Selections from “Tongues of Fire”
Date: 1923-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror; Weird Fiction; Supernatural Fiction; Extra-dimensional Travel
Description: From the master story-teller, eleven tales from “Tongues of Fire.” Only the eponymous story is truly macabre; others take us on tours of extra-dimensional experiences. The final three describe encounters with the intense powers of nature.~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ “Tongues of Fire”: Ceceilia and Harold suffer the consequences of their gossiping, fault-finding, denigrating ways. ~ ~ ~ ~ “The Little Beggar”: … The boy, for some reason, caught his attention and his interest vividly; … his general air of effort and distress, struggling with a bag too big and heavy for him to manage… ~ ~ ~ ~ “Malahide and Forde
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

SELECTIONS
from
Tongues of Fire

ALGERNON BLACKWOOD

MobileRead Edition
2022

From the master story-teller, eleven tales from Tongues of Fire. Only the eponymous story is truly macabre; others take us on tours of extra-dimensional experiences. The final three describe encounters with the intense powers of nature.

These were retrieved from various online archives.
Unavailable titles that are NOT included:
A Continuous Performance, The World-Dream of McAllister, The Other Woman, The Open Window, Petershin and Mr. Snide, The Spell of Egypt, A Man of Earth, The Laughter of Courage, Nephele.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
(AND STORY SUMMARIES)

- Tongues of Fire
Ceceilia and Harold suffer the consequences of their gossiping, fault-finding, denigrating ways.

- The Little Beggar
… The boy, for some reason, caught his attention and his interest vividly; … his general air of effort and distress, struggling with a bag too big and heavy for him to manage…

- Malahide and Forden
Three friends on a walking tour in the country find themselves in a surreal situation.

- The Pikestaffe Case
Miss Speke’s lodger, a professor of higher mathmatics, has turned an ornate mirror to the wall and webbed the room with fine silk threads. After more mysterious activity, her curiosity is overwhelming, and she begins to wish Mr. Thorley would leave.

- Alexander Alexander
Since childhood, she has been fascinated by this odd, double-named personage.

- The Olive
A young man, retrieving an olive dropped by a lovely girl, experiences love at first sight — and more…

- Picking Fir-Cones
A young boy describes how he flew…

- The Man Who Was Milligan
Milligan is enthralled by his landlady’s Chinese drawing — the figures seem to move …

- The Falling Glass
(non-genre)
A description of the birth of a storm.

- S.O.S.
(non-genre)
The frightening adventure of a party of mountain skiers.

- Lost!
(non-genre)
A botanist, seeking flowers, is reported lost in the Alps.

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”.

Contents of this ebook, by Algernon Blackwood (1869–1951), were first published 1919 ~ 1924. (Tongues of Fire in 1924.)This ebook is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

TONGUES OF FIRE

The friendly little dinner party was over, and Cecilia Lance had thoroughly enjoyed it; the Lindleys were kindly, simple people; the gramophone had been turned on and her dancing partner, Harold Sharpe, had been there. Cecilia and Harold knew one another’s steps as intimately as they knew one another’s minds.

“Odd that Cecilia doesn’t marry,” Lindley remarked, half to himself, half to his wife, as they sat over a cigarette when the last guest had driven away. “She’s still pretty. Everybody likes her. And such a cheery soul.” He puffed his cigarette reflectively. “She has charm, too — eh?” he inquired presently, as his wife offered no comment. He glanced up affectionately at her.

“Always full of life, yes,” came the belated reply. “I think she enjoyed herself tonight. I think they all did. They liked the new records, too.”

Her husband smiled and nodded. The new records had cost money. “I wish we could do it more often,” he mentioned, sighing ruefully. The Lindleys were hospitably inclined, but they were poor, and even a dinner party had to be calculated. “Now, that fellow Sharpe—” he went back to his first line of thought — “I thought at one time — they seemed to understand each other pretty well.”

His wife hesitated a moment, gazing into the gas fire. “They still do, I think,” she said. “Their views of life are the same” — then, after a second’s pause, as though the words slipped out against her kindlier judgement — “and of people.”

Her husband, however, discerned neither the hesitation nor the effort at restraint that caused it. Both had their tongues well under control, he by a natural good nature, she by education. They were an affectionate, devoted, faithful couple to whom none but the most determined could impute deliberate evil. A little later, as they tidied away the records before going to bed, he remarked casually:

“Sharp as a needle, though, isn’t she? By Jove, yes!” He laughed. “They both are, for that matter,” and he chuckled again.

“They don’t mean to be, I’m sure,” was his wife’s charitable comment.

Again, apparently, he did not notice anything. It was her usual way of talking, anyhow. The Lindleys invariably were kindly in their judgements of people. They did not criticise others — nastily.

“I’ll put the lights out, Dolly,” he said presently. “You pop up to bed. It’s late, and you must be tired.” He kissed her, patting her on the shoulder. Fifteen minutes afterwards the room, so lately filled with music, whirling couples and merry voices, had darkness and the atmosphere of faded scent and stale cigarette-smoke to itself.

Meanwhile Cecilia Lance and Harold Sharpe were also talking in their taxi as he drove her to the widowed sister she lived with in Chester Street. They were in merry mood, satisfied with the evening just over. They discussed it in their usual way. Both voted it “ripping.”

“Yet I never really care for a gramophone,” Cecilia mentioned.

“It’s better than nothing, though,” her dancing partner agreed, while he qualified.

“Yes, I suppose so,” she submitted, “only the records were so rotten, weren’t they?”

“Putrid,” said Sharpe.

“Why don’t they get a few good ones, I wonder.” She mentioned a few names. “If people use a gramophone for dancing, the least they can do is to have the latest tunes.” To this her companion also gave assent. They both felt aggrieved. In a few minutes there was nothing bad enough left to say about the music, the floor, the cooking of the little dinner, and the heat of the room. They selected all the least favourable points and emphasised them, yet in their easy, natural way and without calculated motives.

Next they turned their attention to the other dancers, Cecilia leading the way, as before, with faint praise. “Not a bad lot,” observed Harold patronisingly. “Quite nice,” Cecilia qualified, “only I wonder where in the world they pick up such people.” Her companion, while agreeing, mentioned that a certain girl “looked all right, I thought.”

“What! That dowdy creature!” Whereupon he swore he had really only noticed one girl, whose name was Cecilia, and so remedied his mistake. The criticism of the dresses which followed was largely a monologue, since Harold Sharpe merely approved her verdict with “awful, perfectly awful”; but when the taxi arrived after a drive of six minutes, the entire evening, including dinner, dance and dancers, had been so damned that no Recording Angel would have thought it worth even entering in his Book. The names of the destroyers, however, he possibly might have entered.

“Oh, come in for a minute and have a drink, my sister’s sure to be up,” invited Cecilia. Over his whisky and soda and her cigarette an opportunity was provided for chatting pleasantly about their late host and hostess, and without a chorus, since the sister had already gone to bed. “A good fellow, Jack Lindley,” was Harold Sharpe’s offhand opinion, “though what he sees in her, I can’t imagine.” But Cecilia, feeling robbed of her accustomed right to start the line of criticism, assured him that he was quite mistaken, for Molly was the possessor of “such a good heart.” “It’s what Molly sees in him that puzzles me! Still, she amuses herself with Sir Malcolm, the good-looking nerve specialist whom she’s always going to see without the slightest reason.”

“What That quiet old frump Molly has a lover!”

“Why shouldn’t she?” Cecilia championed her doubt fully.

Before her cigarette was half finished, Molly Lindley’s character was demolished, and her husband, who was “gay enough when you got him alone,” was insecurely balancing on one leg, which was certainly not fit to stand on. Husband and wife, a faithful, somewhat old-fashioned, devoted couple, who had just put themselves to trouble and expense to give the speakers a happy evening, had not a rag to their backs between them. Naked to the winds, vicious, false, and stupid, they were heading full speed for that hell in which the speakers, their detractors, did not, of course, believe. There was not a nastier couple than the Lindleys apparently in all Chelsea — and this result had been accomplished by faint praise, offered with a pleasant smile; by careless suggestion, presented with a shrug of the shoulders; and by a series of innocent questions sprinkled with adjectives and adverbs that carried dark hints of hidden wickedness and double lives — but without a single scrap of truth to support the entire case. The Recording Angel, if he entered anything, entered it, indeed, as evidence the destroyers unwittingly gave against them selves — a confession that what they had in their own hearts and minds they saw most easily in others.

The case, moreover, presented with the skill due to long practice, was completed in ten minutes at the most. Without motive, without malice, without conscious intention to, do harm or wish to injure, but merely obeying a habit to say something startling perhaps, Mr. and Mrs. Lindley were left naked to the cruel winds and without a leg to stand on.

Incidentally, just before Harold took his leave — in the space of two minutes or so — Cecilia’s sister, asleep upstairs, lay also without covering.

“One of the best,” Cecilia replied, as he dropped a polite word of casual inquiry, “but oh, so queer and moody sometimes.”

“She’s jolly good to you, Ceci,” Harold considered, knowing of the generous allowance.

“Oh, she’s a perfect brick. It’s only her moods that I find trying sometimes.”

“Ah!” His ears were hungry at once. He glanced at her inquiringly.

Cecilia lowered her voice. “It’s drugs probably,” she mentioned.

Harold laughed, nodding understandingly. “They all do it,” he said with a shrug, swallowing a gulp of the lady’s excellent whisky, while the kindly soul they discussed lay dreaming peacefully on the floor above, a homoeopath ignorant of anything stronger than fairy doses of aconite for a cold or colocynth for indigestion. In future, how ever, whenever her name was mentioned in his presence, Harold Sharpe, with a looking of knowing sympathy, would say darkly, “Drugs, you know. Yes, I’m afraid it’s drugs. Oh, her sister knows it….”

“Well, good-night, Cecilia. I must be getting on. See you again soon.”

“At the Lindleys probably. Molly said they’d give another gramophone hop before long. Good-night.” An hour later both of them lay sound asleep, at peace with all the world and entirely pleased and satisfied with themselves, their hearts harbouring no malice, envy, or uncharitableness. Their tongues lay still. Their day, their evening, their conversation, had been an average sample of what occurred on the other 364 days of their year. Fallen Reputations marked their course like birds before a skillful gun. These were not deliberately brought down, but when they aimed with deliberation they landed much bigger game, for they were both deadly shots.

Now, one of the latter, wounded but not killed it so happened, traced the shot that hit him to its source. He was not only big game, he was dangerous big game, a man of personality, a man of power, a man of strange knowledge, too. And he did not bring the action for slander he was justified in bringing, yet neither did he ignore the wicked snipers who used poisoned shafts in the darkness. He merely cursed them. He CURSED them both. His curse, however, was perhaps no ordinary curse…

II

It was a lovely morning some weeks later that Cecilia sat alone in a taxi, examining her face uneasily in the narrow mirror, as she drove to Grosvenor Street. The sun shone brightly and old grimy London laughed with happiness. Flowers shone at every corner, in every button-hole. Birds were singing gaily. The air was sweet and fresh, for it was summertime, and half-past ten was really half-past nine; but the pretty young face reflected in the taxi looking-glass betrayed no summertime. It was neither sweet nor fresh. A haunting anxiety lay in the otherwise bright eyes. The corners of the little mouth turned down. From time to time she crushed a small lace handkerchief against her lips with violence. Occasionally, removing it quickly, she drew in a deep draught of the sweet air from the open window, inhaling and exhaling with fixed concentration in her face, then swiftly placing the handkerchief on her lips again. One might have thought she suffered toothache, neuralgia; some nerve attack perhaps that affected the mouth or lips or gums. Her behaviour indicated extreme uneasiness, if not actual pain.

At the door of No. 100A she dismissed the taxi, and was admitted with scarcely a minute’s delay. The butler with the sphinx-like face bowed her smoothly into the waiting-room, closing the door behind her silently. Evidently, since he did not ask her name, he knew it already. Finding herself alone, she ran to the big mirror quickly, but had only time to catch a glance of a white frightened face before the door re-opened and her name was softly spoken. Biting her lips, her hands clenched tightly at her side, she followed the sphinx into the consulting-room of Sir Malcolm, the famous nerve specialist. With an instinctive movement, as she crossed the threshold and saw the tall, dark-faced figure rising to greet her, she crushed the small lace handkerchief tightly against her lips….

The interview was a long one. When she came out again the waiting-room was half-filled with fidgeting ladies who had been kept, they considered, unduly waiting. Her mind was too preoccupied to observe carefully, but she noticed, she fancied, one man among the women. Picking up her bag and parasol hastily, she looked into no single face. Her hands trembled, her breath came unevenly, her features were hard and aged, she kept the handkerchief pressed against her mouth. She hurried out; the sphinx called a taxi, she drove to her sister’s house, ran quickly up to her room and locked herself in. The first thing she did on being alone was to collect several hand-mirrors and arrange them in such a way before the dressing-table that she could study her face from every possible angle. She studied herself thus for the best part of half an hour, her eyes too strained with intense anxiety for tears; her heart too over-loaded with a strange biting dread for her breath to behave naturally; her mind gone too far beyond control for her to remain still a single instant.

Cecilia Lance was terrified. But she had force, she had courage, her personality was not negligible; she could face anything, provided she first had time to decide upon her attitude and line of conduct. By the lunch hour, when she came down to meet her sister’s guests, she had found herself again. If the face was somewhat drawn, it was not noticeably so. Her breath was normal, her manner quiet yet not depressed, her voice betrayed no trembling. She had faced the situation and taken her line of conduct.

“Ah, there you are! You were out early, Thompson told me. I missed you.” And her sister came forward with her usual affectionate embrace.

Cecilia drew back sharply. “You mustn’t kiss me, Gerty. I’ve — got a cold. Oh, it’s nothing. But I don’t want to give it to you.”

The luncheon party passed off pleasantly. No one could have said that Cecilia was not her gay and normal self, nor could anyone have guessed from her light-hearted manner the amount of nervous power she exerted to appear so. It was with difficulty, none the less, that she ate her food or swallowed her wine. She did not smoke. There was a sinking dread, a constant terror in her that required all her skill and courage to conceal successfully. That inner gnawing never ceased. The wolf of horror tore steadily at her very vitals. The handkerchief went from time to time to her mouth, but in such a way that the manoeuvre seemed quite natural. In her mind still echoed the words the specialist had used a few hours ago. Her visit that morning to Sir Malcolm was not the first. It was the tenth. And after she had left him, he made his next patient wait a little longer for her dreaded yet coveted ten minutes with him. In fact, he did a thing he rarely allowed himself to do — he saw another patient in her place, a man — and when the man had gone, he delayed the fuming lady still another ten minutes, while he made notes, consulted books, and looked generally more puzzled and interested, perhaps dismayed as well, than in the course of his strange practice he had ever looked before. With his subsequent visitors he was even a little absent-minded, though he was certainly too skilful for this cardinal mistake to be discovered.

“It seems more than curious — it’s incredible simply,” he thought to himself, as he glanced over his notes that night before going to bed. It was a thing he had never done before — to think of a case when the day’s work was done. He particularly examined a sheet of tissue paper which had a circular hole in it with rough uneven edges, tinged slightly yellow, red, and black. He wore an expression of bewilderment as he laid it down. He was evidently baffled. “I’ve never come across such a thing before. The books have no record of anything approaching it.” He passed into a mood of deep reflection. “I’m damned,” he said aloud finally. “It’s positively mediaeval. It’s — it’s uncanny.” Sir Malcolm was baffled and admitted it — to himself only. “And two of them, by God!”

III

It was just as the last guests were leaving that Cecilia was called to the telephone by Harold Sharpe. He asked if he might look in for tea and whether she would be alone. His voice had an odd note of seriousness in it. But Cecilia excused herself on the plea that she was resting before the Lindley’s dance that night.

“Aren’t you well?” he asked sharply.

“Oh — I’m all right, yes,” with a moment’s hesitation before she said it. Then Harold insisted. He was very urgent, very determined. “I simply must see you,” he declared, “and alone, Ciss.” A quiver ran down her, making her voice tremble a little. “Oh, all right,” she yielded. “Gerty’s going out. Only you mustn’t stay long. I’m dead tired.” Her body swayed slightly. She dropped into a chair and hid her face in her hands. Ten minutes afterwards Harold was in the room with her alone.

“I haven’t seen you for ages,” he began. “What’s up?” His manner was odd, it was strained and nervous. He spoke rapidly and his eyes had a hunted look. His skin was pale. Fingers and lips twitched badly. “What’s been the matter, Ceci?” It was the form of her name he used when he was in earnest, which was not often. “You never turned up at Claridges last night either.” He coughed. The girl started, and asked quickly if he would smoke, but he declined with a gesture of impatience. He coughed a second time. His handkerchief came out. The girl started again, worse than before.

“Harold—” she said abruptly, then stopped dead, and looked away. She had meant to say something else. “What does that cough mean?” she asked instead, keeping her face still turned from him. “I believe you’re not — quite well. That wasn’t a real cough.”

His handkerchief was against his lips, and he did not answer.

“Harold!” she repeated, with a singular loudness, as though the word were produced by a shock. Slowly her head turned round towards him and their eyes met. “Are you?” she insisted in a tense whisper that had an ominous tremor in it — “quite — well?”

Instead of answering, he asked a point-blank question, staring fixedly at her: “What were you doing in Grosvenor Street this morning, Ceci?” And as he said it her memory worked vividly. She remembered. He, of course, had been the one man in the waiting-room. This flashed across her. Her hand went to her handkerchief, but she did not use it. His eye, however, she saw, detected the movement — and understood it. They knew one another’s minds so intimately.

“So it was you, Harold!” She could only whisper now, it seemed. Control of her voice was gone.

Harold’s face, already pale when he came in, turned a little paler. It went a shade more grey now. They stared hard into one another’s eyes.

“I—” he began, then faltered. “What were you doing there?” he asked suddenly, and as he said it his eyes wandered down her face slowly, pausing at her lips. They were fixed in a dreadful stare. Unutterable questions, she knew, lay in them. Her handkerchief again flew upwards.

“Don’t! Don’t!” she cried vehemently, her voice muffled behind the pressing lace. “For God’s sake, don’t!”

He caught at her hand and wrenched it, so that the momentary pain gave her the energy to deflect her thoughts the least little bit. He was attempting — oh, she realised it quite clearly — attempting to look at her handkerchief and the knowledge gave her the power to try and hide it, to prevent him seeing it, to smother it away. Only he was too strong for her. He forced her palm open.

“You were there,” he said in a voice that was calm but oddly stupid, “for the same reason I was.” He dropped her hand, while she thrust the crumpled scrap of lace with violence into her tiny bag, yet knowing it was a useless thing to do, because he had already seen the strange, discoloured patch.

“How d-dare you?” she cried, stammering in her fear and pain. “You for-g-get yourself, Harold Sharpe!” But he made no attempt at either apology or explanation, merely sinking back with a faint sigh into his chair and leaving his own crumpled handkerchief open for her to see in the palm of his effortless hand.

It, too, bore the same dread signature — a discoloured patch. For several minutes of silence the pair of them sat thus, each staring — as though bereft of any power to move or speak — at that ghastly and significant patch. It bore the appearance of having been burnt or scorched — by fire.

It was the girl who first recovered her self-control, though only in a measure. She rose from her chair and stood over him.

“Harold,” she said in a very low voice, and as though it cost her enormous effort, “it’s the same with both of us. And we’ve brought it on ourselves.” Placing a hand on his smooth, thick hair, though he shrank from her touch, she continued in a whisper: “And do you realise — it’s something not of this world — quite?” She paused, drew back a step, and stared down at him. “It’s from the d-devil.”

He made no sign, no answer, but his whole body shivered.

“Do you understand what it m-means?” she went on.

He sprang suddenly to his feet then, making strange gestures of futile violence with his hands.

“Ceci,” he cried, “you’re crazy You’re talking the damnedest nonsense in all the world. Pull yourself together—” and then his breath failed him and he collapsed in a stupid heap on his chair.

The girl shook him as though she could have struck his face for preference. There was great violence in her heart and mind. There was perhaps murder — or suicide, its equivalent.

“He told you — what he told me?” she asked in a voice that seemed without any emotion because its owner was beyond any feeling.

Harold nodded.

“He tried the tissue paper?”

He bowed his head.

“He told you what — what we have to expect?”

The only answer, the only sign that her words were heard, was a convulsive movement of the body that somehow communicated horror more than any words could possibly have done. It was without intelligence.

“In-c-c-curable,” she said in level tones that conveyed even better than his convulsive gesture her blank, ultimate despair! The stammer added a touch of unintelligence similar to his own. It was dreadful.

He looked up then with an idiotic smile, while she responded, the mind in her obviously already clouded: “Flame that never d-dies.”

“T-tongues of f-f-fire,” he said with a feeble giggle. “We have t-tongues of f-fire — you and I—” He got up with a gesture as though to kiss her. In his hand fluttered his handkerchief, its awful patch apparent.

She did not move. “And afterwards, too,” she whispered, the last gleam of reason fading from her eyes, “for ever and ever….”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE LITTLE BEGGAR

He was on his way from his bachelor flat to the club, a man of middle age with a slight stoop, and an expression of face firm yet gentle, the blue eyes with light and courage in them, and a faint hint of melancholy — or was it resignation? — about the strong mouth. It was early in April, a slight drizzle of warm rain falling through the coming dusk; but spring was in the air, a bird sang rapturously on a pavement tree. And the man’s heart wakened at the sound, for it was the lift of the year, and low in the western sky above the London roofs there was a band of tender colour.

His way led him past one of the great terminal stations that open the gates of London seawards; the birds, the coloured clouds, and the thought of a sunny coastline worked simultaneously in his heart. These messages of spring woke music in him. The music, however, found no expression, beyond a quiet sigh, so quiet that not even a child, had he carried one in his big arms, need have noticed it. His pace quickened, his figure straightened up, he lifted his eyes and there was a new light in them. Upon the wet pavement, where the street lamps already laid their network of faint gold, he saw, perhaps a dozen yards front of him, the figure of a little boy.

The boy, for some reason, caught his attention and his interest vividly. He was dressed in Etons, the broad white collar badly rumpled, the pointed coat hitched grotesquely sideways, while, from beneath the rather grimy straw hat, his thick light hair escaped at various angles. This general air of effort and distress was due to the fact that the little fellow was struggling with a bag packed evidently to bursting point, too big and heavy for him to manage for more than ten yards at a time. He changed it from one hand to the other, resting it in the intervals upon the ground, each effort making it rub against his leg so that the trousers were hoisted considerably above the boot. He was a pathetic figure.

“I must help him,” said the man. “He’ll never get there at this rate. He’ll miss his train to the sea.” For his destination was obvious, since a pair of wooden spades was tied clumsily and insecurely to the straps of the bursting bag.

Occasionally, too, the lad, who seemed about ten years old, looked about him to right and left, questionably, anxiously, as though he expected someone — someone to help, or perhaps to meet him. His behaviour even gave the impression that he was not quite sure of his way. The man hurried to overtake him.

“I really must give the little beggar a hand,” he repeated to himself, as he went. He smiled. The fatherly, protective side of him, naturally strong, was touched — touched a little more, perhaps, than the occasion seemed to warrant. The smile broadened into a jolly laugh, as he came up against the great stuffed bag, now resting on the pavement, its owner panting beside it, still looking to right and left alternately. At which instant, exactly, the boy, hearing his step, turned round, and for the first time looked him full in the face with a pair of big blue eyes that held unabashed and happy welcome in them.

“Oh, I say, sir, it’s most awfully ripping of you,” he said in a confiding voice, before the man had time to speak. “I hunted everywhere; but I never thought of looking behind me.”

But the man, standing dumb and astonished for a few seconds beside the little fellow, missed the latter sentence altogether, for there was in the clear blue eyes an expression so trustful, so frankly affectionate almost, and in the voice music of so natural a kind, that all the tenderness in him rose; like a sudden tide, and he yearned towards the boy as though he were his little son.

Thought, born of some sudden revival of emotion, flashed back swiftly across a stretch of twelve blank years… and for an instant the lines of the mouth grew deeper, though in the eyes the light turned softer, brighter….

“It’s too big for you, my boy,” he said, recovering himself with a jolly laugh; “or, rather, you’re not big enough — yet — for it — eh! Where to, now? Ah! the station, I suppose?” And he stooped to grasp the handles of the bulging bag, first poking the spades more securely in beneath the straps; but in doing so became aware that something the boy had said had given him pain. What was it? Why was it? This stray little stranger, met upon the London pavements! Yet so swift is thought that, even while he stooped and before his fingers actually touched the leather, he had found what hurt him — and smiled a little at himself. It was the mode of address the boy made use of, contradicting faintly the affectionate expression in the eyes. It was the word “sir” that made him feel like a schoolmaster or a tutor; it made him feel old. It was not the word he needed, and — yes — had longed for, somehow almost expected. And there was such strange trouble in his mind and heart that, as he grasped the bag, he did not catch the boy’s rejoinder to his question. But, of course, it must be the railway station; he was going to the seaside for Easter; his people would be at the ticket-office waiting for him. Bracing himself a little for the effort, he seized the leather handles and lifted the bag from the ground.

“Oh, thanks awfully, sir!” repeated the boy. He watched him with a true schoolboy grin of gratitude, as though it were great fun, yet also with a true urchin’s sense that the proper thing had happened, since such jobs, of course, were for grown-up men. And this time, though he used the objectionable word again, the voice betrayed recognition of the fact that he somehow had a right to look to this particular man for help, and that this particular man only did the right and natural thing in giving help.

But the man, swaying sideways, nearly lost his balance. He had calculated automatically the probable energy necessary to lift the weight; he had put this energy forth. He received a shock as though he had been struck, for the bag had no weight at all; it was as light as a feather. It might have been of tissue-paper, a phantom bag. And the shock was mental as well as physical. His mind swayed with his body.

“By jove!” cried the boy, strutting merrily beside him, hands in his pockets. “Thanks most awfully. This is jolly!”

The objectionable word was omitted, but the man scarcely heard the words at all. For a mist swam before his eyes, the street lamps grew blurred and distant, the drizzle thickened in the air. He still heard the wild, sweet song of the bird, still knew the west had gold upon its lips. It was the rest of the world about him that grew dim. Strange thoughts rose in a cloud. Reality and dream played games, the games of childhood, through his heart. Memories, robed flamingly, trooped past his inner sight, radiant, swift and as of yesterday, closing his eyelids for a moment to the outer world. Rossetti came to him, singing too sweetly a hidden pain in perfect words across those twelve blank years: “The Hour that might have been, yet might not be, which man’s and woman’s heart conceived and bore, yet whereof time was barren…” In a second’s flash the entire sonnet, “Stillborn Love”, passed on this inner screen “with eyes where burning memory lights love home…”

Mingled with these — all in an instant of time — came practical thoughts as well. This boy! The ridiculous effort he made to carry this ridiculously light bag! The poignant tenderness, the awakened yearning! Was it a girl dressed up? The happy face, the innocent, confiding smile, the music in the voice, the dear soft blue eyes, and yet, at the same time, something that was not there — some indescribable, incalculable element that was lacking. He felt acutely this curious lack. What was it? Who was this merry youngster? He glanced down cautiously as they moved side by side. He felt shy, hopeful, marvellously tender. His heart yearned inexpressibly; the boy, looking elsewhere, did not notice the examination, did not notice, of course, that his companion caught his breath and walked uncertainly.

But the man was troubled. The face reminded him, as he gazed, of many children, of children he had loved and played with, both boys and girls, his Substitute Children, as he had always called them in his heart… Then, suddenly, the boy came closer and took his arm. They were close upon the station now. The sweet human perfume of a small, deeply loved, helpless and dependent little life rose past his face.

He suddenly blurted out: “But, I say, this bag of yours — it weighs simply nothing!”

The boy laughed — a ring of true careless joy was in the sound. He looked up.

“Do you know what’s in it? Shall I tell you?” He added in a whisper: “I will, if you like.” But the man was suddenly afraid and dared not ask.

“Brown paper probably,” he evaded laughingly; “or birds’ eggs. You’ve been up to some wicked lark or other.”

The little chap clasped both hands upon the supporting arm. He took a quick, dancing step or two, then stopped dead, and made the man stop with him. He stood on tiptoe to reach the distant ear. His face wore a lovely smile of truth and trust and delight.

“My future,” he whispered. And the man turned into ice.

They entered the great station. The last of the daylight was shut out. They reached the ticket office. The crowds hurrying people surged about them. The man set down the bag. For a moment or two the boy looked quickly about him to right and left, searching, then turned his big blue eyes upon the other with his radiant smile:

“She’s in the waiting-room as usual,” he said. “I’ll go and fetch her — though she ought to know you’re here.” He stood on tiptoe, his hands upon the other’s shoulders, his face thrust close. “Kiss me, father. I shan’t be a second.”

“You little beggar!” said the man, in a voice he could not control; then, opening his big arms wide, saw only an empty space before him.

He turned and walked slowly back to his flat instead of to the club; and when he got home he read over for the thousandth time the letter — its ink a little faded during the twelve intervening years — in which she had accepted his love two short weeks before death took her.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

MALAHIDE AND FORDEN

I

Our three-months’ tour was drawing to its close — the Company playing in a midland town at the moment and Forden was chatting with me in the wings during the second act, when Malahide’s great voice boomed in my ears as he hurried to his entrance. It startled me; the audience must surely hear it too. Forden gave me his quick smile, an understanding wink added to it.

“Hubert, old man!” cried the voice. “There’s a place called Barton I want to see — Barton-in-Fabis. Let’s go tomorrow. There’s a train at 10.15. Forden, you come too!” His eyes blazed at us with an odd glare through the grease-paint, his great shoulders swept round the canvas, and he was gone on to the stage, where at once his voice became audible in the lines that ten-weeks had made rather too familiar.

