating; that in fact, a
revision and enlargement of the duties and rights of man had become
urgently necessary, were things it could not entertain, nourished as it
was on an archaic system of education and profoundly retrospective and
legal in all its habits of thought. It was known that the accumulation
of men in cities involved unprecedented dangers of pestilence; there was
an energetic development of sanitation; but that the diseases of
gambling and usury, of luxury and tyranny should become endemic, and
produce horrible consequences was beyond the scope of nineteenth-century
thought. And so, as if it were some inorganic process, practically
unhindered by the creative will of man, the growth of the swarming
unhappy cities that mark the twenty-first century accomplished itself.

The new society was divided into three main classes. At the summit
slumbered the property owner, enormously rich by accident rather than
design, potent save for the will and aim, the last avatar of Hamlet in
the world. Below was the enormous multitude of workers employed by the
gigantic companies that monopolised control; and between these two the
dwindling middle class, officials of innumerable sorts, foreman,
managers, the medical, legal, artistic, and scholastic classes, and the
minor rich, a middle class whose members led a life of insecure luxury
and precarious speculation amidst the movements of the great managers.

Already the love story and the marrying of two persons of middle class
have been told: how they overcame the obstacles between them, and how
they tried the simple old-fashioned way of living on the countryside and
came back speedily enough into the city of London. Denton had no means,
so Elizabeth borrowed money on the securities that her father Mwres held
in trust for her until she was one-and-twenty.

The rate of interest she paid was of course high, because of the
uncertainty of her security, and the arithmetic of lovers is often
sketchy and optimistic. Yet they had very glorious times after that
return. They determined they would not go to a Pleasure city nor waste
their days rushing through the air from one part of the world to the
other, for in spite of one disillusionment, their tastes were still
old-fashioned. They furnished their little room with quaint old
Victorian furniture, and found a shop on the forty-second floor in
Seventh Way where printed books of the old sort were still to be bought.
It was their pet affectation to read print instead of hearing
phonographs. And when presently there came a sweet little girl, to unite
them further if it were possible, Elizabeth would not send it to a
Creche, as the custom was, but insisted on nursing it at home. The rent
of their apartments was raised on account of this singular proceeding,
but that they did not mind. It only meant borrowing a little more.

Presently Elizabeth was of age, and Denton had a business interview with
her father that was not agreeable. An exceedingly disagreeable interview
with their money-lender followed, from which he brought home a white
face. On his return Elizabeth had to tell of a new and marvellous
intonation of "Goo" that their daughter had devised, but Denton was
inattentive. In the midst, just as she was at the cream of her
description, he interrupted. "How much money do you think we have left,
now that everything is settled?"

She stared and stopped her appreciative swaying of the Goo genius that
had accompanied her description.

"You don't mean...?

"Yes," he answered. "Ever so much. We have been wild. It's the interest.
Or something. And the shares you had, slumped. Your father did not mind.
Said it was not his business, after what had happened. He's going to
marry again... Well--we have scarcely a thousand left!"

"Only a thousand?"

"Only a thousand."

And Elizabeth sat down. For a moment she regarded him with a white face,
then her eyes went about the quaint, old-fashioned room, with its middle
Victorian furniture and genuine oleographs, and rested at last on the
little lump of humanity within her arms.

Denton glanced at her and stood downcast. Then he swung round on his
heel and walked up and down very rapidly.

"I must get something to do," he broke out presently. "I am an idle
scoundrel. I ought to have thought of this before. I have been a selfish
fool. I wanted to be with you all day..."

He stopped, looking at her white face. Suddenly he came and kissed her
and the little face that nestled against her breast.

"It's all right, dear," he said, standing over her; "you won't be lonely
now--now Dings is beginning to talk to you. And I can soon get something
to do, you know. Soon... Easily... It's only a shock at first. But it
will come all right. It's only to come right. I will go out again as
soon as I have rested, and find what can be done. For the present it's
hard to think of anything..."

"It would be hard to leave these rooms," said Elizabeth; "but--"

"There won't be any need of that--trust me."

"They are expensive."

Denton waved that aside. He began talking of the work he could do. He
was not very explicit what it would be; but he was quite sure that there
was something to keep them comfortably in the happy middle class, whose
way of life was the only one they knew.

"There are three-and-thirty million people in London," he said; "some of
them must have need of me."

"Some must."

"The trouble is... Well--Bindon, that brown little old man your father
wanted you to marry. He's an important person... I can't go back to my
flying-stage work, because he is now a Commissioner of the Flying Stage
Clerks."

"I didn't know that," said Elizabeth.

"He was made that in the last few weeks... or things would be easy
enough, for they liked me on the flying stage. But there's dozens of
other things to be done--dozens. Don't you worry dear. I'll rest a
little while, and then we'll dine, and then I'll start on my rounds. I
know lots of people--lots."

So they rested, and then they went to the public dining-room and dined,
and then he started on his search for employment. But they soon realised
that in the matter of one convenience the world was just as badly off as
it had ever been, and that was a nice, secure, honourable, remunerative
employment, leaving ample leisure for the private life, and demanding no
special ability, no violent exertion nor risk, and no sacrifice of any
sort for its attainment. He evolved a number of brilliant projects, and
spent many days hurrying from one part of the enormous city to another
in search of influential friends; and all his influential friends were
glad to see him, and very sanguine until it came to definite proposals,
and then they became guarded and vague. He would part with them coldly,
and think over their behaviour, and get irritated on his way back, and
stop at some telephone office and spend money on an animated but
unprofitable quarrel. And as the days passed, he got so worried and
irritated, that even to seem kind and careless before Elizabeth cost him
an effort--as she, being a loving woman, perceived very clearly.

After an extremely complex preface one day, she helped him out with a
painful suggestion. He had expected her to weep and give way to despair
when it came to selling all their joyfully bought early Victorian
treasures, their quaint objects of art, their antimacassars, bead mats,
repp curtains, veneered furniture, gold-framed steel engravings and
pencil drawings, wax flowers under shades, stuffed birds, and all sorts
of choice old things; but it was she who made the proposal. The
sacrifice seemed to fill her with pleasure, and so did the idea of
shifting to apartments ten or twelve floors lower in another hotel. "So
long as Dings is with us, nothing matters," she said. "It's all
experience." So he kissed her, said she was braver than when she fought
the sheep-dogs, called her Boadicea, and abstained very carefully from
reminding her that they would have to pay a considerably higher rent on
account of the little voice with which Dings greeted the perpetual
uproar of the city.

His idea had been to get Elizabeth out of the way when it came to
selling the absurd furniture about which their affections were twined
and tangled; but when it came to the sale it was Elizabeth who haggled
with the dealer while Denton went about the running ways of the city,
white and sick with sorrow and fear of what was still to come. When they
moved into their sparsely furnished pink-and-white apartments in a cheap
hotel, there came an outbreak of furious energy on his part, and then
nearly a week of lethargy during which he sulked at home. Through those
days Elizabeth shone like a star, and at the end Denton's misery found a
vent in tears. And then he went out into the city ways again, and--to
his utter amazement--found some work to do.

His standard of employment had fallen steadily until at last it had
reached the lowest level of independent workers. At first he had aspired
to some high official position in great Flying or Windvane or Water
Companies, or to an appointment on one of the General Intelligence
Organisations that had replaced newspapers, or to some professional
partnership, but those were the dreams of the beginning. From that he
had passed to speculation, and three hundred gold "lions" out of
Elizabeth's thousand had vanished one evening in the share market. Now
he was glad his good looks secured him a trial in the position of
salesman to the Suzannah Hat Syndicate, a Syndicate dealing in ladies'
caps, hair decorations, and hats--for though the city was completely
covered in, ladies still wore extremely elaborate and beautiful hats at
the theatres and places of public worship.

It would have been amusing if one could have confronted a Regent Street
shopkeeper of the nineteenth century with the development of his
establishment in which Denton's duties lay. Nineteenth Way was still
sometimes called Regent Street, but it was now a street of moving
platforms and nearly eight hundred feet wide. The middle space was
immovable and gave access by staircases descending into subterranean
ways to the houses on either side. Right and left were an ascending
series of continuous platforms each of which travelled about five miles
an hour faster than the one internal to it, so that one could step from
platform to platform until one reached the swiftest outer way and so go
about the city. The establishment of the Suzannah Hat Syndicate
projected a vast facade upon the outer way, sending out overhead at
either end an overlapping series of huge white glass screens, on which
gigantic animated pictures of the faces of well-known beautiful living
women wearing novelties in hats were thrown. A dense crowd was always
collected in the stationary central way watching a vast kinematograph
which displayed the changing fashion. The whole front of the building
was in perpetual chromatic change, and all down the facade--four hundred
feet it measured--and all across the street of moving ways, laced and
winked and glittered in a thousand varieties of colour and lettering the
inscription--

Suzanna! 'Ets! Suzanna! 'Ets!


A Broadside of gigantic phonographs drowned all conversation in the
moving way and roared "hats" at the passer-by, while far down the street
and up, other batteries counselled the public to "walk down for
Suzannah," and queried, "Why don't you buy the girl a hat?"

For the benefit of those who chanced to be deaf--and deafness was not
uncommon in London of that age, inscriptions of all sizes were thrown
from the roof above upon the moving platforms themselves, and on one's
hand or on the bald head of the man before one, or on a lady's
shoulders, or in a sudden jet of flame before one's feet, the moving
fingers wrote in unanticipated letters of fire "'ets r chip t'de," or
simply "ets." And spite of all these efforts so high was the pitch at
which the city lived, so trained became one's eyes and ears to ignore
all sorts of advertisement, that many a citizen had passed that place
thousands of times and was still unaware of the existence of the
Suzannah Hat Syndicate.

To enter the building one descended the staircase in the middle way and
walked through a public passage in which pretty girls promenaded, girls
who were willing to wear a ticked hat for a small fee. The entrance
chamber was a large hall, in wax heads fashionably adorned rotated
gracefully upon pedestals, and from this one passed through a cash
office to an interminable series of little rooms, each room with its
salesman, its three or four hats and pins, its mirrors, its
kinematographs, telephones and hat slides in communication with the
central depot, its comfortable lounge and tempting refreshments. A
salesman in such an apartment did Denton now become. It was his business
to attend to any of the incessant stream of ladies who chose to stop
with him, to behave as winningly as possible, to offer refreshment, to
converse on any topic the possible customer chose, and to guide the
conversation dexterously but not insistently towards hats. He was to
suggest trying on various types of hat and to show by his manner and
bearing, but without any coarse flattery, the enhanced impression made
by the hats he wished to sell. He had several mirrors, adapted by
various subtleties of curvature and tint to different types of face and
complexion, and much depended on the proper use of these.

Denton flung himself at these curious and not very congenial duties with
a good will and energy that would have amazed him a year before; but all
to no purpose. The Senior Manageress, who had selected him for
appointment and conferred various small marks of favour upon him,
suddenly changed in her manner, declared for no assignable cause that he
was stupid, and dismissed him at the end of six weeks of salesmanship.
So Denton had to resume his ineffectual search for employment.

This second search did not last very long. Their money was at the ebb.
To eke it out a little longer they resolved to part with their darling
Dings, and took that small person to one of the public creches that
abounded in the city. That was the common use of the time. The
industrial emancipation of women, the correlated disorganisation of the
secluded "home," had rendered creches a necessity for all but very rich
and exceptionally-minded people. Therein children encountered hygienic
and educational advantages impossible without such organisation. Creches
were of all classes and types of luxury, down to those of Labour
Company, were children were taken on credit, to be redeemed in labour as
they grew up.

But both Denton and Elizabeth being, as I have explained, strange
old-fashioned young people, full of nineteenth-century ideas, hated
these convenient creches exceedingly and at last took their little
daughter to one with extreme reluctance. They were received by a
motherly person in a uniform who was very brisk and prompt in her manner
until Elizabeth wept at the mention of parting from her child. The
motherly person, after a brief astonishment at this unusual emotion,
changed suddenly into a creature of hope and comfort, and so won
Elizabeth's gratitude for life. They were conducted into a vast room
presided over by several nurses and with hundreds of two-year-old girls
grouped about the toy-covered floor. This was the Two-year-old Room. Two
nurses came forward, and Elizabeth watched their bearing towards Dings
with jealous eyes. They were kind--it was clear they felt kind, and
yet...

Presently it was time to go. By that time Dings was happily established
in a corner, sitting on the floor with her arms filled, and herself,
indeed, for the most part hidden by an unaccustomed wealth of toys. She
seemed careless of all human relationships as her parents receded.

They were forbidden to upset her by saying good-bye.

At the door Elizabeth glanced back for the last time, and behold! Dings
had dropped her new wealth and was standing with a dubious face.
Suddenly Elizabeth gasped, and the motherly nurse pushed her forward and
closed the door.

"You can come again soon, dear," she said, with unexpected tenderness in
her eyes. For a moment Elizabeth stared at her with a blank face. "You
can come again soon," repeated the nurse. Then with a swift transition
Elizabeth was weeping in the nurse's arms. So it was that Denton's heart
was won also.


And three weeks after our young people were absolutely penniless, and
only one way lay open. They must go to the Labour Company. So soon as
the rent was a week overdue their few remaining possessions were seized,
and with scant courtesy they were shown the way out of the hotel.
Elizabeth walked along the passage towards the staircase that ascended
to the motionless middle way, too dulled by misery to think. Denton
stopped behind to finish a stinging and unsatisfactory argument with the
hotel porter, and then came hurrying after her, flushed and hot. He
slackened his pace as he overtook her, and together they ascended to the
middle way in silence. There they found two seats vacant and sat down.

"We need not go there--yet?" said Elizabeth.

"No--not till we are hungry," said Denton.

They said no more.

Elizabeth's eyes sought a resting-place and found none. To the right
roared the eastward ways, to the left the ways in the opposite
direction, swarming with people. Backwards and forwards along a cable
overhead rushed a string of gesticulating men, dressed like clowns, each
marked on back and crest with one gigantic letter, so that altogether
they spelt out:

"Purkinje's Digestive Pills."

An anaemic little woman in horrible coarse blue canvas pointed a little
girl to one of this string of hurrying advertisements.

"Look!" said the anaemic women: "There's yer father."

"Which?" said the little girl.

"'Im wiv his nose coloured red," said the anaemic woman.

The little girl began to cry, and even Elizabeth could have cried too.

"Ain't 'e kickin' 'is legs--! Just!" said the anaemic woman in the blue,
trying to make things bright again. "Looky--now!"

On the facade to the right a huge intensely bright disc of weird colour
span incessantly, and letters of fire that came and went spelt out--

"Does This Make You Giddy?"

Then a pause, followed by--

"Take A Purkinje's Digestive Pill."

A vast and desolating braying began. "If you love Swagger Literature,
put your telephone on to Bruggles, the Greatest Author of All Time. The
Greatest Thinker of all time. Teaches you Morals up to your Scalp! The
very image of Socrates, except the back of his head, which is like
Shakespeare. He has six toes, dresses in red, and never cleans his
teeth. Hear Him!"

Denton's voice became audible in a gap in the uproar. "I never ought to
have married you," he was saying. "I have wasted your money, ruined you,
brought you to misery. I am a scoundrel... Oh, this accursed world!"

She tried to speak, and for some moments could not. She grasped his
hand. "No," she said at last. A half-formed desire suddenly became
determination. She stood up. "Will you come?"

He rose also. "We need not go there yet."

"Not that. But I want you to come to the flying stages--where we met.
You know? The little seat."

He hesitated. "Can you?" he said, doubtfully.

"Must," she answered.

He hesitated still for a moment, then moved to obey her will.

And so it was they spent their last half-day of freedom out under the
open air in the little seat under the flying stages where they had been
wont to meet five short years ago. There she told him, what she could
not tell him in the tumultuous public ways, that she did not repent even
now of their marriage--that whatever discomfort and misery life still
had for them, she was content with things that had been. The weather was
kind to them, the seat was sunlit and warm, and overhead the shining
aeroplanes went and came.

At last towards sunsetting their time was at an end, and they made their
vows to one another and clasped hands, and then rose up and went back
into the ways of the city, a shabby-looking, heavy-hearted pair, tired
and hungry. Soon they came to one of the pale blue signs that marked a
Labour Company Bureau. For a space they stood in the middle way
regarding this and at last descended, and entered the waiting-room.


The Labour Company had originally been a charitable organisation; its
aim was to supply food, shelter, and work to all comers. This it was
bound to do by the conditions of its incorporation, and it was also
bound to supply food and shelter and medical attendance to all incapable
of work who chose to demand its aid. In exchange these incapables paid
labour notes, which they had to redeem upon recovery. They signed these
labour notes with thumb-marks, which were photographed and indexed in
such a way that this world-wide Labour Company could identify any one of
its two or three hundred million clients at the cost of an hour's
inquiry. The day's labour was defined as two spells in a treadmill used
in generating electrical force, or its equivalent, and its due
performance could be enforced by law. In practice the Labour Company
found it advisable to add to its statutory obligations of food and
shelter a few pence a day as an inducement to effort; and its enterprise
had not only abolished pauperisation altogether, but supplied
practically all but the very highest and most responsible labour
throughout the world. Nearly a third of the population of the world were
its serfs and debtors from the cradle to the grave.

In this practical, unsentimental way the problem of the unemployed had
been most satisfactorily met and overcome. No one starved in the public
ways, and no rags, no costume less sanitary and sufficient than the
Labour Company's hygienic but inelegant blue canvas, pained the eye
throughout the whole world. It was the constant theme of the
phonographic newspapers how much the world had progressed since
nineteenth-century days, when the bodies of those killed by the
vehicular traffic or dead of starvation were, they alleged, a common
feature in all the busier streets.

Denton and Elizabeth sat apart in the waiting-room until their turn
came. Most of the others collected there seemed limp and taciturn, but
three or four young people gaudily dressed made up for the quietude of
their companions. They were life clients of the Company, born in the
Company's creche and destined to die in its hospital, and they had been
out for a spree with some shillings or so, of extra pay. They talked
vociferously in a later development of the Cockney dialect, manifestly
very proud of themselves.

Elizabeth's eyes went from these to the less assertive figures. One
seemed exceptionally pitiful to her. It was a women of perhaps
forty-five, with gold-stained hair and a painted face, down which
abundant tears had trickled; she had a pinched nose, hungry eyes, lean
hands and shoulders, and her dusty worn-out finery told the story of her
life. Another was a grey-bearded old man in the costume of a bishop of
one of the high episcopal sects--for religion was now also a business,
and had its ups and downs. And besides him a sickly, dissipated-looking
boy of perhaps two-and-twenty glared at Fate.

Presently Elizabeth and then Denton interviewed the manageress--for the
Company preferred women in this capacity--and found she possessed an
energetic face, a contemptuous manner, and a particularly unpleasant
voice. They were given various cheques, including one to certify that
they need not have their heads cropped; and when they had given their
thumb-marks, learnt the number corresponding thereunto, and exchanged
their shabby middle-class clothes for duly numbered canvas suits, they
repaired to the huge plain dining-room for their first meal under these
new conditions. Afterwards they were to return to her for instructions
about their work.

When they had made the exchange of their clothing Elizabeth did not seem
able to look at Denton at first; but he looked at her, and saw with
astonishment that even in blue canvas she was still beautiful. And then
their soup and bread came sliding on its little rail down the long table
towards them and stopped with a jerk, and he forgot the matter. For they
had had no proper meal for three days.

After they had dined they rested for a time. Neither talked--there was
nothing to say; and presently they got up and went back to the
manageress to learn what they had to do.

The manageress referred to a tablet. "Y'r rooms won't be here; it'll be
in the Highbury Ward, ninety-seventh way, number two thousand and
seventeen. Better make a note of it on y'r card. You, nought nought
nought, type seven, sixty-four, b.c.d., gamma forty-one, female; you
'ave to go to the Metal-beating Company, and try that for a
day--fourpence bonus if ye're satisfactory; and you, nought seven one,
type four, seven hundred and nine, g.f.b., pi five and ninety, male; you
'ave to go to the Photographic Company on Eighty-first way, and learn
something or other--I don't know--thrippence. 'Ere's y'r cards. That's
all. Next! What? Didn't catch it all? Lor! So, suppose I must go over it
all again. Why don't you listen? Keerless, unprovident people! One'd
think these things didn't matter."

Their ways to their work lay together for a time. And now they found
they could talk. Curiously enough, the worst of their depression seemed
over now that they had actually donned the blue. Denton could talk with
interest even of the work that lay before them. "Whatever it is," he
said, "it can't be so hateful as that hat shop. And after we have paid
for Dings, we shall still have a whole penny a day between us even now.
Afterwards--we may improve--, get more money."

Elizabeth was less inclined to speech. "I wonder why work should seem so
hateful," she said.

"It's odd," said Denton. "I suppose it wouldn't be if it were not the
thought of being ordered about... I hope we shall have decent managers."

Elizabeth did not answer. She was not thinking of that. She was tracing
out some thoughts of her own.

"Of course," she said presently, "we have been using up work all our
lives. It's only fair--"

She stopped. It was too intricate.

"We paid for it," said Denton, for at that time he had not troubled
himself about these complicated things. "We did nothing--and yet we paid
for it. That's what I cannot understand."

"Perhaps we are paying," said Elizabeth presently--for her theology was
old-fashioned and simple.

Presently it was time for them to part, and each went to the appointed
work. Denton's was to mind a complicated hydraulic press that seemed
almost an intelligent thing. This press worked by the sea-water that was
destined finally to flush the city drains--for the world had long since
abandoned the folly of pouring drinkable water into its sewers. This
water was brought close to the eastward edge of the city by a huge
canal, and then raised by an enormous battery of pumps into reservoirs
at a level of four hundred feet above the sea, from which it spread by a
billion arterial branches over the city. Thence it poured down,
cleansing, sluicing, working machinery of all sorts, through an infinite
variety of capillary channels into the great drains, the cloacae
maximae, and so carried the sewage out to the agricultural areas that
surrounded London on every side.

The press was employed in one of the processes of the photographic
manufacture, but the nature of the process it did not concern Denton to
understand. The most salient fact to his mind was that it had to be
conducted in ruby light, and as a consequence the room in which he
worked was lit by one coloured globe that poured a lurid and painful
illumination about the room. In the darkest corner stood the press whose
servant Denton had now become; it was a huge, dim, glittering thing with
a projecting hood that had a remote resemblance to a bowed head, and
squatting like some metal Buddha in this weird light that ministered to
its needs, it seemed to Denton in certain moods almost as if this must
needs be the obscure idol to which humanity in some strange aberration
had offered up his life. His duties had a varied monotony. Such items as
the following will convey an idea of the service of the press. The thing
worked with a busy clicking so long as things went well; but if the
paste that came pouring through a feeder from another room and which it
was perpetually compressing into thin plates, changed in quality the
rhythm of its click altered and Denton hastened to make certain
adjustments. The slightest delay involved a waste of paste and the
docking of one or more of his daily pence. If the supply of paste
waned--there were hand processes of a peculiar sort involved in its
preparation, and sometimes the workers had convulsions which deranged
their output--Denton had to throw the press out of gear. In the painful
vigilance a multitude of such trivial attentions entailed, painful
because of the incessant effort its absence of natural interest
required, Denton had now to pass one-third of his days. Save for an
occasional visit from the manager, a kindly but singularly foul-mouthed
man, Denton passed his working hours in solitude.

Elizabeth's work was of a more social sort. There was a fashion for
covering the apartments of the very wealthy with metal plates
beautifully embossed with repeated patterns. The taste of the time
demanded, however, that the repetition of the patterns should not be
exact--not mechanical, but "natural--" and it was found that the most
pleasing arrangement of pattern irregularity was obtained by employing
women of refinement and natural taste to punch out the patterns with
small dites. So many square feet of plates was exacted from Elizabeth as
a minimum, and for whatever square feet she did in excess she received a
small payment. The room, like most rooms of women workers, was under a
manageress: men had been found by the Labour Company not only less
exacting but extremely liable to excuse favoured ladies from a proper
share of their duties. The manageress was a not unkindly, taciturn
person, with the hardened remains of beauty of the brunette type; and
the other women workers, who of course hated her, associated her name
scandalously with one of the metal-work directors in order to explain
her position.

Only two or three of Elizabeth's fellow-workers were born labour serfs;
plain, morose girls, but most of them corresponded to what the
nineteenth century would have called a "reduced" gentlewoman. But the
ideal of what constituted a gentlewoman had altered: the faint, faded,
negative virtue, the modulated voice and restrained gesture of the
old-fashioned gentlewoman had vanished from the earth. Most of her
companions showed in discoloured hair, ruined complexions, and the
texture of their reminiscent conversations, the vanished glories of a
conquering youth. All of these artistic workers were much older than
Elizabeth, and two openly expressed their surprise that anyone so young
and pleasant should come to share their toil. But Elizabeth did not
trouble them with her old-world moral conceptions.

They were permitted, and even encouraged to converse with each other,
for the directors very properly judged that anything that conduced to
variations of mood made for pleasing fluctuations in their patterning;
and Elizabeth was almost forced to hear the stories of these lives with
which her own interwove: garbled and distorted they were by vanity
indeed and yet comprehensible enough. And soon she began to appreciate
the small spites and cliques, the little misunderstandings and alliances
that enmeshed about her. One woman was excessively garrulous and
descriptive about a wonderful son of hers; another had cultivated a
foolish coarseness of speech, that she seemed to regard as the wittiest
expression of originality conceivable; a third mused for ever on dress,
and whispered to Elizabeth how she saved her pence day after day, and
would presently have a glorious day of freedom, wearing... and then
followed hours of description; two others sat always together, and
called one another pet names, until one day some little thing happened,
and they sat apart, blind and deaf as it seemed to one another's being.
And always from them all came an incessant tap, tap, tap, tap, and the
manageress listened always to the rhythm to mark if one fell away. Tap,
tap, tap, tap: so their days passed, so their lives must pass. Elizabeth
sat among them, kindly and quiet, gray-hearted, marvelling at Fate: tap,
tap, tap; tap, tap, tap; tap, tap, tap.

So there came to Denton and Elizabeth a long succession of laborious
days, that hardened their hands, wove strange threads of some new and
sterner substance into the soft prettiness of their lives, and drew
grave lines and shadows on their faces. The bright, convenient ways of
the former life had receded to an inaccessible distance; slowly they
learnt the lesson of the under-world--sombre and laborious, vast and
pregnant. There were many little things that happened: things that would
be tedious and miserable to tell, things that were bitter and grievous
to bear--indignities, tyrannies, such as must ever season the bread of
the poor in cities; and one thing that was not little, but seemed like
the utter blackening of life to them, which was that the child they had
given life to, sickened and died. But that story, that ancient
perpetually recurring story, has been told so often, has been told so
beautifully, that there is no need to tell it over again here. There was
the same sharp fear, the same anxiety, the deferred inevitable blow, and
the black silence. It has always been the same; it will always be the
same. It is one of the things that must be.


And it was Elizabeth who was first to speak, after an aching, dull
interspace of days: not indeed, of the foolish little name that was a
name no longer, but of the darkness that brooded over her soul. They had
come through the shrieking, tumultuous ways of the city together; the
clamour of trade, of yelling competitive religions, of political appeal,
had beat upon deaf ears; the glare of focused lights, of dancing
letters, and fiery advertisements, had fallen upon the set, miserable
faces unheeded. They took their dinner in the dining-hall at a place
apart. "I want," said Elizabeth clumsily, "to go out to the flying
stages--to that seat. Here, one can say nothing..."

Denton looked at her. "It will be night," he said.

"I have asked--, it is a fine night." She stopped.

He perceived she could find no words to explain herself. Suddenly he
understood that she wished to see the stars once more, the stars they
had watched together from the open downland in that wild honeymoon of
theirs five years ago. Something caught at his throat. He looked away
from her.

"There will be plenty of time to go," he said, in a matter-of-fact tone.

And at last they came out to their little seat on the flying stage, and
sat there for a long time in silence. The little seat was in shadow, but
the zenith was pale blue with the effulgence of the stage overhead, and
all the city spread below them, squares and circles and patches of
brilliance caught in a mesh-work of light. The little stars seemed very
faint and small: near as they had been to the old-world watcher, they
had become now infinitely remote. Yet one could see them in the darkened
patches amidst the glare, and especially in the northward sky, the
ancient constellations gliding steadfast and patient about the pole.

Long our two people sat in silence, and at last Elizabeth sighed.

"If I understood," she said, "if I could understand. When one is down
there the city seems everything--the noise, the hurry, the voices--you
must live, you must scramble. Here--it is nothing; a thing that passes.
One can think in peace."

"Yes," said Denton. "How flimsy it all is! From here more than half of
it is swallowed by the night... It will pass."

"We shall pass first," said Elizabeth.

"I know," said Denton. "If life were not a moment, the whole of history
would seem like the happening of a day... Yes--we shall pass. And the
city will pass, and all the things that are to come. Man and the Overman
and wonders unspeakable. And yet..."

He paused, and then began afresh. "I know what you feel. At least I
fancy... Down there one thinks of one's work, one's little vexations and
pleasures, one's eating and drinking and ease and pain. One lives, and
one must die. Down there and every day--our sorrow seemed the end of
life... Up here it is different. For instance, down there it would seem
impossible almost to go on living if one were horribly disfigured,
horribly crippled, disgraced. Up here--under these stars--none of those
things would matter. They don't matter... They are part of something.
One seems just to touch that something--under the stars..."

He stopped. The vague, impalpable things in his mind, cloudy emotions
half shaped towards ideas, vanished before the rough grasp of words. "It
is hard to express," he said lamely.

They sat through a long stillness.

"It is well to come here," he said at last. "We stop--our minds are very
finite. After all we are just poor animals rising out of the brute, each
with a mind, the poor beginning of a mind. We are so stupid. So much
hurts. And yet... I know, I know--and some day we shall see. All this
frightful stress, all this discord will resolve to harmony, and we shall
know it. Nothing is, but it makes for that. Nothing. All the
failures--every little thing makes for that harmony. Everything is
necessary to it, we shall find. We shall find. Nothing, not even the
most dreadful thing, could be left out. Not even the most trivial. Every
tap of your hammer on the brass, every moment of work, my idleness
even... Dear one! Every movement of our poor little one... All these
things go on for ever. And the faint impalpable things. We, sitting here
together--Everything..."

"The passion that joined us, and what has come since. It is not passion
now. More than anything else it is sorrow. Dear..."

He could say no more, could follow his thoughts no further.

Elizabeth made no answer--she was very still; but presently her hand
sought his and found it.


4. Underneath

Under the stars one may reach upward and touch resignation, whatever the
evil thing may be, but in the heat and stress of the day's work we lapse
again, come disgust and anger and intolerable moods. How little is all
our magnanimity--an accident! A phase! The very Saints of old had first
to flee their world. And Denton and his Elizabeth could not flee their
world, no longer were there open roads to unclaimed lands where men
might live freely--however hardly--and keep their souls in peace. The
city had swallowed up mankind.

For a time these two Labour Serfs were kept at their original
occupations, she at her brass stamping and Denton at his press; and then
came a move for him that brought with it fresh and still bitterer
experiences of life in the underways of the great city. He was
transferred to the care of a rather more elaborate press in the central
factory of London Tile Trust.

In this new situation he had to work in a long vaulted room with a
number of other men, for the most part born Labour Serfs. He came to
this intercourse reluctantly. His upbringing had been refined, and until
his ill fortune had brought him to that costume, he had never spoken in
his life, except by way of command or some immediate necessity, to the
white-faced wearers of the blue canvas. Now at last came contact; he had
to work beside them, share their tools, eat with them. To both Elizabeth
and himself this seemed a further degradation.

His taste would have seemed extreme to a man of the nineteenth century.
But slowly and inevitably in the intervening years a gulf had opened
between the wearers of the blue canvas and the classes above, a
difference not simply of circumstance and habits of life, but of habits
of thought--even of language. The underways had developed a dialect of
their own: above too, had arisen a dialect, a code of thought, a
language of "culture," which aimed by a sedulous search after fresh
distinction, to widen perpetually the space between itself and
"vulgarity." The bond of a common faith, moreover no longer held the
race together. The last years of the nineteenth century were
distinguished by the rapid development among the prosperous idle of
esoteric perversions of the popular religion: glosses and
interpretations that reduced the broad teachings of the carpenter of
Nazareth to the exquisite narrowness of their lives. And spite of their
inclination towards the ancient fashion of living, neither Elizabeth nor
Denton had been sufficiently original to escape the suggestion of their
surroundings. In matters of common behaviour they had followed the ways
of their class, and so when they fell at last to be Labour Serfs it
seemed to them almost as though they were falling among offensive
inferior animals; they felt as a nineteenth-century duke and duchess
might have felt, who were forced to take rooms in the Jago.

Their natural impulse was to maintain a "distance." But Denton's first
idea of a dignified isolation from his new surroundings was soon rudely
dispelled. He had imagined that his fall to the position of a Labour
Serf was the end of his lesson, that when their little daughter had died
he had plumbed the deeps of life; but indeed these things were only the
beginning. Life demands something more from us than acquiescence. And
now in a roomful of machine minders he was to learn a wider lesson, to
make the acquaintance of another factor in life, a factor as elemental
as the loss of things dear to us, more elemental even than toil.

His quiet discouragement of conversation was an immediate cause of
offence--was interpreted, rightly enough I fear, as disdain. His
ignorance of the vulgar dialect, a thing upon which he had hitherto
prided himself, suddenly took upon itself a new aspect. He failed to
perceive at once that his reception of the coarse and stupid but
genially intended remarks that greeted his appearance, must have stung
the makers of these advances like blows in their faces. "Don't
understand," he said rather coldly, and at hazard, "No, thank you."

The man who had addressed him stared, scowled and turned away.

A second, who also failed at Denton's unaccustomed ear, took the trouble
to repeat his remark, and Denton discovered he was being offered the use
of an oil can. He expressed polite thanks, and this second man embarked
upon a penetrating conversation. Denton, he remarked had been a swell,
and he wanted to know how he had come to wear the blue. He clearly
expected an interesting record of vice and extravagance. Had Denton ever
been at a Pleasure City? Denton was speedily to discover how existence
of these wonderful places of delight permeated and defiled the thought
and honour of these unwilling, hopeless workers of the underworld.

His aristocratic temperament resented these questions. He answered "No"
curtly. The man persisted with a still more personal question, and this
time it was Denton who turned away.

"Gorblimey!" said his interlocutor, much astonished.

It presently forced itself upon Denton's mind that this remarkable
conversation was being repeated in indignant tones to more sympathetic
hearers, and that it gave rise to astonishment and ironical laughter.
They looked at Denton with manifestly enhanced interest. A curious
perception of isolation dawned upon him. He tried to think of his press
and its unfamiliar peculiarities...

The machines kept everybody pretty busy during the first spell, and then
came a recess. It was only an interval for refreshment, too brief for any
one to go out to a Labour Company dining-room. Denton followed his
fellow-workers into a short gallery, in which were a number of bins and
refuse from the presses.

Each man produced a packet of food. Denton had no packet. The manager, a
careless young man who held his position by influence, had omitted to
warn Denton that it was necessary to apply for this provision. He stood
apart, feeling hungry. The others drew together in a group and talked in
undertones, glancing at him ever and again. He became uneasy. His
appearance of disregard cost him an increasing effort. He tried to think
of the levers of his new press.

Presently one, a man shorter but much broader and stouter than Denton,
came forward to him. Denton turned to him as unconcernedly as possible.
"Here!" said the delegate--as Denton judged him to be--extending a cube
of bread in a not too clean hand. He had a swart, broad-nosed face, and
his mouth hung down towards one corner.

Denton felt doubtful for the instant whether this was meant for civility
or insult. His impulse was to decline. "No thanks," he said; and at the
man's change of expression, "I'm not hungry."

There came a laugh from the group behind. "Told you so," said the man
who had offered Denton the loan of an oil can. "He's top side, he is.
You ain't good enough for 'im."

The swart face grew a shade darker.

"Here," said its owner, still extending the bread, and speaking in a
lower tone; "you got to eat this. See?"

Denton looked into the threatening face before him, and odd little
currents of energy seemed to be running through his limbs and body.

"I don't want it," he said, trying a pleasant smile that twitched and
failed.

The thickset man advanced his face, and the bread became a physical
threat in his hand. Denton's mind rushed together to the one problem of
his antagonist's eyes.

"Eat it," said the swart man.

There came a pause, and then they both moved quickly. The cube of bread
described a complicated path, a curve that would have ended in Denton's
face; and then his fist hit the wrist of the hand that gripped it, and
it flew upward, and out of the conflict--its part played.

He stepped back quickly, fists clenched and arms tense. The hot, dark
countenance receded, became an alert hostility, watching its chance.
Denton for one instant felt confident, and strangely buoyant and serene.
His heart beat quickly. He felt his body alive, and glowing to the tips.

"Scrap, boys!" shouted some one, and then the dark figure had leapt
forward, ducked back and sideways, and come in again. Denton struck out,
and was hit. One of his eyes seemed to him to be demolished, and he felt
a soft lip under his fist before he was hit again--this time under the
chin. A huge fan of fiery needles shot open. He had a momentary
persuasion that his head was knocked to pieces, and then something hit
his head and back from behind, and the fight became an uninteresting, an
impersonal thing.

He was aware that time--seconds or minutes--had passed, abstract
uneventful time. He was lying with his head in a heap of ashes, and
something wet and warm ran swiftly into his neck. The first shock broke
up into discrete sensations. All his head throbbed; his eye and chin
throbbed exceedingly, and the taste of blood was in his mouth.

"He's all right," said a voice. "He's opening his eyes."

"Serve him--well right," said a second.

His mates were standing about him. He made an effort and sat up. He put
his hand to the back of his head, and his hair was wet and full of
cinders. A laugh greeted the gesture. His eye was partially closed. He
perceived what had happened. His momentary anticipation of a final
victory had vanished.

"Looks surprised," said some one.

"'Ave any more?" said a wit; and then, imitating Denton's refined
accent: "No, Thank you."

Denton perceived the swart man with a blood-stained handkerchief before
his face, and somewhat in the background.

"Where's that bit of bread he's got to eat?" said a little ferret-faced
creature; and sought with his foot in the ashes of the adjacent bin.

Denton had a moment of internal debate. He knew the code of honour
required a man to pursue a fight he has begun, to the bitter end; but
this was his first taste of the bitterness. He was resolved to rise
again, but he felt no passionate impulse. It occurred to him--and the
thought was no very violent spur--that he was perhaps after all a
coward. For a moment his will was heavy, a lump of lead.

"'Ere it is," said the little ferret-faced man, and stooped to pick up a
cindery cube. He looked at Denton, then at the others.

Slowly, unwillingly, Denton stood up.

A dirty-faced albino extended a hand to the ferret-faced man.

"Gimme that toke," he said. He advanced threateningly, bread in hand, to
Denton. "So you ain't 'ad your bellyful yet," he said. "Eh?"

Now it was coming. "No, I haven't," said Denton, with a catching of the
breath, and resolved to try this brute behind the ear before he himself
got stunned again. He knew he would be stunned again. He was astonished
how ill he had judged himself beforehand. A few ridiculous lunges, and
down he would go again. He watched the albino's eyes. The albino was
grinning confidently, like a man who plans an agreeable trick. A sudden
perception of impending indignities stung Denton.

"You leave 'im alone, Jim," said the swart man suddenly over the
blood-stained rag. "He ain't done nothing to you."

The albino's grin vanished. He stopped. He looked from one to the other.
It seemed to Denton that the swart man demanded the privilege of his
destruction. The albino would have been better.

"You leave 'im alone," said the swart man. "See? 'E's 'ad 'is licks."

A clattering bell lifted up its voice and solved the situation. The
albino hesitated. "Lucky for you," he said, adding a foul metaphor, and
turned with the others towards the press-room again. "Wait for the end
of the spell, mate," said the albino over his shoulder--an afterthought.
The swart man waited for the albino to precede him. Denton realised that
he had a reprieve.

The men passed towards an open door, Denton became aware of his duties,
and hurried to join the tail of the queue. At the doorway of the vaulted
gallery of presses a yellow-uniformed labour policeman stood ticking a
card. He had ignored the swart man's haemorrhage.

"Hurry up there!" he said to Denton.

"Hello!" he said, at the sight of his facial disarry. "Who's been
hitting you?"

"That's my affair," said Denton.

"Not if it spiles your work, it ain't," said the man in yellow. "You
mind that."

Denton made no answer. He was a rough--a labourer. He wore the blue
canvas. The laws of assault and battery, he knew, were not for the likes
of him. He went to his press.

He could feel the skin of his brow and chin and head lifting themselves
to noble bruises, felt the throb and pain of each aspiring contusion.
His nervous system slid down to lethargy; at each movement in his press
adjustment he felt he lifted a weight. And as for his honour--that too
throbbed and puffed. How did he stand? What precisely had happened in
the last ten minutes? What would happen next? He knew that there was
enormous matter for thought, he could not think save, in disordered
snatches.

His mood was a sort of stagnant astonishment. All his conceptions were
overthrown. He had regarded his security from physical violence as
inherent, as one of the conditions of life. So indeed, it had been while
he wore his middle-class costume, had his middle-class property to serve
for his defence. But who would interfere among Labour roughs fighting
together? And indeed in those days no man would. In the under-world there
was no law between man and man; the law and machinery of the state had
become for them something that held men down, fended them off from much
desirable property and pleasure, and that was all. Violence, that ocean
in which the brutes live for ever, and from which a thousand dykes and
contrivances have won our hazardous civilised life, had flowed in again
upon the sinking underways and submerged them. The fist ruled. Denton
had come right down at last to the elemental--fist and trick and the
stubborn heart and fellowship--even as it was in the beginning.

The rhythm of his machine changed, and his thoughts were interrupted.

Presently he could think again. Strange how quickly things had happened!
He bore these men who had thrashed him no very vivid ill-will. He was
bruised and enlightened. He saw with absolute fairness, now the
reasonableness of his unpopularity. He had behaved like a fool. Disdain,
seclusion, are the privilege of the strong. The fallen aristocrat still
clinging to his pointless distinction is surely the most pitiful
creature of pretence in all this clamant universe. Good heavens! What
was there for him to despise in these men?

What a pity he had not appreciated all this better five hours ago!

What would happen at the end of the spell? He could not tell. He could
not imagine. He could not imagine the thoughts of these men. He was
sensible only of their hostility and utter want of sympathy. Vague
possibilities of shame and violence chased one another, across his mind.
Could he devise some weapon? He recalled his assault upon the hypnotist,
but there were no detachable lamps here. He could see nothing that he
could catch up in his defence.

For a space he thought of a headlong bolt for the security of the public
ways directly when the spell was over. Apart from the trivial
consideration of his self-respect, he perceived that this would be only
a foolish postponement and aggravation of his trouble. He perceived the
ferret-faced man and the albino talking together with their eyes towards
him. Presently they were talking to the swart man, who stood with his
broad back studiously towards Denton.

At last the end of the second spell. The lender of oil cans stopped his
press sharply and turned round, wiping his mouth with the back of his
hand. His eyes had the quiet expectation of one who seats himself in a
theatre.

Now was the crisis, and all the little nerves of Denton's being seemed
leaping and dancing. He had decided to show fight if any fresh indignity
was offered him. He stopped his press and turned. With an enormous
affectation of ease he walked down the vault and entered the passage of
the ash pits, only to discover he had left his jacket--which he had
taken off because of the heat of the vault--beside his press. He walked
back. He met the albino eye to eye.

He heard the ferret-faced man in expostulation. "'E reely ought, eat
it," said the ferret-faced man. "'E did reely."

"No--you leave 'im alone," said the swart man.

Apparently nothing further was to happen to him that day. He passed out
to the passage and staircase that led up to the moving platforms of the
city.

He emerged on the livid brilliance and streaming movement of the public
street. He became acutely aware of his disfigured face, and felt his
swelling bruises with a limp, investigatory hand. He went up to the
swiftest platform, and seated himself on a Labour Company bench.

He lapsed into a pensive torpor. The immediate dangers and stresses of
his position he saw with a sort of static clearness. What would they do
to-morrow? He could not tell. What would Elizabeth think of his
brutalisation? He could not tell. He was exhausted. He was aroused
presently by a hand upon his arm.

He looked up, and saw the swart man seated beside him. He started.
Surely he was safe from violence in the public way!

The swart man's face retained no traces of his share in the fight; his
expression was free from hostility--seemed almost deferential. "'Scuse
me," he said, with a total absence of truculence. Denton realised that
no assault was intended. He stared, awaiting the next development.

It was evident the next sentence was premeditated.
"Whad--I--was--going--to say--was this," said the swart man, and sought
through a silence for further words.

"Whad--I--was--going--to say--was this," he repeated.

Finally he abandoned that gambit. "You're aw right," he cried, laying a
grimy hand on Denton's grimy sleeve. "You're aw right. You're a ge'man.
Sorry--very sorry. Wanted to tell you that."

Denton realised that there must exist motives beyond a mere impulse to
abominable proceedings in the man. He meditated, and swallowed an
unworthy pride.

"I did not mean to be offensive to you," he said, "in refusing that bit
of bread."

"Meant it friendly," said the swart man, recalling the scene; "but--in
front of that blarsted Whitey and his snigger--well--I 'ad to scrap."

"Yes," said Denton with sudden fervour: "I was a fool."

"Ah," said the swart man, with great satisfaction. "That's aw right.
Shake!"

And Denton shook.

The moving platform was rushing by the establishment of a face moulder,
and its lower front was a huge display of mirror, designed to stimulate
the thirst for more symmetrical features. Denton caught the reflection
of himself and his new friend, enormously twisted and broadened. His own
face was puffed, one-sided, and blood-stained; a grin of idiotic and
insincere amiability distorted its latitude. A wisp of hair occluded one
eye. The trick of the mirror presented the swart man as a gross
expansion of lip and nostril. They were linked by shaking hands. Then
abruptly this vision passed--to return to memory in the anaemic
meditations of a waking dawn.

As he shook, the swart man made some muddled remark, to the effect that
he had always known he could get on with a gentleman if one came his
way. He prolonged the shaking until Denton, under the influence of the
mirror, withdrew his hand. The swart man became pensive, spat
impressively on the platform, and resumed his theme.

