Date: 1934-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Weird Fiction; Supernatural Fiction; Extra-dimensional Travel
Description: Fifteen strange tales from a master storyteller: some in a shadowy macabre mood will evoke chills, one or two some chuckles. Blackwood’s explorations of metaphysics give us a number of stories focused on persons whose connections to their native place and time have broken, resulting in sojourns in other dimensions. ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Elsewhere and Otherwise: A man becomes disconnected from space and time… ~ ~ ~ ~ The Stranger: Despite his wife’s repeated defiance, he knows that Death must come to take her soon. A stranger arrives, and turned away, vanishes. The Colonel hears a whispered “I will come
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

SHOCKS

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

MobileRead Edition
2022

Fifteen strange tales from a master storyteller: some in a shadowy macabre mood will evoke chills, one or two some chuckles. Blackwood’s explorations of metaphysics give us a number of stories focused on persons whose connections to their native place and time have broken, resulting in sojourns in other dimensions.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
(AND STORY SUMMARIES)

- Elsewhere and Otherwise
A man becomes disconnected from space and time…

- The Stranger
Despite his wife’s repeated defiance, he knows that Death must come to take her soon. A stranger arrives, and turned away, vanishes. The Colonel hears a whispered “I will come back…” — but was it his wife’s voice or the stranger’s? The Colonel is convinced that is the moment her recovery becomes certain.

- Full Circle
Jorden encounters a young boy who is strangely familiar.

- Dr. Feldman
Dr. Feldman had to leave before their appointment at 11:30 pm, so Pelham waits for his return. Now why does he see Feldman appearing here and there in the house?

- A Threefold Cord
Malcolm of McQuittie is disturbed and intrigued by a strange woman seen at a party who tells him “I am waiting for you, I’ve been looking for you for a long time — so long…”

- Chemical
Moleson has an unfounded antipathy toward a fellow-lodger, who has been ousted from the room Moleson now occupies. His theory is that his loathing is simply “chemical.”

- Shocks
John Feek is informed by his lawyer (a friend of his late father) that an anonymous person who admires his poetry has set up a large trust fund for him.

- The Survivors
A man seems to have come through a horrific traffic accident completely unscathed.

- The Adventure of Tornado Smith
A light-hearted fantastical romp as Mr. T. Smith, staid stockbroker, detours to Fairyland on his way to work.

- Hands of Death
In Bolivia, Mike Kelly falls in love and marries an Indian woman who is venerated by the village. Marie explains that her mother is the Doctor, and her medicine always cures.

- The Land of Green Ginger
A successful elderly author looks back on an experience with a mirror that seems to predict (or drive?) the future.

- The Colonel’s Ring
Hendrik, whose unsuccessful ten year sojourn in America had provided dreadful things enough, met his only “real horror,” he affirms, in a London service flat. His half-uncle, Colonel Seitz, was host. There were no trappings. Horror slipped in quietly, almost slyly.

- Revenge
Hemmel, embezzling trustee of his nephew’s legacy, goes mountain climbing with the boy.

- The Man Who Lived Backwards
A middle-aged man meets his twenty-five-year-old self…

- Adventures of Miss De Fontenoy
When this young man, a novice writer, is affected by “loveliness,” he becomes able to step into “elsewhere” …

One of the foremost British writers of supernatural tales in the twentieth century, Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951) wrote stories in which the slow accumulation of telling details produced a foreboding atmosphere of almost unendurable tension. Though he wrote a number of horror stories, his most typical work seeks less to frighten than to induce a sense of awe. Literary critic S. T. Joshi stated, “His work is more consistently meritorious than any weird writer’s except Dunsany’s.”

Blackwood’s literary renown began in 1908 with the publication of a highly successful collection of stories, John Silence — Physician Extraordinary, featuring a “psychic doctor.” His two best known stories are probably “The Willows” and “The Wendigo”.

Shocks, by Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), was first published in 1935. This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

ELSEWHERE AND OTHERWISE

I

Among the genuinely strange stories of the world, the strangest are those concerned with total disappearance. Apart from murders and destruction, where bodies are variously done away with, these “total disappearances” stand by themselves. Hi presto! and the fellow is gone, leaving not a wrack behind. The class, naturally, is small. Sydney Mantravers certainly belonged to it.

His case is interesting because, after a total disappearance of four years or so, he reappeared. Not only did he reappear, but he tried hard to tell me where he had been and what he had been doing during his long absence. He failed. Such experiences apparently seem uncommunicable in any language at the disposal of humanity, since they transcend anything humanity has undergone. The necessary words have not yet been coined. Before he could satisfy the thousand questions I burned to ask him, questions, too, he might in time have partly answered, he was gone again, this time, as we say, for good.

I saw him go, I also saw him return: that is, I saw him disappear and reappear. This was my unsought, unwelcome privilege. I was with him when he went, I was there when he came back. That final going in death robbed him, I firmly believe, of a burden of intense and marvellous confession, while it robbed me, but in particular robbed Dr. Vronski, his fellow student, of a rich harvest that was almost within my grasp — a revelation possibly that might have extended the present knowledge of the race.

Sydney Mantravers remains for me an extraordinary, even terrible problem. The mere mention of his name brings back the haunting radiance of his skin and eyes, the breath of some unearthly atmosphere which stimulates, while yet it cools, the blood. Eyes, skin and those thousand unanswered questions will haunt me till I, too, enter that silent darkness which makes reappearance apparently impossible.

•   •   •

His story is not really complicated. It is only that the sequence of its details covers a considerable time, a somewhat extensive field as well. It is best to tell it precisely as it happened. It began, then, in a London club, of which we were both members, and the occasion was August 4th, the night of the Ultimatum. War had been declared. England was at war with Germany. It was a night, as all remember, of intense excitement, of strange exaltation. Emotion was deep and real. It was not personal emotion. All of us, old and young, thought first of the country.

Mantravers, a distant cousin, was over sixty; I was a young officer of twenty-five. He had always been kind to me, I knew him fairly well, he had given me good tips in days gone by, we were friends of a kind, and his knowledge of life, as a rich, travelled, experienced bachelor, had often stood me in good stead. I respected, if rather dreaded, him, dreaded, that is, his strange highbrow theories, his attainments in higher physics, his amazing ideas about space and time and what not. Occasionally, he would pour something of all this into me, leaving me breathless, uneasy, perhaps a little scared. My main interests being horses, women, money and personal advancement, the dread of his intellectual attainments was understandable, but he declared he liked to talk to me because, if ignorant, I was what he called “open-minded and intelligent,” while I think he twigged some secret curiosity in me at the same time. I used to think of those occasional talks as “trying it on the dog,” but when once I mentioned this he shook his head. “No, no,” he said, “it’s not that. You happen to have an unusual mind, an original make-up. If you were trained a bit I could tell you more. You could do things. Your ignorance is to the good, for you would have nothing to un-learn.”

His greatest friend was a certain Dr. Vronski, whom I knew slightly too, another “advanced intellectual” whose experiments with glands, hypnotism, yoga, and other adventures into difficult fields brought him more than once into conflict with the Law. Vronski I saw rarely, he never favoured me with special talks, but he treated me with a certain courtesy, almost a touch of deference in his manner somewhere, as though I interested him as a specimen, or as someone with possibilities that must be watched, at any rate, not damaged, this attitude due, I felt sure, to things my cousin had said about me. I was, naturally, in the confidence of neither. I mention this strange Dr. Vronski because of the role he inevitably played. Another odd thing I must mention too at this point — the astonishing fact that Mantravers, already over sixty, looked even younger than Vronski, who was forty perhaps. My cousin’s youthful air, indeed, was a standing joke almost. Not looked merely — he was young. He had not aged for years; for a quarter of a century, the story ran, he had not changed. Yet, when I caught up with the tale and its undeniable evidence, I had the convinced intuition that this amazing preservation had its mysterious roots, not in any experiment with glands, but in some secret adventure or discovery that had been undertaken by this amazing pair, had failed in Vronski’s case, yet succeeded with my cousin. Sydney Mantravers, to put it ridiculously, had arrested decay, that gradual decay which we call growing older, for something like a score of years.

This was uppermost in my mind, even a rather dreadful barrier between us, each time we met and talked. Owing to my age much of the evidence, of course, was hearsay. Yet his curious youthfulness at sixty never failed to rise in my mind, often to strike me in the face with its uncanniness. He had somehow escaped a good twenty-five years of life. It was present in my mind when the Ultimatum came.

In the club, then, that night of strain and tension, I chanced to be sitting with him when the news we had all been waiting for came in — that war had been declared. We were all “worked up” and above ourselves. Mantravers, too, was all worked up — but, as I suddenly discovered with a shock, not about the declaration of war. He was stirred and excited about quite another matter, a wholly personal matter.

It was this difference of key that isolated him oddly from what all were feeling at the moment. While my mind was occupied entirely with questions about England, the Empire, our army and navy, with my own immediate prospects as a soldier as well, he kept asking me questions about some trivial personal matter. It got on my nerves a bit. Too excited to be puzzled, I felt first exasperated, then angry. He kept asking me if I remembered someone called Defrayne. But the name conveyed nothing to me. I had never heard it, and in any case what could it matter at such a time — unless, perhaps, this Defrayne had something to do with the war.

“He was in the 9th, you know,” said Mantravers, as though Defrayne did, after all, have something to say to the war. I hardly listened, I was barely polite, my interest was so entirely elsewhere. The only point I noticed as curious, and had been aware of, indeed, even before — though the excitement had prevented my paying special attention to it — was the colour of my cousin’s face. His skin was dead white of rather a ghastly kind. “Try and remember,” he urged. “Look back a bit. He was in your regiment. You must have heard of him.” But I listened through a chorus of other voices, for we were all talking at once….

It was well after midnight, “God Save the King” already sung, when, to my surprise, Mantravers begged me to walk home with him, since it was on my own way, and when we reached his door asked, even insisted, that I should come in. He wished to tell me something. Once in his room, a drink before us, I remember that a sensation of discomfort, almost of alarm, came over me, and that I began to watch him more closely. My own preoccupation was still entirely with the war, of course. Literally, I could think of nothing else. Yet his first question, since I had naturally expected something about Germany at least, returned to his own personal affair: “You tell me,” he began in a low and rather tense voice, “that you don’t recall Defrayne?” I did not, and I told him so again bluntly enough, exasperation and impatience showing plainly. I had hoped for something very different.

“Then — if you don’t mind — I’ll tell you something,” he said, and there was a nervous hesitation, almost a demand for sympathy, in his manner that made me wonder. The pallor in his face again struck me sharply. “I must tell someone,” he went on, “and you’re the sort of listener I want. You’re ignorant and simple, but you’re open-minded.” He paused for a second or two. “It’s about Defrayne and myself,” he added, almost in a whisper, and for some reason I felt a sudden shiver run down my back. It was due, this shiver, I verily believe, to an abrupt realisation that he looked twenty-five years younger than he was. I knew this in a general way, had wondered at it often enough. I now realised it. I felt at any rate this passing shiver.

II

Let me say at once that this announcement both bored and half infuriated me, so that at first I listened perfunctorily — for what possible interest could Defrayne, whoever he was, have now? — but that later, if considerably later, my interest was so deeply caught that the war, with all it meant, slipped into the background.

Strange, how many different things the mind can think of at the same time, how many different, even opposing, emotions it can hold simultaneously: the nearest approach to four-dimensional time and space we know, perhaps. The thing he had to tell was so literally beyond belief that had he told it a week, even twenty-four hours before, it must have seemed wholly beyond belief, and I should have thought him mad. Yet now, as I stared and listened, one ear cocked for the street where shouting, tumult and the National Anthem were still audible, I discovered that I did not entirely disbelieve. Nor did I, as must have been the case even the night before, regard my cousin as the victim of an elaborate hallucination, his mind deranged. On the contrary, I found myself listening to something that I felt was not necessarily impossible. And the idea dawned upon me, then, that this shock of the war, which in my case was profound and real, had worked in me some swift curious change. I felt in some way older, more developed. The shock had matured me abruptly, as it were with a jump. A new understanding of Mantravers was born in me. I understood, for instance, his reputation for giving “easy advice,” for saying what the other fellow wanted to hear, rather than what he thought himself. His immense knowledge of life had always brought people in trouble to him, young people especially. “Go and ask Mantravers, he’ll tell you what to do,” was a commonplace, though it would have been more correct to say “he’ll tell you what you want to hear.” I now realised suddenly that this was no false friendliness in him, nor lack of principle exactly, but was due rather to his deep understanding sympathy. He put himself so completely in the other fellow’s shoes that he thought the other fellow’s thoughts instead of his own. It was his own power of imaginative sympathy that sent him wrong.

As my preoccupation with the war now slipped further and further into the background it flashed upon me, too, that after all I did perhaps remember having heard of Defrayne. I did not know even how the name was spelt, when suddenly there leaped into my mind the word “de Frasne,” and I dimly recalled that a young officer in my regiment, of that name pronounced Defrayne, had committed suicide a good many years ago. It was well before my time, but I had heard the case spoken of. In trouble about money, a woman, questions of personal honour involved, the young subaltern had put a bullet through his temple. But he had gone to see Mantravers first. As I listened to the tense, low-pitched voice in the chair opposite to mine, details filled in the story by degrees.

A good many years before, it appeared, young de Frasne had come to ask his advice. The young fellow had involved himself in a terrible mess, yet without having done anything wrong actually. Appearances were hopelessly against him. In a tragic mood, the youngster expected, wanted, tragic advice, and Mantravers took up his case with his usual intense sympathy. He felt, that is, exactly what young de Frasne felt. “Some chaps,” he had suggested, “placed as you are, might, of course, rank honour higher than life….” Young de Frasne went white. “You mean…?” he asked grimly. “There’s always the emergency exit, isn’t there?” Mantravers mentioned, lending himself fully to the other’s theatrical state of mind. It never occurred to him, he swore, that the stricken youngster would take his advice seriously. “I really thought,” he now told me in his flat, “that he’d go home feeling himself a stage hero — then think out another way. He would come back in the morning. But he did not come back next morning, nor any other morning.”

Mantravers, forgetting all about the interview to which he had not attached much importance, went to India that same week. He never heard till he came back to England a year later, and then he only heard it casually, that the young fellow had put a bullet in his brain. The lad had passed from his memory. He forgot even what he looked like. It gave him a horrid turn, he assured me, when he pee the truth, “for in a way, you see,” he explained, “I felt responsible.”

“That was some years ago,” he was saying, my attention not yet wholly caught, “twenty or possibly twenty-five, and, as I’ve told you, I’d forgotten even what he looked like. My memory for faces is shocking. Last year in Dinard I talked and smoked, gambled too, with a delightful fellow whose face I remembered, but whose name, and where we had met, escaped me utterly, a fellow who knew me well too. He turned out to be the Italian barber in Regent Street who cuts my hair….”

“Yes, yes,” I put in, making a show of interest, “but I’m rather like that, too.”

He stared at me a moment. “Maybe,” he countered briefly. “But a week ago,” he went on, his face paler but his eyes oddly bright, “the same sort of thing happened to me again — at a party — and it turned out to be the last person in the world I expected.”

I had not been listening properly, my thoughts still running on the war and what was coming, but the way he said this gave me a jolt for some reason. I felt a crawling again at the roots of my hair. I asked what he meant exactly.

“I went,” he said in a lowered voice, “to an evening party, an At Home of sorts, and as usual ran into all kinds of people who knew me, but whose names — and where I had met them — I could not for the life of me remember. Among them was a young chap whose face I certainly knew, knew it as well as I know yours. But his name, or where we had met before, escaped me utterly. He seemed uncommonly pleased to run across me. It was quite awkward. He didn’t say much, but what he did say was to the point. ‘You’ve forgotten me,’ he said, ‘but I’ve been waiting for this chance. I’ve got a debt I want to repay.’ Having forgotten who he was, yet ashamed to let him see it, I murmured something vague about dining together some night. To my great embarrassment, he jumped at it. I was in a fix, you see. He was so determined, so intense. No memory of any debt occurred to me. I gave him my restaurant address, an Italian place near Leicester Square, and when he asked for a date, I rashly said that I was there most nights and that he would be very welcome … and then, as I was edging off, hoping to escape him, I found instead that he had somehow escaped me. He just melted away. The crowd was pretty thick, a regular crush, and how he managed it so quickly and cleverly puzzled me. One minute he was at my side, touching actually, the next — he wasn’t — ”

“He didn’t say any more, you mean? Not even good-bye?” My interest was caught and held increasingly now.

Mantravers shook his head. “Just that he’d be there — and he was gone,” came the reply. “And would you believe it,” he went on, his eyes fixed hard on mine, “the very next night in my Italian restaurant, who should walk in but this very fellow. He came straight to my table too — and there I was, not knowing his name, or where we had met before, or what I could say to him, or what he wanted. It was a hell of a fix, eh? I felt an acute discomfort. This talk of a debt he had to settle was part of it, for I had a horrid feeling that I ought to remember something.”

I watched my cousin more and more closely as my interest deepened, and the legend about his having somehow beaten time by twenty-five years came back to me Sharply. Very forcibly, unpleasantly too, it struck me, not that he could have passed for forty instead of sixty, but that he literally was forty instead of sixty — as though decay had been arrested. I cannot say why this conviction came over me so overwhelmingly just at this particular moment, nor can I explain why the roots of my hair began to crawl again. I only knew that I was vividly aware of it, and that a faint, unpleasant touch of chill came with it.

“You know,” he went on, “how one is sometimes aware of things, little, trivial things, I mean, without actually noticing them? Well,” he explained, “I noticed in this way one or two odd little details. Not important things, mind you. The important thing was to remember his name, where we had met, under what circumstances, but instead of that I noticed his old-fashioned dinner-jacket, the crease down the side of his trousers, his pumps — all of them details of dress no longer used. They had passed away — before your time, of course — but — ”

“He dined with you? You dined together, I mean?” I brought him back. I was impatient. The cold I felt increased.

Mantravers shrugged his shoulders: his face seemed to grow paler still.

“He sat at my table,” he replied, “for I couldn’t help myself.” His voice went lower than ever, and he looked over his shoulder. “I told the waiter to lay another place, and while that was being done we talked. He talked, rather.”

“Of course, you remembered then gradually? The talk brought him back?”

Again he shook his head. “That’s the odd part of it. The feeling of familiarity, of knowing him quite well, grew stronger and stronger, yet never fulfilled itself. It got no further. Something in my mind deliberately concealed him from me. Kept him hidden. You have guessed, of course, already. But I didn’t — till the end.” A perceptible shiver ran through his body. “All I knew was that while he talked I was longing and longing to get rid of him, hoping he would go, wondering what I could do to bring this about, but listening all the time to what he said — as though I couldn’t help myself and had to listen.”

He stopped and took a gulp of his whisky. asked what kind of things the unwelcome, half-recognised guest talked about. What did he say? It was plain that my cousin wanted to keep this back, while eager at the same time to tell it. He betrayed a touch of embarrassment, of awkwardness, almost of shyness.

“Well, sort of personal things,” he brought it out at length hesitatingly, “said no one gave better advice than I did, it was a privilege to talk to me, that I had helped him once, and that now he could do the same for me — and owed it to me. That was what I disliked so — owed it to me — because — because our troubles were similar. That, he repeated more than once, was why he was able to come at all.”

He raised his glass again, but did not drink.

“It was then,” he whispered almost, “that was the first time, I mean, I began to feel jumpy.”

“Jumpy!” To tell the truth I felt jumpy myself as I listened.

The strange maturity, the sudden growth in myself already referred to, began to work in me, bringing a sharper, deeper insight with it, so that I knew, as with a flash of clairvoyance, that Mantravers himself was in some kind of personal trouble. Abruptly, this revelation came, a sense of discomfort with it, for I understood that he was both anxious to tell it and not to tell it. I waited. In the end, of course, he told it, and it involved a woman, money, honour, and all in a distinctly unpleasant way that heaped appearances — though he had done no dishonourable act — against him. Only the bare outline was given to me, the outline of a very nasty fix.

“To my utter astonishment,” Mantravers went on, “the fellow referred to this, as though he knew all about it. He did know all about it. It amazed me; I was flabbergasted. I felt as if hypnotised, for he had a dreadfully insistent way with him, so that I had to listen. And my eyes kept wandering to a dull red mark he had in his right temple. I had not noticed it before. It seemed to glow. It fascinated me, that mark, and from time to time the fellow’s hand, as he passed it across his forehead, let his fingers trail and linger over it, deliberately, I could have sworn. He saw my eye on it. ‘I’ve been waiting a long time for this,’ he said. ‘It was difficult to arrange, but now you’re in much the same boat I was in once; now I can give you advice so that you’ll understand.’ A sort of icy smile ran over his face. ‘You see,’ he added, ‘by rights I ought to have stayed here another twenty-five years. My life would have run to fifty-one.’ And with that he abruptly stood up to go. The red mark on his temple glowed and spread a little. I got up too. “Meet me in my house tomorrow,’ he said, ‘meet me at six o’clock,’ a strange compelling power in his voice and fixed staring eyes. ‘I shall be there waiting for you.’ With that he turned, I saw the red mark flame out and die away, I saw him walk across the floor between the tables and go out of the restaurant.”

It was only at this final moment, my cousin assured me, his voice a whisper now, that he recognised de Frasne, as though the shutter that all this time had deliberately hidden him from memory, was lifted, also deliberately. Yet no shock accompanied the revelation. His attention, rather, was drawn to quite normal things about him — the waiter, though he had laid a second cover, as bidden, was hovering near, saying something, asking, indeed, whether he should bring the soup since perhaps the expected gentleman was not coming after all, and a moment later serving the single plate and clearing away the second unwanted cover.

I sat silent for some minutes, finding nothing to say, wishing only that my cousin would remove his fixed stare from my face, and relieved when at last he did so and raised his glass and drank. Yet a lot of things crowded jostling in my mind during that brief silence. While resisting with all my might the shivers down my spine, my main thought, the one that obsessed me chiefly, was, oddly enough, not the wild, forbidding story itself, but that other, almost equally sinister legend about my cousin’s personal appearance. His story bewildered me beyond anything I could understand, of course, but it was this point of his physical preservation that for some reason kept intruding dominatingly, forcing its way see other thoughts and feelings. That he actually looked, and was, a whole generation younger than he had the right to be, that he had evaded, as it were, the march and decay of something like twenty-five years, that those missing years lay in wait for him, ready to pounce, and that this period was just about what de Frasne would have lived had he not killed himself — it was impossible and outrageous ideas of this kind that whirled through my mind in such a torrent that I felt as though I were going mad. I made a violent effort to get myself in hand. Mantravers’ eyes were off me for a moment while he raised his glass, but as he drank, his stare fixed me again over the tumbler’s rim. I remember shaking myself free, shaking myself, as it were, mentally and physically, opening my mouth to speak.

Mantravers was before me, however. “I’m going to the house,” he said quietly, his voice no longer whispering. “I shall keep the appointment. I must, you see.”

It gave me a shock to hear him, but his next words brought back another thing I dreaded more — the long cold shuddering down my spine.

“I want you to come with me — in case I go.”

It was the last word that made the shudder repeat itself, and so uncontrollably that my hand was trembling as I lifted my own glass. That “go” was for some reason awful, so that I dared not question even….

Mantravers had my promise before I left his flat, though it took him the best part of an hour to obtain it.

The turmoil in my young mind is understandable without detailed description. England was at war with Germany, I was in the Army, my regiment absorbed my thoughts … For a couple of hours Mantravers had torn my interest away to his own amazing story, but the moment I left him the war and its immediate personal claims returned. I cursed myself for having given that promise. At the same time I was gripped by the unusual tale. I had a deep respect for my cousin. If his reputation, with its semi-legendary atmosphere of suggesting the impossible and supernatural, made me uneasy in his presence, his personality impressed me to a point that made me feel he was not quite as other men are. He was un-ordinary in some peculiar way, extremely gifted, of course, as well; I knew his courage; I looked up to him. His invitation probably flattered me into the bargain … I was a little scared, to tell the truth, rather as a schoolboy might be scared, and the idea occurred to me to get in touch with Dr. Vronski, his friend and companion in adventure. I felt the need of advice. Time, however, made this out of the question. I expected to get my army orders any moment.

In the end I kept my promise, kept the appointment punctually.

•   •   •

And, once again, the first thing that impressed me when we met in the club was his uncommon, even uncanny, youthfulness. I swear he might have been my Captain. I mention this particularly because of what came later, if a good deal later, and that it should have struck me so vividly, that at first it ousted my thoughts and fears of the adventure to follow, is worth emphasis. Coming straight from a feverish, excited day full of thoughts about kit, orders, fighting, France, even about being killed, I found myself registering first this conviction, this positive certainty, that he had somehow managed to evade a long toll of years. His air and attitude, his very atmosphere, conveyed this ridiculous assurance in a way I cannot describe, though the unwelcome shiver it caused in my spine is easily told. A moment later, then, I found myself, instantly and unaccountably, swept up into his mood, into his stream of thought and feeling, so that this world’s affairs, even a war with Germany, seemed somehow of less account than what he had afoot. His face, curiously unlined and young, was also distinctly pa there was a shrinking in his manner. Had I not known his courage, I should perhaps have credited him with what we youngsters called “cold feet.”

“I’m obliged to you,” he remarked quietly, “for being so punctual. But I knew you would not fail me. It’s rather out of your categories, you see,” he added after a slight hesitation, “this proposed visit of mine.” What he meant precisely, God only knows: I only know myself that I was aware of a queer pang as of something that both attracted and repelled me with a certain violence — by which I mean, perhaps, that I both understood yet did not understand. It was the part of me that understood that attracted me.

We set out on foot at once for a walk of a mile or two to de Frasne’s house in Bayswater. All these years it had remained empty, apparently neither sold nor rented. The region, prosaic and respectable, reassured me, for how could anything “unearthly” happen in Bayswater? He had the key, he mentioned. And the only other remark he made during that walk of ours over half an hour was a curious one, uttered with breaks and at intervals moreover, for I said nothing: “If what I think is true,” came in that low voice that again rather gave me the creeps, “young de Frasne … since his death … has been in other time and space … When he said that he had been waiting for me … it was really I who … had been waiting for him …” And then suddenly, as I made no comment, he raised his voice almost to a shout that made me start. “You follow me?” he cried. I managed a reply of sorts. I was following, of course. “I didn’t mean literally,” he explained, lowering his voice; “I meant — do you understand?” My face, doubtless, gave my answer clearly enough. “No, no, how could you?” he went on, half to himself. “You’ve never transcended human experience, so you couldn’t. Naturally, you couldn’t. You only know time in a line, as past, present, future. Vronski and I have known it … otherwise … in two dimensions, two at least … A changed consciousness — that’s the trick, you see — can function in different time … elsewhere and otherwise—”

A sudden flash came to me, so that I stopped him on the pavement.

“Living backwards or forwards, you mean?” I cried.

He stared at me with a kind of exultation. I remember the pallor of his skin, the brightness in his eyes. “I imagine parallel is the right, the better word,” he said, with a kind of odd breathlessness, and then he added quickly, “I felt sure — I always knew — you had it in you — somewhere. Death of unexpected kind, self-inflicted, before the natural moment, I mean … and I showed him the way … would make this possible probably…”

His voice died away into undistinguishable phrases mumbled below his breath. We hurried on. I grunted, stared, and mopped my face. There was only one horror in me — that he would explain more clearly what was in him. I went ahead of him, going faster and faster.

We reached the street, he found the number, we stopped outside an empty house that showed distinct evidence of long neglect, smothered in boards and signs of house-agents. Mantravers went up the eight steps, I following him. He put the key in the door, opened it, then handed me the key.

He gave me a searching look, a sort of frozen smile on his lips, his pallor very marked. “You needn’t come in with me,” he whispered, “and you needn’t lock the door. Keep the key. I’m going in alone. I think I know what I’m in for,” he added, “but remember, if I’m right in my conjecture, no one need look for me. I shall, at any rate, be here.”

He looked me straight in the eyes, and his skin was white as linen. He was not frightened. He struck me as a man in a dream, but an awful, icy dream that shattered ordinary experience. The door banged behind him. I stuck my ear close and listened intently. I heard his footsteps clearly as they went across the carpetless hall, then up the wooden stairs, then along a landing, fainter and fainter, after which came silence. I found myself in a shudder, standing on the outer steps, trembling all over, excited beyond words, my heart positively thumping, my forehead wet with perspiration. I waited some fifteen minutes. There was not a sound from inside the house. The traffic went past noisily. It was already after sunset, the dusk falling. I decided to go in. I put in the key, pushed the door open and walked cautiously inside. I closed the door behind me.

Daylight still hung about in palish patches, but there were shadows too. The hall gaped as though about to utter, but no sound came. Peering into two large empty unfurnished rooms, I went slowly upstairs, the stairs he had trodden just before me, along the deserted landing, passing from failing light across little gulfs of shadow. Everything gaped, gaped with emptiness, dust lay all over, decay, neglect, cobwebs, silence, vacancy, motionless air and musty odours — otherwise nothing. All windows everywhere were closed and fastened. I felt my skin crawl with goose-flesh, and the hair moved on my scalp. I persisted. I searched every single room, even the attics and the kitchen and scullery below. I called aloud. I waited, listening. I stared and watched. Taking quick steps I then paused, every sense alert, intent. I called again, but no answer came. No hint of a human presence was discoverable. I searched, as the saying is, from roof to cellar. That I found the courage to do so seems to me now the proof of my intensely alive curiosity, even of something in me that believed, and hoped, and perhaps expected — to find a clue…

Half an hour later I stood on the outer steps again in the evening air, the street now draped with dusk turning towards night. I decided I must find Dr. Vronski. I must see him at once, without delay. He, rather than the police, was the one to be informed. But at my rooms I found peremptory orders that admitted of no delay or compromise. I left England a few hours later, the key still in my pocket, the door it belonged to unlocked. There had just been time for me to send a hasty letter to Dr. Vronski giving the facts as I knew them, and for a word of reply to reach me: “No cause for anxiety. I’ve heard from S. M. Do your job — but don’t forget him.” With this measure of relief — for I should otherwise have thought that Mantravers had shot himself or leaped from a window to his death — I crossed the Channel, an insignificant unit in that heroic B.E.F. Since Vronski had “heard from him,” he was still alive — somewhere.

•   •   •

What happened to men’s minds during those four years lies, of course, beyond easy understanding — by those who never experienced the strains and stresses they were subject to. Any man capable of going over the ‘edge, went over it. For myself, I cannot say. After a year’s anguish, tension, suffering that I swear lie beyond human expression in words, I was taken prisoner, and for the next three years I languished in a German prison camp. Nothing can extenuate or excuse the inhuman horror of a bad German prison camp. My own was of the worst. Any prisoner who survived the process that stunned, stupefied, brutalised his soul, had in him something unusual. The life taught him to search the very marrow of his soul’s bones to find relief from daily and nightly torture of excruciating kind.

My point here is that, while I could not honestly find myself unusual in any way, I did find relief; and I found a good deal of this relief in speculating about escape — but I mean escape in space and time. Any real relief inside that barbed wire had to be of mental or spiritual kind, imaginative if you will. The point is that I found it to some extent in speculating about the wild ideas of Vronski and Mantravers. My mind, quite possibly, went a bit over the edge, as I called it above, though I cannot judge of that.

My speculations, such as they were, began after a letter I received from Dr. Vronski: “You will like to know about your cousin,” it ran briefly, also disconnectedly, since the censor’s attentions had maimed it badly. “The police gave up the search long ago. The Courts have given leave now to assume him dead. But I know he is … not dead … conceivably within reach even. He is not unhappy, nor is he happy, for he is different. I am not in communication with him, but I know … alive and well … will come back when you come back … you, so to speak, the point in our space and time … point he left at … Shown the way by de Frasne into other conditions. He is, for the moment, elsewhere and otherwise … for him literally for a moment only. If this reaches you, do not worry … think about it only … no help from you needed, but sympathetic thought of most concentrated kind can keep open….” and the letter closed thus abruptly as though the censor rather late in the day imagined a code.

I had years of “sympathetic thought,” stimulated by fierce mental and physical anguish of distinctly “concentrated” kind.

Let us leave it at that….

Mantravers had disappeared, leaving not a wrack behind. Hi presto! and the fellow was gone. He vanished — into an empty and unfurnished house. He was just over sixty when he went, and he was just over sixty when he returned. I was present when he returned and I can testify. I knew him before and after. The clothes he went in were the clothes he came back in — an everyday tweed suit with a blue bow tie. He had been away for over four years. He came into view again, re-emerged into our ordinary three-dimensional categories, into our ordinary life and world that is, precisely and exactly as he left it — almost. Changes of a kind there were, but to describe them here would be to anticipate unduly. They shall be told in their proper place and sequence…

Other letters from Vronski reached me in my prison camp, though most of them, since they dealt with “escape,” were too censored to be intelligible. A book or two came as well, articles and pamphlets, undoubtedly sent by him. My mind, whether “over the edge” or not, being neither mathematical nor metaphysical, made little headway with them, though I read — waded through them rather — with undeniable interest and excitement. Other cases of “total disappearance” were discussed and analysed, and such cases, apparently, were not so rare as I had imagined. There were certain places, certain spots of loneliness on the world’s surface, regions of wild and hostile desolation, regions avoided rather by commonplace humanity, where such queer “vanishings” had occurred too frequently to be normally explained, and my mind, “ignorant but open,” simple certainly, struggled with these strange and semi-marvellous accounts, accounts, moreover, painfully documented with names and dates and other evidence we usually accept as honest.

Such disappearances, however, hardly applied, I felt, to a Bayswater street and a dwelling-house plastered with agents’ boards. It was the deeper, more philosophical articles that held my interest chiefly, the writers who suggested that “escape” from the limited life we know was possible, desirable as well. Life, declared one writer, was nothing but a prison-house, a cage, and we were wise to admit frankly that it was horrible. We were prisoners in it, slaves, caught helplessly by the bars of space and time which were our ghastly limitations. Yet a way of escape, “though few there be that find it,” offered, the ABC of this way being to “go against nature,” since nature kept us stupefied within our bars. The great majority, of course, dominated by the herd-instinct, obeyed the shibboleths of the herd. These never could, because they never wanted to, escape. Only the few who resisted the stunning, deadening influence of the herd, of nature, need ever dare to make the attempt …

A strange new world of possibilities opened before me. I did not close my mind against them, but merely wondered, dreamed, and speculated. Did I actually make practical attempts, following the guarded hints and clues, attempts to practise in my own being the amazing rules laid down? I had these awful, bitter hours to fill as best I could. Physical efforts were not available, I must fill my life mentally, imaginatively, or else, as we described it among ourselves, and as I saw happening daily, hourly, among my fellow-prisoners, “go potty.” My long sleepless nights, my days of endless anguish, sought what alleviation they could find….

Another dimension in space was easier to conceive, I found, than another dimension in time. Moreover, among my fellow-prisoners, was a Professor of sorts, a Russian, to whom I talked a good deal, and he tried to explain the space business to me with at least a glimmering of success. He showed me how a fellow could be in two places at once, in London, say, and Calcutta. Taking a sheet of paper from some old letter, he marked Calcutta at one end and London at the other. He told me to imagine people living on the surface of this sheet, people who knew only length and breadth — a world of two dimensions. “Of height, remember,” he warned me in his broken English, “they know nothing. They have no perception of height — cannot even think of it. They are two-dimensional beings in a two-dimensional world.”

Well, I understood that all right.

“A fellow in their world,” he explained, “can be in London or in Calcutta, but he cannot be in both.” It was obvious enough.

Then he bent the sheet of paper. He doubled it together, so that the spot of London and the spot of Calcutta lay cheek by jowl. They coincided.

“In bending the sheet,” he added, “I have made it pass through height, of course.”

I agreed.

“Yet, in the result, Calcutta and London lie together. The man in Calcutta is in London too. He is in two places at once.”

We glared at one another. “It is only an analogy, of course,” he reminded me, “and it has the fallacy that all analogies must hold.”

I got an inkling of what he meant, but when he talked in similar fashion about time, I could not follow him. It gave me a sick headache merely.

From the books I read and the thoughts I thought, I gathered anyhow that brains, tongues and pens have speculated freely enough about these very rare “total disappearances.” I gathered likewise that such speculations were somewhat negligible, and that only a mere handful who had made practical experiments — among them undoubtedly Vronski and my cousin — could offer anything of tangible value. Among the sparse elect, none the less, I caught strange whispers. A notion grew in the deepest part of me that another dimension in space could explain this wiping out of a physical body, and that such a one, dropping away into a direction at right angles to the three we know so well, drops obviously and naturally clean out of sight. He passes into a region no sense of ours can ever plumb. Out of our known, familiar space he has dropped elsewhere — and otherwise as well, since a new direction in space involves necessarily a new dimension in time.

Time, as we know it, runs forward only in a line; but in two dimensions it would run backwards, or parallel as well. Not only could he be in two places at once, but he could be also in two times at once. He could do two things — two things otherwise mutually self-exclusive — at once.

“At any given moment,” said my fellow-prisoner, “you have a choice of doing several things. Of these you choose one. Actually, you might choose any of the others. You select one, however, and do it. That one thing actualises.”

I nodded, as much as my approaching headache allowed.

“Now, listen: In time of more than one dimension you could choose more than one thing. You could do several things at once — and they all would actualise….”

At which point my sick headache usually developed suddenly, so that my friend continued to talk without my understanding.

I acquired, at any rate, a sort of smattering of comprehension.

“Anyone escaping into other time and space,” he finished later, “would come back, you see, at the point he left, even if years of our time had passed meanwhile — years or a few minutes only….”

Such explanations, I found, supported themselves, loosely enough, with the jargon of Relativity. Einstein, the magician thinker, was called in to help. To me it remained a “line of speculation,” than which the sober mind would say no more.

Mantravers, at any rate, disappeared … and since he vanished when war was declared, and reappeared shortly after the Armistice, there were those who sneered that he had been in hiding. This was untrue, absurd as well. No more patriotic Englishman ever lived. Nor was his courage questionable. The date of his going and returning had nothing to do with the War. The Great War, indeed, was almost a trivial item in his strange experience, and his disappearance I incline to think, was enforced, and singularly enforced.

•   •   •

It was January 1919, when I found myself in London again. My intention, backed by a deep instinct, was to go back to the house where Sydney Mantravers had left me standing on the steps: to enter the building, if still unoccupied; to walk through all its rooms and passages again. I wished to do this alone, and to do it before I had spoken with Dr. Vronski, or even seen him. Vronski’s talk and information could come later. I kept my return secret from him.

If I never quite explained or justified this deep instinct even to myself, I recognised that no mere morbid curiosity lay in it anywhere. Clearest in my mind was the desire to make this visit and inspection before I became immersed again in the world of ordinary everyday affairs, that is, before some inner mood or attitude acquired in my years of solitude had dissipated. During those prison years of introspection, thought, speculation, even of experiment as well, something had come to life in me that contact with the bustling outer world, I knew, must smash to pieces. It was as though I had dreamed of another order of existence, had even fringed the perception of entirely new categories. Two sets of values at any rate, appeared in some depth of my being that was only accessible to me with the greatest difficulty and effort. I was aware of them, no more than that; the slightest mistake, of clumsiness or stupidity, on my part would send them plunging forever beyond my reach. This extremely delicate balance I perceived. The disappearance of Mantravers was concerned with the set of values I had dreamed of, possibly just begun to understand, to acquire even, in my bitter years of prison life. My instinct was to visit the house while this still remained and before its fading, already in progress, resulted in complete forgetfulness.

Did I expect to see him too, actually to see some figure or outline of the man who had disappeared over four years ago and was now legally dead? I cannot truthfully say, although I believe some uncanny, rather awful hope lurked deep down in me…. I reached London at noon, my return to England, my presence in town, a well-kept secret; not wasting a minute I was walking up the Bayswater side-street by the afternoon, the January daylight already fading, and it must have been close on four o’clock when the house came into view, plastered, I noticed, still with agents’ boards, and therefore unlet, unoccupied. The stained and dirty windowpanes had no blinds, the patchy walls showed no signs of recent paint, the air of neglect and disuse were the same as before, only more marked. The key, in case of need, the very key my cousin had handed to me himself, was in my pocket, kept carefully all these years. In the pocket of my mackintosh my fingers gripped it tightly, even a trifle feverishly, as though it might somehow melt away and defeat my purpose. I kept feeling it over, indeed, as a man might finger banknotes to make quite sure he still had them safely.

A definite realisation, moreover, came to me as I walked up the steps — that I was both exhilarated and frightened, and that while the exhilaration contained an immense, a biting curiosity, the fear was partly due to a sudden wave of depression that had come upon me. Was this depression, this lowering of vitality, I remember asking myself, similar to what the two ladies experienced just as they passed the threshold into their unique other worldly Adventure in Versailles? The vivid detail rose up from my reading in my prison camp. It was certainly not a physical fear, it was perhaps a mental, a spiritual hint of terror, as best I could diagnose it, for the idea appeared that my ordinary equipment of mind and body contained no weapon to help me in what might be coming. Yet a touch of horror I had known before “going over the top” seemed in it too. My hand, at any rate, was trembling as I took the big key and began to fit it into the lock of the front door — at which very moment a noise of tapping on glass somewhere above me made me pause. It sounded like fingers drumming or tapping faintly on a windowpane. Startled, I looked up quickly, and there, at a window on the second floor, two storeys above, I saw a face peering down at me through the dusty pane, a face I recognised, the face of my cousin, Sydney Mantravers. Looking over his shoulder, and also staring down at me, was the outline of a second face, but a face that was wholly strange to me. I had just time to note that it wore a small moustache, when both the faces withdrew sharply backwards from the window so that they were no longer visible, and it was in this same instant that my fingers, fumbling with the key automatically, discovered that that door was not locked at all but was indeed already open into the hall.

It is astonishing what thoughts, and how trivial ones at that, start up in the mind as it meets an unusual shock or crisis, for at this moment when an unearthly acceptance and a vehement incredulity clashed together, the one definite impression I could recognise was — that youthful appearance. This flashed over me even as the faces of both withdrew, and it was not the visage of a possible de Frasne, dead these thirty years and more, that made my flesh creep, but the unquestionable assurance that Mantravers, whom I knew to be over sixty, looked hardly forty. The amazing fact that he had “disappeared” for an interval of four years seemed left out of account at this instant; it was the uncanny air of having missed decay for a generation that leaped back into my mind with horror. Then, before I knew what my shaking legs were doing, they had taken me automatically into the hall, and the front door closed behind me with a bang. Standing there in the semi-darkness, it was all I could do to hold myself together, and I mean my “self” precisely, for at first everything I was accustomed to hold on to in a time of stress seemed wavering like a jelly that must any instant dissolve. To hold myself steady, to keep control, was what occupied my mind in that first moment of entering the hall; there was no room in me for anything but this tremendous effort; and in making it, a cold perspiration burst out all over my skin. I only recall that the exhilaration had left me entirely, while the depression had greatly intensified. The curiosity, if of rather an icy kind, remained, but it was fed by a lowering vitality.

The house, as I went in, was very still, no sound audible. It was also dark, all outlines heavily draped, no edges visible. I stood stock still, shivering and afraid, even unable, to move. I could not stir a foot. There was a queer sense that everything had stopped moving the instant I came in, that a crowd had rushed into hiding, that my arrival was anticipated by a fraction of a second; but this, I knew, was due to imagination only. Actually, nothing but emptiness and vacancy surrounded me. The gloom concealed no living thing.

An unoccupied, unfurnished house at the best of times is a ghostly, even a hostile place, but this particular one wrapped in the wintry dusk, turned the perspiration cold against my skin. The conviction that upstairs, perhaps even now watching me, was a man who had been “dead” four years, a companion with him who had left the world by suicide long before him, that this awful pair hidden among the untenanted rooms above, stood waiting to look me in the eyes, perchance to touch me, ask me questions, reveal their knowledge and their presence — this all gave me a sensation of dread and horror that paralysed my muscles. I stood there as though turned into stone, while the echoes from the banging door rolled on through the series of unoccupied halls and chambers, then died away into a silence that was even worse. Had I seen Mantravers at that moment, heard his descending step, or caught the sound of his voice calling me by name, I believe my heart must have stopped dead. Already it was beating like a troubled engine, my breathing difficult as well. Afraid to go forward, afraid to turn back and go out, my shaking body leaning for support against the wall, stood where it was, my powers of self-control gone all to pieces.

What on earth was I to do next? The answer came unexpectedly. A light flashed suddenly across the ceiling, darting its bright beam swiftly from point to point, and with it came the sound of footsteps. Someone was moving cautiously along the landing above, and the flash came obviously from a shifting electric torch. I slipped back into the corner, every nerve taut with horrified anticipation.

“Who’s there?” called a man’s voice loudly. “Who is it?”

I made an attempt to answer, but no sound left my throat. The same second the steps quickened, left the upper landing, and began to come down the carpetless stairs. I saw the dark outline of a man shading his eyes with one hand from the glare of a torch he shifted to and fro in front of him. He came down slowly, cautiously, treading each board with care. A dozen steps from the bottom he stopped and turned the full light of the brilliant torch upon me where I crouched in the angle against the wall. I stood helpless in this dazzling blaze, the stream showing me up mercilessly from head to foot, the man who held it of course invisible.

“Oh, it’s you!” came a voice of startled surprise. “So you’re back in England! That explains it…” as the speaker turned the light upon himself, so that I recognised, with a surprise equal to his own, but with a relief he could hardly have guessed, the face and figure of Dr. Vronski.

I could think of nothing to say or do except what I did say and do:

I pointed overhead. “Hush! Hush!” I cried in a stifled whisper. “He’s up there. I’ve just seen him. He tapped on the window — beckoned. He’s come back, by God—”

“Who?” he asked, his voice, it seemed to me, strangely calm, his manner quiet and matter of fact, the odd composure of the man adding to my horror.

“Mantravers,” I whispered. “I saw him at the window. He tapped. Somebody was with him. Up there on the next floor close behind you.”

He did not even turn. He had reached my side by now. His face was close to mine, so that I saw the fierce light shining in his eyes, but there was no excitement in him. Cold and collected as a fish he seemed.

“He is expecting you,” he said, as quietly as you please. “The other will not stay — stay here, I mean. He has led him to the point where you are needed. The point you left him at four years ago.” His eyes ran over me like a moving flame. “To him — remember if you can — it’s not even a minute.”

I felt my body slipping down against the wall as though my legs were gone. The whole house, it seemed, was listening to our whispered words. I heard the staircase creak. The rumble of street traffic was audible outside. I caught myself thinking that I would have given my very soul to see an omnibus, a good, everyday red omnibus, a taxi cab, a policeman. What was to come next I dared not even think about. Vronski stood close beside me, our shoulders touching. His unescapable eyes ran over me in liquid fire. What would he say next? What would he ask of me?

And then a crackling voice rang out upstairs, a voice I knew and recognised. Though a curious distance was in it, yet a distance that could not muffle, it was sharp and distinct. It called my name.

“Come,” said Vronski calmly. “You must come up and help him. He is expecting you.”

It came over me suddenly that the entire experience was a dream. Things in a dream happened just like this. The sense of surprise, the power of criticism, are absent. Mantravers, Vronski, myself were all figures in a dream. The whole business belonged to a dream. I, the dreamer, should presently wake up. Yet while this thought flashed, its opposite, appearing concurrently, flashed with it: that my consciousness, namely, had changed, and that I was beyond the emotions that pertain to normal consciousness. As consciousness changes, grows, the universe it perceives grows and changes with it….

“In a sense that’s exactly true,” I heard Vronski murmur as we crossed the silent hall, and it did not occur to me as in the least odd that he should know what I was thinking. “We are in a dream-world here and now, a dream condition, a dream civilisation. We are, that is, so little conscious that what we think real is actually hardly more than a dream-state…” and his voice died away among the shadows.

I heard this without an atom of surprise, without a tremor of disbelief. Philosophical talk at such a moment! And yet somehow occasioning no astonishment! Obviously, the experience was all a dream.

“He woke up,” the voice ran on as we reached the staircase, “and consequently he disappeared. That is, he left our dream-conditions.”

I could not quite follow that. I was suddenly stiff with terror too, thinking of the man waiting for us up that dark flight of stairs. It seemed absurd and horrible, comic and tragic, that we should be exchanging philosophical comments at such a moment.

“He became aware of other conditions, though these are about us always, and only a change in our perceptive apparatus is needed—”

I gave a little sharp cry unwittingly, as though the terror had crawled into my throat, and his voice fell away while he took my arm firmly, for I had stumbled over the first step as we began to mount the staircase. “Don’t be frightened, don’t feel fear, or anything negative,” he concluded, his arm preventing me falling. “Feel sympathy, curiosity, interest, even scepticism if you like. But don’t feel fear,” he repeated. “I have come to this house four times a week ever since he left us. I have sat here waiting, hoping for hours on end, without result, though once — once only — I saw de Frasne — rushing — rushing with the speed of light and through every room and passage simultaneously — rushing, I tell you, with etheric speed, etheric omnipresence — but of him, no sign, and I knew at last that only you could get him back, because you were with him when he went. You are a signpost, if you like, the point of departure and so the point of return — of simultaneous return. Above all, therefore, feel no fear, for fear repels and blocks—”

A cry interrupted this amazing flow. It sounded overhead again, in the dark space of the landing. It called my name, but it was fainter than before and held a curious touch of fading distance. We were halfway up the stairs. I stopped dead.

“Answer him, answer,” urged Vronski quickly, almost passionately. “Say you’re here.” And making a great effort, I obeyed.

“I’m here, Sydney, I’m coming to you,” my voice rose out of some kind of automatism. “Hold on!” And Vronski, hastening his step, dragged me with him. “Remember,” he whispered in my ear, “remember all he says, for he can tell marvellous things, though probably to you only.”

We reached the landing, and Vronski flashed his torch along the corridor, flooding it with light, illuminating several doors, a whole series of doors belonging, apparently, to bedrooms, and one of these doors stood open. It was standing ajar. These details showed up with vivid clearness instantly, but it was something else I saw simultaneously that my attention fastened on with immediate horror, although horror is not the accurate word, since the amazement in me — I can only call it an explosion of amazement — was of too vast, too strange a kind to include a negative emotion such as horror. For I saw several figures, a series of them, all moving with great rapidity, moving in the three directions known to us, up, down, across, yet all moving in some incredible manner simultaneously — a figure I recognised, the figure of de Frasne. It is of course impossible to describe, it lies entirely beyond words, beyond our three-dimensional experience, which is all we have. For, in addition to this multiplication of one figure into numerous duplicates, it, or they, were moving in other places than this stretch of illuminated corridor. They moved along other passages, through other rooms on floors upstairs and downstairs, moved up and down between floors and ceilings elsewhere in the house. They were, in fact, all over the building, and in the same instant, while yet the whole series of figures, as I have said, was always one and the same, the figure of de Frasne.

Pages of description cannot make any clearer this instant flash that overwhelmed me with complete conviction. I know what I witnessed, and I know that this certainty of positive knowledge lay in me. No surprise accompanied it, no touch of criticism, as in a dream I accepted it merely as true and possible. There was in me, perhaps, a momentary extension of consciousness, a change of consciousness, that involved some sudden awareness of a changed, extended universe. It went as quickly as it came. I had, in any case, no instant for reflection. The figures vanished. Round the door that was standing ajar, peering at us, fingers gripping the edge, I saw the face of Sydney Mantravers. Vronski saw it too, though whether he had seen de Frasne or not I did not know, and, feeling me shrink back involuntarily, he pulled me sharply, even violently forward, so that together we took half a dozen rapid steps in the direction of the face. I saw the hand that gripped the edge of the door advance; it pushed out; an arm came next; the face, with shoulders behind it followed; the entire figure pushed into full view. There was a blaze.

“Hold out your hand,” Vronski whispered. “Say something. A welcome.”

As in a nightmare, I made the effort. My own hand moved out. My voice spoke, made a sound at any rate, a hoarse whisper, half choked with terror: “Here I am, Sydney. Come on — come back to me — back to us.”

It seemed to me my mind and senses were registering only certain things of limited kind, and that a whole world of other occurrences going on at the same time about me now passed entirely unrecognised. While aware of their existence, I could not perceive them.

The full-length figure then drove forward at what seemed terrific speed through the now wide-open door. There was a rush, a roar too, I believe, as though a comet swept through space, and I felt my hand grasped in a clutch of ice, while a tremendous blow seemed to strike me, not in the face and chest alone and not outward only, but over my whole body, and somehow inside as well, knocking me backwards as with some gigantic energy behind it. I reeled at the shock. I lost my balance. As I fell against the wall at my back, I saw the face and figure of Mantravers come rushing at me with the speed and power as of some awful projectile. I cannot over-emphasise this impression of appalling speed and power. In the flash of a second it happened. Memory and consciousness then collapsed together simultaneously, but before the darkness swept over me, I caught the laughter of both men on the tail of broken sentences.

“… too much for him, but I’m here again … he’s got me out … damned idiot to come … just going back into sleep once more … de Frasne refused … enjoying his boyhood too

The words roared past me like a clap of thunder, but the heavy thump I heard was evidently my own body as it reached the floor.

“Hold on — for God’s sake don’t forget — grip your memory — hold on to that — tell us all you can—” I just caught in Vronski’s voice as I sank into oblivion.

•   •   •

Memory, apparently, is but a clumsy, ineffective process. No man can recall accurately the details of the accident that knocked him out. People who claim to remember past lives usually have blank minds about what happened a month ago. At any rate, to remember in a calm moment what occurred in a time of violent stress seems quite impossible. The chief detail I recalled clearly of this amazing scene was that Mantravers looked exactly the same as when I had last seen him four years before, but that his face had a brilliant whiteness and that he was thin to emaciation. Against the surrounding darkness of the landing he looked radiant, he shone, he rushed at me like a stream of lightning. And hence, of course, the blaze already mentioned.