I experienced a twinge of surprise. Walking was little to Malahide’s taste. He usually spent his spare time playing golf, and in the afternoon he invariably slept for a couple of hours, so as to be rested for the evening performance. That he should propose a whole day’s walk, therefore, was unexpected. My companion and I were left staring at each other.

“Does he mean it — d’you think!” I asked in a low voice. “It sounds such an odd name. You think it’s real!” I laughed a little.

“A lovely name, though,” came the whispered answer. “It’s real enough. Yes — I’ve heard of it—”

“Oh, you’ve heard of it?” I interrupted, looking up at him.

He nodded. Always absent-minded rather, he was also always truthful. An expression on his face now puzzled me. He looked perturbed. I repeated my remark, anxious to press him for some reason.

“People make pilgrimages there — sometimes — I believe. There’s an old church—” Then his cue sounded, and he moved quickly away, but flinging over his shoulder, again with his quick smile, a final whisper: “Oh, it’s real, yes, quite real. We’ll go.”

So it was the church and the odd name that had caught Malahide’s romantic fancy. Yet such a flat and empty name, I thought, without the adjunct, which alone gave it atmosphere. “In fabis,” I gathered from one of the local supers, meant “among the beans,” and Barton was a village “with a lot of historic interest,” he informed me proudly. The name and the historic interest, evidently, had taken Malahide’s vagrant fancy. He was an incalculable fellow; but he was not a man to ply with questions. His temper was insecure as a wayward child’s. I, therefore, asked no questions. Forden, too, was an elusive creature, where questions were concerned. There are people who instinctively detest having to give definite information in reply to definite questions. All the more, then, was I surprised to hear Forden ask one of Malahide — about the expedition. We passed the latter’s dressing room as we left the theatre to walk home together, and the door was open.

“Ten-fifteen, remember, Central Station,” boomed Malahide, catching sight of us. “Single tickets to Stanton. We walk from Stanton.” It again surprised me; he had actually thought out details.

It was then that Forden asked his question:

“I — I suppose,” he ventured, faltering a trifle, “there’s a train back all right?”

The evening performance of course, involved an early meal, and the question seemed so natural that I thought nothing, but Malahide looked up from pulling on his big boots as though it startled him. He seemed taken by surprise. His eyes held the same blaze, the touch almost of glare, I had noticed before, but the startled air was added.

“We’ll work round. What can it matter anyhow — provided we get there?” was all he vouchsafed, and in a tone that did not invite cross-examination.

So it was to be 10.15, with single tickets to Stanton, a walk thence to Barton among its Beans, with its old church and historic interest, and we were to “work round” to another station, and so home. Malahide had planned it all in advance. He wanted to go. Forden also wanted to go. It all seemed natural enough, ordinary, no exceptional feature anywhere about it beyond the trivial detail that Malahide did not care for walking as a rule. It is strange, therefore, that somewhere in my being lurked a firm conviction that the whole business was exceptional. For one thing, I felt sure that both Malahide and Forden did not really want to go. That they had to go, and meant to go, was the impression left upon my mind, not that either of them actually “wished” it.

During our supper of cold tongue, salad and beer, for instance, we made no further allusion to the expedition. Rather than actually avoided, it was just tacitly assumed, Forden, I partly gathered, realised that I still did not quite believe in the Barton walk, but was too delicately loyal to discuss our friend’s delightful irresponsibilities. In his own mind, too, I fancied, lay the thought that Malahide would not turn up, and that he would lose his morning’s sleep for nothing, but that he meant to keep the rendezvous none the less. My fancy may have been quite wrong, yet this, anyhow, was Forden all over. He was of finest material, something transparent and a trifle exquisite in him; and even when poorly cast — as in the present play — this quality shone beautifully through his acting.

We went soon to bed, but Malahide kept late hours, and Forden and myself were asleep long before he turned in. In the morning, however, he was waiting at the station when we got there. He had left the hotel before us. “I’ve been to look at the churches,” was his unexpected explanation. “One of ’em was open, and I went in and sat a bit. A wonderful atmosphere of peace and stillness. By Jove, it makes one think,” and he gabbled on about the charm and atmosphere of an empty, ancient church. It was surprising, of course, and it left us without comment. Yet I had known him before in this odd mood — when he was frightened about something, frightened usually, of death. Malahide, I understood, was frightened now, and his thoughts, for some reason, ran on death. In his eyes, moreover, I noticed, though veiled a little, a trifle deeper down, the same blaze I had seen the night before. And all the way to Stanton he gazed out of the window, humming to himself, the heap of morning papers beside him all untouched. The criticisms of his own performance, as, equally, mention of the Company, though of importance to the week’s business, had, for once, no interest for him. His mind lay, evidently, upon other matters. He looked extraordinarily happy — happier, I thought, than I had ever seen him before; there was a careless indifference, a lightness, something, too, of a new refinement — to use a queer word his vehement personality did not ever suggest — thought were new, yet all this lit, as from below, by the gleam of hidden fear I most certainly detected in him. And it was these contradictions, I think, these incompatibilities almost, that affected me so powerfully. Impressions began to pour and pour upon me. Emotions stirred. Things going on at a great speed in Malahide were things that I could not fathom.

To me, this short train journey to Stanton, en route for Barton among its Beans, already had the spice of something just a little unusual, of something a trifle forced. Unexpected touches played about it, as though a faint unknown light shone from the cloudless sky of that perfect April morning, but from beyond it. Forden, behind the transparent mask of his rather beautiful face, betrayed more than his customary absent-mindedness, sometimes to a point I could have thought bewilderment. Each time I spoke to him — to Malahide I did not once address a word — he started a little. In him there was no attempt at adjustment, no analysis, no effort to explain or query. He asked himself, I am sure, no single question. Whatever life brought him he accepted always. He was receptive merely; a recipient, but an extremely sensitive recipient, leaving all problems, all causes, to his God. Though without a formal creed, Forden was a deeply religious nature. And Forden now seemed to me — let me put it quite plainly as I felt it at the time — preparing, making himself ready, getting himself in hand, to meet something. Yes, to meet something — that is the phrase. And it was the search for this phrase, its discovery rather, that made me aware of an incomprehensible stress of subconscious excitement similarly in myself.

•   •   •

We were a queer enough trio, it may be, even in our normal moments. In myself, at any rate, being of different build to both Malahide and Forden, numerous little wheels were already whirring, gathering speed with every minute. This whirring one usually calls excitement. My own personal reactions to what followed are all, of course, that I can report. Though caught up, more or less, with the other two, I remained always the observer, thus sharing only a small portion probably of what my companions experienced. Another man, of different calibre, placed as I was, might have noticed nothing. I cannot say. My problem is to report faithfully what I observed; and whether another man would have observed the same thing, or nothing at all, is beside the mark…. Already before the train stopped at Stanton I felt — well, as if my feet did not quite touch the ground, and by the ground I mean the ordinary. It may, or may not, be an exaggeration to say that I felt both feet slightly off the earth. That my centre of gravity was shifting is, perhaps, the most truthful expression I can find.

By the time we reached Stanton, at any rate, the whirring wheels had generated considerable heat, and with this heat playing all through my system I had already begun to see and feel in a way that was not quite the ordinary way. I perceived differently: I experienced, as it were, with a heightened consciousness. Perception seemed intensified a trifle; but more than that, and chiefly, it seemed different.

Different is the right adjective, I think. Malahide and Forden were “different” to the Malahide and Forden I knew comfortably from long acquaintance. Very, very slightly different, however, not radically so. I saw them from another angle. There was nothing I could seize or label. The instant my mind fastened on any detail, it was gone. The “difference” escaped me, leaving behind it a wonder of enquiry, a glow of curiosity I could not possibly define.

One sentence, perhaps, can explain my meaning, both in reference to the men and to the inanimate things they moved among: I saw more of everything…

•   •   •

The fields, through the carriage windows, were of freshest green, yellow with a million buttercups, sparkling still from a shower that had followed sunrise, and the surface of the earth lay positively radiant in its spring loveliness. It laughed, it danced, it wept, it smiled. Yet it was not with this my mind was occupied during the half-hour’s run to Stanton, but rather with the being of my two companions. I made no effort to direct my thoughts. They flowed of their own accord, with poignant, affectionate emotions I could not explain, towards Malahide and Forden….

II

Played about them, over them, these thoughts did, lovingly rather, and directed by a flair, so to say, of understanding that was new in me….

Neither would ever see forty again, yet to me they seemed young, their careers still in front of them; and each, though without much energy, groping a way honestly toward some ultimate meaning in life that neither, I fancied, was ever likely to discover. If not dilettanti, both shrank from the big sacrifices. They were married, and each, in this fundamental relationship, unsatisfied, though each, outwardly at least, had mastered that dissatisfaction. Accepting, that is, a responsibility undertaken, they played the game. There was fine stuff in them. And both sought elsewhere, though without much energy as I have said, an outlet marriage had accordingly failed to provide. Not immorality, of course; but a mental, maybe a spiritual, outlet. They sought it, I now abruptly judged, without success. Their stream of yearning, whatever its power, went lost among the stars and unremunerative dreams. The point, however, remains: this yearning did exist in each. Its power, I conceive, was cumulative.

Similarly, in their daily work as actors, and uncommonly good actors, one with a streak of fine inspiration, the other, Malahide, with a touch of fiery genius, both accepted an art that both held, mournfully, and secretly rather, was not creative. They were merely interpreters of other men’s creations. And, here again, lay deep dissatisfaction. Here, indeed, lay the root and essence of a searching pain both shared — since, God knows, they were gifted, honest beings — that a creative outlet, namely, was denied to creative powers.

This fundamental problem — the second one — lay unsolved in both; hence both were open to attack and ready for adventure. But the lesser adventures, refuge of commonplace fellows, they resolutely declined. Were they, perhaps, worthy then of the greater adventure that circumstances, at length, with inexplicable suddenness, and out of the least likely material, offered to them…?

Somewhat thus, at any rate, I saw my companions, as the train jolted us that sparkling April morning, many years ago, towards Stanton, Malahide humming his mood idly through the open window, Forden lying at full length, reading the papers with listless eye. But I saw another thing as well, saw it with a limpid clearness my description may not hold: something ahead — an event — lay in waiting for them, something they knew about, both not desiring, yet desiring it, something inevitable as sunrise.

We move towards and past events successively, calling this motion time. But the event itself does not move at all. It is always there. We three, now sitting in the jolting carriage, were approaching an event about which they knew, but about which I did not know. I received, that is, an imperfect impression of something they saw perfectly. And in some way the accumulated power of their combined yearnings, wasted as I had thought, made what happened possible.

It was an extraordinary idea to come to me with such conviction, and with this atmosphere of prophecy. I glanced at the two men, each like myself the victim, I remembered, of a strange, unhappy weakness. These weaknesses, too, I realised, contributed as well: unbalance, instability, were evidently necessary to the event. To steady, heroic types it never could have happened.

The train was stopping, and Malahide already had the door half-open. Forden, in his turn, sprang up.

“Stanton!” cried the former, as though he spoke a line of tense drama on the stage. “Here we are. Come on, you fellows!” And he was on the platform before the train drew to a standstill. His vehemence was absurd. He used it, I knew, to help him make the start, the fear I have mentioned prompting it. And Forden, like a flash, was on his heels. I followed, pausing a moment to collect the papers in case Malahide should ask for them, and then, thank heaven, as we stood on that ugly platform and asked the porter the way to Barton, my own strange feelings, heightened perception with them, dropped back with a jerk into the normal again. The uncomfortable insight was suddenly withdrawn. It had seemed an intrusion into their privacies; I was relieved to see them again as two friends merely, two actors, out for a country walk with me to a village called Barton-in-Fabis on a brilliant April morning.

One last flash only there was, as I followed them out, one final hint of what I have called “seeing more” of everything, seeing “differently,” rather. The three of us left the carriage as described, in sequence; yet to me it flashed with definite though illogical assurance that only one got out. Not that one was gone and two were left, but that the three of us got out as one, simultaneously. One being left that carriage. The fingers of a hand, thus, may move and point in several directions at once, while the hand, of which they form parts, moves forward in one direction only, as a whole. The simile occurred to me…. I perceived it, moreover, through what I can only call a veil of smoke.

III

“Oh, about three to four mile, maybe,” the porter was telling Malahide, “an’ you can pick up the Midland at Attenborough to get back…. Yes, it’s a nice day for a walk, I dessay….”

The name made us laugh, but the instructions as to paths, stiles, signposts, turnings, I, personally, did not listen to. I assumed, as most do, an air of intelligent comprehension. Forden, I saw, wore a similar expression, from which I knew that he, too, was not listening properly, but was leaving it to Malahide, wondering, like myself, how the latter could carry in his great slumbering mind so many intricate details whereas, actually, he was doing nothing of the sort. Malahide was merely acting, intent upon some other matter that was certainly not here and now.

We started off, therefore, with but a few details of our journey secure: — “a mile and a half down the road, and bearin’ to the right, you’ll see a signpost to Barton across the fields, and if you foller that a little way, bearin’ to the left a bit now, you’ll see a gate on the right just past some trees, but you don’t go through that gate, you go straight on, bearin’ to the right always, till you come to a farm, and then, through another gate…”

There was a definite relation between the length of description and a tip in the porter’s mind, upon which Forden commented wittily, as we swung down the road, each relying upon the other two, and then exclaiming confidently, but with blurred minds, as we reached a signpost: “Ah! Here we are!” while we scrambled over a stile into enticing fields of gold.

We spoke little at first. “We must bear to the left, remember,” mentioned Malahide once, to which Forden and I nodded agreement, adding however: “till we reach the gate,” with Malahide’s firm reminder: “which we do not go through,” followed by my own contribution: “past some trees, yes, to another gate,” — and then Malahide’s conclusive summing up: “always bearing to the right, of course…”

We jogged on happily, while the larks sang overhead, the cuckoos called and the brilliant sunshine flooded a countryside growing more and more remote from signs of men and houses. Not even a thatched cottage or a farm-house broke the loneliness from human kind….

We spoke little, I have said; but my companions, presently, fell into a desultory conversation about their own profession, about present and future conditions on the stage, individual talent, rents of theatres, and so forth, to all of which, being an interloper merely, I listened with slight interest. It was the odd smell of burning, I think, that held my curious attention during this preliminary period, for I saw no cause for it, no smoke of rubbish being consumed, no heath-fire certainly. Malahide, I remember, coughed a little once or twice, and Forden sniffed like an animal that scents an untoward element in the atmosphere, though very faintly. They made no comment, I offered none. It was, obviously, of no importance. The beauty of the day in its fresh spring brilliance absorbed me wholly, so that my thoughts ran on of their own accord, floating on a stream of happy emotion, careless as the pleasant wind. The sentences I caught from time to time did little more than punctuate, as it were, this stream of loveliness that poured through me from the April morning. Yet at intervals I caught their words, a phrase or a sentence would arrest me for a second; and each time this happened, I noticed what I can only call a certain curious change, a change — in distance. Their talk, I mean, passed gradually beyond me.

There was incoherence, due partly, of course, to the gaps I missed; and once or twice, it seemed to me, they were talking at cross-purposes, although tone and demeanour betrayed nothing of the sort. I remember that this puzzled me, that I registered the fact vaguely, at any rate; also, that an occasional comment of my own won no rejoinder from either Malahide or Forden — almost as though, momentarily, they had forgotten my existence and seemed unaware that I was with them.

Deeper and deeper into my own sensuous enjoyment of the day I sank accordingly, glad that I might take the beauty in my own little way. One thing only pierced my personal mood from time to time: the picture of Malahide’s great head thrust forward a little when I glanced at him, the eyes turned upwards, carrying in them still that odd soft blaze, the glare, as I called it, now wholly gone; and that upon Forden’s delicate face was a gentle expression, curiously rapt, yet with a faint brush as of bewilderment somewhere among the peering features. This impression, however, came back to me later, rather than held my attention much at the actual moment. We moved on deeper and deeper into the lonely countryside. With the exception of a man some fields ahead of us, I saw no living soul.

IV

Our path, meanwhile, crossed a lane, and a little later a road, though not a high-road since no telegraph poles marred it, and then Malahide remarked casually: “But, I say! It’s about time, isn’t it?” He stood still abruptly, staring round him. “It’s about time — eh?”

“For what?” enquired Forden gently, not looking at him, a touch of resignation in his voice.

“That signpost, I mean. We should have come to it by now.”

“Oh, that signpost,” echoed the other, without interest.

Neither of them included me in this exchange, which had broken in upon a longish conversation, and I found myself resenting it. They had not so much as glanced in my direction.

“Signpost!” I exclaimed bluntly, looking straight at Malahide. “Why, we passed it long ago.” And as I said it, my eye again took in the figure of the man three fields away, the only living being yet seen. Out of the corner of my eye I saw him merely, and a breath of sharper air, or something like it, passed quickly over my skin. “It said ‘To Barton,’” I added, a flavour of challenge in my tone. I purposely kept my gaze hard on Malahide.

He turned slowly, with a look as though, casually, he picked me up again; our eyes met; that sharper air seemed in my mind now.

“We passed a signpost,” he corrected me; “but it merely said ‘Footpath.’ And it pointed over there — behind us. The way we’ve come.”

Forden, to my amazement, nodded in consent. “Over there, yes,” he agreed, and pointed with his stick, but at right angles to the direction Malahide had meant. “And it said: ‘From Barton.’”

This confusion, produced purposely and in a spirit of play though of course it was, annoyed me. I disliked it, as though somewhere it reached a sad, uneasy region in my mind.

It was Malahide’s turn to nod in consent. “Then we’re all right,” he affirmed with unnecessary vehemence in his deep voice. And that vehemence, again, I did not like. “Besides,” he added sharply, pointing ahead, “there he is!”

A wave of vague emotion troubled me; for an instant I felt again that sharper air — and this time in the heart.

“Who?” I asked quickly.

He replied carelessly: “The man.”

“What man?”

Malahide turned his eyes full upon my own, so that their soft blaze came over me like sunshine, almost with a sense of warmth in them. On his great face lay a singular expression. I heard Forden, who stood just behind me, laughing gently. There seemed a drift of smoke about them both. I knew a touch of goose-flesh.

“What man do you mean?” I asked with louder emphasis, and this time, I admit, with a note of exasperation that would not be denied, for the nonsense, I thought, had gone far enough, and there was a flavour in it that set my nerves on edge.

Malahide’s reply came easily and naturally: “The man who plants them,” he said without a smile. “He sticks them into the ground, that fellow. He’s going about with an assortment of signposts ‘To and From Barton,’ and every now and again he plants one for us.”

“We’re standing under one now,” Forden breathed behind me in his purring way, and looking up I saw that this was true. I read in black lettering upon a white background: “To Barton.” It indicated the direction we were taking.

It occurred to me suddenly now that we had already walked at least four miles, yet had seen no farm, no trees, no garden. I had been sunk too deep in my own mood to notice things perhaps. This signpost I certainly had not noticed until Forden drew my attention to it. Malahide was tapping the wooden arm with the point of his stick, reading the lettering aloud as he did so:

“‘Footpath From Barton,’” I heard him boom. And instantly my eyes fixed tightly on it with all the concentration that was in me. Yes, Malahide had read correctly. Only, the arm now swung the other way. It pointed behind us! And I burst out laughing. Sight and memory had, indeed, fumbled badly. I felt myself for a moment “all turned round,” as the saying is. Malahide laughed too; we all laughed together. It was boisterous, not quite spontaneous laughter, but at any rate it relieved a sense of intolerable tension that in myself had reached a climax. This fooling had been overdone, I felt.

“So, you see, we are all right,” Malahide exclaimed, and swung forward over the meadow, already plunged again in the conversation with Forden which he himself had interrupted. They had enjoyed their little game about the signposts, Malahide, in particular, his touch of fancy about “the man who planted them.” It all belonged to the careless, happy mood of a holiday expedition, as it were — the nonsense of high spirits. This, at least, was the ready explanation my mind produced so glibly, knowing full well it would not pass the censor of another kind of understanding, a deeper kind, that sought hurriedly, even passionately, for the true explanation. It was not nonsense; nor was it acceptable. It alarmed me.

I repeat: this confusion about directions, the two men agreeing that opposite directions were one and the same, was not the nonsense that it sounds; and I affirm this in view of that heightened perception, already first experienced in the train, which now came back upon me in a sudden flood. It brought with it an atmosphere of prophecy, almost of pre-vision, and certainly of premonition, an atmosphere that accompanied me, more or less, with haunting persistence to the end.

And its first effect was singular: all that a man says, I now became aware, has three meanings, and not merely one. The revelation arrived as clearly as though it were whispered to me through the shining air. There is the literal meaning of the actual words; there is the meaning of the sentence itself; and there is the meaning, above and beyond both these, in which the whole of the utterer is concerned, a meaning, that is, which the unconscious secret part in him — the greater part — tries and hopes to say. This last, the most significant of all three, since it includes cause as well as result, makes of every common sentence a legend and a parable. Gesture, tone of voice betray its trend; what is omitted, or between the lines, betrays still more. Its full meaning, being in relation to unknown categories, is usually hidden both from utterer and hearers. It deals simultaneously with the past, the present and — the future. I now became aware of this Third Meaning in the most commonplace remarks of my companions.

It was an astounding order of perception to occur to me, and the difficulty of reporting it must be obvious from this confused description. Yet it seemed to me at the time so simple, so convincing, that I did not even question its accuracy and truth. Malahide and Forden, fooling together about the contradictory signposts, had betrayed this third meaning in all they said and did. Indeed, that it appeared impossible, absurd, was a proof, perhaps the only possible proof, of its reality. Momentarily, as it were, they had become free of unknown categories.

V

My own attitude contained at first both criticism and resistance; it was only gradually that I found myself caught in the full tide that, apparently, swept my companions along so easily. A first eddy of it had touched me in the train, when my feet felt a little “off the earth”; now I was already in the bigger current; before long I had become entirely submerged with them…. Fields and lanes, meanwhile, slipped rapidly behind us, but no farm, no trees, no gate, as the porter described, had been seen. We were lost, it seemed, in the heart of the sparkling April day; dew, light and gentle airs our only guides. The day contained us.

I made efforts to disentangle myself.

“Barton’s not getting any nearer,” I expostulated once.

“Barton-in-Fabis,” mentioned Malahide with complete assurance, that no longer held a trace of vehemence, “is there — where it always is,” while Forden’s breath of delicate laughter followed the flat statement, as though the larks overhead had sung close beside my ear.

“D’you think we’re going right?” I ventured another time. “Our direction, I mean?”

Again, with that ghostly laughter, Forden met me: “It’s the way we have to go,” he replied half under his breath. “It’s always a mistake to trouble too much about direction — actual direction, that is.” And Malahide was singing to himself as though nothing mattered in the world, details as to direction least of all…. It was just after this, I remember, as our lane came to a stile and we leaned over it comfortably, all three, that the odour of burning touched my mind again, only with it, at the same time, a sight so moving, that I paused in thought, catching my breath a little. For the field before us sloped down into the distance, ancient furrows showing just beneath the surface like the flowing folds of a shaken carpet. They ran, it seemed, like streams. Their curve downhill lent this impression of movement. They were of gold. Every inch of the surface was smothered with the shimmering cream of a million yellow buttercups.

“Rivers of Gold!” I exclaimed involuntarily, and at the same moment Forden was over the stile in a single leap and running across the brilliant grass.

“Look out!” he cried, a bewitched expression on his face, “it’s fire!” — and he was gone.

It was as though he swam to the neck in gleaming gold. He peered back at me a second through the shining flood — and it was in this instant, just as I caught his turning face, that Malahide was after him. He passed me like a wave, still singing; there was a rush of power in his speed. I followed at once, unable to resist. The three of us ran like one man over and through that flood of golden buttercups, passing, as we did so, every sign the railway porter had told us to look out for: the farm, the trees, the gate, the second gate — everything. Only, we passed them more than once. It was as though we swung in a rapid circle round and round the promised signs, always passing them, always coming up to them, always leaving them behind, then always seeing them in front of us again, yet the entire sequence right, natural and — possible.

Now, I noticed this. I was aware of this. Yet it caused me no surprise. That it should be so seemed quite ordinary — at the time….

We brought up presently, not even breathless, some half-way down that golden field.

“Nothing to what I expected,” exclaimed Malahide, interrupting his singing for the first time.

“There was no pain,” mentioned Forden, his voice soft and comforting, as though he spoke to a little child. There was an instant of most poignant emotion
in me as they said it; a certainty flashed through me that I could not seize; a sudden wave, as it were, of tears, of joy, of sorrow, of despair, swept past me and was gone again before I had the faintest chance to snatch at any explanation. Like the memory of some tremendous, rather awful dream, it vanished, and Malahide’s quick remark, the next second, capped its complete oblivion:

“And there he goes again!” I heard. “He’s stuck another one in!”

He was pointing to a hedge at the bottom of the field where, behind the veil of its creamy hawthorn, I just made out the figure of a man ambling slowly along, till the hedge, growing thicker, finally concealed him. But the signpost, when we reached it a few minutes later, showed an arm rotten with age, and only the faded legend on it, hardly legible: “Footpath.” It pointed downwards — into the ground.

VI

We swung forward again, without a moment’s delay, it seemed, my companions talking busily together as before, their meaning, also as before, far, far beyond me. They were talking, too, on several subjects at once. The odd language they had just used, the way we swung forward instantly, without comment or explanation, touched no sense of queerness in me — then. No comment or explanation were necessary; it was natural we should go straight on. Their talking on “several subjects simultaneously,” however, did occur to me — yes, as marvellous.

Foolish, even impossible, as it must sound, it yet did happen; they talked on more than one subject at the same time. They carried on at least a couple of conversations at once without the slightest difficulty, without the smallest effort or confusion. My own admission into the secret was partial, I think; hence my trouble and perplexity. To them it was easy and natural. With me, even the strain of listening made the head swim. The effort to follow them was certainly a physical one, for I was aware of a definite physical reaction more than once, almost indeed of a kind of dizziness akin to nausea.

To report it is beyond my power. For one thing, I cannot remember, for another, the concentration necessary left me a little stupefied. I can give an instance only, and that a poor one. They used “third meanings,” too.

Malahide, thus, while voluble enough in his normal state, was at the same time usually inarticulate. His verbosity, that is, conveyed little. The tiny vital meaning in him fumbled and stammered through countless wrappings, as it were. These wrappings smothered it. Now, on the contrary, he talked fluently and clearly. It was I who was puzzled — at first — to find the subject he discussed so glibly. And Forden, usually timid and hesitating in his speech, though never inarticulate, now also used a flow of fearless words in answer. Yet not precisely “in answer,” for both men talked at once. They uttered simultaneously — 0n two subjects, if not on three:

“We all deserve, maybe,” Malahide’s deep voice thundered, “a divine attention few of us receive — God’s pity. We are not, alas, whole-hearted. Few of us, similarly, deserve another compliment. Due to splendour — the Devil’s admiration.”

His voice, for once, was entirely natural, unselfconscious. There was the stress of real feeling and belief in what he said.

“I for one,” he went on, “I take my hat off to the whole-hearted, whether in so-called good or evil. For of such stuff are eventual angels wrought…”

Angels! The word caught me on the raw. Its “third meaning” caught me on the raw, that is, and with a sense of power and beauty so startling that I missed the rest. The word poured through me like a flame. Of what he spoke, to what context the strange statement was related, I had no inkling; yet, while he actually spoke the words, I heard Forden speaking to Malahide, who heard and understood and answered — but speaking, and simultaneously, on another matter altogether. And this other matter, it so chanced, I grasped. Remote enough from what Malahide was saying, and trivial by comparison, it referred to an Alpine sojourn with his wife a couple of summers before. Malahide, too, had been with them:

“Often, after the hotel dinner,” Forden said contemptuously, “I heard them mouthing all sorts of lovely poetic phrases; yet not one of them would make the slight sacrifice of personal comfort necessary to experience that loveliness, that poetry, in themselves…”

To which Malahide, though still developing “God’s pity” and the “Devil’s admiration” in phrases packed with real feeling, contrived somehow to answer, but always simultaneously, his friend’s remark:

“They bring their own lower world,” he boomed, “even into the beauty of the mountains, then wonder that the beauty of the mountains tells them nothing. They would find Balham on great Betelgeuse” — a tremendous laugh rang out — “and Clapham Junction on fiery Vega!”

“Her pity,” came Forden’s words, talking of another matter altogether, yet uttered simultaneously with his friend’s laughing rhetoric, “is self-pity merely. She does these out-of-the-way things, you see, without sufficient apparent reason. It is not a desire for notoriety — that would shock her — but it is a desire to be conspicuous. Life, which means people, did not make a fuss about her in her youth. But the law of compensation works inevitably. Late in life, you see, she means to have that fuss.”

It is the phraseology, perhaps, that enables me to remember this singular exchange. My head, of course, was spinning. For Malahide made a reply to this, while still discussing the poseurs in the Alpine hotel. And while they talked thus on two subjects simultaneously, Forden managed to chat easily too with me — upon a third…. It was as though a second dimension in time had opened for them. Between myself and Forden, again, there was plainly some kind of telepathic communication. He had my thought, at any rate, before I uttered it aloud.

Of this I can give two instances, both trivial, yet showing that simultaneously with his Malahide-conversations he was paying attention to my own remarks, and — simultaneously again — was answering them. It was absolutely staggering.

Here are the instances memory retained:

Some scraps of white paper, remnants of an untidy picnic party, lay fluttering in the thick grass some distance in front of us, and at the first glance I thought they were not paper, but — chickens. Only on coming nearer was the mistake clear. Whether I meant to comment aloud on the little deception, or not, I cannot remember; but in any case, before I actually did so, Forden, glancing down at me with his gentle smile, observed: “I, too, thought at first they were chickens.” He hit them idly with his stick as we passed.