"Whad I was going to say was this," he said; he gravelled, and shook his
head at his foot.

Denton became curious. "Go on," he said, attentive.

The swart man took the plunge. He grasped Denton's arm, became intimate
in his attitude. "'Scuse me," he said. "Fact is, you done know 'ow to
scrap. Done know 'ow to. Why--you done know 'ow to begin. You'll get
killed if you don't mind. 'Ouldin' your 'ands--There!"

He reinforced his statement by objurgation, watching the effect of each
oath with a wary eye.

"F'r instance. You're tall. Long arms. You got a longer reach than any
one in the brasted vault. Gobblimey, but I thought I'd got a Tough on.
'Stead of which... 'Scuse me. I wouldn't have 'it you if I'd known. It's
like fighting sacks. 'Tisn' right. Y'r arms seemed 'ung on 'ooks.
Reg'lar--'ung on 'ooks. There!"

Denton stared, and then surprised and hurt his battered chin by a sudden
laugh. Bitter tears came into his eyes.

"Go on," he said.

The swart man reverted to his formula. He was good enough to say he
liked the look of Denton, thought he had stood up "amazing plucky. On'y
pluck ain't no good--ain't no brasted good--if you don't 'old your
'ands.

"Whad I was going to say was this," he said. "Lemme show you 'ow to
scrap. Just lemme. You're ig'nant, you ain't no class; but you might be
a very decent scrapper--very decent. Shown. That's what I meant to say."

Denton hesitated. "But--" he said, "I can't give you anything--"

"That's the ge'man all over," said the swart man. "Who arst you to?"

"But your time?"

"If you don't get learnt scrapping you'll get killed--, don't you make
no bones of that."

Denton thought. "I don't know," he said.

He looked at the face beside him, and all its native coarseness shouted
at him. He felt a quick revulsion from his transient friendliness. It
seemed to him incredible that it should be necessary for him to be
indebted to such a creature.

"The chaps are always scrapping," said the swart man. "Always. And of
course--if one gets waxy and 'its you vital..."

"By God!" cried Denton; "I wish one would."

"Of course, if you feel like that--"

"You don't understand."

"P'raps I don't," said the swart man; and lapsed into a fuming silence.

When he spoke again his voice was less friendly, and he prodded Denton
by way of address. "Look see!" he said: "Are you going to let me show
you 'ow to scrap?"

"It's tremendously kind of you," said Denton; "but--"

There was a pause. The swart man rose and bent over Denton.

"Too much ge'man," he said--"eh? I got a red face... By gosh! You are a
brasted fool!" He turned away, and instantly Denton realised the truth
of this remark.

The swart man descended with dignity to a cross way, and Denton, after a
momentary impulse to pursuit, remained on the platform. For a time the
things that had happened filled his mind. In one day his graceful system
of resignation had been shattered beyond hope. Brute force, the final,
the fundamental, had thrust its face through all his explanations and
glosses and consolations and grinned enigmatically. Though he was hungry
and tired, he did not go on directly to the Labour Hotel, where he would
meet Elizabeth. He found he was beginning to think, he wanted very
greatly to think; and so, wrapped in a monstrous cloud of meditation, he
went the circuit of the city on his moving platform twice. You figure
him, tearing through the glaring, thunder-voiced city at a pace of fifty
miles an hour, the city upon the planet that spins along its chartless
path through space many thousands of miles an hour, funking most
terribly, and trying to understand why the heart and will in him should
suffer and keep alive.

When at last he came to Elizabeth, she was white and anxious. He might
have noted she was in trouble, had it not been for his own
preoccupation. He feared most that she would desire to know every detail
of his indignities, that she would be sympathetic or indignant. He saw
her eyebrows rise at the sight of him.

"I've had rough handling," he said, and gasped. "It's too fresh--too
hot. I don't want to talk about it." He sat down with an unavoidable air
of sullenness.

She stared at him in astonishment, and as she read something of
significant hieroglyphic of his battered face, her lips whitened. Her
hand--it was thinner now, than in the days of their prosperity, and her
first finger was a little altered by the metal punching she
did--clenched convulsively. "This horrible world!" she said, and said no
more.

In these latter days they had become a very silent couple; they said
scarcely a word to each other that night, but each followed a private
train of thought. In the small hours, as Elizabeth lay awake, Denton
started up beside her suddenly--he had been lying as still as a dead
man.

"I cannot stand it!" cried Denton. "I will not stand it!"

She saw him dimly, sitting up; saw his arm lunge as if in a furious blow
at the enshrouding night. Then for a space he was still. "It is too
much--it is more than one can bear!"

She could say nothing. To her also, it seemed that this was as far as
one could go. She waited through a long stillness. She could see that
Denton sat with his arms about his knees, his chin almost touching them.

Then he laughed.

"No," he said at last, "I'm going to stand it. That's the peculiar
thing. There isn't a grain of suicide in us--not a grain. I suppose all
people with a turn that way have gone. We're going through with it--to
the end."

Elizabeth thought grayly, and realised that this also was true.

"We're going through with it. To think of all who have gone through with
it: all the generations--endless--endless. Little beasts that snapped
and snarled, snapping and snarling, snapping and snarling, generation
after generation."

His monotone, ended abruptly, resumed after a vast interval.

"There were ninety thousand years of stone age. A Denton somewhere in
all those years. Apostolic succession. The grace of going through. Let
me see! Ninety--nine hundred--three nines, twenty-seven--three thousand
generations of men--! Men more or less. And each fought, and was
bruised, and shamed, and somehow held his own--going through with
it--passing it on... And thousands more to come perhaps--thousands!
Passing it on. I wonder if they will thank us."

His voice assumed an argumentative note. "If one could find something
definite... If one could say, 'This is why--this is why it goes on...'"

He became still, and Elizabeth's eyes slowly separated him from the
darkness until at last she could see how he sat with his head resting on
his hand. A sense of the enormous remoteness of their minds came to her;
that dim suggestion of another being seemed to her a figure of their
mutual understanding. What could he be thinking now? What might he not
say next? Another age seemed to elapse before he sighed and whispered:
"No, I don't understand it. No!" Then a long interval, and he repeated
this. But the second time it had the tone almost of a solution.

She became aware that he was preparing to lie down. She marked his
movements, perceived with astonishment how he adjusted his pillow with a
careful regard to comfort. He lay down with a sigh of contentment
almost. His passion had passed. He lay still, and presently his
breathing became regular and deep.

But Elizabeth remained with eyes wide open in the darkness, until the
clamour of a bell and sudden brilliance of the electric light warned
them that the Labour Company had need of them for yet another day.

That day came a scuffle with the albino Whitey and the little
ferret-faced man. Blunt, the swart artist in scrapping, having first let
Denton grasp the bearing of his lesson, intervened, not without a
certain quality of patronage. "Drop 'is 'air, Whitey, and let the man
be," said his gross voice through a shower of indignities. "Can't you
see 'e don't know 'ow to scrap?" And Denton, lying shamefully in the
dust, realised that he must accept that course of instruction after all.

He made his apology straight and clean. He scrambled up and walked to
Blunt. "I was a fool, and you are right," he said. "If it isn't too
late..."

That night, after the second spell, Denton went with Blunt to certain
waste and slime-soaked vaults under the Port of London, to learn the
first beginnings of the high art of scrapping as it had been perfected
in the great world of the underways: how to hit or kick a man so as to
hurt him excruciatingly or make him violently sick, how to hit or kick
"vital," how to use glass in one's garments as a club and to spread red
ruin with various domestic implements, how to anticipate and demolish
your adversary's intentions in other directions; all the pleasant
devices, in fact, that had grown up among the disinherited of the great
cities of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, were spread out by a
gifted exponent for Denton's learning. Blunt's bashfulness fell from him
as the instruction proceeded, and he developed a certain expert dignity,
a quality of fatherly consideration. He treated Denton with the utmost
consideration, only "flicking him up a bit" now and then, to keep the
interest hot, and roaring with laughter at a happy fluke of Denton's
that covered his mouth with blood.

"I'm always keerless of my mouth," said Blunt, admitting a weakness.
"Always. It don't seem to matter, like just getting bashed in the
mouth--not if your chin's all right. Tastin' blood does me good. Always.
But I better not 'it you again."

Denton went home, to fall asleep exhausted and wake in the small hours
with aching limbs and all his bruises tingling. Was it worth while that
he should go on living? He listened to Elizabeth's breathing, and
remembering that he must have awaked her the previous night, he lay very
still. He was sick with infinite disgust at the new conditions of his
life. He hated it all, hated even the genial savage who had protected
him so generously. The monstrous fraud of civilisation glared stark
before his eyes: he saw it as a vast lunatic growth, producing a
deepening torrent of savagery below, and above ever more flimsy
gentility and silly wastefulness. He could see no redeeming reason, no
touch of honour, either in the life he had led or in this life to which
he had fallen. Civilisation presented itself as some catastrophic
project as little concerned with men--save as victims--as a cyclone or a
planetary collision. He and therefore all mankind, seemed living utterly
in vain. His mind sought some strange expedients of escape, if not for
himself then at least for Elizabeth. But he meant them for himself. What
if he hunted up Mwres and told him of their disaster? It came to him as
an astonishing thing how utterly Mwres and Bindon had passed out of his
range. Where were they? What were they doing? From that he passed to
thoughts of utter dishonour. And finally, not arising in any way out of
this mental tumult, but ending it as dawn ends the night, came the clear
and obvious conclusion of the night before: the conviction that he had
to go through with things; that apart from any remoter view and quite
sufficient for all his thought and energy, he had to stand up and fight
among his fellows and quit himself like a man.

The second night's instruction was perhaps less dreadful than the first;
and the third was even endurable, for Blunt dealt out some praise. The
fourth day Denton chanced upon the fact that the ferret-faced man was a
coward. There passed a fortnight of smouldering days and feverish
instruction at night; Blunt, with many blasphemies, testified that never
had he met so apt a pupil; and all night long Denton dreamt of kicks and
counters and gouges and cunning tricks. For all that time no further
outrages were attempted, for fear of Blunt; and then came the second
crisis. Blunt did not come one day--afterwards he admitted his
deliberate intention--and through the tedious morning Whitey awaited the
interval between the spells with an ostentatious impatience. He knew
nothing of the scrapping lessons, and he spent the time in telling
Denton and the vault generally of certain disagreeable proceedings he
had in mind.

Whitey was not popular, and the vault disgorged to see him haze the new
man with only a languid interest. But matters changed when Whitey's
attempt to open the proceedings by kicking Denton in the face was met by
an excellently executed duck, catch and throw, and completed the flight
of Whitey's foot in its orbit and brought Whitey's head into the
ash-heap that had once received Denton's. Whitey arose a shade whiter,
and now blasphemously bent upon vital injuries. There were indecisive
passages, foiled enterprises that deepened Whitey's evidently growing
perplexity; and then things developed into a grouping of Denton
uppermost with Whitey's throat in his hand, his knee on Whitey's chest,
and a tearful Whitey with a black face, protruding tongue and broken
finger endeavouring to explain the misunderstanding by means of hoarse
sounds. Moreover, it was evident that among the bystanders there had
never been a more popular person than Denton.

Denton, with proper precaution, released his antagonist and stood up.
His blood seemed changed to some sort of fluid fire, his limbs felt
light and supernaturally strong. The idea that he was a martyr in the
civilisation machine had vanished from his mind. He was a man in a world
of men.

The little ferret-faced man was the first in the competition to pat him
on the back. The lender of oil cans was a radiant sun of genial
congratulation... It seemed incredible to Denton that he had ever
thought of despair.

Denton was convinced that not only had he to go through with things, but
that he could. He sat on the canvas pallet expounding this new aspect to
Elizabeth. One side of his face was bruised. She had not recently
fought, she had not been patted on the back, there were not hot bruises
upon her face, only a pallor and a new line or so about the mouth. She
was taking the woman's share. She looked steadfastly at Denton in his
new mood of prophecy. "I feel that there is something," he was saying,
"something that goes on, a Being of Life in which we live and move and
have our being, something that began fifty--a hundred million years ago,
perhaps, that goes on--on: growing, spreading to things beyond
us--things that will justify us all... That will explain and justify my
fighting--these bruises, and all the pain of it. It's the chisel--yes,
the chisel of the Maker. If only I could make you feel as I feel, if I
could make you! You will dear, I know you will."

"No," she said in a low voice. "No, I shall not."

"So I might have thought--"

She shook her head. "No," she said, "I have thought as well. What you
say--doesn't convince me."

She looked at his face resolutely. "I hate it," she said, and caught at
her breath. "You do not understand, you do not think. There was a time
when you said things and I believed them. I am growing wiser. You are a
man, you can fight, force your way. You do not mind bruises. You can be
coarse and ugly, and still a man. Yes--it makes you. It makes you. You
are right. Only a woman is not like that. We are different. We let
ourselves get civilised too soon. This underworld is not for us."

She paused and began again.

"I hate it! I hate this horrible canvas! I hate it more than--more than
the worst that happened. It hurts my fingers to touch it. It is horrible
to the skin. And the women I work with day after day! I lie awake at
nights and think how I may be growing like them..."

She stopped. "I am growing like them!" she cried passionately.

Denton stared at her distress. "But--" he said and stopped.

"You don't understand. What have I? What have I to save me? You can
fight. Fighting is man's work. But women--women are different... I have
thought it all out, I have done nothing but think night and day. Look at
the colour of my face! I cannot go on. I cannot endure this life... I
cannot endure it."

She stopped. She hesitated.

"You do not know all," she said abruptly, and for an instant her lips
had a bitter smile. "I have been asked to leave you."

"Leave me!"

She made no answer save an affirmative movement of the head.

Denton stood up sharply. They stared at one another through a long
silence.

Suddenly she turned herself about, and flung face downward upon their
canvas bed. She did not sob, she made no sound. She lay still upon her
face. After a vast, distressful void her shoulders heaved and she began
to weep silently.

"Elizabeth!" he whispered--"Elizabeth!"

Very softly he sat down beside her, bent down, put his arm across her in
a doubtful caress, seeking vainly for some clue to this intolerable
situation.

"Elizabeth," he whispered in her ear.

She thrust him from her with her hand. "I cannot bear a child to be a
slave!" and broke out into loud and bitter weeping.

Denton's face changed--became blank dismay. Presently he slipped from
the bed and stood on his feet. All the complacency had vanished from his
face, had given place to impotent rage. He began to rave and curse at
the intolerable forces which pressed upon him, at all the accidents and
hot desires and heedlessness that mock the life of man. His little voice
rose in that little room, and he shook his fist, this animalcule of the
earth, at all that environed him about, at the millions about him, at
this past and future and all the insensate vastness of the overwhelming
city.


5. Bindon Intervenes

In Bindon's younger days he had dabbled in speculation and made three
brilliant flukes. For the rest of his life he had the wisdom to let
gambling alone, and the conceit to believe himself a very clever man. A
certain desire for influence and reputation, interested him in the
business intrigues of the giant city in which his flukes were made. He
became at last one of the most influential shareholders in the company
that owned the London flying-stages to which the aeroplanes came from
all parts of the world. This much for his public activities. In his
private life he was a man of pleasure. And this is the story of his
heart.

But before proceeding to such depths, one must devote a little time to
the exterior of this person. Its physical basis was slender, and short,
and dark; and the face, which was fine-featured and assisted by
pigments, varied from an insecure self-complacency to an intelligent
uneasiness. His face and head had been depilated, according to the
cleanly and hygienic fashion of the time, so that the colour and contour
of his hair varied with his costume. This he was constantly changing.

At times he would distend himself with pneumatic vestments in the rococo
vein. From among the billowy developments of this style, and beneath a
translucent and illuminated head-dress, his eyes watched jealously for
the respect of the less fashionable world. At other times he emphasised
his elegant slenderness in close-fitting garments of black satin. For
effects of dignity he would assume broad pneumatic shoulders, from which
hung a robe of carefully arranged folds of China silk, and a classical
Bindon in pink tights was also a transient phenomenon in the eternal
pageant of Destiny. In the days when he hoped to marry Elizabeth, he
sought to impress and charm her, and at the same time to take off
something of his burthen of forty years, by wearing the last fancy of
the contemporary buck, a costume of elastic material with distensible
warts and horns, changing in colour as he walked, by an ingenious
arrangement of versatile chromatophores. And no doubt, if Elizabeth's
affection had not been already engaged by the worthless Denton, and if
her tastes had not had that odd bias for old-fashioned ways, this
extremely chic conception would have ravished her. Bindon had consulted
Elizabeth's father before presenting himself in this grab--he was one of
those men who always invite criticism of their costume--and Mwres had
pronounced him all that the heart of woman could desire. But the affair
of the hypnotist proved that his knowledge of the heart of woman was
incomplete.

Bindon's idea of marrying had been formed some little time before Mwres
threw Elizabeth's budding womanhood in his way. It was one of Bindon's
most cherished secrets that he had a considerable capacity for a pure
and simple life of a grossly sentimental type. The thought imparted a
sort of pathetic seriousness to the offensive and quite inconsequent and
unmeaning excesses, which he was pleased to regard as dashing
wickedness, and which a number of good people also were so unwise as to
treat in that desirable manner. As a consequence of these excesses, and
perhaps by reason also of an inherited tendency to early decay, his
liver became seriously affected, and he suffered increasing
inconvenience, when travelling by aeroplane. It was during his
convalescence from a protracted bilious attack that it occurred to him
that in spite of all the terrible fascinations of Vice, if he found a
beautiful, gentle, good young women of a not too violently intellectual
type to devote her life to him, he might yet be saved to Goodness, and
even rear a spirited family in his likeness to solace his declining
years. But like so many experienced men of the world, he doubted if
there were any good women. Of course as he had heard tell he was
outwardly sceptical and privately much afraid.

When the aspiring Mwres effected his introduction to Elizabeth, it
seemed to him that his good fortune was complete. He fell in love with
her at once. Of course, he had always been falling in love since he was
sixteen, in accordance with the extremely varied recipes to be found in
the accumulated literature of many centuries. But this was different.
This was real love. It seemed to him to call forth all the lurking
goodness in his nature. He felt that for her sake he could give up a way
of life that had already produced the gravest lesions on his liver and
nervous system. His imagination presented him with idyllic pictures of
the life of the reformed rake. He would never be sentimental with her,
or silly; but always a little cynical and bitter, as became the past.
Yet he was sure she would have an intuition of his real greatness and
goodness. And in due course he would confess things to her, pour his
version of what he regarded as his wickedness--showing what a complex of
Goethe, and Benvenuto Cellini, and Shelley, and all those other chaps he
really was--into her shocked, very beautiful, and no doubt sympathetic
ear. And preparatory to these things he wooed her with infinite subtlety
and respect. And the reserve with which Elizabeth treated him seemed
nothing more nor less than an exquisite modesty touched and enhanced by
an equally exquisite lack of ideas.

Bindon knew nothing of her wandering affections, nor of the attempt made
by Mwres to utilise hypnotism as a corrective to this digression of her
heart; he conceived he was on the best of terms with Elizabeth, and had
made her quite successfully various significant presents of jewellery
and the more virtuous cosmetics, when her elopement with Denton threw
the world out of gear for him. His first aspect of the matter was rage
begotten of wounded vanity, and as Mwres was the most convenient person,
he vented the first brunt of it upon him.

He went immediately, and insulted the desolate father grossly, and then
spent an active and determined day going to and fro about the city and
interviewing people in a consistent and partly-successful attempt to
ruin that matrimonial speculator. The effectual nature of these
activities gave him a temporary exhilaration, and he went to the
dining-place he had frequented in his wicked days in a devil-may-care
frame of mind, and dined altogether too amply and cheerfully with two
other golden youths in their early forties. He threw up the game; no woman
was worth being good for, and he astonished himself by the strain of
witty cynicism he developed. One of the other desperate blades, warmed
with wine, made a facetious allusion to his disappointment, but at the
time this did not seem unpleasant.

The next morning found his liver and temper inflamed. He kicked his
phonographic-news machine to pieces, dismissed his valet, and resolved
that he would perpetrate a terrible revenge upon Elizabeth. Or Denton.
Or somebody. But anyhow, it was to be a terrible revenge; and the friend
who had made fun at him should no longer see him in the light of a
foolish girl's victim. He knew something of the little property that was
due to her, and that this would be the only support of the young couple
until Mwres should relent. If Mwres did not relent, and if unpropitious
things should happen to the affair in which Elizabeth's expectations
lay, they would come upon evil times and be sufficiently amenable to
temptation of a sinister sort. Bindon's imagination, abandoning its
beautiful idealism altogether, expanded the idea of temptation of a
sinister sort. He figured himself as the implacable, the intricate and
powerful man of wealth pursuing this maiden who had scorned him. And
suddenly her image came upon his mind vivid and dominant, and for the
first time in his life Bindon realised something of the real power of
passion.

His imagination stood aside like a respectful footman who has done his
work in ushering in the emotion.

"My God!" cried Bindon: "I will have her! If I have to kill myself to
get her! And that other fellow--!"

After an interview with his medical man and a penance for his overnight
excesses in the form of bitter drugs, a mitigated absolutely resolute
Bindon sought out Mwres. Mwres he found properly smashed, and
impoverished and humble, in a mood of frantic self-preservation, ready
to sell himself body and soul, much more any interest in a disobedient
daughter, to recover his lost position in the world. In the reasonable
discussion that followed, it was agreed that these misguided young
people should be left to sink into distress, or possibly even assisted
towards that improving discipline by Bindon's financial influence.

"And then?" said Mwres.

"They will come to the Labour Company," said Bindon. "They will wear the
blue canvas."

"And then?"

"She will divorce him," he said, and sat for a moment intent upon that
prospect. For in those days the austere limitations of divorce of
Victorian times were extraordinarily relaxed, and a couple might
separate on a hundred different scores.

Then suddenly Bindon astonished himself and Mwres by jumping to his
feet. "She shall divorce him!" he cried. "I will have it so--I will work
it so. By God! It shall be so. He shall be disgraced, so that she must.
He shall be smashed and pulverised."

The idea of smashing and pulverising inflamed him further. He began a
Jovian pacing up and down the little office. "I will have her," he
cried. "I will have her! Heaven and Hell shall not save her from me!"
His passion evaporated in its expression, and left him at the end simply
histrionic. He struck an attitude and ignored with heroic determination
a sharp twinge of pain about the diaphragm. And Mwres sat with his
pneumatic cap deflated and himself very visibly impressed.

And so, with a fair persistence, Bindon set himself to the work of being
Elizabeth's malignant providence, using with ingenious dexterity every
particle of advantage wealth in those days gave a man over his
fellow-creatures. A resort to the consolations of religion hindered
these operations not at all. He would go talk with an interesting,
experienced and sympathetic Father of the Huysmanite sect of the Isis
cult, about all the irrational little proceedings he was pleased to
regard as his Heaven-dismaying wickedness, and the interesting,
experienced and sympathetic Father representing Heaven dismayed, would
with a pleasing affectation of horror, suggest simple and easy penances,
and recommended a monastic foundation that was airy, cool, hygienic, and
not vulgarised, for viscerally disordered penitent sinners of the
refined and wealthy type. And after these excursions, Bindon would come
back to London quite active and passionate again. He would machinate
with really considerable energy, and repair to a certain gallery high
above the street of moving ways, from which he could view the entrance
to the barrack of the Labour Company in the ward which sheltered Denton
and Elizabeth. And at last one day he saw Elizabeth go in, and thereby
his passion was renewed.

So in the fullness of time the complicated devices of Bindon ripened,
and he could go to Mwres and tell him that the young people were near
despair.

"It's time for you," he said, "to let your parental affections have
play. She's been in blue canvas some months, and they've been cooped
together in one of those Labour dens, and the little girl is dead. She
knows now what his manhood is worth to her, by way of protection, poor
girl. She'll see things now in a clearer light. You go to her--I don't
want to appear in this affair yet--and point out to her how necessary it
is she should get a divorce from him..."

"She's obstinate," said Mwres doubtfully.

"Spirit!" said Bindon. She's a wonderful girl--a wonderful girl!"

"She'll refuse."

"Of course she will. But leave it open to her. Leave it open to her. And
some day--in that stuffy den, in that irksome, toilsome life they can't
help it--they'll have a quarrel. And then--"

Mwres meditated over the matter, and did as he was told.

Then Bindon, as he had arranged with his spiritual adviser, went into
retreat. The retreat of the Huysmanite sect was a beautiful place, with
the sweetest air in London, lit by natural sunlight, and with restful
quadrangles of real grass open to the sky, where at the same times the
penitent man of pleasure might enjoy all the pleasures of loafing and
all the satisfaction of distinguished austerity. And save for
participation in simple and wholesome dietary of the place and in
certain magnificent chants, Bindon spent all his time in meditation upon
the theme of Elizabeth, and the extreme purification his soul had
undergone since he first saw her, and whether he would be able to get a
dispensation to marry her from the experienced and sympathetic Father in
spite of the approaching "sin" of her divorce; and then... Bindon would
lean against a pillar of the quadrangle and lapse into reveries on the
superiority of virtuous love to any other of indulgence. A curious
feeling in his back and chest that was trying to attract his attention,
a disposition to be hot or shiver, a general sense of ill-health and
cutaneous discomfort he did his best to ignore. All that of course
belonged to the old life that he was shaking off.

When he came out of retreat he went at once to Mwres to ask for news of
Elizabeth. Mwres was clearly under the impression that he was an
exemplary father, profoundly touched about the heart by his child's
unhappiness. "She was pale," he said greatly moved; "She was pale. When
I asked her to come away and leave him--and be happy--she put her head
down upon the table--" Mwres sniffed--"and cried."

His agitation was so great that he could say no more.

"Ah!" said Bindon, respecting this manly grief. "Oh!" said Bindon quite
suddenly, with his hand to his side.

Mwres looked up sharply out of the pit of his sorrows, startled. "What's
the matter?" he asked, visibly concerned.

"A most violent pain. Excuse me! You were telling me about Elizabeth."

And Mwres, after a decent solicitude for Bindon's pain, proceeded with
his report. It was even unexpectedly hopeful. Elizabeth, in her first
emotion at discovering her father had not absolutely deserted her, had
been frank with him about her sorrows and disgusts.

"Yes," said Bindon, magnificently, "I shall have her yet." And yet then
that novel pain twitched him for the second time.

For these lower pains the priest was comparatively ineffectual,
inclining rather to regard the body and them as mental illusions
amenable to contemplation; so Bindon took it to a man of class he
loathed, a medical man of extraordinary repute and incivility. "We must
go all over you," said the medical man, and did so with the most
disgusting frankness. "Did you ever bring any children into the world?"
asked this gross materialist among other impertinent questions.

"Not that I know of," said Bindon, too amazed to stand upon his dignity.

"Ah!" said the medical man, and proceeded with his punching and
sounding. Medical science in those days was just reaching the beginning
of precision. "You'd better go right away," said the medical man, "and
make the Euthanasia. The sooner the better."

Bindon gasped. He had been trying not to understand the technical
explanations and anticipations in which the medical man had indulged.

"I say!" he said. "But do you mean to say... Your science..."

"Nothing," said the medical man. "A few opiates. The thing is your own
doing, you know, to a certain extent."

"I was sorely tempted in my youth."

"It's not that so much. But you come of a bad stock. Even if you'd have
taken precautions you'd have had bad times to wind up with. The mistake
was getting born. The indiscretions of the parents. And you've shirked
exercise, and so forth."

"I had no one to advise me."

"Medical men are always willing."

"I was a spirited young fellow."

"We won't argue; the mischief's done now. You've lived. We can't start
you again. You ought never to have started at all. Frankly--the
Euthanasia!"

Bindon hated him in silence for a space. Every word of this brutal
expert jarred upon his refinements. He was so gross, so impermeable to
all the subtler issues of being. But it is no good picking a quarrel
with a doctor. "My religious beliefs," he said. "I don't approve of
suicide."

"You've been doing it all your life."

"Well, anyway I've come to take a serious view of life now."

"You're bound to, if you go on living. You'll hurt. But for practical
purposes it's late. However, if you mean to do that--perhaps I'd better
mix you a little something. You'll hurt a great deal. These little
twinges..."

"Twinges!"

"Mere preliminary notices."

"How long can I go on? I mean, before I hurt--really."

"You'll get it hot soon. Perhaps three days."

Bindon tried to argue for an extension of time, and in the midst of his
pleading gasped, put his hand to his side. Suddenly the extraordinary
pathos of his life came to him clear and vivid. "It's hard," he said.
"It's infernally hard! I've been no man's enemy but my own. I've always
treated everybody quite fairly."

The medical man stared at him without any sympathy for some seconds. He
was reflecting how excellent it was that there were no more Bindons to
carry on that line of pathos. He felt quite optimistic. Then he turned
to his telephone and ordered up a prescription from the Central
Pharmacy.

He was interrupted by a voice behind him. "By God!" cried Bindon; "I'll
have her yet."

The physician stared over his shoulder at Bindon's expression, and then
altered the prescription.

So soon as this painful interview was over, Bindon gave way to rage. He
settled that the medical man was not only an unsympathetic brute and
wanting in the first beginnings of a gentleman, but also highly
incompetent; and he went off to four other practitioners in succession,
with a view to the establishment of this intuition. But to guard against
surprises he kept that little prescription in his pocket. With each he
began by expressing his grave doubts of the first doctor's intelligence,
honesty and professional knowledge, and then stated his symptoms,
suppressing only a few more material facts in each case. These were
always subsequently elicited by the doctor. In spite of the welcome
depreciation of another practitioner, none of these eminent specialists
would give Bindon any hope of eluding the anguish and helplessness that
loomed now close upon him. To the last of them he unburthened his mind
of an accumulated disgust with medical science. "After centuries and
centuries," he exclaimed hotly; "and you can do nothing--except admit
your helplessness. I say, 'save me--' and what do you do?"

"No doubt it's hard on you," said the doctor. "But you should have taken
precautions."

"How was I to know?"

"It wasn't our place to run after you," said the medical man, picking a
thread of cotton from his purple sleeve. "Why should we save you in
particular? You see--from one point of view--people with imagination and
passion like yours have to go--they have to go."

"Go?"

"Die out. It's an eddy."

He was a young man with a serene face. He smiled at Bindon. "We get on
with research, you know; we give advice when people have the sense to
ask for it. And we bide our time."

"Bide your time?"

"We hardly know enough yet to take over the management, you know."

"The management?"

"You needn't be anxious. Science is young yet. It's got to keep on
growing for a few generations. We know enough now to know we don't know
enough yet... But the time is coming, all the same. You won't see the
time. But, between ourselves, you rich men and party bosses, with your
natural play of passions and patriotism and religion and so forth, have
made rather a mess of things; haven't you? These underways! And all sort
of thing. Some of us have sort of fancy that in time we may know enough
to take over a little more than the ventilation and drains. Knowledge
keeps on piling up, you know. It keeps on growing. And there's not the
slightest hurry for a generation or so. Some day--some day, men will
live in a different way." He looked at Bindon and meditated. "There'll
be a lot of dying out before that day can come."

Bindon attempted to point out to this young man how silly and irrelevant
such talk was to a sick man like himself, how impertinent and uncivil it
was to him, an older man occupying a position in the official world of
extraordinary power and influence. He insisted that a doctor was paid to
cure people--he laid great stress on "paid--" and had no business to
glance even for a moment at "those other questions." "But we do," said
the young man, insisting upon facts, and Bindon lost his temper.

His indignation carried him home. That these incompetent impostors, who
were unable to save the life of a really influential man like himself,
should dream of some day robbing the legitimate property owners of
social control, of inflicting one knew not, what tyranny upon the world.
Curse science! He fumed over the intolerable prospect for some time, and
then the pain returned, and he recalled the made-up prescription of the
first doctor, still happily in his pocket. He took a dose forthwith.

It calmed and soothed him greatly, and he could sit down in his most
comfortable chair beside his library (of phonographic records), and
think over the altered aspect of affairs. His indignation passed, his
anger and his passion crumbled under the subtle attack of that
prescription, pathos became his sole ruler. He stared about him, at his
magnificent and voluptuously appointed apartment, at his statuary and
discreetly veiled pictures, and all the evidences of a cultivated and
elegant wickedness; he touched a stud and the sad piping of Tristan's
shepherd filled the air. His eye wandered from one object to another.
They were costly and gross and florid--but they were his. They presented
in concrete form his ideals, his conceptions of beauty and desire, his
idea of all that is precious in life. And now--he must leave it all like
a common man. He was, he felt, a slender and delicate flame, burning
out. So must all life flame up and pass, he thought. His eyes filled
with tears.

Then it came into his head that he was alone. Nobody cared for him,
nobody needed him! At any moment he might begin to hurt vividly. He
might even howl. Nobody would mind. According to all the doctors he
would have excellent reason for howling in a day or so. It recalled what
his spiritual adviser had said of the decline of faith and fidelity, the
degeneration of the age. He beheld himself as a pathetic proof of this;
he, the subtle, able important, voluptuous, cynical, complex Bindon,
possibly howling, and not one faithful simple creature in all the world
to howl in sympathy. Not one faithful simple soul was there--no shepherd
to pipe to him! Had all such faithful simple creatures vanished from
this harsh and urgent earth? He wondered whether the horrid vulgar crowd
that perpetually went about the city could possibly know what he thought
of them. If they did he felt sure some would try to earn a better
opinion. Surely the world went from bad to worse. It was becoming
impossible for Bindons. Perhaps some day... He was quite sure that the
one thing he had needed in life was sympathy. For a time he regretted
that he left no sonnets--no enigmatical pictures or something of that
sort behind him to carry on his being until at last the sympathetic mind
should come...

It seemed incredible to him that this that came was extinction. Yet his
sympathetic spiritual guide was in this matter annoyingly figurative and
vague. Curse science! It had undermined all faith--all hope. To go out,
to vanish from theatre and street, from office and dining-place, from
the dear eyes of womankind. And not to be missed! On the whole to leave
the world happier!

He reflected that he had never worn his heart upon his sleeve. Had he
after all been too unsympathetic? Few people could suspect how subtly
profound he really was beneath the mask of that cynical gaiety of his.
They would not understand the loss they had suffered. Elizabeth, for
example, had not suspected...

He had reserved that. His thoughts having come to Elizabeth gravitated
about her for some time. How little Elizabeth understood him!

That thought became intolerable. Before all other things he must set
that right. He realised that there was still something for him to do in
life, his struggle against Elizabeth was even yet not over. He could
never overcome her now, as he had hoped and prayed. But he might still
impress her!

From that idea he expanded. He might impress her profoundly--he might
impress her so that she should for evermore regret her treatment of him.
The thing that she must realise before everything else was his
magnanimity. His magnanimity! Yes! He had loved her with amazing
greatness of heart. He had not seen it so clearly before--but of course
he was going to leave her all his property. He saw it instantly, as a
thing determined and inevitable. She would think how good he was, how
spaciously generous; surrounded by all that makes life tolerable from
his hand, she would recall with infinite regret her scorn and coldness.
And when she sought expression for that regret, she would find that
occasion gone forever, she should be met by a locked door, by a
disdainful stillness, by a white dead face. He closed his eyes and
remained for a space imagining himself that white dead face.

From that he passed to the other aspect of the matter, but his
determination was assured. He meditated elaborately before he took
action, for the drug he had taken inclined him to a lethargic and
dignified melancholy. In certain respects he modified details. If he
left all his property to Elizabeth it would include the voluptuously
appointed room he occupied, and for many reasons he did not care to
leave that to her. On the other hand, it had to be left to some one. In
his clogged condition this worried him extremely.

In the end he decided to leave it to the sympathetic exponent of the
fashionable religious cult whose conversation had been so pleasing in
the past. "He will understand," said Bindon with a sentimental sigh. "He
knows what Evil means--he understands something of the Stupendous
Fascination of the Sphinx of Sin. Yes--he will understand." By that
phrase it was that Bindon was pleased to dignify certain unhealthy and
undignified departures from sane conduct to which a misguided vanity and
an ill-controlled curiosity had led him. He sat for a space thinking how
very Hellenic and Italian and Neronic, and all those things, he had
been. Even now--might one not try a sonnet? A penetrating voice to echo
down the ages; sensuous, sinister, and sad. For a space he forgot
Elizabeth. In the course of half an hour he spoilt three phonographic
coils, got a headache, took a second dose to calm himself, and reverted
to magnanimity and his former design.

At last he faced the unpalatable problem of Denton. It needed all his
newborn magnanimity before he could swallow the thought of Denton; but
at last this greatly misunderstood man, assisted by his sedative and the
near approach of death, effected even that. If he was at all exclusive
about Denton, if he should display the slightest distrust, if he
attempted any specific exclusion of that young man, she
might--misunderstand. Yes--she should have her Denton still. His
magnanimity must go even to that. He tried to think only of Elizabeth in
the matter.

He rose with a sigh, and limped across to the telephonic apparatus that
communicated with his solicitor. In ten minutes a will duly attested and
with its proper thumb-mark signature lay in the solicitor's office three
miles away. And then for a space Bindon sat very still.

Suddenly he started out of a vague reverie and pressed an investigatory
hand to his side.

Then he jumped eagerly to his feet and rushed to the telephone. The
Euthanasia Company had rarely been called by a client in a greater
hurry.

So it came at last that Denton and his Elizabeth, against all hope,
returned unseparated from the labour servitude to which they had fallen.
Elizabeth came out from her cramped subterranean den of metal-beaters
and all the sordid circumstances of blue canvas, as one comes out of a
nightmare. Back towards the sunlight their fortune took them; once the
bequest was known to them, the bare thought of another day's hammering
became intolerable. They went up long lifts and stairs to levels that
they had not seen since the days of their disaster. At first she was
full of this sensation of escape; even to think of the underways was
intolerable; only after many months could she begin to recall with
sympathy the faded women who were still below there, murmuring scandals
and reminiscences and folly, and tapping away their lives.

Her choice of apartments they presently took expressed the vehemence of
her release. They were rooms upon the very verge of the city; they had a
roof space and a balcony upon the city wall, wide open to the sun and
wind, the country and the sky.

And in that balcony comes the last scene in this story. It was summer
sunsetting, and the hills of Surrey were very blue and clear. Denton
leant upon the balcony regarding them, and Elizabeth sat by his side.
Very wide and spacious was the view, from their balcony hung five
hundred feet above the ancient level of the ground. The oblong of the
Food Company, broken here and there by the ruins--grotesque little holes
and sheds--of the ancient suburbs, and intersected by shinning streams
of sewage, passed at last into a remote diapering at the foot of the
distant hills. There once had been the squatting-place of the children
of Uya. On those further slopes gaunt machines of unknown import worked
slackly at the end of their spell, and the hill crest was set with
stagnant wind vanes. Along the great south road the Labour Company's
field workers in huge wheeled mechanical vehicles were hurrying back to
their meals, their last spell finished. And through the air a dozen
little private aeropiles sailed down towards the city. Familiar scene as
it was to the eyes of Denton and Elizabeth, it would have filled the
minds of their ancestors with incredulous amazement. Denton's thoughts
fluttered towards the future in a vain attempt at what that scene might
be in another two hundred years, and recoiling turned, towards the past.

He shared something of the growing knowledge of the time; he could
picture the quaint smoke-grimed Victorian city with its narrow little
roads of beaten earth, it's wide common-land, ill-organised, ill-built
suburbs, and irregular enclosures; the old countryside of the Stuart
times, with its little villages and its petty London; the England of the
monasteries, the far older England of the Roman dominion, and then
before that a wild country; with here and there the huts of some warring
tribe. These huts must have come and gone and come again through a space
of years that made the Roman camp and villa seem but yesterday; and
before those years, before even the huts, there had been men in the
valley. Even then--so recent had it all been when one judged it by the
standards of geological time--this valley had been here; and those hills
yonder, higher perhaps, and snow-tipped, had still been yonder hills,
and the Thames had flowed down from the Cotswolds to the sea. But the
men had been but the shapes of men, creatures of darkness and ignorance,
victims of beast and floods, storms and pestilence and incessant hunger.
They had held a precarious foothold amidst bears and lions and all the
monstrous violence of the past. Already some at least of these enemies
were overcome...

For a time Denton pursued the thoughts of this spacious vision, trying
in obedience to his instinct to find his place and proportion in the
scheme.

"It has been chance," he said, "it has been luck. We have come through.
It happens we have come through. Not by any strength of our own... And
yet... No. I don't know."

He was silent for a long time before he spoke again.

"After all--there is a long time yet. There have scarcely been men for
twenty thousand years--and there has been life for twenty millions. And
what are generations? What are generations? It is enormous, and we are
so little. Yet we know--we feel. We are not dumb atoms, we are part of
it--part of it--to the limits of our strength and will. Even to die is
part of it. Whether we die or live, we are in the making... As time goes
on perhaps--men will be wiser... Wiser... Will they ever understand?"

He became silent again. Elizabeth said nothing to these things, but she
regarded his dreaming face with infinite affection. Her mind was not
very active that evening. A great contentment possessed her. After a
time she laid a gentle hand on his beside her. He fondled it softly,
still looking out upon the spacious gold-woven view. So they sat as the
sun went down. Until presently Elizabeth shivered. Denton recalled
himself abruptly from these spacious issues of his leisure, and went in
to fetch her shawl.




THE MAN WHO COULD WORK MIRACLES


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

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

"So you say," said Mr. Beamish, repulsing him.

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

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

"You say it couldn't," said Beamish.

"And you?" said Fotheringay. "You don't mean to say--eh?"

"No," said Beamish reluctantly. "No, it couldn't."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For a time Mr. Fotheringay sat in the darkness, perfectly still. "It did
happen, after all," he said. "And 'ow I'm to explain it I don't know."
He sighed heavily, and began feeling in his pockets for a match. He
could find none, and he rose and groped about the toilet-table. "I wish
I had a match," he said. He resorted to his coat, and there was none
there, and then it dawned upon him that miracles were possible even with
matches. He extended a hand and scowled at it in the dark. "Let there be
a match in that hand," he said. He felt some light object fall across
his palm, and his fingers closed upon a match.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What d'yer mean by it?" asked the constable. "Hullo! It's you, is it?
The gent that broke the lamp at the Long Dragon!"

"I don't mean anything by it," said Mr. Fotheringay. "Nothing at all."

"What d'yer do it for then?"

"Oh, bother!" said Mr. Fotheringay.

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

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

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

"Well?"

He could think of no way but the truth. "I was working a miracle." He
tried to speak in an off-hand way, but try as he would he couldn't.

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

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

He was alone!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's possible," said Mr. Maydig. "Something of the sort, perhaps, is
possible."

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

He knitted his brows, pointed to the tobacco-jar and said: "Be a bowl of
violets."

The tobacco-jar did as it was ordered.

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

"How did you do that?" he asked.

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

"It's a most extraordinary occurrence."

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

"Is that--the only thing? Could you do other things besides that?"

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

"It's astonishing. It's incredible. You are either a most
extraordinary... But no--"

"I could change it into anything," said Mr. Fotheringay. "Just anything.
Here! Be a pigeon, will you?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"My dear Mr. Fotheringay! Of course! No--I didn't think."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The thing's unlimited seemingly," said Mr. Fotheringay. "And about Mr.
Winch--"

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

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

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

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

"But--," said Mr. Fotheringay.

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

"Joshua?" said Mr. Fotheringay.

"Joshua," said Mr. Maydig. "Why not? Stop it."

Mr. Fotheringay looked at the moon.

"That's a bit tall," he said after a pause.

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

"H'm!" said Mr. Fotheringay. "Well." He sighed. "I'll try. Here--"

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

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

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

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

"Where's Maydig?

"What a confounded mess everything's in!"

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

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

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

You see when Mr. Fotheringay had arrested the rotation of the solid
globe, he had made no stipulation concerning the trifling movables upon
its surface. And the earth spins so fast that the surface at its equator
is travelling at rather more than a thousand miles an hour, and in these
latitudes at more than half that pace. So that the village, and Mr.
Maydig, and Mr. Fotheringay, and everybody and everything had been
jerked violently forward at about nine miles per second--that is to say,
much more violently than if they had been fired out of a cannon. And
every human being, every living creature, every house, and every
tree--all the world as we know it--had been so jerked and smashed and
utterly destroyed. That was all.

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

"Maydig!" screamed Mr. Fotheringay's feeble voice amid the elemental
uproar. "Here!--Maydig!"

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

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

"I know," said Mr. Fotheringay. "And for goodness' sake let's have it
right this time."

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

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

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

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

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

"So you say," said a voice.

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

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

"That's what you think," said Toddy Beamish, and "Prove it if you can."

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




TWELVE STORIES AND A DREAM--



FILMER


In truth the mastery of flying was the work of thousands of men--this
man a suggestion and that an experiment, until at last only one vigorous
intellectual effort was needed to finish the work. But the inexorable
injustice of the popular mind has decided that of all these thousands,
one man, and that a man who never flew, should be chosen as the
discoverer, just as it has chosen to honour Watt as the discoverer of
steam and Stephenson of the steam-engine. And surely of all honoured
names none is so grotesquely and tragically honoured as poor Filmer's,
the timid, intellectual creature who solved the problem over which the
world had hung perplexed and a little fearful for so many generations,
the man who pressed the button that has changed peace and warfare and
wellnigh every condition of human life and happiness. Never has that
recurring wonder of the littleness of the scientific man in the face of
the greatness of his science found such an amazing exemplification. Much
concerning Filmer is, and must remain, profoundly obscure--Filmers
attract no Boswells--but the essential facts and the concluding scene
are clear enough, and there are letters, and notes, and casual allusions
to piece the whole together. And this is the story one makes, putting
this thing with that, of Filmer's life and death.

The first authentic trace of Filmer on the page of history is a document
in which he applies for admission as a paid student in physics to the
Government laboratories at South Kensington, and therein he describes
himself as the son of a "military bootmaker" ("cobbler" in the vulgar
tongue) of Dover, and lists his various examination proofs of a high
proficiency in chemistry and mathematics. With a certain want of dignity
he seeks to enhance these attainments by a profession of poverty and
disadvantages, and he writes of the laboratory as the "gaol" of his
ambitions, a slip which reinforces his claim to have devoted himself
exclusively to the exact sciences. The document is endorsed in a manner
that shows Filmer was admitted to this coveted opportunity; but until
quite recently no traces of his success in the Government institution
could be found.