His words, the words of Vronski too, held equally clear and definite, audible memories being perhaps more vividly impressed than visual ones. His return to our three-dimensional conditions he regarded thus as a limitation of life and an idiotic one, for it was “falling into sleep again.” The glimpse accorded me, moreover, of the conditions he had left, conditions possible to an extended consciousness, were “too much” for me, while de Frasne, being in different time, could choose his period at will, and preferred his “boyhood” years to anything to be found in our world. Yet of those few pregnant words I caught, it was the word “here” that impressed me most. My cousin said “here” as though he had never left or gone away.

It was later that I was able to note and label other changes….

If his clothing betrayed no passage of the years, there were alterations in his appearance that impressed me profoundly. These testified to something, though what this something was I leave to others cleverer than myself. He looked no older, I can swear to that. He still wore, indeed, that air of mighty resistance to the years already mentioned before he vanished, that extraordinary retention of youth, as though the usual decay had hardly touched him for a generation, as though this natural process had been arrested in his physical being. And this resistance to time, even with these four years added, was what struck me as his radiant face rushed at me in that empty house. I have thought later, if a good deal later, that in earlier experiments with Vronski, he had so out-distanced his companion, left him so far behind, that intelligible communication between the two had blocked. Myself, ignorant, untrained, sympathetic and open-minded, he could make contact with, while Vronski, stopped at a certain point, lay out of his reach….

Yet, if he looked no older, he certainly did look different. Different is the word, though to analyse this difference precisely puzzles me completely. Things had passed over him, he had enjoyed, suffered, worn, while it was not, I swear, the physical envelope that had worn, and his body at 64 looked 40 still. There lay the imprint of signatures on his soul perhaps, of vigils due to an intensity of experience ordinary humans cannot know. I say “perhaps,” for it is imagination that interprets such strange markings, and I cannot expect the report of my imagination to pass as evidence. Were I forced to find strictly truthful terms, I should say that Mantravers during this four years’ interlude which left him physically untouched, had inwardly endured things we may hardly guess at, much less define, things possible only to an altered consciousness in altered conditions of space and time, and whether in the body or out of the body, to borrow from an expert, we need not dare to fathom, since they are not knowable to our three-dimensional faculties. Personally, I phrased it thus — that he had been out of the cage we know as life and living. He had escaped.

The fact remains that, of outward physical signs, his face and skin alone at first betrayed him — their incalculable, sweet, fiery radiance. It was this effect of light that had struck me so vividly, even with a burst of horror, before, an instant later, I lost consciousness.

This momentary weakness in myself I have always bitterly regretted, for it robbed me of witnessing any coherent interchange of words and action between Vronski and himself. Its duration was brief, yet long enough for several minutes to have passed, during which we all three reached the hall below. Vronski was chafing my hands. I opened my eyes. “I’m going to find a taxi,” he said clearly, as soon as he saw I was all right. “Wait here with your cousin.” He placed the hand of Mantravers in my own, and the front door closed behind him with a bang, leaving us together, sitting side by side on two wooden chairs.

Some wholesome magic lay perhaps in that word “taxi,” for a measure of control came back to me, though of those next minutes I remember only one thing clearly: that while I searched feverishly, frantically even, for something to say, or rather to ask, a thousand questions boiling in me, Mantravers spoke himself. In the gloom of that dreary hall, lit only by a gleam through the narrow windows from the street, he turned his radiant face towards me. The blaze had dimmed, but it still shone as with an interior lamp.

“I have been awake,” he said quietly, sadly, “but I am now falling back into sleep again. I have been elsewhere and otherwise, but time now separates things idiotically here. I’ve been out of the cage….”

He said much more, his words, each like a great eagle on the wing, rushing past me, into some region where I could not follow. For understanding left me, even while something just beyond reason beckoned dangerously. With those shining eyes fixed on my own, I felt myself caught up, rapt away, ravished into something beyond experience. Only the feeblest flash of his meaning came — namely, that our earthly consciousness, even at its best and highest, is so limited that it is little better than a state of dream, and that his return to it was like falling into sleep. But before I could frame a single question, much less utter an intelligible comment, the front door had opened again, and I heard Vronski’s rather harsh voice calling: “The taxi’s here. Come on!”

•   •   •

Mantravers was legally dead; in the eyes of authority he had no existence; he could neither be taxed, fined, nor arrested and imprisoned. He lived — went to bed, rather, and stayed there — in Dr. Vronski’s house in Westminster, and to me, ignorant, stupid, scared, but “open-minded,” was allotted by Vronski the task of watching over him. “He’ll talk to you, at least he may,” said Vronski, emphasising “you” and “may,” “if he talks at all. Not,” he added bluntly, resentfully a trifle too, “because you know anything, or will even understand what he says, but because you’re a link of sorts, a link with his dream-existence here, you see, before he left.”

I was too uneasy to feel flattered, as I listened, but it did occur to me to ask why he, Vronski, couldn’t be that link himself. His reply only set my mind going in whirls and whorls. He couldn’t, he explained, because he, Vronski, was still in the state of sleep — what most people called life, whereas Mantravers had been “awake for a long time, for twenty-five years or more. I woke up for moments, but I never could hold it. I dropped back again into — into this,” and he waved his arms over London, as it were. “He left me more than a quarter of a century ago, a whole generation. But you,” he looked hard at me with a bitter envy in both voice and eyes, “though you don’t know it” — he hesitated a moment — “are more awake than I — for longer periods anyhow.” He turned away with a half angry shrug. “Anyhow, he may talk to you, and if he does, treasure his words like gold. I can’t get a syllable out of him.”

He gazed at me with that horrible envy in his eyes. It made me shiver to hear him, and though I longed to ask him about those twenty-five years, missing years as it were, I could not bring myself to do so.

“You have,” he went on more quietly, “an amazing privilege — a chance in a thousand million. Think of it — a man, a human, who has tasted other time and space. You may hear something about existence outside our categories altogether. Make a note of — of everything, especially of what you don’t understand. The more it contradicts our logic and experience, the more valuable it may be. Nonsense, sheer nonsense, here will be right, remember….”

Much more in similar vein he impressed upon me, as he installed me in the dressing-room leading out of the “sick man’s” chamber in his luxurious house, the very house, I knew, where he and my cousin had carried on their audacious experiments of years ago. I listened, listened closely, saying hardly anything myself, while in my mind, or in some part of me that somehow remained aloof, unfrightened, the calmest of calm spectators, I was perfectly aware that Vronski and I were talking in a dream, and that our three-dimensional consciousness was little better than a dream state. The journey in the taxi, to go back a bit, left few clear impressions in me; I was too scared, too utterly nonplussed at the moment to focus attention or reflection. Mantravers, emaciated, limp and so strangely shining, lay back in his corner beside his former friend. He rarely spoke a word. I watched him as I might have watched a nightmare figure. This dream-texture wove itself through the whole journey.

The taxi, I remember, drove dangerously fast, so that, as in the cinema stunt-pictures, crashes which seemed unavoidable were just avoided by a hair’s breadth and the stream of vehicles rushed past us in a dreadful sequence. I was clutching for safety at everything within reach, when my cousin spoke. “Why doesn’t the man start?” he asked impatiently. “He’s got three directions to choose from, hasn’t he, and the house can’t come to us — down here, at any rate, it can’t. I’m there already anyhow, if he only knew it.” He gave a queer little gulp of laughter, turning to me with a look that set my shivers going again. “I knew it, knew it perfectly, you see, before I came back into this, but I’m losing it now, it’s going again.” His piercing, fiery eyes were full upon me; he drew a profound sigh of weariness, of disgust, of pity. “The cage is about me, the stupid, futile cage. It’s time that does it, it’s your childish linear time, time in a single line. In such a limited state it’s not even being awake, just trivial dreaming, almost death—” and the voice died off into a whisper. He closed his eyes, leaning back into his corner.

I saw Vronski clutch him. “Remember,” Vronski shouted, “try to remember! You’re back in three-dimensional space and one-dimensional time now — and with me. Pm Vronski — Nicholas Vronski — your old friend. You remember our talks, our speculations, our experiments!”

There was no response, not even a turn of the head. But one of those flashes I had actually no right to, came to me, and I understood that Mantravers, back now in conditions he had long escaped, found himself so caged and limited that he felt helpless. After the intensity, the difference, the power and liberty he had known, the experiences of our existence were as the unreal phantasmagoria of a dream. “It’s all leaving me,” he murmured once. “I’m forgetting, forgetting. It’s awful, awful. It was always difficult to hold it. I can’t hold it now. Yet I had a flash, a minute — four years, as you think it here.”

The taxi, escaping a hundred deaths, stopped suddenly, and then Vronski, grabbing my arm painfully hard as we got out, whispered something about “get all he says, make notes, remember every word, hold on to him,” and somehow we were, all three, inside the house.

Such is my brief recollection, half hazy, half vivid, of that frightful journey. So perturbed and upset I was that I only vaguely recall that Vronski provided a meal of sorts, put Mantravers to bed, and fixed me up in the dressing-room with only a door between. It all happened with the rapidity of that stunt cinema-picture almost; these little details of preparation, eating a meal, providing me with pyjamas, paper and pencil, and a dozen other necessary matters, all went past with extraordinary swiftness, as though, perhaps, I hardly noticed them attentively enough to take them in. It seemed but a few minutes, when he stood at the door, giving me final injunctions before he left me alone for the night. “I’m best out of sight, in the background anyhow,” he whispered. “Ring for all you want. My manservant is used to anything at any hour. I must go now. I must notify the authorities, of course, for one thing. Keep your door ajar, and watch and listen. Be ready. Your position, your privilege, your duty….” The words poured out feverishly jumbled, there was so much he wanted to say. He shrugged his shoulders, and adding that he would look in again at midnight, he was gone.

He did come back at midnight, a couple of hours later, and entering my room on tiptoe, seemed relieved to hear that there had been no waking yet, hardly a movement of the sleeping body even. “He may sleep for hours,” he told me, “for days, even for weeks, like others before him. But I doubt it. His case is not of that sort. He’ll wake up right enough before too long, and you must be the first person he sees.”

My shudder was noticeable evidently. He eyed me keenly, alive to my exhaustion. “You — you will stick it, won’t you?” he asked, almost piteously.

I looked into those beseeching eyes. The pallid face, wasted with intense desire, distraught, scarred by experiments of nameless kind, the face of a man who had not spared himself in the search for what he deemed knowledge, made an almost violent appeal. The pain, too, was there, the sense of loss, the anguish due to being robbed of refreshment poignantly expected, earned — robbed by another whom, moreover, he considered, at the least, unworthy.

I asked a few questions. He answered them. It all still seemed to me a dream of marvellous, even supernatural sort, a dream I could only partially recover. It seems so today, indeed, more than ever.

“Pm scared,” I whispered.

“You well may be,” he whispered back.

I gave my promise, if fearfully, yet at the same time eagerly as well.

“Scared,” that little trivial word, was the one that hung echoing in the air during the hours of my long vigil. I dreaded the awakening, yet longed for it. My mind was a turmoil. Contradictions raged in me. Mantravers, they said, had of course been in hiding all these years — yet his very clothes hanging over the chair, denied it. It was all a tricky hallucination of my own mind — my recent war experiences denied that still more decisively. The alternative was staggering, more than my faculties could hold or deal with — that my cousin, sleeping calmly in that bed, had left our space and time for a period of four years, and that before this complete disappearance, as a preliminary to it, by way of training possibly, he had escaped our time, while still occupying our space, for a far longer period, for some twenty-five years, an entire generation. When he woke up in that bed across the floor, woke out of this interval of readjustment which was an earthly sleep, he might tell me something, things of unexampled, fearful interest — me, because though ignorant I was open-minded, not knowing enough even to have prejudices….

With books I could not read, with pencil and writing-pad in hand, I sat peering through the half-open door. I could easily see the emaciated, shining face, the collar of blue pyjamas round the neck, the nose buried in the pillow, the counterpane rising and falling with the steady breathing. No other movement came, no sound, no gentle snoring even; he might pass his life away, it seemed to me, dying in his sleep. He looked as if he could never wake, as if he did not mean to, certainly did not want to, wake. What dying might mean to him, I dared not think. Once I crept in on tiptoe, and looked closer, standing within two feet of the bed. God — that strange radiance! Even the transparent eyelids glowed, as though the eyeballs underneath looked through at me. I felt “seen through,” my very soul examined. I returned again and again, stealthily, as though irresistibly attracted, fascinated. I hoped he would never wake, I hoped he would, I sat with nerves on edge, with senses painfully alert, too frightened to feel fear.

The hours passed slowly. No sound penetrated from the London streets. It seemed the silence deepened to something beyond silence. Beneath the surface the turmoil in my mind ran helter-skelter among a thousand thoughts and pictures, playing pitch-and-toss with my years in the prison camp, with my reading, with my own strange experiments in escape…. I wondered, wondered, for wonder seemed the single attitude that held calm and steady in me. For the hundredth time I went over my brief talk with Vronski just before he left, the few wild questions I had put, the startling replies. Incoherent and almost childish that exchange seemed now. Was there anything in particular I should look for, I had asked, apart from noting what my cousin might say? And Vronski, eyeing me hungrily, had hesitated a moment, as though reflecting deeply. “A change,” he had said at length, “an alteration — of unexpected kind — a sudden — possibly a very shocking one.” Into my mind leaped the idea of mania. “No, not that,” came the reply, reading my thoughts again. “I mean that its suddenness, its rapidity — you might find shocking.” It was nothing mental, I realised. “Oh, physical then?” I asked with a little gasp impossible to repress, and he had nodded, the expression on his face dreadful almost, because a queer superior smile lay mingled in it. “He might appear suddenly — rather — different,” his words came slowly. I guessed faintly at what his allusion meant perhaps. I recalled, all in a flash, the stories, my own casual observations in the past, the fact that for a generation Mantravers had not grown older, and the unnatural horror of it came back to me like ice. And Vronski’s slow words were still dropping from his lips in whispers. “The stresses and energies where he has been lie beyond anything we can know or imagine. Their removal here may result in abrupt collapse of even dreadful kind. The price must be paid — paid back! — in our time, of course.” His voice became almost inaudible. “It may be sudden,” I just caught, “what we call sudden.”

The talk ran in a ceaseless circle through my mind, round and round, till any meaning it might have held was lost, as I sat there watching the sleeper’s bed. My armchair was against the open door. The silence deepened, the cold increased, the city traffic lay dead, no birds awake, no wind astir. No hint of sleep came near me. If he wakened — should I dare to ask the thousand questions raging in my mind, dare to frame a single one of them? He did not stir an inch, he did not turn over, trunk and head and limbs lay motionless, and I doubt if my eyes ever left his face for more than a few seconds at a time.

So long this silence and immobility continued that, beginning to feel nothing would ever happen again, I glanced at my wristwatch, noting that it was close upon four in the morning, the hour when human vitality sinks to its lowest ebb, and thinking that daylight must presently come filtering through the blinds. I can swear that my eyes did not leave his face for longer than ten seconds at most, but it was in this very brief interval I became aware of a sudden movement in the still room. I started, gave a jerk as though a bullet had passed through me, while my questions fled like a flock of terrified sheep. The movement was of the slightest, but it was real — the opening of his eyelids. Mantravers was staring at me across the floor. And accompanying this movement was a low sound that came at me like a bell — his voice.

Caution, circumspection, sensible action, all forsook me in that instant, and fear went with them: memory of detailed instruction vanished utterly; caught in a wave of passionate and overwhelming curiosity, I sprang to my feet, obeying instinctively my dominating impulse. I was across the strip of intervening carpet in a second, I rushed up to the bed; with barely a foot between our two faces, I plumped out my first question, regardless of all else. It was what, above all, I wanted to know, apparently, for it burst out like an automatic explosion.

“How did you do it, Sydney — keep young — arrest age and decay, I mean, for twenty-five years on end?”

The question had spurted spontaneously out of my “subconscious,” of course, where it had lain so long, perplexingly unanswered; for I had no thought of asking it till then, and there were others I had meant to put.

Those strange electric eyes gazed into mine. He spoke, and his voice again was like a bell: “A man in his own place,” he answered with a curious gentleness, “is the ruler of his fate. And I found mine.”

“How — how did you get there?” came from my lips, stupidly enough.

“By leaving — this — this imagery.” He made a slight, even a tiny, gesture with his arm, yet it was as though he swept away the house, London, England itself and all it stood for in ordinary experience. Imagery! I almost felt myself swept with it into something beyond all trivial, confined and relative conditions I had hitherto mistaken for reality and life. Though my mind and emotions were a boiling cauldron, little clear and steady in them, another question rising to the surface shot out of its own accord.

“Our knowledge, then — science — ”

An extraordinarily sweet expression stole upon his face. He gently shook his head. “Unreal,” rang the voice, though fainter than before, “(and part of the dream we ourselves create. The How is nothing — mere effects. Here we can dream effects only. Knowledge and reality can be known only in the Why — the world of causes….”

On the last three words the bell-like quality grew fainter, fading from his voice, the eyelids dropped slowly over the terrific eyes. I searched for one more question among the hundreds I longed to ask, but found no single word. He lay quite still again, apart from the gentle rise and fall of the body that breathed equably in what men call physical sleep. The queer notion came to me that he had not really wakened at all, that Mantravers in his totality had certainly not been there, nor gazed at me, nor spoken, but that only a fraction of his being, using the familiar terms of limited human intelligence, had brushed my mind in passing. True enough, of course, the fragment that was spoken, for even I grasped that, and classifying effects can bring no knowledge of reality. Science, which explains how a thing happens, can tell nothing as to why it happens, nor has normal human consciousness any faculty for apprehending this region of causes. Had he, then, experienced that, dwelt in that, known reality face to face?

I remember withdrawing softly, as a giddy man withdraws cautiously from the edge of a precipice that makes him tremble. Quickly, I jotted down the brief exchange in a hand that shook a little. I sank back into my deep armchair with the strange assurance that it would be long before he really woke. I fell asleep. It was, this time, Vronski’s sharp, practical voice that startled me.

“Humph! So you had to sleep, of course,” he exclaimed in a whispered voice between a snap and a growl, yet somehow not unkindly. “It’s six o’clock, you know. You’ve lost something, probably.” He had already examined the sleeper, I knew, for he came to me out of the bedroom. His fearful eagerness was pathetic.

I shook my head, wide awake on the instant, all my faculties about me. I pushed my notes towards him.

“What?” he whispered. “He’s waked then — and spoken? You heard it? You put questions — good ones? You understood — something?” He seized the notes as a famished man might snatch at food, his hand shaking, while he eyed my face and the paper alternately like a hungry wolf. I told him briefly what had occurred, as he read the sentences over and over again, first very rapidly to take in their general sense, then very slowly, reflectively, laboriously even. They were laconic enough, but I filled in the blanks in a whisper. His hunger, his envy, his greed to know, again touched my pity. I felt ashamed of being so unworthy a go-between.

“Yes, yes, of course,” he was mumbling, as though speaking to himself rather than to me, “but we both knew that. We’ve been there before together already. The why of things, rather than the futile how that science gabbles. That’s the first result of a changed, a different consciousness. But he’s been beyond that — far, far beyond it. That’s what I want to know — what the new faculties that come with a changed consciousness reveal — beyond the region of causes even….”

His speech grew so rapid, so involved, I could not follow it. On his face the ravaged look intensified. He kept one eye, none the less, both ears as well, I knew, upon the inner room, and then suddenly glanced sharply back at me, as though my presence had just occurred to him. “There was more, much more, he wanted — tried — to say, wasn’t there?” he shot at me. A quick smile of apology, of courtesy, accompanied it.

“That’s the impression made upon me,” I agreed. “He knew things impossible — utterly impossible — to communicate in ordinary words.”

Vronski fell silent, thoughtful, fora moment, then went on again, as though talking to himself rather than to me:

“He was awake, of course, awake here in our sense,” he muttered. “Just for those moments he was awake here — but to him that would be falling asleep again. He was talking in his sleep. He had already waked up out of all this long ago — waked up a second time. To come back to conditions here would be falling asleep again.” His meaning was quite clear to me. Ordinary waking every morning is merely the gain of increased and clearer consciousness; to wake up then a second time involves a yet greater gain. “If he had talked nonsense, instead of sense,” Vronski was whispering to himself, “he could have told more. Yes, yes, as you felt, he was just talking in his sleep,” again picking an earlier thought out of my own mind. “A man in his own place,” he repeated, “is ruler of his fate.”

I stared stupidly, perhaps, yet not as stupidly as I doubtless looked. I realised, at least, that from the point of view of a different consciousness having new faculties, out own best scientific dicta must be childishly inadequate and false, But I found no useful word to say. Fatigue, too, began to stupefy me. “It was a good question all the same,” he went on, “the one you put. Our three-dimensional consciousness has no faculty that can know anything of a universe that is certainly many-dimensional. Our best knowledge is a dream, born of dream-minds in a dream-civilisation. To tell us how water runs downhill is to tell us nothing — why it runs downhill is god-like.” He looked me over as man might regard a stupid employee who had done his best, and then suddenly something I found awful crept into the face.

“I doubt, I doubt now our getting anything,” he whispered lower than before, and the voice made me think of ice. “Hell wake of course, right enough, but — but he’ll leave us before he can — speak. Leave finally I mean,” his voice breaking queerly. “Just pay his debt and go before we can get a word. The debt — twenty-five years — twenty-five stolen years. Taken from here, they can only be repaid here. In our time, I mean — for where he has been they are not even a moment—”

He stopped, he stood stock-still. He looked me over again, but with an intensity and thoroughness that made me avoid an inspection I found too much. I trembled a little in spite of myself.

“Something I could understand?” I stammered. “You mean — I should witness it?”

The expression that frightened me was gone: he was still grave, extremely perplexed, but his look became human, sympathetic, gentle towards me, as he nodded his head in answer. “Yes,” he murmured, “witness it, and with your own eyes.” I left it there, asking no further question because I dared not, and he went on quickly: “If he wakes, have questions ready. Avoid his eyes, I advise. Hang on firmly, tightly, to your own personality. Grip yourself like iron. Ask him” — he reflected a moment — “ask if he knows death — if he can speak of the War — if love, Love, mind you — exists with value — if — if — ”

He shrugged his great shoulders; the tired eyes that had not closed all night gave me a warmer look. “Oh, ask your own questions,” he added almost hopelessly. “Just ask what occurs to you. And if anything — happens, call me up instantly. The telephone is at your hand. I shall be near — in this building.” He read the shock in my face, of course. “Can you stand it?” he asked suddenly, moving away towards the door, my heart sinking as I noticed it.

I nodded stiffly. “Sudden, swift repayment, you mean?” I stammered. His head bowed as he turned the handle.

“Departure — final departure?” I heard my own horrified whisper. “All those years — in just a moment?” For I caught his meaning, such was the intensity of his mind, with a shock I caught it. Decay and age involve considerable time, as I understood time, for normal life lays such process so gradually, slowly, softly on us all. Years compressed into a moment could only be appalling.

Vronski, now half out of the room, his face a mask of white, answered below his breath, a mere whisper that was dreadful with a kind of spiritual pain:

“If at all — it must be very rapid, may seem almost instantaneous,” came the syllables across the quiet air. “Sweet, too, if terrible. The questions first, remember — if you can.” And the door closed noiselessly behind him.

Alone again, after taking the coffee he had left me in a thermos, I tried to think out the questions I would ask. Something, perhaps subconscious guidance, assured me my cousin would not wake for hours. Were our deeper selves in telepathic communication possibly? I cannot say, I did not even try to think. At the time I was sure of nothing except that it was safe for me to take my rest and sleep, and this I therefore did, opening my eyes again after what must have been many hours, for it was well on into the short winter afternoon and dusk had come. My mind felt clear, it felt also calm, and this calmness I noticed with something of surprise. It has always seemed to me remarkable, indeed, that my nerves and faculties supported the entire experience as they did, and that I did not, almost literally, lose my senses. The riot of tearing emotions I certainly had known, bewilderment, excitement, a raging curiosity and fear beyond easy description, but deep within me all the time was some centre that held steady enough, some part of me that observed and judged, burned with a clear light, and even, for intolerable flashes, understood.

When I woke, at any rate, there was no violence of feeling in me, the tumult had died down, and only two words seemed to ring on hauntingly in my mind, with some touch of the turmoil that had first accompanied them. The combination, “sweet and terrible,” was unusual still, but the horror with which I had first heard them did not now appear. And, after a cautious inspection of the sleeper and the bed in the next room to assure myself that there was no sign of change as yet, I bent my mind to the framing of the questions as best I might.

Yet behind each attempt, and despite my strongest effort to deny it, rose always the ghost of an expectant dread — the dread that before there was time to ask a single one, perhaps, something would happen to prevent, something to render replies impossible, something rapid, sweet and terrible. And this ghost of twenty-five years to be repaid I could not lay, it waved a shroud, as it were, above each word my pencil traced.

Within its limitations, none the less, my mind worked reasonably well, though the difficulty of choosing words and subject were too much for me. The subject was so vast, the field it might cover so inexhaustible. All the great adventuring Discovers, from Buddha to Christ, I remembered, used childish local parables to convey something they themselves knew that yet lay beyond language, beyond any faculties their listeners possessed. How might I, thus, explain to a dog, watching me turn mere pages, that I am deeply immersed in the soul-fortunes of a dozen living characters? And how similarly, could I, the dog this time, ask intelligently about a superhuman experience? I fell back, at last, upon questions of a very simple kind.

I would ask for information on what I called “man-in-the-street” matters, questions about what a commonplace mind like my own would like to know. If Mantravers had actually changed his type of consciousness so that his new faculties made him free of time in more than our one dimension, and in space of more than three, what could he report intelligibly about his experiences? Was he conscious, for instance, of being away from ordinary London life, or was he living both lives simultaneously, one life parallel to the other? Was there continuity of memory and personality, was the duration long or short and what did he do, feel, suffer and enjoy? I longed to know whether his experiences and reactions in this state of “elsewhere and otherwise” were commensurable with our three-dimensional existence, and while I knew it could not possibly be, so I had this burning curiosity to hear what he might say. Did he look forward into a future and back into a past, or were these both simultaneously accessible in the sense that a biography, from childhood to old age, lie between the covers of a book, for the reader to choose any period he will? If, too, the future was accessible to him now, as we say, could he thence influence, even alter, the past? Above all, I longed to know about what, on earth, is called happiness. Having risen above the world of effects which is human knowledge, into the world of causes, which is reality, did he gain satisfaction, rest for the spirit, peace?

I laid my pencil down, having covered sheet upon sheet with questions I knew to be futile — because I should never ask them. They were worthless, in any case, because unanswerable. I challenged myself, as I challenge anybody, to think of better ones. He had no terms, I had no terms, in which comprehensible answers could be given and understood. The Great War? Pain? Sleep? Love? — I drew my pencil through at least a hundred such, and leaned back in my chair to await events….

Dusk was falling, the room darkening, shadows gathering, and my eyes, ever on the mysterious sleeper, saw details of wall and furniture less clearly now. Outlines of bed and chairs and windows faded, the silhouette of the sheets above the sleeper became filmed, there was a blur over the entire room, yet I had the queer feeling that this was less due to the waning light than to a lack of reality in the objects themselves. Each picture lost vividness because it was but a transient appearance of something more real that lay behind, something the senses never knew because no sense could apprehend directly. The idea came, then vanished again. At the same time I became aware of an invading stupor stealing over me, a stupor I fought against with all my power — not sleep or exhaustion of physical kind, but a dulling of my surface consciousness, as though some brighter faculty beyond it were trying to assert itself. That I resisted was, I came to believe long afterwards, a mistake; I here missed an opportunity, offered directly or indirectly by Mantravers. I can only guess at this. It was fear that prevented. Remembering Vronski’s vehement warning, I held on to myself as tightly as I could, afraid of losing grip upon my personality. I was afraid, too, of being caught unawares, of being taken by surprise, suddenly horrified at the sight of the sleeper rising from his bed, coming across the room, standing beside me, looking down into my face…. And, it seemed, a long period passed, whose duration quite escaped my measurement, for though I can swear I did not sleep, I recall that my eyes now opened with a sudden start, and my ears similarly became sharply alert. Had twelve hours passed or twenty-four, or a few minutes only? It was the first definite thought that came to me — was it evening still, or early morning? The same thin layer as of dusk or twilight lay upon the room, but objects were more plainly visible than before. There was a light somewhere, it seemed.

The questions rose, but there was no time to satisfy them, for the nerves of sight and hearing were too insistent for me to think of anything else. There had, once again, been sound and movement. I looked, I listened, with all my power. The sleeping man was sitting up in his bed, that bell-like resonance vibrated in the air, the syllables of my name still echoed, I saw the figure, half upright, like some awful deity upon its throne, and the same second, the first instant of paralysis having passed, I had sprung to my feet. And it was at this moment, as I dashed across the carpet, that I heard a cock crow in the distance, and knew that it was early morning.

“Come to me, come quickly,” rang the bell-like voice, “before I leave. Let the useless questions go. Just come to me.”

I was already beside the bed. He was sitting up, leaning back upon his hands. I had the extraordinary impression he was going to rise and take the air. The radiance in his eyes and face and skin were marvellous. I saw a dark blue stain glow out upon his right temple, then fade away. It was like a bullet wound. All memory of my questions had wholly vanished. “Dying — you mean?” came automatically from my lips. “Is it — death?”

And then he laughed. His eyes ran over my face, the eyes I had been told to avoid.

“My second death. There are so many. This is the life I owed de Frasne. All the lives are simultaneous—”

A flow of words that rushed on I cannot remember, even if I registered them. They held no meaning for me — in the instant of utterance, that is, they held a meaning I understood, as in a timeless flash, but meaning and understanding were gone again as soon as born. Only the shattering effect remained, as of something better left untold, unknown. The laughter, too, unnerved me, that sweet, careless, unearthly laughter that seemed to break up and destroy whatever was left of coherence in me.

“Tell us,” I believe I cried, “tell me — before you go.” I know that something of the sort burst from me. I can still hear my hoarse, breathless cry saying this. I was shaking with terror at the same time lest he touch me, for his hand came groping towards me where I stood against the bed. It seemed to me that if he touched me, my being somehow must dissolve. It seemed my very self was threatened, while yet that threatened self, trembling in the balance, understood why “life must be lost to find it,” and that my courage failed. The awful yearning and the awful dread were there. It was the bell-like voice, with its sound of death or freedom, that caught me back into my pitiful restricted cage again, though not before I had realised something of the loneliness, the deific beauty and glory in that loss of self without which no heaven is attainable.

“Stop thinking,” was what I caught of his answer. “Behind thought lies the entrance. Reason and thinking hold us in the life of least importance. Go behind both to find the beginning — behind the mind — into a different way. You will find several lives together and at once — and more than one kind of death….”

His meaning, at the moment, flashed like lightning across my understanding, but his eyes were now holding mine, and I could not speak. Did his conditions flow over into me? Did I borrow some faint reflection of what he knew, of where he was, of a difference he tried to convey? I cannot say. Words left my mind, for they were useless, vain, meaningless. No words existed anywhere — the few he used are reported as feebly, inaccurately, as those I fought to choose for myself. The mind, as an instrument, lay helpless, withered. His eyes held mine. I looked, that is, straight into his own. And I understood — oh, so easily and clearly and simply then — that my full earth-life was but a fraction, a trivial rivulet, that ran parallel with numerous other streams that were deeper, mightier, more important. It was a question of focusing upon this little rivulet, or spreading attention and consciousness over them all, yet simultaneously. In his eyes I read this fantastic but literal certainty. I became aware of stresses of a kind never before experienced. No mental or emotional tension life had brought me hitherto, either by way of love, hate, passion, yearning, fear, was akin to it. I was stretched and altered, altered above all, in my deepest essential being, and yet such alteration was easy, natural, right, while entirely new, and different to anything I could, imaginatively or intellectually, have even supposed possible. For above all I noticed this — that it was unlike anything my mind could have even imagined.

I watched him, and as I watched the light I had already noticed in the room increased a little, as though it came closer. Its origin I had not guessed, though I certainly had not fancied it, and it was, I knew, external to himself. Both bed and occupant became a shade clearer. I stared with intense and feverish attention. I could have sworn there was a change, the flutter of a change. That was the word — it fluttered, then was gone. But it returned, this faint, fluttering difference. I noticed it a second time. It was lost again. Something touched the face, there was a change upon the features. It vanished. With it came over me a rushing instinct that I must be quick, I must act instantly, or the opportunity would be lost forever. This certainty swept me like an icy wind, and the ghostly dread I could not lay moved down the air. What Vronski feared might happen was on the way, closer, nearer, even imminent. I must plunge in as best I could, and I made the effort, as the hundred questions flew past me in their glittering series. I picked one out, then another, and another, but could not speak them, could not utter even a sound, for all were useless, meaningless, and the awful flutter, meanwhile, had reappeared, this time lingering. Thought froze in me. I closed my eyes a second. It was his quiet laughter that made me open them again the next moment. The light had come closer than before, and the ghastly signature upon his face, I saw, had deepened. I actually saw it spring back, this fluttering alteration, to settle like a great bright insect on the face. He was speaking, but the bell-like note had left the voice, and then the lips stopped moving, the eyes lost their terrible radiance, the whole skin paled, the arms supporting the body sagged.

“Christ!” I heard my voice with a stifled shriek, his curious light laughter still audible across it: It was that same happy, careless laughter, no pain, not even anxiety, possible with such a sound, a laughter of relief rather. And the voice came with it as a bell ringing across great distances: “Ah, that above all else, the way of light,” reached my ears faintly, brokenly, a profound wavering sigh accompanying it. “I will tell you, tell all I can — show you the escaping way — the why — ” the syllables dying into incoherence then, so that I bent over to catch the scarcely audible whisper that almost stopped my heart. Though confused, words running into each other, their meaning penetrated: “a moment — a moment only — I must first pay back the stolen years — now and here. After that I will tell—”

The whisper died out because the lips through which it came were gone already. I remember an odd sound behind me, an increase of light as well, but it was impossible to turn my head. The horror of what Vronski’s cryptic words had suggested was nothing to the horror of what I saw. I stared. The whole dreadful sight came, it seemed, in a single second. Twenty-five years rushed on him in a single moment. He did not stare back because the eyes, following the lips, were no longer there to stare with. The features all ran away together. In the space of a few seconds, fifteen perhaps at most, Sydney Mantravers aged twenty-five years, became a quarter of a century older. The accumulation of this period’s decay was upon him, all over him, with an abrupt, appalling rush. The skin grew loose and wrinkled, changing, even hiding the eyes so that it seemed they disappeared; the muscles slackened, splayed, sagged away, chin and neck showing it most clearly. There was a ghastly crumpling together of the entire physical frame. The shrivelling seemed intensified by its swiftness. I remember that no comprehensible feeling was in me, horror having passed into something else, and similarly, no thought took the brain. The “bends” rose as a picture, because probably my mind contained it as the only comparable human experience, the hideous “bends” that divers know on rising too rapidly from deep waters before the decompression can be applied, or, when caught unawares in too great depths, the frame is jellied, the entire body crammed up into the helmet. There rose another picture too — of a mummy exposed suddenly to air and damp becoming a little heap of dust soon after. These awful pictures rose, then vanished, as though the mind automatically searched for a parallel.

Though it was not quite so, the body none the less collapsed in a dreadful, stupid heap before my eyes, the last detail to suffer change being the small red bruise that glowed in the right temple before it too was gone. One feeble breath rose from the huddled shape upon the sheets, one last fluttering breath escaped the dried and shrunken flesh that had been lips, bearing with extreme faintness a ghost of happy laughter, and just reaching my ears as I bent closer above the dissolving face: “a moment … only a moment … and I will tell you … escaping way … elsewhere and otherwise….”

Loud and quite clear behind my back, as the light came closer suddenly, was the piteous, convulsive sound of Vronski’s sobbing, beyond which again, the faint clear note as of a ringing bell that died away into the silence.

•   •   •   •   •   •

THE STRANGER

The flat lay deadly quiet, voices were hushed, and all moved to and fro on tiptoe. In the room where she lay — the woman who refused to die — this quiet was, of course, most marked, for there her breathing, so faint it was scarcely perceptible, alone broke the pall of silence. The last clearly audible sound had been the lowered voice of the family physician: “I won’t wait now. There is little I can do. I will come back within an hour,” and his heels tapping softly across the tiled floor of the narrow hall toward the lift.

Yes, she might last an hour or two, possibly even till tomorrow, this woman who so hated death that she always refused even to acknowledge it; but she would not wake from unconsciousness. She was sinking fast, the doctor said; the intense vitality at length was unavailing; there was nothing he could do.

And so now it was that the lowered voice, the tap of boots on the tiled floor of the landing, the rumble of the lift, still echoed on in the mind where all else lay muted and repressed.

Apart from two members of the family, and these but nominally, dutifully, affectionate, Colonel Moreland alone was present in that room of silence. Elderly, grizzled, with features set in bronze, he sat motionless beside the bed. Looking like a Roman sentinel, he watched the grim, silent fight, whose arena was a few Square feet of human frailty, and his was the mind in which the recent sounds seemed still to echo. The others, a stepbrother and an uncle; stood with their backs to him by the window, watching the dusk fall slowly over the dismal London street, not otherwise moved, probably, than by those practical considerations the approaching death of a tolerated relative involved. Priority of place, at any rate, they gave readily to the stern man who sat thus motionless beside the bed, almost a stranger to them, yet whose right, it seemed, they admitted gladly.

With the lessening traffic and the dropping of the winter’s night, the silence deepened. A slow wind mourned about the building. The stillness grew. If the faithful serving-woman in the kitchen wept, she wept inaudibly. That she did weep, however, is certain, for some half an hour later, when the Colonel looked into her face, the tears lay still upon her ashen cheeks….

To her, indeed, as to himself, this stealthy approach of death seemed an incredible occurrence, painfully dramatic for all its quiet method of arrival. To the old Scottish woman, a mere lassie from the Highlands when first she entered the family service years before, it seemed impossible that a mistress with such fierce love of living should ever cease to breathe. It was unnatural, almost wicked. A loathing of death, so intense that it amounted to a fixed refusal to die, must surely — somehow — keep her alive forever! Death, in her mistress’s presence, no one ever dared to mention. Had she not proved it again and again: she — would not die!

To both soldier and servant, at any rate, death now seemed an outrage, something almost against the normal order. Yet to Colonel Moreland, though he shared with the humble serving-woman that rare worship of true love which had held faithful over a quarter of a century, the silent battle was painful and dramatic for other, and very different, reasons. From time to time, as the minutes crawled, his eyes would open, gaze for a moment on the face he so passionately loved, then quickly close again, lest the intensity of his inner realisation be even by so much dimmed. His thoughts — pictures, rather than actual thoughts — were of long ago, of more recent years, to be exact, of two weeks before, when news of the dangerous seizure had brought him instantly to her side. No trivial, foolish convention had prevented then, as it had prevented years ago. No trumpery considerations of social rank, of thine and mine, differences that in youth appear so great, in later years so petty, had interfered with the over-mastering power that impelled, even commanded, him to see her, before, in the final sense, it was too late, and — to make his long-concealed confession face to face….

Twenty-five years ago ignorance and timidity had sealed his lips. The V.C., gained on the North-West. Frontier, proved a quality in him which yet had not availed a young man, finely self-forgetful, fighting for a loveliness that seemed wholly beyond his reach; she, all unknowing, had given herself to another — and he had seen her go. Now, on his return from long sojourn in the East, he had heard in one and the same day both of her illness and of her present liberty. He had not hesitated. The late confession had been made that ought to have been made so many years before. She told him her own long secret, too. And in that very breath, which the doctor whispered might be well-nigh her last, she told him likewise — her whole being defiant with aggressive will:

“I shall get well again. I shall live for you. It is never too late for that…. I will get well…!”

The pathetic ignominy of it struck even the unimaginative soldier — the defiant little human will now helpless and inoperative as the last cold Shadow stole toward the bed. Death recked not of human desire and intention, however fierce, and the desolate battle, it seemed to him, was a foregone conclusion. Any moment now the remorseless Figure must stand at the door, approach the bed, and steal her from his world. Colonel Moreland, overwrought perhaps a little, pictured in his mind a relentless and unbending Outline….

The stepbrother turned from the window, lighted a softly shaded lamp, then moved back without a sound to the post he held somewhat awkwardly with his companion. But the bronze outline beside the bed was too intent upon his poignant inner pictures to take much notice of what they did. Only the doctor’s lowered voice, the tap of his boots upon the tiled floor outside, the rumble of the descending lift, still echoed on across the background of his mind…. These, indeed, and the frail outline beneath the sheets, seemed his sole relations with the outer world. When a step, therefore, became audible in the passage, it was natural he hardly stirred at first, and that the opening and closing of the front door, the murmur of confused voices, too, should have merged in that continuous memory of a mental sound.

There was a cold air that sent a faint shiver over him, but it was the whispering by the window that really disturbed his profound reverie.

“The doctor probably … sooner than he meant…” he heard one say, and so was on his feet, startled rather, and out in the passage before either of them. But the woman from the kitchen was in front of him. He ran into her in his eagerness, noticed the tears upon her ashen cheeks, and saw at the same time the tall, thin outline of the stranger, who most certainly was not the doctor.

A very upright and unbending Outline it was, the stiffness, no doubt, adding to the appearance of the stature, beside which the woman seemed diminutive, almost dwarf-like. The dreadful whiteness of her face he found unwelcome — more, it troubled him profoundly, though he recalled this only later. There was talk, confused and hurried, yet the voice of the stranger, he believed, was not once actually audible at all. It was the woman’s voice and words he caught so distinctly, words whose incongruity must, at any other time, have brought a smile to his stern lips. This appearance, however, of rapid exchange between two persons was as clear to him as the certainty that there was a mistake as well, a mistake that seemed grossly stupid at this moment: the wrong name, the wrong door, the wrong building, of course.

Sharply, then, out of this muttering, the woman’s words emerged, both fear and courage in the tone, as she repeated with insistent emphasis that her mistress was not at home: “She’s not at home … to anybody. She’s dying!…”

Colonel Moreland, as he heard, found himself abruptly stopped. He stood stock-still, arrested in his tracks. The incongruity of the language gave him a sense of intolerant impatience, of anger, even. The stupid disturbance, at such a moment was more than he could bear, while yet he took no immediate steps to relieve the fierce vexation that consumed him. His deep annoyance found no outlet. His mind, as well as his muscles, was arrested. There was about the tall, unbending outline of the stranger something indefinable that produced a sudden shock, paralysing him unaccountably on the instant, and with it a flash that struck cold as winter’s ice against his heart. The power of it caught him full: he remained motionless where he stood…. Thus, his first impulse to send the caller peremptorily about his business, to push him out of the still open door, was not obeyed; and on turning an instant to see whether the others followed from the bedroom, he was aware of the woman close against him as though for protection, tears upon a face blanched like linen, terror in the staring eyes, and her body shaking like a leaf.

“I couldna’ stop him,” came her thick whisper. “He said he would — come back.”

It was while she spoke he realised for the first time that she was no longer accompanied. She stood now at his side — alone.

The soldier found his voice, though not yet his entire self-possession. “Come back!” he managed to ejaculate. “Come back!” he repeated. “At a time like this….”

Words failed him then. He glared at the trembling woman, who now pointed, with helpless, unintelligent gesture, to the drawing-room door behind her. Her body, he noticed, was still quivering all over.

“In there,” she muttered. “He went in there….”

Something turned over in the soldier’s heart. He did not argue; he made at first no comment. The one weapon he really understood, a blow, was useless, for he knew not where to aim. His sense of outrage, his anger, moreover, were of a sudden curiously stilled. The ice pressed closer, but if the hair upon his scalp rose, he denied it violently.

“You are mistaken,” he said presently, in his curtest tone. “You made a mistake,” he repeated firmly, the anger now oddly gone from his voice as well. “He — he went out by the front door. He will not come back. It was all a mistake, I tell you.”

The woman, beneath his compelling eyes, mumbled submissively, yet keeping close against him:

“If ye say so, sir,” he heard her whisper. Flustered beyond belief she was, but she was unconvinced, her gaze still fixed in terror on the drawing-room door.

The other found his sternest voice, the one the Army knew, the voice of action.

“Get back to your kitchen,” he commanded. “Kneel down! Kneel down, I say, and pray to your God at once!”

She crept away, shuffling, looking back over her shoulder before she disappeared. Her lips were moving, though no words came forth.

Colonel Moreland strode over and closed the front door, peering first along the bare stone floor, across the narrow landing where the gas-jet flared, then down the darkened passage. There was no one visible. No sound broke the silence. He paused an instant, then abruptly did a curious thing. He said something without knowing why he said it:

“Your mistress,” his sudden whisper followed the trembling woman, though probably inaudible to her, “will not die. She will recover.”

As he spoke the words, wondering whence came his marvellously sure conviction, he pushed into the drawing-room. He felt his courage ebbing. A second’s hesitation, and it must have failed him. He went in boldly.

Again, if the hair upon his scalp rose up, he denied it violently; if that touch of ice pressed nearer on his heart, he faced it; his muscles, if they trembled, were in a grip of iron.

Inside the threshold he felt for the light and switched it on. One glance at the chintz-covered furniture sufficed. There was no figure, there was no living presence. The room was empty.

•   •   •

Their marriage, late in life, proved beyond words a happy one, for passion’s turbulence left no dread of a reaction, and the deeper ties were free to utter their fine call unhampered. If regret for unrealised glories tinged its glamour, it held at least no sordid pity for a gross remorse. To them it seemed unclouded, the gardened house in Kent, surrounded by gracious friends, its perfect setting.

The faithful serving-woman had gone her way, her curious problem with her — so far, at least, as Colonel Moreland had ever questioned. The soldier, indeed, kept his own counsel about a matter he had not cared to probe by cross-examination; his wife, on this point, was never in his confidence. The puzzle remained, for him, unsolved. The woman had seen; he, too, had seen. Yet, since both observers were in a condition of high nervous tension at the time — overwrought, he termed it — neither possibly, for that matter, had seen anything at all. This was the explanation laborious self-deception used; temperament selected it, and stiff self-restraint maintained it, with an effort.

In his own inmost mind, none the less, there lurked a doubt no deliberate effort could wholly stifle. A note of interrogation, like a hidden flame, glowed and would not fade. As soldier, as Englishman, he had that abhorrence of the unordinary which was his due; “supernatural” was a word not found in his vocabulary; hostility, scepticism, rose automatically when anything of the kind was mentioned. He had seen, more than most perhaps, what mysterious India had to show, and had enjoyed it; for trickery might baffle the mind pleasurably without stretching it into uncomfortable postures. Through thick and thin he had always maintained this comfortable attitude; he was not going to change it now for anybody in the world. The doubt, the note of interrogation, none the less, persisted; there remained a question, though a question never asked.

He was glad the serving-woman had gone to a world where questions were impossible, for the fear had been in him that one day he must ask her — worse still, that she might speak to him. He was now relieved of that anxiety. Yet there was another question, independent of an answerer. This was a faint, disturbing memory, though a memory he could never feel quite sure about, since he himself, the only person who might explain it, found no positive answer in him. Had he indeed caught that other voice, or had he not?

A fitful wind, he remembered, moaned in gusts about the building at the time; up the shaft it sighed, and through the opened door as well. A moaning wind could be responsible for sounds a strained mind might well twist into syllables, into the semblance of a voice with words, even into a definite sentence. It had made strange, restless noises, that fitful wind. He was a careful man: he would never positively swear to it. Yet to this sentence had been due his amazing conviction that recovery suddenly was certain, though only afterwards did he realise why he used the words he actually had used to the woman….

There remained this disquieting, persistent memory of another voice, almost a whisper — little more, perhaps, than a breath of wind: “I will come back….” and so gently uttered it seemed to have been sighed into his understanding, rather than spoken audibly: “I will come back.”

Yet the doctor, he remembered, had used a similar phrase when he left half an hour earlier. Was not this second voice, perhaps, its reproduction in a mind troubled and overwrought, a mind still echoing the footsteps on the tiled floor, the rumble of the lift? He would not positively swear; as already said, he was a careful man. He realised only his sudden, positive assurance that recovery from that moment had become a definite certainty.

The note of interrogation thus remained. It haunted and troubled him for years, till with the passage of time it grew less present, less discomforting, at any rate. But it did not die. He could never entirely forget it.

•   •   •

Their happiness, meanwhile, if calm, was of the radiant kind that nothing, least of all differences of opinion, could disturb. Firmly based upon fundamentals, it was securely anchored in a deep need each had of the other. They supplied, indeed, respectively, one another’s deficiencies, finding life’s harvest rich and wonderful; and tolerance seemed their native gift. Yet a single dread they shared in common: lest one should be taken and the other left. That the final harvesting might come for both together was their intense desire.

The house, as a rule, had voices ringing through it; young voices, for they were the kind young people love. Friends of earlier years came with their children, a married niece, a holiday group, so that corridors and garden-paths were alive with footsteps, calling, laughter; everywhere among the lawns and shrubberies moving figures darted, little people climbed the stairs, the children’s quarters echoed, and young life had its happy way.

On this particular Sunday in late September, for the first time, indeed, during the entire summer, they found themselves alone. The Colonel’s niece, with her brood of boys and girls, had left the day before, preparatory to Black Monday when schools reopen. It seemed as if a school treat, rather than four children with their mother, now left the house and grounds so still, so strangely quiet. The servants, as a reward for recent special services, had been given afternoon leave…. There was a touch of melancholy about both house and grounds, of emptiness, almost of desertion, and in their own hearts, too, there lay a certain emptiness, a silence that held half-ghostly whispers of unspoken questions. Though neither gave it utterance, the same thought echoed in that inner chamber, where, but for the trick the years had played them, might now have sounded the pattering of little feet, the cries and laughter, the presences, indeed, of children of their own.

To this thought, tinged with inevitable regret, neither ever permitted utterance; but now, as they sat after tea upon the lawn, each knew full well that the other’s inmost chamber was thus tenanted. There was a happy telepathy between them they did not question. Inexplicable it might be, but frequent custom had established it beyond argument, so that even to Colonel Moreland’s strict habit of mind it had become a commonplace. Some incalculable sympathy of love had taught them the code, the soldier himself acknowledging the results without demur….

He made his suggestion quietly, glancing at her through the cigar-smoke the air hardly stirred: “Aloud, dear — won’t you?” Then, seeing that she hesitated, he added: “You say them so beautifully always.”

He touched her hand, yet turned his head away to listen, for poetry made him shy. He closed his eyes, as she began, his face in mask-like repose. It was the voice, perhaps, as much as the exquisite words that he enjoyed, floating to him over the still lawn and flowerbeds, where the sunset lay in slanting gold. Its music called up pictures of so many years ago … of bright, wondrous hours … “of hours that might have been, yet had not been…” and yet, it seems, of one hour in particular:

“The hour which might have been yet might not be,

Which man’s and woman’s heart conceived and bore,

Yet whereof life was barren — on what shore

Bides it the breaking of Time’s weary sea?”

She paused a moment. He was aware of her eyes upon his own, a question in them, so that he shyly turned to meet her gaze. Thrilled to a deeper understanding than he had ever known before, he divined that question instantly; but he spoke no word, because no word came to him to speak … while the stillness deepened about them, and the shadows lengthened on the lawn. There was a new, sudden stirring in the depths within him. His whole being listened; it was almost as though he waited, expecting something; and the breeze that just moved the rose-leaves behind her hair seemed to mingle with the voice, as she continued:

“Bondchild of all consummate joys set free,

It somewhere sighs and serves, and mute before

The House of Love, hears through the echoing door

His hours elect in choral consonancy….”

Again she paused a moment; and again she raised her eyes to his; listening, as it were, to the Hours Elect that had known realisation, yet for themselves had never struck. He, too, listened; and, as he listened, understanding in him marvellously and sharply opened, so that his whole life rushed suddenly past, presenting with that lightning meaning due, they say, to drowning men, each separate item of failure or success, yet emphasised with its ultimate truth as wisdom or defeat. This lightning experience was abruptly his, lasting at most a second. The flash seemed timeless…. It passed … and he sat listening for her voice, and waiting with a sigh.

He remembered the lines to follow. That “Little Outcast Hour” lay in his inmost thought, perhaps, as he felt sure it lay in hers. There was a look in her eyes, he noticed, that gave him happiness and terror suddenly, the terror of some mighty happiness hitherto unknown, a happiness, he felt, that must be more than he could bear, unless she shared it with him.

The world he realised at this moment was, in any case, an inner world. Of this he was vividly aware. It held no shyness. In it, for him, only the mightier movements passed….

A flooding wave broke over him. He took her hand. “Beautiful,” he stammered, “beautiful and true. How — how could he know — ?”

His words halted, as the wave momentarily withdrew. An inner breathlessness caught him, a groping almost physical, lest his feet be swept from under him, lest he be borne away from his known foundations. He held tightly to the fingers in his own.

“Your hand, dear,” he heard himself saying. “It’s cold.”

He waited a moment. It seemed to him he had been speaking for a long, long time; for days; for years; for centuries.

A new coolness, he noticed, had stolen into the air. It had been coming closer, ever closer; it had now invaded both of them.

Something was happening to her as well as to himself. The happiness, the terror, the returning wave…. His feet lost touch, his mind went groping….

He made a prodigious effort, and it caused him an agony never before experienced.

“Shall we go in now?” he managed to say, his breath difficult to control. “The damp — is rising.”

The familiar words, the commonplace effort, made him realise abruptly that a few seconds only — a scarcely perceptible interval — had passed since her voice ceased on the spoken lines and she had looked into his eyes. But she was still looking into his eyes. Her lips, he saw, were moving…. Only a second had passed, he struggled to remember; only a fleeting second, after

It was, perhaps, a revelation that came upon them across that quiet English lawn, stealing past the roses, using the last sunset light to clothe itself, and taking the notes of a thrush that now burst suddenly into rapturous song in the cedar by the house. The low human tones surely came floating down the evening air rather than from her own lips.

“But, lo! what wedded souls now hand in hand

Together tread at last the immortal strand,

With eyes where burning memory lights love home?”

The voice, the singing of the bird, hushed simultaneously, as a tide of happiness too great for human consciousness burst flooding over him, drowning all utterance in its wave. He saw her eyes — the way they now shifted from his own, searching the space behind him. She had stopped dead. His blood ebbed, then flushed again.