The second instance, equally trivial, equally striking at the same time, was the gamekeeper’s cottage on the fringe of a wood. It suggested to my mind, for some reason, a charcoal-burner’s hut in a book of German fairy-tales, and I said so. This time I spoke my thought. “But, you know, I’ve just said that,” came Forden’s comment, his eyes twinkling brightly as before. And it was true; he had said it a fraction of a second before I did. During this brief exchange between us, moreover, he was still talking fluently with Malahide — on at least two subjects — and simultaneously…. Now, from the fact that I noticed this, that my mind made a note of it, that is, I draw the conclusion that my attention was definitely arrested, surprise accompanying it. The extraordinariness of the matter struck me, whereas to my companions it was ordinary and natural. I was, therefore, not wholly included in their marvellous experience. I was still the observer merely….

Immediately following the telepathic instances with Forden, then, came a flash of sudden understanding, as though I were abruptly carried a stage deeper into their own condition:

I discerned one of the subjects they discussed so earnestly together.

This came hard upon a momentary doubt — the doubt that they were playing, half-fooling me, as it were. Then came the swift flash that negatived the doubt. I can only compare it to the amazing review of a man’s whole life that is said to flash out in a moment of extreme danger. This quality, as of juggling with Time, belonged to it.

Malahide and Forden, then, I realised, were talking together of Woman, of women, rather, but of individual women. Ah! The flash grew brighter: of their own wives. Yet that Malahide spoke of Forden’s wife and that: Forden discussed Mrs. Malahide. Each had the free entrée into the other’s mind, and what each was too loyal to say about his own wife, the other easily said for him. This swiftest telepathic communication, as with myself and Forden, they enjoyed between themselves. With supreme ease it was accomplished.

It was an astounding performance. This discussion of their wives was actually, of course, a discussion of — well, not of Mary Forden and Jane Malahide individually, but, through them, of the deep unsolved problem of mate and sex which each man had faced in his own life — unsuccessfully. The fragments I caught seemed meaningless, because the full context was lacking for me. I got a glimmer of their Third Meanings, however, and realised one thing, at any rate, clearly: they were giving one another help. Forden’s honeymoon, I remembered, had been spent in the Alps, whereas Malahide’s wife had the lack of proportion which made her conspicuous by a pose of startling originality. This gave me a clue. Time, however, as a sequence of minutes, days and years, did not trouble either speaker. The entire matter, regardless of past and present, seemed spread out like a contour-map beneath the eyes of their inner understanding. There was no picking out one characteristic, dealing with it, then passing on to consider another. To me it came, seriatim, in that fashion, but they saw the matter whole and all at once; so rapidly, so comprehensively, too, that the sentences flew upon each other’s heels as though uttered simultaneously by each speaker.

They were it seemed, poised above the landscape of their daily lives, and in such a way that they were able to realise present, past and future simultaneously. It was no longer exactly “today,” it was no longer necessarily “today.” Temporarily they had escaped from the iron tyranny of being fastened to a particular hour on a particular day. They — and partially myself with them — were no longer chained by the cramping discipline of a precise moment in time, any more than a prisoner, his chains filed off, is fixed to a precise spot in his dungeon. Where we were in time, God knows. It might have been yesterday, it might have been tomorrow — any yesterday, any tomorrow — which we now realised simultaneously with the so-called present. It happened to be — so I felt — a particular tomorrow we realised, and it was something in the three of us (due, I mean, to the combination of our three personalities) that determined which particular tomorrow it was. The prisoner in space, his chains filed off, moves instinctively to the window of escape; and they, prisoners in time, moved now similarly to a window — of escape…. .

A flash of this escape from ordinary categories, of this “different” experience, had come to me as we left the railway carriage. It now grew brighter, more steady, more continuous. I seemed travelling in time, as one travels ordinarily in space. To the wingless creature crawling over fields the hedge behind it is past, the hedge beyond it future. It cannot conceive both hedges existing simultaneously. Then some miracle gives it wings. Hanging in the air, it sees both past and future existing simultaneously. Losing its wings once more, it crawls across the fields again. That air-experience now seems absurd, impossible, contradicting all established law. The same signpost points now as it always pointed — in one direction.

This analogy, though imperfect, occurred to me, while we brought up, but not even breathlessly, half-way down the field as already mentioned, and all I have attempted to describe took place in that brief interval of running.

Before entering that field with its rivers of gold, we had been leaning on a stile; we were leaning on that stile still. Or, it may be put otherwise: we were leaning on that stile again.

Similarly, the whole business of running, of passing the signs mentioned by the porter, the conversations, the emotions, everything in fact, were just about to happen all over again. More truly expressed, they were all happening still. Like Barton, in Malahide’s previous phrase, it was all there. The hedge behind, the hedge in front, were both beneath us, existing simultaneously…. At a particular spot in the hedge-a particular “tomorrow” — we paused….

VII

… At my side, touching my shoulders, Malahide and Forden were quietly discussing the way to Barton-in-Fabis, and, as I listened, there came over me again that touch of nausea. For, while flatly contradicting one another, they were yet in complete agreement.

It was at this instant the shock fell upon me with its glory and its terror.

My companions stood back to back. I was a yard or so to one side. They both now turned suddenly — but how to phrase the incredible thing? — they both came at me, while at the same time they went away from me. A hand, endowed with consciousness, a hand being turned inside out like a glove, might feel what I felt.

I saw their two faces. A little more, a little less, and there must have been a bristling horror in the experience. As it was, I felt only that a sheet of wonder caught us up all three. The odour of burning that came with it did not terrify; that drift of yellow smoke, now deepening, did not wound. I accepted, I understood, there was even something in me had rejoiced.

In the twinkling of an eye, both men were marvellously changed: they stood before me, splendid and divine. I was aware of the complete being in each, the full, whole Self, I mean, instead of the minute fraction I had known hitherto. All that lay in them, either of strength or weakness, was magnificently fused…. The word “glory” flashed, followed immediately by a better word, and one that Malahide had already used. Its inadequacy was painful. Its third meaning, however, in that instant blazed. “Angels” in spite of everything, remains.

And I, too, moved — moved with them both, but in a way, and in a direction, I had never known before. The glove, the hand, being turned inside out, is what my pen writes down, but accurate description is not possible. I moved, at any rate, on — on with my two companions towards Barton.

“It’s all one to me,” I said, perfectly aware that I suddenly used the third meaning of the phrase, and that Malahide and Forden understood.

“I’ve just said that myself,” the latter mentioned — and this again was true. The smile, the happiness, on his face carried the very spirit of that radiant April morning, the essence of spring, with its birds, its flowers, its dew, its careless wisdom.

“Such things,” cried Malahide, “are painless after all. It comes on me like sleep upon a child. Ha, ha!” he laughed, in his wild, vehement way. “It’s all one to me now too. Escape, by God!”

The stab of fierce emotion his language caused me passed and vanished; the afflicting memory of the burning odour was forgotten too. Everything, indeed, was one. Both men, I realised, gazed at me, smiling, wonderful, superb, and in their eyes a light, whose reflection apparently lay also in my own; an immense and awful pity that our everyday, unhappy, partial selves should ever have dared to masquerade as though they were complete and real….

“God’s pity,” sang Malahide like a trumpet. “We shall have deserved it…!”

“And the Devil’s admiration,” followed Forden’s sweeter tones, as of a vox humana, both. Distant, yet like a lark against my ears. He was laughing with sheer music. “There was no terror. I knew it must be so…. Oh, the delicious liberty … at last!”

Both uttered simultaneously. In the same breath, anguish and happiness working together, my own voice cried aloud:

“We are, for once, whole-hearted!”

VIII

At the moment of actual experience a new category would not seem foolish or impossible. These qualities would declare themselves only when it passed away. This was what happened — gradually — to me now, and, alas, to my companions too. A searing pain accompanied the transition, but no shock of violence.

At the pinnacle there was a state of consciousness too strange, too “different,” to be set down. The content of life, its liberty, its splendour, its characteristics of grandeur, even of divinity, were more than ordinary memory could retain. My own cry: “We are whole-hearted” must betray how pitiful description is…. Thus, the lovely moment, for instance, when I first saw rivers of gold, kept repeating itself — because it gave me happiness, because it moved me. That field of golden buttercups was always — there. I lingered with it, came back to it, enjoyed it over and over again, yet with no sense of repetition. It was new and fresh each time. Now, Malahide and Forden, selecting other moments, chose these instead, and these, again, were moments easy to be remembered. Their finer instances baffle memory, although I knew and shared them at the time. Forden, for some peculiar choice to himself, was in the mountains which he loved; his honeymoon presumably. Malahide, on the other hand, preferred his stars, though details of this have left me beyond recovery… Yet, while we lingered, respectively, among rivers of gold and stars and snowy peaks, we were solidly side by side in the actual present, crossing the country fields towards Barton-in-Fabis on this April morning.

The gradual passing of this state remains fairly clear in me.

There came signs, I remember, of distress and effort in our relationships. This, at least, was the first touch of sorrow that I noticed. I was coming back to the surface, as it were. The change was more in myself than in the others. There was argument about footpath, signposts, and the way to Barton generally. “The fellow has planted his last post,” I heard Malahide complaining. “Now he’ll begin pulling them all up again. He both wants us to get to Barton, yet doesn’t want it.” He paused. His usual laugh did not follow. “You know,” he went on, his whisper choking a little oddly in his throat, “he rather — puts the wind up me.” A spasm ran over his big body. Then suddenly, he added, half to himself, with an effort painfully like a gasp, “I can’t get my breath — quite.”

Forden spoke very quickly in his delicate way, resignation rather sweetly mingled in it: “Well, at any rate, we’re all right so far, for I see the porter’s farm and gate at last.” He started and pointed. “Over there, you see.” Only, instead of pointing across the fields, he — to my sharp dismay — looked and pointed straight into the sky above him.

It was the fear in Malahide that chiefly afflicted me. And the pain of this, I remember, caused me to make an effort — which was an unwise thing to do. I drew attention to the ordinary things about us:

“Look, there’s a hill,” I cried.

“God!” exclaimed Forden, with quiet admiration, “what amazing things you say!” While Malahide began to sing again with happiness.

His reaction to my sentence forced me to realise the increasing change in myself. As I uttered the words I knew their third meaning; in the plain sentences was something that equalled in value: “See! the Heavens are open. There is God!” My companions still heard this third meaning, for I saw the look of majesty in Malahide’s great eyes, the love and beauty upon Forden’s shining face. But, for myself, having spoken, there remained — suddenly — nothing more than a commonplace low hill upon the near horizon. The gate and farm I saw as well. A feeling of tears rose in me, for the straining effort for recovery was without result, anguished and bitter beyond words.

I stole a glance at my companions. And that strange word Malahide had used came back to me, but with a deep, an awful sense of intolerable regret, as though its third meaning were gone beyond recall, and only two rather empty and foolish syllables remained….

It was passing, yes, for all three of us now; the gates of ivory were closing; there was confusion, and a rather crude foolishness. Oddly enough, it was Forden — seeing that he was altogether a slighter fellow than Malahide — it was Forden who rose most slowly to the surface. Very gradually indeed he left the deeps we had all known together. To all that he now said and did Malahide responded with an aggravating giggle. He said such foolish things, confused, uncomfortable to listen to. His nerves showed signs of being frayed. He became a trifle sullen, a little frightened as well, and in his gait and gesture lay a disconcerting hurry and uncertainty, as though, hesitating to make a decision of some vital sort, he was flurried, almost in a frenzy sometimes, trying vainly to escape. This stupid confusion in him afflicted me, but the effort to escape seemed to paralyse something in my mind. It was petrifying…. And thus the sequence of what followed, proved extraordinarily difficult to remember afterwards. An atmosphere of sadness, of foreboding, of premonition came over me; there was desolation in my heart; there were stabs of horrible presentiment. All these, moreover, were ever vaguely related to one thing — that inexplicable faint odour of burning….

What memory recalls can be told very briefly. It lies in my mind thus, condensed and swift:

The storm was natural enough, but, here again, the smell of burning alarmed and wrung me. It was faint, it was fugitive. Our mistake about the river had no importance, for the depression in the landscape might easily after all have held flowing water. The roofs, too, were not the roofs of Barton, but of a hamlet nestling among orchards, Clifden by name, and it was here, Forden informed us, he had first met his wife and had proposed to her; this also of no importance, except that he went on talking about it, and that it surprised him. He suddenly recognised the place, I mean. It increased his bewilderment, and is mentioned for that reason.

The storm, then, came abruptly. We had not seen it coming. Following a low line of hills, it overtook us from behind, bringing its own wind with it. The rustling of the leaves was the first thing I noticed. The trees about us began to shake and bend. The sparkling brilliance, I saw, had left the day; the sun shone dully; the fields were no longer radiant; the flowers, too, were gone, for we were crossing a ploughed field at the moment.

The discussion between us may be omitted; its confusion is really beyond me to describe. The storm, however, is easily described, for everyone has seen that curious thickening of the air on a day in high summer, when the clouds are not really clouds, but come as a shapeless, murky gloom, threatening a portentous downpour, while yet no single raindrop falls. In childhood we called it “blight,” believing it to be composed of myriads of tiny insects. Lurid effects of lighting accompanied it, trees and roofs, against its dark background, looking as if stage flares illumined them. The whole picture, indeed, was theatrical in the extreme, artificial almost; but the aspect that I, personally, found so unwelcome, was that it laid over the sky an appearance of volumes of dense, heavy smoke. The idea of burning may, or may not, have been in my own mind only, for my companions made no comment on it. I cannot say. That it made my heart sink I remember clearly.

It was a sham storm, it had no meaning, nothing happened. Having accomplished its spectacular effect, it passed along the hills and dissipated, and the sun shone out with all its former brilliance. Yet, before it passed, certain things occurred; they came and went, it seemed to me afterwards, with the simultaneity of dream happenings. Forden, noticing the wall of gloom advancing, catching the noise of the trees as well, stopped dead in his tracks, and stared. He sniffed the air, but made no comment. An expression of utter bewilderment draped his face. He seemed once more bewitched. It was here the smell of burning came to me most strongly.

“Look out!” he cried, and started to run. He ran in front of us, we did not attempt to follow. But he ran in a circle, like a terrified animal. His figure went shifting quickly, silhouetted, like the trees and roofs, against the murky background of the low-hanging storm. A moment later he was beside us again, his face white, his eyes shining, his breath half-gone.

“Come on, old Fordy,” said Malahide affectionately, taking him by the arm. He, for some reason, was not affected. “It’s not going to rain, you know, and anyhow there’s no good running. Let’s sit down and eat our lunch.” And he led the way across a few furrows to the hedge.

We ate our sandwiches and cake and apples. The sun shone hotly again. None of us smoked, I remember. For myself, the smell of burning had left something so miserable in. me that I dared not smell even a lighted match. But no word was said by anybody in this, or in any other, sense. I kept my own counsel…. And it was while we lay resting idly, hardly speaking at all,. that a sound reached me from the other side of the hedge: a footstep in the flowered grass. My companions exchanged quick glances, I noticed, but I did not even turn my head. I did not dare.

“He’s putting it in,” whispered Malahide, a touch of the old vehemence in his eyes. “The last one!” Forden smiled, nodded his head, and was about to add some comment of his own, when the other interrupted brusquely:

“Is that the way to Barton?” he enquired suddenly in a louder voice, something challenging, almost truculent, in the tone. He jerked his head towards the gate we had recently come through. “Through that gate and past that farm, I mean?”

The answering voice startled me. It was the owner of the footsteps, of course, behind the hedge.

“No. That’s a dead end,” came in gruff but not unpleasant country tones.

There was no more than that. It was all natural enough. Yet a lump came up in my throat as I heard. I still dared not look round over my shoulder. I looked instead into Forden’s face, so close beside me. “We’re all right,” he was saying, as he glanced up a little. “Don’t struggle so. It’s the way we’ve got to go…” and was about to say more, when a fit of coughing caught him, as though for a moment he were about to suffocate. I hid my eyes quickly; a feeling of horror and despair swept through me; for there was terror in the sound he made; but the next second, when I looked again, the coughing had passed, and I saw in his face an expression of radiant happiness; the eyes shone wonderfully, there was a delicate, almost unearthly, beauty on his features. I found myself trembling, utterly unnerved.

“We’d better be getting on,” mentioned Malahide, in his abrupt, inconsequent fashion. “We mustn’t miss that train back.” And it was this unexpected change of key that enabled me at last to turn my head. I looked hurriedly behind the hedge. I was just in time to see a man, a farmer apparently, in the act of planting a post into the ground. He was pressing it down, at any rate, and much in the fashion of Malahide’s former play about a “fellow who planted signposts.” But he was planting — two. Side by side they already stood in the earth. One arm pointed right, the other left. They formed, thus, a cross.

The very same second, with a quiver in the air, as when two cinema pictures flash on each other’s heels with extreme rapidity, I experienced an optical delusion. I must call it such, at any rate. The focus of my sight changed instantaneously. The man was already in the distance, diminished in outline, moving away across the bright fields of golden buttercups. I saw him as I had seen him once or twice before, earlier in the day, a moving figure in the grass; and when my eyes shifted back to examine the posts, there was but a single post — a signpost whose one arm bore in faded lettering the words: “From Barton.” It pointed in the direction whence we had come….

I followed my companions in a dream that is better left untouched by words. Led by Malahide, we passed through Clifden; we came to the Trent and were ferried across; and a little later we reached, as the porter had described, a Midland station called Attenborough. A train soon took us back to the town where we were playing. Malahide, without a word, vanished from our side the moment we left the carriage. I did not see him again until, dressed in his lordly costume, he stood in the wings that night, waiting impatiently for his entrance. I had walked home with Forden, flung myself on the bed, and dropped off into a deep two-hours’ sleep.

IX

A performance behind the scenes that night was more dramatic — to me, at least — than anything the enthusiastic audience witnessed from the front. The three of us met in the wings for the first time since Malahide had given us the slip at the station. High tea at six I had alone, Forden for some reason going to a shop for his meal. Malahide, for another reason, ate nothing. We met, anyhow, at our respective posts in the wings. Neither Forden nor I were on till late in the second act, and as we came down the rickety stairs from separate dressing-rooms, at the same moment it so chanced, I realised at once that he was as little inclined to talk as I was. My own mind was still too packed with the whirling wonder of the whole affair for utterance. We nodded, then dropped back towards the door through which he would presently make his entrance.

It was just then, while someone was whispering “He’s giving a marvellous performance tonight,” that Malahide swept by me from his exit and ran to his dressing-room for a hurried change.

“Hullo, Hubert!” he cried in his tempestuous way. “I say…” as though it surprised him to see me there. “By the by,” he rattled on, stopping dead for a breathless second in the rush to his room, “there’s a place called Barton I want to see — Barton-in-Fabis. Let’s go tomorrow. There’s a train at 10.15. Forden can come too!” And he was gone. Gone too, I realised with a dreadful sinking of the heart, a trembling of the nerves as well — utterly gone as though it had never happened, was all memory of the day’s adventure. The mind in Malahide was blank as a clean-washed slate.

And Forden — standing close behind him within easy earshot — my eye fell upon Forden, who had heard every single word. I saw him stare and bite his lips. He passed a hand aimlessly across his forehead. His eyelids flickered. There was a quiver of the lips. In his old man’s wig and make-up, he looked neither himself nor the part he was just about to play. Waiting there for his cue, now imminent, he stared fixedly at Malahide’s vanishing figure, then at me, then blankly into space. He was like a man about to fall. He looked bewitched again. A moment’s intense strain shot across the delicate features. He made in that instant, I am convinced, a tremendous, a violent, effort to recapture something that evaded him, an effort that failed completely. The next second, too swift to be measurable, that amazing expression, the angel’s, shone out amazingly. It flashed and vanished…. His cue sounded. He, too, was gone.

How I made my own entrance, I hardly know. Five minutes later we met on the stage. He was normal. He was acting beautifully. His mind, like Malahide’s, was a clean-washed slate.

X

My one object was to avoid speech with either Malahide or Forden. The former was on the stage until the end of the play, but the latter made no appearance in the last act. I slipped out the moment I was free to go. Malahide’s door was ajar, but he did not see me. Foregoing supper, I was safely in bed when I heard Forden come upstairs soon after midnight. I fell into an uneasy sleep that must have been deeper, however, than it seemed, for I did not hear Malahide come in, but I was wide awake on the instant, dread clutching me with gripping force, when I heard Forden’s voice outside my door.

“It’s half-past nine!” he warned me. “We mustn’t miss the train, remember!”

After gulping down some coffee, I went with him to the station, and he was normal and collected as you please. We chatted in our usual fashion. Clearly, his mind held no new, strange thing of any sort. Malahide was there before us….

The day, for me, was a nightmare of appalling order. A kind of mystical horror held me in a vice. Half-memories of bewildering and incredible things haunted me. The odour of burning, faint but unmistakable, was never absent….

We took single tickets to Stanton, Malahide reading a pile of papers and commenting volubly on the criticisms of the play. A porter at the station gave us confused directions. We followed faulty signposts, ancient and illegible, losing ourselves rather stupidly … and I noticed a man — a farmer with a spud — wandering about the fields and making thrusts from time to time at thistles. A sham storm followed a low line of hills, but no rain fell, and the brilliance of the April day was otherwise unspoilt. Barton itself we never reached, but we crossed the Trent on our way to a station called Attenborough, first passing a hamlet, Clifden, where, Forden informed us, he had met the girl he later made his wife.

It was a dull and uninspired expedition, Malahide voluble without being articulate, Forden rather silent on the whole … and at the home station Malahide gave us the slip without a word … but during the entire outing neither one nor other betrayed the slightest hint of familiarity with anything they had known before. In myself the memory lay mercilessly sharp and clear. I noted each startling contrast between the one and other. At the end I was worn out, bone-tired, every nerve seemed naked … and, again, I left the theatre alone, ran home, and went supperless to bed.

My determination was to keep awake at all costs, but sleep caught me too easily, as I believed it was meant to catch me. No such little thing as a warning was allowed to override what had to be, what had already been…. In the early hours of the morning, about two o’clock, to be exact, I woke from a nightmare of overwhelming vividness. Wide awake I was, the instant I opened my eyes. The nightmare was one of suffocation. I was being suffocated, and I carried over into waking consciousness the smell of burning and the atmosphere of smoke. The room, I saw at once, was full of smoke, the burning was not a dream. I was being suffocated. But in my case the suffocation was not complete, whereas Malahide and Forden died, according to the doctors, in their sleep. They did not even wake. They knew no pain….

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE PIKESTAFFE CASE

I

The vitality of old governesses deserves an explanatory memorandum by a good physiologist. It is remarkable. They tend to survive the grown-up married men and women they once taught as children. They hang on forever, as a man might put it crudely, a man, that is, who, taught by one of them in his earliest schoolroom days, would answer enquiries fifty years later without enthusiasm: “Oh we keep her going, yes. She doesn’t want for anything!”

Miss Helena Speke had taught the children of a distinguished family, and these distinguished children, with expensive progeny of their own now, still kept her going. They had clubbed together, seeing that Miss Speke retained her wonderful health, and had established her in a nice little house where she could take respectable lodgers — men for preference — giving them the three B’s — bed, bath, and breakfast. Being a capable woman, Miss Speke more than made both ends meet. She wanted for nothing. She kept going.

Applicants for her rooms, especially for the first-floor suite, had to be recommended. She had a stern face for those who rang the bell without a letter in their pockets. She never advertised. Indeed, there was no need to do so. The two upper floors had been occupied by the same tenants for many years — a chief clerk in a branch bank and a retired clergyman respectively. It was only the best suite that sometimes “happened to be vacant at the moment.” From two guineas inclusive before the war, her price for this had been raised, naturally, to four, the tenant paying his gas-stove, light, and bath extra. Breakfast — she prided herself legitimately on her good breakfasts — was included.

For a long time now this first-floor suite had been unoccupied. The Cost of living worried Miss Speke, as it worried most other people. Her servant was cheap but incompetent, and once she could let the suite she meant to engage a better one. The distinguished children were scattered out of reach about the world; the eldest had been killed in the war; a married one, a woman, lived in India; another married one was in the throes of divorce — an expensive business; and the fourth, the most generous and last, found himself in the Bankruptcy Court, and so was unable to help.

It was in these conditions that Miss Speke, her vitality impaired, decided to advertise. Although she inserted the words “references essential,” she meant in her heart to use her own judgement, and if a likely gentleman presented himself and agreed to pay her price, she might accept him. The clergyman and the bank official upstairs were a protection, she felt. She invariably mentioned them to applicants: “I have a clergyman of the Church of England on the top floor. He’s been with me for eleven years. And a banker has the floor below. Mine is a very quiet house, you see.” These words formed part of the ritual she recited in the hall, facing her proposed tenants on the linoleum by the hat-rack; and it was these words she addressed to the tall, thin, pale-faced man with scanty hair and spotless linen, who informed her that he was a tutor, a teacher of higher mathematics to the sons of various families — he mentioned some first-class names where references could be obtained — a student besides and something of an author in his leisure hours. His pupils he taught, of course, in their respective houses, one being in Belgrave Square, another in The Albany; it was only after tea, or in the evenings, that he did his own work. All this he explained briefly, but with great courtesy of manner.

Mr. Thorley was well spoken, with a gentle voice, kind, far-seeing eyes, and an air of being lonely and uncared for that touched some forgotten, dried-up spring in Miss Speke’s otherwise rather cautious heart. He looked every inch a scholar — “and a gentleman,” as she explained afterwards to everybody who was interested in him, these being numerous, of unexpected kinds, and all very close, not to say unpleasantly close, questioners indeed. But what chiefly influenced her in his favour was the fact, elicited in conversation, that years ago he had been a caller at the house in Portman Square where she was governess to the distinguished family. She did not exactly remember him, but he had certainly known Lady Araminta, the mother of her charges.

Thus it was that Mr. Thorley — John Laking Thorley, M.A., of Jesus College, Cambridge — was accepted by Miss Speke as tenant of her best suite on the first floor at the price mentioned, breakfast included, winning her confidence so fully that she never went to the trouble even of taking up the references he gave her. She liked him, she felt safe with him, she pitied him. He had not bargained, nor tried to beat her down. He just reflected a moment, then agreed. He proved, indeed, an exemplary lodger, early to bed and not too early to rise, of regular habits, thoughtful of the expensive new servant, careful with towels, electric light, and ink-stains, prompt in his payments, and never once troubling her with complaints or requests, as other lodgers did, not excepting the banker and the clergyman. Moreover, he was a tidy man, who never lost anything, because he invariably put everything in its proper place and thus knew exactly where to look for it. She noticed this tidiness at once.

Miss Speke, especially in the first days of his tenancy, studied him, as she studied all her lodgers. She studied his room, when he was out “of a morning.” At her leisure she did this, knowing he would never break in and disturb her unexpectedly. She was neither prying nor inquisitive, she assured herself, but she was curious. “I have a right to know something about the gentlemen who sleep under my roof with me,” was the way she put it in her own mind. His clothes, she found, were ample, including evening dress, white gloves, and an opera hat. He had plenty of boots and shoes. His linen was good. His wardrobe, indeed, though a trifle uncared for, especially his socks, was a gentleman’s wardrobe. Only one thing puzzled her. The full-length mirror, standing on mahogany legs — a present from the generous “child,” now in the Bankruptcy Court, and, a handsome thing, a special attraction in the best suite — this fine mirror Mr. Thorley evidently did not like. The second or third morning he was with her she went to his bedroom before the servant had done it up, and saw, to her surprise, that this full-length glass stood with its back to the room. It had been placed close against the wall in a corner, its unattractive back turned outward.

“It gave me quite a shock to see it,” as she said afterwards. “And such a handsome piece, too!”

Her first thought, indeed, sent a cold chill down her energetic spine. “He’s cracked it!” But it was not cracked. She paused in some amazement, wondering why her new lodger had done this thing; then she turned the mirror again into its proper position, and left the room. Next morning she found it again with its face close against the wall. The following day it was the same — she turned it round, only to find it the next morning again with its back to the room.

She asked the servant, but the servant knew nothing about it.

“He likes it that way, I suppose, mum,” was all Sarah said. “I never laid a ’and on it once.”

Miss Speke, after much puzzled consideration, decided it must be something to do with the light. Mr. Thorley, she remembered, wore horn-rimmed spectacles for reading. She scented a mystery. It caused her a slight — oh, a very slight — feeling of discomfort. Well, if he did not like the handsome mirror, she could perhaps use it in her own room. To see it neglected hurt her a little. Not many furnished rooms could boast a full-length glass, she reflected. A few days later, meeting Mr. Thorley on the linoleum before the hat-rack, she enquired if he was quite comfortable, and if the breakfast was to his liking. He was polite and even cordial. Everything was perfect, he assured her. He had never been so well looked after. And the house was so quiet.

“And the bed, Mr. Thorley? You sleep well, I hope.” She drew nearer to the subject of the mirror, but with caution. For some reason she found a difficulty in actually broaching it. It suddenly dawned upon her that there was something queer about his treatment of that full-length glass. She was by no means fanciful, Miss Speke, retired governess; only the faintest suspicion of something odd brushed her mind and vanished. But she did feel something. She found it impossible to mention the handsome thing outright.

“There’s nothing you would like changed in the room, or altered?” she enquired with a smile, “or — in any way put different — perhaps?”

Mr. Thorley hesitated for a moment. A curious expression, half sad, half yearning, she thought, lit on his thoughtful face for one second and was gone. The idea of moving anything seemed distasteful to him.

“Nothing, Miss Speke, I thank you,” he replied courteously, but without delay. “Everything is really just as I like it.” Then, with a little bow, he asked: “I trust my typewriter disturbs nobody. Please let me know if it does.”