It has now, however been shown that in spite of his professed zeal for
research Filmer, before he had held this scholarship a year, was tempted
by the possibility of a small increase in his immediate income, to
abandon it in order to become one of the nine-pence-an-hour computers
employed by a well-known Professor in his vicarious conduct of those
extensive researches of his in solar physics--researches which are still
a matter of perplexity to astronomers. Afterwards, for the space of
seven years, save for the pass lists of the London University, in which
he is seen to climb slowly to a double first-class B.Sc., in mathematics
and chemistry, there is no evidence of how Filmer passed his life. No
one knows how or where he lived, though it seems highly probable that he
continued to support himself by teaching while he prosecuted the studies
necessary for this distinction. And then, oddly enough, one finds him
mentioned in the correspondence of Arthur Hicks, the poet.

"You remember Filmer," Hicks writes to his friend Vance; "well, he
hasn't altered a bit, the same hostile mumble and the nasty chin--how
can a man contrive to be always three days from shaving--? And a sort of
furtive air of being engaged in sneaking in front of one; even his coat
and that frayed collar of his show no further signs of the passing
years. He was writing in the library and I sat down beside him in the
name of God's charity, whereupon he deliberately insulted me by covering
up his memoranda. It seems he has some brilliant research on hand that
he suspects me of all people--with a Bodley Booklet a-printing--! Of
stealing. He has taken remarkable honours at the University--he went
through them with a sort of hasty slobber, as though he feared I might
interrupt him before he had told me all--and he spoke of taking his
D.Sc. as one might speak of taking a cab. And he asked what I was
doing--with a sort of comparative accent, and his arm was spread
nervously, positively a protecting arm, over the paper that hid the
precious idea--his one hopeful idea.

"'Poetry,' he said, 'poetry. And what do you profess to teach in it,
Hicks?'

"The thing's a Provincial professorling in the very act of budding, and
I thank the Lord devoutly that but for the precious gift of indolence I
also might have gone this way to D.Sc. and destruction..."

A curious little vignette that I am inclined to think caught Filmer in
or near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was wrong in anticipating
a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse of him is
lecturing on "rubber and rubber substitutes," to the Society of Arts--he
had become manager to a great plastic-substance manufactory--and at that
time, it is now known, he was a member of the Aeronautical Society,
albeit he contributed nothing to the discussions of that body,
preferring no doubt to mature his great conception without external
assistance. And within two years of that paper before the Society of
Arts he was hastily taking out a number of patents and proclaiming in
various undignified ways the completion of the divergent inquiries which
made his flying machine possible. The first definite statement to that
effect appeared in a halfpenny evening paper through the agency of a man
who lodged in the same house with Filmer. His final haste after his long
laborious secret patience seems to have been due to a needless panic,
Bootle, the notorious American scientific quack, having made an
announcement that Filmer interpreted wrongly as an anticipation of his
idea.

Now what precisely was Filmer's idea? Really a very simple one. Before
his time the pursuit of aeronautics had taken two divergent lines, and
had developed on the one hand balloons--large apparatus lighter than
air, easy in ascent, and comparatively safe in descent, but floating
helplessly before any breeze that took them; and on the other, flying
machines that flew only in theory--vast flat structures heavier than
air, propelled and kept up by heavy engines and for the most part
smashing at the first descent. But, neglecting the fact that the
inevitable final collapse rendered them impossible, the weight of the
flying machines gave them this theoretical advantage, that they could go
through the air against a wind, a necessary condition if aerial
navigation was to have any practical value. It is Filmer's particular
merit that he perceived the way in which the contrasted and hitherto
incompatible merits of balloon and heavy flying machine might be
combined in one apparatus, which should be at choice either heavier or
lighter than air. He took hints from the contractile bladders of fish
and the pneumatic cavities of birds. He devised an arrangement of
contractile and absolutely closed balloons which when expanded could
lift the actual flying apparatus with ease, and when retracted by the
complicated "musculature" he wove about them, were withdrawn almost
completely into the frame; and he built the large framework which these
balloons sustained, of hollow, rigid tubes, the air in which, by an
ingenious contrivance, was automatically pumped out as the apparatus
fell, and which then remained exhausted so long as the aeronaut desired.
There were no wings or propellers to his machine, such as there had been
to all previous aeroplanes, and the only engine required was the compact
and powerful little appliance needed to contract the balloons. He
perceived that such an apparatus as he had devised might rise with frame
exhausted and balloons expanded to a considerable height, might then
contract its balloons and let the air into its frame, and by an
adjustment of its weights slide down the air in any desired direction.
As it fell it would accumulate velocity and at the same time lose
weight, and the momentum accumulated by its down-rush could be utilised
by means of a shifting of its weights to drive it up in the air again as
the balloons expanded. This conception, which is still the structural
conception of all successful flying machines needed, however a vast
amount of toil upon its details before it could actually be
realised, and such toil Filmer--as he was accustomed to tell the
numerous interviewers who crowded upon him in the heyday of his
fame--"ungrudingly and unsparingly gave." His particular difficulty was
the elastic lining of the contractile balloon. He found he needed a new
substance, and in the discovery and manufacture of that new substance he
had, as he never failed to impress upon the interviewers, "performed a
far more arduous work than even in the actual achievement of my
seemingly greater discovery."

But it must not be imagined that these interviews followed hard upon
Filmer's proclamation of his invention. An interval of nearly five years
elapsed during which he timidly remained at his rubber factory--he seems
to have been entirely dependent on his small income from this
source--making misdirected attempts to assure a quite indifferent public
that he really had invented what he had invented. He occupied the
greater part of his leisure in the composition of letters to the
scientific and daily press, and so forth, stating precisely the net
result of his contrivances, and demanding financial aid. That alone
would have sufficed for the suppression of his letters. He spent such
holidays as he could arrange in unsatisfactory interviews with the
doorkeepers of leading London papers--he was singularly not adapted for
inspiring hall-porters with confidence--and he positively attempted to
induce the War Office to take up his work with him. There remains a
confidential letter from Major-General Volleyfire to the Earl of Frogs.
"The man's a crank and a bounder to boot," says the Major-General in his
bluff, sensible army way, and so left it open for the Japanese to
secure, as they subsequently did, the priority in this side of
warfare--a priority they still to our great discomfort retain.

And then by a stroke of luck the membrane Filmer had invented for his
contractile balloon was discovered to be useful for the valves of a new
oil-engine, and he obtained the means for making a trial model of his
invention. He threw up his rubber factory appointment, desisted from all
further writing, and with a certain secrecy that seems to have been an
inseparable characteristic of all his proceedings, set to work upon the
apparatus. He seems to have directed the making of its parts and
collected most of it in a room in Shoreditch, but its final putting
together was done at Dymchurch, in Kent. He did not make the affair
large enough to carry a man, but he made an extremely ingenious use of
what were then called the Marconi rays to control its flight. The first
flight of this first practicable flying machine took place over some
fields near Burford Bridge, near Hythe, in Kent, and Filmer followed and
controlled its flight upon a specially constructed motor tricycle.

The flight was, considering all things, an amazing success. The
apparatus was brought in a cart from Dymchurch to Burford Bridge,
ascended there to a height of nearly three hundred feet, swooped thence
very nearly back to Dymchurch, came about in its sweep, rose again,
circled, and finally sank uninjured in a field behind the Burford Bridge
Inn. At its descent a curious thing happened. Filmer got off his
tricycle, scrambled over the intervening dyke, advanced perhaps twenty
yards towards his triumph, threw out his arms in a strange
gesticulation, and fell down in a dead faint. Every one could then
recall the ghastliness of his features and all the evidences of extreme
excitement they had observed throughout the trial, things they might
otherwise have forgotten. Afterwards in the inn he had an unaccountable
gust of hysterical weeping.

Altogether there were not twenty witnesses of this affair, and those for
the most part uneducated men. The New Romney doctor saw the ascent but
not the descent, his horse being frightened by the electrical apparatus
on Filmer's tricycle and giving him a nasty spill. Two members of the
Kent constabulary watched the affair from a cart in an unofficial
spirit, and a grocer calling round the Marsh for orders and two lady
cyclists seem almost to complete the list of educated people. There were
two reporters present, one representing a Folkestone paper and the other
being a fourth-class interviewer and "symposium" journalist, whose
expenses down, Filmer anxious as ever for adequate advertisement--and
now quite realising the way in which adequate advertisement may be
obtained--had paid. The latter was one of those writers who can throw a
convincing air of unreality over the most credible events, and his
half-facetious account of the affair appeared in the magazine page of a
popular journal. But happily for Filmer, this person's colloquial
methods were more convincing. He went to offer some further screed upon
the subject to Banghurst, the proprietor of the 'New Paper,' and one of
the ablest and most unscrupulous men in London journalism, and Banghurst
instantly seized upon the situation. The interviewer vanishes from the
narrative, no doubt very doubtfully remunerated, and Banghurst,
Banghurst himself, double chin, grey twill suit, abdomen, voice,
gestures and all, appears at Dymchurch, following his large, unrivalled
journalistic nose. He had seen the whole thing at a glance, just what it
was and what it might be.

At his touch, as it were, Filmer's long-pent investigations exploded
into fame. He instantly and most magnificently was a Boom. One turns
over the files of the journals of the year 1907 with a quite incredulous
recognition of how swift and flaming the boom of those days could be.
The July papers know nothing of flying, see nothing in flying, state by
a most effective silence that men never would, could or should fly. In
August flying, and Filmer, and flying, and parachutes, and aerial
tactics, and the Japanese Government, and Filmer, and again flying,
shouldered the war in Yunnan and the gold mines of Upper Greenland off
the leading page. And Banghurst had given ten thousand pounds, and
further, Banghurst was giving five thousand pounds, and Banghurst had
devoted his well-known, magnificent (but hitherto sterile) private
laboratories and several acres of land near his private residence on the
Surrey hills to the strenuous and violent completion--Banghurst
fashion--of the life-size practicable flying machine. Meanwhile, in the
sight of privileged multitudes in the walled-garden of the Banghurst
town residence in Fulham, Filmer was exhibited at weekly garden parties
putting the working model through its paces. At enormous initial cost,
but with a final profit, the 'New Paper' presented its readers with a
beautiful photographic souvenir of the first of these occasions.

Here again the correspondence of Arthur Hicks and his friend Vance comes
to our aid.

"I saw Filmer in his glory," he writes, with just the touch of envy
natural to his position as a poet passe. "The man is brushed and shaved,
dressed in the fashion of a Royal-Institution-Afternoon Lecturer, the
very newest shape in frock-coats and long patent shoes, and altogether
in a state of extraordinary streakiness between an owlish great man and
a scared abashed self-conscious bounder cruelly exposed. He hasn't a
touch of colour in the skin of his face, his head juts forward, and
those queer little dark amber eyes of his watch furtively round him for
his fame. His clothes fit perfectly and yet sit upon him as though he
had bought them ready-made. He speaks in a mumble still, but he says,
you perceive indistinctly, enormous self-assertive things, he backs into
the rear of groups by instinct if Banghurst drops the line for a minute,
and when he walks across Banghurst's lawn one perceives him a little out
of breath and going jerky, and that his weak white hands are clenched.
His is a state of tension--horrible tension. And he is the Greatest
Discoverer of This or Any Age--The Greatest Discoverer of This or Any
Age! What strikes one so forcibly about him is that he didn't somehow
quite expect it ever, at any rate, not at all like this. Banghurst is
about everywhere, the energetic M.C. of his great little catch, and I
swear he will have every one down on his lawn there before he has
finished with the engine; he had bagged the prime minister yesterday,
and he, bless his heart! Didn't look particularly outsize, on the very
first occasion. Conceive it! Filmer! Our obscure unwashed Filmer, the
Glory of British science! Duchesses crowd upon him, beautiful, bold
peeresses say in their beautiful, clear loud voices--have you noticed
how penetrating the great lady is becoming nowadays--? 'Oh, Mr. Filmer,
how did you do it?'

"Common men on the edge of things are too remote for the answer. One
imagines something in the way of that interview, 'toil ungrudgingly and
unsparingly given, Madam, and perhaps--I don't know--but perhaps a
little special aptitude.'"

So far Hicks, and the photographic supplement to the 'New Paper' is in
sufficient harmony with the description. In one picture the machine
swings down towards the river, and the tower of Fulham church appears
below it through a gap in the elms, and in another, Filmer sits at his
guiding batteries, and the great and beautiful of the earth stand around
him, with Banghurst massed modestly but resolutely in the rear. The
grouping is oddly apposite. Occluding much of Banghurst, and looking
with a pensive, speculative expression at Filmer, stands the Lady Mary
Elkinghorn, still beautiful, in spite of the breath of scandal and her
eight-and-thirty years, the only person whose face does not admit a
perception of the camera that was in the act of snapping them all.

So much for the exterior facts of the story, but, after all, they are
very exterior facts. About the real interest of the business one is
necessarily very much in the dark. How was Filmer feeling at the time?
How much was a certain unpleasant anticipation present inside that very
new and fashionable frock-coat? He was in the halfpenny, penny,
sixpenny, and more expensive papers alike, and acknowledged by the whole
world as "The Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age." He had invented a
practicable flying machine, and every day down among the Surrey hills
the life-sized model was getting ready. And when it was ready, it
followed as a clear inevitable consequence of his having invented and
made it--everybody in the world, indeed, seemed to take it for granted;
there wasn't a gap anywhere in that serried front of anticipation--that
he would proudly and cheerfully get aboard it, ascend with it, and fly.

But we know now pretty clearly that simple pride and cheerfulness in
such an act were singularly out of harmony with Filmer's private
constitution. It occurred to no one at the time, but there the fact is.
We can guess with some confidence now that it must have been drifting
about in his mind a great deal during the day, and from a little note to
his physician complaining of persistent insomnia, we have the soundest
reason for supposing it dominated his nights--the idea that it would be
after all, in spite of his theoretical security, an abominably
sickening, uncomfortable, and dangerous thing for him to flap about in
nothingness a thousand feet or so in the air. It must have dawned upon
him quite early in the period of being the Greatest Discoverer of This
or Any Age, the vision of doing this and that with an extensive void
below. Perhaps somewhen in his youth he had looked down a great height
or fallen down in some excessively uncomfortable way; perhaps some habit
of sleeping on the wrong side had resulted in that disagreeable falling
nightmare one knows, and given him his horror; of the strength of that
horror there remains now not a particle of doubt.

Apparently he had never weighed this duty of flying in his earlier days
of research; the machine had been his end, but now things were opening
out beyond his end, and particularly this giddy whirl up above there. He
was a Discoverer and he had Discovered. But he was not a Flying Man, and
it was only now that he was beginning to perceive clearly that he was
expected to fly. Yet, however much the thing was present in his mind he
gave no expression to it until the very end, and meanwhile he went to
and fro from Banghurst's magnificent laboratories, and was interviewed
and lionised, and wore good clothes, and ate good food, and lived in an
elegant flat, enjoying a very abundant feast of such good, coarse,
wholesome Fame and Success as a man, starved for all his years as he had
been starved, might be reasonably expected to enjoy.

After a time, the weekly gatherings in Fulham ceased. The model had
failed one day just for a moment to respond to Filmer's guidance, or he
had been distracted by the compliments of an archbishop. At any rate, it
suddenly dug its nose into the air just a little too steeply as the
archbishop was sailing through a Latin quotation for all the world like
an archbishop in a book, and it came down in the Fulham Road within
three yards of a 'bus horse. It stood for a second perhaps, astonishing
and in its attitude astonished, then it crumpled, shivered into pieces,
and the 'bus horse was incidentally killed.

Filmer lost the end of the archiepiscopal compliment. He stood up and
stared as his invention swooped out of sight and reach of him. His long,
white hands still gripped his useless apparatus. The archbishop followed
his skyward stare with an apprehension unbecoming in an archbishop.

Then came the crash and the shouts and uproar from the road to relieve
Filmer's tension. "My God!" he whispered, and sat down.

Every one else almost was staring to see where the machine had vanished,
or rushing into the house.

The making of the big machine progressed all the more rapidly for this.
Over its making presided Filmer, always a little slow and very careful
in his manner, always with a growing preoccupation in his mind. His care
over the strength and soundness of the apparatus was prodigious. The
slightest doubt, and he delayed everything until the doubtful part could
be replaced. Wilkinson, his senior assistant, fumed at some of these
delays, which, he insisted, were for the most part unnecessary.
Banghurst magnified the patient certitude of Filmer in the 'New Paper,'
and reviled it bitterly to his wife, and MacAndrew, the second
assistant, approved Filmer's wisdom. "We're not wanting a fiasco, man,"
said MacAndrew. "He's perfectly well advised."

And whenever an opportunity arose Filmer would expound to Wilkinson and
MacAndrew just exactly how every part of the flying machine was to be
controlled and worked, so that in effect they would be just as capable,
and even more capable, when at last the time came, of guiding it through
the skies.

Now I should imagine that if Filmer had seen fit at this stage to define
just what he was feeling, and to take a definite line in the matter of
his ascent, he might have escaped that painful ordeal quite easily. If
he had had it clearly in his mind he could have done endless things. He
would surely have found no difficulty with a specialist to demonstrate a
weak heart, or something gastric or pulmonary, to stand in his way--that
is the line I am astonished he did not take--or he might, had he been
man enough, have declared simply and finally that he did not intend to
do the thing. But the fact is, though the dread was hugely present in
his mind, the thing was by no means sharp and clear. I fancy that all
through this period he kept telling himself that when the occasion came
he would find himself equal to it. He was like a man just gripped by a
great illness, who says he feels a little out of sorts, and expects to
be better presently. Meanwhile he delayed the completion of the machine,
and let the assumption that he was going to fly it take root and
flourish exceedingly about him. He even accepted anticipatory
compliments on his courage. And barring this secret squeamishness, there
can be no doubt he found all the praise and distinction and fuss he got
a delightful and even intoxicating draught.

The Lady Mary Elkinghorn made things a little more complicated for him.

How that began was a subject of inexhaustible speculation to Hicks.
Probably in the beginning she was just a little "nice" to him with that
impartial partiality of hers, and it may be that to her eyes, standing
out conspicuously as he did ruling his monster in the upper air, he had
a distinction that Hicks was not disposed to find. And somehow they must
have had a moment of sufficient isolation, and the great Discoverer a
moment of sufficient courage for something just a little personal to be
mumbled or blurted. However it began, there is no doubt that it did
begin, and presently became quite perceptible to a world accustomed to
find in the proceedings of the Lady Mary Elkinghorn a matter of
entertainment. It complicated things, because the state of love in such
a virgin mind as Filmer's would brace his resolution, if not
sufficiently, at any rate considerably towards facing a danger he
feared, and hampered him in such attempts at evasion as would otherwise
be natural and congenial.

It remains a matter for speculation just how the Lady Mary felt for
Filmer and just what she thought of him. At thirty-eight one may have
gathered much wisdom and still be not altogether wise, and the
imagination still functions actively enough in creating glamours and
effecting the impossible. He came before her eyes as a very central man,
and that always counts, and he had powers, unique powers as it seemed,
at any rate in the air. The performance with the model had just a touch
of the quality of a potent incantation, and women have ever displayed an
unreasonable disposition to imagine that when a man has powers he must
necessarily have Power. Given so much, and what was not good in Filmer's
manner and appearance became an added merit. He was modest, he hated
display, but given an occasion where true qualities are needed,
then--then one would see!

The late Mrs. Bampton thought it wise to convey to Lady Mary her opinion
that Filmer, all things considered, was rather a "grub." "He's certainly
not a sort of man I have ever met before," said the Lady Mary, with a
quite unruffled serenity. And Mrs. Bampton, after a swift, imperceptible
glance at that serenity, decided that so far as saying anything to Lady
Mary went, she had done as much as could be expected of her. But she
said a great deal to other people.

And at last, without any undue haste or unseemliness, the day dawned,
the great day, when Banghurst had promised his public--the world in
fact--that flying should be finally attained and overcome. Filmer saw it
dawn, watched even in the darkness before it dawned, watched its stars
fade and the grey and pearly pinks give place at last to the clear blue
sky of a sunny, cloudless day. He watched it from the window of his
bedroom in the new-built wing of Banghurst's Tudor house. And as the
stars were overwhelmed and the shapes and substances of things grew into
being out of the amorphous dark, he must have seen more and more
distinctly the festive preparations beyond the beech clumps near the
green pavilion in the outer park, the three stands for the privileged
spectators, the raw, new fencing of the enclosure, the sheds and
workshops, the Venetian masts and fluttering flags that Banghurst had
considered essential, black and limp in the breezeless dawn, and amidst
all these things a great shape covered with tarpauling. A strange and
terrible portent for humanity was that shape, a beginning that must
surely spread and widen and change and dominate all the affairs of men,
but to Filmer it is very doubtful whether it appeared in anything but a
narrow and personal light. Several people heard him pacing in the small
hours--for the vast place was packed with guests by a proprietor editor
who, before all understood compression. And about five o'clock, if not
before, Filmer left his room and wandered out of the sleeping house into
the park, alive by that time with sunlight and birds and squirrels and
the fallow deer. MacAndrew, who was also an early riser, met him near
the machine, and they went and had a look at it together.

It is doubtful if Filmer took any breakfast, in spite of the urgency of
Banghurst. So soon as the guests began to be about in some number he
seems to have retreated to his room. Thence about ten he went into the
shrubbery, very probably because he had seen the Lady Mary Elkinghorn
there. She was walking up and down, engaged in conversation with her old
school friend, Mrs. Brewis-Craven, and although Filmer had never met the
latter lady before, he joined them and walked beside them for some time.
There were several silences in spite of the Lady Mary's brilliance. The
situation was a difficult one, and Mrs. Brewis-Craven did not master its
difficulty. "He struck me," she said afterwards with a luminous
self-contradiction, "as a very unhappy person who had something to say,
and wanted before all things to be helped to say it. But how was one to
help him when one didn't know what it was?"

At half-past eleven the enclosures for the public in the outer park were
crammed, there was an intermittent stream of equipages along the belt
which circles the outer park, and the house party was dotted over the
lawn and shrubbery and the corner of the inner park, in a series of
brilliantly attired knots, all making for the flying machine. Filmer
walked in a group of three with Banghurst, who was supremely and
conspicuously happy, and Sir Theodore Hickle, the president of the
Aeronautical Society. Mrs. Banghurst was close behind with the Lady Mary
Elkinghorn, Georgina Hickle, and the Dean of Stays. Banghurst was large
and copious in speech, and such interstices as he left were filled in by
Hickle with complimentary remarks to Filmer. And Filmer walked between
them saying not a word except by way of unavoidable reply. Behind, Mrs.
Banghurst listened to the admirably suitable and shapely conversation of
the Dean with that fluttered attention to the ampler clergy ten years of
social ascent and ascendency had not cured in her; and the Lady Mary
watched, no doubt with an entire confidence in the world's
disillusionment, the drooping shoulders of the sort of man she had never
met before.

There was some cheering as the central party came into view of the
enclosures, but it was not very unanimous nor invigorating cheering.
They were within fifty yards of the apparatus when Filmer took a hasty
glance over his shoulder to measure the distance of the ladies behind
them, and decided to make the first remark he had initiated since the
house had been left. His voice was just a little hoarse, and he cut in
on Banghurst in mid-sentence on Progress.

"I say, Banghurst," he said, and stopped.

"Yes," said Banghurst.

"I wish--" He moistened his lips. "I'm not feeling well."

Banghurst stopped dead. "Eh?" he shouted.

"A queer feeling." Filmer made to move on, but Banghurst was immovable.
"I don't know. I may be better in a minute. If not--perhaps...
MacAndrew--"

"You're not feeling well?" said Banghurst, and stared at his white face.

"My dear!" he said, as Mrs. Banghurst came up with them, "Filmer says he
isn't feeling well."

"A little queer," exclaimed Filmer, avoiding the Lady Mary's eyes. "It
may pass off--"

There was a pause.

It came to Filmer that he was the most isolated person in the world.

"In any case," said Banghurst, "the ascent must be made. Perhaps if you
were to sit down somewhere for a moment--"

"It's the crowd, I think," said Filmer.

There was a second pause. Banghurst's eye rested in scrutiny on Filmer,
and then swept the sample of public in the enclosure.

"It's unfortunate," said Sir Theodore Hickle; "but still--I suppose--
Your assistants--Of course, if you feel out of condition and
disinclined--"

"I don't think Mr. Filmer would permit that for a moment," said Lady
Mary.

"But if Mr. Filmer's nerve is run--It might even be dangerous for him
to attempt--" Hickle coughed.

"It's just because it's dangerous," began the Lady Mary, and felt she
had made her point of view and Filmer's plain enough. Conflicting
motives struggled for Filmer.

"I feel I ought to go up," he said, regarding the ground. He looked up
and met the Lady Mary's eyes. "I want to go up," he said, and smiled
whitely at her. He turned towards Banghurst. "If I could just sit down
somewhere for a moment out of the crowd and sun--"

Banghurst, at least, was beginning to understand the case. "Come into my
little room in the green pavilion," he said. "It's quite cool there." He
took Filmer by the arm.

Filmer turned his face to the Lady Mary Elkinghorn again. "I shall be
all right in five minutes," he said. "I'm tremendously sorry--"

The Lady Mary Elkinghorn smiled at him. "I couldn't think," he said to
Hickle, and obeyed the compulsion of Banghurst's pull.

The rest remained watching the two recede.

"He is so fragile," said the Lady Mary.

"He's certainly a highly nervous type," said the Dean, whose weakness it
was to regard the whole world, except married clergymen with enormous
families, as "neurotic."

"Of course," said Hickle, "it isn't absolutely necessary for him to go
up because he has invented--"

"How could he avoid it?" asked the Lady Mary, with the faintest shadow
of scorn.

"It's certainly most unfortunate if he's going to be ill now," said Mrs.
Banghurst a little severely.

"He's not going to be ill," said the Lady Mary, and certainly she had
met Filmer's eye.

"You'll be all right," said Banghurst, as they went towards the
pavilion. "All you want is a nip of brandy. It ought to be you, you
know. You'll be--you'd get it rough, you know, if you let another man--"

"Oh, I want to go," said Filmer. "I shall be all right. As a matter of
fact I'm almost inclined now--No! I think I'll have that nip of brandy
first."

Banghurst took him into the little room and routed out an empty
decanter. He departed in search of a supply. He was gone perhaps five
minutes.

The history of those five minutes cannot be written. At intervals
Filmer's face could be seen by the people on the easternmost of the
stands erected for spectators, against the window pane peering out, and
then it would recede and fade. Banghurst vanished shouting behind the
grand stand, and presently the butler appeared going pavilionward with a
tray.

The apartment in which Filmer came to his last solution was a pleasant
little room very simply furnished with green furniture and an old
bureau--for Banghurst was simple in all his private ways. It was hung
with little engravings after Morland and it had a shelf of books. But as
it happened, Banghurst had left a rook rifle he sometimes played with on
the top of the desk, and on the corner of the mantelshelf was a tin with
three or four cartridges remaining in it. As Filmer went up and down
that room wrestling with his intolerable dilemma he went first towards
the neat little rifle athwart the blotting-pad and then towards the neat
little red label--"

".22 Long."

The thing must have jumped into his mind in a moment.

Nobody seems to have connected the report with him, though the gun,
being fired in a confined space, must have sounded loud, and there were
several people in the billiard-room, separated from him only by a
lath-and-plaster partition. But directly Banghurst's butler opened the
door and smelt the sour smell of the smoke, he knew, he says, what had
happened. For the servants at least of Banghurst's household had guessed
something of what was going on in Filmer's mind.

All through that trying afternoon Banghurst behaved as he held a man
should behave in the presence of hopeless disaster, and his guests for
the most part succeeded in not insisting upon the fact--though to
conceal their perception of it altogether was impossible--that Banghurst
had been pretty elaborately and completely swindled by the deceased. The
public in the enclosure, Hicks told me, dispersed "like a party that has
been ducking a welsher," and there wasn't a soul in the train to London,
it seems, who hadn't known all along that flying was a quite impossible
thing for man. "But he might have tried it," said many, "after carrying
the thing so far."

In the evening, when he was comparatively alone, Banghurst broke down
and went on like a man of clay. I have been told he wept, which must
have made an imposing scene, and he certainly said Filmer had ruined his
life, and offered and sold the whole apparatus to MacAndrew for
half-a-crown. "I've been thinking--" said MacAndrew at the conclusion of
the bargain, and stopped.

The next morning the name of Filmer was, for the first time, less
conspicuous in the 'New Paper' than in any other daily paper in the world.
The rest of the world's instructors, with varying emphasis, according to
their dignity and the degree of competition between themselves and the
'New Paper,' proclaimed the "Entire Failure of the New Flying Machine,"
and "Suicide of the Impostor." But in the district of North Surrey the
reception of the news was tempered by a perception of unusual aerial
phenomena.

Overnight Wilkinson and MacAndrew had fallen into violent argument on
the exact motives of their principal's rash act.

"The man was certainly a poor, cowardly body, but so far as his science
went he was no impostor," said MacAndrew, "and I'm prepared to give that
proposition a very practical demonstration, Mr. Wilkinson, so soon as
we've got the place a little more to ourselves. For I've no faith in all
this publicity for experimental trials."

And to that end, while all the world was reading of the certain failure
of the new flying machine, MacAndrew was soaring and curvetting with
great amplitude and dignity over the Epsom and Wimbledon divisions; and
Banghurst, restored once more to hope and energy, and regardless of
public security and the Board of Trade, was pursuing his gyrations and
trying to attract his attention, on a motor car and in his pyjamas--he
had caught sight of the ascent when pulling up the blind of his bedroom
window--equipped, among other things, with a film camera that was
subsequently discovered to be jammed. And Filmer was lying on the
billiard table in the green pavilion with a sheet about his body.





THE MAGIC SHOP


I had seen the Magic Shop from afar several times; I had passed it once
or twice, a shop window of alluring little objects, magic balls, magic
hens, wonderful cones, ventriloquist dolls, the material of the basket
trick, packs of cards that looked all right, and all that sort of thing,
but never had I thought of going in until one day, almost without
warning, Gip hauled me by my finger right up to the window, and so
conducted himself that there was nothing for it but to take him in. I
had not thought the place was there, to tell the truth--a modest-sized
frontage in Regent Street, between the picture shop and the place where
the chicks run about just out of patent incubators--but there it was
sure enough. I had fancied it was down nearer the Circus, or round the
corner in Oxford Street, or even in Holborn; always over the way and a
little inaccessible it had been, with something of the mirage in its
position; but here it was now quite indisputably, and the fat end of
Gip's pointing finger made a noise upon the glass.

"If I was rich," said Gip, dabbing a finger at the Disappearing Egg,
"I'd buy myself that. And that"--which was The Crying Baby, Very
Human--"and that," which was a mystery, and called, so a neat card
asserted, "Buy One and Astonish Your Friends.

"Anything," said Gip, "will disappear under one of those cones. I have
read about it in a book. And there, dadda, is the Vanishing Halfpenny--,
only they've put it this way up so's we can't see how it's done."

Gip, dear boy, inherits his mother's breeding, and he did not propose to
enter the shop or worry in any way; only you know, quite unconsciously
he lugged my finger doorward, and he made his interest clear.

"That," he said, and pointed to the Magic Bottle.

"If you had that?" I said; at which promising inquiry he looked up with
a sudden radiance.

"I could show it to Jessie," he said, thoughtful as ever of others.

"It's less than a hundred days to your birthday, Gibbles," I said, and
laid my hand on the door-handle.

Gip made no answer, but his grip tightened on my finger, and so we came
into the shop.

It was no common shop this; it was a magic shop, and all the prancing
precedence Gip would have taken in the matter of mere toys was wanting.
He left the burthen of the conversation to me.

It was a little, narrow shop, not very well lit, and the door-bell
pinged again with a plaintive note as we closed it behind us. For a
moment or so we were alone and could glance about us. There was a tiger
in papier-mache on the glass case that covered the low counter--a grave,
kind-eyed tiger that waggled his head in a methodical manner; there were
several crystal spheres, a china hand holding magic cards, a stock of
magic fish-bowls in various sizes, and an immodest magic hat that
shamelessly displayed its springs. On the floor were magic mirrors; one
to draw you out long and thin, one to swell your head and vanish your
legs, and one to make you short and fat like a draught; and while we
were laughing at these the shopman, as I suppose, came in.

At any rate, there he was behind the counter--a curious, sallow, dark
man, with one ear larger than the other and a chin like the toe-cap of a
boot.

"What can we have the pleasure?" he said, spreading his long, magic
fingers on the glass case; and so with a start we were aware of him.

"I want," I said, "to buy my little boy a few simple tricks."

"Legerdemain?" he asked. "Mechanical? Domestic?"

"Anything amusing?" said I.

"Um!" said the shopman, and scratched his head for a moment as if
thinking. Then, quite distinctly, he drew from his head a glass ball.
"Something in this way?" he said, and held it out.

The action was unexpected. I had seen the trick done at entertainments
endless times before--it's part of the common stock of conjurers--but I
had not expected it here.

"That's good," I said, with a laugh.

"Isn't it?" said the shopman.

Gip stretched out his disengaged hand to take this object and found
merely a blank palm.

"It's in your pocket," said the shopman, and there it was!

"How much will that be?" I asked.

"We make no charge for glass balls," said the shopman politely. "We get
them"--he picked one out of his elbow as he spoke--"free." He produced
another from the back of his neck, and laid it beside its predecessor on
the counter. Gip regarded his glass ball sagely, then directed a look of
inquiry at the two on the counter, and finally brought his round-eyed
scrutiny to the shopman, who smiled.

"You may have those too," said the shopman, "and, if you don't mind, one
from my mouth. So!"

Gip counselled me mutely for a moment, and then in a profound silence
put away the four balls, resumed my reassuring finger, and nerved
himself for the next event.

"We get all our smaller tricks in that way," the shopman remarked.

I laughed in the manner of one who subscribes to a jest. "Instead of
going to the wholesale shop," I said. "Of course, it's cheaper."

"In a way," the shopman said. "Though we pay in the end. But not so
heavily--as people suppose... Our larger tricks, and our daily
provisions and all the other things we want, we get out of that hat...
And you know sir, if you'll excuse my saying it, there isn't a wholesale
shop, not for Genuine Magic goods, sir. I don't know if you noticed our
inscription--the Genuine Magic shop." He drew a business-card from his
cheek and handed it to me. "Genuine," he said, with his finger on the
word, and added, "There is absolutely no deception, sir."

He seemed to be carrying out the joke pretty thoroughly, I thought.

He turned to Gip with a smile of remarkable affability. "You, you know,
are the Right Sort of Boy."

I was surprised at his knowing that, because, in the interests of
discipline, we keep it rather a secret even at home; but Gip received it
in unflinching silence, keeping a steadfast eye on him.

"It's only the Right Sort of Boy gets through that doorway."

And, as if by way of illustration, there came a rattling at the door,
and a squeaking little voice could be faintly heard. "Nyar! I warn a' go
in there, dadda, I warn a' go in there. Ny-a-a-ah!" And then the accents
of a down-trodden parent, urging consolations and propitiations. "It's
locked, Edward," he said.

"But it isn't," said I.

"It is, sir," said the shopman, "always--for that sort of child," and as
he spoke we had a glimpse of the other youngster, a little, white face,
pallid from sweet-eating and over-sapid food, and distorted by evil
passions, a ruthless little egotist, pawing at the enchanted pane. "It's
no good sir," said the shopman, as I moved, with my natural helpfulness,
doorward, and presently the spoilt child was carried off howling.

"How do you manage that?" I said, breathing a little more freely.

"Magic!" said the shopman, with a careless wave of the hand, and behold!
Sparks of coloured fire flew out of his fingers and vanished into the
shadows of the shop.

"You were saying," he said, addressing himself to Gip, "before you came
in, that you would like one of our 'Buy One and Astonish your Friends'
boxes?"

Gip, after a gallant effort, said "Yes."

"It's in your pocket."

And leaning over the counter--he really had an extraordinarily long
body--this amazing person produced the article in the customary
conjurer's manner. "Paper," he said, and took a sheet out of the empty
hat with the springs; "string," and behold his mouth was a string-box,
from which he drew an unending thread, which when he had tied his parcel
he bit off--and, it seemed to me, swallowed the ball of string. And then
he lit a candle at the nose of one of the ventriloquist's dummies, stuck
one of his fingers (which had become sealing-wax red) into the flame,
and so sealed the parcel. "Then there was the Disappearing Egg," he
remarked, and produced one from within my coat-breast and packed it, and
also The Crying Baby, Very Human. I handed each parcel to Gip as it was
ready, and he clasped them to his chest.

He said very little, but his eyes were eloquent; the clutch of his arms
was eloquent. He was the play-ground of unspeakable emotions. These you
know, were real magics. Then, with a start, I discovered something
moving about in my hat--something soft and jumpy. I whipped it off, and
a ruffled pigeon--no doubt a confederate--dropped out and ran on the
counter, and went, I fancy, into a cardboard box behind the papier-mache
tiger.

"Tut, tut!" said the shopman, dexterously relieving me of my headdress;
"careless bird, and--as I live--nesting!"

He shook my hat, and shook out into his extended hand two or three eggs,
a large marble, a watch, about half-a-dozen of the inevitable glass
balls, and then crumpled, crinkled paper, more and more and more,
talking all the time of the way in which people neglect to brush their
hats inside as well as out, politely of course, but with a certain
personal application. "All sorts of things accumulate, sir... Not you,
of course, in particular... Nearly every customer... Astonishing what
they carry about with them..." The crumpled paper rose and billowed on
the counter more and more and more, until he was nearly hidden from us,
until he was altogether hidden, and still his voice went on and on. "We
none of us know what the fair semblance of a human being may conceal,
sir. Are we all then no better than brushed exteriors, whited
sepulchres--"

His voice stopped--exactly like when you hit a neighbour's gramophone
with a well-aimed brick, the same instant silence, and the rustle of the
paper stopped, and everything was still...

"Have you done with my hat?" I said, after an interval.

There was no answer.

I stared at Gip, and Gip stared at me, and there were our distortions in
the magic mirrors, looking very rum, and grave, and quiet...

"I think we'll go now," I said. "Will you tell me how much all this
comes to...?

"I say," I said, on a rather louder note, "I want the bill; and my hat,
please."

It might have been a sniff from behind the paper pile...

"Let's look behind the counter, Gip," I said. "He's making fun of us."

I led Gip round the head-wagging tiger, and what do you think there was
behind the counter? No one at all! Only my hat on the floor, and a
common conjurer's lop-eared white rabbit lost in meditation, and looking
as stupid and crumpled as only a conjurer's rabbit can do. I resumed my
hat, and the rabbit lolloped a lollop or so out of my way.

"Dadda!" said Gip, in a guilty whisper.

"What is it, Gip?" said I.

"I do like this shop, dadda."

"So should I," I said to myself, "if the counter wouldn't suddenly
extend itself to shut one off from the door." But I didn't call Gip's
attention to that. "Pussy!" he said, with a hand out to the rabbit as it
came lolloping past us; "Pussy, do Gip a magic!" And his eyes followed
it as it squeezed through a door I had certainly not remarked a moment
before. Then this door opened wider, and the man with one ear larger
than the other appeared again. He was smiling still, but his eye met
mine with something between amusement and defiance. "You'd like to see
our show-room, sir," he said, with an innocent suavity. Gip tugged my
finger forward. I glanced at the counter and met the shopman's eye
again. I was beginning to think the magic just a little too genuine. "We
haven't very much time," I said. But somehow we were inside the
show-room before I could finish that.

"All goods of the same quality," said the shopman, rubbing his flexible
hands together, "and that is the Best. Nothing in the place that isn't
genuine Magic, and warranted thoroughly rum. Excuse me, sir!"

I felt him pull at something that clung to my coat-sleeve, and then I
saw he held a little, wriggling red demon by the tail--the little
creature bit and fought and tried to get at his hand--and in a moment he
tossed it carelessly behind a counter. No doubt the thing was only an
image of twisted indiarubber, but for the moment--! And his gesture was
exactly that of a man who handles some petty biting bit of vermin. I
glanced at Gip, but Gip was looking at a magic rocking-horse. I was glad
he hadn't seen the thing. "I say," I said, in an undertone, and
indicating Gip and the red demon with my eyes, "you haven't many things
like that about, have you?"

"None of ours! Probably brought it with you," said the shopman--also in
an undertone, and with a more dazzling smile than ever. "Astonishing
what people will carry about with them unawares!" And then to Gip, "Do
you see anything you fancy here?"

There were many things that Gip fancied there.

He turned to this astonishing tradesman with mingled confidence and
respect. "Is that a Magic Sword?" he said.

"A Magic Toy Sword. It neither bends, breaks, nor cuts the fingers. It
renders the bearer invincible in battle against any one under eighteen.
Half-a-crown to seven and sixpence, according to size. These panoplies
on cards are for juvenile knights-errant and very useful--shield of
safety, sandals of swiftness, helmet of invisibility."

"Oh, daddy!" gasped Gip.

I tried to find out what they cost, but the shopman did not heed me. He
had got Gip now; he had got him away from my finger; he had embarked
upon the exposition of all his confounded stock, and nothing was going
to stop him. Presently I saw with a qualm of distrust and something very
like jealousy that Gip had hold of this person's finger, as usually he
has hold of mine. No doubt the fellow was interesting, I thought, and
had an interestingly faked lot of stuff, really good faked stuff,
still--

I wandered after them, saying very little, but keeping an eye on this
prestidigital fellow. After all, Gip was enjoying it. And no doubt when
the time came to go we should be able to go quite easily.

It was a long, rambling place, that show-room, a gallery broken up by
stands and stalls and pillars, with archways leading off to other
departments, in which the queerest-looking assistants loafed and stared
at one, and with perplexing mirrors and curtains. So perplexing, indeed,
were these that I was presently unable to make out the door by which we
had come.

The shopman showed Gip magic trains that ran without steam or clockwork,
just as you set the signals, and then some very, very valuable boxes of
soldiers that all came alive directly you took off the lid and said--I
myself haven't a very quick ear and it was a tongue-twisting sound, but
Gip--he has his mother's ear--got it in no time. "Bravo!" said the
shopman, putting the men back into the box unceremoniously and handing
it to Gip. "Now," said the shopman, and in a moment Gip had made them
all alive again.

"You'll take that box?" asked the shopman.

"We'll take that box," said I, "unless you charge its full value. In
which case it would need a Trust Magnate--"

"Dear heart! No!" And the shopman swept the little men back again, shut
the lid, waved the box in the air, and there it was, in brown paper,
tied up and--with Gip's full name and address on the paper!

The shopman laughed at my amazement.

"This is the genuine magic," he said. "The real thing."

"It's a little too genuine for my taste," I said again.

After that he fell to showing Gip tricks, odd tricks, and still odder
the way they were done. He explained them, he turned them inside out,
and there was the dear little chap nodding his busy bit of a head in the
sagest manner.

I did not attend as well as I might. "Hey, presto!" Said the Magic
Shopman, and then would come the clear, small "Hey, presto!" Of the boy.
But I was distracted by other things. It was being borne in upon me just
how tremendously rum this place was; it was, so to speak, inundated by a
sense of rumness. There was something a little rum about the fixtures
even, about the ceiling, about the floor, about the casually distributed
chairs. I had a queer feeling that whenever I wasn't looking at them
straight they went askew, and moved about, and played a noiseless
puss-in-the-corner behind my back. And the cornice had a serpentine
design with masks--masks altogether too expressive for proper plaster.

Then abruptly my attention was caught by one of the odd-looking
assistants. He was some way off and evidently unaware of my presence--I
saw a sort of three-quarter length of him over a pile of toys and
through an arch--and you know, he was leaning against a pillar in an
idle sort of way doing the most horrid things with his features! The
particular horrid thing he did was with his nose. He did it just as
though he was idle and wanted to amuse himself. First of all it was a
short, blobby nose, and then suddenly he shot it out like a telescope,
and then out it flew and became thinner and thinner until it was like a
long, red, flexible whip. Like a thing in a nightmare it was! He
flourished it about and flung it forth as a fly-fisher flings his line.

My instant thought was that Gip mustn't see him. I turned about, and
there was Gip quite preoccupied with the shopman, and thinking no evil.
They were whispering together and looking at me. Gip was standing on a
little stool, and the shopman was holding a sort of big drum in his
hand.

"Hide and seek, dadda!" cried Gip. "You're He!"

And before I could do anything to prevent it, the shopman had clapped
the big drum over him. I saw what was up directly. "Take that off," I
cried, "this instant! You'll frighten the boy. Take it off!"

The shopman with the unequal ears did so without a word, and held the
big cylinder towards me to show its emptiness. And the little stool was
vacant! In that instant my boy had utterly disappeared...?

You know, perhaps, that sinister something that comes like a hand out of
the unseen and grips your heart about. You know it takes your common
self away and leaves you tense and deliberate, neither slow nor hasty,
neither angry nor afraid. So it was with me.

I came up to this grinning shopman and kicked his stool aside.

"Stop this folly!" I said. "Where is my boy?"

"You see," he said, still displaying the drum's interior, "there is no
deception--"

I put out my hand to grip him, and he eluded me by a dexterous movement.
I snatched again, and he turned from me and pushed open a door to
escape. "Stop!" I said, and he laughed, receding. I leapt after
him--into utter darkness.

Thud!

"Lor' bless my 'eart! I didn't see you coming, sir!"

I was in Regent Street, and I had collided with a decent-looking working
man; and a yard away, perhaps, and looking a little perplexed with
himself, was Gip. There was some sort of apology, and then Gip had
turned and come to me with a bright little smile, as though for a moment
he had missed me.

And he was carrying four parcels in his arm!

He secured immediate possession of my finger.

For the second I was rather at a loss. I stared round to see the door of
the magic shop, and behold, it was not there! There was no door, no
shop, nothing, only the common pilaster between the shop where they sell
pictures and the window with the chicks...!