“Look!” He caught her low voice. “What is it? So upright, so unbending; and — by the hand — a little child?”

“Dear,” he faltered, following the direction of her gaze, “but — I see no one — no one.”

The lawn was empty.

The next lines — did she say them, or did he hear them singing within him as his feet lost their final touch with earth?

“Lo! how the little outcast hour has turned

And leaped to them and in their faces yearned.”

He saw her try to rise. Her hands were stretched out beyond him. Her face was radiant with a burning glory. The last line yet hung upon her lips.

He made once again a prodigious effort. “No, no!” he wanted to cry aloud. “Don’t say it, dear — don’t say it—”

It was too late. He struggled to his feet in vain. No muscle, either: of tongue or limb, obeyed. A flood of light drove down the evening air, awful yet lovely, and from the heart of it a voice—

“I am your child: O parents, ye have come!”

It was the servant, returning in the dusk, who found them, not sitting in their chairs, but side by side upon the lawn, fallen, her right hand holding his, her other stretched out toward the house, as though … “as though,” the old butler put it, “they had gone to meet someone. That’s how they looked to me…. and the faces both young and smiling.” Between the roses they lay thus, close together.

•   •   •   •   •   •

FULL CIRCLE

It was at the age of 36 that Jorden, stockbroker, first saw the little chap, and he establishes the date because it was also the first time he had realised he was getting older. Between knowing and realising the gap is wide; all know, for instance, that one day they must die; few realise it. A certain emotion, a small yet definite shock, moreover, invariably accompanies the realisation. On this particular occasion it was a commonplace detail that made Jorden aware that he was no longer twenty-five, a fast forward in the football field — it was loss of breath.

Climbing the steep, sunlit slopes above Igls in the Tyrol, that brilliant August afternoon, his wind failed him momentarily; he paused for breath; his age, as he stood panting, occurred to him; the little shock, the consequent emotion, were also present. It was in this instant that he caught sight of the youngster, chasing a swallow-tail butterfly — uphill.

Jorden stood still for some seconds to watch the pursuit. The radiant face and eager eyes, the mouth half open, the zest and energy in the flying limbs, one arm poising the net to strike — these held his attention vividly.

“Uphill!” he exclaimed to himself, envy and admiration in him; and he was on the point of shouting encouragement to the youngster, when — yet with a movement as though he hid deliberately — the boy was gone. A turn in the path, a dip in the flowered slope, apparently concealed him. At any rate, he vanished. “He’ll tire before I do,” ran consolingly through the other’s mind, as he waited in vain some minutes for the reappearance, then presently continued his slow steep climb uphill. “Endurance, at any rate, is mine,” he comforted himself, “if not that happy zest!…”

The incident, for some reason not unconnected with the transient emotion, lingered in his thought: a little English schoolboy, evidently, out with his parents for the holidays. There was another thing that made the picture linger, something he found himself unable to define precisely, presenting itself vaguely to him as a curious sense of intimacy. A further detail flashed back that night, too, just before sleep came: that the boy, namely, midway in the excitement of the chase, had thrown him an understanding and affectionate glance, “as though,” reflected Jorden, “I had been his father, or uncle, or something like that!” Adventure, mischief were in it too. The family luggage, no doubt, was already on the carriage, the distraught parents hunting everywhere for “Master Jack” with frantic phrases in German and English…. This picture edged Jorden’s sleep that night, because, perhaps, he remembered having been similarly naughty in his own childhood years — nearly thirty years — ago. His own reaction to this look that haunted him, he found it difficult to describe, because “yearning” was not the kind of word that would have occurred to Jorden, the stockbroker, at any time, nor one that he would have used without very considerable effort to avoid it. It was, nevertheless, the true and accurate word.

This, then, was the first time that he saw the boy; and it was, he vaguely fancied, the emotion due to his sudden realisation of growing older that made the memory cling.

It was at the age of forty that he saw him next. The interval, meanwhile, had not dimmed the original picture. Often and often he caught himself wondering who the little fellow was; whether he had been smacked for his escapade; whether he had eventually caught the gorgeous butterfly, had got lost in those big wild mountains, had stumbled, hurt himself perhaps … until the atmosphere of affectionate interest he had first felt became permanently associated with the youngster and his uncertain fate. This intimate and sympathetic relationship was established in his mind; his heart acknowledged something that was half friendship and half guardianship.

At the age of forty, then, he saw him suddenly again, but in very different surroundings.

Now, at the age of forty, a man knows his first youth is done with, though he is slow yet to admit that he is middle-aged. It comforts him, none the less, to shift his standard of measurement a trifle. He reads with pleasure, for instance, that a public man of that age is referred to by the newspapers as “a young man still.” Forty, his women friends assure him, is nothing, while forty remains forty for all that. In various minor ways he begins, probably, to humbug himself. He knows, but he does not realise, until something happens to force realisation on him. And when Jorden again ran across the little fellow of a few years before, it so happened that he was in the bitter throes of a disappointing love affair, the disappointment due precisely to the fact that he was just forty, whereas a certain other man was only just twenty-nine.

Here, again, it was an unusual emotion of the moment that made the incident stick in his memory — at a place of public entertainment, Maskelyne and Devant’s, the home of childhood’s conjuring tricks and mystery, the place, above all, where people — vanished.

Surely it was the little lad. The similarity, at any rate, was overwhelmingly convincing: the same, laughing, affectionate expression, the air of mischief, the old quick glance of sympathy, yes, of recognition even. It was the same boy beyond a doubt, although there was now a certain remoteness about him, a certain distance as it were, that puzzled the older man, bringing a hint of chagrin with it. It never occurred to him that the boy looked no older then when he had first seen him. This did not enter his head. What did enter his head, curiously enough, was a childhood’s memory of his own, when he had infuriated a deaf aunt who was “treating” him in this very place — it was Maskelyne and Cook’s in those days, the Egyptian Hall of Mystery, in Piccadilly — by striking a match in the middle of the performance. He had been promptly sent home to bed, with bread and water for his supper. And again his heart yearned towards this little ragamuffin in a sailor-suit — he himself, he remembered, wore a sailor-suit when he lit that match — half-way round the sweep of the dress-circle to the left.

This was during the entr’acte. The lights then went down, the curtain rose, faces about him grew dim and indistinct again. The gnawing pain of his unhappy love affair returned to plague him, but with it, now, this strange yearning, this affectionate and intimate tenderness towards his rediscovered youngster that, for the life of him, he could not explain. There was between them, he felt positive, an undecipherable familiarity, a deep understanding sympathy.

Truth to tell, there was a good deal of emotion in the stolid Jorden at that moment, emotion of various kinds. He realised another thing as well — that the performance bored him. He was too old now for these tricks. The conjuring wearied him. He had come to see a particular disappearing trick, much advertised, yet when he saw it its climax found his thoughts elsewhere. He had not followed the business on the stage at all. His head, in the semi-darkness, kept turning towards the sweep of the dress-circle to his left. That jolly little ruffian! He wished he were his own…. He would have a good look when the curtain fell. Yet when, presently, it grew light again, he experienced a sharp pang of regret and disappointment: the seat was empty, the boy was gone.

“Young monkey,” he reflected, with an understanding. “Been sent home in disgrace, of course! Did something wicked probably — just as I did — and got packed off to bed.” And while he rather hugged the idea, chuckling over it, his heart ached a little because of that empty seat and the lost opportunity of somehow making the acquaintance of its recent occupant.

These two appearances rather haunted him thence-forward, so that, coupling them together, he often thought about them, wonderingly, longingly, yes, yearningly. He wished the boy were his own. The sympathy in him deepened. He flattered himself that he “understood the little rascal,” that he could have made him happy, have given him the life, the training, the education his character and temperament best called for. The boy’s nature seemed an open book to him. In some inner kingdom of the heart he built it all up with tenderness. Only the sense of remoteness troubled him a little, the sense of distance, widening, it seemed, with the years; this brought a touch of pain with it, hinting that his loss perhaps was final. He countered it, comforting himself thereby, with the reflection that it was spatial merely, due to the fact that they had never actually met and spoken together.

Meanwhile the years passed, age came upon him, fate took him to the East where health suffered, and then, suddenly, a new card was dealt. A relative died, and Jorden came unexpectedly into great possessions. Also, he came home. With his faded vitality, his uncertain health, his loneliness, he entered into the management, what most call the enjoyment, of a large estate, an historic house, soaked in tradition and half fossilised into something a long line of ancestors, fading back towards 1400, had deposited through the centuries. He recalled visiting the place once as a little boy, when his cousin had it. It was a Sunday. The occasion, indeed, remained sharp in his memory, since he had been punished for birds’-nesting in his go-to-meeting clothes.

It was an atmosphere he was too feeble now to resist. Without energy to become constructive, much less creative, he became that easier thing, a dreamer. The ghosts, the attractive melancholy, swamped him rather; thoughts ran backwards more and more…. And then it was, walking one crisp autumn morning with the head-keeper through the ancient woods, that he saw a figure suddenly that made him stand stock still: climbing over a stile from the park meadows where the deer were, came the youngster! A school cap perched on the back of his head, the mop of hair was untidy, the Eton suit was torn and muddy, one bootlace was undone. On the face was a guilty, caught-in-the-act expression, yet with the same air of mischief and adventure as before. There was no trace of fear. The laughing eyes, the affectionate trusting look of recognition, betrayed no anxiety. And the understanding sympathy, the sense of peculiar intimacy, rose in Jorden like a flood, while with it came a queer assurance that the former remoteness he had known had become distinctly less. He felt nearer to the boy, yet in some subtle fashion as though this greater closeness lay in himself, that 4e had drawn nearer while the boy had never changed. Two incongruous details, however, failed to strike him: that there were no nests in autumn, and that the boy had not grown older.

The man stood for a moment spellbound. “Birds’-nesting! And in his Sunday clothes! How dare he!” Jorden made this observation aloud, interrupting something solemn the keeper was saying about foxes and the decrease in pheasants’ eggs. “How well I remember doing it myself — just like that — years and years ago! I tore my Sunday trousers, too…. Eh, Thompson? You were saying…?”

But the keeper had touched his cap, murmured a few unintelligible words, and taken a side-path across the woods away from him. The man’s face wore almost an uncomfortable look, though, as usual, respectful and attentive. He seemed a trifle scared.

“Now for it!” added Jorden to himself, but still aloud. He felt full of things he wanted to say. The desire to play was in him. This time he would not let his opportunity slip; this time, by heaven, he would speak.

He advanced towards the boy, moving quickly, yet at the same time cautiously, for an odd fear lay in him that, unless he were very prompt, the youngster would be gone, evading him for the third time. With mind and will, therefore, Jorden gripped him steadily in his thought, his eyes fixed hard, his whole being concentrated in the determination to speak…. And the face, as he drew nearer, watched him eagerly, expectantly, the eyes half mischievous in their laughter, the expression inviting and charged with interest, almost as if the welcome words: “Come, play with me!” must be audible any moment. Jorden, in fact, while noting every detail with the utmost sharpness, even that the dirtied Sunday clothes were just what he himself had worn in that escapade of his own childhood in these very woods, felt also the positive conviction that he knew the boy as he knew his own soul. “Why I know him as I know myself … it’s positively absurd!” The yearning in his heart became, of a sudden, indescribable.

It was at this second that two things happened: first — that the dance of light and shadow from the branches wavered curiously in outline, as in an attempt to resolve the figure into a mere effect of woodland magic. At thirty yards, indeed, the boy might easily have disappeared, have suddenly — not been there. But at ten yards this was difficult. No mere effect of light and shade, moreover, could possibly trick his steady gaze, his concentrated mind. Jorden still held the figure with determined grip. He was now within easy speaking distance. Already, indeed, the boy was moving from the stile towards him, smiling, convincingly substantial, and the man, aware that his heart was thumping, opened his lips to speak. At which moment happened the second thing, namely, that he found no words.

Nothing occurred to him to say; he did not know what words to use. He could find no possible language, no phraseology, the boy would comprehend. The realisation came with a keen shock of pain. His inarticulateness brought a sense of tears. The understanding, the yearning love he felt, the deep desire to enter into the spirit of the little chap’s adventure, the longing to play with him, all this was blocked, desire and hope turned sterile instantly, by the sheer inability to address him in any words that he would understand. This unbridgeable gulf yawned impassably between the two — a gulf of unshared experience that made any language common to them both extremely difficult. An amazing shyness dropped upon him.

The pair stood within actual touching distance, when this bitter realisation fell upon Jorden like a blow. His hand was out, his lips were certainly open, and in this attitude of distressing paralysis he remained, for one second, like a frozen statue, dumb and motionless. His mind refused all action, though the eyes held true, faxing the face and figure indubitably clear before him.

In the eyes, then, came the final proof that the gulf between the two was no fancy merely; the sense of remoteness had, indeed, grown less, yet this lack of suitable words remained insuperable. From the expectant happy face the smile now faded; the sadness in the man’s heart was reflected, as by a mirror, in the young features opposite. The gulf was recognised. A strange, an instantaneous, withdrawal took place. It was established that the “remoteness” was assuredly not spatial merely, but was of time and condition, determined, it seemed, as by a great body of unshared experience….

Jorden’s outstretched hand completed its gesture, yet not the gesture originally planned: hurriedly, it now for an instant covered his own eyes instead. His mind and will, his concentration and assurance, wavered. There was this moment of confused reflection, swift but disturbing, a shadow of some dim, lost memory flickering through it, with twinkling feet, with ghostly skirts. A second later, when he uncovered his eyes again, the stile was empty, the figure gone. The dance of light and shade shifted through the crisp autumn air, the branches swayed, the breeze passed gently in the wood. Comin slowly up the narrow glade, the keeper reappeared, an Jorden, an intense melancholy and regret in his heart, moved heavily to meet him, his mind searching only for phrases about the pheasants and the foxes….

•   •   •

Being a stolid type of man, inarticulate, rather, even to himself, and characteristically shy of the unusual, Jorden thenceforward detected, at the heart of his deep yearning, a note of dread. Desire was still dominant, but this note of dread — it was the merest hint — had become an ingredient of it. “I may see him again any moment, any day,” changed into “I’m afraid I may see him any moment, any day.” The reason for this was too subtle for him; he “had a feeling,” and no more than that. He connected any reappearance now with something in himself; a big fundamental change, as it were; with something, anyhow, his deepest being did not desire. Subsequent meetings — and he knew they were bound to come — would be significant in an unwelcome, almost an unpleasant, kind of way. Shrinking, instinctive and unexplained, accompanied the longing.

The loneliness of his life, meanwhile, of his somewhat unmanageable fate, increased. Not that he cut himself off sourly from his kind — the sweetness in his dumb nature remained — but that his inner life lay silent, uncompanied, inarticulate. Memories, more and more, assailed him, ghostly desires and regrets catching at their skirts. Thought ran increasingly backwards, rather than ahead. Last month was dim, while sixty years ago was vivid. He became old, old….

Subsequent “meetings,” as expected, did occur, though not yet that particular one he dreaded as significant, even final, a word, however, he did not once permit himself. True to his type, he belonged to those who, after a certain stage, live chiefly in the past, yet without bitterness. His was a sweet and healthy mind; merely it pleased, refreshed and satisfied him to dwell upon far distant years, living over again, as with careless zest, adventures of his early boyhood.

These subsequent “meetings,” as he admitted with a smile of amusement, became, indeed, “curiouser and curiouser”: one at a board meeting, the other at a funeral. A kind of a board meeting, that is to say. It was a difficult period for folk with large estates, and Jorden had decided to sell off considerable portions of his land to a building company, himself a director by the terms of sale. The very woods where he had seen the little fellow on the stile, where he himself had gone birds’-nesting in his Sunday clothes, these woods were now to be cut down for building.

It was at the meeting when final details of the scheme were to be decided — Jorden sentimentally attempting to save the plot, the other directors staring at him blankly — it was in the middle of this blundering attempt, since he had no reasons to offer, that the boy suddenly came smiling at him from behind the Chairman’s throne.

Jorden, John Henry Jorden, sprang up. The figure was not there. Jorden, John Henry Jorden, sat down…. He saved the woods, yielding in their place another piece of land at great personal loss instead.

At the funeral, again, the funeral of an unvalued relative, as he stood hatless in a bitter wind beside the grave, there — yes, unmistakably — the little figure emerged. On the outskirts of the dreary and perfunctory mourners, he saw it flit and shift, brighter than before, nearer too, but in a vital sense, nearer to his own being, with laughter this time, not smiles, upon the face, and the hands stretched out towards himself. The welcome in the eyes, the gesture of invitation, of recognition, the whole attitude as though words “Soon we shall be together, shan’t we?” were almost audible — this staggered Jorden as he stared. He turned his head a moment; the others must surely see what he saw too. When he glanced back again only the wearied mourners, shivering as they counted the shovels of falling earth, were visible.

Exposed over-long to the biting air, very old and feeble, his point of last resistance on this occasion was attacked and beaten down…. As he lay in the darkened room, winter gripping the world outside but powerless to grip his heart, he became sharply, suddenly, aware that spring, with its flowers, its sparkling radiance, slipped past the shuttered windows. The nurse was there, reading by a shaded lamp across the room, but the doctor had gone. And Jorden knew quite well, knew the meaning of the deep stillness about him, knew why the doctor would not come back, knew also why lambent spring had thus abruptly routed winter. It entered leaping, with the perfume of fresh earth, the music of running streams, the singing of birds, the carelessness of happy youth.

He felt no shyness now; he was no longer inarticulate. He knew what words to use. He realised, yet without a shock, that he faced the final meeting he had dreaded, and, further, for the first time, that the boy had not grown older — and why this was so. Time behind him had telescoped, dwindled, vanished. Life had performed full circle here. Entering it at a point, from invisibility, he had now reached that point again — back into invisibility. The years collapsed, revealing amazingly their pretence, their sham duration. Their accumulated wisdom, their grave experience, their earnest effort, growth, development, their search and question — all these disappeared as though they never had been, while in their place surged up one fundamental bright desire in unadulterated power, invincible as spring; the desire to live, to play, to be. Unquenchable youth rose in his heart, defying the worn-out instrument that should, yet could not now, express it here.

The little fellow entered unannounced, yet the nurse did not even turn her head. The merry, laughing eyes, the torn best suit, the rumpled hair, the undying mischief and adventure, came up dancing close beside the dim-lit bed.

“You have come back at last,” sang the careless, happy voice he recognised. “We shall be together always now.” The senile body made a movement, so that the nurse glanced up quickly from her book a moment, then went on reading as before. “We have always been together … I never really lost you,” came the faint answer as though a breath of air sighed through the room. He laughed, stretching out his feeble hands. The nurse, holding a mirror briefly to the smiling lips, drew up the sheet across the face, entered a pencil note upon the chart, then quietly resumed her reading. The gulf was bridged at last. Old age and recovered youth went off dancing to the stars. Life, at the point called death, had performed full circle.

•   •   •   •   •   •

DR. FELDMAN

I

Young Pelham reached the doctor’s house on the stroke of half past eleven, and as he pushed the night bell button he felt pleased with his punctuality. He had kept the appointment to the minute. He looked like a traveller just off the train, yet not quite suitably dressed for a warm night in summer. A hint of adventure might have betrayed itself to a discerning eye. In addition to a heavy overcoat, he carried a plaid rug, and a walker’s knapsack was slung across one shoulder, while a stout stick and a felt hat completed the outfit. His mind ran over the contents of the knapsack for the twentieth time — candles, thermos of coffee, sandwiches, book, pistol; and the keys were in his pocket. He had forgotten nothing. His bright eyes betrayed a certain tension; he was excited; the occasional shiver that ran down his spine this warm June night, he assured himself, was anticipation merely. Perhaps it was. He remembered telling his friend, Dr. Feldman, that he intended to go in any case. “I shall sit up till dawn,” he said. “If you won’t come, I shall go alone.” He had meant it, too, only that was in the daytime, and now, with the darkness, his mood had shifted. Companionship, he realised, would be most desirable. The presence of burly Dr. Feldman, with his black beard, his deep voice, his big shoulders, and his clear brown eyes, would be undeniably welcome.

He gave the bell another push, pressing it hard, for the minutes had slipped by. “I’m on the tick,” he repeated, looking at his watch again. “He said he would be ready at eleven-thirty sharp, barring an urgent call. Ah!” he reflected, with sudden uneasiness, “I’d rather forgotten that.”

A voice close behind him made him start, and turning sharply he saw the door wide open and the parlour-maid upon the step. She had been speaking, he realised, for a moment or two, but at first he hardly took in what she was saying. Then his heart sank. “Gone out!” he stammered, in obvious dismay. “But the doctor expected me! We had an appointment!” He was rather flustered. “It’s just eleven-thirty, the time he said.”

“There was an important call, sir. Dr. Feldman left this for you.” He read the note hurriedly on the mat. “I’m called out,” it ran. “Urgent case. I must go. It shouldn’t take long, and I’ll join you in the house the moment I’m free. Leave key under the door. M. F.,, 11 p.m.”

“The doctor told me to say, sir, that he should meet you there,” he heard the girl’s voice through his shock of disappointment; “and that he would bring his own things with him for the night.”

The young man’s composure was upset. “Yes, I see,” he mumbled, stupidly; “we had arranged to walk instead of taking a taxi, so as not to attract attention—” He paused, realising that the girl would not know what he was talking about. “Will you come in, sir, and wait?” she asked, noticing his hesitation. No, he wouldn’t do that. He thanked her. “It’s all right,” he said, as casually as he could, then turned — it cost him a certain effort — and walked slowly down the deserted street alone.

This “effort” he noticed; the disinclination to leave companionship and light. The shock of disappointment rather surprised him too; its strength, its almost bitter flavour. Something that had lain unacknowledged in him all the day, that had become more insistent as the dusk drew on, something he had deliberately concealed from himself, was now suddenly so clear that he had to face it. Pretence had become childish merely. He did face it. The Sal of sitting up all night alone in an empty house he did not relish. “It’s absurd,” he admitted, “but I am, I suppose, a bit nervous!”

He made his way slowly, very slowly, across the dim Bloomsbury square in the direction of the unoccupied mansion, turning from time to time to see if anyone might be following him. He would have given a good deal to see the burly figure swinging down the street, the black beard flying. But pedestrians were few, and men with beards were rarer still. The failure of his friend, though understandable, had disconcerted him more than he cared to admit. “Barring an urgent call,” the doctor had said, and the urgent call had come — an unfortunate, rather an odd, coincidence, the young man felt. As a specialist the doctor’s time was fairly regular, night calls an exception. An unwelcome flavour of question, though not yet of doubt, crept in. His old friend, he remembered, had not exactly favoured this expedition. “If you are sincere when you say you want this experience for your new book,” he said reluctantly, “all right, then I’ll come with you. If nothing happens, at least I can study you!” The mental specialist was not interested in so-called hauntings, but the reactions of a human mind under the stress of unusual emotion might interest him. He had laughed and yielded.

Pelham drew nearer and nearer to the great empty mansion he had visited already in the daytime; its large echoing hall he could easily visualise, the wide creaking staircase, the carpetless corridors, the smaller drawing-room on the first floor where he proposed to keep his vigil, They lay in darkness now — shadows, silence, emptiness, devoid of normal occupants, at least. It was a place that called for companionship of a robust order. The house, with its grim, dreadful story supported by incontrovertible facts, stood waiting for him only a few hundred yards down the deserted street. He could already make out its square, uncompromising shape, its unwashed windows peering sideways at him. He found himself walking slower and slower, dawdling, hesitating, playing for time. An occasional pedestrian passed him, and twice at least he recognised his friend, only to discover his mistake when they were almost abreast. A taxi whizzed by noisily, a policeman laboriously examined innocent doors, but the neighbourhood lay otherwise still and heavy in the thickish, humid June night. Gloomy it was, the houses gaunt and gloomy too, and the particular house that waited for him came nearer till at last he stood opposite to it. Instead of going in — he passed it, with a quick glance at the staring windows. He took a turn round the square. “I’ll wait till twelve,” he told himself. “When the clocks strike midnight, Ill go in — whether Feldman has come or not.”

Having made himself this promise, he held to it. The policeman helped a little, perhaps, for Pelham realised that he was a suspicious figure, mooning about with rug and knapsack in this desultory fashion, and questions were the last thing he wanted. The house soon faced him again, the policeman a good way down the street; no one was in sight, the clocks were striking the hour. Walking boldly up the steps, he inserted the key, entered the black hole that gaped before him, and closed the door quietly behind him.

Quietly, perhaps, yes, but a hundred echoes went flying none the less, as though the place were alive with footsteps, then dying away into the deep silence they had broken. The darkness was at first impenetrable. A window was open somewhere, for the last strokes of twelve came clearly down the stairs. And immediately, before there had been time to move towards a plan of any sort, there happened two disagreeable things, both of which he could explain, but which he disliked because they revealed too sharply his own condition. The second of these two he explained, indeed — with difficulty.

II

The first, as he stood in the well of blackness, not moving, breathing rather low, thinking what he would do next, was a sound close beside him; at his feet it seemed; a curious shuffling sound, and accompanied by a light, stroking touch upon his shoulder, with the result that he had jumped a yard and raised his arm to ward off a possible blow before he realised that it was merely the plaid rug which had slipped from his shoulder and fallen with a faint swishing noise upon the stone floor. He stooped and picked it up, cursing his silly nerves, his movement rapid, as though he felt safer in an upright position, and it was a moment later that the second disagreeable thing occurred, the one he explained less easily.

It happened in this way. The instinct of self-preservation was already automatically at work, for while one hand picked up the rug, the other, dropping the knapsack, clutched the flash-light in his coat pocket, and had actually switched it on as he rose into an upright position again. Holding it askew, in that first second, the beam shot along the hall floor, and the staircase was not directly in its full glare. The blaze, however, was enough for him to catch sight, out of the corner of his eye, of — Dr. Feldman, black beard and all, standing motionless, peering down upon him over the banisters. Close to the top of the first flight he was, and the very same instant, before the beam could show him fully, he had passed silently and rapidly round the angle and on to the landing above. The following beam, now turned full after him, showed no one. Stairs, landing, and banisters were undeniably empty.

Pelham did not move, he did not start, much less did he jump; no single muscle, in fact, stirred. The reaction was of another kind — his heart missed a beat. Breath, at the first gasp, was unmanageable, and at the second — well, some vivid instinct made silence preferable to calling out. To shout, “Hullo, Max! Doctor, is that you?” in the great echoing hall was impossible. Besides — he already had found the line of explanation — the figure was not Dr. Feldman at all. Instinctively, even before he began to argue, he knew it was not his friend. There could be no answer to his call. Dr. Feldman was not in the building with him. No one — he almost said it audibly — was in the building with him. The figure was imaginary, of course.

His critical mind, nerves or no nerves, began instantly to argue towards firm conviction. The sudden light, rushing shadows distorted by startled nerves, the fact that Feldman’s personality lay vividly in his thoughts, that he longed for him eagerly, hoping with a kind of vehemence that he would turn up any minute now — this was quite enough to manufacture the desired figure out of a sudden glare and a flock of leaping shadows. Holding the beam more or less steadily upon the empty stairs and corner of the landing, he explained away the disagreeable thing. “Why, even in the street I mistook two fellows for him till I got close enough to see my mistake!” Beards, he remembered, with a faint smile, were uncommon these days, rare enough to make an impression. The production of a figure with bearded face was easy enough with flying shadows. There had been no sound of footsteps. And as he argued, the premonitory shiver down his spine, while it did not wholly pass, grew a little less.

The mind, that is to say, provided a passable explanation, although emotion, being unable to argue, remained discontented and uneasy. Emotion, he realised, would be his problem. “It’s always primitive, credulous, superstitious,” he reminded himself emphatically. “To observe its behaviour and to note the antics of imagination is why I’m here tonight.” And wisely then, before emotion might gain any further advantage, he decided upon action. He would search the house from top to bottom before settling down to his long vigil. A trick? A practical joke? His friend’s passionate interest in mental experiment? The question of that “urgent call” again flashed past and vanished.

Leaving his paraphernalia on the floor, he took the pistol from the knapsack and began at once his search of the empty building. With firm, echoing steps, he moved slowly up the staircase, flashing his light in all directions as he went.

A large empty building is not inviting in the darkness, nor is a flashlight, with the contrast of inky blackness just beyond its beam, the best way of exploring it. The search undoubtedly required nerve. This house, moreover, was not merely empty; it was empty because no one could live in it. So devoid was it, indeed, of a pleasant living atmosphere that two successive tenants, and that quite recently, had chosen to die in it — by their own hands. And the reason for their choice, according to Pelham’s investigations, added nothing to the homeliness of the atmosphere. Two years before them, another tenant, the origin of the present horror apparently, had also done away with himself, after first doing away, in ghastly fashion, with the rest of his family. Crazed by drugs, drink, love, or something equally powerful and devastating — Pelham had been unable exactly to ascertain — he had been found among the grim remnants of his fearful orgy, strangled by his own hands. His imitators, it was held, owed their similar fates to his vile, terrific, posthumous influence. Subsequent occupiers objected strenuously, broke their leases, paid money rather than stay, even went to court. The house, thus, was in the market for a song — and young Pelham was now searching its dismal entrails at midnight with a shoddy little flashlight. His object was to experience at first hand, and for the purposes of a scene in his new novel, what an imaginative man would feel during an all-night vigil. He himself was an imaginative man, and he got his “copy.” He got more besides. The details remain the strangest among the numerous remarkable cases in Dr. Feldman’s notebooks.

The search was thorough, but unproductive. It established the fact that there was no one in the great dismal building save himself. It was hardly a reassuring process for a nervous temperament, and it called upon all his pluck to go through certain of the rooms — the servants’ quarters, for instance, on the top floor, the offices in the basement, and certain large pieces that had two doors. There was always the feeling that someone trailed stealthily behind him, that he was watched, that the piled shadows concealed a figure. Once a door banged, there were creakings everywhere, there were groans and cracks and whispers down the draughty passages. But the place, otherwise, was still as death, holding its musty smell, its gaping emptiness, its air of rather sinister expectancy in common with most other big unoccupied buildings. And, at the end, Pelham stood in the hall again with the satisfied feeling that he had done his job faithfully, and that he could now settle down in the small drawing-room for the vigil proper. He had brought in a couple of deck-chairs during the day; he had his book and candles, his coffee. Whether Feldman came or did not come, he could manage it. If anything happened, he now told himself, he could manage that too. He went upstairs and settled in. He was calmer — yes, even quite calm. He was master of himself.

It was here that Pelham’s version (marked in red ink in Dr. Feldman’s notebooks) first caught the attention of the specialist. The word “calm” was underlined, a mark of interrogation in the margin. The search of the building should have left the nerves on edge; instead, the reverse had happened — the young man had recovered his normal quiet. He felt “calm,” he could “manage anything” that might happen later. “Didn’t particularly notice this odd calmness in himself,” ran the expert comment. In talking it over afterwards, Pelham used another adjective: “sedative.” Uneasiness had gone, he declared, “just as though I’d taken a sedative and it was beginning to work. I observed everything keenly,” he tried to explain, “but things that half an hour before would have startled and made me jump — well, they just didn’t. I watched them happen, missing nothing, but without any nasty reaction, horror least of all. I was prepared for anything I might see. Like being doped almost.” And in the doctor’s notebook, on this point, is an interesting and suggestive comment: “This curious preliminary calmness, though P. noticed it suddenly, came on gradually no doubt. He was aware of it only when achieved. His own word ‘sedative’ indicates slow approach. Morbid excitement had passed completely, but acute observation nowhere impaired. He felt ‘prepared’ for what might follow. A preparation!?”

The young man, now settled comfortably in his deck-chair, a rug over his knees, the two candles on a packing-case behind his head, sat reading his book with one part of his mind, while, with another part, he stared, listened, watched, every muscle and nerve in alert tension, yet wholly at his ease. His original jumpiness had vanished, nervousness was gone, had exhausted itself perhaps. Opposite to him was the unoccupied chair intended for his friend. Two blindless windows on his right gave upon roofs and a night sky too hazy for stars to show. On his left, wide open, was the door through which the top of the staircase, with the few feet of banisters the sham Dr. Feldman had peered over, was just visible. The carpetless room had no stick of furniture, the blank walls marked only with lines of dirt where pictures and a large mirror had been hung. A glass chandelier above his chair sparkled faintly in the flickering candlelight. The light, of course, was poor.

Here he sat reading while the hours passed and the night drew towards morning. From time to time he pricked his ears; creakings on the stairs, cracks of wood on the floors above, sounds in the big hall below, those he noticed without a qualm, but attributed quite rightly to their natural causes. No purpose, no intent, no meaning, living or posthumous, could be ascribed to them. Nothing approaching a footstep, much less a voice, broke the deep silence that wrapped the building from roof to kitchen. Yet his composure was remarkable rather, considering his temperament and his recent jumpiness. And the young man felt disappointment growing on him. Even if he saw and heard nothing, he had hoped for unusual reactions of interesting kind. These did not come. After his first bout of rather boyish “nerves,” his recording apparatus, imaginative or critical, registered — nothing. His experiment seemed a failure; the scene in his book would gain no verisimilitude from the description of an actual experience. He even began to feel glad that Dr. Feldman after all had not wasted a night’s sleep for nothing. Even if he saw a figure now, his attitude would be one merely of critical examination: could he touch it as solid, walk through it, could it answer questions or show intelligence in response to his advances, his calm, collected, cross-examining advances?

Dr. Feldman! He put his book down. Ah! He had almost forgotten him. The first keen longing, the bitter disappointment, these, too, had left him. He realised that, for a considerable time now, he had not been alertly waiting for his footstep, his voice, his brown eyes. This expectancy had left him too. This indifference, this forgetfulness, Dr. Feldman also stressed in his own notebook — as a proof that Pelham’s mind was no longer working normally. “Noticed his own indifference,” ran the comment in red ink, “but not particularly surprised at it.”

“Dr. Feldman!” And Pelham abruptly realised, for the first time, that he had forgotten to leave the key outside the front door. Completely overlooked it! Even if Dr. Feldman had come, he could not have got in. Perhaps he had already come — and gone. He would probably not have rung, much less would he have knocked. Possibly, indeed, reflected Pelham, the doctor might welcome the excuse and go home to bed. Well, it didn’t matter, the young man thought, as he went down cautiously in the dark to remedy his oversight, but leaving his electric torch on the packing-case. There was nothing of interest here for his clever, learned friend. He was relieved, in fact, to have no critical observer of his own disappointment, of this flat, uneventful, and rather foolish night.

Key in hand, he opened the big door and peered out into the deserted street. It was between two and three in the morning; soon the grey light would come in the sky. No one was to be seen. He paused a moment, standing on the step, then came back inside, shutting the door carelessly, and with a good deal of echoing noise, but again forgetting to leave the key outside, an omission only realised long afterwards. He started to cross the hall. A faint light from his open door above filtered down, so that the banisters were just visible. And it was as he crossed the hall that someone brushed by, and passed in front of him up the staircase. Though no actual touch was registered, he was quite positive of this. Whether he actually heard the steps he could not swear, but that someone who had been standing close beside him in this dark hall now moved up the stairs ahead of him, he was convinced beyond any possible doubt. Had there been doubt, indeed, it was at once negatived, for a second later he saw the outline of a man slip along the banisters overhead and move rapidly along the landing. The outline disappeared towards the door where the faint light issued. The person, whoever it was, had gone into his room.

Pelham went after this figure; he climbed the stairs very quickly, almost ran along the short stretch of landing, and, without a sign of hesitation, entered the room himself. “I burst into it, in fact,” he described it afterwards. “And there, in the chair opposite to mine,” he said, with intense conviction, “sat — yourself. You, Max, sat in that chair.” The deck-chair was occupied by Dr. Feldman, big shoulders, burly frame, black beard and all. The head was sunk a little forwards, down upon the chest rather; the eyes were closed; the breathing was regular and sounded heavy. “You looked asleep, though naturally I knew this was impossible.” And in his written version, Pelham, describing his own reaction to this “bit of nonsense,” emphasised his impatient resentment that a “friend like you, Max, should have played this trifling, rather dangerous trick upon me.” He felt sore, even angry.

For in that first instant of inspection, young Pelham realised that the doctor had somehow secreted himself in the house from the beginning, that the “urgent call” was a thought-out detail, that it was, in fact, an ill-judged practical joke. He remembered his own first fugitive doubt. Dr. Feldman was not going to lose a night’s sleep for nothing; he had always meant to make use of the occasion to give his romantic friend a shock, then study his nervous reactions.

And Pelham resented the trick, its perilous foolishness in view of his own nerves and the fact that he had a pistol. So much did he resent it that, taking his own chair again, he sat there staring at his friend, a kind of dull anger in him, giving no single thought as to how the doctor had contrived his trivial little plan. He did not speak, he made no attempt to tackle him about it, he did not even prod him out of this idiotic pretence of being asleep. He just sat and stared, this sullen, rather sulky anger in his heart. He felt no relief that his friend had come and now sat before him; he no longer needed him, nor was his presence comforting. Comfort, even companionship, of that sort he did not want any more. Deep annoyance, contempt to the point of bitterness almost, was all he felt.

Dr. Feldman, it seems, meanwhile kept up this game of his with a steady perfection that, the other felt, would have been admirable in a better cause. He maintained his pose of sleep without a flaw. It was good acting. No sign of expression showed itself in his face. The body was limp with the relaxation of a man in deep slumber. And the longer young Pelham watched him, the more his angry vexation grew. His thought found words such as “Idiot, imbecile,” phrases like “Amazing trick for a man like you, a great mental specialist, to play” — and finally, after perhaps half an hour of this persistent folly on the “specialist’s” part of silence and immobility, since it betrayed no sign of explaining itself, Pelham took up his book again and went on reading. He was furious, yet wanted to laugh.

Comic, no doubt, the situation was, but he was in no mood to appreciate its comedy. He obstinately refused to speak, and in his mind now was a sort of boyish determination that he would meet the other at his own game, and beat him at it too! He made no sign, no sound. He merely read. The minutes passed. Perhaps half an hour slipped by, perhaps longer. His obstinacy remained cast-iron. Dr. Feldman, for his part, also kept up the nonsense; he aped slumber to perfection; his breathing was heavy, heavy; the black beard rising and falling with the movement of his chest; the brown eyes always tightly closed — till, at last, the sound of a clock striking the hour came faintly into the room where these two sat. Pelham counted the strokes, and they were three. There was a gleam of dawn. He looked up suddenly from his book, hardly knowing why

And this time he started. His blood ebbed, then came back with a rush. What was it? What did it mean? At the first sight, in this faint early light, Dr. Feldman looked precisely as before, ordinary, normal: at the second, he looked — amazing. Every atom of attention Pelham could muster concentrated in his eyes. He stared till they smarted. But his spine ran icy cold.

There was a difference, yet this difference remained concealed. At the first glimpse it was Max Feldman who faced him; at the second, it was someone else. Thus he phrased it in his written version, and the brevity was significant. Here was something, apparently, he could not describe. He shivered all over. The former queer insensitiveness, the numbness, had begun to pass. The “sedative” effect was leaving him, it seemed.

Thus, staring with all his energy, with all available concentration, at his familiar friend, he knew himself: dreadfully overwrought. Yet that “second glimpse” refused to come back; the “amazing” aspect of this well-known shape kept hidden. He had seen it, however, It was, he divined, still there. The blood gushed and ebbed alternately; his feet, his back were cold. He was “all on edge,” like a terrified girl. The figure in the chair, so far as he could analyse, had not altered; the burly frame, the broad shoulders, the black beard, the eyes closed in “sleep” remained as before. “The idiot,” he tried to say, “still pretends,” but his thought refused to frame the words — because they were somewhere, somehow false. “Idiot” and “asleep,” at any rate, were merely lies,

His written description of what followed was extremely, curiously brief. His own eyes remained glued, unable to move. He stared and stared. The beard moved up and down with the slow heaving of the great chest, the relaxed body betrayed no tension, the head sank forwards and downwards as before. Then, suddenly, that “second” glimpse, that “other” aspect came stealing horribly back. The face, hitherto devoid of expression, had begun to change. It was slowly altering. Black and white entered into it somehow, a white that was passionless, a black that was diabolical. The mouth, under the dark hair, sagged; the eyebrows took a slanting twist, the jaw beneath the beard thrust out. It became, slowly but decisively, an entirely different and an atrocious face. The mask slipped gradually downwards from it. And young Pelham, now bereft of power to move, stared helplessly at the appalling change. He was staring, he tried to tell himself, at something he could not believe, something that was not possible, something that human experience cannot admit. But yet he witnessed it. And he could not move his eyes.

“It’s not Feldman, not Max Feldman, not my friend,” his thought struggled to cry out, then realised vaguely that thought was stifled in him, no longer operating. Thought and volition had simultaneously disappeared. And the head then suddenly moved a little to one side. It slowly shifted. The beard, at a new angle, now revealed the neck. There was no collar.

He tried to scream, to shriek, but breath failed him. Horror dropped over him like ice. He trembled from head to foot. The shuddering was audible, his teeth clattered, his feet tapped the wooden floor. But he still stared helplessly, because sight was riveted beyond any power of his that could either move his eyes or close them. He became aware then that this demoniacal face that aped his friend was about to change still further. How he knew this lay beyond him. He did know it. A faint quiver of the cheeks betrayed it, possibly. Something ghastly ran across the skin. He knew the eyes were going to open.

There came a further movement of the head. It lolled to one side — frightfully. The collarless neck was creased with dull red lines. The same instant the two eyes opened, giving back his own awful, fascinated stare. They were bright, fixed, maniacal eyes. Moreover, they were not brown, but black. They gazed into his own with murder in their depths. And the whole figure then gave a convulsive shudder and began to alter visibly like the face. With extreme swiftness, as in a cinema, this alteration supervened. The great frame seemed suddenly to have grown emaciated, the big shoulders sank and drooped, only the black beard still flowed down the collarless neck that was marked with its hideous red.

Then the outline rose. Leaving the chair without visible effort, it stood up, it wavered a moment, half staggering, half lurching; the arms projected abruptly; the hands opened long, muscular fingers that moved through the air towards his throat. He saw the eyes behind them — like shining lamps — close….

The tremendous clamour that broke in here with its sudden clashing gave him, it seems, the power to move his muscles. A bell rang furiously, there was a violent banging on a door. The building echoed. The awful figure, though it did not seem to pause in its advance, came, singularly, no nearer actually to his face and throat. A measure of volition, startled into activity perhaps by the resounding noise, returned to him. He sprang up, he shrieked as though his heart had burst, he staggered, but he reached the door. He was down the steps in what seemed literally a couple of enormous leaps, and across the dark hall. The same second he was fumbling at the big front door, where the knocking sounded. He opened it. Facing him on the step, an electric torch blazing in his hand, stood — Dr. Feldman. He came in, closing the door behind him with a bang. “Frightfully sorry, old man, but it took me longer than I thought. You forgot the key—” was all young Pelham heard before darkness fell over him and he fainted in his friend’s arms.

A swoon, rather than a faint, it was, lasting perhaps a minute. A sip of brandy from the doctor’s flask brought the blood back to normal ways. There followed confused talk, questions, and somewhat incoherent answers, and then — Dr. Feldman insisted firmly on this — the visit to the room upstairs. They went together, side by side, arm in arm in fact, into an entirely empty room. The candles stood guttering on the packing-case, electric torch and pistol beside them, a book on the floor, and a couple of unoccupied deck-chairs opposite.

But young Pelham, shaking from head to foot, white as chalk, found no very intelligent words, and the specialist, thoroughly at home among conditions of this kind, took him home, administered a mild sedative, and read at his leisure some days later the account of Pelham’s night. He had insisted on a written version first. Talk followed, a little study of his own as well, but this was for his private notebooks, as were also two facts he took some trouble to ascertain — namely, that the murderer used drugs on his victims as on himself, and also, oddly enough, that his maniac face held black eyes and was adorned with a black beard into the bargain.

•   •   •   •   •   •

A THREEFOLD CORD

One reads from time to time of startling experiences claimed by certain people in moments of unusual consciousness — and one smiles a superior and incredulous smile. Behind the smile lies the suspicion that it is a stunt of sorts, an imaginative effort, a delusion anyhow. Yet Malcolm of McQuittie’s experience, as he told it, seemed neither stunt, imagination, nor delusion.

A Scotchman, hard-headed, bachelor of fifty, difficult to impose on, he was of that inarticulate type whose laconic speech carried the conviction that he spoke truth. He spent his comfortable income from his comfortable quarters near Piccadilly. With features that were what one calls firm and handsome, a grimmish jaw, was a rather rare delightful smile that when it flashed lit the blue eyes with fire, and a softish, deep voice to match. The women liked Malcolm of McQuittie, only he said so little that they got no farther with him. He moved his eyes, he smiled, but he did not speak unless he had to. Hostesses invited him because the women liked him; he accepted because, oddly enough for so unsocial and taciturn a man, he enjoyed seeing people. Watching them, perhaps, would be the truer phrase. At Mrs. MacFarlane’s party he watched, in particular, a pale dark-eyed woman for some time before he spoke to her.

He had not noticed her at the dinner-table, nor in the drawing-room before dinner was announced; it was afterwards, when a score of extra guests flocked in to listen to the music, that he first became aware of the white, rather melancholy face whose black eyes fixed his own intently across the crowded room. He was standing against the corner of an alcove at the back, all chairs being occupied, a noticeable figure, enjoying a bird’s-eye view of the audience, when the face suddenly seemed to flash at him out of the crowd; and he declares that, at the very first meeting of the eyes that fixed him so intently, he felt a vague sense of disturbance flutter through him, of disturbance only, not of actual discomfort. The gaze was so direct, he sensed intention, purpose in it.

He looked away while the piano banged on through the hot, crowded room, only to look back again a moment later. He looked more carefully this time. The white face, if a trifle sad perhaps, he thought at first expressionless, but the eyes held that quality called arresting. They riveted his own. He found it difficult not to stare, and the more he avoided them, the more he caught himself turning back to stare again. The piano ceased, and in the clatter of applause from an unmusical crowd that clapped over-long because they had been over-bored, he saw the black eyes peering, watching, staring at him more fixedly than ever. The piano started off again, the performer reading in the hostess’s face that an encore was expected — and McQuittie waited, the interplay of eyes continuing as before. He had never seen a gaze so absorbing, yet somehow so difficult of interpretation. Was it inviting? The faint sense of disturbance came and went. He was puzzled and intrigued. He made up his mind to come to closer quarters, though not quite clear why he did so.

In the confusion following the last of the music he searched for her, but could not find her. She was nowhere to be seen. He wanted to speak to her, though without knowing exactly what he wanted to say. No impulse to flirtation was in him; merely that he wanted to know her, to hear her speak, to hear what she had to say — almost as though he knew there was something she had to say to him, something particular. This point he emphasises — that she had something to communicate. Her eyes, apparently, had conveyed this much. The crush in the room, on the stairs, towards the supper-table, made movement slow and difficult. Acquaintances were always holding him up, he could not see her anywhere, and in the end he gave it up, deciding to go home. He slipped down to get his coat and hat, and then, in the hall, he caught her — caught a glimpse of her, rather, as she went out.

How she had evaded his search so completely, so easily, puzzled him, but in so crowded a party it was natural enough; others before him had experienced a similar, quite unintentional disappearance. At the hall door, in the act of going out to her car or taxi, this glimpse came, and he pressed forward as fast as the surge of people still pouring in allowed. In a moment he was by her side, it seemed, only to discover that, having at last reached her, he had nothing ready to say. No single word occurred to him. She, however, had something to say, and said it, and while she said it he realised again that it was to hear her speak that he had searched with such persistence.

“Je vous attends,” came in rather a husky whisper. “Il y a longtemps que je vous cherche — si longtemps.” (I am waiting for you, I’ve been looking for you for a long time — so long.) And she was gone.

Malcolm of McQuittie went home with that flutter of unexplained disturbance still in his being. The little French he knew was enough for him to perceive that it was not the French of a Frenchwoman. A foreigner had used those few odd words in that curious whispering voice. If the door had not banged so quickly, he would have stepped after her, seen her into her car or taxi, asked her name and address, and an explanation of the peculiar words, while yet at the same time he was aware that something in him shrank from doing this very thing, as though he did not really want to know their meaning, almost as though a faint warning bell struck just behind the whisper. The instinct, at any rate, made him hesitate, if only for the fraction of a second, and it had been then too late. Instead, he had gone upstairs again into the crowded rooms, cornered his hostess finally, and demanded verification. Who was this foreign, black-eyed lady, to whom did this face of extreme pallor belong? Whose were the melancholy yet intently gazing eyes? He drew a blank.

Mrs. MacFarlane stared in a vague, if perhaps a trifle disconcerted way, and declared she did not know. “A gate-crasher, perhaps,” she laughed finally; “but a welcome one,” she added gallantly, “since she interested you, Malcolm.” He shrugged his shoulders, perceiving that she was not to be questioned further. That she was preoccupied, he reflected, was natural enough, she had her guests to look after, and he went home unsatisfied, taking with him that little flutter of disturbance that now included, inexplicably, he noticed, a hint of uneasiness as well. The personality of this stranger uncommonly perplexed him.

Once comfortably alone in his own quarters, his servant out, he settled down to think it all over as carefully as he might, only to find that his mind refused to focus her, but persistently ran off into other matters entirely unconnected with her. Instead of thinking of this intriguing woman with the dark eyes, he thought suddenly — of horses. Of horses; and then, quite inexplicably, of his father, of his grandfather as well.

But why horses, and why his father and grandfather, he asked himself, when what he really wanted to think about was this strange encounter that brought such unsatisfactory, almost unwelcome, emotion with it?

He continued his effort. Yet the woman evaded him persistently, for each time he brought his mind back to her, it wandered off to horses — to horses first of all. Now, horses, be it admitted, were a passion with him. He did not bet, but he shared a stable, and fair luck had come his way. He was the first of his family to be horsey; neither his father nor grandfather had the taste. Horses, anyhow, were in his blood. So, oddly enough, though he rarely gave it a thought, was what he had been told was an inherited trait. His grandfather’s fall from an upper window was, of course, an accident, as decided at the time — he was a little boy when it happened — and his father’s drowning was similarly, of course, an accident.

He had not cared for his father much. His grandfather he had feared; he remembered him as very, very old, the broken ruin of a man. That rather dreaded, rather dreadful old figure presented itself vividly now. He surprised a swift, unwelcome thought blundering about in his under-mind — that life was not really worth while after all; it were better ended before decay and senility, to be inevitably reached at last, arrived with all their horror. Unwelcome! Was it altogether unwelcome, this fumbling thought? The two jostled each other to and fro in his brain — the emergency exit and horses….

This passion for horses, and this contempt for a scheme of life which must produce senile helplessness if seen out to its close, lay in his make-up. Why they should crop up just when he wished to concentrate mind and memory upon a very different matter, puzzled and exasperated him. That his father and grandfather should intrude as they did, he explained more easily perhaps, for Mrs. MacFarlane, it so happened, occupied what had been his family’s town house years ago, the house in which his own boyhood had been spent, and from an upper window in which his grandfather had contrived to fall; whence his father, too, had taken his last journey to the boat on the Thames. Here the associations were easily explained, for they were fairly obvious. It was the persistent irruption of horses, of horses in combination with the others, that confused him,

In the end he went to bed, and dreamed about them too, yet with no sign of the foreign woman in his dreams. He was riding in the dreams, on horseback, always riding hard, riding to find his father and his grandfather, in this senseless way….

The next time he saw her was a week later, in the paddock at a race meeting; a mere glimpse again, no more than that. She dissolved among the crowd. Across the intervening fence he felt the black eyes upon him, turned, looked straight into her face, registered the inviting expression — he knew this time it was inviting — and then, having dashed round into the rather crowded paddock, found no trace of her. It was on this occasion that he made a serious, rather gallant attempt to analyse the mixture of emotion the sight of her produced, the undeniable attraction, that is, and the odd note of dislike, of warning, that came with it.

The original impression her strange words produced, “I’m waiting for you; I’ve been looking for you so long,” had never left him. He was as curious, as eager as ever to know what she meant, while at the same time the uneasiness, the feeling that he dreaded an explanation, that it would be unwelcome somehow — this longing and this faint dread persisted side by side. His attempt at analysis, however, had no satisfactory result. He remained baffled. He continued what he called his search for her, yet with little to guide direction. He attended every race meeting, he flattered Mrs. MacFarlane by accepting every invitation; he went there, indeed, with or without an invitation; and it was in Mrs. MacFarlane’s house, once his boyhood’s home, that his persistence was at last rewarded.

Up to this point in Malcolm of McQuittie’s story there seemed nothing particularly out of the way, nothing, at any rate, that called for too far-fetched explanation. Making due allowance for touches of colour that temperament may add, his adventure was not without parallel. What followed, on the contrary, was entirely without parallel. It ran along, moreover, so rapidly, so easily. As he told it, in his somewhat inarticulate fashion, he obviously told something that had really happened to him. He had experienced this actual thing. No doubts, no questions even, occurred to him. His account of it slipped innocently, naturally, past a dozen points where criticism, question, doubt must ordinarily have called a halt. Any such halts or pauses he, quite honestly ignored. Obviously they had not even occurred to him.

It was on his return from spending a month in Scotland that he went again to Mrs. MacFarlane’s, the occasion being some kind of charity At Home in which, of course, he felt not the slightest interest, and suddenly found himself standing right against her, actually touching her. The first thing he knew was a little electric shock in his arm and shoulder; and turning to look down, he gazed straight into her two dark eyes. Everything went swiftly and easily from that moment, there was no hitch, nor any sign of hesitancy in either of them.

Until this moment, so packed was the At Home, he had been on the flight of stairs just above the drawing-room, obeying a sudden impulse to peep into what in boyhood days had been his father’s study. He made a quick run to the floor a few steps farther up. The door was ajar and he enjoyed a glimpse of the old room he knew so well — a momentary glimpse, for a step coming along the passage had sent him flying down again to join the general crowd. It was as he merged himself among the other guests that the electric shock had come.