Miss Speke assured him that nobody minded the typewriter in the least, nor even heard it, and, with another charming little bow and a smile, Mr. Thorley went out to give his lessons in the higher mathematics.

“There!” she reflected, “and I never even asked him!” It had been impossible.

From the window she watched him going down the street, his head bent, evidently in deep thought, his books beneath his arm, looking she thought, every inch the gentleman and the scholar that he undoubtedly was. His personality left a very strong impression on her mind. She found herself rather wondering about him. As he turned the corner Miss Speke owned to two things that rose simultaneously in her mind: first, the relief that the lodger was out for the day and could be counted upon not to return unexpectedly; secondly, that it would interest her to slip up and see what kind of books he read. A minute later she was in his sitting-room. It was already swept and dusted, the breakfast cleared away, and the books, she saw, lay partly on the table where he had just left them and partly on the broad mantelpiece he used as a shelf. She was alone, the servant was downstairs in the kitchen. She examined Mr. Thorley’s books.

The examination left her bewildered and uninspired. “I couldn’t make them out at all,” she put it. But they were evidently what she called costly volumes, and that she liked. “Something to do with his work, I suppose — mathematics, and all that,” she decided, after turning over pages covered with some kind of hieroglyphics, symbols being a word she did not know in that connection. There was no printing, there were no sentences, there was nothing she could lay hold of, and the diagrams she thought perhaps were Euclid, or possibly astronomical. Most of the names were odd and quite unknown to her. Gauss! Minowski! Lobatchewski! And it affronted her that some of these were German. A writer named Einstein was popular with her lodger, and that, she felt, was a pity, as well as a mistake in taste. It all alarmed her a little; or, rather she felt that touch of respect, almost of awe, pertaining to some world entirely beyond her ken. She was rather glad when the search — it was a duty — ended.

“There’s nothing there,” she reflected, meaning there was nothing that explained his dislike of the full-length mirror. And, disappointed, yet with a faint relief, she turned to his private papers. These, since he was a tidy man, were in a drawer. Mr. Thorley never left anything lying about. Now, a letter Miss Speke would not have thought of reading, but papers, especially learned papers, were another matter. Conscience, nevertheless, did prick her faintly as she cautiously turned over sheaf after sheaf of large white foolscap, covered with designs, and curves, and diagrams in ink, the ink he never spilt, and assuredly in his recent handwriting. And it was among these foolscap sheets that she suddenly came upon one sheet in particular that caught her attention and even startled her. In the centre, surrounded by scriggly hieroglyphics, numbers, curves and lines meaningless to her, she saw a drawing of the full-length mirror. Some of the curves ran into it and through it, emerging on the other side. She knew it was the mirror because its exact measurements were indicated in red ink.

This, as mentioned, startled her. What could it mean? she asked herself, staring intently at the curious sheet, as though it must somehow yield its secret to prolonged even if unintelligent enquiry. “It looks like an experiment or something,” was the furthest her mind could probe into the mystery, though this, she admitted, was not very far. Holding the paper at various angles, even upside down, she examined it with puzzled curiosity, then slowly laid it down again in the exact place whence she had taken it. That faint breath of alarm had again suddenly brushed her soul, as though she approached a mystery she had better leave unsolved.

“It’s very strange—” she began, carefully closing the drawer, but unable to complete the sentence even in her mind. “I don’t think I like it — quite,” and she turned to go out. It was just then that something touched her face, tickling one cheek, something fine as a cobweb, something in the air. She picked it away. It was a thread of silk, extremely fine, so fine, indeed, that it might almost have been a spider’s web of gossamer such as one sees floating over the garden lawn on a sunny morning. Miss Speke brushed it away, giving it no further thought, and went about her usual daily duties.

II

But in her mind was established now a vague uneasiness, though so vague that at first she did not recognise it. Her thought would suddenly pause. “Now, what is it?” she would ask herself. “Something’s on my mind. What is it I’ve forgotten?” The picture of her first-floor lodger appeared, and she knew at once. “Oh, yes, it’s that mirror and the diagrams, of course.” Some taut wire of alarm was quivering at the back of her mind. It was akin to those childhood alarms that pertain to the big unexplained mysteries no parent can elucidate because no parent knows. “Only God can tell that,” says the parent, evading the insoluble problem. “I’d better not think about it,” was the analogous conclusion reached by Miss Speke. Meanwhile the impression the new lodger’s personality made upon her mind perceptibly deepened. He seemed to her full of power, above little things, a man of intense and mysterious mental life. He was constantly and somewhat possessingly in her thoughts. The mere thought of him, she found, stimulated her.

It was just before luncheon, as she returned from her morning marketing, that the servant drew her attention to certain marks upon the carpet of Mr. Thorley’s sitting-room. She had discovered them as she handled the vacuum cleaner — faint, short lines drawn by dark chalk or crayons, in shape like the top or bottom right-angle of a square bracket, and sometimes with a tiny arrow shown as well. There were occasional other marks, too, that Miss Speke recognised as the hieroglyphics she called squiggles. Mistress and servant examined them together in a stooping position. They found others on the bedroom carpet, too, only these were not straight; they were small curved lines; and about the feet of the full-length mirror they clustered in a quantity, segments of circles, some large, some small. They looked as if someone had snipped off curly hair, or pared his fingernails with sharp scissors, only considerably larger, and they were so faint that they were only visible when the sunlight fell upon them.

“I knew they was drawn on,” said Sarah, puzzled, yet proud that she had found them, “because they didn’t come up with the dust and fluff.”

“I’ll — speak to Mr. Thorley,” was the only comment Miss Speke made. “I’ll tell him.” Her voice was not quite steady, but the girl apparently noticed nothing.

“There’s all this, too, please, mum.” She pointed to a number of fine silk threads she had collected upon a bit of newspaper, preparatory to the dust-bin. “They was stuck on the cupboard door and the walls, stretched all across the room, but rather ’igh up. I only saw them by chance. One caught on my face.”

Miss Speke stared, touched, examined for some seconds without speaking. She remembered the thread that had tickled her own cheek. She looked enquiringly round the room, and the servant, following her suggestion, indicated where the threads had been attached to walls and furniture. No marks, however, were left; there was no damage done.

“I’ll mention it to Mr. Thorley,” said her mistress briefly, unwilling to discuss the matter with the new servant, much less to admit that she was uncomfortably at sea. “Mr. Thorley,” she added, as though there was nothing unusual, “is a high mathematician. He makes — measurements and — calculations of that sort.” She had not sufficient control of her voice to be more explicit, and she went from the room aware that, unaccountably, she was trembling. She had first gathered up the threads, meaning to show them to her lodger when she demanded an explanation. But the explanation was delayed, for — to state it bluntly — she was afraid to ask him for it. She put it off till the following morning, then till the day after, and, finally, she decided to say nothing about the matter at all. “I’d better leave it,. perhaps, after all,” she persuaded herself. “There’s no damage done, anyhow. I’d better not inquire.” All the same she did not like it. By the end of the week, however, she was able to pride herself upon her restraint and tact; the marks on the carpet, rubbed out by the girl, were not renewed, and the fine threads of silk were never again found stretching through the air from wall to furniture. Mr. Thorley had evidently noticed their removal and had discontinued what he had observed was an undesirable performance. He was a scholar and a gentleman. But he was more. He was frank and straight-dealing. One morning he asked to see his landlady and told her all about it himself.

“Oh,” he said in his pleasantest, easiest manner when she came into the room, “I wanted to tell you, Miss Speke — indeed, I meant to do so long before this — about the marks I made on your carpets” — he smiled apologetically — “and the silk threads I stretched. I use them for measurements — for problems I set my pupils, and one morning I left them there by mistake. The marks easily rub out. But I will use scraps of paper instead another time. I can pin these on — if you will kindly tell your excellent servant not to touch them — er — they’re rather important to me.” He smiled again charmingly, and his face wore the wistful, rather yearning expression that had already appealed to her. The eyes, it struck her, were very brilliant. “Any damage,” he added — “though, I assure you, none is possible really — I would of course, make good to you, Miss Speke.”

“Thank you, Mr. Thorley,” was all Miss Speke could find to say, so confused was her mind by troubling thoughts and questions she dared not express. “Of course — this is my best suite, you see.”

It was all most amicable and pleasant between them.

“I wonder — have my books come?” he asked, as he went out. “Ah, there they are, I do believe!” he exclaimed, for through the open front door a van was seen discharging a very large packing-case.

“Your books, Mr. Thorley—?” Miss Speke murmured, noting the size of the package with dismay. “But I’m afraid — you’ll hardly find space to put them in,” she stammered. “The rooms — er” — she did not wish to disparage them — “are so small, aren’t they?”

Mr. Thorley smiled delightfully. “Oh, please do not trouble on that account,” he said. “I shall find space all right, I assure you. It’s merely a question of knowing where and how to put them,” and then proceeded to give the men instructions.

A few days later a second case arrived.

“I’m expecting some instruments, too,” he mentioned casually, “mathematical instruments,” and he again assured her with his confident smile that she need have no anxiety on the score of space. Nor would he dent the walls or scrape the furniture the least little bit. There was always room, he reminded her gently again, provided one knew how to stow things away. Both books and instruments were necessary to his work. Miss Speke need feel no anxiety at all.

But Miss Speke felt more than anxiety, she felt uneasiness, she felt a singular growing dread. There lay in her a seed of distress that began to sprout rapidly. Everything arrived as Mr. Thorley had announced, case upon case was unpacked in his room by his own hands. The straw and wood she used for firing purposes, there was no mess, no litter, no untidiness, nor were walls and furniture injured in any way. What caused her dread to deepen into something bordering upon actual alarm was the fact that, on searching Mr. Thorley’s rooms when he was out, she could discover no trace of any of the things that had arrived. There was no sign of either books or instruments. Where had he stored them? Where could they lie concealed? She asked herself innumerable questions, but found no answer to them. These stores, enough to choke and block the room, had been brought in through the sitting-room door. They could not possibly have been taken out again. They had not been taken out. Yet no trace of them was anywhere to be seen. It was very strange, she thought; indeed, it was more than strange. She felt excited. She felt a touch of hysterical alarm.

Meanwhile, thin strips of white paper, straight, angled, curved, were pinned upon the carpet; threads of finest silk again stretched overhead connecting the top of the door lintel with the window, the high cupboard with the curtain rods — yet too high to be brushed away merely by the head of anyone moving in the room. And the full-length mirror still stood with its face close against the wall.

The mystery of these aerial entanglements increased Miss Speke’s alarm considerably. What could their purpose be? “Thank God,” she thought, “this isn’t war time!” She knew enough to realise their meaning was not “wireless.” That they bore some relation to the lines on the carpet and to the diagrams and curves upon the paper, she grasped vaguely. But what it all meant baffled her and made her feel quite stupid. Where all the books and instruments had disappeared added to her bewilderment. She felt more and more perturbed. A vague, uncertain fear was worse than something definite she could face and deal with. Her fear increased. Then, suddenly, yet with a reasonable enough excuse, Sarah gave notice.

For some reason Miss Speke did not argue with the girl. She preferred to let the real meaning of her leaving remain unexpressed. She just let her go. But the fact disturbed her extraordinarily. Sarah had given every satisfaction, there had been no sign of a grievance, no complaint, the work was not hard, the pay was good. It was simply that the girl preferred to leave. Miss Speke attributed it to Mr. Thorley. She became more and more disturbed in mind. Also she found herself, more and more, avoiding her lodger, whose regular habits made such avoidance an easy matter.

Knowing his hours of exit, and entrance, she took care to be out of the way. At the mere sound of his step she flew to cover. The new servant, a stupid, yet not inefficient country girl, betrayed no reaction of any sort, no unfavourable reaction at any rate. Having received her instructions, Lizzie did her work without complaint from either side. She did not remove the paper and the thread, nor did she mention them. She seemed just the country clod she was. Miss Speke, however, began to have restless nights. She contracted an unpleasant habit: she lay awake — listening.

III

As the result of one of these sleepless nights she came to the abrupt conclusion that she would be happier without Mr. Thorley in the house — only she had not the courage to ask him to leave. The truth was she had not the courage to speak to him at all, much less to give him notice, however nicely.

After much cogitation she hit upon a plan that promised well: she sent him a carefully worded letter explaining that, owing to increased cost of living, she found herself compelled to raise his terms. The “raise” was more than considerable, it was unreasonable, but he paid what she demanded, sending down a cheque for three months in advance with his best compliments. The letter somehow made her tremble. It was at this stage she first became aware of the existence in her of other feelings than discomfort, uneasiness, and alarm. These other feelings, being in contradiction of her dread, were difficult to describe, but their result was plain — she did not really wish Mr. Thorley to go after all. His friendly compliments, his refusal of her hint, caused her a secret pleasure. It was not the cheque at the increased rate that pleased her — it was simply the fact that her lodger meant to stay.

It might be supposed that some delayed sense of romance had been stirred in her, but this really was not the case at all. Her pleasure was due to another source, but to a source uncommonly obscure and very strange. She feared him, feared his presence, above all, feared going into his room, while yet there was something about the mere idea of Mr. Thorley that entranced her. Another thing may as well be told at once — she herself faced it boldly — she would enter his dreaded room, when he was out, and would deliberately linger there. There was an odd feeling in the room that gave her pleasure, and more than pleasure — happiness. Surrounded by the enigmas of his personality, by the lines and curves of white paper pinned upon her carpet, by the tangle of silken threads above her head, by the mysterious books, the more than mysterious diagrams in his drawer — yet all these, even the dark perplexity of the rejected mirror and the vanished objects, were forgotten in the curious sense of happiness she derived from merely sitting in his room. Her fear contained this other remarkable ingredient — an uncommon sense of joy, of liberty, of freedom. She felt exaltée.

She could not explain it, she did not attempt to do so. She would go shaking and trembling into his room, and a few minutes later this sense of uncommon happiness — of release, almost of escape, she felt it — would steal over her as though in her dried-up frozen soul spring had burst upon midwinter, as though something that crawled had suddenly most gloriously found wings. An indescribable exhilaration caught her.

Under this influence the dingy street turned somehow radiant, and the front door of her poor lodging-house opened upon blue seas, yellow sands, and mountains carpeted with flowers. Her whole life, painfully repressed and crushed down in the dull service of conventional nonentities, flashed into colour, movement, and adventure. Nothing confined her. She was no longer limited. She knew advance in all possible directions. She knew the stars. She knew escape!

An attempt has been made to describe for her what she never could have described herself.

The reaction, upon coming out again, was painful. Her life in the past as a governess, little better than a servant; her life in the present as lodging-house keeper; her struggle with servants, with taxes, with daily expenses; her knowledge that no future but a mere “living” lay in front of her until the grave was reached — these overwhelmed her with an intense depression that the contrast rendered almost insupportable. Whereas in his room she had perfume, freedom, liberty, and wonder — the wonder of some entirely new existence.

Thus, briefly, while Miss Speke longed for Mr. Thorley to leave her house, she became obsessed with the fear that one day he really would go. Her mind, it is seen, became uncommonly disturbed; her lodger’s presence being undoubtedly the cause. Her nights were now more than restless, they were sleepless. Whence came, she asked herself repeatedly in the dark watches, her fear? Whence came, too, her strange enchantment?

It was at this juncture, then, that a further item of perplexity was added to her mind. Miss Speke, as has been seen, was honourably disposed; she respected the rights of others, their property as well. Yet, included in the odd mood of elation the room and its atmosphere caused her, was also a vagrant, elusive feeling that the intimate, the personal — above all, the personal — had lost their original rigidity. Small individual privacies, secrecy, no longer held their familiar meaning quite. The idea that most things in life were to be shared slipped into her. A “secret,” to this expansive mood, was a childish attitude.

At any rate, it was while lingering in her lodger’s attractive room one day — a habit now — that she did something that caused her surprise, yet did not shock her. She saw an open letter lying on his table — and she read it.

Rather than an actual letter, however, it seemed a note, a memorandum. It began “To J. L. T.”

In a boyish writing, the meaning of the language escaped her entirely. She understood the strange words as little as she understood the phases of the moon, while yet she derived from their perusal a feeling of mysterious beauty, similar to the emotions the changes of that lovely satellite stirred in her:

To J. L. T.

I followed your instructions, though with intense effort and difficulty. I woke at 4 o’clock. About ten minutes later, as you said might happen, I woke a second time. The change into the second state was as great as the change from sleeping to waking, in the ordinary meaning of these words. But I could not remain ‘awake.’ I fell asleep again in about a minute — back into the usual waking state, I mean. Description in words is impossible, as you know. What I felt was too terrific to feel for long. The new energy must presently have burned me up. It frightened me — as you warned me it would. And this fear, no doubt, was the cause of my ‘falling asleep’ again so quickly.

Cannot we arrange a Call for Help for similar occasions in future?

G. P.

Against this note Mr. Thorley had written various strangest “squiggles”; higher mathematics, Miss Speke supposed. In the opposite margin, also in her lodger’s writing, were these words:

We must agree on a word to use when frightened. Help, or Help me, seems the best. To be uttered with the whole being.

Mr. Thorley had added a few other notes. She read them without the faintest prick of conscience. Though she understood no single sentence, a thrill of deep delight ran through her:

It amounts, of course, to a new direction; a direction at right angles to all we know, a new direction in oneself, a new direction — in living. But it can, perhaps, be translated into mathematical terms by the intellect. This, however, only a simile at best. Cannot be experienced that way. Actual experience possible only to changed consciousness. But good to become mathematically accustomed to it. The mathematical experiments are worth it. They induce the mind, at any rate, to dwell upon the new direction. This helps.

Miss Speke laid down the letter exactly where she had found it. No shame was in her. “G. P.,” she knew, meant Gerald Pikestaffe; he was one of her lodger’s best pupils, the one in Belgrave Square. Her feeling of mysterious elation, as already mentioned, seemed above all such matters as small secrecies or petty personal privacies. She had read a “private” letter without remorse. One feeling only caused in her a certain commonplace emotion: the feeling that, while she read the letter, her lodger was present, watching her. He seemed close behind her,. looking over her shoulder almost, observing her acts, her mood, her very thoughts — yet not objecting. He was aware, at any rate, of what she did….

It was under these circumstances that she bethought herself of her old tenant, the retired clergyman on the top floor, and sought his aid. The consolation of talking to another would be something, yet when the interview began all she could manage to say was that her mind was troubled and her heart not quite as it should be, and that she “didn’t know what to do about it all.” For the life of her she could not find more definite words. To mention Mr. Thorley she found suddenly utterly impossible.

“Prayer,” the old man interrupted her half-way, “prayer, my dear lady. Prayer, I find,” he repeated smoothly, “is always the best course in all one’s troubles and perplexities. Leave it to God. He knows. And in His good time He will answer.” He advised her to read the Bible and Longfellow. She added Florence Barclay to the list and followed his advice. The books, however, comforted her very little.

After some hesitation she then tried her other tenant. But the “banker” stopped her even sooner than the clergyman had done. MacPherson was very prompt:

“I can give you another ten shillings or maybe half a guinea,” he said briskly. “Times are deeficult, I know. But I can’t do more. If that’s suffeecient I shall be delighted to stay on—” and, with a nod and a quick smile that settled the matter then and there, he was through the door and down the steps on the way to his office.

It was evident that Miss Speke must face her troubles alone, a fact, for the rest, life had already taught her. The loyal, courageous spirit in her accepted the situation. The alternate moods of happiness and depression, meanwhile, began to wear out. “If only Mr. Thorley would go! If only Mr. Thorley will not go!” For some weeks now she had successfully avoided him. He made no requests nor complaints. His habits were as regular as sunrise, his payments likewise. Not even the servant mentioned him. He became a shadow in the house.

Then, with the advent of summertime, he came home, as it were, an hour earlier than usual. He invariably worked from 5.30 to 7.30, when he went out for his dinner. Tea he always had at a pupil’s house. It was a light evening, caused by the advance of the clock, and Miss Speke, mending her underwear at the window, suddenly perceived his figure coming down the street.

She watched, fascinated. Of two instincts — to hide herself, or to wait there and catch his eye — she obeyed the latter. She had not seen him for several weeks, and a deep thrill of happiness ran through her. His walk was peculiar, she noticed at once; he did not walk in a straight line. His tall, thin outline flowed down the pavement in long, sweeping curves, yet quite steadily. He was not drunk. He came nearer; he was not twenty feet away; at ten feet she saw his face clearly, and received a shock. It was worn, and thin, and wasted, but a light of happiness, of something more than happiness indeed, shone in it. He reached the area railings. He looked up. His face seemed ablaze. Their eyes met, his with no start of recognition, hers with a steady stare of wonder. She ran into the passage, and before Mr. Thorley had time to use his latchkey she had opened the door for him herself. Little she knew, as she stood there trembling, that she stood also upon the threshold of an amazing adventure.

Face to face with him her presence of mind deserted her. She could only look up into that worn and wasted face, into those happy, severe, and brilliant eyes, where yet burned a strange expression of wistful yearning, of uncommon wonder, of something that seemed not of this world quite. Such an expression she had never seen before upon any human countenance. Its light dazzled her. There was uncommon fire in the eyes. It enthralled her. The same instant, as she stood there gazing at him without a single word, either of welcome or enquiry, it flashed across her that he needed something from her. He needed help, her help. It was a far-fetched notion, she was well aware, but it came to her irresistibly. The conviction was close to her, closer than her skin.

It was this knowledge, doubtless, that enabled her to hear without resentment the strange words he at once made use of.

“Ah, I thank you, Miss Speke, I thank you,” the thin lips parting in a smile, the shining eyes lit with an emotion of more than ordinary welcome. “You cannot know what a relief it is to me to see you. You are so sound, so wholesome, so ordinary, so — forgive me, I beg — so commonplace.”

He was gone past her and upstairs into his sitting-room. She heard the key turn softly. She was aware that she had not shut the front door. She did so, then went back, trembling, happy, frightened, into her own room. She had a curious, rushing feeling, both frightful and bewildering, that the room did not contain her…. She was still sitting there two hours later, when she heard Mr. Thorley’s step come down the stairs and leave the house. She was still sitting there when she heard him return, open the door with his key, and go up to his sitting-room. The interval might have been two minutes or two weeks, instead of two hours merely. And all this time she had the wondrous sensation that the room did not contain her. The walls and ceilings did not shut her in. She was out of the room.

Escape had come very close to her. She was out of the house… out of herself as well….

IV

She went early to bed, taking this time the Bible with her. Her strange sensations had passed, they had left her gradually. She had made herself a cup of tea and had eaten a soft-boiled egg and some bread-and-butter. She felt more normal again, but her nerves were unusually sensitive. It was a comfort to know there were two men in the house with her, two worthy men, a clergyman and a banker. The Bible, the banker, the clergyman, with Mrs. Barclay and Longfellow not far from her bed, were certainly a source of comfort to her.

The traffic died away, the rumbling of the distant motor-buses ceased, and, with the passing of the hours, the night became intensely still.

It was April. Her window was opened at the top and she could smell the cool, damp air of coming spring. Soothed by the books she began to feel drowsy. She glanced at the clock — it was just on two — then blew out the candle and prepared to sleep. Her thoughts turned automatically to Mr. Thorley, lying asleep on the floor above, his threads and paper strips and mysterious diagrams all about him — when, suddenly, a voice broke through the silence with a cry for help. It was a man’s voice, and it sounded a long way off. But she recognised it instantly, and she sprang out of bed without a trace of fear. It was Mr. Thorley calling, and in the voice was anguish.

“He’s in trouble! In danger! He needs help! I knew it!” ran rapidly through her mind, as she lit the candle with fingers that did not tremble. The clock showed three. She had slept a full hour. She opened the door and peered into the passage, but saw no one there; the stairs, too, were empty. The call was not repeated.

“Mr. Thorley!” she cried aloud. “Mr. Thorley! Do you want anything?” And by the sound of her voice she realised how distant and muffled his own had been. “I’m coming!”

She stood there waiting, but no answer came. There was no sound. She realised the uncommon stillness of the night.

“Did you call me?” she tried again, but with less confidence. “Can I do anything for you?”

Again there was no answer; nothing stirred; the house was silent as the grave. The linoleum felt cold against her bare feet, and she stole back to get her slippers and a dressing-gown, while a hundred possibilities flashed through her mind at once. Oddly enough, she never once thought of burglars, nor of fire, nor, indeed, of any ordinary situation that required ordinary help. Why this was so she could not say. No ordinary fear, at any rate, assailed her in that moment, nor did she feel the smallest touch of nervousness about her own safety.

“Was it — I wonder — a dream?” she asked herself as she pulled the dressing-gown about her. “Did I dream that voice—?” when the thrilling cry broke forth again, startling her so that she nearly dropped the candle.

“Help! Help! Help me!”

Very distinct, yet muffled as by distance, it was beyond all question the voice of Mr. Thorley. What she had taken for anguish in it she now recognised was terror. It sounded on the floor above, it was the closed door doubtless that caused the muffled effect of distance.

Miss Speke ran along the passage instantly, and with extraordinary speed for an elderly woman; she was half-way up the stairs in a moment, when, just as she reached the first little landing by the bathroom and turned to begin the second flight the voice came again: “Help! Help!” but this time with a difference that, truth to tell, did set her nerves unpleasantly a-quiver. For there were two voices instead of one, and they were not upstairs at all. Both were below her in the passage she had just that moment left. Close they were behind her. One, moreover, was not the voice of Mr. Thorley. It was a boy’s clear soprano. Both called for help together, and both held a note of terror that made her heart shake.

Under these conditions it may be forgiven to Miss Speke that she lost her balance and reeled against the wall, clutching the banisters for a moment’s support. Yet her courage did not fail her. She turned instantly and quickly went downstairs again — to find the passage empty of any living figure. There was no one visible. There was only silence, a motionless hat-rack, the door of her own room slightly ajar, and shadows.

“Mr. Thorley!” she called. “Mr. Thorley!” her voice not quite so loud and confident as before. It had a whisper in it. No answer came. She repeated the words, her tone with still less volume. Only faint echoes that seemed to linger unduly came in response. Peering into her own room she found it exactly as she had left it. The dining-room, facing it, was likewise empty. Yet a moment before she had plainly heard two voices calling for help within a few yards of where she stood. Two voices! What could it mean? She noticed now for the first time a peculiar freshness in the air, a sharpness, almost a perfume, as though all the windows were wide open and the air of coming spring was in the house.

Terror, though close, had not yet actually gripped her. That she had gone crazy occurred to her, but only to be dismissed. She was quite sane and self-possessed. The changing direction of the sounds lay beyond all explanation, but an explanation, she was positive, there must be. The odd freshness in the air was heartening, and seemed to brace her. No, terror had not yet really gripped her. Ideas of summoning the servant, the clergyman, the banker, these she equally dismissed. It was no ordinary help that was needed, not theirs at any rate. She went boldly upstairs again and knocked at Mr. Thorley’s bedroom door. She knocked again and again, loud enough to waken him, if he had perchance called out in sleep, but not loud enough to disturb her other tenants. No answer came. There was no sound within. No light shone through the cracks. With his sitting-room the same conditions held.

It was the strangeness of the second voice that now stole over her with a deadly fear. She found herself cold and shivering. As she, at length, went slowly downstairs again the cries were suddenly audible once more. She heard both voices: “Help! Help! Help me!” Then silence. They were fainter this time. Far away, they sounded, withdrawn curiously into some remote distance, yet ever with the same anguish, the same terror in them as before. The direction, however, this time she could not tell at all. In a sense they seemed both close and far, both above her and below; they seemed — it was the only way she could describe the astounding thing — in any direction, or in all directions.

Miss Speke was really terrified at last. The strange, full horror of it gripped her, turning her heart suddenly to ice. The two voices, the terror in them, the extraordinary impression that they had withdrawn further into some astounding distance — this overcame her. She became appalled. Staggering into her room, she reached the bed and fell upon it in a senseless heap. She had fainted.

V

She slept late, owing probably to exhausted nerves. Though usually up and about by 7.30, it was after nine when the servant woke her. She sprawled half in the bed, half out; the candle, which luckily had extinguished itself in falling, lay upon the carpet. The events of the night came slowly back to her as she watched the servant’s face. The girl was white and shaking.

“Are you ill, mum?” Lizzie asked anxiously in a whisper; then, without waiting for an answer, blurted out what she had really come in to say: “Mr. Thorley, mum! I can’t get into his room. There’s no answer.” The girl was very frightened.

Mr. Thorley invariably had breakfast at 8 o’clock, and was out of the house punctually at 8.45.

“Was he ill in the night — perhaps — do you think?” Miss Speke said. It was the nearest she could get to asking if the girl had heard the voices. She had admirable control of herself by this time. She got up, still in her dressing-gown and slippers.

“Not that I know of, mum,” was the reply.

“Come,” said her mistress firmly. “We’ll go in.” And they went upstairs together.

The bedroom door, as the girl had said, was closed, but the sitting-room was open. Miss Speke led the way. The freshness of the night before lay still in the air, she noticed, though the windows were all closed tightly. There was an exhilarating sharpness, a delightful tang as of open space. She particularly mentions this. On the carpet, as usual, lay the strips of white paper, fastened with small pins, and the silk threads, also as usual, stretched across from lintel to cupboard, from window to bracket. Miss Speke brushed several of them from her face.

The door into the bedroom she opened, and went boldly in, followed more cautiously by the girl. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” said her mistress firmly. The bed, she saw, had not been slept in. Everything was neat and tidy. The long mirror stood close against the wall, showing its ugly back as usual, while about its four feet clustered the curved strips of paper Miss Speke had grown accustomed to.

“Pull the blinds up, Lizzie,” she said in a quiet voice.

The light now enabled her to see everything quite clearly. There were silken threads, she noticed distinctly, stretching from bed to window, and though both windows were closed there was this strange sweetness in the air as of a flowering spring garden. She sniffed it with a curious feeling of freedom, of release, though Lizzie, apparently, noticed nothing of all this.