I did the only thing possible in that mental tumult; I walked straight
to the kerbstone and held up my umbrella for a cab.

"'Ansoms," said Gip, in a note of culminating exultation.

I helped him in, recalled my address with an effort, and got in also.
Something unusual proclaimed itself in my tail-coat pocket, and I felt
and discovered a glass ball. With a petulant expression I flung it into
the street.

Gip said nothing.

For a space neither of us spoke.

"Dada!" said Gip, at last. "That was a proper shop!"

I came round with that to the problem of just how the whole thing had
seemed to him. He looked completely undamaged--so far, good; he was
neither scared nor unhinged, he was simply tremendously satisfied with
the afternoon's entertainment, and there in his arms were the four
parcels.

Confound it! What could be in them?

"Um!" I said. "Little boys can't go to shops like that every day."

He received this with his usual stoicism, and for a moment I was sorry I
was his father and not his mother, and so couldn't suddenly there, coram
publico, in our hansom, kiss him. After all, I thought, the thing wasn't
so very bad.

But it was only when we opened the parcels that I really began to be
reassured. Three of them contained boxes of soldiers, quite ordinary
lead soldiers, but of so good a quality as to make Gip altogether forget
that originally these parcels had been Magic Tricks of the only genuine
sort, and the fourth contained a kitten, a little living white kitten,
in excellent health and appetite and temper.

I saw this unpacking with a sort of provisional relief. I hung about in
the nursery for quite an unconscionable time...

That happened six months ago. And now I am beginning to believe it is
all right. The kitten had only the magic natural to all kittens, and the
soldiers seem as steady a company as any colonel could desire. And
Gip--?

The intelligent parent will understand that I have to go cautiously with
Gip.

But I went so far as this one day. I said, "How would you like your
soldiers to come alive, Gip, and march about by themselves?"

"Mine do," said Gip. "I just have to say a word I know before I open the
lid."

"Then they march about alone?"

"Oh, quite, dadda. I shouldn't like them if they didn't do that."

I displayed no unbecoming surprise, and since then I have taken occasion
to drop in upon him once or twice, unannounced, when the soldiers were
about, but so far I have never discovered them performing in anything
like a magical manner.

It's so difficult to tell.

There's also a question of finance. I have an incurable habit of paying
bills. I have been up and down Regent Street several times, looking for
that shop. I am inclined to think, indeed that in that matter honour is
satisfied, and that since Gip's name and address are known to them, I
may very well leave it to these people, whoever they may be, to send in
their bill in their own time.




THE VALLEY OF SPIDERS


Towards midday the three pursuers came abruptly round a bend in the
torrent bed upon the sight of a very broad and spacious valley. The
difficult and winding trench of pebbles along which they had tracked the
fugitives for so long, expanded to a broad slope, and with a common
impulse the three men left the trail, and rode to a little eminence set
with olive-dun trees, and there halted, the two others, as became them,
a little behind the man with the silver-studded bridle.

For a space they scanned the great expanse below them with eager eyes.
It spread remoter and remoter, with only a few clusters of sere thorn
bushes here and there, and the dim suggestions of some now waterless
ravine, to break its desolation of yellow grass. Its purple distances
melted at last into the bluish slopes of the further hills--hills it
might be of a greener kind--and above them invisibly supported, and
seeming indeed to hang in the blue, were the snow-clad summits of
mountains--that grew larger and bolder to the north-westward as the
sides of the valley drew together. And westward the valley opened until
a distant darkness under the sky told where the forests began. But the
three men looked neither east nor west, but only steadfastly across the
valley.

The gaunt man with the scarred lip was the first to speak. "Nowhere," he
said, with a sigh of disappointment in his voice. "But after all, they
had a full day's start."

"They don't know we are after them," said the little man on the white
horse.

"She would know," said the leader bitterly, as if speaking to himself.

"Even then they can't go fast. They've got no beast but the mule, and
all to-day the girl's foot has been bleeding--"

The man with the silver bridle flashed a quick intensity of rage on him.
"Do you think I haven't seen that?" he snarled.

"It helps, anyhow," whispered the little man to himself.

The gaunt man with the scarred lip stared impassively. "They can't be
over the valley," he said. "If we ride hard--"

He glanced at the white horse and paused.

"Curse all white horses!" said the man with the silver bridle, and
turned to scan the beast his curse included.

The little man looked down between the melancholy ears of his steed.

"I did my best," he said.

The two others stared again across the valley for a space. The gaunt man
passed the back of his hand across the scarred lip.

"Come up!" said the man who owned the silver bridle, suddenly. The
little man started and jerked his rein, and the horse hoofs of the three
made a multitudinous faint pattering upon the withered grass as they
turned back towards the trail...

They rode cautiously down the long slope before them, and so came
through a waste of prickly, twisted bushes and strange dry shapes of
horny branches that grew amongst the rocks, into the levels below. And
there the trail grew faint, for the soil was scanty, and the only
herbage was this scorched dead straw that lay upon the ground. Still, by
hard scanning, by leaning beside the horses' necks and pausing ever and
again, even these white men could contrive to follow after their prey.

There were trodden places, bent and broken blades of the coarse grass,
and ever and again the sufficient intimation of a footmark. And once the
leader saw a brown smear of blood where the half-caste girl may have
trod. And at that under his breath he cursed her for a fool.

The gaunt man checked his leader's tracking, and the little man on the
white horse rode behind, a man lost in a dream. They rode one after
another, the man with the silver bridle led the way, and they spoke
never a word. After a time it came to the little man on the white horse
that the world was very still. He started out of his dream. Besides the
little noises of their horses and equipment, the whole great valley kept
the brooding quiet of a painted scene.

Before him went his master and his fellow, each intently leaning forward
to the left, each impassively moving with the paces of his horse; their
shadows went before them--still, noiseless, tapering attendants; and
nearer a crouched cool shape was his own. He looked about him. What was
it had gone? Then he remembered the reverberation from the banks of the
gorge and the perpetual accompaniment of shifting, jostling pebbles.
And, moreover--? There was no breeze. That was it! What a vast, still
place it was, a monotonous afternoon slumber. And the sky open and
blank, except for a sombre veil of haze that had gathered in the upper
valley.

He straightened his back, fretted with his bridle, puckered his lips to
whistle, and simply sighed. He turned in his saddle for a time, and
stared at the throat of the mountain gorge out of which they had come.
Blank! Blank slopes on either side, with never a sign of a decent beast
or tree--much less a man. What a land it was! What a wilderness! He
dropped again into his former pose.

It filled him with a momentary pleasure to see a wry stick of purple
black flash out into the form of a snake, and vanish amidst the brown.
After all, the infernal valley was alive. And then, to rejoice him still
more, came a little breath across his face, a whisper that came and
went, the faintest inclination of a stiff black-antlered bush upon a
little crest, the first intimations of a possible breeze. Idly he wetted
his finger, and held it up.

He pulled up sharply to avoid a collision with the gaunt man, who had
stopped at fault upon the trail. Just at that guilty moment he caught
his master's eye looking towards him.

For a time he forced an interest in the tracking. Then, as they rode on
again, he studied his master's shadow and hat and shoulder, appearing
and disappearing behind the gaunt man's nearer contours. They had ridden
four days out of the very limits of the world into this desolate place,
short of water, with nothing but a strip of dried meat under their
saddles, over rocks and mountains, where surely none but these fugitives
had ever been before--for that!

And all this was for a girl, a mere wilful child! And the man had whole
cityfuls of people to do his basest bidding--girls, women! Why in the
name of passionate folly this one in particular? Asked the little man,
and scowled at the world, and licked his parched lips with a blackened
tongue. It was the way of the master, and that was all he knew. Just
because she sought to evade him...

His eye caught a whole row of high plumed canes bending in unison, and
then the tails of silk that hung before his neck flapped and fell. The
breeze was growing stronger. Somehow it took the stiff stillness out of
things--and that was well.

"Hullo!" said the gaunt man.

All three stopped abruptly.

"What?" asked the master. "What?"

"Over there," said the gaunt man, pointing up the valley.

"What?"

"Something coming towards us."

And as he spoke a yellow animal crested a rise and came bearing down
upon them. It was a big wild dog, coming before the wind, tongue out, at
a steady pace, and running with such an intensity of purpose that he did
not seem to see the horsemen he approached. He ran with his nose up,
following, it was plain, neither scent nor quarry. As he drew nearer the
little man felt for his sword. "He's mad," said the gaunt rider.

"Shout!" said the little man, and shouted.

The dog came on. Then when the little man's blade was already out, it
swerved aside and went panting by them and past. The eyes of the little
man followed its flight. "There was no foam," he said. For a space the
man with the silver-studded bridle stared up the valley. "Oh, come on!"
he cried at last. "What does it matter?" And jerked his horse into
movement again.

The little man left the insoluble mystery of a dog that fled from
nothing but the wind, and lapsed into profound musings on human
character. "Come on!" he whispered to himself. "Why should it be given
to one man to say 'Come on!' with that stupendous violence of effect.
Always, all his life, the man with the silver bridle has been saying
that. If I said it--!" Thought the little man. But people marvelled when
the master was disobeyed even in the wildest things. This half-caste
girl seemed to him, seemed to every one, mad--blasphemous almost. The
little man, by way of comparison, reflected on the gaunt rider with the
scarred lip, as stalwart as his master, as brave and, indeed perhaps
braver, and yet for him there was obedience, nothing but to give
obedience duly and stoutly...

Certain sensations of the hands and knees called the little man back to
more immediate things. He became aware of something. He rode up beside
his gaunt fellow. "Do you notice the horses?" he said in an undertone.

The gaunt face looked interrogation.

"They don't like this wind," said the little man, and dropped behind as
the man with the silver bridle turned upon him.

"It's all right," said the gaunt-faced man.

They rode on again for a space in silence. The foremost two rode
downcast upon the trail, the hindmost man watched the haze that crept
down the vastness of the valley, nearer and nearer, and noted how the
wind grew in strength moment by moment. Far away on the left he saw a
line of dark bulks--wild hog perhaps, galloping down the valley, but of
that he said nothing, nor did he remark again upon the uneasiness of the
horses.

And then he saw first one and then a second great white ball, a great
shining white ball like a gigantic head of thistledown, that drove
before the wind athwart the path. These balls soared high in the air,
and dropped and rose again and caught for a moment, and hurried on and
passed, but at the sight of them the restlessness of the horses
increased.

Then presently he saw that more of these drifting globes--and then soon
very many more--were hurrying towards him down the valley.

They became aware of a squealing. Athwart the path a huge boar rushed,
turning his head but for one instant to glance at them, and then hurling
on down the valley again. And at that, all three stopped and sat in
their saddles, staring into the thickening haze that was coming upon
them.

"If it were not for this thistledown--" began the leader.

But now a big globe came drifting past within a score of yards of them.
It was really not an even sphere at all, but a vast, soft, ragged, filmy
thing, a sheet gathered by the corners, an aerial jelly-fish, as it
were, but rolling over and over as it advanced, and trailing long,
cobwebby threads and streamers that floated in its wake.

"It isn't thistledown," said the little man.

"I don't like the stuff," said the gaunt man.

And they looked at one another.

"Curse it!" cried the leader. "The air's full of it up there. If it
keeps on at this pace long, it will stop us altogether."

An instinctive feeling, such as lines out a herd of deer at the approach
of some ambiguous thing, prompted them to turn their horses to the wind,
ride forward for a few paces, and stare at that advancing multitude of
floating masses. They came on before the wind with a sort of smooth
swiftness, rising and falling noiselessly, sinking to earth, rebounding
high, soaring--all with a perfect unanimity, with a still, deliberate
assurance.

Right and left of the horsemen the pioneers of this strange army passed.
At one that rolled along the ground, breaking shapelessly and trailing
out reluctantly into long grappling ribbons and bands, all three horses
began to shy and dance. The master was seized with a sudden unreasonable
impatience. He cursed the drifting globes roundly. "Get on!" he cried;
"Get on! What do these things matter? How can they matter? Back to the
trail!" He fell swearing at his horse and sawed the bit across its
mouth.

He shouted aloud with rage. "I will follow that trail, I tell you!" he
cried. "Where is the trail?"

He gripped the bridle of his prancing horse and searched amidst the
grass. A long and clinging thread fell across his face, a grey streamer
dropped about his bridle arm, some big, active thing with many legs ran
down the back of his head. He looked up to discover one of those grey
masses anchored as it were above him by these things and flapping out
ends as a sail flaps when a boat comes, about--but noiselessly.

He had an impression of many eyes, of a dense crew of squat bodies, of
long, many-jointed limbs hauling at their mooring ropes to bring the
thing down upon him. For a space he stared up, reining in his prancing
horse with the instinct born of years of horsemanship. Then the flat of
a sword smote his back, and a blade flashed overhead and cut the
drifting balloon of spider-web free, and the whole mass lifted softly
and drove clear and away.

"Spiders!" cried the voice of the gaunt man. "The things are full of big
spiders! Look, my lord!"

The man with the silver bridle still followed the mass that drove away.

"Look, my lord!"

The master found himself staring down at a red, smashed thing on the
ground that, in spite of partial obliteration, could still wriggle
unavailing legs. Then when the gaunt man pointed to another mass that
bore down upon them, he drew his sword hastily. Up the valley now it was
like a fog bank torn to rags. He tried to grasp the situation.

"Ride for it!" the little man was shouting. "Ride for it down the
valley."

What happened then was like the confusion of a battle. The man with the
silver bridle saw the little man go past him slashing furiously at
imaginary cobwebs, saw him cannon into the horse of the gaunt man and
hurl it and its rider to earth. His own horse went a dozen paces before
he could rein it in. Then he looked up to avoid imaginary dangers, and
then back again to see a horse rolling on the ground, the gaunt man
standing and slashing over it at a rent and fluttering mass of grey that
streamed and wrapped about them both. And thick and fast as thistledown
on waste land on a windy day in July, the cobweb masses were coming on.

The little man had dismounted, but he dared not release his horse. He
was endeavouring to lug the struggling brute back with the strength of
one arm, while with the other he slashed aimlessly, The tentacles of a
second grey mass had entangled themselves with the struggle, and this
second grey mass came to its moorings, and slowly sank.

The master set his teeth, gripped his bridle, lowered his head, and
spurred his horse forward. The horse on the ground rolled over, there
were blood and moving shapes upon the flanks, and the gaunt man,
suddenly leaving it, ran forward towards his master, perhaps ten paces.
His legs were swathed and encumbered with grey; he made ineffectual
movements with his sword. Grey streamers waved from him; there was a
thin veil of grey across his face. With his left hand he beat at
something on his body, and suddenly he stumbled and fell. He struggled
to rise, and fell again, and suddenly, horribly, began to howl,
"Oh--ohoo, ohooh!"

The master could see the great spiders upon him, and others upon the
ground.

As he strove to force his horse nearer to this gesticulating, screaming
grey object that struggled up and down, there came a clatter of hoofs,
and the little man, in act of mounting, swordless, balanced on his belly
athwart the white horse, and clutching its mane, whirled past. And again
a clinging thread of grey gossamer swept across the master's face. All
about him, and over him, it seemed this drifting, noiseless cobweb
circled and drew nearer him...

To the day of his death he never knew just how the event of that moment
happened. Did he, indeed, turn his horse, or did it really of its own
accord stampede after its fellow? Suffice it that in another second he
was galloping full tilt down the valley with his sword whirling
furiously overhead. And all about him on the quickening breeze, the
spiders' air-ships, their air bundles and air sheets, seemed to him to
hurry in a conscious pursuit.

Clatter, clatter, thud, thud--the man with the silver bridle rode,
heedless of his direction, with his fearful face looking up now right,
now left, and his sword arm ready to slash. And a few hundred yards
ahead of him, with a tail of torn cobweb trailing behind him, rode the
little man on the white horse, still but imperfectly in the saddle. The
reeds bent before them, the wind blew fresh and strong, over his
shoulder the master could see the webs hurrying to overtake...

He was so intent to escape the spiders' webs that only as his horse
gathered together for a leap did he realise the ravine ahead. And then
he realised it only to misunderstand and interfere. He was leaning
forward on his horse's neck and sat up and back all too late.

But if in his excitement he had failed to leap, at any rate he had not
forgotten how to fall. He was horseman again in mid-air. He came off
clear with a mere bruise upon his shoulder, and his horse rolled,
kicking spasmodic legs, and lay still. But the master's sword drove its
point into the hard soil, and snapped clean across, as though Chance
refused him any longer as her Knight, and the splintered end missed his
face by an inch or so.

He was on his feet in a moment, breathlessly scanning the onrushing
spider-webs. For a moment he was minded to run, and then thought of the
ravine, and turned back. He ran aside once to dodge one drifting terror,
and then he was swiftly clambering down the precipitous sides, and out
of the touch of the gale.

There under the lee of the dry torrent's steeper banks he might crouch,
and watch these strange, grey masses pass and pass in safety till the
wind fell, and it became possible to escape. And there for a long time
he crouched, watching the strange, grey, ragged masses trail their
streamers across his narrowed sky.

Once a stray spider fell into the ravine close beside him--a full foot
it measured from leg to leg, and its body was half a man's hand--and
after he had watched its monstrous alacrity of search and escape for a
little while, and tempted it to bite his broken sword, he lifted up his
iron heeled boot and smashed it into a pulp. He swore as he did so, and
for a time sought up and down for another.

Then presently, when he was surer these spider swarms could not drop
into the ravine, he found a place where he could sit down, and sat and
fell into deep thought and began after his manner to gnaw his knuckles
and bite his nails. And from this he was moved by the coming of the man
with the white horse.

He heard him long before he saw him, as a clattering of hoofs, stumbling
footsteps, and a reassuring voice. Then the little man appeared, a
rueful figure, still with a tail of white cobweb trailing behind him.
They approached each other without speaking, without a salutation. The
little man was fatigued and shamed to the pitch of hopeless bitterness,
and came to a stop at last, face to face with his seated master. The
latter winced a little under his dependant's eye. "Well?" he said at
last, with no pretence of authority.

"You left him?"

"My horse bolted."

"I know. So did mine."

He laughed at his master mirthlessly.

"I say my horse bolted," said the man who once had a silver-studded
bridle.

"Cowards both," said the little man.

The other gnawed his knuckle through some meditative moments, with his
eye on his inferior.

"Don't call me a coward," he said at length.

"You are a coward like myself."

"A coward possibly. There is a limit beyond which every man must fear.
That I have learnt at last. But not like yourself. That is where the
difference comes in."

"I never could have dreamt you would have left him. He saved your life
two minutes before... Why are you our lord?"

The master gnawed his knuckles again, and his countenance was dark.

"No man calls me a coward," he said. "No. A broken sword is better than
none... One spavined white horse cannot be expected to carry two men a
four days' journey. I hate white horses, but this time it cannot be
helped. You begin to understand me...? I perceive that you are minded,
on the strength of what you have seen and fancy, to taint my reputation.
It is men of your sort who unmake kings. Besides which--I never liked
you."

"My lord!" said the little man.

"No," said the master. "No!"

He stood up sharply as the little man moved. For a minute perhaps they
faced one another. Overhead the spiders' balls went driving. There was a
quick movement among the pebbles; a running of feet, a cry of despair, a
gasp and a blow...

Towards nightfall the wind fell. The sun set in a calm serenity, and the
man who had once possessed the silver bridle came at last very
cautiously and by an easy slope out of the ravine again; but now he led
the white horse that once belonged to the little man. He would have gone
back to his horse to get his silver-mounted bridle again, but he feared
night and a quickening breeze might still find him in the valley, and
besides he disliked greatly to think he might discover his horse all
swathed in cobwebs and perhaps unpleasantly eaten.

And as he thought of those cobwebs and of all the dangers he had been
through, and the manner in which he had been preserved that day, his
hand sought a little reliquary that hung about his neck, and he clasped
it for a moment with heartfelt gratitude. As he did so his eyes went
across the valley.

"I was hot with passion," he said, "and now she has met her reward. They
also, no doubt--"

And behold! Far away out of the wooded slopes across the valley, but in
the clearness of the sunset distinct and unmistakable, he saw a little
spire of smoke.

At that his expression of serene resignation changed to an amazed anger.
Smoke? He turned the head of the white horse about, and hesitated. And
as he did so a little rustle of air went through the grass about him.
Far away upon some reeds swayed a tattered sheet of grey. He looked at
the cobwebs; he looked at the smoke.

"Perhaps, after all, it is not them," he said at last.

But he knew better.

After he had stared at the smoke for some time, he mounted the white
horse.

As he rode, he picked his way amidst stranded masses of web. For some
reason there were many dead spiders on the ground, and those that lived
feasted guiltily on their fellows. At the sound of his horse's hoofs
they fled.

Their time had passed. From the ground without either a wind to carry
them or a winding sheet ready, these things, for all their poison, could
do him little evil. He flicked with his belt at those he fancied came
too near. Once, where a number ran together over a bare place, he was
minded to dismount and trample them with his boots, but this impulse he
overcame. Ever and again he turned in his saddle, and looked back at the
smoke.

"Spiders," he muttered over and over again. "Spiders! Well, well... The
next time I must spin a web."




THE TRUTH ABOUT PYECRAFT


He sits not a dozen yards away. If I glance over my shoulder I can see
him. And if I catch his eye--and usually I catch his eye--it meets me
with an expression--

It is mainly an imploring look--and yet with suspicion in it.

Confound his suspicion! If I wanted to tell on him I should have told
long ago. I don't tell and I don't tell, and he ought to feel at his
ease. As if anything so gross and fat as he, could feel at ease! Who
would believe me if I did tell?

Poor old Pyecraft! Great, uneasy jelly of substance! The fattest clubman
in London.

He sits at one of the little club tables in the huge bay by the fire,
stuffing. What is he stuffing? I glance judiciously and catch him biting
at a round of hot buttered teacake, with his eyes on me. Confound him--!
With his eyes on me!

That settles it, Pyecraft! Since you will be abject, since you will
behave as though I was not a man of honour, here right under your
embedded eyes, I write the thing down--the plain truth about Pyecraft.
The man I helped, the man I shielded, and who has requited me by making
my club unendurable, absolutely unendurable, with his liquid appeal,
with the perpetual "don't tell" of his looks.

And, besides, why does he keep on eternally eating?

Well, here goes for the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the
truth!

Pyecraft--I made the acquaintance of Pyecraft in this very
smoking-room. I was a young, nervous new member, and he saw it. I was
sitting all alone, wishing I knew more of the members, and suddenly he
came, a great rolling front of chins and abdomina, towards me and
grunted and sat down in a chair close by me and wheezed for a space, and
scraped for a space with a match and lit a cigar, and then addressed me.
I forget what he said--something about the matches not lighting
properly, and afterwards as he talked he kept stopping the waiters one
by one as they went by, and telling them about the matches in that thin,
fluty voice he has. But, anyhow, it was in some such way we began our
talking.

He talked about various things and came round to games. And thence to my
figure and complexion. "You ought to be a good cricketer," he said. I
suppose I am slender, slender to what some people would call lean, and I
suppose I am rather dark, still--I am not ashamed of having a Hindu
great-grandmother, but for all that, I don't want casual strangers to
see through me at a glance to her. So that I was set against Pyecraft
from the beginning.

But he only talked about me in order to get to himself.

"I expect," he said, "you take no more exercise than I do, and probably
you eat no less." (Like all excessively obese people he fancied he ate
nothing.) "Yet--," and he smiled an oblique smile--"we differ."

And then he began to talk about his fatness and his fatness; all he did
for his fatness and all he was going to do for his fatness; what people
had advised him to do for his fatness and what he had heard of people
doing for fatness similar to his. "A priori," he said, "one would think
a question of nutrition could be answered by dietary and a question of
assimilation by drugs." It was stifling. It was dumpling talk. It made
me feel swelled to hear him.

One stands that sort of thing once in a way at a club, but a time came
when I fancied I was standing too much. He took to me altogether too
conspicuously. I could never go into the smoking-room or he would come
wallowing towards me, and sometimes he came and gormandised round and
about me while I had my lunch. He seemed at times almost to be clinging
to me. He was a bore, but not so fearful a bore as to be limited to me;
and from the first there was something in his manner--almost as though
he knew, almost as though he penetrated to the fact that I might--that
there was a remote, exceptional chance in me that no one else presented.

"I'd give anything to get it down," he would say--"anything," and peer
at me over his vast cheeks and pant.

Poor old Pyecraft! He has just gonged, no doubt to order another
buttered teacake!

He came to the actual thing one day. "Our Pharmacopoeia," he said, "our
Western Pharmacopoeia, is anything but the last word of medical science.
In the East, I've been told--"

He stopped and stared at me. It was like being at an aquarium.

I was quite suddenly angry with him. "Look here," I said, "who told you
about my great-grandmother's recipes?"

"Well," he fenced.

"Every time we've met for a week," I said--"and we've met pretty
often--you've given me a broad hint or so about that little secret of
mine."

"Well," he said, "now the cat's out of the bag, I'll admit, yes, it is
so. I had it--"

"From Pattison?"

"Indirectly," he said, which I believe was lying, "yes."

"Pattison," I said, "took that stuff at his own risk."

He pursed his mouth and bowed.

"My great-grandmother's recipes," I said, "are queer things to handle.
My father was near making me promise--"

"He didn't?"

"No. But he warned me. He himself used one--once."

"Ah...! But do you think--? Suppose--suppose there did happen to be
one--"

"The things are curious documents," I said.

"Even the smell of 'em... No!"

But after going so far Pyecraft was resolved I should go farther. I was
always a little afraid if I tried his patience too much he would fall on
me suddenly and smother me. I own I was weak. But I was also annoyed
with Pyecraft. I had got to that state of feeling for him that disposed
me to say, "Well, take the risk!" The little affair of Pattison to which
I have alluded was a different matter altogether. What it was doesn't
concern us now, but I knew anyhow, that the particular recipe I used
then was safe. The rest I didn't know so much about, and on the whole, I
was inclined to doubt their safety pretty completely.

Yet even if Pyecraft got poisoned--

I must confess the poisoning of Pyecraft struck me as an immense
undertaking.

That evening I took that queer, odd-scented sandal-wood box out of my
safe and turned the rustling skins over. The gentleman who wrote the
recipes for my great-grandmother evidently had a weakness for skins of a
miscellaneous origin, and his handwriting was cramped to the last
degree. Some of the things are quite unreadable to me--though my family,
with its Indian Civil Service associations, has kept up a knowledge of
Hindustani from generation to generation--and none are absolutely plain
sailing. But I found the one that I knew was there, soon enough, and sat
on the floor by my safe for some time looking at it.

"Look here," said I to Pyecraft next day, and snatched the slip away
from his eager grasp.

"So far as I can make it out, this is a recipe for Loss of Weight.
("Ah!" said Pyecraft.) I'm not absolutely sure, but I think it's that.
And if you take my advice you'll leave it alone. Because, you know--I
blacken my blood in your interest, Pyecraft--my ancestors on that side
were, so far as I can gather, a jolly queer lot. See?"

"Let me try it," said Pyecraft.

I leant back in my chair. My imagination made one mighty effort and fell
flat within me. "What in Heaven's name, Pyecraft," I asked, "do you
think you'll look like when you get thin?"

He was impervious to reason. I made him promise never to say a word to
me about his disgusting fatness again whatever happened--never, and then
I handed him that little piece of skin.

"It's nasty stuff," I said.

"No matter," he said, and took it.

He goggled at it. "But--but--" he said.

He had just discovered that it wasn't English.

"To the best of my ability," I said, "I will do you a translation."

I did my best. After that we didn't speak for a fortnight. Whenever he
approached me I frowned and motioned him away, and he respected our
compact, but at the end of a fortnight he was as fat as ever. And then
he got a word in.

"I must speak," he said. "It isn't fair. There's something wrong. It's
done me no good. You're not doing your great-grandmother justice."

"Where's the recipe?"

He produced it gingerly from his pocket-book.

I ran my eye over the items. "Was the egg addled?" I asked.

"No, ought it to have been?"

"That," I said, "goes without saying in all my poor dear
great-grandmother's recipes. When condition or quality is not specified
you must get the worst. She was drastic or nothing... And there's one or
two possible alternatives to some of these other things. You got fresh
rattlesnake venom."

"I got a rattlesnake from Jamrach's. It cost--it cost--"

"That's your affair, anyhow. This last item--"

"I know a man who--"

"Yes. H'm. Well, I'll write the alternatives down. So far as I know the
language, the spelling of this recipe is particularly atrocious.
By-the-bye, dog here probably means pariah dog."

For a month after that I saw Pyecraft constantly at the club and as fat
and anxious as ever. He kept our treaty, but at times he broke the
spirit of it by shaking his head despondently. Then one day in the
cloak-room he said, "Your great-grandmother--"

"Not a word against her," I said; and he held his peace.

I could have fancied he had desisted, and I saw him one day talking to
three new members about his fatness as though he was in search of other
recipes. And then, quite unexpectedly, his telegram came.

"Mr. Formalyn!" bawled a page-boy under my nose, and I took the telegram
and opened it at once.

"For Heaven's sake come--Pyecraft."

"H'm," said I, and to tell the truth I was so pleased at the
rehabilitation of my great-grandmother's reputation this evidently
promised that I made a most excellent lunch.

I got Pyecraft's address from the hall porter. Pyecraft inhabited the
upper half of a house in Bloomsbury, and I went there so soon as I had
done my coffee and Trappistine. I did not wait to finish my cigar.

"Mr. Pyecraft?" said I, at the front door.

They believed he was ill; he hadn't been out for two days.

"He expects me," said I, and they sent me up.

I rang the bell at the lattice-door upon the landing.

"He shouldn't have tried it, anyhow," I said to myself. "A man who eats
like a pig ought to look like a pig."

An obviously worthy woman, with an anxious face and a carelessly placed
cap, came and surveyed me through the lattice.

I gave my name and she let me in a dubious fashion.

"Well?" said I, as we stood together inside Pyecraft's piece of the
landing.

"'E said you was to come in if you came," she said, and regarded me,
making no motion to show me anywhere. And then, confidentially, "'E's
locked in, sir."

"Locked in?"

"Locked himself in yesterday morning and 'asn't let any one in since,
sir. And ever and again swearing. Oh, my!"

I stared at the door she indicated by her glances.

"In there?" I said.

"Yes, sir."

"What's up?"

She shook her head sadly, "'E keeps on calling for vittles, sir. 'Eavy
vittles 'e wants. I get 'im what I can. Pork 'e's 'ad, sooit puddin',
sossiges, noo bread. Everythink like that. Left outside, if you please,
and me go away. 'E's eatin', sir, somethink Awful."

There came a piping bawl from inside the door: "That Formalyn?"

"That you, Pyecraft?" I shouted, and went and banged the door.

"Tell her to go away."

I did.

Then I could hear a curious pattering upon the door, almost like someone
feeling for the handle in the dark, and Pyecraft's familiar grunts.

"It's all right," I said, "she's gone."

But for a long time the door didn't open.

I heard the key turn. Then Pyecraft's voice said, "Come in."

I turned the handle and opened the door. Naturally I expected to see
Pyecraft.

Well, you know, he wasn't there!

I never had such a shock in my life. There was his sitting-room in a
state of untidy disorder, plates and dishes among the books and writing
things, and several chairs overturned, but Pyecraft--

"It's all right, o' man; shut the door," he said, and then I discovered
him.

There he was right up close to the cornice in the corner by the door, as
though some one had glued him to the ceiling. His face was anxious and
angry. He panted and gesticulated. "Shut the door," he said. "If that
woman gets hold of it--"

I shut the door, and went and stood away from him and stared.

"If anything gives way and you tumble down," I said, "you'll break your
neck, Pyecraft."

"I wish I could," he wheezed.

"A man of your age and weight getting up to kiddish gymnastics--"

"Don't," he said, and looked agonized. "Your damned great-grandmother--"

"No!" I cried.

"Be careful," I warned him.

"I'll tell you," he said, and gesticulated.

"How the deuce," said I, "are you holding on up there?"

And then abruptly I realized that he was not holding on at all, that he
was floating up there--just as a gas-filled bladder might have floated
in the same position. He began a struggle to thrust himself away from
the ceiling and to clamber down the wall to me. "It's that
prescription," he panted, as he did so. "Your great-gran--"

He took hold of a framed engraving rather carelessly as he spoke and it
gave way, and he flew back to the ceiling again, while the picture
smashed onto the sofa. Bump he went against the ceiling, and I knew then
why he was all over white on the more salient curves and angles of his
person. He tried again more carefully, coming down by way of the mantel.

It was really a most extraordinary spectacle, that great, fat,
apoplectic-looking man upside down and trying to get from the ceiling to
the floor. "That prescription," he said. "Too successful."

"How?"

"Loss of weight--almost complete."

And then, of course, I understood.

"By Jove, Pyecraft," said I, "what you wanted was a cure for fatness!
But you always called it weight. You would call it weight."

Somehow I was extremely delighted. I quite liked Pyecraft for the time.
"Let me help you!" I said, and took his hand and pulled him down. He
kicked about, trying to get a foothold somewhere. It was very like
holding a flag on a windy day.

"That table," he said, pointing, "is solid mahogany and very heavy. If
you can put me under that--"

I did, and there he wallowed about like a captive balloon, while I stood
on his hearthrug and talked to him.

I lit a cigar. "Tell me," I said, "what happened?"

"I took it," he said.

"How did it taste?"

"Oh, beastly!"

I should fancy they all did. Whether one regards the ingredients or the
probable compound or the possible results, almost all of my
great-grandmother's remedies appear to me at least to be extraordinarily
uninviting. For my own part--

"I took a little sip first."

"Yes?"

"And as I felt lighter and better after an hour, I decided to take the
draught."

"My dear Pyecraft!"

"I held my nose," he explained. "And then I kept on getting lighter and
lighter--and helpless, you know."

He gave way to a sudden burst of passion. "What the goodness am I to
do?" he said.

"There's one thing pretty evident," I said, "that you mustn't do. If you
go out of doors, you'll go up and up." I waved an arm upward. "They'd
have to send Santos-Dumont after you to bring you down again."

"I suppose it will wear off?"

I shook my head. "I don't think you can count on that," I said.

And then there was another burst of passion, and he kicked out at
adjacent chairs and banged the floor. He behaved just as I should have
expected a great, fat, self-indulgent man to behave under trying
circumstances--that is to say, very badly. He spoke of me and my
great-grandmother with an utter want of discretion.

"I never asked you to take the stuff," I said.

And generously disregarding the insults he was putting upon me, I sat
down in his armchair and began to talk to him in a sober, friendly
fashion.

I pointed out to him that this was a trouble he had brought upon
himself, and that it had almost an air of poetical justice. He had eaten
too much. This he disputed, and for a time we argued the point.

He became noisy and violent, so I desisted from this aspect of his
lesson. "And then," said I, "you committed the sin of euphuism. You
called it not Fat, which is just and inglorious, but Weight. You--"

He interrupted to say he recognised all that. What was he to do?

I suggested he should adapt himself to his new conditions. So we came to
the really sensible part of the business. I suggested that it would not
be difficult for him to learn to walk about on the ceiling with his
hands--

"I can't sleep," he said.

But that was no great difficulty. It was quite possible, I pointed out,
to make a shake-up under a wire mattress, fasten the under things on
with tapes, and have a blanket, sheet, and coverlet to button at the
side. He would have to confide in his housekeeper, I said; and after
some squabbling he agreed to that. (Afterwards it was quite delightful
to see the beautifully matter-of-fact way with which the good lady took
all these amazing inversions.) He could have a library ladder in his
room, and all his meals could be laid on the top of his bookcase. We
also hit on an ingenious device by which he could get to the floor
whenever he wanted, which was simply to put the British Encyclopaedia
(tenth edition) on the top of his open shelves. He just pulled out a
couple of volumes and held on, and down he came. And we agreed there
must be iron staples along the skirting, so that he could cling to those
whenever he wanted to get about the room on the lower level.

As we got on with the thing I found myself almost keenly interested. It
was I who called in the housekeeper and broke matters to her, and it was
I chiefly who fixed up the inverted bed. In fact, I spent two whole days
at his flat. I am a handy, interfering sort of man with a screw-driver,
and I made all sorts of ingenious adaptations for him--ran a wire to
bring his bells within reach, turned all his electric lights up instead
of down, and so on. The whole affair was extremely curious and
interesting to me, and it was delightful to think of Pyecraft like some
great, fat blow-fly, crawling about on his ceiling and clambering round
the lintels of his doors from one room to another, and never, never,
never coming to the club any more...

Then, you know, my fatal ingenuity got the better of me. I was sitting
by his fire drinking his whisky, and he was up in his favourite corner
by the cornice, tacking a Turkey carpet to the ceiling, when the idea
struck me. "By Jove, Pyecraft!" I said, "all this is totally
unnecessary."

And before I could calculate the complete consequences of my notion I
blurted it out. "Lead underclothing," said I, and the mischief was done.

Pyecraft received the thing almost in tears. "To be right ways up
again--" he said.

I gave him the whole secret before I saw where it would take me. "Buy
sheet lead," I said, "stamp it into discs. Sew 'em all over your
underclothes until you have enough. Have lead-soled boots, carry a bag
of solid lead, and the thing is done! Instead of being a prisoner here
you may go abroad again, Pyecraft; you may travel--"

A still happier idea came to me. "You need never fear a shipwreck. All
you need do is just slip off some or all of your clothes, take the
necessary amount of luggage in your hand, and float up in the air--"

In his emotion he dropped the tack-hammer within an ace of my head. "By
Jove!" he said, "I shall be able to come back to the club again."

The thing pulled me up short. "By Jove!" I said faintly. "Yes. Of
course--you will."

He did. He does. There he sits behind me now, stuffing--as I live--! A
third go of buttered tea-cake. And no one in the whole world
knows--except his housekeeper and me--that he weighs practically
nothing; that he is a mere boring mass of assimilatory matter, mere
clouds in clothing, niente, nefas, the most inconsiderable of men. There
he sits watching until I have done this writing. Then, if he can, he
will waylay me. He will come billowing up to me...

He will tell me over again all about it, how it feels, how it doesn't
feel, how he sometimes hopes it is passing off a little. And always
somewhere in that fat, abundant discourse he will say, "The secret's
keeping, eh? If any one knew of it--I should be so ashamed... Makes a
fellow look such a fool, you know. Crawling about on a ceiling and all
that..."

And now to elude Pyecraft, occupying, as he does, an admirable strategic
position between me and the door.




MR. SKELMERSDALE IN FAIRYLAND


"There's a man in that shop," said the Doctor, "who has been in
Fairyland."

"Nonsense!" I said, and stared back at the shop. It was the usual
village shop, post-office, telegraph wire on its brow, zinc pans and
brushes outside, boots, shirtings, and potted meats in the window. "Tell
me about it," I said, after a pause.

"I don't know," said the Doctor. "He's an ordinary sort of
lout--Skelmersdale is his name. But everybody about here believes it
like Bible truth."

I reverted presently to the topic.

"I know nothing about it," said the Doctor, "and I don't want to know. I
attended him for a broken finger--Married and Single cricket match--and
that's when I struck the nonsense. That's all. But it shows you the sort
of stuff I have to deal with, anyhow, eh? Nice to get modern sanitary
ideas into a people like this!"

"Very," I said in a mildly sympathetic tone, and he went on to tell me
about that business of the Bonham drain. Things of that kind, I observe,
are apt to weigh on the minds of Medical Officers of Health. I was as
sympathetic as I knew how, and when he called the Bonham people "asses,"
I said they were "thundering asses," but even that did not allay him.

Afterwards, later in the summer, an urgent desire to seclude myself,
while finishing my chapter on Spiritual Pathology--it was really, I
believe, stiffer to write than it is to read--took me to Bignor. I
lodged at a farmhouse, and presently found myself outside that little
general shop again, in search of tobacco. "Skelmersdale," said I to
myself at the sight of it, and went in.

I was served by a short, but shapely, young man, with a fair downy
complexion, good, small teeth, blue eyes, and a languid manner. I
scrutinised him curiously. Except for a touch of melancholy in his
expression, he was nothing out of the common. He was in the
shirt-sleeves and tucked-up apron of his trade, and a pencil was thrust
behind his inoffensive ear. Athwart his black waistcoat was a gold
chain, from which dangled a bent guinea.

"Nothing more to-day, sir?" he inquired. He leant forward over my bill
as he spoke.

"Are you Mr. Skelmersdale?" said I.

"I am, sir," he said, without looking up.

"Is it true that you have been in Fairyland?"

He looked up at me for a moment with wrinkled brows, with an aggrieved,
exasperated face. "O shut it!" he said, and after a moment of
hostility, eye to eye, he went on adding up my bill. "Four, six and a
half," he said, after a pause. "Thank you, Sir."

So, unpropitiously, my acquaintance with Mr. Skelmersdale began.

Well, I got from that to confidence--through a series of toilsome
efforts. I picked him up again in the Village Room, where of a night I
went to play billiards after my supper, and mitigate the extreme
seclusion from my kind that was so helpful to work during the day. I
contrived to play with him and afterwards to talk with him. I found the
one subject to avoid was Fairyland. On everything else he was open and
amiable in a commonplace sort of way, but on that he had been
worried--it was a manifest taboo. Only once in the room did I hear the
slightest allusion to his experience in his presence, and that was by a
cross-grained farm hand who was losing to him. Skelmersdale had run a
break into double figures, which, by the Bignor standards, was
uncommonly good play. "Steady on!" said his adversary. "None of your
fairy flukes!"

Skelmersdale stared at him for a moment, cue in hand, then flung it down
and walked out of the room.

"Why can't you leave 'im alone?" said a respectable elder who had been
enjoying the game, and in the general murmur of disapproval the grin of
satisfied wit faded from the ploughboy's face.

I scented my opportunity. "What's this joke," said I, "about Fairyland?"

"'Taint no joke about Fairyland, not to young Skelmersdale," said the
respectable elder, drinking. A little man with rosy cheeks was more
communicative. "They do say, sir," he said, "that they took him into
Aldington Knoll an' kep' him there a matter of three weeks."

And with that the gathering was well under weigh. Once one sheep had
started, others were ready enough to follow, and in a little time I had
at least the exterior aspect of the Skelmersdale affair. Formerly,
before he came to Bignor, he had been in that very similar little shop
at Aldington Corner, and there whatever it was did happen had taken
place. The story was clear that he had stayed out late one night on the
Knoll and vanished for three weeks from the sight of men, and had
returned with "his cuffs as clean as when he started," and his pockets
full of dust and ashes. He returned in a state of moody wretchedness
that only slowly passed away, and for many days he would give no account
of where it was he had been. The girl he was engaged to at Clapton Hill
tried to get it out of him, and threw him over partly because he
refused, and partly because, as she said, he fairly gave her the "'ump."
And then when, some time after, he let out to some one carelessly that
he had been in Fairyland and wanted to go back, and when the thing
spread and the simple badinage of the countryside came into play, he
threw up his situation abruptly, and came to Bignor to get out of the
fuss. But as to what had happened in Fairyland none of these people
knew. There the gathering in the Village Room went to pieces like a pack
at fault. One said this, and another said that.

Their air in dealing with this marvel was ostensibly critical and
sceptical, but I could see a considerable amount of belief showing
through their guarded qualifications. I took a line of intelligent
interest, tinged with a reasonable doubt of the whole story.

"If Fairyland's inside Aldington Knoll," I said, "why don't you dig it
out?"

"That's what I says," said the young ploughboy.

"There's a-many that have tried to dig on Aldington Knoll," said the
respectable elder, solemnly, "one time and another. But there's none as
goes about to-day to tell what they got by digging."

The unanimity of vague belief that surrounded me was rather impressive;
I felt there must surely be something at the root of so much conviction,
and the already pretty keen curiosity I felt about the real facts of the
case was distinctly whetted. If these real facts were to be got from any
one, they were to be got from Skelmersdale himself; and I set myself,
therefore, still more assiduously to efface the first bad impression I
had made and win his confidence to the pitch of voluntary speech. In
that endeavour I had a social advantage. Being a person of affability
and no apparent employment, and wearing tweeds and knickerbockers, I was
naturally classed as an artist in Bignor, and in the remarkable code of
social precedence prevalent in Bignor an artist ranks considerably
higher than a grocer's assistant. Skelmersdale, like too many of his
class, is something of a snob; he had told me to "Shut it," only under
sudden, excessive provocation, and with, I am certain, a subsequent
repentance; he was, I knew, quite glad to be seen walking about the
village with me. In due course, he accepted the proposal of a pipe and
whisky in my rooms readily enough, and there, scenting by some happy
instinct that there was trouble of the heart in this, and knowing that
confidences beget confidences, I plied him with much of interest and
suggestion from my real and fictitious past. And it was after the third
whisky of the third visit of that sort, if I remember rightly, that a
propos of some artless expansion of a little affair that had touched and
left me in my teens, that he did at last, of his own free will and
motion, break the ice. "It was like that with me," he said, "over there
at Aldington. It's just that, that's so rum. First I didn't care a bit
and it was all her, and afterwards, when it was too late, it was, in a
manner of speaking, all me."

I forbore to jump upon this allusion, and so he presently threw out
another, and in a little while he was making it as plain as daylight
that the one thing he wanted to talk about now was this Fairyland
adventure he had sat tight upon for so long. You see, I'd done the trick
with him, and from being just another half-incredulous, would-be
facetious stranger, I had, by all my wealth of shameless self-exposure,
become the possible confidant. He had been bitten by the desire to show
that he too, had lived and felt many things, and the fever was upon him.

He was certainly confoundedly allusive at first, and my eagerness to
clear him up with a few precise questions was only equalled and
controlled by my anxiety not to get to this sort of thing too soon. But
in another meeting or so the basis of confidence was complete; and from
first to last I think I got most of the items and aspects--indeed, I got
quite a number of times over almost everything that Mr. Skelmersdale,
with his very limited powers of narration, will ever be able to tell.
And so I come to the story of his adventure, and I piece it all together
again. Whether it really happened, whether he imagined it or dreamt it,
or fell upon it in some strange hallucinatory trance, I do not profess
to say. But that he invented it I will not for one moment entertain. The
man simply and honestly believes the thing happened as he says it
happened; he is transparently incapable of any lie so elaborate and
sustained, and in the belief of the simple, yet often keenly
penetrating, rustic minds about him I find a very strong confirmation of
his sincerity. He believes--and nobody can produce any positive fact to
falsify his belief. As for me, with this much of endorsement, I transmit
his story--I am a little old now to justify or explain.