They were side by side, touching. He bowed. An amazing sense of familiarity swept over him. There was no need of an introduction. Against the wall at the back of the room they stood, her face just below his shoulder. In his mind, at this instant, lay nothing but a vague search for any French he could rake up. There was no need of it.

“Please, come with me now,” whispered the voice he had heard a hundred times already in memory, in slightly foreign English. It was a command he could not for the life of him disobey, even had he wished. It was as if, from this moment, some power he could not resist, though not necessarily some power in herself, took charge of him. Normal observation of what went on about him, ordinary criticism, ordinary judgement, these seemed in marked abeyance. It is clear that his attention in what followed only took note of certain things, possibly of a certain order of things only. The rest did not enter his consciousness, as it were.

How they slipped out, evading their hostess still at the head of the stairs with omniscient eyes; how they found themselves in a conveyance that was of horses, not of motor-power; how they reached a house and entered it with a key, her key, and eventually sat together in a darkened room — of all this Malcolm of McQuittie declares he has no clear remembrance. In state he was bemused, though not confused, he affirms; it was simply that certain things failed to reach his notice. His first clear positive emphasis lies in this — that he knew the house; yet, that while it was familiar, it was only vaguely familiar. He swears he had seen it, entered it before, though how or when he could not say. Complete recognition failed him. The old flutter of uneasiness he mentions too, only first realised definitely, however, as they sat together in this semi-darkened room. Yet with this underlying uneasiness was, at the same time, a sense of relief, comfort, almost happiness. He was pleased, if also disturbed faintly, to be with this particular woman in this particular place.

During the half-realised transit, apparently, she had not spoken, but once they were seated side by side on a low divan in the dim room of this house that was familiar yet unrecognised, she began immediately, and in broken, or at any rate accented, English.

“I wish so long to find you,” she said in the low, husky tone that was almost a whisper; “for so vairy long I watch you — here in this same place.”

“Watch me?” he replied, his mind and being strangely heavy. “Watch?” He did not like the word.

He stared down at her. A dark fur round the neck, almost brushing his shoulder, emitted a perfume, half-animal, half-artificial scent.

“They tell me I find you here. They send me. I wait all this long time and watch, and at last I find you. It was deeficult, so deeficult.”

She gazed up into his face, and the gaze was unmistakable. Here was no common sex intrigue, though he felt drawn to her as steel to magnet. Her familiarity held no vulgar, ordinary basis of communion. This intimacy, he knew, was otherwise. He hardly knew what to say. No phrase occurred to him at first, for the obvious questions, it seems, did not even present themselves. Moreover, only certain of her words woke response in his mind at all, as though he left the others unnoticed altogether at the moment.

“They know now I have found you. They come soon, too,” she whispered, her eyes still full upon his own. But though he heard the words, no curiosity, oddly enough, stirred in him just then as to their meaning. His preoccupation seemed still with the idea that she had been “watching” so long, watching and waiting. He did not like it, this idea that he had been watched.

“I saw you — twice,” he heard himself saying. “I stared — unpardonably. I wanted — to see you again. Felt I had to.”

Even as he said it, he was aware of that emotion, attractive yet unwelcome, which had troubled him before. With it, sharply on its heels, came something he could not quite catch, yet wanted desperately to catch. It flashed away before he could seize it, leaving, as with a dream, merely an unintelligible remnant. It was connected with something she had said about having been sent to find him, about “others coming” — here. But the memory eluded him. His effort failed. Instead, horses sprang suddenly through his mind. Horses, yes. “I saw you in the paddock,” he said abruptly.

She smiled, nodding her head, and her whole face lit up. “That how I find you at last,” she agreed eagerly. “Always — for so long — I watch you, but you nevaire see me or look at me. Then the horses help — I find you through the horses.” Her gaze held his eyes fixedly as she then said a thing that startled him: “I know your father — grandfather too.”

The words ran through him like fire. Something made his heart sink. That “know,” in the present tense, was a foreigner’s slip, of course, but even while he told himself this he had the feeling there were two sets of values here, two worlds, and that he was confusing them. Were the eyes hypnotic? Rather wild notions of similar kind flashed and disappeared. He knew nothing of such matters. He felt the power, the intense attraction, while yet no corresponding warmth flowed through his veins. Confusion deepened. This lack of warmth, however, he distinctly noticed. It was negative, of course, but on its heels came something positive, something that struck him sharply. He was aware of cold.

“My father — grandfather,” he repeated, lowering his voice without knowing why he did so, “they — both — went out — early.”

The words were foolish rather, he realised, even as he spoke them. He himself felt suddenly foolish, incompetent, inefficient, without his usual control and powers, whatever these might be. This woman drew him terribly; it was her mind and will that drew him. His own mind, his mental powers and his will, seemed rather shamefully, dreadfully enfeebled. He neither asked her name nor who she was, nor how she knew him, nor what she wanted — he asked her no single ordinary question a man in his present extraordinary situation must have asked. He did not once press for any explanation, leaving even her strange words alone. That two sets of values troubled and confused him, he asserts, was clear; that this found him bereft of guidance was also clear. He did wonder for a moment vaguely, it seems, about such dark horrors as blackmail, trickery, sudden death, even about the terrors of the underworld and its inscrutable gangs, but these ideas dropped away as ridiculous before he even troubled to visualise them. This woman was of another kind — yes, surely of quite another kind.

“I simply longed to speak to you, to be with you.” He found his tongue again at last, a flavour of the ordinary world now in his speech. “I felt so certain you had something to say to me — as it were.”

The references to his father and grandfather were already forgotten. He stared down into her dark eyes that he now knew definitely were terrible and dangerous.

“I’m damned if I know why,” he added, with truth, oblivious that it was ungallant.

“Horses, you see,” she murmured. “You are passioné for horses. I too. And so at last I find you — for them.”

“Horses!” he repeated, enthusiasm waking in him, and her last two words entirely unnoticed. They talked of horses then, yet of no particular animal by name, for what seemed to him a very long time … until he found himself realising two things suddenly: that the invitation in her eyes had become abruptly accentuated and that the room in which they sat and talked was even much colder than it had been. This cold, he now became aware, had steadily intensified while they talked. It had been slowly growing. He felt numb. Another thing he realised as well — the cold was not due to any drop of temperature in the ordinary way, for the air that warm summer night was even stifling. The cold lay in his soul.

The invitation in her glowing eyes was also cold, the fire burning in them without heat. They held his own with power, while he returned the gaze with an effort suddenly, aware at last that he wished to escape from something that threatened to overcome him, something stronger than himself. This abrupt reaction, lasting for a brief moment, woke his common sense, his practical judgement, his realisation that he was in a foolish, even a dangerous situation, and had behaved in a reckless and idiotic manner.

He had followed a strange woman into a strange house that was unknown to him for all its queer feeling of familiarity, and had sat talking with her alone till a very late hour in the night. That they had been fellow guests at a party was no excuse if anything unpleasant supervened, for he did not know her name even, nor anything about her beyond the fact that this mutual attraction existed. The boyishness of the episode appalled him, but it was another thing that decided him upon action now — something she had let fall hours ago when they first began to talk, something he had unaccountably ignored until this moment. Memory now flashed it back into his mind: She had been sent to find him! And someone else — others — were coming, coming soon! This horrified him now.

He got up, noting the great effort it cost him to do so; he put his hand out and took her own. “I’m leaving you now,” were the blunt words he found on his lips. “I must go; I must go at once. I must say good-bye” Only to find that the woman’s fingers held him in a grip of iron. She made no effort, apparently; it was simply that he could not free his hand. About her somewhere was this great effortless power. Nor was it with any other expression than a quiet smile, as she looked him full in the eyes, that she whispered in that husky voice: “Oh no, not now; it is too late. And they have already come … for you.”

He stood there, bending a little over her on the divan as he held her hand to say good-bye, unable to move beyond a slight straightening of his body, knowing that something of resistance and control had horribly weakened in him. He said no word. This weakening was of the mind, not physical, he realised in an instant of hideous terror. His other feelings were of such trouble and confusion, and they raced with such speed through him, that he held none of them even for a second.

It was the terror that dominated all, for he was aware that behind his bent back others had now entered the room, noiselessly, he knew not how, but with relentless determination. And with their advent it was clear to him that the woman, whose hand still grasped his own, was in some curious manner and degree of less importance to him. She, too, was weakening. Her height of power, whatever it had been, had passed its climax, as though, her mission accomplished, she was free to go. The conviction rose somewhere at the back of his confused and racing thought. As he still bent over her, staring down at her before turning to confront those others in the room behind him, he saw that the light seemed fading from her face and eyes, while her hand in his, it seemed, grew smaller, feebler, as though it were dissolving.

He freed his fingers easily from her clasp, straightened himself, and turned slowly towards the new arrivals. They were coming close; he saw them distinctly as they moved towards him in the room that was dim, and growing perhaps, he fancied, yet dimmer. They stood out sharp and clearly defined as they advanced cautiously, slowly, with a curious intense determination, one slightly in front of the other. He watched them, sweetness and horror in him, attraction and repulsion, both powerful. Towards him they moved, these two male figures — two men, with an air of disguise that was yet not intentional disguise, but merely that they were not in clothes the men of his own world wore. There came also a sharp, awful realisation that the pair moved soundlessly upon the floor which, again with a terrifying realisation, he now recognised as the drawing-room of his boyhood days. He was in his family’s house, the house he knew, occupied now by someone else whose name escaped him.

“Come, my boy,” said his father quietly, looking at him, his figure not three feet away. “Come to us, come over. You disliked me, and I had no link. But she found you at last through horses.”

“And me you feared,” issued from the lips of the older face that peered across his father’s shoulder from the shadows. “You have little now to live for—” The broken dreadful ruin of the old man stopped, as though power failed him.

“Nothing,” added his father, with a hard, narrow smile.

A husky whisper came from the divan behind him, fading, as though a great distance intervened:

“From the window. It is at once, and there is no pain.”

He turned his head a little and saw that she had risen and was now standing close behind him. They seemed, all three, to surround him, closing in. He had always disliked his father; he now hated him; had rather dreaded his grandfather as a little boy, whose old, bent figure now, with the shaking head, the thin, skinny neck, the lampless eyes, sent horror through him. They came still nearer, they almost touched him; he was aware of a cold beyond all experience. Yes, they were closing in upon him, nearer every second; yet even while they came, with their silent gliding motion, they were fading, growing dim. Of the woman, indeed, he perceived nothing now but the eyes, two spots of light.

But one thing was not dim — the gaping window just beside the divan. They moved slightly, opening to let him pass, though they spoke no word. The drop from the ledge was easy. He looked down. The railings, far below, were clear. “I’ll come,” he said, “I’ll join you…” and began to heave his big body over. It was not difficult, only somehow his legs, his feet, got caught. He made a violent but ineffectual effort to free them. Then all turned black.

•   •   •

It was Mr. MacFarlane, hiding upstairs from his wife’s tiresome At Home, and seeing Malcolm of McQuittie go, rather stealthily he fancied, past his open door, wondering, too, what a guest — he knew him well — was doing in the upper part of the house; it was Mr. MacFarlane, leaving his book to follow and watch, who saw him go to the open window in the passage. “Hullo, Malcolm! Having a look at the old boyhood scene, eh?” He had received no reply. A queer, tense expression in his friend’s face gave him what he called “rather a turn.” He saw him begin to climb out. He went after him. He caught him just in the nick of time — by the legs and feet.

The unconsciousness continued for several days; his life was given up, the doctor announcing at one time that he was already dead. He recovered finally, however, though memory returned reluctantly and with many obstinate blanks at first. Only a considerable time after could he reconstitute the entire experience, an experience which: had lasted only a few seconds by Greenwich time.

Mrs. MacFarlane was kindness itself, and it was to her he told the details when they began to come back. She gave him sympathy, but one thing she did not give him, one thing she and her husband knew — the little detail that the house had an occupant, an occasional occupant not of her own household — or at least that a figure was seen in it from time to time, a figure not of this world. Accurately, this figure tallied precisely with that of a Russian woman who had lived in the house for a year before the MacFarlanes bought it. She was a strange woman, a gambler of the reckless kind, apparently a bit mad into the bargain, for she had killed herself one fine day by jumping from a third-storey window. Her one great passion in life was horses.

•   •   •   •   •   •

CHEMICAL

It is odd how trivial a thing can cause a first, instinctive dislike: the way a man wears his hat, the smirk with which a woman uses her mirror and lipstick in a public place — and aversion is suddenly aroused. Later knowledge may justify this first dislike, but the actual start has been the merest triviality.

Some think, however, this cause has not been so trivial as it appears; that gesture, being an unconscious expression of the entire personality, may betray far more than speech, which is calculated. Moleson, thinking over the brusqueness of the stranger on the doorstep, the unnecessary way he pushed ahead of him and up the stairs, his whole air, indeed, of general resentment and disapproval, found himself recalling a rather significant answer that a very wise old man had once given in his hearing to a commonplace question. The question was not his own: he was listening to two friends discussing a third.

“Everything indicates,” said the first, carelessly enough, “that I ought to like X. I have nothing against him. Quite the reverse, in fact. Yet I do not like him. I simply cannot like him, try as I will, Now — why don’t I?”

“Your dislike,” was the reply, “is probably chemical. Merely chemical.”

This came back to Moleson’s mind now, as he unpacked his things and arranged himself in the top-floor bed-sitting-room he had engaged that afternoon. It was in Bloomsbury, close to the British Museum. The November twilight was setting in; the gas, electric light stopping at the second floor, was poor; his reading-lamp was not yet unpacked. “Chemical!…” he thought. “I wonder!…” as he looked out a moment into the rather dismal street, where the Museum buildings blocked the sky with their sombre and formidable mass. He had, of course, the layman’s vague knowledge of the loves and hates of atoms, their intense attraction and repulsion for each other, the dizzy rapidity with which they rushed towards, or away from, those they respectively liked or disliked. Had all the atoms of which he was composed, then, turned their backs instinctively upon those which made up the stranger’s body, racing away at a headlong speed that caused him this acute and positive discomfort? Was his instantaneous loathing “merely chemical”?…

As he bustled about arranging his things, his dislike of the fellow remained vivid and persistent. The recent scene again passed through his mind in detail.

He had called in the morning and interviewed Mrs. Smith, with the result: “Not at the moment, sir, I ’aven’t got a room free”; then, after a rather curious hesitation, “But later a little, maybe”; then more hesitation; “This afternoon, per’aps — I — I might be able to manage it — if you could make it convenient — to call in again…”; whereupon, seeing that the house was so admirably close to the Reading Room where his daily work would be, Moleson offered to pay in advance, but was then quick enough to see that it was not the question of money alone that troubled the woman. Her hesitation, he perceived, was not mere independence, nor was it due to his unprosperous appearance. She wanted a lodger, clearly enough — if she could “manage it,” whatever that might mean — and it was not himself that she objected to. It was, he felt sure, a calculation of sorts she was trying to make in her own mind. He wisely decided to give her time to make it.

“I’ll look in again,” he said, “about three o’clock, say,” and he added, with his pleasant smile, that most of his time would be spent working in the Museum opposite.

It was on his return in the afternoon that the scene occurred.:

He had rung the bell, and was waiting just inside the narrow hall while the maid hurried downstairs to fetch Mrs. Smith, the street door still ajar behind him, when somebody, another lodger evidently, pushed past brusquely, offensively, almost resentfully, half shoving him, yet without actual contact, from where he stood at the foot of the stairs — slightly in the way, perhaps — and without so much as by your leave. There might, of course, have been a grunt of apology, for Moleson was a little deaf, but the man’s attitude made it unlikely, and the pose of the head and shoulders, the face being turned away and not visible, was far more of resentful disapproval than of apology. Moleson, on the instant, loathed him, not because of the rudeness, but because of some presentment his appearance offered that stirred an intense, instinctive dislike amounting to positive repulsion. A moment later, when Mrs. Smith arrived, panting and labouring, the man was up the stairs and out of sight, but at first the impression left was so vivid that Moleson would not have been altogether displeased if he had heard that no room was, after all, available. The contrary, however, took place. A bargain was struck, money passed hands, and the room was his.

The majority of young men in these circumstances would probably have given their attention to the landlady, to whom money must be paid, and on whose goodwill they must depend for their comfort and the like. Moleson, instead, found himself thinking only of this rude fellow lodger. Over his dinner in a neighbouring restaurant he reflected that his sudden dislike was odd; he had never set eyes upon the fellow before, and so far had not even seen the face nor heard the voice, yet this loathing had leaped into being. Revulsion, he called it. Its oddness, of course, lay in this want of proportion. He gave a passing thought, too, to his landlady, yet chiefly using her as a means of comparison with the other. Her rather sombre visage, an overwhelming melancholy in it, though certainly not attractive, woke nothing stronger in him than a vague, tolerant sympathy. He felt no dislike, at any rate; she merely didn’t matter; a worthy soul, he decided, worn into sadness by life. Whereas the other human being gave him this instinctive, deep revulsion. Chemical? He wondered. For why, if chemical, should one unpleasing soul wake pity, and another, equally unpleasing, stir violent antipathy?…

Over his coffee, he dismissed the little puzzle. His room was admirably close to the Museum; Bloomsbury liked him; and it was the number in the street — No. 11 — his Manchester friend and employer had mentioned. The price, too, suited him, for money was scarce, otherwise he would not be “devilling” for another man — looking up certain seventeenth-century facts for a writer who would probably clear £1,000 over his silly book, yet “must be sure of my dates and facts, you know. Your expenses and £5 a week, if you’ll do it for me.…” The street and number, close to the Museum, were added. Young Moleson, ignorant of London, jumped at it.

It was some years before our Great Date this happened. Jim Moleson, engaged to a sweet girl, and now married to her, told me the details recently. The War intervened, of course. He had learnt something. At that time I should have described him as highly strung, sensitive at any rate, imaginative certainly, poetic probably. I, his senior by a quarter of a century, rather believed he wrote “Celtic” poetry in his bedroom. The War undeceived us about that type, revealed them rather: their amazing courage, the splendour of their “imagination,” translated into reckless, inspired action. Jim, anyhow, was always headstrong, fierce-tempered, “nasty” once his feelings were stirred, only these feelings were usually for others — for a lame dog, an injured cat, a bird in a cage, an overworked horse. Slights, even insults to himself he could stand, to the point of cowardice, some thought; but this was wrong; he was easy-going to that point; beyond it he saw red and — killed. This savage temper, rarely roused, and then with a curious suddenness, was an item I overlooked. But it was a human, not merely an animal, temper.

His work at the Museum, apparently, absorbed him; no more painstaking and accurate “devil” ever devilled; and he got back to his room, tired mentally and physically. A nice-looking, upstanding lad with his mop of dark hair and blue eyes, he soon made a friend of Mrs. Smith — over his letters first: “Lef’ at No. 7,” she informed him, the printed name of his employer’s Institute on the envelope catching her trained, if mournful, eye perhaps. “The postman arst me, and I thought they was for you,” she explained. So his slight deafness had again betrayed him, and his employer had said “No. 7,” instead of “No. 11.” They talked on a bit. He had the feeling she wanted to talk a bit, but wanted to talk about something in particular, and to him. He explained about the letters and his troublesome deafness in one ear; he heard her say “your glass of porter” when she actually said, “hot bath-water,” and then, after a nice little chat about the weather, prices, and “’ow times was changing,” he noticed that she suddenly stuck.

This was after a week in the house, he told me. The appalling melancholy of her face came over him, but rather in a new way; he realised it in some personal sense, I think, as they stood awkwardly staring at one another, each waiting for the other to speak, so that through his sensitive, imaginative mind ran the thought: “That’s no ordinary sadness, I’ll be bound!…” — and then he stuck.

The impulse to say something kind rose in him, only he could think of nothing to say, nothing suitable. It was here he got his first clear, instinctive impression about this commonplace woman: that she was interested, namely, to ask some definite question of him, that, liking and trusting him, and, further, having watched carefully and waited anxiously the whole week, she now longed to put this definite query to him, yet was afraid. The same hesitation he had seen first on the doorstep showed itself in her face and sorrowful eyes.

He had been vaguely aware of this for some time evidently, but had not recognised it. It was not, he felt sure, any question about his comfort, for he was old enough to know that landladies rarely took that risk. Something, none the less, she wanted to know, something personal to himself. The suffering in her face made him wonder. A queer sympathy moved through him. He recalled the stationer round the corner in Bury Street, when he bought his paper and materials: “Oh yes, I know, sir; that’s Mrs. Warley’s,” saying he would send the parcel round, and, being corrected: “No, Mrs. Smith’s,” he looked blank a moment, troubled a little, but in a kindly sense, before he agreed: “Oh yes, to be sure, sir — Mrs. Smith’s — now. So it is….” That “now” was suggestive. She had changed her name, married again, no doubt, yet there had been trouble of some sort, Moleson gathered. And, though he had not pursued the matter at the time, this little memory came back now, as he stood chatting with her, trying to think of something pleasant he might say. He wondered….

“I’m very comfortable,” he said on impulse, presently, “The room’s just what I wanted—” and he was about to add some kind and soothing word when she interrupted in an eager way that startled him:

“Oh, then everything is all right, sir? There’s nothing, I mean, interfering with your quiet? If anything annoys” — she changed the verb, before it was completed, to “disturbs,” then stopped dead.

It was not the words — commonplace enough: it was her face that startled him. It had been on the tip of her tongue, he felt, so say “anyone” instead of “anything.” He knew it in his bones. Also, she could have cut off that tongue for having let it say what it had said. That, too, he perceived. This question she longed yet feared to ask had nearly slipped out in spite of herself. Her face, anyhow, betrayed an emotion that for an instant obliterated its usual sadness. It was the emotion of terror.

Moleson, as he caught it, felt shocked. The sharp instinct came suddenly to him that it was wiser not to ask. He cut the talk short, as nicely as he could. “Nothing, nothing,” he replied, gave her his pleasant smile, and went up quickly to his room.

Her question was an approach to the real one she wanted so much to ask. That, of course, he realised. Terror lay in it; it was wrapped round with terror as in a cocoon. Once the cocoon burst, was broken, out would come all the hideous wriggling things that lay concealed inside. This was the feeling Moleson carried upstairs with him. It was as though he had just caught a glimpse, behind her suddenly pale skin, of the hideous wriggling things that caused her sadness and her terror. But another certainty lay in him too at this moment: the question she had asked, this preliminary question that was an approach to another, referred — he felt positive of it — to someone he particularly sought to keep out of his thoughts as much as ever he could. She referred, indirectly thus, to the other lodger.

It was his habit at night, after his dinner round the corner, to sort out the notes of his day’s work before an early bed. Tonight, however, this talk stayed by him and prevented. He sat thinking about it … and eventually, it seems, thought circling and circling but coming to no satisfactory conclusion, of course, he dropped asleep, to wake very suddenly much later in a state of uncommon distress — “acute distress,” he called it, “funk.”

This, I think, is one of the most curious and betraying things about the whole business: that, even when he told it all to me later, he kept off that unpleasant lodger, as he called him — kept him so long in the background. He had begun by emphasising his unusual repulsion towards the fellow, dwelling upon it, stressing it, just as I have done in this written account. But then, when I was expecting the lodger to appear in some dreadful and dramatic guise — a sneak-thief, a forger with coining apparatus, a blackmailer in league with Mrs. Warley-Smith (as I styled her), even a murderer hiding from the police with the woman’s help — Moleson merely left him out. He ignored him, made no mention of him. He talked about his work, about Mrs. Smith, his liking the house, yet disliking the room — feeling it disliked him and wanted him out — about anything except the sinister lodger. Having first firmly fixed him in my mind as an ominous character, he just left him there. Thus, when I tried to bring him to the point — this suggestive point of the sinister lodger, and a point he had himself established in opening his tale — he stopped abruptly, and stared into my face, his features working, his eyes gone positively googly. Some fear, I saw, still operated in him, unreleased. His face gave me a touch of goose-flesh. There was an ingredient of salutary “confession” in his delayed account, I began to gather. He lowered his voice. “I knew you’d ask that before long,” he said. “You see — I shirked him myself,”

“Refused to acknowledge him, you mean?” I queried vaguely. “Tried to pretend he wasn’t in the house?”

He nodded, looking down at his boots.

“You disliked him,” I insisted, “to that point?” The expression in his eyes, as he glanced up quickly, answered me better than his words.

“It’s unbelievable,” he whispered, “how that fellow obsessed me. Obsessed is the term.”

I asked if he saw him often.

“After that first encounter on the front-door steps — only twice, all told.”

The intensity, a sort of inner secrecy in him still, made me hesitate, but as he said nothing, I presently asked boldly:

“But — in the end — you found out who he was, what he was doing there? In a word — why you loathed him so?” I got no straight answer, but I got the full story, told in his own evasive, curious way.

“I mentioned how I dropped asleep in my chair, and woke up suddenly feeling frightened,” he went on. “Well — that’s the point, you see.”

“What is?” I asked, justifiably dense.

He cast his eyes down as though he were ashamed of it. “I’d been frightened all along,” he muttered. “Damned frightened. Ever since I’d been in that awful house, I’d been frightened.”

“Of — him?”

He nodded.

He believed he had discovered why the fellow resented his being there: it was because Moleson occupied his room. Mrs. Smith had hesitated that first morning whether she could turn him out or not — his rent probably overdue, and what not — but eventually had spoken to him — and Moleson, as described, cash in hand, had moved in. It was a sufficiently obvious explanation.

“But that didn’t explain my own abhorrence — did it?”

Obviously not.

“He may have felt resentful, furious, because I’d got his room, but that couldn’t have made me feel the physical repulsion, to the point of nausea, which I did feel. And dread too. I only saw him twice after that first meeting, but though I saw him so rarely, I knew he was in the house with me. I never forgot it. He was all over the house expresses it better. I was always expecting to meet him, to run across him on the stairs, to find him in the hall. When I came down the street I imagined him standing on the doorstep, fumbling with his latchkey. When I went to my bath half-way down the stairs, I thought we should pass. At night, if I went out to post a letter; in the morning when I opened my door to take my hot water in. But, no; he made no sign, I did not meet him. What he did all day I have no notion: he never went out, so far as I saw or knew. But then I myself was out from nine to five, then again for my dinner between eight and nine, you see.”

At a great rate he rattled this off. He gave me a good deal in a very few words.

A definite question halted his rambling account, though it was my object, otherwise, to hear the tale just as he cared to tell it.

“Describe him?” He repeated my words. “As I first saw him Oh yes. Though I didn’t see the features, remember, that time.”

Then he startled me by raising his voice most unexpectedly in his excitement: “Misshapen!” he shouted in my face, so that I jumped. “Well, you asked me; and that’s what I felt about him. But mentally, morally, rather than physically. That’s the impression he made on me.” And then he barked out another word: “A monster!” A little shudder ran over him. “I didn’t see the face,” he went on, “because he didn’t mean me to see it. He moved sideways, the shoulder next to me humped up a trifle so as to hide it. A bit of a beard I saw, or whiskers, straggly hair, anyhow, that left in my mind some faint notion of pretence, of a wig perhaps. But my mind at the moment was on my business with Mrs. Smith, and I wasn’t trying to see what a stranger pushing rudely past me was like. I had no particular interest in him then. Clothes? … Oh, that I couldn’t say with accuracy either, but a dark suit, and a bowler hat on his head. Dark,” he emphasised, “the whole look and feel of the man was dark.”

I was still anxiously waiting for that account of his waking up frightened in his chair, for my interest was now deeply held. But I was patient; I had to be. He went on to tell me how he was forever expecting to see the man again, yet did not see him. This repetition, in the tale as he told it, was not redundant, though, when written, it may seem so. It led up with a bang, as it were, to the meeting — the sight, rather — when it came. Every morning on going out to his work he was positive he must pass the fellow on the darkish stairs, but the stairs were empty; on the landing when he opened his door, on the front-door steps when he returned in the evening, but landing and steps were unoccupied. He would have a good look at the door first from a little way up the street, before coming to it, for the dread of meeting was established, horribly established, in his being — “expectant dread,” he called it. Then, suddenly, he did see him. This was the second time.

“I was hardly settled at my desk in the Reading Room,” he described the incident, “when I found I’d left my employer’s letter on the mantelpiece. It had questions for me to verify, you see. I hurried back for it. It only took five minutes — that’s why the house suited me so — but I had a good squint first from a distance to see if the doorstep was free. No one was visible. I ran up. Just as I slipped my latchkey in, I glanced up — something made me — and there he was, staring down at me from the window — my window.”

“In your room!”

“I saw the face for the first time, but only for a second, just long enough for our eyes to meet. He withdrew it instantly — awfully quick, I mean. It was dark, unshaven, the beard not a real intended beard. I saw hanging lips. No, it was not what you’d call an evil face, not in that sense, but it was dreadful in the sense of being out of relation with any world I knew. Horrible, appalling, in that way. It was a mad face. Behind its darkness there was white — the white of terror. The face was all I really saw, with just a bit of the neck that had a thin red scarf about it…. The key dropped out of my fingers with a clatter on the steps. I was shaking all over.

“Ferreting about in my room! … was my first thought — the room that used to be his!… But a second thought came with it simultaneously, and it was this second thought that unsettled me most, I believe. I realised in a flash that the fellow had been actually watching me ever since my arrival, keeping out of my way On purpose, waiting an opportunity, waiting for me to go out — oh, I can’t describe it exactly — but he knew my every movement, I mean.”

“You rushed up?” I interrupted. It was a stupid question, but the dread of this mysterious lodger in my mind excited me.

Moleson hesitated. “I’ve got a vile temper, you know,” he said, shyly rather, as though I was not supposed to be aware of this; “vile,” he repeated with emphasis and a touch of shame, “curiously sudden too—”

“That brute in your own room,” I helped him. For a moment I feared I was to hear of a violent assault.

“I was up those stairs in a second or two,” he went on, “and the first thing I noticed on getting to the top was that my door was moving. There was no one on the landing. The room itself was empty.” He paused, looking at me significantly. “The fellow,” he then added, “had got out — just in time.” Again he paused for a moment. “I shouldn’t have waited to ask any questions, you know.”

I knew he meant it, but I was glad to have been spared details of an ugly assault. This savage temper in Moleson always alarmed me rather. I verily believe he would have done the fellow in. His face, as he told it, betrayed him. By this time, moreover, I already had a shrewd suspicion of what was to prove the explanation of this unpleasant and mysterious lodger: a mad mind certainly, a maniac probably (I had glimpses of a homicidal maniac), he would turn out to be the son of Mrs. Smith. That I was partly right, yet at the same time curiously wrong, is a tribute perhaps to the unconscious skill with which Moleson told his story, concealing its climax admirably, yet disdaining to mislead me by using false clues.

The crime of murder, at any rate, was meanwhile spared him. The room was empty, nothing had apparently been touched, and the corridor was empty too. His suggestion of having been “watched” I disregarded. Later, however, I inclined to accept it.

“Across my landing,” Moleson continued, “was one door only — the door of what I felt convinced was his room. It was closed. My first instinct was to bang at it and ask him what the devil … Well” — he laughed a little — “I didn’t do it, that’s all. My anger had cooled down somehow. I just snatched up the letter I’d come to fetch and went back to the Museum Reading Room.”

I looked at him, impressed by his admirable brevity, thinking of the M.C. gained in Flanders, of that runaway he once stopped, of the two hefty ruffians he fought, half killing one of them, in a Surrey lane when they objected to his interfering on behalf of their overloaded horses. He had various things to his credit of this sort, and he was delicate, of slight build, no muscles or brawn at all. Moleson, with his fierce, perhaps great, spirit, was not negligible. Any story he told, I mean, had value…. “Now,” I thought to myself, “at last we’ll get to this business about waking up frightened!” Not a bit of it. He must tell me something about Mrs. Smith first. And though it delayed the thing I wanted to hear, it was worth listening to.

Poor lodging-houses have secrets, secret lodgers, as well, no doubt. His room was cheap, too cheap. But it was not his business, after all. “Better leave it at that!” he decided. Only one thing troubled me about Mrs. Smith — her interest, namely, in ascertaining if he was “not interfered with” — as though she had rather expected that he would be disturbed. Her phrase had anchored itself in his mind; he was always recalling it; he couldn’t forget it apparently. Why should he be “interfered with”? What — who — should interfere with him? Who, indeed, he reflected, but this man? This man who had been turned out for him? This man whose room he now undoubtedly occupied? And so it was that, since Mrs. Smith came to no closer terms with the real question she longed to ask, he now, for his part, decided to come to closer terms with the question 4e wanted to ask: “Who is your other lodger?” For the floor below being empty, he knew there was none but himself and this other lodger in the house.

After various hints, suggestions and the rest, chances he provided but she did not take, the expression in her face invariably making him pause — after numerous futile leads, he came abruptly one day to the direct question. Tired of fencing, a touch of his queer anger stirred in him. He made up his mind to know whether her feelings were upset or not. He put the direct question, though he did it delicately enough:

“By the by,” he said, as they were in the narrow hall, money having just passed, “I meant to ask you sooner, Mrs. Smith — my typewriter at night — does it disturb anyone? The gentleman opposite, I mean?”

If he was prepared for evasion of some kind, he was certainly not prepared for the answer he received.

“She denied there being any gentleman opposite at all?” I asked, as Moleson hesitated, wondering, I fancied, how best to make her answer sound credible to a Philistine like myself.

“She didn’t answer,” he said briefly. “Her face turned white as a sheet. She fell back against the hat-rack. She screamed. It was a curious scream, rather low, not noisy a bit. And it was pain, not fear. She was hurt, terribly hurt. She began to cry….”

Further explanation of the amazing collapse, beyond that her “’eart caught me sudden — it’s always been weak” — there was none. It was in this brief fashion that Moleson related the incident, then left it there without another word — as J, too, must therefore leave it.

•   •   •

For some days after that nothing happened. He did not see the lodger. He avoided the landlady. He began to look forward to the end of his stay, hurrying his work at the Museum purposely. But his mind was forever going back, he says, to that odd question about being “interfered with,” and one night in particular, as he sat over his notes after dinner, memory carried him away rather forcibly, rather persistently, to that phrase which had started his original uneasiness. He sat in his chair, lolling back, and thinking about it, wondering afresh about this mysterious lodger, about what he did, why he hid so carefully, why he watched him. The old notions slipped through his mind, for no new ones occurred to him: was he a coiner of counterfeit money, a blackmailer, a lunatic, a man wanted by the police, a man who ought by rights to be shut up, a suicidal maniac … and so, eventually, he dropped asleep in his chair … to wake up suddenly “frightened, and in acute distress.”

So, at last, we had got to it.

It was late. The night was very still, all noises in the street had stopped. No footsteps even were audible on the pavement through the open window. “I woke up cold,” he said, “cold to the bone. The room, in spite of the warm summer air, was icy. I was shivering.”

And at first, rather bewildered after his sleep, he sat there listening, waiting, wondering why he felt cold, wondering for some minutes what the matter was. That something was the matter, he felt sure. Something had been happening, had just happened, while he was asleep. But what? He collected his senses, remembering exactly where he was. Details, of course, came back quickly then. He says the first thing he noticed was that a change had come over the room. The room was somehow different. It had curiously altered. When he dropped off to sleep it had been one thing, now it was another. He glanced about him, searching uncomfortably for evidence of this change, but finding no single detail altered, nothing out of place, the furniture exactly as it always was — until his eye rested on the door. The door, he phrased it, “drew” his attention, although a closed door — and it was closed now — must always, it seemed to me, look much the same.

“Well,” he said, “it didn’t.” He used the tone of challenge, anticipating disbelief. “That door,” he declared, “had been opened and shut while I was asleep.” He waited a moment. “It had only just been shut — that very second.”

The imaginative statement struck me as singularly dramatic. Proof, of course, was not possible, yet a door, I reflected, is easily the most significant feature of a house, opened, closed, tapped on, locked; it is a frontier, a threshold, and when passed, either in exit or entrance, leads necessarily to other conditions of living, to other states of mind, since it leads to other people and other atmosphere. I could understand in a fashion that Moleson used those words. He rather convinced me, I mean, that he was possibly right.

“That’s what made you wake,” I offered, filling the pause he left.

“Yes,” he returned flatly. “While I slept, that door had been opened, someone had looked in, come in, moved about the room, done something, then gone out again — pone out just that instant.”

Aware of this change in the room, or in the atmosphere about him, he sat for some time staring at that door. He listened intently. A glance at his wristwatch showed that it was two in the morning, so that he had slept several hours. The deep silence of the house came over him unpleasantly, and his distress, instead of passing, increased. He found himself still shivering. But a moment later his cold skin turned hot and broke out in a profuse perspiration — at a sound. It was a sound he recognised, having heard it before: the dragging of furniture or luggage across the landing, of heavy and awkward articles, difficult to move. He had heard it already several times, late at night, early in the morning, through his dreams as well, and he had always ascribed it to the lodger, busy arranging things in his room opposite, and using the landing sometimes in so doing. He had paid no particular attention to it, beyond a passing annoyance at the choice of hours, and the sounds had usually ceased after a few minutes at the most. Now, however, he was conscious of a difference, for in the first place it was two in the morning, when ordinary people were asleep; secondly, he realised distinctly, it was not furniture or luggage being moved — it was a piece of luggage, a heavy piece, for the sound was unmistakable. He thought of a trunk or portmanteau. Moreover — it was going on immediately outside his own door.

“The fellow was dragging this luggage of his across the landing just beyond my door,” Moleson underlined the fact. “At two o’clock in the morning, if you please!”

The first effect upon him was one of a queer paralysis, mental and physical. He could neither think nor move.

“I just sat listening to the fellow dragging his great bag, or whatever it was, across the landing — dragging it, I supposed, towards his own room opposite. Then, very gradually, my mental numbness lifted, and I found myself wondering why. At two in the morning! Dragging luggage about! What was he doing with luggage on the landing of a Bloomsbury lodging-house at that unearthly hour? So close to my own door too? The bumping and scraping were audible enough; there was no pretence of doing it quietly. Where was he taking his luggage from? Where to? My mind worked quickly, once it started. A score of questions rushed over me. What could it be, this bag, this portmanteau, this heavy bundle so difficult to move? What could it contain? What had he put inside it? Taken?”

“Taken?…” I repeated, not quite following him.

“Some of the questions racing through my mind,” he explained, “brought a kind of answer with them. That’s the only way I can put it,” he added apologetically, a sop to me, the sceptical recipient of his confession.

“What had he taken?” he repeated, looking at me rather hard.

I had no notion.

“But I had,” said Moleson with decision, interpreting my blank expression. “I guessed at once — half guessed, at least.”

He had me at a loss there, I admit; but I made no comment, merely nodding my head affirmatively. His next words took me completely by surprise:

“His great bag or bundle, whatever it was,” whispered Moleson, “contained something he had just taken out of my room. While I slept, the fellow had sneaked in, crept about, found what he wanted, taken it, and sneaked out again with it — in his bag.”

Again I made no comment, the explanation being too preposterous to argue about. Moleson, besides, was now too earnest and convinced — he knew, remember, the climax, whereas I was still in ignorance — too eager to make his full confession for me to interfere and cavil with commonplace criticism. It might have stopped him, for one thing….

“You missed anything?” I asked, no actual disbelief in my face or voice. I had to repeat it before he replied, and his reply, when it came, again took me by surprise. Also, it sent a shiver through me, as though the hair were moving on my scalp.

“What he had taken,” he told me in a lowered voice, and speaking very slowly, “was not in my room at that time — when I fell asleep, I mean. But it had been there — some time before.”

The statement, naturally, left me without a rejoinder. I lit a cigarette and waited in silence.

“At that moment,” he went on impressively, still in his whisper, and loathing coming into his face with a leap, as it were, “I knew — he was a — horror. Oh, in every meaning of the word. And a queer, sudden revulsion rushed over me — the intense desire to see him close, to look at him face to face, to speak to him — I never once heard his voice, you know — to — yes, even to touch the brute; and in so doing — somehow — God knows how — to get rid of him. So far he had avoided me deliberately. All this time he had evaded, escaped me. He meant to avoid and escape me, but now at last I had him close — a few feet away — busy, occupied, within reach, unable to get away — if I just opened that door. I need only open that door, and I should see him — catch him in the act.”

Longing to ask “In what act?” I ventured instead “You felt angry all of a sudden?” and hit the mark better than I knew.

He admitted it, ashamed a little, with a nod. “I felt cold all over, mind you,” he went on, always in that low voice, “scared as well, really scared, but at the same time, as you say, I felt” — he chose a queer word — “vicious.” Exasperated, too, a bit. I wanted to be done with it. I wanted to get at the fellow. Why the devil should he make this infernal row at two in the morning? How dared he? How dared he come into another man’s room, even if it had once been his own? Why should he watch me, bother me, haunt me, get into my mind — and all the rest of it? Yes ’ — with a touch of fierceness — “you’re right — I did feel angry all of a sudden. I decided abruptly I’d go out—” .

“Open that door?” — I simply couldn’t keep it back. Personally, I should not have opened that door at two in the morning under the circumstances.

“Yes, open the door, go out, and tell the brute to go to hell. I decided to do that — and more—”

I knew what that “more” meant.

“ — but when I tried to get up from my chair, I found I couldn’t move. I just sat there, furiously angry, struggling — like a mechanical doll whose machinery had run down. I was dying to get at the fellow. I was perspiring all over. I felt that if he answered back, showed any insolence, I’d — strangle him — just go for him and be done with it. Throttle the devil! I felt my fingers at his throat, the prickle of his filthy beard, saw his hanging lips drop wider as he fought for breath, his beastly eyes bulge out, his face turn black — oh, I was in this odd, sudden fury, I admit — and yet — I couldn’t move an inch.

“Perhaps — probably — I made a noise of some kind — cursed aloud most likely, but anyhow the sound of the dragging luggage suddenly stopped. A deep, rather an extraordinary silence followed. I could hear the blood beating in my head. I sat fixed in my chair like a dummy, staring at the door. Only that door separated us. He existed there — breathing, vivid, intense — a few feet from where I sat rigid in my chair, unable to get at him, unable to move a muscle. He seemed to exert some tremendous pressure on me, paralysing my will, holding me helpless where I was.”

Moleson mopped his forehead a moment.

“I was so angry,” he went on, rather breathless now in his excitement, as though he lived over again his fury and exasperation, “that I felt murder in me. Positively, I felt myself a murderer.”

Curiously, he stopped dead suddenly. A look of shyness came over him. He stared at me, I stared back at him. Such language, of course, in anybody else, would have been merely extravagant, hysterical. In his case it was real. I knew his sudden, ungovernable temper; I knew, too, he was ashamed of it. In a less civilised country he must always have been in trouble with his gun. He was the type that saw red and killed. And a quick flash of understanding somehow came into me, so that I guessed in that instant the explanation both of his abrupt pause and of his queer shyness. Having this dangerous thing in himself, he recognised it in others too. That sympathy existed.

“Yes — that’s how I knew,” he muttered, looking down, having guessed my thought. “Chemical,” he went on below his breath. “It’s opposites that attract, but likes that repel.”

“What was he,” I asked, fumbling with my cigarette.

“A murderer,” he said, quietly. “I felt the same.”

•   •   •

I waited in silence, wondering what he was going to tell me. His face was rather white, his excitement only kept under by his doubt of being believed. It was best now, I felt, to ask no questions. In his own way he would presently go on. But curiosity, I confess, devoured me. Did he open that door? Did he see the other fellow, speak to him, touch him, perhaps go for him?

His own mind, however, was an odd psychological revelation — of himself.

“And the instant I realised that,” he went on, “the power to move came back to me. My muscles acted. The pressure the fellow exerted was lifted, because we understood one another. There was that ghastly sympathy between us. I got out of my chair and crossed the floor. I reached the door. Then I stopped a moment and listened. He, too, I knew, was listening a few inches away from my face, nothing but half an inch of thin boards between us, listening to my movements, bending to the keyhole probably, crouching, his luggage neglected for a moment while he waited to see what I was going to do. A second later I caught the handle, turned it, and flung the door wide open with a rush.

“There he was before me. Quite close. He was bending down, exactly as I had imagined, crouching, his head lowered; and at his feet, less than a yard beyond me, I saw on the floor the dark blotch that was his luggage.

“What happened then happened so quickly that it seemed less than a second. From the stooping position he did not rise, nor make any attempt to rise. One hand, still stretched out upon the bag, began to work. He pulled at it. He had been pulling at it when I opened the door, and he went on pulling at it — dragging it, dragging it away from me, away from the door, and across the landing floor. I, for my part, had one hand raised to strike, to clutch, to kill if necessary, but my hand did not fall. I did nothing violent, because I made in that very instant a horrible discovery. I suddenly realised that he did not see me. He had not noticed me. He was not aware of my being there close beside him. He did not react to my presence in any way because he was simply not conscious of it. He continued doing what he had been doing just before — dragging his luggage across the landing floor. I saw the dark mass of it go hitching along in jerks as he pulled. It was very heavy.

“And this — this not being aware of me, I mean — came as a tremendous shock. The surprise of it, perhaps. It was the last thing in the world I’d expected. I had rather looked for something sudden, violent. I was prepared for it. This way he just ignored me turned me cold. It struck me as unnatural. I stood and stared, for I didn’t know what else to do, and my body was trembling, and I felt queerly uncertain of my legs. I watched him go on dragging at that heavy thing, which I now saw was not luggage after all, not ordinary luggage, at least. It was neither bag nor portmanteau, nor anything like that. It was a sack of awkward shape and outline. It was unpleasant, I thought, the way it bulged. But more than that, more than unusual, it gave me a turn — I felt it somewhere awful. And realising this, I made an unconscious movement evidently, for I felt my breath catch, and I must have staggered a little. I caught at the edge of the door to steady myself, and the door, naturally, yielded with my weight; I lurched with it, sideways at first, then a little outwards as the door came with me, and then — forwards. Before I could recover balance, I was against him. I was right into him.

“But I didn’t fall. I didn’t, thank God, collide with the monstrous creature and his awful sack, but I was so close against him that the shock of finding nothing solid — there was no substance there at all — stopped my heart for a second, It seemed to rush up into my throat. Then my breath came back, and I let out a yell into the night that must have been heard in the street. At which moment, still dragging at his bundle, he made a sudden, rather violent, movement. He turned in a new way. I saw his face clearly.

“By ‘clearly’ I mean close — dreadfully close. It was turned up, but I saw it obliquely rather, a kind of sideways glimpse, and even then he wasn’t looking at me. The light from the open door behind fell on it, and I saw the eyes, blazing eyes, the hanging lips, the white skin smudged with unshaven hair of the growing black beard, and — to my utter amazement — tears upon the cheeks. It was a maniac’s face, if ever I saw one. The other thing that I saw clearly was that the thin red scarf about the neck was not a scarf at all. It was a thin red line of contused blood in the flesh of the neck itself, a line that only a rope, drawn very tightly, could have made.”

Moleson stopped then and sank back in his chair, looking away from me, and glad, I think, that he had got so far without interruption. His words and manner, his facial expression above all, conveyed his horror far better than his jerked-out sentences. I smoked a moment in silence, handing him a cigarette too, which he refused. But he said nothing for some little time, while I also kept back a dozen questions that rushed up in me.

“What happened then?” I ventured at length. “What did you do?”

“Nothing,” he replied briefly, looking up at me again, his manner now quiet and collected. “I did nothing. It seemed, somehow, there was nothing I wanted to do. A feeling I must shout, strike out, do something violent passed. What was done next, he did. I merely looked on and watched. There was no emotion in me of any sort. I was just numb. My whole consciousness, I think, was in my eyes. I stared … as he went on dragging that heavy mass across the landing, always a little farther from me, hitching and shoving it along with great effort — towards the door of his room. Then he opened the door, but the light from my room did not reach to it, and as it was not lit inside, I saw nothing but a black space. I watched. I saw everything he did, every movement he made. He stepped to one side, across the bundle, so that he was then pushing instead of dragging. His whole body was bent double with the effort to get the thing through the door and inside the room. Apparently it was difficult to do. He accomplished it after several minutes. The sack, it seemed, made one or two little movements of its own — jerks. He closed the door, putting his weight against it heavily from outside, and then — after that — well — he wasn’t there any more.”

“He’d gone into the room?”

Moleson shrugged his shoulders. “Can’t say,” he answered rather curtly. “I tell you he simply wasn’t there. I couldn’t see him any more. Id lost sight of him.” He added sheepishly: “Something happened to my eyes, I suppose. I didn’t see him go — but he was gone.”

Fully five minutes passed, Moleson then told me slowly, before he could think, much less move. He was struck dumb with terror and amazement. He felt stupid, empty of life, unable to act at all.

“It may have been five minutes,” he said, “but it may just as well have been twenty — for all I know. The only thing I remember clearly is that my awful yell — that wild shriek I let out into the night some time before — still seemed to me echoing through the house and down the stairs. I had a feeling it must have been heard in the street and the police would be in. But nothing happened. The fellow’s disappearance bewildered me to a point I can’t describe properly. I knew I hadn’t been dreaming, but I knew damned little else, it seems to me.

“I moved at last, after a bit. I moved backwards. I threw my own door as wide as it would go, so as to get all the light there was, and the light streamed across the landing and fell on the door — his door. I knew I was going to open that door. I had to.”

His pluck hardly surprised me, for I already knew it. I admired it. Nothing in this world or the next could have induced me to go near that door, much less open it. Moleson, however, did more: he went over and knocked loudly against its boards.

“The sound echoed,” he told me, “but not inside. It echoed down the stairs, I mean. The boards sounded dull. That dullness explained itself,” he added, with a quick glance up at me as though, of course, I understood what he meant. But I did not understand, and my eyebrows went up in query and response. “It wasn’t an ordinary door,” he said.

“You — opened it?” I had no inkling what he meant.

“I guessed it wasn’t a proper door,” he replied, changing his adjective, but leaving me more ignorant than before. “I felt that some time before.”

“Sham?…”

“Not an ordinary door into an ordinary room,” he explained, with a hint of impatience at my stupidity. “When I knocked,” he went on, “and got no answer, I knew I was right. The dead sound proved it.”

“Oh!…”

“Yes,” he went on quietly, “the dead muffled sound it made. I waited a moment. Then I opened it. It was the door of a cupboard — a rather shallow cupboard.” He paused, then said something that made my blood curdle: “That’s why the creature had to shove it in so hard — stuff it in — to make it stay—”

“Upright?…” I gasped, catching the ghastly meaning at last.

“Upright,” was all he replied.

•   •   •

The dusk was now fallen into our room between us, and I saw the glow of my cigarette-end in the mirror, behind his chair. It had been a dreadful story. I longed for light and a glass of whisky. Moleson had so convinced me of the truth, the reality, of his confession, yet I got the feeling that he hoped I would tear it to pieces and demolish it utterly, proving to his satisfaction how absurd it all was, and using nice words like hallucination, overwrought nerves and the like.

Instead, I remained rather quiet and non-committal, and certainly dumb; I could not honestly comfort him in the way he wished.

“I told you,” he resumed, his voice much lower now, “that I imagined that shriek of mine still echoing in the house and down the stairs? Well, a few moments later, while I still stood glaring at that ghastly cupboard, all black and empty … I heard a sound on the stairs. It was below me, coming nearer. I couldn’t move — not an inch, one way or the other. I was just stuck to the floor. But I felt sure of one thing — it wasn’t” — but he couldn’t say the word he meant, the word in his mind — “it wasn’t — ” He stuck again.

“Who was it?” I asked quickly, eager to help him, but to help myself at the same time.

“First I saw the light,” he said, “the light of a candle, evidently, flickering on the wall, then on the ceiling. Next came the shadow, enormously magnified and grotesque, Then came a large white face of melancholy and terror mixed, looming at me over the banisters. There was a thin voice:

“‘… interfered with…’ I heard from what seemed an immense distance…. ‘He showed hisself, then, did he? … May God forgive me…’ and something about a ‘broken promise’ and a ‘room I didn’t oughter ’ave let to anyone….’ And then, as, to my shame, I felt myself being helped up from the floor — for I had no idea I had let my legs give way like that — something — oh, horrible and dreadful — about ‘… they ’anged him for it; oh, they ’anged him at the Scrubs … it was ’is own father, you see … and now over twenty years ago…”

There were gulping sounds, he remembers, and these odd, broken words.

Moleson, curiously enough, had never gone to the trouble to verify anything, and it was my vile curiosity that had to find its own satisfaction. The British Museum where he had worked so hard, gave me certain facts in the newspapers of long before the war. The “Warley Parricide,” I discovered, and the unpleasant details about how the body was found stuffed upright into a cupboard, and how the public signed a petition and the lawyers urged homicidal mania, but without the intended result.

•   •   •   •   •   •

SHOCKS

I

John Feek, well over forty, was still evidently a child at heart, for as he heard the postman’s knock the same ridiculous old dream rose in his mind — namely, that a letter would someday bring him surprising luck. Out of the blue this letter would come; there would be nothing to lead up to it; it would prove a shock, but a delightful one. It was a dream he shared, of course, with countless other people who have never quite grown up.

After the knock came a pause. He listened. Yes, he heard steps coming upstairs towards the door of his little sitting-room.

“Evening post, sir,” said the lodging-house maid, “and a letter for you.”

She laid it beside his reading-lamp and went out, closing the door upon the smell of cabbage which had followed her upstairs.

“Thank you, Emma,” remarked John Feek, casually, as though his correspondence was unwieldy and a single letter hardly worth bringing up to him. He eyed the typewritten envelope distastefully, and as he did so his dream took wings as usual. Then, turning it over, he read the name of the sender printed on the back.

“Dustworthy and Sons,” he said aloud, with more interest in his manner. “So it’s not a bill or circular after all!”

Dustworthy and Sons had been his family solicitors for as long as he could remember. James Dustworthy, the head of the old firm, used to play tennis with his father thirty years before, to dine with them at home; he had administered the small estate when his father died, and he still paid him the two hundred pounds a year that came from some trust funds, five thousand pounds or so, an uncle had left him. But John Feek had not seen Mr. Dustworthy for many years, not since boyhood, in fact. He had rather neglected his father’s friend, though he owed him many kindnesses. To tell the truth, he only thought about him when the letter came with the quarterly payment. This he would duly acknowledge with some polite and kindly remark or other about Mr. Dustworthy’s health and family. Of late years, however, it was one of the sons, now partners in the firm, who sent the payments. Mr. James Dustworthy, of course, must be getting old, leaving more and more of the routine business to his sons.