“There’s his ’at and mackintosh,” the girl whispered in a frightened voice, pointing to the hooks on the door. “And the umbrella in the corner. But I don’t see ’is boots mum. They weren’t put out to be cleaned.”

Miss Speke turned and looked at her, voice and manner under full command. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“Mr Thorley ain’t gone out, mum,” was the reply in a tremulous tone.

At that very moment a faint, distant cry was audible in a man’s voice: “Help! Help!” Immediately after it a soprano, fainter still, called from what seemed even greater distance: “Help me!” The direction was not ascertainable. It seemed both in the room, yet far away outside in space above the roofs. A glance at the girl convinced Miss Speke that she had heard nothing.

“Mr. Thorley is not here,” whispered Miss Speke, one hand upon the brass bed-rail for support.

The room was undeniably empty.

“Leave everything exactly as it is,” ordered her mistress as they went out. Tears stood in her eyes, she lingered a moment on the threshold, but the sounds were not repeated. “Exactly as it is,” she repeated, closing the bedroom and then the sitting-room door behind her. She locked the latter, putting the key in her pocket. Two days later, as Mr. Thorley had not returned, she informed the police. But Mr. Thorley never returned. He had disappeared completely. He left no trace. He was never heard of again, though — once — he was seen.

Yet, this is not entirely accurate perhaps, for he was seen twice, in the sense that he was seen by two persons, and though he was not “heard of,” he was certainly heard. Miss Speke heard his voice from time to time. She heard it in the daytime and at night; calling for help and always with the same words she had first heard: “Help! Help! Help me!” It sounded very far away, withdrawn into immense distance, the distance ever increasing. Occasionally she heard the boy’s voice with it; they called together sometimes; she never heard the soprano voice alone. But the anguish and terror she had first noticed were no longer present. Alarm had gone out of them. It was more like an echo that she heard. Through all the hubbub, confusion and distressing annoyance of the police search and enquiry, the voice and voices came to her, though she never mentioned them to a single living soul, not even to her old tenants, the clergyman and the banker. They kept their rooms on — which was about all she could have asked of them. The best suite was never let again. It was kept locked and empty. The dust accumulated. The mirror remained untouched, its face against the wall.

The voices, meanwhile, grew more and more faint; the distance seemed to increase; soon the voice of the boy was no longer heard at all, only the cry of Mr. Thorley, her mysterious but perfect lodger, sang distantly from time to time, both in the sunshine and in the still darkness of the night hours. The direction whence it came, too, remained, as before, undeterminable. It came from anywhere and everywhere — from above, below, on all sides. It had become, too, a pleasant, even a happy sound; no dread belonged to it any more. The intervals grew longer then; days first, then weeks passed without a sound; and invariably, after these increasing intervals, the voice had become fainter, weaker, withdrawn into ever greater and greater distance. With the coming of the warm spring days it grew almost inaudible. Finally, with the great summer heats, it died away completely.

VI

The disappearance of Mr. Thorley, however, had caused no public disturbance on its own account, not until it was bracketed with another disappearance, that of one of his pupils, Sir Mark Pikestaffe’s son. The Pikestaffe’s Case then became a daily mystery that filled the papers. Mr. Thorley was of no consequence, whereas Sir Mark was a figure in the public eye.

Mr. Thorley’s life, as enquiry proved, held no mystery. He had left everything in order. He did not owe a penny. He owned, indeed, considerable property, both in land and securities, and teaching mathematics, especially to promising pupils, seemed to have been a hobby merely. A half-brother called eventually to take away his few possessions, but the books and instruments he had brought into the lodging-house were never traced. He was a scholar and a gentleman to the last, a man, too, it appeared, of immense attainments and uncommon ability, one of the greatest mathematical brains, if the modest obituaries were to be believed, the world has ever known. His name now passed into oblivion. He left no record of his researches or achievements. Out of some mysterious sense of loyalty and protection Miss Speke never Mentioned his peculiar personal habits. The strips of paper, as the silken threads, she had carefully removed and destroyed long before the police came to make their search of his rooms….

But the disappearance of young Gerald Pikestaffe raised a tremendous hubbub. It was some days before the two disappearances were connected, both having occurred on the same night, it was then proved. The boy, a lad of great talent, promising a brilliant future, and the favourite pupil of the older man, his tutor, had not even left the house. His room was empty — and that was all. He left no clue, no trace. Terrible hints and suggestions were, of course, spread far and wide, but there was not a scrap of evidence forthcoming to support them, Gerald Pikestaffe and Mr. Thorley, at the same moment of the same night, vanished from the face of the earth and were no more seen. The matter ended there. The one link between them appeared to have been an amazing, an exceptional gift for higher mathematics. The Pikestaffe Case merely added one more to the insoluble mysteries with which commonplace daily life is sprinkled.

•   •   •

It was some six weeks to a month after the event that Miss Speke received a letter from one of her former charges, the most generous one, now satisfactorily finished with the Bankruptcy Court. He had honourably discharged his obligations; he was doing well; he wrote and asked Miss Speke to put him up for a week or two. “And do please give me Mr. Thorley’s room,” he asked. “The case thrilled me, and I should like to sleep in that room. I always loved mysteries, you remember…. There’s something very mysterious about this thing. Besides, I knew the P. boy a little — an astounding genius, if ever there was one.”

Though it cost her much effort and still more hesitation, she consented finally. She prepared the rooms herself. There was a new servant, Lizzie having given notice the day after the disappearance, and the older woman who now waited upon the clergyman and the banker was not quite to be trusted with the delicate job. Miss Speke, entering the empty rooms on tiptoe, a strange trepidation in her heart, but that same heart firm with courage, drew up the blinds, swept the floors, dusted the furniture, and made the bed. All she did with her own hands. Only the full-length mirror she did not touch. What terror still was in her clung to that handsome piece. It was haunted by memories. For her it was still both wonderful and somehow awful. The ghost of her strange experience hid invisibly in its polished, if now unseen, depths. She dared not handle it, far less move it from the resting-place where it rested in peace. His hands had placed it there. To her it was sacred.

It had been given to her by Colonel Lyle, who would now occupy the room, stand on the wondrous carpet, move through the air where once the mysterious silks had floated, sleep in the very bed itself. All this he could do, but the mirror he must not touch.

“I’ll explain to him a little. I’ll beg him not to move it. He’s very understanding,” she said to herself, as she went out to buy some flowers for the sitting-room. Colonel Lyle was expected that very afternoon. Lilac, she remembered, was what he always liked. It took her longer than she expected to find really fresh bunches, of the colour that he preferred, and when she got back it was time to be thinking about his tea. The sun’s rays fell slanting down the dingy street, touching it with happy gold. This, with thoughts of the tea-kettle and what vase would suit the flowers best, filled her mind as she passed along the linoleum in the narrow hall — then noticed suddenly a new hat and coat hanging on the usually empty pegs. Colonel Lyle had arrived before his time.

“He’s already come,” she said to herself with a little gasp. A heavy dread settled instantly on her spirit. She stood a moment motionless in the passage, the lilac blossoms in her hand. She was listening.

“The gentleman’s come, mum,” she heard the servant say, and at the same moment saw her at the top of the kitchen stairs in the hall. “He went up to his room, mum.”

Miss Speke held out the flowers. With an effort to make her voice sound ordinary she gave an order about them. “Put them in water, Mary, please. The double vase will do.” She watched the woman take them slowly, oh, so slowly, from her. But her mind was elsewhere. It was still listening. And after the woman had gone down to the kitchen again slowly, oh, so slowly, she stood motionless for some minutes, listening, still intently listening. But no sound broke the quiet of the afternoon. She heard only the blundering noises made by the woman in the kitchen below. On the floor above was — silence.

Miss Speke then turned and went upstairs.

Now, Miss Speke admits frankly that she was “in a state,” meaning thereby, doubtless, that her nerves were tightly strung. Her heart was thumping, her ears and eyes strained to their utmost capacity; her hands, she remembers, felt a little cold, and her legs moved uncertainly. She denies, however, that her “state,” though it may be described as nervous, could have betrayed her into either invention or delusion. What she saw, she saw; and nothing can shake her conviction. Colonel Lyle, besides, is there to support her in the main outline, and Colonel Lyle, when first he had entered the room, was certainly not “in a state,” whatever excuses he may have offered later to comfort her. Moreover, to counteract her trepidation, she says that, as she pushed the door wide open — it was already ajar — the original mood of elation met her in the face with its lift of wonder and release. This modified her dread. She declares that joy rushed upon her, and that her “nerves” were on the instant entirely forgotten.

“What I saw, I saw,” remains her emphatic and unshakable verdict. “I saw — everything.”

The first thing she saw admitted certainly of no doubt. Colonel Lyle lay huddled up against the further wall, half upon the carpet and half-leaning on the wainscoting. He was unconscious. One arm was stretched towards the mirror, the hand still clutching one of its mahogany feet. And the mirror had been moved. It turned now slightly more towards the room.

The picture, indeed, told its own story, a story Colonel Lyle himself repeated afterwards when he had recovered. He was surprised to find the mirror — his mirror — with its face to the wall; he went forward to put it in its proper position; in doing this he looked into it; he saw something, and — the next thing he knew — Miss Speke was bringing him round.

She explains, further, that her overmastering curiosity to look into the mirror, as Colonel Lyle had evidently looked himself, prevented her from immediately rendering first-aid to that gentleman, as she unquestionably should have done. Instead, she crossed the room, stepped over his huddled form, turned the mirror a little further round towards her, and looked straight into it.

The eye, apparently, takes in a great deal more than the mind is consciously aware of having “seen” at the moment. Miss Speke saw everything, she claims. But details certainly came back to her later, details she had not been aware of at the time. At the moment, however, her impressions, though extremely vivid, were limited to certain outstanding items. These items were — that her own reflection was not visible, no picture of herself being there; that Mr. Thorley and a boy — she recognised the Pikestaffe lad from the newspaper photographs she had seen — were plainly there, and that books and instruments in great quantity filled all the nearer space, blocking up the foreground. Beyond, behind, stretching in all directions, she affirms, was empty space that produced upon her the effect of the infinite heavens as seen in a clear night sky. This space was prodigious, yet in some way not alarming. It did not terrify; rather it comforted, and, in a sense, uplifted. A diffused soft light pervaded the huge panorama. There were no shadows, there were no high lights.

Curiously enough, however, the absence of any reproduction of herself did not at first strike her as at all out of the way; she noticed the fact, no more than that; it was, perhaps, naturally, the deep shock of seeing Mr. Thorley and the boy that held her absolutely spellbound, arresting her faculties as though they had been frozen.

Mr. Thorley was moving to and fro, his body bent, his hand thrown forward. He looked as natural as in life. He moved steadily, as with a purpose, now nearer, now further, but his figure always bent as though he were intent upon something in his hands. The boy moved, too, but with a more gentle, less vigorous, motion that suggested floating. He followed the larger figure, keeping close, his face raised from time to time as though his companion spoke to him. The expression that he wore was quiet, peaceful, happy and intent. He was absorbed in what he was doing at the moment. Then, suddenly, Mr. Thorley straightened himself up. He turned. Miss Speke saw his face for the first time. He looked into her eyes. The face blazed with light. The gaze was straight, and full, and clear. It betrayed recognition. Mr. Thorley smiled at her.

In a very few seconds she was aware of all this, of its main outlines, at any rate. She saw the moving, living figures in the midst of this stupendous and amazing space. The overwhelming surprise it caused her prevented, apparently, the lesser emotion of personal alarm; fear she certainly did not feel at first. It was when Mr. Thorley looked at her with his brilliant eyes and blazing smile that her heart gave its violent jump, missed a beat or two, then began hammering against her ribs like released machinery that has gone beyond control. She was aware of the happy glory in the face, a face that was thin to emaciation, almost transparent, yet wearing an expression that was no longer earthly. Then, as he smiled, he came towards her; he beckoned; he stretched both hands out, while the boy looked up and watched.

Mr. Thorley’s advance, however, had two distracting peculiarities — that as he drew nearer he moved not in a straight line, but in a curve. As a skater performing “edges,” though on both feet instead of on one, he swept gracefully and with incredible speed in her direction. The other peculiarity was that with each step nearer his figure grew smaller. It lessened in height. He seemed, indeed, to be moving in two directions at once. He became diminutive.

The sight ought by rights to have paralysed her, yet it produced again, instead of terror, an effect of exhilaration she could not possibly account for. There came once again that fine elation to her mind. Not only did all desire to resist die away almost before it was born, but more, she felt its opposite — an overpowering wish to join him. The tiny hands were still stretched out to greet her, to draw her in, to welcome her; the smile upon the diminutive face, as it came nearer and nearer, was enchanting. She heard his voice then:

“Come, come to us! Here reality is nearer, and there is liberty…!”

The voice was very close and loud as in life, but it was not in front. It was behind her. Against her very ear it sounded in the air behind her back. She moved one foot forward; she raised her arms. She felt herself being sucked in — into that glorious space. There was an indescribable change in her whole being.

The cumulative effect of so many amazing happenings, all of them contrary to nature, should have been destructive to her reason. Their combined shock should have dislocated her system somewhere and have laid her low. But with every individual, it seems, the breaking-point is different. Her system, indeed, was dislocated, and a moment later and she was certainly laid low, yet it was not the effect of the figure, the voice, the gliding approach of Mr. Thorley that produced this. It was the flaw of little human egoism that brought her down. For it was in this instant that she first realised the absence of her own reflection in the mirror. The fact, though noticed before, had not entered her consciousness as such. It now definitely did so. The arms she lifted in greeting had no reflected counterpart. Her figure, she realised with a shock of terror, was not there. She dropped, then, like a stricken animal, one outstretched hand clutching the frame of the mirror as she did so.

“Gracious God!” she heard herself scream as she collapsed. She heard, too, the crash of the falling mirror which she overturned and brought down with her.

Whether the noise brought Colonel Lyle round, or whether it was the combined weight of Miss Speke and the handsome piece upon his legs that roused him, is of no consequence. He stirred, opened his eyes, disentangled himself and proceeded, not without astonishment, to render first-aid to the unconscious lady.

The explanations that followed are, equally, of little consequence. His own attack, he considered, was chiefly due to fatigue, to violent indigestion, and to the after-effects of his protracted bankruptcy proceedings. Thus, at any rate, he assured Miss Speke. He added, however, that he had received rather a shock from the handsome piece, for, surprised at finding it turned to the wall, he had replaced it and looked into it, but had not seen himself reflected. This had amazed him a good deal, yet what amazed him still more was that he had seen something moving in the depths of the glass. “I saw a face,” he said, “and it was a face I knew. It was Gerald Pikestaffe. Behind him was another figure, the figure of a man, whose face I could not see.” A mist rose before his eyes, his head swam a bit, and he evidently swayed for some unaccountable reason. It was a blow received in falling that stunned him momentarily.

He stood over her, while he fanned her face; her swoon was of brief duration; she recovered quickly; she listened to his story with a quiet mind. The after-effect of too great wonder leaves no room for pettier emotions, and traces of the exhilaration she had experienced were still about her heart and soul.

“Is it smashed?” was the first thing she asked, to which Colonel Lyle made no answer at first, merely pointing to the carpet where the frame of the long mirror lay in broken fragments.

“There was no glass, you see,” he said presently. He, too, was quiet, his manner very earnest; his voice, though subdued as by a hint of awe, betrayed the glow of some intense inner excitement that lit fire in his eyes as well. “He had cut it out long ago, of course. He used the empty framework merely.”

“Eh?” said Miss Speke, looking down incredulously, but finding no sign of splinters on the floor.

Her companion smiled. “We shall find it about somewhere if we look,” he said calmly, which, indeed, proved later true — lying flat beneath the carpet under the bed. “His measurements and calculations led — probably by chance — towards the mirror” — he seemed speaking to himself more than to his bewildered listener — “perhaps by chance, perhaps by knowledge,” he continued, “up to the mirror — and then through it.” He looked down at Miss Speke and laughed a little. “So, like Alice, he went through it, too, taking his books and instruments, the boy as well, all with him. The boy, that is, bad the knowledge, too.”

“I only know one thing,” said Miss Speke, unable to follow him or find meaning in his words, “I shall never let these rooms again. I shall lock them up.”

Her companion collected the broken pieces and made a little heap of them.

“And I shall pray for him,” added Miss Speke, as he led her presently downstairs to her own quarters. “I shall never cease to pray for him as long as I live.”

“He hardly needs that,” murmured Colonel Lyle, but to himself. “The first terror has long since left him. He’s found the new direction — and moved along it.”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

ALEXANDER ALEXANDER

His Christian name and surname were the same, and the fact that he insisted upon their proper use, respectively, made things often most unpleasant. His sombre dignity forbade familiarity. If, greatly daring, I said “Hullo, Alexander!” using his Christian name, he would assume a stern and frightening air:

“Alexander! If you please,” he would say icily. “Use my right name.”

Herein lay, perhaps, the heart of that dark secret which deceived mean for so my years, as also the essence of that horror his double masquerade concealed: Whereas, between Alexander and Alexander none knew which was which, he — alone of all the world — he knew!

To me, as a little girl, there was something portentous about him always. More than a common man, he was a Personage, a Figure. With the passage of the years my conception of him grew, for his bulk and stature grew at the same time, until, more than man, or personage, or figure, he became almost that emanation of legendary life — a Being. Although the original sharp outline remained, he spread himself out somehow over an immense, dim background, against which that first outline yet held itself fixed in vivid silhouette. I conceive him as both remote and very close, as shadow and substance, an unreality yet dreadfully composed of solid flesh and blood.

This confusion in my own mind added enormously to the mystery of his strange existence; but it was the mistake in the use of his name that remained chiefly serious, a crime of untold import, since it was I myself who first — christened him. To call him by a wrong name, therefore, was an insult to his actuality, a careless and unpardonable sacrilege that trifled with the essential nature of his personality.

I lived with an uncle, who was also my guardian, and this mystifying double role contributed, no doubt, an element to the birth of Alexander Alexander. Some childhood’s divination dramatised itself perhaps. If so, this earliest creative drama had a prophetic, even a clairvoyant, quality that enabled him to endure until he had fully justified his dark existence. Both Alexander and Alexander persisted through my girlhood. Only at the threshold of womanhood, when I came of age at twenty-one, did the dreadful pair pass hand in hand to their final distressing dissolution.

He — Alexander — often came to see my uncle, who, I divined, was a good deal afraid of him — a fact that impressed me painfully. He was tall, dark, angular, and so thin that he always looked cold, even in the sunshine; as though, having left off his flesh, as others leave off their thick underwear, he was forever shivering in his bones. Of those mummied Pharaohs he reminded me. He had the great square jaw, deep eyes, heavy cheekbones, and copious hair those gloomy figures of prodigious personality bear tirelessly with them down the ages. He walked on his toes a little, adding thus to the appearance of his height. He took, too, an immense and swinging stride, with an easy gliding motion that seemed to flow. His extraordinary swiftness of movement made me think of running water.

Oh, Alexander — or do I mean Alexander? — how you impressed me when I was about six years old! Which “Alexander”? I don’t quite know, to tell the truth. Years passed before I got even an inkling.

The names still flow, like parallel rivers, down and through my consciousness, to lose themselves in the depths of some mysterious dream-ocean where, at length and at last, they become merged, I believe, in one. There were certainly two of them — once. There was Alexander, and there was Alexander. I can swear to it.

It was his — Alexander’s copious hair that impressed me vividly at the age of six. It was smoothed down with shiny grease whose faint, but not unpleasant, aroma came into a room before its wearer, and hung about in the air long after he had left. Hair, perfume, grease, all fascinated me.

“That’s pomade,” explained my nurse, answering a question and using a strange new word. Then, fearful of some wrong use I might make of the information, she added: “and no business of yours, remember, either.” The queer word seized me; it remained hanging about my mind … pomade, pomade. How vividly, with what lasting depth and sharpness these early impressions score the mind of a child, so tenderly receptive. No wonder the psychologists dive after them to explain the irregularities of nerve and memory that emerge in later life. The name Alexander, to begin with, carried me away. It bore me along with it. There was movement in it. Jones, Green, Brown, one syllable names, are stationary and fixed; but “Alexander” had a glide. It was a watery movement; I always connected it with water. It flowed round and through and under me. It bore me easily away with it. I saw a rapid stream, whose undulating surface had no actual waves, owing to its speed, but swept along in rhythmic rise and fall, like a brimmed rivulet across a sloping meadow. My feet gave under me, and I was off. “Alexander, Alexander, oh, why cannot you meander?” I used to murmur to myself, using another strange new word I had discovered, a suitable word since it was the name of a river that also flowed. I saw copious hair, pomade, a lean, dark, careering figure on its toes, swinging rapidly down my mind with a pulse of hurrying water.

He was a solicitor, I imagined, and the name only half understood, somehow to me suggested prison; and my uncle, who was also my legal guardian, I fancied had done something wrong. It was rather confusing having an uncle who was guardian too. It puzzled me. My uncle was reserved, secretive — that is, as “guardian,” he was reserved, secretive; for as “uncle” he was affectionate, playful, kind, and very dear to me. I had this mingled fear and love.

The name had a strange power. I was, perhaps, nine years old when the goose frightened me in the yard behind the stables, and some undigested fairytale made me think its clacking beak was going to bite me into pieces. Pulling down my little skirts frantically to protect my bare legs, I found the bad rhyme instantly, though I may have shaped it actually a little later:

Alexander, Alexander,

Oh, come down into the yard!

For I’m frightened at the gander—

Oh, come quick with your pomade!

And he came. That was what lived with me for years, increasing enormously his influence. He came at once. The glass door of the conservatory opened, and out he poured with amazing swiftness, on his toes, turning his thin, dark face and head towards me. His great stride brought him up to me in a moment. He was, I believe, really looking for my uncle, who was in the stables just then, examining the horses. But it was in answer to my cry that he was beside me in a second. I caught the whiff of the pomade.

“Oh, Alexander—!” I cried, relieved, but also alarmed.

“Alexander,” he corrected me sternly, his deep eyes staring, while the gander retreated and left me safe at once. Yet, when I turned round again from watching the retreating bird, he — Alexander — had disappeared, and my uncle — or was it my guardian? — was coming towards me from the stables with a smile. The incident, at any rate, left a deep impression on me. The use — the correct use — of the great name evidently carried away with its own movement.

I saw him only occasionally as I grew older; during holidays, when home from school, and later, from a year in Paris to improve my French and acquire manners and deportment. He was aged in the eyes, and skin, and gait. The stream of his name no longer brimmed its banks as formerly. But the spell remained. And the pomaded hair kept young as ever. My uncle, I now realised somehow, welcomed his visits, yet while dreading them. I thought of the two at the time, I remember, as driver and driven in some mysterious enterprise of financial kind. They were. But Alexander was the driven, and Alexander held the whip. And once, lying half asleep in bed, a horrible suspicion came to me that my uncle — or was it my guardian? — knew. Knew what? Why “horrible?” I could not say, I felt it, that’s all.

A week after my return from Paris — I was to be of age next day — I was standing in the passage when he called. Thomas was leading the way. It was just outside the study door.

“Mr. Alexander to see you, sir,” I heard him announced.

The visitor glowered with vexation. “Mr. Alexander,” he rebuked the servant in a low tone, as he swung through the door on his toes into the study, where my uncle, or my guardian evidently awaited him. And as I heard the name, in the way he uttered it, a sudden wave of cold anxiety, more of acute distress, broke over me. As that lean, dark, pomaded head flowed round the open door with its extraordinary swiftness, and vanished, I felt afraid. The footman went past me with an expressionless face, but it seemed to me that his face was ghastly white. He disappeared in the empty hall beyond; I heard the green baize door into the nether regions swing to behind him with its customary gulp. But the draught of its closing came to me across all that distance; so that I felt it on my cheeks. And its touch was icy. I stood there shivering, unable at first to move or think. A vague dread and wonder held me. What were Alexander and Alexander saying to my uncle and my guardian?

What steps to take I knew not. For I was aware that I ought to take steps at once. My hesitation was caused by an inexplicable fear. It was the fear of my guardian, but for my uncle. Is that clear? While dreading my guardian, I felt, I knew, that I must help my uncle. Two courses seemed open to me: to enter the room, or to follow the footman and ask him an awful question.

I chose the latter. In a moment I was through the green baize door that led into the servants’ quarters; but, as I ran, a new suspicion fastened on me. It fastened on my spine where the shivering was. I was amazed and horror-stricken. For the suspicion was so complete that it must actually have lain in me a long, long time already.

“Thomas,” I said, breathlessly; “the gentleman you showed in just now — who was it?”

“I beg pardon, Miss,” he said, staring blankly. I asked the question a second time. “Showed in, Miss,” he repeated stupidly.

“The tall, dark gentleman,” I insisted, in a failing voice, “you just showed in to—” (I could not, for the life of me, say “my uncle’s”) — “into Mr. Burton’s study — Mr. — Mr.—?” I stammered and stuck fast.

The man paused a moment, with a puzzled air. He stared at me. “I showed no gentleman in, Miss,” he said, a trifle offended, his voice firm and decided. “Mr. Burton rang for—” (it was his turn to hesitate) — “for something to drink, Miss. And I just took it in to him.”

I knew then. I knew it all at once, complete. I tore back. But my thought raced faster than my legs. An elaborate fabric built most carefully, and standing firm for years, collapsed into ghastly ruins. The footman’s face, I remembered, was always white. My nurse, now dead, had always fallen in with my fancies. My uncle was tall and thin and dark, and had always worn pomaded hair. But it was only when I reached the study door that the final film cleared off, letting in the appalling light. For I suddenly remembered another thing as well; he acknowledged to a buried name. Hidden away among several others, he owned a name he never used. His full name, of course, was Frank Henry Alexander Burton.

I stood transfixed outside the door.

But precious minutes were passing. “Oh, Alexander, Alexander,” rushed down my mind. The childhood’s rhyme was about to follow, yard, gander, pomade and all, when a sound inside the room sent the ice again down my spine. It made my will tighten at the same time. I might be too late even now. Without knocking, I rushed into the room. The desk was strewn with documents and papers. A decanter of spirits stood beside them, with a half-emptied glass. The French windows were open on the lawn. The summer air came in. There was a faint aroma of pomade. But I was too late. The room was empty. “Oh, Alexander!” I gasped, petrified by the emptiness, and was about to add “Alexander” when a horrid weakness came over me and a blackness rose before my face. My legs collapsed. I fell into a dead faint on the floor….

It was “by water” of course, and the verdict was death by drowning while of unsound mind. I saw the body next day. It was my uncle’s, not my guardian’s body. The hair, for the first time, I saw tangled.

Oh, Alexander, Alexander! Merged at last in one! You, Alexander, left me a pauper. But for you, Alexander, I have still kind memories of a weak, affectionate, and sorely tempted uncle….

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE OLIVE

He laughed involuntarily as the olive rolled towards his chair across the shiny parquet floor of the hotel dining-room.

His table in the cavernous salle à manger was apart: he sat alone, a solitary guest; the table from which the olive fell and rolled towards him was some distance away. The angle, however, made him an unlikely objective. Yet the lob-sided, juicy thing, after hesitating once or twice en route as it plopped along, came to rest finally against his feet.

It settled with an inviting, almost an aggressive air. And he stooped and picked it up, putting it rather self-consciously, because of the girl from whose table it had come, on the white tablecloth beside his plate.

Then, looking up, he caught her eye, and saw that she too was laughing, though not a bit self-consciously. As she helped herself to the hors d’oeuvres a false move had sent it flying. She watched him pick the olive up and set it beside his plate. Her eyes then suddenly looked away again — at her mother — questioningly.

The incident was closed. But the little oblong, succulent olive lay beside his plate, so that his fingers played with it. He fingered it automatically from time to time until his lonely meal was finished.

When no one was looking he slipped it into his pocket, as though, having taken the trouble to pick it up, this was the very least he could do with it. Heaven alone knows why, but he then took it upstairs with him, setting it on the marble mantelpiece among his field glasses, tobacco tins, ink bottles, pipes and candlestick. At any rate, he kept it — the moist, shiny, lob-sided, juicy little oblong olive. The hotel lounge wearied him; he came to his room after dinner to smoke at his ease, his coat off and his feet on a chair; to read another chapter of Freud, to write a letter or two he didn’t in the least want to write, and then go to bed at ten o’clock. But this evening the olive kept rolling between him and the thing he read; it rolled between the paragraphs, between the lines; the olive was more vital than the interest of these eternal “complexes” and “suppressed desires.”

The truth was that he kept seeing the eyes of the laughing girl beyond the bouncing olive. She had smiled at him in such a natural, spontaneous, friendly way before her mother’s glance had checked her — a smile, he felt, that might lead to acquaintance on the morrow.

He wondered! A thrill of possible adventure ran through him.

She was a merry-looking sort of girl, with a happy, half-roguish face that seemed on the lookout for somebody to play with. Her mother, like most of the people in the big hotel, was an invalid; the girl, a dutiful and patient daughter. They had arrived that very day apparently.

A laugh is a revealing thing, he thought as he fell asleep to dream of a lob-sided olive rolling consciously towards him, and of a girl’s eyes that watched its awkward movements, then looked up into his own and laughed. In his dream the olive had been deliberately and cleverly dispatched upon its uncertain journey. It was a message.

He did not know, of course, that the mother, chiding her daughter’s awkwardness, had muttered: “There you are again, child! True to your name, you never see an olive without doing something queer and odd with it!”

A youngish man, whose knowledge of chemistry, including invisible inks and suchlike mysteries, had proved so valuable to the Censor’s Department that for five years he had overworked without a holiday, the Italian Riviera had attracted him, and he had come out for a two months’ rest. It was his first visit. Sun, mimosa, blue seas and brilliant skies had tempted him; exchange made a pound worth forty, fifty, sixty and seventy shillings. He found the place lovely, but somewhat untenanted.