He says he went to sleep on Aldington Knoll about ten o'clock one
night--it was quite possibly Midsummer night, though he has never
thought of the date, and he cannot be sure within a week or so--and it
was a fine night and windless, with a rising moon. I have been at the
pains to visit this Knoll thrice since his story grew up under my
persuasions, and once I went there in the twilight summer moonrise on
what was, perhaps, a similar night to that of his adventure. Jupiter was
great and splendid above the moon, and in the north and north-west the
sky was green and vividly bright over the sunken sun. The Knoll stands
out bare and bleak under the sky, but surrounded at a little distance by
dark thickets, and as I went up towards it there was a mighty starting
and scampering of ghostly or quite invisible rabbits. Just over the
crown of the Knoll, but nowhere else, was a multitudinous thin
trumpeting of midges. The Knoll is, I believe, an artificial mound, the
tumulus of some great prehistoric chieftain, and surely no man ever
chose a more spacious prospect for a sepulchre. Eastward one sees along
the hills to Hythe, and thence across the Channel to where, thirty miles
and more perhaps, away the great white lights by Gris Nez and Boulogne
wink and pass and shine. Westward lies the whole tumbled valley of the
Weald, visible as far as Hindhead and Leith Hill, and the valley of the
Stour opens the Downs in the north to interminable hills beyond Wye. All
Romney Marsh lies southward at one's feet, Dymchurch and Romney and
Lydd, Hastings and its hill are in the middle distance, and the hills
multiply vaguely far beyond where Eastbourne rolls up to Beachy Head.

And out upon all this it was that Skelmersdale wandered, being troubled
in his earlier love affair, and as he says, "not caring where he went."
And there he sat down to think it over, and so, sulking and grieving,
was overtaken by sleep. And so he fell into the fairies' power.

The quarrel that had upset him was some trivial matter enough between
himself and the girl at Clapton Hill to whom he was engaged. She was a
farmer's daughter, said Skelmersdale, and "very respectable," and no
doubt an excellent match for him; but both girl and lover were very
young and with just that mutual jealousy, that intolerantly keen edge of
criticism, that irrational hunger for a beautiful perfection, that life
and wisdom do presently and most mercifully dull. What the precise
matter of quarrel was I have no idea. She may have said she liked men in
gaiters when he hadn't any gaiters on, or he may have said he liked her
better in a different sort of hat, but however it began, it got by a
series of clumsy stages to bitterness and tears. She no doubt got
tearful and smeary, and he grew dusty and drooping, and she parted with
invidious comparisons, grave doubts whether she ever had really cared
for him, and a clear certainty she would never care again. And with this
sort of thing upon his mind he came out upon Aldington Knoll grieving,
and presently, after a long interval, perhaps, quite inexplicably, fell
asleep.

He woke to find himself on a softer turf than ever he had slept on
before, and under the shade of very dark trees that completely hid the
sky. Always, indeed, in Fairyland the sky is hidden, it seems. Except
for one night when the fairies were dancing, Mr. Skelmersdale, during
all his time with them, never saw a star. And of that night I am in
doubt whether he was in Fairyland proper or out where the rings and
rushes are, in those low meadows near the railway line at Smeeth.

But it was light under these trees for all that, and on the leaves and
amidst the turf shone a multitude of glow-worms, very bright and fine.
Mr. Skelmersdale's first impression was that he was small, and the next
that quite a number of people still smaller were standing all about him.
For some reason, he says, he was neither surprised nor frightened, but
sat up quite deliberately and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes. And
there all about him stood the smiling elves who had caught him sleeping
under their privileges and had brought him into Fairyland.

What these elves were like I have failed to gather, so vague and
imperfect is his vocabulary, and so unobservant of all minor detail does
he seem to have been. They were clothed in something very light and
beautiful, that was neither wool, nor silk, nor leaves, nor the petals
of flowers. They stood all about him as he sat and waked, and down the
glade towards him, down a glow-worm avenue and fronted by a star, came
at once that Fairy Lady who is the chief personage of his memory and
tale. Of her I gathered more. She was clothed in filmy green, and about
her little waist was a broad silver girdle. Her hair waved back from her
forehead on either side; there were curls not too wayward and yet
astray, and on her brow was a little tiara, set with a single star. Her
sleeves were some sort of open sleeves that gave little glimpses of her
arms; her throat, I think, was a little displayed, because he speaks of
the beauty of her neck and chin. There was a necklace of coral about her
white throat, and in her breast a coral-coloured flower. She had the
soft lines of a little child in her chin and cheeks and throat. And her
eyes, I gather, were of a kindled brown, very soft and straight and
sweet under her level brows. You see by these particulars how greatly
this lady must have loomed in Mr. Skelmersdale's picture. Certain things
he tried to express and could not express; "the way she moved," he said
several times; and I fancy a sort of demure joyousness radiated from
this Lady.

And it was in the company of this delightful person, as the guest and
chosen companion of this delightful person, that Mr. Skelmersdale set
out to be taken into the intimacies of Fairyland. She welcomed him
gladly and a little warmly--I suspect a pressure of his hand in both of
hers and a lit face to his. After all, ten years ago young Skelmersdale
may have been a very comely youth. And once she took his arm, and once,
I think, she led him by the hand down the glade that the glow-worms lit.

Just how things chanced and happened there is no telling from Mr.
Skelmersdale's disarticulated skeleton of description. He gives little
unsatisfactory glimpses of strange corners and doings, of places where
there were many fairies together, of "toadstool things that shone pink,"
of fairy food, of which he could only say "you should have tasted it!"
And of fairy music, "like a little musical box," that came out of
nodding flowers. There was a great open place where fairies rode and
raced on "things," but what Mr. Skelmersdale meant by "these here things
they rode," there is no telling. Larvae, perhaps, or crickets, or the
little beetles that elude us so abundantly. There was a place where
water splashed and gigantic king-cups grew, and there in the hotter
times the fairies bathed together. There were games being played and
dancing and much elvish love-making too, I think, among the moss branch
thickets. There can be no doubt that the Fairy Lady made love to Mr.
Skelmersdale, and no doubt either that this young man set himself to
resist her. A time came, indeed, when she sat on a bank beside him, in a
quiet, secluded place "all smelling of vi'lets," and talked to him of
love.

"When her voice went low and she whispered," said Mr. Skelmersdale, "and
laid 'er 'and on my 'and, you know, and came close with a soft, warm
friendly way she 'ad, it was as much as I could do to keep my 'ead."

It seems he kept his head to a certain limited unfortunate extent. He
saw "'ow the wind was blowing," he says, and so, sitting there in a
place all smelling of violets, with the touch of this lovely Fairy Lady
about him, Mr. Skelmersdale broke it to her gently--that he was engaged!

She had told him she loved him dearly, that he was a sweet human lad for
her, and whatever he would ask of her he should have--even his heart's
desire.

And Mr. Skelmersdale, who, I fancy, tried hard to avoid looking at her
little lips as they just dropped apart and came together, led up to the
more intimate question by saying he would like enough capital to start a
little shop. He'd just like to feel, he said, he had money enough to do
that. I imagine a little surprise in those brown eyes he talked about,
but she seemed sympathetic for all that, and she asked him many
questions about the little shop, "laughing like" all the time. So he got
to the complete statement of his affianced position, and told her all
about Millie.

"All?" said I.

"Everything," said Mr. Skelmersdale, "just who she was, and where she
lived, and everything about her. I sort of felt I 'ad to all the time, I
did."

"'Whatever you want you shall have,' said the Fairy Lady. 'That's as
good as done. You shall feel you have the money just as you wish. And
now, you know--you must kiss me.'"

And Mr. Skelmersdale pretended not to hear the latter part of her
remark, and said she was very kind. That he really didn't deserve she
should be so kind. And--

The Fairy Lady suddenly came quite close to him and whispered, "Kiss
me!"

"And," said Mr. Skelmersdale, "like a fool, I did."

There are kisses and kisses, I am told, and this must have been quite
the other sort from Millie's resonant signals of regard. There was
something magic in that kiss; assuredly it marked a turning point. At
any rate, this is one of the passages that he thought sufficiently
important to describe most at length. I have tried to get it right, I
have tried to disentangle it from the hints and gestures through which
it came to me, but I have no doubt that it was all different from my
telling and far finer and sweeter, in the soft filtered light and the
subtly stirring silences of the fairy glades. The Fairy Lady asked him
more about Millie, and was she very lovely, and so on--a great many
times. As to Millie's loveliness, I conceive him answering that she was
"all right." And then, or on some such occasion, the Fairy Lady told him
she had fallen in love with him as he slept in the moonlight, and so he
had been brought into Fairyland, and she had thought, not knowing of
Millie, that perhaps he might chance to love her. "But now you know you
can't," she said, "so you must stop with me just a little while, and
then you must go back to Millie." She told him that, and you know
Skelmersdale was already in love with her, but the pure inertia of his
mind kept him in the way he was going. I imagine him sitting in a sort
of stupefaction amidst all these glowing beautiful things, answering
about his Millie and the little shop he projected and the need of a
horse and cart... And that absurd state of affairs must have gone on for
days and days. I see this little lady, hovering about him and trying to
amuse him, too dainty to understand his complexity and too tender to let
him go. And he, you know, hypnotised as it were by his earthly position,
went his way with her hither and thither, blind to everything in
Fairyland but this wonderful intimacy that had come to him. It is hard,
it is impossible, to give in print the effect of her radiant sweetness
shining through the jungle of poor Skelmersdale's rough and broken
sentences. To me, at least, she shone clear amidst the muddle of his
story like a glow-worm in a tangle of weeds.

There must have been many days of things while all this was
happening--and once, I say, they danced under the moonlight in the fairy
rings that stud the meadows near Smeeth--but at last it all came to an
end. She led him into a great cavernous place, lit by a red nightlight
sort of thing, where there were coffers piled on coffers, and cups and
golden boxes, and a great heap of what certainly seemed to all Mr.
Skelmersdale's senses--coined gold. There were little gnomes amidst this
wealth, who saluted her at her coming, and stood aside. And suddenly she
turned on him there with brightly shining eyes.

"And now," she said, "you have been kind to stay with me so long, and it
is time I let you go. You must go back to your Millie. You must go back
to your Millie, and here--just as I promised you--they will give you
gold."

"She choked like," said Mr. Skelmersdale. "At that, I had a sort of
feeling--" (he touched his breastbone) "as though I was fainting here. I
felt pale, you know, and shivering, and even then--I 'adn't a thing to
say."

He paused. "Yes," I said.

The scene was beyond his describing. But I know that she kissed him
good-bye.

"And you said nothing?"

"Nothing," he said. "I stood like a stuffed calf. She just looked back
once, you know, and stood smiling like and crying--I could see the shine
of her eyes--and then she was gone, and there was all these little
fellows bustling about me, stuffing my 'ands and my pockets and the back
of my collar and everywhere with gold."

And then it was, when the Fairy Lady had vanished, that Mr. Skelmersdale
really understood and knew. He suddenly began plucking out the gold they
were thrusting upon him, and shouting out at them to prevent their
giving him more. "'I don't want yer gold,' I said. 'I 'aven't done yet.
I'm not going. I want to speak to that Fairy Lady again.' I started off
to go after her and they held me back. Yes, stuck their little 'ands
against my middle and shoved me back. They kept giving me more and more
gold until it was running all down my trouser legs and dropping out of
my 'ands. 'I don't want yer gold,' I says to them, 'I want just to speak
to the Fairy Lady again.'"

"And did you?"

"It came to a tussle."

"Before you saw her?"

"I didn't see her. When I got out from them she wasn't anywhere to be
seen."

So he ran in search of her out of this red-lit cave, down a long grotto,
seeking her, and thence he came out in a great and desolate place
athwart which a swarm of will-o'-the-wisps were flying to and fro. And
about him elves were dancing in derision, and the little gnomes came out
of the cave after him, carrying gold in handfuls and casting it after
him, shouting, "Fairy love and fairy gold! Fairy love and fairy gold!"

And when he heard these words, came a great fear that it was all over,
and he lifted up his voice and called to her by her name, and suddenly
set himself to run down the slope from the mouth of the cavern, through
a place of thorns and briers, calling after her very loudly and often.
The elves danced about him unheeded, pinching him and pricking him, and
the will-o'-the-wisps circled round him and dashed into his face, and
the gnomes pursued him shouting and pelting him with fairy gold. As he
ran with all this strange rout about him and distracting him, suddenly
he was knee-deep in a swamp, and suddenly he was amidst thick twisted
roots, and he caught his foot in one and stumbled and fell...

He fell and he rolled over, and in that instant he found himself
sprawling upon Aldington Knoll, all lonely under the stars.

He sat up sharply at once, he says, and found he was very stiff and
cold, and his clothes were damp with dew. The first pallor of dawn and a
chilly wind were coming up together. He could have believed the whole
thing a strangely vivid dream until he thrust his hand into his side
pocket and found it stuffed with ashes. Then he knew for certain it was
fairy gold they had given him. He could feel all their pinches and
pricks still, though there was never a bruise upon him. And in that
manner, and so suddenly, Mr. Skelmersdale came out of Fairyland back
into this world of men. Even then he fancied the thing was but the
matter of a night until he returned to the shop at Aldington Corner and
discovered amidst their astonishment that he had been away three weeks.

"Lor'! The trouble I 'ad!" said Mr. Skelmersdale.

"How?"

"Explaining. I suppose you've never had anything like that to explain."

"Never," I said, and he expatiated for a time on the behaviour of this
person and that. One name he avoided for a space.

"And Millie?" said I at last.

"I didn't seem to care a bit for seeing Millie," he said.

"I expect she seemed changed?"

"Every one was changed. Changed for good. Every one seemed big, you
know, and coarse. And their voices seemed loud. Why, the sun, when it
rose in the morning, fair hit me in the eye!"

"And Millie?"

"I didn't want to see Millie."

"And when you did?"

"I came up against her Sunday, coming out of church. 'Where you been?'
she said, and I saw there was a row. I didn't care if there was. I
seemed to forget about her even while she was there a-talking to me. She
was just nothing. I couldn't make out whatever I 'ad seen in 'er ever,
or what there could 'ave been. Sometimes when she wasn't about, I did
get back a little, but never when she was there. Then it was always the
other came up and blotted her out... Any'ow, it didn't break her heart."

"Married?" I asked.

"Married 'er cousin," said Mr. Skelmersdale, and reflected on the
pattern of the tablecloth for a space.

When he spoke again it was clear that his former sweetheart had clean
vanished from his mind, and that the talk had brought back the Fairy
Lady triumphant in his heart. He talked of her--soon he was letting out
the oddest things, queer love secrets it would be treachery to repeat. I
think, indeed, that was the queerest thing in the whole affair, to hear
that neat little grocer man after his story was done, with a glass of
whisky beside him and a cigar between his fingers, witnessing, with
sorrow still, though now, indeed, with a time blunted anguish, of the
inappeasable hunger of the heart that presently came upon him. "I
couldn't eat," he said, "I couldn't sleep. I made mistakes in orders and
got mixed with change. There she was day and night, drawing me and
drawing me. Oh, I wanted her. Lord! How I wanted her! I was up there,
most evenings I was up there on the Knoll, often even when it rained. I
used to walk over the Knoll and round it and round it, calling for them
to let me in. Shouting. Near blubbering I was at times. Daft I was and
miserable. I kept on saying it was all a mistake. And every Sunday
afternoon I went up there, wet and fine, though I knew as well as you do
it wasn't no good by day. And I've tried to go to sleep there."

He stopped sharply and decided to drink some whisky.

"I've tried to go to sleep there," he said, and I could swear his lips
trembled. "I've tried to go to sleep there, often and often. And, you
know, I couldn't, sir--never. I've thought if I could go to sleep there,
there might be something. But I've sat up there and laid up there, and I
couldn't--not for thinking and longing. It's the longing... I've
tried--"

He blew, drank up the rest of his whisky spasmodically, stood up
suddenly and buttoned his jacket, staring closely and critically at the
cheap oleographs beside the mantel meanwhile. The little black notebook
in which he recorded the orders of his daily round projected stiffly
from his breast pocket. When all the buttons were quite done, he patted
his chest and turned on me suddenly. "Well," he said, "I must be going."

There was something in his eyes and manner that was too difficult for
him to express in words. "One gets talking," he said at last at the
door, and smiled wanly, and so vanished from my eyes. And that is the
tale of Mr. Skelmersdale in Fairyland just as he told it to me.




THE INEXPERIENCED GHOST


The scene amidst which Clayton told his last story comes back very
vividly to my mind. There he sat, for the greater part of the time, in
the corner of the authentic settle by the spacious open fire, and
Sanderson sat beside him smoking the Broseley clay that bore his name.
There was Evans, and that marvel among actors, Wish, who is also a
modest man. We had all come down to the Mermaid Club that Saturday
morning, except Clayton, who had slept there overnight--which indeed
gave him the opening of his story. We had golfed until golfing was
invisible; we had dined, and we were in that mood of tranquil kindliness
when men will suffer a story. When Clayton began to tell one, we
naturally supposed he was lying. It may be that indeed he was lying--of
that the reader will speedily be able to judge as well as I. He began,
it is true, with an air of matter-of-fact anecdote, but that we thought
was only the incurable artifice of the man.

"I say!" he remarked, after a long consideration of the upward rain of
sparks from the log that Sanderson had thumped. "You know I was alone
here last night?"

"Except for the domestics," said Wish.

"Who sleep in the other wing," said Clayton. "Yes. Well--" He pulled at
his cigar for some little time as though he still hesitated about his
confidence. Then he said, quite quietly, "I caught a ghost!"

"Caught a ghost, did you?" said Sanderson. "Where is it?"

And Evans, who admires Clayton immensely and has been four weeks in
America, shouted, "Caught a ghost, did you, Clayton? I'm glad of it!
Tell us all about it right now."

Clayton said he would in a minute, and asked him to shut the door.

He looked apologetically at me. "There's no eavesdropping of course, but
we don't want to upset our very excellent service with any rumours of
ghosts in the place. There's too much shadow and oak panelling to trifle
with that. And this, you know, wasn't a regular ghost. I don't think it
will come again--ever."

"You mean to say you didn't keep it?" said Sanderson.

"I hadn't the heart to," said Clayton.

And Sanderson said he was surprised.

We laughed, and Clayton looked aggrieved. "I know," he said, with the
flicker of a smile, "but the fact is it really was a ghost, and I'm as
sure of it as I am that I am talking to you now. I'm not joking. I mean
what I say."

Sanderson drew deeply at his pipe, with one reddish eye on Clayton, and
then emitted a thin jet of smoke more eloquent than many words.

Clayton ignored the comment. "It is the strangest thing that has ever
happened in my life. You know, I never believed in ghosts or anything of
the sort, before, ever; and then you know, I bag one in a corner; and
the whole business is in my hands."

He meditated still more profoundly, and produced and began to pierce a
second cigar with a curious little stabber he affected.

"You talked to it?" asked Wish.

"For the space, probably, of an hour."

"Chatty?" I said, joining the party of the sceptics.

"The poor devil was in trouble," said Clayton, bowed over his cigar-end
and with the very faintest note of reproof.

"Sobbing?" some one asked.

Clayton heaved a realistic sigh at the memory. "Good Lord!" he said;
"Yes." And then, "Poor fellow! Yes."

"Where did you strike it?" asked Evans, in his best American accent.

"I never realised," said Clayton, ignoring him, "the poor sort of thing
a ghost might be," and he hung us up again for a time, while he sought
for matches in his pocket and lit and warmed to his cigar.

"I took an advantage," he reflected at last.

We were none of us in a hurry. "A character," he said, "remains just the
same character for all that it's been disembodied. That's a thing we too
often forget. People with a certain strength or fixity of purpose may
have ghosts of a certain strength and fixity of purpose--most haunting
ghosts, you know, must be as one-idea'd as monomaniacs and as obstinate
as mules to come back again and again. This poor creature wasn't." He
suddenly looked up rather queerly, and his eye went round the room. "I
say it," he said, "in all kindliness, but that is the plain truth of the
case. Even at the first glance he struck me as weak."

He punctuated with the help of his cigar.

"I came upon him, you know, in the long passage. His back was towards me
and I saw him first. Right off I knew him for a ghost. He was
transparent and whitish; clean through his chest I could see the glimmer
of the little window at the end. And not only his physique but his
attitude struck me as being weak. He looked, you know, as though he
didn't know in the slightest whatever he meant to do. One hand was on
the panelling and the other fluttered to his mouth. Like--so!"

"What sort of physique?" said Sanderson.

"Lean. You know that sort of young man's neck that has two great
flutings down the back, here and here--so! And a little, meanish head
with scrubby hair and rather bad ears. Shoulders bad, narrower than the
hips; turndown collar, ready-made short jacket, trousers baggy and a
little frayed at the heels. That's how he took me. I came very quietly
up the staircase. I did not carry a light, you know--the candles are on
the landing table and there is that lamp--and I was in my list slippers,
and I saw him as I came up. I stopped dead at that--taking him in. I
wasn't a bit afraid. I think that in most of these affairs one is never
nearly so afraid or excited as one imagines one would be. I was
surprised and interested. I thought, 'Good Lord! Here's a ghost at last!
And I haven't believed for a moment in ghosts during the last
five-and-twenty years.'"

"Um," said Wish.

"I suppose I wasn't on the landing a moment before he found out I was
there. He turned on me sharply, and I saw the face of an immature young
man, a weak nose, a scrubby little moustache, a feeble chin. So for an
instant we stood--he looking over his shoulder at me--and regarded one
another. Then he seemed to remember his high calling. He turned round,
drew himself up, projected his face, raised his arms, spread his hands
in approved ghost fashion--came towards me. As he did so his little jaw
dropped, and he emitted a faint, drawn-out 'Boo.' No, it wasn't--not a
bit dreadful. I'd dined. I'd had a bottle of champagne, and being all
alone, perhaps two or three--perhaps even four or five--whiskies, so I
was as solid as rocks and no more frightened than if I'd been assailed
by a frog. 'Boo!' I said. 'Nonsense. You don't belong to this place.
What are you doing here?'

"I could see him wince. 'Boo-oo,' he said.

"'Boo--be hanged! Are you a member?' I said; and just to show I didn't
care a pin for him I stepped through a corner of him and made to light
my candle. 'Are you a member?' I repeated, looking at him sideways.

"He moved a little so as to stand clear of me, and his bearing became
crestfallen. 'No,' he said, in answer to the persistent interrogation of
my eye; 'I'm not a member--I'm a ghost.'

"'Well, that doesn't give you the run of the Mermaid Club. Is there any
one you want to see, or anything of that sort?' And doing it as steadily
as possible for fear that he should mistake the carelessness of whisky
for the distraction of fear, I got my candle alight. I turned on him,
holding it. 'What are you doing here?' I said.

"He had dropped his hands and stopped his booing, and there he stood,
abashed and awkward, the ghost of a weak, silly, aimless young man. 'I'm
haunting,' he said.

"'You haven't any business to,' I said in a quiet voice.

"'I'm a ghost,' he said, as if in defence.

"'That may be, but you haven't any business to haunt here. This is a
respectable private club; people often stop here with nursemaids and
children, and going about in the careless way you do, some poor little
mite could easily come upon you and be scared out of her wits. I suppose
you didn't think of that?'

"'No, sir,' he said, 'I didn't.'

"'You should have done. You haven't any claim on the place, have you?
Weren't murdered here, or anything of that sort?'

"'None, sir; but I thought as it was old and oak-panelled--'

"'That's no excuse.' I regarded him firmly. 'Your coming here is a
mistake,' I said, in a tone of friendly superiority. I feigned to see if
I had my matches, and then looked up at him frankly. 'If I were you I
wouldn't wait for cock-crow--I'd vanish right away.'

"He looked embarrassed. 'The fact is, sir--' he began.

"'I'd vanish,' I said, driving it home.

"'The fact is, sir, that--somehow--I can't.'

"'You can't?'

"'No, sir. There's something I've forgotten. I've been hanging about
here since midnight last night, hiding in the cupboards of the empty
bedrooms and things like that. I'm flurried. I've never come haunting
before, and it seems to put me out.'

"'Put you out?'

"'Yes, sir. I've tried to do it several times, and it doesn't come off.
There's some little thing has slipped me, and I can't get back.'

"That, you know, rather bowled me over. He looked at me in such an
abject way that for the life of me I couldn't keep up quite the high,
hectoring vein I had adopted. 'That's queer,' I said, and as I spoke I
fancied I heard some one moving about down below. 'Come into my room and
tell me more about it,' I said. 'I didn't, of course, understand this.'
and I tried to take him by the arm. But, of course, you might as well
have tried to take hold of a puff of smoke! I had forgotten my number, I
think; anyhow, I remember going into several bedrooms--it was lucky I
was the only soul in that wing--until I saw my traps. 'Here we are,' I
said, and sat down in the armchair; 'sit down and tell me all about it.
It seems to me you have got yourself into a jolly awkward position, old
chap.'

"Well, he said he wouldn't sit down! He'd prefer to flit up and down the
room if it was all the same to me. And so he did, and in a little while
we were deep in a long and serious talk. And presently, you know,
something of those whiskies and sodas evaporated out of me, and I began
to realise just a little what a thundering rum and weird business it was
that I was in. There he was, semi-transparent--the proper conventional
phantom, and noiseless except for his ghost of a voice--flitting to and
fro in that nice, clean, chintz-hung old bedroom. You could see the
gleam of the copper candlesticks through him, and the lights on the
brass fender, and the corners of the framed engravings on the wall, and
there he was telling me all about this wretched little life of his that
had recently ended on earth. He hadn't a particularly honest face, you
know, but being transparent, of course, he couldn't avoid telling the
truth."

"Eh?" said Wish, suddenly sitting up in his chair.

"What?" said Clayton.

"Being transparent--couldn't avoid telling the truth--I don't see it,"
said Wish.

"I don't see it," said Clayton, with inimitable assurance. "But it is
so, I can assure you nevertheless. I don't believe he got once a nail's
breadth off the Bible truth. He told me how he had been killed--he went
down into a London basement with a candle to look for a leakage of
gas--and described himself as a senior English master in a London
private school when that release occurred."

"Poor wretch!" said I.

"That's what I thought, and the more he talked the more I thought it.
There he was, purposeless in life and purposeless out of it. He talked
of his father and mother and his schoolmaster, and all who had ever been
anything to him in the world, meanly. He had been too sensitive, too
nervous; none of them had ever valued him properly or understood him, he
said. He had never had a real friend in the world, I think; he had
never, had a success. He had shirked games and failed examinations.
'It's like that with some people,' he said; 'whenever I got into the
examination-room or anywhere everything seemed to go.' Engaged to be
married of course--to another oversensitive person, I suppose--when the
indiscretion with the gas escape ended his affairs. 'And where are you
now?' I asked. 'Not in--?'

"He wasn't clear on that point at all. The impression he gave me was of
a sort of vague, intermediate state, a special reserve for souls too
non-existent for anything so positive as either sin or virtue. I don't
know. He was much too egotistical and unobservant to give me any clear
idea of the kind of place, kind of country, there is on the Other Side
of Things. Wherever he was, he seems to have fallen in with a set of
kindred spirits: ghosts of weak Cockney young men, who were on a footing
of Christian names, and among these there was certainly a lot of talk
about 'going haunting' and things like that. Yes--going haunting! They
seemed to think 'haunting' a tremendous adventure, and most of them
funked it all the time. And so primed, you know, he had come."

"But really!" said Wish to the fire.

"These are the impressions he gave me, anyhow," said Clayton, modestly.
"I may, of course, have been in a rather uncritical state, but that was
the sort of background he gave to himself. He kept flitting up and down,
with his thin voice going--talking, talking about his wretched self, and
never a word of clear, firm statement from first to last. He was thinner
and sillier and more pointless than if he had been real and alive. Only
then, you know, he would not have been in my bedroom here--if he had
been alive. I should have kicked him out."

"Of course," said Evans, "there ARE poor mortals like that."

"And there's just as much chance of their having ghosts as the rest of
us," I admitted.

"What gave a sort of point to him, you know, was the fact that he did
seem within limits to have found himself out. The mess he had made of
haunting had depressed him terribly. He had been told it would be a
'lark'; he had come expecting it to be a 'lark,' and here it was,
nothing but another failure added to his record! He proclaimed himself
an utter out-and-out failure. He said, and I can quite believe it, that
he had never tried to do anything all his life that he hadn't made a
perfect mess of--and through all the wastes of eternity he never would.
If he had had sympathy, perhaps--He paused at that, and stood
regarding me. He remarked that, strange as it might seem to me, nobody,
not any one, ever had given him the amount of sympathy I was doing now.
I could see what he wanted straight away, and I determined to head him
off at once. I may be a brute, you know, but being the Only Real Friend,
the recipient of the confidences of one of these egotistical weaklings,
ghost or body, is beyond my physical endurance. I got up briskly. 'Don't
you brood on these things too much,' I said. 'The thing you've got to do
is to get out of this--get out of this sharp. You pull yourself together
and try.' 'I can't,' he said. 'You try,' I said, and try he did."

"Try!" said Sanderson. "How?"

"Passes," said Clayton.

"Passes?"

"Complicated series of gestures and passes with the hands. That's how he
had come in and that's how he had to get out again. Lord! What a
business I had!"

"But how could any series of passes--" I began.

"My dear man," said Clayton, turning on me and putting a great emphasis
on certain words, "you want everything clear. I don't know how. All I
know is that you do--that he did anyhow, at least. After a fearful time,
you know, he got his passes right and suddenly disappeared."

"Did you," said Sanderson, slowly, "observe the passes?"

"Yes," said Clayton, and seemed to think. "It was tremendously queer,"
he said. "There we were, I and this thin vague ghost, in that silent
room, in this silent, empty inn, in this silent little Friday-night
town. Not a sound except our voices and a faint panting he made when he
swung. There was the bedroom candle, and one candle on the
dressing-table alight, that was all--sometimes one or other would flare
up into a tall, lean, astonished flame for a space. And queer things
happened. 'I can't,' he said; 'I shall never--!' And suddenly he sat
down on a little chair at the foot of the bed and began to sob and sob.
Lord! What a harrowing, whimpering thing he seemed!

"'You pull yourself together,' I said, and tried to pat him on the back,
and... my confounded hand went through him! By that time, you know, I
wasn't nearly so--massive as I had been on the landing. I got the
queerness of it full. I remember snatching back my hand out of him, as
it were, with a little thrill, and walking over to the dressing-table.
'You pull yourself together,' I said to him, 'and try.' And in order to
encourage and help him I began to try as well."

"What!" said Sanderson, "The passes?"

"Yes, the passes."

"But--" I said, moved by an idea that eluded me for a space.

"This is interesting," said Sanderson, with his finger in his pipe-bowl.
"You mean to say this ghost of yours gave away--"

"Did his level best to give away the whole confounded barrier? Yes."

"He didn't," said Wish; "he couldn't. Or you'd have gone there too."

"That's precisely it," I said, finding my elusive idea put into words
for me.

"That is precisely it," said Clayton, with thoughtful eyes upon the
fire.

For just a little while there was silence.

"And at last he did it?" said Sanderson.

"At last he did it. I had to keep him up to it hard, but he did it at
last--rather suddenly. He despaired, we had a scene, and then he got up
abruptly and asked me to go through the whole performance, slowly, so
that he might see. 'I believe,' he said, 'if I could see I should spot
what was wrong at once.' And he did. 'I know,' he said. 'What do you
know?' said I. 'I know,' he repeated. Then he said, peevishly, 'I can't
do it if you look at me--I really can't; it's been that, partly, all
along. I'm such a nervous fellow that you put me out.' Well, we had a
bit of an argument. Naturally I wanted to see; but he was as obstinate
as a mule, and suddenly I had come over as tired as a dog--he tired me
out. 'All right,' I said, 'I won't look at you,' and turned towards the
mirror, on the wardrobe, by the bed.

"He started off very fast. I tried to follow him by looking in the
looking-glass, to see just what it was had hung. Round went his arms and
his hands, so, and so, and so, and then with a rush came to the last
gesture of all--you stand erect and open out your arms--and so, don't
you know, he stood. And then he didn't! He didn't! He wasn't! I wheeled
round from the looking-glass to him. There was nothing! I was alone,
with the flaring candles and a staggering mind. What had happened? Had
anything happened? Had I been dreaming...? And then, with an absurd note
of finality about it, the clock upon the landing discovered the moment
was ripe for striking one. So--! Ping! And I was as grave and sober as a
judge, with all my champagne and whisky gone into the vast serene.
Feeling queer, you know--confoundedly queer! Queer! Good Lord!"

He regarded his cigar-ash for a moment. "That's all that happened," he
said.

"And then you went to bed?" asked Evans.

"What else was there to do?"

I looked Wish in the eye. We wanted to scoff, and there was something,
something perhaps in Clayton's voice and manner, that hampered our
desire.

"And about these passes?" said Sanderson.

"I believe I could do them now."

"Oh!" said Sanderson, and produced a pen-knife and set himself to grub
the dottel out of the bowl of his clay.

"Why don't you do them now?" said Sanderson, shutting his pen-knife with
a click.

"That's what I'm going to do," said Clayton.

"They won't work," said Evans.

"If they do--" I suggested.

"You know, I'd rather you didn't," said Wish, stretching out his legs.

"Why?" asked Evans.

"I'd rather he didn't," said Wish.

"But he hasn't got 'em right," said Sanderson, plugging too much tobacco
in his pipe.

"All the same, I'd rather he didn't," said Wish.

We argued with Wish. He said that for Clayton to go through those
gestures was like mocking a serious matter. "But you don't believe--?" I
said. Wish glanced at Clayton, who was staring into the fire, weighing
something in his mind. "I do--more than half anyhow, I do," said Wish.

"Clayton," said I, "you're too good a liar for us. Most of it was all
right. But that disappearance... happened to be convincing. Tell us,
it's a tale of cock and bull."

He stood up without heeding me, took the middle of the hearthrug, and
faced me. For a moment he regarded his feet thoughtfully, and then for
all the rest of the time his eyes were on the opposite wall, with an
intent expression. He raised his two hands slowly to the level of his
eyes and so began...

Now, Sanderson is a Freemason, a member of the lodge of the Four Kings,
which devotes itself so ably to the study and elucidation of all the
mysteries of Masonry past and present, and among the students of this
lodge Sanderson is by no means the least. He followed Clayton's motions
with a singular interest in his reddish eye. "That's not bad," he said,
when it was done. "You really do, you know, put things together Clayton,
in a most amazing fashion. But there's one little detail out."

"I know," said Clayton. "I believe I could tell you which."

"Well?"

"This," said Clayton, and did a queer little twist and writhing and
thrust of the hands.

"Yes."

"That, you know, was what he couldn't get right," said Clayton. "But how
do you--?"

"Most of this business, and particularly how you invented it, I don't
understand at all," said Sanderson, "but just that phase--I do." He
reflected. "These happen to be a series of gestures--connected with a
certain branch of esoteric Masonry--Probably you know. Or else--how?"
He reflected still further. "I do not see I can do any harm in telling
you just the proper twist. After all, if you know, you know; if you
don't, you don't."

"I know nothing," said Clayton, "except what the poor devil let out last
night."

"Well, anyhow," said Sanderson, and placed his churchwarden very
carefully upon the shelf over the fireplace. Then very rapidly he
gesticulated with his hands.

"So?" said Clayton, repeating.

"So," said Sanderson, and took his pipe in hand again.

"Ah, now," said Clayton, "I can do the whole thing--right."

He stood up before the waning fire and smiled at us all. But I think
there was just a little hesitation in his smile. "If I begin--" he said.

"I wouldn't begin," said Wish.

"It's all right!" said Evans. "Matter is indestructible. You don't think
any jiggery-pokery of this sort is going to snatch Clayton into the
world of shades. Not it! You may try, Clayton, so far as I'm concerned,
until your arms drop off at the wrists."

"I don't believe that," said Wish, and stood up and put his arm on
Clayton's shoulder. "You've made me half believe in that story somehow,
and I don't want to see the thing done!"

"Goodness!" said I, "Here's Wish frightened!"

"I am," said Wish, with real or admirably feigned intensity. "I believe
that if he goes through these motions right he'll go."

"He'll not do anything of the sort," I cried. "There's only one way out
of this world for men, and Clayton is thirty years from that. Besides...
And such a ghost! Do you think--?"

Wish interrupted me by moving. He walked out from among our chairs and
stopped beside the tole and stood there. "Clayton," he said, "you're a
fool."

Clayton, with a humorous light in his eyes, smiled back at him. "Wish,"
he said, "is right and all you others are wrong. I shall go. I shall get
to the end of these passes, and as the last swish whistles through the
air, Presto--! This hearthrug will be vacant, the room will be blank
amazement, and a respectably dressed gentleman of fifteen stone will
plump into the world of shades. I'm certain. So will you be. I decline
to argue further. Let the thing be tried."

"No," said Wish, and made a step and ceased, and Clayton raised his
hands once more to repeat the spirit's passing.

By that time, you know, we were all in a state of tension--largely
because of the behaviour of Wish. We sat all of us with our eyes on
Clayton--I at least, with a sort of tight, stiff feeling about me as
though from the back of my skull to the middle of my thighs my body had
been changed to steel. And there, with a gravity that was imperturbably
serene, Clayton bowed and swayed and waved his hands and arms before us.
As he drew towards the end one piled up, one tingled in one's teeth. The
last gesture, I have said, was to swing the arms out wide open, with the
face held up. And when at last he swung out to this closing gesture I
ceased even to breathe. It was ridiculous, of course, but you know that
ghost-story feeling. It was after dinner, in a queer, old shadowy house.
Would he, after all--?

There he stood for one stupendous moment, with his arms open and his
upturned face, assured and bright, in the glare of the hanging lamp. We
hung through that moment as if it were an age, and then came from all of
us something that was half a sigh of infinite relief and half a
reassuring "No!" For visibly--he wasn't going. It was all nonsense. He
had told an idle story, and carried it almost to conviction, that was
all...! And then in that moment the face of Clayton, changed.

It changed. It changed as a lit house changes when its lights are
suddenly extinguished. His eyes were suddenly eyes that were fixed, his
smile was frozen on his lips, and he stood there still. He stood there,
very gently swaying.

That moment, too was an age. And then, you know, chairs were scraping,
things were falling, and we were all moving. His knees seemed to give,
and he fell forward, and Evans rose and caught him in his arms...

It stunned us all. For a minute I suppose no one said a coherent thing.
We believed it, yet could not believe it... I came out of a muddled
stupefaction to find myself kneeling beside him, and his vest and shirt
were torn open, and Sanderson's hand lay on his heart...

Well--the simple fact before us could very well wait our convenience;
there was no hurry for us to comprehend. It lay there for an hour; it
lies athwart my memory, black and amazing still, to this day. Clayton
had, indeed, passed into the world that lies so near to and so far from
our own, and he had gone thither by the only road that mortal man may
take. But whether he did indeed pass there by that poor ghost's
incantation, or whether he was stricken suddenly by apoplexy in the
midst of an idle tale--as the coroner's jury would have us believe--is
no matter for my judging; it is just one of those inexplicable riddles
that must remain unsolved until the final solution of all things shall
come. All I certainly know is that, in the very moment, in the very
instant, of concluding those passes, he changed, and staggered, and fell
down before us--dead!




JIMMY GOGGLES THE GOD


"It isn't every one who's been a god," said the sunburnt man. "But it's
happened to me. Among other things."

I intimated my sense of his condescension.

"It don't leave much for ambition, does it?" said the sunburnt man.

"I was one of those men who were saved from the 'Ocean Pioneer.' Gummy!
How time flies! It's twenty years ago. I doubt if you'll remember
anything of the 'Ocean Pioneer'?"

The name was familiar, and I tried to recall when and where I had read
it. The 'Ocean Pioneer'? "Something about gold dust," I said vaguely,
"but the precise--"

"That's it," he said. "In a beastly little channel she hadn't no
business in--dodging pirates. It was before they'd put the kybosh on
that business. And there'd been volcanoes or something and all the rocks
was wrong. There's places about by Soona where you fair have to follow
the rocks about to see where they're going next. Down she went in twenty
fathoms before you could have dealt for whist, with fifty thousand
pounds' worth of gold aboard, it was said, in one form or another."

"Survivors?"

"Three."

"I remember the case now," I said. "There was something about salvage--"

But at the word salvage the sunburnt man exploded into language so
extraordinarily horrible that I stopped aghast. He came down to more
ordinary swearing, and pulled himself up abruptly. "Excuse me," he said,
"but--salvage!"

He leant over towards me. "I was in that job," he said. "Tried to make
myself a rich man, and got made a god instead. I've got my feelings--

"It ain't all jam being a god," said the sunburnt man, and for some time
conversed by means of such pithy but unprogressive axioms. At last he
took up his tale again.

"There was me," said the sunburnt man, "and a seaman named Jacobs, and
Always, the mate of the 'Ocean Pioneer.' And him it was that set the
whole thing going. I remember him now, when we was in the jolly boat,
suggesting it all to our minds just by one sentence. He was a wonderful
hand at suggesting things. 'There was forty thousand pounds,' he said,
'on that ship, and it's for me to say just where she went down.' It
didn't need much brains to tumble to that. And he was the leader from
the first to the last. He got hold of the Sanderses and their brig; they
were brothers, and the brig was the 'Pride of Banya,' and he it was
bought the diving dress--a second-hand one with a compressed air
apparatus instead of pumping. He'd have done the diving too, if it
hadn't made him sick going down. And the salvage people were mucking
about with a chart he'd cooked up, as solemn as could be, at Starr Race,
a hundred and twenty miles away.

"I can tell you we was a happy lot aboard that brig, jokes and drink and
bright hopes all the time. It all seemed so neat and clean and
straightforward, and what rough chaps call a 'cert.' And we used to
speculate how the other blessed lot, the proper salvagers, who'd started
two days before us, were getting on, until our sides fairly ached. We
all messed together in the Sanderses' cabin--it was a curious crew, all
officers and no men--and there stood the diving-dress waiting its turn.
Young Sanders was a humorous sort of chap, and there certainly was
something funny in the confounded thing's great fat head and its stare,
and he made us see it too. 'Jimmie Goggles,' he used to call it, and
talk to it like a Christian. Asked if he was married, and how Mrs.
Goggles was, and all the little Goggleses. Fit to make you split. And
every blessed day all of us used to drink the health of Jimmy Goggles in
rum, and unscrew his eye and pour a glass of rum in him, until, instead
of that nasty mackintosheriness, he smelt as nice in his inside as a
cask of rum. It was jolly times we had in those days, I can tell
you--little suspecting, poor chaps! What was a-coming.

"We weren't going to throw away our chances by any blessed hurry, you
know, and we spent a whole day sounding our way towards where the 'Ocean
Pioneer' had gone down, right between two chunks of ropy grey rock--lava
rocks that rose nearly out of the water. We had to lay off about half a
mile to get a safe anchorage, and there was a thundering row, over who
should stop on board. And there she lay just as she had gone down, so
that you could see the top of the masts that was still standing
perfectly distinctly. The row ending in all coming in the boat. I went
down in the diving-dress on Friday morning directly it was light.

"What a surprise it was! I can see it all now quite distinctly. It was a
queer-looking place, and the light was just coming. People over here
think every blessed place in the tropics is a flat shore and palm trees
and surf, bless 'em! This place, for instance, wasn't a bit that way.
Not common rocks they were, undermined by waves; but great curved banks
like ironwork cinder heaps, with green slime below, and thorny shrubs
and things just waving upon them here and there, and the water glassy
calm and clear, and showing you a kind of dirty grey-black shine, with
huge flaring red-brown weeds spreading motionless, and crawling and
darting things going through it. And far away beyond the ditches and
pools and the heaps was a forest on the mountain flank, growing again
after the fires and cinder showers of the last eruption. And the other
way forest, too, and a kind of broken--what is it--? Amby-theatre of
black and rusty cinders rising out of it all, and the sea in a kind of
bay in the middle.

"The dawn, I say, was just coming, and there wasn't much colour about
things, and not a human being but ourselves anywhere in sight up or down
the channel. Except the 'Pride of Banya,' lying out beyond a lump of
rocks towards the line of the sea.

"Not a human being in sight," he repeated, and paused.

"I don't know where they came from, not a bit. And we were feeling so
safe that we were all alone that poor young Sanders was a-singing. I was
in Jimmy Goggles, all except the helmet. 'Easy,' says Always, 'there's
her mast.' And after I'd had just one squint over the gunwale, I caught
up the bogey and almost tipped out as old Sanders brought the boat
round. When the windows were screwed and everything was all right, I
shut the valve from the air belt in order to help my sinking, and jumped
overboard, feet foremost--for we hadn't a ladder. I left the boat
pitching, and all of them staring down into the water after me, as my
head sank down into the weeds and blackness that lay about the mast. I
suppose nobody, not the most cautious chap in the world, would have
bothered about a lookout at such a desolate place. It stunk of
solitude.

"Of course you must understand that I was a green-horn at diving. None
of us were divers. We'd had to muck about with the thing to get the way
of it, and this was the first time I'd been deep. It feels damnable.
Your ears hurt beastly. I don't know if you've ever hurt yourself
yawning or sneezing, but it takes you like that, only ten times worse.
And a pain over the eyebrows here--splitting--and a feeling like
influenza in the head. And it isn't all heaven in your lungs and things.
And going down feels like the beginning of a lift, only it keeps on. And
you can't turn your head to see what's above you, and you can't get a
fair squint at what's happening to your feet without bending down
something painful. And being deep it was dark, let alone the blackness
of the ashes and mud that formed the bottom. It was like going down out
of the dawn back into the night, so to speak.