“No money, anyhow,” reflected John Feek with a sigh, still eyeing the envelope without enthusiasm before opening it. “It’s not due for a couple of days yet.”

It was this small income that provided his excuse for not really working; it just enabled him to live; his literary gifts might otherwise have led to something, for his two small volumes of occasional verse — one of them published at his own expense, he remembered with regret — had been well enough noticed. His talent was mediocre, yet it was a talent worth developing; strangers had written — they liked it.

While these vague thoughts passed through his mind he had opened the envelope. To his surprise the signature, at which he glanced first, was that of James Dustworthy, senior. The letter itself caused him even more surprise:

Dear Mr. Feek, —

I should be very much obliged if you would make it convenient to call upon me at the earliest possible moment. There is a matter of importance concerning yourself about which I should like to talk with you personally, rather than write.

May I hope that eleven o’clock tomorrow, though such short notice, will suit you?

Trusting you are well, and with kindest memories of the pleasant days I spent in your late father’s house,

I am,

Yours very truly,

James Dustworthy, Sr.

John Feek’s immediate impression was one of vague uneasiness, as though the letter emanated something unpleasant, its wording a trifle ominous even; but a second reading helped to dissipate this. A sense of trouble, none the less, hung about the communication; he disliked that “of importance”; the phrasing was so urgent. He asked himself, like a schoolboy, what he had done, what he had been up to, what enemies he had, what person or persons he had wronged? He found no answer to his searching. His life, certainly, was not blameless, yet he had committed no crime — that he could think of. He was ever his own worst enemy; and to tell the truth, he was unable to recall a single individual, man or woman, whom he had treated badly, or who was hostile to him. Search as he might, no single name occurred. His dreamy, generous, lazy character was, in fact, a lovable one. He was an idler, nothing worse. And in the end he came to the conclusion that this “uneasiness” was due to a bad conscience that pricked him because he rather loafed through life. This was the decision he came to finally. And he at once replied to Mr. Dustworthy, senior, that he would be happy to call at eleven o’clock next morning, as suggested.

He went out and posted the letter at the corner pillar-box himself.

“It must be something unusually important,” he reflected, as he slipped the letter in, “or the old boy himself wouldn’t have written!” And he went to bed in due course, excited a little perhaps, but distinctly easier in his mind. “James Dustworthy — the head of the firm,” was his last thought. “And a big, old-established firm into the bargain!”

II

It was Henry Dustworthy, one of the sons, who received him on the stroke of eleven next morning with great politeness, yet obviously did not know him. Neither man, for that matter, recognised the other, having never met previously. And when Feek explained that Mr. James Dustworthy, Mr. Dustworthy, senior, had made the appointment, Henry obviously did not know about that either. He was shown in ceremoniously, however, without delay. He bowed. He sat down. Mr. James Dustworthy wore a beard. Feek had not the slightest recollection of him. The face of his boyhood had entirely vanished from his memory. He stared uncomfortably. The room, though severe, was friendly. Feek’s conscience gave him vague, fugitive trouble. Mr, Dustworthy’s smile, however, at once set him at his ease. “I am not to be disturbed,” said the head of the firm to Henry, who retired, his eyes alight with curiosity. The door was shut.

Aware that his feeling of disquiet might return at any moment, hampering his best judgement of what was to come, Feek broke the pause which threatened to prolong itself:

“I received your letter, Mr. Dustworthy,” he remarked, as casually as he could. “It was very pleasant to hear from you again. I — I’m really ashamed to think how long it is since I saw you. I have such pleasant memories of my boyhood days — when my father — you and my father—”

Mr. Dustworthy interrupted, yet in a stately, serious way that only men of the law can compass. He smiled, a bowed, the tips of his fingers met in front of his face.

“I wrote, Mr. Feek,” he began, gravely, looking at him over the top of those fingers, “because I felt you would prefer to hear verbally what I have to say, rather than” — he smiled stiffly — “read it through the medium of what is sometimes called a lawyer’s letter.”

He paused, but made no slightest movement; the long-winded sentence died away. Feek’s uneasiness rose and fell. He tried to estimate the other’s attitude. There was nothing to estimate. No hint escaped. It struck him incongruously, too, that, search as he might, no trace of the early days was discoverable in that bearded visage.

“Quite so, quite so. I appreciate it,” he murmured, wondering what was to follow. In spite of himself and his innocent life, he felt his skin grow moist a little. “I came at once,” he added.

Mr. Dustworthy, senior, bowed almost imperceptibly. His black coat, his dry voice, his keen eyes that saw everything while betraying nothing, seemed very solemn — unnecessarily so, Feek assured himself.

“Your father,” resumed the lawyer at length, “was kind enough to number me among his friends, his personal friends. I keep the most happy feeling for all the members of his family. I am only too glad, too proud, to be the means of conveying pleasant news—”

John Feek could not contain himself; the reaction set in so suddenly.

“Then — it is good news?” he exclaimed. “I wonder if perhaps—”

Mr. Dustworthy drew himself up. “I should hardly have written to you as I did,” he announced, “nor, indeed, sent you the personal letter I did, unless it concerned a matter that you would be pleased to hear about.”

John Feek remembered that his father had been in the Treasury, a man of some importance. He had been useful to Dustworthy and Sons in many ways.

“Oh, that’s nice of you,” he stammered. “I — er — might have known that, of course. Only — your letter made me wonder perhaps a little — what had happened. Do, please, tell me—”

He could think of nothing else to say. He was afraid to ask outright. That sense of disquiet still lurked in him somewhere. “It’s going to be all right, anyhow,” he consoled himself quickly. “Only, the old boy’s damned slow about it.”

Mr. Dustworthy stiffened visibly, as though he had read his client’s thought.

“It concerns,” he went on almost coldly, “a legacy — a possible legacy—”

“For me? For myself?” burst in John Feek, unable to keep it back.

“A legacy,” Mr. Dustworthy picked up the unfinished sentence where it had been interrupted, “that concerns yourself, yes — from someone who appreciates your — er — work — your writing,.J mean — but who insists upon conditions.”

“Conditions?” repeated Feek, stupidly.

“What I may call,” explained the lawyer, “unusual conditions — rather.”

He lowered his eyes and stroked his beard, while apparently looking for papers that were not on his desk and that he did not expect to be on his desk. He was waiting, obviously, for his client’s gasp. It came. More than a gasp, however, it was a smothered effort to recover breath. For John Feek filled his lungs, trying to appear unconcerned. His heart was beating at an absurd rate, he realised.

“Yes,” he said, “quite so, Mr. Dustworthy,” as though he had expected something of the sort, whereas in reality he had expected something entirely different. “And with conditions, you say? Unusual conditions?” he repeated, burning to ask the amount, but not yet daring to. His skin was growing moister yet cooler at the same time. That his “work” should have found an appreciative individual did not surprise him, such was his poet’s belief in himself, but that this appreciation should take the form of a legacy seemed hardly of this world. With conditions, too! Unusual conditions! What on earth could they be, these conditions? It was the amount of the legacy, however, that bulked largest in his mind. Sums of twenty pounds, fifty pounds, even a hundred pounds occurred to him. His breath, certainly, was now difficult to manage.

“Ah, yes,” he articulated with an effort, as no word came from the man of law; “and — what are the conditions, Mr. Dustworthy? Are they very unusual?” He really wanted to ask if they were impossible to accept.

“Strictly speaking,” stated the lawyer, “I should have said condition. For there is only one. The condition is anonymity.” He stopped dead.

John Feek’s mind likewise stopped dead for a moment. The long word, so ordinary otherwise, suddenly had no precise meaning for him. It sounded unpleasant almost, even a trifle mysterious. Its definition escaped him absurdly. Inner excitement had scattered his wits. He could not concentrate.

“Oh, I see, yes — of course,” he replied. “That does happen sometimes, doesn’t it?”

“No doubt,” agreed Mr. Dustworthy, somewhat coolly, “it can happen sometimes. My own experience, however, of nearly half a century” — he looked almost patriarchal, stroking his beard — “does not support its frequent occurrence.” He paused again. “I consider it, Mr. Feek,” he went on, presently, “unusual, but, in this case perhaps, understandable.” They stared at one another for a moment in silence. “An annual sum of money,” he added with a pontifical air, “is given to you, Mr. Feek, anonymously for your life, anonymity being the essential condition.”

“My life!” cried John Feek, making it a question as well as an exclamation.

Mr. Dustworthy made no reply to this inanity. He sat back and settled his glasses. There came another pause.

“Anonymity,” repeated John Feek, as the meaning of the word came back to him at last. “You mean — I must never know who gives me this sum?” How much was it, he wondered, oh, how much?

“That is the condition,” repeated Mr. Dustworthy. “You must never know from whom this money is received.”

John Feek, with a tremendous effort, kept silence. The sum, meanwhile, was growing in his mind. He reached a hundred pounds, even a hundred and fifty pounds. The words “money” and “receive” stung a thousand thoughts and questions into life. He hovered towards two hundred pounds even. To tell the truth, he could hardly believe this was not a dream. When a dream comes true, occurred to him, it means that one is asleep or dead.

“Never?” he repeated, stupidly.

Mr. Dustworthy bowed. “Never,” he echoed, solemnly, like Poe’s Raven.

In this moment John Feek’s rather childlike mind was filled suddenly to the brim with his dream. If he came into money, what would he do with it? And through his excited thoughts flew simultaneously also the answers he had always given to himself. He reviewed swiftly the friends he would help, the needy folk he would subsidise, the Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mary whose difficult lives he would make easier. This, to his credit, flashed upon his bewildered mind without hesitation. Idler and loafer he might be; he was; but his greatest happiness would ever be the surprise, the unexpected joy of this kind he could give to others. This, certainly, was real in him. His old dream, that a letter would startlingly turn his aimless life into some sort of usefulness seemed coming true. He had now reached three hundred pounds.

The great question burst out of him at last:

“And what amount, Mr. Dustworthy,” he asked as calmly and legally as he could, “is in question?”

The lawyer eyed him steadily over the tips of his touching fingers. The ghost of something like a cold smile just touched his lips. The lips moved then. “You must prepare yourself, perhaps, for a slight shock,” he began. “The donator appreciates your — work.” He hesitated for an instant, giving the excited Feek an odd impression that he rather resented saying what he was about to say. “The amount of the legacy,” he concluded almost frigidly, “is five thousand pounds a year.”

John Feek stared into the other’s face. “I see,” was the only comment he could think of, though its brief utterance nearly choked him. “Five thousand pounds a year,” he repeated, as if to himself.

The sound of his voice rang on and on, it seemed, filling the quiet room. Five thousand pounds. Five thousand pounds. He saw it in figures, then in letters. The exact amount of his capital, curiously enough, occurred to him. Five thousand every year. He tried to work it out by the month, by the quarter, but figures always muddled him.

Mr. Dustworthy, it seems, talked for some time, but Feek did not take in what he said. What did it matter? Ah, five thousand pounds a year was over one thousand pounds a quarter, he realised.

“And — I may feel sure, quite sure?” he asked at length. “Can I really count on it — till I die, I mean?”

The answer was like solid cement being lowered into place:

“Unquestionably. The securities yielding this amount are in my keeping. The first instalment, provided you accept the condition of anonymity, will be paid into your bank as from the first of the month, today being the fifteenth — tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning, yes, I see,” repeated Feek, more to himself than to the lawyer. Then, suddenly, a question occurred to him. “And why,” he asked, abruptly, “why does she wish — why, I mean, can’t I thank her?” He stared hard at Mr. Dustworthy, straight into his eyes. “I can understand her liking my poems,” he added, “but why — why mayn’t I even thank her?”

The appraising legal mind examined him through extremely clear glasses. “I was not aware,” said its owner, suavely, “having stated that the donator was a — lady.”

Feek, struggling swiftly with himself, recovered his equilibrium. He re-crossed his legs, a trifle awkwardly. “I beg your pardon,” he said, clumsily, Mr. Dustworthy making no sign that he heard the words, much less that they deserved a rejoinder. “I gather, however,” he commented, judicially, after what seemed to Feek another interminable pause. “that you will accept the legacy.” It was not a question but a statement. His eyes gazed straight into his client’s face above the tips of those lean, white, inhuman fingers. He waited.

John Feek gazed back at him. He did not reply at once. He paused. His mind, of course, was already made up. He was thinking furiously of Tom, Dick, Harry, and Mary, to say nothing of himself. He would accept. He would accept instantly and unconditionally. He would accept — before he woke up, before he found himself dead, before something — something that threatened menacingly, making his heart sink — happened to prove it all a dream, before the legacy, in a word, took wings and vanished. And yet he hesitated, gazing hard into the lawyer’s bearded face in front of him, and, as he gazed, seeing — for the first time — the younger face, the face of thirty years ago, when its owner was a beardless young man, the face that came to play tennis with his father, that came to dine.

“It would — I suspect — be ungracious of me — not to,” he brought out at length, in a tone he forced himself to keep normal, even judicial.

Mr. Dustworthy, making no comment, watched him closely.

“You yourself,” pursued Mr. Feek, “if I may ask — would advise—”

Mr. Dustworthy, alone knowing all the facts, replied at once, almost, indeed, interrupting his client: “It is not a matter upon which I can offer any advice,” he said, firmly. “Advice of any kind,” he added. “The decision, Mr. Feek, must lie solely with yourself. The legacy,” he contributed further, as though he mentioned a legal detail no client could be expected to know, “is tax-free.”

“Tax-free!” exclaimed Feek. “That means, I take it, that—”

“Precisely,” came the quick answer, accompanied by a patient little inclination of the legal head.

John Feek reflected for some minutes, though hardly knowing why he did so, nor what exactly he reflected about.

“You can — you will, at least, convey my thanks — my gratitude—” he began.

“That,” replied the man of law, succinctly, “I can assuredly — and will — do, yes.”

Somehow, thought John Feek, left to himself a moment, it was all too wonderful to be true. There was a catch somewhere. It was not quite credible. Swift thoughts flashed and vanished. He remembered his first uneasiness. He remembered the lawyer’s odd hesitation, his queer resentment, his air, once or twice, of inexplicable hostility, his icy manner of conveying what he called “pleasant news.” Something was wrong, he felt. This time tomorrow — it was now eleven-thirty — over one thousand pounds would be lying in his bank. At the moment he had forty-seven pounds lying there, ten pounds of which was earmarked for rent. He was aware, as the lawyer had warned him, of a certain shock. This shock was understandable. What he found less understandable was this faint “uneasiness” that refused obstinately and finally to be explained away.

“It’s natural enough, after all,” he reflected, confusedly, “that someone, a woman probably, has liked my stuff — my work, my poems,” he hastened to correct himself, “and wishes to show it in this way. Such things have happened before.”

He heard his own voice speaking aloud again:

“You know of no reason, Mr. Dustworthy — if I may put it in that way — why I should decline — this legacy?” He realised that his uneasiness expressed itself thus spontaneously without his quite intending it.

“None whatever,” was the answer, given, however, with the faintest imaginable shade of hesitation, a hesitation Feek noticed and disliked.

“And — there’s no obligation involved — of any sort?” inquired Feek, again rather surprised at his own question.

“None, Mr. Feek,” came the reply as before, and, as before, with the same unwelcome ghost of hesitation. Feek sensed again, as he heard it, the singular hint of disapproval, as if the man of law, while pleased to convey good news, at the same time resented — shrank from — doing so.

A longish pause followed, during which the two men gazed into each other’s eyes, Feek imagining in the bright orbs facing him an inexplicable combination of ice and passion, of violent welcome and yet of equally violent resentment, of something that desired while it hated.

“I am happy to accept the legacy — and the conditions,” he said at length, with as much dignity as he could summon to his aid — and walked away, wondering why the old lawyer, his father’s friend, seemed vaguely hostile, vaguely resentful. He walked away — on air.

“This one brief hour,” he thought to himself as he strode home to his lodgings upon a carpet of electric air, “has been worth to me a cycle of Cathay! One crowded hour of glorious life with a vengeance! By gad!” And he drew into his lungs a deep breath of the Hampstead air. Time, he realised, is measurable by its content, rather than by its mere duration. “It’s the intensity, by Jove, that counts! Existence is one thing, living is another. shock, yes — I’ve had several shocks — but shocks drive one explosively out of an accustomed rut. I’d willingly give my last ten years of living in a rut — crystallised the blessed shocks of this single, brief little hour. It’s been an eternity!”

III

For a long time John Feek was quite unable to relate the experience to reality; the new factors were difficult to adjust upon the basis of life as it had been. It was too wonderful to be true, he kept saying to himself. He understood how a shock of happiness might well send a mind off its balance.

How the day passed, he hardly knew. Too excited to sleep, when it ended, he passed a night of broken intervals, making plans, constructing his future anew, envisaging a fairyland which was far from being merely a selfish one. Across every dream, whether a waking or a sleeping one, there fell, however, that faint shadow he had noticed during what he now styled the “immortal interview” with the man of law. He remembered his own vague uneasiness. That scarcely perceptible hesitation, that veiled hostility, in the manner of Mr. Dustworthy came back to him again and again.

In the morning, exhilarated still but not refreshed, Feek made a valiant and determined effort to face things practically and sensibly. He evoked his whole store of common sense to help him in the new adjustment to this change in his life. He walked for miles across Hampstead Heath and Highgate; he read a good deal; he thought things over carefully. He felt the need of a pause; he waited; he did not even go to his bank. Long ago, too, he had given up any hope of guessing who his generous admirer might be — a woman probably, he decided, an entire stranger, at any rate. And he read from cover to cover again both his little books of verse, read them with new joy, with deeper appreciation, finding them good, better than he had believed. It did not surprise him that some rich and big-hearted stranger shared this appreciation, and wished to prove it in this delightful anonymous manner.

Once or twice, as a man is said to pinch himself to prove he is not dreaming, he felt the desire to telephone to the Dustworthy office and confirm the fulfilment of his incredible dream. But he resisted the impulse. That staid old firm, established over a century, with a family business of eminently respectable and distinguished clients, largely Burke, he remembered — a firm of this kind did not make mistakes.

A shutter had flown up in his mind disclosing a new horizon, so that even his lodgings wore a different air. All minor troubles had vanished utterly. Once or twice, such is human nature, he surprised a meanish thought scuttling into its hole: “It might have been twice the amount! It might just as well have been ten thousand pounds!” — but the thought merely flashed and disappeared. He set to work meanwhile to write a few letters, enclosing cheques to various needy friends to whom a present, tactfully offered, would come, like his own good fortune, out of the blue. He felt he simply must share his marvellous luck with others; nor was this superstition merely the prompting of a really generous nature. Likewise, he wrote cheques in settlement of the few bills he owed. These cheques he dated a couple of days ahead, the covering letters one day ahead, for he decided not to post them until he had called first at the bank. Of the forty-seven pounds lying there to his credit, he now had nothing left.

And that evening he dined at his club, inviting a friend, an acquaintance rather, for whom he felt nothing in particular, but who gave him a pleasant smile of greeting in the reading-room, and who, faintly surprised at the invitation, yet accepted it. “But why should I sponge on you, Feek? I was dining here, anyhow.” “But why not?” insisted Feek. “Give me the pleasure. I’m alone.”

“D’you know, I rather wanted to give a little dinner here one night next week,” Feek mentioned over their glass of port. “A bit of luck — oh, nothing to write home about — has come my way, and I feel I ought to celebrate.”

The friend, not really interested, agreed. “Always propitiate the gods, yes!” He smiled, for he understood now the reason he had been invited to dine, and this set him more at his ease. They chatted on, discussing the details idly, and the evening passed quite cheerily. Before going home — he walked from Brook Street to his Hampstead lodgings — some half-a-dozen friends he saw had accepted invitations and congratulated him, among them a critic who had damned his volumes with the faintest kind of praise. They ascribed the luck he mentioned to a horse, or the Stock Exchange.

•   •   •

Sleep came to an exhausted mind and body that night, and he woke in the morning clear-headed and refreshed. The dislocating effects of the first shock were passing. He would go to his bank at once. That was the first thing. After that he would look about for a decent flat suitable to his larger income. In the evening he would post those letters. Too busy to read his morning newspapers he stuffed it into his pocket. He took a taxi. As he walked up the steps into his bank the newspaper slipped from his pocket, and, stooping to pick it up, his eye caught a name in big letters on the front page. It was a headline, and the name was “Dustworthy.” Something clutched at his throat. He glanced swiftly at the captions. James Dustworthy, senior partner in the old-established firm of Dustworthy and Sons, had been found dead in his private room at the office. His head was in the gas stove. He had killed himself.

John Feek stopped dead, then turned slowly towards the steps he had just come up. His heart, as he did so, seemed to drop down through the whole length of his body and burst upon the granite floor. What he felt, or thought, or imagined, he hardly knew. He experienced no emotion he could have named. He was numb. There seemed nothing but a blank inside him, an empty void where his heart and mind had been. Mechanically he signalled to a driver. In the taxi, as he hurried to the offices of the firm in Essex Street — no taxi had ever gone so slowly nor by so circuitous a route! — his thoughts gradually collected themselves a little. They provided no convincing consolation. His hands and feet were cold. It was barely eleven o’clock, but even at this hour he found so many people outside the door and in the waiting-room that his sense of horrible bewilderment increased. A feeling of futility overwhelmed him too. Offering a message of formal condolence, but learning nothing by way of information, much less of comfort, from the clerk of the closed offices, he went out into the street again, without a plan.

The club occurred to him, but he presently found himself walking past it; and a second time he walked the whole way out to Hampstead. The familiar house, as he looked at it, had lost the new, different air it had worn since the “immortal interview”; it looked now exactly as it had always looked during the dozen years he had lived there. He fumbled for his latchkey. He passed through the dim, odoriferous hall, and up the creaking stairs.

As he entered his modest sitting-room, a knock rang out loudly — almost challengingly, he thought — on the front door below, the knock that had always summoned that fantastic and ridiculous dream into his mind, the postman’s knock. A queer revulsion swept over him. A moment later the maid was in the room beside him. He had not yet taken off his overcoat, much less sat down.

“A letter for you, sir,” came the familiar words, as the girl placed the letter on the table and went out. Without moving, he eyed the envelope distastefully, as he noticed, too, the smell of cabbage on the stairs again. The name and address were written by hand, but in a writing he did not recognise. Turning the envelope over, he read the name of the sender printed on the back: “Dustworthy and Sons.” He leaned against the closed door for support, while states the envelope with fingers that trembled so they seemed all clumsy thumbs. The contents of the letter were written by hand as well:

Dear Mr. Feek, —

When this letter reaches you, I shall be dead. I have arranged for delay in posting it.

I have been speculating for some time, disastrously, with certain funds, your own capital among them. Your £5,000 is lost.

Seeking out some form of compensation for you, I came to the conclusion that one thing only lay in my power — to give you, namely, a single day, at least, of very great happiness. It would prove illusory, but, while it lasted, would be intense and satisfying. Human pleasures, of course, all are illusory, as mentioned in your poem ‘DUST.’ It was this poem, indeed, that gave me my idea.

I invented the legacy, making the annual amount the exact sum of your capital I have lost.

If for one single day you have, as I sincerely trust, enjoyed the belief that you possessed, instead of £5,000 capital an income of £5,000 a year, your happiness has been so intense that it has provided the fairest amount of compensation in my power to offer, if only, alas, now in retrospect.

With the kindest memories of the pleasant days I spent in your late father’s house.

I am,

Yours un-faithfully,

James Dustworthy, Sr.”

Only one thought worthy of the name passed through his mind, repeating and repeating itself. Though the words changed variously, the thought remained the same! “The firm will make it good, of course.” The idea of the legacy, it seems, was not present; it was the capital sum, the money that enabled him to live without undue exertion, that filled his mind exclusively. “For their own sake alone! For the reputation of the firm! They’re bound to. Of course they will. They must.”

He did not analyse the letter, its unusual wording, the absence of one single expression of regret, the insulting, dreadful comedy of the adverb in the signature. All his energy concentrated itself, apparently, in the one main thought that the firm would be bound to make good his loss. He said the words aloud, over and over again — over and over again.

John Feek, by now, had experienced too many shocks to know quite what he was about, perhaps. He believes he swallowed some lunch, he believes he went out again and walked over Hampstead Heath in rain, but he knows one thing positively — that he eventually encountered, at some street corner or other, Highgate way, a boy holding out a wet, windblown placard, whose big black letters seemed to stun him with the terrible words they formed. Before killing himself, James Dustworthy had filed his petition in bankruptcy. This final shock, robbing him of his last slim hope, fell upon him like a bullet that thuds into a corpse. He felt nothing at all.

The next thing, anyhow, that Feek remembered with any distinctness was being in his dingy sitting-room again, his eye resting upon a little pile of unposted letters, letters that he somehow could not bring himself to the point of tearing up. His mind, besides, was not considering them with any real seriousness, for its attention was fixed upon another fact of more immediate importance, the fact that there were cheaper, meaner rooms on the top floor of the lodging-house, and that these rooms, he knew, were vacant. The bedraggled newspaper, whose placard had stunned him, lay on the carpet beneath his wet boots; he had read every word of the brief statement that concerned him.

The fact that Mr. Dustworthy’s brain had given way for some weeks before the final act, and that he had been subject during this period to grave hallucinations, held no interest, as it held no consolation, for John Feek. His condition was black, hopeless, the interior confusion rather dreadful. The series of recent shocks to his own mind, first of intense happiness, then of equally deep disappointment, had certainly disturbed his equilibrium. He caught all manner of horrible notions flashing to and fro, grimacing at him as they traced ominous, even dangerous patterns in his disordered thoughts. He remembers, however, putting away the heap of unposted letters in a desk, just as he remembers glancing round the room, in a cold, deliberate, calculated sort of way that both pleased and frightened him, to see if it contained a gas stove. It did not. Of course, he had forgotten. He had often meant to persuade the landlady to install one. The day, besides, was a nice warm summer’s day. Absurd! He laughed — aloud. He sat down and opened a book — of poems. They did not interest him. They were cheap, their emotion was not honestly felt, they were artificial and self-conscious, they were his own. In particular he read one called DUST. Its falsity disgusted him. A spontaneous inspiration flamed — he knew now how it should have been written. He began scribbling some lines upon a back page.

During which a considerable time, an hour certainly, must have passed, for the light had begun to fail. A sound in the house below disturbed him, making him start. It was a knock, a postman’s knock. His only reaction to it was a shudder; a sense of shuddering anticipation certainly ran through him. Was it, however, a real knock, he asked himself? Was it not only in his mind, a delusion? He would go on hearing these knocks, these awful postman’s knocks, all his life probably. He never wanted to see another letter again so long as he lived. The sight of a typed envelope, the sound of a postman’s knock, were associated in his mind with dread and disappointment only. The idea, at any rate, brought to his notice one sensible thought — he must write a letter himself, he remembered, several letters, for that matter. He must put off the club dinner. Ill health, he decided, would be the best excuse to offer, adding something about the “occasion, he hoped, being only postponed.”

“A letter for you, sir,” sounded a voice in the air beside him.

He had not heard the steps on the stairs, he had not heard the girl come in, he did not hear her go out again. He did not want to get a letter from anywhere or anybody, and he eyed this one that lay on his table with dislike and loathing even, with something of horror too. For the typewritten envelope bore the same inscription as the two former ones; it was from Dustworthy and Sons. He did not open it because he did not dare to, but neither did he dare destroy it. He merely smiled bitterly, as he locked it away in the desk with the heap of unposted letters. A couple of days later another letter, similarly inscribed, arrived and joined it in the desk.

•   •   •

What John Feek endured during that couple of days, and for several subsequent couples of days as well, need not be described in detail. That his courage made him presently face life again is the only item worthy of mention, perhaps, for it persuaded him eventually to open and read those two odious letters, which, he saw, were signed by Henry Dustworthy, son of the dead man. Nothing more, he felt, could possibly happen to him now; no further shock could touch him.

Without noticing it, Feek read the later one first. It expressed formal anxiety that no receipt had come to hand for the cheque recently enclosed. Feek then tore open the earlier one. It enclosed the firm’s cheque for the usual quarterly payment of his income, and went on to explain briefly Hat James Dustworthy’s petition in bankruptcy was due to a delusion on his “poor father’s” part that he had committed various illegal acts, but that actually, the firm was entirely solvent as usual, and that, in fact, the whole thing was an hallucination on his part, caused by — there followed a Latin word that in plain English was “madness.”

No reference to the legacy lay in that letter, it being obviously a portion of the suicide’s delusion. But John Feek, Henry was pleased to add, was mentioned in his “poor father’s will” for a sum of five thousand pounds, “which amount will be duly paid into your bank as soon as probate is granted.”

John Feek took the unposted letters from his desk and slipped them into the nearest Hampstead pillar-box. They were dated several days before, but that, John Feek considered, really did not matter.

•   •   •   •   •   •

THE SURVIVORS

It is, apparently, the little knocks that hurt — a bruised corn, a kick on the shin — while in the big crash unconsciousness follows before the pain is registered. Only a man who has been in a sudden smash can realise how oddly unexpected the physical reactions can be. A well-known Alpine climber, hero of incredible escapes, has described in particular falling down a couloir, colliding with the cliffs as he banged from side to side like a bouncing ball. He saw each collision coming, he took it, but the shocks did not hurt. He felt nothing more than an intense excitement, which he describes as a kind of electrisation of the body that was almost pleasurable. It is claimed, too, that the murderer in the electric chair feels nothing, since the electric current travels faster by several fractions of a second than the report the nerves carry to his brain. He is dead literally before he knows it.

Lindstrum certainly was aware of no physical anguish when his omnibus skidded, struck a lorry, hovered a moment undecided, then toppled over with an awful, lumbering, slow heave. It crashed upon the pavement by the Kensington Gardens railings, making a thundering roar, of which Lindstrum heard nothing but the splintering tinkle of the breaking glass. He was on the top, on the side against the park railings. He saw these railings fly sideways into space, he saw the kerb rush up at him. A man and a girl, the only other occupants of outside seats, stood up and screamed. He met the paving stones, he thinks, slightly before the body of the omnibus did. Head and left shoulder, he believes, struck the ground together. But he felt nothing; he had no pain; he merely, as the saying has it, knew no more.

So far as his senses were concerned, sight had registered accurately enough; it was hearing, a slower vibration, that had failed, for no other sound than this splintering of glass reached his ears.

Then, presently, a man’s voice was audible quite close to his face: “Gone west, I’m afraid, this chap! We’ll take the others first. Hurry…!”

There was screaming, too, but a little farther off, the screams and shrieks of several voices. He felt himself being lifted and carried away a short distance and then laid down upon something that was softer, anyhow, than the paving-stones.

“Gone west!” indeed. It made him smile. But he said nothing. Needing, he believed, no immediate attention himself, he let the doctor “take the others first.” He was lying on some overcoats and tarpaulins. Some time obviously had passed since the smash.

He examined himself carefully all over, for it was not his first accident, and he knew how to set about it. “Lindstrum’s luck,” he remembered, and smiled again. Nothing could kill him. Thoroughly and slowly, he tried each joint in turn. There was nothing broken, anyhow. He saw no blood, he felt no bruises. Externally, he was whole. Internally? That might be another matter. He tested this more carefully, filling his lungs as slowly as he possibly could. Any moment he anticipated a blinding, fiery sting, a ghastly spasm that would make him sweat blood. They did not come. He inhaled and exhaled to the full with comfort. Breathing was all right. He was uninjured inside and out. “An extraordinary escape!” he decided. “No man can die till his moment comes! Lindstrum’s luck again!” He grinned and sat up.

Looking about him then, he saw the crowd, the splintered bus like a huge red broken beetle, the policemen’s helmets, a couple of ambulances. All this was not a dozen yards from where he lay against the park railings, and it made him shrink, as though the picture horrified and hurt him. He disliked it, indeed, to the point of hating it. It gave him a touch of nausea as he stared, though he realised clearly enough that this rather violent reaction was nervous and mental, of course — an aftermath of shock. That red monster, people torn and broken beneath its great shattered carcass, the curious crowd, the busy, rather clumsy police, the splendid, quick doctors — it all produced in him this sensation of intense dislike, of loathing, of ghastly human futility, the futility of living and dying. It revolted him. He turned away, so that he saw the railings and the trees instead.

The trees were better, he decided, and as a gate showed handy, he made up his mind to go into the gardens, to get away, out of sight of the immediate scene. “They’ve forgotten me,” he thought, “and, anyhow, I don’t need anything.” He chuckled to himself. Rising slowly, cautiously, and finding that his legs obeyed his weight normally, he walked through the gate without being noticed, and sat down upon an empty bench some few yards along the gravel path. Just as he left the road he saw two ambulances drive away. He thanked his stars he was in neither of them with smashed limbs, internal injuries, or concussion. “All the same,” he reflected, “as soon as the crush is over, I’ll look in at the hospital, just to make quite sure.” He grinned again at his exceptional “Lindstrum’s luck.” He was not even trembling. “I’m O.K.,” he said aloud happily, as he made himself comfortable on the wooden bench.

His thoughts turned naturally, yet not excitedly, upon his recent experience. There had been, nevertheless, a shock, he realised, a very severe shock. His physical machinery might be undamaged, thanks to his unknown gods, but his nerves and mind betrayed a difference somewhere, though exactly where and how, he could not at first determine. There was a change in him that rather asserted itself. And while he understood that this was natural enough, he became, at the same time, aware of certain elements in the change that puzzled him. He tried to ascertain in what this change consisted — what, above all, were the elements that perplexed him. These remained, despite his examination, persistently elusive.

Memory certainly was damaged. He had forgotten his own name now, and for the life of him could not recall it. The sense of time, too, was queer, irregular, and these two were doubtless a he reflected. Time and memory were closely related, of course. Despite his best efforts, he could not determine “what time” it was now, what his age was, how long ago the accident had occurred, how long he had taken to walk to this bench where he sat, nor how long he had been sitting on it. Something had telescoped, as it were, so that past and future now had new relations that rather obliterated their usual meaning. For a moment, indeed, he saw the accident, which he called past, coming towards him out of what he usually called the future. But more than that — seeing it coming towards him, he was able to prepare for it. And hence its failure to injure him as it otherwise might have done — which, he declared, was ridiculous.

These two deficiencies of time and memory his mind clearly realised, connecting them satisfactorily as cause and effect. This made it all seem natural. It was natural. Of that he had no doubt. Yet it was more than strange, he began to reflect, that, sitting now on this bench in Kensington Gardens, he was a little boy again, a young lad, a youth, a grown-up man, and a man of nearly forty — yet all of these simultaneously, so that he could choose at will which period he wanted. It was, none the less, quite natural. He was able to be and see all his periods of life, or any one of them separately — which he yet knew was absurd. The mental shock was sufficiently obvious. He laughed. He felt rather happy about it, oddly happy. A new experience anyhow.

These changes, yes, he grasped clearly enough, and they did not alarm him because he knew they would presently pass. But there were “elements” that puzzled and perplexed him. As he rested on the empty bench and surveyed the world about him, he was aware that something in him reeled. For this world about him, this familiar world he had always known, had altered in an inexpressible manner. But how altered? He could not for the life of him determine.

He stared about him, while breathing deeply, cautiously. He watched the people pass. In the distance a glint of the Round Pond caught his eye, with the tops of sailing boats, white and moving. He was sailing a boat himself, a child of ten years old again — literally. He lived in those particular emotions. He experienced them all over again, suddenly understanding that this was possible because they were always there: it was he who had moved away from them, while yet he need not have moved away from them. He did so because everybody else did so. Simultaneously, then, he was also forty, grown heavy, rather worldly-wise, cynical. “Odd,” he reflected, “extremely odd! But it’s right enough and natural.” He was not, apparently nailed down to any period.

Before him, people were passing along the gravel path in both directions. He watched them come and go. Some hesitated, as though about to sit down, for the April day was sunny, with warm sweet air. It was natural to sit in the sun and rest a moment, and he wished they would use the bench. He wanted to speak to someone, to tell about his escape; that really was his keenest desire, he discovered. He burned to tell about it. He was bursting to describe how the bus had overturned and crashed, aad how he had escaped, not for the first time either. If only some of these people would sit down a moment so that he could get into conversation with them and tell them what had happened.

Among the dozens who passed, however, he saw no one suitable, no one to whom he could talk easily and naturally, no one who would not have thought him just a crazy sort of fellow sitting on a park bench in the sun, a little drunk perhaps, possibly a rascal even; a beggar, or worse. He saw no single group to whom, even had they sat down beside him, he could have spoken. He picked out no one suitable.

These people, as he put it to himself, seemed somehow unapproachable. That was the right word, yes — unapproachable.

“An unreal lot,” he decided. “Not real — that’s it. None of them ever been through anything. I’d scare them probably. Yes, scare them.” Their very looks, he noticed, avoided him. “Duds,” he concluded, smiling with a touch of pity. “Only half alive, these people!”

Had they altered somehow? If so, the terms escaped him. He gazed at the grass and trees instead, feeling bewildered yet still quite happy, and it was then that the alteration in those common, inanimate things, too, asserted itself. Where altered? How altered? Again, he could not exactly say. They looked as usual in one way, while in another way they were unusual. There was this startling difference. What was it? He was unable to define it, try as he might and did. The trees — well, they were fiery, almost flame-like; the familiar, clipped grass contained some idea of sound, of music. All these ordinary familiar things shared some new factor that was startlingly different, though he could not seize and label what it was exactly. How could they look the same, he asked himself, and yet be different?

He stared and thought, and stared and thought, and then, quite abruptly, he made a sharp discovery that was satisfactory. He knew it was true, along the right line anyhow: the usual chaos of familiar things betrayed a new meaning.

“That’s it!” he exclaimed aloud, with some excitement. “Part of it, at least, I see — more of everything.”

A sort of convulsive joy and wonder flooded his whole being. This set him puzzling for what seemed many minutes. Just as he saw Time as a whole instead of sectionally, so he saw these common objects entirely instead of in broken parts. It made him laugh. He felt his happiness increase. The intensity of this new experience staggered him rather. He had always been a stranger in the familiar world he knew so well. Now, at last, he was to find out where, in it all, he really belonged.

The need to speak to someone, meanwhile, became so urgent that he could scarcely control it. The longing to describe what had happened, and how he had miraculously escaped, grew painfully. A dozen times he leaned forward to attempt it, but each time sat back without having uttered a sound. No one sat down on his bench, no one paid any attention to him; all passed him by. They chose benches farther along the path, but never his bench. He found himself at length regarding all these park strollers as mechanical automata almost; they were so drab, so unenterprising, so dull, so un-alive. Until, after a long time, a young man came from the trees across the road and walked towards the bench in a straight line without hesitation, and this fellow, Lindstrum saw in a flash, was different.

He was not so drab, so dull, so mechanical, Lindstrum realised, as the others. He walked briskly, as with purpose and decision. There was something about him — lean, thin-faced, alert, like a flying-man — something less dun-coloured, something light, indeed, that almost shone. This effect, at least, of light there was about him certainly. The youth walked smartly up, turning neither right nor left, glanced with a quick smile at Lindstrum, and sat down at the far end of the bench.

“Nice day,” began Lindstrum instantly, in a companionable way, for he could not wait a second longer. “Taking the air like me, eh?”

The other grinned and nodded. “That’s it,” he said, in a pleasant voice. He took out a cigarette case, then put it back again unopened, smiling at his companion. Lindstrum likewise realised that he himself had no desire to smoke. He took a full breath instead, staring hard into his companion’s eyes. What was this radiance in the eyes and face?

Then out it burst: “D’you know,” he began eagerly, “I’ve just had an extraordinary escape…” And he described the incident in full, bringing in his earlier escapes at the tail-end. “I believe I’m the only survivor,” he added, “if it comes to that.”

The other listened attentively, a smile growing on his young sunburned face.

“Not so funny,” he remarked when the end was reached. “Because, you see, I’m another — if it comes to that.”

“What d’you mean?” asked Lindstrum, his breath catching.

The other paused a moment, “I came over to you on purpose” — the youth evaded the question.

“How — on purpose?”

“Well — I saw you a long way off. I knew you’d understand.”

Lindstrum stared. “I don’t get you quite,” he said.

“Probably not,” replied the other. “At first, that is.” He paused. “It’s this way,” he went on a moment later. “Some time ago — can’t say exactly how long — a week or a month or a day, perhaps — I crashed, too. In the air, you know.”

Lindstrum thought hard a moment. “Injured much?”

“Oh, about the same as yourself,” returned the other, with a wide, curious grin.

“Same as me?” repeated Lindstrum, puzzled.

The other nodded. “All the others were pretty badly smashed up, you see. But I escaped.”

“You escaped, eh? Like me?”

“I was the only survivor, yes.”

Obviously the young fellow was telling the truth.

“Damned odd, isn’t it,” commented Lindstrum, “that we should meet like this on the same bench…?” and was going on to say a lot more that was in his mind, when a group of passers-by came to a halt at this very moment in front of them. They hesitated in the sun. There were four people, including an old woman and an old man, with two younger folk. They eyed the bench. There was room on it for two more, but not for the whole party.

“It’s quite warm,” remarked the younger ones, “and we’ve got half an hour to kill. Let’s take a rest.”

They measured the space available.

“Room for all of us,” they announced.

The party of four, after some preliminary shuffling, moved closet. They sat down. They sat down in a row. The old man sat right through Lindstrum, and the old woman sat right through his companion at the other end.

Lindstrum and his companion exchanged looks.

“That’s what I meant,” remarked the young aviator, “when I said I was a survivor. That’s why I came across to you. We’re both survivors.” And they resumed their talk as though no one else sat on the bench, continuing it where they had left off, and talking perhaps for hours, perhaps for days, perhaps for weeks or months, or even centuries….

•   •   •   •   •   •

THE ADVENTURE OF TORNADO SMITH

I

When Mr. T. Smith, the prominent stockbroker of Capel Court in the City of London, woke that morning, the sun was streaming into his comfortable bedroom in a respectable quarter of the region north of Hyde Park. He felt a curious sense of exhilaration, a strange glow of happiness. Like a boy who knows he has done well in an examination, he experienced a delightful, light-hearted anticipation. And this glow pervaded his whole being. It was as if he expected some happy event, a piece of luck, a glorious stroke of chance.

He could not define it, but he felt that it was there, almost within his grasp. So vivid was this happy emotion that he sprang from the bed and stood in his striped blue-and-white pyjamas, staring out of the open window. The sun on his bare neck was hot, birds were singing in the mangy cedar of the small garden, a few early hyacinths blazed just below him in a narrow strip of green. But he saw nothing to account for what he felt. The sparrows were dirtier than ever.

He was puzzled. Tightening the belt of his pyjamas which had become loose in sleep, he smoothed his scanty hair and rubbed his eyes.

“Had a dream, I suppose,” he mumbled to himself. “A jolly dream sometimes does the trick,” he added, opening his jacket wider to let the sun warm his scraggy chest. Only, he could not remember any dream.

Mr. T. Smith liked things explained properly, and this bright happiness lay beyond his explanation. It had nothing to do with his business, nothing to do with the buying and selling of shares. He knew that instinctively. His business was good, but it was not as good as that.

He stroked his bare chest and smiled. Something important was going to happen to him. He felt it in his bones. It was something that might alter his whole life…. But of what kind, he asked himself, opening another button, and staring fixedly at the milkman in the area.

So methodical was Mr. T. Smith, so regular in his life, that this stir of emotion upset him rather. His business, inherited from an uncle, was steady and lucrative. “Mr. T. Smith and Co.” was respected in the City. It was a family business, his clients too respectable to allow of mistakes. They lived and died prepared — by Mr. T. Smith and Co. Irregularities played no role. His quarters in North London were also eminently right. His landlady, Miss Slumbubble, had looked after him for twenty years. She even mended his clothes; added new pockets when his money, wearing holes, slipped through. The first time, he remembered, the new pocket was too deep so that his hand dipped to his knee to find a coin. But that was years ago….

Withdrawing from the open window, where the milkman watched him with too much interest, he thought, Mr. T. Smith dressed and went down to breakfast.

“You ’ad a good night?” asked Miss Slumbubble as usual, bringing the invariable eggs and bacon. “You slep’ well, Mr. Smith?”

“Better than ever, thank you, Miss Slumbubble,” he replied, also as usual. He wondered if she noticed the excitement that still burned in him like a flame. He hoped not.

Apparently she did not. “That mattress,” she observed, “is the best in London. And I always make your bed myself, Mr. Smith.”

She had said this every morning for the past twenty years, and Mr. T. Smith knew exactly the reply she expected. “I thought you had.” He produced it with a smile, and began to eat his eggs.

Only Miss Slumbubble could not know with what curious excitement he had sprung from the “best mattress in London” an hour ago, nor with what a strange sense of anticipatory happiness he started forth upon his day. He put his impeccable tie, if possible, straighter, he tugged at his moustache, he took his umbrella, he set forth. “I feel a bit of a dog, you know, this morning,” he caught himself saying under his breath — then turned sharply, for Miss Slumbubble stood behind him. She invariably saw him off to the City.

“Ah! Good-bye, Miss Slumbubble,” he exclaimed as usual. “I shall be back by seven o’clock.”

“And your dinner will be ready for you, Mr. Smith,” replied the landlady, also as usual. “And I ’ope it won’t rain.”

Mr. Smith paused before making his customary comment. As a rule he said “I trust not,” but this morning the words refused to come as they had always come before.

“It can’t — today,” he heard himself saying.

But the door slammed behind him as he said it. He heard the bang. He was not sure whether Miss Slumbubble had caught his words or not. He laughed to himself. He pulled at his moustache. Usually, it felt soft, but now, he noticed, it felt stiff and wiry. It bristled, tather. He laughed again and set forth briskly to walk across the Park to his office. He had, after all, forgotten his umbrella. “Something’s wrong with me,” he chuckled to himself, “or — perhaps — it’s something right.” He laughed outright. “Anyhow, it’s — different.”

Then, as he strode along, he suddenly recalled that Miss Slumbubble had made an unusual remark to him. His mind, occupied with something else at the moment, had not noticed it. Now it came back to him. When he said it could not rain today, her comment was unexpected.

Ordinarily she would have said that “she ’oped not.” This morning she said another thing: “Anything may ’appen,” were the words she used.

“Anything,” agreed Mr. T. Smith, laughing so happily that, as he crossed Bayswater Road into the Park, he nearly got run over.

II

Following the routine of years, he strolled across the Park, intending to take a bus eventually at Trafalgar Square. But today he felt a strange reluctance to go to his office.

He fought against this, for what would people say if Mr. T. Smith was late? He had never been late. His reputation was based upon his punctuality. His clients would talk. Even Miss Slumbubble might hear of it. It would never do if he dawdled.

“Bother Miss Slumbubble!” he suddenly exclaimed. “And hang my clients! What does it matter if I am late?”

All the way something was singing in his heart. Perhaps it was that the spring was running in his blood. For now, at last, the spring had really come. Late in May the sun had finally struggled out, and the endless winter seemed to be gone for good. He saw a swallow darting past a chimney. A whiff of warm, scented air blew over him. He thought of gorse and pine trees on some sandy waste … of lizards … butterflies….

He knew suddenly that it was something more than the spring. His whole being thrilled to a new rhythm. Someone — somewhere — had piped … and he had heard. The real man had answered.

Not Mr. T. Smith of Capel Court, but the other one — Tornado Smith.

For he now abruptly remembered that he was named Tornado. Mr. T. Smith, most people thought, was Thomas Smith, even Timothy Smith, but actually his first name was Tornado. And surely he was not called Tornado for nothing!

It was the half named Tornado that heard the queer piping and answered to it, the part of him that, against all judgement and reason, drove his little sailing boat out of the safety of the harbour into the wintry gales of his brief holidays — Tornado, the adventurer that underlay the man of business, the part of him that took wild, even ridiculous, risks from time to time. It was just this “something” belonging to “Tornado,” that made him different from the jostling thousands he passed daily on his trudge to his office in the City.

Some spring, some bubble, danced now in his heart, discovered first, it seemed, in sleep.

His steps, unconsciously, became slower and slower. He found himself regretting that he could name no valid excuse for not turning up at the office. At every opportunity he paused and looked about him. He studied the shop windows with the closest attention, as if he had never seen them before — anything to prolong his walk. He was waiting for something. But what that “something” was he had no idea.

“Tornado,” he repeated to himself with a new feeling of its significance. As though his father had been a whirlwind, his mother a storm. It made him laugh, as he dawdled on, staring at this and that, idling, drifting, waiting…

Still it was not till he had reached Trafalgar Square that he came definitely to a halt. The office seemed suddenly more than he could bear. He stopped dead. Something plucked at his heart. He watched the pigeons drinking at the fountains. He was very late already. He knew quite well that his secretary, with a bundle of tiresome letters, was fuming and fussing; clients were wondering why Mr. T. Smith was late. The telephone was ringing …tinging…

“Well, let it ring!” he thought to himself. “And let the secretary wait! And let the clients wonder why I’m late! It’ll do them all good!”

He lingered in the warm sunshine, watching the pigeons preen themselves after their bath, or carrying on the love affairs that the sudden spell of fine weather provoked. The London sparrows, even the flies, detained him.

He caught himself wondering why he still lived in London. He had already made a good deal of money, enough to retire on. Why did he still waste what remained of his early manhood in this hateful way?

Were there not other lands that he could visit, lands with blue skies and sparkling seas? Countries free from the bugbear of what men called “progress,” more primitive, perhaps, yet at the same time more peaceful? Places where people still sang at their work in the hot sunshine…?

He thought of all he had read about the lotus-lands of the East and of scattered isles in the Pacific, of coral reefs and golden strands. It was difficult to believe all the stories he had read about such places, though he remembered the strange thrill the reading had given him at the time. There ought to be, there must be, he felt, countries just like that, countries where things happened, countries where the inhabitants did more than merely catch buses and run for electric trains. He recalled the sunny, golden advertisements he had read, the travel-folders….

And he tried in his mind to decide if there was any place that absolutely fulfilled his requirements. He felt a little doubtful. Nothing short of a real fairyland would do.

For a long time he stood thus, gazing into the shimmering fountain, but he no longer saw the water where the dirty pigeons bathed. He saw the long line of a coral reef with the great combers breaking over it in silvery foam against a background of waving coconut palms on some enchanted island of the Southern Seas. Soft winds brushed his cheeks. He heard the sea-birds cry….

Dimly he became aware that a small boy was standing beside him, gazing up into his face with large, dark eyes. It was these enquiring eyes that first arrested his attention, for they shared, it seemed, his own vision, and saw what he saw. They were looking, surely, at something the others did not see.

Yet the boy, at the first glance, seemed commonplace enough — like hundreds of others one saw pouring out of school in a back street. Poorly clad, with a thin, half-starved body, there was nothing about him the least attractive. On the second glance, however, Tornado saw that there was a difference. His features were finer than those of the average slum child. In spite of his poor clothes, he carried himself with a certain air, a kind of unconscious grace that suggested some wild animal.

Mr. T. Smith, of Capel Court, found himself staring at him — as a dog or other wild creature stares — full of interest, curiosity, wonder, all of them spontaneous and unconscious.

“Buy a ticket, sir,” said the boy in a pleasant, piping voice. “They’re only a shilling.”

“But where can I go — in these days — for a shilling?” Tornado asked, smiling.

“All the way,” the boy answered gravely.

“All the way!” echoed Tornado doubtfully, his heart beating.

He saw that the boy actually held pieces of blue paper in his hand that looked like tickets. The sight troubled him.

“Of course,” he stammered, “of course, I will.” He tried to look as if he were amused, while actually a lump rose somewhere in his throat, as he handed the boy a shilling and took the blue strip of paper in exchange. His hand was shaking.

The little fellow turned to go, then stopped suddenly and came back.

“Be careful never to lose it, Tornado,” he said shyly. “Full directions are written on the back.” And he turned away a second time.

“But — how do you know my name?” enquired Tornado, trembling now all over.

The strange boy smiled up into his face. It was an entrancing smile.

“Oh, we know our customers,” he said softly. “They are so few.”

“You don’t sell many then?” began Tornado.

This time the boy was really gone. It almost seemed as if he had vanished. He melted away so quickly into the passing throng.

Tornado looked at the blue slip of paper in his hand. On the back, sure enough, were some lines of writing. The thin, spidery letters were queer looking, and, instead of ink, some silvery liquid had been used. But the directions, once he mastered the script, were plain:

BLOCKQ

“Be at the Robin Hood Gate at Richmond Park before noon,” he read, “and there you will see a girl knitting beneath an oak tree with a cat beside her. Show her this paper and she will put you on your way.”

III

For some time Tornado turned the paper over and over in his hand. Of course, it was all nonsense. It was some charity stunt, some treasure hunt organised to get money for a hospital. It was one of these modern tricks that extort money out of the sentimental crowd… And yet the whole thing fell in so well with his idle mood that it provided just the excuse he needed — not to go to his office.

“I will go,” he informed himself, rather like a truant boy, “for the park will be lovely, and there may be somebody there!”

He started off.

Looking back afterwards, Tornado often thought that the strangest thing about this strange business was that, the moment he decided to go, no further thought of his neglected work, of his office, or even of his old life, ever crossed his mind. It was as if his normal life had ended suddenly. He seemed to have begun a new existence, while yet this “new existence” seemed always to have been there. It had always been within reach, only he had never found the way. The old shackles and ties were now cut through, at any rate, and a new and thrilling sense of freedom swept over him.

He had found liberty at last! He felt like a gipsy who leaves the old familiar camp behind him, knowing that the entire world is his to roam as he will. His office, his rooms, Miss Slumbubble, were wiped out as though they never had existed.

How he reached Richmond Park he never quite knew. No memory remains. Whether it was by bus or taxi, on foot, or otherwise, he could not say. It seemed to him sufficient that he found himself at the Robin Hood Gate in an incredibly short time. He was simply — there.