Having chosen at random, he had come to a spot where the companionship he hoped to find did not exist. The place languished after the war, slow to recover; the colony of resident English was scattered still; travellers preferred the coast of France with Mentone and Monte Carlo to enliven them. The country, moreover, was distracted by strikes. The electric light failed one week, letters the next, and as soon as the electricians and postal-workers resumed, the railways stopped running. Few visitors came, and the few who came soon left.

He stayed on, however, caught by the sunshine and the good exchange, also without the physical energy to discover a better, livelier place. He went for walks among the olive groves, he sat beside the sea and palms, he visited shops and bought things he did not want because the exchange made them seem cheap, he paid immense “extras” in his weekly bill, then chuckled as he reduced them to shillings and found that a few pence covered them; he lay with a book for hours among the olive groves.

The olive groves! His daily life could not escape the olive groves; to olive groves, sooner or later, his walks, his expeditions, his meanderings by the sea, his shopping — all led him to these ubiquitous olive groves.

If he bought a picture postcard to send home, there was sure to be an olive grove in one corner of it. The whole place was smothered with olive groves, the people owed their incomes and existence to these irrepressible trees. The villages among the hills swam roof-deep in them. They swarmed even in the hotel gardens.

The guide books praised them as persistently as the residents brought them, sooner or later, into every conversation. They grew lyrical over them:

“And how do you like our olive trees? Ah, you think them pretty. At first, most people are disappointed. They grow on one.”

“They do,” he agreed.

“I’m glad you appreciate them. I find them the embodiment of grace. And when the wind lifts the under-leaves across a whole mountain slope — why, it’s wonderful, isn’t it? One realises the meaning of ’olive-green’.”

“One does,” he sighed. “But all the same I should like to get one to eat — an olive, I mean.”

“Ah, to eat, yes. That’s not so easy. You see, the crop is—”

“Exactly,” he interrupted impatiently, weary of the habitual and evasive explanations. “But I should like to taste the fruit. I should like to enjoy one.”

For, after a stay of six weeks, he had never once seen an olive on the table, in the shops, nor even on the street barrows at the market place. He had never tasted one. No one sold olives, though olive trees were a drug in the place; no one bought them, no one asked for them; it seemed that no one wanted them. The trees, when he looked closely, were thick with a dark little berry that seemed more like a sour sloe than the succulent, delicious spicy fruit associated with its name.

Men climbed the trunks, everywhere shaking the laden branches and hitting them with long bamboo poles to knock the fruit off, while women and children, squatting on their haunches, spent laborious hours filling baskets underneath, then loading mules and donkeys with their daily “catch.” But an olive to eat was unobtainable. He had never cared for olives, but now he craved with all his soul to feel his teeth in one.

“Ach! But it is the Spanish olive that you eat” explained the head waiter, a German “from Basel.” “These are for oil only.” After which he disliked the olive more than ever — until that night when he saw the first eatable specimen rolling across the shiny parquet floor, propelled towards him by the careless hand of a pretty girl, who then looked up into his eyes and smiled.

He was convinced that Eve, similarly, had rolled the apple towards Adam across the emerald sward of the first garden in the world.

•   •   •

He slept usually like the dead. It must have been something very real that made him open his eyes and sit up in bed alertly. There was a noise against his door. He listened. The room was still quite dark. It was early morning. The noise was not repeated.

“Who’s there?” he asked in a sleepy whisper. “What is it?”

The noise came again. Someone was scratching on the door. No, it was somebody tapping.

“What do you want?” he demanded in a louder voice. “Come in,” he added, wondering sleepily whether he was presentable. Either the hotel was on fire or the porter was waking the wrong person for some sunrise expedition.

Nothing happened. Wide awake now, he turned the switch on, but no light flooded the room. The electricians, he remembered with a curse, were out on strike. He fumbled for the matches, and as he did so a voice in the corridor became distinctly audible. It was just outside his door.

“Aren’t you ready?” he heard. “You sleep forever.” And the voice, although never having heard it before, he could not have recognised it, belonged, he knew suddenly, to the girl who had let the olive fall. In an instant he was out of bed. He lit a candle.

“I’m coming,” he called softly, as he slipped rapidly into some clothes. “I’m sorry I’ve kept you. I shan’t be a minute.”

“Be quick then!” he heard, while the candle flame slowly grew, and he found his garments. Less than three minutes later he opened the door and, candle in hand, peered into the dark passage.

“Blow it out!” came a peremptory whisper. He obeyed, but not quick enough. A pair of red lips emerged from the shadows. There was a puff, and the candle was extinguished. “I’ve got my reputation to consider. We mustn’t be seen, of course!”

The face vanished in the darkness, but he had recognised it — the shining skin, the bright glancing eyes. The sweet breath touched his cheek. The candlestick was taken from him by a swift, deft movement. He heard it knock the wainscoting as it was set down. He went out into a pitch-black corridor, where a soft hand seized his own and led him — by a back door, it seemed — out into the open air of the hillside immediately behind the hotel.

He saw the stars. The morning was cool and fragrant, the sharp air waked him, and the last vestiges of sleep went flying. He had been drowsy and confused, had obeyed the summons without thinking. He now realised suddenly that he was engaged in an act of madness.

The girl, dressed in some flimsy material thrown loosely about her head and body, stood a few feet away, looking, he thought, like some figure called out of dreams and slumber of a forgotten world, out of legend almost. He saw her evening shoes peep out; he divined an evening dress beneath the gauzy covering. The light wind blew it close against her figure. He thought of a nymph.

“I say — but haven’t you been to bed?” he asked stupidly.

He had meant to expostulate, to apologise for his foolish rashness, to scold and say they must go back at once. Instead, this sentence came. He guessed she had been sitting up all night. He stood still a second, staring in mute admiration, his eyes full of bewildered question.

“Watching the stars,” she met his thought with a happy laugh. “Orion has touched the horizon. I came for you at once. We’ve got just four hours!” The voice, the smile, the eyes, the reference to Orion, swept him off his feet. Something in him broke loose, and flew wildly, recklessly to the stars.

“Let us be off!” he cried, “before the Bear tilts down. Already Alcyone begins to fade. I’m ready. Come!”

She laughed. The wind blew the gauze aside to show two ivory white limbs. She caught his hand again, and they scampered together up the steep hillside towards the woods. Soon the big hotel, the villas, the white houses of the little town where natives and visitors still lay soundly sleeping, were out of sight. The farther sky came down to meet them. The stars were paling, but no sign of actual dawn was yet visible. The freshness stung their cheeks.

Slowly, the heavens grew lighter, the east turned rose, the outline of the trees defined themselves, there was a stirring of the silvery green leaves. They were among olive groves — but the spirits of the trees were dancing. Far below them, a pool of deep colour, they saw the ancient sea. They saw the tiny specks of distant fishing-boats. The sailors were singing to the dawn, and birds among the mimosa of the hanging gardens answered them.

Pausing a moment at length beneath a gaunt old tree, whose struggle to leave the clinging earth had tortured its great writhing arms and trunk, they took their breath, gazing at one another with eyes full of happy dreams.

“You understood so quickly,” said the girl, “my little message. I knew by your eyes and ears you would.” And she first tweaked his ears with two slender fingers mischievously, then laid her soft palm with a momentary light pressure on both eyes.

“You’re half-and-half, at any rate,” she added, looking him up and down for a swift instant of appraisement, “if you’re not altogether.” The laughter showed her white, even little teeth.

“You know how to play, and that’s something,” she added. Then, as if to herself, “You’ll be altogether before I’ve done with you.”

“Shall I?” he stammered, afraid to look at her.

Puzzled, some spirit of compromise still lingering in him, he knew not what she meant; he knew only that the current of life flowed increasingly through his veins, but that her eyes confused him.

“I’m longing for it,” he added. “How wonderfully you did it! They roll so awkwardly—”

“Oh, that!” She peered at him through a wisp of hair. “You’ve kept it, I hope.”

“Rather. It’s on my mantelpiece—”

“You’re sure you haven’t eaten it?” and she made a delicious mimicry with her red lips, so that he saw the tip of a small pointed tongue.

“I shall keep it,” he swore, “as long as these arms have life in them,” and he seized her just as she was crouching to escape, and covered her with kisses.

“I knew you longed to play,” she panted, when he released her. “Still, it was sweet of you to pick it up before another got it.”

“Another!” he exclaimed.

“The gods decide. It’s a lob-sided thing, remember. It can’t roll straight.” She looked oddly mischievous, elusive.

He stared at her.

“If it had rolled elsewhere — and another had picked it up—?” he began.

“I should be with that other now!” And this time she was off and away before he could prevent her, and the sound of her silvery laughter mocked him among the olive trees beyond. He was up and after her in a second, following her slim whiteness in and out of the old-world grove, as she flitted lightly, her hair flying in the wind, her figure flashing like a ray of sunlight or the race of foaming water — till at last he caught her and drew her down upon his knees, and kissed her wildly, forgetting who and where and what he was.

“Hark!” she whispered breathlessly, one arm close about his neck. “I hear their footsteps. Listen! It is the pipe!”

“The pipe—!” he repeated, conscious of a tiny but delicious shudder.

For a sudden chill ran through him as she said it. He gazed at her. The hair fell loose about her cheeks, flushed and rosy with his hot kisses. Her eyes were bright and wild for all their softness. Her face, turned sideways to him as she listened, wore an extraordinary look that for an instant made his blood run cold. He saw the parted lips, the small white teeth, the slim neck of ivory, the young bosom panting from his tempestuous embrace. Of an unearthly loveliness and brightness she seemed to him, yet with this strange, remote expression that touched his soul with sudden terror.

Her face turned slowly.

“Who are you?” he whispered. He sprang to his feet without waiting for her answer.

He was young and agile; strong, too, with that quick response of muscle they have who keep their bodies well; but he was no match for her. Her speed and agility outclassed his own with ease. She leapt. Before he had moved one leg forward towards escape, she was clinging with soft, supple arms and limbs about him, so that he could not free himself, and as her weight bore him downwards to the ground, her lips found his own and kissed them into silence. She lay buried again in his embrace, her hair across his eyes, her heart against his heart, and he forgot his question, forgot his little fear, forgot the very world he knew….

“They come, they come,” she cried gaily. “The Dawn is here. Are you ready?”

“I’ve been ready for five thousand years,” he answered, leaping to his feet beside her.

“Altogether!” came upon a sparkling laugh that was like wind among the olive leaves.

Shaking her last gauzy covering from her, she snatched his hand, and they ran forward together to join the dancing throng now crowding up the slope beneath the trees. Their happy singing filled the sky. Decked with vine and ivy, and trailing silvery green branches, they poured in a flood of radiant life along the mountain side. Slowly they melted away into the blue distance of the breaking dawn, and, as the last figure disappeared, the sun came up slowly out of a purple sea.

They came to the place he knew — the deserted earthquake village — and a faint memory stirred in him. He did not actually recall that he had visited it already, had eaten his sandwiches with “hotel friends” beneath its crumbling walls; but there was a dim troubling sense of familiarity — nothing more. The houses still stood, but pigeons lived in them, and weasels, stoats and snakes had their uncertain homes in ancient bedrooms. Not twenty years ago the peasants thronged its narrow streets, through which the dawn now peered and cool wind breathed among dew-laden brambles.

“I know the house,” she cried, “the house where we would live!” and raced, a flying form of air and sunlight, into a tumbled cottage that had no roof, no floor or windows. Wild bees had hung a nest against the broken wall.

He followed her. There was sunlight in the room, and there were flowers. Upon a rude, simple table lay a bowl of cream, with eggs and honey and butter close against a home-made loaf. They sank into each other’s arms upon a couch of fragrant grass and boughs against the window where wild roses bloomed… and the bees flew in and out.

It was Bussana, the so-called earthquake village, because a sudden earthquake had fallen on it one summer morning when all the inhabitants were at church. The crashing roof killed sixty, the tumbling walls another hundred, and the rest had left it where it stood.

“The Church,” he said, vaguely remembering the story. “They were at prayer—”

The girl laughed carelessly in his ear, setting his blood in a rush and quiver of delicious joy. He felt himself untamed, wild as the wind and animals. “The true God claimed His own,” she whispered. “He came back. Ah, they were not ready — the old priests had seen to that. But he came. They heard his music. Then his tread shook the olive groves, the old ground danced, the hills leapt for joy—”

“And the houses crumbled,” he laughed as he pressed her closer to his heart—

“And now we’ve come back!” she cried merrily. “We’ve come back to worship and be glad!” She nestled into him, while the sun rose higher.

“I hear them — hark!” she cried, and again leapt, dancing from his side. Again he followed her like wind. Through the broken window they saw the naked fauns and nymphs and satyrs rolling, dancing, shaking their soft hoofs amid the ferns and brambles. Towards the appalling, ruptured church they sped with feet of light and air. A roar of happy song and laughter rose.

“Come!” he cried. “We must go too.” Hand in hand they raced to join the tumbling, dancing throng. She was in his arms and on his back and flung across his shoulders, as he ran. They reached the broken building, its whole roof gone sliding years ago, its walls a-tremble still, its shattered shrines alive with nesting birds.

“Hush!” she whispered in a tone of awe, yet pleasure. “He is there!” She pointed, her bare arm outstretched above the bending heads.

There, in the empty space, where once stood sacred Host and Cup, he sat, filling the niche sublimely and with awful power. His shaggy form, benign yet terrible, rose through the broken stone. The great eyes shone and smiled. The feet were lost in brambles.

“God!” cried a wild, frightened voice yet with deep worship in it — and the old familiar panic came with portentous swiftness. The great Figure rose.

The birds flew screaming, the animals sought holes, the worshippers, laughing and glad a moment ago, rushed tumbling over one another for the doors.

“He goes again! Who called? Who called like that? His feet shake the ground!”

“It is the earthquake!” screamed a woman’s shrill accents in ghastly terror.

“Kiss me — one kiss before we forget again…!” sighed a laughing, passionate voice against his ear. “Once more your arms, your heart beating on my lips…! You recognised his power. You are now altogether! We shall remember!”

But he woke, with the heavy bedclothes stuffed against his mouth and the wind of early morning sighing mournfully about the hotel walls.

•   •   •

“Have they left again — those ladies?” he inquired casually of the head waiter, pointing to the table. “They were here last night at dinner.”

“Who do you mean?” replied the man, stupidly, gazing at the spot indicated with a face quite blank. “Last night — at dinner?” He tried to think.

“An English lady, elderly, with — her daughter—” at which moment precisely the girl came in alone. Lunch was over, the room empty.

There was a second’s difficult pause. It seemed ridiculous not to speak. Their eyes met. The girl blushed furiously.

He was very quick for an Englishman. “I was allowing myself to ask after your mother,” he began. “I was afraid” — he glanced at the table laid for one — “she was not well, perhaps?”

“Oh, but that’s very kind of you, I’m sure.” She smiled. He saw the small white even teeth….

And before three days had passed, he was so deeply in love that he simply couldn’t help himself.

“I believe,” he said lamely, “this is yours. You dropped it, you know. Er — may I keep it? It’s only an olive.”

They were, of course, in an olive grove when he asked it, and the sun was setting.

She looked at him, looked him up and down, looked at his ears, his eyes. He felt that in another second her little fingers would slip up and tweak the first, or close the second with a soft pressure—

“Tell me,” he begged: “did you dream anything — that first night I saw you?”

She took a quick step backwards. “No,” she said, as he followed her more quickly still, “I don’t think I did. But,” she went on breathlessly as he caught her up, “I knew — from the way you picked it up—”

“Knew what?” he demanded, holding her tightly so that she could not get away again.

“That you were already half and half, but would soon be altogether.”

And, as he kissed her, he felt her soft little fingers tweak his ears.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

PICKING FIR-CONES

A Fragment

I

Among my earliest recollections of any vividness is a voice saying “yes” across the darkness of my winter bedroom. My exact age at the time is difficult to fix, but since I have no memories of anything before I was six, it may be set, perhaps, safely at seven years old. The voice seemed outside myself; it issued apparently from the shadows as a whole, rather than from a particular corner of the fireless room.

I had been lying awake, wondering “frightfully hard” about everything, why so much was forbidden, and how disappointing it was to be blocked by rules and parents and nurses, and so on, when there stole out of the hush this whispered “yes,” as if in answer to my puzzles. It gave me the feeling that life was intended to be lived. All sorts of things were going to happen at once: I would do, accept them all. An exultant happiness burst up in me. I was alive!

“I’m at it all again,” came to me.

Questions as to goal or origin there were none, but the feeling of “again” was vivid. This idea of resumption was certainly present, I resumed a journey; the train had stopped, but now went on again…. It was to be a long, long business, yet stuffed with interest and excitement to which I looked forward with zest, with positive joy. I had been “at it” for ages already, the journey by no means just begun. I was hungry to live, but to live again, and this hunger was familiar to me. My questions, my wonder, seemed like efforts to remember things just out of reach, yet not impossibly, finally, out of reach. They were recoverable. Meanwhile, I wished “fearfully” to live and experience again,avoiding nothing. “Getting on,” I called it, though growth, quâ development, was certainly not present in my mind at that tender age.

I woke next morning with the excitement to do things in my blood, and to do them as soon as possible. I did them. I turned on all the taps in the bathroom, tried to set fire to a hayrick to see the blaze, and let the pigs out of their pens into the stable-yard and thence into the garden. I remember lifting a broken hop-pole to hit the coachman’s daughter with. I did everything I could, taking the consequences, painful though these were, and puzzling too. For no one really explained to me, but merely said No, and then hurt me physically. It made no difference apparently. I meant to live, to miss no opportunity of doing things and enjoying the experience, pleasant or unpleasant. To avoid and shirk merely because it hurt was to lose an opportunity I was alive to know; whereas to suppress a desire, find no outlet for it, filled me with a choking violence that poisoned my whole being — what my elders meant by wickedness, I suppose.

Keen regret invariably followed such repression: I had missed an opportunity that might never come again. The hunger to live had been denied. To suppress without regret was a stage, of course, I reached much later; to divert this energy into other channels, transmuting it, came later still. If intensity was my native gift, at any rate, I think my energy was merely wasted rather than used for evil. This analysis, moreover, belongs to maturity, when reason loves laborious explanations; at the time I accepted and believed: I only felt and acted.

Evil! It was just this word, so often on father’s lips, that, with its opposite, good, made me feel sure there was some state superior to either, and that this state I had experienced already. I had known it before, but had now forgotten. It was recoverable, however, only I must be jolly quick about recovering it, for once I was grown up it would be too late. It involved an experience of strange, enormous, universal conditions difficult to describe. I wanted to get into everything, to do everything and to do it all at once, to be everywhere and to be everywhere simultaneously. The fir-cone incident was the only practical proof I had that it was possible. It will be described presently.

Here, then, was a definite, though wholly undetailed, memory. Belief, so called, played no part in my attitude towards it. I knew. I was haunted at this very early age by a dim recollection of some state superior to good and evil, and it betrayed itself, briefly, in an intense longing for things to be otherwise than they were — entirely otherwise.

This sounds so ordinary, it was actually so significant. No intellectually-devised Utopia was involved: an absolute change was what I so ardently desired. Hints of it came to me came back: in fairytales, in poetry, in music, yet most frequently and with a closer sense of validity, from the beauty of Nature, especially in wild and lonely places; though as I grew older I grew, it seemed at the same time, smaller, and the chances of recovery rapidly decreased. I was settling in among conditions that excluded full recollection. Soon I should forget altogether.

The memory, as I have said, was undetailed, but two conditions stood out in the recovery so ardently desired: I wanted goodness to be more good, wickedness more wicked. People of both types were so tame, insipid, colourless, so oppressively alike. The good were only just good by the skin of their teeth, as it were, their goodness managed by an effort that left no energy over; they laboured for goodness, and for happiness, at some future time. Good to me meant positively shining. Yet the good folk had no particular joy. I wanted people who were shining and radiant now. Children had more of the quality I meant than older people, but no one had it properly at all.

With what my parents called “evil” it was similar. Depravity there was in plenty, but that was negative: an open wickedness, strong and unafraid, I did not find. What passed for wickedness was a hole-and-corner, afraid-of-being-caught, a shame-faced business; what passed for goodness, an equally negative state that denied living and kept certain rules grudgingly and with sighs for the sake of safety and some reward in the future. Energy, raised to the intensity where it involved worship — though I did not phrase it so at the time — did not exist at all. It was such a trumpery affair, the way folk lived. I wanted an intenser life that was somewhere within reach, within recovery. Memory played faintly round it like a flame, but a flame that was slowly and surely dying as I grew older. I longed to lift a curtain, to stretch the scale, to open life to some gigantic flood that was brimming just outside, ready to pour through and sweep me into joy and power. This immense tide hung waiting only just beyond the way we lived, but some small personal fear of its depth and extent alarmed us all. The keynote, at any rate, of this superior state I refer to was certainly joy, Joy was the quality that no one had that joy, as I knew later, which is the essential quality of wisdom. The surprise, the unearthly touch, of wisdom, are mothered always by this towering sense of joy. It was the denial of joy everywhere that chafed and bruised me at a very early stage of my development, since it was, of course, a denial of life itself. The “yes” in the darkness of my bedroom was an affirmation of its accessibility. And memory was an ingredient.

The accessibility of this superior state I dreamed about remained my firm knowledge for a long time. It lay within reach still, here and now; it was really everywhere. Any moment I might pop back into it at the end of the wet brambly lane, round the bend of the passage in the old house, behind the huge cedars, across the pond, a little further down the river. It was not in the future, but now; it was not away, but here. When least expecting it, I should come upon the exit through which I had slipped down into “this” this life with parents, brothers, sisters, servants, governesses, gardeners, coachmen and policemen, all saying No from morning till night. And, once I came upon the exit, I could slip in again. But the way of slipping in or out I also had forgotten, and I made no special effort to recover it because it seemed so amazingly easy — a mere question of mood almost — that no effort was really necessary. It would come of its own accord. If people would only stop saying No so loudly, it would surely be upon me any moment.

Yet the actual way and method became more and more uncertain. Some kind of distance shrouded it in haze. It was then that I tried to get it back, but found that no mental effort was of any use, thinking and longing least of all. The conviction of genuine belief alone could manage the desired recovery, and it was this belief precisely that had begun to waver and grow dim in me as I got older. I must keep very still, intensely still, but with an interior stillness that was now escaping me, because no one knew of it, practised it least of all: this stillness within me I must find if I was to recover what I longed for before it was too late. Then one day, quite suddenly, it came to me of its own accord. I did not discover it, but just knew. I did it. We called it — do you, my brother, as you read these notes, remember? — by a word of our own invention: dipping,

II

On the back lawn you and Val and I (Val just back from his first term at Charterhouse) were picking fir-cones that crackled sharply to the touch and had earwigs crawling between the dark little gaping crevices. A penny a hundred was the rate of payment father made, half in play and half in sermon-earnest, and the cones were burned eventually in the drawing-room fire, with the remark (if we happened to be present): “See how useful your labour was, my boys! No work is lost, nothing in life is wasted!” The sentence always made me feel rude; I wanted to deny it angrily, but never dared to. The actual picking, however, was rather fun. The crinkly cones with their ugly brown inhabitants were mysterious; the pincers of the insects fascinated me. As a rule, too, this collecting seemed important; it made a difference to the world; yet ever with this half-concealed provision, that it was actually a sham, and that one day some person or other would catch us at it and laugh. The humbug of it would be shown up…. One thing that held my interest, perhaps, was the quantity, and the way the cones deceived me. At first they appeared so few upon the lawn, so thinly scattered; yet half an hour’s labour made no difference to the numbers left. The quantity, indeed, increased; the lawn seemed blacker. I could not make it out. And a hundred cones took up so small a space in the gardener’s wooden basket that smelt of leaves and mould.

On this particular occasion we were picking hard, with remarks at intervals about the number, the prospective pennies, and speculations as to which of us had collected the greater quantity, when, quite suddenly, there was a change.

I was kneeling up at the moment, watching Val — Val, who was so clever, who explained things and “knew it all”; — my head swam a little with the rush of blood from stooping; Val had filled his straw hat, but, forgetting the blue cord fastened to his button-hole, reached out an arm with a careless jerk that upset his entire store. He uttered an exclamation of disgust with a wry grimace, glancing round at me as though he hoped I had not seen the accident. I thought for a moment he was going to cry with disappointment. It was just then that a new mood — the change came on me as with a burst of dazzling light.

The tiny comedy was set upon the big green lawn, the towering cedars behind, the vast summer sky of blue above. Such was the background to the trivial accident — an insignificant human miscalculation of time and distance framed by the steady, unalterable immensities. The contrast made me catch my breath. I did not laugh, I felt. no triumph or pity; I felt, indeed, no interest of any kind, but knew suddenly that I was unutterably bored. The occupation was a sham, it was absurd and trumpery. Someone — father perhaps — was laughing at us. This was not living, it was merely making the time go by without being counted. There were better things to do, real things, immense opportunities sliding past unclaimed. Indeed, we were humbugging as well as being humbugged. I, at any rate, could manage things differently, otherwise, quite otherwise. The sense of the superior state I had forgotten and was in danger of losing altogether came breathlessly close to me. I shivered.

I stopped. A huge simple joy. stole over my whole being. I had a sense of awe that made me hold my breath and at the same time intensely happy. The thing I so yearningly desired was near to me as air, not in the future, not away, but here and now. I only had to claim it. There was rapture. I trembled, as though interiorly I was a sheaf of fine, taut wires drawn thin as silk, and a wind passed over them.

I waited, kneeling upright on the grass and staring. Nothing happened at first. All my activities, not merely the gathering of the fir-cones, came to rest. My inner being had become intensely still. Of Val I was no longer aware, I hardly saw him; but I saw you, my brother; I stared, watching you in your alpaca suit of overalls, as you stooped and picked and stretched out your arms and legs in the sunshine. You moved slowly; and I marvelled why you continued grubbing so contentedly on one spot of ground. You crawled laboriously over the lawn, a few inches at a time, panting with effort, like some monster-insect badly made, clumsily jointed: even the earwigs moved with more skill and cleverer energy.

It was ludicrous; yet I realised you were doing this on purpose and had not really “forgotten” any more than I had. It was a phantom you I watched; the real you looked on, looked down, from this superior state. You yourself watched the phantom “you” with detachment that was not quite indifference. Sharply then I realised another thing: you picked fir-cones with all your energy, because you knew it was the purpose for which you were here. I was vividly aware in that instant of those two different points of view respectively: neither of us had “forgotten”; but, whereas I revolted and wished to be otherwise, you accepted the present and were content. I felt ashamed of myself while this flashed through me. With its passing, however, my own point of view shot uppermost again. I thought you obstinate, stupid, but knew that I loved you dearly.

“You are my darling little brother,” I thought to myself, “only it’s stupid-silly — (you remember our childhood superlative?) — of you to be satisfied with this. Why in the world don’t you…?”

But the actual word escaped me; there was a gap where the right word should have been. The swift, fluttering effort to find it bore fruit afterwards only with the invention of “dip” and “dipping.”

“Let’s go!” I cried instead. “Let’s get on!” It was the nearest I could come to the meaning of what I felt, but could not say. There was an abrupt and passionate vehemence in my voice; in my heart there was absolute conviction. Quietly, without looking up, you replied, “There are more over here,” and continued to fill your basket. The rattle of the cones, as you tossed them in, came to me already from a distance.

“Yes, yes,” I exclaimed excitedly, for I had the horror that you were missing an amazing opportunity, “but why stick in one place like this? It’s awful. We can be anywhere — everywhere at once — doing everything!” I remember the frantic impossibility of finding words to express what I felt so sure of — “Come on, Dick! Come with me!”

Caught by something in my voice, perhaps, you stopped picking and looked up, there was a steady expression in your big blue eyes. You said nothing. I felt that you knew more than I did after all. You wished to restrain me, though at the same time you would have liked to “go.”

I sprang up quickly, lest forgetfulness of the way should catch me.

“Anyhow,” I cried, “I’m going—!”

And then I heard your solemn whisper: “Look out!” you said softly, “it’s not allowed, you know. You mayn’t be able to get back. They’ll cry about you. Mother’ll be in a state. Besides, you’ll only miss all this—”

There was a catch in your voice and breath as you said it; you were eager and ready; you knew the way; but, for some wiser reason than I guessed, you thought it a mistake to go. I confused, I think, the real you and the other that picked fir-cones and objected. I hesitated for a fraction of a second, the merest fraction. At the same moment I saw Val watching us — watching me in particular — and the startled expression on his face decided me. For he was afraid. I realised his vanity, his self-importance, his ignorance; either he had never known, or had entirely forgotten; remembering nothing of this “other” state, he was a sham, unreal, supremely satisfied with himself and with his condition. “Oh, dear,” I thought, “almost everybody’s like that!” And I cried at the top of my voice, bursting with joy and confidence, “I’m off!”

Val gave a gasp, and shouted “Where?” And I wanted to reply, but had no time to get the words out; besides, the right words would not come.

“Look, Dickie! Look!” I cried happily. You smiled into my eyes, but said no word. And I went.

The effort, if effort there was at all, was of some interior and delicious kind that was familiar. It was not muscular, though it was accompanied by a certain tautening of the muscles about the heart and abdomen — a sensation of heat in the pit of the body — followed instantly by a complete and comforting relaxation. It seemed a species of inner determination; perfect assurance, absolute conviction made it possible and even easy. I had no doubt that I could “go.” I knew. And there was joy in me beyond anything my words can possibly explain.