"The mast came up like a ghost out of the black, and then a lot of
fishes, and then a lot of flapping red seaweed, and then whack I came
with a kind of dull bang on the deck of the 'Ocean Pioneer,' and the
fishes that had been feeding on the dead rose about me like a swarm of
flies from road stuff in summer time. I turned on the compressed air
again--for the suit was a bit thick and mackintoshery after all, in
spite of the rum--and stood recovering myself. It struck coolish down
there, and that helped take off the stuffiness a bit.

"When I began to feel easier, I started looking about me. It was an
extraordinary sight. Even the light was extraordinary, a kind of reddy
coloured twilight, on account of the streamers of seaweed that floated
up on either side of the ship. And far overhead just a moony, deep green
blue. The deck of the ship, except for a slight list to starboard, was
level, and lay all dark and long between the weeds, clear except where
the masts had snapped when she rolled, and vanishing into black night
towards the forecastle. There wasn't any dead on the decks, most were in
the weeds alongside, I suppose; but afterwards I found two skeletons
lying in the passengers' cabins, where death had come to them. It was
curious to stand on that deck and recognise it all, bit by bit; a place
against the rail where I'd been fond of smoking by starlight, and the
corner where an old chap from Sydney used to flirt with a widow we had
aboard. A comfortable couple they'd been, only a month ago, and now you
couldn't have got a meal for a baby crab off either of them.

"I've always had a bit of a philosophical turn, and I dare say I spent
the best part of five minutes in such thoughts before I went below to
find where the blessed dust was stored. It was slow work hunting,
feeling it was for the most part, pitchy dark, with confusing blue
gleams down the companion. And there were things moving about, a dab at
my glass once, and once a pinch at my leg. Crabs, I expect. I kicked a
lot of loose stuff that puzzled me, and stooped and picked up something
all knobs and spikes. What do you think? Backbone! But I never had any
particular feeling for bones. We had talked the affair over pretty
thoroughly, and Always knew just where the stuff was stowed. I found it
that trip. I lifted a box one end an inch or more."

He broke off in his story. "I've lifted it," he said, "as near as that!
Forty thousand pounds worth of pure gold! Gold! I shouted inside my
helmet as a kind of cheer and hurt my ears. I was getting confounded
stuffy and tired by this time--I must have been down twenty-five minutes
or more--and I thought this was good enough. I went up the companion
again, and as my eyes came up flush with the deck, a thundering great
crab gave a kind of hysterical jump and went scuttling off sideways.
Quite a start it gave me. I stood up clear on deck and shut the valve
behind the helmet to let the air accumulate to carry me up again--I
noticed a kind of whacking from above, as though they were hitting the
water with an oar, but I didn't look up. I fancied they were signalling
me to come up.

"And then something shot down by me--something heavy, and stood a-quiver
in the planks. I looked, and there was a long knife I'd seen young
Sanders handling. Thinks I, he's dropped it, and I was still calling him
this kind of fool and that--for it might have hurt me serious--when I
began to lift and drive up towards the daylight. Just about the level of
the top spars of the 'Ocean Pioneer,' whack! I came against something
sinking down, and a boot knocked in front of my helmet. Then something
else, struggling frightful. It was a big weight atop of me, whatever it
was, and moving and twisting about. I'd have thought it a big octopus,
or some such thing, if it hadn't been for the boot. But octopuses don't
wear boots. It was all in a moment, of course. I felt myself sinking
down again, and I threw my arms about to keep steady, and the whole lot
rolled free of me and shot down as I went up--"

He paused.

"I saw young Sanders's face, over a naked black shoulder, and a spear
driven clean through his neck, and out of his mouth and neck what looked
like spirts of pink smoke in the water. And down they went clutching one
another, and turning over, and both too far gone to leave go. And in
another second my helmet came a whack, fit to split, against the
niggers' canoe. It was niggers! Two canoes full.

"It was lively times, I tell you! Overboard came Always with three
spears in him. There was the legs of three or four black chaps kicking
about me in the water. I couldn't see much, but I saw the game was up at
a glance, gave my valve a tremendous twist, and went bubbling down again
after poor Always, in as awful a state of scare and astonishment as you
can well imagine. I passed young Sanders and the nigger going up again
and struggling still a bit, and in another moment I was standing in the
dim again on the deck of the 'Ocean Pioneer.'"

"'Gummy,' thinks I, 'here's a fix! Niggers?' At first I couldn't see
anything for it but Stifle below or Stabs above. I didn't properly
understand how much air there was to last me, but I didn't feel like
standing very much more of it down below. I was hot and frightfully
heady quite apart from the blue funk I was in. We'd never repined with
these beastly natives, filthy Papuan beasts. It wasn't any good, coming
up where I was, but I had to do something. On the spur of the moment, I
clambered over the side of the brig and landed among the weeds, and set
off through the darkness as fast as I could. I just stopped once and
knelt, and twisted back my head in the helmet and had a look up. It was
a most extraordinary bright green-blue above, and the two canoes and the
boat floating there very small and distant like a kind of twisted H. And
it made me feel sick to squint up at it, and think what the pitching and
swaying of the three meant.

"It was just about the most horrible ten minutes I ever had, blundering
about in that darkness--pressure something awful, like being buried in
sand, pain across the chest, sick with funk, and breathing nothing as it
seemed but the smell of rum and mackintosh. Gummy! After a bit, I found
myself going up a steepish sort of slope. I had another squint to see if
anything was visible of the canoes and boats, and then kept on. I
stopped with my head a foot from the surface, and tried to see where I
was going, but of course, nothing was to be seen but the reflection of
the bottom. Then out I dashed like knocking my head through a mirror.
Directly I got my eyes out of the water, I saw I'd come up a kind of
beach near the forest. I had a look round, but the natives and the brig
were both hidden by a big, hummucky heap of twisted lava, the born fool
in me suggested a run for the woods. I didn't take the helmet off, but
eased open one of the windows, and after a bit of a pant, went on out of
the water. You'd hardly imagine how clean and light the air tasted.

"Of course, with four inches of lead in your boot soles, and your head
in a copper knob the size of a football, and been thirty-five minutes
under water, you don't break any records running. I ran like a
plough-boy going to work. And half way to the trees I saw a dozen
niggers or more, coming out in a gaping, astonished sort of way to meet
me.

"I just stopped dead, and cursed myself for all the fools out of London.
I had about as much chance of cutting back to the water as a turned
turtle. I just screwed up my window again to leave my hands free, and
waited for them. There wasn't anything else for me to do.

"But they didn't come on very much. I began to suspect why. 'Jimmy
Goggles,' I says, 'it's your beauty does it.' I was inclined to be a
little light-headed, I think, with all these dangers about and the
change in the pressure of the blessed air. 'Who're ye staring at?' I
said, as if the savages could hear me. 'What d'ye take me for? I'm
hanged if I don't give you something to stare at,' I said, and with that
I screwed up the escape valve and turned on the compressed air from the
belt, until I was swelled out like a blown frog. Regular imposing it
must have been. I'm blessed if they'd come on a step; and presently one
and then another went down on their hands and knees. They didn't know
what to make of me, and they was doing the extra polite, which was very
wise and reasonable of them. I had half a mind to edge back seaward and
cut and run, but it seemed too hopeless. A step back and they'd have
been after me. And out of sheer desperation I began to march towards
them up the beach, with slow, heavy steps, and waving my blown-out arms
about, in a dignified manner. And inside of me I was singing as small as
a tomtit.

"But there's nothing like a striking appearance to help a man over a
difficulty--I've found that before and since. People like ourselves,
who're up to diving-dresses by the time we're seven, can scarcely
imagine the effect of one on a simple-minded savage. One or two of these
niggers cut and run, the others started in a great hurry trying to knock
their brains out on the ground. And on I went as slow and solemn and
silly-looking and artful as a jobbing plumber. It was evident they took
me for something immense.

"Then up jumped one and began pointing, making extraordinary gestures to
me as he did so, and all the others began sharing their attention
between me and something out at sea. 'What's the matter now?' I said. I
turned slowly on account of my dignity, and there I saw, coming round a
point, the poor old 'Pride of Banya' towed by a couple of canoes. The
sight fairly made me sick. But they evidently expected some recognition,
so I waved my arms in a striking sort of non-committal manner. And then
I turned and stalked on towards the trees again. At that time I was
praying like mad, I remember, over and over again: 'Lord help me through
with it! Lord help me through with it!' It's only fools who know nothing
of dangers can afford to laugh at praying.

"But these niggers weren't going to let me walk through and away like
that. They started a kind of bowing dance about me, and sort of pressed
me to take a pathway that lay through the trees. It was clear to me they
didn't take me for a British citizen, whatever else they thought of me,
and for my own part I was never less anxious to own up to the old
country.

"You'd hardly believe it, perhaps, unless you're familiar with savages,
but these poor misguided, ignorant creatures took me straight to their
kind of joss place to present me to the blessed old black stone there.
By this time I was beginning to sort of realise the depth of their
ignorance, and directly I set eyes on this deity I took my cue. I
started a baritone howl, 'wow-wow,' very long on one note, and began
waving my arms about a lot, and then very slowly and ceremoniously
turned their image over on its side and sat down on it. I wanted to sit
down badly, for diving-dresses ain't much wear in the tropics. Or, to
put it different like, they're a sight too much. It took away their
breath, I could see, my sitting on their joss, but in less time than a
minute they made up their minds and were hard at work worshipping me.
And I can tell you I felt a bit relieved to see things turning out so
well, in spite of the weight on my shoulders and feet."

"But what made me anxious was what the chaps in the canoes might think
when they came back. If they'd seen me in the boat before I went down,
and without the helmet on--for they might have been spying and hiding
since over night--they would very likely take a different view from the
others. I was in a deuce of a stew about that for hours, as it seemed,
until the shindy of the arrival began.

"But they took it down--the whole blessed village took it down. At the
cost of sitting up stiff and stern, as much like those sitting Egyptian
images one sees as I could manage, for pretty nearly twelve hours, I
should guess at least, on end, I got over it. You'd hardly think what it
meant in that heat and stink. I don't think any of them dreamt of the
man inside. I was just a wonderful leathery great joss that had come up
with luck out of the water. But the fatigue! The heat! The beastly
closeness! The mackintosheriness and the rum! And the fuss! They lit a
stinking fire on a kind of lava slab there was before me, and brought in
a lot of gory muck--the worst parts of what they were feasting on
outside, the Beasts--and burnt it all in my honour. I was getting a bit
hungry, but I understand now how gods manage to do without eating, what
with the smell of burnt offerings about them. And they brought in a lot
of the stuff they'd got off the brig and, among other stuff, what I was
a bit relieved to see, the kind of pneumatic pump that was used for the
compressed air affair, and then a lot of chaps and girls came in and
danced about me something disgraceful. It's extraordinary the different
ways different people have of showing respect. If I'd had a hatchet
handy I'd have gone for the lot of them--they made me feel that wild.
All this time I sat as stiff as company, not knowing anything better to
do. And at last, when nightfall came, and the wattle joss-house place
got a bit too shadowy for their taste--all these here savages are afraid
of the dark, you know--and I started a sort of 'Moo' noise, they built
big bonfires outside and left me alone in peace in the darkness of my
hut, free to unscrew my windows a bit and think things over, and feel
just as bad as I liked. And, Lord! I was sick.

"I was weak and hungry, and my mind kept on behaving like a beetle on a
pin, tremendous activity and nothing done at the end of it. Come round
just where it was before. There was sorrowing for the other chaps,
beastly drunkards certainly, but not deserving such a fate, and young
Sanders with the spear through his neck wouldn't go out of my mind.
There was the treasure down there in the 'Ocean Pioneer,' and how one
might get it and hide it somewhere safer, and get away and come back for
it. And there was the puzzle where to get anything to eat. I tell you I
was fair rambling. I was afraid to ask by signs for food, for fear of
behaving too human, and so there I sat and hungered until very near the
dawn. Then the village got a bit quiet, and I couldn't stand it any
longer, and I went out and got some stuff like artichokes in a bowl and
some sour milk. What was left of these I put away among the other
offerings, just to give them a hint of my tastes. And in the morning
they came to worship, and found me sitting up stiff and respectable on
their previous god, just as they'd left me overnight. I'd got my back
against the central pillar of the hut, and practically, I was asleep.
And that's how I became a god among the heathen--a false god no doubt,
and blasphemous, but one can't always pick and choose.

"Now, I don't want to crack myself up as a god beyond my merits, but I
must confess that while I was god to these people they was extraordinary
successful. I don't say there's anything in it, mind you. They won a
battle with another tribe--I got a lot of offerings I didn't want
through it--they had wonderful fishing, and their crop of pourra was
exceptional fine. And they counted the capture of the brig among the
benefits I brought 'em. I must say I don't think that was a poor record
for a perfectly new hand. And, though perhaps you'd scarcely credit it,
I was the tribal god of those beastly savages for pretty nearly four
months...

"What else could I do, man? But I didn't wear that diving-dress all the
time. I made 'em rig me up a sort of holy of holies, and a deuce of a
time I had too, making them understand what it was I wanted them to do.
That indeed was the great difficulty--making them understand my wishes.
I couldn't let myself down by talking their lingo badly--even if I'd
been able to speak at all--and I couldn't go flapping a lot of gestures
at them. So I drew pictures in sand and sat down beside them and hooted
like one o'clock. Sometimes they did the things I wanted all right, and
sometimes they did them all wrong. They was always very willing,
certainly. All the while I was puzzling how I was to get the confounded
business settled. Every night before the dawn I used to march out in
full rig and go off to a place where I could see the channel in which
the 'Ocean Pioneer' lay sunk, and once even, one moonlight night, I
tried to walk out to her, but the weeds and rocks and dark clean beat
me. I didn't get back till full day, and then I found all those silly
niggers out on the beach praying their sea-god to return to them. I was
that vexed and tired, messing and tumbling about, and coming up and
going down again, I could have punched their silly heads all round when
they started rejoicing. I'm hanged if I like so much ceremony.

"And then came the missionary. That missionary! It was in the afternoon,
and I was sitting in state in my outer temple place, sitting on that old
black stone of theirs when he came. I heard a row outside and jabbering,
and then his voice speaking to an interpreter. 'They worship stocks and
stones,' he said, and I knew what was up, in a flash. I had one of my
windows out for comfort, and I sang out straight away on the spur of the
moment. 'Stocks and stones!' I says. 'You come inside,' I says, 'and
I'll punch your blooming head.' There was a kind of silence and more
jabbering, and in he came, Bible in hand, after the manner of them--a
little sandy chap in specks and a pith helmet. I flatter myself that me
sitting there in the shadows, with my copper head and my big goggles,
struck him a bit of a heap at first. 'Well,' I says, 'how's the trade in
calico?' For I don't hold with missionaries.

"I had a lark with that missionary. He was a raw hand, and quite
outclassed with a man like me. He gasped out who was I, and I told him
to read the inscription at my feet if he wanted to know. Down he goes to
read, and his interpreter, being of course as superstitious as any of
them, took it as an act of worship and plumped down like a shot. All my
people gave a howl of triumph, and there wasn't any more business to be
done in my village after that journey, not by the likes of him.

"But, of course, I was a fool to choke him off like that. If I'd had any
sense I should have told him straight away of the treasure and taken him
into Co. I've no doubt he'd have come into Co. A child, with a few hours
to think it over, could have seen the connection between my diving-dress
and the loss of the 'Ocean Pioneer.' A week after he left I went out one
morning and saw the 'Motherhood,' the salver's ship from Starr Race,
towing up the channel and sounding. The whole blessed game was up, and
all my trouble thrown away. Gummy! How wild I felt! And guying it in
that stinking silly dress! Four months!"

The sunburnt man's story degenerated again. "Think of it," he said, when
he emerged to linguistic purity once more. "Forty thousand pounds' worth
of gold."

"Did the little missionary come back?" I asked.

"Oh, yes! Bless him! And he pledged his reputation there was a man
inside the god, and started out to see as much with tremendous ceremony.
But there wasn't--he got sold again. I always did hate scenes and
explanations, and long before he came I was out of it all--going home to
Banya along the coast, hiding in bushes by day, and thieving food from
the villages by night. Only weapon, a spear. No clothes, no money.
Nothing. My face was my fortune, as the saying is. And just a squeak of
eight thousand pounds of gold--fifth share. But the natives cut up
rusty, thank goodness, because they thought it was him had driven their
luck away."




THE NEW ACCELERATOR


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

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

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

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

"It would tire a man," I said.

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

"But is such a thing possible?"

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

"It would do," I said.

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

"He could dose his private secretary," I said.

"And gain--double time. And think if you, for example, wanted to finish
a book."

"Usually," I said, "I wish I'd never begun 'em."

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

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

"And in a duel, again," said Gibberne, "Where it all depends on your
quickness in pulling the trigger."

"Or in fencing," I echoed.

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

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

"That's a question for the seconds," said Gibberne.

I harked back further. "And you really think such a thing Is possible?"
I said.

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

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

"It will be rather a big thing," I hazarded.

"It will be, I think, rather a big thing."

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

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

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

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

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

"Really?"

"Really!" he shouted. "Incredibly! Come up and see."

"And it does--twice?

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

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

"You've been taking some of this stuff," I puffed.

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

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

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

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

"I don't know how many times it goes," he said, with his latchkey in his
hand.

"And you--"

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

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

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

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

"Well," I haggled. "You say you've tried it?"

"I've tried it," he said, "and I don't look hurt by it, do I? I don't
even look livery and I feel--"

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

"With water," said Gibberne, whacking down a carafe.

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

I made a gesture with my hand.

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

"Shut," I said. "Good!"

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

"Lor'," I said. "And you mean--"

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

The little phial glucked out its precious contents.

"Don't forget what I told you," he said, turning the contents of the
measure into a glass in the manner of an Italian waiter measuring
whisky. "Sit with the eyes tightly shut and in absolute stillness for
two minutes," he said. "Then you will hear me speak."

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

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

He raised his glass.

"The New Accelerator," I said.

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

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

"Well?" said I.

"Nothing out of the way?"

"Nothing. A slight feeling of exhilaration, perhaps. Nothing more."

"Sounds?"

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

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

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

"No," said I; "that's odd."

"And here," he said, and opened the hand that held the glass. Naturally
I winced, expecting the glass to smash. But so far from smashing it did
not even seem to stir; it hung in mid-air--motionless.

"Roughly speaking," said Gibberne, "an object in these latitudes falls
16 feet in the first second. This glass is falling 16 feet in a second
now. Only you see, it hasn't been falling yet for the hundredth part of
a second. That gives you some idea of the pace of my Accelerator." And
he waved his hand round and round, over and under the slowly sinking
glass. Finally, he took it by the bottom, pulled it down, and placed it
very carefully on the table. "Eh?" he said to me, and laughed.

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

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

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

"Why not?"

"They'll see us."

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

And out by the window we went.

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

"Goodness!" cried Gibberne, suddenly; "Look there!"

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

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

"Or smile," said Gibberne, with his eye on the lady's answering teeth.

"It's infernally hot somehow," said I. "Let's go slower."

"Oh, come along!" said Gibberne.

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

"There's that infernal old woman!" he said.

"What old woman?"

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

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

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

"What?" he said, glancing at the dog.

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

"Eh?" he said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




MR. LEDBETTER'S VACATION


My friend, Mr. Ledbetter, is a round-faced little man, whose natural
mildness of eye is gigantically exaggerated when you catch the beam
through his glasses, and whose deep, deliberate voice irritates,
irritable people. A certain elaborate clearness of enunciation has come
with him to his present vicarage from his scholastic days, an elaborate
clearness of enunciation and a certain nervous determination to be firm
and correct upon all issues, important and unimportant alike. He is a
sacerdotalist and a chess player, and suspected by many of the secret
practice of the higher mathematics--creditable rather than interesting
things. His conversation is copious and given much to needless detail.
By many indeed, his intercourse is condemned, to put it plainly, as
"boring," and such have even done me the compliment to wonder why I
countenance him. But, on the other hand, there is a large faction who
marvel at his countenancing such a dishevelled, discreditable
acquaintance as myself. Few appear to regard our friendship with
equanimity. But that is because they do not know of the link that binds
us, of my amiable connection via Jamaica with Mr. Ledbetter's past.

About that past he displays an anxious modesty. "I do not know what I
should do if it became known," he says; and repeats, impressively, "I do
not know what I should do." As a matter of fact, I doubt if he would do
anything except get very red about the ears. But that will appear later;
nor will I tell here of our first encounter, since, as a general
rule--though I am prone to break it--the end of a story should come
after, rather than before, the beginning. And the beginning of the story
goes a long way back; indeed it is now nearly twenty years since Fate,
by a series of complicated and startling manoeuvres, brought Mr.
Ledbetter, so to speak, into my hands.

In those days I was living in Jamaica, and Mr. Ledbetter was a
schoolmaster in England. He was in orders, and already recognisably the
same man that he is to-day: the same rotundity of visage, the same or
similar glasses, and the same faint shadow of surprise in his resting
expression. He was of course, dishevelled when I saw him, and his collar
less of a collar than a wet bandage, and that may have helped to bridge
the natural gulf between us--but of that, as I say, later.

The business began at Hithergate-on-Sea, and simultaneously with Mr.
Ledbetter's summer vacation. Thither he came for a greatly needed rest,
with a bright brown portmanteau marked "F. W. L.", a new white and black
straw hat, and two pairs of white flannel trousers. He was naturally
exhilarated at his release from school--for he was not very fond of the
boys he taught. After dinner he fell into a discussion with a talkative
person established in the boarding-house to which, acting on the advice
of his aunt, he had resorted. This talkative person was the only other
man in the house. Their discussion concerned the melancholy
disappearance of wonder and adventure in these latter days, the
prevalence of globe-trotting, the abolition of distance by steam and
electricity, the vulgarity of advertisement, the degradation of men by
civilisation, and many such things. Particularly was the talkative
person eloquent on the decay of human courage through security, a
security Mr. Ledbetter rather thoughtlessly joined him in deploring. Mr.
Ledbetter, in the first delight of emancipation from "duty," and being
anxious, perhaps, to establish a reputation for manly conviviality,
partook, rather more freely than was advisable, of the excellent whisky
the talkative person produced. But he did not become intoxicated, he
insists.

He was simply eloquent beyond his sober wont, and with the finer edge
gone from his judgment. And after that long talk of the brave old days
that were past forever, he went out into moonlit Hithergate alone and up
the cliff road where the villas cluster together.

He had bewailed, and now as he walked up the silent road he still
bewailed, the fate that had called him to such an uneventful life as a
pedagogue's. What a prosaic existence he led, so stagnant, so
colourless! Secure, methodical, year in year out, what call was there
for bravery? He thought enviously of those roving, mediaeval days, so
near and so remote, of quests and spies and condottieri and many a risky
blade-drawing business. And suddenly came a doubt, a strange doubt,
springing out of some chance thought of tortures, and destructive
altogether of the position he had assumed that evening.

Was he--Mr. Ledbetter--really, after all, so brave as he assumed? Would
he really be so pleased to have railways, policemen, and security vanish
suddenly from the earth?

The talkative man had spoken enviously of crime. "The burglar," he said,
"is the only true adventurer left on earth. Think of his single-handed
fight--against the whole civilised world!" And Mr. Ledbetter had echoed
his envy. "They do have some fun out of life." Mr. Ledbetter had said.
"And about the only people who do. Just think how it must feel to wire a
lawn!" And he had laughed wickedly. Now, in this franker intimacy of
self-communion he found himself instituting a comparison between his own
brand of courage and that of the habitual criminal. He tried to meet
these insidious questionings with blank assertion. "I could do all
that," said Mr. Ledbetter. "I long to do all that. Only I do not give
way to my criminal impulses. My moral courage restrains me." But he
doubted even while he told himself these things.

Mr. Ledbetter passed a large villa standing by itself. Conveniently
situated above a quiet, practicable balcony was a window, gaping black,
wide open. At the time he scarcely marked it, but the picture of it came
with him, wove into his thoughts. He figured himself climbing up that
balcony, crouching--plunging into that dark, mysterious interior. "Bah!
You would not dare," said the Spirit of Doubt. "My duty to my fellow-men
forbids," said Mr. Ledbetter's self-respect.

It was nearly eleven, and the little seaside town was already very
still. The whole world slumbered under the moonlight. Only one warm
oblong of window-blind far down the road spoke of waking life. He turned
and came back slowly towards the villa of the open window. He stood for
a time outside the gate, a battlefield of motives. "Let us put things to
the test," said Doubt. "For the satisfaction of these intolerable
doubts, show that you dare go into that house. Commit a burglary in
blank. That, at any rate, is no crime." Very softly he opened and shut
the gate and slipped into the shadow of the shrubbery. "This is
foolish," said Mr. Ledbetter's caution. "I expected that," said Doubt.
His heart was beating fast, but he was certainly not afraid. He was not
afraid. He remained in that shadow for some considerable time.

The ascent of the balcony, it was evident, would have to be done in a
rush, for it was all in clear moonlight, and visible from the gate into
the avenue. A trellis thinly set with young, ambitious climbing roses
made the ascent ridiculously easy. There in that black shadow by the
stone vase of flowers, one might crouch and take a closer view of this
gaping breach in the domestic defences, the open window. For a while Mr.
Ledbetter was as still as the night, and then that insidious whisky
tipped the balance. He dashed forward. He went up the trellis with
quick, convulsive movements, swung his legs over the parapet of the
balcony, and dropped panting in the shadow even as he had designed. He
was trembling violently, short of breath, and his heart pumped noisily,
but his mood was exultation. He could have shouted to find he was so
little afraid.

A happy line that he had learnt from Wills's "Mephistopheles" came into
his mind as he crouched there. "I feel like a cat on the tiles," he
whispered to himself. It was far better than he had expected--this
adventurous exhilaration. He was sorry for all poor men to whom burglary
was unknown. Nothing happened. He was quite safe. And he was acting in
the bravest manner!

And now for the window, to make the burglary complete! Must he dare do
that? Its position above the front door defined it as a landing or
passage, and there were no looking-glasses or any bedroom signs about
it, or any other window on the first floor, to suggest the possibility
of a sleeper within. For a time he listened under the ledge, then raised
his eyes above the sill and peered in. Close at hand, on a pedestal, and
a little startling at first, was a nearly life-size gesticulating
bronze. He ducked, and after some time he peered again. Beyond was a
broad landing, faintly gleaming; a flimsy fabric of bead curtain, very
black and sharp, against a further window; a broad staircase, plunging
into a gulf of darkness below; and another ascending to the second
floor. He glanced behind him, but the stillness of the night was
unbroken. "Crime," he whispered, "crime," and scrambled softly and
swiftly over the sill into the house. His feet fell noiselessly on a mat
of skin. He was a burglar indeed!

He crouched for a time, all ears and peering eyes. Outside was a
scampering and rustling, and for a moment he repented of his enterprise.
A short "miaow," a spitting, and a rush into silence, spoke reassuringly
of cats. His courage grew. He stood up. Every one was abed, it seemed.
So easy is it to commit a burglary, if one is so minded. He was glad he
had put it to the test. He determined to take some petty trophy, just to
prove his freedom from any abject fear of the law, and depart the way he
had come.

He peered about him, and suddenly the critical spirit arose again.
Burglars did far more than such mere elementary entrance as this: they
went into rooms, they forced safes. Well--he was not afraid. He could
not force safes, because that would be a stupid want of consideration
for his hosts. But he would go into rooms--he would go upstairs. More:
he told himself that he was perfectly secure; an empty house could not
be more reassuringly still. He had to clench his hands, nevertheless,
and summon all his resolution before he began very softly to ascend the
dim staircase, pausing for several seconds between each step. Above was
a square landing with one open and several closed doors; and all the
house was still. For a moment he stood wondering what would happen if
some sleeper woke suddenly and emerged. The open door showed a moonlit
bedroom, the coverlet white and undisturbed. Into this room he crept in
three interminable minutes and took a piece of soap for his plunder--his
trophy. He turned to descend even more softly than he had ascended. It
was as easy as--Hist...!

Footsteps! On the gravel outside the house--and then the noise of a
latchkey, the yawn and bang of a door, and the spitting of a match in
the hall below. Mr. Ledbetter stood petrified by the sudden discovery of
the folly upon which he had come. "How on earth am I to get out of
this?" said Mr. Ledbetter.

The hall grew bright with a candle flame, some heavy object bumped
against the umbrella-stand, and feet were ascending the staircase. In a
flash Mr. Ledbetter realised that his retreat was closed. He stood for a
moment, a pitiful figure of penitent confusion. "My goodness! What a
fool I have been!" he whispered, and then darted swiftly across the
shadowy landing into the empty bedroom from which he had just come. He
stood listening--quivering. The footsteps reached the first-floor
landing.

Horrible thought! This was possibly the late-comer's room! Not a moment
was to be lost! Mr. Ledbetter stooped beside the bed, thanked Heaven for
a valance, and crawled within its protection not ten seconds too soon.
He became motionless on hands and knees. The advancing candle-light
appeared through the thinner stitches of the fabric, the shadows ran
wildly about, and became rigid as the candle was put down.

"Lord, what a day!" said the newcomer, blowing noisily, and it seemed he
deposited some heavy burthen on what Mr. Ledbetter, judging by the feet,
decided to be a writing-table. The unseen then went to the door and
locked it, examined the fastenings of the windows carefully and pulled
down the blinds, and returning sat down upon the bed with startling
ponderosity.

"What a day!" he said. "Good Lord!" and blew again, and Mr. Ledbetter
inclined to believe that the person was mopping his face. His boots were
good stout boots; the shadows of his legs upon the valance suggested a
formidable stoutness of aspect. After a time he removed some upper
garments--a coat and waistcoat, Mr. Ledbetter inferred--and casting them
over the rail of the bed remained breathing less noisily, and as it
seemed cooling from a considerable temperature. At intervals he muttered
to himself, and once he laughed softly. And Mr. Ledbetter muttered to
himself, but he did not laugh. "Of all the foolish things," said Mr.
Ledbetter. "What on earth am I to do now?"

His outlook was necessarily limited. The minute apertures between the
stitches of the fabric of the valance admitted a certain amount of
light, but permitted no peeping. The shadows upon this curtain, save for
those sharply defined legs, were enigmatical, and intermingled
confusingly with the florid patterning of the chintz. Beneath the edge
of the valance a strip of carpet was visible, and by cautiously
depressing his eye, Mr. Ledbetter found that this strip broadened until
the whole area of the floor came into view. The carpet was a luxurious
one, the room spacious, and to judge by the castors and so forth of the
furniture, well equipped.

What he should do he found it difficult to imagine. To wait until this
person had gone to bed, and then, when he seemed to be sleeping, to
creep to the door, unlock it, and bolt headlong for that balcony seemed
the only possible thing to do. Would it be possible to jump from the
balcony? The danger of it! When he thought of the chances against him,
Mr. Ledbetter despaired. He was within an ace of thrusting forth his
head beside the gentleman's legs, coughing if necessary to attract his
attention, and then, smiling, apologising and explaining his unfortunate
intrusion by a few well-chosen sentences. But he found these sentences
hard to choose. "No doubt, sir, my appearance is peculiar," or, "I
trust, sir, you will pardon my somewhat ambiguous appearance from
beneath you," was about as much as he could get.

Grave possibilities forced themselves on his attention. Suppose they did
not believe him, what would they do to him? Would his unblemished high
character count for nothing? Technically he was a burglar, beyond
dispute. Following out this train of thought, he was composing a lucid
apology for "this technical crime I have committed," to be delivered
before sentence in the dock, when the stout gentleman got up and began
walking about the room. He locked and unlocked drawers, and Mr.
Ledbetter had a transient hope that he might be undressing. But, no! He
seated himself at the writing-table, and began to write and then tear up
documents. Presently the smell of burning cream-laid paper mingled with
the odour of cigars in Mr. Ledbetter's nostrils.

"The position I had assumed," said Mr. Ledbetter when he told me of
these things, "was in many respects an ill-advised one. A transverse bar
beneath the bed depressed my head unduly, and threw a disproportionate
share of my weight upon my hands. After a time, I experienced what is
called, I believe, a crick in the neck. The pressure of my hands on the
coarsely-stitched carpet speedily became painful. My knees too, were
painful, my trousers being drawn tightly over them. At that time I wore
rather higher collars than I do now--two and a half inches, in fact--and
I discovered what I had not remarked before, that the edge of the one I
wore was frayed slightly under the chin. But much worse than these
things was an itching of my face, which I could only relieve by violent
grimacing--I tried to raise my hand, but the rustle of the sleeve
alarmed me. After a time I had to desist from this relief also,
because--happily in time--I discovered that my facial contortions were
shifting my glasses down my nose. Their fall would, of course, have
exposed me, and as it was they came to rest in an oblique position of by
no means stable equilibrium. In addition I had a slight cold, and an
intermittent desire to sneeze or sniff caused me inconvenience. In fact,
quite apart from the extreme anxiety of my position, my physical
discomfort became in a short time very considerable indeed. But I had to
stay there motionless, nevertheless."

After an interminable time, there began a chinking sound. This deepened
into a rhythm: chink, chink, chink--twenty-five chinks--a rap on the
writing-table, and a grunt from the owner of the stout legs. It dawned
upon Mr. Ledbetter that this chinking was the chinking of gold. He
became incredulously curious as it went on. His curiosity grew. Already,
if that was the case, this extraordinary man must have counted some
hundreds of pounds. At last Mr. Ledbetter could resist it no longer, and
he began very cautiously to fold his arms and lower his head to the
level of the floor, in the hope of peeping under the valance. He moved
his feet, and one made a slight scraping on the floor. Suddenly the
chinking ceased. Mr. Ledbetter became rigid. After a while the chinking
was resumed. Then it ceased again, and everything was still, except Mr.
Ledbetter's heart--that organ seemed to him to be beating like a drum.

The stillness continued. Mr. Ledbetter's head was now on the floor, and
he could see the stout legs as far as the shins. They were quite still.
The feet were resting on the toes and drawn back, as it seemed, under
the chair of the owner. Everything was quite still, everything continued
still. A wild hope came to Mr. Ledbetter that the unknown was in a fit
or suddenly dead, with his head upon the writing-table...

The stillness continued. What had happened? The desire to peep became
irresistible. Very cautiously Mr. Ledbetter shifted his hand forward,
projected a pioneer finger, and began to lift the valance immediately
next his eye. Nothing broke the stillness. He saw now the stranger's
knees, saw the back of the writing-table, and then--he was staring at
the barrel of a heavy revolver pointed over the writing-table at his
head.

"Come out of that, you scoundrel!" said the voice of the stout gentleman
in a tone of quiet concentration. "Come out. This side, and now. None of
your hanky-panky--come right out, now."

Mr. Ledbetter came right out, a little reluctantly perhaps, but without
any hanky-panky, and at once, even as he was told.

"Kneel," said the stout gentleman, "and hold up your hands."

The valance dropped again behind Mr. Ledbetter, and he rose from all
fours and held up his hands. "Dressed like a parson," said the stout
gentleman. "I'm blest if he isn't! A little chap, too! You scoundrel!
What the deuce possessed you to come here to-night? What the deuce
possessed you to get under my bed?"

He did not appear to require an answer, but proceeded at once to several
very objectionable remarks upon Mr. Ledbetter's personal appearance. He
was not a very big man, but he looked strong to Mr. Ledbetter: he was as
stout as his legs had promised, he had rather delicately-chiselled small
features distributed over a considerable area of whitish face, and quite
a number of chins. And the note of his voice had a sort of whispering
undertone.

"What the deuce, I say, possessed you to get under my bed?"

Mr. Ledbetter, by an effort, smiled a wan propitiatory smile. He
coughed. "I can quite understand--" he said.

"Why! What on earth? It's soap! No--! You scoundrel. Don't you move that
hand."

"It's soap," said Mr. Ledbetter. "From your washstand. No doubt if--"

"Don't talk," said the stout man. "I see it's soap. Of all incredible
things."

"If I might explain--"

"Don't explain. It's sure to be a lie, and there's no time for
explanations. What was I going to ask you? Ah! Have you any mates?"

"In a few minutes, if you--"

"Have you any mates? Curse you. If you start any soapy palaver I'll
shoot. Have you any mates?"

"No," said Mr. Ledbetter.

"I suppose it's a lie," said the stout man. "But you'll pay for it if it
is. Why the deuce didn't you floor me when I came upstairs? You won't
get a chance to now, anyhow. Fancy getting under the bed! I reckon it's
a fair cop, anyhow, so far as you are concerned."

"I don't see how I could prove an alibi," remarked Mr. Ledbetter, trying
to show by his conversation that he was an educated man. There was a
pause. Mr. Ledbetter perceived that on a chair beside his captor was a
large black bag on a heap of crumpled papers, and that there were torn
and burnt papers on the table. And in front of these, and arranged
methodically along the edge were rows and rows of little yellow
rouleaux--a hundred times more gold than Mr. Ledbetter had seen in all
his life before. The light of two candles, in silver candlesticks, fell
upon these. The pause continued. "It is rather fatiguing holding up my
hands like this," said Mr. Ledbetter, with a deprecatory smile.

"That's all right," said the fat man. "But what to do with you I don't
exactly know."

"I know my position is ambiguous."

"Lord!" said the fat man, "Ambiguous! And goes about with his own soap,
and wears a thundering great clerical collar. You are a blooming
burglar, you are--if ever there was one!"

"To be strictly accurate," said Mr. Ledbetter, and suddenly his glasses
slipped off and clattered against his vest buttons.

The fat man changed countenance, a flash of savage resolution crossed
his face, and something in the revolver clicked. He put his other hand
to the weapon. And then he looked at Mr. Ledbetter, and his eye went
down to the dropped pince-nez.

"Full-cock now anyhow," said the fat man, after a pause, and his breath
seemed to catch. "But I'll tell you, you've never been so near death
before. Lord! I'm almost glad. If it hadn't been, that the revolver
wasn't cocked you'd be lying dead there now."

Mr. Ledbetter said nothing, but he felt that the room was swaying.

"A miss is as good as a mile. It's lucky for both of us it wasn't.
Lord!" He blew noisily. "There's no need for you to go pale-green for a
little thing like that."

"If I can assure you, sir--" said Mr. Ledbetter, with an effort.

"There's only one thing to do. If I call in the police, I'm bust--a
little game I've got on is bust. That won't do. If I tie you up and
leave you--again, the thing may be out to-morrow. To-morrow's Sunday,
and Monday's Bank Holiday--I've counted on three clear days. Shooting
you's murder--and hanging; and besides, it will bust the whole blooming
kernooze. I'm hanged if I can think what to do--I'm hanged if I can."

"Will you permit me--"

"You gas as much as if you were a real parson, I'm blessed if you don't.
Of all the burglars you are the--Well! No--I won't permit you. There
isn't time. If you start off jawing again, I'll shoot right in your
stomach. See? But I know now--I know now! What we're going to do first,
my man, is an examination for concealed arms--an examination for
concealed arms. And look here! When I tell you to do a thing, don't
start off at a gabble--do it brisk."

And with many elaborate precautions, and always pointing the pistol at
Mr. Ledbetter's head, the stout man stood him up and searched him for
weapons. "Why, you are a burglar!" he said "You're a perfect amateur.
You haven't even a pistol-pocket in the back of your breeches. No, you
don't! Shut up, now."

So soon as the issue was decided, the stout man made Mr. Ledbetter take
off his coat and roll up his shirt-sleeves, and with the revolver at one
ear, proceed with the packing his appearance had interrupted. From the
stout man's point of view that was evidently the only possible
arrangement, for if he had packed, he would have had to put down the
revolver. So that even the gold on the table was handled by Mr.
Ledbetter. This nocturnal packing was peculiar. The stout man's idea was
evidently to distribute the weight of the gold as unostentatiously as
possible through his luggage. It was by no means an inconsiderable
weight. There was, Mr. Ledbetter says, altogether nearly L18,000 in gold
in the black bag and on the table. There were also many little rolls of
L5 bank-notes. Each rouleau of L25 was wrapped by Mr. Ledbetter in
paper. These rouleaux were then put neatly in cigar-boxes and
distributed between a travelling trunk, a Gladstone bag, and a hat-box.
About L600 went in a tobacco tin in a dressing-bag. L10 in gold and a
number of L5 notes the stout man pocketed. Occasionally he objurgated
Mr. Ledbetter's clumsiness, and urged him to hurry, and several times he
appealed to Mr. Ledbetter's watch for information.

Mr. Ledbetter strapped the trunk and bag, and returned the stout man the
keys. It was then ten minutes to twelve, and until the stroke of
midnight the stout man made him sit on the Gladstone bag, while he sat
at a reasonably safe distance on the trunk and held the revolver handy
and waited. He appeared to be now in a less aggressive mood, and having
watched Mr. Ledbetter for some time, he offered a few remarks.

"From your accent I judge you are a man of some education," he said,
lighting a cigar. "No--don't begin that explanation of yours. I know it
will be longwinded from your face, and I am much too old a liar to be
interested in other men's lying. You are, I say a person of education.
You do well to dress as a curate. Even among educated people you might
pass as a curate."

"I am a curate," said Mr. Ledbetter, "or, at least--"

"You are trying to be. I know. But you didn't ought to burgle. You are
not the man to burgle. You are, if I may say it--the thing will have
been pointed out to you before--a coward."

"Do you know," said Mr. Ledbetter, trying to get a final opening, "it
was that very question--"

The stout man waved him into silence.

"You waste your education in burglary. You should do one of two things.
Either you should forge or you should embezzle. For my own part, I
embezzle. Yes; I embezzle. What do you think a man could be doing with
all this gold but that? Ah! Listen! Midnight...! Ten. Eleven. Twelve.
There is something very impressive to me in that slow beating of the
hours. Time--space; what mysteries they are! What mysteries... It's time
for us to be moving. Stand up!"

And then kindly, but firmly, he induced Mr. Ledbetter to sling the
dressing bag over his back by a string across his chest, to shoulder the
trunk, and over-ruling a gasping protest, to take the Gladstone bag in
his disengaged hand. So encumbered, Mr. Ledbetter struggled perilously
downstairs. The stout gentleman followed with an overcoat, the hat-box,
and the revolver, making derogatory remarks about Mr. Ledbetter's
strength, and assisting him at the turnings of the stairs.

"The back door," he directed, and Mr. Ledbetter staggered through a
conservatory, leaving a wake of smashed flower-pots behind him. "Never
mind the crockery," said the stout man; "it's good for trade. We wait
here until a quarter past. You can put those things down. You have!"

Mr. Ledbetter collapsed panting on the trunk. "Last night," he gasped,
"I was asleep in my little room, and I no more dreamt--"

"There's no need for you to incriminate yourself," said the stout
gentleman, looking at the lock of the revolver. He began to hum. Mr.
Ledbetter made to speak, and thought better of it.

There presently came the sound of a bell, and Mr. Ledbetter was taken to
the back door and instructed to open it. A fair-haired man in yachting
costume entered. At the sight of Mr. Ledbetter he started violently and
clapped his hand behind him. Then he saw the stout man. "Bingham!" he
cried, "who's this?"

"Only a little philanthropic do of mine--burglar I'm trying to reform.
Caught him under my bed just now. He's all right. He's a frightful ass.
He'll be useful to carry some of our things."

The newcomer seemed inclined to resent Mr. Ledbetter's presence at
first, but the stout man reassured him.

"He's quite alone. There's not a gang in the world would own him. No--!
Don't start talking, for goodness' sake."

They went out into the darkness of the garden with the trunk still
bowing Mr. Ledbetter's shoulders. The man in the yachting costume walked
in front with the Gladstone bag and a pistol; then came Mr. Ledbetter
like Atlas; Mr. Bingham followed with the hat-box, coat, and revolver as
before. The house was one of those that have their gardens right up to
the cliff. At the cliff was a steep wooden stairway, descending to a
bathing tent dimly visible on the beach. Below was a boat pulled up, and
a silent little man with a black face stood beside it. "A few moments'
explanation," said Mr. Ledbetter; "I can assure you--" Somebody kicked
him, and he said no more.

They made him wade to the boat, carrying the trunk, they pulled him
aboard by the shoulders and hair, they called him no better name than
"scoundrel" and "burglar" all that night. But they spoke in undertones
so that the general public was happily unaware of his ignominy. They
hauled him aboard a yacht manned by strange, unsympathetic Orientals,
and partly they thrust him and partly he fell down a gangway into a
noisome, dark place, where he was to remain many days--how many he does
not know, because he lost count among other things when he was sea-sick.
They fed him on biscuits and incomprehensible words; they gave him water
to drink mixed with unwished-for rum. And there were cockroaches, where
they put him--night and day there were cockroaches, and in the
night-time there were rats. The Orientals emptied his pockets and took
his watch--but Mr. Bingham, being appealed to, took that himself. And
five or six times the five Lascars--if they were Lascars--and the
Chinaman and the negro who constituted the crew, fished him out and took
him aft to Bingham and his friend to play cribbage and euchre and
three-handed whist, and to listen to their stories and boastings in an
interested manner.

Then these principals would talk to him as men talk to those who have
lived a life of crime. Explanations they would never permit, though they
made it abundantly clear to him that he was the rummiest burglar they
had ever set eyes on. They said as much again and again. The fair man
was of a taciturn disposition and irascible at play; but Mr. Bingham,
now that the evident anxiety of his departure from England was assuaged,
displayed a vein of genial philosophy. He enlarged upon the mystery of
space and time, and quoted Kant and Hegel--or at least, he said he did.
Several times Mr. Ledbetter got as far as: "My position under your bed,
you know--" but then he always had to cut, or pass the whisky, or do
some such intervening thing. After his third failure, the fair man got
quite to look for this opening, and whenever Mr. Ledbetter began after
that, he would roar with laughter and hit him violently on the back.
"Same old start, same old story; good old burglar!" the fair-haired man
would say.

So Mr. Ledbetter suffered for many days, twenty perhaps; and one evening
he was taken, together with some tinned provisions, over the side and
put ashore on a rocky little island with a spring. Mr. Bingham came in
the boat with him, giving him good advice all the way, and waving his
last attempts at an explanation aside.

"I am really not a burglar," said Mr. Ledbetter.