He looked about him eagerly, but at first could see no one that answered in any way to the description on his ticket. The sun blazed down from a cloudless sky; the trees and grasses still held the freshness of early spring; the scent of the good clean earth was in his nostrils. And he drew in deep breaths of sheer delight at getting away so easily from the noise and smell of the city. The day was radiant, sparkling. His blood stirred within him.

A park keeper, he noticed, was chatting idly with a nurse girl, and an occasional car swept along the roadway with a swirl of dust, yet without a sound. They were like pictures only. But nowhere could he discover a girl beneath an oak tree with a cat beside her.

Putting his hand into his pocket, he pulled out the blue ticket, intending to read it over once again, but, even as his hand closed on it, he became aware that he was looking straight at the object of his search.

There sat a girl beneath an oak tree, exactly as described, and a black cat was licking its paws beside her. He gazed. A moment before, the spot was empty. Yet no surprise stirred in him. This, somehow, was just what he expected.

He was excited, but not troubled. A flicker of nerves, however, it seems, ran through him, for he dropped his ticket, and as it fluttered down and he stooped hurriedly to recover it, the girl and cat both vanished too. He could not be quite sure, perhaps, being too intent on picking it up again. Yet it was nowhere to be seen. Only a large green leaf lay at his feet. He grabbed it instantly — and, sure enough, he again held the ticket in his hand.

After all, he must have been mistaken about the disappearance of the girl and cat. There they both were in front of him, as plain as life.

He advanced. The girl watched him coming. She smiled.

“I’m glad you found your ticket,” she said. “I was afraid you might have lost it altogether — like the others.” Her voice was soft.

“Do most people lose it?” he found himself asking.

“Most, yes,” she replied.

“And can you really show me the way?” he went on, after a pause.

The girl seemed amused at the question.

“Of course I can,” she replied.

Something within him hesitated and was afraid. He was afraid of the question he wanted to ask, afraid that the reply would never satisfy him. He took a gulp of breath. Then he asked his question.

“Is it to — Fairyland?” came his whisper. “Is that what the ticket means — all the way to Fairyland?”

“I live there,” replied the girl simply, “and my name is Chance. My sister, Luck, lives with me,” she added, pointing to the cat.

“But how can a cat be your sister?” Tornado asked.

The girl, without answering, looked at the cat, and Tornado, following her glance, met the full glare of the cat’s eyes. He felt a faint shiver run through him. No further answer seemed necessary. The eyes that met his own were not the eyes of a cat, nor of a human being. They were the eyes, he realised of a spirit — the eyes of something — of someone — who had seen the birth and death of worlds, yet still lived on.

A feeling of chill swept over him. Questions that sprang to his lips died in his throat and remained unuttered. His breath failed him for some seconds. He stared from one to the other uncertainly, and for several minutes no one spoke.

With an effort, Tornado looked towards the park gates. To his surprise some subtle change was already at work. The gates became dim, the nurse girl and the keeper appeared less distinct. He gazed hard, trying to focus his sight, but a tenuous veil seemed to have fallen between him and the familiar world he knew of old. No effort he made could pierce it quite. This queer soft gauze fell between his sight and what he had always known as Reality.

He turned again to the girl. Change seemed to be at work in her too. She looked less homely somehow. Her hair, which he had before described to himself as a washed-out blonde, had deepened in colour; her rather faded blue eyes had lightened up. It was as if some hidden lamp shone through. She began to glow, to radiate light. Second by second her beauty increased. A kind of radiance seemed to surround her like a cloud, and this light glimmered everywhere through the air.

Tornado next became aware that in some strange way he, too, was changing. Slight tremors ran through him from his head to his feet. He felt that he was altering, adapting himself in some way to a changed condition of existence.

Everything in him, he felt, was being speeded up in marvellous fashion, quickened, heightened, swept into higher, swifter gears. His thoughts now tore through him at intenser speed. Rapidity was the keynote. Soon at this pace, he would pass beyond the need of ordinary thought at all, of thought as men knew it. A new power was invading him. Already he seemed beyond the need of speech with his companions. Words, syllables, were unnecessary, for in some strange way they answered his unuttered questions. The blood raced through his veins with a power that seemed strong enough to rend his body in pieces. The tear and rush were furious. Yet he remained utterly indifferent. In this new state the loss of his ordinary bodily sensations, perhaps even of his body too, appeared a matter too trivial to notice. There were more interesting things to think of than that.

All the familiar landmarks were already gone. The park gates, the keeper and the keeper’s lodge had long since vanished, and only the tops of the biggest trees remained above a kind of whitish mist. Even while he looked, these, too, disappeared with a kind of spiral swirl. The familiar world had faded.

He found himself upon a sandy path running through deep heather to a lonely sand beach.

The sun shone brightly on the sparkling water, and far away he could just make out the dim shape of an island. Gulls wheeled about the shore, and a heron, on lazy wing, passed circling over his head.

He looked round for his companions. The cat had gone, and in its place stood a dark and lovely girl. Her sister, the fair one, stood beside her, smiling gravely.

“You may call us Chance and Luck,” she said, “for thus are we known among men. But these are only names. Others call us Fate and Destiny, though these, too, are wrong. In reality there is only the Deed and the Payment.” She paused and gazed into his eyes. “Perhaps, this is too hard for you,” she went on gently, “but, if so, Merlin will explain, for he is the wisest of those who dwell in Fairyland.”

IV

Tornado was in no mood to quibble about names, or as to what Chance meant by her talk of Merlin. He felt a new life pulsing through his veins, and his heart sang with happiness. He noted, almost without astonishment, that he had shed his old clothes somewhere on the journey, his usual City clothes. Now he stood clad only in a leather jerkin with bare and sunburnt legs, and instead of shoes he wore rough sandals of deer’s hide. A long hunting knife swung at his belt. Only one thing was missing, a familiar thing that ought to have been there too. What it was he could not say. He recognised its absence — no more than that.

He noted these changes without surprise, but at the same time there came a fugitive flash of memory — a memory of a dream, perhaps, that had come to him only last night. Dreams have this way of cropping up in stray fragments sometimes.

“Miss — er — Slum” he could not get the whole name, “and that place of torture I was going to in my dreams — a bell ringing, ringing — letter — lots of letters — Mr. T. Smith .” He passed his hand across his eyes in a vague effort to remember — “dear, dear, what a horrid dream it was — and there’s something I’ve forgotten — I wonder … I wonder…”

His eyes caught the figures of the two girls running past him, and all memory of his dream slipped from his consciousness in the way dreams always slip away and are forgotten. His years had fallen from him like the leaves of a tree, and the vigour of youth was in his blood. Adventure was calling to him with her deathless voice. Laughing, he ran down the path to join his two companions on the edge of the water. He saw their gleaming white legs as they stepped into a small sailing-boat lying in the cove, its bow resting on the yellow sand, its stern just afloat. As he reached them they paused and looked at him. They leaped back to join him, sitting down on the sand and motioning to him to do the same.

Tornado sat down beside them.

“There’s the boat that will take you to Fairyland,” said Chance, smiling at him mischievously. “Have you the courage to go in her?”

“I think so,” he replied. “What are the dangers?”

The two sisters whispered together for a moment. It was Luck who answered him:

“There is the danger of never getting back,” she said, “of never returning. It takes courage, too, to cross the Dragon Field to get to your home.”

“My home!” he exclaimed.

Looking at him encouragingly, they laughed, and their laughter, he thought, was like the music of bells coming faintly, sweetly across summer meadows.

“Your home, yes,” explained Chance. “Hasn’t your home always been here? Haven’t you yourself made it here? Through all the dull years, haven’t you dreamed of a little house on the edge of the forest, near a pool where the deer come down to drink at nightfall? And a glade where the stags roar when the autumn leaves are falling? And a sailing boat that will take you far away to some enchanted isle? And a girl, perhaps, with dark hair or with blond, and smiling eyes and happy laughter?”

He knew it was all too true. For years and years, all through his life, he had dreamed such things. From boyhood he had dreamed of fords where knights-errant held the crossings against all comers. Sometimes in his dreams he had seen a battlemented town gay with flags, with strange old-world houses and narrow, twisting streets. Time after time he had seen the same town, so that in the end it had become as familiar to him as his own small bit of London. He could find his way about it quite well. He knew where the armourer had his shop and where the leather-workers lived. Even the faces of the people who kept the market stalls in the quaint little square by the church were all familiar. Yet he was never quite sure of his own standing in the town. Even in his dreams he was a little puzzled. Some of the people saw and recognised him, but others completely ignored him as though he was not there. All the same, he felt that it was his own town in a sense. He knew it all, from the archery butts to the tilting ground, where brave tournaments were held with the splintering of lances.

He looked at his two companions. He saw that they read his thoughts, and that there was no need of explanations.

“Tell me, please, about the Dragon Field,” he said, a queer trembling shyness in him. “Are they dangerous?”

“They are terrifying,” said Luck. “You see, they are the Guardians, and they don’t let everybody by. They will not touch you.”

“Whom do they stop?” he asked.

Luck reflected a moment. “Oh, quite a lot of people,” she replied presently. “Those who are cruel to animals and children chiefly. Then money-grubbers and gluttons, the kind that are always thinking of their comfort and their clothes and their looks. Fat people, too, with shiny skins. You know the sort.”

Tornado sighed. “Of course,” he agreed, “it would never do to let them in. They would make the place impossible.”

“And people who never, never take any sort of risk,” Luck added.

“Ah!” said Tornado to himself, and fell to thinking.

“Is that Fairyland that I see over there?” he asked after a while, pointing to a misty island far away. He had noticed it when he first arrived at the beach. Very dim and distant it seemed.

Luck’s expression and voice were graver as she answered. “You would find it difficult to land there,” she told him. “That is called Hy-Bresil by some, by others the Isle of Avalon. The souls of those who perish on some high adventure go there. It is where King Arthur went to rest after his last battle and before he came back to take possession of his two kingdoms.”

“His two kingdoms?” Tornado exclaimed.

“Yes,” replied Luck, “for does he not reign forever in the hearts of the young — and in Fairyland?”

She turned and looked at her sister, exchanging an understanding smile, then turned back to Tornado.

“And now we must leave you,” she said. “There is your boat. Follow that gull with the black patch on his wing, and he will guide you.”

The two sisters drew aside and waited, and though Tornado could have gone on talking with them forever, he realised by the tone of the girl’s voice, as also by the smile he had seen on both their faces, that it was time for him to go. He, at any rate, was not one of those who never take a risk, he tried to assure himself.

He got into the boat and stepped the mast. A light wind had sprung up, blowing off the land. He said good-bye to the two girls and pushed off boldly. He set the sail. Gaily the little craft slid through the water towards its strange and distant goal, as, looking back, he saw Luck and Chance still standing on the yellow beach, side by side, watching him. He waved his hand and they waved back. A moment later, when he turned again, he saw them turn and walk away inland till they disappeared among the trees.

The gull flew steadily ahead, occasionally soaring high up into the blue, at other times diving down and lightly skimming the tops of the waves. Sometimes it flew round and round the boat for a few moments, passing close to Tornado’s head and peering into his face with its bright peeping eyes.

The wind increased the farther he left the shore, and Tornado found that his little boat was really travelling quite fast through the water. He soon lost sight of land, and only the misty shores of Hy-Bresil were visible far ahead. He must have sailed like this for some hours before he discerned a dark spot on the horizon. The wind was rising all this time, and his boat seemed to travel ever faster and faster, leaping from wave to wave like a thing possessed.

For the past hour or two he had been afraid of driving her under and had eased her occasionally, but seeing how bravely she sailed he now let her have her head, comforting himself with the thought that she was a magic boat in any case and ought to know how to keep afloat.

The land drew nearer. He was now rapidly getting near enough to distinguish details. Tall hills, he saw rose inland, but close along the shore the ground seemed to be flat and wooded. He could see no signs of houses or inhabitants. The coast appeared utterly deserted. But it was also an iron-bound coast. Great rocks jutted out into the sea and the waves broke white over them. The flat portions of the shore, he now saw, were few and far between.

It looked impossible for a small boat to make the land; but Tornado, with blind faith in the gull, followed where it led — straight in towards the rocks. Once or twice, he noticed, the bird turned its head quickly as though to reassure him. Nearer and nearer they came, and though he felt a little sick with fear, there was no turning back now. The roar of the surf thundered all round him, the spray wet his face, and the boat felt the surge of the great combers as they hurled themselves over the jagged rocks. He held his breath.

At the last moment, when everything seemed lost, a narrow channel opened suddenly before him, and the little boat swept through between the dangerous rocky walls into a tiny cove. Once inside, all was quiet. The wind, shut off by the high walls all round, hardly rippled the surface of the blue water which lapped peacefully along the narrow sandy bay. And, to his surprise, he saw that there was actually a little pier made of rough slabs of stone, with a ring of twisted withies to which he could fasten his boat. A moment later he had tied her up and leapt ashore.

The gull, as if satisfied that its job was done, flew several times round his head, screaming shrilly as though to say good-bye, and then headed straight out to sea. Tornado waved his hand in farewell. He fancied he saw it flirt its wing with the black spot by way of answer. He watched it disappear into the blaze of sunshine above the wide blue sea.

V

Tornado stood still for some time, taking stock of his surroundings. There seemed to be a footpath from the pier that led directly into the forest. It lost itself at once among the dense trees. After examining the ground in all directions this path appeared the only way he could go, for the shore revealed no openings, and behind him was, of course, the open sea. His best, his only, plan was to follow where it led, since it must, at any rate, lead somewhere.

“Now for the dragons!” he thought uneasily, as a wave of misgiving swept over him. Instinctively, as he started, he loosened the long hunting knife at his belt, although he knew quite well that it would be useless against a dragon that really meant business. The undoubted fact that he was taking a risk pleased him nevertheless; it proved him worthy of being admitted to Hy-Bresil.

As he went cautiously along, keeping his eyes on both sides and in front as well, the trees grew thicker and thicker, larger and larger, so that at last he appeared to be walking in a kind of green tunnel, the branches meeting above his head. Here and there a splash of sunlight stole through and turned some strange flower by the path into a flaming jewel. His feet made no sound on the mossy ground. Silent as the grave the forest was, for no wind stirred.

Quite suddenly, the path led into the open, the trees fell away, and a large clearing lay before him. Deer were grazing quietly all over it. Tornado stiffened like a dog scenting game and almost unconsciously slipped behind a tree to watch them. There were red deer and fallow, here and there an occasional roe, while in the distance he saw other deer that were quite strange to him. But, as his eyes swept the herds, picking out the best beasts in each, his attention was suddenly held by the sight of another animal altogether, and a very weird one.

It was lying down when he first saw it, but, as he watched, it rose slowly and stretched itself. Larger than a stag, he noticed, and coloured like a rocking-horse, dappled black and white. There was no mistaking what it was when he saw the long straight horn coming out of the forehead. He caught his breath. It was the unicorn. Its eyes gazed gently about it, as though, without being alarmed, it somehow knew that a stranger was in its neighbourhood.

“What a gracious, splendid creature!” he exclaimed to himself as he gazed, and a thrill ran through him, for he knew that the unicorn roams no other pastures save those of Fairyland, and that he had, therefore, really arrived.

He must have stood behind his tree for a long time watching the stately creature, his eyes wandering towards the deer as well, for he had quite forgotten the matter of dragons being possibly in the neighbourhood, when there came a sudden roaring in the sky, and Tornado, quickly looking up, saw six dark shapes rushing downwards at tremendous speed towards the forest; indeed, towards the very clearing at whose edge he stood concealed. What looked like jets of flame preceded them, issuing, apparently, from their mouths. They made a curious loud rattling sound, with other noises that were half hooting and half growling.

“Bless my soul!” he exclaimed. “The dragons!”

The shock to his mind and nerves was very considerable, yet his interest was so intense that his fear was not more than he could manage. It was odd, however, that just at this very moment when his entire attention should have been occupied with this arresting sight, he found time to think of something else — that he had forgotten something. This certainty that some familiar object was missing came back again. His hand flew to his knife, but the knife was in its place. There was another thing he ought to have had with him, only for the life of him he could not remember what it was. It was something he always carried. He used it for protection overhead. What it was, however, he could not imagine. He had not got it — that was all he knew.

This thought flashed through his mind, then vanished utterly — and he concentrated all his attention again on the dragons. They were much lower now, just above the tree-tops, in fact, and one by one he saw them plane down into the clearing and settle among the feeding deer as quietly as though they were so many crows. The deer, too, seemed undisturbed by their arrival, moving calmly to one side to give them room to land. The unicorn went on rubbing its horn against a tree. Only they were most certainly not crows. The jets of flame that had poured out of their nostrils while they were in full flight had died down, but a red glow showed when they opened their tremendous mouths, while thin wisps of smoke curled round their jagged lips and floated upwards into the still air. Their huge sides rose and fell as they breathed, accompanied by an odd noise, half rattling, half clanking, that was almost metallic, and came, it seemed, from their interior.

Tornado now felt really frightened. The appearance of these monstrous brutes was chilling to the blood. Any one of them could have swallowed him at a single gulp; their fiery breath could burn him to an ash in a moment; a blow from a single tail — and he would be reduced to a pulp of broken bones and flesh. They were covered, he saw, with bright green scales which gave out a clashing sound as they moved. Their legs and claws were a brilliant scarlet, while their eyes, as large as sou plates, glowed with alternate red and green as touch lit by some internal fire.

On landing they had folded their wings, which towered above their backs fully thirty feet into the air. He stared and stared, and the more he stared the less he liked them. He realised that their arrival coincided too accurately with his own: they arrived because he had arrived. The whole six of them, he noticed, had drawn themselves up directly opposite to where he hid behind his tree, and the path he had been following, the only path there was, ran right through the snide of them. They had arranged themselves with military precision, three on each side of the path.

Peering cautiously round the trunk that sheltered him, he noticed these details. And his heart sank into his deerskin sandals.

Yet his profound trust in what Luck and Chance had told him did not waver. So far, he reflected, he had come safely owing to their guidance. He realised he must trust them to the end, or else fail to prove himself worthy of his quest. His muscles, however, were like paper in his legs. He dared not, could not, move — when, suddenly, he heard a far, shrill cry, and, looking up, he saw the gull with the spotted wing in the air above the trees. It circled once, peeped down at him, uttered its shrill cry a second time, and vanished into space.

It was this that decided him to act. Summoning up all his courage, he took the risk. He stepped out from behind his tree and walked slowly but steadily forward in the direction of the waiting dragons.

The nearer he drew to them the less he liked it. His blood was water. He trembled. But he walked fairly straight, giving no outward sign of flinching. Only a few yards now separated him from the first couple in the dreadful row and he realised that there was only just room to pass between them without actually touching. The slightest stumble, leaning an inch to right or left, would mean that he would brush the awful jaws. Indeed, as he moved slowly forward, the dragon on the right yawned widely, showing an enormous mouth with huge pointed teeth and a red tongue that flickered in and out with a ghastly significance. It was licking its Sea lips, of course. But the behaviour of its companion facing it on the left seemed even more ominous, for its immense tail began to twitch and swing from side to side like the tail of a cat before it springs. It seemed to be gathering its vast legs under it as a kitten does when it leaps playfully at a ball.

Tornado felt himself as the ball. His body dripped with perspiration. His legs only just supported him. But he still kept moving with slow steps forward, nearer and ever nearer.

At last he was actually between the first pair of mighty heads. The creature eyed him, but did not move. He passed slowly onwards. He reached the second pair, whose eyes similarly followed him, the bodies keeping motionless. A whiff of burning brimstone came to his nostrils, blended, he fancied, with another smell that was curiously familiar, though he could not name it. He knew the name, but it had vanished with another part of his life which, equally, was forgotten.

The dragons, as he passed further between four more pairs of heads, never moved, though following him steadily with their huge, fiery eyes.

When half-way down the line Tornado only just controlled a violent impulse to make a sudden run for it. It occurred to him to dash wildly forward as fast as ever he could sprint — and trust to luck. But as the idea took form in his mind, the words “trust to Luck” brought the quick knowledge that to carry out his plan would betray cowardice and failure. To trust to Luck and Chance was not to run away. There was Destiny. And Destiny, though implacable, obeyed courage and determination. He held on his dreadful way to the end.

And the end came, at last, without disaster. He passed the final pair of monsters safely. Not one of the dragons had moved. Now that he was beyond them, though only a few feet, they still crouched unmoved upon the forest sward. Joy! He had not failed himself! He had proved worthy of the heritage of Hy-Bresil, if only by the skin of his teeth!

Trying not to break into a run, Tornado, his breath irregular, his heart thumping like a little drum, followed the path. The unicorn came close, lowered its stately head, and nuzzled his shoulder with its dangerous pointed horn. He looked a moment into its gentle eyes. The herds of deer divided quietly to let him pass, then fell to feeding again, quite undisturbed. In fact, he had to wait once while a large company of them crossed in front of him.

He had not looked back as yet, but now he heard suddenly a tremendous rattling clatter, a hissing and a hooting, and, turning his head, he saw the great dragons take the air. It was a wondrous sight. They rose without effort, snorting fire and smoke, their scales a din of clanking metal, and, once above the trees, he saw the whole six pass across the sky in a wedge-shape formation like a skein of monstrous geese. They became smaller and smaller as they rose into upper space, their roaring died away, they were gone.

Neither the deer nor the unicorn, he noticed, paid the slightest attention to this great commotion. Silence and peace descended again upon the forest.

VI

Tornado drew a deep breath and felt happier than ever in his life before. Such happiness seemed incredible, yet he experienced it. He was coming closer and closer to something he had always yearned for. He longed to wait a while and make closer friends with the attractive unicorn, but some instinct warned him that he must not linger, but should push on farther, for the climax of what he sought lay yet in front of him.

He had now reached the far side of the clearing The sun was sinking, the shadows growing longer. He began to think vaguely about food, about where and how he was going to sleep as well. He was not tired, but sleep when the sun went down seemed natural. Should he lie down on the moss and ferns? Should he look about for berries? The music of a tinkling stream reminded him that he was thirsty. He knelt down and drank his fill of sparkling water.

As he rose to his feet again the forest, it seemed, wore another look. It was not quite the same as when he knelt down a minute ago. He gazed about him. There was a certain curious change, he fancied. He felt he had seen it before. The fringe of the woods he was now approaching wore almost a familiar guise. This old impression grew stronger as he walked slowly on. The path, unless he was mistaken, would presently take a sharp turn to the left just beyond that old gnarled oak tree. There would be a cottage with a pool of water beside it. He would go up and knock on the door, and the door would open….

Sure enough, it proved exactly as he imagined. Leaving the forest, the path turned sharply to the left. There stood the cottage, the cottage of his desires, and the pool that he had loved so long in dream. And that figure among the sunflowers, was it Luck or Chance? He could not quite see. It disappeared behind the rows of sunflowers where he saw the unicorn gazing gently at him over the towering foxgloves. It was coming in by the back way, of course, to open to him. His heart rose triumphantly within him. He wanted to shout and sing. He had at last come — Home!

Tornado, his blood pulsing with this happiness, strode boldly up to the door. He knocked confidently. He stood waiting a moment. No one came at first. He knocked again, but still no one came; there was no sound of a footfall. A vague feeling of disquietude stole over him. Ah! there was another way of getting in, he seemed to remember, and his hand went automatically down the side of his leg as if hunting for something he expected to find there.

Was it a pocket he sought? His pocket, at any rate, was there as usual. The thing he looked for, too, lay hard and firm inside it. He drew out his key and inserted it without effort in the lock. The door opened easily as usual. He went in, also as usual. There before him stood his girl-secretary, a pile of letters behind her on the desk, again as usual.

A bell was ringing impatiently, ringing ringing….

The girl’s face wore a half reproachful look as she bade him respectfully good morning.

“A little late, am I…?” offered Mr. T. Smith, a trifle apologetically. “I — er — walked the whole way, I’m afraid. The morning,” he added, “was so fine, you know….”

“Yes, Mr. Smith,” replied the girl. “A pity it’s clouded over since.” She turned away to answer the telephone, which kept on ringing, ringing.

Even as she said the words he noticed that the first early brilliance indeed had passed. The sky outside was dark and lowering. Rain obviously threatened. The girl was gabbing at the telephone. He waited, listening.

“Miss Slumbubble, sir,” she reported, receiver down. “To say you forgot your umbrella. She’s sending it at once by messenger.”

“Oh — ah — yes,” he murmured vaguely. “I — knew I had forgotten — something.”

He glanced at his watch. After all, he was only fifteen minutes late.

And perhaps another fifteen minutes had passed when a small messenger boy arrived with his umbrella, offering a piece of blue paper which Mr. T. Smith signed by way of receipt, having first paid the little bright-eyed lad a shilling. He signed without thinking, “Tornado Smith,”

•   •   •   •   •   •

HANDS OF DEATH

I

The assistant foreman of the bridge-gang rode his mules slowly up the trail from the river valley to the plateau. His broad-brimmed hat, his fierce moustache, a reckless fling of his great shoulders too, gave him the air of a desperado. As a matter of fact, no warmer-hearted Irishman than simple Mike Kelly ever spared his animal over this arid Bolivian plain. He combined the appearance of a desperado with the emotions of a child, an incurable sentimentalist to boot.

He was on his way to report to Hadow, the foreman, whose hut lay at the far end of the Indian village across the blazing sunshine. The heated air hung motionless. From far below rose the faint tinkling of the workmen’s tools, as they chipped stones for the great railway bridge. Occasionally, drowning all other sounds, came the snorting of the construction train, laden with materials. The torrent at the bottom of the deep gorge was also audible. The barren plateau, baked and split by the sun, lay all about him, but far away rose mountains crowned with dazzling snow. On their green foothills, in this crystal air, he easily picked out the herds of llamas and donkeys feeding.

Mike paused at the top of the trail to give his animal a rest. He looked about him.

“A man’s country!” he said to himself, as he puffed his cigarette. “A man’s way of living too, begad!”

He beamed his deep satisfaction. The next moment, unaccountably, he sighed. In this life of careless liberty something after all seemed lacking. For it was spring. He longed for a companion. Only a mate was needed to make it perfect.

Schooling Mike had never known. A construction camp had always been his home, and the nomad life suited his few elemental needs. He was ever on the move, helping to drive an iron road farther and farther into some grim wilderness. Now, suddenly, in the sunshine of this brilliant Bolivian spring, he knew himself intolerably alone. He sighed again. “Days of grief!” he exclaimed aloud with a melancholy smile. “And not a female anywheres to take me by the hand!”

Unaware that Fate was listening, he rode slowly along the sun-grilled trail. It was deserted, the Indians slept in their huts, no white man was about. Then, as he approached some trees at the entrance of the scattered village, a native girl emerged suddenly from their shade and stepped leisurely along in front of him, stepping at the same time straight into his empty mood of longing. She moved, it seemed, straight into his heart. His pulse stood still, then quickened violently, for the stroke was unexpected, falling like a flash of fire out of the clear sky. Something in him trembled. He urged his mule. “It’s me happy day,” he exclaimed to himself, “sure as God made little apples!”

The abruptness of it took his breath away, yet did not affect his powers of observation. Rather, it increased them. He saw at a glance, from the subdued colour of her dress, that she was a pure-bred Aymara, and very different from the half-breed Chellas who affected gaudy brilliance in their clothes. Taller than her kind, she moved with an easy grace that delighted his eye, instead of with the shuffling gait the Indians used. Her attitude, moreover, suggested a dignity and self-assurance he had never seen before in any native woman. This air of confidence he noticed instantly, while there was, too, another quality about her that gave him a vague sense of trouble, a disturbing touch that was too slight, too elusive, to leave more than the faintest trail upon his mind. He was aware of it, no more than that, for his positive emotions of another kind at once obliterated it. His Celtic fancy idealised immediately. “Divine and wonderful!” he told himself with bright admiration. “And I’d be after sayin’ it to her this minute if I knew her lingo better. Begad, and I will now before she disappears out of me life forever!” And he was in the act of overtaking her when, to his disgust, a man came suddenly out of another hut and stepped into the path as though to speak with her.

Mike cursed beneath his breath. There was always another man, he reflected bitterly. Great was his surprise, therefore, when the fellow abruptly altered his course, rather as though he had just seen her for the first time, hesitated, then drew back in a curious attitude of half respectful, half uneasy waiting, finally allowing her to continue her way without a sign of greeting or recognition. And this, to Mike, was unusual — an act of politeness he had never before seen an Indian show to his own women. He was puzzled a little, while for a passing instant he was again aware of the elusive touch of uneasiness he had known before, though it vanished as soon as it was born. “The daughter of a big Chief!” he decided, as he drew nearer again. “It’s still me happy day then after all!” His heart, indeed, was hammering against his ribs, as the girl, standing aside to allow room to pass, looked up at him.

Mike stopped, turned in his saddle, and the next second lifted his sombrero — to an Indian; but to the most beautiful Indian he had ever seen. Her skin, lighter than ordinary, had a lustre of faint gold about it; the features showed none of the heaviness of her race; she might, indeed, have passed for an Italian of the better class. But it was the luminous eyes, gazing so fearlessly into his own, that enslaved him finally. Did they set other chords vibrating in him too, deep down and out of sight? The question rose certainly, but merely to flicker out and disappear. Strange fires glowed in them, great resolution, something that both attracted and repelled, although repel was far too strong a term to describe the fugitive doubt that passed so flutteringly across the back of his mind. He knew, at any rate, an instant’s uncommon bewilderment. Open to swift intuitions, he was superstitious as well, and an emotion that held both shrinking and enticement swept his primitive soul. Did he imagine some unholy knowledge, some unwelcome secret, lurking behind those veiled fires, something perhaps of Indian Magic, of a forgotten faith the white race never knew? He almost crossed himself. But in that moment the girl smiled — and his fate was sealed. Mike loved at first sight, and his love, evidently, was not unacceptable, for a warm colour flushed the girl’s bare neck and golden dusky cheeks, she let his rough hand take her own, her voice was welcoming and pleasant.

She had long ago picked him out, he decided, in his rush of happy feeling, and loved him secretly already; had seen him about, of course, and taken note of him, and marked him down for her own. He forgot, in his delirium, that his hat was still off in the dangerous sun, forgot that he was white and the girl an Indian, forgot that the torrent of passionate words he poured forth was only half intelligible to her. One thing only from the outside world pierced his mind at the time — the fact that the man he had seen before was now standing with a companion in front of a hut not far away, both watching him intently, then instantly disappearing as the girl turned to look at them. Yet disappearing in a manner not quite ordinary, it struck him. They vanished into the hut as though her mere look had flashed a word of command they feared and must obey.

Mike noticed this; and a sense of discomfort, born he knew not whence, passed over him, going again however, as swiftly as it came. With the girl in his arms, her lips upon his own, all lesser emotions were utterly obliterated.

II

Mike Kelly meant marriage. The difference in race seemed no objection to him. Few whites in these parts were without some trace of Indian blood. Marie would just suit his roving life. The odd respect shown to her by the two men, while it faintly troubled him, added at the same time to her value. His dream obsessed him. He suddenly wondered how long his mule had been standing in front of the foreman’s shanty, when a voice brought him back to earth with a shock.

“Who’s cut your tongue out, Mike?”

Hadow, the Englishman, was staring at him fixedly, a lurking smile behind his clear blue eyes. Unknown to the other, he had witnessed the entire scene from the window of his shanty.

“Days of grief, Boss,” cried Mike with a grin, “they’re over. I’ve just seen the girl I’m goin’ to marry. It’s me happy day at last, and that’s a fact!”

Hadow looked hard into his face.

“You’d be happiest perhaps with a native, Mike,” he said, after a perceptible pause. “She’d understand you better than a cold-blooded white, I guess.”

“You’ve said it,” returned Mike. “She would that.” He gripped the proffered hand, pleased by the wishes of good luck. Then he began to wonder why Hadow held his hand so long and stared so steadily into his eyes.

Suddenly the Englishman spoke. “Fit, ain’t you, Mike?” he asked abruptly. “Sound in wind and limb, I mean?” It was a curious question, puzzling the other considerably. “No disease or weakness anywhere — nothing organic?” Hadow persisted, watching him closely as he asked it. His gravity, his persistence, must have made a man in a less emotional state reflect, for Hadow knew the country, knew the Indians too. Mike was merely puzzled by the long word he did not understand.

“What d’ye mean, Boss?” he asked, grinning broadly. “Why, I’m a two-year-old,” he added quickly, “for all me wicked sins.” And he laughed like of

Still gripping his hand and looking into his eyes, Hadow said quietly, but as if he meant it, “Then see that you keep a two-year-old, Mike Kelly. Take good care of yourself. And — avoid accidents.”

Mike burst into yet louder laughter. Its very loudness, perhaps, betrayed a faint uneasiness, yet if so betrayed it unconsciously. “That’s me, Boss,” he cried, shaking the other’s hand with violence, as though to prove his health and strength. “That’s me every time,” he repeated, while Hadow winced, withdrawing his hand with difficulty, “and it’s a marryin’ man I am this day. And don’t you forget it!”

“I won’t,” laughed the Englishman, smoothing his hand out, while a curious expression crossed his sunburnt face. His men’s domestic affairs after all, it seemed to say, were no concern of his. He made a gesture, however, as though he had been about to say something else, then changed his mind. “Take good care of yourself, Mike,” he mentioned, adding, casually as it were, yet with a hint of significance that escaped the Irishman, “and if you ever need a helping hand, just let me know, remember.”

Mike thanked him, and the two men turned to business.

III

The brief courtship ran smoothly; Mike learned a bit more of the language, and the girl picked up some Spanish. The marriage caused no particular excitement, for the white men regarded it as a passing episode merely. The Indians, however, betrayed an unexpected reaction. The unquestionable respect they felt for Marie and her aged mother they now showed to Mike as well. They built his new hut without payment — a present from the village. If he found himself separated a little from his own kind, he picked no quarrel about it. He was romantically, desperately, in love, and Marie managed her easy-going husband as she pleased. Was he, perhaps, a trifle afraid of her? There were certain things he now began to notice, little things to which he attached significance because he could not quite account for them, and these now and again perturbed him rather. Their combined effect upon him was cumulative.

Her hands, for instance — strong, well-moulded; duplicates, for that matter of her mother’s — were unroughened, untouched by any sign of toil. They had never been put to menial usages. The respect, the reverence, indeed, that was paid to them both by the natives, also required explanation, but an explanation he could not find. This reverence, sometimes almost tinged by fear, was paid to the old woman chiefly, but Marie shared it too, and no amount of questioning on his part elicited more than the fact that her mother performed some work of great importance to the community. The reverence, Marie told him with an enigmatic smile, was due to that, but it was a purely native matter that concerned the Indians alone, and he was not to trouble about it. With a kiss, a little shrug of her shapely shoulders, she dissipated his uneasiness, while increasing his curiosity. Her father, now dead, Mike discovered had been a man of no particular importance, certainly not a Chief, yet mother and daughter both exacted this odd respect as though entitled to it, as though it was their rightful due. That they did no work of any kind pertained to some rights they held in the public estimation.

Even before his marriage, Mike had known that the natives brought them food, placing it outside their door, giving a peculiar cry, and then withdrawing before it was taken in. Now the offerings were placed outside the mother’s hut alone. There were, of course, dozens of little native customs to which the whites paid no attention, Mike ignoring them with the rest as of no importance, but these particular ones caught his attention as somewhere significant. The Indians, themselves, would tell him nothing; they seemed nervous, almost uneasy, when he pressed enquiry. It was, however, the strong and delicate hands his imagination settled upon chiefly, the hands that were never put to common work, the hands that were always so beautifully kept. He never kissed them without knowing a faint shiver down his back, while utterly unable to account for it. The mystery deepened. His superstitious sense increased. Yet neither of these for long, he noticed. His wife’s beauty soon banished such vague fears. Marie dominated him easily. She loved him heart and soul, and in her passionate Indian way. Mike came to realise, perhaps, that the Indians, like his own race, each fostered and enjoyed their own particular collection of little beliefs and fancies, none of which amounted actually to what he called “a row of beans.” He smiled and kissed his way through life, and life was all made up of happy days, his days of grief forgotten entirely.

Then chance brought an incident that pulled him up short with an unpleasant start, revived his lurking superstitious dread, and drove him to more definite questions, since uneasiness prompted him. There were, of course, as mentioned, numerous incidents of curious kind among the Indians, but this one left a deep impression, and he was determined to get to the bottom of it, if he could.

One brilliant moonlight night he came home late, passing the cabin of a native as he knew, was desperately ill. The village, squalid enough in the daytime, was softened into beauty now. It looked unearthly. Silvery haze transmuted its forlorn poverty into loveliness, the glimmering snowfields hung far away in the depths of quiet sky. About the cabin of the dying man Mike saw the group of friends and relatives huddled together, whispering and muttering piss themselves. Then, suddenly, the low door was darkened by a figure, and he saw the old mother emerge, her head bent, her long arms hanging down her sides. He watched her pass through the group, who hushed their voices and moved aside to make room with lowered heads. She paid them no attention. He watched her walk silently away. And almost the same moment he heard the death-wail issue from the hut, announcing that the Indian was dead.

Mike stood still, watching, listening, in the moonlight. The group about the door had resumed their whispering among themselves, but were now, he noticed, directing their attention at himself, looking intently, even pointing, at him. They were discussing him with keen interest. Here, he felt positive, was something that concerned himself. He felt suddenly uneasy. Moving a little closer, he caught a strange word in Spanish — despeñadora, la despeñadora — a hush in the voice that muttered it. The word seemed vaguely familiar, as though he had heard it somewhere long ago. He turned away, 4 superstitious dread clutching at his heart. Where had he heard that word? What did it mean? Why was there something sinister about it?

His questions this time were more insistent. The present of the hut, the food, the respect, the mysterious attitude — what did they all mean? The Spanish word — he cursed himself for it — had slipped his memory, vanished beyond recall. This time, too, his wife answered him:

“It is because my mother,” she told him proudly, “is a doctor, and they fear her.”

“For why should they fear her,” Mike demanded, “if she is a doctor?” Yet he was not too anxious to hear the answer, he realised. There was a light in Marie’s eyes, a troubling smile upon her lips, as she drew herself up, gazing at him.

“Because her medicine,” she said in a lowered voice, “Is strong. It always cures.” She bent a little towards him, their faces close together, then laying her long-fingered hands on his own, she kissed him suddenly with passion. The kiss he liked, returning it as he drew her down upon his knee; it was the touch of her hands that made him shrink. He asked, at any rate, no further questions.

He was very glad, a few weeks later, when the old woman died. He was not so pleased, however, when the night after the burial the peculiar native cry sounded in the darkness outside his own door, and he found the offerings of food, saw the shadows of the donors retreating hurriedly, then caught the blaze of triumphant pleasure in his wife’s eyes as she collected it. A new dignity was in her, a new authority, something proud and sinister that chilled his blood and that even kisses could not dissipate.

“It is the custom of our people,” she told him in her native tongue. “My mother is dead. I succeed my mother. That is all.”

It was the strange fire in her great eyes that scared him. He surprised himself thinking of an animal that has tasted blood. Surreptitiously, he crossed himself. And in that same instant the forgotten Spanish word flashed back.

“Despeñadora…?” he whispered, and saw her head bow proudly, her wonderful hands spread out before her with their long fingers parted.

What the word meant he had no notion, nor did he ask. It had flashed into memory again and offered itself. That was all he knew. Simultaneously with its return rose also Hadow’s curious warning — Hadow, who was now down at La Paz for a month or so, until the river, swollen with the melting snows, subsided enough to make work possible on the bridge foundations….

•   •   •

The heat, the odour, the atrocious atmosphere in the hut were stifling. The stench of iodoform, of native exhalation from the Indians whispering just outside the door, hung so heavy as to seem almost visible. With it, too, came the damp effluvia of rain-soaked clay. Though the sky had cleared at sunset, the late hour of night brought no relief. A flickering oil-lamp added its noisome flavour.

A patch of moonlight, stealing through the low door, was the only clean and pleasant thing Mike Kelly saw, as he lay helpless on his blankets, both arms in rough splints, with internal injuries as well, and gusts of half-delirium raving about his mind. Marie had tended him with infinite love and care, soothing the pain as best she could, her tears often on his blanket; yet each time her hands touched him, a shriek rose to his lips, though never uttered. Some blind instinct, across the pain, warned him to suppress it.

The Bolivian doctor, who had set the crushed bones, had made his fifteen-mile journey now for the last time. Mike realised that. He had caught sight of him a moment outside the hut with Marie, and, uncertain though his vision was, it had registered that grave shake of the head. The bones were mendable; it was the internal injuries that knew perhaps no cure; that shake of the head was eloquent of what the doctor thought. And Marie, strange figure of wild grief and stately dignity, had knelt in a paroxysm of tears beside the couch. Father Manuel, too, had come and gone, a ten-mile trip from the little Catholic chapel. That seemed several days ago, but the fever had obliterated what he said. Mike only remembered, or thought he remembered, that he had begged some favour of the kindly priest, dark fear behind his feverish words, and that the Father had seemed to make strange grimaces in reply. Mike had made some desperate request because there was terror in his heart; but now, whether this was real or delirium, he knew not. He groaned in his agony, but he could not move a muscle.

It was his wife’s whisper that brought him back to a momentary clearer consciousness, lying motionless as a stone statue, but listening intently. Her face, dusky, beautiful, bent over him; he saw her glowing eyes, her tears; he felt — her hands. Their touch, across his pain and fever, summoned a sudden terror, sharp as fire. A change was stealing over her; her attitude, expression, look, were different. What was it? What was she saying, whispering to him now? Then he caught Hadow’s name. It puzzled him. Why Hadow? If only he could have got word to Hadow at once. Word about what? The wish, he realised suddenly, had been in him for some time. There was something of dreadful urgency he wanted Hadow for, something he wished Hadow to know without an instant’s delay, something he had begged the priest to see to for him… Father Manuel’s grimacing face, enormously enlarged, shot before him, ousting all memory of Hadow completely. Then Marie’s voice — it was louder, clearer now — was in his ear again. He could not turn his head; it was of stone.

“But if Hadow knew, my people would only kill him. La Despeñadora is sacred to them…” and the voice died away into a gulf of blackness.

The shock of violent terror that ran through him brought no relief of action to his body of stone: it could not galvanise muscles that refused to stir. Horror froze his blood. He felt stiff with it. His wife bent lower, kissed his burning lips, then moved away. He watched her tall figure pass across the hut, watched her turn slowly round and look at him steadily, the lamplight on her face. In that instant the truth flashed naked into him, for the long, steady look was an examining look. She was appraising him — professionally.

The next instant she was at his side again, kneeling, her face close against his own. “I cured my mother without pain,” she whispered tenderly in broken Spanish. “You shall not suffer, either.”

Mike experienced a reaction that searched him like a red-hot knife. His confusion cleared a little, lifted perhaps by the horror that convulsed him. A dim memory revived, rose out of dark mists, stirred into life. Marie’s use of Spanish helped possibly to its recovery. Faint at first, it became gradually sharper, then, as with a leap, grew clear as day. He recalled a scene of years ago — a bearded man, a Spaniard, the worse for drink, talking to him in a bar at La Paz. He had paid little attention at the time, but memory knows no real forgetting. The neglected cells now gave up their dead. La Despeñadora, the Aymara death-doctor, the Bringer of Death, was an office, a sacred office, handed down from mother to daughter. Its appalling duty was the finishing off of the aged and infirm, of those who could not live, of incurables especially, by deftly dislocating the vertebra of the neck — an office, the Indians held, of mercy, since it provided escape from useless suffering, one, moreover, the Government had been unable completely to suppress. The Indians were too cunning in their concealment always … La Despeñadora, whose “strong medicine always cured.” The long-forgotten talk in the bar at La Paz came back, complete in a single second.

The shriek he gave vent to this time was an audible one, and Marie was instantly at his side. The group outside the door pressed in a little. A murmur of excited whispers rose. But it was his wife’s low tender voice that he heard above all else, clear and dreadful as a bell of death: “I love you too much to let you suffer more….”

It was in her native tongue. She turned a moment, sending the Indians out, so that through the now unobstructed door the small patch of moonlight lay clean and sweet upon the ground beside the bed. Mike’s eyes, the only portion of his body he could move, fell on it. To look into his wife’s face, as she prepared to climb upon the couch, upon his helpless prostrate form, was utterly beyond him; but the hands, he noticed, the hands untouched by common toil, had opened, the fingers spread, curving a little as they sank towards his throat. He felt the pressure of her weight on his chest, as she straightened herself for the final office. He closed his eyes…. In that awful moment he saw two things: her amazing dignity, her authority, her confident strength; the second — a bearded man, his face immensely large, telling him drunkenly across a bar-room counter about 4s Despeñadora, only behind the huge face with the beard, mingled with it in some queer fashion, another face that wore Hadow’s features. Yes, Hadow; it assuredly was Hadow. He choked. The world grew black….

A roaring sound, like a hurricane, burst about his ears, hoofs splashing through wet earth, his own name shouted, bawled, across the darkness. The same instant the roaring sounds subsided, while the voice itself came closer. Inside his own head, it seemed: “Damned liar! Why did you telegraph that the foundations of the bridge were sinking, when they’re as solid as your own thick skull?…”

The voice hushed suddenly, died away. Its owner, having scattered the group outside and rushed in, was kneeling beside the couch. There was a sound of a woman sobbing. “A minute more,” Hadow was muttering, “and there’d have been a hanging job for someone.” He turned to the figure of another man who stood just behind him. Thanks to something Father Manuel had added to the wire, he had brought a competent doctor with him.

•   •   •   •   •   •

THE LAND OF GREEN GINGER

In his luxurious service flat the elderly Mr. Adam sat before the fire with a frown upon his face, a frown not of anger or annoyance but of perplexity. It was the cosy time between tea and dinner; about his armchair lay scattered a number of opened and unopened letters; he was scanning a brief typewritten note, wondering how he should deal with it, and this wonder was the cause of his frown.

“These newspaper symposiums,” he grumbled to himself, “are a nuisance!” His secretary had gone home, taking away with her the dictated chapters of his book, his twentieth novel — his twentieth successful novel, he remembered with a smile that momentarily displaced the frown. “How I started,” he read the typed sentence before him. “What made me first begin to write?” The frown came back. Thought ran off into the mists of years ago…. He remembered quite well what made him first begin to write. “But no one would believe me….”

His face grew quite puckered…. He finally decided he would dictate in the morning a few commonplace paragraphs, giving facts, of course, yet not this queer incident that had first discovered his gift to himself. It had been due to a shock, this discovery; and a shock, some say, can bring out latent possibilities in the mind hitherto ignored. Circumstances, that is, are necessary for their appearance; unless life produces them, the possibilities remain unknown, inactive.

He remembered the shock in his own case, the queer experience it produced, and the first hint of his imaginative gift that appeared as a result. “But they’d think I was romancing!” His pencil, meanwhile, scribbled a few words on the blank part of the letter….

“It is interesting,” he paused a moment to reflect, “how every important detail of the experience was due to something in my mind at the time. All the ingredients were in me. Something just used them, dramatised them. That’s the imaginative gift, I suppose…. It shapes the raw material.”

He could see it all as though it were yesterday . instead of thirty years ago….

The shock, in his case, had been the sudden total loss of the comfortable fortune he had been brought up to expect. The trustee, his guardian, had played ducks and drakes with it, and at twenty, an orphan, just down from Oxford with a prospect of £2,000 a year, he found himself instead with £50, perhaps less. Two details only bear importantly upon the story: his intense bitterness against the swindling guardian, whom he knew personally; and the question of what he could do to earn his living. These two, had he written the truth for the symposium, Mr. Adam would have stressed. For it was with these two, this thought and this feeling burning intensely in his mind, that he had gone for a walk to think things over….

To him, at the age of twenty, the situation seemed intensely tragic; no one in the world before had ever been so overwhelmed by fate; his anger against the psalm-singing guardian was of that bitter kind that could have killed. The young man was stirred to an intense anger and hatred. He could have murdered Mr. Holyoake. The swindler deserved it. And Adam, dwelling upon the years of dishonest speculation that had left him penniless, meant this precisely. Not that he actually wanted to commit murder, but that he realised the possibility lay in him. He still remembered — with a smile today — how he finally dismissed the idea from his mind: “What’s the use?” he had reflected, bitterly. “Even if I did murder him, the State would only murder me in return. I should be hanged. Who murders is murdered in his turn.”

In this way the notion was — as he believed — dismissed from his mind.

The other “important detail” concerned his immediate future. What could he do to earn his living? He dwelt upon it with eager concentration. He reviewed a dozen futures: the stage, journalism, the motor trade, then in its infancy; insurance, emigrating — he thought of many fields and callings, but realised he was trained for none. The choice of work, of something that he could do, troubled him obsessingly. There were a hundred, a thousand possible futures open to a fellow, he discovered. It was the choice that he found impossible. At a given moment in anybody’s life, he reflected, a number of possible things lie waiting — he can take only one, but the multiple choice is there.

He had been walking for some time, and in a circle apparently, for he now found himself wandering towards the waterfront of the ancient port that was his home town. It was after six o’clock on a summer evening, a Saturday, and few people were about. The sunshine fell slanting down the tangle of deserted alley-ways. There was a smell of the sea, of tarred ropes, rigging, fish, and these brought back the idea of emigrating. He thought of a cousin who had just gone to some job or other in China….

One notion chased another; his mind was a seething mass of wild ideas, with bitter, turbulent emotion behind them. Then, glancing up, his eye caught suddenly five little words, whose faded black letters shone in a patch of sunshine on the dull brick wall above his head. They were rather romantic little words, and they snatched at something in his mind. He stood and stared. It was merely the name of the alley, of course, yet thought took a new turn.

A kind of enchantment stole over him, for the words, as the poet puts it, walked up and down in his heart…. There rose before him a picture of forgotten days when the old port traded with southern isles, when dark-bearded sailors gabbling foreign tongues thronged these narrow alley-ways, and the high romance of gallant sailing-ships was in the air…. The five little words were almost a line of poetry.

“The Land of Green Ginger” was what he read.

Mr. Adam, the young one of thirty years ago, paused, his eyes fastened on the faded lettering in the yellow sunlight. Then he started down the twisting alley, whose high walls now housed nothing more romantic than offices of shipbrokers, notaries, typists, packers, and commissioners of oaths, until his eye noted suddenly an exception — an old furniture shop, with its queer wares overflowing on to the narrow pavement. They were a heterogeneous collection apparently. A circular mirror standing on a three-legged pedestal nearly six feet high reflected his figure, as he moved idly towards the shop a few yards lower down. He saw himself reflected, not without satisfaction — his smart flannel suit, his eyeglass, his straw hat with its Oxford colours. He also saw a bent, thin little old man with a skullcap on his head standing among the shadows a few feet inside beyond the dingy doorway.

This figure now moved slowly towards him, scenting perhaps a possible customer.

“A fine piece,” said the wheezy voice. “A perfect bit of glass, me lord! Cheap, too!” He rubbed his hands, nodding his ancient head in the direction of the article. “It come from Chiney thirty years ago!”

Adam realised that he had been examining his own reflection for some minutes. He entered the shop, as an escape from troubling thoughts more than anything else, and as he did so the old man, bowing and scraping, moved too, backing away before him. The interior was dark, and much larger than the small entrance promised. A single oil-lamp revealed a series of deep, narrow rooms, cluttered up with stuff, among which the bent figure now set down the mirror carefully, for he had carried it in with him.

In the dimness the young man found his own reflection more attractive than before; it was softened, more effective, he decided. The wheezy voice was mentioning a price, rather a trumpery price, considered Mr. Adam, a few shillings only. He did not want to buy it, but anything was better than being alone with his tormenting thoughts, and he went closer to examine it. He bent down, noticing an inscription cut deeply into the dark wood of the framework. It was in Chinese characters. He ran his fingers over them, then looked up to ask:

“Who looks in me,” translated the wheezy voice, “murders — and is murdered.” And, carrying the mirror with him, the old man retreated a little farther into the shadow of the room beyond.

The young man was startled. He felt his body give an imperceptible twitch he was unable to suppress. His mind likewise gave a twitch. Was it uneasiness? It was, at any rate, surprise, while at the same time he was aware that something drew him, so that, almost involuntarily, he found himself following the retreating figure, who now, still carrying the mirror with him, was on the threshold of the next long room. It was the third extension of the premises, and it was considerably darker than the first two rooms. A chilliness hung in the fusty atmosphere. The place seemed lonely suddenly.

Aware of a faint tremor in him, though not yet of anything more than that, he spoke in a brusque, almost an aggressive voice:

“And what may such rubbish mean?” he inquired, sharply.

“Precisely what it says, me lord,” came the wheezy voice, much lower than before. There was an unpleasant hush in it. And there came a look into the face that hardly invited merriment, which was, perhaps, the very reason why Mr. Adam chose the moment for an audible guffaw. It betrayed him, he realised when it was too late. He felt nervous — and that he had shown his nervousness. More of a chuckle an actual laugh, it sounded unnatural among this piled-up paraphernalia from foreign lands that gave back no single echo. It sounded dead.

“Does it hold good?” Mr. Adam challenged, the tone of his voice again betraying him — to himself at least. For the tremor crept somehow from the body into the sound. “If I buy the thing, for instance, d’you mean to tell me that I — that you already before me—”

He could not finish the sentence. A shudder stopped his breath, and the voice died on his lips. While speaking he had been looking, not into the old man’s face, but into the mirror, where he still saw his own reflection. But it was not this that stopped his speech, and froze his blood. It was something else he saw. With one wrinkled hand the old shopman still clutched the pedestal; but in the other was an unsheathed knife.

“So far, me lord, it has held good,” came his whisper down the long, dim room, and as he spoke he tilted the mirror to a slightly different angle. The young man saw himself in the glass as before, but he now saw something else behind him, too. It lay stretched upon the floor, motionless, crumpled dreadfully, its position not quite natural. One arm was twisted about the face at an angle not possible to life. In the narrow fairway of the room behind him, the room he had already passed, this pitiful, repulsive body lay. To stand where he now stood, the young man realised, he must actually have stepped over it.

“You — did — that?” he gasped, in a voice that emitted hardly any sound.

“He looked in the mirror,” came the whispered answer. “What do you expect?”

“And before that — he in turn—”

“It works that way.” The other gave back with an awful grin.