I went. It was a change of condition really, but the terms of physical motion describe it best. I went out gliding, as in those flying-dreams so many know, and the slight effort was due to the fact that I had forgotten how to exercise the power properly. As in the flying-dream, I now recovered this half-forgotten power. “I can do this again when I wake,” thinks the dreamer. “I’ve remembered at last,” I thought; “how jolly!” Had I then known Bergson’s suggestion that the flying-dream is due to the feet being deprived of their customary support, I could have given him the lie. The flying-dream is a racial, but also an individual, memory of the means of transition to this other “state.” It is supremely easy; only it must be recovered young, before Reason and excess of physical sensation obliterate instinctive knowledge of the method.

I went out gliding, gliding over the summer lawn. I looked down — down upon the fir-cones and the baskets, the cedar tops, the crescent flowerbeds, the bushy horse chestnut and its bulging shadow, the gravel drive, the squat, foreshortened Manor House. All lay beneath me, curiously flat. You I saw clearly, I saw Val in a haze; and while you increased for me somehow, there was about Val that flat and meaningless quality, as of an empty shell almost, which touched the other objects also with unreality.

And the expression in his face I cannot forget: the staring eyes, the mouth wide open, the perspiration on the puckered forehead, the coat pulled out where the hat-cord tugged at it, and then the look of sheer amazement passing into terror, as he stretched his bare arms out, turned jerkily, as though the power of co-ordinating his movements were impaired, and ran headlong towards the house. He had no breath to scream, or possibly the sound did not reach me; for his attitude was a scream materialised. He disappeared. Yet not by going into the building; it was more a fading out, a dying away, as a reflection fades from a pool when the sun is hidden or a puff of wind obliterates it. He vanished into a depth. He was withdrawn from my consciousness. The phantom Val was all I knew. He was unreal.

With you, however, precisely the opposite took place: you became instantly more real. It seemed I knew you for the first time fully, and understood the reason for the deep tie between us. We both shared another, bigger state. The little figure in alpaca overalls picking fir-cones was not really you at all. It was a phantom you. We now came together for the first time properly, or, as I felt it then, “we were together again — at last.” There was union and the full, rapturous joy of union. The idea of being everywhere at once, of sharing everything seemed amazingly justified.

I cannot say that you joined in my actual physical motion, that you definitely came with me on my gliding, sliding change. It was rather that when I arrived I found you already there; and “there” was a state we had both left temporarily, come down from, as it were, in order to pick fir-cones and do other little necessary things — little things, trivial and unimportant in themselves, yet the doing of which increased our value, our reality. Everybody in the world had similarly “come down,” but the majority became so absorbed in the “little, trivial things” that they forgot. Father, for instance, though he went to church as regularly as to the Treasury where he worked, had not the least idea — he denied that there could be a way back at all. And this was why everyone said No so often and so loudly. The important thing was to continue picking fir-cones as long as possible and as many as possible. Whatever enfeebled or endangered the picking faculties must be prevented. Picking to fill one’s basket, and to fill it first before anybody else, was the sole criterion of reality and a useful life. Church and the Treasury were both, to father, a form of picking fir-cones, and any suggestion that reality lay in a bigger state was merely stupid-silly. This flashed into me as clearly as the meaning of cake and jam at tea-time….

We were properly together, anyhow, you and I, and the joy was wonderful; but not only was I properly with you, for I was in everything everywhere, not stuck in one spot any more, but able to do anything everywhere at once. I had this power, this rapture… At the same time, you understood, apparently, that picking cones on a single spot, and so forth, was worth doing, and worth doing well. It was not to be shirked by any means. We picked experience while we did so, experience that was carried over and stored up in our “other” state, making us more real, and our eventual happiness even more complete. This, too, was very clear to me, simple, easy, and overwhelmingly convincing.

“We mustn’t stay too long,” you said at once. “They’ll be frightened, you see. Besides” — and you laughed happily, as though you referred to a brief, almost an instantaneous interlude “we want to finish, don’t we? Let’s get it done. Then we can be together…”

There was more I cannot remember; but what I do remember with vividness is the feeling of deep, lasting joy that accompanied your phrase, “then we can be together.” For it involved everything that those who love, yet fear separation, most ardently desire — complete and permanent union. I was too young, of course, in those days to have realised death, yet I saw clearly as in brilliant sunshine that death, where love is, meant only the transition into this other “state” where separation was not even a possibility. It was, I suppose, my first experience of a spiritual value. The meaning of Now was shown to me.

But another thing was also clear: Val had looked on death, or on what he thought was death. For him the only reality was picking fir-cones, and the Val that picked them was the only Val he knew. He had “forgotten” everything. Thinking I was dead, he experienced the nameless terror that is the bogey of his kind of those who have forgotten.

III

I found myself in bed. There was a darkened room full of soft rustling and whispering. Busy figures moved to and fro on tiptoe like ghosts amid a general sense of hush. Mother and nurse were bending over me. There was a cold sponge and a feeling of anxiety and awe. I felt this anxiety, this awe, this fear, but I wanted to laugh; I could not understand this peculiar atmosphere of dread. It was unnecessary humbug. I could have screamed. A yearning sadness next came over me. Then I laughed. And the laughter brought relief, although it frightened the others. Afterwards — long afterwards — it was reported that I hung between life and death. Isn’t that delicious? A comic statement the sort of thing a grub might say about a chrysalis: it hung between life and death before it emerged and flew as a butterfly!… A hand stroked my forehead. I knew half-sensations.

Of these half-sensations I was uncomfortably aware. With an effort I had come back, I was shut in again, enclosed, confined in something that had the pain of limitation, yet of limitation that was somewhere valuable. The truth was I had forgotten again, or was beginning to forget, and hence the half-sensations…. They explained presently that I had fainted in the sun; “a touch of sun,” they called it; and when I laughed at this the cold sponge descended on my neck and forehead and the whispers multiplied.

“Lie quite still, my darling, quite, quite still. Do not excite yourself. You’re safe at home, and Mummie’s looking after you!”

It never occurred to them that I might have looked after Mummie.

It was marvellously sweet and tender, but O, how futile and how ignorant! I knew so much; I could tell so little — nothing and less than nothing. I had come back. I was caught again. They could not know, because they had “forgotten.” At last the cold sponge ceased descending on my neck and forehead; I fell asleep; and when I woke again the curtains were drawn back and the sun poured over the room. “That’ s real, at any rate,” I remember thinking, as I felt the warmth upon my skin. The light made me happy, though I knew not exactly why.

I recovered very quickly. It had been something of a false alarm apparently. There were no ill results, although hourly warnings about the sun continued for a long time, and Val was afraid of me for the rest of the holidays. “I thought you were dead,” was all he said; “I saw you tumble down flat, you know.” He was white as he spoke of it. “Once I saw a chap fall on his head from the parallel bars and kill himself,” he added. “By Jove, you know it’ s awful.” Having looked on death, he was afraid of life.

What you thought and felt you never said. You were a solemn little owl. Our love seemed more near and understanding than before. I date our realisation of it from that time, at any rate. But, also, from that moment I knew another thing that lay at the back of my brain; I knew it subconsciously perhaps without explanation or analysis. What one knows and believes subconsciously affects all one does in a natural, instinctive way, whereas what one reasons out is a matter of calculation — one is forever persuading oneself that it is true. This thing I now knew was, perhaps, that daily life was but an interlude of no real duration in a bigger matter, and that death simply closed the interlude — if a state without duration can be said to have an end. My intense desire for things to be “quite otherwise” was actually a memory therefore, true and deep, yet hidden with extraordinary care behind my brain. My true self was not involved with this fir-cone picking business except to watch it and be wise; it dwelt apart, detached from good and evil, so-called; it was everywhere and forever. It was my “otherwise.” To be identified with it meant to know peace and joy and those indescribable states which are of the spirit and of eternity, but to know them Now. To forget — as Val forgot it — meant to be unreal. As a dream of ten seconds may seem indefinitely prolonged, so it was with daily life. At the close of the dream the sleeper wakes and says: “Is that all?” The dream has been an interlude without duration.

Although I can give no further details of what I experienced after I went out gliding, I remembered it for a long time with happy wonder. The tang of its unforgettable ecstasy came back with me. I had known power, sweetness, joy; it was complete and satisfying; I had been everywhere, dipped and merged in everything; and you were with me. Young as I was, I realised this great completeness. “It was all right,” as I said to you; and the phrase seems to me now significant: all and right…. My yearning to be “otherwise” had been justified. I had been otherwise. I had been dipped, then come up to the surface again. And I remember saying this to you, wondering at your owl-like silence, although you knew far more about it all than I did, and then your remark at the end: “Yes. It’s all right, but I vote we stay down for a bit all the same. I think we’ve got to — don’t you see?”

Then, gradually, as we grew older, the memory of the experience faded and grew dim. At school it became heavily obscured, at Sandhurst I forgot it. I did not forget the experience, that is, but I forgot the feelings that accompanied it. I could not reconstruct those feelings; I did not even wish to…. Only much later, with the thrill and the opening of the heart by beauty, did the feelings partially return to me….

I know now, of course, that it is possible to pick fir-cones on the surface, yet to dip and be otherwise, simultaneously; that this, in fact, is really living. Picking fir-cones helps to build empires, but builds the empire of oneself as well; it is human and necessary, whereas “dipping” is exceptional and divine. Everybody wants to be dipped, yet knows not how to achieve it. Being afraid of death, they are afraid of life afraid to live. They think that picking fir-cones is the way. They have “forgotten.” For, instead, it is the way they pick fir-cones that is the Way!

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE MAN WHO WAS MILLIGAN

Milligan looked round the dingy rooms with an appraising air, while the landlady stood behind him, wondering whether he would decide to take them. She stood with her arms crossed; her eye was observant. She, in her turn, was appraising Milligan, of course. He was a clerk in a tourist agency, and in his spare time he wrote stories for the cinema. What attracted him just now in the very ordinary lodgings was the big folding-doors. All he really needed was a bed-sitting-room, with breakfast, but he suddenly saw himself sitting in that front room writing his scenarios — successfully at last. It was rather tempting. He would be a literary man — with a study!

“Your price seems a trifle high, Mrs. — er—?” he opened the bargain.

“Bostock, sir, Mrs. Bostock,” she informed him, then recited her tale of woe about the high cost of living. It was unnecessary recitation, for Milligan was not listening, having already decided in his mind to take the rooms.

While Mrs. Bostock droned monotonously on, his eye fell casually upon a picture that hung above the plush mantelpiece — a Chinese scene showing a man in a boat upon a little lake. He glanced at it, no more than that. It was better than glancing at Mrs. Bostock. The landlady, however, instantly caught that glance and noticed its direction.

“Me ’usband” — she switched off her main theme — “brought it ’ome from China. From Hong-Kong, I should say.” And the way she aspirated the “H” in Hong made Milligan smile. He perceived that she was proud of the picture evidently.

“It’s wonderful,” he said. “Probably it’s worth something, too. These Chinese drawings — some of ’em — are very rare, I believe.”

The little picture was worth perhaps two shillings, and he knew it; but he had found his way to Mrs. Bostock’s heart, and, incidentally, had persuaded her to take a shilling off the rent. The picture, he felt sure, had been stolen by her late husband, a sea captain. To her it was a kind of nest-egg. If she ever found herself in difficulties, it would fetch money. Milligan, by chance, had stumbled upon what he called a “good line.”

Being an honest creature, he had no wish to use his knowledge, but every week thereafter, almost every day, indeed, some remark concerning the Chinese drawing passed between them: with the natural result that, while it bored him a good deal, he cultivated the theme, and in so doing gazed much and often at the Chinaman. That Celestial, sitting in the boat with his back to the room, rowing, rowing eternally across the placid lake without advancing, he came to know in every detail.

Every time Mrs. Bostock chatted with him, his eye wandered from her grimy visage to the drawing. He used it to end the chat with.

“I like your picture so much,” he observed. “It’s nice to live with.” He put it straight, he flicked dust from the frame with his handkerchief. “It’s so much better than these modern things. It’s worth a bit — I dare say—”

It chanced, at the time, that Lafcadio Hearn, the writer about Japan, was in his mind. He had once arranged a successful trip to Japan for a client of his firm, and the client had made him a present of one of Hearn’s strange and wonderful books. It was hardly in the line of Milligan’s reading, for it had no “film value,” and he had sold the book — a collection of Chinese stories — to a secondhand bookseller for a shilling. But he had glanced at it first, and a story in it had remained sharply in his mind: a story about a picture of a man in a boat. An observer, watching the picture, had seen the man move. The man actually began to row. Finally, the man rowed right out of the picture and into the place — a temple — where the observer stood.

Milligan thought it foolish, yet his memory retained the details vividly. They stuck in his head. The graphic description was realistic. Milligan caught himself thinking of it every time he met a Chinaman in the street, every time he sold a ticket to China or Japan. It rose, it flitted by, it vanished. The memory persisted. And the moment his eye first saw Mrs. Bostock’s treasure over the plush mantelpiece, this vivid memory of Hearn’s story had again risen, flitted by, and vanished. It betrayed its vitality, at any rate. Wonderful chap, that Hearn, thought Milligan.

All this was natural enough, without mystery, without a hint of anything queer or out of the ordinary. What was a little queer — it struck Milligan so, at any rate — was an idea that began to grow in him from the very first week of his tenancy.

“That might be the very drawing the fellow wrote about,” occurred to him one night as he laboured at a lurid scenario which was to make his fortune. “Not impossible at all. It’s an old picture probably. Exactly what Hearn described, too. I wonder! Why not?”

Why not, indeed? A fellow — especially a literary fellow — should use his imagination. Milligan used his. Sometimes he used it in prolonged labour till the early hours. The gas-light flickered across his pages, across that lake in China, across the boat, across the back and arms and pigtail of that diminutive Chink who rowed eternally over a placid Chinese lake without advancing an inch. The scenario of the moment brought in China, aptly enough. A glance at the picture, he found, was not unhelpful in the way of stimulating a flagging imagination.

Milligan glanced often. The gas-light was always flickering. Shadows were forever shifting to and fro across Mrs. Bostock’s worthless nest-egg. It was easy to imagine that the boat, the water, even the figure moved. Those dancing shadows! How they played about the arms, the back, the outline of the boat, the oars!

And when it was two in the morning, and the London streets lay hushed, and a great stillness blanketed the whole city, Milligan felt even a little thrilled. It was, he thought, “imaginative,” to catch these slight, elusive movements in the drawing. He imagined the fellow rowing about, changing his position, landing. It helped his own mood, his incidents, his atmosphere. He had read Thomas Burke, of course. His scenarios always referred to Chinamen as “Chinks.”

“That Chink’s alive!” he whispered to himself. “By Jove! He moves in the picture. His place changes. It’s an inspiration. I must use it somehow—!” And imagination, eerily stimulated in the deep silence of the sleeping city, was at work again.

This was the beginning of the strange adventure which befell the literary Milligan, whose imagination worked in the stillness of the small hours, but whose scenarios were never used.

“For why write scenarios,” he said to me, “when you can live them?”

In Peking, ten or twelve years later, he said this to me, and I am probably the only person to whom this scenario he “lived” was ever confided.

In Peking his name was not Milligan at all. He was not working in a tourist agency. He was a rich man, aged thirty-eight, a “figure” in the English community there, a man of influence and position. But all that does not matter. What matters is the story of how he came to be in China at all — and this he does not know. He does not know how he came to be in China at all. There is no recollection of the journey even. Nor can he state precisely how he began the speculations and enterprises that made him prosperous, beyond that he suddenly found himself concerned in big, fortunate undertakings in the Chinese city.

There is this deep gap in the years.

“Loss of memory, I suppose they call it,” he mentioned, after our chance acquaintanceship had grown into a friendship that gave me his confidence. What he could tell he told me frankly and without reserve, glad to talk of it, I think, to someone who did not mock, and making no condition of secrecy, moreover.

There was some link, apparently, between myself and the man who had been Milligan. Chance, that some call destiny, revealed it. And, as I listened to his amazing tale, I swore that on my return to London I would visit Mrs. Bostock and buy the picture. I wanted that Chinese drawing badly, I wanted to examine it myself. Her nest-egg at last should be worth something, as Milligan, ten years before, had told her.

What happened was, apparently, as follows: Milligan, first of all, discovered in himself, somewhat suddenly it seemed, a new interest in China and things Chinese. If the birth of this interest was abrupt, its growth was extremely rapid. China fairly leapt at him. He read books, talked with travellers, studied the map, the history, the civilisation of China. The psychology of the Celestial race absorbed him. The subject obsessed him. He longed to go to China. It became a yearning that left him no peace day or night. In practical terms of time, money and opportunity, the journey was, of course, impossible. He lived on in London, but actually he lived already in China, for where a man’s thought is there shall his consciousness be also.

All this I could readily understand, for others, similarly, have felt the call and spell of countries like Egypt, Africa, the desert. There was nothing incomprehensible nor peculiar in the fascination China exercised upon the imaginative Milligan. It was his business, moreover, to sell exciting tickets to travellers, and China happened to have fired his particular temperament. Natural enough!

Natural enough, too, that, through this, the picture in his lodgings should have acquired more meaning for him, and that he should have studied it more closely and more frequently. It was the only Chinese object he had within constant reach, and he told me at wearisome length how he knew every tiniest detail of the drawing, and how it became for him a kind of symbol, almost a kind of sacred symbol, upon which he focussed his intense desires — frustrated desires. Wearisome, yes, until he reached a point in his story that suddenly galvanised my interest, so that I began to listen with uncommon, if a rather creepy, curiosity.

The picture, he informed me, altered. There was movement among its details that he already knew by heart.

“Movement!” he half-whispered to me, his eyes shining, a faint shudder running through his big body.

The sincerity of deep conviction with which he described what happened left a lasting impression on my mind. His words, his manner, conveyed the truth of a genuine experience. Hitherto only the back of the Chink’s head had been visible. Then, one night, Milligan saw his profile. The face was turned. It now looked a little over the shoulder, and towards the room.

From this moment, though he never detected actual movement when it occurred, the alteration in the drawing was marked and rapid. The face retained its new position; the angle of the profile did not widen, but the position of oars and boat, the attitude of arms and back, their size as well, these now changed from day to day.

There was a dreadful rapidity about these changes. The figure of the Chink grew bigger; the boat grew bigger too. They were coming nearer. “I had the awful conviction,” whispered the man who had been Milligan, “that they were coming — to fetch me. I used to get all of a sweat each time I saw the size and nearness grow. It was appalling, but also it was delightful somehow—”

I permitted myself a question: “Did your landlady notice it too?” I enquired, concealing my scepticism.

“Mrs. Bostock was ill in bed the whole time. She never came into the room once.”

“The servant?” I persisted. “Or any of your friends?”

He hesitated. “The girl who did the room,” he said honestly, “observed nothing. She gave notice suddenly without a reason. So did the next girl. I never asked them anything. As for my friends” — he smiled faintly — “I was too scared — to bring them in.”

“You were afraid they might not see what you saw?” He shrugged his shoulders. “It scared me,” he repeated, looking past me towards the shuttered windows of his study where we sat.

The account he gave of it all made my flesh creep even in that bright Peking sunshine. He certainly described what he saw, or believed he saw, as, day after day, night after night, that Chink rowed his boat slowly, slowly, surely, surely, very gradually, but with remorseless purpose, nearer, nearer — and nearer. The lodger watched. He also waited.

“The man,” he whispered, “was rowing into the room. It was his purpose to row into the room. He was coming to fetch me.” And he mopped his forehead at the thought of what had happened ten years ago.

Suddenly he leant forward.

“In the end,” his thin voice rattled almost against my face, “he — did fetch me. I’m in that picture with him now. I’m not in China, as you think I am. This” — he tapped his chest, the chest of a successful business man — “is not me. I’m not Milligan. Milligan is in that picture with the Chink. He’s in that boat. Sitting beside that Chink. Motionless. Being stared at by a succession of lodgers. Sitting in that stiff little boat. Very tiny. Not dead, but captive. Sitting without breath. Without feeling. Painted, yet alive. Caught on the surface of that placid Chinese lake until time or death dissolve the drawing—”

I thought he was going to faint, but, oddly enough, I did not think him merely mad. His mood, his crawling horror, his intense sincerity took me bodily into his own deep nightmare. He recovered quickly. He was a man who had himself always well in hand. He told me the end at once.

He had been to a dance and he came home tired, sober, having well enjoyed himself, it seems, about four in the morning. The time was early spring, and dawn was just giving faint signs of breaking, but the hall and passage of the house were still dark.

He entered his room and lit the gas, going at once to the mirror to have a look at himself. This was the first thing he did, he assured me, and in the mirror he saw, behind himself, the boat and the Chinaman, both of them — gigantic.

Gigantic was the word he used, though he used it, of course, relatively. The Chinaman was standing in the room. He was in the lake in front of the plush mantelpiece. The wall was gone — there was a sort of hazy space. Close at the Chinaman’s heels lay the boat, both oars resting sideways on the water, their heads still in the rowlocks. Water was up to his feet, to Milligan’s feet, for he not only felt his shoes soaked through, but he also heard the lapping sound of diminutive wavelets on the “shore.”

He gave a great sigh. No cry, either of terror or surprise, he said, escaped him. His only sound was this great sigh — of acceptance, of resignation, of a mind benumbed and yet secretly delighted. The big Chink beckoned, smiled, nodded his yellow face, retreating very slowly as he did so. And Milligan obeyed. He followed. He stepped into the boat. The Chink took up the oars, and rowed him slowly, very slowly, across the placid lake, into the picture and out of his familiar, known surroundings, rowed him slowly, very slowly, into the land of his heart’s deep desire.

•   •   •

All the way home to England in the steamer this strangest of strange narratives haunted me. I still saw the man who was Milligan sitting in the study of his big, expensive house as he told it to me. His shrewd business brain had built that house; the fortune he had made provided the good lunch and cigars we had enjoyed together. From the moment of entering the boat his memory had remained a blank. Continuity of personality though still, it seemed to me, rather uncertain somewhere, had revived only when he was already a rich man who had spent years in China. This big gap in the years remains.

In my mind lay every detail of the story; in my pocket-book lay the address of Mrs. Bostock’s rooms. I prayed heaven she might still be living, even if aged and crumpled by ten more English winters.

I had arranged to cable “Milligan” at once; we had selected the very words I was to use: “Two figures in boat,” or “One figure in boat.” He asked for the message in these words. Fortune favoured me; I found the rooms; Mrs. Bostock was alive; the rooms were unoccupied; I looked over them; I saw — the picture.

Before visiting Mrs. Bostock, however, I had visited the newspaper files in the British Museum, and the “Disappearance of James Milligan” was there for all to read. Millions had evidently read it. It had been the news of the day. Columns of space were devoted to it; dozens of false clues were started; crime was suggested, of course. His disappearance was complete. Milligan was a case of “sunk without trace,” with a vengeance.

It was in the dingy front room that I experienced what was perhaps the most vivid thrill of wonder life has ever given me. I stood, appraising the room as a would-be lodger. Behind me, her arms crossed, appraising me in turn just as she had appraised her former lodger of ten years ago, stood Mrs. Bostock. Probably I looked more prosperous than he had looked; her attitude, at any rate, was attentive to a fault. Why I should have trembled a little is hard to say, but self-control was certainly not as full as it might have been, for my voice shook a trifle as, at length, I drew her attention with calculated purpose to the picture above the plush mantelpiece. I praised it.

“Me ’usband brought it back from Hong-Kong,” I heard her say.

My breath caught a little, so that there was a slight pause before I said the next thing. My voice went slightly husky.

“I have a collection of Chinese drawings,” I mentioned. “If you cared to sell, perhaps—”

“Oh, many ’as wanted to buy it,” she lied easily, hoping to increase its value.

I mentioned five pounds. I mentioned another figure too — the figure in the boat.

“That single figure,” I explained in as calm a tone as I could muster, “is so good, you see. The Chinese artists never overcrowded their paintings. Now, if — instead of that single figure — there were two” — I moved closer to the picture, hoping she would follow — “the value,” I went on, “would, of course, be less.”

Mrs. Bostock had followed me. I had tempted her greed; I had tested her truth as well. We stood side by side immediately beneath the drawing. We examined it together.

At the mention of five pounds the woman had given a little gasp, jerking her body at the same time. Now, at such close quarters with the thing she hoped to sell me, her voice was dumb at first. At first. For a moment later a strange sound escaped her lips, a sound that was meant to be a cry, but only succeeded in being a wheezy struggle to get her breath. Her mouth opened wide, her eyes popped almost from her face. She staggered, recovered her balance by putting a hand on my arm for support, then stepped still nearer to the mantelpiece and thrust her head and shoulders close against the drawing. Her blind eyes peered. Her skin was already white.

“Two of ’em!” she exclaimed in a terrified whisper. “Two of ’em, so ’elp me, Gawd! And the other’s him!”

I was ready to support. I had expected her to collapse perhaps. I felt rather like collapsing myself. She swayed, turning her horror-stricken countenance to mine.

“Mr. Milligan!” she screamed aloud, then, her voice returning in full volume: “It’s Mr. Milligan. All this time that’s where ’e’s been. And I never noticed it till now!”

She swooned away.

The second figure faced the room, for the boat was in the position of being pushed by the oars, not rowed. The features were unmistakable… Half an hour later I sent a cable to Peking: “Two figures in boat.”

The real climax, I think, came three days later, when, with the picture safely in my rooms, I had arranged for “specialists” to call and examine it. A chemist, an experienced dealer, and a sort of expert psychic investigator were already upstairs when I reached my flat.

The picture was in my bedroom. I had examined it myself — examined Milligan’s face and figure — hour after hour, my flesh crawling, my hair almost rising, as I did so. My guests were in the sitting-room, the servant informed me, handing me a telegram as I hurried up in the lift. My three friends were already known to each other, and, after apologising for the delay, I brought in the drawing and laid it before them on the small table. I intended to tell them the story after their examination; the psychic investigator I meant to keep when the other two had left. Setting the drawing in front of them, I looked over their shoulders at it.

There was only one figure — the Chink. He sat alone in the little boat. He was rowing, not pushing; his back was to the room.

The dealer said the drawing was worth a shilling; the chemist said nothing; I, too, said nothing; but the psychic investigator turned sharply and complained that I was hurting him. My hand, it seems, had clutched the shoulder nearest to me, and it happened to be his. I allowed him to leave when the other two left….

I  was alone. I remembered the telegram. More to steady my mind than for any interest I felt in it, my fingers tore it open. It was a cablegram from — Peking, signed by a friend of Milligan and myself:

“Milligan died heart failure yesterday.”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

THE FALLING GLASS

The preparations were so interesting and suggestive that they almost compensated for the temporary loss of our expedition. For three days the calm and cloudless sky pretended that bad weather had left the world forever. This sunny peace, this heaven without a stain, must always be. Our peak ran sharp and still into the spotless blue, and never could be otherwise. Its serene majesty seemed unassailable by any troubling thing, by weather least of all. Then, just when our security was greatest and we had resolved to start next day at dawn, my companion came in to supper darkly, with the ominous remark: “The glass has begun to fall a bit.” This, for us, was the beginning of the change, the first we knew of it; in reality, of course, the actual beginning lay leagues away — many leagues and many hours — in Siberia or Norway, far out on the Atlantic or between the Sahara and the Mediterranean. The glass falling in our little mountain valley was in reply to changes there. And this first hint of trouble communicated itself instantly to ourselves; it might be nothing or it might be grave. There was menace in it, and our sense of security was shaken, for the hearts of climbing men lie close enough to Nature; we were aware of possible attack. That tremor of the sensitive mercury was a presage of something coming; at any rate, of something trying to come. In spite of the depression, however, the warning brought a thrill of pleasure with it; the instinct of self protection stirred; it woke that adorable element in life — resistance against a hostile power that could not be trifled with and certainly not ignored. Somewhere, somehow, it was known that we had planned our great attack at dawn, and so a whisper travelled down from the enormous heights: “Beware! The enemy is on the move:” All this, and more, lay in the casual phrase: “The glass is falling.”

And side by side with a natural annoyance there was this stimulus as well. For the beginnings of things are always Very wonderful, alteration of what has been before, a new direction, purpose and independence, all these are involved in every true beginning. There is anticipation and surprise, promise of novelty, too; something is going to happen; it may be something quite unprecedented. Beginnings, being in the nature of creation, are beyond language marvellous; the beginning of a day or of a night; of anger, when a rising temperature and the hasting run of blood betray in us the lurking savage who kills naturally; of illness, with its sharp reminder that life one day must stop; of love, when the mere sound of a particular voice changes the old world’s aspect; or of spring, when a new softness in the air, nameless by any sense, proclaims the gigantic arrival of an irresistible, flooding life. But the beginning of a storm — of what children call a “most awful and tremendous storm” — is so wonderful that it can easily eat up disappointment. For the preparations are so long and gradual, so sure, so steadily matured, so cumulative; at first so very negligible, yet with a hint of such genuine grandeur coming, that the blood is stirred, and the heart, first warned, then awed. He is a fortunate man who, in these sophisticated days, can find it in him to acknowledge this trace of the primitive spirit of worship. That faint, mysterious tremor that runs through Nature everywhere is divine in its calculated insignificance.

The animal and vegetable world at once respond to it; birds and fishes know, the insects know as well; trees note it and keep very still; all take their best precautions; and only men, not aware of it until it is too late, disregard the delicate warning at their peril. Few humans can feel that the pressure of the air has altered. They watch an instrument and whisper: “Ah, the glass is falling!” The change is born, of course, so very far away. How should they know? Culture has dulled their primitive awareness.

And that night the stars were ominously clear and brilliant. In the morning there were other signs as well. At three o’clock, just when the east was blushing with the night’s first thought of parting, my companion called me, or rather came into my room. “Up already!” he exclaimed; “I just came in to see. What do you think of it? That barometer was a fraud.” We went out upon the wooden balcony and saw the distant ridges mercilessly outlined in the growing light; the summits were near enough to throw a rope across.