"You never will be," said Mr. Bingham. "You'll never make a burglar. I'm
glad you are beginning to see it. In choosing a profession a man must
study his temperament. If you don't, sooner or later you will fail.
Compare myself, for example. All my life I have been in banks--I have
got on in banks. I have even been a bank manager. But was I happy? No,
Why wasn't I happy? Because it did not suit my temperament. I am too
adventurous--too versatile. Practically I have thrown it over. I do not
suppose I shall ever manage a bank again. They would be glad to get me,
no doubt; but I have learnt the lesson of my temperament--at last... No!
I shall never manage a bank again.

"Now, your temperament unfits you for crime--just as mine unfits me for
respectability. I know you better than I did, and now I do not even
recommend forgery. Go back to respectable courses, my man. Your lay is
the philanthropic lay--that is your lay. With that voice--the
Association for the Promotion of Snivelling among the Young--something
in that line. You think it over.

"The island we are approaching has no name apparently--at least, there
is none on the chart. You might think out a name for it while you are
there--while you are thinking about all these things. It has quite
drinkable water, I understand. It is one of the Grenadines--one of the
Windward Islands. Yonder, dim and blue, are others of the Grenadines.
There are quantities of Grenadines, but the majority are out of sight. I
have often wondered what these islands are for--now, you see, I am
wiser. This one at least is for you. Sooner or later some simple native
will come along and take you off. Say what you like about us then--abuse
us, if you like--we shan't care a solitary Grenadine! And here--here is
half a sovereign's worth of silver. Do not waste that in foolish
dissipation when you return to civilisation. Properly used, it may give
you a fresh start in life. And do not--Don't beach her, you beggars, he
can wade--! Do not waste the precious solitude before you in foolish
thoughts. Properly used, it may be a turning-point in your career. Waste
neither money nor time. You will die rich. I'm sorry, but I must ask you
to carry your tucker to land in your arms. No; it's not deep. Curse that
explanation of yours! There's not time. No, no, no! I won't listen.
Overboard you go!"

And the falling night found Mr. Ledbetter--the Mr. Ledbetter who had
complained that adventure was dead--sitting beside his cans of food, his
chin resting upon his drawn-up knees, staring through his glasses in
dismal mildness over the shining, vacant sea.

He was picked up in the course of three days by a negro fisherman and
taken to St. Vincent's, and from St. Vincent's he got, by the
expenditure of his last coins, to Kingston, in Jamaica. And there he
might have foundered. Even nowadays he is not a man of affairs, and then
he was a singularly helpless person. He had not the remotest idea what
he ought to do. The only thing he seems to have done was to visit all
the ministers of religion he could find in the place to borrow a passage
home. But he was much too dirty and incoherent--and his story far too
incredible for them. I met him quite by chance. It was close upon
sunset, and I was walking out after my siesta on the road to Dunn's
Battery, when I met him--I was rather bored, and with a whole evening on
my hands--luckily for him. He was trudging dismally towards the town.
His woebegone face and the quasi-clerical cut of his dust-stained,
filthy costume caught my humour. Our eyes met. He hesitated. "Sir," he
said, with a catching of the breath, "could you spare a few minutes for
what I fear will seem an incredible story?"

"Incredible!" I said.

"Quite," he answered eagerly. "No one will believe it, alter it though I
may. Yet I can assure you, sir--"

He stopped hopelessly. The man's tone tickled me. He seemed an odd
character. "I am," he said, "one of the most unfortunate beings alive."

"Among other things, you haven't dined?" I said, struck with an idea.

"I have not," he said solemnly, "for many days."

"You'll tell it better after that," I said; and without more ado led the
way to a low place I knew, where such a costume as his was unlikely to
give offence. And there--with certain omissions which he subsequently
supplied, I got his story. At first I was incredulous, but as the wine
warmed him, and the faint suggestion of cringing which his misfortunes
had added to his manner disappeared, I began to believe. At last, I was
so far convinced of his sincerity that I got him a bed for the night,
and next day verified the banker's reference he gave me through my
Jamaica banker. And that done, I took him shopping for underwear and
such like equipments of a gentleman at large. Presently came the
verified reference. His astonishing story was true. I will not amplify
our subsequent proceedings. He started for England in three days' time.

"I do not know how I can possibly thank you enough," began the letter he
wrote me from England, "for all your kindness to a total stranger," and
proceeded for some time in a similar strain. "Had it not been for your
generous assistance, I could certainly never have returned in time for
the resumption of my scholastic duties, and my few minutes of reckless
folly would, perhaps, have proved my ruin. As it is, I am entangled in a
tissue of lies and evasions, of the most complicated sort, to account
for my sunburnt appearance and my whereabouts. I have rather carelessly
told two or three different stories, not realising the trouble this
would mean for me in the end. The truth I dare not tell. I have
consulted a number of law books in the British Museum, and there is not
the slightest doubt that I have connived at and abetted and aided a
felony. That scoundrel Bingham was the Hithergate bank manager, I find
and guilty of the most flagrant embezzlement. Please, please burn this
letter when read--I trust you implicitly. The worst of it is, neither my
aunt nor her friend who kept the boarding-house at which I was staying
seem altogether to believe a guarded statement I have made
them--practically of what actually happened. They suspect me of some
discreditable adventure, but what sort of discreditable adventure they
suspect me of, I do not know. My aunt says she would forgive me if I
told her everything. I have--I have told her more than everything, and
still she is not satisfied. It would never do to let them know the truth
of the case, of course, and so I represent myself as having been waylaid
and gagged upon the beach. My aunt wants to know why they waylaid and
gagged me, why they took me away in their yacht. I do not know. Can you
suggest any reason? I can think of nothing. If when you wrote, you could
write on two sheets so that I could show her one, and on that one if you
could show clearly that I really was in Jamaica this summer, and had
come there by being removed from a ship, it would be of great service to
me. It would certainly add to the load of my obligation to you--a load
that I fear I can never fully repay. Although if gratitude..." And so
forth. At the end he repeated his request for me to burn the letter.

So the remarkable story of Mr. Ledbetter's Vacation ends. That breach
with his aunt was not of long duration. The old lady had forgiven him
before she died.




THE STOLEN BODY


Mr. Bessel was the senior partner in the firm of Bessel, Hart, and
Brown, of St. Paul's Churchyard, and for many years he was well known
among those interested in psychical research as a liberal-minded and
conscientious investigator. He was an unmarried man, and instead of
living in the suburbs, after the fashion of his class, he occupied rooms
in the Albany, near Piccadilly. He was particularly interested in the
questions of thought transference and of apparitions of the living, and
in November, 1896, he commenced a series of experiments in conjunction
with Mr. Vincey, of Staple Inn, in order to test the alleged possibility
of projecting an apparition of one's self by force of will through
space.

Their experiments were conducted in the following manner: At a
pre-arranged hour Mr. Bessel shut himself in one of his rooms in the
Albany and Mr. Vincey in his sitting-room in Staple Inn, and each then
fixed his mind as resolutely as possible on the other. Mr. Bessel had
acquired the art of self-hypnotism, and so far as he could, he attempted
first to hypnotise himself and then to project himself as a "phantom of
the living" across the intervening space of nearly two miles into Mr.
Vincey's apartment. On several evenings this was tried without any
satisfactory result, but on the fifth or sixth occasion Mr. Vincey did
actually see or imagine he saw an apparition of Mr. Bessel standing in
his room. He states that the appearance, although brief, was very vivid
and real. He noticed that Mr. Bessel's face was white and his expression
anxious, and moreover, that his hair was disordered. For a moment Mr.
Vincey, in spite of his state of expectation, was too surprised to speak
or move, and in that moment it seemed to him as though the figure
glanced over its shoulder and incontinently vanished.

It had been arranged that an attempt should be made to photograph any
phantasm seen, but Mr. Vincey had not the instant presence of mind to
snap the camera that lay ready on the table beside him, and when he did
so he was too late. Greatly elated, however even by this partial
success, he made a note of the exact time, and at once took a cab to the
Albany to inform Mr. Bessel of this result.

He was surprised to find Mr. Bessel's outer door standing open to the
night, and the inner apartments lit and in an extraordinary disorder. An
empty champagne magnum lay smashed upon the floor; its neck had been
broken off against the inkpot on the bureau and lay beside it. An
octagonal occasional table, which carried a bronze statuette and a
number of choice books, had been rudely overturned, and down the
primrose paper of the wall inky fingers had been drawn, as it seemed for
the mere pleasure of defilement. One of the delicate chintz curtains had
been violently torn from its rings and thrust upon the fire, so that the
smell of its smouldering filled the room. Indeed the whole place was
disarranged in the strangest fashion. For a few minutes Mr. Vincey, who
had entered sure of finding Mr. Bessel in his easy chair awaiting him,
could scarcely believe his eyes, and stood staring helplessly at these
unanticipated things.

Then, full of a vague sense of calamity, he sought the porter at the
entrance lodge. "Where is Mr. Bessel?" he asked. "Do you know that all
the furniture is broken in Mr. Bessel's room?" The porter said nothing,
but obeying his gestures, came at once to Mr. Bessel's apartment to see
the state of affairs. "This settles it," he said, surveying the lunatic
confusion. "I didn't know of this. Mr. Bessel's gone off. He's mad!"

He then proceeded to tell Mr. Vincey that about half an hour previously,
that is to say, at about the time of Mr. Bessel's apparition in Mr.
Vincey's rooms, the missing gentleman had rushed out of the gates of the
Albany into Vigo Street, hatless and with disordered hair, and had
vanished into the direction of Bond Street. "And as he went past me,"
said the porter, "he laughed--a sort of gasping laugh, with his mouth
open and his eyes glaring--I tell you, sir he fair scared me--! Like
this."

According to his imitation it was anything but a pleasant laugh. "He
waved his hand, with all his fingers crooked and clawing--like that. And
he said, in a sort of fierce whisper, 'Life!' Just that one word,
'Life!'"

"Dear me," said Mr. Vincey. "Tut, tut," and "Dear me!" He could think of
nothing else to say. He was naturally very much surprised. He turned
from the room to the porter and from the porter to the room in the
gravest perplexity. Beyond his suggestion that probably Mr. Bessel would
come back presently and explain what had happened, their conversation
was unable to proceed. "It might be a sudden tooth-ache," said the
porter, "a very sudden and violent tooth-ache, jumping on him
suddenly-like and driving him wild. I've broken things myself before now
in such a case..." He thought. "If it was, why should he say 'Life' to
me as he went past?"

Mr. Vincey did not know. Mr. Bessel did not return, and at last Mr.
Vincey, having done some more helpless staring, and having addressed a
note of brief inquiry and left it in a conspicuous position on the
bureau, returned in a very perplexed frame of mind to his own premises
in Staple Inn. This affair had given him a shock. He was at a loss to
account for Mr. Bessel's conduct on any sane hypothesis. He tried to
read, but he could not do so; he went for a short walk, and was so
preoccupied that he narrowly escaped a cab at the top of Chancery Lane;
and at last--a full hour before his usual time--he went to bed. For a
considerable time he could not sleep because of his memory of the silent
confusion of Mr. Bessel's apartment, and when at length he did attain an
uneasy slumber it was at once disturbed by a very vivid and distressing
dream of Mr. Bessel.

He saw Mr. Bessel gesticulating wildly, and with his face white and
contorted. And inexplicably mingled with his appearance, suggested
perhaps by his gestures, was an intense fear, an urgency to act. He even
believes that he heard the voice of his fellow experimenter calling
distressfully to him, though at the time he considered this to be an
illusion. The vivid impression remained though Mr. Vincey awoke. For a
space he lay awake and trembling in the darkness, possessed with that
vague, unaccountable terror of unknown possibilities that comes out of
dreams upon even the bravest men. But at last he roused himself, and
turned over and went to sleep again, only for the dream to return with
enhanced vividness.

He awoke with such a strong conviction that Mr. Bessel was in
overwhelming distress and need of help that sleep was no longer
possible. He was persuaded that his friend had rushed out to some dire
calamity. For a time he lay reasoning vainly against this belief, but at
last he gave way to it. He arose, against all reason, lit his gas, and
dressed, and set out through the deserted streets--deserted, save for a
noiseless policeman or so and the early news carts--towards Vigo Street
to inquire if Mr. Bessel had returned.

But he never got there. As he was going down Long Acre some
unaccountable impulse turned him aside out of that street towards Covent
Garden, which was just waking to its nocturnal activities. He saw the
market in front of him--a queer effect of glowing yellow lights and busy
black figures. He became aware of a shouting, and perceived a figure
turn the corner by the hotel and run swiftly towards him. He knew at
once that it was Mr. Bessel. But it was Mr. Bessel transfigured. He was
hatless and dishevelled, his collar was torn open, he grasped a
bone-handled walking-cane near the ferrule end, and his mouth was pulled
awry. And he ran, with agile strides, very rapidly. Their encounter was
the affair of an instant. "Bessel!" cried Vincey.

The running man gave no sign of recognition either of Mr. Vincey or of
his own name. Instead he cut at his friend savagely with the stick,
hitting him in the face within an inch of the eye. Mr. Vincey, stunned
and astonished, staggered back, lost his footing, and fell heavily on
the pavement. It seemed to him that Mr. Bessel leapt over him as he
fell. When he looked again Mr. Bessel had vanished, and a policeman and
a number of garden porters and salesmen were rushing past towards Long
Acre in hot pursuit.

With the assistance of several passers-by--for the whole street was
speedily alive with running people--Mr. Vincey struggled to his feet. He
at once became the centre of a crowd greedy to see his injury. A
multitude of voices competed to reassure him of his safety, and then to
tell him of the behaviour of the madman, as they regarded Mr. Bessel. He
had suddenly appeared in the middle of the market screaming "Life!
Life!" striking left and right with a blood-stained walking-stick, and
dancing and shouting with laughter at each successful blow. A lad and
two women had broken heads, and he had smashed a man's wrist; a little
child had been knocked insensible, and for a time he had driven every
one before him, so furious and resolute had his behaviour been. Then he
made a raid upon a coffee stall, hurled its paraffin flare through the
window of the post office, and fled laughing, after stunning the
foremost of the two policemen who had the pluck to charge him.

Mr. Vincey's first impulse was naturally to join in the pursuit of his
friend, in order if possible to save him from the violence of the
indignant people. But his action was slow, the blow had half stunned
him, and while this was still no more than a resolution came the news,
shouted through the crowd, that Mr. Bessel had eluded his pursuers. At
first Mr. Vincey could scarcely credit this, but the universality of the
report, and presently the dignified return of two futile policemen,
convinced him. After some aimless inquiries he returned towards Staple
Inn, padding a handkerchief to a now very painful nose.

He was angry and astonished and perplexed. It appeared to him
indisputable that Mr. Bessel must have gone violently mad in the midst
of his experiment in thought transference, but why that should make him
appear with a sad white face in Mr. Vincey's dreams seemed a problem
beyond solution. He racked his brains in vain to explain this. It seemed
to him at last that not simply Mr. Bessel, but the order of things must
be insane. But he could think of nothing to do. He shut himself
carefully into his room, lit his fire--it was a gas fire with asbestos
bricks--and fearing fresh dreams if he went to bed, remained bathing his
injured face, or holding up books in a vain attempt to read, until dawn.
Throughout that vigil he had a curious persuasion that Mr. Bessel was
endeavouring to speak to him, but he would not let himself attend to any
such belief.

About dawn, his physical fatigue asserted itself, and he went to bed and
slept at last in spite of dreaming. He rose late, unrested and anxious,
and in considerable facial pain. The morning papers had no news of Mr.
Bessel's aberration--it had come too late for them. Mr. Vincey's
perplexities, to which the fever of his bruise added fresh irritation,
became at last intolerable, and after a fruitless visit to the Albany,
he went down to St. Paul's Churchyard to Mr. Hart, Mr. Bessel's partner,
and so far as Mr. Vincey knew, his nearest friend.

He was surprised to learn that Mr. Hart, although he knew nothing of the
outbreak, had also been disturbed by a vision, the very vision that Mr.
Vincey had seen--Mr. Bessel, white and dishevelled, pleading earnestly
by his gestures for help. That was his impression of the import of his
signs. "I was just going to look him up in the Albany when you arrived,"
said Mr. Hart. "I was so sure of something being wrong with him."

As the outcome of their consultation the two gentlemen decided to
inquire at Scotland Yard for news of their missing friend. "He is bound
to be laid by the heels," said Mr. Hart. "He can't go on at that pace
for long." But the police authorities had not laid Mr. Bessel by the
heels. They confirmed Mr. Vincey's overnight experiences and added fresh
circumstances, some of an even graver character than those he knew--a
list of smashed glass along the upper half of Tottenham Court Road, an
attack upon a policeman in Hampstead Road, and an atrocious assault upon
a woman. All these outrages were committed between half-past twelve and
a quarter to two in the morning, and between those hours--and indeed,
from the very moment of Mr. Bessel's first rush from his rooms at
half-past nine in the evening--they could trace the deepening violence
of his fantastic career. For the last hour, at least from before one,
that is, until a quarter to two, he had run amuck through London,
eluding with amazing agility every effort to stop or capture him.

But after a quarter to two he had vanished. Up to that hour witnesses
were multitudinous. Dozens of people had seen him, fled from him or
pursued him, and then things suddenly came to an end. At a quarter to
two he had been seen running down the Euston Road towards Baker Street,
flourishing a can of burning colza oil and jerking splashes of flame
therefrom at the windows of the houses he passed. But none of the
policemen on Euston Road beyond the Waxwork Exhibition, nor any of those
in the side streets down which he must have passed had he left the
Euston Road, had seen anything of him. Abruptly he disappeared. Nothing
of his subsequent doings came to light in spite of the keenest inquiry.

Here was a fresh astonishment for Mr. Vincey. He had found considerable
comfort in Mr. Hart's conviction: "He is bound to be laid by the heels
before long," and in that assurance he had been able to suspend his
mental perplexities. But any fresh development seemed destined to add
new impossibilities to a pile already heaped beyond the powers of his
acceptance. He found himself doubting whether his memory might not have
played him some grotesque trick, debating whether any of these things
could possibly have happened; and in the afternoon he hunted up Mr. Hart
again to share the intolerable weight on his mind. He found Mr. Hart
engaged with a well-known private detective, but as that gentleman
accomplished nothing in this case, we need not enlarge upon his
proceedings.

All that day Mr. Bessel's whereabouts eluded an unceasingly active
inquiry, and all that night. And all that day there was a persuasion in
the back of Vincey's mind that Mr. Bessel sought his attention, and all
through the night Mr. Bessel with a tear-stained face of anguish pursued
him through his dreams. And whenever he saw Mr. Bessel in his dreams he
also saw a number of other faces, vague but malignant, that seemed to be
pursuing Mr. Bessel.

It was on the following day Sunday, that Mr. Vincey recalled certain
remarkable stories of Mrs. Bullock, the medium, who was then attracting
attention for the first time in London. He determined to consult her.
She was staying at the house of that well-known inquirer, Dr. Wilson
Paget, and Mr. Vincey, although he had never met that gentleman before,
repaired to him forthwith with the intention of invoking her help. But
scarcely had he mentioned the name of Bessel when Doctor Paget
interrupted him. "Last night--just at the end," he said, "we had a
communication."

He left the room, and returned with a slate on which were certain words
written in a handwriting, shaky indeed, but indisputably the handwriting
of Mr. Bessel!

"How did you get this?" said Mr. Vincey. "Do you mean--?"

"We got it last night," said Doctor Paget. With numerous interruptions
from Mr. Vincey, he proceeded to explain how the writing had been
obtained. It appears that in her seances, Mrs. Bullock passes into a
condition of trance, her eyes rolling up in a strange way under her
eyelids, and her body becoming rigid. She then begins to talk very
rapidly, usually in voices other than her own. At the same time one or
both of her hands may become active, and if slates and pencils are
provided they will then write messages simultaneously with and quite
independently of the flow of words from her mouth. By many she is
considered an even more remarkable medium than the celebrated Mrs.
Piper. It was one of these messages, the one written by her left hand,
that Mr. Vincey now had before him. It consisted of eight words written
disconnectedly: "George Bessel... trial excavn... Baker Street...
help... starvation." Curiously enough, neither Doctor Paget nor the two
other inquirers who were present had heard of the disappearance of Mr.
Bessel--the news of it appeared only in the evening papers of
Saturday--and they had put the message aside with many others of a vague
and enigmatical sort that Mrs. Bullock has from time to time delivered.

When Doctor Paget heard Mr. Vincey's story, he gave himself at once with
great energy to the pursuit of this clue to the discovery of Mr. Bessel.
It would serve no useful purpose here to describe the inquiries of Mr.
Vincey and himself; suffice it that the clue was a genuine one, and that
Mr. Bessel was actually discovered by its aid.

He was found at the bottom of a detached shaft which had been sunk and
abandoned at the commencement of the work for the new electric railway
near Baker Street Station. His arm and leg and two ribs were broken. The
shaft is protected by a hoarding nearly 20 feet high, and over this,
incredible as it seems, Mr. Bessel, a stout, middle-aged gentleman, must
have scrambled in order to fall down the shaft. He was saturated in
colza oil, and the smashed tin lay beside him, but luckily the flame had
been extinguished by his fall. And his madness had passed from him
altogether. But he was, of course, terribly enfeebled, and at the sight
of his rescuers he gave way to hysterical weeping.

In view of the deplorable state of his flat, he was taken to the house
of Dr. Hatton in Upper Baker Street. Here he was subjected to a sedative
treatment, and anything that might recall the violent crisis through
which he had passed was carefully avoided. But on the second day he
volunteered a statement.

Since that occasion Mr. Bessel has several times repeated this
statement--to myself among other people--varying the details as the
narrator of real experiences always does, but never by any chance
contradicting himself in any particular. And the statement he makes is
in substance as follows.

In order to understand it clearly it is necessary to go back to his
experiments with Mr. Vincey before his remarkable attack. Mr. Bessel's
first attempts at self-projection, in his experiments with Mr. Vincey,
were as the reader will remember, unsuccessful. But through all of them
he was concentrating all his power and will upon getting out of the
body--"willing it with all my might," he says. At last, almost against
expectation, came success. And Mr. Bessel asserts that he, being alive,
did actually, by an effort of will, leave his body and pass into some
place or state outside this world.

The release was, he asserts, instantaneous. "At one moment I was seated
in my chair, with my eyes tightly shut, my hands gripping the arms of
the chair, doing all I could to concentrate my mind on Vincey, and then
I perceived myself outside my body--saw my body near me, but certainly
not containing me, with the hands relaxing and the head drooping forward
on the breast."

Nothing shakes him in his assurance of that release. He describes in a
quiet, matter-of-fact way the new sensation he experienced. He felt he
had become impalpable--so much he had expected, but he had not expected
to find himself enormously large. So however, it would seem he became.
"I was a great cloud--if I may express it that way--anchored to my body.
It appeared to me, at first, as if I had discovered a greater self of
which the conscious being in my brain was only a little part. I saw the
Albany and Piccadilly and Regent Street and all the rooms and places in
the houses, very minute and very bright and distinct, spread out below
me like a little city seen from a balloon. Every now and then vague
shapes like drifting wreaths of smoke made the vision a little
indistinct, but at first I paid little heed to them. The thing that
astonished me most, and which astonishes me still, is that I saw quite
distinctly the insides of the houses as well as the streets, saw little
people dining and talking in the private houses, men and women dining,
playing billiards, and drinking in restaurants and hotels, and several
places of entertainment crammed with people. It was like watching the
affairs of a glass hive."

Such were Mr. Bessel's exact words as I took them down when he told me
the story. Quite forgetful of Mr. Vincey, he remained for a space
observing these things. Impelled by curiosity, he says, he stooped down,
and with the shadowy arm he found himself possessed of, attempted to
touch a man walking along Vigo Street. But he could not do so, though
his finger seemed to pass through the man. Something prevented his doing
this, but what it was he finds it hard to describe. He compares the
obstacle to a sheet of glass.

"I felt as a kitten may feel," he said, "when it goes for the first time
to pat its reflection in a mirror." Again and again, on the occasion
when I heard him tell this story, Mr. Bessel returned to that comparison
of the sheet of glass. Yet it was not altogether a precise comparison,
because as the reader will speedily see, there were interruptions of
this generally impermeable resistance, means of getting through the
barrier to the material world again. But naturally, there is a very
great difficulty in expressing these unprecedented impressions in the
language of everyday experience.

A thing that impressed him instantly, and which weighed upon him
throughout all this experience, was the stillness of this place--he was
in a world without sound.

At first Mr. Bessel's mental state was an unemotional wonder. His
thought chiefly concerned itself with where he might be. He was out of
the body--out of his material body, at any rate--but that was not all.
He believes, and I for one believe also, that he was somewhere out of
space, as we understand it, altogether. By a strenuous effort of will he
had passed out of his body into a world beyond this world, a world
undreamt of, yet lying so close to it and so strangely situated with
regard to it that all things on this earth are clearly visible both from
without and from within, in this other world about us. For a long time,
as it seemed to him, this realisation occupied his mind to the exclusion
of all other matters, and then he recalled the engagement with Mr.
Vincey, to which this astonishing experience was, after all, but a
prelude.

He turned his mind to locomotion in this new body in which he found
himself. For a time he was unable to shift himself from his attachment
to his earthly carcass. For a time this new strange cloud body of his
simply swayed, contracted, expanded, coiled, and writhed with his
efforts to free himself, and then quite suddenly the link that bound him
snapped. For a moment everything was hidden by what appeared to be
whirling spheres of dark vapour, and then through a momentary gap he saw
his drooping body collapse limply, saw his lifeless head drop sideways,
and found he was driving along like a huge cloud in a strange place of
shadowy clouds that had the luminous intricacy of London spread like a
model below.

But now he was aware that the fluctuating vapour about him was something
more than vapour, and the temerarious excitement of his first essay was
shot with fear. For he perceived, at first indistinctly, and then
suddenly very clearly, that he was surrounded by faces! That each roll
and coil of the seeming cloud-stuff was a face. And such faces! Faces of
thin shadow, faces of gaseous tenuity. Faces like those faces that glare
with intolerable strangeness upon the sleeper in the evil hours of his
dreams. Evil, greedy eyes that were full of a covetous curiosity, faces
with knit brows and snarling, smiling lips; their vague hands clutched
at Mr. Bessel as he passed, and the rest of their bodies was but an
elusive streak of trailing darkness. Never a word they said, never a
sound from the mouths that seemed to gibber. All about him they pressed
in that dreamy silence, passing freely through the dim mistiness that
was his body, gathering ever more numerously about him. And the shadowy
Mr. Bessel, now suddenly fear-stricken, drove through the silent, active
multitude of eyes and clutching hands.

So inhuman were these faces, so malignant their staring eyes, and
shadowy, clawing gestures, that it did not occur to Mr. Bessel to
attempt intercourse with these drifting creatures. Idiot phantoms, they
seemed, children of vain desire, beings unborn and forbidden the boon of
being, whose only expressions and gestures told of the envy and craving
for life that was their one link with existence.

It says much for his resolution that, amidst the swarming cloud of these
noiseless spirits of evil, he could still think of Mr. Vincey. He made a
violent effort of will and found himself, he knew not how, stooping
towards Staple Inn, saw Vincey sitting attentive and alert in his
armchair by the fire.

And clustering also about him, as they clustered ever about all that
lives and breathes, was another multitude of these vain voiceless
shadows, longing, desiring, seeking some loophole into life.

For a space Mr. Bessel sought ineffectually to attract his friend's
attention. He tried to get in front of his eyes, to move the objects in
his room, to touch him. But Mr. Vincey remained unaffected, ignorant of
the being that was so close to his own. The strange something that Mr.
Bessel has compared to a sheet of glass separated them impermeably.

And at last Mr. Bessel did a desperate thing. I have told how that in
some strange way he could see not only the outside of a man as we see
him, but within. He extended his shadowy hand and thrust his vague black
fingers, as it seemed, through the heedless brain.

Then suddenly, Mr. Vincey started like a man who recalls his attention
from wandering thoughts, and it seemed to Mr. Bessel that a little
dark-red body situated in the middle of Mr. Vincey's brain swelled and
glowed as he did so. Since that experience he has been shown anatomical
figures of the brain, and he knows now that this is that useless
structure, as doctors call it, the pineal eye. For strange as it will
seem to many, we have, deep in our brains--where it cannot possibly see
any earthly light--an eye! At the time this, with the rest of the
internal anatomy of the brain, was quite new to him. At the sight of its
changed appearance, however, he thrust forth his finger, and rather
fearful still of the consequences, touched this little spot. And
instantly Mr. Vincey started, and Mr. Bessel knew that he was seen.

And at that instant it came to Mr. Bessel that evil had happened to his
body, and behold! A great wind blew through all that world of shadows
and tore him away. So strong was this persuasion that he thought no more
of Mr. Vincey, but turned about forthwith, and all the countless faces
drove back with him like leaves before a gale. But he returned too late.
In an instant he saw the body that he had left inert and
collapsed--lying, indeed, like the body of a man just dead--had arisen,
had arisen by virtue of some strength and will beyond his own. It stood
with staring eyes, stretching its limbs in dubious fashion.

For a moment he watched it in wild dismay, and then he stooped towards
it. But the pane of glass had closed against him again, and he was
foiled. He beat himself passionately against this, and all about him the
spirits of evil grinned and pointed and mocked. He gave way to furious
anger. He compares himself to a bird that has fluttered heedlessly into
a room and is beating at the window-pane that holds it back from
freedom.

And behold! The little body that had once been his was now dancing with
delight. He saw it shouting, though he could not hear its shouts; he saw
the violence of its movements grow. He watched it fling his cherished
furniture about in the mad delight of existence, rend his books apart,
smash bottles, drink heedlessly from the jagged fragments, leap and
smite in a passionate acceptance of living. He watched these actions in
paralysed astonishment. Then once more he hurled himself against the
impassable barrier, and then with all that crew of mocking ghosts about
him, hurried back in dire confusion to Vincey to tell him of the outrage
that had come upon him.

But the brain of Vincey was now closed against apparitions, and the
disembodied Mr. Bessel pursued him in vain as he hurried out into
Holborn to call a cab. Foiled and terror-stricken, Mr. Bessel swept back
again, to find his desecrated body whooping in a glorious frenzy down
the Burlington Arcade...

And now the attentive reader begins to understand Mr. Bessel's
interpretation of the first part of this strange story. The being whose
frantic rush through London had inflicted so much injury and disaster
had indeed Mr. Bessel's body, but it was not Mr. Bessel. It was an evil
spirit out of that strange world beyond existence, into which Mr. Bessel
had so rashly ventured. For twenty hours it held possession of him, and
for all those twenty hours the dispossessed spirit-body of Mr. Bessel
was going to and fro in that unheard-of middle world of shadows seeking
help in vain. He spent many hours beating at the minds of Mr. Vincey and
of his friend Mr. Hart. Each, as we know, he roused by his efforts. But
the language that might convey his situation to these helpers across the
gulf he did not know; his feeble fingers groped vainly and powerlessly
in their brains. Once indeed, as we have already told, he was able to
turn Mr. Vincey aside from his path so that he encountered the stolen
body in its career, but he could not make him understand the thing that
had happened: he was unable to draw any help from that encounter...

All through those hours the persuasion was overwhelming in Mr. Bessel's
mind that presently his body would be killed by its furious tenant, and
he would have to remain in this shadow-land for evermore. So that those
long hours were a growing agony of fear. And ever as he hurried to and
fro in his ineffectual excitement, innumerable spirits of that world
about him mobbed him and confused his mind. And ever an envious
applauding multitude poured after their successful fellow as he went
upon his glorious career.

For that, it would seem, must be the life of these bodiless things of
this world that is the shadow of our world. Ever they watch, coveting a
way into a mortal body, in order that they may descend, as furies and
frenzies, as violent lusts and mad, strange impulses, rejoicing in the
body they have won. For Mr. Bessel was not the only human soul in that
place. Witness the fact that he met first one, and afterwards several
shadows of men, men like himself, it seemed, who had lost their bodies
even it may be as he had lost his, and wandered, despairingly, in that
lost world that is neither life nor death. They could not speak because
that world is silent, yet he knew them for men because of their dim
human bodies, and because of the sadness of their faces.

But how they had come into that world he could not tell, nor where the
bodies they had lost might be, whether they still raved about the earth,
or whether they were closed forever in death against return. That they
were the spirits of the dead neither he nor I believe. But Doctor Wilson
Paget thinks they are the rational souls of men who are lost in madness
on the earth.

At last Mr. Bessel chanced upon a place where a little crowd of such
disembodied silent creatures was gathered, and thrusting through them he
saw below a brightly-lit room, and four or five quiet gentlemen and a
woman, a stoutish woman dressed in black bombazine and sitting awkwardly
in a chair with her head thrown back. He knew her from her portraits to
be Mrs. Bullock, the medium. And he perceived that tracts and structures
in her brain glowed and stirred as he had seen the pineal eye in the
brain of Mr. Vincey glow. The light was very fitful; sometimes it was a
broad illumination, and sometimes merely a faint twilight spot, and it
shifted slowly about her brain. She kept on talking and writing with one
hand. And Mr. Bessel saw that the crowding shadows of men about him, and
a great multitude of the shadow spirits of that shadow land, were all
striving and thrusting to touch the lighted regions of her brain. As one
gained her brain or another was thrust away, her voice and the writing
of her hand changed. So that what she said was disorderly and confused
for the most part; now a fragment of one soul's message, and now a
fragment of another's, and now she babbled the insane fancies of the
spirits of vain desire. Then Mr. Bessel understood that she spoke for
the spirit that had touch of her, and he began to struggle very
furiously towards her. But he was on the outside of the crowd and at
that time he could not reach her, and at last, growing anxious, he went
away to find what had happened meanwhile to his body. For a long time he
went to and fro seeking it in vain and fearing that it must have been
killed, and then he found it at the bottom of the shaft in Baker Street,
writhing furiously and cursing with pain. Its leg and an arm and two
ribs had been broken by its fall. Moreover, the evil spirit was angry
because his time had been so short and because of the pain--making
violent movements and casting his body about.

And at that Mr. Bessel returned with redoubled earnestness to the room
where the seance was going on, and so soon as he had thrust himself
within sight of the place he saw one of the men who stood about the
medium looking at his watch as if he meant that the seance should
presently end. At that a great number of the shadows who had been
striving turned away with gestures of despair. But the thought that the
seance was almost over only made Mr. Bessel the more earnest, and he
struggled so stoutly with his will against the others that presently he
gained the woman's brain. It chanced that just at that moment it glowed
very brightly, and in that instant she wrote the message that Doctor
Wilson Paget preserved. And then the other shadows and the cloud of evil
spirits about him had thrust Mr. Bessel away from her, and for all the
rest of the seance he could regain her no more.

So he went back and watched through the long hours at the bottom of the
shaft where the evil spirit lay in the stolen body it had maimed,
writhing and cursing, and weeping and groaning, and learning the lesson
of pain. And towards dawn the thing he had waited for happened, the
brain glowed brightly and the evil spirit came out, and Mr. Bessel
entered the body he had feared he should never enter again. As he did
so, the silence--the brooding silence--ended; he heard the tumult of
traffic and the voices of people overhead, and that strange world that
is the shadow of our world--the dark and silent shadows of ineffectual
desire and the shadows of lost men--vanished clean away.

He lay there for the space of about three hours before he was found. And
in spite of the pain and suffering of his wounds, and of the dim damp
place in which he lay; in spite of the tears--wrung from him by his
physical distress--his heart was full of gladness to know that he was
nevertheless back once more in the kindly world of men.




MR. BRISHER'S TREASURE


"You can't be too careful who you marry," said Mr. Brisher, and pulled
thoughtfully with a fat-wristed hand at the lank moustache, that hides
his want of chin.

"That's why--" I ventured.

"Yes," said Mr. Brisher, with a solemn light in his bleary, blue-grey
eyes, moving his head expressively and breathing alcohol intimately at
me. "There's lots as 'ave 'ad a try at me--many as I could name in this
town--but none 'ave done it--none."

I surveyed the flushed countenance, the equatorial expansion, the
masterly carelessness of his attire, and heaved a sigh to think that by
reason of the unworthiness of women he must needs be the last of his
race.

"I was a smart young chap when I was younger," said Mr. Brisher. "I 'ad
my work cut out. But I was very careful--very. And I got through..."

He leant over the taproom table and thought visibly on the subject of my
trustworthiness. I was relieved at last by his confidence.

"I was engaged once," he said at last, with a reminiscent eye on the
shuv-a'penny board.

"So near as that?"

He looked at me. "So near as that. Fact is--" He looked about him,
brought his face close to mine, lowered his voice, and fenced off an
unsympathetic world with a grimy hand. "If she ain't dead or married to
some one else or anything--I'm engaged still. Now." He confirmed this
statement with nods and facial contortions. "Still," he said, ending the
pantomime, and broke into a reckless smile at my surprise. "Me!"

"Run away," he explained further, with coruscating eyebrows. "Come
'ome."

"That ain't all."

"You'd hardly believe it," he said, "but I found a treasure. Found a
regular treasure."

I fancied this was irony, and did not, perhaps, greet it with proper
surprise. "Yes," he said, "I found a treasure. And come 'ome. I tell you
I could surprise you with things that has happened to me." And for some
time he was content to repeat that he had found a treasure--and left it.

I made no vulgar clamour for a story, but I became attentive to Mr.
Brisher's bodily needs, and presently I led him back to the deserted
lady.

"She was a nice girl," he said--a little sadly, I thought. "And
respectable."

He raised his eyebrows and tightened his mouth to express extreme
respectability--beyond the likes of us elderly men.

"It was a long way from 'ere. Essex, in fact. Near Colchester. It was
when I was up in London--in the buildin' trade. I was a smart young chap
then, I can tell you. Slim. 'Ad best clo'es 's good as anybody.
'At--silk 'at, mind you." Mr. Brisher's hand shot above his head towards
the infinite to indicate it silk hat of the highest. "Umbrella--nice
umbrella with a 'orn 'andle. Savin's. Very careful I was..."

He was pensive for a little while, thinking, as we must all come to
think sooner or later, of the vanished brightness of youth. But he
refrained, as one may do in taprooms, from the obvious moral.

"I got to know 'er through a chap what was engaged to 'er sister. She
was stopping in London for a bit with an aunt that 'ad a 'am an' beef
shop. This aunt was very particular--they was all very particular
people, all 'er people was--and wouldn't let 'er sister go out with this
feller except 'er other sister, my girl that is, went with them. So 'e
brought me into it, sort of to ease the crowding. We used to go walks in
Battersea Park of a Sunday afternoon. Me in my topper, and 'im in 'is;
and the girls--well--stylish. There wasn't many in Battersea Park 'ad
the larf of us. She wasn't what you'd call pretty, but a nicer girl I
never met. I liked 'er from the start and, well--though I say it who
shouldn't--she liked me. You know 'ow it is, I dessay?"

I pretended I did.

"And when this chap married 'er sister--'im and me was great
friends--what must 'e do but arst me down to Colchester, close by where
She lived. Naturally I was introjuced to 'er people, and well, very
soon, her and me was engaged."

He repeated "engaged."

"She lived at 'ome with 'er father and mother, quite the lady, in a very
nice little 'ouse with a garden--and remarkable respectable people they
was. Rich you might call 'em a'most. They owned their own 'ouse--got it
out of the Building Society, and cheap because the chap who had it
before was a burglar and in prison--and they 'ad a bit of free'old land,
and some cottages and money 'nvested--all nice and tight: they was what
you'd call snug and warm. I tell you, I was On. Furniture too. Why! They
'ad a pianner. Jane--'er name was Jane--used to play it Sundays, and
very nice she played too. There wasn't 'ardly a 'im toon in the book she
couldn't play...

"Many's the evenin' we've met and sung 'ims there, me and 'er and the
family."

"'Er father was quite a leadin' man in chapel. You should ha' seen him
Sundays, interruptin' the minister and givin' out 'ims. He had gold
spectacles, I remember, and used to look over 'em at you while 'e sang
'earty--'e was always great on singing 'earty to the Lord--and when he
got out o' toon 'arf the people went after 'im--always. 'E was that sort
of man. And to walk be'ind 'im in 'is nice black clo'es--'is 'at was a
brimmer--made one regular proud to be engaged to such a father-in-law.
And when the summer came I went down there and stopped a fortnight.

"Now, you know there was a sort of 'itch," said Mr. Brisher. "We wanted
to marry, me and Jane did, and get things settled. But 'e said I 'ad to
get a proper position first. Consequently there was a 'itch.
Consequently, when I went down there, I was anxious to show that I was a
good useful sort of chap like. Show I could do pretty nearly everything
like. See?"

I made a sympathetic noise.

"And down at the bottom of their garden was a bit of wild part like. So
I says to 'im, 'Why don't you 'ave a rockery 'ere?' I says. 'It 'ud look
nice.'"

"'Too much expense,' he says."

"'Not a penny,' says I. 'I'm a dab at rockeries. Lemme make you one.'
You see, I'd 'elped my brother make a rockery in the deer garden be'ind
'is tap, so I knew 'ow to do it to rights. 'Lemme make you one,' I says.
'It's 'olidays, but I'm that sort of chap, I 'ate doing nothing,' I
says. 'I'll make you one to rights.' And the long and the short of it
was, he said I might."

"And that's 'ow I come on the treasure."

"What treasure?" I asked.

"Why!" said Mr. Brisher, "The treasure I'm telling you about, what's the
reason why I never married."

"What--! A treasure--dug up?"

"Yes--buried wealth--treasure trove. Come out of the ground. What I kept
on saying--regular treasure..." He looked at me with unusual disrespect.

"It wasn't more than a foot deep, not the top of it," he said. "I'd
'ardly got thirsty like, before I come on the corner."

"Go on," I said. "I didn't understand."

"Why! Directly I 'it the box I knew it was treasure. A sort of instinct
told me. Something seemed to shout inside of me--'Now's your
chance--lie low.' It's lucky I knew the laws of treasure trove or I'd
'ave been shoutin' there and then. I dare say you know--?"

"Crown bags it," I said, "all but one per cent. Go on. It's a shame.
What did you do?"

"Uncovered the top of the box. There wasn't anybody in the garden or
about like. Jane was 'elping 'er mother do the 'ouse. I was excited--I
tell you. I tried the lock and then gave a whack at the hinges. Open it
came. Silver coins--full! Shining. It made me tremble to see 'em. And
jest then--I'm blessed if the dustman didn't come round the back of the
'ouse. It pretty nearly gave me 'eart disease to think what a fool I was
to 'ave that money showing. And directly after I 'eard the chap next
door--'e was 'olidaying, too--I 'eard him watering 'is beans. If only
'e'd looked over the fence!"

"What did you do?"

"Kicked the lid on again and covered it up like a shot, and went on
digging about a yard away from it--like mad. And my face, so to speak,
was laughing on its own account till I 'ad it 'id. I tell you I was
regular scared like at my luck. I jest thought that it 'ad to be kep'
close and that was all. 'Treasure,' I kep' whisperin' to myself,
'Treasure' and ''undreds of pounds, 'undreds, 'undreds of pounds.'
Whispering to myself like, and digging like blazes. It seemed to me the
box was regular sticking out and showing, like your legs do under the
sheets in bed, and I went and put all the earth I'd got out of my 'ole
for the rockery slap on top of it. I was in a sweat. And in the midst of
it all, out toddles 'er father. 'E didn't say anything to me, jest stood
behind me and stared, but Jane tole me afterwards when 'e went indoors,
'e says, 'That there jackanapes of yours, Jane--' he always called me a
jackanapes some'ow--'knows 'ow to put 'is back into it after all.'
Seemed quite impressed by it, 'e did."

"How long was the box?" I asked, suddenly.

"'Ow long?" said Mr. Brisher.

"Yes--in length?"

"Oh! 'Bout so--by so." Mr. Brisher indicated a moderate-sized trunk.

"Full?" said I.

"Full up of silver coins--'arf-crowns, I believe."

"Why!" I cried. "That would mean--hundreds of pounds."

"Thousands," said Mr. Brisher, in a sort of sad calm. "I calc'lated it
out."

"But how did they get there?"

"All I know is what I found. What I thought at the time was this. The
chap who'd owned the 'ouse before 'er father 'd been a regular slap-up
burglar. What you'd call a 'igh-class criminal. Used to drive 'is
trap--like Peace did." Mr. Brisher meditated on the difficulties of
narration and embarked on a complicated parenthesis. "I don't know if I
told you it'd been a burglar's 'ouse before it was my girl's father's,
and I knew 'e'd robbed a mail train once, I did know that. It seemed to
me--"

"That's very likely," I said. "But what did you do?"

"Sweated," said Mr. Brisher. "Regular run orf me. All that morning,"
said Mr. Brisher, "I was at it, pretending to make that rockery and
wondering what I should do. I'd 'ave told 'er father p'r'aps, only I was
doubtful of 'is honesty--I was afraid 'e might rob me of it like, and
give it up to the authorities--and besides, considering I was marrying
into the family, I thought it would be nicer like if it came through me.
Put me on a better footing, so to speak. Well, I 'ad three days before
me left of my 'olidays, so there wasn't no 'urry, so I covered it up and
went on digging, and tried to puzzle out 'ow I was to make sure of it.
Only I couldn't.

"I thought," said Mr. Brisher, "and I thought. Once I got regular
doubtful whether I'd seen it or not, and went down to it and 'ad it
uncovered again, just as 'er ma came out to 'ang up a bit of washin'
she'd done. Jumps again! Afterwards I was just thinking I'd 'ave another
go at it, when Jane comes to tell me dinner was ready. 'You'll want it,'
she said, 'seeing all the 'ole you've dug.'

"I was in a regular daze all dinner, wondering whether that chap next
door wasn't over the fence and filling 'is pockets. But in the afternoon
I got easier in mymind--it seemed to me it must 'ave been there so long
it was pretty sure to stop a bit longer--and I tried to get up a bit of
a discussion to dror out the old man and see what 'e thought of treasure
trove."

Mr. Brisher paused, and affected amusement at the memory.

"The old man was a scorcher," he said; "a regular scorcher."

"What!" said I; "did he--?"

"It was like this," explained Mr. Brisher, laying a friendly hand on my
arm and breathing into my face to calm me. "Just to dror 'im out, I told
a story of a chap I said I knew--pretendin', you know--who'd found a
sovring in a novercoat 'e'd borrowed. I said 'e stuck to it, but I said
I wasn't sure whether that was right or not. And then the old man began.
Lor'! 'E did let me 'ave it!" Mr. Brisher affected an insincere
amusement. "'E was, well--what you might call a rare 'and at snacks.
Said that was the sort of friend 'e'd naturally expect me to 'ave. Said
'e'd naturally expect that from the friend of a out-of-work loafer who
took up with daughters who didn't belong to 'im. There! I couldn't tell
you 'arf 'e said. 'E went on most outrageous. I stood up to 'im about
it, just to dror 'im out. 'Wouldn't you stick to a 'arf-sov', not if you
found it in the street?' I says. 'Certainly not,' 'e says; 'certainly I
wouldn't.' 'What! Not if you found it as a sort of treasure?' 'Young
man,' 'e says, 'there's 'i'er 'thority than mine--Render unto Caesar--'
what is it? Yes. Well, he fetched up that. A rare 'and at 'itting you
over the 'ed with the Bible, was the old man. And so he went on. 'E got
to such snacks about me at last I couldn't stand it. I'd promised Jane
not to answer 'im back, but it got a bit too thick. I--I give it 'im..."

Mr. Brisher, by means of enigmatical facework, tried to make me think he
had had the best of that argument, but I knew better.

"I went out in a 'uff at last. But not before I was pretty sure I 'ad to
lift that treasure by myself. The only thing that kep' me up was
thinking, 'ow I'd take it out of 'im when I 'ad the cash..."

There was a lengthy pause.

"Now, you'd 'ardly believe it, but all them three days I never 'ad a
chance at the blessed treasure, never got out not even a 'arf-crown.
There was always a Somethink--always."

"'Stonishing thing it isn't thought of more," said Mr. Brisher. "Finding
treasure's no great shakes. It's gettin' it. I don't suppose I slep' a
wink any of those nights, thinking where I was to take it, what I was to
do with it, 'ow I was to explain it. It made me regular ill. And days I
was that dull, it made Jane regular 'uffy. 'You ain't the same chap you
was in London,' she says, several times. I tried to lay it on 'er father
and 'is snacks, but bless you, she knew better. What must she 'ave but
that I'd got another girl on my mind! Said I wasn't True. Well, we had a
bit of a row. But I was that set on the Treasure, I didn't seem to mind
a bit Anything she said.

"Well, at last I got a sort of plan. I was always a bit good at
planning, though carrying out isn't so much in my line. I thought it all
out and settled on a plan. First, I was going to take all my pockets
full of these 'ere 'arf-crowns--see--? And afterwards--as I shall tell.

"Well, I got to that state I couldn't think of getting at the Treasure
again in the daytime, so I waited until the night before I had to go,
and then, when everything was still, up I gets and slips down to the
back door, meaning to get my pockets full. What must I do in the
scullery but fall over a pail! Up gets 'er father with a gun--'e was a
light sleeper was 'er father, and very suspicious--and there was me: 'ad
to explain I'd come down to the pump for a drink because my water-bottle
was bad. 'E didn't let me off a snack or two over that bit, you lay a
bob."

"And you mean to say--" I began.

"Wait a bit," said Mr. Brisher. "I say, I'd made my plan. That put the
kybosh on one bit, but it didn't 'urt the general scheme not a bit. I
went and I finished that rockery next day, as though there wasn't a
snack in the world; cemented over the stones, I did, dabbed it green and
everythink. I put a dab of green just to show where the box was. They
all came and looked at it, and said 'ow nice it was--even 'e was a bit
softer like to see it, and all 'e said was, "It's a pity you can't
always work like that, then you might get something definite to do," 'e
says.

"'Yes,' I says--I couldn't 'elp it--'I put a lot in that rockery,' I
says, like that. See? 'I put a lot in that rockery--' meaning--"

"I see," said I--for Mr. Brisher is apt to over-elaborate his jokes.

"'E didn't," said Mr. Brisher. "Not then, anyhow.

"Ar'ever--after all that was over, off I set for London... Orf I set for
London."

Pause.

"On'y I wasn't going to no London," said Mr. Brisher, with sudden
animation, and thrusting his face into mine. "No fear! What do YOU
think?

"I didn't go no further than Colchester--not a yard.

"I'd left the spade just where I could find it. I'd got everything
planned and right. I 'ired a little trap in Colchester, and pretended I
wanted to go to Ipswich and stop the night, and come back next day, and
the chap I 'ired it from made me leave two sovrings on it right away,
and off I set.

"I didn't go to no Ipswich neither.

"Midnight the 'orse and trap was 'itched by the little road that ran by
the cottage where 'e lived--not sixty yards off, it wasn't--and I was at
it like a good 'un. It was jest the night for such games--overcast--but
a trifle too 'ot, and all round the sky there was summer lightning and
presently a thunderstorm. Down it came. First big drops in a sort of
fizzle, then 'ail. I kep' on. I whacked at it--I didn't dream the old
man would 'ear. I didn't even trouble to go quiet with the spade, and
the thunder and lightning and 'ail seemed to excite me like. I shouldn't
wonder if I was singing. I got so 'ard at it I clean forgot the thunder
and the 'orse and trap. I precious soon got the box showing, and started
to lift it..."

"Heavy?" I said.

"I couldn't no more lift it than fly. I was sick. I'd never thought of
that I got regular wild--I tell you, I cursed. I got sort of outrageous.
I didn't think of dividing it like for the minute, and even then I
couldn't 'ave took money about loose in a trap. I hoisted one end sort
of wild like, and over the whole show went with a tremenjous noise.
Perfeck smash of silver. And then right on the heels of that, Flash!
Lightning like the day! And there was the back door open and the old man
coming down the garden with 'is blooming old gun. 'E wasn't not a
'undred yards away!

"I tell you I was that upset--I didn't think what I was doing. I never
stopped--not even to fill my pockets. I went over the fence like a shot,
and ran like one o'clock for the trap, cussing and swearing as I went. I
was in a state...

"And will you believe me, when I got to the place where I'd left the
'orse and trap, they'd gone. Orf! When I saw that I 'adn't a cuss left
for it. I jest danced on the grass, and when I'd danced enough I started
off to London... I was done."

Mr. Brisher was pensive for an interval. "I was done," he repeated, very
bitterly.

"Well?" I said.

"That's all," said Mr. Brisher.

"You didn't go back?"

"No fear. I'd 'ad enough of that blooming treasure, any'ow for a bit.
Besides, I didn't know what was done to chaps who tried to collar a
treasure trove. I started off for London there and then..."

"And you never went back?"

"Never."

"But about Jane? Did you write?"

"Three times, fishing like. And no answer. We'd parted in a bit of a
'uff on account of 'er being jealous. So that I couldn't make out for
certain what it meant.

"I didn't know what to do. I didn't even know whether the old man knew
it was me. I sort of kep' an eye open on papers to see when he'd give up
that treasure to the Crown, as I hadn't a doubt 'e would, considering
'ow respectable he'd always been."

"And did he?"

Mr. Brisher pursed his mouth and moved his head slowly from side to
side. "Not 'im," he said.

"Jane was a nice girl," he said, "a thorough nice girl mind you, if
jealous, and there's no knowing I mightn't 'ave gone back to 'er after a
bit. I thought if 'e didn't give up the treasure I might 'ave a sort of
'old on 'im... Well, one day I looks as usual under Colchester--and
there I saw 'is name. What for, d'yer think?"

I could not guess.

Mr. Brisher's voice sank to a whisper, and once more he spoke behind his
hand. His manner was suddenly suffused with a positive joy. "Issuing
counterfeit coins," he said. "Counterfeit coins!"

"You don't mean to say--?"

"Yes--It. Bad. Quite a long case they made of it. But they got 'im,
though 'e dodged tremenjous. Traced 'is 'aving passed, oh--! Nearly a
dozen bad 'arf-crowns."

"And you didn't--?"

"No fear. And it didn't do 'im much good to say it was treasure trove."




MISS WINCHELSEA'S HEART


Miss Winchelsea was going to Rome. The matter had filled her mind for a
month or more, and had overflowed so abundantly into her conversation
that quite a number of people who were not going to Rome, and who were
not likely to go to Rome, had made it a personal grievance against her.
Some indeed had attempted quite unavailingly to convince her that Rome
was not nearly such a desirable place as it was reported to be, and
others had gone so far as to suggest behind her back that she was
dreadfully "stuck up" about "that Rome of hers." And little Lily
Hardhurst had told her friend Mr. Binns that so far as she was concerned
Miss Winchelsea might "go to her old Rome and stop there; she (Miss Lily
Hardhurst) wouldn't grieve." And the way in which Miss Winchelsea put
herself upon terms of personal tenderness with Horace and Benvenuto
Cellini and Raphael and Shelley and Keats--if she had been Shelley's
widow she could not have professed a keener interest in his grave--was a
matter of universal astonishment. Her dress was a triumph of tactful
discretion, sensible, but not too "touristy--" Miss Winchelsea, had a
great dread of being "touristy--" and her Baedeker was carried in a
cover of grey to hide its glaring red. She made a prim and pleasant
little figure on the Charing Cross platform, in spite of her swelling
pride, when at last the great day dawned, and she could start for Rome.
The day was bright, the Channel passage would be pleasant, and all the
omens promised well. There was the gayest sense of adventure in this
unprecedented departure.

She was going with two friends who had been fellow-students with her at
the training college, nice honest girls both, though not so good at
history and literature as Miss Winchelsea. They both looked up to her
immensely, though physically they had to look down, and she anticipated
some pleasant times to be spent in "stirring them up" to her own pitch
of aesthetic and historical enthusiasm. They had secured seats already,
and welcomed her effusively at the carriage door. In the instant
criticism of the encounter she noted that Fanny had a slightly
"touristy" leather strap, and that Helen had succumbed to a serge jacket
with side pockets, into which her hands were thrust. But they were much
too happy with themselves and the expedition for their friend to attempt
any hint at the moment about these things. As soon as the first
ecstasies were over--Fanny's enthusiasm was a little noisy and crude,
and consisted mainly in emphatic repetitions of "Just fancy! We're going
to Rome, my dear--! Rome--!" They gave their attention to their
fellow-travellers. Helen was anxious to secure a compartment to
themselves, and in order to discourage intruders, got out and planted
herself firmly on the step. Miss Winchelsea peeped out over her
shoulder, and made sly little remarks about the accumulating people on
the platform, at which Fanny laughed gleefully.

They were travelling with one of Mr. Thomas Gunn's parties--fourteen
days in Rome for fourteen pounds. They did not belong to the personally
conducted party of course--Miss Winchelsea had seen to that--but they
travelled with it because of the convenience of that arrangement. The
people were the oddest mixture, and wonderfully amusing. There was a
vociferous red-faced polyglot personal conductor in a pepper and salt
suit, very long in the arms and legs and very active. He shouted
proclamations. When he wanted to speak to people he stretched out an arm
and held them until his purpose was accomplished. One hand was full of
papers, tickets, counterfoils of tourists. The people of the personally
conducted party were, it seemed, of two sorts; people the conductor
wanted and could not find, and people he did not want and who followed
him in a steadily growing tail up and down the platform. These people
seemed, indeed to think that their one chance of reaching Rome lay in
keeping close to him. Three little old ladies were particularly
energetic in his pursuit, and at last maddened him to the pitch of
clapping them into a carriage and daring them to emerge again. For the
rest of the time, one, two, or three of their heads protruded from the
window wailing enquiries about "a little wickerwork box" whenever he
drew near. There was a very stout man with a very stout wife in shiny
black; there was a little old man like an aged hostler.

"What can such people want in Rome?" asked Miss Winchelsea. "What can it
mean to them?" There was a very tall curate in a very small straw hat,
and a very short curate encumbered by a long camera stand. The contrast
amused Fanny very much. Once they heard some one calling for "Snooks."
"I always thought that name was invented by novelists," said Miss
Winchelsea. "Fancy! Snooks. I wonder which is Mr. Snooks." Finally they
picked out a very stout and resolute little man in a large check suit.
"If he isn't Snooks, he ought to be," said Miss Winchelsea.

Presently the conductor discovered Helen's attempt at a corner in
carriages. "Room for five," he bawled with a parallel translation on his
fingers. A party of four together--mother, father, and two
daughters--blundered in, all greatly excited. "It's all right, Ma--you
let me," said one of the daughters, hitting her mother's bonnet with a
handbag she struggled to put in the rack. Miss Winchelsea detested
people who banged about and called their mother "Ma." A young man
travelling alone followed. He was not at all "touristy" in his costume,
Miss Winchelsea observed; his Gladstone bag was of good pleasant leather
with labels reminiscent of Luxembourg and Ostend, and his boots, though
brown, were not vulgar. He carried an overcoat on his arm. Before these
people had properly settled in their places, came an inspection of
tickets and a slamming of doors, and behold! They were gliding out of
Charing Cross station on their way to Rome.

"Fancy!" cried Fanny, "We are going to Rome, my dear! Rome! I don't seem
to believe it, even now."

Miss Winchelsea suppressed Fanny's emotions with a little smile, and the
lady who was called "Ma" explained to people in general why they had
"cut it so close" at the station. The two daughters called her "Ma"
several times, toned her down in a tactless effective way, and drove her
at last to the muttered inventory of a basket of travelling requisites.
Presently she looked up. "Lor'!" she said, "I didn't bring them!" Both
the daughters said "Oh, Ma!" but what "them" was did not appear.
Presently Fanny produced "Hare's Walks in Rome," a sort of mitigated
guide-book very popular among Roman visitors; and the father of the two
daughters began to examine his books of tickets minutely, apparently in
a search after English words. When he had looked at the tickets for a
long time right way up, he turned them upside down. Then he produced a
fountain pen and dated them with considerable care. The young man,
having completed an unostentatious survey of his fellow travellers,
produced a book and fell to reading. When Helen and Fanny were looking
out of the window at Chislehurst--the place interested Fanny because the
poor dear Empress of the French used to live there--Miss Winchelsea took
the opportunity to observe the book the young man held. It was not a
guide-book, but a little thin volume of poetry--bound. She glanced at
his face--it seemed a refined pleasant face to her hasty glance. He wore
a little gilt pince-nez. "Do you think she lives there now?" said Fanny,
and Miss Winchelsea's inspection came to an end.

For the rest of the journey Miss Winchelsea talked little, and what she
said was as pleasant and as stamped with refinement as she could make
it. Her voice was always low and clear and pleasant, and she took care
that on this occasion it was particularly low and clear and pleasant. As
they came under the white cliffs the young man put his book of poetry
away, and when at last the train stopped beside the boat, he displayed a
graceful alacrity with the impedimenta of Miss Winchelsea and her
friends. Miss Winchelsea hated nonsense, but she was pleased to see the
young man perceived at once that they were ladies, and helped them
without any violent geniality; and how nicely he showed that his
civilities were to be no excuse for further intrusions. None of her
little party had been out of England before, and they were all excited
and a little nervous at the Channel passage. They stood in a little
group in a good place near the middle of the boat--the young man had
taken Miss Winchelsea's hold-all there and had told her it was a good
place--and they watched the white shores of Albion recede and quoted
Shakespeare and made quiet fun of their fellow travellers in the English
way.

They were particularly amused at the precautions the bigger-sized people
had taken against the little waves--cut lemons and flasks prevailed, one
lady lay full length in a deck chair with a handkerchief over her face,
and a very broad resolute man in a bright brown "touristy" suit walked
all the way from England to France along the deck, with his legs as
widely apart as Providence permitted. These were all excellent
precautions, and nobody was ill. The personally conducted party pursued
the conductor about the deck with enquiries in a manner that suggested
to Helen's mind the rather vulgar image of hens with a piece of bacon
peel, until at last he went into hiding below. And the young man with
the thin volume of poetry stood at the stern watching England receding,
looking rather lonely and sad to Miss Winchelsea's eye.

And then came Calais and tumultuous novelties, and the young man had not
forgotten Miss Winchelsea's hold-all and the other little things. All
three girls, though they had passed government examinations in French to
any extent, were stricken with a dumb shame of their accents, and the
young man was very useful. And he did not intrude. He put them in a
comfortable carriage and raised his hat and went away. Miss Winchelsea
thanked him in her best manner--a pleasing, cultivated manner--and Fanny
said he was "nice" almost before he was out of earshot. "I wonder what
he can be," said Helen. "He's going to Italy, because I noticed green
tickets in his book." Miss Winchelsea almost told them of the poetry,
and decided not to do so. And presently the carriage windows seized hold
upon them and the young man was forgotten. It made them feel that they
were doing an educated sort of thing to travel through a country whose
commonest advertisements were in idiomatic French, and Miss Winchelsea
made unpatriotic comparisons because there were weedy little sign-board
advertisements by the rail side instead of the broad hoardings that
deface the landscape in our land. But the north of France is really
uninteresting country, and after a time Fanny reverted to "Hare's Walks"
and Helen initiated lunch. Miss Winchelsea awoke out of a happy reverie;
she had been trying to realise, she said, that she was actually going to
Rome, but she perceived at Helen's suggestion that she was hungry, and
they lunched out of their baskets very cheerfully. In the afternoon they
were tired and silent until Helen made tea. Miss Winchelsea might have
dozed, only she knew Fanny slept with her mouth open; and as their
fellow passengers were two rather nice critical-looking ladies of
uncertain age--who knew French well enough to talk it--she employed
herself in keeping Fanny awake. The rhythm of the train became
insistent, and the streaming landscape outside became at last quite
painful to the eye. They were already dreadfully tired of travelling
before their night's stoppage came.

The stoppage for the night was brightened by the appearance of the young
man, and his manners were all that could be desired and his French quite
serviceable. His coupons availed for the same hotel as theirs, and by
chance as it seemed he sat next Miss Winchelsea at the table d'hote. In
spite of her enthusiasm for Rome, she had thought out some such
possibility very thoroughly, and when he ventured to make a remark upon
the tediousness of travelling--he let the soup and fish go by before he
did this--she did not simply assent to his proposition, but responded
with another. They were soon comparing their journeys, and Helen and
Fanny were cruelly overlooked in the conversation. It was to be the same
journey, they found; one day for the galleries at Florence--"from what
I hear," said the young man, "it is barely enough--," and the rest at
Rome. He talked of Rome very pleasantly; he was evidently quite well
read, and he quoted Horace about Soracte. Miss Winchelsea had "done"
that book of Horace for her matriculation, and was delighted to cap his
quotation. It gave a sort of tone to things, this incident--a touch of
refinement to mere chatting. Fanny expressed a few emotions, and Helen
interpolated a few sensible remarks, but the bulk of the talk on the
girls' side naturally fell to Miss Winchelsea.

Before they reached Rome this young man was tacitly of their party. They
did not know his name nor what he was, but it seemed he taught, and Miss
Winchelsea had a shrewd idea he was an extension lecturer. At any rate
he was something of that sort, something gentlemanly and refined without
being opulent and impossible. She tried once or twice to ascertain
whether he came from Oxford or Cambridge, but he missed her timid
importunities. She tried to get him to make remarks about those places
to see if he would say "come up" to them instead of "go down--" she knew
that was how you told a 'Varsity man. He used the word "'Varsity--" not
university--in quite the proper way.

They saw as much of Mr. Ruskin's Florence as the brief time permitted;
he met them in the Pitti Gallery and went round with them, chatting
brightly, and evidently very grateful for their recognition. He knew a
great deal about art, and all four enjoyed the morning immensely. It was
fine to go round recognising old favourites and finding new beauties,
especially while so many people fumbled helplessly with Baedeker. Nor
was he a bit of a prig, Miss Winchelsea said, and indeed she detested
prigs. He had a distinct undertone of humour, and was funny, for example,
without being vulgar, at the expense of the quaint work of Beato
Angelico. He had a grave seriousness beneath it all, and was quick to
seize the moral lessons of the pictures. Fanny went softly among these
masterpieces; she admitted "she knew so little about them," and she
confessed that to her they were "all beautiful." Fanny's "beautiful"
inclined to be a little monotonous, Miss Winchelsea thought. She had
been quite glad when the last sunny Alp had vanished, because of the
staccato of Fanny's admiration. Helen said little, but Miss Winchelsea
had found her a little wanting on the aesthetic side in the old days and
was not surprised; sometimes she laughed at the young man's hesitating
delicate little jests and sometimes she didn't, and sometimes she seemed
quite lost to the art about them in the contemplation of the dresses of
the other visitors.

At Rome the young man was with them intermittently. A rather "touristy"
friend of his took him away at times. He complained comically to Miss
Winchelsea. "I have only two short weeks in Rome," he said, "and my
friend Leonard wants to spend a whole day at Tivoli, looking at a
waterfall."

"What is your friend Leonard?" asked Miss Winchelsea abruptly.

"He's the most enthusiastic pedestrian I ever met," the young man
replied--amusingly, but a little unsatisfactorily, Miss Winchelsea
thought.

They had some glorious times, and Fanny could not think what they would
have done without him. Miss Winchelsea's interest and Fanny's enormous
capacity for admiration were insatiable. They never flagged--through
pictures and sculpture galleries, immense crowded churches, ruins and
museums, Judas trees and prickly pears, wine carts and palaces, they
admired their way unflinchingly. They never saw a stone pine or a
eucalyptus but they named and admired it; they never glimpsed Soracte
but they exclaimed. Their common ways were made wonderful by imaginative
play. "Here Caesar may have walked," they would say. "Raphael may have
seen Soracte from this very point." They happened on the tomb of
Bibulus. "Old Bibulus," said the young man. "The oldest monument of
Republican Rome!" said Miss Winchelsea.

"I'm dreadfully stupid," said Fanny, "but who was Bibulus?"

There was a curious little pause.

"Wasn't he the person who built the wall?" said Helen.

The young man glanced quickly at her and laughed. "That was Balbus," he
said. Helen reddened, but neither he nor Miss Winchelsea threw any light
upon Fanny's ignorance about Bibulus.

Helen was more taciturn than the other three, but then she was always
taciturn, and usually she took care of the tram tickets and things like
that, or kept her eye on them if the young man took them, and told him
where they were when he wanted them. Glorious times they had, these
young people, in that pale brown cleanly city of memories that was once
the world. Their only sorrow was the shortness of the time. They said
indeed that the electric trams and the '70 buildings, and that criminal
advertisement that glares upon the Forum, outraged their aesthetic
feelings unspeakably; but that was only part of the fun. And indeed Rome
is such a wonderful place that it made Miss Winchelsea forget some of
her most carefully prepared enthusiasms at times, and Helen, taken
unawares, would suddenly admit the beauty of unexpected things. Yet
Fanny and Helen would have liked a shop window or so in the English
quarter if Miss Winchelsea's uncompromising hostility to all other
English visitors had not rendered that district impossible.

The intellectual and aesthetic fellowship of Miss Winchelsea and the
scholarly young man passed insensibly towards a deeper feeling. The
exuberant Fanny did her best to keep pace with their recondite
admiration by playing her "beautiful," with vigour, and saying "Oh!
Let's go," with enormous appetite whenever a new place of interest was
mentioned. But Helen developed a certain want of sympathy towards the
end, that disappointed Miss Winchelsea a little. She refused to "see
anything" in the face of Beatrice Cenci--Shelley's Beatrice Cenci--! In
the Barberini gallery; and one day, when they were deploring the
electric trams, she said rather snappishly that "people must get about
somehow, and it's better than torturing horses up these horrid little
hills." She spoke of the Seven Hills of Rome as "horrid little hills!"

And the day they went on the Palatine--though Miss Winchelsea did not
know of this--she remarked suddenly to Fanny, "Don't hurry like that, my
dear; they don't want us to overtake them. And we don't say the right
things for them when we do get near."

"I wasn't trying to overtake them," said Fanny, slackening her excessive
pace; "I wasn't indeed." And for a minute she was short of breath.

But Miss Winchelsea had come upon happiness. It was only when she came
to look back across an intervening tragedy that she quite realised how
happy she had been, pacing among the cypress-shadowed ruins, and
exchanging the very highest class of information the human mind can
possess, the most refined impressions it is possible to convey.
Insensibly emotion crept into their intercourse, sunning itself openly
and pleasantly at last when Helen's modernity was not too near.
Insensibly their interest drifted from the wonderful associations about
them to their more intimate and personal feelings. In a tentative way
information was supplied; she spoke allusively of her school, of her
examination successes, of her gladness that the days of "Cram" were
over. He made it quite clear that he also was a teacher. They spoke of
the greatness of their calling, of the necessity of sympathy to face its
irksome details, of a certain loneliness they sometimes felt.

That was in the Colosseum, and it was as far as they got that day,
because Helen returned with Fanny--she had taken her into the upper
galleries. Yet the private dreams of Miss Winchelsea, already vivid and
concrete enough, became now realistic in the highest degree. She figured
that pleasant young man, lecturing in the most edifying way to his
students, herself modestly prominent as his intellectual mate and
helper; she figured a refined little home, with two bureaus, with white
shelves of high-class books, and autotypes of the pictures of Rossetti
and Burne-Jones, with Morris's wall papers and flowers in pots of beaten
copper. Indeed she figured many things. On the Pincio the two had a few
precious moments together, while Helen marched Fanny off to see the muro
Torto, and he spoke at once plainly. He said he hoped their friendship
was only beginning, that he already found her company very precious to
him, that indeed it was more than that.

He became nervous, thrusting at his glasses with trembling fingers as
though he fancied his emotions made them unstable. "I should of course,"
he said, "tell you things about myself. I know it is rather unusual my
speaking to you like this. Only our meeting has been so accidental--or
providential--and I am snatching at things. I came to Rome expecting a
lonely tour... and I have been so very happy, so very happy. Quite
recently I found myself in a position--I have dared to think--And--"

He glanced over his shoulder and stopped. He said "Damn!" quite
distinctly--and she did not condemn him for that manly lapse into
profanity. She looked and saw his friend Leonard advancing. He drew
nearer; he raised his hat to Miss Winchelsea, and his smile was almost a
grin. "I've been looking for you everywhere, Snooks," he said. "You
promised to be on the Piazza steps half an hour ago."

Snooks! The name struck Miss Winchelsea like a blow in the face. She did
not hear his reply. She thought afterwards that Leonard must have
considered her the vaguest-minded person. To this day she is not sure
whether she was introduced to Leonard or not, nor what she said to him.
A sort of mental paralysis was upon her. Of all offensive
surnames--Snooks!

Helen and Fanny were returning, there were civilities, and the young men
were receding. By a great effort she controlled herself to face the
enquiring eyes of her friends. All that afternoon she lived the life of
a heroine under the indescribable outrage of that name, chatting,
observing, with "Snooks" gnawing at her heart. From the moment that it
first rang upon her ears, the dream of her happiness was prostrate in
the dust. All the refinement she had figured was ruined and defaced by
that cognomen's unavoidable vulgarity.

What was that refined little home to her now, spite of autotypes, Morris
papers, and bureaus? Athwart it in letters of fire ran an incredible
inscription: "Mrs. Snooks." That may seem a little thing to the reader,
but consider the delicate refinement of Miss Winchelsea's mind. Be as
refined as you can and then think of writing yourself down: "Snooks."
She conceived herself being addressed as Mrs. Snooks by all the people
she liked least, conceived the patronymic touched with a vague quality
of insult. She figured a card of grey and silver bearing "Winchelsea,"
triumphantly effaced by an arrow, Cupid's arrow, in favour of "Snooks."
Degrading confession of feminine weakness! She imagined the terrible
rejoicings of certain girl friends, of certain grocer cousins from whom
her growing refinement had long since estranged her. How they would make
it sprawl across the envelope that would bring their sarcastic
congratulations. Would even his pleasant company compensate her for
that? "It is impossible," she muttered; "impossible! Snooks!"

She was sorry for him, but not so sorry as she was for herself. For him
she had a touch of indignation. To be so nice, so refined, while all the
time he was "Snooks," to hide under a pretentious gentility of demeanour
the badge sinister of his surname seemed a sort of treachery. To put it
in the language of sentimental science she felt he had "led her on."

There were of course moments of terrible vacillation, a period even when
something almost like passion bid her throw refinement to the winds. And
there was something in her, an unexpurgated vestige of vulgarity, that
made a strenuous attempt at proving that Snooks was not so very bad a
name after all. Any hovering hesitation flew before Fanny's manner, when
Fanny came with an air of catastrophe to tell that she also knew the
horror. Fanny's voice fell to a whisper when she said Snooks. Miss
Winchelsea would not give him any answer when at last, in the Borghese,
she could have a minute with him; but she promised him a note.

She handed him that note in the little book of poetry he had lent her,
the little book that had first drawn them together. Her refusal was
ambiguous, allusive. She could no more tell him why she rejected him
than she could have told a cripple of his hump. He too must feel
something of the unspeakable quality of his name. Indeed he had avoided
a dozen chances of telling it, she now perceived. So she spoke of
"obstacles she could not reveal--" "reasons why the thing he spoke of
was impossible." She addressed the note with a shiver, "E. K. Snooks."

Things were worse than she had dreaded; he asked her to explain. How
could she explain? Those last two days in Rome were dreadful. She was
haunted by his air of astonished perplexity. She knew she had given him
intimate hopes, she had not the courage to examine her mind thoroughly
for the extent of her encouragement. She knew he must think her the most
changeable of beings. Now that she was in full retreat, she would not
even perceive his hints of a possible correspondence. But in that matter
he did a thing that seemed to her at once delicate and romantic. He made
a go-between of Fanny. Fanny could not keep the secret, and came and
told her that night under a transparent pretext of needed advice. "Mr.
Snooks," said Fanny, "wants to write to me. Fancy! I had no idea. But
should I let him?" They talked it over long and earnestly, and Miss
Winchelsea was careful to keep the veil over her heart. She was already
repenting his disregarded hints. Why should she not hear of him
sometimes--painful though his name must be to her? Miss Winchelsea
decided it might be permitted, and Fanny kissed her good-night with
unusual emotion. After she had gone Miss Winchelsea sat for a long time
at the window of her little room. It was moonlight, and down the street
a man sang "Santa Lucia" with almost heart-dissolving tenderness... She
sat very still.

She breathed a word very softly to herself. The word was "Snooks." Then
she got up with a profound sigh, and went to bed. The next morning he
said to her meaningly, "I shall hear of you through your friend."

Mr. Snooks saw them off from Rome with that pathetic interrogative
perplexity still on his face, and if it had not been for Helen he would
have retained Miss Winchelsea's hold-all in his hand as a sort of
encyclopaedic keepsake. On their way back to England Miss Winchelsea on
six separate occasions made Fanny promise to write to her the longest of
long letters. Fanny, it seemed, would be quite near Mr. Snooks. Her new
school--she was always going to new schools--would be only five miles
from Steely Bank, and it was in the Steely Bank Polytechnic, and one or
two first-class schools, that Mr. Snooks did his teaching. He might even
see her at times. They could not talk much of him--she and Fanny always
spoke of "him," never of Mr. Snooks--because Helen was apt to say
unsympathetic things about him. Her nature had coarsened very much, Miss
Winchelsea perceived, since the old Training College days; she had
become hard and cynical. She thought he had a weak face, mistaking
refinement for weakness as people of her stamp are apt to do, and when
she heard his name was Snooks, she said she had expected something of
the sort. Miss Winchelsea was careful to spare her own feelings after
that, but Fanny was less circumspect.

The girls parted in London, and Miss Winchelsea returned, with a new
interest in life, to the Girls' High School in which she had been an
increasingly valuable assistant for the last three years. Her new
interest in life was Fanny as a correspondent, and to give her a lead
she wrote her a lengthy descriptive letter within a fortnight of her
return. Fanny answered, very disappointingly. Fanny indeed had no
literary gift, but it was new to Miss Winchelsea to find herself
deploring the want of gifts in a friend. That letter was even criticised
aloud in the safe solitude of Miss Winchelsea's study, and her
criticism, spoken with great bitterness, was "Twaddle!" It was full of
just the things Miss Winchelsea's letter had been full of, particulars
of the school. And of Mr. Snooks, only this much: "I have had a letter
from Mr. Snooks, and he has been over to see me on two Saturday
afternoons running. He talked about Rome and you; we both talked about
you. Your ears must have burnt, my dear..."

Miss Winchelsea repressed a desire to demand more explicit information,
and wrote the sweetest long letter again. "Tell me all about yourself,
dear. That journey has quite refreshed our ancient friendship, and I do
so want to keep in touch with you." About Mr. Snooks she simply wrote on
the fifth page that she was glad Fanny had seen him, and that if he
should ask after her, she was to be remembered to him very kindly
(underlined). And Fanny replied most obtusely in the key of that
"ancient friendship," reminding Miss Winchelsea of a dozen foolish
things of those old schoolgirl days at the training college, and saying
not a word about Mr. Snooks!

For nearly a week Miss Winchelsea was so angry at the failure of Fanny
as a go-between that she could not write to her. And then she wrote less
effusively, and in her letter she asked point blank, "Have you seen Mr.
Snooks?" Fanny's letter was unexpectedly satisfactory. "I have seen Mr.
Snooks," she wrote, and having once named him she kept on about him; it
was all Snooks--Snooks this and Snooks that. He was to give a public
lecture, said Fanny, among other things. Yet Miss Winchelsea, after the
first glow of gratification, still found this letter a little
unsatisfactory. Fanny did not report Mr. Snooks as saying anything about
Miss Winchelsea, nor as looking a little white and worn, as he ought to
have been doing. And behold! Before she had replied, came a second
letter from Fanny on the same theme, quite a gushing letter, and
covering six sheets with her loose feminine hand.

And about this second letter was a rather odd little thing that Miss
Winchelsea only noticed as she re-read it the third time. Fanny's
natural femininity had prevailed even against the round and clear
traditions of the training college; she was one of those she-creatures
born to make all her m's and n's and u's and r's and e's alike, and to
leave her o's and a's open and her i's undotted. So that it was only
after an elaborate comparison of word with word that Miss Winchelsea
felt assured Mr. Snooks was not really "Mr. Snooks" at all! In Fanny's
first letter of gush he was Mr. "Snooks," in her second the spelling was
changed to Mr. "Senoks." Miss Winchelsea's hand positively trembled as
she turned the sheet over--it meant so much to her. For it had already
begun to seem to her that even the name of Mrs. Snooks might be avoided
at too great a price, and suddenly--this possibility! She turned over
the six sheets, all dappled with that critical name, and everywhere the
first letter had the form of an E! For a time she walked the room with a
hand pressed upon her heart.

She spent a whole day pondering this change, weighing a letter of
inquiry that should be at once discreet and effectual, weighing too what
action she should take after the answer came. She was resolved that if
this altered spelling was anything more than a quaint fancy of Fanny's,
she would write forthwith to Mr. Snooks. She had now reached a stage
when the minor refinements of behaviour disappear. Her excuse remained
uninvented, but she had the subject of her letter clear in her mind,
even to the hint that "circumstances in my life have changed very
greatly since we talked together." But she never gave that hint. There
came a third letter from that fitful correspondent Fanny. The first line
proclaimed her "the happiest girl alive."

Miss Winchelsea crushed the letter in her hand--the rest unread--and sat
with her face suddenly very still. She had received it just before
morning school, and had opened it when the junior mathematicians were
well under way. Presently she resumed reading with an appearance of
great calm. But after the first sheet she went on reading the third
without discovering the error: "told him frankly I did not like his
name," the third sheet began. "He told me he did not like it
himself--you know that sort of sudden frank way he has--" Miss
Winchelsea did know. "So I said 'Couldn't you change it?' He didn't see
it at first. Well, you know dear, he had told me what it really meant;
it means Sevenoaks, only it has got down to Snooks--both Snooks and
Noaks, dreadfully vulgar surnames though they be, are really worn forms
of Sevenoaks. So I said--even I have my bright ideas at times--'if it
got down from Sevenoaks to Snooks, why not get it back from Snooks to
Sevenoaks?' And the long and the short of it is dear, he couldn't refuse
me, and he changed his spelling there and then to Senoks for the bills
of the new lecture. And afterwards, when we are married, we shall put in
the apostrophe and make it Se'noks. Wasn't it kind of him to mind that
fancy of mine, when many men would have taken offence? But it is just
like him all over; he is as kind as he is clever. Because he knew as
well as I did that I would have had him in spite of it, had he been ten
times Snooks. But he did it all the same."

The class was startled by the sound of paper being viciously torn, and
looked up to see Miss Winchelsea white in the face, and with some very
small pieces of paper clenched in one hand. For a few seconds they
stared at her stare, and then her expression changed back to a more
familiar one. "Has any one finished number three?" she asked in an even
tone. She remained calm after that. But impositions ruled high that day.
And she spent two laborious evenings writing letters of various sorts to
Fanny, before she found a decent congratulatory vein. Her reason
struggled hopelessly against the persuasion that Fanny had behaved in an
exceedingly treacherous manner.

One may be extremely refined and still capable of a very sore heart.
Certainly Miss Winchelsea's heart was very sore. She had moods of sexual
hostility, in which she generalised uncharitably about mankind. "He
forgot himself with me," she said. "But Fanny is pink and pretty and
soft and a fool--a very excellent match for a Man." And by way of a
wedding present she sent Fanny a gracefully bound volume of poetry by
George Meredith, and Fanny wrote back a grossly happy letter to say that
it was "All beautiful." Miss Winchelsea hoped that some day Mr. Senoks
might take up that slim book and think for a moment of the donor. Fanny
wrote several times before and about her marriage, pursuing that fond
legend of their "ancient friendship," and giving her happiness in the
fullest detail. And Miss Winchelsea wrote to Helen for the first time
after the Roman journey, saying nothing about the marriage, but
expressing very cordial feelings.

They had been in Rome at Easter, and Fanny was married in the August
vacation. She wrote a garrulous letter to Miss Winchelsea, describing
her home-coming, and the astonishing arrangements of their "teeny weeny"
little house. Mr. Se'noks was now beginning to assume a refinement in
Miss Winchelsea's memory out of all proportion to the facts of the case,
and she tried in vain to imagine his cultured greatness in a "teeny
weeny" little house. "Am busy enamelling a cosey corner," said Fanny,
sprawling to the end of her third sheet, "so excuse more." Miss
Winchelsea answered in her best style, gently poking fun at Fanny's
arrangements and hoping intensely that Mr. Se'noks might see the letter.
Only this hope enabled her to write at all, answering not only that
letter but one in November and one at Christmas.

The two latter communications contained urgent invitations for her to
come to Steely Bank on a Visit during the Christmas holidays. She tried
to think that he had told her to ask that, but it was too much like
Fanny's opulent good-nature. She could not but believe that he must be
sick of his blunder by this time; and she had more than a hope that he
would presently write her a letter beginning "Dear Friend." Something
subtly tragic in the separation was a great support to her, a sad
misunderstanding. To have been jilted would have been intolerable. But
he never wrote that letter beginning "Dear Friend."

For two years Miss Winchelsea could not go to see her friends, in spite
of the reiterated invitations of Mrs. Sevenoaks--it became full
Sevenoaks in the second year. Then one day near the Easter rest she felt
lonely and without a soul to understand her in the world, and her mind
ran once more on what is called Platonic friendship. Fanny was clearly
happy and busy in her new sphere of domesticity, but no doubt he had his
lonely hours. Did he ever think of those days in Rome--gone now beyond
recalling? No one had understood her as he had done; no one in all the
world. It would be a sort of melancholy pleasure to talk to him again,
and what harm could it do? Why should she deny herself? That night she
wrote a sonnet, all but the last two lines of the octave--which would
not come, and the next day she composed a graceful little note to tell
Fanny she was coming down.

And so she saw him again.

Even at the first encounter it was evident he had changed; he seemed
stouter and less nervous, and it speedily appeared that his conversation
had already lost much of its old delicacy. There even seemed a
justification for Helen's description of weakness in his face--in
certain lights it was weak. He seemed busy and preoccupied about his
affairs, and almost under the impression that Miss Winchelsea had come
for the sake of Fanny. He discussed his dinner with Fanny in an
intelligent way. They only had one good long talk together, and that
came to nothing. He did not refer to Rome, and spent some time abusing a
man who had stolen an idea he had had for a text-book. It did not seem
a very wonderful idea to Miss Winchelsea. She discovered he had
forgotten the names of more than half the painters whose work they had
rejoiced over in Florence.

It was a sadly disappointing week, and Miss Winchelsea was glad when it
came to an end. Under various excuses she avoided visiting them again.
After a time the visitor's room was occupied by their two little boys,
and Fanny's invitations ceased. The intimacy of her letters had long
since faded away.




A DREAM OF ARMAGEDDON


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

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

"I beg your pardon?" said I.

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

"Obviously," I answered, for it was Fortnum-Roscoe's 'Dream States,' and
the title was on the cover. He hung silent for a space as if he sought
words. "Yes," he said at last, "but they tell you nothing." I did not
catch his meaning for a second.

"They don't know," he added.

I looked a little more attentively at his face.

"There are dreams," he said, "and dreams."

That sort of proposition I never dispute.

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

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

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

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

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

"Does he say--" he indicated the book.

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

"Very little--except that they are wrong."

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

"Isn't there something called consecutive dreaming--that goes on night
after night?"

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

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

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

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

"Dreams?"

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

He paused. "Even now--"

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

"It's over."

"You mean?"

"I died."

"Died?"

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

"When you died?"

"When I died."

"And since then--"

"No," he said. "Thank God! That was the end of the dream..."

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

"Yes."

"Past?"

"No--to come--to come."

"The year three thousand, for example?"

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

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

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

"The girl?"

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

He stopped abruptly. "You won't think I'm mad?" he said.

"No," I answered; "you've been dreaming. Tell me your dream."

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

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

"This seems bosh to you?"

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

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

He stopped.

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

He stopped--but I said nothing.

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

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

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

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

"Left whom?" I asked, puzzled.

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

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

"'Come and see,' she cried--I can hear her now--'come and see the
sunrise upon Monte Solaro.'"

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

"I have been there," I said. "I have clambered up Monte Solaro and drunk
vero Capri--muddy stuff like cider--at the summit."

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

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

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

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

"I Faraglioni? Yes, she called it that," answered the man with the white
face. "There was some story--but that--"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'No,' I said. 'I have no secrets from this lady. What do you want to
tell me?'

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

"'Perhaps for me to hear,' said I.

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

"'I have taken no heed of any news for many days,' I said. 'What has
Evesham been saying?'

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

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

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

"'No,' he said; 'but--'

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

"'Yes,' he answered. 'But have you thought--? This talk of war, these
reckless challenges, these wild aggressions--'

"I stood up.

"'No,' I cried. 'I won't hear you. I took count of all those things, I
weighed them--and I have come away.'

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

"'War,' he said, as if he were speaking to himself, and then turned
slowly from me and walked away. I stood, caught in the whirl of thoughts
his appeal had set going.

"I heard my lady's voice.

"'Dear,' she said; 'but if they have need of you--'

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

"'They want me only to do the thing they dare not do themselves,' I
said. 'If they distrust Evesham they must settle with him themselves.'

"She looked at me doubtfully.

"'But war--' she said.

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

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

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

"'But war--,' she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Like--?"

"So that afterwards you remembered little details you had forgotten."

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

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

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

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

"When the dream came again, nearly four days later, it was very
different. I think it certain that four days had also elapsed in the
dream. Many things had happened in the north, and the shadow of them was
back again between us, and this time it was not so easily dispelled. I
began, I know with moody musings. Why in spite of all, should I go back,
go back for all the rest of my days to toil and stress, insults and
perpetual dissatisfaction, simply to save hundreds of millions of common
people, whom I did not love, whom too often I could do no other than
despise, from the stress and anguish of war and infinite misrule? And
after all I might fail. They all sought their own narrow ends, and why
should not I--why should not I also live as a man? And out of such
thoughts her voice summoned me, and I lifted my eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man seemed hesitating on the verge of a description.

"What were they like?" I asked.

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

"Steel?"

"Not steel."

"Aluminium?"

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

"And they carried guns?"

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

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

He sighed.

"That was my last chance.

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

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

"She began to weep, saying, between her sobs, and clinging to my arm as
she said it, 'Go back--Go back.'

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

"'No!' I said.

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

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

"'Yes,' she murmured, softly.

"'Then--I also would die.'

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

"And so my moment passed.

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

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

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

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

He thought.

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

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

"And then?" said I.

"The war burst like a hurricane."

He stared before him at unspeakable things.

"And then?" I urged again.

"One touch of unreality," he said, in the low tone of a man who speaks
to himself, "and they would have been nightmares. But they were not
nightmares--they were not nightmares. No!"

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

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

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

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

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

"And all the rest was Flight--all the rest was Flight."

He mused darkly.

"How much was there of it?"

He made no answer.

"How many days?"

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

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

"Where did you go?" I said.

"When?"

"When you left Capri."

"Southwest," he said, and glanced at me for a second. "We went in a
boat."

"But I should have thought an aeroplane?"

"They had been seized."

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

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

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

"A dream!" he cried, flaming upon me, "A dream--when even now--"

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

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

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

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

"'It is love and reason,' I said, 'fleeing from all this madness, of
war.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'If we had parted,' she said, 'if I had let you go.'

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

"And then--"

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

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

"At the flash I had turned about..."

"You know--she stood up--

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

"As though she wanted to reach me--

"And she had been shot through the heart."

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

He bit his nail suddenly, and stared at it.

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

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

Silence again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He stopped, and there was a long silence.

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

"And did you dream again?"

"Yes."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"'You must not come here,' I cried, 'I am here. I am here with my
dead.'

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

"I repeated what I had said.

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

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

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

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


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

"I saw his face change at my grip.

"'You fool,' I cried. 'Don't you know? She is dead!'

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

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

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

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

"Euston!" cried a voice.

"Do you mean--?"

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

"Euston!" clamoured the voices outside; "Euston!"

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

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

"Any luggage, sir?" said the porter.

"And that was the end?" I asked.

He seemed to hesitate. Then, almost inaudibly, he answered "No."

"You mean?"

"I couldn't get to her. She was there on the other side of the Temple--
And then--"

"Yes," I insisted. "Yes?"

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



THE END


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