Adam felt his body stiffen; yet the blood began to flow in tumult. He felt his fists clench tightly. With his eyes fixed on the shopman and not leaving him for a single instant, he saw that the old man, letting go of the mirror, had suddenly begun to dodge. Light-footed he was, amazingly agile, quick, his movements convulsive, horribly alert. He dodged sideways, backwards, swift as a shadow round his customer, who watched the hideous dance with arrested muscles and with spellbound eyes. The knife gleamed and flashed.

Adam made an effort that seemed to wrench his heart — and the muscles began to function again. His instinct of self-preservation woke. Instinctively he picked up a heavy iron mace from a teak-wood table close beside him. With a strain he could just lift it.

“It’s up to me then, now — is it?” he cried, his own feet shifting quickly.

“I can defend meself!” shrieked the shopman, dodging with incredible rapidity. “If that’s any good to you, me lord!” he yelled, shooting across the floor as an arrow flies, and brandishing his knife.

Moved by a sudden power that surprised himself, the young man leaped towards the pirouetting horror. He made one bound. He swung his heavy mace. The great weapon crashed down upon the ancient skull, driving the cap deep into the split bone. The figure stopped abruptly, uttered a tiny squeak, crumpled, and lay like a great mutilated insect where it fell. It did not move again.

“Murders and is murdered!” the other tried to scream, his voice, as in extreme nightmare agony, making no sound upon the air. “I’ve done you in, at any rate. Then it’s my turn next, is it — ?”

He turned swiftly, with the feeling that someone watched him from behind.

A tall figure, sure enough, darkened the distant door into the street, the outline of a stranger who bent a little to examine something that stood upon the pavement just outside.

The young man stared and stared. Though in semi-darkness himself, the outline was clearly defined in the evening light. But was it a stranger? He wore a smart flannel suit, a straw hat with Oxford colours. As he straightened up, an eyeglass became visible.

Mr. Adam shot round and stared at the crumpled heap upon the floor at his feet. It was not the shopman. An electric shock flowed over him. What he stared down at was a neat flannel suit, a straw hat with Oxford colours.

He shrieked. He raced headlong down the room. He darted at top speed along the next narrow room as well, straight towards the street door, towards the stranger with the tall outline. And this tall outline now came gliding to meet him, very swiftly gliding, silently too, making no sound upon the boarded floor, just as he had seen his own reflected image gliding towards himself in the mirror before. Closer it came and closer, something oddly, dreadfully familiar about it, something that he almost recognised.

It came remorselessly nearer, he could not have stopped it if he tried, while, curiously, he felt that he did not want to, even must not, stop it. Like Fate — his own fate — he must meet it; he could not avoid it — because he somehow welcomed it.

He did not pause himself; he even moved faster, till there was but a foot between them. Terrified he was, yet at the same time his courage rose. They met, they slipped into one another, they emerged, and instantaneously though this came about, he had time to recognise — himself … and that same second to find himself standing on the pavement outside, gazing at a mirror on a high three-legged pedestal, while a little, thin, bent old man faced him, wearing a skull-cap and rubbing his hands. It was the shopman evidently, scenting a possible customer.

“A fine piece,” the old man wheezed. His eyes pierced like gimlets. “And cheap, too. It come from Chiney thirty year ago.”

A wave of pleasant, even delightful, emotion fluttered through the young man’s heart, as he bent to read an inscription carved in Chinese characters upon the wooden frame. He ran his finger over them, then looked up to ask.

“To each,” the wheezy voice translated, “ten thousand futures. Yet each must choose his own,” and went on to explain how a learned gentleman had once kindly deciphered the words for him — only the young man was no longer listening. He was staring intently at the upper part of the frame.

“But — the frame’s empty!” he cried aloud. “There is no mirror!” And again that marvellous emotion passed fluttering across his heart.

“It got broke,” he heard the wheezy voice explaining; “got broke on the vige over. But it’s easy put in again, me lord. A fine old piece.” He mentioned a trumpery price, a few shillings merely.

•   •   •

Young Mr. Adam bought it and took it home with him…. In due course he entered his cousin’s insurance office as a ‘clerk, and one evening he scribbled an account of his adventure in the Land of Green Ginger. Later, he wrote other, longer adventures, too. He had inside him, it seems, some queer gift of scribbling imaginary, possibly imaginative, adventures…. A shock had brought it to the surface.

•   •   •

Next morning the elderly Mr. Adam dictated to his secretary a few commonplace paragraphs about “How I started to write.” They began: “At the age of twenty I entered an insurance office as a clerk….” They were extremely dull. “Send it to the editor,” he told his secretary, “with a line to say I hope it is what he wants; he need not use it otherwise, of course.”

And as he dictated the paragraphs his eye wandered from a long shelf, holding some twenty adventure books, to a mirror on a high three-legged pedestal which, oddly, had no glass, and which, the elderly Mr. Adam knew, had never had one, nor ever would.

•   •   •   •   •   •

THE COLONEL’S RING

Among the rare experiences that include real horror the episode of Hendrik and the Colonel’s ring deserves a place. Real horror, fortunately, is extremely rare. Emotions today are so vulgarised that an insipid person is called a horror, and a mere pudding awe-ful. Hendrik, whose ten years in America had provided dreadful things enough, met his only “real horror,” he affirms, in a London service flat. His half-uncle, Colonel Seitz, was host. There were no trappings. Horror slipped in quietly, almost slyly.

Hendrik had just arrived after ten disastrous years in America, time and money wasted, longing only to hide himself from friends and relations, when he found at his cheap hotel near Victoria Station a note from his uncle: “Welcome back from your Wanderjahre! I’ve not forgotten your headstrong boyhood. I’m alone in town. Do come and dine tomorrow — New Year’s Eve — just you and me. The ship’s purser, an old acquaintance, told me where you had put up.” A tactful P.S. added: “Of course, don’t dress. And I have much to ask you.”

Hendrik, after hesitation, went. Dinner was what he had called in Wisconsin a “major meal,” and he had known years in which one good meal a day kept the devil away, the devil of hunger, cold, misery. He remembered little of Colonel Seitz, beyond that he was a Sapper, his father’s half-brother, and had sown remarkably riotous wild oats. On sailing as a boy for Canada, the Colonel had shaken his hand, mumbled something about “a chip of the old block making good,” and had given him ten shillings. Much as he wanted to avoid his relations just now, and wondering if the purser had mentioned that he had been a steerage passenger, he brushed his only coat, and walked to Half Moon Street.

•   •   •

A genial, rather collapsed old gentleman, far from soldierly, and with a thick neck, Hendrik found him, as they shook hands this second time, though, alas, with no ten-shilling tip, and after a sherry and bitters they sat down to what the half-starved youth considered a gorgeous dinner. He felt more than shy, he felt ashamed, coming home with empty pockets and still emptier history. But his uncle, rather pooh-poohing the ups and downs of life, soon made him feel at home.

“There are several things I want to hear from you, my boy,” he remarked easily over the Burgundy, as he played with his eyeglass cord, making a ring of it, “about life, I mean, not about yourself. One thing,” he added warmly, “is that you never wrote home and squealed.” He created a kindly, comfortable atmosphere in this way. Only Hendrik wished he would leave his eyeglass cord alone, for the way he kept on making loops and nooses with it, got on his nerves a bit. His eyes, too, were continually drawn to the thick neck. High living, he reflected, probably!

Since they had shaken hands ten years before, Hendrik, though acquiring no money, had acquired values of a sort. As a newspaper-reporter in New York, a certain knowledge of men in the raw had come to him. Before the soup was over, he had decided that his uncle was badly worried, and “on his uppers,” as his Yankee lingo put it. A dozen signs betrayed him. He watched his nervous fingers eternally playing with that cord, then with the napkin ring, then with the napkin itself, making it into a noose, a slip knot.

“The old boy’s up against it somewhere,” ran through his observant, watchful mind, as he enjoyed the food, thinking of its cost, and listening to his host’s rather incoherent talk about “these awful modern times” and the “good old days when I saw you off to Canada.” Still, life was a “great game, you know,” and he had “been through hell myself,” though he had always “so far found a way out, you know, in the end.” This, with occasional references to the family, rambled on…. And then, quite suddenly: “You’ve seen lots of fellows go out, I’m sure — shooting — hanging — the electric chair, and the rest. Now, what about it? Tell me — do they mind much? Beforehand, I mean?” His fingers toyed with a metal ring round a faded buttonhole, pulling the wire about somewhat feverishly.

•   •   •

Hendrik, having witnessed such things personally, told what he could, but with reluctance. He did not like this turn in the conversation. His uncle, listening with avidity, he noticed, was now playing with his handkerchief, fastening it tightly round his wrist, then loosening it again. “Lynching, too, I dare say?” came after emptying his glass. But Hendrik shook his head. He lied — that he had never seen a lynching. He disliked the talk still more; he felt a little jumpy.

“I don’t think they feel much,” he answered at length the insistently repeated question. “In my experience, there’s just a natural mental funk, you know, beforehand. Death itself seems painless.” “Ah!” exclaimed his host with a sort of excited guffaw. “That’s what I thought, yes — painless. It amounts to very little really. I wanted to ask you,” he added, “because I felt you would be just the chap to know.” He laughed, if a trifle boisterously, at the same time more genially. Hendrik shrugged his shoulders, taking a sip of wine. He felt uncomfortable.

“You,” the other went on, the face grave again, “you have been hard up. You’ve been up against it, I take it. I needn’t ask, poor boy. Your face shows it,” and he handed a prime cigar to his young guest. “A Corona,” he mentioned, “and I know you’ll appreciate a good ’un,” as he held out a lighted match. “I haven’t much left in life,” he added, “but I’ve managed to keep a few of these, and some marvellous Kümmel. I’ll get it in a minute. Keep it in my bedroom, you know, locked up.

•   •   •

He began trying to fit the cigar band on to a thick finger which refused to take it, and Hendrik noticed a ring he wore, with a white diamond. “Ah, you spot the ring, I see,” came the remark. “It was your grandfather’s. I thought of leaving it to you someday. Proud to, you know, I think it’s wonderful the way you pulled through, my boy. I respect you for it.”

Hendrik grinned sheepishly, feeling rather foolish, but he felt something else as well, something unpleasant, bitter, puzzling. This ceaseless preoccupation with a ring disturbed him. Was it telepathy of a sort perhaps? Was his uncle queer in his mind somewhere? An abrupt impulse came to him that he shrank from, and yet obeyed — the newspaper reporter’s instinct probably — to speak of the very thing he wished to avoid. He yielded anyhow.

“Rings interest you, sir?” he asked casually, and saw an extraordinary expression flash across the other’s face, and die away as quickly as it came. “Oh! — for the moment Faecal yes — only for the moment,” Colonel Seitz said lightly. He pulled out his keys at the end of a silver chain. “Now, that’s not a bad one,” he remarked, examining the keyring; “only it doesn’t give enough.” “Give?” repeated the other, puzzled. “Doesn’t tighten when it ought to,” was the reply, with a touch of impatience. “The keys slip out, you see.”

Hendrik, unable to think of anything intelligent, mumbled something about rubber being more practical. “This,” commented his uncle in a curiously lowered tone, “is far, far better,” and he pulled his napkin into a taut elastic circle round his wrist so that the flesh changed colour. The young man felt a sudden shiver as he watched, a cold air passed near him; he wished he had never come. His flesh began to tingle. While his mind searched for a means of changing the talk, the mood, the atmosphere, his host suddenly pushed back his chair. “By Jove, I mustn’t forget that Kümmel!” he exclaimed, and got up, touching the bell. “Tell the waiter to leave the coffee. I’ll be back in a moment,” he said, crossing to the bedroom door. “You’ll find it great stuff, my boy!” He smacked his lips as he passed through, closing the door with a little bang behind him.

The bang, though so slight, made Hendrik jump as if he had been shot. His every instinct told him to follow — and at once. His skin was moist, he was aware that he was trembling. One shiver followed another down his spine. He hesitated, however, arguing rapidly with himself, and, while he argued, listened. He listened intently. Nothing stirred. He told himself his plain duty was to enter the inner room, while still there was time; he also told himself he had no right to do any such thing, and that he was merely an over-imaginative fool.

•   •   •

Several minutes passed thus, but at last he got up with a jerk. There was perspiration on his forehead. He took a couple of quick steps forwards, and at that moment the waiter entered with the coffee. He came in quietly, without knocking, and at the first sound of his rubber boots, Hendrik shot round with a violent start towards the bedroom door — and saw his uncle moving across the floor in the direction of the table.

He was coming back to his chair, and behind him the bedroom door was still closed. But he had no bottle of Kümmel in his hand. Both hands were empty. They waved oddly in the air, as though seeking for support. He swayed a little, and the face, badly congested, with protruding eyes, sent the instant thought into Hendrik’s terrified mind: “He’s taken poison.”

For a moment he could do nothing but stare, fascinated, into those two eyes that met his own. The body then, he saw incredibly, seemed to lengthen, and, while it lengthened, swayed, but swayed above the ground, as though the feet had no support. It swayed slowly, swinging through the air for several feet. The next instant, the head wrenched itself backwards with a sudden jerk, showing the deep red line about the neck, and Hendrik caught the whisper of a single word: “Painless.”

“Will the Colonel be back for coffee at once, sir, or shall I keep it hot?”

It was the waiter speaking, the waiter who saw only one person in the room, the guest. Hendrik, for his part, now saw only the black-coated figure with the coffee-tray. When, a few minutes later, they had burst open the door — it had been locked on the inside — the ring of thickish cord had done its work.

•   •   •   •   •   •

REVENGE

A hundred years or so ago Hemmel might have been hanged, drawn, and quartered; today mental experts would probably have judged him insane.

Two curious traits, one physical, the other spiritual, were noticeable about him: his hair at the age of forty-five was as white as an old man’s. The spiritual trait was more intriguing, involving a sudden and radical change of personality. At the age mentioned he inherited a comfortable fortune, but instead of enjoying it as predicted — he was a self-indulgent, pleasure-loving man — he spent it entirely on charity, living himself in poverty, even in penury. Withdrawing from his friends, he lived alone for twenty years in a single room, offering no explanation of his conduct. Every penny not needed to keep body and soul together, he gave away. There was no self-conscious philanthropy, no religious excuse of any sort, certainly no love for humanity. He gave, in fact, no excuse of any kind whatever — beyond a comment made to me when once I came across him ill, half starved, obviously not far from death, and urged a doctor, urged at any rate more personal comfort. “I must do it,” he said, shaking his head of white hair, “or else be damned. Probably I’m damned, anyhow.” There was an expression in his eyes I found dreadful; his face, of the kind most might describe as wicked, was tortured, an indescribable horror in it; terror, too, the terror of a haunted man. He recovered that time, however, His mode of living did not alter. His death, when he told me his story, came years later. He continued his painful mode of life to the bitter end. He did not leave enough to pay for a coffin. “I had to do it,” he whispered with his last breath. “It was not my money, you see. Probably,” as the eyes closed and consciousness failed, “I’m damned, anyhow….”

His nephew, an orphan, was ending his minority, and in a month Hemmel, then forty-five, would have to give an account of the estate which, as trustee, he had already half squandered. He would himself inherit this estate if his nephew pre-deceased him. Out of these conditions the hideous project came to birth in his mind. First rejected with horror, then toyed with, then, since it became lodged in his mind, it reached the edge of a possibility. From that to a decision was a step that seemed taken of its own accord, and this Alpine holiday furnished easy opportunity — a slight push at the right time and place, a push that if it failed could be explained as a slip, alone was necessary. That August afternoon, as they scrambled along the Rothwand Ridge, provided both time and place.

Such a day was surely made for innocent happiness and laughter; the blazing sun, the flowers, the white snowfields sheeted against an azure sky, the tinkle of cowbells in pastures far below, these suggested the joy of childhood almost. The soaring peaks held something of fairyland, and young Eric was as gay, certainly, as any child. He was all agog for edelweiss; but edelweiss is not commonly found on grassy slopes — it flourishes in those cold draughts of air that blow upwards from deep, shadowed gulfs. It has this rather unpleasant fondness for edges and ledges of treacherous kind. The boy’s eager search in this crystal air at 7,000 feet, was childish possibly, all the pleasure of youth dancing in his heart, as he picked his way, yet heedful of his uncle’s warnings, along the perilous Ridge. The contrast of that black, devil’s heart, at his heels was terrible, full of terror literally, but he could not know it. As the man watched his prey, step by step, waiting his opportunity, the hatred in him held a touch of mania. Yet it was an impersonal hatred almost, a hatred due to years of toil, responsibility, care, and trouble his trusteeship had caused him, a hatred now intensified because of the awful temptation the lad put in his way. The perversity in his dark soul found odd reasons in support of his frightful purpose.

His hatred of this crystal air was almost devilish. Driving clouds, a misty atmosphere would have suited that purpose better, for modern field-glasses, he well knew, brought distance horribly close, and in the loneliest spot some idle watcher might happen to be covering just that spot. Yet the spot, none the less, presented itself in due course, as he had calculated, and having screwed his determination to the point for days and nights, for weeks, indeed, his resolute, brutal heart did not fail. In this sense, moreover, it did not fail him — that what the heart has long wished, intended, hoped to do, seems done, when it actually comes about, almost spontaneously. The wish, so many times fulfilled mentally and in imagination, seems carried out impulsively, without thought, without preparation, so that the murderer assures himself “I simply couldn’t help doing it — I was impelled by a power greater than my will” — and other lying explanations.

The slight push was so easy, so trivial in its execution, as though he merely stretched an arm clumsily to help his own balance, that Hemmel actually gave a hideous little laugh in his soul as he saw the young body totter, then slide backwards over the brink six feet below. Turning, as it thus slid, the face looked back and up into his own, sheer amazement rather than terror in the eyes. It was unquestionable that the boy was aware of the deliberate push, aware that it was purposed, calculated. He just stared without comprehension, without realisation, as the body, twisting a little sideways, fell helplessly into space, the knapsack already hanging vertically in emptiness below him, hat and ice-axe beside it as they sank, arms spread out in the air, one hand clutching the tuft of edelweiss, the whole of them dropping, quite slowly it seemed, into the gulf of over 2,000 feet. The boy sank out of sight, the eyes fixed upon his murderer’s face till they passed below the precipice edge. The last detail Hemmel saw was the right hand clutching the edelweiss. He remembered particularly this bare, sun-burned hand against a background of blue dim forest thousands of feet across the valley. Covering his own eyes swiftly, he sat back rigidly among the rocks behind him, listening, listening, but the depth of that awful drop was too great, and no thud of the body falling upon the glacier could possibly have reached him. He was in a dangerous spot himself, but before he had time to clamber back into safety a feeling of violent sickness came, followed by a sudden darkening of the air, explained by the fact that he had fainted.

With the return to consciousness, realisation came back slowly, blunderingly, as though somewhere among his usual powers lurked a dislocation. A shock of terrific impact had numbed his ability to focus. A considerable time had passed, apparently, for clouds now hid the peaks, dusk had come, and he was shivering with cold. It was when his sight rested on the perilous edge at his feet that his first clear thought came back. It came with a crash; realisation followed quickly. He had murdered; and his second thought was equally clear — there could be no possible evidence against him. He had only to tell his story — a false step while picking edelweiss — and, whether believed or not, nothing could be proved. Moving his heavy nailed boots to rise, a loosened stone slid a short yard, gave one bound, and plunged into space, his eye following it with a shudder, but no sound following its disappearance. Dizziness seized him, as he cautiously heaved his body, stiff with cold, to a safer stance, two other stones following the first….

He had a long way to go, and darkness dropped early from the lowering sky, while the reaction, nervous, mental, physical, found him exhausted before the first hour of the descent was done. His mind, continually, feverishly, rehearsing the story he would tell, took inaccurate note of the rocks. He stumbled more than once, his muscles trembling and unsteady; night was upon him, he sat down to rest, to concentrate upon the route, to eat some food, only to realise that he could not swallow, that the cold rain driven by a rising wind was almost sleet, and that his sense of direction was now completely at sea. Mist and gloom obscured any lights in the valley far below that might have guided him, nor could he recognise the grouping of the rocks about him. All looked unfamiliar, the violent scenery hostile, unfriendly, in conspiracy against his murderer’s soul. There was white upon his knees, as he huddled down in what shelter he could find. The sleet had turned to snow.

Aware now that he was definitely lost several hours still from home, he yet stumbled on in the darkness, for the increasing cold made movement necessary to life, only to reach a spot in a couloir, the rocks growing ever steeper, where he could neither advance nor retreat. And here, wedging himself as best he could, his belt tying one arm to a boulder lest the sleep of exhaustion caught him, he faced the night. By the way the icy wind drove up in gusts, as by the sound it made, he knew an abyss yawned just beyond his feet. Coma took charge of his slowly-freezing body….

It was a sound that woke him, perhaps a touch, the stirring, anyhow, of someone near him, and in such close proximity that the sound, the touch, were both registered. Wind roaring among the desolate cliffs, however, made words, if words there had been, utterly inaudible. A dim figure passed, of that he was positive, and it was the proximity that had brought him back to consciousness. His eyelashes, frozen together, only permitted blurred sight at first, but he made out what seemed the outline of a peasant lad, a rescuer, anyhow, though no one but a native could have been among these high, lonely rocks at such an hour and in such weather. His voice trying to articulate “Help! Help!” made no sound, yet there before him stood the peasant, dimly discernible in the gloom, an arm stretched out already to help him rise. The body, partially frozen, responded at first without control, but the other’s arm guided him, its touch secure, its leading slow and skilful. There was no stumbling as they crept back to safer ground through the blackness, buffeted by the wind, fine snow driving against their faces stingingly.

Hemmel, fighting an icy horror in his soul, strove to force some sequence into the content of his mind. He was saved now, if by merest chance, for no light, no cry, had led the fellow to where he lay. A local guide perhaps, possibly a crétin, but a mountaineer certainly, for he knew the way and led with confidence. Movement, hope, relief now brought back some attempt at thought, as circulation restored a little warmth and strength, and he found himself hideously rehearsing his story again, yet so clumsily that, if uttered, it could only have betrayed him. “There can’t — there can’t be any evidence—” in his terror he heard his voice say the words aloud. But the fellow did not notice, the wind, moreover, tore the feeble sound away. Gratitude rose in him next, followed by a vile computation of what he might have to pay, then by an even viler reflection that he would now have money. He made an effort to see his rescuer’s face, but the darkness made it impossible, and only the general outline of a young peasant, muffled, the touch of that steady, guiding arm, were perceptible. A dreadful nausea took him and again, a nausea of body and soul combined, so that he dropped to rest on a boulder, the guide waiting patiently, still without speaking. There were attempts at speech, on both sides apparently, but the hurricane smothered all sound.

It was during one of these short pauses to rest, Hemmel beginning to fear he must give up finally, that voices rose faintly from below with a wild swoop of wind, and that lights flickered and disappeared. Their meaning, however, was plain, even to the exhausted man, and he struggled to his feet with a last effort. His guide made a sign as well. The rescue party that must have left the village hours before were close at hand; they would have food, brandy, blankets. He was saved now beyond a doubt. Yet his real saviour, he well knew, was this sturdy, silent peasant who had stumbled upon him by chance or providence.

“They’re coming!” he tried to shout into the wind, shouting again to guide the searchers, and just saw the lanterns wave in reply as he collapsed. His guide beside him came close, bent over him. There were words, but Hemmel could not catch them. It seems a moment of unconsciousness came over him, for the next thing he knew was that the guttural patois of men’s voices sounded close, brandy was at his lips, strong arms wrapped him round. He opened his eyes, he saw the lanterns swinging; in their flickering light he saw the figure of the peasant who had led him into safety, standing a little to one side. For the first time he saw the face, the features showing plainly.

The figure faded, the lanterns flickered elsewhere. But the search party who carried him down in the light litter, and to whom in semi-delirium he gabbled again and again, his lying story learnt by rote, paid small attention to his actual words. They admitted to no other figure. They listened with kindliness and sympathy, the three of them, but assured him there had been no fourth. They had found him quite alone, there was no peasant who had guided him. The good God, they urged, had guided him, for no man without divine assistance could have come, in storm and cold and darkness, the way Hemmel certainly had come. Hemmel himself knew otherwise, though he spoke no further word. In the flickering lantern light he had seen the face of his rescuer, he had looked up into the smiling features, into the kind, forgiving eyes of the boy he had murdered for his money.

•   •   •   •   •   •

THE MAN WHO LIVED BACKWARDS

If it is true that most people have one secret they never share, it is also true that many have an experience they never tell, not so much from fear of ridicule or being disbelieved as from utter inability to describe it intelligibly. Language has grown gradually: it describes the experience of the race; anything beyond human experience exposes the poverty of language at once. No words exist.

Professor Zeitt had something of the sort, it seems. He was an ardent physicist, astrophysics his speciality; he knew all about waves, he was one of the few who really understood Relativity; he was a wireless expert, too. If Jeans, Whitehead and Eddington were in his pocket, the mystery of space-time was in his mind. He chatted as easily about other dimensions in time as most people do about shares and commodities. Conceptions of time beyond our one-dimensional kind were always in his thoughts.

He was also an experimenter; he made, it appears, audacious experiments, some of them psychological. That he ever suffered from overwork, from cerebral excitement of a rather dangerous sort, is open to question. To myself, who enjoyed the privilege, or suffered the affliction, of hearing his experience, there seemed no sign of delusion, hallucination, or mental disturbance. I remain convinced that he told me something that had actually happened — to an able, clear-headed, if unusual man.

It happened to him on a winter’s night as he sat alone in his flat — a Sunday evening, the servants out, and his wife away in Paris. His married life was unhappy, childless, ill-assorted. He had made a mistake. There was another girl he should have chosen. Now, at forty, he realised this, though without undue bitterness, for he blamed himself. Her money had made his career possible. This particular day had been passed in strenuous exercise. His body, he admits, was overtired perhaps, but his mind, at any rate, was resting delightfully — he was reading a story of crime over the fire — delicious relaxation, he called it. The room was dim, only the reading-lamp turned on. Facing him in the wall was a long pier glass.

The book, It Does’t Pay, was the life of a burglar told by himself — Black, if memory serves me, the author — and he was near the end. In his mind, as he read the last chapter, stretched a picture of the man’s whole life, not actually realised, perhaps, but lying there in perspective. Like a map, it existed serially and all at once, though he now focused attention on its close. As a cinema screen, it could have turned back, of course, and repeated any particular section. The whole of the burglar’s life lay between the book covers; it was present, any portion of it accessible by turning back the pages. Its end was vivid at the moment merely because Zeitt, focused attention upon that part, that moment. And so, as was usual with him, he realised that his own life, similarly, existed serially, complete, the whole map there, while he was conscious of himself at the moment called forty, merely because he focused attention on that moment. Only, in his own case, Time made turning back impossible. If time had another dimension, he could have turned back to earlier sections.

He admits his general awareness of this idea in the background of his mind. For it was habitual. Such ideas lay always in his thought. But at the moment, thought and interest were centred on Black’s adventures, these other ideas not consciously to the fore — when something in the semi-darkened room suddenly drew his attention. The room, he felt positive, altered; and this alteration was in his immediate surroundings. Very close to him this abrupt change had come about. And he looked up from his page, startled a little, “as though an unexpected sound had disturbed me,” were his words, “something, anyhow, that drew my attention actively.”

The winter’s night was still, the Sunday traffic negligible, the flat empty, yet he was positive that someone stood in the room in close proximity to him. As he raised his eyes, he looked automatically at the reflection of himself in the pier glass opposite. He saw himself deep in the easy chair, the open book on his knee, the shaded lamp behind his head, and at the same instant saw also the reflection of a tall, straight figure that passed swiftly behind his chair from right to left. Simultaneously with this, and before thought had time to spread, he felt something that, he declares, he had never felt before, something entirely new. Accustomed mentally to contemplate ultimate zero and the colds of outer space, he was instantly conscious now that all about him, in brain and nerves as well, was a sudden cold of another kind altogether, a kind hitherto unexperienced. This cold brought horror with it. He felt as if hanging in interstellar space, adrift from all known moorings, on the brink of something that horrified because it was utterly unknown. By “unknown” he meant he had never experienced it himself. There was no “up” or “down,” because there was nothing to which “up” or “down” could be referred; similarly, “backwards” or “forwards” held no meaning. Nor could he know whether he was in motion or stationary. He was merely “relative.” With a tremendous effort, however, he managed to cling tenaciously with his ordinary mind to ordinary, familiar standards. In the first second all this came to him.

At the same time, he knew that the figure, now passing behind his chair, would appear in a fractional moment beside or in front of him, and even as he realised this, it happened. The figure moved beside him, then in front, then stopped and looked at him. Expecting his muscles somehow to be paralysed by the shock of unusual fear, and that he would be unable to move, he now found that this was not the case. As he saw the tall, straight figure come to a dead stop in front of him, not two feet away, he rose quickly to his feet and faced it. The book fell to the carpet with a thud. It was a young man he looked at straight in the eyes. He was able, even at this moment, to note his sensations. The habit of years worked truly. The intense, strange, different cold, he thus asserts, persisted. It numbed something in him that must have otherwise reasoned, reflected, criticised. These faculties, at any rate, did not function. All that happened seemed not natural, supernatural. The sensation of unbelievable fear that had turned him dizzy was gone. Having terrorised him, it disappeared. His breath became oddly, immensely accelerated. An idea of death slipped his thought. But all these, passing, left an exhilaration beyond all words.

It was under this intensification of consciousness that he then at once began to speak. The figure spoke, too. They spoke together. He emphasised this simultaneous utterance, though the spoken words were not always quite identical:

“Of course, I know you. I know who you are,” he said. “You are myself.”

The figure, a young man in a light, summery suit, smiled eagerly.

“I was twenty-five then,” said Zeitt. “I am twenty-five,” said the other. And, as they uttered together, came all the emotions of troubled love, of doubt, of being drawn in two different directions by worldly considerations and by personal inclination, with all the fever of a young man’s indecision.

“If only I could see ahead,” Zeitt heard himself saying, while simultaneously sounded: “If only I could go back.”

They looked into each other’s eyes while uttering the next words, identical words this time:

“I exist at that point where my attention is fixed at a given moment. But there’s really no need to. I can choose my moment, alter my attention — forwards or backwards. Can’t I?”

The young figure smiled, a curiously passionate expression in the eyes. In Zeitt rose the tumultuous passion for a girl, as against the affection and respect of another girl whose worldly possessions would enable him to follow his dream.

“I can go backwards or forwards,” both spoke together, “by changing my type of consciousness. It’s open. It’s here, it’s now, both accessible, as between the covers of a book — if only I escape from being fixed on a point so stupidly. If only I knew how.”

“I do,” grinned the other, while Zeitt laughed audibly, a laugh of audacious triumph, using the same words exactly. “I do.”

“I can change my consciousness, make it different,” cried Zeitt. “I see the way. My life is serial, all at once, whole. I am not fixed at any point. I am in time of two dimensions.”

“I always am,” said the other, bending his head down to read a letter, whose wet ink still glistened.

“I will destroy it. I won’t send it,” exclaimed Zeitt, despising himself for proposing to a girl he did not really love.

The young figure tore the letter he held into tiny pieces and turned to throw them into the fire. But there was no fire, only a gas stove burning, and the room was a shabby lodging-house room. Zeitt gazed about him. The picture of the girl he really loved possessed his mind. “I’ll go to her — go back to her. Ill go tomorrow.” His speech fumbled slightly.

“I’ll go to her now,” said the figure decisively, his young face alight, as he moved across the faded carpet to a waste-paper basket beside the draughty window.

“I’ll change it — change the past,” and Zeitt realised he was shouting now aloud, amazing joy and wonder in him, as he watched the shower of small, torn bits of paper flutter down.

The figure came suddenly very close, so close that there seemed hardly room to stand without touching, as though space could not possibly contain both of them on that one spot, then closer still, all over one another.

“That would be too dislocating — for others — and until all can do it,” sounded the voice very faintly. Professor Zeitt declares it sounded inside himself. “I’ll make the effort, anyhow. A result of sorts may come.” The voice died out. The figure was no longer there.

Zeitt, the physicist, found himself alone. He stooped down and picked up the fallen book. The heat of the blazing coal fire scorched his face, but did not affect the curious internal cold that lay, like a touch from inter-stellar space, over his entire being. He turned on all the lights, and before sitting down to finish Black’s book, he wrote down the dialogue and description as given above. It was bald, but as accurate as he could make it.

Long afterwards, as I listened to his account, watching his face, I saw a light in his eyes I have never seen before in any human eyes.

“The major part of the experience,” he added, “the important part,” he emphasised, “is beyond any power or words at my command.”

The distinguished man, now famous and happily remarried, smiled as he said this. He shivered a little. “They’d say I dreamed it,” he remarked, shrugging his shoulders. Yet within a few short weeks of the experience, his wife had run off with another man, and Professor Zeitt, finding the girl he loved a widow, had married her.

•   •   •   •   •   •

ADVENTURES OF MISS DE FONTENOY

As an occasional Reader for a friendly publisher, I have come across strange stories sometimes that made me wonder about the writers and whence their material had been drawn. And by “strange” I mean uncommon, odd, unusual, entirely out of the ordinary. Had the stories been lived, or merely invented?

First novels, I knew, were by a large majority autobiographical: the writers had thrown their own experiences into the third person, often brilliantly. But such novels would be rarely followed by a second, for the personal experiences had been used up, and the creative faculty that imagines new ones was not present. A good story, however, even when the treatment fails, is there, though for lack of creative imagination it may remain raw.

It was some “raw material” by a writer called Janet de Fontenoy that caught my attention one day by this quality of strangeness, making me wonder about the writer, and whence she drew the experiences she described. Badly written, poorly presented, they somehow bore the stamp of having actually happened, for signs of imaginative faculty there were none, and they were assuredly not invented. Were they autobiographical, I asked myself? How did she compose such strange adventures? They were so utterly incredible.

My curiosity was stirred. There was an atmosphere about the tales that testified to something lived. Had there been evidence of craft, I might have doubted; it was the conviction that I was reading first-hand experiences that woke my interest to know more about their author. I could not recommend the stuff for publication, but I could write a word of tentative encouragement and suggest an interview. And this I did. Miss de Fontenoy accepted my invitation to talk about her “raw material” with a Reader who had been unable to “recommend its acceptance for publication,” and came to tea one afternoon in my flat.

I felt a trifle guilty, to tell the truth. Her literary talent being non-existent, I could not honestly encourage her to continue writing and the motive behind my invitation was solely curiosity. I wanted to see what she was like, to ask about the experiences I had read, to ascertain wherein exactly lay the oddness of her mind, to judge for myself, in a word, what manner of character and personality it was that could claim to have known such things direct and at first hand. Though she had adopted the device of making the adventures happen to a man, the feminine touch seemed clear. I was too experienced, I flattered myself, to be deceived by that.

That she was not one of those glib women who create a fantasy world to compensate a a life that has disappointed them, I felt equally positive. The mental and emotional fantasia many disappointed women so easily create is unmistakable, for the ego struts and preens itself always as the central figure; but of such tiresome fantasia I could detect no sign. I was, thus, inclined to accept that Miss Janet de Fontenoy had known experiences of rarest kind, had moved, indeed, in a world not realised by the majority. These, for some reason, she had set down baldly on paper. My own training and interest in experimental psychology sufficiently explains the curiosity I felt.

•   •   •

I think I expected the door to admit a small, elderly woman, with glasses, a grave face rather, a pointed chin possibly, and dressed in unfashionable attire, so that when I saw a tall, broad-shouldered young man, hefty, with clear blue eyes, stride in, I confess that it rather took my breath away. After the first surprise, however, my instinctive reaction was one of relief. I was actually relieved to find that Janet de Fontenoy was a healthy looking, upstanding young male. Was there disappointment too? I think so, though it had nothing to do with the sex of my visitor, but rather with his appearance. Fancy had played, no doubt, with a picture of someone who would suggest the mysterious, even the uncanny: there would be a hint of a queer mind, an interestingly unbalanced personality, behind dreamy eyes that saw beyond the common things of life, an atmosphere of the ghostly, even the other-worldly. Whereas this fellow was an athlete surely, a football forward, a diamond sculler, or on his way to the centre court at Wimbledon. There was nothing mysterious in the figure towering above the armchair with cushions I had placed for an elderly lady.

His mind seemed as straightforward as his physical appearance.

“I must apologise for pretending to be a woman,” he began at once in a good deep voice. “I ought to have told you, I’m afraid. But” — he hesitated a fraction of a second, smiling like a shy boy rather — “I knew you’d not be so interested to see a man. And I wanted to come. I hope you will forgive me.”

A shade disturbed by his penetration, I smiled inwardly over my faulty judgement, and assured him there was nothing to forgive and made him sit down.

“I’m not literary either,” he went on, “as you already know. I’ve got the mathematical mind, I believe. At least, figures are my best point. My father’s an actuary, and I’m in his office.”

He was direct as a poker. The little armchair, intended for a frail lady, creaked ominously as he sat down. I poured out the tea, feeling a tankard of ale or a whisky-and-soda might have been more suitable.

“Your — your work interested me,” I told him, choosing the noun wrongly, for while it was not literary, it equally was not work. The writing was done surely of necessity, I knew, functional as eating, and eating is not work. “I rather wondered, you see,” I stammered, “what made you try to write these experiences.”

I met his directness, that is, with similar directness.

He laughed. “Try is the right word,” he replied. “But I’ll tell you why. I wanted to get it out of my mind on to paper. I’d have preferred to build a model, but that was impossible of course. So I chose words — as plain and true as I could make them.”

“You found expression of some kind a relief—” I suggested.

“I suppose so, yes,” he said slowly. He reflected a moment. “The fact is,” he went on, “I think I wanted to find a formula — an hypothesis that would cover my experiences. Writing it all out in words and sentences, setting it down in another medium, I thought, might clear my mind a bit. Besides, I wanted — I — ”

I encouraged him with a nod and an understanding smile, and waited. To my amazement, a slight flush came to his brown cheeks.

“You see, I knew you would read the stuff and ask me to come,” he finished, face, voice and eyes as honest as those of a schoolboy.

“Ah! You knew that,” I repeated. “Knew it in advance, you mean?”

He looked straight at me, nodding his head in turn.

“I knew you’d believe them, too,” he added.

“Believe the experiences — believe they really happened?”

“That’s it, yes.”

“You deliberately picked me out, then?” I asked, showing no hint of scepticism, because I felt none. “You knew my mind, my attitude?”

“Yes — up to a point, that is. I knew your mind was open, without preconceptions. You had no prejudices, I mean, against such things happening.” He took his second piece of cake, having scorned mere bread and butter and the hot trifles I had expected to see a spectacled lady nibble daintily.

I watched him with increasing interest, not sorry to find the direction of the talk could be left to him, and I was aware already that my mind had decided of its own accord neither to argue or deny. I found myself accepting at face value, so to speak, whatever he might tell me. The Adventures I had read in MS. rose before me vividly, forming a background to his straightforward, almost boyish personality, producing perhaps a sense of incongruity somewhere, yet nowhere of doubt. It was not easy, I mean, to reconcile “other-worldly” experiences with this stalwart, hefty fellow eating his cake with zest and with an appetite as honest as his eyes and manner. Nothing dreamy or uncertain emanated from this very fit young man — twenty-eight to thirty years I gave him at most — whose fitness reminded me of newspaper advertisements of Grecian youths who wear “health-giving” underwear, or eat some divine patent food. Nothing fanciful lay in him, no hint of the charlatan, no touch of mystery. Desire for notoriety, as the hero of unusual adventures — a common motive of inferiority-complexes that can achieve peculiarity in no other way — was certainly absent. If this fellow claimed that he had lived unordinary things, he had lived them.

Thus, when he asserted quietly that he knew my mind in advance of meeting me, I found myself disposed to take it as true. The word “incredible” did not again offer itself. What did offer itself, oddly enough, was the idea that his appearance and his adventures were not so entirely irreconciliable after all. This idea rose in me suddenly: that his appearance and personality, so obviously genuine, were an epitome of what he claimed, a simile rather. Behind this “obvious reality” I gazed at, a deeper reality lay concealed. Life, nature, the universe, are but a fractional, imperfect representation of an actual reality behind we never know. Their “obvious reality” is false. Similarly, behind this Janet de Fontenoy crouched another, more real being.

I remember this notion shooting across me, as I watched him enjoying his cake. While my mind, untouched by criticism, held his astonishing claim that he had known me in advance of meeting, a judgement formed itself as well. So swift are intuitive processes, that it rose, like Minerva from the head of Jove, complete in a second. Here, I felt, was a nature at one with itself, made of a single piece, homogeneous, uninjured by any grit, mental or emotional, that crept in to disturb rhythm. His machinery ran smoothly as a complete whole, its simplicity unmarred by any extraneous influence that might cause wavering. Such human beings, I knew, were of necessity extremely rare. To have reached his age intact would, indeed, constitute him almost a freak.

e poison of thought alone, of sex, if of no other activity, destroys this unique quality early. His mind, he had mentioned, was mathematical. Was he, then, acquainted with symbols only? My own thought, at any rate, made this sudden jump in speculation.

That he had gauged my own, at least, was certainly true. He had deliberately picked me out as a Reader of his MS. in advance. He had known that I should invite him to call, that I expected a woman, that I should be interested, and more, that I should believe. And his claim to have foreseen this scrap of the Future I indeed found myself accepting at its face value. No hostile criticism, such as normally must have been the case, stirred in me.

Having finished his cake and set down empty his third cup of tea, he declined a cigarette, asking if he might smoke his pipe.

“’You’ve had no direct experiences of your own,” he remarked, as a statement rather than a question. “If you had, you would be more than open-minded only — you’d be convinced. Wouldn’t you?”

I raised my eyebrows merely, for this further evidence of penetration, of accurate knowledge rather, was again disturbing. But I made no comment. I wanted him to talk first, my own questions could come later, though I already began to have the feeling that these would be answered before I had even stated them. Did I feel that my thoughts were open to him? Hardly that perhaps. It was rather that his power of anticipation was extraordinary. Such trivial evidence of thought-transference, in any case, I reflected, was common enough between minds in sympathy. “You took that out of my very head, I was just going to say it,” is a commonplace, of course. And the sympathy between us was indeed definitely there, for while the visit, the precedents leading up to it, were of a kind to produce a certain tension, if quite easy tension, this was not present. We might have known one another for years. There was a sincerity and naturalness about him that made me think of trees: I might have been sitting in a calm, deep beech wood, communing with nature on a windless day. This sort of peace and reality he brought with him. No disturbance of any kind broke a certain stillness he produced. The simile of a deep wood on a windless day returned — no single leaf was ruffled. Yet my mind was actually seething with questions I meant to ask — about himself, about the experiences I had read, about how, why and whence they came to him, how they affected his being, his reactions to such strange occurrences in his ordinary life, and what, indeed, his “ordinary life” consisted of. My curiosity, my questions, however, somehow did not qualify what I call this stillness. It remained undisturbed between us.

One must pay attention to his actual words. Each phrase held so much.

“I’ve had them, at intervals, since childhood,” he remarked. “At intervals, of course. They are more real than my ordinary life. Though they come as interruptions in my ordinary life, it’s my ordinary life that seems the interruption. As though daily life was ‘being asleep,’ and I wake up suddenly. An Experience is when I’m awake. When it’s over, I fall asleep again — into ordinary life.”

I did not wish to check him. I merely slipped in a a quick question by the way about his sense of time. Did time, during an Experience, seem the same as time in ordinary life? Was the sense of duration similar in both? He smiled with pleasure.

“Of course, you ask that,” he said, “because you know already. Years are very short periods that only seem long. The Experiences last longer, ever so much longer, but in quite another way.” I left it at that, watching him pressing his pipe down, with an air of having said all that was necessary. “Nothing in my parents explains anything,” he went on quietly between puffs. “My mother, a Russian now dead, was emotionally religious; my father lives only for his work and is rich. I get my turn for figures from him. I could always add several columns at a glance, and extract cube-roots, like the prodigies, at sight. That’s what I meant by having a mathematical mind — only figures really. The reasoning that belongs to mathematics I don’t possess. I have no reasoning power at all — none. No sex either. Sex has never developed in me. I see nothing that even begins to waken it—”

I interrupted, for he was going too fast — in the sense that I should never remember all the mental notes I was making for questions later; for, let me repeat — one should pay attention to his actual words.

“An ascetic, are you then? A virgin — still?”

He smiled, his eyes bright with a laughter that was more of surprise than shyness.

“Continent — oh, yes — always,” he answered. He seemed to reflect a moment, as though perhaps trying to find the exact words he wanted. I, too, reflected — as swiftly and intelligently as his pregnant speech permitted. Sexual energy, the basis of all energy, primarily intended for the occasional procreation of children, had long since deteriorated into a mere physical enjoyment of frequent recurrence. The waste of valuable energy to the individual, to the race, to humanity as a whole, was incalculable.

“The energy goes somewhere else,” he went on, as though picking up my own fleeting thought. “Goes in another direction, of course. It all gets used — I know that much. It leaves nothing over for w— for love-making,” he quickly changed the word, and though there was no hint of contempt in his voice, there was a rather nameless quality I thought of as — not pity precisely, so much as pitying.

“Could you express that in your formula?”

He shook his head. “I’ve never got as far as a proper formula,” he answered.

I used the laconic shorthand he evidently preferred, though what he had just said provided a text I could have commented upon with deep interest and at great length. Above all, I felt, argument must be avoided. He surely was telling me, rather casually, things he knew, and argument could only bewilder him. It was his simple direct utterance I wanted, the rest must wait. My visitor, of whom I knew little enough indeed, should be accepted on his own terms. My questions, I decided, must be few, but fundamental. I wished, that is, to establish one or two general principles in my own mind before going into detail. The conviction that I had come across something of rarest interest and value meanwhile deepened. I was aware of uncommon thrill.

“Naturally,” I commented. “I understand. And wisdom needs no formula.”

I gazed into his blue eyes through the tobacco smoke, and he returned my gaze as steadily. It was, I believe, my own eyes that fell first. Not that there was the faintest suggestion of any so-called hypnotic nonsense about his state, but that there was, for all that, some quality I found stimulating to the point of being disconcerting, since I hold “disturbing” to be too strong a word. Yet only remotely so, and perhaps the mot juste after all would be inspiring. It was as though, deep down in me and far out of sight, an odd quiver tried to rise, an eager quiver of intense excitement. His eyes, if extremely direct, did not look through me; it was not that; nor did they, so to speak, see something behind me. That they seemed more aware, more conscious, gazed into a more extended, perhaps a different field, than the one I knew, expresses it best. The phrase “worlds not realised” flashed across my mind as my eyes fell from his, and the thrill I have already mentioned included in that moment a further reaction still, so that I felt spidery legs running up and down my spine, and I acknowledged the shiver we call goose-flesh.

Instantly, again, I had myself in hand, strap-hanging, as it were, to a sensible question:

“Your Experiences cannot be induced, I suspect?” I asked, though my exact meaning, it was clear, escaped him. For he had no reply at first.

“Induced?” he repeated, in his steady voice.

“Can you bring them on at will,” I explained, “or when you want them?”

He shook his head decisively. “Oh no,” he said, “I can’t do that.”

“So you haven’t trained yourself in any special way, I take it? Training of attention or will, for instance? Concentration, breathing, breath-control — what the East calls Yoga?”

He stared for a moment, wondering evidently what I was talking about. “I am ignorant, I’m afraid,” he replied, “for I don’t know what all this is. They come, or they don’t come. Out of the blue they come—”

“Without warning?”

That made him laugh again, a jolly laugh it was, too.

“No bell rings exactly,” he said, “but I’m given notice, if you like. There are warning signs as you might call it, a sort of warning thrill. Something rushes over me — all over, I mean.”

“And what starts the thrill?”

“Well — colour or sound usually, I think, music — outline, too, sometimes.” He broke off, hesitating a little. “A combination, it seems.”

“Beauty?” I ventured.

He nodded at once. “Beauty, yes, that’s it. Loveliness. I get a shock, you see, first.”

If he talked rather as a schoolboy talks, that was what I preferred and welcomed.

“That, too,” I suggested, “refused to come into your formula?”

He chuckled, the shy expression passing across his face again. “I used the word formula before without know! exactly what it means,” he confessed. “Anyhow, I don’t know properly the combination of colour and sound and emotion that bring on an Experience. They are usually the first sign of the change coming — that’s all I can say.”

I gave an understanding nod, as it were, yet not daring to pretend in any slightest degree, for he would see through any camouflage, I felt positive, and I should lose his confidence. Beauty, I mentioned, was well known to heighten and intensify consciousness with sensitive people, producing an exaltation of the faculties. “And this ‘combination ’ you speak of,” I asked, “is loveliness of one kind or another that makes you feel deeply first?”

“That’s it,” he agreed promptly. “The kind that really hurts — you know — gives you a stab, a wound.”

“What you called a shock just now, yes; and the shock shifts your whole being, so that your consciousness finds a way open suddenly — well, elsewhere?”

His face lit up with pleasure. “Splendid!” he exclaimed, almost as though he cried “Well hit, sir!” at cricket. “I knew, of course, that you would talk to me just like this. It’s what I came for really.”

To gain time, perhaps to cover a momentary confusion, I lit a cigarette. My own mind, I felt, had been rushing far ahead of my strange visitor’s, while yet the feeling grew upon me that his own was actually in advance. What I had thought out and reasoned, I mean, he seemed to know as naturally as a child plays with a ball. Speculations I had wildly indulged for years seemed to meet corroboration halfway in his Experiences. Dreams and visions my subconscious had beckoned from the stars came almost to earth as I watched and listened. My critical faculties, however, were not dulled entirely, for as I lit my cigarette and saw its blue smoke rise, I found myself questioning that “shock” that beauty gives — to the young, at any rate. Children, I remembered, are not susceptible to loveliness, they are not aware of beauty, they do not perceive it. At what age, I wondered, had his Experiences begun to show themselves?

“I am intensely interested,” I said, after this slight pause. “But tell me — if you can remember — were you consciously aware of recognising beauty, loveliness, as a child? Did these shocks come to you as a youngster, for instance?”

For the first time he seemed to stammer.

“I — I” he began, then stopped. Yet it was not stammering, nor was it, properly speaking, hesitation even. “As a child,” he went on, presently, “in early youth — I did, yes, get these shocks,” emphasising the pronoun peculiarly, “but — not I,” repeating the personal pronoun with no emphasis at all.

His meaning came to me, though not instantly.

“Another ‘I’ — a different ‘you,’ of course?”

He merely nodded. It was as obvious to him as the sugared cake on the table beneath his nose.

“It’s a longish time ago, you see,” he observed quietly. “I was little more than a boy when the first thing happened — about seventeen — and I’m over forty-five now.”

Why, I caught myself wondering, did this statement, this astonishing statement, hardly even startle me? Why did I not feel bewildered, puzzled? I ought by rights to have known a reaction of amazement, incredulity, laughter, of sceptical disbelief at any rate. Some exclamation of blank surprise, of utter doubt, should have found spontaneous expression: “Over forty-five! What d’you mean? You’re not even thirty yet!” Instead of which, his statement, offered so quietly and naturally, dropped into the pool of my mind as a thin stone slips into water with scarcely a ripple. Not a leaf stirred — to use the simile of the wood again. I was the one who acknowledged to over the half-century mark, and I was talking with a youth, a young man, who yet claimed to be nearly my own age as naturally as though he said: “Yes, I’d like a cigarette,” or “I feel hungry, too.”

It was this absence of the normal reaction in myself that then simultaneously flashed an explanation that was similar, rather, to his stammering choice between “I” and “I” a moment ago. It is less easy, perhaps, to set down this hint of explanation, but the essence of it lay in time. His Experiences took place in other, in different, time. In that he was indeed “over forty,” a hundred, a thousand. His statement was made out of a different time-scale. I now caught myself acknowledging that I had already been aware of age in him, of something old, old, of something ageless rather, even while I sat there chatting with a lad who wore the full bloom of youth. It had lain unrecognised in me hitherto. I searched his face, his physical appearance, keenly for signs that nearly half a century should have traced; and as I did so there again stole over me that sensation as of little feathers that brushed my skin along the spine, stirred by a breath of cooler air, the touch of the unearthly….

“Yes, of course,” I found myself saying quietly after a certain pause, and as much pursuing a thought of my own as addressing him directly, “the careless waste of sexual energy ages us, no doubt, yet it’s not the question of storing it up alone, but the way — the direction — in which to use it afterwards that is important.”

“Is that it?” he replied. “I had never put it into words.”

While he refilled and lit another pipe, and while my own thoughts went diving and soaring a little wildly perhaps, I got the impression that his own mind lay quite inactive, uncharged with thoughts of any kind. It came to me that he really did not think at all. He waited, anyhow, for me to speak. And this time I made a plunge for it:

“And life, as we find it and know it,” I asked, following my own line of ideas somewhat at a venture again, “does life interest you — are you thrilled, I mean, or bored with it? Do you enjoy being alive? Does it seem to you worth while, for instance, or the reverse?”

It was, of course, a fundamental question. His relations to living involved a keynote theme. I wanted to know his main reaction to finding himself upon the planet, conditioned in time and space with a given order of faculties and senses, as human beings are. Had he an object in being alive? Was he ambitious? Was life of value, of importance, to him? Did it seem to him merely a rather futile dream, or filled with meaning?

The question demanded a reply. He gazed into my eyes. Why did I attach such importance to what he might say? I hardly knew. Had I already persuaded myself that this strange and rather casual visitor experienced — occasionally, at any rate — a different kind of life?

“It’s wonderful — isn’t it — merely to be alive,” I added, helping him to a reply, “even if the meaning is not clear.”

His eyes withdrew to the lighting of his pipe, then returned calmly to my face again, and I cannot explain why his quiet, steady gaze increased that faint tickling down my spine.

“Yes,” he answered, “I do enjoy it.” He hesitated. “Knowing there’s a way out makes all the difference, though — doesn’t it?”

I had expected his reply to be of this kind; he knew, moreover, that I had expected it. A smile began, then vanished; but behind the great sunburnt bulk of him I saw another thing steal up, something I can only describe as light and fiery, and of amazing swiftness. It was gone even as I stared.

“Your Experiences you mean, point to a way out?”

He nodded.

“A way of escape — from what would otherwise be — intolerable?”

He nodded again, giving the slightest possible shrug of the shoulders.

“From what’s almost a mechanical state — a state where we just respond automatically to external stimuli of various kinds??” I insisted. “Like machines, rather — automata merely?”

A puzzled expression crossed his face. We laughed a little.

“They’re real, you see. I’m awake then. Wide awake,” he put in.

“Ordinary life seems something of the dream-order by comparison you mean? Semi-conscious almost?”

He nodded again, shrugging his big shoulders, and it was as though he said: “I suppose so.” Evidently, he had never thought of putting it into words before. He gave a kind of long-drawn sigh. “There’s a way out anyhow,” he said, “and once we know that, we can manage to stick the rest — to enjoy it even.”

He puffed his pipe, at any rate, as though he enjoyed that. His manner was as quiet and easy as if we had been discussing cricket averages, or styles at tennis. A pause fell between us, lasting probably longer than I realised, for I was rather intensely occupied with my own thoughts, and these thoughts dived in headlong fashion into somewhat deep recesses of my own field of psychological research. It was after a considerable interval that I heard my own voice again, but as if speaking to myself rather than to him, so that I hardly expected an answer. I was not even certain that I had spoken out loud. His comment startled me, therefore, all the more.

“Shall we ever get any further?” I was thinking. “Will our knowledge ever really advance? Shall we ever know more about essential things….” And, apparently, I spoke aloud.

“Not by any method we’re using at present,” came the startling comment. “We shall go round and round in the same old circle as for thousands of years. Humanity as a whole, I mean. Not individuals, of course.”

Was it telepathy again, or had I uttered actually? In any case, it did not matter; he had taken my own thought whole: that nothing real could ever be known by intellect or reason. It was the wrong instrument.

“We possess no faculty, as we are now, for knowing anything real. That’s what you mean?”

He nodded, pressing the tobacco down into his pipe with one finger. “It’s useless that way,” he remarked, as though he criticised a man’s service at tennis in relation to his improvement. “It’s only adding the same kind of knowledge to the same kind of knowledge.”

He lit a match and puffed vigorously for a moment. “To know more,” he repeated between puffs, “we — we ourselves — must change.”

And on this our conversation abruptly came to an end; it stopped, as though a climax had been reached beyond which nothing useful could then be said. Perhaps that was true, I found myself reflecting, as I saw him rise from his chair and knock the ashes from his pipe which had refused to light again properly. He replaced it in his pocket, his clear blue eyes gazing down at me. I sat gazing up at him a moment, after the most astonishing talk of my life. That this well set-up young fellow was nearly as old as myself seemed, of course, quite incredible. The conversation just ended was, of course, even more incredible. Cryptic, almost like some shorthand known only to the two of us, it must have sounded unintelligible to any third party who had heard it. For I had spoken as though communing with myself, uttering the final results of many years’ difficult experiment and thought, but omitting all process of argument by which these results had been reached. And yet he had not only completely understood me, but had confirmed, even added to, my deep convictions. He had taught me something too.

Something in me felt breathless. Something had emanated from him all this time that almost literally took my breath away.

“You’ll jot down notes about your further adventures,” I remarked, walking beside him to the door, “and let me see them?”

“I’ll come and tell them to you, please,” he answered. “We may hit on the formula together then. You have the time.”

So he knew that too. It was true that I only “read” queer, out of the way, even outlandish MSS. for my friend, the publisher, “reading” them for my own interest without a fee.

I put no unnecessary questions to him, least of all how it was he knew so much about my mind and habits. That my hobby combined research and experiment along psychological and physiological lines was obviously no secret to him. But one question I did ask, as we reached the door into the street.

“Your name — you might as well tell me,” I suggested. “Your address, of course, I have.”

“Smith-Jones,” he replied at once. “John.” And I watched him go striding away down the street with the quiet energy and ease that belong to youth alone. He had left his MS. in my room, but purposely of course.

I

The Experiences assuredly, I reflected, were by no means all of them significant, in the sense that they added anything to life either by way of happiness, knowledge, or human faculty. Some, indeed, were little better than ghost tales, if of rather unordinary kind.

There was, thus, the matter of the mackintosh, or properly speaking, of the mackintosh and hat, an experience capable of more than one fairly obvious explanation that will occur to all, while yet, I hold, of not entirely satisfactory kind. The obvious explanations, that is, explain away better than they explain.

The account of what happened is simple enough; in the version John Smith-Jones set down on paper most would call it banal, trivial, dull. Its schoolboy English, however, could not quite conceal another quality that somehow crept past the style, the errors of punctuation, even the faulty grammar. It was this quality that caught my attention, surviving all the weaknesses of composition. Was I right concerning this “quality,” I asked myself? Did I not perhaps supply it myself, imagine it?

It only to satisfy myself that it was, or was not, my own contribution, I persuaded him, oh, easily enough, one day to repeat it verbally to me. The written account lay clearly in my memory as I listened. The “quality” not only survived, but became intensified.

It was one of the earlier experiences, John somewhere about eighteen years of age, his nose well on the grindstone of his father’s actuarial business, involving office work which began at the comfortable hour of ten every morning. His father, preferring his semi-country little house in Richmond, did not sleep in town, and John had a room in his aunt’s apartment near the Marylebone Road in Devonshire Terrace. Breakfast, dinner and bed he found thus with his father’s unmarried sister, whose alert nowhere intrudes into what happened beyond the fact that one late October she went to Paris, taking her maid with her, and providing an opportunity for the cook, an old family servant, to take a holiday at the same time. John, thus, was left alone in the apartment, with room and breakfast attended to by the porter’s wife. He rather enjoyed it; to dine in a restaurant for a change appealed to him as well, the sense of privacy, as though he owned the flat, amused him; he was the only person with a latchkey.

It afforded him pleasure, he mentioned, to find the place empty and unoccupied on getting home in the evening, or at night after dining on the way, if work had kept him late. And it was the word “unoccupied” rather than “empty” that he stressed. His account contented itself with this slight emphasis, in passing as it were, but drew no deduction from the little point. On my pressing him for a word of further explanation, he merely shrugged his shoulders. I put my question because here, it struck me, was a specific instance where the “quality” I have already mentioned stole out of the loose end his written version had failed to gather up later. “Oh,” he replied, “there was a continual sort of coming and going in the place. No, not of any disturbing kind — I mean, nothing that concerned me personally — merely that I was aware of it” — which was all that I could squeeze out of him, and for the simple reason that it was all that he could tell me. The rooms were, thus, unoccupied, yet, in some sense or other undefined and indefinable, did not seem entirely empty.

Is it a distinction without a difference? I think not. The aunt, only referred to in this single regard, was a kindly egocentric, whose voluble personality filled every corner and cranny she had left behind her. She was of the type that could talk about herself to a visitor for an hour without stopping, nor talk uninterestingly perhaps, yet add when saying goodbye: “but you’ve told me nothing about yourself! How are you getting on?” with an interest wholly sincere. In my own mind I ascribed John’s “coming and going” to what may be called “atmospherics” left behind her.

To this unoccupied suite, at any rate, he returned one afternoon towards the end of October, made himself a cup of tea with the things left out by the porter’s wife, read for an hour, dozed for another hour, and then felt it was time to go out and get his dinner. The weather was raw and squally; he chose a restaurant at hand; he chose also a rather worn grey felt hat and carried a macintosh over his shoulder, and the macintosh was both new and of a very light fawn colour, so light, indeed, that he remembered hesitating when he bought it, with the thought that a darker shade would wear better by not betraying the London grime so easily. And now, as he left the restaurant soon afterwards, the rain was coming down with a steadiness that prophesied a stormy autumn night, with gusts of angry wind and a raw touch of cold. A miserable, gloomy night, it was. He walked the few hundred yards, but was glad to reach the shelter of the building, shaking himself in the vestibule like a wet dog. The porter took him up in the lift and wished him good-night. He let himself in with his latchkey, flung his wet macintosh and grey felt hat upon the ottoman in the corridor just outside his door, and made himself comfortable with a book in the deep armchair of his small sitting-room.

It was perhaps about ten o’clock, the gusty rain driving against the windows. But the rain and wind, shouting the end of summer dismally enough, could not trouble him, for his chair was comfortable, his voluble aunt was far away, the next day, being Sunday, allowed of breakfast in bed, and his book, Arabia Deserta, enchanted, even indeed, enthralled him.

In this pleasant receptive state, his thoughts a vivid picture of the coloured scenes he was reading about, John paid little attention to autumn’s gusty violence, nor noted particularly the passage of time, for the idea of breakfast at any hour he happened to wake next morning rather broke time’s usual tyranny. It was thus a sound in the street that first disturbed his easy enjoyment of Arabian deserts — the music of someone playing upon a fiddle that drew his attention, by slow stages, from his vicarious travels to things closer at hand. He had recognised Tchaikovsky’s Andante even before he named it to himself, but having once named it his thoughts had then been deflected outwards.

Laying the book down upon his knee, he listened, and the exquisite and poignant melody, sighing out its soul upon the dismal street at night, plunged deeply into him. Its gracious melancholy stirred him profoundly. He imagined the homeless player, homeless and hopeless too, for who would be passing ready to give alms at such an hour in the darkness? — he saw the poor instrument, damaged to ruin by the streaming rain, he felt the soaked clothes and soggy boots … and opening his window he called out loudly above the wind, while he threw down half-a-crown wrapped up in a sheet of old newspaper.

The wind blew both voice and newspaper at an angle, but he saw a shadow crawl out of other shadows, pick it up, and retreat into the night … and when he was back in his chair again, the enchanting book ready to be resumed, he discovered that its haunting power had evaporated, something different having replaced it. There was emotion in him of disturbing kind that denied the desire to read. What were precisely its ingredients? He could not say. There was pity, an aching pity; there was yearning, a homeless yearning; a bitter sense of desolate frustration, with a desire to escape, though not for himself primarily, from miseries due to some intolerable slavery. A pang of violent, unearthly nostalgia swept over him, that was accompanied by an icy realisation suddenly of the futility of life’s brief span and its ludicrous limitations. All of which emotions, powerful and searching, grouped themselves about a vivid picture of that wretched shadow fiddling hopelessly in the cold rain and darkness.

A moment this swept over him, a moment merely, and it was while occupied with it that he caught another, closer sound, not in the street this time, but in the flat, in the corridor indeed just outside his door. He was aware of it, no more than that, for it did not draw his attention particularly, and he merely noticed it with enough vague interest to say to himself “Now, what was that, I wonder?” but caring nothing about the answer. He listened. A mouse, a stray cat dropping from a window ledge, a letter pushed beneath the front door or through the flap. There was, however, no conscious attention in his listening, his mood still under the sway of that haunting music, that aching yearning pity, with the mournful, homeless shadow crawling in the rainy darkness. He did listen, none the less, with a certain deliberation, and then, the sound not being repeated, he picked up his book again and went on reading. And he was half-way down the page when it came back to him sharply that no mouse or cat had made that sound. It was a footstep. This did not interrupt his reading; it was merely that another part of his mind recognised the fact while he still read — until he reached the end of the page and laid the book down abruptly because the sound had suddenly been repeated.

He listened now with close attention. A footstep had passed along the corridor immediately outside his door, a very quiet, soft, almost a stealthy, footstep. It was not audible now. It had stopped.

That he was alone in the empty flat then came over him, the front door locked, the porter gone, the lift no longer running, for it was after eleven o’clock, and that the only latchkey was in his pocket, and — that there was somebody in the corridor. This slight increase of awareness came over him. “Who can that be, I wonder?” ran a second question across his mind, yet again a question he asked himself quite casually. There was no trace of nervousness in him anywhere, as he laid his book down and got out of his armchair to have a look for himself.

“I’ll just have a look round,” was the way he put it to himself, as he rose in leisurely fashion and crossed the carpet.

Opening his door, he stood staring along the dark passage, turning on the electric switch the same second. There was no one there, the corridor was empty. He strode along it, looking into each room in turn with the light full on — his aunt’s bedroom, the drawing-room, both draped in dust sheets, the kitchen, the bathroom too. Under the beds he looked and into the cupboards. He even went out on to the iron landing beyond the scullery where the tradesmen hoisted up the food. There was no one. Nor was there any open window through which a cat might have crept. The entire place was empty, silent, apparently unoccupied, so that he turned out the various lights and went back to his reading, feeling quite sure he was alone in the apartment. And it was then, while reading, that another part of his mind let loose an unexpected whisper:

“There was a change in that corridor, a difference in it, something you noticed, but didn’t realise quite.”

It was true. He now realised it. There was a slight alteration in the corridor, a detail missing, something that had been there when he came home from dinner had disappeared. This detail, whatever it might be, was no longer there. The same moment he was out of his chair and in the corridor again, searching keenly with his eyes and memory, and as he looked at the low divan where he had flung down his macintosh and old grey felt hat, he instantly detected what the alteration was.

The fawn-coloured macintosh lay where he had flung it, patched with wet, one sleeve hanging down, the other sprawling over a cushion. It was the grey felt hat he could not see. The hat was gone.

So there had been someone in the flat. His search had not been thorough enough. He must look again. He did so, and ended with the positive certainty that neither man nor mouse, burglar least of all, was in hiding. He closed the door of each room in turn behind him, fastened the chain along its groove in the front door as well. He did this very thoroughly. The hunt for the missing hat was equally conscientious. It had neither slipped behind the divan, nor fallen to the floor, nor become mixed up with the macintosh. It had been lying, he remembered distinctly, on the top of the wet macintosh, for he had taken it off last and tossed it there, and, since it was now gone, somebody had taken it. Somebody, yes, but who? Had, perhaps, the front-door catch failed to work when he came in, so that a hand could slip through quietly?? Not only was the distance too great for any hand to reach, but the front-door was securely fastened, and the only available latchkey was in his pocket.

Moreover, he had definitely heard that stealthy footstep.

A moment longer he stood looking down at the macintosh, which he then folded differently so that another side of it should dry, and then he went back slowly to his sitting-room and calmly resumed the reading of his Arabia Deserta.

Calmly, yes. For somehow, the little incident did not disturb him particularly, did not really puzzle him unduly, as it must have disturbed and puzzled, probably alarmed as well, anybody else. Not that he had the faintest idea how that hat had vanished, nor any explanation of the footstep he had indubitably heard, but that strangely — in some strange way — he knew it was explicable. He understood that it was all right, using both words precisely in their true meaning. The notion of a thief or burglar left his mind entirely. The agency by which the hat had been removed was, literally, all right. That it was being worn now in the gusty rain and wind, as he felt positive it was being worn, he knew equally, was all right. His mind and pen used the schoolboy phrase, where a more lettered choice would doubtless have used “natural.” For “natural” as against supernatural was assuredly what he meant. The positive assurance of its rightness and naturalness, he mentioned, was “all over him.”

The reading of Arabia Deserta, therefore, continued easily and delightfully, and it must have been fully an hour later when a sound again caught his absorbed attention. It was, again, indubitably a footstep, again just outside his door, where someone was walking quietly along the corridor. He heard a gentle click. The same moment he laid his book aside and was out of his room in the little hallway. The light, he saw, to his astonishment was turned on. Perhaps fifteen seconds was the interval between hearing the sounds and standing in the hallway. The corridor was empty, the chain hung securely in its iron groove, no door banged or was stealthily closed, but there was another alteration in the detail of the familiar scene that this time he detected at once. The macintosh, the fawn-coloured macintosh, no longer lay on the divan. It had disappeared. Following the old grey hat, it had been taken too.

Someone who had taken the hat had now come back and taken the macintosh as well. That was as plain as the nose on his face. Both articles had been removed while he sat reading his book, removed by someone who had found an entry into the flat twice in succession, and who, similarly, had left it again twice in succession, each time with extraordinary rapidity. This was clear and positive; but it was equally clear and positive that there was no conceivable way of entry or departure, no possible way by which any human being could have got into the flat and out of it again. The same positive certainty applied to the question of hiding. Faced with which definite and perplexing certainties, he yet was fully aware that the whole puzzle was explicable as simply, above all as naturally, as though he had himself opened the front door and given away the missing articles with his own hands.

Standing in the passage, now flooded with light, he found other positive assurances in him too, and these were as definitely certain as the fact that his wristwatch showed the hour of one o’clock. These positive assurances admitted of no arguing, needed no consideration even; they merely presented themselves to his mind as knowledge. He was convinced of them as he was convinced that his watch face showed one o’clock:

Both hat and macintosh had been removed by human agency. The taker had not been secreted in the flat beforehand, but had entered and left. This taker, moreover, strangely, was still here, still in the flat, even though he had left. The impossibility of this presented no difficulty somehow. The taker, indeed, stood at this actual moment very close to him, as close as hands or feet. This conviction of intimate proximity did not disturb him.

“It is all right,” he heard his mind saying to itself, “it is quite all right and natural….”

The taker, he realised further, was not a thief, but someone who needed both hat and macintosh, someone who could use them, wear them, with a clear conscience, someone who was using and wearing them at this very moment — now.

With such positive and convinced knowledge in him, he did not therefore waste time in making a further useless search, but stood there in the lighted corridor, dealing with these inconsistent and incredible facts. For facts they were, though how precisely he “dealt” with them lay beyond his powers to describe. Not with his mind assuredly, he asserts, nor with any faculties of reasoning or analysis. His medium of expression in words, in literary form, here failed him completely; he used the term “dealt” and made no more exact attempt at description. The incredible inconsistencies and obvious impossibilities, he says merely, did not exist. Neither fear nor nervousness of any kind came near him. He accepted the blazing absurdities quite calmly, standing motionless for a moment, listening, watching. Then he glanced at his watch. It was 2.30. The “moment,” therefore, actually had been an hour and a half.

“It didn’t surprise or startle you?”

He shook his head and smiled.

“And that hour and a half you were standing in the passage — you’ve any recollection of it? Ninety minutes — I mean, or just a moment? Did it seem long or short? Did nothing happen to you in all that time?”

He answered simply, and without hesitation:

“Well — rain and wind were in my face,” he told me. “It was cold. My feet were wet, my body ached like hell, I remember sneezing and shivering. Then there came the comfort of warmth, the heat of a warm bar in a dirty pub., and two or three glasses of beer — of bitter, rather. I dislike bitter very much.”

“Sleeping?” I asked. “Do you remember sleeping anywhere? Lying down? Going to bed, for instance?”

He laughed a little. “In a dim way, yes,” he said. “I changed half-a-crown and the bed was ninepence, but that was somewhere else. And they took a fiddle from me, a fiddle and case, and gave me a ticket. Only, the room was packed with lousy men and stank so that I — sorry — I was sick on the floor—”

“That’s a positive memory?”

He nodded with a rueful smile. “I looked at my watch just after it,” he said, grinning again. “It was 2.30 and I was standing in the corridor.”

Sense of an interval, I gathered next, there was none; yet a sense of duration, apparently, there was.

“You found yourself exactly where you were when you left your book to look for the possible intruder?”

“In the same spot.”

“Any thought, any recollection, of the fiddler in the rain still in your mind?” I asked.

“None whatever.”

“You had forgotten his existence?” I insisted.

There was a moment’s hesitation, as though he wanted to be extremely accurate.

“No thought or picture of the man came to my mind,” he said. “He didn’t crop up once. I thought of him later, of course — next day, I mean. But in the corridor — nothing.”

“And the missing hat and macintosh — the possible thief or intruder — did that bother you?”

“Oh, I remember that passed through my mind,” he admitted, with his frank, delightful smile, “but — I had no feeling of bother—”

“Or question?”

“Or question,” he agreed.

“You felt comfortable and happy — normal?”

After an instant’s hesitation he accepted that. “I felt a sort of inner relief,” he found his words. “Relieved, yes, that’s the word. Sort of pleased and comforted, you know.” And then he repeated the first adjective: “relieved.”

“Any sign of your having left the house and been out of doors?” I fired at him.

He answered instantly. “Soaked to the skin.” He laughed outright then. “And a little sick — a touch of nausea perhaps.” He grinned like a boy who had eaten sweet things unwisely. “What I did then? What I did next? Oh, I got out of my wet clothes, had a hot bath in Auntie’s lovely bathroom, and went to bed and slept like a top till nine o’clock next morning.”

Such a detail as the notorious licensing hours seemed hardly worth mentioning, I felt, though it was in both our minds, of course. In an experience where Before and After held no meaning, where a single individual, it seemed, could operate in two different places simultaneously, argument about such different time and space struck me as useless. I let it pass. I lit a cigarette and looked hard at him with an examining eye across the smoke. His own expression and manner betrayed no doubt or hesitation of any kind. He was frank and honest as a child. Nothing veridical anywhere, absolutely nothing, I thought to myself. Aloud I then said: “You see now why a written account of all this could not interest anyone — because of its utter, its hopeless, incredibility. To the ordinary man even normal, linear time is muddling enough sometimes. Most folk are rather disturbed, too, by any too vivid visualisation of the past, but a glimpse of the future means almost consulting a mental specialist. The two together, just baldly written down—”

We laughed together, but while he laughed he began fumbling in his pocket and a moment later produced a scrap of dirty paper and handed it across to me.

“I found this when I woke up,” he said. “It was on the floor beside my bed.”

It was a doss-house ticket in the name of John Doe, the date stamped on it by a rubber stamp, with the words “One fiddle and case.”

“The date is right,” he mentioned quietly. “The address — well, you’ve read my manuscript.”

I left this detail too till later, since it was a verifiable one, and in due course was verified by myself, for I called at the doss-house, presented the receipt, and now have a fiddle and case in a cupboard of my library. I took up some further questions first. About sleeping, for instance: had he, to his knowledge, ever fallen asleep in an upright position? He had not. Then, were his dreams as a rule actual and vivid? They were not, and for the simple reason that his sleep was always dreamless. He had never once dreamed, he assured me, in his whole life.

“I have never known a dream,” he told me, adding that of course that might only mean that he never remembered them. “My eight hours’ sleep every night go just like that,” and he clicked his fingers in the air. “I shut my eyes, I wake up. It’s like a minute. A dream would probably be as strange to me as — as, say, the taste of alcohol. That’s probably why the bitter made me sick that time.”

The pause between us, though it lasted several minutes, had nothing awkward or embarrassing about it. The prolonged silence was as natural as if I had been sitting in a wood with trees all round me. Oak, beech and pine may overcharge a receptive mind with communications of a rather pregnant silence to which no comment by way of audible response is possible.

I jumped back to something his written account had dismissed with a dozen words:

“The taker, as you call him — were you conscious, when standing in the corridor, of his presence?”

“Of his existence, yes,” he answered.

“As another person?”

“Another — no,” came the prompt reply.

“One?” I asked.

He nodded emphatically. “Just one,” he agreed with decision.

“Very close to you, very near, you felt him?”

“We occupied the same space — as close as that.” Then he laughed. “And how can we get that into a formula?” he asked me with a grin.

•   •   •

It was some considerable time later, the voluble aunt back from Paris, when a sort of climax appeared: a “sort” of climax, for in his written version it was evidently intended as such, though its crude, brief manner of presentation made it merely the addition of another wholly incredible episode.

He was strolling along Jermyn Street shortly before one o’clock to a luncheon engagement, and he was dressed accordingly in what he called his “best,” tidy at any rate and looking a very presentable, even handsome, figure, and being ahead of time he was idling along rather. He carried only a cane. It was a sunny day, the air soft and warm, with the lovely radiance of an Indian summer snatched from June. The light creamed over almost into blossom, the sweetness was like perfume.

“Your mind occupied?” I enquired, since there was no mention of his mood. “Particularly occupied, I mean?”

He shook his head. “Just hungry,” he said, “and looking forward to lunch, while enjoying the day, of course — I mean, you couldn’t help that. It changed the street and houses so—”

“A change in yourself too of any kind?” I put in quickly.

“A bit, yes. I felt a change coming — something or other in me — trembling a little—”

When his attention was drawn suddenly to a figure across the street and slightly ahead of him, the figure of a tall man looking into a shop-window. But his attention was not merely drawn, apparently, it was definitely arrested, so that he stopped dead on the kerb and stared For some seconds, half a minute possibly, he stood quite still, watching the figure, staring at it, as it moved to the next shop-window a little further on. The man, in spite of the warm sun, was wearing a light fawn-coloured macintosh, and on his head was an old grey felt hat. Only the back of the figure was visible, as the man stooped over and peered into the windows, pacing slowly along, and now and again returning a little on his steps.

He watched the figure with the keenest possible intentness for perhaps another minute or so, and then realised that the person was no longer the same. It was not the same figure, something had happened, it was another, a different, person pacing to and fro. He declared that he knew instantly who it was, this changed figure, knew instantly, too, that he must cross the street and join him. He must be very quick, he must go over immediately without a second’s delay. It was imperative beyond all doubt or question to act at once, as imperative — he used a striking simile here in his written version — as to seize a flung rope when you were just sinking for the last time. And he obeyed the impulse, yet even while doing so, while dodging the rather slow traffic, he had time to become aware of another thing as well. His reference to it was brief, a passing mention merely, but its importance to me seemed vital, and I linked it in my mind with his hearing of the Tchaikovsky Andante in the wet and windy street earlier in the adventure.

It was music, though music of a kind that would have left the majority unaffected: a group of four men, singing for alms, had turned the corner up from St. James’s Square into Jermyn Street, and their voices, if rough, were good. They sang in tune, they sang with feeling, there was pathos, even beauty, in the Irish air that only just overrode the traffic rumble.

He caught it as he crossed, and the change he had already mentioned in himself ‘became intensified. This change he had felt coming a moment earlier now abruptly established itself. It was all over him, within him, definitely there.

“You can put a label to it?” I asked. “Describe it?”

He nodded, a smile of peculiar radiance flashed to his face and vanished.

“Loveliness,” he whispered softly.

This was the word used in his manuscript, but mentioned without further elaboration, and I wanted to hear if he could add to it. Questions and answers may be summarised, and what he said was good and easily understandable up to a point. For the beauty of the morning, of which he had already been quite aware, fell upon him with a sudden abruptness for some reason that held shock. With a rush it came over him, “like a burning flame of fire,” as he put it, and the music of those singing voices seemed a spear-head that pierced him to the core. This intensification was due, apparently, to the combination of the light and colour, and the sound. This “loveliness,” which had nothing to do directly with the figure he was watching, burst upon him with its overwhelming, shattering appeal. And he tried to explain, in answer to my questions, that a fellow’s normal state held no machinery adequate for — using the verb he favoured so often — with such loveliness, for it strained almost to breaking point every receptive faculty a man possessed.

“So I went across to him,” he continued, “diagonally over the street, dodging the ‘traffic, and came up with the figure very rapidly, and looked over the man’s shoulder as he stared into the shop, and saw by the reflection of the face in the window who it was. The two pairs of eyes met fairly and squarely in the glass.”

And here, without worrying him with the numerous questions that worried myself, I went straight on to the next point in the Adventure exactly as his manuscript description took it.

“In which instant,” I said, “you found yourself — not in Jermyn Street at all?”

Although we both knew the answer, it came naturally and promptly:

“I found myself in one of those little side-streets that run off Baker Street, perhaps a mile and a half away, and it was raining quite heavily, and I was mighty glad that I was wearing my macintosh and my old grey felt hat,and I had something in my hands, though it was too dark — oh, yes, it was night of course — too dark to see exactly what it was, and a window was flung open suddenly far above me on the opposite side, and someone threw out a coin wrapped in a piece of white paper which the wind blew away sideways, and just as I crept after it and picked it up, I found myself in the lobby of a restaurant in Jermyn Street again, my host a few yards away waiting, while I pocketed a cloak-room ticket from a pageboy, and I had just said to this boy ‘Both hats — you took both hats?’ and the boy was answering with a grin, ‘There was only one, sir — a black felt hat and a cane,’ as I stuffed the ticket in my waistcoat pocket entirely satisfied that the boy was right.”

II

It was sufficiently easy, of course, to check a good many of his statements, and I did this thoroughly enough to satisfy at least myself. Beyond this I felt no interest, for in examining cases of such abnormal kind the verdict of the man in the street seemed to me valueless. Judgements of the herd, being expressions of the herd-instinct, are invariably negative, self-preservation making all innovation abhorrent and dangerous. Anything that attacks the established order must be crushed out. Nor had I any desire to justify experiences that would hold in a court of law. What interested me, frankly, was this chance personal justification of ideas and theories my own research and speculation had led me to think might not be wholly impossible.

In the sense that a mad mind is a mind out of relation with its environment, John Smith-Jones was madder than any Carrolian hatter. He was a crazy man, suffering from acute paranoia, a victim of absurd, incurable delusions, while yet a saner man, a mind more perfectly in relation with its environment I swear I have never met. Environment indeed is here the master word, for his environment was unquestionably an extended one. It was an environment otherwise conditioned, familiar with expansion in space and time.

I made few notes of what had so far come my way from his accounts. Strictly speaking, only one or two conclusions seemed definite enough to be worth setting down on paper, and these I arrived at after hearing a number of his Adventures, not merely the one just sketched. And the first is easily stated: he possessed another way of “knowing,” a way not open to ordinary folk, though affirmed in the Yogi teachings of the East to be accessible to those who can dare the necessary training. Apparently, to stop thinking is the first essential, in other words to arrest the ordinary method of knowing and to get behind thought. Obviously, to cease thinking is a labour of Hercules that, open potentially to all, can be achieved actually by extremely few. John Smith-Jones managed it easily and naturally.

The second conclusion I arrived at was also clear enough: that an Adventure only followed when certain antecedent conditions were precisely right. Unless these exact conditions supervened, his life was as normal and commonplace as yours or mine, but with their arrival he slipped into a state of other consciousness as naturally as one slips from waking into sleeping, or vice versa. All moved on oiled ball bearings, there was no jerk, no hitch, no shock or sense of violent transition. And once in the Adventure, once experiencing it, the intense reality of it was overmastering. It held a shattering intensity of conviction that made it seem his usual state, his daily life in comparison a dream-like kind of brief semi-consciousness.

These antecedent conditions, moreover, were easily recognisable, and can be summed up in a single word: beauty. A message of beauty flamed upon him and he was off! Whether the message came by sound, form, or colour made no difference. Loveliness was the key, and loveliness, blazing upon him as with the power of some awful lightning, fused the limitations of normal consciousness and introduced him into a state of changed consciousness where another way of knowing operated and where time and space lost their pitiful limitations.

The power of beauty to heighten susceptibility and intensify consciousness is, of course, established; but in his case there was more than this. Not merely an intensification, but a different type, of consciousness altogether supervened.

•   •   •

The Adventure in Gloucestershire was induced apparently by the intoxicating loveliness of the may in an ordinary English Spring. What layer of time and space he tapped here, whether medieval, or perhaps not even strictly his own, is not for me ta say. That I followed it at all was due to some out of the way reading I had done. To the ages of superstition, of course, belongs the alchemist’s notion that man is a fourfold combination of the elements, then limited to four instead of over ninety, and that while his physical body was the vehicle for manifestation on earth, it held also three other vehicles for manifesting, respectively, in air, water, and fire. Sylphs, undines, salamanders remain today the nursery myths of what was once, no doubt, believed in all sincerity and, who shall prove, not based upon authentic experience?

The Adventure, at any rate, sprang from the quite commonplace opportunity of a lift by motor a friend offered him into the wilds of Gloucestershire, and the friend was a brown-eyed woman who meant no more to him, he told me, than the girl in the box-office of some cinema where he might buy a ticket.

•   •   •

“The may’s rather poor this year, don’t you think….” she remarked.

On the way out of London this seemed true, the hedges thinly covered, or without any blossoms at all, but as the car crossed Buckinghamshire it gave signs of rising to the surface, in Oxfordshire it showed still thicker, and when Gloucestershire was reached the fragrant white blossoms poured in shining creamy cataracts down the sloping meadows. There was this suggestion of careless rioting. In old-world gardens, too, as the car rushed by, the laburnum, with its pools of dripping gold, was lavish, even to wantonness, while such a glory of buttercups, he thought, he had never seen before.

“The A.A. men are such a decent class, I always think….”

If only she would have let him enjoy it in peace and without interruptions. It was kind of her, of course, to give him this lift on her way to Broadway Village, a score of miles beyond where he had to go; she drove well and safely too, so that, much as he disliked motoring, he felt confidence and was free to enjoy the scenery without worrying about corners and traffic. If only she would leave him to his enjoyment. It was her stream of comments, dealing with the obvious top of life, that broke with interrupting jerks into his deep pool of intense delight and ruined its clear surface, making a rejoinder of some sort necessary. For this Spring loveliness, always a disconcerting experience, brought its customary sweet pain. Today, after months in a London street, the sunshine over this riot of flowers came with a kind of shock. There were foaming torrents of wild hemlock too, the beech leaves at their tenderest, and the grey stone villages rose through a dream, beauty shining everywhere with a poignancy that hurt.

“Wonderfully well marked, the roads, aren’t they?” she commented, as they sped through a stretch of loveliness that seemed hardly of this world at all….

Inside him lay a glass, a mirror, some medium at any rate in which was transmuted all he saw and felt into an ineffable shimmering glory of delight, hinting at transcendental meanings he almost captured, yet never quite.

“Thirty-five’s quite fast enough, isn’t it? We’re ahead of time….” plopped with a little splash into his silent inner pool just when something of translucent gauze and brilliant wings flew towards him with a sudden revelation.

“Oh, rather — quite — it’s just right, I’m sure,” he managed to jerk back with the proper polite interest, turning his head awkwardly towards her as he did so, for it had been precisely in just this fraction of a second that he was first aware of the change about him. It came stealing up and over, yet with its customary instantaneous swiftness, for it was already there, increasing, growing possibly in power, yet definitely established in a flash. It rose from some inmost and viewless centre of the day itself, from that deep heart of painful loveliness, that central power of stinging beauty, through which the car sped with its purring sound.

Purring, yes; that was precisely the right word. The voice, too, was purring….

She had just said something, another remark, and he wondered if he had heard it correctly at first: “Here lies our shell of fire, air, water, earth….” Was that what she said? A phrase so meaningless could not have left anyone’s throat, hers least of all, at such a time and place. He had misunderstood; the car needed water, with more petrol, Shell of course, opening a window for fresh air — anything but what she had seemed to say and he had oat to hear. Then turning to glance at her, this thin, brown-eyed woman, he had sharply realised in the same instant that she was comely. The idea had never entered his head before. He had merely known in a vague kind of way that her voice was pleasant, soothing rather, her smile, if crooked slightly yet not disfiguringly, lit the face oddly, and that the eyes were clear shiny brown. Now, as he stared into them, they held a touch of fiery amber, though that must have been the sun of course.

“Eh? — oh, yes—” he stammered, bewildered by his having possibly mis-caught the words, and then heard his voice adding in quite another tone, a tone that held something whispering about it: “It’s fire with me, remember. I move most easily in that—”

“Fire!” she laughed. “As if I didn’t know it already! I’m air, of course. We are friendly then. Air and fire work together….”

A grinding noise like the roar of a lion, a sudden jerk that shot him forward against the windscreen, interrupted, so that he caught his breath and shielded his face with outstretched hands. There came no crash, however. The car had stopped.

“Hulloa!” he cried, withdrawing his eyes from hers with a kind of difficulty, and wondering why his voice had turned hoarse and trembling. “Not an accident, is it?” He heard her give a quick choked-off laugh in her throat as she said “Sorry! These four-wheel brakes. I forgot. We’re wrong anyhow — our last turn, I think — ” She turned her head round. “You might go and ask that old man where this road goes.”

Her voice died away, as he got out and made his way, as in a dream, to the figure leaning against a gate, an old fellow in gaiters who eyed his questioner good-humouredly enough. A lurcher at his feet got up and sniffed at his approach. “No,” growled the old fellow, showing broken teeth in a grin intended to be friendly, “this road don’t go any further’n the farm yonder.” He pointed with his stick to a scattered group of grey stone buildings fifty yards ahead. “That’s where the man fell over the edge,” he added with his growling chuckle.

“Fell over the edge!”

The old fellow repeated the chuckle that was half grunt, half growl. He seemed amused, as though the man who fell over the edge had only got his deserts. “He thought it went on. It don’t. The road ends sudden,” he explained curtly enough. “But you can get shelter there maybe. They’ll take you in.”

He turned his attention to his lurcher to signify that was all he wanted to say, and the other gave his thanks and swung back towards the car, noticing as he did so out of the corner of his eye a stretch of bare down above the buildings, where against the skyline a gaunt single tree stood out, a big torn branch hanging down loosely and swaying in the wind. Only the car, as he now turned back to report the old man’s words, no longer stood there. No vehicle at all was there except an open cart of sorts, with a tired horse in the shafts, the reins held by a woman wearing, he saw, some shoddy cheap fur about her neck. The brightness and the gay morning sunshine, too, were gone. That lonely tree, it struck him, stood out now against a sky of leaden clouds. The entire scene was gloomy, and with a rising wind that struck cold against the cheek. The dusk was falling fast.

He approached the cart slowly, the woman’s eyes watching him steadily, the only portion of her face visible, as they peered out through a welter of wrapped shawls about her head and shoulders. But the woman, he knew, for all her shoddy clothes, was comely. He was aware of silken hair. At the same time those staring eyes, rather intently fixed, made him think of a feline that looks for prey, an unwelcome notion he could not by any means account for.

“Come on out,” he said in a voice of pretended control, for he was frightened, though the slight shiver running over him might well have been due to the bitter wind. The woman, he felt suddenly and sharply, was somewhere too strong for him. She was very sure of herself. “We’re lucky. We can get shelter in that farm. The horse is done, anyhow. Get out — will you?”

She unwound her shawls a little as he helped her out, but she missed the yielding iron step and a length of fine leg appeared in a grey worsted stocking that yet could not hide its shapeliness. He made her take his arm, while his other hand led the stumbling, weary nag, and at that moment, as though from under her very skirts, a large tawny cat, that seemed to have sprung from the old cart, ran past and ahead of them with a silent dancing gait. It had, no doubt, emerged from the hedge, he hurriedly told himself. It disappeared in the deepening shadows towards the old grey buildings. A column of pale blue smoke rose from the main chimney, but almost at once turned downwards, sinking rapidly, as in sign of coming bad weather, floating in sullen, heavy coils, then, past the lower mullioned windows.

“I’m air … and that means we’re friendly … for air helps fire…” rang on in his ears as he approached the old grey building, knocked, and enquired about shelter.

“I’ll put the ’oss away,” he muttered, as the old beldame opened the door and accepted the benighted couple, nor did it occur to him even that he said “’oss,” or that he stepped in hesitatingly. He only noticed, to tell the truth, that his friend, the slim, brown-eyed woman, brushed past him with rather a masterful air as though she had a right to shelter here, perhaps expected it, and that his nostrils caught a whiff of perfume, half artificial, half of sweet warmish animal fur, as she went by him into the lamp-lit room.

It occurred to him suddenly, while these two talked together of the stormy night and the blind road that ended in a sudden drop where horses, sheep and cattle too easily went lost, that he had left his flint-lock in the cart. And while putting the ’oss to stable he now hid it beneath his heavy coat and brought it back into the house. What made him do so he could not rightly say. There was uneasiness in him, a fear of some sort, a fear of uncommon things, and that was all he knew, a fear that, like the wind, came suddenly and also, like the wind, was rising….

The thick onion soup had a welcome, fragrant smell when he came back, and he sat down to his bowl without a word or question, and broke his coarse bread into it hungrily. Then, looking up, he noticed how hungrily she, too, gulped her soup, yet daintily, and how delicious her moist red lips were. Even when she blew across her big spoon to cool the steaming mixture, she did it invitingly, her brown eyes gleaming above the succulent mouthful. His strange uneasiness grew as he watched, but something else rose up to meet it. A light shudder ran through him.

“God! Am I so weak and easily taken?…” passed through his mind, for he knew that, even if weak and trembling at an offer so perilously easy, this was something he did not mean to yield to. As a Disciple of the Order, as a wrestling and struggling Aspirant, this casual loss of valuable energy, above all else, must not dare to tempt him. Oh, he felt sure of himself and his vows, confident enough in all conscience. With some vehemence he gave himself this hurried assurance. When the scene was gaily set, he reminded himself, among lights and music, wine and colour, he had no fear, for danger was too obvious and flaunting. But it was this chancy, so unlikely setting, in a gloomy farm upon a wayside road, seeking shelter merely for a few hours from an ill-omened night and threatening weather, and with a woman who, foe all her soft brown eyes and comeliness, was surely but of passing acquaintance, it was this very casualness, hiding a stiletto beneath the homespun, that made him tremble.

He gave an involuntary start as her voice reached him across the table:

“You brought in the flint-lock,” she said suddenly between her draughts of soup. “Is it then a cat you are afraid of?” her soft laugh showing her white even teeth. “A yellow-backed farm cat?” Her eyes held his without wavering.

“A cat?” he asked thickly, taken by surprise. “Did you see a cat?”

“There’s always a cat in these old farm-houses,” she told him, taking a mouthful of the fried ham and eggs now set before them. “If you don’t meet a barking dog, it always means they keep a cat, and they’re generally amber-coloured.” Her eyes still held him.

“I brought in the gun,” he admitted a trifle sullenly, “because — this is the sort of place that favours the highwaymen for a night’s lodging. And tomorrow, even sooner, we may be glad of it, for you never know.”

“Tomorrow,” she repeated, without lowering her steady eyes. “Yes, tomorrow maybe,” and she wiped her lips, which gleamed moistly in the lamplight.

The coffee was drinkable, the rum still better, and when he complained of the cold she mixed his second glass, and then his third, having swallowed a sturdy two herself. Her breath, drawing towards him across the narrow table where her elbows rested, her face thrust forward, seemed to mingle with the sweet-flavoured liquor; and it was when the old farmwife, beldame as he first thought her, came in to ask if all was to their liking, that he caught the abrupt swift certainty that the two women were not unacquainted, not strangers to one another. And on the instant, though he gave no outward sign, his whole being rose in sudden, alert challenge. He knew, of a surety, the brown-eyed woman had led him here with purpose. The old tired horse, he remembered now, had made to take another turning as of habitual instinct while she had persuaded it, aye and himself too, otherwise along the rough trail below the down.

“It’s an old beast, eh, that tawny cat of yours?” he asked abruptly of the farmwife, aiming to take her by surprise. “A fine creature too,” he added admiringly.

“Cat!” she replied. “There’s not a cat within a twenty mile of here. I mislike the things and wouldn’t have one about me.”

“A stray cat, dear,” put in the brown-eyed woman quickly, but not so quickly that the quick sharp glance between the pair was lost upon him. He emptied his glass to hide the awkwardness with some natural gesture.

“They do come strayin’ over the hill sometimes,” the old woman was saying, “but they don’t stay long,” she added significantly, “for they know I won’t abide ’em.” And she got up and began to clear away the dishes.

“Yet you have a power of mice,” he put in. “They’re useful to you — a good sharp cat, I mean.”

She never raised her eyes. “Useful to some, maybe,” she mumbled, “but they’re more’n of this world and best put away, to my way of thinkin’.”

He shivered, without knowing exactly why, so that the brown-eyed woman — she was not really thin at all, he noticed again, but most sweetly and comfortably covered — poured him out a glass of yellow rum. “It makes me shiver too, dear,” she murmured soothingly, “and this will just make us sleep good and proper. It was a cold job putting the ’oss to stable, I’ll be bound.”

He swallowed it heartily enough, determined to give no sign if he could help it that he realised something here to do with cats he did not welcome, knew also that he was betrayed, and the amber of her soft brown eyes, he was aware, again slipped stealthily into the gleaming contents of his glass, so that he drank that down too with the rich liquor.

This acceptance and refusal he felt in him, this strength and weakness, lay beyond his entangling; it was as though a portion of his being was growing slowly a little numbed, and he could not be sure whether the rum soothed or stimulated the deep uneasiness that growled out of sight within him….

Their rooms were far apart, at opposite ends of the old building, and as he went to bed he heard that rising wind pass alternately sighing and roaring over the grey tiles and naked downs beyond, an unholy wind, he was persuaded, renewing the faint shudder in his mind with the vivid thought of that old tired tree against the skyline. He saw again the loose dangling branch swinging creakily.

“Good night, dear,” he heard her voice at the corner of the landing when they parted, candle in hand, and saw her amber eyes gleaming brightly in the unsteady flame.

•   •   •

It was the increasing tumult of that violent, unholy wind beating against the narrow casements of his room that mingled with her last words as he stood on the boards by the light of a single candle, hesitating whether to undress or not. The rum worked in his blood, but something else worked too, and instinct, since alcohol dulls the reasoning faculties, was expressly alert. This instinct played a game as it were, a game that lacked form, but assuredly did not lack meaning. It played with several counters, and these counters, if a trifle confused, were insistent in the claim they made upon his attention. He could visualise them distinctly, he could name them correctly, all three of them: that large yellow-backed cat, the understanding between the two women, and the flint-lock.

His mind took each in turn and dealt with it after a fashion.

The gun — he had, after all, left it downstairs; the cat — he had not seen it again; the two women — at the remote end of the house, yet, he somehow knew, far from being in bed and asleep. But it was the gun that chiefly held his attention. He wanted it near, he wished he had it ready to his hand in this dim-lit room. It lay in the hall, he remembered, beneath his overcoat on the settle. The next thought was easy: he would go down and get it. Obeying the instinct, he stole across the floor on tiptoe and cautiously opened his door, and then, without knowing why, he hesitated. He stopped dead. He listened intently.

What made him hesitate? What caused the moment’s uncertainty? Thought, of course. He had begun to think. It was reason that blocked the flow of automatic guiding instinct. Was he, then, afraid of anything, he asked himself? Of anyone? Of highwaymen, least of all, he told himself. Of a great cat with a yellow back? Assuredly not. Then why did he want the gun? He could not use a gun against a comely woman with amber eyes; nor for that matter, he swore to himself again, did he need any means of defence against such temptation except his own firm confident will.

For a second, as he stood hesitating by the door, such thoughts tumbled about in him, and the next second, dismissing them, he passed through the door and crept softly along the landing, lit by the gleam from the candle left behind him. Silent and dark the landing was, though the wind outside made a mighty howling as its gusts stormed against the walls. These passed, leaving a silence deeper than before. He crept along, knowing that the creaking board, if anyone listened, would be put down to the blustering wind. Stealthily, he moved. Remembering the way, he turned right and left when necessary, following the next dim landing correctly, till he reached the stairs that led down into the black well of the hall. Peering down into this murky space, no single outline was discernible. Nothing stirred, there seemed no movement. Both women were safe away in their distant beds. He crept forward down the stairs, and was already more than half-way down when he caught a faint glimmer of light below him by the settle where the gun lay underneath his overcoat.

It was so faint, however, that he doubted his eyes, and, there — even while he stared — it was gone again! Reaching the lowest step without seeing it return, he was certain he had been mistaken. He crossed the hall on tiptoe, came to the corner where the gun lay hidden below the overcoat, stretched out his hand to grope for it, and in that instant his fingers touched something warm and soft and furry. He was aware of perfume, a tiny point of light appeared as well, and the flint-lock was placed deliberately into his outstretched hands.

“I was just bringing it up to you,” a low pleasant whisper startled him. “For I knew you would like it near you this night.” The same moment the point of light grew into a sudden little flare that died out as soon as born, yet not before he had caught the swift picture of a face, two cupped hands shading a match, and the gleam of two amber-coloured eyes that peered into his own.

“You are cold,” he faltered, muttering the words in his throat, shivering himself as he spoke, for he realised that the soft warm thing he touched was a strip of shoddy fur about the neck. “Why should you—”

“Hush!” she interrupted in a whisper, placing a hand gently on his mouth, covering her figure at the same time with his overcoat from the settle, then drawing him backwards more deeply into the corner and making him crouch low beside her. Her warm body lay close against him, her breath perfumed his cheek, as they sank down and hid against the wall. His arm had fallen naturally about her, as she half knelt, half sat, with her weight upon his side. And then someone, shading a light with a thin bony hand, the lines of the fingers visibly marked, came stepping cautiously down the stairs towards the hall.

So suddenly, so quickly, all this happened that it left him worse than bewildered. He stared. His eyes never left that slowly approaching light. The sweet comfort of the woman’s warm body against his own bemused clear vision still further. Yet what chiefly darkened his mind, fluttering thought, emotion, judgement, was the friendly offer of the gun, supporting so unexpectedly his own desire and intention. For how had she thus forestalled his purpose so adroitly, how even become aware of it? Was this a move in her game, a sinister move that mere chance had enabled him to surprise? Was she then with him, after all, rather than against him? Who was the friend and who the enemy? He was warily on guard and alert, but any clear solution failed to present itself. Could she have divined, this amber-eyed woman, that his own will and strength made him invulnerable, that his vows were not so easily rendered vain? Did she seek, perhaps, merely to place a dart, then twist it later in a burning wound that would find alleviation only upon its withdrawal — by her own fingers?

This flashed across him while he watched the descending light creep farther down the stairs towards the hall. Who bore that light he could not see. The holder moved without a sound, the boards were silent, no single creak was audible. The soft breathing against his ear was all he heard, the beating of another heart against his own.

The light reached the last stair and passed slowly, as with a gliding motion, across the hall towards them, then paused within a dozen feet of where he crouched. But now the vague shape behind it was not so vague that he could not distinguish it, and he recognised the bent, huddled outline of the old farm woman. It was curious then that, simultaneously with this recognition, another picture leaped with startling significance before his eyes, but before the eyes of memory, and he saw for a vivid second that gaunt sinister tree on the brow of the naked hill, and realised that the torn loose branch dangling in the wind was a body and no branch at all. This mental recognition gave him a startling, uneasy twist of horror, but it vanished swiftly under the strain of yet greater horror that now followed instantly, as he witnessed something he had always known about, but yet had never seen actually with his own eyes.

He saw it happen a dozen feet in front of him, though in light so confused and dim that outlines were blurred and no sharp edges showed. For the beldame, as she shaded the faint rushlight, became most singularly transformed. Abruptly her figure shook down, as it were, into another figure, a figure much closer to the ground, an animal figure, a creature on all fours. The point of light shivered an instant, then became twin lights, a pair of shining eyes that gleamed out of a bluntish muzzle below two sharply pointed ears. They were fixed steadily upon his own staring face, but vanished the same moment as though turned aside, so that their light was lost. A light, quick pattering, as of scuttling paws, came straight in his direction, shooting across the floor to the corner where he lay in darkness. “The cat, the monstrous cat,” slashed in letters of fire across his brain.

“To the Sabbath,” rose a whisper that yet held the quality of a shriek kept somehow in abeyance, for it was a shriek in exultation. “The wind delights, there are no stars, the brow of the hill is waiting! Bring the sacrifice, dearie, and let the Master see him burn!” From the very floor against his feet the awful voice came rushing.

A terrific gust of wind that shook the building, shook him into a clearer understanding perhaps as well. He felt the warm fragrant body quiver against his own, he felt the weight and pressure become heavier, and was aware in the same instant that the fur he had called shoddy covered not the neck and shoulders only, but spread now over the whole shape completely, covering it indeed from head to tail.

“Two of them — a pair!” his thought gasped frantically, as he gave a violent, spasmodic jerk. He remembered the huge, tawny cat, that yellow beast which sprang so strangely from the cart, if not from his companion’s very skirts. He remembered other awful changelings too, the hare, the fox — and a shiver as of death convulsed his body.

“Keep still, my pet, keep quiet,” came the purring voice against his smothered ear, while the weight upon him increased with sudden, horrifying pressure. “You are safe with me, I hold you fast, and fire and air work friendly.”

He could hardly breathe, such was the suffocating smother of warm fur upon his face and lips; it was well-nigh impossible to stir a foot or leg. The weight took the very air from his mouth, and almost the last resistance from his very heart as well. The heat, the stifling heat, overcame him.

“I’ll come,” he mumbled thickly, fighting for space and air.

“You must,” was the answer that he heard, his helplessness knowing it for true, but in the same instant precisely heard also the pair of them whispering and muttering between themselves. No words, much less sentences, not even syllables indeed, reached his mind, but he caught, despite his smothering, the tone of utterance. And an awful realisation crashed in upon his weakening faculties. A forgotten phrase leaped into memory: “the utterance of demons is indistinct, thin and hoarse.”

And the horror of the memory, salved from what seemed now distant, almost forgotten teaching, passed like forked lightning into his final store of energies. He made a gigantic effort. The weight was lifted from him by a fraction, shifting itself, at any rate, to another angle — and a hand, as by magic, became partially released. How he contrived it Jay utterly beyond him, how his fingers lay suddenly clutched upon the flint-lock, how they contrived the priming, found and pressed the trigger, bringing the flash and explosion in the darkness, timing with the roar of the storm outside — all this he never knew. He only knew that the suffocating weight relaxed, and that a wild, high, dreadful scream, half animal, half human, crashed against his very ears….

•   •   •

“We must have gone wrong at the last turning,” she was saying. “If you’ll get in again, I’ll back her up. It’s only a few hundred yards. The old man is right about the road ending suddenly. We don’t want to go over the edge….”

He climbed back into the car, which she then deftly manoeuvred up the little incline till they reached the fork where the mistake had been made. As it swung slowly round, the brow of the bare down filled his open window for a moment, and he saw the gaunt ugly tree where the dead branch had dangled, only now no branch was there, and only the shattered outline of the ancient tree broke against the blue sky of spring.

It caught her eye too, apparently, though her attention was centred on the car.

“That hill and tree,” she remarked casually, her gaze fixed chiefly on the ditch and width of road for turning, “there’s something about it in the map. They used it for hanging witches once, or burnt them on that hill — I forget exactly what.”

As he consulted the route map provided by the A.A. and confirmed the reference, she turned her head, so that he saw the blood on her cheek — a long, thin, reddened line as though a bullet had just grazed it. He made no reference to it, nor was she, apparently, aware of it, but an hour later, when she set him down at his point on the road, he saw her, from a little distance as she drove away, wiping it with a handkerchief which she first moistened on her red lips.