“Too close,” I said, with misgivings born of long experience.

“But look!” he objected, “there’s not a single cloud.” He loathed my caution, deeming it proud imagination only. “It’s simply brilliant,” he added, his young eagerness unspoilt by knowledge. I shook my older head. Some inborn instinct made me firm for once. Ten years before I should have been overridden, and have started on our perilous two days’ climb with ample hope.

“It’s a whole day to the hut,” I reminded him, “and then — suppose we wake to mist and wind and possibly driving snow! Let’s wait till we’re certain and the glass is rising slowly. For instance, look at that!” And I pointed to a narrow straw of vapour that trailed clingingly across the first huge precipice, five hours away, good going. It was tinged with a faint, transparent pink — unduly luminous.

“That’s nothing,” he exclaimed contemptuously, “mere bit of early morning mist. Why, I’ve known—”

“But it’s too low down,” I interrupted. “On the top it would not matter, it has no business there. It means changed or changing temperature.”

He shivered in his thin pyjamas, yet did not realise that dry cold need not have made him shiver. In the night a new thing had crept in upon the valley — dampness.

“And listen,” I added, as the tops of the pines below the balcony stirred with a rustling sound that as quickly died away again.

“The morning wind,” he cried, “that’s all.”

“But the sound of falling water with it. The north or east — good winds — would not move a single branch down here. Observe the lie of the land.” He did so grumpily enough.

“It’s from the south,” I observed, “and it’s blowing up the valley.”

“There’s hardly any wind at all, anyhow,” he said, impatiently.

“Only what there is, is southerly. The wind has changed. You feel its dampness? That damp is evil. Why man, you can smell it!” For a strong odour of earth and grass and growing things lay behind the exquisite morning freshness of the dawn, and the fragrance, though so pleasant, was suspicious. It was moisture that brought it out.

“Oh, you know best, I suppose,” he growled, “though it looks all right, and I should call it perfect.” He glanced at me with a trifle more respect, however — that change of wind had shaken his confidence — then shrugged his shoulders and moved off reluctantly to bed. “You tell the guides, then,” he added, with resignation, and was gone before he caught my answer: “if they’re fools enough to come!”

But the guides, of course, put in no appearance. They ought, by rights, to have ascertained the “Herr’s” decision, but took it for granted his opinion would be their own. I admit there was this childish pride and pleasure in the disappointment, and to be right even in prophesying disaster is a satisfaction somewhere. It was the “Herr’s” pleasure, however, to sit up and watch this marvellous beginning of a “tremendous awful storm.” The preparations for its splendid climax were so indecipherably faint, yet so carefully thought out and planned, that though the brilliance of last night’s stars had announced their coming, six hours had passed and brought them apparently no nearer. The storm was being massed for attack below the edges of the visible world. One thought of it as a living, monstrous thing that would presently come crowding and crashing down the heavens, alive for miles, and full of violent fury. It was too gigantic to move quickly; each separate detail must be trained and ready before the accumulated blow could fall; but hints of wind and moisture, like delicate antennae, were stretched out in advance to warn the sensitive nerves of those who had them.

I brewed some chocolate, and, with rugs and blankets on the narrow balcony, I watched the paling stars. This slow beginning of terrific weather thrilled me. It was unbelievably slow, unnecessarily cautious; its growth, unhasting but unhindered, brooked no interference, however, and there was a hint of diabolical thoroughness in the steady way beginning crept towards fulfilment. All Nature was pressed into the service; the entire firmament laboured to one given end. The imagination became conscious almost of personal direction in this consummate marshalling of such huge forces in sympathetic combination. Yet once or twice, for all my pride of certainty — particularly at half-past five, for instance, when the advance seemed stayed — I confess I had misgivings, and was tempted to wake my friend again and scold the guides for their inexcusable delay. For the weather held so still and brilliant. “Look at the sky!” I would have cried to the men. “How could you have been deceived by those false, transient signs of change?” Some deity of luck preserved me from their inevitable answer: “We thought the ‘Herr’ could have told what’s surely coming!”

It was of marvellous, though sinister, beauty, well worth the loss of hours of beauty sleep, even worth the loss of the expedition as well, to see the wonder of the dawn across the awful heights, falling on cliff and ridge, and stealing along the high, faint snowfields in the break between the periods. The colours may be guessed, but not described, with the aspect of veiled terror that they wore, of menace in the strange diffusion of the light, and in the apparent innocence of sun and shadow that draped their changed expression. For everywhere expression was otherwise than on an innocent morning. The rising of the mist valley out of sleep, the creeping light, the guileless freshness of the air that brought the tumbling water loud and close, the general stillness, peace and calm — all these were different, but oh! so little different, to their normal aspect when the glass stood high. It was mere pretence, of course. The coming violence attempted to steal unnoticed and unawares upon the sky. Behind that treacherous calm it piled up forces that presently would shake the mountains and make the old woods howl. Yet at six o’clock the big peaks still looked friendly in the crystal morning atmosphere, and it was not till nearly nine that these first assurances of a perfect day began to fade. They passed, slipping away with an unnoticed skill that suggested cunning. No clouds were visible, and no wind to mention stirred, but there crawled into the air a certain dimness that lessened the first unearthly brilliance. Something waned, and the sting of the sharp, delicious heat was gone. Less than haze, it yet took the flash out of the sunshine. and while sound grew clearer, closer, the outlines of both trees and peaks stood blurred a little. Few would have noticed any definite change as yet, none, perhaps, but very keen observers with an interest at stake; but by half-past ten there lay an observable shadow over the entire heavens, cast by no cloud, but as though the tide of light rushed down, then halted and drew back. It was a curious, faint veil before eleven, and an hour later it had dimmed the normal blaze of noon, yet with a glare of unpleasant brilliance that hurt the eyes.

And then, from noon till perhaps after two o’clock, there came a pause when nothing happened, and only a great thick stillness settled over everything. And the pause was ominous, freighted with presentiment; the freshness of the upland world was gone entirely; it seemed a dull, exhausted, burnt-out day. The smell of grass and earth became more marked, and there were soft touches of moisture in the eyes and on the skin; the flies were “sticky,” their tickling of face and hands persistent, and that state of irritation known as “nerves on edge” required steady handling. But though outwardly all this time the signs had seemed minute, they had really been gigantic, and the entire heavens wrote the letters clear. For as the light had piled in waves upon the eastern sky, the west had given its too early answer, and the suspicious radiance that had brought so grand a dawn was of the same evil quality that had lit the stars too exquisitely the night before. By four o’clock, then, just as the shadows lengthened steeply in the nearer gorges, a delicate trail of fine-spun cloud came thinning down the sky from south to north at an incredible height above the tallest peaks. So tenuous as to be scarcely visible, it lined the atmosphere where no clouds were, and five o’clock, when the afternoon was waning, there appeared as if by magic, in several Spots at once, small patches of isolated mist that had darkness on their underside. Below the giddy ridge where our proposed night shelter perched — the hut — they gathered suddenly into a single line, and fifteen minutes later there was a barrier of dirty-looking cloud that was rising — rising in places at considerable speed. On the edges it leaped and coiled with a kind of hurrying impatience. And all this time — these twenty hours of interval — the entire heavens had conspired together to produce no more than this thickening cloud that was the first visible sign a townsman need have noticed with anxiety. The peaks, however, were close enough to touch; a stifling, oven heat, airless as a concert hall, hung everywhere; there was a strange, deep stillness; and from the distant upper pastures the sound of cow-bells came queerly down the village street. The birds had ceased their singing long before.

The wreaths and lines of vapour meanwhile spread and thickened, gaining ground, some rising, others sinking, new centres forming everywhere with a rapidity that argued detailed preparation. A coiling mist wrapped hurriedly about one summit after another, yet leaving the actual top in shining light. A ring was round the sun, immensely distant from it, with a diameter of many miles of sky. The heat in the valley, pressed down and running over, made breathing increasingly oppressive; the sunlight filtered badly and unevenly. The peasants looked skywards and said no word, but barn doors were shut and the cattle came to water early in the nearer pastures. In spots the air grew colder, and then suddenly, with dramatic abruptness, solitary puffs of heated wind came rushing up our valley from the south. Heralded by clouds of dust they passed and went their way, first having tossed the waiting trees, not twice, but once, rattled the windows, closed the open doors — went their way upwards to bear word that all was ready for the main attack.

Long, ominous silences followed them, but with the lurid sunset the change, so long maturing, dropped swiftly. At dusk there was heavy roaring in the mountains as the winds let loose against the darkening cliffs. It was audible even on our balcony. And, before the appointed time, there fell a sea of blackness on the world that blotted out in less than a dozen minutes the last vestiges of sunset or of gleaming, distant snow. By 7:30 the true wind began to rise, or, properly speaking, began to reach us in our sunken hollow. Up the valley like a crying voice it swept, in no puffs now, but in a steady torrent. It wailed and moaned. None perhaps but a climber knows that desolate sound, that strange, wild whistling among rocks and trees, that shrill and angry calling to the earth. It is a threatening sound. He hears a host of javelins and lances flying, for he knows the sting and pierce of that sharp, wetted wind. There is grim foreboding in it, and presentiment in the hot and empty pauses that lie between the heavy gusts. And the upper wind came down to meet it. Again the deep roaring became audible, though where no man could tell, for it was everywhere and filled the inky sky. It descended with its battle how] from the iron fastnesses of scree and precipice and from the bitter snowfields that had iced its fury. It was a wind that could blow a man from the securest foothold into space, mow down the older trees like matches, and even loosen rocks. It seemed the mountains stooped to heave their shoulders at it, driving it down with crashing power upon our village between the forests.

We had little sleep that night. The storm was, of course, the worst that had ever been known. It lasted with unabated fury and with torrential rain for forty hours. Its suddenness, the unenlightened said, was so extraordinary. It came, as it seemed, out of a clear and harmless sky. Only the few who watched as we had watched knew of its marvellous genesis and careful growth, its gradual and distant preparation, the birth of its small beginning hours and hours before it came.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

S.O.S.

It is a question how many witnesses shall be required to establish the veracity of an occurrence so singular, especially when one of such witnesses is a dog.

Three of us, two men and a girl, had skimmed the snow-covered Jura slopes on our skis since noon, arriving toward four o’clock at the deserted chalet where the fourth was to meet us. Upon the arrival of that fourth hung all the future happiness of the girl, and he was to come from a village far away on the other side. The Christmas rendezvous had been carefully arranged.

We had brought provisions for making a hot supper in the empty building, a lonely farm-house used only in summer, and our plan was to ski back all together by moonlight.

“Put on your extra sweaters before you begin to cool,” said the older man, coming round the corner with an armful of logs from the frozen woodpile. “I’ll get the fire going. Here, Dot,” — turning to his niece, — “stack your skis, and get the food out. He’ll be hungry as a bear.”

The three of us bustled about over the crisp snow, and the older man had a wood fire blazing upon the great open hearth in less than ten minutes. The interior of the big room lit up, shadows flew over-head among the rafters, and shafts of cheery yellow light flashed even into the recesses of the vaulted barn that opened out into the cow-sheds in the rear. Outside, the dusk visibly deepened from one minute to the next.

The cold was bitter; but our heated bodies fairly steamed. The big St. Bernard ran, sniffing and prancing, after each of us in turn, and from time to time flew up the mounds of snow outside, where he stood, with head flung back and muzzle up, staring against the sunset. He knew perfectly well that someone else was expected and the direction from which he would come. The effect of the firelight streaming through door and cracks of muffled window into the last hour of daylight was peculiar; night and day met together on the threshold of the chalet, under the shadows of that enormous snow-laden roof. For the sun was now below the rim of the Suchet ridges, flaming with a wonderful sheet of red and yellow light over the huge white plateau, and the isolated trees threw vague shadows that easily ran into a length of half a kilometre. Rapidly they spread, assuming monstrous shapes, half animal, half human; then, deceiving the sight, merged into the strange uniform glow that lies upon a snowfield in the twilight. The forest turned purple; the crests of the pines cut into the sky like things of steel and silver. Everything shone, crackled, sparkled; the cold increased.

“Dorothy, where are you going?” sounded the older man’s voice from the door, for the girl was out on her skis again. Her slim young figure, topped by the pointed, white snow-cap, was sprite-like.

“Just a little way over the slopes — to meet him,” came her reply. She seemed to float above the snow, not on it.

With decision he called her in, and it was the warning in his tone that perhaps made her obey.

“Better rest,” he said briefly; “we’ve got a long run home in the moonlight.” On her skis she came “sishing” back down the gleaming slope to his side, neat and graceful, her shadow shooting ahead like black lightning, enormously elongated. “The Creux du Van precipices, besides, lie over that way,” he continued. “They begin without warning — a sheer drop, and nothing to show the edge.”

“I know them,” she said, pouting a little.

“He knows them, too,” her uncle answered, putting a hand on her shoulder.
“He’ll take the higher slopes. He’ll get around all right.” He had noticed the look in her soft, brown eyes that betrayed — it was the merest passing lash — an eagerness lying too close upon the verge of anxiety. “Harry knows these ridges even better than I do.”

He helped her stack the skis, then turned to whistle in the dog, which had stayed behind on the summit of the slope she had just left, and it was at this instant, I think, that I first suddenly became aware of an unusual significance lying behind the little scene. Such moments are beyond explanation or analysis; one can only report them. They pertain, some hold, to a kind of vision. I can merely affirm that the flash came to me in this wise: I saw the big dog, his outline sharply silhouetted against the skyline and his head turned westward, refusing for the first time that day to obey instantly a whistle that for him was a summons always to be obeyed. His master, noticing nothing, had already gone inside; but the girl saw what I saw, caught a flash similar to my own, and recognized in the animal’s insignificant disobedience a corroboration of something in herself that touched uneasiness. I cannot prove it, — she has never spoken of it, — only, as she stood there a moment, with the sunset in her face and her tumbled hair half over her eyes, I intercepted the swift glance that ran upward to the St. Bernard, travelled beyond him to the huge, distant snow-slopes, and then fell upon me. It was love, perhaps, that carried and interpreted thus the instantaneous wireless message — the love that lay undelivered in my heart, as in her own, and, since she was forsworn already, lay unrecognised. In view of what followed, I cannot wholly say. My sight held clearer and steadier than her own, and it came to me that my strange perception, sharpened to bitter sweetness as if by sacrifice, approached possibly to some kind of inferior divination of the wounded soul. The next minute the great dog came bounding down, and we entered the chalet together, busying ourselves with fire, benches, table, and supper. The portable little kettle of aluminum already steamed upon the hearth.

With us — with myself, at any rate — came into the cosy fire-lit interior a sensation that was new. I felt the terror and desolation of these vast, snow-covered mountains, immense, trackless, silent, lying away from the world of men below the coming stars. Winter, like a winter of the polar regions, held them fast. In the brilliant sunshine of the day they had been friendly, enticing, sympathetic. Now, with the icy dusk creeping over their bare, white faces, the freezing wind sifting with long sighs through the forests below, and the silent Terror of the Frost stalking from cliff to ridge with his head among the stars, they turned terrible. With the coming of the night they awoke to their true power. They showed their teeth. Our own insignificance became curiously emphasized. I thought of the Creux du Van precipices, sweeping crater-like with their semicircle of dark grandeur, a gulf of snowdrifts about their dreadful lips, six hundred feet of shadows yawning within, and shuddered.

“You’re cold,” said Dot, softly, pulling me to the fire, where she warmed her steaming boots. “I’m cold, too.” We piled the wood on; the flames leaped and crackled; shadows flew among the rafters.

“Harry’s due any minute,” said her uncle. “We’ll drop the eggs in as soon as we hear his whistle.” He stooped down to pat the St. Bernard, which lay with head stretched on his fore paws before the fire, staring, listening. “You’ll hear him first,” he laughed cheerily, giving the beast a resounding pat. “Long before we do.”

The dog growled low, making no other response to a caress that usually brought him leaping to his master’s breast. We heard the wind keening round the wooden walls, rushing with a long faint whistle over the roof, and we drew closer to the fire. For a long time no one spoke. The minutes passed and passed.

It was then, quite suddenly, that we heard a step in the snow; but not before the dog had heard it first and bounded to his feet with a growl that was more like a human roar than any animal sound I have ever heard. He fairly leaped toward the door, and the same second Dot and I were also upon our feet.

“What’s the matter?” exclaimed her uncle, startled and surprised. “That’s only wind, or snow falling from the roof.”

Behind us the wooden walls gave out sharp, cracking reports as the heated air made them expand; but in my heart something turned into ice with a cold that lay beyond all cold of winter. The terror I at first experienced, however, was not for myself, but for this soft, brown-eyed little maid who shot so swiftly by me and opened the heavy door. I was ready there to catch her, ready to protect and shield, yet knowing by some strange authority within me that she stood already safe, held by a power that lay beyond all little efforts of my own.

For into that great, fire-lit interior stepped at once the figure of a peasant, large, uncouth, lumbering, his face curiously concealed either by the play of the shadows or by the fall of his hair and beard, — to this day I know not which, — filling the threshold with his bulk, the freezing wind rushing in past his great, sheathed legs, and an eddy of dry snow veiling him like a flying cloak beyond. He stood there a second with an atmosphere of power about him that seemed to dwarf everything, and of such commanding stature that into my mind, bewildered and confused a little with the sudden entrance, ran the thought of a bleak and towering peak of mountain. It came to me that the chalet must crumble, the huge beams split, and fall upon our heads. There was a rush of freezing wind, a touch of ice, and at the same time I was aware of some strange, intolerable beauty, as of wild nature, that made me hide my eves. It was only long afterward that I remembered there was no snow upon his feet, that his eyes remained hidden, and also that he spoke not a word.

“The door’s blown open!” cried the uncle. “For God’s sake—”

All this, moreover, in the tenth of the first second, for immediately I saw that the St. Bernard was bounding round the figure with an unfeigned delight that knew no fear; and next, that he had stretched his arms out toward the girl with a gesture of tenderness and invitation possible only in this whole world to the arms of woman. Terrible, yet inconceivably winning, was that gesture, as of a child. And the same moment, to my amazement, she had leaped forward and was gone. With her, barking and leaping, went the St. Bernard dog.

“Dot, you silly child, where in the world are you going? Do shut the door! It’s not Harry yet. It was a false alarm.” It was the matter-of-fact tone of her uncle’s voice that let me into the secret — that only she, I, and the dog had witnessed anything at all.

“I’ll go with her and see her safe,” I shouted back, and it was only then, as I turned toward the door again after saying it, that I understood there was no one standing there, and that her leap had been really a springing run toward the corner where her skis lay. Already, I saw, they were on her feet. She was away. I saw the dog bounding over the frozen slope beside her. He was a little in front. He held her skirt in his teeth, guidingly. In that pale wintry light of the rising moon I saw their two outlines against the snow. They were alone.

“Bring brandy and a blanket!” I had the sense to call back into the room, and was after her in my turn. But the frozen fastenings of my skis had never seemed so obstinate. It was a whole minute before I was whizzing down the mile-long slope. The speed was tremendous, and the skis skidded on the crust. She left only faint indications of her trail. It was the barking of the dog that guided me best, and far away below me in the yellow moonlight the little speeding spot of black that showed me where she flew, heading straight for the Creux du Van.

At any other time such a descent as we two then made would have been sheer lunacy, even in daylight. The tearing speed, the angle of the huge slope, the iciness of that gleaming crust, all were invitations to disaster; and with the gaping chasm of the Creux du Van lying waiting at the bottom, it was simply a splendid race into suicide. The water poured from my eyes, the frozen mounds whipped by like giant white waves, and no sooner was the black line of some isolated pine-tree sighted than it was past, like the telegraph-poles to an express-train. Only the yellow face of the big rising moon held steady.

She had soon outstripped the dog, and as I shot past him, wildly cantering, with his tongue out and steaming, open jaws, he caught vainly at my puttees. The next moment he was a hundred yards behind me.

But Dot, guided by some power that the mountains put into her little feet, knew her direction well, and went as straight as a die to the edge of the awful gulf; then stopped dead, buried to her neck in a drift that climbed wave-like upon the very lips of the chasm. It stopped her, as ten minutes before it had also stopped another, coming down from the slopes that lay to the westward. I saw the hole of the valley gaping at our very feet as a successful “telemark” flung me backward beside her just in the nick of time.

“Quick!” I heard her cry. “He’s still sliding!” It was then that I realized that the third body, lying there unconscious where the drift had likewise stopped it, was slowly moving with the weight of snow toward the edge. One ski already projected horribly over the actual brink. I heard a mass of snow detach itself and drop even as she said it.

It took less than a second to detach my belt and fasten it to his leg; but even then I firmly believe the strain of our slow pulling must have landed us all three into the gulf below had not the arrival of the St. Bernard put a different complexion upon the scene. It was the grandest thing I have ever witnessed. A second he stood there, the supreme instinct of his noble race judging the problem. He knew the softness of the drift that must engulf him if he advanced; he also saw it sliding. Very slowly, like a courageous human being, on all fours, calculating distance, angle, and tensions, as it were, by his superb animal divination, he crawled round to another side. He crept gingerly along the very edge. His teeth fastened upon the boot and ski-straps. We pulled together. God! I cannot understand to this day how it was that the four of us were not gone! He knew, that splendid dumb creature. We merely followed his magnificent lead.

A moment later we were safe on hard, solid snow. As we lay back exhausted, the snow immediately at our feet slid with a hiss, and disappeared into the valley hundreds of feet below. But the St. Bernard, still pulling carefully and gently by himself, was next busily licking the boy’s white face and breathing his heat upon him, when help arrived with the brandy and the blankets. I believe it was the tireless and incessant attentions of that great dog that really saved the life, for he lay upon the form with his whole body, keeping him warm, and letting go only when he understood that the blankets and our arms, carrying him to the chalet, might replace own self-sacrificing love,

“I heard a voice crying outside the door in the wind,” she told me afterward. “It was his voice, you see, and it called me by name. I don’t know what guided me to the place, for I think I shut my eyes the whole way till I fell at his side.”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

LOST!

There was something unusual in the village street that morning as I made my way to the chalet post-office to send a telegram, but the mind was only vaguely aware of it. A familiar detail seemed lacking: a difference had crept in. One noticed it — no more than that. Sunshine flooded the valley, the forests hung in purple shadow to the west, far overhead the snow shone dazzling against the turquoise blue, and the air was filled with the roar of falling water. Girls in yellow jumpers were going down to the tennis courts, tourists starting on their expeditions, mules clattering on the cobbles, and the Priest went by, his face, as always, grave.

All seemed as usual: the difference did not disclose itself. My mind, perhaps, was too preoccupied composing a complicated telegram in the fewest possible words to think about it. It was on my way back that I suddenly realized what was wrong: the familiar groups of guides, waiting for employment, were omitted from the picture. Something had happened.

A high Alpine climbing village is a sensitive organism, whose collective life responds swiftly to the least change — a new arrival, a departure, a summit conquered, but above all an accident. The news runs through it like a wind. On the way back to my friend’s chalet the Priest passed me again. “Yes, a man is lost,” he said, his face graver than before. “He’s been out all night. The search parties have left.”

He gave a few details, then hurried on, but in the twinkling of an eye the note of that brilliant, even gorgeous, morning had changed completely. The shadow of disaster dimmed the sunshine, the pleasant roar of falling water became ominous, the great peaks wore a forbidding air. Somewhere among their awful loneliness a man was lost. The thing all dread had happened.

It was strange, at this early hour, how the undercurrent of news flashed so swiftly along the sunny street, touching some and missing others. To those who merely played tennis, danced, and went for walks, it meant less; to those who climbed and knew the wild places where the victim might be lying, it was poignant. One resented these careless, happy tourists picking flowers, chasing butterflies, playing tennis, in light-hearted safety. Through the mind flashed vivid pictures of the cold, dreadful heights, of icy slopes, of dizzy ledges, of perilous corners above an abyss of emptiness. One turned, rather, to the peasants who stood about in groups, some with telescopes, all with grave faces and sympathetic questions. A man was lost. He had been out alone all night. There had been a cold wind but a clear sky. He was still clinging, perhaps, to some ledge, unable to get up or down, shouting to the emptiness, perhaps lying injured on some desolate pitch of rock, perhaps motionless.

My host, an old resident of the village, experienced climber as well, had all the available facts at his fingertips when I got back. He was ready to start too. We chose a route the other parties had not taken, and on the way up he gave me details of what was known. We took with us Zeiss glasses, food, brandy, extra ropes. It was a gloomy, mournful expedition. We went fast, much too fast for climbers; the feeling of hurry made it impossible to take it easy.

An odd thing was that, although the man had broken all the rules, no one had used a word of blame. He was not a climber, but one of those vigorous Englishmen of middle age who enjoy “a scramble.” He wore nailed boots and carried an iron-shod alpenstock. He was married, his wife and children at Como, where he was to join them in a few days. He was a botanist. He took with him a knapsack with food and a thermos of tea. He had left his hotel at two o’clock on the previous afternoon, but he had not told anyone exactly where he was going. His direction was only vaguely known. He had not returned for dinner. He had been out twenty hours. Search parties had started at midnight; others had left at dawn. Three shots — echo carries the sound for miles — were to be the signal that he had been found.

We used the “botany” as our guide — taking a precipitous trail to a region of desolate rocks where rare saxifrages grew. Every inch of the ground was known to both of us. We climbed in silence, the pace leaving no breath for words, but the glasses were used constantly, and occasionally there was a pause to discuss direction. Such a man, it was certain, would not choose obviously dangerous places, although his enthusiasm for some rare plant must remain an incalculable factor always. The probability seemed that his search had led him to some point whence descent became suddenly impossible. A common occurrence this, for to get up is often easier than to get down again.

He had clung on through the darkness, beneath the stars, till his strength failed and exhaustion loosened his grip. Or, perhaps, on some steep pitch where ordinary care meant safety, he had slipped. There were ugly drops to the south in plenty, but it was not the obviously dangerous places we need examine.

The few peasants we met — all knew of the possible disaster — gave little help; some had seen a solitary figure, others had not; descriptions varied; there was nothing reliable to guide us. We hurried as the day wore on. Up by the torrent, through deep forest, past waterfalls, across bright green upper pastures where a million flowers shone, scanning every couloir, examining every ledge where a man might venture, and especially the slope of shale at its foot. It was a familiar trail to both of us. The music of the cowbells filled the air. The gentians blazed. The snowfields sparkled far overhead, and the gay tourist village, except as the place where he had started twenty-four hours ago now, was quite forgotten.

It was toward afternoon that I first noticed we began to speak of it instead of he. We were well up above the world by now, in the heart of the great heights, not far from the snow, the huge mountains coming more and more into their own. What we called “the saxifrage rocks” lay an hour below us. The sky wore a darker blue; the wind, creeping down from the glacier, had a nip in it; the flowers changed; and the immense desolation was emptied of any moving figures but our own. An occasional marmot whistled before diving into its hole, a bird flitted to another boulder, a white butterfly danced past, a stray fly buzzed and vanished. But that was all.

Already the Oberland-giants were peering at us from behind the ridges we had topped. The silence of the big mountains, their grandeur, their mighty loneliness, their awe, stole over us. The change one had noticed in the sunny village street was increasingly manifest.

It was this change, though we did not speak of it at the time, that impressed us both, proving how the mood, the attitude of mind, determine selection. The familiar beauty retreated, letting terror in. The scenes we knew so well, had so often enjoyed with happy wonder, now wore another guise. The majesty turned awful, the splendour cruel, the indifference to human life stood out. This new significance in “scenery” we had admired countless times — at dawn, in the moonlight, in the fierce midday sunshine — became ever more apparent. The whole meaning of the high mountains altered, light and shade falling in unaccustomed places. Imaginatively, one became aware of the conspiracy that exists among these great inanimate peaks and precipices, first to entice, then to enforce the penalty for the least mistake. Every detail of crag and summit, every shoulder, col, and dangerous slope, became invested with a dim sense of personality that clothed another type of life. And this life, as the shadows lengthened and darkness grew upon the eastern side, became for us, not merely indifferent, but definitely hostile.

A hint of the monstrous crept into the lonely grandeur. These stupendous Powers, having claimed their victim, now tried to hide him. Other Consciousnesses now watched our puny efforts at discovery, peering down into our minds that still hoped to save. The sense of being watched was present. The weight of wonder, of admiration, of sympathetic tenderness certainly, was shifted from the mountains to the man. Awe was too strong for beauty any more. The eye searched, not for the marvel of form and colour upon these terrible heights, not for the mystery of their inaccessible and dreadful loneliness, but strained ever for a small, significant outline, lying broken among huge, misshapen boulders — the outline of a man, possibly of little importance beyond an immediate family circle, playing no big role in life that mattered, but a human being, a soul who, adventuring carelessly against too heavy odds, had lost.

Never again, for us, could these peaks and precipices, these flowers, snowfields, streams, seem quite the same. Into their collective being we called “scenery” a new ingredient had entered permanently, so that their wonder must ever hereafter hold too much of respect for our former loving admiration. We should pass the slope of shale in silence, glance upward at the treacherous ledge with a sigh, a shudder. Even on the brightest day, spring flowers carpeting our approach, this must be so. Nor would this emotion bear much relation to the wooden cross the peasants erect with reverence. The spot would be haunted by the shadow of an adventure against awful odds.

Half on the shale, half on a patch of turf where gentians actually brushed one cheek, we found him — motionless. Just before the darkness came the glasses picked out the significant outline. The unnatural shape betrayed it among the grim boulders. My friend merely pointed in silence, his face a little paler beneath the sunburn, as he held out the binoculars. The drop was perhaps one hundred feet, but death must have been instantaneous, for the neck was broken. The stick lay fifty yards away. In one hand a little saxifrage was still clutched tightly.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •